The Funeral Bill

Chapter 8

"What about my face?" He took another, cautious step forward.

She parried his gaze and reached back for the doorknob.

Something uncoiled itself within his body. For a moment, he believed he might have pissed himself, and he patted his crotch, checking for dampness. He took another step toward Panky. He murmured—he wasn't sure what he had intended to say. He reached for his crotch, still not convinced that he hadn't soiled his trousers. He felt his mouth gape inexplicably. Panky blurted: "Mister, I don't know what you want." He stumbled forward and clasped his hand on her shoulder. She smacked at his hand. His thumb bit into the meat between her collarbone and ribcage. Panky grimaced and threw Jeffers' hand away.

He lurched forward: "I want you to tell me what I look like."

"You look sick. Like an old man," she said, swatting his hand as it reached out again.

"I am sick."

"Do you need me to get help?"

"Yes. Yes." He then turned and left the porch—Panky already behind the door. Jeffers heard scraping as if heavy furnishings were being drawn to block entry.

He cranked the truck and drove out of the pea-gravel drive. He wanted to howl or squall. He sensed he was running out of something. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly he felt the rubber give loose of the wheel inside the tubing.

He clenched his jaw until his partial denture bit into his gums and he could taste blood. He belched a laugh, or maybe it was a cry. He was stunned by how empty he felt. His crotch wasn't wet, but the numbness swarmed his legs and was advancing upward, a gripping numbness combined with a pressure that seemed to gnaw at the bone. He could no longer sense how deeply he pressed the accelerator or the brake. He let out a yowl and then wondered for a half second if there was someone else in the pickup with him. And then he did it again.

When he got home, RD was on his porch steps, smoking a pipe.

Jeffers hissed.

He pulled his truck into the yard, coming as close to the porch as he could, got out, with the pistol in his hand, and walked slowly, purposefully, painfully the few steps to where RD sat, puffing, his lips drawn into a mirthful grin. All the bags of pennies were gone.

"That yours?" Jeffers asked, snatching the pipe out of RD's mouth.

"Just smoking a little. There's a God awful smell over there and just wanted to smell something sweet for a little bit." RD cocked his head at the pistol: "That's a nice one."

"Maybe it's that haint of yours stinking up the place. Is it house trained?"

"Where you been, landlord? You do some shooting?"

"What do you want, RD?"
"Money."

"Charity?"

"Call it what you like. It's all the same to me."

Jeffers collapsed in his porch chair, put the pistol across his lap, and cleaned RD's spit off the mouthpiece of the pipe with a handkerchief.

"Smells like something died over there, Jeffers."

"Well, she did." Jeffers swatted at a fly that had landed on his arm.

RD looked at him darkly. "Something new."

"Maybe you ought to clear out then, RD. Maybe it's that haint. Or it might be my wives wanting the house for themselves. Maybe they're tired of your laying about."

"Maybe." RD turned to leave. He spat a brown streak of spit in the yard. "When you're ready to settle up, you know where I live."

When RD was behind the pines, Jeffers exhaled a short strangled laugh, and then another, but it was more like a gasp. He placed the pistol on the little table beside him. His right leg twitched, his left crackled as if its very veins and capillaries were bursting. He rapped the pipe on the porch railing to clean out the tobacco RD had been smoking. He took out his pocketknife and scrapped the chamber clean; he lighted a match and burned the mouthpiece a little. He sighed and let his body rest for a few moments.

He reached under the chair where he kept a pack of tobacco. Its weight was wrong—too light. Jeffers spread the bag open. Dust, ash, dirt? He wasn't sure. He leaned over and poured out the contents. Teeth fell out. Fragments of bone. The dog's? LaRea's? Another copy of the funeral bill lined the bottom of the tobacco bag. A small deduction had been made for the tobacco RD had smoked and the pennies.

A fly landed on his hand.

By the time he walked to the squat-gable house, he was sweating and quaking with a chill. The numbness in his legs scoured him bone to flesh. He didn't know why he hadn't driven the short distance. Impatient with RD's games, he'd gotten out the lawn chair and shoved his pistol in his right front pocket and descended the porch steps half blind with anger.

He entered the front door with his own key and limped into the tiny living room, bare except for a tattered recliner and an empty TV stand with a midden of chicken bones and stale French fries littered across it. The smell of the dog was monstrous.

In the kitchen, empty bean cans lined the counter and most of the cabinet doors hung open. A spoon, crusted and unpolished, reclined in the sink. Jeffers could hear RD moving around in the back of the house. He listened for a few moments before continuing down the hall. He passed a slender closet, empty except for a lone, bent coathanger. He passed the bathroom, darkened and faintly urinous.