Keno came asking me this favor. He wanted me to tag along with him to Lamar, a petite little town in Eastern Oklahoma. I say petite meaning little, not petite meaning cute, because one thing Lamar isn’t and is cute. My memory of Lamar is that it was like a teeny-tiny pimple on the bumpy butt of the Sooner State. I’d not been out that way in a couple of years, but didn’t figure the passage of time would’ve improved Lamar too awful much.
“What’d you lose in Lamar?” I asked Keno.
“I didn’t lose anything in Lamar,” Keno said, “but I’ve got to go down there. My mama’s people are from down there, the Duggan side. My mama’s great Aunt Pansy just passed. They need somebody to go down there and haul her body back to Holdenville to get’er embalmed.”
Well, my jaw just about fell off my face.
“You want me to help you haul your dead aunt from Lamar to Holdenville?”
“This ain’t exactly my idea of fun either, Romy. But my mama’s already told ’em that I’d be happy to do this little chore for ’em, so I have to do it. Besides, if you come along I got us a little surprise benefits. I figured, if I have to go, it’d be more bearable if you was with me.”
That was actually a fairly nice thing for him to be saying to me, it really was. And like I say, I didn’t have anything better to do. But it just seemed like I had to ask questions before agreeing to anything, even stuff I was already wanting and willing to do.
“Why don’t your daddy do this chore?” I asked.
“Damn it, Romy, you know my daddy’s pulling a six month-er on a drilling rig up in Alaska.”
He was right. I did know it, but I’d forgotten. I should’ve just said okay right then, but I had to know the what-s and why-s of what we were doing.
“How come the old gal has to be hauled to Holdenville?”
“Holdenville’s the closest place to get her embalmed. You know they don’t have facilities for that kind of stuff in Lamar.”
I did knew it, too. Lamar is two blocks long and surrounded by peanut fields, pastureland, and wild wooded acres filled with Red Oak, Sycamores, and Cottonwood trees. Here and there, you’d see a stand of yellow pines -- but that was unnatural stuff. The only reason the pine was there at all was ‘cause some OSU extension agent had talked a few farmer folk into planting stands of pine to serve as a wind break. The dust bowel days are still etched in the minds of all us Okies, even those of us unborn at the time the dust flew. Seems like all us Okies have a collective memory of when Nature stomped Oklahoma into ground under its angry heel and let the litter of humanity fly with the constant wind.
First, there’d been a draught, followed by years of relentless wind that sandblasted the fields and pasture lands into nothing and blew half of the population all the way to California where we survived as underpaid fruit pickers. If planting a stand of pine could fend off a similar future fate, then why not.
The reason Lamar existed was so farm folk would have a place sort of close where they could buy bread, milk, seed, and feed. Lamar was nothing to me, and even though I had nothing better to do and didn’t give a rat’s ass what I did do so long as it was something else, I still couldn’t for the life of me think why I’d want to go to Lamar.
So I asked him, “How come they feel they got to embalm the lady in the first place?”
Now that was a perfectly logical question. In the backwoods of Eastern Oklahoma, it wasn’t unusual at all for country folk to grab a shovel and bury dead relatives on their on land without regard to legal restrictions.
“It was my great Aunt Pansy’s final wish that she get embalmed,” Keno said, getting frustrated with me. “So now her kin folk have to get her embalmed ‘cause they promised that they would.”
“I got to tell you, Keno, that this is a pretty peculiar chore you’re proposing.”
“I got to tell you, Keno, that this is a pretty peculiar chore you’re proposing.”
“Hell, you don’t have to tell me.”
“Don’t any of those Lamar folk have a truck?”
"Well, of course they got a trucks, for God’s sake. They’re farming folk, for Christ’s sake. Ever’body and their dog’s got a truck down there. If you got balls you gotta have a truck.”
“Well then?”
“Well then, nothing!” Keno was getting extra aggravated with me. “My Uncle Clearance’s truck’s got a busted head. He’s got no money to fix it just now. So --”
I guess Keno could see what I was fixing to ask next ‘cause he cut me off at the proverbial verbal pass, so to speak.
“And don’t ask why they aren’t getting a neighbor to help ’em. These are not the kind of folk that’ll ask non-family folk for help hauling their dead folk around. And besides that, they can’t be farting around trying to figure out the logistics for getting this job done. Every hour Aunt Pansy ain’t embalmed puts her an hour closer to the big stink. We’ve got to get Aunt Pansy done, and we’ve got to get it done quick.”
“I get what you’re getting at, I guess,” I said, “but let me ask you this, and please, Keno, don’t take it bad, but is your mama as wacky as the rest of her family?”
“My mama’s all right, mostly,” he said, “but that family she’s sprung from is cram-jammed full of Boo Raddly rejects.”
“I’m not trying to get out of nothing, Keno, I’m really not,” I said, “but doesn’t the funeral home have a hearse or something to use for jobs like this?”
“Look, Romy, my mama’s people are poor. These funeral guys charge out the wazoo for hauling a body even one way. You add the cost of a round-trip trip, and then add to that the cost of draining Aunt Pansy and refilling her with formaldehyde, and all of a sudden you’ve spend more than you got to spend. Even if they could’ve handled the cost, they’d still be reluctant to pay it. Paying other folks to do stuff they could do for themselves just doesn’t make sense to ‘em. Hell, if those Duggan’s’ had an idea of how to embalm a body, they’d do Aunt Pansy themselves. So, are you going to go with me or are we going to stand around flapping our gums all day?”
I should’ve stopped right then, but the oddness of it all just kept my questions coming.
“Well, jeez, Keno, how’s this done? What are we supposed to do, set her between us and belt her in?”
“Don’t be so fuckin’ stupid,” Keno said.
“Well we’re not going to strap her on the hood of your truck like she was a lung shot deer, so what is the procedure for something like this?”
“Damn it, Romy, it’ll be okay, O.K.? My Uncle Clarence built Aunt Pansy’s coffin. He starting building it a few days before she passed, when they were pretty sure she wasn’t going to make it. Uncle Clarence is good with wood. Aunt Pansy’s sister, lined the insides of the box with foam-rubber and pink satin. They told my mama all about it on the phone last night. They’ll do all the actual handling of the body. We won’t even have to touch her. They’ll but her in the box before we get there. All we’ve got to do is slide the casket into the back of my daddy’s truck and haul her up to the Baker Brother’s Funeral Home in Holdenville. We’ll have three or four hours to mess around Holdenville, and then we’ll haul her back to Lamar and let ’em lay the old gal to her final and eternal rest.”
When I said nothing to that little speech, I could see the frustration level kick up a notch.
“I’ve got to do this,” Keno said. “You don’t. What I’m asking is, will you go with me? If I’m putting, too much on you, then don’t go! Just say, no. But stop making me beg and explain, ‘cause by the time I answer all your questions Aunt Pansy will’ve swelled up and popped.”
Finally, I just said what I knew I was going to say before he’d even started asking me.
“Sounds fun.”
We were two hours getting to Lamar, but that was mostly because Keno was driving slow. He took his daddy’s new blue Ford pickup for two reasons: One, because Keno’s truck had no heater and his daddy’s truck did. It was October and Oklahoma was already getting frosty. Reason two, was that his daddy’s truck had a long bed. Hauling a coffin just seemed like something that might require a long bed. We weren’t wrong.
Being out from under the eyes of meddling adults was a freedom not to be wasted. Before we got out of Wewoka proper, we’d bought ourselves a twelve pack of Miller High Life, the Champagne of bottle beer. We were both under age, but if you know the right person that ain’t no obstacle. And in Wewoka everybody knows everybody.
Taking the back roads toward Lamar gave us the time and the leisure to
savor each bottle. Even though I was drug up in the Church of Christ’s Gospel and Blood, which is a tee totaling religion, it wasn’t like I’d never imbibe before. The fact is this: I was getting into the habit of self-medicated my melancholia with heavy doses of Miller High Life on a daily basis
The Duggans’s domicile consisted of a white framed clapboard house in sore need of paint; so sore in need of paint that it looked positively tender. Summer had blistered the paint’s topcoat pretty bad. A house can get sunburned just like a person can. And just like sun burnt people, houses peel. At a glance, you could see that the Duggan house was once painted a Pepto-Bismol pink, which made me feel like I was needing a dose of Pepto-Bismol in the worst way.
Some of the Duggan folk came out to meet us. Notice I said meet and not greet. Mostly, they hung back and looked at us. I should say they looked at me. They looked at me like I had a big booger hanging out one nose hole. I was the stranger in this bunch. I was the one who didn’t fit; who didn’t belong. Keno was kin, but me they didn’t know and there was this automatic distrust toward outsiders.
Out of the house came two men, four females, and a bony boy about our age. Now I hate to say this, ‘cause Keno is one of my very best friends, and these people were relatives of his and all, but they all look like extras from a cheap remake of The Grapes of Wrath. The whole bunch looked like extra’s from that dang Deliverance movie. No lie!
These people were living breathing Okie-clichés. The boy, Keno’s cousin, Bart, wore these green-bibbed overalls without a shirt. The girls wore no make up, (which was sinful), they had long hair tucked up under their bonnets like big balls of yarn (cutting female hair was sinful), and all of them were wearing long cotton dresses, plain and faded like their futures. One of the girls had big boobs, I could tell, but that plus was canceled out by one wondering eye. The Duggan men needed to’ve shaved about a week back. One of the men had these little stuff stain-lines coming off the corners of his mouth. It looked to me like he’d fallen asleep with a lip full of Skoal and while he was knocking out Zs the spit dribbled out like sorghum. You could see syrupy nicotine tracks running down his face, then down his neck, and finally disappearing behind the collar of a sweatshirt.
As soon as we pulled in, I could see the new made casket resting on a couple of weather worn sawhorses in front of their house. Keno’s Uncle Clarence had built a nice box. It was well made, but, to me, it looked more like a packing crate than a casket.
“Howdy, Keno,” his Uncle Clarence said.
“Howdy, Uncle Clarence,” Keno said.
Keno didn’t seem like he was fixing to introduce me, so I figured I had to introduce my own self.
“Howdy, Mr. Duggan,” I said to him. “My name is Romy Tea Gardner. Keno and me are best buddies.”
“Nice to meet you, Romy,” said his uncle. “I want to thank you boys for coming down to do this little chore for us.”
“No problem,” Keno said.
“Maggie and the women folk’ve washed and dressed her. We just now got her in the box, and screwed the lid down tight. Aunt Pansy’s packed and ready to go.”
Then nobody said nothing.
Once it was clear his Uncle Clarence was finished talking, a kind of comfortless quiet settled over us all, like an itchy wool blanket. We found ourselves just standing ‘round, scratching, kicking stones, and listening to the wind seeking to shake loose the last few leaves of summer.
I saw this older woman come out on the porch wearing a Pentecostal styled dress. It was long sleeved, cotton dress, they kind of cotton that’s always on sale at Wal-Mart. It had a high collar, and was buttoned up way past modesty. On her head was a once white bonnet. She step out of the house to stand there on the porch surveying our group with sad eyes. I figuring she was the dead woman’s sister, maybe. Grief seemed to annoy her features like strands of a spider web that’s broke loose from its moorings, and wavering in the wind.
“Well,” Keno’s uncle finally said, “if you’re going do this for us, you’d best get busy and do it. Dark’ll be here in an hour, and Pansy ain’t getting any fresher.”
So, the Duggan men took hold of the coffin, and hoisted it over to the blue Ford, and slid her in the back. That’s when I noticed that even a long bed truck wasn’t long enough to accommodate that homemade coffin. I figure either Aunt Panzy was over seven feet tall, or ole man Duggan built without botherin’ to measure. We’d have to leave the tailgate down. It wasn’t a problem, not really, it was just odd. With the tailgate down the truck accommodated the length of the box nicely.
Before we left, Keno walked over and said some stuff real quiet in his Uncle Clearance’s ear. His Uncle Clarence called Bart over and said something in that boy’s big ole floppy ear. Bart went to nodding, and then said something back to Keno that I couldn’t hear. The Duggan boy pointed out toward the road we’d come in on just moments before.
We’d been there not even thirty minutes, and we were already pulling out and heading to Holdenville. The brevity of the visit told me that this Duggan clan cared most about getting done what had to get done.
Our only function was to drive two hours, load up Aunt Pansy, get her to Baker Brother so she could get preserved, and then getting her back to Lamar for a home burial. These were no non-sense folk, that was simple and plain to see.
“We got one stop to make,” Keno says as he slide behind the wheel, “then I figured we’d go back the way we came.”
“You’re driving,” I said. “I got nothing to do, and all night to do it in.”
I’d’ve thought Keno’d want to get back to Holdenville quicker since his Aunt was spoiling in the back and that coffin wasn’t no Tupperware dish. But if Keno wanted to go back, the same way we’d came down, well, I figured, what’s it to me? It was already sort of cold in Oklahoma, so that’d slow the old lady’s putrefaction. I was surprised, however, when Keno’s first stop was less than a hundred yards from the front door of the Duggans’s farmhouse. We were just barely out of sight when Keno shut down his ride and fired up a Kool.
“What’re we doing?” I asked. I was curious, but just barely so.
“You’ll see,” he said.
I sat back and looked up. Above us was a canopy of nearly bare branches that looked like brittle black-boned fingers intertwined over our heads. When I looked down, I saw a carpet of leaves looking to me like God’d spilled out a heavenly sized box of Wheaties. The leaves looked just like parched, dry flakes without the milk.
A zoned out for a half second or so, when sounds caused me to coming back to myself. There was the snap of a twig, then a kind of crushing cadence. It sounded like somebody’d stuck his hands in a big ole sack of potato chips and just started punching and crunching ’em in a kind of regular rhythm. Boney Bart was walking out of the wood carrying a cardboard box.
“Howdy Bart,” Keno said as the kid got to the truck.
“Howdy back at ’ya,” says Bart. “How much was you guys wanting?” No small talk for these folk. Even this boy was all business. Keno looked over at me.
“You thirsty?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, not knowing what thirsty had to do with the price of peaches.
“My daddy said, you bein’ family and all, that I shouldn’t make it more than five dollars a quart.”
“Sounds fair to me. Sound fair to you, Romy?”
“More than fair,” I said, still a bit baffled by what was going on.
“Give us two,” Keno told ’em.
Keno fished in his jeans pulling out a wad of bills, ones mostly. He thumbed through the roll and peeled off a couple of fives, which he handed over to boney Bart.
“Here you go, Keno,” says the boy, and he handed through the window two mason jars filled to the lids with clear liquid.
“Thanks a bunch, cuz,” Keno said, and he put the jars in my lap, and fired up the Ford. I never realized before, but Keno was sort of a no nonsense kind of guy himself. Apple trees make apples, I guess.
What he’d bought us was moonshine. I’d never tasted moonshine before, but then I’d never hauled a dead body before neither, and I was doing that, so I figured, why not, you know?
“Why didn’t we just buy this while we was back there standing in the yard?” I asked him.
“‘Cause my Aunt Maggie don’t know he’s moonshining. At least, if she does know,” Keno explained to me, “the two of them have this unspoken agreement to pretend they don’t know. So Uncle Clarence can’t very well be doing business right in front of her, now can he?”
Hypocrisy sticks on religious folk, like stink on shit. There’re hypocrites everywhere, and everywhere it smells all the way up to high heaven. I swear that if there is a God I figured he smells it most of all. Hypocrites probably make God gag and choke. But, who knows? Maybe booze is no big deal to the big guy. Obviously, it didn’t bother me enough not to drink it when it was available. I guess the stench in God’s nostrils comes just as much from me as from anybody else.
Taking the back roads toward Holdenville now made sense. We were consuming some of the strongest homemade hooch distilled in the entire State of Oklahoma. The Duggans had themselves a distillery hidden in the woods somewhere ‘round their place. I should’ve figured out about that still. The signs were all there. When there’s a still near abouts, one of the first things you’ll find is moonshine stumps. Moonshiners don’t bother to cut good size trees ‘cause these small distillery operations only require a small steady fire. All they got for cooking the corn is a small fire box. Big logs would have to be split and that’s way too much work for a moonshiner. Also, moonshiners, being a lazy lot, seldom bother cutting tree down low to the ground. That’s because it is a lot easier to cut a tree down starting about two feet from the ground. Cutting a tree level with the ground means you gotta to get down on your knees and grind the tree off without good leverage, which, again, is way too much work. So if you find a scattering of stumps, all of them thin, and about knee high, you can bet your left nut that somewhere close by somebody’s cooking cracked corn mash and distilling it into moonshine whiskey.
“They use cracked corn, called yellow mash,” Keno explained . “It’s sold all over this country for chicken feed. Even the term, chicken feed, means somethin’ that is cheap, and almost worthless. But my Uncle Clarence as got a recipe that’ll turn chicken feed into liquid gold.”
“You had this stuff before?”
“Once,” Keno told me. “There was this time daddy took me fishing and he brought along a jar of this joy juice. Daddy told me once that Clarence use to use cracked wheat mash for his brew. Instead of corn whiskey he called it whole wheat whiskey.”
“Wooo-weee,” I said when I took my first gulp. “This stuff burns all the way to down to my heels.”
“It burns all right,” Keno agreed. “Daddy says Uncle Clarence puts pulverized pepper in with his mash.”
“I don’t know if I can drink this, without mixing it with a Coke or something.” I wasn’t kidding either.
“Don’t let it beat you,” Keno said. He was driving with one hand and swigging with the other. There was fire burning in his eyes already.
“There’s a reason the Indian’s called it firewater. It’ll burn at first. Keep sipping this hooch and pretty soon, it’ll make you feel like your tongue’s turned into a softball bat. Keep with it and in no time you’ll be swimming in it and think it’s mother’s milk.”
I couldn’t imagine swimming in mother’s milk, and it didn’t sound so seemly to me, but, in general, what Keno was saying was right. Sort of. In just a little while, I couldn’t even taste the stuff, which was the way I wanted it. I mean it, why would anybody drink any kind of alcohol unless they were aiming for inebriation. If it was taste I was after, I’d rather’ve had a Dr. Pepper. I mean, the point of drinking booze was to get a buzz.
Five miles out of Lamar I was crocked like a pot and simmering in my own juice. When we pulled in to the Baker Brother’s Funeral Home neither one of us was thinking too clear, and neither one of us cared. I was numb, dumb, and liking it. That is, I liked it ‘til we crawled out of that truck and I found out what I found out next.
We clambered out of the cab, and the both of us turned to looked at the coffin. Well, we were baffled by what we weren’t seeing, I kid you not. The casket wasn’t there. ou could’ve knocked us both over with a green twig, no lie. Eventually what I figured was this: As Keno got sloshed, he got to driving wilder. The wilder he drove, the quicker he took the curves. The quicker he took the curves, the more he got to spinning and sliding and throwing gravel behind his tires like it was birdshot. I figured his Aunt Pansy must’ve slid out on one of them curves.
There was nothing left to do, but to head back the way we’d came, looking for a long wooden box laying in the road.
We’d farted around going and coming, so by the time we’d finally got to Holdenville is was well after eight. It was October, which meant that by eight o’clock it was already black as a Bible’s back, and cold enough to pucker the nipples on a brass monkey.
There was nothin’ left to do, but go look for Aunt Pansy. As we drove, we took turns chew on each other’s ass.
“You drive like baboon-brained moron,” I said. I felt fairly comfortable with my criticism since he was driving and I riding.
“Listen, butt-wad,” Keno came back at me, “I asked you to keep an eye on my Aunt Pansy.”
“You did not!”
“I did, too! How in the hell could you fail to notice when a great big ole casket fell off the back of this truck?”
“You didn’t notice it either, you’ll notice!”
It was just the mature kind of conversation you’d expect from a couple whacky drunk punks like us.
The blue Ford aimed its lights ahead, as our eyes searching for a big wooden box. Eventually, our quibbling dulled, drooped, and diminished. We just ran out of steam. Once the bickering cease there was, nothing left between us, but a churning frustration filling the cab with the ambiance of anger. We just pud-puded along in silence for another five minutes or so. When we’d both endured about all the quiet we could tolerate, a calmer, quieter Keno said to me, “I sure do hope Aunt Pansy’s box didn’t bust open when it hit the road.”
“If the coffin broke open,” I said, “what’s to keep the coons from having themselves a Pansy buffet?”
“Jesus, Romy,” Keno said grimacing at his own mental images, “why’d you have to say something like that?”
It was insensitive, I’ll admit, but it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t think what I thought on purpose. And how could anybody think what I’d just thought and not say it? It just wasn’t possible to stifle such thoughts without risking an explosion in your brain stem.
“Sorry,” I said, “I just thought it. I didn’t know I was going to think it.”
“Well, I think you should think more carefully. You think too damn hard about shit, and pretty soon everything around you’ll stink like a cracked septic tank.”
I guess even Keno had a touch of the poet in him.
We were almost all the ways back to Lamar, still not seeing a single sign of a casket anywhere, when flashing lights lit up the dark behind us. Well, I just about had the diarrhea, right then and there. Keno and I were, both of us, still lit up like a couple of Christmas trees, which is not the kind of condition you want to be in when a cop pulls you over, and that’s a truth you could print on the front page of the Wewoka Daily Times.
My only comfort was that at least I wasn’t the one driving.
Keno pulled over.
“Should we get out?” he asked me, “or should we wait ‘til he comes up to the window?”
“Let’s get out,” I told him. “It smells like Bud Davey’s Bar in here. Maybe in the night air he won’t get a whiff of us.”
We got out carefully, trying to walk like sober persons. The only problem I had was I couldn’t remember how sober people walked. I walked like somebody’d put slices of bologna in each one of my shoes.
This big ole barrel-chested cop was already out of his car and walking towards us. He had on one of those big ole wide brimmed hats, with a wide flat brim. The guy was backlit by the headlights of his cursor, which helped him to see us a bunch better than it helped us to see him.
“You boys are out awful late,” he says. I notice he’d rested one hand on his service revolver, and he’d unsnapped the hoster.
“Is it late?” Keno asked. I wanted to kick him hard enough to put another crack in his ass. Not knowing what time it was probably just confirm in this cop’s mind that we weren’t exactly teetotalers.
“It’s nearing eleven o’clock,” said the cop. “I see from your tag you’re not from Hardee County.”
“Nope,” I said, hoping I was talking less suspiciously than Keno.
“We’re both of us from Wewoka. Over in Seminole County.”
“You don’t say. You boys mind telling me what you’re doing so far from home, and so close to my town, this late at night? “
“What town?” Keno asked. I wish he hadn’t sounded so surprised, ‘cause sober guys would probably know what towns they were close to, but I have to say, I was wondering the same dog-gone thing. What city was this cop referring to? I had no idea. I mean, I didn’t see a single sign of a city anywhere around us.
“You boys are almost to Bolivia.”
“Bolivia?” both of us said together ‘cause we were, both of us, dumbfounded.
“Bolivia, Oklahoma,” said the cop by way of explanation.
I didn’t even know there was a Bolivia in Oklahoma.
“We’re looking for something we think we might’ve lost,” I said.
“It might’ve fallen off the back of our truck several hours back,” Keno chimed in.
“You boys had something fall off your truck and you didn’t notice?”
We had to nod yeah.
“Was this something small, or was it something big,” asked the cop.
I moved so I could see his nametag. His name of Eaton. Officer Eaton.
“It was something big,” Keno said.
Eaton just sort of popped his eyebrows a little.
“Something big fell off the back of your truck?”
We nodded yeah.
“And you didn’t notice?”
We nodded yeah again.
“And you didn’t go looking for this big thing for several hours, is that right?”
How are you supposed to answer a question like that? What I noticed was there was just the tiniest change in the cop’s face. It was just enough of a change for me to figure out that something we’d just said was fitting in with something else in his big ole boney head.
“This thing you lost off the back of your truck -- is it valuable?”
“No,” Keno said and then realized that he’d just said Aunt Pansy wasn’t valuable which he might’ve thought, but knew it was a wicked thing to actually say, so he corrected himself in about one half of one second. “I mean yes!”
“Which is it son? With, or without value?”
“If it was without value would we be out here freezing our asses off looking for it?” I said. It was a stupid thing for me to say. My only explanation for such stupidity is that I was drunk, and cold
“I believe I need to see your driver’s license,” Officer Eaton said.
He was oozing that cop calm they’re all trained to emit. Keno handed the man his license.
Eaton turned to me and said, “Yours too.”
“Mine?” I said. “But I wasn’t driving?”
“Just hand me your license, son.”
I dug through my billfold and pulled out my license. I hated the picture of me on the license ‘cause it looked just like me which is pretty damn depressing.
The cop moved closer to the nose of his cruiser and held the license in the wash of clarity coming from the headlights. He had this kind of radio on his left pectoral. He talked into his shoulder and then I heard a squawky reply that I couldn’t make out. Then he came back over to us.
“Which one of you is Jerome and which one is Kenneth?”
“I’m Kenneth,” Keno said. He didn’t bother to tell this law enforcement troglodyte that he went by Keno.
“I’m Jerome,” I said. “Everybody calls me Romy.”
“Well, Kenneth. Well, Romy. I guess you boys ’ve been drinking a lot of beer tonight?”
I was trying to come up with a response that would fix things, but Officer Eaton just turned on the heels of his boots and headed up towards Keno’s daddy’s truck. He was back moments later with the mason jars. I could see there was still about an inch in one of the jars.
“This here’s moonshine?”
I wish I’d been wise enough not to say what I said next.
“I told you we wasn’t drinking beer.”
I got another blast from ole laser eyes.
“Where’d you boy’s get moonshine?”
Without missing a beat, Keno spoke up. I figure he was aiming to protect his Uncle Clearance’s manufacturing site. “We bought it off a nigger,” he said.
“Don’t be using the N-word ‘round me, boy! There’re black folk around here that’d cut your nuts off shove ‘em up your nose for using the N-word. What if you want a run for President someday? That kind of phraseology can ruin your life.
“Now tell me this, where is the black gentleman you bought this stuff off of?”
“We never seen him before,” Keno said, “and we’ll never see him again.”
Well, we got us an escorted trip into Bolivia with exclusive reservations at the elegant Bolivia City Jail. It was more of a holding cell than a jail.
They held you in this little cell ‘til you could be transported to the county jail which was more like a real jail.
We got interrogated first. For that, they separated us, and questioned each of us for the longest time. Eventually, one of cracked. I said it was Keno that cracked first. He said it was me. I guess we both cracked. How ever it happened we both them all about how we came to be hauling Aunt Pansy to Holdenville for embalming and how she must’ve slide out the back of the truck on our way there.
“I was afraid that it was somethin’ like that,” Eaton says to me.
“How so?” I asked him.
“We got a call earlier this evening. Seems this old man and his boys were out feeding their cows when they came upon this long box. According to the boys, they thought a crate like rifles was shipped in, or some shit like that. So, they slide the box in the back of their truck, took it home with them, and unloaded it in their barn. The old man used a power drill with a Phillips bit and unscrewed the lid. When he look inside and saw a dead body inside it shocked him so bad he had a heart attack and died right there on the spot.”
So, that’s how Keno and me came to kill a man.
We weren’t charged with killing any body, but both of us felt like that’s what we’d done. We were arrested, me for public drunk, Keno for DUI. We spent a night in jail and the next morning Keno’s mama came down and bailed us out.
Considering the circumstances, she was amazingly unpissed. I think we’d’ve handled it better if she had been pissed off. What she did, instead, was cry. That is the way it was the whole time we were with her. She cried and whimpered, and kept saying, “I can’t believe what you boys have done. I can’t believe it.” Or she’d just look at Keno with amazement and say, “Where did I go wrong?”
I felt powerfully bad, I really did. I also felt powerfully hung over. The spit in my mouth felt like rubber glue. My head was throbbing like a strobe light at a rock concert. Keno looked green. I hoped I didn’t look as sick as he looked to me.
After getting out of jail, we had to head over to the Bolivia IGA. The police had hauled Aunt Pansy to the IGA and got the store manager to open up and allowing them to store Aunt Pansy in their meat locker.
When we picked up that coffin, I saw that the box was scuffed up, but it still seemed as solid as steel. There was not even the slightest wiggle in ole Clearance’s workmanship. What I felt most fortunate about was not having to go out to that farm and face those folk whose daddy’d keeled over when he saw Aunt Pansy.
We finally did finish the chore. With Keno’s mama following us the whole way, we got Keno’s Aunt Pansy embalmed and back to Lamar and we helped put her in the ground. It was a hard service to get through, partly because of guilt and mostly because of being hung over.
We stood around while Clarence, who didn’t seem so religious, said the words of the old gal.
“We’re here to bury our sister in Christ, Pansy Duggan. We lay her down to her final rest here in the family plot. She sleeps among the loved ones that’ve gone on before her. You know,” he went on to say, “grave yards like this one are quiet places. They’re far from the stresses and commotion of our daily life. These are peaceful places. Nothing much goes on here. But it won’t always be so. Someday, graveyards are going to be busy places. Someday Christ will return, and when he does the dead in Christ will rise first, and the rest of us. On that day, graveyards will no longer be quiet places. Then they’ll be the busiest of places. For even though we die, we believe that in Christ, we will live forever. A-men.”
“Amen,” we all said.
We stayed around, Keno and me, after most ever’body else’d left to help shovel in dirt on top of Aunt Pansy. It was the least we could do after screwing up as bad as we did.
My head was throbbing and my guts were churning as I started the final chore of covering ole Aunt Pansy over with earth. Before I’d pushed in five shovels full, I was sweating like racehorse.
“Well,” Keno says, and I looked over and saw that he was soaked in lathering sweat, “we’ll remember this for the rest of our lives.”
But for me remembering was not important. What was important was making sense out of all this. I was shoveling in the red dirt and wondering if I’d ever make sense out all this.
I guess Keno could see what I was fixing to ask next ‘cause he cut me off at the proverbial verbal pass, so to speak.
“And don’t ask why they aren’t getting a neighbor to help ’em. These are not the kind of folk that’ll ask non-family folk for help hauling their dead folk around. And besides that, they can’t be farting around trying to figure out the logistics for getting this job done. Every hour Aunt Pansy ain’t embalmed puts her an hour closer to the big stink. We’ve got to get Aunt Pansy done, and we’ve got to get it done quick.”
“I get what you’re getting at, I guess,” I said, “but let me ask you this, and please, Keno, don’t take it bad, but is your mama as wacky as the rest of her family?”
“My mama’s all right, mostly,” he said, “but that family she’s sprung from is cram-jammed full of Boo Raddly rejects.”
“I’m not trying to get out of nothing, Keno, I’m really not,” I said, “but doesn’t the funeral home have a hearse or something to use for jobs like this?”
“Look, Romy, my mama’s people are poor. These funeral guys charge out the wazoo for hauling a body even one way. You add the cost of a round-trip trip, and then add to that the cost of draining Aunt Pansy and refilling her with formaldehyde, and all of a sudden you’ve spend more than you got to spend. Even if they could’ve handled the cost, they’d still be reluctant to pay it. Paying other folks to do stuff they could do for themselves just doesn’t make sense to ‘em. Hell, if those Duggan’s’ had an idea of how to embalm a body, they’d do Aunt Pansy themselves. So, are you going to go with me or are we going to stand around flapping our gums all day?”
I should’ve stopped right then, but the oddness of it all just kept my questions coming.
“Well, jeez, Keno, how’s this done? What are we supposed to do, set her between us and belt her in?”
“Don’t be so fuckin’ stupid,” Keno said.
“Well we’re not going to strap her on the hood of your truck like she was a lung shot deer, so what is the procedure for something like this?”
“Damn it, Romy, it’ll be okay, O.K.? My Uncle Clarence built Aunt Pansy’s coffin. He starting building it a few days before she passed, when they were pretty sure she wasn’t going to make it. Uncle Clarence is good with wood. Aunt Pansy’s sister, lined the insides of the box with foam-rubber and pink satin. They told my mama all about it on the phone last night. They’ll do all the actual handling of the body. We won’t even have to touch her. They’ll but her in the box before we get there. All we’ve got to do is slide the casket into the back of my daddy’s truck and haul her up to the Baker Brother’s Funeral Home in Holdenville. We’ll have three or four hours to mess around Holdenville, and then we’ll haul her back to Lamar and let ’em lay the old gal to her final and eternal rest.”
When I said nothing to that little speech, I could see the frustration level kick up a notch.
“I’ve got to do this,” Keno said. “You don’t. What I’m asking is, will you go with me? If I’m putting, too much on you, then don’t go! Just say, no. But stop making me beg and explain, ‘cause by the time I answer all your questions Aunt Pansy will’ve swelled up and popped.”
Finally, I just said what I knew I was going to say before he’d even started asking me.
“Sounds fun.”
We were two hours getting to Lamar, but that was mostly because Keno was driving slow. He took his daddy’s new blue Ford pickup for two reasons: One, because Keno’s truck had no heater and his daddy’s truck did. It was October and Oklahoma was already getting frosty. Reason two, was that his daddy’s truck had a long bed. Hauling a coffin just seemed like something that might require a long bed. We weren’t wrong.
Being out from under the eyes of meddling adults was a freedom not to be wasted. Before we got out of Wewoka proper, we’d bought ourselves a twelve pack of Miller High Life, the Champagne of bottle beer. We were both under age, but if you know the right person that ain’t no obstacle. And in Wewoka everybody knows everybody.
Taking the back roads toward Lamar gave us the time and the leisure to
savor each bottle. Even though I was drug up in the Church of Christ’s Gospel and Blood, which is a tee totaling religion, it wasn’t like I’d never imbibe before. The fact is this: I was getting into the habit of self-medicated my melancholia with heavy doses of Miller High Life on a daily basis
The Duggans’s domicile consisted of a white framed clapboard house in sore need of paint; so sore in need of paint that it looked positively tender. Summer had blistered the paint’s topcoat pretty bad. A house can get sunburned just like a person can. And just like sun burnt people, houses peel. At a glance, you could see that the Duggan house was once painted a Pepto-Bismol pink, which made me feel like I was needing a dose of Pepto-Bismol in the worst way.
Some of the Duggan folk came out to meet us. Notice I said meet and not greet. Mostly, they hung back and looked at us. I should say they looked at me. They looked at me like I had a big booger hanging out one nose hole. I was the stranger in this bunch. I was the one who didn’t fit; who didn’t belong. Keno was kin, but me they didn’t know and there was this automatic distrust toward outsiders.
Out of the house came two men, four females, and a bony boy about our age. Now I hate to say this, ‘cause Keno is one of my very best friends, and these people were relatives of his and all, but they all look like extras from a cheap remake of The Grapes of Wrath. The whole bunch looked like extra’s from that dang Deliverance movie. No lie!
These people were living breathing Okie-clichés. The boy, Keno’s cousin, Bart, wore these green-bibbed overalls without a shirt. The girls wore no make up, (which was sinful), they had long hair tucked up under their bonnets like big balls of yarn (cutting female hair was sinful), and all of them were wearing long cotton dresses, plain and faded like their futures. One of the girls had big boobs, I could tell, but that plus was canceled out by one wondering eye. The Duggan men needed to’ve shaved about a week back. One of the men had these little stuff stain-lines coming off the corners of his mouth. It looked to me like he’d fallen asleep with a lip full of Skoal and while he was knocking out Zs the spit dribbled out like sorghum. You could see syrupy nicotine tracks running down his face, then down his neck, and finally disappearing behind the collar of a sweatshirt.
As soon as we pulled in, I could see the new made casket resting on a couple of weather worn sawhorses in front of their house. Keno’s Uncle Clarence had built a nice box. It was well made, but, to me, it looked more like a packing crate than a casket.
“Howdy, Keno,” his Uncle Clarence said.
“Howdy, Uncle Clarence,” Keno said.
Keno didn’t seem like he was fixing to introduce me, so I figured I had to introduce my own self.
“Howdy, Mr. Duggan,” I said to him. “My name is Romy Tea Gardner. Keno and me are best buddies.”
“Nice to meet you, Romy,” said his uncle. “I want to thank you boys for coming down to do this little chore for us.”
“No problem,” Keno said.
“Maggie and the women folk’ve washed and dressed her. We just now got her in the box, and screwed the lid down tight. Aunt Pansy’s packed and ready to go.”
Then nobody said nothing.
Once it was clear his Uncle Clarence was finished talking, a kind of comfortless quiet settled over us all, like an itchy wool blanket. We found ourselves just standing ‘round, scratching, kicking stones, and listening to the wind seeking to shake loose the last few leaves of summer.
I saw this older woman come out on the porch wearing a Pentecostal styled dress. It was long sleeved, cotton dress, they kind of cotton that’s always on sale at Wal-Mart. It had a high collar, and was buttoned up way past modesty. On her head was a once white bonnet. She step out of the house to stand there on the porch surveying our group with sad eyes. I figuring she was the dead woman’s sister, maybe. Grief seemed to annoy her features like strands of a spider web that’s broke loose from its moorings, and wavering in the wind.
“Well,” Keno’s uncle finally said, “if you’re going do this for us, you’d best get busy and do it. Dark’ll be here in an hour, and Pansy ain’t getting any fresher.”
So, the Duggan men took hold of the coffin, and hoisted it over to the blue Ford, and slid her in the back. That’s when I noticed that even a long bed truck wasn’t long enough to accommodate that homemade coffin. I figure either Aunt Panzy was over seven feet tall, or ole man Duggan built without botherin’ to measure. We’d have to leave the tailgate down. It wasn’t a problem, not really, it was just odd. With the tailgate down the truck accommodated the length of the box nicely.
Before we left, Keno walked over and said some stuff real quiet in his Uncle Clearance’s ear. His Uncle Clarence called Bart over and said something in that boy’s big ole floppy ear. Bart went to nodding, and then said something back to Keno that I couldn’t hear. The Duggan boy pointed out toward the road we’d come in on just moments before.
We’d been there not even thirty minutes, and we were already pulling out and heading to Holdenville. The brevity of the visit told me that this Duggan clan cared most about getting done what had to get done.
Our only function was to drive two hours, load up Aunt Pansy, get her to Baker Brother so she could get preserved, and then getting her back to Lamar for a home burial. These were no non-sense folk, that was simple and plain to see.
“We got one stop to make,” Keno says as he slide behind the wheel, “then I figured we’d go back the way we came.”
“You’re driving,” I said. “I got nothing to do, and all night to do it in.”
I’d’ve thought Keno’d want to get back to Holdenville quicker since his Aunt was spoiling in the back and that coffin wasn’t no Tupperware dish. But if Keno wanted to go back, the same way we’d came down, well, I figured, what’s it to me? It was already sort of cold in Oklahoma, so that’d slow the old lady’s putrefaction. I was surprised, however, when Keno’s first stop was less than a hundred yards from the front door of the Duggans’s farmhouse. We were just barely out of sight when Keno shut down his ride and fired up a Kool.
“What’re we doing?” I asked. I was curious, but just barely so.
“You’ll see,” he said.
I sat back and looked up. Above us was a canopy of nearly bare branches that looked like brittle black-boned fingers intertwined over our heads. When I looked down, I saw a carpet of leaves looking to me like God’d spilled out a heavenly sized box of Wheaties. The leaves looked just like parched, dry flakes without the milk.
A zoned out for a half second or so, when sounds caused me to coming back to myself. There was the snap of a twig, then a kind of crushing cadence. It sounded like somebody’d stuck his hands in a big ole sack of potato chips and just started punching and crunching ’em in a kind of regular rhythm. Boney Bart was walking out of the wood carrying a cardboard box.
“Howdy Bart,” Keno said as the kid got to the truck.
“Howdy back at ’ya,” says Bart. “How much was you guys wanting?” No small talk for these folk. Even this boy was all business. Keno looked over at me.
“You thirsty?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, not knowing what thirsty had to do with the price of peaches.
“My daddy said, you bein’ family and all, that I shouldn’t make it more than five dollars a quart.”
“Sounds fair to me. Sound fair to you, Romy?”
“More than fair,” I said, still a bit baffled by what was going on.
“Give us two,” Keno told ’em.
Keno fished in his jeans pulling out a wad of bills, ones mostly. He thumbed through the roll and peeled off a couple of fives, which he handed over to boney Bart.
“Here you go, Keno,” says the boy, and he handed through the window two mason jars filled to the lids with clear liquid.
“Thanks a bunch, cuz,” Keno said, and he put the jars in my lap, and fired up the Ford. I never realized before, but Keno was sort of a no nonsense kind of guy himself. Apple trees make apples, I guess.
What he’d bought us was moonshine. I’d never tasted moonshine before, but then I’d never hauled a dead body before neither, and I was doing that, so I figured, why not, you know?
“Why didn’t we just buy this while we was back there standing in the yard?” I asked him.
“‘Cause my Aunt Maggie don’t know he’s moonshining. At least, if she does know,” Keno explained to me, “the two of them have this unspoken agreement to pretend they don’t know. So Uncle Clarence can’t very well be doing business right in front of her, now can he?”
Hypocrisy sticks on religious folk, like stink on shit. There’re hypocrites everywhere, and everywhere it smells all the way up to high heaven. I swear that if there is a God I figured he smells it most of all. Hypocrites probably make God gag and choke. But, who knows? Maybe booze is no big deal to the big guy. Obviously, it didn’t bother me enough not to drink it when it was available. I guess the stench in God’s nostrils comes just as much from me as from anybody else.
Taking the back roads toward Holdenville now made sense. We were consuming some of the strongest homemade hooch distilled in the entire State of Oklahoma. The Duggans had themselves a distillery hidden in the woods somewhere ‘round their place. I should’ve figured out about that still. The signs were all there. When there’s a still near abouts, one of the first things you’ll find is moonshine stumps. Moonshiners don’t bother to cut good size trees ‘cause these small distillery operations only require a small steady fire. All they got for cooking the corn is a small fire box. Big logs would have to be split and that’s way too much work for a moonshiner. Also, moonshiners, being a lazy lot, seldom bother cutting tree down low to the ground. That’s because it is a lot easier to cut a tree down starting about two feet from the ground. Cutting a tree level with the ground means you gotta to get down on your knees and grind the tree off without good leverage, which, again, is way too much work. So if you find a scattering of stumps, all of them thin, and about knee high, you can bet your left nut that somewhere close by somebody’s cooking cracked corn mash and distilling it into moonshine whiskey.
“They use cracked corn, called yellow mash,” Keno explained . “It’s sold all over this country for chicken feed. Even the term, chicken feed, means somethin’ that is cheap, and almost worthless. But my Uncle Clarence as got a recipe that’ll turn chicken feed into liquid gold.”
“You had this stuff before?”
“Once,” Keno told me. “There was this time daddy took me fishing and he brought along a jar of this joy juice. Daddy told me once that Clarence use to use cracked wheat mash for his brew. Instead of corn whiskey he called it whole wheat whiskey.”
“Wooo-weee,” I said when I took my first gulp. “This stuff burns all the way to down to my heels.”
“It burns all right,” Keno agreed. “Daddy says Uncle Clarence puts pulverized pepper in with his mash.”
“I don’t know if I can drink this, without mixing it with a Coke or something.” I wasn’t kidding either.
“Don’t let it beat you,” Keno said. He was driving with one hand and swigging with the other. There was fire burning in his eyes already.
“There’s a reason the Indian’s called it firewater. It’ll burn at first. Keep sipping this hooch and pretty soon, it’ll make you feel like your tongue’s turned into a softball bat. Keep with it and in no time you’ll be swimming in it and think it’s mother’s milk.”
I couldn’t imagine swimming in mother’s milk, and it didn’t sound so seemly to me, but, in general, what Keno was saying was right. Sort of. In just a little while, I couldn’t even taste the stuff, which was the way I wanted it. I mean it, why would anybody drink any kind of alcohol unless they were aiming for inebriation. If it was taste I was after, I’d rather’ve had a Dr. Pepper. I mean, the point of drinking booze was to get a buzz.
Five miles out of Lamar I was crocked like a pot and simmering in my own juice. When we pulled in to the Baker Brother’s Funeral Home neither one of us was thinking too clear, and neither one of us cared. I was numb, dumb, and liking it. That is, I liked it ‘til we crawled out of that truck and I found out what I found out next.
We clambered out of the cab, and the both of us turned to looked at the coffin. Well, we were baffled by what we weren’t seeing, I kid you not. The casket wasn’t there. ou could’ve knocked us both over with a green twig, no lie. Eventually what I figured was this: As Keno got sloshed, he got to driving wilder. The wilder he drove, the quicker he took the curves. The quicker he took the curves, the more he got to spinning and sliding and throwing gravel behind his tires like it was birdshot. I figured his Aunt Pansy must’ve slid out on one of them curves.
There was nothing left to do, but to head back the way we’d came, looking for a long wooden box laying in the road.
We’d farted around going and coming, so by the time we’d finally got to Holdenville is was well after eight. It was October, which meant that by eight o’clock it was already black as a Bible’s back, and cold enough to pucker the nipples on a brass monkey.
There was nothin’ left to do, but go look for Aunt Pansy. As we drove, we took turns chew on each other’s ass.
“You drive like baboon-brained moron,” I said. I felt fairly comfortable with my criticism since he was driving and I riding.
“Listen, butt-wad,” Keno came back at me, “I asked you to keep an eye on my Aunt Pansy.”
“You did not!”
“I did, too! How in the hell could you fail to notice when a great big ole casket fell off the back of this truck?”
“You didn’t notice it either, you’ll notice!”
It was just the mature kind of conversation you’d expect from a couple whacky drunk punks like us.
The blue Ford aimed its lights ahead, as our eyes searching for a big wooden box. Eventually, our quibbling dulled, drooped, and diminished. We just ran out of steam. Once the bickering cease there was, nothing left between us, but a churning frustration filling the cab with the ambiance of anger. We just pud-puded along in silence for another five minutes or so. When we’d both endured about all the quiet we could tolerate, a calmer, quieter Keno said to me, “I sure do hope Aunt Pansy’s box didn’t bust open when it hit the road.”
“If the coffin broke open,” I said, “what’s to keep the coons from having themselves a Pansy buffet?”
“Jesus, Romy,” Keno said grimacing at his own mental images, “why’d you have to say something like that?”
It was insensitive, I’ll admit, but it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t think what I thought on purpose. And how could anybody think what I’d just thought and not say it? It just wasn’t possible to stifle such thoughts without risking an explosion in your brain stem.
“Sorry,” I said, “I just thought it. I didn’t know I was going to think it.”
“Well, I think you should think more carefully. You think too damn hard about shit, and pretty soon everything around you’ll stink like a cracked septic tank.”
I guess even Keno had a touch of the poet in him.
We were almost all the ways back to Lamar, still not seeing a single sign of a casket anywhere, when flashing lights lit up the dark behind us. Well, I just about had the diarrhea, right then and there. Keno and I were, both of us, still lit up like a couple of Christmas trees, which is not the kind of condition you want to be in when a cop pulls you over, and that’s a truth you could print on the front page of the Wewoka Daily Times.
My only comfort was that at least I wasn’t the one driving.
Keno pulled over.
“Should we get out?” he asked me, “or should we wait ‘til he comes up to the window?”
“Let’s get out,” I told him. “It smells like Bud Davey’s Bar in here. Maybe in the night air he won’t get a whiff of us.”
We got out carefully, trying to walk like sober persons. The only problem I had was I couldn’t remember how sober people walked. I walked like somebody’d put slices of bologna in each one of my shoes.
This big ole barrel-chested cop was already out of his car and walking towards us. He had on one of those big ole wide brimmed hats, with a wide flat brim. The guy was backlit by the headlights of his cursor, which helped him to see us a bunch better than it helped us to see him.
“You boys are out awful late,” he says. I notice he’d rested one hand on his service revolver, and he’d unsnapped the hoster.
“Is it late?” Keno asked. I wanted to kick him hard enough to put another crack in his ass. Not knowing what time it was probably just confirm in this cop’s mind that we weren’t exactly teetotalers.
“It’s nearing eleven o’clock,” said the cop. “I see from your tag you’re not from Hardee County.”
“Nope,” I said, hoping I was talking less suspiciously than Keno.
“We’re both of us from Wewoka. Over in Seminole County.”
“You don’t say. You boys mind telling me what you’re doing so far from home, and so close to my town, this late at night? “
“What town?” Keno asked. I wish he hadn’t sounded so surprised, ‘cause sober guys would probably know what towns they were close to, but I have to say, I was wondering the same dog-gone thing. What city was this cop referring to? I had no idea. I mean, I didn’t see a single sign of a city anywhere around us.
“You boys are almost to Bolivia.”
“Bolivia?” both of us said together ‘cause we were, both of us, dumbfounded.
“Bolivia, Oklahoma,” said the cop by way of explanation.
I didn’t even know there was a Bolivia in Oklahoma.
“We’re looking for something we think we might’ve lost,” I said.
“It might’ve fallen off the back of our truck several hours back,” Keno chimed in.
“You boys had something fall off your truck and you didn’t notice?”
We had to nod yeah.
“Was this something small, or was it something big,” asked the cop.
I moved so I could see his nametag. His name of Eaton. Officer Eaton.
“It was something big,” Keno said.
Eaton just sort of popped his eyebrows a little.
“Something big fell off the back of your truck?”
We nodded yeah.
“And you didn’t notice?”
We nodded yeah again.
“And you didn’t go looking for this big thing for several hours, is that right?”
How are you supposed to answer a question like that? What I noticed was there was just the tiniest change in the cop’s face. It was just enough of a change for me to figure out that something we’d just said was fitting in with something else in his big ole boney head.
“This thing you lost off the back of your truck -- is it valuable?”
“No,” Keno said and then realized that he’d just said Aunt Pansy wasn’t valuable which he might’ve thought, but knew it was a wicked thing to actually say, so he corrected himself in about one half of one second. “I mean yes!”
“Which is it son? With, or without value?”
“If it was without value would we be out here freezing our asses off looking for it?” I said. It was a stupid thing for me to say. My only explanation for such stupidity is that I was drunk, and cold
“I believe I need to see your driver’s license,” Officer Eaton said.
He was oozing that cop calm they’re all trained to emit. Keno handed the man his license.
Eaton turned to me and said, “Yours too.”
“Mine?” I said. “But I wasn’t driving?”
“Just hand me your license, son.”
I dug through my billfold and pulled out my license. I hated the picture of me on the license ‘cause it looked just like me which is pretty damn depressing.
The cop moved closer to the nose of his cruiser and held the license in the wash of clarity coming from the headlights. He had this kind of radio on his left pectoral. He talked into his shoulder and then I heard a squawky reply that I couldn’t make out. Then he came back over to us.
“Which one of you is Jerome and which one is Kenneth?”
“I’m Kenneth,” Keno said. He didn’t bother to tell this law enforcement troglodyte that he went by Keno.
“I’m Jerome,” I said. “Everybody calls me Romy.”
“Well, Kenneth. Well, Romy. I guess you boys ’ve been drinking a lot of beer tonight?”
I was trying to come up with a response that would fix things, but Officer Eaton just turned on the heels of his boots and headed up towards Keno’s daddy’s truck. He was back moments later with the mason jars. I could see there was still about an inch in one of the jars.
“This here’s moonshine?”
I wish I’d been wise enough not to say what I said next.
“I told you we wasn’t drinking beer.”
I got another blast from ole laser eyes.
“Where’d you boy’s get moonshine?”
Without missing a beat, Keno spoke up. I figure he was aiming to protect his Uncle Clearance’s manufacturing site. “We bought it off a nigger,” he said.
“Don’t be using the N-word ‘round me, boy! There’re black folk around here that’d cut your nuts off shove ‘em up your nose for using the N-word. What if you want a run for President someday? That kind of phraseology can ruin your life.
“Now tell me this, where is the black gentleman you bought this stuff off of?”
“We never seen him before,” Keno said, “and we’ll never see him again.”
Well, we got us an escorted trip into Bolivia with exclusive reservations at the elegant Bolivia City Jail. It was more of a holding cell than a jail.
They held you in this little cell ‘til you could be transported to the county jail which was more like a real jail.
We got interrogated first. For that, they separated us, and questioned each of us for the longest time. Eventually, one of cracked. I said it was Keno that cracked first. He said it was me. I guess we both cracked. How ever it happened we both them all about how we came to be hauling Aunt Pansy to Holdenville for embalming and how she must’ve slide out the back of the truck on our way there.
“I was afraid that it was somethin’ like that,” Eaton says to me.
“How so?” I asked him.
“We got a call earlier this evening. Seems this old man and his boys were out feeding their cows when they came upon this long box. According to the boys, they thought a crate like rifles was shipped in, or some shit like that. So, they slide the box in the back of their truck, took it home with them, and unloaded it in their barn. The old man used a power drill with a Phillips bit and unscrewed the lid. When he look inside and saw a dead body inside it shocked him so bad he had a heart attack and died right there on the spot.”
So, that’s how Keno and me came to kill a man.
We weren’t charged with killing any body, but both of us felt like that’s what we’d done. We were arrested, me for public drunk, Keno for DUI. We spent a night in jail and the next morning Keno’s mama came down and bailed us out.
Considering the circumstances, she was amazingly unpissed. I think we’d’ve handled it better if she had been pissed off. What she did, instead, was cry. That is the way it was the whole time we were with her. She cried and whimpered, and kept saying, “I can’t believe what you boys have done. I can’t believe it.” Or she’d just look at Keno with amazement and say, “Where did I go wrong?”
I felt powerfully bad, I really did. I also felt powerfully hung over. The spit in my mouth felt like rubber glue. My head was throbbing like a strobe light at a rock concert. Keno looked green. I hoped I didn’t look as sick as he looked to me.
After getting out of jail, we had to head over to the Bolivia IGA. The police had hauled Aunt Pansy to the IGA and got the store manager to open up and allowing them to store Aunt Pansy in their meat locker.
When we picked up that coffin, I saw that the box was scuffed up, but it still seemed as solid as steel. There was not even the slightest wiggle in ole Clearance’s workmanship. What I felt most fortunate about was not having to go out to that farm and face those folk whose daddy’d keeled over when he saw Aunt Pansy.
We finally did finish the chore. With Keno’s mama following us the whole way, we got Keno’s Aunt Pansy embalmed and back to Lamar and we helped put her in the ground. It was a hard service to get through, partly because of guilt and mostly because of being hung over.
We stood around while Clarence, who didn’t seem so religious, said the words of the old gal.
“We’re here to bury our sister in Christ, Pansy Duggan. We lay her down to her final rest here in the family plot. She sleeps among the loved ones that’ve gone on before her. You know,” he went on to say, “grave yards like this one are quiet places. They’re far from the stresses and commotion of our daily life. These are peaceful places. Nothing much goes on here. But it won’t always be so. Someday, graveyards are going to be busy places. Someday Christ will return, and when he does the dead in Christ will rise first, and the rest of us. On that day, graveyards will no longer be quiet places. Then they’ll be the busiest of places. For even though we die, we believe that in Christ, we will live forever. A-men.”
“Amen,” we all said.
We stayed around, Keno and me, after most ever’body else’d left to help shovel in dirt on top of Aunt Pansy. It was the least we could do after screwing up as bad as we did.
My head was throbbing and my guts were churning as I started the final chore of covering ole Aunt Pansy over with earth. Before I’d pushed in five shovels full, I was sweating like racehorse.
“Well,” Keno says, and I looked over and saw that he was soaked in lathering sweat, “we’ll remember this for the rest of our lives.”
But for me remembering was not important. What was important was making sense out of all this. I was shoveling in the red dirt and wondering if I’d ever make sense out all this.
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