by Beau Johnson
She smiled. “I’m Katie.” She motioned to another woman in scrubs. “Claire, you mind the store for a few?” She snatched cigarettes and a lighter from her purse. “We’ll go outside to talk.”
The smoking area was in the rear near the delivery entrance and close to a cluster of dumpsters. I suppose the hospital didn’t want to encourage bad habits with a good view.
Katie lit her cigarette. “I heard you’re kind of a detective,” she said through a cloud of smoke.
“That’s kind of true,” I said. “I used to be a state trooper. I don’t have a license, so nothing I do could be termed ‘legitimate,’ which means I can’t legally charge you, though I’m not above it if you want to be generous and hand me a few bucks. Nonetheless, I can ask questions and annoy people and tell you whatever I find out.” I pulled a pack of Marlboros out of a front jeans pocket, shook a stick loose, and set the end on fire. “Your brother’s Eddie Dolan.”
She nodded. The affirmation wasn’t awash with pride. Just acknowledgment of the fact.
I blew smoke and waited for her to talk.
If you’ve watched enough true-crime shows—the ones about gruesome deaths in small towns—you’ve heard about ones where it “stunned the community.” That doesn’t do justice to the collective gasp across Parker County when someone found the body of Meadow Charles in the local landfill.
Meadow came from one of those families described as having “storied money,” but no one told those stories because it wasn’t polite to use that sort of language in mixed company. The daughter of Robert Charles—himself the fourth generation to serve as president of Parker Savings and Loan—and the former Parker County homecoming queen, Meadow was one of those girls most people hated on principle. She was smart, she was beautiful, she had money. She should have been playing croquet with Winona Ryder’s head or pushing other girls along toward an eating disorder. But all anyone had to say was how good of a person she was, someone with a kind heart and a sincere smile for the world.
Her remains were found next to moldering piles of food and stacks of used tires. She had been bludgeoned to death, a copper pipe next to her covered in bits of her hair and skull. The coroner found traces of lubricant and post-mortem vaginal trauma, meaning she’d been raped after being murdered. She was eighteen years old.
Fingerprints on the pipe led to Eddie Dolan, a thirty-seven-year-old local with a drug issue and a criminal background, a guy pulling social security because a mental disability left him unable to work. When the police came knocking at his door, he told them a story of the friendship that had developed over the past few years between him and Meadow. A friendship blossomed over their shared mutual interest: heroin.
A few hours with the History Channel tells you how every society has hierarchies—class divides that separate the haves, the have-nots, and the never-wills. Small towns in West Virginia are no different from European monarchies this way. What makes small towns different is a lack of real estate; no matter the social division, it’s tough to keep yourself away from the disreputable when the bad part of town is only two blocks over and everyone has to shop at the same Walmart.
Meadow started with pills at parties and made an effortless segue into shooting heroin. She stopped wearing sleeveless shirts anymore because she couldn’t hide the needletrack marks. Her grades plummeted like the drop on a roller coaster. The cheerleading squad kicked her off because she couldn’t remember routines. If Parker County had still had a garden club, the ladies of it would have been abuzz with the rumors.
Eddie Dolan had a reputation as the local dullard. He made it through life on odd jobs like running errands, cutting grass, and clearing kudzu. People handled him with a mix of ridicule and pity. Somehow, he’d gotten a girl knocked up a few years earlier, but the girl had packed the kid up and moved up north somewhere. Eddie sent money and gifts at Christmas time but got nothing back in return.
For a guy like Eddie, drugs were an easy crutch, and he leaned on them more and more as he had less and less hope. He sent less money to the son he had never seen and spent more money getting high.
Drugs don’t give a fuck about social standing, either, so long as you keep paying the bill. Meadow and Eddie met while scoring heroin at a local dealer’s place. Something clicked between the two of them. Friendships and empires had been built on less.
They spent nights and weekends riding around in Meadow’s pickup, listening to AC/DC and Metallica. They would get high and sleep in the woods for hours. People saw them at Tudor’s on weekends, eating pancakes soaked in maple syrup and drinking endless amounts of coffee.
Meadow’s friends—the few she still had—talked. The class difference, the age difference, the fucking heroin, for Christ’s sake—everything involving Eddie Dolan was met with stern disapproval handled through whispers and text messages. There had to be something else going on, they told her. Meadow said there was never anything physical, that all they ever did was talk.
“He listens to me,” she said. “He doesn’t just hear me; he’s listening.”
Rumors swirled, and in a small town, there was little you could do to keep them quiet. Robert Charles’s money couldn’t keep everyone silent for long.
Then, out of nowhere, Meadow disappeared. “Studying in Europe,” everyone said. “Restarting her education,” they said.
Uh-huh.
When she showed back up several months later, she seemed like the old Meadow. Clear-eyed. Focused. Ready to reclaim her title as queen of Parker County High.
Except that didn’t happen. This Meadow was quieter. Head down, working to regain lost ground. Still friendly. Still always with a smile. But kept to herself more. No more parties. No more wild stories.
She made plans for after graduation. There was a small private college in Tennessee where Robert Charles had pulled some strings, and Meadow’s academic shortcomings were glossed over, and coincidentally a new scholarship was founded and named for Charles’s grandfather.
And then, a few weeks before she was to go off, Meadow got pulled over on a traffic charge. She seemed nervous, and the trooper asked to search her truck, and Meadow, ever the obedient young woman, allowed it.
Pushed up underneath the passenger seat was a shoot-up kit and fifty dollars in heroin.
That would be it for Meadow. Final fucking straw. The thing Robert Charles couldn’t fix. Rehab hadn’t stuck with her, and those dreams of going off to college were gone, a busted tail light the lit fuse blowing up any dream she had of escaping Parker County.
Luck, in some form, intervened for Meadow. There happened to be an ongoing investigation into the influx of heroin in Serenity and Parker County. A task force of a half-dozen law enforcement agencies had cultivated a growing list of addicts willing to pick the option behind Door One—testify against the various dealers in Parker County—over what was behind Door Two: Go to prison.
That was the option the state police gave Meadow: the witness stand or jail time. When your father was Robert Charles, there’s not much of a choice.
And according to the prosecutors who took Eddie Dolan to trial, Meadow’s planned testimony led to her death. Why Eddie met her at the local landfill. Why he clubbed her over the head with a pipe. Because he knew her testimony would put him in jail, they said. Eddie had a rep as a runner for some of the area dealers, a go-between in trade for the occasional hit. Meadow’s testimony would tie Eddie into the local drug tapestry and drop him deep in prison, the prosecutor said. Eddie was just a frightened animal, they said, and like any other creature backed into a corner, he attacked to make his way out.
No one even seemed surprised Eddie raped Meadow. It was shocking, sure, but with a guy like Eddie Dolan, what could you expect? He took his opportunities as he could. It was a note the prosecutors struck over and over, talking about the brutality and savagery of the act. Another act that defiled the memory of Meadow Charles. Another knot in the noose around Eddie Dolan’s neck.
The lead-up to the trial put on display the divide between the haves and the never-haves of Parker County. The contrast between the Charles clan—hair always impeccable, clothes tailored and sharply pressed—and the Dolans—bad tattoos, home perms, not the best dental care—was sharp enough to split a hair or slit a throat. The TV news loved it and played it for all it was worth. Video of Meadow cheerleading and graduating contrasted with pictures of Eddie, who looked like the guy we never want to make eye contact with coming down the street. Flesh-and-blood individuals were reduced to characters in a twenty-four-hour news-cycle drama. TV crews jockeyed for angles on courthouse steps and people posted selfies with cable reporters and running commentaries appeared in every electronic corner available. What became lost were the people mourning the losses of their daughters and sons, a private act played out for millions.
An hour before the trial was set to start, Eddie took a plea deal. Life in prison with a chance of parole in forty years. If everything went perfect for Eddie, he’d be seventy-seven years old when he got to be a free man again.
Meadow Charles, though, was still eighteen years old, and she always will be.
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1
By now she knew her father slept hardest in the hour before sunrise and that by the depth of his snoring she could move through the house to pack up her shit without worrying about waking him to face the hairy scene he’d make about trying to get her to stay.
She crossed into his room and took his wallet from the dresser, behind his snoring and down out the window in the wasted riverbed the coyotes yelping and bawling for food in the dark and remembering the sound of his voice, tired but gentle, she winced as she pulled five twenties out. If there had been more she would have taken it. She knew she’d need more, much more, and soon. Two days soon. A worry that lasted as long as a breath.
Darkness crawled into every window and covered her feet like sludge. And then the dim green light in the kitchen from the clock on the stove, a signal at the bottom of a black water lake. She looked in some drawers for the phone book and the freezer kicked on and she went stiff and the Percocet drained from her face and the needles of pain in her split lips and swollen eyes and the stitches in her brow pulsed in waves so radiant it was like the Mexican girls were beating her up all over again. She wavered and braced herself against the sink when she felt her stomach gurgle and brought her fist to her mouth until the sickness passed and then padded to her room for two more pills she swallowed without water.
She found the phone book and sat cross-legged on the plastic floor and read by the flame of her cigarette lighter: Blood Banks, Garbage Collection, Lumber, Optical, Oil Change, Ready Mixed Concrete, Tire Dealers, Tool Repair. Then back a few pages to Taxi Companies When she stood again the dial tone sounded like a woman humming a love gospel, a woman in a barn or an empty church. She almost sang along and a point of light in the center of her head shone through her voice, her whisper like passionate orgasm and the taxi lady on the other end said, “I’m sorry?”
“For what?” she breathed back. “Wait, wait,” she said. “I mean four twenty-six Cajalco Road. Cajalco Road in Hufford.”
“No, sweetie, I got that already. I need to know where you’re headed.”
“Where I’m headed?”
“Where do you want the cab to take you when the driver arrives?”
“When’s he coming? When’s he going to get here?”
Now she was nervous that speaking through split lips made her sound stupid. When she blinked fast the swell in her eyes tightened and stung. She couldn’t stop herself from touching the stitches, still tender and a little damp. And it wasn’t until the taxi lady said, “You still there, dear?” that she remembered she was even on the phone at all.
“Is he here yet?” she whispered. “Is he here yet, the taxi?”
“Hufford’s way out. Probably take him twenty, maybe thirty more minutes.”
Then she thought about staying, putting the money back into his wallet instead of sneaking off like an ingrate shit snake skanky little barn garbage Okie.
“Honey, I’ve got to know where you want the driver to take you when he gets there. Where it is you’re headed. The driver needs to know that when he picks you up.”
“The beach.”
“The beach? You know how much a cab ride is from Hufford all the way out to the beach? That’s about eighty miles. Good lord, sweetie, do you really know where you’re going?”
The last dose had disappeared entirely and every cell in her face turned into a shard of glass and sliced. Her father coughed and tossed. He cleared his throat.
“Anywhere,” she said. “I got a hundred bucks, honest to God. A hundred bucks. Wherever that will get me. Just send him. I’ll show him the money as soon as he gets here. Please. Just send him. Please. Just send him. I’ll go wherever he can take me. But I don’t have much time. I have to go now. Now. You know what I mean?”
After a week he finally admitted that his missing dog King was dead. He sat in his truck out front of his house, sweating through the hazy sun hot through the windshield, the motor off and the windows up. A brushfire had started over in Wild Horse Canyon earlier that day and the whole truck shook against the violence of the winds storming down from the high desert and down through the Cajon Pass and battering the glass with splintered twigs and grit. Distant hillsides burned with rivers of flames that blew tumbleweeds into feedlots and stables and barns like wheels of wrath sent down from a mountain of punishing judgement.
For the last six nights he had called for King over the back fence and had beamed a Maglite below only to find a vicious snarl of mesquite and scrub oak and buckbrush growing in aimless arrangement along a stretch of dried-out riverbed dense with a flora of spines. One night he stood calling for three hours straight, his voice finally falling to a rasping reverberation that returned an extra man crawling aged up the bluff until neither his strained gullet nor ringing ears could tell the difference between what was hollered and what was heard, King, King, King, King, King, an aftersound that played in his brain a lunatic preoccupation long after he left the fence and lay awake slack with defeat. He lived alone and had no neighbors to disturb. Next to his house was a wasted space of overgrown mustard brush that spread to another squat house that looked a lot like his. Bare white stucco with a door and a few little windows and beyond that some property a few acres away with a fifth-wheeler and two rusted sheds. Then down the road where it ended at a rise of malformed boulders a house that some nights hosted a ragged traffic of slurring beer drunk laughter in the driveway where black shapes of men swayed and drank in the yellow light that glowed from the garage.
There was still an hour before sunset. He loaded up two blankets and a carton of black plastic bags into the flatbed and drove to a spot east of the interstate and parked behind a stand of smoke trees and carried the blankets to a rocky switchback that angled down into the riverbed. When he got to the bottom he wavered in the hot gusts. He stood for a while under the shade of a cottonwood and wiped his forehead. Sand blew up into his eyes and when he closed his mouth, he tasted smoke and dirt and ash.
The walk west was even hotter against the hovering sun through sand and clusters of dead scrub. He trudged as though through a low flood and eyed the larger spaces of shade where King would have been dragged by the coyotes or pack dogs that had killed him. He crouched to rest then walked back into the bare torch of sunlight and the dirty wind of ash and sand and smoke. Another hour passed before he noticed he was no longer sweating. Just burning.
When he finally found King, he only recognized him by the shape of his body.
The animal lay in a patch of charred sand, ha
irless with blackened flesh that glistened as though greased. His snout and both pairs of legs had been bound with wires. Weldon moved though the blowing smoke and dust, squinting, and urged himself to stand over King’s remains. He had his work gloves in his back pocket and he struggled in his trembling to pull them on. The sunset was stained with a haze of motionless brown gas and strings of skinny crows squalled in gradual escalation and vanished into the dimming sky.
He crouched and took King by his front legs and turned him over and saw that his head had been crushed in at his ear. He stood up and yelled, “Hey!” He pivoted in every direction, stomping, and yelled, “Hey!” But he was yelling at nothing but hot, vacant nature.
He wrapped King’s front end into one of the garbage bags and his back end into the other and carried him to the blankets and rolled and tucked them over the bags on all sides and hoisted him over his shoulder. The stink of gasoline and bad meat stung right through the bags and blankets. He winced at the odor as he dragged himself through the sand.
By the time he reached the top of the switchback, he was gasping. He put the bundle of blankets on the seat beside him and kept one hand on it the whole way home and once he got there hung a mechanic’s lamp from the fence and got a shovel from the garage and forced the edge into the soil with the weight of his boot and hoisted out clumps and tossed them aside, the bundle of blankets lit with the chipped and rusted vigil hanging from the fence.
It was nine when he finished filling the hole and after he did, he carried the shovel for a few steps then dragged it across the yard and slouched back into the house with his arms hanging. His telephone was ringing.
A girl’s voice on the other end. “This Weldon Holt?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“Your daughter. Your daughter Tammy.”