"What now?" Dirk asked, unsure.
"We change it," I guessed.
"I've never changed a tire before." Dirk shrugged.
I couldn't believe that I was in the presence of the first forty-oneyear-old guy who had never changed a tire.
"I think it's underneath the bed," he said, referring to the spare helpfully.
We both searched around for what I imagined the jack looked like, but we could find only a piece of it. With frustration and night setting in, I climbed under the truck, the dust settling a thin, dirty haze onto my new shirt, but found no conceivable way of freeing the spare tire from its locked mooring under the truck. The only car I had ever owned was my sissy little red Cavalier with its sissy little quartersized spare tire that any idiot could put on.
With our special, expensive, blood-detecting flashlights illuminating the phone's buttons, we dialed for a tow truck, Dirk now cursing up a storm.
"Make sure you tell them we're in a dangerous area…the tow truck will come faster," I said, but Dirk was in no mood to take suggestions. Cars whipped along the expanse of freeway beside us, late workers racing home to those warm meals, slowing only to laugh at us as they passed. Dirk called Martin next and assured him that we were still coming, failing to mention the holdup of the tire.
"Maybe Martin has a truck," I postulated after Dirk had hung up. "Maybe he knows how to get the spare tire down."
Dirk shrugged off the idea coarsely and, still not open for input, squatted to survey the pieces of jack we had to work with, mumbling to himself. I wiped the dust from my shirt and arm hair in vain, and wished I had my jacket.
Like a bald, chubby MacGyver fumbling with the pieces of tire jack, Dirk was able to jerry-rig a metal pole that would access the bolt securing the tire housing.
An hour later, no tow truck yet in sight, we had the new tire on and the old one taking up space in the bed, next to our crates. Dirk canceled the now unnecessary tow truck, and we rolled on in the darkness toward a scene we could only guess at.
* * *
The street signs of this particularly rural area of Riverside were handmade and impossible to see while driving at night, so once again our heavy, silver blood-detecting flashlights came in use as we stopped at each intersection and climbed out of the truck to read the murky print. I could imagine banjo-strumming inbreds hiding in the dark and eyeing my crotch like it was a plug of Skoal and some Lotto tickets. After we had passed his house twice going forward and twice in reverse, Martin called us and directed us through his gate at a little before 9:00 p.m.
He was taller and older than I imagined, a mostly bald white guy, most likely not inbred, standing barefoot on his gravel driveway in jeans and a white undershirt. Light blazed out of the front door ajar behind him, illuminating him and making him look angelic: our savior.
"I…I…I…don't know what happened, really," he rambled on, his composure fading in and out. "I went to the store…my wife was sick…has been sick…and well, I wasn't gone very long, but she got ahold of the shotgun, and she took her head off."
My first crime scene was going to be an old-lady shotgun suicide.
I felt like I had swallowed a brick. I couldn't think of a more visceral introduction to my crime scene experience.
Tittering with awkward uncertainty, we followed the barefoot Martin across his yard and into his house. The exterior of his faded yellow stucco, ranch-style house looked foreboding among the pale, moonlit "Hoovervilles" of Riverside. It was a low, one-story spread that took up a fair length of land in the rural country. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled its presence.
Approaching the front door, a heavy wooden French job, I felt eerie and voyeuristic. Normally I would never see the inside of this home, and in that moment I realized what I liked about working in porn. It wasn't the act itself but the ability to see in past the window blinds and beneath brassieres and up dresses. It was like having superpowers, like x-ray vision or invisibility.
I could walk where others could not, enter where others could not, and do both with impunity. It wasn't the fucking I liked but the power to watch others do it without repercussions. This was an odd epiphany to have at that moment, but I knew that once I walked through the door, my life was going to take on an odd slant, and I anticipated future philosophies of the sort.
I had mentally prepared myself to mentally prepare myself once I got in the house, figuring that I had the time it took to walk from the front door to the bedroom to center my chi or whatever the hell it was that people did to focus for the unpleasant and the unknown. So when I entered the living room and saw the mess, I wasn't ready whatsoever.
Blindly I had assumed that she had killed herself in the bedroom or the bathroom, but no. The view from the front door was unmistakably red and unbelievably pulpy. My eyes may have bugged out, but my jaw stayed firmly in place, as did any bile in my stomach. If I was going to throw up, it would have to catch me by surprise.
My not throwing up was an important contribution to the team effort, as we were supposed to be conducting ourselves as if we did this all the time. I stepped from the front door across the foyer and down into the carpeted living room, which was streaked with red rivers fanning out in every direction.
She had been sitting in a recliner in the once-white room, next to a little table holding her eyeglasses, her pills, and her
TV Guide
, the three now streaked with a melon-colored, flesh-toned sponge that could only have come from an exploded brain. Similar streaks, in various sizes and distributions, were etched across the wall behind her and onto a framed pastoral scene of a deer or two. Funny, it wasn't the pink color I was expecting, and yet when I saw it, it was unmistakable, even in dime-size flecks.
The recliner had been hit hardest. Blood was soaking into the fabric, pooling in the corners and accumulating around more chunky red pulp. Starburst like, it had spread from there to stretch out and touch a couch up against the adjoining wall.
I turned to face Dirk.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Yeah…"
"Do you want to do this?"
"…Yeah."
I followed him out of the living room and into the dining room, where the old man had taken a seat at the dining room table.
"She was in a lot of pain," Martin said, and it took me a moment to realize he meant before the shotgun blast.
"It's a bad time, I realize, what with it being so recent," Dirk said, "but it's important that we start tonight to make sure that the stains will come out."
"I understand."
"The cost for us to clean all this up is $750, because we're going to have to take the carpeting and the recliner and the table and everything on the table near her, if that's okay…"
"Probably also the picture," I said softly in my most sincere voice, not quite sure about the correct way to extract money and justify the cost to the grieving.
"I can't pay that."
"We can work with the price…"
"No, no, no," Martin said, his lips and face tightening to reveal a momentarily stiffer, more youthful man, a military man with wellhoned reserve. "Look, I'm sorry to call you out here. I know you drove a long way. Just forget it; I'll clean it up myself. I was a pilot; I've seen this stuff before."
My first crime scene wasn't going to be an old-lady suicide.
"Is it the price?" Dirk persisted.
There was a knock at the door behind us, and another old man walked in, this one a few years younger and with a lot more hair. Walking into the dining room, he put his arm around Martin. I turned to go back into the living room, feeling more comfortable with the blood and guts than I did with the human emotion.
"This is my neighbor, Fred," I could hear Martin announce from the next room. The rest of the house was clean but not sterile. It had a lived-in look that suggested that the folks who resided here had done so a long time. It was dark and the air smelled musty, like a comfortable cave.
Portraits of the couple hung on the opposite wall. I couldn't discern their features, but I recognized Martin's vague outline in them. There were also several metal placards advertising beer companies of which I had never heard. These accumulations of a full life lived made me feel a little better about the old lady's actions. If I had spent my life collecting as many metal beer signs as she had, I'd probably kill myself too.
I walked outside to suck in some night air and leaned up against the truck, not sure how to respond. I felt terrible that we were taking the old guy's money, but I was going to feel a hell of a lot worse if we had driven all the way out here only to stare at the scattered meat chunks of some old lady's face and not get paid, especially when I was undoubtedly worse off financially than the old coot. It no longer felt like this job was a divine mission from God to fill my bank account— hell, I couldn't decide if I believed in God at all anymore.
Dirk came walking out to me, nonplussed.
"We're going to do it," he said, emotionless.
"Yeah?"
"Martin's in shock. His neighbor convinced him to do it. But we're doing it for $435. I dropped the price because we're going to leave the carpet."
"Can we leave the carpet? Isn't that counterproductive to the whole crime scene cleaner philosophy?"
"No. We don't clean it if they won't pay for it." He grabbed his crate. "Let's suit up." I guessed I could believe in God for a little while longer.
* * *
The Tyvek suit—or "bunny suit," as we called them—was incredibly hot even in the cold air of Riverside. Stepping into the house covered up to my neck in a protective biohazard suit was like turning on a hair dryer in a pup tent. Sure the blood couldn't get in, but the sweat couldn't get out. Now I knew how the scientists who killed E.T. felt.
"Where do we start?" asked Dirk, suddenly nervous about things, which made me scared as well.
"I guess the recliner," I said, figuring that once it was out of there, the major part of the mess would be isolated.
"It's too saturated with blood to cut into it here," Dirk said, shaking his head. "We should carry it out intact and deal with it later."
Between us, we lifted the recliner awkwardly and then moved slowly, the weight of it more than we had anticipated. We heaved it out at last, though, through the French-door entrance and into the yard, where it sat in the dead of night for the neighbors to gawk at, and the coyotes to gnaw at, while we dealt with the rest.
With permission, we bagged up the pills,
TV Guide
, and eyeglasses for disposal, along with a trash can filled with wadded tissues that had caught some heavy hunks of grandma. We were going to toss the painting as well, but Martin begged us to clean it. "It was her favorite," he said, dazed.
I had just started on the walls, scrubbing at the crimson-splattered drywall with a furniture-stripping brush when I heard the sound of dialing from the dining room, followed by an echoed ring, eerily loud, and then another one.
"Hello?" The unassuming female voice came out of the ethers.
"Hi, sweetheart," Martin said slowly, loudly, unaware. "It's your dad."
"Hi, Dad, what's up?"
She didn't know.
There was a pause, and then Martin said, "Oh, your mom…she… accidentally killed herself with a shotgun today."
He was telling his kids via speakerphone while I was in the next room, scrubbing up mom's "accidental shotgun mistake." Worse than any part of the recliner and its gloppy, undermixed-paint look, worse than the thought of leaving the carpet, had to be overhearing that phone call.
"Oh, my God, what?" An instant release of tears mixed in, so that the words sounded fuzzy, but they were unmistakable and painfully horrible. I scrubbed harder, the coarse bristles doing their damnedest to drown out the rest of the phone call, but it came through crystal clear all the same.
"She loved you guys…you know that," Martin said gravely, and the shrill, unrelated cry of an ignorant and wanting child reverberated through the phone's receiver. "She was just so sick, and so tired, and she hurt, and it was just her time," Martin continued, his voice gravelly but unwavering.
I imagined I was listening to an iPod, the volume notched up, blaring out some rock song with thumping drums, but the only song my imagination could effectively conjure up was "The Star-Spangled Banner." It did the trick. I even hummed along aloud, wiping away the red blood from the white walls and feeling blue the entire time.
We had finished the wall and hit the spots on the couch that we decidedly weren't going to take, mostly because there wasn't enough room in the truck for it, and were starting to feel pretty damn done about things, when I noticed a wall in the hallway that somehow, some way had caught a good amount of the spray. The guts looked like caterpillars trying to inch into the darkness of the next room, but we used our flashlights and got them, too.
My suit was shredded at the knees from inching along the carpet to access the length of wall up to the brick fireplace. Blood had seeped into the fabric, and I prayed it had not breached the plastic lining separating it from my pants. But I still felt fairly good about the job we had done, despite the fact that the carpet still looked horribly streaked and bloody.