morgue was, Johnny had figured out what he was going to tell them. His Pops was out of work (maybe true); Father Zaprazal was recommending him for the job (Father Zap didn’t speak much English); he had four brothers and sisters to take care of (well, his two brothers worked some, but why not); he’d finished eighth grade (rounding up from seventh); and he was sixteen years old (maybe he’d smoke a cigarette to look older than his stunted thirteen). Since they didn’t have a phone at home, he doubted they’d check there, and he looked clean, he figured, so, working in a hospital was just right.
When he got there, one of the men from the night before was sitting out front, smoking a cigar. Johnny took a deep breath, straightening himself up to full five-foot-two height. He walked up to him and looking right in the man’s reddened eyes, and said, “I’m here about the job washing the bodies.”
Without a word, the man stood up, turned, and waved him to follow. Johnny caught the door as it was swinging closed and followed the man down a white-tiled hallway to a room where the label on the frosted glass of the door read Morgue. Opening the door, Johnny was hit by the smells: the sweet odor of the dead, a penetrating antifreeze—like the smell that he later found out was formaldehyde and the stench of feces— that made him stop.
The older man looked back and said, “C’mon, you want the job, doncha?”
Johnny followed, at first holding his breath, and then taking as shallow breaths as he could.
Pulling an apron off a rack, the man tossed it to Johnny and said, “Put this on.”
Johnny barely caught it because his eyes were transfixed on one of the four zinc-covered tables, where a body lay. The abdomen was open and smelled like hamburger gone bad. The purple liver lay like a soft eggplant next to the chalk-white woman’s corpse, oozing blood that drained into the gutter at the edge of the table. Her breasts sagged to the side, and the nipples were almost the same color as the mushy organ next to her. Her eyes stared upward, and the only sign of remaining humanity, that Johnny could see, was her hair, which was curly and brown.
“Hey, kid, c’mon. That one’s already washed,” the man said as he pulled a metal drawer open, revealing a bundle of dark gray blankets over another body, maybe the one he saw getting hauled in here last night, the guy who had been knifed. The man reached inside the blankets and grabbed a wrist, shaking the arm.
XYZ
“Okay, this one’s ready,” he said, convinced that the rigor mortis had time to fade. “Gimme a hand with the gurney,” he instructed, whereupon he pointed to a corner, where one was pushed up against a wall. Silently, Johnny forced himself to move his feet, thinking, Ten cents a body, ten cents a body. He rolled the gurney next to the drawer, and, at the man’s signal, walked over to the other side of the drawer, where the man was.
“Okay, get his feet,” the man said, and, following his cue, Johnny and the man pulled the blanket-covered body onto the gurney. “Next, roll it over here, and get it on one of the tables.”
The man stood back and pointed to the table next to the dead woman with the curly hair. When Johnny hesitated, the man folded his arms and stood back. Johnny pushed the gurney snug up against the table, then dragged the body, first the head and shoulders, then the feet, over onto the dissecting table.
“This guy’s little, kid. If you get a really big guy, and you’re afraid you might drop him on the floor, go out and find an orderly to help you. They’ll expect a nickel to give you a hand, so’s better not do it often if you want to make money. Okay, now, take the blankets off and toss them in the hamper over in that corner,” he indicated to an oversized canvas bag held open in a black, metal rack.
Johnny started pulling the blankets off and had to grab a waxy arm to keep it from rolling off the table. Tugging the blankets from the top of the table, he kept the corpse from rolling, and revealed an old man in pajamas and a waft of sour old man crap, which had saturated his pants. Feeling bile rising in his throat, Johnny’s face turned green. The morgue attendant shoved him over to a slop sink, where the boy vomited curdled bread and milk in one, then two violent heaves. Grasping the sides of the sink and gasping for fresh air, he looked up and felt vomit dripping down his face. The attendant held him firmly by the arm in case he fainted, but Johnny kept his legs underneath him and splashed water on his face with his free hand.
“You gonna make it, kid?”
Johnny nodded, shut off the running water, and turned back to the reeking stiff on the table, noticing that the tables were all tilted slightly and the gutters on the sides and bottom emptied into a pipe that went down into a drain in the floor. The attendant released his grip but kept his hand near Johnny’s arm as they approached the body again.
“All right, then. If you’re ok, take these,” the man said, handing him a pair of large shears. “Usually, the family wants the clothes back, but it was just him, and I don’t figure even the St. Vincent DePaul wants some shit stained, worn out pjs. So, now, you take the scissors and cut the clothes off him and toss them in there,” he said, pointing to a ribbed metal trash can. “Make sure you empty that out when you’re done, and hose it out, too, or we’ll get this place full of bugs.”
Returning again to shallow breaths, Johnny sliced and tugged the threadbare pajamas off the old man, smearing wet feces on the table as he removed the bottoms. Holding the clothes at arm’s length, he dropped the rags into the garbage and returned to the table, where the attendant had stretched a heavy rubber garden hose with an adjustable nozzle.
“Okay, sometimes you gotta use a brush to get ’em clean, but this guy ain’t bad. Just hose him down, turn him over, hose down his backside, and then clean the table. The doc’ll come in, take a look at it, and see if he’s gotta cut into him. If he doesn’t, we wrap him up in one of the sheets over there,” he said, pointing to shelves filled with linen sheets. “And put him back in the drawer for the guys from the potter’s field, or the medical students to pick up. Think you can handle this, kid?”
Clearing his throat, Johnny answered, “Yes,” and held his hand out for the dime he was due.
CHAPTER 13
KENSINGTON, 1930
As Johnny trotted down the front steps that morning, he saw some big footprints in the freshly fallen snow and froze, looking up and down the street for his father. Not seeing him, he looked at the footprints, which showed someone had approached the house, then turned away and went on, their steps lost amongst the others on the sidewalk. Phew, he thought, that’s all he needed now, was his old man to come back, screaming drunk, tearing up the house, and knocking them around.
Johnny walked quickly, north on Fillmore to Ferry, keeping his eyes peeled in case his father was in the neighborhood. He’d heard that Pops had been at Babka’s a couple of times, but she chased him out for being a no-good, who didn’t care about his family. He’d heard he’d been hanging out in the bars on Broadway, doing odd jobs loading and unloading at the market there, then drinking it right up. Nobody seemed to know where he was staying, he just heard about him being spotted around the East Side from neighbors who shut up until he was out of earshot, shaking their heads and saying what a shame it was, what a shame it was.
Well, Johnny was working at the hospital, as he always called it, and it was true. The morgue was just part of the Myer Memorial Hospital, and when he wasn’t washing bodies, he was filling in as an orderly sometimes, mopping floors, cleaning beds, emptying bedpans, and just about any other dirty job no one wanted to do. A few more bucks a month and he might be able to get his own place, away from the cabbage smells of home, the fear of his father’s return, and his family’s ceaseless rounds of worry, prayer, and work.
When he walked into the basement entrance to the hospital, the coroner’s wagon men were there, looking at a watch. They paid no attention as Johnny slipped by and went to the water fountain to get a drink and listen to them.
“Gotta be worth five bucks. We should split it.”
“No, no, no, no, no, Herb, you get the ring, I get the watch this time. The luck of the draw, my friend.”
“Yeah,