Driving With Kevin, A Series - Trapped Gas

This is a paper Kevin wrote for his college English class when we had two kids and were living above a mortuary...

At 3am, my only effective way of staying awake behind the wheel is to blast Metallica over the stereo. I think I hear a sigh, so I turn the music down for a minute to be sure. “Couldn’t be,” I thought to myself. “After all, I’m alone in this van.” I crank the music back up and start banging my hands on the steering wheel to the beat. 

There’s a short pause between songs when I hear it again, I think. More of a wheezing this time. I need to get home as soon as possible. I have found that if I hurry, I never fully wake up and can go right back to sleep when I’m done. Red light after red light awaits me. It’s almost as if some greater power wants to see me get as little sleep as possible. 

There it is again. I turn the radio off as I pull into the garage. I quickly turn the key to kill the engine. I sit for a moment, even though I’m in a hurry to get upstairs. I wait just long enough to assure myself that none of the noises I’d heard are real. As I pull the handle to the car door, an unmistakable gurgling breaks the silence. “Okay,” I thought, “I need to get this body upstairs and into the freezer as fast as I can.” 

“Transporting human remains should really bother me,” I thought. But it doesn’t. I have had enough of these experiences over the last year and a half to understand that gasses and air get trapped in the body and movement from the car helps them escape. 

What does bother me is sleep deprivation. Money is tight, and if my wife is going to stay home with the kids, I need to earn as much as possible. That means working nights. I am not a night person. If I was left in a room with no windows in the middle of the day and the lights were turned off, I would fall asleep almost immediately. This makes working at night difficult, at best. My second biggest obstacle is falling asleep in the car, day or night. Ever since I was a baby, all my parents had to do was put me in the car and I would go to sleep almost instantly. Living in a mortuary and picking up dead bodies in the middle of the night for free rent is a character check for sure. Sometimes I surprise myself at the lengths to which I’ll go to provide for my small family.