My mother was going to kill me.
'Everybody looks real angry,' Sally said. 'We should probably try to rescue Granny.'
'Coming through,' Lula said, head down, plowing her way to the front. 'S'cuse me, move your bony little ass, outta my way, make way for mama.'
Sally and I rode in her wake, stumbling up to the casket, coming nose to nose with Dave Nelson.
Nelson grabbed me by the front of my shirt. 'You have to help me. These people are insane. Your grandmother is insane. She started it all. Somehow she got the lid up. And now everyone wants to see!'
'Is there a problem with that?' I asked.
'Carmen Manoso has been autopsied! She makes Frankenstein look good. She's had her brain taken out and weighed and put back in!'
'Oh yeah,' I said. 'I forgot.'
'I drove here from Perth Amboy,' some lady said. 'I'm not leaving until I get to see the body.'
'Yeah,' everyone said. 'We want to see.'
'They're going to take my mortuary apart, brick by brick,' Dave whispered. 'These people are all ghouls.'
'They just want to be entertained,' I told them. 'I bet you ran out of cookies.'
I stood on a chair and yelled at the crowd. 'Everybody quiet down. We can't open the casket, but we've got some exciting entertainment. Two members of the What band have agreed to do a special performance.'
'We can't do that,' Lula said. 'We don't have any music. And besides, we're professionals. We don't do this shit for nothing.'
'All kinds of people have come to see Carmen,' I told Lula. 'I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of television crews were here. And I think I saw Al Roker when I walked in.'
'Al Roker! I love Al Roker. Do you think he's married?'
'I thought you were in love with Tank.'
'Yeah, but Al is so cute. And I hear he has his own barbecue sauce. You gotta love a man's got his own barbecue sauce. Boy, it'd be real hard to have to choose between Al and Tank.'
'There's a stage behind the casket,' I said. 'And there's even a microphone on that pulpit thing. This could be your big break.'
Okay, so I didn't really see Al Roker and this was probably a rotten thing to do, but I couldn't figure anything else out. And who knows, maybe there were television people in the viewing room. From where I was standing, it looked like half the state was here.
Lula and Sally took the stage and stood there in their pink high heels and raincoats and the whole room went silent. They took their raincoats off and the room went nuts. Lula looked like a big round pink puffball in her genuine domestic farm-raised fowl feather dress. Sally looked like nothing anyone had ever seen before. He was wearing the heels and the flamingo feather thong. The thong sack looked like dyed dead bird. And the rest of Sally made a strong case for full body waxing.
'Hey, all you fuckin' mourners,' Sally yelled. 'Are you fuckin' ready for this?'
Everyone cheered and clapped and hooted. Jersey's always fuckin' ready for anything. Especially if it's hairy and in a thong.
Lula and Sally started singing and waving their arms and dancing around and the mourners all backed up a couple feet. Feathers were flying, and Lula was sweating, and the room was starting to smell like wet water fowl. By the time Lula and Sally got through the second song the room had emptied out some.
'Thanks,' I said to Lula. 'That did the trick. Everybody's happy now. I think you can stop singing.'
'Yeah,' Lula said, climbing off the stage. 'We were pretty good. Too bad, I didn't see Al Roker out there. But I think I saw Meri. Guess she didn't want to be left out.'
'I always wanted to be in a rock-and-roll band,' Grandma said. 'I could do all those dancing moves too. I'm old, but I still got legs. I can't play any instruments though.'
'Can you sing?' Sally asked.
'Sure. I'm a good singer,' Grandma said.
'I've been thinking now that we're playing all these geezer gigs we could use an older demographic in the band. You'd have to get some outfits, and we practice once a week.'