Jordan's Stormy Banks

2

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight, perhaps what I’d done with the corpse hadn’t been so inspired after all.

The building that was shoehorned beneath the grandstands of Neyland Stadium — a wedge-shaped warren of grimy rooms named Stadium Hall — had begun its life, decades before, as an athletic dormitory. Now, deemed too dilapidated to house athletes, it housed the Anthropology Department. Stadium Hall’s chief virtues, as best I could tell during my first week on the job, were two: It contained plenty of rooms — hundreds of rooms — to accommodate what I hoped would be a fast-growing population of Anthropology faculty and graduate students. It also contained an abundance of bathrooms and showers, and it was in one of these showers — the one in the stairwell adjoining the basement bone lab — that I’d decided to stash the corpse over the July Fourth holiday, until I could figure out how best to clean and examine the bones of the dead man.

I returned to the stadium to reclaim the remains at 9:00 A.M. on July fifth. Unfortunately, the building’s janitor had returned at 8:00 A.M., and by the time I showed up, he was mad as a hornet. The university police officers summoned by the janitor were none too happy, either.

I explained the situation to the police officers briefly, showing them the memo about my appointment as State Forensic Anthropologist, and then phoned the Cumberland County medical examiner, so he could corroborate my story — something he did with evident amusement. Great, I thought as the grinning police officers departed. I’ll never hear the end of this — not from the campus police, and not from the M.E.’s, either.

It had taken only twenty minutes to resolve the police officers’ concerns. Not so those of the janitor, who, rightly or wrongly, considered Stadium Hall his territory, not mine, and who threatened me with a smorgasbord of dire fates if he ever found another rotting corpse in his building. “I don’t mind all them Indian bones you got in them boxes,” he said. “But this-here nastiness ain’t got no place in my building. I want it out of here, and I don’t mean tomorrow.”

“It’ll be gone by the end of the day,” I assured him, wondering how on earth I would manage to keep that promise.

“You’ve got a what in one of the showers in Stadium Hall?” The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences — my new boss, as of four days before — sounded groggy when he answered the phone, and the thought that I’d awakened him during a five-day holiday weekend made me wince.

“A decomposing body,” I repeated. I explained the situation to him. It was the third time in an hour I’d summarized the series of unexpected events, hasty decisions, and unhappy consequences.

“And what, exactly, do you want me to do about this?” He no longer sounded groggy; he sounded wide-awake and more than a little annoyed.

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I think I need some land to put bodies on. The Cumberland County medical examiner isn’t the only one likely to send me rotting John Does. The way this memo reads, bodies will be coming in from all over the state. It wasn’t a problem out in Kansas — Kansas is twice the size of Tennessee, with only half as many people. So out there, it takes a while for folks to be found, and by that time they’re generally down to nice, dry bone. Here, on the other hand…”

He sighed. “I’ll make some calls.” I felt my spirits lift, but they plummeted a moment later when he added, “First thing Monday.”

“Monday? But that’s four days from now,” I squawked. “What am I supposed to do with this guy for the next four days?”

“You’re a bright young man,” he said. “You’ll think of something.”

“You’ve got a what in the back of your truck?” Kathleen stared at me as if I’d lost my mind.

“A decomposing body.” I explained the situation yet again; by now I could have told the story in my sleep.

“Where—here? In our garage?”

“No, no. Of course not. I’m not that dumb.”

“How dumb are you? Did you leave it parked somewhere at UT?”

“Uh, not exactly,” I hedged. She gave me a gimlet-eyed look, waiting me out. “It’s in the driveway. Halfway between the house and the street.”

“Bill Brockton,” she groaned. “What am I supposed to do with you?”

“Hey, it could be worse,” I pointed out.

“How, exactly?”

“I could’ve brought him home before the cookout.”

She shook her head and heaved a sigh. “Thank heaven for small favors,” she muttered.

The dean summoned me to his office at mid-morning Monday. By that time the cab of my truck smelled to high heaven, even though the body bag was back in the cargo bed. I’d driven to campus with the windows down and my head in the wind, like a dog’s.

As I left the stadium for the walk up the hill to the dean’s office, I noticed a thick cloud of flies surrounding the truck; on the camper shell’s window screens, they were packed wing-to-wing, as tightly as planes on an aircraft carrier’s deck.

An hour later, trailing a plume of flies in my wake, I pulled away from the stadium and threaded my way up the Tennessee River, a map open on the seat beside me. Six miles to the east — where the French Broad and the Holston rivers converged to form the Tennessee — the university owned a farm where, for half a century, the College of Agriculture had raised pigs. The pig-farming venture had ended a few years before, and the old sow barn, where countless piglets had been born and nursed, now sat empty and idle. That barn, the dean had informed me in our brief, curt meeting, was the place — the only place — where I was to warehouse any corpses I happened to receive from my colleagues in the medical examiner’s system.

“Empty and idle” were accurate descriptors, as far as they went, but they were not comprehensive. A complete description of the sow barn—my sow barn — required “crumbling and stinking,” too. Fair enough, I realized, considering that I’d be contributing more than a little decay and odor to the property myself.

I backed the truck up to the barn, opened the cargo shell and tailgate, then slid the body bag out. It dropped to the ground with a dull, squishy thud. By the time I dragged it across the wooden threshold and into the dim, foul-smelling interior of the barn, the bag and I were already being buzzed by a new squadron of flies.

“Welcome to Tennessee,” I said to myself.