Requiem...For A Death in the High Desert

10-24-06

The requiem booms.

The basso resounds for the dead who stay no longer to hear.

One plastic bag, pulled tight over the head.

One pair of hands, tied behind the back.

One pair of pants, fallen or forced, encircling the ankles in a final posture of abjuration and distress.

The police would come and they would not lift the man sitting dead in his chair. They would leave him in the back room of the clothing store, while taking time to gather evidence and abashedly try not to talk to the local reporter who showed up right on time, which was also too late. They would look without seeing and touch without feeling. And the dead man would remain unmoved.

A man deserves a requiem, even if he is nameless, only a story told here in the neighborhood.

The reporter wore a press badge and looked unassuming. She shrunk into the background with her notepad and sufficed to ask a bystander, who she heard me speaking to, about what he had seen. The police had successfully put her off, or she was just too shy to be pain enough to get the information she needed.

The man she chose to talk to may have been the right one, though. He had been inside when the body was found. He had seen the body.

He described to me the dead man with the plastic bag over the head (and now the question clutches at me from the place thought will not go - what kind of plastic bag was it? It could not have been an everyday grocery bag. A weapon so trivial should never be used for something of such ultimate importance as this: murder. So what kind of bag did the body wear when the coroner came in?).

The young man intimated the posture of a man slumped slightly backwards in his chair, with the pants down so that you could see his "behind" (which is such an oddly respectful and appropriate term to use while still standing outside the scene of the crime, still standing inside the police cordon of yellow tape, talking to me as I stood fingering the tape, trying to think of a way to get inside his head and see what he had seen).

Fours hours after arriving, the police were still there in force. A large RV was pulled up on the curb opposite the clothing store reading in large letters: Antelope Valley Police: a tradition of service and honor.

The yellow tape was still in place, illuminated now by the bright light of a corner streetlight. The streetlight was so bright that no other lights were needed for the police to do their work.

A rough count had a dozen people standing about, neatly scattered so as not to make a crowd in the parking lot of the Boys and Girls Club that loomed behind the scene, across the street, in its brick bulk, an inexplicable pylon rising from its western wall, thin, flat, and, tonight, communicative of the lonesome path that man must walk through life, into death.

Thirteen hours later a new sun rose. Life on the street continued. The police lines only covered the storefront and the rear of the store. The street and the corner were open to traffic, which passed no more slowly than usual just before sunrise.

The meaning of the event waits for an appropriate moment to be realized. What will that moment be like? What necessity can bring it forth; what silence or groaning angst?

Now, a full day after the murder, the block is filled with the same sounds it was two nights ago. There is even more noise from the house under construction next door to the clothing store. The one where the police needed to take down the address because it stands not even ten feet from the crime scene, separated only by a narrow, naked alley. Maybe the carpenters heard something...The saws are buzzing tonight.

The alto of the requiem takes up its sparse few notes. Unnoticed, the dirge moves on until the moment should arrive when light may return to the neighborhood and tell us what this killing means.