Nick Arvin - The Reconstructionist

After a time Ellis crouched. Then he sat. The splayed feet wore white tennis shoes scuffed and greyed by use. The legs wore khaki slacks. A bit of exposed flesh could be seen at the ankle, vaguely obscene. A dark blue sweatshirt, soaked with water. Thick dark brown hair, wet and plastered to the head. The arms extended loosely, hands dangling in the water. Because the hair had no grey in it, the dead man did not seem to have been very old, but otherwise it would have been hard to say how young or old he was. A few hairs on his neck bristled out of the water. The noise of the road gathered volume for a time, then diminished.

The air of the day slowly cooled.

A pair of coots swam the shoreline and shied from the body and moved along. A magpie landed in the brush nearby, then startled away. Ellis looked up and watched, in a leafless dead tree some distance down the shore, several large black cormorants standing motionless.

He fell asleep – knees drawn up, head on knees – and woke in the night. In the distance, when vehicles rounded the curve of the hill, their headlamp beams revolved spasmodically forward and back. The sky glowed magnificently with stars. He was cold. A breeze touched him and jostled the grasses, and he became aware of someone seated a few feet away. The dead risen – this was his first thought – from the lake water to sit there and ruminate on him. But the stars made light enough to see that the body still lay where he had found it, face in the water, feet on the sand. And as Ellis studied the form of the person seated beside him, a car arced past and he saw the eyes gleam. He moved a dry tongue in his mouth and felt an eyelid twitch. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you think you’re stealthy and clever as a ninja or a Comanche or something.’

‘You look awful, Ellis.’

Even in the dark Ellis could see that Boggs did not look well, either – his eyes watery, his clothes rumpled, his posture poor. But his hair was trim, and he appeared to have been eating more than Ellis. Ellis turned, in a sensation of daze, uncertain of import, toward the body. ‘I thought he might be you.’

‘You keep doing that. Who is he?’

‘I have no idea. Do you?’

‘Have you looked in his pockets?’

‘I don’t want to touch him.’

‘There might be an ID.’ Boggs looked at the sky as he talked. ‘There might be a medical-alert bracelet or a bottle of pills.’

The water slapped against the body.

‘Anyway, now you found me,’ Boggs said.

‘You found me.’

Boggs shifted and the sand under him made little mouse squeaks. ‘It comes to the same thing. What do you want to say?’

‘I want to say that I’m sorry.’

The waves came in like the intermittent clapping of a child.

‘That’s it?’

‘I betrayed you,’ Ellis said.

‘It’s what’s happened.’

Ellis let that wander out over the water into the night. He didn’t feel capable of the enquiry that it implied. He hardly felt capable of breathing. The twitch in his eyelid grew worse. He asked, ‘Did you slash my tyres?’

‘I noticed that your rear tyres looked fresh. Nice deep tread.’

‘Middle of nowhere. And as I walked out, I was jumped by a couple of thugs in a Jeep.’

‘That’s terrible. Makes you wonder why anyone even leaves the house any more.’

‘Did you do the tyres?’

Boggs’s brow contracted. ‘No. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I have to say, this is a disappointment.’ He stood. He grabbed the body by an ankle. ‘Come on. Help me.’

Ellis stared.

‘Let’s get him out of the water. I can’t stand looking at him like that.’

‘The police won’t want him disturbed,’ Ellis said.

‘I don’t care.’ Boggs lifted the other ankle, stood between the two and heaved.

‘You’re nuts,’ Ellis said, but with a sense of obligation he stood, shaking, and clasped a leg – thin and clammy cold, making him glad his stomach was empty – and together they dragged the man onto shore.

‘He sure is dead,’ Boggs said.

Ellis very gently put down the leg that he’d been pulling. ‘Someone might be looking for him,’ he said. ‘He could have kids.’

‘We should roll him and get a look at his face.’

‘Don’t do that. Let him be.’ Ellis felt near to weeping.

Boggs did not reply, but neither did he move toward the body. ‘Might be that no one even knows he’s gone,’ he said. ‘A solitary guy, wanders out here, dies, and no one notices. The universe as he understood it is extinguished, and it’s the passing of a mite.’

‘You really don’t know anything about him?’ Ellis asked.

‘How would I?’

‘It just seems strange that I’d stumble onto him here. And then you turn up.’

Boggs laughed. ‘You think I planted a dead guy here?’

‘What’s your explanation?’

‘It is what it is.’

‘You have to admit it’s unlikely.’

‘That never stopped anything from happening.’

‘That’s not true.’

Boggs scoffed. With the point of his shoe he prodded the dead man’s foot. It was difficult to look away from the body. The man’s shoelaces were still tied.

‘If you did set this up, I don’t expect you would admit it.’

‘No. That’s true. I’m too smart for that.’

Ellis laughed. ‘All right. Fate put him here.’

‘Absolutely not. I’m not sure why you think it’s so strange. People die all the time.’

Ellis laughed again. ‘You know, it’s good to see you, Boggs.’

The shirt had ridden up as they pulled the body from the water, showing a thin, pasty waist.

‘Maybe he fell from an airplane,’ Boggs said, scowling.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Ellis asked.

‘Maybe he’d hitched a ride in the bed of a pickup truck, and he flew out on that curve and crawled here to die of internal haemorrhage.’

Ellis was silent.

‘Maybe this is just a place that had some meaning to him and he walked over here and ate a handful of pills and waited for an end. Some connection here. You remember that guy who climbed through the windshield? Maybe this is him. The passenger seat occupant. The one who said the hero guy was a liar.’

‘Really?’ Though he had forgotten it, it did seem that Boggs might have told him this before, years ago.

‘He said that the ex-marine hero man actually didn’t do much. A number of people were helping, and this guy said that he pulled several people out himself, and it pissed him off that this other guy was made out to be the hero with the help of some cop buddies.’

‘His saying that doesn’t prove anything.’

‘That’s true.’

‘I read that marine’s depo. Dragging people out and dragging people out. The screaming. His hand was burned, he went to the hospital, there’s documentation.’

‘No one said that he didn’t burn his hand. No one said that he didn’t hear screaming but felt that the fire was too intense.’

Then with – to Ellis – unexpected finality, as if on a signal, the conversation stopped, and time ran a murky passage through the dark. Boggs sat still and Ellis felt as if to disturb him might initiate terrible consequences. Then he slept for a spell and woke feeling no less tired. When he searched the sky he saw that any number of stars had winked away, as if the universe itself were dying. The lake water lay quiet. A few redwing blackbirds lurched around, reeds rattling in their wake. The sun cracked bright over the horizon. He forgot the body and then saw it again and then he did not want to look, but neither could he move his gaze away. The man’s sweatshirt held a peculiar and slowly changing pattern of dark and light where it was wet and dry. It seemed difficult to believe that the dead man might not move now, while the hair bristled from his naked ankles and the pores there appeared as if they might at any instant begin to sweat.