PART TEN:
FROM THE LIPS OF THE DROWNING
COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA, CALLAIGHT COUNTY
SEPTEMBER 09, 1969
ISSUANCE OF DEATH CERTIFICATE--WITNESS TO A DROWNING--
BODY NOT RECOVERED
No matter where I go, home is home. Home is a cot, a shovel, a Polaroid Instamatic. A bag. A glove. A smell you never stop smelling, the point at which adipose tissue starts to liquefy, the human form to run like chicken fat in the sun.
The way that guy smelled leaking through the ceiling at the American. Space heaters and nightmares and busting some fuck still hiding in his lair up in Point of No Return, in the remains of the day and the remains of what he did, watching the cops slap cuffs on him. Andy Capp's Hot Fries and pickled sausage and falling asleep at the wheel of my K-Car, under a warm Italian soda of melted neon from the BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT of UNCLE BUBBA'S BAR, that's home to me. In between sleep, that's home.
The law presumes that a person shown to be demonstrably alive at a given time remains so until the contrary is shown by some sufficient proof.
The green, green grass of the grave calls us all down, every one, and a young man with a tattooing-gun and a faraway look in his coal-black eyes waits for me at the door. I can't get away from my job. The exam-gloves don't wash off, and under the old-time sodium streetlights in this shit town, the blood washing into the gutter looks like black ink.
In the absence of such proof, until a different presumption arises, the information contained in the affidavits shall be considered sufficient to rebut the presumption of life, and to subsitute therefore the presumption of death, a Death Certificate shall be filed thenceforth.
I realized I'd been sitting there looking at the tattoo on Floryan Kowalczyk's back for half an hour while he talked. (Not my type, you. Get your mind out of the gutter so mine can float past.)
We construe the aforementioned to mean that in the event of a death due to unnatural causes and without medical attendance, the coroner shall complete and sign the certificate...
The question as to which public officer is charged with the responsibility of executing the death certificate is resolved by the following...
No, the old man was just walking around with no shirt, drinking beet juice or tomato juice or some equally godawful thing down by the pint glass and offering me some. "Good for you," he rasped through those neon-white dentures.
I smiled thinly. "Got coffee?"
There was an old cast iron woodstove in the middle of the stone weight-room floor, belching and roaring out orange light behind a diamond isinglass pane. Floryan had a respectable woodpile in the corner with a tarp under it, shipshape. Old Navy frogman, I remembered, and the tats on his arms proved that much.
The arms were something else again. The most amazingly complex set of cast-iron freeweights I had ever seen sat in the corner opposite the stove, looking 1948 if they were a day. Vintage, and still very clearly in use.
Floryan jerked his thumb toward the kitchen. "Blue Mountain Blend. Don't you dare put cream an' sugar in it, either. That shit's not cheap. Savor it."
After I'd had the chance to sip it twice, Floryan went into the back room and came back with a sheet of 8-1/2 x 11 vellum whose general boilerplate was so familiar to me I could zip them off in my sleep. I had, already, so many, drinking black coffee like this with Rich or Floryan or whomever from wherever.
Floryan laid the death certificate down in front of me. I was having trouble reading it all of a sudden, but I could make out the year-stamp just fine: 1969.
Then he took his shirt off, and showed me his back, and I gasped like a green girl. Then I remembered it was Floryan, and promptly got a hold on myself on the double-quick.
"Number-two shader there, look at the fill in between, could almost be a re-color as new as... All right, the Seventies, but still, Von Bode Seventies, not Hell's Angels Seventies, look at how tight the edges are..."
The panels were more Bob Kane than Berni Wrightson, more Detective than DC. The people looked like caricatures in a Tijuana Bible, only most of them had most of their clothes on.
It was the same. Floryan was alive, and yet he had a tattoo the same as the ones in my Book of the Dead, down in the belly of the Old County Court House. Behind his smoked bifocals, his golden eyes looked too alive. He grinned like the Reaper himself, iron-gray crew cut looking like it wanted to stand on end.
"Hush, now," the old man barked, hearing the way I was breathing. "I didn't do it. I'm the only guy I know got one like that, and the fella did it on my back is dead these twenty years. He rolled his bike. He drowned. Russian fella, like you. His name was -----------------"
Floryan said the name again. It wasn't mine this time. But, then, why were my eardrums suddenly alive with this horrid feedback whine between worlds, graying out the name, making noise of the signal...
I clapped both hands to my ears. A drop of blood fell from my right nostril, onto the Death Certificate. We both looked at it.
"I'll get a paper towel." Floryan clapped me on the back. "The air's damn dry in here. Bet you had your adenoids out, when you were a kid?"
I nodded.
"Allergies?"
Another nod.
"Yup," the old medic clucked, satisfied. "Just like me. I get nosebleeds, too. I put a pan of water or three on that stove, most of the time. Just busy today. You know."
I did. The old man's voice was soothing, though those military eyes were a bright magnifying glass to sit under for too long.
"He gave me the tattoo in jail. He said he knew the minute, but not the hour. He was a spook. Real Rasputin type. But smart. He's why I got out. He taught me to love to read. And lift weights. I did the inquest on him--"
Here Floryan returned from the kitchen in the time it had taken me to take four full, deep breaths through the diaphragm, like Sifu taught us, a world away in that bright downtown dojo in the Eighties, form after form after form and hypnotized by the barber pole across the street at Mussellman's, learning how to not get the shit knocked out of me at school...
"You... wait... You did the inquest on the guy...that gave you that tattoo." It wasn't a question. There was no inflection. All of a sudden, my head was ringing again.
The paper towel was in my hand. "Twist a bit of it off, and stick it up your nose," Floryan suggested.
I grinned, blotting the nostril to make sure. "It's cool. It stopped." I wiped the document and it came away clean. (No Blood, as Sifu used to say, No Foul.)
"Now, listen..."
So I did.
Dragging a river was terrible slow work then, Schiya, back in the Sixties. (Hell, I was thirty then, you believe that?) I was out there on my own hook, literally, heh heh heh...
While the Staties were usin' nets and dredges and all manner of shit, I went a ways downriver in m'own little john-boat I brought up there on the roof of my Cherokee. (Yes, Rich Mallory bought a Cherokee like mine. Oh, the beating they'll take, if you know how to keep 'em runnin'.)
I did it the old way, you see. Just me an' a camera and a grapnel. Don't look at me like that. I've done more river-rescues than most men my age have teeth, an' usually in conditions where the dive's so dank and mucky and so far down you're turnin' your head to see what ate ya.
You weren't no itch in your Daddy's pants when me and him was closing down the Rattler! I did it the old way for my friend, ____________, who was probably dead b'fore he hit the water, on account of the angle, you see, of the head-trauma, it...
Schiya, are you... What? Are you sure? Okay. As long as you got it under control. You... It... Tilt your head back. Yeah, I'll get you a glass of ice water, I know you'll drink that.
Here you are. Yeah, get it down you. I... Oh, Schiya, I saw someone take this guy. Down there. You see it?
Yes. On the riverbank. Leftmost panel, second row from the bottom. See how he comes, through the hole in the air? I knew his name was Azrael, and terrible his swift sickle, dread Kronos who reaps us all in the end. I saw him, the lightning of his beard, his mad Ahab eyes, his bloody teeth...
I saw him come through, and drag my best friend's soul up off the water, where it hung like mist in the morning, and I sat there teen feet away, becalmed on some weird stone foundation smack in the fucking middle of that one fishing-dam out on the back of Seven-Mile Lake.
I saw him walk up out of that water, you see, just before dawn, when you could still see bats catching bugs, and see that sort of peach-colored gold that gathers on the wavelets, way out, and smell the hard mineral smell of the mist that makes the bugs go wild, and the rainbow-trouts as big as your arm jump up after them when the water gets above seventy...
I saw him walk out on the deep, and snatch up ------------------------, and take him with...
Jesus, I never saw such a thing. No one saw, but me. No one could see, if I said it. Rich has seen this, he never asked. But last night, he did.
So I'm telling you. He's worried about you, son. Can I... Can I help, in any way?
Write down his name, you say? Why can't y---
Oh sure, sure. I'll write it down. I did say anything, didn't I? Forgive me, dear Schiya. You're a good student to put up with this old Polack and his potatographic memory. Ever juice a potato? It's kind of... unique.
Anyway, yes, here is his name. Now we both have a secret. You say this kid is... what that old bloodybones was that I saw? Like, he got his job?
Kid, that's...
Oh, my God, let me get a
hee
heheheheheh
bwehehehahehhhahhahahh
ow.
Oh, my God, kid, that's so funny I bet it's true. You with your water, me with my juice, a toast to Unsolved Mysteries, and Botticelli's Beautiful Boy from Beyond.
Jesus. Now I've heard everything.
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Copyright © 2009 by Edward Morris
First Electronic Edition—published 2009/2010
ISBN 978-0-9819882-9-0