I stared at the face on the license, and then at the poster that had been taped to the wall behind my counter since February: WALTER DUNNIGAN, 79, HOBBS, NEW MEXICO. LAST SEEN DRIVING A GREEN FORD PICKUP. His niece had mailed it to every tow yard in four counties, and I had put it up between a calendar and a map of Ector County because I had nothing else to do for him. “Mr. Biggs,” I said, “that is not your face.” “No,” he said. “It is the face of the best friend I had in this world. Walt and I were in the same company in Vietnam.”
Harold told it slowly. In February, Walt had driven down from Hobbs to see him, because Harold had stopped answering the telephone. Walt found Krista alone in the house on Andrews Highway, with a story about how her grandfather was resting in San Angelo and could not have visitors. “Walt was no fool,” Harold said. “He asked to see the paperwork. He copied down the name of the home. He told her he would be back with the sheriff. He drove off at six in the evening. That is the last time anyone saw him alive.”
I picked up the telephone and called a deputy I had known for fifteen years, Ana Villarreal of Ector County. She arrived in twenty minutes in plain clothes. She sat on the other side of my desk, and she heard Harold out with her pen moving. When he finished she lifted the dog tags with a pencil and read the name aloud: Dunnigan, Walter L. She did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Mr. Biggs, we found his pickup in a bar ditch near Pecos in March. We always thought he had run off. His niece never believed it.”
A man who is thought dead may live to find the one who is truly missing, and bring him home.
“Who put these in the urn?” I asked. “Somebody with a conscience,” the deputy said. “Whoever cremated that man could have thrown the ring and the tags in the trash. Instead somebody sealed them in a sandwich bag, on top of the ashes, where they were sure to be found by anyone who looked.” We had his name by Friday. Hector Ruiz, forty four, worked the night shift at the crematory on Grandview Avenue. He came to the sheriff department on Saturday morning by himself, with his hat in his hands.
Hector told them everything. In the last week of February, the boyfriend of Krista, a man named Dale Kerr who worked part time at the same funeral home, had brought a body in a tarp after midnight and told Hector to run it as Harold Biggs. Hector needed the job. He had three children. “But I could not stop thinking about the man,” he said. “So I put his ring in the bag. I told myself that somebody someday would open it.” Krista had kept the urn in the back seat of her SUV because she was afraid to leave it in the house.
They arrested Krista Biggs and Dale Kerr two days later in a steakhouse parking lot in Midland, in a rental car with two suitcases and a pair of plane tickets to Cancun. The two hundred fifty thousand dollars was still sitting in two accounts. Dale Kerr had struck Walt Dunnigan with a tire iron on the driveway when Walt would not be bought off. Both pleaded guilty. A judge in Midland declared Harold Wayne Biggs legally alive on a Tuesday morning in a courtroom that smelled of floor wax.
Harold took it with the same calm he had taken everything. The county reissued his license, the bank restored his accounts, and the insurance company, which found itself in the awkward position of having paid a dead man who was not dead, took back its money with a letter of apology. He moved back into his house on Andrews Highway, and for a month he sat on the porch with his cane across his knees as if daring anyone to take it. Every afternoon at four he came by the yard, and I made coffee in the dirty pot.
In April the two of us drove to Hobbs with Walt in the front seat, belted in, because Harold insisted. His niece Pearl met us at the cemetery, a stout woman in her sixties with her hair in a bun, and she held the urn against her chest and wept in a way I do not like to remember. Harold took the flag from the trunk, a folded one that Walt had been given at Fort Bliss in 1969. “He should have the flag,” he said. A bugler from the VFW played taps, badly and perfectly.
On the way home we stopped at a Dairy Queen outside Kermit. Harold ate a chocolate dipped cone with the serious attention he gave to everything, and then he said, “Lonnie, I was ready to die in that home. I want you to know that. I had made my peace. Then a repo man hooked the car of my granddaughter and I got another thirty years of mad.” I laughed so hard I had to put down my own cone.
At Christmas he walked into my office with a package wrapped in newspaper. Inside was a stainless steel coffee maker, the kind with a timer, and a card in shaky handwriting: For the best coffee in Texas. Please wash the old pot. I washed it that night. It took four hours and a bottle of vinegar. The next morning I stood in my yard in the cold with the dog beside me and watched the sun come up over the oil pumps, and I hung the poster of Walter Dunnigan, folded, in the frame behind the counter, next to the photograph of the three of us at the cemetery.