Mortuary Confidential. Kenneth McKenzie
at the clock had been only two hours prior, and my lady friend and I were hardly in the throes of passion then. I had probably only been out for an hour.
Idiot! Idiot! I mentally berated myself. I knew better than to drink too much when I was taking death calls, but one vodka and soda begets another and I started having too good a time. I threw off the sheets and summoned the courage to climb out of bed. I stumbled my way across the remnants of party clothing littering the floor. When I flicked on the bedroom lights the inert form beneath the sheets didn’t even move.
I did the best job I could dressing myself and on my way out of my loft stopped in the kitchenette and chugged a gallon of water. My place, in the old industrial district of the city, was only a few blocks away from the mortuary, so I didn’t have far to go. Walking in the crisp air helped clear my mind.
I got the old station wagon loaded up with a cot and headed for the convalescent hospital. I drove down into the bowels of the hospital and parked by the loading dock. The smell of rotting garbage and soiled sheets in the contained basement assaulted my senses and I staggered to the front of the wagon to empty my guts. When I had collected myself enough to unload the stretcher, I went inside to the nurse’s station.
“Hello,” I said, trying to smile even though I felt like crap.
I was half-drunk, half-asleep, and the nurse spoke half-English. She glowered at me. “Helwoe,” she replied.
I don’t want to be up either, lady, I thought, and returned the sour look.
“I’m here for—” I had to think for a moment—“Betty Hancock.”
She looked at me with a puzzled expression.
“She’s dead,” I said in a voice reserved for small children and animals, “and I’m here from the mortuary to get her.”
She gave me a blank look.
“Dead!” I gave her a hard stare that finally got her in gear.
She shuffled some papers, made a hushed phone call, and then shuffled some more papers and pointed down the hall. “Forry-sen Bee.”
“Forty-seven B?” I repeated.
“Yes,” she said, agitated. “Forry-sen Bee!”
I shot her a withering stare and loped down the hall, my head pounding. It felt like I walked down three miles of ammonia-smelling, tiled hell before I arrived at Room 47. Thankfully, the residents were all asleep. I didn’t waste time on ceremony and steered the cot into the room. I jockeyed it up next to bed B and went around to the other side of the bed and yanked the sheet down. The person under the sheets moaned, arms flailing in the air.
I let out a scream as I jumped back. I caught my breath and quickly threw the sheet back over the patient. That seemed to soothe her and she (I think it was a she) became still. I rushed out of the room and checked the room number. It was forty-seven. I was about to run down the hallway to scream at the nurse for her incompetence when a light bulb went off in my aching head. I went over to bed D. Sure enough, there was Mrs. Hancock.
As I wheeled her out of the hospital I nodded at the nurse and said, “Forty-seven D—just where you said she’d be.” The nurse looked at me like I was crazy.
Later that night, after a long, miserable, hung-over day at the mortuary, I had just laid down in bed to get some much-needed rest when the phone rang. I cursed and grabbed the forever-offending thing. “What?” I yelled, expecting another death call. It was the girl I had left before dawn.
“Whoa, you sound mad,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought it was someone else calling.”
“Obviously. Say, what happened to you this morning? I don’t even know what time you left. I was kind of confused when I woke up. I thought maybe you had ditched me or something.”
“Work,” I said and massaged my eyeballs.
“Work?”
“Yeah, and you wouldn’t believe the day I had.”
“Try me.”
I did. Now I’m married to that girl and we have three grown children. My wife’s name is Liz, or Elizabeth, which is sometimes Betty.
CHAPTER 3
Patch Out
Contributed by a tennis player
It was summertime, an early Friday morning, when I got trapped with the talkers. I was looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend at the lake, where I had pitched in with a bunch of friends to rent a cabin for the summer. My girlfriend and I were both “weekend warriors” at the house, and I knew there was a lounge chair on the dock waiting for me that afternoon, so I didn’t even mind that much taking a death call at 5 A.M.
When I arrived at the house, I backed the van into the driveway to be as discrete as possible. It was one of those Cracker Jack box houses constructed after the Second World War to accommodate the population explosion. The place looked well maintained and the yard was neat. I guessed the couple had bought the house in the late ’40s after the gentleman was discharged from the service and that they had lived there ever since. Sure enough, once I was inside, I found old pictures of the decedent in his military uniform on walls of the bedroom where he lay.
I surveyed the scene, got my equipment, and made the removal.
As I left the house, pushing the gentleman on a cot, the children—a son and two daughters—followed me out; their mother chose to remain inside. For some reason the children felt it was imperative that they make all the funeral arrangements right then and there in the front yard at 5:30 in the morning.
I tried to interrupt at numerous points during their rapid dialogue and let them know they would have plenty of time to fulfill their father’s funeral wishes when they came in for the arrangement conference later in the day. When that didn’t work, I started edging closer to the van with the cot, hoping they’d get the hint. They didn’t.
The paperboy drove by gawking at the draped figure on the cot. I tried using his presence as a distraction to wrap things up. It didn’t work. One of the daughters merely picked up the paper while trying to talk over the other two.
I stood at the rear of the van for as long as I could bear, but when I realized they were never going to stop, I decided to load their father in front of them, hoping that maybe then they would get the hint.
They didn’t get it then either.
They continued talking while I placed their father in the van and slammed the doors. They talked some more while I stood outside and stamped my feet. Even though it was summer, it is cold in the arid climates in the early morning and I had forgotten my jacket.
The paperboy rode back by, this time a lot slower. He wanted more of the show. The daughter with the paper in her hand waved. I wanted to bury my head in my hands.
Finally, I hopped in the van and started the engine and turned on the heater. Still they talked, now over the roar of the idling engine, each one thinking of something and throwing it out, and the others would hop onto that new bandwagon. In mortuary school I had been taught, in painstaking detail, the virtue of patience and politeness. But my patience was gone. After almost 45 minutes in their driveway, I had yet to say a word! Tired of trying to cut in gracefully, I announced it was time for me to leave and said I would call them in a couple of hours, after they had some time to think.
So frazzled was I by the three talkers that I accidentally gunned the engine and dropped it into drive at the same time. The van made a loud screech as the tires spun. I rocketed out of the driveway at a speed a NASCAR driver would have envied. I barely had time to spin the wheel hard to avoid careening into the neighbor’s front yard. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw two nice thick sets of burnt rubber on their driveway.
The cardinal rule of leaving after a house call is to drive as slowly as possible. It gives the family a sense of security knowing