LITMIR.BIZ

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out from under my sweater, the object closest to the camera is my pager, a big rectangular Motorola that went everywhere with me. Every time the pager dug into me, every time I realized it was there, I would hope it was on the verge of going off. I’d already started doing the little planning flick in my head that would go on for years—deciding how I’d get to the fire station if the pager went off, how long it would take me, whether I’d be able to get there in time to catch the first truck before it rumbled away.

      I look posed, leaning against that wall, and I realize now that I look remarkably unprepared for anything. Smug, as if I was sure I already knew everything there was to know, a look that was at the same time betrayed by the soft, unformed edges of my face. A face still forming up, halfway to the face it would eventually be, but already holding hints of what might be strain.

      Back at the truck, the fire chief was blunt.

      “Noxzema job,” he said gruffly, meaning he’d swipe a finger into a blue bottle of Noxzema and fill both his nostrils before he got close to the body, in an effort to keep from being hit too hard by the stench of the early stages of putrefaction. It doesn’t take long in summer, not when it’s someone who’s been out in the weather for three days or so.

      Noxzema sounds like a practical-enough solution, but it is never really as easy as that; there’s no simple way to keep it all away, especially not that smell. The smell of death is something we all seem hard-wired to shy away from. If you smell it and have no idea what the stink is, you’ll still be overcome with the urge to stay away. It can overwhelm curiosity, and it’s a smell that clings, that sticks in your nose the way burnt cedar does, as if certain-shaped molecules find certain-shaped receptors and can’t seem to disengage.

      Then there’s “the body” itself. I learned to use general, less human terms, and even those words get updated, changing over time as people fight over what’s suitable. You can almost place a firefighter’s training in time by what words he uses. Once, the people injured at accidents were called “victims.” I still fall back on that one. Then they became “casualties,” because “victims” always sounded like whoever you were talking about was already dead. But what we really needed was a good, neutral description. It’s easier when the person is just “a body,” a simple thing like a couch or a table or a box spring, instead of “the baby” or “Elizabeth” or anything that makes you think of warm skin.

      It was a small clearing, hardly more than twenty feet square, a small notch in the forest sloped precipitously enough that, by sitting at the top edge, the spruce and pine below didn’t reach high enough to block my view of the valley. It was the kind of place you trip over sometimes by chance, far enough away from the path that you can imagine no one else has ever been there. The kind of place you might hold in your memory as a respite, as its own relaxation; the kind of place that, once found, you would go back to over and over again, either in person or in memory. The place you and a girlfriend would visit some afternoon and always remember. A postage stamp of the world that becomes your property by its mere discovery.

      She had a blanket and a knapsack—the remains of a picnic, an empty pop bottle and wrappers. A few stuffed animals, and her jacket, folded neatly in a square. Pill bottles. She had taken off her shoes— brown flat shoes, the leather in a woven waffle pattern across the toes.

      After we left, someone would have gathered up all the personal effects and litter, and in a week or so the grass would slowly have found its way back upright, looking as untrammelled as ever.

FIVE

      One night in summer we were called out just after dark, and the trucks pulled up sharply next to a steel-girdered bridge across the Gaspereau. The cross-hatch of the girders against the sky was matte black set over the dark blue of the fading light, the way tree branches turn to two dimensions at dark, but the steel was far more ordered.

      The pattern of the metal became even more pronounced as the night blackened and the flicker of the red and white strobe lights played across it, flattening out the depth so that the individual beams held in the air like a flashing, heavy spiderweb. The Gaspereau River is, by then, close to the Bay of Fundy, much wider than even a few miles farther up, and the silty brown water flows in between deep, fleshy berms of soft, gooey red clay and mud.

      Step into that mud and you will sink in great sucking steps, up to the knee and beyond, and with every pulling step back out again you can feel your joints coming unhinged. The smell of the flats is rich and complicated, with a hint of sulphur left by the work of bivalves and mud worms and a hundred kinds of unseen creeping anaerobic life. It looks like a wasteland, but every square inch is packed with some kind of company, from shrimp-like copepods to flatworms so thin you can see their organs pulsing through their skin, to bacteria whose heat cooks the muck and makes it warm enough to steam all winter long, whenever the tide falls away.

      The bridge was high and painted the shallow flat green that the Nova Scotia government must have gotten cheap somewhere. It was only one lane, so that you often had to wait your turn. You didn’t so much drive across it as you aimed your car at the narrow gap and let your wheels do the rest of the work, trapped like a railcar on the tracks. It was the kind of bridge that woke up sleeping front-seat passengers simply by the abruptly altered sound of the tires on the bridge deck, the soft hiss of pavement changing to the angry buzz of the grated surface.

      On both sides the bridge approaches were hemmed in by fat galvanized steel guardrails, bolted onto rows of six-by-six posts so that, if you missed the approach to the bridge, you would still be shepherded onto it, instead of piling into the ironwork or flinging yourself up and over and into the river.

      Unless you hit the guardrail exactly right.

      Every time I went to an accident I would wonder why it was that so many people could hit things just exactly right—just exactly right to do the most possible damage. I spent years going to see the aftermath of the most amazing sets of chances, all running precisely true, the results then fixed as rigidly as if cast in amber.

      The car this time was a burgundy Cavalier, and the place where the guardrail edged down into the gravel was also the exact point where the car had angled away from the road, so that instead of stripping the paint off one side of the car and shrugging the vehicle back towards the pavement, the rail had instead launched the car almost directly into the air. When it was happening, it must have been something to see, I thought, looking down beside the river to where the car had landed square on its wheels in the mud, the front end already dipping into the water.

      I was still standing on the tailgate of the pumper, and my eyes could follow the beam of the spotlight that perched on the back corner of the truck. It’s the unexpected things that strike you the most—the missing things your mind still expects and somehow can’t work out when they’re not there. It took me a while, but I figured it out: what was missing were tire tracks. My brain expected a car to have made tracks in soft, wet mud. But that’s because my head didn’t expect cars to fly. This one had, and I can imagine it still, falling forward through the air for a few breath-holding seconds, like a big square cardboard shoebox, before landing hard twenty feet or so out and below the bridge.

      Inside the car had been two girls, neither of them much older than myself. One was unhurt, and the first firefighter who scrambled down through the mud brought her up on his back, a slow-motion piggyback through the mucky soup. When we had angled the lights down onto the roof, she had been sitting there, waving, having twisted her way out through the open side window.

      Her friend, the driver, hadn’t been able to get out; the landing had broken the car’s back and none of the doors would open. Besides, the driver hadn’t been wearing her seat belt. She hadn’t hit the windshield, but her stomach had fetched up on the steering wheel and the whole car had basically bent into her, the steering column pressing her back into her seat and pinning her in place. She was complaining about pain in her lower back, but she was lucky: sometimes the outside ring of the steering wheel just breaks away and the solid metal post of the column goes right into the driver’s chest like a spear. Steering columns—they’re one of the toughest things to cut in a car.

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