refrigerated storage room in the funeral home and into the embalming room. His son, Willard, had delivered the body from the morgue earlier. Wearing a respirator over his protective outfit, Harold transferred the body onto the stainless-steel drainage table and pushed the cart out of his way. He covered Johnny’s genitals with a dark towel, then turned on his CD player and selected a disc:
Barbra Streisand’s Greatest Hits.
He and Kitty, his wife of twenty-eight years, had seen Babs perform in Las Vegas when they had been in town for a funeral directors’ convention. It had been a great show.
Oh, God, don’t make me listen to this shit!
With Barbara’s music filling the room, Harold washed Johnny’s body with a germicide-insecticide-olfactant. He swabbed the mouth and nose with the same solution, then plugged those orifices with cotton, to prevent leakage later on, and to protect the patient from insect infestation. He enjoyed being a mortician; his father, Lawrence, preferred the human aspect of funeral directing, interacting with the bereaved. But Harold preferred his dead patients to their living relatives. This John Grissom needed him, and the boy’s open eyes didn’t bother him. If he’d learned one thing in his years in the business, it was that death was a natural stage of life.
His son showed little interest in the family business. Willard acted as the handyman and groundskeeper and showed equal disdain for the living and the dead. He spent most of his free time smoking marijuana alone in a shed deep in the woods behind the Lawson Funeral Home. What a disappointment.
Humming along with Barbra, Harold massaged Johnny’s joints, working the rigor mortis out of them. Some people might have found this common procedure disturbing, but not Harold, who suspected most Red Hill residents found his profession a morbid necessity.
The ancient Egyptians invented the art of embalming: originally, they had buried their dead in the desert and the sand had kept them dry, preserving their bodies. But when they started constructing sarcophaguses and pyramids, moisture decomposed the bodies. The creative solution had been embalming and mummification. Modern embalming techniques concentrated on shortterm preservation.
Harold worked massage cream into Johnny’s face and hands to make the skin soft and pliable. Don Beelock, the assistant medical examiner, had done a fine job reassembling the body after the autopsy, but had been careless with the face, which he had only partially stretched over the skull before suturing it. This was typical of Beelock’s work, which resulted in Grissom’s face resembling a cheap dime-store mask. Setting his one hand on Johnny’s scalp and the other on the boy’s left cheek, he slid the entire face up.
Jesus Christ!
Harold inserted two oval-shaped plastic eye caps beneath Johnny’s eyelids; the grippers kept the lids closed. He stuffed cotton down Johnny’s throat to absorb purging fluids, then reached for his least favorite tool: the injection gun. In the old days, morticians had sutured their patients’ mouths shut with a needle and catgut. Times had changed. He pulled Johnny’s lower lip down and pressed the tip of the gun against the lower gums. He squeezed the trigger—
Ka-CHUNG!
—shooting a thick wire deep into the pink flesh. He repeated the procedure with Johnny’s upper gums, then twisted the two obtruding wires together, locking Johnny’s mouth shut. He discovered stubble on Johnny’s chin, so he applied shaving cream and used a straight-edge razor for a close shave. As the razor scraped Johnny’s neck, he raised his eyebrows at the sight of the bruise on his patient’s throat. Wiping away the remaining shaving cream, he held a class photo of Johnny next to his face. The boy had long hair in the photo, but Harold felt obligated to make him look cleancut. His hair had grown even longer and more unruly in the time since his death, so Harold snipped off a full inch
Barbra Streisand’s Greatest Hits.
He and Kitty, his wife of twenty-eight years, had seen Babs perform in Las Vegas when they had been in town for a funeral directors’ convention. It had been a great show.
Oh, God, don’t make me listen to this shit!
With Barbara’s music filling the room, Harold washed Johnny’s body with a germicide-insecticide-olfactant. He swabbed the mouth and nose with the same solution, then plugged those orifices with cotton, to prevent leakage later on, and to protect the patient from insect infestation. He enjoyed being a mortician; his father, Lawrence, preferred the human aspect of funeral directing, interacting with the bereaved. But Harold preferred his dead patients to their living relatives. This John Grissom needed him, and the boy’s open eyes didn’t bother him. If he’d learned one thing in his years in the business, it was that death was a natural stage of life.
His son showed little interest in the family business. Willard acted as the handyman and groundskeeper and showed equal disdain for the living and the dead. He spent most of his free time smoking marijuana alone in a shed deep in the woods behind the Lawson Funeral Home. What a disappointment.
Humming along with Barbra, Harold massaged Johnny’s joints, working the rigor mortis out of them. Some people might have found this common procedure disturbing, but not Harold, who suspected most Red Hill residents found his profession a morbid necessity.
The ancient Egyptians invented the art of embalming: originally, they had buried their dead in the desert and the sand had kept them dry, preserving their bodies. But when they started constructing sarcophaguses and pyramids, moisture decomposed the bodies. The creative solution had been embalming and mummification. Modern embalming techniques concentrated on shortterm preservation.
Harold worked massage cream into Johnny’s face and hands to make the skin soft and pliable. Don Beelock, the assistant medical examiner, had done a fine job reassembling the body after the autopsy, but had been careless with the face, which he had only partially stretched over the skull before suturing it. This was typical of Beelock’s work, which resulted in Grissom’s face resembling a cheap dime-store mask. Setting his one hand on Johnny’s scalp and the other on the boy’s left cheek, he slid the entire face up.
Jesus Christ!
Harold inserted two oval-shaped plastic eye caps beneath Johnny’s eyelids; the grippers kept the lids closed. He stuffed cotton down Johnny’s throat to absorb purging fluids, then reached for his least favorite tool: the injection gun. In the old days, morticians had sutured their patients’ mouths shut with a needle and catgut. Times had changed. He pulled Johnny’s lower lip down and pressed the tip of the gun against the lower gums. He squeezed the trigger—
Ka-CHUNG!
—shooting a thick wire deep into the pink flesh. He repeated the procedure with Johnny’s upper gums, then twisted the two obtruding wires together, locking Johnny’s mouth shut. He discovered stubble on Johnny’s chin, so he applied shaving cream and used a straight-edge razor for a close shave. As the razor scraped Johnny’s neck, he raised his eyebrows at the sight of the bruise on his patient’s throat. Wiping away the remaining shaving cream, he held a class photo of Johnny next to his face. The boy had long hair in the photo, but Harold felt obligated to make him look cleancut. His hair had grown even longer and more unruly in the time since his death, so Harold snipped off a full inch
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