“She did fine,” the orderly pushing the bed claimed. But how would he know?
The last place Catherine wished to visit was the site of the first killings. Her mother sedated in the passenger seat, Catherine parked in front of the house where Misty had lived. She’d driven by here often without actually thinking of Misty. How could that be? The house and the neighborhood had been here, faithfully, reliably, for all these years, and yet she could not recall the last time she’d looked with intention at what she passed through. This was a route to a branch of the public library where she occasionally drove her mother, to the organic meat market Oliver had bankrolled, to the bungalow of Yasmin Keene. The grown-up habit of taking this street had erased the adolescent one, the former destination had become a place she passed by without thinking.
The first victims were a family; the only multiple killings. Misty’s home, the little drab pair of boxes (formerly the gray-green of cement block), had been painted cream, trimmed in burgundy, reroofed in black. At the curb, two black posts with lights, a motif of colonialism. Somebody was reclaiming this neighborhood, one home at a time, accessorizing and trimming, hanging window boxes and filling them with flowers, erecting short ornamental fences that would keep in or out nothing. At Misty’s, there was now an official driveway instead of the muddy patch that had slopped into the yard and up to the door. The place no longer resembled the encampment that it had twenty-five years ago, a site best approached wearing work boots. When Catherine had visited that home, there had been sometimes furniture in the yard and car engines in the kitchen, inside-out, outside-in, one of Misty’s uncles or cousins or honorary relations either reclining out front with a beer or dressed in a grimy jumpsuit, armed with a wrench, twisting something greasy and mechanical at the dining table. The family ate carryout; the refrigerator was full of beer and live bait. The photo albums featured dead elk, rows of rainbow trout, vehicles covered in mud, evidence of exploits out in mother nature, not a human face anywhere to be found, only their bloody tools to illustrate scale.
Hatchet, shotgun, hunting knife.
The dogs pressed their noses against the car windows, optimistic; there was a park here now. “No, my friends,” Catherine told them. “Sorry, just looking.” Young trees were tethered to the ground, waiting to grow thick enough to withstand the Kansas wind. She shivered and turned up the car’s heater, aware that the chill running through her was not about the weather. This park was named the same thing as the school that had once stood here, the elementary school where Misty and Catherine had met those many years ago. The school was utterly gone, deemed too expensive to repair, too inefficient to replace, too shabby to convert. Catherine had driven by here when the wrecking ball and earthmovers were in action. It was a job that took only a few days. Now there was a swimming pool and a rec center, a parking lot and these brave little sticks, future shade trees. All of it prettily corralled inside a loop of sidewalk. Not a single person in sight—a few geese poking at the fence surrounding the empty pool; ahead there was a yellow street sign especially for the birds, a crosswalk warning. Misty’s family would have shot such a sign full of holes; Misty’s family might have shot the geese themselves.
When the old elementary school had been there, Misty attended because she was in its district, within spitting distance. Out her front door she would have run every morning, crossing the street and entering the building thirty seconds after exiting her own house. Catherine, however, had been imported, bussed over from five miles away because she was bright, designated “Accelerated,” and this was where the program sent her. Her, and fifty-nine other “Accelerated” students, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children who stood quivering at their various bus stops, a daily commute of thirty halting minutes each way, a plan meant to fill the emptying classrooms, the school’s neighborhood aging, its former parents now grandparents or ghosts, its small children grown and gone, its older ones delinquent.
Misty hadn’t been in the Accelerated program; she and Catherine had been enemies, generally, back then, the Regulars versus the Accelerateds. For the three years of Catherine’s gifted education, she and her cohorts suffered the taunts and jeers of the neighborhood children. Onto the buses they clomped each afternoon, taking their elevated seats, watching from their Accelerated windows as the Regular gangs dispersed below into the small houses, or through the canal where fetid water ran, into the great cement drainpipes to smoke cigarettes and draw pictures of purported sexual acts and shout foul echoing words. On Fridays, if you happened to be in sixth grade, you could take yourself to Pizza Hut for lunch, and there the Accelerateds would suffer the thrown crusts from the Regular tables, the savage wrath of the average children, and the stifled anxiety of the freakish ones, the ones designated special. No adult, either customer or employee, ever felt like identifying with the Accelerateds, standing up for them or quelling the abuse. Catherine remembered that, the aggrieved expression her group encountered: they were stuck up, sissies, pussies, pathetic. In some other food chain, they would be cut from the herd. Small consolations were offered at home; their parents might routinely promise that adult life would be different, when the tables would naturally turn.
In junior high, a year later, Catherine herself had begun to disdain the Accelerateds. They were an awfully unadventurous group, timid from their time with bullies, soft from having been sheltered, now let loose into the festering depths of junior high school. She was one of only a few who splintered off; the others remained a quaking group, taking Honors classes, huddling together at lunchtime, joining chess and debate clubs. Her mother had been horrified when Catherine declared her break from this tribe. Why would Catherine renounce a better education, a more enlightened group of friends, the lucky advantage that was hers? “They’re dorks,” Catherine had explained.
She’d smoked her first cigarette at the table with Misty’s grandmother, who considered smoking a natural juncture of life, akin to the loss of molars or acquisition of a driver’s license. At age fifteen, Misty had been smoking long enough to be trying to quit. Every third house in the neighborhood was the same, a development pattern from two generations past.
Her mother, roused from her sedated nap, blinked blankly. Catherine said, “That family? The first victims? Their floor plan was exactly the same as Misty’s.” She recalled Misty’s ownership of the story. The way it could have been anyone on the block, it could have been Misty’s own grandmother that maniac had encountered, bound and tortured and killed; instead of that other girl it could have been Misty left dangling from the basement plumbing, semen on her socks. The murderer had stolen the family’s car and left it in a grocery store parking lot, the very same grocery store where Misty’s grandmother shopped, where they themselves—Catherine and Misty, Accelerated and Regular, enemies, then, had bought candy after their Pizza Hut Fridays of sixth grade. The photographs appeared on the six o’clock news of the parking lot, the station wagon sitting in that familiar place.
They’d been avowed enemies in grade school, but it might have been that day in the junior high school cafeteria, Misty holding forth about the scandal, Catherine thought now as she pulled away from the curb, when she and Misty had first become allies, when they’d started on the road to being best friends.
CHAPTER 9
IT DOESN’T MATTER if you don’t have a license!” Ito assured Cattie. “I don’t even have insurance!” They were drinking sweet coffee in the sunshine, watching Montpelier’s teenagers take their Friday lunch break. He was endorsing a road trip; it was right up his alley, half the continent out there waiting, packed full of interesting strangers to meet. “Plus I’m not supposed to own that car anyway. Registering it cost more than I paid.” He’d bought it for ten dollars from a neighbor widow in New Hampshire, a woman the police threatened to incarcerate if she didn’t stop driving; they’d taken her keys but she had extras. It wasn’t hard to imagine that Ito was the old woman’s only friend; he might have been many people’s only friend. He was Cattie�
�s, for instance.
“I don’t know how to drive,” she explained. “It’s not just the license, it’s the skill.”
“Boo? Any fool can drive.” He swept his bangled arm and nail-painted hand toward the intersection, where, it was true, a four-way stop had resulted in a cluster of confusion and waving fists and screeching tires.
“My mother … ,” Cattie began, and Ito understood at once, slapped his hands over his mouth: her mother had died in a car accident. It wasn’t natural for Cattie to want to drive, not just to Texas but to anywhere, ever. Ito had offered his car without thinking. But a bus would suffice. She even knew where the stops were, both here and in Houston. And nobody paid any attention to who purchased a bus ticket. Whack-jobs and runaways and outlaws always rode the bus, in perfect anonymity.
But Cattie sighed. “I just get so carsick in the bus.” As did others, the odor, or threat, of vomit just one of its regrettable trademarks.
“The bus is disgusting,” Ito agreed. They sat on a brick ledge outside the coffee shop, out there with the rest of Montpelier, soaking up the rare bright sun, giddy and distracted, perhaps blinded by it at the now-clogged intersection. Cattie and Ito mutually concocted Bus in their imaginations: the foul endemic atmosphere—along with vomit, the odors of diesel fuel, urine, French fries—not to mention the swaying boatlike movement. “Oh oh oh!—that grease from people’s hair on the windows!” Ito recollected.
“The Jesus freak.”
“The guy with BO.”
“Plural, guys. Plus the drunk skinheads.”
“Who are armed. With weapons. And the screaming baby.”
“I don’t mind the screaming baby,” Cattie said, considering. “I would even hold the screaming baby, if the mom would let me.”
“So. Cute!” Ito said, squeezing her shoulder in congratulations.
“I was a babysitter. I was kind of good at it. I guess I could stand the bus if it didn’t take forever. If there actually was a screaming baby. If I didn’t have to sit next to a pervert. If I had a book to read. If I bought Dramamine …” Cattie sighed. “I miss Houston,” she said.
“Yo, don’t cry!” Ito hugged her again, his own eyes now wet, smiling feverishly. “You want a muffin? Latte?” He jumped up to retrieve these, to distract her. Cattie agreed in order to make him happy. In his absence, she imagined herself stepping off the bus in Houston, into the lush humid clemency of her city. Such a relief to know precisely where she was, the known city spreading around her for miles and miles, mapped without gaps. To breathe the polluted soggy air of home, I-45 overhead carrying its endless roaring traffic, the clouds yet higher still, moving as always with incredible speed, sometimes breaking around the city’s tallest buildings, moisture either falling or about to, and those ubiquitous black clattering birds. The audacious heckling grackles. Staring at Montpelier’s populace, she imagined the walk home among Houston’s, tacking south and west all the way from downtown to Montrose, over the light rail tracks, under Highway 59, across the Blue Bird parking lot, through the St. Thomas campus, right to her own street with its odd knitted stop sign sleeve. The mysterious Montrose knitter, who had, for the last few years, covered with colorful yarn cozies all manner of outdoor objects, poles and door handles and hydrants. Cattie had walked this route before, not from the Greyhound station but from a Vietnamese restaurant close by. At her house, she would cut across the neighbor’s yard, duck beneath and climb over the live oak limbs, fish her lone key from her backpack, unlock the carport door, step into her back porch. And then what?
She had no idea. Her imagination led her that far and no further. As if the door now opened upon a deep sinkhole that had sucked everything beyond it into the earth.
Ito returned with muffins and scones, laid them out on wax paper for Cattie to choose, his eyes pleading for her to be happy. “Would you let Randall drive your car to Texas?” she asked him, selecting randomly among the pastries.
“Randall?”
Cattie chewed on her scone, thinking of a trip with Randall. Terrible motels, for starters; him sleeping in one bed, her lying in the other wearing her clothes, twitching restlessly under the bad bedspread all night. This, too, was not quite fully imaginable. Then she remembered the dogs—the complete cast and scenario of Dogs: the rescue, Joanne’s ominous declaration that she did not want dogs in her house, Randall’s more frequent downstairs visits, and of course the poor runty puppy that had died, limp black rag beside the back door one morning—and now she vaguely brightened. “Me and Randall,” Cattie said. “We’ve been talking.” They hadn’t been talking, she and Randall, but they’d been seeing each other, engaged in their mutual project, feeding the living, and burying the tiny dead dog out back in Joanne’s desolate junky yard, each working to prevent Joanne’s wrath, the litter staying in Cattie’s little room with her, the mother taken daily by Randall for long walks. “And the dogs, actually. They’d have to come, I think. Joanne won’t keep them.” Down the bad motel bedspread went to the bad motel carpet, where the dogs would make a warm pile. A pile between the bad motel beds holding Randall and Cattie, there like a moat.
“Goddamn, I want to go with you!” Ito cried. “That sounds so awesome! Road trip with puppies?”
Now Cattie put Ito’s sedan in her Houston driveway, herself at the carport door once again, this time with Randall following, dressed in his military uniform and his Dijon-mustard-colored boots, carrying the puppies in their box, pulling their mother on her belt leash. Now Cattie could go further, into the kitchen where Max’s bowls were, one for water, one for kibble, both empty, of course. The bag of dog food, there in the utility closet, now probably stale and soggy, but did dogs care about freshness? And the sink faucet, which she’d have to run for a while to clear rust from the pipes. It wouldn’t have been turned on for months now. When she set down the water and food bowls, the dogs would fall over themselves, roll into the containers, knock them over, slip in the mess. Randall meanwhile would require the bathroom, which would mean leading him down the hall, to her bathroom, and then most naturally she would enter her bedroom, directly across from there. Randall would eventually exit the bathroom, and then her imagination clouded. In the hallway the two of them stood, her perhaps adjusting the thermostat to ventilate the place—that momentary throat-clearing noise that the compressor made, and then the roar of air in the vents—Randall frozen, uncertain what to do, where to go next. The only other bed in the house was Cattie’s mother’s, and she couldn’t imagine allowing Randall to sleep in it.
As far as she knew, there’d never been a man in that bed.
Where was Max? she wondered, not for the first time. This question pressed more fully upon her than others, such as: What had her mother been doing in Colorado? Was she drunk when her car went off the road? In not one of the messages collecting on her phone had anybody said a single word about the dog. And now another scenario suddenly popped up: Max dead in the house, lying there on the kitchen floor like a sack of bones, a bigger version of the dead puppy she’d just encountered yesterday morning. Or lying at the front door, whose wood surface would be deeply scarred from her futile attempts to escape. Or on her mother’s bed, curled tightly between the pillows, perfect taxidermy. Cattie’s eyes filled.
“What?” Ito said. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t figure out where Max is,” she said. “What the fuck?”
“Your mom would have left her with a friend.” But this reassurance came from somebody who took the idea and reality of friends for granted, he who had them, who readily made them, and who expected a reciprocal exchange of favors with them, a harmonious unending network built on smiles and guileless, boundless curiosity and tolerance. This was not Misty’s way. It wasn’t Cattie’s way, either. Ito read her face and tried again. “Don’t get grossed out, but listen: if the dog had actually been left in the house? If it had died? The neighbors would have smelled it. It wouldn’t still be there.”
Cattie nodded thoughtfully. “True,”
she said—the old busybody next door, the mailman, the endless parade of children selling worthless crap, or the yardman. Dick Little, insurance snoop. “Thanks,” she added. Ito was like that, helpful. He’d gone online to find the accident report from Colorado. Single-car, at least a week before it was found, one victim, from out of state. Out of state: that was the whole problem—going out of their state. They’d been fine when they stayed in Texas. Cattie felt the onus of her own responsibility for the mess her life had become. If she’d managed to get through high school in Houston, she’d never have been shipped east. And her mother wouldn’t have sojourned to Colorado; it wouldn’t have been possible, if Cattie were still at home instead of out of state.
Home. Now she put herself and Randall back in the hallway, toilet chuckling from his recent flush. She’d sleep in her mother’s bed. He could have her room. He would probably enjoy the mural on the ceiling, although some of her bumper stickers would probably offend a war veteran. And then there came the stray mother dog, sniffing crazily at the baseboard and carpet, followed by her puppies, all six of them running pell-mell around the living room, locating Max’s toys, the stuffed weasel, the weasel hut, the tennis ball, the leather men’s shoe Misty had designated fair game. Max had never mistaken any of Cattie’s or Misty’s shoes for ones she could chew, just this nasty leather loafer, one she’d found in the street. She was a smart animal, Max.
And the puppies would pee on the carpet, and Cattie would have to find newspapers (in the recycling bin, there by the back door, Houston Chronicles dated from September), and also the doggy door gates, which were down in the cellar, leaning alongside some rejected artwork and old school projects on poster board just outside the sump pump pit, and then every other tangible part of her house came upon her suddenly and overwhelmingly, all the things she needed to do. Immediately.
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