Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator

Morgan, Joseph Scott

Perseus Books Group (2012)

BLOOD

BENEATH

MY FEET

THE JOURNEY

OF A SOUTHERN

DEATH

INVESTIGATOR

BY

JOSEPH SCOTT MORGAN

Blood Beneath My Feet © 2012 by Joseph Scott Morgan

Images © 2012 by Joseph Scott Morgan

Design by Sean Tejaratchi

A Feral House Original Paperback

All rights reserved.

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feralhouse.com

Feral House

1240 W. Sims Way Suite 124

Port Townsend, WA 98368

This work is dedicated to my precious wife,

Kimberley H. Morgan.

Thank you for being tough enough to pry me loose

and tender enough to love me when the faces appear

in both my waking hours and in my dreams.

“You are NOT a death investigator,

you are my husband and a father.

Death has taken enough from you…

turn loose, it will all be okay.”

—Kim Morgan, October 2004

“It takes two people to make you, and one people to die.

That’s how the world is going to end.”

—William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Advice from Dead Kinfolks

Painting the Town with Joe

Jerry Lee and Me

It’s All in How You Say It

Southern Man

The Mustache

Red Beans

Hey, Haven’t We Met Before?

The Earache

Forsythia

Gainful Employment

COLOR PLATES

Little Gods and Chocolate Milkshakes

He Was Your What?

The Trailer Park Swimming Hole

Eventually the Sun Will Shine on Every Dog’s Ass

Hell Yeah, It Hurt!

Terminus

ADVICE FROM

DEAD KINFOLKS

THE ASPHALT GLISTENED beneath my headlights. It had been raining for several days, but in this toilet there is never enough water to flush it clean. I was on my way to another traffic fatality. How many was this? Twenty-one years on the job times a non-specific factor of stupidity, plus human frailty, minus sympathy, divided by dumb luck, equals who cares.

Impervious. That’s me. Nothing manages to surprise me any longer. I am not saying that I have seen it all. You never see it all. I have just seen more than enough. By the time I had pulled my vehicle onto the interstate in downtown Atlanta on that predawn morning in 2004, I figured I had been parlaying with death for far too long.

Fragmented skulls and maggot-infested bodies no longer affected me. Apathy was now a warm, protective blanket I wrapped myself in. I no longer pitied or even gave pause to those who grieved. My job was simply to exist from day to day in a haze of competence. I had ceased being a real death investigator, anyway. Once I had lived to answer the questions others didn’t have the desire or the intestinal fortitude to delve into. Now I just didn’t give a shit. Our medical examiner had relegated the investigative staff to the role of clerks. Our opinions no longer mattered to either the ME or the forensic pathologist we served. We were just box-checkers splattered with blood.

In most large cities the job of investigating deaths ultimately rests with a medical examiner and death investigators like me. Though there are numerous support personnel, forensic pathologists sit at the top of that pecking order, above even the ME. As a death investigator, I was the one to go over a death scene and provide written assessments, as well as sometimes assist in autopsies back at the morgue. I’d been assessing Death’s handiwork for decades. Now I just wanted out.

Smoke and flashing lights were refracted in the tiny prisms of rain droplets on my windshield. With the flash of each wig-wag strobe light from the police and fire vehicles, Death was telling me, You’re one step closer, boy.

I had felt for some time an awareness of my own flesh in decay. Whenever I stared down at another finished human being, I now saw my own face. I never allowed terror to grip me, fighting instead only to observe, but each shift I worked had become my own personal deathwatch. There was no longer a question of if but simply when. Because Death, my closest companion, was always waiting nearby.

As a younger man, I had stood over lifeless bodies and arrogantly thought, How could you do this to yourself? Or Boy, you were stupid. Or Better you than me. I had wanted this job. Perhaps I’d thought that the world would view me as somebody, an official medicolegal death investigator who was worthy of accolades due to all the important work I so carefully and sensitively performed. Because I valued life and respected death. But only a fool believes Death cares what we think or do.

The same actors appear at every death scene, only wearing different bodies. The young police officers were milling about, absorbing how the older officers were conducting the investigation. The firefighters and EMTs were rolling hoses and writing reports—there was no one to save. Witnesses were sitting in their cars, still in the disbelief stage, and maybe wondering why all this didn’t look like it does on TV. And of course Death was center stage, in what was left of a charred young man wedged inside his burned-out pickup truck. He had driven himself into the side of the overpass abutment; someone else would figure out why.

Death is like the slobbering drunk at the office Christmas party. You hope he doesn’t see you, but then he does and makes a beeline for you, throwing his arm around your shoulder and blowing his foul breath in your face. He tells you his sickening story and you’ve heard it before. It may feel pointless to listen, but it’s not so easy to get away. Enduring each retelling again and again had become too much for me. For over twenty years I had been the Reaper’s first audience and interpreter, recounting his tale in fine detail to anyone who wanted to hear it. But it had become my own eventual death that appeared in every repeated interpretation.

When a death investigator arrives at a death scene, looks become palpable. I felt everyone’s eyes on me as I closed my car door, tucked my notepad under my arm. The cops and firefighters may think they know what I have seen, but even they don’t want to know everything. The older ones whisper to the younger ones, who probably wonder to themselves what kind of person could want to do what I do every day—come face to face with the dead. I’m sure they all have their ideas about me, and the older ones carry around stories of the things they have seen me do that they could not bear to watch, the places I’ve had to go that make them thank God they don’t have my job. Their platitudes chase me: “Man, I don’t know how you do it!” “Whatever they’re paying you, it ain’t enough.”

There are a few who envy me. They want to know what they have to do to get my job, to be who I am. “It’s only death, how hard can it be?” Here, I silently reply, take it all. Every festering remnant of the people no one cared about in life, much less in death; all the broken children who will never know that I had grieved for them. Take it all. Just leave me my car keys so I can go home permanently. Someone else can listen to the bullshit Death loves to spew. He never shuts up.

Investigators hate rain. It washes away everything that is key, everything that may help you: blood, semen, hair, fingerprints, gunshot residue. Given enough time, water destroys it all. Death prays for rain. With the water, his chances of having a bountiful harvest increase exponentially. Slick roads, drownings, rainy-day blues—water is one of Death’s favorite toys.

Droplets rolled down my face as I neared the truck’s wreckage. The young man sat curled and crispy behind the contorted steering wheel, staring pensively up at the bridge, but his eyes had been burned away. His smell entered my nostrils and he immediately became, like so many others, a part of me. People always say that if you ever smell burned human flesh, you never forget it. I had forgotten. It was like I’d had lidocaine poured into my senses; I could no longer react to it, even though I badly wanted to be repulsed, like anyone else would be. I was someone who had grown immune to it all. But the repulsion was still there, all around me and in me, whether I could feel it or not.

“We got a crispy critter!” One of the traffic cops shouted to me, too big for his polyester uniform.

No shit, I thought.

“Our guess is he was late for work.” With no response from me, the cop drifted away again.

My hands trembled as I stood before the burned-out frame. I avoided the eyes of the others standing around me now, waiting to see me perform. It’s not like I didn’t know what I was doing, but the shaking had begun. I was in the presence of my master, Death, and in recent years my fear of his questions, of his demands on me, had resulted in barely controlled trembling jags. I was tired of him rubbing all his talents in my face. Do you see this? Just like I have told you before, I can do this anytime I want. Death too was watching me perform my thankless job.

I leaned into the cab of the smoldering Ford Ranger. What remained of the body looked like a hot dog that had rolled off the grill and into the coals. Any remnants of the clothes he’d been wearing had melted—along with the seat—to his back. Everything else was gone. Everything except his hands. They hung in the air like blackened hooks. When I leaned closer to see if his seatbelt was buckled, the charred fingers of his left hand brushed my cheek. I jerked back and, without thinking, grabbed his arm. It snapped at the elbow. I stood holding it while the rain persisted.

My glasses had fogged, so with my free hand I pushed them up onto the crown of my head. I stared at the structure of the scorched mass before me, considering its forensic value. My trembling intensified. I wanted to hide. With the dead man’s burnt arm still in my grip, I backed away and attempted to keep a slow, even pace, retreating into the dark patches under the overpass unlit by the response team’s headlights. I held that arm like a dog that had just found a discarded bone to gnaw. I sat on a stretch of concrete in the shadows at the base of the retaining slope, shaking so hard that tears began to fall from my eyes. I felt all alone and hanging onto a bare thread of control in the dirty, wet darkness of Atlanta.

Had Sherman sensed it? The false promise of a place like Atlanta? From the moment I had rolled into this city, years previously, I had felt it pour over my body like some Holy Roller anointing me with rancid oil. But both Death and my own vanity lured me into staying. I was gonna reach truly great heights in my career, in a city that promoted itself as the South’s greatest. Death surely had had a few chuckles at that.

Most Southerners labor under the assumption that William Tecumseh Sherman had hated Atlanta and its residents. As a lifelong Southerner and a Civil War enthusiast, I don’t share the belief of my fellow denizens. It is well documented that throughout the war Sherman made several favorable comments relative to Southerners, and Atlanta in particular. And before the war, he had been the first superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy, which later became Louisiana State University. But to listen to the reports in the local news over the past twenty-five years, one would think that Atlanta is a veritable Dixieland Garden of Eden. It’s not. Even as Sherman’s men set fire to the city, Atlantans held onto a belief in their own supremacy. Their hope remained resolute.

Death investigation, no matter where it’s performed, is a profession lacking all hope. Collecting clues at the scene of a death is meager consolation when compared to the burden of day in and day out loss. The bodies never stop coming. Every day I would drive in from the south side of the city to work, and as the skyline of Atlanta materialized in my windshield, a spirit of dread would ooze over my soul like thick decompositional fluid pouring down my gloves during an examination. The knot in my stomach grew larger over the years, along with the associated nausea. I would sit down at my desk each morning, stare at the pictures of my family, and long to be with them instead of waiting for the Reaper to summon me. Atlanta was sapping me of my breath and my will. Certainly of any hope.

Over the course of the hundreds of cases I investigated in this city, how many people did not die from gunfire or heart disease but died instead from a lack of hope? A former mayor of Atlanta once called the place “the city too busy to hate.” I guess that all depends on your perspective.

In a grotesque twist of fate, two of my ancestors had fought against Sherman in the defense of Atlanta. The entrenchments where they had watched their friends and relatives die, where they had hidden throughout the six-week siege, surely filled with foreboding and fear, are near my office. I wonder whether they had sensed the futility of what they were doing. What convinced them to participate in such an apparently pointless exercise in death? Perhaps the siren song of glory or adventure will always tempt young men, just as it had tempted me toward Atlanta.

The very area where my ancestors spilled blood, and had their own blood spilled, is now occupied by drug dealers, crack whores, and government housing. The same killing fields are where I cleaned up the blood of other young men with no cause to fight for or against except that of their own indulgence.

Those of us who were subjected to Bible-thumping Sunday school teachers were taught that not only was honesty the best policy but that the lack of it was a sin. Having worked first as a death investigator in the suburbs of the most renowned of all Southern cities, New Orleans, then in the urban neighborhoods of Atlanta, I can avow that there is a lot of plain and simple honesty missing in the self-proclaimed Capital of the New South. If these two cities were ladies, and both were known to be whores, New Orleans is the one who at least freely admits it. That type of honesty is easy to live with. Whereas Atlanta is the whore who keeps her face hidden behind a veil of pseudo-respectability, drapes herself in the flashing chrome and glass of the mansions along West Paces Ferry, while her poor survive in substandard dwellings and dodge bullets daily from passing vehicles. Many come to Atlanta for a new, prosperous life only to find the decomposing remnants of a rotting peach.

Those not from the South often use the adjective “charm” to describe all things Southern. Gone with the Wind is the only impression outsiders seem to maintain of the region as a whole and, for some, Atlanta represents its epicenter. In truth, Atlanta is devoid of charm. When tourists arrive here, they find Tara has been supplanted by both multimillion-dollar high-rise condominiums and slums. And this film’s musical score is not full of sweet and melancholic violins, but the thumping sounds of Ludacris and Lil Jon.

My Great-Great-Great-Uncle Steve Dupry. Defender of Atlanta and unreconstructed Rebel. Circa 1901.

As my dauntless ancestors spin in their graves, Atlanta continues her evolution into just another Southern city. And New Orleans, despite its lethal weather and dangerous streets, survives as the graceful Southern lady who speaks more gently and states, “I am here to be loved, but you must love me in total.” New Orleans is both beautiful and violent. It possesses an allure absent from Atlanta, where thousands of commuters drive in and out day after day, living their lives in contrived tract-home developments.

When I first arrived at the Atlanta medical examiner’s office during the summer of 1992, I thought it held promise. I’d imagined the change would do me good, that maybe the cries I carried around in my head from all the anguished New Orleans families would somehow be quelled. They weren’t. The melancholy of constant death hung just as heavily in the air here. I had looked forward to new colleagues who might inspire in me a renewed energy for forensics. They didn’t. They were just as bitter and dissatisfied as all the others I had worked with. The new surroundings bolstered my hope that I would be plying my trade in new, exotic locales. If anything, I missed the comforting allure of the Crescent City.

I soon understood that the professional castor oil I was required to ingest in New Orleans had always at least come with a dose of sugar. In Atlanta, the sugar bowl was quite empty. There were no fascinating cases, just really poor people killing other really poor people. It became apparent that the only intellectually stimulating cases were generated in and amongst the middle class. I had arrived about fifteen years too late to work those cases; the middle class had already fled the city. What remained were the fabulously wealthy, those who believed themselves affluent, and those who existed on government scraps. In New Orleans, people lived on top of one another; there was no place to flee to. The chances that the middle class and the poor would clash were much greater. But the rich of Atlanta never traveled any further south than Turner Field for a baseball game and, because they were so fearful of being robbed, they would sprint to and from their vehicles, then relish a speedy return to their safely gated homes. There are two Atlantas but there is only one New Orleans.

To work as a death investigator is to offer up yourself as a sacrifice to your own personal god of vanity. It is a notorious profession, depicted on TV and in films in ways that intrigue and repulse in equal measure. Some perverse characters even wish they could see the things you have seen. Other professions carry their own built-in cachet—brain surgeon, fighter pilot, professional athlete—but not one of those professions requires you scrape brains off the floor.

As I reflect back and picture myself sitting, trembling under that overpass in rainy darkness as another Atlanta morning broke, I realize I was in that moment at the end of my profession. I held onto that scorched arm of some unknown man caught by Death, shaking so violently I could no longer hide it.

A more official end of my profession would come after three trips to the emergency room within the following two months, certain each time that I was having a heart attack. The third visit required a ride from my office in the back of an ambulance. It was the last time I saw the hollow looks of my colleagues, those devoted few who had pulled this weight with me for so long, interpreting Death’s never-ending stories.

When a psychiatrist assessed me from across her desk as I shivered like a lunatic standing out naked in the snow, I read my future in her eyes. There would be no end to this shaking. She told me I was one of the worst cases of post-traumatic stress she had seen since her days working with newly returned Vietnam vets. She placed me on medications to give my nervous system a break. I stayed home and slept for four days. Everything stopped. Even the remembered screams. And I knew, just as the psychiatrist had said, that I would soon be committed to a mental ward if I tried to go back to being Death’s interpreter.

My unwanted partner had taught me so much, had stolen so much from me. I was no longer Senior Investigator Joseph Morgan. I was just unemployed, disabled Joe looking at a fresh new page and wondering what was next for me. But I had survived Atlanta. I had survived Death, for now. Even though I knew full well that no one ever beats it, I felt hopeful. I continue to feel as if I had, at least once in my life, cheated Death.

Had my ancestors felt this way when they had retreated from their defense of Atlanta? What scars had they borne as they trekked back west to their homes? If given the chance, would they have done it all again? They had come ready to spill blood. I was there many decades later, ready to mop it up. It had probably meant very little to the people of Atlanta, but it had cost us almost everything.

PAINTING

THE TOWN

WITH JOE

THE NAME JOSEPH is a seemingly innocuous one. Think of it. To be described as mediocre or socially invisible is to be called an Average Joe. This is the name I have been known by at various times in my life. Others include José, Josephine (sadistic former stepfather), Dummy, Moron, Eeyore (ex-wife), Joey, and of course the ever-popular, bland Joe. My wife despises Joe. She believes it indicates an intellectual dullard. I don’t necessarily agree. What can I say? I find succinctness appealing.

My wife insists on calling me by my given name; thus, everyone we meet knows me as Joseph. The name has great history: Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers; Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus; Joseph of Arimathea, who provided Christ’s burial plot; and to Alabamans everywhere, the hallowed Joseph William Namath. However, the Joseph who most influenced my life was the one after whom I was named. The influence that I refer to is not so much a result of his taking me fishing or passing on any words to live by; his influence was far more potent, and it originated from beyond the grave.

By the time I was given my name, Joseph Frazer Killian had been dead for almost thirteen years. People just called him Joe. He was the eldest of six children and born to an alcoholic, skirt-chasing stonemason, my great-grandpa R.R. Killian, and his wife, Elizabeth, a woman so devoutly Christian that she forbade anyone to even speak of card-playing in her home. The courtship of my great-grandparents was the stuff of legend. Even their marriage made the front pages of the newspapers of the day—though certainly not because the two had scaled the heights of society, unless chopping cotton and milking cows qualified for social advancement.

On the day R.R. and Elizabeth were wed, Great-Grandpa Killian had waited until Elizabeth’s father, Reverend Frazer Scott, had left to preach a local revival in his buggy, drawn by the family mare. Reverend Scott was well known as a fire-and-brimstone Methodist Circuit preacher. When her Killian beau came to the door, Elizabeth was cooking. As the story goes, he called out to her, like some backwoods Romeo, and Elizabeth rushed out of the house and hopped on the back of R.R.’s horse. Off they rode into local infamy, leaving the peas burning on the stove and subsequently setting the man of God’s house on fire.

That evening, as the newlyweds most certainly found their first coital comfort in one another’s arms, Reverend Scott was searching for his shotgun in the burned-out remains of his home. The next day’s paper detailed the story of the two youngsters, and since Elizabeth was only fourteen, it also added how her father was shooting to kill if he ever caught sight of either one of them.

However justified Reverend Scott would have been in slaying R.R. for the theft of his young daughter’s maidenhead, not to mention the razing of his domicile, the better angels of his nature eventually prevailed, and the two survived to procreate. Perhaps as a peace offering, the young couple gave their first male child the good reverend’s name. Being the eldest child and the only male, Joseph Frazer Killian was idolized by his younger sisters. Each one of his sisters, including my grandmother Pearl, described him as a prankster, but one who would follow up any of his tomfoolery with a reassuring hug and a wink. As Joe matured, he became quite a strikingly handsome man. He was always dapperly dressed and was never one to get his hands dirty. He often looked as if he had stepped off a Hollywood soundstage during the silent era.

Great-Uncle Joe Killian’s family, like many of their clan, resided along the swampy banks of Bayou Macon (pronounced Mason and named for the flatboat pirate Mason, who had plied northeast Louisiana in the 1830s). Bayou Macon was known for the various hooligans who had passed through over the years, the most legendary having been Bonnie and Clyde, who hid from G-men and bounty hunters in an area known as Swampers, or Killian’s Landing.

The Killian Children. Bottom row, left to right: Juanita Killian Osterland, Pearl Killian Morgan (my grandmother). Top row, left to right: Roxie Killian, Eunice Killian Lambert and Joseph Killian (after whom I was named). Circa 1915.

Originally, before the onset of hostilities between the North and South, the Killian ancestors had lived in grand antebellum style in Mississippi on lands that had been granted to them by the Spanish Crown at the end of the 1700s. But the Killians were forced to flee after General Grant had burned down their plantation just north of Natchez, Mississippi, while en route to his siege of Vicksburg. Ulysses was not held in high regard by the family, to say the very least. In fact, one of my grandmother’s uncles is rumored to have named a pig after the much-esteemed hero of the Yankee aggressors.

After the war, the Killians continued their agrarian life on lands the family had already owned in Louisiana, but it was a life devoid of the successes of their earlier generations. Various members of the clan drifted into work as tradesmen and craftsmen, so it stood to reason that my great-uncle Joe would become a craftsman too. He chose house painting. The whole family eventually left Swampers, migrating northwest to the town of Monroe, Louisiana, and it was there that my great-grandpa Killian continued his trade as a stonemason—as well as his whore chasin’—while his son Joe eventually became the president of the state painters’ union.

Joe Killian eventually married and had children. He led a good life, by anyone’s standards, and was loved by most who knew him, especially his quintet of sisters. Their names sound like characters in the mind of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Eunice, Roxie, Myrtle, Juanita, and Pearl. These names may conjure up images of flappers and bathtub gin, but they would never have been caught doing the Charleston in Great-Grandma Killian’s strict kitchen.

What the Killian sisters lacked in Roaring-Twenties sophistication, they made up for in unrivaled loyalty to their family. Under the direction of Great-Grandma Killian, eight-year-old Pearl would take food to the local jail, because one of my great-grandma’s friends from the local Methodist church had been arrested for sending her husband to meet Jesus prematurely. Pearl was terrified to convey this basket of food to the woman in lockup, yet typical of the Killian girls, her older sibling Juanita said, “Don’t worry, sister. I’ll protect you,” and off the two went to face an accused murderess together.

This commitment to each other would serve them all well over the years. Decades later, after Pearl had married and started a family of her own, her mother-in-law said about the Killians, “If you kill a chicken, they all have to show up to eat it.” Though homeless and living under her daughter-in-law’s roof, the woman never quit bellyaching about the family who ended up caring for her until the day she died. The Killian bond was unbreakable, even in death.

The weather on January 24, 1951, was cool and clear. That afternoon Grandma Pearl was at home, getting ready for a Wednesday-night prayer meeting, when her phone rang. Without telling her why, a nurse at the local hospital urged her to come to the emergency clinic immediately. Imagining her husband had been hurt at work or maybe one of her siblings was in need, Pearl tucked my four-year-old father into their car and raced to St. Francis Hospital in Monroe. What the Killian sisters found out that day would not only change their lives but mine too.

The apple of the Killian family’s eye was lying on a treatment-room bed, his hair freshly cut and his skin smelling of barber salts. Great-Uncle Joe had been shot while coming out of a local barbershop. The boy who had once loved, played, and protected his younger sisters was bullet-ridden. He had died in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital.

According to witnesses, this pride of the Killian clan had not been pleading for his life but dancing and darting about the street, trying to keep his parked Ford sedan between himself and a murderer’s gun. It was beneath his Ford, on an Ouachita riverfront street in West Monroe, Louisiana, that he had met his end. As Joe had attempted to scratch his way across the tarmac toward safety, the murderer had stuck a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson under the car and pulled the trigger till there was no further point. Joe’s executioner had then strolled off down the street toward the river, casually holding the weapon in his hand as if he were going fishing in the Ouachita with a new kind of tackle.

As the police and the Killian sisters pieced together what had happened, it became apparent that the young Killian lion had been slaughtered over paint. Great-Uncle Joe had been the first president of the Louisiana Painters’ Local. It was up to him to decide what bids would go to each union member. When a particularly lucrative job of painting a bridge spanning the Mississippi was posted, Joe had made the soon-to-be fatal mistake of not giving it to a fellow by the name of Moore, who then tracked my great-uncle to his barber and waited for him in the saloon across the street.

In graphic detail, over and over again throughout my youth, my grandmother told me how it happened, her eyes weary with tears.

“He always went to the same barber over in West Monroe. Joe always liked to look neat.” She would pause then before saying, “Everyone knew that he went to that barber on the same day every week.”

The only time I ever heard my grandmother use profanity was when she told this story. She explained how Moore rolled the bullets of the revolver across the bar, telling the other bar dwellers, “You see these? They’re for that son-of-a-bitch Killian when he comes out.” Moore then coolly loaded the revolver, strode into the street, and pointed the weapon at Great-Uncle Joe.

Of course, a story this salacious was big news in a small Southern town of the 1950s. The arrest, the sanity hearing, and the trial remained front-page news for months. But what really jolted both the community and the Killian sisters was that, even though his actions were clearly more than enough to get this unapologetic assassin the best seat in the house at Angola, Moore was pardoned by then governor Earl K. Long. It had long been hinted that Earl himself was insane and this only confirmed the fact for the Killian clan.

The alcoholic, homicidal painter and the demented governor of Louisiana set in motion a Killian family tradition. Every year, for almost twenty years to come, on the precise date of beloved Joe’s death, Moore received a black wreath with WE WILL NOT FORGET emblazoned in gold script across its adorning ribbon.

Maybe the insanity and the sorrow have been embedded in my DNA, some kind of loosely twined pair of threads strung through the generations and woven into me. From the moment I was old enough to listen, I was regaled with stories of a man I never met but for whom I bore a name. Tales of how cruel and unjust his death was, how his killer did not receive justice, but that in God’s time he would. My birthright was death.

A Southern man looks not to chance but to the hand of God. My grandmother always told me that God had preordained me to do great things with my life. Her dogma coupled with the ceaseless homage paid to her brother set my young mind to work. I could not then have anticipated what awaited me these many years later, but what boy could imagine a destiny filled with bearing witness to mankind’s foolishness and fragility?

Organized labor flyer registering their collective complaint against the campaign of Cap Barham who was running for Louisiana Lt. Governor. Barham defended the man who murdered my Uncle Joe.

I sought out my destiny at the same time it was searching for me. When I was just a teen, I envisioned myself as an investigator, always asking why or how, and seeking to be in a position where those questions actually meant something. The investigation of death felt as though it fit me like a glove. All my senses told me I was born to it. Understanding the system, the people, and mostly the dead, felt like second nature.

Why would God have me, this Joseph from a long line of Josephs, be the one to record the despair of broken-hearted mothers, wives, and, yes, sisters? Maybe I thought I could do good. Maybe I thought I could save the Great-Uncle Joes of the world and by doing so soothe the anguish of the Killian sisters.

But at the end of the day, things shake out a bit more simply. The path I journeyed as a death investigator was handcuffed to the legacy of a man who bled to death in the street, beneath an old car, and a decision he’d made about paint. You see, neither my long dead great-uncle nor I is an Average Joe.

JERRY LEE AND ME

IN THE SOUTH, music influences your life one way or another. As a small child I would sit in ancient wooden camp-meeting chapels with their sawdust aisles listening to “Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling” and the pleadings of a traveling evangelist. I’d be jammed in next to my Southern Methodist grandmother, wondering if the shouted pleadings would ever end.

“This message is for every mother, brother, daughter, or son. When you walk out that door and get into your car, you may be stepping into eternity! This may be your last chance!” I can’t count how many times I heard these same lines repeated through my childhood. Fat, sweaty, balding, and claiming to have been called by God to preach but lacking any call to formal education, the preacher expected his congregation to trust him without question. “The savior is calling! But he is a gentleman, brothers and sisters. Jesus never barges his way in. He’s waiting at the door of your hearts. Won’t you answer him today?”

A Southern evangelical Christian church is great theater. The drama is in figuring out who would avoid the Devil on any given night.

I preferred to listen to the local music minister sing the hymns in his baritone, rich with a patina that only comes from Deep South humidity and a diet of unfiltered Camels. There was always something soothing about the familiar voice of the music minister as opposed to the preacher, who I knew even at my young age was playing the congregation of suckers with his message of spiritual extortion. From the beginning, I favored the music over the preaching. A music minister once said to me, “The great thing about heaven is that there will never be any more sermons, just endless singing.” Amen to that.

The Killian children with parents: Robert R. Killian, Great-Grandfather and Mary Elizabeth Scott Killian, Great-Grandmother. Though they remained married, his chronic drinking, whore-chasing and card-playing ran contrary to her staunch Methodist worldview.

For all the folks in the South who clamor to be shouted at in church, just as many worship the King—Elvis, in all of his crushed-velvet glory. But not us Morgans. It was the Killer our family measured any advertised musical talent against, and to a certain degree still do—Jerry Lee Lewis.

Whether it was Gershwin or the Stones coming through our tinny television speakers, my father would glare at the screen and state, “Well that sum bitch shore ain’t the Killer.” Then he would abruptly stand and walk away, scratching himself through his boxers, and subsequently slam the bedroom door behind him. My father had been thoroughly proselytized by Jerry Lee. I am still amazed to this day that I was not named after him, Jerry instead of Joseph.

God bless my grandmother. She warned every Morgan, including Daddy and me, about the evils of secular music but to no avail. Who could renounce Jerry Lee, especially when the family rumor was that we were related to him? Hell, my grandmother’s home in Monroe, Louisiana, was located just down the road from Swaggart’s Grocery, owned by Jimmy Swaggart’s aunt and uncle. And Papaw claimed that he had sold horses to Mickey Gilley’s father. So the die was cast for us all, most importantly my father.

My very first concert was seeing the Killer rock the Civic Center in Monroe with my mother. That piano stool flying through the air as he kicked it backwards while singing “Great Balls of Fire,” that’s one image forever burned into my memory. I stood through the entire show. This sure wasn’t a camp meeting and the audience here was actually cheering while someone shouted at them.

Daddy worshipped at the First Church of Jerry Lee. Like a Mississippi Delta snake charmer, Jerry Lee had the ability to make my father groove like no one else. Whether it was the rockin’ Killer or the trailer-park Jerry Lee trying his hand at the country side of life, Daddy danced—destructive, angry, and unfaithful to everyone but his deity. I didn’t understand then but there was a rhythm tumbling out of the Killer’s ivories (Granny would’ve said it was the devil), a rhythm that scored my father’s dance with both life and death. It was a rhythm I loved too, but it also frightened me—just like my daddy frightened me.

He was a fireplug of a man, my father, with ruddy Cajun features and arms that always appeared too big for his body. He had married my mother young and had never finished high school, and soon after he ran with dangerous older men who belonged to secret societies many are afraid to mention in polite company. He wasn’t the type of man to ever back down from a fight and he rarely lost one. His anger was enough to strike fear in the hearts of the stalwart, let alone the tender heart of his own child.

The most infamous Morgan family legend involves my father at age thirteen becoming enraged at his uncle, who was no softie himself—he’d served time in Leavenworth for shooting German prisoners during World War II. Uncle Herman had teased my father into a fury, at which point Daddy grabbed a double-bladed axe and chased Uncle Herman around the yard. According to the story, Herman was visibly terrified and, if it were not for the intervention of my equally ornery grandfather, I may have been less one great-uncle that day. Dear ol’ Daddy was subsequently beaten with my grandfather’s leather plow lines.

At his core, my father was a mean-ass bastard with a chip on his shoulder. He always seemed hell-bent on vengeance and terror. Granny was the first to see him coming one summer afternoon in 1969, when I was at Granny’s and Papaw’s home in Monroe. I stayed with them most of the time because my mother worked and my daddy . . . well, you never quite knew what to expect from him. Those summer days I spent in cut-off short pants, playing in my sand pile, and eating fried bologna sandwiches underneath my grandparents’ chinaberry tree. But on this day Daddy had decided to pay us a visit, with a bellyful of Wild Turkey and a sawed-off Iver Johnson double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun.

Granny jerked me out of my sand pile and pulled me into the house. As Daddy threw metal lawn furniture at his sixty-something-year-old mother, Granny locked the front door against him. He kept screaming—about what, I don’t remember, and it probably wasn’t about much in particular. But I remember the stark look of fear that washed over my papaw’s face. It was a look I would recognize years later on the faces of those who confronted their own mortality.

Daddy crashed the heavy wrought-iron chairs against the rear of the rundown place, cracking and sometimes shattering the asbestos shingles, as my grandmother shoved me under her bed. Then she dropped to the floor right by my face and began to pray. I was able to peer out, past her shaking knees and into the adjoining living room, where my grandfather sat in his bib overalls, rubbing his pocket watch like a talisman, talking to himself. His son called out for his blood while he had a conversation with God or who knows who.

Eventually, as I inched deeper under the bed, I heard sirens approach, but in my five-year-old mind, all I thought about was that I didn’t want Granny and Papaw to get hurt. Where was the merciful Jesus they sang about at camp meetings now?

Car doors slammed. “Drop that shotgun, boy, or I’ll shoot yore ass!” Then the muffled yells from my drunken daddy. Once the sheriff’s men had finally subdued him, I crawled out of my hiding place and watched from the window of my grandparents’ living room, with its mouse-shit brown carpet and homemade cypress-knee furniture, as they took my daddy away. A large painting of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane stared down at me while I stared down at Daddy, bruised, bloody, and staggering, his hands cuffed behind him.

The deputies pressed him forward and thrust him into the rear of their patrol car, big men in khaki uniforms who had walked headlong into a violent situation and had been able to make it all come out right somehow. For the rest of my life I would idolize those men and remain deathly terrified of my father.

The Marine Corps was where Daddy landed after that. At least that was where the judge decided he should be—it was either the Corps or the state penitentiary.

On so many occasions during my career I have thought about that scared little boy beneath that sagging, worn-out bed. What would the man I’ve become say to that little boy now? Would I admit that I’m still scared sometimes, no matter how familiar I’ve become with death? Perhaps.

One thing I’ve learned since then is that dead kids define you. There were days as a death investigator when I would think, “I didn’t sign up for this.” And who would? You’d have to be crazy not to question your sanity if, of your own free will, you chose to deal with dead children.

The pros tell you to dismiss it, to block it out. You toughen, you harden, you disengage, you forget, you move on, you wake up, and you’ve lost your soul. For a load of reasons, one of which was my father, I arrived at my job already an expert at some of those skills.

Thirty years after Jerry Lee had performed for me, and Jerry Lee’s disciple had gone off to Vietnam with the Corps, I found myself outside a dilapidated two-story townhouse in southwest Atlanta. A 911 call had come in concerning a dead infant. Before leaving the office to join the police, I’d grabbed a forensic pathologist to come along with me. The pathologist I’d chosen, Mark Koponen, was thorough and professional, but more importantly he almost resembled a human being. He was one of the few forensic pathologists I could stand being with for more than ten minutes. Take the biggest nerd you ever knew when you were growing up (they have to be totally devoid of any social graces) and give them a handful of sociopathic tendencies, and you have yourself a typical forensic pathologist.

We were greeted at the scene by several uniformed police officers, a police photographer, and a detective. A crowd had gathered outside the house and, though it was a seemingly solemn moment, bass-driven music thumped and people chatted and the young men profiled. Everyone was still kickin’ it, even though a baby had died.

The baby’s body was lying on his mother’s bed, a large four-poster with rumpled covers. The emaciated mother sat in a chair by the bed, rubbing her hands up and down her thighs and staring at nothing. According to the beat officer, the mother was well known locally as a geek monster, a term I’d learned on my arrival in Atlanta. A geek monster was a first-class asshole who put crack cocaine ahead of all else.

As I examined the diapered corpse, I noted that the baby was uncovered; its round infant tummy showed. A baby’s face always looks peaceful after death. But that perception of peace vanishes when you touch the skin and realize that the child is as cold as a fieldstone. No soft warmth, no cooing, no cute smiles—now simply on the road to decay.

From the moment we’d walked in, something didn’t jibe. The mother had said she’d woken up to find the baby not breathing. She had attempted resuscitation. The baby had been dead for a couple of hours, by my estimation, and this didn’t fit with the mother’s timeline. Then she changed her story. The baby had first been in his crib. Then she changed it again. The baby had slept with her all night. According to Koponen, the baby appeared healthy, but the abdomen was slightly swollen. I picked up the infant and considered him for a moment, then had his body removed by our driver.

I was left face to face with the parent of a child who was suddenly gone, a position I’d been in many times over the years. I began by asking the mother about the baby’s medical history and dietary habits. Standard questions. When I asked her about the child’s last known feeding, she began to laugh uncontrollably. The more questions I asked, the louder she laughed. That’s when the conversation ended.

As we drove back through the hopeless landscape of South Atlanta (a transplanted friend of mine from New Orleans called it “a city without soul”), I bumped up against the same question that always seemed to nag at me: Was the child better off dead? It’s callous, perhaps, but consider it for a moment. After so many child deaths, I had begun to measure the degrees of potential pain and misery that child would not have to endure. Any number of times I had wondered what the purpose was of a baby’s existence, if a baby lived this kind of existence. Questions for God, not me, but after walking into so many horrific scenarios involving children, I had begun to wish that I could somehow step in beforehand and save them all. A bit like those deputies had stepped in to stop something worse from happening to my grandparents and me those many years ago. But, for a death investigator, this is dangerous thinking. Sympathy, tenderness, even friendly smiles come with a price. When the end is always death, it becomes your own flesh that you feel decaying.

When we arrived at the medical examiner’s office, Koponen immediately took the infant’s body into the autopsy room and started the exam. At my desk, I began to write up the case. Then I was summoned to the morgue.

“Come look at this,” Koponen said as I walked in. The autopsy photographer was busy snapping shots as they both hovered over the body.

What could not be seen in the inadequate lighting of that bedroom was glaringly apparent under the morgue lamps. On the delicate, perfect skin of the infant’s upper right abdomen was a perfectly circular dark bruise.

As Koponen slowly opened the child’s abdomen, dark red blood pooled out, mixing with the bile and flooding the stainless-steel table. After the blood was sponged away and measured, Koponen examined the organs. The liver lay in its normal position, glistening and beefy red. What stood out was a large laceration sometimes referred to as a liver fracture. The only way this happens is through blunt-force trauma.

The call I made to the homicide detective was fueled by rage, which was the only thing that allowed me to carry the despicable information. The detective explained to me then that he had been in with the mother and, in a lucid recess from her crack-induced psychosis, the geek monster had admitted to being so upset with the crying, colicky child that she had grabbed him by the ankles and swung him over her head. I have imagined it too many times, the infant like a medieval mace, arcing overhead, slamming onto a bedpost. Of course the baby had stopped crying after that.

There are not that many degrees of separation between myself, when I was a child, and this dead baby. My early life was defined by the crashing rhythms of Jerry Lee and a whiskey-soaked father on his slow path to Hell; this little being’s crack-addicted mother had chosen a glass pipe and “The Bankhead Bounce” over him. And, in the end, both our fates had been sealed by a bed. It’s just that one bed had been able to ensure my future and another bed had destroyed his. The terrified little boy I was had become a man who witnessed death daily, and still I wish all of us could fit under my granny’s old mattress, holding each other tightly against the sound of the sirens.

IT’S ALL IN

HOW YOU SAY IT

DREAMS, not the eyes, are windows to the soul. Particularly if you have a bent toward the introspective. For years my dream has always been the same. It begins with buzzing. Not the buzz of a silenced cell phone or the irritating clatter of an old-fashioned doorbell. Organic and familiar, my buzzing rattles my brain and stretches down to my toes. Acute awareness overtakes me and suddenly the dull light of an abandoned room gives my mind’s eye sight.

The space is empty. No furniture, no books, no bedding—only windows with sheer, faded yellow curtains. The windows have been painted shut. I know this because I try to open one every time the dream visits me. My skin prickles and faintly stings. The greased soles of my bare feet slide uncontrollably in fatty, foul decompositional fluid. My body radiates from the vibration of the buzzing and prickling, tickling. My arms flail. My hands slap but never deliver relief.

As always, I fall. Then I lie on my back in a thick layer of the fetid fluid, increasingly covered with large green flies—buzzing, buzzing. The more I thrash, the more I seem to attract the little beasts instead of repel them. My scream is choked by their presence in my throat, blocking my airway, and my throat is drenched in liquid human putrefaction. I eventually swim toward the reality of my life, awakening, yet knowing that dream and reality are separated by so slim a margin.

Unable to breathe, I jar myself from sleep, trying to avoid a death I know the flies bring with them, struggling for air and reassurance that I have not joined the legions of all of those I have examined, all the deaths I have tried so feebly to explain.

Words such as surprise, shock, and astonishment are soon exorcised from a death investigator’s daily lexicon. You cease to raise an eyebrow when a man perforates his colon and subsequently his scrotum while masturbating with a broom handle stuck up his asshole. A daughter slapping the face of her dead father, who had abused her for years, holds no investigatory revelations. You shrug and say, “Next!” It’s like working in a busy deli, only with not so fresh or innocuous-smelling cuts of meat.

Like most investigative practitioners, I had convinced myself—in the spirit of moral nihilism—that there were no absolutes; therefore, no surprises. Relativism always trumps whatever horror you are currently confronting. It tames the natural urge to turn and run away or to beat the shit out of someone. Relativism consumes those once stout of heart enough to walk through the doors of investigative uncertainty and, years later, squats and defecates them out as the most cynical of all human beings.

Horror was not in Roxie Killian’s daily lexicon. She never noticed the worst in anyone. In fact, she was the first beautiful woman I had ever seen. She always wore a string of pearls around her neck and rouge on her cheeks, and smelled of the Camilla face powder she liberally patted on her face every morning. As a small boy, I had thought my great-aunt looked like Eva Gabor from television’s Green Acres, but unlike Mrs. Douglas, Roxie was not out of place in a rural terrain.

Roxie spoke with a demure Southern lilt, a drawl that had been refined by higher education—she had been one of the first women to graduate from Louisiana Tech University. Grandmother Killian told me that Roxie had been proposed to on seven separate occasions by seven different men, but she never married. Instead, she chose to be a schoolteacher and remained one for forty years.

Polite and exacting in all her affairs, Roxie never wanted to offend and always put a Christian face on her every utterance. She and her sister, my granny Pearl, would display their Christian Methodism by taking trips to Carville, Louisiana, where they worked at the only mainland leper colony in the United States. They would come home detailing how “blessed” we were to be intact, declaring that the Lord had chosen us, in his providential wisdom, to bear witness to his faithfulness.

For all their reflections upon the mercy seat of Jesus, Roxie and Pearl were Southern women beset by one shared affliction: gossip. And Roxie and Pearl employed a complex system of communication that allowed them to wear their best face for the Savior and still satiate their need to skewer the public. Their system had been perfected while growing up with an alcoholic father and a heavy-handed, overly religious mother.

“Eirthay Ettinggay away Ivorceda.”

Yes, Pig Latin.

Then would come the obligatory deep-throated grunts, as they passed judgment while I rode in the backseat of Great-Aunt Roxie’s ‘68 Chrysler Imperial.

“Ouyay owknay eshay aughtcay imhay ithway olday astynay omanway anday eythay ereway unkdray asay Ootercay Ownbray!”

Clearly they were oblivious to the notion that Jesus was very likely fluent in Pig Latin.

That ‘68 Chrysler—long, white, and festooned in chrome—was a shiny barge fit for a queen. It was the sisters’ sanctuary of rumor and hyperbole, free from the scrutiny of the Sweet Lord Jesus or the subjects of their slander. They cruised the northern Louisiana countryside, speaking their preferred dialect, until I fell asleep. The Imperial was huge and luxuriant, built back when owning a Chrysler meant that you had “arrived,” and to arrive in an Imperial just put an exclamation point at the end of the statement.

Great-Aunt Roxie kept that car immaculate with the help of her “hired man,” an elderly black man who cut her grass and tended to the chores around her home. The Imperial was equipped with a whisk broom and vinyl trash bags that hung from the dashboard’s control knobs and the window handles in the back seat. I was never allowed to drink Cokes or eat potato chips, which Granny would let me do in her car. This car was a shrine to Roxie’s independence. She had never needed a man, and the Chrysler Imperial epitomized this.

Interestingly, though, there were two other things her car was always equipped with: a full tank of Texaco Gold Star gasoline and the biggest empty clear-glass Pepsi bottle you could buy from Swaggart’s Grocery. The bottle always remained empty, gently rolling around on the rubber floor mats in the back seat. It was there expressly for me.

The two sisters were not stupid when it came to little boys. Roxie had taught them for forty years and Granny had raised them. To be certain, little boys hate naps and will do anything possible to avoid them, but after the whining and protesting, and extracting promises from both women to take me to TG&Y for a toy, next would invariably come the “I need to pee-pee” proclamation.

Without missing a beat, my granny would spin around, grab the bottle, and instruct me to stand. In any other car this might have been tricky. But the backseat in that wide Chrysler, sailing over the rough country roads, was the approximate size of a gymnasium. I would unzip and do my business into that handy glass receptacle, and in one swift move, without disengaging for more than a beat from her coded conversation with Roxie, Granny would tell me to “lie back down” while rolling down the front passenger-side window and pouring out the contents at fifty miles per hour. These ladies loved their gossip.

Everything was subject to their critical observations and embroidered with the singsong rhythm of their language. Although I had been subjected to the abuses and vices of my father and grandfather, it was through these conversations that I first heard of families torn by divorce (unpardonable sin), drinking (sinful but expected behavior, particularly amongst the uncouth males of our family), and infidelity (certainly not approved of, but great fodder for gossip), along with tales of the men who were “funny,” and not in a ha-ha way. (It wasn’t until years later that I would finally understand the meaning of “funny,” though not with the help of either one of these two Southern ladies.) On our rides I would attempt to cut through the clutter of their gibberish like some World War II code breaker, forcing myself to stay awake and try to understand. My great-aunt and grandmother would reward me now and then with nuggets that helped explain—or at least embellish—the sullied wider world.

These conversations played a part in preparing me for the underbelly of humanity. It was through these two inveterate gossips that I first heard when someone outside my family had problems, that I first experienced the callousness of some toward the problems of others, that I first learned how the tragedy befalling one lent itself to the entertainment of many.

When I was eleven, after my father and mother had moved our family to Georgia, my granny phoned to tell us that Great-Aunt Roxie’s Imperial had failed her. A drunk driver had blown through a four-way stop and slammed into her door, breaking all of her ribs and leaving her gasping for breath with blood-filled lungs. She survived for three days in intensive care. She had been on the way to Granny Pearl’s home, to take her for a ride.

My heart broke that day. It was my first experience with death. I believe melancholy took root in me at that precise moment, and it has never left me since.

When I was a young man living in New Orleans, I learned those old lessons all over again, this time not from a sweet, retired teacher and her sister but from Death himself.

The road along the Mississippi River was pitch black at night. The apartment complex I’d been called to sat next to a levee that held back the mighty river’s force. At one time, twenty years before, the area had been a great place to live. Now, the complex’s parking lot was filled with beat-up cars—some in disrepair, others with four flat tires and covered with dirt. I pulled in next to a cluster of police vehicles and a single ambulance. It appeared, for some reason, this death had drawn a crowd.

The complex, like most of them in New Orleans, tried to imitate the French Quarter’s colonial townhouses ornamented with wrought iron, but it had never made the grade. The cheap metal used to construct the stairways and railings looked as if it would give way at any moment. Weak bulbs in the overhead fixtures emitted the only light, and it appeared as if some GE assemblyman had consumed a keg of beer and peed into every fifth bulb just for the hell of it. The faint and uneven yellow glow was eerie.

A homicide detective and friend of mine, Kurt Snow, walked along the outer second-floor walkway. Kurt approached me with a curious grin and said, “Man, I just wanted you to know that when I saw this guy, you were the first person I thought of.” The detective laughed and turned on his heel. “It’s this way.”

I had worked with this particular detective for a number of years and I knew his intrinsic cynicism well. It took quite a bit to amuse him.

The living room was what I refer to as Nazi Neat—almost unnaturally orderly and organized. Hundreds of paperback books were lined up on shelves, labeled and arranged according to genre. The nap of the beige shag carpet bore evidence of having been recently vacuumed.

The adjacent kitchen was similarly ordered, but with labels generated by a label gun. Each drawer and cabinet door had a list of what was within. No spare pieces of paper lay about. No unopened mail. No partially consumed beverages. Nothing bore witness to who occupied the space, other than its diligent orderliness. And the air was filled with buzzing.

As I looked around the kitchen and living room, past the Spartan appearance, the sound chased me. It was a steady, continuous, mechanical hum.

I glanced at Kurt. “What is that?”

“That’s your Cracker Jack prize for showing up, my friend.” He smiled again, like a cat with feathers hanging out of his mouth, then pointed down the hallway.

I stepped out of the kitchen and into the hall. The buzzing grew louder.

Whoever lived in this apartment had built a door in the center of the short passageway. Why? It was a standard apartment, just like hundreds of others I had seen: single bedroom and bath. I placed my hand on the doorknob. It vibrated. A smell seeped into my nostrils, electric and stale. The aroma of rot and decay crept in too. I thought I knew what awaited me on the other side of that door, where the buzzing beckoned.

As I turned the copper knob and inched the hall door open, I expected the fulfillment of my recurring nightmare. The detective could laugh along with Death while I flailed, covered in flies, choking. The joke would be on me.

It wasn’t hordes of green little devils that rushed at me. But the sight of a collection of fruit on the floor was accompanied by the same, though louder, vibrato buzz. The air was foul and my head throbbed. The fruit consisted of a banana, an orange, and a big red apple. They glistened with an unusual sheen, nestled in their bed of shag. I studied them and noticed that each had additional coloring, aside from what nature had intended. Particularly striking were the yellow and orange surfaces meant for nourishment but now covered with jelly-like fecal matter.

Down the hall, close to the bedroom door was an open can of Crisco, just like Granny Pearl used to use to deep-fry her pork chops and country-fried steak. Its pure white, silky surface was stained with feces and blood. My ears rang and behind me Kurt and his fellow policemen laughed.

Considering what my occupation entailed—staring at the dead—one has to laugh now and then. Not once, when I opened a door, knowing there was a body on the other side of it, did my bowels fail to spasm or my breath keep from growing more shallow. I never knew what I’d find. I was afraid, always aware I shouldn’t be there. Surely there were other adults somewhere who could do this job, strong men with white Stetsons on their heads and Vitalis in their hair—not me. Add a layer of unknown buzzing to this kind of scene and I’m a little boy again, curled up deep under the covers in my small bed, worried about the monster in my closet.

I swung open the door and was met by debris. Stacks of magazines—some torn, some still in their wrappers, all with a singular theme: the female form in lingerie, to be precise. Women in nightgowns, with bras, without bras, tied to walls, or on all fours with collars, silky corsets, and a mask.

Buzzing.

The victim, the corpse, the dead guy, the worm food was lying amongst the images and he too wore women’s lingerie. His mortal shell displayed black patent-leather stilettos, a black garter belt with black lace trim, and a corseted bra, which I later found out is referred to, oddly enough, as a merry widow. Rail thin, with ribs protruding, he lacked the voluptuous curves requisite for such attire. The shapely cups made for beautiful, soft, welcoming breasts contained instead shriveled man-tits with areolae surrounded by strands of wiry black hairs, though he had made an effort by stuffing pantyhose into each cup.

To complete the portrait, locks from a shoulder-length dirty-blonde wig poked out from beneath the white plastic bag covering his head. Peeling the trash bag back revealed layers of smeared makeup coupled with the expected decompositional changes. The lipstick he had applied in order to augment his own reality was smudged and now painted his mouth into a frown. His natural hair, beneath the wig, was short and brown, wispy when compared to the blonde volume hiding it.

Between his legs lay what was probably the onetime pride of his manhood. Now as thin and flat as a piece of bacon, it rested, twisted and shaking (along with his testicles) in the grasp of a hand massager that looked as if it were manufactured in the 1960s. Its two elastic straps entwined his member, which he had clamped with a plastic shower-curtain ring. Dead and rotting, heat still rose from his crotch, radiating and vibrating a reminder of the pleasure that had killed him.

I found out later that the young man had been a computer engineer. He had lain undiscovered for over a week, surrounded by fecal-covered fruit and sex toys stained with his bloody pursuit of fleshly delights. Inside the plastic bag around his head he had placed an aerosol can of a substance called Gazz. At the time, it could’ve been bought in the French Quarter at any one of a number of sex shops that dot Bourbon Street. It was an oxygen depriver. The can’s shiny silver label depicted a cartoon-like balloon face that smiled like a John Wayne Gacy clown painting.

I shook slightly as I stared at it. Not that it mattered, but I wondered why he’d done it? When does a man get to this point? At what juncture did he decide to shove fruits and vegetables up his rectum? When did the cold plastic of a device take the place of the warm, gentle touch of a lover? Was I witnessing human devolution? I had been warned before I started the job that I would never see it all, but I would see many things that would leave me wondering.

The massager provided a steady, grating rhythm as we processed the scene, and it periodically provided comic relief, but there was a fear that hummed inside me the whole time. I stared at the wall socket where the device was plugged in. Maybe God had grown disgusted and fried this guy. Maybe God was disgusted with me for just bearing witness. Since childhood and witnessing the mania of my father, I had been afraid of crazy people. I shared the belief with my professional colleagues that if a bastard wants to destroy himself, he will not hesitate to take you along with him.

My eyes darted around the room, across the amused faces of the police officers, over the empty Crisco cans and lacy teddies. I felt afraid. It was one of the first moments when I sensed death beckoning me. I had already started to drink off the job, and I hated myself for it. I couldn’t control the volume of alcohol I consumed, and I didn’t quite understand the need for it until perhaps that night. Ideas crystallized. Mankind was doomed and so was I.

Then panic set in. To myself, I was screaming, Don’t let this be the last scene I see on Earth! Don’t let my death be a punch line for some cop, like this guy!

I reached for the massager’s cord, expecting the same warm current that flowed through this guy’s body to flood me. I imagined myself falling, convulsing across his corpse. I grabbed for more manly thoughts of duck hunting, summer football camp, or Army basic training and yanked the cord from the wall. The buzzing stopped.

In the profession of death investigation there are those who linger along the fringe who have made a name for themselves on the topic of masturbation. Autoeroticism is what it’s called. Self-pleasure. And if you claim you’ve never done it, you’re lying. Like anything else in life, including greasy cheeseburgers and Kentucky branch water, it will not prove fatal if taken in reasonable measure. However, moderation is not usually in the vocabulary of those who not only self-stimulate but also deprive themselves of oxygen. Of course this is what had killed my guy.

You might imagine these deaths happen daily. I suppose they occur with greater frequency than cutting one’s head off with a chainsaw, but it was not something I saw every day. These more bizarre exclamation points at the end of a life just catch the public’s attention. They mean nothing more than that someone discovered a variation on a theme. No trends in homicidal violence, no potential pandemics, no warnings to family members of genetic predisposition to fatal disease—just sexual fulfillment running amok.

When you’re young and placed in a position of authority, you start thinking you know everything. And maybe you do know a bit, from an academic standpoint, about how true knowledge comes from lives lived. From my perspective, you also learn from those who have died. At this early point in my career, I was a moron. I possessed none of the characteristics that make great investigators, let alone a great human being.

Pictured from left to right: Mary Elizabeth Scott Morgan, Bertha Scott and Fred Scott. This image was taken at a studio in the French Quarter of New Orleans prior to Fred’s departure for France in World War I. Bertha was disowned by the Scotts soon after for marrying a Catholic. She lived the rest of her life in the French Quarter. Circa 1917.

The mandatory glaze of compassion and active listening had yet to manifest itself in my twenty-four years of life. I was dangerous because I’d been told that I was intelligent enough to do the job, but unfortunately the smart men who had told me this were forensic pathologists, who rarely if ever have to deal with families. When the masturbating cross-dresser’s mother called me, sympathy was the last thing on my mind.

She called the morning after we’d found her son. I had sent the state police to notify her the night before. With the images still seared into my mind and with that faint buzzing still resounding in my ears, I wondered what I would tell her about the condition in which we’d found her son. Topics my grandmother and great-aunt would not have dared whisper about twenty years earlier, even in their most refined, backwards phonetics, I would now have to discuss openly.

The hold light on the phone blinked as I kept her waiting. I chose wrong. When I picked up the receiver and she spoke in a voice like warm sorghum syrup, dripping with Southern sweetness, sick with grief, I stated, “Your son died from autoerotic asphyxia.” In my rush to impress her with my forensic acumen, I’d set off a rockslide, pounding her toward the inevitable.

“Sir, what is that?” Her voice was the perfect template for a Southern belle. I began to explain, but the further I ventured, the more I felt like Brer Rabbit covered in tar.

I tried again, and after finally describing in brutal simplicity that her son had been found dressed in women’s garments with a bag over his head and that he had died while masturbating, the silence was worse than any buzzing I’d ever imagined. Then her voice gently slipped away with “my precious baby” and the line went dead.

When in doubt, let God comfort, let God assuage, let God fill in the blanks. It was not my voice this mother had needed to hear. It was not the machinations of my intellect she had awaited. It was simply reassurance she had sought, reassurance that her child was now at peace, that maybe he had crossed into eternity in total solemnity. I had robbed a woman with my words. And like the clang of an old church bell, thoughtless words could never be recaptured. With all due respect to Roxie and Pearl and their artful method of disguising the worst, some things are ultimately better left unsaid.

SOUTHERN MAN

SOUTHERN CULTURE, as seen by outsiders, runs the gamut from inbred hillbillies to moonlight and magnolias. I suppose these clichés hold some validity. However, they lack the subtlety that truly defines the South. It has often been said that what separates the typical Southerner from everyone else is that Southerners are able to tell you to go to hell and have you thanking them for it in the end.

The Southern male can generally be defined by four specific criteria: NASCAR, SEC football, hunting, and fishing. Now, none of these pastimes is either mutually dependent or mutually exclusive yet there is one commonality between them: in order to be considered a true Southern man, you must be either sincerely interested or able to successfully fake significant knowledge about at least one of them.

Luckily, I don’t have to fake anything. My two chosen preoccupations—SEC football and fishing—serve me well, given that I’ve been a resident of both Georgia and Louisiana. As a young man I witnessed the evolution of two of the greatest running backs in SEC history: Charles “Alexander the Great” Alexander of Louisiana State University and Herschel Walker of the University of Georgia. I was even present “Between the Hedges” when Herschel broke the NCAA freshman rushing record. Any hopes I held onto back then of playing high school football or playing for either LSU or UGA were dashed when I evaluated my own talent, speed, size, and strength as compared to these guys. So I decided instead to be a prodigious fan and direct my remaining skills toward fishing.

Over the years I’ve caught my fair share of fish. I have lured in trout in the Blue Ridge Mountains with cool air blowing across the bare skin of my arms. I have watched the sun rise over an oil rig in the Gulf while angling for snapper. For all of the places I have fished I have as many stories, some of them inflated, as stories will sometimes be. One of the most poignant fishing tales I’ve heard was told to me by a New Orleans police officer and great friend, Andy.

Andy, who was somewhat older than me, would always invite me along on his twenty-four-foot Carolina skiff whenever he ventured into the saltwater marshes east of New Orleans. One cold March morning some years back, as we sought out bull redfish, this burly cop looked toward the west where the New Orleans skyline was clearly visible, and with a great helplessness in his voice he said, “Brah, wouldn’t it be great to see a mushroom cloud rising right from the center of that bitch?”

I considered his words quietly, not wanting to disturb his thoughts with any of my own. Ultimately, though, I thought better of agreeing with him. The prevailing eastern winds in his scenario would have driven the fallout directly into our faces, and the great bull reds who were eluding me would have never come my way again.

Don’t judge my friend too quickly. There is a certain hue of sadness and even inevitability that police officers and particularly death investigators wear, like thick Kabuki makeup. The grief that we strive so hard to put aside wears on us, and we are never truly shed of it. So we turn to morbid humor. The general public might be appalled by it and our loved ones probably wring their hands over us, praying we will avoid firearms, sharp objects, and bourbon. (Which, by the way, I did not.)

A few years prior to this fishing trip my life had changed in a way not many people could understand. I had been befriended and mentored by a man I had considered the best death investigator I had ever met, Bill Donovan. And, as is often the case with friends, I inherited some of his preexisting relationships. One such relationship was with the family of federal judge Lance Mitchell. Judge Mitchell was a big man with a stout baritone voice that had the most soothing, grandfatherly Southern tone. The judge possessed an incredible sense of humor and a fantastic appetite for all things Southern, including bourbon and branch water, as well as SEC football—particularly LSU football.

The first time I met the judge was in 1988 when I was invited to an LSU vs. Ole Miss football game. In my vast Southern football-fan experience I had never attended such a game. In the first place, it is considered quite the honor to be invited to this game because every year all the LSU-faithful celebrate Billy Cannon’s 1959 Halloween run, which propelled LSU to the SEC Championship. That same year LSU was also declared National Champion. (For those who enjoy sports trivia, the 1959 LSU football team is the same team that the Taylor Hackford film Everybody’s All-American was based upon.) The other unique aspect of this game was the roster of our entourage: Judge Mitchell and his son, Lance, Ron Shapiro of Oxford, Mississippi, and my best friend and mentor, Bill Donovan.

Bill was the glue that held this confederacy together as we traveled up I-10 to the game. Bill Donovan was a proud Irish-Catholic American who, though originally from the north, had integrated himself into Southern society quite well, having graduated from Ole Miss along with the judge’s son. Judge Mitchell, Lance, and Bill were also fraternally bound members of the DKE fraternity.

I was elected to drive and found myself seated next to the judge in his Lincoln Town Car. We barreled down the road, everyone imbibing his choice of libation, with the South Louisiana marshland as our backdrop. The judge tugged on a flask of Crown Royal, and the smell of bourbon hung in the air of the car.

The judge had been cordial to me as I drove but not really engaging me, opting instead to tell stories over his shoulder to the guys in the back seat. Then he suddenly shouted at me, “Bill tells me that you’re a Southern Baptist!” He began referring to me as his “Southern Baptist brother,” explaining that he had grown up in the same fashion. His Catholic wife, he said, would be “running the beads” on him tonight, for his safety and salvation at the game, and that we were stuck with two other bead runners and a “Hebrew” in the backseat.

“Joe, what’s your favorite hymn?”

I couldn’t really say. I was partly ashamed of the fact that everyone in the back seat was now aware of my religious upbringing, and I was being asked by a slightly inebriated federal judge appointed by Lyndon Johnson himself to sing church songs. I sat there staring straight ahead. The right side of my face tingled as I felt his eyes on me, waiting for a response.

“Let me entertain these heathens in back,” he boomed and started up a spirited repertoire of Southern Baptist classics. First was “I Surrender All.” Then he progressed through “Softly and Tenderly” and “Just as I Am” (which he sung exceptionally loudly), and finished with “Amazing Grace”—even the Catholics knew that one.

He took another tug from his flask and declared, “Joey, we’ll get these boys saved yet!” Of course this drew great laughter from every heathen in the rear.

By the time we arrived on campus, I had decided I was in the presence of greatness. And I don’t mean the greatness of the Tiger-faithful. I mean the judge. Both young and old flocked to him when he stepped out of the Town Car, and a lawn chair was set up for him on the parking lot tarmac. As it turned out he was one of the most renowned LSU law graduates of all time. Judge Mitchell, having been a Johnson appointee, was behind some of the most telling judicial decisions of his federal district in South Louisiana. He was also despised by both the Black Panthers and the Klan and had had his life and the lives of his family threatened by both groups.

As I looked on, I noticed something else. His son loved him. Lance sat to the side of the crowd while the judge shared stories with those he’d last been intoxicated with the year before. And Lance was the judge’s pride and joy. As I watched the two speak to each other and the crowd gather around the judge with admiration and respect, I thought about my drunk, angry father beating the shit out of me.

After that game and over the subsequent months, I grew closer to both the judge and Lance. The judge was kind enough to allow Bill and me and our respective families and friends free access to his getaway home on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, complete with an adjacent golf course and dinners at the private restaurant, all paid for by the judge.

Bill had married the judge’s niece. She had grown up without parents and was like the daughter Judge Mitchell and his wife had never had. In retrospect, not only were Bill and Lance conjoined by their collegiate fraternal association but also in a familial sense that ran deeper than I could fully appreciate.

Bill and I worked together as investigators, plus Bill had trained me as an autopsy assistant. Unlike other metropolitan medicolegal organizations, our office gave the investigators the opportunity to make extra money by assisting at autopsies. This allowed an investigator to follow a case from beginning to end, though it was gruesome work. You are essentially gutting another human being, from their brain to their testicles.

There is no way to effectively describe what it’s like to dismantle a human body. It’s nothing like surgery. It’s more like an intellectualized version of what goes on in a slaughterhouse, and everyone with a sharp object has a graduate degree. The sights of mangled bodies, the texture of fractured bones, and the smell of bone dust generated from the Stryker saw as the skull is opened are all impressions that will remain with me for the rest of my life. However, after a while you grow numb to the assaults on your senses, simply out of a need for mental preservation. It becomes like an assembly—or more appropriately a disassembly—line.

In 1989, Bill and I were working alternate weeks in the morgue. We were the only two assistants. Memorial Day rolled around and it was Bill’s week to cover autopsies, though we still covered our regular on-call shifts as investigators. Bill invited me, along with Lance and his fiancée, over to his home for Memorial Day hot dogs and beer by his backyard pool, and we spent a wonderful afternoon, soaking up the sun and good conversation.

Three nights later I was on call when my answering service got in touch with me. They informed me I needed to phone the East Jefferson emergency room regarding a death. I was put on hold while the charge nurse could be found. She and I exchanged names then I asked my standard question, “What do you have?” She had a double-ejection fatality. The name of the driver was Lance Mitchell Jr.

The room spun. Bile rose into my throat. I sat down in my oak desk chair and considered the devastation I was about to inflict upon my Southern Baptist brother and my best friend.

I can still remember my hand dialing the familiar phone numbers. I had dialed them countless times before for advice, to make dinner plans, or to share a great case. For me, that single phone call marked forever a shift in my awareness of my own mortality and the finite nature of the world around me. Though I had been a death investigator for some time by that point and had given bad news to many people, it would never be that difficult or that personal again. I felt like an executioner.

My Great-Grandmother Gussie Morgan with grandchildren. She was mother to the Morgan brothers, and it was said it was because of her that they were all so ornery. My father can be seen at far right in hat and white T-shirt. Gussie was born of a Choctaw mother and a Confederate veteran father who had survived all four years of the War Between the States.

Bill answered the phone in a sleepy haze. I swallowed hard. As has always been my practice, I told him straight out, “Lance is dead.”

After a long pause, Bill asked, “How do you know?”

I told him I had been to the emergency room myself and seen both Lance and his fiancée. What I did not tell Bill was how it had felt seeing them, two mangled, lifeless forms lying in that emergency room. These were not some drug dealers killed in a drive-by or some mentally ill individuals who had been threatening suicide for years until finally they had ventilated their skulls with a Smith and Wesson. These were people I knew. Friends. With whom I had laughed and broken bread.

Bill quietly agreed to go to the judge’s home and be the one to tell him. Knowing now what I did not know then, this was the best thing that could have happened, because what I was about to be asked to do would haunt me the rest my life.

At 5 a.m. another call came in. It was Bill and I could tell he had been crying, which never happened.

“There’s no way I can do it,” he began.

I thought maybe the combination of crushing grief and Chivas had gotten the best of him. “What?”

“Can you do it for me?”

I had no idea then that I was incapable of fulfilling his request while still keeping my sanity intact. But of course I agreed. I could not deny him. I would assist the pathologist with the autopsies on Lance and his girlfriend.

There is a certain component of a Southern man that demands we take care of those we love, even at our own personal expense. Maybe all true friendships are anchored in this principle, but the Southern male has an especially prideful way of setting his face like flint and going forward into any maelstrom when it concerns his family. My genetics would not allow me to say no. I thought that some spiritual force was driving me that night. Certainly there must have been. How else could the confluence of all these events be explained?

I had the transport service move the bodies to the morgue. Three hours later I stood staring at the broad stainless-steel doors of the cooler and felt as if I were staring into an abyss. What the abyss held for me, I could not guess, but I knew it would be transforming.

I opened the doors. On separate stainless-steel gurneys lay the bodies of my friends. I pulled them out one by one and pushed them up to metal drain sinks. Only a few days earlier I had been drinking beer and eating hot dogs with them. I stared at them as the door behind me opened and the pathologist joined me.

“Are you ready for this?”

I assume my gaze and posture did not escape his notice. Eighteen years after the fact, I wish I had replied, “No, I am not,” and turned and run from that place. But my feet were as heavy as boat anchors.

“Get some towels and cover their faces,” he said.

I stood with my green scrubs on, in these days before “universal precautions” were put into practice in all autopsy rooms. The only barriers between the bodies and me were my gloves and a white plastic apron. As I went about my rote tasks, the blood of my friends dripped onto my bare, exposed arms. Their blood speckled my face. I tasted their blood in my mouth. I used my Stryker saw to open Lance’s head, and the smell of the histamine the high-speed saw creates entered my nostrils. I wept as I breathed in the essence of my friends.

After I finished, I grabbed my cigarettes and went outside to smoke and cry. I sat on the concrete steps of the morgue building sobbing with a wrenching pain in my gut. In the practice of death investigation, it is never a good idea to allow your colleagues to see you get emotional. You are branded a head case and trust evaporates. But I no longer cared what anyone else thought.

That day I turned a corner as a death investigator and as a man. Soon after that, I began having tremors, which are still with me today, though thankfully to a lesser degree now that I no longer chronicle death daily. But whenever I see an LSU game or hear their band strike up “Hey, Fightin’ Tiger,” I remember my friends. I remember the judge and his booming voice on a hot autumn night at Tiger Stadium, a night frozen in time.

As for my fishing buddy, Andy, in his twenty-four-foot skiff, I believe what he said to me that day was the blunt expression of a world-weary human being. He simply made an effort to express what many of us who experience death day after day suffer. It wasn’t the people of New Orleans he wanted vaporized by mass destruction, but the horror and anguish that relentlessly held him captive. He merely wanted somehow to be set free.

THE MUSTACHE

COMING FROM a long line of hirsute males, it was inevitable that I would inherit the furry gene. As a child, I burrowed into my grandmother’s old cedar chest, filled with all manner of trinkets from my family’s past, and discovered images of ancestors sporting extensive handlebar mustaches. My personal favorite was my grandmother’s great-uncle Steve Dupree’s beard, which was so long it had extended well below his belt line.

My grandmother loved to tell stories of Confederate veteran Uncle Steve. Each Christmas he would walk over forty miles to her family’s home, bringing with him a sack of oranges, which was the ultimate Christmas gift due to the utter lack of any citrus in the area. My grandmother Pearl always laughed when she told of sitting in his lap as a child and closely examining Uncle Steve’s facial wildlife preserve. She enjoyed tugging on his beard and half-expected some small critter to come crawling out.

The most hallowed Southern icons are equally hairy: Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis, and Colonel Sanders. Early on I attempted to cultivate my own facial hairstyle. I had been shaving since late in my sixth-grade year, but in my nuclear family (which now, since my father had left, consisted of me, my mother, and my new religiously obsessed, paranoid stepfather) any attempt I might make at encouraging hair growth was considered heresy.

My stepfather thought anyone displaying facial hair was in the same league with counterculture Bohemians—anyone from Abbie Hoffman to Leo Tolstoy. He strictly prohibited any such display in my stalwart Southern Baptist home. So when the time came for me to leave his house after high school, I took great pleasure in growing my own cookie duster.

It was grand, with thick, wiry, red and brown hues. I combed my woolly appendage every morning and maintained it with a special pair of shears I had purchased at a seedy flea market in the French Quarter. Compliments were perpetually given by the less hairy of my friends, who secretly coveted my sub-nasal treasure.

A mustache says something about a young man. Perhaps it’s a sign of maturity beyond his years. For the beautiful olive-skinned women of South Louisiana I lusted after back then, it was a draw. In time, though, I realized that my gorgeous lip broom drew them not because it made me uniquely sexy but because I looked like someone dear to their hearts, their equally hairy fathers.

South Louisiana is dependent upon the sea, and one distinguishing characteristic of the men who make their living on the water is the frequent display of facial hair. Whether they work on a shrimp boat, an oyster boat, or an oil rig, they all seem to keep either a beard or a mustache. I presume this affectation has little to do with how good they may look at the local dance club and has much more to do with protection from the elements. Of course anyone who knows about life on the Gulf knows that the most dreaded climatic manifestation is the hurricane. No matter how much body hair one might possess, it could never be protection enough against an onslaught of those behemoths.

In September of 1988 sixteen men lost their lives to a hurricane in the Gulf. They were on board what is commonly called a jack-up barge, which is actually a large, floating platform moored alongside an offshore oil rig in order to perform regular rig maintenance. This barge has four posts, one on each corner, that can be several stories tall and each has huge teeth, much like an old-fashioned car jack. When the barge stops alongside the rig, it ties off and plants these posts into the seabed, jacking the barge up so the crew can access various levels of the oil rig. This design does not make for a very stable vessel. When underway, one captain described it as a ship having “four large pendulums with their own momentum in stormy seas.” The sixteen men had not only been at the mercy of Hurricane Florence but they had been forced to entrust their lives to the unstable nature of a jack-up barge. The Coast Guard estimated that, as the barge had made its break for home, it had caught the outer edges of Florence, which had caused the barge to capsize.

As with many of these cases, since the closest port was in my jurisdiction, the bodies had become my office’s responsibility, regardless of where the deaths had occurred. Two days after the barge had capsized, we received only a couple of the bodies, but recovery efforts intensified so bodies then came in at a rate of two every other day. We discovered that, for some reason, none of the men had any identification on them and almost all of them were clad only in their underwear. They had probably been asleep and had had little or no warning of what was to come.

As the bodies trickled in, we faced a problem. Due to their exposure to the Gulf’s harsh, late-summer environment, the bodies were in terrible shape. It was impossible to identify each body visually or even through fingerprints. Since DNA testing had not yet been perfected, we were left with the old standby, dental identification.

A dirty little secret most in the general public are not aware of is that in cases of severe decomposition, the teeth are often completely removed from the mouth. This is not a pleasant process. An agitating saw—the same used to open a skull—is applied to the jawbones as well as the hard palate. Thus, these areas are cut away or disarticulated and subsequently placed into plastic containers filled with preservative. The idea is to leave the teeth in the correct anatomic orientation for later examination by a forensic odontologist.

At the time of this event, that parish’s morgue was located in its parish jail. Yes, the jail. You haven’t lived until you’ve stepped outside a morgue, covered in blood and stinking of decompositional fluid, to hear the harmonious cat calls of institutionally induced homosexuals clamoring for your attention while playing basketball in an adjacent exercise space. “Hey Blondie! You gots some fries wiff dat shake?”

One method I employed to deflect the advances of these jailbirds was to simply leave the morgue door open long enough for the smell to reach their nasal passages. Regardless of how many prison gang rapes a man may have participated in to boost his street cred with his fellow inmates, the smell of putrefaction trumps the libido every time.

The history of this morgue is fascinating. It had stood in the same location alongside the prison since well before World War I. And the morgue was situated on top of the previous location of the parish gallows. Aside from fending off the lust of jailbirds, the most glaring problem we ended up facing in this historically rich workplace was a complete lack of storage space. That was until the kind folks at Piggly Wiggly stepped in. I never looked at a rib roast quite the same after that.

The local Piggly Wiggly supermarket loaned us a refrigerated truck where we could store the bodies. Day after day I would trudge into the back of this poorly lit food-delivery vehicle and stare at its floor where we had set out all the black plastic body bags. The smell was inescapable. The floor was constantly slick with decomp fluid, and in that foulest of substances both the forensic pathologist and I slipped and fell countless times over the course of those fateful days. Still, we painstakingly hovered over each new bloated, rotten man that came in. We opened each bag with hope that this body would have recoverable fingerprints, but most of the time the fingers as well as much of the face had been gnawed away by marine creatures, which left us with no other choice but to remove the jaw.

This gruesome work quickly wore on me and eroded my ability to work with others. By the end of the whole process, I was sick of the bodies. Not just because they were disgusting—that is easily overcome. But what grated on me most was being placed into circumstances again and again that any human—no matter how resilient he or she may be—is simply not equipped to deal with. This held true for me many times throughout my long career. I have heard people who’ve taken hallucinogens describe their trips in this manner. They are fully aware that they are tripping yet they cannot alter the perceived reality of the moment. The only difference is that my reality was inherently unalterable.

What amazes me still is that I, of my own free will, had become a medicolegal death investigator whose job entailed exactly this, every day of my life. No matter how many cautionary tales I now offer up to younger generations who express interest, they still, like lemmings heading for the sea, push their way into this field.

I think back on my work life a great deal now and I realize that we—myself along with my colleagues—were all steadily losing bits of our minds. Sometimes I can’t quite see myself. Was that really me doing those things? Did I stand in an autopsy room or in the back of a refrigerated truck with a forensic pathologist who had just directed me to decapitate a body in order to achieve a more thorough examination? Intellectually I understood and complied with the pathologist’s directive, but then it would strike me. Holy shit! I just cut off this guy’s head! How does one process an act such as this for the first time, let alone that act compounded by multiple occurrences over the course of a career? I regularly pictured a case of rifles and a clock tower to climb into.

And then, who do I share these experiences with? “Gee son, I remember my first decapitation as if it were only yesterday.” There are a very small number of people who can identify with those of us who have worked in the medicolegal field and that group consists solely of other medicolegal death investigators. Unfortunately, they tend to be just as affected by all of this as I was.

A phenomenon followed me throughout my life as a death investigator. It had started only four or five months into my career, at a Christmas party. For me, there is no more beautiful place to spend yuletide than in the Big Easy—black wrought-iron rails and the columns of Creole mansions wrapped with garlands and twinkling lights, the sound of uniquely New Orleans Christmas music, and the few moments when mercifully the humid air cools for the first time all year.

This party was at one of the Creole-style shotgun houses right off St. Charles Avenue. For those who are not fortunate enough to call the South home, a shotgun house is long, narrow, straight, and typically occupied by the poor. The idea is that you can stand at the front door with a shotgun in hand and fire a blast that will never strike a wall, but will exit the dwelling through the back door, since that back door is perfectly in line with the front door. I’ve worked many cases in shotguns. But in the uptown areas of New Orleans, shotguns were the former town homes of the gentry and had recently been refurbished by new money. Consequently, there they were viewed as status symbols.

This type of socializing was very exciting for me, a young man just starting out in his profession. I was part of something now, and I knew my work would be like none other. It was through my new profession that I believed I would receive recognition, acceptance, and maybe even a little adulation.

The party scenario went something like this: The party was filled with those practicing the usual occupations—insurance, education, sales—along with a few unemployed, alcoholic rich boys who would never make a laudable mark on anything other than the C-section scar they’d left on their mother’s abdomen.

Word leaked out, probably by someone who only knew me peripherally, and the partygoers slowly approached like hungry dogs not sure if they should take part in spilled garbage.

“So, I hear you’re a coroner.”

I politely responded, “No, I am a medicolegal death investigator.”

That hooked them. “What is that?”

After the obligatory explanations, one of these bored partiers asked The Question. Are you ready? Here it comes. Hold on . . .

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?”

Knowing that they are not capable of emotionally or intellectually absorbing the worst I could throw at them, I attempted to gratify their morbid curiosities with some story about a guy blowing his brains out with a hunting rifle and not being found for six weeks. If they only knew . . . The worst thing I would ever see was later that night when I got home all alone and caught my reflection in the blank TV screen. I had my hand around an ice-cold bottle of Stoli and was weeping. Recognition is often hollow, at best.

When I was a child I would go to the annual county fair. I’d walk along the midway with its toothless ex-cons operating rides that they wouldn’t even put their ex-con buddies on. Inevitably I would wander up to the large-bellied, bearded man who was calling out to passersby, attempting to lure them into stepping inside for a peek.

The fat lady fascinated me. How did she get that big? What would drive her to simply lie prone before a crowd of eyes, scantily clad, with her Buddha-like girth fully exposed? She would even roll up a section of a newspaper, light it on fire, and then extinguish it on the skin of her abdomen. Why wasn’t it enough to just be bare before the world? I took my eager looks at her along with the rest of the crowd then traveled on to the next booth or ride, but she remained there, never escaping the sordid inspection by her fellow humans.

To the uptown Christmas partygoers, I was the fat lady. I was a trivial preoccupation, never understood by those who didn’t really care anyway. After my report of titillating horrors, they took with them a moment of visceral excitement and perhaps a punch line for their next party, while I was left with nothing more than what I began with, and perhaps a fraction less.

If only those people I had stupidly tried to impress could have seen me slipping and sliding through decomp juices on the floor of that refrigerated truck. What a price for glory.

After all jaws had been removed, salvageable fingers cut off, and the last drop of foul fluid had been washed from the truck’s floor, there remained the smell, the abiding essence of death that never quite evaporates. It screams long after the creator of the scent has been patted in the face with a shovelful of dirt. That sweetly sick aroma hangs in the air and permeates everything within its grasp. As absurd as it might seem, I have thought that the odor is some type of separate entity with a will of its own. It lingers in order to tell the living that our time is coming.

My scrub suits and my comfortable Nike autopsy shoes had to be trashed. No amount of hot water and Borax was going to save them. Always having been somewhat of a shower freak, I went home to thoroughly scour my own remains. I groomed my hirsute frame to a glowing sheen, giving special attention to my beautiful mustache.

As the days passed after that barge accident, I could not get beyond my experiences in the refrigerated truck. This is when the dreams began for me, not only the one that stayed with me for years, but other similar ones too. Me, naked, falling in a pool of decomp fluid in a dark room surrounded by floating remains. All around me were the corpses of the sixteen men, absent their jaws and reaching for me with fingerless hands. But when I came out of the water, blowflies would settle all over my exposed, sticky body. I would wake up thrashing and swatting at the invisible attackers. The dream continued night after night unabated. It was infinitely troubling to a man who could supposedly withstand the most disgusting of onslaughts.

And the smell lingered.

Several days later, I was in my office when one of my colleagues asked, “Did you work a decomp?”

I responded that even though it was summertime in New Orleans, I had not worked a decomp since the barge accident. It is at this point that my colleague took what is considered a professional courtesy between death investigators, much like apes picking fleas from each other’s fur.

He walked closer, asked me to dip my head forward, then deeply inhaled. “No, you stink.” He then asked other colleagues over to perform the same ritual. They complied and concurred.

I had on a clean shirt and pants. My Nikes had been burned. I had taken a bath that morning and two the previous day. My friend pronounced me permanently foul.

Then I smelled the smell myself. Maybe it’s a form of plausible deniability, so that you can just move on. Like death itself, you become numb to it until some event or some person draws it back into your focus.

That evening, as I stared at myself in the mirror with French Market shears in hand, my emblem of maturity and manhood floated down into the sink. It all went—the hair on my head and chest too, along with my beautiful mustache. A mound of hair before me, looking now more like a cancer patient, I was no longer hirsute. I was bare and bald, before the world.

RED BEANS

THE GREATEST PLEASURE IN THE WORLD, while I was living in New Orleans, was the food. No other city in the United States—including the Big Apple—can boast as many five-star restaurants. If you have the means and the time, a culinary tour of the Big Easy is well worth a visitor’s effort. But don’t just stick to the usual fare. Get off the beaten path and go to a few of the hole-in-the-wall places for a truly Crescent City experience.

One such place for me is Ye Olde College Inn. It’s located directly across from Notre Dame Seminary on South Carrollton Avenue. You can sit and watch the streetcars go by and drink in a true Creole ambiance. I don’t mean Creole the way the Food Channel tries to explain it or the way the Travel Channel tries to sell it. I mean Creole in the sense of true Southern hospitality as defined by New Orleans’ French descendants.

You can sample any variety of soul, Cajun, or Creole down-home cooking, everything from fried chicken to shrimp étouffée. However, the College Inn is known around New Orleans as the place to get both the best bread pudding with rum sauce and their crowning achievement, red beans and rice. You can choose to have your red beans served with either a grilled pork chop or grilled pork sausage, but the staff at the College Inn wouldn’t hear of cooking their sausage in the beans; they include only a ham hock for seasoning, along with a generous helping of other secret ingredients.

For those unfamiliar with New Orleans cuisine and tradition, Mondays are considered red-beans-and-rice day. It may seem unbelievable that a city of formerly a million-plus individuals would devote a day of the week to one particular dish, but the Big Easy has done so for years. You certainly won’t be arrested if you violate this unwritten precept, but if you don’t partake, you miss out on one of the rituals that makes us New Orleanians who we are. There are many possible explanations for this tradition, but the one that seems to me to fit best is that, after a long weekend of partying, few have the money to buy anything special to eat. So the alternative is to prepare a cheap pot of Creole-seasoned kidney beans.

Now, you can get red beans at Chez Paul’s in the French Quarter or at the Court of Two Sisters. You can make the drive to a nouveau restaurant at the lakefront or take a trip down Carrollton to the College Inn. But there is no place better than, as the locals say, “my mama and Nem’s house.”

On Sunday night, rinse your beans to assure the removal of “stones,” then cover them in water and leave them to sit overnight in your mama’s favorite pot. I prefer to also add a dash of dry red wine. By the next morning, the beans will be soft, their skins cracked. They are now ready for cooking.

Cooking beans is a joyous event. As seasoning is added and the stew of beans and flavors thickens, the smell permeates your home and may just cause your neighbor to stick his head out his window with a smile and say, “Hey Brah, you mind if I pass by later so we’s can talk?”

Then comes the meat. Some like pork chops. Some will use smoked sausage. Me, I prefer andouille, a traditional Cajun pork sausage with just enough sweetness and a bite of cayenne. You can grill it or fry it in a pan—either way, you’re headed for a culinary perfection few others have experienced.

Next comes the rice. It can’t be sticky. And somebody had better pass by a bakery on the way home to pick up a fresh loaf of French bread. My preference has always been Randazzo’s Bakery. Prepare the bread by spreading slices with butter and garlic and heating them up just enough to make the toppings soft and the bread pliable for dipping in the bean mixture.

Finally, you need wine. In the words of Louisiana’s famous Cajun chef, Justin Wilson, “Your favorite, not theirs. You drink the kind you want.” This is poor folks’ cuisine at its best and New Orleans’ pride and joy.

It was on one such red-beans-and-rice Monday when the New Orleans homicide squad and I were summoned to an apartment. After receiving complaints of a lower-floor ceiling leak (and after two months had gone by with no rent payments being made), the landlord had stopped in on an upstairs apartment with his passkey. What the old man found had him still shaken by the time we arrived.

I have to admit, what I saw disturbed me somewhat too. There was a bathtub filled with . . . well, let’s say water, and some of it was slowly dripping out and flooding the vinyl floor. The “water” was green and brown and had a foamy residue, a product of decomposing human fat floating on the surface. All that was visible of the man’s corpse lying in that tub were his arms, shoulders, and head. His extended arms reached out to me, probably due to their swollen, rotting appearance.

I began my initial examination, noting that the floor around the tub was very spongy and unstable. The thought crossed my mind that at any moment the tub, the nasty fluid, and the dead guy might take me on a trip downstairs. Speed became essential.

I checked for trauma, making notes while the sheriff’s office technician snapped photos. I warned the removal team to take care as they shifted the body since he was tensely bloated and very slippery. As we hefted this guy out of the tub, something happened that I’d never encountered before. The decedent partially tore in half. We struggled with this new development while the putrid, stagnant water sloshed out, further soaking an already saturated floor, but eventually we were able to get him into a bag and on his way to the morgue.

A significant number of people are found dead in their bathrooms. Most often they are found on the toilet, but it is not unusual to find someone in a bathtub, dead from a cardiac event, which we determined had occurred in this case. Many people go to the toilet in order to get relief from what they think is a need for a bowel movement but turns out to be a major heart attack. Likewise, people try to receive comfort from a warm bath.

As I was leaving I noticed a police detective questioning the young woman who lived directly below and who had originally reported the leak. She was an attractive woman and younger than her haggard appearance let on. I could tell she was a New Orleans native. The brown doe eyes, slightly olive complexion, and Yat accent gave her away. She was a single mother of two; her children sat transfixed in front of a television in another part of the room. She was telling the detectives that she had been experiencing the leak for about three or four days.

Her back was to her small kitchen. The detective reached into his wallet and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and with all of the graveyard sincerity he could muster, he grabbed her hand and placed the twenty in it.

“Ma’am,” he said, “get your kids. Take them to Ground Pat’i or McDonald’s. Tonight’s meal is on the sheriff. Just get your kids and leave. I will secure your apartment.” I could tell the woman wanted to argue, but her weary expression seemed to decide it wasn’t worth the effort.

She hustled her kids past us and down the breezeway to where her car was parked, and I turned back to the detective.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked.

He calmly pointed past me to the kitchen. “Look at the stove.”

There on one unlit burner was a big pot of red beans soaking, just about ready to be turned into a New Orleans culinary masterpiece. But an unexpected ingredient was being added. Right above the pot, on the ceiling, was a wide, wet spot pouring a thin but steady stream of fluid into the mix from the upstairs bathroom. We grabbed that pot together and dropped the whole thing into a dumpster in the parking lot. And that detective went out and bought the woman a brand new pot, just to be certain.

HEY, HAVEN’T

WE MET BEFORE?

RIDING A MOTORCYCLE is a great American pastime. Our culture is an unrepentant road-trip culture, but add the feeling of air rushing over your skin and whipping the ends of your hair, and it becomes an unmatchable sense of freedom. Whatever your taste, there is a bike to match it—whether you want a fat, comfortable hog, a Gold Wing to cruise the countryside, a missile-shaped “crotch rocket” that liquefies your surroundings as you blow past the rest of the world, or a knobby, hard-working dirt bike for rougher terrain. Motorcycles are popular in every area of the country, rural or mega-metropolis, but the type of bike you observe in any location generally seems to fit its environment.

I have been fascinated with motorcycles since I was a young boy. I believe this captivation stems from when my Daddy was home on leave from one of his tours in Vietnam. Like many children of the ‘60s, I grew up going to drive-in movies. My father, not being one for most child-friendly cinema (he would not have been caught dead watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), took us to the drive-in showing of a film that influenced my view of motorcycles forever, Nam’s Angels.

In Mama’s candy-apple red 1967 Mustang fastback with a Gulf Mosquito coil burning in the ashtray and the drive-in’s weather-beaten speaker hooked on the window, my burly father sat in the front seat with my mother while I tried to ward off sleep in the rear, clad in my Underdog pajamas. Mama’s trademark blonde do was whipped atop her head like a lemon meringue pie, and she would lean back ever-vigilantly to protect my innocence with her cover-my-eyes hand-block.

Why my father would have chosen this particular film is beyond me. I suspect it had not so much to do with Vietnam but with the recent infamy earned by the Hell’s Angels at Altamont Speedway. My memories, though interrupted now and then by my mother’s diligent hand covering, explode with images of bearded men in German combat helmets flying through the air and dropping grenades down the backs of their enemies. The bikes of Nam’s Angels came to represent for me not something as trite as the modern vernacular of freedom, but at age six, of ultimate power.

In the peaceful Blue Ridge Mountains community where my family and I now live, we don’t have to worry about wayward bikers looking for something to rebel against. Our motorcycle visitors represent something else. They are both the scourge of the locals as well as a modern gold rush. They drop a lot of money in these here hills, which helps sustain the local economy. But on the weekends, as I weave about the curving, undulating mountain roadways, which are difficult enough for the locals, I’m contending with high-performance crotch rockets regularly whizzing by at dizzying speeds. If I pull into a roadside convenience store, I’ll find the same leather-clad bikers gassing up and stocking up on Doritos. As they blow past me again later, I think (and maybe even shout out), “Damn kids!” But upon closer examination, I realize the rider who just left me in the dust is gray-haired, old enough to draw social security, and driving a $25,000 BMW model. Damn baby boomers.

When I see a dirt biker dodging through urban sprawl, it seems out of place, just as much as a knuckleheaded Harley driver traversing a cow pasture. Such was the case one sunny spring afternoon in 1990 along the neutral ground of West Esplanade Avenue in Metairie, Louisiana. A young man had been putting on quite a show of his dirt-biking prowess. He had flown past the congested rows of suburban homes along the narrow, grassy area most others in this country call a median—that little strip of ground dividing opposing lanes—and he had soon drawn the attention of the neighborhood children. They had watched in amazement as the daredevil had passed by in a blur.

The area where he’d been riding his bike is referred to by native New Orleanians as neutral ground because, at the height of ethnic violence at the turn of the twentieth century, the Irish and Italian gangs could pass safely and without incident on these grassy areas separating the local streets. Originally, the French and the Spanish used these areas when they attempted to peacefully do business with each other, but the concept held true later for the gangs too. So this corridor of détente became known as neutral ground. Unfortunately for the group of five children viewing the one-man show that day, the neutral ground became a gruesome reminder of what havoc weed and high speed could generate.

The young dirt-bike rider had popped wheelie after wheelie, but when his front tire had touched down one final time, a steel support cable for the local electrical lines was there too. He had actually accelerated toward the line, witnesses later said, and had shown no sign of slowing down. When his front tire passed beneath the cable, the driver’s neck had been at an unlucky height and made contact with the cable. His body’s forward motion was temporarily halted, of course, but the cable had sliced his head from his shoulders.

When I arrived at the scene, the group of children was standing to one side being questioned by police. One child excitedly related what had happened.

“First, the motorcycle flipped through the air. Then his body, with blood coming from his neck. And then his head was in the air right behind his body.”

I shuddered.

After assessing the scene, I noted that the bike, torso, and head were all positioned in the order that the children had stated, all in linear relation, as if they had been neatly placed to underscore that one child’s memory. Surprisingly often, Death possesses a symmetry the living can never imitate. And it always speaks the truth.

At the time of my arrival, the young man had not yet been identified. After documenting the scene, I searched his clothes and found marijuana and his wallet. The home address on his Louisiana driver’s license was just blocks away from the accident scene, so I gathered up a deputy sheriff and went to inform his family.

The home was like any typical New Orleans suburban dwelling, with a boat in the driveway and a live oak in the front yard. I knocked on a side door until someone finally came, a middle-aged woman in a housedress. As she stood in the doorway wiping her hands on her apron, I thought about how what I was going to say would forever alter everything for her. I stepped into her home, my badge in hand, and told her that we needed to sit down. She walked backwards toward her family room, begging me to tell her why I was there. When I related the details of her son’s death, she screamed. Her husband appeared on the stairway then and, after hearing the news repeated, he too screamed and collapsed to the floor as if he’d been sucker punched.

I sat on their sectional sofa reciting what they would need to do next in order to take care of their boy’s body. After years of giving these notifications, I knew what I was saying was bouncing off them like rain on a rooftop. The deputy and I left our business cards, delivering our obligatory speech about if there was anything we could do to help . . . as if anything we could do would erase these moments.

I never got used to making next-of-kin notifications. During my first weekend as an investigator, I had to make three within forty-eight hours. I stayed drunk on mescal for the next forty-eight hours after that. I am of the belief that every time an investigator makes a notification, he loses a little piece of himself. Think about ripping the heart out of a total stranger every few days of your life. No one can understand what that feels like. After a death, the families of victims move on, one way or another, but I face the next patch of sorrow and leave yet another little piece of myself behind.

Later that same year, on one cool autumn evening—that is, as cool as any evening can be in New Orleans when it rains—I was summoned to the Alamo Motel on Airline Highway. An off-duty deputy sheriff from an adjacent jurisdiction had barricaded himself in his motel room. When I arrived, I found the usual group of investigators and city officials crowded onto the outside landing of the motel. The room’s door had been kicked in. The bed’s mattress had been propped up against the window as a barricade. Just prior to the police forcing their way into the room, the deputy had shot himself.

Our investigation revealed that the decedent had been involved in the illicit use of steroids, and the pathologist would later postulate that they may have impaired his judgment and possibly contributed to him taking his own life. There were no prior indications in his record that he would have been inclined to do something like this, but he’d managed it with his own Beretta 9mm service weapon.

Since this was a law-enforcement official, we took extra care in processing the scene, but our final task was to find his family. As I dug through his personal effects, I came across his black leather badge case, much like my own, which contained his driver’s license.

New Orleans, prior to Katrina, had been a big city. As I drove through the dark, with rain peppering my windshield, I thought about what I would say. I commonly performed this set of mental stretching exercises, but as I moved through the neighborhoods nearer his home address, I realized my exercises would be unnecessary. I saw the same boat in the driveway, the same live oak in the front yard. I felt the bile rise in my throat.

I parked my car and got out, but my feet felt as if they were screwed to the ground. Early in my career, when I had been particularly disheartened about the emotional weight of my occupation, I had asked my grandmother Pearl for advice. Having dealt with death many times in her life, she had suggested that I “pretend it’s not happening.” As I balanced on the threshold of this family’s home, I thought for once my grandmother had been wrong about something. This was really happening. There was no use in pretending. My guts were too twisted and my nerves were too raw to imagine otherwise. I had no other choice but to go ahead and complete the process of destroying these people once more. Like a wrecking ball crashing down on a tilting structure, I knew I would obliterate them.

I felt Death there alongside me, laughing. I knocked on the door and quickly drew the illumination of outdoor spotlights. The mother stood before me in the doorway. The terror that crept across her face made me feel like some horrible beast from Greek mythology. Immediately she began to scream and cry out, “NO, NO, NO, NO!” Her husband appeared behind his wife and looked at me as if I had just physically assaulted her. I felt as if I had. Again, I produced my badge and said that I needed to talk to them. I don’t believe they heard a single word I said as I robotically related the circumstances of their only remaining son’s death.

As I slammed my car into drive with tears streaming down my face, the only thing I could think about was the absurd odds of this, that within a five-month span of time I would have to go to the same home in a city of a million people to deliver the same kind of news. Two more people now were aching inside their home, cursing such random, hapless fate. What are the odds . . . ?

THE EARACHE

IN THE SOUTH, men don’t have mothers. We have Mamas. This may conjure up scenes of men unable to let go of the apron strings, but for boys living below the Mason-Dixon line, the moniker holds a totally different meaning. Just the tone of voice a Southern male uses when speaking to his mother or referring to that lady as Mama, relates something few others can grasp.

Southern ladies are to be respected. That is what many of us are taught from the moment we come screaming out of the womb. Our families are, by their nature, matriarchal. I believe that if the Yankees had understood this familial structure, the War of Northern Aggression would have been shortened by half and the North would have handed over half its own territory to boot. A Southern female can offer up a look, or even a fading glance, and we Southern men sit at their feet like big clumsy puppies just longing for a scratch.

I am sure many of my Southern brethren would say, “My Mama is beautiful.” I too make that assertion, only I have independent third parties to back me up. People have always said my mother was a looker. The soft tender white skin of an English milkmaid, striking eyes the color of the sky on a clear day, and of course the hair . . . My mother used to have what my grandmother referred to as Holy Roller hair. It stood about two feet above the level of her scalp and was big enough to house a small family of squirrels. Her hair, which to this day has never had a single ounce of chemical coloring added to it, was truly golden blonde. Slight in build, she brings to mind what many people think of when Southern belles are mentioned. Couple her appearance with her demure nature and Faulkner could have written chapters about her.

At age sixteen my mama had been set adrift when her own mother had passed. She had played the piano well enough to set her sights on Juilliard, but she fell under the spell of my delinquent father, who had convinced her to marry him before either of them had finished high school. He presented her with nothing except abuse, violence, and a baby within their first year together—me.

As it turned out, Mama’s sole flaw was her sufferance of two major afflictions: her first husband and her second husband. The first was soon gone, mired in a war, and since the second was as yet over a far-distant horizon, when I was young, Mama had to fight the battle of parenthood alone. It was just her and me in a rocking chair on many nights, while I tugged at my ears in agony and cried. This same sequence played out repeatedly in my early life, and the only solution was the cold steel of a pediatrician.

The procedure was always the same. When I developed an earache, we’d first try the drops the doctor had prescribed, which always came in an opaque brown dropper bottle. My mother warmed the bottle on the stove in a boiling pot of water then let it cool closer to body temperature. While I kicked and screamed, she coaxed me into lying on my side and applied the drops with the hope that this would provide relief. Most of the time it didn’t.

The next morning, I would find myself in a bleached-white waiting room with copies of Bible stories and issues of Boys’ Life. My mother, in a vain attempt to soothe me, would try reading to me but to no avail. For children of the 1960s, visits to a doctor were not moments to be relished. Unlike today, with pediatric waiting rooms containing all manner of aquariums, toys, and game systems to distract and entertain, all we had were images hanging on the wall of Emmett Kelly either smiling or frowning at us through his creepy clown makeup.

The physicians back then were different too. There wasn’t a wide choice of antibiotics available. And a doctor’s approach was more aggressive. If something ailed you, the doctor usually removed it. Since doctors could not excise my ears, the next best solution for an ear infection was the lance.

When we were eventually and inevitably summoned into the doctor’s inner domain, the staff knew what was to come. They knew I was a fighter. When a dentist had tried to cap my teeth in his office when I was four (as a result of cracking all of my upper incisors), I bit him. I’d had to be admitted to the hospital in order to complete the capping procedure. So, at the pediatrician’s office, the staff came in force.

Momma at eighteen years old. She had been kicked in the stomach by my father while pregnant with me, yet we both survived. Between surgical lancings, she would soothe my chronic earaches by singing “Down In The Valley” until I finally fell asleep.

Dr. Funderburke was an older man with stark white hair. He would enter the room and command his nurses and my mother to hold me on my side. The lance looked like a dental tool, only straight. With my head pressed to the table by the meaty hands of a nurse, the doctor would first visually examine my ear to find his target, then guide the tool into the small canal to pierce the pustule that had encased my eardrum. To me, it would sound like cannon fire. I always remember screaming. But I also remember the subsequent caressing my mother administered to my forehead. Relief.

With no more pressure and most of the pain gone, all else would be soothed away in the arms of my mother, back in our old rocking chair at home. Mama would gently sing “Down in the Valley” and my fitful body would find sleep. Fortunately for my mother, she never had to witness my body absent from her care and love, lying dead and alone in a courtyard of some dirty housing project.

Death and the process of death can be full of irony. As I hurdled through my days, I could never tell what might be waiting for me around the next bend. This became somewhat of a survival technique for me. I never said, “Gee, I can’t wait for the next axe murder,” or “Oh boy, a mass fatality!” However, I confess I got a tremendous adrenaline rush from the prospect of going out on a case, especially at the beginning of my career. Friends asked me how I could take any joy in the ultimate pain of another or their families, but I never reveled in another’s pain. It was merely that I was a scientist. I was curious how things worked. I viewed myself as fortunate to have been a witness to important, albeit tragic, milestones.

One night we were working a drive-by shooting in the heart of the projects, in one of the worst areas in all of suburban New Orleans. The local patrol officers had named the area Electric Avenue due to the amount of drug traffic traveling through the area. The scene was pretty much standard: a black male lay dead on the bare dirt courtyard of a public housing unit. Don’t ask me why, but a homicide in the projects for some people is better than cable TV. It must be, because every person residing there will show up and surround the perimeter of a crime scene. And when you turn on the television news cameras, everyone comes running.

What’s really amazing is that no matter what time of day it is, there is always a crowd. Early on I asked myself, don’t these people have jobs or hobbies? Then I would shake myself back to reality and remember where I was. It was not uncommon to have a mother with children as young as two years of age out at four in the morning, playing just outside the perimeter. I actually had one young mother at a scene in Atlanta one night hand me a spent shell casing her child had been playing with. I took it from her without saying a word.

The part I tend to like the most is when an inebriated crackhead is shouting advice to you about how to process a scene. He’s watched episodes of CSI and the like, which portray not only inaccurate forensic methodologies but also deprive the viewer of the sober reality. Death scenes are never safe or antiseptic. They are an odd mix of higher scientific reasoning combined with indescribable sorrow.

Then there is the ever-present reverend of some unidentifiable denomination—you can spot him because he is always wearing some kind of clerical collar or a T-shirt that actually says CLERGY. This man will be shouting very loudly and in close proximity about how they are sick and tired of their young men being taken from them. Then there is the obligatory chorus of rotund women waving fans and accenting his shouts with “Preach!” “Uh-huh,” and “Amen.” The more responses the reverend receives, the louder his interjections become. I’ve come to understand that this is most probably the only opportunity a man like him ever has to speak to a congregation.

Further out, beyond all of these, are the groups hovering along the margins—clowns, I call them. And as they say in Pentecostal circles, the spirit is apparently all over them. They will be yelling things like, “Naw, naw, naw, dat my boo!” or “Dat my brother!” or the ever-popular “Dat my baby’s daddy!” Soon after that, the scene tends to escalate into someone clutching their stomach or their head or screaming at anyone who tries to help them, “Get yo’ fuckin’ hands offa me!” or “Lawd help me, I gonna kill me a motherfucker tonight.”

When I was still a new investigator, I would observe all this behavior and think, Wow, that person is going to be a mother lode of information. But most often it turned out that they didn’t even know the deceased. Their sole aim was to get on camera for that night’s newscast. And, inevitably, a camera crew would get suckered into taping the scene.

If you want to find the people at a public crime scene who really care, it’s the woman with the forlorn look in her eyes, bitterly weeping and totally inconsolable. This is the person with answers. She shuts everything else out and focuses only on the twisted body of the young man she once held as a baby. It was this person I never wanted to offend with thoughtless gallows humor or out-and-out disrespect.

One such mother was there that night, surrounded by her immediate family who were attempting to soothe her. Pain enveloped her face. She sat on the ground, gently rocking back and forth, perhaps longing once again to hold her child and tell him, “It’s okay, baby. Mama’s gonna make everything all right.” But he was gone.

As I saw the mother’s inconsolable anguish, I heard something else. Low, at first. Giggling. And soon the giggling turned into rib-splitting laughter. It was certainly not the mother laughing. I glanced over my shoulder and caught sight of the police officers gathered around the body, laughing.

While performing my examination, I had noticed multiple gunshot wounds. One really nasty one had been just behind the kid’s right ear, and a projectile was partially protruding from the wound, surrounded by his brain matter, attempting to exit this newly formed defect, but the bullet was still lodged in the skin. So the forensic pathologist could see the bullet in place, I had put a large paper bag over the dead kid’s head and secured it at the neck with tape.

As I approached the crowd of cops, I noticed at the center, kneeling next to the body, a newly minted crime-scene technician was supporting the head in his hands and looking up at me with glee, like a kid who had just caught his first big fish. The technician had drawn a smiley face on the outside of the bag with a large cartoon balloon coming from the mouth saying GOOD MORNING, DR. MAC! which was a salutation for the forensic pathologist who would be performing the autopsy. I pushed the technician away and shouted to the scene commander that this prick should be removed immediately from the scene. Thankfully, he never attended another one of my scenes.

When I glanced back toward the mother, the face that had been grief-stricken now possessed a rage beyond anything I could fathom. In that instant, I ceased being an investigator and had taken on the role of perpetrator. No longer could she provide comfort to her son who, like me, had once been rocked by a loving mother. This earache had been fatal. Those who were trusted with finding answers had surrounded her baby and reduced his death to an amusement.

All of the hatred, animus, disdain, and homicidal rage I felt from her that evening, I deserved. And more. Her son had already been slaughtered once. I had allowed him to be annihilated again by thoughtlessness and heartlessness, and that was a bell that could never be unrung.

FORSYTHIA

ONE OF MY MOST cherished memories is of lying in my grandmother’s bed beneath an open window, the wind blowing through the weathered screen. This is the same bed that my grandmother had shoved me beneath when I was four or five and my drunken father had come with his shotgun to kill us all. The ramshackle home had window screens that were painted black and that paint had cracked and flaked from years of exposure to the elements. As a breeze caressed me, the perfumed scent of gardenias danced about the room and throughout the house. Like many of her generation, my grandmother was not accustomed to conditioned air, but through many years of impoverished rural life, Pearl had become an aficionado of cross-ventilation. On the hottest days, she would stand on her back steps in one of her floral-print housedresses and slippers and assess the direction of the wind. Then she would announce, like some colonial town crier, the forecast of the day. It was either Warm, Hot, or Really Hot. The only pronouncement of Cold she would ever make, since she hated winter, was when it was “colder than a well-digger’s butt in Ideeho.”

The Warm months were when Pearl was at her best. Able to pick up the slightest hint of a breeze, she would then strategically make her way through the house searching for the best locations to open a window or door. Pearl would say that you couldn’t just open all the windows and expect to catch a cross-breeze. Only the right combination of open windows would conduct the breeze properly. Inevitably, Pearl would perfectly catch the wind that would allow our family to survive a Louisiana summer.

My grandmother’s home had been constructed shortly before World War II and it appeared as though it had fought in every major engagement. It was encased in dirty white asbestos siding, most of the tiles cracked and chipped throughout my childhood, and a leaky roof that my grandfather never seemed to be able to fix. And the dilapidated barn had a perpetually foul barnyard smell. But for all the general disrepair of their place, one thing always shined brightly: Pearl’s flowers.

When the house had been built she had demanded gardenias and camellias be planted along both sides of the structure. Over time, the bushes grew to an enormous size. The yard also contained dogwoods, my grandmother’s favorite, and pecan and catalpa trees, which we would beat for worms that we would sell as fishing bait. But what most influenced life at the Morgan homestead were the gardenias. With the windows open in the summer, their scent would sneak in, subtly at first but ultimately hanging heavily in every room.

I developed a particular affinity for their smell, which lingered in my mind long after I had left my grandparents’ home for Georgia. That scent always reminded me of summer—my grandfather barbequing on his homemade oil-drum grill, my grandmother’s homemade ice cream, and ice-cold watermelon picked from their garden. Anytime the scent of gardenias hit me, I felt the safety of my grandmother’s hands on my shoulders and her reassurance that God would always protect me.

When I turned eight, my father—still mean as shit and probably even more insane, as well as fresh out of the Marine Corps—was eager to start a new life. He moved us to Georgia and away from Pearl’s gardenias. Then, shortly after that, Daddy abandoned Mama and me. In an unfamiliar place with no family support nearby, the situation went from bad to worse. We lived like mice in a rented trailer owned by a man with a fat cigar and horny designs on my young mother during the age of Helen Reddy singing “I Am Woman.” It was hell. There were no sweet aromatic breezes caressing my cheek, only a taint of hopelessness and anxiety. Yet my mother and I kept going to church and loving Jesus.

No matter where you travel in the South, the carpenter from Nazareth is there, either in the form of tent evangelists set up alongside the road or in painted murals over the baptismal pools in churches. In Him, we were to find peace, protection, and comfort. My grandmother Pearl had always told me that. She claimed that if I kept my eyes on the cross and reflected on Christ’s suffering for me, I would never stray.

People have asked me, when faced with a death, some of the most simplistic yet probing philosophical questions. “Why did this happen? If there is a God, why did he allow this?” I have never had an answer for them.

After I have washed the blood of the dead from my hands, stripped off my trousers now soaked in decomp juice, and returned safely to my home with its familiar quiet, I have sat nursing a drink and asking the same unanswerable questions. In those moments, after years of facing these same chafing questions and the same unsettling death scenes, I sometimes found myself with my .357 Colt Lawman revolver. I would run the cool metal of the muzzle over my face, making small circles around my nose and my eye sockets. Death encouraged me. Death dared me. Death always nudged me on, offered me peace, offered me an easy anesthetic for the accumulation of raw feeling that chased me ever harder and faster as my career advanced.

Had the dead done the same thing before I arrived at their death scene? To be the one trying to decipher their reasons—or Death’s reasons—was an impossible task. I could amass the facts of a scene but I always ended up with the same questions, and I’d been asking them since I was ten years old.

When I turned ten, I had two great revelations: my daddy was never coming back and Bruce was never going to leave.

Within nine months of my father’s abandonment, my mother had started dating one of the managers at the cotton mill where she worked. Bruce was a highly educated man who possessed a seemingly sweet demeanor. He charmed my mama with the refinement of a Southern gentleman and me with tickets to University of Georgia football games. But what impressed us the most was his fervor for Jesus. Jesus had brought him peace, Bruce said, and had washed him clean.

There is a telltale language that Christian believers use when speaking about the Savior of All Mankind. They find Him. He finds them. They are no longer lost. They were born again. They were reborn. They’ve been washed clean of their sins. They’ve been washed in the blood. They’ve been saved. They’ve been redeemed. They’ve been purchased with a price. Their name is now written in the lamb’s book of life. They are now bond servants of the Lord. They are now brothers with Christ. Bruce seduced my mother and me with this language of faith and promises of a better life far from the rage of my father and the squalor of the trailer park.

In the beginning, he played ball with me in the front yard and took my mother to Red Lobster—ah, the good life! Maybe the combination of deep-fried scallops and the sight of her little boy pitching a ball was enough to convince my mama that Bruce would bring us to paradise. The promise of no more hungry nights or badly mannered landlords was easy inducement. Here he was, everything my daddy had not been: refined of speech, gentlemanly, and educated. He had a fine job, a big blue Pontiac, and a university degree, but most of all, he said he had Jesus, just like my grandmother did.

Bruce also trumpeted a life of fidelity and stability, which in my backwoods, rough-as-a-cob life to that point were not things I was familiar with. All the males in my life so far had started and ended each sentence with the word “nigger.” No such utterance would be heard from Bruce. To him, the alpha and the omega was Jesus.

He proposed to my mother. They gave me a chance. They wanted to know if I wanted this too. They said we would have a great life and a great home, that we would have a great family, a family ordained by God’s will.

I wore a snug JCPenney suit in the sanctuary of a little Baptist church in the middle of nowhere at age ten, with no Daddy, and listened to the preacher’s matrimonial speech while Bruce stared at my mother in a trance-like state, a look I would eventually come to know well. The pastor may as well have been reciting a eulogy because within weeks I would understand everything a whole lot better.

Our life with Bruce began in the rich neighborhood of Griffin, Georgia, surrounded by the old textile elite and their children. I felt like the country mouse come to the city. The three of us moved into an expansive five-bedroom ranch home with a sprawling lawn surrounded by boxwoods and rose bushes, but absent of gardenias. We lived in sudden luxury far away from my ridge-running, un-air-conditioned relatives in northern Louisiana. The fragrance of my grandmother’s love was replaced by the scent of Old English lemon oil that my mother used to clean her new hardwood floors.

Absent Pearl’s garden, I now tried to identify the flora of my unfamiliar surroundings, most notably the extensive bushes across the street. They had long, slender branches that exploded up from the ground like a bright yellow fountain. Forsythia, I learned. I had never seen it before, but even at that age I thought the vibrant bush was remarkable. It had no smell, and it was so dense that I could have lain down within it and been completely obscured from view. After its spring bloom, the yellow petals would fall away and be replaced by tiny green leaves, equally as becoming.

Bruce had seen it as well.

Southerners tend to live their lives in a highly reflective manner. We have a hard time letting go of what has passed. Some would argue that the New South is not new at all but simply a new invasion of the South by the North. If Southerners had their way, all the roads would still be two lanes, Jeff Davis’ birthday would still be a state holiday, and everyone who did not attend church would be publicly chastised. My inner Rebel would not allow me to avoid this predisposition; for every trial I’ve ever encountered in my adult life, its magnitude has been measured by the one constant entity from my Southern past: Bruce.

With great clarity I remember walking onto my first death scene in New Orleans. The body had been rotting for over a month. The carcass was lying on the floor, tensely bloated. Because there were so many maggots present, the body appeared to have been still animated. As flies touched my face and arms, I said to myself, I can do this. It ain’t Bruce.

The body of a young man with schizophrenia, who had disemboweled himself because he believed that something dwelled within him . . . Slipping on his intestines as I examined his remains, I thought, Piece of cake. It ain’t Bruce.

The mother who had backed her car over her three-year-old, crushing the child’s head like a grape . . . As I methodically picked the child’s brain matter from the tread of her tires, listening to her anguished screams while the EMTs injected her with a sedative, I soldiered on. This wasn’t Bruce.

Bruce was my measure for all things bad.

Many times I have attempted to figure out why I chose such gruesome work. There was enough of my grandmother’s Jesus in me to make me believe that I had been prepared, predestined for such an undertaking. The only way I could make sense of my experiences prior to being a death investigator was to assume that a higher power had been molding me into someone who could endure the screams, the maggots, the anguish, and the never-ending, inexplicable waste of human life. I had become an automaton who would do without question.

The first beating came as a surprise. Perhaps I assumed that life would be ballgames and late nights spent barefoot in the cool grass catching fireflies. Up until that time I had received belt whippings from my daddy when he had been around but nothing else. On the day the first real beating happened, I quickly realized there was no longer any point to playing G.I. Joe or riding my bike. I only wanted a moment without this new fear. I wanted to be resting again in the arms of those I loved and who loved me. It never came.

Just a few weeks into the marriage, Bruce had told me that I was going to be just like my daddy and, if he had any say-so, it would not happen under his roof. I remember asking my mother what I had done wrong, but she had no answer. Bruce and I had never shared a cross word or a display of disrespect. As a matter of fact, I had mistaken him for Jesus. For a boy with no father and nothing to eat, Bruce had appeared to be Christ incarnate, the Host come to life. Plus, Bruce claimed to walk with Jesus and have regular audience with him. So I had assumed he was Christ’s earthly representative, sent to intervene on behalf of both Mama and me.

One day out of the blue, while standing in our carport, he very theatrically pointed to the forsythia bush across the street and told me to go get him some switches. Now, when I thought of switches, I immediately thought of the large black women at the Laundromat with insolent children who punished them with a tiny switch to the backs of their little toddler legs, then picked them up and held them tightly to their large breasts after the child had cried, saying, “Now, hush baby. You do what yo’ mama say you do.” There was none of that with Bruce.

He gave very specific instructions. I was to come back with three or five branches from the forsythia—the number had to be odd, for some reason. Not wanting to disappoint our new savior, I retrieved five sturdy branches and handed them over. He instantly cast aside two, saying that they were not up to the task, then told me to go to my new bedroom, with its oak floors and fancy furniture, take off my pants, sit on the bed, and wait. Uneasiness crept over me. He stood stripping away the green leaves and staring blankly at what became the instrument that killed my childhood.

After taking off my pants, I sat on the edge of my bed in my tighty whities, resting my hands on my fleshy knees. The feeling that I had in my stomach was the same feeling I would get years later, just before making a death notification—a numb emptiness. Bruce’s shoes clicked along the hall floor as they approached. My belly tightened.

My bedroom door opened and I sat staring at the reality of the decision my mother had made. The three forsythia branches were no longer individual sticks but woven into a wooden flail. At the lower, thicker end of the sticks, Bruce had wound them together up the shafts for about eight inches, just enough to form a handle. The unwoven ends pointed at me accusingly.

As he did for the next four years of my life, Bruce directed me to the end of the bed and told me to grab the footboard. The pressure of his hand rested flat against the small of my back. As the first lash stung my flesh, my toes curled in pain. Six more followed, leaving red stripes on the backs of my legs. Was this Jesus? Granny Pearl had promised that her Christ would always watch over me.

Later that evening, Bruce called me into the den. He prayed that I would be more like Jesus. That night I lay face down on my new bed in our new fancy house and wanted the hands of Pearl to comfort me, but I was left only with my thoughts. I tried to reckon how I could avoid this happening again. My mother sat in the den of her new home, leaving me alone to pray that my grandmother’s Jesus would show up.

Slowly and methodically my identity was taken. No longer was my mother allowed to call me Joey, the name I had been known by since birth. Now I was Joe. Bruce called me Dummy or Josephine. No longer was I permitted to call my mother Mama, now it was Mom. No longer was I allowed to hug my mother in his presence, since this was inappropriate behavior. My hair had been long and blonde, now it was cut because the Bible said that long hair on a man is a crown of shame. All of these refinements were to make me more like Jesus.

Bruce’s behavior became increasingly bizarre. He would sit in the yard for hours on an old sofa cushion, pulling weeds and listening to tapes of sermons. Though an avid football fan, he would periodically have the cable service disconnected because television was a tool of the devil. He even showed up early at church one Sunday morning with our TV in the back of our station wagon and placed it on the church lawn with a sign that read GARBAGE, to the glee of our fellow churchgoers, who proclaimed him a true man of God. That happened in the spring, but by fall we had a new television and the cable service reconnected, just in time for college football season.

In sixth grade, in the boys’ room at my elementary school, I showed the stripes of his lashings to one of my friends. Within the month, Social Services had contacted Bruce and explained there had been a child-abuse complaint lodged against him. He hired an attorney and the complaint disappeared. The beatings did not. The forsythia bush always taunted me from across the street.

There was nowhere to hide and, even if I had tried to get away, I knew the eyes of God would always see me. To disobey, to not submit to parental authority, was apostasy, our Bob Jones University pastor told us. I still held out hope for Jesus, while our fellow church members cheered Bruce’s piety.

By the time I turned fourteen I was a whipped dog. Bruce had graduated to buckling a belt about my waist to hold on to while he swung. This way he would save money on my underwear, since it would always tear when I struggled against him. All the while he would say to me in his flat tone, “You have to be like Jesus.”

Bruce had also taken to staring at me for long periods of time before commencing his punishments, even asking questions about my penis, but he never touched me with anything except the forsythia.

Once, sometime nearer the end of the physical abuse, Bruce discovered that I had not let him know about a failing grade at school. This action was, of course, akin to blasphemy. He related that God hated a liar and he would administer the forsythia daily until I heard the voice of God and came to my spiritual senses. My grandfather—my mother’s father—was scheduled to visit us soon, though. The day prior to his arrival, I was lashed once more and, as I lay bleeding and crying on my bed, Bruce advised me that he would cease his proselytizing of me while my grandfather was in town, but that I had better not say anything. Grandpa trumped Jesus, I guess. For the moment, anyway.

Me at eighteen. Thought I was the next Dick Butkus, but turned out to be just another face in the crowd surrounded by truly great Southern high school football players such as my high school teammate future NFL Hall of Famer Jesse Tuggle.

Daddy had left my mother and me with very little, yet prior to his departure, he had gone to the home of an old black man and bought a Mossberg 20-gauge shotgun for me. It was beautiful. The stock was cherry and had almost a red glow to it. Polished by age and smelling of 3-in-One oil, it had clearly been well cared for. I always imagined the man who’d owned it before me stalking through a large sunflower field next to his home, killing rabbits with it over the years.

The only time I had ever been allowed to shoot it was with my father, before he’d left. When Mama remarried, it stayed in my closet, leaning in the corner, along with a green box of Remington birdshot. Elaborate fantasies developed in my mind, though. It wouldn’t be hard. Instead of lying there crying and wondering why God had abandoned me, I could impose my own judgment. Anything would have been better than the constant humiliation. Besides, I was a Morgan. It was expected of me. People would just say, “Yeah, that’s Howard’s boy. That apple didn’t fall very far from the tree.”

I never knew why Bruce let me keep the gun, but he’d gambled with Jesus and it paid off. I was convinced I would go to hell if I even chambered a shell.

Why is it that God attracts psychotics? Do they seek him out for healing, or do they perhaps believe themselves to be his equal? Does the notion of ultimate power attract them? Or is it that sociopaths can spot the easy marks among the flock?

When I first went to work for the coroner in New Orleans, we dealt with the body of a mother who had been killed by her psychotic son. One of the investigators on the case told me, “Ya’ know, crazy people are only as crazy as we allow them to be.” He may have been right. Many are indulged, few are held accountable.

In June of 1990 a dentist with a long-standing practice was killed. He was considered a pious man, a man of God. After he was shot in the head, his equally devout wife was shot in the head and bludgeoned in a clear fit of rage. To top it off, their daughter, a thirty-four-year-old virgin, was blasted as well, destroying the beauty she had supposedly preserved only for God. The dentist’s son had executed them, but their Jesus had bestowed no mercy.

The son was found in the front seat of his car in the parking lot of the family’s church. He had dispatched himself with a .45 caliber. Brain matter had showered the interior of the car, staining old fast-food containers and a multitude of other weapons he had brought with him. Maybe on consecrated ground he’d felt safe from the licking fires of hell.

The next morning the family lay united once again in the morgue. The parents were conservatively dressed, neat in appearance, but splattered with their own blood and brains. The son was dressed in camouflage fatigues, and even in death he appeared dark and foreboding. But the most remarkable member of the family was the daughter. Her skin was white like the feathers of a dove. Her hair and eyes were as black as coal. Unlike the others, she seemed further removed from these vile morgue surroundings. Even with droplets of bright red blood dotting her head, neck, and shoulders.

We undressed her body and found something else. A vast number of tiny medals were safety-pinned over the surface of her beige bra. They were images of St. Joseph, over sixty of them. I knew Joseph was the earthly father of Jesus, but not being Catholic, I wanted to know his significance. I found out that I was the namesake of the patron saint of the church, but interestingly Joseph was also the patron saint for a happy death. A happy death? How does one happily die? And what did that say about me, another Joseph, who had chosen to work with the dead?

My grandmother used to say, “I ain’t home till I get to heaven.” For many years I had asked myself (as opposed to asking God) whether I would be happy in heaven when God had abandoned me to the likes of Bruce? I wondered that day in the morgue whether this young woman was now happy to be with God. Had she been happy that her own brother had exploded her skull with a large-caliber bullet? Was God happy that she was with him? Was God happy that I was standing over her?

Further investigation revealed much more about the family. They had lived in an upscale neighborhood in a rambling 1950s-style ranch with an indoor pool, though its surface was found covered with green algae. An ornate altar dominated the heart of their home and was surrounded by kneeling benches for daily prayers. Atop the altar, a thick family Bible had been kept.

Religious imagery and icons were everywhere inside their house. I stared a long time at a crucifix hanging on the wall and the Son of God stared back at me. My life had intersected with the lives of this family. I’ve heard so many religious people say that they are striving every day to be more like Christ, but I don’t know what that means. Had Bruce ultimately been too afraid of being more like Christ and had chosen me instead as his proxy? Had the dentist’s son chosen to end his family’s journey, while I had chosen to continue my own?

I remembered all the evangelists and preachers throughout my life who had told me I was going to hell. “You must have Jesus,” they claimed. I remembered all the churches Bruce dragged us to, where preachers with angry voices preached against men with long hair, music with a backbeat, and women wearing pants. “You must have the Lord!”

In a Southerner’s world, which revolves around enduring hyper-religiosity, I know now the question is not “Do you have Jesus?” The real question is “Does He have you?”

GAINFUL EMPLOYMENT

MY GRANDMOTHER bought me large picture books about the Civil War when I was a child. I pored over them, staring into the eyes of the two-dimensional men looking back at me. I had a natural child’s fascination with death, like many of us do, and the images of Mathew Brady, which were so controversial in their day, gripped me much as they had gripped the general public when they first went on display in the 1850s. I would wonder at the swollen, rotting corpses and what twist of fate had led them to this point. Did they die an agonizing death? Did their families ever discover what became of them? Little did I know that years later I would be asking these same questions about the bodies lying at my own feet.

When I first started my career in New Orleans, Miami Vice was all the rage. Guys tried to mimic the styles by wearing loud outfits with accompanying mullet hairdos. We males had images of Crockett and Tubbs jetting along over the Miami thoroughfares in a sleek black Ferrari to the strains of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.”

Back then I worked from home for forty-eight straight hours then had Mondays off. I remember those on-duty nights with vivid clarity. I remember my first weekend, my first scene. I got the call and drove my newly issued Blue Crown Victoria westbound on I-10 to a motor vehicle death, my sweaty hands gripping the steering wheel. I listened to the police radio, but I had also turned on 99.5 FM WRNO, “We’re the Rock of New Orleans.” Almost as soon as I had turned on my headlights, “In the Air Tonight” had come on. Phil Collins’ shrill, effeminate voice ran through the stanzas, and I thought that I had a date with destiny.

As excited as I was about my first scene, I soon became acutely aware of just how untrained and uneducated I was. Thoughts of being viewed as the Crescent City’s version of Don Johnson evaporated, to be replaced by images of Dom DeLuise attempting to justify himself to a discerning audience.

I did the best I could to convince anyone who was watching at the scene that I knew what I was doing. I exited my car stone-faced and, as robotically as possible, with notepad and gloves in hand, I walked toward the cop who appeared to be in charge and flipped out my ID. I kept my mouth shut and listened, while stepping over the debris scattered all over the westbound lanes of the interstate. The victim was mashed into her car’s dashboard. She was young, her golden blonde hair soaked with blood from large lacerations in her scalp. My guts were trembling. I made notes. There were no great mysteries, no whodunit elements to this case—a girl had simply driven head-on into another car. But this was where my professional life began.

Over the years I acquired finer skills. I learned along the way. However, the most convincing tool I picked up was this: When all others are fleeing the stench or crying on each other’s shoulders over what they have witnessed, I had to run forward and embrace the situation. My reputation grew as others witnessed the things I did, things they wouldn’t dare to even consider doing themselves. Yet, after all the parlor tricks and jokes had been used up and I had embedded myself in this world of death, I sensed that I existed alone on a deserted island with no hope of rescue. And I asked myself, What in the hell had I gotten myself into?

Soon after this first night, the thrill of telling people what I did for a living began to wear thin. In the end, all I was left with were the eccentrics who worked in the field, a bunch of dead bodies, and a whole lot of upset families. And the nightmares.

Like the clues I searched out at a death scene, evidence began to appear in the people I worked with. Their views were influenced by the horrors they regularly witnessed and compounded by whatever vice they used to numb themselves against these horrors. There were three investigators in my office and I was one of them. This office was responsible for all the death investigations in suburban New Orleans, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. My other two colleagues were stone-cold alcoholics, and it was a crapshoot as to which one would ask me to cover his shift or whether the answering service would call me in because the on-call investigator could not be reached, or the guy was too unintelligible on the other end of the line to be of much use.

Numbing oneself, I discovered early on, is an unfortunate requirement of doing business with death. British sailors a century ago received a daily ration of rum—maybe medicolegal death investigators should be issued regular gift cards for their neighborhood liquor stores.

Forensic pathologists also need anesthetizing. I can’t count how many times I had to call a forensic pathologist for advice on a case and ended up speaking to someone who closely resembled Otis, the town drunk from Mayberry, only less intelligible. I have worked on a body across from one of these highly educated little gods, all the while breathing in their ethanol-tainted exhalations. Couple this with needing to wield lethally sharp instruments just millimeters away from other hands working in the same body cavity and it makes for one hell of a tense time.

During my tenure at the Fulton County medical examiner’s office, stories always floated around about an employee who would come into work during the night to perform his autopsies. This is not too terribly unusual, but he would always show up either fully intoxicated or recovering from a drunken stint. This made him unable to perform his job to the standards required. So what did he do? He had the uneducated, partially literate autopsy assistant perform his cases for him.

In many of these cases, a successful criminal prosecution hangs in the balance, or a payout of life insurance, or necessary advice about inherited or contagious medical conditions. Unfortunately, when I reviewed several of this pathologist’s reports, my hopes of avoiding such low standards were sunk. His case files would often simply consist of a cartoon-like illustration of either a male or female body with various completely unintelligible markings, including unreadable notes in the margins—that was it. No conclusions could be made, except that one well-lubricated moron had written this.

Being the new guy, I started out welcoming every opportunity to gain more experience, but this soon wore thin. How many crab- and crawfish-covered children’s corpses can you drag out of canals before you start taking a snort of numbing juice too, just to deal with the remembered images?

Our office had a reputation as being a friend to law enforcement and making do with very little while also producing a superior investigative product. You take the good with the bad. Any number of times the on-call investigator might show up at the scene “all snapped up,” but the police appreciated our work so much that they would call me or another non-alcoholic representative from our office to come and deal with the situation. This was the normal course of business in Louisiana politics.

Several years later, when I got to Atlanta, I found the situation was not much different. But let me tell you about Robert.

My favorite subject in high school was literature. I was a voracious reader. Much to the chagrin of my teacher, Dr. Cook, my favorite author was Dickens. Dr. Cook thought Dickens a tedious sentimentalist, but I found him redeeming and a marvelous storyteller. One character that has come to describe what Dickens is all about for me is the character of Joe in The Pickwick Papers. For those not familiar with Joe, he was a fat kid who chronically indulged in food and, when seated too long, fell asleep. The medical community actually has a condition named after this character: the Pickwickian syndrome. If a patient has too much fat around his neck, it will constrict his blood vessels while he’s seated and cause him to fall asleep—this was Robert.

By the time I had been hired at the Atlanta medical examiner’s office, Robert had been there for decades. When he was not at the ME’s, he was at a local funeral home not too far away, where he lived and embalmed bodies on the side. Robert was a rather large man who rarely bathed. He worked as an autopsy technician, and rumor was that he never washed his hands even after gutting the most foul of decomposed bodies. He was always dressed in the same clothes and it was in these clothes that he would eviscerate a maggot-infested corpse. Then moments later he would sit down to devour a chicken dinner.

He wasn’t just fat. He was big. His hands were the size of catcher’s mitts. He walked around the morgue wearing double-knit polyester pants rolled up at the ankles to reveal underlying ashy folds of skin and, as some Southerners like to call it, a dirty wifebeater shirt (a muscle shirt or undershirt, for you Northerners).

The first time I met Robert was at the morgue behind Grady Hospital. It was a few days after my arrival in the summer of 1992. He was sitting at a circular conference table outside the cold room where the bodies were stored. The table was covered with old copies of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the substantial expanse of Robert’s arms. What caught my eye, as I introduced myself, was a clear plastic gallon container of vanilla ice cream that sat before him on the table. It was the same type my grandmother used to buy at Safeway for family gatherings, when she would serve her cobbler to the entire family. With one arm encircling the container like a bear with a honey pot and an enormous serving spoon clutched in his other hand, Robert was making fast work of the tub’s contents. I stood pondering the amount and realized that the container had a disturbing resemblance to the plastic buckets we had stored brains in back in New Orleans.

When I introduced myself, Robert drew the bucket even closer into his chest, as if I were about to snatch it away from him. He looked at me through dull eyes with a white ringlet of ice-cream residue around his rather protuberant lips.

“Do you want some?” was his only response.

My skin crawled. I stared at the huge serving spoon heaped with ice cream. The spoon was so out of place. It should have been on someone’s table serving dressing on Thanksgiving Day. As politely as I could, I declined his offer.

My thought, as I walked away, was that if a man would eat ice cream so close to rotting corpses, what might become of my hand if it ever entered his zone of ingestion?

I saw more of Robert than I cared to, after this. Though I never fell for it, he perpetually asked people for money to satiate his gambling habit and his penchant for women. The physicians in the office were easy marks. I’d hear his sleepy voice say, “Let me hol twenty dollars, Doc.” Imagine a loud mumbler—that’s him.

For those of us who worked as investigators, our time spent with Robert was especially interesting. In the evening he would answer the phone at the morgue. We would see the phone go on hold for what seemed like an eternity, then the loudspeaker embedded in the ceiling would crackle to life and our own in-house Pickwickian would say, “Polees on line fawty-fawty hunred. Day wants to repout a deff.”

Many times the phone would ring for what seemed like ages before he would pick it up. Sometimes he just didn’t. One of us would go downstairs to see what was up and, as predicted, he would be seated in a chair sound asleep.

Our chief medical examiner, Dr. Zaki, was from Egypt and had been trained in Britain. This meant that there were proper ways of going about everything. He even insisted that the investigators wear dress slacks, Oxford shirts, and ties. Nothing like dragging your silk Pierre Cardin tie through black and green decomp fluid to really set a day’s mood.

Zaki had a flash temper and would go off on anybody in his field of fire. One day while at a county commission meeting, one of the black counsel members took issue with the fact that there were no African Americans in positions of authority at the medical examiner’s office. At once Zaki stood up, pointed his finger at them, and stated in a very loud, resolute voice, “I am more of an African American than you will ever be.” Touché. As you can imagine this comment went over about as well as a turd in a punch bowl, but that was Zaki.

Now, combine Robert and Zaki, and laughter soon follows. One story involves the two while Zaki was performing a particularly difficult autopsy on a body with multiple gunshot wounds. Zaki being Zaki was very thorough. Hours went by, and Robert was his assistant. Imagine if you will the hulking form of Robert in his slacks, wifebeater, white plastic apron, and cobalt-blue gloves, all spattered with blood, working alongside precise, pristine Dr. Zaki. There appeared to be no end to Zaki’s laborious external examination, and eventually Robert said, “Doctur Zaki, I gots ta go to the resroom.”

“Go ahead but come back immediately,” Zaki said. Knowing Robert’s nature, he probably didn’t want to take any chances.

Zaki continued with the exam, meticulously going over every inch of the body. After approximately forty-five minutes, Zaki realized that Robert had not returned.

“Where is Robert?” he asked everyone. No one knew. Zaki cursed under his breath.

Eventually, in the break area, Zaki heard snoring. He opened the restroom door and found Robert sawing logs on the toilet seat, still clad in his bloody outfit but with his slacks down around his ankles.

My mother and father on their wedding day, July 3, 1963. Pictured: Howard H. Morgan, Jr. and Louise Edwards. My mother had planned on going to Juilliard but opted to marry my father at seventeen.

My grandmother Pearl and I in 1969. She told me the best way to deal with death and the screams of grieving families was to “just pretend it’s not happening.” After a couple of thousand deaths there’s just so much pretending I could do.

This image was taken around the same time my father threatened to kill the family. My grandmother hid me beneath her bed in the adjacent bedroom. Seated left to right: Pearl Killian Morgan, myself and Howard H. Morgan, Sr. (grandfather).

Pictured are my mother Louise Edwards Smith and my Granny Pearl. Separated by only seventeen years, Pearl was a parent to both my mother and me; loving us, feeding us and giving us a place to live in the absence of my father.

Pictured 1969 with my Granny Pearl and her sister Aunt Juanita “Skeet” Osterland. In the background is the Monroe Louisiana Civic Center where I first saw “The Killer” Jerry Lee perform.

Northerners call them “mobile homes,” Southerners call them “trailer houses,” one of several my mother and I occupied in our trajectory toward a “better” life with my stepfather. I was doing my best rendition of “Folsom Prison Blues.” Daddy sent me the album Live From Folsom Prison while stationed in Southeast Asia.

Mother and son. An image of my father Howard Morgan, Jr. and my Granny Pearl.

Death had required a high price of me. By the end of my career, my children were witness to a quivering, terrified father who saw death awaiting at every turn. Pictured left to right: Abigail, Lexie and Noah.

Better times, my son Noah and I, teaching college and free from staring death in the face day after day.

My first exposure to Southern Evangelisms. I first heard the question “Are you prepared to die without Jesus?”

As a death investigator you bear witness to the height of human frailty and many times an equal measure of stupidity.

I have come to believe that in the end most of us meet Death alone. Many believe that the time is of our own choosing, but Death isn’t interested in anyone’s view of free will; he simply waits and claims us.

Just trying to survive. Prostitutes are always easy targets: used, abused, destroyed and thrown My colleagues and I were the only ones left to care. By the end of my career caring was pointless.

Alone and wrapped in the blankets he died in. His fellow heroin addicts dumped him in the road rather than be found with the body.

There was no one to hear her screams from the soft carpet of pine needles.

An end to life under government care, disabled and left to decay.

Assailant was stopped by the police while cleaning up and just before he began to dismember the body.

In my experience, Death rarely visits in crowds, at parties or ball games. For most, it is a solitary affair, arriving unexpectedly. Some await it.

One final knot.

To experience life in someone else’s skin is an adage that most use as a punch line. One of the techniques often utilized to get a good fingerprint is to slip the skin of the dead over your own gloved hand and “roll” a print for those that no longer can.

As the Bard related, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” No apologies.

Up close and in living color. Inside of a solid waste bin note feces surrounding the body as the head rests on a dead rat. How do you extricate these experiences from your mind and being? Alcohol, therapy, Jesus or a hollow-point projectile?

Opening a body in 1988. I worked as an autopsy assistant during the day and as an investigator at night. This was probably the best classroom I was ever in, but it came with a price.

Those trappings upon which my identity had hung for twenty years...in the end emblematic not of my pursuit for answers but Death’s pursuit of me.

In the cadaver lab at North Georgia. Now I teach Death Investigation to undergrads and occasionally warn them about “flying too close to the flame” of death.

“What the hell are you doing?” Zaki used his most authoritative British-tinged accent, but it took several more shouts and a bout of hard shakes to roust Robert.

After a number of years working there, I came to expect this kind of behavior from Robert; however, nothing topped what happened in 1998. One of my colleagues and I had returned from the scene of an overnight multiple homicide, and we still had much work to do. One of the victims had been a beautiful light-skinned black woman who had been found nude on the scene. She had long, flowing black hair and a very curvy figure. In an attempt to leave her in as pristine a position as possible, she had been transported to the morgue face down. The body was moved directly to an autopsy table without going into the cooler because we were continuing to take body temperature readings, trying to determine how long she had been dead.

Robert walked in while we were taking temps and he came to a dead stop at the feet of the woman’s body. He stood there transfixed. While focusing on the deceased’s rather ample backside, Robert said aloud and to no one in particular, “Who she is?”

Not looking up from my clipboard, I replied, “She’s unidentified.”

“She sho do look familiar,” Robert said.

“Oh yeah?” I added absently. “Do you think you know her?”

Without hesitating, and never removing his gaze from her buttocks, Robert said, “I don’t know, but she sho do look familiar.”

At this point Robert slowly moved closer to the corpse. Never once did he go to her head and look at her face. Robert once again repeated his mantra. Then I caught him slowly raising his hand to his crotch to rub himself.

That’s when I told him he needed to leave. He tramped off toward the bathroom, glancing back over his shoulder. Call me stuffy or call me a wet blanket, but even for the most libertine there are limits to what should be abided. All I could think at that time was, I sure hope Zaki doesn’t need him anytime soon.

There is no doubt in my mind that people wonder about those of us in the field of death investigation. Do we ever sneak a peek? Do we ever cop a feel when no one is looking? Or maybe they consider us ghoulish and perverse, regardless. I have never encountered a genuine necrophiliac, beyond this vague hint from Robert—at least none that I know of. As with any profession that possesses its own mythos, there are bound to be stories that float about and elicit a salacious “You gotta be shittin’ me!”

One such story revolves around an alleged event that occurred at the Orleans Parish morgue. I’ll tell it to you just as it was told to me.

For those of you who saw the movie JFK, the exterior shots of the building housing the district attorney’s office in that film are the Orleans Parish Courthouse, and its basement is home to the Orleans Parish Morgue. In the summertime the smell of putrefied bodies often wafts up into the courtrooms, sometimes so intensely that sitting judges are forced to take indefinite recesses until the smell clears out.

The Orleans Parish coroner utilized prisoners to help in the morgue (felons around sharp instruments?) and sometimes to drive the coroner’s van to a death scene to pick up the bodies (prisoners collecting evidence?). It was to this same morgue that a forensic pathologist and a police officer showed up one morning for an autopsy on a homicide victim. What they saw upon their entry was something that could scar a person forever; I know just hearing about it soured my stomach.

At the topmost row of stainless-steel compartments that housed the bodies, one of the doors was open and its tray was pulled out. The tray contained not just an elderly lady but also that of a sprightly young male prison trustee. The difference between the two, of course, was that the poor woman was dead and the parasite on top of her was not. The blue-haired granny’s rigor mortis-laden legs were splayed and stuck in the air and the trustee was attempting to, shall we say, commune with the dead.

LITTLE GODS

AND CHOCOLATE

MILKSHAKES

WHEN HE BALLED UP HIS FISTS, they were the size of tomato cans and as hard as pig iron. Deep lines were carved into them from years of pulling cable and setting power poles for the electric company. Seeing him was like staring at a steam locomotive—large, self-reliant, powerful, and set upon his own tracks.

My grandfather was a big man for his day, over six feet tall, with thick jet-black hair swept back under a dose of Vitalis. His face was as dark as a Plains Indian chief and deeply rutted. His eyes were dark like chocolate drops and always bore some sadness, the origins of which I never knew. I always imagined he had lost something somewhere along the line that could never be found again, but what it was I never understood. He was there when electricity first arrived to those who had sat in the dim glow of their oil lamps for years. He was a man born out of time, performing an occupational task that seemed out of step with the man he was. He was my Papaw and my John Wayne, the measure of all things masculine.

Howard Morgan Sr. was born in 1911 to an alcoholic father who worked as a grocery clerk and was never around. When his father was around, he beat the shit out of Howard and Howard’s mother, who was half-Choctaw, the daughter of a Confederate veteran, and mean and contrary as hell. Howard was one of five boys, and life was hard for them in the woods of southeast Arkansas.

Pearl K. Morgan and Howard H. Morgan, Sr. at Forsyth Park, 1952, one year after Joseph Killian’s murder. Whether good times or bad they rode it out. Papaw died of brain cancer in 1983. Pearl died in 2006 of cardiac failure.

When Howard was maybe eight years old, he and his siblings went south, riding horses along the Mississippi to Baton Rouge, where along with their grandfather they purchased horses arriving off ships that had sailed from South America and beyond, then drove them back up to Arkansas to sell. They made this trip many times throughout my papaw’s youth, so he spent plenty of time on the trail and learning the horse trade. He and his brothers rarely, if ever, attended school; they, along with everyone else they knew, just tried to survive.

By contrast, the men that I would end up emulating as an adult were nowhere near the measure of the man my grandfather was. Early on in my work life, I fell into the trap of confusing their academic and intellectual arrogance with the common-sense understanding of the world my Papaw had possessed. These men were out of their element in the workaday world. They prided themselves on their ability to preach to others less educated. And they rarely broke a sweat. The forensic pathologists I held in such high esteem in the beginning expected all the world to both defer to their intellect and admire the fact that they could deal with whatever death left behind.

As an old man, Papaw kept his horses in an ancient barn in back of his ramshackle house. It was the aging horseman’s sanctuary. He spent hours brushing and currycombing his horses, cleaning their hoofs, then riding them in his pasture. He wore Texas-style spurs over his weathered Tony Lamas, and just like in the movies, he jingled when he walked. He would slip up into the saddle with his ever-present straw Stetson on his head and pause to survey where he would go, though the path led only in one direction, to the pasture.

When he urged a horse to move, his voice didn’t resonate with the commonly held horseman’s vernacular. He yelped with the voice of an old drover and spoke to the animal by name. He would gallop off, but it was more like a sprint. I remember the first time I saw him on the back of his horse galloping full tilt. The raw power of the horse under his control scared me.

With no horses to drive northward or brothers to ride with, he would simply ride in big circles around his field. Looking back now, I wonder if he ever searched for a hole in the fence to jump through, back to an earlier time, before the Louisiana Power and Light Company took ownership of his life.

I watched my grandfather talk to his horses and mules as if they were men. I always wondered what he was saying. I always tried to listen; for the animal, listening was mandatory. When one of his animals disobeyed, particularly the mules, he would grab their lower lip with his left hand and land a sharp jab with his right between its eyes. My grandfather believed in brevity and economy when it came to communicating with animals as well as most people.

The days at the power company were long for Papaw. He rose every morning at 4:30 a.m. The smell of chicory-laced Community coffee filled the air because my grandmother had risen five minutes earlier. Papaw demanded there always be at least two types of meat on the table at every meal but particularly at breakfast. His two favorites were fried country ham, from which my grandmother would make her red-eye gravy, and hog brains. He had an affinity for squirrel brains too, which he and my grandmother both said tasted sweet. Me, I stuck to the ham, never brave enough to eat something that might have once been thinking of me.

Granny Pearl worked steadily in the kitchen as Papaw dressed himself in a khaki shirt and pants then rolled up his sleeves, revealing his ham-hock-sized forearms. It was always the same routine—he would enter the kitchen and pause before moving to the table, looking toward my grandmother. Being a man of very few words, he would just say, “Ready?” She always was.

There were two things that were never done at Papaw’s table: speaking kindly of Republicans, particularly Abraham Lincoln, and sitting in his chair. His mahogany chair was beautiful and adorned with a carved rose at the apex of its back. It was his space. From here he surveyed the food he had provided and the many people who came to his home to eat it. I always sat to his right, a favored position for a young boy who thought the sun rose and set at his Papaw’s discretion.

As he sat there at the head of the table, Papaw would drink his cup of coffee. I believe that for her own amusement my grandmother would serve it in her delicate china cups with matching saucers. To see this big man, from his rough upbringing, drinking from something so dainty was extraordinary. The coffee always smelled good, but one sip and I knew it could have stripped paint. Whenever I tried to prove how grownup I was by taking a sip from his saucer, my grandfather would give up a toothless laugh.

It was also in this same chair that he would receive from my grandmother the good or bad news about their finances and news of any deaths or births among his relations. At night he would sit, hand-rolling his cigarettes for the next day. At Thanksgiving and Christmas he would sit down to feast on the ducks and deer he had killed or the bullfrogs he had gigged. And it was in that chair that he held me for the first time as an infant, his first grandbaby.

So as custom dictated, when the cancer was done with this seemingly indestructible man, my grandmother leaned his chair forward against the table; it would never be occupied again. It remained a quiet reminder for our family, particularly my grandmother, of the powerful weight it had upheld through all the preceding years. When I would visit Granny later in life, once I’d grown into a man, I always tried not to look at it. The loss was still too dearly felt.

Plus, his old chair reminded me of the ways I had fallen short. When Papaw had died in Louisiana in 1983, I had been living in Georgia, a senior in high school. Out of hatred for my biological father’s family, my stepfather had forbidden me to attend Papaw’s funeral. His chair accused me every time I glanced at it. If it had been me who had died, Papaw would have found a way to come, even if by horseback.

For all the men I encountered in my younger years, Papaw influenced me the most. From him, I learned that life was hard and that hard work didn’t necessarily guarantee a big paycheck, just more hard work the next day. Instead, his reward was at home, where he could be the kind of man the twentieth century prohibited him from being—independent, respected, powerful in his own right.

Papaw’s time away from work more than likely involved more work. Whether in his four-acre garden or tending to his horses or mules, he always labored. He was much more at home in a saddle or cracking a plow line than he was sitting in front of a television set. The man was the last of his friends to abandon the mule and turn to a tractor. He always smelled of sweat and Prince Albert tobacco.

I lost an understanding of his way of life when I reached adulthood. I abandoned the memories of my grandfather’s horse stables and the joys of sitting with him as he spoke of noodling for catfish. Papaw had achieved equilibrium within his world, whether it was with the horses he loved or the other men he horse-traded with, but I dismissed it all as provincial and out of step with what should define me as a man. Instead, I turned my eyes toward the forensic pathologists I served in my work. I sat in their presence daily, perhaps expecting their words to act as my own burning bush.

At first, I reveled in their eccentricities. Anyone both this bizarre and this intelligent had to have a wealth of valuable advice. That and they had to have a deep comfort level with life and how to navigate its troubled waters. Of course my assumptions were utterly wrong. For everything my Papaw was, they were not. The physicians I encountered never attained symbiosis. They constantly remained in conflict throughout their careers. The value they attributed to themselves and their work was in direct disagreement with how others perceived them.

Yes, Howard Morgan was backward and uneducated, but he had an understanding of his own life that never translated well when compared to the broader world. Despite my grandfather’s ignorance, he had achieved what most forensic pathologists obtain only weakly after years of education—an innate surety about himself. It was not a trait contrived through higher education or international recognition, but something only a few men embody. Physicians, I found, attempted to wear that same coat of self-assurance but it translated instead as arrogance. They believed the world should bend at their command, that I—one of the common folk—should happily defer to their worldview, no matter how skewed it might be.

Consider a large handful of people who are bright enough to make high undergraduate grades and good enough to get into medical school. They toil away for four years, learning techniques and studying books, absorbing more and more as they progress. Some of them may begin to perceive themselves as different from those who have not mastered their same knowledge. They, instead, believe themselves to be greater and others lesser. When those few emerge with an MD, eight years out of high school, someone hangs a doctoral hood around their neck and confirms their self-assessment, proclaiming them greater. They are suddenly gods who think they know what others only wish they knew.

This is one benchmark on a longer journey. Further along the way, a certain few of these MDs discover something about themselves. They hate their patients. They have little tolerance for endless questions or complaints and no talent for bedside manner. So they opt for another universe. They become pathologists.

Their residency will be where they can safely learn about disease while seated behind a microscope. But still there are those damn irritating humans. No, not the nurses, the orderlies, or the sick, but the peons who occupy the medical labs with them, the technicians, those who have a different list of questions for them or require their signature on a form.

This particular brand of pathologist—now more eccentric and isolated than ever—can never escape far enough. Yet they still expect to be continually lauded and appreciated. So, in the end, these wispy, rancorous spirits find the morgue. Here, they are not required to say, “You’re going to feel some pressure here,” or “Sir, your tests don’t look good.” Here, all they have to do is field dress bodies and render opinions. Here, they simply hand down decisions without risk of liability.

I recall a statement one forensic pathologist made to me when he was changing into his work clothes for a day of autopsies: “Well, let’s go make some human canoes.” This is a direct reference to the methods employed during an autopsy. In the chest, the breastbone is removed either with an agitating saw or limb shears. Then the body is divested of all of its contents, leaving nothing but a hollow shell. A body after this procedure, more than anything I can think of, is emblematic of forensic pathologists. It is both grotesque and alluring as well as now a gaping void.

For me, the best classroom was always an autopsy suite. There, I began to appreciate the form and function of the human body. The secrets of diseases are revealed and the impact of trauma can be more fully understood. But it is in this environment that forensic pathologists reign.

When I began my career, it was mandated that any coroner investigator also work in the morgue as an autopsy assistant, otherwise known as a diener. This word came to represent for me all that was wrong with forensic pathology. The term has been in use for decades, if not centuries. Its origins are German and when it’s uttered from the lips of a pathologist, it is meant to put you in your place, for the word literally translates as servant.

I came to understand that this term was not just paying homage to the past but a definition of the hierarchy within the filthy walls of an autopsy room. Once, a co-worker and I were forced to work with a particular forensic pathologist who had burned so many bridges in other ME offices throughout the country that he had ended up with us; his father just happened to be our coroner. Working with him was like walking barefoot on broken lightbulbs. Each of our utterances had to be carefully crafted in order not to be misunderstood and, therefore, cause an argument. The staff was so beset by this man that he was allowed to communicate only by pointing and grunting. This went on for months at a time until he might suddenly decide to bless the staff with a single voiced command.

His simian-like speech was just one example of how arrogantly above the fray I think many forensic pathologists place themselves. There are better examples in the profession, but unfortunately over the years I’ve found a greater number to forever bias me not in their favor.

Why are they allowed to get away with so much? I heard one threaten to wipe out an entire office staff with gunfire, a statement considered even more dangerous because many in these offices carry weapons. I’ve actually heard two forensic pathologists arguing over the usefulness of the data gleaned during human experiments performed by Nazi scientists and that this data should be released for modern scientific consideration. And you have not lived until you’ve had a forensic pathologist throw a bloody scalpel at you because its blade was dull.

At first, my impulsive young man’s wisdom decided these were the examples in my profession I should emulate. Not all the time I spent in their presence was wasted, and it was never dull. Plus, I met a few famous and highly respected forensic pathologists along the way.

The most notable for me was Dr. William Eckert. He came from New York, where he had played football at New York University before serving in the army during World War II. Bill Eckert was old school. He had worked at the New Orleans coroner’s office after his time in the army and after graduating from Tulane University’s medical school. He had consulted on the Bobby Kennedy assassination and had revisited the Jack the Ripper killings. When I was in his presence, I felt certain he deserved every ounce of respect I could muster.

I had come to know Dr. Eckert through a colleague of mine at the coroner’s office in New Orleans. In his later years, he stepped in to cover cases at our office when the usual staff pathologists were vacationing. So, during those brief appearances, I had the opportunity to work with this giant of forensic science.

I had acted as diener for other forensic pathologists, but Dr. Eckert was a bit different. Instead of wearing a traditional scrub outfit, he would strip down to his bare chest with his trousers rolled up at their cuffs. He would then don a simple plastic apron and a pair of surgical gloves, and stand alongside the body until I opened it up and eviscerated the organs.

The first time I worked with Dr. Eckert, I noted something about him that was distinct from any other forensic pathologist I had worked with. As part of his standard array of tools, Dr. Eckert equipped himself for every autopsy with a McDonald’s chocolate milkshake. He would stand there slowly slurping it through a straw, awaiting my extraction of the organs, and when I was finished, he would move over to our scale and an adjacent cork cutting board, where he weighed each organ and performed its subsequent dissection.

Autopsies, of course, are very bloody affairs. You cut and pull and tug to free up an organ that has been with its owner since birth. Blood is bound to get slung about. It’s on the floor, the table, the instruments, your face, but mostly it’s all over your hands. Anything you touch automatically bears the evidence of contact.

Slice, slurp. Slice, slurp. Slice, slurp. The milkshake sat right next to his hand on the dissecting table, the McDonald’s logo on the cup covered in Dr. Eckert’s bloody fingerprints. When he finished with an organ, he would pause long enough to take another long tug from the straw then ask me for the next organ in his thick New York accent until the job was completed.

The first time I saw this ritual, I was repulsed. But after a while I grew numb to it, like so many of the other quirks of forensic pathologists. It’s part of who they are—the ridiculous and the absurd are their norm. I adapted to them because they would not adapt to me.

After my grandfather died, my grandmother lived alone in that same ramshackle house in Monroe, Louisiana. Papaw’s pasture was overgrown and his horses had all been sold. The barn sat propped there behind the house, even more dilapidated than when Papaw had been alive. I lived in New Orleans then and periodically I made the four-hour trip north to see Granny Pearl and spend a weekend with her.

It was on one of these weekend visits that I received a page from a colleague. When I called in, the voice on the other end of the line said, “Joe, you are in Monroe right now, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Actually, Dr. Eckert is in Monroe too and he needs help with an examination. You want to chip in?”

I put up an argument. I hadn’t had time off in days and I’d set this time aside for my grandmother.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But this is Dr. Eckert.” As if not assisting him would violate some sacred church tenet.

I weighed the price. My elderly grandmother, in the kitchen frying chicken for me, knew nothing of these people. I seldom saw her anymore and she had been looking forward to this visit for a month, which was all that mattered.

But I agreed. I would be paid seventy-five dollars and have the chance to serve the Great Dr. Eckert. I became a Judas to the woman who had taken care of me as a babe, and she didn’t even know it. At that point in my life, I placed no value on time. I valued instead my work in death investigation and everything it symbolized. Little did I know then that this was the last time I would see my granny frying chicken.

I tried to explain it to Pearl after I hung up. She didn’t completely understand. “Now why are you going to the colored funeral home?”

My explanation fell short, of course. To my shame, I had sold a piece of what little time I had left with my grandmother in order to spend time with yet another dead body, whose death meant absolutely nothing to me, and a man who saw me as nothing more than an accessory. To make matters worse, I had to go pick Dr. Eckert up at the airport myself.

It had been a while since I had seen him. He was a much older man by now and he didn’t look well. There were no more milkshakes from Mickey D’s; he had been diagnosed with diabetes. As I’d expected, I received no thanks from him for picking him up or any recognition that I had made a sacrifice that day. He simply said, “Let’s go.”

The case was an in-custody death. The victim was a twenty-something black male who had died while in the custody of the local police. He’d been high on drugs and the police had beaten him down in order to subdue him. For weeks his body had lain without burial in the largest black funeral home in Monroe. He was neatly dressed in a suit, his hands classically folded across his chest, but his skin was dry, his eyes sunken.

When I walked through the door of the prep room, the sickly sweet smell of embalming fluid hit me. Embalmed bodies are particularly disgusting—not in the same sense that decomposed bodies are, but in the way they are preserved. We are cheating God of His natural order. A body remains frozen in time and hard to the touch. The tissue feels like vulcanized rubber. The mouths are wired shut, and hard plastic eye covers are inserted beneath the eyelids to disguise the sinking and shriveling of the eyeball. It always struck me as exceptionally ghoulish because, unlike my profession, the process is absent true science. It’s just a bizarre art.

I lifted the body from the casket and placed it on the prep table while Dr. Eckert pulled small plastic cases for tissue collection from his briefcase. As I undressed the body, Dr. Eckert stripped off his shirt, which struck me that time as funny, the mimicry of it. I paused for a minute and considered us both. I sensed we had each become something other than what we proclaimed to be. We were, in essence, nothing but buzzards hovering over a carcass, doing nothing more than feasting off the remains of others for our livelihood.

We dissected every inch of this kid’s body, even his back and the soles of his feet, looking for anything the coroner may have missed in his autopsy. All the while Dr. Eckert collected samples. When we were done, we left the body on the table, and Dr. Eckert said, “Don’t worry about closing. He’s going in the ground right away.”

As we stepped out of the funeral home, I made the mistake of asking Dr. Eckert when his flight departed.

“Oh, my flight doesn’t leave for four hours,” he replied. “Let’s just go to your grandmother’s house.”

What could I say? This was the man who had investigated the death of Bobby Kennedy, the man who had reopened Jack the Ripper at the invitation of Scotland Yard.

When I pulled my car into the backyard of Pearl’s house, I looked out over the barnyard where my grandfather had kept his horses and wondered what my grandmother would think of her uninvited visitor. This man meant nothing to her, though he had come to mean everything to me. All that she and my grandfather had taught me and done for me paled in that moment, in the light of the knowledge of the forensic pathologists I worked with. Now I was bringing one into their home, and not just a run-of-the-mill forensic pathologist, one of the world’s most renowned.

Looking back now, I clearly see the lie I had bought into. Young, dismissive, and intellectually arrogant, I had shunned the simplicity of my roots and desired to be approved of by these little gods who asked me to push myself into places I would later pay a price for.

Pearl greeted us at the back door, wearing the face she always wore when meeting a stranger. All I have is yours, that expression said. She welcomed him inside and informed him that she had plenty of food and would make anything for him that he liked. Eckert told her of his four-hour delay and we followed her into her kitchen.

As she circled her table, Dr. Eckert moved aside. Pearl stood considering the old pathologist as he shuffled toward the head of the table. It happened almost simultaneously. His right hand gripped the back of my grandfather’s chair, which had been leaning empty for almost seven years by now, and my grandmother’s hand met his. For a prolonged moment their eyes locked—the god-like figure who drank milkshakes over the dead, and the woman who had risen every morning at 4:25 a.m. to worship her king through forty-five years of marriage.

“This is my husband’s chair,” she said.

As was her way, Granny Pearl gently showed him to another chair and served him a cup of chicory coffee.

HE WAS YOUR WHAT?

MY GRANDMOTHER made the best fried chicken in the South bar none. The reason I know this is because everyone who ever ate her chicken—and there were many—would bring their raw chicken to her and ask her to fix it for them. Notice that in the South we say fix it, not prepare it or fry it. We fix our fowl.

The secret to her chicken was in the right combination of red pepper, black pepper, salt, and flour. And my grandmother, or Pearl as everyone called her (even me), never dredged her chicken—you know, when you drag it through the mix? Oh, no. Pearl relied on a large brown paper bag. Into it went all the ingredients, along with the yard bird, and then the shakin’ would commence. And just when that shakin’ had reached a fevered pitch, out came the most beautifully coated pieces of chicken you have ever seen.

Now, my grandmother did not cotton to the ideas of what many would term an “affirmative nutritional lifestyle,” but boy, could she cook! She achieved this culinary nirvana with the aid of her well-worn cast-iron skillet. She used one specifically designated only to fry chicken. It was just smaller than a Dutch oven and had a lid, and no one else in the family was allowed to touch it, for she believed someone might wash it and destroy the unique curing that skillet had acquired over the years. After she used it, she simply poured the leftover grease into her drippings jar and wiped the skillet out.

In order for her to produce her perfect poultry, she used lard. As our coronary arteries crackled with anticipation, we sat around her huge kitchen table and smacked our lips impatiently. And the liquefied fat sizzled and popped, working on our succulent bird. Finally, after the blessing was said, we could enjoy the perfection.

When I came to Atlanta as a medicolegal death investigator, I thought of the city in terms of my grandmother’s iron skillet, only Atlanta’s products were much less palatable. The city frequently felt to me like one big concrete-and-asphalt frying pan. In the punishing summers, a person can only attempt to endure the heat. There is nowhere to go for relief.

As would happen many times over the course of an Atlanta summer, one time I was called to a death scene in an Atlanta Housing Authority high-rise. What many people don’t realize is that Atlanta was the first city in the nation to have federally subsidized housing for low-income residents. The area once known as Techwood Homes was the nation’s first; its original residents moved in right after World War II. It was also famous for being the hunting ground of the Atlanta Child Killer during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Techwood is a distant memory now; it was torn down to make way for the 1996 Summer Olympic Village and because it was a blight in the eyes of city officials who didn’t want to advertise Atlanta’s poor to the world.

The legacy left behind by the homes was one of terror. The hulking low-and high-rise structures housed Atlanta’s indigent, infirm, and insane, much like warehouses for the soon-to-be dead. The homes weren’t considered a hand up for the impoverished living there as much as a governmental boot in the ass that pressed those inhabitants closer to their graves.

I have an affinity for graveyards, though that is actually an understatement. For hours I have wandered the tombs in New Orleans and other Southern cities, taking in the beauty of gravestone prose and the quiet solemnity of various statuary. Government housing in Atlanta is a tomb as well, but absent any mournful platitudes chiseled by the living, touting lives well-lived or family members missed.

On this particular occasion, in the summer of 1993, I walked into one of the supposedly air-conditioned Techwood dwellings to find the bloated corpse of a somewhat young man lying on the cold tile floor next to a pile of blankets and a pillow without a case. He wore once-white jockey shorts now stained with decompositional fluid, and he was surrounded by all manner of pornographic magazines. (Does this sound familiar?) Actually, one magazine stood out in the pile. On the cover was an airbrushed platinum-blonde strumpet with pouty lips and bedroom eyes, and sticking out of the pages of the magazine was a folded piece of notebook paper. In childlike script, this man had composed a letter to the woman featured inside that month’s issue. On the final page of her photo spread, for thirty dollars plus postage and handling, she promised to send the reader a pair of her used panties.

Mary Elizabeth Scott Killian with her ever-present Bible in hand. Her mother was excommunicated from the Catholic church after she married a Methodist minister. Mary hated drinking and card-playing yet she married a man who liberally engaged in both. My grandmother Pearl peeks around the backdrop at age two. Circa 1915.

The uniformed officer accompanying me that day actually giggled as I read the man’s request out loud:

Dear Sam,

Please send me a pair of your panties. I have been diagnosed with a sick mind and a girl won’t touch me. It be good if I could touch your pretty underwear cause I ain’t never touched a girl before.

The hopelessness of his world and the abiding loneliness in those words overwhelmed me. In my opinion, this small boon he pled for was not the cry of a pervert, but the request of a human to receive something no government program or housing authority could provide—the touch of satin against his unwanted hands, something of beauty to caress his skin, while waiting out his life in the cinder-block reality of the projects.

Later that summer I was called to one of these same locations again. The structure was mammoth, and it housed the elderly and the mentally challenged. Commonly, when I would get out of my car outside one of these structures, I could smell the humanity that dwelt within. The smell is a combination of cheap disinfectants and unwashed old people. Usually there was no functioning air-conditioning system in these units, so the combination of heat and stagnant air, coupled with any other strong aromas, made it almost intolerable to the uninitiated. Every day throughout summer the mixture of smells sizzled in the vast cast-iron skillet that is Atlanta.

I’ve always been fascinated by what humans will tolerate and eventually accept. Never was this brought into tighter focus than that day in 1993. As I entered through the lobby of this building, my eyes were drawn upward some twenty or thirty stories. Each floor had its own balcony-like landing that completely circled the inside of the building. As I looked up, I looked directly into the eyes of countless blank faces staring down at me.

I met a young Atlanta police officer, who had been patiently waiting for me to arrive, and we rode the elevator up together. I found out why he had been waiting in the lobby.

“It’s a decomp. A bad one.”

When we got off the elevator I noticed that, unlike on the other floors, everyone’s doors here were closed and the walkway was empty. The only exception was an immensely large black woman in a housedress with her hair in pink foam-rubber curlers. She was steadily popping gum without ever blowing a bubble. I put on the most pleasant face I could conjure under the circumstances and introduced myself. But before I said anything more, the police officer explained, “She found him.”

She was very anxious to tell me her side of the story, but I advised her to hold what she had to say until I’d had a chance to examine the decedent. It was impossible not to smell him. When I had first stepped out of the elevator, his location was evident.

Perhaps I should stop here a moment and provide a modicum of advice regarding the examination of decomp remains. Don’t place anything under or in your nose prior to the exam (e.g. the Silence of the Lambs scene at the funeral home). What a bunch of BS. The problem is that while you are hovering over some juicy maggot-infested corpse, not only will you have to smell decomp but now that odor is laced with Vicks. The mix is as repugnant as the scene may be. In truth, senses adjust over time and you just get used to the smell.

I immediately saw him when I entered his apartment. He was lying with his right arm thrown grotesquely behind his back, wearing his Jockey shorts, now stained with his green and brown decomp fluid. The entire body was covered with large decompositional blisters referred to as blebs. These are filled with the foulest substance known to man, decomp fluid, so if this stuff ever gets on your clothes, just throw them out or get a new wife because one or the other will have to go.

Both the body and the room were filled with blowflies, and maggot husks were strewn about the floor, indicating that the decedent had been dead for some time. The apartment was neat and would have been quite inhabitable were it not for the festering corpse on the living room floor. There were no signs of trauma or forced entry. However, the one thing I couldn’t get past was the fact that this man smelled so foul, even by my timeworn standards, and though we found out he’d been mentally ill and had lived a very cloistered existence, no one had noticed for weeks. Even though people lived below, above, and on either side of him. Not to mention there was constant traffic in the outside hall throughout any given day.

I exited the apartment. The woman who’d been waiting for me was anxious to let me know that the decedent had had a problem “boo booing on heself.”

So I rolled the dice, prepared for an entertaining story, and asked her the ultimate investigative question: “What do you mean?”

“Dat bouy alway boo booed on heself. An I tol hem that if he boo booed on heself, I ain’t gonna help him no mo.”

Why had she taken it upon herself to take care of this man? This is when I was given insight into a certain segment of the African American culture in Atlanta. She informed me that she was his “play mama.” Don’t get any wild ideas. I found out that “play” relatives come in any and all varieties—play cousins, play brothers, play sisters, play daddies, and the ever-popular play grandmama. Come to think of it, I never encountered a play granddaddy, but I did have a drunk, homeless guy under an overpass once tell me that the dead guy next to him was his “play-play.” For reasons of good taste and my personal sanity I didn’t pursue the woman for an explanation at the time, but later I discovered more about it.

There is bound to be a sociologist somewhere who could describe it more professionally, but I’ll give you my take on it: I don’t have a real one (of whatever denomination of relative—pick one) so I’ll find the biggest sucker I can and mooch off and exploit their goodwill. Taking on this endearment resulted in a fierce loyalty when it came to trying times, such as at a homicide scene. One man admitted to me, after having been identified by witnesses as the play brother of a pedestrian struck by a vehicle, “Man, I didn’t even know his dead ass, and I sure as hell ain’t his play brother!”

I pressed the woman. “Ma’am, if you were his play mama, why had you not told anybody that he was not coming to the door for the past week?”

“I told dat bouy that if his stinky ass kept boo booing on heself, I wunt gonna take care of hem.” She explained that every day she walked past his door, she “smelled the boo boo.” She would knock on the door without response, then announce to him through the door that he should “clean that boo boo up.” After a week had passed someone else, whose olfactory senses were a bit more discriminating, had alerted the super who had then contacted the play mama, and both had entered the apartment.

As we were leaving, I heard the play mama tell the super, “I hope you don’t think I am gonna clean up this bouy’s mess in dare. I tol him not to boo boo on heself.” Ah, the endless demands of motherhood.

THE TRAILER PARK

SWIMMING HOLE

TO BE LEFT BEHIND is an experience everyone hopes to avoid in life. Children get distracted and may suddenly find themselves separated from their mothers. Teenagers long to be invited by would-be friends across a creaky railroad trestle for beers, but our social acceptance relies on discerning the best group to follow for these rites of passage. The “right” university fraternity for many may be the key to their entire future, or so they believe. Though, when you’re finally accepted and arrive at some highly touted gathering of your peers, you may wish you’d been left out after all.

Adult relationships carry similar pitfalls. Girlfriends and wives may think the grass is greener over the septic tank. Or children, in a cyclical twist of fate, may choose to abandon their parents. Life is full of ironies and impediments.

Growing up in the Jesus-saturated South did not make my generation immune to separations and divorces. It did give opportunistic preachers the chance to hammer these already bruised individuals for their sin, even if no true sin had been perpetrated. God’s army is the only army in the world that shoots its own wounded.

Some claim the trouble began when everybody’s mama went out and got a job. Horseshit. This I do know: my daddy abandoned me twice in my life, both times leaving me and mama in a house trailer, broken and without means.

Unlike the sturdy brick structures my grandfather built when he was a stonemason (before he started distributing electricity), trailers are a symbol of modern American culture—cheap and throwaway. These thin, choice tornado targets are crammed into every hollow and open pasture across the American countryside, where once stood hand-hewn homesteads with inviting front porches. Where musty root cellars once contained rows of canning jars filled with preserved foods to get a family through the winter or your grandfather’s not-so-secret stash of Who-Hit-John, now stand rows of jacked-up wheels on cinderblocks—wheels that take a family nowhere.

The first time Daddy left, when the sheriff hauled him off for threatening to kill the whole family, he sat in jail for a time before being sent to Vietnam by the judge. My mother and I were left behind in a gold-painted single-wide we had parked on the property of my grandparents. Fortunately, my grandparents saw to it that we were taken of. Mama worked as a keypunch operator at a local cotton mill while Daddy fought in the Marine Corps, and Granny Pearl took care of me.

Late at night, as the tree frogs croaked, I would regularly slip out the door of our trailer at the urging of my mother and sneak next door into my grandparents’ house. Their door was never locked. In my pajamas I would edge open their icebox and make off with one of their gallons of milk. But once I’d tiptoed back outside with my prize, my papaw would inevitably scare the life out of me by saying from the darkness beneath their chinaberry tree, illuminated only by his hand-rolled cigarette, “Hey boy! Where you going with my milk?” I’d sprint away in the darkness, chased by my grandfather’s toothless laughter, until I found our trailer door. Those were the sweetest of days.

The next time Daddy left us, the memories were not nearly as fond. He had moved us 400 miles away from the safe care of my grandparents. Living near Atlanta now, we had only the red Georgia clay and the leering glares of our trailer-park landlord. This old man would come by our home often, always wearing a brown felt hat with a silk band and smelling of the White Owl cigars he chomped. Our single-wide had torn linoleum floors, stained walls, and no loving grandmothers to turn to.

I spent my time then with Freddie, another cast-off child who lived across from us on Highway 92. His place was a tar-paper shack with torn and rotting furniture parked on its front porch. His perpetually drunk Mama and Daddy beat him regularly. Remembering now his chronically unbrushed yellow teeth and his greasy hair, I think he probably had rickets.

He was my only friend back then and we needed each other equally. We played together with our G.I. Joes or pretended to be Evel Knievel, jumping off wooden ramps we’d constructed from a scrap heap. Freddie would sit with me in our trailer, which I guess was better than the ass-whooping he was bound to be receiving across the road. Unlike at his home, we could at least sit down without fighting German cockroaches for the space. Mama always kept our place clean.

It was safer indoors for both of us. Fun might await outside but so did shouted scoldings from our landlord, who viewed children as bothersome gnats and me in particular as a roadblock to the favors of my still young and beautiful mother. And, for Freddie, our aluminum-sided vestige was a safe harbor from the hateful words he heard in his own home. I’d like to believe, anyway, that my presence there and our trailer performed a measure of good for at least one dirty, unloved boy.

To the uneducated, hell-raising, mill-working youth of the South, trailer parks are armadas of success. They are always occupied by males with names ending in Y—Kenny, Tommy, Davy, Sammy, Johnny, Joey, or the most popular by far, Ricky. The females are a bit more diversified: Christy, Carla, Misty, Crystal, Sonya, or Tonya. When this stratum of the South’s population gets together in groups, their conversation consists almost exclusively of such topics as ex-spouses, the decline of rock and roll since the plane crash of Lynyrd Skynyrd, who of them could kick whose ass, and whose truck is the baddest. They use terms such as “my old lady,” “my old man,” “you shittin’ me,” and “go ahead and call the sheriff and I’ll tell that sum bitch he can kiss my ass too.” Take this amalgam of characters, apply a single-wide or double-wide, and you begin to get the picture.

Now, most Southerners are extremely proud of their heritage, and they are not ashamed to tell you so. Drive down one of our highways and you’ll see it displayed on our bumper stickers: I DON’T CARE HOW YOU DID IT UP NORTH, IT’S HERITAGE NOT HATE, or the timeless G.R.I.T.S. (Girls Raised in the South), or simply FORGET HELL! These people are generally from one of two groups: those who have descended from Southern aristocracy and those who haven’t. Interestingly enough, our ancestors witnessed much the same demographic in the antebellum South. Those who did not descend from aristocracy (which includes one half of my family) went to work either in the fields or in the mills, while the other half owned those farms and mills (the other half of my family).

An outsider can better appreciate the subtle nature of this stratified culture by simply observing how our leisure time is usually spent. Some will be interested in the minutes from last month’s meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution, while the rest take their pleasure in setting the limits on how many squirrels a person is allowed to shoot at any one time. Oddly, the two seemingly exclusive groups greatly depend upon each other’s existence.

A great example of this symbiosis is lived out in mill towns. Though Northern capital has purchased a number of the textile or paper establishments over the years, some Southern owner families remain, along with those who scratch out a living working for them. And many of those inhabit prefabricated trailer-home bliss.

Having spent a good part of my childhood in a trailer (in the South they are not referred to as mobile homes), I speak with some authority about these vestiges of fake-pine paneling and pseudo-stucco ceilings. These structures embody a sense of vulnerability. When the spring storms arrived each year, I would always imagine my mother and I catapulted into the stratosphere by a twister. Nothing would be left behind but a pre-poured set of concrete steps, a few short stacks of cinder blocks, and my Hot Wheels racetrack, which I’d kept beneath our home. We were never catapulted to a new sphere, in fact, though we eventually landed among the Southern elite and their mill money.

Over the course of my investigative career I have paid many visits to trailers, searching for forensic truths. My first visit to a trailer park while investigating a death, as opposed to visiting one of my relatives, involved one of the most astounding handgun shootings I had ever heard of, let alone investigated. This trailer park was situated beneath the high-rise bridge of Airline Highway as it egresses westward past the former New Orleans International Airport. The area is dark and perpetually wet due to poor drainage and its geographic orientation in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. To add to the ambience, there is the perpetual sound of airplane traffic. The smell of JP-5 jet fuel hangs heavily in the air. This is further accented by the relentless rattle and hum of Airline Highway.

Sometimes in the South we ride our horses and on occasion, our horses ride us.

My car splashed through mud holes before I eventually parked and was met by several members of the local police department. They’d been standing about in amazement at the scene. All 110 pounds of the perpetrator sat now safely subdued in the back of a patrol car. That slight weight, it should be noted, also included her bleached-blonde mass of hair with its six-inch black roots. Her friend, Sonya, who had witnessed the night’s events, sat quietly in the back of another patrol car close by.

Apparently, the perpetrator—we’ll call her Misty—and her dearly departed young male victim—henceforth known as Ricky—lived happily together beneath the overpass in what appeared to have been a previously white single-wide trailer balanced on cinder blocks. Evidence of Ricky’s manly strength was present all over the dirt “yard” in the form of crushed aluminum beer cans. Folding lawn chairs, some with their nylon seats torn to tatters, stood unoccupied next to the trailer’s concrete steps. In this fêted location beneath Airline Highway, with its mixture of jet exhaust and the constant cast-offs from the road above, this palace on wheels had taken on a thick, grimy luster.

Sonya told us that as the malt liquor had flowed that night, so did the hateful words between Misty and Ricky. Ricky’s manhood had been questioned. The screaming had turned into hitting, with Ricky landing most of the punches while also professing to Misty that she sure as hell wasn’t gonna live without him.

Ricky lay in the dirt now almost stereotypically shirtless, clad only in boot-cut Levi’s. He had stumbled out their front screen door, calling Misty a good-for-nothing whore. He had evidently crashed about the yard like a tornado while Misty quietly appeared at the screen door, bruised and bloodied. For a moment Ricky might have thought she was giving in, that he had proven his rule over their trailer realm. But then he must have seen Misty’s small nicotine-stained hand holding a .25-caliber Raven automatic, which of course only added fuel to his already blistering fire.

“Go ahead! I’m a man, bitch,” he reportedly said. “I can take it!” Sonya claimed it was about the fourth time that night he’d made this statement.

Misty simply raised the Raven and, in mid-sentence, shot Ricky through the screen. What made the shot so remarkable was not only that she had fired through an intermediate target, the screen, but that the round had traveled through Ricky’s open mouth, over his beer-soaked tongue, and lodged perfectly in his brain stem. Ricky had likely fallen to the ground like the spent engine block of a 1975 Nova Super Sport.

By their very nature, trailers intimate a lack of permanence. People choose to live in them when they are just starting out in life. Or when they are down on their luck. Or at the end of a long life, when the company of other blue-hairs living together in a collection of simple trailer homes, perhaps in the heavy heat of Florida, is a welcome retirement option. They come equipped with a sense of uncertainty about the future. And they silently remind the occupant, You should have done better.

Near the end of my tenure in Atlanta, I was summoned to a trailer park in College Park on a Memorial Day. Since it was a holiday, I was the only investigator on duty. I was in no mood to hang around. I found the officer who had summoned me waiting outside a very old single-wide in a large trailer park well known for its whores and drugs. A taxi was parked outside the trailer and its driver leaned against one of the quarter panels sporting puffy, red eyes and an unshaved face. The man turned out to be the son of the deceased. He’d been working all night, ferrying people about the dirty streets of inner-city Atlanta in his taxi, and at the end of his shift he’d dropped by his mother’s trailer to check on her, as was his custom. But when he’d walked in, he’d found her reclining on her sofa, dressed in her light-blue nightgown with her hands folded across her abdomen, quite dead.

The officer on site related that the woman had a history of heart problems and that her death was not necessarily unexpected, but every death investigator is taught to treat each death initially as a homicide. To my shame, I did not.

As soon as he had said the words “natural death,” I had joked around with him, bemoaning the fact that he and I had to work on a day when everyone else was enjoying a barbeque and drinking a beer. I went through the motions. I took photos. I prepared to examine her body. She was peaceful-looking; her face looked as still as a mountain lake. Her thick gray head of hair was gathered up into a neat bun. Her skin was like parchment, delicate and fragile, telling the story of her life with its lines and age spots. When I finished photographing her body and began my examination, I remarked to the officer how she looked as if she had just drifted off to sleep.

I began at her head, looking for signs that she had been bludgeoned or strangled. Absent that, I moved down the body. The neck reveled no trauma. Unfolding her hands, having to “break” the rigor mortis that had set in, I still saw no obvious trauma. Then I lifted her gown.

For anyone who has watched TV programs that portray some detective uncovering a major clue that unlocks the entire mystery (which of course is conveniently embellished with a flourish of dramatic music), this was one of those moments. Though the only sound that accompanied my discovery was the pounding of my heart in my ears. Thoughts briefly flashed of me being fired from my position or arrested for malfeasance. I’d made the biggest blunder of my career.

Despite my initial inaccurate assumptions, we soon discovered that this woman had been the victim of a drug-addicted pimp and his equally crack-addicted whore. The common perception by many—especially those addled by drugs and desperate for a hit—is that the elderly always hide all their wealth somewhere in their homes. “Yeah, man, that old woman gots to have some money and I’m gonna get all up in it.” Hallucinations of mountains of cash must plague these sorts all too often.

Upon entering her aluminum house on wheels, these two must have been disappointed to find only the trinkets of a woman’s long life: her wedding pictures, images of her children as babies, cheap jewelry given to her by her son forty years earlier (which was as valuable as a sack of diamonds but only to her), and her family Bible. There was no money. She probably hadn’t understood why these misfires of humanity had buried one of her kitchen knives into the side of her frail chest three times. She now lay on the floor, her life gone for no reason at all.

After slaughtering this woman, the miscreants had decided to pick her frail body up off the floor, undress her, wipe away the blood, and redress her. As if they could have wiped away her death. She was then laid on her sofa, hands folded across her abdomen. There she’d been found, robbed of what few items and moments she’d had left, awaiting my arrival.

A trailer is the hobgoblin of a Southerner’s existence. They are a redneck’s oracle, warning of a bleak future, though no one discerns this fate until it’s too late to do much about it. Babies born to their inhabitants never receive a warning. No matter who we are each born to, only fate can determine whether you end up with someone who gives a shit about you.

I came to know several ill-fated children in my time. One was found unresponsive in his crib and was subsequently transferred to a hospital emergency room, where he was pronounced dead. As is a death investigator’s usual practice, I made a mandatory trip to the home of the child after his death in order to observe the living conditions. Later that day I arrived at the family’s single-wide, rooted in the largest trailer park in South Atlanta, and found the baby’s older siblings playing outside. What I saw sickened me.

Their home was positioned immediately adjacent to four trash dumpsters used by all the residents in that portion of the trailer park. The trailer itself stood in a naturally occurring depression in the terrain, and heaps of garbage—primarily discarded foodstuff—had spilled from the dumpsters onto the surrounding ground. A pool of water at least two feet deep had formed in the depression where the trailer stood and where the fluids from spoiling garbage mixed with it. And it was in this fetid swill that the diapered children left behind now played. As if they were splashing about in a crystal-clear spring in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

As I entered the trailer, my own childhood rushed back to me—the confined space, the sights and smells of a kitchen always in view, the ever-present grime on the windows, the cut-rate furniture. The only thing missing was my drunken, Vietnam-vet father swinging his Western-style belt over his head and looking to blister my young ass to the strains of Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried.”

As these memories thankfully faded, I noticed an overwhelming smell of Pine-Sol. As it turned out, the family of the child had assigned friends and neighbors the task of cleaning the trailer before any authorities arrived to inspect it. They had done an excellent job. Dirty clothing had been jammed into every available cubbyhole, and the beds were made, including the crib, in which the EMTs had initially reported seeing a plastic bag. The crib was now as neat as a pin and absent any possible dangers. The pathologist ended up ruling the case a natural death, but I still wonder if that was an accurate conclusion.

I wonder too, now and then, what happened to my childhood pal Freddie. We had been each other’s refuge. Did a trailer shelter him still, as a grown man? Or had he reached for more? I like to think providence smiled and he was now living the high life, but I don’t necessarily believe it.

I am still at war with my trailer-home roots, hoping to avoid a destiny of impermanence in my life, but that fate actually haunts us all, doesn’t it? My work has taught me at least that much. Nothing is truly permanent, except of course death.

EVENTUALLY

THE SUN WILL SHINE

ON EVERY DOG’S ASS

WITHIN THE DNA CODE of all Southern males, the sport of hunting is inevitably found. As boys we wander the woods with our Daisy BB guns or wrist-rocket slingshots searching for something to bag. Of course just because we send some little creature to the great beyond doesn’t mean we will use its carcass to sustain ourselves. Compassion and practicality just don’t measure into it.

All of this held true for me too. My first kill was a blue jay, my second a squirrel—both taken with a Crossman pump-action pellet gun my grandfather had bought me at the local feed store. One less inclined toward the ways of hunting might ask why. After a while, so did I. Then I drifted toward fishing. This was an option my grandfather never would have understood. For Papaw, hunting deer and trading horses defined him and validated his manhood.

For as far back as I can remember, when deer season came around, my grandfather would trailer his horse and, along with his two faithful hunting dogs, Bernice and Clyde, drive just across the state line into Drew County, Arkansas. These two dogs possessed a rich well of understanding and devotion when it came to Papaw. They both were fine examples of Catahoula Curs, or Catahoula Leopard Hounds as they are also known, spotted gray and tan with piercing gold eyes. These dogs were true hunters, descendants of a breed that had arrived in Louisiana with Hernando de Soto in the sixteenth century.

In Monticello, Arkansas, Papaw met up with his four brothers and numerous cousins (who had all brought along their own horses and dogs) at the dilapidated Morgan family home. To call these Morgan men rough as a cob is to make a grand understatement. To a man, they were dyed-in-the-wool Dixiecrats who loved their bourbon and shared a hatred for anything not either Southern or rural. They would sit in the evenings around a potbelly stove in cane-bottom chairs swapping tales of their lies and lives away from the hunting camp, while their dogs lay about on the weathered pine floors around them, as if they too were reunited relations just happy to be together.

It would still be pitch-black the next morning when the Morgan men saddled their horses and placed their rifles in saddle scabbards. All Morgan men came tall and dark, descending from a combination of Welsh and Choctaw stock. Mounted on their horses they looked like a posse from some spaghetti-Western movie. In addition to their weapons and their flasks of whiskey, each brother carried a hunting bugle made from the horn of a bull.

They spaced themselves out along the outer edge of an adjacent pine thicket. Then, on their command, the dogs ran off into the woods to root out any deer. One of two possible scenarios would always occur: either the dogs scared up prey and chased it away, at which time one of the brothers would blow his bugle to call the dogs back, or the dogs managed to scare the deer toward the waiting hunters. When that deer, running as fast as shit through a goose, was within range, a predetermined member of the family would fire off the first shot; however, if he missed, it was a land rush. Everyone wheeled their horses and fired, spurring their rides in the same general direction. They were all either hung over from the night before or still intoxicated, so with large-caliber rifle shots ricocheting around in the pines, they seemed more like a clan of mental patients deprived of their meds wheeling around on fifteen hundred pounds of marginally controlled horseflesh. Bullets whizzed past their heads, fired from their own kin, but one of them would eventually down the deer and all the brothers would bugle in concert, not only to celebrate their kill but to call home their beloved dogs.

My grandfather adored his dogs. What always struck me as odd about their relationship, though, was that Papaw never fed them. It was my grandmother who handled that task, setting out a combination of table scraps and Purina. Plus, I rarely witnessed my grandfather interacting with his dogs other than to occasionally scratch their heads. But whenever Papaw started up his truck to head out somewhere, he walked over to their running line, unhooked them from their leads, and slapped a thigh. “Truck!” he’d say and off they would sprint, hopping into the bed of the ancient Chevy pickup.

The Morgan boys. They loved their horses, dogs, hunting and whiskey. Uncle Herman, pictured at the far left, served time in Leavenworth Military prison for shooting German prisoners in the back that he had “allowed” to escape during World War II. Pictured from left to right: Herman, Roy, Howard (grandfather), Erastus. Circa 1952.

I too responded just like Bernice and Clyde. All my grandfather had to do was call my name and off I would run, happy to be with him. Hunting or dropping by a sale barn on a Saturday morning to look at horses, it was just him and me. Like the dogs with their pack leader, it was more than enough, especially to a little boy without a father.

We moved away eventually, and I didn’t see my Papaw again until he was already dying of brain cancer. When I visited, at the awkward age of eighteen, I found my grandparents’ home even more rundown than I’d remembered it, and the dogs were absent from their running line. Papaw had used two fifty-gallon oil drums as doghouses for Bernice and Clyde, and those drums remained rusting away with moldy hay inside of them. After I had sat for a time with my Papaw, now bedridden and skeletal, I asked my weary grandmother what had become of the two beloved dogs. My grandmother looked at me then with an expression a Baptist preacher might admonish you with if you had let loose a loud word of profanity during his sermon. She explained that shortly before he had gotten sick, “your Papaw put both of them down.”

He knew his end was near. And he was sure no other person would have need of the dogs. He probably thought no one else would take them. Maybe like an ancient pharaoh, Papaw had believed the two hounds would heel at his side on the other side. Perhaps they are indeed there with him now, chasing through the pines with him bearing down after them on horseback, digging in his spurs and drawing his rifle from its scabbard, smiling.

One lesson I’d learned from my Papaw was borne out in my practice as a death investigator: The relationship a person has with a pet is often better than any relationship they have with another human. While investigating deaths I have been chased and bitten by protective animals, but I have also seen creatures so forlorn I just wanted to take them home with me. That hollowness in a dog’s eyes after the death of its owner is considerable and haunting.

In 1990 I was summoned to a neighborhood in Metairie, just outside of New Orleans, regarding a suicide. When I arrived, I found that the police had secured the scene and were waiting on me. The death had occurred in an alley between two ranch-style homes. As I walked toward the detectives there, one patrolman shouted, “It’s messy!” He was right.

The detectives stood around in this narrow passageway adjacent to a side entrance to the decedent’s home. Their backs were up against a tall wooden fence.

“It’s going to be tight working in here,” they said.

The fence was illuminated by bright security lights along with the glow of lights coming from the house next door. The planks of fencing beside the door and even as high as the house’s eaves had been splattered with brain matter and blood. I remember thinking, What did he do? Place a lit stick of dynamite in his mouth? No, but close.

A .44 Magnum revolver reflected the beams of the outdoor lights in blue steel. It also shined with blood. The victim had wrapped his lips around its muzzle and disintegrated his head. All that remained were his lower jaw and his tongue, which hung loosely where the corner of his mouth had once been. I slipped on pieces of his brain. As one of the detectives stood beneath the eave of the roof, a large chunk of brain detached and landed on his shoulder. There is something quite comical about hearing a policeman scream. To heighten the fun, he danced around trying to get the taint of it off his uniform. I approached him slowly, not wanting to get struck by either him or by any more falling brain matter, and plucked the piece off.

“Trash the uniform when you get home,” I told him.

“A lot of damn good that does me now. Fucking cocksucker. Blowing his damn head off and leaving it for us.”

It took some time to finish working the scene, scraping up brain matter and bagging it. I had found the dead man’s suicide note on his coffee table, so we were satisfied it could be logged as a suicide. But as we all walked back toward our cars and the attendants were loading the body into the coroner’s van, a woman screamed.

It had come from the house on the other side of the fence, and the scream was soon followed by high-pitched yelps, as if someone was squeezing the life out of a lap dog. I looked back toward the noise. A woman appeared, looking like Divine’s twin sister. She had to be six feet tall, and she balanced masses of hair on top of that. Plus, she was wearing a loud floral print muumuu and gold lamé slippers.

In one hand she held what appeared to be an extra-long Virginia Slims cigarette between manicured fingers and, in the other, shoved high above her head, she held an object that was obviously the reason for her rush toward me. Fast on her heels was a white Pekinese dog with a red bow tied on the top of its head. He was screaming too, in his own way.

The woman was unintelligible above the rabid noises her dog was making and the clatter of her slippers on the driveway. When she drew closer, I finally heard, “My baby had this in his mouth! My God, my baby had this in his mouth!”

Her “baby” was now leaping two to three feet off the ground in rapid succession, dead set on retrieving his snack.

Very gently she extended what she held toward me: a two-by-three-inch piece of skull. This fragment had obviously been blasted over into the dog’s domain, on their side of the fence. The dog had retrieved it from their backyard and had re-entered their home through his doggy door. The woman had found him lying on her carpeted living room floor happily gnawing away.

I calmly relieved the woman of her neighbor’s skull fragment and walked to my car. She remained on the driveway as I drove away, clutching her little dog to her bosom while the animal continued to complain about his loss.

Almost ten years later and nearly eight hundred miles away, I faced a very different sort of canine, and the incident led my thoughts back to my grandfather.

Dogs have been known to stay at the side of their owners long after that owner has died, watching over them and protecting them from any further perceived harm. Investigators sometimes have to call animal control officers to subdue a dog that is only trying to protect its now-vulnerable pack leader. This behavior I find very compelling, primarily because in my work I much more often encounter a version of the opposite—humans abandoning other humans while still claiming to love them. By their nature, dogs are a thousand times more faithful and honest than we are.

The summer of 2000 was a brutal one. I tried my damnedest to remain in the new air-conditioned medical examiner’s building every minute of my shifts, with visions of a cool shower and a cold beer waiting for me later at home, but such relief was not always to be.

One afternoon, as the sun baked the filthy streets of South Atlanta, I was called to an address next to the Atlanta International Airport. The homes in this neighborhood were older and worn out and they shook with the vibrations of jets passing overhead. Crowded onto this one street were at least six police cars, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime-scene van, and numerous other unmarked government vehicles. When I climbed out of my car, I noticed that a number of men at the scene were wearing surgical masks and several others were clad in white crime-scene coveralls with full headgear—never a good sign. I walked toward the front of the house. One of the uniformed officers met me and stopped me with a hand on my arm.

I caught a whiff of the foul odor that engulfed his body as he explained that he’d been the first on the scene. He spoke so fast that I wasn’t able to understand everything he was saying, but a single word stuck: worst.

People predictably and repeatedly ask investigators like me the same question: “What’s the worst thing you have ever seen?” Invariably the public fails, or refuses, to realize how insensitive this question is. What if someone asked you in a public forum, on a regular basis, to rehash the most terrible moments of your life? Perhaps an average person would reply, “That’s none of your damn business.” But for those of us who have been to the edge of hell, the public somehow feels perfectly justified in prodding us for every gruesome detail, perhaps to stir up some sensation in their lives or to simply relieve their boredom. Couple this insensitivity with the hurt some investigators end up feeling when they figure out they’ve mistaken this querying person’s interest for honest concern. A death investigator’s life is often nothing more than a salacious dime novel for the masses.

As I pushed past the officer and continued toward the house with that word worst still drumming in my ears, the broadside of the foul odor struck me. Plainclothes police officers and a GBI agent waited for me. A stack of mail at least a foot and a half high had collected on the front stoop where they stood.

One of the detectives said, “There’s no power so we’ll be in the dark.”

The fire department had yet to arrive with their heavy-duty lighting units but, as was my habit, I didn’t want to wait. I should have.

I removed a large rechargeable light from my scene kit but left all my other equipment outside with the police. Unlike in the movies, no creepy music escalated and no scary creaks and rattles accompanied me—it was only me with my thoughts.

Cutting through the darkness with my artificial light, I illuminated patches here and there as I moved deeper into the dwelling. Clothing and toiletries were strewn everywhere. Women’s clothing had been ripped and torn to pieces, and bits of garments covered almost every surface. Plus, there was the smell.

The odor of human decomposition is not particularly different in nature from that of any other animal, but to a seasoned death investigator the smell is unmistakable. Over the years I had developed discriminating olfactory sensitivity to any decaying matter. While other men my age sought worldly refinements and filled their nasal cavities with the finest merlots and pinots, I could discern between a freshly dead and an aged human carcass. Go figure.

The owner of the house was lying where the police had said she would be, on the floor of her bedroom. The appearance of her torn bedsheets and pillows made it seem as if she had been the victim of either violence or passion. To say that she was lying there is not a complete picture. The remains I saw were female—the curve of hips and the telltale genitalia told me that—but the corpse was not whole. From her waistline up, there was nothing. Strings of muscle and tendon were the only evidence left behind that a torso had once been present. A wide, rank, greasy spot had accumulated beneath her. It seemed unreal, as if a fairytale giant had come along and snapped her in half, taking only the portion he had a use for.

I ventured alone further into the dark house. My keen nose picked up another odor, not human—a dog’s kennel that had remained unkempt for some time. The texture of the carpet beneath my feet betrayed that I was walking atop something more than standard Berber. I stepped into a den at the rear of the house and my light shone on a floor coated in feces in various stages of deterioration—dry, tacky, and runny. Mixed within this pungent stew was what remained of the woman’s torso along with large clumps of canine fur. I continued to search the room until my eyes locked upon a large remnant of her skull and a single long bone that rested on a red cloth loveseat.

I stood for a long time staring at the skull, hoping those waiting outside would think I was doing something very important and forensically astute, but honestly I couldn’t tear myself away. I had trouble fully processing what I was seeing. It was very late in my career, at this point, yet I don’t believe I’d ever felt anything affect me in quite the same way before. My rational mind understood that this woman had been food for her own dogs, but the rest of my mind staggered a bit to catch up.

Examining the skull and the nearby leg bone, it was obvious they had been amusements for her animals. The lower ridges of the eye sockets and the upper hard palate had been chewed away, teeth and all. The jaw no longer existed. Surrounded by a sea of liquefied dog shit, I held the skull in my hand for a long while. Staring at the empty sockets, I felt more like Hamlet than the Sherlock Holmes everyone expected me to be.

According to the police, the woman’s five dogs had been removed from the scene, gnashing their teeth and starving. The animal control personnel had said that these dogs had developed the equivalent of dysentery. Our final estimate was that they had been locked in the house for about a month and a half, which is remarkable since, despite the presence of the five hungry pets, approximately half of her body still remained.

There were no signs of a struggle or a break-in. Her purse and wallet along with her car and house keys were still there. As I searched through the semi-viscous pools of feces for what remained of her (primarily teeth), I couldn’t keep from wondering how it had all happened.

She had obviously collapsed next to her bed and died there. Perhaps one of her dogs had been attuned enough to her to go investigate or sit beside her as life escaped her. Maybe he sniffed around her and prodded her, then hovered or possibly whimpered. Maybe then the other dogs joined him in his inspection. She lay face down on the floor. Probably they had circled her, nuzzled her, and licked her ears and hands, hands that had shown such care throughout their lives. I believe creatures understand when their lives are about to change.

Perhaps the first day, as the sun had set and the hunger had begun to rumble in their bellies, they had rummaged. But as the days spun into weeks, food grew scarce and their once loving owner had become too pungent, overwhelming their acute canine sense of smell. So they had quit halfway.

I was told later that she had lived alone, had no children, no husband, no parents—just her pack. She had provided a final kindness to the ones who had been her dearest companions.

My papaw had determined that it would be mercy he would show his two old friends, since they might never have been able to chase another deer through the pines or lie in the heat beneath a hot Louisiana sun, basking in his love for them. This woman gave more than she probably ever intended or even imagined, but in the end she gave all that she had left.

HELL YEAH,

IT HURT!

IF A MESSENGER OF DEATH has ever visited your doorstep in the form of a cop, medical examiner, preacher, or drunk neighbor and has just informed you that your kid has been crushed against the side of an eighteen-wheeler on its way back from a liquor store, maybe you can understand. It might be a bit like having your bowels ripped from your abdominal cavity. The first utterance of the first syllable brands your sulcus forever. There is no going back. You will never be the person you were before the moment you heard this visitor relate these words. And suddenly, with a fresh awareness, your own eventual death breathes hotly, closely into your ear.

At the moment such news comes to them, most people lack speech. Often the only response they can elicit is the simplest of all questions: “Did they suffer? Was it quick?” Of course they suffered. If you are the one dying, it is never quick enough. Does anyone ever walk into a maternity ward or a delivery room and ask, “Does it hurt, honey? Would you like the labor to last a little longer, sugar?”

There is a segment of the population who pose these same thoughtless queries after they’ve relinquished their own responsibility for a better outcome. They work full-time jobs and can’t give the time and care needed or they have too much on their plate already, so they drop a failing parent or grandparent at a retirement home and begin to forget.

The final days of that person’s life—a life who birthed the lives of those who just gave them over—are cared for by an overworked mother-of-eight nursing assistant who has always hated her job, or a perverted male orderly who fingers the grandmothers after lights-out and their meds have kicked in. Yeah, they suffer, both in life and in death. No one can claim definitively otherwise.

Those grandparents may lie peacefully at last, spindly hands posed appropriately across their chest, still and finally gone. But this pose reminds us all of what we don’t know about what happens in the end, about what it will be like for us too. Dig your fingers into the arm of the first white lab-coated individual you can find and ask, “Did Mama suffer?”

The answer will most certainly be, “Naw, man. She wuzin’ feelin’ no pain.”

Why do you ask? What makes you need to know?

Maybe the one you loved wallowed around for hours in his or her own blood after having not aimed the bullet at the exact right spot for a perfect, instantaneous death. The soles of my shoes are still sticky with your loved one’s blood and you need to ask me that question. It hangs in the air, begging for ease, comfort, soothing reassurance. I refuse to be the one to give that to you. You want comfort? Buy an inflate-a-mate or a puppy. I’ve clocked out on compassion.

When I knocked on my first door, preparing to deliver such news to the surviving family, I attempted to comfort the grief-stricken in the only way a twenty-something novice could manage. Feeble hand-holding paired with my own honestly sorrowful tears quickly became cold, pointless gestures to those whose lives I had just wrecked. Instead of welcoming my sympathies, they speared me with looks of contempt and shouted at me that I owed them something—excuses, explanations, more. Stupidly, I tried to give it all to them. But of course nothing anyone can say or do will fill such voids. Not even my own ever-present void, which kept expanding with each additional year, month, every day I spent as a death investigator.

So I drank. I masturbated. I tracked down their families. I stared at the corpses for hours. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Hatred and condescension bubbled up in me. I was a clerk caught in an unending rotation of thankless tasks. I never possessed what either they, or I myself, needed in order to satiate our collective craving for comfort and peace.

Preachers especially, but plenty of other people too, like to say there is something better waiting for all of us in the great good beyond. Isn’t that enough of a balm to calm your fears? Why must you demand reassurance from me too? Vast swaths of humankind believe that life after death is better than life on this earth. Entire religions are based on the premise that “I ain’t home till I get to Heaven,” just as my granny Pearl always said to me. Some even threaten to deprive the rest of us of their company or to take hundreds of thousands of us along with them in a final act, confident that something better awaits them elsewhere. Who of us are what I refer to as the Lewis and Clarks of the Afterworld? Who really knows?

Since it all remains unknown, why fear it? What is it about the unknown that is so difficult for us to navigate or to even accept? And is it the unknown, a possible nothingness that we fear the most? Or is it the possibility of the pain or the suffering we might feel in our final moments? Or is it that you’re going to miss something left behind here?

Or is it, in fact, that you imagine some greater being will finally hold your feet to the fire and enact judgment? What scares you the most, the pitchforks or the maggots?

Always boring into my conscience, inhabiting both my dreams and my waking life, was the notion that I had missed some important clue to my own eventual peace. Maybe I had ignored some scrap of paper, droplet of blood, or statement in the course of my own intellectual vanity, something that impeded my ability to comfort and reassure. Was there anything that I had failed to glean that would have given this dance with death significant meaning instead of what seemed to result in a waste of my own precious life? In the end, I was left hollowed out by my own bitterness. And Death continues its march, regardless of my absence as its witness.

TERMINUS

DEFECATION. A normal human bodily function that presses us to rush, hide, strain, and hopefully wash our hands as well as our collective asses. We want to be seen eating at the most prestigiously popular venues. We go on first dates, we discuss business deals, we celebrate birthdays—all over succulent, heaping plates of food. But steaming piles of fetid human leavings are not commonly the centerpieces at the tables where we do our backslapping or share our conviviality. Most of us flee at the sight and smell of such leavings, unless you’re a leather-clad scat master.

To enlist as a medicolegal death investigator is to be relegated to the biggest outhouse in the world. All of humanity waited for me to come on duty and examine what they’d left behind. I stepped in it. I smeared it. I wore it forever. There was no need for me to shake my fist or curse those who had dropped their leavings; they were either already dead or had never cared in the first place.

Taking a crap is certainly emblematic of the end. Our bodies deposit what is of no further use. Be it feces or a fellow human, we are all eventually left in a pile. The question becomes, how will we be dispensed of? Some are placed in lead-lined coffins and buried beneath tons of cement in order to preserve what remains. “They did such a good job with her. I’ve never seen her look better.” “Hey, Billy Ray, come see! Have you ever seen a better arrangement of corn and peanuts?” Some are incinerated in cremation ovens by families looking to save some money. Others are left to rot in abandoned crack houses, on battlefields, or on toilets without a witness or a word of farewell.

In death investigation, humanity is lost. Investigators and forensic pathologists refer to corpses as shit bags, skinned or unskinned sausages, or for those who have been autopsied, human canoes. I wonder what a death investigator or a pathologist will say of me when I am lying on that cold, stainless steel table? My colleagues and I may have joked and thrown around perverse terms, but I doubt any of us thought in those moments that it could be one of us lying there instead. Except for me, perhaps. Death has always whispered in my ear.

It was August of 2003 and blistering hot outside when I was summoned to the waste treatment plant in southeast Atlanta. This was it. I had reached the bottom floor of my career. From the lofty, intellectual heights I had once thought this job would elevate me to, I was ending up in the shithouse of Atlanta. But I have always been inquisitive, so I was eager to finally see what happened to everything that goes bye-bye down the potty.

As I had expected, I arrived to rows of blank stares from the various civil servants whose job it was to be there, police officers and sewage workers alike. Their eyes met mine as I got out of my car, profusely sweating in the heat. The officers sat in their idling patrol cars with the air-conditioning blasting and the hoods cracked so the engines wouldn’t overheat. I soon discovered they were also escaping the turds.

A sewage worker, dressed in a khaki uniform, met me and asked if I was the guy from the morgue. Without waiting for an answer, he followed that with, “One of our guys found something in the processor and we don’t know what to do with it.”

It hung in the air. I was used to thems and theys (or more accurately in the urban South, dems and deys).

He led me to what looked like a large dumpster set beneath the end of a long conveyer belt. The smell of shit permeated my sinuses. Being acutely attuned to human physiology, I knew smelling was the first cousin to eating. Over the years I had de facto eaten my share of maggot-covered shit, with no bonus but the vivid memory.

Rats were everywhere, paying no attention to any of the human activity. It occurred to me that none of the humans were paying attention either, besides me. I stared over the edge of the container. I saw mounds of human excrement interspersed with rubbers, bloodstained tampons, and bits of what used to be toilet paper. God knows what else. It went on forever. Like some 3-D poster with a special, hidden image. If I stared at it long enough, would I figure out what I was meant to understand about my life? Death never provided answers to my questions, just more cross-eyed confusion, driving me closer to madness.

Mr. Khaki Pants explained that once the fluid was drained from a container, anything solid that remained would emerge in the sewer uptake and ride along a conveyer belt until it was dropped into this large catch bin. I had never seen anything like it. The end of the end. A graveyard for waste.

There, curled and resting on a bed of feces, surrounded by the smell not of baby powder but of Atlanta’s shit, was a fetus. Its pink skin looked more human than formative, suggesting the mother had flushed it away closer to arrival than conception.

By this time the police officers had joined us, along with a few other khaki-clad sewage workers. They didn’t seem to be as interested in the human fetus as much as in watching what I would do. Even the waste workers never went into the bin.

So, feeling like a man who was expected to jump from an airplane for the first time, and knowing it would be an experience I could never return from whole, I jumped from the side of the bin into an abyss.

Suction held me in place for a moment. The landscape in there seemed like a metaphor for my entire career. And there at my feet was my twin, this discarded remnant of a human life. The cord was still attached. I lifted the fetus easily and looked for trauma or whatever else it might reveal. Nothing but fecal-covered solemnity.

At my direction, someone retrieved a clean cloth sheet from my van that, along with disaster bags, we sometimes use to transport bodies. After wrapping the fetus carefully in white cloth, I climbed back out of the stew and took the bundle and myself back to my downtown Atlanta office. As I drove, I couldn’t help but contemplate the irony of my workplace, filled with people who thought they had every answer about death, yet not one of them could offer an ounce of viable advice about life.

Just like the physical laws governing mass, life and death cannot occupy the same space. I found myself facing this dilemma only months later while merely sitting at my desk. The room began spinning about me. I struggled for oxygen. My chest throbbed. I tried to focus on anything that wasn’t moving, to stop the whirl. I tried to snag the attention of a fellow worker, somebody to help me, someone to keep me from the coolers.

I was guided down a hallway and led to a sofa. Someone said, “Breathe slowly.” And “Call 911.” “Relax.” I know I heard hushed giggling followed by the scrape of a scythe on the wall behind me. Others began to gather. The regular staff gave way to an assemblage of all the forensic pathologists in the building, a total of five. Had they come to help or just to witness all this for academic purposes?

As I struggled for breath and my heart pounded, everyone closed around me. These people shunned the living. They knew nothing of bedside manner or comfort for the distressed. They only knew how to wield cold instruments over the dead and to explain disease or trauma. These were my only witnesses.

I imagined them competing over intelligent assessments of my gutted remains. One took my hand and told me to pray. His same hand earlier in the day had eviscerated human bodies. The blackness of my thoughts and my deepening tunnel vision engulfed me, dragging me closer toward an end. My scattered mind stuck on memories of that abandoned fetus lying in the collected waste of Atlanta.

Sirens neared. I heard the clanging of the back gate and then the pounding on our door. Large men dressed in blue put their hands on me, pulling me from the grasps and probing eagerness of the forensic pathologists. I felt like a rescued hiker, spinning in a basket beneath a helicopter, floating slowly higher above the danger and the wilderness below. My supposed destiny as a great death investigator, the goals I had set, the purpose I had so longed for—all of it ebbed away. A new, uncertain fate awaited me as I was hauled toward care, toward those who tended not to death but to life.

So many miles. Such pain, fear, and disgust. So much rotting flesh. The frightened little boy who had stood at his grandmother’s window, watching his drunken father being hauled away by powerful lawmen, had become a man, only to return to the same helpless fear again. Now I relied on an ambulance crew to ferry me to safety, away from the horrors I had chronicled for years.

As the ambulance raced down Peachtree Street, was my Great-Uncle Joe watching? Had my parents been justified in bestowing that name on me? Had I given all I could, then given too much? Later, lying in the emergency room, I trembled uncontrollably, but I endured. Death whispered in my head, Failure! But Death had always been a liar.

I am now twenty years downrange from a career that shoved and pleaded and coaxed me closer to my own end. I left New Orleans for Atlanta then left Atlanta to rid myself of the incessant siren calls from Death. Atlanta was originally known as Terminus because it was where the Western and Atlantic railroad tracks ended. For me, it would be also where a new railhead began.

I never returned to death investigation. I spent months sedated then was plied with questions by an old Indian woman who, in her psychiatric wisdom, had deemed me too damaged to return to my former career. I left the domain of death to others and began a long but overdue reintroduction to life. I had narrowly escaped taking what would most certainly have been a shorter and much murkier path. But I still carry with me Death’s faint voice in my ear, a permanent stain of darkness on my heart, and the endless tracks of blood beneath my feet.