Free Carcass Trade by Noreen Ayres

upstairs, decorated with stenciled Dutch girls and boys holding hands around a ceiling border, her fifteen-month-old son stood in his crib smiling and babbling to us when we walked in. I’d taken off my gloves, and when I went to shake a small blue rattle at him, his fat legs danced, and when I brought his diapered bottom to my body lifting him out, the sog drenched and warmed me, and I felt the quick vibrations of his heart.
    When Joe called from his car, I was coming up on Alton Parkway, so I took the off ramp and curled around to head south.
    â€œWho’s out from the coroner’s?” I asked.
    â€œA guy named Oskar.”
    â€œDon’t know him.”
    â€œYou know how to get here?”
    â€œBlue Jay? Isn’t that past San Juan Hot Springs?”
    â€œEight miles,” he said.
    â€œWant to noodle around naked out there after?”
    â€œIt’s closed. They went under, so to speak.”
    â€œDamn.”
    â€œI don’t think I’d want to get naked out here under any circumstances, anyway,” he said.
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œWell, right now there’s a vulture looking at me from the top branch of a digger pine.”
    â€œAre you dead?”
    â€œNot the last time I looked.”
    â€œThen don’t sweat it.”
    â€œThey’re sure ugly sonsabitches.”
    â€œUgly’s in the eye of the beholder.”
    â€œYou’ll see a sign for Riverside, but it turns to Orange County again. Once you make the turnoff to Blue Jay, the road goes to washboard. There’s fallen rock everywhere. Be careful.”
    â€œI just don’t know how I made it in this life before you, hon, I really don’t.”
    He grumbled, then said, “Well, be careful anyway.”
    Famed for its spectacular vehicle flights off cliffsides, the thirty-two-mile narrow stretch of treachery through the Santa Ana Mountains inspires bumper stickers that boast of surviving it. Like Carbon Canyon, it’s also a favorite place for body dumps. Our crew would be mulling around the mountains scaring off carrion eaters for the second time in five days.
    The phone began to crackle and Joe’s words break up as I entered a phone cell that didn’t want to cooperate. “You there?” I heard him say. “Smoke?”
    â€œI’m here. Wait.”
    I turned off the freeway onto the highway named for Sergeant Jose Francisco Ortega, a scout for the Portola Expedition in 1769. His adventure started a chain of land grab beginning with the king of Spain and ending with the Bank of America and finally the county of Orange. Passing through an intersection, I waved at a highway patrol car waiting in the other direction, whose driver wasn’t my pal Ray but easily could have been, his substation being not far away. “I’m on Ortega,” I said. “I’m going to lose you.”
    â€œOkay. Be—”
    â€œRight.”
    When I hung up, my free hand brushed the diaper dampness still on my clothes. I deliberately brought my hand to my face to sniff, remembering the blue-eyed baby I’d kissed on his fragrant temple twice and handed over to the female deputy to take to the county shelter. I thought of his mother, how her hands, arms, and face were covered with numerous small scabs and “picks” from fighting off imaginary bugs. She was bony, her pallor extreme, and the froth at the nose and mouth indicated overdose. Now I wished her up , free of monkeys, preparing her baby for a walk in the sun.
    Signs along the road announced the way to the county dump, these days called “landfill.” Farther on was a long crest of hill with a row of transplanted palm trees, their tops still neatly tied into upswept hairdos to protect the heart of the palm for six months until the twine rots and they come tumbling down. I quickly counted groups of five. The fifty trees made the dune look like a spined fish heading for sea. I knew the palms