In the weeks following her father’s arrest, Marjorie’s family, or what’s left of it, sit around the kitchen table each night while her mother stares absently into space, sometimes lighting a second and third cigarette because she’s forgotten about the one already smoldering in the ashtray. All that’s left of their dad’s kin is her near-senile grandfather and an older aunt who does more beer drinking than working, and they’re hunkered down in their trailer in Galveston as if prepared for a bomb blast. But her mother’s sister, Aunt Tanya, and Tanya’s husband, Earl, drive up from San Antonio as soon as they hear news of her father’s arrest. Occasionally, they bring Danielle a sandwich and a cold drink, sometimes pausing to gather Marjorie’s hair back off her shoulders when she’s forgotten to brush it, but for the most part they hover silently.
Shortly after their arrival, Marjorie’s roused from a nap by sounds she can’t name. A few minutes later she emerges from her room to find they’ve removed every photo of Beatty from the walls and surfaces of the house.
But aside from that determined effort to erase her father’s existence, each evening they say nothing as Uncle Clem rants and raves about the terrible judgment all of Lubbock is poised to rain down upon their family. People are already talking. Not just about Beatty but about them. They want to know how much Danielle knew and when she knew it. Marjorie will be next. Everyone knows she’s a daddy’s girl. Well, look at who her daddy turned out to be!
Marjorie endures these insults for as many nights as she can stand until she levels a gaze on her uncle that appears to freeze his blood.
She’s always hated Clem’s eyes—they’re big and bulgy and often rendered bloodshot by the previous night’s whiskey. In that moment she imagines picking up one of the butter knives from the dirty dishes no one can bring themselves to clear and driving it into his right eyeball. But in a manner that is both slow and methodical. Maybe while holding his head in place with one hand on the top of his skull so she can really get in there and make a mess of his brains. It’s the first time she can remember imagining an act of violence in this much detail, and it sends a pleasurable flush through her that’s similar to the feelings she gets when she rubs her private parts against a bed pillow.
But the vision seems to have power outside of her as well. Clem flinches, as if her contempt for him is a solid thing that takes up space.
“You hate me because you can’t stop looking at my breasts, and that makes you ashamed,” she says quietly.
If her mother possessed the energy, she might have reached out and slapped the back of Marjorie’s head. Face slaps had ended for good after Marjorie shoved back one night, around the time she turned fourteen. But this evening, all Danielle Payne can do is regard her only child with a vacant, dazed look, as if she thinks the girl even more of a stranger now that her father has been revealed to be a rapist.
Clem’s so outraged he shoves back from the table and storms out, bellowing something about he wouldn’t be around to help the family if they treated him with this kind of disrespect. And that’s fine, Marjorie thinks. Since Clem’s rarely any help to anyone at all.
But pointing that out would ruin the moment. Because something truly special has just happened. Marjorie can feel it.
Even though her words were sharper edged than anything she’d ever heard him say, she’s just spoken them with her father’s clarity and elegance. She’s channeled his quietly powerful tone right there in the kitchen he no longer occupies, in a house he’ll probably never visit again. In a house they might lose to the bank because it’s in his name.
She’s done more than just channel him, she realizes. His voice is hers now, because from the moment the drivers of that pickup truck had wrestled him to the side of the road, holding him there until the cops came, her father hasn’t said a word. Not a single word; he’s gone as silent as the prairie on a windless night.
And Clem, it turns out, is wrong.
Suspicion does not fall on Marjorie and her mother.
Instead, her mother becomes a hero.
The story of how her piercing scream had ended a rapist’s reign of terror is reprinted in papers around the country. The town is in agreement that if that driver hadn’t been passing them at just the right moment and if Beatty Payne hadn’t been quite so injured, Marjorie and her mother might have ended up in shallow graves so the Plains Rapist could keep his secret. And the cops had found a lot more in his trunk than the restraints he’d used. In a canvas bag they’d found necklaces, bracelets, rings. Tokens he’d stolen from his victims in what the papers called “a final insult intended to compound the degradation.” Beatty’s unwillingness to toss the bag aside in an empty field the minute he realized how injured he was is taken by everyone as evidence of the pure evil inside him. He wasn’t willing to leave the car by the side of the road because he feared discovery, but he couldn’t bring himself to part with the physical reminders of his brutal crimes, even temporarily, because he was truly depraved.
Her father adds nothing to the story.
He does not say a word to the police. He does not request a lawyer and says nothing to the public defender appointed to him. He puts up no fight as the charges are brought against him. All take this as evidence of his guilt, and he does nothing to persuade them it isn’t the case. After a psychiatric evaluation, he’s deemed competent to stand trial. He isn’t catatonic, hasn’t gone numb to the stimuli around him. He smiles at things he thinks are funny and nods and shakes his head in response to simple, everyday requests. Because of this, the judge brands his silence an act of defiance, not madness. And because his public defender can’t establish alibis for any of the crimes or determine a remotely reasonable explanation for why the restraints, the mask, and the tokens stolen from the victims were in his trunk, everyone is spared the indignity of a long trial.
Even though he refuses to see her, Marjorie’s sure her daddy’s silence is his gift to her, his way of ensuring their last real communication will be that doleful look he gave her in the car once he realized what her mother was about to discover. For his only child, he speaks no words that might give more life to the horrors that divided their family.
What else can he do?
His wife has deprived him of the chance to explain himself to the two people who mattered to him most. For all they know, his so-called victims are all liars. Maybe his worst sin is infidelity, and given what a shrill and terrible woman her mother is, how can Marjorie blame him? It isn’t like those sobbing, self-pitying women have been murdered.
None of it’s fair, and it’s Marjorie’s first instruction in how one person’s voice can steal another’s without interrupting them.
She wishes her mother would start drinking. She wants her to make a spectacle of herself, tarnish her newfound heroine’s reputation with some explosion of anger or grief. But Danielle Payne does nothing of the kind. She holds her head high, becomes more active in her church, does everything she can to make amends to the victims even while she publicly states it’s arrogant of her to assume she can. In the end, her church passes baskets, which allows her to keep the bank from taking their house, and when there’s money left over, she distributes it evenly among her husband’s victims. The model wife of a convicted serial rapist.
Marjorie knows it’s all an act. A cowardly one.
A truly brave woman would have allowed her husband to open up to them on that road. To explain why he’d done the things he’d done. A brave woman engages the darkness within the man she loves. Learns where it ends and begins and learns how together they can learn the dance steps needed to keep it in submission. And Marjorie would have helped, would have shouldered the entire burden herself if her mother had allowed.
If you can’t be loyal and true to your family, you can’t be loyal to anyone or anything.
But you can’t count on your friends, apparently. Marjorie learns that lesson a year after her father goes to jail, thanks to Brenda White.
Sammy Jo Peyton, Clara Diamond, Daisy H
ufstedler—they all hang in with her for a while, but eventually they give up because Marjorie doesn’t want to go for cheeseburgers and talk to boys anymore because everyone still looks at her funny, even if they do fall all over themselves treating her like a victim and not the guilty party.
But Brenda stays true for a little longer, mainly because she loves the movies as much as Marjorie does. Especially the westerns. And so, when it turns out the only thing left that brings Marjorie any joy is buying double- and triple-bill tickets at the local picture show and disappearing into the fantasy on-screen, Brenda’s content to sit next to her, even while her mind is far away. It makes sense, really. Brenda’s always been a quiet girl, as quiet as Marjorie has become after her father’s arrest. Together they go on long walks and kick rocks and watch sunsets. They have the occasional conversation about strange things, like whether snakes have dreams when they sleep during the winter, but for the most part they don’t have to dress it all up with a bunch of words.
Maybe that’s why she tells Brenda more than she should. Tells her that she’s saving up money for bus fare to visit her daddy in Huntsville. There are no big prisons in West Texas in those days, so it’s a trip across the state, but she’s determined to make it. Alone. Brenda nods as if she understands, but apparently she doesn’t, because on the day Lubbock changes forever, Marjorie arrives home from an evening spent in the library to find her mother red-faced and pacing in the living room, demanding every last penny her daughter has saved up to visit her father in jail.
She is never to see her father again, her mother tells her, not even with her own money. Her father has refused to see her, and if Marjorie insists on going against that God-given blessing, then she’s courting darkness. That’s how she puts it. Courting darkness. Marjorie is to give her mother the money until this crazy instinct passes, and her mother will give it back once she’s confident her daughter’s head is back to rights.
The weather outside has turned downright malevolent; Marjorie had run the last few blocks home with her hand shielding her face from the leaves and dirt turned to shrapnel in the wind. Now, the walls of the house shake in a way that echoes the building rage in both women’s souls. The fusillade of hail pelting the roof tells Marjorie she and her mother will be trapped together for the duration of this moment of reckoning, however long it takes to play out.
When Marjorie refuses to hand over a dime, her mother whacks her so hard across the face, she loses her balance and stumbles into the edge of the kitchen table. It’s not the strike of an angry parent. It’s not a blow caused by lost patience. It’s the kind of violence you unleash in a panic against an intruder, containing the force reserved for an insect or a rodent you’ve found in the kitchen.
Marjorie’s face sings with multi-octave pain, her vision blurs. There’s no hysterical apology. Instead, her mother unleashes a torrent of accusations to rival the sound of hail pounding against the roof, and that’s when Marjorie knows this moment might be the end for whatever still holds them together.
And maybe, she thinks through the pain, that’s not such a bad thing.
23
Amarillo, Texas
Marjorie can tell they’re tweakers when she’s within a few paces of the barn.
Sure, they’ve used bolt cutters to snap the padlock from the door, but the car they’ve parked a few feet away is a shitbird on wheels, a decades-old El Dorado beat to hell by both time and bad maintenance. Some old gearhead might be able to restore it to something worth parading at a vintage car show, but only after they spend days scraping the barnacles of rust from its doors.
Tweakers, for sure. High and stupid and messy as all hell. Any thieves worth their salt would at least keep their mouths shut as they rooted through the barn’s contents, but from outside the half-open door, she can hear the little bastards whispering up a storm, giggling now and then like mad hyenas.
She hasn’t seen the car around town, and she’s a good thirty-minute drive from anything you might call civilization. Marjorie doubts they’ve gone to the trouble of actually casing the place. Probably just cruising the dry open country outside Amarillo looking for a place to tweak and do strange sex things and God knows what else.
Since she’d fallen asleep with most of the lights off, who knows if they could even make out the house at all?
She kicks the door open with one foot, sees the two flashlight beams inside do a jiggly dance in response, beams bouncing over the expanse of tarp and plywood she and the boys placed over the pits they dug last year. Marjorie slides the pump on her shotgun, emitting that telltale sign capable of freezing anyone’s blood, she’s sure.
One of them—a boy, it sounds like—lets out a frightened cry. She steps inside. There’s an electric lantern right inside the door. Without lowering the gun, she reaches down, flicks it on. When the kids before her see the massive shotgun in her dual grip, their hands go up and they start shaking their heads with mad energy. She was right. Tweakers, for sure, as filthy as if they’d clawed their way up and out of the mud lining the creek bed a little ways behind the barn. But they’re young. Much younger than she expected, and this gives her a bit of pause. Teenagers at the most.
But another few minutes and they might have assumed the plank flooring covered up something truly valuable, or they might have started messing with the concrete mixer and the coil of the pump’s tube resting in the corner like a sleeping anaconda. There’s nothing for them to steal, and they should have realized that right away, but they stuck around and that was stupid. Real stupid.
One of them—the girl—starts to panic, blubbering, raised hands trembling. Marjorie’s sure the girl’s trying to muster a defense of herself, but her brains are so scrambled she can’t quite make words. She sounds like a mewling bird.
Kids, Marjorie thinks, just kids, both of them. The car’s way older than they are, which means it’s stolen.
She was a kid once. Before her father was so cruelly taken from her.
But even amid that terrible loss, she never allowed herself to become a broken-down thing like this. She kept her focus. Made choices. Determined her fate. Read the signs and took the opportunities presented her.
When the boy starts talking, he sounds just as bad as the girl, but the words are starting to make sense, like the lyrics of a familiar song being played just far enough from you that when in the first minute after you notice it, all you can hear is the bass line.
“Please let us go . . . please, please . . . let us go. Please let us go. Please.”
24
Lubbock, Texas
1970
The words come ripping out of Marjorie, powered by a year’s worth of repression, further fueled by the remorseless anger on her mother’s face.
Words like “loyalty” and “betrayal” and a dozen other descriptions of the real crimes that destroyed their family, crimes her mother committed against her father. A part of Marjorie had hoped that if she ever did get the chance to say these things—and she never thought she would, but her mother hit her so damn hard there was just no keeping her mouth shut—they would overpower Momma, fill her with shame, break down her arrogance and false fealty to Christ and leave behind a woman desperate for Marjorie’s guidance and instruction. A moment similar to that night right after her father’s arrest, when the truth, spoken plain and simple, had shamed Uncle Clem out of the house.
But there’s no shame in her mother’s blazing eyes, only rage. For a split second it feels like each of them assumes the unholy wail suddenly filling the kitchen is coming from the other woman. Has she broken her mother like she hoped? But her momma’s staring at the living room window as if the madly rattling frame is the source of the awful sound.
She’s looking toward downtown, Marjorie realizes, which is where the storm sirens are located.
The sounds of the weather outside have changed in tone. They’re less chaotic, less like dozens of holes being torn open in the sky and more like a gargantuan locomotive roaring toward th
em across the open plains.
It’s the combination of all these things that seems to finally do her mother in—her boiling hatred of her daughter, the terrible sirens, and the approach of a massive house-eating predator are just too much for Danielle Payne to bear. She erupts into hysterical tears, hands going to her mouth.
In her mother’s emotional collapse, Marjorie sees an opportunity.
She races through the kitchen, throws open the back door. The fierce wind and its stinging curtain of horizontal rain slam the door against the side of the house, holding it wide open like a giant palm. As she crosses the backyard, it feels like her hair’s going to be ripped sideways off her head along with most of her scalp. The door to the storm cellar, the one her father dug when Marjorie was a little girl and their house was shiny and new, rattles in its diagonal frame. She heaves it open with both hands, steps inside. At first it seems like her mother hasn’t followed, but when she turns to pull the heavy door shut behind her, there she is, blonde hair raging around her head like a Gorgon’s snakes. She grips one side of the doorframe with a hand to steady herself so she can step through, and that’s when Marjorie pulls the door shut with both hands.
She slides the bolt in place, backs away into the cellar’s dark. For a few moments, her mother’s pounding and pleas are audible above the raging storm; then the scream that destroyed her family is consumed by the sounds of fencing tearing from the ground, tree branches snapping and being shed of their leaves, the serpentine protests of power lines ripping free of their poles, followed by the whumps of transformers exploding.
It’s all lined up so perfectly. Brenda’s betrayal, the fight with her mother, the tornado’s approach. The heavens and their earthly compatriots have conspired to deliver the judgment that has eluded her mother for too long.
25
Amarillo, Texas
Blood Victory: A Burning Girl Thriller (The Burning Girl) Page 18
