Violence

by Timothy McDougall

  All he could think of was the circularity in life, and how he hated coming back around to something because in his case it was usually something not very good. He knew what had been done to them in the autopsy. He had witnessed one in the Army when an Ordnance specialist in his unit had died in an accident. The kid was from a nice Jewish family in Nashville and his parents had asked Anderson to witness the post-mortem examination. The Army quickly alluded to it as being a suicide but the family was having no part of that explanation.

  The parents chose Anderson, he remembered, because he had met them briefly, having lunch with them at a nice restaurant in Atlanta when he and the kid were on leave from Fort Benning. Their son thought it was funny that he, Anderson, had no family whatsoever, and kept bringing it up throughout the meal.

  The parents hated that their son was going to get cut up in the autopsy. They were practicing Jews and this was against their religion. But suicide was an even larger sacrilege. The body was holy, in life and death, and only for God to take, in His time.

  Anyway, the Army would have ignored the parent’s objection except that Anderson said right away he thought it was an accident. The kid’s family was incredibly thankful for this. That was a long phone call, the one he had with the parents, because they wanted to know how their son was in his final days, what he said, how he was feeling. Anderson assured them he was full of life, which he was, and looking forward to the day he would be coming home.

  It really was just an unfortunate mishap. The kid had gone out of their tent to urinate in the middle of the night, and didn’t want to walk the few extra yards to the temporary latrine. So he stepped over to the edge of a nearby canal and relieved himself over the side. Unfortunately, he had taken up smoking recently, more to look Army tough than anything else, and was drowsily trying to light a cigarette at the same time as he was peeing. He slipped and fell in.

  The kid’s family had a big question. Why they were camped so close to an obvious hazard? But it wasn’t the Army’s fault either, to be fair, Anderson thought to himself at the time. The nature of being in the Army was to be in constant danger, everything was about expediency. Laying blame was tricky.

  The autopsy itself was standard. Standard, as Anderson learned from the young Army pathologist doing the duty at the time, meant they started with a million more photographs of the body (which Anderson could agree was necessary, and heck, the body is past caring, but it still gnawed at Anderson that photos had to be taken at all) before the corpse is weighed. The body is then placed on a slab and a rubber brick is placed under the back to make the chest jut accessibly, causing the arms and head to fall away. Then a deep Y-shaped incision is made which begins at the shoulders, meets at the breast bone and continues down to the pubic bone. Once this is complete, the thick layer of skin is then pulled back to expose the ribcage and neck muscles. More cuts are made and the ribcage is sawed through, separating it from the skeleton.

  With the organs now exposed, removal and examination is quite easy. Everything is taken out methodically, weighed and sampled. Veins are opened (there’s hardly any blood because of an absence of blood pressure), stomach and intestinal contents are recorded.

  Once the main body has been gutted completely, the rubber brick is slid back under the head to facilitate sawing the top of the skull open. The crown cap is then pulled away making it easy to sever the brain from the spinal cord and lift it free for examination.

  The pathologist finished in a little over an hour but said it could have taken up to two hours, even longer in tricky cases. But this was routine. Even unnecessary Anderson thought. The bruising on the kid was easy to make out. His head was banged on the side, and his leg and arm on the same side were broken badly indicating he was trying to brace himself from the impact of the fall. If he were trying to kill himself he would have taken a swan dive, Anderson recalled thinking at the time.

  Anyway, the Army pathologist said Anderson could leave but Anderson waited while they reconstituted the remains. This consisted of placing the organs into a plastic bag and dumping them back into the empty chest cavity somewhat like how you see the heart, liver, kidney and neck packaged within a Thanksgiving turkey, only on a human scale. The chest and skull cap were then sewn back up.

  Anderson remembered he never wanted to see something like that again, especially with someone he knew. It wasn’t that he was particularly squeamish but that it confirmed the meaninglessness of life and his cynicism wasn’t a flattering trait. He was smart enough to know that.

  He didn’t know what had ever happened with the investigation. The Military Claims Act imposes serious obstacles to a wrongful death lawsuit. Maybe the parents received some settlement. It just made Anderson feel sadder to think about it. Money would be no comfort.

  The big question for Anderson was why he was thinking about this now? Why was this Army experience invading his thoughts? Maybe this was another self-preservation instinct to keep him from thinking of his complicity, his contribution to Karen and Tristan’s demise because that was all he could reflect on - why this, why that. Why didn’t he stay home and protect them? Why wasn’t he more forceful in his personality, teaching them that there is real evil in the world, to recognize it as such? Why didn’t he insist on putting in that elaborate home alarm system over their objections? Why, and this is most important, why did he escalate a bad situation, turning it into a confrontation when he could have let those guys finish out their work for the day and quietly let his friend who hired them tell them later he had other jobs for them to do in other places? The “whys” were endless and felt like cross-fibers in a tightening noose around his neck.

  Maybe his helping the kid’s family then was giving him the wisdom, the knowledge to take care of his loved ones now. Anderson sided with the Jewish faith that it was really a selfish exhibition to embalm. True, it would hide a lot of the evisceration, allow for an open casket, at least on Tristan. Karen would take major reconstruction to permit even a limited viewing. But it was simply a way to keep a loved one around for as long as possible. Not let go. Injecting them. Spraying them. Coloring them. It would be just another invasion of their privacy. That was over. You are supposed to recall them in their vitality. He was going to remember them for the good and powerful radiance they brought to this grey place.

  Anderson could see the flash of dejection on the funeral director’s face earlier when he said he didn’t want them embalmed. There would be a sizable charge. The funeral director’s spirits rose, though, when Anderson mentioned wanting to get Karen and Tristan a mausoleum crypt. There probably was a referral fee the funeral director would get with the memorial park. Karen and Tristan would be upset with Anderson for thinking like this, even if it was accurate. Let people cheat a little if they have to, they would say, but his way of thinking was… dammit, he had to STOP THINKING!

  He had slept on the sofa at his office the last two nights. If he got a half hour of real sleep he’d be surprised. It was solely just staring into space and willing time on the LED display of the clock radio to move forward. He knew the greatest danger now was to let depression pull him into the abyss like claws reaching up from the earth. When Joyce came to work, he startled her as she put her key to the office lock. He’d pulled the sofa against the entrance and when she tried to no avail to push the door open, he just mumbled something to her about her taking some time off. He could hear her weeping as she returned to her car.

  Roman left a message on his cell phone after a couple of tries to reach him directly but Anderson wouldn’t answer. Roman said how sorry he was and assured Anderson that he would keep the job sites moving, and he, Anderson, didn’t even have to ask.

  Standing there now in the funeral home receiving room, every fiber of Anderson’s being wanted to hold on to Karen and Tristan for as long as possible, their physical beings, but they weren’t coming back. Their bodies had been kept refrigerated most of the time but, considering the violence that occurred, he would still have a simple vi
sitation, closed caskets, that night.

  Anderson stared down at his daughter’s angelic face. Tristan’s skin looked like veined marble. He ran one of his fingers over the area of her hair where a large bluish-purple bruise was visible on the back of her scalp and let his finger light on her delicate eyebrow.

  He then turned, looked down the length of Karen’s body. He could see dark bruising under her forearms, on her wrists and on her shins. She must have struggled, kicked them. An even more vicious torrent of guilt racked him.

  They would now go back to God as unified, as whole as he could keep them. They left this Earth a long time ago. He was truly alone and the weight of this reality caused him to involuntarily sink to his knees. He was saying his good-bye now. His arms outstretched on the gurneys was all that kept him from toppling. He wouldn’t look at them again.

  “’Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God, also have faith in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If there were not, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?’… Dear friends, we now commit the bodies of our beloved Karen and Tristan to the grave, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, as we entrust the souls of the departed to our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.” The priest finished the final blessing as he stood in the blazing sunshine outside the burial crypt that would hold Karen and Tristan’s remains.

  Anderson placed the first roses on their caskets and stepped away so the other mourners could set down their roses and pay their last respects. Many nodded sympathetically in his direction as they filed past and headed back to their cars.

  He didn’t have a reception luncheon after the services, which no doubt was a relief to many of these people and to Anderson because he didn’t know any of them and it would have been strained. The priest was a bit surprised that Anderson didn’t ask him to say grace over the food at some banquet hall but Anderson didn’t know him either, even though the priest kept calling him by his first name Noel with unnerving familiarity. The church service was enough and was well attended like the visitation the night before and the brief service at the gravesite today.

  There were many friends of Karen’s and Tristan’s that showed up to the wake, including a few neighbors, and of course Roman, Joyce and the rest of his employees and their families. There were also some genuine tears shed and Anderson appreciated that. Tristan’s friends wept constantly and openly, their little faces red from the steady sobbing. The girls brought photos they had of themselves with Tristan, some wrote notes. They tacked them all to poster boards. It took several easels to accommodate all the remembrances.

  The adults in attendance at the visitation told Anderson that they had met him previously at the community pool or some school function, a Children’s Concert, a Parents’ Night: events that he sleepwalked through and now longed for so much it felt like it was literally tearing his heart apart. Still, if there was a highlight of this whole process it was that they came at all. It wasn’t easy for them, Anderson knew that, and he acted like he recalled their initial encounter and thanked them for coming.

  Anderson’s most odd moment came when he felt the plush lushness of carpeting at the funeral home was somehow profane, although it should have had the opposite effect. He thought everything should have taken place on hard cement because every step he took felt like a pounding march as the days wore on, no matter what surface he treaded.

  Anyway, it was time to go. The committal service was complete. Anderson needed the heat of the sun because his soul felt as cold as the crypt in which Karen and Tristan would be entombed. He had heard “sorry for your loss” hundreds of times in the last few days, and didn’t want to feel the weight of those words anymore. Karen and Tristan, they had made some real friends and were genuinely a part of this community, he was proud of that, but now he had to wander off and give the mourners a chance to leave.

  Anderson weaved his way through the lawn vases, headstones and memorial slabs and stepped into a chapel. He had been told it was customary for the remains to be entombed after all the mourners had left the area. Still, Anderson wanted to be there until the bitter end and could see a couple of the cemetery staff waiting patiently down an access road.

  It was only a few minutes after the last mourner’s car had receded from sight that the two staffers motored up on their golf-cart utility truck and set about their task of interment. Anderson watched the two men reverently and efficiently place the caskets in the side-by-side garden crypts. They sealed it off as they had done many times before and put the marble shutters in place.

  Anderson experienced a surge of gratitude for the honorable work he felt they did. They didn’t treat the chore ignobly. They did it silently and with respect.

  When Anderson moved up and thanked the two men he had to insist they take the hundred dollar bills he offered them to go get a beer later, on him. The older of the two eventually sheepishly took the money, shook Anderson’s hand, as did the other man, and both said thank you, before they added “sorry for your loss.”

  CHAPTER 9

  It was a week later when Anderson returned to work. Joyce he had sent on vacation. She was an emotional wreck anyway and needed the time off. Roman was filling in for her, doing paperwork, answering the phones and returning calls when he wasn’t needed at an actual job site.

  Anderson was sitting at his desk in his office going over specs. He was trying to focus on what were mundane matters, but he was also happy to be busy at something that would take his mind off things. This is when Roman entered and placed a cancelled work order on his desk.

  “Another cancellation. That’s the third one now this week. Maybe these people think we have bad karma or something.” Roman regretted that last statement as soon as he said it, but it was uttered more out of the strain of having to continually make conversation and tread cautiously around his boss, in order to not recognize the corpses that were still in the room.

  Anderson stared stoically at Roman which Roman read as disappointment with his faux pas but it was really detachment. Anderson hardly heard anything anyone said lately.

  Roman quickly added to fill the void, “Between the economy and…” he was going to say “and this,” but instead just said, “…everything. It’s gonna be tough keepin’ everybody on if things keep goin’ this way.” This statement was still insensitive but at least addressed his pragmatic concerns.

  Anderson simply gazed mutely at him without emotion.

  “We’ll figure it out.” Roman muttered anxiously, angry again at himself for his blatant self-interest. Roman remembered something, dug into his pocket and handed a set of keys to Anderson. “I locked up the house.” Roman was going to add “it looks good” but kept silent, knowing right away that wouldn’t sound right, and he was tired of having to learn the hard way.

  Anderson couldn’t be mad at Roman in any event. Not a bit. Roman had always been an exemplary employee, a first-rate human being, and had really stepped-up for him throughout this ordeal. The “house” Roman was referring to was Anderson’s home. Roman was the first to enter it after the police finished with their investigation of the premises. It wasn’t pretty, even without the bodies.

  Roman helped get the crime-scene cleanup crew started and coordinated payment. These crews were the private firms that victim’s families had to hire to clean and decontaminate a location where a homicide, suicide or other traumatic event took place. Roman had gotten the company off a list that was faxed over from the police station where Crotty worked. It wasn’t that long ago where there weren’t any real companies that did that sort of work (or they were really hard to find) and families would have to clean up scenes where loved ones perished, all by themselves. So the news that there was someone to do this dirty job was greeted with relief by Roman because he would have offered his services.

  As it was, Roman’s significant contribution to the clean up was to act as a go-between in the days right after the murders. He didn’t know how his boss would
want things handled and was thankful when Anderson finally returned one of his calls to address what to do with the furniture and carpeting in the family room.

  The cleaning crew had already dealt with the bulk of the blood, including the cerebral fluid which is particularly slippery and hard to clean up. The brain matter itself was simpler to remove, it dries to a thick mortar-like consistency which usually only requires a stiff blade putty knife to remove.

  Roman mused it looked like a government toxic waste site clean-up operation with all the equipment that was brought in at first: hazmat suits, high-pressure sprayers, wet vacuums, steam machines, solvents, bio-hazard bags and even foggers which are used to send disinfectants and deodorizers into a home’s air ducts to not only clean but to help rid the air passages of any lasting smells of decomposition. Clean-up crews, he learned, also had to assume they could be dealing with deadly pathogens such as HIV or Hepatitis C at any given location, hence the large-scale precautionary measures were not excessive.

  Anderson knew broadly, from his Army days, what the clean-up would entail so when he heard Roman talking on the phone earlier that morning with some relative about the horrifying aspects of the experience he didn’t hold it against him. He knew Roman was just trying to blow off the details on somebody else. It’s hard to carry around the dirty laundry of life without getting someone to share in its burden once in awhile. Roman was speaking in hushed tones anyway and certainly didn’t think Anderson could hear him through the crack in the office door, but since the murders, while Anderson’s soul may have been deadened, his other senses were all heightened. Anderson contemplated that this magnification of his sensory faculties might be yet another self-preservation adaptation to safeguard against further attacks by predators.