‘Death by natural causes’ had a very broad meaning in Ilion Heights. Rabies from being bitten by a feral dog. Bad dope or too much dope. Working at Peninsula Poultry, the chicken processing factory, or Smyslov Felt Works where mercury hung in the air like humidity on a hot summer day. For the elderly or infants at risk for respiratory diseases, living too close to the factory or the felt works. Being Blackie Hauser’s enemy.
     Nobody remembered how Blackie Hauser got his nickname. According to the old timers who spent their afternoons in the sanitation workers’ union hall playing hearts and drinking beers and shots, Blackie earned it by refusing to work with certain new employees hired after a Federal court order desegregated the city sanitation department in 1971. Others said it was because he never cleaned under his fingernails. Some claimed it was because of the money he made writing bets on the Oakland Raiders. Everyone agreed the nickname fit so well its origin did not matter.

     As Kevin Decker positioned the HazMat barrel beneath the hearse that carried Ivory Bill Slavitt to the Ilion Heights cemetery that morning, he did not want to think about how Ivory Bill had died. Black smoke had billowed out of the hearse’s tailpipe during the funeral procession and the limousine behind it had sucked in fumes through the air vents. Jesu Lupita, the funeral director, had to adjust the bill and give a refund that buried his profits. Kevin had promised Jesu the hearse would be ready that night because Jesu needed it for the Arujo brothers in the morning, three year old twins scalded to death in the kitchen sink after their mother passed out from too many Jell-o shots. The city garbage truck in the next bay that needed new spark plugs, wires, and a distributor cap, would have to wait.
     Kevin unscrewed the plug to drain the oil pan, the first step in dropping the pan to check the gaskets, seal, and oil line. Ivory Bill had earned his notoriety when, on a dare, he swallowed a cue ball, first greasing it with butter so it would slide down his gullet. His winnings paid for his stomach surgery. Two months later, Ivory Bill rode a hearse belching black smoke to the promised land. There were rumors about how Ivory Bill had died. The medical examiner cited complications from the surgery. Ivory Bill’s wife insisted he bled to death from a rat bite. Word on the street was bad dope. The union activist trying to organize the workers at Peninsula Poultry where Ivory Bill was a floor boss blamed an infection caught from the raw chickens and squalid conditions in the plant.  Kevin Decker figured Ivory Bill’s wife had the right explanation, but the wrong rat. Blackie Hauser had lost thousands booking bets that Ivory Bill would choke on the cue ball.
     Kevin steadied the funnel so the oil draining from the hearse would not spill over the side of the HazMat barrel. The oil had a red hue as if someone had contaminated it with transmission fluid. Kevin rubbed some between his fingertips and dabbed his tongue. It reminded him of the cherry Cokes from his childhood when soda jerks mixed sodas by adding the syrup to soda water. Maybe that’s why he didn’t like the cherry Coke sold in bottles in the supermarket. It wasn’t tinged with red.
     “Hey!” Blackie Hauser strutted into the shop, swaggering as he had when he walked across the stage at his retirement party as crew chief on a city garbage truck.  Blackie wore a Teamster’s jacket, a Manchester United baseball cap, and construction boots whose rawhide laces, stiff with newness, extended out like a motorcycle’s handlebars. Kevin and his son Pete who worked with him at the garage had attended Blackie’s retirement party, sitting at the table next to the crew of Blackie’s garbage truck.  Like the sanitation workers, they each contributed to the fund collected by Blackie’s union to send him and his wife, Irene, to Hawaii for two weeks. Blackie slapped the door of the hearse. “God damn shame about Ivory Bill.”
     “When do you leave?” Kevin asked.
     “The guy with the dead wife,” Blackie replied, “the bastard hasn’t paid me yet.” Daigo Taira, one of Ivory Bill’s co-workers at Peninsula Poultry, had borrowed $1,000.00 at daily interest of five per cent to pay for his wife’s medical care during her pregnancy. After she died of an infection contracted at the chicken processing factory, Daigo spent the money on her funeral.
     “I didn’t guarantee his loan,” Kevin said. “You asked me if I knew him and I said he’d been in the shop a few times. You asked if he paid and I told you cash. That’s not vouching for him.” The oil fell in droplets now and puddled on the barrel top, the white background highlighting the red. Kevin wiped his hands on the rag hanging from his belt loop.
     Blackie’s fingertip skated around the top of the HazMat barrel, drawing designs in the oil, arrows pointing this way and that. “I hear you’re going to lose the garage in the divorce.”
     Kevin started removing the screws that held the oil pan in place, warning Blackie to stand clear because the pan never drained empty. Miranda wanted the divorce, not him, especially when the attorney he had consulted explained that he could not prevent it under the no-fault divorce statute and that the court would divide the marital assets equally because it was a long term marriage. When Kevin asked if that included the garage, the attorney said, What don’t you understand about the meaning of ‘everything’? Nothing, Kevin replied. Ex-wives want cash, the attorney explained, and the only way to raise cash was to sell the business. When Kevin replied that it was the closest thing he had to a family heirloom, he lowered his eyes so he wouldn’t see the lawyer smirk.
     Now, Kevin asked Blackie, “What’s it to you?”
     “Your dad never would’ve left it to you if he thought you’d lose it in a divorce.” Kevin’s dad, Mack Decker, had died in 1993 of cancer caused by exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. The Veterans Administration insisted that he died of natural causes.
     The delivery from Eastern Auto Parts arrived and the stink of Peninsula Poultry rushed in through the open door. Kevin held his breath as he checked the shipping manifest before initialing it. He wished Pete would return from his coffee run.
     “Mack never told you, did he?” Blackie paused and Kevin figured he was calculating how much to charge for his secret. Other than Father Dominic, the priest at The Holy Shepherd’s Flock Catholic Church who frightened his congregation into donating by reminding them that God spied on them through the eyes of the angels painted on the ceiling of the sanctuary, no one collected more money from the residents of Ilion Heights than Blackie Hauser. Blackie attended Mass every Sunday, but as a warning to the people who owed him money he never donated.  Both Father Dominic and Blackie operated on fear, oddly enough fear of the same thing, the final disposition of the immortal soul; but Blackie’s threat was more immediate, less abstract, the Inquisition without the Bible.
     “We were in the shit together, me and your dad,” Blackie said. “Landing Zone Yellow Jacket. The wrong side of the Cambodian border. He yanked my balls out of the gator’s jaws so many times I lost count. The city garbage truck contract, I settle my debts.”
      In 1975 when Kevin was a senior at Balthazard Vocational High School, Ilion Heights’s only trade school, and Mack had enough health to run the shop, Blackie had steered the contract to service the city’s garbage trucks to Decker’s Garage. Every June, Blackie arranged its renewal for the coming fiscal year, usually with an increase in the labor rate. In 1993 after Kevin had run the shop for several years, Mack, now in the  hospice, explained that he had hired Blackie as a commission salesman. Ten percent on the city contract, five per cent on any other business he brought in. Mack tapped his forehead with his fingertips, blocking his eyes with the cup of his palm. The gesture reminded Kevin of the way he covered his eyes during the scary parts of horror movies when he was very young and he wondered what horror Mack was imagining. His own death? Vietnam? His friendship, if that’s what he considered it, with Blackie Hauser? Mack rubbed his eyebrows with his thumb and forefinger and sighed. The next morning while Kevin replaced the oil pump on a city garbage truck, Mack died in his sleep, bequeathing Decker’s Garage and Blackie Hauser to his son. Ten years later, Kevin still had his inheritance.
     “Forget about that divorce lawyer and his fifty/fifty bullshit. I’ll guarantee you keep the garage.”
      “What’s your cut?”
      “I owe Mack.” Blackie put his arm around Kevin’s shoulders and walked him to the door. “That red shit in the oil, a smart guy like you should know what it is.” Acid backed up in Kevin’s stomach like it did when he ate too many anchovies. Blackie Hauser, he now realized, had drained Ivory Bill’s blood from his corpse and contaminated the oil with it, causing the hearse’s engine to overheat and belch black smoke, a declaration to the people of Ilion Heights that he, Blackie Hauser, had killed Ivory Bill.
     “Miranda’s worth more than a puff of black smoke.”
      “Call me if you change your mind.” As Blackie stepped out on to the sidewalk, a car pulled up and he got into the back seat, waving before he closed the door.
     Although he was the only person in the garage, Kevin sensed a presence beside the city garbage truck. There was nothing his senses could detect. No chill. No strange glow. No puff of air or unexplained breeze. No sound. No odor of decay. Kevin leaned against Jesu’s hearse, waiting for the ghost to appear. Perhaps it would be Mack. Perhaps Hamlet’s father. Perhaps both. Kevin never would have heard of Hamlet if he had not read a prose version of the play while serving in Kuwait and Iraq during Desert Storm. The boredom of the desert made the weirdest things attractive and nothing seemed weirder to Kevin than betting on the camel races or reading about the ghost of King Hamlet, Hamlet’s father. Kevin’s King Hamlet did not appear at night and disappear at dawn, but at noon when the sun was overhead, materializing out of the heat currents that floated above the sand dunes, wearing greasy coveralls with the name King Hamlet stitched above the left breast pocket. Carrying a gauge to measure the air pressure in tires, King Hamlet would approach the tanks and, seeing treads instead of tires, would hover above them and recite his dialogue, explaining that Claudius poured poison into his ear while he slept in the garden. After delivering his speech, King Hamlet vanished.
     The next day while Kevin and the rest of the platoon prepared for the mission they would undertake that night, King Hamlet reappeared. As King Hamlet denounced his murder most foul, Kevin saw a vision of the platoon walking into an ambush, eight men in, two men out, their faces in shadows so that Kevin could not identify the survivors. As the survivors stepped into the moonlight, the desert morphed into a tropical jungle and Kevin recognized his dad and Blackie Hauser limping along a jungle trail, each supporting the other. Behind them, a plume of black smoke rose, a napalm drop. On the mission that night, eight soldiers did stumble into an ambush. Six died. Kevin survived, hauled out by his sergeant who, later, was decorated for bravery, but blamed himself for losing six men whose bodies were reduced to ashes and black smoke by the Republican Guard.
     Two years later, the week after Mack Decker’s funeral, King Hamlet’s ghost walked through the back wall of the garage accompanied by Mack’s ghost who looked the way Jesu had restored him for the wake, healthier in death than in life, wearing a nicer suit than he ever owned during his lifetime, preening as if he wanted to ease the memory of those final days in the hospice, the memory of the skin on his arms and hands, tough and leathery like combat boots; the memory of the skin on his face, thin and flaky, peeling off as if he were a burn victim; the memory of a corpse so gaunt and emaciated that it looked like a piece of meat left too long to dry in the sun. The doctors had no explanation except to say that the effects of Agent Orange were not fully understood. The Veterans Administration blamed the polluted air of Ilion Heights and the years of exposure to transmission fluid, oil, battery acid, and the other hazardous liquids of cars and trucks.
     After several visits, Kevin realized that King Hamlet only appeared when city garbage trucks were in for repairs, not every time, but often enough so that Kevin figured there was a correlation. Sometimes Mack accompanied him; sometimes not. King Hamlet no longer recited his lines, but glided around the garage as if he were riding an invisible wheel-board, shaking his head, slowly and deliberately in answer to an unasked question. Mack when he did appear stood aside, never speaking, an extra on King Hamlet’s stage.
     The evening after King Hamlet and Mack first appeared, Miranda asked Kevin to sell the garage so they could move out of Ilion Heights to a neighborhood where Pete could play outside, a neighborhood, she said, where Pete could grow up with his own kind. Work for a car dealer, she said. More money, fewer headaches.
     Kevin had been in the auto repair business since high school, starting part time while a junior at Balthazard for a garage that serviced gypsy cabs. He was the third generation of Deckers to own Decker’s Garage as Mack had inherited it from his own father, Davey or ‘Double D’. When Double D bought the building, it was a stable with stalls and a hard packed dirt floor. Two stories tall, the building squatted on the corner of Hudson and Charles in the shadow of a six storey brick building occupied first by Moshulu and Sons, Feed and Grain. Flakes of blue and yellow paint from the Moshulu sign still colored the brickwork linking the present to a time when cows and horses outnumbered people in Ilion Heights. At the turn of the century, Smokie Dee’s, Ilion Heights’s fanciest barber shop, bath house, and brothel, bought the Moshulu building. Smokie Dee’s did not have a sign because her clientele knew where to find her.
     After Double D returned from World War II, he borrowed money on his G.I. benefits to pour a cement floor over the dirt and to install lifts. By that time, Smokie Dee’s had been converted to tenements occupied by Negroes migrating from the south in search of jobs, then during the Eisenhower years to a single room occupancy boarding house. Abandoned during the Reagan era, squatters and crack heads now frolicked where Smokie Dee’s honeys once pleasured Ilion Heights's gentlemen and, on Wednesday afternoons, its ladies.
     Over the years, Double D’s cement floor cracked and, in places, chipped away, exposing the dirt. In wet weather, fluids seeped through the cracks, brown and runny like diarrhea, but first Mack, then Kevin, did not have the money to pour a new floor. On hot days when the stench of the chicken processing plant forced Kevin to close the doors and windows of the garage, it smelled as if the nineteenth century horse shit had not been shoveled out. If Pete inherited the garage, he would be the fourth generation of Deckers to own it. Kevin telephoned his attorney.
     “Why can’t I transfer the garage to Pete?”
     “For the fifty-third time, because the court will award half of the garage to Miranda and if you can’t cash her out, she’ll force a sale.”
     “But she’s insane.”
      The previous winter, Miranda had abandoned herself to the Bible and the supermarket tabloids both of which she accepted on faith to be literally true. Space aliens disguised as Congressmen were as real in her mind as God creating the universe in six days, perhaps more real because she believed God hid the space aliens in Congress to oppose the atheists who controlled the government. Dinosaur bones and other evidence of evolution, she proclaimed, were manufactured in a secret government factory and buried underground by government agents. When her favorite tabloid reported that a peasant in the Pyrenees encountered a vision of the Virgin Mary, she emptied the garage checking account to pay for her pilgrimage.
     “Unless you can get a mental health specialist to certify her, there’s nothing you can do.”
     Fifty bucks down the drain, Kevin thought as he hung up the phone. The more he resisted the divorce to preserve Decker’s garage for Pete, the more he worried he was making the same mistake as his great grandfather Hiram who broke into the automobile industry by manufacturing spokes for the wooden wheels used on the first horseless carriages. Metal wheels and vulcanized rubber put Hiram out of business and he died within the year. Why stay married to Decker’s Garage? Why not sell and use his share to open an antique car restoration business far from Ilion Heights, specializing in Model T and Model A Fords, the cars Double D had repaired when he opened the garage?
     Kevin had recently bought a 1914 Model T, the first year of Henry Ford’s assembly line. Ford had cut production time from days to hours, but Kevin had planned to restore it by hand with original parts and enter it in shows, first locally, then, nationally. Ribbons would make his name. After the Model T, a Model A Phaeton. He had his eye on a 1928 that was a ‘fixer-upper’ according to the auto broker. There was something genteel about restoration work, so genteel Kevin changed clothes before working on the Model T so the grease and dirt from the shop would not contaminate it. To him, it was white coat work as if he were a doctor and the Model T his patient. The satisfaction he felt was, he assumed, what a surgeon felt when he saved a patient’s life. He would make more money in restoration than repairing hearses or garbage trucks and be happier doing it, but first he had to build a reputation by winning ribbons. The restoration work also connected him to Double D who serviced Fords at a time when people aspired to live in Ilion Heights. Now, they aspired to leave and, for most of them, one of Lupita Mortuary’s hearses would be the way. Not Kevin. He fancied himself riding out of Ilion Heights in the Model T half restored in the back room.
     Now, Kevin burped and the aftertaste of anchovies fouled his mouth. He sensed a presence, but neither ghost appeared. Projected on the white side of the garbage truck as if it were a movie on a screen, he saw a vision of Miranda’s death. It was summer and she was grilling chicken breasts over charcoal, her favorite meal. She had forgotten to open the barbecue vents and black smoke rose from the chicken. She bought economy size packages at the Peninsula Poultry factory store, wrapping them for the freezer as individual servings. Kevin refused to eat poultry because Ilion Heights stunk of raw chicken summer and winter. In the next scene, Miranda awakened in the middle of the night feeling nauseous and complaining of blurred vision. Soot from the barbecue smudged her face and she looked as if she had just come from church on Ash Wednesday. Too weak to get up, she vomited in bed, first the remains of her dinner, undigested chunks of chicken breast, then a putrid black fluid, thin and runny like used engine oil. Natural causes, the coroner ruled. What about food poisoning from eating bad chicken, Kevin asked. Natural causes, the coroner repeated. Blackie Hauser sent a memorial wreath.
     As the vision faded, Pete returned from his coffee run, black for Kevin, decaf with cream and a shot of raspberry for himself. “I retrieved the engine codes from the hearse’s computer and scoped the engine,”  Pete said. “Drop the oil pan and check the gaskets, seals, and oil line.”
      “I already did,” Kevin replied. “It’s not leaking oil. It’s burning it.”
      “That’s not what the computer says.”
     Pete wasn’t a mechanic like Kevin or Mack or Double D. He was a parts replacement specialist. The computer diagnosed the problem, told Pete what parts to order, how to install them. Kevin figured if he lived long enough, he’d see the day when the computer also did the installation. In his time, in Mack’s time, in Double D’s time, mechanics repaired parts and Kevin still preferred rebuilding a water pump or a fuel pump to installing a new one. There was nothing in a car except the onboard computer that Kevin couldn’t repair or rebuild.
     The old-timers who had time for coffee and gossip and liked to watch him work always asked for Kevin. As did the crews of the garbage trucks because they were still on the clock while their trucks were on the lifts. The hurry-ups who wanted their cars fixed yesterday insisted on Pete. Time is money, Jesu Lupita complained whenever one of his hearses or limos wasn’t ready. Time is more important than money, Kevin replied, but Jesu just smiled his undertaker’s smile, making Kevin feel he was being measured for a coffin. He hoped Jesu would make him as handsome in death as Mack.
     “Go play with your Model T, Dad. I’ll finish the hearse.” Kevin knew that was how his son saw him, as useful on the streets of Ilion Heights as a Model T.

     That evening, Kevin thumbed through his prose version of Hamlet while he waited at the shop for Jesu. Pete had a date with Aquarela who had the night off. Most nights, she waited tables at Slam’s, the pizza joint owned by her father across the street from The Holy Shepherd’s Flock High School. Days, she tutored Shepherd Flock’s athletes for their college boards so they would be eligible to play sports in college. She and Pete had been classmates at Shepherd’s Flock and had been dating off and on since graduation. Neither seemed the marrying type. Kevin blamed Miranda for souring Pete on marriage. He didn’t know what had soured Aquarela.
    Over the years, Kevin had rented several movie versions of Hamlet at the video store.  He preferred the old-fashioned Hamlet with period costumes set in a real castle rather than modernized versions such as the one that substituted an international corporation for the kingdom of Denmark. He liked the swordplay and the intrigue and the way Hamlet outwitted Claudius to avenge his father’s death. Kevin’s mind re-wrote the play. In the first act Blackie Hauser would pour poison into his ear so that the audience would know that his death had been murder most foul. At first, Pete would lust for revenge, buying a gun and concealing himself on the roof of one of the tenements to shoot Blackie as he strutted the streets of Ilion Heights; but Pete would change his mind and make peace with Blackie to preserve the kingdom of Decker’s Garage. The play would end not with swordplay and duels, but with Kevin’s body cremated at Lupita’s Mortuary, a puff of black smoke vented through the chimney. Mack’s ghost would have as little peace as King Hamlet’s.
     Kevin tried to concentrate on his book, but he couldn’t avoid thinking about how Miranda had become part of Blackie’s debt to Mack. Blackie would settle this debt on his own terms whether Kevin wanted him to or not. Kevin thought about forfeiting the city contract so Blackie could partner up with someone else, but he knew the extra dollars would not balance the scales in Blackie’s world. He wished he had the jaws of a gator so he could forgive Blackie’s debt the only way it could be forgiven. Maybe, then, King Hamlet and Mack would stop haunting the garage.
     If only his life fit together as neatly as the Model T with its interchangeable parts, the way the rear axle bearing nestled inside the bearing sleeve, or the bevel pinions nestled inside the pinion housing. If the Model T were like his life, it would be out of tolerance, making snug what should be loose, loose what should be snug. The left half of the differential housing would not align with the right half. The kingpins would not secure the axles. The body would slide off the chassis frame. The wheels would splay. No ribbons for worst in show. Deep in thought, Kevin did not hear the phone until the fifth ring.
     “Jesu! Where are you?”
     “On the sidewalk pounding on the door.” Jesu walked around the hearse searching for scratches or dings. “Why was it burning oil?”
     Kevin shook his head. "Sometimes black smoke just happens.”

     The next morning, Kevin and Pete attended the funeral Mass for the Arujo twins at The Holy Shepherd’s Flock Catholic Church. Blackie Hauser and his wife sat with Daigo Taira in the pew in front of them. When Blackie asked after Miranda, Kevin said she stayed home because she did not believe in funerals. Miranda had stopped attending funerals because one of her tabloids had published a statistical study asserting that one out of twenty people at a funeral die within the week. Kevin looked around the sanctuary, counting heads. Nine or ten of these people, maybe himself, maybe Pete, maybe Miranda or Daigo, would be dead within seven days. Jesu would be very busy. Kevin had a vision of God pirouetting on the steeple of Shepherd’s Flock playing eenie, meenie, minie, moe with the congregation, marking those destined to die with a stigmata. If God were as purposeful as Miranda’s tabloids insisted, He would select the one person whose death would equal ten.
     Father Dominic presided, delivering a eulogy everyone had heard before, challenging the mourners to live righteously because God’s eyes were upon them. There were only so many ways the children of Ilion Heights could be eulogized and Father Dominic had exhausted them all. “May the wings of angels,” Father Dominic prayed, “bear the Arujo twins to their eternal rest.”
      To avoid staring at a large pimple that erupted from the back of Blackie’s neck, Kevin raised his eyes toward the angels painted on the ceiling. Pete, Kevin prayed, would take over Decker’s Garage and, in time, bequeath it to one of his children. He would learn how to rebuild water pumps and oil pumps and fuel pumps rather than replace them. He would honor his father. And his mother. Miranda would come to her senses and cancel her subscriptions to the tabloids. The Model T would win ‘Best in Show’ at every meet it entered as would the Model A Phaeton. Silently, Kevin sighed, then lowered his eyes. In front of him, Blackie scratched the back of his neck, breaking the pimple, smearing blood and puss on his skin and shirt collar. Kevin closed his eyes and recited the Twenty-Third Psalm from memory while Father Dominic, making the sign of the Cross over the coffin of the Arujo twins, commended their souls to God.