THREE
Exitus walked out into an evening assaulted by the cellular ringtone of “Für Elise”. Beethoven’s tinny piano cut high into the crisp air, serenading the drowsy birds and tuning crickets in the field. It seemed to echo, the repetitive first seventeen notes of Elise’s song, bouncing off the trees to stain the hinterland in a paradoxically jubilant and grievous color.
The color of Aunt Lily.
“Damn.” Exitus thundered down the diner’s wooden steps and began to run across the packed dirt parking lot, his shoes slipping and bringing up dust. “Damn, damn, damn.”
E D# E D# E B D C A, C E A B, E G# B C and back again, with the smoothness of two slightly wonky spliced film strips.
“Oh, crap. Oh, jeez.”
He could see Aunt Lily sitting at the telephone station—a small cherry wood table for the old rotary dial to sit upon. He could see her sitting on the plush barstool with her brow furrowed with concern, anxiety slicing lines across her forehead like the cuts made to a Thanksgiving turkey. He could hear her nails drumming against that telephone station and the growing labor to her voice. She’s thinking what she always thinks when Exitus doesn’t answer the phone right away:
She’s thinking that Exitus met the fate of his parents.
The alive and three-dimensional Exitus Quick thrust his upper half through the open window of his hearse—Laka staring at him almost with bemusement—and scrambled for the phone, the redundant ringtone seeming to grow urgent, frantic.
Grappling for the phone, he pictured what that police conversation might look like. Aunt Lily sobbing and flailing and all alone in the world. Gone her sister, her brother-in-law, her husband, her lone nephew.
What a guilt trip.
With a sigh Exitus plucked the phone from the passenger side floor and, still sticking out of the window, connected himself with Idaho.
“Aunt Lily—Aunt Lily I’m here!”
There was a thick silence, the texture of slate and Exitus almost believed his aunt had hung up the phone. But Aunt Lily never hung up when it came to these phone calls. She might have even slept by the phone, listening as the dial tone turned to the screeching banshee of a long dead conversation.
“Tod,” Aunt Lily breathed, her pent-up anxiety coming out in a wavering burst. “I was getting worried.”
“I—” he grunted as he maneuvered himself around and into the hearse. “I know, I’m sorry. I just finished eating dinner.”
“Not more peanuts?”
Laka, if she had been equipped with the necessary parts, might have laughed.
“No. Rodents, actually. I fashioned myself a Pide Piper’s pipe and had myself one sweet barbecue.”
Another pause, this one with an air of nausea.
“Cheeseburger and fries. In this wicked cool Airstream diner in—well, wherever this place is.” With his free hand Exitus began to roll up the windows; rain was predicted to come tonight. “There’s a freaky-looking cow in there, too, right above the cook’s window. They call it Harold.”
“How’s your funding, doing all right?” Always like Aunt Lily—get straight to the point and chit-chat later.
Exitus began to pick at the beaten edge of his Wisconsin road map. “It could be better—could be a lot better. I’m going to have to start peddling my services if I plan on going anywhere anytime soon. Do you have any idea how much it’s costing me to fill up Genevieve? It’s ridiculous! A kid could get solid gold braces with the kind of money I’m exsanguinating.”
“Oh, I believe you.” Aunt Lily’s voice was smooth like honey, like that of someone half her age—and, boy, was that a compliment. “Mike Richardson had to get another job just to pay for his commute to the office, and then he was let go of them both. Then there’s Beverly—you know Beverly, she works at the Senior’s Centre?—well, she sold her car. Didn’t get a whole lot of money for it either, poor thing; no one wants gas-guzzlers anymore….”
With Uncle Monty gone and Exitus out touring the country, Aunt Lily lived alone. She rambled around that big house of hers like a pea in a Mausoleum, occasionally renting out one of the rooms to carpet baggers and rebellious teenagers. For safety’s sake, however, Exitus was her gossip mate of choice—the worst drug he had ever tried was a cigar in junior high and he’d nearly died from the coughing. He also didn’t carry a gun, they were too impersonal. For protection all he had were his handyman tools and Genevieve, maybe Laka if she could stare the person to death.
That was unlikely, so tools and a hearse it was. Luckily, no one really wanted to approach a man driving around town in the big, black car, so Exitus was able to stave off trouble. Aunt Lily, however, could not. She was a doughy woman with a kind, doughy heart. Grandmotherly, in other words. People flocked to her like hungry men to the smell of cooking food, and there really wasn’t a way for her to tell if some of those in the flock weren’t completely insane. Rather than talk to them about the world, she talked to Exitus.
She talked about the price of strawberries at the farmer’s market and about what color the local rebel would dye her hair next—about how long before all that hair fell out and never grew back. She reminisced about Uncle Monty, what he might have thought about the Daytona 500 or the Stanley Cup. On and on she would go, talking until she grew out of breath and then—when Exitus hoped he could get a word in and steer the “conversation” elsewhere—she would breathe and chug along to brighter pastures.
The school Exitus didn’t go to anymore and the community college he wouldn’t have touched with a sterilized barge pole. The weather and the crops and the animals in the backyard—Rocky the Raccoon and Boris the Tortoise. The fate of the country and how much better off they were now that He was out of the office—he of that war and he of that stupidity and he who might have been worse than that other He (third under that other war and of that scandal he should have been impeached for but wasn't because the weasel had resigned), and yes, it was just that confusing. The latest bombs at the movie theatre and the hype about the new “hit”. The births and deaths and marriages and divorces.
Suffice it to say Aunt Lily talked about everything because she had no one to lay the information on, and this was a nightly ritual.
“… Which brings me back to what I was saying earlier, about Bev’s car?”
Laka rolled her eyes, wanted to at least. “You couldn’t have said this before, saving us the anguish of having to listen to your endless commentary to the movie of life?”
Rain began to ping! against the roof of the hearse, then plop! as the droplets became larger and more angry. How they hated the world and how they yearned to wash it all away.
“Yeah?”
She paused, seemed to wring her words around in her hands. “I was thinking….”
“Always dangerous, Aunt Lily. You could really hurt yourself.”
A snort. “I was pondering the idea of— See, I was going into the computer the other day and I went to one of those car websites and you just won’t believe what some of these golden oldies are going for.”
Exitus had a sinking feeling about where this was headed, knew where it was racing off to. Aunt Lily wasn’t thrilled with the idea of her only nephew traveling the country like his parents had done, and they wound up being broken by a speeding car.
“I don’t want to sell Genevieve, Aunt Lily.”
The rain was picking up. Lightening streaked across the sky and a burst of static snaked through the phone.
“Honey, I know you don’t. But….”
Through the window, undulating from the pelting water, Exitus watched the spot-light sign of “Lidia’s Diner. Come & TRY, Our Famous Apple PIE”. A rectangular shock of light brought his eyes down to the door, He of the Times and Apple Pie sauntering out into the storm with the newspaper over his head.
As the man passed by Exitus he gave the hearse a look, that “Degenerate imbecile is going to be the future Ed Gein” look. Exitus did not like those types, those people who assumed that they were better than him because they drove Toyota Priuses and held steady jobs in the mind-numbing, soul-sucking world of Menial Labor and owned a tie. Exitus detested people who gave him dirty stares because his shirt was wrinkled and he had a beard because he’d used his last razor blade so much that it wouldn’t have even cut air.
He gave the man an equally pompous and filthy hand gesture.
“Just think of all the money you’d have, Tod,” Aunt Lily was saying and as the man with the newspaper hat disappeared behind the hearse Exitus was glad she didn’t see his “savage display of emotion”.
“I don’t want money. I don’t like money. You know that.”
She might have been chewing on her lip. “Yes. Yes, I do. I only want what’s best for you, dear. I only want you to have a rich and stable life and if you sell your hearse—”
“My life is plenty rich and full, Aunt Lily. I’m getting more culture than people get in their lifetimes and even then, they just see this stuff on the TV. I know you worry about me, I know it gives you the heebie jeebies when you think about me out on the road, but I like it. I was born in an RV, this kind of life…. It’s fitting.”
“He’s still out there.”
Exitus looked through the rain, through the windows of the diner and watched as Adam and Mary began to clean. Adam his cow—signed by the inspirational Rocco DiSpirito, he had told Exitus—and Mary went around wiping down the counters.
“That was fifteen years ago, Aunt Lily. I have all confidence that the man isn’t driving anymore.”
“But you don’t know that. If the Reno police couldn’t hunt him down after your parents what makes you think he was ever caught?”
Adam and Mary, being isolated in a economically crippled town with only two customers at dinner hour, were finished cleaning in record time. Exitus saw Mary crouch beneath the view of the counter and come up with a rectangular box.
“People like that tend to repeat themselves. They’re kind of like a scratched record, the needle stuck in the groove.”
“Tod, that’s a horrible thing to say.”
Laka concurred and she didn’t seem too happy at all to be agreeing with the woman with the running commentary on life.
Exitus looked back to the diner. Scrabble. Mary had pulled out a box of Scrabble and she and Adam set about fixing the game up on the counter, Mary sitting on a stool and Adam sitting on the counter itself.
“It’s the truth, though,” Exitus told his aunt. “Mom and Dad probably weren’t the only ones, in which case the guy was apprehended. You don’t have anything to worry about, Aunt Lily. I’m perfectly safe from erratic drivers in this steel fortress of a hearse.”
“You could be electrocuted.”
Exitus laughed lightly. “Not in a car, they’re the safest places to be in a lightening storm. Though I don’t know about being on the cell phone,” he mused as another bolt of lightening skittered across the coal grey clouds.
“I don’t mean the car,” Aunt Lily said flatly. “I mean doing your Handy Andy routine and being electrocuted by faulty wiring.”
“I don’t do electrical work. I leave all that to the professionals.”
“Copper piping,” Aunt Lily drilled on. “You’re working on a sink, a tub, and the electric lines have grounded into the copper piping.”
Adam threw his fists up into the air and Mary shook her head, wrote something down on the little pad of paper supplied with the game.
Exitus frowned. “I hate plumbing. I don’t do plumbing unless I have to—which seems to be all the time. It’s like all these people who take down my number have leaky pipes on the brain.”
“See? It’s an accident waiting to happen.”
“Only if you leave the water on when you’re tinkering around with someone’s pipes.”
“You’re so bullheaded, Tod. You’re never going to find a girl willing to marry you now—and what are you going to do if you do? Cart her and the baby around in that death mobile?”
Exitus shook his head, smiling. “No, because by then I’ll be just like Michael Palin. I’ll be paid to travel the world and shoot documentaries and the fam’ can stay home and watch me on TV.”
“And if all of this doesn’t pan out?”
“I’m sure my costume jewelry trees will be a hit.”
Laka scoffed. “Grown men should not be playing with jewelry”.
Aunt Lily laughed. “How’s your supply?”
“Full bin. Someone’s always selling a bag of Grandma’s ugly old jewelry at a tag sale or in a thrift store. I’m almost done with my latest tree, too. I call this one ‘Tanton’s Tantalus Tantrum’.”
“I can’t wait to see that one. ‘Sally’s Sallow Salmagundi’ was quite a hit here.”
“Should be done and shipped by week’s end.”
Aunt Lily might have been marking the little desk calender beside the phone, with a short note as to where to stick this newest collage. “I’ll be anxiously awaiting its arrival,” she said and Exitus did not doubt that at all. “I’m also glad to hear you’re doing all right.” This was her signal, the line that told Exitus she was powering down for the night.
“Me, too. I love you, Aunt Lily. Goodnight.”
“I love you, Tod. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.”
Mary went reaching for new tiles and cheated in doing so. She looked at the tiles as she picked them from the felt bag, throwing back the ones she didn’t want. Adam shoved her hand away and Mary laughed.
“I’ll try to get to the phone more quickly.” To this Laka nodded, bobbing back and forth in the aftershocks of a recent crash of thunder.
Aunt Lily might have smiled. “Goodnight, Tod.”
And there the conversation ended. They both terminated their individual lines and Exitus put the phone back where it belonged, in the glove box.
The rain was ravaging the hearse, making the windshield a liquid wall impossible to see out of and Exitus placed his road map on the dashboard. Laka glared at him.
“If you want to drive in this, that’s fine. Me? I’m going to sleep.”
He looked at himself in the rear view mirror, ran his hands through his messy hair that seemed to always be in a permanent state of bed head. His lazy growth about the chin would have to be shaved soon, decent razor or no, or people would start to mistake him for a hermit who’d just come down from the mountain. At least he wouldn’t be considered crazy, for his labradorite eyes shone with a sanity that might have been the complete antithesis to his situation.
Yawning, Exitus turned away from the mirror and looked back at the diner. Adam and Mary were settled down now, two studious nerds preparing for their Chemistry final and actually understanding what they were reading.
“Goodnight, Genevieve,” Exitus said as he patted the hearse’s steering wheel. “We’ll be off tomorrow morning, my dear lady heart.” To the spicy Laka he merely waved.
The only monumental change Exitus had ever inflicted upon Genevieve was to remove the pane of glass separating her front and rear compartments, specifically for rainy nights such as this and freezing winters so cold his nose hairs would be encased in ice before stepping fully out the hearse.
Pushing aside the lined drapes he had installed to replace the glass, Exitus carefully dove into the rear compartment. Shuffling around on his knees he prepared the attendants seats for their nightly duty. With one last check on the Scrabble players—Mary now doing a small victory dance—Exitus closed all of the hearse’s six curtains and peeled off his jacket and shirt. He stuffed both into a mesh laundry bag, along with his socks. His shoes he set beside the laundry bag.
Settling into his bed, Exitus turned on the little reading lamp clipped to the back of the seat at his head. He rooted through his twined stack of tourist brochures and picked out one about the “Mystery Enigma of Paradox, Colorado”. He fell asleep somewhere between the cabinet’s hours and “A Brief History on Riddling Mystery Enigmas”.
