No Go
That Saturday morning, I was nose deep in the engine of my ’72 Chevy Nova when my cell phone rang.
Craning my neck, I peered around the open hood to see where I’d left the damn thing. It jangled on the workbench halfway across the garage. I thought about yelling for Kathy to answer it, but no, I recalled, she’d just left for a hair appointment. Sighing, I wiped most of the grease off my hands and hopped from foot to foot across the floor, dodging dipsticks and jugs of motor oil.
The glowing rectangle read Johnny. It hadn’t been twelve hours since we left the bar. What did he want? Probably to compare hangovers.
I flipped the phone open. “Yeah.”
“Denny,” he said. “Thank God you’re there. I need your help, man. I’m in trouble.”
I rubbed my temples. What did my little brother do this time, I thought. He’d been kind of a mess since his divorce.
“What’s the matter, Johnny.”
“It’s bad. Really bad.” He sounded a little too keyed up for a guy who was lying on his couch nursing a headache. With a pang of panic, I said a quick prayer that he wasn’t back on those drugs again.
“When can you get over here? It’s bad, Denny.”
“Slow down, Johnny. Tell me what happened.”
Johnny’s voice broke as he croaked, “I think she’s dead.”
#
As I shifted my truck into gear and backed out of the driveway, it occurred to me to wonder if this was another one of my brother’s pranks. Since he was old enough to stick out his foot and trip you, Johnny considered no holiday quite as sacred as April Fool’s Day. He never could be bothered with schoolwork, but he studied diagrams in Boys’ Life Magazine and rigged up Rube Goldberg contraptions to dump buckets of sand on our heads when we walked through the doorway.
On my fortieth birthday, I’d walked to the driveway to find the front seat of my truck crammed full of forty helium balloons that flew out and smacked me in the face when I opened the door. Birthdays were a favorite gag opportunity for Johnny. But that couldn’t be it. My birthday was yesterday, that’s why we’d gone to the bar.
Was somebody really dead? Lord, what would I do if there were a dead person in Johnny’s apartment? I felt nauseous at the thought of touching or doing anything with a corpse. Leave it to my brother to be such a screw-up that he actually needed me to help him hide a body.
Johnny opened the door as my hand was still in the air, about to knock. His mouth twitched oddly. “Thank God you’re here, man. Come in, come in, come in.”
Heart pounding, I stepped inside.
Fifty people leaped out from behind furniture as the lights flipped on.
“SURPRISE!” they screamed.
I staggered backward.
My teenage kids ran to me, screeching with laughter. “Gotcha, Dad!” “Happy birthday!” “Bet you thought we forgot!” Kathy stood smiling next to a table covered in plates, forks, and cake. Johnny thumped me on the back, guffawing. “Best brother in the world, ladies and gentlemen!” he shouted. “He’d even help you hide a body!” My vision blurred as I recognized my nieces, Kathy’s brothers, the guys from work, old buddies from school, all grinning as they looked at my face.
I lurched again, feeling a sharp twinge of pain in my chest as I collapsed to the floor.
#
My eyelids lifted, revealing a white ceiling. What was that beeping noise?
“Kathy, get the phone,” I mumbled. Something was wrong with my lips.
“Stress-induced cardiomyopathy,” said a stranger. “Elevated catecholamines,” said another. “Good prognosis. The angiogram showed no blockage.” What a weird dream I was having. Who the hell was Angie Graham?
Then Johnny was there.
“Hey, big brother,” he said. “I didn’t know you had a heart condition.”
“News to me,” I slurred before passing out.
#
I opened an eye. Johnny sat in a chair, elbows on his knees. His head hung down.
“I can’t believe I gave my own brother a heart attack,” he told the floor. “It was just a joke. Shit, Denny. You’d better get better. I’m… I’m sorry.”
I suddenly remembered one Christmas, when we were kids. The gifts were all opened, shreds of wrapping paper littering the carpet. Johnny had gotten a Matchbox Car deluxe garage, the one I really wanted. I sat by myself in a corner of the sofa. Johnny had climbed up and curled up next to me in his flannel pajamas. “Let’s share it,” he said. “Okay, big brother?”
In the hospital bed, my body jerked. My eyes rolled, and drool trickled its way toward my chin. Johnny jumped up like he’d seen a ghost and started yelling for the nurse.
I grinned hugely.
“Gotcha.”
Jen Mierisch's dream job is to write Twilight Zone episodes. Until then, she's a website administrator by day and a writer of odd stories by night. Jen's work can be found in Short Story Town, Martian, Sanitarium, and elsewhere. Jen can be found haunting her local library near Chicago, USA.