The Body

by Tyler Carey

It was around when we saw signs for Stockbridge, Massachusetts that I realized we'd gone too far. "Didn't Jeff say that the oxbow lake would be just past Budsville?" I asked. Roger stared into space and let his mouth hang open. This was sometimes a sign that he was cogitating. Other times it was a sign that his hamster was stuck on the wheel and in need of help. "Roger?"

"Whuh?" he asked, snapping back into reality. "Oh, yeah. I was just trying to retrace our steps, Dave."

"We didn't get off Route 9, did we?"

"No, we're still trucking along on Route 9. I'm starting to wonder if Jeff said something about a Route 107, though…"

I shook my head. "I think I saw a bait and tackle store back up the road. Maybe we could…"

"I told you," Roger snapped, "I don't use bait! I don't want to do anything to disrupt the ecosystem."

"You're a fisherman, Roger."

"I catch and release. I don't kill."

"Well, that's very Zen of you. But, I was going to say, maybe we can drive back to the bait shop and ask for directions."

Roger harrumphed. "I know where we're going."

"So do I," I said, "Albany, if we don't turn around."

Twenty minutes later, we were both standing in front of the glass display case at one of the many non-descript hunting/fishing/survivalist stores hidden in the wilderness of Western Massachusetts. The wilderness outside of Boston may be Thoreau country, but this far away from civilization, it's Deliverance-land. A man just doesn't go into a gun shop asking for directions. We were desperate, though. There was fishing to be done.

Roger rang the little bell next to the register, and startled the old man dozing off by the hunting rifles. He jumped to his feet, and for a second, I thought he was going to draw a weapon. Instead, he kind of bobbed up and down slowly, inspecting Roger's dreadlocks and my woolly beard. "Can I hep you boys with something?" he asked, uneasily.

"We're looking for the oxbow lake," Roger said.

The old man reached into his shirt pocket and took out a hand rolled cigarette and lit it. I didn't know if this was such a safe idea, what with the amount of ordnance that surrounded us on the walls. "Tain't no oxbow around here," he said.

"Least none I've ever seen."

"I think it was supposed to be around Budsville," I said.

"Ohhhh, that oxbow," he said, taking a drag and inspecting us once more.

"Yeah," Roger said, "our professor said there's some good fishing there."

The old geezer laughed a hoarse emphysemic laugh. "Your professor?"

"Yeah," Roger said. "Maybe you've heard of him. He writes for Outdoors magazine. His name's…"

"Nope," the geezer said. "Never heard of him."

Roger nodded. He knew the score. "So, this oxbow. How can we get there from here?"

The geezer pointed up Route 9. "I'm guessing you came from over there," he said. "Go back there. But this time, when you hit Budsville, take Route 107 South from the center of town. It's about four miles away from civilization." He took his final drag from the cigarette, and stubbed it out on an empty magazine cartridge. I hoped it was empty, at least. "How late are you boys going to be fishing there, tonight?" he asked.

Roger gulped. I stepped up to the plate. "I don't know. Why? Is the bass fishing better at night or something?"

The codger cackled, and sat down to resume his nap. "No reason. No reason at all."

"That guy scared the shit out of me, Dave," Roger said, as we passed the frou-frou cafes and anarchist bookstores of Budsville. Budsville may have been slightly removed from the college campuses that populated the stretch of land between Springfield and the Vermont border in Massachusetts, but it thrived on the artsy crowds and hippies who could just never leave their New England collegiate conquests behind. It's like somebody captured some of the late 60s/early 70s zeitgeist in a bottle and just let everybody in, to stay as long as they wanted, but never leave. A psychedelic Xanadu, if you will. Sadly, we weren't stopping there.

The road south of town was an abysmal wasteland spotted with abandoned gas stations and fields that would have been a developer's wet dream were they not overgrown and filled with rusted autos. I'm a loather of useless strip malls, half-filled apartment complexes and the industrial parks that now dot every bit of our landscape from the Everglades to the northernmost reaches of Barrow, Alaska, but this was not land that lay fallow in honor of Mother Earth - this land was the by-product of a society that's lost hope. I figured that it could only get better by the time we reached the oxbow, but I was wrong. The lake was a shallow sump littered with beer cans and the occasional shopping cart. I took note that even Budsville had no supermarket. Where did these carts come from, then? I shuddered and disembarked from the car after Roger parked by a makeshift dock, from which a few toothless old men were fishing, smoking foul smelling cigars.

"Jeez. Wasn't this the set for the Blair Witch Project?" I asked.

Roger shook his head and grinned. "Are you kidding? This is great! I can almost smell the bass in that lake."

"Bass? In there? This looks like a Superfund site," I replied.

"No, Jeff knows what he's talking about," Roger said. I agreed with this, but I did recall Jeff saying before we left campus that even he wasn't so sure how we'd do - the thaw had just happened, and the fish were most likely still waking up. Upon inspection of the lake, it wasn't the fish that I was worried about awaking. Some dread monster that man was not meant to know seemed to be beckoning me from the shallow depths.

We had only one pole between the two of us, and it was Roger's, so he got to make the first few casts. All of my snarky comments aside, he really did know fishing. His casts were beautiful watch - these sharp flicks of the wrist that tossed the lure a good few dozen yards off into the lake, followed by a smooth reeling-in that skipped the lure across the water for all the fish to see. Sadly, there must have been blind fish in the lake. When it was my turn, my cast went only about twelve feet, and then the lure got tangled in a bunch of weeds. Despite Roger's protests, I yanked hard on the line, and it snapped the lure off - lost somewhere in the depths where dread Cthulhu lay dreaming. I started to feel badly about having lost the lure, and Roger certainly did curse me and any of my offspring that I may not have been aware of. But when he opened his tiny tacklebox - a small blue box that was about the size of a loaf of bread - I felt silly feeling any guilt whatsoever. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of brightly colored lures sure to attract the attention of any proud guppy or dumb shark overflowed from the box. I helped Roger untangle one from the mass, and tried to reassemble the collection for him as he tied the lure on to what remained of the fishing line.

On Roger's next cast, he too hooked the weeds and lost another lure. The next twenty minutes went like this. Every once in a while, he'd mutter something about me cursing his pole. Myself? I think the sleeping beast in the lake was just getting hungry.

Experienced fishermen use their expert eyes to spy "cover" in a lake - the mass of underwater plants or sunken structures that attract fish. After I lost another $30 worth of Roger's lures, followed by a few more bad casts by Roger, Roger deemed this spot "unfishable". He pointed to a collection of branches sticking up from the water on the other side of the oxbow. "I bet that's where them bass are hiding. Maybe a few catfish, too." He nodded contemplatively to himself. "Come on, let's go." Roger walked back to the car.

We rode out of the official entrance to the oxbow and crept slowly northward on the road, back into purgatory. Roger spied a little dirt path off the side of the road that seemed to border the section of the lake he was intent on fishing.

"This looks like some dude's driveway," I said, looking at the road that skirted the lake on one side and a very very dead cornfield on another.

Roger laughed. "Aw come on! These are simple farm folk. I can talk to any of them. If we run into the fella who owns this plot of land, I'll just hunker down with him and ask for permission to fish his land." The thought of Roger "hunkering" amused me, but I nodded. I was just along for the ride, really.

We parked underneath of grove of weary, tall trees and started unpacking the gear. As we were about to scamper down the incline to the lake, a pickup truck rolled up. "Oh boy," I thought to myself, "I get to see Roger try to 'hunker'."

"Hi there, guys," the pickup driver said. He was a middle-aged fellow with a reddish beard, dotted with gray hairs. He wore a bright yellow CAT hat, and the dashboard of his pickup was littered with empty packs of cigarettes, receipts and matchbooks. "Goin' fishin'?" he asked.

Roger looked back at him, like a deer in the headlights. His mouth hung open. The hamster was stuck on the wheel, again.

"Yes, sir. If'n it's alright with you, that is," I offered.

"By all means," he said. "If you catch a few though, feel free to just leave one in the mailbox." He pointed up the road, back from where he'd come. I didn't see any farmhouse or mailbox, but I nodded. It was as if he'd come from nowhere, but when I looked back, he was gone.

With a shrug, we ambled down the hill to the overgrown shoreline. Roger rigged up the line with a big bright orange lure. "A little ambitious, don't you think?" I asked him.

"Nah," Roger drawled. "There's some big cats hidden under that carpet of leaves. I can tell."

While Roger cast his line, in search of Jaws, I looked up the hillside and took in the sights. Y'know, despite all my criticism of this barren hole in the midst of beautiful Massachusetts, this kind of more suburban wilderness was kind of appreciable. I mean, there was Roger's pristine car parked at the top of the hillside, with farmland in the background. Off to the left, I could see the sun leaning towards sunset, against the Berkshires. Even the hill, scattered as it was with littered cans and garbage, it kind of had a nice forest primeval thing going on. It was sad to see Man's imprint on everything, though. I mean, off to my right, I saw this garbage bag, full to the point of overflowing, just dropped at the hillside. "Why would that farmer litter on his own land?" I thought. It must have been someone driving by on Route 107 - the bag falling off the back of their truck, or maybe they just tossed it into the woods. It was just sad, really. I walked over to the big, kicked it once, and then it fell out.

It was a rib.

No, not a rib like you'd get with French fries and beer at some joint called "The Pig 'n' Swig" - this was a man's rib - like Adam's rib. I staggered back, tripped on something, and rolled down the hill into the muddy water.

"You idiot!" Roger hissed. "You're going to scare the fish!"

All of a sudden I was Lou Costello, gasping and wheezing in fear. "Homminah, homminah, homminah," I whispered, pointing up the hill.

"Get out of the water, Dave!" Roger said. He waded in and dragged me out. "What's gotten in to you?" I caught my breath, and pointed at the bag. It only sat a few feet from us, up the hill. "There's a…a rib in that bag, Roger."

"A rib? So? Someone dumped their garbage here."

"No, I mean a rib. Like a man's rib."

"What?!?" Roger shrieked in disbelief. He dropped his pole on the muddy shore and ambled up to the bag, quickly. He stood there, hunched over the rib that had fallen out. "Whoa," he muttered. The opening of the bag was right near the rib, and he lifted it and peaked inside. The next thing I knew, he was crouched, facing down the hill dry heaving. He swallowed hard a few times, coughed and stood up. "What do…what do you think it is?" he asked. I blew out a deep breath and pursed my lips. We looked each other in the eyes. We knew it was a person in the bag.

Roger and I sat on the hood of the car. I had quit smoking six months previously, but there he and I sat, nervously puffing away on American Spirits. The sun was now just hitting the peaks of the mountains, and darkness would be coming on soon. That cold dew that lies waiting in the shadows of hills had already descended upon us.

"What was in the bag?" I asked.

"A body, you idiot," Roger snapped.

"No, I mean…look, I'm sorry to put you through this, but was it identifiable?"

"It had been there for quite a while. I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman…it looked kind of on the small side. Mostly bones and…" Roger swallowed hard and then sucked deeply on his cigarette. He shook his head, his brow sweating.

"Oh, jeez, man. What the fuck are we going to do?"

"Well, we have to tell someone," I said. "Think we should tell the farmer? It's his property…"

"What if it's his wife or someone?" Roger asked conspiratorially. "He could be in on this!"

I doubted that. The guy seemed nice enough. But then I thought back to seeing John Wayne Gacy on TV as a kid - he had seemed pretty smooth, too. "So, I guess we have to call the cops, huh?"

Roger sighed. "I thought for a moment that we should just leave well enough alone, but that could be somebody's son or daughter in that bag." He stood up. "Come on. I saw a payphone at one of those gas stations we passed on the way down the road." Roger started the car, and immediately turned off the radio as the engine kicked. We didn't feel much like listening to the Wailers.

In the parking lot of the deserted gas station, we bickered over who would have to call the cops. After a heated game of rock-paper-scissors, I was handed the quarter. I had no idea what the police department's number was - I wasn't even sure what town we were in, so I pressed "0" and hoped for the best. The operator sounded unenthused when he answered the line. After I told him that I'd found a body and wanted to speak to the police who handle Route 107 south of Budsville, he became the most helpful person in telecommunications I'd ever dealt with.

The police seemed significantly less excited. I suppose that after Stand By Me came out, they probably get their share of calls like this. "Look," I said, "I'm not moving it anywhere. It'll still be there tomorrow if you want to swing by then."

"Fine," said the dispatch officer. "I'll send somebody down. Just go back to the location, and wait at the side of the road."

Obviously, the officer who was given the instruction to come down took things more seriously than the fellow who answered the phones. Two squad cars came barreling down Route 107 with lights and sirens going. Roger and I were standing on the side of the dirt road, and an officer came leaping out of the front car, holding his badge, and with a hand on his hip. He was dressed in an immaculate silk suit, and his overcoat was camel hair. He was far from the man I expected to show up, out here in the sticks. "You the guys who called?" he asked. We nodded. "I'm Sergeant Thibodeaux, Homicide. You haven't disturbed the scene at all, have you?"

"Well," Roger said, "I looked in the bag."

"Shit!" spattered Sergeant Thibodeaux. "I want you two guys to stand over there," he said, pointing towards the edge of the cornfield. "And try not to step on any footprints or tire treads," he added. Looking at the ground, he muttered,

"Well, now those are interested." Stooping to the ground, he stared at a set of tire marks. Roger and I walked over to the cornfield. "Those came from a Ford Custom pickup truck," Roger said.

"How do you know?" asked Sergeant Thibodeaux.

"A pickup truck drove by when we got here. The fella inside said it was okay if we fished on the edge of his land," I explained.

"What'd he look like?" the Sergeant asked.

"Oh, a kind of beefy middle-aged guy. Red beard, yellow CAT cap on. Probably about fifty or so."

"How tall was he?"

"I don't know," I said. "He was sitting down in the truck."

The other officer, a tall lanky woman with mouse-brown hair and glasses ambled over. Unlike Sergeant Thibodeaux, the woman was in a blue uniform. "The bag looks fairly secure," she said to Sergeant Thibodeaux. "Should I call Crime Scene?" Officer Thibodeaux gulped. "No. Let me take a quick look first."

"But, if you disturb…" the female officer, who's nametag read, "Off. Nelson" said.

"I'm just gonna take a peek," he said. Roger and I couldn't see him too well from where we were standing, but he quickly came dashing back, pale and gagging. "Call Crime Scene," he said. "See if they've got anybody with forensic experience on call."

"Should we go?" asked Roger.

"No!" snapped Sergeant Thibodeaux. "You guys are suspects. You stay here until we know what's going on."

"Huh?" I asked. "If we were responsible for this, why would we call you guys?"

"As a distraction," Sergeant Thibodeaux explained casually. "The criminal mind is an interesting thing." He stared at us, letting that sink in. I think he thought he was going to break a confession out of us.

"We're, uh, we're English majors, sir," I said. "We're not capable of that sort of thing."

"You mean outsmarting a hick?" Sergeant Thibodeaux asked. He stepped carefully across the dirt tracks and stood right in front of me. I could feel his breath on my face. "Is that what you mean? Because, I'll have you know, I studied criminology at St. John's University. I'm no wet-behind the ears little Barney Fife that you two bastards are going to outsmart."

Roger laughed. "You think we're trying to use some sort of strange Jedi mind trick on you? You're really giving us far too much credit."

Sergeant Thibodeaux was still trying to stare me down. It was working. "Officer Nelson," he barked. "You guard the suspects. I've got to retrace what we know of the case, so far."

"Suspects?" asked Officer Nelson.

"Retrace the case?" Roger asked. "What's there to retrace? We found a body. We called you. End of story."

Sergeant Thibodeaux was standing between the Officer and us. He looked back and forth, like a trapped animal. "All of you are trying to undermine me…" He wandered back to his car, and sat down with a pad and pencil.

"What we have here," Roger said, "is a failure to communicate."

I elbowed him in the ribs. "This is serious, you asshole."

From the car, Sergeant Thibodeaux called, "Officer Nelson? You might want to read these boys their rights. I'm starting to get a picture of what happened."

Officer Nelson shook her head. "For what it's worth, guys," she said in a stage whisper, "I don't think you guys did jack shit, but…" and she launched into a recitation of our Miranda rights. Taking the cue from the, "anything you say can and will be used against you," bit, Roger and I clammed up and stood uncomfortably in the night's cold until whatever was going to happen happened.

About a half an hour later, a van pulled up with county markings on the side. The driver left the headlights on and jumped out. "Gawlee," he said, "I hear that somebody found a body!"

"That was us!" Roger said, proudly. I glared at him, and he returned to standing silently at attention.

The van driver walked across the dirt road and stuck his hand out. "I'm Sergeant Russell. And you boys?"

I uneasily shook his hand. "Dave Baker."

"Roger Clinton," said Roger.

Sergeant Russell laughed. "Like the President's drunk brother?"

"It's an unfortunate coincidence," Roger said. Man, I'd given him shit over that name for four years in a row. I almost wondered why he didn't change it.

Sergeant Thibodeaux stormed over to us. "Sergeant Russell! Please stop traipsing all over the dirt road! There are tire tracks here…"

"Tire tracks that most likely have absolutely nothing to do with this crime. Lord, I can smell that rancid corpse all the way over here. Trust me, if the man who dumped that body left any tire tracks, they were washed away days ago." Sergeant Russell stepped up to Sergeant Thibodeaux and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Keep in mind, Sergeant, you ain't the only fella with a college education here. Heck," he said smiling, "I hear that Mary's driving all the way to Springfield every night, working on her masters. Ain't that right, Mary?"

Officer Nelson beamed at the good ol' boy.

"So," Sergeant Russell said, "unless you want me to play like Deputy Dawg and let my nose do the work, can anyone point me to this here body?" Officer Nelson very dutifully pointed out the corpse in question. Sergeant Russell snapped on a pair of latex gloves and descended down the hillside.

Sergeant Thibodeaux walked towards the edge of the incline. "Don't you have any instruments you should be using?"

"God gave me my hands, nose and eyes for a reason, Sergeant. If I need anything out of my van, I'll just let you know," Sergeant Russell explained.

"Officer Nelson!" snapped Sergeant Thibodeaux, "Please return to guarding the suspects!"

Sergeant Russell called up the hill. "Oh, Carl…leave them boys alone…"

"What?!?" screamed Sergeant Thibodeaux. "They are suspects in my case, Sergeant."

"No," said Sergeant Russell, his voice getting closer. It sounded like he was climbing back up the hillside. "No, they aren't. There was no murder here."

"But the body was dumped here, and I think they were trying to throw us off their tracks," explained Sergeant Thibodeaux.

"Tracks?" asked Sergeant Russell. "It's funny you should say that. Do you mean deer tracks?" With that, Sergeant Russell tossed a big piece of something to Sergeant Thibodeaux's feet.

Sergeant Thibodeaux looked down in the dim light of the distant headlights and gagged. "What are you…what are you doing?" he asked, in gasping breaths.

"We have no body," Sergeant Russell explained. "Habeas Corpus and all that. Right, professor? You see when I took my forensics courses, and my law courses, I learned that you have to have a human body to charge a man with murder." Kicking the lump of something at Sergeant Thibodeaux's feet, Sergeant Russell concluded. "If you want to arrest these boys for poaching a deer and living the cleanings at the side of the road, be my guest, but this ain't no man. It was a big deer, but it ain't no man."

Sergeant Thibodeaux flushed with anger and tried to say something, anything, but all that came out was,

"You…you…sonofabitch…"

Sergeant Russell leaned in close to Sergeant Thibodeaux. "On second thought," he said, "I wouldn't charge these boys with poaching. Only an idiot would think that a man would poach a deer, leave its carcass in a bag at the side of the road and then come back a week or so later to point it out to the cops. Am I right, Carl?"

Sergeant Thibodeaux stepped back from Sergeant Russell, and the cadaver, and pointed at us. "You'll be getting a bill from the county for sending us on a wild goose chase, and wasting precious police department resources."

Roger and I looked at each other in confusion.

Sergeant Russell settled the matter for us, though. "Say, Carl," he drawled. "You obviously have a hard on over something, so why don't you go back to your squad car and play with yourself, huh?" He winked at us and said, "You boys can go." He walked back to his van, snapped off his latex gloves and tossed them down the hillside. "Evenin' Carl," he said. "Good evenin', Officer Nelson."

Roger and I drove back to campus in silence. Past the waste of Route 107, through the gleaming metropolis of Budsville, down glorious country roads back to our dormitory - all without a word or a note of music. As we pulled up the monstrous drive of our dormitory, Roger said, "Now, Dave..." He parked the car. "I don't want to ever speak of this again." I laughed. "You're kidding, right? This is a great story! When was the last time you went fishing and had this much happen?"

Roger didn't say a word for a moment or three. "Look," he explained, "I pride myself on being an outdoorsman. If everybody I know found out that I was duped by you into believing that that deer carcass was a person, I'd never hear the end of it."

"Duped my me?" I asked incredulously. "You thought it was a person as much as I did. Don't you remember, 'Oh, but what if that's somebody's son or daughter in there..' Come on!"

"Look, there was no skull in the bag, but if I'd seen hooves or a complete skeleton I would have known," Roger protested.

"Of course," I said, "but we did what we had to do."

"Agreed," said Roger. "And now we'll never speak of this again."

"Agreed," I said.

By ten o'clock that night, I had told every single person that I knew. I even looked up the numbers of some of Roger's friends - folks I'd never spoken with - and called them, just to fill them in on our wild adventures. Most folks didn't even find the whole confusion of the deer's cadaver versus a man's corpse so foolish; they just loved the image of Roger trying to hunker down with a farmer to ask for permission to fish on his land. But Roger and me? We've gone fishing probably a dozen or two dozen times since graduating that spring, and the subject of The Body has never once come up. Thankfully, this trauma wasn't a strain on our friendship.

I sure have a lost a lot of his lures over the years, though.