Resurrectionists - Softcover

Chapter 1

I couldn't quite get us back without incident for the burial of my father. We ran into a little trouble along the way. It took us two stolen cars along the interstate to get us home. It's not exactly easy to go to a funeral halfway across the country when you're up to your ass in debt, when you don't have the money for an airline ticket, and you have a car with a shot gasket. You hear about bereavement fares, but have you actually ever met anybody who flew for free to bury a loved one? It's all part of some benevolent myth. Like everything else in life, there are stories within stories.

The us I am speaking of is me, my wife, and our kids, the principal characters who sustained me, if not by love, then by the sheer extent of their need for me as provider. I'd taken on the cross of parenthood with an undue sense of heroism. My wife, Honey, diagnosed it as TAS, terminal asshole syndrome. She says it is a terrible syndrome, since it usually kills those around the victim, not the victim. That sort of summed up how things were at the time we hit the road to bury my father.

I say our kids went back with us, but the elder, Robert Lee, is not mine, in the sense that I didn't beget him, as they say in the Bible. I call Robert Lee "Exhibit A" in a long line of grievances against my wife, Honey Wainscot, who still uses her ex-husband's name for the sake of Robert Lee, to give him stability, to give him a history, to help his transition into manhood, and, I also suspect, in no small measure because her ex-husband, Ken, an abject soul on death row in Georgia, is the true love of her life.

But I digress. I was reading a newspaper before my midday shift at Big Boy when in the back pages I saw this headline, Farmer Murdered by Mystery Man, and there, lo and behold, was a small photograph of my father staring back at me with that hard, impenetrable Lutheran stare of his. The gist of the story was simple, if somewhat bizarre:

COPPER, Michigan -- The tranquillity of a sleepy backwater town was shattered when a 56-year-old man was found dead at his home. Police said the victim's son discovered the body in the family house about 1 P.M. The victim, Ward Cassidy, died as a result of a single gunshot to the head.

Reportedly the victim's son heard noises from the upper part of the house, fled the scene, and the police were called.

Upon arrival, authorities found a man sitting in a back bedroom and made an arrest without incident. Initial reports indicated there was no sign of forced entry, and nothing had been stolen.

The suspect, described as in his early to mid-fifties, is currently being held without bond at the Copper County Detention Center. Nobody in the close-knit community has been able to identify the suspect.

I called my brother, Norman, collect from work, and shit, he didn't sound like a guy who'd found his father's head blown to bits. Right off he said, "How did you hear about this, Frank?" I heard his sanctimonious wife, Martha, say my name and then say, "Oh sweet Jesus!"

I said, "Thanks for goddamn calling me, Norman!"

"You've moved so many times we didn't have an address."

I said, "If I won the goddamn lottery, I bet you'd have found me!"

I could hear Martha talking in the background, asking what I wanted. She said, "This is none of his business, tell him!"

And in a way she was right and wrong at the same time. You see, in the convoluted nature of real life, things weren't so simple. My so-called father was, in fact, my uncle. When I was five years old, my parents died in a house fire, and my uncle took me in and raised me. But let's just say the arrangement was no bed of roses. And so when I announced, "I'm thinking about coming back and paying my respects," you can imagine the jaw-drop reaction I got. I said it in a contrite way, because the truth of the matter was I needed a loan to get back to Michigan. I said, "Norman, you think you could see it in your heart to fly me home?"

Norman didn't exactly say no. What he said was, "The price of hogs has bottomed out. Honest to God. I can't." Norman had a way of talking, a thick, clotted accent that made you think he was something like fifty years old, when he was only twenty-five. He was your typical rural yokel, all brute strength but dumb as shit.

I heard Norman's wife say, "Ask him what's his agenda. Ask him! No, in fact, give me the phone, Norman, let me handle this! I want to have a few choice words with him myself!"

I put on the air of the truly hurt. I said, "Is regret an agenda, Martha?" I said, "I just want to pay my respects."

Martha spelled out the word "N-O." She shouted, "Things aren't settled here. There's an investigation going on right now. We don't know exactly what's happening. Things are hectic, it's a nightmare up here. You don't need this, Frank, not with your condition."

She was, of course, referring to my history of depression, but I said, "My condition. Jesus, are you a licensed medical practitioner, Martha?"

My manager, Louis Schwartz, scowled and pointed at his watch.

Norman took the phone from Martha and tried to gloss things over. "Frank, I'm telling you, honest, Ward doesn't stand looking at. It's going to be closed casket. It has to be, with what happened, with how he was...how he was killed."

It was maybe the first moment I actually thought of Ward as a corpse, but before I could say anything, Martha said real loud, "Hang up on him right now. This is a collect call, Norman!"

Norman said, "I'm sorry, Frank...I'm sorry, but you're not welcome up here."

I said, "Norman, where there's a will, there's a relative!"

I heard Martha shout in the background, "Will...Sweet Jesus, there is no will! He cannot come up here!" and I just hung up, because the lunch hour was starting and my manager was pointing at his cheap-assed watch.

That pretty much ended my career in New Jersey. Whatever opportunity there might have been for working things out amicably with my brother, it had passed, gone in that single conversation. Norman was really my cousin, but we had always called ourselves brothers.

I don't think leaving New Jersey was a legitimate option when I got on the phone, but now it was my only choice if I was going to get my share of the farm.

I had the conviction to finish what was on the grill, to serve up what I had started, since we shared the tips after lunch. I browned six meat patties, toasted some buns, and stuck all of it in a plastic bag. Hunger loomed in the near future, out on the road. But I didn't escape work without one final indignity that underscored my decision to get the fuck out of there. The assistant manager, this fat shit, waddled over to me and said, "Table four wanted their steak rare." I got docked for that kind of screwup.

I walked out of Big Boy and shouted at my manager, "Come on, it's not a bad case of herpes. I swear these sores aren't even contagious!" It unnerved the shit out of the customers.

As I drove over to Honey, it dawned on me that I'd not had a day off in two years.

When I arrived I said simply, "My father's dead."

Honey Wainscot, my betrothed, was up in her glass case at the dispatch office, in her exalted position as dispatch agent, a voice to the dispossessed, guiding truckers through the night. A sign above her glass door said Mr. Credit is on vacation. Until further notice please deal with Mr. Cash.

Honey shifted in her turret. She had a rope of hair that went beyond the crack of her ass, her one abiding link to youth and innocence. I said to myself, looking at her, "Rapunzel! Life beyond the fairy tale," a castaway in a grim place fairy tales dared not tread. I still remember her first words to me, or maybe not exactly her first words, but thereabouts anyway: "I lost my virginity, but I still have the box it came in."

Honey saw the look on my face, and the cogs in her head began turning. "You think you might actually get something?" It was the usual tone she used with me, approximating indignation. A cigarette smoldered in the center of her face. I beckoned Honey down from her turret. She was not a woman to be fucked with. On more than one occasion she had sat on top of me in bed and brought me to the point of suffocation. Honey was dangerous, in a physical sense.

She assumed her usual position of worldly defiance, arms apart like a beleaguered Christ at some second Crucifixion, a Diet Pepsi in one hand and a cigarette in the other, a body language that said simply, "Your problem is not necessarily my problem." Honey slurped the Diet Pepsi, pulled on the cigarette, and then released a tendril of smoke out of the corner of her mouth while I spoke.

I said, "I figure I have a hell of a lot coming to me off that farm."

"How's that?"

"Well." I hesitated for a moment. "I might have neglected to tell you a few things about my past. Not that I was hiding anything, it just didn't seem important."

Honey raised her voice. "Frank?"

"Okay. For starters, the man you always heard me call my father wasn't my father, really."

"Who the hell was he?"

It was something I didn't really want to go into right then, but if I was going to get her to leave, she had to know the truth, so I gave her the lowdown on the fire and how I'd come to live with my uncle, and just shrugged when I was finished.

Honey looked at me. "And it never crossed your mind to tell me something like that?"

I didn't answer her.

"So, what's your point now?"

"Well, the way I see it, now that my uncle's dead, I figure that farm might just belong to me, right? Or at least I should be entitled to a shitload of money when I make Norman either sell the farm or buy me out of my inheritance."

Honey just shook her head. "I don't like this...not one bit."

I talked right over her. "Come on! I don't see how the courts could legally lock me out of what would have been mine if my father had lived. I bet you dollars for doughnuts that there was nothing legally signed giving my uncle ownership, and if I started proceedings right now, I'd get the farm."

"Don't play curbside lawyer. This is all something a real lawyer should handle. I don't exactly feel comfortable taking a gamble on 'what if,' Frank. As far as I'm concerned this is something that could all be done from right here. We don't have to go there."

Before I could say anything more, Leonard, the dispatch controller, came by and eyed me. He walked with a bounce. I knew what he was going to say -- one of two things, either "Who left the birdcage open?" or "Shit, here comes trouble" -- and it ended up being, in fact, "Shit, here comes trouble."

If we had been dogs, we would have torn into each other, but we were of a higher species, so I said simply, "Leonard," stressing the L.

Leonard was already ignoring me. "We got a truck haulin' frozen chicken in a collision outside Charlotte. Refrigerator unit is busted on the rig. We got to get that chicken on ice quick. You want to take care of that, Honey?"

"Sure thing, Leonard."

Leonard just stood there. "Well?"

"I'm on it, Leonard. Honest. Two minutes."

I waited out the moment. I stared at Leonard. He was wearing an industrial gray shirt that had his name embroidered in red letters, Leonard. In fact, we all had our names embroidered onto our work shirts. That's simply where we were in life. Mine said, Frank -- Service with a Smile!

Leonard just turned and walked away. I watched him. He was thin, like a cricket, and had two perpetual spreading sweat stains emanating from his armpits that looked for all the world like two folded wings.

Honey said, "I got to take care of this right now."

I said, "You are coming with me, right?"

"Jesus, you really want to up and leave just like that? Why not use a lawyer? You still haven't answered me."

I said, "Lawyers charge by the goddamn word -- the word, Honey. Who's got that sort of money?"

"And just up and leaving like this isn't going to cost a fortune?"

"Jesus, I'm talking a windfall of cash, something that can get us set straight." I looked around me. "You know what this is here, Honey? A prison without bars!"

Honey said, "It's always a production with you, isn't it?"

I said, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!"

"You sound like a car salesman selling beaters on a lot."

Leonard stuck his head out of a doorway and stared down at me, then his head disappeared in silence, and so did Honey.

I thought it was going to end right then and there, an unceremonious end to a meaningless union between two losers. I figured I might just snag my younger kid, Ernie, from Immaculate Conception preschool and make a break for Michigan.

But then Honey came back and said, "You still here?" which was her way of saying, "Stay." Honey gave me that bewildered look, like she didn't know what to do. She said, "In the break room, if you hit the coffee machine just when you put in a dime, you get the dime back, and you still get the coffee. It works on the candy machine, too."

I said, "This is the chance of a lifetime." I said, "This is your lucky day, that's what this is, salvation! It's like finding a lottery ticket."

Honey said, "I'm thinking, Frank...okay?"

I waited in the break room. It was cold, like a freezer. I got the dime coffee for free. It worked just like Honey said, but not the candy machine. The coffee machine dispensed a cup with a picture of a joker from a deck of cards on it. I sat away from the air-conditioning unit with my hands cradled around the coffee. It felt good, the heat stinging my hands.

It was the first time I had sat still all day since I'd read about my uncle. Like I said, I can't say there was ever a relationship between my uncle and me. There were things between us that had haunted me all my life, what they called suppressed memories, about the night my parents died. Shit, even saying "suppressed memories," giving it a clinical name, made me wince. If I'd heard this from anybody else, I'd have said, "How about we kick the shit out of you, and maybe that'll jog your memory!" But the simple reality was that something terrible had happened to me.

In the aftermath of the fire my uncle and I ended up giving conflicting stories about what happened the night of the fire. Shit, I was just five when my parents died, and who was ever going to believe anything I said against my uncle's account? The lines were drawn between us right from the start, the goddamn fear and eventual hatred that came to characterize our lives as I lived with him over the years. Just sitting there, looking back on things, I thought that maybe I'd been running from what had happened on that farm, maybe not consciously, but down deep, all this time. It was something that took me halfway across the country, and I mean that literally. I got my ass out of Michigan the day after I graduated high school and headed for Chicago. It was something that got me institutionalized in Chicago for a time.

If ...