On the Day I Died (5 page)

I remember this one afternoon. She was up at the front of the class, blathering away and punctuating each boring word with a slap of the ruler she always liked to carry. “I could have been an archaeologist,” she was saying. “As a young woman I trained with the greatest experts of our time. My specialty was Sumerian witchcraft practices, an obscure but fascinating subject.”

That Kisser-upper, Charlene Shansky, asked her, “Why didn’t you, then?”

“Unfortunately, I was hampered in my career by my fear of”—Miss Bolam paused and shuddered—“s-s-spiders.” Her face turned as white as the bun on her head. “Thus I chose the classroom rather than temples and tombs.”

Blah blah blah. Who cared? I made a big show of stretching and yawning.

Miss Bolam’s cold eyes narrowed. “Am I boring you, Mr. Novotny?”

I answered by closing my eyes and making loud, sputtering snoring noises.

Miss Bolam moved down the aisle toward me. Even though my eyes were still closed, I could hear the squeak of her leather shoes, smell the dusty-thick stink of her lilac talcum powder.

Miss Bolam brought her ruler down—
SMACK!
—on the edge of my desk.

My eyes flew open. The entire class was staring at me.

“Hold out your hands,” she demanded.

I felt hot and itchy all over.

“Other teachers may tolerate your disrespectful behavior,” she said, “but not this one.”

Behind me, Charlene Shansky sniggered.

“Your hands!” Miss Bolam demanded.

I knew there was only one way out—I had to give in, do what she wanted. It was the same as when my
pop would stumble home from Mueller’s Tavern whiskeyed up and in a wicked mood. All I could do was take the blows. Only this time it was her ruler instead of his fists. Swallowing my rage and humiliation like some bitter tonic, I slowly held out my hands. They were trembling.

She raised her ruler. “Are you scared?”

I looked straight at her. “Johnnie Novotny’s never scared, you prune-faced old crone.”

“You should be,” she said. “You have no idea of the truly
terrible
punishment I could mete out if I wanted to. But for today … this will do.”

She brought down her ruler, slicing it through the air like one of them guillotines she was always talking about. It smashed into my knuckles, bruising bones and breaking skin. A red-hot pain shot up my arm. But I know how not to cry. I just gritted my teeth as she smacked me again … and again … and again.

When she finished, she leaned in close. “Have you learned your lesson, Mr. Novotny?”

I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of an answer. But as she walked away, I vowed under my breath, “I’ll get even with you. Just you wait.”

Two days later, I left a little surprise in Miss Bolam’s desk drawer—the drawer where she kept that ruler.

“Did everyone do their homework?” she asked as she came striding into the room. Her black eyes landed on me.

I smiled at her, all sweet and innocent-like.

Her fingers reached up to briefly touch her brooch; then she pulled open the drawer.

Spiders—a wave of twitching black and brown legs—poured out. They scurried between Miss Bolam’s fingers and scampered up her arms. They dropped to the floor and crawled across her shoes. An especially furry house spider hopped onto her crepe-skinned cheek. And a daddy longlegs caught its breath on the red stone of her brooch before slipping down the neck of her blouse.

I leaned forward. I couldn’t wait to hear the old bat scream.

But Miss Bolam didn’t scream. Instead, she froze. Her black eyes bulged and her dried-apple face turned the color of oatmeal. A choking, gargling noise rose from deep in her throat, and then … she just dropped into a heap on the floor.

A big gray spider darted across her shoe.

Carol-Marie Price screamed and Charlie Groth ran to get help. An ambulance came and took Miss Bolam away. She never came back to school. We heard later that she’d had a stroke and was tottering at death’s door.

But that wasn’t my problem. She’d asked for it, right?

No, my problem turned out to be Charlene Shansky. Seems Charlene had seen me pull that spider-filled Mason jar out of my knapsack, and as soon as the ambulance carrying Miss Bolam took off, she hightailed it for the principal’s office. An hour later, I was sitting across from Mr. Davenport.

I tried to put on my innocent look. I told him it was just a prank, a practical joke that had gotten a little out of hand. But Mr. Davenport didn’t have a sense of humor.

“I have no choice but to expel you,” he said.

My fists balled. I tell you, I came close to breaking the guy’s nose. But then I thought, Who cares? I’m sprung! It wasn’t like I loved learning or anything like that. The only reason I ever went to school was to get away from the old man.

“You just done me a favor,” I told the principal. Head high, I sauntered out.

I kept walking, too, all the way to Grant Park, where a couple of guys I knew from the neighborhood were living. I didn’t go home. What was the point? Pop would have just slapped me around for getting kicked out of school. No, I decided, I was a free man, and now I needed to make my own living.

And school?

Well, that just wasn’t part of the plan.

“Take that, Funkhouser!” I shouted at the cop. Using all my strength, I flung my head back, slamming it into his blocky chin. His regulation square-brimmed cap fell to the sidewalk and his lip gushed blood. He raised his hand to his mouth, loosening his grip on me for a second. I twisted away and vaulted into the busy street.

“Johnnie, come back!” shouted Funkhouser. But he didn’t chase after me. He just stood on the curb and
watched as I dodged around delivery trucks, sedans and cranky old Model Ts.

I looked back over my shoulder and raised my hand in salute to him. “So long, sucker!” I cried.

There came a horn blast and a squeal of tires as a hearse braked to a stop just inches away from me.

“Jeez, kid,” said the driver, sticking his head out the window. “You came close to being my next customer.”

I looked at the hearse—a Packard, it was, long and black and sleek. Through its windows I could see the ornate silver handles of the casket shimmering against dark wood like some hidden treasure. Jeez, that stiff had more dead than I’d ever had alive.

And that’s when it came to me, just like that. Why bother pinching stuff off living people when there were so many
dead
people lying around? Dead people still had stuff—rings and watches and whatnot—but they couldn’t yell for help or call the cops. You don’t get sent to reform school for stealing a corpse’s pocket watch (or at least, I didn’t think you did). And it would be easy—as easy as taking candy from … well … a
dead
baby.

I started laughing right there in the street, the hearse driver staring at me as if I’d lost my marbles. “Thanks, Funkhouser,” I said aloud. “Thanks a million.”

Back in those days, Chicago was lousy with funeral homes, what with all them gangsters running around, drumming up business. Honest, a guy couldn’t cross the street without stumbling onto one of them death joints.
They was on practically every corner. Most of the undertakers ran their businesses out of their own homes. Down in their basements was where all the body work took place—draining the blood, pumping the bodies full of the stuff that kept them from looking like overheated nectarines, dolling them up with makeup and dressing them up in their Sunday best.

The main floor was where they displayed the bodies. They had these big, long rooms they called parlors that were all decked out with curtains that looked like those fancy dresses the nobs’ wives wore to their stupid music shows down on West Monroe. And there was heavy wood furniture and thick carpets, and pictures of Jesus and bronze crosses on the walls. Sometimes—in the fancier joints—there’d even be a stained-glass window or two. The casket always sat on a bier, a sort of table, at the front of the parlor, sometimes in its own little nook.

Upstairs, right on top of all this dead-body stuff, was where the undertaker and his family lived. At first I wondered what it was like to go to bed every night knowing there was a corpse laying right downstairs. But then I’d seen stiffs before, and they didn’t move. Dead and gone, right? Besides, I figured this was normal for them, just like sleeping in the park was normal for me. People get used to their own lives, you know?

I’ll tell you one thing about funeral homes, though. They were easy pickings. All I had to do was wait until the middle of the night, when I was sure the undertaker
and his family were fast asleep, then open a window and creep right in. The windows in those places were never locked, which seemed downright stupid to me. But, then, who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth? Those undertakers’ trusting natures just made my job that much easier.

Once inside, I’d ease open the big double door that led into the parlor. Then I’d slip along through the shadows—those thick carpets conveniently muffling the sound of my footsteps—until I came to the casket.

Opening a casket’s lid was like opening a box on Christmas morning—you never knew what you’d find inside. A pocket watch? A gold wedding band? A set of pearl cuff links? Eagerly, I’d slide my nimble fingers under the rim of the lid until I found the release tab. The lid would open with a sigh, the stiff would come into view. Always polite, I’d introduce myself.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I’d say as I slipped off her ring. “The name’s Johnnie.”

Or other times,

“Thank you kindly, sir,” as I unsnapped a tie pin.

Or once in a while,

“Sorry, kid,” as I pocketed a baseball card or a Shirley Temple doll.

Business was booming! As long as people kept dying, I was in clover.

Then one night I slipped into the Swickard Funeral Home over on Ashland and Grand. It was smaller than
the other joints I’d robbed—just one tiny parlor that stunk of cooked cabbage and mothballs. Wooden chairs—the flimsy, folding kind—had already been set up for the next day’s funeral, and even in the dark I could see that the carpet was thin-to-none in spots.

Johnnie, I told myself, as sure as eggs is eggs, you won’t be walking out of
here
with no diamond necklace. Still, even a poor corpse might have a bauble or two. Creeping easy, I moved toward the front of the parlor where the cheap pine coffin lay.

And then I stopped. It was a humid June night, and the block of ice that had been placed under the bier to keep the body cool had created a fog bank of pale vapor that swirled, ghostlike, in the parlor’s dim light. I tell you, it gave me a creepy feeling, as if I was stumbling onto the set of one of them Wolf Man movies. I paused, got a grip.

Reaching the casket, I placed my hands on the lid and took a deep breath. Then, quiet, all cautious-like, I raised it, inch by inch, the thrill starting to build inside me as the contents of the coffin came into view.

“Come on,” I muttered, my voice sounding like it did when I was shooting dice, “make it a wedding band, a silver cross, a pair of gold earrings.”

Hopes high, I leaned in through that weird fog and—leaped back, knocking over one of them folding chairs. The clatter echoed in the empty room.

For a couple of seconds I was glued to the spot,
bent over, my heart
rat-tat-tatting
in my chest like a Tommy gun.

It couldn’t be!

But it was!

The face—them waxy, bloodless features—belonged to none other than …

Miss Bolam!

I swallowed hard, my throat feeling all thick and woolly. I’m not afraid, I told myself. It was just creepy, seeing someone dead that I’d seen alive only a few weeks earlier.

I straightened and forced myself to look in. There she lay, her cobweb-white hair done up in her everyday bun, her skin wrinkled as a mummy’s. Her eyes were closed, sure, but in my mind I could see them lifeless black marbles beneath the lids.

A glint of something pulled my eyes away from her face. Pinned to the collar of her death dress, Miss Bolam’s brooch glittered in the mist.

My lips, which had been pressed together so tightly they ached, suddenly relaxed into a smile. Poetic justice. That’s what it was, all right. Poetic justice. Miss Bolam’s precious brooch was about to buy me pecan pie over at Alma’s Diner for the next year!

I reached for it.

And then, by some crazy trick of light, one of Miss Bolam’s yellow, melted-looking hands seemed to move. Except it wasn’t a trick of light, because … the hand
moved again. Twitched. Lifted off her chest. Then it slid down, inch by inch, its long nails making a scratching sound as they dragged across the casket’s satin lining until it finally came to rest at her side.

I pulled away. Squeezed my eyes shut. Opened them again.

Come on, Johnnie. Get a grip. It’s just some kind of dead-person reflex, the body settling or something. You’re spooked and letting your mind play tricks. What with the fog, and finding your old teacher like this, you’re imagining things.

I made myself reach down again, my fingers feeling thick as sausages, and unpinned the brooch. The metal felt cold in my hand. As cold as that block of ice sitting under the bier.

Time to skedaddle, I told myself. Yeah, hightail it out of here
now
. Letting the coffin lid fall shut with a dull thump, I turned and made my way through the rows of cheap chairs. I was already at the double doors, already turning the knob, when I remembered.
Her hand
. Tomorrow morning when the undertaker opened the coffin, he’d see that Miss Bolam’s hand wasn’t crossed over her chest anymore. He’d take a closer look, discover that the brooch was gone and squawk to the cops. Sure as beans on toast, by tomorrow night there’d be nothing in the papers and on the radio but news about the funeral home robbery. And my perfectly good business? So long and good night! Everything spoiled because of dusty Miss Bolam.

I shook my head. That dame had been in the driver’s seat while she was alive. I wasn’t about to let her run things when she was dead, too.

I made myself turn around, forced one foot in front of the other. Drops of sweat the size of dimes clung to my forehead, and my breath came in whistly gasps, like a Model T that’s split an air hose. Hands shaking, I opened the coffin’s lid for a second time.