Black Cat Weekly #26

ALLIGATORS DON’T ASK FOR PAYMENT, by Stephen Wasylyk-1

ALLIGATORS DON’T ASK FOR PAYMENT,

by Stephen WasylykEveryone lives through a bad year occasionally. The one I was having could definitely be called the Mother of All Bad Years, earned me an invitation to appear on a TV talk show, and left the audience weeping.

My wife had departed and divorced me, taking with her all the assets I foolishly believed had been mutually owned, including the semi-mansion she had insisted we had to have to hold our heads high.

Not an unusual tragedy, and the material loss really didn’t bother me. If you’re young enough, what you’ve earned once, you can earn again. Being betrayed by someone you trusted implicitly, who lied so magnificently she should have been awarded the Croix de Ananias with Crossed Palms, well, that was rather upsetting.

I still rapped the side of my skull with my knuckles each morning trying to decide if I was the most naive male ever taken in by a full moon and the scent of jasmine or if a warm, caring woman had somehow quaffed a witch’s potion that overnight turned her into a mean, vindictive shrew.

Then my mother had died, her eyes faintly accusing as if no son of hers would have allowed such a thing to happen.

But as they say, bad things come in threes.

The small corporation I worked for acquired a new CEO, who strode into the lobby shouting, “Line up, everybody! It’s downsize time!” He then proceeded to fire every fourth standee like a Nazi Oberleutenant selecting villagers for execution. Naturally, I was eighth in line.

Really hadn’t happened exactly that way, of course, but it certainly felt like it.

It didn’t end there. My severe mental stress created physical symptoms that put me in the hands of the medical profession. I was pounded, scanned, bled, and X-rayed, and as though I were a side of beef being examined to see if I was fit for consumption, a variety of probes were inserted into my body’s natural orifices by gaily chatting inserters undoubtedly hoping for an excuse to create a few new ones. A very humiliating and demeaning experience.

Stealing a man’s money can’t compare to stealing his dignity. My ex-wife’d had a great deal to answer for.

With no medical insurance to speak of, the enormous bills wiped out what little money I had left. Flat-ass broke was too mild a term for my financial condition when I extracted a letter from the mailbox in my one-step-above-homelessness apartment house, giving only a passing thought as to how the mailbox predators had missed it. They considered everything to be addressed to them, possibly because they couldn’t read.

From the return address, a law firm, I assumed it to be just another dunning letter threatening suit if I didn’t pay. One had irritated me so much, I’d picked up a stone, marched into the attorney’s office, placed it on his desk, and told him to squeeze it. When it cried for mercy, he could expect a check.

Then I noticed the postmark. Clayton, Pennsylvania.

My mother had been born on a farm near there.

Sucking the painful paper cut I had given myself by opening the heavy, cream-colored envelope too hastily, I read the stilted legalize that informed Stanford Hardee that his Uncle Ralph had passed away and named him principal heir. Interment was—I glanced at the calendar—at nine tomorrow. As executor, Grover Meisser, Esq., thought I might want to attend, after which we could settle the necessary details.

It was a trip I couldn’t afford to make. For the price of a stamp I could authorize him to dispose of the estate and send me the proceeds—if I was stupid enough to ever again trust an attorney. Or for the rest of my life put up with hearing the angry flapping of angel’s wings and my mother’s voice snapping, “He’s your uncle, for heaven’s sake! We don’t do things that way!” “We” was her code word for the family. Very proud of her family, my mother, although I couldn’t see we had ever accomplished much but stay out of jail. So far.

Attorney Meisser hadn’t anticipated an unexplained post office delay before the letter arrived, but I could still make it by catching an evening flight from Florida to Philadelphia, renting a car, and driving three hours through the night.

I reluctantly fanned out my credit cards, looking for one that might not yet have hit the seize-and-destroy list.

* * * *

Dozing on the plane, I remembered Uncle Ralph only vaguely, being seven the last time I’d seen him. A tall, raw-boned, black-haired man, he’d inherited my grandparents’ farm. Certainly my mother didn’t want it. She’d never considered herself a farm girl, leaving at eighteen, meeting my father, and settling in Harrisburg. She was the opposite of Ralph; small, delicate, honey blonde hair. When he wanted to needle her, my father would say she was the obvious result of a mad, clandestine, passionate romance behind the barn between her mother and a traveling salesman—to be told, naturally, “We don’t do things that way.”

We’d visited Uncle Ralph occasionally until my father was transferred to Florida. When my father died, Uncle Ralph hadn’t attended the funeral. For some reason my mother wasn’t angry. She continued to correspond with him regularly.

She’d talked about him through the years; of the fun they’d had growing up on the farm. I’d expressed little interest when she told me he’d never married because a woman had played him for a fool and left him bitter, thinking that there was no way that would ever happen to me. I must have been sixteen when she told me he never left the farm. I took no note of that at all, having more important things on my mind like the mysterious, marvelously smooth white thighs of Heidi Johnson.

Having already classified him as weird, I didn’t consider it odd when he didn’t attend her funeral or when I didn’t hear from him afterward. Now I was his principal heir? Some relatives can’t be explained.

Well, whatever the reason for his self-imposed confinement, he sure as hell had been in no position to object the day they’d carried him off.

* * * *

Only a handful of people were at the interment: a pious-faced, middle-aged minister who read from the Bible without enthusiasm and left immediately without spreading the usual hollow condolences around, as though annoyed that his day had been interrupted, and Tom Wellens and his wife, the neighbors who had done whatever shopping had been necessary for Ralph all those years—what my mother had told me seemed to be true, he never left the farm—and had been rewarded with the farm stock and machinery.

In the inevitable dark suit he wore only at weddings, funerals, and on Sunday, his wife in what might have been severe black bombazine and a wide-brimmed black straw hat decorated with fruit, the Wellenses reminded me of Jack Spratt and his wife, although Mrs. Spratt could never have been so warm and friendly as Mrs. Wellens, the only one of us who wept. Someone like her who weeps sincere tears at the passing of a member of the human race, instead of the hypocritical, socially expected ones, is a member of a rare, slowly vanishing tribe.

And Grover Meisser, the attorney. There are stout men, fat men, stocky men, heavy men. Meisser was in a category of his own, appearing to be a pink, smooth-skinned, ageless inflated doll with perfect teeth and black hair. I suspected both were imported from Korea.

He nodded at me. “Shall we go?”

Since I didn’t intend to stand and weep like Mrs. Wellens, I nodded in return and followed him to his car.

I’d checked into the motel at two in the morning, tried to sleep, couldn’t, had breakfast at seven, and called him.

He’d picked me up, and we’d followed the hearse to the cemetery, nothing unexpected in our completely civilized conversation. Ralph had died in bed in his sleep, he said. Tom Wellens had noticed a lack of activity and had found him. Personally, I noticed the car was recognized, while heads bobbed and hands lifted in recognition, not in greeting but with deference. Meisser was clearly a power in this town.

He got down to business the moment we left the cemetery. “You intend to sell, of course.”

I certainly did, but the assured way he said it made me hedge.

“That’s one option, I suppose.”

The hand on the wheel twitched slightly.

“Oh? You have something else in mind?”

“Depends. What’s the farm worth?”

“I think you can easily get two hundred thousand, perhaps a little more if you wanted to be hardnosed. Several developers are interested.”

I put that down as a probe to see how smart I was. The farm had to be worth more. “Exactly what do I own?”

“The land, the house, its contents, and the other structures.”

“I could lease it out, surely.”

“Hmmm. Risky investment, farming.”

He fumbled a key out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “I suggest you check out of the motel and live out there until things are settled. You’ll have to dispose of the contents, but I’m sure there are items of family interest you’ll want to keep. All you need do is stop by my office and sign a few papers. You’ll be liable for the inheritance taxes, but there’s no rush about paying.”

The smug undercurrent in his voice said he knew I’d damned well have to sell part of the property to pay those.

“The title is clear? No outstanding debts or liens?”

“None at all.”

Somehow I didn’t think there were. “He never left the farm. My mother never told me why. Do you know?”

“Oh, it’s no secret. Many years ago he gave a lift to a young girl who lived in town. She accused him of molesting her. He denied it vehemently, but you know how people are inclined to think the worst of anyone. He was arrested, but it never went to trial because the girl finally admitted she’d made up the story to justify getting home late. Ralph was a proud man. As far as he was concerned, his word was his bond, and if he said he was innocent, he expected the people who knew him to believe it. The only ones who did were the Wellenses. So he marched into church one Sunday and told the assembled worshippers that the next time he’d speak to any of them would be in Hell because he certainly didn’t intend to do so in this life. He said he’d never again leave the farm, and if any of them showed up, he’d shoot them and that included the sorry excuse for a minister, whose homily one morning had been how we should all control our basic lustful instincts. You may have noticed a bit of coldness today on the part of the good reverend. Some men of the cloth are no more inclined to forgive than the rest of us.”

At the motel I stepped from the car, leaned down, and said, “Name the time.”

“How about ten tomorrow morning?”

Deep in my head, bells rang, lights flashed, and the word “tilt” appeared. What he should have said was—there’s no rush at all.

* * * *

Some things impress themselves on a seven-year-old mind. The route to the farm was one.

The countryside that flowed by was studded now with clusters of new homes—peaked, gabled, sided with vinyl, glassed, decked—where once, if a crop could grow there and be sold at a profit, it was cultivated. I imagined that from high above those varicolored houses would appear like a strange fungus creeping out from the town and devouring the green valleys.

The farmhouse, barn, machinery shed, and poultry house were painted white and gleaming in the sun at the foot of a gravel access road curling down from the highway that ran by halfway up the hill. Nothing had changed there.

I toured the silent, deserted outbuildings. Everything as neat as a pin and in first-class shape. Family trait.

No rocker or swing on the porch, so I settled at the head of the steps remembering sitting there as a boy, looking down the valley and wondering why everything close was so green while the far hills were a hazy blue.