Dark Places 4

 

Libby Day

NOW

I’d been commissioned to find Runner, but all my feverish, ambitious action of the past week was slopped on the floor next to my bed, like a soiled nightgown. I couldn’t get up, even when I heard the kids make their sleepy duckwalk past my house. I pictured them in big rubber rainboots, clomping along, leaving rounded footprints in the March muck, and I still couldn’t move.

I’d woken up from a miserable dream, the kind you keep telling yourself doesn’t mean anything, shouldn’t bother you because it’s just a dream, just a dream. It started back at the farm, but it wasn’t the farm really, it was far too bright, too tidy to be the farm, but it was and in the distance, against an orange horizon, Runner was galloping toward the farm, hooting like an Old West cowboy. As he got closer—down our hill, through the gate—I saw that his gallop was actually a rickety, bumpalong motion because his horse had wheels. Its top half was flesh, but the bottom was metal, spindly, like a hospital gurney. The horse whinnied at me in panic, its muscled neck trying to separate from the metal below. Runner leapt down, the creature rolling away, one wheel busted, an irritating grocery cart of an animal. It came to a stop near a tree stump, its eyes going white, still struggling to pull itself apart.

“Don’t worry about that.” Runner grinned at the horse. “I paid for it.”

“You got a bad deal,” I said.

Runner’s jaw tightened and he stood too close to me.

“Your mom says it’s fine,” he muttered.

That’s right! I thought, My mom is alive. The idea felt solid, like a pebble in my pocket. My mom was alive, and how foolish I’d been, all these years thinking otherwise.

“You’d better fix your hand first,” Runner said, pointing at my stumped ring finger. “I brought you these. Hope you like them better than the horse.” He held up a flimsy velvet bag, the kind used for Scrabble, and shook it.

“Oh, I love the horse,” I said, batting away my ill will. The horse had torn its hindquarters from the metal and was bleeding a meaty red oil onto the ground.

From his bag, Runner poured eight or nine fingers. Every time I picked one that looked like mine, I realized it was a pinky finger, a man’s finger, a finger of the wrong color or size.

Runner was pursing his lips at me. “Just take one, OK? It’s not a big deal.”

I picked one that was vaguely similar to my lost one, and Runner sewed it to my hand, the ripped horse screaming now behind us, a woman’s scream, terrified and angry. Runner threw a shovel at it, and it broke in two, pulsing on the ground, unable to move.

“There,” Runner said with a lip smack. “Good as new.”

Between my two girlish fingers, a bulbous big toe squatted, tied on with lazy, thick stitches, and suddenly Runner’s girlfriend Peggy was there and said, “Honey, her momma’s not here, remember? We killed her.”

And Runner smacked his head like a man who’d forgotten to bring home milk and said, “That’s right. That’s right. I got all them girls, except Libby.” We three stood blinking at each other, the air turning nasty. Then Runner went back to the horse, and picked up the shovel, which had become an axe.

I flung myself awake, one arm cracking my bedside lamp to the floor. It was barely dawn when I turned and watched the glowing lamp on its side, wondered if the lightbulb would burn a hole in the carpet. Now it was morning and still I couldn’t move.

But the light was on in Ben’s room. My first real thought: that night the light was on in Ben’s room and someone was talking. I wanted to stop thinking about it but I always came back to it. Why would a crazed killer go into Ben’s room, close the door, turn on the light and chat?

The light was on in Ben’s room. Forget the other stuff: a vengeful Lou Cates, a debt-crazed Runner, a pack of goons who wanted to teach Runner a lesson by murdering his family. Forget the bellowing voice I heard, which—fine, I guess—may not have been Ben’s. But he wasn’t home when we went to bed, and when I woke up the light was on. I remember a flush of relief because Ben was home because his light was on and the fight was over between him and my mom at least for today because the light was on and he was talking behind the door, maybe on his new phone, or to himself, but the light was on.

And who was Diondra?

I prepared to get out of bed, tossing the covers aside, the sheets dank-smelling, gray from my body. I wondered how long it had been since I’d changed them. And then I wondered how often you were supposed to change them. These were the kinds of things you didn’t learn. I changed the bedclothes after sex, now, finally, and that I only learned a few years ago from a movie on TV: Glenn Close, some thriller, and she’s just had sex and is changing the sheets and I can’t remember the rest, because all I was thinking was: Oh, I guess people change sheets after they have sex. It made sense, but I’d never thought of it. I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.

I got out of bed, finally returning the lamp to my bedtable, and walked roundabout to the living room, sneaking up on the answering machine, not letting it know I cared if it had a message. I might as well have whistled, my feet kicking out ahead of me—nothing unusual here, just out for a walk. No Diane. Four days and no Diane.

Well, no problem, I had other family.

BEN WAS WAITING for me this time when I came, sliding into view before I was prepared. He sat rigid in the seat behind glass, his eyes unfocused, a jumpsuited mannequin. I wanted to tell him not to do that to me, it gave me the creeps, but I didn’t say anything because why would he give me the creeps unless I still didn’t entirely believe he was innocent.

Which I didn’t, I guess.

I sat down, the chair still humid from someone else, the warmth of the plastic feeling grossly intimate in this place. I mushed my buttocks back and forth, making it mine, trying not to look repulsed, but when I picked up the phone it was still sweaty from the previous user, and whatever look I gave made Ben frown.

“You OK?” he asked, and I nodded once. Yes, sure, absolutely fine.

“So, you came back,” he said. He fixed on a smile now. Cautious, the way Ben always was. At a family party, on the last day of school, he looked the same, a kid who lived permanently in the library— waiting to be shushed.

“I came back.”

He had a nice face, not handsome but nice, the face of a good guy. Catching me assessing him, his eyes darted to his hands. They were big now, bigger than his small frame, piano hands even though we never played piano. They were scarred, nothing impressive, dark pink confetti strips of nips and cuts. He caught me looking, held one hand up, pointed a finger at one deep gash: “Polo accident.”

I laughed because I could tell he was already regretting the joke.

“Nah, actually you know what this is?” Ben said. “This is from that bull, Yellow 5, remember that little bastard?”

We had only a small operation, but we still never named our cattle, that was not a good idea, even as a kid I had no interest in getting attached to Bossy or Hank or Sweet Belle because they’d be sent to slaughter as soon as they were big enough. Sixteen months, that rang out in my head. Once they were a year old, you started tiptoeing around them, you started looking at them sideways with disgust and embarrassment like a guest in your home who just farted. So instead we color-tagged them during calving each year, matching cows with their calves: Green 1, Red 3, Blue 2, sliding out from their mothers, onto the dirt floor of the barn, those feet kicking right away, always trying to get a purchase in the slop. People think of cattle as docile, dumb, but calves? They’re kitty-curious, playful, and for that reason I was never allowed in the lot with them, just eyed them through the slats, but I remember Ben, his rubber boots on, trying to sneak, moving slow and deliberate as an astronaut, and then he got near and he might as well have been trying to grab fish. I remember Yellow 5, at least the name, the famous bull calf who’d refused to be castrated— poor Ben and my mom, day after day trying to get ahold of Yellow 5 so they could slit his sack and cut off his nuts, and each day coming to the dinner table as failures, Yellow 5 having outplayed them. It was a joke to be told over a ground round the first night, everyone talking to the steak, pretending it was Yellow 5: You’ll be sorry, Yellow 5. By the second night it was cause for chagrined laughter, and by the fifth it was grim mouths and silence, a reminder to both Ben and my mom that they weren’t good enough: weak, small, slow, lacking.

I’d have never thought of Yellow 5 again without Ben reminding me. I wanted to tell him to make a list of things to recall, memories I couldn’t pluck out of my brain on my own.

“What happened? He bit you?”

“Nah, nothing that dramatic, he pushed me into the fence right when I thought I’d gotten ahold of him, just haunched me to one side, and I fell full on, jammed the back of my hand right onto a nail. It was on a rail Mom had already asked me to fix, a good five times. So, you know, my fault.”

I was trying to think of what to say—something clever, commiserative, I still had no grip on what reactions Ben wanted—and Ben interrupted. “No, screw that, it was goddam Yellow 5’s fault.” He broke into a quick smile, then let his shoulders slump down again. “I remember Debby, she dressed it all up, my cut, put a Band-Aid on it and then put one of her stickers, those shiny stickers with like hearts or whatever, on top of it.”

“She loved stickers,” I said.

“She put ’em everywhere, that’s for sure.”

I took a breath, debated flitting over to some other harmless subject, the weather or something, then didn’t.

“Hey, Ben, can I ask you a question?”

He went shark-eyed, tight, and I saw the convict again, a guy used to being on the receiving end, taking question after question and getting attitude when he asked his own. I realized what a decadence it was, to refuse to answer a question. No thanks, don’t want to talk about that and the worst you get is someone thinks you’re rude.

“You know that night?”

He widened his eyes. Of course he knew the night.

“I remember, I may have been confused, about exactly what happened …”

He was leaning forward now, his arms stiff, huddled over the phone like it was a late-night emergency call.

“But, one thing I do remember, like stake-my-life-on-it remember … your light was on. In your bedroom. I saw it under the crack in the door. And there was talking. In the room.”

I trailed off, hoping he’d save me. He let me float, that freefall few seconds when your feet go loose on ice and you have just enough time to think, Oh. I am going to fall.

“That’s a new one,” he finally said.

“What’s that?”

“A new question. I didn’t think there’d be new questions anymore. Congratulations.” I caught us both sitting in the same posture, one palm on the edge of the table like we were about to push back from a meal of leftovers. Runner’s posture, I remember it from the last time I saw him, me twenty-five or twenty-six, and him wanting money, asking all flirty and sweet at first—do you think maybe you can help your old man out, Libbydear?—and me telling him no, straight off, a bat cracking a line drive, shocking, humbling. Well, why not? he’d snapped, and his shoulders shot back, his arms flipped up, hands on my table, me thinking: why’d I let him sit down, already calculating the time I’d waste getting him back up.

“I snuck out that night,” Ben said. “I came home, me and mom got in another fight.”

“About Krissi Cates?”

He started at that, then let it slide over him.

“About Krissi Cates. But she believed me, she was completely on my side, that was the great thing about Mom, even when she was pissed as hell at you, she was on your side, you knew that. In your bones. She believed me. But she was angry, and just, scared. I’d kept her waiting for, I don’t know, sixteen hours with no word—I didn’t even know what was going on, you know, no cell phones back then, you’d go a whole day and not talk, not like today. I hear.”

“So, but—”

“Right, we just got in a fight, I don’t even remember if it was exactly Krissi Cates or that’s where it started and went from there, I wish to God I could remember, but anyway, she kinda grounds me, sends me to my room, and I go there and after an hour I’m pissed off again, and I leave the house, leave the radio on and the lights on so if she peeks out she thinks I’m still there. I mean, you know the way she slept, wasn’t like she was going to walk all the way to my room to look in on me. Once she was asleep, she was pretty much asleep.”

Ben made it sound like an unbelievable journey, those thirty-some steps, but it was true, my mom was useless once she was asleep. She barely even moved. I remember holding tense vigils over her body, convincing myself she was dead, staring til my eyes watered, trying to make out breathing, trying to get even a moan. Nudge her, and she’d flop back into the same position. We all had stories of encountering her on coincidental overlapping visits to the bathroom in the night—turn the corner to find her peeing on the toilet, robe between her legs, looking through us like we were made of glass. I just don’t know about the sorghum she’d say, or That seed come in yet? And then she’d shuffle past us back to her room.

“Did you tell the police that?”

“Aw, Libby, come on. Come on. This is not how I want this to go.”

“Did you?”

“No, I didn’t. What difference would it have made? They already knew we had a fight. I tell them we had two? That’s … there’s no point. I was there maybe an hour, nothing happened besides that, it was inconsequential. Entirely.”

We eyed each other.

“Who’s Diondra?” I asked. I could see him try to go even more still. I could see him thinking. The sneaking out may have been true, may not, but I could tell now he was about to lie. The name Diondra chimed him, I could picture his bones humming. He tilted his head to the right just a little bit, a funny you ask that tilt and caught himself.

“Diondra?” He was stalling, trying to figure out exactly what I knew. I gave him a face of slab.

“Uh, Diondra was a girl at school. Where’d you come up with Diondra?”

“I found a note she wrote you, sounds like she was more than ‘a girl at school.’”

“Huh. Well, she was a crazy girl, I do remember that. She was always writing notes that, you know, she was a girl who wanted people to think she was, wild.”

“I thought you didn’t have a girlfriend.”

“I didn’t. Jeez, Libby how do you go from a note to a girlfriend?”

“From the note.” I tensed up, knowing I was about to be disappointed.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I wish I could say she was my girlfriend. She was, just totally out of my league. I don’t even remember getting a note from her. Are you sure it had my name on it? And how’d you even get a note?”

“Never mind,” I said, removing the phone from my ear so he knew I was leaving.

“Libby, hold on, hold on.”

“No, if you’re going to work me like some … convict, I don’t see the point.”

“Libby, hold the hell up. I’m sorry I can’t give you the answer I guess you want.”

“I just want the truth.”

“And I just want to tell you the truth, but you seem to want … a story. I just, I mean Christ, here comes my little sister after all these years and I think, well, here might be one good thing. One good thing. She sure as hell wasn’t helpful twenty-four goddam years ago, but, hey, I’m over that, I’m so over that the first time I see her, all I am is happy. I mean there I was in my fucking animal pen, waiting to see you, so nervous like I was going on a date, and I see you and, jeez, it’s like, maybe this one thing will be OK. Maybe I can have one person from my family still in my life and I won’t be so fucking lonely, because—and I mean, I know you talked to Magda, believe me I heard all about that, and so yeah I have people who visit me and care about me, but they’re not you, they’re not anyone who knows me except as the guy with the … and I was just thinking it’d be so goddam nice to be able to talk with my sister, who knows me, who knows our family, and knows that we were just, like, normal, and we can laugh about goddam cows. That’s it, you know, that’s all I’m asking for at this point. Just something as tiny as that. And so I wish I could tell you something that won’t make you … hate me again.” He dropped his eyes, looking at the reflection of his chest in the glass. “But I can’t.”

*****

Ben Day

JANUARY 2, 1985

5:58 P.M.

Diondra had a little belly, it freaked Ben out, and for weeks now she’d been talking about the “quickening.” The quickening had happened, the baby was moving, it was a very special, important moment and so Ben had to put his hand on her stomach all the time and feel the baby kick. He was proud of making the belly, proud of making the baby, the idea of it at least, but he didn’t like to actually touch that area or look at it. The flesh was weird, hard but globby at the same time, like ham gone bad, and touching it was just embarrassing. For weeks, she’d been grabbing his hand and pressing it there, watching his face for a reaction, and then she’d yell at him when he couldn’t feel anything. For a while, actually, he’d thought maybe the pregnancy was just one of Diondra’s jokes to make him feel dumb—he’d sit there with his hand sweating on that gross mound of skin, and think, maybe that rumble, was that it, was that the baby or was that just indigestion? He worried. He worried that if he didn’t feel anything—and he hadn’t those first weeks after the quickening—that Diondra would yell at him, It’s right there, it’s like a cannon going off in my womb, how can you not feel it? And he worried that if he finally said he did, that Diondra would blast him with her laugh, that laugh that bowed her at the midsection like she’d been shot, the knee-grabbing laugh that made her gelled hair shake like a tree after an ice storm, because of course she wasn’t really pregnant, she was just fucking with him, didn’t he know anything?

He had, in fact, looked for signs she may be lying: those big, bloody maxipads that his mom always rolled up in the trash and that always ended up unfurled within a day. Otherwise he hadn’t been sure what to look for, and he wasn’t sure if he should ask if it was his. She talked like it was, and that was probably as sure as he’d get.

Anyway, in the past month, it was clear she was definitely pregnant, at least if you saw her naked. She still went to school, dressed in those giant baggy sweaters, and she left her jeans unbuttoned and partly unzipped, and the mound got bigger, Diondra holding it and rubbing it in her hands like it was some sort of crystal ball of their fucked-up future, and one day, she grabbed his hand and he felt it, no doubt—that thing was kicking and all of a sudden he saw the swipe of a little foot move under the surface of Diondra’s skin, smooth and fast.

What the hell’s wrong with you? You birth cows out there at the farm don’t you? It’s just a baby was Diondra’s reaction when he snatched his hand away. She pulled it back and held it there, held his palm on that twitching thing inside her, and he thought, calving is damn different than your own real baby, and then he thought, let me go let me go let me go as if the thing were going to grab him like some late-night slasher movie and pull him inside her. That’s how he pictured it, a thing. Not a baby.

Maybe it would have helped if they talked about it more. After the quickening, she wouldn’t speak to him at all for a few days, and it turned out he was supposed to give her something for the quickening, that you gave pregnant ladies presents to celebrate the quickening, and that her parents had given her a gold bracelet when she got her first period and that this was like that. So in place of a present she made him go down on her ten times, that was the deal, which he thought she probably picked because he didn’t really like to do it, the smell made him queasy, especially now, when that whole area seemed used. She didn’t seem to like it either, that’s why it felt like punishment, her yelling at him about fingers and pressure and higher, it’s higher up, go higher and finally sighing and grabbing his head hard, by the ears and pulling him to the spot she wanted and him thinking you fucking bitch and wiping her off his mouth when he was done. Eight more to go, you fucking bitch, you want a glass of water sweet-heart? And she’d said No but you do, you smell like pussy and laughed.

Pregnant women were moody. He knew this. But otherwise, Diondra didn’t act pregnant. She still smoked and drank, which you weren’t supposed to do if you were pregnant but she said only health nuts gave up all that stuff. Another thing she didn’t do: plan. Diondra didn’t even talk much about what they’d do when it was born—when she was born. Diondra had never been to a doctor, but she was sure it was a girl because girls made you sicker and she’d been sick the first month so bad. But she really didn’t say more, reality-wise, than to talk about it as a girl, as an actual girl that would come out of her. He’d wondered at first if she was going to get an abortion. He’d said if you have the baby instead of when, and she’d completely freaked, and Diondra completely freaking was something he never wanted to see again. She was a handful enough at her most calm, this was like watching a natural disaster, the nails the crying the hitting, and her yelling that that was the worst thing anyone had ever said to her, and it’s your flesh too, what the hell is wrong with you, you asshole piece of shit?

But otherwise, they didn’t plan or couldn’t plan, since Diondra’s dad would literally kill her if he ever found out she was pregnant outside of marriage. If he ever found out she even did it outside of marriage, he’d kill her. Diondra’s parents had only one rule, only one single rule, and that was that she must never, ever let a boy touch her there unless he was her husband. When she turned sixteen, Diondra’s dad had given her a promise ring, a gold ring with a big red stone that looked like a wedding ring and she wore it on that finger, and it meant a promise to him and to herself that she would remain a virgin til marriage. The whole thing grossed Ben out—doesn’t that seem like you’re married to your dad? Diondra said it was a control thing, mostly. This was the one thing her dad had decided to get hung up about, it was the one thing he asked of her, and goddamit, she’d better do it. She said it made him feel better leaving her alone, unsupervised, unprotected, except for the dogs, for months at a time. It was his one parental thing: my daughter may drink or do drugs but she is a virgin and therefore I can’t be as fucked up as I seem.

This, she said, with tears in her eyes. This she said while near her pass-out part of a drunk. She said her dad told her if he ever found out she’d broken the promise, he’d take her out of the house and shoot her in the head. Her dad had been in Vietnam, and he talked like that, and Diondra took it seriously, so she didn’t do any planning about the baby. Ben made lists of things they might need, and he bought some hand-me-down baby clothes at a Delphos flea market right near Christmastime. He’d been embarrassed, so he just bought the whole bunch from the woman for $8. It turned out to be undershirts and underwear, for a bunch of different ages, lots of ruffly undies—the woman kept calling them bloomers—which is fine, kids need underwear for sure. Ben stored them under his bed, which made him more glad he had the lock, he could picture the girls finding them and stealing whatever fit. So true, he didn’t think enough about the kid, and what would happen, but Diondra seemed to think even less.

“I THINK WE should leave town,” Diondra said now, a surprise, the hair still over half her face, Ben’s hand still clamped to her belly, the baby scuttering around inside like it had dug tunnels. Diondra turned slightly toward him, one lazy boob lolling on Ben’s arm. “I can’t hide this much longer. My mom and dad will be home any day now. You sure Michelle doesn’t know?”

Ben had saved a note from Diondra, it talked about how horny she was and how much sex she wanted from him even now, and nosy-ass Michelle had found it going through his jacket pockets. The little bitch had blackmailed him—$10 not to tell Mom—and when Ben complained to Diondra, she went ballistic. Your little fucking sister could tell on us at any moment, you think that’s OK? This is on you, Ben. You fucked up. Diondra was paranoid that somehow Michelle would figure out she was pregnant from those two words—“even now”— and they’d be undone by a fucking ten-year-old, how perfect.

“No, she hasn’t mentioned it again.”

That was a lie, just yesterday Michelle caught his eye, shook her hips, and said in a teasy voice, “Hey Beee-ennn, how’s your seeeex life?” She was such a shitty kid. She’d blackmailed him on other things—chores he’d left undone, extra food he’d eaten from the fridge. Little stuff. It was always little crappy stuff, like she was there just to remind Ben how cramped his life was. She’d spend the money on jelly donuts.

Trey made a loud loogie noise in the other room, and then a thweeewp! spit sound. Ben could picture the yellow phlegm dripping down the sliding glass door, the dogs licking at it. That was something Trey and Diondra did: they hocked loogies at things. Sometimes Trey shot it straight into the air, and the dogs would catch it in their drooly mouths. (“It’s just body stuff going into another body,” Diondra would say. “You’ve thrown some of your body stuff into my body and it doesn’t seem to bother you none.”)

As the TV got even louder in the den—wrap it up you two, I’m goddam bored—Ben tried to think of the right thing to say. He sometimes thought he never said anything to Diondra that was just pure talking, it was all verbal elbows and arms, trying to fend off her constant annoyance, say what she wanted to hear. But he loved her, he did love her, and that’s what men did for their women, they told them what they wanted to hear and shut up. He’d knocked Diondra up and now she owned him, and he had to do right by her. He’d have to drop out of school and get a full-time job, which would be fine, some kid he knew quit last year and worked over near Abilene at the brick factory, got $12,000 dollars a year, Ben couldn’t even begin to think how to spend it all. So he’d drop out of school, which was just as well, considering whatever the hell Diondra thought she’d heard about Krissi Cates.

It was weird, at first that made him really nervous, that those rumors were going around, and then part of him got kind of proud. Even though she was a kid, she was one of the cool younger kids. Even some of the high schoolers knew her, the older girls took an interest in her, that pretty, well-bred girl, so it was sort of cool that she had a crush on him, even though she was a kid, and he was sure whatever Diondra had just told him was her usual exaggeration. Hysterical, she sometimes got.

“Hey, hello? Try to stay with me. I said I think we have to leave town.”

“Then we’ll leave town.” He tried to kiss her and she pushed him away.

“Really, that easy? Where d’we go, how will you support us? I won’t have my allowance anymore, you know. You’ll have to get a job.”

“I’ll get a job then. What about your uncle or cousin or whoever in Wichita?”

She looked at him like he was crazy.

“With the sporting-goods store?” he pushed.

“You can’t work there, you’re fifteen. You can’t drive. In fact, I don’t even think you can get a real job without your mom’s permission. When do you turn sixteen again?”

“July thirteenth,” he said, feeling like he’d just told her he wet himself.

She started crying then. “Oh my God, Oh my God, what are we going to do?”

“Your cousin can’t help?”

“My uncle will tell my parents, how will that help?”

She got up, walking naked, her stomach bulge looking dangerously unsupported, Ben wanting to go stick a hand under there, and thinking how much bigger she’d get. She didn’t put on any clothes to walk across the hall to the shower, even though Trey could see right down the hallway if he was still sitting on the couch. He heard the guttural sound of the shower twisting on. Conversation over. He wiped himself off with a moldy towel near Diondra’s hamper, then squeezed back into his leather pants and striped T-shirt and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to guess what smart-ass comment Trey was going to make when they went back out to the den.

In a few minutes, Diondra breezed into the bedroom, wearing a red towel, her hair wet, not looking at him, and sat in front of her dresser with the mirror in it. She squirted her mousse into her palm, a giant dogshit of a pile, and scrunched it into her hair, aiming the blowdryer at each section—squirt, scrunch, woosh, squirt, scrunch, woosh.

He wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to leave or not, so he stayed, sitting on the bed still, trying to catch her eye. She poured dark foundation into her palm, the way an artist might pour paint, and swirled it onto her face. Some girls had called her a base face, he heard them, but he liked the way it looked, tan and smooth, even though her neck sometimes seemed whiter, like the vanilla ice cream under the caramel dip. She put on three coats of mascara—she always said it took three, one to darken, one to thicken and one for drama. Then she started with the lipstick: undercoat, overcoat, gloss. She caught him looking and stopped, dabbing her lips on little foamy triangles, leaving sticky purple kiss marks on them.

“You need to ask Runner for money,” she said, looking at him in the mirror.

“My dad?”

“Yeah, he’s got money right? Trey always buys weed from him.” She dropped the towel, went over to her underwear drawer, a thicket of bright lace and satin, and dug around til she pulled out underwear and a bra, hot pink, with black lace edges, the kind girls wore in the saloons in westerns.

“Are you sure we’re talking about the same guy?” he said. “My dad does, you know, handyman stuff. Labor. He works on farms and stuff.”

Diondra rolled her eyes at him, tugging at the back of her bra, her tits overflowing everywhere—over the cups, under the clasps, unwrangleable and eggy. She let the bra go finally, threw it across the room—-fuck, I need a goddam fucking bra that fits! She stood glaring at him, and then her underpants started rolling under themselves, edging away from her stomach, up in her ass crack. None of those sexy underclothes fit. Ben thought first: chubby, and then corrected: pregnant.

“Are you serious? You don’t know your own dad deals? He sold to me and Trey last week.” She tossed away the underpants, then put on a different bra, an ugly plain bra, and new jeans, pouting about her size.

Ben had never bought drugs himself before. He smoked a lot with Trey and Diondra and whoever had pot in that crowd, and sometimes he chipped in a buck or two, but when he pictured a dealer, he pictured someone with slick hair and jewelry, not his dad in the old Royals baseball cap and the cowboy boots with the big heels and the shirts that looked like they were wilting. Not his dad, definitely not his dad. And weren’t dealers supposed to have money? His dad definitely did not have money, so the whole argument was stupid. And if he was a dealer, and he did have money, he wouldn’t give any to Ben. He’d make fun of Ben for asking, maybe hold a twenty just out of Ben’s reach the way a bully would grab a nerd’s notebook, and then he’d laugh and shove it right back in his pants pocket. Runner never had a wallet, he just carried mangled bills in the front of his jeans, and wasn’t that enough of a sign he had no cash?

“Trey!” Diondra yelled down the hall. She threw on a new sweater with patterns that looked like a geometry experiment. Ripped off the tags and tossed them to the floor, then rumbled out of the room. Ben was left staring at the rock posters and the astrology posters (Diondra was a Scorpio, she took it very seriously) and crystals and books on numerology. All around her mirror were stapled decrepit, dried corsages from dances Ben had not taken her to, they were mostly from this senior back in Hiawatha named Gary that even Trey said was a prick. Trey, of course, knew him.

The corsages unsettled Ben, they looked like organs, with their folds and their twists, their pink-and-purpleness. They reminded Ben of the stinking globs of meat sitting in his locker right now, a horrible gift Diondra had left him—surprise!—the girl parts of some animal, Diondra refusing to say where it came from. She hinted it was from a blood sacrifice she did with Trey; Ben assumed it was just leftover pieces from a Biology experiment. She liked to freak him out. When her class did baby-pig dissections, she brought him a curlicue tail, thought it was hilarious. It wasn’t, it was just nasty. He got up and went to the living room.

“You sorry sack of shit,” Trey called from the sofa, where he’d just lit a joint, not taking his eyes off the music video. “You don’t know about your dad? The fuck, dude.” Trey’s bare stomach was almost concave, but rippled, perfect, tan. The opposite of Ben’s soft white mouse-belly. Trey had balled the shirt Diondra gave him under his head as a pillow.

“Here, you broke-dick dog.” He handed Ben the joint, and Ben took a big pull off it, feeling the back of his head go numb. “Hey, Ben, how many babies does it take to paint a house?”

Annihilation.

There it was back, that word. Ben pictured barbarian hordes busting through the big stone fireplace, and swiping Trey’s head off with an axe, right in the middle of one of his fucking dead-baby jokes, the head rolling over across the dogshit and stopping next to one of Diondra’s black buckle shoes. And then maybe Diondra dies next. Fuck it all. Ben took another drag, his brain feeling minty, and gave it back to Trey. Diondra’s biggest dog, the white one, glided over to him and stared with no forgiveness in its eyes.

“Depends on how hard you throw them,” Trey said. “Why do you put a baby in a blender feet first?”

“I’m serious, Trey,” Diondra said, continuing a conversation Ben wasn’t privy to. “He thinks his dad doesn’t deal.”

“So you can see its reaction. Hey, Ben? You’re smoking your dad’s stuff, buddy,” Trey said, finally turning to look at him. “It’s crap. Potent, but crap. That’s why we know your dad has money. He overcharges, but no one else has any right now. Think he said he got it in Texas. He been to Texas lately?”

Runner had disappeared from Ben’s life after Patty gave him the boot. For all Ben knew he might have gone to Texas for a while. Hell, you can drive to Texas and back in a day if you drive hard, so why not?

“This is cashed,” Trey said, in a toke-choke voice. “Anyway, he owes me money, like everyone in this town. They love to make the bet, they never want to pay it off.”

“Hey, I didn’t even get any,” Diondra pouted. She turned away and started sifting through the cabinets—the basement den had a minikitchen, too, imagine that, needing a separate room for all your junk food—and then cracked open the fridge, got herself a beer, didn’t ask Ben if he wanted one. Ben saw the inside of that fridge, which had been packed with food the month before, and now just had beer and a big jar with one single pickle floating in it like a turd.

“You grab me a beer, Diondra?” he said, pissy.

She cocked her head at him, then handed him hers, went back to the fridge for another.

“So let’s go find Runner, and we’ll get some pot and get some money,” Diondra said, draping herself next to him on the chair. “And then we can get the hell out of Dodge.”

Ben looked at that blue eye, that bright blue eye—it seemed like Diondra was always looking at him sideways, he never saw both eyes at the same time—and for the first time he felt really bone scared. He couldn’t even drop out of school without his mom’s permission before he turned sixteen. Much less get a job at the brick plant or anything that made enough money for Diondra to not hate him, not sigh when he came home at night, and now that’s what he saw, not even that little apartment in Wichita, but some factory near the border, near Oklahoma, where the really cheap work was, where you worked sixteen hours a day, worked weekends, and Diondra would be with the baby and she’d hate it. She had no mothering instinct, she’d sleep right through the baby crying, she’d forget to feed it, she’d go out drinking with some guys she met—she always was meeting guys, at the mall or the gas station or the movies—and leave the kid there. What can happen to it, it’s a baby, it ain’t going nowhere! He could already hear it, him being the bad guy. The poor, idiot bad guy who can’t provide.

“Fine,” he said, thinking once they left the house, they’d lose track of the idea. He almost had. His brain was bundling itself up, getting woolly. He wanted to go home.

Trey immediately shot up, jingling his truck keys—I know where to find him—and suddenly they were out in the cold, tromping through the snow and ice, Diondra demanding Ben’s arm so she wouldn’t fall, Ben thinking, but what if she fell? What if she fell and died, or lost the baby? He’d heard girls at school saying if you ate a lemon a day you’d have a miscarriage, and had thought about sneaking lemon into Diondra’s diet Cokes and then realized that was wrong, to do it without her knowing, but what if she fell? But she didn’t, they were in Trey’s truck with the heater wushing on them, and Ben was in the backseat as always—it was half a backseat, really, only a kid could fit on it, so his knees were smashed sideways to his chest—and when he saw a shriveled pinky of a fry on the seat next to him he popped it in his mouth and instead of looking to see if anyone saw, he just looked for more, which meant he was very stoned and very hungry.

*****

Libby Day

NOW

Back in grade school, my shrinks tried to channel my viciousness into a constructive outlet, so I cut things with scissors. Heavy, cheap fabrics Diane bought by the bolt. I sliced through them with old metal shears going up and down: hateyouhateyouhateyou. The soft growl of the fabric as I sliced it apart, and that perfect last moment, when your thumb is getting sore and your shoulders hurt from hunching and cut, cut, cut … free, the fabric now swaying in two pieces in your hands, a curtain parted. And then what? That’s how I felt now, like I’d been sawing away at something and come to the end and here I was by myself again, in my small house with no job, no family, and I was holding two ends of fabric and didn’t know what to do next.

Ben was lying. I didn’t want this to be true but it was undeniable. Why lie about a silly high school girlfriend? My thoughts chased themselves like birds trapped in an attic. Maybe Ben was telling the truth, and the note from Diondra really wasn’t to him, it was just part of the haphazard flotsam that went with a houseful of school kids. Hell, Michelle could have pulled it out of the trash after some senior boy tossed it, a useful bit of garbage for her ongoing petty blackmail.

Or maybe Ben knew Diondra, loved Diondra, and was trying to keep it a secret because Diondra was dead.

He’d killed her the same night he killed our family, part of his satanic sacrifices, buried her somewhere out there in that big, flat Kansas farm country. The Ben that frightened me was back in my head: I could picture a campfire, liquor sloshing in a bottle, Diondra-from-the-yearbook, with her spiral curls bouncing as she laughed, eyes closed, or sang, her face orange in the fire and Ben standing behind her, gently raising a shovel, eyes on the crown of her head …

Where were the other cult kids, the rest of the pack of Satan worshipers? If there was a ring of pale, sloe-eyed teens who’d recruited Ben, where were they? By now I’d read every scrap of information from the trial. The police had never found anyone involved in Satan worship with Ben. All the wild-haired, pot-smoking Devil kids of Kinnakee morphed back to peachy country boys in the days after Ben’s arrest. How convenient for them. Two “habitual drug users” in their early twenties testified that Ben had shown up at some abandoned warehouse, a hangout place, on the day of the murders. They said he screeched like a demon when someone played a Christmas song. They claimed he told them he was going to make a sacrifice. They said he left with a guy named Trey Teepano, who supposedly mutilated cattle and worshiped the Devil. Teepano testified he only vaguely knew Ben. He had an alibi for the time of the killings: his dad, Greg Teepano, testified Trey was at home with him in Wamego, more than sixty miles away.

So maybe Ben was crazy all by his lonesome. Or maybe he was innocent. Again the birds in the attic battered around. Crash thunk shatter. I had probably sat for hours on the couch, wondering what to do, being shiftless, when I heard the heavy footsteps of my mailman thump up my stairs. My mom always had us bake Christmas cookies for our mailman. But my mailman, or lady, changed every few weeks. No cookies.

I had three envelopes offering me credit cards, one bill that belonged to someone named Matt who lived on a street nowhere near me, and one envelope that looked like dirty laundry, it was so soft and wrinkled. Used. Someone else’s name and address had been blacked out with a magic marker, and mine written in the cramped space left below it. Mrs. Libby Day.

It was from Runner.

I went upstairs to read the letter, sitting on the edge of my bed. Then, as I always do when I get nervy, I smushed myself into a small space, in this case the spot between my bed and the bedside table, sitting on the floor with my back to the wall. I opened the dirty envelope and pulled out an unwholesome piece of women’s stationery, bordered with roses. My father’s handwriting swarmed across it: tiny, frenetic, pointy, like a hundred spiders had been splattered across the page.

Dear Libby,

Well, Libby, we sure find ourselves in a strange place after all these years. At leest I do. Never thought I’d be this old, and tired, and by myself. Got cancer. They say only a few months. All rite by me, Iv’e been here longer than I deserve any way. So I was exited to here from you. Look, I know I was never close with you. I was very young when we had you, and I was’nt the greatest dad, altho I tried to provide for you and be close with you when I was able. Your mother made it difficult. I was imature and she was even more. And then the murders were very hard on me. So there you go. I need to let you know—and please do’nt lechure me I shoold have done this before. I know I shoold have done this before. But between my gambling problems and I am an alcaholic, I have had truble facing my demons. I know the real killer of that night, and I know it was’nt Ben. I will tell the truth before I die. If you can send me some money, I woold be happy to visit you and tell you more. Five hundred bucks shoold work.

I look forward to hering from you.

Runner “Dad” Day
12 Donneran Rd.
Bert Nolan Home for Men
Lidgerwood, OK

PS Ask somone what the zip code is, I dont know.

I grabbed the thin neck of my table lamp and hurled the whole thing across the room, the lamp soaring three feet until its electrical cord stopped it short and it fell to the floor. I charged at it, yanked it from its socket, and threw it again. It hit the wall, the lampshade bumping off and rolling drunkenly across the floor, the cracked light-bulb jutting out the top like a broken tooth.

“Fuck. You.” I screamed. It was directed toward me as much as my dad. That, at this stage of my life, I was expecting Runner to act correctly was stupid to the point of outrageousness. The letter was just a big long palm stretching out over the miles, asking for a handout, working me as a mark. I’d pay that five hundred and never see Runner again, until I wanted more help or answers, and then he’d work me over another time. His daughter.

I was going down to Oklahoma. I kicked the wall twice, rattling the windows, and was going for a good third windup when the doorbell went off downstairs. I looked outside automatically, but from the second floor saw only the top of a sycamore tree and the dusky sky. I stood frozen, waiting for the visitor to go away, but the doorbell went again, five times in a row, the person on my porch knowing I was home, thanks to my tantrum.

I was dressed like my mom in the winter: big, formless sweatshirt, baggy cheap longjohns, thick itchy socks. I turned to the closet for a second and then decided I didn’t care as the doorbell went again.

My door has no window in it, so I couldn’t get a glimpse of the person. I put the chain on and opened the door a crack to see the back of a head, a mat of tangled tawny hair, and then Krissi Cates turned around to face me.

“Those old women over there are kinda rude,” she said, and then gave a showboaty wave, the kind I’d given them the week before, the broad, fuck-you wave. “I mean, hello’? anyone ever tell them it’s not polite to stare?”

I kept looking at her through the chain, feeling like a little old lady myself.

“I got your address from the—when you were at the club,” she said, bending down to reach my eye level. “I don’t actually have that money for you yet. Uh, but I was hoping to talk to you. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you that night. I drink way, way too much.” She said it without embarrassment, the way someone would say they have a wheat allergy. “Your place is really hard to find. And I actually haven’t been drinking. But I’ve just never been good at directions. Like, if I reach a fork in the road, and I can take a right or a left, I will choose whichever is wrong. Like, I should just listen to my gut and then do the opposite. But I don’t. I don’t know why that is.”

She kept talking like that, adding a sentence and then another, without asking to be let in, and that was probably why I decided to let her in.

She walked in respectfully, hands clasped, the way a well-brought up girl would, trying to find something to compliment in my run-down place, her eyes finally alighting on the box of lotions by the TV set.

“Oh, I’m a total lotion fiend too—I have a great pear-scented one I’m really into now, but have you tried udder cream? It’s what they used to put on dairy cows? Like on their udders? And it’s so smooth, you can get it at a drugstore.”

I shook my head loosely, and offered her coffee, even though I had only a few granules of instant left.

“Mmmmm, I hate to say it, but you have anything to drink? Long drive.”

We both pretended it was the long drive, like two hours in a car would make anyone need some liquor. I went to the kitchen and hoped a can of Sprite would appear in the back of the fridge.

“I have gin, but nothing to mix it with,” I called out.

“Oh, that’s OK,” she said, “Straight is good.”

I had no ice cubes either—I have trouble making myself fill the trays—so I poured us two glasses of room-temperature gin and returned to find her loitering near my lotion box. I bet she had a few of the mini-bottles jammed in her pockets right now. She was wearing a black pantsuit with a pale pink turtleneck underneath, a painfully aspirational look for a stripper. Let her keep the lotion.

I handed her the glass and noticed she’d painted her nails to match her turtleneck and then noticed her noticing my missing finger.

“Is that from … ?” she began, the first time I’d known her to trail off. I nodded.

“So?” I said, as nicely as I could. She took a breath and then settled herself down on the sofa, her gestures tea-party delicate. I sat down next to her, twining my legs around each other and then forcing them to untwine.

“I don’t even know how to say this,” she started, swallowing some gin.

“Just say it.”

“It’s just that, when I realized who you were … I mean, you came to my house that day.”

“I’ve never been to your house,” I said, confused. “I don’t even know where you live,” I said.

“No, not now, back then. The day your family was killed—you and your mom came to my house.”

“Mmmm,” I said, squinting my eyes, trying to think. That day hadn’t really been that big a deal—I knew Ben was in trouble, but not why or how deeply. My mom had protected us all from her growing panic. But that day. I could remember going with my mom and Diane to look for Ben. Ben was in trouble and so we went looking for Ben and I was sitting in the backseat alone, uncrowded and pleased with myself. I remember my face on fire from the salami Michelle fried. I remember visiting bustling houses, a birthday party my mom thought Ben might be at. Or something. I remember eating a donut. We never found Ben.

“Never mind,” Krissi interrupted. “I just—with everything that’s happened, I forgot. About you. Could I have a refill?” she held her glass out to me, briskly, as if a long time had lapsed with it empty. I filled it to the brim so she could keep her story going.

She took a sip, shivered. “Should we go somewhere?” she said.

“No, no, tell me what’s going on.”

“I lied to you,” she blurted.

“Which part?”

“Ben never molested me.”

“I didn’t think so,” I said, again trying to make it gentle.

“And he definitely didn’t molest any of the other girls.”

“No, everyone dropped their story but you.”

She shifted on the sofa, her eyes rolling back toward the right, and I could see her remembering her house, her life, way back when.

“The other stuff was true,” she said. “I was a pretty girl, and we had money and I was good in school, good at ballet … I always just think, just think if I hadn’t told that one stupid lie. That one goddam lie, if it just hadn’t come out of my mouth the first time, my life would be totally different. I’d be like a housewife, and have my own ballet studio or something.” She pulled a finger across her belly, where I knew her caesarian scar was.

“You have kids though, right?” I said.

“Sorta,” she replied and rolled her eyes. I didn’t follow up.

“So what happened? How did it start?” I asked. I couldn’t figure out the significance of Krissi’s lie, what it had done to us that day. But it felt big, relevant—ripply, to quote Lyle. If the police wanted to talk to Ben that day, because of what Krissi had said, that had meaning. It had to.

“Well, I mean, I had a crush. A big crush. And I know Ben liked me too. We hung out, in a way—and I’m totally serious here—that wasn’t probably right. I mean, I know he was a kid too, but he was old enough to … not have encouraged me. We kissed one day, and it changed everything …”

“You kissed him.”

“We kissed.”

“Like?”

“Inappropriately, grown-up. In a way I definitely wouldn’t want my fifth-grade daughter to be kissed by a teenage boy.”

I didn’t believe her.

“Go on,” I said.

“About a week after, I went to a slumber party over Christmas break, and I told the girls about my high school boyfriend. All proud. I made up things we did, sex things. And one of them told her mom, and her mom called my mom. I still remember it, the phone call. I remember my mom talking on the phone, and me just waiting in my room for her to come and yell at me. She was always pissed off about something. And she came to my room, and she was, like, nice. Sweetheart and Honey, and holding my hand, you know, ‘You can trust me, we’ll work this out together,’ and asking me if Ben had touched me wrong.”

“And you said, what?”

“Well, I started out with the kiss, and that was all I was going to say. Just the truth. And I told her and she, she seemed to move away, like ‘OK, not that big a deal. No problem.’ I remember her saying, Is that all? Is that all that happened? Like she was disappointed almost, and all of a sudden, I remember, she was already standing up, and I blurted it out, ‘He touched me here. He made me do things.’ And then she was back.’”

“And then what?”

“It just kept getting bigger. My mom told my dad when he got home, and he was all, my baby, my poor little girl, and they called the school and the school sent over a, like, child psychologist. And I remember he was this college guy, and he made it impossible to tell the truth. He wanted to believe I was molested.”

I frowned at her.

“I’m serious. Because I remember, I was going to tell him the truth and have him tell my parents, but … he’d ask if Ben had made me do things, sexually, and I said no, and, he’d, like, be mean about it. You seem like a smart, brave girl, I’m relying on you to tell me what happened. Oh, nothing happened? Gosh I thought you were braver than that. I was really hoping you’d be brave enough to help me out on this. Maybe you can tell me if at least you remember this sort of touching or Ben saying this? Do you remember playing a game like this, can you tell me if you at least remember that? Oh that’s good. I knew you could do it, what a smart, good girl. And I don’t know, you’re at that age, if a bunch of grownups are telling you something or encouraging you, it just … it started to feel real. That Ben had molested me, because otherwise, why were all these adults trying to get me to say he had? And my parents would be all stern: It’s OK to tell the truth. It’s OK to tell the truth. And so you told the lie that they thought was the truth.”

I was remembering my own shrink, after the murders. Dr. Brooner, who always wore blue, my favorite color, for our sessions, and who gave me treats when I told him what he wanted to hear. Tell me about seeing Ben with that shotgun, shooting your mother. I know this is so hard for you Libby, but if you say it, say it aloud, you will help your mom and sisters and you will help yourself start to heal. Don’t bottle it up, Libby, don’t bottle up the truth. You can help us make sure Ben is punished for what he did to your family. I would be a brave little girl and say that I saw Ben chop up my sister and I saw Ben kill my mother. And then I’d get the peanut butter with apricot jelly, my favorite, that Dr. Brooner always brought for me. I think he really believed he was helping.

“They were trying to make you comfortable, they thought the harder they believed in you, the easier it’d be for you,” I said. “They were trying to help you, and you were trying to help them.” Dr. Brooner gave me a star-shaped pin with the words SuperSmart SuperStar printed on it after I nailed Ben with my testimony.

“Yeah!” Krissi said, her eyes going big. “This therapist, he helped me, like visualize, like entire scenes. We’d act it all out with dolls. And then he started talking to the other girls, girls who never even kissed Ben, and, I mean, it was just a few days, that we had made up this entire imaginary world where Ben was a Devil worshiper, doing things like killing rabbits and making us eat the insides while he molested us. I mean, it was insane. But it was … fun. I know that’s horrible, but we girls would get together, one night we had another slumber party, and we were up in the bedroom, sitting in a circle, egging each other on, making up stories, bigger and juicier, and … have you ever played with a Ouija board?”

“When I was a kid.”

“Right! And you know, you all want it to be real, so someone moves the heart-thingie a little and you know someone’s moving it, but part of you thinks maybe it’s real, it’s really a ghost, and no one has to say anything, you just all kind of know you’ve agreed to believe.”

“But you’ve never told the truth.”

“I told it to my parents. That day, the day you came over, the police had been called in, all the girls were at my house—they gave us cake, I mean, jeez, how screwed up is that? My parents said they’d buy me a dang puppy so I would feel better. And then the police left and the girls left and the therapist left, and I went up to my room and I just started crying, and it’s like, only then did I realize. Only then did I think.”

“But you said your dad was out searching for Ben.”

“Nah, that’s just a little fantasy.” She said it, and stared across the room again. “When I told him? My dad shook me so hard I thought my head would come off. And after those murders, all the girls panicked, everyone told the truth. We all felt like we’d really summoned the Devil. Like we made up this bad story about Ben and some part of it became true.”

“But your family got a big settlement from the school.”

“It wasn’t that big.” She eyed the bottom of her glass.

“But your parents went ahead with it, after you’d told them the truth.”

“My dad was a businessman. He thought we could get some sort of, compensation.”

“But your dad definitely knew, that day, that Ben had not molested you.”

“Yeah, he did,” she said, giving that chickeny neck jerk toward me, defensive. Buck came and rubbed against her pant leg, and she seemed calm, ran her long fingernails through his fur. “We moved that year. My dad said the place was tainted. But the money didn’t really help. I remember he bought me a dog, but every time I tried to talk about the dog, he sort of held his hand up, like it was too much. My mom, she just never forgave me. I’d come home and tell her about something that happened at school and—and she’d just say, Really? Like I was lying, no matter what I said. I could have told her I ate mashed potatoes for lunch and she’d just go, Really? And then she just stopped talking, she’d look at me when I came in the door from school, and then she’d walk over to the kitchen and open a bottle of wine, and she’d just keep refilling, wandering around the house, not talking. Always shaking her head. I remember one time I told her I wish I hadn’t made her so sad, and she said, she said, Well, you did.”

Krissi was crying now, petting the cat rhythmically.

“And that was it. By the end of the year my mom was gone. I came home from school one day, and her room was cleared out.” She let her head drop to her lap then, a childish, dramatic gesture, her hair flung over her head. I knew I was supposed to pet her, soothe her, but instead I just waited and eventually she peered up at me.

“No one ever forgives me for anything,” she whimpered, her chin shaking. I wanted to tell her I did, but I didn’t. Instead I poured her another drink.

*****

Patty Day

JANUARY 2, 1985

6:11 P.M.

Patty was still muttering sorrys as Lou Cates hustled her toward the door, and suddenly, she was out on the step, in the freezing air, her eyes blinking rapidly. Between blinks, before she could get her mouth to move, to form any sort of word, the door opened again, and out stepped a man in his fifties. He shut the door behind him, and then there they all were, on the small front porch: Patty, Diane, Libby, and the man, basset-hound bags beneath watery eyes, his graying hair brushed straight back. He ran a hand through the pomade while he assessed Patty, his Irish Claddagh ring flashing.

“Mrs. Patty Day?” His coffee breath lingered in the cold air, vaguely discolored.

“I’m Patty Day. Ben Day’s mother.”

“We came by to find out what’s going on with these stories,” Diane interrupted. “We’ve been hearing a lot of rumors, and no one’s bothered to talk to us directly.”

The man cocked his hands on his hips, looked down at Libby, looked quickly away. “I’m Detective Jim Collins. I’m in charge of this investigation. I had to come by here today to talk to these folks and then of course I was going to get in touch with you. You saved me a drive. Do you want to talk somewhere else? It’s a little cold here.”

They went to a Dunkin’ Donuts just off the highway, separate cars, Diane muttering a joke about cops and donuts, then cursing Mrs. Cates—wouldn’t even give us the time of damn day. Bitch. Normally Patty would have said something in Mrs. Cates’s defense: Diane and Patty’s roles, straight-talker and apologist, were grooved deep. But the Cates family was in no need of defense.

Det. Collins was waiting for them with three paper cups of coffee and a carton of milk for Libby.

“Didn’t know if you’d want her to have sweets,” he said, and Patty wondered if he’d think she was a bad mother if she bought Libby a donut. Especially if he knew they’d had pancakes that morning. This will be my life from now on, she thought, always having to think about what people will think. Libby was smearing her face against the pastry glass already, though, hopping from one foot to another, and so Patty fished around in her pocket for some change and got a pink frosted donut, gave it to Libby on a napkin. She could not deal with Libby feeling denied, staring mournfully at all those pastel shades of sugar while they tried to have a conversation about whether her son was a Devil-worshiping child-molester. Again she almost laughed. She settled Libby at a table behind them and told her to sit still and eat while the grown-ups talked.

“You all redheads?” Collins said. “Where’s the red come from, you Irish?”

Patty thought immediately of her always-conversation with Len about their red hair, and then she thought, The farm’s going away. How did I forget that the farm’s going away?

“German,” she said for the second time that day.

“You have another few little ones, don’t you?” Collins said.

“Yes. I have four children.”

“Same daddy?”

Diane rustled in the seat next to her. “Of course, same daddy!”

“But you are a single mother, correct?” Collins asked.

“We’re divorced, yes,” Patty said, trying to sound as prim as a churchwife.

“What’s this got to do with what’s happening with Ben?” Diane snapped, leaning across the table. “I’m Patty’s sister by the way. I take care of these kids almost as much as she does.”

Patty winced, Det. Collins watched her wince.

“Let’s try to start this civilly,” Collins said. “Because we’ve got a long way to go together before this is cleared up. The charges leveled against your son, Mrs. Day, are of a very serious, and very concerning nature. At this point, we’ve got four little girls who say that Ben touched them in their private areas, that he made them touch him. That he took them out to some farm area and performed certain … acts that are associated with ritualistic Devil worship.” He said those words—ritualistic Devil worship—the way people who don’t know cars repeat what the mechanic said: It’s a broken fuel pump.

“Ben doesn’t even have a car,” Patty said in a barely audible voice.

“Now the age difference between an eleven-year-old and a fifteen-year-old is only four years, but those are very crucial years,” continued Collins. “We would consider him a danger and a predator if these accusations turn out to be true. And, frankly, we’ll need to talk not only to Ben, but to your little girls too.”

“Ben is a good boy,” Patty said, and hated how limp and weak her voice was. “Everyone likes him.”

“How is he regarded at school?” Collins asked.

“Pardon?”

“Is he considered a popular kid?”

“He has a lot of friends,” Patty mumbled.

“I don’t think he does, ma’am,” Collins said. “From what we understand, he doesn’t have very many friends, he’s a bit of a loner.”

“So what does that prove?” Diane snapped.

“It proves absolutely nothing, Miss … ?”

“Krause.”

“It proves absolutely nothing, Miss Krause. But that fact, combined with the fact that he doesn’t have a strong father figure around, would lead me to believe he may be more vulnerable to, say, a negative influence. Drugs, alcohol, people who are maybe a bit rougher, a bit troubled.”

“He doesn’t associate with delinquents, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Patty said.

“Name summa his friends for me then,” Collins said. “Name the kids he hangs out with. Name who he was with last weekend.”

Patty sat, tongue thick in her mouth, and then shook her head, folded her hands near a smear of someone else’s chocolate icing. It was late coming. But now finally, she was being revealed for what she was: a woman who couldn’t quite keep it together, who lived from emergency to emergency, borrowing money, scrambling for sleep, sliding by when she should have been tending to Ben, encouraging him to pick up a hobby or join a club, not secretly grateful when he locked himself in his room or disappeared for an evening, knowing it was one less kid to deal with.

“There are some parenting gaps then,” Collins sighed, like he already knew the end to the story.

“We want a lawyer before anything else happens, before you talk to any of the kids,” Diane interrupted.

“Frankly, Mrs. Day,” Collins said, not even glancing at Diane, “with three little girls at home, if I were you, I’d want the truth out more than anyone. This kind of behavior doesn’t go away. In fact, if this is true, and to be frank, I think it is, your daughters were probably his first victims.”

Patty looked behind at Libby, who sat licking the frosting off her donut. She thought of how much Libby used to hang on Ben. She thought of all the chores the kids did on their own. Sometimes after a day working in the barn with Ben, the girls would come back to the house, irritated, weepy. But … what? They were little girls, they got tired out and cranky. She wanted to throw her coffee in Collins’s face.

“May I speak plainly?” Collins said, his voice kneading her. “I can’t imagine how … horrible it must be to hear these things as a mother. But I can tell you something, and this is straight from our psychologist, who’s been working one-on-one with these girls, and I can tell you what he tells me. That’s that these girls, they’re telling us things a fifth-grader wouldn’t know about, sexually, unless they’d actually happened. He says they are classic abuse scenarios. You know about the McMartin case, of course.”

Patty vaguely remembered. A preschool in California, and all the teachers were on trial for being Devil worshipers, molesting the kids. She could remember the evening newscast: a pretty sunny California house and then black words stamped across it: Daycare Nightmare.

“Satanic worship is not uncommon, I’m afraid,” Collins was saying. “It’s made its way into all areas of the community, and Devil worshipers tend to target young men, get them in the fold. And part of Devil worship is the … the degradation of children.”

“Do you have any evidence?” Diane bellowed at Collins. “Any witnesses besides some eleven-year-old girls? Do you even have kids yourself? Do you know how easily they imagine things—their whole lives are make-believe. So do you have anyone to vouch for these lies but a bunch of little girls and some Harvard know-it-all psychiatrist who impresses you all?”

“Well, as far as evidence. The girls all said he took their underpants as some sick souvenir or something,” Collins said to Patty. “If you’d let us look around your home, we could start to clear that up.”

“We need to talk to a lawyer before that,” Diane grumbled to Patty.

Collins swallowed his coffee and stifled a belch, banged his chest with a fist, and smiled mournfully over Patty’s shoulder at Libby. He had the red nose of a drinker.

“Right now we just need to be calm. We will talk to everyone involved,” Collins said, still ignoring Diane. “We interviewed several faculty members from his high school and the grade school this afternoon, and what we hear doesn’t make us feel any better, Mrs. Day. A teacher, Mrs. Darksilver?”

He looked at Patty for her to confirm the name, and Patty nodded. Mrs. Darksilver had always loved Ben, he’d been an especial favorite of hers.

“Just this morning she saw your son nosing around Krissi Cates’s locker. In the grade school. During Christmas break. This disturbs me, and,” he looked at Patty from the bottom of his eyes, aiming the pink rims at her, “Mrs. Darksilver says, he was apparently aroused.”

“What does that mean?” snapped Diane.

“He had an erection. When we looked inside Krissi’s bin, we found a note of a provocative nature. Mrs. Day, in our interviews, your son was repeatedly characterized as an outcast, a misfit. Odd. He’s considered a bit of a timebomb. Some of the teachers are actually frightened of him.”

“Frightened?” Patty repeated. “How can they be frightened of a fifteen-year-old boy?”

“You don’t know what we found in his locker.”

WHAT THEY FOUND in his locker. Patty thought Collins would say drugs or girlie magazines, or, in a merciful world, a bunch of outlaw firecrackers. That’s what she wanted Ben to be in trouble for: a dozen Roman candles sitting like kindling in his backpack. That she could take.

Even when Collins did his greasy lead-up—this is very disturbing, Mrs. Day, I want you to prepare yourself-—Patty had figured, maybe a gun. Ben loved guns, always had, it was like his airplane phase and his cement-truck phase, except this one just kept going. It was something they did together—had done together—hunting, shooting. Maybe he brought one to school just to show it off. The Colt Peacemaker. His favorite. He was not supposed to go into the cabinet without her permission, but if he had, they’d deal with it. So let it be a gun.

Collins had cleared his throat then, and said, in a voice that made them lean in, “We found some … remains … in your son’s locker. Organs. At first we thought they might be part of a baby, but it seems they’re animal. Female reproductive parts in a plastic container, from maybe a dog or a cat. You missing a dog or a cat?”

Patty was still woozy from the revelation they actually thought Ben might have part of a baby in his locker. That they thought he was so disturbed that infanticide was actually their first guess. It was right then, staring down at a scattering of pastel donut sprinkles, that she decided her son was going to prison. If that’s how twisted they believed her son to be, he had no chance.

“No, we’re not missing any pets.”

“Our family is hunters. Farmers,” Diane said. “We’re around animals, dressing animals all the time. It’s not so strange that he might have something from them.”

“Really, do you keep parts of dead animals in your home?” For the first time Collins looked straight at Diane, a hard stare he cut off after just a few seconds.

“Is there a law against it?” Diane barked back.

“One of the rituals that Devil worshipers engage in is the sacrifice of animals, Mrs. Day,” Collins said. “I’m sure you heard about them cattle axed up over near Lawrence. We think that and the involvement with the little girls all ties together.”

Patty’s face was cold. It was done, it was all done. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“I’ll follow you to your place, so we can talk to your son, OK?” Collins said, turning paternal on that last note, his voice going high, almost flitting into babytalk. Patty could feel Diane’s hands clench next to her.

“He’s not at home. We’ve been trying to find him.”

“We absolutely need to talk to your son, Mrs. Day. Where do you think we can find him?”

“We don’t know where he is,” Diane interrupted. “We’re in the same boat as you.”

“Are you going to arrest him?” Patty asked.

“We can’t do anything until we talk to him, and the sooner we do, the sooner we’ll get this cleared up.”

“That’s not an answer,” Diane said.

“Only one I got, ma’am.”

“That means yes,” Diane said, and for the first time she lowered her eyes.

Collins stood up and walked over toward Libby during the last exchange, now he was kneeling down next to her, giving her a Hi sweetie.

Diane grabbed his arm. “No. Leave her alone.”

Collins frowned down on her. “I’m just trying to help. Don’t you want to know if Libby is OK?”

“We know Libby is OK.”

“Why don’t you let her tell me that. Or we could have Child Services—”

“Screw off,” Diane said, getting in front of him. Patty sat in her place, willing herself to disconnect. She heard Diane and Collins snapping behind her, but she just sat and watched the woman behind the counter make another pot of coffee, trying to focus all her interest on the coffee. It worked for just a second before Diane was pulling Patty and Libby, her mouth grimy with donut, out of the restaurant.

PATTY FELT LIKE crying some more on the way home, but wanted to wait until Diane was gone. Diane made Patty drive, said it would be good for her to focus. The whole way home, Diane had to tell her which gears to switch to, she was so distracted. Why don’t you try third, P? I think we need to go down to 2, now. Libby sat in the backseat, saying nothing, bundling herself up, knees to chin.

“Is something bad going to happen?” Libby finally asked.

“No, honey.”

“It seems like something bad’s going to happen.”

Patty had another panic-flash then: what the hell was wrong with her, taking a seven-year-old into this kind of situation. Her mother would not have done this. Then again, her mother wouldn’t have raised Ben the way Patty had—slipshod and fingers-crossed— so it wouldn’t have been an issue.

Right now, she had an almost obsessive need to get home, nest up, feel safe. The plan was, Patty would wait for Ben to get back—he had to be back soon, now—and Diane would go out and assess the gossip. Who knew what, whose side people were taking, and who in God’s name Ben was hanging around with.

They rattled up to the house and saw Patty’s Cavalier and another car, some bucket-seated sportscar that looked about ten years old, spattered with mud.

“Who’s that?” Diane asked.

“No idea.” She said it tragically. Already Patty knew whoever it was, it would be depressing news.

They opened the front door and felt the heat roll out. The thermostat had to be past eighty. The first thing they saw was an open box of microwave cocoa, the kind with fake marshmallows, on the dining room table, a trail of the cocoa mix leading to the kitchen. Then Patty heard that wheezy laugh and knew. Runner was sitting on the floor, sipping hot chocolate with her daughters leaning on him. Some nature show was on the TV, the girls squealing and grabbing his arms as an alligator boomed out of the water and snapped something with horns.

He looked up lazily, as if she were a delivery person. “Heya, Patty, long time, no seeya.”

“We got some family stuff going on,” Diane injected. “You should go on home.”

During those stretchy weeks that Runner had returned to stay with them, he and Diane had scrapped several times—her bellowing and him blowing her off. You’re not the husband, Diane. He’d go to the garage, get drunk, throw an old baseball against the wall for hours. Diane was not going to be the one to get Runner to go home.

“It’s OK, D. You go on. Call me in an hour or so, let me know what’s going on, OK?”

Diane glared at Runner, grumbled something into her chest and stalked out, the door shutting firmly behind her.

Michelle said “Jeez! What’s with her?” and made a funny face for her dad, the little traitor. Her brown hair was wild from static where Runner had done his Indian rub. Runner had always been weird with the kids, roughly affectionate, but not in a grown-up way. He liked to pinch and flick them to get their attention. They’d be watching TV, and he’d suddenly lean across and get a good snap on their skin. Whichever of the girls he’d just stung would look over at him in a teary, outraged pout, and he’d laugh and go, “Whaaaat?” or “I’s just saying hi. Hi!” And when he went with them anywhere, he trailed a few steps behind instead of walking beside them, eyes sideways on them. It always reminded her of an old coyote, trotting at the heels of its prey, just teasing for a few miles before it attacked.

“Daddy made us macaroni,” Debby said. “He’s going to stay for dinner.”

“You know you aren’t supposed to let anyone in the house while I’m away,” Patty said, wiping up the powder with a rag that already smelled.

Michelle rolled her eyes, leaned into Runner’s shoulder. “Jeez, Mom, it’s Daaaaad.”

It would have been easier if Runner was just dead. He had so little interaction with his children, was of so little help to them, that if he’d pass on, things would only improve. As it was, he lived on in the vast Out There Somewhere, occasionally swooping in with ideas and schemes and orders that the kids tended to follow. Because Dad said so.

She’d love to tell off Runner right now. Tell him about his son and the disturbing collection in his locker. The idea of Ben cutting and holding on to animal parts made her throat close. The Cates girl and her friends, that was a misunderstanding that may or may not end well. The assortment of body parts she couldn’t think of an excuse for, and she was good at thinking up excuses. She didn’t worry about what Collins said, that Ben may have molested his sisters. She had examined that thought on the ride home, turned it over, peered in its mouth and inspected its teeth, been excruciatingly thorough. And there was not a doubt in her: Ben would never do that.

But she knew her son did have a taste for hurt. There was that moment with the mice: that robotic shovel pounding, his mouth pulled away from his teeth, his face trickling sweat. He’d gotten some pleasure from that, she knew. He roughhoused with his sisters, hard. Sometimes giggles turned into screams and she’d come round the corner and see him holding Michelle’s arm behind her back, just slowly, slowly pulling up. Or grabbing hold of Debby’s arm, vise-like, for an Indian rub and what starts as a joke gets more and more frantic, him rubbing until he draws speckles of blood, his teeth grinding. She could see him getting that same look Runner got when he was around the kids: jacked up and tense.

“Dad needs to leave.”

“Geez, Patty, not even a hi before you toss me out? Come on, let’s talk, I got a business proposition for you.”

“I’m in no position to make a business deal, Runner,” she said. “I’m broke.”

“You’re never as broke as you say,” he said with a leer, and twisted his baseball cap backward on stringy hair. He’d meant it to sound jokey, but it came out menacing, as if she’d better not be broke if she knew what was good for her.

He dumped the girls off him and walked over to her, standing too close as always, beer sweat sticking his longjohn shirt to his chest.

“Didn’t you just sell the tiller, Patty? Vern Evelee told me you just sold the tiller.”

“And all that money’s gone, Runner. It’s always gone as quick as I get it.” She tried to pretend to sort through mail. He stayed right on top of her.

“I need you to help me. I just need enough cash to get to Texas.”

Of course Runner would want to go where it was warm for the winter, traveling child-free like a gypsy from season to season as he did, an insult to her and her farm and her attachment to this single place on the ground. He picked up work and spent the money on stupid things: golf clubs because he pictured himself golfing someday, a stereo system he’d never hook up. Now he was planning to hightail it to Texas. She and Diane had driven to the Gulf when Patty was in high school. The only time Patty’d been anywhere. It was the saltiness in the air that stuck with her, the way you could suck on a strand of hair and make your mouth start watering. Somehow Runner would find some cash, and he’d spend the rest of winter in some honkytonk alongside the ocean, sipping a beer while his son went to jail. She couldn’t afford a lawyer for Ben. She kept thinking that.

“Well, I can’t help you, Runner. I’m sorry.”

She tried to aim him toward the door, and instead he pushed her farther into the kitchen, his stale-sweet breath making her turn her head away.

“Come on, Patty, why you going to make me beg? I’m in a real jam here. It’s life or death stuff. I got to get the hell out of Dodge. You know I wouldn’t be asking otherwise. Like, I might be killed tonight if I can’t scrape up some money. Just give me $800.”

The figure actually made her laugh. Did the guy really think that was her pocket change? Could he not look around and see how poor they were, the kids in shirtsleeves in the middle of winter, the kitchen freezer stacked with piles of cheap meat, each one marked with a long-gone year? That’s what they were: a home past the expiration date.

“I don’t have anything, Runner.”

He looked at her with fixed eyes, his arm leaning across the doorway so she couldn’t leave.

“You got jewelry, right? You got the ring I gave you.”

“Runner, please, Ben’s in trouble, bad trouble, I got a lot of bad stuff going on right now. Just come back another time, OK?”

“What the hell has Ben done?”

“There’s been some trouble at school, some trouble in town, it’s bad, I think he might need a lawyer, so I need any money I have for him and …”

“So you do have money.”

“Runner, I don’t.”

“Give me the ring at least.”

“I don’t have it.”

The girls were pretending to watch TV, but their rising voices made Michelle, nosy Michelle, turn her head and openly stare at them.

“Give me the ring, Patty.” He held out his hand like she might actually be wearing it, that chintzy fake-gold engagement ring that she knew was embarrassing, flimsy, even at seventeen. He’d given it to her three months after he proposed. It took him three months to get off his ass, go down to a five-and-dime, and buy the little bit of tinsel he gave her while on his third beer. I love you forever, baby, he’d said. She knew immediately then that he’d leave, that he was not a man to depend on, that he wasn’t even a man she liked very much. And still she’d gotten pregnant three more times, because he didn’t like to wear condoms and it was too much trouble to nag.

“Runner, do you not remember that ring? That ring is not going to get you any money. It cost about ten dollars.”

“Now you’re going to be a bitch about the ring? Now?”

“Believe me if it had been worth anything, I’d have pawned it already.”

They stood facing each other, Runner breathing like an angry donkey, his hands shaking. He put them on her arms, then removed them with exaggerated effort. Even his mustache was shaking.

“You are really going to be sorry about this, Patty.”

“I already am, Runner. Been sorry a long time.”

He turned, and his jacket brushed a cocoa packet on to the floor, scattering more brown powder at his feet. “Bye girls, your mom’s … a BITCH!” He kicked one of the tall kitchen chairs over and it cart-wheeled into the living room. They all froze like forest creatures, as Runner paced in tight circles, Patty wondering if she should make a run for a rifle, or grab a kitchen knife, all the while, mind-pleading that he just leave.

“Thanks for FUCKING NOTHING!” he tramped to the front door, swung the door open so hard it cracked the wall behind it and bounced back. He kicked it open again, grabbed it, banged it into the wall, his head bowed low against it, all his strength slamming it again and again.

Then he left, his car screeching down away from the house, and Patty fetched the shotgun, loaded it, and set it atop the mantelpiece with a scattering of shells. Just in case.

*****

Libby Day

NOW

Krissi ended up sleeping on my couch. I’d walked her to the door and realized she wasn’t OK to drive, she was slip-slopping in her shoes, a web of mascara down one cheek. As she swayed out onto my porch, she turned around suddenly and asked about her mother, if I knew where her mother was or how to find her, and it was then that I pulled Krissi back inside, made her a Velveeta sandwich, parked her on the sofa, and wrapped a blanket over her. As she rolled into sleep, setting the last quarter of the sandwich carefully on the floor beside her, three of my lotion bottles fell out of her jacket. Once she passed out I tucked them back in.

She was gone when I woke up, the blanket folded with a note scrawled on the back of an envelope: Thanks. Sorry.

So Lou Cates didn’t kill my family, if Krissi was to be believed. I believed her. On that count at least.

I decided to drive down to see Runner, ignore the two messages from Lyle and the zero messages from Diane. Drive down to see Runner, get some answers. I didn’t think he had anything to do with the murders, whatever his girlfriend might say, but I wondered if he knew something, with his debts and his drinking and his gutter-friends. If he knew something or heard something, or if maybe his debts had triggered some horrible vengeance. Maybe I could believe in Ben again, which is what I wanted to do. I knew now why I’d never gone to visit him. It was too tempting, too easy to ignore the prison walls, and just see my brother, hear the Ben-specific cadence of his voice, that downward slope at the end of every sentence, like it might be the last thing he was ever going to say. Just seeing him, I remembered things, nice things, or not even nice. Just regular things. I could get a whiff of home. Way back when everyone was alive. Man, I wanted that.

I stopped at the 7-Eleven on the way out of town, bought a map and some cheese-flavored crackers that I discovered were diet when I bit into them. I ate them anyway, heading south, the orange powder floating through the car. I should have stopped for a meal on the way to Oklahoma. The air on the highway was thick with tempting smell-pockets: french fries, fast-food fish, fried chicken. But I was in an unnatural panic, worried for no good reason I would miss Runner if I stopped, and so I ate the diet crackers and a mealy apple I’d found on the corner of my kitchen counter.

Why was the note, that dirty note that wasn’t addressed to Ben, mixed up in a box of Michelle’s stuff? If Michelle had found out Ben had a girlfriend, she’d have lorded it over him, all the more if he tried to keep it a secret. Ben hated Michelle. Ben had tolerated me, had dismissed Debby, but he’d hated Michelle actively. I remembered him pulling her out of his room by an arm, her whole body almost sideways, Michelle up on tiptoes, moving with him to keep from being dragged. He tossed her out and she fell against the wall, and he told her if she ever came in his room again, he’d kill her. His teeth flared whenever he talked to her. He screamed at her for always being underfoot—she’d hover outside his door day and night, listening. Michelle always knew everyone’s secrets, she never had a conversation that didn’t have an angle. I remembered that more vividly since discovering her bizarre notes. If you don’t have money, gossip isn’t bad leverage. Even inside one’s own family.

“Ben talks to himself a lot,” Michelle announced at breakfast one morning, and Ben reached across the table, knocking her plate into her lap, and grabbed her by the shirt collar.

“Leave me the fuck alone,” he screamed. And then my mom calmed him down, got him to go back to his room, lectured us, as always. Later we found bits of egg that had catapulted up onto the plastic chandelier over the table, the chandelier that looked like it came from a pizza parlor.

So what did that mean? Ben wouldn’t kill his family because his little sister found out he had a girlfriend.

I passed a field of cows, standing immobile, and thought about growing up, all the rumors of cattle mutilation, and people swearing it was Devil worshipers. The Devil lurked nearby in our Kansas town, an evil that was as natural and physical as a hillside. Our church hadn’t been too brimstoney, but the preacher had certainly nurtured the idea: The Devil, goat-eyed and bloody, could take over your heart just as easily as Jesus, if you weren’t careful. In every town I lived in, there were always the “Devil kids,” and the “Devil houses,” just like there was always a killer clown driving around in a white van. Everyone knew of some old, vacant warehouse on the edge of town where a stained mattress sat on the floor, bloody from sacrifice. Everyone had a friend of a cousin who had actually seen a sacrifice but was too scared to give details.

I was ten minutes into Oklahoma, a good three hours to go, and I started smelling something overpoweringly sweet but rotten. It stang my eyes, made them water. I had a ridiculous quiver of fear that my Devil-think had summoned the beast. Then in the distance, the churning sky turned the color of a bruise, I saw it. Paper plant.

I turned the radio on scan—station 1, station 2, station 3— blasts of unpleasant noise, static, and ads for cars and more static, so I flipped it right back off.

Just past a sign with a picture of a cowboy—Welcome to Lidger-wood, Oklahoma, Pardner!—I pulled off the ramp and headed into the town, which turned out to be a busted-down tourist trap of a city. It had once fashioned itself as an Old West locale: The main street was all frosted glass and faux-saloons and shoppes. One storefront called itself The Olde Photo Stoppe, a place where families could commission sepia photos of themselves in frontier garb. In the window hung a poster-sized print: the father holding a lasso, trying to look menacing under a hat too big for him; the little girl in a calico dress and bonnet, too young to get the joke; the mother, dressed as a whore, giving an uncomfortable smile, her arms crossed in front of her thighs where her petticoat was slit. Next to the photo hung a For Sale sign. Another matching sign next door at Daphne’s Daffy Taffy, more For Sales at Buffalo Bill’s Amazing Arcade and a storefront with the ridiculous stretch of a name, Wyatt Earp’s Slurpies. The whole place seemed dusty. Even the defunct waterslide loop-de-looping in the distance was plugged with dirt.

Bert Nolan’s Group Home for Men was just three blocks off the downtown drag, a square, low building with a tiny front yard infested with foxtail weeds. I’d always liked foxtail as a kid, it appealed to my literal brain, because it looked like it sounded: a long, thin stem with a length of fuzz at the top, just like a fox’s tail, but green. They grew all over our farm—entire meadows were given over to the stuff. Michelle and Debby and I would break off the tops and tickle each other under our wrists. My mom taught us the colloquial names for everything: lamb’s ear, coxcomb, all those plants that lived up to their titles. A lamb’s ear is as soft as a lamb’s ear. Coxcomb actually looks like a rooster’s red comb. I got out of the car and fluttered my hands across the tops of the foxtail. Maybe I’d grow a garden of weeds. Windmillgrass actually fans out at the top like windmill blades. Queen Ann’s lace is white and frilly. Witchgrass would be appropriate for me. Some devil’s claw.

The door to Bert Nolan’s Group Home was made of metal, painted dark gray like a submarine. It reminded me of the doors in Ben’s prison. I rang the bell and waited. Across the street two teenage boys rode their bikes in lazy, wide circles, interested. I rang the bell again and gave the metal a bang that failed to reverberate inside. I debated asking the guys across the way if anyone was home, just to break the silence. As they were looping closer to me—watcha doing there, lady?—the door opened onto a pixie-sized man in bright white sneakers, ironed jeans, a Western shirt. He jiggled the toothpick in his mouth, not looking at me, flipping through a copy of Cat Fancy magazine.

“Don’t open for the night til …” he trailed off when he saw me. “Oh, sorry honey. We’re a men’s hostel, you have to be a man and over eighteen.”

“I’m looking for my dad,” I said, leaning into my drawl. “Runner Day. Are you the manager?”

“Ha! Manager, accountant, priest, cleaning boy,” he said opening the door. “Recovering alcoholic. Recovering gambler. Recovering deadbeat. Bert Nolan. This is my place. Come in, sweetheart, n’re-mind me of your name.”

He opened the door onto a room full of cots, the strong odor of bleach rising up from the floor. The elfin Bert led me through the rows of thin beds, each one still indented from the night, to an office just his size, just my size, which held one small desk, a file cabinet, and two foldout chairs we sat down on. The fluorescent light was not flattering to his face, which was pocked with dark, dimpled pores.

“I’m not a weirdo, by the way,” he said, flapping the Cat Fancy at me. “I just got a cat, never had one before. Don’t really like her much so far. She was supposed to be good for morale, but so far she just pisses in the beds.”

“I have a cat,” I volunteered, surprising myself with my sudden, intense fondness for Buck. “If they go outside their litter box, it’s usually because they’re angry.”

“That right?”

“Yeah, otherwise, they’re pretty easy pets.”

“Huh,” Bert Nolan said. “Huh. So you’re looking for your daddy? Yeah I remember, we spoke. Day. He’s like most men here— should be happy someone’s looking for them, after the crap they’ve pulled at home. Usually money stuff. Or lack-of-money stuff. No money, too much booze. Does not bring out the best. Runner. Huh.”

“He wrote me a letter, said he was back here.”

“You want to take him home, take care of him?” Bert said. His eyes were black and shiny, like he’d told himself a joke.

“Well, I’m not sure about that. I just want to check in.”

“Ha, good. That was a trick question—people who say they want to find one of my men to take care of them, never do.” Nolan smelled his fingertips. “I don’t smoke anymore, but sometimes my damn fingers still smell like tobacco.”

“Is he here?”

“He’s not. He’s gone again. I don’t allow drinkers here. He just had his third strike.”

“He say where he went?”

“Ah sweetheart, I just don’t give out addresses. Just don’t. Found that was the smartest way to handle all inquiries. But I’ll tell you what, because you seem like a nice lady …”

“Berrrrrt!” came a howl from outside the building.

“Ah, ignore that, just one of my men trying to get in early. That’s another thing you learn to never do: never let anyone in early, ever. And never let anyone in late.”

He had lost his train of thought, he stared at me expectantly.

“So you said you’d tell me what?” I prompted.

“What?”

“How you might help me find my dad?”

“Oh, right. You can leave a letter here with me.”

“Mr. Nolan, I’ve already done that. That’s why I’m here. I really, really need to find him.” I caught myself in the Runner stance, palms on the edge of the table, ready to vault myself up if I got mad.

Nolan picked up a plaster figurine of an old, balding man throwing his arms out in some expression of exasperation, but I couldn’t read the words on the base. Bert seemed to find some consolation in the thing. He let out a sharp sigh between barely parted lips.

“Well, sweetheart, I’ll tell you what, he may not be here, but I know he’s still in Lidgerwood. One of my men saw him just last night outside-a Cooney’s. He’s laying low somewhere, but he’s around. Just prepare yourself for some disappointment.”

“Disappointment about what?”

“Oh, you name it.”

WHEN BERT NOLAN got up to lead me out of his office, he turned his back to me, and I immediately made a grab for his little figurine. But I made myself set it back down, and took his bag of CornNuts and a pencil instead. Progress. They sat in the car seat next to me as I drove to the nearest bar. Cooney’s.

Cooney’s had not given in to the Old West theme. Cooney’s was proudly crappy in the present day. Three wrinkled faces glared at me as I opened the door. This included the bartender. I ordered a beer, the man snapping that he’d need to see my driver’s license, holding it up to the light and then down near his belly, giving a hmmph, when he couldn’t prove it was fake. I sipped and sat, letting them get used to me being there. Then I spoke. As soon as I hit the word Runner, the place lit up.

“That jackass stole three cases of beer from me,” the bartender said. “Went around back in broad daylight and just took them off the truck. And I’d stood him for a lot of drinks, believe me.”

The middle-aged man two stools down grabbed my arm too hard and said, “Your goddam daddy owes me two hundred bucks. And I want my lawn mower back. You tell him I’m looking for him.”

“I know where you can find him,” said an old guy with a Hemingway beard and the build of a girl.

“Where?” everyone else said at once.

“Bet anything he’s living with the rest of them squatters, camped out over at the Superfund site. You should see it,” he added more to the bartender than me, “it’s like a old-time Hooverville, bonfires and shanties.”

“Why the hell would anyone live at the Superfund site?” the bartender snapped.

“Well, you know no one from the government will show up.”

They all laughed angrily.

“Is it even safe to go there?” I asked. I pictured toxic waste barrels and lime-green sludge.

“Sure, if you don’t drink the well water and you’re not a grasshopper.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“That’s what it’s from: the whole site is soaked with arsenic. It’s an old dumping spot for grasshopper bait.”

“And shitheads,” said the bartender.

*****

Ben Day

JANUARY 2, 1985

8:38 P.M.

They drove toward town, snow starting to fall, Ben just remembering he left his bike back at the warehouse and now that was probably gone. “Hey,” he yelled up front—Trey and Diondra were talking, but he couldn’t hear them over the music screeching on the radio, like ripped sheets of metal, Weeeeeeeer-weer-weer-weer. “Could we stop by the Compound real quick so I can grab my bike?”

Trey and Diondra exchanged looks.

“No,” Diondra busted out a grin, and they started laughing. Ben sat back for a second, then leaned back up. “I’m serious, I need it.”

“Forget it, dude. It’s gone,” Trey said. “You can’t leave shit at the Compound.”

They drove onto Bulhardt Avenue, the main strip in town, where nothing was happening, as usual. The hamburger joint was a bright yellow diorama featuring a few jocks and their dates, all draped over each other. The stores were black, and even the bar looked barely open—only a vague light could be seen in the single rectangle of window in the front. The door itself had been painted navy and revealed nothing.

They parked right out front, Diondra still finishing her beer, Trey grabbing it from her and drinking the rest—the baby won’t mind. On the sidewalk, some old guy, his face a confusion of wrinkles, his nose and mouth looking like they were molded out of a twist of clay, scowled at them once and walked into the bar.

“Let’s do it,” Trey said, and started to get out of the truck. And then when he saw Ben hesitate, still sitting in back, his hands on his knees, Trey stuck his head back in the car and smiled that businesslike smile: “Don’t worry, dude, you’re with me. I do a lot of drinking in there. And—heh!—you’re pretty much visiting your dad at the office.”

Diondra fingered the edges of her crunchy curls, her version of running her fingers through it, and they both followed Trey inside, Diondra with her lips pouty and her eyes sexy-sleepy, the way she looked in most photos, like you woke her up from a dream about you. Next to her, Ben feeling gangly and droopy as usual, literally dragging his feet.

The bar was so smoky Ben choked as soon as he entered, Diondra already with a cigarette lit, slouching next to him as if that made her look older. A nervous guy, his hair in patches like a molting bird, scurried up to Trey immediately, his head lowered, and muttered something in Trey’s ear, Trey nodding, sucking his lips in against his teeth, looking concerned and serious. Ben thought maybe the guy was a manager, was kicking them out, because maybe Diondra passed for older with the extra makeup but Ben didn’t. But Trey just patted the guy on the back, saying something like, “Don’t make me chase, man,” and the nervous guy got a big grin and laughed and said “No no no, don’t worry about that, don’t worry about that at all, not at all” and Trey just said, “Sunday” and walked past the guy to the bar, ordered three beers and a shot of SoCo, which he swallowed straight off.

The bartender was another old, gray-haired fat guy. It seemed like a joke, how much all these dudes looked alike, like living was so hard it just erased your features, rubbed out anything distinctive. The bartender gave Ben and Diondra a wise-guy look, a just-so-you-know, I-know look, but slid them two beers anyway. Ben turned away from the bar to drink his, one foot against a stool, in a way that felt casual, like he’d done it before, because he could feel Trey’s eyes on him, looking for something to make fun of.

“I see him, I see Runner,” Diondra said, and before Ben could ask her why she sounded so easy saying his name, Trey was calling it out, “Hey Runner, c’mere!” and Runner got the same nervous, weasel look the first guy had.

He came loping over, that seesaw walk of his, his hands jammed in his pockets, his eyes big and yellow.

“I just don’t have it, man, I just don’t. Tried to scrape it up earlier, but I just, I was going to come try to find you, I just got here myself, I can give you the last of my weed in the meantime—”

“You want to say hi to Diondra?” Trey interrupted.

Runner started, then smiled. “Oh, hey Diondra, hehheh, wow I must be drunk, oblivious!” He pretended to close one eye so he could see better, made a little jump on the tips of his toes. “Heh, yeah drinking myself cross-eyed because I’m so freaked out about this situation.”

“Runner, you want to look at who’s next to Diondra?” Ben had barely turned to face him, he was trying to think of something to say besides, Hey Dad, but he couldn’t so he just stood there, waiting for the inevitable shittiness to happen.

Runner peered through the dimness of the bar and didn’t recognize Ben.

“Hi … there,” he said, and then to Trey, “That your cousin? I can’t see too well, night vision, I need contacts but—”

“Oh my God,” Trey said leaning back to pretend to laugh but looking enraged. “Take another look, asshole.” Ben wasn’t sure if he was supposed to display himself better, like some girl hoping to scam. Instead he stood rigid, staring at his dark flop of hair in an old Schlitz mirror on the far wall, as he watched Runner sidle up to him, reaching a hand out toward him fairy-tale-like, as if Runner were a troll and Ben some awful treasure. He kept getting closer, stumbling on Ben’s foot, and then they made eye contact and Runner yelped, “Ohhhh!” and seemed even more nervous. “Hair’s not red.”

“You remember your son, right, this is your son, isn’t it, Runner?”

“It is, my son! Hey Ben. No one can blame me for that one, hair’s not red. I didn’t even know you knew Trey.”

Ben shrugged, watching Runner’s reflection back away from him in the mirror. He wondered how much Runner owed to Trey, why Ben felt like some ransom victim, not that Runner would actually care if he was up for ransom. He wondered too, how accidental this visit was. It had seemed like spur of the moment, but Ben was guessing now that they were always going to end up here tonight.

“I don’t get it, Runner,” Trey continued, talking one notch above the country music. “You say you don’t have any money, Ben here says you don’t have any money, and yet, you had that giant stash of weed just a few weeks ago.”

“Wun’t good weed though.” He turned his shoulder toward Trey, cutting Ben out of the conversation, shooting backward glances at him, trying to push Trey toward the center of the room by standing closer and closer to him, Trey not moving, finally saying, “Get off me, man,” and Runner settling back on his heels.

“Nah, nah man you’re right, it wasn’t good stuff,” Trey continued. “But you were charging like it was.”

“I never charged you nothing, you know.”

“You didn’t charge me because you owe me, dipshit. But I know for a fact you were charging $20 for a dimebag, now where the fuck is the money, you give it to your wife to hold?”

“Ex! Ex-wife,” Runner yelled. And then: “I was trying to get money from her, not give it. I know she’s got money there, even when we were married, she’d hide money, rolls of it, hundreds, from the harvest sales, and stick it in funny places. Found $200 in the foot of her pantyhose one time. Maybe I should go back.” He looked over at Ben, who was listening but trying to pretend he was teasing Diondra, his finger twirling Diondra’s hair, Diondra only partly playing along.

“Can I talk to you about the situation over there in private?” Runner pointed over to a corner where three tugboat-sized men were playing pool. The tallest, a pale, white-haired old guy with a Marine tattoo, propped his pool cue up and puffed his chest out at them.

“Right,” Trey said.

“You can talk in front of me,” Ben said, trying to sound like he didn’t care.

“Your son needs money from you, just like I do,” Trey said. “Maybe worse than I do.”

Runner turned from a shriveled position under Trey’s black-lamp eyes, and headed back over to Ben, raising himself to full height. Somewhere since summer Ben had grown. He was just a little bigger than Runner now, 5’5”, 5’6”.

“You owe Trey money? Your mom said you’uz in trouble. You owe Trey?” he blasted at Ben, his breath yellow—beer and tobacco and maybe a mustardy tuna salad. Ben’s stomach grumbled.

“No! No!” He was aware his voice sounded nervous, cowed. Diondra shifted her weight next to him. “I don’t owe anyone.”

“Then why am I supposed to be giving you money I work my damn tail off for, huh?” Runner said, his voice bitter. “That’s what I never understand, this idea of handouts: alimony and child support and the government with its hands in my pockets. I barely can support myself, I don’t know why people think I need to take three extra jobs to give money to my wife, who has her own farm. Her own house on the farm. And four kids to help her out with it. I mean, I sure as hell didn’t grow up thinking my daddy owed me a living, my daddy oughta give me money for Nikes and college and dress shirts and …”

“Food,” Ben said, looking down at his broken boots with sloppy-joe stains on them.

“What’s that? What’s that you say to me?” Runner was in his face now, those blue irises rolling around in the yellow orbs like fish on the surface of a bad lake.

“Nothing,” Ben mumbled.

“You want money for your hair dye, that it? Want money for the beauty parlor?”

“He wants money for his girl …”Trey started, but Diondra was giving him quick axes across her throat, no no no.

“Well, I’m definitely not in charge of buying things for his girlfriend,” Runner said. “You his girlfriend now, Diondra? Small world. But definitely ain’t my business.”

The men at the pooltable had stopped playing altogether, sneering at the scene, and then the white-haired guy limped over, put a firm hand on Trey’s shoulder.

“Problem, Trey? Runner here, he’s good for it. Give him another twenty-four hours, OK? On me. Understand?” The man had a wish-boned stance, like gravity was pulling him toward the ground by both legs, but his hands were muscled, sinewy, and they pressed into Trey’s shoulder.

Runner smiled, wiggled his eyebrows up and down at Ben, signaling they should both be pleased. “Don’t worry, buddy, it’s OK,” he told Ben. “It’s OK now.”

Trey tightened his shoulder under the man’s hand, seemed about to shrug it off, then stared into the middle distance.

“Sure, twenty-four OK, Whitey. On you.”

“Appreciate it, Injun,” the man said. He winked, made a cheerful, creaky noise with his mouth like he was calling a horse, and rejoined his friends, a rustle of laughter going up from the group just before the pool ball clacked.

“Piece of shit pussy,” Trey said to Runner. “Tomorrow night, here. Or so help me, Runner, I will hurt you.”

Runner’s victory rictus, that Halloween smile, faded, and he nodded twice, and as he was turning to the bar, snapped, “Fine, but then stay out of my business.”

“Man, I cannot wait to stay out of your business.”

As they started to leave, Ben waited for Runner to say something to him—sorry, see ya, something. But Runner was already trying to talk the bartender into giving him one on the house, or maybe on Whitey, Whitey would stand him a round, and he’d already forgotten about Ben. So had Trey and Diondra, they were busting through the doors, and Ben stood with his hands in the front pockets of his pants, caught sight of himself in the mirror, looking so different, and he watched himself in the mirror as he turned around to Runner.

“Hey, uh, Dad,” he said, and Runner looked up, annoyed he was still there. It was that feeling of pestiness that made Ben want to make Runner respect him. He’d felt the tiniest jingle of camaraderie before—that word, buddy—he wanted it back. He had pictured, just a quick flash, him and his dad at the bar, having a few beers together. That’s all he really wanted from the guy, just a beer together every so often. “I just wanted to tell you something. It might make you feel, I don’t know, good,” and Ben started grinning, couldn’t help himself.

Runner just sat there, sleepy eyes, not giving any expression.

“I uh, Diondra’s pregnant. I, uh, we, Diondra and I are having a baby.” And then his smile split wide for the first time, for the first time really feeling good, saying it out loud like that. Going to be a dad. A dad, with some little one depending on him, thinking he was it.

Runner tilted his head to the side, lifted his beer sloppily, and said, “Just be sure it’s yours. I doubt it’s yours.” Then he turned his back on Ben.

OUTSIDE, TREY KICKED the side of his truck, screamed between closed lips. “I tell you what, that old crew better die off soon, because I’m sick to fucking death of them protecting their own—you’re telling me it’s honor, it’s not, it’s old white guys trying to hold on to the last bit of business before they start shitting themselves and need name tags attached to them so they know who they are. Fucking Whitey!” He pointed a finger at Ben, the snow everywhere, floating down Ben’s shirt and melting on his neck. “And your old man is a piece of crap if he thinks I’m believing his line of bullshit. I hope you’re not too attached to him because I’d like to flush him like a piece of shit.”

“Let’s just go, Trey,” Diondra said, opening the door, ushering Ben into the backseat. “My dad is going to come home next week, and I’ll be dead anyway.”

Ben felt like hitting himself. The one thing he wasn’t supposed to tell, and he’d wasted it on Runner. Ben was so angry as soon as he got in the backseat, he began punching it blindly, spittle shooting from his mouth, fuckerfuckerfucker, kicking at the cushion, banging his knuckles on the roof of the car, hitting his head on the window glass over and over until his forehead was bleeding again, Diondra yelling, baby, baby what?

“I swear to God, I swear to fucking God, Diondra, fuck.”

Annihilation.

He could never tell Diondra he’d told.

“Someone should fucking die,” Ben spat. He put his head in his hands, could feel Trey and Diondra consulting each other, silently, Trey finally saying, “Your dad’s a fucking douchebag, dude.” He threw the car into reverse and squealed out into the street, knocking Ben against the window. Diondra snaked a hand back and stroked Ben’s hair until he sat upright, barely, a pile. Diondra’s face was green under the lamplight, and suddenly Ben could see what she’d look like in twenty years, flabby and pimply like she described her mom, her skin hard and wrinkled, but with that electric glow from the tanning booths.

“There’s stuff in the glove compartment,” Trey said, and Diondra popped it open and began rifling through it. She pulled out an oversized pipe crammed with leaves, the pot spilling everywhere, Trey saying easy now, and then she lit it and toked in, passed it to Trey. Ben reached up a hand—he was almost sick now, so shaky from lack of food, dizzy from the streetlights fluttering—but he wasn’t going to be left out. Trey kept it from him. “Don’t know if you want this, buddy. This is me and Diondra’s thing. Hard-ass weed. I’m serious, Diondra, it may be tonight, I need the power in me, I haven’t felt it in too long. It may have to happen.”

Diondra kept looking up ahead, the snow dizzying.

“Ben might need it too,” Trey pushed.

“Fine, let’s do it then. Take a left up here,” Diondra said.

And when Ben asked what was going on, they both just smiled.

*****