Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

  “There’s Nadine’s car,” Becky said.

  Once inside, the Egg Rock crowd was easy for Benny to spot. Half a dozen insipid Christians huddled around a table for four, laughing too often and too loud.

  “This is Benny,” Becky announced to the table as they walked up, then named its occupants in counterclockwise order. “Nadine. Raymond. Steve. Jinx. And Craig. Where’s Nance?”

  “She should’ve been here twenty minutes ago,” Craig said, turning his fist to scowl at the watch on his wrist. Benny recognized the man from somewhere. Not the church though, but he may have been there.

  “How’s your dog?” Raymond asked.

  “Y’all order me some iced tea and some wings,” Becky said, pretending not to have heard the question. “I’ll be back in a jiff.”

  Benny sat at a corner of the table, as far outside the ring of intimacy as he could get away with, watched Becky go into the bathroom. He, too, avoided the question about Squat. But Raymond pressed the issue.

  “Wonder where he got ahold of those underwear?”

  “Y’all come here a lot?” Benny asked. “What’s good to eat?”

  Nadine started to tell him about the chicken wings, but stopped mid-sentence when Craig spoke.

  “They ever find that girl’s sister?”

  “No, Craig,” Nadine said. “No one’s heard from Jenna. And that girl’s name is Becky.”

  Craig nudged Benny, who regretted sitting beside him.

  “She tell you about that?” Craig asked.

  The man brought something dangerous to the moment; Benny couldn’t tell exactly what yet.

  “About what?” Benny asked.

  “Her spooky sister dropping off the face of the earth.”

  Becky returned from the bathroom, tailed by the waitress, before Craig could say anything else.

  “Can I get you folks something to drink?”

  Benny looked around the table. Craig had a beer, some kind of dark import. Raymond drank a cocktail that resembled iced tea. None of the other drinks were alcoholic.

  “You got Coors on tap?” Benny asked.

  “Nope. Bud. Bud Light. And Yuengling.”

  “Let me have a Budweiser.”

  “Lemonade, please,” Becky said.

  “How can you drink that piss-beer?” Craig asked.

  “I know you from somewhere,” Benny said in response.

  “I don’t think so,” Craig said, dismissing the possibility. “Unless you shop at my store.”

  Craig puffed out his chest with that last statement.

  “Contain your domain,” he said, repeating the slogan on his shirt in a way that let everyone know he said it often and meant it in every possible way.

  “What?” Benny said.

  “Contain your domain,” Craig said again, and nothing else.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Benny asked, and both he and Craig were surprised by the abruptness of it.

  “He works at the Container Store out off the interstate,” Jinx, the other woman at the table, said from behind, and around, the fat straw in her mouth.

  “I manage the Container Store,” Craig said, then sat back to pout a little. “Where the hell is Nance!”

  No doubt about it, Benny hated Plumb Bob’s; dread crept like bile up the back of his throat, and when the already-numbing din of table after table of yacking patrons was surpassed and ruptured by the pierce of microphone feedback, he knew things were only going to get worse.

  “Karaoke,” Becky said, squeezing his thigh under the table. “Want to try?”

  Benny chose not to dignify the question. Many, in fact most, folks in the bar, including Becky and her friends, turned or positioned their chairs to better see the low stage tucked between the two bathroom doors. And they all seemed genuinely enthused when the first singer climbed drunkenly up to the mike. “Singer” didn’t seem the right word for what the man did. He took an already bad song, something by Bob Seger, and mashed it around in his liquored-up mouth until nothing made sense, but the meager audience roared and clapped their meager appreciation for the effort. Karaoke-er, karaoke-ist, karaokonist.

  Benny looked at Craig, and looked closely. The man had turned to face the stage, but paid much more attention to the napkin he was shredding; tearing off little bits of paper, rolling them into tight balls between his thumb and forefinger, and piling them up on the table, beside the peeled and shredded label from his beer bottle. Benny couldn’t place Craig, but he knew they’d met before.

  “Contain your domain.”

  Craig said it to the waitress that time.

  Two tables over, against a wall and beneath a poster of Miss Plumb Bob’s 1997 and the autographed hard hat she wore in the picture—the hard hat that matched her bathing suit—a couple sat engaged in a conversation Benny wished he was privy to. It had to be more interesting than the Egg Rock claptrap. The woman at the other table cried. The man looked as if he wanted to, but couldn’t. They would lean in, both of them, to speak or hear, then pull away to absorb and react. Benny wondered what made her cry. He tried reading lips, with no luck

  “Go for it, Becky,” Nadine said. “Do it. Do the Achy Breaky Heart song.”

  “Noooo,” Becky answered, but made it clear that she just wanted a little more encouragement.

  “I’m going to call Nance!” Craig said, shoving his seat out from the table too quickly for the passing waitress to get out of its way. She spilled a tray of drinks. Apologized profusely. Craig offered nothing.

  “Okay,” Becky said. “I’m going.”

  Benny watched Craig walk away. Watched Becky work to make the step onto the stage, the crowd hushing in anticipation. Then it hit him. No. Not “hit.” The realization rose, foglike, around him. Memory eased lackadaisically into cognizance. He remembered where he’d seen Craig. Benny had never been into the Container Store out on the interstate, but he’d often looked down on it from high above, on the tower where he serviced the satellite dishes. He remembered the day the two men fought. He remembered the blow job. As Craig walked back to the table, looking less satisfied than when he left, certainty locked into place. Craig had won the fight that day.

  “Nance tell any of you where she was going?” Craig asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Did she leave with Ja—”

  “Shhh,” Jinx said.

  “I told her the next…”

  “Hush, Craig! Becky’s singing,” Jinx said.

  The others, grateful she spoke up, glared in solidarity.

  And while the song itself grated on Benny’s nerves, nipped and pinched at his own questionable sense of taste, what came out of Becky’s mouth came out songlike. Her voice, rich and solid, overcame the ridiculous lyrics. Everyone else must’ve thought so, too; she got a huge round of applause and shouts of “One more!”

  Becky chose, for her second number, another oddball, but at least one Benny liked. Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” and when Becky finished and walked, in her sturdy dwarf shoes, off the stage, she got a helping hand from the next participant as she made the step down. Just as Becky was about to sit, Nance arrived.

  “Hey, Nance,” everybody said. Everybody except Craig. Craig looked toward the wall. Craig looked toward the restrooms. Craig looked everywhere except at Nance, that is, until the others turned their attention back to Becky.

  “You go, girl!”

  “Rock on, mama!’

  “Great job, Beck!”

  Et cetera.

  Benny smiled and nodded his quiet approval. And Becky basked, fairly wallowed in the moment.

  Which is why she didn’t see what happened. To Nance.

  The woman pulled her chair in tight, close to Craig. Reached to pat his thigh. She smiled nervously
at Benny; he was the only one looking her way. And when the next karaoke devotee started to bellow from on stage, everyone turned to watch. Except Benny. He rocked his chair back, balancing on the rear legs. Bored and wanting to go home. If not for the pause, the melodramatic second of silence in the song, Benny wouldn’t have heard the faint snap. Had he not been watching Craig, and, over Craig’s shoulder, Nance, he wouldn’t have seen her face, that look of disbelief, that grimace that swept her face, and the shudder of realization. Craig broke her finger. He reached under the table, with both hands, to where her hand rested on his thigh, and snapped one of her fingers. Benny couldn’t tell which, but he didn’t doubt the fact.

  Nance’s face went flush, then pale. She tried not to cry. Everyone but Benny was turned away from her, watching the performance. But she did cry. Benny watched the tears bead on the thin rim of her bottom lid, then spill over. Nance, because she was looking at Craig, was looking at Benny. She tried to smile, as if … But in that contorted gesture nothing smilelike emerged. Nevertheless, Benny couldn’t believe her composure. No shriek No apparent rage. No hitting. Only the forced smile through which she blew several sharp breaths. Nance didn’t even bring her injured hand up to look at; rather she reached down under the table with her other hand and just sat there holding tight to her pain.

  The crowd cheered—none louder than the Egg Rock table—and while they cheered the end of one karaoke song and the beginning of another, Benny couldn’t help but think they were applauding Nance’s perfor­mance, or Craig’s.

  Plumb Bob’s reeked. Of fried chicken wings and onion bricks. Of bad beer. Of stupidity. Benny looked up in time to catch Craig glowering at him.

  Fuck this, Benny thought. This is not my business.

  “I have to go,” he said, standing.

  “What?” Becky asked. Then again, not sure she heard. “What? Why?”

  “I forgot something. Are you coming with me or…”

  He let the option hang in the air.

  “I can give you a ride home, Beck,” Nadine said.

  So Benny left, with the bare minimum of good-byes.

  He went home. He ate a shitty dinner. He went to bed.

  “You seen the paper today?” Jeeter asked when Benny picked up the phone.

  “No.”

  “Look at it.”

  “I don’t get the paper, Jeeter. What is it?”

  “I ain’t saying. You have to go get it.”

  “Come on!” Benny said. “Don’t be an asshole.”

  “It’s what I do best,” Jeeter said. “Hey, I got an idea for a new invention.”

  “Against my better judgment, I’ll ask, what is it?”

  “A dick strap,” Jeeter said.

  “A what?”

  “A dick strap.”

  “And what exactly do you do with a dick strap?”

  “You ever wake up with a pee-boner?”

  Benny could hear Jeeter’s enthusiasm.

  “Of course.”

  “Ever wake up with it bent backwards or sideways and hurting?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well…”

  Benny wasn’t interested in the more technical details.

  “What about your other invention? That dildo seat?”

  “It’s a vibrator, not a dildo. I’m still working out the kinks.”

  After breakfast, Benny ventured out to the 7-Eleven for a Buffalo Shoals Tribune, and a stick of turkey jerky for Squat, which the old dog devoured unceremoniously on the floor of the van, in the parking lot, while Benny sat reading the paper.

  “Son of a bitch!” he said, but got no response from Squat.

  “Look at this,” he said, holding the paper down a little.

  Truth was, Squat probably would’ve recognized Dink in the grainy black-and-white photograph on the front page of the community section, the one called “Pasture Notes,” except that Dink stood all but behind the real reason for the picture, which was a life-sized bust of Jesus made, no, crafted, solely out of dryer lint. Made, no, Grafted by, who else, but Dink himself. Without the title indicating such, Squat probably wouldn’t have been able to recognize Jesus, for a number of reasons. All in all, though, the form was vaguely familiar as both human and biblical.

  “Son of a bitch,” Benny said again, with a little less emphasis.

  According to the paper, Dink had been gathering dryer lint from all the lint traps at the laundromat for years, working on the sly in the basement at his mother’s house, with buckets of thin plaster, building the sculpture day by day. As it were, Jesus would’ve remained there, in that basement, for God knows how long if the repairman who’d come to change the filters and service the furnace before wintertime wasn’t such a devout member of the newly formed, and still floundering, Baptist congregation that met in the vacant storefront between the Big Lots and Hammer’s Gun-shop in a strip mall just out of town. They were short on furnishings and accoutrements.

  So moved was the repairman that he made several calls right away: his boss, who also happened to be the minister at the church, his wife (who suggested the next call), and the newspaper office.

  Dink, said the paper, agreed to donate the bust to the church following a three-month public viewing at the Buffalo Shoals Public Library. The article closed with a few quotes.

  “It’s a miracle,” said the preacher’s wife.

  “Bless his heart,” said the repairman’s wife.

  “Smells kind of funny,” said somebody’s kid.

  Chapter 22

  Benny chugged from the water bottle strapped to his belt, but up on the tower there was nothing to block the sun, nor any way to escape the August heat. Off in the distance, where Crowder’s Mountain ought to be, a dense haze obliterated everything on the horizon. Benny finished all but the last couple inches in the bottle and poured the remaining water over his head. He hated this particular tower, mostly because of its proximity to the vinegar plant. Even on good days everything stank of vinegar, your eyes stung, and the taste settled in to the back of your throat and refused to leave.

  Across the street from the plant and the tower, a cemetery lay claim to a rectangle of earth the size of a football field. Shadeless, therefore parched, and cordoned off by a six-foot chain-link fence, there was nothing remotely pastoral or restful about the lot, and Benny wondered why anybody would want to be buried, or allow a loved one to be buried, there.

  One family had recently made the choice. Near the far edge of the property a motley group—their connection evidenced by similarities in their mismatched, ill-fitting clothes—made up of four little kids who clearly wanted to be somewhere else, half a dozen grownups no less eager to be there, and three old people who didn’t seem to care one way or the other, formed a ragged circle around a humped mound of dirt, almost obscene in its redness.

  Just as Benny tucked a wrench back into his belt, ready to begin the climb down, he heard the automatic sprinkler system come on. It would be hard to say who was more surprised, Benny or the mourners, as the perfectly spaced sprinkler heads rose from hiding out of the earth and began to spray crisscross patterns over the graveyard. Back and forth. Back and forth. And each sweep was timed so that the showers of water—there now, gone here—offered both opportunities for escape and drenching to the grieving family. So they ran, antlike, between and around and from the sprays. And finally, in attack-and-retreat fashion, they placed their flowers and spoke their words, and, to be sure, none escaped completely dry.

  This was one of the silliest things Benny had ever seen. It left him so busy laughing that he couldn’t remember if he’d actually checked that last bolt. But when Benny looked, from halfway down, straight back up to the top of the tower, a wave of vertigo so thoroughly swept his body that all he could do was cling to the hot and rigid steel frame, trembling, until the
nausea and dizziness passed. It happened to him once before, and took several hours before he could actually make the climb down. Mercifully, it wasn’t so bad this time. Benny took the last step down onto solid ground just before suppertime. He’d tell Becky about the whole experience that night.

  After the incident at Plumb Bob’s, the karaoke, the snapped finger, Benny had eased away, just a little, from Becky. But he missed companionship. Doodle spent most of her time with the guy in the white pickup truck. Jeeter dug ponds and cleaned fish tanks all day. And Dink, only tolerable in small doses during normal times, was even more obnoxious now that his dryer-lint Jesus sat in the foyer of the public library.

  Benny gave in. Succumbed to the oldest itch on the planet: desire. He’d called earlier that day to see if she wanted to get a beer or something. Maybe go to the softball game. When he picked her up that evening, they both decided that it was too hot to sit outside, so they went to the Dairy Queen instead, where they met Jeeter and Dink, in the tiny but cool dining room, its air thick with the scent of sugar.

  They sat licking their cones in silence. Until Dink spoke.

  “Y’all know how buzzards cool off on a hot day?”

  “No, Dink,” Jeeter said. “How do buzzards cool off on a hot day?”

  “They screte on their legs!”

  “What?” Both Jeeter and Benny asked the question.

  “Screte! They screte on they own damn legs!”

  “You mean shit?” Benny asked.

  “Fuckin’-a I mean shit. They shit right down their own legs!”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Jeeter said without hesitation. “I mean if it’s a really hot day?”

  The question baffled Dink into silence. For the duration, at least.

  • • • • •