“The only thing I touched was the man himself, seeing if I could get a pulse, clear his wind passage, give him a lick of coffee when he asked for something to drink. Beyond that, there was not much I could do. He was wedged in pretty tight. It took a while, even with the hydraulic machinery, for your boys and the EMTs to get his body out. I could see I shouldn’t try to move him. I didn’t take anything. I just pushed my jacket in around him and waited for the ambulance. Within maybe twenty minutes of the time I got there, he was dead.”
“And that left, what? Maybe another twenty or thirty minutes before the emergency response arrived? What were you doing all that time?”
Mikesh tried not to pause, not to sound evasive, but he didn’t like his own answer. “I kept my hand against him. . . . . I was talking to him, not sure when it was he really died. I had my hand on his neck, checking for a pulse so I just kept it there. After pushing my jacket in there around him, it seemed like the one other thing I could do.”
Fox searched Mikesh’s face.
“The jacket you say you pushed around the victim, that is with his effects. We will have to keep it until the investigation is completed. There’s a lot of blood on it.”
Mikesh was quiet.
“So there’s nothing more you can tell me about why you were there, what you saw at the scene, or what you said?”
Mikesh said nothing.
“I see you are a man with a record, and I want to make sure the report for this incident is complete.”
Mikesh felt his blood pressure surge. “That record is for a high school prank.”
“Car theft is more than a prank.”
Fox had unearthed the one incident, from Mikesh’s careful life, which landed him in court for a criminal offense.
“A buddy and I hid the car of a guy who was just a little too fond of it.”
Mikesh was eighteen. The car was a Mustang, the owner Bill White. While his accomplice had gone with White into the house to watch the taped highlights of the 1985 football season where Bill had played fullback and his friend a left tackle, Mikesh drove the Mustang to the parking lot of the hair salon favored by the town’s oldest ladies and parked it there, underestimating the frenzy and the wrath of its owner once he found it gone. One night in jail and two levels of reduced charges later Mikesh paid his fine and spent his summer before university on probation, doing community service.
“There aren’t a lot of people in this county who have a vehicle theft on their record.”
“And not one who was charged for such a stupid reason.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that. A record is a record, and I’m just trying to get the report for this death complete and clear. A lot of people are interested in this man.”
“I’ve told you what I know.”
“Does your boss over at the community college know about your record, or the state employment people?”
“We’re talking about Calmar, Iowa. Anybody who has lived there more than fifteen minutes knows the story, including the color of shirt I was wearing when I walked away from the lot of the Twirl ‘n’ Curl and probably, for that matter, the brand of my underwear.”
“The last time I looked, your boss doesn’t live in Calmar.”
“What does that have to do with what happened in the fog last night?”
Fox paused. “Maybe nothing. I’ve got to get the facts, got to be sure I understand my sources.”
“Seegmiller said you are still investigating out at the scene.”
“We’re working with the state. You have to check everything out.” Paul Fox picked up a paper clip and tapped it on his blotter. “Make sure in the final report every t is crossed, every i dotted. That’s my plan, so you may need to come in again. You’ll probably need to talk to state investigators.”
The law enforcement center lot was gray with thinning fog as Mikesh, zipping up his Carhartt, walked across the asphalt. Unhappy that he seemed to be the careless driving suspect in a stranger’s death, and surprised at how deeply the sheriff seemed to be invested in proving his guilt, Mikesh hoped he was on his way home, but he was greeted by me, walking toward him from between the cars, offering my hand.
“Are you Arnold Mikesh?” I asked. “I’m Tom King, Joshua’s brother.”
Okay brother, sister reader. I have already told you I’m the brother of the dying man. What you don’t know is that I am not just Josh King’s brother, but his twin, the fraternal twin, conceived on the same occasion, only six minutes his junior in entering the cold December air of Northeast Iowa. Ever since Josh left college his main nickname for me has been “Diddy Mouse,” which he told me meant “twin.” That, at least, is was what it meant to Josh. In the last few months before he died, Josh had some fun with my given name too, sometimes calling me ‘Tom-Tom,’ saying I would be the Spirit’s drum.
If my delay in this information makes you suspicious, excellent. It’s smart to be skeptical. Something as basic to your wellbeing as water, administered the wrong way, say in a blinding fog, or the bath into which you pass out from having too much drink—can kill you. It’s wise to be suspicious. If you are, you know that I am too close to my brother to tell his story with the detachment you can trust. Better that you get it through the somewhat surprised eyes and ears of one who is just as new to Josh King as you. Hence the tale of Arnold Mikesh. Hence my role as reporter and stage manager. I talked Mikesh into being the star witness of this account. Eventually that meant going over the whole sequence of events that Josh’s accident started in motion. This involved some very long talks. The first began outside what most residents in Decorah call “the cop shop.”
Surprised by my parking lot introduction, Mikesh was flustered as he returned my shake with the grip of his beefy hand. “I’m sorry . . . sorry about your brother dying.”
Mikesh is more at home with empty hallways and feeding cattle than small talk. Not comfortable in this kind of conversation, he was distracted, studying me, trying to imagine what my brother might have looked like when standing and chatting, realizing that even though we were not identical (which we are not) the resemblance was strong.
“Thanks.”
I didn’t know where to begin, myself. A phone call in the night. A long, slow drive from Des Moines. I sat in the back, next to my mother Maria, with our friend Simon at the wheel. In this strangely formal, but necessary arrangement we drove north, white fog in the headlights. Stumbling around our brains were questions with a hand out for answers that remained short on offer. At our destination was a quiet hospital room where Josh’s broken body lay beneath a green sheet, folded back at his groin for the three of us to identify him. Blood had been washed from him, but the crown of rips in his scalp where he broke through the windshield glass were the same raw color as the stew beef in a supermarket meat counter. His abdomen was torn, and ringed round with a purple bruise where the roof and dashboard had clamped him like a vise. And all I could wonder, as I stood and stared at the battered remains of my brother, was what I would next make of my life.
“You were there. You know what we had to look at,” I told Mikesh.
“It was a bad accident.”
“I wanted to thank you for what you did. You probably were not the first person to drive by. No one else stopped.”
“It was quiet the whole time I was out there. There weren’t a lot of people on the road. I was violating a travel advisory