by Landon Houle
What would Candy do, they all wondered, when her mother passed away?
There was, in the house, a general wafting of death and decay that came, yes, from the sandals and the calloused feet that wore them, but also this smell, this horrible sweetness was on account of the small animals that Candy had recently began dissecting.
Sue, a woman with plenty of her own predilections, was terrified of global warming and, consequently, any aerosols including the only air fresheners that had any effect. So it was with a kind of pleading sense of defeat, just the sort of attitude Candy despised, that Sue lit bundle after bundle of herbs and also long sticks of flea market patchouli that smelled more than anything like the barbecue Black Creek was supposedly known for, but the incense did nothing about the odor of decomposition except perhaps make the smell of dead animals a degree more appetizing.
Please, Sue begged, but she didn’t bother asking Candy to stop anything that she was doing. After forty years together, Sue knew better. She did ask if Candy the sweetheart, Candy her little dove, could perhaps consider the outdoors a better place for her projects? Say, for instance, the shed?
But the light in the shed, where Candy’s father had spent most of his time when he was alive—hiding, Sue said—was just a dusty old bulb and no comparison to Candy’s high wattage vanity lamp, and anyway, if the animals stunk to Sue in a way they most certainly did not to Candy, good enough! In the first place, it was Sue’s fault that Candy had never learned the workings of a frog’s intestines or, for another example, the unique respiratory system of a worm. When they’d got to this unit in school, Sue had banned Candy from participating. She’d gone so far as to organize a protest, a picket line against animal cruelty. But such causes found little support in South Carolina, and though a few whimpering mothers had brought protest sandwiches and protest coffee—they felt for Sue, they really did—after an hour or so, it was only Candy and Sue, Candy sitting on the curb with her chin in her hand, watching her mother, who, for the occasion, had drawn whiskers across her cheeks and an upside-down heart for a nose—hold up a poster until her arms shook, screaming, No slice! No mice! No slice! No mice!
Candy tried to explain that the classes didn’t even use mice. There was a worm, and then a cow’s eye, and then a fetal pig, and finally, the culmination of it all and the basis for the final exam—a shark. But Sue wasn’t listening to Candy. Or perhaps she didn’t care. It’s the principle of the matter, Sue said, and though she was beautiful and Candy was most certainly not, there was something in common about their persons even if they couldn’t see it.
They might have, in their shared adulthood, become something like friends as many mothers and daughters will, but instead, they simply continued much as they had before, and at forty, Candy spent most of her time alone, reading a biology textbook she’d found at the Friends of the Library semiannual sale. She was using this book as a guide to learning the workings of small animals, vertebrate and invertebrate. It was slow-going, and though she’d never admit it, new concepts didn’t come as easily for Candy as they once had, but she still had the same determination, the same drive to, as the Fighting Falcons motto said, Believe and achieve!
To Sue, Candy said, You can’t tell me what to do.
A lot of people, besides Candy’s teachers, thought Candy had a few problems. Black Creek was a small town where, everyone conceded, not much happened. It was probably tough for Candy to figure out how, every week, she and the splice-happy reporter would figure out how to fill all ten pages of the newspaper. It was no wonder that every now and then, there’d be some article the drugstore coffee-drinkers would describe as “off the wall.” An editorial, for example, about data collection and the ways in which the government would use the records of your Piggly Wiggly purchases as evidence against you in the case for terrorism. And what about that other column Candy wrote about the dangers of marijuana addiction? Sure, dope was bad, and some of it, that stuff they made with household cleaners, for example, was real bad—everybody could agree on that, but the ferocity of Candy’s conviction, the sharpness of her tone (These people are the very dredges, the open sewage of our modern society.) made you feel downright sorry for the druggies. Addiction, the pharmacist said, was an illness, after all.
In this way, Candy was deft at achieving but often with the opposite of her intended effect.
Most everybody figured Candy was just doing her best to make a name for herself, to break out as young people were always wanting to do. Black Creek was a conservative place, but the people were surprisingly sympathetic. They forgave one another, or at least pretended to, and maybe this was why, after Clemson, Candy had come back. Even if, despite all those research-heavy articles on the school’s mascot, she hadn’t been made teenage queen of the Black Creek universe (weirdo!). Even if she didn’t get along so well with her mother. Even if this and a million other things stood as good reasons for Candy to make a life elsewhere, maybe being away at Clemson had taught her that she wouldn’t be accepted—not even a little bit—anywhere but here.
Candy didn’t talk much about college, and in a way, it was like that time in Candy’s life wasn’t quite real, as if she could only exist in one place in her own particular and puzzling way.
Sue figured that, at the very least, Candy was a homosexual, and Sue, being the caftan-wearing, patchouli-burning free spirit that she had carefully crafted herself into being, spent a lot of time reassuring Candy that she wouldn’t have a problem, she wouldn’t say a word if Candy wanted to, someday, say, bring over another little dove.
Candy didn’t answer one way or another except to say, Gawd! in such a way that made her seem somewhere near a quarter of her age, which was probably accurate in emotion if not intellect.
Sue remained convinced that homosexuality wasn’t just one of Candy’s problems but was, of course, the very crux of all of Candy’s less than desirable traits—her irritations and her tantrums, what Sue referred to as “mood storms.” Sue had a lot of interesting phrases. All would be revealed when Candy acknowledged her primal self as Sue had done during the post-intermission session of a Pink Floyd tribute concert.
With all this thought about cores of the self and girlfriends, Sue could not have been more shocked—and, admittedly, relieved—to hear, one morning, the deep notes of a man’s voice coming from behind Candy’s closed door. Sue’s authentic primal self was actually far more conservative than she’d like to admit. So happy was Sue that she fell back in bed and back to sleep as if Candy’s newfound and surprisingly conventional love life was a kind of lullaby, a bedtime story that, like Candy, had been constructed for the sole purpose of relaxing and comforting Sue herself.
Little did Sue know, about this or, according to Candy, anything else. This was not the first time Candy had been with Officer Marty. The first time had taken place in Candy’s office, after hours, after The Airhead had left with a stack of grammar handbooks Candy had loaned her with relevant lessons flagged by yellow sticky notes. Yes, the first time with Marty was in the office of The Record, and some—those with a limited understanding of Candy-like individuals—would be surprised to know that Candy had been the initiator, that she’d been the one to grab Officer Marty by his meaty shoulders and pin him down across her desk, her face sweating and flashing nothing but irritation when Marty’s hand inadvertently sent her cup of red pencils tumbling to the carpet.
Those first few kids who’d said, Weirdo—they would understand. They wouldn’t have a problem imagining the action Candy could take.
And maybe little did Sue know, but little would she have been surprised if made privy to these juicy details because her daughter might have been anti-social and a bit, you might say, of a loner, but Candy was never timid, and, in fact, once, when Sue had come at her with a leather-bound grooming kit, Candy had wrestled Sue to the ground and grabbed the tweezers and swore she’d shove a hole right through Sue’s eye.
She hadn’t gone that far, but still, Sue understood that within Candy rested a power made d
ark by the world and the people in it which Candy found to be a constant source of disappointment and frustration, boneless saps that they were.
Candy had those red pencils collected and back where they belonged, point down in the cup, before good old Officer Marty could zip his fly. My lands, Marty said, you’re something.
And Candy, who by that time, was back in her office chair, told Officer Marty that if he ever had any hopes of becoming sergeant, he should really make an effort to be more specific when communicating. Saying a person is something, she said, is as good as saying a person is nothing.
She stared at Marty. Is that what you mean?
And good old Officer Marty, poor soul, said exactly what he meant, which wasn’t much. I don’t know, he said, and it was then that one of those red pencils, sharpened to a fine point, flew like a dart beside the red gristle of Marty’s ear.
Candy was tough. That much was certain. And not in the moments leading up to that time or the weeks after did she ever believe she thought (and she certainly didn’t feel) anything remotely lovey-dovey (one of Sue’s favorite phrases) about Officer Marty. He was neither handsome nor charming with his hard, low paunch and his skinny legs and his typical tearful story—so trite, Candy could have finished his sentences—of his recent separation from his wife Deborah and what he feared would soon become a custody battle because what Candy didn’t know was that good old Officer Marty had a taste for some of the things he found in the pockets and the trunks of Black Creek’s less desirables. My boy, Marty said when he got talking about his son. My baby boy, Marty nearly moaned, and it was all Candy could do not to slap him.
But there was something about Marty—the way he let Candy grab him by the shoulders and throw him down, for example, or the way he smiled when she threw the pencil—that Candy found attractive, that Candy found downright irresistible. If anyone had asked her about Marty, which absolutely no one did, Candy would have said that Officer Marty, like The Airhead and like Sue, could stand to learn a thing or two including but not limited to the importance of specific language and the proper identification of a frog’s pancreas which was to the right of the gall bladder.
That morning, which really was the fourth time they’d been together, Candy was working at the frog with the heavy biology book splayed out across the vanity. She was, in fact, using the very same tweezers that she’d promised to send through to the nut she said Sue had for a brain. See there, Candy said. There is the small intestine.
Candy spoke, like always, with authority, but the truth was she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure where the stomach ended and the small intestine began. The picture in the book didn’t look like real life, and anyway, Candy was having a hard time concentrating.
Behind her, Marty was waking up.
Something about this, their fourth time together, had been different, and even though Candy kept picking at the frog that she’d trapped in the tangled coil of the water hose and then suffocated in a Mason jar, she was, in her mind, making a list of things that weren’t the same.
Officer Marty, number one, had rolled Candy over—rather clumsily but ultimately successfully and with some force—so that he was on top. This was a definite difference.
Difference number two, they’d been in an actual bed instead of across her desk or in the back of his patrol car.
Number three, Officer Marty had either lost weight or put on some muscle in his thighs. He had a more balanced feel to him, and Candy kept glancing up from the dead frog to the reflection of Officer Marty in her vanity mirror.
He was awake now. He’d pushed on his glasses, and he was looking at his phone, and before Candy could catch herself, she said, Is it her?
Marty blinked, which for him, sometimes seemed more like a twitch, a kind of compulsive squinting that, like his pathetic “my boy” refrain, bothered Candy immensely. Is it who?
Deborah, Candy said. On the phone?
Marty looked back at the phone like he needed Candy to tell him what it was he held and what he was supposed to do with it. His chin tripled when he tucked it so, and Candy scratched the part about him dropping a few pounds. When he shook his head, the chins quivered. It’s about a girl, he said. They found one. Down in the creek. Dead.
Candy watched him in the mirror, and for a minute, neither one of them moved. They might have been two figures in a bizarre portrait, shirtless fat Marty in bed with his phone and Candy with her splayed frog and still in her bath robe. It would have been just the sort of art, full of reflection and symbol and secret emotion, that Candy would have hated no matter how hard her teachers would have tried to get her to see what it was that brought these two together or, conversely, what kept them apart and what ultimately their experience said about the rest of us.
She’s got, the teachers had often said about Candy, so much potential.
Then Candy moved. Candy whirled around on the silly backless vanity stool and said, What girl? You didn’t tell me about any girl.
Marty’s whole body was squinched down on itself—his eyes, his neck, his shoulders. Some people don’t like talking about work.
Some people aren’t me.
Marty looked at her. He took a breath and let it out his nose, which rattled. Then he pushed off the covers, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and reached for his pants.
They found her in the creek, Marty said.
You said that.
She was dead.
You said that, too.
So I did tell you, Marty said. He stood up, zipped his pants, buckled his belt. Even if he had lost some weight, he was still fat. Or at least he looked fat from where Candy was on the stool.
We’re still trying to find the parents, Marty said. It’s hush-hush.
People have a right to know, Candy said.
Marty opened his mouth, and even though he was awake, he looked as slack as when he’d been sleeping with his face jammed against the pillow. He buttoned the last button on his shirt. Then he reached back to his pocket, and for a single absurd second, Candy thought he would take out his wallet. That he would take out his wallet and reach inside and give her money. It was a ridiculous thought. No sense to it. Marty was only checking to make sure he had everything, and when he saw that he did, he kissed Candy on the top of the head. He told her he’d see her soon.
What’s the girl’s name? Candy said, but Marty was gone.
Alone, Candy sat with her jaw hanging loose, a look she found maddening when she caught it in other people. In the window, a fly buzzed, drawn by the smell of the frog.
Candy had sensed a difference in Marty, and now she thought maybe the dead girl was it. Black Creek was a small town, the kind of town, Marty would say later, where kids didn’t die. Outside of the small-time drug busts, Marty’s job primarily consisted of speeding tickets and cat rescues. A dead girl in the creek wouldn’t be anything Marty was used to seeing, and it wasn’t the kind of thing Candy was used to writing about, but to Candy, every story was the same and constructed from a kind of formula. She’d put all the pieces together—the hook, the news, the backstory, and the future cast.
In the window, the fly buzzed, and Candy spun back around, and it was then that she’d realized that her robe had fallen open, that when she’d turned back toward Marty, not as a lover to a lover but as an editor to a cop, one of her breasts was bared.
The exposure was worse for being incomplete. If Candy had been without the robe at all, she might have said the revelation was of her own accord. But as it was, this small and loose sack, this evidence of human corporality, the inadvertent exposure of this breast let flow a rush of embarrassment and shame that, in Candy, quickly turned to anger and sometimes violence. When she stood up, the stupid stool crashed to the floor where Candy left it in her rush to reach for an old issue of The Record, which she took in her hand and made into a tube and thwacked so hard against the window that the glass, or something, cracked, and still, as Sue called out, as Sue yelled, Okay in there? the fly circled above Candy�
��s head looking for a place to land.
The girl’s name was Makeisha Toffer Powell. Candy managed to pull this information from a reluctant and surprisingly terse Officer Marty in addition to the following facts, which she wrote down in all caps in every other line of her reporter’s notebook: 15 YRS OLD, DROWNING (ACCID? SUI? MURD?), 127 QUINBY PLACE.
This last part, which meant that Candy and Makeisha were practically neighbors, came as a bit of a shock. Candy tried to think of girls she’d seen around the neighborhood, but she couldn’t remember anything specific. She’d never had much use for girls and after a certain age, didn’t really think of herself as one. In her mind, they were all different versions of Sue, bouncing figures with little else to consider but boys and brows and perfumes.
There were always girls roaming the streets, prowling the sidewalks like they were looking for something to eat or otherwise get into. But to Candy, they were all the same. She couldn’t tell one from the next.
That’s the grandmother’s house, Marty said about the place on Quinby and then he told her to go on, to get out of the office. He was going to lose his job, his pension if Candy didn’t watch out.
They were sitting at his desk, which was different than Candy’s desk in that it was out in the open of a large room full of other desks, a positioning that prohibited Candy from certain courses of action. Even in December, the place was hot with bodies and computers. Nobody was watching them, but Marty kept looking over his shoulder.
It’s your own shadow, Candy said, but she got up. She pulled her sweater out and over her chest. Are we on?
Marty pushed at his glasses. His eye twitched, and his head swiveled on his neck. I don’t know. I might have Roger.
Roger. The boy. My boy, as Marty would say if he were spinning his sad little tale.
You’ve gotta eat.
I don’t think so.
Fine.
Hey.
Candy was walking away from him now. She kept on like she didn’t hear.