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

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

  Morgan, Joseph Scott

  Perseus Books Group (2012)

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  * * *

  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.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  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 c
olleagues 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.