Amber Bananafish

May you find it in you to create that place poised on the edge of your childhood wonder and your adult know-how.

I picked Bruce up twice a week, a ride from his Father’s place in My Town to his Mother’s in her’s.  A paraplegic confined to a wheelchair, he was still a teenager, wanted to know all about the corpses, so I explained:  “That’s the job.  I’m paratransit for the elderly and disabled, but then I get a phone call and became Mobile Disposal (MOD) for a dead people.

“Ow a-ee eah ee-oh?”

That’s the way it was with Bruce.  Major speech impediment—part of his condition—and,  at first you had trouble conversing, but once you mastered the technique, you were in.  You had a friend.

“How many dead people?” I asked.

“Ee-ah,” Bruce said.

“Two, so far.  Well okay, five, but two’s supposed to be the limit, so I always say ‘two.’ Fact is, families tend to knock off together; one guy dead turns out to be his wife and a kid too.  Maybe my dispatcher really thinks there’s only one, or maybe he’s waiting to see if I protest about the extra stiffs, or maybe he just doesn’t care.  Point is, I do it all anyway, always have extra body bags.”

The pause.

“For the overtime,” I quickly added, because that was the easy way to talk about it back then; make it like I needed the money.

I’m thinking about the time Bruce and Daisy-Anne were on the bus together, and scratching my head, wondering why they were both there at the same time.  I guess I must have passed Daisy-Anne’s corner on my way to pick Bruce up and decided I may as well pick her up too.  The day was still young.

It was against rules, of course, driving anybody who wasn’t approved, but it was insurance rules mostly, and where were the insurance companies then?  Broke or useless, that’s where.  Part of the world that used to make sense from day to day, but didn’t anymore.

And D.A. and Bruce got along famously, so what of it?

“What did he say?” she’d ask, because she was just getting her feet wet in Bruceese.

“Says he’s sixteen, next month” I’d confirm.

“Oh Sweetheart, you’re so young,” she’d say, laughing.  “Let me know when your 18th rolls around, and I’ll give you a special present. One of the things I do.”

Bruce made the high howling noise that was his laughter.

Back then, no one knew that she and Bruce would never live to see his 18th.  That’s what this chapter’s about, I guess.  In The Corps you learn how to not get too attached to people who might be dead a minute later.  You learn that fast, the hard way, then you come back home and go through the process unlearning it so you don’t come off too weird for the civilians.   I’d done that.  Now I was regretting it.

So..  Taking Daisy-Anne to the morgue, the morning after I became haunted, and there was Dufus at the front desk again, being a dick and saying it was none of my business if anyone had brought in any automatic-weapons victims recently, so just do my job..

I ignored him and pushed a gurney with Daisy-Anne down the hall; where they kept the bodies.

“Hey!  You can’t go back there, it’s against the rules!”

I wanted to tell him to try and stop me, bit my lower lip instead.

And it was full; corpses lying all over because this morgue wasn’t big enough to deal with the kind of volume produced by The Plague, and the stench was indescribable with the electricity off most of the time; no refrigeration.

You opened two successive doors into this room, the second like the door to a bank vault, and you went into the carnage, the flies buzzing, and smell like a punch in the face, and then you remembered seeing gas masks on a table outside and knew what they were for, but it was too late.

Back to get one, and I literally staggered into Dufus, who was pleading with me.  “Rules and regulations are what we’ve got now.  The only thing that sets us apart from the fuckin’ animals.”

I reached for a gas mask and simultaneously lost my footing.  Dizzy from the stink. It was Dufus who caught me, kept me off the floor in a heap.  He was saying, “This has been declared a hazmat area for specialists only, Man.  Forget about The Singing Sickness, who knows what kind of disease you’ll get back there.”

I steadied on my feet, got the gas mask on, kind of.

“Here’” Dufus said, tightening some straps for me, moving the mask around, adjusting.  “If you’re going to do this, at least do it half-assed right.”

He may have said more, I can’t remember, before he grabbed another mask, put it on.  I heard him asking, “You breathing okay?”

“Smells like an old sock.” 

“Hang on.” he said, behind his mask,  and he unscrewed a round plate on my mask, let the thick round filter fall to the floor.  New filters were on the table, in plastic bags, and he took one of the bags, tore it open, dropped the bag as he took the new filter and inserted it.  The round plate back into place.

“Smells like a cleaner sock now.  Sort of mity”  I said.

“Way it’s supposed to smell,” he said, following me in.  Then he added, “No one knows if you get the disease by air, by touch, sex, food, whatever.  Truth is, you can sum up what’s known about it on the back of a postage stamp, so the gas mask is no guarantee.  We’re still taking a risk, here. In fact, one of the guy who’s supposed to be working in here is over there.  His partner stopped coming to work.”

“Can’t say I..”

The flies buzzing.  The smell of mint.  Bruce.

“Huh?”

Over there to the right, bent, twisted, dead.  Bruce next to the dead guy in the yellow hazmat suit.  I recognized the the wounds on Bruce. Small punctures, more than one, basically the same location. but leading up because he was falling as he was shot.  These kind of wounds are like Show-And-Tell.

“What?” Dufus insisted.

“Can’t say that I blame his partner for not showing up,” I said.

I was looking at Bruce, but pretty sure Dufus thought I was looking at the guy in the hazmat.

“You keep records?” I asked.  “All the recently deseased coming in here, it’s listed somewhere, right?”

Dufus shrugged.  “Girl who was supposed to be doing that died,” he said.  “I’m not so good at it.”

“Show me,” I said.

“The records?  I’m not sure I’m supposed to.”

I shrugged.  Did an about-face.  I didn’t want to leave Daisy-Anne here, but what was the option?

Not me, she whispered from somewhere far off, a place only haunted people hear.  Just meat, she said.

She was right.

Back outside, I closed the bank vault door behind us and threw the gas mask on the table.  My face was sweaty, hair disheveled.

“Okay,” I said, “You’re not sure whether I’m supposed to look at the records, but you can show me what you’re not sure what I’m supposed to look at, right?”

“That’s..”  He trailed off.

“Then I look at it anyway, and you’re not sure whether you should stop me, but pretty sure I could get physically abusive if I don’t get my way.  Let’s say there’s something about my demeanor that worries you.”

He looked at me.  He was a bit afraid of me, I could sense it.

“Not saying I’m going to get mean, just that, for all you know, the threat is there.  Imminent.  You can tell your boss that.”

He followed me down the hallway wearing his uplifted gas mask like a hat. In his office he said, “I’m not so sure about this.”

I sat behind his desk, would have started going through the drawers systematically, but what I was looking for was was a red binder I found quickly, and Dufus didn’t say anything as I went through it and saw clearly where the girl who was supposed to be doing this had left off–the change in handwriting, the sudden lack of detail in new entries.

I took a pen and wrote Bruce Pratchett (paraplegic).  Under “Cause of death,” I wrote, gunshot(s).

“What are you doing?” Dufus wanted to know.

“Just helping out.  Simmer down.  I know someone back there.”

A few beats, and Dufus said “Sorry for your loss,” like a robot.

“Yeah, sure, thanks,” and after I’d finished entering Bruce into the ledger, I was skimming the list, and this was how I stumbled on the name Ortega.

Ortega..Ortega.. Why’s that name so familiar?

“Oh yeah,” I said out loud.

“What?”

Ortega was one of the entries the girl had made.  Under cause of death she’d listed “Gunshot Wounds.”

“Nothing, I said, committing the address to memory.  I didn’t want Dufus to see me writing it down.

(Paintings by Roberto Ferri)