Long Term Parking - Part 8
She had been in college for nearly a month when his mother had called. She had been in a hot shower and the small apartment was full of steam and it smelled of scented soap and shampoo, and as she raced to phone she was eager to hear his voice. They hadn’t spoken in seventeen days. He had been busy. But it was his mother’s voice she heard, and she could tell immediately that something was wrong.
He had taken his .22 caliber rifle, his rabbit gun, and stood in the living room of his parent’s house, where he had still lived. He was next to the jagged, hand-carved stone fireplace, when he placed the barrel of the small rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger and a bullet ripped into his brain. He did not say why, now could not say why, and had not left a note.
She went with his mother to the Holdstedt Funeral Home to see his body. He was in the back room of stainless steel brightness and glass and gauze, and it smelled the same as she remembered, of rubbing alcohol and something else, something sweeter with more depth, she would later learn from Mr. Holdstedt to have been formaldehyde.
Her boyfriend was naked and dead on the metal autopsy table. He looked as if he had been beaten severely by something heavy and jagged, which had smashed his nose and shattered his teeth, and gouged deep gashes in his scalp and face, arms and body, peppering his body with monstrous wounds. He had been cleaned but no attempts at repair had been made, and none would be made. His parents were ashamed, his father could not even utter the boy’s name, and his would be a closed casket and a small funeral, at a cemetery several miles outside of town, in the midst of fields and flanked by a tall grain silo with a red and white checkerboard pattern on its top third, lonely and abandoned.
