Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

  Jenna steps into view. Strips naked. Her prosthetic leg a dull, lifeless tan. Stands for a brief moment, then, without looking back, she walks into the water. No hesitation. First she filled the camera’s viewfinder, then she left it, empty. The surface of the water kept her secret, revealed nothing. Offered remarkably little sound. Revealed nothing about whether Jenna struggled or fought. Nothing about the murky water filling her mouth her nose her lungs her gut. Filling and filling. Nothing about fear or courage. Nothing about her body, the machine itself and how it fought her resolve the moment consciousness left. Did she have a seizure. Did her mouth gape and close and gape and close? At what point did her automatic functions surrender?

  Then, minutes and minutes of the river flowing by at flood stage. The camera watches, without judgment, all that passes. A suitcase; a road sign, its stenciled message bobbing—DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT—into and out of sight; detritus passing through the field of vision, almost as if staged by Jenna herself.

  Benny stopped the tape again. Rewound it. Pushed Play with the absurd hope that things would be different. Then again. And again, looking for clues, hoping for change, stopping each time the camera came to terms with her absence. Watched, over and over, the tiny speck of himself coming down from the tower, far off in the camera’s view, and the van driving away. Finally he let it play on, and on until Benny, unprepared in both places, watched himself appear on camera. Fearful then, fearful now, Benny felt the ligaments and tendons of time snap and ping inside himself. Benny watched himself walk to the river’s edge, and for a moment wondered if he was going to walk right into the water after her.

  “No!” Benny called out, there in his half of the duplex.

  “Squat?” he called in that other world so long ago. “Good dog.”

  Then, Benny, too, disappeared from the camera’s view. Moments later, the screen went black.

  As soon as he’d put everything away, Benny called Becky’s apartment, but when she answered, he hung up. Sleep came and went fitfully; Benny dreamt of snakes, writhing masses of snakes. Benny dreamt himself in the pews of a church, and kneeling there amid the other congregants. The other congregants being fish: catfish and perch, crappie and sunfish, gar, snapping turtles, crawdads, all clicking their gills, their mouths, their claws in praise.

  Jeeter, for the first time, seemed to recognize Benny. Jeeter, immediately, started to cry.

  “Benny…” he whispered. “What am I gonna do?”

  Benny, working hard not to cry himself, took his friend’s hand.

  “You’re gonna be okay, man. You’ll be out of here and good as new before you know it.”

  Jeeter turned his face away from Benny, drifted into sleep.

  Benny went out to his van, in the parking lot, climbed into the back, and tried to nap. Mostly, though, he just looked out the rear windows. And mostly at the sign for Shinn’s Market, which advertised a special deal on Vienna sausages, and bore this message on the marquee: JESUS RULES, DOWN YOU BEAST.

  On his way back into the hospital, Benny picked up a Tribune and, more out of boredom than genuine interest, a current Creative Loafing. He read while Jeeter moved in and out of consciousness. Moved in and out of despair.

  “Jeeter,” Benny said, in a more cognizant moment. “I could put a lift in my van. You know, a wheelchair lift.”

  Jeeter closed his eyes and slept.

  “Fuck,” Benny said aloud. There, in the Buffalo Shoals Tribune Police Blotter, Section A, page 13, the first entry reported the details of Dink’s arrest for prostitution and lewd and lascivious behavior. Fuck. Benny folded the paper carefully and dropped it in the wastebasket. Fuck.

  Fuck. The word works perfectly in so many situations. Jeeter stirred, mumbled something through the drug haze, fell back into silence. Benny reached for Creative Loafing, a free paper marketed to yuppies and freaks.

  From time to time, Benny picked one up from the seemingly millions of boxes around the city, but the only thing he ever looked at with any attention were the adult-services ads and the personals. Women Seeking Men. And he and Jeeter regularly found something to laugh at in the “Other & Alternative” listings.

  “Hey, Jeeter,” Benny said, knowing full well he’d get no answer. “How about this one?”

  Unique attraction. Educated, articulate, not creepy MWM 41, wife lives out of state, ISO M/D/SWF amputee, 40 or younger, for dinners, outings, discreet, intimate fun. No strings. Love pleasing a woman, three or fewer limbs a must.

  Benny thumbed through the paper, looking for distraction, and was about to toss it away with the Tribune when an article caught his eye. A photo, actually. A face he recognized. The headline, telling in and of itself: ART ON THE RAZOR’S EDGE. And the photograph? Arrogance epitomized. Assholery made manifest. The artist Max, self-serious and smug, glared at the camera. Benny read, and because the reading differed in tone and diction from most of the reading in his life, he struggled. Benny struggled, and as he struggled he became embarrassed. And as his embarrassment grew, Benny became angry.

  Part interview, part bullshit manifesto, the article covered past scandals generated by Max’s art. A two-part series called Blood caused some stir of late. One half of the series involved paintings, portraits mostly, of women, in blood. Menstrual blood. For the other half Max, always at the ready, took heavy paper to accident sites of all kinds, and pressed the paper into the spilled blood and body fluids.

  “Accidents are all around us, waiting to be used. We just have to look.”

  Bastard. Asshole. Fucker.

  More disturbing was the reportage of Max’s current show at Firehouse Gallery. Beautiful Women Shitting. Opening reception, the coming day, Friday.

  “Becky,” he said. “Are you there? Pick up the phone.”

  She didn’t, then, so he called back every fifteen minutes.

  “What, Benny?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Everything,” he said, hoping to cover all the bases. “I want to go on a date.”

  “What?”

  “I want to take you out. We’ll go eat. Then … I want to show you something.”

  “What is it?” Becky asked, her hesitance plain.

  “Can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

  “I don’t know, Benny…”

  Benny didn’t want the opportunity to slip away.

  “It’ll be fun,” he said.

  “I miss you,” he said, too emphatically, but such was Becky’s need that she bought it all.

  “Well…”

  “I’ll come get you tomorrow around five.”

  “Where’re we going?” Becky asked. “I’m hungry.”

  “I want to show you something first,” Benny said. “Before we eat.”

  As it happened, the Firehouse Gallery stood less than a mile from Claxton Looms Luxury Apartments, in the heart of the gentrified neighborhood reclaimed by the au courant.

  “What’s this?” she asked, as they passed the crowd gathered in front of the building. They had to circle the block twice to find parking.

  “An art thing.”

  “What? What kind of art thing?”

  “You know,” Benny said. “An opening.”

  Becky, clearly baffled by his choice, asked the logical questions.

  “Do you know anything about art?”

  “No,” Benny said. “Not really.”

  “I don’t, either. Do you … I mean, do you care anything about art?”

  “This I do,” he said. Benny didn’t allow himself to think through what he was doing.

  “Are you going to tell me what it’s about?”

  “You’ll see.”

  On their approach, making their way down the sidewalk, it became clear that the crowd gathered in front of the Firehouse
Gallery gathered there for a multitude of reasons. Not all came as art buffs. Certainly, the folks carrying signs reading things like THE BODY IS THE TEMPLE OF CHRIST and PORN = SIN = HELL—each sign emblazoned with the acronym “C.U.S.P” (Citizens United against Smut and Porn)—no doubt had agendas and goals that conflicted with the shorn, tattooed, boot-wearing, leather jacketed, braless, pierced, and surly group of women and their issues. And in fact each group took their stands on opposite sides of the doorway, and seemed to alternate directing their chants and rallies and die-turns at the gallery and its contents and at, as it were, the opposing team.

  “I can’t go in there, Benny,” Becky said, stopping on the sidewalk.

  “What do you mean, you can’t go in? You don’t even know what the show is.”

  “Well, I know that some of those people are from Daddy’s church. I can’t go in there.”

  Benny hadn’t expected that.

  “Look, we’ll sneak in when nobody’s looking.”

  “Benny! People always look at me. I can’t sneak anywhere.”

  Giving up on patience and lobbying, Benny simply bent down, grabbed Becky’s hand, and pulled her through the crowd. Force.

  “No!” she said, but not wanting to attract anything beyond the normal gawking attention, said it more in a whisper that anything else.

  Benny led her right through the middle of the protesters and into the open doors of the gallery. Once inside, the reason for all the hoopla outside became clear. These were the paintings—these and more—Benny had seen so long ago on the videotape in which Jenna had interviewed the artist.

  “Benny,” Becky whispered with urgency driven by shame and embarrassment. “What are we doing here?”

  The canvases, big six-foot canvases, loomed on the walls. There was the woman squatting on the dining-room table. There, the woman shitting in the church. And there, and there, ten, maybe twelve larger-than-life, highly realistic paintings of women in the act of defecating. Standing before each of them, a pack of wine-swilling, cheese-gumming aficionados, oohing and ahhing and gasping in exaggerated disbelief, and generally filling all the available air space with inanity.

  “I’m gonna be sick, Benny,” she said. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

  A complicated shame crept up from the pit of Benny’s stomach. He squelched it.

  Becky covered her eyes with her free hand while Benny led her to the back of the gallery by the other.

  Outside, on the walk, easily seen through the glass, the fundamentalists and the femi-nazis banged their pots.

  “Please take me home, Benny. I want to go home now.”

  And there it was. Bigger than some. The painting he knew would be there. Jenna. Benny didn’t know how Max would do it, neither theme nor pose, but he had no doubt of the painting’s existence. And there it was. Jenna, her limbs and fingers intact, squatting on a potter’s wheel. Squatting over a fat pile of a different kind of clay.

  “Look,” he said to Becky. “This is the one I wanted you to see.”

  She refused.

  “I don’t want to see this stuff, Benny! It’s obscene. It’s nasty and disgusting. This isn’t art, it’s…”

  “Just look, Becky! Open your fucking eyes and look at the picture.”

  Benny spoke too loudly. People around them hushed, gave them some space, waited for the next move. Benny knew how horrible he was being. He lacked the power to stop himself

  “Why, Benny? Why am I looking at this?”

  Benny leaned in toward the painting, with his index finger extended.

  “Please don’t touch the art, sir.”

  Benny stepped back a little. Pointed.

  “Do you recognize something here, Becky? See something that looks familiar?”

  He, of course, referred to the birthmark, the purplish one shaped something like a fish, on Jenna’s buttock. Her sister’s buttock. There, on that taut buttock, on that mammoth painting, rendered in the same degree of perfection as the anus and its little ring of hairs, was the fish.

  “Tha—Ben, do you … did…”

  Becky seemed to have been fully infected by her mother’s condition of incompletion. She couldn’t say any whole thing.

  “It can’t … I mean … Benny!”

  Then Becky broke down. She put her head into her hands and, there in front of all, sobbed and sobbed.

  Again, as in the rear of his van not so long ago, a wave of shame washed through Benny. He forced it back into its dark hole, and in its absence power remained.

  “Is everything okay?” someone asked. Probably the gallery manager. “Would you like to step outside?”

  “How did you know this, Benny?” Becky demanded. “Tell me how you knew about this. About my sister. About her birthmark.”

  Benny, in lieu of answering, smirked ever so slightly.

  Becky, barely able to catch her breath, stormed, to the degree that her little stubby legs would allow, out of the gallery and down the sidewalk. Her gait, monstrous. Careening. And when she walked right by Benny’s van, he made no effort to stop her.

  No effort. No effort to stop himself, on the way home, from pulling up to that very familiar pay phone, flipping through the phone book, tracing a single fingertip down the column: Hesser, Hewitt, Hicks, Higgins, Hill, Hines, Hinkey …

  Benny disguised his voice, practiced once, then again, and called.

  “Hello,” Mrs. Hinkey said. “The Hinkey residence.”

  “She’s dead,” Benny said, although it may have come out like “Sheep’s head.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Benny paused, let the momentum carry him farther into meanness.

  “Dead. Your stupid daughter is dead.”

  “Uh … who…”

  “The dumb bitch drowned herself. She’s dead. Gone. Ain’t coming back.”

  Then he hung up, took three tries to fit the phone back into its cradle. Benny pulled away from the pay phone without looking, pulled nearly into the path of a UPS truck, whose driver pounded the horn but kept his mouth shut. Benny drove home.

  For the first time in months, despite the cool November air, Doodle sat on her front stoop, reading a paperback book and drinking a beer.

  “Hey, Benny Poteat,” she said. “I got something to show you.”

  “You waiting for me?”

  “Maybe,” she said with that sweet tease he missed so.

  “Where’s Mr. White Truck man?” Benny asked.

  He sat down beside Doodle.

  “Working,” she said. “Hey, I heard about Squat. Sorry.”

  “He was a good old dog.”

  “Yeah. He was.”

  They just sat a while then, Benny trying to calm himself down, or at least to seem calm. Doodle just being Doodle.

  “I got a favor to ask,” she said.

  “What is it?” Benny answered, and reached for her beer.

  “I need to go somewhere. I need you to take me somewhere.”

  “Okay. But where?”

  “St. Augustine. Florida.”

  “What the hell you want to go to St. Augustine, Florida, for?”

  “Can’t tell you yet, Benny.”

  “When do you want to go?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow. Next day at the latest.”

  “Let’s go right now,” Benny said.

  “What?”

  “Now. Let’s leave tonight.”

  “Really?” Doodle asked, and in spite of herself scooted a little closer to Benny.

  “I just need to get some stuff,” he said. “I can be ready in fifteen minutes.”

  “Can you give me half an hour?” Doodle asked. “I need to sponge
off.”

  And while the water ran in Doodle’s bathroom, Benny secreted the milk crate of Jenna’s belongings into the van, where he stashed it under the bed. He forgot to pack anything else.

  “Want me to call Honey for you?” Doodle asked from her window.

  “No,” Benny lied. “I already did.”

  A little over four hundred miles. Eight, maybe nine hours with stops.

  “We can take turns driving,” Doodle said.

  “I don’t mind driving,” Benny said. “We need to get a map, though.”

  “No,” Doodle said. “I can get us there. There’s Clyde, blow the horn.”

  And so, in faith, Benny pulled out of the driveway, swerved into November as if he hadn’t a care in the world. As he drove, as he put more and more distance between himself and Buffalo Shoals, as he got farther away from the messy life he led there, leaving behind his damaged friends, Becky and her drowned sister and his hard secret, Benny felt like he got closer and closer to a way of thinking and being he’d almost forgotten. He felt like he was returning to himself

  He and Doodle talked. Small talk. Chitchat. For the first couple hours, anyway. They reminisced about their time together at Nub and Honey’s restaurant. They passed a sign for the Cyclorama at Columbia, and despite Benny’s insistence on stopping, Doodle held sway.

  “Honey used to make Nub take her there at least once every summer,” Benny said.

  “Maybe we’ll stop on the way back.”

  “You still haven’t told me why we’re going to Florida,” Benny said.

  “I know,” Doodle answered.

  Benny, eventually, asked the question.

  “So, who’s your boyfriend?”

  “Joe. His name is Joe.”

  Benny told her a story about camping with Nub as a boy. They had an old pup tent out in the backyard.

  “I was little,” Benny said. “And I went to sleep right before it got dark. Next thing I know, Nub was shaking me awake … he’d gone out and caught a whole bunch of lightning bugs, must’ve been hundreds of them, and let them loose in the tent. I woke up and it was like magic.”