The Grandmother

Daryl and Hank stood on the screen porch and surveyed the backyard, trying to figure out where exactly they should bury their grandmother. Mosquitoes hovered around their heads like insect halos and the thick backyard grass looked like it was sweating. A few doors down they could hear the Sabinski kids shouting crap and balls and doing cannonballs into their above the ground pool. With a hand gesture and a nod they decided to bury the body in between the sagging willow tree and the cinder block doghouse that Chunk used to shit in, before he ran headfirst last summer into a van full of stoned teenagers and died.

Inside and upstairs and laying in her bed their grandmother’s body was cooling underneath a slow rotation ceiling fan. The window was cracked open and the curtain pulled aside, letting in a strip of light in the otherwise dark wood room. On the nightstand there was a still lit candle, a picture of grandma’s dead louse husband and a King James Holy Bible opened to a highlighted section of Revelation, the part about the woman being drunk with the blood of the saints. Grandma was wearing purple sweatpants and a purple sweatshirt that said Precious across her breasts in gold cursive. Her face looked like lined silly putty and her gray black hair was pulled into a tight bun held together by a small Chip-Clip. Above the bed and hanging from the wall was a framed poster of the rapper and producer Dr. Dre along with some members of his posse, all of them standing with scowls and arms crossed beneath the polluted Los Angeles skyline (as a joke, Hank had told his grandmother that it was a picture of Martin Luther King and some of his faithful parishioners, and so for the last three years his devoutly religious grandmother had slept underneath a man who celebrated drugs and misogyny and once released a song titled Dick On Hard: The Sequel. Every now and again Hank would bring friends into her room and tell them with a straight face that his eighty-year-old grandmother was a devotee of Dre and had even seen him live two summers ago at the Rapalicious Festival. His friends would laugh and shake their heads and then head downstairs with Hank, get baked on the sofa and watch with dry open mouths as the cat licked its own backside).

Hank had discovered his grandmother’s body that morning when he’d first knocked and then opened the door, entering her room with the usual breakfast, two Hot Pockets on a paper plate and a coffee mug full of Pepsi. He’d placed the plate and mug on the table at the foot of her bed, opened the dirty white curtains and then like clockwork turned on the TV and turned it to Maury. He clapped his hands twice and said I’ve got pizza flavored Hot Pockets and then he walked over to her side and stood there for a minute before he realized there was no movement.

He held his thumb against her neck.

He held his finger under her nose.

He ate one of the Hot Pockets.

He called his cousin Daryl and said get over here she’s dead.

An hour later Daryl pulled into the gravel driveway on his clunking moped and as he handed over his helmet asked Hank if he had anything to eat. Inside they sat on burnt orange Barcaloungers and ate cold chicken in humid silence. Twenty minutes passed before Daryl asked what happened. Hank licked barbecue sauce from his fingers and then he shrugged and said she just gone ahead and died.

Upstairs the cousins stood over their grandmother’s body and stumble whispered through a prayer. Then Daryl asked what time is Maury on and Hank said we missed it.
As they descended the frayed green carpet stairs Daryl told Hank that he’d lost his job washing dishes over at Yesterdog. Hank Senior replied with a grunt and they ended up on the back screen porch sweating through their shirts while looking for where to bury their dead grandmother.

Neither of them discussed the fact that grandmother needed to be buried and that the authorities couldn’t be notified of her passing. They didn’t discuss that there would be no death certificate and no autopsy, no funeral home or hearse or selecting of caskets. Nobody would pick out flowers or phone up relatives or line up a priest or choose a hymn.Both of them understood that. It needn't to be discussed.

Daryl stuck his nose through a hole in the porch screen and then pulled back. “I’m supposta meet Brandi down at Gomorrah’s at four,” he said, as he wiped a patch of sweat from his forehead and glanced at his broken Coors Light watch.
Hank placed both hands on his paunch and then shook his head back and forth. Very slowly. “Grandma is dead,” he said, sounding bewildered. “She just went ahead and died on us. D-E-A-D.” He spelled it out.

“Yup,” his cousin said, without emotion. “Fucking d-e-a-d.” He spelled it out too, only slower.

Hank Senior lit a cigarette and then looked at Daryl. “What did you say about Gomorrah’s?”

“Got to be down there at four. Bowling with Brandi. New league.”

They were both quiet for a long moment. Daryl told his cousin that Gomorrah’s had air hockey now. It was unclear why he mentioned the air hockey. They could still hear the Sabinski kids doing cannonballs and yelling obscenities. One of them shouted monkey dicks and then there was a wave of laughter and an enormous thump splash and then even louder laughter.

From the neighborhood willow trees they could hear blue jays talking to each other but mostly just to themselves.

From the upstairs window they could hear a local news anchor speaking from their grandmother’s television set. In low gravel tones the newsman mentioned the death of a centenarian whose recipe for lasagna had received some local attention the previous winter.

From each other they could hear belly humid air breaths.

“Well, I imagine we can get her buried before four o’clock,” said Hank. “So long as we got two of them shovels down the basement.”

The backyard was tight and private, surrounded by a wood high fence and sagging willow trees and shrubs and bent hedges and brush that should have been cleared years ago. While it may have been prudent to wait until nightfall, the cousins were on pretty safe ground with a daylight burial.

There were two shovels.

There was a brief conversation about who was going to use which shovel.

There were four Pepsis on a nearby picnic table.

There were breaks for smoking cigarettes and breaks for sitting in sweaty silence.

They were sunburned and spent and nearly finished when Robbie Sabinski poked his pie faced Polish head over the fence and said whatchya doin? Hank and Daryl didn’t flinch and didn’t look up and Hank said go back to your cannonballs, ain’t nothing going on here. Daryl said yeah, go back to your cannonballs, ain’t nothing going on here. Robbie Sabinski said looks like you guys are digging some kind of grave or something. In the background one of the other Sabinski kids yelled honkey nuts and then cannonballed into the pool, producing waves of both water and laughter. Robbie asked the cousins if they just heard his little brother yell honkey nuts. Daryl kept digging and didn’t look up but told him yeah, he heard his brother say honkey nuts. Hank said he didn’t hear anybody say honkey nuts.

Everyone was quiet for a few minutes.

Robbie Sabinski rested his sunken chin on the top of the fence and watched the cousins dig in silence. Then he asked again if they were digging a grave. Hank put down his shovel and pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket. He put the cigarette behind his ear and looked up at Robbie who was still dripping wet from doing cannonballs.

“We ain’t digging no grave, Robbie,” he said, both matter of fact and calm. “Why don’t you go on back home and get back to your cannonballs and cursing?” Robbie squinted his eyes in a way that conveyed skepticism. He looked at Daryl and then looked at Hank. “Honkey nuts isn’t a curse word,” he said, then popped down from the fence and ran barefoot through four backyards and dove ass first into the Sabinski pool.

Four years ago, after announcing to a rearview mirror that book learnin’ is for pussies, Daryl dropped out of junior college and segued into an easy life of gambling and gorge, spending his days placing losing bets on local high school football games and devouring fishsteaks across town at the Rib Shack. He rented a basement apartment from a senile pensioner who accepted bogus rent checks with a wondrous smile and occasionally baked raisin flavored muffins and served them to Daryl in the middle of the night. In less than a month, Daryl owed forty thousand dollars to a credit card conglomerate based in Connecticut and another sixty to a bookie named Tino who lived above a failing tanning salon out near the water tower. He characterized his predicament as being fucked with a capital C.

At the same time Hank had been involuntarily turned loose by his wife, a blue collar ballbuster who supported both of them by working twelve hour shifts at Simpatico, an erroneously named garment factory that cranked out athletic sweatbands and footie socks and skimped on overtime and heat. She came home one Tuesday after work and found Hank passed out at the kitchen table with his head buried in a next day birthday cake. She scrawled out a note that said ‘be gone by noon tomorrow’ and then stayed the night with her sister in Douglas.

Hank found himself without a wife, without an apartment and most importantly without a benefactor. He could no longer wake at up at eleven and from the comfort of his bed watch a succession of shout and slap talk shows and Mexican soap operas. He could no longer rip bong hits alone and then sprawl out for hours on the living room floor, dicking around with his childhood Erector Set. Hank Senior characterized his predicament as being fucked with a capital D.

That first solo night he drove over to cousin Daryl’s in a sputtering Chevy packed full of clothes and bric-a-brac bullshit. He slept upright in a yard sale rocking chair made of pine and woke the next morning and for breakfast split with Daryl a hard raisin muffin. Two weeks later in an empty Denny’s parking lot they hatched their plan. The next day with a nothing to lose attitude they set about executing it.

Early that cold morning they climbed into Hank’s Chevy and clunked across town, farting a trail of exhaust into the slush and snow that blanketed the streets. They arrived at their grandmother’s house just as she was settling into her Barcalounger to watch a little Montel. She greeted them by names that weren’t their own and asked if they’d like to go dancing at the UAW hall. Daryl said this won’t hurt and then Hank dropped a burlap sack over her head, removed the TV remote from her hand and led his senile grandmother out to the Chevy while Daryl kicked over the Barcalounger and then shattered the living room window with his elbow. He then ascended the green carpeted stairs and stormed the bedroom where he toppled over the dresser and then popped open an antique jewelry box, emptying its contents into the pockets of his sweat pants. Inside the nightstand drawer he found twenty five one hundred dollar bills. He put five of them in his pocket and stuffed the rest in his sock. He looked in the vanity mirror and made a face like Dirty Harry. Then he jogged down the stairs and out of the house and joined his cousin and grandmother in the idling Chevy.

The three of them drove ten minutes outside of town and checked into a motel called Pleasures. At the reception desk the girl behind the counter asked why the woman had a sack on her head. Daryl gave Hank a nudge in the ribs and under his breath asked why the fuck did he leave the sack on grandma’s head. Hank ignored him and told the reception girl they were making a little movie. The girl perked up and asked if she could be in it. Hank said you’re too pretty for this kind of movie.The girl smiled and gave them two keys and didn’t ask anymore questions.

For the next three days they stayed in the room watching talk shows and ordering in burgers and pizza for meals. The only questions their grandmother asked had to do with turning in arithmetic assignments and milking cows. Daryl thought about taking off his shirt and wagging his man tits in from of grandmother, saying it was time for milking, but Hank told him it was a stupid joke so he didn’t do it. Daryl lost a midnight rock paper scissors contest so he had to fake the burglary and his grandmother’s disappearance. He practiced several times with the motel telephone, trying out everything from hysterical crying and confusion to cool and calm reporting. Then Daryl wolfed down a cold Angus beef burger, took the keys to the Chevy and said he’d be back later. Hank said wait a minute you forgot the blood and then walked over to the room service tray and grabbed a bread knife. Daryl eased his grandmother onto the bathroom toilet and Hank slit his grandmother’s flabby forearm with the knife, squeezing the blood into a small sandwich baggie then plugging the wound with a wool sock. Grandmother had a confused smile on her face and said oh goodness I think the dog is biting me. Hank placed a hand on her head and said everything’s going to be okay let’s go watch Maury. Daryl told his cousin to order up a bucket of chicken and then he left, slamming the motel room door shut with a whoomf.

While listening to the Packers game he drove the rattling Chevy over to grandmother’s house, where he trailed her blood through the bedroom and kicked over a few pieces of furniture for added effect. Then he called the police from the rotary phone on the kitchen wall and reported the crime in a tone alternating between rage and blame, neither of which he’d practiced. Twenty minutes later a police cruiser eased unrushed into the driveway and two mustached fat gutted cops emerged with hot chocolates in hand. Daryl greeted them with an awkward, impromptu bow and thanked them for coming. Inside the cops talked about the Packers while walking through the house and writing in small notebooks.
Later, outside on the front porch, all three of them smoked cigarettes and with a fake tear in his eye Daryl asked if his grandmother was going to be okay. One of the cops put his hand on Daryl’s shoulder and said I’m sorry for your loss young man and then both cops threw their smokes into a melting snow bank and drove away.

The inheritance checks and deed to the house showed up the next month. Daryl and Hank each received $137,453.76 in addition to co-ownership of grandmother’s home and a couple family ‘heirlooms’ -- one sepia tone war picture of their grandfather standing on a Sicilian street with a prostitute, and a lock of hair that belonged to their grandmother’s first boyfriend, a migrant cabinetmaker named Fredo. Hank flushed Fredo’s hair down the toilet and after laying claim to the Italian hooker picture taped it to his Chevy dashboard.
Hank bought out Daryl’s half of the house and moved in with grandmother, keeping the curtains drawn day and night and encouraging her to take her meals up in her bedroom or down in the basement.

Daryl bought a duplex across the street from an Auto Zone and rented out the bottom to a fat family from San Salvador. The parents were quiet and worked long hours and paid rent in cash and never once spoke to Daryl, except one time when the husband asked in broken English where he could go to get his neck fixed.

Hank barely spoke to his grandmother.

He brought her meals and ran her baths and washed her sweatsuits but also kept her housebound, in part by keeping all three televisions tuned to Maury or Springer or Montel, insuring that his grandmother would sit there without complaint, much like a hostage under hypnosis, watching with wide eyes as grown women hiked up their skirts and mooned live audiences, men proposed marriage to house pets and toddlers the size of hippos stuffed their faces full of casseroles and wedding cake while panels of glassy eyed parents looked on with helpless indifference. Hank deposited his inheritance into an online sports book and while listening to Biggie Smalls or some old Cyprus Hill would place daily bets on his laptop from the comfort of his upstairs waterbed. He was partial to harness racing, but occasionally threw down a couple grand on a college hockey game or a Mexican wrestling match, the latter, he suspected, usually rigged.

He did well.

Thirty thousand in profits his first year, sixty-five the second. With no mortgage and no kids his expenses were terrifically low, a fiscal formula that allowed him to walk around town with thick rolls of pocket cash, occasionally picking up a big bar tab down at Winky’s or stuffing a ten dollar tip into the breast pocket of a confused cabbie or the thong of a bored stripper. If he ever had to leave the house when grandmother was awake Hank would handcuff her to one of the Barcaloungers and then tell her it was just a fun recess game called Lockup. Usually she would just smile and nod but twice she spanked Hank on his ass and said Fredo you’re so naughty.

One afternoon Hank got loaded and lifted over at Winky’s and didn’t get home until the following day. He stumbled into the house smelling of Peach Schnapps and bummed menthols and found grandmother sitting with tears in her eyes, handcuffed to her urine soaked Barcalounger.

He bent down and began to uncuff her.
He looked up into her eyes, where for the fist time in years Hank's grandmother saw straight through his eyes and deep into his mind soul. There was a flicker of understanding, a beat of condescending recognition, and a brief moment where she seemed to be saying I know what you’ve done.

Hank let the handcuffs drop to the floor and then he drunk slumped down with his back to the Barcalounger and his grandmother. A powerful shotgun blast of guilt cracked him in the chest and then exploded and washed over him like heavy rain. He deep breathed to himself as Montel Williams paraded like a strutting peacock across the television set. He sat and considered the catalogue of deceptions and frauds that he’d committed, recalling the time he locked his own grandmother in the basement for six hours while the Sears guy came over to fix the dryer, asking Hank twice during a smoke break where that crying was coming from. He could see like it was present time the moment he left her in a cooling bathtub for nearly two hours while he had drunk sex on his waterbed with a waitress from Winky’s. After a small argument about cab money he ushered the waitress out the front door and then returned to check on grandmother, who he found lying limp in the bathtub, staring dead eyed and helpless at a woodpecker through the bathroom window, a frozen wet smile on her face.Hank crouched down by her side and tap slapped her cheek, telling her two or three times not to die. He blew his warmed over breath on her face and pinched her gently on the cheek, fearing the worst. He believed in no God but said a prayer. She finally flinched, blinked and licked the bottom of her lip. Then she turned to him and asked if the wheat field needed to be cleared. Hank stood up and breathed relief into his hand and that night made promises to himself that he never kept.

Daryl took a sip of the Pepsi and then offered it to Hank, who declined with a wallow grunt. They both heard one of the Sabinksi kids yell mayonnaise on my nuts followed by a massive woompf and then water crashing down onto the pool’s surface.
“We just gonna haul her on down here and put her in the grave?” Daryl asked.
“Well, yeah,” said Hank. “But we’re gonna have to wrap her up in something.”

They both then looked up towards grandmother’s window, which was cracked open, the white dirty curtains blowing back and forth in the humid summer breeze. They could hear her television broadcasting an infomercial. A high voiced man was in full pitch, telling viewers that if they sent him a check in the amount of twenty dollars he would send them what he called his Timeless Secrets To Wealth, something he said was worth thousands of dollars and contained an enumeration of wealth building secrets invented and employed by Roman Empire merchants, 17th century Dutch traders and Gilded Age American industrialists. The man failed to articulate any of the specific methods and instead emphasized that implementing them would be easy, requiring only two, perhaps three hours of work each week, the efforts paying off a million fold as bulging envelopes full of cash would appear each day at your home, so fat and thick with fifties and hundreds that the postman would be forced to forgo the unaccommodating mailbox altogether and instead leave the packages on the front porch, knocking twice on the door before walking away dazzled, wondering how in the world you’re hauling in so much loot without even leaving the comfort of your own house. The man briefly mentioned Benjamin Franklin’s thrift and John Rockefeller’s vision before listing many of his own prized possessions, including a mock Tudor estate in Plantation, Florida, a convertible flamingo pink Humvee, a marble floored Nevada penthouse apartment with a view of The Bellagio, a sea-through cigarette boat made almost entirely of glass and a twenty foot tall Statue of David replica that sat surrounded by disco floodlights on the front lawn of his octagon mansion outside of Atlanta.

The infomercial bled into local news.

An anchorwoman with a Latin surname reported an increase in the number of car jackings in the area and then announced the winner of an octogenarian beauty pageant.
A Sabinski kid stood on the diving board, cupped his hands around his mouth and then alternated between shouting ass boogers and donkey show.

With his head Hank told his cousin it was time to say goodbye to grandma.
Inside they stood over the yellow brown Formica kitchen island, splitting a sausage Hot Pocket in silence.
Outside the cannonballs and cursing ceased.
Downstairs in the basement they found a rolled up blue tarp covered in cobwebs and grime and leaning against the furnace.

Upstairs they slow pushed open their grandmother’s bedroom door and entered gingerly, as though it were a pharaoh’s tomb or a sleeping child’s nursery. The faded white curtains blew long and wide as a huff of summer wind tumbled through the window. The flickering bedside candle leaned towards Dr. Dre. Their grandmother was still, her bone cold arms and veiny hands draped across her empty stomach, the Chip Clip in her hair lodged deep into the pillow that rested beneath her head. The cousins almost tip toed as they approached the body, Daryl quiet dragging the tarp behind them. Hank blew out the candle and then motioned for Daryl to join him at the side of grandma’s bed.

He called for a moment of silence and then they both stood there staring at their grandmother, their backs to the open window, Dre looking down on them from above, a damning judgment in his critical eyes. Their grandmother was sealed still like an icicle, all movement and life having already come to an abrupt close, giving way to a quiet and permanent stillness. As they stood beside one another and looked down on her body both of them could see their grandmother’s broken luckless past unfold before them.

They saw her screaming birth inside the basement of a failing farmhouse outside of nowhere.

They saw her sitting alone on the porch of that same house while her parents crashed about inside like fuming lions, cursing and lashing and bullying each other towards an inevitable divorce.
They saw a loveless foster home made of brick and deceit.
They saw men behaving badly.
They saw sunsets that she didn’t.
They saw a sweating and lurid suitor pressing himself against her at a UAW hall outside of Flint, Michigan.

They saw their raging grandfather hold her by the neck against a wood paneled wall, their own reflections visible in her frightened steadfast eyes.

They saw her standing over an oven and dressed in a bathrobe, their grandfather and a fist of friends leaning into a table of cards and drinks in the next room.

They watched as she stood expressionless and almost alone at his rainy low cloud burial.

And then they looked on as she was bless swept into the warm light of a lower-middle class Mexican church that butted up against a Fudruckers.

They watched her kneel in silent prayer at the edge of an empty pew and back her station wagon full of canned goods into the rectory parking lot.

They looked on as she lit candles for those she knew and those she didn’t, offering a god bless to scowling strangers, a cigarette to the fallen and a hand made of love to the young women who showed up alone on Sundays, bellies plump with life.

They watched while over and over again from the depths of her broken loving heart she cried for forgiveness, only to be told each and every time, in silence and thunder, from somewhere lit and unseen, that her soul was made of magic.