The thin man was done. He smirked and turned, whistling as he strolled down the tiled floors and hallway. He pushed through the double doors, and I did as told: the important parts were bagged, and the loose edges were joined with needle and thread. Then came the sponge and the scrubbing. The refuse was incinerated, the knives and pans cleaned with soap and water, and the whole thing rolled away under a sheet.

On my way back from the cooler, I saw Harvey walk into the tiled room, stopping at the long countertop. He made an entry in the log book, his dark brown forearms bulging above blue latex gloves as he wrote. After closing and replacing the book, he looked over. “Got another call; it’ll be here soon.” Harvey pulled on the sleeve of his glove and released it with a snap, saying, “Me and Hershell are going for barbeque down the street; you can eat later.”

“Barbeque?” I asked, suppressing a wave of nausea.

Harvey chuckled. “It gets better later.”

Hershell came through the double doors and nodded to Harvey, and together, they strolled out the back door onto the loading dock. There was a rush of heat before it slammed and locked behind them.

Minutes later, the door buzzer sounded. Outside, a long, black car was backed up against the dock, idling with heat coming off the hood in waves. A weedy man with sweaty hair held a clipboard and a pen. He wore a cheap tuxedo, and his grimy, white finger pointed to a line on the form. “You’re new, right? Make your mark here—just like the U.S. Postal Service.” I took the pen and signed.

A second man in a tuxedo got out of the passenger side. He made his way to the rear of the vehicle and swung open the back, revealing a large, zippered, black vinyl bag with a central protuberance. He said, “Found in an old hotel near the beach—no AC.”

I went back inside and returned with a stainless-steel tray on a gurney. I grabbed one side, and the second man said, “I’ll take this end.” Several copies of Hustler and a naked Barbie doll came into view, lying under the bag as we schlepped it onto the tray.

The second man followed my eyes, saying with an odd grin, “He can’t use them anymore.”

Back inside, the contents were weighed and measured with a stained wooden ruler like a shepherd’s crook. Fingerprinting the slimy hands gave me the yips, and I dropped the roller inside. After completing the log, I left a note about my mistake for Harvey and rolled the bag and gurney into the cooler.

The supervisor was old and had an Eastern European surname. He rarely visited the tiled room but told me at my interview to clean the floors during work breaks. Harvey and Hershell returned to find me picking bone chips and hair out of the floor drains.

“We have a janitor, kid,” Hershell said. “Go eat.”

I left by the back door. The loading dock was at the rear of the huge hospital complex and faced a high chain-link fence dividing the satellite service road from a busy city street. The hospital kitchen and laundry were nearby—at least, the odors suggested so. After a few minutes of walking, sweat began to run down my cheeks, and I came upon a red Cadillac parked beside a large dumpster. The white liquid oxygen silo and its thick, ice-coated pipes stood next to the open trunk, where two men loudly argued. I crossed the asphalt, but one of them saw me and shut the trunk. I turned around and hurried back; my appetite was poor, anyway.

There were more arrivals after lunch: homeless drifters dying alone with worn-out livers and hearts; gray, unshaven men who came south in winter and stayed, hanging on in shabby rooms and cashing social security checks.

It wasn’t long before the logic of delivered death dawned on me: violence occurred at night, and the bodies were there first thing – quarrels punctuated by double-ought buckshot, drug deals gone wrong, and barroom knifings. By contrast, boating, traffic, and construction accidents were daylight affairs. Prolonged heat made death messy, but after a while, they all looked the same. I could have lifeguarded at the Y, but the morgue job offered career opportunities, or so said my dad. I rode the train and looked toward the weekends.

Mark was my friend that summer. He threw a speedball in high school but lacked control; after a few semesters of community college, it became clear that wasn’t for him. On Saturdays, his old Firebird lumbered across the causeway, taking us to the beach. The radio played hard rock, the breeze blew through the open windows, and the palms and pines swayed under the cloudless blue sky.

Mark spit tobacco juice into a half-full, two-liter Sunkist bottle he swirled. “My stepdad told me to get my life in gear.”

“When was that?” I asked.

“A few weeks ago. I came home drunk; he noticed and asked about classes.”

“Yeah?” I turned to him, squinting in the sunlight.

“I signed up with the Army.” Mark grimaced. “I report for basic training in September.”

I stared across the bay’s blue-green water. “Sounds extreme for getting drunk once.”

“It’s okay, really,” he said. “Can’t do this forever, whatever this is. The recruiter said I could be an MP, which would set me up as a city cop later on.”

“You want that?”

“I’ve got to do something.” He laid his hand on the dusty, cracked dashboard, coarsely vibrating as he accelerated. “Every week, I put a quart of oil in her. Can’t afford to get her head replaced—just want to make it to September.”

“Here.” I put a few dollars on the seat. “For gas.”

The beach was a world slightly beyond our reach. Silky girls strutted the sand while catamarans glided the shallow surf, strafing the shoreline and scooping them up. Clearly, the guys in the skiffs had something we lacked; they sure didn’t scrub dead bodies or put oil in their cars each week. We walked down the beach, thinking about those girls.

A month after starting, Harvey found me after a case. “Smoke?”

I shook my head. Nonetheless, he gestured toward the loading dock. I followed him. Outside, Frank and Hershell were already there, staring through the fence and across the road while they smoked.

Harvey took out a pack of Pall Malls and lit up. “It’s a bad habit; I know I should quit.”

Frank was shorter and wore thick glasses, his nearly ebony skin set off by the lime green scrub top. He turned to me. “How’d you end up here? Not a job for a white college boy.” He took another draw. “We’re garbagemen without a truck.”

Hershell nodded with a sly smile. “It’s okay, kid – we’re just interested.”

“Someone said this would get me into medical school,” I said.

Harvey placed his thick hand on my shoulder as he choked and coughed. Hershell roared with laughter. “Who told you that?”

Frank gazed at him flatly. “Ain’t funny, Hersh.” He glanced back at me. “Listen, kid, the doctors here aren’t right.”

Hershell stopped laughing and nodded. “True that.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

Harvey took a long draw. “Just watch ‘em. That’s all I’ll say.”

During those first weeks, all food, including my mother’s dinner, smelled like the morgue. The odor of badly spoiled Swiss cheese. But as Harvey predicted, things improved with time, and my nose accommodated to the new olfactory reality. I still balked at the barbeque joint, instead eating at the air-conditioned hospital cafeteria.

One of those lunchtimes, a man in a button-down shirt with a boyish haircut and a whiff of cologne sat down at my table, eyeing me curiously as I ate soup and crackers. As usual, I wore a green scrub top, and he asked where I worked and said I looked fit. I shrugged, but after a brief exchange that included the specifics of my job, his interest rapidly waned, and he left the table.

In July, an unusual request came across the desk. A body had been found, someone who was thought dead from a jet crash in the Everglades years before. Hershell told me to get a gurney and follow him. He held a jangling keyring and walked me behind the morgue to a long trailer with a loud cooling unit. He then opened the door like a real estate agent showing a duplex; there was an icy blast as it swung outward.

“We need to pull out an old body,” said Hershell.

“I thought bodies got burned or buried?” I asked.

“These are just parts – God only knows who they are,” he said. “This happens sometimes.”

Hershell directed me toward the back shelves, which, after a while, reminded me of the freezer back home: hard plastic-wrapped limbs and torsos covered with frost. Hershell remained at the threshold while I searched the numbered tags.

“This looks like the one,” I said, trying to grasp its odd shape in the cramped space – I looked down the row toward the door. “I can’t lift it.”

Hershell stepped back outside and waved me forward. “Drag it.”

The plastic-wrapped body parts were rolled back to the morgue and thawed over the next few days. Ultimately, I helped the doctor dissect the severed arm and chest cavity. Near the end, his thin blonde mustachioed mouth grinned strangely as he held the arm out to me. “Want a hand job?”

Afterward, Hershell gave me the keyring. “You know where to put it,” he said.

The next week, a woman was booked in after a ruptured brain aneurysm. She ended up with us because, coincidently, she had been raped the week before; the cops wanted to charge the perp with murder. She lay in the pan like the others, except she was in her twenties, had strawberry-blonde hair, and was physically stunning. There was a small crowd present when the doctor opened the chest and abdominal cavities. He made a T incision across her upper chest and between her perfect breasts and then proceeded to remove her organs. Harvey weighed the heart on the scale, calling out the result to the doctor – the lungs and liver were similarly recorded. A side-to-side head incision followed, and the scalp was separated and pulled forward, completely obscuring her face. He then sawed through the cranium in a band pattern. Bone dust fell on the corn-colored tile, and the skull cap came off with the tap of a shiny chrome hammer.

“Damn shame,” said Harvey.

Hershell walked over and shook his head. “None of us know our time.”

A detective wearing a tie and cheap-looking loafers stood at the counter, his sallow face with several days’ growth of red stubble. He chewed and spit tobacco into the sink and then walked over to her. By then, the brain was gone, revealing the bony skull base with its curved cuckolds for the lobes and tracts. From the neck up, she didn’t look human anymore. “Do you know what caused her death?” he asked the doctor.

“Subarachnoid hemorrhage from an aneurysm,” replied the doctor. “A surprising defect in her anatomy – unrelated to the rape.”

“You certain about that?” the detective asked. “Because it sure as hell should be.”

The doctor stroked her thigh with his gloved hand and swallowed hard. “Seems a waste, doesn’t it?” He leered at me. “Bet you never dreamed you’d be this close to…” He paused and, scanning the faces of the detective and the others, seemed to reconsider. “Just clean her up, kid.”

That afternoon, before the end of the shift, Harvey, Hershell, and Frank walked out onto the dock to smoke and motioned for me to join them. They stood and looked out over the concrete buildings, many stained black with mold from the recent rains.

The sun waned in the sky, and Frank, still staring toward the horizon, exhaled after a long draw. “You’ve seen too much here, kid.” He dropped the spent cigarette, ground it into the concrete with his boot, and turned to me. “Best to leave and forget.”

Mark and I still went to the beach most Saturdays; however, in mid-August, the Firebird’s engine froze up on the causeway while driving back. We left it on the side of the road, made the long walk to a pay phone, and called my dad to pick us up. We walked back, and Mark removed paperwork and a handgun from the glove compartment.

“Dude, where did that come from?” I asked.

“My stepdad gave it to me when I joined up,” he said. “This is a rough town.”

When Dad pulled up, Mark spit out his Skoal and wrapped the gun in his towel. After the heat outside, the interior of the Buick felt frosty, so I wrapped my towel around my chest like a kid coming home from the pool.

We dropped Mark off, and Dad talked on the drive home. “How’s Mark?”

“He joined the army,” I replied.

“I’ve heard the Army provides good job training,” he said.

“I guess it’s a career decision for him,” I said.

The following week, Mark scrapped the Firebird, and that was our last beach trip. I saw him once more before I left for college, but by then, he had already shaved his head, reasoning it would be less traumatic if he did it himself.

When I returned home the next summer, Mark was gone, and I got a job finishing concrete in the heat. In the end, Frank was correct; I had seen too much and didn’t go back. Forgetting was another matter.

– Richard Scott Morehead