by Chris Bauer
I smelled supper from the door stoop. Baked macaroni and cheese.
How would Viola’s eyes be tonight, I wondered. For the forty years of our marriage they’d been full of life, so large and warm and bright. When our son, Harry, got sick last year, they started fading. When he died in February they nearly died with him. I reckoned the past two months my eyes hadn’t fared much better, but around her I did my best to keep them bright enough so she saw in their reflection just what she meant to me.
“Hi, sweetie,” I called to her. I made my way into the kitchen where she stood in front of the stove, stirring a pot. I planted a big one on the back of her neck, moved in behind her and wrapped my arms around her waist, me looking to stir up a pot of a different kind. I pulled her close, whispered something naughty in her ear. She blushed then reached her cupped hand back to pat my cheek.
“If I’m not too tired,” she said, and the smile in her voice tried to find its way to her eyes. I hugged her tightly, told her it was okay either way, and the truth was, it was. Okay if she was too tired, me knowing how the parish housekeeping chores been taking so much out of her lately. Okay otherwise, just in general.
“No corn on the cob today, Johnny,” she added. Viola wouldn’t call me Wump; had never liked my nickname. “Too dear this time of year. Tonight it’s canned. And tomorrow night, too, until the price comes down.”
I was scraping the dinner dishes into the garbage strainer in the sink when the doorbell chimed. Viola left the kitchen to answer it.
“My goodness, Leo, look at you. Johnny, come here.”
Leo stood full of mud on the front stoop, some of it caked, some still dripping, brown up to his waist, and he was shaking. I got up close to him. The boy smelled like a sewer.
“Teddy fell in, Wump!” Leo said, panting. “Slid down the side of the hole for the restaurant, right to the bottom. We were on Schuetten Avenue, carrying the paint and he was talking to me, telling me about his dad, the tannery, stuff like that, then all of a sudden there’s no more Teddy, and I see he’s in the big hole, in water and, ah, yucky stuff, up to his belt. That hole wasn’t like that yesterday. I helped get him out, but I couldn’t get him to leave with me.”
“Get me some blankets and towels,” I told Viola.
We wiped Leo down real quick, then draped a blanket around him; he stopped shivering. I told him to get into my truck, a faded red and crusty brown ’52 Willys pickup that was still a workhorse even though it looked like the river had burped it up. Before we could pull out, I did a double-take. Out for an after-dinner walk was Father Duncan, his cleric’s collar back on under a zipped-up spring jacket. I quick told him what happened and he got into the front seat of the truck beside Leo. Schuetten Avenue was four blocks away.
Teddy was still at the site. Light from the street lamps on the avenue showed us the excavated hole, about sixty by sixty, one half deeper than the other, the drop sharp. The deeper section was like a swimming pool, the back half just puddles. “Yucky stuff,” Leo’s description of the slop the hole contained, just didn’t do it justice. Not by a long shot.
We moved toward Teddy, me as fast as my legs would carry me, Father high-stepping it a lot faster. Teddy was shivering something fierce; when Father got there he draped a fresh blanket around him. Father looked at where Teddy pointed, in what was left of the water.
“Sumpin’s under there,” Teddy said. “Sumpin’ crunchy, on the bottom. I was stepping on it. Then Leo got a board and I climbed out.”
We all looked but couldn’t see what he was talking about, the muddy water below us in the shallower half still foamy in spots. The place stunk to high hell, like rotten eggs mixed with a hundred years of raw sewage. Then something yellow-white and round and smooth as an overturned bowl poked through the tan foam, to our left. The foam kept dissolving, enough so a second bowl was visible. Then a third, over to the right, and a fourth, and a fifth, except now it was obvious they weren’t bowls.
They were skulls. I stopped counting.
My legs weakened, some from a smell bad enough to water a person’s eyes, some from seeing all these jumbled-up bones and skulls bunched in spots around the hole’s floor. But mostly it was from a childhood memory so gruesome it snatched at my sanity for a moment. I steadied myself, listened hard, and waited for the screams I knew were coming, girded myself for the screams and whimpers I was sure no one else would hear because they weren’t there to hear them the first time.
Voices gathered, tinny, squealing voices like tiny birds, chirping and jabbering from inside this hole, on its floor, the chirping starting to swell up. I could feel it, could feel them, here they come…
The noise slammed and held me like a siren, assaulted my eardrums, was more earsplitting than my nightmares. I would have screamed if I’d had the breath.
…no heaven no heaven NO HEAVEN—
I willed myself to breathe, willed myself with eyes squeezed tight to not move, to not turn, to not run because this time, at my age, there could be no running. No way, no sir, no how, unh-unh.
—whywhywhyWHY—
I held my ground. The voices snapped in midscream and were gone.
When a priest drops a coin into a pay phone and says it’s an emergency, things happen. The police were now here and so were some city waterworks and sewer maintenance folks. Father talked with a cop, the both of them sidled up to a water company fella who studied a blueprint, other long rolls of blueprints under his arm.
I told Teddy and Leo they needed to call it a night. Leo humored me with an “okay,” then did what he wanted anyway and wandered over to where Father made conversation with the fella from the water company. I was left with Teddy.
“God was watching over you today, son. You’re one lucky young man.”
“Yeah. Right. Lucky,” he said. It wasn’t a sarcastic answer, just Teddy’s way of processing what you told him. He sneezed. “I gotta go. Grammy will be worried. My daddy may be, too.”
He was right about his grandmother and her worrying. I knew her; she was a good woman. I knew Teddy’s father, too. The man was drunk this time of night.
Father Duncan motioned me over to him. “This fellow is a water department supervisor, Wump. Says he might know what’s going on with this hole.”
The guy was in light blue coveralls with a hardhat, thirty years old maybe, slight build, big Adam’s apple, glasses. “These fucking restaurant people,” he said, then caught himself and turned real sheepish toward Father Duncan. “Sorry, Father. These, ah, idiots bought this acre and the one behind it from the city, were told they could sink their hole toward the back of the second lot, to the left. So where did they put it? In the front of the first lot and on the right, which is close to a water main. But it still should have been okay because that’s not what they hit.”
Hadn’t heard nothing about any skulls so far. The guy looked down Schuetten Avenue as its amber streetlamps timed on around the avenue’s curve, spring’s lengthening days not yet figured into the mix. “I’m waiting on someone from the main office,” he said. “He’s bringing older maps. This hole looks like it’s been dug into what used to be a storm sewer tributary. One that was filled in and rerouted. They did some of this around here, way before my time.” He turned to me and looked me over. “But probably not before your time, huh, Pops?”
I boxed in prison, knocked out men in and out of the ring for far less than what this guy just called me. This water department asshole had better watch his mouth.
The city engineers were rigging up lights. At the front of the hole for the restaurant, straight down from street level, was a wall of brick at least thirty courses high and a few courses deep. A chunk of it was missing. Looked like the steam shovel operator stopped just short, probably hadn’t even known the wall was there. With most of the dirt on this side of the brick gone, part of the wall had buckled. On the other side I could see some vertical black bars, six inches apart or so. Grating for a large sewer or storm drain. The debris on the floor of
this hole had come through those bars. Bones and skulls, and fragments of both. The skeletons of fifty or more bodies was my guess.
I looked up Schuetten Avenue to an intersection, squinted to confirm the name on a signpost for the cross street. I knew what was in this hole, now that I was sure of my bearings.
Baby skeletons, every last one of them.
2
My breath lingered in steamy puffs inside the truck, the heater not fully kicked in while the truck idled curbside next to the restaurant excavation. It was chilly this morning, chillier than normal for early April. The cops and waterworks guys were back down in the hole same as they were last night, all blowing in their hands. I sat in my truck behind a black Caddy station wagon with gold-paint stenciling on its two front doors. The letters spelled out its purpose in a sweeping longhand beautiful as a nun’s penmanship: Coroner. The stenciling didn’t fit the car’s purpose, a bit too giddy maybe, like it should have had an exclamation point after it, or like maybe the coroner himself was a fairy or something, which I had no reason to believe, not meaning any disrespect one way or the other. And it wasn’t like the writing could have thrown a person off either, like someone wouldn’t have guessed its business, its rear windows as black and glossy as the car’s paint job, just like a hearse. A few nicknames percolated: crypt buggy, cadaver car, meat wagon.
Maybe not meat wagon, considering.
I’d seen this coroner before, on the TV news. A big-waisted Perry Mason look-alike only shorter and heavier. He was down there with the rest of them, a full story underground, all the water pumped out, the pumps on standby. It was set up like a crime scene now, the cops gathering up the small skeletons and placing them in canvas sacks, stuffing as many bones as they could into each one.
Leo was here, and today he had Raymond with him. Leo had already dug out the cans of paint Teddy Agarn lost when he slipped into the hole last night. Without the paint Leo wouldn’t get his errand money, and there wasn’t much that could stand in the way of Leo and money, cops and crime scenes included.
Leo slid the paint cans into the covered wire basket under the seat of Raymond’s wheelchair. My idea, this basket was, knowing how Leo took Raymond on errands with him. Except Leo kept the basket loaded with rubber swords and baseballs and army guns and other toys for when the two of them were play-acting. Still, whenever I asked him to run an errand, he always managed to find room in there, a lot like a magician with a false-bottom box. Of course, poor blind Raymond didn’t do much real playing, mind you. He could hold things and lift his arms a bit, but he was too weak for much else. Leo had a grand old time with him anyway.
Leo wheeled Raymond up to the driver’s side of my truck and got eye level with me. “Morning, Wump. You want this hardware stuff left out back of the, ah, don’t tell me, lemme guess, out back of, um…”
Leo’s face pinched. He could have chosen from five places where he could leave it, the church, the school, the rectory, the convent, or the long shot, my house, where I sometimes did prep work for parish projects. He looked back and forth between Raymond and me, studied me like maybe I would give the answer away. My face stayed blank while I tried to remember if I’d told him what my plans were, that I needed to repaint one of the parish nun’s rooms—
“The convent!” he said, beaming, then squealed out a giddy ha-ha. “Can I have my errand money now?”
I’d been playing guessing games like this with him for I didn’t know how long. It used to be if there were, say, three choices a person might have, Leo would just as likely pick choice number forty-two million, like maybe home plate at Connie Mack Stadium, or the planet Mars.
“That was a real good guess, son. Here.” I handed him a dollar and reminded myself even a blind chicken finds a kernel of corn once in a while. He’d use the buck to get some candy for him and Raymond. “And here’s another fifty cents for Teddy. You be sure to give it to him.”
“Sure,” he said, then jerked an openhanded swipe at his itchy nose. “I went to see Teddy this morning. His dad yelled at me. Wasn’t my fault he fell in the hole, was it, Wump?”
“Of course it wasn’t, son. It was an accident. Don’t pay no attention to him.”
It was something I expected from Teddy’s father, a discontented bozo if I ever knew one. It reaffirmed my opinion he needed a foot up his ass.
I talked with one water department guy, old-timer to old-timer, who’d brought maps he said had been tucked away in a vault at a regional office in downtown Philly. We were at street level above the excavated lot, the maps opened flat on a piece of plywood laid over two sawhorses, bricks holding the maps down.
“Sixty years on this earth and forty-one of them spent in shit,” he confessed. A dingy little guy in tan coveralls under a boxy crewcut, he had an upper denture plate that stuck some when he talked. Wouldn’t be long before those choppers were in a drawer. “But I can’t say I’ve seen anything like this before. Won’t do any good making this a crime scene now. There can’t be much of a trail left on crimes committed over thirty years ago.”
“More like sixty years ago,” I told him. “It was rougher around here back then. Lots of German immigrants trying to make ends meet. Too many mouths to feed. Desperate times for desperate people.”
“Around the turn of the century?” He rubbed his chin. “Sure, why not.” The man was humoring me. “All I know is,” he said, “whatever crimes we’re talking about were committed before the late twenties, which was when the water department rerouted the sewers and storm drains in this area to accommodate new housing.”
“If they rerouted them,” I said, “then what’s that?” I was pointing down, into the hole, at a rectangular concrete tunnel about seven feet high and fifteen feet wide, on the other side of the scattered bricks. The morning sun was low enough to brighten maybe twenty feet of the tunnel’s darkness.
“On this side of the wall, where the restaurant will go,” he said, “the contractors back then did what they were supposed to do: dug down into the tunnel and filled it in. But under Schuetten Avenue and north,” he pointed to the darkness beyond the brick, “they shorted the job. My guess is they walled it off at both ends. Without it being active, over time it dried out. I had a blowtorch in here to cut out all the grating,” he said, pointing to where the iron bars were visible last night, “and I sent three men in there about twenty minutes ago to see how far north it goes. One thing’s for sure”—his mouth click-clacked once as he lifted a dirty thumb to push up his false teeth—“it’s carrying wastewater again.”
“Untreated wastewater, right?” I said to him. The smell told me this. Still, I wanted him to say it.
He studied the old map real hard, started tracing some of the sketch lines with his index finger, moved his finger north until it ran out of paper. Just when I figured he hadn’t heard me, his white eyebrows wrinkled up and he answered real absent-like, like he was the one who posed the question. “Untreated wastewater. Yeah.”
It was then he shot me a sideways glance and his eyes narrowed. “What did you say your name was?”
He and I had spoken on the phone a few times, even met once, and now he was close to remembering. I answered him and his mental tumblers clicked into place; his face changed.
“You again? Get off this site now, you crackpot, before I get someone to throw your ass off. We’re done talking.”
I’d done my begging the last time we met, so I wasn’t about to do it again, but him and me were far from done talking. I summed it up real quick for him, just in case he’d forgotten: industrial sewage dumped into a freshwater tributary, foamy creeks and streams, fouled drinking water, people getting sick. People dying, my son Harry one of them.
A hand dropped onto my shoulder from behind me, but I wasn’t finished, damn it. “The evidence is right here, under your nose, in that hole. I’d say it’s time for you to be a man instead of some heartless, bureaucratic weasel—”
A town cop had hold of me, his arm around my shoulder, firm but gen
tle like he knew me, which wasn’t a stretch considering most folks around here were churchgoers. He guided me around the police barricades and up the street, told me in a calm tone to let the water department folks do their job and sort this out.
All I knew was that a good portion of my days I spent in pain. A dark, emotional pain that had no chance of letting up unless the right folks got clued in on the unhealthy slop that traveled through the waterways around here.
The cop stayed with me until we reached my truck. It was then we heard raised voices and a flurry of noise coming from the hole’s floor, the workers scattering like ants looking for higher ground. Out of the tunnel’s mouth came a foamy blast of brown water with a jumble of adult arms and legs as three men in slop-covered uniforms appeared at the crest of a small sewage tidal wave. The gushing stopped, the deeper section of the hole a swimming pool of filthy water again. The poor saps who came out with it were on their butts in the upper elevation, coughing and trying to catch their breath, wiping their faces and eyes with mucky fingers.
“Jarret!” the supervisor with the crew cut yelled. “Don’t you know to hold your breath if it looks like you’re gonna take a shit-dip?”
“But, boss,” his worker said through a coughing fit, “we never saw it coming. We stepped off about eight city blocks, up to where the tunnel stopped at another wall just like the one on this end, except there was a hole in the wall’s brick.” Someone tossed a folded yellow towel down to him. The man buried his face in it, then looked for a dry spot to finish wiping off his eyes. He addressed his boss again. “Some water was still trickling through it. We chiseled at one of the bricks until we heard a rumbling from the other side. Before we could back ourselves out, the whole friggin’ wall exploded, and we were taking a ride on a shithouse roller coaster.”