Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt

My funeral home wasn’t doing very many calls a year. One weekday morning I was drinking coffee and reading the sports scores when the phone rang. It was the coroner’s office; a body had been found in the foothills. I took the location from the woman, thanked her, and hung up. I called a part-time guy, Paul, who helped me do removals, and he agreed to me meet me at the funeral home.

We piled into the run-out old Chevy station wagon and drove out to the site. I live near the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The weather fronts that blow off the Pacific Ocean hit the mountains and have nowhere to go, so they dump their precipitation. It’s usually raining in my neck of the woods. This day was no exception. It was more like a heavy mist than an actual rain, but combined with the chilly air, it was a certifiable foul day. One of the sheriff’s deputies recognized my vehicle as we pulled up to the scene and waved us through the cones he had set up on the lonely mountain road.

I stepped out of the wagon and turned my collar up. It was no use; the wind still cut right through the fabric. The area where the body had been found was on a bend of a secondary road leading up towards the mountains. Old-growth forest towered over the road on one side, and on the other, an embankment dropped away from the road. I walked over to the guardrail where the coroner was staring down the hill intently.

“Hey, Joe,” I said, fumbling for my cigarettes in my pocket with frozen fingers.

He glanced at me, grunted, cigar clamped between his lips, and then looked back down the hill.

I pulled out a cigarette and inserted it between my lips. “Nasty fall, huh?” I said, following his gaze down the steep embankment to where I could see two deputies picking their way through the brush around the little stream at the bottom of the ravine.

Joe grunted again, and pulled his cigar from his lips with his thick fingers.

I tried lighting a match but the moisture just made it crumble. I tried several before I gave up and flicked my unlit cigarette down the hill in disgust. “So, what’s the story?”

Joe sneered. “What does it look like?” he said. “Asshole fell. Got what he deserved for walking around here at night. No street-lights out here in the boondocks.”

I stared down the muddy embankment to the little creek that had formed at the bottom of the ravine and wished I hadn’t worn one of my few suits. I knew this wouldn’t be a tidy job.

“Hey fellas! Find anything down there?” Joe yelled.

The deputies at the bottom of the ravine looked up and shook their heads. Not that they were really looking any too hard for clues. They were pussyfooting around in the tall grass, trying to steer clear of the mud and water.

“Well, Toules, looks like we have an obvious accident on our hands.” Joe pushed up off the guardrail where he had been resting his foot, using his knee as a leaning post.

“You going to go down and look for yourself?” I asked, incredulous. Joe was lazy and had the kind of stupidity combined with cunning intellect that could get you in trouble if you crossed him. He had been elected into office eons ago, and just kept getting re-elected. It was almost like he got recycled in spite of himself. The more he got re-elected the lazier he got.

“I can see just fine from up here what happened. Obvious accident.”

I squinted down into the ravine. “You sure?” I asked dubiously.

“Fell.”

“He fell over the guardrail?”

Joe took the stub out of his mouth and flicked it at my feet. “What? You want to play coroner today, Toules? My job here is done. You and your corpse-humping friend get your asses down there and drag that body out of that water, and try not to get your nice shoes wet.” He pounded me on the back and laughed meanly. “I’ll stop over later to make an ID,” he called over his shoulder.

Asshole, I thought, as Joe got into his government-issue sedan and took off with a squeal of tires.

“Does he do anything?” Paul asked as I returned to the wagon.

“No, except stuff his face at Smiley’s Diner.”

We both laughed.

“Lets get this over with,” I said and sighed.

“Bad?” Paul asked.

“It’s going to be messy.”

I put on a pair of rubbers to protect my good shoes and donned a pair of large yellow kitchen gloves, the kind that go nearly up to your elbow. We used them for coroner-related work because we never knew what kind of mess we’d find, and they afforded a little more protection than regular latex gloves. Paul pulled the cot out onto the pavement and collapsed it to the ground. I got out a black body bag and a coil of rope. Handing the coil of rope to my partner, I hopped over the guardrail and wind-milled my arms as I slid down the muddy slope. Thankfully, I made it to the bottom without falling. Paul wasn’t so lucky.

I found myself standing in sixteen inches of muddy water and him sitting in it. We turned the air blue with our language as we got to work. I unfolded the thick vinyl body bag on the tall grass of the stream’s embankment parallel to the facedown man.