‘You break window, crazy fuckmother! Go away from here,’ she told me.
‘I’m here to get Dolly,’ I said.
She eyeballed the stretcher, the ambulance. ‘Closed!’ she grunted.
‘Hold on - is Milo—’
‘Closed!’
‘My name is Renfroe. Milo told me to—’
‘Closed for permanent! No meat!’ She slammed the door shut to prove her point, and the top glass panel rained down in shards onto the cement slab below. After a moment, her face loomed in the horse door she’d created. Her hair was short on the sides, but six inches of tight black coils were piled on top, redolent of some particularly nasty wild mushroom. ‘Shit now!’ she barked.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a money clip, wagged it at her. I tore off my beekeeper getup, showed her my sincerest expression, and said, ‘There’s a deceased girl in your meat locker, and I’m here to take her away from you. Milo and I arranged it, and I’ve got five hundred dollars right here for payment.’
‘Milos, he is dead from heart attack. One week past.’
‘By God, I’m sorry,’ I said. Then, after a solemn few seconds I added, ‘Can I talk to him anyway?’
‘He has no remember.’
The bugs were all over my face, in my hair. I squinted to keep them from landing in my eyes, but I held my ground and made a wide fan of that money so ‘Grunta’ could get a good whiff of it. I forgot her name, but Grunta got the gist.
‘You come help me fix hole,’ Grunta demanded.
‘Can you tell me, is the girl still here?’
‘Fix hole now, headshit!’
I tossed my beekeeper bonnet onto the cot and scrambled inside, lugging the stretcher behind me. Close up, Grunta smelled like pepperoni. She pointed to a stack of plywood boards atop the empty glass case that once enshrined the choicest meats.
‘I get hammer,’ Grunta said. She waddled into the back room while I hoisted up a plywood slab large enough to cover the missing pane. I pressed it against the opening and waited. A calico cat appeared from some hiding spot and leaped up onto the glass case. It was stalking a beetle, bobbing its head to the rhythm of the beetle’s stumbling buzz. I made kissing sounds at it, but the cat ignored me, as cats are wont to do.
Grunta hurried back into the storefront with the hammer raised in striking position, a dozen nails jutting head-outward from her pursed lips. She fastened the board I held to the doorframe with nails she plucked from her mouth. The loose flesh on her arm seemed to pucker up nicely as she worked. She had to be two feet shorter than me, twice as big around.
‘No bugs!’ she coughed, expelling the last couple nails. She hammered a cricket that had landed on the wall beside a tacked-up poster of Prague’s Charles Bridge and its promenade of life-size saint statues. ‘You here for dead girl in freezer?’ Her nostrils flared when she spoke.
‘Yes, Milo and I agreed to a five-hundred-dollar fee for—’
‘Milos is dead! He remembers nothing. I say seven-fifty. ’
‘I’m not in any position to argue,’ I said.
‘Come here,’ she demanded. The cat stepped gingerly from the meat case onto her shoulder and crouched there, tail switching. The room we entered was made for slicing things apart. Huge knives and saws lined the walls, an empty cutting-board table below them, stained with dark splotches. Drains in the floor would wash it all away.
A raw smell I thought was Grunta became stronger back here, sweetly rank. At the far end of the butcher shop stood the meat-locker door with a handle like a horizontal tavern tap. I almost reached for that handle, eager to break the vacuum seal, but instead Grunta led me into a meager office with an antique turn-dial television set, a few open TV trays with stacks of papers on them, and a human corpse seated upright in a rocking chair, slowly rocking. Milo was the source of the smell, and it was sharp enough to make my poor pointless epiglottis spasm.
The look of him made my heart pound hard enough to prove it was still in use. His ugliness was bearable, but what he evoked was not: negative spaces, black holes in human shape, maddening blurs to which your eyes refused focus, statues in flesh molded by some demon hand, oracles that announced with every twitch of their bones a vastness and darkness that no living brain could fathom. They could not be true but were. They attracted too many flies.
Grunta grabbed a plastic flyswatter from atop a paper pile and lashed at Milo’s head with it. The cat on her shoulder rode out this violence like a rodeo cowboy.
I could hear the flies buzz, like in the poem by Dickinson, that creepy little Amherst goth who wrote a hundred hymnals to the Dead. The TV was muttering afternoon news: A California commune of three hundred souls had finally, after much preamble from their high priest, tossed themselves like lemmings into the deep molten canyon that, a few weeks earlier, an earthquake had ripped through downtown San Francisco. They’d leaped one by one screaming, each of them, ‘Mother Nature forgive us!’ There had been no miracles to witness, no onset of the King.
Milo turned away from this broadcast and studied us both with the cool detachment that he must’ve reserved, in life, for fresh slabs of meat. His eyes were sunken and rheumy, and the skin on his face had tinted greenish, sagging so that his mouth arched downward like a Greek-tragedy mask. His hair, once a lush bloom of salt-and-pepper curls, was gone, and the flesh on his head seemed to have petrified into another layer of bone.
‘Milos, this man come to see you,’ Grunta explained.
‘Renfroe,’ I said. ‘We’ve talked a few times before,’ I said.
Milo winced and his mouth eased open, but he said nothing. Instead, he raised a litre bottle of vodka from between his legs and poured the last swill of it in the general direction of his mouth. Most of it trickled down his chin and seeped into the bib of moisture spreading downward from his undershirt collar. Beside the legs of his chair were other, empty litres of vodka, gin, Kentucky bourbon.
‘Drunkard,’ Grunta complained, as her chin quivered.
‘It kills some of their pain, the alcohol,’ I told her. ‘They crave it, I’ve noticed.’
‘Same as before dead for him, then.’
‘Does he speak to you?’
‘At first,’ she said. ‘No more. He is quiet now.’
In life, Milo would erupt with theatrical talk. He’d sweat and his face would grow ruddy. He despised his wife, harassed the young women who dared step into the store, wiggling sausages at them suggestively. There was always booze on his breath and a pistol under his cash register.
Made you wonder, but we’d all been musing lately on the Soul. You couldn’t avoid wondering, in the presence of these walking, talking human shells. It was the reason I came back to Milo’s Specialty Meats - for Dolly. Things were different. The universe had color and verve.
‘Let me just pay you now—’ I started, producing the chunk of money again.
Grunta snatched it out of my hands, the whole thousand bucks. She ran it under her nose to sniff it. It was real money and rather easily procured, though neither of us knew what it was worth any more. Cash had become hardly more than memento. It was supposed to represent gold in a vault somewhere, sure, but gold was just a kind of rock.
‘Uh, that’s actually a thousand,’ I told her. ‘But I’ll make you a deal.’
Gunta pursed her lips. ‘What deal?’
‘I’ll give you the whole grand for Dolly and all the booze you have left.’
‘What is Dolly?’
‘The dead girl.’
Grunta shoved the money in her pocket. She scratched the cat under its chin, and the cat eased its eyes shut. I followed Grunta back into the butchery and watched her snap open the handle on the meat-locker door. The automatic light came on inside, a harsh medical white. Bags of anonymous meat cuts were stacked on plastic shelves; a half dozen long beef sides hung on a track like suits in a bedroom closet.
At the far end of the room was a packing crate made of cheap wood and nails, like a pauper’s coffin. The girl inside it, I knew, was maybe nineteen or twenty, not more than a hundred pounds, barely five feet tall. She had less literal substance than the larger cuts of hooked meat around us, but this other flesh could not be revived like hers could.
The cat leaped down from her mistress’s shoulder and skittered out through the open freezer door. I asked Grunta for the biggest flathead screwdriver she could find.
When she brought it back she said, ‘What are you doing with this girl?’
‘Awakening,’ I explained. I slipped past her into the freezer, too eager now to batten down for questioning. When I leaned down beside the crate, both knees on the cold floor, Grunta jabbed her index finger into my shoulder to get my attention. Her breath misted as she said, ‘Tell me why you need this girl.’
‘I want to know what it’s like . . . to be dead. I want to ask her.’
Grunta snorted. ‘Ask Milos. It is nothing. No remembering. ’
I shimmied the screwdriver head into the crease between the crate and its nailed-down lid, slapped the handle with the palm of my hand to wedge it in deeper. ‘I want to take her on a trip,’ I said. I shoved down on the handle, and the crate nails screeched as they lifted out of place.
‘She might not wish to be with you.’
‘She can do whatever she wants,’ I said, ‘but I can keep her safe.’
‘What is
safe
meaning for a dead person, eh?’ Grunta asked.
I didn’t answer. I was breathing aerobically now. When the lid was loose enough, I slid my fingers between the nails. The cheap balsa wood crackled and buckled. Dolly was there, zipped inside a clear plastic bag that hazed my view of her. She was lying in a bed of ice packs, piled around her and sprinkled atop her limbs and her abdomen. I brushed aside those that covered her face and tugged with both hands at the zipper until it gave way.
There was Dolly’s face - white lips, cyanotic skin, paper-thin eyelids curved shut over the rounded half-moons of her eyes. A sleeping beauty, though frost had matted her dark hair in unseemly, petrified clumps. That luster would return, I knew.
‘Jesu,’ Grunta sighed. ‘You are not going to bugger this carcass?’
I stood up again, and I outsized her, screwdriver tight in my fist. I let Grunta listen to the way my teeth chattered together. I could see her eyes darting. She was wondering how she’d gotten herself alone in a freezer with a strange man and a corpse in a crate.
Behind her, dead Milo shuffled into the freezer doorway, mouth agape. He raised a limp hand to waist level and waved lazily at us. I offered the screwdriver back to Grunta, handle first.
‘There are some sick people in the world,’ I told her. ‘Especially now. See, before these troubles I was an emergency medical technician for the Port City area. When things began to go haywire, well, you can imagine the despair. People were afraid to die. People have always been afraid to die. But some people, they get so full of fear, so full of despair, they give up. Look at this.’
I unzipped the plastic bag all the way down to Dolly’s navel. She was naked as a newborn, modest breasts flattened almost boyish in her supine repose, but I paid only clinical attention. What I meant to show Grunta was to be found on both of Dolly’s forearms, but I lifted only the left, raised it carefully and overturned it to expose the inside length of her arm. A single purplish groove ran from her wrist to the crook of her arm, a foot-long deliberate gash. It was puckered, though the wound itself was bloodless now. Dolly’s fingers twitched as I held her hand. She was so utterly cold, my hands stung from the touch of her flesh.
I said, ‘Think of how lost she must have felt, to do this to herself. I don’t understand that kind of despair, but the minute I found her, I knew she’d be back. Heck, she herself must’ve known she’d be back. I had to help her.’
‘You are the person who brings her here to my shop?’
I nodded. Milo stood now beside his wife, dumb-struck, but less than two weeks before he had agreed, for the price of a thousand dollars on deposit and five hundred on retrieval, to let me store the body of a suicide girl in his freezer. He was the only man I knew with cold storage large enough to keep her, the loose scruples to do it for cash, and the gusto to hold fort while everyone else in the county split to the coast in fear of four horsemen.