Living Dead Girl (2 page)

I TAKE THE
Granite Lake exit off the two-lane highway and immediately see the signs for Granite Point Park. When we moved here, Granite Point Park was just two cabins and five or six double wide trailers. Clyde and Phyllis Duper and their young son Bruce ran it back then as a fishing stop.

Bruce isn’t really young. Wasn’t really young. He was about our age then.

The signs now proclaim that Granite Point Park is
AN IDEAL PLACE FOR A WEDDING OR REUNION
. Granite Point Park is
WHERE THE WATER MEETS THE SKY!

“You lived here?” Ginny asks.

“Yes.”

Bruce’s parents, Clyde and Phyllis, must be dead. They were quiet people.

“This is surreal,” Ginny says. “I thought places like this only existed in David Lynch movies.”

Every thirty yards or so is another sign.

BIGGEST BROWN TROUT IN THE STATE!

IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BUY NOW!

FULLY STOCKED WITH LIVE BAIT BITIN’ MACKINAW!

“These signs are new,” I say.

“They’re great advertising flare,” Ginny says, her voice dreamy. “Like old matchbooks. Really wonderful as far as art is concerned, don’t you think?”

“I can’t really remember what it looked like before,” I say: before Bruce Duper called me on Wednesday to say that he was worried about my wife, that he hadn’t seen her in several days and that the house was locked up. Before I drove twelve hundred miles with a nineteen-year-old pierced goddess. Before the roads were paved and the bones were found and the carbon was dated.

She used to say, “You can’t race an avalanche.”

“Still,” Ginny says. “I wonder if your friend Bruce has ever considered renting out space for filming.”

How long has it been since I was here last? Three years? A day? Have I ever left?

In 1960, with the advent of potassium-argon dating, anthropologists discovered that the age of the Zinjanthropus site at Olduvai Gorge was more than 1.75 million years older than they thought. It threw off the entire history of the Pleistocene age. Time had to be recreated. Books had to be changed. History had to be adjusted.

It’s true. It can happen at any time.

Bruce Duper stands waving on the front steps of what was formerly a small two-bedroom house. It is
now a Swiss style chalet. Bruce is tall and husky with a trimmed beard. My wife once said he was a “real man.” She once said that he was probably no smarter than the fish he caught, but that he was also the gentlest person she’d ever met. He looks like an animal to me now, all fur and teeth, and he’s waving his big paw in the air.

I wave back, thinking, Everything here is wrong. I should have never brought Ginny with me. She doesn’t fit the scenery. Her body is too lean, her hair too blond. She has eleven fingers and thinks we’re in love.

GINNY WALKS DOWN
to the marina so that I can talk to Bruce alone.

“Thing of it is,” Bruce says in between sips of coffee, “she’s always been so regular. She’d come across just about every day to get her mail and such. Pick up some bread and eggs; use the phone if she had to, you know. I got worried when she didn’t show for a couple days. Thought she might be sick or something, so I went across with some food and her mail, but she wasn’t there. Front door was locked and the boat was still docked.”

We’re sitting inside Bruce’s new house in high-backed leather chairs. He has a view of the lake from every conceivable angle.

“I appreciate you calling me first,” I say.

Bruce shakes his head like he’s trying to knock out a foul smell. “Paul, we’re old friends, right’?”

“We’ve known each other a long time,” I say.

“I thought about calling the sheriff straight away,” he says, “but I wanted to give you a chance to get up here first. In case, you know, there was something bad out here. I don’t think it would be right for you to find out secondhand.”

“Bruce,” I start to say, but he cuts me off with a wave of his hand.

“I may not be a college teacher in California like yourself,” he says, “but I know that family is important. You know what can happen out here, Paul. Things can go fishy for folks when they spend a lot of time out on the water. My mom and dad could tell you stories that would make your skin
run
. Anyway, you’re here now. We should probably get the sheriff down.”

“Let me look around the house before we go calling anyone,” I say. “I mean, she could be in Bosnia doing humanitarian relief.”

“It’s been some days,” Bruce says. “You sure you wanna wait any longer?”

“Bruce,” I say, “I know my wife.”

A phone rings somewhere upstairs, so Bruce excuses himself for a moment.

She’s not in Bosnia.

People used to make her claustrophobic. She said she could feel them “living” and it made her nervous. We’d be in a restaurant and she’d start counting all of the people.

“There are forty people in here. Forty-two if you count us,” she said once. We were eating dinner at a Black Angus in Spokane. “Four of us have been molested or beaten by our parents. Isn’t that bizarre?”

She had perfect teeth. Her father was a dentist. Her mother was his hygienist.

“And maybe three or four of us like our sex partners to pee on us,” she said.

Her father was short and pudgy. Her mother was short and skinny. She is five nine and weighs 125 pounds.

“One of us has a venereal disease right now,” she said.

She’s one big living, breathing, recessive trait.

“Sorry,” Bruce says, sitting back down. “That was my dad.”

So they’re not dead.

“How is Clyde?”

“He and mom live in Boca Raton,” Bruce says. “He’s stopped drinking, which makes everyone a lot happier.”

“That’s good for them,” I say.

“He mostly misses his old boat. Talks about that Fischer like it were a yacht. I keep it clean just in case they pop back in unannounced.”

“Have they seen your renovations?”

Bruce laughs and scratches at something on his throat. “No,” he says. “I’m trying to make this place over, you know, bring it up to the twenty-first century. Attract a younger crowd. Did you see the signs I put up?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it might make this place seem more exciting. What do I know?” We’re both laughing now, and I’m thinking that Bruce’s parents never spent a single day not loving their son. “Listen,” Bruce says, serious again. “It’s none of my business what you do in your private life, so don’t take this the wrong way. But you know how people on the lake are about sex and stuff, so folks are gonna ask me about your friend.”

“I don’t know anyone here anymore,” I say. “Tell them whatever you want.”

“How about I say she’s your sister?”

There is no one on the lake that could possibly care about me. “That’s fine, Bruce.”

We stare at each other for a moment in silence. There are two people in this room. If we were the last
two humans alive on the planet, what are the odds that one of us would kill the other?

Which one of us has the strongest animal instinct?

Is it the hairy beast with the soft mane of brown facial hair or the anthropologist who can break down each step of the human parade?

“We’ll need to rent a boat,” I say.

“I already reserved you one down at the marina. No charge on it, Paul,” Bruce says. “Mom and Dad consider you guys just about family and would be sick to hear your wife was missing.”

“I’m sure she’ll turn up,” I say. “Probably just a touch of miscommunication on all of our parts.”

We both stand up, and when I reach out to shake Bruce’s hand, he pulls me into his body and hugs me roughly, slapping my back hard.

He smells like orange peels.

“Hell,” he says in a tiny whisper beside my ear.

“It’s going to be all right,” I say because I’ve never been so close to Bruce in my life. I guess I do consider him an old friend, though his parents once told me I was going to rot in hell for trying to debunk the Bible. “Everything is going to be fine,” I say, but Bruce is crying and then I’m crying and I can’t figure out how long I’ve been away.

Chapter 2

S
he has a name. It’s Molly. When I hear her name in my head it sounds disembodied. I rarely say it out loud. Couples never do. You only hear your first name when you’ve done something wrong or when you’ve done something terribly right.

We are not in love anymore.

I am.

She isn’t.

There isn’t a date on a calendar that marks the end of us.

There are marks on my chest that do.

Molly and I were married in May 1990. We were both twenty-two; too young, but still older than the woman who wants to be my wife now.

Ginny leans over the side of the boat and vomits, lake water spraying into her face.

“Can you slow it down, Paul?” Ginny says in a tearful voice I’ve heard before. “Can you slow it fucking down!”

“Okay, okay,” I say, but she retches again and doesn’t hear me. Our rented boat is a rectangular aluminum barge with an Evinrude outboard motor attached to the back. It’s for lake fishing and not meant for comfort. My old house is on the north side of the lake, a forty-five-minute ride by boat, a ninety-minute ride by car. The water is rough today from the wind, a cool Alaskan, and foot-tall white caps are making the boat bounce.

“Christ,” Ginny says. I hand her a Kleenex and she wipes her face. “I didn’t realize we were river rafting. Tell me again why we couldn’t drive?”

“Remember these details,” I say. “It will make your movie seem more real.”

Ginny frowns. “Be kind to me, all right?”

I try to always be kind to Ginny. She is a good student. I don’t feel compelled to root for her when she takes one of my exams. I grade her as I would any student. Her theories about evolution vacillate wildly, but in an intriguing fashion. She tries to figure out ways that Adam and Eve could have existed alongside primitive man.

“What if Adam and Eve were Australopithecines?” she asked me once. “Couldn’t the Bible then just be an allegory about the links in our chain?”

“Could it?” I said.

“Be kind to me,” she said then. “Just give me an answer, not another question. My brain is about to implode.”

I reach over now and touch her knee. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I shouldn’t have eaten all of those doughnuts,” Ginny says.

“It’s not much longer,” I say. “We’ll be there before the sun goes down.”

“Fine,” Ginny says. “There’s nothing left inside me now anyway.”

AFTER I FIRST
noticed her in class, I would see Ginny everywhere I went. She would be the girl checking my groceries at Ralph’s, the woman jogging at the gym, the ingénue in the new sitcom.

To make it clear, I’m not a dirty old man. I don’t teach school so that I can find women. And I guess it’s not really
school
, is it? Community college isn’t school as much as it is a weigh station. No one who wants to be an anthropologist is sitting in one of my classrooms. And no one teaching anthropology at a community college will ever be an anthropologist. The Leakeys never taught at Los Angeles Pierce College.

But Ginny.

She began showing up during my office hours to
chat about
Indiana Jones
movies. She’d ask if I thought they were realistic.

She didn’t know the difference between archaeology and anthropology. I explained it to her.

One day she came into my office and asked me if I could drive her home since her car wouldn’t start.

“That’s crossing a certain line,” I said. “The faculty frowns on that sort of thing, I’m afraid.”

“I could drop your class,” she said.

“Or you could call AAA.”

She grinned then and started tapping her extra pinky against her front teeth, like she knew every sweet, evil thing I had in my mind whenever I saw her.

“Tell me something, Ginny,” I said. “Do you know why you have an extra finger?”

“It’s called polydactyly,” she said.

“I know what it’s called.”

“My mom told me it was because she rubbed her belly so much when she was pregnant with me,” Ginny said. “But I stopped believing that after I saw
The Elephant Man
and his mother thought he was deformed because of some elephant accident.”

“When was this?”

Ginny paused for a moment and closed her eyes. “Gosh,” she said. “I guess that was Tuesday.”

We made love that day in the backseat of my Honda.

Made love. That’s not right. We’ve never made love.

Banging.

“What did you guys do for fun out here?” Ginny says now.

“We read,” I say. “We talked. Ate home-cooked meals.”

“No TV?”

“No,” I say.

“I’d be mainlining in a month,” Ginny says, almost wistfully. “Not that you could probably score anything out here.”

There are a few other boats on the water today, mostly fishermen. In the summer, people from Spokane usually filled the lake with house boats and water skis, but during the fall and winter the permanent residents of Granite Lake numbered under one hundred. Our house is a mile away from the closest neighbor, and now, as I see it rising behind the evergreens, I wish that I still lived in it.

I suppose I could. I suppose if we had lawyers and accountants and screaming fights I could live here year-round. I could apply to some doctorate programs. I’d spend two weeks in southern France searching for mandible bones, two weeks at Olduvai Gorge discovering the missing link, and then the rest of the year here, piecing it all together.

“That’s the place?” Ginny says, pointing ahead.

“Yes,” I say.

“I feel funny about this, Paul,” Ginny says, but she pulls out her 35mm camera anyway. “I mean, if she’s just sitting in there or something I’m going to feel like a real bitch.”

“It’s fine,” I say, but she’s already snapping photos.

It comes to this, finally: admitting that the worst is possible. Making a decision that you could walk into your home and it could be splattered with blood. You could see your wife dead in a heap, body twisted like they always are in those forensics programs. Your life could disintegrate in front of you, and immediately you’d need to figure out how to pick up the pieces.