Read The Removers: A Memoir for Free Online

pronouncing doctor get this wrong? Is there a dead man alive in the car with me? “Orville, please stop,” I say. “Please stop, Orville.” I am alone, I tell myself. This person is dead . The light turns green, and when the hearse moves again his moaning grows louder and stronger. And then stops. We’re almost to the funeral home. Orville is almost returned to the state of existence in which he spent every one of his living days: not my problem. He lets out another moan so low, so long I feel tears coming. “Orville, please!” It’s 2:00 a.m. on a weeknight. My fingers are shaking on the steering wheel of a silver hearse. I am pleading with a dead man to leave me in peace.
    I back up to the garage at Wepner’s. I open the back door of the hearse. Slowly. My body is a single section of quivering bowel. Orville appears still. I’m sweating. Before I can put my hands on the stretcher to pull him out of the car, I take four deep breaths. What if he moves? What if he talks to me? I need this to be done before he talks again. I am expert at avoiding talks. I turn and punch in the garage door code I’ve been given by the answering service. When the door has finally receded up into the ceiling of the garage, I take a last breath and then yank the stretcher and race us inside. In the funeral home’s morgue I pull Orville’s body bag from the stretcher onto the embalming table. I let myself breathe. Icould leave at this point. Part of me is screaming, “Leave!” I’ve brought the body in. I’ve earned my thirty-five bucks. But I need to see him. I could argue it’s for his sake. If he’s alive he needs to go back to the hospital. But I don’t do it for him. I’m discovering that something in me craves the most baleful havoc this job can produce. If I’m a dinghy moored to my sad parents, to Frankford, to my own mounting failures, then maybe this job can snap the rope, blow me clear of real life’s dock, push me far, far away into some fantasy ether and leave all this drudgery shrinking at the horizon. I want this dead man to spring up and try to kill me, or at least wake up singing “Hello, It’s Me.” Something. Anything. I peel the bag back slow. Before I unveil his face, the part of me that wants to run takes one last dose of courage from the thought that if Orville’s eyes are open and focused on me then I will die instantly from a heart attack and not have to worry about him anymore.
    I start to believe Orville’s dead when I see his eyelids three-quarters closed and perfectly still—a trick the living can’t pull off—exposing only milky undercrescents of eyeball. He doesn’t sit up or yawn. I put my gloved fingers on his bare chest. It’s still. I don’t have the guts like Charlie to put my lips to him to feel for breath. Instead I pinch his forearm. Nothing. I am fairly certain he is among the deceased. When I’ve washed my hands I look at him one more time. “Orville,” I say, “I’m leaving now.” His eyes stay closed.
    I drive back to the garage in silence. At some point along Frankford Ave I realize I don’t want the night to end. Removals, these visits I now find myself making to the membrane between life and death, don’t feel anything like I’d expected. The dead are becoming the most vivid people in my life. They are for sure the only ones whose chests I’m touching.
----
    French I, freshman year of high school. There’s a bookcase in the back of the room filled with recent copies of Paris Match . Father Kibbie runs the class in a loose way, meaning he leaves large chunks of “study time” during which we’re beseeched to do French homework or read the magazines. I can remember many days sitting at my desk egging on a full erection incited by nude beach candids of Brigitte Nielsen. During one of these study sessions, something wet hits the back of my neck. A little wad of balled-up loose leaf, gummy from spit. I turn around and see a kid with spiky, flaxen hair who looks