Benny sat in the one truly comfortable chair he owned—the upholstered rocker, the one with thin looping swan’s necks supporting the frayed armrests, the chair Benny had hauled, with its attendant ottoman, throughout his adult life because … well, because it seemed the right thing to do, the chair sitting now by the window overlooking the front yard and driveways—and took his boots off immediately. His poor toe oozed pus from beneath the Band-Aid he’d gotten from Jeeter. If it had been a normal day, Benny might’ve turned the news on, had himself a cold beer. But what could he possibly find in the news of the day to provide ballast? What, in that flickering shadowbox with its heartless circuitry, its cabled analogue IV drip, could provide guidance or explanation for the things he saw out by the river? Even more pressing, how to reconcile the apparent, possibly growing, lack of concern for the person of the drowned girl? Benny had watched her die. She walked into the water. She didn’t resurface. Benny did nothing to stop her. But what could he have done? She just walked right off the solid earth and was gone before Benny had time to react. There was no hesitation. No ceremony. No pomp and circumstance. In fact, her death was quite unremarkable. If not for the video camera, the whole thing could easily be dismissed as a daydream. Or relegated into that vault of unattended memories that eventually shrivel into dust motes, to be blown willy-nilly and forever lost in the craggy deserts of the cerebral cortex. There ought to be, Benny thought, some acknowledgment of the event. Of the moment. Of the loss. If we, each and every one of us, are as invaluable to this world as we so adamantly profess to be, doesn’t it stand to reason that, for each human that dies, the entire natural world should stop in its tracks and bemoan the passing? Wouldn’t the grackles bow, wings over beak, and lament? Trees—sycamore, oak, all of them—lower their branches, leaves curl in on themselves? Shouldn’t the waves acquiesce to gravity and lay flat? Fishes roll belly-up in sorrow? Ought not the constellations to reconfigure for a moment of silence? The girl was dead; Benny was the only living soul that knew it. And for now she was just a dead girl, with the emphasis on dead.
“Squat,” Benny said, shifting his foot slightly. “Quit it.” But the dog kept licking Benny’s toe. Truth be known, Benny only half wanted Squat to cease and desist; he’d grown up hearing, thus believing, that there was something curative about a dog licking your wounds.
Even with the windows open, the neighborhood seemed quiet to Benny. Doodle blew her nose. Laughed out loud at something. Opened, then closed, her silverware drawer. Because it stood by her bed, against the wall they shared, Benny could hear the incessant trickle of water through her fish-tank filter. Jeeter was the one that talked Doodle into setting up the tank; he ought to be the one to help her move it.
Benny looked out the window at his van. He looked back at the clock, an Eiffel Tower made of wire with a face lodged at its midpoint, hanging over his sink. He should’ve been hungry by then. Benny sat and thought about lots of things: macaroni and cheese, the re-lampingjob he had to do tomorrow, how to get the tapes out of the van without being seen, Ramen noodles, his throbbing toe, what to do with the tapes if and when he did get them inside. Benny didn’t have a VCR. It was an unclear point of pride for him.
Laundry. Benny had a load of dirty laundry in the two plastic milk crates beneath his bed, a good reason to go to his truck. Sometimes Benny did his washing at Dink’s, but usually he took it to Nub and Honey’s house. Neither he nor Doodle had a washer or dryer, but Doodle regularly filled the clothesline that stretched from the back of the house out to the power pole in the corner of the yard with hand-washed socks, panty hose, shirts, and underwear. Benny stood, working hard over the decision of whether to go to the refrigerator for food, or to drag the dirty laundry from beneath his bed and take it out to the van. Then, as if by telepathic coincidence, the phone rang.
“Whatcha doin’?”
It was Little Dink.
“Eating supper,” Benny lied.
“Let’s go to Shuffletown.” Dink didn’t have a car, only a moped. “They’re racing tonight.”
“Can’t,” Benny said. “I have to help Doodle.”
“You gonna poke that poon this evenin’?”
“She wants me to move her fish tank.”
“That’s what I’m saying! You gonna’ move her fish tank?”
“I got to go, Dink.”
“You ever lick her butt hole?”
“Good-bye, Dink”
“I wouldn’t lick that thang. Too dang old for me!”
“I’m hanging up the phone now, Dink.”
“I’d look at it, tho…”
Benny hung up. From through the wall he heard Doodle fart, which, surprisingly, she didn’t do, audibly, often. A different day, a different mood, and Benny would try to work up a sympathy fart. Little Dink was, at worst, an annoyance. At best he was a harmless, and in many ways helpless, friend. Benny knew that Little Dink had a shunt. Had it since he was a kid. Benny’d known it forever, but he really wasn’t sure what the shunt did. It—the shunt, as well as the musky odor and nocturnal-animal quality with which Dink carried himself—was the kind of thing that made people both suspicious and strangely tolerant. Of Dink’s incessant, obsessive, crude-to-the-point-of-infuriating sexual comments, Benny chalked them up to the shunt. As for those other, more covert, behaviors, who knew? When Dink was a kid, they all played in the red-dirt gullies back in the woods behind the mill. Someone had tied a thick jute rope to the top of a massive poplar tree whose branches hung out over the eroded gouge in the earth. All the kids took turns swinging. Back and forth. Back and forth. For years. Little Dink just happened to be on the rope when it finally broke. Happenstance. Any other possibility was denied. Dink had always been a little odd; even among the everyday oddity of mill-hill life, he stood out. But after his month as a shut-in, convalescing from the fall, Little Dink was stranger than ever. And that’s when the nonstop sex talk started.
Little Dink ran his folks’ business. Which is to say, he maintained the laundry and car-wash equipment. His father was dead, and his mother was resisting mightily any suggestion that she go to the Brian Center, where the old and infirm came from miles around to while away their last days strapped wheezing to wheelchairs or gurneys. Dink never got a driver’s license, and everybody who knew him was sure that he’d be killed one day on the puttering, smoke-belching little moped he constantly rode around town. Most likely, he’d be run down by a semi out on the bypass where, every Saturday, Dink went to the Kroger’s Super-Supermarket at lunchtime for the abundance of free samples. At the end of nearly every aisle somebody was giving away something spread on a cracker or impaled on a toothpick. Lordy, how Dink’s eyes rolled, his tongue flicked, when he talked about Kroger’s.
Doodle’s phone rang. Benny heard her go out the back door where she often sat on the patio, in one of those ubiquitous molded plastic chairs, and talked. He usually tried not to listen. A car door slammed down the block and Benny jumped. He fingered the Venetian blinds, peered out to make sure no kids were playing around his van. His van. And the terrible secret locked up inside it. What exactly was the secret? That someone died? No. More than that. Don’t get the impression that Benny was a stranger to death. In many ways, tragedy had been his boon companion since childhood. Here’s a story, informed by memory and its attendant mythomania.
SHOOKS. That’s all the sign said. SHOOKS—routed out of plywood, painted olive green, hung from two fat posts over, and sometimes obscured by, a thicket of nandina bushes. It could’ve been anything. No punctuation. No symbol or image to suggest or clue. If you didn’t know that the sign referred to the seven mobile homes, most without skirting or foundation, at the far end of the one-lane gravel road that snaked behind the old white house, a peeling two-story farmhouse, built too close to the macadam for comfort, whose front lawn and nandina bushes garnished the sign, owned by one Mr. Shocks, trailers laid out around the horseshoe
loop (a historic design pattern found throughout the South) of the drive in what used to be, when old man Shocks was a boy, a goat pasture, at the center of which, then, sat a barn—nothing left by the time Benny was born but the stone foundation with a gnarled black walnut tree reaching up and out from its center—if you didn’t know about Shooks’s trailer park, then you had no business there.
Benny had business there. Briefly. It’s where his parents lived. Past tense.
Shocks lay at the far end, the worst end, of an unincorporated community called Thankyalord. However, most of the hundred-fifty-odd residents had long since given up the ghost on gratitude, and spent their time waiting for their government checks, furiously spending that pittance, or conniving and planning ways to get injured so that they might start receiving even more disability checks.
Pete Shocks had standards, though. If you wanted to live in his trailer park, you had to have a job. Of the six trailers Shocks rented out—he kept the one closest to his house empty for personal reasons—all the residents of working age did so in some capacity or another.
Pete Shocks, sitting up in the back bedroom of his house, lording beneficently over his domain, saw it all coming that day. It was hot. Afternoon. And so oppressively humid that no one would’ve been surprised to step out in the backyard and find the grass alive with minnows, silver and bellyflopping, and more, having swum heavenward from the creek down the road, falling out of the sky. Pete Shocks saw it all coming. What he couldn’t see, he intuited. Because it was Sunday, he saw that the young Crews brothers were not at work logging for pulpwood. JC, the youngest, slept beneath a circulating fan on the couch in their trailer. DW and AJ, sweating profusely, pitched horseshoes in the regulation-sized pit laid out within the barn foundation. A motley flock of guineas wandered the grounds, wandering occasionally into the path of a flying horseshoe.
Ralph White, the sometime garbage collector, planned to join the Crews brothers at horseshoes after he finished sanding the rust from an old wrought-iron bed he found earlier in the week. Ralph liked to work in the backyard for the off-chance look at Myrtle Plowman in the next trailer over, for whom he’d silently carried a torch since she moved in. Myrtle worked at the cotton mill. Heavy in the rump, with an amazing bladelike nose, she was everything the scrawny, nearly pickled Ralph dreamt about. Beautiful without vanity. Devout without sanctimony. Prone to singing hymns, unselfconsciously and with rapture, throughout the day. And married to a complete buffoon. Mr. Plowman was never at home. He was a loom fixer at the mill, with a puffed-up sense of self-worth, and preferred the company of grease and wrenches to the woman he wedded. This indifference was sunshine and rain for the seeds of Ralph White’s desire. He never missed an opportunity to help Myrtle with one household task or another that needed the male influence. Myrtle suffered her husband’s absence with dignity. Whether or not she knew the effect it had on Ralph when, on warm evenings, she’d sit on her back porch in a house-dress of muted floral print, sit in a straightback chair with a dishpan cradled in her lap, shelling peas—pinching back the stem and string, easing open the thin shell at the seam with both thumbs, pulling one deft digit, a thumbtip, through the verdant membraneous trough, raking the peas out in a soft rain—and singing or humming softly to herself: “A Closer Walk With Thee,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “I’ll Fly Away”; whether Myrtle had even the vaguest notion of the powerful stirrings these simple domestic acts generated in the industrious but skittish trash collector living next door was open to debate. She was a woman, no doubt, young enough, of this earth and therefore fecund. But you could not, in good faith, accuse her of either dalliance or coquettishness.
That day, it was too hot to shell peas on the back porch. Pete Shocks had a feeling, and when the rogue breeze pushed aside the curtains of her bathroom window the briefest shadowy glimpse, that Myrtle was engaged in her only decadence, the long bath. Ralph, in his own backyard, rubbed at the rusty bars of the old bed with a steel-wool pad clutched in his sweaty palm. Myrtle sang through the window; Ralph struggled to keep time to her singing with his strokes, and to position himself so that the erection pushing so desperately against his overalls would not be immediately obvious to anyone who happened to look his way. Everybody at Shocks, except for, maybe, Myrtle, knew how Ralph felt; there were contradictory opinions about Myrtle’s position. Nevertheless, it was too hot that day for her to be anywhere out of doors. Had Ralph known, had Pete told him, that Myrtle was lying, naked but for the damp rag on her forehead, in a bathtub full of cool water, just beyond the window closest to him, Ralph’s poor rummaging heart may not have been able to stand it. Had Ralph known, or Pete suspected, that Myrtle had sung herself almost to sleep, had slipped into that sort of semiconscious place wherein the mind lets down its guard and makes itself available to forces both inside and out, a warp in everyday reality where the keening of a cicada can mutate into love songs, where the flick of a housecat’s tail brushing one’s wrist as it walks by becomes a tongue, both welcome and feared, had the two men known this about Myrtle, and more, had they understood that despite her moral fortitude, she had succumbed, there in the raw wet moment, to the dream state, had in fact taken the aural gift of Ralph’s rhythmic sanding to heart and was at that moment thoroughly engorged down there, the two tight buds of her nipples blossoming above the water’s surface, had they known … well, it’s best that it didn’t happen that way.
Pete Shocks knew most everything that went on in his trailer park. He felt it was his right and his obligation. You cannot protect and manage from a place of ignorance. He was well aware that Old Lady Dishman, the most reclusive resident of them all, was holed up in her trailer with the blinds drawn and the doors closed. He knew she was alive because of the weekly delivery of snuff, groceries, and tablets of lined writing paper from the store. Pete made sure her bills got paid.
Pete knew the mimosa trees and the lilac bushes. He knew the yellow jackets’ nest in the rock wall. He knew the toad that lived inside the door of the well house. He knew of the hatred between Shooks neighbors Ed Pinch and Ed Sault, one an erstwhile preacher, the other a dedicated heathen. A hatred, shared by their wives, that manifested most often in bitter silence and spiteful petty acts. A hatred not embraced by their children, the three Pinch boys and the Sault brother and sister, who were that day gathering bugs—beetles, roly-polies, caterpillars, anything slow enough to be captured—and dropping them one by one into a small bonfire made of a pair of old work boots doused in gasoline, built next to the stone barn foundation.
Pete knew that in the farthest trailer, a two-tone thing with a sleeping berth at one end that made it look somewhat shiplike, a young couple, tired but proud, and in love, was easing into their first act of intimacy after bringing their newborn son from the hospital not two weeks before. Mayree Poteat had endured a hard, hard labor, but she was a dutiful wife, and eager in those matters. Nevertheless, when, as they lay naked for comfort from the heat on the narrow bed they shared with their infant, when Maynard’s hand slipped from its resting place on Mayree’s loose paunch, that sweet space where Benny had taken root and grew, when the hand eased on down to the tender portico of her sex, not selfishly, but unthinkingly, he was gently rebuffed.
Benny lay peacefully, sucking a sugar-tit, on a folded up quilt tucked into a peach crate beside the bed. Maynard moved on to a more tolerable expression of his love, putting his fingertip to Mayree’s nipples again and again, transferring tiny beads of the watery milk that seeped out to his mouth. It was Sunday. The next day, Maynard would go back to work as chief fry cook at Nub & Honey’s. In a few weeks, Mayree expected to go back as well, cashiering for a while until she felt strong enough to waitress again.
But while Pete knew most everything about Shocks, its politics and shenanigans, its hopes and shortcomings, its hothouse qualities, and could, sometimes wisely, often, less so, muck about in the lives and livelihoods of his renters, he was powerless against many thing
s. Weather, for instance.
Pete saw the sky change. Saw it go from the bleached impenetrable gray to a luminous green, the color of an angry sea. He saw the leaves on the sugar maple trees along the paved road furl and present their undersides. He witnessed the already-nervous guineas cower and tremble. A black presence grew and loomed on the western horizon. Massive and wicked-looking, the presence was ushered in by a moment of immaculate silence. The mockingbirds shushed. The cicadas and crickets stilled their tegmens. Snapping turtles wouldn’t snap. Even the burning boots stopped their sizzle and pop. The kids didn’t laugh. Ralph White stopped sanding in mid-stroke. Myrtle held her dreaming tongue; the cool tub water refused to splash around her nakedness.
Everyone else was standing still, expectant, when DW Crews flung his horseshoe, flung it mostly because he was already in midpitch when the silence descended. The iron U cut the quiet air in a high graceful arc and it rang the post with a thunderous clink. Round and round the horseshoe spun, bringing with it the biggest tornado to hit Thankyalord in a century.
Visits from the Drowned Girl Page 5
