One long and dangerously hot summer my friend Catfish cleaned the homes of suicides in Grand Rapids. Then he finds himself in prison, and the classification lady finds out about his earlier summer job. So when some elderly inmate two weeks from release wedges his head under the wheel of an idling semi behind the chow hall and waits for the truck to take off, they have Catfish clean it up. He’s the go-to guy now for the messes people make at our facility. All hours, day or night, like a doctor. Catfish.
I asked him once how many people he cleaned up during that one summer on the outside.
“A lot,” he said. “It was hot, like a hundred degrees for three months straight.”
“How many is a lot?” I asked. We were at a table by the softball field waiting for the energy to exercise. All we’d done so far was smoke five cigarettes.
“Have you ever seen the mess a shotgun in the mouth makes? Really, man, one is a lot.”
This is true of course, but he knew I wanted numbers.
He shrugged. “A dozen, fifteen tops.”
Catfish is half Mexican and half Irish. He’s short with a long, bald head and widely spaced teeth, the whole effect making him look like a homely extraterrestrial. He was in prison because he took his wife fishing, killed her, and sunk her in the lake. That’s his case, at least. I’ve read his transcripts—all three hundred pages—but I don’t remember the name of the lake or the name of the small town it was near.
What I remember most about the transcripts is that his public defender put him on the stand in his own defense. His defense was that they fought, she died, he panicked and weighted her down with some bricks he found along a secluded bank. The worst part of the three-day trial occurred when the prosecutor asked him what he did after he’d sunk her. “I kept fishing for catfish,” he said. Even reading the scripts, I could see the jury: twelve middle-aged white people, their mouths collectively open, revealing the small black holes of the accused’s future. I doubt they even paid attention after that.
I’ll just come right out and say it: I don’t think Catfish killed his wife. I’m pretty sure his sister killed her because the wife stole her crack, and Catfish took the rap. On and off for the past year I’ve tried to get him to admit it. I’m not sure why, except I don’t think he should carry that weight all alone. He won’t do it, though. He’ll talk around the subject, about how his sister and his wife really hated each other, about how they both loved to smoke crack, and once he said, “Mary stole—” and that was it. He stopped himself.
So we got off the table finally, at the same time, like a couple of birds that agree to fly away without a sound between them. It was the first day of March and we needed to get back in shape. It was cold still but there were twenty or so guys walking around the asphalt track.
We walked in silence for a few minutes then stopped and did twenty push-ups on the grass near the guard tower. It was sunny but there were still patches of snow around the yard. We walked awhile longer and after our second set of push-ups he told me there’s a serial shower crapper on B-Wing. “About once every three days, they call me to clean it up.”
I asked if he’d rather clean up crap in a shower or suicides. “Suicides, definitely,” he said. “After three or four, it’s no worse than—I don’t know—cleaning a bunch of fish. With suicides you wear a respirator and it’s mostly a bunch of scraping. It’s the same thing all over the room, brain and bone, sometimes parts of teeth. You think of something else. You can be putting the last of a guy’s head in a bag thinking of who Detroit’s playing tonight, whether Rentería is going to come out of his slump, what you’ve got to pick up for dinner.”
We did our third set of push-ups. My arms were starting to feel a little rubbery, but I wanted to get at least one hundred in, and at least three miles. As we warmed up we took off our coats, state-issue blue with a bright orange stripe down the arms and back.
About half the homes he cleaned were middle-class: nice and neat, except for the room, usually a smaller room, like a closet or basement. The other half of the homes were dirty, messy with signs of obsession such as stacks and stacks of every issue ever of a magazine. The homes of the mentally ill. They smelled different, he said. They were dark. The shades were drawn.
The last home he cleaned was a house trailer. Dirty dishes everywhere, Catfish said, not just in the kitchen but the bathroom and bedroom, the bathtub, oven, the fridge.
There were three piles five feet high of Scientific American. There were full ashtrays of Kools. A small TV sat in front of a well-worn recliner. A police scanner occupied a TV tray to the left of the chair alongside an empty bottle of champagne that the man used as a candleholder. There was a half-burned yellow candle smelling of butterscotch when Catfish went to clean.
And then the room. There was always the room. “You’re told which one and where it is, but you can smell it first without the respirator on. Especially when it’s hot. It’s not rotten, so much as a cross between gunpowder and old hamburger meat,” he said.
His boss, Cindy, would stand outside the white panel van equipped with five-hundred-gallon tanks of cleaning solution and hot water, huge coils of thick gray hoses, levers and switches on a complicated control panel. It was a van-size vacuum cleaner powered by a mufflerless diesel generator, the sound of which let everyone within a mile know something serious was taking place. The fifty-foot hose snaked from the van to Catfish’s long steam nozzle, which sprayed hot, sanitizing cleaner on the forward pass, then vacuumed the now-bloody solution on the pull back. The hose coiled then released like a python as it sprayed and vacuumed, vacuumed and sprayed. His boss ate Cheetos while Catfish worked, staining her fingers the fluorescent orange of a traffic cone.
The man had killed himself in his bedroom. It must have been a side-aimed pistol shot because the mess was on the wall, as opposed to the ceiling, indicating a barrel in the mouth. The cleaning was ordinary, except for the pictures on the wall: six of them in glossy color, eight by ten, framed in glass. They were a series of one event with the time and date each one was taken written in the white ink of a gel pen on the lower left corner. Catfish knew right away what the series recorded.
Outside the door of the suicide’s trailer, a glow in the sky many miles away. Catfish remembered seeing that glow from his own house, how it was preceded by a low rumble and a flicker of the lights. His TV went off and everyone in the neighborhood went outside. He thought a jet had crashed somewhere around Gerald R. Ford International, and he knew then why he’d dreamed for years about all manner of aircraft disintegrating before his eyes—once or twice a year, ever since he was a kid. In the dreams the sky was full of them, all flying in a frenzy, until suddenly they didn’t, and he’d watch them fall one by one in a fiery trail. He was watching people die, he knew. Why planes? he’d often wondered, until this rumble and glow led him out that cold night. He was nervous but also excited as he got in his car and drove south toward the glow.
This one had considerably more of the man stuck to the glass. Catfish sat on the bed, and with a soft rubber scraper he slid the viscous matter into the red biohazard bag then cleaned the picture with bleach wipes.
The picture was taken without flash through the front window of the man’s car. The glow is closer now. There’s a line of cars ahead of him. As Catfish drove closer to the site, he knew for sure it was definitely not a building. There were only fields for miles and miles. The perfect place for a jet to crash.
Fire, fifty to a hundred feet high over the tops of trees. Catfish looked for the detritus of a plane crash: seats, luggage, scattered contents of bright white socks and shirts and underwear. He looked for wreckage. He looked for something he would remember forever: a lady’s wig blowing across the field, a hand on the road, a laptop that had turned itself on glowing next to the road. But there was nothing yet. He rolled down the window and heard the loud, shrill scream of what may or may not have been a jet engine still running. He smelled fuel of some kind.
The fourth picture is bright and beautiful. A long, clean flame shooting straight into the air. The only darkness to contrast the overwhelming fire is the bodies of the onlookers at the bottom of the frame. Catfish could have been one of these people, his hands over his ears, leaning slightly forward, as if trying to soak in some of the heat or light. It wasn’t a jet crash after all but some sort of exploded gas transfer area. People in silver suits walked toward the fire.
I asked Catfish if he was disappointed that it wasn’t a plane.
“Relieved, mostly. Some dreams, you know, you don’t want to run into.”
A hole in the upper-right corner, small caliber, maybe a .22. The glass was shattered and there was no way to decontaminate it. Brain, hair, skin, and blood. The picture had been taken driving away, the glow at about the same intensity as driving toward. If you didn’t know about the event, if the photo was not part of a series, it would have been meaningless. Catfish slipped the photo from the frame and into a separate biohazard bag. It still hangs, he thinks, on the wall in the home where he used to live, in the home where his mess of a sister lives now.
Two hours after the first. The same view as picture number 1, except there’s no glow. A quarter moon has risen in its place. A chunk of ear stuck to the glass of this one, though cartilage and bone look a lot alike.
When Catfish came home from seeing the fire his wife was watching it on the news. Her name was Mary and that night she wasn’t smoking crack. She was drinking Popov out of the bottle. She offered the bottle to him when he walked in, and he took a big drink, then another. He handed it back. She said he smelled like oil or something, and she told him to turn out the lights to see if he glowed. He didn’t glow but she capped the bottle, dropping it to the carpet floor, undressed him and pushed him onto the couch. She tied his hands behind his back with his belt and wouldn’t let him move. Cheap vodka always made her aggressive.
We finished the last of our push-ups and I think we probably walked over three miles, but I stopped counting laps after a while.
Sometimes you only get one chance, and right then was mine. He would have told me what I already knew. It might have been as easy as saying his name. Or I could couch it in easily deniable terms such as “Your sister made a mess and you had to clean it up, right?” He would have nodded, I think, happy to have one other person in the world that knew.
But it’s not so easy to know when a chance like that is passing.
“It’s not too bad out here as long as you keep moving,” I said.
“How many laps did we do, you think?”
“A dozen, at least.”
“We need to do this every day,” he said, lighting up a cigarette, subtly acknowledging that we would not do this every day.
I was thinking about that fire and about how Catfish must have felt he was driving to his destiny, no matter how horrible it was. After all those years dreaming about crashing jets, he was headed toward his dream come true. Then, as if he was thinking about the same thing, he said, “Maybe I was a little disappointed.” We walked in the direction of our unit. “Not that I wanted anyone to die, understand.”