The New Black

by Richard Thomas

  Punter shuts off the television, stubs out his cigarette. He takes a shower, shaves, combs his black hair straight back. Dresses himself in the same outfit he wears every day, a white t-shirt and blue jeans and black motorcycle boots.

  On the way to his car, he stops by the garage and opens the freezer lid. Her body is obscured behind ice like frosted glass. He puts a finger to her lips, but all he feels is cold.

  X

  The gas station is on a wooded stretch of gravel road between Punter’s house and the outskirts of town. Although Punter has been here before, he’s never seen it so crowded. While he waits in line he realizes these people are here for the same reason he is, to be near the site of the tragedy, to see the last place this girl was seen.

  The checkout line crawls while the clerk runs his mouth, ruining his future testimony by telling his story over and over, transforming his eyewitness account into another harmless story.

  The clerk says, I was the only one working that night. Of course I remember her.

  In juvie, the therapists had called this narrative therapy, or else constructing a preferred reality.

  The clerk says, Long blond hair, tight-ass jeans, all that tan skin—I’m not saying she brought it on herself, but you can be sure she knew people would be looking.

  The clerk, he has black glasses and halitosis and fingernails chewed to keratin pulp. Teeth stained with cigarettes or chewing tobacco or coffee. Or all of the above. He reminds Punter of himself, and he wonders if the clerk feels the same, if there is a mutual recognition between them.

  When it’s Punter’s turn, the clerk says, I didn’t see who took her, but I wish I had.

  Punter looks away, reads the clerk’s name tag. OSWALD. The clerk says, If I knew who took that girl, I’d kill him myself.

  Punter shivers as he slides his bills across the counter, as he takes his carton of cigarettes and his candy bar. He doesn’t stop shivering until he gets out of the air-conditioned store and back inside his sun-struck car.

  The therapists had told Punter that what he’d done was a mistake, that there was nothing wrong with him. They made him repeat their words back to them, to absolve himself of the guilt they were so sure he was feeling.

  The therapists had said, You were just kids. You didn’t know what you were doing.

  Punter said the words they wanted, but doing so changed nothing. He’d never felt the guilt they told him he should. Even now, he has only the remembered accusations of cops and judges to convince him that what he did was wrong.

  X

  Punter cooks two venison steaks in a frying pan with salt and butter. He sits down to eat, cuts big mouthfuls, then chews and chews, the meat tough from overcooking. He eats past the point of satiation on into discomfort, until his stomach presses against the tight skin of his abdomen. He never knows how much food to cook. He always clears his plate.

  When he’s done eating, he smokes and thinks about the girl in the freezer. How, when walking her out of the pond, she had threatened to slip out of his arms and back into the water. How he’d held on, carrying her up and out into the starlight. He hadn’t saved her—couldn’t have—but he had preserved her, kept her safe from the wet decay, from the mouths of fish and worse.

  He knows the freezer is better than the refrigerator, that the dry cold of meat and ice is better than the slow rot of lettuce and leftovers and ancient, crust-rimmed condiments. Knows that even after death, there is a safety in the preservation of a body, that there is a second kind of life to be had.

  X

  Punter hasn’t been to the bar near the factory since he got fired, but tonight he needs a drink. By eight, he’s already been out to the garage four times, unable to keep from opening the freezer lid. If he doesn’t stop, the constant thawing and refreezing will destroy her, skin first.

  It’s mid-shift at the factory, so the bar is empty except for the bartender and two men sitting together at the rail, watching the ball game on the television mounted above the liquor shelves. Punter takes a stool at the opposite end, orders a beer and lights a cigarette. He looks at the two men, tries to decide if they’re men he knows from the plant. He’s bad with names, bad at faces. One of the men catches him looking and gives him a glare that Punter immediately looks away from. He knows that he stares too long at people, that it makes them uncomfortable, but he can’t help himself. He moves his eyes to his hands to his glass to the game, which he also can’t make any sense of. Sports move too fast, are full of rules and behaviors he finds incomprehensible.

  During commercials, the station plugs its own late-night newscast, including the latest about the missing girl. Punter stares at the picture of her on the television screen, his tongue growing thick and dry for the five seconds the image is displayed. One of the other men drains the last gulp of his beer and shakes his head, says, I hope they find the fucker that killed her and cut his balls off.

  So you think she’s dead then?

  Of course she’s dead. You don’t go missing like that and not end up dead.

  The men motion for another round as the baseball game comes back from the break. Punter realizes he’s been holding his breath, lets it go in a loud, hacking gasp. The bartender and two men turn to look, so he holds a hand up, trying to signal he doesn’t need any help, then puts it down when he realizes they’re not offering. He pays his tab and gets up to leave.

  He hasn’t thought much about how the girl got into the pond, or who put her there. He too assumed murder, but the who or why or when is not something he’s previously considered.

  In juvie, the counselors told him nothing he did or didn’t do would have kept his mother alive, which Punter understood fine. Of course he hadn’t killed his mother. That wasn’t why he was there. It was what he’d done afterward that had locked him away, put him behind bars until he was eighteen.

  This time, he will do better. He won’t sit around for months while the police slowly solve the case, while they decide that what he’s done is just as bad. This time, Punter will find the murderer himself, and he will make him pay.

  X

  He remembers: Missing her. Not knowing where she was, not understanding, just wishing she’d come back. Not believing his father, who told him that she’d left them, that she was gone forever.

  He remembers looking for her all day while his father worked, wandering the road, the fields, the rooms of their small house.

  He remembers descending into the basement one step at a time. Finding the light switch, waiting for the fluorescent tubes to warm up. Stepping off the wood steps, his bare feet aching at the cold of the concrete floor.

  He remembers nothing out of the ordinary, everything in its place.

  He remembers the olive green refrigerator and the hum of the lights being the only two sounds in the world.

  He remembers walking across the concrete and opening the refrigerator door.

  More than anything else, he remembers opening his mouth to scream and not being able to. He remembers that scream getting trapped in his chest, never to emerge.

  X

  When the eleven o’ clock news comes on, Punter is watching, ready with his small, spiral-bound notebook and his golf pencil stolen from the keno caddy at the bar. He writes down the sparse information added to the girl’s story. The reporter recounts what Punter already knows—her name, the school, the abandoned car—then plays a clip of the local sheriff, who leans into the reporter’s microphone and says, We’re still investigating, but so far there’s no proof for any of these theories. It’s rare when someone gets out of their car and disappears on their own, but it does happen.

  The sheriff pauses, listening to an inaudible question, then says, Whatever happened to her, it didn’t happen inside the car. There’s no sign of a struggle, no sign of sexual assault or worse.

  Punter crosses his legs, then uncrosses them. He presses the pencil down onto the paper and writes all of th
is down.

  The next clip is of the girl’s father and mother, standing behind a podium at a press conference. They are both dressed in black, both stern and sad in dress clothes. The father speaks, saying, If anyone out there knows what happened—if you know where our daughter is—please come forward. We need to know where she is.

  Punter writes down the word father, writes down the words mother and daughter. He looks at his useless telephone. He could tell these strangers what they wanted, but what good would it do them? His own father had known exactly where his mother was, and it hadn’t done either of them any good.

  X

  According to the shows on television, the first part of an investigation is always observation, is always the gathering of clues. Punter opens the closet where he keeps his hunting gear and takes his binoculars out of their case. He hangs them around his neck and closes the closet door, then reopens it and takes his hunting knife off the top shelf. He doesn’t need it, not yet, but he knows television detectives always carry a handgun to protect themselves. He only owns a rifle and a shotgun, both too long for this kind of work. The knife will have to be enough.

  In the car, he puts the knife in the glove box and the binoculars on the seat. He takes the notebook out of his back pocket and reads the list of locations he’s written down: the school, her parents’ house, the pond and the gas station.

  He reads the time when the clerk said he saw her and then writes down another, the time he found her in the pond. The two times are separated by barely a day, so she couldn’t have been in the pond for too long.

  Whatever happened to her, it happened fast.

  He thinks that whoever did this, they must be a local to know about the pond. Punter has never actually seen anyone else there, only the occasional tire tracks, the left-behind beer bottles and cigarette butts from teenage parties. The condoms discarded further off in the bushes, where Punter goes to piss.

  He thinks about the girl, about how he knows she would never consent to him touching her if she were still alive. About how she would never let him say the words he’s said, the words he still wants to say. He wonders what he will do when he finds her killer. His investigation, it could be either an act of vengeance or thanksgiving, but it is still too early to know which.

  X

  Punter has been to the girl’s school once before, when the unemployment office sent him to interview for a janitorial position there. He hadn’t been offered the job, couldn’t have passed the background check if he had. His juvenile record was sealed, but there was enough there to warn people, and schools never took any chances.

  He circles the parking lot twice, then parks down the sidewalk from the front entrance, where he’ll be able to watch people coming in and out of the school. He resists the urge to use the binoculars, knows he must control himself in public, must keep from acting on every thought he has. This is why he hasn’t talked in months. Why he keeps to himself in his house, hunting and fishing, living off the too-small government disability checks the unemployment counselors helped him apply for.

  These counselors, they hadn’t wanted him to see what they wrote down for his disability, but he had. Seeing those words written in the counselor’s neat script didn’t make him angry, just relieved to know. He wasn’t bad anymore. He was a person with a disorder, with a trauma. No one had ever believed him about this, especially not the therapist in juvie, who had urged Punter to open up, who had gotten angry when he couldn’t. They didn’t believe him when he said he’d already told them everything he had inside him.

  Punter knows they were right to disbelieve him, that he did have feelings he didn’t want to let out.

  When Punter pictures the place where other people keep their feelings, all he sees is his own trapped scream, imagined as a devouring ball of sound, hungry and hot in his guts.

  A bell rings from inside the building. Soon the doors open, spilling girls out onto the sidewalk and into the parking lot. Punter watches parents getting out of other cars, going to greet their children. One of these girls might be a friend of the drowned girl, and if he could talk to her then he might be able to find out who the drowned girl was. Might be able to make a list of other people he needed to question so that he could solve her murder.

  The volume and the increasing number of distinct voices, all of it overwhelms Punter. He stares, watching the girls go by in their uniforms. All of them are identically clothed and so he focuses instead on their faces, on their hair, on the differences between blondes and brunettes and redheads. He watches the girls smiling and rolling their eyes and exchanging embarrassed looks as their mothers step forward to receive them.

  He watches the breeze blow all that hair around all those made-up faces. He presses himself against the closed door of his Ford, holds himself still.

  He closes his eyes and tries to picture the drowned girl here, wearing her own uniform, but she is separate now, distinct from these girls and the life they once shared. Punter’s glad. These girls terrify him in a way the drowned girl does not.

  A short burst of siren startles Punter, and he twists around in his seat to see a police cruiser idling its engine behind him, its driver side window rolled down. The cop inside is around Punter’s age, his hair starting to gray at the temples but the rest of him young and healthy-looking. The cop yells something, hanging his left arm out the window, drumming his fingers against the side of the cruiser, but Punter can’t hear him through the closed windows, not with all the other voices surrounding him.

  Punter opens his mouth, then closes it without saying anything. He shakes his head, then locks his driver’s side door, suddenly afraid that the cop means to drag him from the car, to put hands on him as other officers did when he was a kid. He looks up from the lock to see the cop outside of his cruiser, walking toward Punter’s own car.

  The cop raps on Punter’s window, waits for him to roll down the window. He stares at Punter, who tries to look away, inadvertently letting his eyes fall on another group of teenage girls.

  The cop says, You need to move your car. This is a fire lane.

  Punter tries to nod, finds himself shaking his head instead. He whispers that he’ll leave, that he’s leaving. The cop says, I can’t hear you. What did you say?

  Punter turns the key, sighs when the engine turns over. He says, I’m going. He says it as loud as he can, his vocal cords choked and rusty.

  There are too many girls walking in front of him for Punter to pull forward, and so he has to wait as the cop gets back in his own car. Eventually the cop puts the cruiser in reverse, lets him pass. Punter drives slowly out of the parking lot and onto the city streets, keeping the car slow, keeping it straight between the lines.

  Afraid that the cop might follow him, Punter sticks to the main roads, other well-populated areas, but he gets lost anyway. These aren’t places he goes. A half hour passes, and then another. Punter’s throat is raw from smoking. His eyes ache from staring into the rearview mirror, and his hands tremble so long he fears they might never stop.

  X

  At home, Punter finds the girl’s parents in the phonebook, writes down their address. He knows he has to be more careful, that if he isn’t then someone will come looking for him too. He lies down on the couch to wait for dark, falls asleep with the television tuned to daytime dramas and court shows. He dreams about finding the murderer, about hauling him into the police station in chains. He sees himself avenging the girl with a smoking pistol, emptying round after round into this faceless person, unknown but certainly out there, surely as marked by his crime as Punter was.

  When he wakes up, the television is still on, broadcasting game shows full of questions Punter isn’t prepared to answer. He gets up and goes into the bathroom, the pain in his guts doubling him over on the toilet. When he’s finished, he takes a long, gulping drink from the faucet, then goes out into the living room to gather his notebook, his binoculars, his knife.


  In the garage, he tries to lift the girl’s tank top to get to the skin hidden underneath, but the fabric is frozen to her flesh. He can’t tell if the sound of his efforts is the ripping of ice or of skin. He tries touching her through her clothes, but she’s too far gone, distant with cold. He shuts the freezer door and leaves her again in the dark, but not before he explains what he’s doing for her. Not before he promises to find the person who hurt her, to hurt this person himself.

  X

  Her parents’ house is outside of town, at the end of a long tree-lined driveway. Punter drives past, then leaves his car parked down the road and walks back with the binoculars around his neck. Moving through the shadows of the trees, he finds a spot a hundred yards from the house, then scans the lighted windows for movement until he finds the three figures sitting in the living room. He recognizes her parents from the television, sees that the third person is a boy around the same age as the drowned girl. Punter watches him the closest, tries to decide if this is the girl’s boyfriend. The boy is all movement, his hands gesturing with every word he speaks. He could be laughing or crying or screaming and from this distance Punter wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. He watches as the parents embrace the boy, then hurries back through the woods as soon as he sees the headlights come on in front of the house.

  He makes it to his own car just as the boy’s convertible pulls out onto the road. Punter starts the engine and follows the convertible through town, past the gas station and the downtown shopping, then into another neighborhood where the houses are smaller. He’s never been here before, but he knows the plastics plant is close, that many of his old coworkers live nearby. He watches the boy park in front of a dirty white house, watches through the binoculars as the boy climbs the steps to the porch, as he rings the doorbell. The boy does not go in, but Punter’s view is still obscured by the open door. Whatever happens only takes a few minutes, and then the boy is back in his car. He sits on the side of the road for a long time, smoking. Punter smokes too. He imagines getting out of the car and going up to the boy, imagines questioning him about the night of the murder. He knows he should, knows being a detective means taking risks, but he can’t do it. When the boy leaves, Punter lets him go, then drives past the white house with his foot off the gas pedal, idling at a crawl. He doesn’t see anything he understands, but this is not exactly new.