‘We should roll him and get a look at his face.’
‘Don’t do that. Let him be.’ Ellis felt near to weeping.
Boggs did not reply, but neither did he move toward the body. ‘Might be that no one even knows he’s gone,’ he said. ‘A solitary guy, wanders out here, dies, and no one notices. The universe as he understood it is extinguished, and it’s the passing of a mite.’
‘You really don’t know anything about him?’ Ellis asked.
‘How would I?’
‘It just seems strange that I’d stumble onto him here. And then you turn up.’
Boggs laughed. ‘You think I planted a dead guy here?’
‘What’s your explanation?’
‘It is what it is.’
‘You have to admit it’s unlikely.’
‘That never stopped anything from happening.’
‘That’s not true.’
Boggs scoffed. With the point of his shoe he prodded the dead man’s foot. It was difficult to look away from the body. The man’s shoelaces were still tied.
‘If you did set this up, I don’t expect you would admit it.’
‘No. That’s true. I’m too smart for that.’
Ellis laughed. ‘All right. Fate put him here.’
‘Absolutely not. I’m not sure why you think it’s so strange. People die all the time.’
Ellis laughed again. ‘You know, it’s good to see you, Boggs.’
The shirt had ridden up as they pulled the body from the water, showing a thin, pasty waist.
‘Maybe he fell from an airplane,’ Boggs said, scowling.
‘What are you going to do now?’ Ellis asked.
‘Maybe he’d hitched a ride in the bed of a pickup truck, and he flew out on that curve and crawled here to die of internal haemorrhage.’
Ellis was silent.
‘Maybe this is just a place that had some meaning to him and he walked over here and ate a handful of pills and waited for an end. Some connection here. You remember that guy who climbed through the windshield? Maybe this is him. The passenger seat occupant. The one who said the hero guy was a liar.’
‘Really?’ Though he had forgotten it, it did seem that Boggs might have told him this before, years ago.
‘He said that the ex-marine hero man actually didn’t do much. A number of people were helping, and this guy said that he pulled several people out himself, and it pissed him off that this other guy was made out to be the hero with the help of some cop buddies.’
‘His saying that doesn’t prove anything.’
‘That’s true.’
‘I read that marine’s depo. Dragging people out and dragging people out. The screaming. His hand was burned, he went to the hospital, there’s documentation.’
‘No one said that he didn’t burn his hand. No one said that he didn’t hear screaming but felt that the fire was too intense.’
Then with – to Ellis – unexpected finality, as if on a signal, the conversation stopped, and time ran a murky passage through the dark. Boggs sat still and Ellis felt as if to disturb him might initiate terrible consequences. Then he slept for a spell and woke feeling no less tired. When he searched the sky he saw that any number of stars had winked away, as if the universe itself were dying. The lake water lay quiet. A few redwing blackbirds lurched around, reeds rattling in their wake. The sun cracked bright over the horizon. He forgot the body and then saw it again and then he did not want to look, but neither could he move his gaze away. The man’s sweatshirt held a peculiar and slowly changing pattern of dark and light where it was wet and dry. It seemed difficult to believe that the dead man might not move now, while the hair bristled from his naked ankles and the pores there appeared as if they might at any instant begin to sweat.
‘Don’t you think,’ Boggs said, ‘that if you weren’t in love with my wife, you could come up with something a little more compelling to say? There must be a part of you that would be happy to see me gone. Maybe only subconscious. Your brain throws up some ideas, not others. What are the constraints on their formation?’
‘You’re trying to guilt-trip me.’
‘Yes.’ Boggs stood, and he seemed to tower in the new light. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Leave him?’
‘Yes.’
‘We can’t do that.’
‘Actually, we can.’
The body’s flesh was bone pale. The skin of the neck held two creases, an imprint of years of life.
‘You’re welcome to stay,’ Boggs added.
One of the body’s hands still extended to the lake, and the waves teased the fingers like a cat.
‘How can we leave him?’
‘We don’t know anything about him. Later we’ll probably wonder if he even really existed.’
Ellis didn’t know which was more terrible, that he didn’t know anything about the man, or that this meant that he might leave him. But Boggs started away and Ellis moved in his trail.
The world appeared to unsettle and shift as if composed of tiny swarming insects, and although he followed as best as he could, his foot caught in a hole, he fell and he lost sight of Boggs. When he reached the road Boggs had gone, and even the road lay empty. He clambered into the minivan and accelerated, tyres scrambling.
He drove south a mile, then turned onto a divided highway with entry and exit ramps and a grass median – it was a state highway, but looked like an interstate. He stopped below the windmills. Boggs was not to be seen. Ellis stood out of the minivan, but after a minute he climbed back inside. He felt at a loss. He doubted whether he had the energy to pursue Boggs further, and he didn’t know what he should have said to him, but felt that he hadn’t said it. Perhaps Boggs was right about his subconscious. Perhaps he really only wanted Boggs’s spontaneous and unjustified forgiveness.
Eventually he stood out again and with aimless impatience he walked a little distance uphill. Wind ghosted the grasses. To his right grew a patch of waist-high milkweed and moving across the weeds were the long-limbed shadows of a turning windmill, shadows that came toward him and passed over him, and he had to fend off a sudden vertigo, and turned to the traffic below, coruscating in the sun. The accident had occurred in a fog bank and involved three semis, five cars, two SUVs, a minivan and a pickup towing a pontoon boat. Witnesses described an aftermath of smashed and overturned vehicles haphazard on the road, two of them burning, the pontoon boat on its side, injured people wandering and shouting, the sirens and lights of police, fire and ambulance vehicles drifting in the fog, and the bodies of dead pigs – one of the semis had been pulling a trailerload of hogs – scattered over asphalt and into ditches and fields, and all of this overlaid with the awful screams of uncomprehending, writhing wounded pigs, and the occasional report of a police pistol silencing one.
But what Ellis recalled vividly was that when he and Boggs came here to conduct their scene inspection a year later, a stray black-and-brown mutt with white in the muzzle had sat a short distance away from them and barked mournfully while Boggs had left the rental running, announcing Tolstoy’s ‘Master and Man’ through open windows, the sound of certain words floating in the air like wallowing balloons, ‘
And now on the opposite side of the highway Boggs’s green convertible slowed and parked.
Boggs stood out gripping a white paper bag, and without hesitation he stepped into the lanes – a car swerved
