THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Read online

  He confronted her again with the microphone. “And where do you live, Mrs. Collins?”

  Her lips moved soundlessly.

  “How’s that again, Mrs. Collins?” He held the mike closer and turned up the volume.

  “Kansas City,” boomed through the hall, and the ladies had a good laugh at the winner’s expense.

  “Kansas City, here we come, they’ve got some pretty little women there, and one of them has just won today’s first Blue Cross Special of two hundred dollars. There you are, dear, and congratulations.” Bing handed Mrs. Collins the money.

  As the usher led Mrs. Collins off the stage, Bing pattered on, announcing the next game, and the prizes: for the first vertical row, $10; for the first horizontal row, $20; for the first double diagonal, $50; and for a full card, $250. A full-card game could take forever, but business was light, and the special attraction of bingo, from the customers’ point of view, was that they could linger over it all through the afternoon and still lose less than they would have at the slots. In that respect Bing considered his job humanitarian, on a par with nursing or styling hair, but more importantly it was show biz, glamour, razzmatazz, a stage with Bing at the center and down front an audience, bless them, who listened, who laughed at his lame jokes, who pretended, along with him, that they were on a television game show instead of just marking time at a jerkwater bingo hall. For those who lacked the money or the moxie to lose at high speed in the grown-up casinos, here was bingo with dignity, here was a home.

  “Bing,” said the tiny voice in the earphone pinned behind his ear. He switched the microphone to the office and asked what was up.

  “You just got a phone call from—um, an important phone call. It came in the middle of the last game, and the individual wouldn’t stay on the line. But maybe you better let Mindy take over for now. She left the number you’re supposed to call back.”

  “What in the world is so important it can’t wait till my break? This must be a real disaster. Did my mother die?”

  “Uh… I—uh—”

  “She did, didn’t she? How’s that for psychic powers? Actually she’s been about to pop off any moment, so I can’t say I’m shocked, and I can’t say I’m very sorry, since we haven’t been on speaking terms since 1966. Still, she was my mother, wasn’t she? Do you think I should tell the ladies? They’ll all think it’s terribly sad and dramatic, which it is, I suppose. It just hasn’t sunk in yet. I’m probably in a state of shock.”

  “I wouldn’t say anything now if I were you, Bing. Some of the ladies might get upset.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t be flippant.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just the idea of anybody’s death. It’s not something they want to think about.”

  “Well, you’re the boss, sweetheart. Tell you what. They’re getting restless. Why don’t you reserve me a seat on a plane to Minneapolis. Sometime after eight, so I’ll have time to pack and grab a sandwich.”

  “Mindy’ll take over the calling, Bing. You don’t have to keep at it now.”

  “But this is my life,” Bing insisted, then thumbed the microphone back to the PA system. The trumpet blew, the cage revolved, and Bing reached in to take the first number:

  “In the G column, fifty-three. Fifty-three and fancy-free. G-fifty-three.

  “Under B, B-thirteen. Lucky for someone, B-thirteen.

  “In the O column, seventy-five. Seventy-five and still alive. O-seventy-five.

  “O, again. O-sixty-nine. No comment on O-sixty-nine.”

  The ladies giggled.

  Bing winked.

  The cage revolved.

  CHAPTER 17

  Part of the beauty of the sunset—and the sunset is always beautiful—is the fear it inspires. Night and the view it opens into the void above cannot help but be unsettling to anyone lately attentive to the sun. The sun is warm and friendly; it informs us that the sky is blue, and if that is not the sky’s entire truth, we seldom refuse to be taken in by the sun’s report. We don’t say, That blue is just an illusion, a trick of the atmosphere. In fact, the sky is black and space a vacuum. But at sunset we’re reminded that even if we avoid saying this, it is so. The sky is black. The moon is lifeless, and the planets too, and the stars, though many, are far away and exert no influence across the light-years on our small lives.

  She had expected all this to change in the afterlife. She had thought the stars when they appeared would have some new message she’d been deaf to before, but they were the same stars she had looked at from the balcony of her motel room in Las Vegas. They reminded her now, as then, of her own smallness and fragility. Though she had entered on this new, not entirely material existence, she felt no certainty that she could not still be destroyed as quickly and utterly as a moth lured to a bug light. What did she know, more than a moth, of the forces that governed her existence now?

  There was fear in that thought, surely, but not so great as to be insupportable. The fear was a kind of string leading her back (the wind of that first elation had dropped, and she could feel herself wobbling like a kite about to plunge) to the safety and stability of the ground; it was a line of moonlit pebbles pointing the way home.

  But where was home? Below her the city spread out its seine of lights in feeble but effective contradiction to the prevailing dark. Headlights negotiated the grid of streets and clustered on the long double curves of the expressways. Their energy seemed as feeble, their progress as slow, as the similar configurations she had sensed in the grave—the worms tunneling through winter soil. Where amid all these interweaving lights and purposes was her light, her purpose? Could she choose, for instance, that van and follow it? that lighted porch behind its still-unbudded hedge of lilacs? that window of blue flickerings where someone watched TV?

  The kite string snapped, and she felt herself tobogganing down the steep slope of the night. In the exhilaration of the long spiraling descent, she did not consider where she might be bound. To the bottom, wherever that might be. To ground.

  Then, without transition, she found herself pinned, like a mathematical point, infinitely small, to a single winking photon of light. Not even light: another kind of energy. It pulsed, faster than the fastest disco beat, while beyond this less-than-nutshell to which she’d shrunk there roiled a kind of smoke, a blackness unlike the inert blackness of night and space because it was capable of motion, desire, and purpose.

  The blackness bulged and extruded a filament like the long tongue of a lizard. The black filament curled around her and began to squeeze. At its first actual touch she knew the blackness to be her husband. She had returned, unwilling and unconscious, to her own home and was trapped in it. Like a ghost weighed down with chains and groaning, she knew herself to be no longer autonomous: a function, instead, of the blackness that was Glandier, a mote in the dim corridors of his consciousness, too insignificant to bear noticing. Even more than when she had lain within the grave, a captive of her own corpse, she felt the horror and panic of imprisonment. She would have screamed, but lacked existence. There was nothing she could do but feel his presence surrounding her, thickening and growing blacker.

  CHAPTER 18

  It was still early as Glandier pulled into his blacktop driveway. The willows and windmill behind Michael Sheehy’s house were black silhouettes against cloud stripes of gorgeous, gory red. “Someday, motherfucker,” he promised, “someday!” But he was able, tonight, to consider the long postponement of these ill intentions with something like equanimity, if not downright benevolence. A sweetening of $80,000 could neutralize a lot of acid. Already, in his magnanimous mood, he had okayed funeral arrangements far in excess of Joy-Ann’s strict requirements. At the same time he’d amused himself by insisting that the cemetery correct its mistake in having planted Giselle in the wrong plot. Wake up, sweetheart (he’d sent by psychic telegram), it’s Resurrection Day!

  The one sour note had been struck when Flynn, Joy-Ann’s lawyer, had insisted that Bing Anker be notified of his mother’s death.
Glandier had pointed out that Bing and his mother hadn’t been on speaking terms for years. Why raise false hopes (Glandier had urged benignly) and involve the poor sap in the expense of a wild goose chase? Flynn wouldn’t argue. He’d just offered Glandier a choice between making the call himself as next of kin or letting Flynn make the call. “You do it,” Glandier had told him, then waited at the side of his desk while the call was put through. When Bing answered, it turned out that he’d already been told of Joy-Ann’s death (by that meddling bitch Alice Hoffman) and had started to pack. Bing had asked Flynn if he could stay at his mother’s house, and Flynn passed on the inquiry to Glandier, who did a long double-take over the tip of his cigar and finally answered, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Glandier resented the growing likelihood of a wrangle over the inheritance. Bing Anker’s coming to the funeral could only mean that he was expecting a slice of the pie, perhaps even all of it. Not that he stood a bat’s chance in hell of getting so much as a nibble. When Bing Anker, at age seventeen, had left home to become a faggot in California, he had written himself out of his mother’s will. Joy-Ann had never stopped feeling acutely sensitive to the shame of having her only son (who had always gone to Catholic schools) turn out to be a cocksucker. Glandier, naturally, had lent his own moral support to Joy-Ann’s occasional expressions of outraged orthodoxy, and he could do so without feeling the least hypocritical or self-serving, since he quite genuinely hated faggots under any circumstances.

  An annoyance, but (knowing that Joy-Ann’s will was in order) only a minor annoyance, the merest flyspeck in a five-gallon pot of ointment. Rejoicing was therefore in order, and to that end he’d brought home two big bags of groceries and a carton of booze from Byerly’s. In the kitchen he turned on the oven in readiness for a pizza and ordered the groceries into categories of freezer, Frigidaire, cupboard, and immediate consumption. Then, after he’d unboxed one of the pizzas, stuck it in the oven, and set the timer to ding in twenty minutes, he peeled the skin of foil from a plastic tub of dip and emptied a bag of rippled potato chips into a mixing bowl. This was the life.

  He thumbed the cap off a bottle of Heineken’s and carried bottle, dip, and bowl out to the living room, where he settled, bowl in lap and bottle and dip on the armrest, into the sighing recliner, sighing himself in complementary fashion. He lifted the bottle in mock salute to the deceased: “Here’s to you, you old scumbag.”

  As the first icy swallow struck like a breaker against the rocks of his thirst, he remembered the pictures of Giselle and of her mother that he’d at last be able to retire from his den to the junk heaps in the basement. Now that his life was no longer being patrolled by a mother-in-law, there was no one in the whole fucking city who had any claim to be allowed inside the house. His privacy was absolute and inviolable, a castle. Luxuriously he scooped up dip with a potato chip, but at the moment he opened his mouth for the first creamy crunch his senses registered an acrid and altogether inappropriate smell of burning chocolate.

  CHAPTER 19

  She awoke bathed in brightness. The sheets, the walls, even the roses by her bed were all immaculately white. So white and so unshadowed that at first only by blinking could she make out these constituent shapes. Isn’t it lovely, Joy-Ann thought, before it occurred to her to wonder where she was or how she’d got there. More oddly, when those questions did arise, they didn’t seem very important. It sufficed that she was being taken care of. Her wristwatch had been taken from her, and that was a nuisance, since without it any long wait would stretch out to eternity.

  But what was she waiting for? And could she really object to an eternity spent so pleasurably? For she was comfortable, wonderfully comfortable, as fit in all ways as the woman in the ad for Anacin who is able, again, to lift that heavy frying pan. The pain was gone from inside. She felt relaxed, cheerful, dapper.

  Since no one had told her she shouldn’t, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and wiggled her toes into fluffy pink slippers. Her nightgown—really more of a negligee—was the same pink with infinitely many ruches and ruffles, a fashion model’s dream. She shuffled her feet in fox-trot patterns and then, without a moment’s thought, whirled around, twice, on her right toe.

  She froze then, worried that she might be seen and ordered back into bed. Where were the nurses and doctors? When would they bring her dinner, and would there be something for dessert besides that rubbery Jell-O you always get in hospitals?

  Looking for answers, she opened a door, but it turned out to be the door of the closet, and the closet was full of more questions: Could this gown of golden feathers be for her? And what possible explanation could there be for the harp?

  For that—she twanged the largest of its six strings—is what it was, a harp! Joy-Ann could not play a harp. She’d never known anyone who could. She’d never seen a harp before, not this hand-held variety, except in pictures of angels.

  Only then did it dawn on her that she had died and gone to heaven.

  “God?” she called out, though not loudly since this was, besides being heaven, a hospital too.

  There was no reply. Either He wasn’t paying attention or she wasn’t qualified yet to deal with Him directly. Well, there would be plenty of time, if this was heaven. She wasn’t really feeling impatient, only a little antsy.

  Wasn’t it funny, though, to think that heaven was just the way everyone had told her it wouldn’t be. Full of harps and angelic robes. Funny, but nice, too, in an old-fashioned way. It was a bit like stepping off Hennepin Avenue (which had gotten to be so sleazy) and finding yourself in one of those old-fashioned soda fountains that looked ritzy and simple at the same time.

  She tried to recall if she’d left anything important undone down on the terrestrial plane, but the immediate past was hazy. She’d been dancing to the Bing Crosby record, and then she’d written the letter to Sister Rita. But that was yesterday. Today she’d gone somewhere with Alice Hoffman, and then…

  The closet door opened to admit a nurse in a charming little white cap just like the caps the nurses wore on General Hospital.

  “Joy-Ann Anker?” the nurse read from her clipboard.

  “That’s me.”

  “Already out of bed. My, that was a quick recovery. How are we feeling?”

  “Actually, I’ve never felt better.”

  “Good. Let me just—” She lifted Joy-Ann’s hand and pressed a finger to her inside wrist, taking her pulse.

  “I love your cap,” said Joy-Ann. “It makes you look like Diane, on General Hospital.”

  The nurse smiled and touched the cap in an absentminded way.

  “I hope we’re allowed to watch TV here,” Joy-Ann said.

  “Of course,” said the nurse, pointing to a beautiful white Zenith that Joy-Ann had somehow not noticed till now. “There’s even Home Box Office.”

  Joy-Ann observed that although the nurse was taking her pulse she wasn’t using a watch to time the pulse against. “Aren’t there clocks in heaven?” she wanted to know.

  “Oh, this isn’t heaven, Joy-Ann. More what you might call a kind of halfway house. Time goes on here pretty much at the pace you’re used to, though it’s true we don’t have any use for clocks. We all know the time instinctively here. And it’s time right now, my instincts tell me, for you to get back in bed and rest.”

  “Rest? But I feel I’m bursting with energy.”

  The nurse nodded knowingly. “Yes, but what you should be feeling, Joy-Ann, is deep, calm inner peace. Now—” She pulled back the coverlet of shimmery white silk and waited for Joy-Ann to return to bed. Reluctantly, Joy-Ann submitted to the nurse’s divine authority.

  “Rest!” the nurse insisted once again, and went out through the closet door.

  To the right of that door, on the wall just across from the bed, was an embroidery sampler that Joy-Ann had not noticed before, though it represented the only note of bright color in the otherwise so white room. The sampler showed a rainbow in a bright blue sky with elm trees
on either side of the rainbow, elms as tall as the elms you used to see shading Calumet Avenue in the days before the blight, and in the foreground below the elms a winding brook, and all along the edge of the brook were flowers—violets, bluebells, daffodils, irises; flowers of spring—and beneath the flowers, cross-stitched in colors as bright as a rainbow of petals, the first of the Beatitudes:

  BLESSED ARE

  THE POOR IN SPIRIT

  FOR THEIRS IS THE

  KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.

  CHAPTER 20

  To speak of any spirit as “disembodied” is to say no more of it than that it is a spirit. Spirits in their nature are bodiless. Yet we all understand, in an a priori way, that somehow our bodies of flesh and blood, these “selves” of ours, are governed by something immaterial. We may resist calling that something a spirit or a soul, but we are quite certain that our actions are not determined in some simplistically mechanical way, as by the gears of a clock. At the very least we must partake of the nature of automobiles (or they of ours), requiring a spark—that is, a process volatile as fire—to set us into motion. Where, in that case, is the human spark plug located? What is the source of the fire? Where do spirit and flesh connect? In the liver, as some Greek philosophers believed? In the pancreas, as Descartes guessed? In the brain, as a Gallup poll has shown to be the current consensus? The correct answer is (d) none of the above. Soul connects to body not at the juncture of some particular organ but at a certain depth, at that level of the microscopic where microscopes no longer avail—smaller than the smallest components of the living cell, smaller even than the twining lattices of DNA, deep within the spinning orreries of the atom itself and then still deeper until cause-and-effect melts to mere statistical probability. There the soul lives and enjoys its autonomy, which seems, from our more macroscopic view, a bit illusory.