]:[ Romac ... the film...not the film!!!!]:[

In the morning Dog and I drove to the hospital to pick up the new joker. He was from out of town and his girlfriend was there to make the arrangements until his family arrived.
A night's sleep had given her enough distance on the accident to conclude that he'd brought it on himself. He was the kind of guy who expected things to go wrong, so they usually did.
They'd been out for supper. The music in the restaurant was so loud they couldn't hear themselves talk. It took twenty minutes to get a waiter's attention and he wouldn't turn it down until they threatened to leave. When he did all they could hear was the noise of the renovations going on upstairs.
It was too late to go anywhere else. They decided to order. Half an hour went by before they could get the waiter back. The menus were stuck shut. The bread was stale. The wine, off. There was a piece of unidentifiable scooge on the guy's fork. The waiter took it away and didn't bring another one back. He got up and went to the toilet and the guy next to him peed on his shoes.
The pasta was cold and crusty. By the time the waiter came back the kitchen was closed and it couldn't be heated up. The builders were hammering, yes, but the kitchen was closed. In even tones the guy ordered a club sandwich. His girlfriend took his hand to comfort him. When the club arrived he bit into it and nailed his jaws shut with the toothpicks. The owner's dog came over to the table and farted.
He stood up violently, knocking his chair back, brought both fists down on the table and screamed in agony. A badly placed skid of cinder blocks fell through the ceiling and killed him.
He looked ready for bed all right. A real mess. We strapped him to the stretcher and took him down to the car.
On the way back we sighted two women on the sidewalk whose jeans were so tight they showed little diamonds of daylight at the crotch.
"Let's go near them," said Dog.
We fell into pace. I leaned over him towards the window.
"Hey girls!" I said. "Don't you know those jeans are illegal?"
Their lips were red, red, red and curled in twin sneers. They wore identical, plaid-framed, heart-shaped sunglasses. "Huh?" they said.
"You're in contravention of the penal code," I explained. "Yah," said Dog. He put his hands on the window and wiggled like a pound puppy. "You'll have to be penalized."
"We'll have to take penal measures," I concurred.
They looked at one another.
"Hey," I said, "want a ride in a limousine?"
They peered in behind. "You got a dead body in there?"
I wank at them. "Yup. Wanna see?"
They scrambled into the moving car, and we drove off in search of a place to bop.
Dog snaked his arm around one. "Did you ever just sit there and count the number of service stations in the phone book? There's hundreds ub'm!"
She looked at her friend. "What's yours sayin�?"
It was with a feeling of repletion that we arrived back at the f.h. We wheeled in the gourmet and lifted him onto the table.
Jump had the hotel joker looking like he just came off the lot, and now his anxieties were trained on another project. The previous day we'd received the body of a man so big and fat he'd been brought in on a half-ton under a tarp. Took a mover's dolly to get him inside. He'd had a heart attack trying to get out of his car. Life is so fragile.
Now Jump had to worry about getting him into a casket. On the surface this posed no particular problem. A little judicious use of the electric carving knife and he'd slide in like a drawer.
But Jump had to work quickly, and quietly. If the boss ever found out he'd overlooked a chance to order a custom-made and vastly expensive bathtub it would mean his job. And the boss was always apt to intrude without warning.
"Danruther," he said, and Jump almost boned the joker. It was only the intercom. The boss could switch it on without being heard and you never knew if he was listening to you or when he might speak. It got on Jump's nerves, and the boss enjoyed that.
"Come in here, will you?"
Jump felt his heart.
I straightened my tie and went along the hall past the hush of the viewing rooms to the front office.
The boss was in his Embalmer's Monthly pose, pen poised, glancing over some work on his desk. His nose and chin were large and chiseled. He would have made a great statue but somehow the effect in flesh and bone was grotesque. Just looking at him you heard organ music.
"Sit down, Danruther." He screwed the top onto his pen, still perusing his papers. "Came back without the goods, did we?"
"False alarm," I said.
"Well then why, exactly, were you gone for the whole afternoon? There is work to be done here, Danruther!"
I shifted in my seat and sniffed professionally. "Well, sir, the old man seemed to want to talk. Thought I was the Angel of Death or something. Ha!" At his glance I resumed my composure. "And I figured rather than take a chance on losing him I should, you know, play along."
His eyes darted back and forth. "There's no danger of them switching companies, is there?"
"I think we're all right now, sir.
"Good, good. Don't do anything to upset them. People," he said, resuming the lecture that was always more or less in progress, "are loyal to their neighborhood funeral homes. You really have to try, to alienate them. But we must be careful!
"Now: you took the hearse over there. When you make a pick-up you're supposed to take the first-call car. You took the hearse." He smiled. "Why?"
The boss was a stickler on the fine points of economy. The first-call car was a mere station wagon with paneled-in windows, and used less gas than the hearse. We wouldn't even have had a lead limo if his wife hadn't insisted. He wanted a Chevette.
This compulsive thrift of his was a sore point with the staff. He never hired extra help when things got heavy, just came around looking over your shoulder, urging you on.
And we still didn't have an ozone purifier. You don't want the jokers around too long in the mild weather no matter how well you do them. And when you get a floater�guy's been in the river all week�you find yourself volunteering to go out for the coffee and bran muffins.
The boss's solution was to come in and move the fans around. He regarded two-ply toilet paper as an unnecessary expense.
"Well, sir," I said, shifting again, "I thought maybe for the Gorntons, something more formal." The truth is, I liked wheeling around in the Caddy.
"Yes," he drawled. "And you took it again this morning. And"�he shook the pen at me�"it took you the whole morning to make a single pick-up!
I have already remarked that the big car was a considerable ace to play with the hard bodies. (We are speaking now of the young rather than the dead.) Indeed at the phrase "pick-up" I averted my gaze.
"I had to chase down the paperwork at the hospital," I said. Under the circumstances, I thought a little fib would be all right.
He dropped his hands on the desk. "Danruther," he sighed. "Danruther, Danruther, Danruther."
I glanced down shyly.
"And where were you last night?" he said finally, his soul a sea of disappointment. "You were supposed to be on call."
"I was! I must have been out getting something to eat! But I had the remote with me!"
"You mean you were seducing the pooch in some bar while I was paying you overtime. Je-sus wept, Danruther!" He rose and stared out the window. "You didn't even leave the sign on!"
There was nothing to say. The boss was convinced that we would lose that unimaginable customer who drove around at night window-shopping for a funeral parlor. The thought was as repugnant as if someone had arranged to donate his body to medical research.
We sat in silence.
"When people think of death," he explained, "I want them to think of me."
"I know I do," I offered.
"You don't count," he said. He laughed. "Why, you couldn't even afford a bottom-of-the-line funeral! We'd have to wrap you up in plastic, like dry-cleaning!"
This was typical of the boss. He was an accomplished p. in the a. If he wasn't getting you into the office to rag on you, he was coming around making everybody nervous in the back room. When he was really getting his period he'd lean over your shoulder humming a tune you couldn't possibly decipher and ask you if you thought you were doing that right.
"None o' your beeswax!" Nadine would tell him. "You want to do it yourself if you're so smart?"
A threat like that was enough to send him off muttering. He was senior man, and all, and had his black belt in embalming, but it had been years since he'd done any front-line work and he was a little out of practice. He'd been caught short-handed before and his efforts to pinch-hit had not been rewarding.
See, a corpse will swell up if you don't do the thing exactly right. You want to know about this?
Okay. You've got your hose, right? Your hose is for pumping out and pumping in. Now, the nozzle on the hose is a two-foot steel stake, as for pounding into the hearts of vampires. And that's about how you use it, except you stick it in at the high point in the abdomen around the solar plexus. The joker's usually pretty firm by then so you have to lean your weight on it to get it through. Makes a kind of whump when it goes in like you were forcing it through a tire.
So you've got it in. Now you point it upwards and poke it through the diaphragm in a few places, vacuum out the heart, the lungs and the chest. Then you point it downwards and do out the abdomen and lower organs, a jab here, a jab there, taking care not to miss any.
Then you reverse engines and pump the formaldehyde in to replace what you just took out. Same sticker, same hole, same motions.
Now you have to plug everything up. You poke a large Kleenex or two up each nostril (you'd be surprised how much you can get up there), anchor the gums with a staple gun and wire the jaws closed. When you think the lips look right you close them up with Crazy Glue.
For the hole you made with the sticker there's a steel stud the size of the end of your thumb with threads on it like a bolt. I'm afraid you just screw it in. Then you stuff the lower orifices (cotton will do, since you're not afraid of any pressure from inside), tie off the dingaling pour monsieur, and you're ready for coffee.
Of course you've still got to stitch up the gouges you made in the neck and thigh for draining the blood and putting in the fluid, but that's a whole other thing. Body-cavity-wise, you've got yourself a sealed-up joker.
Now, the thing is this: if you don't get every one of those organs while you're jabbing around�and you can't see what you're doing in there�you're going to get swelling. And swelling makes pressure. It takes practice. And the boss was inclined to be a little over-confident, perhaps even cavalier.
So while the mourners were standing around the casket making subdued small talk, blood and body fluid were leaking through the joker's nose and getting all over his clean shirt. It was a gross-out.
Somebody ran to get the boss, and he came in with a box of tissues and asked the widow to just dab the nostrils if anything seeped out.
Doesn't really go over.
Next time just to make sure he poured the whole tube of cement into the nose and mouth and used plastic stoppers down below. The pressure built up all day and during the evening rosary the plugs blew and ricocheted around the slumber room.
No, Nadine had leverage with a threat like that. She was the only one who wasn't afraid of him. She even made him put a touch-tone phone in the back room so she could play the radio contests. The dial just wasn't competitive.
Then too, he had Jump right where he wanted him, and he didn't know how to talk to Dog. I was the goat.
"It is your duty," he said, "to make sure that sign is left on." He turned his profile to me until his pique had expelled itself.
"I guess I made a little mistake," I said.
"We have an image to maintain, Danruther. I've had to speak to you about this before."
Yes, there had been words. We had different philosophies. There were three things the boss reviled and would not tolerate.
One was drinking. He was known for his temperance. Mixed his Perrier with straight water.
The second was sexual frivolity. No sexual frivolity. The presence of children embarrassed the boss, hard evidence as they were that people had been fucking.
And this above all: no unauthorized person was to be admitted to the back room. No one! Casket salesmen and pizza delivery boys alike had been collared and hustled out. We were entrusted with the secrets of the community, we knew whose husbands had worn tanga underwear and so forth, and that preparation room was as private as a surgery.
But the boss could not rid himself of the suspicion that Dog and I had invited women into the back room, become drunk with them and performed lewdnesses among the solid citizens. He was obsessed!
Such behavior was far worse than walking down the street dressed like jazz musicians, eating huge ungainly pastries�a thing he had called us on.
Worse than playing ball-and-paddle in the parking lot.
Worse than jerking the collection plate at the service so the interesting party drops the money on the floor and you help her pick it up, get talking.
Worse than giving a noisome brat the finger at graveside, and he gives you back the arm, and his mother tells on you.
"It was just a joke," I insisted. "She took it wrong, or something."
Worse than sitting a joker in the boss's chair and photographing him for the staff bulletin board, pen poised and glancing over some work on his desk.
Worse than conducting a service wearing false eyebrows. I mean I know you're not supposed to but gee!
Yes, worse than all these things was the mere possibility that revels had taken place in the back room. In this matter the company's reputation was most closely involved. Just thinking about it made the boss incandesce.
Of course he had no proof.
The closest he had come to catching us in flagrante amuso was stealing in during a game of puff soccer, where you blow a ping-pong ball around through milkshake straws. The work tables are perfect for it because the troughs keep the ball on-side.
We just looked up and there he was!
"I'm not paying you good money," he said now, "to stand around chewing your mustache!"
In fact, neither I nor anyone else on the staff had a mustache. He resented having to keep us on salary while we sat there emory-boarding our nails, waiting for the phone to ring. But what could we do?
I hadn't finished the accounts. I hadn't washed the cars. I hadn't vacuumed the rugs, thrown out the flowers, set up the guest registers, scraped the gum off the seats�every item a line in the litany.
It was like being strapped to a chair and forced to listen to folk music. I was going brain-dead. I felt for my pulse.
Then there was the morning coat. He wanted me to do the funerals in top hat and striped pants. Gray gloves. Which would have been great! I'd have said yes to knee-breeches and powdered stockings. But he wanted me to buy them! With my own money! He didn't even pay for my blaze-orange belt and cuffs for directing funeral traffic! I mean, really!
And there was Dog. Somehow Dog always devolved as my responsibility, I don't know why. He'd been the gofer on the scene since before my own entrance.
But no, I took the heat.
Dog had left the motor running in the family car while he got out to direct the procession, and the bereaved had to sit there listening to Joe Cocker. I took the heat.
More than once he'd been spoken to for popping his Dr. Pepper with a joker's teeth. My point.
He was as apt as not to clam to the side without looking and hang one on a client. "Oh," he would say, "I'm sorry." Of course he was not.
I won't say he didn't worry me. I'm not saying that. You'd find him outside with scissors in the fall trying to cut the leaves as they fell.
"I just wish he wouldn't let his mouth hang open like that," said the boss.
Once he scared an intern into a seizure by uncovering a container with a three-week-old body in it for the paperwork at the hospital. Without warning the guy. The skin was glazed and there were little worms under it all over the face. Big joke.
And then there was the matter of the pie. The boss always brought that up. His wife had baked a cherry pie for us, sort of as a gesture from management to labor, and brought it in hot with the coffee.
"It was very excellent pie," I said, though this was scarcely to the point.
It had been left unattended with only a piece or two missing and, drawn by its warmth, Dog had crept up to molest it and had actually let go into the pie.
The boss flinched at the memory. Usually speechless with rage at this point, he was now able to blurt, "It had chiz in it! "
I crossed my legs and looked grave.
"He's trying to clean himself up," I usually said.
"He's a stick short of a cord, Danruther, and you defend him!"
"You bet he defends him," said a voice behind me. It was Hannah Merklinger. Mrs. Boss. "He has to defend him. If we didn't have Dog, Monsieur the Prince here would have to get off his hip and do some of the work around here. Then what, I'd like to know."
She leaned in the doorway, arms folded, looking sour and at neither of us.
I rose a little to acknowledge her presence but even this limited courtesy was construed as a sarcasm.
"He won't wear the striped pants!" said the boss. She spoke in a taxi-dispatcher's tone. "He's got no stake in this, what do you expect? He's a drifter."
"He's a dunce!"
"Doesn't want to succeed."
"Succeed! How's he going to succeed! He's a dunce!" Now that this was a conference call I shifted my chair around in a little gesture of inclusion.
She waved us away. "He's not serious. He's not a serious man."
The boss and his wife had presided over the turnstile together since the parting of the primordial mists, and their partnership had long since become a matter of mutually oblivious convenience.
She was more attractive than he had a right to expect. Good features, slender extremities, carried her house on her hips. But if her silhouette, fecund and, after all, there, had ever beckoned him with thoughts of little Merklingers, it did no more.
Perhaps the nearest, what, intimacy between them for years had been the incident of the pie. One sensed that he couldn't look at her without recalling it.
Imagine him gesturing at the Home. "These," he would say, "are our children."
And yes, their marriage, like how many others, had become a haunted house, a wandering in the presence of faintly heard voices. They would mutter past one another until it occurred to one of them to look up and say, "What?"
"Lu! What are you doing?"
"I'm doing what I'm doing!"
And they would drift by.
She took evening courses in New Interpretations of Existence and filled in the chinks in the administration of the income.
As far as she was concerned I was a mere good-time-haver, which I think is as good a stance as any in the face of the chaos. But she took my nonchalance as an affront. Try as I might to affect chalance, I could never quite bring it off.
"No anchor," she said.
"He'd better tighten up his wig."
"Wants it both ways."
I want it every way I can get it, I almost said. The whole Kama Sutra! But I changed it to: "I'm doing my best to improve." She gave a one-syllable laugh.
He looked away.
I just sat there.
"Well," I said, suspecting his wife might like a word with him, "was there anything else?"
"Did you give me the budget report? Where's the analysis for the next three months?"
"Those are my two next things to do," I said.
"Well do them later. The Gorntons called. The old man wants you back over there."

Chapter 4

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