Dis Mem Ber and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense

  Here’s my camera, Jill-y, now you take some of me right here on this rock.

  Know how it works? This button you press.

  Look through the little lens. Then you press the button.

  Don’t pretend to be dumb, you’re a fuckin smart little girl. Everybody says.

  Hey Jesus!—watch out.

  (The camera almost slips from my fingers into the creek, I am shaking so.)

  Rowan snatches the camera from me, cursing.

  Then seeing the sick scared look in my face, and laughing.

  Seeing how I am gagging, and choking. Coughing up a thin frothy-white liquid onto the front of my shirt as Rowan Billiet shakes his head and laughs.

  What had it been, in the creek?—they are asking me.

  What had Rowan Billiet brought me to see, and to take pictures of.

  Something that had drowned? Or been killed?—shot?

  Carcass of a dog? A deer? A sheep?

  In my life there are things not-named. If I shut my eyes I can see them clearly and yet they are not-named.

  Waiting patiently for me to speak. Not police officers (I have been told) but social workers from Beechum County Family and Children’s Services who are questioning me with my parents’ approval (I have been told). I can feel how they pity me for it is easy to believe that I am slow-witted or so handicapped by shyness or by what has happened that it comes to the same thing as being slow-witted.

  Overhearing one of them say to the others in a lowered voice Maybe she just doesn’t know. Maybe she never saw a thing but just imagined it. Maybe we are giving her ideas by asking these questions….

  2.

  Get a kick out of it.

  More than once he’d said. Many times he’d said.

  You’ll get a kick out of it, Jill-y.

  Winking at me like there’s a joke between us. (What is the joke between us?)

  But a kick is not a nice thing. You do not want to be kicked.

  Or does kick mean that you will be doing the kicking?

  But it is only a single kick. That is strange, I am thinking.

  And years later, I still don’t know. Why would you think that a kick is a good thing?

  Thought you’d get a kick out of it, Jill-y.

  Don’t pretend you didn’t. You did.

  Bet you’d like to use my stained-steel Jap knife wouldn’t you.

  Sure you would.

  Next time, maybe you will.

  Maybe a live thing. Hear him squeal.

  Up at the road, at the sky-blue car I am still feeling shaky. My knees are weak. There’s a buzzing in my head. The bad smell in my nostrils. Rowan scolds me if I’m gonna be puking in his car he don’t want me in his car, I can walk back home.

  Sounding disgusted with me but then he relents. Winks and laughs and says it’s O.K. ‘cause I’m just a girl and can’t help it.

  Feeling kind of sick and dazed but excited too. What I have seen has not entirely registered. It is easy to not-see it, to shut my eyes tight and wish all the ugliness away.

  Thinking how there is this secret Rowan Billiet shared with me that makes me special even if I can’t boast of it to my friends and girl cousins and no one will ever know.

  Jill-y! You’ll get a kick out of these.

  In the glove compartment of the sky-blue Chevy smelling of kerosene and cigarette smoke are magazines Rowan Billiet keeps hidden he says except for special passengers.

  Pulp-paper magazines Rowan Billiet shows me. Given to him by a friend (in Port Oriskany) he hopes I will meet someday. A friend who is a colonel (I think this is what Rowan says) who wants to meet me.

  Why’d anybody want to meet me. This makes me laugh, it is so silly and improbable and scary.

  Why’d any grown-up man like a “colonel” want to meet an eleven-year-old girl!

  ’Cause I told him about you, Jill-y. ‘Cause I said you’re my favorite niece and guess what the Colonel says?—he has no fuckin niece at all.

  Rowan turns the magazine pages slowly. Wrinkled pages he smooths out on the car seat between us. Police Files, True Detective, True Confessions, Argosy of Fear, FBI’s Most Wanted. Rowan’s lower lip is caught in his small yellowish teeth. Rowan’s shiny-glass eyes are fixed on me as I stare blinking at the faces in the magazines, the bodies in the magazines, of a kind I have never seen in the magazines that come into our house or on TV. These are bruised and bloodied faces with shut eyes. These are bodies from which clothes have been removed or torn. Disfigured and deformed and mutilated bodies but it is clear that they are female bodies to which something terrible has been done.

  Some girls are bad, Jill-y. They’re “jail bait”—they “ask for trouble.”

  If a girl “asks for trouble”—y’know, she’s gonna get it!

  Did you ever see anything like this, Jill-y?

  If I could speak I would tell him no.

  Y’think you will ever look like her, Jill-y? When you’re all growed up?

  If I could speak I would tell him no.

  She’s biggern top than Irene, ain’t she? But Irene has a nice ass not fat at all.

  I don’t like fat females. There’s something disgusting about a fat ass when they sit on it, and it kind of spreads.

  It’s too bad what was done to this one, eh? Know what that’s called?—where the knife cut her?

  That’s called a nipple, Jill-y.

  You got them, too. Just little ones.

  When you get older they get bigger. A lot bigger.

  And if somebody pinches them—like this—they get hard.

  Like Rowan is just playing, teasing. I pretend to think this. Pushing his hands away from my chest, giggling though his pinches hurt.

  My eyes are aching at the corners and flooding with moisture so that I can’t see what is on the page that Rowan has turned to.

  Black Dahlia, they called her. Dirty girl got what she deserved.

  Kind of cross-eyed ain’t she? Slut.

  Rowan’s fingers gripping my hand. Rowan’s forefinger and thumb gripping my wrist and tugging my hand toward him between his legs that are spread open at the knees.

  Like this, Jill-y. Don’t pretend to be dumb, you’re a fuckin smart girl, Jill-y.

  Rowan’s breath is coming quick and sharp as if he has been running.

  Rowan has removed the dark-tinted aviator glasses. His eyes are shiny like glass chips. His face is slick with sweat and the skin is a strange pale color like lard. His breath sounds as if it is hurting him.

  There is a cry Rowan makes that is the cry of a small wounded animal. His eyes roll white in his head and a thread of saliva drops from his mouth.

  Afterward Rowan says, If you ever tell any of this, Jill-y, your mother will know you for a bad, bad girl. Your father will whip your sweet little ass.

  His bad luck, Rowan Billiet would say, he’d been born in Beechum County, New York. In L.A. he’d have had a chance—a career in popular music, movies, TV.

  In L.A. you could be discovered in a drugstore, for instance. In Strykersville you would wait forever and not one good thing would ever happen to you.

  He’d sent a glossy photo of himself to The Dick Clark Show identifying himself as a seventeen-year-old high school student with “dancing experience”—but he’d never heard back.

  That was his luck, Rowan said. Born in Beechum County where there’s a thousand times more cows than people.

  In defiance of his surroundings Rowan Billiet was always well dressed! Nothing like the boys and men we knew.

  Rowan Billiet was not a manual laborer, worker. He did not ever use his hands, he did not dirty his hands like other boys and men.

  Instead, Rowan Billiet favored fresh-laundered white shirts, short-sleeved in summer. Sometimes a polka-dot bow tie. A belt with a silver or brass buckle.

  His (short) legs in neat-ironed khakis or dark trousers. Not ever jeans or overalls—not for Rowan Billiet!

  His jobs were always changing. No sooner did Rowan begin a job than he bec
ame restless, bored.

  Drugstore clerk, shoe store salesman, ticket seller at the Starlite Drive-in. Busboy at Enzio’s Pizza. At the Ransomville volunteer firemen’s picnic in July Rowan Billiet was hired to call bingo numbers through a microphone in a smooth radio voice—Ladies and gentlemen, BINGO! These were mostly jobs you had to look nice for, nothing that would dirty Rowan’s hands or clothing or muss his hair combed in a slick little pompadour like Elvis Presley’s hair.

  Rowan liked to boast he’d quit before he was fired. There were rumors he’d “helped himself to” merchandise or loose cash but Rowan Billiet was never arrested so far as anyone knew and my mother insisted that he had never stolen a penny in his life, Rowan had too much dignity.

  At the time of Rowan’s death it would be reported in the paper that he had no record of any adult arrest only traffic tickets and a summons.

  Last job Rowan had was “private driver”—”chauffeur”—for a man named Cornel Steadman who lived in Strykersville. Mishearing his name people called Rowan’s employer the Colonel.

  Had to be the only chauffeur in Beechum County history, people said, sneering. For this position Rowan wore white shirt and bow tie, dark trousers, smart-looking hat with a dark green visor. Shiny black Cadillac Seville he drove for the Colonel who sat sometimes in the rear of the vehicle and sometimes in the front seat beside Rowan Billiet.

  On Main Street of Strykersville the men were seen in the Cadillac Seville, frequently. The Colonel staring straight ahead like George Washington crossing the Delaware River on Christmas Day 1776 (a reproduction of the painting hung in our school library) and beside him Rowan Billiet in chauffeur clothes and green-visor cap grinning and gripping the wheel tight.

  The long black chrome-glittering automobile was impressive to see from the sidewalk but there were those (like my father) who identified it as a not-new Caddie, had to be ten years old at least.

  The question would be put to me more than once: had Rowan Billiet ever driven me in the Cadillac? Had I ever ridden in the Cadillac with Rowan Billiet and Cornel Steadman? Had either man ever touched me?

  There was a special emphasis to this word—touched. So that you knew that it meant more than it seemed to mean and that any answer to such a question had to be given with care.

  No, I tell them.

  Shaking my head so there is no confusion—No.

  In fact I’d never glimpsed the Colonel. By the time Rowan Billiet knew the Colonel he’d forgotten me and he’d forgotten my mother who was his (step)-cousin he hadn’t time for any longer.

  Also I’d never glimpsed the shiny black Cadillac Seville. So it is surprising to me, I seem to remember the beautiful car so clearly.

  Shut my eyes and there it is and Rowan Billiet in the driver’s seat sitting straight in his white shirt and bow tie, in tinted aviator glasses and smiling at me like an arrow shot to my heart.

  Jill-y! Make sure the fuckin door is shut.

  Where did you drive with Rowan Billiet?

  What kinds of things did Rowan Billiet say to you?

  Did Rowan Billiet give you—gifts? Money?

  Did Rowan Billiet show you—pictures? Photographs?

  Did Rowan Billiet show you any of his knives?

  Dismember was a word we had never heard. No child was told that word.

  How old was I when I first heard the word dis mem ber?—it had to be after the day my father came to take me out of school. But when I try to remember it’s like a blackboard that has been smudged.

  Almost you can decipher the words or numerals beneath the smudge marks. You try and try until your eyes flood with tears from the strain but finally, you can’t.

  In the sky-blue Chevy he picks me up at the Greyhound bus station on Ferry Street, Strykersville, late on a rainy afternoon when the weather has changed. It is the day before Hallowe’en that would fall on a Friday that year.

  It is almost dark at 5:15 P.M. Heavy bruise-color rain clouds have been blowing overhead all day. I have told my mother that I am staying after school for basketball practice and I will catch the later (6 P.M.) bus home.

  I am older now, I am in seventh grade at Strykersville Middle School. I don’t remember how it has been arranged but it happens often in the fall of this year, Rowan Billiet picks me up at the bus station and drives me in his car out of town into the countryside when (it is believed by my mother) I am staying after school for activities.

  Just at the edge of town there’s a drive-in Dairy Queen where Rowan buys us milkshakes, sundaes, ice cream cones. And farther along State Highway 31 there’s a tavern called The Pines that smells of beer and cigarette smoke and stale pretzels and something faintly sour and dank beneath.

  It’s like entering a cave. From the gravel parking lot into the tavern where Rowan Billiet says to the bartender Hiya! Bud for me and Coke for my little niece.

  Rowan likes to empty his pockets on the bar. Jangling and jingly his spare change mixed with his car key.

  The good thing is, Rowan gives me coins for the jukebox.

  But today Rowan hasn’t stopped at the Dairy Queen or The Pines. He hasn’t stopped for a drink at the Iroquois Grill & Bowling Lanes where the proprietor is an old friend (Rowan says) of his father.

  Instead he has driven out of Beechum County and into Monroe County through hilly countryside, pastures and fields now broken and desiccated with the stumps of cornstalks.

  Turns into the Monroe Shopping Mall. This is a recently opened mall with more stores than you could imagine and a parking lot big as a football field.

  Rowan is driving slowly now. As he drives he talks to me. As he talks to me he taps his fingers on the steering wheel in a staccato rhythm. I am not certain what Rowan is telling me but I like it that he calls me Jill-y which is a name no one else calls me.

  His finger and thumb circling my wrist as no one else does.

  Young children in masks and costumes are being escorted by their mothers into the shopping mall. Must be there’s a Hallowe’en party tonight.

  It is Devil’s Night, when there is likely to be serious mischief committed by unsupervised teenagers.

  Rowan brakes his car in little surges like hiccups. Moving at less than five miles an hour through the almost-empty parking lot. Dims his headlights out of courtesy.

  Not all the costumed children are with adults, it seems. Some appear to be with older children, hands grasped by older sisters or brothers.

  Rowan brakes the car to a stop. Rowan has a surprise for me out of the glove compartment: a black satin half-mask to put on my face. And Rowan has a matching mask for himself.

  Put it on, Jill-y!

  The elastic catches in my hair as I adjust the mask on my face. The eye holes are not quite right for me to see through. The satin fabric is stiffer than you’d think.

  But I like the mask, I like wearing the mask, peering at my reflection in the rearview mirror Rowan has shifted for me to look at.

  Real sexy, Jill-y. Eh?

  Rowan’s black satin mask makes him look like the Devil in a cartoon drawing. Lower lip caught in his teeth in a wet sly grin.

  Driving through the parking lot, slow. Rowan calls it trolling.

  Like you troll for fish, if you are a fisherman.

  But it is a very ugly sight, when a fish has swallowed a hook. When a fisherman yanks the squirming fish out of the water, and tears the hook out of the fish’s bleeding mouth.

  The fish eyes bulge. The fish gills open and close desperate to breathe.

  There is a light chill rain. This is disappointing, on the night before Hallowe’en.

  Rowan says, Look there, Jill-y.

  Two girls my age. But I don’t know them. The shopping mall is miles from Strykersville and in another school district.

  The girls are only minimally dressed for Hallowe’en. The chubbier of the two is wearing a black crepe shawl in the design of a cobweb over black silky slacks like pajama bottoms. The other girl is wearing cheaply glamorous clothes including a “fox fu
r” boa and exaggerated makeup. Both girls have sequins sparkling in their hair and are wearing high-heeled shoes that cause them to walk awkwardly and bright red lipstick that makes their mouths glow unnaturally.

  The girls are not very pretty, I am thinking. I wonder why they are not wearing masks.

  Rowan whistles thinly through his teeth and I feel a twinge of jealousy—what’s so special about them?

  Rowan nudges me—Ask do they want a ride?

  Because it’s raining? It isn’t raining hard….

  Jill-y! I said ask them.

  This is not right. I shake my head no.

  Just lean out the window. Ask if they want a ride. Say your dad will drive them wherever they want to go….

  Your dad. These words in Rowan’s mouth are exciting to me.

  But I am afraid to do this. Or I am reluctant to do this. For I am thinking—This is not right. No.

  Yet I hate the girls, I think. They are older than I am, probably fourteen or fifteen. They are more mature than I am and sexy in Rowan’s eyes, I am sure.

  I feel a twinge of anger at the girls. Just as Rowan is about to drive away I lower the car window and call out in a hoarse happy voice—Hi! D’you want a ride?

  The girls turn to look at me. At the sky-blue Chevy, and Rowan Billiet behind the wheel half his face hidden by the black satin mask.

  It is scary to me, and it is exciting, to imagine what the girls are seeing when they look at us. When they look at me, in my black satin mask.

  It’s raining! Get in! My dad will drive you wherever you want to go….

  My voice is quavering. Even with the mask there is something in my face the girls can see, that causes them to shake their heads and smile nervously—No thanks!

  You sure? It’s no trouble—Rowan calls past my head.

  His voice is a friendly voice. A friendly-dad voice.

  But the girls are sure, they don’t want a ride in the sky-blue Chevy driven by the smiling man in the black satin half-mask.

  Their red-lipsticked lips are not smiling. Quickly they turn away in their high-heeled shoes.

  In a whisper Rowan curses me. Terrible things Rowan says to me, I can’t believe that I am hearing.

  You fucked up! You ugly little mutt! You scared them off.