Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

  Neither was it, from Benny’s perspective, anyway, like kissing a mon­ster. The lips and tongue of that strange head, at once childlike and womanlike, were as human as any he’d kissed. Not shriveled, nor fetid. Not scalded, nor cankerous, nor overly phlegmy. Not veiny and ribbed with cartilage, or barbed. No foul, squatty spirit lodged itself in his nose. Benny tasted nothing of her fused misshapen spine, of her limbs bound hard and tight by some genetic buffoonery. Nothing of her lifelong sense of alone-ness, of rootlessness, that threatened daily to keep her spirit as battered down and diminutive as her body.

  Nor did, during that first kiss, heaven itself open up its gilded doors for true love to spill out and wash them both clean. Him of deceit, her of credulity. Nor was Benny’s skullcap peeled back and a hot nugget of desire dropped in the cavity; that ceaseless, burning want, want, want he’d felt in the past. It was not a kiss of sunsets or sunrises. Nothing stellar nor lunar about it. No flower petals the color of blood or peaches. No blooming of wings. No choirs or heavenly hosts. Not a vertiginous swirl of lights and sounds. Nothing that reeked of clichéd passion, nor heart-thumping freshness.

  No. It was a plain, artless kiss. In fact, Benny’s single tentative sortie with his tongue brought back the most tangible aspect of the kiss: a small flake of tuna, and with it, bound by mayonnaise and masticate, a few crumbs of bread and a grain of black pepper. Nevertheless, it was a kiss that propelled them forward.

  “Oh, my,” Becky said.

  Chapter 16

  No one was more surprised than Benny Poteat to find himself sitting at the supper table with Rebecca and her family, and Deacon Hinkey asking him to bless the food.

  “Would you ask the Lord’s blessing for this meal, young man?”

  Very little question in the tone.

  Benny looked over the table. The big milk-glass bowl of converted rice, drawing in the butter pats, each grain taking on a yellow sheen. Pork chops, pan-fried; Benny could smell the oil in the air. Biscuits. Overcooked green beans and stewed corn. Good eats. Worthy of blessing, if one were so inclined. Benny hadn’t blessed a meal in twenty years.

  Benny hesitated. The silence spanned impossible distances.

  He played in his mind all the various prayers he’d like to offer. He could pray for Jenna to resurrect. To walk smiling into the room and say it was all a joke. Or, even, to storm into the dining room, thoroughly pissed off and ready for answers. Either would be fine. He could pray that, in good cliché form, he’d jerk himself awake and find the whole ordeal nothing more than a nightmare. He could, couldn’t he? Isn’t that what prayer is most often about? The impossible? For a while, as a young man, Benny had this theory. He’d pray only for things that he already had. It minimized disappointment.

  Deacon Hinkey cleared his throat.

  Deacon Hinkey was a man of God. No doubt about it. Benny Poteat suspected that God even had something to do with the patches of black hair sprouting on the good deacon’s knuckles, and the small but noticeable conflagration of hair and snot in his nose. Surely, Deacon Hinkey’s vanity came out in other ways. His suit, for instance. Hard and black as a beetle, and somber as a pallbearer, Benny imagined him, always in that coat and tie.

  Benny could pray that Deacon Hinkey be struck blind and mute, just long enough for him to escape. Or, better, that he would have a ministroke and forget the request altogether. Half an hour before, when Rebecca said “Daddy, this is Benny Poteat,” Benny Poteat felt a hard, mean piety in the old man’s scrutinizing once-over.

  So, there Benny sat, at the dinner table with Deacon Hinkey, Mrs. Hinkey, and Rebecca Hinkey. The family of the drowned girl. In some respects, it would’ve been a good time to come clean, but Benny wasn’t willing to give anything to these horrible people. Not to the deacon, anyway. It would be almost like betraying Jenna, except … except that she’d documented her act. Jenna had wanted people to know. Now, Benny was in control of that knowledge. While he’d been powerless to stop her suicide, the power, the control over how and when her death impacted all these people intoxicated Benny more than he knew. How did things get to that point? Not two days earlier he’d been with Mrs. Hinkey and Becky, moving Jenna’s belongings out of an apartment the missing daughter had rented in town.

  The elation over the body found earlier in the week not being Jenna fizzled in short order, simply because they still had no idea where she actually might be. Shortly after that first kiss between Benny and Becky, and a couple others, she confessed to him that the good deacon, while he loved his missing daughter more than he’d ever say, wasn’t about to pay rent on an empty apartment. Becky asked Benny if they could use his van. He told her that the van came complete with muscle.

  “Benny, you think you could…” Mrs. Hinkey said.

  Mrs. Hinkey lacked—what? Hard to say exactly, but something was missing. As if she’d been beaten down by the year-after-year tag team of God and her godly husband. She just looked tired. Gray. Formless.

  “I just don’t believe that we can…” Mrs. Hinkey said.

  Surely God had provided Mrs. Hinkey with complete thoughts at some point in her life.

  “You reckon all this stuff is…” Mrs. Hinkey said.

  It took Benny a while to realize that Mrs. Hinkey never finished her sentences. She always spoke in transit, as she moved from one room to the next, or even from one place to another in the same room. She got going full-throttle with an idea, then just chopped it off, or let it fizzle out.

  “Rebecca, I think we ought to…”

  Most of Jenna’s stuff was in paper bags or cardboard boxes already. After Benny got the futon disassembled and down in the van, he helped with the smaller items. He and Mrs. Hinkey passed closely in the narrow hall that led from the combined kitchen and living room, him coming from the bath and her from the bedroom. They both turned sideways with their loads, but when they bumped it was Mrs. Hinkey’s bag that started making noise. That started to whir.

  “What in the world…”

  Benny followed her into the living room, where she set the grocery bag, with its top rolled shut, down on a table. They both waited for Becky to come back upstairs. She was slow on the stairs. Mrs. Hinkey and Benny waited patiently.

  Rebecca came in, out of breath.

  “Becky, honey, don’t you strain…”

  “What’s that noise?” Rebecca asked.

  “Something in that bag,” Benny said, pointing at the table.

  “What is it?” Becky asked. She grinned at Benny, and he couldn’t tell if the grin was nervous or playful. They all stared at the bag, listening to the faint, droning whir of a small motor, and watching a barely perceptible movement within the paper walls of the bag.

  “For heaven’s sake,” Rebecca said, then unrolled and opened the mouth of the bag.

  It was Benny who lifted out the top layer of neatly folded socks.

  What they expected to see, if they had expectations at all, surely differed with each of them. But, for certain, none of the three were quite prepared for the size, shape, or color of the battery-operated dildo doing its silicone hootchie-kootchie before their very eyes.

  “Oh, Lord…” Mrs. Hinkey said. “Oh, Lord, oh, Lord…”

  Benny knew he’d never seen a nearly see-through neon-green dildo before. Not a small one, not a medium-sized one, and certainly not one the size of his forearm, like the one wiggling in the bag.

  Becky sucked in a sharp breath and left the room.

  “Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy. Lord…”

  Despite the surge of embarrassment, Benny forced himself to look closer so he could figure out what it was that rose from near the thick base of the vibrator. And it took him far too long to figure out what the little bunny-shaped appendage was for.

  Benny tried to drop the socks back down onto the dildo, to cover it, to hide it from view and ther
efore deny its existence, but only one sock fell in place. It draped across the dildo and the sex toy brought the sock to life in a feat of obscene animation. Mrs. Hinkey went from ashen gray to a grayish red. Benny, summoning all his courage, reached in and found the Off switch. He rolled the top closed. Becky came through with another bag and went out the door without mentioning what happened.

  “Let me see if that other…” Mrs. Hinkey said, walking away too quickly.

  And so they loaded the rest of the drowned girl’s possessions into Benny’s van. Only two other items of note: a small ceramic bowl full of origami frogs made, apparently, from the pages of the pilfered Gideon New Testament lying nearby, and a videotape in a white sleeve with Jenna’s handwriting on the label. The former, inexplicably, filled Benny with a surge of tenderness toward Jenna, maybe even love; the latter, a surge as well, a churning mix of disquiet and yearning, with a fear thrown in for good measure. Benny tried to pluck the tape from its resting place, with the intention of hiding it in the waistband of his pants. But Rebecca walked into the room and picked up the box.

  “Hmm,” she said.

  “One of your sister’s films?” Benny asked.

  “Did I tell you she made movies?”

  Funny how much literal space something as insubstantial and incorpo­real as a sentence can fill. Benny misspoke and time ground to a halt. His gut, the room, the building, filled with anxiety.

  Benny extricated himself from the situation by pointing to a framed certificate on Jenna’s dresser; a Piedmont College Cinema Verite Society award for a film called Lilith Kickin’ Ass. Becky winced at the sight of the certificate. But he didn’t intend to mention the tape again. And neither Rebecca nor Mrs. Hinkey mentioned the dildo at supper that night.

  Benny also didn’t plan to mention what he saw in the last of the tape called “Prophets” he’d watched the night before, in part for all the obvious reasons, but mostly because thinking about the tape made him seethe.

  July 15, 1998 • • • Rec

  4:00 p.m.

  MAX, the only word on the title board, fades out and what is left is his face. Max, the painter.

  “Hey, Max,” Jenna says. “Thanks for agreeing to the interview.”

  Max lights a long brown cigarette in answer. The camera pans, wide right. Takes in the studio. Max is in his element. Large canvases, in soft focus, line the walls in the distance. A hard driving music throbs from a paint-spattered stereo stacked in a far corner.

  “You seem to have made some progress on that piece,” Jenna says. “What’s it called?”

  “Need,” Max says. “It’s called Need.”

  Then for ten minutes he describes the painting, down to every brush­stroke. Benny sat with his finger on the fast-forward button. Benny knew some arrogant men, but never in his life had he heard someone go on at length about themselves like this Max guy. “My work” this, and “my work” that. Benny couldn’t understand, and he had no doubt of it, why Jenna was so interested in him.

  “You graduated from Piedmont less than a year ago, and already you’re causing trouble in the art community.”

  Jenna lets the statement hang. The camera hangs as well, on Max’s face.

  “I am the art community in this town,” he says.

  “I’m talking about your current show, Blood, at the Firehouse Gallery.”

  “I know what you mean, girly. Do you?”

  “Why do you think the show caused so much controversy?” A leading, obvious question.

  “You tell me.”

  Jenna, as camera, pans the studio, taking it all in.

  “What are you after?” he asks. “What do you want from this interview?”

  “You,” she said. “I want to know about you.”

  “You want to know me … about me … come pose for me.”

  Jenna is silent. Clearly thinking. Forgotten, the camera tilts toward the floor.

  “For another Blood painting?” she asks.

  “Blood is past tense. I’ve moved on to other things.”

  “Another series?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “What’s the theme?” Jenna asks. “What’s it about?”

  “That’s always a bad question, but since I like you so much, I’ll answer it. It’s about politics. It’s about perception and hypocrisy. It’s about body and flesh. And it’s about desire and the absence of desire.”

  “Do you have a working title?” she asks.

  “I don’t fuck around with working titles,” he says with a sneer. “I name my work what it is.”

  “So … what is it then?”

  “It’s called Beautiful Women Shitting.”

  Benny stopped the tape. He’d had enough for one night. He couldn’t listen to any more of Max’s nonsense, and he all but prayed that Jenna would tell him to fuck off—that, when he started the tape again, there’d be no more Max. But Benny was doubtful of both, prayer and Jenna’s decision-making skills.

  He could pray for Rebecca’s legs to straighten and stretch and grow, her spine to unfurl, her blocky face to sharpen. Benny supposed, rightly or wrongly, that these were tired old prayers, worn out from overuse.

  Deacon Hinkey shifted in his chair, a ladder-back beast of burden with a cane seat at least as old as Benny. The chair moaned beneath its charge, each joint straining against itself. In true call-and-response fashion, Mrs. Hinkey and Rebecca shifted subtly as well, and their own seats cried out. Benny had no choice; he said the only prayer he remembered.

  “God is great, God is good. Let us thank him…”

  “Benny,” Mrs. Hinkey said, after the amen. “Help yourself to some—”

  A child’s prayer. Was that the best Benny could do? He knew he’d botched it by the way Deacon Hinkey snorted and reached for the biscuits. A botched prayer is a dangerous thing.

  Chapter 17

  Benny hadn’t prayed outright for Becky to sleep with him. He wasn’t even sure he wanted such a thing to happen. But eventually she did. The night of the dinner, the night after moving Jenna’s things—dildo and all—into a musty old garage beside the Hinkeys’ house, that night the good deacon closed the occasion with a guarded, almost accusatory prayer for Esther to return home safe, sound, and penitent. They all held hands around the table, Benny between Becky and Mrs. Hinkey. Becky’s hand feeling much less like a doll’s and much more pawlike than before; Mrs. Hinkey’s, stiff and damp.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” Rebecca asked. “Was it?”

  Benny didn’t know whether she was asking about the dinner, or the kiss he’d just given her. They stood out by his van, it between them and the house. Lord only knew what Deacon Hinkey would do to the man that kissed his odd daughter. Benny was worried, but not enough not to kiss her again.

  After the prayer, Benny excused himself, saying he had a busy, busy day tomorrow. Needed to get home and sleep. He shook the deacon’s hand. Mrs. Hinkey started a few sentences by way of good-bye. And Rebecca followed him out the door.

  “Thank you so much,” she said. “For helping move Jenna’s stuff and everything.”

  “I’ll send you a bill,” he said.

  “Sorry about that one thing,” she said, looking Benny straight in the eye.

  “I’ll send you a big bill,” he said, blushing in the dark.

  There in the driveway, she came up to his chest. They stood close, her looking up, him looking down.

  “Hope I can afford it,” she said. “Everything’s negotiable,” he said.

  Then they kissed. He knew it was going to happen when she started coming up on her tiptoes.

  Benny met her halfway.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  The dinner? Or the kiss?

  Both, in their own ways, were excrucia
ting and exquisite.

  On the way home in the van, windows down to suck out the incessant heat, Benny realized something. In the Hinkey household, other than one step stool that he saw tucked in a corner, there were no obvious concessions to Rebecca’s diminished stature. Benny stewed over this for some time, so engrossed that he almost forgot the “Prophets” tape, and Beautiful Women Shitting.

  He couldn’t bear to finish watching the tape that night, but his dreams were scatological in nature, and terrifying. Two hard days passed before Benny saw Becky again. Only one before he watched the tape.

  “Wow,” Jenna says, the tone genuflectory. “That’s bold.”

  “Fearless is the word, girl.”

  Max, followed by the camera, gives a tour of the pieces in progress. Max works from photos this time; his studio walls are filled with Polaroids of various girls, from various angles and various distances, all squatting. Some, not all, reveal, in fact, the act.

  “Jesus!” Jenna says.

  “I told you,” Max answers. “Beautiful women shitting.”

  “I wasn’t expecting it to be so literal.”

  “Subterfuge is for cowards.”

  The camera takes it all in. There are three paintings on easels around the studio; each painting a composite of one of the women in the photos. Big canvases, on which a dozen hyperclose-cropped pictures—a thigh or hip, a profile, the folds of some fabric, indecipherable shapes and things—surround the predominate image: a woman squatting, clothed but uncovered, with her legs spread over a pile of excrement. There were women on toilets, women outside. A woman shitting on a fully made bed, and a woman shitting on a baseball diamond: home plate. There was a woman squatting on a dining room table, over a dinner plate. A wedding dress, hiked up. Behind the pews of a church. On an office desk.