Just Kill Me (13 page)

She smiles a tiny bit.

I have her at nearly every turn. I'm winning. And she knows it.

“You're still in trouble for lying about being at a movie with Kacey.”

“I'll accept any punishment that doesn't interfere with work.”

“And you'll keep your job at the grocery store for now.”

“But I can take the gig with Mysterious Chicago?”

“We'll call it a trial period,” she says.

I hug Mom so hard she nearly chokes.

In the afternoon I hit the coffee shop to post the story I'd planned to post earlier, then hit the vintage stores on Harrison Street, looking for something “goth casual” that doesn't look like a corny costume, but makes me look the part of a modern-day murdermonger.

Two days later I help Mom set up for Mrs. Gunderson's funeral, decorating the entryway downstairs with some pictures of her that the home sent over. Most of them are group shots from when she was younger: smiling family and friends on the beach, groups of women in their USO outfits from the war, and one beautiful shot of her and a man—her husband, probably—walking down State Street decades ago.

Everyone else in the pictures with her is probably dead now. None of her friends or family are coming to the funeral. People from the home are all she had left.

After the short service, I get into Cyn's truck and ride with her and Rick out to Mount Carmel Cemetery for the graveside
service, talking about life, the afterlife, and all of that. None of us are huge believers in Heaven or anything.

“I didn't notice not being alive before I was born,” Cyn says. “Probably won't notice it after I kick it, either.”

“I hope there's no afterlife,” I say.

“Really?” asks Rick.

“Think of the longest time you can think of. If you thought of a number so big it took your whole life just to think of it, that number still wouldn't even be a drop in the ocean of eternity. We can't even conceive of infinity. Mrs. Gunderson was bored with life after ninety years. Who's not gonna be bored sitting through eternity?”

“I hear ya,” says Cyn. “Ain't nobody got time for that shit.”

“I just hope you still get to dream, if you go someplace,” says Rick. “It wouldn't be Heaven if you can't wake up thinking you're about to be baked into a pie by a walrus now and then.”

“When I was a kid I used to be afraid I could still think, but not leave my grave,” I say. “So I'd have nothing to do forever but stare at the inside of my casket and let my brain run crazy while I wait for people to visit me.”

“You think you'd notice people visiting?” asks Cyn.

“Maybe. I'd notice more if they robbed my grave.”

“Just give yourself to a medical school and cut the middleman,” says Cyn.

“That's what my mom wants. Me too, probably. As long as
someone builds, like, a giant golden statue of me someplace. Or a pyramid. Whatever. I'm not gonna tell my worshippers how to do their job.”

“I don't want a tombstone at all,” says Rick. “When I croak, I want someone to prop my body up on the backseat of a cross-country bus. You, Megan, if you're the one in a position to do it. Good to get someone younger in on this.”

“Uh . . . okay.”

“He goes on about this all the time,” says Cyn. “Since he was twelve. He's obsessed.”

“I am not,” says Rick. “I just . . . I want to see how far I get before the driver figures out that the smelly guy in the back is a corpse. I'll bet I make it clear to the coast.”

“Noted,” I say.

“He wants to be an urban myth,” Cyn teases. “He wants people fifty years after he died to be telling the story of Ricardo Torre, the famous comedian, being buried in a shallow grave by the bus company.”

“Hey, there are stars, and there are legends,” says Rick. “I'm gonna be a legend.”

Cyn shakes her head and says, “Doinkus,” in the most affectionate possible way.

And we drive through the gates of the cemetery to bury Mrs. Gunderson.

In my research I found a neat quote about Mount Carmel Cemetery: when one of the Genna Brothers gang was buried
there, some guy at the service pointed out the graves of a bunch of his rivals and said, “When Judgement Day comes and them tombs open up, there's gonna be hell to pay in this cemetery.” And that was
before
Al Capone was buried there. Lots of local Catholic big shots, too—cardinals and whatnot. Probably not a good one for me. My dad's a Catholic, so I could probably get in if I wanted to, but even without believing in the afterlife, I still sometimes imagine spending eternity in whatever cemetery they put me in, hanging out with all the other dead people there. Watching the gangsters argue with the cardinals would be okay and all, but Graceland would be better.

Mount Carmel is a neat old cemetery, though. Besides all the old-time gangsters, there's a statue of a woman in a bridal gown, and a photograph of her wearing it in her coffin. The stone says it was taken six years after she died, and she was in good shape. And there's a statue of a family that rotates when you push it.

And now Mrs. Gunderson will be here too.

She's being buried next to her husband; her name and birth year have been carved into the stone for years, so they just had to add the death year. She was one of those people who wanders the earth with a tombstone already in place. If she remarried she might have ended up with two of them; the old one, still with its blank space, and a new one beside the other husband. That seems like the sort of thing that would inspire a ghost story.

We watch as her casket is lowered into the ground, beside her husband, and then she's gone forever.

Unless some little bit of her is still hovering around in Lincoln Park, near the Couch tomb.

For the tour the next night, I do some eyeliner tricks to look a bit older, and I wear a long, breezy black dress that I picked up. It'll be easier to look the way I really like to when it cools down and I can wear my long black jacket; I never like how I look without it. This outfit is an improvement over my grocery store uniform, at least.

On Clark Street a party trolley full of drunks catcalls as they pass me. The bum standing beside me says, “Ah, don't mind them. Dumb bunch of white assholes.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“You got a dollar for the Jack Daniels Foundation?”

I give him two.

Rick and Cyn are waiting for me at the bus.

“Our tour's a weird one tonight,” says Rick. “Just one private party from downstate. A family or something. Rented out the whole bus. We'll sort of cater the tour to whatever they're into.”

“You want me to tell any stories?”

“Feel free to jump in at any time.”

We drive to the Greyhound station to pick the family up, and find out right away that what they're into is goofing off.
They're a bunch of hicks, really. Lubbers (a word first recorded in 1362). Hob-clunches (1578). Jobbernowls (1592). The kind of people who wear camouflage even though they aren't anywhere near a forest, and who say the word “shit” in front of their seven-year-old kids (whereas my mom waited until I was eleven, because she's a
lady
).

They seem a bit restless when Rick tries to tell a historical story, but they love messing with passersby. Rick cuts the stories way down and focuses on the jokes, and they love him for it.

These people are sort of idiots, but I guess they're fun idiots, at least. As long as I drop all sense of propriety and decency, I can have a good time with them. When we get stuck in traffic next to a Mexican restaurant and they start making burrito/bathroom jokes, Rick tells them about various diners (he is an expert on local grubby diners), and which ones make you need a bathroom the soonest, which ones you should only order a pizza puff from (a pizza puff is like those frozen pizza rolls, only instead of eight of them you get one big one—they come frozen so they're the same everywhere), and which ones have salsa so hot you'll be asking for toilet paper from the freezer, and all of that. They laugh so hard they almost choke.

I get into the spirit too. I pull up the
OED
on my phone and fill time at a long traffic light by looking up words for “bathroom” and “toilet.” My favorite is still “gingerbread-office,” but there are a ton of good ones, like “gong” (first recorded circa
1000), “crapping case” (1800s), and “shit-pot,” which actually meant both “a chamber pot” and “a despicable person” in the 1840s. The example the
OED
gives is from the
New York Daily Globe
, 1849: “He called me a dirty shit-pot, and I will have the honor of being the first shit-pot to give him a cow-hiding.”

That just slays them. Reading from the list of words gave me a good chance to practice my timing, waiting for a laugh to die down just enough before saying the next one, the way Rick times his jokes in his stand-up routines.

Outside of Hull House, when they're taking pictures in the courtyard, one of them says, “Hey! I got one of those orb things!”

Rick normally ignores it when people get all excited about orbs, but this time he says, “Zoom in on it. Sometimes there's a face in the middle of them.”

The guy looks at his picture and zooms in, then nods. “Think I got one here.”

“Awesome,” says Rick. “Now, most of the time orbs, even the ones with faces, turn out to be something other than a dead person, but the face ones are cool. At one place, we used to get the same face over and over again. It looked like the dude on the Quaker Oats box.”

“Sweet,” says the guy. “This one look like anyone you recognize?”

Rick looks, then shrugs. “We know a bunch of people died in this house. Melicent Hull in 1860. Her son in '66.
A bunch of people in the 1870s when this was an old folks' home. But we don't have pictures of any of them.”

“Bet this is one of them,” says the guy.

“No way to prove it, but it's interesting to imagine,” says Rick. “There's no such thing as good ghost evidence, but there's cool ghost evidence.”

As we all walk back to the bus, I slide in beside Ricardo and say, “Seriously? The guy on the Quaker Oats box?”

He shrugs. “It's a private group. If they want orbs, I'm just gonna let 'em have fun with it. That's all. No one signs up to get a lecture about what an idiot they are.”

Fair enough. He isn't telling them it was really a spirit. He was just telling them it's a cool picture. That it's
interesting to imagine
.

Toward the end of the night, as we're all wandering back to the bus from the Couch tomb, the same customer comes over to me. “I think I got another one here,” he says.

He shows me his orb picture, and I watch as he zooms in.

There's a face in the little ball of light, all right.

And maybe it's mostly my imagination, but it looks exactly like Mrs. Gunderson.

Smiling.

“The earth keeps some vibration going

There in your heart, and that is you.”

—EDGAR LEE MASTERS, “FIDDLER JONES”

O
ver the rest of June, I run more tours and get more comfortable with the route, the stops, and the moves of the city.

I spend nearly every night staying up late, texting with Zoey while I trace ghost stories and murder stories through the
Tribune
online archives, looking for more stories I can tell on the tours.

The city becomes my office. My own.

After just a few tours I pretty much know what I should be saying at every turn, no matter what the traffic is like. I know how to recraft the Resurrection Mary story based on how many lights ahead of us are red when I start and how many are green. I know where the laugh lines and gasp lines are. I learn to sense which crowds I can say the words “ass” and “shit” in front of, and which ones I should change it to “butt” and “crap” for (even though, as Rick points out, “ass” and “shit” are always, always funnier).