by Todd Harra
“Hey there,” I greeted him. He clutched a couple of road flares in his hand.
“Hull-o, Miss,” he replied. “I understand you have a blowout?”
“Yeah. Left front tire is completely gone.”
He smiled at me with crooked teeth. He wasn’t wearing much more than a heavy flannel shirt and a ball cap. He was the type accustomed to working outdoors in the cold. “We’ll have you underway in just a few minutes, Miss.” He popped the flares and dropped them on the rumble strip alongside the van.
“Oh, thank you, sir,” I said. “It’s been a long day and I’m ready to get home.”
“Let’s have a look.” He loped up to the front of the van and poked at the tire. “Yup. Blew it out all right. Thankfully you didn’t bend the rim, so everything is going to be fine. You probably won’t need a tow unless you bent the axle.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Seems to me, if I remember correctly, the spare for this is located behind the front seats in the cargo area under the floor-boards.”
“Okay,” I said and swung the doors open.
The man peered into the cargo area. “What’s that?” he asked and put a crooked finger on his grizzled chin.
“Just a couple of bodies,” I said briskly. “I’ll move them out of the way so you can get to the tire.”
The man recoiled. “I’m not touching this van!”
“What?” I said, confused. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll pull the bodies out and you do your job. You don’t have to touch them.”
“I’m not getting in there!” he said. “There are dead people in there!”
My gratitude quickly melted into frustration. “Then what are you here for if you’re not going to help me?”
“I’m not getting anywhere near no dead people.” He took a step backward toward his pickup.
I snorted. “Then just get the hell out of here! I’ll do it myself,” I yelled. I had never changed a tire before on a car, much less a giant van, but I wasn’t going to sit around and suffer this fool.
I pulled the two cots out onto the shoulder of the freeway. The cars zipping by slowed; a strange scene was unfolding on the side of the road and the drivers wanted to rubberneck. I crawled into the back of the van, lifted up the floorboard, and retrieved the spare tire and jack. The tire didn’t look like the regular ones. It was smaller and didn’t look as sturdy—almost like a donut.
I rolled the donut between the suspended steel bays and crawled out, my charcoal pantsuit pants now smeared and greasy. I noticed with annoyance the guy was sitting in his pickup, watching. I loaded the two cots back inside the van and marched back to the pickup and rapped on the window. He rolled his window down.
“There,” I said, “the bodies are all gone, now do your job.”
He looked at me and said, “I told you I’m not going near that death van.”
“Then go on. Get the hell out of here. I don’t need you if you aren’t going to do anything.”
“Can’t. Gotta stay. Rules.”
“Do the rules also mention you sitting on your ass doing nothing?” I glared at him and marched back to the spare and jack. I picked them up and went around to the front of the van and got down on my hands and knees and looked under the chassis of the van. I found what appeared to me to be a suitable place to put the jack and started cranking. After I had the rim off the ground a few inches, I took the wrench and tugged at the bolts holding the old tire on.
“You’re doing it wrong!” the man called from his truck. I ignored him. The bolts were stiff and I was using every ounce of my strength. The van rocked perilously. I stopped and waited for it to stop moving. Then I tugged at the wrench, applying more even force. These bolts are really on there, I thought as I gave the wrench a final pull. The jack kicked out from under the van and it crashed down. I dove out of the way just in time. I sat on my rear end a few feet away, shaking from my close call.
“You’ve got to loosen the lugs before you jack up the van!” the man in the pickup truck called.
Thanks, asshole! I thought, picking myself up off the shoulder and dusting my coat off.
I retrieved the wrench from where I had flung it and found that by partially standing, I could put all my weight into loosening the bolts. I got all five loose and again jacked up the van. I slipped the spare on the rim and let the vehicle down. The spare donut seemed really soft, but I wasn’t going to ask the useless idiot in the pickup for anything like an air pump.
I tightened the bolts and navigated slowly back onto the interstate. Opening my window, I flipped the old guy the bird before I roared off. I kept the van at thirty-five all the way to the mortuary.
It was a long ride back.
CHAPTER 10
Severe Clear
Contributed by a bicyclist
One night about ten years ago, I received a call at the witching hour. It’s not at all unusual in my business to get calls in the middle of the night, but this call was quite unusual. It went something like this:
“Freeman Mortuary. Gabe speaking.”
“Yes,” the shaky voice on the other end of the line said. “My name is Betty Drake. I’m sorry to bother you but I didn’t know who else to call.” She paused and wept.
“Did someone pass away?” I inquired, still lying in bed with my wife, the lights out.
“Yes… no. It’s our dog, Clear.”
“Oh,” I replied. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you,” Betty said. “We heard some noises about an hour ago and came out to the kitchen—my husband and I—and found him… dead!” She wept again. I remained silent. Betty composed herself and continued. “We just moved here and we didn’t know who to call. My husband suggested I look in the phone book for a funeral home. We knew the undertaker where we used to live and he came and got our last dog twelve years ago. I found your number in the Yellow Pages and called.”
“You want me to come get your dog?” I asked.
“Well, yes,” she said. “If that’s something you do.”
No, that’s not something I do, I thought, but what the hell. “I’d be happy to come get your dog,” I said. “What kind is it?”
She told me and gave me her address. I promised to be there within the hour and hung up. I redialed the phone. “Hey, Tom, don’t be mad, but—”
When I hung up with Tom, I lay in bed for a moment thinking, Don’t look at the clock, don’t look at the clock. I looked and groaned. My wife just rolled over and continued sleeping.
Tom and I arrived at the Drake household forty-five minutes later and found a crying Mrs. Drake and a somber Mr. Drake. They were an older couple; I guessed them to be in their early to mid-sixties. Mrs. Drake led us into the kitchen, where one of the most beautiful dogs I have ever seen, a husky with a black and white coat lay on the floor.
“We were never able to have children,” Mrs. Drake said. “So our dogs are like—” She bit her sentence off.
Mr. Drake knelt next to the dog and stroked the fur around his neck. “You ever dive?”
“Excuse me?” I said, confused.
“Dive. You know, skydive?”
“No,” I said, “can’t say that I have.” I was lost.
“We called him Clear,” he said. “His official name on his kennel papers is Severe Clear because his eyes were the exact color of the sky on a perfect skydiving day, called a severe clear day.” Not sure if I was supposed to comment, I remained silent. “I was Airborne. I used to dive,” Mr. Drake said, looking up for the first time from his place on the floor.
I nodded.
“I dove for sport later in life. When Betty brought this little guy home from the kennel and I saw those eyes, I knew exactly what we were going to name him. Either of you guys have dogs?”
Tom and I nodded. Tom has a chocolate Lab, and I have a Yorkshire terrier, so we know what it’s like to be attached to a dog. People who don’t have pets don’t realize what a big presence they are in the house, but they
each have their own personalities. They become part of the family.
We expressed our sympathies to the Drakes and Mr. Drake escorted the still crying Mrs. Drake out of the kitchen while we loaded the eighty-pound husky onto the cot and took him back to the funeral home. The Drakes stood on the front stoop and watched as we pulled away. Mrs. Drake hugged herself while Mr. Drake stood with his arm around his wife’s shoulders.
The next day I took Clear to the animal crematorium, and later in the week transferred his ashes from the little plastic box that held his remains to a small blue painted steel urn.
I got busy, and it was two weeks before I was able to deliver the urn to Mrs. Drake. When she saw the urn with the name Severe Clear on the brass nameplate, she started to cry. “I thought the color was fitting,” I told her.
She just nodded through her tears. Finally, she regained her composure enough to ask, “How much do I owe you?”
“Nothing. Just count this as a favor from one dog owner to another.”
“Thank you so much,” she gushed. “Could I invite you in?” I declined, saying I was busy. As I turned to leave, Mrs. Drake said, “We miss him so much, you know. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Gabe. You have made this really easy.”
I thanked her for her kind words and bid her goodbye, and chalked the whole thing up to good karma.
Now, I’m not trying to toot my own horn, telling people they’ll “get something” for doing a good deed. I certainly wasn’t looking to get anything from the Drakes. But in the ten years that have elapsed since I went to their household in the middle of the night to get Severe Clear, both of Mrs. Drake’s parents have died and she called me, remembering my kindness. And recently, when Mr. Drake died, Mrs. Drake called me to take care of him. We placed the blue urn in his casket.
“It just seems fitting,” Mrs. Drake said.
I agreed.
CHAPTER 11
Roadblock
Contributed by a retired infantry officer
I grew up in the city. My favorite time of year is winter. There is nothing more beautiful than a snowy cityscape. The whiteness blankets the filth and urban ugliness with cleanliness and soft edges while the urbanites run for the shelter of their giant buildings, leaving the streets deserted. The only problem is that the snow makes my job damn near impossible to do, or so I found out the hard way one night when I nearly quit, but I’ll get to that later.
I was a career infantry officer in the Army. Got commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant, saw some combat, got decommissioned with silver oak leaves—a light colonel. I traveled around the world several times over and saw a lot of things. Some good. Some bad. But it was all interesting. My career propelled a troubled eighteen-year-old boy out of an equally troubled area, gave him an education, and gave him a life. I shudder to think what would have become of me if I hadn’t joined the Army. I’d probably be in prison, or worse.
When I retired from the Army at age fifty-four I didn’t know what to do with myself. I still got up at 5 A.M., I still kept my hair high and tight, and I still rolled my socks the Army way. It’s hard to know what to do when nobody’s giving you orders, if all you know is how to take orders. My wife finally shooed me out of the house. I was driving her crazy.
I took some classes, volunteered, and even tried a new hobby—watercolor. I found I hate watercolor. My colors always ran together and I all I ever got was a big brown mess and elevated blood pressure. The classes bored me, and the volunteering… let’s just say I’ve found that I’m too old to change the world, or too tired. I can’t decide. I was like a ship in a storm without a tiller.
Then my mother died and everything changed.
We called the undertaker my family has used in town for ages: Pickering and Sons, Inc. They came to my house, where my mother had been living with us, and did the removal. The next day I went in and met with the owner, Thomas F. Pickering, V, to make arrangements.
It wasn’t a sad occasion. My mother was old, and it was her time. She had lived the hard life of a single parent, trying to feed herself and her son by cleaning hotel rooms. My wife and I were planning on burying her in the cemetery plot we were eventually planning to use ourselves. No fuss. No fanfare. I told Thomas Pickering my plans, and afterward we got to talking. I told him how as a boy, when I lived in the city near their old funeral home, I used to wash cars for his grandfather, Thomas F. Pickering, III, and do other little jobs to earn a bit of money to blow at the five-and-dime store. I then proceeded to tell Mr. Pickering how if I hadn’t gotten into mischief and subsequently gone into the service to avoid jail time, I could easily have envisioned myself as an undertaker.
I was half joking.
“It’s never too late,” Mr. Pickering told me and handed me his card.
It was an impressive card, cream-colored linen stock with raised ink lettering bearing fancy script and the family crest.
“We use part-time employees all the time, and I’m always looking for reliable help.”
“I don’t know, sir—”
He interrupted. “Please. It’s Tom.”
I laughed. “Sorry. Force of habit. Back to what I was saying. I’ll be pushing sixty real hard in a few years. I imagine you need strapping young recruits to do this job.”
He shrugged. “Obviously you need to have some strength, but older guys can do it just as well. I’ve found that older people are much more reliable than the younger crowd. I call some twenty-something part-timer on a Friday evening and what’s he tell me?”
“He’s gotten into the sauce?”
“Exactly!” Tom exclaimed and pounded the desk. He stroked his silver goatee, looked at me, and winked. “Not that I don’t like a pop every now and again, but you can’t go pick up a body when you’re drunk. It’s not professional, and it’s dangerous.”
I was listening.
“Well, Nicholas, if you find you’re ever interested in pursuing that second career, or just looking for something to keep you busy, give me a call. I’d be happy to add you to my roster. Besides,” he said and gestured across his giant mahogany desk to me, “you don’t give yourself enough credit. You look as fit and trim as any twenty-year-old who has ever worked here.” And it was true that the Army had instilled in me a rigorous schedule of exercise that kept me limber and free of the paunch many of my peers were plagued with.
I placed his fancy card in my shirt pocket. We settled up the bill and later that week buried my mother.
Tom’s card sat on my bureau for a couple of months. I suffered through some more interminable watercolor attempts and too many sessions of a dreary class at the senior learning center (a name I hate) called “Manifest Destiny: Land Bondage of the American Indians” before I mustered the courage to pick up the phone. Tom hired me right on the spot. Soon I was doing removals for the firm, a week on, a week off. When I am “on” I carry a pager with me twenty-four hours a day. Another gentleman and I work together, alternating. He does a removal and I do the next one. And if it is a residential removal, we both go together.
I finally had a mission!
The beauty of the job is that I can just get in the van and go, and there is enough work that it keeps me as busy as I want to be in my retirement years. Sometimes, they even send me on road trips to pick up or deliver a trade job (a body that’s embalmed by another funeral director) or take a burial out of town in the hearse. I am in different places and situations every day, meeting people at every turn. It’s certainly never dull, almost like being back in the good ol’ Army.
The only time I almost quit was a couple of years ago right around Christmas. I was dispatched to a nursing home in the city. I hate doing removals there because of the parking problems, and to top it off it looked like it was going to be a white Christmas. It was snowing hard.
This particular nursing home was in an established residential section of the city, where there was just room enough for the building—nothing else—certainly no parking lot. The ambulance ramp at the rear of the
building extends out to the sidewalk on a one-way street. Normally, this would worry me because I have to park in the middle of the street and block traffic, but the snow compounded my worries. Snow and ice make navigating the cot hard enough, but going down a slippery ramp with at least a hundred pounds of weight is a near-impossible feat. The only thing I had working in my favor was the fact that the call came in at eleven o’clock at night. That meant traffic would be light.
I got to the nursing home, parked the van in the middle of the street, and took the keys out, even though it was below freezing and I would have preferred to keep the heater running. I put the emergency flashers on, wheeled the cot up the ramp, and was buzzed in. A sleepy and slightly hostile nurse threw some papers in front of me and pointed me to Mrs. Jardeen’s room. Much to my dismay, Mrs. Jardeen was, to put it nicely, a big woman. I hefted her onto the cot, pulled the straps tight, and headed back out into the tempest. The staff at the nursing home hadn’t salted the ramp. Holding onto the rail with one hand and allowing the weight of the cot to pull me, I slowly slid down the ramp without incident.
I was so pleased with myself at successfully navigating the slushy ramp that I threw caution to the wind. Mistake. As I lowered one end of the cot off the curb it hit a patch of ice and swung wildly to the right. I desperately twisted the rear of the cot into the skid, trying to stop it, but the weight on the cot torqued it right out of my hands. The force I was using to pull the cot suddenly wasn’t counter-balanced and I fell backward. I ended up sitting hard on my rear on the snowy sidewalk. The first thing out of my mouth was, “Oh, shit!” I watched in slow motion as the front wheels swung back to the curb and hit it. The forward momentum of Mrs. Jardeen kicked the legs of the cot out. It flopped on its side in a growing snow bank with a sickening thump.
I sat for a moment on the cold, snowy sidewalk, stupefied by the little drama that had just played out before my eyes. I finally got up and dusted myself off and tried hefting the cot up. She was far too heavy for me to dead lift—no pun intended. There I was, out on the deserted city street in the middle of the night with a flipped cot and my van blocking the road… in a snowstorm.