Visits from the Drowned Girl Read online

  “You stay here,” he said to Squat.

  Maybe this wasn’t the best place to pull over. There was a 7-Eleven just a few more miles down the road. But maybe Benny saw it as a test, a penance of sorts, for not doing more to stop the girl. The mirrored windows promised that ALL THE BEST STUFF HAPPENED IN THE EXTRA HOUR. ADULT NOVELTIES BEYOND BELIEF. LARGEST SELECTION OF VIDEOS THIS SIDE OF THE STATE LINE. MORE MAGAZINES THAN YOU COULD SHAKE A STICK AT.

  All in huge, white grocery-store-font letters. Benny just hoped they had a telephone. Walking barefoot across the sun-baked asphalt, he dodged broken glass and cigarette butts to the front door. Before the yank was complete, the smells of soured mop water and Clorox, made heavy and cool by the air conditioner he heard struggling away somewhere out of sight, those and the smells of cigarette smoke, musty paper, and general rank maleness hit him full force the second he stepped inside.

  “Cain’t come in without shoes!” The voice called, too fast, from the back of the store.

  “You got a pay phone?” Benny walked toward its source, which as far as he could tell was an oversized long-sleeved flannel shirt.

  “What?” It came from back near a cash register, through a maze of shelves and display racks whose goods Benny, for the moment, lacked the wherewithal to peruse.

  “You got a pay phone?” The tile floor was gummy, gritty, and cool.

  “What?”

  Benny finally picked out a head, large or either bald or so blond and cropped as to appear so. When the clerk spoke again, the black gape of his mouth helped Benny get his bearings.

  “Read that sign! Cain’t come in without shoes.”

  The problem was due in large part to the man’s skin. He was huge, of indeterminate age, and the great mass of visible epidermis—his head and hands—was so pale that in the all-encompassing wash of light from the ample fluorescent bulbs and from the array of flashing marquees advertising this special or that delight, in all the busyness his flesh just disap­peared. Benny took a deep breath and spoke.

  “You wouldn’t believe what I just saw.”

  “What?”

  “I saw something.”

  “What?”

  By then he stood at the cash register, facing the clerk. Each time the man barked “What,” he cocked his head toward Benny and leaned closer. Deaf, Benny thought for a brief moment. Thought it with some pity until he saw the quarter in the man’s ear. A shiny new twenty-five-cent piece stood tucked behind the tragus, that little flap of skin at the front of the ear canal, and rested on the auricle. Heads. What could it mean? Something about the wages of sin? The cost of redemption? Benny decided he couldn’t fight this battle. It was this ear the man turned to Benny’s predica­ment.

  “You got a pay phone?” he shouted directly into George Washington’s tiny ear.

  “Outside!”

  Benny hadn’t seen it on the way in.

  “Can I get change?”

  “What?”

  Benny pulled the tight ball of a dollar bill from his pocket.

  “No change!” The man pointed to the front of the cash register, where a shopworn index card bearing this scribbled message hung by a strip of duct tape: No Change Without Purchase.

  Benny looked closely at the man. He wondered about the kind of things this man had seen. Quality and quantity. At the register, haphazardly displayed, was a selection of unguents, salves, and potions, most working to death the “-glide,” or “-lube,” or “-probe” suffixes. Remem­bering his hunger, Benny grabbed the only edible products within easy reach: two sticks of turkey jerky and a penis-shaped chocolate lollipop. Balls and all.

  “You got any other shapes?” Benny asked, pointing the chocolate at the clerk.

  “No.”

  “You got anything to drink?”

  “No.”

  Benny paid for his purchases.

  “You cain’t come in here without shoes.”

  While the initial transition from the parking lot to the store had been harsh, the reverse, the stepping from the carnal artificiality of Pandora’s Back Door into the parking lot and the hot wet and sunlit world it was configured in, caused Benny to stagger. He stubbed his toe on one of the ankle-high concrete barriers meant to prevent a person, in a fit of lusty exuberance, from driving through the storefront. Benny cursed and fell on the pavement, dropping the turkey jerky and chocolate penis. Gravel chewed his palm. Squat barked and fell off the van’s driver seat. He was unhurt.

  Embarrassing enough in a vacant parking lot, the cosmos timed Benny’s humiliation to coincide with the passing of a state patrol car. Which Benny didn’t see, because he was lying on the ground. But he sat up when he heard the quick deceleration and the bite of rubber on pavement as the policeman whipped his car into Pandora’s parking lot and pulled up beside Benny. For the longest time the policeman just sat in the car with his window up, looking out at Benny. “Looking out at” was an assumption. The praying-mantis-eyes effect of the officer’s sunglasses made it impossible to tell.

  This could have been—should have been, even—the solution to Benny’s problem. He’d stopped with the explicit purpose of calling the police to report what he’d seen. And there, like a gift from God, a deus ex machina, swooping in to save the day, a cop. All Benny had to do was state the facts.

  “What are you doing?” the officer asked. The best thing about conver­sations with police officers is that there’s nothing superfluous about them.

  “I stubbed my toe.”

  With both hands, Benny sort of held his foot aloft.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Drinking? No, sir. I just went in to use the phone.”

  There was a meaty pause. Benny noticed the officer’s hair, so short and shellacked that it, too, could’ve been a weapon.

  “That yours?” the officer asked, pointing at the chocolate penis.

  There was another meaty pause.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Benny put his foot down and occupied himself with picking gravel out of the exposed derma at the tip of his big toe.

  “Well?”

  “Well what, sir?”

  “You going to eat it?”

  “What? Sir.”

  “Littering is a crime, son.”

  Benny picked up the two sticks of turkey jerky and the chocolate penis, clutched them bouquetlike, and remained sitting in the parking lot. The officer was, at best, five years older than Benny. The temperature in his air-conditioned patrol car was, no doubt, at least thirty degrees. The radio hissed and spit, but the officer seemed to understand something in its racket. Benny knew, then and there, that he couldn’t report, couldn’t confess, anything to this man in this moment of humiliation.

  “That your van?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That dog bite?”

  Benny didn’t realize that Squat had witnessed the whole sordid affair.

  “No, sir.”

  “You might want to clean that toe up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Satisfied of Benny’s harmlessness, or redirected by some higher, colder power, the officer closed his window, reversed his car, and sped away down Plank Road. By the time Benny stood up, the cop was completely out of sight. Benny considered himself quick on his feet. A problem-solver. But the biggest problem in his recent life was still piled in the floor of his pumpkin-colored Dodge. Why couldn’t he tell the policeman about the drowned girl? Why didn’t he open the van and unburden himself of the horrible responsibility and its proof? Why did he buy a chocolate dick from a man with a quarter in his ear, then bust his toe wide open? Fear, maybe. Pray, not apathy. Perhaps, even in the best of circumstances, Benny wouldn’t be able to rise to the occasion.

  “No loitering!”

  The command spat from a spe
aker hanging loose beneath a security camera at the corner eave, except that it came out “No lawterin’!” Benny put his boots back on, figured, however half-assed, that he ought to make one more attempt at reporting the death.

  “Good dog,” he said to Squat, then tossed his purchases onto the center console. Each step away from the van brought pain; the raw wound on Benny’s toe raking the protective steel shell inside his boot. He hobbled around behind Pandora’s, looking for the pay phone.

  “Shit.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Shit.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Shit.”

  There was, as promised, a battered but still blue BellSouth phone booth at Pandora’s side. It seemed to have shifted on its foundation. Seemed, even, to be listing a little to its right. Benny sort of half-hopped, half-limped up to the box and tugged at the folding door. Inside, on every possible surface, at every available height, and at every conceivable angle there were phone numbers, promises, propositions, assertions, dimensions, denials, even prayers of the more bestial sort, recorded using any available writing implement. What must have been the phone book lay in a mildewed heap at Benny’s feet. Too, there were the remains of umpteen Christian tracts. The pamphleteer brigade liked to target phone booths. One piece of propaganda, still intact enough to read, had a miniature hundred-dollar bill on one side. On the other, a diatribe against Benny himself, in the form of moral dos and don’ts. Most disappointing, however, was the phone itself More accurately, its absence. The coin box and dial were there. As was the cord. But it hung from the box, limp and flaccid. The receiver was nowhere to be seen.

  “Fuck.”

  “Shit.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Shit.”

  “Fuck.”

  By the time Benny got back to the van, Squat had eaten one of the sticks of turkey jerky and half its plastic wrapper. He’d also chewed the tip off of the chocolate penis, the entire glans, and was gnawing away at the shaft.

  Dogs shouldn’t eat chocolate, no matter what its shape, Benny took it away from Squat and opened the remaining turkey jerky for himself. Half a mile down the road, he was still hungry. After the briefest hesitation, a check up the road and in the side mirrors, Benny went to work on the chocolate shaft, biting off chunk after chunk, swallowing them down, until all that was left was one bittersweet testes, which he gave himself license to suck.

  “Dogs shouldn’t eat chocolate,” he said to Squat. Squat belched.

  “What the hell am I going to do?” Benny asked, paused, then asked further. “What about all this stuff?” He gave a nod to the backpack and cam­era equipment. Squat’s chocolate-smeared tongue lolled. “I ain’t going to the police station. Not unless…” He couldn’t finish the sentence.

  Benny had a culturally, if not genetically, ingrained aversion to uniformed authority of any kind. The brief encounter with the cop in the parking lot had been terrifying enough. To imagine himself walking into a police station, full of cops and Authority, was beyond Benny.

  Talking to his dog in times of crisis brought Benny some small comfort. He’d been talking to Squat since finding him one day, seven years ago, beneath the Welcome to Gastonia water tower. Benny had returned that morning to complete the lettering on the newly painted structure. welcome to gas greeted the interstate travelers throughout the night; Benny expected to have TONIA done by lunchtime. He hadn’t counted on finding the dog carcass at the foot of the ladder. A beautiful red dachshund bitch. Beautiful despite the condition of her poor dead body. Someone, some malicious asshole, had thrown her from the top of the water tower. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the dog was pregnant, fully pregnant, at the time. Clearly, she had ruptured upon impact, her sweet taut gut gave way; blood, viscera, and half a dozen pups the size of small rats ejected from within, splayed out blossomlike on the concrete pad. The dog was dead; no room for debate. But it stood to reason that if the dog was dead, its belly shouldn’t be moving. Not regular, like breath, but something compelled the mass of intestines, shattered bone, and blood-matted fur to twitch. Benny knelt close and poked around in the organs with a stick. Whatever had moved was hidden inside. Benny reached, with his thumb and forefinger, into the body cavity of the dachshund bitch and plucked a living pup free. Wet. Struggling for breath. As pliable as an overripe fig, and about the same color. “Good dog,” Benny said, taking off his T-shirt to wrap the orphaned puppy in. “You’ll be okay.”

  Benny went to the vet straight away. Came back later to bury the bitch. He tucked the lifeless pups into the hollow glove of their lifeless mother, wrapped them in a clean work rag, and lay them in a shallow hole dug near the tower’s base. Benny sang a little song, but he couldn’t muster up what it took to pray. Namely, belief.

  He made a list that day, too: fucker, chickenshit, candy ass, pencil dick, cowardly lion, mountain lion, panther, bobcat, tiger, tiger-striped, pinstriped, horsewhipped.

  In his time and place, worldly speaking, meanness reared its glorious head regularly; some pissed-off boy run amok, killing and hurting with beautiful, perfect fury. Benny could think of at least a dozen idiots capable of such a thing, and those were only the ones he knew personally. None of this surprised him. He buried the dog. He finished painting the tower. He went back to the vet’s office, half expecting bad news.

  “Good dog,” he said to Squat. Old now, obese, arthritic, and an olfac­tory barrage, Squat as a confidant was unbeatable. Benny took him every­where. What do you do after watching someone die? With the possessions of someone recently drowned? The logical option of going to the address on the business card escaped him. Benny’s old van sagged under the bur­den of those questions, the engine backfired and sputtered. Driving toward Buffalo Shoals seemed as good an idea as any. It’s where his friends were. It’s where he lived. There were telephones there, in Buffalo Shoals, but neither buffalo nor shoals to speak of. Only an abundance of feral cats and the pitiful Dye Creek that ran through the mill district. But nobody seemed to question the discrepancy. One time, before Benny dropped out of school, his class went to the Buffalo Shoals Public Library for a lecture called “The Founding and History of Buffalo Shoals, as told by Myrtle Sperling: President & Oldest Living Member of the Buffalo Shoals Historical Society.” Lord, even the name of the program threatened to put Benny to sleep. He did, in fact, nod off, sitting on the back row in a creaking straight-back chair, his head resting against the entire Dewey Decimal collection numbers 835.41 through 876.11. Went right to sleep the moment Myrtle opened her mouth and began rattling on about cotton mills and turpentine camps. She hadn’t said anything about buffalo by the time Benny went to sleep; he woke with the overemphatic applause, just in time for peanut-butter crackers and tea, and to this day felt like he may have missed some important information. Many times when Benny was little, riding in his uncle Nub’s pickup at night, the old man would slam hard on the brakes and swerve, claiming he narrowly missed a buffalo crossing the road.

  “Big as a damn house!” he’d say. “Did you see it?”

  “I didn’t see it! I swear I didn’t.”

  “Lord-a-mighty! That was the biggest one yet.”

  “Let’s go back, Uncle Nub! Let’s go find it!”

  “No,” he’d say, shaking his head. “Too dangerous.”

  It was years before Benny figured out the joke.

  Chapter 4

  The further Benny got from what happened at Bard’s tower, the farther he drove from Big Toe River, which no doubt carried the body, a stranger’s body Benny felt all too connected with, farther away from him, the less inclined he became to get involved with any kind of hasty resolution. What, really, was the hurry? His toe hurt. His feet were hot. He didn’t want to be implicated in this girl’s death. Benny took the tapes and the camera; that much was sure. It’s the dubious “why” nonsense that confused him.

  He needed to lo
ok through the backpack one more time. To get some feeling for what it was all about. The tapes, the camera, everything. If he pulled off onto the shoulder of the road, he’d run the risk of attracting another state trooper. They had an uncanny tendency to show up in the midst of a person’s private ordeals and stomp around in those big black boots. He could go to Dink’s Clean ‘em Up Carwash & Launderette and pull into a stall, but Little Dink was sure to be there. Benny didn’t want to explain anything to him. Benny blew the horn as he drove by; people constantly blew their horns at Dink’s. Little Dink, standing, hunching really, by the vacuum machine at the third stall, waved.

  Benny didn’t want to go home. Not with the tapes. Not yet.

  Plank Road led into the heart of Buffalo Shoals, a grid of half a dozen streets, some named for the farmers who’d pastured and tilled the rock-choked fields years ago, others named after the got-rocks who, with no small sleight of hand, pulled the cotton mills up out of the dust and commanded them to turn profits: the owners. Nearly a hundred years later, the mills had all but closed, and Benny Poteat had washed the windows of all three newer buildings that qualified as modest skyscrapers in the center of the city—there were four if you counted the brick behemoth put up by Duke Power, but it was practically windowless. He had hated that job; hated the things he had to see through the windows. Nevertheless, in Benny’s opinion, Buffalo Shoals wasn’t a bad place to live.

  Once you went through the center of the city proper, southbound, with all the banks, fancy restaurants, the condos, and the too-cool-for-you stores, things got edgier. And more affordable. Benny lived in that direction, but he was avoiding home. He turned north, toward Jeeter’s. It was an instinctive move.

  Throwing the tapes away was out of the question. Driving by the police station and leaving the box orphanlike on the steps didn’t seem right, either. Claxton Looms? The address on the business card. Maybe later. For the time being, Benny thought it best to get some advice. Expert or otherwise.