The corsages unsettled Ben, they looked like organs, with their folds and their twists, their pink-and-purpleness. They reminded Ben of the stinking globs of meat sitting in his locker right now, a horrible gift Diondra had left him—surprise!—the girl parts of some animal, Diondra refusing to say where it came from. She hinted it was from a blood sacrifice she did with Trey; Ben assumed it was just leftover pieces from a Biology experiment. She liked to freak him out. When her class did baby-pig dissections, she brought him a curlicue tail, thought it was hilarious. It wasn’t, it was just nasty. He got up and went to the living room.
“You sorry sack of shit,” Trey called from the sofa, where he’d just lit a joint, not taking his eyes off the music video. “You don’t know about your dad? The fuck, dude.” Trey’s bare stomach was almost concave, but rippled, perfect, tan. The opposite of Ben’s soft white mouse-belly. Trey had balled the shirt Diondra gave him under his head as a pillow.
“Here, you broke-dick dog.” He handed Ben the joint, and Ben took a big pull off it, feeling the back of his head go numb. “Hey, Ben, how many babies does it take to paint a house?”
Annihilation.
There it was back, that word. Ben pictured barbarian hordes busting through the big stone fireplace, and swiping Trey’s head off with an axe, right in the middle of one of his fucking dead-baby jokes, the head rolling over across the dogshit and stopping next to one of Diondra’s black buckle shoes. And then maybe Diondra dies next. Fuck it all. Ben took another drag, his brain feeling minty, and gave it back to Trey. Diondra’s biggest dog, the white one, glided over to him and stared with no forgiveness in its eyes.
“Depends on how hard you throw them,” Trey said. “Why do you put a baby in a blender feet first?”
“I’m serious, Trey,” Diondra said, continuing a conversation Ben wasn’t privy to. “He thinks his dad doesn’t deal.”
“So you can see its reaction. Hey, Ben? You’re smoking your dad’s stuff, buddy,” Trey said, finally turning to look at him. “It’s crap. Potent, but crap. That’s why we know your dad has money. He overcharges, but no one else has any right now. Think he said he got it in Texas. He been to Texas lately?”
Runner had disappeared from Ben’s life after Patty gave him the boot. For all Ben knew he might have gone to Texas for a while. Hell, you can drive to Texas and back in a day if you drive hard, so why not?
“This is cashed,” Trey said, in a toke-choke voice. “Anyway, he owes me money, like everyone in this town. They love to make the bet, they never want to pay it off.”
“Hey, I didn’t even get any,” Diondra pouted. She turned away and started sifting through the cabinets—the basement den had a minikitchen, too, imagine that, needing a separate room for all your junk food—and then cracked open the fridge, got herself a beer, didn’t ask Ben if he wanted one. Ben saw the inside of that fridge, which had been packed with food the month before, and now just had beer and a big jar with one single pickle floating in it like a turd.
“You grab me a beer, Diondra?” he said, pissy.
She cocked her head at him, then handed him hers, went back to the fridge for another.
“So let’s go find Runner, and we’ll get some pot and get some money,” Diondra said, draping herself next to him on the chair. “And then we can get the hell out of Dodge.”
Ben looked at that blue eye, that bright blue eye—it seemed like Diondra was always looking at him sideways, he never saw both eyes at the same time—and for the first time he felt really bone scared. He couldn’t even drop out of school without his mom’s permission before he turned sixteen. Much less get a job at the brick plant or anything that made enough money for Diondra to not hate him, not sigh when he came home at night, and now that’s what he saw, not even that little apartment in Wichita, but some factory near the border, near Oklahoma, where the really cheap work was, where you worked sixteen hours a day, worked weekends, and Diondra would be with the baby and she’d hate it. She had no mothering instinct, she’d sleep right through the baby crying, she’d forget to feed it, she’d go out drinking with some guys she met—she always was meeting guys, at the mall or the gas station or the movies—and leave the kid there. What can happen to it, it’s a baby, it ain’t going nowhere! He could already hear it, him being the bad guy. The poor, idiot bad guy who can’t provide.
“Fine,” he said, thinking once they left the house, they’d lose track of the idea. He almost had. His brain was bundling itself up, getting woolly. He wanted to go home.
Trey immediately shot up, jingling his truck keys—I know where to find him—and suddenly they were out in the cold, tromping through the snow and ice, Diondra demanding Ben’s arm so she wouldn’t fall, Ben thinking, but what if she fell? What if she fell and died, or lost the baby? He’d heard girls at school saying if you ate a lemon a day you’d have a miscarriage, and had thought about sneaking lemon into Diondra’s diet Cokes and then realized that was wrong, to do it without her knowing, but what if she fell? But she didn’t, they were in Trey’s truck with the heater wushing on them, and Ben was in the backseat as always—it was half a backseat, really, only a kid could fit on it, so his knees were smashed sideways to his chest—and when he saw a shriveled pinky of a fry on the seat next to him he popped it in his mouth and instead of looking to see if anyone saw, he just looked for more, which meant he was very stoned and very hungry.
Libby Day
NOW
Back in grade school, my shrinks tried to channel my viciousness into a constructive outlet, so I cut things with scissors. Heavy, cheap fabrics Diane bought by the bolt. I sliced through them with old metal shears going up and down: hateyouhateyouhateyou. The soft growl of the fabric as I sliced it apart, and that perfect last moment, when your thumb is getting sore and your shoulders hurt from hunching and cut, cut, cut … free, the fabric now swaying in two pieces in your hands, a curtain parted. And then what? That’s how I felt now, like I’d been sawing away at something and come to the end and here I was by myself again, in my small house with no job, no family, and I was holding two ends of fabric and didn’t know what to do next.
Ben was lying. I didn’t want this to be true but it was undeniable. Why lie about a silly high school girlfriend? My thoughts chased themselves like birds trapped in an attic. Maybe Ben was telling the truth, and the note from Diondra really wasn’t to him, it was just part of the haphazard flotsam that went with a houseful of school kids. Hell, Michelle could have pulled it out of the trash after some senior boy tossed it, a useful bit of garbage for her ongoing petty blackmail.
Or maybe Ben knew Diondra, loved Diondra, and was trying to keep it a secret because Diondra was dead.
He’d killed her the same night he killed our family, part of his satanic sacrifices, buried her somewhere out there in that big, flat Kansas farm country. The Ben that frightened me was back in my head: I could picture a campfire, liquor sloshing in a bottle, Diondra-from-the-yearbook, with her spiral curls bouncing as she laughed, eyes closed, or sang, her face orange in the fire and Ben standing behind her, gently raising a shovel, eyes on the crown of her head …
Where were the other cult kids, the rest of the pack of Satan worshipers? If there was a ring of pale, sloe-eyed teens who’d recruited Ben, where were they? By now I’d read every scrap of information from the trial. The police had never found anyone involved in Satan worship with Ben. All the wild-haired, pot-smoking Devil kids of Kinnakee morphed back to peachy country boys in the days after Ben’s arrest. How convenient for them. Two “habitual drug users” in their early twenties testified that Ben had shown up at some abandoned warehouse, a hangout place, on the day of the murders. They said he screeched like a demon when someone played a Christmas song. They claimed he told them he was going to make a sacrifice. They said he left with a guy named Trey Teepano, who supposedly mutilated cattle and worshiped the Devil. Teepano testified he only vaguely knew Ben. He had an alibi for the time of the killings: his dad, Greg Teepano, testified
Trey was at home with him in Wamego, more than sixty miles away.
So maybe Ben was crazy all by his lonesome. Or maybe he was innocent. Again the birds in the attic battered around. Crash thunk shatter. I had probably sat for hours on the couch, wondering what to do, being shiftless, when I heard the heavy footsteps of my mailman thump up my stairs. My mom always had us bake Christmas cookies for our mailman. But my mailman, or lady, changed every few weeks. No cookies.
I had three envelopes offering me credit cards, one bill that belonged to someone named Matt who lived on a street nowhere near me, and one envelope that looked like dirty laundry, it was so soft and wrinkled. Used. Someone else’s name and address had been blacked out with a magic marker, and mine written in the cramped space left below it. Mrs. Libby Day.
It was from Runner.
I went upstairs to read the letter, sitting on the edge of my bed. Then, as I always do when I get nervy, I smushed myself into a small space, in this case the spot between my bed and the bedside table, sitting on the floor with my back to the wall. I opened the dirty envelope and pulled out an unwholesome piece of women’s stationery, bordered with roses. My father’s handwriting swarmed across it: tiny, frenetic, pointy, like a hundred spiders had been splattered across the page.
Dear Libby,
Well, Libby, we sure find ourselves in a strange place after all these years. At leest I do. Never thought I’d be this old, and tired, and by myself. Got cancer. They say only a few months. All rite by me, Iv’e been here longer than I deserve any way. So I was exited to here from you. Look, I know I was never close with you. I was very young when we had you, and I was’nt the greatest dad, altho I tried to provide for you and be close with you when I was able. Your mother made it difficult. I was imature and she was even more. And then the murders were very hard on me. So there you go. I need to let you know—and please do’nt lechure me I shoold have done this before. I know I shoold have done this before. But between my gambling problems and I am an alcaholic, I have had truble facing my demons. I know the real killer of that night, and I know it was’nt Ben. I will tell the truth before I die. If you can send me some money, I woold be happy to visit you and tell you more. Five hundred bucks shoold work.
I look forward to hering from you.
Runner “Dad” Day
12 Donneran Rd.
Bert Nolan Home for Men
Lidgerwood, OK
PS Ask somone what the zip code is, I dont know.
I grabbed the thin neck of my table lamp and hurled the whole thing across the room, the lamp soaring three feet until its electrical cord stopped it short and it fell to the floor. I charged at it, yanked it from its socket, and threw it again. It hit the wall, the lampshade bumping off and rolling drunkenly across the floor, the cracked light-bulb jutting out the top like a broken tooth.
“Fuck. You.” I screamed. It was directed toward me as much as my dad. That, at this stage of my life, I was expecting Runner to act correctly was stupid to the point of outrageousness. The letter was just a big long palm stretching out over the miles, asking for a handout, working me as a mark. I’d pay that five hundred and never see Runner again, until I wanted more help or answers, and then he’d work me over another time. His daughter.
I was going down to Oklahoma. I kicked the wall twice, rattling the windows, and was going for a good third windup when the doorbell went off downstairs. I looked outside automatically, but from the second floor saw only the top of a sycamore tree and the dusky sky. I stood frozen, waiting for the visitor to go away, but the doorbell went again, five times in a row, the person on my porch knowing I was home, thanks to my tantrum.
I was dressed like my mom in the winter: big, formless sweatshirt, baggy cheap longjohns, thick itchy socks. I turned to the closet for a second and then decided I didn’t care as the doorbell went again.
My door has no window in it, so I couldn’t get a glimpse of the person. I put the chain on and opened the door a crack to see the back of a head, a mat of tangled tawny hair, and then Krissi Cates turned around to face me.
“Those old women over there are kinda rude,” she said, and then gave a showboaty wave, the kind I’d given them the week before, the broad, fuck-you wave. “I mean, hello’? anyone ever tell them it’s not polite to stare?”
I kept looking at her through the chain, feeling like a little old lady myself.
“I got your address from the—when you were at the club,” she said, bending down to reach my eye level. “I don’t actually have that money for you yet. Uh, but I was hoping to talk to you. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you that night. I drink way, way too much.” She said it without embarrassment, the way someone would say they have a wheat allergy. “Your place is really hard to find. And I actually haven’t been drinking. But I’ve just never been good at directions. Like, if I reach a fork in the road, and I can take a right or a left, I will choose whichever is wrong. Like, I should just listen to my gut and then do the opposite. But I don’t. I don’t know why that is.”
She kept talking like that, adding a sentence and then another, without asking to be let in, and that was probably why I decided to let her in.
She walked in respectfully, hands clasped, the way a well-brought up girl would, trying to find something to compliment in my run-down place, her eyes finally alighting on the box of lotions by the TV set.
“Oh, I’m a total lotion fiend too—I have a great pear-scented one I’m really into now, but have you tried udder cream? It’s what they used to put on dairy cows? Like on their udders? And it’s so smooth, you can get it at a drugstore.”
I shook my head loosely, and offered her coffee, even though I had only a few granules of instant left.
“Mmmmm, I hate to say it, but you have anything to drink? Long drive.”
We both pretended it was the long drive, like two hours in a car would make anyone need some liquor. I went to the kitchen and hoped a can of Sprite would appear in the back of the fridge.
“I have gin, but nothing to mix it with,” I called out.
“Oh, that’s OK,” she said, “Straight is good.”
I had no ice cubes either—I have trouble making myself fill the trays—so I poured us two glasses of room-temperature gin and returned to find her loitering near my lotion box. I bet she had a few of the mini-bottles jammed in her pockets right now. She was wearing a black pantsuit with a pale pink turtleneck underneath, a painfully aspirational look for a stripper. Let her keep the lotion.
I handed her the glass and noticed she’d painted her nails to match her turtleneck and then noticed her noticing my missing finger.
“Is that from … ?” she began, the first time I’d known her to trail off. I nodded.
“So?” I said, as nicely as I could. She took a breath and then settled herself down on the sofa, her gestures tea-party delicate. I sat down next to her, twining my legs around each other and then forcing them to untwine.
“I don’t even know how to say this,” she started, swallowing some gin.
“Just say it.”
“It’s just that, when I realized who you were … I mean, you came to my house that day.”
“I’ve never been to your house,” I said, confused. “I don’t even know where you live,” I said.
“No, not now, back then. The day your family was killed—you and your mom came to my house.”
“Mmmm,” I said, squinting my eyes, trying to think. That day hadn’t really been that big a deal—I knew Ben was in trouble, but not why or how deeply. My mom had protected us all from her growing panic. But that day. I could remember going with my mom and Diane to look for Ben. Ben was in trouble and so we went looking for Ben and I was sitting in the backseat alone, uncrowded and pleased with myself. I remember my face on fire from the salami Michelle fried. I remember visiting bustling houses, a birthday party my mom thought Ben might be at. Or something. I remember eating a donut. We never found Ben.
“Never mind,” Krissi interrupte
d. “I just—with everything that’s happened, I forgot. About you. Could I have a refill?” she held her glass out to me, briskly, as if a long time had lapsed with it empty. I filled it to the brim so she could keep her story going.
She took a sip, shivered. “Should we go somewhere?” she said.
“No, no, tell me what’s going on.”
“I lied to you,” she blurted.
“Which part?”
“Ben never molested me.”
“I didn’t think so,” I said, again trying to make it gentle.
“And he definitely didn’t molest any of the other girls.”
“No, everyone dropped their story but you.”
She shifted on the sofa, her eyes rolling back toward the right, and I could see her remembering her house, her life, way back when.
“The other stuff was true,” she said. “I was a pretty girl, and we had money and I was good in school, good at ballet … I always just think, just think if I hadn’t told that one stupid lie. That one goddam lie, if it just hadn’t come out of my mouth the first time, my life would be totally different. I’d be like a housewife, and have my own ballet studio or something.” She pulled a finger across her belly, where I knew her caesarian scar was.
“You have kids though, right?” I said.
“Sorta,” she replied and rolled her eyes. I didn’t follow up.
“So what happened? How did it start?” I asked. I couldn’t figure out the significance of Krissi’s lie, what it had done to us that day. But it felt big, relevant—ripply, to quote Lyle. If the police wanted to talk to Ben that day, because of what Krissi had said, that had meaning. It had to.