The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

  It is sheer agony for her to think of Corn Dog: so pure and innocent. She remembers afterwards, when his man-sized spindle dwindled, how sweet and mild he would be on her, how they would laugh and read poetry, and make love again, feeling glad and satisfied. For what shallow reasons did she let the buck slip away! Money and her image in front of a pack of father figures-her clients were like the Shibbolite Elders, older men for whom she wanted to appear perfect. And then she thinks of the finality of seeing Corn Dog go off with the police. Ah, the memories, the pain of her powerlessness, her cowardice, make her feel more lonely than ever. And her human hungers, to be whole and sane, to live in a normal family and be raising Gloria instead of ignoring her, consume her more than ever. But her remorse only makes the split pea crave to be god-handled further by her dreadful visitor. An overwhelming excitement comes over her with the shame of taking on so inhuman a lover. She prays that it will cover her again, and so it does. And again, as a consequence, she feels remorse, plummeting sorrow, each time ever greater.

  The playboy suffers too, his aplomb challenged from being so thoroughly rejected. He is patient, but only as long as he continues to believe Sarah’s aloofness is a class act. This rejection gives him the slightly agreeable feeling of being in a club too good to have him as a member. But, as her performance lately shows some major deficiencies, he is losing both his patience and his desire.

  Since they moved into this house, since she sleeps in that bed, she is too exhausted to put in time at her vanity or go to the salon. Her hair is uncombed, her make-up carelessly applied, if at all. And what does she do to damage her clothes so? Her dressing gowns are all tattered. Her graceful figure is spoiled as she arches her shoulders with the pain of some awful skin condition.

  Harry does what he can to remain optimistic. With the annoying feeling that he is being watched for marital breaches by his sister’s private eyes, the long-time bachelor must rely on his knowledge of how to entertain himself otherwise. He buys a sports coupe, a little red roadster, and tinkers with the engine. He gets the best phonograph money can by and all the latest records. He goes to bookmaking parlors, racetracks, sporting events, goes out drinking with the boys, and enjoys spending the weekend upstate skiing in the Kinderhills. He even finds himself going out to classical music matinees with Gloria. He marvels at Gloria; the three-and-a-half-year-old is an angel of attention, and good company too. Strike up the band, and Daddy-o’s little girl closes her eyes, puts her head against his arm and hums like a contented kitty until the music’s over. He is touched by the child’s fixed center and her easy take to him. It calms him down. Children have always been a mystery to him, but with Sarah in a fog, young Glory Bee seems to rise to the occasion and take the role of the adult. With the mother back and forth to the moon, the daughter has both feet planted firmly on earth, yet she warms him like the sun.

  The house may be going through changes for the better, but by the end of January, after a month of regular purple hazings, beauty boat Sarah is a total wreck and sinking fast. Never bothering to wash anymore, she smells like sour cream and rotten peaches. By the end of the February, they all stand by in horror as a skeleton in a raggy robe—cheeks, long and gaunt, exploded eyes, withered figure—stumbles down the stairs. And her back! What was once such a white swan elegant dream in a low cut dress now is sore and burnt, oozing, red as a raw hamburger. Laudette prays over her bones and Harry is distressed. Where is the bombshell he married?

  Harry has to face up to the awful truth: this woman has gone mad, apparently hallucinating, is malnourished, and shows evidence of an awful skin disease. Maybe the thing to do is have her hospitalized. In any case she should be seeing a doctor. But should it be a doctor of medicine or the mind?

  Harry is concerned about the legal implications should his wife be certified as a mental case. What would Hilda do if Sarah had to be institutionalized? The will says they have to live under the same roof. His sister would no doubt try to force him into the sanitarium with her. Better for him if Sarah starved to death, but Harry, a fun-loving man, cannot think so ruthlessly. He knows that Laudette has been in the story for longer than he and knows more than she says. He turns to her for answers.

  “As you can see poor Mrs Swan has been sliding downhill the past few months. I thought moving here would be just the ticket to set her straight, make her feel rich and beautiful, but instead, I’m sure you’ve noticed, she’s down to skin and bones, and wearing an old bathrobe. I could kick myself for calling it “puppy love”, Miss Lord. I was a fool to think it would be easy to win her over from the affair she had with this … uh … whatshisname? Corn Dog? Is that what’s on her mind?”

  Faithful Laudette is quick to change the subject whenever Harry tries to lead her with lines about the buck. Now, saddled with the general contracting, she has a lot on her mind to choose from. “Do I have to keep my eyes on everything, all the time?” she asks. “Sir Harry, they’re all a bunch of thieves, lazy lying thieves! The plumbers delivered a toilet yesterday and now it’s missing. I’ll bet you it was those darn painters that walked off with it.”

  But Harry, not there to talk about a missing bowl, says, “You think so? Then look into it by all means,” and goes back to the subject of his wife. “I was so sure she would loosen up once she was settled here in this, the most exciting city in the world. I thought the Empire lights would knock her into silk stockings, take her mind off the past. I tried to kid myself, but I can’t anymore. Mrs Swan took a turn for the worse when we came to this house. You’ve seen her back, what do you suppose it is? Scabies? Impetigo? I’d say sunburn were it not that she’s been in a dark room all winter. Although they’ve never helped me much, I think she should see a doctor, at least get some shots or something to pump her up. What do you think?”

  “Sir Harry, even though it’s none of my business I worry more about Sugar than I do about Baby. She’s mighty sick in my estimation. Heaven knows, I’m always trying to get her to eat something nutritious. I doubt a doctor could succeed where I’ve failed. Oh, no, if you please, Sir Harry, the problem is not that simple. Things were never simple with Sugar to begin with, and then they built up one on another. No medicine in this world is going to cure what’s ailing her. Why we might be able to get better help from a priest. She’s got a monkey on her back, but it’s not drugs. I’ve been reading up on this house. Do you know that almost thirty years ago a man was shot to death by his wife up in that bedroom? And that some time later she and her lover got gassed in that same chamber. I wouldn’t be the least surprised if Sugar’s got some kind of ghost on her.”

  The playboy is of the western world variety, and he’s not at all kind to the idea of ghosts.

  “Don’t you notice those sulfury vapors trailing through the house? They’re coming from Sugar’s bedroom. I’ve been praying for her as if my life depended on it and I would suggest you do the same, but seeing as how you’re not a religious man, Sir, all you can do is keep a good thought about her, and hope she comes out of it.”

  Harry tries to shrug off his pessimism one more time and avoids the decision to take Sarah to see a doctor. “I surely hope you’re right, Miss Lord. Nothing would make me feel happier than to see my wife make a spontaneous recovery, and go back to being her good old self.” Then he leaves the sitter to her prayers and goes out to place a bet on a boxing match.

  “Heavenly Father,” Miss Lord prays, “please don’t let Sugar waste away any more. I know she’s been bad underneath and she’s acted good, but I know that you know that underneath that badness there’s something basically good about her again.”

  The next day, while Laudette is checking through the services listed page of the Bleek Street Bugle for new painters, her eye is caught by an unusual message.

  When your pipes break you tell a plumber. When your nose runs you tell a physician. When you have wavelengths that need channeling you tell a medium. Have a problem with haunting experiences? Suffering from nervous breakdowns? Tell Madam Klare Kei
nar, metaphysician, visionary, psychic healer, and telepathist. The Happy Medium guarantees results. One-sixty-nine Nussbaum Street.

  Laudette catches up to Harry in the garage, on his way out for a drive, and shows him the classified ad, “Dipster Jackson was no prig when it came to ghost-bashing. He would tell us that even X Rays could be tainted by bad magic. ‘And sometimes when you’re fighting with the devil,’ he would say, ‘you have to match fire with fire.’”

  Merely agnostic when it comes to religion, Harry considers the mentalist or metaphysical approach pure poppycock, but not knowing what else to do, fearful of Sarah’s being declared incompetent, he’s willing to let Laudette go out on any limb. “All right, Miss Lord, if you insist, take her to this Madam Keinar. But if Mrs Swan doesn’t show some sign of improvement within a week then I’m afraid for all of us she’s going to have to see a medical doctor as well as a psychoanalyst. And I’ll be happy to pay for analysis for you too, for I have to tell you, I consider this scheme of yours to take her to a psychic quite irregular, and more than a bit balmy.”

  “Oh no, Sir. I don’t know about Sugar, but my bowel movements have been coming very regular, and I don’t have any trouble with gas, so, thank you, I won’t be needing to see any analyst.”

  “You didn’t quite understand me, Miss Lord. Psychiatry is the scientific study of the mind. Psychoanalysis is a method of revealing trauma in the patient. Based on what I gather so far, my wife had some intimidating father figure, and had to keep her childish fascination with clean, healthy sex a secret just as she refuses to share with me whatever tragedy befell Gee Bee’s father. If I were a psychiatrist I would probably say that this bogeyman she’s being bothered by is nothing more than a projection of the accumulated burden of her guilt. Why, by now she distrusts even the smallest act of kindness from a man. She’s suffering nightmares and melancholy at the hands of a severe auto-erotic neurosis. Her rash is probably psychosomatic. Do you understand?”

  “Oh yes, Sir Harry, I’m not that stupid, but with all due respect, I don’t think she’s a bit mad about this nice new roadster you bought. You go out and enjoy yourself auto racing around, and leave that Sugar to me.”

  Madam Keinar

  During an afternoon dark phase the baby-sitter packs up her troubled employer and takes her downtown on a subway train.

  One-sixty-nine Nussbaum is Keinar’s Candy and Tobacco Shop, owned and operated by Madam Keinar’s brother, Yonkl. When Laudette tells Yonkl, who reeks of vodka, they have come because of the ad in the Bleek Street Bugle, he seems delighted. He smiles and bids them follow him upstairs to an apartment where both Keinars, immigrants from Svobodia, have lived together since their arrival on the Freeway, some thirty years earlier. Yonkl tells them to wait in the parlor while he gets his sister out of bed. The room is overdecorated and not too clean. Three black cats stroll around a panoply of protective and divinatory fetishes, magic lamps, magic wands, crystal balls, prayer wheels and beads, magic carpets, divining caps and rods, bells, books, candles, and caducei.

  There are human skulls and an assortment of animal bones. Laudette scans a collection of knives, choppers, and short swords and rolls her eyes. She says, “Oh Sugar, I don’t know about this …”, but Sarah is non-responsive and blank-eyed.

  The medium emerges from the bedroom with a full mug of beer in her hand. When she greets them, she slurs her words and dribbles a little from the corner of her mouth. The sitter sits her blacked-out boss down in a wing chair but, uneasy about the devilish signs and symbols and the medium’s dissolute use of alcohol, stands next to Sarah, ready to march her out at the first sign of nonsense.

  Ashen-haired, burned-out bombshell Sarah is not the only one who looks as if she’s seen a ghost. Looking every bit as spooky as the electrified leading lady in the movie Bride of Shreckenstern, Klare Keinar’s silver-streaked jet hair is wired in spiral shocks with pin curlers, her eyes are bloodshot, blackened and blued with eyeliner, and she is as ghastly white as pancake makeup will get her. The medium is not a medium, but a short and chubby, barely five feet. She has an owlishly flat face, a beak nose, huge Svobodian lips overstuck with red lipstick, and a constellation of hairy moles on her chin. In the final moments of her middle age, and with an extra-lumpy body, nevertheless she has the nerve to wear a paisley print dress, one of the new silkless silks, with a very low neckline that shows off her wrinkled, liver-spotted cleavage and clings to her soft, chunky belly, lumpy buttocks, fat hams and legs. The dress is not too clean, stained by beer and sweat. The shape Keinar is in is so sad, her style so hideously inappropriate, that she makes blockish Laudette feel a twinge of pride in being a natural she-woman: no pretense of glamor, fat, but sweet and clean.

  At the same time Laudette notices a distinct crackle in the air around Keinar, like an electrical charge. When the two women shake hands Laudette feels a flash, as if a small bolt of lightning jumps from Keinar’s hand to hers.

  Nervous, Laudette gets right to the point by waving her hand in front of Sarah’s unresponsive wide dark eyes. “This would be our problem. I work for this lady, Sug- Mrs H Thornton Swan Junior, Sarah by name. Most of the time lately she’s the vegetable you see here before you! Nobody home! Believe it or not six months ago this girl had a perfect figure eight. Now look at her, she’s down to skin and bones. And what about this sunburn?” Laudette turns the faraway peach to the side as if she were a rag doll, pulls her blouse up from her skirtwaist and reveals her blistered back. “It’s unnatural, I say. Ever since we moved here about three months ago, this lady has been getting worse. If you ask me there’s a spook in our new house that got on her mind and won’t let her live in peace. I’m pretty sure it’s ghosts. It gives me goose bumps to even think about it, but three people died in the very bed she sleeps in. A wife shot her husband in the head, and she and her boyfriend slept happily ever after in it until they died too, twenty years later, from a gas leak.” Laudette hesitates to say more. She knows that Sarah’s denial of Corn Dog and his subsequent death has direct bearing on the mental case in question. She must choose between keeping the secret she swore to always keep and trusting in the confidentiality of the healer-patient relationship. As she does when discussing the situation with Harry, Laudette decides to steer a middle course with the medium, familiarize her with the overall situation rather than the specifics. “Some time ago in another city this girl suffered quite a shock. Someone very close to her died and she had some good reason for holding herself to blame. She took to praying to some devil dogs. I heard her loud and clear, asking them all—one by one—to undo this friend’s death. I think she was putting some body language in her prayers too, if you take my meaning. I told her it was bad luck to try to bring back what the Lord had taken away, but she wouldn’t listen. So I guess she might have dredged up some unhappy soul or even a demon from hell, huh?”

  All this time Keinar has been looking straight into Sarah’s dull eyes. Her only movement is to periodically bring the mug of beer to her lips, take a mouthful, and swallow. “Please!” She says when the glass is empty, spitting out the word in a testy nasal voice, “Enough. Allow me, I’m psychic.”

  “Oops! That’s right, so you are, I almost forgot!” Laudette settles into a couch while the medium passes her hands over Sarah’s frazzled silver pate, looking into it with her penetrating owl eyes as if it were a crystal ball. Then she pulls up a rocking chair and sits down directly in front of Sarah, a few feet away, so she can slide to the edge of the rocker and have her knees almost touching Sarah’s. She bends forward, her elbows on her knees, her fists to her temples, extends her thumbs and index fingers, and flicks them up and down, in and out. She clucks her tongue, as if she were changing gears, switching channels. “Yes,” says the medium, closing her eyes to better see the wavelengths Sarah has in mind, “I detect many supernatural forces and unauthorized psychic phenomena surrounding this sister. I see a man writing her name in a big black book. He’s her father, I believe. He thinks that writing her name is a
blessing for her, but the sorry truth is it’s a blotch on her soul, a curse she must split herself to overcome. Next I see a beautiful boy, the child’s father, a bronze-skinned mixed-breed in a golden fleece, an underdog, an artist, a little brazen and rough around the edges, coming into her life …”

  “Damn!” Miss Lord does not swear lightly, but she is amazed when Keinar describes the resourceful brave Corn Dog to a tee, right on his jazz age melancholy, right on his abstract art blankets, and right on his obscure, unpatterned life style.

  “The day she told her father the truth, that she was in love with this boy and pregnant with his child, was the day both her father and lover withdrew from her, one in hatred, one in fear for his life. Am I right? I can see more. Before she was married she was the type of artist’s model who put men in the picture for money. Right? It was to get revenge on her father that she sold herself. While she was at it she took revenge on herself. Did she not? For not wanting to miss a trick, she denied knowing the love of her life, and caused his death. Am I right? There was some violence. I see policemen. But this boy is gone, and glad to be: melted ghost and all into the night of Eternal Light. I can definitely say it’s not his ghost that’s bothering her.”

  “God bless me, yes!” But good luck telling that to Sugar, Laudette thinks.

  “But what’s this now? Death separates and it also ties together. I see another presence is being pulled into her by the vacuum in her heart. Wait! I can almost see his aura—”

  Here Keinar stops and gasps as if what she is seeing were too marvelous for words. Laudette gets to the edge of her seat waiting for what the medium will say next.

  “Uh-oh,” says Keinar, letting her voice drop, “the picture is getting unclear, the image is fading, but I think I can help her. It would help me if I could hold something that belongs to this troubled sister close to my heart.” She opens her eyes, unhooks her right hand from her head, holds it out, snaps her fingers and rubs them together. Laudette gets the message. She fishes around in Sarah’s purse and comes up with a twenty-dollar bill. The medium makes it disappear into the breach between her flabby breasts before she puts her antenna back on.