Visits from the Drowned Girl Read online

  Jeeter claimed, regularly, that he wouldn’t live in the city for all the pee in China. No doubt, his lifestyle and habitat would be an eternal boil on the ass of any zoning commission. The five miles of Hager’s Creek Road between the city and Jeeter’s empire seemed a workable buffer zone. He was far enough from any businesses to avoid complaints, and his few distant neighbors probably shared his aesthetic, so Jeeter was left alone. Left to rule the ebb and flow of a ragtag entrepreneurial domain, a hodgepodge of businesses he built on the site of what was the first turpentine camp in the county, in peace.

  “Nice panties,” Benny said. Followed it by a slow wolf whistle.

  “Screw you,” said Jeeter, but he didn’t move.

  “Why do you bother with them skinny little Speedos?”

  When Benny saw the stepladder at the back of the dump truck, he knew he’d find Jeeter, already tanned but still tanning, slathered in oil, lying on a webbed folding aluminum lounge chair up in the bed of the truck. Benny climbed the ladder, and the heat and the stench of chemical coconut almost knocked him back down. Jeeter lay belly-up.

  “You might as well be naked,” Benny said.

  “Too many buzzards,” Jeeter said. He picked up a squirt bottle, misted himself quickly from head to toe.

  “What?”

  “Buzzards. I’d hate one to fly overhead and look down, see me laying naked here and think he was gonna have hisself a big old snake for dinner.”

  If Benny was a thinker, then Jeeter was a doer. Driving the dump truck was one of the things he did. ‘Dozers and backhoes, too, when he was hired to do so. But the dump truck he’d bought with hard-earned money. Unlike Benny, Jeeter sought his answers inside the earth, through the intimacy of hydraulics. They differed. In more ways than one.

  “Or a robin? Looking for the early worm.”

  “I didn’t hear you drive up,” Jeeter said, taking his sunglasses off and sitting up. “You want a glass of tea?”

  Benny, lean and stealthy, stood exactly one inch taller than Jeeter’s five feet seven inches, but unless they were side by side Jeeter, because of his fullness—not fat, just full in his skin—looked bigger. Both men were tired of the tattoos on their arms; chosen and endured drunkenly from Slim Deal’s Tattoo Palace when Benny was seventeen and Jeeter was sixteen.

  “Yeah,” Benny said. “I want a glass of tea.”

  After pulling off Hager’s Creek Road onto the long rutted dirt track that was Jeeter’s drive, which comes up quick once you go through the corrugated-steel underpass beneath the railroad tracks, a road flanked by deep ditches filled with mosquitoes and muddy spring runoff, and would be easily missed if not for the cast-iron mailbox shaped like a humongous bluegill—which Jeeter made himself in a welding class he took at Piedmont College—Benny stopped the van and hid the tapes, backpack, camera, tripod, and clothes in the cabinets under the sink. Sneaking up on Jeeter was always possible. He was liable to be occupied anywhere in his acre-and-a-half patch of earth ringed by pines and sweetgums and the one anomalous mimosa—a hardscrabble piece of property, its center bare of flora, but occupied by a mobile home way beyond any hope of mobility; three wheel-less school buses in different mutations to which he pirated electricity, a dump truck, several piles of assorted junk (some in recognizably motorcycle form), and one shed in haphazard orbit around it. A prize of real estate he called his compound. Benny liked coming to Jeeter’s.

  “What’s the matter with your foot?” Jeeter asked, noticing Benny’s limp.

  Squat followed behind, wheezing.

  “Nothing,” Benny said. “You got a Band-Aid?”

  They sat on the trailer’s plywood porch, where Jeeter had bolted bus seats, drinking sweet tea from colored aluminum cups, while Benny doctored his toe with rubbing alcohol and Mercurochrome.

  “You stink,” Benny said. “Like a coconut cake. Put some clothes on.”

  Jeeter faced the sun. “Oh, but I’m purty,” he replied. “All the girls think

  so.

  Red dust from the bed of the truck clung to his oiled feet, darkened and clotted.

  “All of ‘em?”

  “Yup.”

  Jeeter claimed to have inherited the land, the remnants of this turpentine camp. Not everybody believed him. In fact, there were many uncertainties surrounding his existence. Jeeter was an educated man. When not hauling fill-dirt or operating the ‘dozer or other heavy equipment for Crews Brothers’ Logging and Landscape, he was either servicing a growing list of clients for his (successful despite the abundance of naysayers) aquarium setup and maintenance business, Tanks-a-Lot; or he was at Piedmont College, working toward another associate’s degree. To date he’d studied welding, horticulture, funeral science, and culinary arts, and while he hadn’t actually completed any of the degrees, Jeeter was rounding himself out rather nicely.

  With an acetylene torch, Jeeter had cut the steel roof from one of the old school buses and replaced it with a glass-paneled structure, rigged up a fan-and-heater system, and fashioned a very functional greenhouse in which he nurtured an amazing array of plants. At the rear of the bus, blocking the door, were more varieties of cacti than Benny knew existed. Some were tall, thick, and intimidating; others tiny and with impossibly delicate flowers. Jeeter liked the succulents best. Jades, rubber plants. At the other end of the bus, on a series of shelves built around what was the driver’s seat and console, sat the bonsai trees that Jeeter pruned, tended, and cared for with no less love than he would give a child. The Japanese black pine, nearly fifty years old and no more than ten inches tall in its upright pose; the cascading ficus; a miniature grove of maples. A dozen trees or more, displayed in various stages of manipulation, at the mercy of bind­ing wire and the insistent pruning shears. For the more tenuous specimens, Jeeter rigged a water-drip system to prevent them from dying of thirst.

  The other buses were closer to the trailer. There, Jeeter housed the livestock and supplies for his aquarium-maintenance business. In one, another feat of engineering genius, another manifestation of his need for small, controllable worlds, Jeeter built the hatchery where he raised the discus and the corydoras catfish that he specialized in, as well as the supply offish species that he stocked his clients’ tanks with. The inside of the bus was lined with ten-and twenty-gallon aquariums, floor to roof, three high. A fifty-gallon tank, long and wide, stretched across the back of the bus beneath four bright fluorescent bulbs. In it, Jeeter kept the aquatic plants. A submerged garden. To walk into the bus was like entering a deep lake in the dry confines of a glass bubble. Except for the lights over the plants, the bus was dim, and all around the sounds of water surging through filters and splashing back into itself, sounds buoyed into view by the schooling, dithering fish and the lush and fluid green of the plants. Jeeter had clients all over the county. Businesses mostly, wanting the tanks in the reception rooms to make a good impression. He had a few private clients as well.

  On top of the third bus, two satellite dishes mooned heavenward; but Benny had never seen a television inside Jeeter’s trailer.

  “I’m thinking about branching out, Benny,” Jeeter said, leaning close to look at Benny’s toe. He scratched the dog’s head.

  Benny didn’t reply right away; sometimes Jeeter’s roller coaster of obsessions was exhausting.

  “Ponds,” Jeeter said. “Fishponds are hot now. Everybody wants one.”

  “I don’t,” said Benny.

  “I’d need some help. Digging. Stocking. Maintaining.”

  “I don’t want to dig holes, Jeeter,” Benny said. The run of catastrophes was easy to imagine.

  “You better take care of that toe.”

  Benny had known Jeeter for as long as he’d known anyone. They weren’t always friends, but the nature of their world was such that things overlapped, and, consciously or subconsciously, sometimes you just go with the flow. Jee
ter was Nub’s nephew. Benny wasn’t. But in familial matters as in nearly everything else, Jeeter existed on the fringe. Benny grew up with Nub and Honey, in their house. In the fishcamp where his father and mother had worked.

  Down the road from Nub’s was the catfish pond owned by Jeeter’s grandfather. The old man kept it well stocked; he ran a little concession stand under the pond’s only tree, selling nightcrawlers, canned corn, grubs, homegrown boiled peanuts, and Coke. Cost you two bucks to fish all night. Out by the road, a plaster-cast fish big as a horse leapt skyward, the hours of operation painted in red on its sickly-green flesh. Even after the old man died, after the pond dried up and became a bed of scales and fish bones, spines like tiny ladders climbing nowhere, Benny continued to have dreams about that plaster fish; it swam nightly through the skies of his dreams, its big trout mouth chewing up stars that spewed as clouds from its gills. The dreams lay somewhere between nightmare and sheer ecstasy.

  Benny put his boot back on. Jeeter went into the trailer, came out a moment later with an open pack of hot dogs. He took one out, bit off one half and handed the other to Squat. He offered the pack to Benny. Benny shook his head. What do you do after watching someone die? After busting up your toe, then eating chocolate testicles? Benny had a hard time deciding.

  “I want to ask you something, Jeeter.”

  Jeeter ate another hot dog, started to reach a second one out to Squat.

  “Don’t give him no more of them,” Benny said.

  For a few minutes it was quiet but for Jeeter’s chewing and Squat’s hopeful panting.

  “You ever see anybody die?” Benny asked.

  “Yep.”

  Benny stared at his friend, who offered no more. Neither did Benny.

  “You acting awfully damn spooky, big boy,” Jeeter said.

  At that moment, Benny realized what he had. He had a secret. It was his. His possession. He’d never owned a thing so important. A thing so much his and his alone.

  “Never mind,” Benny said.

  They drank their iced tea, Benny and Jeeter, while the sun inched toward red, and the gibbous moon crept up over the shoulder of the pines along Hager’s Creek Road.

  “There’s a race tonight, at Shuffletown Dragstrip. I’m going on my motorcycle, me and a couple other guys. Want to come?” Jeeter asked.

  “I’m cooking at Nub’s tonight.”

  “This ain’t Friday.”

  In fact, it was a lie. Benny had no plans for the evening.

  “Well, if you come, don’t bring Dink.”

  “Come on, dog,” Benny said.

  The way back to town was blocked. A battered and rusty pickup truck sat at the end, in the middle, of Jeeter’s drive. Benny pulled up behind the driverless truck and considered his options. He could try driving around the truck, but there wasn’t enough room. He could put the truck into neutral and just push it out of the way. That seemed risky. Or he could just blow the horn and see what happened. That’s when he heard the commotion in the side ditch. There, a scrawny, shirtless man stood bent, almost squatting in the muddy water, his hands struggling with something beneath the surface. ‘You’re liable to see anything that far out in the country, so Benny was unfazed. But the small pistol that jutted out of the back pocket of the man’s cutoff jeans could prove problematic. Benny heard him curse when he slipped; wet now to the crotch. Benny tried to come to terms with the man’s struggle. It wasn’t as if he, the man, was holding a thing down. Rather, he pulled against something, a thing he was trying to get out of the water, and that something pulled back with considerable force. Just as Benny was about to get out of the van to offer either assistance or interference, the man reached a momentary place of balance. A skinny arm held tight to whatever was beneath the surface of the water; the other reached back for the pistol grip.

  One shot.

  Another.

  Two caplike reports from the small-caliber gun, and the struggle ended. The man pocketed his gun then reached under the water and lifted. Benny heard the man grunt as he lifted the big turtle’s body into the air. A terrapin. A cooter. Its shell as wide as the lid of a garbage can, a web of blood catching sunlight.

  “Dinnertime,” the man said, his snaggle-toothed grin as wide and mean as a carpet knife. He threw the terrapin’s heavy carcass into the bed of the truck with no ceremony. He climbed behind the wheel, turned the ignition, and drove away.

  Chapter 5

  Benny Poteat went home. Finally.

  Where else could he go?

  He stepped out of the van and before his foot hit the dirt there was an all-too-familiar call.

  “Hey! Benny Poteat! I got something to show ya.”

  “Hey, Doodle.”

  Doodle was Benny’s neighbor. Doodle liked to flirt with Benny, and because the duplex they occupied shared bathroom and bedroom walls, as well as the concrete slab that was the back patio, and because Doodle waited tables at Nub & Honey’s Fishcamp, where Benny cooked on Friday and Saturday nights, he sometimes felt married to her. Sometimes Benny flirted back.

  That day she came out and sat on her front stoop.

  “Hey. How about my fish tank? You were supposed to be here earlier.”

  The duplex—a clapboard rectangle chopped in half by that thin mutual wall that made it possible for Benny to hear Doodle, a voracious reader of paperbacks, turn the pages every night, made possible an unasked-for aural intimacy: Doodle’s regular and restrained crying, Doodle at her toilet, Doodle on the telephone by her bed, Doodle’s whispered, guilt-heavy, “No no no” on those rare nights of self-pleasure. This duplex designed by economics, not aesthetics, a front door and a driveway at either end, set back from the street by a thin patch of Johnson grass that Benny mowed infrequently, on a lot with only the merest pretense of yard, halfway down a block of similar rental properties, in a tight neighborhood of the same, making up one of the once-numerous, never-prosperous Mill Hill district of Buffalo Shoals—this duplex Benny had shared with Doodle for the past seven years.

  “Aw, Doodle. I’m sorry. I just forgot.”

  Benny opened the door for Squat, who immediately ran to Doodle. The tapes, of course, the secret, stayed in the van. Doodle, who wasn’t nearly as dumb as her name might imply, was more forgiving than believing.

  “Can we do it tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. We can. Did you eat?” Doodle asked. She fingered the pages of a fat, dog-eared book resting by her thigh; there was no front cover, which meant she got it out of the ten-cents-each box at the flea market.

  She was pretty in a mature-woman sort of way. Forty maybe, or forty-two. Doodle was several years older than Benny, and two inches taller. Benny liked her mouth; it was big and she smiled a lot. For six of the seven years they’d been neighbors, Doodle and Benny worked together on weekends. Sometimes he cut lemons for her; she brought him iced tea when things were really busy. And for five of those years Doodle had greeted Benny with the same phrase. “Hey Benny Poteat, I got something to show ya.” Benny knew what it was that Doodle wanted to show him, he just wasn’t ready to see it. Most of the time he pretended not to understand.

  “I made some white beans. And corn bread,” she said. “Got fresh tomatoes at the farmer’s market.”

  “I already ate.”

  That was another lie.

  “What’s wrong with your foot?” Doodle asked.

  “Nothing,” Benny said. “Come on, Squat.”

  He thought to go back and lock the van, decided against it. That act would certainly arouse suspicion. If not from Doodle, then from any number of neighbors who were, blatantly or covertly, sitting on the front porches or fingering the window blinds, watching their exchange. Under normal circumstances, Benny didn’t mind the scrutiny; it was familiar and safe in a way. Warm days, everybody in a two-house radius knew that T. C. Hewit awoke ats
ix A.M.to WROC’s “Sunrise with Stanky” and that he left for work at Brother’s Tire somewhere between seven and a quarter past. In high summer, the whole block heard Mr. Trivett’s window unit struggling to cool the air in his bedroom. Lawn mowers. Dogs barking from within bare circles of earth where they were chained. The couple whose name Benny didn’t know that fought drunkenly almost every Friday night and made raucous love on Wednesday mornings. At the end of his street, a long-distance truck driver regularly parked his rig; its diesel engine sometimes running all night, rattling like a box of bones. And then there was Clyde directly across the street, who sat on his front porch all day, every day, waving at passersby. Weather be damned, Clyde intended to wave at every single person that drove or walked past his house. Last Christmas he wore a Santa suit.

  Not everybody shared Benny’s welcoming acceptance, however. Periodically some poor soul would crack under the tension of the communal intimacy and hurl obscenities out into the night.

  “SHUT THAT GODDAMN DOG UP!”

  “Who the fuck are you looking at?”

  For some, existing in that Petri dish of virulent curiosity becomes unbearable. Case in point: Benny’s previous neighbor. Before Doodle, Benny shared the unit with a lady whose full name he never knew. For two years, Benny heard but rarely saw Mrs. Younts. There was no evidence of a Mr. Younts. No friends called or visited. One morning Benny heard her front screen door slam shut, then watched her walk out the door, down the center of the driveway, the sound of gravel crunching beneath her sensible pumps, nod deliberately to the Terry’s Taxi driver, climb into the backseat, and disappear into the day. Terry’s Taxi took her away and never brought her back. When Benny asked the landlord, he mentioned something about nosy neighbors.

  Then Doodle moved in, and Benny—although he couldn’t tell you why—sheepishly, under the cover of darkness, took a razor blade and scraped the If This Van’s A Rockin’, Don’t Bother Knockin’ sticker off of his truck. It was on the van’s rear bumper when Benny bought it from Sweeny, but it hadn’t bothered him until then. Over the past few years, he’d come to know Doodle through the thin walls, and through their conversations, both at home and at work, as intimately as he had ever known anyone, and he assumed that she knew things about him as well. Predictably and Janus-like, that intimacy brought its inverse; as the newness wore off, it grew increasingly difficult to open up to her in any emotional sense. Not that he would have ever been labeled “forthcoming,” but even Benny recognized that it was much easier to bare your soul to perfect strangers. (There was a trial-and-mostly-error period of obscene phone calls, Benny picking sexy-or at least interesting sounding names out of the telephone book, Benny dialing furtively, shamefully, and trying out various lines—”What color panties are you wearing?”—in hopes of making an erotic connection.) And the more you got to know someone, the more op­portunities arose for deceit, denial, and avoidance, or just plain apathy. But never, until now, had Benny possessed a secret so worthy of protection.