Loudmouth

Turk’s attitude is puzzling. It baffles Dabney. There’s nothing to gain from it. There’s nothing to gain from Turk running his mouth off like this, thinks Dabney. He could just as well keep it shut and nothing bad would happen. Why take that risk, Turk? Why this need to establish verbal dominance when clearly other forces than eloquence are in play, other kinds of dominance are what count in the here and now? Only grief may come of this.

There are two types of guy in the world, in Dabney’s reckoning. There’s guys who are hobbled at the mouth, who are simply not comfortable with words as a thing. Long they consider before they speak, and then, after they’ve thought for some while, they say no more than just the bare minimum.

Then there’s guys who are all too happy to talk. Jabber jabber jabber, they go. They unspool their minds without hindrance, these other kind of guys. The first kind of guy generally loathes the second kind, and in certain cases will take serious measures against the sheer intrusion of such excessive verbosity. Big Tomás is the first type. He sits there gripping the steering wheel while Dabney’s on-the-job briefing is overrun by Turk’s need to interject, to talk over and through these simple instructions for the task at hand.

It’s like Turk’s planning already to speak before the first words are out of Dabney’s mouth, like the constant threading pressure of the nonstop voice inside his head won’t allow him to listen even for a fractional moment to what he needs to hear.

It’s like:
“So we have to wait for end of shift...”
“I always...”
“...when the guard locks up and goes home...”
“I always say the best time to work is at night when things...”
“...and we enter the mausoleum...”

“...at night when things are so quiet that you got time to think and there ain’t no noise to bother you and there ain’t nobody to see what’s happenin’ and call it in and of course there’s always someone but you can see then there’s somebody and you can shut them down if you see them, but you don’t always see them but anyway the important thing is to work quick and quiet and be like discreet so nobody notices and if anybody does notice they don’t really notice that they notice, know what I mean? It don’t matter it’s just more of the same...”

And so on. By this time Dabney’s fallen silent, he’s waiting for the tide to abate, for the flood of backseat talk to wash over them so he can go back to explaining what it is they’re doing here, in this car parked outside the Forest Lawn cemetery as the sun goes down behind the large houses on this cedar-lined street, some Spanish villas hacienda-style, some lunking trapezoids in Tudor half-brick, some antebellum plantation-columned mansions, and Tomás grips tighter the wheel so his thick sausage fingers get whitened and taut, knuckles straining. It’s the first time these three have worked together and there are bound to be such moments of adjustment.

“Bocazas,” mutters Tomás. His neck tatts speak their own language of frustration: pitbulls straining at the leash, fiery skeletons squirming under restraint. “Bocazas de mierda,” he repeats. Turk pays no heed to these murmurings and goes on with his spiel. Frontseat vinyl shifts squeaky under the impatient bulk of Tomás. He wants to bounce or to drive, anything other than sitting here in this smoky car watching the melancholy light fade and hearing all of this verbose shit.

Turk in the back sits southside dapper in silken electric-blue tracksuit and slick spandex beanie, handlebar moustache signifying some cultured Levantine coffeeshop early manhood of worrybeads and shisha shitsessions all through those long evenings. Gold chains hang low-karat plentiful on a thin chest. He’s like thirty-five, a mid-range loner. He’s not actually a Turk, more like an Azerbaijani or a Chechen or something, but the soubriquet Turk has stuck solid to him. He has the air of someone who isn’t looking for a fight but is constantly in conflict, an aggrieved why me? of victimization that settles in wordlessly under the blanket of verbiage that swathes the outside.

Dabney looks at his watch. “It’s time,” he says. He and Tomás pop the front door locks and step out. Turk lingers unsettled. Did he hear, or was he lost in his own patter? But quickly he catches on and steps out of the back seat, hitching the silky tracksuit pants up on his skinny waist there in the potholes of the darkening street. He wears knockoff Korean Nikes and bounces once or twice on the street pavement before following on.

It’s the darkest moment: the sun has just gone down but the streetlights, weak as they are in their pale urine glow, haven’t come on yet. The three amble and roll over to the cemetery gate, discreet as such guys can be in all their disreputable demeanor. Dabney in his double-breasted gray suit, florid tie on maroon shirt, opens the padlock on the chain and the lock on the gate itself and they slink in and he replaces the chain and the padlock but doesn’t lock it.

They know which mausoleum they want to get to. Dabney was there just this morning for the funeral. It’s a like a little temple with columns and shit, like most of these things are, but there’s a big angel on the roof with a long thin trumpet to sound the last call.

“It’s inneresting,” says Turk. “It’s like what they call the Annihilating Angel or somesuch. No, the Exterminating Angel. I saw that movie once, they couldn’t get out. Inneresting how the tube, like the trumpet thing, is all in brass while the angel is stone, is it marble? And the trumpet is it brass or is it actually gold? It would be worth something if it is. They could go in but they couldn’t come out, like, fuckin’ rich people, trapped in a place with turkeys, soldier, singer, pigs there was, a diplomat. Had to shit in a vase. Hey what would it take to take off the gold tube? Crowbar, saw, what-d’you-call-it, bucksaw, handsaw, no, hacksaw, of course an oxy-acetylene torch would do in a second but bulky, need a trolleycart to pull it in and out, but quick, man, real quick...”

Inside the crypt they place a pair of flashlights on adjoining tombs, which join their beams on the sarcophagus opposite, their objective. Tucked in behind the target tomb there’s a little bag with crowbars which Dabney hands out to the other two. The heavy granite lid to the sarcophagus isn’t bolted down, so it’s a matter of using the brute strength of Tomás to displace it. Dabney and Turk drop their crowbars which clang to the floor and they seize the lid to strain and shift it to a position leaning against the crypt wall.

This first part has gone extremely well. They rest for a moment, gasping, and their exhalations fog the crypt air, individual mists twisting a skein, a transitory union of breath infolding in the flashlight beams. They will breathe this mist in again, and some confederacy or cameraderie will either form from that mingling, or else it won’t.

The hard part is done, now it’s the delicate part. No splinters. So Dabney holds both flashlights and shines inside the sarcophagus while Turk and Tomás crowbar, gently crowbar, the lid of the fine oak coffin. Repeatedly Dabney calls for delicacy, for a light touch, so this easing up of the lid goes on some time and such is their concentration that Turk says not even a word but just grunts soft and steady.

And then that lid too is prised away and the fine woodwork with its brass name plaque ROSA MARIA BENEDETTI is laid aside gently. They peer inside: the embalming work has been masterful, the dressing of the body immaculate, she lies beautiful, more beautiful than when alive, in billows of white satin like a saint, which she wasn’t, thinks Dabney, most definitely not a saint and not beautiful either, but she was kind sometimes and a good cook.

The process of preservation of the flesh is foremost in their minds, all three. In the moment of contemplation gazing down at the immaculate face at peace and quiet and radiant they seem to ponder the same thing. Dabney thinks: like a saint pardoning sins on this earth, fresh, serene. Tomás thinks: yet there is a... yet there is... yet there is a sadness here. Una tristeza. The thought is melancholy and exhausting to form like that in words.

Turk thinks and says: “Perishable, supposed to be. The fading flesh, right? The perishable flesh, they say, and I guess in some cases that ain’t so, there’s like saints and monks and shit and they’re still perfect in their tombs. Saint Teresa, right? And there’s zen monks in Japan they just sit down to die and they dried themselves out so much with handfuls of dried rice that they don’t perish, they just sit there and mummify. And that commie fuck, what’s his name? Lenin or Stalin, right, he sits in his mausoleum and he’s perfect too, maybe an ear fell out or something, but...”

“Shut the fuck up, Turk,” says Dabney wearily. He’s not angry, just overcome. Like, consumed with a great tristeza. Their breaths are mingling here and their sadnesses too, could be.

So to the penultimate part of the task: there’s a heavy-duty combat-issue bodybag left in the same place as the crowbars, and it is laid on the floor and unzipped. Dabney and Tomás take the shoulders, Turk is assigned the legs. This part must be performed with great tenderness. Any bruises found on her body will be visited tenfold on them, says Dabney, so careful. They lift and maneuver.

“That’s right,” says Dabney. “Moving round to my left now, and...”
“So have you even...”
“...easy, up a little here...”
“So have you even thought...”
“...that’s right, now lower...”

“So have you even thought what this is for, I mean what he even wants with her, I mean it ain’t exactly normal is it? Normal thing is you leave the departed to rest, don’t disturb, like: Do. Not. Disturb. But this ain’t exactly normal is it, I mean it’s fuckin’ ghoulash creepin’ around in crypts and shit, she sure smells nice what is that Chanel? Still pliable too, I thought they go all stiff after a while like what is it? rigid mortis, but still flexible only the cold to tell, but maybe with some good mortician work that don’t happen, the rigid, and the whole job is hinky that way I mean what even does he want with her...”

They let him go on, Dabney and Tomás, it’s like they don’t even care anymore, it’s nearly done anyway, let him talk and talk his fill. Still Dabney puzzles over it: what’s to gain from this? He’s nervous, sure, they’re all nervous, nobody wants to be doing this kind of work, what is it grave-robbing? Body-snatching? But nervous ain’t an excuse for all this jabber jabber. Something’s wrong with this guy, some word-sickness that makes him wanna fill up his emptiness with more emptiness in the form of empty words, thinks Dabney.

She’s laid in the bodybag which carefully is zipped up tight and they move it slightly over towards the doorway and then move back to do the last part. Dabney turns to face Turk. He points his finger at his face. Like a gun, like a pistol in a kids’ game of cops and robbers. Turk looks open-mouthed at the finger dangling in front of his face. He’s speechless: what kind of game is this? He starts to say something.

Behind him, Tomás lowers the crowbar over his head and pulls it hard when it reaches Turk’s neck. He’s pulling hard on the crowbar as it rises up his neck under his chin, lifting his whole body against Tomás and his broad chest. Turk’s beanie falls off, his deep brown eyes go wide, the eyes become vivid red and spidery, the eyes see red, see nothing at all.

He looks very much like he wants to say something urgent. The need to express himself is turning his face crimson, is bursting his forehead veins with unvoiced pressure for utterance. But he speaks nothing more than bubbles and froth flecked with blood. His words are broken gargles.

At this moment Dabney’s mind wanders to the Italian café, the old family coffee bar without a name where they all hang. Where he and Tomás and the boys all hang.

Cup of espresso. Espresso: that which is expressed, squeezed out like juice is squeezed from a juicy citrus, a fat orange or a lemon. He sees Turk’s eyes go unseeing and he thinks of the strangeness that ‘express’ is to press out: to express yourself is to press out your thoughts like a lemon squeezer, like a toothpaste tube with the word-thoughts all oozing out of the nozzle.

They lift Turk’s body into the coffin and replace the wooden lid, then the heavy lid of the sarcophagus, a strenuous enough job for two alone. Then they rest silently for a while before even thinking about lifting the body bag and gliding out through the cemetery in the soft night. Sometimes you need a moment just to collect your thoughts in silence.

== LOUDMOUTH // END ==

Any contributions to the writing fund are more than welcome in the

COFFEE BAR FUND