by Kim Powers
“What—the murders or how little I got paid?”
That shut Alice up, but not for long. Alice never shut up for long, even as she moved into her seventies. Especially as she moved into her seventies; she’d earned the right to say anything she wanted.
“He got you when you were very tender, very vulnerable, just waiting for your own book to come out . . .”
“I have never been vulnerable a day in my . . .”
“. . . that’s what he always did, even as a child, he had a gift for it. Little fairy child like that, zeroing in on other people’s soft spots. Imagine. You’re the one got all those people to talk to him, and there he goes, adding fuel to the fire about The Book . . . telling people he . . .”
“Hush.”
Alice had violated the cardinal principle: never talk about The Book.
It was the thing that hung over them like the rock of Sisyphus, teetering at the top of a hill, the merest whisper capable of sending it down to flatten them.
The Book, the thing that Nelle had labored over for years, writing and rewriting and writing again, and people still had the nerve to . . .
“Why didn’t she write another one?”
“Did Truman really write it?”
Alice was sick of it. So was Nelle, she just didn’t feel the need to go on and on about it. But it was the sole conversation her sister had been having, usually with herself, for the last two decades. Every year, some writer came to town—so impressed with themselves for finding their way to Podunk, Alabama—trying to dredge it all up, all over again. So impressed with themselves, thinking they’d get the scoop, once and for all. Well, Alice was impressed with herself, too: she just handed them a pack of Xeroxes she’d already stapled up, the past interviews she or Nelle had given long ago, so they didn’t need to ever give one again. The answers they’d already given were still good enough, about why Nelle had never written another book: “When you start at the top, there’s nowhere else to go.”
And then Alice would hand them a bill, for the cost of the copying.
She wasn’t her lawyer father’s daughter for nothing, carrying on the family legacy as a lawyer herself, even though she was so hard of hearing her clients practically had to shout to be heard. Not that there were many clients these days: title searches, some wills, the business of life. Mostly she was engaged in the business of protecting her sister, even though Nelle, leathery and sun-bleached, had no need for extra protection. Alice was handy with a cease and desist letter, as when the local historical society came out with Calpurnia’s Cookbook—really, the nerve—or the local golf club wanted to name an invitational in Nelle’s honor. No, thank you, Alice politely wrote back, on her sister’s behalf; there’s no need for that. No, thank you; they’d been brought up to be polite southern ladies, even when they were saying no. But if a second or third overture was made, that’s when Alice got nasty—southern nasty, which was as nasty as you could get. “I find myself giving an interview I never agreed to in the first place,” she’d say, then slam down the phone, or bang shut the door.
“No, if I would have picked up that phone first, when he called that very first night”—now Alice was shouting to Nelle, her normal decibel level, continuing the private conversation she had started in her head—“there would have been no second night to it, let alone a third.”
“I thank you for defendin’ my honor,” Nelle said, as she got up and kissed her sister on top of the head, on her way to the icebox.
“Something’s twitchin’ in that little mind of yours, and I don’t like it one bit,” Alice said, as Nelle snuck a piece of caramel cake with burnt-sugar icing. “And while you’re out—I know you’re goin’ somewhere, Nelle Harper, doing Lord knows what—swing by Doc Jensen’s, if it’s not already too late, to save those teeth of yours from rotting all the way to kingdom come and back because of all that sugar and sweet tea you guzzle.”
Nelle nursed the cake in a Dixie napkin with little blue and pink baby bunnies on it and left the house, taking a big chomp out of it to coincide with the back door slamming, that simultaneous explosion of sugar and door that told her the day could begin.
Alice, who never had to leave home because her law office was there, tried one last time, calling out through the screen door, “Nothing’s open this early. Where are you going? What did he put in your head, little sister?”
“You’ll know when I do, Bear,” her sister called back, some crackle in her voice for the first time in a while, a bit of sparkle through the cataract. The phone calls from Truman had put something in her head, some memory that had filtered through in bits and pieces, as dreams, during the past few nights. And she would make this rare trek out of her house, and alone, to find out what it was.
Truman had laughed at her in Kansas, when she insisted a Coca-Cola cake with caramel icing was the way into the hearts and minds of these midwesterners. If Truman wanted them to spill their guts, first he’d have to fill their guts—and no better way than with dessert. Sugar and butter would grease the wheels of this investigation.
They had been invited to Sunday supper at the home of Marie Dewey and her husband, Alvin, who was heading the task force for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. It was the first break they got, after Truman had nearly derailed the whole thing by cavalierly proclaiming to Alvin—upon their very first meeting, their very first meeting—that he didn’t give a hoot and holler if the killer was ever caught. That wasn’t his interest; his only interest was writing about the effects of murder on a small town.
Well, said Mr. Alvin Dewey, he could just hoot and holler his way back to New York City, not even stop at the hotel to pack up his bags, because his only interest was catching the killer.
Nelle had patched things over—“Oh, no, no, that’s not what Truman meant, not what he meant at all, sir”—while privately she wanted to take Truman’s scarf (the very scarf she had begged him not to wear unless he wanted to end up as dead as the Clutters) and pull it tight around his neck. Her apology got them an invitation to Sunday supper.
It was just a few weeks into their first trip to Kansas, while people were still sniffing around Truman. He was so nutty, maybe he was the killer, some of them probably thought. And that strange tall woman with him: was she his gun moll, Bonnie to his Clyde? Truman had packed pâté for the trip, thinking he might use it as a bribe, never thinking these people might not be interested in eating some poor animal’s mashed-up liver. Nelle—smart, wise Nelle—insisted a Coca-Cola cake was the way to go; it was the way to go in Monroeville when you were trying to make an impression or meet someone new—although there was no one new in Monroeville left to meet—and it would do for Kansas just as well.
When they got to the Deweys’, Nelle led the way, holding her cake aloft; Truman had insisted on taking his pâté as a backup, even though he kept it hidden in his coat. (Plus a bottle of J&B Scotch, which he kept visible, and accessible, at every moment.) Marie Dewey burst out laughing and pointed to her table: there, as its centerpiece, was the exact same thing: another Coca-Cola cake, and beside it, New Orleans-style rice and beans.
Of course, Truman insisted the cake was his idea, that he never went anywhere without it.
Especially to the home of new friends.
Which he sincerely hoped the Deweys would become.
He laid it on thicker than the fudgelike caramel icing; Nelle thought she would gag. But they did become fast, new friends, and had kept up through the years, exchanging Christmas cards and recipes and birth announcements. New friends, now old; they had remained better friends—or at least more constant—than Nelle and Truman had.
Nelle licked the last crumb of cake from the napkin and continued her morning constitutional into town, to the hideaway that had somehow come to her mind, ever since Truman’s first call just a few nights ago.
You got what you came for, didn’t you?
She stopped, midlick.
Why had that come to mind? It was a line from something she vaguel
y remembered, but couldn’t quite place:
You got what you came for.
But who’d said it, and why?
Had she got what she’d come for?
Don’t wanna go there, not this early in the morning.
She moved on, but stopped again when she suddenly remembered there was more to the line:
You got what you came for, didn’t you? Then why not go?
It was something someone had said—a woman in a movie, she thought?—before panic took over.
Before a question turned to begging and pleading: then why not go?
She didn’t remember what came after, but it wasn’t good.
Had one of the Clutters said it?
She didn’t know, but she sped up on her way to the hideaway, before another voice in her head made her change her mind.
Chapter Four
In the humble opinion of Myrtle J. Bennett, Truman had officially lost his marbles.
It was surprising it had taken her this long to come to that conclusion.
The late-night, drunken phone calls to that woman hadn’t convinced her, Myrtle having to dig up his ancient address books, then keep herself awake so she could hang up the phone after Truman passed out with it in his hand.
Nor had his insistence that Myrtle start placing the orders for his snakebite kits—in her name, the very same name the good Lord gave her—from some new place deep over the border in Mexico. He didn’t want his “top secret!” getting out.
No, now he’d started mailing off the damn things. It wasn’t enough that she had to look at them as she dusted; now he was going to inflict those cubes of plastic and cardboard and bizarre pasted pictures on the rest of the world. Oh, he never told her, but she knew. He’d come home from mysterious errands that he wouldn’t explain, muttering that this was finally going to make it all right, this was finally getting his juices going again, and she’d find his pockets stuffed full of mail slips. She’d find his wastepaper baskets overflowing with snippets of wrapping paper. She’d see gaps where the boxes used to be on display in his office. She’d find heads and things cut out of her favorite magazines, just when she’d settle down on the couch with them for her coffee break.
And he wouldn’t explain any of it, just get nervous and jittery and say, “I’ve gotta get this out before I go; I don’t have much time left.”
When Myrtle asked what he meant—“Time left for what?”—he’d snap that he would have hired somebody from Busybodies Anonymous instead of the local Luby’s Cafeteria, where he’d found Myrtle, if he’d wanted to answer that.
His fingers would be covered with dried glue from working on the boxes, and he’d rub together the now smooth fingerprints and say, “They’ll never find it now.”
But find what, he wouldn’t say.
And then, one day, the coup de grâce (that was the fancy French term Truman used; Myrtle didn’t know what it meant, but she figured out a rough translation: “Now he’s gone really crazy”).
He wanted to go kite flying in the middle of the Palm Springs desert.
“Why?” she asked.
“So I can get my message up in the air, closer to God,” he said. “I’ll spell it out on a kite; that way He’ll have to read it.”
“And just what message do you have for our Lord and Savior?” she asked.
“Top secret!” he cackled, then slapped her hand.
These days, whenever Truman said, “Go fly a kite,” he meant it.
As the day of the kite flying got closer—Truman had been watching the weather reports like a hawk, trying to figure out when they’d have enough wind to launch—he said he’d had a change of plan.
It wasn’t a message to God he wanted to send, but to Nancy Clutter. She was the one he wanted “off his back.” That’s the way he said it, like it was underlined.
God could wait.
For some reason, he wasn’t as secretive about his message to Nancy: it would read I’m Sorry. Myrtle felt like telling him the same message would work just fine for God, but decided to keep her mouth shut for once.
But when she asked him, “Sorry for what? Who’s Nancy Clutter?” he wouldn’t answer, just complained, “Haven’t you ever read a damn book in your whole life?”
It was one of the few tiffs they’d ever had.
“I’ve gotta take care of the two of them; get Nancy out of the way, before I can really focus on Nelle. It would take years to explain, and I don’t have years left. I don’t have any time left. Everything’s crowding my brain too much and too fast . . .”
Myrtle’s, too. She didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
On brightly colored pages torn from magazines, Truman traced out the massive letters himself, saying he couldn’t find them “store-bought and big enough to get my point across.” He rambled on that it was Nancy’s brother Kenyon who was blind as a bat and really needed the extra-large letters, but he wasn’t “ON MY BACK!” the way Nancy was.
Truman’s hands shook as he cut around his tracings, so Myrtle took over, afraid he’d cut himself and get the letters all crooked at the same time. If he was going to do a damn fool project like this, he might as well do it right. Like she always said, “Who knows what goes on in the hearts of white folks?” That’s what she felt like gluing on a kite, for all the world to see.
Sometimes, if she fixed him another drink—or he fixed himself one, going into the kitchen for his “orange drink” that was 90 percent vodka, with a splash of pulp from an orange grown on his own property—the shaking would die down, and he could return to the cutting. Sometimes, Myrtle would put her hands over Truman’s as he cut, guiding him, and she felt the same silent happiness he seemed to.
It gave him something to do.
It gave them all something to do, since Mr. Danny and Myrtle had been drafted for the kite-flying project as well. They would all be needed to get Truman’s full message across; he said there wasn’t room enough on just one kite. After Truman’s kite with the words “I’m sorry,” Mr. Danny’s kite would launch the word “Forgive,” and Myrtle’s would bring up the rear with “Me.”
Personally, she would have preferred a bigger word, something a little more elaborate, or at least a few more little ones bunched up together. She felt selfish and embarrassed singling herself out with the word “me.” She argued for a “please” in there somewhere—why not on her kite? she had plenty of extra room—but Truman told her it was his message, not hers; besides, he’d gone through life doing just fine with the word “me,” and look where it had gotten him.
My point exactly, Myrtle wanted to say. Look where it got you. Hiding out under a palm tree in Palm Springs, after everybody in the world deserted you, slaving away on a pile of pages you call your “magnum opus.” Sometimes he called it his “payback to the bitches.” Myrtle didn’t like when he talked like that; not because she minded a little cussing now and then, she just wondered if she was one of the bitches.
So all told, “I’m sorry. Forgive me,” became Truman’s final message to Nancy Clutter.
“I’m sorry. Forgive me.”
That was it: simple, clean, declarative sentences, nothing more, nothing less.
Nancy could take it or leave it.
And that was the end of that.
Almost.
Now that Truman knew what he wanted to say, he had to decide where to say it: should the cut-out letters go on the top side of the kites, or underneath? Although really, Myrtle argued, with the wind whipping them every which way but loose, was there a true top or bottom? Truman said that very question had perplexed him his entire life, then giggled; Myrtle didn’t know what he was talking about.
On top, Truman finally decided; whether or not he could see the words, as they rattled above him, Nancy could, and that’s what mattered. She’d be looking down on them, from heaven. Besides,Truman said, he didn’t want anyone down on the ground looking up at the kites and thinking the people holding them were crazy. No, Myrtle thought to herself—t
hey’ll just see you and Mr. Danny and big fat me running across the desert, about to give ourselves strokes in the heat; they won’t need to see anything else to know we’re crazy.
As the final assembly began taking place—Truman shredding his fine French bed sheets into tiny little strips for tails on the kites—Myrtle had a brainstorm that almost derailed the whole project.
Since they were going to the trouble of getting the kites up and everything, why not kill two birds with one stone and launch her maid service at the same time? Truman had been promising it forever, and she wasn’t getting any younger; she’d have her own fleet of girls to do the work, and she could finally put her feet up for once. They could put her name on the underside of the kites, since that part was just going to waste; it was prime real estate. She wanted the name to be Myrtle’s Maids, but Truman insisted on Myrtle Bennett Inc.—it had to be classy or he wouldn’t have anything to do with it. She said first name or last, it really didn’t matter; she just wanted her name up in the sky, big and black, like her.
No, Truman said; one message at a time. He didn’t want to confuse the reader, whether it was Nancy Clutter or someone who needed to have their windows and washing done. There was a time, and place, for everything. After so many years with Truman, Myrtle knew not to press things, until her boss threw this curveball at her:
“Besides, have you figured out how to get blood off baseboards? Any girl can’t do that, you shouldn’t hire her. That’s the real test; you figure out how to do that, then I’ll launch your maid service.”
And he sucked in his cheeks and raised his eyebrows, moistened his lips with his tongue, silently daring Myrtle to take the bait.
She did.
“What the heck are you talkin’ about?”
“Just ask Nancy Clutter about blood on the baseboards” was all he would say.
Now Myrtle was really confused: had Nancy Clutter been somebody’s maid?
