A moment later, I saw the swimmer thrashing out of the far side of the cage, pulling a long ghost shape like a funeral streamer of pale seaweed.
Someone was mourning. Dear Jesus, it can’t be me!
They had the body out on the canal bank now, and the swimmer was toweling himself. The lights were blinking off in the patrol cars. Three policemen bent over the body with flashlights, talking in low voices.
“—I’d say about twenty-four hours.”
“—Where’s the coroner?”
“—Phone’s off the hook. Tom went to get him.”
“Any wallet—I.D.?”
“He’s clean. Probably a transient.”
They started turning the pockets inside out.
“No, not a transient,” I said, and stopped.
One of the policemen had turned to flash his light in my face. With great curiosity he examined my eyes, and heard the sounds buried in my throat.
“You know him?”
“No.”
“Then why—?”
“Why am I feeling lousy? Because. He’s dead, forever. Christ. And I found him.”
My mind jumped.
On a brighter summer day years back I had rounded a corner to find a man sprawled under a braked car. The driver was leaping from the car to stand over the body. I stepped forward, then stopped.
Something pink lay on the sidewalk near my shoe.
I remembered it from some high school laboratory vat. A lonely bit of brain tissue.
A woman, passing, a stranger, stood for a long time staring at the body under the car. Then she did an impulsive thing she could not have anticipated. She bent slowly to kneel by the body. She patted his shoulder, touched him gently as if to say, oh there, there, there, oh, oh—there.
“Was he—killed?” I heard myself say.
The policeman turned. “What made you say that?”
“How would, I mean, how would he get in that cage—underwater—if someone didn’t—stuff him there?”
The flashlight switched on again and touched over my face like a doctor’s hand, probing for symptoms.
“You the one who phoned the call in?”
“No.” I shivered. “I’m the one who yelled and made all the lights come on.”
“Hey,” someone whispered.
A
plainclothes detective, short, balding, kneeled by the body and turned out the coat pockets. From them tumbled wads and clots of what looked like wet snowflakes, papier-mâché.
“What in hell’s that?” someone said.