SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER FOUR

FOUR

On the rare occasions when Exitus dreamed, he recalled very little of them after waking. In the rawest of effects, the dreams raped his mind; he woke only to the feeling of being violated. A few nightmarish images clung to him like a ravenous beast from a Stephen King novel, black talons thrust deep within Exitus’s skin.

The beast, of course, was not something borne of fantasy but of mEmery and in these mEmery dreams he was perpetually eight years old, his head stuffed with cotton and his nose a faucet opened to full power. Always in these “dreams” he was in the RV. The smell of citrus cleaner hung heavy in the air. Though his nose was filled with mucus, he knew it was there. His mother was always cleaning, maybe because in an RV there wasn’t much else to do. She was fond of orange-scented cleaners, the kind likened to a vexed medieval torturer on grime but, a fluffy bunny rabbit to children and the environment. But she wasn’t cleaning in these mEmery dreams.

In the “dreams” little Tod always woke with a cold, coughing his raw throat more raw and groaning in his bed above the RV’s cockpit. Because Dad was perpetually driving, Mom was the one who eternally came to the rescue. She climbed up to her suffering son and felt his heavy forehead, and frowned.

“Toddy Toad,” she said through that frown. “This won’t do at all.”

She pulled down his smoldering comforter and folded it neatly at his feet. Baseball bats and crisp white leather balls disappeared into a sea of navy blue cotton and polyfill. Tod stared down at his feet—twin peaks jutting from the red cotton flat sheet—and lazily wriggled his toes. The movement made him ill, so he stopped and looked to the RV’s wall at his right.

“Do you want some orange juice, honey?”

Tod nodded, the clogged sinuses in his cement-filled head clicking.

Mom kissed his sweaty brow, gently ruffled his hair. “Extra chunky, how’s that sound?”

“Gud,” he replied, his voice emanating from the bottom of a well. He wiped his nose with his arm. The hairs tickled his nose and caused him to sneeze.

Down the ladder and in three large strides Mom was at the refrigerator. She opened the tiny door and pulled out Tod’s juice—and it truly was his, for his name was scrawled across all sides of the carton in black marker.

“Jeffery, we’ve got a sick one back here!” she called, getting a Fraggle Rock thermos from the cupboard.

“Uh-oh!” Dad replied to a bout of Tod’s coughing. “Get my hook from the bedroom. I think we’re going to have to string the boy up—cut a drainage hole in his head.”

“Not on my floors we’re not!”

Mom readied the thermos and set the orange juice back into the fridge, then proceeded to gather provisions: a plastic bag from the holder by the locked front door, a box of tissues from the dinette and back up to her son. He took the juice from her and laced his hand through the handle. The whole family used thermoses; on a moving-shaking-bouncing RV, they were simply easier to hold onto and if they ever did fall the spilling was minimal.

Tod coughed again, the phlegm in his chest feeling like a massive network of honeycomb. The Fraggles undulated in his unsteady hand. When the spell passed, Tod wheezed and looked to Mom. “You really wouldn’t string me up like a fish… would you?”

“Of course not,” Mom said as she set the tissues by Tod’s head. She tied the plastic bag to the ladder. “Toddy Toad goo everywhere? We’d never be rid of the smell.”

“We’d use a bucket! Easy clean-up, just toss it all out the door.”

Tod stared down at his thermos, bright orange tapioca sloshing around inside. He took a deep swig and chewed, setting down the thermos on his bedside shelf.

“Don’t pay any mind to your father, dear, he’s facinorous.”

“Fass—” Tod began to question, but coughed instead. The coughing quickly led him to blow his nose, sounding like an elephant. Unfortunately the mucus did not recede in his head; it grew, like a bad Disney song that just wouldn’t go away.

Mom frowned and climbed down the ladder. She went to the candy cupboard over the sink and took out a small bag of kiddie lollipops—the kind with the safety loop at the base—and brought them to Tod. “Fass-in-or-us. It means atrociously wicked. Say it again, sear the word into your mucousy brain.”

He smiled at what his brain might look like: green and gelatinous and globular, sliding around in his head and leaking mold-colored sludge out his nose.

Tubular.

“Facinorous,” he recited slowly, then once again, faster. He sat up a little more on his mattress, head pounding, and reached for his thermos. He chewed another mouthful of juice, the pulp like a thousand tiny bugs between his teeth, baby termites perhaps. Given enough time, those baby termites would grow and eat miles of scrupulous tunnels through his organs. How even more tubular. If only Mom would let him swallow termites.

“Very good,” she praised. “Now, it’s time for fulvous fulsome fellows to become fainéant.”

Mom had a bad habit of doing that: using big words Tod didn’t understand. He assumed it was the result of the RVing lifestyle; in addition to cleaning, she read the unabridged dictionary.

“Today is sponsored by the letter F!” Dad exclaimed from his captain’s chair. “How many things do you see that begin with the letter F?”

Mom patted Tod between the shoulders as he began to think, blowing his nose for good measure.

Feet, flowers, fingers, Fraggles. Feathers, fowl, Formica, fridge.

“I want a total by supper, Tod. Let’s see if you can beat me. Why, look—a Ferrari! Driven by a ferret in a fedora no less. Twitchin’.”

“Nu-uh, Dad.”

“Swear to Buddah, my real gone cat.”

Tod frowned deeply. “Rodents can’t drive.”

“Don’t be such a fink, daddy-o.”

“Yeah, well….” Tod looked to Mom, unable to come up with a good comeback in the slang of his father’s generation.

Mom leaned forward and whispered something into Tod’s ear. He giggled.

“At least I’m not thicker than a $5 malt!”

“Heavy.”

Mom laughed. “Meanwhile, back at the ranch….” She plunked a light fist on Tod’s arm and started down the ladder.

“Okay, Dad. You’re on.”

With Mom gone again, Tod continued to think through his cold-stuffed head. Every day was sponsored by a letter, revealed by Mom’s silly triplets and declared by Dad. It was then a game, a race to see who was more observant and knowledgeable with words. Mom never played, thankfully, but acted as the referee, who returned in the middle of Tod’s list—flour, fur, fossils—with a portable television and a nigh empty box of Benadryl.

She set the television in the far corner of Tod’s loft. With a pop! and the appearance of a wavy, growing rectangle of picture, the mini TV came to life. A quick search through the stations brought them to VH1—and some guy in a polo shirt and mullet singing about how everybody wants to rule the world. How that correlated to a couple of dudes in fancy suits dancing in front of gas pumps….

Mom gave him the last dose of Benadryl and settled him under the covers. She kissed his forehead for the umpteenth time. He really wished she wouldn’t to that.

Tucked into the sheets like a pill bug, Tod sunk his head into the pillow. He yanked a fistful of tissues from the box and sneezed, the drippings from his nose sludgy and sticky.

“My poor Toddy Toad,” Mom lamented as she situated the safety suckers within easy reach. “If you need anything, we’re right below you.”

Tod nodded and snuggled deeper beneath the sheets.

His mind went after that.

He registered Mom leaving to join Dad at the helm, the commercials on VH1 and some more music. An angry lady named Pat Benatar addressed a lousy heart breaker, dream maker, love taker—don’t you mess around with her. Then sometime during a song by a redundant Mr. Mister whining about his broken wings, drowsiness crashed down upon him. His head was fuzzy and his eyelids suddenly were made of stone.

When Tod finally woke it was to the night, VH1 still on (though muted) in efforts to keep the dark at bay. The Fraggle Rock thermos was gone, replaced by a piece of folded card stock baring Dad’s block printing.

“IN CASE YOU WAKE BEFORE WE GET BACK, WE’VE GONE ACROSS THE STREET FOR SUPPLIES.” Almost as if an afterthought: “HOW’RE YOU DOING ON YOUR LIST, KIDDO?”

Kiddo sat up in bed. His head was a boulder on his shoulders, but at least his nose had dried up. His throat, however, was on fire. The bag of suckers was still sitting beside him, so he took one and threw the wrapper in the plastic bag hanging from the ladder.

As he sucked on a hard disc of grape, Tod looked about the RV—which was parked. Where he didn’t know, but it was parked. There was a cacophony of cars and people seeping through the walls, though, and Tod’s amazing powers of deduction revealed that they were parked in a city. He rolled over across his bed and looked down into the kitchen, those city lights so bright it looked like day down there.

The kitchen walls were tattooed with ethereal discs of light, broken by the blinds, which grew larger and larger until a car came too close to the RV to throw its light up through the high windows. Their menacing shapes hummed by, wraiths in the night.

Through the windows, past the cars, Tod saw the brightly lit curb of a supermarket or gas station—whatever it was the RV was parked in front of. He rested his elbows on the top rung of the ladder, shoulders thrust into space, and watched the cars pass by and listened to the ceaseless drone of city-life. Suck-slurp-suck-clack went the sucker.

Tod didn’t like cities. He much preferred the back woods of civilization: the ghost towns, the silly roadside attractions, the stone monuments and the massive national parks. He liked to sit at the edge of the lake in his kid-sized travel chair, fishing pole in hand and the lure bobbing up and down in the water. He liked the fritinancy, the noise of insects, and the call of birds. He liked the sharp sound of campers’ boots against gravel or the slushy, slippery sound of those boots against wet grass. The soaring operatic melodies of moose and wolves and elk and other woodland beasts filled Tod with a searing wonder and paralyzing awe—but the sound of cars and buses and trucks rushing past the RV, the noise of it all, grated against Tod.

His head was pounding, hanging over the loft like it was, the blood vessels in his eyes and the aggravated sinuses in his nose pulsing feverently. With a sigh, Tod twisted himself around (carefully so as not to choke to death on a safety sucker: that would be “ironic” as his mother would say) and slid down the ladder almost like a fireman down a pole—hands and pajama-footed feet on the beams for maximum velocity.

Tod hit the ground and woozily backed away into the kitchen. He walked over to the sink and looked out the window. The imposing structure of a major pharmaceutical chain staring back at him from across the street. Though it was late into the evening (or early into the morning), there were still enough cars in the parking lot to prohibit the Titanic of the Highway entry.

Mom and Dad weren’t in the parking lot, not that Tod looked hard enough for them. He didn’t come down the ladder to look out the window, but to “book it to the KYBO and take a whiz” as Dad would say. Tod rapped his knuckles against the metal sink, the cold refreshing to his warm skin, and jogged off toward his appointment.

Halfway to the KYBO a woman screamed. The scream superimposed itself onto another sound: the roar of two heavy things fwunk! fwunk!-ing against something metallic and hollow.

Tires tore into pavement and squealed off into the night, charging through the past and into the present—attacking the hearse’s walls and violently assaulting the night.

Exitus woke as he typically did after such “dreams”: sweating and disoriented. He didn’t know where he was, who he was. For several fleeting moments he was still Toddy Toad—dazed and confused and wondering where his sucker had gone off to, why he wasn’t wandering out into the street staring at his bloodied parents, Mom still holding onto a shopping bag exanguinating cough drops and Benadryl. Wondering why he was instead lying in the back of a hearse sixteen years older and one hundred pounds heavier.

Then it came seeping back like flood waters through the walls of a stone cellar.

He wasn’t Toddy Toad but a kid with the moniker of Exitus traveling the country in Uncle Monty’s hearse. He had left home not so long ago with the dream of becoming the American Michael Palin—paid to travel the world and shoot documentaries. But currently he was parked in the lot of Lidia’s Diner in a town in Wisconsin with a name too unimportant to remember.

Exitus tossed the blankets away and rolled out of the makeshift bed, sat on the floor and stared at the crimson drapes.

“For a minute there, I lost myself”, as a man named Thom Yorke (a man with a head presumably made of radios) once sang to a group of Karma Police. And indeed, Exitus had lost himself for a minute there but, that was over now—now he was the dumpy Exitus Quick with a complete disregard for his image.

With a sigh he wiped the sweat from his eyes and kneeled up onto his knees. He searched in vain for a clean t-shirt and at last found a sweatshirt that didn’t stink of road and man. His jeans were freshly laundered from the day before last, so he would wear them again. But if there was anything the horrors of gym class had taught him, it was the importance of clean underwear.

Once dressed, Exitus gathered his toothbrush and battered old razor, a bar of Irish Springs and shoved his supplies into the pouch of the sweatshirt. He shimmied through his homemade partition and eased into the front cab of Genevieve, bid hello and good morning to his beloved vehicle and the morose Laka.

“’Good morning’?” she asked through her evil eyes. “What’s so good about it?”

Exitus gave the hula girl an “Oh, you” grin, then dug into his pants pocket for his wallet—which was getting to be far more brown than it was green. He would have to start looking for work soon, there was no way around it. First, however, was a clean-up and a decent breakfast.

“If they have snakes and snails and puppy dog tails, Laka, I’ll bring some back to you.”

“How considerate.”

“I know. Aren’t I a real prince?”

He pocketed his wallet and slid over into the driver’s seat. Opening the door, he stepped out into a perfect fall morning. The air was stark and cold, but still held a minute amount of warmth to it alongside the dampness from the evening storm. The sun was also still rising in the sky, battling against the night to return color to the world. Brilliant hues of yellow and orange pushed against black, staining it a steely grey.

Gingerly slamming the door behind him, Exitus hiked through the mud to the diner’s easy-to-ascend wooden stairs—his shoes sucking and smacking all along the way. He grimaced down at his feet, at his thrift store, name brand boots now unrecognizable; they were filthy with wet dirt and rain debris. He tried to scrape them off as best he could on the bottom step before proceeding up the rest, though they were still saturated enough to thunk! heavily against the treads. If he tracked mud throughout the diner, at least it would give the poor waitress something to do—that and stare at him strangely when he asked for permission to use the bathroom as a shower (manners had been beaten into him as deeply as the cuddly fat encasing him).

Exitus looked to make sure the “ALWAYS OPEN” sign was still in the window and turned the door handle, opened it to the Dead Fall day.

Quiet met Exitus as he walked into the diner. Horror greeted him when he lifted his head from his shoes.

The door nearly broke Exitus’s nose as he scrambled to get back through it, collided into his shoulder and banged against his elbow. He hurled himself against the railing of the stairs, his gut folding into the wood as Exitus heaved himself over to vomit into the rhododendrons.

SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER THREE

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”.