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18.
We walk around the back of the building and find four locked steel doors and
nothing but ranch land, patches of palmettos dotting an expanse of gold-green
grass. The stench is worse here, and I feel afraid to keep walking. Ben and Radar
are just behind me, to my right and left. We form a triangle together, walking
slowly, our eyes scanning the area.
“It’s a raccoon!” Ben shouts. “Oh, thank God. It’s a raccoon. Jesus.” Radar
and I walk away from the building to join him near a shallow drainage ditch. A
huge, bloated raccoon with matted hair lies dead, no visible trauma, its fur
falling off, one of its ribs exposed. Radar turns away and heaves, but nothing
comes out. I lean down next to him and put my arm between his shoulder blades,
and when he gets his breath back, he says, “I am so fucking glad to see that dead
fucking raccoon.”
But even so, I cannot picture her here alive. It occurs to me that the Whitman
could be a suicide note. I think about things she highlighted: “To die is different
from what any one supposed, and luckier.” “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow
from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.”
For a moment, I feel a flash of hope when I think about the last line of the poem:
“I stop some where waiting for you.” But then I think that the I does not need to
be a person. The I can also be a body.
Radar has walked away from the raccoon and is tugging on the handle of one
of the four locked steel doors. I feel like praying for the dead—saying Kaddish
for this raccoon—but I don’t even know how. I’m so sorry for him, and so sorry
for how happy I am to see him like this.
“It’s giving a little,” Radar shouts to us. “Come help.”
Ben and I both put our arms around Radar’s waist and pull back. He puts his
foot up against the wall to give himself extra leverage as he pulls, and then all at
once they collapse onto me, Radar’s sweat-soaked T-shirt pressed up against my
face. For a moment, I’m excited, thinking we’re in. But then I see Radar holding
the door handle. I scramble up and look at the door. Still locked.
“Piece of shit forty-year-old goddamned doorknob,” Radar says. I’ve never
heard him talk like this before.
“It’s okay,” I say. “There’s a way. There has to be.”

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We walk all the way around to the front of the building. No doors, no holes,
no visible tunnels. But I need in. Ben and Radar try to peel the slabs of