he be buried in a simple pine box—convinced that his worldly remains would quickly be carried off by Isis to begin its long journey home to the sun. This turned out to be a big mistake. To begin with, when the man from Crippner’s Funeral Home rolled the coffin out the back of the hearse into the waiting hands of the pallbearers, the weight practically tore each man’s arms out of their sockets. The people at Crippner’s had had little success in removing Mr. Svendergard from the cement chunk that he was originally delivered in. Their chief embalmer wasn’t trying to be ironic when he said that it would take a better man than he—Michelangelo’s hammer and chisel perhaps—to free Gil Svendergard from the chunk of cement that enslaved him. His first half-baked attempt ghoulishly separated a foot with the shoe still on it from the corpse, so Crippner’s decided to quit while they were ahead, or at least while the body still had a head.
The pallbearers took half a dozen wobbly steps under the weight of what surely was four hundred pounds, when Mr. Svendergard’s body suddenly broke through the bottom of the pine boards and fell to the ground. The gravediggers, it turned out, had gone for a drink. With the limited manpower on hand, the pallbearers had to resort to flopping the cement-encrusted corpse end over end. Mrs. Svendergard gasped and wailed with each flop, until, like craps, seven was the lucky number and the conglomerate that was Mr. Svendergard fell into the grave, head down.
Buster shoveled a spade of dirt over his second adopted father, hoping that, after a short period of mourning, everything would return to normal. Would Mrs. Svendergard still read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped to him while cleaning his ears in her naked lap? He certainly hoped so. Mrs. Svendergard cornered Sheriff Dudival before he could close the door of his patrol cruiser.
“I don’t think I can keep Buster.”
“Why not?” Sheriff Dudival asked.
“I don’t… I don’t feel comfortable being alone with him.”
“Do you believe Buster was responsible for your husband’s death?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what is it?”
“I think he’d be better off in a family with a male role model.”
Mrs. Svendergard was not just thinking of Buster when she made that suggestion. She had received an unexpected phone call that morning from a golf properties consortium in Coral Gables, Florida. A famous golf course architect, Gordon McClain III, had flown over her property in an UltraLight airplane on the way to Phoenix and was taken with the eccentricity of her topography. This was his specialty in golf course architecture—finding the challenging sites in what he called the “American vernacular.” Mrs. Svendergard wasn’t interested in the vernacular side of things as much as she was in the price per acre. He said that his consortium would not be willing to go over four thousand per. They would spread the payment over ten years. Mrs. Svendergard said that would be fine with her and gently put the phone down in the cradle. She quickly scribbled the figures on the back of a nudist magazine called Svenska Exposures that was by the phone. She ciphered 640 times 4,000 divided by 10. She looked at it again. Could this be right—256,000 a year? Zella and Gil only lived on forty thousand, and they had spent like Romans! The way she figured it, she could live for thirty or forty more years and never have to lift a finger! She could leave narrow-minded Vanadium with its freezing winters and live her dream: the Brisa Suave assisted living nudist commune in Costa Rica. Mrs. Svendergard broke down and cried. Buster, who was in the kitchen cleaning up the breakfast dishes, assumed she was on the phone talking to a relative who was offering condolences and came to put a comforting hand on her shoulder. Mrs. Svendergard looked up and blubbered at him.
“My God, I can’t believe this has happened to me.”
“Ah’m sorry, Mommy.”
Buster was going to be a problem. There was no way she could take him to the most famous nudist colony in the world. Buster would be an embarrassment to her. Time and time again, she tried to explain to Buster that looking at someone naked and sexual stimulation were two different things. But despite her patient pedagogy, Buster stubbornly insisted on parading around the house with an erection. If this was her chance to finally get out of Vanadium, she wasn’t going to miss it because of him.“I’ll send somebody up for his clothes,” said the sheriff.
“They’re in the car,” Mrs. Svendergard said.
Sheriff Dudival looked around at the people at the funeral heading for the parking lot. There was the quiet Mary Boyle from the Buttered Roll. Mary was a good person in her early thirties married to Bob Boyle, a one-time star on the rodeo circuit. The sheriff put in an emergency call to the Vanadium Women’s League.
CHAPTER FOUR
Learning the Ropes at the Boyles’
Mary Boyle was in the back of the Buttered Roll stuffing tarragon tuna fish into beefsteak tomatoes when the little bell rang on the door. It was Sheriff Dudival acting as emissary for the Women’s League of Vanadium.
“Hello, Mary, may I speak with you for a moment?”
She wiped her hands on her apron and came out, a look of dread on her face.
“Certainly, Sheriff. Anything wrong?”
“No, no. I just wanted to know how things were going for you at home.”
“You mean, since Bob…?” She didn’t complete the sentence, which would have been: “…beat the living crap out of me and I dialed nine-one-one convinced that he was really going to kill me this time but then I begged you to not arrest him because it would’ve only made life more difficult for me than it was worth and you didn’t?”
“Yes, since then.”
“Things are great,” she said. “Thanks for asking.”
Yes, the sheriff had not arrested Bob, even though the law said it was mandatory. This was but another of the laws that Sheriff Dudival felt better left to his discretion. Mary refused to go to a women’s shelter and she had three young children that she would have had to take care of herself—no daycare being available in Vanadium in those days.
“Happy to help,” he said. “But, uh…” He tilted his hat back to scratch his head. “I was wondering if you might do a little something for me.”
The Boyles lived behind the Buttered Roll, the restaurant Mrs. Boyle had bought before she married Bob, a rodeo star who’d been a regular customer. Like most newlyweds, they’d had big dreams. Theirs was to buy the defunct Victorian Vanadium Hotel on Main Street. It had been built in the forties to house the mining executives who then frequented the town, but when the mine closed, the place had gone to seed. The asking price was $140,000. Mary thought that they could refurbish the place to its former glory. With pencil and paper, Mary and Bob sat down every night and worked out a financial plan. They would support themselves on the Buttered Roll income and bank Bob’s rodeo winnings.
The Boyles’ savings plan went into effect and was working well—even after they had their first child. Mary was still able to run the restaurant and manage the baby. It became a little more difficult after the second child, one year later. At that point, she had to close the restaurant for dinner and serve breakfast and lunch only. Her third child was born autistic. The Vanadium school wouldn’t let him stay in kindergarten. They said he disrupted the class. So, Mary had no other choice but to home school. The Buttered Roll was now only open for breakfast.
In
