Dripstones

Yelm, 1998, 1:38 AM

“Fix the fence.”

“What?”

I look over at Phil. “Fix the fence. He still has to fix the fence.”

Phil laughs, nervously. I look back at the dry erase board with its list of to-do items. Fix the fence. Feed the cats. Witching. I wonder what that means.

“Who knows? These Ramsters are into some pretty weird stuff.”

“Ramsters? What the hell is that?”

“You never heard of Ramtha?”

I shake my head, and Phil explains that Ramtha is a new age religion run by some woman who hangs with Linda Evans and Yanni.

“You seriously don’t know what Ramtha is?”

“I seriously don’t know what a lot of stuff is.”

Phil pushes back the visor of his firefighting helmet, which keeps falling forward. “Ramtha is like this Teutonic knight from the 14th century. The woman who runs Ramtha channels him.”

“And what does he say?”

“I dunno. Some shit about peace.”

I look around the place. Stacks of magazines, newspapers, cigarette cartons, opened electronic gadgets, half disemboweled of their circuitry, a couch that’s doubling as storage space, a coffee table that’s doubling as a couch, those variety packs of single serving size potato chips. I have to step over mounds of items so dense, that I cannot tell the individual pieces that make up the piles. They’re just piles.

He must have died three or four days ago. Though it is no more than 45 degrees outside, it is over 80 in here. The heat was left on. He is laying on his bed in only his underwear. His body has ballooned to twice its normal size, the skin stretched so thin you can see through it.

I come up to his head, and the swelling has forced his features into such a tight mound of constriction that there is hardly anything recognizable as a face. The dark hole of his mouth makes a perfect circle, calling down into his pillow his last thoughts.

The assistant chief looks at me. “When you die, everything in you wants out. So it escapes through the first openings it can find. Your mouth and your groin.”

I look back at his underwear, and there is a dark stain directly underneath. The assistant chief bends over, and has me do the same. “You see how much of his fluids have come through the mattress?”

I look under the bed, and the fluids have created a kind of environment that reminds me vaguely of a childhood trip I took to Carlsbad Caverns. Stalactites of this man hang from the mattress to the carpet.

“Pretty fucking cool, huh?”

Phil says, “Hey, here’s his wallet.” We each take a turn looking at the driver’s license photo, unable to recognize the 5’6”, 160-pound, 59 year old man who once occupied this gigantic corpse, who has apparently died of a heart attack alone in this shack in the middle of the forest, an ashtray full of cigarette butts.

“See those butts? See how they’re all half-smoked? He couldn’t finish a whole cigarette, that’s how bad he was. Kept smoking, though. That’s a fucked up addiction.”

I step outside to grab a breath of fresh air while we wait for the coroner. The air inside doesn’t smell bad at all, not like I expected. In fact, a kind of sweetness covers the scent of human remains, reminding me slightly of someone who’s used perfume instead of antiperspirant after a long day of work. But the air inside is damp and warm, nevertheless, and I don’t want to be reminded of this man’s solitary passing with all the things he still had left to do. I search the yard for a fence, but don’t see one at all.