Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

  “Hey, sexy,” Benny said. “How’d you know it was me?” he asked, feeling playful. And genuinely appreciating the sight of Doodle’s behind. Doodle answered without turning around.

  “Radar,” she said, wiggling again. “When are you gonna do more than just whistle at this thing?”

  Benny walked up behind her, and pinched.

  “There,” he said. “What’re you doing?”

  “Careful, now,” Doodle said. “Don’t let your passion get the best of you.” She turned and sat on the stoop, facing Benny. “I’m planting tomatoes, like I do every year. And I’m sure, after the rabbits and the raccoons eat their fill, I’ll harvest three pitiful little wormy tomatoes, like I do every year.”

  Benny sat on the stoop.

  “I admire your spunk,” Benny said. “They say trying is what counts.”

  “Do they? I always found counting the tomatoes a more reliable conclusion.”

  “Me and Jeeter are going to the flea market tomorrow. You want to go?” Benny asked.

  “Can’t,” she answered.

  “I’ll get you some more dirty books,” he said.

  “Ooo! You do know how to satisfy a woman, Benny Poteat.”

  “Hey, Doodle, you got a VCR?”

  “Yeah. I do, but it’s busted. Why?”

  “Just wondering. How much did it cost?” Benny stood up.

  “Didn’t cost me anything.” Doodle stood up, brushed the hair from her eyes, leaving behind a smudge of black dirt on her forehead. “By the way, you never told me the worst thing you ever saw.”

  “You never told me if you knew the girl at the lake,” Benny answered, licking his fingertip and wiping the smudge from Doodle’s head.

  Benny picked up the Mr. Pibb can, shook it, found it empty, and crushed it.

  “I’m going to the recycle center today. Want me to take yours?” he asked, walking toward his door.

  “Sure. Thanks. Hey…” she said.

  Benny turned, half expecting to see her tits.

  “You can rent one at the video store,” she said.

  “Oh,” Benny replied, a little disappointed by the lack of flesh, and a little apprehensive over the new information. A VCR would put him one step closer to knowing. One step closer to doing something, anything, about the situation. Benny wasn’t convinced of his own readiness for such a big step. He took it anyway.

  Chapter 9

  Benny thought Saturday night at Nub & Honey’s Fishcamp would never end. But it did. Like all things, even the most unbearable, its time simply ran out. He made excuses until Doodle, Scotty, and everyone else had left the restaurant before him. Benny didn’t want anybody following when he went to the video store. He passed Buffalo Video, adjacent to the 7-Eleven, several times a week, on his way to work and back, never noticing the WE RENT VCRS sign until Doodle mentioned the option. He hoped they would still be open. And he hoped he’d have the balls to actually go inside.

  Benny made a list: Channel catfish. Banjo cat. Corydoras. Talking catfish. Bullhead cat. Bristle-nosed cat. Plecostomos. Blue-eyed plec. Whip-tailed cat. Upside-down cat. Ghost catfish. He ran out of road before he ran out offish. Killing the engine and lights, Benny eased into the parking lot with as much stealth as the old van allowed. Judging by the marquee, lights flashing manically, Buffalo Video was open for business with only two other cars in the lot. In the hope that he wouldn’t have to deal with them, Benny said a little prayer that those customers would be skittish old perverts, skulking around in the adult room.

  One pair apparently wasn’t. They were a couple, actually, new in love, holding hands and no doubt looking for something to mirror, even bellows, their stoked-up feelings. Something that’d make them want to kiss even more than they already did. Speculation on Benny’s part, but pretty clear. It occurred to him that if he owned a video store, he’d arrange the movies according to the customers’ moods or emotions rather than by vague genres. Sometimes all a guy wanted was to pick a movie from the “plights worse than your own” aisle and go home to brood. Sometimes a girl just needed a good cry, even when nothing specific in her life warranted it. More speculations from a guy who didn’t even own a VCR. Benny wandered the aisles, picking up and reading boxes at random, until the couple left.

  “Can I help you?” asked the clerk, a pimpled kid with nice hair covering half his face, when Benny, fairly skulking himself, approached the counter.

  “You rent VCRs?”

  “What?” the clerk asked, cocking his head at Benny.

  Goddamnit! A quarter! Just like that lunatic at Pandora’s. Benny’s heart did a double step. This kid couldn’t be related, and he actually seemed friendly. There are times when it seems that life is trying to teach a lesson, or at least get one to pay close attention. Benny had no idea why he was meeting this odd twin, or what he could learn from the recurrence, but he couldn’t help thinking of conspiracy. Maybe he’d stumbled upon a secret society.

  “VCRs? Do you rent video machines?”

  “Yep. Fifteen bucks a day. Want one?”

  The kid took Benny’s only credit card and gave him some forms to fill out. Benny did so truthfully. When Benny handed back the finished paperwork, the clerk knelt behind the counter, mumbled and grunted, then heaved a thick plastic briefcase-looking thing onto the countertop.

  “Let me show you how this works,” he said.

  Benny listened patiently until the lesson was finished, then picked up the VCR and started to leave.

  “Don’t you want a movie?” the clerk asked.

  “What?” The question confused Benny. “Oh … yeah. I guess I do.”

  Benny didn’t move from the counter, though.

  “Our adult selection is in the back. Behind the green door.” The kid pointed with both index fingers.

  “I … uh … I’m not looking for an adult movie,” Benny said. Situationally true. He liked porn movies as much as the next guy, but even if he’d had a VCR, Benny would be too ashamed to actually rent one.

  “Okay,” the clerk said. “The signs will tell you where everything’s at.”

  Benny wandered down the closest aisle, comedies, and picked the first asexual, normal-seeming video he came to.

  “I hated this movie,” the clerk offered, scrutinizing the box for who knows what. Benny shrugged for lack of any better response.

  “That’ll be three seventy-five.”

  Benny handed him a five-dollar bill. The clerk took a dollar from the register and, with all the flourish of a magic trick, plucked the quarter from his own ear and held it out to Benny.

  “One twenty-five’s your change,” he said. Grinning. “Due back tomorrow before midnight.”

  The exchange shook Benny up so that he tripped over the curb as he walked out of the door. He struggled, and did not drop the VCR, but the rented cassette fell victim to his stumble and skated two spaces away across the lot. Lo and behold, his tripping coincided with the passing of a state patrol car. Benny felt the spray of gravel when the officer pulled to a stop two spaces away from Benny, in front of the 7-Eleven, on top of the dropped videocassette.

  History repeats. Momentarily as well as millennially. Dèjá vu implies subtlety. What do you call it when the past knees you in the groin? Opportunity, once again, presented itself. Opportunity to make things right. Opportunity for redemption. Opportunity to report the drowning. All Benny had to do was open his mouth and tell the truth. Much to his surprise, the officer—the same officer from Pandora’s, sans sunglasses—paid only perfunctory attention to Benny when he got out of the patrol car, engine running, window down. Nodding once, as if completing an assessment of the situation, the officer put his hat on and went into the con­venience store, giving no indication that he recognized Benny. Benny, of course, said nothing.

  Benny opened the passenge
r door of the van, put the VCR inside. He figured he’d just stand there until the cop left then get his tape. But the cop didn’t come back out right away. And after ten minutes, Benny realized that he hadn’t gone to the bathroom after work, after a night of iced tea, and he really had to pee. To worry, to obsess, only exacerbates any situation. Benny probably didn’t need to urinate nearly as bad as he convinced himself he did, but within a few minutes he stood, thighs clenched, stepping in place. Inching close enough to look into the window of the store, Benny saw the cop leaning against the Slurpee machine, sipping leisurely and laughing at something. This called for decisive action. Benny, hands and knees on the pavement, knelt by the driver’s side of the patrol car. A wave of air-conditioned cool spilled out of the car and over Benny’s head. He saw the tape, dead-center beneath the car. He stuck his arm under, first on his belly, then on his back, as far as possible, but the tape lay just out of reach. He inched his torso beneath the undercarriage, grabbed the tape, held it tight.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the officer asked. As if there might be a plausible answer.

  Benny held the tape from beneath the car, but remained hidden.

  “Dropped my video,” he said.

  “I would’ve moved if you had asked,” the officer said. “Are you finished?”

  Benny pulled himself out, then stood. “Sorry,” he said.

  They stood face to face for an insufferable moment, Benny smelling the chemically enhanced hyperstrawberry in the cop’s mouth and feeling like he didn’t have the authority to end the situation. Then the officer spoke again.

  “How’s your toe?”

  Benny looked at his sneaker, hoping it would by some miracle provide the answer.

  “Better,” he finally answered, then sheepishly climbed into his van.

  Back in the duplex, Squat paced by the back door, whimpering, while Benny peed in the bathroom sink. It made him feel like a rebel. A troublemaker. Anyway, the sink, wide and just the right height, made the perfect hurry-up receptacle when the toilet lid was down.

  “I’m coming,” Benny said, shaking himself off and rinsing the sink. “Good dog.”

  Benny stood in the yard while Squat ambled around to do his old-dog business. No sense in rushing him. Benny stood there, thinking about the disgusting nature of males. Jeeter, Benny himself, Dink, especially Dink, every guy he knew displayed publicly one or more repulsive habit, and what they did privately was better left unknown. He wondered about women. He often wondered about women. Lots of things. But that night in the dark, in his backyard, he mostly wondered if women were actually higher on the evolutionary scale of cleanliness, or if their dirty little secrets were just better-kept. He hoped, if and when he ever got married, that he’d discover the truth. Benny knew, also, that all this wondering was little more than avoidance of what he planned to do. No lights showed in Doodle’s windows.

  Benny called Squat inside, gave him a few dog biscuits to keep him quiet, then set about moving the television, his rocking chair, and ottoman to the far end of the duplex. Afraid that Doodle might hear something, he’d rather hunch in the corner, ears straining, eyes too close to the screen. By flashlight, which Benny held in his mouth, he struggled to connect the VCR cables. Standing at the refrigerator, debating the need for a beer—his last act of procrastination—it was Benny who heard something. Doodle, calling out in her sleep. A mumble of words, full of slurred urgency. Benny couldn’t tell if the urgency was fearful or playful.

  “G’night, Doodle,” he said softly, trying to project comfort through the wall.

  When Benny pulled the milk crate containing the drowned girl’s tapes and possessions from beneath the bed, his heart picked up its pace. When he folded back the NASCAR towel, a flood of images stormed his mind.

  She walked into the water.

  She drowned.

  Herself. She drowned herself.

  Again and again, that moment of disappearance played like a looped tape in Benny’s head.

  Two weeks and three days since the suicide, two weeks and three days that Benny had held tight to her secret. His secret. In that brief time, he’d tried to imagine the circumstances of her life, those events, collusions or collisions of things done, undone, and words said, heard, or denied, that made it necessary for her to walk forever into Big Toe River. Anything other than necessity seemed absurd. Try as he might, though, Benny’s imagination wasn’t up to the task. He couldn’t get beyond his own memories, his own face. Watching the tapes became his necessity.

  The clothing, her clothing, Benny stacked neatly on the floor. The business card, Rebecca Hinkey’s, he placed on top of the clothing. He figured then and there that he could never go back to Claxton Looms. Benny left the camera equipment alone. All that remained were the tapes. Nine altogether. Scotch. Maxell. Kodak. Tapes that could be purchased at any drugstore. Each in its thin cardboard sheath. Benign in stasis, their secrets codified by magnetization, perfectly defended, useless even, without the appropriate tools: VCR, electricity, desire. One by one, Benny traced each handwritten label with his fingertip.

  Triptych: Psalms, The Gospel of Crows, Revelations. Fall 1997

  Winter Solstice. April/May 1998

  Prophets, Etc. Summer 1998

  Epiphanies. September 15, 1998

  Lilith Kicks Ass. Winter 1999

  Homemade Bible Stories. Fall 1999

  Duplex. Winter 2000-2001

  March 3, 2000

  Untitled. April 3, 2001

  Heavy stuff! Heavy-handed, even. Even to Benny. The first tape was almost four years old. He tried to project himself back four years, to imagine the changes, however small, in that passage of time. The things he’d done and seen. Nothing, really. Nothing to warrant recording. Not his habits. Not dreams. Not his secrets, which, until recently, seemed banal and unremarkable. But Benny knew that even the most banal secrets took their toll.

  Which tape to watch first? Was there some cosmic order or logic he could employ to help with the decision? Ultimately, what it boiled down to was fear. He feared the drowned girl at the moment of her death, and wanted to begin this portentous voyage as far from that moment, that girl, as possible. The decision to watch them over a period of time was made at a subconscious level. Was nonnegotiable.

  Benny pulled the first tape from its sleeve. Triptych. His hands shook, his mouth went suddenly dry. Benny thought he might vomit. He pushed the tape into the slot in the VCR, stabbing at the Stop button before the machine had completed its mechanical swallowing of the cassette. Benny closed his eyes and took some deep breaths, holding the last when he fingered the remote.

  Finally, with trepidation, Benny pushed Play.

  August 7, 1997 • • • Rec

  10:40 a.m.

  “Psalms.”

  No tricky fade-in. No dissolve. No credit list or text, other than a momentary shot of the title, written on cardboard in Magic Marker, in the same script as that of the labels. “Psalms.” The camera sits at ground level, in the middle of what must be a macadam road. The angle of the lens is wide; beyond the few feet of pavement just in front of the camera, in which every stone and fissure is crystal-clear, things blur. After a while, the camera remaining stationary, the focus begins to narrow. To sharpen, following the safety-yellow stripe. With deliberate, incremental slowness, the field of vision creeps forward. At some point a form takes shape at the center of the picture. There, where black macadam, yellow paint, and the slate-gray of the sky converge, something swells into sight. A blooming, almost. Its shape irregular, ovoid if anything. As clarity develops, the mind, uncomfortable in confusion and eager for recognition, begins to assume things. A crushed box? No. Fallen tree? No. The mind initially resisting anything painful or awkward. Pile of garbage? An old coat? A child’s toy? No. No. No. Benny recognizes the true form of the dead cat bef
ore the camera officially allows it. A ragged carcass, several days into death; the animal had no doubt been hit by a car. Several by now. The camera begins to move, to pivot, first around, then above the dead cat. Painstakingly slow; And when its position is finally fixed directly over­head, the exquisite beauty of the decaying carcass is revealed. It is, in fact, a blooming, as organic and purely natural as any flowering bud. The camera begins a slow, steady zoom. Down, down, down into the body cavity. Beneath fur and flesh. Beneath bone. Into darkness.

  What the fuck? Benny thought.

  Cut to another wide focus, another macadam road. Another plodding zoom into roadkill. This time, an opossum. After that, some sort of bird. There were two, after the bird, before, mercifully, The End.

  What is this nonsense? Benny thought.

  Where is she? Benny wondered. He desperately wanted to fast-forward, but couldn’t. Again, fear.

  The drowned girl never appeared in the tape Benny watched that night. Not in the second portion of Triptych, “The Gospel of Crows,” which was nothing more, or less, than the repeated scene of three crows taking turns ribboning the viscera from the split belly of a dead turtle somewhere in a patch of Johnson grass. Repeated, and repeated, and repeated, for the better part of ten minutes.

  Nor did the face of the drowned girl come to light in “Revelations,” which starred? featured? contained? bore witness to, maybe, a thin man in a chef’s coat, the picture cropped at his neck and by the table at which he stood. Before him, on the table, a cutting board with a filleting knife and sharpening steel forming an X in its center. Flanking the cutting board to the man’s right, a case of whole chickens. To his left, one huge stockpot and a stack of hotel pans. At some signal, known only to the man on screen, he began boning the chickens. Quickly. Expertly. Incessantly. One after another, he sat the chickens down, backs to him, ran the thin blade down either side of the spines, then began to peel the flesh away from the ribs. Traced the thigh and leg bones with the knife tip, and within three minutes, he’d removed all the meat, intact, from the bones. He tossed each skeleton into the stockpot, without ceremony or even pause. But the flesh of each boned chicken he folded into a corpselike pose and placed delicately in neat rows in the pans.