“So…” Max says.
“So … what?” Jenna asks.
“You going to pose for me?”
Jenna laughs.
“I can’t do that,” she says and the camera spins once around the room.
“You’re saying you don’t want to,” Max says, now just a voice off-camera.
“No, not exactly…”
“You’re saying you choose not to.”
“No, not that, either.”
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Jenna laughs again.
“I don’t know about that.”
“Tell me this,” Max says, commanding more than asking. “What time of day do you normally shit?”
“Max!”
“Call me before you come so I’ll know you’re ready.”
Benny had to turn the tape off again. He’d known some really fucked-up men in his life, men whose taste and proclivities would, and did, get attention from assorted authorities and concerned citizens. But this Max guy, he was more blatant than anyone Benny had ever encountered.
Benny took a shower. He had a beer. He had half another before he found the guts to finish watching the tape.
July 19, 1998 • • • Rec
10:00A.M.
“Disciples.”
The title board is obviously edited in after the fact.
The camera focuses on a well-lit but bare model stand. Max moves in and out of view. Jenna talks.
“I don’t think I can do this, Max.”
“You’re here. That means you can and will. Take your underwear off, but leave your skirt on.”
“Is this how you did all those others? Here, in your studio?”
“I do things all different ways.”
There is the sound of fabric against skin.
“Okay, what do I do now?” Jenna asks.
“Step up on the platform. And just stand there.”
Jenna moves into view. Takes the high step, faces the camera with her hands in the deep pockets of a floral-print rayon skirt.
“I’m embarrassed,” she says.
“Good,” he says. “You’re even more beautiful when you’re embarrassed.”
Jenna smiles.
“Lift your skirt and turn around,” Max says. “I want to see your ass.”
Jenna blows her bangs out of her eyes, gets a look of determination, then does as Max asked.
“Cute,” Max says, no doubt of the scarlet birthmark roughly in the shape of a fish on her right buttock.
Jesus! Benny thought. Maybe he even said it aloud. Jenna’s behind is quite sexy. Despite what Benny thinks she’s about to do, he couldn’t help but continue watching.
“Arch your back,” Max says.
She does.
“Take your hands and hold your cheeks apart.”
She does.
Max circles, like a raptor. His camera shoots rapid-fire.
“You’re beautiful,” he says. “Now squat down.”
She does.
“Okay. I want you to shit for me.”
She does.
“Wow,” Becky said, entering the door of Benny’s duplex for the first time. “This your bachelor pad?”
“I reckon so,” Benny answered. He’d gone through the place again and again that morning, making sure nothing of Jenna’s was visible; even so, Becky’s presence made him twitchy and nervous. “Would you like a beer? I’ve got Coors, and some homebrew my friend Jeeter made. Or would you like some iced tea?”
“Tea would be good,” Becky said, wandering around and exploring the tight confines of Benny’s world.
“Sorry the place is such a pigsty.”
Becky didn’t answer. She looked through Benny’s stack of magazines—deftly avoiding the copy of T&A Extreme tucked among the issues of Newsweek, People, and Trucker—and fiddling with his few knickknacks. The date was her idea; they were going to play miniature golf at the Dangling Anchor Putt-Putt, where all the holes and hazards had some nautical theme.
“I’ve never been there before,” she said when she asked him over the phone earlier that day.
“Me neither.”
Benny, ashamed that he felt it, hoped no one he knew would be there.
Becky came, promptly at6:45, just as she promised. Benny had just showered and dressed, and was brushing his teeth when she knocked.
“Here you go,” he said, handing Becky the glass of tea. “I’ll be ready in a minute. You can sit there if you’d like.”
Benny pointed at his rocker. Becky accepted the offer, pulling the ottoman close to keep her feet from dangling.
“Comfy,” she said.
Benny couldn’t remember the last time any woman, besides Doodle, sat in his chair. Or set foot in his apartment, for that matter. He worried, for a moment, that, given her lower point of view, Becky might be able to see under his bed from there. But all she’d really see was the milk crate.
“I got to get my dog in,” Benny said. “Are you okay with dogs?”
“Sure,” Becky said, but Benny could see apprehension cross her face.
“He’s little and old,” Benny said, hoping to calm her fears. “But he stinks to high heaven.”
When Benny opened the door Squat lumbered inside, having to pause a moment after putting his stubby front legs up on the stoop, his belly resting there, before hauling his equally stubby back legs into the house.
“Oh,” Becky said. “A dachshund.”
Squat waddled in and went directly to Becky, despite the fact that his freshly filled food dish sat in its place by the kitchen sink Squat, often hesitant around strangers, sniffed at Becky’s blocklike feet hidden away in their blocklike black shoes. He sniffed at her calf, and when she put her hand out, palm up, he sniffed that, too. Affinity? The dachshund, like the bonsai, like the fancy goldfish, are mutations. Created by, and for the pleasure of, humans. Maybe, in the limited confines of his old dog brain, Squat toyed with the idea that he’d finally found his human equivalent.
“Hi, boy,” she said.
“Ready to go?” Benny asked. He worried that Doodle may come home soon.
‘Let’s take my car,” Becky said, climbing out of the rocking chair.
Squat followed her to the door. Benny tried not to notice the similarities in their labored gaits.
Benny, happy to let Becky drive, climbed into the passenger seat of her car, his attention turning immediately to the mechanical contraption—a pivoting lever and some pushrods—that allowed her to drive.
“Some people use pedal extensions,” Becky said. “My legs aren’t quite long enough.”
Benny, fascinated, watched her work the controls all the way to the Dangling Anchor, where despite the fact that the only handicap space by the door was blatantly empty, Rebecca parked across the lot.
“How many?” the kid behind the counter said, as if he didn’t see Becky, his bucktoothed pout and acne scars emphasizing his irritation over being pulled away from the guitar magazine spread out by the cash register. Benny recognized the boy from somewhere, some other miniature golf course, or maybe from Nub & Honey’s.
Benny paid for the game; insisted on paying, in part so that he wouldn’t have to watch Becky choose her putter from the children’s rack. However, anyone playing the course that day couldn’t help but notice the short shaft, thick grip, and fat plastic putter head.
“What color ball do you want?” Benny asked.
“Orange,” Becky said. “That’s my lucky color.”
Which seemed to be true. Becky scored a hole in one on the first hole, then again on the third, each followed by a little whoop that attracted more attention than Benny liked. Becky, it stood to reason, was far more comfortable with her stat
us as a midget than Benny was.
The giddy and rambunctious church group playing in front of them held things up at hole five, where the object was to negotiate a gangplank and a swinging pirate’s cutlass—a staticky, feebly sinister laugh accompanying each sweep—that more often than not sent each player’s ball into a shallow moat. Benny and Becky waited. They sat on a bench shaped like an open treasure chest and talked.
“I just wish she’d call, or send a card or something,” Becky said.
“Me, too,” Benny said, and the impossibility of their mutual wish pierced him deeply. Not so many hours ago, he’d watched Becky’s sister defecate on videotape. He couldn’t tell Becky about the horrible scene and how it had both disgusted and aroused him. He couldn’t tell Becky how excruciating it was, the whole fucked-up situation. How as he got to know Becky more and more, and cared more and more about her, he was also discovering more about Jenna, becoming more invested in her life through the tapes that would soon lead him, without doubt or hope, to the end of that life. Soon enough he’d watch Jenna die, again, on videotape, no matter how much he and Becky wished for something different, and the scene would probably disgust and arouse him.
To lighten the mood, one of them made a joke, an oblique reference comparing the size of a plaster pirate’s nose to the size of the lime-green dildo found at Jenna’s apartment.
Becky won, finishing the game at three over par. Her only trouble came at the final hole, where two monstrous, plaster-cast, and clearly dwarfish sailors guarded the steep ramp up to where the balls dropped out of sight and clunked through the short pipe that led to a cardboard box behind the surly clerk. After the game, when they returned the clubs, the kid didn’t even look up from his magazine.
“That was…”
“… fun.”
They spoke at the same time.
With little effort, Benny talked her into stopping at the Dairy Queen on the way home. Then, at home, noting Doodle’s absence, and with not much more effort, he convinced her to come in.
“Just for a while,” he said.
Sex, better yet seduction, filled the air. Both of them felt it. They’d kissed several times by then. But Benny wanted to see Becky naked, no use in kidding anyone. He wanted to see for himself, to touch for himself, to find out, for himself, how her odd body differed from others he’d known.
As apartments went, Benny’s lacked much in the way of comfort, accoutrements, and design for wooing or entertaining of any sort. Becky, as before, sat in Benny’s rocker, her feet propped on the ottoman. Benny pulled up a kitchen chair.
“You got any pictures?” Becky asked. “Any pictures of your grandpa that worked in the mill?”
Benny had to think quickly.
“No…” he said. “They all burned up in a fire when I was a kid.”
“Oh, my…”
“We lost everything,” Benny said.
Becky leaned forward and put her hand on his knee.
“You’ve known your share of tragedy, Benny Poteat.”
Benny leaned forward and put his mouth on hers. And they kissed like that for a while, both pitched and off-balance. Both tasting of Heath Bar Blizzards. When Benny ventured his hand out and placed it on her left breast, Becky took her feet from the ottoman and leaned into him even more, so much so that she almost fell off the chair. If not for Benny supporting her by the breast and mouth, she would have. With her desire clear and full against him, Benny wanted to touch her more, but with her weight full against him, Benny’s caress was limited to rhythmic squeezes of the single breast. Becky moaned softly at each.
“We can go in the—” Benny said, trusting that Becky’s skills at intuiting the ends of incomplete sentences had been honed by interaction with her mother.
“Okay,” Becky said, and followed Benny and Squat into the bedroom.
“Can we turn out the light?” she asked.
Benny did, but opened the blinds. The moon, full and low, molting, cast its yellow feathers of light over the bed and Benny and the naked midget. And naked, lying on the bed, washed in moonlight, smelling of sex, and urging Benny on, there was nothing at all monstrous about Rebecca Hinkey.
In fact, considering that the videotape of Jenna Hinkey’s death, the only certain answer to the question of her absence, the thing Rebecca and her parents ached to know, considering that the fact of the drowned sister lay draped by a NASCAR towel under the very bed upon which Benny penetrated and probed the unwitting and still-living sister, the true monster wore the taut skin and elongated bones of a tower climber.
Afterward, Benny lay propped on his arm, absentmindedly circling Becky’s nipples with his fingertip, each born up by a sparse ring of unruly black hairs, each a dark beetle leaping out from the center of her breast.
“What’s that noise?” Becky asked.
“What noise?”
“That noise.”
And in the mostly quiet, Benny could make out a sound he knew almost too well to hear.
Squat, licking. Licking something disgusting, no doubt.
“Where’d you put your panties?” he asked.
“On the floor,” she said.
“Squat!” Benny yelped, sitting up. “Cut it out!”
Oblivious to the fact that he should offer to wash the garment for Becky, Benny returned to the bed confident that, having put Squat out of the bedroom and closed the door, he’d proven himself as a caring lover.
“So,” Benny said, curling into and around Becky, ready to ask the question he’d been wondering for a long time. “You’re a midget right? Not a dwarf?”
It was the first time either of them had uttered the words in each other’s presence.
“They’re the same, really,” Becky answered, after a pause. No doubt she’d heard the question before. She told him a little about her condition, mostly because she knew little about it.
“I only ever went to our family doctor,” she said. “He attended Daddy’s church. I could tell he didn’t know what to say to me, or to do about me. But he was kind.”
“What do your folks call you?” Benny asked, not intending the question to sound as cold as it came out.
“They call me Rebecca.”
Becky said she’d learned from reading books in the library that her condition was called “achondroplasia.”
“Used to be called fetal rickets,” she said.
Benny kissed her again, and eased his hands over the swell of her belly and down between those bowed legs where he found a most normal thing.
“I had this book one time,” Becky said. “When I was a kid. I used to read it every day, sometimes more than once.”
“What kind of book?”
“It was a picture book, about this little acrobat who got sick and tired of the circus and decided to become a monk. Except that he couldn’t cook, or sing, or garden, or do any of the things the other monks living in the monastery did. He tried hard. He tried to do everything right, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything right.”
Benny pulled his fingers from between Becky’s legs. She continued the story, moving in and out of the words she’d read so often.
“One day, after the acrobat had accidentally trampled the tomato plants in the garden then spilled the watering can, the other monks got really, really mad and told him to leave. The little acrobat went to his room in the basement of the monastery and packed up all his stuff. On the way out, he stopped in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. He put his bag down at her feet, stepped back, and began doing headstands and tricks for the stone saint.”
Benny thought she might cry any minute.
“When he didn’t come back out of the monastery, after an hour, maybe more, the other monks went in to get him. There, inside, in the basement, they found the little acrobat walking back and forth on his ha
nds in front of the statue. He was sweating and trembling and crying. The monks were about to cry out “Blasphemy!” and “Sacrilege!” when the little man fell to the ground, exhausted. Before they could rush to him and pitch him out the door for good, something happened.”
Rebecca paused, closed her eyes.
“What?” Benny asked. “What happened?”
“She … the Virgin, stepped down from her stone pedestal and tenderly, so tenderly, wiped the sweat and tears from the little acrobat’s face with the hem of her own garment.”
After a long, and okay, silence, Benny spoke.
“What a great story.”
“My daddy threw the book away,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because it was Catholic.”
Later, before sleep, they lay in bed, in the dark, with the windows open, sharing a beer.
“Hear the peepers?” she asked.
“Umm-hmm.”
“I love that sound, don’t you?”
“Umm-hmm.”
Then Benny asked a question.
“Rebecca?”
“Hmmm?”
“You ever see anybody die?”
Chapter 18
The next day, on the tower, Benny thought about her answer.
I dreamed I saw Jenna die.
She had thought about it for a long time before answering. He didn’t know why he’d asked. He didn’t want to hear about her dream. He feigned sleep, only mumbling when she nudged him. He was thinking about that so intently that he didn’t hear the car drive up to the tower.
“Benny Poteat!” a voice called. “You’re under arrest!”
Benny recognized the voice before the second phrase.
“Fuck you, Jeeter.”
“Watch your mouth, son. I’ll shake you right off that tower.”
Visits from the Drowned Girl Page 17
