Shaking out the Dead Read Free Page A

obviously repeating herself. What was her name? Marley? She looked like a recipe for pretty gone awry. Every strand of blonde hair was the exact same color. She had blue eyes and symmetrical features. All the right ingredients, and yet, they added up to something else.
    â€œYes,” Tatum stuttered. “But I’m not so sure people get what they deserve, good or bad.”
    Marley stared at her. Tatum bit her hors d’oeuvre, needing something to do. The half left behind on the toothpick broke and fell toward the floor, Tatum catching most of it in the palm of her hand while still chewing on the half in her mouth. Marley fake smiled at her, said “Excuse me,” and walked away.
    Tatum found her way to the kitchen to dispose of the olive bits that had fallen to the floor. She washed her hands and slipped away from the gathering to Lee’s den. She would rummage through the phone books to keep herself occupied. She’d done this here before and found the phone books in a pile under the same side table she had in the past. In Montana, six or seven books covered the whole state. Here, it took that many to cover the Chicago suburbs.
    She flipped through the phone books, looking through the G ’s for Vincent’s name and number. Vincent Goes Ahead. Though a big family name on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana, “Goes Ahead” would not be a common name in the Midwest. There would not be a list of right name but wrong numbers to call and interview. Tatum looked for Vincent’s number whenever she left town, wherever she went. Losing a person to death may not be a cakewalk, but losing one to his life was considerably more complicated. In his final message to her, left on her answering machine, he said he was confused, but she knew better. The confused stay put. It is clarity that provokes us to action.
    Tatum sank into the soft leather of the wingback as she turned phone book pages. Clarity and confusion. She knew the difference. With confusion the mind mulls, chews, and frets. It trips and tangles on its own so-called logic. Lots of activity. No movement. With clarity, on the other hand, the thinking is done. It was clarity Tatum felt before ingesting a fistful of pills in a Nebraska motel room ten years back. Clarity she felt before playing chicken with a bullet.
    Ah, the drama of youth, she thought, smiling to herself. Her death fantasies had become considerably more tame with age. Her current one featured her dying not by her own hand but of a terminal disease that while not pleasant, of course, would not debilitate her completely until the very end. She would have a party before the fat lady sang, she had decided, a pre-wake kind of thing. Guests would receive a string of raffle tickets as they came through the front door, and at the high point of the evening, she would raffle off her stuff. From her sickbed, she would draw the numbers from a hat. The sofa: 3-6-2. The coffee table: 1-7. Books. Household appliances. The big-ticket items would provide the night’s highlight. The car. The boom box. The guests would see the raffle as a perversity, a peverse request but a request of the dying, not to be denied. Secretly, they’d cross their fingers and hope their numbers were lucky.
    By the evening’s end, only her sickbed and a nightstand would remain. Tatum had shuffled through dead people’s belongings. She didn’t want it happening to her. She would clean the place out in advance, she decided. There’d be nothing left but maybe a missed safety pin ground into the carpet or an old broom leaning in a corner.
    Tatum returned one phone book after another to the pile, once again coming up empty. She didn’t know that she would actually call Vincent, even if she did find the number. She certainly didn’t know what the hell she’d say.
    Then, she stood and wandered in the den reading the spines of books and examining trinkets. She absently wondered