Kristen Langereis is a Dutch-American writer living in Amsterdam. With no pets or children, she still finds ample time to fall behind on daily tasks. She is of the opinion that a sandwich tastes better when made for her by someone else.
Anatomy of a Cover Up
I knew a lot about death, even then, including what a dead body smelled like. It’s a fun way to open a conversation. I could tell you what embalmed flesh looked like. It’s flaked skipjack.
You see, Dad could only eat white meat tuna – albacore packed in water. He took it with bread and butter pickles and too much mayonnaise. He wouldn’t touch skipjack, nor would my mother. She wouldn’t even buy it because it’s poor people food. Dad said skipjack reminded him of the cadavers he worked on in school. He mentioned it every time she made him his tuna sandwich, which was every Friday, and he only finished about half before he’d get that look which said the good tuna had turned from safe to dead in his imagination. So, I always ate that extra half sandwich – thinking it would be a shame to waste it when my mother took such pains to open both a can and a jar.
I was nine when I thought for sure I would know how a decomposed body might smell. When pilfering a third, or fourth popsicle from the back freezer I had left the door ajar. The majority contents, stuffed every which way next to Lean Cuisines, bags of party ice and popsicles of every flavor were the individually-wrapped remnants of a butchered whole cow. Dad had traded the cow for oral surgery more than five years prior. I remember thinking we were going to pick up an actual, living breathing cow when Mother drove us to the ranch south of the city. I should have been tipped off by the two big coolers she brought, I suppose. But I was young, and happy to be allowed in the front seat next to the air-conditioning. The cow traveled home with us disassembled.
The steaks, tenderloin, and roasts had been eaten first and the remnants, garbage-meat as Mother called it, lived in our utility room freezer. My carelessness caused everything in the freezer to defrost and dozens of cherry-mottled white butcher paper packages, some visibly stamped Heart/Short-Ribs/Tripe, mingled their bloody juices with a corn syrup rainbow. Mom screamed and shut the door. She said we must to wait until nightfall, while Dad slept, to bring everything to the big black garbage can in the alley.
When he started to snore she grabbed my hand and a roll of black garbage bags. We snuck out back to clean and dump it all. I think we both knew that even though there was slim chance our family would eat tripe, especially cooked by her, that he still wanted to hang on to it, just in case. I was sworn to silence. But, as it goes with crime, eventually someone finds out. Weekly garbage collection had just happened a few days prior. Everything we hoisted that night into big black garbage bags festered, cooked, and decomposed further within the big black garbage can. Our across-the-alley neighbor called 911 because he thought someone had dumped a dead body. Since he was a cop, I figured he should know. I figured that a dead body smelled like old, dead cow parts, cherry popsicle frostbite and panic.
I tell that story to this day, never mentioning that now I really know what is the real smell of death, and adding that Dad never thought that the huge amount of dumped meat which had caused a minor neighborhood ruckus was indeed his. Even at the end, we kept that from him too.