“Say again?” she said. He repeated himself. The killer had made a puzzle, letters and numbers as in a Seek-and-Find, Sunday-comic-style exercise. On the one hand, it was hard to take him seriously; on the other, it was impossible not to.
“Your man’s a moron,” said Oliver. “But the fact that he has to keep prodding everybody is getting embarrassing.”
“I thought about him a lot on my drive down today. The way he sort of kept popping up all those years. And the way he just vanished.” Conventional wisdom held that he’d come back because the newspaper had featured a story last January, anniversary of his first crime, still unsolved three decades later. Wrongheaded speculation about his demise had apparently forced him to set the record straight: alive, intact, authentic, at large. Winning the game he was playing with the city. Catherine paused. “It’s hard to imagine my mother on the Internet. Also hard to imagine you and she spending time together in that place. The smell alone …”
“You warned me, and I still forgot the VapoRub. But actually, it was fine.”
“There’s a woman there who does nothing but cry, all day long. And another who reads the same line from the same children’s book. ‘Jesus loves the little children. Jesus loves the little children.’ Listen long enough, and you think that she’s going to inflect differently, sooner or later, ‘Jesus loves the little children.’ This other lady always asks if I’ve heard from her sister. Every time, ‘Have you heard from Moira?’ How could you live like that?”
“I couldn’t.” He’d already told her, years ago, that he’d kill himself first. The question was, would you remember what you wished for, when the time came? If the weeping woman, for example, wanted to kill herself, how would she pull it off now? How would her old self redress the situation of her new self?
“Thank you,” she said. “I know you hate going there, and I appreciate—”
From his end, the dogs suddenly began barking. “Must go, the lads are having a fit.” He didn’t like to be thanked. His second wife, the martyr, had ruined gratitude for him. It was very difficult to make him hear it. They hung up. Catherine consulted the phone to see how many minutes they’d spoken. Only four. She was quite certain that he’d prodded the dogs into their frenzy. If you took them to the deck door and gestured toward the railing, they would assume defensive positions in anticipation of squirrels, cats, possums.
And then she asked herself: Why hadn’t she brought the dogs with her? How had she forgotten to bring them on her sojourn?
The short-skirted waitress who’d earlier brought her a drink now delivered Catherine her dinner. “Sole in Its Coffin,” she said. “We like to say it’s to die for.”
“Thanks.”
Houston was not at all what Catherine had expected, although she couldn’t quite pin down what she had expected. Astronauts? Oil rigs? Ten-gallon hats? It was moist, filled with trees, houses that reminded her of ones in Wichita. When she arrived, she’d parked in Misty Mueller’s bungalow driveway and studied the front porch. Yellow brick, cream-colored trim, a flower bed and porch swing. Frogs, crickets, birds: the rhythmic noise of creatures and nature, the atmosphere pleasantly sodden. She’d decided then to cancel her hotel reservation, to stay at Misty’s.
When she returned to the house, after dinner, she sat on the porch swing and creaked it back and forth. Dick Little was late, but she didn’t mind. Pleasant, this place. The sound of traffic, at a distance, and the restless animals in the jungly undergrowth up close. The nighttime city sky, pink and lacking stars. Some sweet balmy odor reminiscent of spring rather than January, which made time seem strangely upended. From down the block came a single light, wobbling. An overweight man on a bicycle appeared, ringing a bell that sounded like an old-fashioned telephone. “I apologize, I apologize!” he was calling. Dick Little was large yet graceful, appearing to embrace and flaunt his size the way one would a parade float, the way Santa might behave, navigating magically up the drive and off the comically small bike in one smooth motion. He approached with outstretched hands, the Venus flytrap shake, helmet tucked between elbow and ribs.
“Come in, come in! Isn’t this a sweet place? I’ve been checking in on it, making sure nothing says ‘Unoccupied, welcome crack hos, come on in, gangbangers.’ ” He was flipping on lights, igniting one room after another. “Someone else has a key,” he called out, “probably from her office, somebody who emptied the fridge before the food could rot. Thank God I didn’t have to do that! AC! AC!” he trilled, disappearing down a hall.
Catherine looked around, wondering anew at what she did not know about Misty Mueller. They’d parted ways almost exactly half her lifetime ago; this was what had happened next.
The place was clean, its air stale and damp, its separate spaces appointed as if adhering to the designs of dollhouses: living room with a fireplace, dining room with a long empty table and candlesticks, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen with all the compulsory appliances. Misty had not grown up with this clarity and order, this protected museum atmosphere. To see it here on display made Catherine’s chest hurt.
Her uncle with his red-eyed ferrets. The Lava soap rough as sandstone in the kitchen sink. Toolbox packed with greasy instruments instead of sideboard filled with silver. A deer carcass hung upside down in the garage, blood drained in the horse tank, offal thrown in the alley.
“Without a dog around, any old thing could walk in,” Dick Little was saying, indicating the small plastic opening in the larger back door. Around its edges a dark oily stain, where the dog had rubbed coming and going. “Couldn’t leave that open.” He’d duct-taped the thing shut.
“I was just thinking that I should have brought my dogs.” Catherine described the corgis, her adventurers and companions.
“I have a bichon frise,” Dick Little said. “He has asthma, just like me!”
He was florid, freckled, grinning, ginger-haired, a man holding on to his health with a tentative grip, socially robust but succumbing to something larger than asthma. His fingers and cheeks trembled, an illness or drug reaction, and it took him a moment to steady his breath. From their phone conversations, Catherine knew she would like him, as she did most fallible or frail people who gallantly tried to hide those things, to laugh rather than whine. Now he produced hand sanitizer from his pocket and offered Catherine a squirt.
“I hadn’t seen Misty in twenty-three years,” Catherine said, not for the first time. “But when we were in eighth grade, we stole a dog once. This jerk of a guy owned it, and we saw him beating it in his yard. Yelling at it. Every day we walked home from junior high past his house, and finally we just decided to take his dog.” To prove him evil, they’d returned a few days later, pretending to look for a lost cat. He’d snarled menacingly at them, sworn that some asshole had stolen his dog, then slammed his front door in their faces. Vindicated, they kept his dog, that servile, flinching animal. It went between their houses, each girl claiming that the other owned it, that it was just visiting. At Misty’s, it lived in the backyard in the mud, in a box; at Catherine’s it stayed in her closet, undiscovered by her mother, who would have objected. Her mother objected to anything that hadn’t been her idea.
“I’m a dog person,” Catherine said.
“Me, too,” agreed Dick Little.
That dirty animal stain ringing the dog flap was the first thing that made Misty seem real to Catherine. Real in the way of sensing her, imagining Misty making a mental note to someday scrub away that mess. Imagining the dog’s head coming in, its tail going out. Familiar, a dog who, in Catherine’s mind, looked like that long-ago rescued creature.
Young Catherine surely must wonder what had become of that dirty dog. An empty kennel had been found in the wrecked car.
“Not to speak ill of the dead?” Dick Little said, “but I was very sad to see that.” He indicated with a wagging finger the pretty half-empty bottle of citron vodka centered on the kitchen table. “We were AA buds. She was going on sixteen years sober.”
�
��Maybe she threw a party?”
He shook his head knowingly.
“She drank vodka when I knew her,” Catherine admitted. “We liked it with orange juice.” She shuddered to remember the flavor—healthy breakfast beverage made toxic by alcohol.
“You just hate to see sixteen years gone.”
“Yeah.” Catherine put together the information. “She stopped when she got pregnant.”
Dick Little tilted his head, rolling out his lower lip. “You’re right, that’s probably it. And then her girl goes away, and so what’s the point? Higher power: AWOL.”
“But she was keeping everything together,” Catherine said, indicating the home. “I mean, bills were being paid, right? Mortgage, utilities?” Why did she feel a need to defend a virtual stranger, a person who’d been, in fact, indisputably headed toward disaster when last Catherine had seen her?
“Direct deposit,” Dick Little said. “For a while, the cleaning service was still coming once a week.” The vodka on the table, the car off the cliff in Colorado: this was evidence contrary to “keeping things together.”
Before he left, Dick Little turned the thermostat to 75, fiddled with the television remote, flushed a toilet, provided Catherine with young Catherine’s cell phone number (“I leave messages. It’s still receiving calls, but be prepared for the greeting: whew!”), then took his leave. “I’m fascinated to know what is up with that child,” he said, strapping on his helmet. “Gimme a shout?”
“Of course.” Catherine thanked him, closed the door, and stood in the center of Misty’s living room. Eventually she poured herself a glass of that pricey, lemon-infused vodka. Then she sat on the couch and sipped at it. From where she sat she could see a photograph of the girl, her namesake and goddaughter. In her unsmiling face Catherine attempted to make out the father. Could it have been any of those boys she’d once also known? Not for the first time today, she followed the twisty path of her and Misty’s attachment to those boys and men. The path that had diverged, eventually, she going one way, Misty another.
She’d had a meditative day in the car, remembering them.
First had been Lyle Skinner, who for starters had a real beard. Not mere wisps or patches, not the soft facial hair that some high school boys (not to mention some high school teachers) seemed not to have even noticed on their own faces, but a beard that was busy at all hours growing, surging anew every morning scratchy and rough, perfectly shaped to hold his features, lips, nose, chin. Brown red blond: the girls stared at his face in the early dawning light of a night spent with him, each admiring how, when he lifted his chin to most efficiently inhale the last hit of cocaine, his new beard sparkled like bits of glass on the beach.
She and Misty had found him on the telephone, haunting their call like a poltergeist. Whomever he’d been speaking to, he’d not brought with him to meet them.
He liked to talk to Misty, but he liked to look at Catherine. Maybe this was why, for a while, the three of them were enough. Misty could match him, drink for drink, smoke for smoke, drug for drug, all night long. Catherine tended to pass out, or to pretend to pass out, which gave Lyle somewhere to rest his eyes. She curled into a beanbag chair between the couch and the television, a spot Lyle let his gaze settle on while comparing notes with Misty about relatives and prison sentences. Like a man, Misty’s conversation style was of one-upmanship. In response to the news that Lyle’s father was in Leavenworth for desertion, she notified him hers had died in a local jail awaiting extradition. “Attempted murder,” she explained. Of her mother. While her mother was pregnant. With Misty.
Liar, Catherine would think, amused, opening her eyes to see Lyle caressing her with his stoned focus. She might shift her slightly plump shoulder, hunch it beneath her chin, chilly in the vinyl chair. She could have covered herself, but she liked to imagine the way her body snuggled into itself, her hands up at her throat, crossed at the wrists, like a child napping, knees drawn to elbows, the hemline of her shorts cutting into her thighs: all under his adoring eyes. Her bare feet, like her hands, folded into one another, a person elegantly compacted, as if put in a package. Say, an eggshell or pouch, a satin nest perhaps.
“And rehab?” Misty would be saying. “Don’t get me started.” She drank beer and enjoyed it, not like most girls, who drank only to get drunk, their faces pursed in distaste. She carried stick matches and lit them with her thumbnail. She shook her no-color hair out of her face like a boy. She wore Levis and work boots and work shirts, undershirt and no bra. She had a mole on her jaw, a few hairs growing unplucked from it. Her eyes sloped depressingly down, but her mouth was loose, lazy, likely to grin, which exposed her crooked teeth. She wasn’t stupid, but she looked it. She wasn’t morose, but she seemed to be. She would have made a better man than woman, but she wasn’t lucky enough to have been born one.
She looked like someone with bad luck.
“You guys lesbians?” Lyle had asked the girls, their first night together, the first time he’d watched Catherine slip into her dreamy silence, the first occasion on which he and Misty had yakked away the hours, each staring in blurry fascination at the pretty sight Catherine had arranged of herself before them. His question led the two of them, Misty and him, to sex. Catherine roused at the query, which Misty had felt obliged to answer, like a man, with action rather than words, as if he’d challenged her rather than merely announced his curiosity. And still Catherine knew Lyle watched her as he and Misty fucked on the couch. Catherine’s mouth was shaped as if to say, “What?” and she could feel his focus on her parted lips, on the welcoming curious kiss they seemed to form.
But she was frightened of Lyle. When they went somewhere in his truck, he often insisted that Misty drive so he could arrange himself in the middle, put his right thigh up close to Catherine’s left one. Against the door she nudged herself, resisting. Meanwhile, Misty would shift aggressively, throwing the knob into third and fifth just so she could run her palm over his knee. Again, he would watch Catherine while Misty touched him. Catherine staring out at the Kansas landscape, fields and cows and flashes of lightning in the distance. Bored summer, bottles of beer and vodka hidden beneath the dash, some hair metal band on the radio.
Eventually he had to invite friends. Ron and Don Kovich, twin brothers. “Meet the Twinkies,” he said one night when Misty’s Buick had rumbled into his trailer’s drive. The girls had hung back, seeing two other cars there, the car ticking like their own hesitation. Catherine was made nervous by men; she flinched when she visited Misty’s house, the uncles and cousins and neighbors and coworkers who did not greet visitors, who sat unmoving like volcanoes, simmering. They drank as if to quench that heat inside. They stared at Catherine as if assessing merchandise. Misty they treated like one of them. Catherine always felt childish in their midst, ignorant, innocent, pampered, irrelevant. Representative of a group these men wished to avenge themselves upon. She’d been brought up by people who asked how you were, what you wished to eat, where you were going when you left. Parents, in short. Misty lived among a different set of adults. They sent her on errands because they were too wasted to perform them themselves. They did not indulge girlish novelties like privacy or squeamishness, a diary or a fear of mice. Misty slept in a sleeping bag, like everyone else. Her earnings, from the Dairy Queen where she and Catherine both worked, went into the community pot.
Catherine’s paychecks went directly to a savings account. When she had enough in it, she planned to buy a velvet chaise longue she’d put down a deposit on at a thrift store. Purple. It would go with her antique bed.
Like Lyle, Misty’s relatives also studied Catherine’s prettiness. Her flesh, her polished toenails, her hair in its ponytail, the thick mascara on her lashes, her peace symbol earrings. She hung around Misty, but she wasn’t like Misty. She did not wish to be one of the guys. When she got drunk, before she passed out, she would begin to assert herself, her funny opinions, her quaint notions. She would tell them about the book she was reading, or about
a party her parents had thrown, or about a place she’d visited as a child. Alaska. Italy. New York City. Drunk, she quit worrying that she was bragging or offending or being pretentious. Why shouldn’t she let them know who she was, what she liked, how she spent her time when she wasn’t wasting it with them?
“Asparagus makes your pee stink,” she informed them once; no one else in the room had ever tasted asparagus, let alone known what its effect was on urine. Sly minx, she thought of herself.
On the evening she and Misty were introduced to Ron and Don, the Twinkies, she discovered a mix of cocaine and vodka that allowed her to both stay awake and converse without inhibition all night long. Adding two men to their original threesome somehow served the purpose of liberating Catherine’s tongue. Now she had a real audience; she and Misty weren’t subtly competing for the attention of Lyle—an attention Catherine feared even as she coveted it, rebuffed even as he insisted on bestowing it—instead, they were negotiating a complicated set of attractions. Which man was most desirable? Which girl? A hierarchy developed where none had been before. It was practically geometry. Lyle, in the face of this, grew possessive. These were his girls, the one he nervously adored and the one he casually fucked. He didn’t understand how pleased he’d been with the situation until the Twinkies showed up and ruined it.
Catherine staggered to the trailer’s bathroom, and the four others all shifted on their seats, adjusting, clearing their throats, passing cigarettes and waiting as if at intermission in the drama of their evening. Without Catherine, the performance would not continue. Misty’s presence did not make it a party.
And Misty was fine with that, actually. She was accustomed to it. Her gratitude in having company, the company of another girl, that was enough. More than enough. She had been alone with men her whole life. Her grandmother, like Misty herself, might just as well have been a man, tough, irritable, aggrieved by unending hardship: mouths to feed, bonds to post, fights to quash. That Catherine seemed to find Misty amusing, that Catherine consented to accompanying her here, and elsewhere, made Misty newly amazed and thankful every single day. That she could provide these men with the likes of Catherine meant she was necessary, a linchpin in their fun plan. The bathroom door opened, and they could all hear the toilet’s suctioning recovery, Catherine coming unsteadily back, the trailer sensitive to all motion in it, all lurching and bumping. Into the beanbag chair she fell, skin squeaking on the vinyl. And another screwdriver handed her, each one stronger than the last. At Lyle’s, there was far more vodka than orange juice in the refrigerator.
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