(as seen in www.cellstories.net)

I grew up in Winnipeg, which is an Ojibway word meaning “Stagnant Waters”.  Our house sat on the banks of the Red River, the very stagnant waters for which the city was named.  On days that the Carling O’Keefe factory wasn’t wafting its yeasty stench in our direction, it wasn’t a bad place to be.  The summer of 1980, it was phe-freaking-nomenal.

Friends were in short supply, that summer after seventh grade.  I was no longer speaking with Theresa Spak.  She’d refused to believe me when I told her I was the one who’d started the custom of saying “Number One” and “Number Two” when discussing bodily elimination.  “Someone had to invent it, why is it so hard to believe it was me?!” I’d screamed at her over mayonnaise sandwiches.  Years later I would come to realize that I was probably wrong, but by then there was too much water (and number one) under the bridge to do anything about it.

Then there was Elena Hrabiuk. We’d met at camp the previous summer. Elena had wide-set eyes and usually smelled of fried onions.  Seeing that my only alternative was to spend the afternoon with my brother Aaron while he farted “This Land is Your Land” on my head, I decided to call Elena and invite her over.  

We hung out in my room for forty-five minutes or so, crying to the greatest hits of “Air Supply”.  After the batteries on my boombox died we went out to the backyard where my dad was standing over the barbeque, swearing at a plate of raw hamburger. My dad was once a radical hippie and back in the day he had marched at Berkeley.  But now he was living in Winnipeg and the only remnant of his hippie past was the three hits of acid chilling in the refrigerator crisper.

He suggested we “go play down by the river”.  Since Elena was raised in Eastern Europe and unfamiliar with the concept of irony, she led the way.

We climbed down the bank through the slimy grass and discarded beer bottles, and jumped onto the wooden dock that belonged to our gay neighbor Ken (whose sexuality was so exotic to us that we only ever called him OurgayneighborKen).

The Paddlewheel Queen chugged past for its daily afternoon cruise.  We jumped up and down, waving and yelling obscenities at the boat whose passengers consisted of a few drunken old ladies and some retarded kids from a nearby group-home.  The boat sent a ripple of waves toward the dock, disturbing the dark water.  My eye caught something floating, maybe fifty feet out.  I picked up a rock and threw it at the object, nailing it (which is odd for me, since I throw like a girl with no arms).  The object pitched and bobbed slowly with the weight of something quite dense.

I decided instantly that it was a human head. 

I told Elena my suspicions.  She squinted and shrugged her shoulders.  I remembered then why I didn’t like her. 

I opened my mouth to call for my father, then stopped.  Instinctively I knew that this would go over like a lead fart due to my reputation of making, what some might call, questionable claims.  For instance, earlier that year I’d tried to convince my family that our house was haunted by 17th century fur traders. In third grade I pretended to have stomach cramps so severe that I ended up in the hospital (then made a sudden and complete recovery during my first rectal exam).  And I’d once faked a very credible seizure.

But the majority of my claims involved corpses.  I’m not sure when I’d gone from happy-go-dorky kid to “The Night Stalker”, but I couldn’t remember a time when a pile of leaves was just a pile of leaves and not a hiding spot for a headless corpse… or a freezer at a yard sale wasn’t clearly holding two dead bodies, chopped up and stacked like logs. Attics, closets, crawlspaces, porta-potties– all were fair game for my corpse-based suspicions.

I looked again.  There was no way I was wrong about this one.  That floating head was so clearly the real deal it made all my other dead-body-hunches seem like the ramblings of a madwoman. 

I yelled for him.  “Dad!”

No answer.

I called again.  “Dad!

Finally, a response: “Fuck off, I’m cooking!”

Elena looked confused – there was no time to explain to her the intricacies of my family, or the fact that it was likely my father was stoned at that very moment.  I left her there and ran up the grassy slope, up to the barbeque where my father was attempting to swat a fly with a greasy spatula. 

I spoke carefully, “Dad, I need to show you something.  We – I… I found a head”.

“Can’t you see I’m busy?”  A piece of hamburger flew off his fly-swatting spatula and hit me in the cheek.  I gave him a serious look, the kind I’d seen Lucy Ewing give JR any number of times.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake… alright, let’s go”.

I led him down to the dock, shoving my way past Elena.  We were joined by my brother Aaron who was taking a break from terrorizing the cat.  I pointed to the bobbing head in the water.

My dad squinted.  “That?  It’s just driftwood.  Probably upturned by that asshole with the speedboat who’s been racing around”. 

I begged him to look again.

Aaron snickered.  “Oooh.  Maybe we should call the river patrol”!  I agreed.   “Yes, please call them!  And when you tell them about me don’t call me Jojo. Or Gooch.  Use my real name.”

My father considered it.  “I guess I could call.  It’ll give me a chance to register a complaint about that commie fascist bastard with the speedboat.  FUCKING ASSHOLE!”

He called, and in twenty minutes two moustachio’ed officers from the River Patrol pulled up in a motorboat.  I waved frantically, pointing to the spot where my detached head was bobbing. 

Mustache Number One drove the boat, circling around my soon-to-be-validated discovery.  Mustache Number Two lowered a length of rope into the murky sludge, then hand-over-hand, pulled the rope into the boat. 

On the end of the rope was not a head but an entire fucking body. 

I held my breath while they lifted the old man’s corpse into the boat, then drove it over to OurgayneighborKen’s dock where they laid him out. I pressed every wrinkly crease of my brain into service, recording the details of the unfolding event: The red and white plaid shirt.  The bald head that held a few soggy wisps, one above each ear.  The brown leather shoe and leg brace on the right foot, and the shoeless black sock on the left.

One of the officers pulled a wallet from the dead guy’s pocket.  He opened it and retrieved a water-logged driver’s license that showed an address, just three blocks away.  I caught sight of a huge wad of cash, possibly as much twenty dollars, then wondered if I could claim the money using the “finders keepers” rule (and hoping OurgayneighborKen wouldn’t invoke the “possession is nine-tenths of the law” rule, considering the body was now on his property).

A couple of houses over was a tiny strip of public land where they found a cane and some muddy footprints at the river’s edge.  “Looks like he just fell in”, said Mustache Number Two.  As his partner radio’ed a call back to the police station, my family started back up to the house to eat dinner.  I was stunned.

“How can you eat?  There’s a dead man in our yard!”

“Ask him what he wants on his burger”, my dad said as he walked up the steps, then pulled the sliding screen door shut behind him.  

I stayed with the River Patrol until two more official-looking men with moustaches showed up, put the body onto a stretcher and carried it to a plain white van in our driveway. 

As the van pulled away I sat on the curb and pondered my future.  Surely I’d be getting a call from the police for my minute-by-minute eyewitness account of the whole body-finding event.  Then I’d probably hear from Sylvia Kuzyk, the pretty blonde anchor from CKY-TV, with a request for an exclusive interview. And when school started in September Principal Reese would undoubtedly arrange an assembly so I could give a speech and sign autographs afterwards.  I ran my fingers through my hair and silently cursed my mother for not letting me get my ears pierced now that I was going to be famous.

But Sylvia didn’t call.  The police didn’t call.  Nobody called.

A week later I heard that a family friend, a man by the name of Norman, found another body in the river.  Norman lived about a half mile up the Red and the whole neighborhood had turned out to see his body, that of a young woman.  Evidently she’d been dead for several days and was blue and bloated and much more impressive than my mere day-old corpse.  I was furious.  Just because Norman was inattentive and let his body sit for several days before finding it, he was being celebrated?  Spare me!

By the time school started again a month later my dead body was old news.  Also, Tammy Pepidadis had cut off her pinky while washing dishes and that was the talk of the school.  But I was fine with that.  By that time my bitterness had been replaced with something much more lasting: sweet vindication.  They thought I was weird for thinking dead bodies were everywhere; turns out I was right.  Anyway, that was just my first.  I’m still looking for number two (and by “number two” of course I mean my second body, not poo).  There’s a world of corpses out there.  And those bodies aren’t going to find themselves. That’s why I had my ears pierced.  You just can’t be too ready.