Brandon Cook Writer

A short story I wrote a few months ago. Not finalized but I’m hoping the ideas are here!

Miles Rich, his name was, and he was twenty-one and he’d come from nothing, he said, didn’t own anything but a six-string guitar, the change in his pocket, and the clothes on his back, and because he had nothing, he owed nothing; life had screwed him, but he was working his way up and he’d get it all, he said, everything that was owed to him, and so much more.

“But I mean, you didn’t call me up to hear all that,” he said.

            Au contraire, I assured him. Hadn’t I asked for the full package? We were, I assured Miles Rich as I bought him another whisky sour (three), establishing a rapport. And conversation had been in short supply. The bickering of Mrs. Grundley and the snide remarks of Felix Lorne aside, I hadn’t had any real talk in a very, very long time.

            “So, this must be kind of special night, yeah?” he asked.

Miles Rich flashed at me his fulgent, brown sugary eyes. His skin was coffee-colored and sleek as a baby seal, and he was built like a Mesopotamian god—tall and lean and unconsciously commanding devotion. No sooner did he mention a drink then I bought it for him.

            “Oh, yes. I am celebrating my retirement, you see.”

            “You found the right guy for a party I can tell you.”

“Oh, yes, I believe I have.” Clink went our tumblers. Let the night begin.

            Five, no, six years ago was the last time I was at a bar, and then not by volition, but with Mrs. Grundley. I couldn’t recall which surgery we were celebrating. We’d performed these little rituals multiple times over the course of our relationship. Mrs. Grundley, she of the famous short temper, the well-chosen barb, the bottomless pockets, would quip: “These bastards ought to know by now every time they tell me I’m gonna die it just sends me back into the dive.”

She drank Pimm’s Cups and Beefeater gin neat. At the time of our first drink, I’d been her home nurse for a little less than three months. It was a different season. My patient was neither wheelchair-bound, nor did she require the nightly medicinal cocktail. For my part, I maintained the vestiges of a private life, returning home four nights a week to a toy shiatzu named Trollope (Mrs. Grundley being transferred to the care of a Latina nurse named Maria), to meals in microwaves and late-night shows featuring celebrities of unwatchable films. My friends were none. My hobbies, like my vices, few and of little interest. I tended an azalea garden and stocked a birdfeeder from which, on occasion, I blew the brains out of trespassing squirrels. I was a confirmed bachelor.

Had not Trollope been run over by a Chevy truck going thirty over the speed limit, things might have continued this way indefinitely. The driver, I did not learn his name, was slapped with $200 fine. I buried Trollope under the azaleas. No sooner than I had placed his still warm body in the ground, my landlord doubled the rent, citing a raise in property taxes. The reasoning was doubtful. My landlord, a fattish Mexican named Raymon, had been seeking for a way to remove me owing to the dead squirrels in the yard. In fact, it would not have surprised me to learn that the was the driver of the homicidal Chevy. When the lease expired, I sold my TV and microwave and moved to the nearest Best Western. With Trollope gone, my needs were spartan.

Life, alas, does not leave us alone. Three weeks later, Maria was stripped of her nursing license—the rumor being due to questionable relations with a patient, a not-uncommon occurrence—and I became the assistant steward of Amazing Grace Manor.

The precise details of Mrs. Grundley’s fabulous wealth had always eluded me. Roughly one half was the wealthy inheritance from her property-developing family. The other came from a divorce settlement, the ex-husband having had some role in the creation of some small yet essential electronic components that went into cruise missiles. I might have looked the matter up, but I did not care to know. Grundley, whoever he was, had been a man of appalling tastes. You could see it in the house—an old-world monstrosity, like the lovechild of William Randolph Hearst and a Russian oligarch. In the garage of Bentleys and Mercedes, one could make out the name GRUNDLEY painted in appallingly huge acrylics across each of the passenger doors. The same poor taste could also be seen in the choice of Mrs. Grundley for a wife, who might have been a belle in her day but had been driven, alas, into premature aging by Bordeaux and Dunhill cigarettes, coping mechanisms for Grundley’s no doubt numerous affairs: I imagined buxom, platinum-headed tarts and androgynous Asian catamites, but these, of course, were mere speculations.

Whatever the details, it had landed Mrs. Grundley a rich settlement. The furniture was Louis Quinze in teak that glowed like fruit salad. The bathrooms were marbled chess-sets. The bedroom housed a four-poster affair in Grand Dame velvet. Making the thing was a half-hour affair, with its layers of silken sheets, brocaded blankets, and millions of pillows.

Of the mansion’s three stories, Mrs. Grundley’s occupied only a quarter of the first. In the backyard was a yard large as a polo pitch, next to which abutted an artificial lake filled with trout, bass, and catfish. Maples lining the walking path scattered their leaves onto its dewy surface. An eighteen-hole course lay beyond, which occasionally cast golf balls onto the lawn: the only vestige of human contact. We might have been on Mars.

The work was middling. I administered medications, helped the old woman dress and bathe, took her walking, prepared meals, and kept the manor tidy. Given the nature of her disease, there was always the threat of sudden-onset cardiac arrest, hence the need for a live-in nurse. Most afternoons were peaceful. A rough routine saw Mrs. Grundley asleep for her afternoon nap from twelve to two, and then again from four to five-thirty.

Evenings were a toss-up. Most nights she woke herself up between three and four in the morning and did not fall back asleep until the early hours. I suspected the bad sleep was one of the causes of her frequent negative spirals.

“I’d have thought you fags had better things to do with your time than wipe an old woman’s asshole,” she said to me after I’d assisted her in the toilet.

More recently, just before the arrival of Felix Lorne, Mrs. Grundley’s spirit had given way to lapsed into long, studied meditations on (I supposed) the theme of her impending death. I did not interfere. At the end of these long silences, she’d become wistful, melancholy, apologetic, even afraid.

 “I am so alone,” was a constant refrain.

Also: I am hated by everyone.

Also: the family hates me.

Also: those back-stabbing, sycophantic, brain-dead, cow-buggering sons of whores.

And then, most rare of all: “you are the only one who has any affection for me at all.”

“Of course I do, Mrs. Grundley.”

“It’s the goddam money. The goddam, goddam money. Long as they’ve got a piece of the pie they don’t care if I’m living or dead.” Imagine here, reader, a crafty glint of the eye and a stroke of the villainous mustache as Mrs. Grundley entertained her most satisfying theme of all: “But this old bag of bones is capable of surprises yet. You listening to me?”

“Of course, Mrs. Grundley.”

“What’d I just say?”

“That you are still capable of surprises.”

“And don’t you goddam forget it.”

            Clink went out tumblers. Miles, rosily tipsy, was waxing romantic: “I just have this dream of getting into a car and driving and driving and driving and keeping the sun in front of me as long as you can, you know? And maybe there’s nothing around you forever: like the cornfields in Nebraska or some shit like that, yeah? And then you pull into a drive in and get a slice of pie and just keep going, like that, forever and forever.”

            “I understand precisely what you mean.” I sipped my Pimm’s Cup and let my eyes find the pale white flesh in the V-cut of Miles Rich’s cotton shirt, beneath which I imagined taut muscles, shiny and toned as the flesh off a roast duck. Grab slap plunge throttle fuck. Words, I hungered for. Words I imagined, since excised from the vocabulary of myself and Mrs. Grundley, who was made of wattles and swayed like bamboo, on her feet, in her mind.

“You are the only one who has any affection for me at all,” she’d said.

“Of course, Mrs. Grundley.”

Affection it certainly was not. Hunger for those uncounted millions, the life of royalty within the warm rosewood bosom of Amazing Grace. A hunger matched with equal hunger, for when I peeled the socks away from that white, liver-spotted, bed-sore ridden flesh, my touch ever gentle, and my fingers grazed that skin, her whole body turned to jelly. Her face, eyes tilted the ceiling in the pose of a martyr at the stake, give a little tremble, and her eyelids flickered, and her small, wet mouth opened with slightest gasp. With the second stocking I was more deliberate. I let my hand slide along the cool, shaven-baboon-asshole-smooth lip of her lower thigh and cupped a rounded buttock. No passionate sighs or lovers’ pants. We knew each other too well. For after it was over and I’d attended to Mrs. Grundley’s evening toilet, she motioned for her checkbook and signed for me ten thousand dollars. “Get yourself something good to smell,” she said.

Deferential, I folded the check, the first of my, into my shirt pocket, and while the old lady slept, I drove the Grundley Mercedes to Dillard’s and purchased a pair of buttery-leather penny loafers, and a sport coat, and had my graying hair styled at the local barber’s and dabbed my neck with eau de cologne.

Oh, we were happy in our trysts, in the satisfaction of bodily hungers, Mrs. Grundley grumbling and grinding heat back into those dry wrinkled joins, slowing off the years of neglect and need.

Happy before Lorne showed up.

Self-assured, his things in an Arc’teryx hiking backpack, blonde hair in a bun, glasses thick and black as the window bars. He couldn’t have been thirty. He said: “I’m from Center,” as though I was supposed to know what that was.

Gradually, the situation was made clear. Concerned about Mrs. Grundley’s worsening condition and concerned, apparently, for my well-being, The Family had taken on Felix Lorne to work Friday and weekends. His credentials called him, “very good.” In referrals he was, “full of promise.” He had treated children for malaria in third world countries. He had worked poverty-stricken households in Appalachia for a charitable NGO. He declaimed against the eating of meat and fish. Care for the world’s mistreated, he said, was not a profession, but a vocation.

What could one do against such charity? Complaints that there was no need of Lorne and his ways—his emptying of bedpans and administering of medicine I’d performed for years—all would fall on deaf ears. One did not argue with The Family.

Weekends, I returned to my Best Western, my long nights perched above the community swimming pool, watching the shrieking, brown Mexican children attempt to drown one another.

Had my professionalism been called into question? Had I not been timely, dutiful, even loving in the execution of my duties? There were caring arms in which Mrs. Grundley had passed the terrors of night, and they were not those of Felix Lorne.

A tenuous peace held the first months, but it did not take long for Lorne to insinuate himself deeper into manor life, working late and arriving early. “I’m just tidying things,” he’d answer when I found him still at the manor Monday mornings, and on Thursday afternoons when he arrived early, he was just “setting up.” I knew lies when I heard them. I heard the condescension when he offered to clean the old lady. I felt the eyes of inspection. Lorne’s. The Family’s.

I refused the help, remained deferential, ignored his subtle glances. And when he made little biting remarks: “careful you don’t spill that now” while I was handling the bedpan, or “careful with that needle,” and “just the one dose,” when I was administering the medications, I smiled and thanked him, though I wanted to march over and stick the needle into the eyes and poke, poke, poke them out like little martini olives.

Never had I made a mistake in my work. Lorne, for his claims that “Mrs. Grundley needs the help,” and “The Family would feel safer with the two of us,” spoke rot. Not one misplaced pill. Not a single dereliction of duty. It was me who was needed. Mrs. Grundley couldn’t move twenty feet without me.

Yet a change came over my patient. The Family featured less in her remarks. There were fewer imprecations. Less of the old fighting spirit. She spoke in murmurs and whispers, in doubts and second-guesses. “Should I say’s” and “if only I hadn’t’s.” When I wheeled her about the greensward, she was pensive and dumb, chewing her lower lip. We no longer shared the bed.

Lorne had now but to stick his face through the door and her tone would change entirely. The wrinkled old thing would sit straight in its chair, make inane comments about the weather. Inquire about Lorne’s sister. Pull up the greasy, red folds of her lips in what passed for a smile as Lorne took her cold, dry hand in his and gave it a wet squeeze.

It took months for me to realize what I should have spotted it immediately. It was there in all the passing of smiles, the squeezing of hands, in the crisp, white crease of a new check poking out of Lorne’s coat pocket. Grundley and Lorne.

The small, crumpled, crazed, bitter, rich hag had found herself a new lover.

“So, you got a place close by?”

            “Oh, yes,” I said. “The time has well-nigh escaped me. We’re only up the road a little ways. Not far at all.” I plonked the keys on the table louder than I intended. Tipsy.

            Miles gaped at the keys. “You tellin’ me this is your car?”

            “Just a weekend drive, mind you.” There were lights of greed in his eyes. I smiled. “You wouldn’t care to take us home now, would you? I’m afraid I’ve gone a little light-headed.”

            Miles Rich inserted a hand down the back of his shirt and gave his tawny neck a slow twist and a delicious crack. “I dunno, man. There something funny about all this, you know?”

“About what?” I feigned perfect ignorance.

“Calling up a guy like me just to drink and listen to me talk.”

“That’s not all we’re going to do, my dear Miles.”

“Just what the hell’s a guy like you doing driving around in a Rolls?”

            “A perk from the office. It bears our logo. We like to flash our money around, turn some necks.” I smiled, good-humored. “You can see it in the parking lot, just over there?”

“That when there with the name Grundley on it? That you?”

            A moment’s hesitation. One could see the turning of mental gears, the biting of a lip, the flexing of fingers. Of course, a sports car was too much for a poor Miles to refuse, and in five minutes, we were purring along nicely through the crisp, foggy air. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, etcetera. I feigned dropping loose change to lay a hand on Mile’s leg. Ten minutes up the road, a right into the gated community, past the golf courses, and there we were. “Bienvenue,” I smiled. “Welcome to the domicile chez Grundley.”

            “You actually live in this place?”

             “Tis Grace will lead me home,” I smiled.

“Huh?”

“Yes, it’s just my humble abode. Leave the car in the front. You must see the home coming up through the main entrance, as it was intended. Do you mind if I take your arm? I am becoming rather dizzy…”

            Up the garden path we pranced, amazement sparkling in Miles’s eyes as we entered the gilded foyer and her crystalline chandelier, and the back wall of window opening onto the luscious green and placid lake.

            “Goddam fancy as shit, man.”

“It is a work of grandeur,” I conceded, stifling at my beau’s choice of diction. “Have you ever been in a place like this?”

“You shitting me? Dad was a cop. Couldn’t afford KFC.’

“I am sorry to hear that.” I took his arm but he shrugged away to inspect the miniature Rodin in the corner.

“Got anything else to drink around here?”

“Would another whiskey sour be to your liking?”

Miles moved from Rodin to me. His eyes were fire. His face a god’s. “You do that,” he said, his voice all ice and butter. “And then we’ll have a little party of our own.”

I could barely squeak out my answer, and then I rushed to the kitchen bar. The dishes I’d used early to make Mrs. Grundley’s porridge were still there. I washed them quickly and then set to work on the drink. A generous pour of Crown Royal, dab of lemon juice and Gomme syrup, heavy dollop of egg white and garnish with the lemon peel fetched from the refrigerator. It was when I was closing the door that I chanced to look out the window.

A perfectly white and wrinkled face stared right back.

Down dropped the tumbler in an explosion of Swarovski crystal. I might have screamed. Perhaps I yelled for Miles as well, though he might have come in when he heard the shatter of the glass. The only thing I was sure of was that the face I saw outside the window, one foot dragging behind and head bent in the drugged-out-old-lady shuffle, vomit and bloodstained nightgown shifting in the breeze, as she stumbled and collapsed at the water margin, could only be Mrs. Grundley.

She’d been sleeping while I prepared the meal in the kitchen, humming along to a Rossini overture playing from a favorite classical station. That was when Lorne stepped into the room. You could always tell when he was in the room from the eek of his body spray, the dry, cold slap of Rainbow flip-flops on the tiled floors.

“I know what you’ve been doing.”

This I ignored. There was boiling water to pour into the colander. A Seisuke knife to be fetched to slice the brie.

“She told me everything. About how you seduced her for her money. Every disgusting detail.”

“If you don’t mind, I am rather busy at the moment.”

“I’ve told the family everything. You’ll never work again in your life. And if you think you’re protected, Mrs. Grundley agrees with me. You hear that?”

Lorne grabbed my arm. What happened next—instinct, reflex, self-defense, call it what you will, but something took over. I twisted, breaking the hold, while the Seisuke hand described a calm, clean forward motion, entering the soft Vegan body like a toe in a warm bath.

             “I understand you are frustrated, but if you see things from my point of view, I believe you would understand.”

            Lorne stood frozen, the knife protruding like a key in a lock, and then succumbed gradually, a curious, dumb expression stamped on his face.

“I would like us to get off to a fresh start, Mr. Lorne. If that is possible. Would that satisfy you?”

Little gurgled whispers came from his mouth. Then his knees buckled and the rest of him followed suit, bowing to the floor like a penitent at prayer.

            A job like this traditionally involves a good amount of foresight and careful planning, advantages which I would have to do without. Years of handling Mrs. Grundley’s body had given me an upper body strength that served well as I packed him into the garden wheelbarrow and drove him onto the greensward. The night was still and crisp, the stars merry and bright. You could make out Venus on the lake surface. The waters themselves were still and didn’t make so much as a ripple when I gave them Lorne. All that fasting made for a small splash.

            I’ll need a drink after this, I thought to myself. And something stronger.

            But there was still the matter of Mrs. Grundley’s meal and medication.

Never had I been derelict in my duties.

The Scream. The Discovery. The Accusation. Only something with a lurid title would do to describe the scene of Mrs. Grundley in all her ghastly glory, gasping like a beached fish. And Miles— blessed, poor, sweet, naive, stupid Miles— screaming “who the hell” this and “what the fuck that” until I grabbed his thrashing arms and sat him down on the grass.

I told him everything, right then and there. That Mrs. Grundley of Amazing Grace had died peacefully in her sleep that very night after a long struggle with a debilitating illness. That the aforesaid Grundley had left a generous stipend to her long-faithful caretaker, including cars, the manor, the Rodin. That what he was seeing was only a phantom, as easily whisked from reality as waking from a bad dream.

 “Look at me,” I whispered.

            Miles was firmly en squat, his hands behind his neck.  

            “It’s all true, my dear Miles. What must you think of me? You don’t truly believe I’d hurt a hair on her head, do you? The woman I’ve taken care of for seven years?”

Miles unclasped the hands behind his neck.

“Remember the sun in the cornfields of Nebraska,” I said.

Miles rose.

“We can drive and drive and drive and never look back,” I said.

Miles took a long, husky breath.

“Forever and ever,” I said.

“You wouldn’t hurt an old lady.”

            “Never in my wildest fantasies,” I said.

            “Everything you said is true.”

            “Gospel,” I said.

            “The house is yours.”

            “The house, the cars, the furniture. All mine.” Our fingers laced, warm and tight. The night was calm and beautiful, and the waters still. No doubt the perch and bass were already at their work, metamorphosing Lorne into pearly coral. Those were pearls that were his eyes, etcetera.

Mrs. Grundley gave a little groan and placed her head back in the grass.

“Ours,” I said.

Slowly, Miles lifted Mrs. Grundley from the grass. Slowly he bore her from the shoreline, up the greensward, and together, one little happy family, we withdrew into the manor.