Bottomland: Based on the Murder of Rosa Mary Dean in Franklin, Tennessee

by Trey Holt

  BOTTOMLAND

  Trey Holt

  Based on the Murder of Rosa Mary Dean

  in Franklin, Tennessee

  Copyright©2015 Trey Holt.

  All rights reserved.

  Franklin High School Gymnasium

  Chapter One

  I had been meeting Sharon behind Franklin High School, by the gym door, for the better part of the school year. Sitting in her old man’s carfrom about 5:15 till a little after 6:00, I’d pull her body so tight to mine that it felt like we were one person. And then we’d talk…and then we’d do what we did some more.

  “Tell me something you love about me,”she’d say.

  And I’d tell her that her hair was the prettiest, the blackest I’d ever seen.

  “And what about my eyes?” she’d ask.

  “They’re still as pretty as I told you they were yesterday, baby,”I’d answer.

  “Do you think I’m pretty enough to be a model?” she’d ask. I bet she’d asked me that a thousand damn times.

  “You are a model, aren’t you, baby?”

  “Well, yeah…. but not really. I mean, I’m mostly just a counter girl. I just get to model sometimes.”

  “You’re as pretty as any model I’ve ever seen,”I’d tell her. I knew she wanted to be a model, had wanted to be ever since I’d met her.

  She’d been in the front seat and I’d been in the back. Van had been with her; it was the same as always—most girls noticed him long before and after they ever paid any attention to me. I’d been with her sister, Sheila. When we left the restaurant, she’d said she was hot, draped her coat over the seat and then put her hand under it, along the edge of the seat’s back. Then I’d snuck my hand under her coat and we’d held hands. I thought she was probably doing it just to get back at Van, who could be a pretty big asshole.

  I even felt surprised the next day as she waved at me when I saw her uptown, right off the square just down from the bank. Her skirt was blowing a little in the breeze, showing off her legs, as she waved and tried to hold her hair in place with the other hand. She was pale and dark at the same time, if that makes any sense. I was sure that she must have been waving at somebody over my shoulder.

  “What ya doin’?” she had asked after I realized she was waving at me.

  “Goin’to get some stuff for L—my father,”I said.

  “Isn’t he the Police Chief?” she asked.

  “Yeah,”I said.“He is.”

  “What’re you getting?” she asked.

  “Oh, just some stuff for the basement pipes,”I answered.“He thinks we got water gettin’into the basement.”

  “You go to BGA with Van, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Yeah,”I nodded.

  “Don’t you play football?”

  I nodded again. BGA, or Battle Ground Academy, gave scholarships to four or five kids around town every year, kids who’d help their athletic programs and couldn’t afford it or their parents wouldn’t pay for them to go. I’d always figured I’d gotten the scholarship because of my old man, because some strings he’d pulled with somebody somewhere. He’d been appointed the Chief of Police when the one before him keeled over from a heart attack. He’d been the assistant before that.“Once a goddam assistant, always one,”he liked to say around our house.

  She licked her lips, honey red and flashed her pale green eyes at me.“Are you gonna go out with my sister again?”

  I hadn’t really thought about it. I figured if she wanted to see me again then she’d let Van know and he’d let me know. That’s the way it was with probably four out of five girls I went out with.

  “Well, if you’re not gonna go out with her…let me know and you can go to my prom with me,”she said, smiling.“I don’t think Sheila wants to go out with you anyway. She said you were too short. I think she likes Van.”

  And I thought I had gotten away with one on his ass. But that’s the way it always was with him. You might think you had one on him, but he was two or three moves ahead of you already. Usually before I even knew what was happening in the present moment he was minutes or hours or days down the road, figuring what he would do in response to what somebody else did.

  She popped her gum a few times. Looked at me, then over my shoulder at the forty-nine Ford parked on the curb.“So you think you will?”

  “Will what?”

  “Go out with Sheila again?”

  “Hell no,”I said.“Why would I wanna go out with her if she wants to go out with him?”

  She laughed, then pulled a pen and piece of paper from her purse. Holding the paper tight to her thigh, she scrawled something on it.“Here,”she said.“You can take me to the Franklin prom. Don’t y’all have one of those at BGA?”

  “Yeah,”I said.“It’s already gone.”

  “Who’d you take?” she asked.

  “Um, um, Nancy. At least that’s what I think her name was.”

  “You’re more with it than you act, aren’t you?”

  I laughed because I didn’t really have an answer. The truth was that Van had fixed me up with her, too. Another friend or sister of somebody. And the other thing on my mind was that this girl spoke the best English I had ever heard. You could tell she tried her hardest to be proper.

  She reached and stuck the paper in my shirt pocket.“My work number’s on there. Call me. It’s in two weeks.”

  I don’t know if I called her because of the look in her eyes or just to get at Van’s ass.

  + + +

  On this morning, December 13th, 1953, it didn’t really matter anymore. As it seems any time we let go, take our brain out of its place of being in charge and let our heart start directing our actions, time had turned in on itself. I wasn’t sure if the last seven or eight months now presented themselves in my memory as days or years. All I knew was that the current of this thing we call“love,”I believe more powerful than all the rivers in the world, had taken me and was sweeping me into the rest of my days.

  I waved at Jackson Mosby, the janitor at Franklin High School, who I saw every morning when I was behind the school, well really between the school building and the gym, waiting on Sharon to pull up. He waved back at me. In all the months I had been waiting out here for Sharon, there wasn’t one morning I could recall when he and I hadn’t waved at one another. I could even see him smile sometimes, what teeth he had left glistening white against his skin. Sometimes we’d even stand there apart, I bet you not more than seventy-five feet from each other, both of us smoking a cigarette, for five or ten minutes but we’d never say a word to each other. I often wondered what he thought, what it was like to be him in this town of Franklin, Tennessee. I often wanted to ask him about his family, his boy … maybe even what it felt like to have to sit in the balcony of the gym during the basketball games even though he cleaned the damn place before and afterward. No matter, every once in awhile I would have sworn I could even hear him laughing a little when he smiled and waved, like maybe he remembered when he was my age or when he and his wife did something like this, maybe thirty years before. But we never spoke.

  “How was the paper route?” she asked, as I was getting into her car after she finally pulled up and shut her lights off.

  “Colder’n hell,”I said.

  “That’s not too cold,”she said back.

  “Just turn the heat up,”I said, knowing it didn’t work too good or sometimes at all.

  “Where’s your motorcycle?” she asked.

  “Where it always is,”I told her.

  “Why do you park it over there?”

/>   “‘Cause that’s the easiest place to put it.”

  “Behind the dumpster?”

  “It’s an incinerator, number one. And yeah, that’s the easiest place to put it where nobody thinks anything while I’m out here waitin’.”

  “Who’s going to think anything?” she asked.

  “Look,”I told her,“most everybody in town knows that motorcycle. You say 1942 Indian and they think of Henry Hall, Lucky’s son. They been watching me ride that thing around here for the last three years. Before that it was a bike. I been delivering papers all over this godforsaken town since I was nine years old. Since Lucky said,‘Boy, you’re old enough to work. It’s time to get a job!’”

  She laughed the way somebody does when something’s funny and not funny. I watched her face start to beam as she smiled. Every once in awhile, it would strike me like something thrown down from heaven: that she was the most beautiful human being I’d ever seen, from her black hair to her shining green eyes to her smell that was really no more than soap, hair spray and chewing gum. In the lack of light it was still hard to make out her face. I focused on her silhouette, trying to remember what she had looked like the day before.

  “What?” she said.

  I didn’t answer. Just kept staring.

  “What?”

  I shook my head and smiled and she moved toward me in the passenger seat. As she leaned onto me and pressed her lips to mine she reminded me, like she had a thousand times in the last few months, that it would be worth Lucky beating my ass if he caught me. She scooted her butt from under the steering wheel and into the middle of the seat and swung her legs over mine. My breath hard to come by, I put one hand on her thigh and the other one over her shoulder and on her back and pulled her to me so hard that I thought our bodies might melt together. Over her shoulder, past Franklin High School, I could tell the sky was lightening with each passing moment. Two hundred yards south of us was the scourge of a place I went to school. BGA. Battle Ground Academy. The Academy. At this time of the morning I liked to pretend that I didn’t have to go there in an hour or so. I liked to pretend that Sharon and I would just do what we were doing most of the day or that I would meet Van and Tully in the parking lot behind The Academy and we’d just stay out there and smoke cigarettes the majority of the morning. Or that there was some other way I was free of that godforsaken place where grown men tried to torture you into becoming like them. Discipline. Discipline makes the man.

  “Hey, baby,”I said.

  “Yeah?” she answered. She was breathing hard, too. I tried to pretend she was breathing harder than me. That she was turned on more than me.

  “What’s say we skip school today. What’s say we just skip the whole goddam thing. School. Work. Everything.”

  I could tell she was dreaming for a minute, like me. I swear I would have done it, though.

  “Hunny, you know I can’t skip school. You know I can’t skip work either.”

  “Just a pipe dream,”I said. And then we got back to doing what we’d been doing.

  Between The Academy and Franklin High School lay the Carter House. I’d ride behind it every day after Sharon and I were through. Holes from bullets and cannon balls still littering its back, sides and front, when I slowed down and drew close enough to think about it, it reminded me why The Academy was so-named in the first place. Battle Ground Academy. A man falling to the ground every five or six seconds.“That crazy ass driving his troops over and over and over into Schofield’s lines. Until there was nothing but goddam death,”my uncle liked to say.

  Sometimes I found myself still looking for him when I was riding my Indian around town throwing papers; I found myself looking over Sharon’s shoulder while we sat in the car together, thinking maybe he might just appear on his way back from the river that seemed, as did many things, to speak with him in a language few others understood.

  I often thought if the Harpeth River could talk, it could tell me why. Perhaps why Tully and I, against all natural odds, stopped short of it that night. Why, too, it seemed to lap up lives, rise and fall, at its discretion, unknown to logic or good sense. Why what my father told me about it all those years ago holds true even today. How he described it. Then and now, as I stand there on that land, the only sounds detectable are silence and the sound of the river passing. Or maybe they’re one in the same.

  + + +

  Sharon and I saw the goddamned body, saw it as plain as day, as plain as anything I ever want to see again, there in the coming daylight of that morning, December 13, 1953. We saw her sprawled out on the pavement, one arm splayed above her head, the other bent grotesquely underneath her, flat of her back, one leg under the other, folded at the knee. And she had that quality that only dead bodies do, like death has its own face or something. Like no other. A body without life, without being prettied up at the funeral home, reminds you that it’s just not made for death…ain’t comfortable there. Like a fat man in a small chair, it’s just not meant for that space.

  I probably shouldn’t have hollered and motioned for Sharon to pull back across the parking lot when I saw her there. If I’d had any consideration, I would have just let her go on and pull out of the parking lot. But there are just some things that you don’t want to see alone. And God knows this was one of them.

  The blood that had spilled from the four deep wounds at her neck had covered almost all of her, including her green-checked flannel shirt and these riding pants that not many women wore back then, looser at the hips and ass then tight below the knee and cropped. One of her shoes had come off and was laying by her foot. Her shoes were small, as she was not a big woman and like slippers, a style that had been more popular a few years before. A heavy man’s coat with fur at the collar lay more off her than on.

  Sharon stood there as still as lake water after I’d called her over there, after I’d chased her to the edge of the parking lot and flagged her down and motioned frantically for her to come back. For a long time she didn’t say a word. She just watched her like she was waiting for her to start talking any minute and tell us what in god’s name had happened to her. As calm as Sharon seemed, all things considered, I couldn’t bear to admit to her that I had screamed at the top of my lungs when I’d stumbled over one of her feet on my way to the Indian. That I had gasped so hard the breath had gotten lodged in my chest and nearly choked me. And that no more would come until I started to chase her car as she got to the edge of the parking lot.

  The sky glowed and burned in the distance like somebody had mixed orange and purple and light blue and black together and flung it over the entirety of the horizon. Even though I’m sure there had to be some, I couldn’t hear cars as they passed on Columbia Avenue. I couldn’t hear the rustling of the wind that touched at my hands and face. I could hear only my own breathing.

  I turned to Sharon, whose eyes hadn’t left the woman since she had stepped from her car, walked over and looked at what I pointed.

  “My God,”she finally said.

  “My God’s right,”I said, and I could feel my words bubbling and bucking in my throat as I spoke them. Trying to turn themselves into more gasps, even tears.

  “Oh my God,”she said.

  “Yeah,”I said.

  “We’ve got to go get somebody,”she said. She made a step toward the woman.

  “Who?” I said.

  “The police,”she said.

  There was only one thing wrong with that. We’d be calling my father. Well, not really Lucky, but the city police and the dispatcher, Miss Helen Riley, would be in touch with Lucky in the time it took her to get him on the radio or at home. I looked at my watch. It was a Mickey Mouse watch I’d bought with the first paper money I’d ever made, one of the few things I still clung to from childhood. Other guys on the football team gave me shit because I still wore it. It was going on 6:30, which meant that Lucky had probably left home half an hour ago. About stuff like that he was the most responsible person I’d ever known. He got up at the same time ever
y day, shaved at the same time, took a shit at the same time. Ate his breakfast that my mother fixed at the same time every morning. He had to walk out the backdoor within the same thirty second period on any given day. All of which meant that Miss Helen could get him on his radio in the car in just a few seconds. And he’d be here in a matter of a couple of minutes.

  “You mean goddam Lucky,”I said. I turned my eyes on the woman again. The blood was dry on her shirt, around the huge gashes across her throat. Even dried on her hands where she’d obviously fought to keep the knife away, pawed at the wounds for the few seconds she probably lived after they were inflicted. There was none on the pavement. I knew this meant she’d probably been dumped there. I could hear Lucky’s voice in my head, observing these facts.

  “I mean whoever, Henry,”she said. Tears were at her eyes now. I could tell by the way her voice sounded.

  “Whoever’ll be Lucky,”I said.

  She turned her face to me and swallowed hard.“Then’s it got to be Lucky.”

  I assured her as I had earlier that it wasn’t that I was afraid of Lucky, but more that I just didn’t want to get involved in something like this. That Lucky had no stake in where I was from six to seven every morning. Again, I could hear him.

  “You been fuckin’that little girl behind the high school, haven’t ya?”

  And it wouldn’t matter if I had or I hadn’t. We’d still get to the same ending. His lack of temper would get the best of him.

  “Do you mean that we should just leave her laying here?”

  “No, I think we can just call from somewhere else. Like we can go to the Academy and use Nedler’s phone. He’s down in the locker room. I can sneak in...” And then it occurred to me that Helen Riley would surely know my voice. She’d been hearing it since I was little.“I guess you could go and stop at a payphone and call, or we can just walk up to the payphone at the corner and you can call‘em. Tell‘em that we’ve found her layin’here.”