by Kim Powers
Bonnie put the cup of coffee aside and touched her face to wipe away her tears. Nelle reached out to hold her hand again; this time, she felt how thin and arthritic it was, how prominent the veins were. Bonnie still wore her wedding ring; for some reason, the killers hadn’t taken that, even though they’d looted the house for money. Herb had tried so hard to reassure his wife the men just wanted money and wouldn’t hurt them. But that was the first wrong thing he had said to her that night, because Bonnie knew Herb didn’t keep any money in the house.
It would just make the men madder.
Of all of them, she was the only one who knew how angry men got over money, and how the night would end.
A cold bathroom on a cold November night in Kansas.
Her husband nudged away with the tip of a long rifle.
The last glance that passed between them: Herb saying “Don’t worry” with his eyes, Bonnie not even able to say “I love you” back with hers, because she was shaking so much.
Kenyon shoved down the stairs without his glasses.
Nancy practicing “Greensleeves” on her flute, that very night, but now she couldn’t, because her hands were tied behind her back . . .
“STOP IT.”
For a moment, Nelle wasn’t sure which one of them had said it.
Then she saw Bonnie looking at her askance, and realized the words had come out of her very own mouth, after seeing the same things Bonnie couldn’t get out of her head.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .”
Now words, not just pictures, came pouring out of Bonnie.
“Herb’s not one to talk. He can barely tell ya what he wants for dinner, or if you cooked the steak too done. But if you don’t let these things out, they’ll just eat away . . . I don’t have anybody to . . .”
She started crying even harder.
With those words, Nelle finally knew why Bonnie Clutter had come tonight: to have someone tell her to stop, that she didn’t have to relive that night again and again, ever again.
Bonnie reached over and hugged Nelle around the shoulders.
Nelle could feel her.
This wasn’t a dream.
“Oh, thank you.”
It’s like the stale old air stored up in Bonnie Clutter’s lungs all these years could finally get released, now that the pictures were gone. She breathed in and out a few times, feeling how good fresh air felt.
“Do you know how it feels—to just breathe again? You forget how . . . oh, sweet Lord,” she said, and just kept taking deep breaths. “Now I’m going to tell you a secret. It’s about those boxes you’re getting, and those pictures. And those coffins. What they mean . . .”
Just then, the phone rang in the other part of the house.
This time, there was no gradual shimmer about it: Bonnie was immediately gone.
Vanished.
And Alice was there in seconds, to take her place. Standing at the door, holding the gun, and saying, “Some crazy woman’s on the phone, saying she’s calling for that man.”
That man could only be one person.
Alice pointed with the gun at the cup of coffee that was on Nelle’s nightstand, next to the Bible. Steam rose off it.
“With libations like that, you won’t ever go to sleep.”
But had she been asleep at all?
Chapter Sixteen
At first, Nelle thought the woman must be calling to say Truman was dead—why else would she call in the middle of the night?—but no, she was just apologizing for sending snake guts.
“He made me send that box. I’d never put snake parts through the U.S. Postal Service. It’s not Christian. It’s not right.” Saying “it’s not right” made Myrtle start crying again; it’s not right she was going to die, that’s why she was calling. She had to line up somebody to take care of Truman. She didn’t want to die with him, or snake guts, on her conscience.
Nelle could have used another cup of coffee; where was Bonnie Clutter when she needed her, to make a fresh pot? Nelle was still in a daze. She barely knew what was being said, or what she was saying in return, before she heard herself saying it.
“Is he there now? Truman? Put him on, I’ve about had it with these boxes . . .”
“He’s out like a light . . . he’d have a fit if he knew I called. Had to sneak away. Must have given you some sort of shock, opening that box . . .”
There she goes again, with those damn snake guts.
“Then why’d you send it!” Really. This woman. People had to take some responsibility for what they did. “How’d you feel if you opened up something like that? I haven’t heard from him in twenty years and now he sends me something like that. Those . . . boxes. Coffins. Pictures. If he wants something, just tell me . . .”
“You know Truman . . .”
No, she didn’t, not anymore.
“. . . has to say ten words when one’ll do just fine, thank you very much.Ten you can’t even figure out anyway, they got so many curlicues on ’em. Anybody else, they’d just send those boxes back . . .”
“How could I? I didn’t even know they were from him, not for sure . . . I don’t have an address . . .”
“. . . forget the boxes . . . you’re the only one even takes his calls anymore.”
That stopped Nelle.
“Even in the middle of the night, you never hung up on him. All those other people did, those people used to brag he was their friend and such . . .”
And Nelle had been about to hang up on this woman, calling in the middle of the night.
Sometimes, that’s the only time you could send out a call for help.
Just like Bonnie Clutter, this woman was searching for what she wanted to say, ten words when one would have done: help.
“He’s acting crazy these days, saying ghosts comin’ to get him . . .”
Days ago, Nelle would have laughed.
Now, this very night—why is this night different from all other nights?—she’d just had coffee with Bonnie Clutter.
That’s why it was different.
“Only ghost around here is Truman, he’s so full of liquor and pills. Fadin’ before my very eyes. I don’t know what to do anymore. He’s outta his head . . . why else would he put a dead snake in a box . . .”
“He hates snakes. One bit him when he was little, he almost died . . .”
“Got ’em all over the house now, stuffed ones, carved ones, fake ones, but he had Mr. Danny haul that one up, after we went out in the desert looking for a sign from Nancy.”
She said it like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Days ago, Nelle would have laughed at that, too.
Now, she wanted to cry, after all her nightly visitors.
“But what does he want? Those pictures he puts in . . . even got somebody to put one of them in a grave. A grave. Where somebody had died. If that’s not plum illegal . . .”
Myrtle hadn’t known that.
Where somebody had died.
Death.
Her own.
It’s why she had called, she couldn’t forget that. She had business to accomplish, but now it seemed hopeless: would you take somebody in who’d been sending you coffins through the mail?
“He’s ramblin’ all the time now, and I don’t know if he’s talking to me, or somebody I can’t see. This house is getting too crowded, and as far as I can see, there’s just the two of us in it, and pretty soon it’s just gonna be the one . . .”
“You’ve gotta wake him up . . . I’m gonna put an end to this . . .”
“. . . and now he’s going on about this party and I know he’s gonna wear himself out even more . . .”
“What party?”
“. . . and nobody’ll come anyway. He wants to throw this big bash, just like that black-and-white thing. See, he just got his book back . . .”
“What book?”
“He says it’s the part everybody’s waitin’ for . . . he says it’s the last thing he’s ever gonna write, �
��sides a suicide note. Got it with him right now, that book, hugging it and snorin’, won’t let it out of his sight . . . says you’re the only one he trusts with it, you’ll know what to do, the graveyard, all the answers are there, back where it all started, he’s not making any sense far as I can tell . . .”
Then another voice, in another room:
“Myrtle, get me my pills . . . the blue ones . . . and the orange ones . . . and get this damn dog off me, I’m covered with dog slobber . . . Goddamn it, Maggie . . .”
“Oh, Lord, he’s wakin’ up now . . .”
Oh, Lord, Myrtle thought, now I’m never gonna get anybody to take care of him.
“Please. Let me just talk to him . . .”
Now it was Nelle’s turn to cry for help, in the middle of the night.
“I’ll call later . . .”
“No, wait, please, just give me your number . . .”
But the phone went dead.
Nelle was left to her anger and sadness and confusion: she didn’t know anything more about the boxes, but she knew Truman had a new book, and a party in the wings, and some kind of answer, back at the graveyard. Or was this a dream, too? Would she wake up in the morning and see the phone cord in her hand, and have no idea how it got there? How could two people, once best friends, once soul mates, be so different: Nelle had published one book, and then deliberately faded into the woodwork;Truman didn’t even wait for one to come out, and had already started planning the guest list.
She’d barely made the first guest list.
She was about to lose her mind: what did he want?
Ed would know what to do, he’d know what it all meant.
She went back to her bedroom and took the writing tablet from under the Bible on her bedside table; tonight, she didn’t feel like climbing up to the attic.
Tonight, for the first time in quite a while, she was afraid of the dark.
My Dearest Ed:
Are you mad at me, Big Brother? Please say no. Big Sister Bear is; in the morning, she’ll come grumbling into the room, her fur all cinched up in righteous indignation, to let me know she didn’t appreciate my late night phone call.
Do you mind my late night call to you?
It is strange, being visited by these ghosts of people I came to know so well on paper, but never knew in real life. And never being visited by the ghosts of those I knew best in flesh and blood, like you or Mother or Amasa. Or do you come to me, in ways I don’t realize—the ongoing conversation we have in my head when I write you a letter, or the strange dreams that came for years after you died? You know I’d be a receptive audience, as I hope I was with Bonnie Clutter. Did I do right by her? You must tell me how to act around ghosts, I don’t know. I don’t want to do the wrong thing. (Am I better at socializing with the dead than I am the living? Maybe that’s why everybody’s so scared of me, and I’m so scared of them.)
There are many things on my mind tonight, many fears, but while it is uppermost, I want to write on the subject of parties.
A strange topic, you might think, for this twilight time between waking and sleeping.
Not really; I think of parties, and what comes to my mind is the time I was in between, neither started nor finished.
I think of the night Truman almost finished the act of killing me, that he had started in Kansas.
I feel as if I’ve been left hanging in between ever since.
Everybody thinks my “missing years” are the ones long after The Book came out, but they’re really just the few years after I fled Kansas in the middle of the night, until Truman’s Black and White Ball.
I saw Truman several times, during those in-between years, but we never mentioned what had happened that night, not in words, at least. But in every look that passed between us, it was the only subject.
I don’t know why I even talked to him again, but I did.
Maybe I was as lonely as he was.
Back in New York, we went to Sardi’s and had cold potato soup and took the Deweys to see “Hello Dolly” and “The Odd Couple”: the odd couple, it’s what people must have called me and Truman, behind our backs.
I was doing just fine getting my name in the paper, same as him, whether I wanted it there or not. (He certainly did, no disputing that.) I went to the teas and the chicken ala king luncheons in my honor; I talked to the reporters who thought I was a man until I showed up in person, and probably still thought so after I left. I sent money when somebody needed to defend my book against being “immoral ”; I read about the church in Chattanooga that buried it as a “strange god ”—along with short shorts, TV sets, and clocks—a harbinger of a modern age they didn’t want. (Little did they know, I didn’t want it either. At least I was in good company; they buried Steinbeck alongside me. That’s the closest I ever got to meeting old Johnny.) I got myself invited to the opening of the Kennedy Center; I even had my picture taken with Lady Bird, who told me she liked a good book as much as a big piece of steak.
I did all those things; I was famous, for a while.
I was famous until Truman thought I was too famous.
Months before the Black and White Ball—bear with me, Brother, I’m getting to where Truman almost kills me, again—he started harping on what I should wear. Harping on Harper, he called it. I’d planned on wearing my good black suit; it had been good enough to get me my job at the airlines, good enough to bury our father in, and it would be good enough for Truman. I couldn’t imagine myself in a gown; I’d look like a circus freak, trying to get all butter-cupped up and looking even more freakish. A giant, trying to look demure. I’d wear the strand of pearls Mother left me, and there you have it—Black and White, just like the invitation requested.
“No,” screamed Truman, as if it were the last sound he would ever make, and he had to make it count. “A suit? A black suit? I am not going to have you meet all my important New York friends done up in something you wore to a funeral. It’ll smell like death—you can’t get that stench off no matter how hard you try, I know, sister, I’ve tried—and I want you to smell like life. Because that’s what I’m starting, a new life. With this book, I can tell.”
He dragged me, kicking and screaming, to the same places his fancy lady friends went—to the salon of Mr. Kenneth, who took one terrified look at the mop on top of my head and said not even he could do anything with it; to Tiffany’s, where Truman had thought about holding the ball; to Bendel ’s, for a fairytale gown . . .
It was all too rich for my blood, and I told him so: “I’ll look like somebody took pity on an old abandoned dog and stuck a tacky circus costume on it to cheer it up. I’ll look ridiculous wearing all that fancy stuff. Don’t worry, I’ll find something decent to wear . . .”
He screamed at me once more, even louder than before.
“Decent won’t do! This is the party to end all parties! If you can’t make a little effort to pull yourself together for it, then we’ll just see if you make the final cut or not. Just maybe you will, maybe you won’t . . .”
And to think this had all begun when four people, four decent, innocent people, had their brains blown out.
He pulled out the little notebook that all of New York high society lived in mortal fear of in those days, jotted down a notation, and wagged it at me.
What had he written: “Nelle won’t play dress-up the way I want her to, so I’m not gonna invite her”?
I was tired of playing dress-up for Truman.
I’d been doing it since I was six years old, when I’d climbed a chinaberry tree with him to watch Halloween come and go, taking our childhoods with it. But I wasn’t six years old anymore. I was famous now, too. My book had made a splash, so had its movie. I’d won the Pulitzer; Truman hadn’t, yet, although he was certain it was coming his way. I deserved my own party, and in one of the rare moments of indulgence I allowed myself, I fantasized that Truman was giving the party—for me.
It would be my little secret.
It would get me through th
e night.
I’d wear the mask he requested, but behind it, I’d be the true belle of the ball. (Imagine me, the belle of anybody’s ball.)
And it came to pass: once people found out who I was—the dreamy-eyed girl hiding in the grass on a book jacket, now grown up and wearing a ridiculous long black dress—they couldn’t get enough of me.
Once they found out Truman was my Dill Harris, that strange little creature who came to visit us every summer, they really couldn’t get enough of me.
And once they found out I’d helped Truman on In Cold Blood, going there in the snow and talking to all those folks, they almost lost their minds. (I longed for them to take off their masks so I’d know who I was talking to, but Truman was on the prowl: if he saw anyone remove their masks before the appointed time at midnight, he ran out of the receiving line and snapped it back into place. When they winced at the sting of rubber band against flesh, he said, “Let that be a reminder to you to do as you’ve been told.”)
I introduced them all to Al Dewey—I called him Foxy to tease him, just as we had back in Kansas—and said, “this is the man who solved the crime and put Dick and Perry behind bars.” Then I paused and said, “And this is his wife, who kept them there.” That always got a laugh, even though I didn’t really know what it meant.
The Deweys looked as elegant as anyone there.
Soon, everyone forgot about wanting to visit with Truman at all, forsaking him for me, and my campfire tales of the Clutters and murder on the Plains.
Did you see the house?
Did you see the blood?
Did the police really burn the mattress Nancy got killed on?
Did you meet the killers?
What were they like?
Pure evil?
Did you know Truman would grow up to be famous?
(“Wait,” I interrupted, “are we still talking about pure evil, or Truman?” That got a laugh, too.)
Soon, I had a receiving line as long as Truman’s and Mrs. Graham’s, the Washington Post owner and guest of honor. I excused myself to the ladies’ room to catch a breath, and try to cool down the fever of the crowd and their questions. I shoved my mask on top of my head; it was a black sleep mask I’d swiped from Truman and cut eye holes in, even though women were supposed to wear white, another fashion faux pas I’d never live down. I splashed my face with cold water—you know me, no makeup to worry about—and felt the same sting of cold against hot I’d felt that night in Kansas.
