Women of the Mean Streets: Lesbian Noir

by Greg Herren

  I’d like to tell this story from the beginning—that’s always the best way to unravel a mystery, to put the pieces in their logical and chronological order. But I’m not sure when the beginning was, exactly. And I’m not certain that where I am now is the end. Maybe telling the bits and pieces of the story will make it clear—give it a beginning, middle, and especially, an end.

  *

  Blood is a strange thing. If you eat meat, you see it run onto your dinner plate all the time. But you never think: blood. And (unless you’re a vegetarian like I am) you never think: killing. You just eat what’s on the plate and think maybe, delicious or tasty or overcooked or underdone or needs salt or something like that. You don’t think about what the meat was before it was on your plate. You don’t think about the blood running out of the animal onto the floor of the abattoir and down into the French drains they have all over the meat-processing plants. You don’t think about the fact that yesterday the cow or the chicken or the pig was running around in a yard or in a pasture and now it’s on your plate. You just don’t think about the killing. Or why there’s blood on the plate. And that you’re eating it. But there’s some kind of killing every time you eat an animal. Something has to die.

  We see blood a lot, every day, and we don’t really think about it. Cut your finger on a knife in the kitchen, or the scissors slip, or the paper runs through your hands too fast, or you fall off your bike, or you trip on the stairs and there’s blood. Somewhere, every day, there’s blood.

  There was blood in our house. It took a long time before anyone saw it. It took a long time before anyone said so tragic or they kept to themselves or how awful.

  *

  When I turned thirteen, my grandfather died. It wasn’t the first death in the family but it was, for me, the only one that mattered because he was the only person I was sure I loved. And then he was dead.

  He died the way a lot of children see grown-ups die: He just disappeared. One day he was there and the next there was a phone call from a hospital and the word aneurysm and then he was gone and I never saw him again. There was no good-bye scene like there is in the movies, no letter like there is in books. Just nothing—the page turns and the next one is blank.

  He died on the day before Halloween, so I kept thinking that there would be a ghost, a real ghost, that would hover near us, that I could see. But there wasn’t. There was just blank space. There was nothing to protect us. Nothing to protect me.

  I didn’t cry. I’m not sure why. Crying was forbidden in the crazy house—crying was for babies, crying was for those who were weak, and crying was something to be ashamed of. Don’t do it. Don’t cry. I’ll give you something to cry about.

  When you watch a TV show with murders—especially more than one—some psychologist always comes in and talks about triggers. “Well, that must have been the trigger.” Because the trigger is the thing that goes off—the cocking of the gun or the pulling back of the arrow and then…

  My grandfather’s death was a trigger. He died. Then the dog died. Then my mother went very, very crazy. My brother stopped talking and didn’t go back to school after Christmas. My father disappeared. The baby… And then someone else went to the woods and tried to hang herself, except a man came along with a dog that wasn’t dead and cut her down.

  That was me.

  Mysteries almost never have suicides. There’s the body that is set up to look like a suicide, but it always turns out to be murder. The killer forgets something specific, like kicking the chair over in the right direction, or using the left hand for the prints on the gun, or remembering how neat and tidy the victim was, or typing out the note and not signing it, because nobody does that.

  It was easy to tell the man with the dog that someone else had done it—strung me up with the rope and left me. I think he went that way! And then I escaped, because the woods were my second home and I knew where to hide from the man and even the dog, because when you live in a crazy house, animal instinct is something you know very well. So I crawled behind the waterfall into the crevice of rock where I used to sit in the summer and read because it was cool and the sound of the water was soothing and the big spiders as big as your hand that moved delicately over the wet rock didn’t bother me. I crawled there and waited. Waited until I realized that perhaps the way out was simply not to go back.

  I didn’t explain why I was there in the woods with the rope, using my Girl Scout training to tie a slipknot that would hold my thirteen-year-old self. I didn’t explain why I thought this was the best answer to the question of what lay behind the door with the big brass knocker.

  I went to the woods to hang myself because that afternoon when I came home from school there was blood. Lots of blood. There were bits and pieces of flesh and a smell like metal and rotting meat and when I saw everything that was there, I decided I didn’t ever want to see anything else again. I got the rope from the shed out back and I went down to the woods, made the knot, tossed the rope over the limb of the tree, and tried to figure out exactly how to swing myself down from the big rock to the left of the trunk so that my neck would snap quickly and I would die.

  Without any blood.

  But then the man came and he was screaming and the dog was barking and running around in a circle. It was almost dusk and very cold and I wasn’t exactly sure if I was conscious or not. I remember the feel of the rope on my neck, bristly and rough, and how it cut into the flesh like hundreds of tiny teeth. I remember the rock was dull and gray and there was moss on one side and that my left foot slipped when I was trying to position everything the way I thought it should be before I jumped off.

  And then there was screaming and barking and a man who kept saying a rush of words that came like the sound of the waterfall at the mouth of the creek nearby.

  “Who did this to you? What kind of monster… Can you hear me? Wake up, come back to us. Just a slip of a girl, a slip of a girl…”

  That was me, the slip of a girl. I had slipped the rope over my head, then slipped on the rock, and now I would slip through the truth into a lie, because lies came easily and readily to me because when you grow up with crazy, you learn that the truth isn’t something anyone really wants to hear.

  And so I lay on the leaves and pine needles, smelling the loamy smell of the woodsy earth and the smell of the dog barking near my head and the smell of the man’s hands as he slapped my face lightly, his hands were surprisingly warm and my face was cold and his hands stung my cheeks. And then I sat up slowly and I was dizzy and so cold and I looked at the man and the dog and for a second I thought I might cry and then I raised my hand and pointed away from the waterfall and toward the old mill house road that led out of the woods and said, “I think he went that way!”

  The man looked toward the mill house and then at me and the dog had stopped barking and was looking at me like it knew I was lying, but couldn’t say anything and I thought for a moment about our dog, our dead dog, our dog who no one came to help until nothing could be done, and I wanted to hug the dog and leave with the man. But instead I just pointed again, mutely, my eyes glistening with tears, and the man said, “You stay here, I’ll be right back and we’ll get you seen to.” And then he took off at quite a clip and the dog looked around once and then I slipped behind the waterfall and I never saw the man or the dog again.

  It was almost dark when I realized it was too cold to stay in the woods and I would have to go back home. Home to the blood and the carnage and the things I wish I had never seen.

  As I crawled back out and over the rocks and up the embankment to where the rope still lay like a thick chalk outline of a young girl’s body on the floor of the forest, I wondered what I would do when I got home. Would I call someone—who would I call? Would I clean everything up? I wasn’t sure how I could clean up what I had seen. I wasn’t sure if anyone could clean up what lay behind the door with the big brass knocker.

  The door was still unlocked when I got back to the house. I went around turning on
lights, careful where I stepped. In the back hall near the kitchen I saw one of the cats lapping at blood on the floor and I tried to remember that this was just like blood on the plate at dinner for the cat and that it shouldn’t make me want to vomit.

  I went upstairs and went into my grandmother’s bathroom and ran the water in the sink and started to wash my face. There was a ring of red and purple around my neck and one of my eyes was black and blue, the white a bright red, like someone had stuck a pin in it. There were leaves in my hair and on the shoulder of my sweater and there was dirt on my cheek.

  I took all my clothes off and got in the shower and stood there under the water like I had stood behind the waterfall—for a long time. Then I got out and wrapped myself in several towels and went to my room and shut the door. My clothes were still in a pile on the floor of the bathroom.

  I put on a T-shirt, then a sweatshirt, and a pair of jeans and got under the quilt. I was shaking with cold and the house was really quiet. I don’t ever remember it being so quiet. It was quiet enough to think, but I couldn’t think. I didn’t know what to think. I was going to try to sleep, then I was going to get up and feed the cats and try and figure out what to do. Because I knew I had to do something. I just wasn’t at all sure what that something was. And I was so tired. I had to sleep. I had to sleep and pray I wouldn’t dream.

  When you go to sleep with all the lights on but it’s dark, it’s disorienting when you wake up. Is it night or day? Where am I? What time is it? What day is it? I lay in my bed under the quilt trying to remember.

  And then I remembered.

  *

  I got home from school at 3:15 in the afternoon. It was cold. Very cold. When you live in a crazy house, things are always one of two ways: very quiet or very loud. In our house, all the doors to all the rooms were always shut. It was like a rooming house where everyone has their own space and then there are common areas like the kitchen and dining room and living room for people to congregate in. Except there was no congregating in the crazy house. My mother never left her room. My father never came home. My grandmother lived in her own rooms—a sitting room, a bathroom, a bedroom—like a little apartment in our house after my grandfather died. My brother and the baby slept in the same room because they were both boys. And I had my own room up in the attic, which had started out creepy, but then got comfortable, like the place behind the waterfall in the woods. The windows in my room had ivy growing over half of them and at night there would sometimes be glowing eyes peering in—there were raccoons who climbed down from the roof and they always looked in my room first. They were the only things that ever checked on me there. Well, not the only things.

  It was usually quiet in our house unless my mother was screaming. But she screamed a lot. And the screaming could go on for a very long time. The screaming could go on until you would do almost anything to make it stop. Your hands over your ears or a pillow over your head was never enough. Sometimes I would find a way to slip out the back door and ride my bike to church and just sit in there, because it was quiet and peaceful and Jesus didn’t ask anything of me. Other times I would walk down to the woods and just sit there on one of the rocks by the creek and imagine that when I went home it would all be different and better and no longer crazy.

  On this afternoon, there was no screaming. There was just quiet. And cold. So cold my teeth started to chatter. And there was blood. So much blood.

  *

  It’s hard to know why people do the things that they do. You’re in a situation and you just think, I’ll do this. But it isn’t always the right choice. I decided to go to the woods with the rope. It wasn’t the right choice. And then I came back home—because I didn’t know where else to go—and that wasn’t the right choice, either.

  When you smell gas, they tell you to leave the house and call 911. But sometimes there’s still an explosion. Flip a light switch and the whole block can go up in flames, everything blown to smithereens. I saw that on the news one night. Someone made the wrong decision and bad things happened. That’s just how it is sometimes. There’s no way of knowing that things will go so wrong.

  *

  Nothing prepares you for blood. Not really. Sure, we got “the talk” at school and the little package of things to prepare us for our first period. Yet the first time there’s blood on your underwear, you get scared and you can’t help thinking you must be dying. And then it just seems normal after that. You know you won’t die. You know the bleeding eventually stops. But there’s still something off about the whole thing that you can’t quite explain. It’s unsettling. And it doesn’t prepare you for more blood, just for that blood.

  I wasn’t prepared for this blood. For the blood on the stairs and on the walls and in the sink and on a chair and on the beds and in the crib. I wasn’t prepared for how blood looks when it’s matted into hair or running down a cheek like a tear or dripping slowly down fingers onto a rug. I wasn’t prepared for how blood spreads like tendrils of hair across a quilt or soaks into a pillow. I wasn’t prepared for blood spattered onto the fur of a cat or sprayed across a table top or swirling at the bottom of a coffee cup.

  It was just so much blood. Which is why I had to try and get the images out of my head. Forever.

  The decision I made was to just keep going. The man and the dog had saved me. I wasn’t part of the blood and the meat-like bits strewn through the house that had once been but no longer looked anything like the people I had seen that morning before I left for school.

  Thirteen is that blurry, indistinct time. You think maybe you’re grown-up enough to live like an adult. But then you decide to do stuff that really proves that you aren’t. I decided to just go back to my house. And then I decided to act like everything was okay. That’s the kind of thing a kid thinks can work. Because thirteen really is still a kid. No matter what that kid has done or seen or had happen to her. Thirteen isn’t as blurry as anyone ever thinks.

  *

  When I woke up and I didn’t know if it was day or night, I went through the house and decided that I could just close the doors. One by one. Shut out the blood and the smells and the other things that I can’t even explain. Close the doors. Because one of the things about the house that had always been true was that the doors were always shut. And so if the doors were shut now, then it would all seem the same as it had before the blood, before there had been some kind of killing in all those rooms, with all those people.

  I got the cats out of the rooms. I didn’t look at any of it anymore—I just closed the doors. I went to the thermostat and turned the heat down because I had seen enough CSI episodes and read enough mysteries to know that heat makes bodies decompose faster. So I kept it as cold as it could be without the pipes freezing or me and the cats freezing.

  I pretended none of it was there and that I was just in the quiet house, not the screaming house, and that my only chores now were to feed the cats and go to school and do that over and over again.

  The cats pretended along with me. At first they scratched at the doors. Then they stopped.

  I’m not sure exactly how it all unraveled. It may have had to do with money—in the movies and books money’s usually the thing that’s at the center of everything. That wasn’t the case in my house—at least that wasn’t why there was some kind of killing. But it was probably why everything fell apart afterward—because at thirteen you really don’t know how much money it takes to live and eat. And you don’t really know what to do when you don’t have any money. You just know you have to get some.

  Did I ask someone for money? Maybe I did. Or maybe I just went into the drawer where Sister Mary Margaret kept the petty cash from the recess candy sales and took that. And maybe someone saw me take it and said something. And maybe when the phone just rang and rang at my house, someone decided to go there. And maybe someone decided to open all the doors. And maybe a big buzzing of flies came out, even though it was still winter. And maybe you could see maggots crawling on places where there shoul
d have still been flesh. And maybe someone saw the cats run in and lap at the blood that had congealed to jelly on the floors. And maybe the quiet turned to screaming all over again.

  I can’t be sure. Because some memories are vivid and some are vague, but neither really seems to have a close connection to the truth. That’s the really unsettling part. Like when they explained that you would bleed for a week but not die and you knew you had to believe it, but how could it be true? Or like when I was in the snow with my dog and everything turned that brutal grayish white and I could tell that my dog was dying and that there was nothing I could do to save him, even though I was praying really hard and I remember praying really hard and thinking that it had to work, because it was just an accident and accidents shouldn’t have terrible consequences like when things are done on purpose. Or like the last time my mother slapped me so hard that my face stayed red the rest of the day and her hand was imprinted on my cheek, just like a stigmata on one of the saints I read about at school.

  I remember all of these things really really vividly—so vividly that I can feel the cold wet numbness in my knees from kneeling in the snow next to my dog or the hot painful mark on my cheek. Yet I can’t be sure how true the memories are, just because they are vivid. Because sometimes we tell ourselves things and make up new memories because what’s wrong is so terrible that something less wrong feels better, somehow—a bad memory is better than a horrifying, terrible, make-you-wake-up-screaming memory. Like kneeling in the snow with your dying dog because it was hit by a car, not kneeling on the linoleum in the laundry room with your dying dog because someone slit its throat. Or…or all those other things that were more than a slap, more than a red mark on the face of a child.

  *