Appendix     by Daniel Worden

    Samson’s Uncle Berto died two days ago of appendicitis. Berto had a bad habit of taking baths and showers in his sleep, so he thought the pains in his side meant that he had slipped in the tub one night while sleepwalking. He drank heavily his last couple of days to combat the excruciating ache emanating from his side and passed out on his couch with a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker. Martha, his wife, found him dead the next morning. When the ambulance arrived for the body, the bottle of Johnnie Walker was empty, and Martha was spinning around in circles; she passed out when the paramedics tried to take Berto’s pulse. Martha rode with her dead husband to the hospital, lying in a stretcher right next to him. She came home yesterday to get the house ready for the reception after the funeral.

    Samson announced our purpose for the afternoon as if it was what we did everyday. Nothing special. "We need to stop by Edwin’s and pick up something before the funeral tomorrow. Then we gotta stop by the lake."

    He told me as we plopped into my car, a Ford Escort station wagon, an off-white, banged-up contraption, one of those oddly-shaped oval-bubble hybrids. The tiny frame of the vehicle wobbled as we sat down inside. Samson tossed his backpack behind him, and it landed with a soft thud in the back seat. His hands were clasped together in his lap, fingers interlaced, and he just looked ahead, as if everything was perfectly normal.

    I sat down, threw my bag on top of his in the back and stared at him, the concavity of his glasses distorting his nose, eyes, and eyebrows into small clumps of flesh, green iris, and blonde wisps of hair. " Something for the funeral?"

    He turned, his face its normal shape again. "Yeah. Edwin’s got something I need to put in the lake for Uncle Berto. It was his last wish, so we gotta do it."

    I started the car and took off down the street to Edwin’s. Samson hummed along with the radio, his hands still clasped firmly in his lap.

    Samson and I had a long-standing relationship. We met in elementary school on the bus; my house was the last stop in the morning, and he was the only kid sitting alone. Ever since then we had done basically whatever I wanted: played soccer, did our seventh grade science fair on spiders, even stayed in the normal classes instead of going up into the gifted and talented program. Samson demanded very little in our collective social and academic lives, except when it came to his family. I learned quickly that family matters had to be attended to, and nothing came between Samson and his relatives. Samson missed school for his grandparents’, aunts’, and parents’ birthdays, and they, Samson and his extended family, numbering about 200, gathered for two weeks every December in a cabin in Yosemite.

    "I came for the jar." Samson didn’t even seem to notice the smell of formaldehyde tinged with moth balls, reminiscent of the old folks that for the most part kept this place in business.

    Mr. Edwin nodded slowly and crept away into the back room, the room where he cleaned, primped, and made up the bodies that came into his place of business every week or so. He had a slight limp from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in high school; Mr. Edwin, at least according to everyone else in town, had tried to commit suicide. He propped up a shotgun between two speakers and pushed the trigger of the gun with an old broom handle. The shotgun slipped from out between the two speakers and fell just as the broom handle pressed the trigger, and Mr. Edwin, then just Kenny to everyone in town, shot himself in the shin. He graduated from high school the next year, borrowed a few thousand dollars from his parents, and set up Edwin’s Mortuary. He couldn’t die successfully, but working with the dead made him feel complete.

    Mr. Edwin came slinking back carrying a pink and white striped hat box, holding it by a yellow string that wrapped through the lid. The hat box jutted back and forth with each limp Mr. Edwin took. "Alright, here you go Samson. See you tomorrow for the funeral. Your Uncle’s starting to look pretty darn good in there." He swung his shoulders in the direction of his cleaning room.

    Samson took the hat box from Mr. Edwin, dangling it by the yellow string and began to swing it around in circles. The string curled up tight, made Samson’s middle and index fingers turn purple, and then swung back out. The string wound tight and loosened, slower and faster. "Thanks Mr. Edwin. See you tomorrow."

    He turned away from Edwin, swinging the hat box into my knee. "Well, let’s go to the lake."

    I climbed into the car and reached over to unlock Samson’s door. We drove for a good three or four minutes without saying anything, Samson drumming his fingers along the top of the hat box to the beat supplied by the radio.

    Samson’s pink fingers drew my eyes to the box. "So, uh, what’s in there?"

    He turned towards the window and pushed up his horn-rimmed glasses. "It’s for Uncle Berto’s funeral. Something for the family."

    I scratched my head and then readjusted the clump of hair that stuck straight up from my itching. "What, his ashes? I thought Edwin was fixing him up for tomorrow?"

    "He is, its something else that we do. Its a tradition, don’t worry about it. It’s just something we do that other people don’t do. Not a big deal, just a tradition."

    Samson wasn’t drumming on the box any more. His fingers ran up and down the pink stripes on the box. I drove without talking for a few more minutes and watched him meticulously finish tracing the pink stripes with his fingers and move on to the white.

    Samson finished tracing the white stripes and pushed up his brown, horn-rimmed specs again. "Do you think my family’s weird? I mean, do we seem strange to you?"

    I clenched my jaw and felt my molars press into the skin of my cheeks. "Not really. You know, your family’s close, not like most families. Not like mine, at least."

    "Well, you can tell me the truth. I know we’re weird. Just tell me if you think so. It’s not gonna be a problem."

    "You guys just take the family deal seriously. Nothing wrong with that."

    "Okay. Just checking."

    Samson wrapped his arms around the hat box, his hands grappling onto its bottom and pressing hard. The lid jutted up and wrinkled from the pressure. His blonde hair fell down over his eyebrows, brushing in front of and behind his glasses, as he stared down at the pink and white stripes.

    My parents loved Samson. He always opened the door for my mom when we went to restaurants or to the store, and that chivalry, at least in my mother’s eyes, made him the most valuable boy in town. Dad never held the door open for my mom.

    My parents and I heard stories about Samson’s family, odd stories about rituals in the woods and evil spells and witchcraft and sacrifices and even more absurdities that grew less and less plausible. Except for Edwin, who worked all Sunday morning preparing for the endless Sunday afternoon funerals, nearly everyone in town went to church. Mom and dad figured that since Samson’s family didn’t go to church, the town entertained itself with stories about their pagan religious practices.

    I never really listened to the stories told by the barber or the kids at school that carried around Bibles in leather slipcovers. In every room of Samson’s house, though, there was a collage on the wall. Not a bunch of stamps or photos, but just a bunch of clipped words from newspapers, magazines, books, anything with words. All of the words were the same: Appendix. Samson checked out a new book from the high school library every week and took it home, and the books always came back with holes. Instead of taking an elective, I worked in the library for an hour everyday while Samson was in wood shop, and he gave me his books to return. He loved books with appendices; they always had at least two occurrences of "appendix," one in the table of contents and one at the top of the appendix.

    The librarians hadn’t noticed yet, three years into our education at high school, but I doubt that they could even read in the first place. While I worked everyday from eleven to twelve, they sat in their office, drank coffee, and gossiped, every now and then about Samson’s voodoo family. Mrs. Slocomb, a two hundred and fifty pound librarian, entertained daily the notion that Samson checked out so many books because he and his family were plotting to take over the world and therefore needed to know a little about everything. The librarians never even glanced at what Samson checked out at the library to somehow add some evidence to their theory. It was better to just speculate about Samson’s secret, evil life.

    The road began to slowly transform into dirt as we drove closer to Lake Pochanima. The lake was man-made; the water was nothing but dilute mud. Yellow and white bathing suits came out of the lake looking decrepit, like old parchment paper that would crack and disintegrate with the slightest thump of the finger.

    I pulled up into the small dirt parking lot situated right in front of the restrooms, showers, and changing rooms. Samson and I caught our first glimpses of the female anatomy in those showers in the fourth grade. Samson’s cousin, who was sixteen at the time, took us swimming in the lake one summer. The lake always made people want to shower. The water didn’t cleanse, it muddied. Samson’s cousin hopped into the shower, and we watched her, lying flat on our stomachs with our heads craned around the wall. No one was in the shower this time, though. The lake served little purpose after that year; the town built a public swimming pool next door to the courthouse downtown, so the town swam in the clean, chemical water.

    Samson lifted the pink and white hatbox up, his arms still wrapped tightly around it, and opened the car door with his pinkie and index finger. "Just wait here. I’ll be back in a second."

    He stepped out of the car, hatbox still in firm grasp, and plodded over to the shore. His left shoelace was untied and drug through the mud that constantly surrounded the water. He sat the hatbox down, removed its lid, and pulled out a Miracle Whip jar. The label was still on the jar, but it was filled with a clear liquid. Well, somewhat clear. Ill-defined, pale-pink chunks of something floated around in the liquid, globules of rubber or flesh or paint.

    Samson’s mouth started moving as he held the jar in the palm of his left hand. His right hand slowly moved to grasp its blue lid. I rolled down the window with some quick circles of the arm to listen.

    Samson bellowed, and the words echoed back from the other end of the lake. "I immerse ye once more in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Bertolini Kane, you are set free. No longer of this Earth, your eternal being sets sail in the lake to be cleansed of the taints of the physical and immersed in the purity of the spiritual. Farewell, noble soul, I cast thee out."

    He unscrewed the lid and poured the contents of the jar into the lake; a few pale-pink, mushy chunks plopped into the water. They sank momentarily, air bubbles rising, then floated up and began to bump into one another, stationary at the edge of the motionless water.

    "See ya, Berto."

    Samson reached into the water, scooped up the two biggest chunks of pink, and tossed them further into the lake, brown water spinning from them as they flew.

    Samson placed the lid back on the hatbox, careful to line the stripes up with one another, and walked back to the car, the box dangling by the yellow string once again. He plopped into his seat, shaking the station wagon, and passed the hatbox over his head and into the back seat, spreading the mud on its bottom onto the car’s interior and my backpack.

    Samson didn’t give me a chance to talk. As I started the car, he immediately reached for the radio volume knob, twisting its soft black rubber up to the seven mark. Samson drummed his chubby fingers on the dashboard, while I drove. He sung to the music and shook the car with his feet, keeping up with the drums.

    As I maneuvered out of the parking lot, the hatbox rolled along the backseat and spread mud onto Samson’s backpack and the rest of the interior. Its pink and white stripes blurred in the rearview mirror.