Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

  Benny turned the key without turning off the headlights. Mistake. The aging vehicle, its aging engine, and most especially its tired old battery didn’t have the gumption necessary to crank under the added stress. One sluggish revolution of the crankshaft, one grunted exhalation, was all the engine mustered, and in its refusal to turn over again, dimmed the headlight beams even more.

  Benny articulated his frustration clearly. “Shit, shit, shit. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  What the hell was he going to do, stuck miles from anywhere, with an ankle so swollen he couldn’t stand on it, much less walk? Benny thought through his options. Once, on a TV show, probably Gilligan’s Island, he’d seen someone spell out “SOS” in burning coconuts on the beach. He wondered what he had to spell “SOS” with; what he had for fuel; and who was liable to fly over and pay any attention to the message, anyway.

  Sending Squat, with a note tied to his collar, up the road to find help was out of the question. The dog was too old and too stupid.

  Benny himself crawling several miles for help seemed ill-advised, too.

  Benny wondered how long he’d have to stay there until his ankle healed enough for him to walk. He’d probably starve first. Of course, he could crawl along the riverbank, catching small fish and crawdads with his bare hands … emerging finally from the wilderness months later as some hairy and feral creature a few steps back from man.

  Or he could turn off the headlights and try cranking the van one more time.

  He did.

  Without the added burden of powering the headlamps, the single half-turn of the leaky V-8 sucked just enough fuel through the line and held sufficient oomph to fire all the cylinders. The van shuddered and stuttered to life. Benny, and even Squat, sighed in relief The drive home, wet and muddy, ankle throbbing and swelling, the crushing millstone of secrecy still pressing mightily, was uncomfortable but at least possible. Benny stopped three times on the way back to his duplex.

  The first time was to remove the boot completely from his right foot and, using his hands, return the foot up onto the van’s engine cover. The second time, Benny stopped at the drive-up window of Eckerds’ Rx, where normal transactions involved the pickup and dropoff of drug pre­scriptions.

  “I need one of them Ace bandages,” Benny said to the assistant pharmacist manning the window, a skinny, effete man peering over, around, and through the tiny eyeglasses pinching his nose.

  “What?” he said, and Benny immediately looked for a quarter in the man’s ear.

  “One of them Ace bandages, and the strongest pain pills you got over the counter.”

  ““You’ll have to come inside for those items sir,” the man said, seeming not so much powermongering and defiant than suspicious of Benny’s bedraggled state.

  “I can’t walk,” Benny said. “It’s my foot.”

  And Benny saw a shift take place, a movement from doubt to pity on the pharmacist’s face.

  “Just a sec, hon.”

  Hon? Lord God, Benny thought, why? Why? Why does everything have to be so complicated?

  “Here you go, sweetie, and I put you a tube of analgesic cream in there for good measure.”

  Benny made one last stop on his way home, an unplanned stop. As he passed Dink’s Clean ‘em Up he steered the van into the parking lot, past the huge canister vacuums and the dispensers for Armor-All, polishes, towels, and air fresheners, past the washbays, to where he knew a drive-up pay phone stood in the back corner of the lot.

  Benny, as if on autopilot, eased the van up as close as possible to the phone, lowered his window, and leaned out to retrieve the plastic-covered phone book dangling from a thick wire beneath the coin return. No one comes to a pay phone without some sense of urgency or desperation or need, and that fact is borne out most clearly by the condition of the phone books. Often they’re missing altogether, and, when present, are always battered and worn from misuse. That particular phone book, many of its pages wrinkled and yellowed from rain—at least Benny hoped rain was the damaging liquid—and with whole chunks and passages of information ripped out—half the E section of the yellow pages, all the maps in the front of the book, various sections of residents’ names—and the remains scribbled over with doodles and notes and pleas, that phone book served its purpose for Benny. He found, with very little trouble, midway through the H’s, the Hinkeys’ telephone number. And, still acting without complete control or cognition, Benny slipped his quarter into the slot, listened to it clink home, and then fingered the numbers on the keypad.

  By then it was nearlytwo A.M., and Benny didn’t expect a quick answer. He expected enough time to figure out what he planned to say. So when Mrs. Hinkey crackled her feeble hello halfway through the first ring, Benny said the first thing that came to mind.

  “Shit,” he said, although midway through he made an attempt to disguise his voice, so it came out more like “sheet.”

  “Hello?” Mrs. Hinkey said again, not quite believing anyone would call her up to say “sheet” at two in the morning.

  Benny’s mind went blank. His foot hurt. A bitter backwash of guilt rose in his throat. What could he say to this old woman whose daughter he’d watched die? He could tell her that Jenna was dead, and never coming back, but what good would that do?

  “Who is…” she said, true to form in her incompletion.

  In the background he heard the good deacon snort, “Who in God’s name are you talking to?”

  Benny, never good in a moment of social crisis, took the surest way out. He hung up.

  Back at the duplex, Benny, after noting the presence of the white pickup truck parked beside Doodle’s car, and after hopping the short distance from the drive to the front door, pharmacy purchase in hand, crawled into his bedroom and into his bed, muddy clothes and all, where he wrapped his ankle as tightly as he could stand with the stretchy bandage, swallowed four or five extra-strength Advils, then slept.

  “Honey,” he said over the phone the next morning. “Would you tell Nub I hurt my foot? I can’t come in tonight.”

  “You okay, sugar? Can I bring you anything?”

  “No,” Benny said. “I’m fine.”

  And in fact his ankle wasn’t as damaged as he’d expected. After a fitful night’s sleep, with the foot propped on the only pillow Benny owned, the swelling had subsided and the pain reduced to a dull throb, unless he tried swiveling his ankle.

  Despite the discomfort, Benny had slept later than normal. He didn’t wake up until he heard Doodle saying good-bye to someone, and then what must’ve been the white truck cranking and driving away. When Benny got up and hobbled into the kitchen, sure enough, Doodle’s car sat alone in the drive.

  Slut, Benny thought playfully. If he wasn’t so filthy and miserable, he’d call her up and give her shit about it. Instead, he made himself a plate of sandwiches—some peanut butter, some baloney, and one banana sandwich with mayo—enough to last the day. He took the banana sandwich and a glass of milk into the bathroom and ate sitting on the toilet while the tub filled. Not until he was immersed and almost comfortable did Benny remember the lost tape.

  Drying quickly proved painful until Benny realized that haste wasn’t necessary. The lost tape would still be lost whether he went out to his van in ten minutes or two days. Nevertheless, he needed to know which tape the river had claimed. The time it took Benny to dry and dress, satisfy himself Doodle had left, then make the crippled orbit out to the van and back with the laundry basket was more than enough to ensure raging, stomach-churning anxiety. He sat back on the bed, the basket of tapes in his lap, used the NASCAR towel to wipe dirt from the cardboard sleeves, then arranged the tapes chronologically.

  “Duplex.” The missing tape was the one called “Duplex,” dated Winter 2000-2001. Given his status, for years now, as a duplex resident, Benny had looked forward to that video. Had hoped that Jenn
a, with her insightful analog eye, truly captured the nuances of duplex living. The agonies. The intimacies. Had hoped that she—and through her some larger audience—recognized worth amid the banal and mundane. Would elevate his existence, his struggles, to epic levels. Jekyll and Hyde. Janus. Eng and Chang. And the like.

  Given how close he’d come to losing all the tapes, Benny took some small solace in losing only one. He shoved the remaining ones, all but “Epiphanies,” back into the milk crate and under the bed. A lesser man might have watched all the videos in a single sitting. This pacing, this delayed gratification, this denial, seemed to be the only self-control Benny had.

  Ignoring telephone calls and sitting still as much as possible, Benny nursed his injured ankle for the entire day. Fortunately, Doodle left early, so she wouldn’t be bothering him. Out of sheer boredom, and the desperation that often accompanies it, he scrounged around in the duplex’s only storage closet, situated in the short hall between the kitchen and bathroom, its confines mostly consumed by the furnace and water heater; there he found what he sought, a birthday gift from Honey, several years back. A paint-by-number crucifixion scene. Golgotha. Place of Skulls. A color-fragmented representation of the Father-why-hast-thou-forsaken-me moment.

  Benny opened the box and laid its contents on the kitchen table. One plastic-handled brush. Two little bottles: turpentine, linseed oil. The canvas itself, a stiff board; Jesus’s passion diminished somehow when rendered in thick blue lines against the white gesso. And then the paint: seven small vials, numbered, the colors not even named. Benny twisted open the bottle of linseed oil just to smell it. He loved the odor. He opened the paint and found that all but a couple of the colors (numbers 1 and 4) had dried to the point of being useless. Shit. To amuse himself, Benny gave the colors names that seemed appropriate. Agony red. Suffering yellow. Misery brown. Damnation orange. Torment black. Et cetera.

  No sooner did Benny get settled in to watch “Epiphanies” than the phone rang.

  “What are you doing home?”

  “Hey, Becky,” Benny said. “I hurt my ankle yesterday. Thought I should stay off it for a while.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “Want me to come over and tend to you?”

  “No, no,” Benny said, a little too quickly. “I mean, I wouldn’t mind but…”

  “Men,” Becky said, and left it at that.

  Benny wondered just how much experience she’d had with the species.

  “So, who’s driving this weekend?” Becky asked. “To the 4-H show?”

  “You should, I guess. If you don’t mind.”

  They arranged a time for Becky to pick him up. Benny had to work a little harder to convince her not to come over that afternoon, and still half-expected her to show up at his door. He was so unsure of her promise that, during “Epiphanies,” he spent as much time looking out the window and jumping at the sound of every passing car as he did watching the television. No great loss, though; “Epiphanies” was nothing more than forty-five minutes of Jenna being filmed as she walked up behind various unsuspecting people, in assorted public settings, and, without them knowing what was happening, displayed one of several handmade signs: HUNG LIKE A HORSE; FARTS LOUDLY WHEN ALONE; PEES SITTING DOWN.

  “Hey, Gimpy,” Jeeter said. “What’s wrong with your foot?”

  Benny’s ankle healed enough by the next day that he could, if willing to limp around awkwardly, at least get out of the house. He went to Jeeter’s, to help bottle homebrew.

  “I tripped,” Benny said, then felt the need to embellish and distract. “Running from all those gorgeous women who can’t keep their hands off me.”

  “What women would those be, my crippled comrade?”

  Benny thought. And he thought. Never as quick as Jeeter in this kind of banter, he usually fell short of success.

  “The daring, the beautiful, the damn-near-fabulous Lady Bombers.”

  “Ha!” Jeeter said. “In your dreams. In your pitiful, no-pussy-gettin’ dreams. About the only place you’re liable to get chased is down at the VFW bingo hall, where the ladies have so many cobwebs in their cooters that nothing can get in or out.”

  “You’ve been around Dink too long,” Benny said.

  “Point taken,” Jeeter replied. “Sorry.”

  “What are you doing?” Benny asked.

  Benny never knew where he’d find Jeeter, or what he’d be doing around the compound. Since the storm, Jeeter spent most of his time cleaning and rebuilding his various structures. That day, though, Jeeter, wasn’t hard to locate. He sat on his motorcycle, which was on his front porch, across which was strewn the contents of a toolbox. Most baffling to Benny was the strange dance Jeeter seemed to be doing on the motorcycle. He’d scoot way forward on the seat, then reach one or both hands back under his buttocks. Then he’d slide back to where a passenger would sit—should anyone be foolish enough to climb on with him—and slip one or both hands between his legs under his crotch, all the while craning to look at a magazine open on an upturned pickle bucket. Pressed against the screen of one of the trailer’s front windows, a boom box spat the lyrics of what Benny knew to be one of Jeeter’s favorite songs.

  Goin’ up north babe, to get my hambone boiled.

  Gonna stay around up there,

  ‘till my hambone’s good and spoiled…

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Benny asked again.

  Instead of answering, Jeeter climbed off the bike and removed its seat, which he flipped upside-down across a layer of newspaper spread at the edge of the porch. He reached for a pair of pliers, then for a fat Phillips-head screwdriver. Benny didn’t speak again until Jeeter had removed the plastic plate under the motorcycle seat and had begun to peel back the black vinyl to reveal its foam core.

  “Jeeter?”

  Still no answer. Rather, Benny’s mysterious friend pointed at the open magazine, his finger making quick circles in the air. Benny looked, but on the pages of classifieds advertising trips and products, Benny couldn’t tell which one had so captivated Jeeter. Benny sat, with something closer to resignation than patience, while Jeeter went into one of his buses, coming back a few minutes later with a box of electrical items. Tape, resistors, wire, etc. When Jeeter marked out a small rectangle on the foam of his motorcycle seat with a felt pen, then opened a safety razor and began cutting a hole within the lines, Benny’s pretence of patience dissolved.

  “If you don’t tell me what you’re doing, I’m gonna leave.”

  “I told you,” Jeeter said, stopping his work long enough to place an index finger directly on the advertisement to which he kept referring.

  “Vibe-Rider,” Benny read. “You have to be shitting me.”

  The ad described a device that gets embedded in one’s motorcycle seat at the precise spot where the carefully chosen female passenger’s crotch rests against said seat. When activated by the driver, the oblong thingama-jig vibrates—the intensity of those vibrations at the mercy of the driver’s thumb—the goal being to twitch and wiggle the unwitting pudendal prisoner into a state of orgasmic ecstasy, and, by extension, availability.

  “You didn’t really buy one of those did you?” Benny asked.

  “Nope,” Jeeter said. “I’m making one.”

  Benny listened as Jeeter explained the plan, and watched as he placed something beneath the seat fabric and wired it to the motorcycle battery.

  “This seems ill-advised, Jeeter.”

  “Spoken like a true coward.”

  “I thought you wanted help bottling your beer.”

  “I’m all done here,” Jeeter said, snapping the side cover back into place. “Just let me give her a test.”

  But when Jeeter pushed the starter, the motorcycle engine turned and turned over without cranking. He opened the gas cap and threw the bike from side to side between his legs.r />
  “Shitsky,” he said. “Benny, I’ll make you vice president of the Jeeter empire for a whole week if you’ll siphon some gas out of that backhoe for me.”

  Benny flipped him off on the way to the shed for a gas can and a hose. Ever since they were kids, Jeeter had an aversion to siphoning gasoline. The fumes made him sick to his stomach. Usually, Benny didn’t mind doing the favor. Usually, he paid attention when he sucked at the hose. But he was so distracted that day his mouth filled with stinging orange fuel after one hard cheek-sucking pull, because he forgot to check the level of gas in the can.

  He spat. Coughed twice. Retched and heaved.

  He borrowed Jeeter’s toothbrush. Didn’t tell him.

  At Nub & Honey’s, later in the afternoon, Benny leaned against the worktable, watching Scotty peel shrimp. Doodle came and went through the door to the dining room, winking at Benny each time. Benny wanted to talk to her, to see how things were going, but she seemed too busy.

  “Where’d you say Nub went?” he asked Honey as she walked past with a five-pound bag of mints clutched to her bosom.

  “Big Lots,” she said. “Went to get some Red Devil Lye for the toilets.”

  “Tell him I ought to be back at work by Saturday.”

  Benny drove away from the restaurant, surprised. Surprised at how much, after really only one weekend’s absence, he actually missed the place, its routines, its busyness. Surprised at how well the restaurant ran without him.

  Chapter 19

  “Are your friends going to be here?” Becky asked as Benny pulled to a stop at the County Fairgrounds’ front gate, where on either side geriatric sentinels stood with their hands grubbing around in the change-heavy pockets of their 84 Lumber aprons.

  “At’ll be one dollar,” the man on the driver’s side said, poking his head far enough in the window for Benny to smell the coffee-and tobacco-thick breath.