Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You

by Laurie Lynn Drummond

  After a minute I got up and checked on Vince, who seemed to have dozed off, a faint snore coming from low in his throat, his fingers twitching. I told Doris Whitehead I was going to smoke a cigarette, but she just stared at the pan, waiting for the water to boil.

  I walked down to the dock and squatted on my heels, pulled the smoke deep into my lungs. Exhaustion swept in like one of those fierce, sudden Louisiana afternoon thunderstorms, and I tried to remember when I’d slept last, really slept. Sunday night. Seven solid hours with Ricky’s arm wrapped over my side, one hand barely cupping my breast before the alarm went off at 5:15 A.M. and I got up, headed to work, found Jeannette’s body.

  Fact: What we had done was wrong. Panic of the moment, true; protecting our own, true. But we should have stayed, accepted the consequences: Gwen losing her job, the rest of us suspended probably. If it had been just me, I’d take him back, admit to all of it. But I couldn’t make that decision for the others; I couldn’t make that decision for Gwen. All I could do was hold firm to what I knew for sure: no more killing. The question was, could I live with letting him go?

  The muscles in my thighs started to ache. I laid my gun on the dock and stretched out, pulled my T-shirt out of my jeans, enjoying the taste of air on my skin. My fingers trailed across my belly, pulled up the slight pooch of flesh. I ran two fingers up under my last rib, following that upside-down smile to the middle point, then walked them up my sternum. I heard my mother’s voice again: The itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout.…I pulled my hand out and let my fingers keep walking up alongside my heart to the dip where my neck began, pressing against my larynx, along the curve of my jaw, my other hand coming up to walk in the opposite direction, both hands moving now, fingers walking, walking, along the side of my ears, down into the hollow of my eyes, following the ridge of bone, pressing hard, the tips of my fingers feeling the spongy-firm orbs resting deep in their sockets, back up and above my eyes, walking across my eyebrows, down along my nose, feeling the contours of my skull, imagining the flesh eaten away, here under all this flesh the steady bone, pulling down hard against the skin, fingers pressing deep in a slow slide, out across my cheeks, smoothing it all away.

  When I went back in, Vince was still sleeping and Doris Whitehead seemed to have relaxed out of her anger. She sat staring at her coffee cup, told me there was more if I wanted it. When I said I needed to pee and asked if there was an outhouse somewhere round back, she chuckled and pointed to a door off to my left that I’d barely registered.

  I opened the door, flipped on the light, and stood there, frozen in midbreath. It was a small room, painted robin egg’s blue, a big window of glass blocks taking up one wall without curtains or blinds. On the other wall, the wall facing me, hung a black-and-white photograph of a naked woman, her back to the camera, standing in a field, high grass brushing her calves. Her dark hair was pulled back up off her neck, just a few loose strands caressing her shoulder blades.

  I heard Doris Whitehead’s footsteps and then her voice just behind me. “Sumpthin else, ain’t it. That’s Jeannette’s.”

  I looked back at her quickly. “Her picture?”

  “Her picture, she took it. Her room, she painted it. Her body. That’s Jeannette.” She smiled at me gently and patted me on the back. “Go on. Use it, and then I’ll tell you.”

  I closed the door slowly and stayed in there a long time, staring at the photograph, following the curves of her body, those muscular calves, the vulnerability of her neck, the narrow shoulders. I ached to see all of her, the living, breathing Jeannette: that funny mole swimming between her eyebrows, the angle of her cheeks, the texture of her pores, her collarbone, breasts, the V between her legs, the shape of her knees. But all I could do was imagine, remembering the picture of her on the dresser, her body on the floor. Was her expression shy, giddy, solemn, interior, mischievous? What had she been thinking right at that moment? I reached out a finger, touched the glass lightly, right at the nape of her neck. And for a second, just a second, I felt her there in that room with me, soft breath on my own neck, and I flinched, shut off the light, and left.

  Doris Whitehead had a bottle of whiskey sitting by her feet. She offered me some, but I shook my head no, tilting my head toward the bedroom. Not when I’m on duty, I almost said, and winced at the absurdity.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  Jeannette dreamed of being a photographer, Doris Whitehead told me, but she flunked out of LSU after a year, unable to pass the basic classes. Mostly she was self-taught. She worked at a refinery to pay the bills. When she met Vince—at a bar in Port Allen, Doris Whitehead said with distaste—and fell in love, he promised her she’d be able to try school again. But that never materialized, Vince always having one reason or another why it couldn’t work just yet. Still, she persisted, taking rolls of film down to Southern Camera off Government Street where one of the salesmen befriended her and got them professionally developed on the cheap.

  “Vince didn’t like that,” Doris Whitehead said.

  “The salesman?”

  “Everything. He was a controlling sumabitch.”

  I glanced toward the bedroom, Vince’s faint snore just discernable over the wisp of the ceiling fan overhead. I wondered what his dreams were, so twisted up and blocked that he couldn’t let Jeannette pursue her own. What tiny terrors chased a man so hard that he’d torture the woman he claimed to love?

  “She started coming out here with me about a year ago,” Doris Whitehead continued. “She loved the solitude like me, liked takin’ pictures of the water, sunrises, trees. Simple stuff. She kept tellin’ me we could really fix this place up, wanted to try with one room, so ’bout three months ago, I told her go ahead. Do the bathroom. Figured if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have to look at it all that often.”

  “And did you?”

  “Like it?” Deep lines appeared around her mouth and eyes. “I loved it,” she whispered. “She always had a way of makin’ me see things in a new way. See the beauty in things, in people. That was Jeannette.” Her eyes went distant. “I loved her like she was my own daughter.” She laughed gruffly. “Not that she didn’t have her faults. She could be stubborn. Bad with money, petty sometimes. Often,” Doris Whitehead stopped, searching for words, “dense. She was simpleminded, not real smart, you know, far too trustin’, but she could see, my God could she see, things you and I wouldn’t, in everything and everyone.”

  “Except for Vince,” I pointed out.

  She seemed to fold into herself then, deflate. “Yup. Him she was blind to. Never could figure that out.”

  We sat there quietly for a while. It was warm, and, despite all the coffee, my eyelids kept drooping. Once I was so close to the edge of sleep that I jolted upright, reaching for my gun. I looked at my watch: 3:23.

  “Go on, get a few winks. I’m wide awake. I’ll watch him,” Doris Whitehead said.

  “Not if you keep drinking that whiskey.”

  She smiled, got up and tucked the bottle in a cabinet, came back and put the shotgun across her knees.

  I scooched my chair around closer to the bedroom. “I’m just going to rest my eyes,” I said, and closed them to one last view of Vince’s body, listening to her steady breath, Vince’s jagged snoring, the ceiling fan, and underneath all that, the rustle of trees and occasional splash of water. Can I let him go? The thought swirled around like a twig caught in an eddy, twitching this way and that.

  Despite my best intentions, I drifted off to sleep.

  I dreamed the usual dream, the recurring one.

  A gun, pointing at me. I never see the person holding the gun. Just the hand and the gun. Terror so raw I can taste it, my limbs heavy and dense, my throat constricting, breathing quick and shallow. Pulling my own gun up slowly, too slowly, out of my holster, like my arm is concrete, so very slowly the gun comes up. My index finger thick on the trigger, absent of bone and muscle; I can’t pull the trigger, and then, with great effort, I do, the hammer flying forward, but
my gun dry-fires, no bullet comes out, and the other gun, the one pointed at me, fires. Slow motion the bullet comes toward me, mind screaming at the body to move, but the body doesn’t respond. The bullet enters my chest, hard heavy whoosh of pain, air gone from my lungs; I’m thrown backward with the impact. A cold white light grows from that place, rippling through the pond of my body, my limbs going cold, dissolving, and then it’s dim, I’m floating in a milky grayness.

  Usually the dream ends there, and I wake, disoriented, the residual taste of death and terror in my mouth. But this time I keep bobbing along in the sea of gray, a sense of aching loss and regret but a kind of acceptance too, when the scene shifts abruptly and I’m in a precinct, one I’ve never seen before, but there are the usual battered desks and chairs, the institutional green on the walls, filing cabinets with cockeyed drawers, the floor pitted and gritty, everything not quite clean, not quite new, an undertone of sweat and cigarettes and stale coffee, a hint of mildew, cops moving about and talking, noise like a distant beehive.

  I’m standing in front of a one-way mirror, facing a lineup room. There are people behind me, but I can’t see them.

  Six females walk into the lineup room, right to left. They are a mixture of young and old, tall and short, black and white, children and adults. I’m confused; you don’t mix age and race and height like that, not for a lineup. They turn and face me. I gasp. A black woman is missing half her face; a young girl’s face is bloated blue and purple; an elderly woman has empty eye sockets and a torn ear; a teenager’s arms and legs have deep gashes and burns.

  “They’re dead,” I say. “These women are all dead.”

  “Yes,” a voice says behind me, one I don’t recognize. I try to turn my head to see him, but can’t. “Which one?” he says.

  “Which one what?”

  “Which one did it?”

  “None of them did anything!” My voice is shrill with indignation.

  “Next,” the voice yells, and the females turn, shuffle out the door on the left. Six more females enter from the right. They turn and face me. Bile chokes my throat. I want to run screaming from the room. But my feet won’t move. My body won’t respond.

  “Which one?” the voice says again.

  Letticia Baldin is dressed in pink shorts and a blue T-shirt; she’s chewing gum and having a hard time standing still, all wiggly energy and curiosity. The skeleton woman, Val, cuts her eyes up at the ceiling, a smile dancing around her mouth; her hands tap lightly against her thighs. Jeannette. Jeannette in her hiking boots, the Guatemalan shirt and khaki shorts, her hair pulled high on top of her head, looking straight at me, calm and steady, that mole between her eyebrows catching the light. Gwen looks pissed. Doris Whitehead looks grim. And me, this mirror image of me in the other room is red-eyed, my hair in disarray, my fists clenched tightly. I am looking at myself about to burst out of my skin.

  My stomach rearranges itself into a throbbing braided knot. “You’ve mixed the dead with the living,” I whisper.

  “What’s the difference?” says the voice.

  And then my body does respond. I turn, launch myself at the voice, rabid with fury, but midleap I am hurtled toward consciousness. I fight it, fight to stay there, to understand, to finally understand.

  But it’s too late.

  I opened my eyes, disoriented, dry-mouthed, my heart thudding hard in my ears, my neck sore. Weak light filtered through the kitchen window. Early dawn. Doris Whitehead’s chair was empty. I squinted toward the bedroom, then stumbled forward, gun in hand, to the bedroom doorway, saw the rope and one set of cuffs lying there on the bed, but the other set of cuffs and the gag and Vince gone. I moved quicker, dread coming up from my stomach along with disbelief that I hadn’t heard them leave, to the front door, threw it open, and a great whoosh of relief came out of my lungs.

  I could just see them through the trees and overgrowth out on the dock, Vince facing the water, his pants down around his legs, Doris Whitehead pointing her shotgun at his feet. He just needed to piss again. I sagged against the door frame, giggled weakly. Poor Vince, having that woman pull his pants down, eye his privates. I could only imagine what she’d said to him, the look she’d given him.

  Vince turned around, and I saw his hands move, out in front of him, and Doris Whitehead said something. I frowned, looked down, and saw the cuffs glinting on the dock beside Marge’s red bandanna, looked back up quickly as Doris Whitehead’s shotgun came level to his chest, and I knew.

  I pushed off running, hard, my legs stretching long, the fierce “NO!” I wailed, deep and hollow, drowned out by the KA-BOOM of the shotgun. Still I kept running, branches slapping at my face, tearing at my clothes, kept screaming “NO!” as I cleared the trees, thinking even as I ran that somehow I could stop this—the blotched red hole appearing in Vince’s chest, his legs buckling, his slow tumble back into the water, Doris Whitehead turning to look at me, a grim, knowing stare. Running faster, my shoes hitting the deck, each thud of my foot traveling up my legs, the sick realization that this was what she’d always intended if she had her chance. And I gave it to her. She knew I couldn’t, wouldn’t, do anything once it was done.

  I stopped at the edge of the dock and looked down into the thrashing palette of water—white, green, pink, brown, red—Doris Whitehead’s quiet, satisfied voice coming from a great distance through the roaring in my ears, “Gators’ll get him. Won’t be anything left for us to worry about.”

  I looked up, away from the wet, choked screams below me, tears clouding my eyes. Fingers of light stretched out and danced on the water as the sun crested the trees. A figure appeared, hovering just at the water’s edge on the far bank. It was Jeannette. She was bathed in light, her face serene. And in that instant before she vanished, she looked right at me, her eyes shining, but whether from sorrow or joy, pity or compassion, I can never say.

  WHERE I COME FROM

  When I left, I drove for days: east until the taste of salt was heavy on my skin, north up the coast avoiding large cities, then a hard left through the twisted hills of West Virginia, following the dash compass west/northwest. When I slept, which wasn’t often or for long, I parked in campgrounds or church parking lots; never at rest stops. Sometimes I drove all night and well into the morning and then found a cheap, local motel for a shower and a real bed until nightfall came again. I wore the same clothes for days, rarely turned on the radio, ate raw vegetables and fruit and crackers, drank gallons of water and coffee. When I hit the far shoulders of Idaho, I circled back south, down through the blistered red of Utah into New Mexico.

  I drove aimlessly for hours, well below the speed limit, following two-laners with little traffic, passing through dusty, anonymous towns separated by long, uninhabited stretches, until whatever had propelled me this far left me wrung dry inside, unable to muster the energy to continue.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for until I saw it: a small, hand-lettered rental sign resting against a POPULATION 986 welcome marker. The town was a clump of adobe and stone—tired buildings squatting close to the ground on sagging foundations—with a small plaza and two traffic lights.

  I found the house on a pitted, faded street on the far outskirts of town. It was a perfect square set back from the road, with weathered wood once painted some shade of gray and an old metal roof the color of rotten apples. Twisted, stunted trees reached toward the wide front porch, half hiding the sun.

  My flesh seemed absent of bone or muscle as I walked up to the front door and found it unlocked. Inside, one large, worn-looking room was broken only by a half-wall between the kitchen and another large area with a closet of a bathroom and a door that led out back. Behind the house, open rocky spaces crept up small, uneven hills, and high grasses—bleached brown and burnt yellow—rippled in the hesitant, late-afternoon breeze; a large stand of what looked like cottonwood trees hunkered in the distance. I stood there a long time, both dazed and comforted by the harsh bleakness, by the near absence of green. It seemed as good
a place as any.

  The FOR RENT sign directed me across the street and two houses down. An elderly Mexican woman opened the door. I’d never seen so many wrinkles or eyes so black. Two huge braids, more silver than black, wrapped her head twice around. Her chin looked like a swollen knuckle; her ears were small and as translucent as a newborn’s. She stared at me a long, painful moment after I asked about the possibility of a month-to-month lease. At first I thought she didn’t understand English, but then she smiled, nodding, revealing three missing front teeth, two on the bottom and one on the top.

  “No, no,” she said in a thick accent. “Docientos por un mes. Two hundred, one month. Si? Stay long you want.”

  I paid three months rent in advance. She shook her head as she took the money, her whole manner signaling displeasure.

  “Quieres mucho,” she said. “In you, el miedo tiene hambre,” and walked barefoot beside me back to the rent house, leaning into me and gripping my arm with surprising strength. My knowledge of Spanish was dismal; I’d studied French long ago in high school and picked up the Cajun patois. But I knew that mucho meant much. The rest of what she’d said was a mystery. Much what, I wondered. I wanted nothing but a shower and sleep.

  “El aire ’tá bueno. Air good,” she kept repeating. “Los arboles recuerdan las memorias. Trees…” she brought her cupped hands together, “remember. Si?”