Dark Places 2

 

Libby Day

NOW

After my mother’s head was blown off, her body axed nearly in two, people in Kinnakee wondered whether she’d been a whore. At first they wondered, then they assumed, then it became a loose jingle of fact. Cars had been seen at the house at strange times of night, people said. She looked at men the way a whore would. In these situations, Vern Evelee always remarked that she should have sold her planter in ’83, as if that was proof she was prostituting herself.

Blame the victim, naturally. But the rumors turned so substantial: everyone had a friend who had a cousin who had another friend who’d fucked my mom. Everyone had some bit of proof: they told of a mole on the inside of her thigh, a scar on her right buttock. I don’t think the stories can be true, but like so much from my childhood, I can’t be sure. How much do you remember from when you were seven? Photos of my mother don’t reveal a wanton woman. As a teenage girl, hair shooting from her ponytail like fireworks, she was the definition of nice looking, the kind of person who reminds you of a neighbor or an old babysitter you always liked. By her twenties, with one or two or four kids clambering up her, the smile was bigger, but hassled, and she was always leaning away from one of us. I picture her as constantly under siege by her children. The sheer weight of us. By her thirties there weren’t many photos of her at all. In the few that exist, she’s smiling in an obedient fashion, one of those take-the-dang-photo smiles that will disappear with the camera flash. I haven’t looked at the photos in years. I used to paw at them obsessively, studying her clothes, her expression, whatever was in the background. Looking for clues: Whose hand is that on her shoulder? Where is she? What occasion is it? When I was still a teenager, I sealed them away, along with everything else.

Now I stood looking at the boxes as they slouched under my staircase, apologetic. I was gearing up to reacquaint myself with my family. I’d brought Michelle’s note to the Kill Club because I couldn’t bear to actually open those boxes, instead I’d reached into one cardboard corner where the tape was loose, and that’s the first thing I pulled out, a pathetic carnival game. If I was really going to take this on, if I was really going to think about the murders after all these careful years spent doing just the opposite, I needed to be able to look at basic household possessions without panicking: our old metal egg-beater that sounded like sleigh bells when you turned it fast enough, bent knives and forks that had been inside my family’s mouths, a coloring book or two with defined crayoned borders if it was Michelle’s, bored horizontal scrawls if it was mine. Look at them, let them just be objects.

Then decide what to sell.

To the Kill Creeps, the most desired items from the Day home are unavailable. The 10-gauge shotgun that killed my mom—her goose gun—is snug away in some evidence drawer, along with the axe from our toolshed. (That was another reason Ben got convicted: those weapons were from our house. Outside killers don’t arrive at a sleeping home with limp hands, just hoping to find convenient murder weapons.) Sometimes I tried to picture all that stuff—the axe, the gun, the bedsheets Michelle died on. Were all those bloody, smoky, sticky objects all together, conspiring in some big box? Had they been cleaned? If you opened the box, what would the smell be like? I remembered that close, rot-earth smell just hours after the murder—was it worse now, after so many years of decay?

I’d once been to Chicago, seen Lincoln’s death artifacts in a museum: thatches of his hair; bullet fragments; the skinny spindle bed he’d died on, the mattress still slouched in the middle like it knew to preserve his last imprint. I ended up running to the bathroom, pressing my face against the cold stall door to keep from swooning. What would the Day death house look like, if we reunited all its relics, and who would come to see it? How many bundles of my mother’s blood-stuck hair would be in the display cabinet? What happened to the walls, smeared with those hateful words, when our house was torn down? Could we gather a bouquet of frozen reeds where I’d crouched for so many hours? Or exhibit the end of my frostbitten finger? My three gone toes?

I turned away from the boxes—not up to the challenge—and sat down at a desk that served as my dining room table. The mail had brought me a package of random, crazy-person offerings from Barb Eichel. A videotape, circa 1984, titled Threat to Innocence: Satanism in America; a paperclipped packet of newspaper stories about the murders; a few Polaroids of Barb standing outside the courthouse where Ben’s trial was being held; a dog-eared manual entitled Your Prison Family: Get Past the Bars!

I removed the paperclip from the packet and put it in my paperclip cup in the kitchen (no one should ever buy paperclips, pens— any of those free-range office supplies). Then I popped the videotape into my very old VHS player. Click, whir, groan. Images of pentagrams and goat-men, of screaming rock bands and dead people flashed on the screen. A man with a beautiful, hairsprayed mullet was walking along a graffiti’d wall, explaining that “This video will help you identify Satanists and even watch for signs that those you love most may be flirting with this very real danger.” He interviewed preachers, cops, and some “actual Satanists.” The two most powerful Satanists had tire-streak eyeliner and black robes and pentagrams around their necks, but they were sitting in their living room, on a cheap velveteen couch, and you could just see into the kitchen on the right, where a yellow refrigerator hummed on a cheery linoleum floor. I could picture them after the interview, rummaging through the fridge for tuna salad and a Coke, their capes getting in the way. I turned off the video right about when the host was warning parents to scour their children’s rooms for He-Man action figures and Ouija boards.

The clippings were just as useless, and I had no idea what Barb wanted me to do with the photos of her. I sat defeated. And lazy. I could have gone to the library to look things up properly. I could have set myself up with home Internet access three years ago, when I said I would. Neither seemed like an option right now—I was easily wearied—so I phoned Lyle. He picked up on the first ring.

“Heeyyyy, Libby,” he said. “I was going to call you. I really wanted to apologize for last week. You must have felt ganged-up on, and that wasn’t what was supposed to happen.” Nice speech.

“Yeah, it really sucked.”

“I guess I didn’t realize that all of us had our own theories, uh, but none of them included Ben being guilty. I didn’t think it through. And I didn’t realize. I didn’t take into account. Just. You know, this is real to you. I mean, I know that, we know that, but we don’t at the same time. We really just never will. I don’t think. Totally get that. You spend so much time discussing and debating it becomes … But. Well. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t want to like Lyle Wirth, as I’d already decided he was a prick. But I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music. I can’t do it, but I can applaud it in others.

“Well,” I said.

“There are definitely members who’d still like to acquire any, you know, mementos you want to sell. If that’s why you’re calling.”

“Oh, no. I just wondered. I have been thinking a lot about the case.” I might as well have said dot dot dot aloud.

WE MET AT a bar not far away from me, a place called Sarah’s, which always struck me as a weird name for a bar, but it was a mellow enough place, with a good amount of room. I don’t like people up on me. Lyle was already seated, but he stood up as I came in, and bent down to hug me, the action causing much twisting and collapsing of his tall body. The side of his glasses poked my cheek. He was wearing another ’80s-style jacket—this one denim, covered with slogan buttons. Don’t drink and drive, practice random kindness, rock the vote. He jangled as he sat back down. Lyle was about a decade younger than me, I guessed, and I couldn’t figure if his look was intentionally ironic-retro or just goofy.

He started to apologize again, but I didn’t want any more. I was full up, thanks.

“Look, I’m not even saying I’m sold on the idea that Ben is innocent, or that I made any mistakes in my testimony.”

He opened his mouth to say something, then snapped it back shut.

“But if I were to look into it more, is that something the club would be able to help finance? Pay for my time, in a way.”

“Wow, Libby, it’s great news that you’re even interested in looking into this,” Lyle said. I hated this kid’s tone, like he didn’t realize he was talking to someone with seniority. He was the type who, when the class was over and kids were tapping toes and the teacher asked, “Any more questions?” actually had more questions.

“I mean, the thing is, we all have theories about this case, but so many more doors would open for you than for anyone else,” Lyle said, his leg jittering under the table. “I mean, people actually want to talk to you.”

“Right.” I pointed at the pitcher of beer Lyle had next to him, and he poured some into a plastic cup for me, mostly foam. Then he actually swiped his finger against his nose and put it in the beer, oil-flattened the foam, and poured more.

“So. What kind of compensation were you thinking?” He handed me the cup, and I set it in front of me, debating whether to drink it.

“I think it would have to be case by case,” I said, pretending I was just thinking of this for the first time. “Depending on how hard it was to find the person and what questions you’d want me to ask.”

“Well, I think we’d have a long list of people we’d want you to talk to. Do you really have no contact with Runner? It’s Runner that would be tops on most lists.”

Good old fucked-in-the-head Runner. He’d called me once in the past three years, mumbling crazily into the phone, crying in a wee-heee! shudder and asking me to wire him money. Nothing since. Hell, not much before either. He’d shown up sporadically at Ben’s trial, sometimes in an old tie and jacket, mostly in whatever he slept in, so drunk he listed. He was finally asked by Ben’s defense to stop coming. It looked bad.

Now it looked even worse, with everyone in the Kill Club saying they believed he was the murderer. He’d been in jail three times I knew of before the killings, but just podunk crap. Still, the guy always had gambling debts—Runner bet on everything—sports, dog races, bingo, the weather. And he owed my mom child support. Killing us all would be a good way to be quit of that obligation.

But I couldn’t picture Runner getting away with it, he wasn’t smart enough, and definitely not ambitious enough. He couldn’t even be a dad to his lone surviving child. He’d slunk around Kinnakee for a few years after the murders, sneaking away for months at a time, sending me duct-taped boxes from Idaho or Alabama or Winner, South Dakota: inside would be truck-stop figurines of little girls with big eyes holding umbrellas or kittens that were always broken by the time they reached me. I’d know he was back in town not because he came to visit me but because he’d light that stinky fire in the cabin up on the ridge. Diane would sing “Poor Judd Is Dead” when she saw him in town, face smudged with smoke. There was something both pitiful and frightening about him.

It was probably a blessing he chose to avoid me. When he’d come back to live with my mom and us, that last summer before the end, all he did was tease me. At first it was leering, got your nose sort of stuff—and then it was just mean. He came home from fishing one day, clomping through the house with his big wet waders, banging on the door to the bathroom when I was in the tub, just screwing with me. Come on, open up, I gotta surprise for you! He finally flung the door wide, his beer odor busting in with him. He had something bundled in his arms, and then he flung them wide, threw a live, two-foot catfish in the water with me. It was the pointlessness that frightened me. I tried to scrabble out of the tub, the fish’s slimy skin sliding over my flesh, its whiskered mouth gaping, prehistoric. I could have put my foot in that mouth and the fish would have slid all the way up, tight like a boot.

I flopped over the side of the tub, panting on the rug, Runner screaming at me to stop my damnbaby crying. Every single one of my kids is a scared-ass dumbshit.

We couldn’t clean ourselves for three days because Runner was too tired to kill the thing. I guess I get my laziness from him.

“I never know where Runner’s at. Last I heard, he was somewhere in Arkansas. But that was a year ago. At least.”

“Well, it might be a good idea to try to track him down. Some people would definitely want you to talk to him. Although I don’t think Runner did it,” Lyle said. “It maybe makes the most sense— debts, history of violence.”

“Craziness.”

“Craziness.” Lyle smiled pertly. “But, he doesn’t seem smart enough to pull that off. No offense.”

“None taken. So, then, what’s your theory?”

“I’m not quite ready to share that yet.” He patted a stack of file folders next to him. “I’ll let you read through the pertinent facts of the case first.”

“Oh for the love of Pete,” I said. Realizing, as my lips were pressed into the P, that it was my mother’s phrase. For the love of Pete, let’s skeedaddle, where are my ding dang keys?

“So if Ben’s really innocent, why doesn’t he try to get out?” I asked. My voice went high, urgent on this last part, a child’s whinny: but why can’t I have dessert? I realized I was stealthily hoping Ben was innocent, that he’d be returned to me, the Ben I knew, before I was afraid of him. I had allowed myself a dangerous glimpse of him out of prison, striding up to my house, hands in his pockets (another memory that came back, once I let myself start thinking again: Ben with his hands always burrowed deep in his pockets, perpetually abashed). Ben sitting at my dinner table, if I had a dinner table, happy, forgiving, no harm done. If he was innocent.

If ifs and buts were candies and nuts we’d all have a very Merry Christmas, I heard my aunt Diane boom in my head. Those words had been the bane of my childhood, a constant reminder that nothing turned out right, not just for me but for anyone, and that’s why someone had invented a saying like that. So we’d all know that we’d never have what we needed.

Because—remember, remember, remember, Baby Day—Ben was home that night. When I got out of bed to go to my mom’s room, I saw his closed door with the light under it. Murmuring from inside. He was there.

“Maybe you could go ask him, make that your first stop, go see Ben.”

Ben in prison. I’d spent the last twenty-odd years refusing to imagine the place. Now I pictured my brother in there, behind the wire, behind the concrete, down a gray slate hall, inside a cell. Did he have photos of the family anywhere? Would he even be allowed such a thing? I realized again I knew nothing about Ben’s life. I didn’t even know what a cell looked like aside from what I’d seen in the movies.

“No, not Ben. Not yet.”

“Is it a money thing? We’d pay you for that.”

“It’s a lot-of-things thing,” I grumbled.

“Okaaaaaaaay. You want to look into Runner then? Or … what?”

We sat silent. Neither of us knew what to do with our hands; we couldn’t keep eye contact. As a child, I was constantly being sent on playdates with other kids—the shrinks insisted I interact with cohorts. That’s what my meeting with Lyle was like: those first loose, horrible ten minutes, when the grown-ups have left, and neither kid knows what the other one wants, so you stand there, near the TV they’ve told you to keep off, fiddling with the antenna.

I picked through the complimentary bowl of peanuts in their shells, brittle and airy as beetle husks. I dropped a few in my beer to get the salt. I poked at them. They bobbed. My whole scheme seemed remarkably childish. Was I really going to go talk to people who might have killed my family? Was I really going to try to solve something? In any way but wishful thinking could I believe Ben was innocent? And if he was innocent, didn’t that make me the biggest bastard in history? I had that overwhelming feeling I get when I’m about to give up on a plan, that big rush of air when I realize that my stroke of genius has flaws, and I don’t have the brains or energy to fix them.

It wasn’t an option to go back to bed and forget the whole thing. I had rent coming up, and I’d need money for food soon. I could go on welfare, but that would mean figuring out how to go on welfare, and I’d probably sooner starve than deal with the paperwork.

“I’ll go talk to Ben,” I mumbled. “I should start there. But I’d need $300.”

I said it thinking I wouldn’t really get it, but Lyle reached into an old nylon wallet, held together with duct tape, and counted out $300. He didn’t look unhappy.

“Where you get all this money from, Lyle?”

He beefed up a bit at that, sat up straighter in his chair. “I’m treasurer of the Kill Club; I have a certain amount of discretionary funds. This is the project I choose to use them for.” Lyle’s tiny ears turned red, like angry embryos.

“You’re embezzling.” I suddenly liked him more.

*****

Ben Day

  JANUARY 2, 1985

  10:18 A.M.

It was an hour bike ride from the farm to Kinnakee proper. At least an hour, at a good pace when the cold wasn’t turning your lungs metal-red and blood wasn’t dripping down your cheek. Ben planned his work at the school for the times when it was most empty—like, he’d never go there on a Saturday because the wrestling team had the gym on Saturdays. It was just too lame holding a mop when all these blocky, muscled, loud guys were waddling around, spitting chaw on the floor you just cleaned and then looking at you, half guilty, half daring you to say something.

Today was Wednesday, but it was still Christmas break, so the place should be kind of quiet—well, the weight room was always busy, always making that sound like a thumping steel heart. But it was early. Early was always best. He usually went from eight to noon, mopped and straightened and shined like the fucking monkey he was, and got the hell out before anyone saw him. Sometimes Ben felt like a fairy-tale elf who’d creep in and leave everything spotless without anyone noticing. The kids here didn’t give a shit about keeping things clean: They’d toss a carton toward a trash can, the milk drooling all over the floor, and just shrug. They’d spill sloppy-joe meat on their cafeteria seat and just leave it there, hardening, for someone else to deal with. Ben did it, too, just because that’s what everyone did. He’d actually drop a glob of tuna sandwich on the floor and roll his eyes like it wasn’t worth dealing with, when he was the guy who’d be dealing with it in a few days. It was the stupidest thing, he was actually abusing himself.

So it sucked to deal with this shit at any point, and it was even worse to deal with it when other kids were around, trying to avoid seeing him. Today, though, he’d take his chances, go ahead and put in his shift. Diondra was driving into Salina for the morning to shop. The girl had at least twenty pairs of jeans, all of them looking the same to Ben, and she needed more, some special brand. She wore them baggy, rolled the cuffs tight at her ankle with those bulky socks peeking out. He always made sure he complimented the new jeans, and Diondra would then immediately say, but what about the sooooocks? It was a joke, but not really. Diondra wore only Ralph Lauren socks—they cost, like, $20 a pair, a fact that turned Ben’s stomach. She had an entire dresser filled with socks—argyle and polka-dotted and striped, all with the horseman at the top, midswing. Ben had done the math: must be $400 of socks in that drawer, sitting there like a bin of Florida fruits—worth probably half what his mom made in a month. Well, rich people need stuff to buy, and socks are probably as good as anything. Diondra was a strange one, not really preppy—she was too flashy and wild to fit in that crowd—but not entirely in the metal crowd, either, even though she blared Iron Maiden and loved leather and smoked tons of weed. Diondra wasn’t in any clique, she was just the New Girl. Everyone knew her but didn’t at the same time. She’d lived all over, a lot of it in Texas, and her standard line whenever she did anything you might want to frown on, was “That’s how they do it in Texas.” No matter what she did, it was OK, because that’s how they did it in Texas.

Before Diondra, Ben had just floated: he’d been a poor, quiet farm boy, who hung out with other farm kids in an unnoticed corner of the school. They weren’t dorky enough to be actually reviled; they were never picked on. They were the background noise of high school. To him, that was worse than being humiliated. Well, maybe not, there was this guy with big bifocals, a kid Ben knew since kindergarten who’d always been weird. The kid crapped his pants the first week of high school—the stories varied how: one had him dropping bundles of shit out his shorts while he climbed the rope in gym, another had him losing a load in homeroom, there were third and fourth and fifth versions. The main point was, he was forever branded Shitshorts. He kept his head down between classes, those moon-sized glasses aimed at the floor, and still some jock would slap him in the head, Hey Shitshorts! He’d just keep walking, his face in this grim smile, like he was pretending to be in on the joke. So yeah, there were worse things than being unnoticed, but Ben hadn’t liked it, didn’t want to be the same Nice, Quiet Red-headed Kid he’d been since first grade. Dickless and boring.

Big fucking thanks then to Diondra for claiming him, at least in private. She’d actually hit him with her car, that’s how they met. It was summer—orientation for freshmen and new kids. It was a crummy three hours, and after, as he was walking across the school parking lot, she’d plowed into him. Knocked him right up on her hood. She’d gotten out, screaming at him, What the fuck is fucking wrong with you? her breath smelling of wine cooler, the bottles clinking in the footwell of her CRX. When Ben apologized—he apologized to her—and Diondra realized he wasn’t going to get angry at her, she got real sweet, she offered to give him a ride home and instead they drove to the outside of town and parked and drank more wine coolers. Diondra said her name was Alexis, but after a little bit she told him she’d lied. It was Diondra. Ben told her she should never lie about a cool name like that and it made her happy and after a little bit longer Diondra said, “You know what, you have a really nice face,” and then a few seconds later, she said, “You wanna scam or what?” and then they were full-on making out, which wasn’t his first time, but was only his second. After an hour, Diondra had to go, but she said he was a great listener, it was really cool how great a listener he was. She didn’t have time to drive him home after all. She dropped him off right back where she’d hit him.

So they started dating. Ben didn’t really know her friends, and he didn’t ever hang out with her at school. Diondra darted in and out of the schoolweek like a hummingbird, sometimes she’d show up, sometimes not. It was enough to see her on the weekends, in their own space where school didn’t matter. Being with her had rubbed off on him, he was just more there.

By the time Ben pedaled into Kinnakee, a cluster of pickup trucks and beat-up sports cars sat in the school parking lot. So, basketball players as well as wrestlers. He knew who drove each car. He thought about ducking out, but Diondra wouldn’t be home for hours, and he didn’t have enough money to linger at the hamburger joint— the owner was red-faced crazy about kids hanging out there without buying something. Plus sitting by yourself at a diner during Christmas break was worse than actually working. Fuck his mom for being such a stress case. Diondra’s mom and dad didn’t care what she did— they were out of town half the time at their place in Texas. Even when Diondra was busted for missing two whole weeks of school last month, her mom had just laughed. When the cat’s away, huh, sweetie? At least try to do some homework.

The back entrance to the school was chained shut, so he had to go in through the locker rooms. The smell of flesh and footspray hit him as he entered. The overhead thunk of the basketball court and clank of the weight room reassured him that the locker room, at least, would be empty. Outside in the hallway, he heard a single long yell—Coooooper! Hold uppp!—echo against the marble floor like a battle cry. Tennis shoes slapped down the hall, a metal door banged open, and then everything was relatively quiet. Just gym and weight-room noise: thunk-thunk, clank, thunk.

The school’s athletes had this trust thing, a sign of teamwork, that they never put locks on their lockers. Instead they all tied thick shoestrings through the loops where a lock would go. At least twelve white strings hung on the lockers and Ben wavered as usual about looking inside one. What the hell did these guys need anyway? If you had school lockers for books, what would go in these gym bins? Were there deodorants or lotions, some kind of underclothes that he was missing? Did they all wear the same kind of jockstrap? Thunk-thunk, clank, thunk. One shoelace hung limply, unknotted, just a quick yank and the locker would open. Before he could talk himself out of it, he pulled off the lace and gently, quietly lifted the metal latch. Inside the locker was nothing of interest: some gym shorts crumpled at the bottom, a rolled-up sports magazine, a gym bag hanging loosely from a hook. The bag looked like it contained a few objects, so Ben leaned in and unzipped it.

“Hey!”

He turned around, the bag swaying wildly on the hook and falling to the bottom of the locker. Mr. Gruger, the wrestling coach, was standing with a newspaper in his hand, his rough, splotchy face twisted up.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing in that locker?”

“I, uh, it was open.”

“What?”

“It was, I saw it was open,” Ben said. He shut it as quietly as he could. Please fuckfuckfuck just not let any of the team come back in, Ben thought. He could picture all the angry faces aimed at him, the nicknames to come.

“It was open? Why were you in it?” Gruger let the question hang there, didn’t move, didn’t give any clue what he was going to do, what level of trouble this was. Ben tried just staring at the floor, waiting to be chastened.

“I said, why were you in that locker?” Gruger smacked the newspaper against his fat hand.

“I don’t know.”

The old man just kept standing there, Ben thinking all the while, just yell and get it done with.

“Were you going to take something?”

“No.”

“Then why were you in it?”

“I was just …” Ben trailed off again. “I thought I saw something.”

“You thought you saw something? What?”

Ben’s mind flashed on things forbidden: pets, drugs, titty magazines. He pictured firecrackers and he thought for a second he’d say the locker was on fire, be a hero.

“Uh, matches.”

“You thought you saw matches?” The blood in Gruger’s face had moved from his cheeks straight up to the flesh beneath his fuzzy crewcut.

“I wanted a cigarette.”

“You’re the janitor boy, right? Something Day?”

Gruger made the name sound silly, girlish. The coach’s eyes examined the cut on Ben’s forehead, then marched pointedly up to his hair.

“You dyed your hair.”

Ben stood under his thatch of black and felt himself being categorized and discarded, sectioned off into a group of losers, druggies, wimps, fags. He was sure he heard that word snarl into the coach’s mind—Gruger’s upper lip twitched.

“Get out of here. Go clean somewhere else. Don’t come back in here til we’re gone. You are not welcome here. You understand?”

Ben nodded.

“Why don’t you say it out loud, just so we’re clear.”

“I’m not welcome here,” Ben mumbled.

“Now go.” He said it like Ben was a boy, a five-year-old being sent back to his mother. Ben went.

Up the stairwell to the janitor’s dank closet, a droplet of sweat dripping down his back. Ben wasn’t breathing. He forgot to breathe when he was this angry. He got out the industrial-sized bucket and rattled it into the sink, ran hot water into it, poured in the piss-colored cleaning mixture, ammonia fumes burning his eyes. Then heaved it back into the wheelframe. He’d filled the bucket too heavy, it tipped as he tried to get it over the edge of the sink, sloshing a half-gallon of water down his front. His crotch and leg were nice and soaked. Looked like he wet himself, Janitor Boy Day. The jeans stuck to his thighs, turned rigid. He’d have three hours of shitty grunt work with a wet crotch and jeans like cardboard.

“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 bottom 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 to 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”).

I drove three hours into Kansas, rolling up and down the Flint Hills, then hitting the flatlands, signs inviting me to visit the Greyhound Hall of Fame, the Museum of Telephony, the Largest Ball of Twine. Again a burst of loyalty: I should go to them all, if only to smack ironic road-trippers. I finally turned off the highway, heading north and west and north and west on jigsaw back roads, the farm fields dots of green and yellow and brown, pastoral pointillism. I huddled over the wheel, flipping stations between weepy country tunes and Christian rock and fuzz. The struggling March sun managed to warm the car, blazed my grotesque red hairline. The warmth and the color made me think again of blood. In the passenger seat next to me was a single airplane bottle of vodka I planned to swallow when I got to the prison, a self-prescribed dose of numbness. It took an uncharacteristic amount of willpower not to gulp it on the drive, one hand on the wheel, throat tilted back.

Like a magic trick, just as I was thinking Getting close now, a tiny sign popped up on the wide, flat horizon. I knew exactly what it would say: Welcome to Kinnakee: Heart of America! in 1950s cursive. It did, and I could just make out a spray of bullet holes in the bottom left-hand corner, where Runner blasted it from his pickup truck decades before. Then I got closer and realized I was imagining the bullet holes. This was a tidy new sign, but with the same old script: Welcome to Kinnakee: Heart of America! Sticking with the lie, I liked it. Just as I passed the sign, another one arrived: Kinnakee Kansas State Penitentiary, next left. I followed the direction, driving west over land that was once the Evelee farm. Ha, serves you right, Evelees, I thought, but I couldn’t remember why the Evelees were bad. I just remembered they were.

I slowed to a crawl as I drove down this new road, far on the outer edge of town. Kinnakee had never been a prosperous place—it was mostly struggling farms and optimistic plywood mansions from a preposterously brief oil boom. Now it was worse. The prison business hadn’t saved the town. The street was lined with pawn shops and flimsy houses, barely a decade old and already sagging. Stunned children stood in the middle of grubby yards. Trash collected everywhere: food wrappers, drinking straws, cigarette butts. An entire to-go meal—Styrofoam box, plastic fork, Styrofoam cup—sat on a curb, abandoned by the eater. A scatter of ketchupy fries lay in the gutter nearby. Even the trees were miserable: scrawny, stunted, and stubbornly refusing to bud. At the end of the block, a young, dumpy couple sat in the cold on a Dairy Queen bench, staring out at the traffic, like they were watching TV.

On a nearby telephone pole flapped a grainy photocopy of an unsmiling teen, missing since October 2007. Two more blocks, and what I thought was a copy of the same poster turned out to be a new missing girl, vanished in June 2008. Both girls were unkempt, surly, which explained why they weren’t getting the Lisette Stephens treatment. I made a mental note to take a smiling, pretty photo of myself in case I ever disappeared.

A few more minutes, and the prison appeared within a big sunburnt clearing.

It was less imposing than I’d pictured, the few times I’d pictured it. It had a sprawling, suburban look to it, could be mistaken for some regional offices of a refrigeration company, maybe a telecommunications headquarters, except for the razor wire that curlicued around the walls. The looping wire reminded me of the phone cord that Ben and my mom always fought over toward the end, the one we were always tripping on. Debby was cremated with a little starburst scar on her wrist because of that goddang phone cord. I made myself cough loudly, just to hear something.

I rolled into the lot, the poured-tar surface wonderfully smooth after an hour of potholes. I parked and sat staring, my car crinkling from the drive. From just inside the walls came the murmur and shouts of men, taking their rec time. The vodka went down with a medicinal sting. I chewed a piece of hardened spearmint gum once, twice, then spit it into a sandwich wrapper, feeling my ears get booze-warmed. Then I reached under my sweater and undid my bra, feeling my breasts woosh down, big and dog-eared, to the background noise of murderers playing hoops. That’s one thing Lyle had advised me on, stuttering and careful with his words: You only get one chance to get through the metal detector. It’s not like at the airport—there’s no wand thing. So you should leave everything metal in your car. Um, including, um, with women, uh, the, I think is it underwire? In the bras. That would be, could be a problem.

Fine, then. I stuck the bra in my glove compartment and let my breasts roam free.

In the interior of the prison, the guards were well mannered, as if they’d seen many instructional videos on courtesy: yes ma’am, right this way ma’am. Their eye contact was without depth, my image bounced right back at me, hot-potato. Searches, questions, yes ma’am, and lots of waiting. Doors opened and shut, opened and shut, as I walked through a series of them, each shifting in size, like a metal Wonderland. The floors stank of bleach and the air smelled beefy and humid. Somewhere nearby must be the lunchroom. I suffered a nauseous wave of nostalgia, picturing us Day kids and our subsidized school meals: the bosomy, steamed women, yelling Free Lunch! toward the cash register as we came through with a dump of stroganoff and some room-temperature milk.

Ben had good timing, I thought: Kansas’s disappearing-reappearing death penalty was in moratorium when the murders happened (here I paused at my jarring new mental phrasing, “when the murders happened,” as opposed to “when Ben killed everyone”). He was sentenced to prison for life. But at least I didn’t get him killed. I now stood outside the smooth, submarine-metal door of the visitation room and then stood longer. “Nothing to it but to do it, nothing to it but to do it.” Diane’s mantra. I needed to stop thinking family thoughts. The guard with me, a stiff blond man who’d spared me small talk, made an after-you overture.

I swung the door open and shoved myself inside. Five booths sat in a row, one occupied by a heavyset Native Indian woman, talking to her inmate son. The woman’s black hair speared down her shoulders, violent-looking. She was muttering dully to the young guy, who nodded jerkily, the phone close to his ear, his eyes down.

I sat two booths away, and was just settling in, taking a breath, when Ben shot through the door, like a cat making a break for the outside. He was small, maybe 5’6”, and his hair had turned a dark rust. He wore it long, sweeping his shoulders, tucked girlishly behind his ears. With wire-rim glasses and an orange jumpsuit, he looked like a studious mechanic. The room was small, so he got to me in three steps, all the while smiling quietly. Beaming. He sat down, placed a hand on the glass, nodded at me to do the same. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t press my palm against his, moist against the window like ham. I smiled milkily at him instead and picked up the phone.

On the other side of the glass, he held the phone in his hand, cleared his throat, then looked down, started to say something, then stopped. I was left looking at the crown of his head for almost a minute. When he looked up, he was crying, two tears from both his eyes trickling down his face. He wiped them away with the back of a hand, then smiled, his lips wavering.

“God, you look just like Mom,” he said all at once, getting it out, and coughed, wiped more tears. “I didn’t know that.” His eyes flickered between my face and his hands. “Oh, God, Libby, how are you?”

I cleared my own throat and said, “I guess I’m OK. I just thought it was time I came and saw you.” I do sort of look like Mom, I thought. I do. And then I thought, my big brother, and felt the same chesty pride I’d had as a kid. He looked so much the same, pale face, that Day knob of a nose. He hadn’t even grown much since the murders. Like we both got stunted that night. My big brother, and he was happy to see me. He knows how to play you, I warned myself. Then I set the thought aside.

“I’m glad, I’m glad,” Ben said, still looking at the side of his hand. “I’ve thought about you a lot over these years, been wondering about you. That’s what you do in here … think and wonder. Every once in a while someone’ll write me about you. But it’s not the same.”

“No,” I agreed. “Are they treating you OK?” I asked, stupidly, my eyes glazed, and suddenly I was crying and all I wanted to say was sorryI’msorryI’msosorry. Instead I said nothing, looking only at a constellation of acne scattered around one corner of Ben’s lips.

“I’m fine, Libby, Libby, look at me.” My eyes to his. “I’m fine. I really am. I got my high school degree in here, which is more than I ever prolly would have done outside, and I’m even partway to a college degree. English. I read fucking Shakespeare.” He made the guttural sound that he always tried to pass off for a laugh. “Forsooth, you dirty bugger.”

I didn’t know what the last part meant, but I smiled because he was waiting for me to smile.

“Man, Libby, I could just drink you in. You don’t know how good it is to see you. Shit, I’m sorry. You just look like Mom, do people tell you that all the time?”

“Who would tell me that? There’s no one. Runner’s gone, don’t know where, Diane and I don’t talk.” I wanted him to feel sorry for me, to float around in my big empty pool of pity. Here we were, the last of the Days. If he felt sorry for me, it would be harder to blame me. The tears kept coming and now I just let them. Two chairs down, the Indian woman was saying her good-byes, her weeping just as deep as her voice.

“Ya’all by yourself, huh? That’s no good. They should’ve took better care of you.”

“What are you, born again?” I blurted, my face wet. Ben frowned, not understanding. “Is that it? You forgiving me? You’re not supposed to be nice to me.” But I craved it, could feel the need for the relief, like setting down a hot plate.

“Nah, I’m not that nice,” he said. “I got a lot of anger for a lot of people, you’re just not one.”

“But,” I said, and gulped down a sob like a kid. “But my testimony. I think, I may, I don’t know, I don’t know …” It had to have been him, I warned myself again.

“Oh that.” He said, like it was a minor inconvenience, some snag in a summer vacation best forgotten. “You don’t read my letters, huh?”

I tried to explain with an inadequate shrug.

“Well, your testimony … It only surprised me that people believed you. It didn’t surprise me what you said. You were in a totally insane situation. And you always were a little liar.” He laughed again and I did too, quick matching laughs like we’d caught the same cough. “No, seriously, the fact that they believed you? They wanted me in here, I was going to be in here, that just proved it. Fucking little seven-year-old. Man, you were so small …” His eyes turned up to the right, daydreaming. Then he pulled himself back. “You know what I thought of the other day, I don’t know why. I thought of that goddam porcelain bunny, the one Mom made us put on the toilet.”

I shook my head, no clue what he was talking about.

“You don’t remember that, the little bunny? Because the toilet didn’t work right, if we used it twice in an hour it stopped flushing. So if one of us crapped when it wasn’t working, we were supposed to close the lid and put the bunny on top, so no one else would open the lid and see a toilet full of crap. Because you guys would scream. I can’t believe you don’t remember this. It was so stupid, it made me so mad. I was mad I had to share a bathroom with all of you, I was mad I lived in a house with one toilet that didn’t even work, I was mad about the bunny. The bunny,” he broke into his confined laugh, “I found the bunny, like, it humiliated me or something. Unmanned me. I took it very personally. Like Mom was supposed to find a car figurine or a gun figurine for me to use. Man, I would get so worked up about it. I’d stand there by the toilet and think, ‘I will not put that bunny down,’ and then I’d get ready to leave and I’d think, ‘Goddamit, I gotta put the bunny down or one of them’s gonna come in here and all the screaming—you guys were screamers, high, Eeeeeeeaaaahh!—and I don’t want to deal with that so fine here’s the goddam bunny on your goddam toilet!’” He laughed again, but the memory had cost him, his face was flushed and his nose was sweaty. “That’s the kind of stuff you think of in here. Weird stuff.”

I tried to find that bunny in my memory, tried to inventory the bathroom and the things in it, but I came out with nothing, a handful of water.

“Sorry, Libby, that’s a strange memory to throw at you.” I put one tip of my finger near the bottom of the glass window and said, “That’s fine.”

WE SAT IN silence for a bit, pretending to listen to noise that wasn’t there. We had just started but the visit was almost over. “Ben, can I ask you something?”

“I think so.” His face went blank, preparing.

“Don’t you want to get out of here?”

“Sure.”

“Why don’t you give the police your alibi for that night? There is no way you were sleeping in a barn.”

“I just don’t have a good alibi, Libby. I just don’t. It happens.”

“Because it was, like, zero degrees out. I remember.” I rubbed my half finger beneath the counter, wiggled my two toes on my right foot.

“I know, I know. You can’t imagine.” He turned his face away. “You can’t imagine how many weeks, years, I’ve spent in here wishing I’d done it all differently. Mom and Michelle and Debby might not be dead if I’d just … been a man. Not some dumb kid. Hiding in a barn, angry at Mommy.” A tear splashed onto the phone receiver, I thought I could hear it, bing! “I’m OK being punished for that night … I feel … OK.”

“But. I don’t understand. Why were you so … unhelpful with the police?”

Ben shrugged his shoulders, and again the face went death-mask.

“Oh God. I just. I was such an unconfident kid. I mean, I was fifteen, Libby. Fifteen. I didn’t know what it was to be a man. I mean, Runner sure wasn’t helpful. I was this kid no one paid much attention to one way or the other, and here all of a sudden, people were treating me like I scared them. I mean, presto chango, I was this big man.”

“A big man charged with murdering his family.”

“You want to call me a stupid fuck, Libby, please, go ahead. To me, it was simple: I said I didn’t do it, I knew I didn’t do it, and—I don’t know, defense mechanism?—I just didn’t take it as seriously as I should have. If I’d reacted the way everyone expected me to, I probably wouldn’t be here. At night I bawled into a pillow, but I played it tough when anyone could see me. It’s fucked up, believe me I know it. But you should never put a fifteen-year-old on a witness stand in a courtroom filled with a bunch of people he knows and expect a lot of tears. My thoughts were that of course I’d be acquitted, and then I’d be admired at school for being such a bad-ass. I mean, I daydreamed about that shit. I never ever thought I was in danger of … ending up like this.” He was crying now, wiped his cheek again. “Clearly, I’ve gotten over whether people see me cry.”

“We need to fix this,” I said, finally.

“It’s not going to be fixed, Libby, not unless they find who did it.”

“Well, you need some new lawyers, working on the case,” I reasoned. “All the stuff they can do with DNA now …” DNA to me was some sort of magical element, some glowing goo that was always getting people out of prison.

Ben laughed through closed lips, the way he did when we were kids, not letting you enjoy it.

“You sound like Runner,” he said. “About every two years I get a letter from him: DNA! We need to get some of that DNA. Like I have a lockerful of it and just don’t want to share. D-N-A!” he said again, doing Runner’s crazy-eyed head nod.

“You know where he is now?”

“Last letter was care of Bert Nolan’s Group Home for Men, somewhere in Oklahoma. He asked me to send him 500 bucks, so he could continue his research on my behalf. Whoever Bert Nolan is, he’s ruing the day he let goddam Runner into his home for men.” He scratched his arm, raising his sleeve just enough for me to see a tattoo of a woman’s name. It ended in -olly or -ally. I made sure he saw me notice.

“Ah this? Old flame. We started as penpals. I thought I loved her, thought I’d marry her, but turned out she didn’t really want to be stuck with a guy in prison for life. Wish she’d told me before I got the tat.”

“Must’ve hurt.”

“It didn’t tickle.”

“I meant the breakup.”

“Oh, that sucked too.”

The guard gave us the three-minute signal and Ben rolled his eyes: “Hard to decide what to say in three minutes. Two minutes you just start making plans for another visit. Five minutes you can finish your conversation. Three minutes?” He pushed out his lips, made a raspberry noise. “I really hope you come again, Libby. I forgot how homesick I was. You look just like her.”

*****

Patty Day

JANUARY 2, 1985

11:31 A.M.

She’d retreated to the bathroom after Len left, his livery smile still offering something unsavory, some sort of help she knew she didn’t want. The girls had flooded out of their bedroom as soon as they heard the door shut, and after a quick, whispery caucus outside the bathroom door, had decided to leave her alone and go back to the TV.

Patty was holding her greasy belly, her sweat turned cold. Her parents’ farm, gone. She felt the guilty twist of the stomach that had always made her such a good girl, the constant fear of disappointing her folks, please, please God, don’t let them find out. They had entrusted this place to her, and she had been found wanting. She pictured them up in the clouds of heaven, her dad’s arm around her mom as they looked down on her, shaking their heads, What in the world possessed you to do such a thing? Her mom’s favorite scold.

They’d have to move to an entirely different town. Kinnakee had no apartments, and they were going to have to cram into an apartment while she got a job in some office, if she could find one. She’d always felt sorry for people who lived in apartments, stuck listening to their neighbors belch and argue. Her legs puddled and suddenly Patty was sitting on the floor. She didn’t have enough energy to leave the farm, ever. She’d used the last of it up these past few years. Some mornings she couldn’t even get out of bed, physically couldn’t make her legs swing out from under the covers, the girls had to drag her, yanking her with dug-in heels, and as she made breakfast and got them somewhat ready for school, she daydreamed about dying. Something quick, an overnight heart attack, or a sudden vehicular clobbering. Mother of four, run down by a bus. And the kids adopted by Diane, who would keep them from lying around in their pajamas all day, and make sure they saw a doctor when they were sick, and snap-snap at them til they finished their chores. Patty was a slip of a woman, wavery and weak, quickly optimistic, but even more easily deflated. It was Diane who should have inherited the farm. But she wanted none of it, had left at eighteen, a joyful, rubberband trajectory that had landed her as a receptionist at a doctor’s office thirty mere-but-crucial miles away in Schieberton.

Their parents had taken Diane’s leaving stoically, as if it had always been part of the plan. Patty could remember back in high school, them all coming to watch her do her cheerleading thing one wet October night. It was a three-hour drive for them, deep into Kansas, almost Colorado, and it rained lightly but steadily the whole game. When it was over (Kinnakee lost), there on the field were her two gray-haired parents and her sister, three solid ovals, encased in rough wool coats, all rushing to her side, all smiling with such pride and gratitude you’d have thought she’d cured cancer, their eyes crinkled behind three sets of rain-speckled glasses.

Ed and Ann Day were dead now, had died early but not unexpectedly, and Diane was now a manager in the same doctor’s office, and lived in a mobile home in a tidy trailer park bordered with flowers.

“It’s a good enough life for me,” she’d always say. “Can’t imagine wanting anything different.”

That was Diane. Capable. She was the one who remembered little treats that the girls liked, she never forgot to get them their yearly Kinnakee T-shirts: Kinnakee, Heart of America! Diane had fibbed to the girls that it meant Magical Little Woman in Indian, and they’d been so gleeful about it that Patty could never bring herself to tell them it just meant rock or crow or something.

DIANE’S CAR HORN intruded on her thoughts with its usual celebratory honkhonkhonk!

“Diane!” screeched Debby, and Patty could hear the three girls racing toward the front door, could picture the mass of pigtails and muffin-bottoms, and then imagined them still running, straight out to the car, and Diane driving away with them and leaving her in this house where she would make everything go silent.

She pulled herself off the floor, wiped her face with a mildewy washcloth. Her face was always red, her eyes always pink, so it was impossible to tell if she’d been crying, the only advantage to looking like a skinned rat. When she opened the door, her sister was already unpacking three grocery loads of canned foods and sending the girls out to her car for the rest. Patty had come to associate the smell of brown paper bags with Diane, she’d been bringing them food for so long. That was the perfect example of the fall-short life Patty had made: She lived on a farm but never had enough to eat.

“Got them one of those sticker books, too,” Diane said, flapping it out on the table.

“Oh, you’re spoiling them, D.”

“Well, I only got them one, so they’ll have to share. So that’s good, right?” She laughed and started making coffee. “You mind?”

“Of course not, I should have put some on.” Patty went to the cabinet to find Diane’s mug—she favored a heavy cup the size of her head that had been their father’s. Patty heard the predictable spitty sound, and turned around, pounded the blasted coffee maker once; it always stalled after its third drool of coffee.

The girls came back in, heaving bags up on the kitchen table, and, with some prompting from Diane, started to unpack them.

“Where’s Ben?” Diane asked.

“Mmmm,” Patty said, scooping three teaspoons of sugar into Diane’s mug. She motioned to the kids, who’d already slowed their cupboarding of cans and were peering up at various angles of pretend nonchalance.

“He’s in trouble,” Michelle exploded, gleefully. “Again.”

“Tell her about his, you know what,” Debby nudged her sister.

Diane turned to Patty with a grimace, clearly expecting a tale of genital mishap or mutilation.

“Girls, Aunt D got you a sticker book …”

“Go play with it in your room so I can talk to your mother.” Diane always spoke more roughly to the girls than Patty did, it was Diane playing the pretend-gruff persona of Ed Day, who’d rumble and grumble at them with such exaggerated fatigue they knew even as kids that he was mostly teasing. Patty added a beseeching look toward Michelle.

“Oh boy, a sticker book!” Michelle announced with only slightly overdone enthusiasm. Michelle was always happy to be complicit in any grown-up scheme. And once Michelle was pretending she wanted something, Libby was all gritted teeth and grabby hands. Libby was a Christmas baby, which meant she never got the right amount of presents. Patty would hold one extra gift aside—and Happy Birthday to Libby!—but they all knew the truth, Libby got ripped off. Libby rarely felt less than ripped off.

She knew these things about her girls, but she was always forgetting. What was wrong with her, that these bits of her children’s personalities were always surprising her?

“Wanna go to the garage?” Diane asked, patting the cigarettes in her bosom pocket.

“Oh,” was all Patty answered. Diane had quit and returned to smoking at least twice a year every year since she was thirty. Now she was thirty-seven (and she looked much worse than Patty did, the skin on her face diamonded like a snake), and Patty had long learned the best support was just to shut up and make her sit in the garage. Just like their mom had with their dad. Of course, he was dead of lung cancer not long after his fiftieth.

Patty followed her sister, making herself breathe, getting ready to tell Diane the farm was gone, waiting to see if she’d scream about Runner’s reckless spending and her allowing Runner’s reckless spending or if she’d just go quiet, just do that single nod.

“So what’s up with Ben’s you-know-what?” Diane said, settling into her creaky lawn chair, two of the criss-crossed straps broken and hanging toward the floor. She lit a cigarette, immediately waving the smoke away from Patty.

“Oh, it’s not that, it’s not anything weird. I mean weird, but … he dyed his hair black. What does that mean?”

She waited for Diane to cackle at her, but Diane sat silent.

“How’s Ben doing, Patty? In general, how does he seem?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Moody.”

“He’s always been moody. Even when he was a baby he was like a cat. All snuggly one second and then the next, he’d be looking at you like he had no idea who you were.”

It was true, Ben at age two was an astonishing thing. He’d demand love outright, grab at a breast or an arm, but as soon as he had enough affection, and that came quickly, he’d go completely limp, play dead until you let him go. She’d taken him to the doctor, and Ben had sat rigid and tight-lipped, a stoic turtle-necked boy with a disturbing ability to withhold. Even the doctor seemed spooked, proffering a cheap lollipop and telling her to come back in six months if he was the same. He was always the same.

“Well, moody’s not a crime,” Patty said. “Runner was moody.”

“Runner is an asshole, not the same. Ben’s always had that remove to him.”

“Well, he is fifteen,” Patty started, and trailed off. Her eyes caught a jar of old nails on the shelf, a jar she doubted had been moved since their dad’s time. It was labeled Nails in his long, upright handwriting on a scrap of masking tape.

The garage had an oily concrete floor that was even colder than the air. In one corner, an old gallon jug of water had turned to ice, busted its plastic seams. Their breath hung thick with Diane’s cigarette smoke. Still, she was oddly contented here, among all these old tools she could picture in their dad’s hands: rakes with bent tines, axes of every length, shelves packed with jars filled with screws and nails and washers. Even an old metal ice chest, its base speckled with rust, where their dad used to keep his beer cold while he listened to ball games on the radio.

It unnerved her that Diane was saying so little, since Diane liked to offer opinions, even when she didn’t really have any. It unnerved her more that Diane was staying so motionless, hadn’t found a project, something to straighten or rearrange, because Diane was a doer, she never just sat and talked.

“Patty. I got to tell you something I heard. And my first instinct was to not say anything, because of course it’s not true. But you’re a mom, you should know, and … hell, I don’t know, you should just know.”

“OK.”

“Has Ben ever played with the girls in a way that someone might get confused about?”

Patty just stared.

“In a way that people might get the wrong idea about … sexually?”

Patty almost choked. “Ben hates the girls!” She was surprised at the relief she felt. “He has as little to do with them as possible.”

Diane lit another cigarette, gave a taut nod of her head. “Well, OK, good. But there’s something more. A friend of mine told me a rumor that there’s been a complaint about Ben over at the school, that a few little girls, Michelle’s age or so, had talked about kissing him and maybe him touching them or something. Maybe worse. The stuff I heard was worse.”

“Ben? You realize that’s completely crazy.” Patty stood up, couldn’t figure out what to do with her arms or legs. She turned to the right and then the left too quickly, like a distracted dog, and sat back down. A strap in her chair broke.

“I do know it’s crazy. Or some misunderstanding.”

That was the worst word Diane could have said. As soon as she said it, Patty knew she’d been dreading just exactly that. That wedge of possibility—misunderstanding—that could turn this into something. A pat on the head might be a caress of the back might be a kiss on the lips might be the roof caving in.

“Misunderstanding? Ben wouldn’t misunderstand a kiss. Or touching. Not with a little girl. He’s not a pervert. He’s an odd kid, but he’s not sick. He’s not crazy.” Patty had spent her life swearing Ben wasn’t odd, was just an average kid. But now she’d settle for odd. The realization came suddenly, a wild jolt, like having your hair blown in your face while driving.

“Will you tell them he wouldn’t do that?” Patty asked, and the tears came all at once, suddenly her cheeks were soaked.

“I can tell everyone in Kinnakee, everyone in the state of Kansas that he wouldn’t do that, and it might not be the end of it. I don’t know. I don’t know. I just heard yesterday afternoon, but it seems to be getting … bigger. I almost came out here. Then I spent the rest of the night convincing myself that it wasn’t anything. Then I woke up this morning and realized it was.”

Patty knew that feeling, a dream hangover, like when she jumped up from a panicky sleep at 2 in the morning and tried to talk herself into thinking the farm was OK, that this year would pick up, and then felt all the sicker when she woke up to the alarm a few hours later, guilty and duped. It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn’t so.

“So you came over here with groceries and a sticker book and all along you had this story about Ben you were going to tell me.”

“Like I said …” Diane shrugged sympathetically, splayed her fingers except for the ones holding the cigarette.

“Well, what happens now? Do you know the girls’ names? Is someone going to phone me or talk to me, or talk to Ben? I need to find Ben.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. We had a fight. About his hair. He took off on his bike.”

“So what was the story with his hair?”

“I don’t know, Diane! What in God’s name does it matter now?”

But of course Patty knew it did matter. Everything now would be filtered and sifted for meaning.

“Well, I don’t think this is an emergency,” Diane said quietly. “I don’t think we need to get him home right now unless you want him home right now.”

“I want him home right now.”

“OK, well let’s start calling people then. You can give me a list of his friends and I’ll start phoning.”

“I don’t even know his friends anymore,” Patty said. “He was talking to someone this morning, but he wouldn’t say who.”

“Let’s hit redial.”

Her sister grunted, stamped out her cigarette with a boot, pulled Patty out of her chair, led her inside. Diane snapped at the girls to stay in their room when the bedroom door cracked, and made her way to the phone, purposefully hit the redial button with one braut-sized finger. Sing-song numeric tones blared out of the receiver— beepBeepBEEPbeepbeepbupBEEP—and before it even rang, Diane hung up.

“My number.”

“Oh, yeah. I called after breakfast to see when you’d be over.”

The two sisters sat at the table, and Diane poured more mugs of coffee. The snow glared into the kitchen like a strobelight.

“We need to get Ben home,” Patty said.

*****

Libby Day

NOW

Moony as a grade-school girl, I drove home thinking about Ben. Since I was seven, I pictured him in the same haunted-house flashes: Ben, black-haired, smooth-faced, with his hands clasped around an axe, charging down the hall at Debby, a humming noise coming from his tight lips. Ben’s face speckled in blood, howling, the shotgun going up to his shoulder.

Id forgotten there was once just Ben, shy and serious, those weird unsettling blasts of humor. Just Ben my brother, who couldn’t have done what they said. What I said.

At a stoplight, my blood sizzling, I reached behind my seat and grabbed the envelope from an old bill. Above the plastic window, I wrote: Suspects. Then I wrote: Runner. Then I stopped. Someone with a grudge against Runner? I wrote. Someone Runner owed money to? Runnerrunnerrunner. It came back to Runner. That male voice, bellowing in our house that night, that could have been Runner or an enemy of Runner’s as easily as it was Ben. I needed this to be true, and provable. I had a gust of panic: I can’t live with this, Ben in jail, this open-ended guilt. I needed it finished. I needed to know. Me, me. I was still predictably selfish.

As I passed the turnoff for our farm, I refused to look.

I stopped in a 7-Eleven on the outskirts of Kansas City, filled up with gas, bought a log of Velveeta, some Coke, white bread, and kibble for my old, starving cat. Then I drove home to Over There That Way, pulled up my slope of a hill, got out, and stared at the two old ladies across the street who’d never look at me. They sat on the porch swing as always, despite the chill, their heads rigidly straight, lest I muddy their view. I stood with my hands on my hips, on top of my hill, and waited until one finally caved. Then I waved rather grandly, an Old West corral sort of wave. The wrinkled biddy nodded at me, and I went inside and fed poor Buck, feeling a bubble of triumph.

While I still had the energy, I knifed bright yellow mustard onto my white bread, stacked thick smushy chunks of Velveeta on top, and swallowed the sandwich while negotiating with three different but equally bored phone operators to reach the Bert Nolan Group Home for Men. That’s another thing to add to my list of potential occupations for ole Jim Jeffreys: operator. As a kid, that was something little girls wanted to be when they grew up, an operator, but I couldn’t remember why.

A thin layer of bread pasted to the roof of my mouth, I finally reached a voice at the Bert Nolan Home, and was surprised to find it was Bert Nolan himself. I’d assumed anyone with a home named after him must be dead. I told him I was trying to find Runner Day, and he paused.

“Well, he’s been in and out, mostly out the past month, but I’d be happy to give him a message,” Bert Nolan said in a voice like an old car horn. I gave my name—no recognition on his part—and started to give my phone number when Nolan interrupted me.

“Oh, he’s not going to be able to phone long distance, I can tell you that right now. The men here tend to be big corresponders. By mail, you know? Less’n fifty cents for a stamp and you don’t have to worry about waiting in line for the phone. You want to leave your address?”

I did not. I shivered at the idea of Runner clomping up my steps with his overstacked dress boots, his grimy hands around his little waist, grinning like he’d beaten me at a game.

“If you want, I can take any message you have and you can give me your address privately,” Bert Nolan said reasonably. “And once Runner finishes his letter to you, I can mail it for him, and he’ll never even know your zip code. A lot of family members do it that way. It’s a sad but necessary thing.” In the background, a soda machine rattled out a sodapop, someone asked Nolan if he wanted one, and he said No thanks, trying to cut back in the kindly voice of a town doctor. “You want to do that, Miss? Otherwise it’ll be hard to reach him. Like I said, he’s not really one to sit by the phone and wait for you to call back.”

“And there’s no e-mail?”

Bert Nolan grunted. “No, no e-mail, I’m afraid.”

I’d never known Runner to be much of a letter writer, but he always wrote more than he phoned, so I guessed that would be my best shot, short of driving down to Oklahoma and waiting on one of Bert Nolan’s cots. “Would you tell him I need to talk about Ben and that night? I can come down to see him if he just gives me a day.”

“OK … you said, Ben and that night?”

“I did.”

I KNEW LYLE would be too smug about my turnaround—semi-possible, potential turnaround—on Ben. I could picture him addressing the Kill Club groupies in one of his weird tight jackets, explaining how he convinced me to go see Ben. “She really was refusing at first, I think she was scared of what she might discover about Ben … and about herself.” And all those faces looking up at him, so happy about what he’d done. It irritated me.

Who I wanted to talk to was Aunt Diane. Diane who’d taken care of me for seven of my eleven years as an underage orphan. She’d been the first to take me in, shuffling me into her mobile home with my suitcase of belongings. Clothes, a favorite book, but no toys. Michelle hoarded all the dolls with her at night, she called it her slumber party, and she peed on them when she was strangled. I still remember a sticker book Diane had given us the day of the murders— flowers and unicorns and kittens—and always wondered if it had been in that ruined pile.

Diane couldn’t afford a new place. All the money from my mom’s life insurance went to get Ben a decent lawyer. Diane said my mother would want that, but she said it with a drawn face, like she’d give my mother a good talking to if she could. So no money for us. Being runty, I was able to sleep in a storage closet where the washer/dryer would have gone. Diane even painted it for me. She worked overtime, shuttled me to Topeka for therapy, tried to be affectionate with me, even though I could tell it hurt her to hug me, this pissy reminder of her sister’s murder. Her arms encircled me like a hula-hoop, like it was a game to get them around me but touch as little as possible. But every single morning she told me she loved me.

Over the next ten years, I totaled her car twice, broke her nose twice, stole and sold her credit cards, and killed her dog. It was the dog that finally broke her. She’d gotten Gracie, a mop-haired mutt, not long after the murders. It was yappy and the size of Diane’s forearm and Diane liked her more than me, or so I felt. For years I was jealous of that dog, watching Diane brush Gracie, her big manly hands wrapped around a pink plastic comb, watching her barrette Gracie’s tassled fur, watching her whip out a photo of Gracie from her wallet, instead of me. The dog was obsessed with my foot, the bad one, with only two toes, the second and the pinky, skinny gnarled things. Gracie was always smelling at them, like she knew they were wrong somehow. It did not endear her to me.

I’d been grounded for something, the summer between sophomore and junior year, and while Diane worked, I sat in the hot trailer getting angrier and angrier with that dog, the dog getting feistier and feistier. I refused to walk it, so it had resorted to running in frantic loops from the sofa to the kitchen to the closet, yipping the whole time, nipping at my feet. As I coiled up, nursing my fury, pretending to watch a soap opera but instead letting my brain turn good and red, Gracie paused in one of her loops and bit at the pinky toe on my bad foot, just grabbed onto it with her canines and shook. I remember thinking, If this dog takes one of my last toes, and then getting enraged at how ridiculous I was: On my left hand was a stump where a man would never put a wedding ring, and my unsupported right foot gave me a permanent sailor’s gait in a land-locked town. The girls at school called my finger a nubbin. That was worse, it sounded both quaint and grotesque at the same time, something to giggle at while looking quickly away. A physician had recently told me the amputations probably weren’t even necessary, “Just an overambitious country doctor.” I grabbed Gracie around her middle, feeling her ribcage, that chilly tremble of a little thing. The tremble only made me angrier, and suddenly I was ripping her off my toe—the flesh going with her—and throwing her as hard as I could toward the kitchen. She hit the pick-axe edge of the counter and collapsed in a twitching pile, bleeding all over the linoleum.

I hadn’t meant to kill her, but she died, not as quickly as I’d have liked, but within about ten minutes as I paced around the trailer trying to figure out what to do. When Diane came home, bearing an offertory of fried chicken, Gracie was still lying on the floor, and all I could say was, “She bit me.”

I tried to say more, to explain why it wasn’t my fault, but Diane just held up a single, shaking finger: Don’t. She’d called her best friend, Valerie, a woman as delicate and motherly as Diane was bulky and bluff. Diane stood hunched over the sink, looking out the window as Valerie folded Gracie into a special blanket. Then they huddled behind a closed bedroom door, and emerged, Valerie standing silently next to Diane, teary and kneading, as Diane told me to pack my things. In retrospect, I assume Valerie must have been Diane’s girlfriend—every night, Diane would climb in bed and talk to her on the phone til she fell asleep. They conferred on everything together and even had the exact same gently feathered wash-n-wear haircut. At the time I didn’t care who she was to Diane.

I lived my last two high school years with a polite couple in Abilene who were twice-removed somethings and whom I only mildly terrorized. From then on, every few months, Diane would phone. I’d sit with her on the line, all heavy telephone buzz and Diane’s smoky breathing into the receiver. I’d picture the bottom half of her mouth hanging there, the peach fuzz on her chin and that mole perched near her bottom lip, a flesh-colored disc that she once told me, cackling, would grant wishes if I rubbed it. I’d hear a creak-squeak in the background, and knew Diane was opening the middle cabinet in the kitchen of her trailer. I knew that place better than I did the farmhouse. Diane and I would make unnecessary noises, pretend to sneeze or cough, and then Diane would say, “Hold on, Libby,” pointlessly since neither of us had been talking. Valerie would usually be there, and they’d murmur to each other, Valerie’s voice coaxing, Diane’s a grumble, and then Diane would give me about twenty more seconds of conversation and make an excuse to go.

She stopped taking my calls when Brand New Day came out. Her only words: What possessed you to do such a thing? which was prim for Diane, but filled with more hurt than three dozen fuckyous.

I knew Diane would be at the same number, she was never going to move—the trailer was attached to her like a shell. I spent twenty minutes digging through piles at my house, looking for my old address book, one I’d had since grade school, with a pig-tailed redheaded girl on the cover that someone must have thought looked like me. Except for the smile. Diane’s number was filed under A for Aunt Diane, her name inked in purple marker in my balloon-animal cursive.

What tone to take, and what explanation for calling? Partly I just wanted to hear her wheeze into the phone, her football-coach voice bellowing in my ear, Well, why’d it take you so long to phone back? Partly I wanted to hear what she really thought about Ben. She’d never railed against Ben to me, she’d always been very careful about how she spoke of him, another thing I owed her retroactive thanks for.

I dialed the number, my shoulders pulling up to my ears, my throat getting tight, holding my breath and not realizing it until the third ring when it went to the answering machine and I was suddenly exhaling.

It was Valerie’s voice on the machine asking me to leave a message for her or Diane.

“Hi, uh, guys. This is Libby. Just wanting to say hi and let you all know I’m still alive and.” I hung up. Dialed back. “Please ignore that last message. It’s Libby. I called to say I’m sorry, for. Oh, a lot of things. And I’d like to talk …” I trailed on in case anyone was screening, then left my number, hung up, and sat on the edge of my bed, poised to get up but having no reason to.

I got up. I’d done more this day than the previous year. While I still held the phone, I made myself call Lyle, hoping for voicemail and, as usual, getting him. Before he could annoy me, I told him the meeting with Ben had gone fine and I was ready to hear who he believed was the killer. I said this all in a very precise tone, like I was doling out information with a measuring spoon.

“I knew you’d like him, I knew you’d come around,” he crowed, and once again I pleased myself by not hanging up.

“I didn’t say that, Lyle, I said I was ready for another assignment, if you want.”

We met again at Tim-Clark’s Grille, the place cloudy with grease. Another old waitress, or else the same one with a red wig, hustled around on spongy tennis shoes, her miniskirt flapping around her, looking like an ancient tennis pro. Instead of the fat man admiring his new vase, a table of hipster dudes were passing around ’70s-era nudie playing cards and laughing at the big bushes on the women. Lyle was sitting tightly at a table next to them, his chair turned awkwardly away. I sat down with him, poured a beer from his pitcher.

“So was he what you expected? What did he say?” Lyle started, his leg jittering.

I told him, except for the part about the porcelain bunny.

“See what Magda meant, though, about him being hopeless?”

I did. “I think he’s made peace with the prison sentence,” I said, an insight I shared only because the guy had given me $300 and I wanted more. “He thinks it’s penance for not being there to protect us or something. I don’t know. I thought when I told him about my testimony, about it being … exaggerated, that he’d jump on it, but … nothing.”

“Legally it’s maybe not that helpful after this long,” Lyle said. “Magda says if you want to help Ben, we should compile more evidence, and you can recant your testimony when we file for habeas corpus—it’ll make more of a splash. It’s more political than legal at this point. A lot of people made big careers on that case.”

“Magda seems to know a lot.”

“She heads up this group called the Free Day Society—all about getting Ben out of prison. I sometimes go, but it seems mostly for, uh, fans. Women.”

“You ever hear of Ben with a serious girlfriend? One of those Free Day women whose name is Molly or Sally or Polly? He had a tattoo.”

“No Sallys. Polly seems like a pet’s name—my cousin had a dog named Polly. One Molly, but she’s seventy or so.”

A plate of fries appeared in front of him, the waitress definitely different from our previous one, just as old but much friendlier. I like waitresses who call me hon or sweetie, and she did.

Lyle ate fries for a while, squeezing packets of ketchup on the side of the plate, then salting and peppering the ketchup, then dipping each fry individually and placing it in his mouth with girlish care.

“Well, so tell me who you think did it,” I finally nudged.

“Who what?”

I rolled my eyes and set my head in my hands, as if it was too much for me, and it almost was.

“Oh, right. I think Lou Cates, Krissi Cates’s dad, did it.” He leaned back in his chair with satisfaction, as if he’d just won a game of Clue.

Krissi Cates, the name jangled something. I tried to fake Lyle out, but it didn’t work.

“You do know who Krissi Cates is, right?” When I didn’t say anything, he continued, his voice taking on a sleek, patronizing tone. “Krissi Cates was a fifth-grader at your school, at Ben’s school. The day your family was killed, the police were looking to question Ben— she’d accused him of molesting her.”

“What?”

“Yeah.”

We both stared each other down, with matching you-are-crazy looks.

Lyle shook his head at me. “When you say people don’t talk to you about this stuff, you aren’t kidding.”

“She didn’t testify against Ben …” I started.

“No, no. It’s the one smart thing Ben’s defense did, making the case that they weren’t legally linked, the molestation and the murders. But the jury was sure poisoned against him. Everyone in the area had heard that Ben had molested this nice little girl from this nice family, and that was probably what led up to his ‘satanic murders.’ You know how rumors go.”

“So, did the Krissi Cates thing ever go to trial?” I asked. “Did they prove Ben did anything wrong with her?”

“It never went forward—the police didn’t bring charges,” Lyle said. “The Cates family got a quick settlement with the school district and then they moved. But you know what I think? I think Lou Cates went to your home that night to question Ben. I think Lou Cates, who was this powerfully built sort of guy, went to the house to get some answers, and then …”

“Flew into such a rage he decided to kill the whole family? That makes no sense at all.”

“This guy did three years for manslaughter when he was younger, that’s what I found out, he hurled a pool ball full-throttle at a guy, ended up killing him. He had a violent temper. If Lou Cates thought his daughter’d been molested, I can see rage. Then he did the pentagrams and stuff to throw off suspicion.”

“Mmmm, it doesn’t make sense.” I had really wanted it to make sense.

“Your brother doing it doesn’t make sense. It’s an insane, insane crime, a lot of it isn’t going to make sense. That’s why people are so obsessed with these murders. If they made any sense, they wouldn’t really be mysteries, right?”

I didn’t say anything. It was true. I started fidgeting with the salt and pepper shakers, which were surprisingly nice for a dive.

“I mean, don’t you think it’s at least worth looking into?” Lyle pushed. “This massive, horrible allegation exploding the same day your family is murdered?”

“I guess. You’re the boss.”

“So, I say until you find Runner, see if you can get someone in the Cates family to talk to you. Five hundred dollars if it’s Krissi or Lou. I just want to see if they’re still telling the same story about Ben. If they can live with themselves, you know? I mean, it’s got to be a lie. Right?”

I was feeling shaky again. My faith did not need to be tested right now. Still, I clung to a weird bit of assurance: Ben had never molested me. If he was a child molester, wouldn’t he have started with a little girl right at home?

“Right.”

“Right,” Lyle repeated.

“But I’m not sure I’ll have more luck than you would. I mean, I’m the sister of the guy they say molested her.”

“Well, I tried and got nowhere,” Lyle shrugged. “I’m not good with that kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Finessing.”

“Oh, well that’s definitely my kind of thing.”

“Excellent. And if you’re able to set up a meeting, I’d like to come along.”

I shrugged silently, stood up, planning on leaving him with the bill, but he belted my name before I got three steps.

“Libby, do you know you have the salt and pepper shakers in your pocket?”

I paused for a second, debated acting stunned—oh my gosh, I am so absentminded. Instead I just nodded and hustled out the doors. I needed them.

LYLE HAD TRACKED down Krissi Cates’s mother in Emporia, Kansas, where she lived with her second husband, with whom she’d had a second daughter almost twenty years after the first. Lyle had left several messages in the past year, but she’d never returned his call. That was as far as he’d gotten.

Never leave a message for someone you really want to reach. No, you keep phoning and phoning until someone picks up—out of anger or curiosity or fear—and then you blurt out whatever words will keep them on the line.

I rang Krissi’s mother twelve times before she picked up the phone, then, in a rush, said, “This is Libby Day, Ben Day’s little sister, do you remember Ben Day?”

I heard moist lips part with a puckery sound, then a thin voice murmured, “Yes, I remember Ben Day. What is this about, please?” Like I was a telemarketer.

“I’d like to talk to you or someone in your family about the charges your daughter Krissi made against Ben.”

“We don’t talk about that … what was your name, Lizzy? I’ve remarried, and I have very little contact with my previous family.”

“Do you know how I can reach Lou or Krissi Cates?”

She let out a sigh like a single puff of smoke. “Lou would be in some bar, somewhere in the state of Kansas, I’d guess. Krissi? Drive west on I-70, just past Columbia. Take a left into any of those strip clubs. Don’t call again.”

*****

Ben Day

JANUARY 2, 1985

12:51 P.M.

He took a piece of pink construction paper from Krissi’s bin, folded it in two, wrote on it, It’s Christmas Break and I’m Thinking of You—Guess Who? With a B at the bottom. She’d get a blast out of that. He thought about taking something from Krissi’s bin and transferring it to Libby’s but decided not to. Libby turning up with something nice would be suspicious. He wondered how big a joke he and his sisters were at school. The three girls shared one-and-a-half wardrobes, Michelle running around in his old sweaters, Debby wearing what she scrounged from Michelle, and Libby in what was left: patched-up boys’ blue jeans, soiled old baseball jerseys, cheap knit dresses that Debby’s belly had stretched out. That was the difference with Krissi. All her clothes had snap. Diondra, too, with her perfect jeans. If Diondra’s jeans were faded, it was because that was the latest style, if they had bleach splatters, it was because she’d bought them with bleach splatters. Diondra had a big allowance, she’d taken him shopping a few times, holding clothes up to him like he was a baby, telling him to smile. Telling him he could work it off, wink wink. He wasn’t sure if guys should let girls buy their clothes, wasn’t sure if it was cool or not. Mr. O’Malley, his homeroom teacher, always joked about new shirts his wife was making him wear, but Mr. O’Malley was married. Anyway. Diondra liked him in black and he didn’t have the money to buy anything. Fucking Diondra would have her way as usual.

That’s another reason it was cool to hang out with Krissi: She assumed he was cool because he was fifteen, and to her fifteen seemed extremely mature. She wasn’t like Diondra, who laughed at him at weird moments. He’d ask her, “What’s so funny?” and she’d just giggle through a closed mouth and sputter, “Nothing. You’re cute.” The first time they’d tried to have sex, he’d been so clumsy with the condom she’d started laughing and he’d lost his hard-on. The second time she’d grabbed the condom away from him and tossed it across the room, said screw it, and put him inside her.

Now he had a hard-on, just thinking about it. He was dropping the note in Krissi’s bin, his dick hard as hell, and in walked Mrs. Darksilver, the teacher for second grade.

“Hey Ben, watchoo doing here?” she smiled. She was in jeans and a sweater, penny loafers, and toddled toward him, carrying a bulletin board and a length of plaid ribbon.

He turned away from her, started toward the door back to the high school.

“Ah nothing, just wanted to drop something off in my sister’s bin.”

“Well, don’t run away, come give me a hug at least. Never see you anymore now that you’re the big high school man.”

She kept coming toward him, loafers padding on the concrete, that big pink grin on her face, with the bangs cut straight across. He’d had a crush on her as a kid, that sharp fringe of black hair. He turned completely away from her and tried to hobble toward the door, his dick still jammed up against his pant leg. But just as he was turning he could tell she knew what was going on. She dropped that smile and a disgusted, embarrassed grimace came across her whole face. She didn’t even say anything else, that’s how he knew that she’d seen it. She was looking at the bin he was in front of—Krissi Cates, not his sister.

He felt like an animal limping away, some wounded buck that needed to be put down. Just shoot. He had flashes of guns some-times, a barrel against his temple. In one of his notebooks, he’d written a quote by Nietzsche that he’d found while flipping through Bartlett’s one day, waiting for the football players to leave the building so he could clean:

It is always consoling to think of suicide;
    it’s what gets one through many a bad night.

He’d never actually kill himself. He didn’t want to be the tragic freak that girls cried over on the news, even though they never talked to him in real life. Somehow that seemed more pathetic than his life already was. Still, at night, when things were really bad and he felt the most trapped and dickless, it was a nice thought, getting into his mother’s gun cabinet (combination 5-12-69, his parents’ anniversary, now a joke), taking that nice metal weight in his hands, sliding some bullets into the chamber, just as easy as squirting toothpaste, pressing it against his temple, and immediately shooting. You’d have to immediately shoot, gun to temple, finger on trigger, or you might talk yourself out of it. It had to be one motion—and then you just drop to the ground like clothes falling off a hanger. Just … swoosh. On the floor, and you were someone else’s problem for a change.

He didn’t plan on doing any of that, but when he needed some release and he couldn’t jerk off, or he’d already jerked off and needed more release, that’s usually what he thought of. On the floor, sideways, like his body was just a pile of laundry waiting to be gathered up.

HE BUSTED THROUGH the doors and his dick went down, like just crossing into the high school emasculated him. Grabbed the bucket and rolled it back to the closet, washed his hands with hard Lava soap.

He headed down the stairwell and toward the back door as a pack of upperclassmen brushed past him toward the parking lot, his head feeling hot under the black hair, imagining what they were thinking—-freak, just like the coach—and they said nothing, didn’t even look at him, actually. Thirty seconds behind them, he banged open the doors, the sun against the snow a shocking white. If this was a video, now would be the guitar flare, the whammy bar … Bweeeerrrr!

Outside, the guys were piling into a truck and peeling out in loose, showy loops across the parking lot. And he was unchaining his bike, his head throbbing, a drip of blood falling on the handlebar. He smeared it up with a fingertip, swiped the fingertip across the trickle on his forehead and, without thinking, put the finger in his mouth, like it was a stray glob of jelly.

He needed some relief. Beer and maybe a joint, undo himself a little. The only place to try was Trey’s. Actually it wasn’t Trey’s place, Trey never said where he lived, but when Trey wasn’t at Diondra’s he most likely was at the Compound, down a long dirt road off Highway 41, surrounded by hedgeapples on both sides, and then came a big brush-hogged clearing, with a warehouse made of a hard, tin material. The whole thing rattled in the wind. In the winter, a generator hummed inside, just enough juice to run a bunch of spaceheaters and a TV with sketchy reception. Dozens of carpet samples sat in bright, smelly patches on the dirt floor and a few old ugly couches had been donated. People gathered smoking around the spaceheaters like they were actual bonfires. Everyone had beer—they just kept the cans sitting in the frost outside the door—and everyone had joints. Usually there was a 7-Eleven run at some point, whoever was flush would come back with a few dozen burritos, some microwaved, some still frozen. If they had extra, they jammed the burritos in the snow alongside the beer.

Ben had never been there without Diondra, it was her crowd, but where the fuck else was he going to go? Showing up with a broken forehead was sure to get him a grudging nod and a can of Beast. They might not be friendly—Trey was never exactly friendly—but it wasn’t in their code to turn anyone away. Ben was sure to be the youngest, although there’d been younger: once a couple had shown up with a little boy, naked except for a pair of jeans. While everyone got stoned, the kid sat silently sucking his thumb on the sofa, staring at Ben. Mostly though, people were twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, the age where they’d have gone to college if they hadn’t dropped out of high school. He’d stop by, and maybe they’d like him, and Diondra would stop calling him Tag (short for Tagalong) every time she took him there. They’d at least let him sit in the corner and drink a beer for a few hours.

Maybe it’d be smarter to go home, but fuck that.

THE WAREHOUSE WAS rattling when Ben finally pedaled up, the tin sides vibrating with a guitar riff inside. Sometimes guys brought amps with them, worked the whammy bar until everyone’s ears shrank to pinholes. Whoever was playing was pretty good—some Venom song, perfect for his mood. RumadumDUMrum! It was the noise of incoming horsemen, looters, and burners. The sound of chaos.

He let his bike fall over in the snow and worked his hands loose, cracked his neck. His head hurt now, a ringing sort of hurt, not as easy to ignore as a headache. He was hungry as shit. He’d ridden up and down the highway, trying to talk himself into making the turn for the warehouse. He needed a good story for the cut on his face, something that wouldn’t get him as much shit as awwww, baby fell off his bike. Now he daydreamed that Diondra or Trey would pull up just in time, escort him in, no biggie, everyone all smiles and liquor when he walked through the door.

But he’d have to go in alone. He could see for miles across all that flat snow, and no cars were coming. He pushed the flap up with a boot and squeezed in, the guitar peel banging around the walls like a cornered animal. The guy playing the guitar, Ben had seen before. He claimed he was a roadie at one point with Van Halen but he was short on details of how anything really worked on the road. He glanced past Ben but didn’t register him, his eyes floating out to an imaginary crowd. Four guys and a girl, all with fried-out kinky hair, all older, passing around a joint, slouched around the carpet squares. They barely looked at him. The ugliest guy had his hands on the girl’s hips, she was stretched across him like a cat. Her nose was stunted and her face was red with acne sores and she seemed deeply stoned.

Ben walked across the space—there was a huge gap between the door and the carpet squares—and sat down on one thin green patch about four feet away from the group, kept his eyes sideways on them so he could give a nod. No one was eating, there’d be no food to scrounge. If he’d been Trey, he’d have given them a shake of his head and said, “Set me up with some of that, will ya?” and he’d be smoking with them at least.

The guitar player, Alex, was actually pretty decent. A guitar was another thing Ben wanted, a Floyd Rose Tremolo. He’d fucked around on one in Kansas City when he and Diondra had gone into a guitar store, and it felt OK, like something he could pick up. At least learn enough to play a few really kickass songs, come back here and make the warehouse shake. Everyone he knew had something they were good at, even if it was just being good at spending money, like Diondra. Whenever he told her things he wanted to learn, things he wanted to do, she laughed and said what he needed to do was get a decent paycheck.

“Groceries cost money, electricity costs money, you don’t even understand,” she’d say. Diondra paid a lot of the bills at her house since her parents were gone so much, that was true, but she paid the bills with her parents’ stinking money. Ben wasn’t sure being able to write a check was such an amazing thing. He wondered what time it was and wished he’d just gone over to her house and waited. Now he’d have to stay here and hour or so, so they wouldn’t think he was leaving because no one was talking to him. His pants were still damp from the bucket spill, and he could smell old tuna on the front of his shirt.

“Hey,” said the girl. “Hey kid.”

He looked up at her, the black hair falling over an eye.

“Shouldn’t you be in school or something?” she said, her words coming in dopey mounds. “Why are you here?”

“It’s break.”

“He says it’s break,” she told her boyfriend. The guy, mangy and sunk-cheeked, with an outline of a moustache, peered up at that.

“You know someone here?” the boyfriend asked him.

Ben gestured toward Alex. “I know him.”

“Hey Alex, you know this kid?”

Alex stopped the guitar, paused with both legs wide in a rocker pose and looked at Ben, hunched on the floor. Shook his head.

“Nah, man. I don’t hang out with middle schoolers.”

This was the sort of shit they always gave him. Ben had thought the new black hair would have helped, made him look less young. But guys just liked to fuck with him, or ignore him. It was something about the way he was built, or the way he walked, or something in his blood. He was always picked third to last in any team game—the afterthought boy who was grabbed right before the real shitballs. Guys seemed to know it instantly; they flirted with Diondra in front of him all the time. Like they knew his dick wilted a little bit when he entered a room. Well, fuck them, he was sick of it.

“Suck my dick,” Ben muttered.

“Wohhhh! The little guy is pissed!”

“Looks like he’s been in a fight,” the girl said.

“Dude, dude, you been in a fight?” The music had stopped entirely now. Alex had propped his guitar up against one icy wall and was smoking with the rest, grinning and bobbing his head. Their voices boomed up to the ceiling and echoed out, like fireworks.

Ben nodded.

“Yeah, who’d you fight?”

“No one you know.”

“Ah, I know pretty much everyone. Try me. Who was it, your little brother? You get beat up by your little brother?”

“Trey Teepano.”

“You lie,” Alex said. “Trey’d kick your ass.”

“You fought that crazy Indian mother fucker? Isn’t Trey part Indian?” said the boyfriend, ignoring Alex now.

“What the fuck that got to do with anything, Mike?” one of their friends asked. He sucked in some weed with a roach clip, the bright pink feather fluttering in the cold. The girl finished it off, cashed the joint, and snapped the roach clip back into her hair. One mousy curl tweaked out crookedly from her head.

“I hear he’s into some scary-ass shit,” Mike said. “Like serious, conjuring Satan shit.”

Trey was a poser, so far as Ben could tell. He talked about special midnight meetings in Wichita where blood was spilled in different rituals. He had shown up at Diondra’s one night in October, cranked and shirtless and smeared with blood. Swore he and some friends had killed some cattle outside of Lawrence. Said they’d thought about going into campus, kidnapping some college kid for sacrifice too, but had gotten wasted instead. He may have been telling the truth on that one—it was all over the news the next day, four cows slaughtered with machetes, their entrails gone. Ben had seen the photos: all of them lying on their sides, big mound-bodies and sad knobby legs. It was fucking hard to kill a cow, there was a reason they made good leather. Of course, Trey worked out a few hours a day to metal, pumping and squeezing and cursing, Ben had seen the routine. Trey was a strutting, tan bundle of knots, and he could probably kill a cow with a machete, and he was probably fucking loony enough to do it for kicks. But as for the Satan part? Ben thought the Devil would want something more useful than cow entrails. Gold. Maybe a kid. To prove loyalty, like when gangs make a new guy shoot somebody.

“He is,” Ben said. “We are. We get into some dark shit.”

“I thought you just said you were fighting him,” Mike said, and finally, finally reached behind him into a Styrofoam cooler and handed Ben an Olympia Gold, icy-wet. Ben chugged it, put out his hand for another, and was surprised to actually get a second beer instead of a load of shit.

“We fight. When you do some of the stuff we do, you’re going to end up in a fight.” This sounded as vague as Alex’s roadie stories.

“Were you one of the guys who killed those cows?” the girl asked.

Ben nodded. “We had to. It was an order.”

“Weird order, man,” said the quiet guy from the corner. “That was my hamburger.”

They laughed, everyone did, and Ben tried to look smooth but tough. He shook his hair down in front of his eyes and felt the beer chill him. Two fast, tinny beers on an empty belly and he was buzzing, but he didn’t want to come off as a lightweight.

“So why do you kill cows?” the girl asked.

“Feels good, satisfies some requirements. You can’t just be in the club, you have to really do stuff.”

Ben had hunted lots, his dad taking him out once, and then his mom insisted he go with her. A bonding thing. She didn’t realize how embarrassing it was to go hunting with your mom. But it was his mom who’d made him a decent shot, taught him how to handle the recoil, when to pull the trigger, how to wait and be patient for hours in the blind. Ben had shot and killed dozens of animals, from rabbits up to deer.

Now he thought of mice, how his mom’s barncat had rooted out a nest, and gobbled down two or three gooey newborn mice before dropping the other half dozen on the back steps. Runner had just left—the second time this was—so it was Ben’s job to put them out of their misery. They’d wriggled silently, twisting like pink eels, eyes glued shut, and by the time he’d run back and forth to the barn twice, trying to figure out what to do, the ants were swarming them. He’d taken a shovel, finally, and smashed them into the ground, bits of flesh splattering his arms, getting angrier, each big loose wield of the shovel infuriating him more. You think I’m such a pussy, Runner, you think I’m such a pussy! By the time it was over, only a sticky spot on the ground remained. He was sweaty, and when he looked up, his mother was watching him from behind the screen door. She’d been quiet at dinner that night, that worried face turned on him, the sad eyes. He just wanted to turn to her and say, Sometimes it feels good to fuck with something. Instead of always being fucked with.

“Like?” the girl nudged.

“Like … well, sometimes things have to die. We have to kill them. Just like Jesus requires sacrifice, well, so does Satan.”

Satan, he said it, like it was some guy’s name. It didn’t feel bogus and it didn’t feel scary. It felt normal, like he actually knew what he was talking about. Satan. He could almost picture him here, this guy all long-faced and horned, with those split-open goat eyes.

“You seriously believe this shit—what’s your name again?”

“Ben. Day.”

“Ben-Gay?”

“Yeah, never heard that one.” Ben took another beer from the cooler, without asking, he’d bumped over a few feet since they started talking, and as the booze chilled him out, everything he said, all the shit rolling out of his mouth, seemed undeniable. He could become an undeniable guy, he could see it, even with that last crack, how that asshole knew his joke was going to whistle out and flop.

They fired up another joint, the girl pulling her clip out of her hair again, the goofy, friendly flip of hair falling back to its normal place, her not looking as nice without it. Ben breathed in, took a decent amount, but—don’t cough, don’t cough—not enough so he got seeds in the back of his throat. This was ditchweed stuff, the kind that got you dirty high. It got you paranoid and talky, instead of mellowing you out. Ben had a theory that all the chemical runoff from all the farms rolled into the ground and was sucked up by these mean, greedy plants. It infected them: all that insecticide and bright green fertilizer was settling into the grooves of his lungs and his brain.

The girl was looking at him now, that dazed look Debby got after too much TV, like she needed to say something but was too lazy to move her mouth. He wanted something to eat.

The Devil is never hungry. That’s what he thought then, out of nowhere, the words in his brain like a prayer.

Alex was plucking at his guitar again, some Van Halen, some AC/DC, a Beatles song, and then suddenly he was fingering “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” the binky chords making Ben’s head ache more.

“Hey, no Christmas songs, Ben wouldn’t like that,” Mike called out.

“Holy shit, he’s bleeding!” the girl said.

The cut in his forehead had opened up, and now it was dripping lushly down his face onto his pants. The girl tried to hand him a fast-food napkin, but he waved her off, smeared the blood across his face like warpaint.

Alex had stopped playing the song, and they all just stared at Ben, uneasy smiles and stiff shoulders, leaning slightly away from him. Mike held out the joint like an offering, on the tips of his fingers to avoid contact. Ben didn’t want it, but breathed in deep again, the sour smoke burning more lung tissue.

It was then that the door-flap made its wavy warble and Trey walked in. He had his arms folded, feet planted, slouchy stance going, rolling his eyes over the room and then jerking his head back like Ben was a fish gone bad.

“What are you doing here? Diondra here?”

“She’s in Salina. Just thought I’d stop by, kill some time. They been entertaining me.”

“We heard about your fight,” the girl said, all sly smiles, her lips thin crescents. “And other bad stuff.”

Trey, his long slick black hair and chiseled face, was unreadable. He looked at the group on the floor, and at Ben squatting with them, and for once seemed unsure of how to play the situation.

“Yeah, what’s he been saying?” He kept his eyes on Ben and grabbed a beer from the girl without even looking at her. Ben wondered if they’d slept together, Trey had the same disdain Ben once saw him direct at an ex-girlfriend: I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don’t even ripple.

“Some shit about the Devil and what you guys do to … help him,” she said.

Trey got his grin going then, sat down across from Ben—Ben avoiding eye contact.

“Hey Trey?” Alex said. “You’re Indian aren’t you?”

“Yeah, you want me to scalp you?”

“You’re not full though, right?” the girl blurted.

“My mom’s white. I don’t date Indian chicks.”

“Why not?” she asked, running the roach clip feather in and out of her hair, the metal teeth tangling themselves in the waves.

“Because Satan likes white pussy.” He smiled and cocked his head at her, and she started to giggle, but then he kept the same expression and she shut down, her ugly boyfriend putting an arm back on her hip.

They’d liked Ben’s patter, but Trey was spookier. He sat there almost cross-legged, eyeing them in a way that seemed friendly on the surface, but was entirely without warmth. And while his body was folded in a casual way, every limb was held at a tense, sharp angle. There was something deeply unkind about him. No one offered to pass the joint again.

They all sat quietly for a few minutes, Trey’s mood unnerving everyone. Usually he was the loud, smart-ass, fight-starting beer swigger, but when he got upset it was like he sent out hundreds of invisible, insistent fingers to push everyone down by the shoulders. Sink everyone.

“So you want to go?” he suddenly asked Ben. “I got my truck. I got Diondra’s keys. We can go to her place til she gets home, she’s got cable. Better’n this freezing cold shithole.”

Ben nodded, gave a jittery wave to the crowd, and followed Trey who was already outside, tossing his beer can on the snow. Ben was definitely altered. Words clotted in the back of his throat, and as he climbed into the GMC he tried to stammer some excuse to Trey. Trey who’d just saved his ass, for unclear reasons. Why was he the one with Diondra’s keys? Probably because he’d asked for them. Ben didn’t think to ask enough.

“I hope you’re ready to back that shit up, what you were saying in there,” Trey said, putting the stick in reverse. The GMC was a tank, and Trey drove it straight across the farm property, bumping over old cornstalks and irrigation ditches, forcing Ben to grab on to the armrest to keep from biting his tongue off. Trey landed a meaningful glance on Ben’s tight grip.

“Yeah, of course.”

“Maybe tonight you become a man. Maybe.”

Trey flicked on his cassette player. Iron Maiden, midsong, hell yes, the words hissing at Ben: 666 … Satan … Sacrifice.

Ben worked the music in his head, his brain sizzling, feeling angry-frantic, the way he always did to metal, the guitar strum never letting up, bundling him tenser and tenser, bumping his head up and down, the drums shooting up his spine, the whole thing this rage-frenzy, not letting him think straight, just keeping him in a tight shake. His whole body felt like a cocked fist, ready for release.

*****