Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

  “Oh, Benny. Most of that was just play, honey…”

  “I’ve decided not to turn you away anymore. I’ve decided I want whatever it is you’ve got to show me.”

  “Benny, I can’t. It’s…”

  Benny leaned into the narrow space between the seats; with the van parked so close to the fence on her side, she had nowhere to go.

  “Let me kiss you one time, just one time before you say anything.”

  And when he pushed closer into her, Doodle just went ahead and kissed him. It was a thing she’d done before. No big deal. But Benny’s kiss got a little more intimate than she’d expected. When his guilty tongue wormed its way between her teeth, Doodle protested.

  “Benny!” she said, dropping the bulb to the floor of the van. “Stop it, Benny!”

  And when he reached his hand into her shirt, Doodle swung at him.

  “Goddamn it, Benny!”

  Benny fell back into the driver’s seat.

  “What the fuck’s the matter, Doodle?” he asked, in earnest. “What have you been asking for the last seven years?”

  “Benny,” she said. “I’m getting married. Me and Joe are getting married next month. I’m signing divorce papers here, too.”

  Benny thought over this new development. It never occurred to him that Doodle would reject him. Not even for the guy in the white truck.

  “I want to show you something,” he said, and climbed between the front seats into the back of the van. When Benny knelt in the floor, and reached beneath the van’s low bed—knowing that if he shared his secret with her, Doodle would have to, want to, choose him—he heard the van door open then slam shut.

  “Doodle!”

  By the time Benny got to the door himself, and missed and missed the handle twice until he got it open, then, in his urgency, falling out onto the sand before standing and squinting into the sun, Doodle had disappeared somewhere into the orange grove.

  “Doodle! Goddamn you, Doodle! Come back here!” But she didn’t. Benny climbed onto the roof of the van, hoping to spot her moving in and out of the squatty trees. Those trees heavy-laden with fruit, like a crop of new suns. Hoping to catch sight of her amid the globes. No such luck. Benny didn’t know what to do. Where to turn. So he left.

  And he drove. And he drove without sleep. Drove back toward home and all the misery there. Benny drove and drove and drove and drove straight through exhaustion. Drove beyond hunger. Drove through Way-cross, Georgia, and up into Macon. And what drove Benny he didn’t know, couldn’t know, but even in the act of unknowing and in every thought that preceded unknowing there rested both history and potential. Benny drove through his past, from frost heave to equinox. Drove through desire, the hoodwinked member dry as jute twine. Drove through memory right up the ass of dream, where potential sleeps its fitful sleep. Where history swings its brickbat. There is where it’s found. It being both past and pres­ent. Truth be known, future, too. There, in consonance and in assonance. There, on shank’s mare and in harm’s way. There in the greasy circles of stains on paper plates left by the salmon patties she brought to jail that Sunday. There in his mother’s averted eyes. Dead. Dead. In the rebuilt carburetor of a 1971 Ford Pinto: jet and bowl and float. In the thin blue wing of a pilot light beating itself senseless against a porcelain day. In the wet wheezing breath of the fat mailman who groped him twice on the porch that summer. Or, dressed in piss-yellow taffeta like the Dry Branch Pork Princess at the Alamance County Fair. In the pencil box and in the esophagus, in panties indiscreetly tossed to the floor, and in every stupid and pathetic and disgusting thing ever done in the name of loneliness. Find it in the bellies of all things living and dead. In the bellies and ears and eyes. And eyes. And one eye in particular. And here, come barreling out of history or potential, here comes Pig Eye, called Pig Eye on account of that mooneye that rolled around its socket according to its own gravity. Sometimes that Pig Eye spins around so that you look at his face and there sits the whole moon in place of his eyeball and up in the sky another moon, a screen door swings open and a woman stands there washing dishes except they ain’t dishes she’s washing really they’re little babies all the drowned babies of the world she’s washing the mud out of their eyes raking the sticks and twigs from their mouths rubbing their little blue limbs to give them some comfort except that it ain’t comfort she brings them drowned babies only want to lay still in their death suits and rot for all the years it takes them to get out of this godforsaken place place place of gutting knives it ain’t nobody’s mama standing there in the moon’s kitchen which really if you take away the linoleum and the Formica and the matching dishrags and the milk-yellow light could be a tub and a spigot and a plank hear her schhhickk schhhickk schhhickk scraping each the dead drowned babies not but rather little perch or sunfish yanked out of the pond that very morning or maybe catfish no scales but thick greeny skin and they bark little barks of pain of protest of fuck you you knife-wielding fucker until you nail their heads to the plank and with your sacred pliers all slick with purpose and under the tutelage of black ice learn the bootlick dance and peel back peel away skin hammer nail and blood and now their eyes purple crocuses praying up through wet loam a blackbird working against a headwind its epaulettes on fire and all their milk teeth spill pell-mell from the choked side ditches of their mouths like a murder of bleached crows refusing flight flight flood light flood fled flood floyd floyd who the fuck is screaming floyd and why and why?

  “Floyd! Floyd! What you doing, Floyd?”

  Benny woke, a jarring shift.

  “Floyd?”

  Someone pounded on the window, the very window Benny’s face lay pressed against.

  “What are you doing, Floyd? Where’s your wife?”

  Benny, through the windshield, through the fog of exhaustion, saw a yellow car, a Plymouth Valiant, parked in front of him, and the interstate highway stretching out ahead through the Georgia landscape. He must’ve pulled over and fallen asleep.

  “Floyd? It’s me, Floyd.”

  Who the fuck was this lunatic? Then Benny remembered. It was that goddamn man with the stob and his catalytic eunuch.

  “Where’s your wife, Floyd? You okay? “You hungry?”

  Benny cranked the van, jammed the shift lever into drive, and, turning sharp to miss the Plymouth, pulled away so quickly that he knocked Floyd to the ground.

  Some people go their entire lives not knowing, or caring, or even wondering why they do the things they do. They simply do. They do things without the benefit of hindsight or foresight, and as a result, drift aimlessly—sometimes providentially, more often than not haplessly—from birth to death without ever learning to see what lies ahead, and. more important, their role in that future. Who’s to say whether Benny could’ve predicted his current predicament? And who could know whether, all those months ago, if he’d not clung so tightly to his secret, whether things would’ve turned out differently? Too, it would be impossible to judge whether or not, even with foresight, even knowing clearly all that would happen in his future if he chose to keep the secret, that Benny would’ve made a different decision. Who could know? Who’s to say?

  All those grand ideals have little bearing on the moment, in the moment. And most certainly it’s not what Benny thought about as he drove the length of a dirt road, a familiar dirt road, one he’d traveled once before, until it came to an end where the Big and Little Toe Rivers converged, and across the expanse of water the Bard’s Communication tower jutted heavenward, and bore its full weight toward hell. Benny had no plan when he pulled the video camera, the tapes, the backpack, and the drowned girl’s clothes from beneath the bed in the back of his pumpkin-colored van, lugged them out to the water’s edge. And not until he had the video cam­era on its tripod—as close as he could remember to where he’d found it—and his eye to the viewfinder, looking across the water, looking for the tower, di
d he realize he was trying to find that tower.

  Benny put all but one of the videotapes into the backpack. The final tape, the one in the camera when it last sat by the river all those months ago, Benny put back into the camera and clicked it home. He lay the backpack beneath the legs of the tripod, fished the business card from his pocket, and lay it on the pack:

  Claxton Looms Apartments

  3 Shuttlecock Court

  Rebecca Hinkey, Resident Manager

  As for the drowned girl’s clothes—the panties, the shirt, the shorts—Benny pressed each to his face, inhaled deeply, then tossed them to the ground. He put the milk crate back in the van, and returned to the camera, to fumble with the On button.

  Nov 11, 2001 • • • Rec

  3:37 p.m.

  It clicked and whirred until he brought the tower into focus. Redemption? Or retribution? What is it that Benny sought? No way of knowing. He stood there, by the water, and thought, without much in the way of clarity, about his options. The Toe Rivers offered little resistance, but kept their cold opinions to themselves. Benny knelt on the bank, painfully conscious of the camera’s eye at his back. It seemed easy, on film anyway, the way the river welcomed Jenna. The way she allowed herself to be taken in. Benny stood. There, across the water, the familiar. The tower. Benny Poteat had seen a lot of things in his life. Most of those, the ones that he held to, and learned from, he’d seen from way up high.

  When he stepped out of the camera’s field of vision, it kept filming. With infinite patience, it captured, chronicled, without judgment, the life that passed before it: the flat rivers, peaceful now as they flowed toward winter, and in the distance the hard vertical line made by the radio tower, and its angled guy wires barely visible. The camera, doubly masterful, held, too, the sounds that life offered it from moment to moment. The opening and closing of a door, the door of vehicle, one would assume, the door of a pumpkin-colored van. The turn of an ignition, the revolution of a crankshaft, the corresponding up-down slap of pistons. And the fading crunch of tires on gravel as the vehicle pulls out of sound. Benny drove away. The dirt road stretched a mile, maybe more. At its end, there would be two options. The camera would only acknowledge one. The camera only allowed for one. The camera … the camera.

  BATTERY TOO LOW!

  BATTERY TOO LOW!

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the following for the sundry and necessary ways of support during the writing of this book: The National Endowment for the Arts, Cynthia Green, Barbara Campbell, Dinty Moore, Penn State Altoona (the whole damn thing), Simon Lipskar, Glory Hallelujah, Johnny Cash, Lee Bordeaux, Megan Simpson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lewis Nordan, Frank Stanford, and Pookie.

  Also by Steven Sherrill

  Steven Sherrill, Assistant Professor of English, teaches creative writing and integrative arts courses at Penn State Altoona. After receiving a Welding Diploma from Mitchell Community College (and the passing of a considerable amount of time), he went on to earn an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Sherrill was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction in 2002. Sherrill is the author of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, The Locktender’s House, and Ersatz Anatomy. He lives in Pennsylvania. www.stevensherrill.com

  The Locktender’s House

  From the author of cult classic THE MINOTAUR TAKES A CIGARETTE BREAK comes a mesmerizing tale that lurks in the evocative literary landscape between suspense and horror.

  Janice Witherspoon’s stagnant life is upended by a senseless death thousands of miles away. Fueled by shock, steered by fate and fear, she gathers her belongings from her North Carolina apartment and takes to the road. But something—an inner voice, or the beguiling utterances of an older, darker soul—drives Janice farther off course. When she finally comes to a stop, Janice finds herself deep in rural Pennsylvania on the grounds of an abandoned lockhouse.

  Janice is seduced by the calm of the old house, the dry canal, and the mountains rising up all around it. Days turn to weeks and months before Janice lets down her guard, opening her doors to the inhabitants of her new province. There’s Stephen Gainy, a reclusive art teacher and stone carver, as well as a spectral woman unlike any Janice has ever met. As Janice grows more enmeshed in the lives of those around her, her calm gives way to a flood of terrifying accidents and nightmares.

  Soon Janice is pulled into a web of her own history, bound by blood ties to events of the past that threaten to consume her whole, and frantically piecing a story together as the edges between the real and unreal blur and break down.

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