The Living End Read online

  “Sir?” (“Be off,” God had said.) He saw a way out. If he could just get the fellow’s attention”I’m Jay Ladlehaus,” he shouted, “and through a grievous error I’ve been buried alive. Inadvertently interred.

  There wasn’t any foul play, you needn’t be alarmed. You couldn’t get in trouble.

  “Honor bright.” We say “Honor bright’ in our family when the truth’s involved and we take a holy oath.

  You got a shovel?”

  “Oatcakes,” Quiz said.

  So, Ladlehaus thought gloomily, it’s my in corporeality No more voice than a giraffe. And settled down with his thoughts for eternity with not even pain left to stimulate him. Not seeing how he could make it and wishing that God had closed down his consciousness too.

  “Well it isn’t picturesque,” he said. His hope had been for a peaceful afterlife, something valetudinarian, terminally recuperative, like his last years in the Home perhaps, routinized, doing the small, limited exercises of the old, leaving him with his two bits worth of choice, asking of death’s nurses that his pillows be fluffed, his bed raised inches or lowered, and on nice mornings taking the sun, watching game shows on television in the common room, kibitzing bridge, hooked rugs, the occupational therapies, the innocuous teases and flirtations of the privileged doomed. And hearing the marvelous gossip of his powerless fellows, his own ego-though he’d never been big in that line -sedated, sedate, nival, taking an interest in the wily characters of others, in their visitors and their visitors’ calm embarrassments. He could have made an afterlife of that, not even arrogating to himself wisdom, some avuncular status of elder statesman, content to while away the centuries and millennia as, well, a sort of ghost. It would have been, on a diminishing scale, like hearing the news on the radio, reading the papers. A sort of ghost indeed.

  Dybbuk’d into other peoples’ lives, their gripes and confidences a sort of popular music. What could be better? Death like an endless haircut.

  “Forget it, Ladlehaus,” he said, “forget it, old fellow.” And resigned him self in what he continued to think of as a cemetery, a wide, deep barracks of death.

  Later-it might have been minutes, it could have been days-he heard the voice again.

  “Oatcakes,” it said, diminished this time, softened, and Ladlehaus tried again, his heart not in it.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “I have been inadvertently interred. Dig where the stone says “Ladlehaus.” He was my cousin. We were very close.”

  Quiz heard him. He had heard him yesterday when he had come to eat his lunch on the bench near Ladlehaus’s stone and had discovered that Irene had packed oatcakes for him. Quiz had recently been told by his doctor that he had excessively high blood pressure, hypertension, and, in addition to his diuretics, had been commanded to go on a strict low-fat, low-salt, sugar- free diet. He had been told that he must eat natural foods only.

  He did not terribly mind the restriction of sweets and seasonings, but he found the health foods extremely distasteful. Unnatural, if you asked him. The sunflower cakes and shrimp flavored rice wafers, the infinite soybean variations tricked out in the consistency of meats, the greens and queer vegetables, their odd shapes and colors like mock-ups of the private parts of flowers. The little pudding cups of honey with their garnish of wheat germ and lecithin.

  “He can live a normal life,” the doctor told Irene. I live a normal life,” Quiz had said.

  “Your pressure’s dangerously elevated,” the doctor said.

  “Irene, tell him. Am I hyper tense

  “He’s cool as a cucumber, Doctor. He don’t ever brood or get angry.”

  “Trust me, Mrs. Quiz,” the doctor said, “Mr. Quiz’s triglycerides are off the charts and he has engine room pressure. If you want him around you’ll have to put him on the diet.”

  “Ain’t that stuff expensive?”

  “What’s your life worth to you, Mr. Quiz?” So he went obediently on the diet.

  So he had heard the fellow Ladlehaus. Buried alive. Inadvertently interred. Did Ladlehaus think he was a fool? There were his dates plain as day right there on his tombstone. Dead eleven years. Now how did the fellow expect him to believe a cock-and-bull story like that? Quiz was no spooney. Locked in the ground eleven years and still alive? Impossible. Not worth the bother of a reply really.

  Quiz finished his lunch, wiped bits of oatcake from the corner of his mouth with a napkin. Silly, he thought. Lips like a horse’s. Then the diuretics took effect. He’d read that the human body was about 70

  percent water. If he kept getting the urge his would be a lot less than that in no time.

  “I’ll be landlocked, a Sahara of a man.” He stood up but saw that he was going to be caught short.

  Hurriedly the groundskeeper unzipped and relieved himself.

  “Can you hear me?” Ladlehaus asked.

  “There’s been a terrible mistake. If you’d just get a shovel, sir. Or come back with your mates. Can you hear me?”

  Of course Quiz heard him. I’ve got high blood pressure, he wanted to say, I’m not deaf. But he held his tongue, wouldn’t give Ladlehaus the satisfaction, insulting his intelligence like that. He was only a groundskeeper in the new high school’s stadium, Quiz knew, no genius certainly, but no damn fool either.

  That was one of the things that got the passively bypertense groundskeeper down. Everybody was always trying to fool you, tell you a tale, make you believe things that weren’t so. Politicians with their promises, the military, the papers, the gorgeous commercials on television. A fellow worked hard and scraped just to keep body and soul together, and right away he was a target for the first man who came along with something to sell. Sometimes, when you didn’t know, you had to go along. Now he might have high blood and he might not and it just wasn’t worth it to him to defy the doctor to find out. But when even the dead lied to you that was something else. That was something he could do something about. He told Irene.

  “There’s this dead man near the bleachers,” he said.

  “Fellow named Ladlehaus.”

  “Oh? Yes?”

  “Keeps nagging at me with a cock-and-bull story about being buried alive. Wants me to dig him out.

  Calls me ‘sir,” and wants to know do I have a shovel. Dead as a doornail but you should hear some of the stuff he comes up with. I give him high marks for invention.”

  “Just ignore him,” Irene said, “don’t let him upset you. Tell him you’ve got high blood, engine room pressure. Tell him your triglycerides are off the charts and he should leave you alone.”

  “Wouldn’t give him the satisfaction,” Quiz said. That’s how to deal with him,” the. wife agreed.

  “Insulting my intelligence.”

  “Called it a name, did he?”

  “But I fixed him,” Quiz confided.

  “How’s that, my darling?”

  “I peed on him.”

  Through a kind of sortilege, Ladlehaus’s was the only grave allowed to remain where it was when the city fathers closed down the new section of the municipal cemetery under its right of eminent domain. They picked the site for the new high school after several feasibility studies had been made. Ladlehaus would have been surprised to learn that he lay between the track and the bleachers-like grandstand in a plot of consecrated ground no larger than a child’s bedroom. He would have been astonished to learn that for a time there had been serious talk of naming the new school in his honor. A feasibility study was made.

  He had no record so that was in his favor, and he had outlived everyone whom he had ever served as an accomplice. The difficulty was that he had no surviving relatives to speak up for him, and the people in the Home whose gossip and small talk had been the comfort of his last years either did not remember him at all or recalled his appreciative silences and attention as the symptoms of a man far gone in senility.

  The upshot was that -the school was named for the contractor who had purchased the honor with a kickback to the chairman of the committee wh
ich had done all the feasibility studies. Thus it was that Nick Capiapo High School had gained its name and was not called after a man who had not only had actual conversation with God and who had the distinction, like a player of Monopoly who gets a “Bank Error in Your Favor” card, of receiving the courtesy of His holy “Oops,” but who was the only man in the long sad history of time ever to die.

  Reassured by his wife that he had taken the right course with Ladlehaus, Quiz now regularly ate his lunch near Ladlehaus’s grave, hoping the organic scents of honey and fiber, of phallic vegetable and subtropical fruit, of queer nuts heavily milligramed with potent doses of Recommended Daily Allowance, fetid to his own meat-and-potatoes temperament, might prove actually emetic to the dead man’s. For the caretaker, who was neither drawn to nor repudiated the living, hated Ladlehaus and took an active dislike to this decomposing horror beneath the grassy knoll at the bleachers’ bottom. He acknowledged the unreason of his aversion.

  “Maybe,” he told Mrs. Quiz, “it goes deeper than his trying out his ghost tricks on me. I’d treat him the same if he was a genie in a bottle. These dead folks have got to be stopped, Irene.”

  “Don’t let him bother you. You must concentrate on cleaning up your lipids, on scraping the last pre-digested enzymes off your plate. Don’t let him get your goat, my lover.”

  “Him? Bother me? That ain’t the way of it by half. I been teasing him, drawing him in, having him on. I make out there’s a war right here in St. Paul.”

  “Here? In the Twin Cities?”

  “Between the Twin Cities.”

  “Stand at ease, men. Smoke if you got ‘em. That a comedy book you got in your fatigues, Wilson? No, I don’t want to see it. Put it in your pack. Renquist, leave off reading that letter from your sweetheart or you’ll wear it out. All right.

  Now the captain wanted me to talk to you about the meaning of this war. He wants you to know what you’re fighting for, and do you understand the underlying geopolitical reasons and whatnot. Well, I’ll tell you what you’re fighting for. So’s the bastards don’t sweep down from Minneapolis and do their will on our St. Paul women. So’s they don’t wreak their wicked ways on our children. Let me tell you something, gentlemen. A St. Paul baby ain’t got no business on the point of a Minneapolis bayonet. You seen for yourselves on Eyewitness News at Ten what happened after Duluth signed the surrender papers with them. Looting, rape, the whole shooting match. Them Duluth idiots thought they could appease the enemy’s blood lust. Well, you seen how far that got ‘em. So it’s no time to be reading comical books, and if you birds ever hope to see peace with honor again you better be prepared to fight for it.

  “Whee-herr-whee-herr-whee-herr!

  “There’s the air-raid warning, boys. Capiapo, you and your men take cover. You, Phillips, your squad’s in charge of Hill Twelve.

  “Hrr-hrr. Hrn. Hrn-hrn.

  “It don’t need no fixed bayonets, Sarge. Dey’s our tanks. Ain’ dat so, Gen’rul?

  It is, Mr. President.”

  History had gone out of whack, current events had run amok. Ladlehaus despaired. Hearing what he did not know were Quiz’s master sergeants and the high blood-pressured man’s High Command, his presidents and sirens and generals and tanks, he accepted in death what he had not known in Hell-that the great issues which curdled and dominated one’s times were shorter-lived and more flexible than personality or character. In his own lifetime he had outlived depressions and dictators, wars and the peace that came between them, outlived the race questions and the religious, all the great ideas and great men who thought them, outlasting the trends and celebrated causes. What he wanted to know was what Wilson thought of his comic book, what Renquist’s sweetheart had to say.

  “Is there anything bothering you, Mr. Quiz?” the caretaker’s doctor asked him.

  “Mrs. Quiz tells me that you’ve been sticking to your diet and taking your medications, yet your pressure’s as high as it ever was. Are you under any particular stress at work?”

  “Some dead man’s been trying to play me for a sucker.”

  “Hsst,” Ladlehaus said.

  “Hsst, Renquist.”

  “He’s trying to get to me through my men,” Quiz told his wife.

  “Boys,” Quiz asked the ten- and eleven-year olds who had the Board of Education’s permission to use the facilities of the high school stadium, “do you know what a dirty old man is?”

  They made the jokes Quiz had expected them to make when he asked his question, and Quiz smiled patiently at their labored gags and misinformation.

  “No, boys,” he said when they had done, “a dirty old man is none of those things. Properly speaking, he’s very sick. For one reason or another his normal sexual needs-do you know what normal sexual needs are, boys?-have not been met and”-he waited for their raucous miniature laughter and hooting to die down-“he has to take his satisfaction in other ways. It’s much the same as hunger. Now I doubt if any of you boys has ever really been hungry, but let’s suppose that your mom never lets you have candy. Let’s suppose you never chew gum or drink soda, that she doesn’t let you eat ice cream or nibble peanuts. That you can’t have fruit. The only sweets she lets you have are vegetables-corn, say, or sweet potato, sugar beets, squash.” He waited for them to mouth the false “yechs” and mime the fake disgust he knew they would mouth and knew they would mime.

  “What might happen in such a case, boys, is that you’d grow up with a sick sweet tooth. You wouldn’t know what to do with real candy. A Hershey’s might kill you, you could drown in a Coke.

  “It’s the same with dirty old men, boys. Maybe they can’t have a relationship-do you know what a relationship is, boys?-with a person their own age, so they seek out children. Your moms are right, boys, when they tell you not to accept rides from strangers, to take their nickels or share their candy. Children are vulnerable, children. They don’t know the score. You give a dirty old man an inch he’ll take a mile.

  His dick will be in your hair, boys, he’ll put your wiener in his pocket. They can’t help themselves, boys, but dirty old men do terrible things. They want to smell your tush while it’s still wet, they want to heft your ballies and blow up your nose. They want to ream and suck, touch and diddle. They want to eat your poo-poo, boys.”

  He had their attention.

  “Do you know why I say these things to you?”

  They couldn’t guess.

  “Because I’m thirty-seven years old, boys. Raise your hands if your daddies are older than me.” Nine of the twenty children raised their hands.

  “See?” Quiz said, “almost half of you have pops older than I am. They’re not old. I’m not old.

  “The other thing I wanted to say, boys, is that I have a good relationship with Irene. Irene is my wife.

  We do it three times a week, boys. There’s nothing Irene won’t do for me, boys, and I mean nothing.” He listed the things Irene would do for him.

  “Do you know why I tell you these things, boys?”

  They couldn’t guess.

  “To show I can have a relationship with a person my own age. To show I’m not dirty. I’m not old, I’m not dirty.

  “So that when I tell you what I’m going to tell you you’ll know it isn’t just to get you to come over to the grandstand with me.”

  The attack had started. Ladlehaus could hear the foot soldiers- their steps too indistinct for men on horseback-running about in the death grounds From time to time he heard what could only have been a child cry out and, once, their commander.

  “Cover me, cover me, Flanoy,” the commander commanded.

  “Yes, sir, I’ll cover you,” the child shouted. He heard shots of a muffled crispness, reduced by the earth in which he lay to a noise not unlike a cap pistol. He held his breath in the earth, lay still in the grids of gravity that crisscrossed his casket like wires in an electric blanket.

  Horrible, he thought, horrible. Attacking a cemetery. Defending it with children. A desperate situation.<
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  He had fought in France in the war. Captured three of the enemy. Who’d turned out to be fifteen-year-old boys. But these kids could not have been even that old. What could they be fighting about? He was disappointed in the living, disappointed in Minneapolis.

  “Stop,” Ladlehaus cried.

  “This is a cemetery. A man’s buried here.”

  “How was the kohlrabi?” Irene asked.

  “I dropped the kohlrabi during the charge on that wise guy grave.”

  “Kohlrabi’s expensive.”

  “You should have heard him. What a howl.”

  “Regular katzenjammer, was it?”

  “You think it’s right, Irene? Using kids to fight a man’s battles for him?”

  “The kids weren’t hurt,” she said.

  “Umn,” she said, “oh my,” she said, squeezing his dick, hooking down and kissing it, twirling him about so she could smell his tush.

  “Umn. Yurn yum. What’s more important,” she asked hoarsely, her pupils dilated, “that a few kids have bad dreams, or that my hyper tense husband keel over with a stroke just because some nasty old dead man is trying to get his goat? Ooh, what have we here? I think I found the kohlrabi.”

  The boys didn’t have bad dreams. They were ten years old, eleven, their ghosts domesticated, accepted, by wonder jaded. ODd on miracle, awe slaked by all unremitting nature’s coups de th6dtre, they were not blase’ so much as comfortable and at ease with the thaurnatological displacements of Ladlehaus’s magic presence. Still he insisted on coming at them with explanations, buried alive stuff, just-happened-to-be-passing-by, to-be-in-the-neighborhood constructions, glossing the stunning marvel of his high connections with death. They knew better, it was stranger to be alive than to be dead. They could read the dates on his marker. Perhaps he’d forgotten.