Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

  Chapter 7

  “You look tired, Benny,” Honey said. “You been sleeping okay?”

  “Yeah,” Benny answered. A lie. “Where’s Nub?”

  “Gone to the bank, I think. You need him?” Honey worked as she talked, wrapping tinny forks and dulled knives in paper napkins. Three folds and a roll. She loved that task for its meditative quality.

  “No, just wondering. Who’s here?” Benny asked, turning so that Honey could tie his apron in the back.

  “Me and Scotty. What’s wrong with your foot?”

  The toe was improving, but slowly. Benny limped.

  Scotty was the dishwasher. Honey, more mother than boss to most of the employees of the restaurant, but especially to Benny, ran the cash register and greeted folks as they came in the door. Nub & Honey’s Fish-camp, Est. 1961, sat in a clearing hacked out of a pine grove at the end of a dirt road somewhere in Buncombe County. For the first twenty years of its existence, the single-story clapboard building operated as a liquor and gambling house that just happened to have a deep-fat fryer because the proprietors eventually figured out that their customers would drink longer and more if they occasionally got some other form of nourishment, preferably salty. Secluded, but not really secret, the business ran successfully until the third reported homicide, or was it suicide, forced the county, caving in to ample Baptist protest, to close it down. Nub got the building for a song (and more work than he cared to remember trying to get the various stains out of the floors, walls, and ceilings).

  “Hey, Scotty.”

  “Hey, Benny.”

  “Did you get them shrimp peeled?”

  “Yep.”

  He, Benny, had been underfoot at the restaurant since his first toddling steps. Before that, Honey kept him in a bassinet near the register. By the age of ten, Benny was sweeping floors and refilling iced-tea glasses on busy nights; at thirteen he filleted flounders as well as any man. Scotty, a pimply kid struggling to pass driver’s ed, had a ways to go before he could be trusted with any serious kitchen task, but Benny was patient.

  “What’re you doing now?” Benny asked.

  “Got to mop the Buoys and Gulls,” he answered, almost giggling. Scotty hadn’t been there long enough for the bathroom signs to lose their humor. Or maybe he was just slow on the uptake.

  “Did Nub ask you to feed the fish?”

  “Yep.”

  Benny never minded coming to work early. Usually, he liked the semi-quiet time before the other cooks and the waitresses got there. Liked the way the pitch increased incrementally, predictably, as the afternoon pro­gressed. Sometimes he sat and watched the angelfish in the fifty-five-gallon tank Jeeter installed a few years ago; Nub was his first official client. The fish were beautiful. Exotic, even, with names like “Gold Marble,” “Black Lace,” and “Smoky Blue Blushing,” their veiled fins trailing behind as they glided effortlessly among the driftwood and Amazon swordplants. A small foyer, lined with Naugahyde-covered benches, opened into the main dining area of Nub & Honey’s, where the sea-floor mural covering the length of the back wall had begun to peel, and where in each corner of the ceiling hung a fishing net filled with plastic lobsters and shells, and that room was flanked on either side by smaller rooms, one of which could be rented for private parties, anniversaries, and such. Sometimes, particularly weekends, when the wait for an open table could be up to half an hour, things got a little tense and edgy in the foyer. Honey doled out mints and platitudes from the cash register, but often that wasn’t enough. Jeeter convinced Nub that a fish tank in the foyer would bring a sense of calm. By God, he was right. The kids loved it. And even the adults usually chose to watch the angelfish, prolific and diligent parents, rather than complain to Honey.

  Benny was too distracted that day to pay attention to the fish. His secret gnawed at him from within and pressed him from the outside. Despite its intangibility, the thing got in the way in a very physical sense. Benny could not think clearly; therefore, he did not act clearly. At three o’clock the other cooks would come in: Spalding, who helped with the fryers, and Rob, who took care of everything else. Nub & Honey’s menu—a complicated affair of platters and combinations (perch, flounder, catfish, trout, oysters, shrimp popcorn or jumbo, scallops, stuffed crab, crab legs) fried (salt-and-pepper, cornmeal, or traditional breading) or broiled (not both, unless you pay extra), bowl after bowl of hush puppies on every table, and the choice of onion rings, salad, baked potato, fries, or coleslaw—required a good bit of precision work if things were to flow smoothly.

  By four, two of the waitresses, usually Doodle and Audrey, would be there making tea and refilling the tartar-sauce squeeze bottles. Then, at five-thirty, Ruth and Jonette, both career girls at Nub & Honey’s, arrived. When the doors opened for business at a quarter to six, the swelling crowd of fish-eaters, the sounds of clinking glass and chatter and fork tines against knives and ice and pouring water and tea and laughing and the cash register and dishes would build and build in orchestralike fashion until the crescendo at around eight o’clock, when things would just fizzle out. That vacuum, that space left by retreating sound, brought solace to all who worked in it—all but Nub, probably. His office filled to overflowing what used to be a closet at the back of the kitchen. He’d hacked a window to the outside and made a gravel drive-up lane, where he sat the night, filling take-out orders and watching televangelists on an eight-inch TV screen, getting more pissed off at them as the night went by.

  “Hey, Scotty,” Benny called as the boy dumped his mop water into the drain. “I need you to peel and quarter these onions for me.”

  “Sure thing, boss man.”

  Benny pulled a case of lemons from the walk-in, a knife and cutting board from the dish racks, and went about the business of slicing. Halved. Quartered. Into eighths, if the lemon was big enough. Benny tucked a wedge into his mouth, bit down, and sucked. Hoping for something in the tart shock, some way of understanding revealed. Why? Why hadn’t he reported the drowned girl’s death? Why had he kept her possessions? Why hadn’t he, at least, watched the tapes? Benny spat the lemon wedge into the trash, slipped another in its place. Bitter and pithy. Nub came in the back door with a cloth sack full of change.

  “Hey, Benny.”

  “Hey, Nub.”

  Nub, a gentle and sweet man despite that televangelist nonsense, was by some accounts oblivious to the day-to-day workings of his business.

  That Friday night, as with countless Friday nights before it, while the bats whipped up the dusky Carolina sky, most of the fish-eating population in a thirty-mile radius would return to Nub’s restaurant and grease their chins around his tables.

  Once, for a whole summer, Benny wrote down on the grainy white expanse of a take-out bag the names of those who came to Nub & Honey’s Fishcamp. Benny headed and dated the list—The (Mostly) Regulars: July-August, 1985, penciled beneath the Rite-White Bags label—and tacked it on the corkboard by the employee bathroom, where over rime it became faded, spattered with ketchup and tartar sauce, and scribbled on, but remained nonetheless an impressive tribute to Buncombe County’s potentate of hush puppies and popcorn shrimp.

  From Buncombe, then, came the Chuck Crouches and the Plevels, and a man named Edsell, who Benny knew from the Ford place, and Superintendent Haw Mayhew, who lapsed into a coma at a tractor pull last summer up in Virginia. And the Ridenhours and the Dew Belks, and a small herd named Diggs, who always took up several tables in the big room and snorted through bared teeth when they laughed. And the Whitlows and the Masseys (or rather Lem Bolick and Mr. Massey’s wife) and Trow Ketchie, whose body hair, they say, fell off one winter morning for no good reason at all.

  Bill Raby was from Buncombe County, if Benny remembered correctly. He only came one time, on an old Norton motorcycle and wearing leather chaps, and got blessed out in the parking lot by a Mary Kay representative. From out near the ri
vers came the Ingles and the G. G. Huff-mans, and the Isaac Myerses from somewhere up north, and the Jimperts and the Big Penson Skeens. Penson came three nights in a row before being born again during an impromptu parking-lot homily. So slain in the spirit was Penson that, one by one, he picked up the back ends of nearly every car in the lot. The Rinehardts came, too, and Mrs. Eula, who was believed to be a hundred and three, and Jim John McKinzie, and the Ruckers, and Spivy, who owned the first Jiffy Lube in town, and Spivy’s dirty sons.

  From Alamance County came the Byers and the Awlreadys and Ed Sault and Ed Pinch, who remained neighbors, Shumake the erstwhile mayor, and one Mister Honeycutt, who ran the triple-X drive-in and adult novelty stores just beyond the town line, and Mullis and Strom Craven and Lloyd T. Downers (Junior) and Shaw Spanks, all engaged in the burgeoning vice industry in one way or another. And the Eeberns and the Yateses and Connie Trivett, sister to that Trivett who cut off his wife’s toe to pay a gambling debt. Rev. Chambers, the tent revivalist, came there, and Mitch Hambright and Maynard (“Pup”) Suggs and the Tousignants and Andy Auten—they came to eat crab legs, and when Pup Suggs staggered into the bathroom it meant he had overeaten and the tattooed and multi-pierced girls who worked with him, third shift, on the box-and-tape line at Draymore Shirt Factory would have to cover for him that night.

  A man named Settlemeyer was there so often and so long that he occasionally pitched in to bus tables when things got hectic—Benny seriously doubted that Nub paid him for the service. Of the entertainment types, there were Eve Sinclair and Salina Tweens, exotic dancers, Shoshana Wingate, who was rumored to have appeared in some network TV commercials as a girl (Benny believed it; she was beautiful), and Yates Bumgarner, the wrestler. Also from Alamance County were the Brawleys and the Novernes and Fran Kistler and the Tubroses and the Witherspoons and the Culbertsons and the now-divorced Curtises, whose open hatred toward each other made shopping in their Hallmark franchise painful but irresistible.

  Dexter Brackett always arrived with two other guys. One claimed to have a fifteen-inch penis; the other was said to be a hermaphrodite. You couldn’t tell from looking at them if either was true, or which was which. There was one girl whose name Benny refused to speak; she lost her virginity, at least once every summer, draped over the life-size plastic cow on the roof of the Dairy Barn. And then there were all the sad daughters of the great NASCAR drivers, who came and went together, a tight pack jockeying for vague positions of power, flashy and too loud for such a small restaurant.

  In addition to all these, Benny remembered, from time to time, other folks who frequented the restaurant. Humpy Wheeler came there at least once and the Fish sisters and G. I. Cockrell, who returned from Vietnam with a plate in his head and not a lick of sense, and Ms. Rummage and Mr. Lawler, her significant other, and Chiquita Arnot-Smith and Mr. D. Dauber, once famous all over the state for his motivational speeches, and Widow Tucker with a man reputed to be her plastic surgeon, and, believe it or not, the best damn country music star ever to pick a tune whose name, it goes without saying, didn’t even need to be called.

  These were the people that dined at Nub & Honey’s Fishcamp.

  “Here’s your onions, Benny.” Scotty clanked the metal bowl down on the table in front of Benny, whose eyes began to sting immediately.

  “Thanks, Scotty.”

  Benny took the bowl of quartered onions and put them in the buffalo chopper with the pickles and capers. He turned away while the chopper worked, but the action didn’t prevent the burning tears. It happened every time Benny handled onions.

  “Why don’t you let me do that?” Scotty asked. “If it hurts you so damn much.”

  “I don’t mind,” Benny said.

  He seasoned the mixture. Put it in the Hobart with the mayonnaise and lemon juice. All measured by sight. Making tartar sauce was about derivation. Sometimes subtle, sometimes extreme. As long as the concept of a thing, tartar sauce for instance, were met, who cared if it tasted a little saltier or had more sweet relish than the last time? Everything, really, was about derivations. There were no new experiences, or ideas, or sauces. Just revisions.

  “Hey, Benny Poteat.”

  Benny looked around, half-expecting Doodle’s bare breasts, the lemon wedge a yellow beacon behind his lips.

  “Sexy dentures,” she said, tucking an order pad into her apron pocket.

  “You look tired,” she said. “How is Dink?”

  “Waah,” Benny spat the lemon wedge into the garbage. “What?”

  “Dink? Didn’t you take him to the doctor?”

  “Oh. Yeah. He’s pitiful as ever, but healthy.” Benny’s lies seemed to come easier. He lifted the dish rack full of clear, clean squirt bottles onto the counter. “Will you do something for me?”

  “What you got in mind, big boy?” Doodle winked. “Got some fresh sauce for me?”

  “Can you get Audrey to fill these?” Benny asked.

  “No, sourpuss. I’ll do them myself Audrey’s liable to pitch a conniption fit if I ask her.”

  “Ask me what?” Audrey stood behind Doodle, curling her hair into a bun.

  And so the night began. Benny behind schedule. Audrey in a tiff. Rob came in late because his wife had blood in her stools that morning, which he repeated to everyone in the kitchen at least a dozen times before Nub took him in the office and closed the door. Ruth decided she couldn’t walk another step with the corn on her big toe, so she leapt full-force into a multistage home-remedy process that left her sitting on an upturned pickle bucket shoeless for a good hour. Honey couldn’t find the mints to replenish the bowl by the cash register. And nobody knew if the dirt-track race out at the fairgrounds had been canceled. But by six the customers were stacked at the door and a modicum of order had been restored.

  “What’s the worst thing you ever saw, Doodle?” Benny sidled up to her by the ice machine.

  “What do you mean? Like a car crash or something?” She lined up glasses for a four top, then clipped an order to the wheel.

  “A car crash. Or anything.” Benny took the order, called it to Rob and Spaulding. “Something that really fucked with you.”

  “Let me think about it,” Doodle said on her way out into the dining room.

  The night progressed. Scotty only broke three plates. And that was because he and Benny were having a long, complicated discussion about climbing towers. Things began to slow down around seven-thirty. Doodle pulled a pecan pie from the reach-in cooler and called Benny over.

  “One time out at the lake, at a party, I saw these guys pull a chain with this really drunk girl.”

  “Pull a what?” Benny asked. He held the pie in place as she sliced it.

  “Pull a chain,” she said. “You know…” And when it was apparent that Benny didn’t know, she offered, “They gangbanged her. For hours.” Doodle raked the knife blade with her finger, then stuck the finger in her mouth.

  “How come nobody stopped them?”

  “Everybody that was there took part. She was a mess.”

  “Did you know them?” Benny asked.

  “I did.”

  Audrey came into the kitchen to make a fresh pot of coffee. They stopped talking until she left.

  “Did you know her?”

  Nub shrieked at the television.

  “Why are you asking this stuff, Benny?”

  “Did you ever see anybody die?”

  “Well, yeah. Sure … a couple times. But dying is the easy part.”

  Later, much later, after the customers had gone home to their antacids and dual La-Z-Boys, after the noise, after the tubs of cocktail and tartar sauce were put in the walk-in, after the grease in the deep-fat fryers had begun to congeal and the odor of bleach subsided and Nub & Honey’s fell into a brief torpor, Doodle and Benny sat on their shared back patio after work, smelling of fish and grease
and sweat, and split a beer. Benny fed Squat some leftover shrimp from a Styrofoam box.

  “So?” Doodle asked.

  “So what?”

  “What’s the worse thing you’ve ever seen?”

  “I’m still trying to figure that out.”

  Chapter 8

  The first thing Benny noticed upon pulling into the Claxton Looms Apartments parking lot the next day was the placard:

  Employee of the Month

  Rebecca Hinkey

  It hung from, and partly obscured, a sign reading:

  Reserved for Resident Manager

  Rebecca Hinkey

  A car sat in the parking space, a clean car. Benny figured two things. If she’d been gone from work for more than a week, Rebecca Hinkey probably wouldn’t still be Employee of the Month. And the car wouldn’t be so clean. Evidence thus far indicated that the drowned girl was not Rebecca Hinkey. Evidence. By now he’d begun to think of the drowned girl as his own personal mystery. Benny maneuvered his cumbersome van into a tiny spot allocated for visitors.

  He hadn’t planned on going there. In fact, he had actually headed toward Jeeter’s then, with him, planned to go to the flea market to look for a CD player for the van. And he needed some milk and cereal from the grocery store. Twenty minutes later found him parked by the mirrored doors of Claxton Looms Apartments. Twenty-three minutes found him opening those same doors and walking inside. Twenty-four? He stood in the marble foyer, transfixed by the vision before him. Benny had seen plenty of fish tanks in his day. Lord knows, there were enough fish, dead and alive, in his life that it seemed like thematic overkill even to Benny. As if fate were hammering home some point that he was always just a little too dense to get. But the tank in the foyer of Claxton Looms housed a creature he’d never, ever, seen before. It was big, the tank. A hundred, maybe a hundred-fifty gallons, saltwater, and contained within the interior wall of the room so that it was the first, and only, thing you saw upon entering. Benny deduced that it was a saltwater tank by the artful arrangement of bleached coral and delicate, beautiful, but lifeless sponges, gorgonia, and sea fans rising from a substrate of crushed oyster shells, by the brilliant lighting, and by the livestock: tangs the color of lemons, a pair of animated clownfish, wrasses, and something called a “dog-faced puffer” he’d only seen pictures of Nowhere, however, not in pictures, nor encyclopedias, nor in real life, nor even in his dreams, had Benny seen a thing like the one sitting atop the stepladder that rose from the substrate, through the depths of the aquarium, toward the surface. It was a woman. A tiny woman, in tiny-woman clothes, perched on the ladder, her shoe-clad feet crossed on the second rung. She held a small jar in one hand, reached out with the other, and seemed to be negotiating a conflict between a moray eel, a snowflake moray whose gaping, beakish mouth could swallow her whole, and a lionfish with elaborate, venomous fins. Steady she sat, in the current that worked the gills and fins of these fishes that were held captive by her presence, and fearlessly decreed in miniature. And when she finished, the little woman climbed, with exaggerated care, down the step-ladder and walked across the substrate, out of sight.