by Lisa Howorth
She would have to make sure that Charles and the children could see about the animals and themselves while she was in Richmond. All the drills: food, school, walking the dogs on time, dealing with any piles or puddles, dealing with homework. Odd that her mother hadn’t called.
The impulse to whine to someone came over her, but at the same time the last thing she wanted was to talk about it. Her family had been sucked up into a tornado of grief and fear and the unknowable, and when the storm subsided, their bodies fell scattered about their house and they were zombies; the walking dead. The awful thing had never been discussed with her mother or with her brothers, and certainly not with her stepfather, who died not long after. They’d all chosen not to know; newspapers went straight to the trash, news channels were quickly changed. That day, those days, were rarely spoken of again. The implications and the volatility of the matter within the often touchy, so-called blended family—it had just been too big a risk for any of them to take. The price in terms of their necessary relationships with one another was too high. But was it still? Over the years, each of them had hunkered down into their personal pods of regret and sadness. And ignorance, and, she supposed, blame. Although life had changed forever and Stevie’s loss, the terrible way they’d lost him, gripped them all, they tried to put it aside. It was easiest. That much they all seemed to understand.
No one had ever brought up the question of her part—her alleged part—in it. How much her mother and stepfather had known about what the police knew, or guessed, Mary Byrd had never known. She suspected that each of them had different pieces of information, or misinformation, about the murder, as if they all had the same disease but different symptoms, or were in different stages of it, and there was no cure.
Mary Byrd began to feel an old creepiness, a poisonous smog of bad feeling, leaving her in a black, blank space that would easily fill up with all kinds of ugliness. She should talk to someone about the day’s news, to make it seem real, and navigable. Well, it wouldn’t be her mom, or Charles, who did not invite conversations about feelings.
She was afraid of bringing on the old bad dreams again. They didn’t come to her often anymore, but when they did, they were paralyzing and heart-squeezing and sleep-sucking and day-ruining. She’d never said a word about them. Back then, after Stevie died, she’d slept in the basement of the new house they’d moved into to start fresh, to get away from the fearful neighborhood, their haunted house on Cherry Glen Lane with Stevie’s empty room, and the horrified neighbors who avoided them because they had no idea how to act or what to say. Who would? Her basement space in the new house with its own bathroom, which her mother said would give Mary Byrd more privacy from her brothers, only isolated and spooked her. Her mother had really been thinking, surely, of keeping her out of the way of her despondent stepfather, his crazy binge drinking, his rage and resentment. So for a long time Mary Byrd, the big sister, slept with her light on, a nine iron by her bed and a knitting needle and a barbecue skewer easily reachable, sticking slightly out between the box springs and mattress. She had been afraid of everything. Tuttle. Creepy detectives. Her stepfather and her mother. Herself. Her memories were like her nightmares, but she’d always been able to slam the door on them. Now that door swung wide, wide, wide as hell open.
Rain had been falling down that evening, seemingly at the same rate and density as the cherry blossoms. The spent petals—it was early May—had fluttered down with the sparkly drops and been illuminated by the streetlight so that Mary Byrd, not wearing her glasses, had imagined that the dark woods across the street were a deep blue, almost black prom gown studded with luminescent pale pink pearls and rhinestones. From time to time her boyfriend’s head had obscured the view. They were making out, necking, it used to be called, struggling with heavy petting, reclined in the backseat of his little blue Chevy convertible, steaming up the back windows. They’d had to put up the top quickly because of the rain, which had surprised them; it had been such a gloriously bright Sunday, and they’d taken a drive once the Rhineharts’ afternoon dinner was over. It was Mother’s Day, but she’d been allowed to go riding with the boyfriend because he no longer had a mother, and maybe Mother’s Day was not such a good day for him. Eliot Nelson. What had ever happened to him? He’d been a senior, and she’d never seen him again after that spring. Quiet and handsome-ish, and not as interested in her as she was in him. She’d pretty much initiated the make-out session; he’d seemed aloof … Maybe because she was too young for him?
She’d been late; she should have been home, but it had been hard for her to quit, and the night had been so balmy and beautiful, even, or especially, with the rain. They’d each had a couple warm beers. She was fifteen and only a few weeks earlier on her birthday she had finally been allowed to “go in cars with boys,” and it was the most exciting, fun thing in the world.
What she hadn’t known, there in the backseat with her boyfriend, was that her family had been out looking for Stevie for hours. And what none of them knew, and wouldn’t for another day, was that in the dark velvety woods, not a hundred yards away from Eliot’s convertible, Stevie lay dead.
Two
Mary Byrd shuddered and drifted deeper into the yard, glad to kick clods of clay that Teever had left around after transplanting some red Midnight Flare azaleas that clashed with the Coral Bells. She picked up fallen sticks and it felt good to snap them into kindling size, and to viciously stomp some pooched-up mole tunnels. Any animal with fur, generally, she liked except for voles, or moles, or whatever they were, the ones with those creepy hands. They must have been eating her Naked Lady bulbs, because she’d noticed them dwindling; the previous July there hadn’t been the usual cheerful pink crowd.
She thought about the only two people, really, she could or would call. Actually only one—Lucy was touring with her band somewhere. Austin? Chicago? It would be hard to reach her even if she knew; they were on totally different schedules. It was too bad she’d never made any close friendships with other housewifey women. Most women scared her. Their neat, wholesome lives. Their judgment. She didn’t really trust herself, so why would she trust other women?
But there was Mann, as always. Mary Byrd supposed that what Mann got out of their friendship was mostly entertainment. There was enough dysfunction and drama and artiness in the Thornton orbit to keep him endlessly amused. And he cared about Charles and Eliza and William and the animals as well: his old prep-school friend, the children he’d never have, and the pets he could enjoy but never have to fool with. Mann was practically family, devoted to them all. But he was just a tiny bit more devoted to Mary Byrd, she thought, no doubt because she needed him more. Lucy was a better ear for complaints about Charles because she wasn’t close to him. Not that there was ever much to complain about. So as usual, she’d call Mann. Almost always upbeat, with a lot of free time, he tolerated her whining or rants, he sometimes had useful things to say, and when he felt she’d indulged herself enough and she was boring him, he’d stop her. Mann was the perfect surrogate husband when you left out sex and reproduction. He was also so precious and tiny—collectible—with his beautiful coppery hair, violet eyes, and perfect little clothes that he often let her wear. What would she do without him?
Hubard Mann Valentine Jr. was from Dundee, a decrepit, crumbly river port town—“Home of the World’s Largest Bream”—where his Virginia forbears, like so many Mississippians, had migrated after losing the considerable fortune they had made importing liquor and wine into Richmond before the war. It wasn’t that after the war there was no longer a need for booze; in fact, there was an insatiable need—the desperate need of big-time losers. But the Valentine home had been burned with much of Richmond by General Goddamn Weitzel, and so had their James River dock and boats, and the Richmond and Danville railroad had been torn up, and the Yankees had taken their horses, wagons, and mules, and the slaves had bolted, and anyway nobody had had any money anymore to buy good liquor. Bootleggers, who never went to war, took over wit
h their jinky distilling contraptions made of cottonseed oil drums and hog intestines (the ones that weren’t eaten), producing unguinous, toxic swills that they sold in used bottles that they painted so that customers couldn’t see the sick color or the varmint hairs and bug pieces that might float within. Deciding on a fresh start, the Valentines descended to Mississippi and bought into the newly rebuilt Mobile and Ohio Railroad as minor shareholders. The family scraped along in considerably reduced circumstances for a couple generations until Mann’s daddy met his mother, Carusa, a hard McComb girl with ambition. She took the genteelly impoverished and feckless Mr. H. M. Valentine Sr., who had been reading for the law at the university for thirteen years and making and drinking his own small-batch shine, and steered him away from alcohol and law. Thanks to Carusa Valentine, the reconstruction of southern railroads, the advent of trucks, and the South’s addiction to fried chicken, the family built another fortune.
Mann had grown up in the chicken plant, cleaning up, hosing down, packing, wearing waders and slogging through offal, feathers, cigarette butts, tobacco cuds, and blood. Carusa insisted that he learn the business from the bottom up, and she meant this very literally. Every time in his adult life that something unhappy occurred, Mann rated it against the summers he had had to work the conveyor belt, seizing slippery, naked dead birds by their drumsticks, spreading them, and sniffing their private cavities for freshness. He had kept a bucket by his feet for when he puked on the bad ones, and was happy when he was promoted to the chick pens, where he became the only non-Vietnamese at the plant who could sex a three-day-old chick. After prep school at Woodberry Forest, where he and Charles were roommates, Mann was sent off to business school at Emory, where he very belatedly realized his sexual preference amongst the gaggles of fluffy blond Hitler-youth, Jesus-adoring boys. Some were and some weren’t. If he could only sex them or sniff them out, like his chickens. He learned soon enough. But, confused about the nature versus nurture controversy surrounding homosexuality, and worried about all the hormone-dosed poultry he’d come in contact with, Mann had wondered if his chicken experiences had marked him. To Mary Byrd he described his early hetero encounters in terms of chicken; a date situation he’d gotten into once had been “exactly like putting my hand in a bucket of hot, throbbing, just-harvested chicken livers.” Although Mary Byrd assured him that it wasn’t a choice—“You just hatched out of your own queer little egg just the way you are”—Mann never felt completely convinced that the chicken work hadn’t turned him gay.
After college, he was invited back to Dundee and into the office where he spent long, nutty days on the phone dispatching trucks and fussing with buyers in Russia or Mexico or dealing with shitweasels like Elvers Hartay. A nasty bantam of a man who called himself a preacher, Hartay also ran a dirty little farm where he raised roosters that he somehow, Mann was convinced, stole from the vast chick pens at Valentine Chickens. Mann also suspected Hartay of doping rooster chicks with huge amounts of steroids, and then, when they grew scarily gigantic, selling the roosters, big and mean as turkey vultures, back to Mann as “good breeding stock.” What Hartay’s Cocks LLC was really doing was providing most of the champion fighting birds at work in the Deep South. Even at the end of the twentieth century, a chicken thief was still a chicken thief and one of the lowliest of assholes. Mann was determined to bust Hartay someday, somehow, preferably in his own church pulpit, where Hartay railed every Sunday morning and Wednesday night against cold beer and in less public places about lower-echelon nigras and hummasekshuls.
At any rate, now Valentine Chickens was enormous, operating internationally, and Mann was one of the most successful chicken brokers in the country. A revendeur de poulet, as he snarkily referred to himself. He actually even loved some aspects of the job. He employed his highly evolved decorating skills to create gorgeous, eye-catching graphics for his trucks, packaging, and advertising. He chose two colors: an old red and a beautiful meadowy green—more Martha Stewart than John Deere—stolen from the shutters of the Soniat House, his favorite place to stay in New Orleans. The Valentine logo he designed himself, inspired by an old paper valentine from the 1940s and a cake shop in New York: a cozy-looking farmhouse and pasture done in the green, framed by clover and hearts and a kitcheny checked border in the soft red. Across the top of the logo, in Hollywood newsreel lettering, was valentine chickens and beneath that the slogan from us to you with love. Used on the chicken packages, the green of the logo brought out the fresh pinkness of chicken meat, and made the chicken of rival companies seem to be a sickly yellow. But the trucks were Mann’s magnum opus. The billboard-size flanks of the trucks were done entirely in the lovely green, and the logo appeared in cream and the pinky red that looked vintage even when freshly painted, the whole thing evoking wholesomeness, World War Two, Valentine’s Day, and Christmas as the semis rocketed down the highways with their raw, frozen loads of legs, wings, tenders, breasts, necks, livers, hearts, gizzards, and random pieces-parts for America’s tables and dog bowls.
In spite of all his money, Mann wasn’t pretentious, or snobby. How could you be uppity about being a chicken man? He didn’t give a rat’s ass, actually; chicken money spent just as well as any other kind. Chickens afforded him a tiny jewel of an apartment, his pleasure dome in the Marais and a charmed life with the occasional lover, clothes from Barneys and Bergdorf’s, good restaurants, and travel. With the exception of a few jerks like Elvers Hartay, Mann was pretty much accepted, in fact, well respected in their town, where he’d chosen to live because he loved college sports, and in Dundee, where he commuted to his office when he had to.
In spite of the rest of the world’s perception, small southern towns knew how to tolerate difference. There was always an old queer or lesbian couple, or a Boo Radley in town. You just had to not be from away, and stay within the unspoken boundaries, and you would have grown up knowing what those were. There was a place—a role—for everyone, and there actually had to be a few marginal types to provide the entertainment that kept everyone going and feeling that they were what normal was. Your chance of social success was greater if you were somebody’s smelly, addled uncle or transvestite cousin than if you were a stranger from California or Chicago trying to accrete in.
Mary Byrd loved Mann and she knew that’s who she’d call. Back in the house, she listened for Evagreen, who she thought was upstairs. She was so stealthy, you never knew. Picking up the phone in the study, she yanked it and its cord into the small booze closet and closed the door. She didn’t need J. Edgar Evagreen listening in. She dialed Mann’s number, which always gave her a soupçon of happiness: 328-2449, or as Mann enjoyed telling select people, EAT-CHIX. His head was charmingly miswired, and he got things backward or confused: “chopsticks” might come out “foresticks,” the Longshot Bar might be “The Shothole,” or he might describe a color as being “egg-robin blue”—but he was very smart in ways that Charles and Mary Byrd appreciated.
Mann answered the phone and Mary Byrd said what she always said when things, for one reason or another, weren’t going well: “Come get me.”
“What now?” he asked.
“God,” she sighed. “The worst. Well, of course not the worst, but not good.”
“Tell me,” he encouraged.
“You know that stuff that happened with my stepbrother? When he died?”
“Of course.”
“And you know they never got the guy who did it? A guy right down the street, but they could never prove it, and oh, god, I don’t know, it just never got solved. We … we didn’t keep up with it. We just wanted it to go away.” Mary Byrd could hear Mann fiddle with his stereo, turning down his music. Sade. It bugged her when he did certain trademark gay things—profiling himself. “But now some reporter in Richmond has apparently been going back through files, cold cases, and digging around for stuff to write about. She’s going to do an article or book or something.”
Mann exhaled loudly. “How do you know all this?” he asked.
/> “Because she—the reporter—called me. I guess she turned something up, and the police don’t want to look stupid, or have her fucking up the case. A detective called me, too, and now they want to talk to my whole family. On Monday.” Her voice broke a little on family.
“Aren’t you glad that they might finally solve things? And it will all be over?”
“No!” she said, and quickly added, “I mean of course I am. I, we, are sort of over it, as much as we can be, you know? I mean, it was thirty years ago. I don’t want to have to do all that again.”
Mann asked, “So maybe they’ve got new evidence. DNA. Or a new suspect.”
“I don’t know. The detective wouldn’t say, and I don’t know what the reporter knows. I wouldn’t talk to her.”
“Just think: whoever it was could still be walking around committing more … crimes, and messing up more lives. It’s got to be a good thing that they’re bringing the case back up.”
She sniffed hard to steady her voice. “Of course I get that. I just can’t tell you how much it will suck to go there again. And if it’s true—did I ever tell you this?—one of the theories,” she said the word with sarcasm, “one of the stupid ideas the police had was that this guy who they thought killed Stevie did it because of some twisted fixation he had on me. That I led him on. What if that’s true?”