American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,5

fierce. Already she can see him formulating any number of lines he hopes might magically translate this sordid little afternoon into a quick fuck in whichever motel is closest.

She asks him what his next job is. He is surprised, and thinks and says, “Well, they got a parking lot they need leveled off in Bayton.”

Christ, she thinks. Gravedigging at two, parking lot at three. What an interesting little county her father chose to die in.

“You got anyone else coming?” he ventures.

“Doubt it.”

“Well. You want to go ahead and get on with the show?”

“There isn’t a minister coming or anything?”

“I believe you have to schedule him.”

“So it isn’t an automatic civil service or whatever?” she asks, and laughs morosely. “I thought this was God’s country.”

“Not for free, it isn’t,” says the gravedigger.

Where they are is Montana City, Texas, which is a joke of a name: it can only be called a city in that it has two traffic lights. One is broken, but they don’t count that against it. Mona had the option of transferring her father up to Big Spring, which is bigger in the sense that a gnat is bigger than a flea, but she doesn’t see why she should foot a dime more than she has to to plant her father, Earl Bright III, deep in this godforsaken soil. After all, he was a horrific skinflint, and it feels appropriate to stick him in a stretch of earth just as begrudging and hostile as he was in life.

The gravedigger climbs into his backhoe. “You want to say something?”

She thinks about it, and shakes her head. “It’s all been said.”

He shrugs, revs the engine, and starts it forward. Mona watches impassively behind her silvered sunglasses as the crumbly clay earth tumbles down to embrace the pine coffin below.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, yadda yadda yadda.

Earl, of course, had not been foresighted enough to write a will, so all of his belongings enter the complicated and cryptic world of probate. Or at least it would be complicated anywhere else, but here the judge plans to go elk hunting in a week, so they cut down the time before the heirship proceeding accordingly, because honestly, who cares.

On the appointed hour, Mona dutifully appears at the local probate court, a low-ceilinged place filled with the reek of burned coffee. It looks as if it moonlights as a VFW hall. There’s a moment of confusion when the officials see Mona, for though Earl was as white as snow, Mona’s looks are all her mother’s, so she is quite Mexican. But Mona was prepared for this—she has to be, in Texas—and the appropriate forms and badges of identification mostly quell the questions. Then they get down to business.

Of a sort. The judge is present, but he’s got his feet up on the table and is utterly absorbed in his newspaper. Mona doesn’t mind. The easier this is, the better, because she’s looking for something specific, a treasure Earl would have never parted with even in his most extreme old age: his 1969 cherry-red Dodge Charger, the pride and joy he spent most of his life on, and which Mona was forbidden from ever driving. As a teenager she often dreamed of sitting in its leather seats and feeling the motor burst to life with the push of the pedal, the vibrations of the pistons dancing up the steering shaft and into her arms. Once, on a hot summer evening when she was sixteen, she tried to steal it for the night. She hadn’t even gotten it out of the garage before he caught her. Even today, the resulting scar has not healed.

So it is a very bitter grin that blossoms on her face when the gray-faced little court officer informs her that yes, that vehicle is still licensed to Mr. Bright, and as the deceased never indicated who it should go to she can claim it if she is willing. “By God, I am willing, sir,” she says. “I am damn willing.”

“All right,” he says, and makes a note. “And what about his other properties?”

This comes as a surprise. Judging by his living conditions, her father had been scratching out a miserable and penniless life in this tiny town. “What other properties did he have?” she asks.

Oh, a fair few, the officer tells her. The car, for instance, is located at a storage unit with several of his other belongings, and these are hers if she wishes. She shrugs and says, why not.