Chapter Four

At three o’clock in the morning, William prays for small talk.

The phone rings. He crosses his fingers hoping for a wrong number or a voice trying to sell him something. He would donate money to anyone speaking with confidence of a rare medical condition. He would switch phone companies, buy vacuum cleaners, even pledge his time for a fundraising walk on behalf of survivors—any survivors, breast cancer, a forgotten World War, AIDS—if this ringing isn’t a work call. But at three in the morning it’s always work.

As the phone hits ring two, stumbles into three, Julie pulls the sheets tight over her head. “Answer it,” she mutters.

William, half-awake, throws his arm to the nightstand and searches through the accumulated mess. Keys hit the floor. A near-empty mix of Alka-Seltzer and warm milk tips over, forcing him up to investigate. Nothing has spilled from the cup so he relaxes.

The phone rings again. Julie replaces the blanket over her head for a pillow.

William returns the cup to the table. A shallow milk film adheres to the inside of the glass, hard and defiant after this half- night of abandon. William counts this as the single relief to a day already blistered and sore. He is not in a mood to clean.

He finds the phone in the middle of its fifth ring. “Hello.” His voice grinds deep with sleep.

“Lowson, we got one for you.” And before William can ask for an address, this first-precinct officer recites numbers with the impassioned confidence typically reserved for Bible verse. “A big red house without windows. We need it cleaned by morning.” The years have taught William to dread where this voice leads him.

“It is morning, Larry.”

“You’d better hurry, then. Already called Filbert,” the officer says.

“Philip,” William corrects him. “The stains will be there tomorrow. They don’t fade away.”

“Nothing does, does it…?” Larry says, letting the moment steal the silence for a few breaths. William ignores Larry’s odd introspection and returns to his night table for a bottle of aspirin. Larry has been a desk officer since well before William and Philip signed on to clean city messes. Larry isn’t their boss, but he leverages the age gap to imply otherwise. An accident on the job left Larry with a split femur that doesn’t abide by fieldwork anymore.

“The place sounds like a residence,” William says. “Couldn’t find any survivors,” and Larry hangs up.

The morning begins. William chokes down two ibuprofen tablets, lubricating the gulp with only his own spit. Today might be the day, he thinks, the day I clean up a spilled life and tell myself the world grows stronger. The pill fights its way up his throat. He balances it on his tongue. Or it might be tomorrow. He massages a stimulated muscle in his neck and tries again.

With an obvious suicide situation—a note covered in fingerprints; or a missing shoe, an exposed toe, and a large gun all married to a single body—Philip and William are called within hours. It might be a family member who discovers the body, calling under guidance of a police official suggesting William and Philip’s services as a “tragically necessary” means for cleanup. Because the city has no responsibility for residential tragedies— other than the body itself—the mess is a family burden. A father or brother or mother or daughter calls still crying, sometimes days after the death, unable to pronounce words like “blood” and “carpet stain” and “no face,” and William has to do the best he can to get an address. But when officials find no surviving family, the police have permission to take action, to get things moving before airborne particles become a public health issue.

The early hour and the “by morning” deadline could mean the officials would rather the press know as little about the situation as possible: drug deal in a quaint suburban neighborhood gone violent, domestic thing, battery turned murder via passion. But this is all speculation. Law enforcement officers give Philip and William nothing to go by because legally they can’t.

For seven years they’ve worked at the bottom of the cities, scrubbing away the remnants of failed lives. They understand the world at a base level, one that rarely gets acknowledged, because acknowledgement would be an admission of failure. And if there’s one thing crying families and grieving friends can teach it’s that failure is a hard concept to accept. Nobody needs it. Nobody wants it. Nobody asks for it, but we’re all born anyway.

Julie doesn’t mind for now. She has warned William of the late nights and long days inhibiting a cohesive family. “Once our family starts,” she has said. As her gut expands, she becomes more insistent on a solid family structure, refusing even a grain of sympathy for William’s thoughts regarding the absurdity of new life.

William drops the phone to its receiver. Julie rolls over, asking if everything is alright. He lies to her, making the situation sound worse than it probably is: “a recently divorced man was just found baked to the kitchen floor of his apartment,” he says. “A heart attack left him dead for a straight week. It’s been hot out.” He says this only because in Julie’s feigned concern, foggy under the late hour, she has already forgotten the question.

Julie insists that William keep every detail to himself. She asks about his day with superficial interest. “I’m asking,” she has told William, “because I read that you need to be involved in your partner ’s professional life for a happy marriage.” He pretended agreement, then at her happiest, reminded her: “as dictated by a magazine article you read when you were bored with me.” Julie didn’t talk to him for days after that comment.

If William comes home covered in the brown insides of a methamphetamine dealer hollowed out by the explosion of drug lab built under the influence, he tells Julie it was raining. Got muddy.

If he smells burnt, like a two-story house, ashes now for reasons vocal neighbors speculate might be arson, or insurance fraud, or an “unfortunate lack of precautions, and that poor child, and her mother and…” he tells her that he stopped for something to eat at the new barbeque place on Merchant. “I didn’t get you anything,” William would say, “you said pork is bad for the kid.”

When he tells her what the residues really are, she gets upset and starts insisting he quit to find a more acceptable job. But this is Brackenwood. The jobs stop well short of “acceptable.” Lives are lived and made in this little town just south of Alexandria, and the people do the best they can, but if work doesn’t mean a city job, an assembly line, or a small gas station then work probably isn’t legal. The truth is William has learned to endure his job. He is paid to be a witness, and even though it might push him deep sometimes, he rides with good company. Philip and William share drinks and laughs between shifts.

It takes only minutes once William wakes to drive over to Philip’s house. The small man sits on his porch swatting at mosquitoes attracted to the light he leaves on when he’s gone. Philip claims the light charade is a low cost form of security. He leaves a worn pair of size seventeen men’s boots on his porch for the same reason.

“Turner Street,” Philip says slamming the large, rusted door on William’s van. “I think that’s on a cul-de-sac, right?”

“No idea.”

“Yeah, probably is. I remember a firework show a couple years ago around there. Got a niece that lives in the area. If it’s the right area, I mean.”

The engine throttles in reverse; William’s stomach competes as he pulls out of Philip’s driveway, each machine rumbling. At three a.m., with the dread of rubber gloves and CaviCide tearing away at thinning nostrils William forgets about breakfast.

“You don’t look so good, Will,” Philip says, eyeing his own shirt, stretching a wrinkle from his sleeve.

“I’m good. Just tired.” He yawns every word.

“No. The hand.” He points to the gauze around William’s palm, brown and loose at the ends.

“Dog.”

Philip nods. “But you hate dogs.”

“Still do.” William tries his best to keep the van on the road. Every blink he stretches to a nap one breath long.

When they arrive at the address in Alexandria the world reflects Brackenwood, only bigger, and fifteen miles different.

Stepping out onto the cold asphalt, Philip inhales the scene and mumbles, “Probably right.” He nods slowly as he examines the house, glancing back to William every few seconds. “Larry told me they think it was a suicide, but mum’s the word and all that.”

“He told you this.”

“Mum’s the word. They haven’t officially stated anything.”

“Of course,” William says. “You know, Larry doesn’t remember your name.”

Philip doesn’t respond. “He did confirm sex. Male,” and he steps to the back of the van appearing moments later in a full Tyvek suit. Respirator, gloves, everything.

They walk past the yellow tape with suitcases of supplies tucked under their arms, their hands overloaded with impressive equipment and cellophane sealed rags. They over-exaggerate this cumbersome ritual out of necessity; the neighborhood must stay docile. If William and Phillip look important, the neighbors sense purpose and don’t bother the department with unnecessary phone calls. Most of the time they need only rubber gloves, a few waste bags, and the CaviCide—stuff they could carry with less of a show—but if people don’t see supplies they fear for the worst.

William steps behind the van and returns with only rubber boots and gloves.

Philip powers on a 9-Watt spotlight. He pans the house, the porch, the grass. “Look at this yard. Perfect. The house is shit— the yard perfect. Trimmed to the millimeter. And those bushes all along the outside, perfect.”

“I respect a kempt yard,” William says. “But this house…”

What is left of the building sits in a perpetual state of falling, the siding shifted and the windows broken by the stress of the tilted frames around them. The walls have only remnant red paint chips and holes where doors used to be. The roof might cover a full two-thirds of the foundation, but at those areas, fear of collapse far outweighs the fear of weather. Vines keep this pile a home.

With a light push, the door creeks back on broken hinges. William lights a cigarette and steps past Philip, who absorbs the dismal circumstance with wide eyes. Philip follows, gentle pressure to the aching floorboards before he commits to each step. He matches the spotlight’s sweep to his neck’s slow rotation.

Locating the stains from a dead body can be difficult. The house may be completely perfect otherwise, entertaining the possibility of a wrong address. And nobody knows the importance of a correct address more than William. Busting through a front door with plastic bags and uniforms asking where the body was demands a certain level of good excuse should a mistake have been made. The first time, William refused to admit his mistake, ensuring the perfect family of four—more alive than most people—that dead body residue had to be around somewhere. Now, he knocks.

At 1309 Merchant Street, the address is not the problem. Finding the stain is difficult because everything looks dead. The mission becomes to first establish what was never human and then search. They tempt a hall dismantled to rotten wooden studs. The carpet starts dry at the front door and slowly dampens as William journeys deeper. Pipes fill the walls, exposed and rusty. All of this under the spotlight and the low light of a street corner lamp because, as the package might suggest, electricity does not exist in this home.

William rounds one of the only solid corners in the building, dragging slowly on the cigarette. He pans the room, the porous walls, walks the hallway and traces its peeling yellow wallpaper with his finger. The bathroom stinks of dust and swollen drywall. In the kitchen, he finds a blood splatter covering half of the refrigerator and three of the four cabinets lining the countertop. The brown stain still looks human. William can see the outline of arms and shoulders, but where the head should be there is a hole, opening into drainage pipes from under the kitchen sink. A few small dots radiate from the center. A typical shotgun death. Possibly self-inflicted. Possibly not. He’d be able to guess more accurately but by the time he and Phillip arrive the body has already been removed, its tissues already embalmed, and the few lines of newspaper commentary already drafted.

Philip starts in with a mop. William pulls on gloves and heads toward the kitchen counter in search of larger debris that may have been overlooked during the initial rundown. He finds a small patch of hair, still attached to skull or a chuck of wood, and peels it from the wall. The hair could be mold, but by the time they complete the cleanup everything will be in plastic bags anyway—the carpet, any untreated porous wood, their rags and mops.

“Why do you think it happened?” Philip asks. This sort of speculation is a common game for the two of them, guessing what might have turned a body into a mess. Why did this person die and—unspoken, but etched on both faces—am I in danger of the same end?

“I don’t know.” William’s typical response, and as his fiancée’s pregnancy packs on months his retort grows increasingly somber.

“This guy obviously wasn’t married. We can be sure of that. No woman would keep a house like this.”

William nods, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, and continues his hunt.

“We can rule out wealthy, too.” “Of course,” William says.

“But by the lawn I’d say he took pride in appearances, cared what people thought. Maybe a miser or something. Rich as hell but frugal to match.”

William nods. Philip paces along the remains of a main support-wall, stroking the cracked wallpaper, kicking through piles of paper, boxes of trash, which judging by the smell have sat undisturbed since the day the final resident escaped. He kneels down to a small box, digs through its disintegrating paper and finds what he yells is, “The mother load.”

He pulls a few stacks of paper from the box and shoves the find in William’s face. “Photographs,” he says. “These people were perfect.”

“They weren’t perfect,” William says. “They wouldn’t have been squatting here.”

“Look at these people.” He shuffles through the photographs, paying the most attention to the family portraits—mother, father, children. The sepia-toned subjects are old, dated, great-grandparents and their children. None likely to be the body belonging to the stain they’ve been called to clean. “Looks like this guy had a pretty good family. Why he’d go and shoot himself, I could never guess.”

“We don’t know it was suicide,” William says.

“I envy him is all. I’d love a family this good looking. And he had to have found something special with these people. Why else would he lug a box of photos with him to a dump like this?”

William shrugs.

“Maybe he just didn’t understand what he had.”

“It’s possible,” William says. His stomach rumbles again. “Check the cabinets,” and he flicks his exhausted cigarette filter at a wall. It explodes against the wood, raining fire to the floor.

“Good thinking.” Philip drops the photos, leans his mop against rain-saturated drywall, and approaches the cabinets. “Lots of cans, instant potatoes and stuff. Might mean lazy, might mean busy.” Philip pulls his respirator down over his face.

William’s stomach rumbles again. He sets his biohazard bag on the ground and approaches the cabinets. Staring up to the food, he opens a drawer by touch, finds a spoon, a bowl, and grabs a half-empty bag of chocolate cereal. “I’m not betting on milk,” he says to Philip as he passes him en-route to an open spot on the floor just large enough to breathe and eat comfortably.

Philip returns to cleaning. He wrings out his mop and whistles a muted tune through his respirator. He works for an hour, nothing said between the two of them, wiping down walls and rising dried blood from carpets with peroxide. Most of the carpet they will get rid of anyway, but William doesn’t stop him. Maybe it’s the cereal, dry, that placates him. He becomes lenient to breaking rules, understanding that he is in no position to criticize or judge right from wrong. The only noises in their little world are Philip’s soft whistle and the heavy crunch in William’s mouth.

Philip has always been the worker. Whenever they—

Drip…

Whenever they get out this late at night, Philip becomes a machine, and the hour doesn’t even seem to—

Drip…

Register. He takes pride—

Drip…

“What’s that noise?” William asks. He intends a sort of contemplative inner question, but by the look on Philip’s surprised face William has yelled. Philip might be scared, but this isn’t William’s purpose. He wouldn’t do anything to Philip, but if he’s willing to source the sound, William is not going to—

Drip…

Stop him.

Philip turns quick and in doing so pushes a puddle of blood along the wall with his feet. For a few seconds the drips flow to a hard surface below them. The sudden gush brings William to skim the walls looking for a drain, a vent, anything that would allow the sound of free falling blood and that splash at the bottom.

“What was that?” William asks. He doesn’t expect an answer. The comment serves only to announce the dropping at that place in his stomach, that place that pinches up at the possibility of unexpected work. He reasons that if the amount of blood they’ve heard fall and splash in just these last few seconds has been constant since the shooting, then there is a saturated basement below them, walls seven coagulated layers thick. His boots would have to be exchanged for the waders he has always kept in the van for their credential purposes but never actually planned on using.

William investigates slowly. “Precision” he claims when Philip suggests he hurry. But it isn’t. William’s logic is that if he ignored the slow drips and pretended the waterfall didn’t exist, then maybe neither would.

“I found it,” Philips says half-smiling. He drops to a blank stare when he sees William refusing to share in his excitement. Philip retreats: “Maybe it’s a crawl space or something. We could just let it all soak up into the soil. Splash some water, run the o- zone generator for a while.” Philip brings back the half smile. “At least that was probably all of it. It’s probably soaked halfway to the bedrock by now.”

They’re great thoughts, both of them, William thinks.

Drip...

One of them.

The cereal is stale, a realization allowed by curbed hunger. William sets the bowl to the floor and heads outside to search for a way under the house.

It’s early as the sun breaches the horizon. The air fills with moisture while dew shines the perfect grass. The men track blood from their soiled shoes behind them as they search. Three crimson layers, three times around the house and they’ve found nothing. From above, the house might appear marked for protection. Or the red circle they’ve formed is a target and the entire neighborhood is two seconds to parking lot.

William doesn’t notice until a yell sounds from inside the house that Philip is gone.

“I found it,” he calls.

Philip stands at the far corner of the house with his head and half his torso wedged into a barely open door. He slips in as though stealth would help, but even gaining upper ground would not abolish William’s fear. Full-size doors don’t open to crawl spaces. Full-size doors open to full-size basements, and William has already made up his mind to deny any good that can come from a blood-filled basement. Philip turns back as if wanting a boost, a few words, a blessing even. “Go on,” is all William offers.

He creeps, breathing loud enough to challenge the sound of creaking wood and the harsh sputter of his fingers along the handrail. He turns back to encourage his partner. That move is the only reason William follows.

Philip raises his hand to a string hanging from a light bulb and pulls three times before the absence of electricity dawns on him. William waits three steps from the bottom for Philip to return to the surface for his spotlight. In preparation for the impending climax William pulls out another cigarette.

At the first drag, he calms. He recognizes the false build-up and realizes that one body could not contain enough blood to justify their panic. Two drags and he exhales confidence. He hopes for the worst, something worth a story to back the panic— maybe something liable to extra pay. Brackenwood, and its crime-infatuated, overpopulated neighbor, Alexandria, are big enough, but sometimes just not enough people die violently to keep the bills paid as punctually as creditors would prefer. During the dry season William does road kill to keep Julie’s cable.

Philip returns, runs through William’s cloud of smoke, and lands at the last step as though the before and now are seamless. Philip sweeps light through the area in slow, even strides. William blows enough smoke to fill the room. The spotlight beam is strong, dying only as smoke dissipates. The sun strengthens and they know this only because the crickets have calmed and the world around them grows by slow degrees. The beam finds the corner and stops.

A body, a simple lump of blue skin, black hair, and features, sits molded to the corner. Not a stain, not a mess, but a real human being. Her eyes roll toward the light. In a final stretch for good news, William turns to Philip and shrugs. “At least most of her blood is still in her body.”