Carcass Trade Read Free

want to spoil your fantasy,” he said. He smiled and left me, taking slow, careful steps, the steps of a man who’d learned all things have their natural rhythms, whose favorite expression was “It takes the time it takes,” said about almost anything, from paperwork to investigations to the winding and unwinding of love.
    I needed to measure actual distances, so I headed over to a boulder where I would tuck the end of the tape and walk up the slope, then come back down and measure from the boulder to the table ledge, then measure the ledge’s height and width. All the while, I was thinking of what I would see in the car, how badly burned the person was, how terrible the act of burning alive must be. And I hoped dearly that we would learn that the fire was merely an attempt to hide an already completed crime, or better yet, that it was an accident after all; for someone had surely once loved the someone in the car. Someone had heard him or her laugh, and watched whoever it was ride trikes and discover things, and someone had sacrificed to keep whoever it was in clothes and in schools and to give the child what we’ve come to expect is the right to reasonable living. When a life is deliberately taken away, it’s a theft from dozens of people. And theft, to my mind, each time it happens and no matter to what degree, is a little killing, a murder of time and thought and caring.
    I finished the measures and stood for a moment looking at the narrow passageway between the car’s tires and the backstop. My height at five five plus the height of the door with the car on its side would not allow me a perspective if I approached that way. I passed to the left where an aluminum ladder still lay, probably from off the fire truck, along the thirty-inch-high ledge. Lifting the ladder, I propped it against the car frame, setting the legs firmly in the mix of soil and leaves. I wasn’t too worried about getting ash on me because I had on an old green twill jacket and pants; they’d survive.
    Les Fedders came toward me. He saw me at the ladder and turned his palm up. “Ladies first.”
    â€œOh, you go right ahead.”
    â€œNuh-uh. I like to see women climb ladders.”
    â€œLes, does your wife make you sleep on the porch?”
    He laughed, and with his hands in his pockets, looked down and made sure leaves weren’t lapping over his gleaming brown shoes. He said, “You go on and do your thing, Smokey.”
    Joe told me a long time ago, “They pay you to think.” They pay you to think, not feel. And so a certain practiced dispassion overtook me while I climbed. The abundant smell of carbon, purged fuel, melted rubber, and incinerated flesh overtook my nostrils. I stilled myself at the thought of what lay inside the blackened salvage. What mute thing would send its plea for recognition: I was , therefore I am?
    I would look inside the ruin that yet released its heat to the morning air, and I would listen for what the blackened being within would tell me of its life and death. And afterward, at the morgue, I would explore the heart of the Greek word autoptos meaning “I see for myself.” I would see for myself. I would listen and learn. And if there had been a helper in the victim’s hard release from this world, I would be alert to it, and come to know that too.

2
    When I peered into the chute, the shock of what I saw almost threw me off the ladder.
    At first I thought it was a dog, CC Rider’s size. Against the driver’s side lay a thing that looked like a burned duffel bag. The legs were gone to the knees and the arms so consumed they were not in the usual pugilistic posture of severely burned persons when ligaments and tendons shrivel, pulling the fists up as though the victim in final frenzy could box the flames away. Where the head should have been, a stump of leaden vertebrae remained.
    I lifted my eyes while steadying myself with a keener grip