Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

  By the time the scene changed, opening on the Hinkeys’ dinner table again, the camera positioned so that Jenna and her father, the deacon, were in full view, Rebecca and their mother visible but more in profile, Benny felt certain the erotic quality of the video wasn’t going to increase. And when Jenna and Deacon Hinkey came to loggerheads, her shrieking about what he paid for Becky’s college and the things he refused to do for her, him spilling out one pious diatribe after another, both claiming disrespect, her a whore and tool of Satan, him a self-righteous holier-than-thou hypocrite, and Jenna, finally, in an act so planned Benny could imagine the storyboard, Jenna lifted her shirt to bare her new, and unfettered, breasts to her father and shrieked over and over “How do you think Jesus would like these?” Benny had to turn off the tape.

  Becky answered on the fourth ring, just as Benny was about to hang up.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  He wanted to ask her about all he’d just seen in the video. To say he was sorry, even.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I reckon.”

  “I’m really sorry about what happened.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay.”

  A dirty, nasty silence oozed from one plastic mouthpiece to the other, died die distance between them.

  ‘‘Next weekend there’s a Fourth of July picnic out at Gnogg’s Farm, Want to go?”

  Becky didn’t answer.

  “There’ll be lots of good music,” Benny added. “And a tanker truck of beer.”

  “Let me think about it,” Becky said.

  “Call me,” Benny said. “There won’t be any animals there,” he said.

  Chapter 20

  Becky called. The very next day. She apologized for “pouting,” and said she’d love to go to the picnic.

  “Want to come over tonight?” Benny asked, more horny than in need of companionship.

  “The fish died,” Becky answered.

  “What?”

  “The fish. The tang with the hole in its head.”

  “Shit. Sorry about that.”

  “I can’t get him out,” Becky said. “He sunk to the bottom in the corner, and I can’t reach him.”

  Benny offered help.

  Becky accepted.

  “Poor little fucker,” Benny said, tossing the carcass into the trash two hours later. “Let’s go get a hot dog.”

  Before Becky could answer, the phone rang.

  “Claxton Looms Ap—oh, hi, Mom.”

  While Becky talked on the phone, Benny moved around the room looking at her breasts from various angles. He was comparing them, in size and placement, to her dead sister’s implants. Benny, like most men, was prone to lapses in judgment, was prone to fixating at the drop of a sat on one inappropriate thing or another, then acting out of that flawed moment. Sometimes, though not often, he had an acute awareness of the stupidity of his impending action. Even then, he rarely possessed the wherewithal to stop himself. Tits, Benny thought. Nice. Nice tits. Jenna had Becky has nice tits. Jenna had nice tits. Becky has nice tits.

  Benny felt the need of a titty in his hand. He circled behind Becky as she sat, legs crossed, at her desk, talking to her mother. Benny paid no attention to the conversation as he stepped up, reached both hands over to cup both Becky’s breasts in his palms, and give them one, two little bounces before she snorted, put her feet against the desk drawer, and pushed the chair backward into Benny’s shins.

  “Shhiiit!” Benny said, nearly falling.

  “Quit it!” Becky said, her stubby fingers wrapped over the telephone mouthpiece.

  After hanging up, it took a while to calm her down.

  “I’m sorry,” Benny said. “I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean it. I won’t do it again.”

  “Daddy’s mad,” she finally said after some uncertain silence.

  “At me?” Benny asked.

  “No,” Becky said, although her tone didn’t rule that out as a possibility sometime in the future. “He’s mad at Piedmont College, where Jenna goes to school … went … where Jenna went to school.”

  “Why’s he mad at them?”

  “Jenna owes tuition for the past two semesters.”

  “So? Does he have to pay it?”

  “He won’t, whether he should or not. On principle,” Becky said.

  “What do you mean? He’s against paying for college?”

  “No. Not that. He didn’t … Jenna was … Jenna is kind of arty.”

  “You told me that,” Benny said, hoping he remembered correctly.

  “Daddy didn’t like what she was doing.”

  Becky left it at that.

  Benny wished he could tell her that he knew about the dinner table and the breast implants.

  “I don’t think the good deacon likes me,” Benny said.

  “I don’t think he likes anybody,” Becky replied. “But you’ll earn some points if you come to the hymn sing with me next week.”

  “What kind of points?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you’ll get into heaven quicker.”

  “Let me think about it,” Benny said.

  And they did go back to Benny’s house. And they did have sex. Unambitious, distracted sex. Benny kept seeing himself as a goat, hoofed and randy. And Becky, naked, seemed more grotesque, more animal-like than ever before. Jenna’s before-and-after pictures, blood, scars, and all, flashed continually in Benny’s mind. Becky, bruised from the incident at the fair, couldn’t get comfortable. Both of them heard Doodle and the man who drove the white truck having their own kind of subdued sex on the other side of the wall. The next morning, after both Becky and the other man left, Benny listened to Doodle move furniture.

  He took Squat out to pee.

  “Hey, Benny Poteat,” Doodle said. Nothing else.

  “Hey, Doodle.”

  They were both a little embarrassed by the night before. Something akin to infidelity wedged itself between them.

  “You going to Gnogg’s picnic?” she asked.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “I think so.”

  Gnogg’s Farm, owned and operated by the youngest Gnogg, Greg, only a few years older than Benny—remembered most for that one horrible incident at a high school football game—functioning more as a party spot than any kind of crop-producing farm (although the previous generations of Gnoggs peddled eggs, vegetables, and melons at a large roadside stand), lay in the thickets and kudzu-draped pine copses where Alamance County slammed to a stop at the banks of the Little Toe River. Though it was fecund, able to bear and bear, those first Gnoggs were limited in vision and means, so the farm never amounted to more than a couple hundred poorly managed acres. But Gnogg’s farm had a nice view of the river, and of Crowder’s Mountain in the distance, and the lay of the land seemed particularly suited for parties, barn dances, corn shucks, bonfires, weddings, birthdays, and holidays. Over time, folks started asking for permission to hold their special functions at Gnogg’s Farm. Now, Greg leapt on every opportunity to host a bash.

  One fenced pasture of several rolling acres was used for parking: a buck per vehicle. Five dollars got you an all-you-can-drink wristband for the cheap kegged beer. Food you generally paid for upon ordering. The July Fourth menu included deer burgers, hot dogs, baked beans, coleslaw, and the like. Only the music was free at Gnogg’s parties.

  “At’ll be one dolla’,” the man said when Benny rolled to a stop at the pasture gate. While it was clearly not the same man that made the same demand of Benny at the 4-H show, there were enough similarities to make Benny wonder whether they were related in some way, or even if there wasn’t perhaps an entire subspecies or caste of persons filling these roles. The man was decked out in red, white, and blue,
with so many stripes going in so many directions that Benny, dizzied, had to look away.

  “You ought to introduce him to Clyde,” Becky said, referring to Benny’s neighbor who traditionally spent the July Fourth holiday sitting on his porch in an Uncle Sam hat and beard, and had waved his flags enthusiastically at Benny and Becky when they left that morning.

  “Clyde’s got better taste,” Benny said.

  They parked and headed for the festivities, but before they got too far, Jeeter, with quintessential Jeeter timing and flair, gave a quick double-rev and pulled his loud motorcycle to a stop beside Benny’s van. And, even before Jeeter got the kickstand down, his passenger, not Angie from before, but some Angie-ish other woman, in short-shorts and a halter top, began pounding on Jeeter’s back and on his helmet with her fists.

  “Goddamnit! I told you to stop,” the woman screamed as she took off her helmet.

  “What?” Jeeter yelled. “What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

  “There’s something wrong with this fucking motorcycle!” she yelled. By this time the woman had leapt off the bike and was prancing around, splay-legged, with one hand down the front of her pants and the fingers of the other holding the hem of the leg band out and away from her body.

  “My goddamn pussy’s blistered! Didn’t you hear me telling you to stop?!”

  Jeeter looked befuddled. Jeeter looked embarrassed. Jeeter looked mad.

  “How the fuck was I supposed to know what you were yelling about? I thought you were enjoying the ride!”

  When the woman threw her helmet on the ground and stormed off, Jeeter looked at Benny and shrugged.

  “I need to go shoot something,” Jeeter said, joining Benny and Becky.

  “Something or somebody?” Benny asked.

  “Whichever moves first.”

  The crowd, already strong, was sure to grow steadily throughout the afternoon. Gnogg’s parties historically ran clear into the next day. Benny and Becky, mostly Benny, had come early because of the music. Fat Mumford was playing. Fat belonged to several local bands, and played a number of instruments: guitar, banjo, mandolin sometimes. What he played best, though, was the fiddle, and Benny knew Fat would have his fiddle there that day.

  Benny loved bluegrass and old-time music. Nub and Honey used to take him to all the local fiddlers’ conventions—regional music competitions, held in spring, in school auditoriums, groups of all ages with little in the way of professional polish, competitions mostly about fun and the joy of singing and playing together. When he was a kid, and because everybody knew them and ate at the fishcamp, Benny always got to go backstage where the musicians practiced and warmed up in the classrooms. He never forgot the sights and sounds. Big and heavy, or lank and wizened, hardworking men, in their freshly washed overalls, perched in a circle on tiny kid chairs, making music, their tough hands gently coaxing high-pitched rhythm from their instruments. Birdlike women, their faces drawn tight, or solid firepluglike matrons, singing in harmony so sweet Benny wanted to cry.

  “Fat gonna be here?” Jeeter asked.

  “Yep.”

  “I’ll get us some beer,” Jeeter said. “You guys get the seats.”

  As usual, Greg Gnogg had parked a flatbed trailer at the back of the largest barn, where, fifteen feet out, the ground rose gently, forming a natural grass amphitheater. Off to the right of the barn, where the ground remained flat, the sounds of the horseshoe pit and a badminton game competed with the musicians playing on the trailer. Nobody seemed to mind. Benny and Becky picked a spot in the shade of an old mimosa tree. Their timing was perfect; just as they sat, Fat, fiddle case in hand, struggled up the steep riser at the trailer’s end. Behind him, a skinny little man with a huge stand-up bass, then a guitar player and a banjo player, both of whom had their instruments slung around their necks.

  The South in July is often a blast furnace. Some places, some times, even a breeze does more harm than good. But Gnogg’s farm, situated just so, was often blessed with a cool breeze, such as the very breeze that meandered by at the exact moment when Fat Mumford sat his fiddle case across his wide lap, unclasped the three latches, and opened it up like a lopsided and sacred mouth. That sweet cleansing breeze, having recently tumbled down the slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains and over the foothills, trickled through the weeping willows that lined the Little Toe River and blew right across Fat Mumford’s lap and the instrument he cradled there. Blew softly, but definitely, over the fiddle’s belly and over the strings held taut by its carved bridge. And when that cool stir of air played across the catgut strings, it pulled something, a silent and ancient something, out of the soundpost (that soul of the instrument), out of the f-holes; a plea, or sublime curse maybe, that it carried right off the farm, carried up the gravel road to where gravel became macadam, then along the crumbling potholed black path into town—or the scruffy edges of it anyway, where the weed-choked trash gullies gave way, reluctantly, to the houses on Mill Hill—wafting, in windlike fashion, its quiet way up the front steps and onto the porch of the first house, belonging to a Mr. Tick Freeze, where he sat with a glass of milk to soothe the ulcer his third wife had bestowed upon him, sat cursing the goddamn punks who kept running the stop sign on the corner, sat under the slit-eyed and wanting watch of an obese Manx tomcat sprawled on the porch at his feet, one of a long long, long lineage of felines, most of them feral and inbred, lop-eared, cross-eyed, kink-tailed, and mangy. Tick Freeze, people would tell you, couldn’t keep a wife because he stank. Tick Freeze stank offish; partly by birthright, and partly by vocation.

  Tick Freeze, and his daddy, and his daddy’s daddy, and on back to when the Mill Hill was first built and all those farmers and folks came out of the mountains fooled into believing mill jobs with regular pay had to be better than depending on the earth and climate, all those Freezes supplemented their meager incomes by selling catfish caught in the river. Catfish eagerly purchased by churches for Friday night fish fries, or by tired women and hungry men. They were good, the Freezes, damn good at catching catfish, and before too long one of the Freezes had fashioned a murky pond in his backyard to raise them. As good as they were at catching catfish, the Freezes were even better at cleaning them. Tick Freeze was the reigning Filet King; when his knife was sharp, and it was always sharp, Tick could skin and gut a catfish in thirty seconds. Put the filets, wrapped in newspaper, in your hand in forty-five.

  But what do you do with the ropy wet guts and comblike spines and the barbed heads—with their dimming fish eyes—of all those catfish? The Freezes, generations of Freezes, gathered the innards in tin buckets, a day’s worth at a time, and flung them, a red shower of viscera, into the gully behind their house. Catfish bark when you pull them out of the water. Guttural little yips of protest. Some say that if you walked past the gully behind Freeze’s house at night, you’d hear the ghosts of the dead catfish, years and years of dead catfish swimming the dry banks, that you’d hear the guts and spines still barking. Crying out. That if you walk up to the edge of the gully, at night, you’d see all those catfish eyes looking up at you glinting in the milky moonlight.

  It’s true. There were things to hear and things to be seen by anyone who ventured past the unhallowed grounds, but those things were not piscine in nature or origin. Rather, they were feline. Wild cats, drawn to the gully by the stink of rotting guts and the promise of feast. Beginning with the first tossed bucket of fish entrails, cats began to gather in the gully. Neighborhood cats. Alley cats. Barn cats. Cats with no regular residence. Even wampus cats. All coming to sup and grow fat and mean on the fishy carrion. And they stayed. Soon even the house cats stopped going home, back to their bowls of milk and their catnip sachets, back to their owners, doting or indifferent. Choosing instead to live with the growing pride. Dividing and subdividing into factions. Some liked only the fish heads. Others the guts or tiny fish hearts. A few, the meanest, would fight to the death fo
r the eyeballs. Soon Mill Hill teemed with cats, whiskers always slick and foul no matter how fastidious their grooming habits. And as cats are creatures of habit, the whole pack of them took to sleeping by day, and by night glutting themselves and yowling and fighting and fucking until dawn. Sleep, for anyone living near the gullies, was difficult. Years later the whole town seemed overrun. Children were afraid to go out at night. A friend of a friend of a friend actually lost a daughter to the cats. Look close at any photograph from the period—mill picnics, soft-ball games, candid shots of the workday, even funerals; anyplace people gathered—and you’ll find a cat in the picture, hunched by a table leg, peering out from any available cranny. Look even closer and some of the cats become recognizable, showing up in picture after picture, year after year, with frightening longevity. People did look close, and recognized. And they named a few of those cats. Named them after the mill owners, for their tenacity and other less-mentionable traits. A one-eyed Manx, in particular, could be traced with photographic evidence at least a hundred years back. Outliving his contemporaries and most of the Manxish cats he spawned. Surviving countless assassination attempts by the boys of the town, who were paid a dollar for every dead cat they brought to the backdoor of city hall. Many a successful Buffalo Shoals entrepreneur got their start hunting cats, with .22-caliber rifles, for bounty. That old Manx lost an eye to the bounty hunters, and was rumored to have been hit several more times. But he refused to die. He and his progeny tormented the town and county for years. The cat problem dominated many official discussions. And while it never occurred to anyone that perhaps the Freeze family could dispose of the fish guts in some other more sanitary way, the idea of poison came to Superintendent Brown in a dream one night, and all agreed on the plan. A handful of arsenic stirred into every bucket of fish remnants proved successful. Cats began to die all over. Every morning a fresh crop of feline carcasses littered the environs of Buffalo Shoals. Gape-mouthed and stiff on the seats and in the trunks of abandoned cars. Curled tight in the weedy ditches. Lumped in doorways. A few even had the audacity to die right in the middle of the sidewalk. So many dead cats. It didn’t take long for the new problem to be identified. And not much longer for the bonfire solution, which also came to Superintendent Brown in a dream. Every Friday night, for an entire summer, at the back of the high school parking lot, the town maintenance crew stoked up a raging fire in the steel bed of the only municipal dump truck, and folks came from miles around with boxes, bags, or handfuls of dead cats. For a while, it became a sort of social event, families coming with chairs and ham biscuits and gallons of tea. By wintertime, the cat population was near zero, and the stink of burning cat flesh that had permeated everything for months had begun to clear. The old one-eyed Manx, still seen from time to time slinking along in the dusk or dawn, although slowed some by the loss of a back leg, continued to sow his seed. That winter was particularly hard and bitter. Not so much snow, but a cold snap so deep and persistent that it broke all records. As human nature goes, some folks began to pity the plight of the remaining cats, homeless and hungry as they were. Tick Freeze’s mother was a woman of compassion. She knew of a new litter of kittens, curled and suckling at their sickly mother’s teats in the dank black beneath the toolshed. She knew, too, that the old flannel shirt they lay on wasn’t enough to stave off the cold. Having fretted all night with worry, Tick’s mother went to bring them inside as soon as the sun came up. Went too late. The mother cat had hissed and run away. Tick’s mother found all but one of the kittens dead. Stiff She gave Tick the remaining kitten for his birthday.