1

EVERY TIME THEY GOT a call from the leper hospital to pick up a body Jack Delaney would feel himself coming down with the flu or something. Leo Mullen, his boss, was finally calling it to Jack’s attention. “You notice that? They phone, usually it’s one of the sisters, and a while later you get kind of a moan in your voice. ‘Oh, man, I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I feel kind of punk.’ ”

Jack said, “Punk, I never used the word punk in my life. When was the last time? I mean they called. Wait a minute. How many times since I’ve been here have they called, twice?”

Leo Mullen looked up from the body on the prep table. “You want me to tell you exactly? This is the fourth time I’ve asked you in the past almost three years now.” Leo wore latex gloves and a plastic-coated disposable apron over his vest, shirt, and tie. He looked like a man all dressed up doing the dishes.

Jack Delaney stood in the open double doorway of the tiled room, about five feet from the head of the porcelain table-tilted slightly toward the sink-where Leo was preparing the body. It appeared to be a short balding man with a lot of body hair. The poor guy, his feet down at the other end pointing in at each other, a tag wired to his left big toe. Jack would never walk in here and look directly at a body. He’d take quick glances to guard against shockers, accident victims, sights that could remain vivid in your mind forever. This one seemed to be safe. Jack looked. Oh, shit. And looked away again. The guy must have been in a car wreck. He wasn’t balding, he’d been scalped in front, given a sudden receding hairline through a car windshield. Jack ran a hand through his own hair. Then dropped his hand before Leo noticed and might tell him to get a haircut. He kept his eyes on Leo, who was squirting Dis-Spray, a disinfectant, into all of the guy’s orifices, his nostrils, his mouth, his ears, all of his dark openings.

“All three times they phoned the times before,” Leo said, “I seem to recall you came down with some kind of twenty-four-hour bug. That’s all I’m saying. Am I right or wrong?”

Jack said, “I’ve been to Carville. When I worked for the Rivés we’d go up there once or twice a year, tune the organ. One of ’em, usually Uncle Brother, would be on the console hitting notes, I’m up in the loft by the pipes, way up on a shaky ladder making the adjustments on the sleeve. I was the one with the ear.”

Leo looked like he was tuning the organ of the guy on the prep table, lifting his private parts to spray down in there good, Jack watching, thinking the guy might’ve been proud of that set at one time. A little guy, but hung.

Jack said, “Have I mentioned I’m sick or not feeling too good?”

Leo said, “Not yet you haven’t. They just called.” He picked up a plastic hose attached to the sink and turned on the water. “Hold this for me, will you?”

“I can’t,” Jack said, “I’m not licensed.”

“I won’t tell on you. Come on, just keep the table rinsed. Run it off from by the incision.”

Jack edged in to take the hose without looking directly at the body. “There’re things I’d rather do than handle a person that died of leprosy.”

“Hansen’s disease,” Leo said. “You don’t die from it, you die of something else.”

Jack said, “If I remember correctly, the last time Carville had a body for us you had a removal service get it.”

“On account of I had three bodies in the house already, two of ’em up here, and you telling me how punk you felt.”

Jack said, “Hey, Leo? Bullshit. You don’t want to touch a dead leper anymore’n I do.”

Jack Delaney could talk this way to his boss because they were pretty good friends and because Leo was his brother-in-law, married to Jack’s sister, Raejeanne, and because Jack’s mother lived with Leo and Raejeanne part of the year, the four or five months they spent across the lake, at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

Leo was the last of Mullen & Sons, Funeral Directors, the fifty-year-old grandson of the founder; he had gone to work for his dad and an uncle and was now on his own, the end of the line. In ten years he’d sell and retire to the Bay, put out crab nets, and read historical novels. In the meantime he would appear dedicated, offer words of comfort, lead rosaries if he had to, and never duck upstairs for a drink until the bereaved had gone home. There were bartenders who thought Leo was Jack’s uncle. Jack said to him one time at Mandina’s, “You should never have been an undertaker.” And Leo said, “Now you tell me.”

Jack Delaney was all of a sudden forty but looked younger. His mother called him either her fine boy or her handsome son. She never mentioned Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where her boy had served thirty-five months working in cotton and soybean fields and clearing brush. Jack told his mom they had brush brought in from Mississippi when they ran out. His mom had seven framed photographs of him on her dresser, several of them she’d cut out of the paper when he appeared in fashion ads for Maison Blanche. She had one photo of Raejeanne, her daughter’s Dominican High graduation picture. Girls loved Jack’s mussed sandy hair, his slim build, his hint of a nice-guy smile. They said, “Oh, wow,” when he told them he’d been a fashion model, sportswear mostly. They said, “Oh, my Lord,” if he happened to mention he’d served time. The girls would wrinkle their noses, wondering what this cute guy could have done to be sent to prison. He’d tell them it was a long story but, well, he had been a jewel thief at one time. They’d want to hear it and he’d tell about some of the scarier situations, low key, having learned there were girls who were turned on by presentable ex-cons.

While he was living in medium-security at Angola it was Leo who did the most for him. Leo talked to some of the right people in Baton Rouge, told them his brother-in-law was a little wild, immature. You know, thought he was a hotshot, every girl’s dream. Leo explained that Jack was intelligent but had lacked proper discipline as a boy; his dad had died in Honduras working for United Fruit when Jack was in the ninth grade at Jesuit High. Jack was the kind, he’d always been full of the devil. Like he’d go over to Manchac and hunt snakes and dump them into country-club swimming pools. But not poisonous ones. Leo told the people in Baton Rouge he’d give Jack Delaney a job in a profession that offered daily reminders of life’s realities, its consequences, and get him straightened out. That is, once Jack spent some time in state rehabilitation, one month shy of three years out of the five to twenty-five of his sentence.

So going to work for Mullen & Sons, 3600 Canal Street, was part of Jack’s parole deal. He didn’t see working with dead people any more a career opportunity than picking cotton at Angola; but here he was living on the second floor of a funeral home, down the hall from the embalming room, driving a hearse, picking up bodies at hospitals and parish morgues, watching the door during visitation hours, sticking flags on cars in the procession… Jack had said to his brother-in-law when he hired him, “You sure you know what you’re doing?” And Leo said, “I know it isn’t good for either of us to drink alone.”

Leo said now, “If you haven’t been to Carville since you worked for the Rivé brothers it must be six or seven years.”

“Longer’n that,” Jack said.

“They’re not sure how you contract leprosy-I mean Hansen’s disease-though I’ve read you can get it from an armadillo. So stay away from armadillos.”

Jack didn’t say anything.

“I know none of the sisters ever got it and they’ve been there since the place opened, almost a hundred years ago. The same ones that are at Charity Hospital. You recall if you met a Sister Teresa Victor?”