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My head feels like it’s about to explode. Trying to maintain my usual even keel, calm demeanor, I ask Sean if I can get a private word with him in the storage room. He nods in the affirmative and together, he, Joanne, and I head into the room, and close the door behind us.
“Jesus freaking Christ, Sean!” I bark in this sort of screaming whisper. “You’re buying the drugs from the very guy whose brothers we killed and buried in our basement...the guy whose money we took to buy this funeral parlor and whose drugs we just sold on the streets. Jesus, you must have paid him with his own money. His own freaking cash. What if he somehow recognizes it? If he finds out who we are and what we’ve done, he’ll stop at nothing to see us dead. But first, he’ll torture the crap out of us.”
Sean raises his hands, palms up like he’s trying to tell me to calm down in sign language. He also keeps nodding emphatically like he totally agrees with every word spitting out of my mouth.
“I know, I know, I get it,” he insists. “Just relax and hear me out, Brad buddy. I thought you knew we were going to be buying from him.”
“Yes, darling,” Joanne says. “Let’s just calm down a little and hear what Sean has to say. And he’s right. He did mention that we might be buying from Perez at some point.”
They’re both right of course. But I guess I never really thought we’d go so far as to do business with the very man whose little brothers we killed, disintegrated in acid, and buried in our basement. Not to mention the money and drugs we stole off of them. Don Juan’s drugs and money.
“Okay, Sean,” I say, “what the hell in the world made you decide to do business with Juan Perez, even if we did talk about the possibility? I mean, I know your boss, Carcov, wants to do business with him, but that doesn’t mean we have to take the chance.”
His face takes on the same expression it does when he runs out of beer. Part annoyed, part sad, part desperate.
“There is one very simple explanation,” he says. “Juan Perez is the only game in town. Listen, Brad man, he is tied directly to the Escobar cartel, and they do not fuck around. When they moved into the city, they took up all the oxygen in the room, so to speak. Every competitor was either squeezed out or forced out at gunpoint. Those who decided to still compete either found their homes burned to the ground, usually with the occupants still inside them, or their heads cut off.”
“Oh, dear God,” Joanne says.
“Exactly,” I say.
It strikes me that Sean is either being a little overly dramatic or, on the other hand, he’s telling the God’s honest truth. Maybe a little of both.
“Okay, if what you’re telling me is the reality of the situation, why suggest we cook our own shit?” I say. “Won’t that put us in direct competition with Juan Perez? Won’t that make him our enemy?”
Lowering his hands, he assumes one of his sly grins.
“Not if we make a product that’s so good, Perez has no choice but to buy it from us.”
“I never thought of that,” Joanne says.
“You need to see the bigger picture, Bradley buddy,” he goes on, like he’s trying to sell me a casket years before I kick the bucket. “We don’t compete with Perez. Instead, we partner up with him. We offer him a product that will not only make him more money, but the entire cartel more money. It will make Carcov money, and us more money than we ever dreamed.” He forms a big ass smile. “Everyone goes home happy.”
“We hardly know how to run a funeral business,” I say. “How are we going to find someone who can cook whatever drug it is you have in mind?”
“Karl knows more than just the funeral business,” he says. “So do the two grunts, Jay and Jack. They come from Carcov so they can be trusted. And we have plenty of room down here in the embalming basement. It’s also the perfect cover. Nobody in their right mind would ever want to sneak down inside a place where corpses are drained of their blood.”
“There will have to be renovations,” Joanne adds. “I know a couple of guys who could do the work and keep their traps shut so long as we pay them in cash.”
She’s talking about the contractors who are presently fixing up our bathroom and basement. How she knows she can trust them to keep quiet about building our drug factory, I have no idea, but I guess I’ll just have to believe her.
“How much do you think building a drug lab would cost, Sean?”
He cocks his head a little.
“Not as much as you might assume, Brad man,” he says. “You need cookers and some racks. We already have the proper exhaust equipment due to the crematorium. Maybe twenty or thirty-grand.”
Call me Penny Wise, but the number doesn’t sound so half bad to me.
“That’s it?” I say. “You sure?”
“I can’t be sure about anything, but it sounds about right. Course, we’ll have to give Karl and his men a decent sized raise.”
“But they’ll more than make up for their cost if they put out a unique product,” I say, like a question, for which I already know the answer.
“The product will be something no one has ever heard of or seen before, Brad baby,” Sean says like his enthusiasm for the illicit drug trade knows no bounds. “Something that offers up a brand-new experience. Not a drug that gets people stoned or high or buzzed. But something that provides a profound experience. Something that blows their minds.”
“We’ve seen it before,” I say. “It’s called LSD.”
“In a show I binged on Netflix,” Joanne interjects, “these everyday people get involved in the drug world and end up selling crystal blue colored methamphetamine. I think they call it Blue Ice. It’s supposed to be the best in the world.”
Sean smirks and shakes his head.
“Crystal meth is for pussies,” he says. Then, “Oh excuse my language, Jo.”
“You’re excused,” she says. “And I agree.”
My wife...a woman who was too timid to drive the speed limit...agrees that crystal meth is for pussies...Who the hell is she becoming?
“And all those crime shows on Netflix is Hollywood make believe, Brad man,” Sean goes on. “This is real life. If we present something to Perez that’s never been done before, he’ll have no choice but to work with us. No choice but to pay us top dollar. And get this...no choice but to trust us.” He looks over both shoulders, like we’re not hidden inside this storage room but instead exposed to the world. He leans into me, brings his lips close to my ear. “You ever read the Art of War, Brad buddy?”
“Nah,” I say.
“You should,” he says. “It was written thousands of years ago by a Japanese warrior, but the lessons spelled out in it were just as important then as they are now. Especially when it comes to business. You wanna know what the most important rule of them all are?”
“You’re gonna tell me anyway, so what is it?”
He bursts out in a big belly laugh and slaps my shoulder.
“That’s why I like you so much, Bradley buddy,” he says. “For leading such a dull life up until now, you certainly have not lost your sense of humor.”
“What’s the rule, Sean?” Joanne presses.
He raises his right hand, extends his index finger high.
“Keep your friends close,” he says, poking me gently in the sternum with the finger. “But keep your enemies closer. Get it?”
I don’t want to break his big ass bubble by telling him I’ve heard that one a thousand times before, so I nod like I’m entirely impressed.
“Okay then, it’s settled,” Joanne says. “We instruct Mr. Anomoly to start a drug cooking operation. An extraordinary drug no one has ever before experienced.”
“Leave everything to me,” Sean says. “Now, let’s go burn that body.”
The two open the door and step out. I tell them I need to use the restroom real quick.
“You gotta go, you gotta go,” Sean says.
Making my way past Smirking Jack and Smiling Jay, I take the staircase up to the first floor, and lock myself in the bathroom.
Here’s the deal. Yeah, I gotta piss like a racehorse. But another big part of me just needs to be alone for a long moment. I gotta regroup, if only in my head. First things first. Put the seat up on the toilet, drain my bladder. What did an old, nearing retirement postal worker once say to me outside the vending machines near the distribution center lady’s and men’s rooms back when I first became a young mailman? Never pass by a bathroom, never waste a hard-on, and never trust a fart. I remember laughing thinking I’d never be that old. That old man was around my age now.
Flushing the toilet, I wash my hands, and splash some water onto my face. I stare into the mirror above the sink. Water drips from my face. I guess I should have shaved this morning. But why bother now that I’m retired? I’m seeing my face. The same face I’ve been seeing for going on sixty years, but I’m not really seeing me. I’m seeing someone entirely different. He is a total stranger in a strange land. He is most definitely not the man his parents raised to be a good, kind, and law-abiding citizen. What did my mother used to tell me when I was in high school?
Just pass, Bradley. You don’t have to get A’s. You’re not really cut out to be an A student.
What did my father suggest when I first went to work for the Post Office in lieu of heading off to college (or going to work for his contracting business) like most of my friends?
Try not to be the center of attention, kid. Just do your job and pretend to like it. You’re not really particularly talented at anything, so you should feel lucky to have a job with the federal government. You stick with it for thirty or forty years, you’ll retire with a nice pension. That’s the American Dream.
Now they’re both gone, and I am indeed retired. But that pension wouldn’t be enough to pay off my mortgage, plus my kid’s student loan, much less keep Joanne’s mother in her nursing home and have enough left to eat every month. Something has indeed gone wrong with the American Dream.
I pull a bunch of paper towels from the dispenser and dry my face. I toss them into the trash bin, and once more give myself another look. My hair is getting grayer and receding more and more. Maybe it’s time to cut it down to the scalp. I can grow a mustache and goatee. It will make me look bad ass. The perfect look for a drug runner posing as a funeral director slash casket salesman.
In my mind, I see Joanne. I see how much she’s changed in just a few week’s time. Most women might fall apart at the seams knowing they are responsible for the death of two young men. So what if she killed them out of self-defense? So what if they were evil gangsters? They were still God’s children. Or so she might have been telling herself every minute of every day since we buried what was left of their remains under the concrete floor in our basement.
Instead, something has changed inside her. No, that’s not right. More like, something has come to life. Something or someone that was always inside her that lay dormant since the day she was born, and only now is awake and thriving. The same thing has happened to me too. I wish I could tell you the life of a drug runner is not for me. I wish I could just go to the police, tell them everything and beg for mercy. But I don’t want to do that. Once I got my first glance at all that pretty green cash...when I realized the enormous possibility of getting rich beyond my wildest dream, and doing it fast, I knew there was no going back to the old Joanne and Bradley Jones. In the span of a relative instant, we have gone from Ma and Pa Kettle to Bonnie and Clyde.
Pulling out my smartphone, I press the photos icon. I bring up the selfie of Joanne and I wearing our oxygen masks just as we were preparing to disintegrate the Perez brothers in the bathtub. We are actually smiling in the picture like we’re having fun.
Bonnie and Clyde. That’s what Joanne and I have become. And I have to say, while it’s scary, it also feels pretty fucking good.
Exiting the bathroom, I head back down to the embalming/cremation room. I catch Joanne and Sean having themselves a little private pow wow in the far corner near the oven. They see me out the corners of their eyes and quickly break it up.
“Am I missing something?” I ask.
Sean assumes one of his chubby faced smiles.
“Not at all, Brad buddy,” he says. “Jo and I were just saying we wanted to wait until you were back in the room before we torch the old drunk. Now that your back, may the festivities begin.”
Festivities...
By the excited looks on Sean’s and Joanne’s faces, I half expect them to break out the marshmallows for roasting. Smirking Jack and Tall Jay close the casket lid on vagrant person 6-715 while Karl/Lurch opens the oven doors via a series of buttons located on a panel mounted to the concrete block wall. The stainless-steel door slides south and reveals the deep oven, its gas burners already lit, small yellow/orange flames emerging from them.
“Gentlemen, you may proceed,” Lurch says, while crossing his hands over his mid-section.
Rather than bother with raising the gurney to oven level, the two black suited workers choose to lift the casket by hand, each man taking one side apiece. They then slide the casket into the crematory, like they’re inserting a very long meatloaf into a kitchen oven. That’s when I feel Joanne grab me by the bicep and squeeze.
“Isn’t this so exciting, Bradley?” she says. “Our first cremation. I almost feel like popping the cork on a bottle of champagne.”
“Beer for me,” Sean says.
“Gee,” I say, “you two should have brought a cooler.”
When the body is all the way inside the oven, Lurch turns once more, and presses the same button that raises the oven door. He then hits a fire engine red button that makes the oven explode with fire. It’s such a sudden unexpected powerful burst, it feels and sounds like a small explosion.
“Oh my,” Joanne says, “it takes my breath away.”
“He’s broiling now,” Sean says happily, as if witnessing the cremation of a homeless bum is the most fun a grown man can have with his clothes on.
“Oh my God,” Joanne says. “You smell that, Bradley?”
“It smells like victory,” Sean says.
“Smells like cooked meat, da?” Lurch says matter of factly, in his low gravelly voice.
The two workers just stand there looking bored out of their skulls like watching human flesh and bone burn to a crisp before their eyes is an everyday occurrence. I’m pretty sure it probably is.
“I don’t think I’m going to be barbecuing steaks tonight,” I say.
It’s sort of a joke but it’s also the truth. Despite what looks like a pretty sophisticated exhaust system, you can’t help but smell the odor of meat being cooked. And check this out. The smell isn’t necessarily a bad one. But it isn’t very good either. If I had to describe it, I’d say it’s a cross between beef and a sort of coppery, metallic smell. Like cooking steak in a frying pan on high and forgetting to take the pan off the burner. I guess that’s because not only is the flesh cooking but so is all that iron-rich blood and booze-soaked organs. One thing is for sure, it’s sort of making me sick to my stomach.
“If you all don’t mind,” I say, “I’m gonna head back up top.”
“Hey, Brad buddy,” Sean says, eyeing me up and down. “You don’t look so good. A little pale in the gills.”
“You all right, honey?” Joanne says.
Karl/Lurch just eyes me with his stone face. I’m not sure what he’s thinking, but it most likely isn’t a very good thought. Maybe he thinks I’m not cut out for this kind of business. That’s when my stomach rumbles and whatever is inside me starts coming up. I make a beeline for the staircase and as I pass by Tall Jay and Smirking Jack, they both shoot me a crooked faced look like, Wow, what a pussy.
I’m still hearing their muffled giggles as I bound the stairs two at a time, shoot into the men’s room, drop to my knees before the toilet, and puke my guts out.
When I’m through, I flush the toilet, and drag myself back up onto my feet. I run the cold water, stick my head under the faucet, and rinse out my mouth. I splash the cold water on my face like I did just a few minutes ago and shut off the faucet. But this time, I don’t bother with looking at myself in the mirror. In all honesty, I’m not sure I’m gonna like what I see.
Drying myself with the paper towels, I then head back out into the empty viewing room. Joanne and Sean are standing there, waiting for me.
“Don’t tell me, buddy,” Sean says, a sly expression on his red face.
“Don’t tell you what, Sean?”
“You lost your cookies, didn’t you?” he poses.
“Maybe.”
“That would mean yes,” Joanne interjects.
She comes to me, gently touches my face.
“Poor baby,” she says. “You are positively clammy. Maybe we’d better get you home.”
“I’ll be all right,” I say. “It will pass.”
“Working with the dead isn’t for everyone, Brad man,” Sean says. “But in time, you’ll get used to it. Besides, it’s not like you need to be here every day, or at all for that matter.”
“It would probably look better if I were around,” I say. “Makes things look more legit.”
“I sort of agree with Bradley, Sean,” my wife says. “We need to appear every bit the legitimate business enterprise or else invite unwanted suspicion.”
“If you say so,” Sean says. “Just stay away from the crematorium, Brad man, and you’ll be okay. Probably better if you don’t watch the guys embalm a dead body either. That shit ain’t for the weak of character.” Then, realizing what he just said. “Oh shit, buddy, I hope you don’t think I’m trying to insult you. You’re like my best friend. But maybe you should concentrate more on the casket side of the business.”
I could get pissed off at him, but he’s right. I am weak of character when it comes to blood and guts. That is, until I assisted my wife with disposing of the corpses of two south-of-the-border gangsters, one of whom was pretty badly mutilated. At the time, I didn’t get sick to my stomach. I just wanted to get rid of the evidence as fast as physically possible before a cop like Detective Danish showed up. Only after it was all over, and what was left of the bodies were successfully buried in the basement, did I take a long moment to realize what Joanne and I had accomplished, and yeah, I’m definitely surprised I didn’t blow chunks. But even then, the moment was short lived when we started counting the money at the dining room table and making business plans with Sean to launder it.
“No worries, Sean.” Glancing at my watch. “Listen, why don’t we get a beer? It’s been a long day and by the looks of it, we made a few bucks. Let’s end the day on a high note.”
“Wings and beer, Brad buddy,” Sean says, clearly excited. “It’s on me.”
“When you think about it,” Joanne says, “it’s on all of us. We’re business partners, after all. We’re the three amigos. We’re going to be rich as fuck.”
...rich as fuck...
As we exit our brand-new funeral home, I’m thinking that once again, my beautiful wife, whoever and whatever it is that she’s become, is spot on.