You’d need to go back, defeated, and see a warped scratched reflection of yourself in that belt buckle given to him by my mom in an earlier life, from back before she was a movie star. To really appreciate that long afternoon you’d need to see the dried flowers wicking up his blood. No longer faded, now flushed. Those daisies and carnations, reviving decades after they’d been picked, you’d watch them come back to life, blooming again in various shades of red and pink. Tiny vampires.
Even if my nana only boiled water in a pan, she’d scrub the pan before putting it away in the cupboard. That’s my Nana Minnie in a word: fragile. I couldn’t tell her the truth about anything.
Imagine being an expert witness to something you could never, ever tell anyone about. Especially not anyone you loved. I was going to hell. It’s why I know I’m evil. That’s the secret I’ve kept hidden from God.
DECEMBER 21, 9:20 A.M. CST
The Dog Doo-doo Defense
Posted by [email protected]
Gentle Tweeter,
Eventually, the state patrol officers called what happened a hate crime. I wanted to correct them and politely explain that my grandpa Ben’s death was actually more of a hate accident. Maybe a hate misadventure. But I didn’t dare. Before anybody called the death anything, nobody called at all. My Nana Minnie had to issue the opening volley of tentative telephone inquiries.
The first night my Papadaddy Ben was dead, my nana stayed awake, waiting for his rusted pickup truck to pull into the driveway. I pretended to go to bed but my heart stayed alert, listening to her make restless sounds in the parlor. My thinking stomach ached with the hunger of not knowing my next action. I knew I could fix all her worries but that would involve telling her a truth that would make her feel even worse. Lying in that weird upstate bed without even security cameras watching me, I pictured her pantry and root cellars, where wooden shelves were lined with bottles of pickles that had lived and died before I was ever born. Their labels, like tombstones for stillborn babies with one year telling the whole story. Cucumbers floated in brine, their skin rubbery and see-through, like a homemade circus sideshow. Like biology, these pickles were so translucent you could see the dead seeds of future generations embedded within them. I imagined all the rows of preserved bottles so that I wouldn’t fall asleep and relive my awful day. I had only to close my eyes to see my papadaddy dragging his bloody pantsless self across the bedroom floor, ranting and shouting that I was evil and damned forever.
This same bed had been my mom’s about a hundred years earlier, only she’d been stuck in it for her whole childhood. Her threadbare, Chinese-slave-labor-made stuffed teddy bears sat around my pillow, smelling like her. Not merely like her Chanel No. 5, but like her real skin, how she smelled when she wasn’t slaving away as a big-time movie star. My fingers half expected to encounter loose strands of her farm-girl hair.
Tomorrow I’d have to pretend to be devastated. If my mother could be a famous actor, I could at least fake sleeping. Later on, I’d fake shocked bereavement. Every day I already had to pretend that I didn’t feel hurt and abandoned, but for tonight, pretending to be asleep seemed like good practice.
In bed, I wondered whether my papadaddy’s dead outline was marked in chalk or masking tape next to the drain where all his blood had trickled away. I pictured a scene like in a movie starring my mom as a plucky private detective hot on the trail of a ruthless serial killer. This imaginary version made me the serial killer, but even being some Jeffrey Dahmer tasted better than being some idiot kid who’d mistakenly bled her grandpa to death by carelessly slicing his amorous wiener against daggers of sharp metal. My mind wandering, too tired to sleep, I wondered whether I could kill again. I worried that I might develop a taste for murder. By killing a larger variety of victims, possibly I could establish a pattern and look less like a hapless amateur at my eventual prosecution.
The alternative was to swear to tell the truth and look totally ridiculous at my trial for one klutzy half-baked manslaughter. Any little Miss Hottie Hot Pants could tell an erect penis from a regular dried-out dog poop. I imagined my Swiss classmates following my trial live by satellite. Even getting the electric chair would be better than going back to boarding school with everybody giggling behind my back. In Locarno, girls would chase me down hallways, forever menacing me with their fecal-looking candy bars.
Nobody would believe my side of the story. My explanation would be endlessly joked about as the “Dog Doo-doo Defense.”
Every direction I could see to go was just a different nightmare.
My nana’s voice came down the hall, around a couple corners, faint from where it started in the parlor. First came a tickling sound: a fast dash followed by a quiet rattling of tiny clicks. This I recognized as a finger dialing their old rotary telephone. Yes, my grandparents had a telephone, but just barely. It was a phone like the Pilgrims might use to check their voice mails from Plymouth Rock, connected to the wall by a cord you couldn’t unplug. The rattling dial sound went on for seven long times, and my nana’s voice said, “Admitting, please.” I imagined her toying with the curly cord that held the receiver to the ringer part, trapped on the parlor sofa by the short length of that cord. Her voice said, “I’m sorry to bother you …” and it was light, singsong, the tone you might use to ask a stranger on a street corner for the correct time. She said, “My husband ain’t come home yet, and I wondered if there’d been any accidents reported?”
She waited. We both waited. If I shut my eyes I saw my fingerprints dotted on a dirty toilet behind stretched-tight Day-Glo crime-scene tape. In my fantasy, state patrol detectives in wide-brimmed Canadian Mountie–style hats held walkie-talkies alongside their lantern jaws and barked all-points bulletins. Stripes ran down the outside legs of their uniform pants, leading to polished shoes. I envisioned a forensics expert wearing a white lab coat as he lifted a thumbprint using a piece of clear tape; holding the print between his face and the upstate moon, he studied the whorls, saying, “Our suspect is an eleven-year-old girl, four-foot-six, pudgy, a little dumpy, a real fatty-fatty-two-by-four, with hair that never does what she wants it to.…” He’d nod sagely, reading the finer details. “She’s never even kissed a boy, and no one likes her.”
At that, a police artist standing nearby and sketching wildly on a large pad would say, “Based on the evidence I think I have your killer.” The artist would whip his pad around, and drawn on the white paper would be a portrait of me, my eyeglasses restored to my nose, my freckles, my giant, shiny forehead. Even my dreaded full name would be written across the bottom: Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer.
From down the hallway my nana’s voice said, “No, thank you.” She said, “I’ll hold the line.”
Covering my tracks hadn’t occurred to me. It wasn’t until lying there that I thought about the Beagle book and my stained shirt. My murder weapon. Moonlight stretched a white rectangle into my bedroom, the shape of it flaring from my windowsill to almost fill the far wall. Under the moon’s scrutiny I scrambled from the quilts and covers and donned my second-best pair of eyeglasses. I knelt beside the bed and wedged an arm between the mattress and box spring, feeling until my fingers dug out the book wrapped by the incriminating chambray shirt. Even in just moonlight you could see the stains had set in the fabric. They made larger and smaller blob shapes across the front of the shirt, trailing but close to one another, like a cloth map of the Galápagos Islands. In the middle of the Beagle book, around Tierra del Fuego, the pages were stuck together. With my fingernails I picked at their edges. Like a forensic investigator lifting a fingerprint, I pinched each of the two center pages and slowly peeled them apart. The paper felt heavy, gummy, and the pages came apart with a sound like a Korean aesthetician waxing my mom’s legs, ripping out all her hairs by the roots. The sound of incredible pain.
From down the hallway my nana’s voice told the telephone, “I see.” She said, “Yes’m.”
My hands spread the book’s
pages like you’d part curtains, and spattered there was a psychology test in dark splotches. Made more or less symmetrical by the book’s being shut, the dark parts looked like a butterfly … or a vampire bat. While my eyes were trying to decide, the rest of me saw the white shape down the middle of the book where the two pages met. There, still white and printed with Mr. Darwin’s thoughts, a longish narrow shape pointed straight at me. Under the moonlight the blotchy black parts you could tell would be red in other light. Tomorrow they’d be blood. The ghost shape in the middle, the void where nothing was, that was an outline.
Still kneeling there beside my bed, I heard a breeze that was really my nana gasping, loud. With the air of that same inhale she told the telephone, “Thank you.” She said, “Give me twenty minutes to get there.”
The shape at the heart of my book was my papadaddy’s dead wiener. As heavy footsteps approached down the hallway, I slammed the book shut. In less than two footsteps I buried my stained shirt deep in the dirty-clothes hamper. In another two approaching footsteps I stashed the book under my pillow and leaped back into bed among the Mom-smelling teddy bears. By the last footstep my eyes were closed and I was faking a deep, peaceful slumber when the truth came knocking at my door.
DECEMBER 21, 9:25 A.M. CST
Grand-patricide
Posted by [email protected]
Gentle Tweeter,
That first night my Papadaddy Ben went missing, my nana had to drive us to the hospital to find out something the police refused to reveal over the phone. Something that I already knew. In her car she lit each new cigarette off the last. She dropped the butt of the smoked cigarette out her window, a tiny meteor flaring orange sparks into the dark. The way a falling star foretells a death. Mostly, back then, it felt weird for me to ride in a front seat next to where a chauffeur should go. Thusly, we followed our headlights into the grim future.
I wanted to impress upon Nana the social stigma of secondhand smoke and littering, but decided to swallow my gripe. This chore-haggard woman was about to become a widow. No doubt the melodramatic reveal would take place in front of a crowd of strangers in the autopsy suite of some medical examiner. Probably she would collapse into a dead faint still wearing her calico apron getup paired with a faded gingham housedress, a smoldering butt pinched between her careworn lips.
Farm fields lined either side of the highway, and our headlights skimmed over an occasional soiled upstate cow garbed in distressed, low-quality leather.
For our midnight foray I chose to wear flannel pajamas, pink flannel, under my junior-size, stroller-length chinchilla coat. The feeling was glamorous, like posing as a Miss Hooky von Hooker, with my bare feet in bedroom slippers made of pink fuzz sewn to look like floppy-eared bunnies with black button eyes. My nana hadn’t given my snazzy ensemble a second glance. Her attention had a ten-mile head start and was waiting impatiently at the emergency room for the rest of her to catch up.
Our route skirted one side of the infamous freeway traffic isle, and as we passed I saw police cars nosed up close to the cinder-block bathrooms, all their spotlights aligned to bathe the squat, ugly building like a stage. The uniformed officers who stood in that glare looked like actors drinking coffee out of paper cups and underplaying the drama of their scene. Papadaddy’s pickup truck with its cracked windshield and patched taillight still sat in the parking lot, but now it was roped off with sawhorses and twisting swags of police tape. People stood outside those barricades and stared at the truck like it was the Mona Lisa.
As we drove past I pretended not to look. My feet didn’t reach the car’s floor. I bounced my pink bunny slippers and tried to resolve the toilet wiener flasher with the Papadaddy who’d taught me how to paint a birdhouse yellow. My memory tried to keep the poopie finger a poopie finger, but keeping a lie alive in my head was wearing me out. It’s exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth. It didn’t help that this was two in the morning.
That holiday in tedious upstate, everyone kept a secret: I’d killed someone. My papadaddy was a restroom lurker. My nana had cancer the size of a cherry, a lemon, a grapefruit, growing inside her like a garden, but I didn’t know that as yet.
Just in case the police found a witness, I planned not to look like myself for a while. That’s one reason I got truly obese: camouflage. Becoming a fatso turned out to be a very clever disguise.
Otherwise it was only my nana and me and drunk drivers on the late-night highway. She motored past the traffic island without a glance. A cigarette puff later, after a couple hacking coughs, she asked, “How are you liking the book?”
I choked back the memory of a squashed, dead wiener outlined in people blood between two pages. That Beagle book, squirted full of some juice I told myself wasn’t sperm. “It’s fine,” I said. “That book is a literary tour de force.” God only knew what she was rambling on about. I reached to turn on the radio, and my nana slapped my hand away from the knob. Just that tiny smack reminded my stomach of the Darwin tome thwacking that wrinkled menacing … whatever.
Now I’d never know how evolution ends.
The way my nana talked, with her lips clamped onto the brown part of a cigarette, the white paper burning part bobbed in front of her face like a blind man’s cane. Red-tipped, even. She was feeling her way along, asking, “Have you got to where the collie dog helps stick up a bank?”
Of course, she meant that The Call of the Wild book. The saga of some animal implanted with radioactive chimpanzee embryos from the Crab Nebula. If I’d chosen that Jack London book we’d all still be alive. Even with my eyes shut I’d picked the wrong option. I told her, “Bank robbery?” I said, “I loved that chapter.”
Nana Minnie’s chin tilted up a little, lifting her eyes off the road a smidge. She stared in the rearview mirror, watching the bright toilet crime scene shrinking from a real place, smaller and smaller, until it was just another night star. She said, “How about the part where the dog sees the crazy person murder the old fella in cold blood?” She asked, “Have you got that far?”
Our headlights zoomed ahead, skimming over a stretch of upstate highway, and I watched the steady horizon without giving her any answer. Instead, I imagined peaches, apricots, cherries, tomatoes, beans, even watermelon pickles preserved in clear glass bottles. Sapphire pink and ruby red and emerald green juices. A treasury of food, this bounty steeped in too much sugar or too much salt, to keep bacteria from setting up shop. My Nana Minnie had blanched, boiled, and canned a long future of meals for her and Papadaddy, and now it was only her. The best way to support her would be to help her eat. Maybe between the pair of us we could justify all those years of peeling and coring.
My nana asked, “You know, I always felt sorry for that collie dog.” She said, “If that dog could’ve just told the truth, you know, folks would’ve still loved it.”
Whatever she was talking about, it was no book I’d been reading. Instead of answering her with more lies I sagged my head to one side on a limp neck. My hands snuggled in my chinchilla pockets. My eyes drifted shut and I made a fast snore like I was asleep, only it sounded more like I was just reading the word snore off a thousand cue cards.
Nana Minnie said, “Everybody knew that collie dog was just defending herself,” but then she had to take a break from talking in order to catch up on her coughing. For my part, the car was jam-packed with everything I didn’t want to say. If my nana was going to be hurt, I wouldn’t be the person to do it.
I couldn’t spit out my secret any easier than she could cough up her tumor.
At the hospital she pretended to wake me, and I pretended to be groggy, mostly blinking my eyes and acting out yawns. One unintended outcome was that we’d no doubt have to hold a funeral, and my parents would have to come. They’d have to collect me and take me away with them, and that rescue seemed almost worth killing someone for. We walked, me and my nana holding hands, up a hospital sidewalk and into bright light behind sliding glass doors. The linoleum floor was waxed so s
hiny it seemed as bright as the fluorescent ceiling, and the waiting room seemed sandwiched between these two forms of light. There, she left me to sit with the magazines, in a hard-plastic chair that would’ve been avocado-chic in Oslo but in upstate read as just plain shabby. Among the magazines were three old issues of Cat Fancy with me cuddling my kitten, Tigerstripe, on the cover. Poor Tigerstripe. Beginning with People, Vogue, and Time, I began to leaf through every copy in search of scenes from my other life. My real life.
Suddenly, I worried my papadaddy might be alive in a bed nearby, tubed to a saggy, hanging-down bag of secondhand blood, laughing and eating Jell-O as he told the nursing staff how his roly-poly, spoiled-rotten grandbaby had tried to hack off his wiener when all he’d been doing was playing her a practical joke. Then I heard a police officer walk past saying the words “hate crime” to a doctor, and I guessed I was in the clear.
Within my earshot the officer said how my grandpa’s wallet, watch, and wedding ring were missing, and I fumed that someone would rob an old man lying dead on a toilet floor. It’s true I’d killed him. That goes without saying. But I was his Baby Bean Sprout. That made it different. From their talk it was clear the police didn’t have anything right. It irked me to let their theories stay so totally wrong, but there was no pressing reason my nana had to be a widow and know she’d outlived a sex pervert.
No one said anything about finding my dropped euros and rubles soaked in blood, or about finding my busted eyeglasses or the dagger of shattered glass from the tea jar. The policeman said, “Insane thrill killer.”
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