What day had Uncle Willis died anyway? She had the obituary in her bag, she took it out and read the date, relayed it to Beta, and there she was, looking in on Uncle Willis’s last day of life on earth.
He looked much the same, sparser of hair and thinner, maybe the lenses in the glasses were thicker but actually much the same. He was in the kitchen, he had one of those plastic and foil packets of lunchmeat and a loaf of bread on the counter, he was making a sandwich. Not much of a sandwich. Just luncheon meat and bread. Plop on a plate. Biting into it standing up. Frowning. She didn’t blame him. Sighing. Recalling Mother’s cooking? Yes, in a way, he said it out loud, “I’d give a lot for one of your pickles, Lucille.”
Another dry bite of sandwich. “Guess they’re all gone.”
He chewed, swallowed, picked at his teeth. False teeth. Ugh.
“It was quite a while back,” said Uncle Willis. “Not much chance that there might be just one jar still hanging around...”
Of course not, she assured the Betamax. She smashed them all. Ages ago.
What was Uncle Willis doing?
He was heading for the basement. Are you senile, Uncle Willis? she asked him. There’s nothing down there but spiders and dust and old junk long forgotten...
He made his way down the stairs, blinked in the semigloom. There were shelves holding old tins and empty jars and wadded up cloths, there was the cubbyhole behind the chimney, yes, he was heading for it, the man had lost it, obviously the man had lost it, looking for pickles almost thirty years later...
He bent over, reached in, and found nothing, she could tell by the look of disappointment, he reached in farther, as far as his arm could go and... brought out a filthy container of something, he rubbed at it like Aladdin’s lamp and uncovered glass, he cradled it in his arm and struggled back up the steps as fast as he could go, in the kitchen he rubbed at it with a dishrag until there it was for Uncle Willis and Betamax and Didi (back to the small d again) to see...
She blinked her eyes, shook her head, stopped, rewound, began again. There was Uncle Willis and the sandwich just as before, but that was all. No pickles. Just Uncle Willis eating his sandwich, rinsing off the plate, wiping it and putting it away (he had always been neat), going up to his room for his afternoon nap, going to sleep, a restless sleep, tossing, turning, making sounds, gurgles and choking noises and at last the death rattle... Uncle Willis had died in his sleep! That’s all. Just as she’d thought. Natural causes. She’d imagined the pickles. She’d dreamed the pickles. (Just as she’d imagined the smashing of the pickles? Why don’t you bring that day back, Didi? The day of departure. Did you really go down and smash the jars of pickles, did you really? Why don’t you look and see?)
“Didi has a very vivid imagination,” her mother was fond of saying. “She’s going to do something very artistic when she grows up because she has this wonderful imagination. Not like me, not at all like me. If I can’t see it, I can’t picture it but Didi can.”
Yeah. Right. Something artistic. Like selling undergarments in the local Penney’s. As for imagination, people who see pickles that aren’t there are in serious trouble, she had to be sure and she was afraid to run the tape again because this time maybe the pickles would be there. What she needed to know was — why had Uncle Willis died?
Who could tell her? The doctor who’d signed his death certificate had the answer, there had to be a doctor, that was the law, but who was he and whom could she ask?
Ask? No one. It would seem very strange if she went around asking what killed Uncle Willis. “Beta, do your thing,” she commanded and began the tape on the day after Uncle Willis died.
It was evening, and there was someone standing on Uncle Willis’s porch as the police cruiser drove up. The someone was a woman, a woman with a child, the child was whining and pulling at his mother, his mother was saying, “Shut up, Gordon.” She had no idea who they were.
Two uniformed policemen got out of the car and went up to the porch. “I rang the doorbell, and I knocked, and I looked in the windows,” the woman told them. “He’s pretty old, you know, and I think something must be wrong.”
“Mama,” wailed Gordon.
“Shut up,” she said without emotion.
“You live next door?” one of the policemen asked.
“Yeah. Over there. I come in a couple of days a week and vacuum and clean, this is payday, he always pays me on Fridays, but he don’t answer. I just know there’s something wrong.”
The cop banged again on the door. The other cop peered in the window. “Why can’t you just bust the door in?” asked the woman.
“Can’t do that without cause,” said the cop. “Private property.”
“I’ll have a look-see around back,” the second one announced.
“I should think you would just bust the door in,” said the woman. “I know something’s wrong.”
“Hey, Smitty,” his partner called from the rear of the building.
Smitty clomped down the steps and disappeared around the corner of the house.
“Mama,” wailed the child.
“Shut up,” his mother commanded. Muttering (“Seems to me he could just bust the door in”), she pushed at the front door, twisted the knob, and the panel swung open. “Hey,” she called. “Hey!” She went into the house, and Beta went with her.
She passed through the rooms calling his name, the child trailing after her. In the kitchen she saw the policemen peering in through the window, went to the back door, and let them in. “The front door was open,” she told them. “You should have busted in.”
“Lady,” began the cop called Smitty. The other one shushed him. “No sign of him, huh?”
“He’s here somewhere,” the woman said. “I know he is. I think he’s dead. I’ll bet you — and I’ll never get my money. Gordon, shut up, will you. Well go home when I’m ready.”
They found him upstairs in his bed, all curled up in a ball. “What do you figure?” Smitty asked his partner.
“How should I know? Heart attack? You never can tell with these old guys. The doc will know. Guess we’d better call him.”
“You can go along now,” Smitty told the woman. “You were right. Something was wrong.”
“I told you,” she said. “But what about my money?”
His partner bristled, said, “Lady...”
“Come on, Gordon.” She jerked at the child’s arm. “We’ve been gypped again. Twenty bucks I’m out. Twenty bucks down the drain. Every time something starts looking good, it turns to...” and her voice faded as she disappeared down the stairs.
“Come on, Beta,” Didi exhorted, “get on with it. Bring on the doctor.”
When he came, he was brisk and brusque. “Can’t tell much, but I’ll put down coronary. That’s what got him, that’s what gets us all one way or another. The old ticker stops. Okay, you can haul him off. I’ll do an autopsy sometime tomorrow. When I get to it. He’s number three or four, I figure. Any of you guys got a match? I know I ought to cut out smoking but...”
She turned off the Beta.
Turned it back on and started it up again; Beta, please take me to the morgue, take me to Uncle Willis... she had to shut her eyes, she couldn’t bear to watch. But she could hear. “Uhmm, pretty well preserved considering... uhmm, something here in the vascocon-stricter sector, can’t tell for sure without testing... what did you say, Ernie? Well, could be. High blood pressure, no doubt... these oldtimers never had much medical attention, you know, thought doctor was a dirty word and say hospital to ’em and they run like the devil was on their tail... Well, if you agree, I’m going to let it lie. Coronary, period. Okay? Okay. Next.”