“It was the ‘society wives’ thing.”
“Oh. Sorry.” He held up his hands in an inadequate second of apology. “Listen, Gudgeon’s not important here, other than as a counter-example of what I want to do with our project. Look, just for example.”
Chadwick pulled out his wallet, a streamlined fold of brown leather, and dug around in the compartment behind his credit and debit cards, among the receipts and customer loyalty cards that normally took up this netherzone. He took out a card that had once been red, but was now a dusty pink splotched with white, like diseased skin. When he flipped it over in front of me, I had to control my natural recoil, pretending that I was just rearranging my skirt.
“I got two of these on eBay. This one was in the worst shape, already lost its value, so I carry it around for moments like this.”
Chadwick looked proud. Ugly proud with a grin too big for his face, the way Chuck Varner looked when his first order of these cards came in from the print shop. He’d told me that I could keep two for myself but only if I put a hundred of them under windshield wipers outside the movie theater. No one would stop a cute five-year-old girl from flyering, he said. He’d patted me on the head. Chadwick looked like he wanted to pat me on the head, too, when I finally leaned forward to read this visiting card from the past.
The Varner 6
1. Chaos is our natural state. Violence reminds us of that.
2. Leadership is essential, even in chaos.
3. Obedience = Faith.
4. Spread our laws through action: keep your allegiance secret.
5. There is no justice or peace in civilization. Only in chaos.
6. The only order in chaos is death.
“That Jill Gudgeon was able to miss out on this in her book,” said Chadwick, shaking his head, “that she breezed over the manifesto that your father mass-printed—well, that just shows the caliber of research she was willing to put into the project. She told Crissy Varner’s take on the story effectively enough, I suppose, but that’s it. Gudgeon never understood what your father was trying to do—to spread tentacles, to install believers in a grassroots way at first, and then take his teachings national through the Harlow Mall shootings. Gudgeon was shortsighted, and that’s why she didn’t understand what Crissy Varner was telling her.”
“And what was that?” I asked, knowing what he was going to say.
“Chuck Varner was a cult leader, not just another spree shooter. You know and I know that he was more than just another killer. At the very least, he was an impatient Manson, let’s say, one who liked to do his own wetwork.”
“Keep your theories in your doughy head,” I said, quickly realizing that I was whispering. “And take this poison away. Manifesto, god. It’s fucking nonsense. Crazy, evil nonsense,” I said, louder. The fleshy card, its edge damp from condensation, started to waver in my vision as I remembered Chuck Varner making me stare at it until I could recite it back to him, word for word. Each mistake meant I had to run around the trailer park five times, one for each year of my age. He’d deliberately left off the seventh rule: that had to wait until later, it couldn’t be part of the initial pitch. It was where he explained what faith and obedience meant. The seventh rule was what he said to Crissy and to me every morning and every night. Your Life Is Mine.
Chadwick slid the card into his shirt pocket.
“I’m sorry. It was impolite of me to dive right into speculating before asking you more about what you think. You feel like leaving, don’t you?” Chadwick asked.
“Absolutely.” I looked into the courtyard for the rest of the body that had been attached to the arm that reminded me of Chuck Varner’s, then forced myself to look back at Emil Chadwick. I couldn’t start losing the focus that had kept me steady for years, right when I needed it most. I buried the fear in the same place I kept the memories, let it descend from a boil to the constant simmering horror it always was.
“If you do, I want you to know that’s fine. I’m not restraining you here in any fashion, of course. But I have an article ready to drop that details your personal history and suggests, in a fairly ugly fashion, that you are exploiting the Marigny killings as a slow build to your own true crime opus, which is going to be an apologia for Chuck Varner and for the media’s treatment of spree shooters in general. I have a contact at the Times who owes me and might allow me to slot it in as an opinion piece on true-crime-media-gone-wrong, maybe piggybacking off the most recent school incident. So that’s what happens if you don’t hear me out.”
“You’re a total piece of shit.”
“I can be. But I don’t want to operate that way. I want to go the Atlantic route, and I want us to do an honest, fully formed piece of work together. After my feature article is polished—an honest one, about how you transmuted trauma into your work, we work together on a movie. We talk to Varner victims, the families. Your origin story, made by you.”
The drink was too good to throw in his face, so I took Emil Chadwick’s phone off the bar and sank it into his half-finished beer. He yanked it out and started shaking it.
“Jesus. Shit,” he said.
“You want me to go from two decades of no one knowing I had anything to do with that monster, to me making it some sort of explanation for my entire life?”
“It is, though, Blanche. Chuck Varner’s a big part of your story. I know Jaya would agree—she must have been pushing you toward doing this story in little steps since you started making these movies together, no? Maybe even since you moved in with her and her mom, what with what happened to her family?”
“No.” I stared at him. “Jaya has as little interest in exploiting her father’s death as I have in exploiting my father’s killings. And there’s a big difference between what Chuck Varner did and Mr. Chauhan taking a dumb mugger’s bullet. Jaya’s dad didn’t ever make a step wrong. Chuck was despicable.” I started pressing on my hip bone with my thumb again, willing a knife or a gun to fill my hand, Jaya’s name in this creep’s mouth now worse than hearing him say Varner over and over again.
“It’s two sides of murder, but it’s still murder, right? I know you two are both reaching toward something in your work, that it’s happening now. You can’t keep away from true crime because both of you are true crime,” Chadwick said. He set his disabled phone down, giving up.
“Try a bag of rice,” I said, wiping my forehead, trying to push the violence I was imagining out of my brain.
He kept going with his theories. “You come from where you come from, you emancipate from your mother, you immediately make best pals with your sidekick whose dad wasn’t a shooter but was shot—”
I thumped a fist onto the bar. Chadwick twitched and shut up.
“You think because her dad died that we have some sort of divine bond that was driving her to trick me into making a documentary about Chuck Varner? You truly are a moron, Chadwick. We’re friends because we’re friends, not because we’re in the Dead Dad Club.”
“And you’re telling me that your distancing yourself from the Varner name doesn’t ring out to you a little like someone running from the story she was always meant to tell?” Chadwick asked, taking a sip from his pint that he paused halfway through, remembering and maybe tasting the phone that had just come out of it.
“I ditched the name because of how little it meant to me, not how much.”
“Look at the movie you just made. You were born to document and explore murder, and you didn’t inherit your eye for that from Mom. Condolences on that, by the way.”
“What?”
“The inheritance thing? I thought it was pretty elegant and clear.”
“No, ‘condolences.’ ”
Chadwick started worrying at the phone again.
“That’s what—that’s what I was talking about when I said ‘a crime in the present.’ The investigation we’d—the Stilford police haven’t called you?”
“No one back there has my information. No one. I made sure to burn the trail from
my old name to this one any way I could, legal and otherwise.”
“I can’t believe this. I’m sorry.” For the first time since the movie theater, Chadwick almost had appeal again, because he looked authentically lost and sorry. “I’m just going to tell you straight: your mother died last month. Not naturally.”
Chadwick didn’t only tell me straight, he told me fast, stuttering in his haste to get the sentence out. I stared at his glass of beer until it started to blur. A creep of nausea started somewhere below my stomach.
“I just saw her,” I said.
CHAPTER THREE
* * *
HI, BLANCHE. HUMIDITY’S awful, isn’t it?” Crissy Varner said. The crew was all still in the house, packing gear after our final B-roll pickup shots. It was the end of our last day of shooting. All I had with me in that Marigny street was endless heat, a bougainvillea bush, and this specter in front of me.
Crissy looked almost the same as she had the year I left home. Just barely older, showing only in her hair, which had grayed out from the shade it had once been—the same brown as mine. Poorer, maybe, her clothes more worn and frayed than anything she would have walked out in public with when Chuck was alive, or when I was with her. Jean shorts, a raggedly customized red denim vest, and one of Chuck’s Entombed shirts, so dryer-scarred that the design and logo had peeled and cracked into a wordless red-and-blue enigma that I only recognized because I could see it stretched over my father’s chest in my memory. I was holding the Pentax I used to take on-set photos with, sitting in the open bed of the truck that belonged to our New Orleans fixer, Jerome. He was arguing with a cop one block over, explaining which permits we already had and which ones we didn’t need, while we made our gear as invisible as possible.
The heat, a late-May boil of the air that shimmered even if you were completely sober, which I wasn’t, made Crissy look unreal to me until I noticed her shabbiness. That’s not the kind of thing you hallucinate—Crissy looked good, just not as good. I convulsively pressed down on the shutter like I was pulling a trigger, but the camera was dangling at my side, pointing at the enormous trunk of a live oak across the street.
“No,” I said. It was all that would come out, until Crissy spoke back to me in the same taunting voice she used when she was teaching me an oh-so-obvious lesson, the same persuasive, patient wheedle that Chuck used when he was teaching me to aim and shoot the .22, first at cans, then at things that moved until I stopped them from moving.
“ ‘No’ what, Blanche? You can’t say it isn’t humid out here. It’s just a fact. We’re breathing so much vapor we could be underwater.”
“It’s ‘no,’ I don’t want to talk to you. No, get the fuck away from me, right now.”
“I know you don’t want to talk to me, Blanche. I got that impression from the paperwork you had sent over after you left,” Crissy said. Her eyes looked placid, in a way they almost never had when I’d been with her. As though all the rage had evaporated out of them, that her lifetime allotment of emotion was used up and she was left with either peace or emptiness.
“You really didn’t need to be so official about it all,” Crissy went on.
My tongue had withered in my mouth, become a dried, sour fruit that I couldn’t dream of speaking with. Not being able to talk made her words soak into me with permanence, like I was listening to a sermon in a quiet church, not this bird-teeming, lush street in a forever unquiet city.
“Almost got yourself downright adopted by that Hindu family. Ran out of time, I guess, growing up as fast as you were, not being a minor anymore. Or did you ask them not to try? Thought that dropping Chuck’s name, our name, was distance enough?”
“Don’t come any closer,” I managed, using stock TV-police-warning words as an incantation to get myself talking. Crissy seemed to have no intention of moving. I could tell, with absolute clarity, that this was how I would look in twenty years, when I caught up to the age Crissy was right now. I had Chuck’s eyebrows, especially since I stopped plucking them into unnatural arcs, but Crissy’s eyes and the rest of her face, jawline aside. She was squeezing that little cherub’s chin while she talked to me, a nervous habit she managed to make look both thoughtful and mocking. She was standing four sidewalk squares away, the cement between us agitated and broken by the insistent roots of trees. When I told her to stop, she held her hands up and sat down right where she was, getting into a cross-legged meditative pose, lacing her right foot up and over her knee with her hands.
“I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do, Blanche. I never have, not since you left me. I didn’t come for you, I got the message. I understand that you have been loyal to me in your own way.”
“Stop,” I said, shuddering hard enough that the camera slipped out of my sweating hands, the strap catching on my wrist before it could slide to the ground. “Stop talking like Dad, you fucking crazy bitch. Stop it.”
“I could never talk like your father,” Crissy said, sounding as meditative as she looked. The Entombed T-shirt was sweat-stained, but I couldn’t fault her for that in this temperature. It was the white salt rims of all the previous sweat stains around her neck and armpits that made me wonder what she smelled like, when she had dropped out of the game of decent society altogether. She couldn’t be holding a job in that state. “Only Chuck spoke like Chuck. Only he was capable.”
I knew that. I didn’t think it was true, but I knew it, on the level that you internalize and know things when you are a child and are given no choice to believe otherwise.
He was empty, but when he was rolling, Dad spoke like a god.
“He wasn’t perfect,” Crissy said, though, cutting into my thoughts. “I bet you think that I believe him flawless, your dad. He wasn’t. When it mattered most, he didn’t even know what he was.”
“Which was?” My mind finally started working well enough that I reached for my phone, sitting next to me in the flatbed, and tapped out an SOS text to Jaya.
“A leader, Blanche. A king of men, a prince, someone who should have been at a pulpit his whole life, not behind a gun for a couple hours. He should have left that work to his followers, but he was just so eager—so purely committed to the message—that he made the worst mistake he could have.”
“What was that?” I glanced down. Jaya had answered my text with a “?,” which made sense, because I’d never sent her an SOS text before, and also I’d spelled it “AOS.”
“You can look at your phone in a minute, honey, I’m almost done. Chuck took himself away from the world. His mission was to assign, Blanche. Like he did with you, with me. He taught us, prepared us, then lost patience with how slow we all were on the uptake. We were weak. You’re weak, Blanche.”
“You still waitressing, Crissy? Does talking like a complete nutcase hurt your tips?” I hopped down from the flatbed and walked around to the passenger door of the Chevy, never taking my eyes off my mother, her cross-legged docility meaningless to me. Chuck had taught us both how to draw a pistol from any posture.
I opened the truck door and the glove compartment, hoping that Jerome was the kind of fixer who drove around with a gun. No. Trash, receipts, and a knotted sock full of coins—useful for short-range road rage, but not for anything I might have to face from Crissy.
“Stopped last year, Blanche. I live simple and saved enough for the time I have left. Plus, I stopped having to worry about you costing me anything except pain.” As though this little prod had made her aware of her current physical discomfort, Crissy stood up, massaging her knees a little before straightening up.
“Fly back where you came from, Mom. Crissy.”
“I left you alone after you went because I knew you wanted it that way. I have to admit you were a great help to me, and I missed you so much when you left. You loved me. I let you and Chuck down, letting you go, letting that family take you in and help you pretend you were something else, but I knew it was what you wanted. You couldn’t bear the burden any longer. You lost patience, that’s a
ll. Like your father did.”
“I don’t want to hear this crap ever again. I’m within screaming distance of ten friends and at least one cop.” I couldn’t help hearing Crissy, though. And she was getting through. My right pinky and ring finger started to shake, the way they did when I was getting nervous, or when I was about to cry. Chuck tried to teach me how to control the shake, said it would prevent me from being a great shooter unless I could get it under control.
“Still wouldn’t be fast enough for what you’re afraid of,” Crissy said, walking a step toward me. “Not that you need to be afraid. You, of all people, should never be afraid. Chuck and I both made you know that. You’re the most important piece of all of this, Blanche. You have to be there for the next one.”
“What ‘next one’?”
“For when it happens again, Blanche. Do you think that just because you left, just because I was feeble, one time, that this would all stop? You should know that’s impossible.” Crissy smiled at me, moved her right hand a bit. From the way she was holding her fingers I knew she wanted to brush my face.
“Your Life Is Mine is bigger than us. It’s bigger than our world. We’re going to do what Chuck Varner did. We’re going to let the bullets loose again. You have to be there. You just have to. It’s history.”
“Get away from me,” I said. I climbed into the truck through the passenger door and started it, with the tailgate down, my phone rattling around on the flatbed until I finally braked five blocks later and it flew off to shatter on the sidewalk. When I drove back to the house twenty minutes later, the crew was on the sidewalk with our gear, Jerome yelling at them to stow it before the cops rounded the corner again and we got a fine that would devastate our already tight budget. I got out and Jaya saw my face. She hugged me, diplomatically turning me away from the crew so I could cry for a second. They respected my work, after these weeks we’d spent together, but men on set are always looking for a way to stop respecting your power, your choices. Jaya and I both knew that. I lied and said a man had tried to drag me into his car after asking me for directions.
Your Life Is Mine Page 3