The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus, Page 4

  “There was a man kneeling over what appeared to be a stretcher in the back of the hearse and covering up a body with a funeral home blanket,” County Assistant District Attorney Howard Chalmers told the judge. “They noticed that his pants were in disarray and his zipper was found, I’m afraid, down.”

  Whitehead told deputies that the cot “became loose and was rocking back and forth,” and he had gone into the back of the vehicle to secure the body. He later admitted that he had sex with said body, Chalmers said.

  The victim, Deborah Jo Hartman, had spent most of her life in state institutions and was transferred to Dix for treatment of a heart condition. The mother, Donna Coleman Hartman, said her daughter had the mental capacity of a three-year-old child. When Deborah Jo died, she weighed 72 pounds and stood less than five feet tall.

  The victim’s family and others in the courtroom shook their heads and muttered when Attorney Ryland R. Smith, also of Falls, claimed that he had no reason to think that Whitehead had done anything similar in the past.

  “I believe this was a spontaneous, isolated event and not a pattern,” Smith affirmed.

  He described Whitehead as “non-assertive, timid and compliant.” He said that at the age of 38 Whitehead had an inflammation of the spinal cord that paralyzed him briefly from the waist down. Since then, Whitehead had had “impaired sexual function” and “limited sexual activity,” Whitehead’s lawyer said.

  Smith claimed Whitehead may have been seeking a sexual encounter with a person or “non-threatening object.”

  The prosecutor said he was satisfied with the suspended sentence. If Whitehead had been given the standard two-years for the charge, he likely would have been released after serving only two months and would not be on supervised probation. What he will do for his 100 hours’ community service has yet to be determined.

  Whitehead, who worked at the funeral home for 17 years and was terminated shortly after the incident, chose not to speak in court.

  His attorney stated, “This case is one that from the very beginning had sadness written all over it for everyone involved. This ranks up there,” Smith elaborated. “This moment on 401 South, in the dark of the night, hurt this woman’s family deeply, it hurt Mr. Whitehead’s family, and it hurt Mr. Whitehead himself. This was an awful night, but he has owned up to it.”

  —Patty Hobgood-Thorp, Staff Writer,

  the News & Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina.

  I.

  DEPUTY SHERIFF Wade Watson Cutcheon, Jr., fifty-seven: his unedited tape-recorded testimony, taken at the County Courthouse, Falls, NC, 5:37 a.m., February 20, four hours after apprehending suspect Whitehead.

  A person thinks he’s seen pretty much everything. Babies we all are, when it comes right down to it. We have not got clue number one, now, do we?

  Betty? I will talk it all out. Please trim the rougher stuff and make it to sound official, okay, honey? I feel so lucky, knowing that my own beloved wife is the finest legal secretary in Tuscarora County. Helps steady me, knowing it’s you my voice is first going to.

  Okay, so me and Rocky get a call saying Mrs. Wembley’s greenhouse is being broke into. Again. The call comes every few weeks in cold weather, anonymous, and we guessed who’d made it. But you got to check things out or folks will eat your ass alive if somebody really does steal fifteen hundred geranium seedlings.

  I always use the five-battery flashlight you gave me, Betty. Shined it into the greenhouse (locked up tight as a tick, of course). I remember light scooting over all those baby plants. Little did I know what that good beam’d have to clamp onto not nine, ten minutes later. There was most of a moon out, everything in it looking orderly at present. Eleven forty-nine, we’re talking.

  So we was coming down old 401 South, snacking on your own excellent cheese straws. Rocky having finally quit smoking, we’ve been keeping the baggie in our cruiser’s (clean) ashtray. Some kind of good eating. I remember we’d just got serious about the upcoming Police Benevolent Barbeque Fundraiser at the firehouse—how many trestle tables we’d be needing—when Rocky says, “Wait one, Wade, bud. Now, who’d be having a funeral at the edge of Old Man Martin’s peanut field on to midnight with it being a February this cold?” Of course, in any town where folks call the police to check their geraniums, a hearse misparked after the witching hour is bound to draw a second glance. There’d been some drug smuggling over in Castalia. Private airstrips in tobacco fields, leather knapsacks still tainted with white powder. FBI got into it. A local deputy found three apple-red BMW 730s, keys, everything, abandoned in one ditch. Sure snagged him quite some glory. So …

  We pulled the cruiser over—and I played my five-battery wand across the hearse bumper and read Nowell-Johnstone’s Mortuary Needs gold-lettered crest: at least the funeral home was local. Some comfort. According to procedure, we split up and approached from opposite sides of said vehicle aforementioned. My light showed me a single set of tiny (probably human) shoe prints, leading from the driver’s door to the rig’s tailgate, tracks crawling right on up in there as unto the grave itself. Honey? My small hairs knew before I did.

  Long, black limo-wagoneer, waxed, moonlight soft-soaped all over and aimed at an angle like it’d been run off the road or had car trouble. Strange thing: if the hearse had been parked correct, we might not have noticed.

  “Lookee,” Rocky goes. That’s when I saw some crawling and scrambling in the back. First it appeared to be one large, weird, busy animal. A full moon lit separate parts of it, all moving like a pale bug, rowboat-sized, with maybe too many legs hooked on it and struggling to get upright off its back. Yuck. Moon kept making everything prettier and so, I reckon, creepier.

  Our lights caught a face behind the car window, a pair of eyeglasses. Blinking, it was. Flat-white, and under the blue-green of the hearse’s tinted glass, it looked like drowning, mouth opening, mouth closing. What seemed to be a man, looked to be kneeling, over what appeared to be a stretcher, in the back of what was sure as hell a hearse. The man was trying to cover the body with a blue blanket. I stopped cold. Even my flashlight tried to look the other way. Babies we all are, when it comes right down to it. We think we know decency, but we ain’t got the first idea of it, now, do we?

  I recognized the thick spectacles. Hadn’t I known John Bill Whitehead all my life? In school, had he not been considered book-smart, if doughy and kind of a runt? Hadn’t I given him a twenty-dollar tip after he’d done everybody so nice at Momma’s funeral and her looking so “natural,” plus fifteen for old maid Aunt Mary that won’t a real aunt but we called her that?

  Yes.

  “What you got ahold of back there, John Bill?” Rock hollered, jolly, not knowing what a mouthful he’d done asked. Our lights held Whitehead’s specs, glaring. Such a yanking up of breeches. Such wrestling, Jacob and his angel.

  I think it was Rocky went around, opened the back of the hearse-wagon. Out spilled Whitehead, white as the wax on your fig preserves. Kept fumbling with his belt buckle and zipper, with more manhood than you might expect from somebody so outwardly wimpish.

  Maybe if he’d just buttoned his black suit coat over the problem area, we wouldn’t have thought too much about it. Maybe I am wrong. Her being completely naked—I mean, the corpse—was, I’d say, prominent among our first early-warning tip-offs.

  Here it was, late February, quite the cold snap. In moonlight, our breath showed plain, cut through by flashlight crossbeams. A little fog was rising off the peanut field like the stubble peaks, Betty, on your lemon meringue pie: like little witnesses watching. We had to help hold John Bill up some, none too sure on his legs. Never what you’d call a big man nor a gruff one. This off-duty mortician just whispered: “Everything under control, boys. Routine matter, really, everything covered, boys. I should know what I’m doing here, but can’t thank you enough, boys, everything cov—” Then Rocky’s light found much that wasn’t … covered.

  It looked to be a child, spread-eagled, not real secretly: a girl-child.
That much even Sherlock’s Dr. Watson could have picked up at a glance. Only when we’d seen it was a girl-one did we understand about certain shapes we’d spied earlier, flung up on his shoulders. I ain’t going to say Whitehead was a-pushing into her like shoving a wheelbarrow, with the handles of her legs to guide him, but something like that—under oath, in however crowded a courtroom—is what I’m going to have to spill. SohelpmeGod.

  Whitehead tried explaining how the straps had slackened and she’d come a-loose. Due to speed bumps. Out here? Rocky, always a joker but with that gentle streak you find in most men his size, laughed. “She’s probably come a-loose okay, John Bill.” Babies we all are, when you get right down to it. We think we know decency and what local folks will do to other locals, but the majority of us good Christians ain’t got hint number one concerning what goes on “behind closed doors,” now, do we? It was only about then, my fast-typing Betty, that I begun to glom on to the full extent of it.

  If Mrs. Wembley—at least we think it was her—had not phoned in that anonymous tip as how somebody was busting into her glass geranium house; if we hadn’t then swung over to 401 South instead of our usual route past Millie’s Diner (it being so late that even Millie would likely be closed), Rock and me might not have noticed how crookedy that hearse was parked at a dead-end road where the high school kids like to go to smooch (but usually earlier). It wasn’t that original or clever a spot for John Bill to pick, not a whole hearse. And then we might not have caught him with the poor little Hartman girl.

  Whitehead kept trying to block the open tailgate with his body, arms out and fingers spread to make for a better screen. But we had viewed enough to where it seemed we’d best go on and check further.

  I go, “Stand aside, John Bill. Look at you—and a family man!” It was then he drew both hands up over his face. It was only then I noticed the white rubber gloves. Those scared me the worst so far: on hands way bigger and stronger than all the rest of him combined, rubber pale as roots. They forced me to step back one. If it hadn’t been for them gloves, and the lowered zipper he’d had such a hard time drawing up (because of those slippery rubber gloves?), the man might have got away with it for another seventeen years, and at the best white funeral home in Falls, too.

  “John Bill,” I said in a style that was stern but human, like a law officer but one who’d known him coming and going all these years. “John Bill … why?”

  Here, way off the record, I need to say that Rocky acted inappropriate. It was nerves, I believe. Referring to Whitehead’s heavyset wife—and with John Bill being such a jumpy, bent soda-straw of a man, not much taller than five-four would be my guess—Rocky says: “What, Doris holding out on ye?”

  That wasn’t funny for anybody concerned (little Hartman girl least of all) and Rocky soon regretted it, hearing the lack of response. But I want to cite it, not to get poor Rock in trouble, just to show how mixed up and end-over-end we were, all of us. Sex after death. It’s not something you bump into with the frequency of, say, Saturday jaywalking downtown. Lordbepraised.

  “Well, sir,” I told John Bill, “I reckon we need to see … the condition of the … of her … of the accessory….”

  I was righter than I knew.

  When Rocky lifted one handle of the stretcher, John Bill grabbed the other, maybe thinking if he cooperated we wouldn’t tell? And up to that point, I got to admit I was considering not—telling.

  Because I didn’t rightly know how to. Words never were my strongest suit. Betty, you know what I can do and what I can’t. But, hey, a person needs college to explain this mess. Needs medical school.

  In my mind I test-phrased it: “Guess what? You know that mousy John Bill Whitehead who has the rock-thick specs, and is one-third the size of his nice but humongous wife, and with a high-school daughter who’s just been tapped into Honor Society? Well … and you know the Hartmans’ Mongolian idiot child who has lived longer than anyone expected and has been in mental homes except for Christmas and Easter, when her folks dress her up like a doll in frills the color of bad cakes and punish everybody local by bringing her to church (at her age, twenty-five or forty, still carrying that same blue stuffed toy, long-since too old to wash)? You know how her folks just spite everybody who criticizes them for not keeping her at home and doing and caring for her and ruining their lives because they slipped up and had a child too late in life and there won’t enough left in either of them to make a whole person? Well … and you’ll never guess what.”

  No, I could not bring myself to even put these two unlikely characters in one sentence, much less stuff them in a single midnight hearse.

  But here was the other odd part. Odd, past its being so late, and past its being a girl I’d never seen but on major holidays and only then in pinafores, and even past its being a body naked as day. Maybe oddest of all, atop the pile of oddness already heaped up, was—I’ve got to say: the beauty of her.

  “What a body!” Rocky sighed, then caught himself, giggled but sounded punished. See, it made me know: beauty is odd, always. Odd like death—and near-about as surprising. Once you come to know how to see both death and beauty, why, they start fetching up pretty much everywhere. Betty, don’t be going thinking I’ve flipped. This is how it reached your Wade out yonder. (Feel free to trim all this before submitting.) But, out beside a field whose crop was moonlit fog, it was the beauty of her body that first made Rocky and me look at each other, and then look across it, and then look it over, and then check back with each other before turning shoulder-to-shoulder and staring afresh at John Bill. It was an ideal, miniature midgety body. Freeze-dried perfect, like a small, white, naked old-timey statue. I think it was Debbie Jo’s unexpected below-the-neck perfectness that told us we had not a lick of choice except to turn poor John Bill Whitehead in. I felt my stomach fist all up. Babies we each are, when it comes right down to it, and not having idea number one as to what-all some folks’ll try when nobody alive is around. Not the first hint do we got, nor do we want it, either, right?

  But Rocky and me both understood: we both could almost imagine it. Sure, we’d just seen the deed in progress. Which was rough. But imagining was even rougher. Know why? Because, that puts you into it. Her. Her coolish ankles mashed up humid near your ears. Sorry, Betty.

  Our lights were aimed down on one pert chest. Strange, but her tiny nipples drew to my mind my favorite boyhood candy, Neccos, little purple discs with a nice mediciny taste. The flashlight then found her small reddish pubic brush, and her legs as tapered and strong, if a little more bowed, than Sonja Henie’s. Of course, Rock and me are Veterans of Foreign Wars members, him from ’Nam, me from that overlooked Korean expeditionary mistake. But us two strong fellows studied each the other and knew; and then spun around and, as if trained in this at the Smithfield Police Academy Refresher Weekend Law Enforcement Seminar, both vomited.

  The orange from certain recent cheese straws made our act a mite more dramatic—out there in the blue mud and the brown fog and the clear moon. It was only then, I believe, that John Bill gauged our seriousness, once he’d seen us upchuck (or heard us, because, mercifully, we both aimed our lights elsewhere, though Rocky couldn’t resist, once it was over, from doing a quick check on his—only human).

  A trained professional, I at least scanned my watch throughout. It was 12:07 a.m. when we first seen the bad parallel park that hearse had made, as if “the Moleman” (as we used to call weak-eyed John Bill at school) had been barely able to resist stopping. Maybe he drove slower and slower till, four miles from surrendering her to Nowell-Johnstone’s funeral parlor, John Bill saw this muddy moonlit road and temptation activated his turn signal.

  At 12:09 our flashlights first found the facts I’d rather not have lodged into this oh-so-local brain (too much for somebody like me with a big heart but just a high-school education).

  At 12:11 we got John Bill, refastening his own unzipped lower body, off of her and out of there. My clipboard report states plain how both officer Rockf
ord Suggs II and yours truly “Retched, copious, 12:14.” Which must mean it was about 12:13 sharp when we started understanding, to the full extent of the law, what had gone on.

  By then we’d seen her body, the opened crotch just perfect, and we knew that in some small, un-law-abiding, ugly yet beauty-loving part of us, we too, on looking at her (the face still covered), felt a teensy bit of, if not desire, then … imagination. Yoosch!

  Forgive me, Betty?

  And John Bill, cleaning those big smudgy eyeglasses (God knows where they’d been) on his shirttail without even needing to yank it out, and Rocky noting (with a little help from his three-battery flashlight—gift of his wife, but not near so good as the one you gave me) that just a bit of the said shirttail was pooching forth out through the quickly shut, snaggletoothed zipper of John Bill’s black pants. Well, plainly, some deed from yours truly was now required. It’d already been tough. I mean, haven’t I known Whitehead for as long as I’ve been knowing I am alive on earth? Yes. So …

  Yours truly was forced to approach the cruiser, take up the handset, and risk reporting it. But in what language? Whose? In my head, I can sometimes imagine giving a sermon or a solid public speech. It’s only when my mouth opens do I hear a piss-poor used-car’s carburetor coughing. Still, here goes, thought I. In some way, your Wade already knew his life was changing. I hope I never have another case like this. I reckoned I would never again enter Bob Melton’s Barbeque without getting pointed out by somebody’s toothpick as the man that caught the undertaker doing an undertaking not exactly family-authorized.

  “Twelve-eighteen and over, Edna?”

  “Read you, Smoky. How many geraniums did that pot-smuggling gang swipe from a certain selfish Wembley woman, not to name names on air, ha, over?”