by Nick Arvin
Two more occupants kicked through the windshield and crawled out on their own. The rest died.
A wind hummed in the fence, and Ellis put his hands on it to feel for the vibrations, but his hands only shook the wire. He walked back to where the van had come to rest and scoured again for caught pieces of paper or fabric, a thread, a hair. He worked his way through the weeds until he came again to the fence. From here he could see a few bright glimmers of the lake surface.
He climbed the fence and pushed through brush. The water lay further away than it appeared, and the brush caught him as if to drag him back. His legs began to shake. He had to stand waiting until it passed.
Nearer the water, he bulled through tall sharp-edged grasses and came at last to an open place along the shore. He crouched. The water was clear, faintly rippling, shallow. He cupped a handful and smeared it onto his face. The opposite shore was also enclosed in reeds and grasses, and the narrow lake stretched away to uninhabited distances right and left. A few ducks loitered on the water.
A short squeal of tyres startled him, but no noise of impact followed. He stood to look at the road, and as he did he glimpsed a human shape to his right, near the water. He stepped through some weeds, wetting his shoes in mud. Someone face down at the water’s edge – someone drinking from the lake or washing in it, as he had just done. But the figure did not move.
‘Boggs?’ Ellis called.
He stood watching, waiting for Boggs to raise himself, and the trembling took him so absolutely that he could hardly move for fear of toppling. After a minute he shuffled forward a few steps, and then he saw that it was not Boggs – too short, too thin, wearing clothes that Boggs would never wear. He stepped from one thatch of grass to another, until he stood over the body of a small, thin man, perfectly dead. Waves came across the lake to jostle it.
After a time Ellis crouched. Then he sat. The splayed feet wore white tennis shoes scuffed and greyed by use. The legs wore khaki slacks. A bit of exposed flesh could be seen at the ankle, vaguely obscene. A dark blue sweatshirt, soaked with water. Thick dark brown hair, wet and plastered to the head. The arms extended loosely, hands dangling in the water. Because the hair had no grey in it, the dead man did not seem to have been very old, but otherwise it would have been hard to say how young or old he was. A few hairs on his neck bristled out of the water. The noise of the road gathered volume for a time, then diminished.
The air of the day slowly cooled.
A pair of coots swam the shoreline and shied from the body and moved along. A magpie landed in the brush nearby, then startled away. Ellis looked up and watched, in a leafless dead tree some distance down the shore, several large black cormorants standing motionless.
He fell asleep – knees drawn up, head on knees – and woke in the night. In the distance, when vehicles rounded the curve of the hill, their headlamp beams revolved spasmodically forward and back. The sky glowed magnificently with stars. He was cold. A breeze touched him and jostled the grasses, and he became aware of someone seated a few feet away. The dead risen – this was his first thought – from the lake water to sit there and ruminate on him. But the stars made light enough to see that the body still lay where he had found it, face in the water, feet on the sand. And as Ellis studied the form of the person seated beside him, a car arced past and he saw the eyes gleam. He moved a dry tongue in his mouth and felt an eyelid twitch. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you think you’re stealthy and clever as a ninja or a Comanche or something.’
‘You look awful, Ellis.’
Even in the dark Ellis could see that Boggs did not look well, either – his eyes watery, his clothes rumpled, his posture poor. But his hair was trim, and he appeared to have been eating more than Ellis. Ellis turned, in a sensation of daze, uncertain of import, toward the body. ‘I thought he might be you.’
‘You keep doing that. Who is he?’
‘I have no idea. Do you?’
‘Have you looked in his pockets?’
‘I don’t want to touch him.’
‘There might be an ID.’ Boggs looked at the sky as he talked. ‘There might be a medical-alert bracelet or a bottle of pills.’
The water slapped against the body.
‘Anyway, now you found me,’ Boggs said.
‘You found me.’
Boggs shifted and the sand under him made little mouse squeaks. ‘It comes to the same thing. What do you want to say?’
‘I want to say that I’m sorry.’
The waves came in like the intermittent clapping of a child.
‘That’s it?’
‘I betrayed you,’ Ellis said.
‘It’s what’s happened.’
Ellis let that wander out over the water into the night. He didn’t feel capable of the enquiry that it implied. He hardly felt capable of breathing. The twitch in his eyelid grew worse. He asked, ‘Did you slash my tyres?’
‘I noticed that your rear tyres looked fresh. Nice deep tread.’
‘Middle of nowhere. And as I walked out, I was jumped by a couple of thugs in a Jeep.’
‘That’s terrible. Makes you wonder why anyone even leaves the house any more.’
‘Did you do the tyres?’
Boggs’s brow contracted. ‘No. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I have to say, this is a disappointment.’ He stood. He grabbed the body by an ankle. ‘Come on. Help me.’
Ellis stared.
‘Let’s get him out of the water. I can’t stand looking at him like that.’
‘The police won’t want him disturbed,’ Ellis said.
‘I don’t care.’ Boggs lifted the other ankle, stood between the two and heaved.
‘You’re nuts,’ Ellis said, but with a sense of obligation he stood, shaking, and clasped a leg – thin and clammy cold, making him glad his stomach was empty – and together they dragged the man onto shore.
‘He sure is dead,’ Boggs said.
Ellis very gently put down the leg that he’d been pulling. ‘Someone might be looking for him,’ he said. ‘He could have kids.’
‘We should roll him and get a look at his face.’
‘Don’t do that. Let him be.’ Ellis felt near to weeping.
Boggs did not reply, but neither did he move toward the body. ‘Might be that no one even knows he’s gone,’ he said. ‘A solitary guy, wanders out here, dies, and no one notices. The universe as he understood it is extinguished, and it’s the passing of a mite.’
‘You really don’t know anything about him?’ Ellis asked.
‘How would I?’
‘It just seems strange that I’d stumble onto him here. And then you turn up.’
Boggs laughed. ‘You think I planted a dead guy here?’
‘What’s your explanation?’
‘It is what it is.’
‘You have to admit it’s unlikely.’
‘That never stopped anything from happening.’
‘That’s not true.’
Boggs scoffed. With the point of his shoe he prodded the dead man’s foot. It was difficult to look away from the body. The man’s shoelaces were still tied.
‘If you did set this up, I don’t expect you would admit it.’
‘No. That’s true. I’m too smart for that.’
Ellis laughed. ‘All right. Fate put him here.’
‘Absolutely not. I’m not sure why you think it’s so strange. People die all the time.’
Ellis laughed again. ‘You know, it’s good to see you, Boggs.’
The shirt had ridden up as they pulled the body from the water, showing a thin, pasty waist.
‘Maybe he fell from an airplane,’ Boggs said, scowling.
‘What are you going to do now?’ Ellis asked.
‘Maybe he’d hitched a ride in the bed of a pickup truck, and he flew out on that curve and crawled here to die of internal haemorrhage.’
Ellis was silent.
‘Maybe this is just a place that had some meaning to him and he walked over he
re and ate a handful of pills and waited for an end. Some connection here. You remember that guy who climbed through the windshield? Maybe this is him. The passenger seat occupant. The one who said the hero guy was a liar.’
‘Really?’ Though he had forgotten it, it did seem that Boggs might have told him this before, years ago.
‘He said that the ex-marine hero man actually didn’t do much. A number of people were helping, and this guy said that he pulled several people out himself, and it pissed him off that this other guy was made out to be the hero with the help of some cop buddies.’
‘His saying that doesn’t prove anything.’
‘That’s true.’
‘I read that marine’s depo. Dragging people out and dragging people out. The screaming. His hand was burned, he went to the hospital, there’s documentation.’
‘No one said that he didn’t burn his hand. No one said that he didn’t hear screaming but felt that the fire was too intense.’
Then with – to Ellis – unexpected finality, as if on a signal, the conversation stopped, and time ran a murky passage through the dark. Boggs sat still and Ellis felt as if to disturb him might initiate terrible consequences. Then he slept for a spell and woke feeling no less tired. When he searched the sky he saw that any number of stars had winked away, as if the universe itself were dying. The lake water lay quiet. A few redwing blackbirds lurched around, reeds rattling in their wake. The sun cracked bright over the horizon. He forgot the body and then saw it again and then he did not want to look, but neither could he move his gaze away. The man’s sweatshirt held a peculiar and slowly changing pattern of dark and light where it was wet and dry. It seemed difficult to believe that the dead man might not move now, while the hair bristled from his naked ankles and the pores there appeared as if they might at any instant begin to sweat.
‘Don’t you think,’ Boggs said, ‘that if you weren’t in love with my wife, you could come up with something a little more compelling to say? There must be a part of you that would be happy to see me gone. Maybe only subconscious. Your brain throws up some ideas, not others. What are the constraints on their formation?’
‘You’re trying to guilt-trip me.’
‘Yes.’ Boggs stood, and he seemed to tower in the new light. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Leave him?’
‘Yes.’
‘We can’t do that.’
‘Actually, we can.’
The body’s flesh was bone pale. The skin of the neck held two creases, an imprint of years of life.
‘You’re welcome to stay,’ Boggs added.
One of the body’s hands still extended to the lake, and the waves teased the fingers like a cat.
‘How can we leave him?’
‘We don’t know anything about him. Later we’ll probably wonder if he even really existed.’
Ellis didn’t know which was more terrible, that he didn’t know anything about the man, or that this meant that he might leave him. But Boggs started away and Ellis moved in his trail.
The world appeared to unsettle and shift as if composed of tiny swarming insects, and although he followed as best as he could, his foot caught in a hole, he fell and he lost sight of Boggs. When he reached the road Boggs had gone, and even the road lay empty. He clambered into the minivan and accelerated, tyres scrambling.
He drove south a mile, then turned onto a divided highway with entry and exit ramps and a grass median – it was a state highway, but looked like an interstate. He stopped below the windmills. Boggs was not to be seen. Ellis stood out of the minivan, but after a minute he climbed back inside. He felt at a loss. He doubted whether he had the energy to pursue Boggs further, and he didn’t know what he should have said to him, but felt that he hadn’t said it. Perhaps Boggs was right about his subconscious. Perhaps he really only wanted Boggs’s spontaneous and unjustified forgiveness.
Eventually he stood out again and with aimless impatience he walked a little distance uphill. Wind ghosted the grasses. To his right grew a patch of waist-high milkweed and moving across the weeds were the long-limbed shadows of a turning windmill, shadows that came toward him and passed over him, and he had to fend off a sudden vertigo, and turned to the traffic below, coruscating in the sun. The accident had occurred in a fog bank and involved three semis, five cars, two SUVs, a minivan and a pickup towing a pontoon boat. Witnesses described an aftermath of smashed and overturned vehicles haphazard on the road, two of them burning, the pontoon boat on its side, injured people wandering and shouting, the sirens and lights of police, fire and ambulance vehicles drifting in the fog, and the bodies of dead pigs – one of the semis had been pulling a trailerload of hogs – scattered over asphalt and into ditches and fields, and all of this overlaid with the awful screams of uncomprehending, writhing wounded pigs, and the occasional report of a police pistol silencing one.
But what Ellis recalled vividly was that when he and Boggs came here to conduct their scene inspection a year later, a stray black-and-brown mutt with white in the muzzle had sat a short distance away from them and barked mournfully while Boggs had left the rental running, announcing Tolstoy’s ‘Master and Man’ through open windows, the sound of certain words floating in the air like wallowing balloons, ‘… cob… sledge… drift… ravine… mittens…’, while the two of them worked up and down the road, dodging in and out of traffic. No sign of the pigs remained, but there were long dark stripes where the vehicles’ tyres had skidded and yawed, and a series of indentations on a guard rail where one of the semis had bumped and slid. They documented everything with cameras and surveying equipment, sweating and shouting to each other down the open distance of the roadway and over the roar of passing trucks. For most of the afternoon the black-and-brown mutt sat scratching itself and contemplating them from the edge of the ditch, occasionally sniffing and doddering around, and then this one, too, came to their specially outfitted hard-sided equipment case and lifted a leg. Boggs looked at the dog, looked at Ellis, then shrugged, yelled, threw a measuring tape and chased the dog down the road shoulder, arms upraised, yipping, shrieking. He had appeared absolutely happy.
And now on the opposite side of the highway Boggs’s green convertible slowed and parked.
Boggs stood out gripping a white paper bag, and without hesitation he stepped into the lanes – a car swerved violently around him, honking. Others braked hard.
Ellis shouted and started down the hill toward him.
Boggs walked across the lanes and into the median, while traffic beside him came to a standstill, a chorus of horns blaring. He moved into the other set of lanes the same way, but there happened to be a gap in traffic and the effect was less dramatic. As Ellis came up, Boggs frowned at the minivan. He said, ‘Don’t they make some kind of a man’s version of that?’
‘Boggs -’ Ellis said.
‘I brought doughnuts.’ Boggs held out the white paper bag. Ellis pushed it away. Scenting the sweetness, he felt sick.
Boggs began up the hill, and after a second Ellis followed. Now and again he stopped to gasp and to yank burrs from the cuffs of his slacks. He caught up with Boggs at the base of a cyclone fence that surrounded the windmills, and they sat. The windmills swished and squeaked faintly, and the noise of the highway rose in a susurration. In the distance they could see the other hill and the Texaco sign about additives and the road that curved at its foot and the lake where the dead man lay. With the sun behind them, the lake waters appeared black. It was part of a chain of lakes stretching out behind a reservoir in the far distance. Nearer, a hawk floated round on a thermal.
‘In the fog, you couldn’t have seen anything from here,’ Boggs said. ‘All there would have been were pig screams and shots.’ A semi, entering the fog, had slowed. A second semi, following the first, had not slowed as quickly as the first and hit it. Other vehicles coming into the fog piled up behind. A man in a pickup had survived a collision with an SUV and climbed out and, as he stood in the roadway, a semi ran him over. To explain how
he ended up where he did – seventy feet down the roadway – was tricky, and Ellis and Boggs had concluded that a flange in the undercarriage of the semi had dragged him along until the semi jackknifed and overturned. It was the same semi that had hauled the doomed swine.
‘What are you going to do?’ Ellis asked.
‘I’m thinking maybe a little hut near a beach in California, maybe sell juice and smoothies to girls in bikinis, and I’ll have a small apartment upstairs, and I’ll learn to surf.’
‘Are you serious?’
Boggs grinned and shrugged. ‘I’d like to see these windmills at sunset. Something about windmills has always reminded me of the end of things. Sunsets and windmills and Ragnarok. Nothing so large should be moving like that. It’s as if we’re trying to engineer the world into a freakish final image before we destroy ourselves.’
‘Yeah. I’m tired, Boggs. Are you going to kill yourself or not?’
‘I like you, Ellis, but I wish you had more sense. I like your melancholy air, your talent for writing a technical report and your skill at calculating crush energy, but you’re kind of an asshole, too.’
‘Talk to me about your decision process.’
‘Jesus,’ Boggs said. ‘There’s no process. I’m devoid of process.’
‘No process. OK. You’re just doing nothing.’
‘I suspect that on some level in my poor brain I was giving it all to you. I never felt I was good at anything except work. She was my only other success, and I’d screwed that up. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know what to do, and it became doing nothing, and it became a gift. I was giving her an out. And giving myself one, waiting for you two to take it from my hands. But you know what got into me and twisted? The way you dragged it out. How long have you been fucking her? A year and a half? Longer? You couldn’t just run away with her? Bled me all that time. I thought I had decided to wait it out. But I broke, I guess.’
Ellis shook himself. Leaning forward, not looking at Boggs, he said, ‘I can’t have all of this on myself. You have your own volition.’
Boggs laughed. ‘Sure. Volition. Awareness of my own volition has been eating me alive. Terrible stuff. On the other hand, let me tell you about an accident: one day I get out of a depo sooner than expected, go to the airport, put myself on standby for an early flight, catch a tailwind and land on the ground almost five hours early. I get in the car and start driving back to the house. And along the way I happen to see, at the edge of the Home Depot parking lot, a familiar-looking RV. Did you really think, by the way, that that thing was inconspicuous? Why not go around fucking my wife in a lime-green school bus? So I stopped and watched the RV, and when it started up, I followed. It went to your place, you got out and you went inside. Jaunty, I thought, very jaunty. I hadn’t seen you walk like that before. And then – then all the options sucked. Usually I know what I want to do, but with this thing, trying to decide what to do felt like trying to reach my hand down my throat to grab my liver. I gave up. I figured I’d let you guys figure it out. You seemed to have ideas. Why should I step into it?’