by Kim Powers
Men whose eyes looked frozen in headlights.
Men whose eyes were ringed with mascara.
Men with Brylcreemed hair, and bouffants, and Christmas sweaters tucked into slacks, and rep ties like English schoolboys, and someone who looked like Perry Como . . .
Men.
But nobody else like Truman.
“You gave me a story about Dick and Perry, I wanted to give you one about them . . . and this is it. This is what was going on in their heads, men with men, just like it was in prison. They were lovers, haven’t you figured that out yet?”
He practically screamed it, but the decibels were lost in the din of the place.
Joyce, terrified of looking small-town in the face of Truman, and already calculating if she should include this visit in her article, said, “Well, it’s very . . .”
“Interesting? Is that the word you were going to use? Interestin’? It’s not interesting, it’s sick.”
In that moment, Truman sounded as if he hated himself, not for what he was, but for what he had just done.
By then, some of the patrons realized who Truman was. They flocked to him, plying him with questions and flattery, playing with his ears. At least that’s what it looked like to Harold, more ammunition that it was sick. Who’d play with somebody’s ears? Freak show. They grabbed Truman’s scarf and turned it into a may-pole game, skipping around him and draping it around his neck. Someone pulled it off and, in a sleight of hand worthy of Houdini, exchanged it for a feather boa.
Harold wanted them to keep going.
“Wrap it around his scrawny neck till he chokes.”
Nelle spoke up, the smoke from so many cigarettes burning her eyes—and she was a smoker.
“Truman Streckfus Persons”—for that was the real name he was born with—“you’ve pulled some wild stunts in your life, but this wasn’t called for, so we’re goin’. You can stay if you want, but you’ll have to walk, ’cause we’re takin’ that car out there your good friend Ray has waitin’ by . . .”
And they all three walked out, leaving Truman standing under a smoky spotlight, with a ragged pink boa wrapped around his neck.
But when Truman walked downstairs minutes later, he found Nelle waiting for him. The car was gone, the Nyes were gone, and she was alone.
She couldn’t tell Truman why she had waited, and he didn’t ask; just took her by the hand, as he had done since they were five years old, and pulled her alongside him to another lone door in the wintry landscape.
“Looks like it’s just us, Nellybelle. Guess we’ve had this date from the beginnin’ . . .”
The sound he made was something between a cackle and a cry, but she didn’t stop him. She couldn’t move on her own anymore; she could barely think as he opened the next door and led her in.
He had never told her he was homosexual, but she knew. At six years old, she knew that this delicate, ancient creature living next to her was something very fine and rare and different. They grew up, they moved apart, she heard what people whispered about him, but he had never said it aloud to her, so it didn’t exist.
Nobody knew who she was, so there were no whispers about her, except the whispers she made to herself late at night.
Now, it was as if Truman had heard those whispers, whispers that had become prayers, and brought her to the place where they could be answered. It was the place where she could finally say them aloud, but she had lost her voice, and Truman had to speak for her.
“Here, drink me . . .”
It was the note that had greeted Alice, in Wonderland, the drink that had made Alice only ten inches tall.
That’s what Nelle wanted to be, the smallest woman in the room, instead of the Paul Bunyan lumberjack, the tree trunk, she was. She wanted to be so small she could disappear, but still be there, so drink it she did, and when Truman said drink some more, she did that, too, and it felt good, and she wanted to pour an entire bottle of burning liquid down her throat to fan the flames and put out the fire at the same time.
“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen ice . . .”
Nonsense phrases were forming in her head, as her brain shut down and lines from a beloved Robert Frost poem channeled through her body to her mouth and tongue and teeth and lips, and she said it aloud to no one, and everyone . . .
“. . . and some say the world shall end by fire, but I think by ice, and . . . something something desire, but that would be nice . . .”
She was babbling, words she knew by heart but could no longer remember.
Fire and ice; now she knew what it felt like to be shot, just as Truman did.
She knew what it felt like to be the Clutters.
Truman looked at her as if he were welcoming her into a very exclusive club, watched her as she couldn’t meet his gaze but turned her eyes to the other women in the room instead.
Women who looked like men.
Women who looked like they belonged to a third sex that hadn’t yet been named, with skin tanned from sports and hair cut so short you could see scalp underneath it.
Women who were more beautiful than any of the starlets Truman had ever collected for his scrapbooks, their skin so white they must have bathed in cream, their hair so shiny and silken and blond it was like the hair angels must have.
And now Nelle whispered, her first words to Truman that weren’t a poem.
“Why did you have to go and ruin it all?”
“So your prayers can be answered, little sister, just like mine.”
Nelle’s voice got a little louder.
“I help you, I follow you, I pick up the pearls you drop, I get you into these people’s house . . .”
“. . . and I got you into this house. It’s the one you’ve been wanting to visit most of all, isn’t it? Your own key to unlock the door . . . and all it takes is saying yes, yes . . . whisper it if you have to . . .”
But she couldn’t say it.
All she could do was run out of the house into the burning cold, leaving her footprints behind in the snow.
She ran and ran and didn’t quit running until she got back to her hotel, slipping and sliding in the ice, no thought of a salt-ring buildup on her shoes now.
And where did Truman run to, that little boy/man who had told her just hours ago he would never hurt her, who had written about outcasts adrift in a giant tree, telling soul secrets late into the night? Where was the ancient little boy who had worshipped a wounded and backward old woman named Sook, who went deep into childhood forests with her to pick windfall pecans and bargain with Indians for moonshine? Where was the little boy who went to the pictures every Saturday, with the nickel he had hoarded during the week, then came home and acted out his version of the movie, better than Hollywood’s? When had that little boy turned into a monster, still standing in the slush at the corner of Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth streets of a strange city?
That little boy was long gone, if he had ever existed in the first place. Maybe he had always been a fiction, and Nelle had been as suckered in by him as the next ticket buyer; he lived only in print, a towheaded changeling child who had to drain the life from others before he could take form and shape himself.
A vampire who lived on ink instead of blood.
Nelle felt the kind of rage at Truman that could cause someone to pull a trigger four times, as Perry had done inside the Clutters’ house.
She was so mad she could pull the trigger five times, with the revolver Truman had asked her to buy. She found herself holding it, even though she didn’t remember picking it up. Alone in her Kansas hotel room, she knew how a gun must have made those killers feel, like no one could hurt them anymore. She wanted to shoot it, shoot away her pain and confusion; she wanted to witness destruction.
She moved to the door that adjoined her room with Truman’s and gripped the doorknob. It would be a contest: whichever thing she squeezed harder—the doorknob or the gun’s trigger—would be the winner.
She would rather have squeezed out tears, to g
et the poison of what Truman had forced her to confront out of her system. But tears wouldn’t come; she was too mad for tears. Pain did come, though; she squeezed so hard into the ornate filigree design on the doorknob that it bit into her flesh, leaving a red welt.
She squeezed harder; she wanted blood.
She saw the veins distend out on both wrists.
By the grace of God, by a hair, she squeezed the doorknob tighter than the gun.
It swung open, and she was in Truman’s room: the Underwood typewriter, the liquor bottles, the kimono with butterfly-shaped sleeves, the piles and piles of notes they had made in black-and-white journals.
She wanted to rip it all up, splatter cartridge pen ink over everything, take it all away, just as he had taken everything away from her.
On the bedside table was a single copy of Other Voices, Other Rooms, propped up on a reading stand as if it were the bejeweled Gutenberg Bible. She picked the book up and saw him in his author’s photo, lounging on a divan and looking doe-eyed, staring back at her from the back cover.
If the author wasn’t here for her to shoot, she’d shoot his photo instead.
But she couldn’t shoot a book, or a gun, any more than she could kill a mockingbird.
She had to do something to relieve the pain.
She picked up the book and smashed it—face-first—into an ornate mirror in the room.
A crack, then a thunk, as the book stopped dead in the thick wood behind the beveled glass. In the splinters and prisms, she could still see the photo of Truman.
She could also see herself.
And she had no clue which one she was really aiming at.
She ran out of the room and didn’t stop running until she was back in New York, and even there, she kept running, until she’d finally run all the way back home, to Monroeville.
But her footprints were still out there in Kansas, frozen in time; she saw them, as she stared at the photograph in her hands. A photograph someone had sent her, nearly twenty-five years after the longest night of her life.
Fire and ice.
She shivered and couldn’t stop shaking, just like the people in the picture.
Chapter Fourteen
As soon as Myrtle opened the door in the morning, first thing Truman did was announce they were having a party.
A big one.
“My book’s back, and I’m putting it in hiding. Nobody will ever find it now, till I’m ready for them to. Danny’s gone, and he’s never coming back, so we have to celebrate. Another party. Bigger than the first. No more black and white. Color.”
Myrtle was used to his pronouncements, and usually didn’t pay much attention to them. She said words just to fill up the air, on her way to the kitchen to get her first cup of coffee of the day. “Long as I don’t have to cook for it . . . don’t wanna wear no fancy shoes neither . . . long as you can guarantee me them two things . . .”
“If you don’t show a little more excitement, I might not invite you at all. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I’ve been up all night planning it.”
He grabbed her by her uncaffeinated arm and pulled her into his inner sanctum, where the “plan” was revealed in a single image. Photos and pictures from his files, the ones he usually reserved for his snake boxes and kites, were flung all over the room, but a new, lone picture, torn from the fancy art book of one of his friends, adorned a central place over his desk on the wall—the very spot Myrtle had rubbed bare trying to get the snake off it.
“There. That’s the theme. Whaddaya think?”
“A big mess with a little bit of snake? That’s what your party’s about? Ain’t gonna do no cleanin’, neither . . .”
“There.”
He literally put his hands on either side of her head and positioned her eyes in line with the picture:
“There. The Arabian Nights.”
It was a glossy print of an Arabian palace: columns draped in gauzy, jewel-colored curtains, brass bottles with incense wafting out of them, and a snake charmer in the corner, the flute at his lips enticing a snake out of a basket.
“That’s it! That’s me!”
Myrtle didn’t know if he was talking about the charmer, or the snake.
He read her mind.
“The man. I’m the snake charmer! That’s gonna be my costume. I’ll be in the corner, all in white, but rags. White rags. I’ll hobble in disguised as a beggar, which is what I’ve always been, picking at scraps from their tables. They won’t know it’s me, they’ll treat me like dirt until the stroke of midnight, when I remove my disguise, then they’ll all be revealed for the shams they are. The men in black caftans, the women in veils, everybody takes off their disguises at midnight. I’ll have incense and smoke everywhere, like a Turkish bazaar, and I’ll have storytelling booths, and people telling fantastic yarns, like Scheherazade . . .”
“Shehera who?”
“She had to tell stories to save her life, and if her stories weren’t good enough, they’d kill her—just like me. She could have been my twin sister. I had to worm my way into their courts, but if I wasn’t amusing enough, they’d cast me out, so believe me, I’ve sung for my table scraps plenty, and now, they’ll be singing for theirs . . . and if they want anything other than gruel to eat, they’ll have to kiss the snake charmer’s hand, but I’ll cover it with warts. They’ll be beggin’ to come anyway. At midnight, I’ll take the silver covers off their plates, and everybody’ll have one of my new books sittin’ there instead of food. Then they can read what fools they are, treatin’ me like a beggar. They’ll see who the beggar really is. It’ll be bigger than the party in ’66. That one had five hundred and forty . . . this one’ll have a thousand. I’m gonna start working on an invitation list right now . . .”
He’d barely paused to take a breath.
He was high as one of his kites, flying on something.
He plunked down on the couch with a fresh journal, and the pages of the new book that had been returned to him. He wet a pencil lead with the tip of his tongue and started writing, but his revenge fantasy must have worn him out. By the time Myrtle came out of the kitchen with her coffee, Truman was asleep, Maggie the bulldog curled up and drooling next to him. They looked so peaceful Myrtle felt like sliding in next to them for warmth and comfort, molding her knees behind the fold of Truman’s, throwing her big arms around his even bigger belly, to become a big tangle of fat. A big black and white spoon, that’s what it would be. It wouldn’t be romantic, just peaceful, after the stress of her mission to the post office—and the other thing. But no, she couldn’t mess up that spoon, man and dog; they were perfect together.
Truman snorted, and the pages on his chest shook.
Maggie pawed at them in her sleep, chasing a rabbit: a quiver, then deep panting, her front legs and back jerking as if all four were attached to electrodes. Now Truman’s legs started quivering, too, in sympathy: chasing something, or running from it?
Myrtle was tempted to snatch the book from him—she’d be doing him a favor, in case he let go and all those pages scattered over the floor, or Maggie slobbered on them and the words all ran together, but she knew she’d be violating a trust. From all the fuss he put up, it was clear he didn’t want anybody reading this book, not yet.
She’d let him keep his book “top secret!” but she couldn’t resist looking at the notebook in which he had begun his party plans. Her head bobbed up and down as she tried to keep pace with his rising and falling chest; the notebook rose and fell along with it, but she was able to see the one and only page he had completed before sleep and party dreams took over.
On one column he had written To Invite: the one and only name, so far, was hers: Myrtle J. Bennett.
On another column he’d written To Keep Out at Any Cost: Danny.
Next to his name, a question mark.
So much for casting him out forever.
Revenge must be exhausting, but good for the soul, Myrtle decided; Truman’s face looked tired, but peaceful. She
thought she should try some revenge; she needed some peace right now. It was only when Truman was asleep that Myrtle could see it, only when slumber and dreams allowed his face to relax enough to allow some sweetness to come through, that Myrtle saw what he must have been like as a child. The bags and broken capillaries and wrinkles and nastiness fell away, and his skin became smooth and unblemished again. She wasn’t a stupid woman; she knew everybody else looked at Truman and saw only what he’d become: bloated, drugged out, cruel. He was cruel so often, she doubted he even knew the difference between cruelty and kindness anymore. But no, she saw something else. Sleeping, he could have been six years old, tender and innocent and sad.
He was her baby, and babies were supposed to be tender and innocent, but not sad.
Sad, no little child deserved that.
It wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t right.
Out of nowhere, tears started running down her cheeks.
She wasn’t crying for Truman.
She was crying for herself.
She wouldn’t make it long enough to go to his party, unless he had it tomorrow.
She was going to die.
They’d gotten it all wrong.
Truman’s ghosts were coming for her.
Those folks she’d never met, Nancy and Kenyon and Perry—they were her harbingers, not Truman’s.
They were paving the way for her.
She had cancer, and she didn’t have much time left.
Who was going to take care of her sleeping Truman now?
She’d found out over the weekend, when she’d lied to Truman and told him her husband was taking her away for a second honeymoon—second honeymoon, humph, thirty years too late. Said he was gonna take her to Vegas to play some craps; Truman gave her a hundred dollars and said throw some for me. She hadn’t liked lying to him, but she didn’t want Truman to know she was going to the doctor. She had a bad feeling about all the blood and weight she’d been losing lately.
Her bad feeling was right.
When she’d gone back to the doctor a few days later for the results, after delivering that package at the post office, she’d taken one look at the doc’s face and said, “Don’t even bother telling me, I don’t wanna put you through it. It’s not your bad news, it’s mine.” If there was anything Truman had taught her, it was how to read the look on somebody’s face. In her mind, it was a better thing to read than some old book.
