STEPHEN GIBSON Noir

STEPHEN GIBSON

Noir

What is a river? A river is water that flows and carries things away, including the river itself; its “there-ness” is never the same “there.” This Zen moment was brought to you by the Green River Killer in the northwest, a man who drove its highways in his truck.

Gary Ridgway kept a hammer in his truck under the driver’s seat—it made blood flow on roads all along the American northwest. If you were a runaway, he thought of the river. It was so cool when he offered weed to you. The woods are full of weed, he’d say. Let’s go there—

and he’d turn at a logging road with you there staring into the headlights with him in the truck. You suspected what was going to happen to you, though not the details. Until body fluids flowed he kept your corpse, then dumped it into the river. Mortuary sites all along the American northwest

were as common as truck stops. In the Northwest, hikers out with their dogs would find bodies there under thin piles of dirt and leaves, or the river would give up another secret begun in his truck. On the news, detectives gathered, the river flowed behind them, and it seemed like a rerun to you—

it was. He watched the same TV reports as you. Someone was killing girls in America’s northwest, temporarily buried them, then just let the flow of the river carry them downstream—until there you found them—like so much junk a pickup truck illegally deposited, like an old mattress, into the river.

In Millais’ painting, Ophelia floating down that river looks lovely, tragic—she could recite poetry for you. That’s not how death happened inside that truck. Millais’ painting was shown at a memorial—Northwest high school seniors are as sentimental as you there in the Northeast or Midwest or South, and overflow

with just as much emotion whether rivers in the Northwest or South or wherever you are give up corpses. And there also, men like him sit in trucks, watching the emotions flow.