Your Life Is Mine

by Nathan Ripley

  “I didn’t know they got around up here,” I said.

  Maitland grinned. “Your moving away doesn’t make Stilford Mars, Ms. Varner. Ms. Potter. We’ve got computers, we’ve got VOD. We even have a populace that takes an occasional interest in matters beyond college and pro ball. I thought Mainline Dosing was very good. I just wish you’d make something like it here in Stilford so I could make a better case for us showing it in schools.”

  “I make documentaries, Maitland, not War on Drugs PSAs for you to scare ethnic kids with,” I said. He flinched again—not with his body, not even with most of his face, just a drawn-in movement of the skin just beside his tear ducts.

  “You don’t seem anything like what I thought you’d be, Ms. Potter.”

  “What gave you any idea of what I’d be, Officer?” I asked, guessing the answer before he could come up with one himself. “Jill Gudgeon’s book? You read that piece of shit?”

  Maitland simultaneously apologized and confirmed with a small nod.

  “It’s a true crime book set in my own city. I sort of had to, Ms. Potter. Why’d she call you Stella in the book, other than to protect your identity, of course?”

  “Blanche, Stella. A Streetcar Named Desire. She was both lazy and wanted to make it as easy as possible for everyone to guess my real name. Anything else?” I wasn’t about to offer anything more up, not from the past, at least. I could already guess how Maitland would tell this at some cop bar—She’s Chuck Varner’s daughter, for real. Something off there.

  “We’ll want to ask you questions,” Maitland said. “Time and place stuff. I have no doubt that you’re accounted for and out-of-state during the time of your mother’s—happening—but I need to type something into the file.”

  “Get me the body and I’ll get you your information. And I want to sit down with Reilly. I’m going to talk to him whether you facilitate it or not.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, WALKING TO my rental, I considered driving right back to LA. It had been a bad summer for forest fires, and the smoke that had settled into the valley Stilford shared with a few other cities, towns, and the agricultural heart of California was hazing the air, making breathing a caustic experience. Five hours to the south was my existence as it stood before Crissy embedded herself back into it with her death. I could regroup, make phone calls. Get Jaya to hold me and promise not to talk for an hour, minimum. Order delivery to the shitty apartment I was going to be gentrified out of unless my paychecks started catching up with the neighborhood. I could turn off the lights, flush my phone down the toilet. But it was useless to go back until I buried this, the way I hadn’t when I went to Jaya’s house instead of dealing with Crissy directly when I was sixteen. I could have stopped her poison—Chuck’s poison—then.

  “Your Life Is Mine,” I said to the steering wheel. Chuck used to sing it in a death metal rasp in his truck, pounding the steering wheel, once slipping and snapping the windshield wiper toggle right off. He’d let me tape it back on as one of my special jobs, giving me a Payday bar when I was finished. Dad. He told me to only call him “Father” or “Dad” when I was four, said that “Daddy” sounded creepy.

  “You were the creep for thinking any way that made it creepy, Chuck,” I said. A memory shot back while I changed lanes, of him ripping my booster seat out of Mom’s Datsun and throwing it farther than I thought any human who wasn’t on TV in a uniform with a ball could throw anything, the little cushioned hunk of plastic bouncing off the closed lid of the trailer park dumpster. He didn’t want teenage boys thinking he had a baby—it didn’t match with his recruitment talks.

  “They can know I have a family later, but not right away. The boys, the girls, both of them. Can’t give that game away. They get close enough that they get into the car, Crissy, means that they want a new father, one who’ll concentrate on them, on teaching them, on loving them. I’m offering these people unconditional love and a chance to control their own futures. They need to see me as singular, and in some cases, that means single. Unattached.”

  Crissy nodded that night. I think I remember Chuck’s voice, his words, so well not because I was bright, but because he’d so often begin and punctuate these mini-manifestos with violence. Always just a gesture, always just objects. He never marked us, Crissy or me.

  And I remembered that speech about the car seat, every word, because I knew he was lying. He wanted it out of the car so he could pass himself off as single, yes, but not to potential followers. He’d tell the women he talked to when we went on our little nighttime ventures while Crissy was waitressing that he was the visiting cousin who’d gotten saddled with babysitting, but he didn’t mind, because look how cute, look how docile.

  I was excited to spend some time with Chuck. He’d usually get me ice cream or lemonade while he trawled for women on the beach boardwalk, wearing a half-buttoned cotton short-sleeve, always blue, over his permanent white tee. He had a teenager’s narrow, shallow chest his whole short life, as pictures proved. To me he always looked enormous.

  When Chuck had luck with a woman he’d get me a second ice cream or lemonade and drop me off while he went with her to a hotel. I’d never told Crissy. Chuck’s command not to wasn’t voiced, but it was clear. I was afraid of breaking a promise to him. Almost all of his promises, in some way, demanded silence. The cheating, the base pettiness of it, was incompatible with the Chuck we kept alive in our home afterward. She probably knew, anyway. It wasn’t something she ever would have told me.

  I turned the key and reversed away from the station, almost grazing a cop cruiser I didn’t notice in my blind spot.

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  THE BOY WATCHED Blanche leave the station and get in her car. The Boy, The Boy. He was still wary of using this name, either as a self-referent or, even worse, passing it on to others to use on him. But Crissy had insisted that this was Chuck Varner’s preferred name for his messiah, for The One Who Would Come After.

  Lying in Crissy’s bed one night, about five years before he killed her, they’d talked it through in detail. It was one of their Proximal Transference nights, another Chuck Varner term that had fallen away between them as they started to sleep together more often. But in the beginning, Crissy had told The Boy the story: she’d come home from work early once, and seen Chuck in bed with a girl from the high school that Blanche would eventually attend.

  “The girl looked nothing like me, that’s how I knew that Chuck was being straight with me. That and that he always was,” Crissy said to The Boy. “She was this little skinny nothing with black hair, very dusky, almost, you know. Just not Chuck’s thing. He told me that physicality could be a part of teaching, especially to the young—that knowledge, the true knowledge, could pass through naked bodies in proximity. That just being in bed together didn’t mean anything coarse. That congress had multiple forms.”

  The Boy hadn’t thought to laugh when Crissy had first told him. It was exciting for him to lie down next to Crissy Varner’s nude body, an excitement that had been enhanced by the need for total control: he had to stare at the ceiling, to listen to what she said with absolute attention, ready to take one of her pop quizzes at any moment as he stared at the odd false wood-grain wallpaper on the ceiling of the trailer. They’d lain together, had their “chaste congress,” for two years, before Crissy allowed it to become something else. Always initiated by her, always with her in control. Every time they lay down together, he had to stay limp until she touched him, or risk being ejected for a full month, a penalty that Crissy had only had to enact twice. The Boy was proud of his ability to control himself, to manage a body part that was as disobedient as the heart or lungs for most men. But not Chuck’s Boy.

  That name was what they spoke of on that evening five years ago. “Chuck’s Boy.” It seemed undignified, The Boy tried to suggest. Not the name of a leader.

  “The Child is the Father of the Man, Chuck always said. The dignity is in your
purity of purpose. Especially raised as you have been.”

  “Didn’t he also use ‘The One Who Would Come After’? Doesn’t that have more weight to it, Crissy? I’m asking for the followers we don’t have yet, not for myself,” The Boy said, his hands flat on the even flatter mattress beneath him, a relic that lay upon the slats of the trailer’s bed like a length of single-ply toilet paper resting on railroad tracks.

  “You’re asking out of pride. Out of a need to escape the boyhood that Chuck Varner wanted his greatest descendant to always dwell inside. That need is your devil, do you understand? Blanche couldn’t find the humility to know and dwell in her place, and that’s how we lost her.” Crissy’s speech always became more formal when she was upset, and reading emotion was where the mattress’s paucity was useful. The Boy wasn’t allowed to look Crissy in the eye when they were in congress, sexually or otherwise, but he could feel her shake with pleasure or twitch with grief through the cotton and latex. When she talked about Blanche, the mattress moved with sobs that were choked back before they could even become sounds, let alone moist ones.

  “Do you think we could get her back?” The Boy asked. He almost risked taking Crissy’s naked hand, touching the naked thigh next to it, but didn’t. He let his smallest finger graze her left hand, as though by accident.

  “Blanche could never properly leave. She’s bonded to Chuck and her fate in a way that’s beyond me, and definitely beyond you, to understand,” Crissy said. She didn’t take The Boy’s hand, but did rest her palm on his cock.

  “But will she come back of her own will? Do we need to bring her back?” The Boy asked, not knowing until he said it that he was making a plan. He put his hand over Crissy’s, suggesting movement. She swatted him away and put her hand back where it was, still.

  “Life will bring her back. Not a request, not a phone call, not an invitation. Life, Chuck’s plan. I promise that. To you, that promise is a prophecy, but to her, any promise from me sounds like a threat. Because she’s weak. She’s not like us, Blanche. But Chuck couldn’t have been wrong about her. She was just part of his one mistake: dying. Blanche needed more time with Chuck to become what she needed to be.”

  Crissy got up and hovered over The Boy, knowing that as soon as she sank down onto him that neither of them would be willing or able to keep talking. She waited until The Boy gave the right answer.

  “Chuck is still here. He’s alive in us. Blanche will have more time with Chuck as soon as she understands that. As soon as she’s with us, she’ll be with her father again.”

  Crissy eased The Boy inside of her and he started to have sex with her, with total physical presence, tailored to the often spoken and detailed demands of the only woman he had ever been with. But for the first time, his mind wasn’t in the act at all. Fucking Crissy wasn’t a pleasure or a duty anymore. It was no longer part of Chuck’s plan.

  Crissy hadn’t known it, but Chuck must have always known about this phase. The Boy couldn’t have come to understand the plan so well unless it had been ordained. Crissy had just issued Chuck Varner’s orders to bring Blanche home, and there was only one sure way to summon her.

  Crissy, that day, had ordered The Boy to kill her without even knowing she had. That was how they could bring Blanche Varner home. To her proper place, at the center of the great, definitive killing, the one that would finally cement Chuck Varner in the American mind and the world’s consciousness.

  Outside the station, The Boy watched Blanche Varner start her car and started his own immediately afterward. Blanche Potter was such an odd name to choose, he thought, but perhaps not as odd as The Boy. When they were together, she would revert back to her true name, and he would finally graduate into his. As soon as he made everything clear to Blanche, The Boy would start to call himself by his true name. In barely more than a day, when the next great demonstration was complete, he would call himself Chuck Varner. And the world would listen.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  I WAS AIMING FOR my first home, and not the motel pass-out I badly needed. They were in the same direction, the trailer park just off the West Side Freeway, but I blew past the Arcadian Inn and kept going to the park. Jaya called while I was driving, making my cell rattle around in the cup holder’s parking meter change. With an immediate purpose, I wouldn’t panic. Without it, I’d end up wide awake on that motel bed, thinking about rifles in towers, handguns pressed into people in a crowd who would, at first, think they were only being nudged.

  They’d renamed the park: Underwood, it was called now, a nice new blue sign out front that looked deliberately retro, like living in this place was a quirky decision and not the result of insurmountable financial hardship. When I passed the gates I saw why.

  “Sweet rebrand,” I said, driving past gapped rows of RVs that flanked the entry path, leading up to the central office that old Mr. Kindt used to haunt, chasing boys and girls around the park with strips of mosquito-blackened flypaper while laughing. He was mostly friendly, we thought, but his interest took on a nastier edge when the kids verged into teenagehood, enough that Maddie Ryder’s dad had once had a baseball-bat talk with him. Alfred Kindt, bald and with a pate that was always peeling, never properly able to take on a tan, had no interest in me until the After Chuck era, when he talked about our fictional bond to any reporter who came asking.

  “Dead by now,” I said to myself, just before Kindt came out onto the porch, scratching flakes from his skull into the backward tiara of white hair that still circled his head. He didn’t wave at my car, just watched me drive toward the back of the place, where I was confident I’d find something closer to what I’d grown up in.

  Yes. Past the tourist RVs, past the new and hey-not-so-bad mobile homes, was the place I remembered. My old home, a rotten core of ten overpriced and barely maintained, week-to-week renter trailers, the economic engine that kept the lights on in the landlord’s house. Kindt’s boss, whoever it might be now, didn’t make credit checks on renters in these rectangles, these human storage units. You just paid at the beginning of the week, every week, or were evicted on the spot. Kindt would have movers, of a sort, waiting behind him as he roved around, taking the envelopes. The whole time I lived in the park, from four years before Chuck’s death right up to age sixteen, there had never been a Monday morning without a forced eviction.

  Farther down the drive was where the lifers lived. Twenty mobile homes that hadn’t gone anywhere for decades and wouldn’t go anywhere until they were disassembled. Chuck used to call it Septic Acres, referencing a disaster that happened when I would have been about three. One of his running jokes with Mom.

  “With Crissy,” I said, biting the word off. Crissy. Emil Chadwick would be delighted to hear me sinking into the forced habits of childhood, giving this family treatment to the woman I’d been forced to grow up with. Another chat with Chadwick and I’d be calling Chuck “Dad” again.

  I parked in front of lot 7B, if that was what it was still called. If the address was on the door, it was covered with one of the ten or so strips of duct tape that blocked entry, as though the cops had run out of the yellow crime scene tape that now hung, snipped, from the four posts that had been erected around the trailer. The duct tape looked like a Kindt touch.

  The grass was high back here, and as I got out of the car, I stopped, staying quiet for a moment to see if what I’d noticed was just temporary. It wasn’t. It was quiet out, even though it was four p.m., prime time for the kids to be tearing around out here, letting their parents sleep it off or have sex or, in the case of the roughly 40 percent of steady, sane, substance-free families, make dinner, watch TV, and prepare a balanced lunch to be loaded into a paper bag for the next morning. There were working poor families in this place, normal folks with aims for themselves and their children. Pretty much what Crissy and me looked like to anyone who didn’t know about Chuck, who didn’t hear Mom talk about him: a waitress with a forty-five-hour workweek and her precocious latchkey daughter
. Just a pair of decent people working toward a brighter future.

  If anyone still lived in the three trailers near Crissy’s—and the recent McDonald’s wrappers and Del Taco bags suggested that it wasn’t totally abandoned—they were older. Quiet, no kids, small interior dogs. The new No Dogs signs that had dotted the property had been obeyed, by the sound of things: no barks, no coils of shit, even back here.

  I hadn’t consciously taken my video camera out, but it was in my hand—the little Pentax I always had with me when we were shooting a project, the one I used to pick up B-roll ambience that I’d play for myself at night when I was thinking about shooting the next day’s subjects, whether they were interviews or places. It helped me see better, watching what I’d shot and walked around in on a screen back in my apartment, or a motel room. Nothing seemed real, or at least multi-dimensional and fixed, until I’d seen it this way.

  I circled the trailer, watching it on the monitor. It had gotten a paint job since I left, a cerulean that had likely been closer to the sapphire blue of the Underwood sign before a few relentless years of sun had eaten the color up the spectrum. I breached the line of the cut police tape, getting close to the walls and windows of the place I’d grown up in, where I’d listened to Chuck Varner speechify and my mother praise him, where I’d wondered how much I’d have to disobey him to get a dose of the violence that he talked about carrying out against the people who’d wronged him every day—the beatings and the coffee-burnings, the acts of vandalism and minor terrorism that he bragged about to me before the big day. I’d never tested him, not once, which seemed impossible for a child. But it wasn’t. That level of awareness of danger, of caution, didn’t just come from being smart. I used to think it came from faith, from the knowledge that Chuck was righteous, that his violence was something he was entitled to.