by Mark Johnson
I always stay until he’s done with the apple and the grain and often stick around just to watch him munch his hay with gratitude and contentment. It’s contagious, his gratitude and contentment. A distinct calm always settles over me there, no matter how brutal or terrifying the previous hours have been. I’ll sit on his comfortable bed of straw, lean back against the wooden stall, breathe in deeply the rich, loamy scents, the quiet stillness, and admire him: his towering strength, his gentleness, his humble obedience and his guilelessness, his trustfulness and trustworthiness. Invariably, being there brings to mind the childlike delight in Nancy’s face when he prances for her.
I love being here with him. The earthy simplicity and beauty of it always move me. It’s an unworldly peace, at dawn, with the Prince. As a manger should be.
Five months later I was dispatched to a domestic in progress in that same parking lot, in front of the P & H Market. A white male was slapping around a white female. After we got them separated and put the bully in the cage, I was getting his information for the arrest form. He identified himself as Merle Weatherby.
“Any chance you’re related to Carl Weatherby?”
“Yeah, he’s my brother” came the sullen reply. “Or was. He died about six weeks ago.”
Carl had bonded out from his Christmas morning arrest. While awaiting trial, he had overdosed on heroin. At this news, my only thought was good riddance.
*Your six o’clock position (behind your back)
5
Cops ’n’ Corpses
Dying should come easy, like a freight train you don’t hear when your back is turned.
—Charles Bukowski
We’d been dispatched to an audible burglar alarm at a funeral home, Tyrone and me. We found the door ajar. Tyrone, usually the picture of deadpan cool, advised me I was on my own, that stiffs give him the creeps, and anybody who broke into a building full of stiffs had to be even creepier. I teased him about being a scaredy-cat and entered the building alone while he waited outside and lit a Newport. Always eager to find a live burglar I drew my gun and swept the rooms with my flashlight, creeping from chapel to chapel, office to office, finding nothing amiss and nobody there.
A letdown. The caretaker had probably just failed to properly secure the door when he left. I slowly made my way to the backrooms, eventually coming to what appeared to be the cadaver prep area. I eased open a creaking, swinging door and a jolt like a Taser shot down my spine. My beam had swept a steel table in the center of the room on which a motionless human form laid. The shock of the corpse weakened me at the knees, churned my stomach. Goose bumps coursed across my shoulders, down my arms, my back and calves. I regulated my breathing and circled the slab, studying him. A sheet across his midsection maintained his modesty but none of his dignity. I paused, mentally noting his characteristics as I might a fleeing suspect: white male, early to mid-sixties (not much older than I am), 5 foot 8 or 9, 200–210, probably forty pounds overweight. Blotchy complexion, balding gray hair, unshaven, stiff brushes of gray hair protruding from his ears and nostrils, a slack jaw revealing uneven, discolored teeth, large working-man’s hands, scarred and unadorned, dirty fingernails, a rounded mound of beer belly, big feet with gnarled overgrown yellow toenails. I sniffed the air. There was none of that fabled “scent of death,” just an antiseptic, chemical smell: maybe Pine-Sol, with a hint of something sharper. It occurred to me that maybe this guy’s already been embalmed. I considered lifting the sheet for a peek at the mortician’s handiwork but decided against it. As the goose bumps faded from my arms I chuckled at myself, thinking, what did you expect? You’re in a funeral home, doofus. When I regained my composure, I rejoined Tyrone outside and teased him a little more. “Nobody’s talkin’ in there,” I said. I didn’t tell him that the corpse had made me jump out of my skin.
Many times I had backed other officers on signal 26s (dead bodies), but the primary units had always been simply responding to a dispatch initiated by the call to police from a discovering party—usually a family member, or a hospice worker—who had found the body first. We knew what to expect. The deceased had always been elderly and bedridden, and there was usually the odor of soiled bedclothes and linens (from the involuntary evacuation of bladder and bowels) mingled with a more subtle though unmistakable scent of decay. These deaths had always been relatively recent, however, and invariably peaceful and tidy; the discovering spouse or caregiver, though clearly saddened, was in control (or simply muted), often having been calmed and comforted by close relatives whose arrival had preceded ours.
But one time I was searching abandoned houses for stolen flat screens and other booty stashed from recent burglaries in the area. I was alone at dusk and pulled up the gravel driveway of a dilapidated shack nearly obscured from the road by waist-high weeds and overgrown shrubbery. The front door was half open, and it was dark and silent within. I entered, knocking, and announced myself: “Police!” Silence. I peered around the front room, the waning light sufficient to see that the house had been stripped of everything but random broken furniture and piles of old clothing, fast-food wrappers, and decades-old periodicals and newspapers littering the floor, which was an exposed concrete slab, absent of flooring or carpet. Insulation hung in fuzzy garlands like moss on a live oak, from gaping holes in the ceiling through which the attic’s electrical wiring had been ripped. The kitchen cabinets, counters, and sink had been violently jerked from the wall, its copper piping cut and pried out from behind the ravaged sheetrock. I walked down a darkened hallway stepping carefully over debris, then froze at what sounded like a television or a radio coming from behind a bedroom door. Could there still be electricity in this ruin? None of the light switches had worked.
I rattled the doorknob: stuck. I stepped to the side of the door, then reached to pound on it, yelling “Police!” louder. No response. I drew my weapon and considered kicking it in, but something made me hesitate.
Sometimes places like these, despite their complete devastation, are still inhabited. Usually by squatters, or crack whores doing five-buck blow jobs—either being arrestable trespassers—but every now and then, an ancient, frail homeowner somehow stubbornly clings to a place like this, though it’s literally falling down around him. I exited the front door, holstered my gun, and checked the mailbox. Nothing but yellowed fliers addressed to Occupant. I waded through the weeds to the window of the room I’d heard the audio coming from. Cupping my hands and face to the glass, I let my eyes adjust to the room’s dark interior and shined my flashlight through the filthy panes and battered window blinds sagging inside. There was a flickering TV across the squalid room. I thought, no plumbing, no water, no lights, heat or air, but by God they’ve got the boob tube wired!
My eyes fell to what appeared to be a cot or narrow single bed, snug up against the window, right before me. I shined the flashlight up and down the length of the bedding, which was a lumpy mass of tangled dirty sheets and a thin, ratty blue blanket. It looked like it might be occupied, but it was motionless, and I couldn’t make out a head, feet, or limbs. I banged on the glass and yelled “Police” again. No stirring, no sound, save the incessant chatter from the TV. I redrew my Glock, went back in the front door, down the hall, kicked on the bedroom door and jerked the knob both ways. To my surprise, it swung open. A familiar stench greeted me, a signal 26 stench. Damn, I thought. A stiff.
Across the room was the lumpy blanketed bed I’d glimpsed from outside the window. Next to the bed was a battered wheelchair and a nightstand crowded with medicines and pill bottles and medical-looking equipment with wires and tubes leading to the bed. I followed a tube with my eyes from the nightstand to where it snaked in under the sheets and made out its end point, covered in white adhesive tape, buried in a patch of pasty flesh: an arm, or a leg. I couldn’t tell which.
Damn, I muttered, thinking I’m due to get off in a half hour and processing this corpse could last well through end of shift and suppertime. I considered just leaving, letting a neighb
or or next of kin find the stiff and phone it in for the next squad to handle. But duty—or the chance of having been observed going in, and then getting reported for not doing my duty—drove me to confirm my discovery. With the tip of my boot I tapped gently on the bed’s metal frame. Nothing. Just to be safe, I raised my Glock. I’ve seen them play possum, then come up fighting. But they don’t usually stink like this one. I addressed the stiff, barking, “Let me see your hands!” then kicked the bed, hard.
Suddenly a head pops out from under the sheets and I nearly crap my pants. A contorted, blanched face squeals at me, his eyes popping at me as mine are at him. “I’m deaf! I’m sick! I’m deaf!” The bald-headed baby-faced old man is convulsing in terror. My own tremors nearly shake the gun from my hand. I holster it, catch my breath, and put up both hands. “S-s-sorry,” I stammer, backpedaling. “I-I thought you . . . you. . . . Sssorry, mister!” I back out the door and pull it shut, steady myself on the wall down the hallway, and escape to the safe comfort of my Crown Vic, spraying the house with gravel as I drop it into gear and spin away.
The next day, feeling guilty, I checked with the neighbors of the bedridden deaf guy and learned that he wasn’t just wasting away all by his lonesome in that wreck of a house. The neighbors assured me that a county human services caseworker checks in on him every week or so, and a hospice worker stops in daily to change his dressings, monitor his fluids, and check his equipment. And the old man’s only local relative, a daughter who works as a nurse’s aide at a local assisted-living facility, visits him at about once a month.
What a relief.
The only thing worse than discovering a stiff that turns out to be alive is to come upon a really, really dead one. A ripe one, still at home, unprepped by the undertaker. It’s not that spooky. Just wretched, stinky, and often unbearably sad. The neighbors, alerted by the smell emanating from the house and fierce swarms of buzzing flies at its screened windows, had called the old man’s daughter. When she arrived from across town and smelled the smell, she called police, afraid of what she knew was inside. Her daddy, Mose Battles, was in his late eighties, she said. Lived alone, except for his little old dog, Sweets, named after the Swisher cigars the old man loved to chew on. She wondered why Sweets wasn’t barking. Daddy was diabetic, she said—he’d already lost part of a foot—and had a heart condition, but he was too stubborn to move in with her or to a nursing home. She hadn’t seen him since the Fourth of July. It was mid-August, in Mobile, Alabama. The house wasn’t air conditioned.
Batting flies, I opened the front door with the daughter’s key as she and gathering neighbors waited at the curb. The distinct smell of something dead and rotting made me gag, and made the daughter and neighbors cover their mouths and noses with hands and kerchiefs. Inside, I called out “Mr. Battles? Sweets? Mobile PD.” I could hear a television on in the bedroom and headed that way, down the hall. As I passed the bathroom, there he was. The old man had died while defecating (not uncommon) and had fallen off his toilet. He lay crumpled on the tile, between the tub and the toilet, his pajama pants still down around his ankles, his feces still in the bowl. The room sweltered. He had been slowly basting in his own juices for weeks. A small, old, overweight pit bull mix—Sweets—lay at his master’s feet, also dead. I guessed the dog had died from starvation after the old guy had fallen off the toilet. The dog’s fur had begun to fall away from its flesh in tufts on the tile around him. The old man was swollen and discolored on the bottom half of his body: his left cheek, shoulder, buttocks, and legs were a dark eggplant color from livor mortis, the hypostasis of blood settling to the body’s lowermost points. At several places along the darkened lower half of his face and trunk the swollen skin had split like overripe fruit, oozed organic matter, and crusted. The smell of their vacated bowels (the dog’s crap littered the bathroom floor) combined with the putrefaction of their flesh made for a staggering stench. But my eyes welled up at the tender, sad sight of Sweets. What had he thought, these last weeks, slowly failing, growing weaker, starving, as Mose lay immobile and unresponsive to his whimpers and wags, sniffs and pawings?
Outside, the histrionics had begun, like a live performance of James Brown (I’ve seen him five times) but without the spangley cape they drape over his shoulders to usher him, weak from sharing too much soul, offstage. As siblings, children, nephews, nieces, and in-laws arrived, each had his or her moment of bawling, chest-pounding, hair-pulling anguish. People fell to their knees in the street, shouted their disbelief, implored the mercy of Jesus, proclaimed their loss. Others shoved and pushed (though not convincingly) my partners, who arrived to gawk at the stiff and to keep order.
Some of the bereaved were apparently driven to enter the house. By what? Spirits?
For what? To rescue or anoint the deceased? To demonstrate the depth of their loss? To say good-bye, to gaze once, last, upon the dearly departed’s earthly vessel? Would Mose—or anyone—want to be seen stinking, stiff, discolored, suppurating, and defiled, with his pants around his ankles? Others held them back as if to say you dare not look this way, asserting their control of the scene, their protection of the deceased from the living—or the living from the deceased. Teens and young children took their cues from their elders, intently studying with wide eyes the adults’ writhings and weepings, then spontaneously erupting with their own outcries and gyrations of grief, or panic. Was it genuine? There were actual tears shed, yes. But was it theater? A cultural response? A social expectation? I was as troubled by my own coldly skeptical response to this most human scene as I was by my sole urge to weep only at the discovery of the stilled, loyal canine at Mose’s feet.
Fortunately for me, there were official duties to divert me from crowd control, grief assessments, and searing doubts of my own compassion: radio for Fire & Rescue paramedics to confirm the death, rule out any question of foul play, inventory and seize the contents of the medicine cabinet, determine the names of the decedent’s physicians, get one of them by phone to speculate on the cause of death and to agree to sign the death certificate, report all this to County Department of Forensics, arrange for the transport of the body to the mortician.
As the ambulance team wheeled Mose out the front door and muscled the gurney down the steps, I took my leave of the family. It had not been too many years since I had lost my own parents, and I purposely thought of them as I expressed my condolences to the bereaved Battles clan for the loss of their elder. To my relief, my throat tightened and a tear trickled. The grievers seemed genuinely touched, grateful for my empathy. I was glad to know I could still at least summon these somatic signals of humanity, even though they had failed to arise naturally.
But emotional subtleties and skepticism play no role when dispatched to a death scene that’s not the result of natural causes. Mangled, twisted, severed corpses at interstate wrecks provoke the ghoulish, irresistible pull of a freak show. The Backwards Man remains vivid in my mind and appears from time to time in frightening dreams: broken and twisted at the waist a full 180 degrees, so that he faced the opposite direction that his feet pointed in. The Faceless Biker, struck by a car, catapulted through the air, whose visage was no more than a protracted smear on the asphalt, the only vestige of human countenance the few broken teeth in his dangling jaw. Even more compelling are the criminal death scenes, like that of the executed thug, Melted Man, felled by a close-range shot to the head from a rival, then doused with fuel and set ablaze from the neck up. And of course, the gore-smeared, bedridden old Mama, whose crack-addled fifty-two-year-old son had bludgeoned her to a lifeless crimson pulp with a brick-filled pillowcase, slung repeatedly against her skull. He departed with a bounty of $47 cash from her purse in her battered nineteen-year-old Taurus, headed for the casinos in Biloxi, leaving Mama’s tender-loving brains splattering the bed, headboard, and walls. Mama’s seven-year-old granddaughter had discovered the brutal scene. She had been screaming with hysteria for fifteen minutes before I arrived. (Forty minutes later the brick slinger had been tak
en into custody by Mississippi troopers alongside I-10, where Mama’s car had run out of gas.)
I was at once repelled and relieved by the utter absence of the emotions I had expected would sweep over me: revulsion or horror or anguish or grief or rage. And this cold calm wasn’t gradual, the result of a series of numbing, deadening exposures to savagery. It had arrived with the very first murdered stiff and has remained, unvarying, through dozens of mutilating, desecrating deaths of young and old, innocent and otherwise, at the hands of others.
I once arrived at a shooting, first at the scene, and the victim, a mid-teen gangbanger, lay dying on his mother’s front lawn. The rest of the family was still inside, cowering from the automatic gunfire that had sprayed the house. The shooters were nowhere to be seen. I rushed up to the boy and knelt beside him. He was gasping for air and choking on his own blood. Lifting his head slightly, I wiped some blood from his lips and demanded he tell me who shot him. He struggled mightily to speak, looking earnestly into my eyes. His eyes bespoke surprise, fear, and intense longing. I leaned in close to his face in an effort to understand the words he mouthed. He gurgled and choked and expelled his final wet breath on my cheek as backup arrived, and his screaming family came streaming from out of the house. I stood up to stop them and only then noticed the 9 mm semiauto still clenched in dead boy’s hand. Another youth about the same age—the victim’s brother? a fellow gangbanger?—bounded up and reached for the weapon. I stepped on the victim’s clenched pistol and clotheslined the rushing kid, his feet flying out from under him. “Get back!” I heard myself growl, startled at my own voice and my gun hand brandishing my own Glock in a wide arc toward all comers. I was startled, as well, by their abrupt compliance. “He’s gone!” I declared. “You can’t help him now!” Then, flatly into my radio, “Three-twelve to Dispatch, start medical for one down, gunshots to the chest and throat. Advise 1 Sam 3 to start ID and Homicide.”
