I call up the cop who questioned me, leave several messages. I’m sitting in the backyard beside dog’s grave, drinking a beer, when he finally calls me back Monday evening. I tell him what I’ve found out. He tries to talk me out of it meaning anything.
“What about the glove?”
“And what links the glove to the victim?”
“The matching glove on the victim?”
“There was no glove on the victim.”
“What are you talking about? I saw it. There was a glove on his right hand.”
“I’m telling you. I’ve got the file right here in front of me, and there’s no glove.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you whose house it was right off.”
There’s a silence I take to mean I’m supposed to think he’s offended. “I assure you we will investigate as we deem appropriate. I suggest you leave this matter to the proper authorities. And I remind you that trespassing on private property is a serious offense and potentially dangerous to the trespasser.”
He hangs up.
I check the photos I took of the dead man. I must’ve thought I was doing a portrait study or a mug shot. None of them show his right hand.
Next morning I’m at the corner of the Lowe’s parking lot where I’ve seen brown men gathering looking for work. A dozen or so guys cycle through, hired by circling SUVs and pickups with law-abiding citizens behind the wheel. I show the workers pictures of the dead man, talk to them in my awkward, rusty Spanish. They’re nice to me, patient. They admire my white beard. Señor Barbas one of them calls me. Mr. Whiskers. I figure they think I’m a cop, INS, or a crazy street person, but I hang around anyway, boring them with stories about my travels in Mexico.
Another man, however, who’s been in Richmond awhile, gives me the nickname that sticks. “General Lee,” he says. “El hombre a caballo.” The man on horseback. We’re only blocks from the statue, and he isn’t the first to note the resemblance, especially if I haven’t been eating enough fiber or I’ve just watched what passes for the evening news. I was once mistaken for a Lee reenactor while walking past the Confederate Chapel on my way out of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The city’s full of memorials to the leaders of the armed rebellion against the legal authority of the United States — the same one nation under God indivisible that the devoted admirers of those memorials like to wax pious about with a mystifying lack of irony.
The conversation turns to politics. They have questions about the Civil War. Mexicans understand revolutions, revolutionaries. They’re curious why the losers got the statues. It’s complicated, I tell them. Fortunately, they understand class and race too.
I get a few odd glances from the people looking for workers. A neighbor from a few blocks away whose name I can’t recall spots me, and he seems genuinely alarmed to see me sitting on the fence with the Mexicans. I approach to reassure him or to offer to do light carpentry, I’m not sure which. He only knows me because dog and I used to walk by his house, but she hadn’t been able to make it that far in over a year.
“How’s your dog?” he asks me. Of course he’s going to ask me. Everyone’s going to ask me. He just happens to be the first.
“She died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“She lived a good life.”
He tosses his head toward the workers. “You doing research for a story or something?”
“We were just talking about the Civil War. Can’t become a true Richmonder, become assimilated as it were, without talking some Civil War trash, right?”
It’s supposed to be a joke, but he doesn’t crack a smile. “Do any of these guys do tile work?”
I get out of the way of commerce. Antonio, who’s hung around for the whole General Lee gringo show and looked stunned when I first showed him the pictures of the dead man, asks how old my dog was. “Quince,” I say. Fifteen.
“My oldest sister,” he says in English. “She have a dog. In Kansas City. She crazy about that dog.”
I give him the pictures of the dead man. I’ve written my phone number on the back. “I found him, okay? I pulled him out of the river. I have to do something. Maybe you know someone who knew him. Maybe someone else will know.”
As I walk home through the Fan, the word sticks in my mind, a quick, stabbing chant, quince, quince, quince. When I get home there’s a message from my ex-reporter friend who kay-aked over to see the site only to find there’d been a bonfire, still smoldering. Teens, they’re saying, drinking, getting out of hand, or maybe homeless. Or illegals. Damn them all to hell!
I walk through the house with a garbage bag, gathering up every tennis ball, veterinary prescription bottle, squeaky toy, busted leash, food dish, rawhide, etc., getting down on hands and knees if necessary until I’m sure I’ve found them all, then I put the bag in the trash can in the alley.
My wife returns home from work desolate and exhausted from having to hold it together all day at some inane training about terrorism. We have a quick dinner, narrate the fragile bones of our days, and go to bed early. She wants to be more engaged by my story of trying to help the dead man, but neither one of us has anything left. “Be careful,” she says, and falls asleep. I lie awake awhile and finally get out of bed.
A little after midnight my phone rings, and I take it. I’m at my computer, staring at the screen, at the Google photo of a time when the dead man was still alive. It’s Antonio with an address out Jeff Davis Highway, a trailer park. Can I come now? Some of the people I need to talk to just got off work. Others have to go in early. Two men are arguing in the background in rapid-fire Spanish too faint and fast for me to track. Sure, I say.
It’s a grim, tired place, but affordable. If it has a name, I don’t see it. There’s a certain coziness about the old trailers crammed in close together, the sounds of TVs and radios, cooking smells. I roll through slow, my General Lee beard must look like Casper floating by. A woman watches me pass through a tiny trailer window. She must be bent over her kitchen sink. At number seventeen, several somber men are waiting for me. We go inside where there are several more men and a single woman packed into what is likely the largest living room in the park. The men whose voices I recognize from the phone continue their argument. Not everybody thinks inviting me was such a great idea. Enough, several say. Let the man speak. So I tell my story. They’re not taking any chances on my Spanish. A woman named Irayda translates.
Then they tell her their story, and Irayda tells it to me, though I get the gist in Spanish. They were working with Felix — Felix is the dead man — when the man who hired them — the man who lived in the big house up above — showed up to hurry them. People were coming to his house, and he didn’t want anyone to see them working, but it was a big job and dangerous because there were some large trees and not much room to get out of the way if anything went wrong.
The big white tree came crashing down on Felix while the man from the house was there shouting at them. He told them not to call 911 or they’d all be arrested and deported, and they could dig Felix out and take him to the hospital just as fast themselves. They started digging. They didn’t have enough shovels for everyone. One of the men went back to the truck to get some more, but they couldn’t get Felix out before he died. The man said he’d call 911 after they took off, so they wouldn’t be arrested. They had left the man alone with Felix’s body Wednesday night. Then I showed up at Lowe’s the following Tuesday with his picture. Antonio stayed with Felix’s son when he first came to Richmond. His son was killed in a robbery last year.