The driver—a fifty-something guy named Fred Dobbs (I’m not kidding; just like the character Bogart played in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, swear to God), a man built like a walk-in freezer who was also a twenty-two-year veteran driver for the County Coroner’s Office—nodded his head and sighed as if empathizing, though he was trying hard to conceal a grin. “Yeah, whenever we get a call like this one—y’know, when the folks have been dead a day or two—sometimes you’re gonna find that the bodies have been laying in the bed or on the floor, and if the weather’s all hot and humid like it’s been and they ain’t got air-conditioning, the internal gasses build up a whole lot faster and then things start to strain and tear and rupture and the bodies, well…sometimes they leak when you move ‘em.” He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again his tone was much lighter, as if telling a joke: “I once had so much trouble trying to get this one old gal out of her bed—her bedsores were so bad that I thought her skin was gonna peel off and dump her guts right on my shoes—I finally just had to wrap her up in the sheets she’d died in before transferring her to the bag. If it’s bad, then we let the wizards in the doc’s office do the peeling. Our job is to just get in there and remove the bodies.”
“Which sometimes leak.”
Another nod: the teacher pleased that the student wasn’t as dim as he’d feared. “I’m not trying to make you sick or nothing, understand, but I figured maybe you ought to prepare yourself for the possibility.” He shrugged, honked the horn for reasons I‘d never know at someone or something I couldn’t see, then removed one of his hands from the steering wheel and flexed his fingers, the bones crackling like dry twigs on a campfire.
I reached out to turn down the radio; the news had been talking about a massive (what they called “…spectacular”) eight-car accident in Columbus on the I-71 loop last night that so far had left five people dead. The radio station had someone broadcasting live from the scene which still hadn’t been cleared. It appeared the accident had been caused when someone driving a Hummer cut across all four lanes without signaling and slammed into a Ford Gargantua or some other four-wheeled yuppie tank that in turn hit a semi...and I didn’t want to hear about it. There’s only so much death and destruction I can take when the sun is shining and there’s still the possibility of having a nice day.
“‘Course, now,” said Dobbs, “if the bodies’re on a rug or carpeting, that makes it a bit easier in some ways. If they’re leaking all over a rug, we just roll ‘em up in it and save the county the cost of a bag.”
“And if they’ve leaked onto the carpeting?” Pause for a moment and consider: how many people get to start their workday with conversations like this? Was I the luckiest guy on the planet, or what?
“Then we haul out the carpet cutters and…” He mimed scissoring around a body. “But then you’ve got the added problem of some extra weight if they’ve really been leaking, and especially if it’s shag carpeting.”
I shook my head. “Damn the shag carpeting!”
“Oh, you got that right. Me, I think that shit makes any room look like something that belongs in a porno movie—not that I’ve seen all that many pornos, you understand, it’s just there’s something kinda…I dunno…sleazy and tacky about it.”
Gas-ruptured bodies and home decorating tips. With lunch still hours away. My life was an embarrassment of blessings.
I looked in the back of the wagon where a crate hand-labeled Retrieval Gear sat with its unlocked lid bouncing up and down every time we drove over a pot-hole. Symbolic thoughts of Pandora’s Box notwithstanding, the sight gave me the creeps, knowing as I did what was inside.
“Do you think we’ll have to use any of the science-fiction paraphernalia?”
Dobbs seriously considered this; I knew he was considering it seriously because the right side of his face knotted up as if he were having a stroke. “Hard to say. I kinda like putting on them HazMat suits myself. Scares the hell out of people and they keep outta your way. I used to feel silly wearing that stuff until the doc explained to me that dead, leaking bodies produce their own kind of toxic waste.” He looked at me and, for the first time that morning, outright smiled; there was a lot of genuine kindness it. “Don’t you worry none. If it’s bad, I’ll walk you through it. I know this ain’t exactly what you had in mind, and I may act like a royal horse’s ass most of the time—at least according to anyone who’s known me for more than twenty minutes—but I got sympathy.”
“You’ve had assistants like me before?”
He barked a loud laugh. “Hell, buddy, how do you think I got started on this job?” “You’re kidding?” “If I was kidding, don’t you think I’d try to come up with something funnier than that?” “Good point.”
He gave a short, sharp nod. “They got me same way as you. Had one too many before hitting the road one night and got stopped by Johnny Law. Since I’d drove an ambulance in Vietnam, judge figured that me and the meat wagon was a perfect community-service match.” He shrugged. “When my CS period was done, they offered me a permanent job.” He looked at me. “I actually kinda like it. Dead folks’re quiet, and I treat them with respect, even when I gotta roll ‘em up in sheets or rugs.”
“Or shag carpeting.”
He almost grinned. “I don’t make no jokes when I’m taking care of them. The doc likes that, likes my attitude, which is why I can get away with some of the shit that I pull, and whenever the city does its budget-cut dance, like they done here last quarter, I don’t have to worry about being left out of work.”
“That explains why I wasn’t given a choice in the matter.” My lawyer had told me that the courts try to match your own individual abilities to a county department where those abilities could best be used, which is why I’d expected to find myself cleaning offices—I’m a crew manager with a local janitorial company—but Judge Walter Banks was in a bad mood, evidently being pressured to assign more defendants to CS duty (damn the budget cuts!), and said he’d had his fill of “…people who think they’ve got the constitution of an ox so they don’t think twice about getting behind the wheel while under the influence…” and slapped me with both a five hundred dollar fine and one hundred hours of community service. My lawyer argued that, by law, I was to be given a choice of assignments; Judge Banks pointed out that the matter of being offered a choice was up to the discretion of the bench, and his particular bench felt that I damned well ought to be exposed to the dead in order to remind me of what could have happened had I hit a pedestrian or another car.
So I was assigned to the budget-strapped County Coroner’s Office. As Fred Dobbs’ assistant. In the passenger seat of the meat wagon. Talk about your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
“By the way,” I said, “I wasn’t drunk.”
“Of course you weren’t. And every man on Death Row is innocent.”
“I’m not trying to say I didn’t deserve my fine and the rest of it, I just want it made clear that I wasn’t drunk.”
“But you were half-snowed on Demerol.” “I’d gotten slammed with a migraine, I went to the ER, they gave me a shot—” “—and probably told you not to drive yourself home, isn’t that right?” I shrugged. “I thought I could make it home before the stuff really kicked in.” “Appears you were mistaken.”