by Kim Powers
“‘We’re two lost souls, on the highway of life, da duh duh duh duh, no sister or brother’ . . . that’s from Damn Yankees, best show ever. You ever see that show, Myrtle? Never could understand the baseball part, but sure as hell understood the part ’bout sellin’ your soul to the devil, ’cause that’s what I did, long time ’go . . .”
“You might’a done that, Mr. Truman, but don’t go draggin’ me down with you . . . ain’t no two lost souls about it . . . you take away one a’ them lost souls right now. Any deal you made with the devil, you made it by your lonesome.”
“You see the things I seen, you’d sell your soul to the devil, too, just to forget ’em . . .”
Now that Truman had brought the devil into things, it was definitely time to go.
“Come on now, this hell talk’s givin’ me the munchies. We’ll buy some more sugar, get on home, I’ll make you a nice fluffy coc’nut cake . . .”
Danny wanted to say wait, take me with you, I want some cake, too, I’m sorry, I didn’t know he loved me, I thought he was just using me, but he stayed quiet and hidden. For the first time since the “book-napping,” he bothered to look at what was written on the pages, and almost started crying himself.
On the spot, he came up with another plan, a better one, as he looked out the window one last time and watched Ebony and Ivory struggle up from the car.
“You know, Myrtle, you and me, we’re just poor lost souls, on the highway of life . . .”
“No,” she answered back, not unkindly, “just the highway out of Palm Springs.”
An hour or so after Truman and Myrtle had finished spying on Danny, he was spying on them, peeping through the window of the house where he used to be a guest. The smell of gas was on his hands and wouldn’t come off, from where he’d had to drain his car to start over with a fresh tank of gas. Their sugar trick had worked; he’d have to remember that next time he wanted to keep somebody from making a fast getaway.
He looked inside one window and saw Truman sitting in his office with a black-and-white lined notebook in his hands, just drawing pictures in it.
Danny moved to another window and saw Myrtle bustling around in the kitchen, tearing open a plastic bag of coconut with her teeth and dumping the shreds of sticky white into a bowl to turn into icing. She snatched a few pinches of it in her fingers and sampled it.
She smiled, like it tasted good.
Danny could taste it through the glass of the window.
He went around to the front door and thought, for just a second, about knocking. Maybe he could start all over, go back to that first time when he’d shown up on a service call to fix the AC. But people like him didn’t get third or fourth chances like that, so he put Truman’s book down instead, weighing it down with the antique iron that served as a doorstop.
Danny didn’t know he was bringing back a life. He just thought it was a cash cow he was about to let go of, and it hadn’t been easy. But neither was witnessing Truman’s declaration of love in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night.
Maybe Danny did have a little bit of a soul after all.
Maybe he thought he could get even more money from Truman by getting back into his good graces.
Maybe he just wanted to keep his teeth, because Truman had paid for all new ones, and Danny knew he’d be coming back on the warpath for those, too. Getting those taken out would hurt a lot more than giving back some book.
Some book.
Maybe Danny was so upset by what he’d seen in the book’s pages he didn’t know what to do, and just wanted to be rid of the thing.
It would be there all night, and it would be there when Truman woke up in the morning.
Chapter Eleven
Nelle closed her Bible and put it on the bedside table next to her along with her glasses. It usually put her to sleep, reading the Bible, but not tonight. No, tonight The Reverend was holding forth and he wouldn’t let go.
She was sitting up in bed with him; a photo of her going to read and write about him, that is. That’s what had been inside the latest box, from the cemetery. When she’d gotten home, she’d taken straight to bed, without telling Alice about her latest discovery. She didn’t want to scare the poor woman half to death, any more than Nelle herself was scared. It wasn’t every day you walked into a cemetery and found something other than the flowers that were supposed to be there, sitting on top of a burial plot. And what had been sitting there Nelle couldn’t figure out, any more than the first box.
This new one was built on the same snakebite kit as before, now edged around the bottom on all four sides by pictures of verdant grass, clipped out of a magazine. An elongated snake wove in and out of the grass, up and around one long tombstone; the snake’s head rose up, ready to strike, just where the box opened.
There were no names on the tombstone.
On top of the lid, a tiny chestnut horse appeared to rear back on its hind legs, its mane tossing.
And inside that box, tucked underneath grass, and a snake, and a horse, was the photograph Nelle held. Just one this time, and of recent vintage: Nelle walking up the steps of the courthouse in nearby Jefferson City. A big courthouse in the middle of an old-fashioned town square, where friendly old people played checkers and attended trials and didn’t care, or even know, that she was famous. Nelle. They didn’t even know her last name. She was just another old lady who liked a good true crime, and The Reverend’s was as good and true as it got.
Nelle was writing a book about him.
She’d been writing it for years, even though she knew she’d probably never finish it. She just couldn’t figure out a way to tell it, even though she knew every in and out of the story. He had used voodoo, or so it was said, to kill off five members of his own family, for the insurance money. Then, having the nerve to preach at one of their funerals, he’d finally been killed himself, shot by a grieving relative and literally falling into the coffin.
It was the deep calling the deep, yet again.
She’d been hesitant to even start taking notes at first, not sure she wanted to go back to the realm of murder that had started with Truman. But she couldn’t resist evil, or, more precisely, trying to sort out what caused it. Evil had to be punished. She could do that with her writing, even if it didn’t always happen in real life.
Her writing.
That brought a sad laugh to her.
It was never going to happen, same as it wasn’t going to happen for Truman.
What had happened to them in Kansas? Had those murders so sapped them they didn’t have anything left over to put on the page?
She used to try, because she wanted to bring justice to the people The Reverend had killed. But ever since Truman’s first call, nights ago, a new and different thought had come to her: did The Reverend’s victims want her help with justice? Or would they rather the whole thing, the crimes committed years ago, just vanish, so they could be left in peace, to go on with their lives of anonymity? Is that what the surviving Clutter children, the two grown-up girls who were out of the house that night, would have wanted? Had she and Truman done right by them?
Who knows; they never bothered to ask.
Who knows, indeed?
Nancy Clutter did. She’d just told Truman he needn’t have bothered; she hadn’t wanted the fame.
Nancy said what had been on Nelle’s mind for the last twenty-five years.
Nelle ripped the photo in her hands in half, to drown out the sound of someone else saying:
I’ve got you in my sights.
You can’t escape me.
I’m never far away.
I know where you go.
The Reverend isn’t important.
It’s you I want.
Nelle wanted as far away from that cemetery and its pictures as sleep would take her, but dreams wouldn’t come. They remained far away, displaced by waking images of tombstones and snake men and ugly plastic flowers on graves, trembling walks toward coffins and a mother and broth
er lying flat and still and a Reverend who offered death instead of comfort.
Maybe those were her dreams.
They were all crowding her head, until a ghost showed up and shooed them all away.
Nelle was looking out her bedroom window at a perfectly round moon. That’s strange, she thought; she’d looked at the almanac, and it hadn’t predicted a full moon. She reached to the bedside table and patted down the objects on it until she came to her glasses; she picked them up by the stems, careful not to smear the glass with fingerprints. She put them on; it took a few seconds to adjust to what she thought was the light of the full moon.
Instead, she decided it must be a yellow smiley-face balloon that had floated out of someone’s hand and gotten entangled in the tree branches outside her window. She smiled to herself at the revelation, although she wished it was the moon. She needed a moon right now. I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you, she thought; I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing a smiley face, just didn’t have the same ring.
And then she did see a smiley face, in her room. Smiling at her.
She stopped breathing.
She tried to pull air into her lungs to yell for Alice, but couldn’t. She couldn’t think, let alone breathe. It wouldn’t matter anyway; Alice wouldn’t hear a peep because she barely heard anything anymore, except what she wanted to.
One of Truman’s crooks was in Nelle’s room to be her dispatcher. It was an automatic response: one of her hands flew to her throat, the other reached to the bedside Bible to ask the angels to watch over her, to not let death hurt, whenever, however it came.
Maybe she could let the intruder have whatever he’d come to steal, and he’d leave. (He’d already stolen her life and pasted it on a box; what else was there to take?) But bargaining like that—here, take what you want and leave, I won’t tell—never worked. It’s what the Clutters had tried, and look what happened to them.
The person in her room was in no hurry; he was just watching and waiting.
So was Nelle. She saw a flare of red, but it wasn’t blood: it blossomed, crinkled into ashy gray and white, like a firework dying in the sky, then blossomed red again.
It was the draw on a cigarette. She knew it well. She craved it, after a three-pack-a-day habit.
Her intruder was smoking.
Then another pull, another flame of red, and the face behind the cigarette was illuminated.
Now she knew who it was.
Kenyon Clutter, the boy she’d only ever seen in photographs.
Kenyon, the four-eyed geek with the strange name, who’d never gotten to make love, who had to watch his father cower before a madman, who couldn’t see a thing without his glasses, including his own murder.
Kenyon, who was so lucky he was blind.
He was the Clutter Nelle had loved the most, after trying to love them all. Truman had given all his love to Nancy; there wasn’t any room left to love her. That’s the grave he’d made a beeline for, nobody else’s. That’s who he gave the last scene in his book to, nobody else. A young girl, cut down in her prime, wearing the same red velvet dress in her coffin she’d planned to wear to her prom. Nelle wanted to feel for Nancy, she really did—Nelle had gotten to have her prom, after all, as ugly and ungainly as she’d felt at it—but no . . .
It was Kenyon who had somehow taken the most of her grief and left her very little to spare.
After a love as strange as that, she didn’t think he was here to kill her, so she let herself breathe again. And the first and only thing she wanted in that first intake of air was nicotine, to anesthetize the terror she’d just felt. Her heart wouldn’t stop beating out of her chest until she had a smoke.
She propped herself up on her pillow and asked the ghost of Kenyon Clutter if she could bum a cigarette.
He said sure, and held out the pack.
Asking a ghost for a cancer stick.
Now she knew there was a first for everything, for every absurd thing under the sun, just as she knew she was entering the land of no return, where her friend Truman Capote had gone to permanently reside. At first, when he’d told her about his ghosts, she’d laughed. Then she’d felt strangely jealous. Now, she felt even.
She felt chosen.
She felt alive.
She felt lost, and wondered if she’d ever be found again.
Kenyon slid a bony wrist out from the heavy cotton sleeve of his letter sweater. It was hard to see the color in the dark room, but Nelle thought it was maroon. She’d seen the letter sweater in his closet back in Kansas, but she couldn’t remember precisely. Maroon, wasn’t it, with a gold letter? For basketball? Or was it 4-H? Did they give letters for 4-H? She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten.
The hand did a precise little shake; a cigarette popped out of the pack, already lit. Either Kenyon moved faster than the human eye could see, with a lighter in his other hand, or he’d just done something that was humanly impossible.
But possible for him, because he wasn’t human anymore.
Neither was Nelle.
She didn’t know what she was anymore, except . . . adrift.
Nelle sucked in the offered cigarette, trying to get her brain to kick-start, trying to get the nicotine to calm her nerves and slow her breathing and heart, and make her wake up.
This couldn’t be happening.
This was happening.
This is what Kenyon had felt, this jangled panic, just before . . .
She had to stop it.
“How’s Nancy? How’s your sister?”
Nelle knew it was the dumbest thing she’d ever said the minute she heard it. Dumber even than saying she wanted to be the Jane Austen of south Alabama. (Why south Alabama? Why not all of Alabama, why limit herself? That was dumb.)
No, this was dumb, remembering an old interview she’d given, when a figment smoking a cigarette was in her bedroom, and she was smoking with it.
It.
Him.
Kenyon.
“Why does everybody always ask about her first? Nancy. Just cuz she’s a girl. Like it hurt her more. I got it too, ya know. Why don’t you ask me how I am? Murder hurts the same, boy or girl. Hurts like hell.”
He angrily dashed his cigarette to the floor and ground it out.
Nelle remembered her manners and did what he’d asked. “I’m sorry. How are you?”
“Okay. That’s all I wanted. To be asked.” Kenyon lit another cigarette, trying to calm himself down. “And I’m sorry, too. It only hurt for a sec. Not even that. I didn’t even feel it.” He looked down, searching with his eyes, his foot. “And don’t worry ’bout your floor. It won’t leave a mark. Trust me.”
Nelle knew it wouldn’t, because she knew Kenyon wasn’t really there. This was just a dream, about a smiley-face balloon, and cigarettes, and cemeteries, and The Reverend, and Kenyon Clutter. The clutter of a dream . . .
So why did she smell smoke?
No matter if she and Alice had nothing to talk about at breakfast the next morning, she would never tell Alice about this.
But she was wrong about the smiley face, she saw now in the glow of the cigarette. Smiley faces had strong, definite features: assertive, contagious black smiles, coal-button eyes. Kenyon had none of those: his features were haggard, washed-out; his lips had no color at all. They were creamy, pale, dry; his eyes looked the same behind his thick glasses, as pale and wispy as the cigarette smoke that came out his nostrils.There was so much pomade in his hair it looked wispy white as well, peppery and gray and silver. He was only fifteen, but his hair had no color at all, like a very old man’s.
There was so much Nelle wanted to know: about the Clutters, about Kansas, about Heaven. That is where Kenyon had gone, wasn’t it, and where he’d come from now? He deserved that much, didn’t he, eternal rest, after what he’d gone through?
Where did she even start?
At the beginning.
Truman.
“Truman said . . . were you really at
Truman’s the other night, like he said? Did you see him? I couldn’t tell if he was just dreaming, or . . .”
Kenyon finished her thought, lifting an imaginary bottle to his mouth. He wasn’t big on words.
“He called me up, just outta his mind, and said he’d seen a ghost . . .”
“He . . . he shouldn’t drink so much. Or take all those pills. I mean, I know he’s your friend and everything . . .”
“Not so much anymore . . .”
“. . . but . . . it’s addin’ up. Gonna take its toll. Actually, it’s not that long till . . .”
He stopped short, realizing he was about to spill privileged information.
Nelle jumped on it.
“D’you know? Can you see what’s gonna take me? Or when?”
“Can’t say.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
Now the woman who was known for her lush words and great descriptive powers was becoming as sullen and tight-lipped, as stingy with words, as the high school boy who wasn’t standing in her room, sucking on a cig.
“Sorry. Not allowed.”
He put his thumb and index finger together, next to his pale, creamy lips, and twisted the lock closed on the answer.
So be it. She had tried. She didn’t really want to know how she was going to go. She didn’t even want to know about her death after it happened, like Kenyon evidently did, having to remember it all the time.
He read her mind again and shrugged.
“Yeah, I know. Bum luck.”
Bum luck. A short life, a horrible death, and that’s what it came down to. Bum luck. It wasn’t eloquent, but it pretty much summed things up, Nelle thought.
Kenyon was better with words than he thought.
He fashioned his hand into a gun shape—forefinger out, thumb up—pointed it between his eyes, and then cocked and pulled an imaginary trigger.
“Kkkaaaboooommmmmmm . . .”
He made a high-school-boy sound effect, magnifying the finale over and over, and fell back into her mirror.
