Read Online Jolly by John Weston - Free Book Online Page A

trembled convulsively, and tears sprang down on his cheeks.
    “Oh, Christ, there he goes again. You can pick the craziest times to get the gigglzes. You shoulda seen him at the movie the other night, Dad. The only person in the whole damn theater that laughed at the ending.”
    George Meaders looked up from his work. From above his steel-rimmed glasses he watched Jolly intently for a moment, then bent his attention to the suture he was tying. “Hum,” he said.
    “Had to wait about thirty hours for him to calm down before we could walk out in the goddam lobby,” Luke went on. “All right, Osment, all right. Jeez, you give me the heebie-jeebies.”
    The liquid in the glass jar gurgled once and was gone.
    “Remove it now,” Luke’s father said.
    Jolly watched the needle slide out, clean. He had not expected it to be clean. The hole in the dead man’s flesh remained open, a light wetness formed around its edge.
    “Here,” said Luke, extending a small plastic article to Jolly, “button him up.”
    Jolly held the item in his hand and turned it over. It resembled a button on one side, but on the other it rose to a tiny screw-shaped pyramid. He looked at Luke perplexed.
    “Watch,” said Luke. He took the button from Jolly, pushed it into the hole in the dead man’s flesh, and screwed it twice. “Now he won’t leak.”
    Jolly stared at the button incongruously attached to the pale flesh. He felt another giggle rise toward his throat but stalled it by looking away and speaking rapidly. “Now whataya do? When do you put the makeup on him? Do you put shorts or anything on him before you put on his regular clothes? When’s the funeral?”
    When Luke and his father had dressed the man in a white shirt and blue tie and a dark, pin-stripe suit, after transferring him to another table, George Meaders bent over the body once more and combed the gray hair smoothly back from his forehead. Suddenly Jolly allowed himself to recall that this was, or had been, a human being. The naked figure on whom they had just performed a miracle against decay became again a reposed, middle-aged man who had been—until this afternoon when he lay down for a nap—a busy, breathing, working man, someone’s relative, someone’s husband, someone’s enemy; someone’s father now at rest, ridiculously, on a bare wooden table in a suit without any back to it, furnished as part of the expense of being inalienably dead.
    “Christ, I’m hungry. And Mom’ll be madder’n hell. Drive me, Luke?”

 
SIX
     
    JOLLY tossed his books onto the back shelf of the Blue Goose among the litter of red-penciled papers, backless textbooks, pencil stubs, athletic socks, one athletic supporter partially obscured inside a stiff, rolled towel, and two naked-breasted Hawaiian dolls whose grass hips wobbled on springs at the least provocation.
    “Hey, horse patookus.”
    “Hey, Luke.”
    “You almost missed the train.” The back tires spun in the gravel as Luke jostled into the line of cars waiting to cross the bridge.
    “No feminine types, artist? You’re losing your touch. More likely, you’re touching too much.”
    “Yeh? What do squirrels gather in the fall?” The car squealed onto the pavement.
    “Nuts. And keep your goddam hands to yourself.”
    “Look out. You damn near made me run over that old lady,” Luke laughed.
    “No points for old ladies.”
    Luke turned the car onto Montezuma Street and slowed for the cruise once around the courthouse plaza. “Well?” he asked. “Who’d you get?”
    “For tomorrow night?”
    “Yes. Some a your prizes or something, no doubt.”
    “Lucas, baby, you better get a good hold on it, because I really fixed us up this time.”
    “Who? Don’t just set there, a-hole. Who’d you get?”
    “For you, dad, I got Babe Wooten.”
    “No kidding? Wow!” Luke whistled once, long and shrill.
    “And for me, Di Carson,” Jolly said with more than a note of triumph.
    “Now I know you’re kidding.”
    “No crap.