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  When he hits the “It’s gonna be alright, alright? Woman, alright?” bit which used to be my least favorite part, I can’t take any more and head for the men’s room. It’s empty. Everybody is outside, mesmerized by the former clown up there singing the shit out of their expectations. I lock myself in a stall, sit down and begin to cry.

  It starts off as shudders. Little convulsions that double me over, hugging myself and rocking on the toilet. There’s a high pitched raspy moan leaking out of me that just intensifies until I’m sobbing and convulsing, helpless against the tide of bottled up emotion the little fairy in the blouse and eye make-up just uncorked. I stay in that stall a long fucking time.

  Time to buy myself a dress.

  Flash forward one hour and I’m seeing red. I kill the guy. Lila screams.

  When I emerge from the bathroom the club has transformed. The house lights were up and AC/DC was on the system. Some of the members of Copernicus are sitting at tables along the back wall applying their signatures to old posters and t-shirts. I don’t see Tracy Collins with them. I also can’t find Lila.

  I walk around for a few minutes scanning the thinned out crowd before abandoning my search of the inside and head for the parking lot. Right away I spot my own car with a note stuck under the wiper. It’s from Lila instructing me to meet her at the diner down the street in an hour. She’s got something special planned for me.

  My already tender heart gives an especially soft thwump, thwump in my chest and I feel more tears coming. God, that Tracy Collins really fucked up my emotional equilibrium. But I let it happen, getting into the car for some privacy. Lila’s so sweet. I love her so much and making a baby with her is just about the best thing that’s ever gonna happen to me in my life.

  I figure two can be romantical and go to the 7-11 for some paper roses. Thinking I’ll spread them all over the hotel room so she’ll be surprised and happy when we get there. The guy behind the counter smirks at me while I’m buying the flowers and a ten dollar bottle of wine. When I notice, he answers my unspoken question. “You see Copernicus tonight?”

  “Yeah.” And I realize I’d been humming their hit.

  “I hate that song.” He says while he’s ringing up the sale and his abrasiveness throws a kink into my mood. “Everybody’s humming that song tonight. It’s gonna be stuck in my head for a week.”

  I’m angry at him, for shitting on my music, but at the same time, I understand ‘cause I’d have felt the same way last night if someone had got that song stuck in my head. I just take my change and leave. I don’t wanna start any shit.

  I keep humming the song all the way to the hotel, even singing the words that I know under my breath. I smile at the lady behind the desk and hum my way down the hall with my flowers.

  When I open the door to the room, I’m immediately aware that I’m not alone. Slapping and grunting sounds hit me like a hammer and I drop the flowers. Quietly I close the door and creep around the corner where some fat asshole fucking Lila from behind on the bed.

  My first thought is to rescue her from the rapist, but her vocal encouragement makes me reevaluate the situation. She’s going uh, uh, oh yeah, yeah like that, right like that, uh, uh.

  My whole world goes psychedelic in an instant. Spots burst bright red behind my eyes and the room goes away till all I can see is my sweet Lila fucking somebody else like I’m watching it in a fun house mirror. The shape of them moving together bubbles up and contracts, pulsing to a trippy rhythm and I feel like I’m going to fall down. But I don’t. I go through my repertoire of emotions in a heartbeat and settle finally on rage.

  There’s an animal howl that gets all of our attention and it’s only in retrospect that I realize it was me making the terrible sound. Lila and Tracy Collins turn their heads toward me, but it’s too late. I swing that wine bottle right at his head.

  Tracy had abused his body so severely for so long, it was really a miracle that he’d lived long enough for me to kill him. But that single blow to the head was all it took and he collapsed on the bed, transformed in an instant from Lila’s teenage sex god into a dead tub of shit.

  Lila screamed. Not like a scaredy scream or even surprised, but angry beyond even what I’d felt when I did it. “No, you idiot, no. Asshole, fucking asshole what’d you do?”

  Ty Crenshaw died. Tracy Collins died. Ty left behind a fortune and a string of bastards to inherit it. Tracy didn’t have any wife. No children. Lila’d figured he was still worth something. And look at him. He wasn’t going to live much longer.

  When I’d told her I loved her, and she saw that it was true, it was like the aligning of all the right stars. She did want to raise a baby with me; she just didn’t want me to sire the brat. And she didn’t want me to know that I hadn’t. She’d have been happy to use me as Mr. Mom for a year or two until Tracy Collins met his inevitable early end and then dump me and prove with a paternity test, her child’s true father. Figured she could inherit some of that fortune he hopefully wouldn’t have completely depleted.

  But I’d fucked it up.

  “What did I do, Li? What did you do? What the fuck did you do? Broke my fucking heart is all.”

  “He’s dead, Carl.”

  “Looks that way, Li. Hope you’re happy.” We looked down at the body when it farted. “What the shit?”

  She grabbed him under the arms and tried to tug him over the bed to a better spot. “Don’t just stand there, help me.”

  “We need to get out of here, Li.”

  “Uh-uh, I’m getting pregnant tonight and now you’ve gotta help me.”

  “What are you talking about? If you think I’m gonna give you a baby now, you’re so wrong.” But she wasn’t listening to me. Instead she was taking Tracy’s still rigid dick in her hands and beginning to straddle the dough boy. “The hell are you doing, Lila? That’s sick.”

  “C’mon, we can still make this work, but you’re going to have to help me.”

  “What?”

  She turned her face to me and the fierceness behind her eyes set an ice block squarely in my stomach. “He wont last that much longer. You’ve got to make him cum.”

  Her theory, which I had my doubts on, but wasn’t about to voice, was that he could be made to ejaculate by milking the prostate. I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s true that a man can be brought to orgasm by sticking a finger or two up his ass and rubbing the prostate gland. Homos do it, but they don’t always use a finger, and I guess any dude can do it to his own self if he wanted to, but as far as the method’s merits on the recently deceased go, I really couldn’t say.

  I guess I still loved her.

  She’d used me and cheated on me and probably would’ve laughed about it later, but she still held a special place in my heart. I had changed. Grown. Somewhere in the midst of all that reading I’d done on parenting a critter and taking care of both child and mother, I’d realized that my priorities had changed. I wasn’t living just for myself any more. Lila was my priority and soon our kid would be too. I’d gotten used to it pretty quickly, such was the hold she had on me.

  So, I guess I still loved her. It’s the only reason I can think of that I went along with her plan. It was hard work, let alone disgusting, but Lila coached me and all I had to do was concentrate on her voice and command. And follow.

  I got underneath him and with the help of a bottle of Astro-glyde, worked my fingers up his butt and started rubbing away while she ground into him from above. He was heavy and unwieldy. His head flopped backward onto my shoulder and I buried my face in what was left of his hair, preferring to smell the sweat and shampoo there than the sex and death scents that were rapidly overpowering everything else.

  My hand cramped up and I had to switch back and forth between right and left several times. Lila bucked and twitched like a pro, her eyes shut tight mostly, but opening to transfix me every few minutes. Time melted away. My hands were covered in blood and shit.

  Still Lila worked at it.

  I
realized finally that I was truly outmatched by her. However much I changed and grew, I would never be able to equal her in a relationship. We were driven by different forces. She was beyond me in every way.

  And as I watched her doggedly press on, I knew two things simultaneously. One was that however this turned out, Lila would survive. She’d move on and be just fine. And two, it was over between us.

  The Whole Buffalo

  Right from the start, the papers made such a big deal of it, but the whole thing was really blown way out of proportion. Not to say they got it wrong, exactly, but certainly many of the details were sensationalized. Can't really blame them for trying, though. The Hamilton County Gazette's a bit starved for readership. I've know them to reprint some stories from previous issues to fill space sometimes. Nobody ever complains about that. Not sure anybody else notices. Anyhow, it was a big deal to them to get a story picked up for the nationals. The good days dried up pretty quick, though as the big guys with field reporters and budgets and the like just sent their own folks to St. Thomas to excavate what story there was and then, like the vultures they are, leave the town, to rot, stripped to a pile of bones, and then they're off to follow the next salacious tale in some other nook of the world.

  The Gazette's editors still saw a healthy bump in readership and advertising for a few months and when the trial came about, they experienced it again, armed this time with a certain worldliness and know how, they were short of before. For instance they learned there are loaded words you can toss in to any sentence and instantly you've got a headline: mutilate... corpse... cannibal...

  I never wanted the attention, but I'm a good sport. I knew that it was my chance to pump a little money into the tax base of the town. So I played along, granted interviews, held back some of my best stuff for the local boys, though they were often pretty slow on the uptake, and I had to spoon feed them and answer questions they weren't asking. I'd like to think I maybe paid for some road work or uniforms for the football team. Can't hardly have a town worth living in around here without a high school football team. Building block of society, really. I was not and am not ashamed of anything I did, but you'd have thought I was a real sicko, if the papers were your only source of information. You'd have thought I was some demented, old necrophile jack off, but what it really boiled down to was thriftiness and good business sense. Like the Indians, you know? Use the whole buffalo.

  The other day, a reporter asked me and I couldn't give a grand total. You think I kept books on that? No sir. Whatever I may be, stupid is not one of my traits. Though, I've not thought much as to volume, I have wondered occasionally if all the families with junk stored at the Stock 'N Lock had any notions that it was hallowed ground they tread, or if they had familial connections to anyone resting in peace behind one of my garage doors. Now that I've got nothing but time on my hands, I suppose I could put my mind to some calculations and arrive at a figure shortly. It would be approximate mind you, but I will, now that I think of it, try to.

  Maybe get us a gift shop, build a tourism industry.

  What really does wrinkle my scrotum, though, is that nobody would have any problem with the whole affair at all if it weren't for that insufferable bitch Susie Dross. That uptight boner killer nearly took down the whole town, in the end. Just about killed it as surely as if she'd set a fire or used an atom bomb. I was the one who finally put an end to the old biddy, humanely even, much better than she deserved, and do I get a medal?

  Let's just say none of us get what we deserve.

  Susie Dross had a husband, you might say, though I wouldn't. I've been one before and let me tell you, any emasculation I may have suffered at the hands of my various ex's would merely feel like tight pants compared to the continual and public nut flaying Herbert Dross took up as his daily cross. She may as well have kept his testes tied to either end of a baton and twirled the motherfucker in front of a brass band everywhere they went together. He may have had his esophagus clawed out of his neck by the pack of dogs that ran wild in the woods on the south side of town, but I haven't ruled out suicide. I don't know what exactly you'd call that relationship, but marriage just doesn't seem right.

  Anyway, after the attack Susie brings her funeral business my way and I really thought about turning her down from the outset. I didn't because that's not something I've made a practice of in thirty years of service as a mortician. Donnelly Funeral Home has lain to rest St. Thomas's dead for most of a hundred years now. When I bought out the Donnelly family back in 1978, they'd been the first and most trusted name in death care in all of Hamilton County and they didn't accomplish that by turning away clients based on personal dislike.

  So one night, as I'm standing over the sink with my micro-waved enchiladas not even thinking about how empty the house is these days, there is a knock at the door, which I'm accustomed to. I suck the insides out at the back end where they're threatening to drip, then set down my dinner on a paper plate nearly transparent with grease, suck my fingertips and wipe them on my pants, donning my black jacket as I go for the front entrance. My stomach drops into my gonads when I see that it's Susie Dross all barely composed and puffy on my doorstep.

  "Good evening, Mrs. Dross." I say, like she were any other human person I might have reason to see at my house.

  "No. No Mr. Wainscot, it is not." She sniffles just a bit and touches a well used kerchief to her face. "Herbert..." And she breaks into a fit of tears as violent as it is short. I stand solemnly quiet before her, waiting for the news. "Mr. Dross has been killed this very evening." And she waits there for me to supply the appropriate professional, if not personal, condolences.

  Good for him, is my first thought. I can't believe he lasted this long, is my second. "I'm so sorry for your loss." is what pours from my lips, like some automaton set perpetually on polite. I hold open the door for her, and she enters.

  I lead her to my consultation room, just off the vestibule, straight ahead as you enter. It features decor the very substance of sobriety and sincerity, picked out by Tamara Donnelly, grandmother to those I bought the place from, all those years ago. It's been a good choice to leave it alone and not redecorate as each of my wives has encouraged me to do over the years. People seem to find something reassuring in the old fashioned look of the place. I often think, as I lead the grieving into this 19th century time warp how shocked most of their delicate sensibilities would be if they knew the acts committed upon the furniture on which they now rest. I can't speak for the Donnelly’s, but it is my experience that the dark tones of the wood paneling and carpet and the dim lighting have remained there just as much to cover the various stains crusted in to the fibers and left on the walls as to assure them they are in the best and most respectful and understanding of hands.

  In this very room my first wife and I used to throw parties with couples from out of town. Cool little get-togethers with some costumes and coke. There'd be all manner of role play and experimentation. We were always careful not to include locals, because you never know who's going to get the heebie-jeebies discussing the details of a loved one's funeral sitting upon the very couch they watched you pork her on. Wearing the bunny ears.

  Learned a lot about ourselves as a couple and individuals, which I always thought was a good thing, but that was where I just saw the world different from Joni. Eventually something really freaked her out, got her permanently out of the mood and into the booze. She sulked and cussed me good, and took to saying some pretty hurtful things on a pretty regular basis. I told her finally to cut that shit out and she was ready to. I think she joined a cult or something.

  Susie Dross has recovered her composure by the time I've placed the lacquered tissue box on the solid oak coffee table in front of her. The sturdiness of the furniture is another reason I've not redecorated. You come to appreciate good craftsmanship after collapsing a couple Ikea pieces of crap just trying to get your nob polished. She seems completely back to her stern old self, and I just want to get this over with. "Mr.
Wainscot, my husband deserves the very best."

  A martyr's remembrance 'is what I think.

  "And I expect you will not take his meager pension into consideration when you make your recommendations for the service." I can tell she's really going to get off on her new opportunity to suffer nobly. "You needn't worry about such things. If he's left me only enough to cover the ceremony, I'm sure that God has put that before me for a reason."

  She just can't resist taking digs at him, even in her grieving. He never made enough money, is what I'm supposed to hear, so I'm perfectly capable of fending for myself in his absence, the way I have had to my whole life. The blame is really on me for marrying a man of such low quality and character as to not care enough to provide better for me and then to just check out and leave me with nothing.

  I squeeze my fists a couple of times, just to get some tension out. She bothers me. She senses the devil about me, I know from loose talk I've picked up from other clients over the years. Plus those fiery editorials she prints in the papers have made it pretty clear the type of people who earn her contempt. St. Thomas is a pretty small town though, and unless she wants to drag her ass, with the broom handle poking out, over the state line and create a lot more hassle in paperwork and legalities, Donnelly Funeral Home will be providing her the sensible, assuring and steady support she'll need to weather this storm.

  "Mrs. Dross, let me assure you that I take this period in a family's life very seriously and would suggest in your case, just as in every case brought before me, modesty in scale and arrangement." I can see she wants me to notice her irritation at this remark. Nobody comes in asking for the cheapest crate we got, and I'm glad enough to play this role and offend their pride until they come around to my reasoning. Before she can offer a token rebuttal, I continue. "Frankly Mrs. Dross, nothing speaks of a guilty conscience louder than a garish funeral. Just like the most elaborate weddings always produce the shortest marriages. People see through that, and I know that is not the impression you would want them to have. Certainly, I am not suggesting that a guilty conscience resides in you, but I am quite serious when I say that, that is how it will look if you insist on silk pillows, printed announcements or other silly, ornamental things just because some huckster with a black suit and a pinched sincerity about him says it is the best."