CODA
Ypsilanti, Michigan. August 8, 1967.
It might be a deer, all hulked up and leathery and melting with rot, or a dog. Animals are always going and getting killed around here, like stupes, as they flash across Geddes and LaForge Roads from one farm field to another then off into the trees. The carcass is small for a deer, though, and big for a dog. And it’s too far from the road to have been launched here by a car, so it must have been put in this spot, just like, set down in this weedy place near the sagging foundation of a farmhouse and a silo. But why here? This spot is a hangout. A stand of box elder trees shields it from the road. Kids park here to drink and make out. They prowl around the old foundation, toss their beer cans and cigarette butts into it. Why dump a deer carcass here? A joke? A stink bomb?
A boy sidles toward the thing. He is fifteen and burned brown from working his father’s farm all summer. He wears a T-shirt and cutoffs and a filthy Tigers cap with the visor pulled down so low that he has to raise his chin just to see where in the hell he’s going. He rotates his chest, unconsciously, so that his left shoulder is slightly forward, as if he means to sneak up on the deer.
At a distance of twenty feet the air is foul, even out in the open like this. The dungy stink of decay. The carcass is old. It is manuring, crumbling in the summer heat.
Another mystery: The boy was here just a week ago-this place is next to his family’s farm, the fields run right on up to it-and he did not see a carcass here, though you could hardly miss it now. So if the animal was moved here recently, it must have been good and rotten already. Who would touch it then?
Closer now, the boy can hear the flies buzz. They are swarming, excited. They hop up and down on the carcass, they jerk around in the air. Their electric zzzzzzz harmonizes with the grumble of a tractor off somewheres, and that is the sound of summer, of hot afternoons, that insect-buzz coming in waves.
Standing over the carcass, though, all the boy can hear is the hum of flies. The black surface of the carcass is seething with them. He can’t see the thing clearly.
The head is misshapen, melted. It seems to have collapsed like some sodden, rotting, black piece of fruit. The flies are clumped thick on it, feasting on the sweet meat inside. The boy gazes at the head a moment until a shape at its center, a little flower of whorls, becomes a recognizable shape-a human ear-and the boy is sprinting, startled, back across the field.
Then the cops come. Sheriffs from Washtenaw County and state police from the Ypsilanti barracks and someone over from Eastern Michigan University where a coed went missing about a month earlier. They close off the roads. They comb through the weeds until they turn up a baggy orange dress and a torn bra and a sandal.
These are sensible men. They have daughters and granddaughters, and they do not like to look at the body-it lies at the center of all this activity; it cannot be moved until the M.E. arrives to handle it-because when they look at the shape on the ground, they see that it is a girl. She lies on her side, nude, her face turned down toward the earth. Once their minds have made this picture, the black carcass seems all the more ghoulish. (It is missing both feet and one forearm. Its chest is riddled with thirty stab wounds.) So they hang back from the corpse. Tight-lipped, they turn their backs to it. They gather on the road to have a smoke and wait while the search continues and the M.E. makes his way over.
A quarter mile away, at the periphery of this scene, well away from the body itself, away from the charged atmosphere, a cruiser is parked across the road and a young deputy directs traffic away.
A car rolls up to this roadblock. The windows are open. The driver is a man, mid-twenties. In the afternoon heat, his blond hair is matted and his cheeks flushed. He wears a damp shirt. The temperature is near eighty-five. “What’s going on?” he says.
“You’ll have to turn it around, sir. Road’s closed.”
“What happened?”
“There was a murder.”
“A murder! Oh my God. What happened?”
“They don’t know yet.”
“A murder! Is it that girl, from E.M.U.?”
“What makes you say it’s a girl?”
“What do you mean? She’s been missing, the poor girl. It’s in all the papers.”
“Well, like I told you, they don’t know.”
“How’m I gonna get back to Ann Arbor?”
There is a distinct honk in the man’s voice, a nasal foreign accent, Ann AH-buh, which catches the deputy’s attention. He walks to the back of the car. Massachusetts plates.
“You mind if I ask what you’re doing here today, sir?”
“Heading back to school. I’m at U of M.”
“May I see your license?”
“My license? What’d I do?”
“Just routine, sir.”
“Routine.” The young man makes a skeptical smirk. He knows he’s being harassed but he is willing to play along. The cops are hopped up about a murder in town. It’s understandable. He gets his wallet out of a back pocket, and the license out of the wallet.
The deputy reads, Kurt Lindstrom, 50 Symphony Road, Boston. “This license is expired.”
“Is it? I’m sorry, I hadn’t realized. I moved here pretty recently. So much to do, you know? So much paperwork. Guess I’ll need to get a Michigan license.”
The deputy considers, then he relents and offers the guy a friendly little smile, and hands the license back. Today there are bigger fish to fry. “Take care of it right away.”
“Oh, I will. Thank you, Officer.”
“You’re from Boston?”
“That’s right. Ever been?”
“No.”
“Well, you should go someday. Not in winter, though. It’s murder.”
“Alright, then. I won’t.”
“Good, well,” Lindstrom holds up his expired driver’s license, “thanks for the break. I’ll take care of this, I’m gonna get right on it.”
“Welcome to Michigan, sir.”
Lindstrom executes a cautious three-point turn. But before he drives off, he stops to share a last thought with the deputy. “Hope they catch the bastard that did this.”
