4.01
my momma she draggin me long faster’n I wanna be dragged along, cant hardly breathe but she draggin me faster’n faster. Its dark out, she say and I say I know that, and she say You hush now, and she say It past my bedtime, but when we come up to the police station she let up a little, I think to let me catch my breath but when I look up she just starin at the building, the windows is open and I can hear voices shouting, cant hear what they sayin but I can hear em shouting and then my Momma starts up again with the dragging, even faster, I can’t even find the breath to ask her slow down and her fingernails cuttin right into my wrist, she call down to me don’t you never go out past dark without me or you end up like that, she say, you end up just a voice in a room.
4.02
Howard Goertzen
the dark mound of it was like a lesion in the road. Ten years ago Lucy Robertson had stood in this very same intersection in a dirty and torn white dress and screamed for help because of what that white nigger’d done to her, and now there was just the dress, not the white lace one she wore when she was seven years old but the purple stretchy velvet one she’d looked so cute in at Rosemary Krebs’s dance the other night, when she was with that little pansy boy from New York City, and Howard Goertzen put gloves on before he rolled up the dress, and he had a sense that rolling it up wouldn’t do no good in the same way that rolling up an unrolled roll of toilet paper doesn’t do no good, and then he drove to the station house and he gave the bundle to Lawman Brown and he watched as Lawman Brown re-unrolled the dress on a steel examination table. There was something fundamentally lifeless in the way the dress moved beneath Lawman Brown’s gloved fingers, as though some essence it had contained once was gone now, and Howard Goertzen had to swallow the gorge that was rising in his throat, and when, finally, he could speak again, he could only say, “Aw gee,” and when the dress was fully extended and as flat as it could go he said, “Aw, aw gee,” again, and nothing else. The dress was so badly shredded that the strips of its fabric showed up against the silver surface of the table like a dark maze. It was frayed, flayed even, as though it had been whipped as in whipped-with-a-whip whipped from her body, and it seemed to be decaying under the rot of mud and blood and other stains that coated it, and Howard Goertzen heard Lawman Brown say, “It looks like somebody threw it in a washing machine with a load-a broken glass,” and there was the gorge again, and Howard Goertzen swallowed it back down again, and he said, “And Lucy, it looks like he threw Lucy in there too.” In the other room Nettie Ferguson could be heard saying, “I’m saying he said he was gay, said it, just like that,” and then Howard Goertzen said, “I was just driving by, to look at the spot where, you know, where Charlene died. And there it was, right in the same place, right on the corner-a East Adams and First. Right where that bastard killed her.”
4.03
Nettie Ferguson
it was a while plastic bag with the word Zabar’s written on it in big orangy-brown capital letters, and didn’t nobody have to tell nobody where it come from. “That just sounds like New York City to me,” Eustace said when he saw it. “Zay-bar’s,” he said, and then he said, “Yup. Jew York City,” and if the situation hadn’t been so serious and if Myra Robinson hadn’t been standing right there Nettie Ferguson would-a allowed herself a chuckle at Eustace’s joke, but as it was he remained stiff and formal in front of Myra Robinson and so Nettie Ferguson did too, she was standing behind Myra Robinson but she remained as stiff and formal as Eustace while meanwhile Myra Robinson stood there shaking and holding the bag by its knotted plastic handles, which the bag, Nettie had noticed when Myra first come into the station house, the bag was filled with something dark and fluffy and weightless apparently, a big ball rustling in front of her stomach in Myra Robinson’s shaking hands and Myra Robinson herself looking a bit like a big rustling ball in front of the hulking form of T.V. Daniels—gosh darn but that boy could eat—his body dwarfing hers the way she dwarfed the bag, and between the two of them Nettie Ferguson couldn’t hardly even see the bag let alone begin to guess what might-a been in it. Now T.V. cleared his throat and said, “I found it in her mailbox,” his voice the voice of the tall lanky boy he used to be, Nettie Ferguson oughta know, she used to babysit for him way back when when her Horace was alive, and when Nettie Ferguson looked at T.V. now what she saw was a little reed of a boy trapped underneath layer upon layer upon layer of fat, it was sad, Nettie thought, it was a shame really, when he was a boy he used to watch that Mickey Mouse Club show every single day and when the closing theme song came on he’d be so caught up in it that he’d get up in front of the TV and dance around real slow and pretty and Nettie Ferguson just could not imagine what T.V. would look like if that song came on right now. At T.V.’s words Myra Robinson made a choking noise and Nettie saw Eustace reach out and take the bag away from her before she dropped it. “There there,” Eustace said as soothingly as he knew how, which wasn’t very much, even he would-a had to admit it, Eustace Brown didn’t really know from soothing. “Now now,” he tried again, Eustace tried again—one of the things Nettie Ferguson had learned from her bird’s-eye point of view on more than a few criminal investigations was the need for specificness of detail—“Now now,” the Sheriff of Cadavera County said to the distressed mother of the missing person, Myra Robinson, “I’m sure it ain’t nothing. It don’t hardly weigh enough to be nothing, but let’s just have us a little look-see to be sure,” and then Nettie Ferguson saw him make a little experimental tug at the knots, which resisted his fingers, and she nodded her head approvingly when Eustace said, “Hey, Myra, you ain’t happened to of run across Reginald Packman lately?” because she knew that what Eustace was doing was distracting her, distracting Myra Robinson, in order to reduce her state of agitation. “Been looking for him for a few weeks now,” Eustace went on. “Can’t seem to find him nowhere.” Myra Robinson looked at Eustace as though he’d spoken Spanish or something. “What?” she said. “Who?” “Reginald,” Eustace said, his fingers pulling harder at the knots, “Packman,” he finished, still trying without success to work the knotted handles free of each other. There was a long moment of silence then, until T.V. Daniels said in a weak, in a sort of strained, quiet voice, “Divine,” and Myra Robinson repeated, “Divine?” She was looking down at the bag Eustace was still working on as though T.V. were telling her that Reginald Packman—Divine!—was in that bag, and Eustace was prying at the knot with his key now—boy, Nettie Ferguson was thinking, that bag don’t weigh nothing, does it—and then Myra Robinson said, “No, no, no Divine,” as if he didn’t even exist, and a moment later T.V. said real quiet, “No one’s seen Divine in a dog’s age,” and Nettie Ferguson herself was just about to ask T.V. why he was so well acquainted with Reginald Packman’s comings and goings but just then the handles suddenly snapped free of each other and the bag spat forth some of its contents into the air and all over Eustace’s desk in a thin but almost corporeal cloud. “What the hay?” Eustace said, and T.V. Daniels put his hand over his nose like he thought it was poison gas or something but Myra Robinson was already sobbing and screaming and clutching at clumps of the stuff, and it took Nettie Ferguson, trying to extricate the chain of her glasses from the buttons of her blouse, a moment to understand what she was saying. “My baby” was what Myra Robinson was sobbing. “My baby, my baby, my baby. Your hair!” and all the sudden Nettie Ferguson found herself in need of something to lean on and she put a hand down and felt it land on the familiar comforting shape of the telephone, which when all the sudden it rang scared Nettie Ferguson so much that she fainted clean away.
4.04
Lawman Brown
T.V. daniels come in with a stack of them. “I thought it was odd,” he said, wheezing, “all them red flags up. Everybody in town don’t usually mail a letter on the same day.” There was like a moment, every time Lawman Brown saw T.V. Daniels, that he had to stop a minute and process just how fat the guy was, like say the number “seven hundred and thirty-one” didn’t really mean nothing—the number being the number Donnie Miller had given him, Donnie Miller who worked at the grain elevator and who, he said, had weighed T.V. Daniels the same way he weighed a load of wheat, namely, by weighing T.V. Daniels’s lopsided car with T.V. Daniels in it, and then weighing it again, still lopsided but empty this time—but anyway this number didn’t really mean nothing to Lawman Brown, but what did mean something was how Nettie Ferguson had had to haul herself up, complaining about her arthritis every step of the way, to unlock the second half of the double door so T.V. Daniels could like get in the building, and it was only after processing this that Lawman Brown took the handful of pictures from T.V. Daniels—the pictures having the same relationship to T.V. Daniels’s hand as postage stamps have to most other people’s hands. Then he was all business. He shooed Nettie back to her phone and leafed through the pictures slowly, Polaroids, by the look-a them, and after a minute he threw them onto his desk and he said to T.V., “Polaroids.” “Kodak, actually. It says so on the back.” Lawman Brown scowled at T.V. “Why you bothering me with these? They ain’t nothing.” T.V. hesitated a moment, and then he sifted through the pictures and pulled one out. “Lookit that one,” he said, and Lawman Brown squinted, and he saw nosy Nettie Ferguson trying to see what he was seeing, and he turned his body a little and put on his glasses, squinted again, and then he said, “Is that a hand?” and T.V. nodded, and Lawman Brown said, “Well, all I gotta say is that somebody should learn to focus, is all I have to say,” and then T.V. cleared his throat and said, “Um, Sheriff Brown,” which secretly annoyed Lawman Brown, he liked people to call him Lawman Brown so he could tell them to call him Sheriff Brown, but he liked to be called Lawman Brown first, “Sheriff Brown,” T.V. Daniels was saying, in that high thin trapped voice of his, “most of em, I mean, well, most of em are all the same color?” Nettie Ferguson punched like maybe three keys on her typewriter. Lawman Brown squinted at T.V. over the thick horn-rimmed top of his nonbifocal lenses. “Meaning?” T.V. ran his hands over the fulminatiousnessness of his stomach, which took a long time, and when he finished he said, “I think they’re pictures of some . . . body,” at which point Nettie Ferguson’s old Royal Electric produced the distinct sound of several keys all striking each other rather than the paper, and at the same time Lawman Brown slapped his forehead and said, “Lord a-mighty! He’s dismembered her!” “No, no,” T.V. said now, “it’s just the pictures. She’s whole. It’s just the pictures that’re bits and pieces,” he said, and then he began clearing away the mess of dirty napkins and plastic forks and styrofoam coffee cups with solidified inches of white-veined coffee stuff in them and spreading out the pictures on Lawman Brown’s desk, and as he worked he said, “Here’s her hand, see, and this one, I think, this one’s her wrist, and I think this is her forearm,” and so on, piece by piece, he began putting them together, until finally Lawman Brown put a hand on T.V.’s hand and stopped him. Nettie Ferguson was staring outright now, and he glared at her until she picked up the phone and held it absently to her ear, and then he said to T.V. in his best neutral-slash-accusatory tone, “You seem to know just how these here things go together,” and T.V. Daniels performed a sort of upper body wiggle-jiggle-and-shake it took Lawman Brown a moment to recognize as a shrug, and he, T.V., he said, “they got numbers on the back of em.” Before either of em could say anything else, the door chimed and Matthew Edwards, who had complained in the past that T.V. didn’t always make it all the way down the Damar-Palco road to his house (and mailbox), Matthew Edwards walked hesitantly into the station house with a little white-rimmed black rectangle held in one hand, and he tipped his hat hi-lo to Lawman Brown and flashed a look at T.V. Daniels, but before he could say anything his eyes dropped to the vaguely fish-shaped assortment of pictures on Lawman Brown’s desk, and he stared at the single picture they made and very slowly he added his own piece to the puzzle that had become Lucy Robinson’s body.
4.05
Cora’s Kitchen, Sumnertime’s Café,
and Sloppy Joe’s Pool Hall
almost everybody said the same thing: wasn’t the first time Myra Robinson wandered up and down the streets of Galatea in the middle of the night, drunk and carrying on in a state of what Rosemary Krebs had once called “partial undress.” Of course, usually she sang, and of course usually when she was in a state of partial undress the temperature wasn’t hovering right around the freezing mark, that’d be zero degrees Celsius but your average folks around here didn’t have much truck with the metric system, which is to say that they tended to think in terms of like thirty-two, thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit, and given the temperature and a recent and rather unexpected thunderstorm Galatea’s dirt roads were in a soupy semifrozen state, like the Jolly Green Giant’s broccoli-n-cheddar mix taken out of the freezer but not fully defrosted yet, and folks figured this had something to do with the fact that Myra Robinson—who as Faith Jackson just had to tell Reverend Greeving she didn’t even know where you could buy a nightgown like that around here but you sure couldn’t buy it out of the Sears catalog that was for sure—Myra Robinson wasn’t singing but was making little like screaming noises, which also seemed understandable, given the temperature, and recent circumstances. Not much had happened recently to make Myra Robinson sing. She wandered Galatea’s snow-sogged streets, sobbing, crying out sometimes, and always making a funny keening noise, keening being the word Matthew Edwards used, Matthew Edwards who claimed to be part Comanche or Chickasaw or some such, and when Yankee Carting asked Matthew Edwards what the hay keening was Matthew Edwards said it was the sound a squaw made right before she threw herself on her brave’s funeral pyre, and even before Yankee could ask what a pyre was Matthew Edwards said, fire, funeral fire. Myra had a coat on, open, over her nightgown, and she hugged a little black box to her chest. Afterwards folks admitted they worried about her catching pneumonia but no one really thought about frostbite because that nightgown with its little fake fur ruffs at cuff and hem and neckline—was that waistline you said? Darrell Jenkens said with a wicked grin out to Sloppy Joe’s—that nightgown dragged on the ground behind Myra Robinson like something out of a old black-and-white movie and who would-a thought she didn’t have no shoes on under there, and, well, besides, people assured each other, everybody knows you can’t talk sense to a drunk, which, if we’re going to be brutally honest, is what Myra Robinson just in fact is, and Lucy or no Lucy nobody in Cadavera County, which had been a dry county until the mid-eighties, that’s the nineteen eighties, had much sympathy for a single mother with a drinking problem and a nightgown whose neckline showed off her bellybutton. And so it was only when she wandered back out of town again, toward her house, then past it, and on toward what certain folks persisted in referring to as the old Deacon house and what other certain folks liked to call the limestone house and what only Wade Painter and Rosemary Krebs called Colin Nieman’s house, it was only then that someone came to her aid and it was the new man, the man whose, ahem, friend, had been present at the scene of the crime, the man whose coat had been found there and whose bag had contained Lucy Robinson’s hair and whose Polaroid or was it a Kodak had taken all those pictures—well how much more evidence do you need, was what Vera Gatlinger had to say, I mean really—it was the man who owned the house, Colin Nieman himself. Well, good for him, T.V. Daniels was heard to say at Sumnertime’s—T.V. who said the pictures was taken by a Kodak—in a tone of voice that didn’t sound like it wished him well at all, but anyway by the time Colin Nieman found her the tape in the tape recorder she was carrying—it was his tape recorder, wouldn’t you know it—had run out, and Myra Robinson was by that time as quiet as a church mouse, and when Colin Nieman got her inside of that big old mausoleum, oh excuse me, Grady Oconnor laughed at Cora’s Kitchen, that mansion, when Colin Nieman got her inside his house and into the light he saw then that she didn’t have no shoes on and her feet looked so terrible that he just picked her up and carried her to his truck and drove her straight to the hospital down to Bigger Hill, which as you can imagine Rosemary Krebs mentioned to Pastor Little that if Galatea had its own hospital then perhaps something more could have been done for poor Myra Robinson’s feet. It was only later, as he was driving home from the hospital, it was only then that Colin Nieman remembered the tape recorder, which sat now on the passenger seat, and this Nettie Ferguson had it straight from the horse’s mouth that Colin Nieman pressed the eject button on the tape recorder and a tape popped out and Colin Nieman slipped said tape into the car stereo which Nettie couldn’t remember the brand name of but she said she was pretty sure that it wasn’t even Japanese, it was German, which after a significant pause she sniffed and said well that tells you how much it cost and a few other things too, and Colin Nieman rewound the tape back to its beginning in his expensive German car stereo in his expensive British jeep-type vehicle and then, when it got there, it switched into play mode automatically, which DuWayne Hicks said his R.C.A. car stereo would do too, and it was made right here in the U.S. of A., as the A. in R.C.A. let you know, and when you remember that Colin Nieman hadn’t heard Myra Robinson wandering the streets earlier then you can maybe understand why he drove his car into the ditch, because the car stereo speakers spat out nothing but screaming, not a woman’s screams but a girl’s, not Myra’s, but Lucy’s, and in the dead silence at Sumnertime’s that followed this last revelation Howard Goertzen allowed as how it seemed to him that Colin Nieman probably would-a drove his vehicle into the ditch anyway because Colin Nieman had already demonstrated with fatal-to-Charlene effect that he wasn’t exactly the world’s most accomplished driver, which is to say that he seemed real good at going forward but not so good when it came to stopping, that was all Howard Goertzen had to say, and then Elaine Sumner said that if it was okay with everyone she was just going to make a fresh pot of coffee and serve everybody a slice of that apple pie they could all smell because it seemed to her that a body could use something a little sweet and a little stimulating after a story like that, on the house, Elaine Sumner said, moving her big hips in and out and in between the little tables in her café, and she added too that she sure hoped the groundhog saw his shadow tomorrow because she for one and she didn’t think she was the only one but she for one was going to buy whatever her Mary Kay account executive said was her spring colors because she could not n-o-t not take one more day of this winter, not one.
4.06
now when myra Robinson walked she rollicked back and forth in that way she’d had ever since the tape showed up on her front porch and she’d gone out for her little midnight stroll in the slush. The doctors’d managed to save her feet but she had no feeling in them, nothing, she said, it was like her legs stopped at her ankles and she was walking on air, and she was perpetually pitching back and forth and side to side and having to use her hands for balance, which today as she made her way through the station house door she was carrying a fairly smallish box, and when she pitched forward the box rattled, not in any unusual or ominous way, all sorts of things could rattle although off the top of his head Lawman Brown couldn’t think of anything, not one thing in the world that would rattle inside a cardboard box, and for no reason at all the blood ran cold in his veins. The doctors had given Myra orthopedic shoes which looked kind of like jackboots with a steel exoskeleton running up the ankle, and they clanked and clumped something awful when she walked. She pitched and stumbled into the station house, past Nettie Ferguson’s desk, who by this time Nettie Ferguson pretended not even to notice when Myra Robinson came into the station house, and as she threw the rattling box on Lawman Brown’s desk she, Myra, she was saying, “Oh God oh God oh God oh God,” and Lawman Brown, already put off his feed by the sound of the box and Myra’s clippety-clop of a footstep, Lawman Brown said, “Now, now, Myra, calm down,” but Myra just went on saying, “Oh God oh God oh God oh God,” and then, finally, she took a breath, a wheezing wobbling breath—Myra hated to sit down because standing back up tended to be a ordeal—and she said, “Oh, Lawman Brown, I just know it’s something terrible this time, terrible, terrible, terrible.” Lawman Brown was so frazzled that it didn’t even occur to him to tell Myra Robinson that his name was Eustace and his title was Sheriff, and instead, tentatively, he picked up the box. There were no markings on it that he could see. It was plain brown cardboard, clumsily taped shut, about the size of a loaf of bread, and “Please,” Myra was saying, and swaying like a stalk of wheat in a heavy wind, “please, just open it and get it over with. Just open it. Just tell me what is it.” “Now let’s not be hasty, Myra,” Lawman Brown said, recovering himself a little, “we don’t want to get ourselves into trouble here,” at which point Myra shouted, “What do you think, Eustace, it’s a bomb or something? It don’t weigh a pound, for Christ’s sake. It weighs less than a little bird—” “Myra, please,” Lawman Brown just had to interject, “your lang—” “Just open the damn thing!” Myra screamed. “—gwage,” Lawman Brown continued, setting the box back down on his desk and drawing himself up to his full height. “And I’ll thank you to afford me the respect and title my position is afforded.” He stood there, unconsciously swaying in sync with Myra’s swaying, but then he out and out stepped back when Myra teetered forward and put her face right in his and said, “Listen, Eustace Rumpford Brown, I was at school when you was just the fat doughnut-eating son of a sharecropper who spent four years butt-warming the bench of a football team that didn’t even have eleven players, and if you don’t open that box right now I swear to Christ I’m going to climb on top of your desk if I have to flap my arms and fly to get there, and I’m going to take such a big and smelly shit all over your precious collection of stained napkins and picnic silverware that you won’t be able to get rid of the smell for a month!” Somewhere in the interval between the word shit and the word silverware Lawman Brown concluded that dignity was no longer really an issue here and compliance was the cheapest option available to him, and so he pulled out his pocketknife, which he had half a mind to stick in Myra Robinson’s larynx box for calling him a bench warmer, he was a alternate and it said so right in the yearbook, and he slit the box down the center with a vigorous stroke and ripped the box flaps open so roughly that whatever was inside went spewing into the air and bounced on his desk and on the floor with a sound like falling marbles, and the first thing Lawman Brown thought of was Myra’s reference to birds, and he tried to tell himself that what he was looking at was little speckled blue eggs and not, as he knew they were, Lucy Robinson’s fingertips. “Dear Jesus,” he said, and Myra Robinson said nothing, and behind her Nettie Ferguson was saying, “Eustace? What is it, Eustace?” and Lawman Brown tried to shake his head but the movement brought the bile to his throat, and he ran toward the restroom, and behind him he heard Nettie Ferguson scream, and the uneven clompety-clomp-clomp of several of Myra’s footsteps, and then the heavy wet-flour-sack sound of her body falling to the floor.
4.07
Winda Bottomly
the thing was, she didn’t really want nobody to know it, but the thing was old Winda Bottomly couldn’t read. Didn’t really bother her none, not really, not too often, she had the TV at home and just about the only thing else she ever did was go to church and by this time in her long, long life—one husband, two kids, all three of em gone now—she’d memorized every last song in the hymnal and Reverend Abraham, who was one of the few people who knew her secret, Reverend Abraham always made a point of having some nice young boy or girl from the grade school speak out the Scripture reading for the week, and not just for her benefit neither: there was more than one person in Galatia who’d never learned to read, and don’t you think the phenomenon was confined to the east side of the grain elevator neither. Oh, and Cora’s. Winda Bottomly went to Cora’s, but there wasn’t no need for reading there: your nose could tell you what was on the menu just fine. Be that as it may, it was Winda Bottomly who found the sign. It was the first day of spring, and Winda had made a point of tending to her husband’s grave every year for the past ’leven years on the first day of spring, the kids, well, the kids hadn’t died around here and the powers that be, in one case a no-good husband and in another the U.S. Marine Corps, hadn’t seen fit to send em back for a proper burial, but “I put him to sleep in the winter,” Winda told her friends, “and I wake him up in the spring,” and this year she had awakened early and she had made her way out to the graveyard before sunrise because it was something to see, the sun spreading its infinite grace over the prairie, creeping along on its red-tipped fingertips over the just-turned-green fields of wheat and touching, finally, the shiny dome of the bald bluff, and afterwards, after the sun’d come up and Winda had combed the grass clean over William’s grave and planted this year’s plant, a white lily this year, for peace, it was after she’d done all that that Winda Bottomly made her way back to town and it was then that she saw it. To her it was just a scrawl on the white wall of Rosemary Krebs’s grain elevator, a tangle of black spray-painted lines with a couple-a red splotches off to the right, but, illiterate or no, Winda Bottomly recognized writing when she saw it. Immediately she thought of Webbie Greeving. That would-a been the person to get, Winda Bottomly thought, in the first place Webbie knew about Winda, and in the second Webbie was the kinda person who didn’t just read something, she told you what it meant—but no one had seen hide nor hair of Webbie Greeving since just after this all started, and besides, it occurred to Winda Bottomly, the only person liable to be up that early, in town, was Cora, and so it was to Cora’s she went, but who answered the door was that white woman, Miss Rosetta Stone, she called herself, which Winda Bottomly was pretty sure was a fake name she’d stole from the Good Book. Winda didn’t dislike Rosa, no, she wouldn’t go that far, but she sure didn’t trust her, and when Rosa told Winda that Cora was sleeping in this morning and if it pleased Winda okay Rosa would come with her and look at whatever it was she wanted looked at, Winda looked at her suspiciously but couldn’t see no way around it. And so off they went, Winda and Rosa, not exactly arm in arm, not exactly buddy-buddy, Rosa not asking what Winda was doing up so early and Winda not asking Rosa what Cora was doing in bed so late, and then, when they had got smack dab in front of the grain elevator and there was the words staring them right in the face Winda just stood there and waited, because she didn’t want to admit to some white woman she didn’t even know that she couldn’t read, but Rosa, instead, I don’t know, instead of reading the words out loud or whatever it was that Winda had imagined she’d do, Rosetta Stone let some sound out of her mouth that sounded unholy to Winda Bottomly, and then she struck out at Winda Bottomly, hit her right in the shoulder she did, and she screamed, “Why you bring me here!” and then she run off, and so it wasn’t until some three hours later when Faith Jackson herself called up Winda to ask her if she’d seen it that Winda Bottomly found out that what was written on the wall of the grain elevator was just two words: find me!, it read, and the red marks off to the side, Faith Jackson told her, those red marks was a explanation point.