 Somebody Found A Body
Somebody found a body in the woods and called the Chicago Police which was the right thing to do. But it was just an old man sitting with his back to a tree and a very pleasant expression on his face, an old man who had departed from this world about as easily and gently as it is possible to do. Had he been a mobster with his eyes shot out, or a beautiful blonde woman stripped naked, the Chicago Police might have looked upon this as an opportunity worth pursuing. As it was, they decided this was a job more properly suited to the other agency that held jurisdiction over this tiny patch of woods–the Cook County Forest Preserve Police. I was driving beat 416 that afternoon, and an officer we called "the Lady" was driving beat 414 which meant that she got the body and I showed up to assist. "We don't need you here," she said, as if I did not perfectly well know it. She was always that way, the Lady was, and that is why I have such pleasant memories of her to this very day. We were all there, Chicago, some other departments, myself, and the Lady. You can't keep cops away from a found body--once it is established that some other cop is going to do the actual work. Which is really not all that much. You're not going to push this poor old guy on his back, bend his legs out straight, and give him CPR. He's clearly a stiff, and to be perfectly honest, he looks as if he wouldn't come back if you gave him the opportunity to do it. Somebody went through his pockets and found his wallet, somebody called for the ambulance that would take him off to a hospital where he could be officially pronounced dead. The people at the hospital would make the call to the next of kin,. Nobody in our department ever made those calls. There'd been a time when we'd made them, but that all stopped when a certain Lieutenant (who really was as nice a fellow as you might want to know) was heard telling some poor woman, "Do you have a son named Kevin? Well, he's dead." Hospital people do ever so much better at stuff like that. The thing I remember best about this old guy was the way he was sitting there, I think on a fallen log looking out over a little pond that wasn't more than a mud puddle. He must have been out for his daily walk, and stopped to take a rest. What a nice way to die, I thought. Why are we so scared? You just go out, sit down, you don't even have to close your eyes. The last thing you hear, maybe, is a couple of crows quarreling in the trees. There were lots of crows in those days. It would be quite a few more years before the West Nile Virus arrived on the scene. When I first started police work, I dreaded the day I would have to handle my first body, but I was lucky all the way through. The bodies came, one or two a year, but for me they were always fresh, no maggots, no stink, no half rotted flesh. One body was even frozen stiff and we set him on edge like a cardboard doll while we went through his pockets. So I could view these things philosophically. For a cop, a found body in the woods is the next best thing to a coffee break. You have to have enough officers there to keep the curious from crowding up and spoiling the "scene" but that's not really so difficult to do. With everything else under control, all you do is wait for the ambulance, for the evidence technicians, for whatever the bosses want to do. Usually somebody does show up with coffee, and you sip it, and you swap gossip while you sip, especially from one department to the next. Cops are great at gossip. That's how I know all these cop shows on tv are phony. TV cops sit around talking about crime. Real cops gossip. There's not much you can say about the main item of this show, the dead man. He'd be more interesting if he were a murder victim, but not that much more interesting. A murder victim is just a guy who happened to die in a different way. Some guy who went out in the woods looking for a blow job and got his throat cut instead. Or some guy shot on the city streets and dumped into the high grass. Who cares who done it? Let the detectives worry about that, they're the ones who get to work in soft clothes and look cool and act important, and do you know what, they don't care either. Got an extra cup of coffee? They don't mind if they do. If you are thinking about dying, I recommend against doing it in the woods. I'm not sure where would be a good idea. The whole problem with dying, other than the obvious, is that once you've stopped breathing, there is no way you can protect yourself. Some stranger is going to come up and do stuff to you. Out in the woods they are probably going to take your picture, and it's probably going to be sitting around in the police files for years, if not forever. When I went through the police academy I saw hundreds of photos and slides of bodies in various degrees of decrepitude. Bodies hanging from tree limbs, bodies sprawled in alleys, bodies face up in the morgue, bodies swollen on the banks of streams, bodies stuffed into sewers, bodies burnt black in automobiles, bodies shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, crushed, and dismembered, men, women, children, the fat, the lean, the white, the black, the can't tell which. Naked bodies in the morgue. For some reason it seems wrong to me to take some poor dead guy's clothes off and then take picture of him. But if you are a body, there isn't much you can do about it. I'm not sure where would be a good place to die. The hospital? Total strangers come in and look at you. They yank you out of bed and wheel you down a long dark hall. You are dead and strangers are in charge of your body. Even when you die at home, you are not entirely safe. My first wife died at home, died right on our living room couch where she'd been watching Jimmy Cagney sing and dance his way through "Yankee Doodle Dandy." She'd been terribly sick and coughing and I'm not sure how much of that movie she actually saw, no matter, she'd seen it so many times she had it by heart. When she was young and pretty she would play "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" on the piano and sing it at the top of her lungs. Now she was wasted with cancer and I knew from the way she was wheezing and fighting for breath that we were very near the end. Somewhere in the middle of the show, when the wheezing and coughing got especially bad, I asked her if she wanted me to take her to the hospital. But we both knew there was no longer any point in that. Finally the wheezing stopped and she lay back on the couch and said to me: "I'm going to be all right now." Then she died, just like that, and the long struggle was over. The thing is, she'd made out one of those living wills. What she dreaded more than anything was that "they" would keep her alive on a respirator. She dreaded it so much she made out this living will, signed it, and give it to my son instead of to me because she didn't trust me to honor it. So, when the ambulance crew arrived, I didn't have it to show them, and of course they had to try to bring her back. I knew they couldn't. Hadn't I seen enough dead people by now to know when I was looking at one? But they tried. They laid her poor wasted body on the floor, got out their electric shock things and plastic breathing tubes, and went to work. She was my wife whom I'd been married to for over forty years, but now she was their body. They took her off to the hospital and I followed in my car and when I got there the doctor, a calm likeable woman slightly younger than my sons, said that she was sorry, but they had not been able to bring her back On the gurney, covered with a white hospital sheet, her hair short, dark, and straight and almost grown back from the useless chemotherapy, my wife looked more like herself than she had in quite a long time. She'd finally beaten the god damn cancer for it was dead right along with her. So you see, even at home is not a good place to die. Your poor body. People are going to mess with it no matter what you do. But at least at home there is someone who knows you, who can put his hand on your forehead, who can say your name one last time. That's what it is with these other dead people, the strangers you find in the woods or crumpled up in their cars or floating face down. They have names and they were someone, you know that full well, but until somebody shows up to claim them, they are just bodies. You look at them and you think of your own mortality. Maybe you pray, although not once did I ever see anyone ever do it. But mostly you keep on doing what you were doing, which is living. We didn't see too many bodies in this recent television war that went on in our living rooms. I understand there was some kind of an unofficial understanding that the tv wouldn't show anything that would too much upset upset the public. But every now and then you would see footage of American troops driving through the desert, and there would be some poor Iraqi curled up at the side of the road like a load of dirty laundry, maybe a soldier, maybe a civilian, as if bodies cared about such distinction. And the young men in the tanks or trucks by would look at that body, how could they not look, without so much as changing their expressions. Well, what were they supposed to do, give each other high fives? A body on the screen, that's just a picture. What those young men were seeing was real. Maybe some of these young men were seeing human bodies lying dead and unprotected for the very first time.. Maybe for those young men the world just got a bit bigger. Or smaller. More likely, they just lit another cigarette and kept on going. It's only a body. That's what some people will say. Well sure. But it's also all that is left of you. And there is no way you can escape indignity. If only you could vaporize one minute after death, simple fade into the atmosphere in a little puff of smoke, nothing left to be prodded and poked at, touched, photographed, nothing left for anyone to do stuff to. But that old man. He was sitting there so nice. He had such a pleasant expression on his face. He almost seemed pleased. The end |