F*ckface

by Leah Hampton

  I didn’t know any of this then, of course. The homicide detective had to tell me three times before I’d believe her, and I still wanted to read the report later on. In the moment, I figured murder. I figured whatever did that was still around, and maybe I was scared it wasn’t even a person or animal that had done it, but another thing entirely. I don’t know what else I thought it could have been, but I was alone out there with it.

  The branches swung him a little, and his body turned toward me. His face looked torn and wrong, and his guts were hanging out. Fire finally welled in my legs, and I spun and scrambled. I fumbled into the truck and locked the doors, breathing whoosh-whoosh like a woman giving birth. All I thought was get out, get out, go, but it seemed like whatever had brought that body was everywhere, and I couldn’t escape.

  I radioed again, giving details as best I could. Suzanne was on dispatch that day, and she could barely recognize my voice.

  I shut my eyes tight as they’d go, but then I was afraid of what might see me while I wasn’t looking. So I opened my eyes and looked straight ahead. The snow fell like a sheet. I yanked the truck into gear and drove in tight circles in the gravel turnaround beside the gate, just so I could be moving. If something jumped down or came for me, I could gun the accelerator and drive off. I did that for an hour, circling, keeping the body just on the edge of view, waiting for the thud of flesh or beast against my door, until backup got there and I didn’t have to be alone with him anymore. I wouldn’t get out of my truck until four deputies and a fire truck arrived.

  * * *

  Danielle heard about the teacher on the news before I got home. It was a big story, and the snowstorm kept me at the scene and the police station for a whole day. By the time I walked in the back door, she had worried herself into one of her headaches.

  I stood on the wet floor mat, and the first words out of my mouth, my first words to my wife were, “Who goes to that much trouble?”

  I still had my coat on, and the linoleum was covered in slush I’d tracked in. I unlaced my boots, kicked them off, and stood in my sock feet. The television in the living room was bouncing blue light off the kitchen countertops.

  “Pea,” Danielle said, “why in the world don’t you just leave it?”

  She reached out and tugged at my heavy coat sleeves, one at a time, back and forth. It rocked me off balance, and I tottered like a child.

  “We got options,” she said. “We could go someplace warm together.”

  “You think?” I leaned close to her and whispered, “You think all this death wouldn’t follow me?”

  Danielle tugged at me again, and I felt my throat tighten around a sob. Then she backed away and got herself some water and more headache pills, and I undressed alone in the kitchen.

  * * *

  They put me on the standard mandatory leave after the teacher. After every found body, a ranger has to stay off the parkway for a week or two, depending on how bad the situation is. The regional deputy director took one look at me and said I had to take a month. He told me to eat and take care of myself, to let Danielle cook me something nice.

  I had a few nightmares. In my dreams, the teacher’s body would jump down from the tree and hurl itself at me, guts cut open, screaming for me through mutilated cheeks, beating my windshield with his bloody hands. Those nights were bad, but I got bored during the day, so I finally went to the ranger station and asked for desk duty. Suzanne gave me a bunch of filing to do. I went through old personnel records, purchase orders, that kind of thing. Most of it we destroyed. Suzanne said they keep everything on the computer now, so we shredded piles of National Park Service history.

  They also required me to get counseling at a psych practice in West Asheville. It looked hippie-dippie, stuck in some creaky-floored Victorian house with pale green walls and wind chimes on the porch. I had to do three sessions, and I had to talk about the bodies.

  The first session, the therapist made me do a visualization exercise to calm myself after the Traumatic Event. That’s what he called it.

  “Just pay attention to your breathing,” the therapist told me. “Find a place where you’re completely comfortable.”

  I stretched out on the long tweed couch in his office, closed my eyes, and pictured my brother-in-law’s place down on the coast.

  I lay on his itchy sofa and felt the air passing in and out of my chest, the tweedy fabric digging little needles into my back through my cotton shirt. I crossed my arms over myself between my breasts and thought about the flatness of the coast, the warmth. I love my brother-in-law’s driveway, how long and open it is—treeless and sandy hot. I kept staring down that driveway until my toes curled, and I almost could see the ocean. The therapist’s sofa started to smell beach-musty instead of mold-musty, and I eased into a warm place. I could see what was coming. The emptiness in front of me was clear and straight, free of switchbacks, no fog. I felt Danielle beside me, the quiet between us easy and soft, like it used to be, not tense like it had been lately. Afterward I figured maybe the therapist knew what he was doing.

  In my last session, the therapist got all whispery and asked if I ever read Dante or if I knew about the boatman on the Styx. I said sure, but I didn’t understand the connection, except sometimes after it rains, the asphalt on the parkway can look black and winding like a river. And anyway, after what the teacher had done to himself, I didn’t want to carry his body or help him, not like I helped those other people I found.

  * * *

  When my mandatory leave was over, I went on rotation for a couple of days. I worried maybe I’d have the shakes or see shadows.

  I spent the first day at Waterrock watching Harleys thrum past and shake the spring buds. It seemed like there were thousands more visitors than usual, all louder than before. I watched tourists stop at the overlook and take pictures. Everyone moved strangely, spoke in echoes, as if their bodies were hollow.

  I spent the second day in the elk trail lot. I sat on my bumper with my arms crossed over the park patches on my chest. I tried to talk to folks, but I had cottonmouth. Somebody asked me for directions to a waterfall, and I couldn’t remember which milestone to send them to. So I climbed in the truck and watched everybody from there. Nothing connected. No flow or rhythm to the traffic, no breeze whirling a pattern in the leaves.

  The parkway had this gloss on it, like a plastic apple I couldn’t eat. I thought about Coralis all alone at Herman Falls, and I went home finished. There’s going to be more bodies like the teacher, and I don’t want that job.

  I went up to the ranger station this morning to put in my separation papers and talk to Suzanne one last time. Our station sits above five thousand feet, in among the spines of evergreens stripped bare by invasive adelgids. The station is the last place in three states to see any leaves in spring, and those skeletons poke out from the maples and poplars all year round. I used to love to end my shifts up there, with the hushed Blue Ridge undulating in every direction and birds calling down in lonesome coos.

  This morning the ranger station seemed like the worst place I could be. I didn’t want to be among dead trees or watch the blue valleys. I don’t want to be above all that, looking down into it.

  Suzanne seemed real sorry about it when I told her I was leaving, but I didn’t let her pat my hand this time. I held my arm up to keep her off me and told her me and Danielle were moving to the coast. That’ll be news to Danielle, but I’m pretty sure she’ll go along with the idea.

  Milestones and bodies. These ridgelines can’t hold them anymore. Coralis was right about people using parks for selfish reasons. We empty sorrow and trash out of ourselves into them, and now everything is harrowing up and spilling out from the boundary. I have to look away.

  TWITCHELL

  For the first half of Margie Pifer’s pottery lecture at the Arts Council picnic, Iva Jo Hocutt thought the Russian girl was asking for a tampon.

  “What?” Iva Jo whispered. “No. I don’t know.” She dodged the Russian girl�
��s mortified stare for the fifth time; Iva didn’t want Margie Pifer to think she wasn’t listening.

  The Russian girl was shaking her head and ignoring everyone but Iva Jo. On the little stage at the front of the white rental tent, Margie Pifer was lecturing about “the mountain craft tradition.” Iva Jo sat in the second row of folding chairs, in the very last seat. She was bored and hot and thirsty, and her body felt to her today like a series of lumps. She wore a loose pair of linen capri pants and a gray Arts Council T-shirt. Iva stuck her leg out a few inches, just beyond the shade of the tent. The sun cast a bright, hot shard of July onto her freckled shin.

  The tent was next to the soccer field, which was across the street from the elementary school where Iva Jo was the head office assistant. The whole complex occupied the left hand of the stippled body of Queensport, Tennessee, a valley town in the green Blue Ridge where Iva Jo spent her life. Houses dotted Queensport’s seventeen capillary-thin streets, and Main was its spine. The Arts Council picnic was held every summer in this northwestern outskirt; the buzzing tents and booths looked from above, from atop the mountains, like colorful beetles held in the town’s palm.

  The Russian girl was perched alone on a bench a few yards from the tent, directly in Iva’s line of sight. The bench occupied a shadowy patch under two willows.

  Margie Pifer held up a big, rustic, multicolored bowl. She was made almost entirely of angles, so the swooping arcs of the bowl’s edges looked sloppy in her hands.

  “Sanitary,” the Russian girl hissed again, her smooth, pale cheeks blushing livid.

  Iva Jo squinted.

  “There is blood,” the Russian girl mouthed. She bared her teeth. “You have sanitary?” Her h in the word “have” was wet and phlegmy.

  The mention of blood shook some compassion from Iva Jo, and she wondered briefly what she could do to help, but she didn’t have anything in her purse. Iva was forty-nine; she hadn’t had a period in months.

  Poor thing, thought Iva, remembering the embarrassments of teenage menstruation. A breeze thwopped the tent’s taut roof and wafted across the crowd. She ran a ring finger under each of her eyes—blue, bright, her best feature, she always thought—to wipe the sweat pooling there and focused on Margie Pifer and her bowl. Knowing Margie, there might be a quiz later.

  Finally the Russian girl pointed at Iva Jo’s feet with a rude thrust. The girl’s delicate, quivering finger compelled Iva to pick up a foot and look at her sandal.

  She was bleeding all over herself.

  Two scarlet rivulets were dribbling down Iva’s thick calf. Her green capris were soaked almost black, her white plastic chair an abattoir. She had no cramps, had at this moment no sense of herself emptying out. Iva Jo felt nothing now except piercing alarm radiating across her scalp.

  In the universal synchrony women find in such moments, Iva Jo and the Russian girl set about a tacit, determined series of looks, signals, movements. First, Iva looked up at the Russian girl in white horror and humiliation. The Russian girl snapped into dutiful action. She rooted around and found a crumpled paper tablecloth, recently blown hither from some other tent. The Russian girl snatched it up and signaled Iva with wide eyes. I am coming. Iva eyed back, Thank you; please hurry.

  The Russian girl bent over, crouched low, and weaved her way around the tent poles separating them, trying not to be seen. When she got to Iva Jo, the Russian girl bobbed her head and gave more eyes to tell her to stand up, that she would cover her with the tablecloth. She put cold fingers on Iva’s upper arm, which meant, I will walk behind you; we are going inside the school, across there, to the bathroom, together. Iva coded back with glances and tensed muscles that she needed her purse; someone would see the blood on her chair. The Russian girl shook her head and crouched even lower. Leave them; they don’t matter. Go.

  Iva Jo stood up slowly and made it four steps before she passed out cold.

  * * *

  When she got home from the hospital that night, she found that Margie Pifer had dropped off a casserole, a get-well card full of Bible verses, and the deformed bowl from her lecture.

  Hank patted Iva Jo’s shoulder as she eased herself onto the sofa.

  “You want a glass of tea or anything?” he said.

  She asked for a Pepsi, and her phone buzzed. She picked up.

  “I’m so sorry I missed your lecture,” she said, stroking her stomach. “Mm-hm. Oh, now, don’t worry, Margie. I feel fine.”

  She listened for a long minute. “Hank will, but I’m not hungry. I’m just sick of myself.”

  Iva listened again. Hank came in with a fizzing glass for Iva and a plate full of Margie’s casserole. He turned on ESPN and muted it, then picked at the casserole.

  “They cleaned me up, did an ultrasound. Said I need hormones. Mm-hm. No, they reckon that was the heat, made me pass out. But they don’t know. I don’t know.”

  She listened again, lips pursed. She fussed with the ties on her pajama bottoms. “No, Margie, I don’t want to do that. Because it’s surgery. Radical surgery.”

  Iva watched the baseball players on ESPN chew and spit and whomp their bats in the sparse grass. “Mm-hm. At least it’s summer. Time off to figure things out. All right now. God bless you, too, honey.”

  She hung up, drank the Pepsi, and tried to forget about the rock of fear in her gut.

  Iva went to bed early. She bled through the night, so much she had to get up three times. There was still no pain, only an elevated heart rate that roared in her ears like soft static. Finally she changed into a Depends she found in the guest bathroom, left over from an elderly aunt’s visit. Iva lay in bed and longed for her mother. She wept. She prayed for a granny witch to appear in the backyard, thin and spooky like a haint, and spare her whatever health crisis was coming, to cast a spell or make her a magic poultice of roots.

  Then nothing.

  The next day it was like the blood had never happened. The thick, extra-long maxi pad Iva Jo stuck in her panties stayed dry apart from a few rusty streaks, and by supper time she was in a half-bright mood. She was patting out a couple of hamburgers when Hank came home from work and touched her on the shoulder.

  “You all right today, girl?” he said, and sniffed the patty in her hands.

  “You want more A.1. than that?”

  Hank nodded and began to empty his pockets into a basket on top of the microwave. He ran his hands into the various hiding places of his long body, the folds of his work pants, his work shirt. There were pockets on every limb. He produced four pens, a thin-framed pair of glasses, then a wallet, two sets of keys, a tape measure, a handful of change. He patted his broad chest, rubbed his backside, and frowned. The lines on his tan cheeks were deep and spidery.

  “I left my—” he said, and held up two fingers. “Gonna run back out to the truck.”

  Iva Jo washed her hands, gathered dressings for the burgers, and opened a can of beans into a red pot on the stove. Her kitchen was dark but tidy. Theirs was a splanch-style house, and the kitchen and living room were on the sunken end. Iva’s kitchen windows were flush with the ground. When she looked out, she saw the world through the trunks of hedges.

  On her way past the microwave, she peeked into the basket and checked Hank’s pocket leftovers. She looked for stray bits of paper, business cards scribbled with private numbers. Realtors liked Hank. His inspections were always spot-on and filed fast, so he got sent to a lot of the country clubs and newer developments. Lady realtors flirted with Hank. Lady realtors, Iva had observed, all had wispy hair and even, snowy teeth.

  Hank returned with a thick binder, two clipboards, and a dozen spray roses wrapped in supermarket cellophane.

  “There now,” he said, passing the flowers to Iva, whose palms were still pink and clammy from handling the ground beef. “You’re gonna be just fine.”

  * * *

  At church the following Sunday, Pastor Rob said a special prayer for Iva Jo, which she appreciated. Hank wasn’t much for religion, so she carpooled wit
h Margie most weeks.

  The church was First Baptist—large, brick, and stalwart at the base of Queensport’s spine.

  “Lord, we’ve had so much cancer in our congregation,” said Mrs. Pickering after the service.

  Mrs. Pickering was ninety and diminishing. She got confused about things.

  “Iva doesn’t have cancer,” Margie said.

  They were in line for refreshments, inching down a long, white, crowded hallway stretching from the main church into its newly renovated hall. Margie was wearing a sleeveless dress covered in tiny zigzags that matched her spiky hair.

  “I had it in both my breasts,” Mrs. Pickering went on. She gripped her cane and leaned against the oak doorframe of the Sunday school hallway. “My sister, too. And my niece.”

  Iva Jo tried to be helpful. “Two of my cousins had it. One was cervical. And Hank’s brother’s in remission from liver cancer.” They moved up a few steps in line as the low murmur of the congregation swelled, subsided, then swelled again around them. The rhythm of chatty crowds. “It touches near about everybody.”

  Mrs. Pickering nodded. “All the local families, all the ones been here a good while.”

  Margie rolled her eyes. “Here we go,” she mouthed at Iva.

  “Makes you wonder. I’ve been wondering.” Mrs. Pickering shut her eyes tight, lifted her face to the fluorescent light above, and shook her head. “I’ve been wondering years.”

  “Well, it’s not Twitchell, if that’s where this is going again,” said Margie. “I’ve told you, Missus P, that’s the price we pay for having jobs. Industry.”

  “I never worked there,” said Mrs. Pickering. “Did you?”