Issue #98

Making Arrangements

by Steven Fletcher

We needed clothes for my grandfather to be buried in, so my father and I went to the retirement facility. On the way I thought I smelled scorched engine oil. I called back from the passenger seat, "When's the last time you got this thing an oil change?" Dad didn't answer. I didn't press. Maybe the wind had taken my words, but either way, dad was a bundle of nerves and I didn't want to rattle him further. The ride was jerky going down, then he taxied aimlessly around the lot passing several adequate spaces before parking at an angle over multiple spots.

The nicest things we found hanging in granddad's closet were a mustard-yellow zoot suit and an earth-tone plaid polyester bellbottomed leisure suit.

I pulled out a dresser drawer and found it filled to the brim with blue, pink and yellow sugar-free sweetener packets. I found the next drawer full of packets of salt and pepper. Another drawer: ketchup and mustard packets. Another drawer: soy sauce and duck sauce.

At the bottom of the closet was a cloth garment bag. I unzipped it and out tumbled hundreds of candy-striped after-dinner mints in cellophane wrappers.

Dad said, "He did live through the Depression."

Whose? I wanted to say, but didn't.

Then, a very loud buzz came through speakers in the ceiling we hadn't realized were there, followed by an announcement urging all residents to stay in their rooms and lock their doors.

We heard shouts and cries from the hall, and loud banging. My father locked the door and then flitted frantically from wall to wall and corner to corner as if looking for a secret exit, cheeping a nervous monologue. "Maybe it's a fire, they're probably saying stay in your rooms because it's a bunch of old people, they don't want them clogging the hallways and falling down stairwells, but we're able-bodied, maybe we can leave, maybe you should call down to the front desk and ask if we're allowed to leave, or maybe we should just make a break for it, no, maybe you should call the front desk..."

I called the front desk. I told the receptionist look, we needed to go make arrangements for my granddad's funeral. Was it really such an emergency? Could we leave? He said no, stay in the room until the all-clear, for your own safety. I asked is it a fire? He whispered, "No. You want to know the truth? Next door there's an asylum for the criminally insane. A patient escaped, a homicidal lunatic. They spotted him here. He's armed with an axe and has a hook for an eye. Don't tell anybody I told you."

The volume on the phone was all the way up, so my dad heard everything. He bounced around like a pinball repeating, "...armed with an axe ...a hook for an eye..."

He cast fretful glances at me where I stood in the middle of the room. I tried to stay the center of calm, an anchor, but if anything the stiller I stood the faster dad skittered. The room seemed suddenly very small, the ceiling inches from the top of my head. I didn't want to die with him there.

"Dad, calm down," I said. "It'll be fine."

"You don't have to shout at me!" he shrieked.

Some incoherent burbling came from the other side of the door. I looked through the peephole and sure enough there stood a man with a hook for an eye wielding an axe. I stepped back as the first blow shook the door.

Now dad was hopping from chair to chair to the bed to the window (no escape there; the building had no ledges and we were on the top floor). "This is his doing!" said my father, pointing up. He meant my grandfather. He meant his father had somehow sent us this homicidal lunatic from beyond the grave (so to speak, since he wasn't in the grave yet).

I said, "Why would he do this?"

"He just would!"

My grandfather had been a firearms enthusiast. The retirement facility had a no-guns policy, but if I knew granddad, I figured he must have one stashed away. The nightstand was brimming with individually wrapped moist towelettes. I rifled through and found nothing else. I looked under his pillow but found only toothpicks and joint wooden chopsticks in paper sleeves. The man outside continued a stream of incomprehensible yammering as his axe blows splintered the door. Somewhere a woman was yelling.

At last I looked under the bed and found a double-barreled shotgun. I stood before the door, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Out of the barrels spilled a cascade of plastic single-serving coffee creamer cups. They pooled harmlessly in a mound on the carpet.

I threw the gun aside, grabbed the fire extinguisher and aimed it at the enlarging hole in the door. I squeezed the discharge lever and out poured foil-wrapped pads of butter, misshapen and rancid.

I went for the Louisville slugger leaned up against the wall, but as I gave it a practice swing, it broke apart like a piñata. It was stuffed with little tubs of concord grape, strawberry and mixed-fruit jelly, and orange marmalade.

The door broke apart and the man crashed through, but just then he was tackled from behind by a police officer in tactical gear.

The police were taking our statements and had the man handcuffed on the floor, still jabbering glossolalia when an older woman, another resident, came to the door and said, "Wait, that's Morton Feigenbaum. He lives here."

The police officer put up a hand. "Ma'am, I'm gonna need you to step back."

She looked at me. "He borrowed that axe from your grandfather and just wanted you to have it. It was too heavy for him and he fell into the door, blade first. I saw it. It took all his strength to pull loose, then he fell forward again. That kept happening over and over. I yelled at him, 'Mort, just leave it,' but he wouldn't listen."

Hadn't I heard a woman's voice yelling during the commotion? The man on the floor did look the right age for a retiree, and was dressed in a salmon-pink polo shirt, khaki shorts and a bucket hat, not a straightjacket or hospital gown. His unintelligible utterances had taken on an insistent corroborating tone.

"He doesn't talk so good since his stroke," said the woman. "That hook? He's had it since he was a boy. Fishing accident. It's inoperable." Trying to shake the officer's hand off her shoulder, she said, "Get your mitts off me."

"She's resisting arrest," said the officer into a radio on his shoulder.

Four officers wrestled the woman into the hall and took her away. I don't know her name and I never found out what happened to her, or the man, who might have been an escaped lunatic or might have been Morton Feigenbaum, friend of my grandfather. The police took them both away and left us alone, apparently no longer interested in what we had to say. My dad shrugged. I shrugged. We went with the plaid leisure suit for some reason, then we left.

We reached the parking lot just in time to see a traffic cop stick a ticket to Dad's cockpit windshield. She tipped her helmet have a nice day and took off in her sci-fi futuristic gyrocopter thing, which next to Dad's ancient biplane looked like a completely different species of aircraft, which I guess it was.

Dad read the ticket with trembling lips, muttering "...over the line? ...over the line? ..." I toed the ground and gave him a couple minutes to process, but eventually had to say, "Hey, c'mon." We still had to go to the funeral parlor.

We hadn't been in the air ten minutes though before the reek of scorched oil got markedly worse and black smoke poured from the front of the fuselage. The tractor screw sputtered and slowed.

Dad started emitting a wheezy rhythmic grunt from the back of his throat.

I said, "Dad, what are you doing? Take us down."

I turned around and saw his eyes were red and bulging. Sweat streamed down his face.

I reached up and grabbed a strut, pulled myself out and crawled back into dad's cockpit. By then we were in a dive. I basically had to sit on my father to pull up on the yoke. The feel of his knobby little knees on the backs of my thighs was repulsive.

I had to land us in a swamp, miles from anywhere. The moment it was safe I climbed out and stood on the lower main plane. "What is wrong with you?" I asked.

His rhythmic wheeze had become a wavering keen. He grabbed the sides of his skull and leaned his forehead against the yoke. I saw how frail and thin he was. The skin was sheer over the twin bones of his forearm, and his tiny shoulder blades jutted like bird wings through his t-shirt. He's just a little boy, I thought, a little boy who's lost his dad.

But the nearest sentiment to empathy I could muster was, welcome to the club.