The Next in Line

«Some one year, some five, senor, some ten, some sev-enty.»

There was an embarrassment of horror. You started with the first man on your right, hooked and wired upright against the wall, and he was not good to look upon, and you went on to the woman next to him who was unbelievable and then to a man who was horrendous and then to a woman who was very sorry she was dead and in such a place as this.

«What are they doing here?» said Joseph.

«Their relatives did not pay the rent upon their graves.»

«Is there a rent?»

«Si, senor. Twenty pesos a year. Or, if they desire the permanent interment, one hundred seventy pesos. But our people, they are very poor, as you must know, and one hundred seventy pesos is as much as many of them make in two years. So they carry their dead here and place them into the earth for one year, and the twenty pesos are paid, with fine intentions of paying each year and each year, but each year and each year after the first year they have a burro to buy or a new mouth to feed, or maybe three new mouths, and the dead, after all, are not hungry, and the dead, after all, can pull no ploughs; or there is a new wife or there is a roof in need of mending, and the dead, remember, can be in no beds with a man, and the dead, you understand, can keep no rain off one, and so it is that the dead are not paid up upon their rent.»

«Then what happens? Are you listening, Marie?» said Joseph.

Marie counted the bodies. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, «What?» she said, quietly.

«Are you listening?»

«I think so. What? Oh, yes! I'm listening.»

Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen.

«Well, then,» said the little man. «I call a trabajando and with his delicate shovel at the end of the first year he does dig and dig and dig down. How deep do you think we dig, senor? »

«Six feet. That's the usual depth.»

«Ah, no, ah, no. There, senor, you would be wrong. Knowing that after the first year the rent is liable not to be paid, we bury the poorest two feet down. It is less work, you understand? Of course, we must judge by the family who own a body. Some of them we bury sometimes three, sometimes four feet deep, sometimes five, sometimes six, depending on how rich the family is, depending on what the chances are we won't have to dig him from out his place a year later. And, let me tell you, senor, when we bury a man the whole six feet deep we are very certain of his staying. We have never dug up a six-foot-buried one yet, that is the accuracy with which we know the money of the people.»

Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. Marie's lips moved with a small whisper.

«And the bodies which are dug up are placed down here against the wall, with the other companeros.»

«Do the relatives know the bodies are here?»

«Si.» The small man pointed. «This one, yo veo? It is new. It has been here but one year. His madre y padre know him to be here. But have they money? Ah, no.»

«Isn't that rather gruesome for his parents?»

The little man was earnest. «They never think of it,» he said.

«Did you hear that, Marie?»

«What?» Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four. «Yes. They never think of it.»

«What if the rent is paid again, after a lapse?» inquired Joseph.

«In that time,» said the caretaker, «the bodies are re-buried for as many years as are paid.»

«Sounds like blackmail,» said Joseph.

The little man shrugged, hands in pockets. «We must live.»

«You are certain no one can pay the one hundred sev-enty pesos all at once,» said Joseph. «So in this way you get them for twenty pesos a year, year after year, for maybe thirty years. If they don't pay, you threaten to stand mamacita or little nino in the catacomb.»

«We must live,» said the little man.

Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three.

Marie counted in the center of the long corridor, the standing dead on all sides of her.

They were screaming.

They looked as if they had leaped, snapped upright in their graves, clutched hands over their shriveled bosoms and screamed, jaws wide, tongues out, nostrils flared.

And been frozen that way.

All of them had open mouths. Theirs was a perpetual screaming. They were dead and they knew it. In every raw fiber and evaporated organ they knew it.

She stood listening to them scream.

They say dogs hear sounds humans never hear, sounds so many decibels higher than normal hearing that they seem nonexistent.

The corridor swarmed with screams. Screams poured from terror-yawned lips and dry tongues, screams you couldn't hear because they were so high.

Joseph walked up to one standing body.

«Say 'ah,'» he said.

Sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, counted Marie, among the screams.

«Here is an interesting one,» said the proprietor.

They saw a woman with arms flung to her head, mouth wide, teeth intact, whose hair was wildly flourished, long and shimmery on her head. Her eyes were small pale white-blue eggs in her skull.

«Sometimes, this happens. This woman, she is a cataleptic. One day she falls down upon the earth, but is really not dead, for, deep in her, the little drum of her heart beats and beats, so dim one cannot hear. So she was buried in the graveyard in a fine inexpensive box….»

«Didn't you know she was cataleptic?»

«Her sisters knew. But this time they thought her at last dead. And funerals are hasty things in this warm town.»

«She was buried a few hours after her 'death?'»

«Si, the same. All of this, as you see her here, we would never have known, if a year later her sisters, having other things to buy, had not refused the rent on her burial. So we dug very quietly down and loosed the box and took it up and opened the top of her box and laid it aside and looked in upon her?»

Marie stared.

This woman had wakened under the earth. She had torn, shrieked, clubbed at the box-lid with fists, died of suffocation, in this attitude, hands flung over her gaping face, horror-eyed, hair wild.

«Be pleased, senor, to find that difference between her hands and these other ones,» said the caretaker. «Their peaceful fingers at their hips, quiet as little roses. Hers? Ah, hers! are jumped up, very wildly, as if to pound the lid free!»

«Couldn't rigor mortis do that?»

«Believe me, senor, rigor mortis pounds upon no lids. Rigor mortis screams not like this, nor twists nor wrestles to rip free nails, senor, or prise boards loose hunting for air, senor. All these others are open of mouth, si, because they were not injected with the fluids of embalming, but theirs is a simple screaming of muscles, senor. This senorita, here, hers is the muerte horrible.»

Marie walked, scuffling her shoes, turning first this way, then that. Naked bodies. Long ago the clothes had whispered away. The fat women's breasts were lumps of yeasty dough left in the dust. The men's loins were indrawn, withered orchids.

«Mr. Grimace and Mr. Gape,» said Joseph.

He pointed his camera at two men who seemed in conversation, mouths in mid-sentence, hands gesticulant