Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

  “You’ve reached Rebel Yell Ponds and Aquarium Service, please leave a message. If this is an aqua-emergency, please dial my pager number.”

  “Pick up the phone, asshole,” Benny said. “I know you’re…”

  “Hey, shithead,” Jeeter said. “What’s up?”

  “You going tonight?”

  The question struck Jeeter as absurd. They agreed to meet at Gnogg’s at six o’clock.

  “Hey,” Jeeter asked. “Will you do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Swing by here and pick up a couple cases of homebrew. I’ll leave it on the porch.”

  “You riding your bike?” Benny asked.

  “Yep. Looks like the weather’ll be good.”

  “So … how’s the hot seat working?”

  “We’ll see tonight.”

  “You didn’t ask him what he was coming as,” Becky said.

  “He wouldn’t tell me. We never tell.”

  They left Benny’s house before dark, Benny tapping the horn to wave at Clyde. Halloween was always a favorite holiday for Clyde. He gave out lots of candy. Chose his costume with love and care. That Halloween, Clyde sat, as usual, in the rocking chair on his front porch. Beside him, close, another chair. In it, a full-sized fake skeleton. Clyde had bound the left forearm of the skeleton to his own right forearm. Every time Clyde waved, the skeleton waved. Benny drove around the block just to see Clyde wave again.

  In the back of the van, Squat grunted, most likely in discomfort. Or annoyance. Becky insisted on putting the dog’s costume on before leaving. Benny had no doubt that the whole thing was going to embarrass him at the party. Becky wore her black business suit, tailored to fit her awkward frame. She’d put the mask on when they got to Gnogg’s. Benny, his face and hands painted silver, sweltered inside his airless costume. He’d don dark glasses upon arrival.

  “I’m going to pass out from the fucking heat,” he said. “Will you crack your window?”

  They picked up the beer. Jeeter had already left. By the time Benny and Becky and Squat got to Gnogg’s, at six o’clock, the party was already in full swing.

  “Something smells good,” Becky said, from the mouth hole of the Rea­gan mask.

  “Didn’t I tell you,” Benny said. “Gnogg’s Halloween party is always a pig-picking.”

  “Oooooo.”

  Benny helped Squat out of the van. Not two steps and the poor old dog tripped on his stirrups.

  “He looks ridiculous, Becky.”

  In the time it took for the three of them to make their way to the kegs and the barbecue pit, enough people had laughed at poor Squat to make it clear that, to Benny anyway, the horse costume wasn’t a good idea.

  “Wow!” Becky said, as they stood in line with paper plates and plastic forks waiting for a man in a nurse’s dress and shoes to serve them chunks of pork. “Look at that pumpkin.”

  A small pickup truck drove slowly by, headed toward the barn. In its bed, three, maybe four people sat holding the biggest damn pumpkin Benny had ever seen.

  “How much does that thing weigh?” Benny asked.

  “ ‘Bout eight hundred and fifty pounds.”

  Low whistles all around. People, men in particular it seems, are impressed by overkill.

  The lady standing in line in front of Benny and Becky turned and spoke to them.

  “Y’all know Shaw Bunchy?”

  The jutting, misaligned, and blackened false teeth she wore made understanding her difficult, and the very realistic eyeball hanging convincingly from her cheek proved distracting in other ways.

  “No,” Benny said. “Why?”

  “He growed that punkin’,” she said. “They going to use a chainsaw and make a big old jack-o’-lantern.”

  “That so,” Benny said.

  As if on her cue, Benny heard the chainsaw crank: two pulls then the high-pitched whining rev.

  “Let’s go watch,” Becky said.

  “Let’s wait for Jeeter first.”

  She seemed disappointed.

  “You can go if you want. I’ll wait here, then when Jeeter comes, we’ll both come to the barn.”

  Becky lacked the confidence to go alone, even as a diminutive ex-president. Fortunately, they didn’t have to wait long.

  “What the fuck?” Benny said to Jeeter, who laughed for five full minutes at Squat before he could respond.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Duct Tape Man! And … what’s all that shit hanging from you?”

  “Well, clearly you are too functionally illiterate to get it. Becky?”

  “Gosh,” she said. “I don’t know. Trash Dump Man?”

  “Heathens! I’m Job. These are my plagues and boils and such.”

  “Are you by yourself?” Benny asked.

  “What do you think?” Jeeter asked, with exaggeration.

  “Then where is she?”

  “Fixing her costume,” Jeeter said, and winked at Benny.

  The three of them stood waiting, periodically washed over by oily porcine smoke pouring from the two spits.

  “Y’all want a beer?” Becky asked. She left, then returned just as Jeeter’s friend walked up.

  “This is Crystal,” Jeeter said, nodding toward the woman dressed as a vampire who stood beside him. “Crystal, Benny, Becky. Benny is the fool wrapped in duct tape.”

  “Hey y’all,” she said. “Who’s this cute little rascal?”

  Crystal knelt to scratch at Squat’s ears. Benny positioned himself to get a better look at her cleavage. Becky turned away. Shortly, they all meandered toward the barn to see the state of the pumpkin.

  “Anybody seen Dink?” Benny asked. “What’s he coming as?”

  “Nothing,” Jeeter said. “He’s not coming.”

  “Why?”

  “Got something bad mooching at Kroger’s yesterday. He called this afternoon and said he’d been puking all day, and didn’t feel like it was going to stop.”

  “Reckon he’s got enough sense to know if he needs to go to the doctor?”

  “Well, I thought about that. But when he asked me if I’d ever seen a nekkid lady puke, I figured he was going to be okay.”

  The party progressed, as large parties do. Random encounters, increasing drunkenness that leads to increasingly vapid, downright stupid exchanges with both strangers and acquaintances, seemingly epic shifts in idiocy. And on and on, and there at Gnogg’s Halloween party, everything made more acute and heightened by the costumes. A group of three lunatics in particular seemed in random orbit around the party, stirring up little troubles each time they passed through. They were boys, drunken and stoned, and doubly dim-witted by the testosterone surging through their eighteen-year-old bodies.

  “Look at those assholes,” Benny said, the first time he saw them taking turns caving in a pumpkin with their boots. The next time they wandered by, the boys spent several minutes harassing a man who’d passed out sitting against a hay bale. Dropping their cigarette butts into the beer bottle that the man still clutched in his hands was bad enough, but when they removed the man’s boot and took turns urinating into it, several people told them to quit it. As if they’d listen.

  Poor Becky, having had a more sheltered life than her companions, covered her eyes at least once every half hour. She and Crystal hit it off. They fell, easily, into conversation, Becky with her Reagan mask perched on top of her head. They’d all eaten. They’d all had enough beer to slow things down. They sat, with lots of other folks, on a covered patio between the barn and the house, where Gnogg had put out dozens of chairs. Folding chairs, and old ladder-back wooden chairs that always reminded Benny of family reunions.

  “Where’s Squat?” Becky asked.

  “He’ll be okay,” Benny said.


  “I haven’t seen him for a while,” Becky said.

  “He’ll come back,” Benny said.

  “What if he gets lost? Or somebody takes him?” Becky said.

  “He won’t, and they won’t,” Benny said.

  “Maybe we should go look for him,” Becky said.

  “Becky,” Benny said. “If you want to go look for the fucking dog, then go look for the fucking dog.”

  Becky grew quiet, which didn’t stop Benny.

  “He’s my goddamn dog. I’m not sure why you think you have a better idea of what’s good for him than I do.”

  Silence.

  “I got to piss,” Crystal said, then patted Becky’s leg. “Come help me find the John.”

  When they’d left, Jeeter reached into his costume robe for a small baggie of marijuana.

  “What the fuck was that all about?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Benny said. “She just went on too long about the fucking dog.”

  Fact is, Benny may not have realized how over the top his response was. Nor, at that point in time, and in that state of mind, would he have been able to trace the gnawing and festering feeling that seemed to taint all his interactions of late back to the knocked-out lady in the bed of the truck. And as for naming it, well …

  Throughout most of his life, Benny had felt inadequate in many, and usually simultaneous, ways. But he’d never admit it.

  Jeeter rolled several joints, lit the first, and passed it to Benny, who took a hit, and in turn, passed it to Jack the Zipper, and down the line around the circle. After Jeeter’s stash met its match, others brought forth. Jeeter and Benny were so engaged in a conversation about the relative beauty of koi fish that neither noticed the cowboy making his way around the circle. When the man stopped in front of them, all squint-eyed with his mouth drawn tight, Benny and Jeeter looked up at the same time. When the cowboy pulled the sawed-off shotgun from behind his back and held it at his waist, they both flinched at the same time. When he opened the breech and put his mouth up to the empty barrel, they both smiled at the same time. But when the warm stream of marijuana smoke began to curl from the tip of the gun barrel, Jeeter took the initiative and leaned forward to accept it.

  “So,” Benny said. “You get that girl all worked up on the way over here?”

  “Just a tease,” Jeeter said. “Not enough so that she’d figure it out. I kept turning it on and off. But tonight, on the way home…”

  Before he could finish, Becky and Crystal returned.

  “Where’ve y’all been?” Benny asked, forgetting for the moment why they left in the first place.

  Crystal answered.

  “Partyin. Ain’t this a party?”

  She came over, straddled Jeeter, and kissed him deeply.

  “Hey,” Jeeter said. “I heard something about a big pumpkin. Let’s go find it.”

  They did. They staggered and stumbled, to greater and lesser degrees, their ways around to the back of the barn just in time to see the last of what had been dozens of candles illuminating the monstrous orange vegetable sputter out.

  “Holy fucking shit,” Jeeter said.

  “That’s the biggest goddamn punkin’ I ever seen,” Crystal said.

  “Hmmm,” Benny said.

  And Becky kept quiet. She’d pulled her Reagan mask back over her face and stood presidentially stoic.

  The mammoth pumpkin demanded attention. Maybe even respect. Propped with two-by-fours, it stood a good four and a half feet high. Without the benefit of candlelight, the maniacal smile, upswept eyebrows, and jagged eyeholes glared pitch-black at all who passed.

  “They carved it with a chainsaw,” Benny said.

  “I ‘spect they had to,” Jeeter answered.

  There were lots of other jack-o’-lanterns scattered around the grassy area behind Gnogg’s barn, the place where the bands usually played, and among them even more inebriated partygoers. Gnogg had ringed the area with bales of hay, and when Jeeter sat down on one, Crystal, again, sat across him and made her intentions clear. Becky, still pouting and angry, strayed as far from Benny as she could. Benny went for more beer. When he returned, he returned with the young rowdies, mostly because they just happened to be walking in the same direction.

  It’s funny sometimes, other times disturbing, how one reacts to hurt and anger. How feeling helpless, or inadequate, turns inside of a man. Becomes something fueled by desperation. Benny didn’t mean to suggest anything, any course of action, to the three drunken assholes. He just asked a simple question as they walked up together.

  “I wonder if President Reagan there would fit in that big pumpkin?”

  And that’s all it took.

  Becky sat alone, unaware and unprepared, and when two of them picked her up, she was too much in shock to protest right away. But by the time she saw the third guy standing at the giant pumpkin, holding its cap by the massive stem, Becky realized what they had in mind. She began to kick and scream. To no avail. The three boys shoved Becky inside the big pumpkin and put the cap back on. They held it in place while she fought and cursed from within the slimy orange cavern. Most of the people there thought it funny to see a diminutive president stuffed into a gigantic pumpkin, at least for a little while. Besides, things were loud all around. Benny could easily pretend he didn’t see or hear the terrible thing that was happening to Becky. Job and the vampire had their tongues so deep in each other’s mouths that it no doubt blocked their hearing, too. But Benny was watching. And listening. He saw the big pumpkin rock unsteadily as Becky threw herself against its slick walls, and watched the rednecks hold it up and hold its cap down tight. Benny heard her screams and curses become wracking sobs. And he took note, too, of when the struggle stopped. When Rebecca Hinkey gave up.

  That’s when Crystal withdrew herself from Jeeter to see what all the racket was about.

  “You motherfuckers!” she said, swinging as she went. “Jeeter!”

  Then, of course, Benny had to take action. Had to pretend to be as outraged as the rest. Crystal took the three troublemakers by surprise—Benny and Jeeter, too, for that matter—when she hit the biggest one, the one holding down the pumpkin’s jagged cut cap, full-fisted in the back of the head. When they saw Jeeter and Benny coming behind her, the boys chose not to fight back. They could’ve easily hurt Crystal, but they ran away instead, laughing and laughing.

  When they ran, the pumpkin tipped, and Crystal tried but couldn’t keep it up alone. The orange behemoth fell forward, ruptured, and gave birth to a sticky dwarf in a Ronald Reagan mask. Becky wept. She sat up, hugged her knees and wept.

  “Come on, honey,” Crystal said. “Let’s go get you cleaned up.”

  “What a fucking trip that was,” Jeeter said.

  Benny said nothing. Nothing was said to Benny.

  When they returned, Becky had found a shirt somewhere; the pants they cleaned up as much as possible; the mask was gone.

  “Take me home,” Becky said. She said it to Benny, but didn’t call his name.

  “Becky,” Benny said. “I can’t. I can’t drive.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Everybody here is completely wasted. There’s no way.”

  “I’m not drunk,” she said.

  “But you can’t drive my van. Not with…”

  He didn’t finish the statement.

  “I’ll walk,” she said, and turned to leave.

  “Be … wait Becky.”

  Benny went to face her.

  “Look, why don’t we sleep in the van. In the morn—”

  “I’m not sleeping anywhere with you, Benny!”

  “Okay. Whatever. You stay in the van. I’ll sleep in that lawn chair.”

  Becky considered her options.

  “I’m too mad to sle
ep. I’m too humiliated to sleep. I’m—”

  “Come on. I’ll take you to the van. Just try and get some sleep. Tomorrow morning everybody will be sober. And I’ll take you home as soon as you want to go.”

  “Here, Becky,” Crystal said. “Here…”

  She held out her hand, fist closed.

  “Take these,” she said, and dropped two small blue pills into Becky’s waiting hand.

  “Oh,” Becky said. “I don’t … I mean I can’t … Are these drugs?” she fi­nally asked.

  “Just Valium,” Crystal said. “I promise they’ll just make you sleep. That’s it.”

  Becky, too tired and shocked to put up any fight, put the pills in her mouth and swallowed.

  “Later, dude,” Jeeter said.

  Poor Becky. Poor, poor Becky. She was staggering by the time Benny got her to the van.

  Benny opened the door and before helping her inside, he tried to hug her.

  “Nooo,” Becky slurred.

  He moved out of the door and Becky crawled in, and, crawling still, made her way back to the bed. Benny stood and watched. Within minutes, Becky, lying on her stomach, smelling of pumpkin and soap, lay breathing soundly asleep.

  Fuck it, Benny thought. This is my van.

  He climbed in, closed up the van, and lay down on the floor. The floor of the van stank from years of dirt and years of Squat wallowing there. Benny, drunk and stoned, lay looking up at the spinning roof

  Fuck it, he thought. This is my van.

  He shoved Becky over and lay down beside her in the narrow bed. He lay still and tried hard to go to sleep, but his cloudy mind filled itself with images. Becky spilling out of that pumpkin, over and over again, all covered with pulp and crying. Soon enough, in his memory of the moment, she came naked out of the pumpkin, her flesh dotted with pumpkin seeds. Benny’s hard-on snuck up on him. And, almost as sneaky, his hand crept down and loosed it. Benny lay in the back of the van, his van, stroking himself beside the drugged sister of the drowned girl. This notion, logically, led Benny’s mind to images of Jenna. Various naked images of Jenna. Ones he’d seen on the tapes, and ones he’d frequently imagined.

  Benny stroked and pulled and imagined and remembered, but every time orgasm eased into sight, he lost focus. He needed a little more stimulus. Benny looked at Becky. He nudged her with his elbow. No response. He shook her more directly. No response. Benny rolled her over onto her back. No response. No response when he unbuttoned her blouse and put his hand into her bra. That was nice, but not enough; he still couldn’t come. Benny undid her pants and paused only for a moment before slipping his hand into her underwear. Just touching. That’s all. Nothing serious. Nothing wrong. Benny yanked at his raw penis and stroked the folds of Becky’s labia. Nothing. He brought his hand from between her legs, smelled it. She was dry. Unready. Benny licked his fingers and put the hand back to work. First the middle finger, then the index finger wiggling into her dry sex. Nothing wrong. He’d been there before, at her invitation. Nothing wrong. Benny fingered Becky and thought of Jenna and jacked his dick. Jenna naked on her knees. Jenna kneeling before him. Jenna posing for the artist. Jenna squatting for the artist. Jenna shitting for the artist. Why couldn’t he come? Benny took his fingers out of Becky. Pussy, he thought, licking them. Pussy. Benny rose to his knees and pulled Becky’s pants and underwear down to her ankles. Nothing wrong. Nothing bad. Just touching. He lay down again. He got up again, turned her onto her stomach. He lay down again, began to squeeze at the solid cheeks of her ass. He traced the cleft. Jenna naked. He circled her anus with a fingertip. Jenna doing all those terrible disgusting things. Jenna’s scarred stump. Benny put his thumb to his mouth, got it wet with spit. Jenna kneeling and squatting. Jenna’s near-titless chest. He found the deep trench between her buttocks. Jenna on the low platform, under bright lights. He put his thumb tip at the closed bud. Jenna grunting with effort. He pushed his thumb quick and deep into her anus. Becky flinched, even in sedated sleep. Tried to pull away. Benny held her tight and shoved his thumb as deeply as it would go. And he came. And he came. And before he finished, before the disgrace set in, Benny yanked his thumb from her ass and put it quickly in his mouth. Shit. It tasted of shit. His nose filled with the scent of shit. He felt the pasty texture of shit on his tongue, smeared on his teeth.