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Dead Man’s Suit
An Original Short Story
Every time he wore it, he thought it had a strange odor. It had been dry cleaned multiple times and no one else noticed any sort of odor. In fact, his wife, Wilma thought he looked “spiffy” in it and loved to see him in the double-breasted, brown suit with the faintest of gray pinstripes. “He looks like a movie star,” she proudly told her sister Grace Lynn. Far better in that suit than in the greasy dungaree overalls that he wore most of the time. But truck mechanics don’t wear suits to work in. They work in greasy overalls. The brown suit was for Sunday church and extra special occasions, like when they had gone to the casino and had a steak dinner for their tenth anniversary.
For their anniversary dinner, Wilma had worn a Kelly-green dress with lots of sparkles that matched the brown suit perfectly. She had even insisted that he pay the $5 to get a special color photograph of them together in their finery.
Harlan Royce was a big-chested man and a double-breasted suit looked best on him. A single-breasted suit would make him look bulgy; he would stick out in the wrong places. But, in a double-breasted suit and with a wider, patterned tie, he looked, well, like a movie star!
Still, every time Harlan Royce wore the double-breasted suit, he noticed the smell. The one that no one else noticed.
~~~
Harlan Royce was 39 when his slightly older cousin, “Cooter”Royce died.
No one who knew both “Cooter” and Harlan was surprised that “Cooter” died flat broke and without suitable clothing for his own burial. No one would be surprised, either, that Harlan Royce paid for the suit that “Cooter” was buried in. Harlan was a hard-working truck mechanic who attended church and remained true to his wife. “Cooter” --- well, not so.
“Cooter” liked to call himself a “rogue” and even had the word tattooed on his left upper arm in red and blue ink. That tattoo was probably the only positive thing to result from “Cooter’s” brief time in the United States Navy. He had been thrown into the brig for stealing government property. A more accurate charge would have been that “Cooter” used Navy trucks to commit felonies, specifically the transport of untaxed liquors across state lines and onto U.S. military bases. “Cooter” called himself a “liquor supplier.” Twenty years earlier, he would have been called a “bootlegger.”
“Cooter” Royce had been a bootlegger before he joined the Navy in a temporary bout of patriotic fever. He was a bootlegger while in the Navy, and he was a bootlegger after his dishonorable discharge.
In fact, he remained a bootlegger for his entire adult life. He was a bootlegger, a thief, a con man, a liar, a womanizer, a “no account” who spent all his money as quickly as he got it.
“Rogue” was an apt descriptor.
