Bunker 01 - Slipknot Read Free Page B

a town where, I couldn’t help but notice, the law was unwelcome. Except for Clyde, the Green Haveners s l i p k n o t
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    moved away from the sheriff as he passed. Some shot dirty looks in his direction. In an attempt to justify his badge, the sheriff began directing the young men carrying the stretcher.
    “Lug that thing down here. Give them some room, folks.
    That’s it.”
    Amazed and intrigued with the notion that perhaps nobody at the location—with the exception of me—had ever seen a corpse outside a silk-lined casket, I tucked my notebook into my messenger bag and closed my jacket over my camera. With hair that was neither long nor short, not really dark or light, and a build that could best be described as average, I had always been good at disappearing in a crowd. I wondered as I glanced offshore at the island that loomed in the distance, interrupting an otherwise pristine horizon, how my life would have been different had my mother not plucked me away from my island birthplace and planted me in South Florida. Yes, I thought, that must be the Acadia Island I had wondered and fantasized about. If I had been raised there, I wondered, would I be here now as a real member of this assembly? I must still have family there.
    Florida had been the most exotic and faraway place my mother could imagine when she decided to escape Maine with her two children; my brother, Wally, was just an infant. I thought the three of us were moving to another country by the time the Ford LTD station wagon rattled over the border of Georgia and into the state that would become our new home. Nearly thirty-eight years later, I could still hear the whoop my mother let out when she read the sign welcoming us to Jacksonville, as clearly as I had from my cozy nest of

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    L i n d a G r e e n l a w
    blankets in the backseat of that old car. As if we had been chased the length of the eastern seaboard by something that couldn’t penetrate the northern border of the Sunshine State, my mother declared us free. So at the age of four, I decided that my mother was different from other mothers.
    My familiar stroll down this well-worn path of imaginative memory was cut short by a high-pitched screech and a flood of tears from a woman right beside me. Too well dressed to belong in the scene, I thought, the screamer stood out in the sea of long white lab coats—the plant’s traditional uniform.
    This woman’s reaction to the sight of Nick Dow’s lifeless body was telling. Perhaps they had been lovers. Except for this one outburst of emotion and a few gasps that had slipped from behind hands trying to contain them, this body had been viewed nearly as casually as an abandoned shell that once housed a hermit crab. I was struck by how different this scene was from the many I had witnessed in Dade County.
    Maybe this coolness was the Yankee way. Or maybe no one had liked Dow much. Ginny Turner’s reaction was significantly different. Ginny was quite dismayed at her own misfor-tune of a delayed start to this morning’s schedule. If this had occurred on one of Florida’s beaches, a southern Ginny would have closed up shop for the week and been home bak-ing for the funeral festivities. There would be a lot of crying and carrying on. Someone would have thrown him- or herself on top of the body by now. These northerners were quite different. My mother had never meshed with Floridians. I was beginning to understand that the difference was in-grained. Although I had never known exactly what my mother s l i p k n o t
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    had fled, I understood that my retreat north was every bit as calculated as hers had been.
    As I brushed by the sobbing, overdressed woman whose face was buried in the neck of a consoling bystander, I heard single chopped syllables staggering through all her gulps and sniffles. From what I could piece together of the almost unin-telligible hysteria, I knew that, at least in the mind of one woman, this death was not a simple