Bottomland: Based on the Murder of Rosa Mary Dean in Franklin, Tennessee

by Trey Holt

  “He does love your football.”

  “Yeah, a lot more than I do.”

  “It’s your senior year in high school. You’re supposed to enjoy it. You’ve got everything in front of you. Life by the tail. You might as well enjoy it.”

  “Since when did you become so optimistic?”

  “I told you recently, I’m plannin’on livin’my life now.”

  “I am lookin’forward to gettin’through this year,”I told him.“I think that Sharon and I might get married. At least that’s what we’re talkin’about. She says that she had known what she wanted even before the wreck happened. Known it from the end of June when she and Van went their separate ways…when the bastard had gotten what he wanted and decided to move on to get it from somebody else.”

  As I talked on, Percy said nothing. Only lit cigarettes and drew on them and nodded his head up and down, listening to me now like I had listened to him for all the years. Giving me his undivided attention except when he looked out the window till I had to get ready to go on my route and he disappeared in front of me out the back door and into the darkness of the still morning.

  + + +

  “So what if I did do it?” he scowled at me across the room.“Lucky—I think I will start calling him that out of the disrespect—thinks he knows everything about the law. He acted like it was a crime if I had a relationship with the girl next door. There’s a reason they say,‘The girl next door. It’s synonymous with something good…not something bad. It’s not even against the law, that is, if it’s consensual. She’s sixteen. He says it’s eighteen, but that makes no sense. He married your mother when she was seventeen. Made her parents madder than hell. Did you know that? Married into what money they had…and kissed Mr. Oscar Garrett’s ass. That’s what he’s been good at doing. That and talking about work and how far it gets you and then drinking and playing craps on the job. He’s never wanted in his whole life for me to be happy. This is just another symptom of that. Ever since Inez drowned in the goddamned Harpeth River, he’s always tried to make it look like things were more my fault than they were. If he cared about my happiness, he certainly wouldn’t send me to a place like this!”

  This time he would stay a little more than a week, not forced to take up residence like the last time. Medical technology was better now, Lucky had assured me. There might be another way besides electricity, Guppy had told him.

  As to whether it was a crime or not, Percy had believed it the night Lucky had enlisted me to help him force him into the car, and so had I. The belief, true or false, had served as the leverage it took for it to happen. The rest, in the parking lot and the lobby of Central State, came off because of the weight bestowed upon the matter by Lucky’s badge. What the law was, I still could not tell you.

  “I think she’s goddam fifteen,”Lucky told me on the way home.“The man’s in his thirties.” Even in the darkness of the car, I could tell his eyes were bloodshot from the whiskey he had ingested earlier that evening to carry out what he thought he had to.”Doyouknow—howoldheis?” His words pushed together from the slur that had developed. Rarely did I see Lucky’s tolerance allow his body to show its drunkenness.

  “Isn’t he thirty-six or seven?” I said. I couldn’t remember him ever having a birthday…or at least him celebrating one.

  “Idontknow.”

  During the two times I visited Percy during his second stint in Central State, I did not remember to ask him. The visits, I am ashamed to say, were short because Sharon could not be with me.

  As for his girlfriend, she had been an outcast, too. They were just different kinds of outcasts, he explained. Where Lucky had been afraid he might hurt or disturb his mother and father and thus removed him, Christine Smithson had been held a prisoner in her own house. Todd had not been treated so badly because he was a boy. She, though, had been allowed only to go to school and back. Her family really kept everything among themselves. Hadn’t I ever noticed? he asked.

  “No, I’ve always been too busy tryin’to keep Lucky from beatin’my ass,”I had answered.

  “For nine years?”

  “Yes, for nine years.” That and the fact that my own life had captivated me enough that had believed that it was the worst life you can have. Crazy Uncle. Mean as hell father. Shitty sister. A mother who turned her back to almost everything. Van trying to fuck me all the time. Having to work since I was eight. Hell, no, I haven’t noticed. I didn’t say these things; neither did I speak the fact that I was certain anger and self-pity had taken much of my attention also. Either then or years later when I came to know it as truly as anything that ever happened to me.

  It had started innocently enough, he explained to me. He was there a lot. So was she. I had my own life, was out and gone most of the time. Had had all the mess with Van and Sharon…and ever since that day Lucky had kicked me in the ass going up Adams Street when he found out about the night before, I’d been like a different kid. And Lucky, whether you’ve noticed it or not, hasn’t been himself. You notice, I’m still calling him Lucky. But he hasn’t been right either.

  I had to remind him across the dimly lit room of where he had begun. Sharon, her piece of ass, was waiting. I cringed, reminding myself of Van.

  “Anyway, you and Lucky, not Dillard but Lucky, have your lives. And your mother, Sweet Mary, sweeter than any woman in the world to put up with my brother, has her work and seems utterly involved in it most of the time. She would listen to me, but her heart seemed as burdened as my own most of the time. Then…then there was Jean. Well, whatever she does, she was doing it. And the streets and the cemeteries and the river eventually get as lonesome as I imagine hell is. And it gets lonesome, people thinking you’re crazy. So, sometimes I’d just go out in the backyard and sit under that big elm out there and smoke a few cigarettes and stare at the sky and try to remind myself that life wasn’t that lonely. And then I’d come back in and lie on the bed and Lucky’s voice would echo through my head and I’d think that I should go get a job and I wouldn’t be so lonely. Then I’d go back out in the yard and more ways than one, be right back where I started. Lonesome and alone.

  “I swear, the first time I ever talked to her, she told me that she was a junior in high school, and then later a sophomore. Then she told me she was a freshman. I swear, I didn’t know she was fourteen going on fifteen. You can’t ever tell your father…Lucky this, but if I’d known that she was that age I’d have never gotten near her. I’m still not sure we have the truth. Anyway, she’d wave at me and smile when she was coming in from school. And it would do my heart good. Make me not feel so bad for a little while. She smiled and waved like she was lonesome, too.

  “You know, it’s funny how you can live by somebody that long and never really even take a close look at them. Never really look in their eyes. Years ago, so long ago that I can’t tell you how long ago it’s been, I’d see her looking out the window like she was trapped in that house, longing to get out. She wears her mother’s old dresses but she’s not a pound overweight. Did you know that?”

  I assured him that I’d never thought about it. Also reminded him that maybe she was trapped in the house because she was so young.

  He immediately identified that neither Jean nor I had ever been treated that way.

  True, I said, but we had just suffered different maladies.

  “Well, she wasn’t…isn’t…she’s not dead…have you seen her? She isn’t overweight at all. I really thought she would have called by now…or come see me. I wanted to know how that would happen since she wasn’t old enough to drive a car.” He said he thought maybe her brother, Todd, would drive her down. Todd liked him too, he assured me. He had come out and sat behind the shed with them a few days, smoked cigarettes he’d given him. And, he added, he didn’t feel one bit bad giving Christine cigarettes, because she could buy them, as well as beer, at Chester’s Grocery. But he and Christy, that’s what she wanted him to call her, had sat out there every day for going on six weeks. Sometimes
he thought he might die from Friday evening to Monday morning when he couldn’t see her, that was, if her parents didn’t go somewhere and she couldn’t sneak out behind the shed.

  “And we were fine till one day Old Man Smithson came out looking for something. I could hear somebody rustling around in the shed, and kept trying to tell her I heard somebody and she kept telling me that she didn’t hear anything. She was smiling when she said it. You know, when she’d smile it was like her blue eyes picked up the glimmer of whatever light was around and danced. Anyway, she just kept sayin’over and over that she didn’t hear anybody. And then the noise just stopped. She said it was probably just the cat.

  “Well, the cat didn’t come back for another few days and she started tellin’me that nobody was gonna find us and that it was like our own private little place. And I guess I kind of believed her. Or at least I wanted to. You know how it is back there: the back of that old shed just pretty much runs up against the back of Lucky’s carport and then there’s that great mangled growth of bushes and trees between them. On the other side, you know there’s that thicket of blackberry and dogwood bushes. It felt like nobody in the world could see us. That somehow we’d fallen off into a world that was all our own.

  “All I can tell you is that was the best two weeks of my life. Man, did we live in it. For those days I began to realize what it was that normal people, if there is such a thing, do with their lives. I’d never thought I’d have that opportunity. Even Walter couldn’t take it away from me. When he was there, he’d just sit over there in the shadows and act like he couldn’t speak. In here, they’re tellin’me that he’s a delusion or a hallucination. But I think they need to check their dictionaries, because I don’t think either of those terms encompass the power the heartless—no, I shouldn’t call him that—the plain bastard has. At least, for the first time, he cut me some slack. For the first time, it seemed more important to live things than think about them. For the time I had with her, I let myself settle into nothing but being. Pure Being.”

  “Pure Fucking,”Lucky told me when I was at home that night, trying to explain to him for the last time what Percy had tried to tell me.

  “So, you think he was just fuckin’her to fuck her, then?” I said.

  “‘Fuckin’her to fuck her?’”he said.“What the hell’s that s’posed to mean?”

  I wasn’t sure if it was Lucky or the bottle talking. Most likely the latter, I concluded, since he had been on it heavier than usual ever since we’d had to drag Percy through the yard and lock him in the back of the squad car and then drag him across the parking lot at Central State.

  “It means,”I said,“that I think maybe he just wanted somebody to love him. Just like all the rest of us.” It had sounded just like something Percy would say. Possibly had said. And I found myself wanting to argue with Lucky.

  He was probably too drunk to get up, I knew, like many times before, but he was also different. Something had given, a leak had sprung inside him. He wasn’t so sure he was right anymore. He simply stared at me for a long moment and then fumbled with a cigarettes until he finally lit one. He inhaled and held the breath a long time, then watched as it rose to the ceiling and disappeared into the darkened stain made by years of doing the same.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The air was cold enough to bite by the time Lucky and I came home from our meeting with the Beatty’s, Dr. Guppy and George Preston. And, as it is prone every once in awhile to do, the snow had made its way directly through middle Tennessee, covering us in a three inch blanket. Against Lucky’s suggestion, I had taken the Indian anyway, knowing the car was much more likely to be seen when I went to meet Sharon. By the time I left home for the paper office, the snow itself had stopped and the world had become its quietest. Down Cleburne and Adams, there was only a single line of tire tracks, where one car had been out after the street had been covered. Much the same as Rosa Mary Dean’s murder had shut down Franklin, the snow always did the same. As Lucky had said the night before, from Nashville to Franklin to any other town nearby, no one really had the implements or resources to fight it. I imagined that Lucky would be cursing upon his arising from bed, knowing that along with the information he had come by the night before, he would also have the dozen wrecks around town as people tried to make it through the mess.

  When I left the paper office, without a word between me and Raymond Collins, I might add, it had begun again: huge, white, soft flakes that flew rather than fell, skidded to a stop rather than landed. Throwing my first papers down South Margin, I recognized what I did every time it snowed: if you hit a sidewalk just right, the paper would slide on top of the snow with hardly any evidence of having crossed there. The first real marks it would actually make would be when it came in contact with the first step and became airborne. Then, and only then, it would sail into the air three or four feet, then onto the porch and leave a final mark through the dusting of snow that blew in under the front porch roof. I always wondered if anyone noticed the paper’s path or the fact that there were almost no marks along the sidewalk. It often reminded me of skipping a rock, which Lucky had taught me to do when I was a small boy.

  As many memories tend to do, this one had announced its presence there for the first time in years. For just a moment, it’s like your mind is a movie screen and across it comes a part of your life only vaguely seen before. Like some of the images that had passed in front of Van and Tully and me as we sat in the dark, cool theater on Main Street.

  + + +

  An hour into my route, the snow had begun to let up and masquerade as freezing rain, throwing itself from the heavens almost sideways and pelting me in the back and face. I cursed myself as I drove, for not having taken Lucky up on his offer. Hollered loud enough that I was sure that some of the families to whom I threw papers would hear me, like a mad, frothing dog howling at the hint of a moon that had left itself showing behind the rolling silver clouds. I cursed Lucky. I cursed myself for having left the house that morning in my leather jacket, afraid for anybody to see me in the rain suit and galoshes I should have been wearing. By the time I knocked on her window, I was shaking so hard I couldn’t clench my teeth hard enough to keep them from chattering.

  “Get in, silly,”she said as she pushed the door open.

  I laughed in the face of my pain, knowing that anything she said to me would be like salve on some chronic wound. I sat down, peeled my coat off and slung it in the back seat.

  “Too cool to wear your poncho?” she said, a word I’d heard only when she called it that.

  “Style over comfort,”I said.

  She laughed where she’d barely part her lips, showing her white teeth between the lipstick, tilted her head back. Sighed at the end, like for some reason I imagined her father had.

  I pulled the rearview mirror toward me and checked myself, sure I looked like a drowned rat.

  Ran my fingers through my hair after I pulled my cap off.

  “You’re as cute as ever,”she said.

  “I figured,”I told her. Laughed like she had, amazed at how quick we pick things up.

  Thankfully, under the leather coat, most of the weather hadn’t penetrated. I touched my shirt, only damp from the moisture that filled the air everywhere. But there was no rescuing my pants. Their rolled cuffs, ever-popular in the day, had even wilted like a dying flower and gathered themselves around the ankles of my boots.

  “You can put them on the floorboard and let the heat dry them out,”she said.

  “There isn’t any heat in this car,”I told her.

  “Bobby fixed it yesterday. He’d stopped by for a little bit after I’d come in from school to see how everybody was. I told him that I’d been cold in the mornin’ …not you.”

  “Good,”I told her.“Because I’m tough enough I could make it.”

  “Yeah…you look tough enough…shakin’there like a leaf.” She pulled the mirror back her way, checked herself. Smiled, at her own beauty, I imagined.“Did your ciga
rettes keep dry? I hope you didn’t let them get soaked.”

  “They’re somewhere inside my jacket,”I told her, still contemplating whether or not to take off my pants. I did so before I searched my jacket for the half pack of cigarettes I had left. I tried to remember the last time she had smoked with me, had asked for a cigarette. To the best of my recollection, it had been when we found that goddam woman…no, now she had a name…Rosa Mary Dean. Maybe the next day. I knocked one out of the pack, damp enough I feared it might not light. Snapped a flame out of a match, lit it for her. Did the same to one for me. I handed her my pants, which she laid on the heater vent that had eluded me all the early winter.

  “You remember when you always used to tell me that the reason that you hung on through high school was because of football?” she said.

  “Yeah, I remember sayin’somethin’like that,”I told her.“I guess that and so I won’t have to end up throwin’papers the rest of my life.”

  She nodded. I watched the rain slog down outside, begin to wash away the snow that had collected overnight. Knock the whiteness off the hood of her car. I could feel the heat making its way to my bare legs. Wished they were not as white and skinny…that I could get them to quit shaking.

  “You think you all’ll have to go to school today?” she asked.

  “Yes, the goddam academy always goes,”I told her.“I’m surprised they let us out the day Rosa Dean was killed.”

  “Who?” she said.

  I realized that I hadn’t told her about our night previous. That note that I couldn’t get out of my head, that had haunted me almost as much as seeing her body had.

  “That woman,”I told her.“That’s her name. We met with these people—“

  “The woman we saw?”