A whole section was set aside for the patriotic death wish. There were bas-reliefs depicting Nathan Hale on the gallows, the Redcoats around him looking strangely Oriental. There were reproductions of Lincoln’s assassination, his beard luminescent, the theater box resting on a cloud while John Wilkes Booth, on the stage below, smoking pistol in hand, bore a marked resemblance to Joe Stalin despite the suggestion of horns over his eyebrows. Just so the other side shouldn’t feel slighted, there were also prints depicting the death of Stonewall Jackson with Yankee Bluecoats coming over the ridge like so many creeping socialists. And there were neckties and shirts and ladies’ blouses silk-screened with martyrdom in bold colors with red, white and blue for the good and the true, and defecation-brown and green-tinged flesh tones for the enemy who might once have been British, or Mexican, or Spanish, but were all Russian or Chinese now. Also multi-color samplers with maxims, over-simplified maxims touting death and the right wing and motherhood and Barry and the Hereafter and the California Chamber of Commerce. Sunshine and suffering abounded in the section devoted to patriotic gore, and all the solutions to all the world's problems were as beautifully simple as the stickers being sold for the bumpers of cars. Yep, Death—unnamed, unmentioned—was the answer to everything!
It sickened me, but it only seemed to amuse Winthrop Van Ardsdale. “Hypocrisy may be horrendous, but in America it’s so frequently hilarious, too,” he remarked. “I’ll grant it’s a sick kind of humor.” He picked up a little gold star. “Consider the predicament of the American Legion Post Commander who runs a notions store on the side and has to decide on just how much markup he's entitled to when he peddles these gold stars to bereaved mothers. Why, it’s a real moral and ethical question -- except that the mother might be cashing in on it in an emotional way just as much as he is in a commercial way. Well, that’s the good old U.S.A.”
“It is like hell!” His cynicism made me mad. “This kind of crap exists—I can’t deny that, not standing in this ghoul market. But it doesn't define the country. The country’s better than that. The real heart of the country is the men who do the dying in Vietnam, not the men who clamor to send them there.”
“You see?” Winthrop sneered. “You’ve bought it. You’re saying death is ennobling. But it isn't. It’s usually just messy.”
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying the country is better than its senseless deaths, better than its funereal foolishness, better than its patriotic provincialism. I’m saying that while Robert Welches and Lester Maddoxes may spring from its soil, so do Adlai Stevensons and Martin Luther Kings. I’m saying there’s always a Walt Whitman waiting in the wings to remind us of what the country really is, always a Thoreau to say it’s really the conscience of each individual, always a Henry Miller to prick the balloon and hold up the mirror to our foolishness and to echo the truth we’ve always known, which is that this country can be whatever we want it to be if only we’ll want it badly enough!”
“Listen to him!” Winthrop was only more amused. “And it isn't even the Fourth of July.”
“Sorry.” I was embarrassed. “I really didn't mean to come on waving the flag. It’s just that the discrepancy between our pettiness and our potential bugs me.” I glanced at my watch. “I guess we’d best be getting over to the crematory,” I told Winthrop.
I used to think burials were bad. The disposal of Louis Ching’s remains proved to me that cremations can be worse. It's the mechanization of the ceremony, I suppose -- as if all man’s scientific ingenuity from the invention of the wheel on up through space technology just naturally resulted in the crematorium. “Ashes to ashes” sort of negates the efforts of the Einsteins, or distorts them, anyway.
The hollow words sounded even more hollow in the large, echoing hall of the crernatorium. The banalities were not for burning, but there was no stopping them. Still, they did stop finally, and there was the dramatic moment of silence before the coffin containing Louis’s body slid down the chute and into the flames shooting up from the incinerator in the bowels of the building. I'd known Louis as a simple man—despite my suspicions that he might indeed have been the Commie agent Ex-Lax -- and his ending seemed all too complex and mechanistic to be in keeping with his simplicity.
When the ceremony was over, I started out with Winthrop. The funeral director was standing at the door like some mournful, never-glutted eater of carrion. Behind us the muted whoosh-roar of the incinerator which had gobbled up Louis could still be heard. Nevertheless, life must go on and natural functions don’t cease as long as it does. So I asked the funeral director where the men’s room might be.
He pointed the way to a long hall, told me which way to turn and which door to look for. I arranged to meet Winthrop outside and started out in the indicated direction. I found the john without any trouble and did what I had to do. It was while finding my way out again that I fouled up.
I must have taken a wrong turn. And then I certainly went through a wrong door. I found myself in a dimly lighted room, the walls of which were lined with deep drawers. In the center of the room were five or six slabs with white shrouds covering them. It took me a moment to realize that I must be in the place where they kept the bodies before preparing them for cremation.
I stood still for a moment, both curious about my surroundings and repelled by them. Curiosity won out. I approach one of the slabs. The outline of a female body was distinguishable under the shroud. I lifted the corner of the sheet. The shoulder of the body was bare. I deduced that the rest of it was probably naked as well. I let the sheet fall and started to turn away. A sudden movement made me turn back.
The sheet falling away from it slowly, the body sat up on the slab and the face grinned at me!
CHAPTER EIGHT
WELL, I mean—! When you’re in a mortuary, you just don’t expect one of the corpses to sit up and laugh in your face. It’s disconcerting. More! It’s traumatic. It’s the kind of trauma that can frazzle your nerves for life. It’s the kind of trauma that might cause a pronounced tic every time you pass a billboard advertising J. Walter Cook. It could even give you a heart attack. It’s very serious! You'd think any corpse—dead or alive--would realize that. You’d think they’d see the seriousness of the situation. But this corpse just went right on laughing . . .
“Shut your mouth, Steve. You look like you should be hanging in the window of a fish store."
“Wha- Wha- Wha—?” I stuttered.
“Very good!” She clapped her hands and the sheet slipped a little farther down. “Now try it in E flat.”
“Just what the hell are you doing here?” I managed to recover my voice.
“I’m here on a lay-in. I thought you were my partner.”
I just stared at her. The words she’d spoken made no sense to me. I was still trying to reconcile the presence of cinema sex kitten April Wilder in a mortuary without her clothes on. “You were playing dead.” I struggled to put the facts in order, one at a time.
“Well, yes.”
“You scared me out of my wits.”
“I’m sorry. I really wasn't expecting you. I was waiting for Dick Potts.”
“Who’s Dick Potts?”
“The fellow I’m laying in with. It was just a sort of a gag on him. It wouldn’t have bothered him so much, because he expected me to be here. I can see how you’d be pretty shook up, though.”
“That’s putting it mildly. But what’s this about a lay-in?”