The More They Disappear

by Jesse Donaldson

  “That’s fine,” Mary Jane said. “I’ll manage.” She hoped this might end the conversation. She understood that her father wasn’t inviting her to join him; he just needed a sounding board to complain about Lyda. Sometimes she felt less like a daughter than a warehouse to store her parents’ grievances.

  “Maybe tomorrow we’ll all eat Sunday dinner together,” Jackson said. “Like a proper family.”

  “Maybe,” Mary Jane replied, unable to mask her sarcasm. Formal Sunday dinners were a relic of her father’s childhood that he futilely tried to maintain, though they usually ended in raised voices and at their best were filled with awkward silence.

  “I don’t know why I try with you,” Jackson said.

  Mary Jane couldn’t let this pass. “Yeah,” she said. “You try real hard.”

  Jackson huffed dramatically. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, Mary Jane, but you need to look in the mirror and start making some changes.”

  She flicked him off as he closed the door and tried not to cry, tried not to care. She’d never felt close to her father. As a child her grandfather had filled the void. It wasn’t until she started spending the night at friends’ houses and met fathers who played games and hugged their kids good-night that she realized her own dad was notable mostly for his absence. Most days Jackson could be found hacking the golf ball at Idle Haven; most nights he could be found at the bar trading bullshit stories with other old rich men. As a kid, Mary Jane had loved swimming at Idle Haven’s pool, but she grew to hate the rules about what you could wear and who you could bring and when. The Haven, as its members called it, was a throwback to old-guard southern conservatism, a place with separate lounges for men and women and black porters in white gloves. Her parents found comfort in Idle Haven’s defense of status quo, but as Mary Jane grew older and learned to think for herself, she came to hate everything about the club. She didn’t want to become her mother playing doubles tennis, didn’t want to become her father talking about what kind of “stock” this person or that came from.

  It was only after she failed to get into college that Jackson’s fatherly indifference turned into outright disappointment and that disappointment morphed into resentment. Both his and hers. Jackson tried to persuade the University of Kentucky to rethink their decision—it was his alma mater after all—but Mary Jane’s grades and test scores were an embarrassment. They couldn’t talk anymore without fighting. It was the same with her mother, though Lyda’s shortcoming had never been indifference. Her mother had tried to shape Mary Jane into a version of herself, as if she were a nesting doll, but Mary Jane stopped fitting the mold. Every once in a while she told Mary Jane she could still be beautiful, but it was always couched with the words if you only or if you would just …

  Mary Jane climbed the stairs to her father’s third-floor office. Jackson’s desk was that of a man who spent too much time with his work. Papers paralleled edges in perfect stacks. Ornaments sat catercorner. A gilt pen was clipped to a notepad with a list of letters and numbers that had something to do with investment. Mary Jane licked the coating off an OxyContin, crushed it, and snorted a line of blue dust. Her life had become a routine of drug-induced ups and downs, but the office was a special treat—the best room in the house to get high. The windows were two squares that touched both the floor and slanted ceiling. She’d liked to stand between them as a girl: big as a wall!

  Mary Jane couldn’t spend another night in the house sad and alone; she wanted to go out into the world, to revel. She decided to call Tara Koehler. Even though Tara was a year younger and they’d never been that close, Tara liked to party. Besides, Tara was as close a thing to a friend as Mary Jane had left in Marathon. Almost everyone she’d known growing up had moved on—to college, the military, jobs in other towns. Mary Jane was supposed to have done the same but she’d stalled out.

  She snorted the rest of the Oxy, pulled out the phone book, and dialed Tara’s number. When a voice said hello, her thoughts cobwebbed. “Hello? Hello?”

  Mary Jane’s eyelids fluttered as the Oxy pulsed through her. “Tara?”

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Mary Jane. Finley.”

  “Mary Jane? You don’t sound so good.”

  “I’m okay. I took some pills.”

  “Hold on.” She heard the cupping of the receiver, followed by a whisper. “What did you take?”

  “An Oxy. Will you pick me up and take me somewhere?”

  “You got any more?” The room shifted. The ceiling bore down. Mary Jane became lost in the pattern of a rug. “Mary Jane?”

  “Sorry. I … I have more.”

  “If you can get me high, I’ll take you to the dirt track.”

  “Sure. Anything. Just come over.”

  Mary Jane hung up and looked down at her legs. They jangled but she didn’t control them. Parts of her raced, flew, and hummed. Parts of her stayed numb. She grabbed the desk and swiveled the chair. Come on feet! Come on legs! She stood. She stumbled. She walked. What freedom!

  The office was the best place to get high. Streetlight slanted through the cat-eye windows and the musty smell of books filled the air and the faces in the photos that hung along the wall stared back at her. She studied a pair of Civil War soldiers in a split frame—both of them kin. The Confederate rested an arm across a saddle, his hand loosely gripping a pistol. An unlit cigarette dangled from his lips. He was handsome and cool, nothing like the Union man standing rigidly before a bullet-marked wall with his arms crossed like he didn’t know what to do with them. Next to the soldiers hung tintypes of toddlers in church clothes, their eyes dead and stern. Mary Jane moved down the wall, photo after photo. Generations of Finleys smiling into the flash. There was her grandmother in a black one-piece that made Mary Jane think of a penguin. Alongside her a photo of her grandfather. Pappy, Mary Jane called him. Anything-for-Mary-Jane Pappy. Her grandfather had been the one to tuck her in at night and tell her bedtime stories. He brought home leaves and taught her to identify the trees, and on Sundays they made pancakes in a century-old cast-iron skillet that Lyda once washed with Palmolive. Pappy hadn’t spoken for a week. Mary Jane was thirteen when he died, a girl a year away from starting to grow awkward. It had all been downhill after that. “Why’d you have to go and leave me?” she asked.

  The most recent photos added color. There was her mother in a beach chair, hair nested, smoke drifting from her lips. Jackson beside her. Jackson staring at her. Mary Jane’s heart slowed. Not even the faintest tendrils of affection held her parents together anymore. In the wall’s last photo, Jackson held Mary Jane, just a baby, just a whiff of hair on her head, which Lyda stroked with slender fingers. Mary Jane’s colorless eyes stared straight ahead. It was as if her parents had thought that by holding her they were holding each other. And then the story stopped. Her father hadn’t hung any photos of Mary Jane as a girl or as a teen or as a young woman, but that seemed to make sense in its way. Because when she looked back at the thin, drawn faces of her ancestors, their fair skin and hair, Mary Jane didn’t feel like part of them. She didn’t feel like part of anything.

  three

  A bulleted sun beat onto Mary Jane and sweat-dampened strands of brownish hair clung to her pale skin. She woke as if from a bad dream and wiped the grit from her eyes. She was in the backseat of Tara’s car. Alone. All the proper buttons were buttoned and zippers zipped but her mouth tasted like stale cigarettes and she had scratches and a bruise along her left forearm, bits of crushed leaves ground in her hair.

  She decided she must’ve fallen down and started making up an excuse to tell her mother in case Lyda asked why she hadn’t come home. She’d stayed at Tara’s. Tara had been upset over a fight with her boyfriend. That’s how Tara was—high drama. Mary Jane had stayed to comfort her with rom-coms and ice cream. Lyda knew how it was with girls. Mary Jane smiled at the story, how easy it came, how believable it seemed.

  She coughed as she opened the door and something loosed in
her throat that she spat on the ground. The world was washed out in bright light and amplified sound. Birds chirping like jackhammers. The horrid hangover of a morning after. Tara’s car was one of a handful scattered among the beer cans and cigarette butts of the dirt track parking lot. Mary Jane looked for her—checked on a pair of bodies huddled in the field grass, checked under a tarp roped between two trees, finally found Tara naked as the day she was born and stretched across the bench seat of a truck with a boy wearing only his socks. Tara’s little tits stood at attention, her nipples bumpy from the cold. The boy had a long, thin penis. Uncircumcised. Mary Jane had never seen one like that.

  Tara got the boys now. Once upon time it had been Mary Jane, but when it mattered, when it meant getting felt up and fucked instead of passing notes in class or playing spin the bottle, Mary Jane had faded into the background.

  “Tara,” Mary Jane said. “Wake up.”

  The boy whimpered in his sleep.

  The keys dangled in the ignition so the stereo could play but the speakers were silent. Mary Jane hoped Tara didn’t make her stick around to give the boy a jump. She leaned in through the open window and pressed Tara’s pink knee. “Tara,” she said. “Tara, wake the fuck up.” Tara wouldn’t move, so Mary Jane yanked her hair—just a little tug at first—then a harder one. Tara flinched and opened her eyes. They radiated fear for a moment before she recognized Mary Jane. Then she glanced over at the boy and smiled. Mary Jane wanted to tell her to fuck off but she needed the ride. “Let’s go,” she said. As she walked back to the car, Mary Jane noticed a small clump of hair in her hand. She studied the delicate blond ringlets and opened her fist and watched them float away in the breeze.

  * * *

  Harlan walked into the sheriff’s department and was greeted by the sight of Frank sprawled over the couch with his boots kicked off and his holey socks perched on an armrest. He held a cold pack to one eye.

  “What happened to you?” Harlan asked.

  Frank dropped his hand and revealed a bruise more yellow than black but ugly enough.

  Harlan shrugged. “Well?”

  “I pulled this guy over outside the dirt track and had him step out to fail his sobriety test when bang!” He smacked his hand against the cold pack. “I never saw it coming. Next thing I know there’re four, five guys pounding on me.” Frank didn’t look like he’d been worked over by more than one good punch but Harlan didn’t press the finer points. Paige came out from the break room and Frank pointed at her. “Ask Paige. I radioed for backup and she come out there.”

  Harlan tipped his head toward Frank. “What do you know about this?”

  “Whoever did it ran off,” she said. “It was ugly out there. No one wanted to help the cops much, you know?”

  “What kind of car?”

  “White sedan,” Frank said. “A Toyota, I think.”

  “You write down the plates?”

  Frank didn’t reply and Harlan crossed his arms.

  “Give me a break, okay?” Frank said and put the cold pack back to his eye.

  Harlan pointed at Paige. “You and me are going out there. Frank, put your feet up on your own couch. And next time write down the plates.” Frank groaned and shifted his heft as Harlan tossed his keys to Paige. “You’re driving,” he said.

  He felt crackerjack as they walked outside, buoyed by the confidence that comes from giving orders and having them followed. For the first time, he felt like the sheriff of Finley County and not some interloper. Paige kept turning toward him with her mouth half-open as she drove, but whenever Harlan looked back, she returned her eyes to the road. She was new to the department, less than a year in. Lew had been against hiring a woman but the mayor insisted, not that Lew’s objections kept him from spouting some high-minded rhetoric about gender equality to the newspaper when it ran an article about the hire. Paige was cautious around the other deputies, seemed to know her place was tenuous. “If you have something to tell me, speak up,” Harlan said.

  She took a moment before replying. “It’s just … last night was a shit show. Frank’s beat up and cursing those kids and they’re cursing me and who knows if one of them has a gun. Half of them are high. I was afraid. And what am I supposed to do? Call you? Call in every deputy? We’d still be outnumbered. You get what I’m saying?”

  “You’re saying there’re more criminals than cops.”

  “I’m saying I don’t see why we don’t shut the dirt track down.”

  Harlan cracked the window and lit a smoke. The dirt track was the brainchild of a petty criminal named Leland Abbot. After inheriting his father’s spread, Leland turned the property into an ATV park by building an oval track and cutting trails through the woods for off-roaders. It was the closest thing to a legit enterprise he’d ever dreamt up and the most happening nightspot in Finley County. He charged parking fees and looked the other way when underage kids brought in beer. There’d been talk of trying to shut the track down—through tougher enforcement or by passing new laws—but nothing came of it. “It’s a legal-type situation,” Harlan said. “Lew looked into it. The track’s on private land and we don’t get noise complaints ’cause it’s in the middle of nowhere. Leland doesn’t break any building codes ’cause there aren’t any building codes to break. It’s like a giant house party. One time we tried going in with the Staties—half the people ran into the woods where we couldn’t find them, the other half ran to their cars and sped off bombed out of their ever-loving minds. The next night nothing had changed. Same party at Leland’s. Same problems.”

  Paige pressed the gas. “I think we should enforce the law even when it’s inconvenient.”

  Harlan liked that she cared. The department could use more of that. “We’re heading there now, aren’t we?” he said. “And if we find the guy who punched Frank, I’ll shake his hand and then cuff him for assault.”

  Paige cracked a smile. “Poor Frank,” she said.

  The listing fences of Leland’s property were newly topped with barbed wire and a snagged grocery bag fluttered in the breeze. A purple Grand Am was stuck nose down in the ditch that bordered the front gate—its trunk open. Whoever wrecked had salvaged their cooler. The gravel road onto the farm was lined with trees and switchbacked up a steep incline. As Paige eased the Impala up the grade, another car crested the hill and started down. She put out a hand to stop it, and the compact’s brakes squealed as the driver cranked her window down.

  “Tara?” Paige said, peering at the driver. “Tara Koehler?”

  The girl didn’t respond—a bit confused, a bit afraid.

  “I’m Paige. Paige Lucas. I was friends with your sister.”

  “Oh,” the girl said. “I remember you. How’s it going?”

  “Good. How about you?”

  “Long night,” she said and laughed. Harlan craned his neck to get a better look.

  “Well, I’m glad you didn’t drink and drive,” Paige said. “But I don’t think you should be hanging out here. Your mom wouldn’t like that.”

  The girl shrugged. “I doubt she’d care.”

  Harlan leaned over. “You hear anything about a deputy getting punched out here last night?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “What about your friend there? What’s her name?”

  The passenger leaned forward. “Mary Jane,” she said.

  “You hear anything about a deputy getting punched, Mary Jane?”

  She shook her head. “No, sir.”

  Harlan tapped Paige’s shoulder. “Let’s keep moving.”

  “You girls get home safe,” Paige said and rolled her window up. In the side mirror, Harlan watched the compact continue downhill. “Her older sister and I were friends,” Paige said. “Alexis went into the navy. Looks like Tara’s taking a different path.”

  At the top of the hill, the road opened onto a grassland-turned-parking lot. Fifty yards out the racetrack, banked by concrete barriers and chain link, sat in the middle of a field. Scattered along the outsi
de were piles of rubble from wrecks and pieces of stone stacked like shrines. The gravel road continued up to an abandoned farmhouse. Somebody had busted the windows, and where kudzu hadn’t taken hold, the paint was stripped. Next door stood a brand-new trailer. The house had belonged to Henry Abbot before he died one morning feeding his chickens. Harlan remembered when Lew had been called out to meet the coroner. He came back talking about how the chickens pecked poor Henry blind. Leland lived in the trailer.

  The parking lot was littered with empties and Harlan played kick the can while Paige rapped her knuckles against car windows and questioned a bunch of couldn’t-give-a-fuck degenerates. Most of them had to be told where they were. All of them claimed ignorance when it came to Frank’s busted eye.

  A skinny tattooed punk with a shaved head stumbled out of a van and slurred, “Fucking 5-0 pigs.” Harlan heard a girl giggle from inside the van. The punk, who was barefoot and naked save his jimmy shorts, stepped gingerly on the ground as he told Paige to suck various manners of cock. Paige turned to Harlan for guidance. “Have at him,” Harlan said.

  Paige stepped forward and punched the punk in the stomach, then lifted her knee to his crotch and put him on the ground, where he whined like a sick cur. Harlan expected the girl in the van to step out and take up the cause, but she didn’t have a horse in the race. “She must’ve found your little willy-nilly,” the girl called out and kept on giggling. Paige smiled despite herself. Harlan had never been one to work over the assholes he met on the job, but he understood the impulse, and he wasn’t so holy as to think they didn’t deserve it.

  He had Paige drive him up to the trailer and told her to stay in the cruiser. You never knew what you were gonna get with Leland, and he wasn’t exactly kind to women or authority. The front door was ajar, and when Harlan knocked, it swung open to reveal a naked man drinking a beer. The moans of a porno pulsed from the TV, but Leland had a newspaper folded across his lap and seemed to be doing the crossword. He squinted at the light that came through the door. “You have a warrant, Harlan?”