by Melhoff, D.
Crunch…crunch…crunch.
The sound was continual—circular—like rubber on gravel, getting louder and louder…
The two of them moved in unison, turning around just in time to see a long, piano-black funeral coach come crawling around the far corner of the airport’s hangar building.
A bar of sunlight struck the roof of the hearse and broke into a dozen blinding fragments. As the vehicle slunk out of the shadows and onto the landing strip, more beams tried piercing the hearse’s windows but failed; the tinted glass sucked them up like bottomless black holes and returned nothing except disfigured reflections. Since no one could be seen piloting the vehicle, it gave the impression that the car was moving on its own; circumstantially, it gave the even more twisted impression that the thuds of the human remains had summoned it like a dinner bell.
The old-timer gulped as the hearse rolled by—an ornate letter V glinting in a crest on its side—and slowed to a stop beside the aircraft. Camilla’s eyes were like black balloons as she watched the pilot wheel the human remains up to the tailgate and open the back doors. He slid the tray inside with a firm push, then slammed the compartment closed again and slapped his hands against his pants like they had just gotten dirty. Finally he patted the roof of the car to signal he was done.
The hearse didn’t move.
Camilla watched the pilot rub his chin and then stroll over to the driver’s door. He leaned against the roof and mouthed, Something wrong? to a figure through the tinted glass (a window must have cracked open since a little light was shining through and outlining a vague silhouette). The coachman bobbed his head and made a few hazy gestures.
Suddenly the pilot looked up and made eye contact with Camilla. He pointed at her and said something back to the coachman. The coachman nodded impatiently, and the pilot gave Camilla another glance, then motioned her over.
“Jesus,” the old-timer whispered. “Guess you really are going to Nolan.”
She smiled and gave a little wave with her fingers. “Yes. Nice meeting you.”
The pilot met Camilla at the back of the hearse. When she was a few steps away, the tailgate clicked and released automatically, as if an invisible person was there pulling the doors open for her. To anyone else it would’ve been creepy—to Camilla, it was fantastic.
“He says you’re going to Nolan?” the pilot asked, reaching down and unceremoniously heaving her two suitcases on top of the box marked “Human Remains.”
“Yes.”
“Never heard of it,” he replied. “And I’ve been flyin’ Air North almost four years.”
Camilla glanced back at the old-timer across the tarmac. He was still watching her, frozen. Not even blinking.
The pilot closed the rear doors and waved good-bye, then took off toward his 748. Camilla approached the passenger side of the hearse—smoothing down her black pinafore, adjusting her shoulders—and pulled on the handle.
It didn’t open. She tugged again—nothing.
She cupped her hands around her eyes and squinted through the window, but she couldn’t make out anything past the impregnable glass.
Click.
The sound barely registered. She was still staring into the passenger window when something caught the edge of her vision and she turned around in time to see the rear doors of the hearse hovering open again. Puzzled, she looked from the back of the car to the front, then front to back.
It kept waiting.
She walked to the tailgate and eyed the empty space beside the box of human remains. Spectacular. Her hands led the way into the compartment, and when she was fully inside, she reached for the doors behind her and slammed them shut with a finite thud!
The old-timer, a grim expression still etched on his face, watched the funeral coach circle around and take off west down the Klondike Highway. As it vanished down the quiet road, he closed his eyes and tipped his Stetson hat in respect, both to the box of remains and to the strange girl whom he would never see again.
2
Nolan
As Camilla Carleton rattled along in the back of the hearse, the first lines of an old song popped into her head: Oh never laugh as the hearse goes by, for you may be the next to die.
The rhyme brought back a sharp memory from almost a year ago. She was sitting in a pub called The Konnerkauhn on St. Patrick’s Day, chanting the song with a totally straight face, while Vickie—her lab partner—and Vickie’s roommate, Jasmine, leaned across the table and called out the most ridiculous garbage they could think of: “Mister Rogers in a thong!” “Two ostriches making love!” “Shampooing your uncle’s chest hair!” She tried blocking the hecklers—”Sneezing pandas!” “Hitler milking a cow!”—but her breathing changed and a forbidden smirk brimmed on the edge of her lips. Finally everyone burst into laughter and screamed, “Drink! Drink!” while she downed the rest of her beer and watched them cackle through the bottom of her heavy mug.
Leave it to two Funeral Services majors and a Dark Ages nerd to make a drinking game out of “The Hearse Song,” she thought. Of all folk tunes.
To be fair to Jasmine (the Dark Ages major), they were all nerds. Konner’s wasn’t their regular stomping ground—that would have been Alkaloids Anonymous, the chemistry building’s oxygen bar—but on St. Patty’s Day, it was a decent place to be. “Never mind that it’s run by a group of American franchisors who didn’t even pick a real Irish word when they named the place,” Vickie, who actually had some Celtic blood in her, had informed them. “The beer is green and the nachos are greasy, and that’s as close to Irish as anyone born after 1985 in North America cares about anyway.”
As Camilla jerked along in the back of the hearse, the dizzy memories of the Konnerkauhn’s emerald décor—and its toilet stalls toward the end of the night—wobbled in front of her eyes. Another wave of nausea swelled up, and she pulled open the curtains to try to stabilize her motion sickness.
Outside the sun was shining over the Yukon’s lush hills. Following the road was a long, lazy stream, its brackish current rippling over a bedrock of smooth creek stones that glinted like glass marbles. Farther ahead, planted in the watery shallows, was the shell of an abandoned gold-mine dredge. Its metallic exterior, which once shone like blinding-white armor, was dull and forgotten, and a hundred years of oxidation had roasted the walls to a dirty brown color that bled down the corrugated siding and into the water’s current. The empty building, along with its crumbling waterwheel and shattered windows, was an eerie fixture on the innocent green landscape.
Camilla kept massaging the car’s curtains—velvet, still plush—comfortingly between her fingers. Perking up, she looked around and began noting other subtle details in the belly of the hearse. The rollers under the air tray were brass (as opposed to steel), and the caulking around the windowpanes seemed fresh and spongy. She sniffed—no mothballs either. Impressed, she nodded and continued humming “The Hearse Song” while picturing how jealous Vickie and Jasmine would be if they knew she was cruising down the highway inside an authentic 1940s landau.
They wrap you up in a big white sheet,
From your head down to your feet.
They put you in a big black box,
And cover you up with dirt and rocks.
Her thoughts stayed with her friends. She could hear them chiming in with the tune: Vickie’s high-pitch soprano punctuated with witchlike giggles and Jasmine’s snide quips added into the rests.
She missed them badly. The three of them had agreed all the way up until convocation that they couldn’t wait to leave school for the freedoms of privacy, a paycheck, and everything else associated with “real life”, but in retrospect, mortuary school had been the first place Camilla had actually had a life. All of a sudden she wasn’t so sure she was ready to start from square one again.
Square one had always been a difficult spot for Camilla. She could trace her string of bad starts all the way back to the first grade, back to her very first run-in with death.
The me
mory started twenty years ago, early in September, when summer had just ended and the leaves were already changing.
She was dragging her yellow-and-white sneakers on her way to elementary school when something had snagged her heel in the gutter. Looking down, she spotted a dead robin lying on the bars of a sewage grate, its head cocked unnaturally to the side and its little body deflated like a leaky balloon. She remembered bending down, poking the bird twice and then, without any hesitation, scooping it into her pencil case and taking it up to the playground. Later that afternoon—when it got to her turn at show-and-tell—she unzipped the pencil case and pulled out the bird by the tip of its disjointed wing, holding it up so the whole classroom could get a good look. Mrs. Stinson had screamed the loudest. Her shrieks had been so shrill that years later, when the students had moved on to high school, they still joked about suffering PTSD—Post Traumatic Stinson Disorder. Camilla wondered how many of them were actually joking.
The memory skipped forward, like a disk with a scratch on it.
She was now in a dingy office. Beside her, sixty-two-year-old Wanda J. B. Stinson was telling the school’s walrus-like principal exactly what had happened, start to finish, with a textbook story arc that only Shakespeare and grade-school English teachers could appreciate. He hardly reacted. After Stinson was finished, the principal had turned to Camilla and said in a slow, raspy voice: “Don’t touch dead things. They’re bad.”
That was it from Administration’s perspective. Case closed, send in the next little shit. And had it been solely up to the principal, Camilla might have gotten off with a simple warning. But no. Oh no. Old Stinson made sure of it: no recess for three weeks and garbage duty all year long, justice served.
The truth was, Camilla couldn’t have cared less about the punishment. She didn’t have anyone to play with at recess anyway, and garbage duty didn’t take more than fifteen minutes tops at the end of every week. But something else had bothered her. It was the principal’s reaction—those six slow, raspy words that she still remembered over twenty years later.
Don’t touch dead things. They’re bad.
The idea that a dead thing could be bad was troublesome and confusing, especially to six-year-old Camilla. The bird was dead; how could it be anything? And how was it any more harmful than a Barbie or a bicycle or a hotdog?
That settled it: she would have to find out. Scientifically.
(Another skip, another scratch in her memory’s disk.)
It was the day Camilla’s recess ban was lifted. She smuggled out her safety scissors and found the dead bird still stuffed under the dumpster in the teachers’ parking lot. Clip by clip, she performed her first autopsy at age six on the wooden seat of the school yard teeter-totter (a good location, she reasoned, since there was no risk of being interrupted—everyone hates teeter-totters, children especially). The entire time of the autopsy, the bird didn’t move. Its talons and innards and eyes were just a bunch of bloody bits; no detectable evil, nothing insidious. Nothing “bad.” She smiled, satisfied, and buried everything in the gravel before rinsing off her scissors in the drinking fountain.
The dean was wrong. His warning hadn’t deterred her at all; in fact, it enlightened her. She spent the rest of her elementary recesses at her teeter-totter autopsy table, dissecting all manner of dead things, including insects, mice, and, one time, a bat. She didn’t kill the animals; she only studied the carrion that she could scavenge in the boundaries of Alice Park Elementary. Back then it was the only way to answer her budding questions, seeing as her family didn’t own a computer and—as a medical practitioner—Dr. Seuss seemed grossly unqualified.
Camilla blinked back from the memory. Her eyes hovered around the stomach of the hearse again, pausing on the box of human remains.
She snickered. It was funny how a person can think they’ve come so far since learning their ABCs and 123s, when really, she was more or less in the same boat that she’d been in since the first grade: alone with a dead thing.
The hearse curved along the Klondike Highway into Dawson City. They kept on the road closest to the shoreline, skirting around the edge of town with the long, tall hills following on the left.
The car passed an old whitewashed courthouse, then the chapel and inns on Front Street. If it weren’t for the pickup trucks that were parked in the driveways and the satellite dishes slapped on the sides of the buildings, Camilla would swear she was back in time at the turn-of-the-century gold rush.
Farther down, a row of pickups and hatchbacks were parked along a boardwalk of cotton-candy-colored buildings that housed five-and-dime souvenir shops. Klondyke Cream & Candy, Goldbottom Tours, the Downtown Hotel (home of the Sourtoe Cocktail, your choice of drink served in a glass with a real human toe). Camilla smiled, charmed, when she spotted a sign that read “Jimmy’s Place: All Kinds of Stuff.”
As the funeral coach passed the colorful shops, Camilla picked up on something strange: she hadn’t seen a single person since they drove into town. The curtains in everyone’s windows were pulled shut, and no matter how long she stared, she couldn’t tell if anyone was watching from the shadows of the porches and alleys.
Then suddenly there was a sound of another car’s tires turning off the road. Camilla pressed her cheek to the window and put her eye flush against the glass, hearing other tires turn off the gravel in tandem. She saw a string of vehicles parked along the boardwalk, and when she looked closer, she noticed there were people sitting inside them. Some had their heads bowed—eyes trained on their laps—while others gawked in their rearview mirrors as the coach swept by. They had pulled over to let the funeral car pass, but they didn’t seem in the least bit pleased to do so.
Camilla stared back, frowning. The last time she remembered seeing looks like those was at Damien Brown High School. DBHS: Home of the Brown Bears, rah-rah-rah, and the biggest assholes east of the Glenhurst Creek. Damien was best known by the outside world for its senior football team, but to anyone who actually went there, it was bullying capital of the tri-state area. The girls were the worst, she recalled. Any time she got a new outfit or changed her hair, she could guarantee a dozen eye-daggers would sail her way from both sides of the hallways. Name-calling was typically reserved for when she wasn’t around, but one time she overheard a cheerleader telling the squad that she was a “butter brain.” “Everyone thinks that Carleton chick’s pretty,” the girl explained, “but something about her brain is messed up. It’s ugly in there.” Camilla had been used to her share of trash talk, but that specific comment landed like a deathblow. She proceeded to run to the bathroom and lock herself in a stall all afternoon, turning on the waterworks and cursing the name of every cheerleader she could remember. Now, thirteen years later in the back of the hearse, she was surprised to recognize the same feeling—the eye-daggers from the high-school hallways—in the eyes of the people watching the funeral car roll by.
They didn’t like it; it didn’t belong.
They wanted it to go away.
The road curved down to a riverbank where the water lapped at the edge of the Dawson City shoreline. A six-car ferry was tethered in the froth, its gangplank already lowered and waiting, with a long steel arm holding a flickering propane lamp above its deck like a watchman on the foggy waters.
The hearse slowed down as its tires touched the loading point and boarded the vessel. Camilla still had her cheek against the window, excited to be on a ship, and noticed a rack of buoys and bright-orange jackets hanging outside the tinted glass. She smiled at the juxtaposition of a funeral car surrounded by life preservers.
The car stopped and the driver killed the engine.
Everything went quiet for a full minute. The hearse was silent, bobbing unevenly on the water, and then the ferry rumbled to life with a massive groan and drifted off the shoals. In under a minute they were making decent speed, and in another thirty seconds Dawson City disappeared behind them in the heavy mist.
The ferry glided along the glassy water in comple
te silence. There was no telling how long this trip would last, and without a view, Camilla was trapped alone with her nerves again.
She unzipped the front pocket on one of her suitcases and took out a hardcover book, peeling it open to a diagram of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man alongside a modern CT scan. Her fingers traced the terminology, but it wasn’t much of a distraction. As her hand drifted over the skeleton’s abdomen, another stanza of “The Hearse Song” bobbed lazily into her head.
A big green worm with rolling eyes,
Crawls in your stomach and out your eyes.
Your stomach turns a slimy green,
And pus pours out like whipping cream.
“Darn, me without a spoon,” she mumbled the extra line out loud, even though it was usually Jasmine’s part.
Her fingers flipped through the biology textbook and revealed multicolored notes on every page. Anatomy and chemistry had been her sanctuaries since high school, and textbooks were the bibles that she studied religiously. They’re what made sense to her; there was no inane fiction or fantasy—only fact. Hearts pumped blood, brains managed information, lungs circulated air. Organs had functions, not feelings.
She flipped past chapters thirteen and fourteen to the section on chemiluminescence. There were a few formulas scrawled at the bottom, along with the words “BLOOD—PRESUM” capitalized underneath the drawing of a dead stick figure in a pool of red ink. She snickered, remembering the time her mother had found her doodling stick figures on the wall of their trailer and pulled up a chair beside her, joining in.
Mom. A pang hit Camilla’s heart.
She hadn’t told her mother that she was moving until earlier that morning. Six days. Six days I kept it a secret, and good thing too. Any more than a few hours might have given her enough time to come up with a convincing argument to stay.
But now that she’d had a chance to think about it, Camilla realized that her refusal to stay had in fact been the single biggest factor for accepting this particular position. The Vincent Funeral Home had made her a good offer out of college, yes, but why wouldn’t she have waited to see if something else came along? And why accept something in the Middle of Bloody Nowhere Yukon if she didn’t want to get away, and get away good?