New Jersey Noir Part 1

NEW JERSEY NOIR.

Joyce Carol Oates.

Miles of black turnpike and parkway pavement scrolled out onto the soil of the no-longer farms.

You could speed now from one place to another and not see the slums, the factories in broken-eyed ruin.

Everywhere ruin-did n.o.body see it arriving?

-C.K. Williams, "Newark Black"

We are happy with the fake, and happy with the real, but the near real-the too near real-unnerves us.

-Jonathan Safran Foer, "Too Near Real"

INTRODUCTION.

HOW BLACKLY LOVELY: NOIR IN NEW JERSEY.

During the past several decades, "crime"-as historical fact, as literary subject, as theme and variation-seems to have acquired a mythopoetic status in our American culture. To write about crime is to focus upon American life in extremis: as if distilled, pure. The complex and overlapping worlds of criminal behavior and law enforcement, highly publicized criminal trials, the dissolving of the putative barrier between "business" and "crime"-a subculture of intense interest in the phenomenon of serial killers and a new awareness of "victims' rights"-these have become significant culture issues; as in a novel by Balzac or Dostoyevsky, in which a dense swath of society is minutely examined, the anatomizing of both high-profile crimes and more ordinary, even quotidian crimes has become a way of exposing the American soul. The considerable success of Akashic Books' ambitious Noir Series is both a testament to this American preoccupation with crime as a way of decoding American life and a symptom of the preoccupation.

Noir isn't invariably about crime, nor is the subject of crime invariably a noir subject, but the two are closely bound together, as in this collection of original, highly inventive, and disturbing noir stories, poetry, and art set in the "Garden State"-a t.i.tle meant to be taken literally (for New Jersey is beautifully rural, hilly, and even pastoral-once you are off the Turnpike and out of range of those powerfully pungent smells of industry), though many inhabitants of the state would guess that it's meant as a cruel irony.

Noir isn't subject matter so much as a sensibility, a tone, an atmosphere. Noir is both metaphor and the actual-raw, ravishing-thing. Noir is the essence of mystery: that which cannot be "solved." Most of all, noir is a place-"a certain slant of light"-in which a betrayal will occur.

Noir is the consequence of an individual's expectations, hopes, or intentions confronted by the betrayal of another, often an intimate. Noir is usually-though not inevitably-s.e.xual betrayal: death is a secondary matter, set beside the terrible betrayal of trust.

Quintessential noir centers around a man-(yes, the genre has been male-oriented, by tradition)-whose desire for a beautiful woman has blinded him to her true, manipulative, evil self: the (beautiful) female as evil, like the primeval Eve. (Unbeautiful women can be evil too, though men are not so likely to be seduced by them, hence betrayed.) But the noir betrayal can range farther and deeper and can encompa.s.s, in more ambitious works of art, a fundamental betrayal of the spirit-innocence devastated by the experience of social injustice or political corruption.

Which is why works of enduring significance-Aeschylus's Orestia, Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, to name just a few-owe their genesis not simply to crimes but to unspeakable, hideous, taboo crimes: "sins" against humanity.

Noir as the primary human condition: the betrayal of one's kind.

Our indigenous and most glamorous American noir is likely to be identified with the Los Angeles of James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity), Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely), Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest)-that is, the Los Angeles of the 1930s and '40s. These are "cla.s.sic" noir works of fiction in which the femme fatale is a locus of evil, as she is the prime mover of plot: without the primeval Eve, there is no mystery, therefore no story. But they are cla.s.sic noir works in which the (male) voice of the private detective, and his distinct, post-Hemingway sensibility, are raised to the level of art, not merely pulp entertainment. The private detective as a variant of a crusading knight-the "incorruptible" (male) consciousness seeking to make sense of a labyrinth of lies, double crosses, betrayals, murders. Though in life private detectives are virtually never involved with homicides or crimes of great significance, in noir literature and film the private detective is a successful compet.i.tor with the police homicide detective, and is not bound by the officer's putative code of behavior.

The private detective is both cynical and, oddly, innocent-open to being deceived, at least temporarily. That the private detective is open to being betrayed makes him our alter ego in the struggle of good-and-evil-the struggle of good to know evil, to name and conquer it.

These cla.s.sic noir t.i.tles, made into equally cla.s.sic films, have exerted a powerful influence upon American successors well into the twenty-first century-James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, Tom Cook, Patricia Cornwell, and Laura Lippman, among numerous others. These are "crime" writers but the focus of their concern is moral: the knowing, naming, and conquering of evil. Where noir falls beyond the compa.s.s of the questing detective as in, for instance, the sequence of graphically violent, neo-biblical allegories of the West written by Cormac McCarthy (from Blood Meridian to No Country for Old Men and The Road), there is only the knowing and naming of evil-there is no conquering of evil. The human hope is for mere survival.

Noir has flourished in films, particularly in the wake of the influence of displaced European filmmakers (like Fritz Lang) after World War II and the Holocaust-giving to even conventional Hollywood films like Henry Hathaway's Niagara (1953), with its final, eerie, starkly German Expressionist scene of the killing of the unfaithful Rose (Marilyn Monroe in her breakthrough screen role) by her vengeful husband (Joseph Cotten as a traumatized and "impotent" war veteran), a mythopoetic gravity. Cla.s.sic noir films-from Tod Browning's Freaks (1932) to Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's Vertigo (1958)-are too many to list; outstanding neo-noir films include Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997), and the more recent, innovative Memento (2001) by Christopher Nolan. In television, there have been relatively few noir standouts-the Kafkaesque The Fugitive (196367), the highly stylized Miami Vice (198489) with its pounding, erotic pre-MTV music track, and the more gritty police procedurals Hill Street Blues (198187), NYPD Blue (19932005), and Homicide: Life on the Street (199399). Of the two television series generally named as the greatest achievements in the history of the medium, both are brilliantly original noir dramas-The Sopranos (19992007) and The Wire (200208). Famously set in New Jersey, suggested in the opening credits as an appendage-that is, a "suburb"-of the more powerful crime families of New York City, The Sopranos is based upon creator David Chase's inspired adaptation of New Jersey Mafioso history including the careers of the Newark "G.o.dfather" Ruggiero Boiardo (18901984) and Abner Zwillman, "The Al Capone of New Jersey" (190459). (Zwillman was the most famous Jewish crime boss of his era; as C.K. Williams notes in "Newark Black": Our gangster hero, Longie Zwillman, who had a black car.) It was Chase's brilliantly original interpretation of the Mafioso legend-the operatic gravitas of Francis Ford Coppolla's G.o.dfather epic rendered in diminished, often domestic images-that made The Sopranos like no other crime saga in film or TV history. So thoroughly has the iconic thickened figure of Tony Soprano saturated American popular culture in the early years of the twenty-first century, it's as if the image of "New Jersey" itself has been transmogrified into a set-a backdrop for the ongoing drama of organized crime in collusion with a corrupt political leadership. In place of the archetypal elder G.o.dfather Vito Corleone of The G.o.dfather, played with dignity by Marlon Brando, is the distinctly less elevated but very New Jersey Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini.

(Among Jersey settings memorably used in The Sopranos is the teasingly protracted, mordantly funny sequence t.i.tled "The Pine Barrens," in which Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti try gamely to kill a Rasputin-like member of the Russian mob in the wilderness of South Jersey from which they are barely rescued after becoming hopelessly lost. The subtext of the episode seems to be that "organized crime" is an urban phenomenon: lost in the wilderness, if only the relatively tame wilderness of the Pine Barrens, the bl.u.s.tering Mafioso are helpless as children.) More recently, Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed Boardwalk Empire (201011), set in Prohibition-era Atlantic City, draws upon Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City by the New Jersey judge and historian Nelson Johnson; the HBO series is a fictionalization of the flamboyant life and career of the entrepreneurial Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, a Prohibition bootlegger who hosted what is said to have been the first national organized crime syndicate meeting, in 1929, with Al Capone and other mob bosses, photographed companionably together on the Atlantic City boardwalk.

The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire are noir romances. Boardwalk Empire in particular is rich in 1920s period detail-costumes, automobiles, hairstyles, vernacular speech; unlike Tony Soprano with his loose-fitting sport shirts and careless grooming, Nucky Thompson is the gangster-politician as dandy and visionary. Though frequently and graphically violent, The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire are populated with characters who are domestic and familial; their most intense concerns are with human relations, not "business"-or not exclusively "business." (It's a measure of the romance of The Sopranos that the mob boss Tony Soprano is so unfailingly solicitous of his wife Carmella-even when they argue, Tony doesn't beat her. And his immense patience for his excruciatingly self-absorbed children is equally impressive.) Like the serio-comic mystery series by Janet Evanovich, featuring an unlikely female bounty hunter in Trenton, New Jersey, and particularly popular with women readers, these HBO dramas appeal to an audience for whom the noir quest-the knowing, naming, and conquering of evil-is linked to colorful storytelling. Not even Martin Scorsese would wish to cross the line into the annals of real-life, unorganized New Jersey crime at its most extreme: the infamous rape and murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka, for instance, in Hamilton, New Jersey, in 1994, by the serial s.e.x offender Jesse Timmendequas (subsequently incarcerated in New Jersey State Prison); the five or more murders committed by the psychopath Richard Biegenwald, of Monmouth County, between 1958 and 1983 (Biegenwald died in New Jersey State Prison in 2008); the slaughter of his family in Westfield, in 1971, by the accountant John List (who died in prison custody in 2008 at the age of eighty-two). Noir is a highly selective art-and such brute ugliness isn't redeemable by art.

In this volume, no work of fiction or poetry directly evokes such crude, h.e.l.lish crimes, but the surreal-nightmare family snapshots of Gerald Slota's art at the start of each section comes closest to evoking the "pure products of America" (to use William Carlos Williams's striking phrase) from which these terrible crimes and criminals might spring.

New Jersey!-"The Garden State"-our fifth smallest state, with only Hawaii, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island below it in land ma.s.s, yet it's the state containing the "most murderous" American city (Camden) and the state generally conceded to be, square mile per square mile, the most densely politically corrupt. (Louisiana has been, by tradition, the most corrupt of all U.S. states, but in recent years Illinois has been closing the lead.) Atlantic City, Jersey City, Hackensack, Hoboken, Secaucus, Newark, Camden (three recent Camden mayors have been jailed for corruption)-in these cities as in others corruption isn't aberrant but rather a way of (political) life. (Why? The answer seems to be that New Jersey is a maze of overlapping and competing munic.i.p.alities-556, to California's 480-that bring with it rich opportunities for political entrenchment, deal-making, and outright thievery.) New Jersey is among the wealthiest of states, with a per capita income that was the highest in the United States in 2000; judged by the desolation of its inner cities, it is simultaneously one of the poorest. New Jersey is a microcosm of the profoundly unequal distribution of wealth in the United States generally-within an hour one can drive from the wealthy exurbia of Far Hills and Saddle River to the dismal poverty of inner-city Newark; from the mansions of Princeton to the desperate poverty of inner-city Camden. Within an hour's radius of Princeton University, the most heavily endowed (per student) university in the United States, with an endowment in excess of $25 billion, are inner-city schools in everdesperate need of funds. Sitting between the great cities of New York and Philadelphia, New Jersey has been by tradition a heavily "organized" Mafia state, as it was at one time a northern outpost of the Ku Klux Klan, with a concentration of members in Trenton, Camden, Monmouth County, and South Jersey. (Officially, the Jersey Klan was disbanded in 1944, but a writer friend of mine, now living in Princeton, recalls her Jewish father being hara.s.sed by the Klan in the 1960s, when a cross was burned on the front lawn of his family home in Long Branch, on the Jersey sh.o.r.e.) New Jersey has had a rich history of sensational crimes. Still unsolved are the Hall-Mills murders of 1922: Reverend Edward Hall was a charismatic Episcopal priest in New Brunswick, found dead with his married mistress Eleanor Mills, a singer in the church choir; Hall's wife and two brothers were tried for the murders but acquitted, in a trial that attracted rabid national media interest. Then there is the Lindberg kidnapping-murder of 1932-The biggest story since the Resurrection, as H.L. Mencken dryly remarked. After a manhunt and a badly botched police investigation, the illegal German immigrant and ex-convict Bruno Richard Hauptmann was tried, convicted, and executed for having kidnapped and murdered the twenty-month-old Lindberg baby, taken from his crib in the East Amwell country house of the Lindbergs, near Hopewell. (Though Hauptmann was found guilty, the case remains controversial among aficionados of high-profile crime.) In more recent years the "devoutly religious, family annihilator" John List accrued a high degree of notoriety by eluding police for eighteen years after murdering his mother, wife, and three children in 1971; and the charismatic Cherry Hill rabbi Fred Neulander was a tabloid sensation for having commissioned a hit on his wife Carol in 1994. (Neulander was found guilty of conspiring to murder his wife, following the testimony of the hired a.s.sa.s.sin.) But most New Jersey crime falls far below the radar of the tabloids, as most New Jersey citizens will never merit the hysterical attention accorded a resident celebrity like Charles Lindberg.

Of the contributors to New Jersey Noir, only Barry N. Malzberg and Bill p.r.o.nzini take on a "sensational" subject-the a.s.sa.s.sination of teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, who disappeared from public view in July 1975 and was declared officially dead seven years later. In Malzberg and p.r.o.nzini's first-person confession, "Meadowlands Spike," we learn that-possibly!-the late, not-much-lamented teamster boss has found a resting place in just the right corner of the Garden State.

Based upon an event out of New Jersey history, though much transformed by Bradford Morrow's gothic imagination, "The Enigma of Grover's Mill" evokes the notorious 1938 Hallowe'en broadcast by the young Orson Welles of H.G. Wells's terrifying The War of the Worlds, which Wells set in a fict.i.tious "Grover's Mill, New Jersey" invaded by Martians-unfortunately, residents of Grover's Mill, New Jersey and vicinity, who heard the broadcast without realizing that it was fiction, panicked and tried to flee. Morrow makes of this serio-comic situation a suspenseful, mysterious, and finally poignant story of an orphaned young man coming of age in the generation following the Martian invasion. (If you visit Grover's Mill, which is not far from Princeton, you may want to take photographs of the ruin of a water tower allegedly shot to pieces by terrified local residents, mistaking it for a large Martian.) s.e.xual/erotic allure, seduction, and betrayal, the very essence of noir, is depicted by Jonathan Santlofer with such finesse, in "Lola," that this cautionary tale set in a partly gentrified Hoboken will take the reader by surprise-as it takes the narrator by surprise. An eerie, unsettling variant on the theme is Sheila Kohler's "Wunderlich," which unfolds like one of the crueler Grimm's fairy tales, set in the quintessence of seemingly imperturbable Jersey suburbia, Montclair. The mysterious circ.u.mstances of a yet more complex betrayal are investigated in the painfully realistic Asbury Park of "Excavation" by Edmund White and Michael Carroll: significantly, the dreaded epiphany comes on a Hallowe'en night amid campy goth celebrants like a demented chorus in the final act of a tragedy.

Richard Burgin's sparely narrated quasi-minimalist evocation of a doomed relationship, "Atlantis," takes its lovers inevitably to Atlantic City to meet their fates; what is surprising is that, for all its grittiness, revealed with Burgin's characteristic blend of irony and sincerity, "Atlantis" is still a love story. Newark, synonymous in New Jersey with urban decay, financial collapse, and physical peril, is vividly rendered in two very different stories-S.J. Rozan's suspenseful "New Day Newark" (set in a ghetto neighborhood) with its unexpected ending, and S.A. Solomon's suspenseful "Live for Today" (set mostly in the county morgue). Though each story has a female protagonist at peril in her Newark environment, and each story is written by a woman, no two stories could be more unlike.

Betrayal that isn't s.e.xual or erotic but related to more purely masculine noir activities like drug-dealing, theft, and murder is explored with exacting verisimilitude in Jeffrey Ford's surrealseeming "Gla.s.s Eels" (Greenwich) with its stunning conclusion, as in Robert Arellano's "Kettle Run" (Cherry Hill) with its achingly convincing portrayal of teenaged and older "losers." Jersey City, a place of ethnic diversity as well as long-entrenched political corruption, is an ideal setting for Hirsh Sawhney's low-keyed pitchperfect portrait of a middle-aged Indian American at the margins of an Indian community, "A Bag for Nicholas." (Nicholas is a Caucasian drug-user of the "local bourgeoisie" for whom Sawhney's sympathetic protagonist Shez seems to have ruined his life.) The bleak and treacherous Camden of news headlines is the setting for Lou Manfredo's deftly written story of a young police officer whose moral courage is put to a crucial test in "Soul Anatomy"-as the historic Camden, in which our great American poet Walt Whitman lived, is the setting for Gerald Stern's elegiac poem "Broken Gla.s.s." (Again, no two excursions into a troubled New Jersey city could be more unlike.) Paul Muldoon's cleverly satirical poem "Noir, NJ" is set, nominally, in Paramus: the conventions/cliches of noir speed past us in the poet's tongue-in-cheek rhythms and rhymes, homage to the noir of pulp fiction and Hollywood Bfilms. By contrast, C.K. Williams's "Newark Black" is a pa.s.sionate recollection of the poet's boyhood in the Newark of 19401954, an incantation of blackness in its myriad guises: Black slush, after the blizzard had pa.s.sed

and the diesel buses and trucks were fuming again,

but you still remembered how blackly lovely

the branches of trees looked in new snow.

Robert Pinsky's "Long Branch Underground" is a sequence of three-line stanzas evoking a lost boyhood at the Jersey sh.o.r.e-Wheel of the tides, wheel of the surf, hot nights. It's an elegy for Carousel waltzes and polkas ... The manic neon chicken in spasms dashing / Into the neon basket, and rising again. Here is a noir world eerily depopulated, as if everyone has died.

Similarly lyric, dramatically compressed, and delivering a whiplash of a final line, Alicia Ostriker's "August: Feeding Frenzy" evokes the horrific image of life devouring life-in which "New Jersey" is a microcosm of the vast pitiless Darwinian world that lies beyond our human conceptions even of noir-in the very presence of childhood innocence.

The mysteriously shunned (male, forty-six-year-old professor) protagonist of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Too Near Real" lives a numbed half-life simultaneously in Princeton and in Google's 3-D map in the aftermath of a scandal-(s.e.xual hara.s.sment? resulting in the death of a female student?)-and the breakup of his marriage. In a moral paralysis, he travels widely-that is, inwardly, in "virtual" s.p.a.ce-returning inevitably to his home where he seems to have discovered (I went up to myself. It was me, but wasn't me. It was my body, but not me. I tilted the world) the evidence of his own death, by suicide. And my own story, "Run Kiss Daddy," turns out to be, surprisingly, the only one in this highly diverse collection to be set in the beautiful western edge of the state along the Delaware River: a story in which "nothing happens"-in the aftermath of something very brutal that has happened in the past, of which the (male, divorced, wounded) protagonist dares not speak, for fear of ruining the precarious happiness of his new life.

In such ways, the most civilized and "decent" among us find that we are complicit with the most brutal murderers. We enter into literally unspeakable alliances-of which we dare not speak except through the obliquities and indirections of fiction, poetry, and visual art of the sort gathered here in New Jersey Noir.

Joyce Carol Oates.

Princeton, New Jersey.

July 2011.

PART I.

INNER-CITY NEW JERSEY.

LIVE FOR TODAY.

BY S.A. SOLOMON.

University Heights (Newark).

En route to her job at the morgue, Jinx walked on JFK Boulevard to the PATH station at Journal Square. It was hot for June, the evening cloud cover an airless ceiling pressing on the street. A grimy storefront diorama displayed mannequins behind plate gla.s.s, girls with bald heads and painted-on lashes, clad in cheap, thin dresses. They stood frail against the hard gray light. Commuters hustled by, indifferent to the girls' orphaned gazes.

At the station, a man with a crew cut, his florid face glistening in the heat, watched her stride by in her work pants. He spit on the tracks.

"Walk like a woman," he said hoa.r.s.ely.

The train arrived. She wedged into the car. Sweat trickled down the backs of her thighs. The train labored past boarded-up factories, fossils of a former manufacturing town, brick sh.e.l.ls tagged with graffiti (LIVE FOR TODAY) that had migrated from the gentrifying precincts of Jersey City. A trash curd drifted by with the Pa.s.saic River, awakened by the recent heavy rains. The Pulaski Skyway reared up like a roller coaster against a steel sky. The kid next to her pointed it out to his younger friend, drawling, "Welcome to Newark, son. Try not to get shot."

She emerged to a garbage truck rounding the corner, gears grinding a hard-used complaint, its foul breath trapped in the day's heat. The Market Street bus trailed it past dollar stores and a recently vacated video rental/laundromat/dry cleaner (Your One Stop Shop), shut down for supplying certain regular customers with special-order baggies in the pockets of their indifferently pressed shirts. She hurried into the inst.i.tutional building housing the morgue on Norfolk, but clocked in late.

Downstairs in the autopsy room with its overflow drains set into a tiled floor, Manny was waiting. His skin looked ashen in the watery light. As usual, he was stoned. The first job of the evening (Manner of death: Accident. Cause of death: Acute drug intoxication), a young white woman, lay on the gurney, flame-red hair curling all the way down to the circled A (for anarchy) tattooed atop her livid b.u.t.tocks.

Manny's bloodshot eyes rolled in their sockets as he slid the body off the transport. The girl's doughy bottom succ.u.mbed to gravity and she spilled heavily into his arms.

Manny crooned at her, "Que linda."

"Give her here, Romeo."

"No, she's mine, see the way she looks at me?" He scrolled her eyelid with a practiced thumb. A hazel eye flashed at them.

"Cut it out, pig."

"Listen, you're already behind on yesterday's homicides. The way you moon over them, someone would think you're a little ..." He stuck out his tongue, liverish in the morgue light, and twirled his finger over his head. "I mean if they didn't know already."

He propped the body on the prep table.

"Besides, the cooler's out again-we called for repairs but you gotta work faster, get me?"

It did smell riper than the usual ambient odor of decay, bearable (though a civilian might observe a preference for the stronger varieties of perfume and aftershave among the morgue workers, your musks and essential oils) until it reached the no-go level, tripping the gag reflex. Jinx bit her fingers in irritation, shredded cuticles inflamed from the latex gloves they wore to work with clients. Clients was how she referred to them, anyhow. It was respectful. She pinched her thumb and forefinger together and squinted in Manny's direction.

"What's up with that?" He wrinkled his forehead, usually smooth like a baby's blissful brow.

"It's the universal symbol for pot-smoking loser."

"Oh," he said in a mock hurt voice. "What you saying, you gonna narc on me? d.a.m.n, they should require it for this job."

But he knew her history and knew she wouldn't snitch.

"All right," he relented, "you can have her-but be ready for me at six a.m. sharp. I'm making my deliveries." He tapped her lightly on the back and she flinched. "Twitchy, huh? You need something to relax you?"

"Some of us are over that s.h.i.t," she snapped.

"Some of us still got fingers left." He inspected her ragged hands. "You better double bag those, girl. You don't know what she tracked in, just because she's Anglo ..."

She knew what he meant: white junkies like this one were pegged as middle-cla.s.s, slumming bourgie kids, dumpster divers who observed the niceties of the needle exchange. It wasn't so much of a panic if a glove finger popped and bodily fluids leaked in (an occupational risk because of the soup of potential pathogens, hep C, and HIV, among other nasties).

"Who you talking to, Manny? Once a junkie, always a junkie. I know they're all fools."

He shrugged. "All right, blanca." He heaved the girl onto Jinx's table, nose wrinkling as a marshy gas escaped the body. "Whoo, she's all yours. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

He rode the gurney through swinging doors into the fluorescent hallway.

As a morgue technician, her job was to prepare bodies for autopsy by the medical examiner and afterward clean and prep them for release to the funeral home, or, if there was no family (as was often the case in the county morgue), a pauper's burial. She also performed clerical tasks a.s.sociated with the issuance of death certificates and the collection and tabulation of medical information related to the conduct of autopsies, and photographed and fingerprinted decedents upon admittance for verification of ident.i.ty.

What Manny meant by "be ready for me" was for the report (with corroborating photos) to read: White female, appears 25 years of age, measures 67 inches, weighs 150 pounds, hazel eyes, short red hair.

What he wanted was a baggie filled with those luxurious waves of hair. If anyone (there was occasionally someone, family or a friend) noticed, well, what girl didn't cut off all of her daddy's pride at least once? It was a rite of pa.s.sage. Manny had been in the hair trade for as long as she'd been here: shearing likely candidates and selling their crowning glory to wholesalers, who weren't so choosy about where they got it. Downstream, the chain of custody was even more lax. She'd seen the signs downtown: We sell human hair. She wondered what the customers for wigs and hair extensions would say if they knew their source.

Probably nothing. Like Manny always says: "All's fair in love and hair."

But lately Jinx had been resisting, making it harder for Manny to ply his wares. It wasn't scruples on her part, exactly, but something closer to possessiveness.

Manny, in high entrepreneurial mode, had already vacuumed, disrobing the body, sucking up any loose personal effects EMS had overlooked. She snapped on powdery gloves and the requisite face mask. The girl was surprisingly clean, except for the acrid drops of urine dewing her reddish pubic hair. Most of them had to be hosed down, were caked with the release that accompanied the terminal event.

Others, like the teenage male she had prepped last night (Manner of death: Homicide. Cause of death: Gunshot wound, perforated heart. Box #53. Decedent's race: Black or African American), were smeared with blood and lymph, as coated on departure as they were at birth. She could have fit a fist into the exit wound on his chest. She imagined being sucked down into it, drifting through his exploded ventricles. They would become intimate; he would share his secrets, his final thoughts.

The antiseptic stung her bitten fingers as she wiped down the redhead's freckled body. Kind of fat for a user; maybe a first timer. Lousy beginner's luck. She'd heard there was a bad batch on the street (once a junkie, always). She spotted a pinhole in the glove finger. Irritated at her carelessness, especially after Manny's lecture, she pulled at the glove to peel it off and her index finger burst through the split rubber, indenting a marbled thigh. At contact, a thrill coursed through her like she'd only ever known on the small end of a syringe.

Jinx shuffled backward, landing heavily on the one office chair they rolled from station to station to do the paperwork (the county had a terminal budget problem). She crashed into the cooler which lodged the morgue's transient populace. Her fingers flew to her mouth but, remembering, she spit them out. It's not fair, is it?-but life isn't fair-fighting the hunger so hard for so long and now here it is, back again to taunt her, like a sense memory. What's the message now: better off dead?

Maybe Manny's secondhand smoke had finally gotten to her. But weed never carried this. .h.i.t, such extreme bliss she couldn't possibly contain it, not if she wanted to stay alive. Truth be told, that was a coin toss, weighed against the delirious acceleration to the roller-coaster emotion of childhood-the real deal, the hard stuff, not the mediated compromise that pa.s.sed for it in adulthood-and the return of tears switched off somewhere in her teens.

There was the young girl, a Latina (Decedent of Hispanic origin? Check yes, Box #52) NPD phoned in last week from a domestic violence shelter, her wrists slashed. (Manner of death: Suicide. Mechanism of death: Exsanguination. Other significant conditions contributing to death: Facial contusions, subdural hematoma. Box #36. If female: check if pregnant at time of death.) She had glanced at the report (Age last birthday: 15) and realized the girl's D.O.B. coincided with her actual or presumed date of death. She'd touched the plump hand with its girlish fingernail decals, and was tapped into a current of sorrow, of homesickness, of utter aloneness so intense it was hypoglycemic: the sweats, the shaking, the blurry vision.

Last Friday she was working rapidly, mask tight over nostrils, on the remains of an old man destined for potter's field, discovered in a trash-filled alley (Manner of death: Could not be determined). Eyes watering, she'd abruptly snapped out of a half dream where she stood on a ship's deck, watching the sh.o.r.e recede in a flutter of handkerchiefs. G.o.d willing, when you get there, you'll make good and send for us? The family had given him all their savings. I will, Mama, Poppa, you'll see.