Spring Thaw

Gary hauled the trash out from his hardware store. He dumped the can into the dumpster. It was a beautiful day, thirty-eight degrees surely this was the spring thaw. March blew in like a lion but was going out like a lamb. None too soon, he was tired of winter, and short hours of daylight.

He wondered about leaving during winter. He was starting to look at places down in Florida near the beach. That would be lovely. He scooped up a shovel full of snow, dumping it on the melting drift behind the store. The water was starting to pool at his back door. A piece of material in the snowbank caught his eye. Probably a scarf that blew off a person walking in the alley. He put the shovel up against the building, picking up the garbage can he went inside.

A few days later, Gary went outside to check on the drift. He broke some ice in front of the bank and piled it on top. Today was cold, so no water threatened his back stoop. He wanted to keep it clear so he wouldn’t break his neck. The black material caught his eye again. It was just a little bigger. The dark material reflected sunlight and had widened the gap around it. He still couldn’t tell what it was. But he noticed something further in the snowbank was starting to peak out.

On the third day, Gary went out after closing the store. He was on his way to his car when he noticed the unusual shape of the bank, now. Through the weak light of the streetlamp, Gary couldn’t see much. He got into his car and drove home.

Returning the next morning, he saw a little more peeking out of the snowbank. He laughed, thinking to himself that it had the look of a dead body. It was still too cold to chip away ice from the back door. He would wait until the afternoon sun came around to work on it again.

The garbage truck picked up his trash. He could hear the dumpster being deposited on the blacktop. He looked out the window as the truck pulled away. Gary went out and closed the lids. He hated it when they left them open. He flipped the cover, which came down with a resounding bang. The smell was terrible; it made him dry heave. He’d have to get out here before it got too hot and scour out the garbage bin. Maybe he could get one of the employees to do it then he thought again, he only paid minimum wage.

When he left that evening, the undeniable shape was coming out of the snowbank. Gary was freaked for a moment, and then quickly turned away. Under the streetlight, it appeared to be a body. The material that poked out of the snowbank originally looked like it was a scarf, another open patch could be the elbow of a coat, and now the tip of a shoe. He didn’t want to be involved. He hoped that someone else would discover this thing. Not tonight, he didn’t want to deal with it. Let someone else do it.

Gary thought if he had read anywhere about a missing person, recently. If it was a body, it had to be laying there for quite some time. It had possibly been picked up with a bucket full of snow and dumped when they were clearing out the parking lot. More snow had been piled on top of it and the body was interred in its icy coffin until the spring thaw.

He tried not to stare at it on his way to the car. The more he looked at it, the more it looked like a body, and the more he felt he should be calling the cops. He was just tired tonight. Tomorrow, he figured, if it was still there, he’d call the police.

It snowed five inches that night. Gary pulled up to the back of the store, sneaking a peek. The body was no longer exposed. He walked into his store. The snowplow had piled more into the bank, making it higher and broader.  Gary was relieved. He wouldn’t have to deal with this today, either. He opened the store and then spent the day looking for missing persons in the area on his laptop. Maybe the person was a vagrant and wasn’t noticed. No one ever reported them missing.

April 1st, he could no longer ignore the snow pile. It was obvious, that a body was in the snowbank. Gary picked up the phone and made that phone call trying to sound incredulous. Was he convincing? He didn’t know.

The police were out in no time. An officer kicked around the snowbank and called in others. Soon the parking lot was covered. They started to dig into the snowbank carefully. Gary who was standing in the back of the building looking through the door heard someone swear, clap the guy next to him over the back. The next thing several cars left the parking lot. A uniformed officer came through the back of the store.

“Are you Gary Banks?” he acknowledged his name. The officer asked him to come outside. Gary could see a frozen arm sticking out of the snowbank.

“I don’t want to see it,” Gary said to the cop. The color was draining from his face. 

“I need to see if you can identify the body.” The officer insisted Gary followed him hanging back, he allowed the officer to move around to the face of the corpse frozen in the snowbank.

Slowly Gary moved around to the side. There was the face. The frozen eyes closed, the hair painted. Wait a minute. The hair was painted.

“Is it a mannequin?” Gary whispered. The officer laughed.

“Yes, it is. The dress shop next door went out of business and threw the mannequin out before the first snowfall. The plow buried the garbage pile before the trash pickup came through.

Gary sighed a big sigh of relief. The officer laughed.

“We called the waste company and have scheduled the removal of the trash pile. We don’t want more involved citizens like you, calling in a dead body now that it’s visible. I bet you had quite a scare.”

“I did,” Gary laughed, shaking the officer’s hand. He went back into his store, closing the door behind him. Gary was relieved that the body was merely a mannequin from the dress shop, but also very ashamed knowing that had it been a real body, Gary let it lay out there another week before he came forward and reported it because he didn’t want to get involved. At least no one but Gary would ever know the whole story.