by Johnny Shaw
“Thanks. I just want to know she knows.”
A memorial service will be held at 4:00 p.m. Thursday, August 31, at Tanner Brothers Mortuary in El Centro for John “Jack” Veeder who died August 25 at the age of 83.
Jack Veeder was born in Oakley, California, in 1927, the only child of James and Emma Veeder. A U.S. Army veteran, Jack served with honor in World War II and the Korean War. He was decorated with both the Silver Star and Purple Heart. After his service, he settled in the Imperial Valley, where he began his lifetime career as a farmer and vegetable packer. A member of Rotary International, Jack was active in the college scholarship committee.
He is survived by his son, James Veeder.
There were quite a few things that I quickly got tired of hearing at the memorial service. “I’m sorry.” “He’s in a better place now.” “Things happen for a reason.” “It was his time.” “At least he didn’t suffer.” “He had a good, long life.” “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” “He’s no longer in pain.” The fact was, there was nothing anyone could say that didn’t grate. The sentiment might have been sincere, but the repetition and execution was torture. I wanted one person to say something original rather than Hallmark me.
Bobby came close, keeping to a terse, “Fucking sucks. Shit, man.” What it lacked in delicacy, it made up for in profanity. He also handed me a flask full of tequila, one of the few quantifiable efforts to comfort me.
One old man that I didn’t know said to me, “I guess that means I’m next.” Which was pretty good. It got a smile, but ended up being a little off-putting because he appeared to be serious.
It was a decent turnout. Some empty seats, but after Red’s prologue, I hadn’t known what to expect. Too hot for a suit, slacks and button-up short-sleeve shirts were the uniform of the day. The flowers were beautiful. Aunt Phyllis’s Mexican connection had done her right.
Red spoke eloquently of Pop and his friendship. He told a hilarious story about the time they got stuck out in the Heber Beach dunes, abandoned their truck, and walked back to town with the worst sunburns of their lives.
I turned around at one point during his eulogy, craning to see any familiar faces in the crowd. I saw Bobby, Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Frank, Mike Egger and his family, Daniel and Marta Quihuis, Angie, Mr. Morales, Buck Buck, Snout, a few familiar faces from high school, some old men whose names I couldn’t remember, and standing in the back were Tomás, Little Piwi, and Yolanda.
Aunt Phyllis had arranged for a reception at the Elks Lodge. The food was great. Funerals and weddings were the only time I got to eat pit beef. The beans were always prepared in a certain way, too. It was like it wouldn’t have been a funeral without each specific menu item. The staples of mourning. I was sad, but I had seconds.
I kept to myself, occasionally shaking a hand or listening to a story. Bobby’s tequila kept me slippery. Before I knew it, the flask was empty and I’d probably drank another six beers on top of it. I tried to pass drunk off as grieving, but I didn’t really care whether or not I was pulling it off.
By the end of the reception, I was liquored. Mr. Morales suggested that anyone who wanted could continue the wake at his bar. What could be more convenient? Bobby drove, and the last thing I remember from that night was walking through the door into Morales Bar.
An eruption of shotguns blasted all around me. Bright sun pounded down on my sensitive eyes. I turned on my side and tasted dirt in my mouth. It felt like someone was pinching me on my arm, neck, and stomach. I wanted to go back to sleep, but the shotgun blasts kept roaring. My ears rang, my eyes throbbed, and my skin burned.
I sat up slowly, trying to figure out where I was and what was happening. It didn’t take long. I was on the ditch bank behind my house, and I was covered in fire ants. I stared in fascination at the trail of red ants that made their way over my shirtless torso. Most of them just went about their business, but a few stopped to bite. I stood up and brushed my body frantically, dancing like a crazed lunatic. My hungover brain wasn’t having any. I had gotten up so quickly that I fell back down and almost passed out. My light-headedness waned, but then a pounding took its place deep in my skull.
Another shotgun went off. And that’s when it occurred to me that today was September 1. It was the first day of dove season.
“What the fuck?” I heard from the ditch below me.
Still brushing ants off my skin, I peered down into the ditch. Bobby lay on his back and looked up at me. He smiled, shielding his eyes with one hand. “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.
“Ants,” I said.
Bobby looked down at his body. “Not down here. You should’ve been smart like me and slept in the ditch.”
“They’re biting the shit out of me,” I said, running toward the house.
“Hey, Jimmy! Put on a pot of coffee,” I heard behind me.
I ran into the shower and turned on the water. Nothing. Not even the weak stream I was used to. Not even a drip.
“Come on,” I screamed at the inanimate son of a bitch. I hopped out of the shower and tried the sink. Nothing there either. The water was completely out.
I stripped naked and rubbed my dry body down with a towel for ten minutes until I was positive there were no more ants on me. Even without the insects on my skin, it still felt crawly.
I really wanted that shower. My skin felt uncomfortably warm from sleeping in the sun. I put on a pair of shorts and a tank top, and then I washed my face with some tonic water from the refrigerator. It was ice cold and cooled my face, but it made my skin feel sticky. I found my sunglasses and went back outside.
I headed out to the water pump, determined to fix the fucking thing once and for all. That’s what I got for procrastinating. The first thing I noticed when I got out there was that the pump was running. It sounded like it was working hard, so there should have been pressure to the house. The pipe had to be plugged.
Bobby approached from the ditch bank, half his body and face covered in dirt. “You make coffee?” he said.
“Come over and help me with this,” I said.
“I’ll take that as a no.”
“There’s something blocking the intake to the house. Probably in the pipe down at the bottom of the cistern. I’m going to see if I can fix it the dumbass way. I’m going to drop a ladder down there, get whatever gunk is in there out.”
“I hold the ladder. Got it.”
“You’re here to make sure I don’t die. Like a swim buddy. That’s your job. Make sure I come out of the water alive.”
“Will do.”
Bobby and I got the rickety wooden ladder from behind the house and carried it back to the water pump. I lifted one end of the ladder to the concrete edge, looking down into the cistern. The catch in my throat echoed from the vacuum below.
Yolanda stared up at me from the depths of the cistern, her mouth open and full of black water. Wet hair stuck to the side of her face. Mosquitoes feasted on exposed skin. Her body floated on the surface, joints twisted in unnatural directions to fit within the confined space. She looked like a string puppet at the bottom of a toy box. I turned away when I could no longer stand the clouded vacancy of her dead eyes.
PART TWO
Not counting Pop and a handful of open-casket funerals, I had only seen one other dead body in my life. At fifteen I helped pull a week-old, fish-pecked and bloated body out of a canal. The poor bastard’s grayish skin was so misshapen and frayed that it looked like tattered rags. His faceless face continued to resonate. In discordant surroundings the once-alive shell of a human being carries tremendous weight.
Movies and television give the impression that a dead body is no big deal. We are so inured to bad guy extras doing the machine gun dance that death on the screen has become mundane. Villains die from increasingly original projectiles. Sidekicks quietly close their eyes after saying something glib. Blue-veined models lie on steel slabs, the nude centers of a coroner’s investigation. It looks like she’s sleeping. She’s not
. She’s acting. She’s pretending to be dead, and it looks nothing like death. Nothing like a corpse.
A fear-eyed corpse has lost all vanity. Life has quickly turned to rotting meat. Personality to stagnation. Beauty to nothingness. The eyes are shockingly empty, but it’s the skin that tells the truth. The flesh goes slack. The body no longer resists gravity, melting downward away from bone and muscle. The effect is subtle, almost unnoticeable, yet unmistakable.
I had never been afraid of dying, but I was scared shitless of becoming a corpse.
I sat on the grass smoking a cigarette and staring at the unremarkable concrete cistern. I found myself slowly following the web of surface cracks with my eyes. At the top the fissure was thick and defined, but like a river it branched out and thinned as it ran along the weathered exterior.
“I called the sheriff’s office,” Bobby said.
I turned to see Bobby returning from the house with a pitcher full of some frothy red liquid and two empty glasses.
He said, “With dove season starting today and all, might take a while for them to get out here.”
“You made Bloody Marys? You really think now is the right time for cocktails?”
“No. I made Barrio Marys. Clamato and beer. I tossed a couple of aspirins at the bottom of each glass. Best hangover remedy in the world.”
Bobby handed me one of the glasses. I poured the three aspirins into my mouth and dry-swallowed.
“I can’t believe you made drinks,” I said as I held out my glass and Bobby filled it.
“It ain’t like we’re celebrating. This is medicine. Hang over’s only going to get worse if it goes unchecked. Drink up.”
“Did you see her?” I looked back at the chipped cement lip of the cistern.
“Fucked up,” Bobby said.
I took a drink of my Mary. “That’s disgusting,” I said and then took another drink.
“That’s how you know it’s working.”
An hour later Bobby and I were still sitting in the grass waiting for the sheriff’s department to arrive. The dry heat of August had made way for the sticky humidity of September. The muggy air made me feel like I was covered in hot grease. An army of Apache cicadas buzzed in a nearby tree, intermittently interrupted by a volley of shotgun fire.
Bobby and I both stared silently at the water pump. We drank and stared, not a word spoken between us for the length of the hour. I wouldn’t assume what was going through Bobby’s mind, but the image of Yolanda’s dead face haunted mine. I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing her. I knew if I took another look, there would be no change in her frozen expression. Fifteen feet away, Yolanda was trapped, her body lost in the water and the darkness.
I couldn’t fucking stand it anymore.
I carefully slid the ladder into the cistern. The wooden ends broke the surface of the water and slipped past Yolanda’s body into the black murk. The morning light shimmered on the wet, satiny surface of her black dress, making it hard to tell where her dress began and the dark water ended. A splinter of wood caught her dress, pulling it tighter to her body and turning her to one side. A shake of the ladder and the material was free. Slowly the ladder crept lower. As I was about to pull the ladder up and search for a longer one, it found some unseen, semi-solid mass at the bottom.
“Last time I’m going to say it. We should really wait for the cops,” Bobby said.
Bobby had spent the previous fifteen minutes trying to talk me out of it. He brought up a number of excellent and surprisingly logical reasons to leave her in the water, but I couldn’t leave her down there.
“I can’t sit in the grass and wait while she floats in that water,” I said, my voice a little shaky.
Bobby nodded. “Okay. I tried. I don’t get many opportunities to be the voice of reason—thought I’d give it a go. I can take bottom, if you’re not up for it.”
“I should.” I wasn’t sure why it was important, but it was.
I emptied my pockets, took off my boots and socks, and climbed onto the ladder. It immediately sank about a foot and half straight down. I held on for the ride until I was convinced it had settled.
“Hey,” Bobby said to get my attention. “You’re going to have to climb into the water. Like waist deep. Right next to her. Enough to get a grip. Even with the water making her heavier, don’t look like she weighs nothing. Then I climb down, you lift her, and we walk her up together. Sound like a plan?”
I nodded, following Bobby’s eyes to Yolanda. I was relieved to find that she was no longer looking at me, her face having rolled to the side. Her black hair hid her eyes.
I must have been staring at her for some time, enough to prompt Bobby to speak up.
“You all right?” Bobby asked. He started to rotate onto the ladder, frozen with his leg up like a pissing dog. “I can still take bottom.”
“I’ll be okay,” I said after a violent shake of my head to snap into focus. I took a deep breath and let it out. I kept my eyes on Yolanda. Wooden splinters poked my bare feet with each tentative, downward step. The damp mildew filled my sinuses.
When one bare foot touched the water, I instinctively jumped back. Considering the heat, I thought it would feel refreshing. But it was warm and thick and felt nothing short of glutinous. I had mentally prepared myself to have to touch Yolanda’s corpse, but the soupy ooze of the water on my skin felt like I was stepping into a vat of saliva.
“Don’t think about it. Just do it,” Bobby shouted above me.
Through gritted teeth and closed eyes, I climbed two steps into the water. I felt like I was being enveloped by its weight. I had to push Yolanda’s body along the surface with one hand in an effort to get my body under her for leverage. She moved across the water with little effort, her body seemingly weightless.
All of a sudden, it got considerably darker in the cistern. For a second I thought Bobby was playing a joke on me and had replaced the tarp. But when I looked up, I saw that it was only Bobby’s body blocking the light. He was on the top rails of the ladder, looking down and waiting for me.
“I’m going to drop down one more step, try to get my arm around her waist and lift her rightways-up so you can get under her armpits. Then we take her a step at a time, you under her arms, I’ll have got her feet,” I said, trying to picture the plan and convince myself it would work.
I descended one more step, almost waist deep. With one hand still on the ladder, I reached out my hand, tugged on Yolanda’s dress, and pulled her close to me. I got my hand around her waist, relieved to only feel the slickness of her dress and not her skin. I pressed her slack frame to me as best I could and looked up at Bobby.
“Ready?” I said, not sure I was.
“Right here.” He hooked his foot in the ladder and held both hands down to me.
I jerked Yolanda’s body up. My foot slipped off the rail of the ladder. And before I knew what had happened, I was underwater. In my immediate confusion, I illogically clutched at Yolanda’s body, pulling her down with me, above me, on top of me. The momentum and the weight of both our bodies forced me to the soft, muddy bottom. The surprisingly cold pudding squished between my sinking toes. Grasping at sanity, I let go of Yolanda and kicked off the bottom, but I only sank deeper into the semi-solid goo.
That’s the closest I came to panicking. I kicked at the bottom, trying to free myself from the calf-deep sludge. The darkness and silence overwhelmed me. The only sound was my heart pounding in my head. I found the concrete side of the cistern with my hand. I knew which way up was. I used my fingertips to crawl to the surface, forcefully pushing Yolanda’s body out of my way. The material of her dress caught my arm and covered my face. I shook violently to untangle myself. I had no air left in my lungs when I broke the surface of the water.
Bobby’s hand grabbed my shirt at the shoulder and pulled me toward the ladder. I got my foot on a rail and gasped for air, hugging the ladder close to me.
Bobby kept his firm grip on me. “You all right?”
I
nodded, not ready to talk. I tried to steady my breathing. I looked down at Yolanda. She was face-down. Her dress had shifted to one side, revealing too much pale leg.
“That was fucked up,” Bobby pontificated.
I gave him a look.
Bobby said, “Let’s leave her. Pull the ladder. Wait for the cops.”
“No,” I said too loudly, my voice hollow within the space. “We’re not leaving her down here.”
“Dude, she’s dead,” Bobby said. “It’s fucked up, but what’s the difference? More respectful to let someone knows what they’re doing handle this.”
“She wasn’t a stranger. Maybe you leave a stranger in the water with all that filth and bugs and shit, but not someone you know,” I yelled back at him. I still felt disoriented from my undersea adventure.
Bobby stared at me for a ten-count and then gave me a short nod and a hard slap on the back. “Round two.”
Our second effort was less of an abortion. After the ten minutes it took me to regain my composure, I climbed back down and according to plan lifted Yolanda’s body high enough for Bobby to get a grip. We weren’t delicate about it, her head bobbing from side to side with no support, her arms limp at her sides. We twice scraped her body against the slimy concrete walls, leaving green-black smears on her skin. One step at a time, we carried her up the ladder, draped her over the edge of the cistern, and then climbed out ourselves.
We laid her on the high weeds next to the water pump. Her black dress stuck to her skin, her hair to her face. Her dress had shifted, exposing one of her breasts. Her skin looked white. Not Caucasian white, but white like a lily. I readjusted her dress. The dead might not be modest, but they deserved respect. Bobby got a blanket out of his Ranchero and covered her.