by Todd Harra
My uncle said nothing but crossed himself.
The next day Sue and Harold stopped by the funeral parlor, with Ridley the cat, to make arrangements for Sue’s dad. They had just come from the vet’s office, where Ridley’s leg had been set in a cast. My uncle insisted they bring the poor thing in rather than have it wait in the cold car. It was both sad and comical to watch the furry survivor, with his look of obvious irritation, hobbling stiff-legged around the parlor while his masters made funeral arrangements.
To this day, whenever I see a black cat, my mind flashes back to that cold night years ago when I heard a dead man scream.
CHAPTER 2
Lost in Translation
Contributed by a food bank volunteer
I was having a dream that I was late for class. The bell kept ringing and ringing, but I couldn’t seem to run down the hall fast enough to make it to class in time. That’s when I woke up.
Reality was much, much worse. The phone next to my bed was ringing off the hook. I blinked my eyes several times at the bedside clock. It was one of those old alarm clocks where the tumblers turn over new digits. A tumbler turned and the new time read: 4:17.
I cursed and then blanched. My mouth felt like it was filled with cotton and cigarette butts. Next to me, the girl I had met at the party, and whose name I couldn’t remember, stirred. The phone trilled again and I snatched it off the hook. “What?” I growled.
It was my boss. It was a death call.
I took down the address, and slammed the phone back into its cradle. I cursed again, this time loudly, and flopped back into my pillow. The city’s lights filtered in through my uncurtained windows and played across the ceiling. I tried to focus on the bars of light. It didn’t work. Last night’s and this morning’s party had agreed with me too much. The last time I had glanced at the clock had been only two hours prior, and my lady friend and I were hardly in the throes of passion then. I had probably only been out for an hour.
Idiot! Idiot! I mentally berated myself. I knew better than to drink too much when I was taking death calls, but one vodka and soda begets another and I started having too good a time. I threw off the sheets and summoned the courage to climb out of bed. I stumbled my way across the remnants of party clothing littering the floor. When I flicked on the bedroom lights the inert form beneath the sheets didn’t even move.
I did the best job I could dressing myself and on my way out of my loft stopped in the kitchenette and chugged a gallon of water. My place, in the old industrial district of the city, was only a few blocks away from the mortuary, so I didn’t have far to go. Walking in the crisp air helped clear my mind.
I got the old station wagon loaded up with a cot and headed for the convalescent hospital. I drove down into the bowels of the hospital and parked by the loading dock. The smell of rotting garbage and soiled sheets in the contained basement assaulted my senses and I staggered to the front of the wagon to empty my guts. When I had collected myself enough to unload the stretcher, I went inside to the nurse’s station.
“Hello,” I said, trying to smile even though I felt like crap.
I was half-drunk, half-asleep, and the nurse spoke half-English. She glowered at me. “Helwoe,” she replied.
I don’t want to be up either, lady, I thought, and returned the sour look.
“I’m here for—” I had to think for a moment—“Betty Hancock.”
She looked at me with a puzzled expression.
“She’s dead,” I said in a voice reserved for small children and animals, “and I’m here from the mortuary to get her.”
She gave me a blank look.
“Dead!” I gave her a hard stare that finally got her in gear.
She shuffled some papers, made a hushed phone call, and then shuffled some more papers and pointed down the hall. “Forry-sen Bee.”
“Forty-seven B?” I repeated.
“Yes,” she said, agitated. “Forry-sen Bee!”
I shot her a withering stare and loped down the hall, my head pounding. It felt like I walked down three miles of ammonia-smelling, tiled hell before I arrived at Room 47. Thankfully, the residents were all asleep. I didn’t waste time on ceremony and steered the cot into the room. I jockeyed it up next to bed B and went around to the other side of the bed and yanked the sheet down. The person under the sheets moaned, arms flailing in the air.
I let out a scream as I jumped back. I caught my breath and quickly threw the sheet back over the patient. That seemed to soothe her and she (I think it was a she) became still. I rushed out of the room and checked the room number. It was forty-seven. I was about to run down the hallway to scream at the nurse for her incompetence when a light bulb went off in my aching head. I went over to bed D. Sure enough, there was Mrs. Hancock.
As I wheeled her out of the hospital I nodded at the nurse and said, “Forty-seven D—just where you said she’d be.” The nurse looked at me like I was crazy.
Later that night, after a long, miserable, hung-over day at the mortuary, I had just laid down in bed to get some much-needed rest when the phone rang. I cursed and grabbed the forever-offending thing. “What?” I yelled, expecting another death call. It was the girl I had left before dawn.
“Whoa, you sound mad,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought it was someone else calling.”
“Obviously. Say, what happened to you this morning? I don’t even know what time you left. I was kind of confused when I woke up. I thought maybe you had ditched me or something.”
“Work,” I said and massaged my eyeballs.
“Work?”
“Yeah, and you wouldn’t believe the day I had.”
“Try me.”
I did. Now I’m married to that girl and we have three grown children. My wife’s name is Liz, or Elizabeth, which is sometimes Betty.
CHAPTER 3
Patch Out
Contributed by a tennis player
It was summertime, an early Friday morning, when I got trapped with the talkers. I was looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend at the lake, where I had pitched in with a bunch of friends to rent a cabin for the summer. My girlfriend and I were both “weekend warriors” at the house, and I knew there was a lounge chair on the dock waiting for me that afternoon, so I didn’t even mind that much taking a death call at 5 A.M.
When I arrived at the house, I backed the van into the driveway to be as discrete as possible. It was one of those Cracker Jack box houses constructed after the Second World War to accommodate the population explosion. The place looked well maintained and the yard was neat. I guessed the couple had bought the house in the late ’40s after the gentleman was discharged from the service and that they had lived there ever since. Sure enough, once I was inside, I found old pictures of the decedent in his military uniform on walls of the bedroom where he lay.
I surveyed the scene, got my equipment, and made the removal.
As I left the house, pushing the gentleman on a cot, the children—a son and two daughters—followed me out; their mother chose to remain inside. For some reason the children felt it was imperative that they make all the funeral arrangements right then and there in the front yard at 5:30 in the morning.
I tried to interrupt at numerous points during their rapid dialogue and let them know they would have plenty of time to fulfill their father’s funeral wishes when they came in for the arrangement conference later in the day. When that didn’t work, I started edging closer to the van with the cot, hoping they’d get the hint. They didn’t.
The paperboy drove by gawking at the draped figure on the cot. I tried using his presence as a distraction to wrap things up. It didn’t work. One of the daughters merely picked up the paper while trying to talk over the other two.
I stood at the rear of the van for as long as I could bear, but when I realized they were never going to stop, I decided to load their father in front of them, hoping that maybe then they would get the hint.
They didn’t get it then
either.
They continued talking while I placed their father in the van and slammed the doors. They talked some more while I stood outside and stamped my feet. Even though it was summer, it is cold in the arid climates in the early morning and I had forgotten my jacket.
The paperboy rode back by, this time a lot slower. He wanted more of the show. The daughter with the paper in her hand waved. I wanted to bury my head in my hands.
Finally, I hopped in the van and started the engine and turned on the heater. Still they talked, now over the roar of the idling engine, each one thinking of something and throwing it out, and the others would hop onto that new bandwagon. In mortuary school I had been taught, in painstaking detail, the virtue of patience and politeness. But my patience was gone. After almost 45 minutes in their driveway, I had yet to say a word! Tired of trying to cut in gracefully, I announced it was time for me to leave and said I would call them in a couple of hours, after they had some time to think.
So frazzled was I by the three talkers that I accidentally gunned the engine and dropped it into drive at the same time. The van made a loud screech as the tires spun. I rocketed out of the driveway at a speed a NASCAR driver would have envied. I barely had time to spin the wheel hard to avoid careening into the neighbor’s front yard. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw two nice thick sets of burnt rubber on their driveway.
The cardinal rule of leaving after a house call is to drive as slowly as possible. It gives the family a sense of security knowing their loved one is safe and sound, and, unlike me on that day, not in the hands of some madman.
I remember thinking as I drove down their street, a little slower: I hope they didn’t get the wrong impression.
CHAPTER 4
The Fly Swatter Saga
Contributed by a fitness buff
It was June. I remember because my partner and his wife always take the last week of June and go on a cruise. That summer they were in the Mediterranean. While they were being waited on hand-and-foot and sipping tropical libations, I was back home trying to keep the shop running.
Of course, with my usual luck, I received a call that someone had died at our local hospital in the early hours of the morning. Normally, a hospital removal isn’t a big deal at all; one person can do it, except that I have the nasty habit of nodding off while I’m driving at night. I have a form of sleep apnea, and, although I wear a Darth Vader mask when I sleep, I am still prone to napping while driving. The rumble strips have saved my life more than once, and it’s not nearly as funny as when Chevy Chase did it.
Generally my partner, Chuck, will drive us at night or just go by himself, but since there was no Chuck, my wife, Sammy, offered to drive me to the hospital. She stipulated that she’d only do it if she didn’t have to dress up or get out of the van. I gratefully accepted her terms.
We made the long forty-five minute trek to the hospital, which at that time of the night was closed for all intents and purposes. I signed the necessary paperwork at the front desk and then directed my wife around the building to the loading dock where the removals are made. I left her listening to the new Rascal Flatts CD in the van and met the sleepy orderly at the back door.
The orderly led me down the familiar path of twisting hallways and anterooms that led toward the morgue and then helped me transfer the remains. I bid him adieu after giving him a little something for his help and saw myself out through the bowels of the hospital.
I banged against the crash bar to the back door and passed through. It closed with a loud click. Sammy, seeing me coming down the ramp with the body, hopped out of the van, slammed the door, and went around to open the rear panel doors.
They were locked. She ran around to the passenger side to unlock the rear doors, but it was locked too. So was the driver’s door.
Unfortunately, in her zeal to help me she had hit the automatic locking button.
No problem, I told myself, I’ll just call the front desk. I reached for my cell phone and remembered, it’s in the pocket of my suit, which is… in the van. So there I stood with my barefoot wife behind a locked, vacant hospital with a locked, idling van in the middle of the night as we contemplated the body on the cot.
“What do we do now?” my wife asked.
I looked at her and raised an eyebrow. I wasn’t mad at her. She had only been trying to help, after all. But I paused before I spoke to make sure no angry words would come out. She used the pause to ask, “Is there a phone in there?” She gestured to the door I had just exited from. “Perhaps we could call the cops to come and pop the lock.”
I shook my head. “Cops don’t do that anymore. Besides, even if there was a phone inside that door, it’s locked this time of night.”
She shrugged and asked for the second time, “What do we do now?”
Good question.
We talked about calling for a locksmith, but the closest one was in our town, forty-five minutes away, so we nixed that idea. There were spare keys to the van hanging at the funeral home, and we batted around the names of several people we could call at this time of night to bring the keys out to us, but we didn’t want to ask anyone such a huge favor. I had never popped a car lock before but decided this was a good time to try. First I needed some tools.
“You want to come with me to the front desk or do you want to stay here?” I asked Sammy.
“What about the body?” she protested.
“I care more about your safety right now. The body will be fine here alone for a few minutes at this time of night.”
“I can’t let anyone see me like this! I’ll stay here,” Sammy said. And indeed, besides being barefoot, she was only wearing a tiny pair of sweat shorts and a novelty spaghetti-strap top that was a spoof on the milk commercial. It read: Got Formadehyde? I had given it to her as a joke for Christmas; she of course never wore it outside the house. Sammy is the type of woman who would rather (excuse the pun) die than have anyone see her dressed so inappropriately.
“Suit yourself,” I told her and set out to make the long trek around the hospital. It took me what seemed like ages to hike around the sprawling medical complex. Where are those little trams when you really need them? I remember grumbling to myself at one point. During the day the hospital has courtesy golf carts to ferry people around. Not so much at the witching hour.
I was sweating bullets by the time I marched through the front door. The receptionist gave me a surprised look when I strode up to her for the second time and asked politely, “Could I please borrow a metal coat hanger?”
She laughed. “Honey, we ain’t got nothing like that here.”
I explained the situation and the grin on her face got wider. When I finished my saga she said, “Wait here. Let me go see what I can find.” She disappeared and after a few minutes re-appeared with an old fashioned fly swatter. “Here. Try this. It’s the only thing I could find.”
I gingerly took it, thanked her, and made my way back to my van, this time through the hospital. The vehicle still sat idling with the cot resting next to it, but my wife was gone. I looked all around. No Sammy. “Sammy?” I called. “Sammy?”
She came around one of the dumpsters, picking her way delicately through the scattered trash.
“What were you doing?” I asked.
“I didn’t want anyone to see me like this! So I found a chair the employees use during their smoke breaks and was just waiting. Did you get it?”
I showed her the fly swatter, its yellow plastic mesh surface speckled with the mangled pieces of its victims. Sammy grimaced. “Sorry, it’s all the lady at the front desk could find. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”
I bent the white wire handle into a hook and jammed it between the glass and gasket of the window and made a motion like I was churning butter. Nothing happened. I twisted the wire. It got stuck. Sweat rolled off my face, as I gave it more elbow grease. I was about to call it quits when I angled the wire down and felt it catch. I gently pulled toward the side mirror and it slipped. I
released a stream of language that made Sammy blush; wiped my face with my shirtsleeve and repeated the same procedure. The second time I felt the lock click.
Victory!
I loaded the body into the rear of the van and we drove back to the front of the hospital. I bent the wire handle of the fly swatter back into its original configuration as best as I could and proudly returned it to the receptionist.
My wallet now contains a spare set of keys.
CHAPTER 5
Business Hours
Contributed by an artistic gymnastics competitor
It was one of the usual morning staff meetings. All the guys I work with sat guzzling their coffee and I sipped on my Mountain Dew. I can’t stand coffee. I can’t figure out how they can drink it all day long. In fact, I won’t even date guys that drink it. That’s how much it grosses me out.
As with most morning meetings, I was bored. Our manager, Hunter, is a numbers guy. So we have to hear about casket sales this quarter compared to this point last quarter. Up. Down. He whines either way. Just give us our daily assignments and be done with it, I want to scream. But I don’t. I just sit there and sip my green soda and hope Hunter and his spreadsheets will get devoured by a pack of rabid beavers on his way home. I say this because Hunter looks like Howdy Doody, and Howdy Doody is made of wood… you get the picture. I was entertaining my usual beaver fantasy when an old woman poked her head into the employee lounge.
“Can I help you?” Howdy Doody asked. He was clearly annoyed at being interrupted while discussing the things we could do to increase fuel economy in the company fleet.
“Oh, dear. I hope I’m not interrupting,” the woman said. She looked like a sweet old grandmother.
“No, you’re not,” Howdy Doody said in a tone that suggested otherwise.
