Suicide Supper Club

by Rhett DeVane

  Four weeks before suicide, Tuesday

  Choo-choo Ivey noticed Prissy’s total lack of appetite. Most small dogs had a reputation for acting finicky, but not the poodle, at least not while Charlie was alive. One of the first snapshots Charlie had taken of Prissy showed a puffball of fur asleep with her head resting on a shallow bowl of kibble. Prissy had never met a food bowl she didn’t like, until her dotage, when she ate in secret to protest her beloved owner’s demise.

  When Choo-choo folded back the comforter, the little dog shifted and whined. Too far out to be an aftermath of the scuffle.

  “Mama will fix you some nice chicken and rice. I’ll bet that will whet your appetite. You stay in bed, sleepy-head.”

  Choo-choo hesitated at the door to the kitchen. How many years had it been since she used that old saying? Not since Jacqueline was small. Could it be, her daughter would be . . . what? She counted the years. Sixty? No, that couldn’t be right.

  She placed a frozen chicken breast cutlet into the microwave and took a container of leftover white rice from the refrigerator.

  Jacqueline. Jack to her closest friends. Her daughter’s given first name had been Choo-choo and Charlie’s idea of an inside pun based on a female member of the famous First Family—Jacqueline Kennedy; they now had their own “Little First Lady.” Choo-choo’s daughter refused to answer to the name, preferring first Jackie, then Jack. Heck, she might even have had it legally changed by this point, for all Choo-choo knew. When Jacqueline moved to Portland, Oregon, she had positioned herself as far away as possible, short of Hawaii or Alaska, or Europe.

  Jacqueline had been a daddy’s girl. Charlie adored his daughter from the first time she held his index finger in her tiny grasp. Maybe Choo-choo should have nursed the infant the old-fashioned way. But at that point, bottle-feeding was in vogue. None of her friends embraced the natural way. Not like current days, when a woman might pop out a plump breast anywhere and nurse. Choo-choo admired them, how they fought gallantly for the most basic of mother’s rights.

  The most likely cause of their problems: their similar personalities. Both liked to be in the thick of the action, to see and be seen. As a teenager, Jacqueline had constantly pushed the limits to fit in with her peers. At one point, Charlie had nailed the window shut in his fifteen-year-old daughter’s room. That, and a scattering of creaky boards near the front and back doors, kept Jacqueline from slipping out past the witching hour.

  Once Jacqueline turned twenty and moved from home, the chasm widened. Charlie’s death removed Jacqueline’s basic desire to return home. No matter how hard Choo-choo tried, their infrequent meetings—at one of the end-of-the-year holidays—were strained and exhausting.

  Choo-choo anticipated Thanksgiving and Christmas with a miasma of emotions: joy at seeing Jackie (she refused to call her Jack), sadness over the estrangement, and apprehension about making the holiday perfect. The house would be spotless, dust and dog-hair free. The linens on Jackie’s bed cleaned and ironed. The second bathroom, gleaming. The refrigerator and pantry, stocked with anything her daughter might enjoy. Not that it would matter. Each year brought some new preferred style of eating and never what Choo-choo had on hand. Strict vegan? Middle-Eastern? California Fusion? French? What would it be this year?

  “I simply refuse to make a soy turkey,” Choo-choo said aloud. “I’ve yet to see a bean I could stuff and serve with mashed potatoes.”

  She reduced the chicken and broth to a simmer, then poured a tall mug of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table. The original dining set had contained four ladder-back chairs. When it was clear there would be only one child, Charlie had put the spare chair into storage. After Jackie left, Choo-choo insisted on two chairs, and another joined its mate in the workshop/shed. The cramped kitchen needed all the space it could beg, borrow, or steal. She could remove Charlie’s chair, but a table with a solitary chair seemed so bleak.

  After it cooled, Choo-choo shredded the boiled chicken into the rice and forked the mixture into Prissy’s clean bowl. When the little dog refused to move from bed, Choo-choo gently lifted her and carried her into the kitchen.

  Prissy looked at the food, then up at Choo-choo, her cloudy eyes thick with mucus. Choo-choo knelt down and picked up a small portion. “Try to eat a little bit for mama.”

  The dog licked the moisture from her fingers, then ate a couple of small bites.

  “Is that all you want? You must really feel bad.” Prissy wobbled and whined. “Your daddy wouldn’t like you feeling this way.”

  Choo-choo ruffled the dog’s hair, then picked her up and carried her back to bed.

  While she showered, Choo-choo’s thoughts wandered from worrying about Prissy to the previous night’s dream. Charlie—dressed in his old khaki coveralls—waited at the back fence. His hair was dark and thick like it had been when they first married. Poor man, he had succumbed to male-pattern baldness in his mid-thirties.

  Charlie’s face wore an impatient expression, the one he used when she wasn’t moving quite fast enough. She tried, she truly did. Choo-choo attempted to cram too much into too little time, and it never worked.

  The same dream had occurred—or some variance of it—the past four nights. What did it mean? Was her time finally coming? Would she see him soon?

  Choo-choo pitched the disposable razor and opened a fresh one. Since her circulation had become so poor, very few hairs grew below her knees. Still, she wouldn’t take any chances. The funeral director would paint up her face and make her look good from the waist up, but Choo-choo would be hanged before she’d go to her eternal rest with prickly legs.

  Loiscell reclined on the exam table.

  “The biopsy was positive for cancer. I’m sorry.” The oncologist’s words circled like vultures riding the thermals. Twice before, Dr. Johnson had been in the position of handing her the news. Poor man. How many times a day, a week, a month, did he have to say those same words? His voice remained professional; the fine worry lines around his eyes and mouth told the real story.

  The air sucked from the room, as if oxygen had suddenly dropped from the periodic chart. She heard the snick of the inexpensive wristwatch strapped to the arm she had tucked behind her head; smelled the faint aura of germicidal cleaners overlaid with a pleasant clean-linen scent; noticed the dust motes suspended in the light rays coming from a series of narrow, high-set windows. The downy hairs on the nape of her neck prickled.

  No. No. No!

  Loiscell slipped chunks of raw chicken into boiling water, added a generous amount of salt, and stirred. Through both regimens of chemotherapy, she had stocked containers of chicken and rice in the refrigerator. The Southern staple was one of the few dishes Loiscell’s ravaged stomach tolerated. When she picked up the black pepper mill, memories stunned her. Memories of chicken pileau cooked in deep iron pots.

  The chicken pileau dinner on the last night of a long summer weekend was as well-planned as any gourmet meal. Pots suspended over hot coals held gallons of broth. Chicken, cooled and plucked from the bones, stood ready in heaping bowls.

  Loiscell’s father loved pepper, and added the spice to anything and everything.

  “Why do you put so much pepper in there, Daddy?” she asked.

  “It adds the right amount of punch, little gal. It’s hard to cook out-doors. Too many gnats flying around. Pepper helps disguise the few that dive in.”

  Being such a girl, Loiscell squealed. “Eww! Daddy! You mean . . . we eat them?”

  Her father—always the jokester—answered, “Gnats are good protein.”

  Loiscell ground more pepper into her pot. No matter how hard she tried, her pileau never tasted as rich as her father’s. Must be the lack of gnats.

  A few minutes later, Loiscell dipped the cooked chicken into a bowl to cool. She thought about fear. Before that first go-around with cancer, the notion of “tasting fear” seemed preposterous. Just some author’s dramatic attempt to portray the body’s reaction to a threat.

  Now s
he understood. Fear had a distinct flavor: a blend of brine and acid. Metallic, like the twang of chewing down on an errant piece of aluminum foil sugar-glued to the bottom of a hot pastry.

  When she spoke, her voice seemed to come from somewhere outside of herself. “I can’t do this again. I simply cannot.”

  Loiscell glanced down. The chicken carcass steamed in a pool of fat and broth. Shreds of meat hung from the brown/gray bones like tattered sails. After a fashion, when so much of a thing was cut away, what remained?

  She picked up the bowl and cast it, bones and all, into the garbage.

  Four weeks before suicide, Saturday

  Glenn Bruner drove the hilly county highway leading to the private entrance of the camp. The land around Chattahoochee stood out in sharp contrast to central and south Florida; it wasn’t one big flat parking lot overrun with mouse-crazed tourists. The area signaled the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, though not as impressive as its counterpart above Atlanta.

  The truck seemed to steer itself, and with no traffic on the back road, Glenn’s mind was free to wander to a time before his father’s lust for alcohol trumped his need for anything else. Glenn had long since memorized every detail. Played it over and over in his mind until it seemed more a favorite movie than his actual past.

  Over his mother’s feeble protests, his father had packed the Ford sedan with a few meager supplies, and the two left for a week in the Smoky Mountains. His first camping trip. And with his daddy.

  Glenn knew to keep his mouth shut and not whine about the endless miles of peanut and cotton fields of southern Georgia. He whittled the time by counting the handful of automobiles they passed, mentally burying them when they went by a cemetery.

  The road game kept him occupied until they reached the outskirts of Macon and left the narrow two-lane highways for Interstate 75. Cars and trucks whooshed past. When they hit Atlanta, Glenn’s mouth hung open at the traffic and tall buildings. Everyone seemed to be in a big fat hurry, changing lanes and speeding past as if they were hell-bound. The topography morphed into gentle rolling hills as they moved north, where the deciduous trees painted spring lime-green against the deeper hues of the short-needled pines.

  Hours later, they pulled into a small family-owned campground. By the time the sun set and the evening chill sent shivers down his back, Glenn sat beside his father in a folding aluminum-framed chair, warming his hands over the low flames of a small campfire.

  At home, Big Glenn cooked on a charcoal grill, but avoided the kitchen. That was his mother’s realm, and Big Glenn couldn’t find the salt and pepper shakers without asking for directions. Now, Glenn watched in amazement as his father prepared simple meals over an open pit fire.

  “Ever heard of S’mores?” Big Glenn asked.

  Glenn shook his head.

  Big Glenn handed him a butter knife and a package of graham crackers. “Slap some peanut butter on a couple of these. I’ll get the marshmallows and Hershey bars out of the car.”

  His father sandwiched hunks of marshmallow and milk chocolate between the peanut-butter-slathered graham crackers and wrapped them in a sheet of aluminum foil. “Now, we just pop this right into the fire . . . over here where the coals are nice and red-hot.”

  In a few minutes, his father used a fork to move the soot-blackened bundle to one of the smooth river rocks lining the fire pit. Glenn wiggled in his chair. No use to act impatient and make Big Glenn angry. For the first time in as long as he could recall, his father seemed happy. He hadn’t hollered once since they had left the traffic in Atlanta.

  “Most folks don’t add in the peanut butter.” His father opened the foil and handed over a gooey cracker. “Came up with that on my own.”

  Glenn bit into the warm cookie sandwich. The blended flavors oozed over his tongue and marshmallow goo roped down his chin. Big Glenn took a long swig of cola, then handed the bottle to his son. “Shore good, ain’t it?”

  If Glenn concentrated hard, he could still feel Big Glenn’s rough fingertips brush his temples.

  Glenn spit a wad of tobacco out the lowered window and reached into a small cooler for a beer. Sometimes, the smell of wet, rich country dirt could evoke that memory. He passed a low, hand-lettered sign for a primitive Baptist church and took the second unpaved road to the right. Oak saplings reached their skinny arms to rake the sides of the truck.

  “You’d think as much as we pay in dues, they’d widen this pig trail of a road!”

  Each time he visited the camp, Glenn spent a good couple of hours afterwards with a container of rubbing compound, trying to erase the dashes and dots in the top coat. If he had that extra loot, he could buy the fancy bass boat and have enough left over to pick up a used truck, one with faded paint that he could drive to Hell and back if need be.

  The noise of his passing disturbed a covey of quail. They rose into the sky in a fluttering mass of sound and beating wings. Glenn pointed his trigger finger at the birds, certain he could bring one or two down, easy. Shooting for a living, it was a job custom made for him.

  What would his father think of this latest business opportunity? Big Glenn believed in an eye for an eye, and thought they ought to put a rush-to-the-devil delivery stamp on anyone sitting on death row, or put in electric bleachers so a bunch of them could be fried at once. The heck with years of appeals, delays, and free room and board at the taxpayers’ expense. “Torch ’em all and let God sort it out,” Big Glenn often said.

  Some living things—human and animal—were better off dead. Glenn shot deer, squirrels, rabbits, quail, dove, and anything else in season, or not. If he could skin it and eat it, or mount it on his wood-paneled den wall, its death served a higher purpose. The Good Book said animals were put on earth for men to lord over. Plain and simple. Even his Bible-thumping mother had agreed with that. And people were basically animals, after all.

  “What would you do, Daddy?” Glenn’s question joined the slurry of dust and morning air rushing between the pick-up’s lowered windows.

  Glenn could swear he heard Big Glenn’s boozy reply: “If you stand by a money tree and expect it to drop dollar bills, you’re stupider than you look, boy. But if you shake that trunk, you deserve whatever falls your way.”

  Choo-choo Ivey took a few moments to soak in the ambiance of the Hospice patient’s country kitchen. White windowpane-styled cabinets stacked with heirloom pottery dishes and glassware hung above white tile countertops. A set of ruffled chintz curtains defined the single window over a deep double sink. Crock canisters stood in a cluster beside a white pitcher filled with wire whisks and wooden spoons. Overhead, a wrought-iron rack held suspended pots and pans.

  All of the trinkets told a story, Choo-choo was certain. This was no showplace without substance; it was a cook’s kitchen. The woman who owned this kitchen had no doubt poured love into every dish. The coffee, flavorful and rich. The confections, gooey and satisfying. The conversations, confidential and reassuring. Choo-choo wished she had known that woman.

  Johanna, the second of three daughters, walked into the room. The faint circles beneath her blue-gray eyes spoke of hours of worried concern, but her lips held the remnants of a smile.

  “I heard you and your mama laughing a few minutes ago,” Choo-choo said.

  Johanna opened a cabinet, pulled out a mug, and poured herself a cup of coffee. “You must think us weird, Miz Caroline. I mean, who laughs at a time like this?”

  “Not at all, Johanna. And please, call me by my nickname Choo-choo. Caroline is a fine name, but I use it only for legal dealings.”

  The young woman drew a hand through her long brown hair. She was the middle child of the Hospice patient down the hallway. The other two, Choo-choo had met once in passing. They lived out of state and managed infrequent visits to relieve their sister. As with many of the families she visited, one person shouldered the majority of care.

  “Sorry, Miz Choo-choo. You’d think I’d remember that by now. Mama always taught us to be a bit formal.
Respect, you know.”

  “And I appreciate it. So many young people these days don’t respect anyone, much less themselves.” Choo-choo took a sip of coffee.

  “I try to teach my boys respect. It’s hard. Especially when all of their friends don’t do the same.” Johanna’s shoulders lifted and fell. “We all do the best we can, I suppose.” Her lips curled up, though her eyes remained sad. “Mama fades in and out, with the morphine. Most of the time, she’s asleep. That’s not a bad thing. She’s too good of a person to hurt.”

  “From what little I know of your mother, I agree. If I’m not prying, what were you and Miz Anna in such a stitch about?”

  “We had this cat when I was little.” Johanna’s features appeared to shift slightly, revealing the girl behind the woman. “Daddy named her D.B. That stood for Damn Bitch, excuse my language. That cat hated my father and took any opportunity to let him know it. But she adored Mom. It was kind of funny.”

  “I know all about animals bonding to one person over another.” Boy did she.

  “Every Christmas, Daddy went to the woods behind a friend’s house near Grand Ridge and cut a short-needled pine. Problem was, they were often bare on one side, so he’d cut two and wire them together.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “They weren’t bad little trees. Not as picture perfect as the Frasier firs they ship down here now. Every Christmas, D.B. would crawl behind the tree and pee.”

  They laughed, then Johanna continued, “It made my daddy spitting mad! He tried everything. All kinds of repellant sprays that stunk up the house to high heaven and did no good, little bells tied to the bottom branches so he could catch her in the act. He even rigged up this mat that would alarm if it was touched. Nothing worked.”

  “Cat urine is so much stronger than a dog’s,” Choo-choo added. “If Prissy—my old poodle—was a cat, I’d have to burn the house down to rid myself of the smell.”

  “Mom learned to wait until D.B. did her thing before she put the quilted tree skirt around the base, and definitely before she put any presents down. One year, she had to rewrap everything after that cat wet. I know people could still catch a whiff when they got their gifts that year.”