Another tale from Mission City
Hector looked at his work laid out in front of him, a scrapbook full of pictures, a few scribbled notes, and he sighed. It was a heavy sigh, full of irritation and boredom, a sigh of nonchalance and pettiness. Hector knew it, and he did not care. After all, there was no one to hear him. He worked alone, at his kitchen table, the same kitchen table that he used for meetings with his clients. Unless his clients wanted him to come to them. Occasionally it was necessary, perhaps for an older client who wasn't able to get out anymore.
The obituary he was working on was going nowhere. His grandfather had laughed at his idea of becoming a freelance obituary writer, telling him, "Hector, no one's going to pay good money for you to write about 'em after they're dead."
"They won't be dead when I write about them, they'll be dead when the obit's published. I'll write while they're alive, that way they can see what's said about them."
"Foolish, Hector, foolish," his grandfather had muttered, turning away from him.
Hector had responded maturely, showing his grandfather's back one finger.
Occasionally Hector had wondered if his grandfather was right. Business had never been booming. Hoping for inspiration, Hector picked up the newspaper and turned to the death notices.
"Death notices," he muttered to himself, "why not call 'em obituaries? That's what they are."
Some of them made his head hurt. 'Alma Lee, passed through life and entered the Kingdom of Heaven,' started one, and he shivered at the crassness of it.
"Alma Lee oughta of come to me first, then she'd have obituary to remember. 'Scuse me, Alma Lee, death notice is what I meant." He fingered the page as if it were gritty, feeling the print wipe off on his hand.
He still resented the way he'd been treated when he'd applied at the Mission City Daily, a rag of sensationalistic reporting and feature stories about people who deserved less than 15 minutes of fame.
"What're you applying for, again," the human resources clerk had asked him, her freckled nose wrinkled as if he smelled bad, as if he'd gone past his expiration date.
"Obituary writer, or what you call death notice writer," Hector had answered, feeling as if he ought to be having a hat in his hand he could crumple.
"We don't have any openings for that," she'd said, looking down at her desk.
"Well, I think you ought to check on that, because whoever's doing 'em now isn't qualified, and it shows. I'm sure they're wanting to replace him. Or her," he added hastily, wanting to make sure his insult wasn't gender specific.
"Okay. Let me check." She got up then, her surprisingly large frame heading into an office behind her. She shut the door behind her with a resounding "thwack."
Hector heard laughter come from the office, and the clerk say, "I know, I told him," and then a flurry of words he couldn't make out. Not that he was eavesdropping, though he was leaning towards the door in question and concentrating fiercely.
A larger woman came out of the office a moment later, her wide smile focused on Hector. "This is it," he thought, "Someone who's got to take me seriously."
"Can I help you," she asked, sweetly, as if she didn't know why he was waiting.
"Well, didn't she tell you?"
"Didn't who tell me what?"
"What I was here for?"
"Why don't you tell me, sir?" Her smile had faded.
"I'm here to apply for the position of obituary writer," he forced out through clenched teeth, feeling the need for a hat in his hand again.
"I'm sorry, sir, but we currently don't have an opening for that."
"But you need a new one. Anyone can see you need one." Hector could not understand why these people did not see their need. It was as plain as the noses on their faces, especially, he told himself, the nose on the face in front of him, which seemed to be sniffing the air as if pork chops were close by.
"Nevertheless, sir, we're happy with it for now."
"Can I at least fill out an application? In case there is an opening?"
The woman looked at him straight on, the sort of look his mother used to give him when he was in trouble, and she said, "No."
If Hector didn't need the Mission City Daily for his work he'd cancel his subscription, so annoyed was he with the treatment he'd received.
"They shoulda hired me," he muttered, "would have, if they had any sense."
The lack of people who had sense were many in Hector's life. It was as if they followed him around, there to annoy him at every opportunity. Hector didn't mind, he knew it was his fate to be a martyr.
The obituary in front of him was refusing to write itself, but Hector just couldn't think of anything interesting to say about the life of Mr. John Peabody Forrester. His years in the Congo meant nothing to Hector, nor his discovery of a biological agent that could halt aging, nor the fact that three of his sons had grown up to be famous pro football players and then U.S. Congressmen.
"Another wasted life," Hector mumbled, and it was then that the telephone rang.
Since it rang so seldom, Hector was still unused to the sound, and he jumped as if it were a silent alarm that had suddenly found its voice.
"Hullo!" He barked into the phone, certain it was a salesman of some sort.
"Mr. Page?" The voice was thin and hesitant, qualities that intrigued Hector.
"Yeah. Can I help you?"
"I need an obituary, Mr. Page, and I need it done as soon as possible."
"Who for?"
"Why, for me of course. Who else?" The thin voice seemed confused.
Hector prided himself on his consummate professionalism, so he resisted the urge to say, "Well, duh!" though he was certainly thinking it.
"Okay. Who are you?"
"Oh. Catherine Freeman." The thin voice was starting to fade, as if her life were leaving right at that very moment.
"Can you come to my place of business?" Hector did not mention that his place of business was his kitchen table. He had dreams of opening an office someday, but with business so slow he'd had to delay even that modest goal.
"No, I really can't. Can you come to me?"
"I s'pose so." Hector hated deathbed obituaries for the inconvenience they caused him. Not only did the subject expect a quick obituary so they could read it before they died, they also expected him to go to them. He charged deathbed clients twice what he charged his other clients, figuring they couldn't take their money with them anyway.
Catherine Freeman gave him her address, an address that was on the upper east side of Mission City. Though not far from the sewage plant, this area was highly desirable in the real estate market because of the views of the canal. On a good spring day, the denizens of the upper east side could see the rushing water of the canal, and, if they were very lucky, a tourist or two swept away in the unexpected strong current.
Hector made an appointment for five o'clock that afternoon, and as he dressed for his new client, ensuring he wore clean jeans and a shirt that had the trademarked duck that represented Mission City's finest maker of clothes, he wondered how Miss Freeman was expecting to die.
The house wasn't what he expected. Though high on the bluffs of the upper east side, the view of the canal had been blocked by a high brick wall in the back. This was odd, since the main reason for having a house in this location was the view. It was also not like the other twentieth century late additions to the area, the houses that attempted a classic look but ended up looking dated days after completion. The nouveau riche, Hector thought of their occupants, a class he considered on a par with those who called him daily in order to sell him something. Catherine Freeman's house, in comparison, looked as if it had been part of the bluff all along. That may have been because half of the house was underground, projecting out from the hillside like a cancerous growth no one knew what to do with. Hector found it charming in its unpretentiousness. The yard had been given over to wildlife, and as Hector approached the front door he was certain he saw a skunk slink around the corner. He might have been able to follow it to see for certain, but the snake that arose in front of him distracted him.
Hector had never been fond of snakes, and so the sound that escaped him was high and quavery, a close approximation of his grandmother's voice when she encountered yet another mouse in the kitchen.
The front door opened, swung back quickly as if he'd screamed bloody murder, and young woman peered out at him, then down to see what he was staring at. "Sheila, Sheila, leave that man alone." The snake acquiesced and stopped rattling, then slithered off around the corner, apparently in pursuit of the skunk.
"It's okay, that was just Sheila. She rarely bites anyone."
Hector was speechless, yet still managed to say, "Uh, uh." He then cleared his throat, hoping against experience that would do the trick. When he still couldn't form any words the young woman, Ms. Freeman he assumed, wrinkled her brow and spoke again.
"What's wrong?"
"Uh." Hector had a fleeting feeling of nausea. He glared at the young woman as if she could understand from his expression that he was quite unhappy at being greeted by a snake.
"Look, it was only a small snake. And I don't know what you said to her to make her so mad. She's usually very good with people. Anyway, you must be Mr. Page. Come in, before she comes back."
Hector entered the house hesitantly. What sort of horrors might she have inside, he wondered, but didn't want to be outside in case the snake did return.
"Sit down. Can I get you something? Brandy? Beer? Whiskey?"
Hector had begun motioning feverishly at the last, and she brought him a drinking glass half full of what appeared to be whiskey. Hector wasn't much of a drinker, and it could have been Scotch for all he knew. It didn't matter, he gulped it down and then remembered what he disliked about drinking. It was the taste, mostly. He screwed his face into an approximation of a gargoyle while the drink set his innards on fire, and then sat, exhausted and ready to return home.
"Shall we get started? I'm Catherine Freeman, nice to meet you."
"Uh."
"Is that all you're going to say? I was hoping to talk to you a little more."
And Hector wanted to talk to her. Not only because she was attractive in an unwashed street urchin sort of way, but also because he couldn't afford to lose a client. He coughed, a sharp hacking sound that took away his breath, but it worked.
"No, it isn't." He took a breath after that so he could speak again. "I'm Hector Page, and it's nice to meet you."
"First, let's go through the preliminaries."
"Preliminaries?" She was smiling at him, but it was a smile of confusion.
"Preliminaries are those things we do in advance of doing the real work, Ms. Freeman." Hector felt as if he were speaking to a child.
"I know what preliminaries are, Mr. Page, I just didn't know we had to do them."
Hector grunted. She was winning him over with her charm, and he knew he'd have to be careful to get his full fee. "When are you passing?"
"What?"
"Dying? When are you dying?"
"Not anytime soon, I hope."
"But you said," and Hector took a deep breath, "you said it needed it done right away."
"But I do."
"That usually signifies that passing is soon."
"No."
"Okay."
"Are we done with the preliminaries yet, Mr. Page?" She smiled again, and he noticed how white her teeth were. They weren't particularly white, but he did notice them all the same.
"No. I require half payment in advance, and the balance upon completion."
"Fair enough. How much?"
He told her his rates. Hector liked to work with a stepped rate plan. The deluxe plan was the most expensive, and in it he promised that he would incorporate key factors in the subject's life into a personalized and moving obituary that would deeply move survivor and stranger alike. The special plan made much the same promises, but worded differently, and the basic plan made the same promises also, but with fewer words. The same amount of work would go into each obituary Hector did, or lack thereof, depending on the subject, no matter the rate paid. Hector liked it for it afforded his less well-off clients the same service as his rich clients, but gave him more money when the rich clients opted for the deluxe plan, as they invariably did.
Catherine Freeman left the room and returned with a sum of money that she held loosely in her hand. It was in cash, and she handed it over to Hector. "I'll pay it all now, if that's all right with you."
Hector was quick to secrete the cash in his pocket, not wanting to give her the opportunity to change her mind.
"Shall we start?" She smiled at Hector again, and he smiled back at her. That was when the cat entered the room.
"This," said Catherine, obvious delight in her voice, "is Big Cat."
The cat was large, at least large enough for Hector to wonder if it was a small dog at first.
"I s'pose I see why you call him Big Cat," Hector said, bending over to pet the gray and white cat, who was even then stretching around his ankles.
Catherine Freeman looked up at him, her smile at seeing Big Cat fading into consternation. "What do you mean?"
"Well, he is big."
"Oh! That." She laughed, a high tittering sound that reminded Hector of chipmunks. Hector despised chipmunks, and he began trying to reconcile his distaste of chipmunks with the object of his sudden affection.
"No, silly, he's named after my grandfather, Horace Bigelow."
"So his name's really Bigelow Cat?" Hector thought it a rather silly name for a cat.
"Well, I'm not really fond of the cat part, so I'm thinking of changing it."
Hector had continued to pet Big Cat, and was fervently hoping the cat was flea
free. Unable to formulate a question for that particular concern, Hector instead asked, "What's wrong with Cat?"
"It's a bit too specific, you see." She pursed her lips, as if she'd just eaten a lemon. "Everyone expects to meet a cat when they hear his name."
Hector wasn't sure what he could possibly say to this, so he reverted to his default reply. "Oh."
"For example, Heckie, (Heckie! thought Hector) if I'd called you and asked you to come do and obituary for Big Cat, you mostly likely wouldn't have come."
Hector began to get a sinking feeling in his stomach, his eyes began to ache, and he wondered if his worst nightmare was about to come true. "I'm not here to do an obituary for Big Cat, am I?" He chocked the words out in a voice he didn't recognize as his own.
"Of course not! Big Cat has seven lives left. It's much too soon for that." She laughed again, the chipmunks scurrying around the room and chittering wildly.
Hector, or Heckie as he'd begun to think of himself, discarded the idea of asking what had happened to Big Cat's missing life, brushed his hands of the stray fur Big Cat had deposited there, sat forward in his chair, and said, "Shall we proceed?"
"Oh, let's do, Heckie." Catherine clapped her hands vigorously at this, as if Hector had offered to take her to the zoo, and she were a child.
"Boring stuff first." Hector was having trouble keeping his eyes off Catherine, she so reminded him of someone he'd once known, or had once met, or had meant to meet, or perhaps someone he had dreamt of. Hector wasn't sure. "Survivors?"
"Oh. Big Cat of course." She clapped her hands again, delighted at the question.
Hector wrote "Big Cat" in big letters on his yellow legal pad.
"Anyone else?"
"No, no one else. I expect everyone else to be dead by then."
Hector looked up at the ceiling. It looked as if someone had tried to paint it, not in the way he would expect a ceiling to be painted, but more as if someone had wanted to paint a picture, and then had stopped. It looked like there were outlines of trees.
"No, everyone I know will be dead. Except you, of course, Heckie! I certainly didn't mean you." The chipmunks again. Hector rubbed his aching eyes and forced himself to stop thinking about the ceiling.
Catherine was smiling at him, grinning with a single-minded determination so that Hector began wondering if he should call for help.
"So I want you to say that I lived a long time, I did a lot of things, and that I will be greatly missed."
"Greatly missed by who?"
"By everyone, I would think. And Big Cat." She looked around, as if expecting to see Big Cat, but he had left and there was no sign of him. "Where has that cat gone to? He just wanders around like he owns the place."
Hector had a sudden yearning to change the subject. "Interesting house. Interesting how it merges into the hillside like that. It reminds me of a hobbit house."
"A what?"
"A hobbit house?"
Catherine pursed her lips again and eyed him speculatively. "What is a hobbit house?"
"Where hobbits live? Have you never heard of hobbits? Lord of the Rings?" Hector felt desperate to make a connection.
"No, I don't know them."
There were bookshelves at the other end of the room, and Hector looked over at it. When he had first entered the house, he had seen the bookshelf and felt a sense of relief. Too many people had given up reading, and he was always comforted to find someone who had books. But as he looked at the bookshelves he realized there was something odd about them. He rose from his chair, aware that Catherine was watching him, and walked to the shelves. The books were sorted neatly, alphabetically. Except they weren't books at all, but cardboard, the sort of faux books found in inexpensive furniture stores, sitting neatly on shelves next to the cardboard computer. And that was when his love for Catherine, which had not yet even developed into love, died. It died slowly and painfully, and it took much longer to die than it ever had to begin. Hector's heart felt heavy with the loss, and his toes began to tingle, as if there were no blood left in them.
"I'm going to give you this questionnaire, Catherine," he said, without any inflection, "and you fill it out, and when you're done, call me and I'll pick it up, and I'll do your obituary from that." This was a measure he took only with his most difficult clients, the ones who wouldn't settle down and tell him anything useful. Usually he never heard from them again; they rarely bothered to fill it out or call him back. He took a slightly wrinkled form from the between the last yellow sheet of paper and the cardboard, walked over to her, and put it on the table.
"But aren't you going to ask me questions?" Though he was only a few feet away, she was looking at him as if over a wide gulf.
"Not today. Not now."
He turned away from her and towards the door, still clutching his yellow legal pad.
"Hector?"
"Catherine?"
"Hector? If anything happens to me, will you take care of Big Cat? He's really all I have, and I don't know anyone else in town."
He didn't turn around to answer, just said, "Yes." And he let himself out.
And that's how Hector came to be allied with Big Cat, for Catherine Freeman was found barely three months later, or rather, the body of Catherine Freeman, in her front garden, stabbed with what appeared to be a pitchfork. The constable called it a suicide, but there were those on the upper east side who dismissed that idea as the work of a lazy man, and who feared the killer still loose.
None of that was Hector's concern, for it appeared that within days of his meeting with Catherine, she had drawn up a new will, and had left him everything. Big Cat. The house, which had belonged to her grandfather, Horace Bigelow. And a tidy sum of money.
Sometimes, late at night while the wind blew and he and Big Cat slept in the bedroom that had not appeared to be Catherine's, for hers had been filled with frills and lace, he imagined her out there, in the front garden, with a pitchfork pinning her to the ground. It wasn't a pleasant thought, but his love for her had died within days of his visit, so it was mostly an inconvenience, and one he was willing to live with.
