The place where they were keeping the car was behind the cop shop. Dudley led me out the back way and walked me over. It was a gigantic aluminum building that I felt certain had not been there ten years before.
We stopped at the door to the garage, the side door, not the big slide-up door that was pulled down around front. There was a police cruiser parked nearby. The sun rested on the back of my neck like a weight.
Dudley put his hand on the doorknob, then said to me, “They make you put some covers on your shoes, and you’ll have to wear plastic gloves and a shower cap. Gloves ain’t enough anymore.”
“Okay,” I said.
“First, for the record, let me know for sure it’s the car. Still remember it?”
“Like yesterday.”
“All right, then.”
Inside it was air-conditioned and there was a nervous little freckle-faced fellow seated at a desk near the doorway. He was doing paperwork with greasy fingers blackened by oil and automotive fluids. The pages he was writing on had smears to match his fingers.
Dudley nodded at him, said, “Give us some gear.”
The nervous fellow got up, put on plastic gloves, opened a plastic crate, took out the stuff we needed, and brought it over.
I could see the car, which was parked over a grease pit. I could see hands reaching up from below, a wrench in one of those hands. The mechanic was doing something to the bottom of the car, but I wasn’t sure what. Damn sure wasn’t fixing anything; he was looking for something. Clues?
The wheel rims were rusted and full of mud, and there were a few strands of rubber tire hanging off them. I could see the top of a shower cap–covered head on the opposite side of the car.
“Is that it?” Dudley asked me, nodding at the car.
“Yes, sir, that’s it.”
The original color was gone and it had taken on the hue of the lake bed, brown and gritty-looking. The side windows were caked with mud, and there were little things I couldn’t identify stuck in that mud. I had envisioned the car to be wet, but of course it was dry now, worked over by a drought and the burning sun as well as time under air-conditioning.
Looking at the car, I could almost hear the cracking of the bridge where the Buick had gone through the railings, could still feel the breathtaking plunge as it headed down into the moon-slicked waters.
We each put on gloves, cap, footies, and a plastic tunic over all of it. It crackled when I moved. I felt like I was wearing a condom.
When we got closer, I could see the gap where the rear windshield had been. I had been blown through it by the force of the water, while my father, being larger, had been pressured to the front seat. Inside the car there was a lot of mud and some twisted items I finally realized were the mud-coated remains of clothes.
I looked at the trunk where my mother’s bones had been found. I knew she had been removed, but I visualized her inside, her once beautiful, now ruined body wrapped in a blanket next to a spare tire. My old man in the front seat, maybe clutching that pair of her panties he told me about.
Looking through the gap where the back window had been, I could see the front window was missing too, and as we passed the rear of the car, I saw the glass on the driver’s side was still in place, but it was crusted with mud and had visible stars and cracks where something, perhaps my father, had slammed into it. Seeing all of this, remembering that night, it hit me like a freight train.
When we got around on the other side, the person who was there lifted her shower-capped head and looked at us.
She might have been ten years older and covered in plastic, but those shiny deep brown eyes were the eyes of my mermaid.
Ronnie.