Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

  “What do you want, Jeeter?”

  “Let’s go to the ball game tonight.”

  Jeeter picked up a stick and whacked the steel struts, once, twice.

  His friend looked small and buglike down there. As if Benny could step on him.

  “Jeeter!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Who’s playing?” Benny asked.

  “The daring, the beautiful, the damn-near-good Mill Hill Lady Bombers!”

  Benny, and all his friends, liked women’s softball.

  “Can’t do it tonight,” Benny called down. “When are they playing again?”

  “Next weekend.”

  “I’ll go then.”

  After Jeeter left, and the dust had settled, as Benny unhooked the safety belt, about to climb down for lunch, he heard a ruckus in the canebrake below. Seconds later the ruckus spilled out into the clearing in the form of a pack of dogs. Three, four, maybe five differing breeds of mutt, all chasing another dog, a skinny setter-looking thing with mud in its yellow fur. The dog being chased stopped in the middle of the clearing, and as soon as she stopped one of the pack mounted her.

  The coupling lasted only a few brief, mechanical moments, and separation seemed painful; Benny heard the yelping. But no sooner than one dog finished than another climbed aboard. Benny clipped himself back to the tower and hung there for a good forty-five minutes, watching the dogs fuck. He couldn’t tell if the bitch’s meager protests were merely for show or if she was just too fatigued to fight back. Benny watched until the largest dog in the pack, a shepherd, took his turn. When it came time to pull apart, they couldn’t. The more effort the shepherd made to separate, the more the yellow bitch howled in pain. Moments later, having spun themselves so that their ass ends seemed glued together, the bigger dog began to run, an awkward splay-legged trot, and dragged the other into the weeds and out of sight.

  That morning, when Benny sleepily walked Becky out to her car, dew cool against his bare feet, and the sun rising over the peak of the neighbor’s roof, he didn’t know Doodle was watching from her window.

  Benny closed Becky’s car door, waved as she pulled out of the drive. She gave a quick rhythmic toot of her horn before rounding the corner. Then Benny turned to go back inside.

  “Mornin’, Benny Poteat.”

  “You spying on me, Doodle?” Benny said, playfully, but embarrassed nonetheless.

  “I knew it was true,” Doodle said, leaning into the screen so that Benny could see her face.

  “What? You knew what was true?”

  “That you’re two-timing me.”

  Benny, surprising even himself, grabbed his crotch and said, “There’s plenty of this to go around.”

  When he could no longer hear the yellow dog yelping, Benny climbed down the tower. On his way home from working the towers that day, late and tired, the sun already collapsing behind the treeline so that everything to the west became sharp black silhouettes, Benny drove past Chick’s Sales & Service, a business he had passed by countless times in his life. Chick was the only man in town who sold and repaired bucket trucks: Midsized cranes holding at boom’s end a hip-deep enclosure big enough for a man or two. Some folks called them cherry pickers. They’re most often used by utility companies and arborists. Benny, having driven by Chick’s umpteen thousand times, rarely acknowledged it in passing. But that night, he did pay attention. Chick kept his trucks lined up across the gravel lot, facing the macadam. That evening, as soon as Benny rounded the curve that preceded the stretch of straight road along which Chick’s enterprise lay, he saw a most amazing thing. The buckets. All the booms of all the trucks—different colors, different heights, all empty—all of them reached, fully extended, skyward. As if in praise of the coming night. Benny was so moved by the image that he decided he’d bring Becky out to see it later.

  Their sex, more and more frequent (the state of desire in either or both of them communicated through a barely coded signal of raised eyebrows and kissy lips), became no less tentative at its beginnings and endings, bookended as it was by awkwardness, but during the act both Benny and Becky gave themselves freely. Becky, whatever else life had given her in the way of experience, seemed to know the mechanics of sex as well as anyone else Benny had slept with. Benny, rooting around animal-like in her armpits and between her legs, turning her this way and that, appreciated her willingness. Becky, bucking and mewling to beat the band, appre­ciated his attention. They hadn’t encountered Doodle yet, in the flesh, but once she gave a few taps on the wall following a particularly raucous headboard-banging session.

  “We’ve never done it at your place,” Benny said.

  Becky deflected the statement.

  “I thought you were going to take me to the ball game,” she said.

  Benny had blown off Jeeter the week before; in fact he’d avoided all his friends. Even called in sick at Nub & Honey’s once, although Doodle knew better and gave him shit about it for days afterward. Benny didn’t really care where they did it, as long as they did it. Doing it helped to keep his gnawing, increasing guilt at bay. He liked her. He really did. But only when she lay naked on his bed, belly down with the full mounds of her rump up in the air, or straddling him with her midget titties bouncing, only then could Benny be fairly certain that she wouldn’t talk about, or he wouldn’t think about, the dead sister.

  “Mama’s thinking about making up a bunch of posters,” Becky said. “With Jenna’s picture on them. Will you help me put them up?”

  ‘‘Sure,” Benny said. “Sure. Hey. You ready?”

  “For what?” Becky asked.

  “Aren’t we going to the ball game?”

  It didn’t surprise Benny to find Dink’s moped parked beside the concession stand at the ballpark. Dink went to every game—the ticket-takers usually looked the other way and let him in for free. Between innings he’d scrounge in the trash cans and under the bleachers for five-cent-return bottles, then cash them in for candy at the concession stand.

  By the time Becky and Benny arrived, the Lady Bombers were down by two runs and at bat with one out in the top of the third inning. Benny was surprised to find Jeeter sitting with Dink in the bleachers. Doodle sat one row back with another waitress from Nub & Honey’s.

  “This is a regular family reunion, ain’t it?” Benny says.

  “Hey, Benny.”

  “Howdy, Benny.”

  Somehow Doodle must’ve prepared them because neither Dink nor Jeeter registered any surprise when Benny showed up at the softball game with Becky—a midget? a dwarf?—in tow.

  “This is Becky,” Benny said, and that was all.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  Not until they were settled up in the stands—Benny between his date and Jeeter, who sat beside Dink—did Benny realize how uncomfortable bleacher seating probably was for Becky, her legs dangling over the gaping spaces between the benches and the footboards.

  “Do you want to sit down lower?” he asked.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Thanks for asking.”

  Jeeter jumped right into conversation.

  “What you doing with this fool?” he asked, playfully indicating his friend.

  She told him she was a preacher’s daughter.

  “Oh,” Jeeter said, with exaggerated surprise. “That explains everything.”

  Becky pretended to swat at him. She asked what church he went to.

  “Church?” he said. “My dear, I am a devout apathostic.”

  “A what?”

  Benny had heard it all before. “Apathostic” was Jeeter’s favorite made-up word.

  “About church,” Jeeter said. “Who cares.”

  Dink split his time between watching the game, shouting random insults at the umpire, and craning his
neck behind or in front of Jeeter to get a look at Becky. When Benny said, “I’m hungry. You want a corn dog, Becky?” and got up to go to the concession stand, Dink was on his heels. And the barrage started before they were off the steps and out of earshot.

  “Benny! She’s a got-damn mee-jit, Benny! “You fuckin’ that thang? Huh? What’s she look like nekkid? “You suckin’ them mee-jit titties? Tonguin’ that furry little pisshole?”

  And Dink kept talking the whole time Benny was placing his order at the counter, despite the fact that folks were listening. When the clerk, no doubt a volunteer from one of the churches, slid the flimsy cardboard tray holding two corn dogs, two Pepsis, and two bags of chips across the worn Formica countertop, sneering at Benny for his choice of friends, Dink said loud enough for everyone in line and everyone working the stand to hear, “I bet she got a pussy like a snappin’ turtle.”

  Benny hit him. He couldn’t take it anymore, so he busted Dink’s lip. And Dink fell. No sooner did Dink hit the ground than a strong arm came around Benny’s neck from behind and his punching arm was twisted and bent up his back.

  “Ungghh,” Benny said, from both pain and anger.

  “What’s the problem here, son?”

  He’d heard the voice before. The pressure lessened and Benny was allowed to turn and face a man at once familiar and not so. Not until Benny caught sight of his own reflection in the man’s dark glasses did he recognize the cop—off-duty and out of uniform, but for the glasses and the bulge at his side that was most certainly his weapon—from the parking lots of both Pandora’s and the video store. He’d been standing in line behind Benny at the concession stand.

  Benny convinced the off-duty cop that there’d be no more fighting. And Dink, of course, having been smacked around all his life, wouldn’t push the issue. Benny bought him a cup of ice for his swollen lip, and Dink pouted and sulked all the way back to the bleachers.

  “What happened to you?” Jeeter asked him.

  “Nothing,” Dink said into his cup.

  “Somebody hit him?” Doodle asked, her maternal instincts rising.

  “Nothing happened, Doodle,” Benny said, with too much emphasis. “Just leave it alone.”

  “Why you acting so damn weird, Benny?” Jeeter asked.

  No answer. Fortunately, Dink was incapable of remaining subdued for long. Within the half-hour he was cajoling the umpire again. Shortly after that, Dink, fully himself once more, turned his attention, inevitably and finally, to the team.

  “Them Lady Bombers sure is hot, ain’t they? I wish one of ‘em would come up here and swing my bat. Lord God, I bet them cooters is all sweaty. Mercy, what I wouldn’t give to sniff ‘em all.”

  “Please shut up, Dink,” Doodle said, worried more about Becky’s reaction than anything else.

  But Dink was on a roll.

  “I’d like to sop me a biscuit in that pussy stew. Hey, Benny? Know what I want for my birthday?”

  “What, Dink?” Benny asked, against his better judgment.

  “A wash tub.”

  “A what?” It was Jeeter that followed up.

  “A big old galvanized tin tub. I want to lay in it nekkid. Then I want all them ball gals to hang their asses over the edges, with their butt cheeks squashed up against each other, and when I count to three I want them to pee all over me.”

  “Dink! For godsakes, shut up!”

  “Head to toe,” Dink added in closing.

  “Sorry about Dink,” Benny said as he drove Becky home.

  “Oh, I didn’t pay him much attention,” she said. “I’ve known worse.”

  Benny doubted it, but she was kind to say so.

  “At least we won,” Becky added.

  The Lady Bombers rallied in the ninth inning with a home run, knocked over the JESUS SAVES AND SO CAN YOU AT KEEPERS BANK & TRUST sign to win by two points.

  Benny was sorry, truly sorry about the fight with Dink. And even sorrier that Becky had to hear Dink’s foul mouth.

  When Benny pulled into the lot at Claxton Looms, Roger, the Andy Griffith professor, was walking into the lobby, gym bag in hand.

  “There goes your boyfriend,” Benny teased, and remained in the van.

  “Watch it, smartypants,” Becky said, coming around to the driver’s side, standing on her tiptoes for a kiss. “I might just put the moves on him if you keep talking like that.”

  “You got any interest in the County 4-H show next weekend? Out at the fairgrounds?”

  “Giant tomatoes and homemade fudge?” she asked.

  “Giant chickens and homemade pigs,” Benny answered.

  “Yep,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”

  “We still haven’t done it at your place.”

  Could it be that emotions are planetary in nature? That at birth the various orbs of feeling that wreck and wreak us are set in motion around the thump-thumping black hole of our frantic hearts, and gravitate and gravitate, bound not by action or event—although prone to excruciating coincidence—bound, rather, by nothing more than egg-shaped whim? Orbit. Benny, in the periastral moment, was overcome with black, black guilt. Back at the duplex, almost in tears (although skilled at holding them in), he pulled the laundry crate of incriminating evidence, of proof that he, Benny Poteat, was a bad man, from under the bed. Without uncovering the tapes, Benny took the basket out to his van. He didn’t care that Doodle, clinking and clanking at the sink one thin wall away, might see, might ask, “What you doing, Benny Poteat?”—how would he answer?

  “Come on, Squat,” he said. The old dog being the only living thing to know Benny’s secret, had a right to see it come to an end. He’d dreamed of Jenna regularly since witnessing her death, but his dreams had taken a frightening twist since Becky started sleeping over. In the dreams, Jenna talked to Benny. Mocked him. Chided him for his awful dishonesty. Benny’s plan was to destroy the tapes. He wanted to get rid of the secret, without telling it, and to stop lying to Becky. He hoped that in flinging them one by one into Big Toe River, near where he found them, that somehow the tapes would find their way to the drowned girl and rest in peace with her. That’s what Benny hoped.

  Not hope but bile churned inside Benny when he pulled to a stop on the dirt road along the river, just opposite from the Bard’s Communication tower he’d climbed so many times. He parked the van so that the headlights shone out over the water; a sickly, and quickly disappearing, bipartite swath of light all but useless for the task at hand. Benny knew himself well enough to understand that, for him, hesitation was the death of action. Rather than getting out of the van byway of the driver’s-side door and walking all the way around for the laundry basket, he stepped over Squat, who lay between the two front seats, knelt to open the hinged side doors, and climbed out, clutching the basket in both hands. What he should’ve done was watched where he put his foot. Even then he may not have seen the bottle—Blue Nun Liebfraumilch, someone’s idea of romance, now partly filled with mud and silt from a trip down the river—lying on its side in the exact spot Benny intended to, or by karmic default was instructed to, place his own booted right foot. When he came down, the bottle didn’t break. Rather, it rolled to one side, taking his foot with it, leaving his ankle behind.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fucking shit fuck fuck shit fuck!”

  Squat, too arthritic to make the two-foot leap from the floor of the van down to the ground, howled his own doggy curses from his place of abandonment. Benny fell, his leading foot taking that quick and unexpected jaunt in a direction other than that which his body expected, and when he fell, riverward, the basket of tapes went up and fell back down like dense anticonfetti. The basket itself, kept in a one-handed knuckled grip, inverted and came to rest over Benny’s head, but the tapes—one, two, three, four, five-six, seven, eight—he listened for the thuds. One landed on his chest. Several more along the riverb
ank. But Benny heard one, at least one, splash.

  “Goddamnit!”

  Lying on his back, in the dark—made extra-dark because he lay outside the weak beams of light cast by the van’s headlights—along the muddy riverbank, with a basket over his head so that all he saw, he saw through the basket’s mesh—a world parceled out in perfect plastic rectangles—lying there with his ankle—not broken, thank the Lord—already swelling inside his boot, Benny realized the error of his plan. Realized it the moment he heard the videotape splash in the moving water. A realization more visceral than intellectual; his gut seized, his heart stormed. Getting rid of the tapes would not eliminate the secret, or its damage done. Getting rid of the tapes may, in fact, cause the already raw presence of what he knew to fester and grow cancerous. And then there was Becky. Sweet, dwarfish Becky. It may just be that the secret had something to do with Benny’s attraction to Becky.

  “Ow!” Benny screamed into the upturned basket, then flung said basket from over his head. Sitting up, he loosened the lace of his boot, pulled the tabs wide, and let the tongue loll over the criss-crossing leather strand. Squat whimpered, wanting out of the van, wanting to comfort his master. Benny got to his knees and, using the running board of the van for support, tried to stand. Quickly toppled.

  “Fuck!”

  With no other recourse, he flipped the basket upright and began crawling along the bank, stopping every few feet to drag the container up alongside, gathering the videotapes. With most lying in an irregular arc around where Benny fell, he found all but one, the one the river took Because it was dark, and because the pain shooting up his leg made thinking clearly all but impossible, Benny had no way of knowing which tape he’d lost. He’d have to wait until later. It took him a full forty-five minutes of crawling in the mud and grass and mosquito swarms to collect all the tapes, place the basket in the van, then climb up and drag himself into the driver’s seat. Figuring, correctly, that his right foot couldn’t bear the pressure of working the gas and brake pedals, Benny twisted so that the injured foot extended into the passenger side, against the engine cover, and he could drive with his left foot: a thing he did from time to time anyway, on long trips.