by Kim Powers
Right now, she was mostly worried about how—or if—she was gonna break the news to Truman, and who she was gonna get to take care of him, after she was gone. She couldn’t go to her grave in peace if she didn’t have that figured out. Maybe that Joanne Carson, Johnny’s ex-wife; she called Truman all the time, about the only person who did call anymore. Or maybe that Nelle woman, that Truman was sending his boxes to. Maybe Myrtle could make up a really giant box and ship Truman off to her in that, with a note pinned to his shirt.
Or maybe the good Lord would take Truman first and she wouldn’t have to worry; the way he—Truman, not the good Lord—was going, it wouldn’t surprise her. One day, she’d gotten so mad she’d scooped up all his pills and thrown ’em in the pool—all those brown and orange see-through bottles, just floating along the top. But she knew she wasn’t doing it for real; Truman called it an “empty, symbolic gesture.” If she’d really meant business, he said, she would have unscrewed the lids and dumped the pills in, bottle by bottle, so the pills would dissolve in the water. When he told her that, she realized it was true. He’d already won. She used the fishnet pole to scoop out the bottles, along with a handful of waterlogged leaves and a tadpole.
Truman took the bottles out of the soggy net one at a time, read their labels, dried them off, and kissed them. Then he solemnly kissed Myrtle, too—“I thank you for trying”—before he returned them all to his hidey-holes in the house.
Just before he went inside, he turned around and said, “Sometimes symbolic gestures are all we have left.”
She wasn’t sure what it meant, but she knew it made her sad.
Even sadder: sometimes he’d beg her to hide the pills from him, and five minutes later, now with tears in his eyes, beg her to tell him where they were. She’d give in, with tears in her eyes, too, and know she was killing him.
And sadder still: here she was about to meet her Maker, and it was Truman she was worried about.
She knew she’d lived a good life, wasn’t any confusion about that. When she stood before the good Lord for her final review—other than Him saying she should have lost a few pounds—he’d have to nod His head and agree she’d done her best. Even trying to blow up Mr. Danny’s car, she’d done that to make Truman happy.
But other than kindness, what did she have to show for her life? You’d go in Truman’s house, see his books lined up in all sorts of languages on the shelves, so many he hadn’t even broken the covers of most of them. Did she have a shelf full of books to show? No, just a clothesline full of maid’s uniforms, blowing in the breeze. But wasn’t that something? The smell of freshness they gave off, their cool damp to the touch; she’d seen Truman go running through the clothesline, letting the wet uniforms slap against his face. She knew that didn’t make him a pervert, sniffing some maid’s uniforms. He always came back in talking about his childhood after he’d done that, how that was something he used to do in Alabama, how happy that made him. Wet wash on the line, the best perfume in the world, he called it. Maybe they could market it.
That was something you could put on a tombstone, wasn’t it, that you’d made somebody happy, if just for a moment?
Damn it.
How was she going to tell Truman?
She was going to call that Nelle woman right now, while Truman was asleep. She’d put her thoughts right out there, and get her to take over.
And while she had her on the phone, she’d apologize for sending that box full of snake guts.
Just then, Maggie snored and liked to scare her to death, a bit too early, and Truman started moaning in his sleep.
“No, no, get away . . . I will not apologize . . .”
Guess they both had ghosts coming to take them away.
Chapter Fifteen
Truman had taught Nelle well, a lesson from the old masters: when a gun got introduced into a story, it had to go off.
She just didn’t know when yet.
But she knew it would.
Listen to her, Wyatt Earp, quivering in her bed with a gun in her hand. She’d do better with a golf club.
It was the first time she’d held it since nearly twenty-five years ago, that last night in Truman’s hotel room. After looking at that picture of the four of them in the snow, she’d retrieved it from the bottom of the file cabinet where she kept her letters to Ed. She’d kept it there all those years since Kansas, untouched and unfired. She gripped it even tighter now, wishing she had waited for Truman in his room back then, instead of smashing his mirror and running away to New York.
She’d started out this night with the gun under her pillow; she didn’t know where else to put it, now that it was back in her life. (Wasn’t there some old wives’ tale in the back of her head, literally: sleep with a gun under your pillow and you’ll dream about . . . ?) She didn’t want to hold it all night long—that was surely an invitation for it to go off—but she didn’t want to just leave it lying loose on top of the bedcovers, either. She’d have one stray muscle twitch in the middle of the night and bam, there goes a big toe, or worse. So she’d removed it from underneath the pillow, not wanting whatever kind of dream it might presage.
Too late.
She was holding the gun in both hands, its nose pointing toward the door, when Bonnie Clutter timidly stuck her head into the room.
It’s hard to tell who was more scared: Nelle, at seeing another ghost, or Bonnie, at seeing another gun pointed at her, when it was the last thing she’d seen on earth. They both reacted at exactly the same time: Nelle yelled “Sweet Jesus” and dropped the gun, and Bonnie saw a tiny spark of flame come ripping out of the barrel, a replay of the single gunshot that had ended her life.
The bullet lodged in the doorjamb, and Bonnie Clutter vanished, to be replaced by someone else, in the flesh.
Alice.
Awakened from her sleep.
There was no mistaking her for a timid ghost.
Even in the middle of the night, minus her tennis shoes and hearing aid, she was a formidable presence. Nelle wasn’t sure she wouldn’t rather deal with a ghost.
“SweetJesusLord,” Alice said, taking in her sister, who had now picked up the gun. It was pointing at her.
Probably by accident.
“Since when did you start packing heat when you went to sleep?”
“It went off. It’s the gun I’ve had since Kansas. I got it out of the office tonight.”
“Why.” When Alice asked a question, it didn’t have a question mark at the end of it.
Nelle couldn’t answer. She didn’t know why she had brought the gun into her bedroom.
“Planning on doing me in? Let me remind you, little sis, you’re the one with all the money. Not gonna get a penny out of me, dead or alive. I’ll take this if you don’t mind; need you around to make my breakfast in the A.M.”
Alice retrieved the gun, holding it at arm’s length as if it were a dirty diaper.
“I’m in court tomorrow, so I’d be beholden if you kept the activity in here to a minimum. And if you need the services of a gun, just yell out, and I’ll come blazin’. Evidently, my hand’s steadier than yours. And a pleasant good night to you, too.”
Both sisters waited that extra second, as if they had secrets to tell each other and just needed a little opening to let them come pouring out: Nelle, of the other packages she’d now received; Alice, of snooping in her sister’s office. But neither was going to make the first move.
After decades together, neither was going to make the first move.
Alice left, a “You had your chance” in her eyes.
Nelle’s eyes followed Alice’s departing figure down the hall, and another shadowy form began taking her place. Whether it was Nelle’s old eyelids drooping and forming spontaneous cataracts, or sleep coming back on much too fast, or the limbo land between dream and sleep, she didn’t know. Wisp, air, form, veil, hat, suit—in a few seconds, the ephemera became Bonnie Clutter once more, peeping back in, deceased but undeterred, done up in a little hat
with organza flowers covered by a net. It was as if she’d dressed up for a special occasion; the hat and veil all but managed to hide the gaping hole in the center of her forehead.
Nelle wasn’t sure if Bonnie even knew she was dead.
“Mrs. Clutter?”
“Just call me Bonnie. Everybody does.”
It was something Bonnie Clutter had rarely said in the living world, not because she was unduly formal, but because she was almost too shy to tell people to call her anything. It must have taken everything she had to pull herself together for this earthly visitation, and Nelle had almost ended it, at the wrong end of a gun that hadn’t seen the light of day, or night, for twenty-five years.
Bonnie waited a moment, then timidly asked, but with pride, “My goodness, does everybody down here have a gun in the house now, for protection? Is that because of us?”
Since this was only the second ghost Nelle had ever welcomed into her bedroom in the middle of the night, she didn’t know how to answer. But she didn’t want to scare her off again.
Nelle held out her hands; they were empty.
“I’m so sorry, the gun, it’s gone now, see . . . I got it when we went to Kansas, but . . . you’re safe. It’s gone now. My sister . . . she took the gun, although between us, I don’t know which is scarier . . . my sister or a gun . . .”
She was rattling on as nervously as if she were at her first job interview.
Or like she’d never seen a ghost before.
Bonnie stuck her head a bit farther into the room, not completely taking Nelle’s word for it. She lifted the veil from her hat and looked around the room suspiciously, as if someone else might be hiding in the corner.
“You’d think I’d be over it by now, but I’m not. The kids and Herb have moved on, but I . . .”
She stopped, shaking her head.
“It’s not something you get over quickly.”
Nelle didn’t know what to say to that, so she stayed quiet, and let Bonnie find her way. Bonnie Clutter, the mother of Kenyon and Nancy, standing at the exact spot Kenyon had just nights ago. He had leaned insolently against the doorjamb, holding a cigarette; Bonnie leaned against the wall for support, as if she would collapse without it.
She was so tiny. Even after all the pictures Nelle had seen of her, and all the descriptions neighbors had given, Nelle wasn’t prepared for how small she was. The little red suit she was wearing, it was so tiny it made Nelle want to cry. She couldn’t imagine a big stern farm man like Herb Clutter with this little woman.
“This is my first trip . . . down here. Kenyon said I’d like it. He did, coming to visit you the other night. He said I’d like you, too. We don’t have many secrets anymore, not like down here, but . . . we don’t like to go where we’re not welcome.”
Bonnie Clutter was an apologetic woman, even in the afterlife.
Bonnie Clutter was a woman starved for company.
She ventured a little farther into the room now, touching things, as if remembering her room had been like this, too. They were both rooms without a man; Bonnie and Herb had slept in separate rooms for the last several years of their lives, Bonnie moving to the spare room on the second floor. Bonnie and Nelle both had antique furniture, a pretty mirror, doilies and lace, but not too much else, besides a Bible on the stand next to the bed. Bonnie seemed to like that. She smiled, as if thinking, This is a good Christian woman. I can talk to her. She’ll understand. (Just as Nelle had once thought, when she was a visitor in Bonnie’s bedroom, I know this woman, I grew up with her, she could have been my mother.)
Bonnie’s fingers lingered on the Bible.
“‘I lift mine eyes to the hills, from which cometh my help.’ I said that, you know, that last night. But help . . . well, it never came. At least not the earthly kind . . .”
She shrugged her bony shoulders—her little knit suit, edged in black rickrack, rode up on them.
Bonnie Clutter was a woman who couldn’t quite say what was on her mind, not yet.
But Nelle didn’t want to rush her. She didn’t want to wake up, if she was sleeping; she wanted to keep dreaming and find out what Bonnie Clutter was doing here.
She had questions for Bonnie, too.
But she had to start slow, so she started with a compliment.
“You raised a fine young man, that Kenyon. I sure did enjoy meeting him. I’m sure he makes you proud.”
“Oh, that he does. Why, did you know, that boy was making a cedar chest down in the basement for his sister’s wedding, his sister Beverly’s wedding, and he’d just varnished it the very day those . . .”
She started shimmering, as if she were about to disappear again. The force of the word she couldn’t say, and the image she didn’t want to remember, were almost too much for her. But she marshaled on, as if her visit were part of some curative therapy plan.
“. . . the very night those men came in, and that Perry . . .”
She spit the name out, her body wavering like a heat mirage in the desert.
Nelle interrupted. “You don’t have to put yourself through this . . .”
“Yes, I do.”
She took a deep breath, to steady herself.
“Yes, I do. That Perry put his knife down on the chest, and Kenyon, even tied up on the couch down in the basement, asked him to move it, because he didn’t want it messing up the finish.”
No mother had ever had to say such words about her son, words of such pride and anguish intermingled.
“Can you imagine a boy doing such a thing? With them standing right there, he’s thinking about his sister’s wedding . . .”
The memory had almost done Bonnie in, and she lurched toward the edge of Nelle’s bed before she collapsed. Her eyelids were flickering, as if she were trying to remember the scene behind them—and bat it away at the same time.
She needed to remember it.
“They rigged those knots up so hard . . . you strained against them, it hurt even more . . . I hope he hurt. I hope Perry hurt when he died.”
Bonnie’s lips went white, they were clenched so tight.
Nelle could tell her Perry had hurt when he died, even though she hadn’t been there to witness it. He’d asked her to be one of his witnesses, but she wouldn’t dignify his death with that. He’d walked up the regulation thirteen steps, thirteen unlucky steps, to the gallows; a stranger, plucked from anonymity and paid in cash so there would be no record of his identity, put the noose over his head and pulled the trapdoor. He’d gone into freefall until he came to the end of the rope, then his heart kept beating for eighteen or nineteen minutes until he was pronounced dead.
Bonnie nodded her head in agreement, as if she could see the very things Nelle had just imagined.
“Good.”
Nelle reached out to hold Bonnie’s hand, to calm both of them down, and almost jerked it away when she felt how cold it was. But Bonnie held on fast.
“Why don’t we go in the bathroom and wash your face,” Nelle said, then remembered a bathroom was the last place Bonnie Clutter would want to go, having been pushed inside one and tied up in a chair there, as strangers rampaged through her house.
“Oh, good Lord, can’t I just think for two seconds before I open my big fat mouth . . .”
“It’s not the kind of thing you get over quickly,” Bonnie said once again, shaking her head in remembrance.
Nelle’s faux pas had her dying for a cigarette, but she knew it wasn’t the right thing to do in front of Bonnie. But if not a cigarette, then maybe a cup of coffee; she needed something to steady her nerves. Maybe Bonnie would join her, the only one in the Clutter household who stood up to Herb’s rule against spirits or stimulus.
As soon as she thought it, it was in their hands, two steaming mugs of piping hot coffee, with a little cream and sugar. Cups of coffee that appeared out of nowhere.
It was good against the shock of this nighttime visitation; Bonnie removed her hand from Nelle to grip the cup with both hands, warming herself up. N
elle wondered if they had coffee in heaven, or even kitchens; did they even need to eat?
It was mostly all she thought about lately, what heaven would be like.
Bonnie seemed to hear her, without words.
“We have . . . whatever we need. Just . . . no dishes.”
And she laughed, shyly, like someone who was testing the waters of a new vocabulary, wondering if she’d taken something in vain. The coffee mug shook in her hands and threatened to slosh over, but didn’t.
“Don’t know what I’d do without my coffee.”
Bonnie took an extra-long draw from the cup and gargled it around in her mouth for warmth. Nelle saw it move around, as if she could see through the very skin of Bonnie’s cheeks.
Was she dreaming?
Bonnie squeezed the mug tighter, and her birdlike hands pushed through its ceramic walls. The cup itself didn’t move, but her hands transcended earthly physics and went directly into the hot liquid, without displacing a single drop or getting burned.
She didn’t even notice what she had done.
Nelle was still looking at Bonnie’s hands in shock when Bonnie started speaking, finally ready to get something off her chest.
“I wasn’t a good mother to those kids. I was ‘sickly,’ that’s the word everybody used, no use denying it, they certainly didn’t mind telling it to you and Truman when you went asking around . . .”
She looked at Nelle, but somehow, it wasn’t an accusation.
“. . . but nobody could ever figure out what was wrong with me. I took to the bed, and Kenny and Nancy pretty much had to fend for themselves, not just on that last night, but . . .”
She started crying.
“Nancy could make a cherry pie like nobody’s business. And Herb, he made coconut cookies that could’ve won a state fair prize. A man, mind you, a farmer, baking his own cookies, and had the idea of putting coconut in them. I barely ever made it to the kitchen.”
