Shutter(12)

Angie was one of the first women to make sergeant, with her master’s in science and specializations in everything from ballistics to laboratory forensics. I learned all I could about investigating and reading a scene from her. I was going to miss her.

“So, what’s going on?” I wanted to get this going and get out of there. My eyes burned, and my body hummed as I shivered.

“A couple was walking home from up on Second Street, by that billiards place. They saw this poor gentleman lying here under the bench. I guess they noticed he wasn’t breathing because there was no steam coming out of his nose.” We made our way over to the body lying in the street. “I thought I would bring you down and see if you could see something I’m missing.”

For months now, there had been a rash of violence against the people that lived on the streets of Albuquerque—with Native people taking some of the worst punishment. Of course, life on the streets was dangerous for everyone, but recently we had seen an escalation of the callous prejudices and hatreds that came with the history of this city. It had only been a year since we were on the scene of the murders of Cornelius and Otto Tsosie, two semi-homeless construction workers who had fallen asleep in an alley down by the university. Before they could see their next morning, two teenagers had crushed their heads with cinderblocks only three blocks from where we were standing. The hate on these streets lived and breathed.

Freezing to death on the streets wasn’t any better, although they say if alcohol is involved, it could help to numb the pain— it thins the blood and speeds the process along. You could still catch a hint of alcohol on this man, but only the ME would know how much. He lay there in a semi-fetal position, as if he’d pulled himself tightly together, only the grip of death finally allowing him to relax. He was dressed in a timeworn marine jacket, government issue, with the name tag torn off, only a T-shirt beneath that. He looked like he could be Navajo or a Native of some kind. His cheekbones were riddled with scars—long scrapes and puncture holes—and so were his hands.

There was a stark and unnerving silence, just the sound of our breath crystalizing in the air and distant radio calls from Angie’s unit. It was fifteen degrees outside tonight.

“Well,” Angie said finally, “I’ll talk to the medical examiner. I don’t know if he died here or was dropped here. I think we need to make sure.”

She was right. We needed to know.

I grabbed my camera out of my bag, hanging the strap around my neck, and began to look around. Angie pulled some evidence markers out of her toolbox and walked with me, filling out the scene diagram and making notes. I took the first picture about fifteen feet out. We were outside a former office building that now housed a divorce lawyer and a Chinese massage parlor. The bench the man lay beneath sat under a small Chinese oak, planted there recently in the city’s attempt at revitalizing downtown.

I had ten establishing shots from every angle. Angie placed the yellow markers on the ground as I snapped the photographs. An empty vodka bottle rested flat on its back, the remaining liquid unfrozen. Marker number one. His wallet was right behind him, as if it had fallen out of his pocket. Number two. There was about $2.50 in change around his left hand. Number three. His right hand was balled into a fist around his stomach; we could tell it was holding something tight. A dark blue bandanna, with a ring of sweat and dust around its edges, lay about five feet from him. Number four. His boot heel was scuffed badly—as if he had been dragged backward, his foot scraping on the ground. We were surrounded by concrete; there was no way to tell if the scraping had happened here. The other boot was two feet, seven inches from his bare foot, and he wore no socks. Number five.

We pulled out a rolled piece of paper from his right hand that turned out to be a photograph: a young man sitting in a white chair under a tree with a little girl on his lap. The girl wore a light-yellow dress with flowers along its cuff. Michelle Atcitty, age three was written in blue ink on the back. But we found nothing in the wallet that let us know who he was. He had two bus passes, a business card from the urgent care clinic down at the shelter, and three dollars. That was all.

I continued to take photographs of the man. He wore a tarnished turquoise ring on his roughened left hand. He had handsome features, but he was weathered, his skin a dark red, the maroon of wind and alcohol. His face was frozen by the winter moisture, his lips arched into a disturbing grin. I snapped seventy-seven images onto the card, the body documented for environment and measurement. I stepped up one more time and focused closely on his face. The shutter opened and closed.

“Háadish nits’éé’ ?ee’ sitá?” His eyes moved, turning to look at me. He had asked me in Navajo where I was from, or where my umbilical cord was buried. It was one of the only Navajo phrases I could remember.

My camera fell to my ribcage, the leather strap pinching my neck. I stood and stared.

“Tohatchi naashá,” I answered.

Angie stood in the blustery air, talking to the ME and sipping her coffee. “You okay over there?” she shouted.

I stared again at the dead man lying on the sidewalk. His sickening gray-blue eyes were frozen in place. I wondered if he heard me.





CHAPTER EIGHT

Polaroid Land Camera 1000SE

THE YEAR I started kindergarten, a blue car pulled into Grandma’s driveway and dropped off my cousin Gloria and her suitcase. She wore her hair down—that hair of hers that never tangled, that was always where it needed to be—and was tall and thin and had a steady smile. She had been left with Grandma for the same reason I had: our mothers could not take care of us. My mother was at school somewhere, but Gloria’s mother, Ruth, was nowhere to be found. She walked the streets in town, one hour away, with a spiritless and injured group of Indians. She loved to drink and would sometimes go months before she came home for a few days, stole money, and left once again. Gloria was sixteen when she came to live with us. It was the best thing that could have happened to us.