Carcass Trade

by Noreen Ayres

  “Like some people I know,” Joe said.

  Overhead, the bigger birds just gave an empty stare and flew to the ground for something, hopping like prisoners in foot chains with too short a lead.

  When we reached the far side of the canyon where Joe felt the car had gone over, the ravens had flown away to the north, and I thought they were gone to better hunting, but they came flapping back and settled in another tree. Glancing up at them, I said, “You know what they call a collection of ravens? An unkindness.”

  Looking over the side at the gray hulk below, noting the flattened weed on the road edge and the open wound of dirt where the car had bit off the edge, Joe said, “An unkindness? That’s an unkindness.”

  “No argument from me.”

  He pointed: “We have lemon and white splash on the metal inside the car. That means a fire of around two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, even in the rain.”

  I looked around my own feet where we stood, wondering if Doug had got pictures here, wondering if we were trampling on tire and shoe impressions, and saw nothing and mentioned it to Joe.

  “It’s pretty sandy here, and I think it rained after the event. It’d blur easy.”

  “Could it have been a pipe bomb?” I asked.

  “Pipe bombs don’t usually do the kind of damage their malicious little engineers hope. Juveniles and amateurs settling a grudge. No, we’d see wide searing on the undercarriage, and we don’t. The salvage guys’ll look for toolmarks on fuel lines, melted motor mounts, that sort of thing, just to be sure I’m reading this right. If some guy was just pissed at a car company, he’d probably set fire to the engine compartment. The radiator lead would liquefy, the fan belt would be burned. But I think the fire started from accelerant poured in through the window. One thing’s for certain: Somebody was sure pissed at somebody.”

  He hiked his pants as he sat on his heels, one finger on the ground for balance as he looked down at the scene once more. A cop’s eyes. A scientist’s eyes. Not so different one from another.

  The harsh racket of motorcycles preceded two monster bikes around the bend. The riders were without helmets. Two more bikers came roaring by, one a woman, her long brown hair whipping in the wind. As she passed, the sun struck her just right and I could see on her bare thigh below her torn stone-washed jeans a blue skull with a rose in its teeth.

  My pal from the California Highway Patrol, Ray Vega, told me about a rider he personally cited over twenty times for no headgear. The guy said he’d pay as many fines as it took till the legislature came to its senses. The very next day Ray found him with brain seepage out his ears and nostrils, his head a hockey puck that had connected with a bent fence pole near a newly razed gas station.

  But now as I caught the black leathery gleam off the backs of the last riders, the smallish one with his arms cocked out on the handlebars and a full head of snowy hair free in the wind, I had no ill thoughts about them. God help them, if they want to dare death, let them. Death, like life, has its own illogic.

  I looked at Joe squatting there, another weed in his mouth, and felt a sudden sadness. He must have felt me looking, and turned with a question in his eyes.

  I said, “How about taking me to the Cowboy Boogie Company tonight? Honey.”

  He said, “You’re absolutely on. Baby.”

  3

  Every butt was synchronized. The band was on break, but the canned music didn’t stop anyone. A couple of grannies in cowboy boots were dancing with the rest of them while Clint Black’s voice dipped to a passionate growl and you just knew he was singin’ straight to you.

  Joe and I sat on barstools at a long table and watched Ray Vega and his new girlfriend Francine doing the Push Tush, the line dance that made even country music sexy. When the song finished, Ray and Francine came back grinning and reached quickly for their abandoned beers. She collected the condensation from her bottle and slipped her hand under her hair to pat the back of her neck.

  Doug Forster came alone but lost no time asking women to dance. In his Western-cut shirt and his roommate’s black hat matching his hair, Doug could be old Glintin’ Clinton himself. When he squeezed by Francine to get to his stool, his hand dragged across her waist all the way, but Ray didn’t see it, or if he did, didn’t care.

  “I say day-am. I do believe I’m gettin’ the goshdarn hang of this,” Doug said, smacking his thigh like a ranch hand learning poker. On the level below us, a sea of cowboy hats flowed by, the hardwood floor a rose color under the lights.

  “Well, you’ve danced with every woman out there, you should,” Ray said.

  “And here you were the one who didn’t want to come because you didn’t have a date,” I said.

  Joe was offering a credit card to the waitress and giving the go-round circle with two fingers and not paying particular attention to Doug, who maybe’d had one too many already.

  Doug said, “I have a date,” and looked at me with an expression I had not seen on his college-kid face.

  Ray caught it and said, “A date with your hand under the sheets.”

  “Ray!” Francine’s eyes went wide and her mouth hung open, the lips glossed in deep pink. Her black hair shone and she looked really pretty in the warm light and her purple silk blouse. She had that full kind of figure that looks comfortably waterlogged, if a guy didn’t groove on the anorectic look. A flush began at Francine’s neck. She looked at me as if I should do something, because Raymond’s a friend of mine and an officer with the highway patrol, and sometimes he thinks he’s my brother. Ray’s face went taut with warning, and I couldn’t believe it myself, what Raymond had said to Doug, and wondered if all the Dos Equis had yet to be danced off out there on the floor.

  “Well hell, it was a try,” Doug said. He shot a quick look at Joe, who was back with us now and none the wiser, his cheeks apple-rosy with the help of Absolut and tonic.

  Another song started, and then I saw Doug’s glance catch on some point over my head in the direction of the snack bar. In a moment he said, “There is a God.” A bleached-white blonde in white jeans strode toward us, wearing red cowboy boots and a red hat, and under her denim jacket and low-cut white knit shirt were two of the biggest, bubbliest bazooms that ever bounced the earth. She swung by, towing a good-looking guy, her frontal burden traveling freely. Joe Sanders choked back a swallow even before I kicked him hard on one of his new boots, and Francine’s dark eyes stayed wide with wonder. In one of the few moments of the evening that found Ray agreeing with Doug, he groaned, “Touch me, turn me on, and burn me down,” and laughed, shaking his head.

  Doug was out and around the table before I knew it. “Watch this,” he said, preparing to follow the couple down the step to the dance floor.

  I said, “Doug, don’t. You’re going to make a fool of yourself.” But since it’s permissible to dance with two partners or none in country dancing, I guessed Doug was going to try for a ménage à country before these two knew what hit them.

  Tipping his Stetson down and putting a backhand to his mouth the way you do when sharing a secret, he said, “Make a fool of myself? Who was it found the maxilla, Smokey? Hm? What was that?”

  He left me fuming, then tried to catch up to the girl in the red boots, but a happy lady in a long blue skirt hooked him and they slipped into the Two-Step as if they were old friends.

  “Found a what?” Francine asked. Ray’s nose was pinched between her fingers as she kept his head rigid so he couldn’t follow the blonde woman’s passage around the floor.

  I said to Joe, “So I couldn’t find all fourteen bones of the face and eight of the goddamn cranium. Order me a Sex-on-the-Beach. Tell her I want the L.A. version, no pineapple juice. I’m goin’ to the john.”

  Removing my straw hat, I scrunched it onto Joe, holding his whole adorable sandpapery mug in my hand to snug the hat down. The beaded feather dangled in back.

  “Got you where you live, didn’t he?” Joe’s hand landed on my thigh and rubbed up and down, and all the muscles
in my groin tightened in a needy way.

  “Forget him, Smokey,” Ray said. “Snot-nosed kid.”

  I said, the booze assisting self-pity, “Why are all you men such competitive assholes?”

  Raymond came around behind Joe and massaged my shoulders. “Why, that’s just part of our charm.”

  His smell was rich and sweet and maybe I leaned on my stool and into him too far. The music started again, Tanya Tucker suggesting that if your heart ain’t busy tonight, neither was she.

  I patted Ray’s hand on my shoulder, then left and went to the rest room. While there I was thinking of Doug finding the maxilla only because a raven found it first. How petty of me. How competitive of me. An unkindness. In Germany, bad mothers are called Rabenmutters, because ravens often abandon their offspring. Doug was a baby. What did he know?

  In front of the mirror, I fluffed my hair, thinking I’d let it grow again, maybe even lighten it, what the hell. I tore off a paper towel and dampened it to dab at the shine on my face, saw the flush of my skin drowning my lips, my Bardot lips, one man once told me, so I added two swoops of a brownish lipstick, and went out the door.

  When I got back to the table, the band had started up again, and I heard Joe saying to Ray, “. . . from Beverly Hills.”

  “Are you talking about the canyon?” I asked.

  He nodded, midswallow of his vodka, then said, “Miranda Robertson, on the registration. Six, twenty-three, sixty-three.”

  “That her measurements?” Ray asked, appalled. Then winked at me after looking at Francine.

  Francine gave him a quick, disgusted look, then surveyed the dance floor, her gaze stopping on a man who looked like a TV star, a James Dean type with dark eyebrows and hollow cheekbones, who stood at the perimeter with his left thumb in his pocket, just watching for the right bird to fly by.

  “My much-married brother,” I said, “had a wife one wife back named Miranda.” I had to kind of shout it, the music was so loud. The band stopped abruptly, the lead laughing into the mike, saying, “Sorry, folks,” and adjusting something on the amplifier, then launching in again, this time not so loud.

  From Joe: “Might you say he Mirandized her?”

  “Miranda, Mirandized? Why do I know you?”

  “Destiny, my dear,” Joe answered. He narrowed his eyes in thought and said, “Trenton. I got lost on that street once, trying to buy a car cover.”

  I asked, “In Beverly Hills?”

  “That city ain’t what your average Hubert from Ohio thinks. Real people live in real houses and go to work at crummy businesses just like anywhere else.”

  “How disappointing,” Ray said.

  “One dream after another shattered,” Joe said. He looked at me with swimmy blue eyes, grinning through the fog. I asked him if he wanted to dance. He shook his head and said, “Bad knees. Old football injury.”

  Ray laughed and said to me, “I’ll scoot boots with you, Smokey.”

  He took my wrist and we started away, and Francine’s black eyes, when I thought to look at her, held on me, and then she looked at Joe and said, “So, you have a neat car, or what?” and tucked her purple blouse in her waistband, raising her breasts into the soft glow and smiling slyly at an old man whose glance fell upon her as he was passing by.

  ***

  “It’s not even Friday night,” I said, in my bathroom.

  “Does it have to be?”

  “We have to get up in the morning.”

  “We will. We will get up in the morning, and we will get it up in the evening, and—”

  “Hey, what are you doing?”

  “I’m lifting you up on the sink, my dear. Have some imagination.”

  “God.”

  “What’d you call me?”

  “Your bad knees,” I whispered.

  “What knees?”

  “Oh, hon.”

  “Say it again.”

  “Oh—”

  “I’ve missed you, baby,” he said. “Where you been?”

  The light above the mirror gilded every single shiny thing in the room so that I thought I was back staring at polished brass rails and hearing the Kentucky hunk singing sexy about his achy-breaky heart.

  “This can’t be done, can it?”

  “Hush up. Kiss me.”

  “Joe.”

  “Just kiss me. Jesus. Slide forward.”

  Deep in my throat, those sounds.

  “Doll, is this what you want? Hm? Just tell me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hm?”

  “Oh hon . . .”

  4

  On the way over to the morgue two blocks away from the lab, I told Doug, “You don’t have to do this, you know. We don’t both have to be there.”

  “And let you be the only lucky stiff? Ha-ha. Get it? Lucky stiff?”

  “Please.”

  “You make it home all right last night?”

  “Of course.”

  “You seemed a little wasted.”

  “Did I?”

  “You’re different than in the daytime.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Not so serious. Kinda . . . you know.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  The morning was bright as clear glass. A deputy driving by waved at us, and I waved back though I didn’t recognize him.

  Doug said, his gaze straight ahead as we crossed the street, “Joe drive you home?”

  “Well now, you’re the nosy one.”

  When we reached the other side, a Santa Ana police car passed and popped its horn at another cruiser with a female officer at the wheel. Doug put on his shades and looked as hip as could be, smoothing down both sides of his hair. He was wearing clean jeans, a white shirt, and a navy blue sports jacket with gold buttons, no tie.

  “You two doin’ the wild thang?”

  I tossed him a look without answering.

  “Didn’t think so. Too old for you.”

  “What’s the matter with you, you ask me a none-of-your-business question like that?”

  “So you are doin’ the wild thang.”

  Shaking my head, I said, “I’m glad to see you aren’t sporting two black eyes, chasing after Miss Buxom last night.”

  “Nah,” he said. “People love me. Once they get to know me.” As he walked he bounced as if his tennis shoes had tacks through the heels.

  “Must be nice to be Mr. Personality,” I said.

  “Hey, I am stud du jour.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t go after Ray’s date.”

  “Francine? Two years, she’ll be packing burritos around her middle like one of them life jackets.”

  We went by the big white building that served as the jail and walked through a treeless parking lot. Opposite the inmate Intake-Release Center, we turned down a walkway lined with yellow pansies minus faces shuddering in the wind. Approaching the morgue, a building of gray blocks with orange tiles breaching the middle, Doug asked, “How many autopsies you seen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A hundred?”

  “No.”

  “Fifty?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I want to notch a hundred. Say, Happy Hour, some chick goes, ‘What do you do, stud?’”

  He brushed away a giant John Belushi bee that zipped out from a hibiscus bush near the entrance.

  I held the door and said, “I’ve got a feeling you’re a much nicer person than you make yourself out to be, Doug. Who you trying to impress?”

  “Does it walk? Does it talk? Does it wear size thirty-six D?”

  Two million people will die in the U.S. this year, fifteen thousand in my county. Of that number, one out of four will undergo the medicolegal procedure known as autopsy.

  No one I know enjoys observing that procedure. But nearly everyone I know bears a profound urge to disperse mystery. Mystery, from the Greek word myein, meaning to be closed (of eyes). In a disciplined hour, the coroners and technicians at the morgue, the observers like me and my dippy c
ohort, Doug Forster, would open our eyes to see, in the knowledge that someone has to, and in the knowledge that we could.

  Doug’s sneakers gave off a loud sneeek in the entry room, piercing through the piped-in Muzak. While I wrote my name on the register, three women clerks behind in the office were talking about a Kevin Costner movie, one saying she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, he looked like a geek to her. Another clerk moved papers while she had a phone handset clamped on her shoulder, a Mexican girl in a pink suit who just got her A.A. degree in business. “Yo, Smokey,” she said, and looked at Doug with a half smile. “I’m on hold.”

  “Is the canyon Jane up yet? The bum from yesterday?”

  “We had an officer-involved case, so it got delayed.”

  “Good. So are we. Delayed.” I looked back at Doug. “You two know each other?”

  “Hi, Doug,” Janetta said, all cheeriness. “How you doing?”

  I left them smiling at each other and went in the other door and down the hallway, passing by the office of a deputy coroner, his high forehead gleaming as he hunched over the phone.

  Thirty-eight people, including clerical help, cover the twenty-four hours here. Even so, only about eight autopsies are performed a day compared to L.A.’s daily twenty-four, and the techs don’t have to forklift bodies three to a shelf the way they do there.

  The odor of formalin and alcohol filled the air, and I patted my pocket to see if I still had my Mentholatum stick. Most corpses we see do not have that much of an odor because the amine-type chemicals responsible for decomposition—cadaverine and putrescine—haven’t yet begun their work.

  It’s the smell of the formalin that slugs me. In its usual state as a preservative, it’s a solution of formaldehyde and water but it’s also used in powder form, sprinkled in the cavities of bodies so violently disrupted by autopsy. Early household deodorizers contained formalin, not so much to hide the odor as to numb the ability to smell. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work all that well. Not so much in the autopsy room, but in the refrigeration room where the treated corpses wait until removal to a funeral home, I have to use something for my nostrils, sissy or not.