“Why don’t we start with the bodies in the trucks,” Franklin said, placing his cell phone on the table in front of his empty glass and pressing record.
“Just keep my name out of it,” Lopez replied.
“Don’t worry. You’ll sound like a cross between a mob informant and a serial killer.”
They sat in a booth at the Red Rooster, for many years the county watering hole for local law enforcement and first responders, one of the few establishments that had recently reopened, albeit at a quarter percent capacity. The short, wiry deputy sighed. He had not officially quit the Sheriff’s department, but the ensuing lockdowns and disruptions of the past year had been the final straw. He was in the process of finalizing his purchase of property in Texas and knowing of Franklin’s podcast, could not resist sharing his story, one last fuck you to Montgomery County.
He downed his bourbon and immediately motioned to the bartender for refills, looking around the room, head on a swivel, a thief casing a convenience store, still with the nervous energy that Franklin remembered from his court reporter days at the Herald. The bartender, also the owner of the Café (and on this Wednesday night in the year of Covid also waiter, server, and floor mopper) brought their drinks and exchanged some brief pleasantries through his cloth mask before departing. When he was gone, Lopez said “I’m having second thoughts about this.”
“Steve, this won’t come back to you,” Franklin said. “When did it all start?”
“You know the timeline bro. Everything shuts down in March, the whole world turning to shit. First week of April the trucks roll up. Drop trailers parked in the docks of some closed old warehouse. So of course someone’s got to watch over them considering the Cargo and with my luck I get assigned to the night shift.” He gave a mirthless laugh, right leg laying down the beat to a rhythm only he could hear. “The proverbial graveyard shift.”
“What kind of trucks?”
“Trailers, man. Big ass refrigerated trailers. Kind that delivers frozen food to Safeway.”
“Just so I understand, we’re talking two tractor-trailers?”
“Wasn’t just Montgomery County, it was Bucks and Chester too, pretty sure Delco. All the county morgues were filled. And the overflow? Well yeah, the powers that be came up with a plan.”
“So what did you have to do?”
“Monitor them, basically. Make sure no one tried to fuck around. Check every hour that the refrigeration was in order, the fuel good. They had gauges that were linked to the County computers. Any drop in temp, you’d get a red light.”
Lopez was speaking in a low voice that Franklin found difficult to hear.
“Can you speak up a little?”
The deputy surveyed the room for the hundredth time. Usually on a Friday night there would be a crowd, some live blues and amplified laughter, liquid decompression all around. It would have been better for Franklins podcast, the backdrop of chatter and music and tinkling glasses, the warm sound of life to help his listeners visualize the scene, to see the room. The weight of reality. Instead, the hollowness of the cafe was a forlorn echo, every other table stacked upside down, barstools staggered, an older couple chatting in another booth.
“So who knew about this?”
“Very few in the Department knew about it. Our Chief, the county coroners, probably a few other suits.”
“Jesus. I mean, I still have some connections, but I didn’t get a whiff of this.”
“Yeah, well, just imagine if it got out.”
“So, if I was to drive out there now–”
“The trucks are gone. Detail ended in June.”
“But if I were to go out there.”
Lopez’ blue eyes became still and focused. He leaned across the table, lowered his voice to a whisper. “I know you’re going to do your own thing even though I’d suggest you don’t, but whatever you’re planning, you need to watch your back.”
***
Good evening, Franklin Graves here, inviting you to ride with me on this dark night. As you huddle in isolation, with our hospitals and morgues overflowing and a prevaricating swindler and his dough faced minions hemorrhaging lies, I’d like you to accompany me to a site in the heart of our county where for months the victims of this contagion were kept in cold storage Welcome, listeners to Episode 22 of Grave Matters: “Warehouse of the Dead”.
***
At the end of March, after the entire world shut down, Franklin visited the cemetery where his father was buried. He brought a fifth of Four Roses and two whiskey glasses and performed the ritual he did every Easter in the twelve years since his passing (“Seriously?” Adde scoffed the one time she accompanied him) and poured two fingers over the grave and downed the next himself and said, “How the longshots running Pop?”
He was astonished by the number of freshly dug graves he saw. In years past times past he would note one or two recent burials, but that day the entire slope of St. Augustine’s was littered with dozens of mounds of freshly excavated dirt, undeniable proof of the pandemic’s impact. He felt guilty when he set the bottle down on his father’s simple marker, but hey it’s your fault Pops, all those trips you took me along when I was a kid and he started taking photos of the sun dappled landscape with his phone, wishing he had his camera. The piles of soil, brown mixed with red clay, were like mutant anthills, an obscene contrast to the rebirth of grass. He could hear Adde in his head, “You and your greedy eyes.”
She wasn’t wrong. It was always about what he saw, what he could record, always about the photos, two that were like bookends of his career. The first, the one that lit the flame for his
lifelong obsession with forgotten history was a dog-eared black and white photo circa 1920 of his grandfather Gerald leaning against the very same huckster cart his father often told him about. He’s wearing a white tee shirt and a tilted straw hat, muscular arms crossed, ebony skin burnished by the sun, a hint of a smile in his eyes, a look that always struck Franklin as sardonic, as if he saw something others were blind to.
“Your Grandfather was a huckster,” said his father (also named Gerald but called Jimmy for reasons never clear to Franklin, something to do with a gambling debt and a man named Bip) on the frequent drives through the village of Port Kennedy where his father was raised nestled in the bosom of Valley Forge Park. “He sold Produce and eggs and meats out of on old wooden cart. Up and down these roads…dirt roads in those days. He traded produce for wine with the Italians up the hill, dealt with the Irish by the churchyard, the Germans who worked across the river. Everybody knew your grandfather. He was what you would call an entrepreneur and along this road lived families of all race and creed.”
He pointed out areas of significance amid the bramble and overgrown fields, especially the weedy slash of land where a block of ten houses once stood. Wooden structures, two stories high with identical double hung windows and tiny front porches and outhouses in the back and no electricity, company houses, built by the factory nearby where nearly all the men of the village worked, and some died, including his grandfather. His father would ramble on about the history of his erased hometown, plowed under in later years by the state for construction of the 422 highway and the expansion of Valley Forge National Park, the town itself disappeared via eminent domain, a story behind every crumbling stone wall and abandoned well and limestone cave the only
artifacts left of a once thriving village. He told Franklin how they used to film silent movies in the village, how his uncles and cousins were often used as extras: runaway slaves, cowboys, gandy dancers. The stories sparked his young mind with the power of myths, igniting a lifelong obsession with the past, a fascination with sites that through neglect, erosion or erasure had been forever lost. “Landscapes of the Forgotten”, his first book of photography, published nearly twenty years ago, before the digital age transformed everything. Before his own vanity and stupidity derailed a promising career. And now this contagion, of all improbable things, had reignited his imagination.
Ha! And what about that second photo, Franklin, Adde demanded to know. The one responsible for their breakup? Oh that’s what you think? Nope, not today. Shaking his head, he drove her voice away as he walked back to his car.
Leaving the cemetery, he realized the grass wasn’t all that green.
***
It’s pitch-black tonight. Even the moon is obscured by clouds and there’s very little traffic on this usually busy highway, which is fine, suits our purpose tonight. Other than the streetlights, the main illumination is the glow from the mall ahead, even though it’s closed at this hour. We turn onto the dark street that leads through the shuttered buildings of the industrial park, a boulevard of empty offices, and drive up the winding road where the warehouse awaits us, no longer in use, a place where the trailers parked, loaded with their terrible cargo, the place where they stored the dead in refrigerated trucks right under our noses.
***
He played the elegy from Vasks Quartet # 4, preferring the bleak glissandi of the strings to the mocking sarcasm of his usual background music, “Fables of Faubus”– he’d save that for the Lopez segment and deal with the comments from the purists that would instantly materialize: Why did you switch, I hate classical, too depressing, the jazz was fun missing the whole point of the Mingus composition, but then you’d have to know something about the past, about American history. Truth be told (ha!) he was sick of podcasts, sick of the entire facile, ephemeral, misinformed likes, dislikes, emoji booted lowest common denominator social media swamp. Fuck it! This is my last.
It was darker in the industrial park, offices still in lockdown, most of the streetlights extinguished, the hooded, hollow lamp sockets serving no purpose. Twice that week he had gone on reconnaissance to get the lay of the land (due diligence his father used to say while pouring over the racing charts in the Daily Telegraph, a gnawed #2 pencil firmly in hand) following Lopez’s explicit directions to the location, carefully mapping out his plan of attack: where to park, safest ground to navigate, how to breach the warehouse. The facility itself was unexceptional: a large white two-story mason block with high, evenly spaced windows. There were three delivery bays in the rear of the building. A saw-toothed roof protected the roll-up doors, one of which was slightly raised, an open invitation he hoped was still in play.
He drove past the building and pulled into the parking lot of an adjacent business and parked, letting the car idle for the warmth; after sunset the late October chill had come quickly. He wore an old hoodie and a wool cap; next to him on the seat was a backpack that carried the essentials: flashlight, gloves, camera. There were no other tools, no wire-cutters or crowbars, or anything else that could be used to pry, jimmy or otherwise force entrance to a locked facility; caught with such items the penalty would be breaking and entering instead of the more benign trespassing. There was enough danger in his line of work without the added risk of jail time.
“Jail time? That’s what worries you? With this on your resume,” Adde said, pinching the skin of his forearm. “One look at your black ass squirreling around and they shoot, no questions asked.” He used to laugh it off, pointing out that her skin was darker than his to which she would snort and say, “I’m Calabrese, big difference!” Just a game they played until it wasn’t.
Always something with that woman. She would man the barricades over an over-cooked veal at a restaurant, sneering at him for failing to back her with whatever degree of anger she deemed sufficient. Constant emotional turbulence with her, all the fucking time! Seriously, what was he doing? Nothing in common except…except that and the way she gripped the bedposts and… and Adriana, yeah, God almighty how he missed her.
***
As I sit here staring through my windshield at the bay doors of this empty warehouse, I can’t help but think that something is terribly wrong in this country. And I’m not talking about the pandemic. What worries me is that the daily accumulation of transgressions will erase our collective will to seek the truth, something more important than ever before in this time of cosmic erasure when violence is called patriotism, where malfeasance is called morality, where what you see with your own eyes is denied, repackaged, appropriated and ultimately forgotten. Even this, the sheer inescapable fact of a once in a century contagion, something with the dreadful power to stop the world, already being discounted, transformed, consigned to the nether world of conspiracy
and lies and that even those of us who reject this false narrative will bury our heads and gaze away and stare at our little screens in our own little corners of the world, safe and secure and not giving a damn.
***
So yeah photo #2, taken barely a mile from this spot where he now treads carefully on the wet muddy surface, moving slowly through the trees and down the slope to the warehouse, trying to avoid the slick gnarled roots because of course it’s started to rain. Yes, tell our listening audience about that Franklin, Adde whispers in his ear to which he replies out loud “Would you please shut up!”
He paused and surveyed the grounds: no activity on the streets of the business park, a nebula of light from the shopping mall and to the west, the black silhouette of hills from Valley Forge. Nothing but darkness and silence. As he moved through the thicket of trees, pocket flash in hand, it struck him that some elemental force kept drawing him back to this land, where his grandfather had sold his wares from a horse drawn cart, where his father was born and raised in the forgotten town of Port Kennedy.
In his first book it had been photographs of theaters and synagogues, suburban streets and North Philly stoops; crumbling factories and dark alleys and wooded trails, each picture captioned with brief notes describing their significance. The lead painted ghetto schools, the asbestos inebriated factories, any site where violence, decay or cruelty had once laid its mark, any landscape tainted by evil and forgotten by history, and yeah, Adde, whatever his greedy eyes compelled him
to record. Like the photo taken barely a mile from where he now was, one of the best compositions in the entire book: a glorious spray of autumnal sun filtering through the dying leaves of a maple tree, shafts of light illuminating the ground below where the raped and strangled body of 16-year-old Jennifer Satriano was found by a biker alongside the Schuylkill River trail.
That crazy woman’s rage after all these years. His one and only book signing event at Readers Haven, the woman descending upon him like a Valkyrie, leaning over the table where he sat, her breath spitting in his face. . . I’m Jenny Baxter’s’ mother you damn…and he waited for it, certain the word would come, but she held back and with a dramatic swipe sent books, pens and bottled water crashing to the floor before slapping him in the face and after all the uproar and chaos that followed (he did not press charges) that look on Adde’s face when he returned to their apartment, you could literally see the dark clouds roll across her face, her olive eyes growing darker come on into my kitchen cause it’s gone be raining outside but what do you do when the storm is Adde? No sir, one she-devil you don’t want to meet at the crossroads. She accused him of exploiting the suffering of others to use for his art, but she didn’t ever understand, it was never about exploitation, but always about remembrance and preservation, a memorial to the facts, not air-brushed history, this very thing happened here!
***
He stopped in the dock area, noted the security camera mounted beneath the anemic bulb that lit the ramp leading to the receiving door and decided it no longer functioned. There was half a wood pallet resting against the retaining wall and he carried it to the partially opened bay to use as a ladder. Pushing 50 and still got it, he thought, rolling his six-foot frame into the warehouse.
Immediately he gagged. His nostrils burned and his eyes shimmered and a bittersweet stench poured razor blades down his throat. Choking and coughing, he sprang to his feet and through blurred eyes saw floating lights in the darkness of the adjacent room and heard men’s voices and loud rubbery footsteps. Before he could follow his bag back out the warehouse the grinding roar of an 18-wheeler pulled into the bay, slamming against the dock enough to shake the walls. By then he was squeezed behind the industrial baler in the far corner of the receiving area and trying not to vomit.
“God Damn Tank, knock the building down why don’t you,” someone said from the interior and a man came into view between the iron slats of the baler. He wore a black vinyl apron that reached his ankles, a plastic visor with a head lamp attached, a N95 white mask, black gloves, boots and as the truck idled he reached up to the pull chain and with two powerful rips rattled open the dock door with a noise like sheet metal running through a shredder. A white owl appeared, glaring from the back door of the truck beneath the words Blind Owl Transport. Clouds of frozen air poured out of the trailer when the door opened. A man similarly dressed rolled a pallet into the trailer with a hand jack and the two of them began moving things inside while more lights were switched on in the other room and floor lamps were positioned in the bottom bays around gray metal tables positioned under three-tiered storage racks. Dark, aproned shapes moved across the floor, plugging in wires and testing equipment.
“Hurry up we don’t have all night,” someone barked and shortly the pallet reappeared out of the trailer with bodies cross stacked and shrink wrapped forming a naked pyramid and the well-
oiled jack zipped across the epoxy to the bays were the others tore into the plastic wrap and tossed the bodies onto the tables and the bone saws started up in earnest.
It was like the ticket windows at the track when his father brought him along, the brutal efficiency of the seasoned gamblers. Win, place, show: lungs, kidneys, livers. One man shouting out the tally, another jotting down numbers as the skin peeled away and the ribs snapped and the organs sluiced into white containers.
He watched the activity in the adjacent room, swallowing his bile and searching for options. The emergency door on the closest wall to the baler was still in the shadows. In his reporter days he had once covered a civil suit against a local Tube company, a case involving a warehouse fire and a locked emergency door which resulted in the death of a worker. OSHA regulations stipulated clear access to all Emergency doors and a functioning panic bar, a gamble for sure.
But he needed to document this atrocity…
He was moving as quietly as he could, digging out his cellphone to film, searching for the video app when someone said, “Get more slop buckets,” and one of the men broke off and walked towards the baler, switching on a brilliant flashlight that exposed a stack of plastic buckets half-covered with tarp right next to him. The light played around the stained wall. Something not water dripped onto the floor.
“You need to step out, asshole.”
Franklin raised his arms and wedged out from behind the baler. Time to play that card.
“Man, get that light out my fucking face, I can’t see a thing.”
The charnel house in the other room ground to a sudden halt. Not a sound except for his heart on his ribs.
“Just here looking for some pipe, tryin’ to earn a living, just like y’all. Ain’t sayin’ a word to nobody.”
The man who was barking orders called out directions that Franklin didn’t want to hear, he was too focused on the head lamp of the man directly in front of him. “Just some fucking junkie,” the man responded, turning slightly, which was when he moved forward, cobra-quick, hands seeking purchase on the slick apron and yanking the man towards him while simultaneously burying his head into his chin, using all the brute force of his hips and thighs. The visor shattered, the head lamp and flashlight clattered, and the man fell back, collapsing onto the tarp and upending the containers which puked out piles of gelatinous objects all over the floor.
He juked around the outstretched arms and raced for the exit door praying this godforsaken place still adhered to best safety practices. The exit bar compressed, and he was suddenly breathing in the rain scented night. He sprinted down the ramp, his eyes focused on the dim outline of hills to the west and his last thought before the truck driver waiting at the bottom of the ramp smashed him with the sap was I’m coming home Pops, I’m coming home and never gone back.
***
When he regained consciousness his first thought was that it was still raining because he felt the wet dripping on his face. In his face, plink against the bone, right down his throat slick and coppery and cold. The cold was freezing his brain, blowing icy wind currents through his skull, yet he was not outside. He was moving, could clearly hear the fat-tired rumble of wheels on rain slickened asphalt. And he soon realized he was not alone, the dead having a presence that was unmistakable.
He rubbed his face, then gently probed the rough texture of dried blood on his cheeks. A stickiness, a muddy drying on his cheekbones that he clawed at and peeled away from his skin.
There was a sickening grating noise when he blinked. He did it once, then a hundred times more and each time his eyelids crumpled and folded into caverns of scalloped flesh. He wasn’t aware that his fingers were probing his eye sockets and meeting no resistance until he heard the shrieks reverberating off the walls, the sounds reaching an octave achieved by small animals at night, succumbing to predators. And the sound of the tires hissed in tandem with the motorized growling as the truck rolled on.
***
In June of the following year a car parked across the street from where the warehouse once stood. The driver was a tall, dark-haired woman who helped her passenger from the car. He wore sunglasses and walked slowly, assisted by a cane. He leaned against the fender of the car, and the woman, at his request, proceeded to describe what she saw. Men with hard hats moving through the dust and the few twisted girders of a demolished building, the cranes dropping the rubble into dump trucks. Hanging from a chain-link fence a sign advertised a reimagining of purpose for the site: a green space for the community with fountains and trees and walking paths, a playground for the children.
The Tributary 