Mr. Tall

by Tony Earley

  Still, even though several years had gone by since she’d last opened her door on October 31, Mrs. Wilson found herself wondering whether the stolen girl had ever trick-or-treated at her house. “The stolen girl” was how local television reporters had come to refer to Angela B., age thirteen, who had vanished while walking from her house, at one end of Mrs. Wilson’s block, to the school-bus stop, at the other. No matter how hard she tried, Mrs. Wilson could not picture the smiling young face she saw on television (and in store windows and stapled to telephone poles and taped to the back windows of pickup trucks and blown up and plastered on the sides of Metro buses) on her own front porch. Whenever, during station breaks, the announcer posed the question “Have you seen the stolen girl?” Mrs. Wilson blinked at the girl’s school picture, then shook her head, because she honestly couldn’t say.

  She liked to imagine that she had once opened her door and found Angela (she would not have been stolen then, so her name would still have been Angela) standing there, waiting patiently, dressed as—what?—a mouse, perhaps, or a rabbit, something soft and nonthreatening. She imagined that she had given Angela not just one or two miniature chocolate bars, as was her habit, but the whole bag, because Angela was clearly such a nice girl and she listened so attentively while Mrs. Wilson told her about Jesse James. She even asked questions. Mrs. Wilson tried not to imagine anything after the point where Angela said thank you and turned to walk away. The thought of the stolen girl stepping off her porch and disappearing into the darkness inevitably brought tears to her eyes.

  Mrs. Wilson’s house was equidistant from the stolen girl’s house and the bus stop that the stolen girl hadn’t reached, and now seemed marked as the place between Point A and Point B where the unknowable existed and the unthinkable occurred. A black hole, the Bermuda Triangle of East Nashville. Four days after the stolen girl had disappeared, and three days after Mrs. Wilson had told two uniformed police officers what little she could, a Metro detective—a sober black woman whose air of professional detachment made Mrs. Wilson even sadder for the stolen girl than she already was—had sat on Mrs. Wilson’s good sofa and asked her if she was sure she hadn’t seen anything suspicious. Outside, a TV reporter was broadcasting a live report, which Mrs. Wilson and the detective both glanced at from time to time on Mrs. Wilson’s muted television. Later, other police officers searched her garage and car trunk and underneath her house for the stolen girl’s body. (One of them wriggled out of the crawl space beneath the porch clutching a beautiful cut-glass doorknob, which he solemnly presented to Mrs. Wilson.) The candlelight prayer vigil and neighborhood march organized by the stolen girl’s church stopped in front of her house and sang “Where You Lead Me I Will Follow.” Not knowing what else to do, Mrs. Wilson blinked her porch light on and off in what she hoped was a show of solidarity. For days on end, her view of the street was blocked by the satellite-TV trucks parked at the curb, their tall masts raised, their great dishes pointed heavenward, as if awaiting a word from God.

  Although months had now passed since the stolen girl had vanished, Mrs. Wilson combed through her memories every day, hunting for the one small clue that might help to break the case and return the stolen girl to her family. What had she seen that day? Surely she must have seen something. The stolen girl jogging past, her books clutched to her chest, chased by a gang of taunting older boys? A van prowling back and forth, its shadowy driver no doubt a religious zealot of some kind, searching for a girl to steal? But Mrs. Wilson remembered nothing of the sort. Increasingly, what she found swimming to the surface of her mind were memories that she had forced herself to set aside years before. She imagined this process to be not unlike that of a police boat trolling the Cumberland in search of one particular corpse and dragging up another instead.

  When Mrs. Wilson was fifteen years old and lived in Jackson, Tennessee, she had loved a boy and become pregnant. Her parents had pulled her out of school, and when she began to show, they sent her away to a home in Kentucky, where she lived with two Mennonite spinsters, as lumpen and sexless as sacks of horse feed, and a dozen other “girls in trouble.” They were housed in a converted antebellum mansion on top of a hill outside Lexington, but there was nothing in any way grand about the place. Its parquet floors had been covered with gray institutional linoleum, which, although it was already spotless, the spinsters forced them to scrub every day. The girls understood that the endless scrubbing was a punishment of sorts, part of the deal that their parents had struck with the operators of the home, something to make the girls “think twice” the next time they considered climbing into the backseat of a car with a boy. When Mrs. Wilson’s baby came, she was not allowed to hold it. She glimpsed the child, a girl, only briefly, as they carried it away, still bloody, its mouth a tiny black O of perfect accusation.

  Mrs. Wilson watched the news in Nashville and tried to recall the morning that the stolen girl had disappeared, but instead she remembered the violently blue eyes above the mask of the nurse who had leaned over her as she cried for them to bring back her baby. “Now, sweetheart,” the woman had said, “you know you can’t take care of a baby.”

  A week after the baby was born, Mrs. Wilson returned home. Her family pretended that nothing had changed, but, of course, everything had. During her absence, she had become invisible to the boy she loved. She was too embarrassed to go back to school, and her parents didn’t force her. Although she was the daughter of a doctor, and spent those long, empty days working on her tan at the country-club pool, she eventually married a poor boy, Virgil Wilson, who was handsome and kind to her and seemed not to notice that she was damaged goods. When Mrs. Wilson came to know Virgil better, she realized that he had considered her a canny choice, a good deal on his part—used, certainly, high-mileage, even, but overall a much better model than he would have been able to afford new.

  They moved together to Nashville, where he worked as an electrician. They bought the house at the address that Jesse James had once called home, and they lived there more or less amicably for the forty-eight years it took Virgil Wilson to smoke himself to death. Their only child, a pleasant but wholly unremarkable boy, now lived in Phoenix, where he spoke Spanish like a Mexican and managed a small office for a large company that installed sprinkler systems in the yards of rich people. Mrs. Wilson’s daughter-in-law was a vicious anorexic girl from California; her grandchildren couldn’t understand her Tennessee accent over the phone. These were the facts of Mrs. Wilson’s life, as she now added them up. If she had only been looking out the front window the morning the stolen girl had last walked by, if she had been able to run from the house and scream for the police and save that girl, how different it all might have seemed!

  Mrs. Wilson still followed the case avidly on TV, though the reports were less and less frequent. She already knew, of course, that on the morning of the disappearance the stolen girl had been wearing blue shorts, a white T-shirt, and pink sneakers. One night at five, however, she learned that the stolen girl had also been wearing underwear decorated with a picture of Tigger, from Winnie-the-Pooh, and one of only two bras she owned. Her other bra remained neatly folded in her top dresser drawer. She had not packed a bag, nor had she removed from her nightstand the cache of sixty-eight dollars that she had earned babysitting.

  The next night at ten, a beautiful young woman with perfectly unnatural red hair delivered a report that she, Mrs. Wilson, had watched the young woman tape over and over earlier in the day, apparently trying to get it just right. “For several months in the late eighteen hundreds,” the woman said now, staring seriously out of Mrs. Wilson’s television set into Mrs. Wilson’s living room, “unbeknownst to his neighbors, the outlaw Jesse James lived with his wife and children in the house you see behind me. Now this quiet street bears an even darker secret: what happened to Angela B.?” At this point, the camera zoomed in on Mrs. Wilson’s house, and Mrs. Wilson was alarmed to see herself on her own television, peering like a ghost from behind her living-room curtains. “If
the people on this street know what happened to the East Nashville seventh grader,” the young woman said, off camera, “they’re not talking.” Mrs. Wilson was aghast. The report was, of course, just filler for a slow news night, but that little bitch had never even asked her if she knew anything! And the actual house that Jesse James had lived in had burned down years before Mrs. Wilson was even born! She made a note to herself to call the station the next morning and complain.

  Mrs. Wilson went to bed angry and woke in the middle of the night to find a door that she had never seen before ajar in the wall opposite her bed. She stuck her feet in her scuffs, put on the housecoat that lay at the foot of the bed, and crossed the room. She pushed the door open with the palm of her hand and almost giggled as it creaked melodramatically. Below her, an old wooden staircase disappeared into a dug-out basement. She didn’t find it odd to discover a basement in a house that she had lived in for more than half a century, and for this reason alone she decided that she had to be dreaming.

  She stepped tentatively onto the top step. It bent slightly under her weight, and she groped around for a light switch, which she did not find. The stairs, though, didn’t seem entirely dark, so she took another step down, then a third and a fourth. Soon the staircase opened up entirely on her left (the stairs didn’t have a handrail), and, afraid to look down into the space below, she kept to the right-hand side of the steps, brushing the earthen wall gently with her fingertips as she descended. Studying the wall, she made out spade marks left by the man who had dug the old basement God knows when. The air grew cooler. It smelled moldy, unbreathed, perhaps unfit for breathing, and it began, as Mrs. Wilson traveled slowly downward, to take on a faintly rotten odor. She heard her grandmother’s voice saying, “Copperheads, Julie, you can smell ’em. They smell like rotting Irish potatoes.” And, for the first time, Mrs. Wilson understood that this basement was not a good place, that she would discover nothing here that would make her happy.

  At the bottom of the steps, she found herself in a long, narrow room with a dirt floor. Dim daylight made its way in through a row of three filthy transom windows, set in the walls, just below the exposed floor joists of the house. At the center of the room crouched a massive black furnace, which Mrs. Wilson instantly recognized as the coal furnace from the home in Kentucky where she’d spent the final months of her pregnancy. Painted in white letters on the firebox door was the word “Hyde”—the name of the company that had manufactured the furnace—and she remembered sitting on the floor next to it with a sad, long-faced girl from Alabama, sharing a single contraband cigarette. She remembered that the girl from Alabama had pointed at the name on the furnace and said, “That right there is what we’re doing.” The girl from Alabama lost her baby not long after, Mrs. Wilson recalled, and she never heard from her again. Mrs. Wilson wondered how in the world the furnace from Kentucky had ended up underneath her house, and how much she would have to pay to have it cut up and hauled out. She cautiously approached the furnace, turned the handle, and tugged open the heavy door. As she leaned over to look inside, a voice from behind the furnace said, “It don’t work anymore. It ain’t hooked up to nothing.”

  Mrs. Wilson walked around the furnace, where a man sat on a box in the corner in the thin light below one of the narrow windows. He had black hair and a full black beard. A dark bruise appeared to stain his left cheek. His suit reeked of mildew, but tied carefully around his throat was an old-fashioned string tie. Mrs. Wilson understood, without quite knowing how, that the man had been sitting on that box, below that opaque window, for untold years. At his feet lay a moldering pile of something vaguely organic that Mrs. Wilson was able to recognize as a saddle only by its two rusted stirrups.

  After a time of staring at the man, her mouth opened in recognition. The man nodded. But when she pointed at him and said, “You’re—” he raised his hand and cut her off.

  “Don’t say my name,” he said.

  “I won’t.”

  “You have my doorknob.”

  Mrs. Wilson pointed above her head. “It’s still in the house.”

  Jesse James nodded, as if this were a satisfactory answer.

  “What do you know about me?” she asked.

  He, too, pointed upward. “Everything,” he said. “I can hear you.”

  She looked up at the exposed joists and above the joists at the thin flooring. A stray nail poked through the boards in a spiky nest of splinters.

  “See?” he said.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asked.

  Jesse James reared back on his box and laughed, a scratchy, ill-used sound that made her flinch. His teeth were yellow and dry-looking, and Mrs. Wilson imagined his mouth filled with cobwebs. “Why, kingdom come, Mrs. Wilson,” he said. “Judgment Day. I’m waiting for ’em to roll back the stone.”

  Beside the outlaw, Mrs. Wilson saw for the first time, there was a perfectly round hole—the entrance to a tunnel—cut into the wall. She felt not exactly a breeze but a slight stirring of air emanating from the hole, and she inhaled again the fetid copperhead smell she’d noticed as she descended the stairs. It was stronger now. She measured the hole silently with her eyes and decided that it’d be big enough to walk through if she hunched.

  Jesse James saw where she was looking and shook his head. “I can’t let you go in there,” he said.

  “But I need to go.”

  “If you go in there, I can’t let you come back out.”

  “Who’s in there?” she asked.

  “The stolen girl,” he said.

  “Which one?” she heard herself ask.

  Jesse James cocked his head and looked at her quizzically, as if she should already know the answer to the question. “Why, all of ’em,” he said.

  Mrs. Wilson awoke to find herself clutching her stomach and howling. She climbed out of bed and stormed through the house, doubled over, screaming into a pain that seemed to have no particular locus but flowed from everywhere at once.

  “No!” she yelled in the kitchen.

  “No!” she cried in the hallway.

  In the living room, she collapsed onto her good sofa and wailed, “No! Don’t take her. Bring her back!”

  She drew her knees up to her chest and sobbed until the pain eased and it was the sobs themselves that had become painful. When she rolled onto her back and stared upward, trying to catch her breath, she was surprised to find that it was morning, that sunlight, indifferent and beautiful, was filling the room, as if all were right in the world. Mrs. Wilson climbed to her feet and staggered to the front door. She took the key from the nail, unlocked the deadbolt, and pulled the door open. She gasped when she saw two little girls, no more than seven or eight years old, heading along the sidewalk toward the bus stop, their arms linked, their heads close together, giggling and whispering conspiratorially. School had started again. A cold shot of adrenaline fluttered into Mrs. Wilson’s heart. Nobody was watching the girls. Where were their parents? Where were the police? How could everyone have forgotten the stolen girl so soon? Only a few months had passed, after all, since the stolen girl had walked this street for the last time.

  Fifteen or twenty yards behind the girls, an overweight teenage boy clumped along, his black baggy jeans drooping down over the tops of his shoes, some sort of sports jersey hanging almost to his knees. He was looking at the ground, nodding his head to whatever music was coming through the headphones clamped over his ears.

  Mrs. Wilson crossed her porch. She stepped down onto the top step and pointed an accusing finger at the boy. “I’m watching you,” she called out. “I know who you are. I know where you live. I’ll recognize you.”

  The boy nodded along, oblivious. But out of the corner of her eye Mrs. Wilson saw one of the girls look back. The girl whispered something to her friend, who also glanced over her shoulder at Mrs. Wilson. Then the second girl said something to the first and together they began to run, their book bags bouncing against their backs in a way that looked painful.

>   Mrs. Wilson clutched the collar of her housecoat and ran a hand through her hair. “No,” she whispered. “Oh, no.” She took a few hesitant steps down the sidewalk, waving at the girls, as if waving could pull them back, could make them unafraid. “Come back!” she said. “It’s not me! I swear. You don’t have to be afraid of me!”

  Yard Art

  SHE LIVED ALONE NOW, in a big house in Brentwood bought with the royalties of a bad country music song her husband had sung. When her husband moved out he had taken the furniture with him—out of spite—enough to fill the six large units he had rented at a place on Gallatin Road. She found that she liked the house without furniture—she had acres of parquet floor on which, after a few glasses of wine, she gleefully slid in her sock feet—but one of the toilets downstairs ran constantly, which drove her crazy. She could hear it all over the house, even when she covered her head with a pillow in the master suite upstairs.

  The plumber she called was a singer, of all things—“Arlen Jones, the High Lonesome Plumber,” said his ad in the Yellow Pages—and it was the High Lonesome Plumber who now sat backward astride her noisy toilet, working on something inside the tank while she leaned against the doorjamb and watched.

  The plumber’s pants had not slid down the way one frankly and perhaps unfairly expected a plumber’s pants to, but when he leaned over the tank, his golf shirt hiked up his back, and she caught herself staring at the thin column of curly, gray hair that had migrated north of his belt. She looked at her wineglass and set it down on the counter beside the sink. She had no idea why she had called a plumber who wanted to be a singer, instead of a plumber who just wanted to be a plumber, because—for the moment, anyway—she hated all singers and thought that the world would be a better place if somebody invented some kind of bomb to drop on Nashville that would kill all the singers without hurting anybody else. Well, maybe not all the singers. Maybe just the hat acts. That’s what Nashville needed—a hat-act bomb. Her soon-to-be ex-husband, the furniture thief, was a hat act.