See How Small

by Scott Blackwood

  “He seems to really care for her.” She looked hard at him.

  “Well, that’s good,” he said, failure creeping in.

  “I think it is,” she said. She sat down at the table, started eating.

  “No dreamy-eyed kid,” he said.

  “No, not this one. And he’s polite. You know, in that fake southern way you like. Chivalrous.”

  “Perhaps I shall have to make this gentleman’s acquaintance,” Jack said, raising his eyebrows. “To determine if his intentions are honorable.” He paced out a few steps in the kitchen, turned, aimed the spatula at an imaginary opponent across the room.

  Carla grinned. “Jack Dewey’s finally here to defend our honor, ladies. Cue the collective swoon.”

  30

  I think people are looking in the wrong places. That’s my feeling. Lots of pressure on the police, understand. Three young white girls. They’re going to find someone. They’re going to find someone because that’s the story they’re telling. The story they’re telling those girls’ parents. The public. The one they’re telling themselves. They march some unlucky motherfucker in braces out in front of the cameras, say take a look at that. We in control now. But somebody’s out there telling a bigger story. And this bigger story makes the other one look small. In fact, the smaller story’s already a part of the bigger story and doesn’t know it. Can’t see it. Can’t pick it out of a lineup. Why? Because evil don’t look like anything.

  You know why we got all those moon towers? Like the one at Zilker Park they string all the lights on to make into a Christmas tree? They put those up in the 1890s after seven women—five of them black—were raped and murdered. Mutilated. One beheaded. One with an ice pick jammed through the ear. Servant girl annihilator, that writer O. Henry called it. That was before they hauled his ass away to jail for supposedly embezzling money from a bank. Stupid motherfucker got on the wrong side of somebody. I’ll say this: He got murdered black girls in the newspaper. How often does that happen? So, after the murders, the city starts a curfew. A few people arrested, prosecuted, the husband of one of the murdered white women gets acquitted at trial. They don’t have any evidence, no real motive, but they try to tell a story anyway. Folks are still scared. They keep their kids out of the front yard. Don’t go out at night. So they try another story: Why don’t we make night into day? Put up a fake moon?

  31

  THIS IS WHAT Truck and Trailer told Hollis:

  Down where the springs gush from the dam, they’d met a young man who asked about Hollis. The young man was walking along a creek path choked with honeysuckle and clouds of bees. He was smooth-shaven (shiny, Trailer had said, like a baby) and dressed in a white dress shirt and tie like a missionary, a leather satchel draped over a shoulder. A motley-colored dog trotted behind him, but they couldn’t say if it was his. The young man paused next to their camp and gave them some breakfast tacos in a paper bag. He sat on a rock and watched them eat, seeming to take pleasure in their appetites. When Trailer winced from his bad tooth, the young man suggested a tincture of clove oil until he could see a dentist. He asked them about the area but seemed to know the neighborhoods already. He spoke about the natural beauty of the landscape. Live oaks and cypress. Told them the hills all around were once a mountain range that was beaten down by a sea. Those mountains, he said, were still down there, moving, sending tremors in the earth.

  Hearing this, Truck and Trailer nodded and chewed. The young man was a gentleman and a scholar, Truck said. Trailer said that the young man had a peculiar way of talking. Like someone standing a ways off but whispering in your ear.

  “You some kind of missionary?” Trailer had asked the man.

  “No, nothing like that,” the young man said, and smiled as if he was pleased they thought so.

  “Aren’t you hot in that getup?” Truck asked him, motioning to his tie.

  The young man, staring off through a break in the trees at the creek, didn’t seem to hear. “Do you gentlemen know a Mr. Finger?” he asked, but in a casual way, as if he could take or leave the answer.

  Truck and Trailer nodded but stopped chewing.

  “Hollis, you mean?” Trailer said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Hollis.”

  “Hollis hurt his head in Iraq,” Truck said, excusing Hollis his many trespasses.

  “That’s why I need to talk to him.”

  “To help him?” Trailer asked.

  “That’s right,” the man said. “I’d like to offer a little help here and there.” The young man’s forehead gleamed. His cheeks were flushed. He picked up a small, flat piece of limestone and tossed it toward the creek, where it struck the surface several times and disappeared.

  “You with the VA?” Truck asked, squinting up at his bright face.

  Wind blew high in the trees, but the air close to the ground was stifling. Truck said for some reason he thought the motley dog, which lay motionless on its side on a slab of rock, had died. And then a tremor went through its body that made him think it might be whelping puppies.

  “You with us or against us?” Trailer said, wiping a clump of egg from his mouth.

  “That’s enough, Arthur,” Truck said quietly.

  “It’s okay,” said the man. “You’re just looking out for your friend.”

  “Hollis ain’t done nothing to nobody,” Trailer said.

  The man said he was sure that was true, that sometimes things got confused and had to be turned inside out to be understood. And even then they wouldn’t always give up their mystery. He said he knew a man who once set fire to a whole apartment building out of love. The man had immolated himself in his lover’s bed.

  “I don’t get you,” Truck said.

  The young man threw another stone and it skipped silently across the creek.

  “Immolated?” Trailer asked. “Set himself on fire?”

  “That’s right,” the young man said. “He couldn’t be separated from her. A moth to the flame, so to speak.”

  “People died in this fire? Besides him?”

  The young man seemed to think about this for a second. “It was a very fierce love,” he said.

  The dog now started barking at something scuttling in the underbrush, an armadillo or possum, and the young man tossed it something from his pocket to quiet it. He pulled a flask from his satchel, took a drink, and passed it to Truck and Trailer. They sipped on the whiskey for a bit. The young man seemed cheerful but mindful of their qualms, Truck told Hollis. At this stage of the telling it became unclear to Hollis whether or not they’d told the young man about Hollis’s sleeping in his art car on side streets, or his trips below the gushing spring to swim and bathe, or his recent visions of the girls, though Hollis had pressed them on these points.

  After they’d drunk most of the whiskey, Truck and Trailer said the young man told them a story about Judas from a gospel they’d never heard of. In this gospel, Judas didn’t betray Jesus at all. In this story, Judas is the only disciple who understands Jesus’s true teachings and his own role in turning things inside out. In this story, Judas is the hero because he brings about Jesus’s suffering, frees him from the terrible clothing of his body. The young man said that this was the fiercest love of all.

  Truck told Hollis he felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. He said he didn’t say anything for a minute or so because his head was buzzing with the whiskey, his heart thudding too fast. He could hear the creek rushing clear and cool over the rocks below them. Then he saw that the young man had an erection.

  Trailer told Hollis he knew all along that the man was a missionary.

  32

  THE VIDEO OF the ice cream shop is a glimpse into another world. A canvas painted by a master, rolled up and spirited away, then rediscovered by chance in somebody’s attic. The woman, Theresa Mooney, lives in Houston. She’d forgotten where the video was taken, she told Rosa Heller on the phone. She’d visited her sister in Austin that December to help her move after the sister and her husband had sepa
rated. So she’d held an impromptu sixth birthday for her son with his cousins in an ice cream shop not far from where her sister lived. She’d forgotten the name. Her sister’s trouble back then had colored everything. She wouldn’t have remembered anything if it wasn’t for the photo of one of the girls in the article Rosa had written on the fifth anniversary of the murders. Elizabeth, her name tag says in the video. Elizabeth had helped with the birthday party, made balloon animals, even shot some video of the birthday boy and his cousins. She appears at the 1 minute 51 second mark on the DVD, which Theresa Mooney recently found in some boxes, its case mislabeled as X-MAS PARTY. In the video, the focus is off. Theresa Mooney is still learning to use the camera. Zoom or not zoom. Elizabeth is hamming it up a bit, making balloon crowns and swords. Zoom and you see small scars on her hands as they twist and twist, this way, the other. A Lyle Lovett song is playing in the background somewhere.

  Theresa Mooney’s son Dean’s striped shirt already has a smudge of chocolate ice cream down the front. He sticks out his tongue. Theresa tells Rosa about the little scar under his chin where he fell four feet off the porch when he was two because she was distracted. Down he went, she says, a moment still frozen in her mind.

  On the tape, in a wider shot, you can see that it’s dark out, likely still early evening by the crowd. The windows and double doors at the front of the shop reflect back the interior. If you enlarge the DVD image, as Rosa has, you can see several things: at the counter, the other two girls are working. Meredith’s head is down, counting out change but thinking about boys, Rosa imagines. Or maybe her horse. A misplaced bridle or brush. Zadie with her ponytail at the drive-through window. The oldest and dreamiest of the girls. If you enlarge the image more, you can see Zadie moving her hips, swaying to a tinny song that’s playing on a car stereo in the drive-through line. It’s hard to tell what song it is at first, but if you replay it several times, like Rosa, you can tell it’s a cover of “Sea of Love.” Do you remember when we met?, a line that plays in Rosa’s head for weeks after. The reflection of Zadie leans out in the drive-through window, laughs with her hand to her mouth as if she’s been caught being herself.

  Here, you might suddenly remember, as Rosa did, that these reflections aren’t like photo negatives, not images of us flipped left to right; they’re images of us reversed front to back, as if looking at a mask turned inside out.

  You can see other things in the window’s reflection at the 2:46 mark: near the front counter, behind the table where a woman and a bearded man are spooning ice cream to their mouths, are two men, one in a long overcoat. The man in the overcoat is sipping from his shake. There’s glare on the window where their faces should be.

  In the foreground of the video, at the 3:11 mark, one of the big balloons slips out of Elizabeth’s hands, makes a farting sound, then curlicues in the air. The birthday partiers giggle. When she goes to retrieve it, the camera follows her and the two men rise from the table but turn away. One of them, the one in the overcoat, his back to the camera, presents the deflated balloon to Elizabeth with a chivalrous bow, as if returning a lost glove.

  33

  WE’RE SEVEN EIGHT nine ten eleven twelve and our mother is driving us to Galveston. Every August we’d stay in a beach house on stilts that our Nana owned. Galveston is no fancy-pants like Corpus Christi, our Nana would say. It’s real. Things get washed away here. When we see the city limits signs, we sing the Glen Campbell song until we’re hoarse. Around the tenth time our mother says if we don’t stop she’ll turn around, head back to Austin, where it’s sweltering and there is no beach. She means it, she says. She’s got a splitting headache because she and Ray have been fighting. Another of us, the horsey girl, is in the front passenger seat, but our mother just ignores her like she does. She’s made her a white space on the wall because it’s just too much, she says. But we say it isn’t enough. We’re together, we say. She pokes at us in the backseat with an old umbrella and we say, Oh, wow, thanks, Mom, you punctured a tendon in our arm or something. But then we quiet down and hum the rest of the Glen Campbell song to ourselves and watch her eyes in the rearview. Weather her mood. It rains as it always does here in the afternoon, and the water branches out in little rivulets on the backseat car windows, like arteries or roots feeding something or nothing. Behind these, turquoise, violet, orange wooden beach houses flicker by, and we think how beautiful it all is. That even if it was all made up, we’d want it anyway. Like looking forward to watching a terrific movie again even as you’re watching it. The Birds is our favorite. Have you ever seen so many gulls? What do you suppose it is? We scream every time just before the dumbass blows himself up at the gas station. Laugh until ginger ale comes out our nose. Watching our mother’s eyes in the rearview, we can tell she is thinking of the Halloween we dressed her up as the actress Tippi Hedren, papier-mâché crows with wire feet perched high in the blond wig we got from the school’s theater prop room. Shut the door, we hear our mother say in her spunky Tippi Hedren voice. They’ll get in. Shut the door!

  34

  You’re leaving out so much.

  What about the part when we went to Galveston when the girls were small and my mother answered the door and she pretended not to know them? I don’t know any Zadie or Elizabeth, she said. Their names don’t ring a bell. Maybe you can describe them for me? And the girls turning to each other, round-eyed in amazement.

  IV

  35

  THE WEEK AFTER the Christmas party, Kate had driven by Jack Dewey’s house dozens of times. Parked outside, some nights. Watched him disappear and reappear in windows that he seemingly never bothered to cover. Once she fell asleep in the driver’s seat and was startled awake when the paperboy missed his aim and struck her car with a thwack. She’d been dreaming of the girls again. They were being disagreeable. She’d said some terrible things to them, had woken up ashamed. In the dream, she was letting out their prom dresses, using a seam ripper with its tiny sharp hook along the stitching. The girls stood on chairs in the kitchen, which was also Kate’s mother’s kitchen in Galveston, except for some reason the floor had a funny slope to it so all the fruit rolled up the counter. Kate’s mother sat at the kitchen table in a blue flowered dress, playing Scrabble, ignoring them. Every time Kate tried to get her girls to stay put for a new measurement, they’d shift their feet or add a few pounds or begin to crumble and smoke there on the chairs with their arms out to their sides. Kate’s hand shook. How thoughtless. Didn’t they know she had better goddamn things to do with her evenings? She threw the seam ripper and it stuck in the wall by the calendar, a tiny harpoon. Her girls looked at each other with round eyes, stifling a laugh.

  Jack was on a three-on, four-off schedule at his station. On his off days, he would run in the evenings, circling the park. After, he’d bike to Deep Eddy Bar or the Horseshoe Lounge. He was working on a project of some sort, judging by the building materials in the garage, the tarp-covered stack of wood on the side of the house. He ate at odd hours, she thought, drank too much. When his daughter wasn’t there, he’d often turn all the lights on in the middle of the night, as if the house was bustling with activity. She heard him playing the piano sometimes at night, though slowly, ploddingly, as if he’d just picked it up and didn’t have much of an ear. A few times she’d braved the backyard and crouched in the honeysuckle that had taken over his fence line. The new perspective, its distances and proportions, excited her blood and made her dizzy. She could see the blur of his head in the frosted bathroom window, when he was showering. Once, she saw him masturbating in a nice mid-century chair in his bedroom. She didn’t turn away.

  Now, in the long living room window, she can see paint cans, drop cloths, a toolbox. He’d apparently taken off the old paneling recently and replaced it with maple bead board. Painted the walls sea green, sanded and stained the wood floors a dark pecan. Framed photos hung in the hallway. She could see a senior-year photo of Jack’s daughter, Samantha.

  Later, she’ll think how her body
knew before her head did. Crouched low in the honeysuckle, her legs began to tremble. It took her several seconds to realize she was looking at a replica of her old living room.

  36

  JACK FEELS ALONG the nylon search rope in his head, fingers the knots he’s remembered to tie at intervals, finds the girls.

  You should call Kate, Elizabeth says.

  I’m afraid.

  She’s not getting any younger, Zadie says.

  I keep thinking things will get better, that I’ll snap out of it.

  All that smoke and water makes your head soggy, Elizabeth says.

  When I was in sixth grade, Jack says, we moved to Temple, Texas. I was just miserable. Didn’t know anybody. I used to run away from school every few weeks, head out into a cotton field past the field house. Hide there in the irrigation ditches until school was out, making up another life in my head.

  We know just the place, Meredith says.

  Tell us a story, Zadie says, in Jack’s daughter’s voice.

  I liked the ones about the Texas explorers, Jack says. Coronado in the panhandle. Cabeza de Vaca living with the cannibals.

  Everyone naked and mosquito-bit, Elizabeth says. She shudders.

  What kind of parent names their child Cow Head? Meredith says.

  Tell us a story, Zadie says. One we’ll remember.

  Cabeza de Vaca is shipwrecked on Galveston Island, Jack says. Almost all his men lost. The Karankawa find him and three others there on the beach. They weep at the men’s suffering. Then the Karankawa enslave them for two years.

  Sounds like theater work, Zadie says.