Читать книгу Second Life - Paul Griner - Страница 10
ОглавлениеI wiped down the embalming table with a sponge first, so nothing splattered, then bleached it and hosed it off, and all the loosened epidermis and coagulated embalming fluid sluiced down the drain, leaving the nicked and dented table shiny and ready for the next body. I poured the drain and tissue buckets into the proper biohazard trash cans, sealed them, swapped the used scalpel blade out with the Qlicksmart remover and slipped it into the sharps container, then snapped off and discarded my latex gloves. Since I’d already slid the body with the McDonald’s tattoo back in the cooler, I was done.
Done with the easy part, anyway. On the ninety-minute drive to Danville, past rolling hills planted with tall green corn and stubby yellow-green tobacco, past church after church after church interspersed with distilleries, past horse farms marked by miles of black running-board fences and cattle farms where Black Angus and bone-white cows clustered by the water troughs in the blazing sun, I’d thought incessantly about Lia and how desperate I was to find her. I had plenty of time, the drive slower than normal because farmers were going to their fields on their tractors and I was stuck in a long line of pickups behind them. We had Lia’s name; we didn’t have her corpse. And of course that made me think of McDonald’s, a corpse we had in Danville without a name. She was well preserved, if a bit dry after five months in the cooler—no amount of Biostat could change that—yet we still had no idea who she was. McDonald’s was about my age, about Lia’s, and my boss Buddy had said after we’d had her for about a month that she could be my sister.
Gross, Buddy, I’d said. That’s awful.
I don’t mean it that way, he said, but you sure you don’t have a missing long-lost relative? Same height, same hair, same facial features, mostly. And with your mother gone, you’re both orphans now. Unlike you, though, maybe she was a woods colt. He’d had to explain to me that that was Kentucky slang for illegitimate.
I stood a crate next to the chute window and tilted my head up, breathed deeply, forcing the rank chemical scent from my nostrils. Car wheels, pavement, a dog lifting its leg. Such was the daily view from our belowground lair in the Danville coroner’s office, which was in even worse shape than the morgue at University Hospital. At least that had been updated in the past fifty years.
When I closed my eyes, I saw the body of McDonald’s again, mostly her right breast with the McDonald’s logo tattooed across it, her singular identifying mark, the M of the golden arches curling around her nipple (tiny and light, so no children), the remaining smaller letters marching down her ample breast toward her sternum. An unusual tattoo, though it hadn’t helped identify her. She was a Jane Doe, pitched in a drainage ditch off Route 127, the back of her head crushed. No sexual assault but all her clothes gone, all her ID too, so aside from the tattoo we had nothing.
Twenty-five, Buddy had said the day of her autopsy, before we’d opened her up to check her cranial plates, twenty-eight tops, while I guessed closer to midthirties.
Buddy had tapped a pencil against his lower teeth, mulling. You think? he said and straightened, hands pressed to his sore lower back. Why?
Her skin. I pointed to the darkened blotches of forgotten sunburns on the upper slopes of her breasts, then the smaller dark spots on her lip and forehead.
Those sunburns too? he asked.
Probably estrogen fluctuations, I said. They start around thirty.
He’d glanced at my forehead, visible above my mask, and I’d had to resist the urge to shake my bangs free.
All right, he’d said, penciling in thirty-five. You win again. Before I even had the chance to think it, he said, Like always.
Which was why he was a good coroner; he listened and learned. I liked those moments, teaching Buddy, the rare moments of communion we had, working on a body. And, of course, sometimes he taught me.
But that was about as far as we got with McDonald’s. No missing woman was known to have a McDonald’s tattoo, and dental records drew a blank. She had immaculate fingernails, no bruises or needle tracks, was tanned and ridiculously fit, so she hadn’t been homeless. Her liver was free of hepatitis and cirrhosis so she hadn’t been an alcoholic, and her organs were drug free. All of that meant that she wasn’t a suicide or an accidental death, so we’d classified her as a homicide, and all of that should have meant that someone, somewhere, was missing her. But no one had come forward, and if they didn’t soon, we’d run out of time; by law, we weren’t allowed to keep the body beyond six months—even with a homicide—and we were at five-plus now. She would be the first body we’d have had to dispose of ourselves, and I guessed Buddy didn’t want to have to deal with body brokers. Who could blame him?
Missing Lia, frustrated, I’d taken McDonald’s out again, thinking we might have skipped over something important, but nothing was there, nothing at all except the tattoo, which had made me think of Lia, the twin fleurs-de-lis we’d had inked on the undersides of opposite wrists the day we’d turned eighteen. In celebration, but also false bravado, growing out of our foolish disappointment when both our breasts turned out to be too large for champagne coupes, which we’d read on a women’s blog was the perfect size. If we weren’t perfect, we decided, we could at least be distinctive.
From the open chute window an ambulance beeped as it slipped into reverse, meaning another body was on its way, and I made sure nothing was obstructing the slide. Sometimes the maintenance engineers leaned giant rolls of paper against it or piled up sawhorses, thinking it funny to make a mess for us since, like most old morgues, Danville’s was in a subbasement—so bodies wouldn’t putrefy—a holdover from the time before air conditioning. With the elevator out, ambulance drivers used the coal chute to save their backs, dropping them down without warning. Sometimes in the morning when I opened the office, if there’d been an accident on one of the parkways, I’d find bodies stacked on top of one another like pickup sticks. As long as the bodies were in body bags, bored drivers treated them like toys.
The body slithered down the chute in its black bag, and as I was wrestling it to the dolly, Buddy came down the long hallway from Maintenance, singing, off-key as always. That meant he was angry, which made me clumsy, and I nearly dropped the bag. Just before the door swung open I wedged my shoulder under the body and flipped it back onto the chute.
Wait, Buddy said. He stopped by the long row of nails sticking out from the wall at head height and pulled down his white lab coat. Both of us had cut our heads on the nails and learned to avoid them.
It’s all right, I said, sweating, my gloves slippery. I got it.
I wanted to show I was trying, I always wanted to, since I was lucky to have any job at all, luckier still not be in prison. To get probation I’d had to have a job, yet getting a job was nearly impossible in the aftermath of being fired as a corpse wrangler from CGI, given the case’s publicity; restaurants I’d once waitressed for wouldn’t hire me as a dishwasher. Yet Buddy had hired me with few questions, which had been a double blessing; because it was a job, and because working in a morgue was one of the only things I was good at.
Now he shrugged his coat on and said, No, I’m not worried about that guy, and he began spooling and unspooling his purple yo-yo. We’ve got something else.
He slapped a file down on his desk, and I realized he wasn’t angry with me, which allowed me to breathe out.
McDonald’s, he said. I see you already had her out. Weird. He flipped to a picture of McDonald’s with paper bags over her hands, held in place by rubber bands, the way bodies usually arrived at a morgue. Suicide, he said. Or an accident.
Not possible, I said.
Oh really? His left eyebrow, the white one, rose. Why?
Because no one who took so much care of herself commits suicide.
He stopped spinning the yo-yo and I realized what he was thinking: no way he could use that as scientific evidence, even if he knew I was right.
Why is this coming up now? I asked.
The mayor’s term is nearly up. He has to start running for office again in a couple of weeks. If she’s a homicide, the murder rate rose on his watch.
Why do you care? If he loses, let the new mayor deal with it.
Harold loses, he writes letters to his successor, with recommendations whether or not my assistant should be retained. He’ll get to me by cutting you.
I ignored my buzzing phone. Damn, I said, meaning, I can’t lose my job.
Exactly, Buddy said. And McDonald’s is the only case that can be reclassified.
What about this one? I rested my hand on the black bag’s cool plastic zipper.
Car accident. Only question is whether he had a heart attack first.
I thought, If McDonald’s turns accident or suicide, cops won’t search out her family. They wanted to solve a murder, even a distant one. Changing her designation for the sake of covering the mayor’s ass would be like killing her twice.
You didn’t find anything? Buddy asked. Just now, when you had her out? The yo-yo spun from his palm to the floor and back in a purple blur.
No, I said, shaking my head. Not a thing.
Well, we’ll look through other files from this year, he said and caught the yo-yo and pocketed it. His sudden stillness seemed like a type of noise and Buddy seemed to notice it too; his hand went into his baggy pocket to retrieve the yo-yo, and I held my breath, thinking he might cut himself. Besides his yo-yos Buddy kept food in there and a pocketknife and sometimes an uncapped scalpel, but his hand emerged unscathed, gripping a different yo-yo: mint green with a banana-yellow rim.
I don’t have much hope about those other files, Buddy said, walking the dog with the yo-yo, studying its progress across the floor. People with the back of their heads blown off, a man stabbed fifty-three times by his wife. I don’t see how we could change any of those.
Beside McDonald’s file was an issue of Mortuary Gazette. Buddy picked it up and waved it, saying, I read in here how down in New Orleans they found a man with his hands bound behind him and two gunshot wounds to the back of his skull, and they still called it a suicide. But you know what? He tossed the journal aside, making McDonald’s file flop open; her, during her autopsy. He closed it. We don’t live in Louisiana. And I don’t want to end up the subject of some expose.
That was a great fear, and one I understood all too well, having been the subject of one myself. Yet it hadn’t deterred me from being hired, had perhaps even spurred it. I’d been dealing with bodies for fifteen years when Buddy beat out his only challenger for the job of Danville coroner, a female doctor, the sheriff’s cousin. Buddy, Danville born and bred, had easily beaten the outsider. And I’d been out of work for three weeks when he started the job.
Buddy was a popular realtor before his election—everyone in town knew him—and he still kept up with real estate at work; the MLS site on the computer, flyers about open houses, etc. On really slow days he’d have me watch the place while he went out to show houses. He’d run for the coroner’s job on a bet, he told me, had been surprised by winning, and had returned from his week-long training course, required of all non-MD coroners by the state, to one of the worst cases I’d ever seen, Danville’s biggest disaster in decades. Nothing in his lectures and quizzes had prepared him for it, he told me over the phone, and he hoped to God that I could help him out.
An illegal fireworks factory had blown up downtown, destroying six buildings and killing nine people. Windows shattered five miles away. The day I interviewed was the morning before the explosion; I’d left thinking I didn’t have a chance, but the next morning he called me at seven AM. If I could get to work within two hours, I had a job. I was there in seventy-five minutes.
We recovered one hand two miles from the blast, still in its yellow work glove and holding a manila envelope, though we never did locate the arm that went with it. Limbs and torsos had been blown everywhere, one headless body cut clean in half, blue intestines curling from the gaping hole, while two blackened heads rested in a bush, face to face as if they were kissing. Buddy threw up twice at the site, several more times back at the morgue.
The sheriff, still angry about his sister losing, had made things miserable for Buddy—A fucking realtor as coroner, he said—but I’d helped Buddy through it, instructing him to see the body parts as puzzle clues, as impersonal as the bags of gunpowder. Wires from a chest meant a pacemaker, metal rods in a leg indicated surgery. We started piecing people together from their medical histories and, when the sheriff ragged us for taking so long, I told him it wouldn’t ever have happened if he’d been doing his job: the factory had been in a boarded-up building five blocks from city hall. He backed off and bit by bit we stitched the bodies back together as best we could, nine bodies from thirty-seven body parts, having to guess on only a few.
Nothing else was ever as gruesome, not the occasional floaters from the Kentucky River, not the decomposing old folks who’d baked when their AC cut out during heat waves and the electrical outages that followed thunderstorms, ripening as no one had checked on them for days, and after we were all done Buddy repaid me by never once indicating he thought less of me for what I’d been involved in. Once, though, after reading a newspaper report about yet another budget cut for the coroner’s office, he’d asked me how the body parts market worked. I’d filled him in, but the next day he’d told me to forget he asked, and I had, though I’d never been able to forgive myself for having polluted him. My work as a diener at University Hospital had introduced me to the trade, and, after college—where my communications degree hadn’t produced any job offers—I realized body brokering was more lucrative, and, as simple as that, I’d disappeared down the rabbit hole. Part of me was probably wishing Buddy would do the same thing—the guilt of others might lessen my own—but most of me was glad he hadn’t.
All morning after his announcement about McDonald’s, I went about my chores quietly, chafing at what we were being asked to do, vexed that I couldn’t get away to track down Lia. Lunch, I told myself. At lunch I’d ask Buddy for the afternoon off, and in the meantime I kept quiet, helping Buddy as I could.
He worked on the new guy without speaking, a bad sign, and leaving off the music of Arvo Pärt, a worse one. Every time he played him, it meant Buddy was happy.
I took photos of the corpse fully clothed, and then photos of him nude and unwashed. Before we washed him and took the last set of whole-body photos, Buddy turned on country music, music that made him angry, so I knew he’d made up his mind: McDonald’s was going to be reclassified. The music was a kind of scourge, to punish himself for caving.
Putting the bodies back together years before had been hard, awful work over long days and longer nights, and the toll on Buddy had been ferocious. Bags grew under his once luminous brown eyes, filled with fluid, grew darker, turned blue and then black, as if they’d been tattooed, as if they were paved. They’d never disappeared and he seemed to have aged a decade a day. But if it was shocking, it was also why I had a job now and why I knew what was coming, my stomach growing heavier throughout the morning, filling with clay at the thought of it, with dread. I was going to be the one to reclassify McDonald’s.
It would be his signature on the report—it had to be, to be official—but I’d do the actual typing, about which he was superstitious. If you wrote it, it was yours, the actions, the meanings, the morals. He’d been protective of McDonald’s from the start, and one night, still going over the files as I left, he sat bent over the desk, not looking up from paperwork so white in the pool of light it glowed. As I reached the door, he said, When my sister died, she was around this age. We never found out why.
For all of his loquaciousness it was one of the few personal things he’d ever told me, though it took me a moment to realize it. So I would type in the changes, hating to do it to McDonald’s but telling myself that of course she’d never know. I wouldn’t be hurting her, not in a way that would matter to her, at least, and I’d be doing it for Buddy and, more selfishly, for me. Who knew when having him owe me again would come in handy?
I wanted to slice my palm with a scalpel for thinking that way, but I knew that wouldn’t stop me. Finding Lia was too important to allow time for nobler sentiments. After all, I’d been the one who put all those things in motion years before, my fault, my fault, my fault, something I believed and told myself so often it had become my mantra, something I hummed in the shower or while chopping vegetables for yet another homemade soup—I didn’t go out much anymore—or sitting bored at a stoplight, waiting for it to change. And often, peculiarly, the chanting was in Lia’s voice.
Buddy rallied when checking the new body for distinguishing marks. Vietnam, he said, running his hands over the man’s puckered left thigh. His wallet had revealed him to be a veteran, but it was the scars Buddy was looking at, glossy, raspberry-colored, wrinkled indentations on both thighs, trailing down the left shin like an archipelago.
Land mine. Exactly how I got my scar, Buddy said, referring to his thigh. I’d seen it only once, when he came directly from a pool party to collect and autopsy a cadaver found in the woods.
It was May, and we’d driven out to Dreaming Creek to fetch the body. Buddy had told me to bring water. As we made our way down through the wooded hills toward the burbling creek on an old game trace and I started coughing, I knew why: a strong wind moving through the leaves with a sound like rain, blowing a mist of lime-green pollen from the trees, which clogged my nose and throat.
Sycamore and oak, Buddy said, waiting in the dappled light as I drank. They like creek beds.
I tried to talk but my throat was too sore, so I took in the landscape instead, the thickly treed hills dotted with pink and white dogwoods still blossoming though the canopy overhead had begun to leaf in, the rarer but more spectacular red-buds, with their masses of black raspberry–colored blooms, and the creamy white magnolia flowers, as big as owls. If you were going to die, I thought, it was a beautiful spot to do it.
A dozen people clustered by the creek. I wanted to push ahead because they might be contaminating a crime scene, but Buddy held me back with an extended arm.
Wait, he said. No crime. It’s a drowning. That’s why there’s no police.
How do you know that? I croaked.
They told me.
They? The men were in brown short-sleeve shirts buttoned to the neck, the women in long, simple burgundy dresses. They looked like few people we ever saw in Danville; maybe the Mennonite honey sellers who set up occasional Saturday farmers’ markets in a deserted bank parking lot.
Kin, Buddy said. When I looked at him he shrugged and said, Distant. The only kind I have left. That’s how I knew to come.
A woman knelt beside the drowned man, who’d been dragged from the clear shallow water and lay face down on the muddy bank. Two men stood in the creek, on limestone slabs so smooth they looked placed, and the woman was holding a baby with a port-wine stain covering half its face. She took the dead man’s hand and touched it to the birthmark.
Okay, Buddy said, dropping his arm. He’s ours now.
What was that about? I asked.
They think it’ll make the birthmark disappear. He’s the baby’s father.
Before attending to the body, Buddy shook everyone’s hands, even the women’s, so I did the same. The men helped us bag and carry out the corpse, but even so it was getting dark as we turned to make our way back up the hills, which seemed twice as steep now, twice as slippery; the men carrying the body had to stop every ten yards to let Buddy and me catch up. The women went ahead through the trees with flashlights, singing through the dusk, something that surprised me by sounding celebratory. A psalm, I guessed; I was too shy to ask which one. The nesting cardinals in the darkening trees began to sing and whistle too, as if in response, with their clear, piercing calls: what cheer, what cheer, what cheer, wheat wheat wheat.
Now, Buddy said, if anyone tries to take out those leg bones, they’d better be careful.
I knew what he meant; the metal splinters could cut badly. Had, many times, on careless bone removers, myself included the first time I’d come across one, a WWII vet. All kinds of things got blown into legs in accidents and times of war; with road rash you always looked for gravel, but with war injuries the subsequent gifts were mysteries. Watch sprockets and gears or a bit of a photograph, a Gillette razor blade, the name still clearly written after fifty years, on one vet three embedded molars, as if some enemy had bitten down on him in his final agony. But Buddy fell quiet after discussing this guy’s wounds, though he did crank the country music up to deafening levels when he began handing me the internal organs to weigh.
At eleven—the Episcopal church bells sounding through our open window—Buddy finished the last bit of sewing on the heart attack, snipped the thread, and tossed the needle in the biohazard bin. The king is dead, long live the king, he said, the way he ended all autopsies and obituaries. I’d always meant to ask him where his little Britishisms came from, but now didn’t seem the time.
He peeled off his gloves and said, About McDonald’s, she had no defensive wounds.
So it’s an accident, right? I said.
He opened her file, noticed a chunk of concrete in a picture. That could be blood, right? He laid his finger on a dark stain covering one corner. Could be what she fell back against. Maybe it was that weird lunch she had.
He’d commented on her stomach contents during her autopsy—pomegranate and pears. Now he said, Maybe she was dizzy from lack of protein.
A chunk of concrete four feet from her body; how could she have fallen against that, Buddy? But I already knew she was going to be an accident. Okay, I said. I’ll make the switch, after I clean up here.
Good, he said. I’m going to take an early lunch. Make sure you send an amended report out to all the police departments we initially contacted, telling them they no longer have to worry about a murderer on the loose.
Buddy? I said, before he left the room. Can I have the afternoon off?
His shoulders stiffened, but I wasn’t worried he’d say no. I’d heard him talking to my PO earlier in the morning, as he did daily, confirming I was at work, and though she could drop in at any point unannounced, she wasn’t likely to drive the ninety miles from Louisville to Danville. Who could blame her? She’d gone to the University of Louisville, and the only flags that outnumbered the blue University of Kentucky’s on the drive down were Confederate ones, both of which infuriated her. But even if she did, Buddy could say I was running errands for the morgue, which would be enough to keep me from violating my probation and ending up in prison. Or so I hoped.
It’s something personal, I said. Something important. I couldn’t tell him what because the PO often asked if I was breaking any rules: dealing with corpse wranglers; marketing tendons or heart valves; contacting medical researchers; visiting morgues or funeral parlors. And I knew Buddy: if I told him the truth, he’d feel obligated to pass it on. Promises aren’t piecrusts, he’d once said. They’re not meant to be broken.
He seemed to understand that and nodded again, rubbing the lemon-scented disinfectant into his hands. Don’t do anything stupid, he said, and pointed at me with glistening fingers, which made me shiver.
Too late, I thought. But I said, No, of course I won’t. I’ve already done enough stupid things to last a lifetime. And Buddy, I said, just as he reached the door. Keep McDonald’s around for a bit, okay? Now that we’re going to reclassify her, maybe something unexpected will come up. It always happens that way.
He held up two fingers, which for a bizarre moment I thought was a victory sign. Then he said, We’ve only got two weeks, but I will. His eyes glistened, though I only realized it when he wiped one with his shirtsleeve.
He said, I’d keep her forever, if we could. Until we knew.
I realized then that he had the sickness, this attachment to the dead. For me it had been sheer numbers that did away with it, body after body after body, so that they blurred together into a river of death and I became merely another set of hands they passed through on their way to their final, distant shores. That wouldn’t happen here, couldn’t; Danville simply wasn’t big enough. It wasn’t all bad—a reverence for the dead was something I’d parted with too easily, and in McDonald’s case I was beginning to feel some of the same things as Buddy—yet it could lead someone to concentrate on the dead at the expense of the living. And once that happened, there seemed almost no way to come back.
After he left, I searched through McDonald’s file one more time, stopping at the details of all the women she might have been—their names, their birthdates and Social Security numbers, a bit of their family histories. In my worst moments, when the scandal seemed like it would never end, I’d wished that I could die and come back as one of them, or take one of their identities and move on. Once I’d said as much to Buddy.
You couldn’t, he’d said. Wouldn’t be right.
I know, I said. It’s not something I’d actually do. Just something I wish I could. And really, it’s not that I wished I were dead. Just that I could have a clean slate. Without that, it seems like I’m always going to be running from my past.
That’s not what I meant, he said. It’s not that you need to suffer for your sins, but that sooner or later someone might find you out. You’d use their Social Security number to get a job, and a cop or a PI would track you down because the parents were still hoping you were alive. It would hurt them, you know?
I could always use Carmine, I said. And in truth, I’d had a fake ID made up for myself in that name, just in case.
He gave a bitter smile. Sure.
Carmine Semple was an orphan and a missing person, but no one was really looking for her. Her name had come to us from the Georgia state police when we were first trying to uncover McDonald’s identity; she’d gone missing from an Atlanta waitressing job and from her still-furnished apartment, and the Georgia police hoped we might solve their case, one they left open but didn’t seem to find particularly troubling. Because Carmine Semple was known to have a peculiar tattoo (though exactly of what was unknown), when we learned of her, Buddy hoped we’d finally found our woman, that he could at last give McDonald’s some closure. Even if she had no family, she could have a name, a burial, a headstone. But no luck, since dental records and DNA from Carmine didn’t match with McDonald’s, no luck, and now we were going to make it worse by reclassifying McDonald’s as an accidental death—yet another discarded dead woman, left to fend for herself in the next world as she probably had done in this one.
I amended her report on both the computer and the page, as Buddy had asked, reclassifying her death as accidental, wrote a group e-mail to local and regional police departments explaining our reasoning, and sat for a good ten minutes deciding whether or not to hit Send. A train whistled mournfully outside of town, a car honked nearby, crickets chorused in the heat. Finally, I couldn’t do it. This was the first time I’d ever gone against Buddy’s wishes, but I felt so dirty reclassifying her in the morgue that I couldn’t bring myself to send her changed status out into the world. It’s all right, I told myself, deleting the email and shutting off the computer. There’ll be time enough for that in the weeks to come.
It was absurd and wrong and irrational, yet before I put McDonald’s file away, feeling that something had changed, that now that we’d rechristened her as a newly minted accidental death long after we’d swapped her blood for formaldehyde, now that her paperwork would be filed away and forgotten, I wanted some tangible link to her past. So I took out the sheet with the names and vital information for all the women she could have been, should have been, and folded it into squares and stuffed it in my purse. Finally, as old-timers in the country around here sometimes did, I picked the shiniest quarter from the change clustered in the bottom of the bag and tucked it under McDonald’s tongue.
It was supposed to bring luck to the dead, and lord knows McDonald’s needed it. If I weren’t so superstitious, I’d have tucked one in my mouth too.
