The Talk-Funny Girl (15 page)

“What about after church?”

“We have food going out for at Mimi’s, times.”

“What about after that? We can drive there in two and a half hours. I’d get you home by nine at night.”

I imagined myself walking in the door of our house at nine o’clock at night.

“Why do you ask me on that?” I said, because I was especially curious about him then. I had seen that he wasn’t afraid of my father, and that didn’t make sense. Everyone was afraid of my father, everyone except Dad Paul, and, at certain moments, my mother. It made me wonder if Sands might be even more capable of hurting a person than my father was, and it resurrected the idea—which I’d covered over in my
thoughts again and again—that he was playing some elaborate trick on me. Whoever was killing the girls did it at the rate of only about one every six months, which meant that he took his time setting up his next victim. It probably also meant that he was someone who didn’t seem like a killer, someone very careful and slow and sneaky, the kind of person you could walk past in the grocery store and never worry about.

“Why? Because I’m going to look at a museum. Then out for a meal at an Italian restaurant I like. Nothing would cost you anything. Nothing else would happen.”

“If I can’t, will you fire me off?”

He just looked at me a moment, his strong arms hanging at his sides, and I saw something else in his face, something close to defeat. He was, I thought, a little bit like the boys in school. They seemed to want something from me they could never come out and just ask for straight. “You’re afraid of me still,” he said. “After all this time. Either that or you just don’t like me.”

“Afraid for nothing,” I said, but it was a lie and I thought he could probably hear that in my voice.

“But you won’t go.”

“Can’t to.”

“Why?”

I shrugged and watched him, waiting for him to fire me. I would run then, I told myself. I wouldn’t go back home even for one night.

But he only made a sad smile, just a flash of it, and looked away. “I’ll drive you to the store. Your aunt will get the money to you before you come to work again next week, don’t worry.”

“Friday is a day for work again.”

“Right. Friday and Saturday. You’ll get it before next Monday.”

“And I can to work Friday?”

“You better show up and you better work hard.”

It wasn’t until we were in the truck that I realized he might have been trying to make one of his halfway-jokes.

In the 112 Store parking lot, with my backpack on my lap and my
fingers on the door handle, I said, “Thank you,” as I always did. And then I added, “For on the ride and the job too.”

“When school gets out you can work more hours if you want. More money, too.”

“Thank you,” I said a second time, but by then I wasn’t sure of my voice anymore. I wanted to say something about my father, to explain him to Sands—the way he looked, the way he talked, the way he acted—to apologize for him and for not being able to go to Boston, but the words just wouldn’t come out of my throat.

“And I’ll ask you again about Boston. Another time. You’d be welcome to bring along a friend … if she’s skinny enough to fit on the seat here.”

“Okay,” I said. I opened the door.

“That was a little joke, but I meant it about the friend.”

“All right then.”

“What’s
dowsha
?” he said when I was standing on the gravel with the door still open.

I squinted my eyes as if he’d said something I hadn’t quite heard. The gesture felt to me exactly like telling the lie had felt. It caused a particular kind of sourness to run up into my mouth.

“What your father said to you at the end. ‘Dowsha.’ What did it mean?”

“I didn’t listen on it,” I said, and I thanked him again, quickly, before he could say anything else about it or change his mind about my job. I closed the door and walked away.

Eleven

A
t that time of year, the middle of May, the blackflies fill the air, as Aunt Elaine says, like pepper grains sprayed out of a fire hose. They like the damp, and the cool, and places where the water runs, and they swarm around people’s faces as if they’ve been waiting all winter for the taste of human flesh. Mosquitoes you can hear and kill fairly easily, but blackflies are small, quiet, and quick. The best you can do is swing your arms around or hope for a breeze to push them off. Sometimes they get into your mouth and you swallow one. “The price we pay for living in a great place like this,” I often heard people say about the blackflies. They said it, too, about the long winters, the twenty-below-zero nights, about frost heaves on the road, and mud season, and power outages caused by falling trees in ice storms, about the flocks of tourists who come in early October to see the leaves change and clog the roads. There were, I sometimes thought, a lot of high prices to pay for living there.

That afternoon, while I was walking away from the 112 Store along the highway, the blackflies were especially bad. There were times when a driver passing a pedestrian waving arms around her face in May would stop and offer a ride. It is fairly typical of that part of the world, where, even now, strangers often stop to help a stranded driver push a car out of a snowbank, and where, when I was a girl and before the
abductions, you’d still occasionally see someone hitchhiking without being afraid. But I never accepted those offers. Even before the girls were taken I had been afraid to do that.

That day no one stopped. With the blackflies swarming around me, I hurried past Warners’, and Patanauk’s, and the two houses, then made the left onto Waldrup Road and slowed down. I didn’t know what effect my father’s trip to the work site would have on the mood of the household, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. Sometimes he said he’d douse me and then he seemed to forget or have a change of heart. Sometimes, after an embarrassment or an argument or a bad moment with my mother, he’d fall silent for a day or two, and I could feel the anger and the humiliating memory growing inside him. And then he would act. You never knew. My parents were like gasoline spread around a room—there was the sharp smell of danger, the threat that something might erupt, but it could just as easily evaporate as explode.

Lately, my mother had started throwing up in the bathroom—from all the years of drinking wine, I suspected. It hadn’t made her any easier to live with. On top of that, my father’s mood usually turned sour in spring, when the soft earth and bugs made it more difficult to work the woods, and the uplifted spirits of everyone else formed a sunny background to his belief that life was made up of nothing but disappointment and insult.

I was sure of this: Anything having to do with money carried the potential for trouble. So I wasn’t surprised to step into what felt like an ominous quiet in the house. I could smell food being cooked and knew instantly what it was: beans and baked potatoes. That meant we’d come to the point in the month where there wasn’t enough money for meat. My father’s store of homemade venison sausage had run out. The money from the check had almost run out. This was the worry that had driven him to come to the site; I understood that now. I knew he’d spent money on chewing tobacco that should have been spent on something else, perhaps a pound of bacon or hamburger, but that he hadn’t wanted to face Sands without that prop, without his good
hat; hadn’t wanted to drive his loud, rusted-out, ten-year-old truck to the site and ask somebody he didn’t even know to pay his daughter an amount he wasn’t even sure of. It had been a big event for him—dressing up, going to a store, leaving his cane in the truck, and forcing himself to walk through town to where his daughter was employed, while he wasn’t and hadn’t been for years. The few minutes with Sands—so big and young and unintimidated—had been an enormous humiliation for him, and it had been smoldering in his mind all the hours since. I knew that without looking directly at him where he sat, his chair angled away from the table, the hat and tobacco gone, his eyes cast down and to the side and fixed there, while his fingers jiggled on his legs.

I helped my mother by putting out the bowls and spoons and then serving the food into them. My father didn’t turn his chair to face us as he ate and made no eye contact. No meat, no meat, no meat—that was the chorus running through his thoughts, I was sure of it. That and the idea of Aunt Elaine with cash money in her hand while his family ate beans and baked potatoes. I kept my eyes down. I listened to the sound of fork tines scraping the potato skins for the last bits of white; I heard peeper frogs whistling in the stream outside. It took us only minutes to finish the meal. I brought the bowls to the sink and washed them, turning them upside down on a dish towel to dry. My father went out to his woodpile. My mother told me to light in a Prime, then sat tightly squeezed into a corner of the ratty sofa, surrounded by smoke.

I retreated to my room and lay down on my stomach so that the pillow pressed against the place where I felt hungry. Outside my window, the peepers’ song moved up and down in a slow, whistling rhythm and I could hear the
bang … bang
of my father’s maul, regular as a clock. I imagined going to Boston in Sands’s truck and eating with him in a restaurant there. I thought he probably wasn’t playing any kind of a trick on me, but even if he was, it almost didn’t matter.

Twelve

I
t seemed strange to me that we went to the service that Sunday, because usually when my parents had come to the end of their money for the month they stayed home. Even if we skipped the luxury of the breakfast buffet at Mimi’s—which we surely would—there was the two dollars for the collection basket and the cost of gas to consider. But when I’d been awake only a few minutes, my mother put her head in past the doorjamb and told me to dress for church, so I did. We made the forty-minute drive in a light, steady rain, the smoky inside of the cab as gray as the overcast sky. In the Quonset hut there were only about half as many people as on a typical Sunday, and I suspected some of the other families had run out of money, too. On Pastor Schect’s face I thought I could see ripples of anger bubbling his skin from the inside, pressing against his eyes, as if the rows of empty chairs were taunting him.

As he often did, Pastor Schect began the service by walking back and forth in front of us, head lowered, arms hanging limp at his shoulders, his voice little more than a mumble that seemed to evaporate into the air before it reached the arched metal ceiling. But after a time—and this, too, was typical—as if he had needed only to warm up his vocal cords, Pastor lifted his eyes and strengthened his voice, and stood still
facing us. He raked his wounded gaze across the empty chairs and the handful of attentive faces. “Jesus Christ the Lord of Lords, what did he do when there were sinners amongst the youths nearby him?
What did he do?!
” Pastor Schect shouted those last words, the veins in his neck and forehead bulging and his dyed hair making small jumps on his head. A little boy in front laughed at the sight. Pastor Schect looked straight at the boy and shouted, “He stoneth them, say!” so forcefully that the boy burst into tears and wrapped both arms around his mother’s leg. Pastor Schect went over and stood behind the homemade pulpit. He slapped the palm of his hand down on it, and the
bang!
echoed around the church. “Stonethed them! Let he cast the first stone! Let he!” Pastor jabbed himself in the chest with a straight index finger. “It would be better for the children, say, if they had a mill hung around their necks and were dropped in the river, it tells in the Bible. Isn’t it?”

Men and women nodded solemnly, but I noticed that a certain kind of stillness had fallen across my parents. They weren’t moving at all; they seemed not to be breathing. The silence came off them like the charred smell after a house fire, and I puzzled over it, almost to the point of not paying attention to Pastor Schect’s words. Something was different. Something wasn’t right.

“So we come forth in saving penance,” he was saying. “When you have a headache, you are saving penance, say! When you cut yourself with a knife. When you bang yourself and hurt, the pain is for a penance. Bad backs are for a penance, say. Bad backs! All the cancers are our penances being saved, say!”

He stopped. He lifted his face to the ceiling, pushed out his lips, and his eyes seemed to go as empty as the dozens of empty chairs. His voice dropped so that he was almost humming the words. “But sometimes that God-given penance isn’t enough, say. Not enough. Sometimes the Lord of Gods wants more out of us. Suffer the little children, said Jesus Christ the Lord of Lords. Suffer the little children to our penance!”

He closed his eyes as if in ecstasy, and at that moment I understood where everything was leading, why my parents had come to the service
despite the money situation, why they were so still, what Pastor Schect was talking them toward. One drop of urine went into my underwear. I squeezed my legs together. I made my hands tight into fists and fought down an urge to sprint for the door.

It was three or four more seconds before Pastor Schect went up on his toes and shouted, “Which parents among them, say, have a penance child today? A sacrifice! A child who must be
faced
!?”

I noticed that my father’s arm moved a few inches, then flapped back down at his side. I felt a sweep of relief for all of one second before I realized my mother was raising her arm, so slowly that I wanted to reach out and take hold of it. I watched Pastor Schect’s eyes turn and fix on my mother’s hand, her fingers pressed tightly together, the elbow straight, the back of the hand slanted toward her as if she was a smart pupil who knew the answer. I squeezed my legs and hands to keep myself from running.

“Come ye then, say,” Pastor Schect yelled in a victorious voice. There wouldn’t be much money in the woven basket on that day, but there would be a facing. A facing would help his reputation spread. Soon the multitudes of grateful parents would come, having found, at last, a God-sent man who could help them tame their children. That was Pastor Schect’s entire strategy, a strategy that came from the fact that, deep down inside him, he could not bear to see a child who was beyond his control. I understand that now. I have thought about it a thousand times during all these years. I’ve felt the same feelings in myself at bad moments with my own children, maybe all parents feel it—do what I want you to do, don’t disobey, don’t disregard me—but in him it was children in general, all children, and the feeling was intense beyond describing. He was smart enough to have an intuition that other adults felt the same, and he had staked out his corner of the spiritual territory as the pastor who could fix all those terrible kids, who understood what trouble they caused, what feelings of frustration they raised. He had an answer for that.