Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator Page 3

  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 wa
s 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.