Vanished

by Mary McGarry Morris

  Wallace waited, but in a few minutes when Carl still had not come out, he left the cabin and passed quietly up to the barn door, which was slightly open. He cocked his head, blinded by the bright slant of dust-riddled light that sieved through the opening. The air against his cheek was hot and dry.

  “Just touch it.” Carl’s voice was thick and glutinous. He was short of breath. “I’ll give you a quarter like I do Kelly.”

  “No,” said Canny, her voice a faint rustle, like a page turning.

  “I’ll give you two quarters.”

  “I don’t want two.”

  “Just touch it.”

  “No.”

  “C’mere.…”

  “Let goa me.…”

  “Gimme your hand … just p …”

  “You let goa.…”

  “Don’t!” Carl growled. “Uhhh! You little …”

  “Poppy!” she screamed. “Poppy!”

  At that, he scurried back to the cabin, and with his hands on her sweaty back, shook Dotty, pumped her up and down on the bed, pumped her as if she were a drowned body, pumped the sleep from her sleek, wet back.

  “He’s gonna kill her … gonna suck her blood and drink it and kill her Wake up, Dotty. Please! Oh please!”

  She sat up trembling, but her eyes wouldn’t open. Propelled by the terror in his voice, she staggered blindly to the door in just her underpants and bra. Wallace ran back and grabbed the sheet from the bed and threw it around her as they came to the barn. With Wallace close behind, Dotty slid the door open. Up in the rafters, a family of mourning doves shot from their warm, dark perches, their wings beating like the crackle of flames.

  “You bastard!” she bellowed, lunging at the shadowy mass that knelt over the struggling, groaning child, his hand clamped over her mouth.

  Before he could stand, Dotty was on his back, tearing fistsful of hair from his scalp. Canny sprang at Wallace. Blood trickled from her nose and mouth. Wallace swept up the sheet from the floor and tried to stop the bleeding. He tried to find the vampire’s bite, but his eyes were blurred with tears.

  “Poor Canny,” he bawled, and hugged her close. “Poor baby Canny.”

  The barn door swung completely open and in the sudden gash of sunlight, Dotty’s arm rose and fell with a sick thud. The rusty shovel she had snatched from its nail on the bin caught Carl on the shoulder. Moaning, he lay curled on the floor in an oily smear.

  “What the hell’s …” It was Jiggy, blotting out the sun, the startled dog raging at his heels, snapping, while Wallace continued to dab the sheet corner at Canny’s streaked chin.

  “What’re you …” Jiggy had grabbed Dotty’s wrist, snaring the shovel in mid-blow.

  “Kill him!” Dotty panted. “Kill him and kill him.…” She lunged for the shovel, and, with his open hand, Jiggy slapped her, hitting her so hard that her head snapped back and trembled on its stem.

  Carl huddled against the bin with his arms scarfing his head. He whimpered like a child.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay; it’s okay,” Wallace continued to whisper in Canny’s dry, brittle hair, though he knew it was not; for now the worst had happened. From the pages of fairy stories of lost princesses and fairy babies, down the long, dark, wet corridors of nightmare, had stepped this monster, this blood-drinker, Carl. And, as in his dreams and the long-ago times (lurking with his ears to the cold, hard wall) he asked himself over and over: What had he done, what had he done, what had he done.…

  14

  “How’s this sound?” Dotty asked, her head bent over the paper. “Hello, Mr. Bird,” she read. “How are you? I would like to take just a few minutes of your time if you don’t mind.…”

  “Sounds shitty,” interrupted Jiggy, as he penciled a short line on the map, and then, turning it sideways, drew a longer, intersecting line.

  Her eyes had dark circles under them. She glanced at Wallace, who sat on the edge of the bed. Ever since the incident with Carl this morning, Dotty had seemed on the verge of something; whether tears or laughter or hysteria, Wallace couldn’t tell, but something would boil over in her soon enough. This was the tenth time Jiggy had belittled the dialogue she was writing for Wallace to use on the phone.

  “What’s wrong with it?” she asked.

  “Same as before. Sounds made up. Fake.” Jiggy leaned over the map.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about! Course it’s made up. I’m making it up!” She threw the paper and pen onto the bed and stomped across the cabin and stood by the door. After a moment, she wheeled around and pointed at Huller. “I know what’s the matter!” she said in a tight voice. “You’re still pissed about that brother-in-law of …”

  “Shut up,” Jiggy said. “Sit down and shut up!” Carefully, he drew another line on the map, this one in ink, blood-red ink. He smiled and darkened the line.

  “Well you are!” she said. “You been on my ass all day and I’m sick of it!”

  Jiggy looked up and smiled. “Yah, I guess you’re right. Only you got the reason ass-end-to. You see, the thing that really bugs me is getting out there too soon—before you split the fucker’s head in two.”

  Dotty sighed. She shrugged nervously and sighed again. She blinked and her eyes were filled with tears.

  Huller tilted back in the chair and shook his head. “What the hell’re you doing? You chop the hair off one of my in-laws, and then you try to chop the balls off the other. Who the hell’s next?” He smiled.

  Dotty laughed uneasily. She picked up her purse from the end of the bed and began to search for cigarettes. “Son of a bitch,” she said through the cigarette she was lighting. “Doesn’t deserve to live.” She took a deep drag that wheezed in her chest. For a moment she stared into space. “Some don’t, you know. Once I knew this girl. She was just a kid, really. Fourteen, I think she said. She never had nothing. All her life, nothing. Not even her own bed. Her daddy was just the meanest cocksucker around. I mean, mean!” She shivered and hugged herself. “He was always at her. Just all the time, every minute on her case. ‘Do this! Don’t do that! Help your Ma! Take them kids out for a walk!’ He never let her be a little kid herself, you know what I mean? Him and her mother, they just used her. Only he was the worse; he used her the worse way of all. First, it was touching. Then, it was all the way. Poor kid. She was only ten and then when she was thirteen, she went to her Ma and told her. And her Ma said, ‘You dirty, lying, pig tramp, saying such things about your own Daddy.’

  “And her Ma slapped her and punched her and kicked her and just went crazy, beating on her and screaming, ‘Pig tramp, dirty little pig tramp.…’ Beat her so bad she couldn’t go to school for a week till the sores and cuts got better. So then this girl I knew said, I’ll fix her! I’ll show her!’ And she waited till just the right time, till he was drunk and half mean and half sexed up and winking and rubbing himself against the corner of the table and getting that blindy look he’d get like a flabby-donked old bull, tryna talk sweet, but only could think of dirty words like a little kid.

  “Only that time she didn’t steer clear of him. She didn’t leave the house or the room even. Her Ma was due home from cleaning the pigman’s place any minute and all her little sisters were on the floor watching TV. She sat up on the chair staring down at the backs of their heads and she thought how if somebody didn’t do something, if somebody didn’t stop him, then he’d be on one of them next, on one of those sweet little girls she loved so much like they were her own even. So she just sat there and let him keep on and keep on and keep on. And so just when she figured it was time for her Ma to get there, she looked up at him and she smiled and, for the first time, she didn’t try to run or anything.

  “He grabbed her and she just got up and never once pulled back and went in the room there and never said a word. He was just getting ready and she heard the shed door open and close and then she heard her Ma’s voice saying hello to her little sisters. Right then he started on her and once he got going, he didn’t care if t
he whole county came by. ‘Ma!’ she hollered. ‘Ma! Come and get him off me. Ma! Help me, Ma!’

  “And you know what happened then?” Dotty smiled, almost amusedly. “The TV just got louder and louder and louder and then she just stopped screaming and fighting and just laid there and waited for him to finish. And she knew then how it was the same for her Ma in a way. How it was up to her, she knew, to keep him off all of them.

  “After that, if she said anything, all her Ma ever said was, ‘I can’t do nothing. Run away then. Take off.’ And by then she had a boy she liked, this older guy she used to tell about her and her Daddy to, only she said how it was someone else she knew. And this guy said, ‘Tell your friend, some bastards don’t deserve to live.’

  “And then one night, right after that, it was a boiling hot night and she was sleeping on the couch with just a shirt on and in he came in the middle of the night. It was so hot and sticky and, to tell the truth, she was kinda high herself and had just a while before snuck in from her date with the guy she liked; and he kept shaking her, tryna wake her up, and just when he was gonna lay on her, she rolled off the couch and ran outside, and he took off after her with his bottle in his hand. He caught her, and when it was over, he sat up and lit a cigarette and took a swig, and all of a sudden she grabbed the bottle and she just let him have it. Over and over on his head and his face, and when the bottle was just the broken neck left with blood in her hand, she picked up a big rock and kept on going. Then, just so there wouldn’t be any doubt, so her Ma’d know, so everyone’d know, so he’d know, she lit a match and tried to set him on fire—there. The matches kept going out but she could smell his hair burning. So she kept lighting them, one after the other, till the book was empty.”

  Dotty looked at the cigarette she was stubbing out in the litter of potato chips and ashes. “The weird thing is, she wanted more matches. That’s all she could think of, how she needed more matches. But when she got back to the house, the door was locked. So she slept in the shed and then, the next morning, he didn’t come back, so she knew he was dead. When her Ma left for the pigman’s, she got more matches and went back and tore off his shirt sleeves and put them on his belly and lit them, but the fire kept going out. So she figured she better get going, only she got lost in the woods that day and night and maybe even the next. And she could hear men’s voices, sounding mean and hot and mad, and she could hear dogs baying and snarling, and she knew they weren’t gonna listen. It hit her how it was probably gonna be just like all those times with her Ma. They’d call her dirty names and they’d never believe her.”

  Now there was silence. Wallace stared at her and Jiggy stared at her and the only sound in the cabin was the drip of the bathroom faucet. She looked so young right then, like a little girl, Wallace thought. It was the kind of youth that emerges from dreams, from sleep, disembodied and fragmented.

  “She get caught? The men ever find her?” asked Huller. He had wedged a matchbook cover to a point, which he was using to dig out the grime under his thumbnail.

  “She never said,” Dotty answered brightly, her voice like the jangly glass pieces that used to tremble in the wind on Hyacinth’s front porch.

  “You mean they might still be looking for her?” He held up the thumbnail and, frowning, examined it from every angle.

  “Who the hell knows.” Dotty stretched back and yawned. “Or cares.”

  “I do.” He had said it so softly and yet so deliberately that Dotty jumped off the bed and stood over him. “Why the hell should you care?”

  “What’s her name?” Jiggy shot back.

  “I forget.” Dotty shrugged. “Look, just drop it, will you? I only met her a few times and halfa what she said I never believed anyways, she was such a liar.”

  Huller had turned to Wallace. “You ever meet her before, the one she told about?”

  “Nope.” Wallace shook his head and thought hard. “But I heard of her. Some place-ter-other.”

  Dotty’s story had confused him. After she and Jiggy left in the truck to get milk for Alma and to find a suitable telephone booth for their call to the Birds, Wallace took out his clipping. Only a few of the letters would come together, just the easy ones like and, the, me. He stared at the print and tried to remember how the story went. But Dotty’s story kept intruding, so that Canny was sitting in a dimly lit room in front of the television set, while in the distance the pigman’s hogs squealed, which was crazy, because the only pigman he ever knew was back in the Flatts. And Buntie the bloodhound was licking a dead man’s face. Blood and gore trickled down its drool, and from the fleshy detritus assembled a face, bleary-eyed and black-whiskered, a face he knew, had known, had seen, feared, avoided on the mountain roads and down by Ida’s on Fridays. And Canny held up her arms and screamed, “Poppy! Poppy!” And when he went to pick her up, the dog sprang and its fangs tore into his throat, into the soft underflesh of his jaw, where a mouth began to suck, began to work, to suckle his blood.

  The door banged. Framed by the harsh glare of the doorway were Alma and Canny.

  “She got bugs?” Alma demanded. Breathless and furious, she pushed Canny out in front of her.

  “I ain’t got bugs!” Canny said indignantly. “Tell her I ain’t got bugs.” Her eyes widened on Wallace’s for confirmation.

  “She ain’t got bugs,” he said.

  “Then how come she’s always scratching her head and what the hell’d she want kerosene this morning for?” asked Alma.

  “Her head’s itchy.” Wallace shrugged. He looked at Canny. “How come your head’s itchy?” he asked softly.

  “’Cause of the heat,” Canny said, jerking her bare shoulder out of Alma’s rigid grasp, which left the indentation of deep, colorless half-moons where her nails had been. “Makes me itch.”

  Alma’s eyes narrowed. “Well, what’d she want kerosene for?”

  “What’d ya want kerosene for?” Wallace asked Canny. A look of panic came over her. “I was thirsty,” she told him. “It was hot and I was thirsty.”

  “She was hot,” repeated Wallace, looking to Alma. “And she was thirsty.”

  “You were gonna drink it?” Alma asked.

  “I thought it was cider,” Canny said, with clear, wide eyes.

  Alma sniffled and drew the side of her sweaty face across her shoulder. “You’re not a very smart little girl,” she said. “Causing all this trouble just ’cause you’re stupid.” And then, as if unstoppered, a great weeping cry drained from her. She sagged onto the edge of the bed and bawled. She sat with her feet so far apart that Wallace could see her huge white panties. He stared at a point behind her head, at the yellow knothole that bled through the whitewashed pine boards.

  “Everything’s just falling apart,” she cried. “My whole life’s just falling apart.”

  “What time is it?” Dotty called out to Jiggy. “Six,” he answered.

  It was suppertime, but no one was very hungry. Jiggy sat on the front porch, tilted back in a wooden chair with his feet propped on the splintered railing. On the floor beside him was the six-pack Dotty had just brought out from the refrigerator. She wore black shorts and a white halter top that kept slipping down. She couldn’t stay still. Alma was in bed, complaining of a bellyache, so Dotty was frying bacon and scrambling eggs in a black iron pan. She kept going out to the porch every few minutes to see if Jiggy needed anything else.

  When it was time to eat, Wallace turned off the television and trailed the three children into the kitchen. He noticed that in the space of only a few minutes they had all scratched their heads. Dotty set the pan of eggs and bacon directly on the table and told them to help themselves. She went to the door and leaned against the frame. “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Six thirty-five,” Huller answered.

  She sighed and pressed her forehead against the screen. Wallace bent low over his plate. Suddenly, Krystal spit her eggs into her plate and burst into tears. Kelly had kicked her under the table. Canny went on eating and said no
thing. She reminded Wallace of a small gray mouse. Once or twice she glanced at him. Everything about her seemed lifeless and dull. Only her eyes shone.

  “She kicked me!” Krystal charged.

  “Liar!” Kelly sniffed.

  “What time is it?” Dotty asked again.

  “Six forty,” Huller called back.

  “Gross!” Krystal gasped and pointed at her sister. “She’s showing her food!”

  “Fuck face,” Kelly leaned forward and whispered, eggs frothing between her teeth.

  At that, Krystal took up a fistful of eggs that had catsup on them and flung them at her sister, missing the mark entirely and, instead, hitting Dotty’s bare back. In a blind rage, Dotty flew at the little girl and slapped her.

  “Mommy!” Krystal ran upstairs screaming, the mark of Dotty’s hand hot on her cheek. Her screams knifed through the house.

  “Jesus Christ,” Huller muttered from the porch. He sat forward and, one by one, hurled the empty cans at the dog, who had been sleeping in the driveway.

  “Now I gotta change!” Dotty cried, running between the bathroom and the porch door. “What time is it? I got time to change? Goddamn, I didn’t mean to hit her … oh shit … oh God, I feel like my head’s gonna blow fuckin’ off, I’m so nervous. Wipe me off, Poppy.” She stood with her back to him so he could clean away the mess. “You’re such a little bitch,” she scolded Kelly, reaching behind her back to shake out the halter top. “You’re just the meanest little bitch I ever knew!” Her voice was shredding, falling apart.

  The child’s face hardened and her eyes seemed to sink into her skull. “I can’t wait till you get arrested,” Kelly said, and held out her chin and did not flinch or blink when Dotty bent over her, but continued to stare up coldly at her ashen face.