Colton Huelle: NECROPANTS • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Colton Huelle
NECROPANTS

Erik’s set to fly out of Logan at nine in the morning, and I’m crashing at his place so we can get on the road early enough to beat rush hour. It feels just like when we were kids—me on the air mattress, Erik somewhere above me in the dark, riffing on any one of a million inside jokes. I keep expecting his mom to barge in and tell us to stop cackling like little girls.

He asks me if I’ve ever heard of necropants.

“It’s an old Viking custom,” he explains. “Where on the night before a big battle, you’d make this pact with your closest comrade that, if one of you died in combat, the survivor would flay his buddy’s corpse and wear his legs as pants.”

“You’re full of shit,” I tell him.

“Am not! There’s a pair on display at the Icelandic Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft. I’ll send you a picture.”

Tomorrow, he’s heading to Reykjavik for this Scandinavian history festival. A few years ago, he joined a group of Viking reenactors. The Hird of the Hearth, they call themselves. At meetings, they dress in Viking garb, practice Viking combat with authentic Viking weapons, and build Viking longhouses with hand-crafted Viking tools. They read Viking sagas and sing Viking songs.

“Listen,” I say, after the last of our laughing fits. “You’re not gonna do some weird, Viking suicide deal over there, are you?”

It’s a thought that’s been keeping me up the past few nights.

Earlier this week, Erik met with his oncologist and learned that the immunotherapy, like the chemo and the surgeries before it, has failed. The tumor in his stomach has spread to his lungs and his liver. He’s decided not to continue treatment. The Reykjavik International Living History Festival will likely be his last reenacting gig.

Erik lets loose a fresh peal of laughter that’s cut short by a violent cough. I raise my voice to drown it out.

“I mean it! I keep picturing your Viking buddies pushing you out to sea on a floating pyre or some shit.”

“And I’d just, what? Burn alive? Tough way to go.”

We’re silent for a while after that, and I’m just about asleep when this old memory pops into my head. We were in sixth grade, and I was running for class president. Erik was my campaign manager. He’d written my speech, put up flyers, and rallied the band and theater kids behind me. The whole school had gathered for a pep rally, and at the end, they announced the election results: I’d won. So I stood up to make my way down from the bleachers to the podium to give my victory speech. Erik stood up with me and pulled me into this massive bear hug. But then, over his shoulder, I saw Holly Parker, my first crush, pointing and giggling at us. My whole body stiffened and, instead of returning the hug, I shoved him off me and made my way to the podium.

That’s how it’s always been with us. Like when I called to tell him that Chrissy was leaving me, he drove up from Boston just to drop off a sweet potato casserole. A year later, when his wife left him for a coworker, he moved back home to Manchester. All I could think to do was take him out to the fucking Applebees on Second Street and get him blitzed on these weird rum drinks with gummy sharks floating in them.

And wanna know what I said to him last Monday, when he told me that he was going to be dead in six months? I said, “Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.” It’s what Babe Ruth says to Smalls in The Sandlot. It was our favorite movie growing up, and, I don’t know, I guess I thought it might cheer him up? It sounded better in my head. But Erik, God love him, he just nodded along like I’d said something deep.

The thing is, he’d be so much better at this if the roles were reversed. And I wish to Christ they were. He’d have been with me at all the oncologist appointments—asking the right questions, taking detailed notes. Why the hell hadn’t I thought to do that? Had his Viking buddies gone to his appointments with him? Those fucking guys, man.

I went out drinking with them one night, a few months after Erik joined their little Viking squad. In the first hour alone, I counted sixteen I love yous. I mean, they were throwing that word around like it was nothing. Erik has told me that he loves me before. Mostly when we were younger, but more recently that night at Applebees. The best I was able to do in response was “back atcha.” So finally he stopped saying it, which is fine. We don’t need to say it. He knows.

I can hear Erik turning in his bed above me. “I love you, man,” I try to say into the dark. But the words don’t fit in my mouth.

“Hey, Corey?” Erik whispers. “You still up?”

“Yeah.”

“I want you to make me into necropants.”

“Can you believe that medical shit they’re giving me?” he asks as we cross the border into Massachusetts, the same border I’ll have to cross, alone, if I want to get my hands on some weed after—well. “I wonder if I can leave you my card after I croak.”

“About that thing you said last night,” I begin, turning down the Norwegian black metal (I always let him pick the music now). “That was just the pot talking, yeah?”

It takes a few beats for him to remember. Then, a big smirk. “The pants?”

“You were fucking with me,” I tell him.

“The hell I was. If Hunter S. Thompson can be fired out of a cannon, I don’t see why—”

“Not the same.”

“Sure it is.”

Erik is dead serious, or he wants me to think so at least. Thirty-something years, and I can never tell with him. It’s gotten even harder since his diagnosis. Listen, I know all about how grieving looks different for everyone, but sometimes, Erik’s humor borders on the psychotic. Like, on his first day of chemo, he drew this doodle of his tumor dressed up like a Viking, and all the other cells in his body as screaming women and children. And below the doodle, he wrote: MY HAPPY TUMOR FRIEND. And he just mailed that to me in a gold envelope. No explanation.

What was I supposed to do with that, huh? What am I supposed to do with this?

“I know you don’t give a hoot about my Viking stuff,” he says, turning to stare out the window. “But it’s like the highest act of friendship in Viking culture, and it’s what I want.”

“Is it even legal?”

“I don’t know, man. If it’s gonna get you tossed in jail, obviously I don’t want that. But we could look into it, right? You’ll give me that much?”

“I’ll think about it.”

I thought about it for the rest of the drive, as best I could over the angry Norwegian guy screaming at me from the speakers. I thought about it as I pulled up to the terminal, as Erik hugged me goodbye, as I made him promise one more time that he wouldn’t die in Iceland.

Back in Manchester, I’m still thinking about it as I wait for my cheeseburger at The Queen City Diner. I try to distract myself by reading the advertisements for local businesses printed on the placemat. Mostly, they haven’t changed since we were kids. In high school, Erik always got a kick out of this one picture of a bull-necked contractor. He’s wearing a tank top and a fat, gold chain around his neck. And he’s standing with his wife and teenage daughter on opposite arms, both of them posed with their hands on his chest. He’s smiling like a coked-out shark.

The picture is at least twenty years old, which I know because it’s been here since Erik and I were in high school, but also because the teenage daughter happens to be my ex, Chrissy. I pick up a pen and scribble her face out until I’m carving into the countertop below. I mutter a word I’m not proud of. So now I need a distraction from the thing I was using to distract myself from the other thing.

Enter: Angelique St. Cyr, Esq.

She’s looking up at me, seductive as hell, from the box beneath Chrissy’s dad—forty something, fake blonde, and absolutely stacked, chest-wise. LEGAL TROUBLE? ANGELIQUE HAS THE ANSWERS.

Let’s get one thing straight: there’s no fuckin’ way I’m going through with this pants thing. I keep imagining my poor Ma walking into Market Basket and seeing my ugly mug on the front page of The Union Leader. Manchester Man Wears His Friend as Footy Pajamas.

But if I talk to a lawyer about it, then it’s not me saying no to Erik, it’s the law. I’m dialing the number when my cheeseburger finally comes. I put my phone back in my pocket—but no, fuck it, let’s get this over with. So I call.

“Good afternoon, Law Offices of Angelique St. Cyr, this is Dale speaking, Angelique has answers, how can I help you?” gasps a young man’s voice.

“Hey, yeah, I’m in a weird, kinda sticky legal situation, and I was hoping I could run it by a lawyer.”

“Weird and sticky are literally Angelique’s specialties,” the man says. A gay man, I notice…not that there’s anything wrong with that. Don’t think I’m prejudiced or anything. They take a lot of shit, the gays, and that’s the price they pay for being so shamelessly themselves. And that takes balls. I respect that.

It’s different with those Viking guys. See, they get to wear their goofy Viking hearts on their sleeves and blubber on about how much they love each other, and nobody can point at them and giggle cause they’re like 6’4, 250 pounds, with ZZ Top beards and beefy beer muscles.

“We’re located in the Willow Street Plaza,” Dale tells me. “Unfortunately, her only appointment today is in thirty minutes.”

I tell him I’ll be there.

The Law Offices of Angelique St. Cyr is housed inside of an old Blockbuster—the same one that Erik and I used to rent The Sandlot from, over and over again until his mom finally caved and bought it for us on VHS. The blue-ticket stub signage is still fixed above the front door, partially covered by a banner that reads: ANGELIQUE HAS THE ANSWERS.

Dale greets me from behind a comically small white desk. I’ll give him this: he’s got swag, with his navy suit and bright red loafers.

“You have some ketchup on your chin” is the first thing he says to me. He dabs at a spot on his chin to show me where.

The thing is, I’ve already noticed this in the mirror of his aviators and was already taking care of it several seconds before he said anything. So he was just saying to be a prick, which rubs me the wrong way. I catch my teeth grinding. “Happy thoughts,” I can hear Erik saying in my head. “Think happy thoughts.” This is what Erik says to me when he sees that I’m about to lose my shit on someone. He knows it pisses me off, but in a way that’s funny, so that I’ll forget about being pissed off in a way that’s not.

The polished wood panels of the lobby are empty, except for a framed poster on one of the walls. It shows a cartoon pinup girl in a bikini top and a mini-skirt, squatting with her legs spread. “Make like a lawyer and get me off,” the poster reads.

The first thing I notice about Angelique St. Cyr, when she steps into the lobby and calls my name, is that she’s carrying. The second is that her leopard-skin holster matches her dress. She sees me eying the pistol and looks at me skeptically.

“You’re not anti-Second Amendment, are you?” she asks.

“No ma’am.”

“Good, I don’t work with clients who don’t value their freedom.”

In her office, she asks me what kind of trouble I’m in.

“Well, my friend, he’s like, really into Vikings, but he’s dying, you know? Stomach cancer. And when he dies, he wants me to…well, there’s this Viking custom, I guess, it’s crazy, but…” I fumble my way through the explanation, half-expecting to be committed for even appearing to consider going through with something so ghoulish. But as I talk, Angelique just nods along, chews on her glasses, nods some more. “I know there’s no way it’s legal,” I say, grateful to have found my out. “But I told my friend that I’d at least look into it.”

“I’m not intimately familiar with New Hampshire regulations for disposing of a body, but no, I don’t imagine they allow for skinning your friend and wearing him as pants.”

“Yeah, that’s what I—”

“However, what I am intimately familiar with is the creed that sets New Hampshire apart from every other state in the union: Live. Free. Or. Die.” She emphasizes each word with a knock on her desk, and something feral flashes in her eyes. Her voice creeps up into a higher pitch as she says, “I mean, those four words…they’re everything, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“If this friend of yours wants you to make him into pants, that is his God-given right as an American, and especially as a Granite Stater. If there’s one thing I cannot abide, it’s an overreaching government robbing its sovereign People of the pursuit of happiness.”

I nod and scratch the back of my neck. “Totally.”

“If you take me on as your counsel, I will do everything in my power to arrange this thing in such a way as to shield you from legal liability.”

Well, here it is: a clear path to necropants laid out before me. This is my best friend’s dying wish, I remind myself. Then, who knows why, I tell Angelique about pushing away Erik’s hug in sixth grade.

“I think it’s sweet that you’ve been friends so long, and I totally get why you’d want to do everything in your power to honor him. It would be a genuine pleasure to help you carry that out. Truly.”

The pants thing is a go! I imagine myself telling Erik when I pick him up from Logan in ten days.

I love you too, he’ll say.

“Yeah, fuck it,” I tell Angelique.

“Excellent. At this point, I typically ask for a deposit of one hundred dollars. This will officially make you my client and, therefore, protects anything we discuss under attorney-client privilege. I offer a discount for payments made in crypto, but I will also happily accept cash, card, or Venmo.”

Once that’s settled, she fires up her laptop, and I watch her eyes race from left to right at a speed I didn’t know eyes could move.

“I belong to a vast, state-wide network of liberty lovers,” she explains, “generous, steadfast men and women who share their skills and talents to help one another evade the tyranny of the State. I’ll put together a list of contacts who’ll be useful to you and have Dale make your appointments with them. They’ll each have their own price for services rendered, but they’ll respect an attempt to bargain. And for God’s sake, invest in crypto.”

At three in the morning, I wake up to my phone buzzing. Once, twice, three times. I rub my eyes, reach in the dark for my phone, and panic when I see the texts are from Erik. I assume the worst, but they’re only pictures.

The first: a wax statue of a Viking woman cutting off her own boob with a sword.

The second: Erik soaking in a hot spring, drinking from a terracotta beer stein. I flinch at how yellow his face looks, then tell myself it’s just bad lighting. He’s grinning from ear to ear, and I remember that the Viking friends don’t know that his cancer has spread. That he’s stopping treatment.

The third: a selfie with the only pair of necropants in existence. For now.

“I’ve gathered up some intel on the matter,” says Clive, the taxidermist, a few days later.

We’re sitting at a picnic table in his barn-studio, way the fuck out in Walpole. Between us is a fox whose glass eyes are droopy and crossed, like a drunk’s.

“He was my first,” says Clive. His gray mustache twitches as his lips curl into a sheepish smile. He gestures broadly at the taxidermied owls, muskrats, and opossums lording over us from shadow-boxes mounted to the wall. “I hope you can see the improvement.”

He doesn’t live on an operational farm. But he dresses like he wants you to think otherwise: rubber boots splattered with mud, denim overalls, brimmed hat. We’ve been making small talk for fifteen minutes. He’s spit at least fifty times.

“I ain’t ever worked with human skin before,” he says. “But I betcha I can fix ’em up for ya. I made my ex-girlfriend’s grandson some swaddling clothes outta tanned pigskin, and I don’t suppose that’s much different. But before we get to that, I’d like to ask you about some incongruities between the way things were explained to me and what I found on the internet.”

“Okay?”

“As I understand it, your friend told you that necropants are a Viking practice. A sort of grieving ritual for fallen comrades, or something of the sort.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

He licks the pad of his pointer finger and pulls a messy bundle of paper from an accordion folder.

“Well, I hate to break it to you, but as far as I can tell, necropants ain’t got shit to do with Vikings. The practice seems to have emerged in the late 17th century—that’s, oh, about six hundred years past the Viking age.”

I feel my teeth start to grind, and I let them.

He goes on to read aloud the Wikipedia entry on necropants, and the long and short of it is: Erik is full of shit. Not only did necropants have nothing to do with Vikings, but the whole point of making them, it turns out, was not to grieve a friend. It was just about getting rich. Get this: the guy wearing the dead man’s legs would deposit a gold coin into the scrotum, and then the coin was supposed to magically, endlessly reproduce, making the wearer of the pants rich. Who needs crypto?

Oh, and the necropants in the museum? They’re not even real, just a “frighteningly realistic replica.” But it’s the last line of the Wikipedia entry that really guts me: “It’s doubtful that necropants ever existed outside of folklore.”

Maybe sending me on this sick, twisted goose chase was Erik’s way of punishing me for not going with him to Iceland. For not being there at his oncology appointments. For saying “back atcha” when he told me that he loved me. Whatever it is: point taken, Erik.

“Now, I’m more than happy to carry this thing out for ya,” Clive says, plucking me out of my thoughts, my warm blanket of rage. “But I felt honor-bound to clear up any misapprehensions you might have.”

And then my phone chirps from my pocket. More dispatches from Iceland: Erik in full Viking attire, riding a miniature horse; Erik and his Viking buddies trying shark in a fancy restaurant; Erik in his underwear wielding a battle-axe. I see my reflection layered over the pictures, and I imagine that what I’m seeing is my future self, looking back at these photos from those unthinkable days to come.

My ears fill with the sound of wasps, and somehow, over that sound or inside of it or whatever the fuck, I hear something crack in my mouth. I slide my tongue over my bottom-left crown. Chipped again.

“You all right, son?” asks Clive.

That’s when I see that demented-looking fox with its wino eyes staring up at me. I can hear him laughing. Erik’s laugh. When I backhand the thing, I’m surprised by its density, its hardness. It seems to happen in slow motion. For a brief eternity, Clive and I watch the fox flipping ass over tea kettle, through the air, across the barn, and smack into the wall. A stillness and silence as time returns.

Clive ambles on over to the fox, who lies face down in a pile of hay. “Well, you’ve shattered his eye,” he says.

I try to respond, but I’ve lost contact with all the words I know.

Clive looks up at me, hard, and says, “Break it, you buy it.”

“How much?”

He glances down at the thing, scratches his whiskers awhile. “Twelve hundred,” he says.

I’ve been trying not to make a big thing of it, so as not to come off as anti-Second Amendment, but Clive, like Angelique, wears a pistol on his hip. Now, he sees me seeing it. His mustache twitches again, and beneath it, a smile. Not at all sheepish.

“Venmo?” I ask.

I’ve just pulled into the cell phone parking lot at Logan, and if you think we’re listening to that death metal shit all the way back to Manch, you’ve got another thing coming, pal. No more playing the cancer card. You know what you’ll be listening to on the drive home? Me ripping you a fresh asshole, and I swear to Christ, if you even think the phrase “happy thoughts,” I’m leaving your ass on the side of 93.

Angelique called this morning. She’s billing me for ten hours, which she says is how long it took to research corpse regulations and set up appointments with Clive and the mortician who was going to leave Clive and I alone with your body for a few hours. Who knows how much the crown replacement is gonna run me. And all of that is on top of the twelve hundred I ended up paying for Odin. Yeah, I named the fox Odin. Thought you’d get a kick out of that.

Just so we’re clear, I’m still mad at you. You’ll notice that Odin is strapped into the passenger seat. You’re in the back, motherfucker.

I’m trying to get comfortable talking to you when you’re not here.

I can’t believe I fell for it. I bet you laughed all the way to Reykjavik, imagining me scrambling around Manchester, figuring out how to make you into pants—yeah, yeah, you’re sorry. (You can’t see, but I’m making a jerking off gesture and blowing a raspberry at your apology, you fuck).

We made good time getting down here, Odin and me. Your plane isn’t landing for another thirty minutes or so. That’s fine, I’ve always liked watching planes land. Remember that little dirt lot, out on Brown Ave, by the pet cemetery, where we used to smoke blunts and watch the planes come and go? We went back there the other night, after your appointment. I wanted to say, “I love you, man,” but I didn’t. I wanted to tell you that I knew a shit-ton of sad-sack divorced guys that were just like me in every way except for one thing. None of them had you.

What I ended up saying was: “Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.”

One plane lands, and then another, and one of them will bring you home. A happy thought. The happiest.

Colton Huelle is a friendly neighborhood fiction guy hailing from scenic Manchester, NH. His stories have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, and Necessary Fiction. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of New Hampshire and now lives in Cambridge, MA.