Land of Dreams

by Eugene Lester

  "What do you know about the next briefcase?" he asked.

  Shelley cut a lemon in half and squeezed some juice into her iced tea glass.

  "A guy named Fred, a tall guy with large ears, walked up to me at the hotel today,” Clendon said. "He’s the same guy I saw talking to Brooks in the park. He wanted to know about the next briefcase. How the hell did he know I was there unless he’s been following me."

  "Brooks probably told him about you and he knew you were registered at that hotel and he was hanging around waiting for you."

  "Maybe he stole your car," Clendon said. "But was that before or after he shot Brooks?"

  "I don’t like sarcasm," Shelley said.

  She drank her iced tea down, then paced the kitchen, her arms folded across her belly and her body stooped. She stared at the floor as if looking for chug holes she might trip in.

  "When Brooks moved out, he got two apartments. He lived in one south of Century City. The other was in Westwood. He told me that I was the only person in the world besides his landlord who knew he had an apartment in Westwood. He called it his ’safe’ apartment. He said he could go there if he had to."

  "Have you ever been there?"

  "No."

  "Do you know where it is?"

  "He told me the address."

  "What’s this ‘next briefcase’ business?"

  "I hope it’s at the apartment in Westwood and that it’s full of money."

  "Do you think it’s safe for us to go over there?"

  "I don’t know, but Brooks gave me a key. He said it was in case of an emergency."

  "Where is the key?"

  "Hidden in the Volvo."

  "I always knew you were smart."

  "Flatter me. I like that."

  * * *

  Shelley went through the phone book and picked out a funeral home in the Palisades named Whispering Hills that almost overlooked the Pacific. Clendon called them. The man he talked to sounded so caring that Clendon thought maybe the man was on a special drug.

  "Of course he was nice," Shelley said. "He’s already adding up the bill."

  Whispering Hills would take care of everything. They would call the coroner’s office and have Brooks’s body driven over that evening.

  * * *

  Mr. Boyd called back.

  "Shelley’s life is out here now," Clendon said, "and she wants to bury Brooks close to her."

  Mr. Boyd replied with a silence that stretched out until Clendon thought he would start pounding the phone into the wall.

  "My wife and I want Preacher Flood," Mr. Boyd finally said.

  "Bring him out."

  Another long silence, then, "Well, we’ve never been to California. I guess Brooks loved it out there."

  * * *

  Shelley fixed a dinner of roast chicken, brown rice, fresh green beans, and salad. Clendon took a couple of shots from a Jack Daniels bottle he’d gotten on a pit stop. After they cleared the dishes, it was dark.

  "You should sleep," Clendon said. "Without drugs."

  "I’ll try if you come up and hold me."

  "You’ve been brave all day."

  "I can’t be brave much longer."

  That afternoon Shelley had restored her bedroom and the rest of her house to order. Now she turned off the light and moved to undress. Clendon glimpsed her through shadows. She left her panties on and put on a T-shirt without a bra. He turned away and took his clothes off.

  "Get under the sheet with me, Clendon."

  In the dark he slid under the top sheet and waited for her.

  "Clendon, please hold me tonight and nothing else."

  "I’ll hold you all night."

  Shelley slipped into bed and lay on her side. He cuddled up next to her and put his arm around her belly. She smelled clean and faintly of magnolias. Faint light nudged through the drawn curtains. Clendon eased his hand under her shirt and rubbed her belly in small circles.

  "He was using you, Clendon. He had some big fucking deal going on and he was just using you."

  "You’re right, but he’s the one who’s dead."

  "I hated his guts."

  "You were crying over someone you hated?"

  "No, I was crying over someone I used to love."

  Clendon kept rubbing the same place on her belly around her navel and she began to relax. He moved his mouth to her ear.

  "Shelley, I think I’m in with love you."

  He moved his hand lower. She placed her hand over his and held it still.

  "Sleep," she said.

  * * *

  Clendon knew he was dreaming that he was carrying Brooks’s coffin up those stairs. Brooks wasn’t in the coffin, but Clendon’s mission was to find Brooks for his family, who were following behind Clendon. Shelley climbed a few steps ahead of him, dressed in a silver-blue flowing gown. She smiled and beckoned him up. He stumbled because he had to take his eyes off the stairs to look at her and with the weight of an empty coffin on his back. . . His stumbling woke him up. He flinched.

  Shelley looked at him, her silver-blue eyes electric. They lay face to face, her face an inch from his, but they weren’t touching.

  "Good morning, Clendon."

  "Good morning."

  "You were snoring."

  "Was it bad?"

  "No. It was soft. You’re fun to look at in the morning." Shelley touched his nose with her fingertip, then bounced out of bed. "I’m going to take a shower," she called over her shoulder. "Don’t come in."

  "Never."

  Muted light spread through the room. Clendon had a morning erection so sensitive that he stroked himself a few times even though his bladder ached. He was surprised he came so quickly. He lay there as his breathing slowed, thought about the thirty minutes it would take for the semen on the sheets to dry, and decided to pull the comforter over the wet spots.

  When Shelley returned, she was wearing a towel around her head and a short bathrobe.

  "I think I’ll jog early this afternoon so it’ll take the edge off before we have to pick up my parents at the airport."

  "Fine."

  Shelley dried her hair, then tossed the wet towel onto his head, covering his face.

  "I want to get dressed," she said.

  "Go ahead. I’ll hide my eyes."

  * * *

  Shelley had taken only one Valium with breakfast and Clendon had gone easy on the coffee. They arrived at the Whispering Hills Funeral Home at five after nine. The Whispering Hills lawn was so green it looked spray-painted. Clendon remembered the childhood tales about funeral homes fertilizing their lawns with the blood drained from the deceased during embalming. He felt his stomach flinch.

  Inside, the aroma of blooming flowers muffled other smells. They met the fellow with the concerned voice, who introduced himself as Mr. Eddington. He was very tan, dressed in a dark blue suit and red power tie, and carrying a thick zippered briefcase.

  Mr. Eddington took them to a lounge with stuffed black leather chairs and a round glass table. A thick, full color catalog filled with photographs of caskets lay open on the glass table. They sat in the leather chairs around the table as Mr. Eddington unzipped his briefcase and pulled out some forms.

  "Is Sunday morning, say, eleven, okay for the service?" Shelley asked.

  "Sunday morning funerals are very unusual."

  "But not illegal."

  "No, of course not."

  "Then we can have it Sunday morning."

  "No problem," Mr. Eddington said.

  "We’ll have it in your chapel."

  "Yes. A violent, unexpected death is always very hard. We have special counseling available."

  "His in-laws are bringing in a preacher. They’re from the was-he-saved-or-not crowd. That means we can’t cremate."

  "Mrs. Boyd, we specialize in handling these delicate situations, especially religious, which may cause dissensions within a family."

  "Good. Just keep that godda
mned preacher away from me."

  Mr. Eddington nodded and made some notes.

  "When— "

  "The families are flying in this evening," Shelley said. "Where do we bury him?"

  "We can make arrangements with any of several memorial parks."

  "Don’t they have plain old graveyards out here? Is there one overlooking the ocean?"

  "No. Ocean front land is too expensive."

  "What do you recommend?"

  "Hillside Memorial Park in Fox Hills is nearby and reasonable. There's a small cemetery in Santa Monica but it's much more expensive and there's no view."

  "Let’s bury him at Fox Hills."

  Mr. Eddington scribbled in his leather notebook.

  "You should get two plots," he said.

  "One for me, huh?"

  Mr. Eddington scribbled on.

  "Do I get a discount or something?" Shelley asked.

  "About ten per cent."

  "It’ll look good for the Boyds," Clendon said.

  "I know that. All right, make it two. Fuck the expense. Pardon my Greek."

  "No problem," Mr. Eddington said. "The memorial park will charge a fee for opening and closing the grave and it also requires that the casket be placed in a burial vault inside the grave-- "

  "What?"

  "You can get an elaborate vault or a simple concrete one."

  "Make it simple."

  "Fine. Let me show you our casket catalog."

  "Do you have a green one that’s good, but not too expensive?"

  "Yes. The twenty gauge steel caskets are modest in price but still look good and are protective."

  "Then I’ll choose one like that. I can’t stand to sit here and flip through a picture book of fancy coffins."

  "No problem. Do you have one of your husband’s suits for a burial garment?"

  "Buy him a new one at Bullock’s. Make it dark blue like yours and real sharp. I suppose you can measure him for the right size."

  "No problem," Mr. Eddington said. "Do you wish the body to be embalmed?"

  "Yes. Of course."

  "Do you have anyone in mind to serve as pallbearers?"

  "Get six engineers from Positron, if they’ll do it. Brooks knew half of the engineers there."

  "No problem. Do you know if the relatives plan to prepare their own lunch after the funeral or would you like our caterer to have lunch prepared for you to eat at your house?"

  "Cater it."

  "Any menu preferences?"

  "Clendon, what do you think they’d like to eat?"

  "I don’t know. . . Fried chicken."

  "Great idea. We’ll have fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy. Make plenty of biscuits. You’ll be presenting me with an itemized list of all expenses before I sign anything?"

  "Of course, Mrs. Boyd," Mr. Eddington said. "Our payment policy is that all expenses must be paid before the funeral. We avoid probate. We need to know one more thing. Will the service be open casket or closed casket?"

  "You mean the autopsy where they peeled the skin of his face back and sawed the top of his cranium off-- plus the bullet hole in his forehead."

  "Our cosmetologist can do excellent work, however, someone in the family might—"

  "No problem," Shelley said. "Shall we go look?"

  * * *

  Mr. Eddington led them into a small room that was carpeted and curtained and had one stained wooden coffin in the center. It was chillier in there, though not as cold as the county morgue. The lighting was low. Mr. Eddington opened the lid and a small overhead light came on. Brooks lay, face rouged, almost proportional despite the autopsy procedure, a wax plug line in the bullet hole barely visible, eyes and mouth shut, face relaxed, shaved, hair combed. A beige shroud, tucked over his Adam’s apple, covered the rest of him. His ears stuck out. He looked heavy and weightless at the same time.

  "He still looks dead as hell to me," Shelley said.

  Mr. Eddington folded his hands in front of his crotch and lowered his eyes.

  "Make it open," she said. "Let them all have a final good look at the golden boy of Boyd-Tek." She started to walk out. "The way he lived, the dumb bastard should’ve had a pre-paid funeral plan. Instead, he didn’t leave me a nickel to pay for this blow-out."

  She opened her purse and took out her checkbook.

  * * *

  Brooks’s parents and Preacher Flood stayed at the Ramada Inn by the airport. They took the BMW to pick up Shelley’s parents. They all came back to Shelley’s house and sat in the living room and drank coffee until after dark. Mr. Symmes was handsome and silver-haired. Shelley had inherited his eyes.

  "How did the BMW’s window get smashed?" he asked.

  He had sneaked some whiskey into his coffee and his breath smelled of it.

  "Vandals," Shelley said.

  "That would piss me off. I couldn’t live in such a high crime city."

  "What do you do for a living?" Clendon asked.

  "I am an attorney for the second largest firm in the state," he said. "I am a bought-off liberal."

  Shelley’s mother was short and plump, with perpetually teary eyes who said "it’s so sad," over and over.

  * * *

  The limousines arrived at 10:45 in the morning. The sky was cloudless, deep blue. Clendon slipped on his new pair of polarized Gaultier sunglasses. When Shelley asked him to sit next to her in the limousine, Mr. Symmes frowned at her. She carried a large black purse and held onto Clendon’s hand as she shivered in her black dress, panty hose, and low heels.

  "I had to take two Valium this morning."

  They met Brooks’s parents in the chapel. They looked pale, stooped and fidgety. Preacher Flood was with them. He was a short, bloated man of fifty with small eyeglasses and graying hair slicked back with hair tonic. He strutted around with a fat, worn Bible in his hand. Tricia from the office was there. The pallbearers, engineers who worked with Brooks at Positron, had brought their wives. The attempts at small talk made Clendon’s mouth dry. D. C. Lyman, the man in the photograph that Fred had shown Clendon, was there, too. He sat alone in the back pew. He appeared smaller in person than Clendon thought he would. Clendon wondered if Fred had accosted Lyman in a hotel and shown him Clendon’s photograph.

  Shelley sat in the front pew between Clendon and her father. Clendon had eaten too much greasy sausage for breakfast, but Mrs. Symmes had kept shoveling it onto his plate. Now his stomach fluttered and quaked. He was overheated in his new suit, the one Shelley had bought him the day before and put on her MasterCard. He removed his sunglasses and took Shelley’s hand. It felt clammy.

  The green casket was closed. Flowers surrounded it and smothered it. Their scent made Clendon’s stomach queasier. A hidden organist played “What A Friend We Have In Jesus,” a request from Mr. and Mrs. Boyd. The words were printed on the funeral program. Shelley started singing and Clendon joined in.

  What a friend we have in Jesus

  All our sins and griefs to bear.

  What a privilege to carry

  Everything to God in prayer.

  The families flung glances at them, but Shelley kept looking straight ahead. When the song was over, she whispered in Clendon’s ear, “What friend? This’d make Jesus puke.” The word “puke” made his stomach spasm.

  Preacher Flood rose to the pulpit and gave a brief biography of Brooks. Then he looked up, eyes heating.

  "We have come here today to examine the soul of Brooks Boyd," he said.

  Shelley jerked.

  "We believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God," the preacher said, "And the Bible says in the Gospel of John, chapter 3, starting with verse 16, ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth in him is not condemned; but he that bel
ieveth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.’” He had quoted the verses from memory. “Friends, 'Gospel' means 'good news.' On this dark day, I bring the good news of Jesus Christ to you who are grieving, so we may know today whether your son, husband, and friend, Brooks Boyd, heard the good news, believed Jesus Christ was his personal savior, and was saved."

  Brooks’s mother began bawling.

  "Brooks Boyd was murdered, and we pray that the perpetrators of this awful, evil crime be brought to human justice, just as we know that they will some day stand before God on Judgment Day and tremble before His divine justice. But has the divine mercy of God’s love been extended to Brooks Boyd?"

  Shelley’s hand squeezed Clendon’s as Preacher Flood stared at her until Clendon wanted to jump up and hit him in the mouth. She held the preacher’s eyes with hers till he looked away.

  "I remember the day I baptized Brooks and he told me that he believed Jesus Christ was his personal savior. He was fourteen years old. I believed the sincerity of his words then. Did Brooks keep his vow? The Book of Romans tells us that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Which did Brooks choose?"

  Mrs. Boyd kept crying. The preacher’s voice dropped.

  "Now I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘preacher, you believe in all that hell-fire and damnation and I just don’t like it'" He chuckled. "It doesn’t matter whether anybody likes it or not, because it’s in the Bible." Preacher Flood shouted the word "Bible." Then he opened his Bible to the very back, to a place marked with a crimson book marker. He read, "'The unbelieving shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.' Friends, there it is. It’s in the Bible, and that means we have to reckon with it."

  He closed his Bible and smiled.

  Mr. Symmes leaned over and whispered, "This guy pisses me off."

  "The First Epistle of John, chapter 1, verse 7, reads, 'The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us all from sin.' Yes! Jesus offered up his blood so that we might live eternally. Did Brooks reject this gift from Almighty God?"

  Clendon imagined a bloody, limp, and lifeless Jesus sprawled naked across Brooks’s coffin, gushing blood from his side wound onto the floor. Clendon’s head began to throb. His stomach contracted and hot acidy vomit shot up his throat. He got up and ran for an exit, clamping down on his stomach until he could make it outside. He dashed onto the asphalt parking lot a few yards from the parked hearse. Without his sunglasses, the brightness was like hitting a wall. The sausage and hash browns and coffee and toast exploded up and out of his mouth and splattered on the asphalt in three rockets of vomit. Pain speared through his head. He didn’t care about all the fresh spots on his new suit and trousers. Finished, he bent over with his hands on his knees and heaved for breath.