As the sirens regained the upper hand over the receding motorcycle noise, Rex made his way over to me in quick, erratic lunges, using the headstones and monuments for cover in a practiced manner far too accomplished to be self-taught. One more mystery. As he crouched beside me, he tucked a palm-sized, nine-millimeter automatic into an ankle holster.
"Catch you later." He looked about with a quick, precise scan as the sirens grew louder. "Can't hang around." He gave me an enigmatic smile. "All those warrants, you know."
Then he was gone, all swift, fluid moves and secure, confident steps. I was even more convinced than before that I would not want him as an adversary.
With the immediate threat certainly gone, the great survival gate in my mind imploded beneath a flood tide of dark, biting grief. As I looked down at Vanessa-not really her, but at the deceptively dead sack of organic remains of what once had been her-I searched for a thought to tag this feeling with, a dust-to-dust sentiment or maybe something about remembering people as they had lived and not as they had died. But where I had remembered Psalms and sorrow and guilt with Mama, Nietzsche came to me now. Words I had not remembered since college filled my head and with the same dark emotional entourage that had accompanied my postadolescent Herman Hesse Steppenwoff phase. "Many die too late, and a few die too soon… Die at the right time!
… Die at the right time-thus teaches Zarathustra."
I shook my head, trying to shed the words. But it was all too clear to me Vanessa had not died at the right time, and that made me angry. I held my hand close to my face and looked intently at the bits of gray matter clinging there. Fractions of a second before, the tissue had held Vanessa's mind. I had devoted my life to figuring out how this biological jelly mysteriously orchestrated itself into the phenomenon of consciousness, how it defined who we were and how it gave us the unique human consciousness of being conscious, our awareness of being aware of being aware.
I sat back on my haunches, transfixed by tissue that had once sustained genius and goodness, a sense of humor and one of outrage. Now the shards of Vanessa's mind were just sticky dying bits of organic dust-to-be thanks to the simple transfer of kinetic energy from a few grams of lead.
"Where are you?" I tried to imagine where her thoughts had gone.
Sirens pulled me back into the cold, bitter day as first one, then a second squad car came flying into the cemetery showering gravel over the nearby graves. A big, white, boxy ambulance followed a few seconds behind. The driver's-side door of an Itta Bena PD squad car opened, and a moment later a defensive-tackle-sized black man in a police uniform climbed out. He reached deliberately into the car and pulled from it a large black cowboy hat, which he carefully placed on his head. Only then did he look slowly around the cemetery and pull a large automatic pistol from its holster and hold it along his thigh, index finger resting ready outside the trigger guard. Shouts echoed through the cemetery. Everyone pointed toward me.
The cemetery grew silent again as the giant cop looked at me. His face was as broad and expressive as a cast-iron skillet as he took in my embrace of Vanessa. Something like disapproval rippled beneath his gaze, then turned to horror as he took in Vanessa's bloody, gaping wound.
I saw recognition make its way across his face. Despair, then anger, and finally sadness played across his face in cinematically swift flashes as he recognized Vanessa. During all this, the ambulance attendants stayed close to their vehicle, looking to the giant cop for directions. Finally, he holstered the automatic and made his way slowly toward me. The paramedics came running behind; the contents of their kits rattled in the stillness. I thought to tell them they could take their time, but my words found no voice.