“What’s this stuff about Emil Chadwick’s mom?” I asked. There was a pause that the frogs filled with their mindless, thrumming music.
“Jaya? Still there?”
“I don’t want to load more on, Blanche.”
“I don’t think the condescension of the only friend I have in this fucked-up world and business is going to soothe me.”
“Emil Chadwick is Jill Gudgeon’s son. That’s why he knows all about you. His mom wrote the book on it. On you.”
“That bitch,” I said. Of course. Jill Gudgeon had written to me once when I was at USC, sending the letter c/o my department, addressing it to Blanche (Stella) “Potter.” The department secretary, a trim, aging man named Tom who often provided students with usefully embarrassing anecdotes about our professors, recognized Gudgeon’s famous name in the return address, but didn’t get the Stella reference. He’d only read Gudgeon’s Warhol book and her memoir of AIDS in early ’90s Castro, SF, which I had also read and had to admit was pretty good, even if she had no business being the one to write it. I threw the letter away unread, first opening the envelope and inserting a banana I had in my bag, crushing it into the text and tossing the mess into a campus dumpster.
“Which one?” Jaya said.
“They’re both bitches. His mom at least gave up trying to rope me into a follow-up.” The frogs had gotten louder, the force of their croaks loud and unified enough to become choral. An amphibian soundtrack behind this discussion of reptiles.
“I looked Chadwick up after you left. He used to write scripts for podcasts, which, I guess everyone has to start somewhere, and he started his career trying to bury that connection to Gudgeon. Except when she opened doors for him to get work, I assume. He got floated a book contract a couple months ago. That’s the gossip. Mix of a mom memoir and true crime gossip.”
“Jaya? You were right. This is too much. I’m going back to the hotel for the night to process this shit. I have the minibar and half a bottle of NyQuil waiting for me.” There was a shake in my hand, the one holding the phone, and I steadied it using one of the mental tricks Chuck had taught me, shutting my eyes for three seconds and focusing on my pulse. The flutter went away, but the feeling of Chuck’s hand on mine didn’t.
“Please. We can’t be flip like this, Blanche. Not now. We have to talk for real, okay? She was your mother, and no matter—”
“No matter what, Jaya? I can’t—you of all people know this about me,” I said, stamping my right foot hard when the nervous shake turned up there. “That thing was my mother and Chuck Varner was my father and that’s why I’m talking to you like this and not sobbing about how it all hurts. If I start with that I’ll never do anything again, do you understand?”
“I do,” Jaya said.
I let a buzzing silence build, thought about saying more. But I couldn’t, not without losing it.
“I need to get to Stilford,” I said. “I’m changing my LA flight as soon as I hang up with you.”
“I’m coming with,” Jaya said.
“Not right now. You can’t. I need you to make sure they don’t take our next movie away. I’m not going to let Crissy derail the life we made together, now that we’re finally actually doing it. So you get back to LA and tell Rod and Jarod—tell them I’ll do another one of theirs right after they get us development funding for our Blackwood movie.”
“I’ll do that if it’s what you need from me, but I don’t like leaving you to go back there alone. So then I’m driving up to Stilford, Blanche. Once we get your business sorted, we can give an inspiring talk in our old AV class, get Mr. Walley crying about how big of an influence he was on us,” Jaya said, doing her best to get some jokiness into her tone. About forty memories of our years in high school together converged on me at once, and I slid down the median I was sitting on, settling on the cool broken pavement.
“I love you, Jaya. I’m going alone for now, but I will need you, you’re right.” Even if this wasn’t true, I knew Jaya needed to hear it. And it might have been true.
“You going to stay with Mom? You better.”
“No,” I said. Padma Chauhan’s house was the first and last sane home I’d had in Stilford, since moving in a few weeks after leaving Crissy’s trailer for good, after a series of planned run-ins that confirmed Jaya and I as friends. It wasn’t hard—Jaya was reeling from the very public loss of her dad and her newfound celebrity status at high school, where murder gets you quicker notoriety than a leaked nude. I knew I could help Jaya and that she could help me, and Jaya’s mom was so shattered and suggestible at the time that taking on another kid, first unofficially then legally, seemed as good an idea as any in a world where waking up barely made any sense anymore. We all pretended our way into being members of a family.
“She’s going to be pretty hurt,” Jaya said.
“That’s where you come in. Tell her what happened, why I need to get my head around it before I can cross her threshold and hang any of this shit on her. I want to be able to smile and hug her and mean it. She’ll get it.”
“Blanche.” Jaya’s voice shrank, the way it did when she was about to get more sincere than either of us could handle.
“What?”
“Would you think about not going there at all? You said it, you know—she’s not even really your mother anymore. Can’t we just forget it? Let it go, let the city handle it?”
“It wouldn’t be right, and you know it. Think about what Padma would say.”
I didn’t add that it wasn’t the past that I was going there to seal up—it was the future. The future that Crissy Varner had opened up with the follower she’d found. The one who’d killed her. The one who almost certainly wouldn’t stop at her.
“I want you to be around for the next one,” Crissy had said, just a few blocks from where I was now.
Now you won’t be around for the next one, Crissy, I thought, thinking of the bodies hitting the tile floor of Harlow Mall twenty-two years ago. She’d missed that one, too. Crissy was always jealous of that, and didn’t do a good job of hiding it. That Chuck had made me his official living witness, not her.
I kept walking after I hung up, shunting from memories of high school to those of Jill Gudgeon’s dry, cool hand around mine in the Harlow Mall, when I was a little white-trash kid who had never seen the ideal crescents of a manicure that close up. The stuff I said that day to freak her out, all the real things that Chuck told me, I can still remember, and while Gudgeon changed all of Crissy’s speech into a Manhattan-imagined pastiche of uneducated rube dialogue from the South and the West Coast, she didn’t tamper with the way I spoke to her. The quotes were right, just everything around it was sick. Gudgeon spun me, made me story. Used that awe-stricken prose of hers to make me the inheritor of Chuck Varner’s crazy, some sort of low-income Damien just waiting till I was tall enough to see through the window of a bell tower with my junior three-quarter-sized scoped rifle.
Emil Chadwick had his mother’s eyes, I thought, as I looked over my shoulder for a moment to see if he’d followed me. There was no one there.
A frog hopped out of the grass, onto the sidewalk in front of me. I lifted my foot and thought for a second about crushing its soft-boned body with as much ease as I’d pulped that citrus fruit before I left Emil Chadwick behind. It hopped back into invisibility in the grass before I could finish the thought, or the step.
CHAPTER SEVEN
* * *
Excerpt from Last Victims: The Varner Spree Killings, by Jill Gudgeon. Morris & Connington, 2000.
The little girl is all limits. I’ve come here and talked to her mother every day since I arrived. Eighteen and a half hours of tape. But Stella, which is what I’ll call this daughter of Chuck Varner’s: she’s a closed bud, waiting for the bees to leave.
I am the bees, and that’s plainly evident to me when I’m talking to the mother. Crissy McKee, or Crissy Varner, as she insists on being called. She had her name officially changed after the shootings, mak
ing herself Chuck Varner’s wife in death, saying that it was that way when he was alive, anyhow. “I was and am his wife. In flesh and in spirit.” The daughter doesn’t go by McKee or Varner at school, Crissy says. “I’m ’nonymizing her to the public. But at home she knows who she is.”
The girl is made even smaller by her system of containment. I saw her looking through my bags at the front entrance the first night I drove into Stilford from Los Angeles, when I came by Varner’s house before checking in to the hotel. His home is a trailer, just as I had envisioned when I read about the killings, about Chuck Varner. I was ashamed then of how classist it was of me to assume. While much of the population here lives hard, most of them do so in dilapidated homes, in apartments that advertise weekly rates and have thick-chested men who collect the rent in smudged envelopes that jingle. But Chuck Varner did indeed live in a trailer, and I like to think that when I saw him there in my mind, it was insight and not prejudice that lent me the vision.
There’s no air-conditioning, or if there is, Crissy doesn’t use it. Dogs, a few chained and some roamers, bark intermittently outside, provoking shutups from their owners. Crissy asked me if I wanted a drink and I said yes, as I always do when I’m offered alcohol and I’m away from my home, from my own child. Crissy didn’t ask me what kind, just made me what she was drinking: gin with three teaspoons of frozen Minute Maid lemonade concentrate, a bit of water, and ice. I knew innately that this was Chuck’s drink, his personal cocktail. An oversweet punch.
Stella stole all the tapes from my bag on my fourth day in Stilford. I didn’t bring it up with Crissy when I made the discovery, in her Datsun pickup, its color a delicate interaction between the original maroon and overtaking rust. My journals were still in the purse, both of them, the rubber bands undisturbed, as though written words were protected by Stella’s code of privacy and acceptable violation in a way that the spoken ones on my tapes were not. If I really were prejudiced, I’d have assumed that she just couldn’t read yet: but the girl’s mind is incandescent, a glow of intelligence in her haunted home.
“This is where he took the first one,” Crissy said, pulling over on an overpass. She mimed reaching into the back for a rifle, a particular rifle—Chuck’s AR-10, long since vanished into whatever canal or sewer Crissy said he’d tossed it into in 1996, in the hours between the highway shooting and Harlow Mall.
There were no cars coming toward us, nothing behind—for a glimmering moment, in the warm Malick light before the sunset, I felt afraid of her. The highway beneath the overpass wasn’t much used, even though it was newer than the one we’d driven there: a disgraced remnant of the state and city’s infrastructural reach in a direction that citizens and commerce hadn’t wanted to flow.
Crissy could be withdrawn on most topics, and stunningly ignorant on others (“If we go round the sun once a day and spin the whole time, you think anyone could drive straight?”), but on Varner’s massacre, she was voluble. Sometimes I thought her ignorance was playacting, her truncated words and gaps of knowledge flitting masks that her intelligence burned through whenever she forgot herself. She was absolutely eloquent when she spoke of the combination of chance, psychosis, and artillery that had allowed Chuck Varner to murder eleven people in Stilford on August 17, 1996.
“Chuck used to lie under the tarp of his truck with his rifle for hours. Every day. Top peak-heat days, especially, when it was hardest. He loved that. He’d practice being invisible, vanishing totally, and I’m telling you, he made it. I’d know he was out there, parked right in front of the kitchen window, the barrel pointed into the room. Stella playing with her dolls between me and his Ford—all I could see in back of the truck was cinder blocks, rebar, some, you know, light bumps. Nothing big enough to be human, nothing moving. Chuck was skinny, you know, beautiful skinny, but no one could get flat as he was back there except by magic or hypnotizing anyone who looked that way, in a snap.
“If I stared long enough I’d still never see him, but I would see the hole.”
“The hole?”
“The black at the end of the gun. It’s darker than the rest of the dark around it. If you concentrate long enough, you can see it. Chuck taught me that.”
Crissy broke into this odd, gothic timbre after a few minutes of talking about Chuck, but these were clearly her own words, not some leftover programming of Chuck’s, like the treacly lemonade cocktails. She’s good with language, good at seeing. Not as bright as her daughter, but perhaps she once was. I began to grip what it was that Chuck needed from both Crissy and Stella, how they fit into his aspirational project. Crissy provided both structure and absolute faith. And if Chuck had held on to this world, if he’d anchored himself as the leader Crissy insisted he was instead of losing himself in murder, Stella could have been his ideal acolyte. A more appealing teacher than her father, whatever the lesson was. Crissy had tried to explain her dead husband’s thoughts on chaos, his “Your Life Is Mine” lyrical nonsense, but she never managed to articulate what made Varner’s code at all special, or even a code, as opposed to a scattering of cool-sounding one-liners.
The tiny cab of the Datsun was sweaty, despite Crissy’s window being rolled down and mine entirely absent, kicked out last month from the inside by Crissy’s pistoning thighs and calves, her feet in Chuck’s steel-toed construction boots, a cheaper workaround to fixing the broken roll-down mechanism, she said, adding that she’d make a new window out of packing tape when it wasn’t summer anymore.
After ten minutes of silent waiting that Crissy didn’t explain, a hatchback appeared on the highway below us. Crissy grinned and clapped once. Then remembered herself, who she was with.
“So he would have done it today, too. What he told me when he got home afterward is that he posted up here intending to wait fifteen minutes, exactly. ‘A clean fifteen,’ he said, and if no one, no car showed up in that time, he was going to take the AR-10 apart, drop off pieces along the twenty miles of road back to town, turn up at the hospital construction site, and ask for work starting the next day. Decide what to do about his teachings after a couple of months of thought-killing hard work. But someone did show.”
“He came home after the first shootings?”
“Sure,” Crissy said, uncertain for a moment, then back into the flow of her telling. “After he got rid of the rifle, he came back to talk to me, to Stella, a last time. I told the cops, they knew it. Just not the papers. He didn’t tell us he was going out again to do anything, though.”
“Didn’t you guess? What else did he do at home?”
“Talked some and split,” Crissy said. She didn’t elaborate, but smiled again.
The Dillons were the predecessors to Varner’s performance in the mall. George Dillon, a sixty-three-year-old ex-Army North Dakotan and devotee of the lost highways of America, took the one and only round from the rifle. It splintered on impact with Dillon’s skull, flowering, steel shreds twisting off and passing through June Dillon’s cheek and up into her brain. George was dead before their car hit the guardrail, but June, a city heritage and restoration advocate with a mail-order yarn business, didn’t die until after their car flipped and flamed up.
At the mall, Chuck used a Beretta 92FS, an effective, frequently police-issue gun that was still modest next to the portable cannons widely available in California gun stores. He killed his last nine in a forty-second stroll through the main concourse. Each shot was close, as Chuck nestled the muzzle into rib cages, backs, stomachs, the bodies acting as silencers, powder burning polo shirts and halter tops. Mel Kronstein’s polyester shirt would have melted into his lower back: a witness saw it flame up, but the blood that gouted out extinguished the blaze.
I was, all this time, being slow-baked in Crissy’s car, thinking of my own child at least once a minute. Listening to Crissy, back into full eloquence now, talking Chuck alive again with every sentence. Chuck, who pressed a gun barrel into the warm bodies of two small boys and one girl as compact and pure as his daughter, Chuck who fou
nd the surface over organs that he wanted to pulp into malfunction, who pulled the trigger and made those bodies cold.
“That’s what people have to remember about Chuck,” she said. “He wasn’t ‘an independent actor’—what he called it. Chuck read a lot of JFK/Oswald stuff—I’ll show you the folders he made at the house. He had so many good ideas. But for his own work, Chuck was making sure that it all fit with fate. There was every chance that the Dillon man and his wife wouldn’t come by when they did—but they did.”
A black Trans Am topped the horizon on the highway Crissy and I were still staring at, and she laughed. I did, too. Not spontaneously, but to lock our connection in deeper. Crissy trained her pointing index finger on the Trans Am just as it was about to speed below us.
“Pop,” she said, displacing the bang I’d been hearing in my head since we left Stilford.
* * *
As I sat on that overpass with her murder-channeling mother, Stella was listening to my voice on the garage-sale DuckTales stereo in her tiny bedroom. When we returned, I found her and pressed Eject, Scrooge McDuck shaking a downy fist at me from above the tape. Stella assented silently to the reclamation, sparing me the trouble of asking for the others by opening a shoebox hidden in her laundry hamper.
I took the rest of my cassettes, wondering briefly if they’d been wiped, taped over with Art Bell broadcasts or FM hard rock. I recognized, looking at Stella, who had turned to face the wall above her desk so she didn’t have to look at me, that the girl gave up the tapes so quickly because doing so meant I wouldn’t have a good reason to stay and talk to her.
* * *
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