One 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 on the odometer. Nearly all the miles were spent going to and from Potter's Field, the burial ground for New York City's poor, and nearly all the miles were driven by Charlie Garcia. "See that blue van," said Charlie, lighting up a cigarette and tearing north on First Avenue. "That's what they use to get the bodies with. I used to have that job. You go in the houses, on the beach, wherever. It's an awful job. You have to straighten them out if rigor mortis has set in, and you put them in a bag. In this job, they're already in boxes."
A pretty blond woman in a sports car leaned out her window to ask Charlie how to get on the F.D.R. Drive, and he cheerfully gave directions, wondering whether she would have hailed him if she had known his cargo. Once, the truck broke down, and the tow truck driver the city sent got terribly upset when he learned what he was hauling. "People have a hard time when it comes to bodies," Charlie observed.
"I say it's the live ones you got to worry about, not the dead ones. They don't complain about the bumpy ride.
They don't complain if I get there late." Charlie drove the bodies up the East River, which fairly boiled this summer day, then through The Bronx, past signs for truck parts and cigarettes. The landscape was unrelievedly dismal until Charlie crossed the bridge to City Island, off the flank of The Bronx in Long Island Sound. Here there were bright, scrubbed storefronts, fishermen in slickers, the air of New England, and a ferry with a happy crew. Lloyd Roberts, an engineer, remarked on Charlie's load, "These passengers are the best. They don't pay, they don't talk back, and they are all one way." Last year 2,698 such passengers took the ferry from City Island across the 2/3-mile-wide channel to Hart Island, site of Potter's Field. In the past 114 years, about 1 million bodies have made the trip.
"And he [Judas] cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself. And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, 'It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood.' And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in."
—Matthew 27:5-7