My Wife and My Dead Wife

by Michael Kun

  At the job interview I spoke with a man from the personnel department. The man who interviewed me for the job was about the same age that I am now. He had a crewcut and a round face, with crow’s feet at his eyes. He seemed bored with me until I mentioned that I was from Cadbury. He asked me if I knew where Crow’s Point was, and I said I did: Crow’s Point is ten miles or so from Cadbury, southeast.

  “I once knew a girl in Crow’s Point,” he said. “In fact, I was engaged to her. She was a beautiful, beautiful girl. She was murdered. It was very strange. You see, she was collecting money for charity, and when she knocked on the door, the guy answered and—boom!—he just shot her in the head with a pistol. Then he took her out back and buried her in the backyard like he was burying tulip bulbs. Her parents filed a missing person’s report with the police when she didn’t come home that night, and it only took them an hour or so to find her. They found her car parked right in front of the guy’s house, and then they found her body in the backyard. It’s a very sad story, not a story for the weak of heart.”

  The man told me this story matter-of-factly, like a teenager reading Shakespeare aloud in class. You could tell he’d told that story, that EXACT story at least a thousand times. When I left the office I knew he wouldn’t offer me a job. Everything worked out fine, though. Had I worked for that company, I wouldn’t have ended up going back to Cadbury that summer to work in the appliance store where Shellie worked. We wouldn’t have ended up getting engaged and married. So everything worked out fine. Except for the girl in Crow’s Point. I have to remind myself of that sometimes.

  Except for the girl in Crow’s Point.

  x

  It was only two days after they found the body that the police arrested Victor Smalls. He was forty-eight years old according to the articles in the newspaper, and he owned Smalls’ Clothing, the same place where I had bought my suit. He was a widower and he dressed well, which made sense since he could get all the clothes he wanted. They arrested Victor Smalls, and the following morning my mother and Carl and I bumped into one of the police officers who’d arrested him. We ran into him at the post office, where we were in line to send off some packages, and my mother asked him if they were certain it was Victor Smalls who’d committed the murder.

  And the policeman said, “There’s some very damaging evidence.”

  And my mother said, “What’s the evidence?”

  And he said, “I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”

  Already there was a rumor in town that Victor Smalls had tortured the boy in the cellar of his store. My mother asked if that was true, and the policeman said, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything, ma’am. But I will tell you this. When we arrested him, Smalls said, `There are some crazy people in this town.’ Well, if that’s the case, we ought to elect him Mayor.”

  The best I remember, though, Victor Smalls had never done anything crazy. He was not some shifty brute. He sold clothes. He was a normal, quiet man, like most men in Cadbury. But the fact that Victor Smalls was a normal, quiet man could only mean one thing: he was guilty. Anyone who’s ever been to the movies knows that being normal and quiet is considered incriminating evidence.

  Very incriminating.

  But there was something unusual about the murder, too. The boy had a fresh cigarette burn on the palm of his hand.

  And Victor Smalls didn’t smoke.

  x

  The school had counselors come talk to all of us about our grief. They told us that after a tragedy, it’s not unusual for sick, insensitive jokes to run wild, and that’s what happened in Cadbury. It happened after the Challenger spaceship blew up. The counselors said that psychologists excuse these jokes as “defense mechanisms.” They say jokes are natural. One of the jokes went like this: “Did you hear that Victor Smalls was voted class clown in high school? Yup, he was a real cut-up.”

  The first time I heard that joke, everyone laughed, but they did so in a strange way, as if they were pretending they hadn’t heard the joke at all, but instead had thought of another, harmless joke of their own at precisely the same moment. Later, I’m sure, they each repeated the joke to someone else. Like I just did.

  Here’s something else: On one of the bridges in town, some boys painted “VISIT CADBURY, GEORGIA! BRING THE KIDS!” At least I suspect that boys painted it. I can’t imagine girls doing that. It was the only graffiti I ever saw in Cadbury.

  Later, when our basketball team went to play a game against Magruder High School, the students at Magruder wore T-shirts that read “I SURVIVED CADBURY, GEORGIA.” On the back was a drawing of an old, well-dressed man clutching an ax.

  In the cartoon bubble coming out of the man’s mouth, it said, Here come the Cadbury Poets, I killed their kids, but they didn’t know it.

  It was all very natural.

  x

  In high school, our phys ed teacher was named Mr. Mennori. He’d been in the Marines. The Marine insignia was tattooed on the inside of his arm. To get us to run faster, Mr. Mennori would shout to us, “Pretend a madman is chasing you with a knife.” That was BEFORE what happened with Victor Smalls.

  The sports teams there are now called the Cadbury Bulls, and the students all cheer:

  Rattle, rattle, rattle

  Here come the cattle

  Moo moo MOO!

  There aren’t cattle within fifty miles of Cadbury, for godssakes. It’s a fishing town.

  Why would they do that, change the name of the sports teams?

  Why?

  x

  Victor Smalls was listed in Who’s Who in Cadbury, Georgia. My father was, too. It wasn’t so much an honor as it was a fact of life: all of the men in town were listed in Who’s Who. The Chamber of Commerce didn’t want to get anyone angry, so they decided to include everyone. That would never happen in a large town like Atlanta. God knows what they do in New York.

  Victor Smalls’ entry read: “Proprietor of Smalls’ Clothing.” That was all, one sentence. He wrote it himself. Everyone wrote their own entries each year. My father once wrote, “Samuel J. Ashe, Jr. King of Spain,” and no one edited it. They ran it just like that: “Samuel J. Ashe, Jr. King of Spain.” So I guess that made me and Carl Princes of Spain.

  It’s strange what crosses your mind at times, how in the midst of a gruesome event like what happened to those children, you could think, Where is everyone supposed to buy clothes now? I thought it, and I’d bet I wasn’t the only one who did. But what was everyone supposed to do? Were we supposed to drive to another town?

  x

  My grandfather was a fisherman. My grandfather on my mother’s side. He once met Ty Cobb, the great baseball player, in a parking lot outside a liquor store in Albany, Georgia and got him to autograph a baseball. He gave it to me, but I don’t have it anymore.

  The largest tiger shark ever caught weighed 1,780 pounds. It was caught by a man off Shady Grove, South Carolina in 1964. Not a week later, not a week, my grandfather caught one that weighed 1,777 pounds—three pounds less!

  “I should’ve put my thumb on the scale,” he told us.

  Each morning, even today, dozens of fishermen steer their crafts into the bay, then set off for deeper water and larger fish. At night, most of the boats are tied to the docks by the grocery store.

  One night, when I was in high school, I took a walk through town, and I wound up by the grocery store. I looked at the boats as I walked down one of the docks, not looking too carefully. All of them had women’s names. Linda. Silly Sue. My Maria. Amy Sweet Amy. When I reached the end of the dock, I sat down and just watched the water. Several hours passed before I got up and started to walk back toward home. It was then that I saw the boat nearest the grocery store. I hadn’t seen it when I’d walked out. The boat was listing to one side so that it had filled with thick, brown water. It was painted light blue, but the paint was chipped, peeling, and the bow had turned green-red with rust. The lantern in front was broken. So were the windows. The cabin was filled with garbage. A wooden bas
ket with its slats broken, with a single line of string running into the water. A red rubber hose. A broken navigation panel. A wire cage. A rusted motor, on its side. Twigs. A broom. A cardboard box with “Perishable Fresh Seafood” on the side. Some soda pop cans. Crumpled cigarette packs. Pieces of wood. I remember looking at it and thinking I could pull it out of the water and fix it up. Keep it in the garage and work on it on weekends. Put it up on cinder blocks like some of the boys in school did with old cars. Sand it down, slap on a fresh coat of paint.

  I decided to pace off the boat to see how large it was. I walked on the dock, alongside the boat, counting off my footsteps. When I turned again to consider the boat, I saw its name painted on the bow: Kathy. Suddenly, I was lightheaded. A few months earlier, two of my classmates found a boy’s hand in that same boat. It was the hand with the cigarette burn on the palm. The other pieces of the body were found in the bay, in very shallow water, beside the boat. Pieces only a doctor could dream of.

  My grandfather used to keep his boat—the boat in which he caught that tiger shark—no more than 50 yards away, back when he was still living, of course. The first time he took me fishing, we left at five o’clock in the morning. He showed me how to bait the hook, and how to cast, and how to reel in. I was the first to make a catch, a tiny bluefish that couldn’t have been more than four inches from end to end. My grandfather twisted the hook from its mouth and explained to me that it was too small to keep.

  “Blessed are the little fishies,” he said, and he dropped it back into the water.

  x

  Our entire high school attended the funeral. The counselors said it would be a good idea, but they never explained why. It was the first funeral I’d ever been to, and I’ve hardly gone to any since, just my grandparents’. I just can’t stand to look in the caskets, or even to imagine what’s inside. “People always seem to look smaller without their souls,” as my mother used to say. I don’t know if I agree with that. I just know that the body in the casket didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen before.

  Several days later, there was a photograph of the boy’s mother on the front page of the Cadbury Weekly newspaper. She looked dignified in her black dress and dark glasses, with a white handkerchief in one hand. She was holding an umbrella because it was drizzling. The caption said something like, “The mother of the slain child grieves at the grave of her son.” In the article beneath the picture, she said, “He was a joy. He was a bright, ambitious boy. He wanted to be an astronaut. And a professional football player. And a private detective.” It was enough to make you wonder whether you should ever even dream about being an astronaut or a professional football player or a private detective. It was enough to make you wonder whether you should ever dream about doing anything at all with your life.

  In the article, they also quoted a poem that one of the girls in our class read at the funeral. She was the editor of the school yearbook, Serendipity. I don’t remember her name, but I remember the poem word-for-word, even after all these years, as if I’d just heard her read it a moment ago:

  Let’s pull the stars down from the sky,

  Let’s help the moon turn its back,

  Let’s drain the oceans til they’re dry,

  Let’s make the sun turn brown, then black.

  Let’s be strong and not meek,

  Let’s turn the clocks back a week.

  Spin the dials counterclockwise,

  Seven days in reverse,

  Wipe our noses, wipe our eyes,

  A friend returns, none the worse.

  A friend returns, and always stays,

  Only now it’s been eight full days.

  And now it’s nine, and now it’s ten,

  And there’s much to do before we’re through,

  Too many clocks to turn back, friends,

  Too much rewinding for us to do.

  So let’s close our eyes and get some sleep,

  Let’s think of him and not weep.

  Let’s leave the stars up in the skies,

  Let’s keep the moon in its place,

  Let’s let the oceans fall and rise,

  Let’s look the sun right in the face.

  Let’s not be meek, let’s be strong,

  Let’s let the clocks just tick along.

  Maybe that’s why I think the Cadbury Poets was a lovely name for a sports team. Maybe that’s why I don’t like the new nickname.

  x

  Several days after Victor Smalls was arrested, my mother and I were in the grocery store, and we overheard an old married couple talking. It was a couple by the name of Mr. and Mrs. Steen. They were talking about the murders, about Victor Smalls.

  “I don’t know,” the woman was saying, “I always thought he was very nice.”

  And her husband said, “He’s a murderer.”

  And then she said, “Maybe, maybe not. Besides, how do you explain the cigarette burns on the boy’s hand if Victor Smalls didn’t even smoke? Hmm?”

  And her husband said, “Maybe he had an accomplice, like in the movies and TV shows.”

  I remember something else I heard the woman say. She said, “Even if he did do it—and he’s innocent until he’s proven guilty in this country—even if he did do it, we’ll never know why. Only God knows why someone would do something so brutal.”

  Her husband said, “At the very least—I mean, at the very least,—we should vote to take him out of the Who’s Who.”

  And she said, “What if he’s innocent?”

  Then he said, “Well, if he’s innocent, we’ll just put him back in next year,” which is exactly what the Chamber of Commerce voted to do: remove Victor Smalls’ entry from the Who’s Who and put it back in the next year if he was found not guilty. Only they never had to put his name back in the book.

  x

  Shellie and I had hardly spoken after she’d beaten me in the school election. We ended up working at the appliance store together a couple summers later, though, the summer after we’d graduated. She was pretty, and she was charming in the way only southern women can be, and she was good at selling vacuum cleaners. She’d pretend vacuuming was fun. She smiled while she demonstrated whatever vacuum she was trying to sell.

  “I pretend a parade is going past,” she explained to me once. “That’s how I do it. If you pretend a parade is going past, you can’t help but smile.”

  Sometimes she’d even sing while she was vacuuming.

  It was hard to stay mad at her about the election. The whole “HAM IS A PIG” thing was actually pretty funny, if you think about it. “You didn’t miss out on much,” she said. “Not being our class president, I mean.”

  And I said, “Is that so?”

  And she said, “It’s not like a lot of foreign dignitaries flew in to meet me.”

  And I said, “No?”

  And she said, “No, but I was on a first-name basis with the president of the math team.”

  Sometimes, when business was slow, we would sit on top of the dishwashers and tell each other stories. For instance, I told her about how my grandfather met Ty Cobb and how Carl was going to go to law school. Once, sitting on the dishwashers, she told me about her brother. Her twin brother. He was the boy who was killed. He was the boy with the cigarette burn in the palm of his hand. She said he’d wanted to be an astronaut, and a professional football player, and a private detective, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

  She said, “Let’s not kid ourselves. I only beat you in the election because I got the sympathy votes.”

  And I said, “No, you beat me fair and square.”

  Later that year, when she said she loved me, I asked her to marry me. It’s hard not to marry someone who’s pretty and sad and who loves you. It’s hard not to give her everything she wants.

  x

  I remember our wedding like it’s a movie I’ve seen on television too many times. We were married in Cadbury at the Church of the Holy Angels. It was the same church where I’d been an altar boy when I was in schoo
l. It was the same church where Carl and I had been baptized. Shellie and her brother, too.

  Shellie wore her mother’s wedding dress, which was creamy white with a scoop neck and a long train; the seamstress had done a wonderful job. Carl was my best man. My mother sat in the front row and cried. My father patted her hand like he was the bearer of bad news. The bridesmaids wore blue dresses the color of the ocean where it’s stopped being brown or green, a color you can only reach by boat.

  Near the end of the ceremony, the priest said to me, “Do you, Hamilton Ashe, take Shellie O’Connell to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

  And I said, “I do.”

  He turned to Shellie and said, “And do you, Shellie O’Connell, take Hamilton Ashe to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

  And she smiled at me with those pretty white cheerleader’s teeth of hers, then leaned forward slightly and in a tiny, tiny voice so quiet that only the priest and I could hear she whispered, “Ham is a pig.”

  That was how our marriage STARTED.

  CHAPTER 4: TAILORS NEED SEAMSTRESS

  Palmeyer and I work late, until about eight o’clock, and when I get home, Renée is already sitting on the couch with Guitar Walter, the college boy. The first thing I notice is the tape recorder.

  The tape recorder Renée bought is as large as a microwave oven, maybe larger. I’d expected it would be one of those little tape recorders that you hold in the palm of your hand, the kind you see people carrying when they’re running or riding their bicycles or doing some other kind of exercise. Only it’s not. It’s ENORMOUS, and it has dials and knobs and red lights on it like the control panel of a jet airplane.

  Then I notice the microphone. Renée didn’t say anything about a microphone, but there’s a microphone, too. A big microphone with a foam ball on the top the size of your fist.

  Then I notice Renée’s clothes. She’s not wearing a T-shirt like she normally does. No, she’s wearing the chicken shirt. MY chicken shirt. It’s a white collared shirt with drawings of chickens on it that I usually wear while I’m just sitting on the couch reading the newspaper or watching television or something else of that nature. Sometimes Renée wears it when she goes to sleep. It’s not the kind of shirt I’d wear outside the apartment. It’s not the kind of shirt I ever show anyone other than Renée.