and on he comes, and reaching the bottom step raises one of his hands to his sheriff’s hat and actually, what in the hell, takes the hat off—Don’t take your hat off, Sheriff, you son of a bitch, what is wrong with you?
Gordon, says the sheriff.
And some time after that, unremembered time, the sheriff’s cruiser is on the 52 South and the bright world is sweeping by and yet there is the sense of not moving at all, of the cruiser standing still while it’s the land, the trees, the wire fences that rush by. Like a fish holding its place in a stream.
Just the two of them now, the sheriff having stopped at the station to drop off the little girl, and the sheriff driving ten miles over the posted limit not out of official urgency but out of decency maybe, or maybe the sooner to get his errand over with, and only when he comes up on drivers who slow him down on the rural two-laner does he throw his lights and give a short whoop of siren. Passing these drivers without a glance while his passenger looks hard at every face, every car, each one of them worth pulling over, questioning, searching. She’d been struck by a vehicle, the sheriff believed, her body pushed afterward into the river. A drunk in a panic. A kid or kids high and believing, in that moment, that the river would carry the evidence away like a bad dream and their lives could go on—college, marriage, kids of their own.
Do you want a smoke, Gordon?
The sheriff, Sutter, pushing his pack at him. Gordon can smell it, taste the smoke in his lungs, feel the nicotine speeding to his brain. He hasn’t smoked in years, not since Roger Young’s cancer. The cigarette would be good but who wants good. Who wants relief of any kind if it isn’t the relief that will last forever. He raises his hand no thanks and Sutter withdraws the pack, and it’s a long while before Gordon thinks to say, You go ahead, and Sutter goes ahead—lights up and draws the smoke deep and cracks the window and exhales into the rush of wind.
Next he’s moving slow and heavy down a hospital corridor, the air reeking of sickness and ammonia and old burned coffee, Gordon a step behind Sutter, who pushes through a gray metal door saying authorized personnel only, and on the other side of the door the linoleum turns to concrete and the walls are cinderblock and the air is almost too cold for smell but not quite, smell of chemical fumes and the faint putrid stink of meat. A third man emerging now from somewhere, thin man dressed like a surgeon down to his surgical gloves, and this man leading them to the large stainless-steel what, refrigerator? A bank of three square doors side by side at waist level and each with a large latch handle. Rubber-gloved hand on latch, the unlatching echoing on concrete and cinderblock, the suck and gasp of rubber seal pulled from metal, the greased clicking of the large industrial glides as the bed—what else do you call it? slab? gurney?—floats from the dark square like a magician’s trick all the way into the room, into the light.
Morgue man standing on one side of the floating bed, Gordon and the sheriff on the other. A body in the white bag, under the zipper. Shape of a female chest. Shape of a face. A nose. Sheriff standing back and Gordon stepping forward for the unzipping, the most terrible sound, and the breath of the river it releases.
And there she is. Her hair tangled and damp. Her face blue. Lips a darker blue and slightly open, the white of her front teeth bright in the blue. Eyelids down over the curve of her eyeballs, tender thin lashes on her cheeks, washed of all makeup. Over these blue, unmoving features play living expressions, like projections, faces of her youth surfacing, rippling, sinking away again into the blue mask. Wake up, daughter. Wake up. Breathe. Placing his large hand over her forehead as if to take her temperature. So cold. Smooth, cold skin over a hard curve of bone, nothing more. Her bare blue neck, enough of her blue chest to see that she is naked in the bag—yes, Gordon nodding yes, it’s her, and the zipper makes its sound again.
The morgue man wants a moment alone with Sutter but Gordon isn’t going anywhere.