Word: garcias
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...Garcia...
...thick-aired Thursday morning in Manhattan, Charlie Garcia picked up ten dead paupers from the morgue at Bellevue Hospital. All the dead were adults, so they were in adult pine coffins, which cost the city $32.90 each. The price includes a tar-paper lining and a handful of zinc nails with which to seal the top. The cheap wooden boxes were placed in the back of Charlie's vehicle, which is still called the body wagon, although these days the wagon is an 18-ft. Ford truck, blue and gray, license number 20898-E, with 106,892 miles...
...world apart from Riker's Island. "Over there it's a diseased cesspool," says McMurray. "Am I right or wrong," he yells to a dozen fellow diggers. "Right!" they holler, then go back to shoveling dirt into the gash that holds the ten coffins that Charlie Garcia has placed in their charge. "It's one germ after another [at Riker's Island]. If you don't have anything wrong with you going in, you will coming...
...Charlie Garcia drove his empty body wagon away. Tomorrow, Friday, he would bring up another load from the medical examiner's office in Manhattan. He does not haul bodies on weekends or on Mondays. Tuesday is the day for the poor dead of Queens and The Bronx. Wednesday is for Brooklyn. And Thursday, Garcia comes back to Bellevue. Staten Island buries...
...Garcia, like everyone else one meets in the business of disposing of this city's impoverished dead, seems rarely to have given the task a reflective thought; he might just as well be hauling pulpwood. Moreover, the mood in the morgue at Bellevue could easily be the mood on the loading dock of any plant...