by Tom Wright
Sometimes when they came back from these visits L.A. would be driving, depending on Gram’s level of confidence in heaven that day. Then we’d go out and buy hamburgers, onion rings and milkshakes at the Sundown on Beckley and bring them home to eat at the kitchen table. L.A. always put big puky gobs of mayonnaise on her onion rings, even with me looking at her funny about it, which incidentally was how I learned what a waste of time it was trying to influence her with disapproval.
By this time, even though she’d never even set foot on a high board until last summer, she’d moved completely beyond what I’d taught her about diving, practicing until the final whistle at sundown almost every Adult Day, and at this point her skill was so unbelievable that people from the neighborhood would stop by the pool just to watch her. And Gram had finally let her get a bikini, hot-pink, a super color for her with her dark skin and eyes. I suppose her wearing it helped some when it came to attracting attention. It certainly attracted mine. When she climbed the ladder up to the high board I’d look around and see guys elbowing each other in the ribs and pointing and I’d enjoy the feeling of being her original coach, the one who got her started diving in the first place. Then she’d somersault through the air, come cleanly out of her tuck and slip into the water silent as an ice pick, and there’d be claps and whistles around the pool and even out on the sidewalk.
But as far as you could tell from looking at L.A. she never even noticed anybody was watching. Looking on, I felt a weird combination of pride, humiliation and envy, knowing the time when my diving was equal to hers, the time when there was anything I could teach her, was gone forever. She was now at a level of ability that I couldn’t even truly understand, much less compete with.
I don’t remember now why, but on the morning I’m thinking of we didn’t go to the pool even though it was an Adult Day and the weather was clear. L.A. left the breakfast table as soon as she’d finished her coffee and milk—“café-oh-lay,” Gram called it—and carried the cup and saucer to the sink, rinsed them off, then went out to the garage.
I could hear her thumping around out there as I was trying uselessly to get Jazzy to jump up for a leftover corner of my toast. She wouldn’t jump, just kept trying to get the toast by turning around in circles on her hind legs, the way L.A. had taught her. I guess it was hard for her to let go of a skill that had always worked for her, with her mind shorted out by the smell of the food right there above her nose.
“Kitchen detail,” said Gram, pointing her finger at me as she stood up. She went into the laundry room and began sorting through a basket of clothes, throwing whites left, colors right. I gave Jazzy the toast and she took it straight to her box. Then I started clearing the table, not my favorite thing, but I had a rhythm for it: hot water on, soap in, grab the silverware and slip it into the water, then saucers, plates, cups and cereal bowls as the water level came up. Pitchers and serving bowls in last when the water was deep enough for them. Butter, milk, jam and juice back into the fridge, bread in the box. Couple of passes with the rag over the table, then the dishes in reverse order, large to small, rinse in hot, into the rack and I was done. Even though Gram herself used a towel and made L.A. do the same, she let me rack-dry, a break I got for being the man of the family.
As I worked I watched L.A. in the doorway of the garage next to the loose black coils of Old Sparky, our thrill-a-minute outdoor extension cord, ferociously rug-shaking a burlap sack, dust clouds billowing around her in the morning sunlight. When she was satisfied, she dropped that sack and picked up the other one she’d brought out.
Gram, who had walked back into the kitchen, looked through the window at L.A. and said, “Mercy! What’s the girl doing, fighting off snakes?”
In a minute L.A. came in through the back door holding a sack in each hand. “Let’s go find bottles,” she said. This had been one of our routines for years. Now that L.A. lived here Gram gave us both a pretty okay allowance, but this was an angle we couldn’t pass up, good bottles being easy to find if you knew where to look. You could rack up a few bucks in an afternoon if you showed a little energy, and then if we took the bottles to Beauchamp’s there was Froggy’s bonus on top of that. At the time I actually thought it was about the money, not realizing that projects like this were what Gram had meant by lollygagging and that she was encouraging them.
I pushed aside the thought that I had outgrown this kind of stuff and said, “Sure.”
Jazzy, hearing the word “go,” watched L.A. with her eagerest expression, hoping to hear “basket” too, which would have meant L.A. was taking her bike and Jazzy could ride along in the carrier behind her. But for us riding bikes was pretty much a thing of the past by now, and since Jazzy was too short-legged to walk very far with us, taking her along just wasn’t something we worked into our plans much anymore.
When she figured out that she wasn’t signed on for this expedition she trudged back to her box with her tail drooping, circled around three times counterclockwise and lay down with a sigh, gazing up at L.A. with piteous eyes.
We took off up Harlandale with the tow sacks over our shoulders. Both of us enjoyed walking, and for summertime this wasn’t a bad day to be out, the air clean and bright, not too hot yet and with a nice breeze in our faces. We knew the dogs and cats, and one parrot, along this route and liked to check in with them if they were the sociable type, petting them or at least talking to them in the case of the dogs and cats, and whistling to the parrot, whose cage hung out on the front porch of his house in good weather.
I was thinking that lately L.A. had seemed a little stronger and more like her old self, and I considered asking her how she really felt and maybe testing the waters about bringing up my nighttime visitor. It was something I definitely wanted to know her thoughts about, but I couldn’t mentally put the words together in a way that sounded right, so instead I got out the cigarette I’d swiped from Froggy the last time we were down there, lit it with a kitchen match and took a drag. I offered the smoke to L.A., but she shook her head.
At the overpass above the tracks I looked at the road and at the weedy downslope, visualizing the trajectories of the bottles as they flew through the air. People threw them out as their cars approached the railing, trying to get them as far down toward the tracks as possible. The traffic was fast along here, which gave the bottles a lot of added velocity, and I was amazed how far down some of them carried. We were headed for the general area down below where most of them ended up.
Green bottles were fairly dependable and would usually stay in one piece when they hit, but you couldn’t say the same for the brown ones, which didn’t bring refunds anyway. They were not only worthless but treacherous because of the way they’d sometimes break into long ugly spikes that stuck up like fangs in the weeds. The broken bottles worried me more than they did L.A., so she was in the lead as we headed down the slope, picking our way carefully through the grass.
Near the bottom of the main slope, L.A. had just come to the top of a small rise in the ground about fifteen feet ahead of me when she suddenly stopped. She turned around and bent over with one hand covering her mouth and her eyes shut tight. She stayed that way for a second or two, then opened her eyes, blinked a few times and took a couple of deep breaths.
“Hey,” I said as I came up to her. “What’s wrong?”
She swallowed and straightened up to put her hands on my shoulders, then walked me around past her so I could look down at what she’d seen.
“Jesus Christ!” I yelped, jumping back.
There was a bluish white dead girl lying on her back in the grass just down the slope. She was naked, lying with her legs spread wide apart and bent at the knees, her hands over her breasts and her eyes half closed. A few strands of hair straggled across her cheeks and between her lips, and her face had a peaceful, faraway expression, as if being here dead like this were no big problem for her.
But it was for me. I was having a hard time getting enough air.
“Oh, man!” I blurted.
“Oh, shit!” I turned around. “Let’s get out of here.”
L.A. was looking at the dead girl and still breathing pretty hard herself. But she said, “Wait.”
I stopped.
“Come on,” she said. “I want to see.”
Which was L.A. for you.
My hands were shaking and my heart was in my throat, but L.A. said, “Come on” again, and we moved down to opposite sides of the body. L.A. sat on her heels with her elbows on her knees and her hands on her head, looking at the pale girl, her eyes going everywhere over the body without embarrassment or favoritism. The fact that the girl was about our age made the whole thing that much weirder.
But it wasn’t the only thing that did.
“I’ve seen her somewhere,” said L.A. “At the movies, I think. She must have lived around here.” She touched the dead arm on her side of the body.
I was too shaken up to say so, but I had most definitely seen this girl. In a way it seemed wrong not to tell L.A., but even if I could make my tongue work, what would I say? I know where she lived—she lived in my dreams.
She was the girl who’d been standing by my bed every night as I slept.
L.A. leaned forward and lightly took one of her fingers, lifting cautiously. The hand and arm came up a little, but not freely.
“She’s a little bit stiff,” L.A. said.
Under the hand we could see a nickel-sized black circle where the girl’s nipple had been cut off. I tried to swallow but my throat was too dry. L.A. put the first hand down and carefully lifted the other. That nipple was gone too.
This was getting too unnatural for me. I wanted to cover my eyes. I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted time to reverse itself so this whole thing would be undone. And then, without any kind of warning at all, I had one of my flashes of knowing something other people didn’t, something I didn’t have any right to know. And didn’t want to know.
“She was glad when he did that to her,” I said. Then when I heard myself I yelled, “Damn!” and rapped my forehead with my knuckles, feeling like I’d just had my heart licked by a hyena.
“What?” said L.A., her eyes wide. These spells of mine were nothing new to her, but the situation may have had her a little spooked too, even if she’d never admit it.
I looked at the body, then back at L.A., my head thumping. “She tried to make herself believe that would be the last thing,” I said. “That he’d be through with her then and let her go.” We both just breathed for a while, looking at each other, me thinking about how totally wrong the girl had been.
Finally L.A.’s eyes went back to the body. “Look,” she said, pointing to a bruised line around the girl’s neck. “Choked.”
Her wrists and ankles were marked the same way. Looking at the girl’s body, I realized her legs would have been pretty if she were alive and wondered if she’d shaved them. This wild thought, along with seeing the matted hair between her legs, made me sick with embarrassment, and for a second I wondered if I might be going crazy right here in the weeds.
“Wonder how she ended up down here,” I said.
Looking around at the grass, L.A. said, “Somebody drug her from somewhere, maybe the road. Then he fixed her like this.”
“How do you know it was a he?” I asked stupidly.
L.A. confirmed that with the you dumb shit look.
Of course. Whoever had killed the girl was absolutely a man. Women didn’t do things like this. And it came to me as an obvious fact that arranging the body just so, not hiding or burying it, meant something. It meant the man who’d killed her wanted her to be seen this way. I imagined him fussing around, arranging the body, getting everything just right, maybe talking to himself or even to the body as he worked, like little kids do when they play with dolls.
Maybe he wasn’t gone yet. Maybe he was watching us right now, to see how we reacted.
I looked around us in every direction, up and down the slope, along the edge of the trees, down the double ribbon of the tracks. I checked to make sure my Case knife was in my pocket and experienced a rush of relief when I felt it, along with a flicker of amazement at how important a three-inch blade could suddenly seem.
“We’ve gotta get back and report this,” L.A. said. “We shouldn’t touch anything.”
“We touched her.”
“Well,” said L.A. She looked around until she found a piece of cardboard and brought it over to cover the girl’s lower body and thighs. Then she stood looking at the marks on the wrists and ankles, frowning slightly and biting her lower lip. I saw that her eyes were starting to get that wild look you had to watch out for, and she was beginning to shake a little.
L.A. had this thing about people being tied up. For some reason the idea had an unraveling effect on her mind. If she saw somebody tying a person’s hands in a movie or on TV she’d get up and leave, and later wouldn’t talk about it. For no reason I could put my finger on, it seemed to me this had something to do with her other little problem, the one about being surprised, and how you had to remember not to come up behind her or grab her as a joke or anything. Because it wouldn’t be a joke to her, and you can believe me when I say she’d make it a fun-free occasion for you too. Just ask the poor guy at school.
“I gotta pee,” she said. “Stay here.”
She ran behind the concrete piling. Watching her disappear, I thought of the time on one of our jaunts along the tracks a while back when I suddenly had to go, so I turned aside, unzipped and let fly. L.A. just stood there without saying anything for a minute, then dropped her jeans and panties to half mast, leaned back slightly as she pulled up on herself somehow and shot a golden arc down the other side of the embankment, getting about as much distance as any guy could have. All I could do was stare at her in disbelief, having had no idea any such thing was possible. To this day I didn’t know what the hell her demonstration had been about, but it created in my mind the long-term question of whether this was a special talent only L.A. had or something girls in general could do if they really wanted to.
I waited, feeling awkward and trying not to look at the body in the wrong places. But I couldn’t help myself, my eyes lingering on her breasts, and in spite of myself I wondered if she’d ever done it with anybody. Then suddenly I knew she had, with the guy who’d killed her, or rather he’d done it to her, not only in front but from the back too. And it had hurt. It had made her scream. Another thing I didn’t want to know and didn’t feel I had any right to know. Even here in the full sun a dark chill found me.
When L.A. came out she was slightly more like her usual self, and I relaxed a little. We stood and thought about the dead girl a while longer, then started back up the slope. On the way back we worked out how we were going to tell the story. Gram would be the first to hear it, and naturally L.A., being the actual finder, would lay out the main points. But I had clear standing too because I’d been there and checked out the body on an equal basis with L.A. I may not have actually touched it like her but I didn’t see that as neutralizing my position, because seeing the dead girl naked was a bigger deal for me since I was a guy. This was a fairly subtle point but a significant one, and I knew it wouldn’t get past L.A.
Gram was ironing when we came in. The way she did it was sort of a production, setting the board up, or more likely having me set it up if I was around, next to the window under the floor lamp with a big glass of iced tea on a coaster and a few windmill cookies on a small plate on the library table beside her. She had her own special braided rug that she stood on in her woolly slippers and the radio was always on a station that played old-people music, Gram humming along with the tunes she liked. There were baskets of clothes to be ironed on her left and a rack to her right where she hung the pieces when she was finished with them.
When Gram saw the look on our faces she said, “What is it, you two?”
“We found a dead body,” said L.A. In situations like this she never wasted her breath on the small stuff.
Gram’s mouth opene
d. She set the iron down on its end. Jazzy appeared and began carefully sniffing our ankles.
“It was a girl with no clothes on,” said L.A. “She was choked, and somebody cut her here.” L.A. pointed to her own breasts.
“Oh, my Lord,” said Gram, taking off her glasses. “Where was this, honey?” You had to give Gram credit, not coming back with any bullshit about whether we were fooling or whether we were sure the girl was dead or whether we had let our imaginations get the better of us.
“By the overpass,” I said.
“You couldn’t see her from the road,” L.A. added.
Gram nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s right, there was an article, last week sometime.” Gram read both newspapers every day and at any given moment knew pretty much everything there was to know. She moved to the side chair and sat down. “Did you leave her as you found her?”
“Yes ma’am,” I said, seeing the girl again on her back in the weeds, her head over to the side, her half-closed eyes unfocused and vacant, the narrow bruise around her neck blue-gray in the sun.
Gram nodded again. “We’ll need to call the police,” she said, reaching for her small address book.
As she did this, I felt the flow of things beginning to change. There was going to be a lot of excitement, no doubt about it, but that could definitely be a two-edged sword. As we watched Gram dial and heard her say, “Detective Chamfort, please,” I understood that this wasn’t a story now, and it no longer belonged to us. It had turned into a case. It belonged to investigators and reporters and lawyers. By the time they were through it would all be about them, and about whoever did the murder, and the lost blue girl would gradually shrink away to nothing.