Capote in Kansas

by Kim Powers

  The pages whipped up outside, the only specks of light pulling her into a pitch black night, pulling her toward Truman.

  Someone once said to Nelle, after Ed had passed, “Where’s your brother?” She looked at them a full minute in disbelief—they knew Ed had died—until they repeated the question differently: “Where’s he buried?”

  Oh.

  That.

  Ed was here, in the graveyard.

  Truman’s people weren’t.

  The Faulks, his mother’s people, were buried elsewhere, and his father’s people were in New Orleans.

  Nelle had been living in New York just a short while when Truman’s mother died. Truman himself was in Paris when it happened; he later joked how appropriate that was, since his mother’s favorite perfume had been Evening in Paris. He thought she’d arranged it like that, so he’d never forget.

  He hated her and she hated him; he said he doubted he could have forgotten that, no matter where he was at the time.

  The polite story was that she died of pneumonia, but everyone knew. Everyone knew she lived beyond her means; everyone knew she’d changed her name from Lillie Mae to Nina when she moved from New Orleans to Park Avenue; everyone knew her new husband, Joe Capote, embezzled money from his job to keep her happy. And everyone knew Joe was going to Sing Sing, now that his employers had found out. There was no way around that, famous stepson to bail him out or not. Nina couldn’t handle it; she took a bottle of pills to bail herself out.

  Someone called Truman in Paris to let him know; he took a seventeen-hour transatlantic night flight back, crying most of the way, even if he hated her.

  Evening in Paris, indeed.

  He wouldn’t cry again until Dick and Perry were executed.

  Truman wanted Nelle to ride in the limousine as part of the family, on the way to the funeral at Frank Campbell’s. Joe Capote threw a fit, said she’s my wife, I’m paying, I’m deciding.

  Truman said, “Can an embezzler say ‘I’m paying’ with a straight face?”

  Nelle rode in the limo with the family.

  Very few of Truman’s family made the trip up north, scandalized because Truman was going to have his mother cremated. “Every so often, you have to give your memory a little lobotomy, and that’s what I’m going to do, cut them out one by one . . . cut out the past.”

  Nelle was a part of that past; it was the first time she’d wondered if he’d eventually do the same to her.

  They huddled in a bar after the service, knocking back Kentucky bourbon.

  “I hate her, I hate what she did to me. I gave her all this, why did she do . . . she’s never accepted me. You know that time I wrote you? In high school? I came home and somebody had written ‘Capote the Fag’ on the door? She said it was a delivery boy. I bet it was her. She hated me. Her own son. Well, damn her.”

  He paused, gulping fire from the South.

  “Nelle, I’m going to be famous.”

  She didn’t know if that continued from the previous thought—“Well, damn her”—or just existed on its own, a non sequitur never far from Truman’s mind.

  “It’s all I’ve ever wanted, and I got it from her. It’s the one fucking thing she gave me.”

  He chewed on an ice cube to put out the fire.

  “I should have been a girl.”

  Gulping her own fire, Nelle joked, “And I should’ve been a boy.”

  A memory before it happened, a memory of the fire to come, in a bar in Kansas.

  “We should just switch and be each other. That would solve all the problems. C’mon, we’re going. Put the bourbon in your purse.”

  He took them to the Latin Quarter in the West Fifties, using his velvet funeral suit and Kentucky mash to push his way through the crowds outside, already well-known enough to get in without waiting.

  “We’re gonna dance our way so far away from all this.”

  The day he buried his mother, and he was swing dancing with the most leaden partner there, telling the orchestra leader to pick up the tempo. When a slow dance came up, Nelle assumed he’d want to sit that one out, but he held onto her even harder.

  His whispering mouth barely reached her ear.

  “Never leave me, Nelle, you’re the only one who understands. Promise.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer; years later, he would be the one to leave her.

  They only sat down ringside when the entertainment came on: Christine Jorgensen, the “convertible blonde” who had started out life as a man. She launched into “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” kicking up her svelte and shapely legs; Truman squealed and clapped.

  By the time she got to her finale, it was as if she were singing only to him. Tears streamed down his face, and he mouthed the noble words along with her: “When you walk through the storm, hold your head up high . . .”

  This woman who used to be a man, getting Truman to cry.

  “Nelly, I should’a been a girl.”

  “And I should’a been a boy.”

  They were both crying now.

  Thoughts of shape-shifting late at night, in a cemetery.

  There were no Capotes in this graveyard, only Nelle couldn’t escape them, wherever she went.

  She hurried on to Ed’s grave.

  Myrtle threw on a sweater and went outside; should she get something else to cover Truman? He’d just been wearing pants and a T-SHIRT, unless he’d put on something else. The car was still there, so he must have gone somewhere on foot. It was cold out in the desert around their house; as hot as it was during the day, it was cold at night.

  She grabbed a scrap quilt that Truman’s cousin Sook had made long ago; normally, it was the padding on a bench right by the door. She’d drape it around Truman’s shoulders when she found him. He used to point to the intricate designs on it and tell Myrtle every one of them had a meaning; they were secrets only he and Sook could interpret. Some cold day, he kept promising, he and Myrtle would wrap up in it, and he’d explain what it all meant.

  He’d better hurry up with it, unless he planned on it being her shroud. Then, she’d have all the time in the world to figure it out for herself.

  Damn it!

  Not now.

  She had things to do.

  First, find Truman. Then she’d worry about dying.

  She didn’t have a good feeling about this.

  Truman was afraid of the dark; he wouldn’t have gone out there by himself if he was in his right mind, which he seldom was these days. Between his ghosts and his pills, she didn’t know which was worse. No, she didn’t have a good feeling about this at all.

  And the pages she’d seen from his book hadn’t helped.

  Maggie pawed at the screen door behind her, thinking it was time for her walk. But Myrtle wouldn’t get anywhere if she had to be on the watch for Truman and the dog both, worried a hyena or hawk would swoop down and take off with it, so she left Maggie behind. Let the dog watch TV; it was still on, a blue beacon through the window. Maybe it was like an evening star that would guide Truman back home from wherever he had gone.

  Suddenly, a light hit her in the face; thank God, there he is! At least he’d had the good sense to take a flashlight. But then the light shifted, and in its aura, she could see the face behind it—not Truman, but Mr. Danny.

  She was glad to see even him, but she couldn’t let him know that.

  “What you do with Truman?”

  “Whaddaya mean? I just got here.”

  “He’s missing. Wouldn’t be the first thing you took didn’t belong to you.”

  “I brought the book back. I came to say I was sorry.”

  That reminded Myrtle of what she’d done to his car; she was sorry, too. With the weight of her own mortality on her shoulders, she thought she better set things right first, then look for Truman second.

  “I’m sorry ’bout your car. You get it runnin’ okay?”

  “You see me standin’ here? I didn’t walk all the way.”

  “You’re damn lucky he didn’t
come after the caps on your teeth. I had to talk him out of that one.”

  “I still care for Truman, you know.”

  “You got a funny way of showing it.”

  “He’s a hell of a lot more fun than my wife is.”

  “Don’t know if I like hearing that.”

  “Sometimes you gotta hear things you don’t want to.”

  He paused, then asked the question that was still on his mind.

  “You read any of that book of his?”

  Myrtle paused.

  “Some pages of it blew away when he took off. Yeah, I looked at ’em.”

  And she wished she hadn’t.

  The book he was planning the biggest party in the world over, at least from the evidence of the few pages at hand, wouldn’t make for anything.

  It was the single word heliotrope typed over and over, turned into its own crossword.

  Danny spoke up.

  “You know that word?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know what it means?”

  “No.”

  “I looked it up.”

  That’s a scene Myrtle would have liked to have seen.

  “‘Heliotrope.’ It’s a sunflower that faces the sun.”

  “Nothing wrong with that, just . . . Truman knows a lot more words. Why’d he keep using that one over and over?”

  “It’s something else, too. A color.”

  “What kinda color?”

  He aimed his flashlight at the night sky around them: “Sorta like this.”

  Heliotrope: the sky was reddish purple, the color of blood.

  It looked different at night, Ed’s grave. The flecks of shiny marble and granite on the surface of the tombstone picked up the moonlight and sparkled in a way they didn’t during the day.

  In the light of the moon, it seemed to glow.

  Nelle put down her bag on the plot of land and began pulling out items from it. Oh, how she would have laughed, or shivered, if she’d been able to float above and look down on the scene: an old woman with gray hair, in the middle of the night, laying out the artifacts of her necromancy on a grave. She’d become the witch everyone already said she was. She hadn’t known what she was going to do with them when she left the house; she still didn’t know, exactly. Probably bury the things and get them out of her life forever. She’d gone up to her attic office and with one unceremonious, backhanded swipe of her fist, knocked them all into a K-MART shopping bag.

  Once—in her childhood? In her mind? In a book, a movie?—she had kept a worn cigar box filled with precious mementoes like this: a pocket watch, cat’s-eye marbles, Indian-head pennies, rubbed-down crayons, the figures of a boy and a girl carved from soap.

  They had come from a stranger, who watched her from afar.

  Now, the play pretties she carried were considerably more grown up, and much scarier, although they had come from a watcher in the woods as well: Truman, who had been there at the very beginning, when she wanted to find surprises in a tree. She thought back to one of the most useful lessons he had ever taught her about writing, a single question: what story are you telling? He said that’s the only question a writer had to ask himself; once you knew that answer, the book wrote itself. He’d also said, write what you know. To which she said, but we don’t know the Clutters, so why are we writing about them? He answered in kind, because I want to know them. They seem like good people. It was one of the kindest, truest things she’d ever heard come out of his mouth.

  Now, she wanted to ask him the same question: what story are you telling?

  She laid out the items Truman had sent, fanning them out in three rows, like instruments for a surgical procedure, or tarot cards, waiting for a sorceress to reveal their hidden meanings.

  First, the photographs:

  Her tending this very grave, unaware of having her picture taken.

  Truman and her in the Clutters’ basement, just weeks after the murders.

  Her entering the courthouse in Jefferson City, working on a book about a killer that would never be finished.

  That night in Kansas City, in the snow, with the Nyes; a “night on the town she’d never forget,” Truman had said, before he killed a part of her forever.

  Just pictures, snapshots from her life: grief and a kind of death the common denominator in all of them, no matter what they seemed to show on the surface.

  Next, the three small hand-carved coffins, one of which had come filled with earth, one inlaid with red velvet that might have come from a dead girl’s prom dress, one with a snake’s rattle.

  Finally, in the row closest to her, the strangest of all: the snakebite kits, with their bizarre collages. She lined them up, one after another, in the order she had received them . . . and there it was, plain as day, the story he was telling.

  It was an image of the Clutters’ grave, and she’d missed it the whole time, even though it had been right in front of her. Not quite a picture, or a photograph, it was more like a dream landscape, a portrait constructed through the filter of memory. Once the three boxes were lined up together, their sides touching, the tops and largest front panels formed one unbroken panorama that had been cut into three equal puzzle pieces, all adding up to the fight they had had at Nancy’s grave, when he told her he was going to make up the ending of the book and turn a scene of violence into a scene of peace and moving on.

  There was one large grave marker with four separate scribbles on it.

  There was a giant tree, its roots spreading deep down, under the coffins.

  There was a chestnut horse, Babe, Nancy’s horse, rearing on its hind legs in the distance.

  There was the hint of green grass, and the spring to come, but covered with a dusting of pearly gray snow.

  There were two people, a man and a woman, one short, the other tall, a boy and a girl lost in the past who shivered as they looked down at it all.

  And there was a snake that seemed to be burrowing down ever farther, lower than the roots of the tree.

  On the tombstone, there was scribbling that looked like the Rosetta stone, telling her that these were all clues to be deciphered.

  But what did they mean?

  The same question she’d been asking since day one; she knew the story, but what did it add up to?

  It couldn’t mean that Truman had actually buried something there, at the Clutters’ grave, could it? Not even he would go that far, to desecrate the final resting place of the young girl whose death had shaken him so.

  Would he?

  He played fast and loose with a lot, but not with Nancy’s memory. It had almost killed him to write about her murder; he’d wept as he called Nelle from Switzerland after finishing it, just needing to talk to someone. He told her if science ever came up with a kind of fingerprint powder for words—and could lift the very last things the Clutters had breathed to themselves off the insides of the tape that had gone over their mouths—he wouldn’t want to know what it was. He couldn’t bear to see those bubbles of spit and prayer and terror.

  But was Truman telling Nelle to go there now and find out if something more was buried there, other than the memory of a huge fight they’d had, under the spreading arms of a beautiful oak tree . . .

  She was working too hard on this, thinking it added up to something, when, if Myrtle was right, Truman was just crazy these days, and it added up to nothing. But something festered in her. This was too precise for that. As much of a mess as Truman had become, he was very reverent about his art. That was not to be wasted, and these boxes, they were a work of art, almost religious. Find the story, tell it, but never make fun of it afterward. That was as sacred to him as any golden rule a southern lawyer had ever taught her.

  She knocked the boxes over with a swipe of her forearm so she wouldn’t have to look at them anymore.

  So they wouldn’t have to look at her, not getting it.

  So she could quit thinking.

  So the dead could have their dignity, their all-knowing eyes weighted
down with pennies.

  And there it was, what Truman had wanted her—and only her—to see, and understand, all along.

  It was on the bottom of the boxes, as careful a part of the design as everything on top had been.

  She hadn’t even looked at the bottoms before, even though the slithering snake had been guiding her there the whole time.

  On the bottom, another picture of a snake had been cut into three sections, each part pasted on a separate bottom. Individually, it looked abstract; you couldn’t tell what it was. But put them together, unbroken, and there was no mistaking it: it was a snake.

  And underneath the snake was a single word, made up of a letter on the bottom of each box.

  On the bottom of the first box, an M, made up of two tall Marilyn Monroes on either side, a strand of pearls in a V shape linking them together.

  M is for Marilyn.

  On the second box, an A, two mirror images of Gregory Peck as Atticus, leaning in on himself like a teepee, shaking hands with himself so that his outstretched hand became the bar across the two slants of the A.

  A is for Atticus.

  And on the third box, under the head of the snake, was an N: three pictures of Truman’s favorite, Nancy Clutter, from a high school yearbook picture, where she was in a cheerleader uniform, leading the team on to victory. Long, vertical pictures that formed the three lines of the letter.

  N is for Nancy.

  On top, a snake.

  On the bottom, the word man.

  Snake Man.

  The two figures of a boy and girl on top of the box, looking down into something—the Snake Man’s grave.

  It’s something only Truman and Nelle would know about, unless he’d told over the years. She hadn’t. They’d sworn to keep it a secret all those years ago, and she’d kept her word.

  That was the story he was telling.

  That’s where she had to go now, deeper into the cemetery, to the Snake Man’s grave.

  Assassins were after Truman, trying to steal his book and all its secrets. If he could just get to the sacred spot in the desert where he’d found the dead snake, he’d be safe.