A Particular Darkness

by Robert E. Dunn

  “I am a regular cop.” Billy said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I’m a pretty regular cop too.” I told him. “If you thought Billy could keep you clear of things you should have—”

  “I’m not trying to keep clear of nothing to do with the dead dude. That has nothing to do with me. It’s the fish.”

  “Fish?” I asked.

  “Don’t ask,” Billy chimed in. “Just wait to see.”

  It wasn’t a long wait, but it was a wait spent tramping through thick overgrowth at night. By the time we reached the edge of the water I swore I could feel ticks crawling over every bit of my skin. Even though it was too early in the spring for the parasites, I’d still check carefully when I got home. Then it hit me that there was no one there to help with those odd little tasks married people share. Thoughts like that came unbidden but never unexpected. I had a history of going to the dark places without much warning.

  Usually I went to a patch of dirt in Iraq—a spot so dry and bare it was as if the earth had been rubbed raw and left to scab over. I could feel the dark pulling me in, and I reached up to touch the small crescent of scar tissue that curled out of my eyebrow and curved along the outer corner of my eye socket on the left side. It was a habit and a warning to myself. I only did it when things bothered me.

  At the end of a therapy day I’d been called out into the woods by the lake to investigate a body and, possibly, be manipulated by a friend. What was there to be bothered about?

  “Over here.” Billy gestured with his flashlight and turned off trail to follow the lapping lake bank.

  A reflection came back from the beam. It was dull at first, the aluminum of a boat. It brightened when the light struck the registration letters.

  “Whose boat?” I asked.

  “It’s mine.” Damon answered. “That spot, with the flat rock is a good place to clean my fish and make a camp.”

  As we got closer the smell rose slowly, but hit suddenly. I almost retched. Billy took a drink of soda like it had no effect on him.

  “Don’t you smell that?” I asked it like an accusation. How could anyone walk into that miasma sucking on a sugary drink?

  “I was already here once. I got used to it.”

  Damon didn’t seem too bothered either. We kept following the bank closer to the boat and deeper into the foulness. It became a physical thing when we hit the flies. Their sound came first, then the blind bumping of their bodies against my skin. I waved a hand trying to keep my face clear as they landed and crawled on me.

  Any cop will tell you what’s worst about the job. They will tell you different things because it’s a job full of worsts. Way up on that list are dead bodies. I never knew until that night that the dead bodies of fish were in the top ten.

  Billy’s flashlight was paused on a pile of gutted and rotting fish. The pile almost appeared to be one large organism, with dozens of eyes and one thick, pale white skin that wriggled continuously. Maggots. The living cloud of flies swept down to walk the pile, then like a startled flock of hellish birds they took flight, their tiny bodies flashing green iridescence in the light beam. Carrion eaters hard at their task.

  “You did this?” I turned to look at Damon.

  He shook his head.

  “Look closer,” Billy said, passing the light over the pile again, then settling it on a large carcass at the edge.

  I could see the fish: a body, a tail, one eye gone milky and staring like it had caught a ghost in its last vision. But there was something else. Something wrong. The proportions weren’t right or the light was bad. It was a bit of MC Escher art, fish that were kind of fish, but kind of not fish, and my mind couldn’t see what my eyes were looking at.

  Billy reached in with his foot and used the toe of his boot to lift a long bone. As soon as he did things fell into place.

  “It’s a paddlefish,” I said.

  The bit he’d moved with his boot wasn’t a bone, it was a long, spoon-shaped snout.

  Paddlefish are an ancient species with a skeleton of cartilage like sharks and noses almost half the length of their body sticking out front. I knew that because my uncle liked to tell fish stories and he’d caught one in this same lake that had weighed over eighty pounds. But that was about all I knew.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” Billy let the blue-white snout fall off his toe.

  I turned to look at Damon.

  He raised his hands in front of his chest and waved them like he could wave away suspicion. “No, ma’am. Not me. I didn’t have nothing to do with this.”

  “Then who?”

  “Probably this guy.” Billy swept the flashlight’s beam from the writhing pile of maggots and fish into the lake. There was a man, bundled into a cocoon of monofilament netting, face down in the water. He had long black hair that made the skin, every bit as pale as the bellies of the fish, look even more colorless.

  One thing stood out though. On the upper part of his exposed arm was a tattoo I recognized instantly. It was a shield framing an eagle head and underneath it was a ribbon that read AIRBORNE.

  For a few moments it was like my head had turned inside out. The darkness that surrounded us was within me. The buzzing of flies and lapping of water occupied the nighttime vacuum. The sounds were the invisible stars reflecting on waves with no substance. I was the dead soldier, but my grave was dry, my bonds were the long tracks of wounds inflicted by combat knives. It was a memory beyond memory that remained always on the doorstep of my perception. My life was slowly bleeding away into the dirt of Iraq even as my body was being buried by blowing dust. The drowning sensation I felt was the pooling of blood in my lungs.

  “Hurricane.” It was a call from a million miles away and just as many years. “Hurricane!”

  Suddenly Billy was there. Or I was back and he’d always been there. His face was confusing because it seemed out of order. I was supposed to see him later, in the back of the Humvee. He would say, everything will be all right.

  “Hurricane,” he said again waving the flashlight in my face.

  “What?” I shielded my eyes as I snapped at him.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m just thinking about things. Get that light out of my face and back on the body.”

  He did and the beam centered on the tattoo.

  “Damon,” I waved at him to come stand beside me. “You recognize that tattoo?”

  He came reluctantly trying hard to avoid looking at the bloated, misshapen person in the netting. “Airborne,” he said then quickly turned back away.

  “And you were . . .”

  “I was Airborne.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  He looked at Billy quickly. There was no telling if it was for reassurance or help. He got neither.

  “This is the start of the hard road, Damon.” Billy told him. “Just man up and walk it.”

  Damon seemed to take the advice to heart. He straightened his spine and turned back to face me then said, “Ma’am . . .”

  I straightened my own back and looked him in the eyes as he told his story.

  “I was fishing, like I said. I was grabbin’ for paddlefish out there.” He pointed into the darkness and the breaking reflections of the moon on the water. “There’s a good spot. One of my favorites. Anyway, I got one, a big one and brought it in. When I got here the smell hit me. I’ve smelled worse. That was other times, other places. I know you understand that. I was okay until I put a foot down on a gutted fish and fell.”

  Helping the story along, Billy turned the flashlight beam again and set it on two pieces of soggy fabric. One was a light jacket heaped onto a rock and the other was a T-shirt hanging from a prickly shrub. Both looked to have been covered in blood and slime.

  “Your shirt and jacket?” It was a needless question, but I asked anyway.

  “I got rotting fish guts and blood all over me.”

  I nodded, understanding. But Damon either missed it
or misunderstood it.

  “That pile isn’t all of it.” He sounded a little desperate his tone and pace rising. At the same time I noticed him rubbing his arms through the jacket again like he was unable to get warm. “There are fish scattered. It was a horrible sight to see and it reminded me . . .”

  “Of what?” I prodded.

  “Things.”

  I understood him completely.

  “Take a deep breath then go on.”

  He didn’t take the breath. “I went over there.” He pointed and Billy directed the light. “’Cause I saw the rope.” A rock was holding down a braided line that trailed from the mud into the water. The far end of it was coiled around the neck of the man in the net. “I pulled it thinking there might be some fish on it. Live fish. I was going to let them go if I could.”

  “Let them go?”

  “I’d kind of lost my appetite for fish by then. I woulda put out the one that I’d caught, but it was too bad caught. I got it in the belly.”

  “Does that matter?”

  Damon heard the question, but he heard it in a different way than spoken. Either that or he was hearing memory. “Matter?” he asked. When he turned his eyes to gaze right into mine, even in the darkness, I could see the firefight he was seeing. “Of course it matters. How could it not matter when a friend takes one in the guts?”

  “Damon.” I spoke calmly and quietly. “Damon. We’re talking about fish.”

  Like pulling a switch something of the light of battle went out and the man came back. I wondered if that was what people see when I went away. Then for some reason, vanity, denial, or simply wishful, stupid thinking, I had the thought that I could hide it better.

  “You get that don’t you?” I asked, still in the careful voice. “Fish.”

  “I get it,” he said.

  I could see the last moment of the transition, where Damon changed places with his earlier self in his posture. At the same time he stood straight again and relaxed.

  Billy put the light on the back of his friend’s head. It made a black silhouette with a halo of mist around it. “Are you okay to go on, man?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I was just asking about the fish,” I said, hoping to steer him a little closer to now. “Why did it matter that you got one in the belly?”

  “You know about fish grabbing?”

  “I know about sucker grabbing. I’ve seen it done in rivers.”

  “Same thing,” he said. “Use big, bare hooks to snag the fish and pull it in. In a clear river you can put a rag on the line so you see it. When the fish swims over”—he jerked his arms upward like he was pulling on an invisible pole—“in the lake you can’t see. You just find good spots and hope. You do it because suckers and paddlefish are basically filter feeders, sucking tiny plants and bugs in and catching it all in their throats. They don’t take bait. The suckers are hardy with thick scales. The paddlefish have slick, thin skin. But with either one, the belly is the soft spot. It’s easy to kill ’em or hurt ’em bad bringing one in.”

  “You don’t hurt them if you can help it.”

  “I don’t hurt anything anymore if I can help it.”

  I gave him a few seconds to breathe and relax. Then I said, “That doesn’t tell me why you didn’t call 911.”

  Damon shrugged looking down at his feet or the fish on the ground.

  “You know I have to ask you again, Damon. You find a body and you call your friend to what? Help you cover it up? Give you an alibi?”

  Billy laughed and I wondered what was so funny.

  “No.” Damon shot a look over at Billy who kept chuckling at him. “I called Billy because I thought he could help me with my fish.”

  “What do you mean, help you with your fish?”

  “Tell her,” Billy told his friend.

  “I didn’t want to get in trouble for it.”

  “Get in trouble for what?” I was getting tired. I can understand the troubles of vets. I have more than my own share, but dealing with those issues in others was exhausting.

  “With the game warden. The season doesn’t start until tomorrow.”

  “You found a dead man and a pile of fish and you were worried about getting a ticket for starting the season early?”

  Billy started laughing again.

  “Well when you put it like that it sounds bad,” Damon said.

  “Yeah,” I told him, “It does and I can’t see any other way to put it.” I turned and put my gaze on Billy. “And why’d you drag me into this?”

  “Mike Resnick,” he answered.

  “Oh.”

  “Billy said your friend is a conservation agent,” Damon explained. We thought maybe.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  Chapter 2

  I was the one with Detective in front of my name so I made the calls that put the machineries of death into motion. Bureaucracy and guns are a terrible and almost irresistible force when combined, but the monster they make is slower than most people realize.

  While we waited, I pulled out a pen and my pad to sketch out the scene. There would be photographs, a million details taken and categorized with digital precision. A sketch, my own sketches anyway, fixed things in my mind. I drew out the scene and added notes around each element. I noted the rope, its length and type, and the fact that it was cut and left to fray on the end rather than being tied off.

  I even drew out the pile of fish and marked the individual animals that were left out of the pile. In the end I couldn’t resist the urge to draw little dots of flies and adding the word, Buzz. What I ended up with was a series of pictures that were what I saw, not necessarily what was objectively there. Along with it I noted times and names and anything I could think of that related. When I asked Billy to shine his light on the bow of the boat so I could copy the registration number, Damon seemed to get a little nervous.

  When I stepped inside to look around he asked, “You really need to do that?”

  “You have something to hide?” I asked in way of an answer.

  “Everybody’s got something to hide from government eyes.”

  “Government?” I asked. “Not cops?”

  The light was focused in the boat but Damon was standing on a point of shore that left him between the scattered light of the Milky Way reflecting on the lake and me. He was like a relief sculpture carved from obsidian, black over black.

  “You need a warrant,” he said.

  I looked over the top of the flashlight at Billy. His face was worried and grim. He locked his gaze with mine and refused to turn toward his friend.

  “No, Damon. I don’t.”

  “Billy?” Damon’s voice was quiet, but insistent.

  What was grim in Billy’s face fell into a soft embarrassment. He kept the light in the boat but finally turned to Damon. “This is a crime scene. You were the first one here. That’s all the probable cause in the world. I’m sorry.”

  “Unreasonable search and seizure—”

  “That’s what I’m telling you man, it doesn’t get any more reasonable than this.”

  “And Reno said kids were in danger at Waco too.” Damon’s anger was fully bloomed. His body was taut and his voice had gotten as cold as the accusation behind it.

  I stood up straight with my legs wide to keep balance. With the boat half in and half out of the water the keel was rocking on mud and the transom was bobbing on waves. It was an unsteady platform that matched perfectly my feelings about our conversation. I stared silently at Damon for a moment, trying to sweep thoughts and words into a sensible pile. I didn’t want to search his boat but I had to. On the other hand, his nervousness demanded that I take a good hard look. If I had a third hand I’d have put into it a whole host of government errors and myths of black helicopters. I’d tie them all up with a bow made out of the lack of after-service counseling for vets because I was beginning to think I understood what was going on.

  Billy had the sense to take the flashlight beam from the boat and
put it on Damon. But because the man was his friend he didn’t have it centered in his face. He wasn’t blinding Damon but he was making sure I could see his hands. At the same time, Billy moved his right hand down to the weapon at his hip.

  Either Damon saw Billy ready his gun grip or he knew from experience the tension we were feeling. “Oh. So that’s how it is?” It wasn’t really a question. “You violate a man’s home when he tries to do the right thing?”

  “Not your home, Damon.” Billy spoke calmly, slowly, but he kept both the light and his gun hand steady. “Just your boat.”

  “The boat is his home,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Put the light back here in the boat.”

  “Man, screw you both.” Damon’s voice was weak with resignation. “And the horses you rode in on,” he added quietly as Billy moved the light back to the boat.

  Along with a pole and tackle box there was a small suitcase and a sleeping bag under a tarp in the bow of the boat. Sitting in a cup holder duct taped to the edge of the boat was a bottle of water with a toothbrush secured to it by a rubber band. Tucked back by the transom was a small camp stove. In the built-in storage compartments were plastic tubs filled with various soups, stews, and a full case of store-brand pork and beans.

  As I looked I also tried to keep an eye on Billy. I didn’t feel any more threat coming from Damon, but Billy still had a hand on his service weapon and a shamed look on his face. Mental conflict can lead to all kinds of bad situations when cops and guns are involved.

  “Relax.” I spoke quietly hoping my voice wouldn’t carry to Damon.

  I saw Billy’s hand move away from the gun but he didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at his friend either. He looked into the boat and it was clear the shame he felt was for more than being party to searching his friend’s stuff. He had not known that Damon was living on the boat. He was questioning how good a friend he had been and why Damon had never trusted him enough to ask for help. Guilt can be like a spider web you walk through and never see coming.

  I went through his belongings as carefully as I could. Pretty much everything on the boat was a case of tetanus waiting to happen. Doing it in the dark with one flashlight wasn’t making the search any easier. No matter how thorough I was, the job would have to be done again, either in daylight or in a lighted garage. Damon wasn’t getting his home back tonight.