Percival Everett - Damned If I Do

Fragua looked at Lem who nodded. “We’ll talk again in the morning. Officer Becker and I have some questions we need to ask.”

The deputies left.

Lem and Fragua didn’t speak on their way back to the station. Lem just let the other man out.

Lem walked into his house and looked at his walls, funky furniture, and unwashed dishes in the sink and breathed easier. He peeled off his hat and coat, went to the gas heater and turned it to high. His shoes off, he slipped into the moose-hide moccasins his mother had given him last Christmas. He looked at the collection of feathers and patches of hair and spools of thread on his desk.

He went to the kitchen, poured himself a tall glass of orange juice, then returned to sit behind the vise clamped to his desktop. He secured a size 10 hook and imagined a trout on the Henry’s Fork River in Idaho rising for the Green Drake he was about to tie. He recalled watching his father spending the cold winter nights reading and tying flies for the next season. Lem finally asked his father to teach him to tie, not because he wanted to catch fish so much, but because he thought the flies were beautiful. He was ten at the time and he could still remember watching his first colorful streamer develop in the vise in front of him, and the way it felt to trim the deer hair on his first grasshopper, the pieces of feathers floating, how much fun it was to dub the muskrat fur onto the thread with his thumb and index finger. He laughed at himself. He hadn’t even put the first winds of thread on the hook and he was already feeling better.

As he dubbed a mixture of yellow rabbit and tan-red fox fur onto the olive thread he recalled his father. He no longer felt sad when he thought of him. In fact, thinking of him made Lem relax. They had been close, for some reason they never had the conflicts his friends did with their fathers. He wondered if his present profession would have caused a problem between them. He wondered himself why he did it. Somehow he felt out of touch with his time; that was how he put it. He didn’t feel like people his age. He wanted to be a part of another generation. He shook his head now as he played it over in his brain. He wasn’t like a lot of people who became policemen, didn’t want to be like them, but then most of the lawmen in those parts weren’t like that, not tough, not hard, but doing a job that made them feel pretty good. He worked the grizzly hackle around the body and turned his mind again to trout.

The morning that came was as quiet as sleep, the layer of snow smothering the sounds of daybreak. He sat now at the edge of his mattress, his brain still tethered to the remnants of a dream. He was chasing another man on a dirt bike. It was a kind of game, he thought, since they were both laughing. They were riding over rough terrain, bouncing high and sliding, but there were buildings there. Finally, Lem stopped and the other man came back to him and together they observed Lem’s badly warped front wheel. It seemed a common thing, no surprise to either of them, and so Lem lifted the bike and carried it. The logic of the dream began to disintegrate as his eyes opened more fully.

He rubbed the back of his neck and looked out the window at the foot of snow. The sky was clear of any promise of more bad weather, a brilliant cobalt blue that lifted his spirits and also told him that the hour was late. He found his watch on the stand by his bed. It was nearly eight.

Still, he took his time showering, enjoying the steaming spray. There were a lot of things wrong with his small house, but the shower was not one of them. The water was good and hot and the pressure was strong, like in some gym locker rooms, the droplets of water seeming to pierce the skin like tiny darts. He dried off, got dressed, and went into the kitchen where he fried himself some bacon and a couple of eggs. He appreciated these early hours alone, wanted them to last, but they wouldn’t, they couldn’t. When he was finished eating, he readied himself for the cold and went out to free his car from the snow.

As he cleared the ice from the windshield he thought of his business that morning. He had to go question the Marottas and go through the kid’s room. That wouldn’t be pleasant, but at least Warren Fragua would be with him.

The incompetent highway crews had done a good job of transforming the hazardous roads into deadly sheets of ice. They had also done a beautiful job of dumping endless strands of salt and sand down along the center line where no one’s tires would ever touch it. He parked in front of the station and entered just behind Fragua.

Once inside he was shoulder to shoulder with Fragua, staring at the chubby finger Sheriff Bucky Paz was pointing at them. “I want the two of you to go to Fonda’s Funeral Home right now.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Somebody broke in there last night and walked away with José Marotta.”

“Stole his body?” Fragua said.

“Apparently. All I know is Fonda got there this morning and the boy was gone. By the way, that truck last night was stolen from Taos, reported five days ago. Now, go.”

Lem drove. The acquisition of so many dead bodies was unusual for the Plata Sheriff’s Department and the only place to put them was the same place a single body would have been put, Fonda’s Funeral Home. From there the bodies were to go to the forensic pathologist in Santa Fe for autopsies.

“I’ll bet Fonda just misplaced him,” Fragua said.

“Why would anyone take a dead body?” Lem wondered aloud. “Maybe the kid swallowed a bunch of dope in balloons and the bad guys want it back.”

“You’ve been watching television again. I told you, just tie every night and your mind won’t get polluted.”

“You watch television all the time,” Lem said.

“So, I ought to know, right?”

Lem slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a pickup that skidded through a stop sign.

Fragua braced himself with a hand against the dash. “Don’t think about it. Let it happen. That’s what my daughter says. ‘Let it happen.’ And I tell her she better not let it happen. You know what I mean.”

Lem smiled.

“It’s like tying flies,” the Indian said.

“Everything for you is like tying flies.”

“True. But listen. You’ve got to tie things down in the right order or it won’t work. You can’t go tying down the tinsel after the body or tie the tail on last and expect it to look right. Everything works in the same way, one step at a time, but the right step.”

“I never knew you were such a philosopher.”

Fonda was a square man, not very tall, but wide-shouldered with large features, huge eyes and nose, and big hands and, like so many morticians, Lem thought, drained of all blood and body heat. He was mad, but like the funeral director he was, he wasn’t unsettled. “What can I tell you?” he said. “I came in this morning and the boy was gone.”

“Is there any sign of forced entry?” Lem asked, following Fonda into the back room with three tables with bodies and one without.

“Forced entry?” the man said, almost a giggle in his voice. “It’s a robbery, not a rape.” He laughed.

Lem sighed and caught his eyes. “That’s not funny,” Lem said.

“Excuse me,” Fonda said sarcastically.

“Forced entry?”

“I don’t know,” Fonda said. “This place has a hundred windows. This is a funeral home. I never expected break-ins. All I know is that he didn’t get up and walk away.

“So, get your clues and get out. It’s bad for business to have you seen here.”

“How do you figure that?” Fragua asked.

“Cops are bad for any business,” Fonda said. “Unless you own a doughnut shop.” He laughed again.

Lem watched as Fragua walked past the bodies to the empty table. “Mr. Fonda, you’re the only undertaker in this town. I doubt our presence will affect your good work.”