At that time, years back, Dr. Bijur looked, herself, to be barely hanging on, living off Atrovent and Albuterol inhalers in lieu of air. She still was. I hoped to hell she got a professional discount on the things.
“As I told … Santos,” she went on, stringing words on double fenceposts of pauses for breath and hits off her inhalers, “we’re not … sure what’s happened.”
With each breath her shoulders lifted to help draw in air and her head thrust upward like a turtle’s to add that extra tiny pull. Her ankles were round as soccer balls. Cracked everywhere, her skin had gone gray and dry as parchment from constant steroid use. Back in Arkansas, creeks and rivers would recede, leaving behind mudflats that, baked in the sun, looked much like her skin.
“Someone could have taken a carving knife to him, from the look of it,” Santos said, “then followed up with a vegetable peeler. Mostly, the features are gone. Ears, toes. Not much skin left, either. Your son’s been gone how long?”
“Just over a week.”
“No word from him?”
“None.”
“No idea where he might have gone?”
“Not really.”
“And no recent change in habits? Suddenly talkative, stops talking altogether maybe, starts staying to himself?”
“I know the drill, Santos.”
“Sure you do. No one new in his life, then? Woman, male friend, lost parent?”
I shook my head. “I assumed he’d gone back to the streets. Descendre dans la rue, as the French put it. Doesn’t transfer well to English, but it’s what the French have always done-1789, 1830, 1871 or last week, it’s all pretty much the same-when the world starts weighing on them.”
“He’s got a history of this kind of thing, then. Dropping out. Disappearing.”
I nodded.
A morgue assistant in dreadlocks that looked as though they’d been pressed between hot rocks made his way through the minefield of gurneys, found one and, bent like a surfer over his board, rolled it towards us. When he pulled back the rough sheet, Santos and Dr. Bijur looked up at him. A young woman’s body lay there, face gray, lips and breasts pale and translucent as wax. He checked the toe tag.
“Sorry, man,” he said. “Wrong citizen.”
Moments later, he trucked another gurney and rider down the waves. From size and general build, the body under the sheet easily could be David’s, I thought. But when Smashed Dreadlocks pulled back the cover, the world you and I live in day to day went flying away. What lay underneath looked like a skinned deer, a Gray’s Anatomy dissection showing muscle, sinews and tendons, flesh that peculiar maroon color. Most of one eye was left. And the eye wasn’t David’s.
I told them so. “What happened?”
“First we thought some kind of compulsive, serial killer thing,” Santos said.
“Too many bad … movies.” This from Dr. Bijur.
“Yeah, but how’re you not gonna think that. Just look at this poor son of a bitch. Some kid practicing peeling grapes, you think?”
Back home, in the hill country not far from where I was raised, poor folk lived off squirrels they nailed to trees then skinned in a single long tear. The meat went into skillets for frying and into pots for stew. The skins stayed behind on trees. Dozens of them, hundreds finally, ringing the homestead.
“Not much … I could put my finger on … a hunch…. Kind of thing happens … you do this all these years.” When she stopped to rest from that last headlong plunge, I realized that Santos and I were breathing hard ourselves. If this had been a musical, all the bodies on gurneys under sheets would start chugging right along with us.
“We have someone on call … for situations like … this. Professor at LSU … came right down. New York … one or two other major cities’ve … got them on staff … full-time.”
Santos and I exchanged glances.
“You told me on the phone it was bugs,” he said.
Taking a hit off one of her inhalers, Dr. Bijur decided it was empty. She tossed it backhand towards one of several tall galvanized cans sitting about (best not to think what might be in there), then started rummaging in the soft plastic cooler slung over her shoulder for a replacement. The discarded one fell short by a yard and hit the floor spinning. Santos walked over, picked it up, sank it.
“You’re supposed to float … the damn things. They tip over, whatever … they’re still good. Like we aren’t going to know … when they don’t … work anymore?”
Her eyes went wide with the fresh (concentrated?) hit. “Greevy’s a forensic … entomologist. Roaches were hard at work … he says. Man’d only been there … two, three days, not … weeks, like we’d thought.”
“And my son’s wallet? How’d that get there?”
Dr. Bijur shrugged her shoulders. At first I didn’t take it for what it was; it looked like all her other struggles for breath.
“He doesn’t drive and … there’s no … bus … for a while. Bill’d probably … be out at the site … if you wanted to go by.”
One of those typical New Orleans cul-de-sacs, city’s ancient soul pushing up through layers of attempts at refurbishment, this long-unused lot in the crook of old buildings extended half a block before it ended at a wall of cinder block serving no discernible purpose. Yet even here, on this bare, abandoned island, in the shade of automobile tires, shopping carts, shattered wine and antiseptic bottles, sacks of garbage bleached gray and dry as driftwood, life went on.
Dr. Greevy sat on the overturned ceramic tumbler of a Sixties washing machine. The console stood alongside, Large load, Normal, Warm/cold dialed in-for how many years now? Green shoots ran out from beneath the tumbler. Knees apart with elbows propped on them, Greevy held the last two inches of a po-boy in both hands. Sauce and part of a meatball ejected when he took a bite. He chewed once or twice and swallowed.
“You’d be Griffin.”
I nodded.
“It wasn’t your son, was it?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.” He finished off the po-boy, wiped hands on the backs of trouser legs. “Body was up there, third floor, but you know that. Not much to see. Anything likely to be of use to you, it probably rolled out of here with the body.”
“I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”
“We never do. Count ourselves lucky if we’re able to figure out so much as what direction to look in.” He smiled. “Man had your son’s wallet. Stands to reason you’d want to know what killed him, where he’d been-anything you can find out. It’s a deep canyon, with only this foot-wide path up here on the rim. But it’s what you have.”
“And you’re going to tell me that? What killed him, where he’d been?”
“Some of it, anyway. Like everything else, that depends mostly on luck. Give me a few days.”
Greevy reached behind him. He’d tucked a bottle of Pearl back there, and in the interim a grasshopper had claimed it as perch. Slowly Greevy brought the bottle up close, until the two of them were eye to eye.
“It’s really their world, you know.”
Kiting out over fragments of brick, dropping at glide’s end onto a grassy patch, the grasshopper took flight. Greevy sat looking after it.
“City has several dozen varieties of roach,” he said at length. “All of them as distinct as individual human faces, many of them deriving from one specific area of the city. Not to mention the others. Fleas, mites, lice. Moths and ants. Or our best if most rapacious friends, flies. Not only different from one another, but vastly different in behavior, diet, where they lay their eggs, how the young develop, gestation period.”
Greevy took a deep swig of beer and held the bottle out to me. What the hell. Here we were, casual scientists, two men of the world talking things over, trying to understand. I drank and passed the bottle back.
“Day or two, the samples I took will start hatching. From the eyes, mouth, wounds. I’ll be able to tell you more then. Almost to the moment how long he’d been dead. What he’d been eating. What parts of the city he frequented.”