Which is why it came as such a shock when, over a breakfast of eggs and toast, Rita asked if he wouldn’t mind if they kept their affair a secret. He wanted to tell the whole world, but she said no, people were, speaking in large generalities, shit sandwiches who wouldn’t rest until everything beautiful and sacred in this world was ruined beyond recognition.
“Let’s just keep this between us,” she said, kissing him, wafting her irresistible scent his way.
He shrugged and said, “Sure, you’re the boss.”
And she was, the full five years they had together, all the way up until the day she died in a hospice center in Fort Wayne, bald, angry, and only one hundred pounds. Irv wasn’t there, of course, people being shit sandwiches and all. He heard about her death from one of Rita’s fellow waitresses, who pulled Irv into an alcove outside the kitchen and handed him a note.
The note read, I love you, you ugly bastard. Don’t forget me. She didn’t sign it, of course. She didn’t have to.
* * *
“That was it,” he told the dog, hurrying to the end, which he didn’t like to think about. “She was it for me.”
The dog barked and a flower of blood bloomed on the towel near his tail. Irv wrapped him tighter and flipped the channel. The cute blond anchorwoman on Channel 12 was saying there were new developments in the Daisy Gonzalez case. Irv pointed to the little girl’s picture on the dusty screen. “Think you could find her?”
The dog whined and licked his nose while the anchorwoman teased the town’s housewives. “Tune in to First at Four for details,” she said.
Irv tossed back the rest of his drink, his eyelids drooping. He cupped the dog’s head with his palm and leaned back. To dream of Rita, he thought. To dream.
* * *
The next day Yuhl was on him from the moment Irv walked in, following him all the way from the front of the public works building to the break room, tsking after him worse than a wife.
“Where did you go? Greta told me she called you four times and you didn’t answer. I’m looking at the Corpse Count Log from yesterday and it’s blank. Plus, I know for a fact you took your ‘Be Safe Be Seen’ vest home with you. I checked this morning and it wasn’t in your locker and Irv, you know that’s a violation of rules twelve and fifteen.…”
When Yuhl joined the department six years before, he insisted Irv keep a “Corpse Count Log,” so that at the end of the year Yuhl could justify Irv’s salary to The Powers That Be. Before Yuhl, Irv didn’t have to keep track, just had to make sure the streets were clean for the next day’s traffic. Now he had to chronicle each pickup, writing down a short description of the animal’s condition and where he found it. Yuhl said the log was his way of making sure that Colliersville’s tax dollars were well spent, but Irv despised the thing. It flew into his dreams, flapping around his head like an enormous bat, forcing him to remember in detail what he’d just as soon forget.
It was like the dump, which Yuhl rechristened the Greater Colliersville Carbon-Based Waste Processing Facility. With his nonsensical micromanaging and delusions of grandeur, Yuhl had managed to take what had been a pretty awful job to begin with and make it completely insufferable.
“I told Greta, I told her there must have been some extenuating circumstances. Irv just isn’t the kind of guy to fall asleep at the switch like that, I said. So, Irv, what happened? What was the big deal?”
Irv poured himself a cup of coffee from the break-room carafe. His jacket was wet with rain, and the lima bean–colored floor was already muddy from fifty other booted feet. He nodded at a few mechanics passing around a Playboy. They smiled and went back to the centerfold, the grease on their hands leaving little black tracks on the table in the shape of frowns.
There was something about the break room—its brown walls, perhaps, or all the “Be Safe Be Seen” literature on the corkboard over a rack of fake plants—that made Irv feel hopeless.
“I got sick,” he said.
“Oh.” Yuhl pulled on his mustache. “I wish you could have told us, or told Greta at least. She was worried.”
Sure, Irv thought, spying Greta through the glass window between the break room and the call center. She was blowing on her nails and smiling up at the new landscaping hire.
“Sorry, Yuhl.”
Yuhl coughed. “That’s okay. That’s all right. It’s just that, with Daisy Gonzalez gone missing and that blood curse in front of Breeder’s business, people are starting to get concerned. You know. To think there might be dark forces at work.”
To hear him talk, Yuhl was the Daisy Gonzalez search team’s most dedicated volunteer. He seemed especially keen to make himself useful during the searches held at night near water and liked to brag in the break room about the gear he’d bought to either a) make himself glow in the dark or b) keep his body spectacularly dry.
“Any big breaks in the Daisy search?” Irv asked. “Heard something on Channel 12 about new developments.”
Yuhl lit up. “Well, me and the mayor’s son, we saw a wheelchair near the Detroit train bridge, adult-sized but still. We really thought we were on to something.” He sighed. His gut pushed against the black buttons of his shirt. “I tell you, Irv. Another day, another setback.”
The search team was all volunteer and when Yuhl described some of the weekend scenes when the group got together, Irv thought the whole thing sounded oddly festive. A potluck dinner. Prayers. Hand-holding sing-alongs. Maybe that’s why they hadn’t found Daisy yet. They were having too much fun.
“Of course, we prayed it wasn’t Daisy, and lo and behold, the Lord has given us the chance to carry on, to search another day.”
“Amen.” Irv smiled tightly and started shuffling back toward the front of the building, curling his shoulders up against Yuhl’s earnestness, which he didn’t trust. Yuhl seemed determined to follow him, and Irv wondered what he’d say to him if he trailed him all the way to the truck and saw the buck languishing there. Just found the bugger. Ain’t he cute? Don’t mind the buck. Ignore the blood. Everything’s under control.
“A miracle’s coming our way,” Yuhl said, stopping at the front doors. “Maybe tonight. I feel it. The Lord gives, doesn’t he? He doesn’t just take away.”
“True. True.” Irv took his hat off, put it back on. “Well, I should really make up for lost time. That log’s not going to fill itself, is it?”
Yuhl laughed and slapped Irv on the back, wished him Godspeed. “Love to see you out there some night, Irv. On our search. We’re doing the Lord’s work, you know. To have you join us. Well. That would just do me no end of good.”
* * *
The dog hadn’t moved except to gnaw his way through a granola bar left on the seat. The buck hadn’t moved at all.
Irv had a list of pickups from Greta. One was in the same spot on Route 20 in front of the trailer park where he’d found the buck, only this time the corpse was a coyote. “Again? What an odd coincidence,” Irv had said, but Greta just stared at him blankly.
The morning was dark and heavy with rain. Irv pulled out of the public works parking lot onto Main Street, where the traffic lights made Christmas-colored pools on the ground. He passed the elementary school, the courthouse, and White Swan Grocery, envying that sweet, slow kid, Trevor Hochstetler, wrestling with a line of carts outside the doors.
“That’s the life,” he told the dog. “No fuss. No muss.”
The dog, wrapped in another pink towel of Rita’s, licked his paw. Irv had considered seeing if Shannon might watch him, but she had her work at the Laundromat and he didn’t want to inconvenience her. And since Irv didn’t want to leave the dog home alone, his only choice was to bring him on his route and hope no one, including Yuhl’s wife, Pearl, who waved at him from the corner of Main and Elm, spotted the thing as it let out the occasional yelp.
Main Street became Route 20 just outside of town, and Irv could feel himself growing tense the closer they got to Maple Leaf. The buck was bad enough, but coyotes sort of got to him. T
hey reminded him of his childhood dog, Pepper, a raggedy shepherd mix with a taste for rats and bus chasing. Pepper got hit by a car on Irv’s tenth birthday and it was Irv who found him, sliced in half in front of the Nelsons’ mailbox but otherwise fine, like one part of him could have gotten up and walked east into the sunrise and the other into darkness.
As he pulled up on the coyote carcass he could see that it was mostly intact, and not alone. Standing next to it, in a bright yellow rain slicker, was Fikus Ward. It’d been a few years since Irv had last seen him, but when Fikus turned his face to Irv’s truck lights there was no mistaking him. Sunken eyes. Straw-colored hair. Lips that chewed themselves. Irv killed the engine and told the dog to sit tight.
“Fikus.”
“Irv.”
“Long time no see.” Irv held his hand out to Fikus for a shake.
“Yes sir.”
“What we got here?”
“A not so wily coyote.”
“Bad spot for animals just now.” Irv thumbed the air over his right shoulder. “Buck I got in the back perished in the same place.”
Fikus hung his head, his neck jutting out like a vulture’s. “Somethin’ ain’t right, Irv.”
Irv agreed with Fikus, but mostly because he didn’t think it was the behavior of a healthy man to be standing out in the wet over a dead coyote if he didn’t have to. “So what’s going on, Fikus? What brings you out here on this lovely day?”
“Daisy Gonzalez.”
“Oh.”
“I’m going to find her.” Fikus’s face froze into an odd mask. “Have to.”
“I see.”
The dog perked up then, gave Fikus a few suspicious barks, and Fikus did a double take. “Where’d you get that dog?”
“Found him yesterday. In the ditch yonder.”
“Mary mother of God.”
“What is it, Fikus? Are you okay?”
Fikus approached Irv, got close enough for Irv to smell his breath, which was oddly sweet. Whiskey and bananas. His hand shook as he reached out to grab Irv’s shoulder. “Help me.”
“Help you? How?”
“You got a car. I don’t.”
Irv thought of Greta’s list of pickups sitting in his cab next to the dog. He really didn’t plan on getting them all—there was a Saint Bernard out by the water treatment plant, a wild turkey in front of Angola Trinity Lutheran, a freakishly big possum blocking the egress of the Spencerville Army Surplus store, and a family of rabbits scattered across the highway into Auburn—but hitching his wagon to Fikus’s star didn’t seem like a good idea.
“It’s my fault,” Fikus said, his gray eyes wide and rimmed with too much white. “I dropped her off in the company of that Juan character and I left because this other kid had shit his pants and I was in a hurry to get gone. She’s missing because of me. Please. I’m going crazy here.”
Irv did a thoughtful circuit around his truck, checking on the dog and giving the thing a nod and a knock on the window. The dog nosed Irv’s knuckle through the glass and drooled on the door handle. Irv had no desire to spend his day looking for dead things. They’d stay dead, wouldn’t they? If anything, they’d be a little more dead tomorrow. His job didn’t matter. He didn’t, either. Not to anyone anymore.
“Okay,” Irv said. “But I only got a few hours.”
“Thank you,” Fikus said, grabbing Irv’s hand again and pumping it. “Thank you thank you thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” Irv said. “Help me with this thing?”
Fikus took a deep breath. “It’ll be like old times.”
“Or I could just use the hoist. County sprung for one a while back. Pretty nice. Takes the work out of work.”
“Nah, I’ll help.”
“All righty.”
Irv took the head and Fikus the feet and they swung the coyote in next to the buck, puffy now and hard to the touch. Then they stood for a moment staring at the coyote and deer, squeezed together like mismatched puzzle pieces, both the color of tree bark.
Eventually Irv said, “You hungry?”
Fikus shrugged. “I can usually eat.”
“Flying J’s?”
“Fine with me.”
Fikus had struck Irv as oddly normal, emotionally stable even, until he took a seat next to the mutt. He kept glancing down at it, curled up and panting happily next to Irv, like it might explode.
“Fikus, he’s a dog, not an IED. What’s wrong?”
“Seeing ghosts is all.”
* * *
Flying J’s was loud with retiree chatter and the clink of forks against stoneware. It had gone through a makeover since Rita died, from brown-and-orange plaid to a cheery, almost tropical peach and yellow, but new upholstery wasn’t enough to shed the smell of thousands of cigarettes smoked and coffee left to burn away to dust on hot plates around since the seventies.
The first few years after Rita’s death Irv avoided Flying J’s, preferring to eat his bachelor dinners in the privacy of his own home, but gradually it had again become a part of his morning routine, and being reminded of Rita didn’t hurt like it used to. There was even a thick-legged young waitress Irv liked because she never bothered him with too much chitchat, just brought him his standing order—French toast if the morning was cool, two eggs over easy with sliced tomato if it wasn’t—and threw him a few sad smiles over his newspaper.
“Mmm, bacon,” he said to Fikus, who’d stopped just inside the front doors and had gone from chewing his lips to fluffing his hair. Over and over and over. Like a girl at a photo shoot. “Smells like victory.”
“Gone veggie myself,” Fikus mumbled. Fluff, fluff, fluff.
“Ah,” Irv said. “That’s your conscience talking, I suppose. I don’t listen to mine. Hey, would you stop messing with your hair? You’re making me nervous.”
Fikus slammed his arms to his sides. “Sorry. Habit.”
“Have you considered therapy?”
“I told you. I’m fine.”
“Sure you are.”
Irv’s favorite waitress was at the hostess stand, scrubbing syrup from a plastic menu. “Sit anywhere,” she said.
Which was her way of making a joke. It was morning rush and Irv could spy just two empty chairs in the entire restaurant, both at the lunch counter and separated from each other by a broad-shouldered man staring into the pie case. Hector Gonzalez. He had a bowl of oatmeal in front of him and a spoon raised over the rim. Irv watched him for what seemed like a full minute and the man didn’t move. Not once. He hardly even blinked, and the spoon just hung, poised above the bowl like a diver suspended in midair while the pies rotated slowly: pecan, lemon meringue, cherry, sugar cream. Irv had taken Hector some food right after Daisy went missing but hadn’t tried to connect with him since. Irv got the feeling the man wanted to be left alone.
Fikus tugged at Irv’s elbow and stage-whispered, “I can’t eat here. Not with her dad just sitting there like that.”
Irv gritted his teeth. “Fine. Let’s go, but I’m still hungry.”
“I don’t know how you can even think of food at a time like this,” Fikus said, stepping on one of Irv’s shoelaces as they crossed the parking lot to the truck. “Our world is falling apart.”
“They ate while Rome was burning. Well, someone did. Barbecue.”
“Maybe you should just take me home.”
Irv thought about it. He thought hard and unlocked the truck door for Fikus, pushing the dog to the center. He was prepared to turn around and head right for Maple Leaf, but just then Hector Gonzalez emerged from the restaurant entrance and dropped his wallet on the sidewalk. The sight of that heartbroken man stooping to pick it up and the memory of him and his untouched oatmeal and levitating spoon made Irv think again.
“You can’t give up that easily, Fikus,” Irv said. “You must have some idea of where you wanted to look. What’s first on your list?”
Fikus fluffed his hair and pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his back pocket. “The elementary
school.”
“You actually have a list?”
“You just said, ‘What’s first on your list?’”
“I was speaking figuratively.”
“She’s a real girl, isn’t she? Not a figurative one.”
“Never mind. Why would she be at the elementary school? I’m sure Yuhl and his crew checked there already.”
The dog nuzzled Fikus’s leg and Fikus jumped. Then he opened his window, letting the rain in. “You name it yet?”
“Not yet,” Irv said.
“It’s going to need shots.”
“Probably.”
“You should put a leash on him at least.”
“He’s injured. Leg wound. Don’t think he’s going anywhere for a while.”
“That’s what I thought about Daisy,” Fikus said.
Before he could reply, Irv’s cell phone rang. It was Greta, of course, “worrying about him” again. Irv ignored it and put the truck in gear, passing in front of the restaurant entrance where Hector Gonzalez now stood, wallet in hand, gazing out across the rows of cars as if he’d forgotten where he parked. The man was lost. Completely lost. Irv remembered that feeling. It was what happened when your home wasn’t a house but another person and that person was gone. Fikus had the same look about him.
“First stop,” Irv said. “The elementary school.”
* * *
General Henry Colliers Elementary School was an old brick two-story with pillars out front and baseball fields in the back. A few years before, the mayor’s wife had spearheaded a campaign to tear the school down and build new, something modern and energy efficient and easy to secure in the event of a mass shooting or terrorist attack, but the push ended in what came to shove and the school stayed. Why fix what isn’t broke? And why turn our tax dollars over to the government only to see them wasted? That was the gist of the opposition, led by relative newcomer and successful real estate agent Mike Marino, who, according to rumors, had his eye on the mayor’s office. Irv had to agree with the man, much as it pained him to do so, but unlike Marino’s, Irv’s reasons weren’t purely practical or mercenary. He found the building beautiful and some things had to be saved for beauty’s sake.
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