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

  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.