“Fuck you, fucker,” he muttered quietly. He kicked the wall with a workboot, spraying plaster, and smashed the wall with a hand. “Fuuuuuck!” he bellowed, his voice going high at the end. He waited in the closet like a coward, worrying that Gruger would track the scream and decide to screw with him some more.
Nothing happened. No one was interested enough to see what was going on in the janitorial closet.
HE WAS SUPPOSED to have cleaned a week earlier, but Diondra had whined it was officially Christmas break, leave it. So the cafeteria trash was filled with old soda cans dripping syrup, sandwich wrappers covered in chicken salad, and moldy helpings of 1984’s final lunch special, a hamburger casserole with sweet tomato sauce. All of it rotten. He got a little bit of everything on his sweater and jeans, so in addition to ammonia and B.O. he smelled like old food. He couldn’t go to Diondra’s like this, he was an idiot to have planned it like this in the first place. He’d have to bike home, deal with his mom—that was a thirty-minute lecture right there—shower, and bike back over to her place. If his mom didn’t ground him. Screw it, he’d still leave. It was his body, his hair. His fucked-up faggoty black hair.
He mopped the floors, then bagged the trash in all the teachers’ rooms—his favorite chore because it sounded big but amounted to gathering bunches of crumpled paper, light as leaves. His final duty was to mop down the hall that connected the high school to the grade school (which had its own embarrassed student-janitor). The hallway was papered with loud notices about football and track and drama club on the high school side, and then slowly disintegrated into children’s territory, the walls covered with letters of the alphabet and book reports on George Washington. Bright-blue doors marked the grade-school entrance, but they were ceremonial; they didn’t even have locks. He mopped his way from Highschooland to Kiddieville and dropped the mop into the bucket, kicked the whole thing away from him. The bucket rolled smoothly across the concrete floor and hit the wall with a modest splash.
From kindergarten through eighth grade, he’d gone to Kinnakee Grade School; he had more connection with that side of the building than the high school side where he stood now, pieces of its refuse stuck to him.
He thought about opening the door, wandering through the silence on the other side, and then that’s what he was doing. Just saying hi to the old place. Ben heard the door shut behind him, and felt more relaxed. The walls here were lemon yellow, with more decorations outside each classroom. Kinnakee was small enough that each grade was just one class. The high school was different, twice as big because other towns funneled their teens in. But the grade school was always nice and cozy. On the wall, he spotted a smiley felt sunshine, Michelle D., Age 10, written along one side. And here was a drawing of a cat in a vest with buckle shoes—or maybe they were high heels—anyway it was smiling and handing a present to a mouse who was holding a birthday cake. Libby D., Grade 1. He looked but saw nothing from Debby, he wasn’t sure the kid could draw, come to think of it. She tried to help his mom bake cookies one time, breathing loudly and botching the recipe, then eating more of the dough than she cooked. Debby was not the kind of kid who had anything put up on the wall.
All along the hallway were rows of yellow bins where the students were allowed to keep personal items, each kid’s name written on masking tape on their bin. He looked in Libby’s and found a peppermint candy, partially sucked, and a paper clip. Debby’s had a brown lunchsack that stank of baloney; Michelle’s a pack of dried-up markers. He looked in a few others just for kicks, and realized how much more stuff they had. Sixty-four Crayola crayon box sets, battery-operated toy cars and dolls, thick reams of construction paper, key chains and sticker books and bags of candy. Sad. That’s what you get when you have more kids than you can take care of, he thought. It was what Diondra always said when he mentioned tight times at home: Well, your mom shouldn’t have had so many babies then. Diondra was an only child.
Ben started back toward the high school side, and caught himself scanning the fifth grade bins. There she was, the little girl Krissi with the crush on him. She’d written her name in bright green letters and drawn a daisy next to it. Cute. The girl was the definition of cute, like something on a cereal commercial—blond hair, blue eyes, and just well taken care of. Unlike his sisters, her jeans always fit and were clean and ironed; her shirts matched the color of her socks or barrettes or whatever. She didn’t have food-breath like Debby or scrapes all over her hands like Libby. Like all of them. Her fingernails were always painted bright pink, you could tell her mom did them for her. He bet her bin was filled with Strawberry Shortcake dolls and other toys that smelled good.
Even her name was right—Krissi Cates was just a naturally cool name. By high school, she’d be a cheerleader, that long blond hair down her back, and she’d probably forget she ever went crazy over this older boy named Ben. He’d be what then, twenty? Maybe drive in with Diondra from Wichita for a game and she’d look over mid-bounce and see him, break into a big white smile, do a little excited wave, and Diondra would do her hee-haw laugh and say, “Isn’t it enough that half the women in Wichita are in love with you, you gotta pick on poor little high school girls too?”
Ben might never have met Krissi—she was a grade above Michelle—but he got recruited one day at the beginning of the school year. Mrs. Nagel, who always liked him, grabbed Ben to help monitor the after-school art class. Just for the day. Her usual monitor hadn’t shown up. He’d been due back home, but knew his mom couldn’t get pissed at him helping with the little ones—she was always on him to help with the little ones at home—and mixing paint was a hell of a lot more inviting than hauling manure. Krissi was one of his kids, but she didn’t seem that interested in painting. She just moved the stuff around with her brush until her whole paper turned shit brown.
“You know what that looks like,” he’d said.
“Poop,” she said and started laughing.
She was flirty, even for a kid, you could tell she was born cute and just assumed people would like her. Well, he did. They talked between long flatlines of silence.
So where do you live?
Pour, slap, swipe. Dip the brush in the water and repeat.
Near Salina.
And you come all the way out here for school?
They haven’t finished my school yet. Next year, I’ll go near home.
That’s a long drive.
Squeak of a seat, slump of a shoulder.
Yup. I hate it. I have to wait hours after school for my dad to get me.
Well, art’s good.
I guess. I like ballet more, that’s what I do on weekends.
Ballet on weekends said a lot. She probably was one of those kids with a pool in the backyard, or if not a pool a trampoline. He thought about telling her they had cows at his house—see if she liked animals—but felt like he was already too eager with her. She was a kid, she should be the one trying to impress.
He volunteered the rest of that month in art, teasing Krissi about her bad drawings (what’s this supposed to be, a turtle?) and letting her go on about ballet (no, you big goof, it’s my dad’s BMW!). One day, gutsy girl, she snuck over to the high school side of the building and was waiting at his locker in jeans with sequin butterflies on the pocket and a pink shirt that poked out in gumdrop lumps where her breasts would be. No one was bothering her, except for one maternal girl who tried to mother her back to the right side of the building.
“I’m OK,” she told her, flipping her hair, and turned to Ben. “I just wanted to give you this.”
She handed him a note, folded into the shape of a triangle, with his name written in bubble letters on the front. Then she pranced away, half the size of most the kids around her, but not looking like she noticed.
Once I was in art class and met a boy named
Ben.
It was his heart I knew I would win.
He has red hair and really nice skin.
Are you “in”?
At the bott
om was a big L, with -onger -etter -ater written alongside it. He’d seen friends of friends with notes like these, but hardly ever got them himself. Last February, he got three valentines, one from the teacher because she had to, one from the nice girl who gave everybody one, and one from the urgent fat girl who always seemed on the edge of crying.
Diondra wrote him now sometimes, but the notes weren’t cute, they were dirty or angry, stuff she scrawled in detention. No girl had ever done a poem for him, and it was even cuter that she seemed to have no idea he was way too old for her. It was a love poem from a girl who had no idea about sex or making out. (Or did she? When did normal kids start making out?)
The next day she waited for him outside art class and asked him if he’d sit in the stairwell with her, and he said OK but just for a second, and they’d joked around for a whole hour on those shadowy stairs. At one point she grabbed his arm and leaned into him and he knew he should tell her not to, but it felt so sweet and not at all weird and just nice, not like Diondra’s sex-crazed scratching and yelling or his sisters’ poking and roughhousing, but sweet the way a girl should be. She wore lipgloss that smelled like bubblegum, and since Ben never had enough money for bubblegum—how fucked-up was that—it always made his mouth water.
So they’d gone on like that for the last few months, sitting in the stairwell, waiting for her dad. They never talked on the weekends, and sometimes she even forgot to wait for him, and he’d be standing in the stairwell like a dick holding a packet of warm Skittles he’d found cleaning the cafeteria. Krissi loved sweet things. His sisters were the same way, they scrounged for sugar like beetles; he came home one time to find Libby eating jelly straight out of the jar.
Diondra never knew about the thing with Krissi. When Diondra did come to school, she beat it straight home at 3:16 to watch her soaps and Donahue. (She usually did this while eating cake batter straight from the mixing bowl, what was it with girls and sugar?) And even if Diondra did know, there was nothing wrong going on. He was like a guidance counselor in a way. An older guy advising a girl on homework and high school. Maybe he should go into psychology, or be a teacher. His dad was five years older than his mom.
The only iffy thing with him and Krissi happened just before Christmas and wouldn’t happen again. They were sitting in the stairwell, sucking on green apple Jolly Ranchers and jostling each other and suddenly she was much closer than usual, a small nudge of nipple on his arm. The apple smell was hot on his neck, and she just clung there against him, not saying anything, just breathing, and he could feel her heartbeat like a kitten on his bicep and her fingers squirm up near his armpits and suddenly her lips were right there on his ear, that breath turning his ear wet, his gums twitching from the tartness of the candy, and then the lips were trailing down his cheek, sending chills down his arms and neither of them acknowledging what was going on and then her face was in front of his, and those little lips pushing against his, not really moving, and the two of them just staying there with identical beating hearts, her entire body now fitted between his legs and his hands kept rigidly down by his sides, gone all sweaty, and then a small moving of his lips, just a little opening and her tongue was there, sticky and lapping and them both tasting of green apple and his dick got so hard he thought it might explode in his pants and he put his hands on her waist and held her for a second and moved her off him and ran down the stairwell to the boy’s bathroom—yelling, sorry sorry behind him—and he made it into a stall just in time to jerk twice and come all over his hands.
Libby Day
NOW
So I was going to meet my brother, all grown up. After my beer with Lyle, I actually went home and looked at Barb Eichel’s copy of Your Prison Family: Get Past the Bars! After reading a few confusing chapters about the administration of the Florida State Penitentiary system, I flipped back through the foxed pages to the copyright: 1985. How not remotely useful. I worried about receiving more pointless bundles from Barb: pamphlets about defunct Alabama waterslide parks, brochures about smithereened Las Vegas hotels, warnings about the Y2K bug.
I ended up making Lyle handle all the arrangements. I told him I couldn’t get through to the right person, was overwhelmed by it all, but the truth was I just didn’t want to. I don’t have the stamina: press numbers, wait on hold, talk, wait on hold, then be real nice to some pissed-off woman with three kids and annual resolutions to go back to college, some woman just wiggling with the hope you’ll give her an excuse to pull the plug on you. She’s a bitch all right, but you can’t call her that or all of a sudden there you are, chutes-and-laddered back to the beginning. And that’s supposed to make you nicer when you phone back. Let Lyle deal with it.
Ben’s prison is right outside Kinnakee and was built in 1997 after another round of farm consolidations. Kinnakee is almost in the middle of Kansas, not so far from the Nebraska border, and it once claimed to be the geographic center of the forty-eight contiguous United States. The heart of America. It was a big deal back in the ’80s, when we were all patriotic. Other cities in Kansas made a grab for the title, but Kinnakeeans ignored them, stubbornly, proudly. It was the city’s only point of interest. The Chamber of Commerce sold posters and T-shirts with the town’s name cursived inside a heart. Every year Diane bought all us girls a new shirt, partly because we liked anything heart-shaped, and partly because Kinnakee is an old Indian word, which means Magical Little Woman. Diane always tried to get us to be feminists. My mom joked that she didn’t shave much and that was a start. I don’t remember her saying it but I remember Diane, broad and angry as she always was after the murders, smoking a cigarette in her trailer, drinking ice tea out of a plastic cup with her name written in log-cabin letters on the side, telling me the story.
Turns out we were wrong after all. Lebanon, Kansas, is the official center of the United States. Kinnakee was working from bad information.
I’D THOUGHT I’D have months before I got permission to see Ben, but it seems the Kinnakee Kansas State Penitentiary is quick with the visitor passes. (“It’s our belief that interaction with family and friends is a beneficial activity for inmates, helping them stay socialized and connected.”) Paperwork and bullshit and then I spent the few intervening days going over Lyle’s files, reading the transcript of Ben’s trial, which I’d never mustered enough courage to do.
It made me sweat. My testimony was a zigzag of confusing kid-memories (I think Ben brought a witch to the house and she killed us, I said, to which the prosecutor replied only, Mmmm, now let’s talk about what really happened”) and overly coached dialogue (I saw Ben as I was standing on the edge of my Mom’s room, he was threatening my Mom with our shotgun). As for Ben’s defense attorney, he might as well have wrapped me in tissue paper and set me on a feather bed, he was so delicate with me (Might you be a little confused about what you saw, Libby? Are you positive, positive it was your brother, Libby? Are you maybe telling us what you think we want to hear? To which I replied No Yes No.) By the end of the day, I answered I guess to every single question, my way of saying I was done.
Ben’s defense attorney had hammered at that bit of blood on Michelle’s bedspread, and the mysterious dress shoe that left a print in my family’s blood, but couldn’t come up with a convincing alternate theory. Maybe someone else had been there, but there were no footprints, no tire treads outside the house to prove it. The morning of January 3 brought a twenty-degree bump in the temperature, melting the snow and all its imprints to a springlike mush.
Besides my testimony, Ben had weighing against him: fingernail scratches across his face he couldn’t explain, a story about a bushy-haired man he initially claimed killed everyone—a story he quickly exchanged for the “out all night, don’t know nothing” defense—a large chunk of Michelle’s hair found on the floor of his room, and his general crazy demeanor that day. He’d dyed his hair black, which everyone deemed suspicious. He’d been spotted “sneaking” around school, several teachers testified. They wondered if he was perhaps trying t
o retrieve some of the animal remains that he’d kept in his locker (animal remains?) or if he was gathering other students’ personal items for a satanic mass. Later in the day he apparently went to some stoner hangout and bragged about his Devil sacrifices.
Ben didn’t help himself either: He had no alibi for the murders; he had a key to the house, which had not been broken into; he’d had a fight with my mother that morning. Also he was kind of a shit. As the prosecutors proclaimed that he was a Satan-worshiping killer, Ben responded by enthusiastically discussing the rituals of Devil worship, particular songs he liked that reminded him of the underworld, and the great power of Satanism. (It encourages you to do what feels good, because we are all basically animals.) At one point the prosecutor asked Ben to “stop playing with your hair and get serious, do you understand this is serious?”
“I understand you think it’s serious,” Ben replied.
It didn’t even sound like the Ben I remembered, the quiet, bundled brother of mine. Lyle had included a few news photos from the trial: Ben with his black hair in a ponytail (why didn’t his lawyers make him cut it?), wedged into a lopsided suit, always either smirking or completely affectless.
So Ben didn’t help himself, but the trial transcript made me blush. Then again, the whole thing left me feeling a little better. It wasn’t all my fault Ben was in jail (if he was truly innocent, if he truly was). No, it was a little bit of everybody’s fault.
A WEEK AFTER agreeing to meet Ben, I was meeting Ben. I was driving back toward my hometown, where I hadn’t been in at least twelve years, which had turned itself into a prison town without my permission. The whole thing was too quick, it gave me emotional bends. The only way I could get in the car was to keep reassuring myself I would not go into Kinnakee proper, and I would not go down that long dirt road that would take me home, no I would not. Not that it was my home anymore: Someone had bought the property years ago, razed the house immediately, crushing walls my mother had prettied with cheap flowery posters, smashing windows we’d breathed against while waiting to see who was coming down the drive, splintering the doorframe where my mom had penciled the growth of Ben and my sisters but been too tired to chart me (I had just one entry: Libby 3’2”).