Thanks to Multnomah Co. Deputy Medical Examiner Robert Boggs, Funeral Director Guido Santella, the late Blair County Coroner Charles Burkey,
And my mother, Catherine Morris, B.S.N.
who taught me to be tough at the sight of blood.
CANVAS ONE:
THE DIENER'S TALE, EXHIBIT A
"Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friend's door,
Even when their sorrow almost was forgot,
And on their skins, as on the barks of trees,
With my knife, carved in Roman letters,
'Let not thy sorrow die, though I am dead.' "
--William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
Clean Digital Audio Tape tone, and:
27 August 2002. Recording. Personal journal, off-duty, off-record, anybody finds this you'd better toss it in the trash or you gonna have a lot of 'splainin' to do in court one way or the other.
I will pistol-whip your ass, you listen beyond this, I will... Oh, hell, why am I even recording it, then?
Why, unless I expect the flunky of which I am about to speak to come knocking at my door with his terrible hands, his terrible eyes...
We all get The Knock, one day. But I am learning his ways, through the stories he leaves me on their skin. Almost as if...
But I can't even think it...
'K, that being said, tonight I have officially burned out on my chosen profession, and find myself wondering how I got here to begin with.
People often ask me, every time I speak before the Fraternal Order of Police, the Chinese Benevolent Society, or any big gathering of two or three or more of you civilians...What's the weirdest case you've ever had?
It's Friday. Before this Monday past, the weirdest case I'd ever had was this little dude we found frozen to death on the top of Locke Mountain with no identifying marks, no blunt trauma, nothing. No wallet, either. And nothing in his pockets but a bag of weed and a box of shotgun shells.
Fingerprints and dental records turned up zip. But the ad we put on TV placed him as a backup horn player, a hired gun, who'd been touring with Parliament Funkadelic. George Clinton and the boys had sold out the Bryce Jordan Center down in State College, and were on their way to New York.
His road manager said this gentleman went out to try to shoot a deer and got lost. We found the gun that spring. George Clinton sent us all some free tickets to his next gig. We sent him our condolences and some roses. (I think one of the State Cpos may have "confiscated" the bag of weed.)
I'm not a doctor. I don't even play one on TV. I'm a Deputy Medical Examiner. A Forensic Investigator. A felsher, a chi jao yi sheng, an unlettered country-doctor of the night watch, who has seen and knows far too much about decay.
See, the human body is like a big tallow andle, designed to burn down, down, down...We are all of us candles in a hurricane. Death has always been a part of my life.
When I was still in highschool here in Powersburg, Pennsylvania, I began working for the only funeral home in the West End, in all of Germantown; on Clarke Street at Main (blocks west of my sordid recently former room at the American Hotel.)
I was what the Russian owner Mr. Skolodny called a dvornik, a caretaker. I'd clean the place, paint and do scut-work everyone else was too busy to do. Eventually, I woke up one day and I was driving a six-foot-nine decedent from a death scene, after loading the big galoot into an antique wicker basket to put in the back of the hack.
The two snickering cops who helped me load the giant kept snickering until I noticed that the decedent had become aroused in death, and the fruit of that arousal was nearly reaching my shirt pocket. That was my first day as Vitaly Skolodny's apprentice.
I drove the cranky old bastard's hack to death scenes and trasported remains back to the office. For ten hours a pop, and crazy cash. Skolodny, the de facto CEO, was a tall horse of a man with a peeling skull-mullet haircut, Buddy Holly horn-rims, a booming voice, the best eyes and the best hands I've ever seen.
His gloomy, melancholic Russian-Gypsy temperament aside, Vitaly taught me more about the living than I ever wanted to know. He made me start studying old psych books, guys like Viktor Frankl and Carl Jung, before ever meeting with one bereaved family.
"In the mind, dead live on," he often told me. "We must give them good home, yes? Make them and us healthy, send them on their ways from our heads and hearts, or they stay and make the mess for all around."
The longer I live, the more I come to see the sense of that. While English might have been his second language, I have no trouble taking his meaning now...
Vitaly drilled me through AP Sciences at Lincoln High, and Core Bullshit Everything Else. By the time I got to Penn State Powersburg, his sons were doing most of the books and real work around the mortuary.
I got an Associate Degree in Mortuary Science, took the national boards and became a licensed funeral director and enbalmer just in time to place silver rubles on my teacher's eyes.
His death made me shrink back into the shell of a professional student as the path of least resistance up Croyon Mountain to St. Basil's to get my B.S. in more ways than one. While hip-deep in their excuse for a Bachelor's of Science track in any version, I got a call from down the Mountain (the operator had to patch him through), a radio vioce that rattled the stovepipe chimney to my dorm heater, or seemed to.
"Hey, there, uh, this is Rich Mallory. I'm the Co'ner up this way. Was it you called Sheila down't my office an' ast about some kinda... I dunno, ride-along, shadow, whatchamacallit... Anyway, that you?"
I breathed a huge sigh of relief. "Yes, Coroner Mallory. Yes, it is. Was. On a whim, like for school. I didn't think I'd hear from you so quicly." Something occurred to me. "Aren't you on duty?"
Rich's sigh was full of Marlboro smoke. "Kid, I am always on duty. You sounded like you got a bazillion questions, on my machine. Why don't you come town to 1145 Heaven Hill, soon's you can get out there. You got wheels, or you takin' the bus?"
"Moped," I admitted. It felt like coming out of the closet. Rich guffawed. "Good. Beat the bar traffic. They corner tight, you can take the back ways."
"What's at that address?" I asked him, having already written it down on my hand.
"My house," he answered simply enough. "Dinner. My good girl Maura put a roast on. She comes to see me, sometimes, from Columbia U up in the Big Apple..."
His delightful, sad-eyed daughter Maura was my real interviewer for the job in Rich Mallory's office I wound up with. That tow-headed oracle knew everything about thirty before she ever made twenty-two. I think Rich was unusually silent that night simply because he couldn't get a word in edgewise, with his 'good girl' grilling me about cadavers and car wrecks and jumpers, all the flashy bits of the job.
Maura was in Art School, though, so I didn't have to steer her away from this tough, thankless gig. But she was curious about her father's night work, and wanted to imagine him when he was young, before she happened.
"I want to know him like a man. Like someone I went to school with," she said, barely blinking. "To see how he grew a t what he does, I'd like to see how he teaches someone. Cool?"
"Cool. Rich, are all your kids this---"
Maura smirked. "So far as I know, One-Man Crime wave here stopped at one."
Rich just shrugged again.
Still fulfilled the definition, there, just fine." Here his voice went up and assumed a brogue I could only take to be him mimicking a relative, by Maura's cackle. "According to the letter of it, yeh bedamned little tom-boy caution joy-ridin' me Buick clear down to the Sportsman's Club, she did, Richard Cuchulain Mallory, at which time she did pop the top on a fire hydrant and take the arse out of the front window at Fedor's Beer & Lotto?"
His daugher blushed so prettily I could go to jail for even finishing the thought, if girls of any kind did it for me. "I was six, Dad, you always tell that story when someone new's up here. How about the time you got treed by that emu in Delphine Martel's back forty?" Once again, her smirk gave half a lie to her years. "Like the electrified barbed wire wasn't enough of a--"
Rich held up one callused finger. "Emus are cold, nasty critters. They bite like geese."
Maura scoffed. (I was enjoying all this more than I could communicate. Maybe it was just the wine. I'd had two glasses, not big ones, either, but in that house it seemed to go straight to my head.) "Yeah, if you starve it, like in some sort of...pen and feed it on human flesh..." Her voice assumed a mock Boris-Karloof-shouting-down-Peter-Lorre accent, then normal pitch and timbre. "Dad, just admit it. You never saw one before. It spooked you."
Rich's head swiveled toward me. "You passed my litmus test. That being--" He caught me before I could as. "My baby girl. If she don't like you..." They exchanged a look. "Maura's my canary."
I knew what that meant. That was miner talk, but from a few generations back, before the mines got mostly played out. Miners would bring a canary in a cage down with them, and if the bird got sick from the presence of methane, they'd go dig somewhere else until they could vent that tunnel, or if.
"What happens if she keels over?" I ventured, half-jokingly. Rich touched his duty sidearm, a vintage Colt .45 with a long barral, older than Dirty Harry Callahan's but no less flashy-looking. Still, it would make one hell of a new orifice.
"She won't. I'm going to start you at twenty grand a year--"
When my tongue wnet down my throat, I heard it go. My eyes teared up. No more one-room palace above the thumpasauruses at the American Hotel. After a few more years, no more student loans.
I lived in that back office. Seriously. I begged for the abuse. Just so I could sleep through, even on-call. There were nights when Rich pulled the extra Extra cot out of the broom closet. Sometims he slept on it. Sometims we slept on shifts.
I learned to appreciate real Kona coffe, then and good whisky after we went back into what he called "the clean world...None of your charcoal-filtered Jack Daniels piss water, I'm talkin' about oisadeagh, m'Hebrew cousin, the very Water of Life...Tullamore Dew. Balvenie Dew. And up..."
And on. And on, through the mellow Rembrandt light of that office at all hours, listening to Rich's endless line of sociopolitical musings and local tall tales. He needed another pair of hands back there in the new digs behind the Old County Courthouse.
More than that, though, he needed a second pair of eyes. He needed an on-call with no life. Cue me. I was glad to do it. I assisted Rich on just about every autopsy he ever performed.
In the Egyptian sense, I guess I was his nurse; gathering the blood, the piss, the vitreous humour, any humour at all, fair or foul, and evisceratig the decedents like hornless, hairless deer; hosing down the floors, bleaching everything that didn't move (except our lucky contestants, who were even luckier to be past caring about any mess...)
Rich hired me as his full-time deputy ME (that's Medical Examiner, to you) the year after I embalmed Vitaly.
Now people often ask me, "What's the weirdest case you ever had?"
My weirdest case just rolled in this Monday morning past, and creeped me out beyond the point of medically valid dialogue. Decedent was a white male, age 46, mild Down's Syndrome, chronic alcoholic, DOA from Cirrhosis at Mercy Hospital.
Honest John lived at the American Hotel, in one of the cheap basement rooms that always smell like the slop-sink from the bar on the main floor that empties into that room's radiator. Big surprise. (Even in death, I could smell the TB in his lungs, too, before the post-mortem. TB has a smell you never forget. You sensitize to it. At least I have.)
Across his back, an entire story was written in jailhouse ink, laboriously, with pictures here and there that faded and cyanosed with burst veins, the pictures becoming strange.
There wasn't much to the story. It was writ large, but disturbing nonetheless.
Rich and I stayed up late re-reading Honest John until our eyes were bloodshot. It wasn't that we couldn't believe someone had done this, but...
In the name of God, why would anyone sit still for it?
"Just like Cloyd Taylor," Rich mused, glancing apologetically at me.
"My great-grandpa Conor was Callaight County Sherriff around the time of the States War," he explained. "Told me about a chester... A pedophile... A goddamn baby-raper, who lived at the top of Grant Street Hill where the fire siren is now."
I tore myself away from the page of skin, the woad-blue scars marching like ants through the taffy of Time itself... "Th-that one hill that dips in the middle, and it's almost past vertical?"
Rich nodded. "Where the kids sledride at. He used to... Aw, it ain't worth it. He was sick in the head, though. Sherriff before G'-Grather took him away from his folks and put him with the Sisters. Locked the Dad up, didn't say why. Anyway, the apple didn't fall too far from the tree."
I waited. I'd lived here most of my life. I could smell the kerosene, in those little miniature woodcuts. I could hear the mob. I could relate. As always around The Boss, I kept listening.
"Some folks come and lynched him outta there when they found the Culvir boy out behind the schoolhouse near bled out. Cloyd Taylor never got no tombstone, G'-Grandfather just wrote about it in his own journal." He frowned. "Which I have. The pictures..."
I looked at the two or three woodblock cuts in skin, interspersed at various points in the narrative. The hill was big, and it dipped in the middle.
Some of the oak trees along the walk were the same ones I knew.
The configuration of stars above the huddle of torches was roughly congruent. Botticelli's Beautiful Boy, there, in the middle, wrenched my heart out of my chest with his encyclopedic wounds, the set of his head, the grim determination to cling to life, or at least drag himself somewhere to die.
Rich put down the camera, mustache bristling as if terribly startled. He ran a hand nervously through his black hair.
"Shiya, you know well's I do, it's... not done. The story just...leaves off, like in that Monty Python bit, 'cept nobody carved Aargh anywhere..."
Coroner Mallory snickered at his own joke. I wanted to laugh. Truly, but...
"It's not complete," I heard myself clarify. "It... goes with something else. There are letters that just stray off into nowhere, sentences unfinished, it... See, right here, 'He Couldn't Die...' -- 'He was trudging the last mile...' -- 'Allegheny Ridge...' "
I looked at my teacher, my friend, very carefully for a moment. A drop of sweat trickled just past my eye.
I could smell the sour toxins leaving Honest John, the nicotine coating his skin like a chitinous shell, orange-oil deodorizer in the air, Rich's spendy cologne. The clock on the wall ticked once. 23:58.
The mountain that was Rich Mallory cleared his throat.
"Why in the flip-flyin' fuck would this stumble-bum here have Cloyd Taylor's death recorded on his back like a damn journal entry... like G'-Grandfather's...Think we might see more of these, Deputy Dawg?"
"Call it a hunch." I bent down to the steel table again to read between the shading, the parts I couldn't even make up with all my experience in the business. The Rest of the Story, like Paul Harvey says on his radio show. The parts I'm apparently too thick to get.
We're all of us candles, guttering in the hurricane. This is my first automatically cold, insoluble case. My first "X-File", only I'd gladly hand this off to the Smoking Dude in a heartbeat.
So far, Smoking Dude hasn't called. I hold my breath, do my work and wait for the next chapter to die.
[END RECORDING]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Mercury Retrograde Press.
Copyright © 2009 by Edward Morris
First Electronic Edition—published 2009
ISBN 978-0-9819882-9-0