One warm summer evening in 2021, I was sitting in my comfortable office and salivating over the latest issue of Funeral Homes Monthly by lamplight when a loud crash shattered the silence. I looked up from his magazine and narrowed my eyes, my grip on the magazine tightening.
Was that one of my caskets? It sounded like one of my caskets.
And I knew the sound of falling caskets all too well.
Last month, I gave my nephew, Billy, a job at Morton’s Memorial Gardens. Billy was a punk-ass hood whose idea of work was selling pot to his little prick friends at P.S. 199 and I would have rather given the job to someone who wasn’t a fuck-up, but my sister Miranda begged me and I relented. In the thirty-two days since, Billy had made every goddamn mistake he possibly could. Seriously, the kid was all 3 Stooges rolled into one. I couldn’t even be mad at him: He made screwing up into a fucking artform. Have you ever seen an upside down car on the roof of a barn and stroked your chin because the fuck up that got it there was just that impressive?
That was Billy.
One of Billy’s favorite pooches to screw was setting up the caskets in the showroom wrong so that they eventually collapsed and scared the Jesus out of you. The first time it happened, I was sewing the gaping chest cavity of a gunshot victim when CRASH! I jumped, jabbed myself with a needle caked in corpse gunk, and almost shit myself. The second time, I did shit himself. By now, though, I was used to the sound of my product breaking on the hard, unforgiving floor. Oh, I’d think, it was just another 2,500 dollar casket cracking beyond repair. Nothing to worry about at allllll.
None of the caskets had actually been damaged, so I tolerated it, but the last time it happened, I gave Billy hell and made sure it would never happen again.
You break one of my caskets, I said and jabbed the dumb bastard’s chest, and I swear on my mother’s grave, I’ll put you in it. Understand?
Billy thought I was kidding.
I wasn’t.
Sighing, I closed the magazine and sat it aside, a tight frown creasing my features. “Billy, Billy, Billy,” I muttered and got up.
Hot pain flared in my lower back and I grimaced. “Goddamn it.” I slapped my hands on the desk and bent over until it passed. How long had I been sitting here?
I looked up at the clock on the wall.
Just past midnight.
What time did Billy leave? Seven? Eight? Three or four hours at least.
No wonder I felt like shit. I’m fifty-two and staying in one position too long at my age is a goddamn death sentence.
Feeling better, though not by much, I rounded the desk and went into the hall, where darkness ruled.
To the left was the viewing room where bereaved families congregated to console each other while Grandma lay in state like a Thanksgiving turkey, and on the left, past the lobby, was the embalming room, the showroom, and the chapel. Light spilled from the showroom and lay across the floor in a bar.
Just like Billy to leave the light on.
I started toward it, but froze when a noise drifted from the showroom, a noise that had no place in an empty funeral home at midnight, a noise that was both mundane and terrifying at the same time.
A cough.
Someone was in there.
I froze.
Then, all at once, it hit me.
My caskets were in there.
All 50 goddamn thousand dollars worth.
I’m a small businessman in the United States of America. My merchandise is his everything and without it, I’m fucked. Maybe small business owners can fail in China, but not here. If you fail here, you’re shit out of luck.
Flush with courage born of capitalistic terror, I jutted my chin out, clutched my hands into fists (just in case I needed to beat someone to death), and marched right in there like a pissed-off principal who was sick of his students’ shit.
The showroom was brightly-lit and trimmed with oak. Caskets were posed left, right, front, and center, their lids propped invitingly open. His eyes went instantly to the casket on the floor. Metal and cobalt blue, it was one of the more expensive ones and…
JESUS CHRIST, THE LID WAS BROKEN.
The casket lay upside down, the lid bent and hanging on by a single hinge. There was no fixing it. It was gone. Kaput. As dead as tolerance on Twitter.
I stared at it, mouth agape, then something happened
I got mad.
Heat crept up the back of my neck and wrapped around my face, turning my cheeks a deep shade of crimson. My eyes glassed over, and my thin lips pulled back from my perfect teeth. My chest started to rise and fall and I began to shake like a tea kettle on a hot stove. I whipped my head around (WHO BROKE MY CASKET?) and saw them, three men standing over a gleaming oak casket, their backs to me. The two on the ends were big and broad-shouldered, but the one in the middle was short. I could take him.
“This is really nice,” the guy in the middle said in a high, pipsqueak Brooklyn accent, “you can fit twelve guys in here if you cut ‘em real thin.”
His friends laughed.
They broke my casket and they were laughing about it.
Hahahaha, now old man Morton can’t sell that box we broke. LOL. Fuck him!
“What are you doing in here?” I thundered.
Like a three-headed thing from mythology, the men turned as one. All of them wore neatly pressed suits and shoes like mirrors. The one in the middle was youngish, maybe thirty, and his brown hair was combed back from a big five head, not a strand out of place. He rolled his neck like a pugilist taking the ring and walked over. “Hi, how ya doin’?” he asked. “I’m Vinnie. You own this place?”
“Yes, I do,” I said through my teeth. “And I want to know what the hell you’re doing in here. We’re closed.”
Vinnie tilted his head smugly to one side. “You are? That’s not what the sign said. Door was unlocked too.”
Damn it, Billy.
“Well, we are,” I said. “You’ll have to leave. Right after you pay for the casket
you broke.”
Vinnie’s eyes narrowed. “I barely touched that thing. It fell over on its own. Almost broke my foot. You’re lucky I don’t sue you.”
“You still have to pay for it,” I said.
The little Italian rolled his neck again. “You know what? Okay. It was my mistake. I’ll cut you a check, alright? Would that make you happy?”
“Yes,” I said.
Like any capitalist, I accept checks.
“Alright, alright. I’ll make it happen, okay? First, I have somethin’ I wanna talk to you about. Kind of a…a business proposition.”
I started to tell Vinnie to shove his business proposition up his ass, but changed my mind out of curiosity. “What kind of proposition?”
“Caskets,” Vinnie said.
“What about them?” I asked.
Vinnie shrugged. “You got some nice caskets here. And I know people who like nice caskets.” He turned to his friends, and they nodded: They, too, apparently, knew a lot of casket connoisseurs. “You make me your partner and -”
Even as he spoke, it dawned on me what was happening. This guy’s a fucking mobster and he’s shaking me down.
Oh, hell no.
“No, thank you,” I said, cutting Vinnie off mid-spiel. “I don’t need a partner. I do just fine by myself.”
Not missing a beat, Vinnie held up his index finger. “Actually, actually, I think you do.” He gestured to the sad, broken remains of the casket on the floor. “What if someone came in here and decided to do somethin’ like that on purpose? What if someone broke in and stole all that crap you pump in dead people, huh? That embalming fluid shit - you know people smoke that, right? I seen ‘em do it. That junk goes for top dollar on the street. With me around, nothing bad will happen, see? If I’m not here…”
Vinnie spread his hands. Who knows what might happen?
“That’s why we have the police,” I said, putting emphasis on the P word.
“Yeah, you got ‘em now, but what about when they get defunded, huh? The city’s already goin’ crazy, now you got cops quittin’, retirin’, and De Blasio takin’ all their money away. Look, maybe the guys down at city hall don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I do. You’re gonna see madness. And when you got five meter maids protectin’ a whole city, they’re gonna worry about the big stuff. Someone breaks in here and smashes a few caskets, forget about it, they’re not comin’. But with me as your partner…let’s just say I’m well-known and people don’t like to mess with me.”
As Vinnie made his pitch, his goons came up and stood beside him. They tried to look intimidating but looked constipated instead.
I had never dealt with the mob, but I knew all about them from the movies: They were greedy bloodsuckers who’d drain every last red cent from your account, then break your legs for the hell of it.
Fuck that.
“I’m not interested,” I said. I stepped aside and jabbed his finger at the door. “Now leave.”
Vinnie scrunched his lips and looked me up and down. “Boys,” he said, “persuade him.”
Before I knew what was happening, the goons were on top of me. One grabbed my wrist and jerked my arm up between my shoulder blades and the other forced me to my knees. Fire streaked up my arm and I let out a strangled cry. Vinnie stood over me with his hands on his hips, a ghost of a smile on his lips. The sick bastard was enjoying this!
I gritted my teeth against the pain but could do nothing about the tears flooding my eyes.
Bending over, Vinnie grabbed my chin and forced me to look at him. His breath was rank, his touch cold. “You’re either very brave or very stupid. I can’t tell which it is so I’m gonna assume stupid.”
He leaned in until our noses were almost touching. I tried to look away but Vinnie held me in place. “I’m a very powerful and very feared person,” Vinnie said. “You might not know who I am, but -”
“I know exactly who you are,” I said, “prick.”
Then I spat in Vinnie’s face.
Vinnie whipped his head away as if struck. He slowly, deliberately, wiped the spit from his face. “Alright, that’s it,” he said. As I watched in shock, his canine teeth elongated. “Gimme his fuckin’ neck.”
One of the goons forced my head to the side, exposing my throat. I was too stunned to resist. Vinnie’s eyes had changed, yellow and cat-like, and his fangs dripped with saliva.
No.
This couldn’t be.
This…couldn’t…be…
Vinnie moved in for the kill, and all at once, I came alive with a high, womanish
scream. “NOOOOO! GOD, NO, PLEASE! GOD, PLEASE, NO, DON’T BITE ME! NOOOOO! I’LL DO WHATEVER YOU WANT!!!”
I squeezed his eyes closed and steeled myself for the sensation of tearing and rending. When it didn’t come, I creaked one lid open. Vinnie sat on his knees and stared at me. His fangs were still down and, oh, God, they looked sharp.
“You’ll do whatever I say, huh?” Vinnie asked.
The goon still held my head, preventing him from nodding. “Yes,” I swore, “anything you say, please, God, don’t bite me.”
Vinnie considered for a moment, then stood. “Alright. I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you bring me in. Every time you get a shipment of caskets, you save two back for me. I’ll send my guys to get ‘em and that’s that.”
“A-Are you gonna pay for them?”
Vinnie hissed, and I cried out. “Okay! Okay! They’re on the house!”
“That’s what I thought.”
“B-But what are you going to do with them?” I asked. “I didn’t think mobsters used caskets.”
Vinnie nodded. “They don’t. But as you see, I’m a little different and I deal with a different kinda person. A lotta people out there need caskets to sleep in, and because most of them don’t work 9-5, they can’t afford what guys like you charge. Which is a lot for some wood and metal. You’re bigger fuckin’ crooks than we are.”
It took a moment for what Vinnie was saying to sink in. “You’re going to sell them on the black market to other vampires?”
Vinnie’s face darkened. “Don’t worry about what I’m gonna do. Worry about keeping me happy, alright? ‘Cause if I’m not happy, I’m gonna come back here and eat your neck.” He opened his mouth as wide as he could. Then…his jaw dislocated, and it opened wider, a gaping black maw ringed with teeth that put I in mind of a snake.
“Okay! Okay! I will! I will!”
Vinnie closed his mouth again, rolled his head, and massaged his jaw back into place. “Good. That’s what I like to hear.” He patted my cheek and got to his feet. He motioned to his goons, and they let me go. Without them holding me up, I toppled to my side and lay there like a corpse waiting for someone to come along and find it. “I’ll be back in one week,” Vinnie warned. “You better have some caskets for me.”
With that, he and his goons departed.
Every week from then on, Vinnie the Vampire got his caskets…
…and I got to keep my neck.