Population 485 (19 page)

Now and then I have occasion to run that section of interstate. When I pass the white cross planted in the grass and hung with the dark blue Smokey the Bear hat favored by the Wisconsin State Patrol, I feel the stillness of the cross. I usually think about the guy who hit her. He claimed he was digging under the passenger seat for some jewelry, didn’t see her, despite the long, flat curve, the flashing lights, the stationary vehicles. The day he was acquitted of manslaughter charges, the local television station ran footage from the courtroom. When the jury announced its verdict, he made this little move that seemed celebratory. Jacques and I had lifted her so gently from the concrete—when I saw his reaction, I felt a flare of rage. Still do. Knowing that such a thing might happen, that a fellow can be pleased to have things go his way in the wake of such mortal carelessness, I want to know how one attains the peace implied by that quiet roadside cross.

Time passed, and one night, in a dream, I was climbing, burrowing through dead weeds, and I pulled myself up to a high spot, and there, down below, nesting in dead grass, was the hand. Even in the dream, I recognized it immediately. It happened again, off and on over time. I have never seen her face, or her hair, or her body—just the hand. It is always the same; palm up and cupped, fingers curled. It would be overdramatic to say the image haunts me. I have gone for long stretches without seeing it. But every once in a while, I’ll be flowing through a dream, and there it will be. And despite all the years, I recognize it immediately. When I awaken, my gut is laced with ice.

It is a given in the fire and rescue business: Sooner or later, you will handle a corpse. Unprettied and unposed, the bodies allow death no romance. Heeding Dylan Thomas, we generally do not go gentle into that good night. We go hacking and drooling, lurching and puking, darkening and purpling. Someone who has flown through the windshield of a Pontiac at seventy-five miles per hour to ricochet off a white pine and land in the brush like a bag of wet gravel does not look as if he is sleeping. People who shoot themselves, people who hang themselves—even people who quietly overdose or suffocate themselves—may find peace beyond the vale, but they leave a blotchy, seeping mess back on this side. At best, a corpse looks worn out.

Worn out, and yet, powerful. I once bought a used book called
Celebrations of Death
, in which authors Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf wrote, “The vitality of a culture or ideology depends upon its ability to channel the power of such mordant symbols as the corpse.” We honor the dead, but we are speaking to ourselves.

Tracy Rimes was seventeen years old when she rolled her car on Jabowski’s Corner. A little less than a year later, her classmates graduated. A folding chair on the front row of the dais was left empty, save for a white rose placed across the seat. The next morning, in the local café, a group of women were discussing the girl’s death, describing in turn how upset they had been, laying out their ties to the girl and her family. One remembered her as a child. One had just spoken with her parents. One said, “Those kids shouldn’t have put that rose out…. I was fine until I saw that rose…then I just lostit.” There was a certain tension to the conversation. While the women waited to speak, they nodded, but they nodded as if they were marking time, waiting for their own opportunity to stake claim to a piece of the grief. Given the slightest space between syllables, they interrupted—often by agreeing: “Yeah, I…”—and pinched the end of the previous speaker’s sentence, gently pirating the conversation, steering it back to their own waters. The subject was always the girl, but the object shifted from person to person.
Celebrations of Death
includes the following passage regarding the French sociologist Emile Durkheim:

What Durkheim finds important…is the way that other members of society feel moral pressure to put their behavior in harmony with the feelings of the truly bereaved. Those who feel no direct sorrow themselves will nonetheless weep and inflict suffering and inconvenience upon themselves. How can it be other than a positive affirmation of their commitment to an abstract value of neighborliness, of society?

So on the one hand, we’re a little selfish. On the other hand, it’s nice to suppose that the conversation in the café was driven at least in part by an innate desire to find common ground, to knit individual experiences into a cloak of mourning wide enough to drape across our neighbor’s shoulders.

If nothing else, bless that girl for bringing us a little more together.

Names sand-blasted into the polished Bangalore marble of the Vietnam Memorial, notes left at Ground Zero in New York, the white rose on the folding chair, these are commemorations, but they are also attempts by the living to draw conclusions from the dead. A lot of it, I’m sure, comes from years of being steeped in Christianity, of being told Christ died for our sins.
For
something. Surely, we tell ourselves, we can’t die just because we hit a patch of pebbles on a curve. Surely there is preordination in the pea gravel. We are creatures of myth, hungry for metaphor and allegory, but most of all, hungry for
sense
. Death—a stillness within the chaos, after all—serves these cravings. Death provides us the pretext and the context within which we may arrange and participate in our own symbolic mythology, to establish significance and import, to reassure ourselves that it all
means
something. Death is the ultimate passion play, and we want to be on the bill, if only as a member of the chorus.

A man drove up to the café while the women were talking. He parked his pickup across the street, crossed over, and took a seat at the counter, and ordered the pork chop special. He wore a seed-corn cap at a tilt, and left it in place as he ate, elbows splayed over the counter to either side of his meal. His face was weathered and creased. One of the women wondered aloud how the girl’s parents would get over her death. The man turned to look at her, a spoonful of corn niblets hovering halfway between his plate and his mouth.

“You talkin’ about somebody losin’ a child?”

“Yes,” said the woman.

The man’s gaze drifted down and away from the woman, to a space just above the floor in front of him. Then he rolled out the words flat and cold as a length of strap iron:

“You
never
get over it.”

He pronounced
never
as quietly as the rest of the sentence, but both syllables were laced with a poisonous certainty. He returned to his food, and didn’t speak again. After a few looks, the locals went back to talking. When the man paid his bill and left, no one seemed to notice. But I watched him, and halfway across the street, he stopped, and right there on the centerline, with first one and then the other sleeve of his rough coat, he wiped his eyes. Then he was in his truck, and gone.

I think of that guy whenever a celebrity dies and I hear some talking head in the media say we have lost a part of ourselves. You have to figure that’s a little tough for him to swallow, when he knows what it is to grieve a child, all alone in the middle of a highway. This is a grief neither assuaged nor exalted by the attention of a nation. This is a grief that refuses to arrange itself around prime time.

“Get out of bed!” my high school science teacher used to say. “People die in bed!” Truth be told, ambulance calls have taught me otherwise. People tend to die in the bathroom. They tip over while groping in the medicine cabinet for Maalox, or straining on the pot just enough to blow a leaking abdominal aneurysm. Rare is the EMT who hasn’t performed CPR between the tub and the toilet. I have found people dead in bed, but I have found more of them in the bathroom. I have also found them in the brush, in snowbanks, in cars, on the road, sitting upright in chairs, draped over the kitchen table. My brother once drove his ambulance to a corn field and got stuck with an abiding vision of the pulverized remains of a farmer still spinning on a power shaft. I had a partner who once found a man hanging from the ceiling with alligator clips on his nipples. Another partner, responding to a call on an empty stomach, relished the smell of turkey when he entered the house until he walked into the living room and found an old man, dead for days, his forearm slow-roasting at the foot of a space heater. Last winter, a fisherman collapsed and died on Lake Tres Verde. He must have been catching fish pretty regular, because when the ambulance crew arrived, another fisherman was standing over the body, with his line down the hole previously manned by the deceased. We enter this world in generally uniform fashion; the means of egress, on the other hand, are infinite.

On a cold night in early autumn, a universe of stars pinpricked across the black sky, we round a sweeping bend of the interstate and the usual burst of state trooper lights directs us to an accident scene. I am still in training, back in the Silver Star days, riding with Leif and Todd. Leif pulls the rig past the farthest patrol car and parks on the rumble strip beside the guardrail. Looking over the edge of a sloping embankment, I can see the sweep and wink of flashlights forty feet below.

Following the wobbly lead of my own light, I make my way down the steep slope. Something crunches beneath my feet. Then it happens again. As I go lower, the crunching increases. I direct the light at my feet and tiny points of light wink back, reflected off scattered shards of black fiberglass. A group of officers are standing at the woven wire fence running parallel to the interstate, searching the brush with their flashlights. Suddenly one of the officers makes an exclamation, and the beams converge in a shifting blob of light. The lights focus on a body.

He is a young man, maybe eighteen. Barefoot. He is lying at an impossible angle, and steam is rising from his torso. His upper body is facedown, but his midsection is so severely twisted that his buttocks rest flat on the ground. One leg is extended naturally. The other is flexed at the knee and then, midway up the thigh, is bent again at a ninety-degree angle. His hair is curly, brown, and tousled.

Leif checks for a pulse and I check for another passenger. There is no pulse, and one of the officers tells me the boy was alone in the car. The officer seems a little dazed, keeps shaking his head. “It was a routine traffic stop. Kid was speeding. He pulled over, no problem, he was real cooperative. Showed me his license, answered all my questions, no sign of trouble.” The plates hadn’t checked out, however, and the officer asked the boy to follow him to the patrol headquarters one exit back.

“He said fine, no problem. When I pulled into the turnaround, he just disappeared. Killed the lights and split. I knew I’d never catch him, so I just followed slowly. Got to this curve, could see a vehicle had left the roadway. No skid marks, the kid never touched the brakes.”

The car was a Corvette. Later, the reconstruction experts will calculate that the vehicle was moving at well over 100 miles per hour when it launched from the embankment. After casting around a bit, I find the bulk of the car far below, leaning against a sturdy tree. It looks a foil gum wrapper that has been rolled between a giant pair of palms. The two bucket seats are wrapped tightly around the engine. The rear axle is bent at a severe angle, one tireless chrome rim sticking straight up in the air. Backtracking, I can see that the vehicle began snapping off trees about twenty feet up. One large pine has a two-foot-square gash of bark ripped away. I bump into the battery. I find a shoe. The gas tank, separated from the frame, is resting in some weeds. I sweep my light through the treetops, and see a flash of white. A sweat sock, hanging from a branch. Then I see another flash of color, and another. It takes me a minute, but then I recognize them. Comic books. They’re everywhere, as far as the light can reach, the brightly colored sheaves of paper draping the branches like unfallen leaves, or Christmas tree trimmings. There is no wind; they do not stir.

The boy landed forty feet beyond the bulk of the car. We crunch back up the hillside to fetch a longboard, some straps, and a body bag, and return to the body with the coroner. An officer is taking pictures of the scene. The white flash fires sporadically, painting the whole scene white for fractions of a second. The coroner bends down, inspects the body. It still steams, but not so vigorously. Leif looks at the coroner. “Wanna mark his position before we move him?”

“Yeah,” grunts the coroner, a fat man wearing a loose tie. “Anybody got paint?”

We stand there then, silent, while the trooper hikes to his car for spray paint. This is how it goes when you die this way, people stand around your body, poke it and prod it, turn it over to look at your wounds, conjecture about how it might have gone. One minute you’re alive and flying, the next you’re cooling in the leaves. You drop to the temperature of the dirt, and it’s all over.

The coroner digs out the kid’s wallet. He’s carrying five hundred bucks and a picture of his girlfriend. She lives in Minneapolis, and he was on his way to meet her. Minneapolis is just over an hour away. She’s probably putting on her makeup. The kid is seventeen. He’s three states away from home. The trooper returns with the paint and says the license check is back; the car belongs to the boy’s dad, and it’s been reported stolen. That explains the kid bolting.

The coroner shakes the aerosol paint can. The glass mixing ball rattles noisily in the woods. Then, bracing one hand on his pudgy knee, he bends over and laboriously traces a fluorescent orange line around the boy. The paint sticks to the brown leaves. Some of it spatters on the boy’s jeans. The coroner straightens, nods at Leif and Todd. “All yours.”

We move him to the body bag, every move accompanied by the gentle grating of pulverized bone. We wrap the bag in a white sheet, strap it to the longboard, lug the whole works up the hill and stow it in the rig.

The ride to the morgue is a quiet one. Whenever we turn or hit a bump, the body rocks gently beneath the sheet. Leif and Todd are in the front. I ride in the back with the boy. I think of the father, probably still angry about his car, and the girlfriend, checking herself in the mirror, making herself special. It is eerie to know someone is dead while their loved ones are oblivious. We sit with the bodies and wonder about the family, a mother, a father, a lover, someone occupied with the mundane business of living, and here we are, in possession of information that will shatter their life.