‘Never mind, once we start digging we’re bound to come up with something. Went around saying Pa was healthy a few days before he became a decedant, didn’t he? There you are, breach of patient privacy, mis-diagnosis — we’ll pick up half a million there, easy. Then we sue Muscatine here. I can see his gadget caused you a total breakdown — but Welby’s the real mother lode. Let his receptionist sign the death certificate, looks like, got the name and cause of death in the wrong places — half a million, believe me.’
Roderick looked up. ‘But wouldn’t that cover our debts?’
‘No, barely covers costs in your claim for title, see, first we gotta file this writ of habeas to keep anybody else like this Kratt Industries from slapping a claim on you, then we gotta go through one of these procedures I outlined before, what we want is a clear title over your body… this has to take time… costs… but when you own your body you can sell it like any other chattel, see, borrow money on it, anything…’
Roderick stopped listening to stare down at his childhood skull. Inside that hollow piece of tin, I was.
Miss Violetta Stubbs did not wait to take off her hat when she got home. She went straight to the crocheted doll covering her telephone, removed it, and punched a number.
‘Doreen? Listen I was just at the funeral, Pa Wood you know… the Guild? No wait listen, she was flirting with this black man right there in front of everybody! Leaning on his arm! Listen they sat right down and stuck their feet right in the ga-rave! And that… yes but listen, that’s not all. If I hadn’t heard it myself I wouldn’t believe it either, but there they were, bold as brass, with a lawyer, talking about cutting up half a million dollars! Half a… and poor Pa not even covered up with earth yet — oh yes, and there’s something very wrong with the death certificate! Well I can put two and two togeth… wouldn’t put it past her, would you?
‘Now this Guild thing, I’m sorry but it looks like they’ve sent us the wrong speaker… yes again… I don’t know… must be something wrong with their computer… No listen, I wanted the Reverend Capon just as much as you dear… But listen, we can have Positive Breathing next month then, we’ll just have to put up… I say we’ll just have to put up with this, this Miz Indica Dinks, whoever she is, she’s going to speak on something called Machines Liberation… neither do I, but I certainly don’t intend to just sit home tomorrow night, do you? And so what if she is a Communist we can always just walk out and leave her cold… Doreen, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
That night when Ma went out for her walk, Roderick followed. At first they headed for Main Street, past the post office, the Courthouse, Simms’s Do-It-Ur-Self, the Idle Hour (where a few men lounging on car bumpers drinking beer gave him hard looks) and the place that had once been Selma’s Beautee Salon but was now called HAIR TODAY. But then Ma turned off by the library, headed down Church Street and straight on out of town. Was she lost? Or just nuts? Because there was nothing out this way, not even lights. Just the darkness and the gravel road leading out to Howdy Doody Lake.
Roderick didn’t like it. If he dropped back too far, she might turn off somewhere and disappear. If he kept too close, she might hear his footsteps on gravel. There didn’t seem to be any distance at all between too close and too far, and he could think of only two other answers: go home, or catch up with her and pretend it was just a coincidental meeting. (‘Hello Ma. Pa told me he didn’t want anything upstairs, said I should get out and get some fresh air like you. Funny we both decided to go this way, ain’t it? Odds against it must be, let’s see… Well sure I know most robots don’t need fresh air, guess I must be different…’)
Ma wouldn’t want company. In fact she was acting kind of stealthy, walking too quietly on the gravel, stopping every now and then (to listen?). Like an international spy on his way to the hollow tree. Was she meeting someone? Was she, was she… but spies made him think of the cipher in his pocket, and that made him think of Pa, Pa and this miserable little old woman hobbling along in her bare feet in the middle of the night.
A penance, that was more like it. Offered up to reduce Pa’s days in Purgatory, his time off for her good behaviour. She must love him a lot.
Or maybe she hated him a lot. Sure it was her cooking that used up that million dollars’ worth of gas, caused Pa to take one look at the bill and keel over. Probably she felt relieved (‘So much for chickens and damn dumplings!’) and probably that made her feel guilty. Walking it off, trying to walk it off, not knowing it really came from her unhappy childhood, those early traumas causing horizontal cracks in the ego structure for which she could never forgive her father, hence Pa, hence herself. And even now unconsciously she was humming that tune: ‘Take me to the river, deliver me to the lake…’
Well suicides are stealthy. Roderick resisted the impulse to rush forward and stop her, before the cathartic moment when — but holy mackerel, didn’t she know it was a sin? St Augustine said if you were a pure, innocent person suicide was twice as bad because then you were guilty of murdering a pure, innocent person — something wrong with that maybe but sin was sin. And even if John Donne thought that suicide was no self-murder, that Jesus Christ had killed himself on the Cross by just taking a breath and blowing out his soul (but then how did he get it back three days later?), sin was sin.
Unless maybe Ma was thinking of a literary suicide! But then why pick this lake? It was so shallow that any man could be an island, and its history was no deeper than its dirty waters. Even the name sounded like reconstituted orange juice, who wanted to drown in Howdy Doody, that’s just asking for obscurity. Unless maybe she wanted to make a protest: life is shallow, art is shallower… poop on the world!
A protest, though, might be a real protest about the real world, a focus for the historical perspective, sure because look at greedy capitalist entrepreneurs like Welby and Bangfield, putting up their so-called leisure complex right on the shores of good old Howdy Doody Lake. There once silvery fish leapt, jewel-bright dragon-flies hovered near a silent canoe in which a lean red man glided o’er the glassy waters to claim his bride; they would live simply, in peace with Brother Nature.
Okay, okay it was an artificial lake only about fifty years old, but same principle — once the horny-handed farmer sat down on these shores to eat his lunch, feeling the good warm earth and smelling the clean wind — then along came lakeside cottages and water-skiers and the Welby-Bangfield Leisure Complex, profit heaped on profit, fat men in silk hats and striped pants puffing their cigars and laughing themselves sick at the idea of poor honest men standing in breadlines in cities where the buildings were heaped up like piles of gold — but one day the gold would trickle away into the dust, the cities tumble down, the silk hats rot as tatters of striped pants flapped in a new wind of change, as the expropriators got expropriated to pieces. Only that didn’t sound much like Ma either. Probably she just wanted to join Pa.
‘Will you join me?’ ‘Why, are you coming apart?’ But on the astral plane nothing ever came apart, nothing was lost. Death was just people getting temporarily misplaced — open the right drawer and there they are! Yes Ma half-believed that stuff, with all the paradoxes: life is death, all is one, up is down, yes means no. If you don’t know whether you’re a man dreaming you’re a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming you’re a man, swat the butterfly. For all is one and one is nothing, and you can be the person who killed the person who killed the person who…