BILLY HOOVER
Everybody knew a student was missing. They’d been searching for days, searching all over—cops driving country roads, teachers and classmates walking through cornfields, combing the woods. They walked along the river, poked around abandoned sheds and trailers. Every cow pond, gravel pit, every dumpster got looked into. And, each day that passed, people got a little more scared. Scared of finding. Scared of not finding.
I heard about it from my uncle, Tom Hoover, who worked in College Security. My father had died the year before, my mother was “failing,” as they say around here. She went down real fast after my father died. A lively, healthy woman—the talker in the family—turned thin and silent. I’ll never know about her fall down the steps of our house, which she’d walked down thousands of times before, whether it was an accident or not. The end of her failing, that’s what it was. That happened a few months before the student disappeared and Tom was there for me, getting me new clothes for eighth grade, taking me fishing, hunting, out for pizza. Some nights, he took me to work at the college—patrolling parties, keeping drinkers out of cars, escorting girl students home from the library at midnight. That was my first taste of college.
I remember wondering about that missing student, not just where he went, but why. For me, lost meant misplaced: lost keys, lost ball, lost and found. Not like lost at sea, lost in combat, lost forever. Even the posters that were all over town— at the bank, the post office, the grocery and gas station—though they were supposed to show who folks were looking for, seemed more like messages meant for the student himself, telling him that people missed him and it was time to come home now, please.
My home was—and still is—a farm just across the river from the college, which sits up on a wooded hill. My father always told me I was lucky to be born where I was, in this part of Ohio, in this particular place. Not everybody had a famous college in walking distance. That brought some quality to life, he said. Some magic. Just look at it, he used to say, pointing up at the hill. Like a castle. Or a monastery. Or a space station, shooting signals out into the stars. High and mighty talk coming from a college maintenance guy who plowed snow and scattered salt in winter, mulched leaves in autumn, cut grass in summer and spring. There were plenty locals who took potshots at the college, at spoiled kids and snobby faculty and presidents who...as my Uncle Tom put it...thought their shit didn’t stink. But, low rank as he was, my father believed in that place and what he believed in was good enough for me.
It was Indian Summer that day, a kindly warm spell after a killing frost. The October heat was a surprise. Flies were buzzing, crows circled overhead and—just when the wind was right—I could hear the announcer at the home football game, the college taking yet another pounding. Our local high school team could beat them, folks said. I sat awhile on a railroad trestle, walked along the river, then set off uphill, into the woods, into a neighbor’s orchard that smelled like cider, drunken bees feasting on windfall apples. I followed a deer trail back onto our place into a bumper crop of blackberry bushes, sumac, scrub oak and maple, a field that hadn’t been planted for years. My father wasn’t out to shake the last penny out of the ground. Leave something for the deer, he said, the wild turkeys, the raccoons and the possums.
Leave something for the crows. They were all over an empty barn at the edge of the field, up against the woods. My dad used the barn for wood, dismantling it a board at a time, when he was building benches and tables for professors who liked that weathered, broken-in-look in their garden furniture. The crows had found it now, swarming around the place, cawing like crazy, circling overhead. I walked towards them, through dry grass and brambles, floating through that last warm sunlight, late in the day, late in the season.
The smell hit me, slugged me, before I saw where it was coming from. Something hanging inside the barn, hanging at the end of a rope looped over a beam at the edge of the hay loft. A week had passed since the student vanished, a week of warm days since the crows had found him, turning him slowly as they landed and took off but never deserting him completely, one or another always in contact, never leaving the dead kid alone, never backing off to admire their work. I folded down on my knees, gagging and vomiting. The crows knew I was there but that didn’t bother them. I chucked a handful of stones at them. That didn’t bother them much. They lifted off the corpse, letting me see their work in progress. The eyes were gone, the ears, the tongue, cheeks, everything that made a face. All the easy pickings. When I saw that, when I looked down at where trousers had split open, where like kids pulling ribbons off a gift, the crows tugged at intestines, I screamed and ran. It was him alright, the lost student. I couldn’t believe it, that I was the one to find him. I hadn’t even been looking. As soon as I hit the trail that runs along the river, I saw Tom Hoover walking towards me. He always was able to find me, whenever I needed him, and now I threw myself into his arms, crying. “I know,” Tom said. “I know.” He told me I should stay put a minute and he headed for the barn. I could see him shudder when the smell hit him but that didn’t stop him. He stepped inside, stayed a minute and came back to me. “Spoiled,” he said. “Spoiled rotten.” He held me and hugged me, the way he did the day they found my father in the river. “There’s a reward,” he said.
The reward was a hundred dollars. But it was more than money. It was death. The smell of road kill got me, ever since. The sight of anything hanging the way that dead boy had hung. A deer on the first day of hunting season, hung from a branch, gutted and bled. A piñata thing at a Mexican party. That was my reward. A gift that kept on giving. A role to play, a part in life. I was the one who found the bodies. Or they found me.