by Kim Powers
Did they just take it on at first because I was Truman’s friend?
I never asked; they never told.
When it began to look like it might turn into something, the questions started up: What are you writing next? How’s your next book going? Slow but fine, I’d say, polite Southern girl that I was, and meanwhile I’m hauling Greg Peck around town and meeting Lady Bird Johnson.
Tall clover indeed. Clover for sure, more like hayseed. Truman took that picture of me on the first book jacket, lying in the grass. I’m surprised I wasn’t chewing a stalk of it. That was me, dreaming away in the grass—dreaming of other books, dreaming of you? I look back on the last words I ever spoke to the American public and they absolutely haunt me: “I want to be the Jane Austen of south Alabama.” I quote, and I quoteth not—it’s captured in black and white, you can double-check me. Goodness, why is it that those were practically my last words in print? It’s probably good I shut up after that. But did I quit talking, or did they quit asking?
And from dreaming in that grass, to . . . just dreaming, I guess. When did I stop writing, except to you? How do decades go by, and you don’t really remember what you did with them? When did the new book I was working on not turn into a book? When did they look at what I had and say no amount of work is going to fix this? All these years later, and I still have the questions, but not the answers.
I didn’t need the money, even back then, and that was before every school kid in America had to read It. Riding the bus in Manhattan one time, I saw a little girl up ahead of me reading It. For about two Alabama seconds—although that’s a pretty long time, the way we draw things out—I thought about tapping her on the shoulder and saying I wrote that; maybe it’d help her get extra credit or something. But no one would believe her; no one knows what I look like. I’m just some tall, gray-haired lady, who used to be taller, who’s spent too much time out in the sun. A tanned but shrinking giant. (“Giants Among Us,” that would be a good title for something, but it’s probably been used. Most things have; maybe that’s why I don’t write anymore, there’s nothing left to write about.) They’d laugh if they only knew: one of the most famous unseen writers in the world, and I walk among them, and they never even know.
In Monroeville, they know. Last year, for Halloween, I heard giggling out on the porch—children daring each other to come up here for candy, knowing full well who lived here. I opened the door, and they were dressed up like they were in the agricultural pageant at the end of The Book. One of them was a ham, like Scout, encased ramrod straight in chicken wire and paper maché. They thought it was clever—maybe it was an homage, as the snooty French say—but it scared me senseless and I slammed the door.
Alice, of course, tells me it’s my own damn fault for opening the door in the first place.
I hate it that I’ve become Boo Radley.
And now, somebody’s managed to not just get me to the door, but to sneak inside the house, with these old, and new, pictures of me. Maybe it’s Truman, maybe it’s some crazed fan, but whoever it is, I’m scared, and I want to slam the door shut again.
Oh, Brother, how I miss you. Tell me what to do, tell me what they want.
Someday, I’ll put all these letters together, present them to the world, and say these are my missing chapters. Do with them what you will, but be kind. I’m going on an old lady now. Maybe I could publish them under a different name, and then, if they like it, say it was me all along, and if they don’t, no one’s the wiser and I just disappear again.
But I’ll never disappear on you.
She never signed the letters. That would be too much of a good-bye. She just folded them up and put them in an envelope, then added them to the full-to-bursting drawer at the bottom of the file cabinet. As she opened the drawer, she held her hands in it, among the other pages on which she had poured out her daily life, and prayed to draw extra strength from them.
They were the missing chapters of her life; she didn’t know how many more she had left, or how much longer she could keep her secrets hidden, now that there were intruders in the dust, snuck in as stealthily as Dick and Perry had entered that house out in the middle of nowhere, where no one could hear the screams.
Chapter Eight
“NO MORE SNA-A-A-AKES!”
If anybody had been listening to the dry wind that echoed round and round in the Palm Springs desert at that particular moment, that’s the scream they would have heard, as Danny pushed out the last syllable and spit into the sand.
“No more snakes, that’s right, that’s telling ’em!” he thought to himself.
He added a final exclamation point by grinding the spit into the sand with the toe of his boot, but whether by “’em” he meant them—the snakes—or him—Truman—he wasn’t even sure himself. Maybe a little bit of both, the snakes and Truman: “same fuckin’ thing” he mumbled, part of the ongoing conversation he’d been having with himself for the past two hours, ever since Truman had delivered his ultimatum: get the snake, or get packing. Truman had delivered another ultimatum, almost to himself: a snake with a bullet in it, or a bullet hole in his own head; he said it was one or the other, and he’d been acting so squirrelly lately, Danny didn’t doubt him.
But even in the vast, empty desert, with no one to see or hear him, Danny was almost afraid to curse the little man—the little man who now had him hauling up a dead rattler, if he could find it first.
“NO MORE!”
He yelled it into the open sky, a “take that” he was rehearsing for Truman in person.
Pouring the dregs of his beer into an S shape in the sand, he watched the foam bubble up and fry away in the desert heat. He kicked at this lump of sand rather than grind it up, but his words had none of the same kick in them; they were more of a defeated whisper:
“No more snakes.”
He might as well have been saying “No more life.”
This life.
His life, that had twisted and turned from lucking into a cash cow like Truman to hauling up dead rattlers for him.
Some luck.
Danny had seen and smelled a dead snake only once before: a family had kept one as a pet, and it had crawled into their central air system and died. For days before it was found, the air kept getting warmer and warmer, no matter how low they turned down the thermostat, and smellier and smellier, until finally Danny was called. He retched when he walked into the house, retched even more when he pulled the snake—what was left of it—out of its final resting place.
He swore that was the last time he’d have anything to do with snakes.
But that was before he’d met Truman, one night when he flew into the tiny Palm Springs airport, where Danny moonlighted as a grease monkey, gassing up the planes. Nozzle in hand, Danny filled up tanks while he dreamed and schemed about the fat-cat man or woman, didn’t matter which, who’d offer to take him away from it all. He could roll up his shirtsleeves so they bunched up his biceps and made him look fit; unbutton his shirt to there so it showed off a nice little thatch of hair—didn’t matter that it was just about the only hair on his head or chest, it looked good on top of the V-shaped tan he managed to get working outdoors most of the time. If you looked hard, you could still see the X-ray of the man he used to be, before a wife and kids and humping two dead-end jobs took over. And make no mistake: pumping gas was a dead end: always smelling like diesel, the vapors going to your head and making you sick, scrubbing your skin so hard every night it rubbed off raw and red, the wife always yelling you smelled up the house, made it stink like it was about to blow up if somebody struck a match.
The man he used to be: that must have been what caught Truman’s eye the first time they saw each other, as Truman walked down the stairs from his plane and across the tarmac. Danny knew he had the hook halfway in when Truman gave him a wink, and in return, Danny gave him his card: who knew when his air conditioner might break down? Lucky thing it did, or at least that’s what Truman said. That time, at Truman’s house,
Danny got a bigger wink, and a pinch on the butt. (And if his butt was bigger and fleshier than it had been a few years ago, well, some guys liked that. More to hang on to.) Danny saw the books with Truman’s name on them, the checks Truman left lying around, the stack of pages from the new book he was working on. There were a lot of pages; there would be a lot of checks coming in from that haul.
That’s when Danny decided: it was gonna take a lot of time to get Truman’s AC up and running to where it should be. Even if Danny had to break a few extra things first, to come back and fix them later. And so what if Danny’s wife was threatening to leave him if he didn’t spend more time at home. Where was he all the time? Why wasn’t he at home for dinner anymore with the kids? Why didn’t he want to have sex with her anymore?
That was then, this was now: now, Truman’s AC was running just fine, but Danny was out in the vast middle of the desert, looking for a snake with a shotgun blast to its head.
Where was his AC, while he was out here, hot and boiling in the desert?
He’d thought about finding any old snake and shooting it in the head himself. A dead snake was a dead snake was a dead snake, period, right? Wrong. Truman, almost reading his mind, had said, “Don’t bother coming back unless you come back with the right one. And I’ll know which one that is. I never forget a snake.”
Danny felt like that snake, racing away on its belly, knowing a man was standing behind, holding a shotgun to his head.
In Danny’s case, that man was Truman.
Danny had been in control at first; somewhere, somehow, the tables had turned, and Truman was on top now, in more ways than one.
“NO MORE SNAKES!”
That felt good, to yell, get it out of his system.
Nobody could stop him from yelling out here as much as he wanted.
Nobody was around to hear.
The sun was at two o’clock—not directly overhead, but the perfect angle to hit under the brim of Danny’s Peterbilt cap and blind him, and leave a beet red burn across his jaw. He’d had a lot of time to think as the sun migrated from high noon to two o’clock; think about the unfairness of his life, and think up what to do about it. Truman said he just needed some guidance; now, he had to prove how smart he really was. Hooking up with Truman was the first smart thing Danny had ever done; he had to do something else that was smart now, and not get stuck hauling rattlers for the rest of their “relationship.”
That’s what Truman called it.
Danny called it a “business opportunity,” but he had to come up with something new, and fast, before it turned into a “going out of business sale.”
By the time Danny finally found the damn snake—what was it now, three days after he’d originally stumbled over it?—all the moisture had soaked out, and ants and flies had eaten away everything that wasn’t nailed down. All that was left was skeleton and cartilage and papery skin.
Three days, but no Resurrection for this lowly creature.
Taking another long chug of beer for courage, and putting on an old pair of work gloves, Danny scooped up the remains and laid them on top of an old gunnysack, the four corners of which he carefully crisscrossed and tied together.
And for just a second, he burst into tears: they came rushing out of him, but he squeezed them back as fast as they came. DAMNITWASN’TFAIR. Working so hard, just minding your own Goddamn business, not getting any breaks, not hurting anybody, then getting whacked out in the desert and left to rot: whether he was recounting the litany of his own life’s sorrows, or the snake’s, he didn’t know.
And he didn’t care.
FUCKIT.
That was all about to change.
Just screwing Truman wasn’t enough.
Helping him make Goddamn kites.
Putting up with that busybody housekeeper.
Doing the SHITWORK while Truman bitched and moaned and rolled around in his bathrobe saying he was working.
Danny would show him what real work was.
He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, mopping up sweat and tears with one fell swoop.
He wasn’t going to cry anymore.
He was smart: he’d just come up with a plan.
Chapter Nine
How many minutes out of her life had Nelle spent in front of coffins and dead people?
Too many to count.
How many had she imagined?
Even more.
And now she was making yet another return trip, to the cemetery where her brother Ed was buried. She was always in the mood for a visit after writing him one of her letters, but knew that a trip to the boneyard every time would set even more tongues wagging than already wagged: a woman who barely left her own house except to see the resting place of dead people. (And those were just the trips she made on foot; if they only knew how often she traveled there in her mind.) No, an outing to the cemetery wasn’t always a good idea for her, let alone the gossipy neighbors, but now she had work to do: Truman, or somebody, seemed to be directing her there. That’s the only thing she could think of to do, spurred on by the picture of herself, standing graveside. It had been the scene of one of their earliest life (and death) lessons; now, was there something else to be learned there?
And it wasn’t just Truman who seemed to be pointing the way there; Brother was, as well. Usually when she wrote him—oh, neighbors, get a load of this! The crazy lady authoress writing letters to her dead brother!—she felt as if he were communicating right back. But with this last letter, there had been no answers from the other side, just the echo of her own questions. No, if she wanted to talk to Brother today, she’d have to meet him halfway, in his current place of residence: the cemetery. It seemed as logical a place as any to start looking.
But start looking for what?
The ground was damp; you’d think after all these years she would have learned her lesson and worn sturdier shoes after a rain shower. Step, sink, step, sink. She’d have to leave these in the mudroom, even though that’s what it was for, and Alice would kick up a fuss about having to take one of her good steak knives to whittle off the dried mud. But Nelle had rushed out of the house with no thought to footwear, let alone her sister’s good steak knives: she’d just thought of a taped-up photograph, taken in a graveyard, that seemed to be directing her right back there. She didn’t want to take the picture with her, stick it in the bottom of her purse along with her mints and Kleenex and cigarettes. She didn’t want it contaminating anything else it might touch, but she couldn’t forget it, either.
She’d never forget it.
Nelle’s friend Tom Butts brought her to the cemetery; he was often her traveling companion on such journeys. He’d recently retired from preaching, and now saved his sermons for her and the catfish they competed over catching. Tom served two roles these days, chauffeur and spiritual advisor; Nelle wasn’t sure which one she needed more right now, when she was too shaken to drive. Tom always knew when she wanted conversation and chatter; he also knew when to offer silence and let her wander alone, while he went off to do rubbings of the tombstone epigraphs he hoped to collect in a book someday.
Now, Tom knew something was wrong.
“I know who we’re gonna find here, same old dead people we always do, but who, or what, are you looking for? Your eyes haven’t stopped dartin’ around since we pulled through the gate. You havin’ a fear of ghosts all the sudden?”
No, just the person who seemed to have trained a bead on her head, and shot her—with a camera. That person who might be aiming to shoot her again, now. That person who seemed to know what she was up to before she did. That person who wanted to draw her into the clearing of a cemetery, for . . . whatever.
Maybe somebody who was really pissed off that she’d never written a sequel to The Book.
“Olly, olly, oxen free,” Nelle suddenly yelled out.
“What the heck was that about?” Tom asked.
“Just had to get it out of my system,” she answered.
But of course, no
one answered her back, not even an echo.
She was suddenly as pissed off as the person awaiting a sequel that was never going to come: she was pissed off that she was becoming a scaredy-cat. She never used to be afraid of anything, but lately, even before she got the package, she’d felt her nerve fading up and shrinking, just like her body. She didn’t know if it was old age she was afraid of, mad at, or somebody sending strange packages, but her “Olly, olly oxen” cry was a warning: she was pissed.
And scared.
On this, holy ground.
There were plenty of places for someone to hide: behind the trees that bordered the grounds, in the shadows of the tall mausoleums that belonged to some of Monroeville’s finest families, underneath the Spanish moss that cascaded from the trees like widow’s weeds. She used to put it in her hair like a wig when she was little, until Truman told her it was infested with chiggers and she’d have to have her scalp scrubbed raw with kerosene—and, he added, set on fire—to get rid of them. She trusted the chiggers part; the kerosene part sounded like something Truman had cooked up on the spot. She didn’t drape the hanging, airborne plant in her hair anymore, although all these years later, she still couldn’t help but marvel at it; the South wouldn’t be the South without it.
This cemetery wouldn’t have hiding places without it.
She wouldn’t be scared without it.
“Somethin’ happen?” Tom asked again. “You know you can tell me most anything.”
But she couldn’t tell him this. Whatever this was, or was to become, she knew it was hers alone, and not to be shared.