The Swamp Killers

by Sarah M. Chen

  Melody Duplass started it all.

  Two years ago.

  Granval slows as they near a stop sign. Ten black vultures stand in a row atop the guardrail of the bridge on the perpendicular cross-street. Vicky’s mind’s eye turns the birds into a row of pineapples, on display where her daddy used to work.

  She rolls down her window, blinking her eyes to turn the mirage of pineapples back into the black vultures of reality, and a whoosh of clicking cricket frogs fills the cab of the truck. Her memory returns to the pineapple display and two years ago.

  Living in a suburb of Atlanta, Vicky was sixteen and her daddy, Clarence Windsong, worked the produce aisle at Sister Craig’s Supermart. On the day in question, Vicky stood by the pineapples in Sister Craig’s produce aisle, waiting on her father to finish his shift. He used to whistle when he worked, and he’d break into seventies’ light rock songs. Regular customers called him “Pipes.”

  Clarence Windsong, so unlike his daughter, didn’t appreciate details beyond a song and the collective hues of all his produce. That day two years ago, he slid across Sister Craig’s black-and-white checkered floor, whizzing past the kumquats and tangerines, and landed behind Vicky at the pineapples. As he always did, he set his hands on her shoulders from behind and encouraged her to move in rhythm as he sang Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again.” Vicky hummed and danced along with him, smiling at the feel of her daddy’s strong palms on her shoulders and the way his breath smelled like peppermint when he exhaled between chords.

  A customer over by the kale and mixed greens, three sections over and at the other end of the wide aisle, called out, “Pipes, over here,” needing help on finding the right lettuce. Clarence turned and slid across the black-and-white floor to his customer. Vicky’s back faced this customer, and so, Clarence Windsong, when speaking with the customer, didn’t see Vicky move around the aisle’s cap, out of view, so she could study a display of nuts, a fascinating series of bins with a different nut quarantined to each bin. The variety of browns and textures was as compelling to Vicky as the poetry her English teacher relented on letting her read in lieu of novels. Poetry, poetry she got, because poetry was how she translated the world, and poetry most often, she found, placed scent, sight, sound, touch, and taste in capsules—like quick-hit sensory drugs.

  Cashews curve, smooth with dents

  Peanuts tan, rust-red dress

  Cashmere, cardboard, almond ridge

  Green peeps from, p’stach’ lids

  From around the corner, Vicky heard her father’s voice start in on a new song, this time Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara,” so she stepped away from the nuts to return to their song and dance routine. As she came around the corner, she saw that Melody Duplass, then sixteen and her classmate in school, had arrived and stood exactly where Vicky had stood by the pineapples. Remarkably, and disastrously, Melody wore the same green dress from Nordstrom’s that Vicky wore. Same hair color, same hair in a ponytail. And, sealing their fates, Melody was about Vicky’s height too.

  A horror clotted Vicky’s throat, like a nightmare in which you can’t scream at a perpetrator. She watched Clarence, his lids half-closed, not paying attention to any details, not slowing down, oblivious and blurring the details of reality for the sake of his song. He slid up to Melody’s backside, placed his palms on her shoulders from behind, set his cheek to hers, and moved her body side to side while singing a song about drowning in the sea of love.

  Melody screamed a hellfire, yelling and jumping and hitting Clarence.

  Clarence woke up, snapped out of it, jumped back, and launched his arms in the air as if being arrested. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I thought you were…”

  “Dad,” Vicky yelled from the other end of the produce aisle.

  “I thought you were…” Clarence couldn’t speak.

  Melody kept screaming in his face. The manager jogged over from the bakery section.

  And it was this very second in time when Melody Duplass set the pin in everyone’s futures. She looked over to Vicky, who she knew from school, and she acknowledged by way of a wink that she understood there had been an innocent mistaken identity. She did. She winked. She knew. She drew in a long breath, and Vicky catalogued the exact shape of the hollow in her neck, and how the divot shallowed in her slow, menacing exhale. To Vicky, no neck had ever looked like Melody’s, and no neck ever would.

  The moment was over, the split-second when Melody was honest in her microscopic wink and slow exhale, and she fucked it all goodbye by then switching out of her sly, devilish wink to a scrunched and crying face. Nobody else in the world would have seen the shift, the nanosecond in which Melody chose deception, but Vicky saw Melody’s evil in granular, molecular grains.

  Melody turned to the manager. “He was squeezing my breasts and grinding his dick into my ass like a perv!”

  “He was not!” Vicky yelled.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” Clarence cried, backing away, his arms still in the air.

  “I’m telling my parents and all of Atlanta that Sister Craig’s is a perv factory!”

  Melody made immediate good on her threat by drawing her phone and tweeting out, right there as the manager stammered and begged her to calm down:

  Sex assault on ME by a friend’s dad @SisterCraigs today.

  Can’t trust anyone, not even dads. #lostinnocence #feelcrushed

  Lies. Vicky and Melody were not friends. In fact, they’d never even talked.

  Thereafter, life dismantled. Melody soon revealed via numerous social media accounts that her “friend” was classmate Vicky Windsong, whose father was Clarence Windsong, the perpetrator. A local TV reporter picked up on the story and then the media bombarded Sister Craig’s. Sister Craig’s Minneapolis headquarters sent a fleet of PR and lawyers. And even though security cameras verified Clarence’s and Vicky’s version of events, Clarence was “let go” because of the “optics.” No charges were filed, of course, because the video rebut Melody’s story—in fact, it was clear that Clarence’s hands were on her shoulders, not her breasts, and his groin at least a foot away from Melody’s ass. But his was the word of a forty-year-old produce man against a wealthy and influential, connected too, sixteen-year-old girl. And people didn’t care about truth anymore.

  Then the death threats came from goons and mobsters, given Melody’s family connections. Vicky and Clarence tried to hide, but they had no savings to hide for long.

  One morning a month later, waking up in a brown-on-brown, flea-trap, no-tell motel, Vicky awoke to the suicide note:

  You’ll be better off without me, Babe. Your song lifts me up, up, always up, through the dark to the light, beyond the cosmos. I’m joining your mother now.

  —Love for always and eternity, Dad

  Authorities found his body, drowned in a stupid, nameless, pointless river behind the motel. Vicky’s been with Nana Windsong since.

  All Nana did for the first month after her son’s suicide was wail on the floor of the B-TAP’s Porkroll Shack. The B-TAP shuttered with an ominous sign at the entrance: IN BEREAVEMENT. CLOSED. Nana’s crying then turned into repeated mutterings of “That bitch. That cunt. That whore. I’ll fucking kill her.” She offered no consolation to Vicky, who cried up on the top floor of the Book Tower alone. It was easier then for Vicky to sink whole-hog into her lifetime condition as her sole remedy to all-consuming grief. She fingered individual fibers on her softie blankie; she counted clicks of cricket frogs.

  The days, the months, rolled on.

  Nana’s grief grew to unrelenting homicidal rage.

  Beyond poetry, the other high school course Vicky had prevailed at was tech lab. There was something in the minutia of code, of algorithms, the order of digits that consumed her. So she excelled. And thus, she hatched her virtual human fishing idea to Nana, and Nana bought her the computer to execute it.

  Granval stalls at the bridge, the perpendicular line of black vultures is still there. The
vultures turn their heads in unison to an approaching figure. It was the twitching in the vultures’ wings that caused Granval to stall, Vicky too. Now, both watch the figure walk closer toward the truck in passing the row of vultures on the bridge.

  This person is a woman, and she stops to take a picture of the birds. She pulls a piece of paper from her jean shorts pocket and seems to be using it, directions perhaps, to track where she needs to turn at the intersection at the end of the bridge. The woman continues on, closing in on Granval and Vicky in the truck. As she comes closer, Vicky notes her face is obscured by huge sunglasses and a deep bucket hat. She’s hiding her face, but nothing conceals the distinctive hollow in her neck.

  “No way,” Vicky says.

  “Holy shit,” Granval agrees.

  “Fucking Melody. Walking right to us.”

  “Holy shit. Holy shit.” Granval’s seen Melody’s picture hundreds of times, her happy, arrogant, entitled mug plastered constantly in selfies for the world to watch. Stills and videos of her, morning, noon, and night. Any basic voyeur would know the hollow in Melody’s neck, those cutoff jean shorts she bought last summer, the cycles of her period, down to the day, as well as when she cleared her last zit. Anyone who’s studied Melody online for two years would know every minute detail about her, would know her presence in an instant, no matter how hard she tried to lie and fake.

  It seems to Vicky that Melody is so consumed in looking at the black vultures who study her in return that she doesn’t appreciate Vicky and Granval watching her in the truck at first. Melody moves closer to them while whistling a song, and when about ten feet away, finally looks up to see Granval in the driver’s seat. His window is rolled down. From where Melody stands, Vicky believes Melody can’t see her in the passenger’s seat.

  “Hey,” Melody yells. “Hey, hey. Is a place called the Book Tower or something down there?” Melody asks, pointing in the direction of the wave column of green over the street, that Granval and Vicky just drove.

  Granval, still shocked Melody has literally walked into their trap and no manual coaxing is needed, is slow to say, “Ayup.”

  It’s all too much for Vicky. Everything blurs and blends, the frogs’ clicking is a stew of sound, the panic of the past chokes her breath, the whole world speeds ahead and rewinds, and speeds again, all untimed, counterclockwise, everything being forced upon her to take in all at once. Her father’s body floats in the river below the bridge, but that’s the past. That’s the past. She can’t breathe. Vicky yanks her door handle and bursts out of the truck, running straight into Melody’s space, not taking any seconds to hesitate or think further on what she’s about to do, what she’s about to undo after two years of work. The physical presence of Melody Duplass uncorks bottled rage within Vicky, rage and grief and hatred. But it also surfaces a relentless nagging guilt of what’s to come, and Vicky finally grasps that she doesn’t want any of it. None of these terrible, negative emotions.

  “You horrible bitch. You lying, fucking bitch. You killed my father,” Vicky yells as soon as she’s a foot away from Melody. It’s like a sudden, wonderful dream and horrible nightmare, all coiled together, all at once, to be here, right now, in the presence of her worst enemy. Her target. Her father’s killer.

  Melody jumps backwards, stumbles, and falls on her ass, nearly missing a drop-off by the bridge’s edge that would have tumbled her into the river. Her hat and sunglasses fly off and fall to the water. She’s unmasked.

  “Fucking Melody Duplass, you dumb fucking whore. Do you know you’re here because I fished you here?”

  “Vicky?”

  “Yeah, Vicky Windsong. Clarence Windsong’s daughter. The girl whose life you ruined.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? What the fuck?” Melody’s voice is high, vibrating, somewhat caught between anger and despair, fright and shock. Her hands grapple for traction in the roadside dirt.

  Vicky stalls.

  The world slows.

  That west wind hisses.

  A frog clicks.

  Click.

  Vicky fixes her eyes on all the shocking blue around Melody. Around her neck, in her ears, around her wrist, sparkling bubbles of blue. Sapphires, she’s dripping in sapphires. The volume is obscene. The amount of blue baubles, popping all over her, is pornographic even, in the bursting suggestion of fertility, like a split pomegranate. Shiny, shiny orbs of blue.

  Blue. Blue. Blue-blue gem; for the jeweler’s fruit, she’ll lift her hem.

  How dare this bitch waltz around whistling songs, dripping in jewels, while her father drowned, poor and despondent—all his songs snuffed.

  With Vicky transfixed on the details, the numbers, the individual glints of sunshine ricocheting off several sapphires, Melody stands, using the bridge’s railing as her crutch.

  “Holy shit, Vicky Windsong. Crazy as fucking ever.”

  “You bitch,” Vicky says, fighting her way out of the strings of refracted blue in the air. “You don’t get it, do you? I tricked you into coming here. Didn’t you notice all the fake accounts?”

  “What the ever-living-fuck are you talking about?”

  “All the Facebook posts, friends you accepted but don’t know. The memes. The pictures. The tweets. All of it led you to me. To here.”

  Melody rolls her eyes, bugging them at Vicky like she’s crazy. “Are you like on drugs or something?” she asks. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I engineered you to come here, Melody. Because you’re so fucking dead inside.”

  “You mean like you like troll-farmed me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh my God, you’re insane. I didn’t come here because of you. I came here because…nevermind. I came here because none of your fucking business.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Melody continues to shake her head at Vicky as if she’s nuts, but less assured, as Vicky holds firm. Vicky wonders if Melody is asking herself, who suggested Jacksonville? What subconscious manipulations might have been woven into conversations, into planning? Who, how, what prompted the idea to come here?

  Can we ever really know if we hold an original thought?

  Granval steps out of the truck, his door sending the sound of creaking metal. Melody steps back, edging closer to plummeting into the river. Where she stands offers the long way down along the rocky edge; the fall into the river could be fatal. Granval’s full height stretches higher than the top of the truck’s cab; his arms are swollen pythons, slithering thick out of his white tank.

  “Oh, what’s this? Your boyfriend going to hurt me now?”

  Vicky pushes her hands against the air for Granval to back down. She turns to Melody. “Melody. You don’t deserve any mercy. But here’s the real deal. You are here because of me. You’re going to give me those sapphires, and you’re going to turn around and leave. You don’t want to go to the Book Tower.”

  Melody laughs in her face. “Fuck you, Vicky. You’re fucking insane. I’m giving you nothing. I’ll go where I want. What the hell do you have to do with the Book Tower? It’s a damn tourist trap.”

  Vicky turns to Granval. The B-TAP has no public-facing connection to the Windsongs.

  “Oh, you think your boyfriend can rob me? Scare me? You do anything to me, you’ll both be dead by morning. You know who my family is.”

  “Where is your family right now, Melody? You’re all alone. Taking a stroll, like you’re some tourist. I know you’re on the run. I’ve had access to your accounts for years. Real great disguise you got here.” Vicky eyes Melody’s now-blown pathetic disguise and rolls her eyes in open disdain.

  And there it is, the split-second flinch. Melody has such easy tells. Nobody knows where Melody is, and now Melody has just revealed this vulnerability. A quick flinch that Vicky didn’t miss.

  Vicky steps closer. “You don’t believe me? That I led you here?”

  “Of course I don’t. Get lost.” Melody drags her pho
ne out of her pocket, an act Vicky witnesses in slow-motion. Vicky swats Melody’s hand before she dials. The phone rockets up and plummets over the bridge railing and into the river below, whisking away in the current like her sunglasses and hat.

  “Give me your sapphires and turn around. Leave.”

  Melody, after staring into the river at the bubbles of her drowning phone, turns to Vicky, inhales, and narrows her eyes. “Cunt.”

  “Don’t do this, Melody. Don’t stall. Just believe me. Sapphires and you leave.”

  “Fucking no. Show me.”

  “What?”

  “Show me. Show me how you fished me here.”

  “Stop trying to buy time. Sapphires now. And you leave.”

  Granval interrupts. “Vicky, she’s asking for it. So, show her.”

  “Woo, hoo. Big Cock has a brain after all,” Melody mocks. “Listen to your Big Cock boyfriend, Vicky. Show me.”

  “I’ll give you one last chance. Apologize for what you did to my father by giving me those sapphires and turn around. Leave.”

  “Do I stutter? Fuck. Ing. Show. Me. You. Crazy. Little. Bitch.”

  One of Vicky’s eyes trembles, as if she’s suffering a stroke. She stops herself from pushing Melody to her death by shoving her hands in her pockets. Just one push and it would all end; Melody has no idea how precarious her footing is. She isn’t paying attention to her environment, only her emotions, only the mottled distortion of fright and flight.

  “Show. Me,” Melody yells.

  Vicky breathes in, her eyes closed. This is exhausting. This is the longest time she’s engaged in a focused conversation with another person without pausing to listen to the clicks of the frogs, or taste something sweet in her mouth, watch the movement of a shadow over sheets. She opens her eyes, determined to plow ahead.

  “Your choice. I’ll have to show you at the Book Tower.”

  “Oh so now you want me to go to the Book Tower? You’re insane.”