How They Were Found (10 page)

It is not something I’ve ever told anyone.

Here, in the game, I stop and pull my hand away. I say, I’m so sorry for what I did to you, and the girl doesn’t say anything back because she’s too far gone to talk.

I say, I promise I won’t do it again, and then I get out of the bed, untangle our cords, and cover her gently with a blanket. When I walk downstairs to find her friends, to tell them they need to look after her, I see that the party is deserted, its falsehood revealed. The only person left is Teacher, holding his big black drill in one hand, a red plastic cup of beer in the other. When he stands and starts walking toward me, I step back, raise my hands in protest.

I say, It’s over. There’s nothing for you here. I changed what happened all by myself.

He moves quickly then, carelessly whipping his beer away in an arc of foam as his other hand shoots up and forward, shoving the drill at my face, the bit already whirling threats. He shakes his head, says, As if one moment was all it took.

I say, I’m still ashamed, Teacher. I’m just not afraid of my shame anymore.

I wrap my arms around the vacuum and its bag full of my dirt. Teacher pulls the trigger, but it is meaningless and he knows it. There are other rules besides the first one, and despite the drill I have begun to discover them.

No new turn follows, only some sort of timeout, intermission. I’m sitting in the end zone of a high school football field while sweat drips from my face, my arms and legs shaking from exertion. Even my vacuum looks tired, its belt worn, its bag full to the point of bursting. Teacher walks across the field with his drill dangling loosely in his grip, and while there’s no malice in his movement, I can’t help jerking away when he comes to sit beside me. The armpits of his shirt are darkened with sweat like sulfur and cheap cologne, rotten eggs soaked in musk.

He says, Why be afraid? Why resist? The only thing I’m killing are the places you were most scared, the places you were caught, found out for what you are.

That’s not true, I say, thinking about the moments where I was proudest, where someone decided I was a good husband, a good son, a good friend. Memories rare enough before the drill.

Teacher smiles, more teeth than curved lips. He says, Good with the bad, sweet with the sour, sometimes you gotta amputate the heart to save the head.

And then there is the drill bit again, pressed against my forehead, already biting through.

I say, I don’t want to play anymore.

I say, It’s not fair to everyone I hurt if I can forget what I did to them.

The drill turns slowly, tearing the skin without piercing the bone beneath. The bit is both cold and hot at the same time. Half of my memories are gone, replaced with the dead nothingness of Teacher’s treatment. If Teacher wins, there will be no remainder left behind.

Through the pain, I say, You cheated. You never explained the rest of the rules. You never told us there was a chance we could win too.

And then I see it, the solution, how to turn the half-life left to play into a second chance, the possibility of being better. I smile too now, wider than I have in all these sad years, and even with the drill twisting through my face I can see that Teacher is for a moment as afraid of me as I am of him.

Teacher says, You’re the one who asked to play, and then he presses the red trigger the rest of the way. The drill bit slides through bone and brain all over again, but this time I don't give in as quickly. I focus, desperate to hold out for even one more millisecond than I have before. Even that will be an improvement, the first play at the beginning of a big comeback.

Teacher says, Game on, and as my eyes shut, I think, Yes, yes, it is.

THE DROWNED GIRL DRIPS EVERYWHERE, soaking the cheap cloth of the Ford's back seat. Punter stares at her from the front of the car, first taking in her long blond hair, wrecked by the pond's amphibian sheen, then her lips, blue where the lipstick's been washed away, flaky red where it has not. He looks into her glassy green eyes, her pupils so dilated the irises are slivered halos, the right eye further polluted with burst blood vessels. She wears a lace-frilled gold tank top, a pair of acid wash jeans with grass stains on the knees and the ankles. A silver bracelet around her wrist throws off sparkles in the window-filtered moonlight, the same sparkle he saw through the lake's dark mirror, that made him drop his fishing pole and wade out, then dive in after her. Her feet are bare except for a silver ring on her left pinkie toe, suggesting the absence of sandals, flip-flops, something lost in a struggle. Suggesting too many things for Punter to process all at once.

Punter turns and faces forward. He lights a cigarette, then flicks it out the window after just two drags. Smoking with the drowned girl in the car reminds him of when he worked at the plastics factory, how he would sometimes taste melted plastic in every puff of smoke. How a cigarette there hurt his lungs, left him gasping, his tongue coated with the taste of polyvinyl chloride, of adipates and phthalates. How that taste would leave his throat sore, would make his stomach ache all weekend.

The idea that some part of the dead girl might end up inside him—her wet smell or sloughing skin or dumb luck—he doesn't need a cigarette that bad.

Punter crawls halfway into the back seat and arranges the girl as comfortably as he can, while he still can. He's hunted enough deer and rabbits and squirrels to know she's going to stiffen soon. He arranges her arms and legs until she appears asleep, then brushes her hair out of her face before he climbs back into his own seat.

Looking in the rearview, Punter smiles at the drowned girl, waits for her to smile back. Feels his face flush when he remembers she's never going to.

He starts the engine. Drives her home.

Punter lives fifteen minutes from the pond but tonight it takes longer. He keeps the Ford five miles per hour under the speed limit, stops extra long at every stop sign. He thinks about calling the police, about how he should have already done so, instead of dragging the girl onto the shore and into his car.

The cops, they'll call this disturbing the scene of a crime. Obstructing justice. Tampering with evidence.

What the cops will say about what he's done, Punter already knows all about it.

At the house, he leaves the girl in the car while he goes inside and shits, his stool as black and bloody as it has been for months. It burns when he wipes. He needs to see a doctor, but doesn't have insurance, hasn't since getting fired.

Afterward, he sits at the kitchen table and smokes a cigarette. The phone is only a few feet away, hanging on the wall. Even though the service was disconnected a month ago, he's pretty sure he could still call 911, if he wanted to.

He doesn't want to.

In the garage, he lifts the lid of the chest freezer that sits against the far wall. He stares at the open space above the paper-wrapped bundles of venison, tries to guess if there's enough room, then stacks piles of burger and steak and sausage on the floor until he's sure. He goes out to the car and opens the back door. He lifts the girl, grunting as he gathers her into his arms like a child. He's not as strong as he used to be, and she's heavier than she looks, with all the water filling her lungs and stomach and intestinal tract. Even through her tank top he can see the way it bloats her belly like she's pregnant. He's careful as he lays her in the freezer, as he brushes the hair out of her eyes again, as he holds her eyelids closed until he's sure they'll stay that way.

The freezer will give him time to figure out what he wants. What he needs. What he and she are capable of together.

Punter wakes in the middle of the night and puts his boots on in a panic. In the freezer, the girl's covered in a thin layer of frost, and he realizes he shouldn't have put her away wet. He considers taking her out, thawing her, toweling her off, but doesn't. It's too risky. One thing Punter knows about himself is that he is not always good at saying when.

He closes the freezer lid, goes back to the house, back to bed but not to sleep. Even wide awake, he can see the curve of her neck, the interrupting line of her collarbones intersecting the thin straps of her tank top. He reaches under his pajama bottoms, past the elastic of his underwear, then squeezes himself until the pain takes the erection away.

On the news the next morning, there's a story about the drowned girl. The anchorman calls her missing but then says the words
her name was
. Punter winces. It’s only a slip, but he knows how hurtful the past tense can be.

The girl is younger than Punter had guessed, a high school senior at the all-girls school across town. Her car was found yesterday, parked behind a nearby gas station, somewhere Punter occasionally fills up his car, buys cigarettes and candy bars.

The anchorman says the police are currently investigating, but haven't released any leads to the public.

The anchorman looks straight into the camera and says it's too early to presume the worst, that the girl could still show up at any time.

Punter shuts off the television, stubs out his cigarette. He takes a shower, shaves, combs his black hair straight back. Dresses himself in the same outfit he wears every day, a white t-shirt and blue jeans and black motorcycle boots.

On the way to his car, he stops by the garage and opens the freezer lid. Her body is obscured behind ice like frosted glass. He puts a finger to her lips, but all he feels is cold.

The gas station is on a wooded stretch of gravel road between Punter's house and the outskirts of town. Although Punter has been here before, he's never seen it so crowded. While he waits in line he realizes these people are here for the same reason he is, to be near the site of the tragedy, to see the last place this girl was seen.

The checkout line crawls while the clerk runs his mouth, ruining his future testimony by telling his story over and over, transforming his eyewitness account into another harmless story.

The clerk says, I was the only one working that night. Of course I remember her.

In juvie, the therapists had called this narrative therapy, or else constructing a preferred reality.

The clerk says, Long blond hair, tight-ass jeans, all that tan skin—I'm not saying she brought it on herself, but you can be sure she knew people would be looking.

The clerk, he has black glasses and halitosis and fingernails chewed to keratin pulp. Teeth stained with cigarettes or chewing tobacco or coffee. Or all of the above. He reminds Punter of himself, and he wonders if the clerk feels the same, if there is a mutual recognition between them.

When it's Punter's turn, the clerk says, I didn't see who took her, but I wish I had.

Punter looks away, reads the clerk's name tag.

OSWALD.

The clerk says, If I knew who took that girl, I'd kill him myself.

Punter shivers as he slides his bills across the counter, as he takes his carton of cigarettes and his candy bar. He doesn't stop shivering until he gets out of the air-conditioned store and back inside his sun-struck car.

The therapists had told Punter that what he'd done was a mistake, that there was nothing wrong with him. They made him repeat their words back to them, to absolve himself of the guilt they were so sure he was feeling.

The therapists had said, You were just kids. You didn't know what you were doing.

Punter said the words they wanted, but doing so changed nothing. He'd never felt the guilt they told him he should. Even now, he has only the remembered accusations of cops and judges to convince him that what he did was wrong.

Punter cooks two venison steaks in a frying pan with salt and butter. He sits down to eat, cuts big mouthfuls, then chews and chews, the meat tough from overcooking. He eats past the point of satiation on into discomfort, until his stomach presses against the tight skin of his abdomen. He never knows how much food to cook. He always clears his plate.

When he's done eating, he smokes and thinks about the girl in the freezer. How, when walking her out of the pond, she had threatened to slip out of his arms and back into the water. How he'd held on, carrying her up and out into the starlight. He hadn't saved her—couldn't have—but he had preserved her, kept her safe from the wet decay, from the mouths of fish and worse.

He knows the freezer is better than the refrigerator, that the dry cold of meat and ice is better than the slow rot of lettuce and leftovers and ancient, crust-rimmed condiments. Knows that even after death, there is a safety in the preservation of a body, that there is a second kind of life to be had.

Punter hasn't been to the bar near the factory since he got fired, but tonight he needs a drink. By eight, he's already been out to the garage four times, unable to keep from opening the freezer lid. If he doesn't stop, the constant thawing and refreezing will destroy her, skin first.

It's mid-shift at the factory, so the bar is empty except for the bartender and two men sitting together at the rail, watching the ball game on the television mounted above the liquor shelves. Punter takes a stool at the opposite end, orders a beer and lights a cigarette. He looks at the two men, tries to decide if they're men he knows from the plant. He's bad with names, bad at faces. One of the men catches him looking and gives him a glare that Punter immediately looks away from. He knows that he stares too long at people, that it makes them uncomfortable, but he can't help himself. He moves his eyes to his hands to his glass to the game, which he also can't make any sense of. Sports move too fast, are full of rules and behaviors he finds incomprehensible.

During commercials, the station plugs its own late-night newscast, including the latest about the missing girl. Punter stares at the picture of her on the television screen, his tongue growing thick and dry for the five seconds the image is displayed. One of the other men drains the last gulp of his beer and shakes his head, says, I hope they find the fucker that killed her and cut his balls off.