by Kim Powers
Two photos.
She narrowed her eyes to see through the smudged bifocal part of her glasses. She needed a new prescription; smudge was going to make it even worse. And she needed vision right now.
One of the photos was from long ago, the other of a much more recent vintage, but she had no clue who had taken either one of them, or what—exactly—they meant.
The one on top wasn’t a reproduction or page torn from a magazine, but an original she had never seen before, from long ago. In it, she and Truman were in the basement of the Clutters’ house. It had been cold; they were wearing winter coats, and in their expressions it was clear they had been caught off guard; their faces were blurred as they turned to look at something outside the frame of the picture. (Maybe the blurring was their breath coming out in the chilly air; maybe it was a ghost trapped in the room.) Behind them was a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling; it exposed the wooden stairs leading to the basement and its bare, cinderblock walls.
She remembered being down there and shuddered.
She moved the second picture on top.
It had been taken just a few weeks ago, the last time she had gone to the cemetery where her parents and brother Ed were buried, where an unwanted plot waited for her. She went every few weeks, to deliver fresh flowers, to clean out the old ones from their swampy Mason jars. Her visits there weren’t a secret; they were one of her regular stops, same as Hardee’s or one of the diners in town. But this photograph made it seem as if there was something secretive or furtive, or even shameful, about it, and someone was exposing her as she bent over, pulling stray weeds from Ed’s grave. It was broad daylight—anybody could have taken the picture—but the very fact that they had, without her knowing it, catching her unaware like that and with some evident purpose in mind, scared her to the very bone.
She still believed what some nearly extinct tribal cultures had professed when they first saw cameras: that every photograph taken of you robbed you of a bit of your soul. And these pictures, inside and outside the box, had taken away a large portion of hers. Two small photographs within a tiny homemade coffin within a cardboard box covered with pictures, a Russian nesting doll of her life; the overkill of it made her dizzy. She had to plant her feet more firmly on the porch and even bend her head between her knees—as far as it would go with her arthritis—to keep from fainting. She was glad Alice wasn’t there to see that, or she’d have called an ambulance as soon as she was done calling the police.
Was Truman behind it? If he was, what was he trying to get at, to say to her? Why hadn’t he just come out and said it over the phone? The little “hand-carved coffin” seemed to be a giveaway; it was the name of one of his last books, but anyone could have borrowed that. And the earthworm, and the picture from the graveyard . . . who was responsible for those? Truman wasn’t around, and he’d die before he’d touch some creepy-crawly thing.
But then again, the picture from the Clutters’ basement; surely he was behind that? Who else would have had it in their possession? Hell, what was he trying to say? Or was he trying to say anything? Maybe he was just being strange, sending a reminder from their shared pasts, a signal that he still had a hold over her. But why would he do that? He hadn’t spoken to her in nearly twenty years; did she even matter to him anymore? Why get back in touch now? What else was left to say, after the calls of the last few nights? They hadn’t been malevolent or threatening; she didn’t think he wanted to scare her, but that’s the only way she could interpret this box of things from the past and the very near past: it was scary.
And she didn’t know why.
You didn’t send an aging person a coffin without expecting them to get a little anxious.
Would this be the last chapter of her life, the one her fans had waited on all these years? A last chapter delivered through the mail, that she was then expected to do something with? Maybe she’d known all along that this time would finally come, and that’s why she had willed herself to stay alive all these years, when she didn’t have much to keep her going but golf and catfish and Alice. Maybe this is what she and Truman had meant, years ago, when they swore they’d always be together.
And as if on cue, as if to confirm she was right, her left index finger began to twitch, the very same finger she had pierced to become blood brothers with Truman. It had happened before; she’d gone to the doctor for it, and he’d told her it was an isolated form of neuropathy, picked up from banging on those stiff typewriter keys all those years. But why it should affect just that one finger, the doctor didn’t know.
The finger was tapping and twitching so much she felt like she could leave it alone and let it tap out a telegraph message to Truman, on the armrest of the rocker: dash-dash-dot, nerve synapses shooting straight from her brain to her finger, without going through her heart for processing.
And what the message would spell out, for the recipient on the other end:
What are you doing?
Stop.
What do you want?
Stop.
We’ve gone this long apart, why come back now?
Stop.
I’ll be waiting for your answer.
Stop.
Chapter Six
Truman’s feet jerked spasmodically, then quit, tapped out, as he stared blankly at a corner of the room, watching something only he could see, but which he didn’t have the energy to respond to or challenge anymore.
The toe tapping had been going on for the last three days, and the sound was about to drive Myrtle out of her mind, if the sight didn’t get to her first: her Truman, in bed, in the same baggy boxer shorts and T-shirt he’d been wearing without change, his bare, swollen feet shoved into a pair of tap shoes.
Black tap shoes, at the end of pale, skinny, hairless legs.
Not pretty, not for a minute, no sir, no matter how much she loved him.
Shoes of any kind weren’t meant to be worn without socks. Like she said: who knows what goes on in the minds—and on the feet—of white people?
Myrtle used to think she did.
Suddenly, he started up again. One leg doing a solo number on the bed, the other leg swung off the side and onto the floor. The wooden floor. That’s the part that was driving her batty. At least let her put a rug down to muffle the sound.
It didn’t take a genius to translate the spasms that were coming from Truman’s nervous feet: after the elation of finding the sign from Nancy, he’d gone into a funk, something post-partum after delivering his message on the kites, and nothing could get him out of it, not even his beloved tap dancing.
It used to be the perfect cure-all. Whenever he’d lie in bed for days on end and do nothing but drink and moan, Myrtle could lure him out of his blues with a few well-timed tap steps, or, more to the point, well-tapped time steps.
Now, it was taps for taps, and he wouldn’t tell Myrtle why.
Besides, the tapping was her own damn fault. She was the one who’d bought him the shoes years ago, a birthday present for a man who could have bought his own tap shoes a million times over. He said it was the one thing he’d never gotten as a child that he’d always wanted. In an act of desperation—a little child yelling I WANT! I NEED!—he’d even gone as far as nailing bottle caps to his one good pair of church shoes, but that was as close as he ever got to his own pair of taps, until Myrtle answered the call. Nature abhors a vacuum, then fills it, Truman had said, tears in his eyes, when he first saw them. Myrtle said she “abhorred a vacuum” too, not quite getting the poetry of the moment.
The second he slipped them on—this fat, worn-out, middle-aged man—his muscle memory returned: buck and wing, toe-heel-toe, soft shoe, all learned from imitating Saturday-afternoon movies as a child. Myrtle matched him step by step: she’d been a Cotton Club dancer earlier in life—and don’t get her started on how she’d gone from that to this—and knew how to shake away the blues, his and hers. (She called hers “the black and blues.”) The shoes came on, the moves came back, and so did the s
mile, in Truman’s lips and eyes.
That was, until now.
She’d practically shoved the damn things on his feet, but nothing—except for him grunting and rolling over in bed, letting out a big fart as his belly jiggled.
And then, like a fever that broke, he told her why he was depressed: Nancy was still here. Even after sending up the kite, and finding the sign of the dead snake, she wouldn’t leave him alone. She was still haunting him. She was there, in the room, right now.
Didn’t Myrtle see her?
He couldn’t take it anymore.
What did that damn girl want, blood from a stone?
No.
She wanted him to bury the snake.
How could he have done something so inconsiderate—left it out in the hot sun, to bake?
It was like leaving her out in the sun, no good to anybody after she was dead.
It hurt her feelings.
Now, Myrtle finally understood why he hadn’t said anything for three days: HE HAD LOST HIS MIND, AND EVEN HE KNEW IT.
As if to acknowledge he had a problem, that he was trying to do something about it, and to let Myrtle know he knew, Truman yanked off a tap shoe—the tightness of it leaving a red ring around his pale flesh, even after it was off—and threw it at the wall.
“GO AWAY!”
Then he looked meekly at Myrtle: “It’s a start. For now, humor me that she’s there, and help me find the snake. It’s the only way to get rid of her, once and for all. That, and have Nelle forgive me. It’s like making my amends, which as you know was the one part of AA I could never cotton to. Guess that’s why they wouldn’t have me anymore.”
He harrumphed, his own private joke, because he knew as well as Myrtle he’d never even tried to quit. He was lying to himself, as well as the rest of the world.
“You know, ghosts linger on because they still got business to finish. That’s Nancy’s: bury that snake, then make my peace with Nelle Harper, then she promises she’ll move on. AND LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE.”
Fine.
Just go back, find the snake, wrap its poor blown-off head in gauze, the same way Nancy’s head, and all the Clutters’, had been wrapped in their coffins, then give it a decent burial.
Truman stood up after he announced his latest brainstorm, dusted off his hands as if to say “And that’s that,” then executed a tap step that was so furious it knocked him back into bed.
Myrtle knew as well as the next cleaning woman that a snake was never going to look like a person, no matter how much you wrapped up its head, but since this was the only thing that had gotten Truman out of bed in days, she wasn’t about to argue with him. For now, she went to the medicine cabinet to pull out the gauze.
Myrtle had finally found out who Nancy Clutter was, but almost wished she hadn’t. She’d kept asking Truman about her, in the early hours of his funk, as he kept keening her name over and over; he didn’t say a word, just yanked a book out of the bookshelf by his bed and thrust it at her—after signing it, of course. A mind’s a terrible thing to waste, he said, then started crying and pulled the covers over his head. She didn’t know if he meant her mind or his. She’d stayed up nights reading the book, keeping her husband up, too, and now she knew something she could never forget, no matter how much she’d like to. A dead girl with her head wrapped up, a girl in a coffin, wearing the same red velvet dress she’d planned to wear to her prom. No wonder Truman was moody and drunk and haunted most of the time; she’d be, too, if she had to live with that.
She’d lived through a lot with Mr. Truman, ever since he bought the house in 1968. She’d liked to tease him by playing like she didn’t know who he was, didn’t know that he was on TV all the time or what he’d written. She saw the books all over the house, in all the foreign languages and different covers; what they meant to her was just more to dust. She fixed up the house whenever his big city friends came to visit, but he always told her his favorite time was just after they’d left, when it was just him and her again. She’d say, “Mr. Truman, are you flirting with me? You know my husband won’t like that,” but he’d just go on about how she was the only one who really understood him, her and Nelle Harper, because they reminded him of his childhood, which was his favorite place to be.
Not the hellhole he was trapped in, here in Palm Springs.
And he didn’t mean the weather.
And he didn’t mean Myrtle was a bad housekeeper.
He meant something else that he never would explain in words, but Myrtle knew: he wanted to go back home, but couldn’t.
That’s what it all came down to.
By now, days had passed since they’d gone kite flying, and Myrtle wondered if they’d be able to find the snake again. Maybe a vulture or hyena had carted it off. And even if they could find it, what kind of shape would the poor thing be in? Out in that hot sun, decomposing morning noon and night. She knew what a few minutes in the Palm Springs sun did to her, especially the way she’d been feeling lately, worn out and losing weight. Truman was gaining; she was losing; and neither one was trying. No sir, Truman could pick up the snake if he wanted to, but she wasn’t about to go traipsing out in the hot sun one more time to touch the damn thing, even if she did say prayers for Nancy Clutter every night now.
Besides, the last thing they needed in the house, even if temporarily, was another snake; Truman already had a menagerie of them. He said they brought him good luck, ever since he’d been bitten by one as a child and survived, at Hatter’s Mill Pond. His beautiful white hair had fallen out and his leg had swollen up to the size of an elephant’s, but he said it taught him he could survive anything.
Anything but wrapping a damn snake’s head up in cheesecloth and pretending it was some girl from Kansas, Myrtle wanted to say.
Only one of the snakes in the house was real; that one was stuffed and coiled, its mouth open, its fangs bared. Truman had bought it from a local taxidermist. Myrtle was scared to look at the creature, let alone touch its skin, but Truman insisted she keep it oiled up with furniture polish, the kind that was “lemony fresh.” She said you don’t pay me enough to go touching dead things and you can keep it “lemony fresh” your damn self. Sometimes, he’d bring out a pair of fancy snakeskin boots he owned and hold them next to the real thing: he’d rub the skin on the boots, then the snake, to see if he could detect a difference. He couldn’t. That pleased him. It made Myrtle sick.
He had three other snakes, none of them real: one was gold, jointed, and flexible; one of his fancy lady friends had sent it to him years ago, when she was still speaking to him. Truman wrapped it around his flabby arms like a bracelet. He tried to get Myrtle to do it, but she wouldn’t, even though she knew it was just a big ol’ piece of jewelry. There was also a wooden snake that he’d gotten on a trip to Java, carved out of bamboo and painted with slashes of red and green and blue; his bulldog, Maggie, had a special fondness for that one, and you could practically mark the dog’s growth by the size of her teeth marks that fluted up and down the snake’s spinal column.
But Truman’s pride and joy was yet another one entirely: a white plaster sculpture of a cobra, entwined around a tree limb. Such was the craftsmanship that you could see every separate scale, every piece of rough-hewn bark on the limb. The sculpture hung over Truman’s writing desk, so that on those now-rare occasions when he actually made it out of bed to write, it seemed as if the snake was inching down to take a bite out of his head.
It comforted him, knowing the snake was there.
It’s what used to drive him to write.
He said he needed a new snake to goad him on now, and he had one—dead and out in the desert, with a bullet hole in its head. If Myrtle wouldn’t pick it up, then Mr. Danny would, and if he didn’t want to, then there was something else he could pick up: his check on the way out. His services—and there was a broad range of them, only one of which was repairing the AC—would no longer be required at the Palm Springs residence of Mr. Truman Capote and Mrs. Myrtle J. Be
nnett.
Now, with that settled, they could both break out their tap shoes and celebrate with a dance.
But first, Truman had to get his other shoe back, from the corner where only he could see Nancy Clutter.
Chapter Seven
The police told Alice Lee to go fly a kite.
She told them she’d be happy to, if she survived this latest assault on her sister through the mail, but if she didn’t, they were welcome to have her blood on their hands at their next Police Athletic League picnic.
Blood and lemonade; she hoped it mixed.
Good day.
She promptly hung up the phone, and just as promptly returned to the porch to repeat the conversation to her sister. Nelle wasn’t surprised; Alice had become the woman who cried wolf, always calling the police with some complaint, imagined or not: someone lingering in front of the house too long; a car slowly driving by; someone asking Nelle, a little too aggressively, for an autograph.
Nelle was glad to have someone ride shotgun for her, but she thought Alice saw things that weren’t necessarily there.
This latest package in the mail: just another nut.
Or Truman.
Same thing.
But as Nelle told her sister not to worry and kissed her on the head, Alice Lee saw one more thing for certain: Nelle stuffing something in her pocket that she didn’t want Alice to see.
But Nelle was worried; this, even more than the dead mockingbird.
Someone spying on her.
Watching.
Waiting.
Was even Truman that crazy, that rattler-nasty?
What if it was someone else? A stranger, following her like that? A stalker? You read about them in the paper all the time . . .
Now she was sounding like Alice.
That was even scarier.
She didn’t know how to reach Truman; she didn’t have a phone number for him anymore, and hadn’t thought to get one when he’d started calling again. She hadn’t thought the calls would lead to him terrorizing her, with these pictures from her past, on the inside and outside of a baby coffin. (A coffin just big enough for a baby bird, she just realized. A mockingbird. Was that what he was doing—mocking her? But why? She’d never done unto him; he’d just done unto her.)
