Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

  And there it lay, years later, Tick’s cat, named Cat, half asleep, languorous and heavy with history, waiting for Tick to finish the milk, knowing that the last few drops the old man would spill out on the porch floor for it to lap up. Lay there in torpid defiance of anything, except for the milk, that might compel it to move. Then came the breeze. The one that originated miles away, but had most recently played over the strings of a particular fiddle. Strings made of gut. Catgut, renowned for its stretchability and soft song. When that breeze crawled up the front steps of Tick Freeze’s house, onto his front porch, along the fleabitten leg of Cat and across its belly fur, that ancient something the breeze carried with it from the fiddle spoke to the animal. There was no way to know just what it said, but immediately the cat, pitched into a hissing-and-spitting frenzy, leapt up, charged into the street, where it was hit and killed by a car, one of them goddamn punks who’d just ran the stop sign, thereby ending, as far as anyone could tell, the domesticated branch of a complicated, proud, and relatively historical feline lineage. Its death, piercing, coincided with the first note Fat Mumford played that day, a mile or more away, one long drawn out C note to open up “Soldier’s Joy.” The note came out just a little flat, which puzzled and annoyed Fat Mumford, who’d just tuned the fiddle perfectly moments earlier.

  “Can I get those for you?” somebody asked, walking by with a trash bag.

  “Thanks, buddy,” Benny said, handing him the empty beer cups.

  Flat note notwithstanding, everybody enjoyed the show.

  “What’s that he keeps putting on the bow?” Becky asked.

  Fat paused between songs to take something out of his fiddle case and draw the bow across it.

  “Rosin,” Benny said. “It’s a little cake of rosin.”

  It’s what allowed the horsehair bow to stutter out the sounds. Benny wished for a moment that he could put a cake of rosin under his tongue to help him say the things he struggled with.

  “I gotta go find that girl,” Jeeter said. “And make sure she’s okay.”

  Jeeter came back a while later with the woman walking several paces behind.

  “Will you give that girl a ride home?” Jeeter asked.

  She didn’t say a word to Benny or Becky the whole trip. Just sat in the back of the van, on the bed, with her legs spread.

  Chapter 21

  “Benny?” Becky called from the bedroom.

  Benny sat at his kitchen table, waiting for a cup of instant coffee to cool.

  “Benny?” she said, a little louder.

  Benny heard her call the first time, he just wasn’t in the mood to answer.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” she asked coming into the room.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Guess I was daydreaming.”

  “Have you seen my undies?”

  “What?”

  “My undies. I left them on the floor by the bed.”

  “Look under the bed,” he said, not offering to help. “Squat probably dragged them there.”

  “I did,” she said, clearly irritated. “Can you help me look?”

  Benny didn’t move. Eventually, Becky sighed her discontent and looked for herself

  “If you find them,” she said, “will you please bring them when you come this afternoon?”

  She refered to the hymn sing at Egg Rock Pentecostal Church, which Benny finally agreed to attend.

  “Yep,” he said.

  “It starts at four,” she said. “Will you pick me up around three?”

  “Yep.”

  Bitch, he thought when she left, then realized immediately that she’d done nothing to elicit the response. Benny wanted to watch Jenna’s next tape. “Homemade Bible Stories. Fall 1999.” It’s the main reason he was abrupt with Becky. The other reasons he couldn’t articulate, anyway. Maybe he should just tell her that her stupid sister was dead. That she walked right into the Toe River, big new tits and all, and didn’t come back up. Maybe he could explain the whole thing to Becky without her getting angry, or calling the police. What good would the police do now, anyway? Maybe he and Becky could watch the tapes again and she could explain things to Benny. Probably not, though. With Becky gone, he had a few hours to himself before the hymn sing. Benny put the tape into his VCR.

  Dec. 11,1999 • • • Rec

  10:00 a.m.

  The camera is mounted on the dashboard of a moving car. The scene jumps back and forth between forward-and rear-facing motion. By the sound of their voices, one Jenna’s, and another male voice, two people are in the car, but it’s unclear who drives and who is the passenger. Their conversation is limited.

  “Here?”

  “No.”

  “Here?”

  “No”

  And on and on. They drive through the country, progressively hillier country, and come to a stop eventually.

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  In the middle of an orchard. An apple orchard. The scene jump-cuts and the camera has been moved outside the car, where it pans 360 degrees; apple trees as far as the eye can see, split by a narrow road, the road itself flanked by barbed-wire fencing: three-strand. The camera fixes on the road, and in the distance, from no small distance, a walking figure appears. The day is blue. Blue. And the orchard is a great expanse of green, raked again and again by the gnarled gray branches and stippled with the crimson red of apples.

  The figure comes into focus. A woman, Jenna, wearing a short leather skirt and a tank top, walks without stopping up to and past the camera, which turns to follow as she walks to the fence. She climbs, with difficulty, over the top strand of wire and walks into the orchard, where she stops at the first tree and picks an apple. Apple in hand, Jenna climbs back over the fence, faces away from the camera, lifts her skirt over her hips, hooks her thumbs in the waist of her white panties, pulls them off, hangs them be­tween two barbs on the top strand of wire, making visible the circle and circle and circle bull’s-eye drawn over the front of the fabric, straightens her skirt, smoothes it over her buttocks, kneels, picks up the apple, and nestles it into the crotch of the hanging undergarment, where it sags low and distorts the circles.

  There’s a cut, and Jenna stands in the middle of the road, holding a gun at arms’ length with both hands. She fires once into the air, once in the direction of the camera, then spins to fire the remaining shots at her underwear, hitting it twice, the apple exploding in a spray of white flesh from inside the fabric. Jenna stops, points the gun to her temple, smiles, clicks. Clicks. Clicks.

  Stupid. Benny thought the whole damn thing was stupid. And the next segment, a thing with a loaf of bread and a can of sardines, stupid, too. There were three other segments on the tape, but they were all boring as hell. Benny rewound the tape and tried jacking off to the scene where her butt showed, but no luck. Stupid.

  Stupid, Benny thought, pulling up in the Employee of the Month spot at Claxton Looms. He’d rather be going anyplace than a hymn sing at Deacon Hinkey’s church.

  “Wait here, Squat,” Benny said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Squat lay still, in agreement. Benny brought him along because the old dog seemed a little out of sorts. Like he needed company or something. With a bowl of food and a bowl of water, Squat would happily spend the afternoon in Benny’s van.

  “Hi, Squat,” Becky said.

  Squat lay still as his greeting.

  “He okay?” she asked.

  “Just old,” Benny said.

  The Egg Rock Pentecostal Church parking lot teemed with Christians and Christian cars and trucks. While no uglier or more unattended-to than most, Benny’s van attracted attention when they drove in. Maybe because of all the un-Christian, downright heathen, implications that go along with owning a conversion van, or maybe, probably even, because Deacon Hinkey�
�s midget daughter sat up in the passenger seat like nobody’s business.

  “You parked right beside Daddy’s car,” Becky said.

  Moving was out of the question.

  “Hey y’all,” she said to any of the myriad onlookers who watched her make the little jump out of Benny’s van.

  While it had been years, decades even, since Benny was last inside Egg Rock Pentecostal—the last time he remembered being the funeral of some withered friend or relative of Honey’s—the hard, mean familiarity of its knotty pine interior pierced Benny’s side; a stab of hot pain burrowed deep. Either that, or the tomato sandwich he’d eaten for lunch was coming back with a vengeance.

  Benny followed Becky. He felt big, gargantuan, hideous, and despicable; as if the months of lies and deceit seething and coursing through his veins had begun to fester and his bloated flesh and swollen muscles hung loose about his rancid bones, the whole damn mess ready to rupture at the slightest touch. They took their seats in the second pew from the front, where Becky’s feet dangled a good six inches from the floor. Her mother sat, smiling, in the front. Lord have mercy. Despite the span of time, the dry, pious smell of the old hymn books, the creaking and groaning of belabored pews, and the dizzying swirl of pine-knot patterns on the walls, all felt as if they’d been a daily part of Benny’s existence. As did the hush that trickled, in two parts, over the congregation, first when the seven-hundred-year-old pianist tottered into view and unsteadily to her bench, then again when the deacon emerged from one of two narrow doors on either side of the pulpit.

  If he saw Becky sitting there in the second pew, Deacon Hinkey gave no indication. If he saw Benny, monstrous or not, sitting close beside his dwarfish daughter, he gave less than no indication. When the good deacon opened the service with a prayer for souls “lost and wandering in sin,” Benny thought he detected a fleeting, pitiful, harangued spark of humanity.

  The choir, in intent and purpose, strove to be choirly, robed, arranged according to some unknown criteria (pitch, or height, or age, or presence of unsightly hairs) behind the deacon, and knuckling their hymnals. Becky had to elbow him in the side several times before Benny realized he was supposed to pick up his own hymnal and join the congregation as they struggled to catch up, then keep up, with the pianist’s mad dash at “Shall We Gather at the River,” page eighty-seven. Then again through page forty-three, “Rock of Salvation.” And again, and again. The manic quality of the hymns—the choppy, off-key piano, the cacophony of talentless but give-’em-hell-anyway worshipers—never varied; Benny couldn’t tell whether they were all charging toward heaven or away from hell. Somewhere in the middle, Deacon Hinkey spoke about the virtues of hard work, clean living, sobriety, and abstemiousness, which elicited “amens” all around. After another hour of singing, the ordeal came to a close with a bitter prayer.

  Every good Christian loves a dog. So when Benny went straight to his van after the hymn sing ended, to let Squat out to pee, Becky followed, and in the name of fellowship (and general nosiness) so did several others.

  “At’s a good dog,” someone offered when Benny opened the door to Squat lying on the van floor, looking no less forlorn than before. Benny had to help the old dog out of the van, and while Squat nosed around in the Johnson grass looking for, presumably, a place to urinate, Benny fielded questions about his age and breed and the various tricks he couldn’t do.

  Becky sat nervously on the footboard, knowing full well that there was a sizing-up element to the whole encounter. As if the congregation exercised some protective, familial rights over Becky. She sat nervously, knowing full well that her father would be coming to his car any minute. Sure enough, coincidence, that sublime trickster, held sway.

  “What you got in this thang?” a jowly, jovial Pentecostal asked, poking his head in the open door of Benny’s van. Becky moved aside as Benny tried to deflect attention away from the bed. Nobody paid any attention to Squat. Nobody except a little boy named Punk, who called out, just as Deacon Hinkey walked up, “They’s something wrong with that dog!”

  Everyone turned to Squat. Squat stood, heaving, on the grass. Rhythmic and violent spasms; his old dog back alternately arching, stomach sucked in, then relaxing.

  “Probably just ate something,” Benny said, not too concerned. “Proba­bly ate some grass.”

  Squat proved him wrong, though. The old dog hadn’t eaten grass. Instead, what he ate, he chose to reveal the very instant Deacon Hinkey stepped into the small crowd.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Benny said.

  “Nothing, Daddy,” Becky said.

  “Something’s wrong with that dog,” Punk said.

  And Squat gave his last, most wrenching, heave, and there on the grass, swimming in a pool of yellow bile, lay the thing he’d eaten. Punk broke off a stick, and despite Benny’s wish to the contrary, everyone gathered around to watch the little boy fish the thing from the dog puke.

  “That’s a damn panty!” somebody said. ““Your dog sicked up a panty!”

  And, in irrefutable fact, it was a panty—complete with the looping cursive “Sunday” stitched in thin red across the front panel—that hung by one chewed leg-hole from the stick held high in Punk’s hand. Deacon Hinkey looked at Becky, then Benny, then Becky, then, finally, at Benny. Becky looked down, only down. Benny couldn’t find a place to look. And everyone else took it all in with righteous relish. Everybody, except Punk, ignored the panty. Punk had begun to swing it around and around, the slow arc described by trails of thin yellow vomitus.

  “Put that stick down, son!” the deacon said. Punk obeyed the commandment immediately.

  Eventually some merciful soul broke the spell of embarrassment. A friend of Becky’s. Nadine.

  “Hey, Becky,” Nadine said. “A bunch of us are going to Plumb Bob’s tonight for hot wings. Why don’t y’all come?”

  Thus the crowd dispersed.

  “I better ride home with Mama,” Becky said. But Benny knew what she meant. With Daddy.

  Becky mouthed “Call me later” from the backseat of Deacon Hinkey’s car, with only her head visible over the car door. Benny picked up Squat and eased him into the van. The old dog seemed a little peppier after lightening his load.

  “I’m sorry,” Becky said when Benny called her that afternoon.

  “About what?” Benny asked.

  “About this afternoon,” she said. “Will you go to Plumb Bob’s with me tonight?”

  “Who’s going to be there?”

  “Nadine, the girl who asked me, and her boyfriend. Probably her sister, Nance, and Nance’s fiancé, too. I don’t know who else.”

  Benny hesitated.

  “It’ll be fun,” she encouraged.

  Benny hesitated.

  “They have really good wings. Hot.”

  “I reckon,” Benny said. “But I can’t stay out too late.”

  He had nothing to do, later or the next day, that might preclude a late night. Benny just wanted to give himself an escape route.

  “You know these folks well?” Benny asked before they got there.

  “Pretty well. Nadine and Nance grew up in the church. The guys just sort of come and go.”

  “Do you hang out with them a lot? I mean, I’ve never heard you mention them until today.”

  “You think I didn’t have a life before you, Benny Poteat?”

  “No,” he said. “I mean, yes. I didn’t mean that at all. Sorry.”

  Becky laughed, but it was a tiny pointy-faced little laugh.

  Plumb Bob’s, out on River Road, had a reputation for several things. Fiery-hot chicken wings. One-dollar draft beers. Foosball and karaoke. It used to be known for fights and trouble, especially on the weekends, but after a young tough was knifed and beaten, and bled nearly to death under a car in the parki
ng lot, new owners came in and scrubbed the place down. Now the crowd seemed more wholesome. Or at least less prone to stabbing and shooting one another.