Your Life Is Mine

by Nathan Ripley

  But after living with the same feeling with Crissy for the next decade after Chuck’s death, I came to know that that kind of awareness wasn’t born of belief. It came from being terrified, from morning until bedtime, of knowing that only by stepping exactly right in every waking second around the person that you thought you loved were you guaranteed to survive.

  I tripped over a car battery I hadn’t seen in my sideways amble around the trailer, but fell like a true shooter, holding my right arm and the camera up high above my head, twisting my body so my back would hit with full impact, keeping the Pentax unscathed. A patch of starved, yellow grass scratched against my lower back as my T-shirt rode up. Twenty years ago there was a good chance it would have been a broken bottle.

  There was a flash above me that I thought was the camera firing off a shot when I gripped it to make sure it wasn’t broken, but I knew the light was too small and localized when I was collected enough to sit up again. It was a glint off glass in the hills west of the trailer, probably off a dirt bike’s windscreen. I could see little trailing dust clouds from a few bikes buzzing around over there, one thing that hadn’t changed since I was a kid—I remembered Billy Vaughan asking me if I wanted to ride on the back of his as a twelfth birthday present, saying no, and grabbing the bike for a ride of my own as soon as he got off and had his back turned.

  Wiping myself off, I went to the side of the trailer. Someone, not too long ago, had spray-painted something four letters long in green that had then been poorly covered up by some rollered-on dull brown house paint, the same shade as the fencing that separated the lots from each other in the RV section at the mouth of the park. This part of the trailer faced the hills and the eventual sunset, and the bright afternoon light allowed the neon of those four letters to shine through the paint: Ylim. Your Life Is Mine. Crissy never would have put this on her own home; it wouldn’t benefit anyone. So someone else had: a Varner true crime fanboy, at best. A follower at second-worst. And, worst and most probable, Crissy’s killer. In black Sharpie just below the window, someone had written “Psyco Bitch.” For that one, the suspects were infinite, limited only by how many people the unwashed last version of Crissy had encountered who were accurate judges of character.

  I shot video of it all, then walked to the trailer door, climbing the few steps. Someone, probably Kindt, had rubbed soap on the windows on this side to prevent anyone who wasn’t going to make a little effort from looking in, and no one had. Just to the right of the door was a puffy sticker, pale pink and featureless now. It used to have a rainbow and a unicorn on it. Crissy had gotten it a few months after Chuck was gone.

  “This is for you, Blanche,” she’d said, still in that abstract voice she’d used for a while after Chuck died and before she’d built herself into the apostle she believed he’d want her to be. That hadn’t truly happened until her interviews with Jill Gudgeon opened her up again, got her thinking about Chuck’s Path, about our future. In the year between Chuck’s death and Jill Gudgeon’s first letter, Crissy had been a ghost, almost silent, barely looking at me and certainly never touching me unless she had to. After Jill Gudgeon, Crissy found a way to live: by becoming Chuck’s ghost.

  I owed Jill that, at least, both sides of it: she’d brought my mother back for the few years I was going to have to endure her anyway, making the occasional nice days we had together possible, as well as putting Crissy back on the road that had ended with her dead in this trailer. I pulled the sticker off, gently, but it tore anyway. Crissy must have superglued it up there: the cheap adhesive this thing had come with would have dissolved decades ago in this weather. On the back of the sticker was a key, just where Crissy told me I’d always have a secret spare.

  I tried it on the door and it opened right away, swinging inward on hinges that moved too easily, like something had come loose. The stink rushed out at me first: decay, but not human. Garbage. Red light from the sunset behind me poured into the trailer, bringing dim illumination to the mess.

  “Hey,” a man said, from the dead silence behind me. I made a weird grunting noise that would have been a scream if I were better hydrated and dodged into the trailer, turning around when I was in the kitchen, realizing I was scrabbling for a knife only when Mr. Kindt came in with his hands up. He laughed.

  “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “Didn’t call no one. Recognized you. Next of kin. Remember how I set up that pool for you and the other littles back too many years now?”

  Despite his decent vocabulary, Kindt was the ideal form of a certain kind of Northern California male, a sort of nostalgia-trash they don’t make here anymore, and that for a long time must have been a simulated fusion of Vietnam vet and Haight-Ashbury these men cobbled together from images they’d seen in magazines and on TV. His belt was a piece of rope, his jeans ancient but clean, the shirt blooming with tropical flowers that had never grown on this planet. He was standing closer to me than even the confined space of the trailer called for. I did remember the pool he’d set up for us kids back then, and how Crissy didn’t let me swim in it after the first time, telling me it wasn’t up to the dignity Chuck would have wanted from me to splash around with our neighbors barely dressed.

  “Hi, Mr. Kindt. Can you give me a little room?”

  “Sure can. I just stand close because of my hearing, don’t like making people speak up. I can just stand back here a pace and lean if you’re willing to yell, though. Was it Darla? No. Rose.”

  “Blanche,” I said.

  “Can’t forget a pretty name like that. Kind of thing that a slave ought to be whispering with a ‘Miss’ in front of it while she waves a fan over you.” Kindt did back off, but I kept tight against the counter, set the camera down, and moved my right hand over to my back pocket to grip my phone. If I had to, I could bring it down hard onto the bone just under his eye. I’d done that once to a mugger when I was drunk and stupid enough not to just hand over my bag, maybe ten years ago. He’d taken the purse anyway, but left bleeding.

  “You remember me, Mr. Kindt? I’m impressed.”

  “I remember all the old residents, even if they come back looking different. And you were here until you were what, sixteen? Turned into a lady quick, left us all in your dust.”

  I let that hang in the air. Kindt flipped the lights on, illuminating the conditions of Crissy Varner’s former existence. “They wouldn’t let me clean it up,” he said.

  “Once they got the body out.”

  “And the brains and the splash, yeah,” he said. “Sorry,” he added, not looking up at me. “I knew it was that Reilly. Told the cops about him lots of times, even called in when I saw him roaming ’round earlier that night, sort of driving by slow in his Pontiac. They don’t listen to me.”

  “They did afterwards.”

  “What?”

  “They listened to you. That’s why Reilly’s in jail, right? Because you put him there.”

  “I didn’t put no one anywhere, just said what I saw and that’s that.” Kindt got trembly around the lips, like he was one question or poke away from divulging something closer to the truth. If he was all Maitland and Co. had to go on other than some security tapes that didn’t come anywhere close to covering Crissy’s trailer, I would be even less friendly during my next drop-in at the station, and insist on seeing this Pargiter, the detective who had dumped the case off on Maitland.

  Kindt had been coming closer to me again as he talked. He hooked a right in the narrow chamber and sat down on the unmade bed, which wasn’t curtained off as it was when Crissy and I lived here. The curtain was now a brown plastic divider, drawn tight to the wall. I’d always cared more about privacy than Crissy had. She never worried much about nakedness, and once Chuck was gone, no other man set foot in this place while I was there. Other than Jill Gudgeon, barely anyone had—Crissy just learned to fix anything that broke, or left it broken.

  “Get off that,” I said. “Stand up.”

  “What? This here’s a rental unit, sweetie. I’
m the one to be telling you where you can and can’t go,” Kindt said. He circled a hand around on the mattress as he spoke, not exactly in an inviting way, but close enough that I wanted to jam the heel of my Converse into his gappy teeth. I gestured to the side of the trailer.

  “When did that graffiti turn up? The letters you painted over?”

  “Dunno. Sometime after your mom died, I guess. Asked the cops if I could at least clean that up, they said yeah.”

  “Did they come down and take a look first?”

  “Nah. I just told them it was some letters, nonsense, that we have kids tagging every goddamn thing around here unless I’m on night patrol with a floodlight.”

  “Who’d you talk to? Got a name on the cop?” I asked, but Kindt didn’t answer, poking instead at a crusted orange food stain in the carpet with his toe. The unique glow of powdered cheddar from mac ‘n’ cheese.

  “They took both my spare keys for their investigation, too—didn’t think to look around for whether your mom had a spare, or I would have been in here to do the proper thing and get this place in decent shape again.”

  “Ready for turnaround to the next renter as soon as possible,” I said, more bitter than I thought I’d be at this place I had no nostalgia for being passed over to another tenant as though it was a place to live, and not a tomb for Chuck Varner’s cult and my childhood.

  “If you want to get cynical about it, Blanche. Now can I have that key you used? Don’t think you’ve got any right to it.”

  “When I’m done, Mr. Kindt,” I said. The cheese stain was illuminated by light pouring in the window that faced the hills. Kindt was between me and the window now, so I passed close by him as I walked over, looking out at a view that I had memorized from the time I was tall enough to see out of this pane of glass until I escaped. Kindt was within groping distance of me, but that meant I was in punching range of him. It wasn’t the light that was drawing me to the glass: it was its cleanliness. Absolutely pristine, inside and out, not a smudge or a smear, as though it had been freshly Windexed. It was neater than anything else inside or outside the trailer.

  Then I saw the flash again, up there in the grass of the hill. And this time I recognized it for what it was: sunlight off a lens. I dropped to the carpet and grabbed Kindt’s arm, pulling him down with me. The echoing blast of a gunshot was the first sound I heard after the air came blasting out of my lungs in a cough.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  * * *

  WE COULDA STAYED on the bed if you wanted to move things along.”

  “Shut up,” I said. The glint and the sound should have come with a bullet, or at least the sound of a ricochet, but there was nothing. A light layer of sweat had slicked over me, the way it had whenever I went outside in New Orleans, but this time there was an animal scent of adrenaline in it. Any of the times I’d gone shooting with Crissy, using an old SKS while we both thought of Chuck’s hidden AR-10, I’d instantly get this sweat going and try to conceal it from her, hoping she would concentrate on the accuracy of my work at the target, hoping that having the gun in my hands and no one else’s would help me take hold of the fear that I’d never been brave enough to confess to Crissy, and had never talked about with anyone else. I couldn’t hear a shot, outside of a movie, without seeing Chuck walking into those first couple of people in the mall, and caressing them into his gun, before the bangs had everyone running. You’d never guess how loud a gun could sound in the echoing architecture of that mall.

  I’d seen the light bounce from the scope, before coming into the trailer. That glimpse when I fell. There had been no attempt at shooting me then, when it would have been easy, easier by far than trying to nail me in this trailer through a window, no matter how clean the glass was. That shot was an invitation, not an attempt. A starter pistol for whatever was coming next.

  Or maybe he had just hesitated the first time and missed the second. I stayed on the ground when Kindt started to get to his feet, about to warn him when he cut me off.

  “This ain’t normal mourning,” he said, adjusting his rope belt and taking a packet of Eclipse spearmint out of his shirt pocket, likely the closest he ever got to a toothbrush. “You think your mom’s accident is on some sort of repeat cycle? I’d have a hard time getting renters out here if everyone was crime-scene allergic. This break-and-enter shit happens a lot but that don’t mean you’ve got a high chance of getting murdered just by coming in the door. Vernon Reilly came here to rip her off, didn’t think she was gonna be quiet about it either before or after, so he did what he did. It’s sad, but that’s that. Maybe she talked back, or maybe he was so squirrely from the drugs that he shot when he didn’t mean to, but it pans out the same. It’s over.”

  “You didn’t hear that gunshot?”

  “I don’t hear shit these days, that’s why I look you in the face when I listen to you. I got about 20 percent hearing left, and only in this,” Kindt said, flicking his right earlobe.

  “Even mostly deaf, you can hear a gunshot.”

  “I can hear a backfire, I can hear kids setting off fireworks, and I can hear gunshots, sure. There’s plenty of all three out here most days, and if I collapsed every time one sounded, my knees would be even more gone than they are.” Kindt squatted and wiggled a bit, testing his joints for lawsuit potential.

  I headed to the door of the trailer, telling him I’d see him back at his office within the hour. Enough time for me to get to where I’d seen the light careen off the glass, or for me to get murdered or taken away or violated by whoever it was up there.

  “Lemme guess,” he said. “I call the cops if you’re not back by then?”

  “No, you call them now,” I said, giving him Officer Maitland’s card. “This is probably the one you’ve been dealing with up until now, right?” Kindt grunted, leaving the trailer. He started walking back to his office, crossing the open yard, and wasn’t harassed by any fresh gunshots.

  Before making an approach to the hills, I stopped to check another of Crissy’s hiding places, this one for items too large to be hidden behind a puffy sticker. It was a hollow compartment behind the coat hooks just to the left of the door inside the trailer. The wall-mounted unit looked like it had been badly installed, sticking slightly out on one side, but it had actually taken Crissy seven tries to get it stuck on perfectly. I remember the day she did it, keeping me out of school with a fake cold so I could assist her. She’d been wearing one of my old T-shirts as a bandana, and when it got too hot as we worked, she stripped down to just her bra and jeans. Finally she got it just right, a recessed hiding place that would look like a widow’s fumbling home improvement job to a cop.

  I put a hand into the little dark space behind the wall mount, feeling the intervening decade of dust inside before pulling back and taking a pen out of my pocket, which I used to poke around first. The pen came back furred white, but without any mousetraps snapped around it. I reached in for the ziplocked object Crissy had entombed in there in 2004.

  Taking the small, holstered Ruger SP101 out of that filthy bag, checking the cylinder and feeling the weight of it, marked the first time I’d held a gun since I’d helped Crissy hide the rifle before I left this place for what I thought was forever.

  “I hate guns,” I reminded myself, to contradict the intense wave of comfort and security I felt when I slid the holster onto my belt and slipped outside.

  In that way she had of somehow appearing when I was about to do something stupid, Jaya texted me. I saw her name but didn’t read what she sent, pocketing the phone and letting it buzz with a few more ignored texts. I started walking around the trailer, feeling how opened up it had gotten here since I was a kid, how the trees had either vanished or seemed more sparse now that I was an adult. I’d made the six trees back here into a thicket in my memories, but they were spaced out and gave a clear view of the hill that I was walking toward, through desiccated patches of grass like the one that had scraped my back when I fell.

  I started running the
camera again, bracing it against my collarbone with my left hand as I climbed toward where I’d seen the flash. My right hand I kept free and close to the Ruger. My thumb was twitching with the remembered motion of working the revolver at the range.

  “Chuck would have hated that I didn’t buy another Beretta, but this one just felt right,” Crissy would say, as though this was somehow an element of defiance that normalized her wholesale acceptance of Chuck’s cult rules and claims.

  Other than the dead whisper of Crissy’s voice, I heard nothing behind me, but there were sounds farther up on the hill—scatterings, rustlings. Not animal sounds, I didn’t think, but probably not human ones either.

  The trees here did match up with my memories, thick and close together, the canopy that overhung the rough path adding extra darkness to this sunset hour: I could still see well, at least in front of me, but I couldn’t make out what, if anything, was on my left or right. I started to cast the camera around in those directions, after adjusting for the lower light. It could see what I couldn’t, but not in time for it to be of any use to me up here.

  The forest broke into the tiny clearing I remembered from all the times that Crissy had brought me up here on her practice runs, and from when I’d brought my own friends to play and, eventually, to make out.

  There was nobody here: just the source of the glimmer. I walked close enough to the tall branch the scope was hanging from to see and recognize its pitted, scored surface, the brown-painted metal so naturally worn it almost looked like the pockmarked skin of a man. The lenses, though, were pristine. Chuck had found it at a pawnshop when I was with him, on a day when he was supposed to be picking me up from kindergarten and driving me to the illegal day care that Mitzi Winslow’s mother ran. I’d been four, and even then he’d tried to explain to me what a score this purchase was, how amazing it was to find something this high-end in such a broken-down little shop. We’d hidden the scope and rifle before he took his last drive to Harlow. Crissy and I had buried both deep in the woods behind the trailer before the police did their full toss of our home two decades ago, first carefully disassembling the rifle, coating the components in oil, and wrapping each one in a piece of aluminized Mylar before putting everything in a PVC pipe section that she capped and sealed. Crissy described the process to me in great detail at least once a month, when we walked out to the burial site. The rifle was used one more time after that, and the next time it was hidden I dismembered the thing and spread it all over town. There was no reason for this scope to be here, looking as well-preserved as it did now.