Benny Poteat, utterly exhausted by the night’s apprehension, utterly disappointed by what he’d seen so far, utterly bored by the same, fell asleep halfway through the case of chickens, halfway through “Revelations,” hunched in the rocking chair.
Chapter 10
Benny Poteat awoke before dawn. Just. Awoke certain of a few things. First, of his discomfort. His back, his shoulders, nearly every muscle of his body had something to say about sleeping doubled over in a rocking chair all night. Too, he awoke certain that he knew nothing more about the drowned girl that morning than he had the morning before. And he awoke fairly certain that something horrible must have happened in the night. The evidence being that the sun, which normally eased egg-yolk yellow through his kitchen window every clear morning, was now a luminous blue streaming in from the opposite side of the house. Only after the square of his television screen, less than two feet away, came into focus did Benny realize what he saw. Empty of image. Empty of movement. Empty of sound. And blue. In fact, the sun wouldn’t be up for another twenty minutes.
At Benny’s feet Squat sat at attention, concern wrinkling his dog brow. The change in sleeping arrangements no doubt confusing.
“Good dog,” Benny said, scratching Squat’s head. Benny stood to stretch his back, but instead fell to his knees on the floor, almost knocking the television over in the process, both feet numb and cumbersome as blocks of wood from lack of circulation. Squat licked his face, whimpered with even more concern. By the time Benny massaged his feet back to life, hid the evidence of last night’s activities, and ate breakfast, the sun beamed in all its regular yellow glory through his windows.
Benny, hiding the tapes in his kitchen, in the bathroom, moved as quietly as possible; Doodle liked to sleep late on Sunday mornings.
At aquarter to nine, Benny pulled to a stop in Jeeter’s driveway. Tapped a rhythm on the horn. Jeeter came from the greenhouse bus, wiggling both middle fingers at Benny.
“What in God’s name are you wearing?” Benny asked, although he’d seen Jeeter in the red kimono numerous times before.
“Been working on my little trees,” Jeeter said. “This is my bonsai uniform. Sexy, ain’t it?”
“You got any coffee?” Benny asked, climbing out of the van, with obvious difficulty from his sore muscles.
“Damn!” Jeeter said. “You look like you’ve been up all night. Rode hard and put up wet, as they say.”
“Who?”
“Who, what?” Jeeter said.
“Who says that?”
“Ours is not to question why, my pencil-dick comrade.”
After coffee, Jeeter and Benny went to the flea market, held every weekend on the grounds of Honeycutt’s Triple-X Drive-in out off the bypass. Every Saturday and Sunday, hundreds of people from Buffalo Shoals and surrounding counties milled about the tables of useless goods set up among the speaker poles standing like grave markers, spooky in both their orderliness and silence, milled about in the detritus of the previous night’s meager decadence—cigarette butts, old French fries, broken beer bottles, the occasional condom—milled about near the mosquito-thick slough from which rose long, leggy reeds and cattails, upon whose stalks those brilliant damselflies the color of fine silk panties flitted, milled about in a numbed and desperate search for the bargain.
Both men avoided the tables specializing in wood-burning arts. And the hooked rugs. And the plaster Jesus and Last Supper tableaus. Jeeter fingered the tools, both new and (often over-) used, as if they were delicate porcelains. Benny picked up every car stereo he found, turned them over in his hands, tugged at the umbilical-like wires. He did the same thing every time he went to the flea market.
“You want a corn dog?” Jeeter asked.
“It’s not even ten o’clock yet,” Benny said.
“I didn’t ask you what time it was, I asked if you wanted a corn dog.”
“Sure,” Benny said.
While they stood in line, Benny noticed a man selling books from the trunk of an old Ford Pinto hatchback. The exploding model, Benny recognized. Half expecting pornography, Benny wandered over after laying a precise stripe of mustard along the length of his corn dog from a gallon pump-bottle bolted with its red sibling to the side of the concession stand.
“Howdy,” Benny said to the sunken-eyed man who perched so intently at the edge of a straight-back chair that rested against the Pinto’s rear bumper that he probably scared away most of his potential customers.
The man nodded in return.
No pornography, which disappointed Benny a little. Mostly the man had college textbooks, boxed by category, each category named and/or misspelled in marker on all sides of the boxes: science stuff, math, history, litature. Benny flipped through the box of history texts. He opened a volume of earth science, drawn by the photograph of an erupting volcano. When he picked up a book from the misspelled category, the man finally spoke.
“You can have that thang for a dollar.”
Benny didn’t recognize the title, nor the author.
“This one of them sci-fi books?” he asked, skeptical.
“I couldn’t make any sense of it,” the man confessed. “Kinda stupid, if you ask me.”
“You got any paperbacks?” Benny asked, returning the book he held to its box, whereupon the lackadaisical bookseller extracted a secret stash, a stuffed-to-overflowing plastic grocery bag, from the backseat. Most were coverless, fat, epic romances, set in a past as unreal as the characters and their actions. Benny picked three, based solely on their level of discoloration, and paid the man.
“What’d you get?” Jeeter asked, returning with a set of three pipe wrenches in his hand.
“Books for Doodle.”
“Ya’ll set a date yet?”
“Fuck you,” Benny said.
“It’s her you ought to be sweet-talking, not me.”
On the way out, Benny scanned the remaining tables for a decent-looking VCR, with no luck. He couldn’t have bought one anyway; Jeeter would ask too many questions. At the last table, by the entrance gate, something caught Benny’s eye. For as long as he could remember, Dink had been collecting Avon Chess pieces, those six-inch-high bottles of Wild Country Aftershave. Dink had nearly a full set, thanks to the help of friends, and once a few years ago Benny made a list of the pieces he lacked. But Benny lost the list shortly after making it, so he usually just bought any that crossed his path. There were two variations: amber bottles with silver-flaked plastic tops, or the reverse, silver-flaked bottles with brown plastic tops. A knight caught Benny’s eye as he and Jeeter left the flea market. The complicated, tripartite equid. A dark horse with a silver head.
Dink didn’t play chess. But the inherent beauty of the game, as manifest through Avon, and possibly even the smell of Wild Country, captivated him. Benny plucked the horse from its encampment between a Pee-Wee Herman lunchbox and a deck of playing cards spread out to reveal a dozen or more Playboy centerfolds, and paid for his purchase.
He dropped Jeeter off at home.
He went to Dink’s Clean ‘em Up Carwash & Launderette.
Dink often paid himself in quarters, paid himself for the time spent cleaning the lint traps in the dryers and the cement trough running through the center of the laundromat into which the washers drained their sudsy waste, and replenishing the soaps and buffing towels in the carwash stalls, so it came as no surprise when Benny pulled into the business to see Dink standing there with his pockets bulging, so heavy that the waistband of his jeans peeled away from his belly.
Benny pulled to the fully automated “Touch-less” bay and fed it money. He tapped at the horn to get Dink’s attention, then held up a five-dollar bill, pinched at either end with forefinger and thumb. Dink climbed into the van, tucked the bill into his shirt pocket.
“Hey, Benny,” he said, as the big door roll
ed open.
“Hey, Dink,” Benny said, easing the van forward until the red light flashed. Before the door had fully closed, Benny had his pants unzipped. Before the rinse cycle climbed over the van’s hood, his penis stood out and hard. And by the time the high-pressure sudsing began, Dink’s mouth worked away at that penis.
Dink, guileless and therefore regularly beguiled by life, had been giving five-dollar blowjobs for years. Most everybody knew it. And most folks kept the secret respectfully. From time to time, some drunken redneck, feeling guilty about his role, or perhaps unable, due to age or circumstance, to place the moment of intimacy in its true perspective, communicated that confusion with his fists. Dink got the shit beat out of him about once a year. But, overall, it was a welcome convenience. The Super-Deluxe option, complete with undercarriage wash, wheel-soak, and vortex-dry, took four and a half minutes. Dink rarely needed that much time.
And what did Benny think about with Dink’s head busy in his lap? Benny often thought of Mary Steenburgen, the actress. Sometimes, though not through conscious choice, Doodle came to mind. That day, surprise, surprise, the image of Rebecca Hinkey, her hands in particular, cradling the telephone, pushed Benny over the ejaculatory precipice. At the moment, just when the hot-wax cycle began, he gripped tight the steering wheel of his van, mostly to keep from stroking Dink’s head. For a whole lot of reasons. Benny didn’t want to touch the shunt, which lay visible through the skin and Dink’s short, lint-flecked hair. Anyway, the action seemed too tender, too affectionate. Borderline queer. Dink finished the job, retched, but kept the semen down. Retched again as the mechanical door climbed its track.
Benny crept through the pivoting mouths of the vortex-dryer, then pulled to a stop by a vacuum machine that was still running, sucking away at nothing. He reached under the seat for the chess piece, which Dink took with a flash in his eye, all that Benny would get for gratitude.
“You go to the flea market with Jeeter?”
“Yeah,” Benny said.
“I seen Doodle this morning,” Dink said, then opened the door and spit on the cement.
“Where?”
“At the Kroger’s, buying groceries. Man, I’d like to suck them titties!”
Benny knew better than to encourage him.
“You think she’s got a lot of hair on her pussy?”
“I wouldn’t know, Dink.” Partly true.
“I bet she does. Might even have hair on her dookie-hole.”
“Hey, Dink,” Benny changed the subject. “You ever see anybody die?”
“Yeah. My daddy died.”
“And you saw it?”
“Yeah.”
“What was it like?” Benny asked.
“I cried some.”
Doodle, grateful for the paperbacks, made a lunch of fresh tomato sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise and lots of salt and pepper. She and Benny ate sitting on their shared back patio and talked of familiar, comforting banalities. As the afternoon temperature crept toward ninety, Benny suggested they go to the Dairy Queen. Doodle suggested they do laundry—across town; she couldn’t deal with Dink—after the ice cream, and while their combined whites and colors churned, spun, and fluffed, they played game after game of pinball on the old low-tech machine wedged between the soap dispenser and the unisex bathroom. Doodle won, five out of seven. Thus the day passed.
Thus the day passed, and Benny attended to the passage of time as best he could. He remembered a film from high school. Earth Science class. A huge spool of old film about erosion and the things that shape the earth. He remembered three tiny pebbles trapped in a shallow dip where one stone lay against another. He remembered their tick-tick-ticking as they danced in an unremitting wind, and how, over time, the pebbles had milled out a hollow the size of a mouth and polished smooth as marble. Benny, even then, felt the Tightness of that far more than he could ever articulate. Later, much later, after Benny determined that Doodle had to be asleep, he once again moved the rocking chair and television. Connecting the rented VCR came easier the second time around. Even handling the tapes seemed less traumatic, albeit no less hopeful. Without hesitation, Benny selected the second tape in the sequence: “Winter Solstice. April/May 1998.”
Discrepancy in season and date duly noted, Benny pushed Play.
April 15, 1998 • • • Rec
12:00 p.m.
Blur.
The camera is so close to its object of attention that detail is indiscernible. Colors? yellow-oxide browns. Eggshell. Sound? There is a soundtrack, its tune unclear. Something disconcerting about the music. And the camera begins to pull back, slowly. Steadily. Not changing in level or angle. A wall becomes some sort of wooden box, takes further shape as … what? … is it an altar? No panning from side to side. No sweep of the lens, up or down. The growing awareness is confined to, restricted by, only what can be seen as the camera backs away from its original source of focus. Backs. Backs. Backs away to reveal the full altar. Farther, the aisle and empty pews. Backs right out the door, which becomes a dark portal in the sun-bleached fagade of Egg Rock Pentecostal Church. The soundtrack, vaguely familiar in certain turns of the notes, but something is wrong. The ear, the mind is kept off-balance.
The camera, and one assumes the camera’s operator—although nothing human, or living, has been seen—continues to reverse. Away from the house of worship into, what must be, a car. The view defined by the back glass and the shallow plane of the trunk. The car begins to move down the road. And you know the car moves forward, but you are looking backward. By the time the car reaches its destination, after several empty miles, a realization occurs about the accompanying soundtrack. The song. The song is “Amazing Grace.” Everybody knows the tune. But here, it, too, is played backward.
The camera transitions from the backseat of the car smoothly, without giving away anything, takes in the car itself. Tight focus. The focus widens as the camera pulls back, through a yard: a clothesline, tilting; three dogwood trees in bloom; a shed. Through mostly intuition, it is clear that the camera is backing up a series of low steps. One. Two. Three. A door frame conscripts the view. When the door closes, the frame is filled with color. Then goes black.
Benny paused the tape. Sat back in the rocker. Sighed. He didn’t think he could stand another night of pretentious nonsense. Benny needed some sense of progress, of forward motion. He got a beer from the refrigerator. He pushed Play.
Benny closed his eyes through parts of the second viewing in hopes of checking the imbalance in his equilibrium.
May 3, 1998 • • • Rec
12:00 a.m.
Mouth.
The camera opens on a mouth. A girl’s mouth. A woman’s mouth. Only the mouth. Small but well-defined lips fill the frame. The tip of a tongue slips out and back. Preparation for speech. The lips part, a sliver of tooth suspended from the thin inverted parentheses of space.
My name is not Esther.
My name is not Esther.
My name is not Esther.
A girl’s voice? A woman’s voice? It belonged to the mouth. Seemed right coming out of it.
Jump-cut to the eyes. So green they are almost gray. The eyes lack the confidence implied by the voice. The eyes struggle to remain steady.
My name is Jenna.
My name is Jenna.
My name is Jenna.
Jump-cut to a face split vertically: the forehead; her right eye; a small blade of a nose, halved, its nostril a near-perfect circle; the fine cheekbone receding back to the tragus and visible rim of her ear; that mouth, split twice now; and the chin. This is half of a pretty face. Boyish, but definitely the face of a young woman.
I was not Esther.
I was not Esther.
I have never been Esther.
Cut, again. This time the other side of her face. Asymme
try? Yes. A small dimple in the left cheek. A slight, barely perceptible crook at the tip of her nose. The left eye, offset slightly.
I am Jenna.
I am Jenna.
I have always been Jenna.
And now the camera offers the face, whole. She is beautiful. Whether or not she is the drowned girl is hard to say. But her beauty stands without question. The head shot, backlit in soft yellow. Ample defiance in her voice.
My name … is Jenna … Hinkey.
My name is … Jenna … Hinkey.
My name is Jenna Hinkey.
Benny dropped his beer on the floor and rewound that moment of tape as it spilled.
My name … is Jenna … Hinkey.
My name is … Jenna … Hinkey.
My name is Jenna Hinkey.
What did this mean? This girl on the tape, who may or may not be the drowned girl, is related to Rebecca Hinkey. Rebecca Hinkey, the resident manager and employee of the month at Claxton Looms. Rebecca Hinkey, who Benny blatantly lied to three days prior. Benny stopped the tape.
He gathered his wits, then pressed Play again.
May 5, 1998 • • • Rec
5:55 p.m.
Dinner.
A dinner table, to be precise. The camera, an intrusion no doubt, is mounted on a tripod looking over the shoulder of Jenna Hinkey, her lean face occasionally in profile as she speaks to the person on her right. That person? Diminutive. Childlike, even, in stature. Not at eye level with Jenna. It was the midget. Rebecca Hinkey. Compact. Fuller in her small body than Jenna, but there is resemblance in the face. The camera looks down onto the remains of a modest dinner. Looks down into the faces, the averted eyes, of the three people—Rebecca; an older, stern, man, an older, resigned, woman—all distinctly familial: the posture, the cut of the jaws, set of the eyes. The dinner is cold.
Visits from the Drowned Girl Page 10
