Back in New York, a raging blizzard has shut down the airports. The lone daily flight to New York out of the tiny airport where you are in West Virginia will not be leaving anytime soon—one or two days, the woman you finally reach at Delta, after hundreds of minutes on hold, tells you.
This was not your plan. Your plan was to attend Parents’ Weekend at your child’s school, in the pretty rolling foothills of the Appalachians, and go back home, where you could get a cup of coffee that tastes like coffee, not the feeble stuff that people drink here, and buy The New York Times.
But Parents’ Weekend is over, and here you are, in your room at the Holiday Inn Express. Which is … where? Not in a town, exactly. Outside your filmy window is your vista: the interstate, and a sprawl of newish stores—a Walmart, an auto body shop, a ninety-nine-cent store, a store that sells discount cigarettes by the carton and beer by the case, an Applebee’s.
The real town, with a Main Street and sidewalks, is several miles down the road, but now it’s not a real town, either; Main Street is all antique shops and gift shops and pricey bistros catering to the guests of a grand old resort somewhere near here and to the parents at your child’s school. So, actually, the view out your window is more of the real town. More of the real America. It’s a shame you don’t drink anymore; what a perfect time and place to go on a bender. All your needs would be met—alcohol, ciggies, and a $9.99 steak dinner to wolf down after a happy day of drinking on an empty stomach.
Maybe that temptation is what gives you the idea of doing a crafts project. Or maybe it’s that Christmas is coming, and you’re thinking about what presents to give your loved ones, if you ever get out of here.
For whatever reason, you decide that making something with your hands would be fun—or, failing fun, something to do. You’re not too good at crafts projects—fifteen years after your attempt to make snow globes for Christmas presents, tiny white plastic “flakes” are still embedded in your carpet—but that’s what you like about them. You feel like you’re seven years old again. Wow, you think, admiring the lumpy little ceramic doodad or limp, worked-over origami bird you’ve produced, I made this!
Here’s your idea: You’re going to tie-dye a lot of T-shirts for your young-adult children and nieces and nephews. Tie-dyed T-shirts are very in now, and yours will be made for a song while other, less crafty people will be buying theirs for ninety-eight dollars apiece on Avenue A.
First you go to Walmart, which is right next door to the Holiday Inn Express. Normally you boycott Walmarts because of the company’s heinous labor practices, but there aren’t yet any Walmarts where you live, so this has mostly been a theoretical position.
You forget all about the horrible labor practices two seconds after entering the store because Walmart is so amazing. So vast, like a store in a dream, endless aisles of shockingly inexpensive things—trinkets, sunglasses, little makeup holders for your purse! Ten pairs of underpants for three dollars!—many of which you toss into a shopping cart the size of a Zamboni that you feel you’re driving more than pushing. You spend an hour wandering the aisles in a pleasant fugue state, tossing things into your huge cart.
To your surprise, this Walmart barely has a crafts section. A hunting-gear section, yes, with many Day-Glo orange caps and vests; a candy section, ten or twelve acres’ worth: Hershey’s bars big enough to club someone over the head with, Raisinets in bags the size of feed sacks, and great buckets of candies you hardly ever see anymore—those pale orange soft ones shaped like big peanuts, white nut-studded nougats. And a hair-care section—also enormous, aisle upon aisle of shampoos and mousses and gels and creams and unguents and shellacs. If aliens came to our planet and Walmart was their first stop, they would say, “This is a species that worships hair, and toothlessness.”
The crafts section is so dinky! A few shelves, mostly kiddie stuff—some old Little Mermaid paint-by-numbers kits, a few dusty packets of modeling clay. You may have romanticized the people who live around here. You thought craft-making was still going on in this part of the country, quilt-making and afghan-making and such, but everyone here has probably turned to beer and television, like the rest of the world, for their entertainment.
But here, on a bottom shelf, is a tie-dye kit. And here, several miles away in the underwear section, are twelve men’s T-shirts for $3.99. Fate is smiling on your project!
* * *
You try not to be impatient in the checkout line, where you wait for a long time while the checkout woman and a customer are shooting the breeze as if there were no one on line at all. You gather from the conversation that the customer is going to have a baby shower for her goddaughter, whom the cashier used to babysit. They are practically planning the whole shower right there—discussing recipes for sherbet punch and ideas for the party games. Finally you say, “Excuse me, but I’m in a little bit of a hurry.” The cashier and the customer trade a look, and the customer silently takes her shopping cart and marches toward the door. “Everything’s not all rush rush rush, you know,” she says over her shoulder.
You feel bad. You didn’t realize that Walmart is the town square now, that this is where people exchange the news of the day in a leisurely way, and that you have ruined their visit. “I’m sorry,” you say to the cashier, but it’s too late. She jams your purchases into plastic bags, not looking at you.
Back in your room, you lay out the contents of the tie-dye kit on the floor: a big plastic sheet to protect the carpeting from getting stained with dye as you work; a million rubber bands; packets of powdered red, yellow, and blue dyes. You pour the dyes into the little squirt bottles provided, mix them with tap water, and shake them up. You’re ready to work!
Not yet. The directions say to wash the T-shirts before dyeing them. You find the laundry room down the hall and exchange several dollar bills for quarters with Rick, the nice day manager. You load the washing machine with the T-shirts, noting that the woman next to you, in a tank top that shows off the array of tattoos on her arms, is doing a surprisingly large load of laundry in the other machine. She explains that she and her husband and kids live just up the street but have decided to spend the weekend here at the hotel as a treat, so she’s brought a lot of laundry from home.
While the T-shirts are being washed, you head over to Applebee’s for dinner. Teresa, your friendly young waitress, points to your hands and says, “Looks like you’ve been paintin’ somethin’.” Your hands, you now notice, have been stained red, the color of boiled lobster claws, by the red dye. You laugh and tell Teresa about your project; she tells you that her fiancé loves to wear tie-dyed shirts and is in a heavy-metal band with Rick’s brother, Tracy.
* * *
After your T-shirts have been washed and dried to damp as instructed, it’s time to decide what patterns you’ll make. For the popular sunburst pattern, for example, you pinch the center of the T-shirt between thumb and forefinger and hold up the shirt so that the rest of it falls loosely, like an empty parachute. Then you wrap about a thousand rubber bands tightly around it, leaving a thin section of shirt in between each rubber band. Doing this to twelve shirts takes you five hours. While you do it, you watch a local hunting show on television. The show is simple in concept: Hunters are shown hunting, in real time. In this episode, two hunters crouch behind some bushes, waiting for a deer to appear.
“You think that buck’s gonna show up, Steve?” one of the hunters says.
“I hope so, Mike, my boots are sure soaked.”
You feel sorry for the buck, but there’s something valiant about Steve and Mike, stuck out there in the soggy brush, waiting and waiting. They’re like Vladimir and Estragon, only in fluorescent-orange hunting caps.
Now, though it is practically the break of day, you’re ready to dye. Carefully at first, and then with increasing abandon, you squirt the different colors of dye onto the shirts, this time not failing to use the plastic gloves provided in the kit. You leave the rubber-banded, dyed shirts on the plastic tarp so the dye can “set” for a few hours.
You wake up in the morning, a little bleary from lack of sleep, but eager to see the results of your labors. You begin rinsing out the T-shirts in the sink, as instructed, to wash out the extra dye. Each shirt takes forty minutes or so to rinse and wring out, and your wrists hurt so much that you wonder if tie-dyeing can give a person carpal tunnel syndrome. By the fifth shirt, you decide to just dump the rest of the shirts in the sink and let them soak while you go downstairs to enjoy the free breakfast buffet, perhaps followed by a soak in the hotel’s Jacuzzi.
On the way to the breakfast buffet, you pass the pool room and notice through its picture window that the Jacuzzi is packed with splashing children. Sitting nearby is the mother from the laundry room, who smiles at you and holds up her can of Dr Pepper in greeting.
A chatty older lady named Patty manages the breakfast buffet. She’s heard about your tie-dye project from Teresa, she says, whom she used to babysit and who lives next door to her.
“Hon, Teresa told me it looks like you kilt somethin’ with your bare hands,” Patty says, with a little laugh.
* * *
Still a raw-looking red, your hands do kind of look like you killed something. Maybe you’d better go back to your room and give them a really good scrubbing. You share the elevator with the kids from the pool, shivering in their towels. At first they are laughing and pummeling each other playfully, but when you get on the elevator, they look at your hands and fall silent.
“I’ve been tie-dyeing in my room,” you say, a little too brightly.
“Yes, ma’am,” a skinny little boy says, and looks at the floor.
You feel like you’re lying, or like they think you’re lying. Which is so ridiculous!
Back in your bathroom, the water in the sink is a dark, ugly brownish purple. You dredge out the soggy T-shirts and set them on a big white towel and let out the sink water. The empty sink basin is stained the same shade of puce. You wonder if you’ll get a charge on your bill for “sink replacement.” Also, the color is upsetting—the color of liver, of internal organs. It looks like a butcher has been at work in here. Who could be you, with your red hands and all. But you’ve just been tie-dyeing! What are you so worried about?
* * *
You buy a packet of powdered bleach from the laundry room—the mother is in here again, stuffing another giant load of laundry into the dryer—and, back in your room, scrub the sink with the bleach, using your toothbrush. The stain fades, but the basin is still tinged a faint brownish purple. And your hands—you scrub and scrub them too, like a surgeon, like Lady Macbeth, but they stay an angry red. The stain of your deeds. What deeds? It’s not like you murdered someone in here.
But it is, sort of. Someone could think that. And now, you notice, the towel you’ve carelessly laid the wet shirts on is stained that liverish brown. You rinse and rinse the towel under running water, but still the dye will not wash out. You will have to hide this towel in your suitcase and take it home with you. Now you rinse out the shirts, one by one; amazingly, the shirts have taken on none of the hideous hue of the sink water but instead retain their bright, separate colors, each shirt a merry red and blue and yellow. They look great. They look like festive clown wear.
Working with running water as you are, you don’t hear anyone enter. A young woman is standing there. You scream.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I thought y’all went out!” It’s Briana, from housekeeping, here with her cleaning cart. Briana is Patty’s second cousin. You know this because Briana is, like Patty, loquacious; yesterday morning, when she came to clean your room, she told you how she is staying with Patty for a while to save on rent so she can pay for her wedding to Ron, whom Ruth introduced her to because Ruth used to teach Sunday school with Ron’s mother, and who is Rick, the day manager’s, hunting buddy.
But Briana isn’t chatting right now—now she is staring at you, and your room, and the bathroom, and smiling in a confused, worried way.
“Oh, I’m sorry! You surprised me. I’m just tie-dyeing,” you say. You look at your surroundings. It’s awful in here. The purple-brownish sink, for one. For two, the stained towel you rested the wet shirts on. For three, the room is an unholy mess, the mess of a crazed, disturbed person—empty squirt bottles tossed about; rubber bands everywhere; your rumpled, unmade bed; that plastic sheet on the floor covered with dark, pooled-together blobs of dye. There’s something sinister about any big plastic sheet. Yours is no exception.
And now you notice a red smear on the wall, from when you steadied yourself with your hand to get up from the floor while you were tie-dyeing.
“Do you think you could come back a little later?” you say to Briana.
“Yes, ma’am,” she says, and leaves quickly. Who knows what Briana is thinking. But she’s going to bend Patty’s ear about the chaos in here, that’s for certain. Briana and Patty are probably thinking you have murdered someone, and that “tie-dyeing” was just a cover. Or maybe you’re tie-dyeing all of your victim’s clothes so that no one will be able to identify them as his or her clothes. Or maybe you’re a serial killer, and tie-dyeing your victims’ clothes is the “art” you create from your kill, your “trophy.” What a sick, sick trophy—happy, clownish raiments made from the wardrobe of your kill. Or maybe you slaughtered a school of clowns.
Okay, there’s no body. You have that going for you. But there will be, of that you may be sure. Everyone owns a gun here and uses it—even Patty, who is a grandmother many times over, told you she goes hunting every weekend for muskrat with her husband. Someone—some transient, someone like you—will show up dead in a Dumpster in the back of some local parking lot, having been shot in a bar fight or for letting their hound dog wander into someone’s yard. Or having been beaten to death with a bucket of nut-studded nougats, for sport, by local hoodlums high on crystal meth.
And you, the stranger in town, will be suspect número uno.
You review your alibis. The places you’ve been in the past hours where people have seen you not murdering someone. The cashier and the customer from the checkout line at Walmart hate you and will say that you seemed agitated and in a rush. Teresa from Applebee’s will note your red hands and suspicious blabbing about your tie-dyeing project. So will Patty. So will the little kids from the elevator, whose mother—who cannot believe how close her children came to being slaughtered themselves, their little bathing suits turned into tie-dyed souvenirs—will report how she thought it was weird that a single woman was laundering many men’s T-shirts in the laundry room. And Briana will clinch it, with her description of your scream, of the red smear on the wall, and of the shocking mess in your room, clearly the result of a struggle.
Everyone will think you’re guilty because everyone here knows everyone, and already at least five of them know you did it. And they’re probably all related to the DA and to the public defender, who is probably the DA’s brother, so just forget about a vigorous defense. The public defender will be winking at the jury while you give your lame testimony—“I was just tie-dyeing!”—and his wink will say, Yeah, right.
But there’s DNA! DNA will save you! Because there won’t be any in your room, except for yours—none from your victim! You never appreciated DNA until now. Thank God they discovered it.
But wait, the mother saw you buying bleach in the laundry room. Which anyone who has ever watched a TV crime show knows is what the killer uses to get rid of DNA evidence.
Clearly, there is only one thing to do, and that is to drive your rental car over to the police station and turn yourself in. They won’t give you the death penalty if you confess. You’ll just spend the rest of your life in the women’s prison down the interstate. Your family will visit you, but not that often, because it’s so far away. You will pass your days in your cell, being served grits and boiled broccoli on a tin tray shoved through a slot in your cell door.
Maybe it won’t be so bad. You’ve always had a soft spot for grits. Maybe they’ll have franks and beans, which you also like, and fresh biscuits. And hip-hop aerobics in the yard. At least you won’t have to live like this, in constant fear, which is no kind of life at all, you can already tell. Maybe there will be crafts projects, as therapy. You’ll pass on the tie-dyeing, but you’d enjoy lanyard-making and pot holder–making. That would be fun for you. Or at least a way to pass the time.
Oh, look, here’s a text message from Delta. Your flight has been canceled, again. The blizzard back home is over, but now the storm is headed here, and they’ve closed the airport. All you can do, really, is pray for leniency.