Last Summer at Mars Hill (16 page)

“Right,” I said, dropping the phone in disgust and kicking back onto the bed. These things were always blown out of proportion, the proportions usually made up of some poor woman’s face slammed against the wall, or blown to pieces inside a mobile home out by the Piggly Wiggly. But the hell with it. I tried to tell myself it was just a job.

I slept for a while. When I woke I showered, played back my tape and made a few notes, then buzzed Lyman’s room. Out: no doubt soaking up more local color, or tracking down another cousin. I changed into jeans and a T-shirt and headed for the motel bar.

The motel sat on a sand-colored hillside, a few miles off Route 77 and with an impressive view of the Arbuckle Mountains rolled out like sepia corduroy to the east. A rusted sign advertising some defunct waterslide clapped loudly in the parking lot. Beneath the westering sun gleamed a tiny swimming pool half-full of overchlorinated water, the chemical smell so strong it made my eyes tear. I glanced vainly around for Lyman, crossed the parking lot, and stopped.

A single other car was parked in the lot, around the corner from our room. Not a car, actually. An RV, a mid-sized late-model leviathan with fake wood trim and darkened windows, identical to a million other RVs holding up traffic from Bar Harbor to Yosemite.

Only I recognized this one. I couldn’t figure out how, or from where, but I’d seen it before. I stood staring at it, wiping the sweat from my upper lip and wishing I’d worn my sunglasses. All I had was a vague remembrance of unease, the name and the sight of that van making me distinctly uncomfortable. I walked past it slowly, and as I approached fierce barking broke out from inside. The vehicle shimmied slightly, as a dog—make that dogs—threw themselves against the side; and
that
was familiar, too. A flicker of shadow against one of the windows, then a thump and furious snarling as they leaped against the windows again.

“Huh.” I paused, listening as the dogs grew more and more frantic. From the sound of it they were big: no retirees with fluffy cockapoos here. The RV was big enough to house half-a-dozen Dobermans. And whoever owned the van wasn’t putting hygiene at a premium—it smelled like the worst kind of puppy mill, with a lingering fecal odor of rotting meat and straw. Still I stood there, until finally I decided this was stupid. I probably
had
seen it before, parked at the motel in Oklahoma City, or even at the Holiday Inn. According to Lyman, the Arbuckle Mountains were supposed to be some big vacation spot. No real mystery.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the RV was out of context, here; that wherever I’d seen it before, and heard those dogs, it hadn’t been on this trip. At last I turned and went inside. The barking didn’t cease until the bar door closed behind me.

The bar was one of those places where frigid air conditioning and near-darkness pass for atmosphere. The same Muzak piped into the motel’s tiny coffeeshop echoed here, and the paltry clientele seemed to consist of motel employees getting off the three
P.M.
shift. I found a corner as far from the speakers as possible and sat there nursing a Pearl beer and squinting at the local paper. It was a weekly, nothing there about the animal mutilations yet, but the police blotter said that Susan Brownen, of Pauls Valley, had filed a complaint against her former husband. Seemed he’d tried to set her trailer on fire and, when that didn’t work, totaled her car. George Brownen I assumed was still at large. There was also a long feature on someone celebrating her one-hundredth birthday in the Sulphur Rest Home, and a recipe for Frito Pie that used pickled okra. I finished my beer and decided to call Lyman again. Then I saw her.

She was at the bar, that’s how I’d missed her before; but now she was turned toward me and smiling as the bartender shoved a mixed drink and a Pearl longneck in front of her. She slipped some money on the counter, took the drinks, and headed for my table.

“Janet Margolis, right?”

I nodded, frowning. “I
knew
I recognized that RV from somewhere. I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name—”

She sat down, waving her hand self-deprecatingly as she slid the longneck to me. “Please! How could you? Irene Kirk—”

We shook hands and I thanked her for the beer. She pulled one leg up under her, smoothing the folds of an expensive pleated silk skirt. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she said, her eyes narrowing as she laughed and squeezed a lime into her glass. I nodded, leaning back in my chair as I sipped my beer.

Irene Kirk. I had been covering the trial of Douglas “Buddy” Grogan a year before, the story that had gotten me a Pulitzer nomination—the first ever for
OUR
magazine. It was a horrible experience, because the details of the case were horrible. Another estranged husband, this one granted visitation rights to his three-year-old son. After a year of threatening his ex-wife, then begging her to reconcile with him, one weekend when the little boy was visiting, Buddy Grogan had called her on the telephone and, as she listened and pleaded with him on the other end, shot the child. What made the whole thing almost unbearable, though, was that she had the whole thing on tape—she’d been recording her phone calls since he’d begun threatening her. And it wasn’t the sort of thing you got used to hearing, even if you wrote for a tabloid that was trying to tart up its image for a more politically correct decade.

Irene Kirk had been there. She was a lawyer, the kind of feminist the newspapers always described as “ardent” rather than “militant.” She lived in Chicago, but traveled all over the country doing
pro bono
work for rape crisis centers and abortion clinics and the like. She was a sort of camp follower of cases of this sort. Since the Grogan trial I’d heard of others running into her, at Congressional hearings, celebrity rape trials, shelters for the abused and homeless. But she wasn’t exactly an ambulance chaser. For one thing, she obviously didn’t need to work for a living. Small and delicate, with skin like white silk and inky hair pulled into a chignon, even here in the middle of nowhere she wore the kind of clothes you usually only saw on models in the European editions of tony women’s magazines. And at the Grogan trial she spent a lot of time talking to women outside the courtroom—friends of Grogan’s wife, women from local shelters, women who seemed to have stories not too different from the one I was covering, except they hadn’t ended tragically—yet. Every morning she cruised around the courthouse until she found a parking space for her leviathan RV and I’d wondered what a woman like that—with her sueded silk suits, smelling of Opium and ylang-ylang shampoo—was doing with a van full of snarling dogs. Protection, I finally decided;
I
sure wouldn’t want to mess with them.

During the course of the trial we’d spoken several times, mostly to shake our heads over the shameful state of affairs between men and women these days. Eight months later we would have had more to talk about: during a routine transfer to a federal penitentiary, Buddy Grogan somehow had escaped, aided by an unknown woman. He hadn’t been heard from since. But that was still a ways off. When the trial ended Irene Kirk gave me her business card, but that was right before I got mugged by a couple of innocent-looking vegan types near Tompkins Square Park and lost my Filofax.

“I was very impressed by the way you handled the White’s story,” she said. She took a sip of her drink and glanced up at me through slitted black eyes. “It’s amazing, isn’t it, the way we just keep on going? One thing after another, and still we just can’t quit.”

I winced, tried to hide my expression behind my beer bottle. I remembered now why I’d been unhappy to see that van outside—Kirk’s outspoken but somehow coy insistence that “we” were in this together, that together we formed some heroic bulwark for the victims we exploited, I with my articles, she in some subtler way I couldn’t quite get a handle on. “It’s my job,” I said dryly. “I
can’t
quit. Baby needs shoes, you know” I have my reasons for what I do—everybody does—but I’d be damned if I’d share them with Irene Kirk.

“Oh, I didn’t mean you and me
individually
.” Kirk’s cultivated voice was soft, but her eyes glittered in the dimness. “I mean all of us. Women. These terrible things happen but we just keep going on. We just keep fighting.”

That last mouthful of beer turned sour in my mouth. I grimaced and looked around the room, as though seeking someone in the empty corners. “Yeah, well.”

I thought of the photos I’d seen from the White’s massacre: a mother hunched over the crumpled body of her daughter, a grandmother hugging a tiny limp figure, her face so raw with grief it no longer looked human.
Those
women sure hadn’t been fighting. And then unbidden the images from that afternoon rose up in front of me: the bloated blackened carcasses slung out on the gravel, their eyes swollen with larvae and dust. When I looked up again Irene Kirk was still staring at me with those intent black eyes, her expression somewhere between concern and disdain. I suddenly wanted to leave.

“Well, it’s all in the capable hands of the State of Oklahoma now.” I tried to keep my voice light. “So I guess we just have to keep believing that justice will be done.”

“Justice.” She laughed, a small hard sound like pebbles clattering in a bowl, and leaned forward to stare into her half-empty glass. “The famous feminist reporter for
OUR
magazine still believes in justice.”

The disdain in her voice was my cue to leave. I slid my chair back from the table and rose, giving her a blank smile. “I’ve got to go meet my photographer. Thanks again for the beer.”

“I’ll go with you.” A slithering sound as the long folds of her skirt slipped down her legs. I shrugged, the smile frozen on my face, and headed for the door.

Outside the sun was dipping below the flattened edge of the prairie. The sawtoothed ridge of the Arbuckle Mountains cut a violet line against the bright sky. When I looked across the lot at Lyman’s room I was relieved to see that the curtains had been drawn against the sunset.

“Well,” I said again with forced cheerfulness—feeling ungrateful, somehow, and guilty for feeling so. “Nice seeing you again.”

“Why are you here?”

The way she said it put an accusatory spin on the question, but when I looked at her she only smiled, her steps slowing as we approached her RV For some reason I felt like lying. Instead I shrugged and said, “I was covering the Bradford case. But they pulled the story, so we’re going back tomorrow.”

“Mmm.”

I turned to squint at the sun, then glanced back at her. She had an absent, almost dreamy look on her face, as though the name
Bradford
made her think of distant places—white beaches veined with blue water, an empty shoal beneath a midsummer sky. My earlier disgust returned. I whirled around, walking backwards across the empty lot, and called, “Have a good trip—thanks again for the drink—”

She raised a hand to me, her slight figure unnaturally black against the molten sunset. After a moment she turned and headed toward her van. As she approached it I heard again the frantic barking of the dogs inside. Then I was rapping on Lyman’s door, falling inside with absurd relief as it swung open and the cool air flowed over my face.

Lyman’s barbecue joint turned out to be small and crowded, run by a small woman named Vera who didn’t crack a smile at Lyman’s praise and left a handful of mintscented toothpicks beside our plates when she dropped the check. But the barbecue was good, lean and dry and smoky, with a vinegary sauce on the side—Texas-style barbecue, not the sweet soppy mess you get in New York. I asked him about the strange stones I’d seen along the old road.

“Dragon’s teeth,” he said. He lifted another piece of barbecue on his fork and eyed it dreamily. “That’s what they call ’em out here. They’re famous, geologically speaking. Arbuckle Mountains are one of the oldest places in the world, after the Black Hills and Olduvai Gorge.”

I took a pull of my beer. “Dragon’s teeth?”

“Sure. You know—Cadmus sowing dragon’s teeth and an army springing up. It’s in Aeschylus.”

I snorted. “Lyman, you’re the only person in this whole damn state ever even heard of Aeschylus.”

After we ate he tried to talk me into going to some dive for a beer, but I was exhausted and too aware that the next day I’d be struggling to come up with some kind of story out of a few dead pigs.

“I’ll put in for an eight o’clock wakeup call,” he said as we stretched and yawned in the darkened parking lot. Overhead the day’s clouds had blown on. There was a thin brittle moon and a few brilliant stars that made it seem like the air should be cool and brisk, instead of heavy and smelling of dust.

“Make it seven-thirty. I want to get out of here.”

I saluted him and headed for my room, stopped after a few steps to look across the lot. Two other cars were parked beneath the yellow streetlights. I could hear a television shrieking from inside one of the rooms near mine. And Irene Kirk’s RV was gone. I walked slowly past where it had been parked earlier and went inside.

It was a while before I could fall asleep. I felt like the whole day had been wasted; like months had been wasted, chasing another grim story and then having to bail out at the last minute. I knew it was absurd, that my coverage of the Bradford case was nothing more than another cheap tabloid hustling to cash in on misery in the Dust Belt. All my pieces were like that, but the process of writing them up and then seeing them in print somehow defused the stories of some of their horror, for me at least. It was like sticking around till the end of some particularly gruesome movie to read every line of the credits, reassuring myself that it was all nothing more than a string of sophisticated special effects and calculated screenwriting. Only with Bradford, of course, there were no credits; at least not until the TV movie appeared.

I finally dozed off, the distant grumble of trucks on the Interstate a comforting background roar. I was dreaming about pigs, pork barbecue, and beer, when the phone rang for my wakeup call.

“Mrs. Margolis?” A woman’s twangy voice, like something you’d hear on a Bible call-in show. I groaned, feeling like I’d only been asleep for a few minutes, and rolled over, fumbling on the night table for my alarm clock. “Mrs. Margolis, is that you?”