Cut to the Bone (13 page)

CHAPTER 16

Tyler

TYLER SLID THE BODY
bag halfway out of the truck, then paused. “Ready, Dr. B?”

Dr. B leaned over the tailgate and grasped the corners at the bag's other end. “Ready.”

“Okay, on three. One, two,
three
.” As Tyler walked backward, the bag slid; just before it dropped off the edge of the tailgate, Dr. B hoisted the end, and together they trudged to the chain-link cube in the woods.

The cube—a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot cage, with a concrete floor and a chain-link roof—wouldn't win any architectural prizes, that was for sure. But they'd designed and built it themselves, for a few hundred bucks, and it would do the job it was designed to do: keep out raccoons and coyotes and buzzards, but let in blowflies and other bugs . . . and let in Tyler, to observe and document the insects' arrival, activity, and departure in the days and weeks to come.

The corpse—the unclaimed body of a seventy-year-old white male who'd committed suicide—had come from the medical examiner in Nashville. Most male suicides used firearms—“Men love guns, even when they hate themselves,” Dr. B had said to Tyler once. Men preferred guns and nooses to kill themselves; women went for poison. This man, though, had cut his own throat, an act that spoke to Tyler of fierce determination and deep despair. Slashed wrists were often survivable, especially if the cuts were shallow and crosswise, rather than lengthwise and deep enough to shred arteries. But taking a straight razor to the neck, like this guy had done? No turning back, long as you nicked the jugular vein or the carotid artery.

They squeezed through the narrow gate, Tyler first, moving backward. “Walk softly,” Dr. B reminded him. “The concrete's only been curing for forty-eight hours.” Dr. B had wanted to wait a week before putting any load on the concrete, but as Tyler had pointed out—repeatedly—fall was coming, and if he didn't start the project before the weather turned cold, the only insect activity he'd be able to record for quite a while could be summed up in one word:
hibernation
.

By the time they laid the body bag on the wire-mesh rack Tyler had built—a cot, basically, made of two-by-fours and quarter-inch wire mesh—the bag was swarming with flies, and as he tugged the long, C-shaped zipper open, the eager insects began squirming through the gap to get at the body.

The blowflies' eagerness was no surprise to Tyler, nor were their numbers; he'd seen them plenty of times before, at death scenes and at the pig barn. What was new to him was that this time—with this
corpse
—the flies were not simply a nuisance to be endured, a buggy cross to be borne. This time, the flies were the stars of the show, the subjects of scientific scrutiny, their comings and goings and ages and stages to be attentively observed and meticulously chronicled.

Dr. B watched, and then posed, as Tyler took photos: the first photos of the first research study at the world's first laboratory focused on human decomposition. Then, satisfied or bored, he departed, leaving Tyler alone in the cage with the corpse. “I'll give you two some time to get acquainted,” he'd joked as he headed toward the parking lot. “Keep in touch. And take plenty of pictures.”

By the time the sound of Dr. B's truck had faded away, dabs of white, grainy paste were already appearing on the corpse. The dabs, whose appearance and timing Tyler duly recorded on film and in his field notes, were deposits of blowfly eggs, and by mid-afternoon the eggs had already begun to hatch, releasing thousands of tiny, wiggling, ravenous little maggots, whose miniature feeding frenzies Tyler watched through a magnifying glass and photographed with a close-up lens. The hatching eggs were clustered at the edges of the eyes, the nostrils, the mouth, the ears, and also—especially—along the bloody slash across the neck.

After shooting an entire roll to document the corpse's initial state, Tyler dug a collapsible tripod out of his backpack and positioned it beside the corpse, screwing a second camera on top—a camera with a built-in timer, set to take one photo every hour, day and night. Then, and only then, did he take time to unfold the metal chair he'd brought over from the stadium. Reaching into his backpack once more, he took out the Chinese forensic handbook Dr. B had given him,
The Washing Away of Wrongs,
and settled into the chair. He opened the book to a dog-eared page and read—aloud, as if the corpse could hear the story, and would appreciate its relevance—about a crime that a clever investigator had solved some seven and a half centuries before:

There was an inquest on the body of a man killed by the roadside. It was first suspected that he had been killed by robbers. At the time when the body was checked, all clothing and personal effects were there. On the whole body there were ten old wounds inflicted by a sickle. The inquest official said, “Robbers merely want men to die so that they can take their valuables. Now, the personal effects are there, while the body bears many wounds. If this is not a case of being killed by a hateful enemy, then what is it?” He then ordered those around him to withdraw, summoned the man's wife and said, “In the past what man was your husband's worst enemy?” She replied, “Hitherto my husband had no enemies. But only recently there was a certain X who came to borrow money. He did not get it. They had already fixed on a definite date and they discussed that. But there were no bitter enemies.” The inquest official secretly familiarized himself with the victim's neighborhood. He thereupon sent a number of men separately to go and make proclamations. The nearest neighbors were to bring all their sickles, handing them in for examination. If anyone concealed a sickle, they would be considered the murderer and would be thoroughly investigated. In a short time, seventy or eighty sickles were brought in. The inquest official had them laid on the ground. At the time the weather was hot. The flies flew about and gathered on one sickle. The inquest official pointed to this sickle and said, “Whose is this?” One man abruptly acknowledged it. He was the same man who had set the debt time limit. Then he was interrogated, but still would not confess. The inquest official indicated the sickle and had the man look at it himself. “The sickles of the others in the crowd had no flies. Now, you have killed a man. There are traces of blood on the sickle, so the flies gather. How can this be concealed?” The bystanders were speechless, sighing with admiration. The murderer knocked his head on the ground and confessed.

BY SUNDOWN THE FLIES
had dissipated: gone to ground, or to the trees, or to wherever they took their night's rest. But within the cage, upon the corpse on the wire-mesh cot, the maggots remained, restless and ravenous, their labors unceasing; their appetites insatiable.

THE DRONE OF THE
flies—so constant over the past two days that it had become white noise, soporific in its regularity and monotony—suddenly grew louder and more singular, as an intense tickle in his left nostril caused Tyler to leap from the folding chair and paw at his nose. “You little bastard,” he said to the retreating blowfly, which narrowly avoided being crushed by the pinch Tyler gave his itching nose. He pointed down at the corpse, which rested on the cot of wire mesh, already beginning to drip with greasy effluvia. “
Him,
dumbass, not me.”

Tyler had been observing blowflies for two days now—observing, photographing, and occasionally swatting, despite Dr. B's admonition to the contrary. Penned in the new research enclosure with the first corpse in his entomology study, he was beginning to feel like a prisoner, though his sentence was a self-imposed one: bug bites and a chain-link cage, for the sake of science.

He stepped outside the cage and locked the door behind him, then stripped off his fly-spotted clothes there in the woods, a stone's throw from the hospital employees' parking lot, too weary to care if any orderlies or nurses or janitors caught a glimpse of his pale ass shining through the trees. Funny thing, how tiring it was to sit in a chair for twelve hours, rising only to take photos, or take a piss in the woods, or scarf down a sandwich.

He bundled the clothes—stinking of sweat and decomp—into a plastic trash bag, hoping he wouldn't forget to put them in the washer when he got home. Then he hosed off, using the spigot that Dr. B had somehow cajoled a maintenance guy into installing beside the enclosure. He filled his palm with shampoo and worked it into his hair, over his face, under his arms, across his chest and belly, and into his crotch, scrubbing with fingertips and fingernails, scrubbing away fly tracks and fly eggs, real and imagined. The water was warm at first, the afternoon's heat still stored in the serpentine coils of the hose. Coil by coil it cooled, and by the time he was finished, he was shivering. Opening a second trash bag, he took out a threadbare beach towel and dried himself briskly, rubbing warmth back into his skin before slipping into ripped, velvety Levi's, a faded sweatshirt, and floppy leather moccasins.

As he wadded the towel and added it to the laundry bag, he found himself blindsided by a wave of loneliness and longing and tenderness. The towel was one of two that he and Roxanne had found at a beach—at what he thought of as
their
beach.

PLUM ISLAND, MASSACHUSETTS, AUGUST
of '91—their first trip together, to visit Roxie's sister in Newburyport. They'd borrowed bikes and started pedaling, no plan or destination in mind, and after a while they found themselves on Plum Island, following their noses and the signs to the wildlife refuge that occupied most of the island. Refuge Road: surprisingly hot and buggy, walled off from the Atlantic's breezes by a ridge of dunes and scrub. Six sweaty miles down Refuge Road, they finally reached the southern tip of the island, Sandy Point, astonished to find that the small parking lot was empty. “I wish we'd thought to bring stuff to swim,” Roxanne had said, but Tyler had smiled and pointed to the towels: two of them, neatly folded at the edge of the asphalt—obviously forgotten by other beachgoers, but seemingly placed there just for them.

“Come on,” he'd said, grabbing the towels and running toward the water, shucking clothes as he ran.

“Tyler!” she'd shrieked. “We can't—what if we get arrested?” He'd simply turned, arms spread wide, a goofy grin on his face, unabashedly delighted to be free of his clothes and headed for the water. Dropping the towels at the high-tide line, he'd bounded into the water until it was up to his thighs, then plunged headlong into a breaker. By the time he'd surfaced and stood, his back to the surf, she was naked and prancing into the water, high-stepping like a Tennessee walking horse, her breasts and belly and the dark thatch of her pubic hair catching the golden afternoon light in a way that took his breath away. She'd shrieked a second time as a wave reared up and broke against her, toppling her backward. When she stood up, laughing, she flung her head back, whipping her hair over her shoulders and sending a shower of droplets skyward. For a fraction of a second, the droplets created a rainbow around her, and Tyler knew that he'd remember that fraction of a second for the rest of his life.

A few minutes later they were lying on the warm sand and the found towels. “Tyler, we can't,” she'd said again, this time in a husky whisper. “We could get arrested.”

“It's a wildlife refuge,” he'd murmured, nibbling her neck. “We're just part of the wildlife. And you are my sweet refuge.”

“Oh, my,” she'd breathed. Then, as his hand slid slowly down her body, simply, “Oh. Oh.
Oh.
”

HE RETURNED TO THE
cage and the corpse at daybreak, arriving—as best he could tell in the pale light—before the first of the flies. During the night, as Tyler had drifted in and out of dreams of Roxanne, the temperature had dropped to 57 degrees, according to the bare-bones weather station he'd installed at one corner of the enclosure: a warm night for late September, but not warm enough, apparently, to hatch more of the fly eggs. Meanwhile, the prior day's maggots—mere specks, as of sundown—had grown visibly, thanks to their unceasing efforts during the night.
The graveyard shift,
he thought. The head start meant that they and their progeny—the generations they would swiftly beget—already had a leg up in the Darwinian race to survive and thrive, to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and consume it.

As the first rays of sunlight slanted through the trees and slipped through the woven wire, Tyler caught a flash of iridescent green in the air, followed swiftly by another, another, and a hundred more.

And the evening and the morning were the third day,
he thought, wondering what it was that he and Dr. B were creating here.
Not exactly the Garden of Eden. More like
Lord of the Flies
.

THE GARDEN OF EDEN:
The words rattled around in his mind, knocking loose another memory of Roxanne, and of the Edenic week they'd spent house-sitting for the Brocktons, shortly after the Plum Island trip. They'd spent most of their time in bed, crawling out only for brief forays into the bathroom and the kitchen. Tenderness, awe, lust, hunger, thirst, elimination: the sublimest of emotions and the rawest of physical needs, coexisting not just peacefully but joyously and powerfully, during the heady days and nights of new love. Tyler and Rox had broken one of the bed slats during a final, frenzied coupling on their last afternoon there. The board had snapped with a crack like a rifle shot, and as the mattress gave way beneath them, their cries of passion gave way to gales of laughter. Rox had washed the sheets and towels while Tyler had dashed to Home Depot for a new slat, skidding into the store's parking lot just minutes before closing time. On a whim, as he was leaving—exiting through the store's lawn and garden section—he'd bought a small concrete statue for the Brocktons' back patio: a waist-high angel, its wings spread high and wide, a sword pointing heavenward. “To guard the gates of Paradise,” he'd explained to Rox as he tucked it beside an azalea bush by the sliding-glass door.