The Mortician's Road Trip

Upstate New Yorker Baz Rathbone makes ends meet by selling human skulls. By contract, he should cremate them, but he doesn’t. His little business comes to the attention of the FBI when a woman spots her late husband’s skull being used as a candlestand by a skinhead (she recognizes the skull from a distinctive Texas-shaped bone flap). The feds’ investigation ultimately takes them to Moose Wallow, Maine, where they interview assistant mortician Lazlo Wetzo and his taxidermist friend, Uliba Helmsman, two loveable potheads. When Uli, Lazlo, and Laz’s girlfriend, Annette Fibrowski, travel from Maine to the Carolinas to pick up a preserved human body and also the carcass of an orangutan -- the former for burial in Maine and the latter to be stuffed for a zoo near Charlotte -- chaos ensues. Through a complex set of connections, Baz Rathbone hires an inexpensive-but-stupid hood to steal the ape, whose skull would bring in serious money, but the heist goes wrong. Justice is eventually served, but only after a hilarious set of misadventures.

James D. Loy taught physical anthropology at the University of Rhode Island from 1974-2010 where he studied the social behavior of monkeys. In the mid-90s, he shifted his research to a biography of Charles Darwin’s wife (J. D. Loy and Kent M. Loy, 2010, Emma Darwin: A Victorian Life, University Press of Florida). Jim and his wife are enjoying retirement in the beautiful Appalachian mountains.