Stealing Hunter

The phone rang, so I answered it. Finally figured out it was Hunter's aunt, saying Hunter was in the hospital. Went hack to sleep. Later she called hack to say Hunter died.  Kidney infection, then some other infection too, and boom, no more Hunter.

Services at Knight Mortuary, Tuesday at ten.

"Huh-unh." I told the aunt. "She wanted to he cremated.  I know for sure."

"The arrangements have been taken care of by the family.  We just thought you'd like to know, Susan."  She hung up.

"Hey," I said. Intelligent as hell, standing there listening to the dial tone, like something else was going to come on the line:  the news maybe, or the sports report.

None of this Knight Mortuary jazz. Hunter told me more than once about driving on Sunday to her little brother's grave. Everybody standing around staring at the tombstone for twenty minutes, then
they could eat.  She never wanted that.  She wanted to go back to the Earth as ashes, cheap and quick and simple.

I didn't think it was right for her family to take strong healthy Hunter, the queen of second base, and pay somebody to suck out her blood and pour in chemicals. Then Max Factor her face enough to create the fashionable prostitute look, and put her out on display like she was in a bakery case.  In a pink dress the color of a little girl's birthday cake, probably.

 Okay, then what? Steal the body, what else? That's what friends are for.

                                               ***

The back of  Knight Mortuary didn't have a tree, a sign, anything for cover.  Out there at midnight with the security light on you, it's The Ed Sullivan Show, the whole world sees you from I-69. I try the back door, one of the back doors. Have to break the glass. I get the pliers out of the glove compartment, wrap a Burger King bag around the pliers. It's all I have, I am unprepared,
Not in the corpse-stealing business, how would I know?

No alarm after I break the glass, very helpful. I have to put a piece of the burger sack over my fingertips and pick glass out of the door frame. Reach around and feel for the lock.  Oh no, a
push-button lock, I can't figure out how it goes.

Pick the rest of the glass out, back the car bumper up to the door, stand on the trunk,.climb through the window in the door. Car backed up against the building, anybody on 1-69 on their way to a phone booth?  Hello, police. . .?

Lots of doors in the hallway, locked, locked, locked. But at the end, folding accordion room divider, exit to the hallway from a chapel, maybe? Not a chapel, a viewing room, coffin up on stilts. Closed coffin. Hunter wouldn't be in a coffin yet, happy thought, I turn away. I have to find the autopsy room, whatever it is, embalming room.

I break another window in another back door and start again.  In a supply room this time, mop bucket in the corner. Door to the rest of the building is locked, but it's a cheap plywood pre-hung, so a hoot to the latch area. Cost them fifteen cents to replace this door.

Bingo. Dead people under medical green sheets, all over the place. And I can't look under any of the the sheets. Knock, knock, who's there?  And how did you die?  I'm scared to look at dead strangers.    Hunter would be okay, how different can she look dead?  I'm going to have to wait till the night after the funeral and dig up the grave.

                                                   ***

Tuesday night is dark, cold, and wet. Brought an entrenching tool to the graveyard, borrowed from the guy at work, used to be army reserve.  It's gonna take three of me two days to dig a six-foot hole with an entrenching tool, but one of me has to do it in three hours because Wednesday morning is coming real soon.  I already committed breaking and entering.  I don't need more trouble.  That's why I brought the entrenching tool.  Graveyard, sneaking in the dark, long-handled shovel:  recipe for prison.

When I get to the headstone with Hunter's name on it, I am confused.  I am also a little bit drunk so it's hard to tell what's going on.  There's no dirt in the grave, just the big box lying on the bottom. I guess they wait till the day after to shovel the dirt in. This is working out nicely, Easy Street. I drop the entrenching tool and climb in.

Except.  Can't get the box out. loo far down, too heavy,  no room around it to put my feet.

I take the entrenching tool back to my car and drive back to The 101 Lounge, where I fortified myself before I came over.  Big Cheryl's at the bar, drunk. "Hey, Cheryl," I say.  "I need you,"

She thinks I'm picking her up. I have to give her the word, twenty dollars to come with me, thirty more when she finds out where we're going. When she finds out what we're doing, I better go home for the checkbook.

I tell her. She gives me back the fifty. I figure goodbye, but no. She wants to help for free.  She was good friends with Hunter too, she says.

Drunk, or what? Who cares, let's go.

We stop at the Sunoco station and get a tow chain off of Big Cheryl's dad's truck.  Then we take my car back to the Land of the Dead.  Box is still down in the hole.

I climb down and hook the chain onto the coffin handle.  The two of us loop the chain over a tree limb and pull. We almost lose the box three or four times, Hunter banging around inside,
I'm sorry, I'm no good at this. 

We wind our end of the tow chain around a grave monument, then I climb into the hole and push.  Cheryl yanks on the handle upstairs, and the box bumps up on the lip of the grass.  I climb out.  Cheryl bends down to open the lid, but I tell her wait and go to the car. 1 come back with a blanket and show Cheryl that the hatchback is open and I go over on another grave and sit on the marker.  I feel dizzy and weak.

Cheryl's drunk too but she's a stronger person that I am.  She wraps Hunter up in the blanket to make a bundle and puts the bundle in the back of the car, after she makes room by pushing down the back seat.  I give Cheryl a lift back to the 101 Lounge, set her up, seven-and-seven. The lounge is supposed to close at two a.m., but the Excise officers never seem to enforce over there. 

                                              ***

The first hint of dawn is showing at the horizon when I go through the state park gate and turn right on the road to the lake.  I can feel the weight in the back as the car pulls up the hill before the road slopes down to the water. Bundle in the back, nestled in with charcoal briquets, lighter fluid, and part of a bale of straw, all stolen from my parents' storage shed.

I make the pyre on the rocky narrow little beach, thinking of skinny-dipping, chucking rocks at the men who gawked at us from rowboats. Better would be to make the funeral fire up in a tree like the Indians, but that would take time and dawn comes in half an hour. I carry the bundle down our favorite path to the shore, lay it in place on the pile of sticks and charcoal and straw.  I pour lighter fluid all over the blanket, light a dry twig with my butane.  Takes forever, dip the branching flame into the puddled fluid on the cloth. Goes out, do it over, do it over again.  There it finally goes.  I don't want to watch the flames take Hunter.  I go back up the path to wait in the woods, bump into the park ranger.  He isn't sure if he needs his gun.  He grabs me tight around the arm, I turn my head.  Flames very high, how's he going to put it out?  We're fine.

"I assume you're going to report this," I say.