by Kim Powers
The mirror shook.
Nelle’s reflection rattled in it.
Ghosts didn’t have the weight and mass to knock into something and make it rattle.
Kenyon looked at Nelle and again seemed to know what she was thinking. How could he explain himself, what he was now? Ghost, dream, visitation, imagining? She was the one in the room with the words smart and good enough to do it. But Kenyon struggled on with the only words he did have.
“Sorry, that wasn’t nice, the gun thing. It just kinda . . . sticks with ya. Let’s change the subject.”
“Fine with me.”
She’d like to change the dream, but that didn’t seem possible.
Was it a dream?
She tried to smell him without him noticing, tried to pass it off like she was just inhaling the smoke from her cigarette, that fine vintage of tar and nicotine and tobacco. But it was his pomade she got instead, to let her know how real he seemed.
He smelled like the boys she’d gone to college with, the artistic types who’d worked on the school humor magazine with her. The ones who shyly asked her for dates, the ones she always told no.
Why hadn’t she ever said yes?
She would have said yes to Kenyon Clutter.
She took another whiff, for courage, and asked what was really on her mind:
“Why did Truman send those boxes? It is Truman, isn’t it? Then who’s following me around, taking those pictures, trying to scare me? I don’t want this. I don’t want attention. Truman does, but not me.”
Kenyon wasn’t answering her question.
“Am I missing something? Just give me a hint. Am I supposed to do something? Is he mad? Are you mad? We tried to get your story right, I swear we did. Nancy—is she mad? Truman said she was . . .”
Nelle was running at the mouth now, every question, every thought, bubbling over at last. So was Kenyon. He didn’t have much time left.
“Yeah, but . . . she’ll get over it. No matter what Nancy says, everybody wants to be remembered. I wanted to make things, build things, maybe become an architect.” He took one last, sad drag, then ground that cigarette out, too. “I wanted to make so much more.”
“So did I,” Nelle thought. “I’ve had all this time, but . . . have I wasted it?”
Of all the questions she’d asked Kenyon Clutter, this was the one she most wanted answered, and she couldn’t answer it herself. “I’ve had so much time, and you had no time at all, you poor boy . . .”
He was fading away, his smell of smoke and greasy kid stuff disappearing to just a grace note, the reflection of the moon off his eyeglasses to just a speck, the maroon of his letter sweater melding into the indistinguishable dark of the room.
Nelle closed her eyes at the very moment she should be opening them widest, trying to take in every last vestige of him; she tightened her brain and eyes to squeeze him back, she even yelled out, “Don’t go yet . . .”
But he was gone.
When Nelle woke up in the morning, had she remembered anything from the night, she’d have seen that Kenyon had indeed kept his word: the cigarettes he’d stubbed out on her floor hadn’t made any marks at all.
But the cigarette in her ashtray—she really shouldn’t smoke at night.
Chapter Twelve
When Truman woke up after the night of trying to sugar-bomb Danny’s car, he remembered this, from a night of horrible dreams: he had been held down and told he was going to have both arms amputated, above the elbow at the bicep. He couldn’t see who was doing it, but he felt that they were strong and that there was no resisting them. Broad cuffs of leather were tightened around his limbs; his saggy old-man flesh squeezed under the restraints, and knives were sharpened. Whoever was doing it gave him an injection just above the leather cuff; he twisted and fought against that as much as the approaching blade.
He passed out before the first cut, because he knew what the result would be: he would have no hands or fingers to write with anymore.
Waking up extra early, Truman couldn’t remember ever crying so much; his pillow was soaked to the touch, tears and snot tracing the outline of his face.
Walking his dog that morning was a blessing; he never wanted to go to sleep again as long as he lived.
Outside, on the porch, Truman’s jowly bulldog, Maggie, saw the manuscript first, and squatted to pee on something that had once held her master’s scent.
Truman shooed the dog away, at first thinking somebody had dropped off a manuscript for him to read. They did it all the time: What do you think of this? Can you help me get it published? Would you just jot down a few notes? What do I do now? Truman was happy to let Maggie pee and poop on those books; sometimes he felt like joining in, then telling their owners exactly what he had done. He wasn’t in the business of getting someone else’s books published when he could barely finish one of his own anymore.
But these pages were somehow different; Truman knew that the second Maggie finished and began licking the spot she had started to pee on just seconds before. Truman would know these pages anywhere; they were the exact height of the stack of pages that had sat next to his typewriter for years, with the same familiar smudges and dog-ears marking them. But the only way they could have gotten there is if Danny had returned them, and people like Danny didn’t change their minds.
Did they?
Danny had tried to murder Truman by taking his book, and now he was returning it? It didn’t make sense. Truman knew the criminal mind, and making amends wasn’t in its repertoire. You couldn’t take back murder, no matter how much you tried, and that’s what this abduction had amounted to—murder. Danny was the type to try to make a mint off someone else’s misery, just like Dick and Perry had. Perry had even tried to sell Truman’s letters to him, a hustler till the very last minute he was swinging from a rope. If he could have, Perry would have cut the rope down after he was dead and tried to sell that as well.
What if Danny had defaced the pages? Truman was almost afraid to look. But he bent down and lifted off the antique iron doorstop that had kept them from blowing away in the night—the same iron, now rusted to a flaky pumpkin orange, that his old cousin Sook used to put on top of a hot stove, then do up their clothes with.
Truman looked at the first page, and it was what he remembered, and he looked at the second page, and he remembered that, too, and he looked at the very last page, some hundreds of pages behind the first and the second, and that was the same. He fanned through them all, and there was no excrement or blood wiped on them—except what Truman himself had left there, sweated out in his writing, to mark them as his own.
He had been spared; his arms hadn’t been cut off in the night, but returned to him. The nightmare had been his penance, what could happen if he wasn’t anymore respectful of his gift. But he had been the stronger; the surgeons hadn’t been able to complete their cutting. Truman still had his arms, his hands, his instrument.
He still had his gift.
He went inside, completely forgetting that Maggie was still out, doing her business.
Truman had business of his own to finish, now that his life had been returned.
He needed somewhere to hide the book so no one could ever take it again.
When Myrtle came to work that morning, mere hours after she’d left from baking her cake, she found Maggie pawing and scratching at the screen door, and Truman inside, oblivious and manic, scrubbing snake (and Danny) off the walls of his inner sanctum.
It was the first time Myrtle had ever seen him do anything, other than drink, or try to write.
Truman looked at her, his eyes full of something she hadn’t seen in a very long time.
“I’ve got it,” he said triumphantly.
Myrtle said, “No, I think you missed a little spot over there.”
“It. My book. My revenge,” he said.
Truman held up the stack of pages, but Myrtle still thought he was talking about something else. There was something strange about the way he said “it
.”
“I feel like I’ve been given back my arms. Do you know what that’s like, losing your arms then getting them reattached? And now my arms are gonna reach out into the world and shake their teeth loose, molar by molar. This . . .”
. . . and there Truman raised up the pages even higher, like an evangelist in a summer revival tent, shaking the pages like he was shaking the devil out of their very souls . . .
“. . . this is what they want but they’re not gonna get it. Oh, no, I’ve got a special place for this,” he said. “A special place indeed. Danny must have brought it back when he saw that I was a force to reckon with.”
“We were a force, all right; that box of confectioners’ sugar must have had him quaking in his boots.”
Myrtle grabbed the sponge Truman had been using, dipped it in a bucket of Lysol, and started scrubbing away at a dab of dried snake. She rubbed so hard the wallpaper tore away; what had been Truman’s eyes from the Warhol print gave way to bare wall underneath.
Truman must have had some of her coconut cake for breakfast; sugar was speeding him on, and he could barely slow down as he put aside the pages and moved his attention to a new snake box, the glue still drying on it. “I started working on this the minute I got the book back, when I wasn’t washing off snake. You ever see a snake fight? I have. Two of ’em, back behind Mr. Katz’s drug store when I was just six years old. Imagine an adult taking a child, an impressionable child, to see that, but that’s what my aunt Tiny did. Cost a quarter each. We begged to go, she took us. Me and my friend Nelle Harper, they killed each other.”
“The snakes?”
He didn’t answer, seemingly lost to the past, and who had killed whom.
“That’s when I decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. A snake charmer. Just another name for writer. Keep the snakes from fighting. That’s who you gotta send this to. Nelle Harper. She’ll know what I mean. She’ll remember.”
The scene on the box looked somehow outdoorsy, but Myrtle couldn’t really tell what it was, just what looked like a wonderful carpet of green to walk barefoot through. She curled up her toes inside her shoes, trying to feel it.
“That your Garden of Earthly De-lights again?” she asked, not quite approvingly. There was something a little bit sinful about it, she thought, like man trying to re-create what God had already made, a whole lot better.
“Um-hum,” Truman answered, with the same kind of teasing excitement he used to have when he was writing, when he’d work so nonstop his clothes would go dirty and smelly in the pursuit of his art.
Maybe the boxes were his new art.
He was always talking about “new forms”; maybe this was one of them. Myrtle got confused when he talked about things like that, and usually excused herself to go do a load of laundry. Leave him to his new forms; leave her to her laundry.
Truman smoothed down a final leaf of grass that he’d pasted on the box, edged out an air bubble that had pimpled up, then wiped a smear of glue off on his shirt and moved his attention to a stack of pictures Myrtle had never seen before, kept in an old brown accordion file tied together with a fraying black shoelace. Inside, there were dozens and dozens of photographs: real pictures of real people, not torn out of magazines or art books.
Truman paused, debating among several small black-and-white candids, then chose one: it showed four people bundled up in coats against the cold, as if they were trapped inside a snow globe. He tenderly placed it inside the box, as if he were trying to warm the people up, deep inside the leafy tropical forest he had created for them on the outside.
Myrtle leaned in closer to get a better look, but Truman slammed the lid closed before she could, as if he had to get the photo in the box before he changed his mind.
Changed his mind about what, she didn’t know.
Now she knew.
Myrtle stood in line at the post office, expecting a big pair of hands to clamp down on her meaty shoulders at any minute. Because of what was in the package she held, she thought the smell might draw flies, and flies, looks, and looks, arrest. She’d wrapped the box herself, after Truman relinquished it to her custody, with a double and then triple layer of brown butcher paper. She’d even baptized it with some of the White Shoulders bath powder Truman gave her every year for Christmas. But as she stood in line, she thought that would have to be some mighty strong perfume to stanch the smell of an animal that had laid out in the Palm Springs sun for days on end, then been scraped off a wall and put inside a box.
Myrtle told Truman, “You can’t go sendin’ dead things through the U.S. Postal Service.”
He said, “I’ve been around enough dead things in my life to know what I can and cannot do with them. Mail it.”
But no one was wrinkling up their nose funny in her direction, or sneaking off to call the police. She was safe for now, that is, unless her picture popped up on a wanted poster. She was almost afraid to look up at the bulletin board where the FBI posters were—usually, one of her favorite pastimes in the PO—because she was afraid she’d see her face staring right back at her. What if someone had seen her and Truman out at Mr. Danny’s last night, tampering with his gas tank? She could just imagine the mug shot they’d take of that: a picture of the both of them, beaming the silly, hungry grins of two fools high on gas fumes and doobies, who had the munchies for homemade coconut cake.
Slowly, so as not to draw attention, she let her glance move from the package in her hands to the bulletin board.
So far, so good: the FBI hadn’t caught up with Myrtle J. Bennett.
She could breathe.
But then she caught a whiff of snake.
She panicked and looked straight ahead again, to divert attention.
Why didn’t Truman have her mail off one of his butterflies, then they’d both be safe.
He loved butterflies.
He had collections of them all over his house, “butterflies under glass” he called them, exotic breeds mounted on black velvet and encased under Plexiglas, or swimming inside clear glass paper-weights.
Myrtle didn’t understand how you could love something so much, then have it killed and preserved so you could stare at it forever, no matter how pretty it was. But Truman said butterflies had a short life span and were going to die anyway. They were going to get old and tired, their high and proud wings go limp, their color fade and rub off to gray, so why not capture them at the peak of their powers, when their wings were full and strong, all their colors still intact?
He said it exactly like that, all those words.
She wondered if he was just talking about butterflies.
Sometimes, he called her “his black butterfly”; that’s what she had been, in the Cotton Club. A butterfly, hard to see it now with her ham-hock arms and flat feet, but she’d been spry on the wing umpteen years ago in Harlem. No penguin suit for her, no sir; she’d had a costume none of the other girls could carry off, gossamer wings of real spun gold edged in black, and streaks of gold glitter on her cheeks. She caressed her body with the wings, then tipped them through the smoky air of the club to some lucky gentleman in the audience. Reached out and blessed him with the wing of her costume, and then flitted away.
She sometimes thought that’s why Truman had hired her, because she’d been a butterfly in another life.
Something as pretty as a butterfly wouldn’t set off a stink.
The post office line inched forward, and Myrtle began thinking about the lady who was getting the package, on the other end of the receiving line. It was the same lady Truman had taken to calling late at night, when his ghosts came. How would she feel when she opened up this package, all excited, thinking it was a present—that’s how Myrtle felt when she got something wrapped up in the mail—then, surprise, it’s snake guts! Should Myrtle call her up and warn her? Or better yet, not send it at all, just tell Truman she had? No, she was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a liar. She’d say a prayer for the name on the address; that would have to be good enough, until
Truman helped her open her maid service.
Then she’d make all the damn calls she wanted.
She closed her eyes to pray, but the hum of the overhead fluorescent lights changed what she had to say. Instead of saying “Thank you, God,” and leaving it at that, she said “Thank you, God, for the post office.” Maybe that was her new form of prayer, just like the box she was holding was Truman’s new way of writing.
If not her prayer, it was certainly her secret: coming here late some nights, on her way home from work. You’d think after a hard day at Truman’s, she’d just want to get on home to her husband, but there was even more work waiting for her there—fixing his dinner, talking to him, when they’d said all they had to say years ago. No, the post office was the only place she could be alone, even if it was under the “cold, clinical glare”—that’s a phrase she picked up from Truman—of the fluorescents. She liked the hum and hiss they made; it filled her head and she didn’t have to think anymore. She liked background noise when it was as soft as that. She liked the idea of a government building that wasn’t locked up but was free and open to the public, like the front section where all the PO boxes and copy machine were. She paid her taxes like anybody else; she had a right to see what they were being used for, any hour of the day or night. She liked the big marble counter in the middle of the room, and all the forms that were tucked into it. She always took some, whether she needed them or not; her tax dollars paid for those, too.
Myrtle J. Bennett liked getting her money’s worth.
In a public building where anyone could walk in on her at any moment, she found the most comfort and privacy.
It had started when she went there to do some copying for Truman on their Xerox machine, ten cents a copy. She’d done it for a few nights in a row, but when he stopped writing, and didn’t have anything else left to copy, she found herself still going there.
She couldn’t accept it on its own, at first; she didn’t understand the draw of the place. Being there had to have a purpose, an activity—so she Xeroxed her face. She lifted up the heavy rubber cover and laid her cheek against the cool glass of the machine, then dropped in a dime and squinted her eyes shut against the luminous green light that whirred to life to take her picture.
