by Matt Bell
These counselors, they hadn’t wanted him to see what they wrote down for his disability, but he had. Seeing those words written in the counselor’s neat script didn’t make him angry, just relieved to know. He wasn’t bad anymore. He was a person with a disorder, with a trauma. No one had ever believed him about this, especially not the therapist in juvie, who had urged Punter to open up, who had gotten angry when he couldn’t. They didn’t believe him when he said he’d already told them everything he had inside him.
Punter knows they were right to disbelieve him, that he did have feelings he didn’t want to let out.
When Punter pictures the place where other people keep their feelings, all he sees is his own trapped scream, imagined as a devouring ball of sound, hungry and hot in his guts.
A bell rings from inside the building. Soon the doors open, spilling girls out onto the sidewalk and into the parking lot. Punter watches parents getting out of other cars, going to greet their children. One of these girls might be a friend of the drowned girl, and if he could talk to her then he might be able to find out who the drowned girl was. Might be able to make a list of other people he needed to question so that he could solve her murder.
The volume and the increasing number of distinct voices, all of it overwhelms Punter. He stares, watching the girls go by in their uniforms. All of them are identically clothed and so he focuses instead on their faces, on their hair, on the differences between blondes and brunettes and redheads. He watches the girls smiling and rolling their eyes and exchanging embarrassed looks as their mothers step forward to receive them.
He watches the breeze blow all that hair around all those made-up faces. He presses himself against the closed door of his Ford, holds himself still.
He closes his eyes and tries to picture the drowned girl here, wearing her own uniform, but she is separate now, distinct from these girls and the life they once shared. Punter’s glad. These girls terrify him in a way the drowned girl does not.
A short burst of siren startles Punter, and he twists around in his seat to see a police cruiser idling its engine behind him, its driver side window rolled down. The cop inside is around Punter’s age, his hair starting to gray at the temples but the rest of him young and healthy-looking. The cop yells something, hanging his left arm out the window, drumming his fingers against the side of the cruiser, but Punter can’t hear him through the closed windows, not with all the other voices surrounding him.
Punter opens his mouth, then closes it without saying anything. He shakes his head, then locks his driver’s side door, suddenly afraid that the cop means to drag him from the car, to put hands on him as other officers did when he was a kid. He looks up from the lock to see the cop outside of his cruiser, walking toward Punter’s own car.
The cop raps on Punter’s window, waits for him to roll down the window. He stares at Punter, who tries to look away, inadvertently letting his eyes fall on another group of teenage girls.
The cop says, You need to move your car. This is a fire lane.
Punter tries to nod, finds himself shaking his head instead. He whispers that he’ll leave, that he’s leaving. The cop says, I can’t hear you. What did you say?
Punter turns the key, sighs when the engine turns over. He says, I’m going. He says it as loud as he can, his vocal cords choked and rusty.
There are too many girls walking in front of him for Punter to pull forward, and so he has to wait as the cop gets back in his own car. Eventually the cop puts the cruiser in reverse, lets him pass. Punter drives slowly out of the parking lot and onto the city streets, keeping the car slow, keeping it straight between the lines.
Afraid that the cop might follow him, Punter sticks to the main roads, other well-populated areas, but he gets lost anyway. These aren’t places he goes. A half hour passes, and then another. Punter’s throat is raw from smoking. His eyes ache from staring into the rearview mirror, and his hands tremble so long he fears they might never stop.
At home, Punter finds the girl’s parents in the phonebook, writes down their address. He knows he has to be more careful, that if he isn’t then someone will come looking for him too. He lies down on the couch to wait for dark, falls asleep with the television tuned to daytime dramas and court shows. He dreams about finding the murderer, about hauling him into the police station in chains. He sees himself avenging the girl with a smoking pistol, emptying round after round into this faceless person, unknown but certainly out there, surely as marked by his crime as Punter was.
When he wakes up, the television is still on, broadcasting game shows full of questions Punter isn’t prepared to answer. He gets up and goes into the bathroom, the pain in his guts doubling him over on the toilet. When he’s finished, he takes a long, gulping drink from the faucet, then goes out into the living room to gather his notebook, his binoculars, his knife.
In the garage, he tries to lift the girl’s tank top to get to the skin hidden underneath, but the fabric is frozen to her flesh. He can’t tell if the sound of his efforts is the ripping of ice or of skin. He tries touching her through her clothes, but she’s too far gone, distant with cold. He shuts the freezer door and leaves her again in the dark, but not before he explains what he’s doing for her. Not before he promises to find the person who hurt her, to hurt this person himself.
Her parents’ house is outside of town, at the end of a long tree-lined driveway. Punter drives past, then leaves his car parked down the road and walks back with the binoculars around his neck. Moving through the shadows of the trees, he finds a spot a hundred yards from the house, then scans the lighted windows for movement until he finds the three figures sitting in the living room. He recognizes her parents from the television, sees that the third person is a boy around the same age as the drowned girl. Punter watches him the closest, tries to decide if this is the girl’s boyfriend. The boy is all movement, his hands gesturing with every word he speaks. He could be laughing or crying or screaming and from this distance Punter wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. He watches as the parents embrace the boy, then hurries back through the woods as soon as he sees the headlights come on in front of the house.
He makes it to his own car just as the boy’s convertible pulls out onto the road. Punter starts the engine and follows the convertible through town, past the gas station and the downtown shopping, then into another neighborhood where the houses are smaller. He’s never been here before, but he knows the plastics plant is close, that many of his old coworkers live nearby. He watches the boy park in front of a dirty white house, watches through the binoculars as the boy climbs the steps to the porch, as he rings the doorbell. The boy does not go in, but Punter’s view is still obscured by the open door. Whatever happens only takes a few minutes, and then the boy is back in his car. He sits on the side of the road for a long time, smoking. Punter smokes too. He imagines getting out of the car and going up to the boy, imagines questioning him about the night of the murder. He knows he should, knows being a detective means taking risks, but he can’t do it. When the boy leaves, Punter lets him go, then drives past the white house with his foot off the gas pedal, idling at a crawl. He doesn’t see anything he understands, but this is not exactly new.
Back at the pond, the only evidence he gathers is that he was there himself. His tire tracks are the only ones backing up to the pond, his footprints the only marks along the shore. Whoever else was there before him has been given an alibi by Punter’s own clumsiness. He knows how this will look, so he finds a long branch with its leaves intact and uses it to rake out the sand, erasing the worst of his tracks. When he’s done, he stares out over the dark water, trying to remember how it felt to hold her in his arms, to feel her body soft and pliable before surrendering her to the freezer.
He wonders if it was a mistake to take her from beneath the water. Maybe he should have done the opposite, should have stayed under the waves with her until his own lungs filled with the same watery weight, until he was trapped beside her. Their bod
ies would not have lasted. The fish would have dismantled their shells, and then Punter could have shown her the good person he’s always believed himself to be, trapped underneath all this sticky rot.
For dinner he cooks two more steaks. All the venison the girl displaced is going bad in his aged refrigerator, and already the steaks are browned and bruised. To be safe, he fries them hard as leather. He has to chew the venison until his jaws ache and his teeth feel loose, but he finishes every bite, not leaving behind even the slightest scrap of fat.
Watching the late night news, Punter can tell that without any new evidence the story is losing steam. The girl gets only a minute of coverage, the reporter reiterating facts Punter’s known for days. He stares at her picture again, at how her smile once made her whole face seem alive.
He knows he doesn’t have much time. He crawls toward the television on his hands and knees, puts his hand on her image as it fades away. He turns around, sits with his back against the television screen. Behind him there is satellite footage of a tornado or a hurricane or a flood. Of destruction seen from afar.
Punter wakes up choking in the dark, his throat closed off with something, phlegm or pus or he doesn’t know what. He grabs a handkerchief from his nightstand and spits over and over until he clears away the worst of it. He gets up to flip the light switch, but the light doesn’t turn on. He tries it again, and then once more. He realizes how quiet the house is, how without the steady clacking of his wall clock the only sound in his bedroom is his own thudding heart. He leaves the bedroom, walks into the kitchen. The oven’s digital clock stares at him like an empty black eye, the refrigerator waits silent and still.
He runs out of the house in his underwear, his big bare feet slapping at the cold driveway. Inside the garage, the freezer is silent too. He lifts the lid, letting out a blast of frozen air, then slams it shut again after realizing he’s wasted several degrees of chill to confirm something he already knows.
He knew this day was coming—the power company has given him ample written notice—but still he curses in frustration. He goes back inside and dresses hurriedly, then scavenges his house for loose change, for crumpled dollar bills left in discarded jeans. At the grocery down the road, he buys what little ice he can afford, his cash reserves exhausted until his next disability check. It’s not enough, but it’s all he can do.
Back in the garage, he works fast, cracking the blocks of ice on the cement floor and dumping them over the girl’s body. He manages to cover her completely, suppressing the pang of regret he feels once he’s unable to see her face through the ice. For a second, he considers crawling inside the freezer himself, sweeping away the ice between them. Letting his body heat hers, letting her thaw into his arms.
What he wonders is, Would it be better to have one day with her than a forever separated by ice?
He goes back into the house and sits down at the kitchen table. Lights a cigarette, then digs through the envelopes on the table until he finds the unopened bill from the power company. He opens it, reads the impossible number, shoves the bill back into the envelope. He tries to calculate how long the ice will buy him, but he never could do figures, can’t begin to start to solve a problem like this.
He remembers: The basement refrigerator had always smelled bad, like leaking coolant and stale air. It wasn’t used much, had been kept out of his father’s refusal to throw anything away more than out of any sense of utility. By the time Punter found his mother there, she was already bloated around the belly and the cheeks, her skin slick with something that glistened like petroleum jelly.
Unsure what he should do, he’d slammed the refrigerator door and ran back upstairs to hide in his bedroom. By the time his father came home, Punter was terrified his father would know he’d seen, that he’d kill him too. That what would start as a beating would end as a murder.
Only his father never said anything, never gave any sign the mother was dead. He stuck to his story, telling Punter over and over how his mother had run away and left them behind, until Punter’s voice was too muted to ask.
Punter tried to forget, to believe his father’s story, but he couldn’t.
Punter tried to tell someone else, some adult, but he couldn’t do that either. Not when he knew what would happen to his father. Not when he knew they would take her from him.
During the day, while his father worked, he went down to the basement and opened the refrigerator door.
At first, he only looked at her, at the open eyes and mouth, at the way her body had been jammed into the too-small space. At the way her throat was slit the same way his dad had once demonstrated on a deer that had fallen but not expired.
The first time he touched her, he was sure she was trying to speak to him, but it was only gas leaking out of her mouth, squeaking free of her lungs. Punter had rushed to pull her out of the refrigerator, convinced for a moment she was somehow alive, but when he wrapped his arms around her, all that gas rolled out of her mouth and nose and ears, sounding like a wet fart but smelling so much worse.
He hadn’t meant to vomit on her, but he couldn’t help himself.
Afterward, he took her upstairs and bathed her to get the puke off. He’d never seen another person naked, and so he tried not to look at his mother’s veiny breasts, at the wet thatch of her pubic hair floating in the bath water.
Scrubbing her with a washcloth and a bar of soap, he averted his eyes the best he could.
Rinsing the shampoo out of her hair, he whispered he was sorry.
It was hard to dress her, but eventually he managed, and then it was time to put her back in the refrigerator before his father came home.
Closing the door, he whispered goodbye. I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.
The old clothes, covered with blood and vomit, he took them out into the cornfield behind the house and buried them. Then came the waiting, all through the evening while his father occupied the living room, all through the night while he was supposed to be sleeping.
Day after day, he took her out and wrestled her up the stairs. He sat her on the couch or at the kitchen table, and then he talked, his normal reticence somehow negated by her forever silence. He’d never talked to his mother this much while she was alive, but now he couldn’t stop telling her everything he had ever felt, all his trapped words spilling out one after another.
Punter knows that even if they hadn’t found her and taken her away, she wouldn’t have lasted forever. He had started finding little pieces of her left behind, waiting wet and squishy on the wooden basement steps, the kitchen floor, in between the cracks of the couch.
He tried to clean up after her, but sometimes his father would find one too. Then Punter would have to watch as his father held some squishy flake up to the light, rolling it between his fingers as if he could not recognize what it was or where it came from before throwing it in the trash.
Day after day, Punter bathed his mother to get rid of the smell, which grew more pungent as her face began to droop, as the skin on her arms wrinkled and sagged. He searched her body for patches of mold to scrub them off, then held her hands in his, marveling at how, even weeks later, her fingernails continued to grow.
Punter sits on his front step, trying to make sense of the scribbles in his notebook. He doesn’t have enough, isn’t even close to solving the crime, but he knows he has to, if he wants to keep the police away. If they figure the crime out before he does, if they question the killer, then they’ll eventually end up at the pond, where Punter’s attempts at covering his tracks are unlikely to be good enough.
Punter doesn’t need to prove the killer guilty, at least not with a judge and a jury. All he has to do is find this person, then make sure he never tells anyone what he did with the body. After that, the girl can be his forever, for as long as he has enough ice.
Punter drives, circling the scenes of the crime: The gas station, the school, her parents’ house, the pond. He drives the circuit over and over, and even with the air conditioning c
ranked he can’t stop sweating, his face drenched and fevered, his stomach hard with meat. He’s halfway between his house and the gas station when his gas gauge hits empty. He pulls over and sits for a moment, trying to decide, trying to wrap his slow thoughts around his investigation. He opens his notebook, flips through its barely filled pages. He has written down so few facts, so few suspects, and there is so little time left.
In his notebook, he crosses out father, mother, boyfriend. He has only one name left, one suspect he hasn’t disqualified, one other person that Punter knows has seen the girl. He smokes, considers, tries to prove himself right or wrong, gets nowhere.
He opens the door and stands beside the car. Home is in one direction, the gas station the other. Reaching back inside, he leaves the notebook and the binoculars but takes the hunting knife and shoves it into his waistband, untucking his t-shirt to cover the weapon.
What Punter decides, he knows it is only a guess, but he also believes that whenever a detective has a hunch, the best thing to do is to follow it to the end.
It’s not a long walk, but Punter gets tired fast. He sits down to rest, then can’t get back up. He curls into a ball off the weed-choked shoulder, sleeps fitfully as cars pass by, their tires throwing loose gravel over his body. It’s dark out when he wakes. His body is covered with gray dust, and he can’t remember where he is. He’s never walked this road before, and in the dark it’s as alien as a foreign land. He studies the meager footprints in the dust, tracking himself until he knows which way he needs to go.
There are two cars parked behind the gas station, where the drowned girl’s car was before it was towed away. One is a small compact, the other a newer sports car. The sports car’s windows are rolled down, its stereo blaring music Punter doesn’t know or understand, the words too fast for him to hear. He takes a couple steps into the trees beside the road, slows his approach until his gasps for air grow quieter. Leaning against the station are two young men in t-shirts and blue jeans, nearly identical with their purposely mussed hair and scraggly stubble. With them are two girls—one redhead and one brunette—still wearing their school uniforms, looking even younger than Punter knows they are.