by Cutter Wood
I was woken from this dream by my phone ringing. It was daytime, and the first cars were passing down the road. Not recognizing the number, I answered just before the final ring.
“Is this Cutter?”
“Yes,” I said. “Who’s calling?”
“Hey, man. It’s Bill. You know, Bill Cumber.”
“Bill,” I said. “How’d you get this number?”
“Oh, I told my attorney you and me was friends and I lost your number.”
“Your attorney? That worked?”
“Listen, bro, I don’t have a lot of time. Things have been tough, real tough. They came in the other day and searched my cell and put me in the hold for two weeks. And when I came out, apparently the FBI was here, asking everybody whether I had told them anything, and offering to reduce their sentences if they gave up any information. Which they didn’t, because I didn’t do it, and if I did, I wouldn’t’ve told anybody here. But anyways, that’s besides the point. The reason I’m calling is—”
The phone cut out. I looked at it for a long time. Then I left it by the bed and went to take a shower. When I got back, there was a message.
“Hey, man, what I was trying to say when I got cut off is that I finished Eclipse, so don’t send that one.”
Summer arrived early that year. In the sudden thrust of heat, the ginkgo trees began to drop their fruit onto the campus sidewalks, where, crushed under the flip-flopped feet of the student body, the orange berries oozed a putrescent umber liquor. There were only a few weeks left of classes, and the undergraduates, seized by the sudden panic of impending examinations, could be seen running between academic buildings, and lining up outside the registrar’s office to see whether the last day to drop a class had already passed. They pored over Wikipedia. They loitered around the desk of the weary librarian in her faded Nirvana shirt, whose half-finished book, Hesse’s Siddhartha, lay on the desk unopened.
As a graduate student fresh with ambition, I was paid to teach these young people how to write, and I had run headlong into the courageous but monosyllabic and punctuation-averse world of late-teenaged communication. The inclination to throw up one’s hands was strong, and most of the young instructors had developed their own pedagogical approaches. One had his class sit in a line facing the rear wall of the room with their copies of The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson while he, as if in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose, selected who was to read the next poem. Another wooed her students by using only films with sex scenes as her course texts. A third often wept. One had assembled a list of topics for his creative writing students that—due to their tendency to descend most rapidly into monotony, self-aggrandizement, and cliché—he had forbidden. The list, emblazoned on the back of his syllabus in bold, all-caps, size-forty font, eventually grew to such length that it precluded nearly all but the most esoteric ruminations, but at that time it read only:
NO DEAD GRANDPARENTS
NO VACATIONS
NO SEX
One of my students had turned in that week a story about a young man named George, and the end of George’s recent relationship. As is often the case, it was based largely on the events of the student’s own life, and he had inadvertently referred to the main character as Dylan, his own name. The premise of the story was simple. George/Dylan had been dating the same young woman, Kelly, since early high school. They had both come to the university together. They had chosen to live in abutting dormitories. They had picked the same major. But the relationship soured, and George/Dylan, knowing it was the right thing to do, had broken it off. He was now seeing someone new, Brittany, who was far better in every way than Kelly had been and—here Dylan interjected to highlight a point not stated clearly in the text—“super hot.” The narrator was happy now, everything was great, he had even forgiven Kelly for being “a little bit of a bitch,” and—it was reading this final phrase again that something broke loose in me—he hoped she was happy.
“Do people believe this?” I said. “Do we all really believe that George wants Kelly to be happy?”
“It says so at the end of the story,” said a student.
I was breathing with some force through my nose. I looked again at the line, then back at the class. Dylan sat with his legs splayed out, his face as blank and impassive as a shovel. I turned the story over and laid it facedown on my desk.
“No,” I said. “No, this just isn’t the way love works. You don’t just stop and start loving like that. You bring all this baggage with you, whether it’s your ego or your insecurities, or some weird hang-ups inherited from your parents or from your own previous relationships. You have all these expectations about how you should act and how she should act, and because of that you do fucked-up things to each other. You know that George is probably playing Brittany the songs that Kelly used to love, and Brittany’s probably using the same tone of voice with him that her mom used with her dad. You’re just doomed to play out the same shit again and again, and really you’re just trying to use her to obscure your own unhappiness.”
In the silence that followed, I heard my entire speech play again, and I was horrified not only by its autobiographical tone but also by the realization that perhaps George really did want the best for Kelly. I had the sense that the students were staring at me with some mixture of pity and disgust, but when I looked up, I found that a few had let their gaze drift out the window. One was picking at a blister on her hand. Dylan was looking at his phone beneath his desk. The student who had spoken before raised her hand again.
“It’s sort of like George still likes Kelly.”
After this class, I set off for home, feeling very clearly a sense of gratitude for Erin, a need to sit down and speak with her, and a certainty that whatever indifference had entered our relationship, we could dispel it by simply talking. I wanted to tell her about my students, about the various birds in the trees, about the boy I passed in an alley, fending off invisible enemies with a stick. The house was empty when I arrived. Remembering that we were expecting guests for dinner, I washed the dishes and swept and mopped. I put on water for spaghetti and stole a flower from the neighbor’s garden, and all the while I was looking forward to the moment when she would come home, when I’d tell her how wrong I had been. I wiped the glass clean in the front door and tightened the screws that held the knob in place. I set the table. I dusted the ceiling fan and then the baseboard. But as the time passed, as I realized that there would be no opportunity now for my planned confession, I began to work with a different kind of urgency. When at last she arrived, I kissed her, but I did so too insistently, knowing already what her reaction would be, wanting to cause her to pull away.
“They’re going to be here any minute, aren’t they?” she said, already passing into the next room. “Thanks for taking care of dinner. It looks great in here.”
Of the dinner itself, I recall only that the husband of her coworker was more handsome than I would have liked, that I thought Erin doted upon him more than was necessary, and that at some moment, he revealed he was from Florida.
“Cutter’s writing about Florida,” Erin said, leaning forward. “Maybe you can give him the inside scoop.”
Afterward, she cleared the table and swept and tidied while I did the dishes. I had just finished the pots and pans when she started brushing her teeth. For a moment, we stepped around each other in the bathroom—spitting, rinsing, flossing, washing our faces under the tap—and then she went to bed and I went and lay down on the couch with a book. After a while, she got up again and began turning out the lights.
“Do you mind if I turn this out?”
“I need it to read.”
“I thought you were using that one.”
“I’m using both.”
She went back to the bedroom and lay down, but some time later she was up again.
“Are you coming to bed?”
“Not tired,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m not tired.”
Much later,
I awoke on the couch with the book still open in my hands. I turned off the lights and went to the bathroom in the dark, and then, being careful not to wake her, I slid very quietly into the bed we shared.
7: Before Everything That Happened Happened
That week, Bill’s letters came one after the other in rapid succession (I had stopped picking up the phone when he called), and they sat in a pile on my desk.
Cutter,
Today I tried calling you several times but no answer. If I’m starting to bother you let me know something. It’s just that you’re all I have out there. It’s a harsh reality but it’s true. Hope to hear from ya soon.
Your friend,
Bill
Cutter,
Look dude, I don’t know what’s up with you but you really need to stop messing with my head. I do not need the added “like I’ve said before” disappointments in my life. I have tried to call you several times but to no avail. You seem to be avoiding me. Why, I do not know. If this is what you call friendship than I can do without it. Let me know your thoughts.
Bill
P.S. If you are able to send books please remember that I like Stephanie Meyers. Why R you avoiding me?
“Live Long and Prosper”
Cutter,
Please believe me when I say to you that I’m thankful for everything you have done for me and also for the things which you have mentally attempted to do for me. You have put up a valiant effort trying to be my friend and I appreciate it tremendously but I must honestly say that, “like my mother, father, the judicial system and Santa Claus,” that I’m tired of disappointments in my life and that’s what you have turned into to me. Maybe I’m just a game to you but I’m tired of playing games. Especially when I’m the pawn. You may find it childish but to me a man has only his word that must be honored when spoken. But know this, things have really taken a positive change of direction in my life. Freedom is all I want in life now and I will achieve it.
Thanks again,
Bill
Cutter,
This is a brief message to let you know that I received the books. I really, really, really, really appreciate it. Even though they’re a simple read they still have their moments of gratification. I heard about how the youngins like Twilight. There’s a team Jacob and a team Edward. One is a vampire and the other a werewolf and they both love the same girl. She chooses Edward. Tough.
I need to discuss something with you. Its business oriented so do not stress the statement. I must let you know that we are allowed to have hard backs.
Later,
Bill
This last contained, folded in quarters, a pencil drawing of a teddy bear. The bear wore a drooping bow tie and held a heart from which a vine sprouted, its tendrils spreading across the page and terminating at last in smaller hearts. The bear’s gaze, cast above his head, fell fondly on a short message in swooping letters: You are my Everything. An attached note mentioned that the picture was an example of his artwork, and would be “suitable for a mat frame.”
I was sitting at my desk, looking at this drawing. I had received a message from one of the detectives investigating the case, and I was waiting for him to call back. Even so, I was startled when the phone rang.
“This is Detective Gisborne from the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office, Mr. Wood. If you have a minute to talk, I just have a few questions.” He didn’t pause to wait for my answer. “We did a search recently of William Cumber’s cell, and we found one of your letters. I just wanted to get a sense of what sort of relationship you have with Mr. Cumber.”
“I’m working on a story about Sabine Musil-Buehler’s disappearance,” I said. “I’ve been conducting interviews with people who might have information relating to it, and William is one of those people.”
“Would you say you and William have a good working relationship?”
I looked at the drawing in my hand. “I would say we have a good working relationship.”
“Look, I’ll be perfectly honest here. I don’t know how familiar you are with this case, but we believe that William Cumber killed Sabine Musil-Buehler and buried her body on the beach.”
It was still an active investigation, he went on, so they hadn’t released much information to the public, but they had everything they needed to hand things off to the prosecutor. Along with the blood in the convertible, his DNA was on the driver’s seat. They’d found blood in the apartment, too, and evidence that someone had tried to hastily clean it up. They also knew that the car had been parked by the beach the night she’d disappeared.
“That’s why you started digging out there?”
“Funny story,” he said. “About a month after she goes missing, one of our guys remembers he ticketed a white Pontiac out on the island that night. We look up the ticket. It’s our vehicle.”
“You think he was out there on the beach burying her while the car was getting ticketed?”
“The patterns of blood on the back seat and on the front seat belt indicate that a body was put in with the top down and then pulled out of the passenger side door. We think he took her somewhere where he was worried someone might see him and that’s why he took her out through the door instead of putting the top down. And this indicates, we figure, she’s buried out there somewhere.”
Supporting this hypothesis, he told me when they first brought Cumber in for questioning, his hands were blistered, as if he’d spent the night digging. Cumber could offer no alibi for that evening, and his story had changed each time they spoke to him. He told them that he kept trying to call her after she left, but his phone records showed that wasn’t true. The list of incriminating evidence went on. They had testimony from Musil-Buehler’s friends describing Bill as a violent, dangerous man, and they had the record of his very public tailspin after her disappearance: stumbling drunk down streets, pawning her belongings one by one, eventually fleeing the county. The state attorney was ready to charge him with homicide first thing tomorrow morning, the detective said. They had everything they needed to make a conviction, with the exception, of course, of the obvious thing: the body of the presumed victim.
“I’d love it if we could get you down here again, talk a little more, maybe see whether we could set up a meeting with Cumber,” he said. “I think you see where I’m coming from. The family would like to put this behind them.”
I looked across the apartment to where Erin lay on the couch. “I’ve been thinking I might try to break away from Iowa at some point this summer.”
“That’s great. Well we’ll be in touch then.” I could hear the squeal of an office chair as he leaned back. “By the way, I haven’t read any of your books, but my wife is a big fan, a real big fan. She can’t get enough of them.”
The afternoon of my flight was sullen and wet. The men in yellow slickers outside the plane seemed to be gesturing for help. As we waited to be cleared for takeoff, I rested my head against the oval window and watched the people and long caterpillar-like vehicles hurrying across the tarmac through the beading rain. And just as they seemed to dart this way and that with no apparent reason, I began to feel my thoughts untether from their normal course and scatter across my mind. I closed my eyes, and a number of images swam before me—tigers, bedridden men, a train running through the forest—until in a moment they cohered into a dim opera house, the walls of which, covered in ranks of red velvet seats, disappeared steeply up into darkness. I was awaiting the parting of the curtain when, with a few glances right and left, I perceived that the other patrons—decked out in pearls and jewels and grosgrain finery and eagerly awaiting the performance—were corpses.
“Sabine,” I said, putting my hand out to touch her arm. “I think we’re at the wrong opera. This one is for dead people.”
I opened my eyes. Only a second had passed since I closed them, it seemed, and I struggled momentarily to comprehend what had happened to the tarmac beyond my window and the people walking across it, all of which had been replaced by a hazy patchwor
k of brown and gray. When at once I realized I was seeing the earth from a height of some ten thousand feet, I was stricken by a feeling of vertigo like I had never before encountered. It was as if in a moment the ground had been pulled out from beneath me, and like a cat held aloft above the bathtub, I clawed mortally at the air, seeking to find some purchase, discovering only the sweatshirted arm of the Iowan beside me, who smiled, waited for me to release her, and returned to her magazine.
I carried with me on that flight my collection of note cards in pale pink, yellow, and blue. Each of these cards contained some note relating to Sabine’s disappearance and to my own investigation of it.
Tom Buehler: “poster child for ADHD”
on night of disappearance, Bill made Sabine a “lovely” dinner
These I laid out on the tray in front of me, and between hesitant glances out the window, I began to arrange and rearrange them, flipping some over as if playing a child’s memory game, then placing some together in a stack. But I failed to make even the slightest progress during the flight. Instead I began to sense that I was being watched, noticing at last that the woman beside me whose sweatshirt was emblazoned with a large yellow hawk was now staring at the card nearest her, which read only:
patterns of blood
Then the airplane banked steeply over St. Petersburg, the light from the low sun briefly gilded the faces of the economy-class cabin, the woman turned away, and as I gathered my things, we began our descent to the runway in Tampa.
I don’t recall getting off the airplane or riding the miniature train that carries passengers back and forth to the main terminal. Nor do I recall the descent to the baggage claim. I stood beside the dirty translucent flaps of the baggage chute, watching as the items of luggage, tagged and bar-coded, emerged one by one and tumbled onto the revolving track. I remember looking into the eyes of a flush-faced boy being carried by his father, who only stared back at me defiantly when I smiled. And I recall that in some far corner of the room, two pieces of unclaimed luggage circled each other endlessly on an otherwise empty track.