by Barbara Bell
“Lots of money,” he says. “I can get you lots of money.”
“Oh shut up, shithead.”
Perusing the room, I see that on the dresser there are a whole bunch of pictures lined up in neat rows. Keeping my eye on the happy couple, I ease over and browse the pictures. Betty and Dave. Betty and Dave. My supposed sister. Then a picture of the supposed me. I pick it up and walk over to the bed, sticking it in Betty’s face.
Did you love her? I ask.
She’s still crying.
Of course I loved her. She was my baby.
But you left her, I say. You left her to Dave. You let him screw her. How often? Once a week? Twice a day?
No, she wails. No.
Dave, I say, strolling around the bed. What was she like? Was she a really good screw? Is that why you did her like that?
What do you know? he yells. You don’t know shit.
I want to bust him over the head.
But I do, Dave, I say. I knew her. She told me all about you. That’s why I came. To let you know that somebody knows what you did to her. I loved her something awful. It was you chased her into that river.
I put the muzzle up to his head. He goes still.
No, Betty cries. No.
I stay there. I wait. I’m so good at waiting.
Tell the truth, Dave. You screwed her, didn’t you?
His lips tremble. I push the muzzle against his temple harder.
Yes, he says.
It was your baby she had, wasn’t it?
Yes .
Are you going to talk to the press anymore, telling them lies?
No.
I wait, wanting to pull the trigger, wishing, wishing, wishing that I could.
Why can’t I ever pull the trigger?
I go back to the dresser and see a picture that stops my heart. It’s Mama. It’s fat old Mama and me sitting in a swing. I look to be five or six.
I take the picture over to Betty. Who’s this?
That’s Mama, she says. And Terri.
Terri. Hearing her say it like that gives me a jolt. That was my name back then, before Ben beat it out of me.
She raised Terri, she says. Mama took care of Terri and James Vincent, my son from a different marriage. I got Terri back when she was twelve.
Mama, I think. A picture of Mama.
Why then? Why when she was twelve?
The house burned down. The kids got out. Mama died.
She burned up, I say. Roasted alive.
What’s this to you? shouts Dave. Who are you?
I pick up the tape, jogging around the bed, and rip a piece off, slapping it over Dave’s incestuous mouth.
I told you to shut up. You’re lucky I don’t slice off your prick.
I look at the picture again and want to start crying. Slipping it into the front of my jeans, I pace back to the dresser. I hold up my gym bag and push all the pictures into it.
What about your boy. James?
He ran off when I came to get him.
I start shaking. The whole event is beginning to clobber me.
You’ve got photo albums, don’t you?
Yes, Betty says. Over there on the shelves.
I walk over and find three hefty volumes. I dump these into my bag.
I don’t want to read about this in the paper, I say. I don’t want to find out you’ve been fucking lying to the media again. I’ll come back. I’ll send friends that hate you even more than I do. (Now I’m sounding like a deranged five-year-old.)
Betty whimpers.
I back out of the room but stop in my old bedroom, picking up the cup, the doll’s head, and the toupee. I race out of that house, thinking I should have poured it over with gas. I should have lit a match. I should have watched it go up in flames.
By four in the morning, I finally find my way back to the highway. Lucky for me (or unlucky, depending on your perspective), there’s a twenty-four-hour liquor store at the interchange. I decide to break out of my rhythm and go for a bottle of tequila.
Then I hook on to I-75 and follow it north to I-70, stopping after about an hour of driving. I take a room at a hotel named, of all things, El Rancho. At this point, I’ve devoured a third of my tequila.
I lug my gym bag and duffel bag into my room, and a few guns just in case I need them. I think I start going through the pictures, though I’m not sure. By the time the tequila is near gone, I swallow the bottle of Valium. I would have taken the codeine too if I’d been able to manage it.
Kat and the boys stopped coming to me. The ghosts pressed in. I twitched. I followed them with my eyes.
Now Ben came. He let my hands and legs go. He made love to me. I was starved for touch and craved his presence, his watery voice and body.
He began to teach me by feel. Touch this here. Stroke like that. Now wait. Pay attention to the body. This with the tongue, that with the fingers.
Ben kept me blind, still gagged most of the time unless he wanted me to use my mouth. When he went away, it was a torture for me. But now, he left my arms and legs free, forbidding me to touch the tape at my eyes or the gag. I lay obedient and filled with such a pressure of constant arousal that my thighs wept for his touch.
Then there was nothing. No one came.
I hummed all Mama’s songs. I talked and talked, jerking from the pinching ghost fingers.
At first I didn’t know. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t the ghosts that had gotten me to my feet. And they were pushing me, but I couldn’t walk very well.
Ben’s voice came from behind me. “This is your last lesson, Beth. So you don’t ever forget.”
They dragged me to the rail. They tied my hands to a pipe over my head, the rail catching me at the waist.
That was the worst time ever. He whipped me loud. He whipped me inside out. By the time he was done, Ben had whipped me deaf.
After that whipping, they cut me down and left me lying like a puddle on the floor. I didn’t make a sound. I didn’t move. I didn’t wait anymore.
They came to get me later on, having to carry me up the stairs. My eyes were so crusted over that Kat had to work at cleaning them for hours, making over me, saying, revery and revery. Bright lights and shapes scared me for near a year afterward.
But Kat and the boys were so sweet, so good to me.
I had graduated. I was seasoned. I was a child born from a sharp and sorry womb.
“Oh my God.”
My eyes go half-open. I lift my head a bit and smell rather than see that my cheek is smack in the middle of a pile of vomit. My left nostril is half buried in it and burns like hell from sucking it in.
A guy bends down. His face looms before my eyes.
“She’s still alive.” He steps over me. I can see out into the corridor. Two maids, one an elderly black woman with horn-rimmed glasses and a watery eye, and the other fresh from south of the border, stare at me.
I hear the phone pick up. He dials. Waits.
“Yes. I need an ambulance.”
I try to push up, but can’t, so I roll over and say, “No.”
He ignores me and keeps talking.
“No,” I say again and pull myself onto my feet, using a chair for support. I stagger and fall toward him, slapping my hand down on the phone, disconnecting the call. Then I slump against the guy, wiping puke down his sleeve.
“Fuck,” he says, and steps back, staring at me like I’m a piece of shit.
“You’ve got a half hour to get out of here,” he says. “Or I’m calling the cops.”
He stalks away and slams the door behind him. The two nice ladies disappear from view.
I fall onto the bed and use the sheet to clean off my face and blow my nose. I can’t believe how bad I feel.
Crawling to the bathroom, I stumble into the tub, turn on the shower, and lie back, letting it drench both myself and my clothes. After I worm out of the shower, I brace against the sink to look in the mirror.
If Dave and Betty could only see me now. How gr
atified they’d feel. I wonder how long it took them to get free. I wonder how Dave’s face is doing. I bet it looks better than mine.
I trudge back to the other room and find some dry clothes, thinking I should hit a Laundromat soon.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? If you’re alive, you have to deal with all the niggly things. The keeping things clean, when all they want to do is get dirty. And the having to keep your guns handy.
That’s a trick.
Somebody pounds on my door.
“Okay,” I yell. I dress and stuff everything else into the duffel bag. Hoisting it onto my shoulder, I almost collapse. Then I drag the gym bag with its stolen merchandise along the floor, opening the door. The lovely man who’s been so helpful is standing with his arms crossed and a nasty look on his face.
Cramming everything and myself into the car, I weave out of the parking lot, cross the street to his competitor, and take a room there. Then I stumble to a nearby service station. I buy a gallon of Gatorade.
When I wake up the next day, my head feels like a jackhammer on concrete. My stomach is shredded. I think somebody rearranged all my organs, squeezing them first so that they ache. I spring for another night.
Theresa Sue Lumley. Terri. I try saying it in different ways like I might have said it before. Then I take out the picture of Mama. I cry. To have a picture of her like this is the best thing in the world.
I flip through the photo albums. Most of the pictures are recent ones of Dave barbecuing, Betty in the kitchen, or the two ofthem on a cruise. They seem to cruise a lot. There’s just a few of me, or the little girl parading as me. The pictures of my supposed sister abound, flowing like a veritable fountain.
I close the album. This trip into midwestern familyhood is making me even sicker. I pick up a framed picture of Dave in his golf clothes with his arms around the shoulders of two buddies.They’re all smiling. I wonder if it’s a special club of childfuckers. They’re all happy about the fact that when they get home, they can throw one of their daughters on the bed and hump themselves even happier.
I pitch the picture at the wall.
I guess I showed him.
After sleeping again, I take out the pictures of me. I find another photo of Mama sitting in a kitchen. I grab that one too, sticking the stuff I don’t want in the gym bag.
When I pick up the picture I threw against the wall, I find that the glass broke, and behind that picture are two small school photos. One is of me. The other is Vin. He must be about ten. I cry again.
Oh Vin, Vin, Vin. Or James, I guess. I stash these two pictures in my pocket.
Two days later, after gallons of Gatorade and a few packs of crackers, I force down two eggs and toast for breakfast, tossing the pictures of Dave and Betty in a Dumpster.
I rev up the Taurus and hit I-70, heading west.
7
Utopia
As I buzz along the interstate, I’m all wigged up in my Becca outfit, still sick and dismal about Betty and good old Dave. My head all of a sudden slips back to Ben and Violet and what I think of in my mind as “the night.” I ride with Ben in the limo again. I wait in the reception line. I sip champagne.
Ben’s talking very serious with a guy I’ve never seen before. He’s about as big as Ben, but has long hair pulled back into a ponytail. I admire his ass as I stand, bored to death, in the center of a group of lobbyists.
It suddenly comes to me how the man that Ben was talking to wore gym shoes. Tux coat and pants, and black gym shoes.
Driving along the highway, I can’t get Ben out of my head. I never would have thought him to be someone to fall in love. But then I remember his face when he ran out of the van that night on the bridge. I think maybe Violet was right, and that even in someone like Ben, the ache drives you forward, stuffing your lungs and your belly until you’re drowned for sure and you fix yourself up to get stacked in Rivertown.
That’s when I notice that the interstate I’m following is winding through some dark, industrial wasteland. According to the map, I’m heading full-tilt toward Chicago. Thinking back, I decide that I must have gotten turned ass-backward on that screwy junction in some place called Indianapolis. At first I’m a little pissed about the change in my hazy planning procedure, but when I see the Chicago skyline, I get homesick for Manhattan.
Getting downtown is a trick, since road construction is more like a disease in Chicago than a beneficial activity. Once I hit downtown, I find a room and eat at a nice, civilized restaurant. Afterward, I pick up a copy of the Times and a notebook. The stories are pushing again. The something behind is chasing.
Strolling into Grant Park, I sit on a bench and open the paper. I get my worst chit yet. The headline says: SERIAL KILLER IN MANHATTAN? But it’s not the headline that gets me. It’s the pictures. There are seven photos in all and one drawing. Four guys and four girls. Most of them are strangers to me, but one of them is definitely Matt. The article names him John Weathers from Tennessee. It’s his yearbook picture.
I hear the sound of that pop again, from when Ben broke Matt’s arm, and my head goes a little blank. I never saw Matt after we left him in that room. None of us did.
My dinner starts feeling like it might want to make a second showing. And there’s this feeling that works itself into me. I can smell that play room. I hear Matt’s screams clear as if he were next to me. My skin is electrified.
None of the other photos looks familiar. It’s the drawing that gets me. She’s named Jane Doe, as no positive identification has ever been made. I can see why they might not want to use Detective Bates’ photos. The artist’s rendition of Violet doesn’t capture the moment of her lips brushing mine.
The article says, similar wounds. It says, all runaways and prostitutes. It says, no witnesses or clues. Except. And now the really big chit. Except a woman brought in the same night as the murder of Jane Doe, who had a wound believed to be made by the same knife. The woman’s name is being withheld by the police for reasons of confidentiality.
I curl up on my park bench, feeling like somebody’s sending jolts of current into my head. I get a picture in my mind of that same play room of Ben’s. He liked it a lot. Violet is on the floor, her hands cuffed behind. It looks like she’s sleeping, except for her body is all wrong. It shouldn’t bend quite that way. I see a man leaning over her. He has a ponytail and is wearing a long overcoat. On his feet are black gym shoes.
I can’t get to her. I can’t scream. All I can think is that I must be strapped up some way.
I’m off the bench now and running. I stop myself at some point and walk fast, glancing behind like somebody might be after me.
It’s too neat. Too true. All the chits falling in a row.
And where was Ben? He was usually watching, or else he had one of the big boys do it for him. And what happened to Slim and his friend? Why, instead of being free of Ben, did Violet end up dead?
I think of Detective Bates. He knew all along. God, he’s patient, waiting five years to hit me again for information. And Ben, why didn’t he want them to know I was his girl?
He didn’t want it to hurt business.
Violet dead on the floor, and he’s worried about business.
Nearby, a young couple stroll with a baby carriage. I see Violet’s eyes on every side, pale, glassy. Muddy water passes over, dragging me down.
This is what I get for trying to learn fly-fishing.
I think of my fall from the bridge that night, of my longing to find something I lost a long time ago. I think of my new life, my messy, screwy new life. And Violet pursues.
We are captured not by the living, but by the dead.
Mandy and me knew that a long time ago.
In the winter, the river didn’t change much except that the water got colder. Leaves dropped from the willows and the cotton-woods. In the swamps downstream, the snakes went away for a time. The peepers and the crickets went silent.
Vin and me would sleep near on top of each other to stay warm som
e nights, with Mama snoring nearby like a dog choked with a bone.
In the spring, though, the river was like suicide. It rose fitful, crawling up near the porch like it wanted in. Then there’d be a sudden surge and you’d wake in the morning with the water surrounding on all sides and below.
The spring was when all sorts of things broke loose in the water, things that froze up north, I guess, and after the melt were being dragged downstream. We found pieces of boats and broken furniture. Big logs and branches swept down. Vin and me and Mandy would climb a willow and sit up over the water, watching to see what might come down.