by G. M. Ford
“Georgie,” she said. “You look very official.”
“Damn things are drafty,” he groused.
“Hey,” said Red Lopez. “Do I look medical?”
“Ready for surgery,” she assured him.
She walked to the back of the van and opened the doors. “Come over here, fellas,” she said. “I’ll show you how to use the gurney and how to tie it down for the ride.”
I kept out of it. Standing over by the shrubbery, I watched as she showed them how to get the gurney out, raise it up, roll it around, and then lift it back into the van, lock the wheels, and connect the safety straps so the stiff would stay still.
She slammed the door, dusted off her hands, and asked, “You got it?”
They said they did.
She handed George the paperwork. “Make sure you get a signature,” she reminded. “This van doesn’t have a built-in radio, so I got two handhelds. One for you guys and one for us. We’ll be right behind you all the way.”
George’s driving was a little shaky at first, but, by the time we made the freeway, he’d gotten the hang of it again and was tooling right along.
Traffic was like it always was, like the city was being evacuated. I was hanging back a couple of cars as we blew past Southcenter and started up the hill.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I said. “It’ll be a miracle if we pull this off.”
She chuckled. “If we don’t . . . we all get arrested; I get fired; you and I move somewhere where nobody’s ever heard of either of us, somewhere the sun shines all the time, and then you and your old man’s money support me in a style to which I shall soon become accustomed.”
“Left at the stop sign,” Rebecca said into the radio.
George turned left onto Pacific Avenue.
“It’s the second building on your right,” Rebecca said. “Pull up to the gate. Red, you get out and push the intercom button. When somebody answers, you just say, ‘King County. We’re here for the remains.’”
I hung back, keeping a full block between us and the van. We pulled over onto the shoulder and watched as Red got out and used the intercom. Ten seconds passed before the gate began to roll open. “Over to the left side of the building, George,” Rebecca said.
“There’s a garage door down at the far end. Back right up to it.”
She pointed through the windshield. “Go up a ways,” she said to me. “So we can see what’s going on.”
I rolled two blocks up the street and pulled back onto the shoulder. The King County van was backed up to a green garage door. The boys were wrestling the gurney out of the back doors. A third guy in a pair of blue coveralls was standing nearby watching them. No prompting from the radio now. The boys were on their own.
When they finally got the gurney out and standing on its wheels, all three of them disappeared inside the building.
Rebecca was gnawing at her thumbnail, trying to look confident. The dashboard clock said they’d been inside for the better part of ten minutes when they finally reappeared. A black rubber body bag was belted onto the gurney in three places.
Took two tries, but they managed to hoist the gurney up into the van. Red climbed up inside to tie things down. George gave Blue Coveralls a two-fingered salute and headed back to the driver’s seat. Red reappeared, closed the doors, and climbed in next to George.
“They did it,” Rebecca whispered.
I waited for an eighteen-wheeler and a city bus to pass, then did a K-turn and pulled back onto the shoulder, facing in the opposite direction.
George gave us a jaunty toot of the horn as he drove by. “Left at the stop sign,” Rebecca said into the radio. George growled something back about knowing the damn way back. I had to wait for a FedEx truck to pass before I could pull out. Unfortunately, FedEx was going the same way we were, so we lost our visual on George and Red.
When we hit the freeway north ramp, I could see the King County van about four cars in front of me. Rebecca suddenly sat forward in the seat, nearly pressing her nose to the glass. “Is the back door ajar?”
“I can’t see. The damn truck’s in the way.”
“I think it is,” she said. “We’ve got to get up there.”
“George,” she said into the radio. “George.”
No response.
She tried again with the same result. And then again.
“It’s not working,” she said, as much to herself as to me.
“Hang on,” I said as I whipped the wheel to the left, put my foot into it, and began passing people on the shoulder of the on-ramp. The FedEx driver leaned on the horn as we went flying by. The Asian couple in the Smartcar were, quite literally, cowering as we roared by them and then swerved back onto the pavement.
George was two cars up and in the process of merging onto the freeway. That’s when I clearly saw the right-hand door bouncing. “I think you’re right,” I said.
“We’ve gotta get him to pull over.”
She tried the radio again. Nothing.
The minute my front tires hit the interstate, I floored it and roared out into the center lane, only to find a big pulsating arrow dominating the road ahead. MERGE RIGHT . . . CONSTRUCTION NEXT 6 MILES . . . 40 MPH . . . FINES DOUBLE IN CONSTRUCTION ZONES . . . 40 MPH. The road signs strobed by like a picket fence.
I heard Rebecca’s breath catch in her throat as I veered back the other way, jamming myself into the slot directly behind George, missing the first orange barrier by about an inch as we narrowed to a single lane of traffic.
I had to stand on the brakes to keep from piling into the back of them. Just as my heart was climbing back into my chest, we had one of those and then everything seemed to go into slow motion moments of song and story.
The van hit a big pothole. The back doors flew open, and the gurney bounced out onto the highway. The second and a half it hovered in the air was sufficient for the spring-loaded wheels to deploy. Like a cat, the gurney landed on its feet, just in time for me to plow into it, sending it rocketing back from whence it had come.
When the gurney’s wheeled undercarriage collided with the back of the van, it folded up, sending the gurney and the last mortal remains sliding into the interior of the van, at considerably greater speed than was ever intended by the manufacturer.
I watched in horror as the gurney shattered the Plexiglas shield that separated the driving compartment from the dead body compartment.
Apparently we now had George’s attention. He’d slowed down to about ten miles an hour by the time we came to an area where the orange barriers ended and rubber cones were being used to mark the edges of the roadway.
Up ahead was a deserted area the construction crews had leveled off and were using to store equipment. George angled the van in that direction, ran over several cones, and slid to a stop immediately behind a paving machine.
George and Red came tumbling out of the van, swatting at the air around them like it was full of bees. Rebecca opened her door and stepped out. I stayed put, trying to tamp my nervous system back into place.
From twenty yards away, through the open car door I suddenly could smell it. A decaying body has an odor like no other. Stepping out the door was like running into a wall. The stench was truly overpowering as I haltingly approached the back of the van.
Red looked like he was about to puke. George had both hands clamped over his face.
I was still crabbing my way in that direction when Rebecca sprinted back to the car, rummaged around in her purse, found a tube of something, and hustled back. I watched as she squirted something onto her finger and then smeared it beneath her nose.
I stayed where I was, swallowing hard, trying to hold on to my cookies as she did the same thing for both George and Red. She turned and crooked a finger in my direction.
I walked over. The smell was making my eyes water. She applied a finger full of something to my upper lip. The unmistakable smell of Vicks VapoRub suddenly filled my head.
“It’s wh
at the homicide cops use.” She grabbed me by the shoulder. “I need you to help me,” she said as she hurried over to the van. I followed along like a recalcitrant puppy. Took us a full five minutes to get the gurney secured. The body bag had ripped halfway down one side. We loosened the yellow belts and rolled the remains over, trying to get her weight to help seal the rubber. It got a little better, but not much.
We closed and fastened the doors, by which time George and Red had sidled about fifty yards away. “Come on,” I yelled.
At first, neither of them moved. Eventually they short-stepped it back over to us.
“Goddamn that’s ripe,” George growled.
“Ooooweee,” Red howled.
“You’re just going to have to live with it,” Rebecca said. She handed the Vicks tube to Red. “If it gets bad, put more of the Vicks on yourself.”
She reached out, grabbed George by the shoulders, and turned him around. “You know how to get back to my yard,” she said. “We’re going to go on ahead and make sure everything is ready. Go!”
They moved at glacial speed.
Rebecca and I got back in the car, waited for a break in the traffic, and then headed north. I watched in the mirror as the boys navigated their way back onto the roadway.
“What are you going to do about the damage to the van?” I asked as we got up to speed.
“Call the cops,” she said. “The van and the gurney were taken out of service a couple years back. They’ve been sitting out in the corner of the yard ever since. Apparently some vandal broke in over the weekend.”
“The world’s going to hell in a handbasket,” I said.
“The end of civilization as we know it.”
A couple of miles later, I asked, “How do you work around that smell?”
“You get used to it,” she said. “It’s just a couple of diamines. Putrescine and cadaverine. They show up in the body when the amino acids begin to break down. Individually, they smell pretty bad. Together they really stink.”
“Okay. I feel better now.”
Next time I saw the dearly departed was right after 7:00 that evening, from behind a one-way glass partition in the basement of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office. Rebecca was dressed in her full Doctor Death scrubs, mask, hat, and all.
The Vegas contingent was milling around the far corner of the room. The older of the two was going gray around the temples and pudgy around the waist. The younger guy had buzzed his head since the last time I’d seen him. They both had the kind of eyes generally only seen on the Discovery Chanel, during Shark Week.
“Gentlemen,” Rebecca began. “I want to reiterate that what you’re about to see is rather unpleasant. I know you feel it’s possible that the remains might be those of a woman who you, at one time, knew under another name, so I’ve arranged this special viewing to help you put your minds at ease. I want to assure you, however, that the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System makes very few mistakes and that these are indeed the remains of one Tuesday Jo Hollister. Born, Elko, Nevada . . .” She read the vital statistics from a clipboard. “Ms. Hollister was found floating in Commencement Bay five days ago. It’s estimated she’d been deceased anywhere from seven to ten days at the time she was found. The state of her decomposition makes it impossible to determine the cause of death.” She looked over at the deadly duo. “The remains will be interred in Lakeview Cemetery at three thirty tomorrow afternoon.”
She paused. “Are you gentlemen ready?” she asked.
They sauntered over to her side. The very picture of studied nonchalance. Rebecca looked from one to the other and pulled down the zipper. Before she’d even pulled the rubber back, the diamines began to work their olfactory magic. Both men took an involuntary step backward, as if shoved by an unseen hand.
Rebecca reached down and parted the black rubber bag. The older of the two began a slow backpedal. The younger guy turned his back to the corpse and puked all over the floor.
“Yeah okay,” the older guy choked out. “That’s her. Thanks.”
Rebecca handed Buzz Cut a paper towel. He was still wiping his chin as they wobbled from the room. Rebecca walked over and looked down at the puddle on the floor. She pulled the mask down over her chin and looked over at me.
“Either penne or ziti, it’s hard to tell,” she said with a grin.
I’m not much of a believer. The way I see it, you’re here on earth for an indeterminate period of time, and then the lights go out. End o’ story. Fade to black. Could be I’m wrong. Lord knew a lot of people felt otherwise, but that’s the way I see it.
And I’m not much for formal good-byes either. I’d rather remember the person as they were in life. So, funerals had always seemed a bit beside the point and overly melodramatic to me.
Didn’t matter though. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. At three forty-five on the following afternoon, I was standing by an open grave in the Lakewood Cemetery, looking out over Portage Bay, while a Lutheran minister droned on about eternity and the Almighty.
“Who shall separate Tuesday Jo from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?”
If indeed there was some omnipotent being watching over the proceedings, He or She had evidently decided that this afternoon’s theme was going to be WET. What had started out this morning as an intermittent drizzle had morphed into a full-fledged downpour of biblical proportions. The kind where you have to shout to be heard by the person standing next to you.
“Listen again to the words that we heard earlier, but this time with Tuesday Jo’s name. Hear the word of the Lord Almighty.”
I’d recruited Ralph Batista and Harold Green, Margie, and Shorty from the Zoo to act as mourners. Red Lopez refused to be parted from his new set of scrubs and George claimed his sinus cavities were never going to be the same, so neither of them were putting in a guest appearance.
On my right, Rebecca was doing yeoman’s duty, standing tall under a black umbrella as the rivers of retribution fell from the sky. On my left, Sergeant Roscoe Templeton was beginning to look as if maybe he’d never seen this much water at one time in all his life.
I’d called him yesterday. Asked him if maybe he couldn’t fly out from Vegas and lend a further air of authenticity to today’s proceedings, just in case the Braciole Brothers hadn’t given up the ghost. Which they hadn’t.
They were huddled together about three graves down, not too far from my grandparents. I got the impression that whoever they worked for wanted to know that they’d followed their assignment through to the soggy end.
“No, in all these things are more than conquerors through him who loves Tuesday Jo. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate Tuesday Jo from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
I was doing my best to ignore the torrent of water dripping from the end of my nose.
Most everybody I’d ever been related to was buried right around here somewhere. My mother and father rested side by side just over the crest of the hill. My father’s brother Frank was marked by a weeping marble angel, which, if you’d known Frank Waterman, could only be taken as a final irony. His oldest sister, Anne, was remembered by an ornate garland of chiseled flowers.
Mercifully, the preacher was winding down.
“Eternal God, your love is stronger than death, and your passion more fierce than the grave. We rejoice in the lives of those whom you have drawn into your eternal embrace. Keep us in joyful communion with them until we join the saints of every people and nation gathered before your throne in your ceaseless praise, through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
The preacher made the rounds, shaking everybody’s hand, telling them how Tuesday Jo was in a better place now, which seemed a bit overly optimistic to me, having recently returned from my
near-death experience in Vegas.
The Vegas crew didn’t stick around for the pleasantries. By the time the preacher had finished, they’d already made it to their rental Buick and were headed up Fifteenth inside a moving cloud of rainwater.
I slipped Margie a fifty and told her to buy everybody a stiff one on me. By the time the Zoo crew had shambled out to the street, only Rebecca, Roscoe Templeton, and I remained. Templeton nudged me with an elbow. “I don’t know how in hell you pulled this off,” he said with a wink, “but nice work.”
“Thank her,” I said, nodding Rebecca’s way.
Templeton smiled and gave Rebecca an admiring nod.
“Let’s hope that’s the end of it,” I said.
“Those two bananas are booked on the six twenty-five to Vegas.”
Rebecca took my arm. We started down the hill. Behind us, a cemetery worker started up the backhoe. The wind was rising. The trees were whipping in all directions at once. The diesel smoke rode the wind southward like a black arrow.
“Give you a ride somewhere?” I asked Templeton.
He shook his head. “Got me a rental,” he said.
“Thanks again for coming.”
“It was the least I could do for her.”
Rebecca and I stood and watched Templeton short-step it down the hill and disappear from sight. Rebecca pulled at my arm. “Come on,” she said, pulling me up the hill instead of down.
The backhoe operator already had the grave filled in and was folding up the big blue tarp that we’d all been standing on.
We walked to the top of the hill and then started down the other side. She pulled me over to the left and then stopped. There they were. My parents. William H. Waterman. The day of his birth and the day of his death. That was it.
Mary Catherine Waterman. Same thing with the dates. The fairest rose fallen far too soon.
We stood there for a long time.
“He was just a man, Leo,” she said finally. “Bigger, meaner, and smarter than most, but just a man.”
“He’s always been hard for me to separate,” I said after a long moment.
