as someone lays dying

ever since the corpse of spencer barclay was found in the basement of whit's end on adventures in odyssey, circa 1990, i have been--half jokingly, half seriously--afraid of finding a dead body. i can't really handle horror movies. i don't like mummies on display. i didn't even do so hot with the shrunken dead body in "wise blood." the worst nightmare i've ever had is about exhuming a body, which really, i can't think of anything i would rather do LEAST in all of life. no, no, no. a few incidents to demonstrate my point. once, a couple of years ago, my sister kelly (maybe the other sisters were there too, i don't remember, but kelly for sure) and i were driving at night and it was raining. we got to state street, which is this really wooded street near where we live, and there were police cars all over and they had dogs out, sniffing around. as soon as i saw the body-sniffing dogs, i turned the car around and went home another way. i said it was because i didn't think we could drive through. like the cops wouldn't let us. kelly swears to this day that it's because i was afraid they were in the process of finding a body and i just didn't want to know about it if they were. that's incident one. incident two: when i was in college, there was a kid from omaha that also went to my school. one day i saw him in our little cafe on campus, and he said to me, "hey, did you hear that they found a body, shot and then burned, at 60th and state, in omaha. that's right by your house." sure enough, it is. bastard. that's why i'm not friends with that guy. good thing i wasn't living at home when it happened. incident 3: again. in my college days, i read faulkner's "as i lay dying," which is all about the bundren family, taking their mom's rotting body back to her home land so that she can be buried with her people. pretty much every character in the story narrates a section, including the dead mother. they are all crazy practically, and two of the boys think that the sounds of whatever bugs are coming from her coffin are actually her talking. it's pretty awful. and the wood of the coffin features heavily. at any rate, at the time, i was sleeping on the bottom bunk of a bunk bed made out of unfinished wood, and when i would lay in my bed at night, i felt like i was dead and buried and inside the coffin with the moldering body of addie bundren. so i stayed with emily until the book was finished. and then incidents 4 and 5: this spring, when omahans started hunting mushrooms, dead bodies kept turning up. amber harris in hummel park. and then that one woman inside that 50 gallon drum. whatever it was. seriously, i try not to know the details. but even as i hate this stuff, i still sort of want to know about it. that's why i didn't stop reading "as i lay dying" or, at a much younger age, turn off adventures in odyssey. so anyway, there are two spots in omaha where you can regularly smell very strong, bad smells. one is near lake cunningham. the other is on 50th between the radial and maple street. my theory is that dead bodies are the cause. so i was explaining a much more abridged version of this to my coworkers at lunch, half afraid my theory was right and half hoping it was. and then shelli, one of the x-ray techs, explained to me that the cunningham lake smell is half rotting fish (because they drained the lake) and half rotting cabbages from wenninghoff farm. oh the relief. oh the disappointment. i'm still not sure about 50th street...