Dan Harris was a freshman at Penn, a biology major, and he came from Akron. His girlfriend, Carol, was a Canadian medical student, currently doing an internship in London. The two had met at a science fair in Saskatchewan three years before and were desperately in love. He had vowed to see her in London at Christmas, but to buy a ticket he needed a good, well-paying job. Then there had been the ad in the Gazette: “Hospital worker wanted, Westmoreland County Hospital, Greensburg. Applicants with strong constitution and rudimentary anatomical skills preferred. Piecework rates. Write John Utton, Box 545.”
Harris had been the only serious applicant. Utton said he had managed to screen out all the necrophiliacs over the phone. He had liked Harris’s remark that “humans are just like big dogfish, really — or rabbits, I guess,” and reckoned he would have no problem with the work required in the autopsy lab around the back of the county morgue. The pay, he told Harris, was twenty bucks a body. Prep them for the autopsy, clean them up afterwards, stitch them up, and hand them over to the funeral home. Strong stomach needed, but other than that, good money.
“Only don’t make a career out of it,” said Utton, looking more than usually lugubrious. “Else you’ll end up looking like me.” And he gave the kind of laugh you’d expect from a Charles Addams cartoon.
The first days on the job, in early November, had been easy enough. Yes, Harris had gagged on his first corpse, but Utton had been there, and had showed him that by smoking a small cigar he could ward off the effects of the formalin and the other less savory aromas of the morgue. And the chief mortician, a big German woman with the name Fleischaker, who everyone not surprisingly called Flesh Hacker, was a jolly woman without the slightest tendency to the macabre. She was actually interested in the biology of death, and moreover had a cousin at the University of Montana who was writing a Ph.D. thesis on a little-known branch of the rhythmic sciences coming to be known as Thanatomusicology. “Muzak to Die By,” Utton called it until he saw the cousin concerned and was astonished by her beauty and her brains and began to take all of her utterances with total seriousness.
It was sometime during his second week at work, the first week of November, that Sergeant Henry Allen presented himself, at horizontal attention, for Dan Harris’s services. The toe poking from beneath the shroud had a small label on it, written by the consulting physician. “Marrow test required,” it said. “Suspected leukemic disorder.” At the head of the trolley was the patient’s name, sex, age, and date of death: H. D. Allen, it said. Male, 76. 11/4/92. To be fair, Harris didn’t remember all of this, but he did remember the surname, and the request from the doctor. The standard operating procedure required that he remove a femur and send it up to the pathology laboratory. They would perform the necessary tests later that day and determine — Harris guessed the insurance had an interest; or perhaps it was just a Pennsylvania statistical requirement — if Mr. Allen had died of leukemia or from something else, like weariness, or old age.
It was simple enough work, preparing a body for Dr. Fleischaker’s explorations. A long incision on the ventral side, removal of the digestive tract, opening of the brain pan — well, for the squeamish, perhaps not too graphic at this point. Not, in any case, that work on the torso or the cranium is particularly relevant to this story. Nor is it relevant to mention the fact that Harris routinely removed the patients’ pituitary glands to send them off — at a bounty of $100 for a tub of ten — to a friend of his at Case Western Reserve who was doing some dark work on male growth hormone, which the innocent-looking little pituitary manufactured.
The relevant moment on this particular day came when Dan Harris took out the femur. He broke it away from the pelvis and the tibia and fibula and pulled it away, tearing the great wads of connective tissues that make the thigh so bulky a part of the body. Mr. Allen’s muscles were somewhat wasted, as you’d expect of a man of seventy-six, but it was still something of a tussle to get his thighbone out, after which he scrubbed it clean and put it in a Ziploc bag for the folks upstairs.
Dr. Fleischaker came and did her thing, smoking and grunting as she inspected all the viscera. Then, with a Wagnerian flourish, she tore off her green rubber apron and said: “Lunchtime. Sew the old man up, will you? Tate’s are taking him off. They need him by two.”
Henredon Drive was only ten minutes away, and the man from Tate’s Funeral Parlor dropped in all the time, picking up customers, as he called them, in his black Lincoln hearse. He was called Millinship, and he was tiresome, Dan thought — always wanting the specks of dried blood wiped off the faces, always wanting the eyes to match even if the lids were closed.
“I know you guys take them,” he said. “And I really don’t care what little side orders you get from all those smart-ass university pals of yours. But you put glass ones in their place and you make darned sure they’re the right color, okay? Otherwise I spill the beans. You got it?”
It was in anticipation of Millinship’s hostility that Harris knew he had to put something in Allen’s leg. In all other respects the body was now fine: a decent blanket stitch had closed all the wounds. The eyes had been left untouched. The hair was combed neatly over the back of the head. The hands had been scrubbed. But the leg — now that the femur was gone, it had nothing supportive in it between hip and knee. It was a bit of an embarrassment. It kept dropping off the side of the table as Dan worked tidying up the rest of Mr. Allen’s appearance.
Millinship would never accept it, that was for sure. He would be truculent about it, and if he was in a foul temper again he would probably threaten to tell everyone about the eye scam, and the pituitary scam, and one or two other little favors that Harris had been asked to perform for his friends back at school. So he had to finish Mr. Allen off and leave him in good condition, acceptable to Tate’s. He had to stiffen up that leg. But what, pray, to use?
It was cold outside, the beginning of an easterly wind whipping the garbage around in the yard. There would be snow by tomorrow, Harris told himself. But then as he mouthed to himself, “It’s an ill wind...,” so, suddenly, a gust blew away a sheet of cardboard to reveal a short length of drainpipe, lying unwanted on the ground. The pipe, galvanized steel by the look of it, was eleven inches long, two inches in diameter, and had a small angled screw-end to it. It must have weighed five or six pounds, heavier than he would have liked. But in all other ways it looked perfect.
He brought it back out of the cold and placed it against the great wound on Allen’s thigh. It was a bit too long. He found a bone saw and hacked away for ten minutes or so, not very efficiently, but eventually reducing the pipe by an inch. He jammed the milled end into the concavity of the hip joint and then, straining against the old muscles of the infantryman’s leg, pushed the other end against the knee joint.
At first it refused to go in. He pressed and pushed, twisting this way and that until suddenly, with a loud click, the pipe went home. The lower leg shot out like an arrow, the foot straightening up so hard that the hospital slipper that had been half tied to it shot off and landed near the sink. Harris gave a cheer. Perfect, he said to himself, and hurriedly blanket-stitched the wound closed, each turn of the thread removing the dull grey gleam of steel from human sight. There must’ve been five pounds of iron in the old guy’s leg. Just as well he wasn’t planning to go swimming. But no one would ever know.