Dead Schmed

The heavy drinking did not start right away.

It began slowly, taking several weeks to build to the point where I was having blackouts, waking up on the kitchen floor, stuff like that. I figured if I got drunk enough I’d see the ghost again, and I could have it out with him. That was the excuse I used most often. It took about three months—or at least I thought it did.

I was weaving through the house trying to find my cigarettes—I’d started smoking again—when I heard a clattering sound coming from the south bedroom, which had once been Smed’s office. I opened the door and—you guessed it—there was Smed, two-fingering his old Royal typewriter, the same one I remembered from when I was a kid. He banged out a couple of lines, then swiveled his head like an owl and nailed me with his good eye.

“Pete!” he said.

“How do you do that with your head?”

He smiled.

“Where’s your cigar?” I asked.

“Quit,” he said, scratching at his twisted throat. “Told you that last time we talked.”

“No, you didn’t,” I said, clearly remembering him puffing away during our last and only post-corporeal conversation.

He gave me a blank look, shrugged, and said, “You probably don’t remember. You didn’t remember last time either.” He unrotated his head and resumed his hammering, alternate index fingers striking the keys with the regularity and force of pistons. I looked over his shoulder and read, Lorum ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam …

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

… nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat …

“Last time we talked you were smoking like a chimney,” I said. “What is that, Latin or something?”

Smed stopped abruptly and turned toward me, this time using his entire body. It was extraordinarily realistic, right down to the chair squeak.
“You know those blackouts you been having, Pete?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to admit to the blackouts.

“Yeah, you do,” he said. “Let me tell you something. Every time we talk, you hit the jug a little harder. Four times now I been back. How many blackouts have you had?”

Three or four, I thought. If I hadn’t just polished off a bottle of wine and half a pint of Johnny Walker, this news might have caused me some alarm. As it was, I was more interested in the cigar issue. Smed and cigars were bound up in my mind like fire and heat, with the same cause and effect inevitability. I didn’t understand this new order.

“So why’d you quit smoking? Aren’t you dead already?”

“It’s got nothing to do with dead, Pete. By the way, Dink says you should do something about that woodwork. Johnson’s Wax.”

“Johnson’s Wax,” I repeated.

Smed nodded, patted his empty shirt pocket, looked down. He laughed. “Keep forgetting I don’t smoke anymore.”

“It doesn’t seem fair, being dead and all, you should have to quit.”

Smed’s ghost laughed, face congested with blood, bad eye protruding, scalp showing bright pink through his mane of snowy hair. “Fair? Fair?”

He was laughing hard enough to force tears from his eyes. “Pete, did I ever tell you about the time Dink accused Tuck of killing that cat?”

“No.” Tuck was my father’s name.

“Dink found this dead yellow cat in the back yard, and since Tuck was the nearest kid to the cat, she naturally assumed he was the one who’d done the deed.” He bobbled his eyebrows. “Sure I never told you this one?”

I shook my head. I was pissed, but I wanted to hear the story.

Smed’s hand drifted to his shirt pocket, brushed its emptiness, fell back onto his lap.

“You know, Dink doesn’t like cats. She didn’t so much mind that this one was dead, but she was upset about it being dead right there in her back yard. By the way, you’ve really let that back yard go, Pete.”

“It’s that maple tree. It’s gotten so big, nothing else wants to grow.”

“I’m just telling you what I see. Anyway, Dink starts in hollering at your dad, and nothing the kid says matters. She wants him to get himself a shovel NOW and put that cat two feet under NOW and she’s not going to listen to any of his fibs and that’s THAT. Once she got going, it could be scary, Pete.

“So your dad went and dug a hole in the corner of the yard, stuck the dead cat in it, and covered it up. Later on it comes to light that one of the Mornay kids found the cat in the street and drug it over to show Tuck, but Tuck wasn’t home so the Mornay kid just sort of dumped the dead cat in our yard. I remember your dad, once it was made clear to Dink that he’d had nothing to do with the dead cat, I remember him stamping his foot on the ground and saying, ‘It ain’t fair!’

“Dink, she just looked at him and said, ‘You go tell that to the cat.’”

Smed laughed.

I said, “I don’t get it.”

“Neither did Tuck.”

“That’s a stupid story.”

Smed said, “You think so? Well it doesn’t make any difference what sort of story it is, since you won’t remember any of this tomorrow. You’ll just go finish off that bottle of Scotch you got downstairs and when you wake up tomorrow it’ll be all gone, the booze and your memory. Convenient for both of us, don’t you think?” He turned back to his typewriter:

… wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat …

I closed the door and went back downstairs to—as Smed had predicted—finish my bottle. I wanted to blot out the muted clatter of the typewriter. I wanted to forget the entire encounter. I watered down the Scotch with 7-Up—an abysmal combination, but easy to swallow—and drank it quickly. I turned on the TV, cranked up the volume, watched the shopping channel. The next morning I woke up on the sofa with the usual complaints from my brain and belly, but this time I remembered.

Which did nothing to improve my hangover.

I forced a cup of instant coffee down my throat, nibbled at a piece of toast, then made myself climb the stairs. The door to the south bedroom stood open. I thought I’d closed it. I remembered closing it. I peeked into the room. No ghost. No Royal typewriter. Just a table and chair, which had been there all along, and a sheet of paper covered with typewritten words. I looked at the sheet without touching it.

Lord in so doldrums sit met, consecutive adipose elite, seed dam not rummy nib eroded incident but laureate dolor magna aliquot errata voluminous. But wise enigma ad minimum venom, quips nostrum exercise tertiary helicopter suspicion laborites nil gob a lot or eat commode consequences.

This was different than the document I had watched Smed type the night before. It was a string of real words. What I remembered from last night was a bunch of made-up words. Had I been too drunk to read?

Impossible. It was the document that had changed. Now it was made up of real words, sounding a bit like a prayer, but containing no obvious message. I read it over again, but could make sense of nothing but the last seven words, which, as near as I could tell, meant “spit a lot or eat shit”—a concept that, no matter how you look at it, just doesn’t have a lot of meat on it.

Even after you are dead, according to Smed, there are rules about what you can and cannot do. For instance, Smed’s ghost told me that he’d had to quit drinking after he was dead. Not right away, but a few years into the afterlife the word had come down.
“What, you mean God sent you a memo or something?”

Smed, who was sitting on the toilet during this particular conversation, shook his head.

“Don’t know who it came from,” he said. “How it works is, you hear it from some other dead person, like it gets passed along through the ranks. It was your grandmother told me I’d have to kick the sauce.”

“Just like that? You quit?”

“Yeah. One good thing—it’s not like when I was alive. When you’re dead it’s a lot easier. Somebody tells you to do something and you do it, no problem. You’ll probably like it, Pete.”

“Right. Listen, are you about done? I mean, I just came in here to take a leak.”

Smed looked between his legs and grunted. “Huh. No action. Oh well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised—it’s been thirty years.”
He stood up and pulled up his pants. To my astonishment, his pants kept on going up past his waist, over his head, up through the ceiling, swallowing Smed and disappearing all in one motion.

***


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