A Good Judge Of Character

 

     Few weeks ago, a sponsored post appeared on my Facebook News Feed. The post was from a page called Reedsy Prompts, announcing a weekly short story writing contest (1,000-3,000 words) and it got me interested because the result would be quick and there’s a US$50 prize for the winner (they’ll pick only one) which they’d send through PayPal. The mechanics of the contest are, you’d get an e-mail from them, giving you five different writing prompts, you can choose one and write a story about it  (if you’re prolific, you can choose all the prompts and write different stories based on them). You have a week to write it and the result will be out a week after the deadline. Nifty, isn’t it? I learned about the contest Wednesday night, I registered that night, got the prompts instantly, I chose one, wrote it the next day, Thursday, then, submitted it on Friday. They would screen your story before it could be an official entry, and my story, luckily, was approved. But there were hundreds of (approved) entries so naturally, my story lost. Lol.

     Reedsy Prompts continues to send me prompts but I haven’t written an entry again, but I definitely will join the contest again soon.

     Here’s the story I wrote for the contest based on the prompt: “Write about someone getting a job offer they never would have thought to apply for…”

 

A Good Judge of Character

             Jack glanced at his wall clock as his cell phone continued to ring savagely on the bedside table.

3 AM.

Who would call him at three in the morning? No one even bothered to him during daytime anymore.  He grudgingly sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the phone, letting it ring for a few more seconds before picking it up. “Hello?” he said, his voice grumpy.

“Mr. Jack Alvarez?” a man from the other line inquired.

He yawned. “Yes, this is Jack.”

“I am calling to offer you a job.”

That made him sit straight. “What job?”

“An embalmer.”

That made him slouch again, dismayed. So he woke up in the middle of the night to answer a prank call? “An embalmer,” he said.

“Yes.”

“The one who dissects dead people?”

“I won’t describe the job that way.”

“Why the hell would I apply as an embalmer?”

“You sent us an application through email,” the man calmly told him.

“No, I did not.”

“You did.”

“I did not.”

“Check your email then.”

“No, I won’t,” Jack said. “I’m sure I did not send an application to a funeral home. And I hate you for disturbing my sleep.”

Jack hung up and he swore that he would curse the caller nonstop if he ever rang him up again that moment. But his cell phone stayed quite in his hand. He exhaled sharply to calm himself down. So how did the caller know his number? Because he sent him an email with his phone number on it? No, no, he shook his head, he wasn’t insane to send an application to a funeral home seeking the position of an embalmer. He wasn’t a scaredy cat and he wasn’t afraid of the dead, and he didn’t mind working with them, or on them. But he didn’t know anything about embalming. I am an accountant, for God’s sake! A jobless accountant for almost a year now and he had lost count on how many resumes he had sent through email and how many offices he had stepped into just to apply, only to be told that they would just contact just in case. He was lucky he was not married as his wife would have sure abandoned him now. His savings were depleted as he reached his sixth month of unemployment and he was now subsisting on the kindness and generosity of his relatives and friends.

He found himself checking his email on his phone. He went straight to Sent and immediately, his attention was caught by an email address: Deadwoodhome@gmail.com. He opened it and yes, he sent a resume to this email address. And it was the wrong address. He should have sent it to Driftwood@gmail.com, a shipping company that was in need of an accountant. He googled Deadwood Home and yes, it was a funeral home.

I was applying for an accountant, not an embalmer, he thought, utterly bemused. Why didn’t they just ignore his letter? It was clear that he made a mistake. Driftwood was mentioned in the body of his letter. And that man really had the audacity to call him at wee hours.  He put his phone down and lay down on his bed again. But before he could sleep, he remembered his landlord’s last visit to him and her threat to evict him from her apartment if he’d still fail to pay his rent within a week from now. That would be his second eviction since he went jobless. And he doubted if he could still find a new place to stay. You needed money to relocate.

He badly needed a job.

 

 

“I was apprehensive that I disturbed your sleep last night, Mr. Alvarez, my apologies,” said Mr. Rigor, the 65-year old owner of Deadwood Funeral Homes and the man who called him last night. They were in his office. The businessman, wearing white long sleeve polo with a tie, sat behind his desk while Jack sat on the chair fronting the old man. Instead of a couch, two white coffins could be seen near the door.  And Jack hoped that both were empty.

“It’s okay,” Jack said and smiled. “Water under the bridge.”

The old man smiled back. “I’m a night owl, I am awake at the wee hours until dawn, then I sleep until noon,” he explained. “I am aware that at the hours I am awake, majority of people are asleep. But sometimes, I forget it. So you want to be an embalmer now?”

Temporarily, Jack thought, until I find a normal job.  “Yes,” he answered. “But I don’t know anything about it.”

“Everything can be taught,” Mr. Rigor smiled again. The old man’s smile, Jack noticed, looked genuine and cheerful and normal, not the eerie, spooky type you’d expect you’d see from people who worked and earned from the dead.

“But why not get somebody experienced?”

“That was actually my plan,” the old man leaned on his chair and intertwined his fingers. There wasn’t a ring on any of his fingers. “Then, I saw your resume. And what you wrote there.”

‘What did I write there?”

“That you’re a good judge of character, including people you’ve met for the first time,” he said. “You can tell if they’re bad or good just by looking at their face. You say it’s a gift. It was written on the part “About Myself.”

Jack’s forehead furrowed, but before he could ask questions and clear his confusion, the old man spoke again. “You’ll work temporarily as an assistant embalmer for your first two weeks, then after that, you will work as full-fledged embalmer.”

“How much will my salary be?” he finally was able to ask the question he’d been meaning to ask since the start of the interview. It would depend on the answer on whether he’d accept the job or just continue looking for jobs that befitted his work experience.

But the amount the old man mentioned was staggering, almost triple his last salary.

He gladly accepted the job.

 

 

On his first day, Jack was introduced to Martin, a 50 year old man with a twenty-year experience as an embalmer. “The job’s easy,” Martin told him with a grin on his face. “The client never complains.”

And their first client was a sixty-year old man who committed suicide by hanging himself from the ceiling of his room.

“Unless the body and the face were really mangled and the family still wants the deceased to look like a heartthrob, every job takes only two hours,” Martin told him as they washed the hair and body of the dead man.

They were about to finish when a tall, lean man, who seemed in his mid-thirties and was wearing a resplendent black suit, entered the room and approached them while they worked.

Martin nodded and smile shyly at the man before introducing him. “This is Jack, our new guy,” he told the visitor.

“How are you, Jack?” the visitor asked him.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Jack, this is Mr. Darmon, he’s a good friend of Mr. Rigor. “And he likes to observe what we do.”

And Jack thought bird-watchers were weird. It was so far the oddest thing he learned about the funeral home, weirder than the two coffins inside Mr. Rigor’s office: a man who loved watching someone being embalmed. Jack would rather watch paint dry than observe an embalmer do his job. But he didn’t say anything and just continued on assisting Martin.

“Mr. Jack, do you know that man?” Mr. Darmon’s fingers tapped his left arm gently and asked him, referring to the cadaver.

“I don’t,” he answered.

“Look at him,” Mr. Darmon said again, his voice authoritative but wasn’t really demanding. “Do you think he’s a good man or a bad man?”

So Mr. Rigor had been telling people about his resume? But he found himself obliging Mr. Darmon. “He committed suicide,” he said as he looked at the dead man. “But that didn’t really automatically make him a bad man.”

“Of course not,” Mr. Darmon said. “Suicide is not a sin, it’s a sacrifice, and it takes courage to do it.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “But I would never recommend it.”

“The sins he committed and the kindness he did when he was still alive neutralize each other,” Mr. Darmon said. “So it’d be hard to say if he should go to heaven or hell. But judging by his appearance, where do you think he should go?”

“He looked peaceful,” Jack said. “A wicked man’s corpse would look angry and bitter. This man, it seems to me, felt that he was a burden to the world being alive and that death stopped him from being like that. It seems like him dying was him giving the world a favor.”

Mr. Darmon looked very attentive. “So you think he was a nice guy?”

“Yes, I do,” he said. “Taking your life so that others could live is the supreme sacrifice. At least, that is what I assume happened.” Mr. Martin had earlier told him that the dead man was gravely ill and had been racking up hospital bills for his poor family to pay.

“So he should go to heaven?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Mr. Darmon smiled and nodded. He stared at the dead man, sympathy visible in his eyes, and then bade them goodbye.

Jack watched the man completely get out of the room before he turned to Mr. Martin. “What’s up with that man?”

“Oh, he just popped outside the funeral home one day, asking if he could see someone, a 30-year old woman, who died that day,” Mr. Martin said. “He asked me and Mr. Martin if we could judge the character of that dead woman, and we said no. I’ve been living with my wife for more than twenty years and I still really don’t know her.” Mr. Martin chuckled. “Sometimes, she’s the devil to me, sometimes, I think of her as an angel. But he and Mr. Rigor became quite good friends. Mr. Darmon would still visit us and observe me work on the dead every now and then. But he never asks me questions again. Yesterday, Mr. Rigor called him up and told him about you.”

“What’s the use of someone’s character when he’s already dead?” he asked Mr. Martin.

Mr. Martin chuckled again. “Mr. Rigor loves to tell me that Mr. Darmon is a Grim Reaper.”

“The Grim Reaper.”

“No, a Grim Reaper,” Mr. Martin corrected him. “Apparently, there’s a lot of Grim Reapers out there and Mr. Darmon is one of them. And not all of them are smart, apparently. Mr. Darmon wants to know if a dead man or a dead woman is nice or naughty before he picks up their soul and bring to heaven, if they’re nice, or to hell, if they’re naughty.” Mr. Martin chuckled again and shook his head. “But I think it’s just a joke.”

But Jack remembered the creepy coldness he felt when Mr. Darmon touched his arm earlier, like the man’s hand was made of ice. The man felt colder than the dead man on the table, like he had been dead for hundreds of years but wasn’t allowed to decompose.

No, he shook his head, it’s probably not a joke.

He needed to find a new job immediately, one that didn’t deal with the dead. ®®®