Stacking in Rivertown

by Barbara Bell

  We saw a bright red tablecloth. We saw barrels and barbed wire. We saw a mattress all muddy and torn. The next day we watched the bed frame slide down. We saw photos of women and men, and once we saw a dead goat, thinking at first it was a man with a big nose. We had a terrible fit at that, and Mandy just about fell in it scared her so bad.

  I dream of being over the river and watching it pass. Everything goes by, floating off in a river like suicide, some happiness waiting just beyond the bend, until it makes the eddy near Fowler, where all the trash collects and sinks down in.

  I spend the night in the bathroom of my hotel room curled up between the tub and the toilet, clutching a gun in each hand, listening for the gym shoes. As soon as it’s light out, I change into Becker and duck out of the hotel, packing everything back in the Taurus. Then I weave through the streets, searching out a pay phone. I call information. The automated voice barks out a number in NYC. I dial and wait.

  The precinct desk guy picks up, and I ask for Detective Bates. I hold, having to jam in quarters.

  “Bates here.” It’s his rat’s ass voice all right, like something trying to sneak up on you in the dark.

  I can’t speak. I think I might have to hang up.

  “Detective Bates,” I manage to say.

  “Yes?”

  “I have a tip. Some information about the article in the Times yesterday.”

  “Who is this?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s about Jane Doe. The killer had a ponytail. He was tall. He was at a reception that night for one of New Yor k’s senators.”

  “Beth,” he says.

  I go silent.

  “Betty and Dave were real shook up.”

  I chew my lip.

  “How the hell did you survive that drop?”

  I hang up. Asshole. How did he know?

  I rev the Taurus, wishing it were a Porsche, and tear out of there as if Bates might be right around the corner watching me. I don’t slow down until I find myself near someplace called Joliet.

  That’s when I begin to get back what little nerve I’ve retained through the past few days. I stop at an old metal diner like the kind you might see in some TV sitcom.

  Sitting in a booth with my hands shaking, I open my atlas, thinking I better lie low again. The nearest national forest is Shawnee, down in south Illinois.

  Before I leave, I pump my waitress for directions to a sports store. Then I sneak into the women’s john and dress as Becca, leaving off the wig. I’m thinking of trashing that idea. I barrel into downtown Joliet, looking to pick up some gear.

  Having a hard time making up my mind, I shop for over an hour. There are so many cool choices, so many color combinations to set off against each other. As I wait at the checkout counter with my pile of stuff, I peruse the message board next to me.

  Farmhand wanted, it says. Male or female worker needed to help out on organic farm. Room, board, and stipend. There’s a phone number. It grinds around in my brain as I wait and wait while the lady ahead of me keeps trying to find a charge card that will get accepted. I locate a phone on the wall near the door, so I wheel my stuff over, dialing the number.

  “Hello.” A man’s voice.

  “Hi. I’m calling about the farmhand needed.”

  “You’re hired,” he says.

  I’m stumped. “You don’t want to meet me first? I could be a paraplegic. I might be too ugly to look at day after day.”

  He doesn’t laugh. Bad sign.

  “If we don’t get help soon, we’re going to start losing some of our crops. You’re the first person to call since we put the notice up three weeks ago.”

  “Why doesn’t anybody else want it?” I say, nervous.

  This time he laughs. “People don’t like the labor or the heat. They like desks with soft chairs. They want air conditioning. They prefer to wear uncomfortable clothing like ties and high heels.”

  Now I laugh. “You don’t have air conditioning? And by the way, I’m real attached to my heels.”

  “I’ll work on the AC,” he says. “I don’t care what you wear on your feet.”

  He gives me directions and I end up at a tall, narrow old farmhouse with a large red barn, some outbuildings, five large oaks hanging over the house, and four very large, very noisy, mangy-looking dogs. I wait in my car. I see that beside the house is an old Volkswagen van that looks like it used to have paisley and flowers painted all over it.

  Hippies, I think. Organic farm. Utopia.

  A woman steps out of the house looking like the original earth mother. Behind her is a little boy, sticking to her like glue. She calls off the dogs and shakes my hand when I get out of the car.

  “Joan,” she says. Her eyes are soft at the edges, and the lines on her face, accentuated by so much sun, look to be from smiling a lot.

  “Becca.”

  She pulls the little boy in front of her. “Tut.”

  I stare down. “Hi Tut.”

  He doesn’t say a thing. Tut’s clutching a small boombox, and he looks at me with gorgeous wide brown eyes deep as the river. His skin is milk chocolate and his hair is reddish-brown with a good amount of kink. He looks to be about six or seven.

  She shows me a room off the side of the barn. It has a bed, dresser, a small kitchen with a sink, hot plate, and toaster oven. The john is tiny. A tall guy wouldn’t be able to sit on the seat without having to pull his knees up.

  “We could use you in the field now,” she says.

  Tut is sitting on my bed, fiddling with his boombox. He’s so serious. I watch as he reaches in a pocket of Joan’s skirt, takes out a CD very carefully, and slides it in. It’s one of the younger female singers that are coming on right now.

  I drop my duffel bag and face Joan. “I want to be paid in cash. No papers signed. And I like to wear a pistol.”

  She doesn’t blink an eye. “It’s a deal.”

  That’s the beginning of something fine. John and Joan treat me like family. We get up before dawn and hit the rows as soon as we can see to pick. Then we traipse into the barn and wash it down.

  They have regular customers that they pack up boxes for. But they also have several restaurants and health-food stores in Chicago and the suburbs that they supply twice weekly, filling up the back of the Volkswagen van, and hiking it up to the city. Whatever’s left they sell at local fruit and vegetable stands.

  I work myself dead every day, sleeping hard at night. By the end of three weeks, even though I still hurt from all the bending over and kneeling, I’m feeling strong again.

  John is one of those tall, lanky guys that you’re always worrying how his jeans might just drop right off. His hair is bleached from the sun, and his mustache and beard are part gone to gray. His eyes glitter. Before I worked there, I was already good at choosing vegetables and fruits. But John’s vast knowledge of varieties helps me perfect my talent.

  Most of the time, Tut stays with Joan, but the longer I’m there, the more I find him following me as I’m bent over picking beans or cutting broccoli.

  It turns out that Tut is a foster child that John and Joan took on when both their kids left for college a couple years ago. This year their son Tom and daughter Susan are taking summer classes, which is why they hired me.

  Of course they want to know about me, so I fabricate an abusive husband from whom I’m running, which is why the pistol and the need for secrecy. I guess in some ways I’m not lying all that much.

  I have a copy of the Times sent to the farm every day. I feel a need to keep my eyes peeled. And I’m beginning to worry about Ben. If the round-bodied Detective Bates figured me out, Ben might have figured it, too. And he has contacts in the police.

  One morning when I get up, I’m having more trouble than usual with my back. It turns out that Joan’s too sick to make the Chicago deliveries. Since we’d hit a lull in weeding, John suggests that I do the route. He makes me a map with directions. I worry. Maps obviously aren’t my strong point or I wouldn’t have ended up
near Joliet in the first place.

  After we have the van so full the front wheels are almost off the ground, Joan surprises me by suggesting that Tut go along with me. I’m about to say no when I see his face light up. It’s the first time I’ve seen him smile since I’ve been here.

  So I throw my backpack into the van and Tut scrambles into the passenger seat. As the van weaves and lumbers its way to Chicago, Tut drops that same CD into his boombox again, and the two of us listen to it.

  I didn’t like it the first time I heard it, but now, as I begin to take in the words, I feel drawn down, like I’m in the river again and sinking below where the current is strong and cold, where the ache runs hard. But there’s more in the music than that. I have a sense of a woman’s face, of her eyes watching me, knowing Beth and Clarisse, seeing Terri.

  “Who is this singing?” I ask Tut.

  “Miriam Dubois,” he says.

  Before we hit Chicago, I pull in at a rest stop and change into Becker.

  “This is our little secret,” I say to Tut as I sit in my seat.

  He smiles at me and giggles. Much to my surprise, I find myself smiling back. He looks in my eyes for the first time. And gazing at him, I feel some kind of lightness inside of me. I wonder how it would be to live a life without Ben in my head and Violet bleeding onto the floor. I wonder what it would feel like to be happy.

  So we go about our business, unloading through the day, finishing up about dinnertime. I’m not in the mood to head home yet, so we stop at a mall in a suburb just south of Chicago, looking to pick up dinner.

  We take our time, nosing out the stores. As we’re hiking down a long expanse of marble glaring into our brains, surrounded on all sides by loads and loads of stuff, I hear Tut say real loud, “Is that your sister?”

  I turn and look, seeing my Clarisse Broder face a hundred times repeated in the display windows of a bookstore. A sign yells in my face: “Available Now!”

  I slouch. I pull around the brim of my hat. I punch my sunglasses tight against my face.

  “Shut up, Tut,” I say as people look at us. I shuffle over and study the picture. It’s different than the one they had in the papers. I have no idea where Jeremy found this one. Tut and I mosey inside, where I pick up a copy. It’s the new printing.

  They added lots of pictures from Jeremy’s sister’s archives. There’s us in front of a Christmas tree. There’s Jeremy’s mother and me trying to avoid touching each other. There’s me staring at the turkey like it’s a scary petrified meat.

  When did she manage to take all these pictures? The sneak.

  I also see a batch of Betty and Dave’s earlier photos, including the one of Mama and me. I think I might start crying.

  The last two pictures near the end take the cake. The first is a view down to the water from the Brooklyn Bridge. The other is of a pile of flowers left at the place where I jumped.

  God, they’re milking this. I want to call my agent and tell her she should be ashamed of herself.

  On the back of the book jacket it says, tragic suicide. It says, dark novel, cult phenomenon. It doesn’t say, undercurrent. It doesn’t say, the dangers got her. There’s so much it doesn’t say that it makes me sick.

  I buy a copy, contributing to Jeremy’s investment strategies in futures. Searching for Tut, I find him plopped on the floor with a Dr. Seuss book spread on his knees, happy as a bee.

  I think preschool. I think college tuition.

  I buy him the book.

  We get back to the farm late that night. Tut wants to sleep with me, so I let him curl up at my side. But I lie awake, worried again. Even here in Utopia, my past has a way of sneaking up on me. I decide that I’m going to have to leave soon, before my ugly little world reaches in and snatches Utopia away.

  Every night after we brought Violet up from the basement, she curled against me just like Tut. I got to looking forward to her slipping in next to me. She helped the ache.

  And later, when we were making love, when she was rubbing my back or tending welts or bruises on me, or when I held her in my arms, the ache became finer, weaker. But it never went away.

  The last few months of that time are coming clearer to me now. I think of Violet moody. I think of her watching Ben with hate undisguised. I remember how the ache grew in me as Violet got pushy about getting out, as she worked me like she tried with Ben, withholding her love at times. That was a misery to me, so that I pushed Ben into whipping me just to get her affection.

  And I remember orgasm after orgasm of nothing but despair. Violet made her plans. She drew me along by the power of my misery and love.

  I remember kissing her good-bye that night as clear as though it happened just now. She had helped me dress in the black strapless gown, adjusting my slip and hose.

  I can smell her breath, taste on my lips that which made her Violet and no other. I see her eyes, still roving and wet, still sly, and her skin smooth, flush, a world made round.

  That was just a few hours before the Dumpster, before the blanket drawn back, before the sky wept Violet clean through, melting her off like salt, washing her down through the sewers.

  The next week, I begin to go down. I want whiskey. My eyes start itching for smack. At the end of the week, they send me on the Chicago route again because Tom, their son, is flying in from Berkeley. Joan’s too busy cooking up some heart-clogging farm dinner and John is balancing the books. Tut’s not able to go with me this time since his social worker is visiting that afternoon.

  Before I hit O’Hare, I find a record store where I look up Miriam Dubois, intending to buy Tut another CD of hers. When I finally find her, I check the picture. I stop.

  She could be Violet’s sister. In fact, the similarities are so strong she could almost be a twin, though she has lighter skin and hair. She holds her eyes different. Her lips are softened, as though waiting, and her chin less adamant. I gaze at her, unable to look away. I think of her music. How the ache runs through.

  So I buy a CD for Tut and three for me. I’m thinking I’ll get to know her, as though it might make those other pictures fade, the ones in Detective Bates’ briefcase.

  Later, as I’m waiting at the terminal, dressed as Becca, paranoid as hell, I see a tall man with a ponytail in a business suit. I freak and stare at his shoes. Thank God they’re not gym shoes.

  But it throws me backward, and I hate Ben so hard, I think I’m going to bust open. He didn’t do anything to help Violet. He just let her die like a stuck pig.

  “Hi.”

  I jump and reach for my gun.

  “You must be Becca.” A young guy looking a lot like Joan in the eyes and chin is looking me up and down. “Dad gave me a general description,” his eyes rest on my breasts, “but he left out some important points.” Now his eyes drift downward. “I think I should have come home sooner.”

  So within a few days, who shows up in my room at night but Tommy-boy.

  I’m becoming such a part of the family, I think, as Tom undoes my shorts, as he lifts my shirt over my head.

  I show him new positions and advise him on pleasuring a woman. I tie his hands to the bedposts and tease him for hours.

  The young are so fun to teach.

  After he departs for the night, I put on the CDs of Miriam Dubois, or M.D., as I’ve started referring to her in my mind. I gaze at her pictures, amazed at how she’s so like Violet. I let her music draw me under. I know I’m getting goofy, but I think I fall in love with her like I’m a teenager. I dream of her eyes looking at me. If I still believed in hexing, I’d have made a doll to draw her to me. I keep telling myself it’s just because of Violet, and how she died, and how much I miss her.

  That’s when things start to really go down. The Times arrives one day with you-know-who on the front page once more. Or should I say, two different incarnations of you-know-who.

  There’s the mug shot of Beth the shoplifter next to the cover picture of Clarisse Broder. The headline? ARE THESE THE SAME WOMAN? SECRET P
AST REVEALED.

  The Times has been getting a little slack lately, dipping into yellow journalism to boost sales.

  And as I’m reading the story, I get a creepy feeling my favorite detective is baiting me. I’m sure he leaked this out, trying to scare the rabbit from its hole, which I’m determined is not going to happen. That is, until I read the last paragraph about Mrs. Broder’s alleged death.