The Scared Stiff

17

What a beautiful widow Lola made, there on the broad stone steps in front of the gleaming-white church, as slinky and sexy in her long black dress as the vamp in a movie from the twenties. I could see the outline of her pelvic bones from across the plaza. Mamá and Papá supported her on both sides, and she moved with sinuous exhaustion, a golden hanky to her cheek.

The casket was in the hearse, and the cousins all stood to one side, watching Lola’s pelvis. The flower car was bedecked. Señor Ortiz’s men shepherded Lola and Mamá and Papá and Uncle Nestor and Aunt Mercedes to the limo. Others of Señor Ortiz’s men waved to us chauffeurs, and we drove around in a loop to the church, lining up behind the limo. The rest of the mourners had started to ooze from the church by now and to hurry away in the sunlight to their cars, in plebeian rows at the end of the plaza.

I recognized Luz, in a short purple dress, purple shoes, purple hat, and purple handbag, on the arm of a man old enough to be anything she wanted. I suppose purple was as close to black as she could get. I hadn’t seen her since that first night at Carlos and Maria’s, when she’d spoken to me in English, nor had I asked either Carlos or Maria about her. Let sleeping Luzes lie, that’s what I thought.

I didn’t know any of the people who were ushered into the three cars ahead of me, though I supposed they had to be related to Lola in one way or another. They all mostly made me think of drug cartels: large swarthy gold-strewn men and overripe platinum-blond women. Carlos and Maria, when they approached the Buick, looked utterly middle-class after those people. They got into the backseat, as before, Señor Ortiz’s man shut the door, and I followed the white Jag. The cars of the hoi polloi fell in line behind me.

The cemetery, Campo Santo Lúgubre, was eight miles north of town, off the main road, in a hillier drier area where it was easier to dig and things didn’t rot quite so rapidly as down by the town and the river. Our long cortege drove toward it at a stately funereal pace not because we were a funeral procession but because we were following a timber truck loaded far beyond capacity with huge mahogany logs, teetering far above the slat sides of the truck body. The driver was lucky the vehicle would move at all under that weight, and when he got to some of the hills farther north, it seemed to me, he would come to a dead stop.

Speaking of dead stops, here’s the cemetery, with a wrought-iron archway entrance featuring the name of the place spelled out in spidery letters. Carlos and Maria had been chatting cheerfully together on the way out from town, gossiping about the other mourners, but now they fell silent as we passed under this grim arch.

It wasn’t a cheerful place. Most of the graves were sunken; many of the stones leaned this way and that in exhaustion; most of it was weedy and scraggly. The occasional well-tended grave, with fresh flowers and gleaming stone and carefully weeded neat rectangle of lawn, was somehow even more depressing than the rest, because it said that someone who’s been left behind by a loved one comes out here all the time, with nothing better to do than turn a grave into a garden.

It was an old graveyard, Sabanon being a very old town, settled before 1700. The gravel roadway meandered past graves ancient and modern, and our slow conga line followed the hearse deeper and deeper in. Dark green jungle surrounded us, and just when I had begun to think we would never get wherever we were going and would become a loop, a circle following itself, out ahead I saw something bright yellow and metallic, and I knew we were almost there.

Yes. A backhoe, standing beside the new open hole in the ground. Once, gravediggers would stand at that spot, leaning on their shovels as in Shakespeare’s day, but today it’s the backhoe, with one fat guy in a dirty white T-shirt, a red bandanna around his neck, leaning against the side of his machine.

Everybody stopped. Señor Ortiz’s men were quickly out, encouraging the cars behind us to come up along the grass to our left, so everybody could get nearer the grave, which was just off the road to the right. I sat there watching it all, until Maria leaned forward to tap my shoulder and murmur, “Sorry, Ernesto, but the chauffeur opens the door.”

“Oh! Of course, sorry.”

The other chauffeurs were already out and doing their duty, and now I popped out of the Buick and opened the rear door on my side, so Maria could step out first, followed by Carlos. Cars were passing right next to us, being hustled along by Señor Ortiz’s busy and efficient men.

Maria and Carlos walked around me and headed along the road toward the new grave, where the priest now stood, holding his black book, with purple cinctures (for funerals) over his white surplice over his black cassock. He had to be hot.

The other chauffeurs, after unloading their cargoes, had gotten back behind their wheels, so I did the same. They kept their engines running, though it seemed to me a fast getaway was not in the cards here, so I did too.

I hate to have to admit this, but even your own funeral can get boring after a while. I was seeing it from a distance, but it looked exactly like a funeral. A bunch of people in dark clothes stood in a horseshoe shape, facing a hole in the ground. The priest spoke, though with the windows closed I couldn’t hear what he was saying. And, of course, there was no one from my family present.

We’d agreed on that ahead of time, that one of the many reasons for a fast burial was so she could assure my parents by telephone it would be impossible to get here in time; we didn’t want our scam to louse things up for them more than absolutely necessary. They’d find out the truth once it was all over. But that meant I was rather unrepresented at my own funeral.

And here came Arturo, walking briskly, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, matches prominent in his hand, obviously looking for a place where it wouldn’t be irreverent to smoke. After he’d passed the Jag in front of me, everybody else now behind him, he signaled me to open my window, so I did. As he walked by, he tossed something onto my lap, and I buttoned the window closed again.

It was a small white envelope, containing two objects: a slender rectangular card of the sort hotels use as keys, and a note scrawled on a torn-off piece of lined paper, which read Inter-Nación 2217 7 P.M.

Inter-Nación was the hotel by the airport, outside San Cristobal; 7 P.M. must mean tonight, since Lola would be flying to New York tomorrow.

I looked in the rearview mirror, and there was Arturo, strolling amid the parked cars, trailing cigarette smoke. Ahead, the crowd had started shifting from foot to foot. I caught a glimpse of my casket being lowered, bearing somebody else’s scam to his final resting place. The man with the red bandanna climbed up into the seat of his backhoe.

A few minutes later, as the mourners straggled back to their cars, at least one chauffeur, as he leaped out to open the rear door for his passengers, was grinning from ear to ear.