Bereavement

Wichita Heights

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a place called Old Country Kitchen outside of Wichita Heights. I don't mean to be disrespectful to any other restaurants, but the best all-you-can-eat buffets are the ones you find in the mid-west. Most of our people come from the red states.

I like to work backwards from the soft-serv machine. A long time ago when I worked in the drive-in back home I learned how to do it--the key is not having to turn the cone completely around, just swiveling it in a shallow figure eight so the vanilla or chocolate or strawberry forms a base to build on, keeping your other hand on the lever with the black ball on it to control the speed. There were a couple of kids watching the process, a boy of four or five, blond, with dark ringed eyes, eyebrows joined together in the center. His sister, a few years older, wearing school clothes and a white sweater, looked at me with suspicion as I handed over the piled-high cone.

"Is that okay with your mom?" I asked him, smiling at his mother, a pretty woman who was decorating a cup of yogurt with colored candy. Following her lead I filled up one of the small cups for myself. She liked the traditional pastel sugar sprinkles, whereas I was a little bit of a free spirit, scattering a scoop of brightly colored gummi bears across an alp of frozen vanilla. "Hey, do I know you from someplace? You look so familiar. Is your name by any chance Sharon?"

It turned out it wasn't what she was called, Jenny, believe it or not, but she was a quite a nice lady, pretty and self-assured mother of two, Rachel and Ben. I guess I've got an eye for ladies who are making it out on their own. Jenny had a friendly face, a dark brown head of hair, wore faded bluejeans over a pair of tan suede boots.

Sure, it was just a pickup line, but even without a snowball's chance we'd ever met, and even though things didn't ever go anywhere from there, it did seem like she was familiar, like someone I'd been friends with in the past, though I when I suggested Houston, where I work, she said she'd never been.

They want you to start with the cinnamon rolls. I like a couple of them, but not too many because you've got to save room for stuff like the fried chicken and the lasagna, which is also good. A cup or a bowl of chili makes a better hors d'oeuvre. Plus this place will give you a number and the guy with the chef's hat on will make you a burger and fries--while you wait, there's always plenty of turkey and roast beef coldcuts folded up. I always use both mayonaisse and mustard for my sandwich. I know that's a little weird, but you got two slices of bread, you might as well use them both.

Since it was nearly Thanksgiving I settled on turkey. Just kidding about the mustard, they had two kinds of cranberry sauce to mix with the mayo, crinkly dark green lettuce poking out from the edges. While I munched I looked out the window at the people moving back and forth freely through the mall.

Honestly, this is what it's all about. Right outside the restaurant a man was pushing an older lady in a wheelchair up the concrete handicapped entry ramp, his wife holding open the door. Out in the parking lot another family climbed down from a blue Ford Excursion and headed up a sidewalk toward the Cineplex, chattering happily.

"Ever been in the service?" I asked a fat man and woman who were sitting at the next table, tapping my finger on the newspaper I had picked up from the rack outside to show the guy what I was talking about. The headline read, "Bomb Blast kills 6 GIs in Bagdhad." I've never been to Iraq per se, though the company does have me traveling quite a bit. Back when I was in the Army there was talk that they might send us over to Bosnia, but that didn't happen either.

"Marines, yeah," the man said, still chewing on a plate of pork spareribs. People like me, and I can read them pretty good. I never have any trouble striking up a conversation. I guess that's part of why I'm in the job. He was about the same age as me, maybe a little older, big shoulders tight in a blue striped polo shirt. "Four year enlistment. Yeah. Getting tough over there."

"Yeah," I said, shaking my head sadly. "Kinda seems like things never really change, doesn't it? Is that strawberry pie any good?"

I looked back at the dessert island longingly, but Jenny and her two kids had finished their ice cream and were leaving the Old Country Kitchen into the other side of the parking lot. Oh, well. In my job you meet a lot of people. Most of them you meet once and then never see again.

At the movie theatre across the way they were playing "Capote" which was about the guy who wrote "In Cold Blood," the story how two robbers killed a whole family in the city of Holcomb, Kansas, back in the sixties. Then there was the case of Dennis Rader, the BTK serial killer. He was from right there in Wichita. So I shouldn't have been surprised that the women around the place were a little skitzy.

"You know," I said, "Sometimes it seems as if it just isn't worth it, doesn't it? I mean, I see death, real human death and the human cost of it every day. Oh, I don't think I mentioned it, I'm from down in Houston, where I work for a company that does business supporting our troops in Iraq. Consoling widows is over-rated, I can tell you."

"No, not that company, though we do work very closely with Halliburton. They're one of our biggest clients. I'll tell you something else about that--we do good work, we don't overcharge anybody for anything. The feds wouldn't let us do it even if we wanted to. What do I do there? Well, you know, HR, Human Relations, I'm a contractor. Oh, OK, well, nice to meet you both..."

Fuck. So anyway, I just gave up and found my rental car and drove to the address on the sheet early.


I've only been in Bereavement a little over eighteen months. Before that it was Recruiting, back during what we called the big food service boom--a whole bunch of us were hired to go after the best and brightest in commissary management, supply chainers, recreation and comfort people. Within a couple of six weeks we had paid out bonuses, expedited commercial flights, and inside of a year we had shopped, shipped, and served close to ten million meals to the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What do you want from me? What I used to say, just give me your second best guy. I guess in a way it's like the cycle of life, everyone getting rich at first, a while afterwards people aren't as happy, eventually you've got a retention problem, a certain amount of bad news to deliver. I've been through it before.

Because the way it works is, you always just have to start from the bottom up...

I never even hired out of the Kansas/West Prairie region. My old territory was east of the mississippi, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. Following the GPS display in the rental car, I drove in a downtown direction from Wichita Heights, spiraled left off W. 29th Street N. onto Arkansas Ave. Three blocks ahead was W. 32nd, another left onto N. Shelton Street, number 3245, almost to where the street dead ended, a good house in its time. Three bedrooms, a couple baths, a detached garage...

Pretty much you've got the widows and you have the parents. The widows will be in apartments, small houses, or trailer parks, the parents in these kind of older family homes. It didn't look like Jenny from the Old Country Kitchen would be meeting me at this front door. It was a tall porch, with a curving red clay colored front walkway and brick steps, four sculpted wooden columns that supported a triangular roof over a wide entry. A small, round doorbell.

Don't get me wrong. It's just that when you deal with the mass of humanity you become aware of certain patterns after a while. I still consider myself a people person. Even after this incident I'm telling you about.

Sure, I'm African-American. But it's not like there aren't some of us in these midwest cities, usually some kind of rundown neighborhood that it wasn't worth buying into, a lot of times one like this. But the man who answered the door was white, bushy eyebrows raised above pale blue eyes. "Can I help you?

"Daniel Morrison?" I asked. "I'm Tim Harvey, representing Logistic Strategy Associates. How are you and your wife Eileen holding up?"

"Excuse me?" It appeared that our office had not yet informed Mr. Morrison. In situations like this, and they've happened to me a couple of times, a couple of things usually occur--there's a roaring in your ears, a faintness that kicks your legs out from underneath you. You experience a physical understanding that instantly transcends all ambiguous words. I put out an arm to steady both myself and the man who was rocking on his heels in the doorframe before me. It isn't that I can't handle delivering bad news, it's just that, you know, when it isn't really your job.

"It was a roadside device," I said quickly, anticipating Morrison's first question. "Jeremy was driving a refrigerator truck into Takrit--bringing up supplies for the battalion that's been fighting to hold the city." And then, in further answer, "Last Wednesday afternoon."

The old man's reaction surprised me. "I'll blow your fucking guts out." The gunpowder intensity of denial was shot through a rusted muzzle of racial hatred, but there was no gun, only pain. "Coon ass strutting negro. You fucking nigger." These kind of confrontations are not my favorite part of the job.

"Jerry? ... Jeremy?" Now the father's voice began to fail as he called back uncertainly into the darkness of the house and the past. As though his young son could be evoked out of time to spring up the stairs from his bedroom in the finished basement.

"Dan? What's wrong?" It must have been the sheer scripted predictability of the moment that told me the story. As I've mentioned, I catch on to people pretty good, and as soon as I saw her face, dark eyes lined with mascara, an uncertain mouth, I was sure. The woman who appeared in the doorway already knew her son was dead.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," I said.

Part III, Roadside Device