by Joss Cordero
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My thanks to all those members of the West Palm Beach Police Department, the Fort Myers Police Department, and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, who were so generous with their help.
CONTENTS
Part One
The Undertaker’s Apprentice
Part Two
The Courteous Killere
Part Three
Bloody Valentine
Part Four
Helping the Dead
PART ONE
The Undertaker’s Apprentice
It isn’t easy keeping up the Christmas spirit in the tropics, but Palm Beach County does its best. Even the palm trees dress for the season, with warm white lights wrapped around their trunks like the stripes on candy canes.
In their homes on Christmas Eve, families decorate more traditional evergreens.
In Fiorello’s Funeral Home, the night watchman decorates the deceased.
Strings of colored lights bring the corpses to life, beaming holiday cheer on cold flesh, colder than death alone would warrant, for each body reposes in a drawer pulled from a great stainless steel refrigerator.
Having downloaded All-Time Christmas Classics onto his iPod, Zach listens to Bing and Frank sing, God rest ye merry gentlemen as he performs his holy work, applying the finishing touches to his once merry gents.
Two of the gents are old and flabby. Another is in what would’ve been his prime had he been kinder to his liver. But Zach animates the three corpses with equal reverence, arranging the pretty little bulbs on their torsos and around their private parts.
He wears no gloves or mask or scrub suit, nor does he deign to use any of the numerous antibacterial products designed for undertakers who’ve been taught to defend against the dead. Fear of infection is not a phobia Zach shares with less enlightened mortuary workers. He knows the dead are in a sacred state. He receives from them, and gives back. Tonight’s electrified resurrection is his offering, his thanks, and his atonement.
As he moves from drawer to drawer he recalls a lullaby he learned as a child. He touches the pause button on his iPod, and sings it slowly, just like Great Aunt Emmy taught him.
Oh, lovely appearance of death,
What sight upon earth is so fair?
Not all the gay pageants that breathe
Can with a dead body compare . . .
Though the words are uplifting, the tune’s a bit mournful for such a festive occasion, so he returns to Bing and Frank as he walks among his cadavers, weaving strands of tinsel through their hair and draping it over their ears.
The embalmer’s goal is to make the dead look beautiful, and that’s what Zach is doing tonight, though this describes his efforts only on the most mundane level.
He has neither the formal education to be an embalmer, nor money for embalming school, but he’s spent more time in Fiorello’s Funeral Home than at any job he ever had, and he’s had plenty.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, sings Judy Garland as Zach pulls out the drawer he’s saved for last: the young woman killed in a car crash. Considering that her neck was twisted and her rib cage crushed, Mr. Fiorello has done a remarkable straightening job, a job that makes Zach feel he’s working for an artist like himself.
For this queen of the night, Zach has bought a string of flicker-flames, each miniature bulb representing the gift of fire. He spreads them out on her naked body, then plugs them in; her icy form seems to dance. As she pulses red and green and blue, he hovers over her, waiting for the scintillating corpse to rise.
Naturally, she doesn’t. Zach is not the Messiah. But he knows that the spirits of the dead linger near their bodies during this difficult transition, and so he helps them along. Tears are not appropriate. Let the soul rejoice in its wreath of lights. He feels the young woman’s spirit filling with gratitude toward him for illuminating her mortal remains.
Tenderly he tucks a silver angel into her vagina.
And now to the accompaniment of Gene Autry singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” he photographs his beautiful corpses.
A voice that isn’t Gene Autry’s cruelly penetrates Zach’s trance. “My God . . .”
Zach spins around to see Mr. Fiorello clutching a miniature fruitcake in one hand and a carton of eggnog in the other.
Zach realizes that the fruitcake and eggnog are for him, a thoughtful Christmas surprise from his employer. He also suspects that he won’t be allowed to partake of them tonight.
Mr. Fiorello’s voice is as controlled as it always is, from a lifetime of dealing with people who range from mildly grieving to totally deranged. He has one tone, that of the funeral director. His words emerge from him as softly as crepe soles on a thick carpet.
“You sick fucker.”
He makes this statement in the same gentle way he describes the caskets from which the bereaved can choose—from hand-rubbed solid mahogany to imperial maple, gold plated or copper, photo decorated with The Last Supper, Gone Fishin’, or Fairway to Heaven, down to spot-welded auto body metal, which offers dignity with economy. On the other hand, should the loved one be consigned to the flames, the bereaved has a tasteful choice of Lucite weeping angel urns, classic alabaster, sculpted bronze, or marble. Or he may prefer to have his loved one enclosed in a walking stick, teddy bear, or music box. We are here to help at this painful time.
“To think I left my own Christmas Eve party to bring you fruitcake.”
The gentleness of Mr. Fiorello’s voice strikes Zach with greater force than anger could. Anger would indicate that Mr. Fiorello is a common man, and Zach knows his boss is not a common man because he deals with the dead with respect, if not with Zach’s mystical fervor.
It is because he lacks this fervor that Mr. Fiorello will never understand the deep religious significance of what Zach has done. So Zach doesn’t explain. Only a crazy person would even try. But his secret self is raging. Mr. Fiorello may consider what Zach has done a desecration, but it is Mr. Fiorello who has desecrated the corpses’ Christmas. It is Mr. Fiorello who has driven the young woman’s spirit away from her body on her last Christmas Eve.
And yet . . . Zach still feels her hovering near, hoping to be alone with him, sharing the blessing of the lights.
Mr. Fiorello’s thoughts are running along less lofty lines entirely. Even though he’s slightly smashed on eggnog, he sees clearly, and it isn’t desecration he sees. It’s litigation, followed by bankruptcy and ruination, a venerable family business destroyed by one demented employee with a camera. Suppose Zach posts his pictures on the Web somewhere? Even in South Florida where it’s nearly impossible to shut down a funeral home, no one can get away with this level of outrage.
A recent scandal comes to Mr. Fiorello’s mind, involving a chain of funeral homes where bodies are regularly mixed up and the wrong corpse appears at a viewing or is shipped to Cuba by mistake. The reason these deplorable offenses haven’t closed the chain down is because its business is with low-income immigrants. But Fiorello’s Funeral Home caters to more upwardly mobile cadavers, and his venerable family business is built on respect, integrity, and commensurately hefty prices. You don’t expect to put your loved one in a classy place like Fiorello’s
and have her naked body strung with Christmas lights.
A chilling idea occurs to Mr. Fiorello, as cold as the air emerging from the refrigerated compartments. His night watchman isn’t merely a maniac, but a blackmailer who will threaten to show his obscene jpegs to the loved ones’ relatives.
“The camera,” says Mr. Fiorello in the same soft tone he never strays from.
Zach hands his camera over, out of his long habit of obeying bosses. The festival is over. To pretend it’s not is beneath the dignity of the high priest he feels himself to be. He removes the buds from his ears and places them in his shirt pocket, where Gene Autry continues to lead the flying reindeer troop in muffled song.
As Mr. Fiorello deletes the photos from the camera, an even more chilling idea crosses his mind. Since the camera is digital, his night watchman must own a computer, filled with incriminating photos. Deleting the ones in the camera is just the beginning. God knows what’s been going on down here at night. Corpses decorated with Easter bunnies, witches’ hats and broomsticks, flags and firecrackers . . . Mr. Fiorello doesn’t want to consider what macabre, grotesque, and, to say the least, bad for business things Zach may have done to other women.
Zach does in fact possess a hard drive filled with macabre, grotesque, and bad for business photos of corpses. But their purpose isn’t blackmail. Their purpose is love.
Mr. Fiorello, of course, doesn’t know this. He tries to think things through, tries to drive the eggnog from his brain. The best thing to do is to kill Zach and cremate him.
Mr. Fiorello immediately realizes this is the eggnog speaking. Because Zach could more easily kill him. Mr. Fiorello looks at his night watchman surrounded by dead bodies illuminated by Christmas tree lights, and knows that Zach holds all the cards. He isn’t just a mental case, he’s also frighteningly strong, which is why he was hired in the first place, to lift deadweights. Though he’s not the hulking football player type, he’s one of those lean, wiry bastards with every vein and sinew bulging like the roots of a strangler fig. Even his face is lean and muscular.
Zach doesn’t meet his boss’s gaze. Not now or ever has he met my gaze, thinks Mr. Fiorello, trying to see his night watchman objectively through the eggnog haze. Objectively, Zach might be a good-looking fellow, in a photograph for instance, but not in person, definitely not in person. That shaven head of Zach’s covers up some very strange thoughts, and stranger practices.
Suddenly Mr. Fiorello realizes what Zach really looks like—a muscular attack dog, just waiting for the command to regress to wildness and spring at your throat.
Mr. Fiorello takes a step backward, but then reminds himself that, until tonight at least, Zach has been his dog. A suspicion enters Mr. Fiorello’s befuddled brain. With relief he realizes it isn’t blackmail on his nutty night watchman’s mind.
“What is it, Zach? What do you want to tell me?”
Gazing at the quartet of illuminated corpses in tinsel wigs, Mr. Fiorello waits for Zach’s reply.
“I want you to send me to embalming school.”
Mr. Fiorello is so surprised he actually gives it some thought. But even in the sleaziest funeral homes, where no one is turned away for lack of room and loved ones are strewn around unrefrigerated to decompose like reeking roadkill, the profession isn’t ready for Zach. Nor is Mr. Fiorello about to put his reputation on the line by sponsoring him.
“I can’t help you that way.” Mr. Fiorello hands back the emptied camera, then regretfully reaches into his pocket and takes out all his cash. “Let me give you your Christmas bonus, Zach, and let’s call it a night.”
Lights twinkle behind Zach’s head like a halo. “You mean you don’t want me to continue working here?”
Mr. Fiorello answers in his softest voice. “Under the circumstances, I would have to say no. You’ve got to understand, what you’ve done here tonight, for whatever reason, excludes you from the profession.”
“Why?”
Mr. Fiorello has trained himself to speak in somewhat ornate phrases to convey how thoroughly he understands you want the highest standards for your loved one. With his silver tongue he comforts you in your bereavement, rubbing off the edges of your judgment, leading to a hand-rubbed casket, complete with lead lining rendering the loved one impervious to the forces of nature for 10,000 years and often demanding extra pallbearers, provided for a price by Mr. Fiorello. In fact, Zach, being especially strong, has filled in on a number of occasions, dressed in the black suit given to him by Mr. Fiorello. With his somber chiseled face, Zach has fulfilled the role admirably.
Gently Mr. Fiorello unpacks his oratory: “A funeral home is the place where a woman has no defense, except for the honor of the establishment. We are their protectors. Which means we don’t trim their naked bodies with Christmas tree lights.” He pauses, thinking it isn’t exactly just this one point. “Or decorate them for any other holidays.”
Zach continues looking at the dead young woman with the tiny candles gaily twinkling over her pale flesh.
Maybe, thinks Mr. Fiorello, he wants his Christmas lights back. Mr. Fiorello unplugs the flicker-flames and hands the string to Zach.
Now the angel of the night is truly dead, and Zach’s work has been curtailed with her. He is no longer the high priest of the festival. He’s an unskilled employee who’s lost his job. It’s hardly the first time he’s been fired.
“I’ll need the key,” says Mr. Fiorello softly.
Sullenly Zach returns the key with which he’s been entrusted, then jams the string of miniature candles into his back pants pocket, from which they dangle.
And that is Mr. Fiorello’s last view of him—a chastised attack dog, dragging his lightbulb tail.
What can I expect for what I pay? he thinks. Either they don’t speak English, or they’re peculiar.
“My God,” he says again, noticing the angel protruding from the dead girl’s vagina. He washes his hands with antibacterial solution and puts on disposable gloves before removing the decorations.
So here he is with his corpses on Christmas Eve.
This is not a story he will pass down to his children, and certainly not to any of his colleagues. It is for himself alone. Not even his father, from whom he inherited the business, ever faced something like this. He’s pretty sure, because the old man told him everything.
Those were innocent days, before cell phones, when a relative couldn’t always be reached the instant his loved one passed over. Unless mortuary arrangements were specified in advance, a hospital worker on retainer called Fiorello’s father, who sent a team to whisk the deceased from the hospital to the funeral parlor. What was the bereaved going to do? Take the cadaver somewhere else?
As Mr. Fiorello moves among the three deceased gentlemen, he looks back fondly on his long life with the dead, starting in his teens when he helped move the bodies. Never will he forget the day his father unlocked a cabinet and said, “Son, here is my retirement.” Inside were gallon jars of gold teeth. Nowadays, gold teeth in Lake Worth are mainly found in corpses you wouldn’t want to steal from because their friends might notice when they open the deceased’s mouth to stick in a joint. The compensation is that the gold-toothed crowd are excellent clients, always killing each other and partial to ostentatious funerals.
The downside of this particular clientele arises when tempers clash at the funeral home itself, as happened when fourteen mourners were shot outside the Funeraria Latina Emanuel in North Miami. Fiorello prefers his bullets to be limited to the person being buried and not disbursed in the bodies of the mourners or, perish the thought, himself.
But Mr. Fiorello has no time to think about gold teeth, past or present. He’s got to take the tinsel out of the corpses’ hair. He’s got to be sure that, half smashed on eggnog, he gets out every goddamn strand.
He fortifies himself with fruitcake.
God rest ye merry . . .
&n
bsp; Zach rides his bicycle south on Dixie, the string of flicker-flames waving from his back pocket. He’s too upset to go home.
Even Mr. Fiorello, who should know better, proved himself incapable of understanding Zach’s feelings toward the dead, especially his chivalrous feelings toward the girl. Her spirit had been there, hovering over her illuminated form, grateful for his attentions. Other men might turn away from her dead body, desiring her only when alive; Zach adored her immortal essence. It was a love affair so brief, so rare, and so rudely interrupted. At Mr. Fiorello’s entrance, her shy, already shocked soul had been forced to fly away.
Zach knows about women’s souls. He believes he knows more about them than anybody. And this soul was pure, the soul of an angel. Now he’s cut off from his angel. And like any misunderstood artist, he’s in need of consolation.
He can’t face his bed, or his trailer, or the trailer park itself, which is a pit. Though he faithfully pays his rent, every month he receives an eviction notice. It’s a standard notice sent out to all the tenants on the theory that most of them won’t be paying their rent. And unfairly it’s sent to him too. This is the kind of milieu Zach keeps falling into, among Mexicans, Guatemolies, you name it. Not that he has anything against illegals, he’s worked with them often enough in the fields.
Probably that’s where he’ll wind up again, picking fruit and vegetables. This is not his favorite season for picking. His favorite season is late spring when rusty old school buses with their windows and seats removed are filled with watermelons, like severed heads being sent to school to learn to be good melons. Piling those shiny heads into yellow buses always lifts his spirits.
When tax season comes he might work for Liberty Tax, dancing on a street corner dressed like the Statue of Liberty. It isn’t a bad job, as long as you ignore the drivers you’re out there to attract and concentrate instead on the music on your iPod. There are more permanent jobs available to unskilled workers, like at McDonald’s, but Zach doesn’t like dealing with living people.
