Chris and Charlie Pick Up a Body in Rapid City

Rapid City, South Dakota — Summer, 1958

The summer between my junior and senior year I worked at McColley’s Mortuary in Hot Springs, South Dakota. It was steady work. Some of it was interesting and some of it was creepy, and a boy of seventeen cannot always tell you which was which until later.

One morning Tom McColley asked me to take the hearse up to Rapid City and bring back a body from the hospital.

I said, “OK.” 

Then I thought about the drive. It is about sixty miles north on highway 79, and sixty miles is a long way alone with a stranger who will not talk to you. So I called my cousin Chris Cranston. Chris was a couple of years behind me in school and had the kind of face that got both of us in trouble and then got both of us out of it.

“He’s letting you drive the hearse?” Chris asked.

“He is.”

“I’ll go with you. Pick me up.”

The hearse was a black and maroon Cadillac, long and polished, and it rode like a church rides. The drive up route 79 was dry and hot. We did not talk much. There is a way you sit in a hearse when you are seventeen, which is very straight, with both hands on the wheel, like someone who has been trusted.

At the hospital they brought the gentleman out on a gurney. We loaded him and strapped him down and shut the rear door, and I checked the straps twice because I did not want to explain anything to Tom McColley that afternoon.

Then Chris said he was hungry.

He was right. It was past noon and we had a long ride back, and there was a drive-in on the edge of town with the cars nosed in under the awning, Fords and Chevys and a Studebaker, and the carhops moving between them with trays.

I pulled the hearse in between two sedans.

Nobody said anything. That is the thing about a hearse. It does not make people shout. It makes them go quiet and look at their hands.

The carhop came over. She was young, maybe our age, with a pencil and a pad, and she came to my window and she was polite about it, the way you are polite at a funeral.

I ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate shake.

Chris ordered too. He took his time about it.

Then Chris turned around in the seat, put his arm over the back of it, and called out toward the rear of the hearse.

“You want anything?”

The carhop did not move.

I have thought about her face many times over the past nearly seventy years. It was not just surprise. Surprisea pass. This was something deeper and more permanent, the look of a person watching the world quietly rearrange itself in a drive-in lot on a Tuesday.

She did not scream. She wrote nothing else down. She walked back toward the window very carefully, the way you walk on ice when you’re wearing roller skates.

I do not remember whether we got the food. I hope we did. I remember Chris laughing until he could not get his breath, and I remember trying not to laugh, because I was the one with the keys and the responsibility and the dead man in the back.

Nothing came of it. We drove home back on 79. The gentleman rode quietly and did not complain about the stop.

That is the whole story.

I will say this in our defense. If you give two high school boys a Cadillac hearse, sixty miles of highway, and a passenger who cannot object, something is going to happen. It is not a question of character.

It is a question of physics.

Maybe.

~ CC