by Kim Powers
But why?
In that, she and her sister were exactly the same. They knew what they were, but not why.
Alice started moving things around on the desk, looking for answers. Then she began looking beyond the things on the desk; she found herself opening drawers and cabinets that were covered with dust, sneezing with the dust mites. How did her sister work up here? And hiding behind that question, another one: what did she do up here? That was the real question, even if she swore the opposite up and down to a dozen people who asked every day.
Damn it! She couldn’t keep her mind from going back there, even when she’d just held a little coffin in her hand.
She got so mad at herself that she slammed a drawer on her finger. And she started crying, not because of the pain, but for doubting her sister, and even worse, the scariest thought of all, the one that hovered just at the bottom and edges of her consciousness, after all these years: had Truman helped her with The Book?
Is that why Nelle had never written anything else?
Damn that coffin and that other box that had come into their house and poisoned her mind with such thoughts (thoughts that had been there long before any such package arrived).
When she found herself wrapping her blouse around her hands (no fingerprints!) before she opened even more drawers, she knew in her heart she was committing the worst of sins—not that the police would ever know, but her sister would, and that was the greatest sin of all, doubting her sister after all these years.
She couldn’t get out of that room fast enough.
How many minutes of her life had Alice spent wondering these things about her sister?
Too many to count.
Chapter Ten
It was too late at night to hire a hit man, so Truman got a box of sugar to do the job instead.
Why?
To pour in Mr. Danny’s gas tank. And that wasn’t lovey-dovey talk for anything else: Truman said his gas tank, he meant his gas tank. On his car. Nowhere else. Truman had read somewhere that sugar in a tank would keep a car from running, now he’d find out. It was the nastiest thing he could think to do on short notice, after what Mr. Danny had done to him: come back from the desert rip-roaring drunk and lassoing an old gunnysack over his head.
Myrtle could smell him before she saw him, as he tore into the house.
“I’m better ’an this, haulin’ up rattlers and scorchin’ my ass off, and he’s gonna know that for once. I’ve got a plan. Everybody thinks I’m just a dumb fuck, well, I’ve been lookin’, I’ve been listenin’ . . .”
Before Myrtle could stop him, he used the sack to bang open the door to Truman’s inner sanctum, the room no one was ever supposed to go into—except Myrtle, armed with Spic and Span—and saw a million pairs of eyes staring back at him. Truman’s eyes, in psychedelic colors. The four walls, and even the ceiling, were plastered with the Warhol print of Truman that had been on the cover of Interview magazine. Guess Mr. Andy with his Polish last name and silver white wig didn’t know it could be wallpaper, too. (Myrtle did; she was the one who’d been flat on her back for days, pasting the covers onto the ceiling, the Michelangelo of the Palms.)
Even Mr. Danny, pumped up with booze and piss and sun and resentment, stopped short at the sight of all those eyes in all those colors.
“STOP STARING AT ME! I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE! No more STARING! And no more SNAKES!”
He threw the sack at the wall and the remains came flying out. Myrtle thought she’d never see a flying snake as long as she lived; now she could scratch that one off the list, just as she saw it land on Truman.
“You wanted that Goddamn snake. There. Have at it. Bury it. Fuck it for all I care, ’cause you sure ain’t fuckin’ me no more. It’s yours. I’ve got a plan.”
He grabbed a stack of foolscap pages that were stacked neatly beside Truman’s typewriter—albeit a little splattered now, by decomposing snake—and said what he’d been rehearsing in the hot sun all afternoon:
“Seems like a pretty fair trade to me. You got what you want: a snake. I got what I want: your book. After I read it, I’ll figure out what it’s worth, and may the highest bidder win. Your precious baby is now officially being held ransom. Teach you to treat me like dirt out in the sun . . .”
It was the book Truman had worked on for the last decade of his life, his masterwork.
When Truman wasn’t making snake boxes or flying kites or drinking, he talked about it. He talked about it a hell of a lot more than he actually wrote it: his exposé of the high-society ladies of New York, his former best friends, his swans. He’d already published a few chapters from it in Esquire magazine, spilling their secrets—the glamour girls who had started out as hookers, or their rich and powerful and silver-haired husbands who fucked the maids while the wives were gone. No one had ever written anything like that before. Truman might as well have used real names. He’d been run out of town on a rail, abandoned by his swans, when he’d thought they’d just all get a good laugh out of it.
The joke was on him.
Now, he was close to finishing it.
He’d been close to finishing it for years.
The masterwork no one had ever seen, that would top even In Cold Blood.
It was years overdue at the publishing house.
And this was the only copy in existence.
In Danny’s snake-stained hands.
Truman grabbed his chest as if he were having a heart attack and opened his mouth to scream, but the words froze.
And if a flying snake was rare, the sight—and silence—of a speechless Truman was even more rare. In fact, it was unknown, and lasted for just that split second.
If he was a good writer, he was an even better yeller: with a gun to her head, Myrtle couldn’t have described the sound that came out of his mouth, and soul. Later, she would swear she had seen Truman’s tongue fork in two, darting in and out of his mouth and licking at his lips. She would swear she had seen him become one of his snakes.
His eyes narrowed to little slits and he hissed as Danny high-tailed it out of the house, flicking little bits of serpent flesh off his shoulders.
As he ran past her, Myrtle was hit by a hot flash, but it had nothing to do with the change of life or the excitement of the past few minutes or even the heat radiating off Danny’s body.
No, it was hot as the blazes in there. Shit. The AC had just gone out again. Now who the Sam Jackson were they gonna get to fix it?
Truman’s scream pierced the heat and took her mind off Yellow Pages and repair calls.
“That man is dead. DEAD! My life! He’s taken my LIFE! Now he’s gonna PAY WITH HIS . . .”
Myrtle didn’t get how a box of sugar—and confectioners’ sugar, at that; it was the best she could do on short notice—in Mr. Danny’s gas tank was gonna make him pay with his life, but that’s how she and Truman came to be sitting across the street from his house, waiting for his lights to go out.
I’ll punch his lights out, Truman thought.
Oh my God, why hast Thou forsaken me, Myrtle thought.
She’d been counting on that box of sugar to make a coconut cake; that was before Truman had grabbed it out of her cupboard without even asking, and pulled her along with it. (Damn if people weren’t snatching up things left and right tonight. If it wasn’t nailed down, you could bet good money somebody would take it.) And how Truman loved her coconut cake—and that wasn’t lovey-dovey talk for anything else, either. She said coconut cake, she meant coconut cake. With icing. On a plate. Nowhere else.
Sometimes a thing was what you called it; sometimes it wasn’t.
Sometimes her Truman went insane; sometimes he didn’t.
Tonight, he’d gone insane, aided and abetted by a bottle of J&B Scotch and Nancy’s snake, splattered all over his inner sanctum.
Truman and Myrtle were crouching in hiding behind a row of bushes when Truman announced that Myrtle was going to be the one to race across the street and pour in the sugar.
; He called her his “Wilma Rudolph.”
She called him her “road to ruination.”
“Why am I the one runnin’ my way into a life of crime, ’stead of the other way around? Seems YOU’RE the one met his sorry ass in the first place. Seems YOU’RE the one has a book sittin’ in that nasty low-rent house of his, ’cause if it was MY book, wouldn’t be sittin’ in nobody’s house, but flyin’ off the shelves. Bestseller for sure, after I write up everything you put me through . . .”
“If you ever go tellin’ my tales outta school, it’s gonna be a hell of a lot more than sugar I’ll pour down your gullet . . .”
“Forget the sugar, you still haven’t told me how him not being able to run his car’s gonna help you get your big ol’ book back . . .”
“One thing at a time. First we gotta scare him . . .”
“I know some people scared a’ packin’ on a few pounds, but how in God’s green earth some sugar’s gonna scare him . . .”
Their back-and-forth tirade was interrupted when Mr. Danny’s house finally went dark.
“There. Now’s your chance, Wilma.”
“At least nobody’s gonna spot me. There’s no moon out.”
Truman pushed Myrtle up; she looked like a mastodon trying to lumber her way out of extinction and the La Brea Tar Pits at the same time. She looked left and right, for safety’s sake, then darted—as fast as a mastodon could dart—into the shadows across the street. As she moved, she rubbed the box of confectioners’ sugar like a rosary: “Jesus God, protect my black ass, and forgive the sins I commit in the name of that little white pip-squeak I work for.”
It was then she discovered a kink in the plan. That box of sugar had been sitting in the cupboard for weeks, if not months. Inside the cardboard, the granules had lumped together like a square brick. That sugar wasn’t going in anybody’s tank. Only thing you could do with it was brain somebody in the head, which is exactly what she felt like doing to Truman.
She turned back around and hissed at him, “This ain’t gonna work.”
Truman hauled himself up and joined his partner in crime in the middle of the street.
At 2 A.M.
A streetlamp cast their two shadows over the neighborhood.
From inside his bedroom, Danny couldn’t help but see what looked like shadow puppets—one tiny, the other enormous—on his wall. (His wife and children were so fed up with him they had moved out to her mother’s; for now, he was all alone in the house.) He staggered out of bed—the booze headache was really beginning to lock in on his brain—and raised the window a crack to listen to their voices drift up through the night:
“What the hell you mean it’s not gonna work?”
“See for yourself . . .”
Truman felt the heft of the sugar brick in his palm.
“I don’t pay you good money to keep old food in the house, goin’ bad on us . . .”
“How the hell I know you were gonna be usin’ it for a lethal weapon?”
“Way you cook’s lethal enough. Now get on over to that car and start crumbling; we’re not going home till that hole is plugged.”
Truman pulled Myrtle the rest of the way to Danny’s car, and they ducked down by the gas cap on the back side.
The shadow puppets on Danny’s wall abruptly disappeared, but he could still hear them, even if he couldn’t see them. They might as well have knocked on his door to announce their plans.
“We should’a brought gloves,” Truman lamented.
“You should’a thought of that before you let me get my fingerprints all over his gas tank. Gas tank, gas chamber, that’s where I’m headin’, and you the one drivin’ me there . . .”
“If I don’t get that book back, we might as well both call it quits, ’cause everything is restin’ on that. I got a plan, too, ya know . . . secret plan.”
“‘Top secret’ plan, yeah, I know . . . we all got our plans . . .”
She was used to humoring Truman, when he went temporarily insane, and drunk, and his accent became more deep-fried than it had ever been in his childhood.
Truman’s fingernails dug into the sugar like a harpy’s claws, then began feeding gobs of it into the gas tank. Myrtle scraped away as well, her speed motivated more by the fear of getting caught than by revenge, but they both stopped when they heard the first sizzle as the sugar melted into the gas.
It was working.
“Maybe there’s something to this, get his tank all gummed up . . . gotta give you credit,” Myrtle said.
“Serves him right. He’ll be out here pumpin’ the clutch like an idiot, we’ll be makin’ an end run in his house to get back my book . . .”
Inside his house, Danny was too hypnotized by the absurdity of what they were doing to stop it.
“I’m gettin’ light-headed, this gas is makin’ me sick,” Truman whispered.
Good, serves him right, Danny thought. It was the smell he faced at the pumps every day of his life, the way his head felt all the time, like it was going to float off his body.
“Maybe we should get somebody to break his legs instead . . . serve him right for BREAKING MY SPIRIT . . .” Truman stood up and yelled it at the house, no attempt to keep quiet now.
Myrtle yanked him back down. The fumes were going to her head, too, but she was trying to think straight for a few last minutes.
“If you wanna break something, why not just throw a real brick through his window . . . break in and get your book back that way . . .”
But Truman was full of words, not action, and his words were slurring even more as the gas continued to cast its spell. “It’s contaminated now. All those pages, all that work . . . if they only knew every drop of blood those pages took, every drop more they’re gonna take, they might as well just put me in a hospital right now and open my veins, ’cause that’s what it’s gonna be like when my swans finally see what I wrote about ’em. They thought I was done when those stories came out, but I was just gettin’ started . . .”
“Swans? What swans? What about your snakes?”
“If they were so stupid, so busy preenin’ their feathers to know they shouldn’a been tellin’ me their secrets, might as well just put those pearl-covered necks of theirs on the choppin’ block, my choppin’ block, their pearly necks . . .”
“What swans? Whose necks?” Myrtle demanded.
Danny wanted to know what swans, whose necks, too—maybe they had money. Maybe they’d buy the book, if they were the ones in it. He wanted addresses and phone numbers.
“I’m a writer, what the hell else am I gonna do with all the stories they told me? Just forget ’em? You know any gangsters?” Truman suddenly switched, bringing down the ax on any more talk of swans or necks or stories.
“That takes the cake . . .”—the cake Myrtle was no longer able to bake, by the way—“. . . takes the cake, you thinkin’ a decent Christian woman like me would know some nefarious character, only ’farious character I know is you . . .”
“If there’s any nefarious characters to know, believe me, I already know ’em,” Truman said, answering his own question, before he began rambling again. “I’ve seen blood on the walls, Missy, and I’ve PUT IT ON THE PAGE, don’t you ever forget it, don’t think I ever made you clean up after THAT . . . thought I was rid of blood and criminals, now they’re back . . . thought I was rid of Perry, now he’s back and changed his name to DANNY . . .”
Truman screamed it at the house, now standing up and throwing handfuls of sugar at the front yard.
“. . . just like Perry, turnin’ on me, playin’ me after I offered him EVERYTHING . . . don’t even have to go to sleep at night to be haunted by a ghost, ’cause the ghost is RIGHT THERE. I LOVED HIM and this is how he treats me . . .”
Truman was crying.
Danny hid behind the bedroom curtains.
He didn’t know he’d hurt Truman like that.
Nobody had ever loved him enough to be hurt by him.
Truman slid down the side of
the car, spent by his outburst. He barely had enough energy left to squeak out the next question.
“The ghost is right there. Can’t you see it?”
Myrtle almost could: the ghost of her Truman.
She took him by the hand, the sugar that was on both their fingers cementing their bond.
“It’s time to go home. We’ll get your book back somehow. We’ve done enough damage for tonight.”
“Damage has been done to us.” Truman jabbed at his heart. “Done to this. Fix this,” he said weakly, trying to rally one last battle cry. He wasn’t even looking in the direction of Danny’s house anymore; he wasn’t looking anywhere; his eyes had gone blank.
“C’mon, we’re goin’ home. I’m gonna make you a cake if I have to chop down my own sugarcane. You need your sugars to pick you up.You need to give Mr. Jack a call in New York . . . all this talk about Danny, it’s not right. Mr. Jack the one that loves you . . .”
Myrtle tried to pull Truman up but he refused to be lifted.
“No, if I go home, she’ll come back. He’ll come back. Nancy. Perry. They’ll all come back. No more ghosts. I can’t take anybody else I don’t invite . . .”
Myrtle plopped back down next to Truman, defeated for the moment. There they were, Ebony and Ivory, propped up against the metal backrest of a rusted-out car, the dark sky and palm trees high around them.
Danny strained to hear them, but heard only silence, until there was a sulfurous spark, a match striking against the asphalt pavement of the street.
“Oh my God, they’re gonna blow up my car . . .”
But a few seconds later, there was no explosion, only inhalation, and then a sickly sweet, smoky smell that wafted all the way up to Danny’s window. And then, the almost imperceptible sound of lips and tongues touching paper, the crinkle of fire as it caught.
There, by the open gas tank of Mr. Danny’s car, Truman and Myrtle were toking up and smoking a joint.
Danny saw a plume of white rise above the far side of his car, like some smoke signal for peace they were offering up. And from sight to sound: he heard high-pitched humming, almost a purr, and soon, the purr developed into song.
