Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

  Doodle told him a story.

  “The last time I made this trip was fifteen years ago. With my ex-husband.”

  “Doodle! You were married?”

  “He wouldn’t stop. Only to get gas. Nothing else. He peed in a milk jug. He wouldn’t stop for me to feed our son.”

  Doodle played out the revelations slowly.

  “Whoa … married and a kid.”

  “David, our boy, he was only four months old. Too little for such a long ride in the car. And that asshole wouldn’t stop the car for anything. I had to change David’s diapers going down the road. He wouldn’t take a bottle yet, so I had to flop over his car seat with my tit hanging out of my shirt every couple hours.”

  “Nice guy,” Benny said.

  Three hours into the trip, they stopped at a Mobil station for gas, to pee, and to get some snacks.

  “Pork rinds,” Benny said, as Doodle headed for the door. “And will you get me two ice cream sandwiches?”

  Benny pumped the gas and paid little attention to the old man who pulled up at the next pump in a rusted out Plymouth Valiant, yellow. Benny paid little attention until the man spoke, anyway.

  “I had me one of them one time,” the man said. Said while digging a thick fingertip into his ear.

  Benny didn’t answer at first, but the man kept talking.

  “One of them Dodges. Used to be my son’s. I got it when he died. Out there in California.”

  Benny nodded, hoping that would be enough. The man didn’t look particularly crazy, looked benign even standing there in a green and ill-fitting short-sleeved dress shirt and tan slacks pulled high over his paunchy gut, but these days it paid to be careful.

  “Wouldn’t hardly run with all that ee-missions bullshit on it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Benny finally asked.

  “That damn Dodge. Wouldn’t hardly run. It was that catalytic eunuch kept it from getting any gas. Know what I did? I busted it out with a horseshoe stob. Then it run like a damn top. Never did like that thing, though. You like yours? What kind of mileage it get? Where y’all headed? Hellfire, this my stomping ground; I was borned and raised not two mile from here. Ain’t a bad place ‘cept for the ticks and mosquitoes. That’s a purty lady you traveling with. My name’s Floyd, by the way. What’s yours?”

  And the man never slowed down long enough for Benny to answer, which didn’t seem to bother the man, who, by God only knows what logic, became convinced that Benny’s name was Floyd, too.

  “Ain’t it funny we got the same name? I meet so many fellas named Floyd. A whole blessed army of us. Hellfire, y’all ought to come over to the house for dinner one night. I’ll get the old woman to barbecue up some goat. Ever eat any goat meat? God-a-mighty, talk about good eatin’. Bring your wife. Bring your girlfriend for all I care. Y’all ever play canasta? Takes two decks.”

  He was still talking when Doodle returned. She shifted the bag of food from one hand to the other so that she could open the van’s door.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  They spoke at the same time.

  “That’s Floyd,” Benny said.

  “I had to pee,” Doodle said. “They couldn’t find the key to the toilet.”

  Floyd talked even as they drove away.

  “Damn good to meet you, Floyd, and your fine woman, too. Y’all drop in when you pass through again. We’ll roast us a goat. And watch out for them ticks. And them mosquitoes too. Shitfire, I…”

  Doodle, being a woman, and women being generally more curious than men in certain areas, after a tactful period of time, broached a subject she’d no doubt been stewing over for a while.

  “So, do you like that girl, Benny?”

  “What girl?” Benny asked, playing the dumb game. “You mean Becky?”

  “Who else? Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you like her?”

  Benny thought about the question. Was it possible to like someone and do the things he did to her? Is it possible to do the things he did to her without liking her?

  “I don’t know, Doodle. Why?”

  She let it drop, for the moment, anyway.

  “Look,” Doodle said, pointing out the window at the car traveling beside them on the interstate. “That car has a flat tire.”

  Benny craned to look out her window, and in the clear moonlit night saw that in fact the left rear tire on the big red sedan was airless. The driver, his bouffanted wife, and the two kids sleeping in the back seat seemed oblivious.

  “Reckon they don’t know?” Doodle asked.

  “They wouldn’t keep that speed if they knew,” Benny said. “Maybe you ought to tell them.”

  Doodle thought about it for a minute. It was dark enough that the driver may not be able to read her lips, even if she gestured at the tire.

  “I’ll make a sign,” she said. “Got something to write with?”

  Benny remembered a laundry marker in the dash, left by Dink, no doubt. Doodle scrounged around for a sheet of paper, then wrote in big block letters: YOUR TIRE IS FLAT, LEFT REAR. Benny pulled alongside the sedan and blew the horn while Doodle held the sign pressed to her window. Within a minute, the car pulled off on the shoulder, the driver waving and mouthing his gratitude.

  “You’ve earned your Girl Scout points for the day,” Benny said. And when Doodle was just about to wad the sign up and toss it away, he had an idea.

  “Wait,” he said. “Keep it.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s see how many cars we can get to pull over.”

  For the next forty-five minutes, they played their silly joke on every fifth car that they passed, and all but one pulled over, nodding and waving and thankful. Then they tried different signs. SOMETHING HANGING FROM CAR. WHEEL FALLING OFF. YOUR CAR IS ON FIRE. Eventually moving into more suspect territory. JESUS LOVES YOU. They did this for miles and hours. Eventually, the gullibility of people pissed Benny off.

  “People are stupid,” he said. “They’ll believe anything.”

  Not that he could articulate the reasons for his feeling, but anger found its own way into articulation.

  “Make another sign,” he said to Doodle.

  “Okay,” she said. “What?”

  “Write ‘Your Mother Just Died.’ ”

  “No, Benny! I can’t do that.”

  “Just write the sign, Doodle. I’ll hold it up.”

  She did as told, reluctantly. Did so even when Benny got meaner. YOUR HUSBAND IS SLEEPING WITH YOUR DAUGHTER. And, in response to political bumper stickers like “Charlton Heston Is My President,” or “In Case of Rapture This Car Will be Abandoned,” a sign reading simply FUCK YOU!

  “This is too mean, Benny,” Doodle finally said. “I’m not doing any more signs.”

  Benny, his anger dulled by use, didn’t argue.

  By and by, the road eventually led them through the night. By and by, that same road led them to St. Augustine.

  “I’m hungry,” Benny said.

  “Let’s get some breakfast.”

  Egg Harbor’s neon open sign blinked and blinked and beckoned them to stop, so they did. More shack than anything, and on a sandlot carved out of the mangroves, the restaurant made up for the absence of harbor, or any other water in sight, through an abundance of beachy decor.

  “Can I get you folks some coffee?” the sole waitress asked of the sole customers.

  “Yep.”

  When she brought the coffee back, Doodle asked a question that surprised Benny.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, would you happen to know where the courthouse is?”

  She didn’t, but she was sure Buster the cook would.

  A minute later, she returned with crea
m, sugar, and the information.

  “Wonder when they open?” Doodle mused, more to herself than anyone else.

  “Ten o’clock,” Buster said, from the serving window, his face framed perfectly there. Then he went about making their eggs and bacon.

  Benny waited as long as his patience held out, then asked.

  “You gonna tell me why we’re here?”

  Doodle thought for a while.

  “David,” she finally said. “My ex is taking full custody of David. And I need to sign some papers.”

  Benny didn’t press the issue any further. They ate. Drank coffee. Killed some time.

  “We still have an hour before the courthouse opens,” Benny said.

  “Let’s drive around a little bit.”

  “Y’all come back,” Buster called.

  They both preferred back roads. So Benny just turned off the highway at the first opportunity, and they meandered through the neighborhoods of St. Augustine proper, crisscrossing the main streets where Ripley’s Believe It or Not and The Fountain of Youth vied for their confidence and their money.

  The first time Benny drove past the Tragedy in U.S. History Museum, he would’ve missed it as a point of interest completely if Doodle hadn’t pointed it out.

  “Look at that,” she said. “Go around the block.”

  The next time around, Benny paid closer attention to the two-story stucco house. And did find something intriguing about the hand-painted sign out front that promised a wealth of experiences inside: BONNIE & CLYDE’S BULLET RIDDLED GETAWAY CAR, ORIGINAL HUMAN BILL OF SALE, OLD SPANISH JAIL WITH REAL HUMAN SKELETONS INSIDE, THE CAR JAYNE MANSFIELD (FAMOUS MOVIE STAR) LOST HER LIFE IN, ANTIQUE TORTURE EQUIPMENT—HEADSTOCK, NECKBREAKER & WHIPPINGPOST, AND MUCH MORE.

  The third time past, Benny pulled up in one of the three dirt parking spaces beneath a moss-draped oak in front of the museum. He looked up in time to see someone pull a curtain aside in one of the open upstairs windows.

  In the large glass-front window, by the entrance, in life-sized diorama, a department-store mannequin in army fatigues with an ancient rifle balanced between his rigid arms stood amid stacks of rotting cardboard boxes, each with the word books scrawled childlike on all sides. A sign nailed near the low ceiling read, REENACTMENT OF OSWALD KILLING PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY. ADMISSION: $3.50.

  Doodle rang the bell; they heard a door slam upstairs and the sound of someone coming down the steps.

  “Two adults, please,” Benny said to the woman who raised the shade of the ticket booth and smiled at them. Late thirties, probably, wearing a faded maroon smock with CURATOR stitched over the breast pocket, unbuttoned to reveal a mismatched T-shirt and what were either big panties or very small shorts. She had the look of someone interrupted, glad for the business, but distracted.

  “That’ll be seven dollars. Y’all can just go on in it’s the first floor of the house and the property out back enjoy the sights now and thank you for stopping.” Then she disappeared from the booth and they heard her run back up the steps.

  Benny and Doodle entered through a narrow turnstile and wandered aimlessly, silently around the three tiny rooms. The exhibits were pathetic. Benny rarely visited museums, but even he recognized that fact. Lots of framed, illegible letters, faded newspaper articles, and yellowed photographs. As they stood against the red velvet ropes separating them from what was supposed to be The Car Oswald Used to Transport the Murder Weapon to the Texas Book Depository, muted laughter came from overhead. For a second Benny thought they were laughing at him and Doodle—another pair of dupes—but then the laughter gave way to a slow, rhythmic squeaking. Bedsprings. As the pace quickened, each squeak, squeak, squeak was followed by a thump, thump, thump.

  “Reckon we’ll be charged extra for that?” Doodle asked, raising her eyebrows to acknowledge the noise.

  A woman, a woman’s voice, presumably the curator’s, began to shout “ummph!” in the fraction of sound space between the squeaks and the thumps. Another voice, some lucky docent maybe, countering with his own “ooosh!” And all this took place just above The Famous Zapruder Film Showing Each Bullet as It Struck the President, stretching frame by frame along the narrow hallway.

  “That may be the greatest tragedy of all,” Doodle said.

  “What? The dinky quality of this whole mess? Seven dollars to hear two strangers screwing above the dumbest museum in the world?”

  “All of the above,” Doodle said.

  Make no mistake, Benny was a voyeur in his heart, capable of morbid fascination with every element of that kind of experience. And his life, of late, and historically, reeked of voyeurism, mostly accidental. But there are some things you just don’t want to imagine, naked or otherwise. Those two strangers rutting noisily overhead, just on the other side of a low, thin ceiling, and that documented and photographed mishmash of human decline overwhelmed him. The tiny alcoves closed in.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said, pulling Doodle through the door. But there was no escape in the fenced backyard. Weeds, rust, and decay.

  Years of exposure to the hot Florida weather had taken its toll on the outdoor displays. And worse, the open windows on the second floor made the sounds of them doing it even clearer than inside.

  “Kind of like group sex, huh,” Doodle said.

  They couldn’t find all the Antique Torture Equipment. There was a huge iron cage, probably the Old Spanish Jail, and a dugout place the size of a small grave covered with thick glass, but the condensation was so dense on the glass that they couldn’t see the Real Human Skeletons. Benny took it on faith that they were there. About the most interesting things were some laminated photographs hanging by the Bullet Riddled Getaway Car. Pictures of the dead Bonnie and Clyde, both naked and bloody. Lots of obvious bullet holes.

  “She was pretty,” Benny said. “Even dead.”

  “Nice breasts,” Doodle added. And they were.

  “I would’ve paid more if they advertised this.”

  “See The Tits Of Bonnie Parker Postmortem.”

  The couple upstairs orgasmed as Doodle and Benny peered into the Mansfield car. They came loudly and apparently together. Within seconds, from the window, Benny and Doodle heard somebody urinating, then the toilet flush.

  “I could’ve lived my life to the end having never heard all that, and been satisfied,” Doodle said.

  “It’s about ten, Doodle. You want to go to the courthouse?”

  Benny turned the ignition.

  “Maybe we should. But…”

  “But what?”

  “I’m tired all of a sudden,” she said. “It’s going to be hard signing those papers, and I’d like to take a nap before I have to do it.”

  “Well,” Benny said, an idea hitting home like never before. “We could get us a room?”

  Doodle smiled. An easy, understanding smile.

  “I don’t think so, Benny.”

  She must’ve seen the hurt, however subtle, cross his face.

  “You know, it’s got nothing to do with wanting to.”

  “Maybe we can find someplace to sleep on the beach,” Benny said.

  So they drove out of town, looking for such a place. And would’ve easily found one, except that Benny got distracted. Distracted. Distracted and determined. In the distance, somewhere off to the right, and knowing full well that the beach and its accompanying ocean lay to the left, Benny spotted a tower. A big, tall, skinny radio tower hurling itself a thousand or more feet into the hot Florida sky. And at its top, a flashing red beacon.

  “Let’s go this way for a second,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  Doodle, trusting, agreed.

  Before long, the mangroves gave way to acres and acres of orange trees. And as they drove, it became clear to Benny that the tower stood so
mewhere deep in the orange grove. Through part intuition and part visual tracking, he made his way left and right, through a gridwork, a labyrinth of dirt roads until, sure enough, after one last turn, the tower’s base, ringed in six-foot chain-link fencing, loomed before them.

  “Where’re we going, Benny?”

  “We’re here,” he said.

  “Here?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why?” Doodle asked.

  “You’ll see,” Benny said, stopping the van right next to the fence, so close that the passenger doors wouldn’t open. “Sit tight.”

  Benny got out, climbed onto the roof of the van, and jumped over the fence into trespass. Then, quickly, up the tower. Too quickly for safety’s sake. Fifteen minutes later, Benny was back at the bottom and scrambling over the fence.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?” Doodle asked, more amused than concerned.

  Benny, out of breath from the climb, opened the van’s door, reached into his shirt, and pulled out the red lightbulb from the top of the tower. He held it out to Doodle; she leaned over the seat and accepted the gift.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s still warm.”

  “I’ve been a son of a bitch to you, Doodle.”

  “No, Benny. No. You’ve been a good friend.”

  “I’ve been mean. And I’ve lied to you. And I don’t want to do that anymore.”

  Benny climbed into the van, sat sideways in the seat, facing Doodle.

  “It’s okay, Benny,” she said. “I forgive you for whatever you think you did wrong.”

  But, clearly, Benny had more than forgiveness in mind.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “About all the things you’ve said to me.”

  “What things?”

  Doodle turned in her seat so that her knees wouldn’t be so close to his. Not sure what else to do with her hands, she held tight to the red bulb.

  “What things are you talking about, Benny?”

  “I don’t remember exactly what you said, Doodle, but I do know that you’ve been coming on to me since the day you moved in the duplex. And I’ve been turning you away for just as long.”