Entropy (3 page)

I used to fish like them; almost all of the kids in the neighborhood did when I was growing up. My father used to call it “poor fishing”. Our families were mostly lower middle class, so our parents couldn't afford to buy us actual rods and reels, so we made do with what surrounded us. I remembered raiding my best friend's garage, looking for broken garden rakes or shovels that we could cut off at the handles. Even if some of the parents had the money, they were smart enough to understand that in a few months' time, or when the pond froze all the way through, the poles would be discarded and left to rot at the back of the garage. Our attention was always diverted from one idea or product to the next. The patience just wasn't there. It would have been a complete waste to have spent decent money on boots, hooks and bait anyway, because none of us ever really caught anything from the pond; and thankfully, none of us caught anything like what those kids caught on that Sunday.

When I drove up to the edge of the creek basin that drained into the pond, my car tire rolled over and broke some of the makeshift fishing poles that had been left on the dirt path. A few of the kids who had alerted the police to the body were wrapped in blankets but one of them had been taken to the emergency room when he went into shock. It's a frightening experience, seeing the corpse of a human being, especially that of a child. It's not something that could be forgotten or dismissed, especially one that had been in the water for a period of time. It was more chilling than how an author could described it in the pages of a book, and more gruesome than what even a skilled artist could make it out to be.

The three children that were still there were being interviewed by the detectives. Two were boys and one was a girl. I passed by at the moment when their respective parents arrived, who after embracing their children, placed their hands tightly on the sides of their faces, and looked anxiously into their eyes. That was what genuine fear looked like if you had to describe it as a concrete image: the colorless uncertainty in those few moments between a parent and a child, when something like that happened. I opened the trunk of my car and started to put on the dry suit that I had removed from a long canvas bag. I wore the dry suit when the water was dangerously cold, like it was that afternoon. A large sheet of ice covered the surface of the water. I noticed the nose clip that I used to wear when I swam competitively in a small plastic bag underneath some clothing in the canvas bag. It probably still smelled like chlorine.

“Some kids who were fishing with long sticks and twine spotted the heel of a black sneaker propped up against the side of the drainage pipe, over there on the other side. One of the kids reached in and tried to pull it out. That's when he saw the tips of fingers. All I can think is, when the ice cracked or shifted as the temperatures changed, the body must have started creeping towards the surface,” Mull remarked, as he tapped his pen against the broken facing of a wristwatch, then used it to point towards the pond. “It wasn't completely frozen over until roughly a week ago, so we're assuming the body was placed there then. One of the kids we interviewed said he was out here with some friends last weekend, and the pond didn't have any ice on it.”

He offered me a cigarette, and I declined. “The department wanted someone who knew the forensic procedures,” he said, as he flipped to a blank page in his notebook. I guess they also wanted someone who knew the routine of swimming alone with the dead. In the beginning, I had hated being needed like that. But I had no way of knowing at the time, when I first shivered at the edge of a backyard pool trying to remember what the forensics experts had coached me on. I never expected to be in that situation again. I had never expected that there would be so many … not here.

During the winter, the pond was fairly isolated, and the only people that went up there were kids, occupying their time with ice skating, hockey, or the occasional snowball battle. It was hard to get to when the only road was so often buried by snow. The body would undoubtedly be covered in soil and ice, and be difficult to move. But, depending upon how long the victim had been in the water, the decomposition rate could be extremely advanced. I had learned that cold inhibited the acceleration unless the victim had been killed and dumped for some time before the pond had frozen over. The body might then be gaunt and insubstantial, spread out lightly across the breadth of my forearms, like a costume or a dress. However, there was no way that I could tell until I got into the frigid water. I glanced around at the gathering crowd of people who had been pushed behind the caution tape, as I rummaged around the trunk of the car.

Everything was changing. I could see it in the distraught and desperate faces of the people in the community, and in the empty playground behind them with swings that rocked back and forth gently in the minimal push of the wind, with no one enjoying their innocent rapture.

I looked out at the crime scene, which was much larger than that of the first victim. Someone had cut a large access hole into the ice, about fifty feet away from the body. That was where I would go under the water. I was told that the depth of the pond floor was about eleven to fourteen feet, with some areas dipping to sixteen feet or so. A police officer helped me secure the air tank over my shoulders, and check the regulator to make sure that the unit was functioning properly. There was something oddly comforting in following my routine of checks; it was warm, like a familiar embrace.

I tightened the mask over my face and walked gingerly down to the area that the police had cordoned off. I placed a sharp knife under the compensator strapped across my chest. Sometimes, a body could be stuck or submerged in debris and you had to go underneath it to cut it loose, in order for the victim to float to the top. You would often hear people call the bodies “floaters,” but I never did. To me, it just showed a complete lack of respect for another human being. It wasn't garbage or hospital waste in the drift and tides of the ocean. But for the person who had disposed of the bodies that I was sent in to retrieve, their perspective was measurably different, and that was something that you could never allow yourself to forget or you would start to drown, even outside of the water, where everything was supposed to be safe and dry.

I watched Mull break his attention away from one of several reporters who had gathered, and look back over his shoulder into the woods, where the trees were weeping under the heavy ice. I wasn't sure, but I thought I detected a vague sense of pity in the surrounding light reflected from his glasses. All I knew for sure was that it wasn't for me.

I stepped onto the ice and gradually made my way towards the point of entry, staying close to the taut safety line that an officer had secured to the base of a nearby oak tree. I used to play in the creek that ran through the area before the pond was constructed; before time had widened its banks and when the waters ran more rapidly than they did now. We used to grab for crayfish. What time did to places … and to people.

I signaled with a thumb raised high that I was ready and dropped underneath the ice. It took a few minutes for my field of vision to clear due to stirring up the water, debris and sediment. During that time it felt like being in a mudslide: the confusion, the anxiety, and the initial shortness of breath. It was essential that I did not panic. To do something like this took persistent training and nerve, but the certification I had achieved was just a formality, an inconsequential sheet of paper that, in the end, gave you nothing.

What people neglected to tell you during training was that you had to look into the puffed faces of dead bodies once your vision cleared under water. And it was immeasurably worse if that enlarged face was a child's. There was nothing in the procedures and equipment manuals that could prepare a person for that. I almost had to think of everyone and everything as indecent and distance myself from the tears that would inevitably cloud up on the inside of the mask if I thought too much about what I was witnessing. I still struggled to discover a separation and detachment from the dead, despite having to readjust to life outside of the awkward stability of the water.

The body that I had been sent to collect was someone's child, someone's baby. No matter how old a person became, they were always somebody's baby. I had it easier than most in the department though. I didn't have to deal with what happened afterwards: the repercussions brought on by the abductions and the subsequent murders; the lives left behind to rot and decay in the water until there was nothing left that was recognizable. I felt sorry for the therapists and the caseworkers dealing with the families of the victims. There was no interaction between the dead and myself.

It was late afternoon and I had to turn on a flashlight to see. Although power crews had been summoned to bring in portable emergency lights, they had not yet finished setting up. I got my bearings after a few minutes and tugged on the safety line, in order to let them know that I was heading towards the body and away from the entrance. Small chunks of ice circled around me like frozen coral broken away from a reef. I turned on my back and tried to figure out how thick the ice was above me. I might have to break through it if I lost sight of where I was, or became disoriented.

The cold of the water felt like steel beams pressed against my arms and legs. My chest hurt. Again, I reminded myself that I would have to check to see if the body had been tampered with, rigged or weighted to remain submerged and unnoticed. I listened to my breath collide with the apparatus. As I neared a bright marker attached to a piece of rebar they had forced through a small hole drilled in the ice, I saw the boy. His body was stationary next to the inlet of the pond, and remained several inches beneath the surface. One shoe was missing and there was a belt tied around his ankles, which strapped his legs together. The coroner would determine if it had been placed around his ankles post-mortem. I pulled down on the marker flag to let the officers above the ice know that I was in place.

Nothing in the pond appeared alive. It looked like a blurred, underdeveloped photograph of images captured in the dark. I took a deep breath, grabbed the boy's hand and tried gently to move his body. The water and the surrounding environment tugged back. Part of his right hand and the crown of his head were frozen into the ice but not far up enough that it could be seen from the surface. Perhaps it was covered with leaves or blocked by some debris. He would have to be cut out. I screamed and bit down on the breathing apparatus. After turning away from his body for several minutes, I finally removed an underwater measuring tool I used on pipeline repairs and started calculating a spot where we could begin chipping away at the ice from above without damaging the body.

The water could teach you how to forgive if you let it.

After I came back up onto the flatland, near where I had parked my car, I watched everyone's reaction to the body being placed onto a collapsible gurney and loaded into the coroner's van. I had assisted the officers in cutting a diameter around the body using a gasoline-powered chainsaw. The block of ice was removed cautiously from the pond and placed onto a tarp and dragged to the edge of the pond. From where I stood I could see the boy's knuckles. Nearly all of the fingers on his left hand were blackened from the cold. It didn't look real. Without knowing that it was a child I had removed from the water, I could have sworn that the ice contained an elderly man or woman. Officers started to take the names of the people at the scene again. Mull told me that sometimes perpetrators returned to the scene of the crime to gain some sort of sexual satisfaction.

Someone patted me on the back while I removed my dry suit, like I had just done something noteworthy or commendable, or had somehow saved someone. I hadn't saved anybody. It was totally the opposite. I ruined lives by providing the indisputable answers that destroyed lingering hope. I pulled down on my undershirt that had ridden up on my chest. Wisps of gray smoke emanated from the exhaust of the coroner's van as it started back towards town. A woman reached out and touched the side of the van as it drove away from the scene. Until the body had been removed from the ice no one would be able to identify him with any certainty. Mull assigned someone to research local missing person's cases in our county and surrounding districts.

People always say that they want closure in missing person's cases, disappearances, or child abductions. When I looked at the way that woman reacted after touching the coroner's van, I wished that she would never know what had happened to that boy. At first, she moved through the other people in the crowd angelically, lightly touching the shoulders of a few witnesses, as if she were looking for someone. But as I climbed the hill higher towards my car, her demeanor changed.

There were no details when there was uncertainty, and that had to be a comfort in some abstract way. It depended on what way you looked at it I supposed. I wasn't sure if she was a possible relation or just a concerned neighbor whose daughter might have dated him someday, who would have taken him to pick out his tuxedo for the prom, and slipped him a kiss on his way out of the back seat of the limousine. There was always someone relieved when they realized that it wasn't their son or daughter. I could just tell. That had to be a hard thing to live with, being glad that a child other than your own was dead. No one really understood how powerful and destructive the truth could be.

No one stopped the woman as she stood at the edge of the pond. She then removed her shoes and stepped purposely out onto the ice. Despite people cupping their mouths and shouting, the woman remained determined and moved further out. Another woman went out to help her and coaxed her back. Wrapping her arms around the shoulders of the distraught woman, they both sat down at the edge of the pond while a paramedic wrapped a wool blanket around their bodies. I slammed the door on the trunk of my car and tossed the mask into the back seat.