Free The Deader the Better by G. M. Ford

than they can chew.”
    She nodded in agreement.
    “Claudia wants him to ask his parents for money, but he won’t.”
    I didn’t mean it, but I said it anyway. “He’ll figure it
out.”
    I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes. Funny how
people are. To keep our pain at bay, we create a hierarchy of
suffering. For reasons I don’t understand, it seems like we
automatically place our own brand of agony at the bottom of the
order. Relegating it nearly to the status of the mundane. At the
other end of the pain chart are the sufferings of others, whose
tribulations always seem so much more romantic, so much more
dramatic, and, in the end, so much more life-threatening than our
own. Go figure.
5
    FLOWING DOWN FOURTH AVENUE IN AN ADRENALINE MIST. The red bows on
the lampposts whispering a reminder that Christmas isn’t optional. You will participate and you will have a good time. You
will participate …Seems like it never ends. Before the Halloween
pumpkins have even begun to rot, the Christmas decorations are
everywhere. No wonder it drives us nuts.
    Rebecca had a list. A “Things to Be Buried with the Pharaoh”
scroll. She worked it hard with a pencil. Crossing out, then erasing
and then crossing out some more. I heard her rolling it back up and
then heard the snap of her purse.
    “Done,” she announced. My heart soared like a pigeon.
    “Ready to head back to the car?” she asked, removing the other
parcel I’d been squeezing with my forearms. That left me with one
jammed under each arm and a shopping bag in each hand. She reached
for another bag. I shook my head.
    “I’m good,” I said. “Let’s go.”
    We surfed down Fourth Avenue on a wave of hustling humanity.
    “I wanted to compliment you, Leo on how patient you’ve been.”
    Across the street, a four man steel drum band played a reggae
version of “Deck the Halls.” The sound of Salvation Army bells
came from several directions at once and, although there wasn’t a
tree in sight, the air smelled of pine boughs.
    “Must be middle age,” I said.
    Distressingly, she agreed with me.
    We turned right down Olive, passing under the Monorail, then cut
diagonally across Fifth Avenue and around the corner toward the Vance
Hotel. The Explorer was parked about four blocks up Stewart. We were
giving a scant nine bucks to park for the afternoon. In this
neighborhood it’s a buck a block. Every block closer to Third costs
you another dollar, until it peaks at fifteen bucks a pop to leave
your car for a couple of hours. Joni Mitchell was right. You want
good advice. Put up a parking lot.
    By the time we’d stuffed our second load of holiday cheer into
the Explorer, rear visibility was a thing of the past. Hell, there
was barely room for us as we bounced down Boren.
    “You ask the Boys to the party yet?” she asked.
    “I can’t find ’em. I asked around the square the other day
and nobody’d seen ’em for a couple of weeks.”
    The Boys weren’t exactly boys. As a matter of fact, with the
exception of Nearly Normal Norman, they were all pushing seventy. The
remains of my old man’s political machine, Harold Green, George
Paris and Ralph Batista had all managed to drink their way out of the
middle class and into the streets. They’d been homeless since
before there was such a thing as homeless. Back then, they’d just
been bums. What I discovered, however, was that, if I kept them
relatively sober, they made excellent street operatives, because they
could hang around places for hours and nobody noticed; they were
invisible.
    Nowadays, I try to find them a little work whenever I can. Between
their meager monthly pension checks and what I throw their way, they
manage to stay juiced nearly all of the time and out of the rain some
of the time. Works for them. Rebecca and I had been thinking about
throwing a little Christmas party for them. Maybe the week before the
holi day. Wasn’t like you could have a big regular Christmas bash
and just