all over the palms and the fingers and the backs of the
hands, open as if in supplication. He is wearing a white shirt and gray flannel trousers. His tongue is protruding
from his mouth. It appears almost black.
She steps up close to his body hanging there.
She looks up into his face.
'Dad?' she says, disbelievingly, expecting him to
stick his tongue out farther, perhaps make a razzing sound, break into a grin, she doesn't know what, something, anything that will tell her he's playing a game, the way he used to play games with her when she was a little girl, before he got old . . . and boring. . . and dead. Dead, yes. He does not move. He is dead. He is really and truly dead and he will never grin at her again. She stares into his wide-open eyes, as green as her own, but flecked with pinpricks of blood, her own eyes squinched almost shut, her face contorted not in pain, she feels no pain, she doesn't even feel any sense of loss or abandonment, she has not known this man for too long a time now. She feels only horror and shock, and anger, yes, inexplicable anger, sudden and fierce, why did he do this, why didn't he call somebody, what the fuck is the matter with him?
'I never use such language,' she tells the five men
listening to her, and the room goes silent again.
The police, she thinks. I have to call the police. A
man has hanged himself, my father has hanged himself,
I have to notify the police. She looks around the room.
The phone. Where's the phone? He should have a phone
by the bed, he has a heart problem, a phone should always
be within—
She spots the phone, not alongside the bed but across
the room on the dresser, would it have cost him a fortune to install another jack? Her mind is whirling
with things she will have to do now, unexpected tasks to perform. She will have to call her husband first, 'Bob, honey, my father's dead,' they will have to make funeral arrangements, buy a casket, notify all his friends, who the hell are his friends? Her mother, too, she'll have to call her, divorced five years, she'll say, 'Good, I'm glad!' But first the police, she is sure the police have to be notified in a suicide, she has read someplace or seen someplace that you have to call the police when you find your father hanging from a hook with his tongue sticking out. She is suddenly laughing hysterically. She covers her mouth with her hand, and looks over it like a child, and listens wide-eyed, fearful that someone will come in and find her with a dead man.
She waits several moments, her heart beating wildly in her chest, and then she walks to the telephone and is about
to dial when something occurs to her. Something just
pops into her mind unbidden. She remembers the key to the safe deposit box in the little black leather purse, and
she remembers her father telling her that among other things like his silver high school track medal there is an insurance policy in that box. It isn't much, her father told her, but you and Bob are the beneficiaries, so don't forget it's there. She also remembers hearing somewhere, or reading somewhere, or seeing somewhere on television or in the movies—there is so much information out there today—but anyway learning somewhere that if somebody kills himself the insurance company won't pay on his life insurance policy.
She doesn't know if this is true or not, but suppose it is? Neither does she know how much he's insured himself for, it probably isn't a great deal, he never did have any real money to speak of. But say the policy's for a hundred thousand dollars, or even fifty or twenty or ten, who cares? Should the insurance company get to keep all those premiums he's paid over the years simply
because something was troubling him so much—what the hell was troubling you, Dad?—that he had to hang
himself? She does not think that is fair. She definitely
does not think that is fair.
On the other hand . . .
Suppose . . .
Just suppose . . .
Just suppose he died in his sleep of a heart attack or something? Just suppose whoever it is who has to write a death certificate finds him dead in bed of natural causes? Then there'd be no problem with the insurance company, and she and Bob would be able to collect on however much the policy is for. She thinks about this for a moment. She is amazingly calm. She has grown used to the silence of the apartment, her father hanging there still and lifeless. She looks at her watch. It is a quarter to ten. Has she been in the apartment for only ten minutes or so? Has it been that short a time? It seems an eternity.
She is thinking she will have to take him down and
carry him to the bed.
She moves up close to the body again. Looks into his dead green eyes, studies the pores on his face, the
pinprick points of blood, the ugly protruding tongue, summoning the courage she needs to touch him, thinking if she can stand this close to death without vomiting or soiling herself, then surely she will be able to touch him, move him.
The fabric around his neck looks like the belt from a
robe. She sees that her father knotted the ends so that it
formed a loop and then slipped the loop over his head and
around his neck. He must have used a stool or something
to climb onto when he put the loop over the hook, and then
he must have kicked the stool away in order to suspend
himself. But where's the stool? Or did he use something
else? She can't worry about that just now. However he did it, he did it, and unless she can take him down and
carry him to the bed, she and her husband will lose out
on the insurance, it's as simple as that.
She does not in these next few moments even once
consider the fact that she is doing something that will
later enable her to commit insurance fraud, she does not for an instant believe she is breaking the law. She is merely correcting an oversight, her father's stupidity in not realizing that committing suicide might negate the terms of the insurance policy, if what she heard is true. She's sure it must be true, otherwise how could she have heard about it?
Well, she thinks, let's do it.
The first touch of him—his face against hers as she
hunches one shoulder under his arm and with her free
hand hoists the belt off the hook—is cold and repulsive.
She feels her flesh puckering, and almost drops him in that instant, but clings tight in a macabre dance, half-dragging,
half-carrying him to the bed where she plunks him down
at once, his back and buttocks on the bed, his legs and feet
trailing. She backs away in revulsion. She is breathing
hard. He was heavier than she expected he would be.
The belt is still looped around his neck like a wide blue necklace that matches his grotesque blue hands and feet. She puts one hand behind his head, feels again the clammy coldness of his flesh, lifts the head, and pulls the belt free. She unfastens the knot, and then carries the belt to the easy chair across the room, over which the
