What To Do With The Bodies?

It was a Sunday night, raining, near closing when I crossed the threshold into The Cup, an architectural oddity in the shape of a cup. I’d worked there in high school. Inside, the place was much the same: curved front counter, low ceiling, smell of cheesesteaks. I stepped to the left to study the ice cream menu when the woman behind the counter ditched me for some dude near the register. I would have recognized his voice anywhere. And the eyes. And the mustache extending down both sides of his mouth, still groovin’ to the ‘70s. The Firefighter. 

This was one of the hazards of moving back home during a mid-life crisis: drawers being yanked open in my memory morgue. I tried to shape-shift into the Frito’s display, but he saw me, yelled out my last name, and stepped closer. I can’t say my stomach dropped or anything like that. He didn’t have that kind of power over me anymore. 

~

I was fourteen years old and The Firefighter was twenty-three when I got lost in his smoldering ash eyes. I don’t remember how it started: the flirting, circling the blocks around the firehouse on my 10-speed, bought with S & H Green Stamps, imagining what it would be like to kiss him, really kiss, not kid stuff like spin-the-bottle in an alley or someone’s basement. A bunch of us regularly stopped at the firehouse on the way to The Cup or to Bause’s, a drug store with candy, a soda fountain, and Playboys openly displayed. The gleaming trucks, the crackling CB, never knowing when the alarm might sound—the Firefighter had all that on his side, no small arsenal in a rinky-dink town, where kids got their kicks huffing Pam Spray out of a paper bag.

But for me it was a different kind of danger, flirting with something I could not name. In the past year, a line had appeared in front of me, and I wanted to meet him on the other side. I was different, but not—still wearing grubby Chuck Taylors, t-shirts, and gym shorts, with tube socks pulled up to my knobby knees. 

For months I was a sleepwalker through a smoky haze of infatuation as I replayed every word of our banter. I never imagined having sex with him. That thought frightened me. My father said, Men are animals. They only want one thing. Believe me, I know. As a devout Catholic and budding athlete, protecting myself from assault, sin, and pregnancy were becoming the bulwarks of my awakening sexual self. No, I was focused on a French kiss, a proper French kiss.

And then it happened. One late summer afternoon, nobody else around, between parked cars outside the firehouse, our faces close. No words. Our tongues met in a wet, electric shiver. 

~

That was not the first time a man had put his tongue in my mouth. I was twelve years old when my dad’s youngest brother, a sometimes-meth cook who claimed Squeaky Fromme once crashed at his trailer for the night, arrived from “out west” for Christmas. There was a festive atmosphere upon his arrival, and he came in fast for a hug, his tongue forcing its way into my mouth. Thrust and retreat. He laughed wickedly as he pulled away. Fear shuddered through me. Did that just happen in front of everyone, yet was invisible?  For a split-second, he had inhabited the place where words came out of me, and a silence followed. In two heartbeats, I realized I was on my own: I could not go to my submissive mother, nor my father, who would laugh like his brother. He himself poked, tickled, and grab-assed when I did the dinner dishes, and hugged my friends too long. After my father’s death, a woman told me of his attempted assault of her when she was a teen. By then I already had confirmation, from a survivor, of my dead uncle’s pedophilia.

Two years after what my uncle had done, maybe my 14-year-old self believed that the meeting of my tongue with that of an older man—on my terms—meant not that I was a slut or a vixen or a temptress, but that I was not a victim. I had agency. The Firefighter and I kissed one or two more times before I was swallowed up by high school life. Over the next few years, as I dribbled to a nearby playground to shoot around, his occasional, leering comments from behind the wheel of his black Ford Bronco felt sordid, while my true love—basketball—would get me recruited and out of that town.

~

At The Cup that night, he launched into a jaunty soliloquy about the huge pension he had amassed at a government job, and how he moonlit on weekends, with his truck, as a body transporter for the county coroner’s office. He said I could ride along sometime if I wanted—when he was picking up the bodies. Of course, I could not get out of the truck for crime scenes, but I could for regular dead bodies. I nodded knowingly. Of course.

He talked fast and he talked a lot and I let him, liking the idea that maybe he was squirming. At one point, he said to the woman behind the counter, “She looks exactly the same as when she was a little girl.” And he put his hand out to indicate the height of a young child. Was that whom he remembered kissing? He jotted down his cell number and email on a scrap of paper and handed it to me. Wow. Did he think we were going to pick up where we left off 35 years earlier? I suppose going on a dead-body run would make a great essay, but I didn’t need more material. I needed the right words to weave a body bag for these ghosts, a firm grip on the zipper, a burial ground.

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