The Dead I Know by Scot Gardner

said.
    ‘Morning, Grant. Anywhere we can park?’
    ‘Hope you’ve brought a bucket,’ he said. He moved a traffic cone and ushered the van through. The small crowd of service personnel parted at the sight of us and John crawled to the roadside and parked on the grass ten metres from the front of the truck. The oil stains I’d seen from the road weren’t oil.
    ‘Okay?’ John asked.
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    The door alarm chimed and we were among the police and the firemen. We collected a hard plastic container from the back, like a small, sleek fibreglass casket, and carried it between us over to the truck. We were steered by the police past paramedics tending a bearded figure huddled under a silver blanket. At the back of the truck, basking in a private lake of crimson, was the mangled body of the motorcyclist. Bones protruded from the black jacket and it took me a few seconds to realize there were bits missing. The jacket sleeve seemed intact but its contents had been delivered elsewhere by the impact. One leg was considerably shorter than the other.
    ‘Ah,’ John said. ‘Probably won’t need to check for a pulse.’
    That’s when I realized the motorcyclist had mislaid his head.
    We lowered the casket on the edge of the pond. It unlatched like a toolbox and the lid opened with a disinfectant huff.
    ‘Right,’ John said quietly. ‘We’ll get as much as we can with one lift.’
    There were no obvious handles – like feet or square shoulders – to hold. John circled the tangled remains and bent beside the intact arm. He looked up at me, reading my face.
    ‘Grab the jacket,’ he said, and I found some purchase. A heavy lift – a true dead weight – and we couldn’t get the whole body off the road. It scraped and grated over the tar, bumped bloody on the rim of the casket and eventuallycame to rest on the plastic tray inside. John straightened the limbs and wiped his gloves and the fibreglass with a small dark towel.
    ‘We can’t leave until we’ve completed the jigsaw,’ he said. ‘No missing pieces.’
    So began an hour of sifting through the scrub and grass on both sides of the road. We had police help, but the point of impact was more than a hundred metres down the highway. A boot – with a foot inside – had turned up in the paddock about seventy metres from the asphalt. Between us, we collected every bit of bloodstained clothing, every dark human scrap and every shard of bone. Still, one significant piece eluded us. The search area grew wider and more ridiculous until we were combing a swampy drain nearly a kilometre from the truck. Every empty drink can and ball of takeaway wrapper gripped at my stomach. Every old shred of tire suddenly became mortal remains.
    I walked in a line with two policemen. Their radios barked and fizzed with static. They yelled back and forth but their words barely made it to my ears. My head rang with the strangeness of the situation and the sense that we might be searching for the rest of the day; and then I found it.
    Pressed among the bright green rushes growing in the drain was an arc of shiny black. I could just reach it without getting wet – the dome of the motorcyclist’s helmet, with his waxen head inside. I lifted it by the chinstrap.
    ‘Ho!’ one of the policemen said. ‘That’s what we’re looking for. John’s boy wins the cigar!’
    I carried it like an odd valise to the casket and laid it gently in position. John – puffing from his own searching – noddedhis approval. We fitted the lid and carried the container to the van. I became aware, as John closed the door, that although we’d been conducting the same search, the policemen and I had been looking for different things and for different reasons. They were hunting mortal remains to finish a job, I was hunting the still countenance of someone’s son, perhaps their brother, maybe even their father, to bring him a final grace. By giving him grace, I found some of my own. The police protected