Visits from the Drowned Girl Page 2

  There are a few things Benny had experienced from up high that he never told another soul about. Sometimes, in late summer, storms come up quick. The distant threat of bad weather wasn’t enough to keep him grounded, but nobody in their right mind wanted to be three hundred feet up a metal pole during a thunderstorm. “Right mind,” however, is awfully subjective. Benny just wanted to get done that day. Three summers ago, on a Friday, and he normally didn’t do tower work on Friday because he worked for his uncle Nub on the weekends. But the flashing beacon and two other bulbs had burned out at the very top of a tower not too far from the county airport. Leaving the dead bulbs in place for the weekend was a dangerous proposition because of all the weekend flying lessons. All Benny had to do was go up and change the bulbs. He knew the weather report called for something wicked, but even without the weather-band radio harping away, or the little beep-beep-beep of the warning that scrolled across the bottom of the TV screen, Benny could’ve predicted an afternoon storm. It had been hot, sweltering hot, for three days in a row, and no rain. The rains were due.

  “Come on, Benny,” his boss said on the telephone. “You’re quicker than anybody else. Forty-five minutes max, hour and a half minimum. That’s all it would take.”

  Benny hesitated, just to hesitate. He knew he’d do the job.

  “It can’t wait till tomorrow. You know that, don’t you?”

  By the time Benny got to the site, he could see the storm clouds banking on the southern horizon. When he got in harness, all he could smell was ozone. The storm was a mile or more away, so the sky overhead was clear, but the color shift had already occurred; everything that could reflect light did so with a yellowish pall. Forty-five minutes; maybe an hour. The wind picked up when he was halfway to the top of the rungs. Benny hurried. Because he was in a hurry, he clipped himself to the tower at intervals of twenty-five feet or more, instead of the usual ten feet. Besides, Benny never fell. He watched a wall of heavy rain overtake a small dairy farm a quarter of a mile from the tower. The cows got nervous when the thunder started; they trudged single-file toward the barn. With one bulb changed, the mist that moved ahead of the rainfall cooled Benny’s face.

  He’d forgotten to roll up the windows in his van. Oh, well. Benny let the second bulb, the burned one, drop to the ground. Even through the gut-rumbling thunder, he heard the bulb explode on impact with whatever it hit. Before Benny made it to the top bulb, the most important one, he was in the thick of the storm. All the towers are grounded, so Benny wasn’t that afraid of the lightning. But Lord—the wind and the thunder and the heartless black of the clouds so thick he could no longer see the trees, the field, his van, nor the ground below him. Benny went to reach for the last rung. He knew he’d clipped the carabiners in place. He remembered doing it. But he never expected such a gust of wind, such a thunderclap that seemed to have him at its core. Benny fell. It scared the hell out of him. Despite the carabiners. Despite his good common sense and plenty of experience. Benny felt himself lose grip, slip away from the tower, and begin that most serious dance with gravity.

  So why is Benny still climbing towers? What happened next was the thing he couldn’t get a grip on.

  Benny fell, two times the distance from the last carabiner. All he saw was black cloud shot through by the steel tower. He felt the rush of wind swelling in his ears. He felt the surge of heart and belly. Then it stopped. He stopped. He wasn’t falling any longer. There was no sudden gut-wrenching jerk. There should have been, but there wasn’t. He didn’t slam against the metal-tower frame, didn’t have his breath knocked out of his body. He should have slammed against the tower, but he didn’t. He just stopped falling. Found himself holding on lower down the tower, as if he’d been placed there. Benny was clipped to the tower, sixty, maybe seventy feet from the top. He held on and cried until the storm passed. Benny considered himself as good a heathen as anybody else, but sometimes you have to consider the alternatives.

  One time, when they were both drunk, Benny asked Jeeter if he believed in angels.

  “Shut up, Benny.”

  That was the closest Benny ever came to talking about it. All the other reasons he’s still climbing towers is anybody’s guess. For sure, the woman across the river wouldn’t have the slightest idea, because she apparently didn’t see Benny at the top of the tower. And his van was probably obscured by the fence and by the tower base itself

  Benny wanted to get done with the day’s work. Doodle, one of the waitresses at Nub & Honey’s, and Benny’s neighbor, asked for help moving her fish tank He didn’t really want to, but he planned to do it right after work. To get it over with.

  From so far away, and so high above, Benny couldn’t discern much about the woman who’d laboriously walked all the way down the long dirt road and had stopped on the opposite bank of the river. She must have walked three, maybe four miles. To Benny’s limited sight, each step seemed a chore. In addition to her pack, the woman carried something else slung over her back. Later, he might give himself time to wonder why. When Benny heard the sharp click-click-click of the tripod legs lock­ing into place across the river, he figured the woman to be some arty type out to take pictures of the high water. It had rained all month. The water churned through the landscape, gorgeous in its ferocity.

  If he wasn’t in such a hurry, if he wasn’t distracted, or if the woman had interested him more, Benny may have reached for his binoculars. As it was, he didn’t go to the trouble. Not when she attached her camera. Not when she positioned, then repositioned the tripod, leaned into the eyepiece to set the view. Benny realized then that it was a video camera she was looking through. From his distant perspective, it seemed she was filming a random spot on the river. He didn’t reach for the binoculars when she walked to the riverbank directly in front of the camera. Nor when she pulled the T-shirt over her head and dropped it beside the backpack, then did the same, less gracefully, with her pants and underwear. Understand, Benny would postpone most anything for a naked woman. But between the time he noticed the oddity of her leg—left? right? he was too befuddled to tell—something was wrong and before Benny could figure out what it was, she had walked into the water.

  Hey! Benny thought this as loudly as possible. Stupid. It’s stupid to swim when the water’s so high. The important point is that she didn’t swim. She didn’t dive, but neither did she pronate and embrace the surface of the water. The woman simply walked into the water. With no ap­parent distress. And without hesitation. No hint of anguish. And, without hesitation, the water, swift and muddy, betraying no confidence, took her in. She just disappeared.

  “Hey!” Benny may have said it aloud this time.

  He reached around to fumble with the clasp on the binocular case. Realized it was pointless.

  On the riverbank, the tripod stood dutifully. Beside it, a pile of clothing, absurdly empty now. And the backpack.

  Benny Poteat had seen a lot of things. Almost nothing surprised him. But that day, that woman, that camera … What do you do after watching someone die? After watching someone kill herself?

  Benny finished what he had to do on the tower.

  Chapter 2

  What do you do after watching someone die? Benny Poteat played the scene over and over in his head. Over and over as he climbed down the tower.

  She walked. She walked into the water. She walked into the water and drowned.

  Hey! he’d thought. A preconscious act, however small, registering Benny’s awareness that what happened shouldn’t have.

  Benny made a list. It’s a thing he did when he was nervous: ball cap, cowboy hat, porkpie, bowler, top hat, straw hat, hard hat, pillbox … he couldn’t think of any more.

  She walked into the water. She walked into the water and drowned.

  “Good dog,” he said to Squat, who waddled from beneath the van. Benny slid the side door open and lifted the dog in. Squat jumped from Be
nny’s arms into the passenger seat and lay down, panting from the effort.

  “Hey!” he thought he’d said to the girl, but it made no difference.

  Benny put his harness and tools in the wooden box that slid out from under the bed at the van’s back door. What else do you do after watching a woman die? Benny locked the gate to the tower’s fence. It was really none of his business what that girl did. Besides, somebody else probably saw it. Benny realized the absurdity of this even before he finished the thought.

  Another version: “Hey!” he said to the girl, just as her foot touched the roiling surface of the water, and she paused. She paused. One insistent toe skimming the water. “Hey!” he said, and she didn’t look up, but she paused, mid-step, until Benny climbed and clanked down the tower, drove helter-skelter up one side of the riverbank, across the bridge at Plank Road, and down the other dirt road to where she stood before the tripod and camera. Naked. Balanced. Impossibly balanced. Until Benny realized, in that moment, it wasn’t only her frozen in hesitation. Everything. Everything. Overhead, two juncos hung in midair before a backdrop of static clouds. The sun spun in place, tracking nowhere. Surely, the sap stopped rising in the trees. And the river itself ceased its flow: gape-mouthed minnows suspended in the noncurrent; turtles, driftwood, snake doctors, and the cattails’ sway, detritus of every sort, marked the stillest time. Inanimate, everything awaited Benny’s arrival.

  “Hey!” he said again, but in that version, too, things had gone too far. Before he could reach out and touch her flesh, the juncos continued their swoop to catch the snake doctor in flight as it hovered over the cattails; the sun engaged its orbit, which in a roundabout way drew the sap up through the trees; minnows dithered and flitted in the river’s spill; she walked into the water and drowned. The lopsided moment, as they always do, rectified itself. Benny would swear he heard the cogs and gears meshing.

  “Hey!” Benny said, in still another translation of the story. And the woman stopped her walk into the water. She turned, shielded her eyes from themiddaysun, to look for Benny at the top of the tower. “Wait!” he said. “I’ll be right there,” he said. She folded her muddy legs beneath her and sat on the bank, and was still there, naked and patiently waiting when he pulled up in the van. Benny helped her dress. They didn’t talk much. Benny took her to her apartment, but they decided she’d be better off with him. Benny told her she didn’t need to bring any of her own stuff. She said okay. Benny got her a job at Nub & Honey’s, waiting tables. She made good tips. Once a week they made love in the van, because it reminded them of that day.

  What do you do? In the world as real as Benny could know it, when he got there, on the other side, those versions of what happened were far from true. The world and its messy business hadn’t paused for this moment, significant or not. Hadn’t even slowed. She wasn’t sitting cross-legged on the bank, waiting for him. All that remained was a tripod and camera, some clothes, and a backpack.

  Benny opened the side door of the van; Squat jumped out. The dog grunted as his low-slung belly hit the dirt.

  “Good dog.”

  For a fleeting instant, Benny wished for a cell phone. A lot of good it would do now. Maybe he shouldn’t even have come. Maybe he should’ve just driven right on down Plank Road to Buffalo Shoals. But there he was. Once there, Benny didn’t know what to do. He made another list: spit, shit, tit, kit, lit, pit, clit, wit, sit, slit, shit … If you repeat a word, you have to stop. Benny tripped, his fat work boot hanging in a rut in the dirt road. Almost fell on the dog. He flushed, hung his head, as if there might actually be somebody five miles out in the middle of nowhere waiting to laugh at him.

  What do you do when you see such a thing? This death.

  Benny looked around. For what, who knows. He walked to the river-bank. Stood right on the spot where she stepped off. He could tell by her footprints. Except that there was only one clear footprint: the right one. The other, her left, showed no delineation of toes. No lines on the sole or heel. Nevertheless, that ghost of a footprint, too, led into the water.

  “Hey!” Benny said. He yelled it that time. Out over the flowing river. There was no answer.

  Benny picked up her clothes. Both hands. He smelled them, the whole bunch. The walk had made her sweat. Jesus! Benny loved the smell of a woman’s sweat. He wished he could tell her that. Wondered if it would have made a difference. He felt a little pathetic.

  Even before Benny got to the video camera on its tripod, he heard it running. Humming, almost. One time, when he was little, Nub held him up to a plank wall of an old building. Told him to listen. Benny pressed his ear to the splintery gray wood. From within came the most beautiful, most mysterious sound he’d ever heard. “Might be wood fairies,” Nub said. “Or termites.”

  That’s what the camera sounded like. Benny felt his stomach pitch and yaw. He didn’t want to touch the video camera, but he scowled at it long enough to find the Off button. Its silence shrieked in Benny’s ears. The only other thing there was the backpack. Was it wrong for Benny to root through this dead woman’s possessions? Or had she abdicated her right to privacy through her act? Or did she have no need, possibly even a disdain for, the notion of privacy? At some point, Benny stopped trying to figure it out. He took everything over to the van, emptied the contents of the backpack on its floor. Squat stood with his truncated legs up on the door channel.

  One. Two. Three. Five. Six. Eight videotapes, labeled and dated. An extra camera battery and a business card:

  Claxton Looms Apartments

  3 Shuttlecock Court

  Rebecca Hinkey, Resident Manager

  Something was familiar about the card. Maybe the address. Maybe the name. Benny was in no state to figure things out. He put all the tapes back into the pack. On each shoulder strap, a small pin: one reading Potters Do It On The Wheel; the other, Hung Like A Horse. There was no wallet. No license or ID of any kind. No letter, no written note. No photos. No Chapstick, keys, tampons, sunglasses. No aspirin bottles, no spare change. Only the business card. Benny folded the dead girl’s clothes neatly and put them in the pack with the tapes. He lay the business card on the faux-wood console sitting atop the engine cowl between the van’s front seats. Benny knew the address. Sort of. He lifted Squat back into the van.

  Chapter 3

  Benny laid the options out as he drove. Thinking, in the van, was difficult, particularly on warm days. Not long after he bought it, from Nub’s cousin Sweeny—who always had something for sale in his front yard—Benny stripped the heater-control knobs. So no matter how he configured the plastic grilles, hot air continually blew out at his feet and up through the defrost vents. A short time later, the on/off switch for the radio relin­quished its power and stuck in the On position. “She’s got one helluva sound system,” Sweeny had said, and pointed to speakers in the doors and built into the paneled walls at several places in the back of the van. It was one of the selling points. Now, the din of the radio babble—almost, but not quite, out of earshot—filled the van whenever the ignition key was on. Benny usually kept it tuned to WSOL, “Your Light to Jesus,” for no other reason than it kept him a little edgy and mad. At least that’s the only rea­son Benny would give you.

  He could go by Nub & Honey’s. Honey would know the decent thing to do.

  He could go straight to the address on the card: Claxton Looms Apartments.

  He could go home, and try to think clearly about what to do.

  Or he could just drive out to the trash dump, throw the backpack and everything else into the compactor, and forget about the whole ordeal. Eventually, calling the police occurred to him. Maybe he’d do just that. He’d stop at the next convenience store, get a snack, and call the police. It’d be good to get out of the van.

  Sweeny gave him a sweet deal on the 1972 Dodge. The paint job, a high-gloss orange with black pinstripes, had lost some of its luster
over time, and Benny liked the custom work more than he’d admit: a moonroof and a tinted porthole window on each side; along the driver’s side, a long smoky mirror and two small cabinets hung over a sink, a broken refrigerator. The walls and doors of the van covered in button-and-tuck Naugahyde, red as new blood.

  “Them’s highway miles,” Sweeny said when Benny climbed up into the high bucket seat behind a steering wheel shaped like a miniature ship’s helm. He looked in the rearview mirror, but couldn’t see out the back because of the orange velvet curtains hung to provide privacy in the low bed at the rear of the van. “No telling when you might have to lay down,” Sweeny said when he saw Benny looking in the rearview mirror. They had a little laugh together, each man making assumptions about the other. Benny gave Sweeny $350 that day, and paid him once a month until the van was his free and clear. The only real change he’d made was replacing the shag carpet with a piece of indoor/outdoor he cut to fit with scissors and glued down with Liquid Nails. And that he did because Squat peed several times on the floor between the two center seats. He’d like to get a CD player someday.

  Benny reached over to Squat in the passenger seat. The dog rolled belly-up for a scratch. Acutely aware of his cargo lying just out of reach in the back, Benny drove carefully. Much more carefully than usual. Like he was protecting something. Coming from the south, once you went under the bypass, Plank Road was Buffalo Shoals’s business corridor. Halfway to town, Benny thought his feet were going to melt inside his leather work boots. Those steel safety toes got hot as ovens beneath the van’s heater. Benny pulled off the road at the first open business he passed. Squat sat up in the seat, panting expectantly, when Benny came to a stop against the concrete curb at PANDORA’S BACK DOOR, OPEN 25 HOURS A DAY. He’d driven by the place countless times, but never stopped. Benny wrestled his boots off, socks, too, then opened the door and hung his feet out to cool.