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Excerpt

Excerpt

Skels

"If he's not dead, we get a back-up and they'll transport," my partner Duane whispered. "Otherwise, we'll just put him in the back with the televisions. Drop the TVs in the Bronx, then run him over to the morgue, this'll work out good.""If he's not dead, we get a back-up and they'll transport," my partner Duane whispered. "Otherwise, we'll just put him in the back with the televisions. Drop the TVs in the Bronx, then run him over to the morgue, this'll work out good."

"I don't want to go to the morgue," I said.

"Shhhh!" He shot a look at the man who was hanging from our side mirror. It was ten at night and we were driving along a footpath in Riverside Park, bushes brushing against the box of the ambulance, no one around except for a few homeless men asleep on the benches. The call was for a cardiac arrest in a cave inside the abandoned rail tunnel near the river. The caller met us at the entrance of the park to direct us there.

He was a pale man, thin and dirty, with white hair like a blown dandelion, falling in threads across his forehead. I couldn't see him that well, but he looked about fifty, and as if he might be an albino. Except I had always thought that albinos had pink eyes, and his eyes weren't pink; more of a peculiar shade of lavender. He clung silently to the bar of my mirror, occasionally gesturing which way he wanted Duane to turn.

Cardboard boxes filled with hot televisions thumped around in the back of our ambulance. I didn't know how we were going to fit a dead man in there, the boxes were stacked from floor to ceiling. We had just spent the past hour transferring them out of some semi-truck that belonged to one of Duane's many cousins, and into the ambulance. Duane had informed me that I was entitled to a free one for keeping my mouth shut, but they were so huge I couldn't imagine trying to get one up the five flights of stairs and into my apartment.

We bumped down a narrow path, into an unlit section of the park. The trees were so close the branches cracked as Duane slid us between them. In the distance, I heard a woman laughing, the rush of cars on the Henry Hudson Parkway. The trees thinned, and the man hopped off the side, motioning for us to stop.

This was my first cardiac arrest. My stomach fluttered as I jumped out of the ambulance. We were in a crescent ringed with trees, bounded on one side by a long hill, about seventy feet high. Set into the side of the hill was a wrought-iron door, like the door to a garden. There were no lights, only a dim grayness reflected from the clouds overhead, and the rhythmic flashing of the ambulance beacon. The air had a sweet, sandy smell, mixed with the exhaust from our engine.

We grabbed our equipment and followed the man through the doorway into a dark tunnel, lit only by pillars of gray light that fell, like the light inside a cathedral, from rectangular vents cut into the stone forty feet above our heads. A deep carpet of soot muffled my footsteps, and the air was twenty degrees cooler than it was outside. Duane clicked on his flashlight, the circle of yellow falling onto a stretch of rusted rail. Our guide walked quickly, already ten feet up the tracks, his steps never hesitating.

Duane and I followed, the light bouncing on the ground ahead of us. Slowly, my eyes got used to the darkness. There was a cart of some kind turned on its side, a makeshift fence of thin plywood; everywhere broken bottles of pint wine, piles of soot and rock where anything could have been buried. And the thin black shape of the man who had called, moving swiftly towards a place where no one would ever find us if something went wrong.

"Hey Duane," I said.

But then the man stopped, and waved us forward, to the edge of the track, where the stone wall rose fifty feet to curve into a rough ceiling. A piece of carpet had been nailed there. Around the edges I saw light. Orange. Flickering. The man pulled the carpet aside and I stepped into the strangest room I had ever seen in my life.

It was a cave, really, just a hole in the rock, about eight feet deep and six feet wide. I could stand up, but Duane had to stoop, or his head would have cracked against the ceiling. To my right was a painted tin table, covered with lit candles. Set around the edge were plastic statues of birds. Not real birds, birds from cartoons. The candles threw long shadows of Daffy Duck and Roadrunner onto the walls; they seemed to move as the flames flickered. There was no other light. An old wooden guitar rested in the corner. Above the table hung a net hammock, filled with brightly colored stuffed animals. A dead man lay on the mattress against the far wall.

He was thin; almost emaciated. In the candlelight it was hard to tell, but he might have been an albino too. His skin was pearly-white, stretched over the cords of his muscles. He wore only a pair of gray jockey shorts, and had stiffened into a bow. I had never actually seen a dead man before. I crouched beside him. He was so still. There was a halo of darkness, like a bruise, around his navel, and purple clouds of blood had settled into his flanks and the backs of his arms. I knew he was dead. He had to be. But still I reached towards his neck to feel for a pulse.

"Hey! He's in rigor," Duane said. "He's been dead for a while, you don't have to check for a pulse."

I pulled my hand back and stood up, Objects were scattered around the body. None touching it. It was as if someone had placed them there, after he was dead, to comfort him. A photograph of a gull, with bright white eyes. A crooked horn, jet black, about a foot long. A tassel of braided red wool. Two feathers. A rosary, an old fashioned brass seal, three squares of yellow soap or plastic. On the wall above the man's head was writing; white chalk in careful rows, the letters strangely elegant, as if the writer had been schooled in an earlier age, when penmanship mattered. Around the words was a curve of white, like a tombstone.

MYSELF IT SHAPED TO A LONE BLUE DOVE
AND DRAVE ME FROM MY HOME
MY BROTHER A KENAI WOLF IT MADE
IN FOREST WILD TO ROAM

What was a Kenai Wolf? The staticky sound of police radios came from the tunnel outside. I wondered how the cops had found the place.

"This is perfect," Duane said, "We'll hold our signal, tell 'em the radio wouldn't pick up in here and we were waiting for the cops to conclude their investigation."

A cop poked his head through the door, the beam of his flashlight blinding me. He ran it quickly over the dead man, and muttered something I couldn't make out.

"Hold tight," Duane said. He followed the cop out into the tunnel. I could hear them talking, voices rising and falling amid the chatter of the radios.

I sat in one of the two chairs and looked around. The table was set, as if for a meal. Two battered metal cups, two shallow bowls, two spoons. There was a flimsy shelf across from me, stacked with cans of soup and boxes of tea; another shelf of books, most so old and leathery I couldn't read the titles. The few I could read seemed to be concerned with geography and the categorization of birds. A charred pot and a can opener hung from nails pounded into the stone wall. On the dirt floor were two plastic jugs of water.

The room was neat. There was even an ancient broom leaning against the wall. But the dead man lay on a bare mattress. He was starting to smell a little, the faintest bit of old meat mixing with the waxy smell of the candles.

Duane ducked back into the room, dragging the scoop stretcher.

"Okay, we just got to get him onto this. I wish we had a sheet, why don't these people wear clothes? You got any gloves?" I shook my head.

"Shit. Pardon my French." He tossed the scoop down beside the mattress and wrestled the dead man onto it, cinching the straps across him.

"You want the head or the feet?" he said.

"Wait a minute, don't I have to get his information?"

"He's dead, sweetie, its doesn't matter what his name was, he's not getting any more mail."

Duane had taken to calling me sweetie, but I didn't think it was a term of endearment. I was pretty sure he had totally forgotten what my name was. I grabbed the foot of the scoop, and we carried him out to where the cops were.

I gave the cops the time we pronounced him, and my badge number, and we set the man down so one of them could tie a tag with his name on it around his toe.

"Look at them all," the other cop said, "like maggots under a rock, they just keep crawling out."

I watched as a man emerged from a hole ten feet down the tunnel; a shadow moving out of the stone. I hadn't noticed the holes on the way in. But they were there. All along the wall, some so small that a man would have to crawl to get through, some the size of a door, with carpet or blankets hanging down. There must have been twenty men now, standing around in small groups, not talking. It was hard to see their faces. Most were white; they were tall, thin. Like mountain men, living in this strange world under the city.

"I'm sorry we couldn't help him," I said to the one who led us in. He seemed surprised that I had spoken to him. He looked so much like the man who had died. Maybe it was his brother. Both albinos. The same pearly skin, the pale hair that caught the light in a white shimmer.

He nodded, and looked at my badge. "Miss, do you think I might be able to-"

The cop was between us instantly, his hands on my shoulders, moving me out of the way. He was a tall man; curly black hair just beginning to gray, deep-set Spanish eyes, olive skin with a smear of darker pigment, like a wing, across one cheekbone. "No! I'm in charge here, not her. How many times to have to tell you? That's a crime scene in there, you don't go in until I tell you to go in, got it?"

The albino backed away. "Okay, boss, no problem."

"Morgan," the cop's nametag read. I looked at him more closely. His features were even and regular, but there was something wrong with him. As if all the fat, every bit of softness, had been burned away in some terrible fire. And what remained would never deliver a moment of comfort. He seemed to have forgotten all about me. He stared at the albino for a moment longer, then stalked to the doorway and shone his light in, looking for what I didn't know.

The other cop scribbled in his logbook. The albino stood a few feet from me, staring at the dirt. I wondered what he would do, all alone down here now. In his little cave with its two cups and two chairs, its table and candles and plastic birds that he must have carried for blocks along the dark tracks. I walked over to him. I felt like I should say something deep, something to mark this person vanishing from his world.

"Are you going to be okay?"

He nodded.

I unrolled the ACR. "I need some information on your friend."

"My brother." He took the ACR from me and pulled a pencil from his pocket, squinting as he braced the paper against one knee and wrote.

"He didn't suffer," I said. Morgan was a few feet away, watching. He had the strangest expression, as if he were smothering a smile. The albino's head was down. He continued to write. When he was done, he rolled up the ACR and handed it back. "Thank you," he said, "I appreciate your kindness."

"Come on, let's go." Duane shifted his feet impatiently.

We picked up the scoop and walked along the sooty railbed, moving between bars of darkness and light cast by the vents overhead, the dead man swinging between us, getting heavier with each step. I wished we had a sheet to cover him. His eyes stared at the ceiling and his arms bobbed as we lurched along.

My arms ached and my hands got numb, but there was no place to rest. We came out the way we had gone in. Our ambulance and the cop car were parked crookedly on the grass.

Duane jerked to a halt. The edge of the scoop stretcher swung into my stomach. I grunted.

"Man, don't you have anything better to do?" Duane said. But not to me. A tall, doughy figure stood on the rear step of our ambulance. Its white shirt shone with each flash of the blinkers.

"Captain Davis," I whispered.

He glared at me, then popped up off the bumper like a piece of toast out of a toaster, and landed six inches from my face. "Paramedic Breton." A cloud of spit misted onto my cheek. "I can't wait to hear how these televisions got into the back of your ambulance."

Excerpted from Skels © Copyright 2004 by Maggie Dubris. Reprinted with permission by Soft Skull Press. All rights reserved.

Skels
by by Maggie Dubris

  • paperback: 260 pages
  • Publisher: Soft Skull Press
  • ISBN-10: 1932360255
  • ISBN-13: 9781932360257