Date:         Sun, 6 Sep 1998 07:23:35 PDT
From: Mark Brown <brownm46@HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject:      [WRITERS] SUB: Vaccuming (Mark Brown, fiction)

Hello Everyone,
I'm new to the list, so I'll give you some short bio stuff and get to
important matters: I'm an English instructor at Volunteer State
Community College in Gallatin, TN whose work has appeared in
Explorations, Number One, The Little Read Writers Hood, The Red Mud
Review, and Squatter's Rites.
Ain't it fun,
Mark Brown

Vacuuming With the Dead
) Copyright 1998 Mark Brown
Word Count: 3,215

Being the kind of woman who ain t comfortable around dead guys, I wanted
out of that place before Marge even brought up the latest.  Nursing
homes are creepy enough without guys dropping dead like clockwork.  Then
Marge wanted to carry on conversations about them.  Ever notice old
people look dead when they re asleep?  How s somebody supposed to clean
around a bunch of dead-looking people?  The creepiness got worse when
they started dying, believe me.

Anyway, I knew Marge wasn t going to drop the subject.  She can be as
stubborn as a wasp when she s curious.  She looks like one, too, with
that skinny body and nose like a stinger.  She hardly ever goes outside
because she says daytime bores her.  Her skin stays reddish, though,
like a wasp.

She rubbed her fingers like she was trying to get rid of the dirt under
her nails.  "They all died in the same bed.  Ain t that strange?"

It was more than strange, but I didn t know a word that meant more than
strange.  "It s spooky, like something off Unsolved Mysteries," I said.
It didn t seem like "spooky" really fit, though.

She pushed our cart down the hallway, the bottles of Pine Sol clanking
off  each other.  She cut her eyes to the floor, even though that dingy
green carpet wasn t interesting, then peeped at me from the corner of
her eyes.  She wanted to say something and was just trying to figure out
how to say it.

That was nothing special.  Everybody in Springfield had something they
wanted to say to me and was just trying to figure out how to say it.
Word was out in town about the goings on at the nursing home on Friday
nights.  No one said much about the first three.  After all, old guys
die all the time.  When the last two bought it, though, people started
talking.  I knew somebody was going to put two and two together.

Marge fixed a towel on our cart as we passed the nurse s station.  No
one was at the desk.  Usually, Regina s there.  She's a sweetheart who
has the cutest little blonde-haired girl.  They re always in Sunday
School.  Anyway, maybe Regina was off getting a cold drink.

"Doctors know the time of death?" Marge said.

"Same as the others."

"Jesus."  She shuddered like Jell-O, the lime kind.  "Five deaths in
five Fridays and you ve . . ."  She picked at a spot on her T-shirt.

Five deaths in five Fridays and I d been in that ward for all of them.
Janie Ballard was the hand of death, and all those old guys was waiting
for me to carry them across the Jordan.  "Switch wards with me, Marge."

She jumped, and her rag fell from her back pocket.  "I ain t."

"Just this one night," I begged.  I try not to beg much, but I ll be
damned if I wanted to go back in that ward.  "Somebody ll die if you
don t."

"Might be me, if I do.  I m too scared to go in there, Janie."

Horseshit.  Sorry, but that's what it was.  Every time she didn t want
to do something, Marge claimed she was scared.  If she was too lazy to
clean the top of a window, she was scared of heights, and I d have to
haul my wide ass up the ladder.  To be fair, though, maybe she did have
a reason for being scared of that ward.  "You don t care that I ll kill
somebody if --"

"Don t talk about killing nobody," she mumbled.  "You just been in the
ward when they died, is all."

"Marge." I tried to keep my voice even and calm like when I lecture one
of my nieces or nephews.  "There s a lot of stuff you can t explain in
this world.  It just takes common sense to see they re connected."  She
opened her mouth, and I waved my hand to cut her off.  "Like O.J. and
that bloody glove.  You can t tell me his dead wife and a bloody glove
that fit him was in the same place by accident."

"You ain t got no bloody glove."

"Interrupting s rude."  I took a plunger from our cart and smacked the
handle against my palm so I d look like I knew what I was talking about.
"Now," I said and smacked the plunger handle against my palm real hard,
"five weeks ago, we started on this account, and every Friday for five
weeks I been cleaning that ward between nine and ten, and every Friday
for five weeks some old guy has decided it was time to face Judgment
between nine and ten."  I smacked the plunger in my hand.  "You mean to
tell me that ain t connected?"

"You ain t a murderer, Janie.  You re a cleaning lady."  From her tone
of voice, I got the impression she didn t mean it as much as she was
trying to make me feel better.

"I didn t say I was a murderer.  I got bad karma."

She bunched up her eyebrows like a pile of potato peels.  She really did
look like a wasp then, a really stupid wasp with three or four hairs
straggling out of the top of her eyebrows.  "What s karma?"

Everybody knows what karma is, but Marge don't watch the Discovery
Channel.  "It s energy from God.  I heard about it on TV."  I watch the
Discovery Channel because it s time well spent.    "Some people got good
karma, and it makes good things happen around them.  Some people got bad
karma, and it makes bad things happen around them.  I got bad karma."

She blew a breath through her lips.  "I ve never heard of it," she said
in a voice a couple of pitches higher than normal.  She does that when
she talks about something she doesn't believe.

"It s in the Bible, somewhere."

She chewed on her bottom lip like she always does when she's confused.
She saw me watching and stopped, like she always does, too.  "Maybe
those five didn t have anything to do with each other."

"They was in the same bed, Marge."

She bit her lower lip again, just once.  "Maybe the equipment s bad on
that bed."

"The doctors done checked it all a dozen times."

"Maybe there s a short and it s shocking them to death."

I threw the plunger in our cart.

She flinched when it clattered against the bottles of Windex.  "I can t
believe the families ain t done nothing.  Wouldn t you want to know what
was going on if it was your grand dad?"

If it was my grand daddy?  If I had a grand daddy I cared about, I
wouldn t want him stuck in that place.  No one cared because maybe those
dead guys was better off dead.  They was dying anyway.  Maybe going out
so soon saved them some suffering.  That s what that Dr. Kevorkian
thinks, and it seems to me, he's right.  "When the police get involved,
it s my ass."

Marge stopped our cart.  The placard beside the door to Room 115 was
crooked, so she straightened it.

"It s like one of them TV movies," I said.  "They re going to think I
hate old guys, so I m suffocating them with a pillow."

Really, I thought one of them doctors did it.  They're under a lot of
pressure from all the death and sickness they see.  One of them could
crack just any time.  Although, it could ve been one of them nurses,
except Regina.  She's too sweet to do anything like that.  Nurses put up
with a lot off them old guys, cleaning their bedpans and stuff.
Regina's the only one who cares about them.  What's another dead guy to
them nurses except one less old guy to worry about?  Those guys aren t
real anyway.  They're all doped up or in a coma.  How else could I
vacuum at nine o clock at night?

See, I wasn t in that ward all the way from nine until ten.  As soon as
I d cleaned, I was gone.  After that, some crazy doctor or nurse
could ve snuck in and suffocated anybody they liked.  Maybe they was
trying to make it look like I did it because people always try to blame
the butler or the cleaning lady.

But I wasn t sticking around to find out.  I didn t want to see nobody
die.  I d seen my cat die when I was a little girl.  Mr. Moto ran up
under my daddy s lawn tractor.  It whacked off his back legs and one of
his ears, but it didn t kill him right off.  He laid in the grass, all
bloody, flopping and squalling while I screamed and bawled, and my daddy
kept mowing because he didn t know he d run over anything.  That s what
he claimed, anyway.  Not that he would ve given a damn if he d known.
Then, Mr. Moto jerked his whole body off the ground and plopped down
dead.  It scared me so bad I couldn t sleep for a month without having
this dream I was being chased down the street by a bloody cat who drug
its butt on the ground because it didn t have no back legs.  I m telling
you, Mr. Moto s the only dead body I ever want to see.

"They re not going to call the police," Marge said.  "They don t care."

She gave the placard a last look, then pushed our cart to the end of the
hallway.  I went around it, like always, to pull the vacuum off the
front.  By my right hand was the door to my ward.  To my left was the
door to Marge s ward.

She was on the other side of our cart, looking at that dingy carpet
again.  "You ain t killed nobody, have you?"

"Not that I know of," I said, looking at the top of her head.  She
needed to bleach her hair again. Her roots was showing.

"Did you like your dad?"

"He was my daddy, wasn t he?"  That s what you should answer when
someone asks a question like that.  My daddy was a big son of a bitch
from day one, though.  He was big in every way I knew.  Big head, big
gut, big fists.  When he died, Dr. Gunn said his liver was as big as a
horse's.  My daddy was a big, lumbering fool with only enough time for
beer and a card game.  He died slow, but I don't want to talk about
that.

"They say if a woman didn t like her dad, she might not like men at
all," Marge said, "and she might want to --"

I stamped my foot on the floor.  "I don t hate men, Marge."

"You ain't never been married."  She snuck a peek at that ward door.

"I ve watched you long enough to know I don t want to be."  Marge was on
her third husband.  One ran off with a Pizza Hut waitress from Cross
Plains.  The other just ran off.  Jim, her latest, she met in Skull s
Rainbow down on Printer s Alley.  They knew each other all of six weeks
before they got married.  People do things quick when they re getting
old.  "You ve got about the same effect on husbands that I ve got on old
men."

She pushed her lips together like she does when she s pissed off and
said,  "That s mean."

So I said, "It was mean to say I hate men."

"I m just saying people talk about you." She peeked at that ward door
again, which really irked me.  "Most people been married at least once
by the time they re thirty-five."

"Not me."  I tried to sound like I was proud of it.

"Then this starts happening," she said, "and maybe, people start
thinking --"

"That s what I ve been saying."

"It looks funny, but you ain't killed nobody," she said in that
high-pitched voice.

"You know I couldn t murder nobody."

She pulled a Windex bottle and a stack of rags from our cart.  "I didn t
think O.J. could, neither."

"I m telling you, it s bad karma."

"I don t know nothing about --"

"Trade wards with me, Marge."  I had to do something.  If Marge didn t
believe me, I was in big trouble.

She took two short steps towards her door.

"You got to trade, Marge, or somebody ll die."

"I ain t going in that ward."

I took a step around the cart and said in a really low voice, "If you
don t trade, it ll be you."  Not that I meant it.  I was just trying to
get my way by scaring her.

She turned on me.  "You got a bad temper."

I'm a lot bigger than her skinny ass, so I could usually bully her.  She
was too scared of that ward to be scared of me, though.  "My temper s
not bad."

"You just said you d kill me."

That was a good point.  I'll give her that.

I rubbed my eyes to give myself a couple of seconds to calm down then
took a breath.  "If I go in there and another old guy dies, I ll fall
apart, and it ll be your fault."

She threw her Windex bottle and rags on the floor and folded her arms
across her flat, little chest.  "I ll quit before I go in there.  I
don t want nobody dying within a hundred yards of me."

"Fine," I said and snatched the vacuum off its rack, "but our friendship
is through."

"That s all right with me."  She picked up her stuff.  As she went in
her ward, I thought I heard her mumble "Murderer," but I wasn t for
sure, or I might ve thrown something at her.

The door to that ward opened way too easy.  It should ve been locked for
security.   Inside, the ward was mostly dark, but it was filled with
machine hissing.  It sounded like Darth Vader breathing through his mask
in there, which is what it was.  Eight Darth Vaders breathed through
masks hooked into the walls.  That ward was always full.  As soon as one
old guy went the way we ll all go, they wheeled another in.

So, I snuck down the rows of Darth Vaders, four to each wall at my
sides, dragging my vacuum behind me, towards the bed at the end on my
left.  That bed.  My plug-in was in the wall behind that bed.  Just my
luck, the only plug-in I knew of  was behind the bed where every time I
vacuumed some guy died.  Really, that was the first plug-in I found, and
I didn t look for another.  I was there to clean, not hunt for plug-ins.

That bed was getting too close, too quick, so I dragged my feet.  I
figured I was getting static electricity from the carpet. The thought of
shocking some guy to see if he could feel anything occurred to me, to
see if he d jump.  That would ve been mean, though, so I didn t.
I could see the guy laying in that bed, his Darth Vader hissing coming
from behind the mask on his face.  From back in the town square, the
courthouse clock tolled.  Then again.  And again.  White moonlight
creeped through the window and over the guy.  His skin had a yellow tint
to it, and the moonlight made his hands, laying flat on the wool spread,
glow like two big fireflies, except his hands had brown blotches dotting
them.  The clock tolled again.  And again.  I was close enough to see
his eyeballs cut back and forth and back and forth beneath the veins
showing like red sewing thread on his eyelids.  The Discovery Channel
said your eyeballs are supposed to dart around like that when you dream.
And the clock tolled again.  And again.  And again.  And I was right up
on him.  His skinny ankle and bony foot poked out from under the covers.
I took his chart off the end of the bed as the courthouse clock tolled
for the last time.

The chart said his name was Theodore Pace, Sr.  I figured his grandkids
called him Grandpa Teddy because he looked like the small, sweet sort of
grand daddy that kids have sweet names for.  He wasn t a grandfather
like those other guys who had been in that bed.  Grandpa Teddy bought
his grandkids candy and took them to the Cumberland Museum and the
Nashville Zoo.  The other rigmarole on the chart probably said he was
old and dying.  I put the chart back and unraveled my vacuum s cord.

Both plug-ins was full.  Every week, both plug-ins was full.  They knew
I d need those plug-ins, but they still plugged stuff in there anyway.
How could I vacuum if I couldn t plug in my vacuum?  They was messing
with me.  Some guys did it because they never take anyone else into
consideration.  Just to show them, I yanked loose both cords, like I had
to do every Friday.  When I finished, I d plug in whatever they had
plugged in, just so they d never know I was getting over on them.

After a couple of minutes of vacuuming, I noticed Grandpa Teddy kicking.
His body was jerking hard in the bed, really, throwing his legs out like
he was kicking.  I tried to tell myself I was going nuts, seeing things,
just keep vacuuming, but he wouldn t stop jerking, no matter how hard I
pushed that vacuum into the carpet.  I cut the vacuum off.  That s when
I heard him wheezing and gasping, like I d heard a catfish I caught
once, only Grandpa Teddy was louder.  I never want to hear a sound like
that again.  He wheezed and jerked and gasped and jerked, and then, he
stopped.

Grandpa Teddy was dead.  That was for sure.  The vacuum handle slipped
out of my hand and cracked me across the top of my foot, but I didn t
even jump.  The other Darth Vaders hissed around me while I just stared
and stared at Grandpa Teddy s dead body.  I knew I should do something,
but my legs wouldn t move, so I turned my head towards the door.

No one believes this, but that s when I saw Mr. Moto with no back legs
coming towards me, dragging his butt and leaving a bloody trail on the
carpet I hadn t even vacuumed yet.  I swear to God I did.  He looked mad
that I d let him run up under the lawn tractor.  I d known my daddy
never paid attention to nothing.  I screamed just before my head hit the
carpet.

I don t know how long after that, the lights came on in the ward and
footsteps ran around and people yelled.  My head was picked up off the
floor, and I heard Marge say my name.

"Mr. Moto," I said.  I didn t open my eyes because it felt like Mr. Moto
was on my chest.  I couldn t breathe for nothing.

"What?" Marge said.  "Speak up, Janie."

"Mr. Moto," I said as loud as I could, which probably wasn t very loud.
"Mr. Moto killed Grandpa Teddy."

I didn t hear Marge say nothing.  I did hear Regina, though.  She said
some idiot had unplugged something.  It sounded like something
important, but I didn t hear the last of what she said because I passed
out again.  I swear to God I did.


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