The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed (2 page)

I felt calm as I followed the hedgerow back to the river. My crepe-soled shoes left no mark on the frozen ground. There was no way they could trace me; nobody was even aware that I knew her.

She made number ten. I searched myself for elation and found none. It was like reaching into a cookie jar and finding nothing. I was empty.

Later it came, of course. Not elation, but a sort of remembrance. I thought of Bernice and her little
Hausfrau
attitudes: the way she gathered up the tissues and cigaret butts which had accumulated during my visit, bending from the waist and snatching them up like a hen snapping up grains of corn … opening the furnace door with face pinched tight and throwing the little package away with a gesture of rejection … then looking to see if she’d missed anything, biting her index finger with those two prominent incisor teeth. I thought of her brain and its memories of me, now dead. (Within three days she’d been taken from the well, and reburied in her home town nearly two hundred miles away. The well was filled up, and her death ruled accidental.) I thought of the hours she’d spent waiting for me, the hope that must have surged up when she saw me, the habit she’d acquired of washing and perfuming herself in intimate places … something she would not have done if it hadn’t been for me. Before she died I had changed her life. In a sense, I had created her…. I have only contempt for those who go out on a dark street and select a victim at random. They are ending a life they do not understand; they are crude and barbarous vandals, like savages who smash a radio. Let an engineer destroy a radio, that is significant. Let him destroy a radio which he has built himself, that is better still.

Bernice had lived her life. At twenty-one she was complete. She couldn’t grow into something else, no more than a calf can grow into a gazelle; the genetic materials are not available. Bernice could only have become an older, coarser version of what she was; I could do nothing more with the materials at hand, so I destroyed her.

As weeks passed, the memory of Bernice became a sick sweetness, as when you eat too much pork fat. By killing Bernice, I seemed to have killed myself. I had existed in her mind, and when her mind ceased to exist … what became of the man she knew? I walked the street feeling my feet thud against the concrete and I would wonder whose feet they were. Walls began to waver, as in the heat warp from a stove. I worked harder, fitting my days with labor, creating things I could look at and somehow see myself reflected in—

But these things were only wood and metal and plants rising from the soil. I needed a person, a woman—not in a physical way, but as a partner in the game. My thoughts turned, as they often had before, to Velda.

I can walk past the store and see her behind the counter. Usually the store is empty, and she is alone. This quiet woman in this quiet place fascinates me. I stop and took through the plate glass, most of me hidden by posters Scotch-taped to the inside which announce sales on meat, soap powder and canned goods. An open book lies on the counter before her. She sits on a high stool, one bare knee atop the other, running the point of her pencil through the pale rust-colored hair which she has pulled above her ears and bound up in the back. From time to time she shifts her legs, hooking one foot behind the ankle of the other. She is beautiful in a way which does not immediately strike the eye: her features are almost, but not quite, ordinary: a sheen of gold brightens her red-blonde hair, an emerald tone deepens the green of her eyes; her narrow nose ends in a slight upward tilt; her long smooth jaw suggests a masculine stubbornness. Her upper lip forms a tight unmoving line; the lower swells and protrudes slightly. She lights a cigaret without interrupting her reading, thrusting out her jaw and lilting her head so that the lighter does not flare into her eyes. She draws deeply once and allows the smoke to roll from her nose and lips; then she deposits the cigaret in an ashtray and smokes it no more, only waves away the wisps of smoke which trail across the page.

She does not look her thirty-five years: her body seems to have early acquired a toughness, a resilience which resists the sagging effects of age. Her long crossed thighs show faint ridges of muscle through the dress; her calves are smoothly rounded, free of blue swollen veins which are the stigma of the retail trade. She wears a bibbed white apron over a blue cotton dress; her breasts press full and firm against it.

A customer enters; a bell rings above the door. She closes the book and marks it with a sliver of cardboard; she slides off the stool and stands erect, placing her palms flat on the wooden counter. A diamond-crusted circlet glitters on her third finger, left hand; the large center stone shoots out arrows of blue light. The customer is a talkative woman. Velda converses with her: she laughs—a half-amused chuckle which ripples only the surface—she carries her verbal share of the conversation … but always there is something reserved, some little chamber of emotion she does not open. (The local people have forgotten that she is beautiful; they have seen her so often they no longer see her. A woman comes to town only half as lovely as Velda and all heads turn to follow her because she is new. In a year or two she will also become invisible, condemned to the peculiar anonymity a small town conveys.) Probably this is good for Velda, for she has acquired none of the self-conscious poses of women who are accustomed to attention. She has no false modesty because she knows no reason to feel proud.

All this is speculation. I don’t really know her—though I know her as well as or better than anyone else in Sherman, because I have studied her and they have not. At midmorning she often disappears behind the green plywood partition which segregates her office and a small bathroom. She locks the door and remains for sometimes an hour. I wonder what she does in there, but the bell over the front door always rings when I enter. Even when I muffle its ringing—as I did once by winding tape around the clapper—the wooden floor creaked and she came out looking flushed and surprised. (Does she know I am studying her now? Probably not, I am a familiar face; my behavior undergoes no major change, and in minor changes I am shielded by the same anonymity which protects everyone else in this town.) Oh, I’m not teased by the mystery of what women
do
when they’re alone … little dabs of grooming, searching out gray hairs, pushing hair masses here and there to see how it would look in a different style, checking for new pimples and wrinkles, squeezing blackheads … But what does she
see
when she looks in the mirror? What image is reflected to her and why does it dissatisfy her? Because there is discontent in the way the lips sometimes curve downward. It could be her marriage, but then she would need only to give some sign of availability and the men would come. Strangers make overtures, true, which she studies and rejects. The rejection is not important, but the study is. She desires, she does not obtain….

Another symptom is her reading. New worlds inside the covers of books. Surrogate experience, proving that reality falls short. Like any avid reader she knows words, good words, big ones. But, living in cultural isolation, she often mispronounces them, or drops them in the middle of a sentence, like a rock which destroys the symmetry of her speech. Her information is spotty, another result of undisciplined reading. She discovers history and devours all she can find on the subject, at the same time lacking even a high school graduate’s knowledge of astronomy or philosophy. She is a strange blend of knowledge and naïveté. Normally she talks in a studied, level tone, letting no emotion out, merely communicating. Yet when she is angry, the blunt country words break through, pungent and steaming and barbed with the directness of the hills. The emerald eyes sparkle with green fire, the lips stretch tight across even white teeth, and you see that the words belong to her. You see her as she was when I first saw her, sitting in the back of a Studebaker wagon, her bare feet swinging a foot above the dusty road, She was a woodland creature born and raised in the hills of Brush Creek, taking her first look—not really, but it seemed so—at neon lights and movies and fountain Cokes. She was no beauty then; she had vivid freckles dusted across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. Her teeth were small and not quite closed up, with dark gaps between them. Her sunbleached hair was a hue most accurately described as mustard. It framed a long thin face which may have been clean when she started to town, but had since acquired a gray coating of road dust. She wore a dress made from a flowered Parina sack; it lay not quite flat across her chest; her immature breasts did not bounce with the movement of the wagon….

Now she is by local standards a rich man’s wife. Nylon sheathes the legs which knew only wool in winter and the wind in summer. She has grown used to imported silk and French perfume and gold which does not turn green; her small hands know the satiny smoothness of new money and the wheel of the powerful, expensive car….

But this latter woman is totally divorced from the poor little hill girl. Velda is either one or the other, she is never a blend of the two.

I see her as a victim. This is as natural as a beautician seeing her with her head beneath a dryer, a policeman seeing her behind bars, or a surgeon seeing her with her stomach cut open. I think of how she would look dead, or in the process of being killed. (She would fight, this is certain; I visualize her as a naked, clawing, spitting savage.) But the picture is unsatisfactory, because she is not ready. Even at thirty-five, she is an unformed, immature woman.

An element is missing, a catalyst which will blend the hill girl with the rich man’s wife and make her complete. The element is not me, for I am already in her life, and have blunted my power to affect her without risk. The element is not even in Sherman, for she has adapted to all those who live here, examined them and shoved then aside. The element must come from outside. Until she changes, Velda is immune….

When you see a stranger in our town, you know he’s come
here,
he’s not passing through on his way to somewhere else. Sherman is the end, the jump-off. At the east side of town there’s a sign reading:
State Maintenance Ends.
From here west the gravel roads dwindle away into a wilderness of limestone ridges they call the Brush Creek Nation. Ten miles west the ridges slope down into Lake Pillybay, but tourists always approach it from the other side on Highway 30.

That’s why I stared at the man who came into the store just after I’d opened. A blond beard hid the lower part of his face; his deep tan was a rarity in late March. I watched him wipe mud from calf-high rubber boots and walk toward the counter. He was young, I could tell from the springy sureness of his walk. He was married; I saw the gold wedding band as he lay his palms flat on the counter. A deep bass voice asked for a can of Velvet and I set it in front of him. He opened it, gouged the tobacco with a long forefinger, and raised it to his nose. He squinted at me over the can and said:

“Velda Groenfelder?”

I shook my head. “Velda Bayrd. I married Louis Bayrd.”

His sun-whitened eyebrows rose. “Ah, you’ve risen in the world. A flatlander by marriage.”

I frowned at him, looking for a familiar face beneath the beard. Only a native would speak of flatlanders with that peculiar taunting inflection.

“You used to live in the Nation?” I asked.

He nodded. There was movement behind the foliage as though he might be smiling, but I wasn’t sure. I tilted my head so I could see his face in better light. That mat of beard darkened from yellow on his cheeks to a coppery black beneath his chin. A deep tan gave his blue eyes a piercing brilliance. He might have looked mean but I didn’t feel it because of the intelligence in his eyes. Hate and intelligence don’t go together.

I shrugged and smiled. “I can’t place you. Come out from behind the bush.”

“Curt,” he said. “Curt Friedland.”

My knees went soft at the sound of the name. My smile stuck in place and my cheeks felt like old leather. His eyes drove into me like blue steel rivets. He was leaning across the counter, making me hear it, making me like it. I saw something in his eyes I’d missed the first time I’d looked; a hard reckless indifference. I knew the grin was there now, but it was a twisted taunting thing that said I could think and do what I liked because he didn’t give a damn.

I took the can of tobacco and set it on the cash register.

“They sell tobacco in the tavern,” I told him. “It’s fresher. You’ll like it better.”

He shook his head slowly. “After fifteen years, Velda? I didn’t even think you’d know me.”

“I knew your family. Your brother.”

He leaned back, still smiling in a way that didn’t reach his eyes, smiling like I was a little doll doing all kinds of funny tricks.

“My brother Frank,” he said. “Your sister Anne. She’s been dead twelve years and Frankie’s serving life. And what’s all that got to do with you and me?”

“You know damn well what it’s got to do with us.”

“Code of the hills? The pride of the clan?” He shook his head. “I’m a long time away from cornbread and hominy grits, Velda. I’m surprised you aren’t.”

I felt hot blood burning my cheeks; I didn’t like the way he made my words sound. “They held a trial. The verdict was guilty.”

“You believe it?”

“—Yes.”

“All right. Stick to it. Don’t even think about it.” He reached past me and picked up the tobacco; I could have stopped him by grabbing his hand, but I couldn’t make myself touch him. He dropped a quarter on the counter and walked away. I was surprised to see that he was over six feet tall and heavy in the shoulders. I remembered him as being thin and pale … but then he’d only been sixteen when he left.

My hand touched the quarter and I started to ring it up. A sudden impulse made me throw it toward the front of the store. It clanged against the window and went spinning off, leaving a tiny starburst on the plate glass. Curt paused an instant, then turned around.

“I suppose Frankie killed Bernice Struble too.”

“Bernice? Why … that was an accident. The coroner’s jury—”

“Keep believing it, Velda. The authorities are never wrong.”

He smiled and walked out. I watched him climb into a mud-caked Ford with a Florida license. His smile was gone now. He backed out and drove away without looking back.

I went into the bathroom and bathed my face in cold water. I put my hand to my breast and breathed slowly, wishing I’d inherited a little less of the Groenfelder temper. I should have been dignified and haughty with Curt:
Really, Mr. Friedland, did you expect to be met by a brass band?

I touched up my lips and brushed hack the red-blonde hair above my ears. Then I walked back into the empty store, through the warm smell of oranges and floor wax and leafy vegetables. I looked at the calendar: March twenty-third. I pulled a pencil from above my ear and circled it. It’s a habit of mine; my husband says I try to hold back time by putting little traps around the dates. I saw that I’d also circled February tenth, the day Bernice Struble fell in the well….

Or was pushed? Oh no, I thought, I won’t let Curt Friedland’s evil seed take root. The coroner’s report had said she died by drowning. Hair and pieces of scalp had adhered to the bricks where she’d scraped her head going down. It was assumed she’d slipped on the ice and fallen in; fingernail scratches on the curbing indicated that she’d tried to catch herself and failed.

I’d been in Franklin that day, watching my daughter Sharon roller-skate. We’d just gotten home when the line ring came about Bernice. You can’t mistake a line ring: the insistent
zzzt-zzzt-zzzt
goes on until presumably everybody picks up their phone to learn what the emergency is. Half the time the operator announces that school is closed or the Eastern Star meeting is canceled, but often it’s real tragedy. It rang on April 17, 1947, the day the tractor turned over on Marston and crushed his chest. That date will never be anything else for me, just as June twelfth will never be anything but the date we were supposed to get married. It rang when Marvin Jobe drowned, when Tom Groner’s little gal Lotte burned to death on a haystack, and the morning Audrey and Jim were found in their car poisoned by carbon monoxide. It rang on February 4, 1954, the night Jerry Blake burned to death along with his store. It rang on July 18, 1951, while I sat at home sewing a dress for Sharon’s fourth birthday. I lifted the receiver to hear that my sister Anne had been found dead in her car outside the Club 75 and that Frankie Friedland had been shot trying to escape—

Gladys Schmit came into the store with her overshoes flopping, uncoiling a woolen scarf from around her neck. She pulled off her embroidered mittens, remarked how nice it was to see a thaw after three weeks of snow and ice, then with a birdlike jerk of her head she asked:

“Who was that young man with the beard?”

After thirty years of teaching school, Gladys treated the entire community as though they’d never left her fifth and sixth grade room.

“Curt …” I said, and the last name stuck in my throat. “Curt Friedland.”

Her eyes went round behind silver-rimmed spectacles. For a moment her lips pursed in a childish disappointment which reminded me that Gladys was, after all, pushing sixty.

“I didn’t know he was coming back.”

I fingered the ball-point pens in the rack and said nothing. Gladys peered at me with a look of bright interest: “What’s he going to do?”

“You’ll have to ask him, Gladys. I don’t know.”

“You knew him, didn’t you?”

“He was four years younger than I. You couldn’t say I knew him.”

“Oh.” She was frowning, obviously trying to get in touch with her memory. Then, giving an abrupt jerk of her head, she picked up a loaf of bread and brought it to the counter. “He was the youngest of the four, I remember now. His brothers were so rowdy and athletic. Nobody thought there was brains in the family until they brought that intelligence test in, and Curt made the highest score in the state. People were amazed, he was always so shy and polite….”

I thought: Gladys,
are we talking about the same one?
I remembered seeing Curt fight a larger boy on the playground; Curt had seemed to back away, trying to flee in panic, and my heart had gone out to the kid because I thought he needed help. He backed against the barbed-wire fence which ran between the playground and a cornfield; the other boy lunged, flailing his arms. Curt sidestepped abruptly and the boy crashed into the fence. Curt turned and began hammering with his small fists; when the other boy tried to defend himself he ripped his arms on the sharp barbs. The other boy had finally run away crying. with blood streaming from the gashes on his arms and dripping off his fingers. He’d had twenty stitches taken and Curt hadn’t a bruise. The boy’s parents had wanted Curt punished, but there was nothing to he done; Curt hadn’t cut the boy, the boy had cut himself. Only those of us watching realized that Curt had deliberately maneuvered the boy into the fence. I’d stopped feeling sorry for Curt at that moment; from then on I’d pitied those who were deceived by his quiet manner.

Gladys was telling how, as alumni secretary, she’d kept Curt’s address up-to-date in order to send him invitations to the alumni banquet. In five years she’d traced him around the world: “Germany, France, Italy, Tangier, Morocco, Mexico. Japan. Hong Kong. Hawaii. Haiti. Costa Rica. I sent him questionnaires for the school paper and he filled in occupations like opium peddler, beachcomber, ship’s cook, taxi driver, things like that. I was so relieved when he settled down and got a college degree, then got a job with that research firm. When he started his own firm I thought, Well
finally
one of the Friedlands will amount to something. Then six months ago his questionnaire came back from the West Indies. He’d listed his occupation as fisherman. Now he’s here.” She pulled on her mittens and tucked the bread under her arm. “Well, Curtis wasn’t like his brothers. He won’t cause trouble.”

She went out with her overshoes flopping and I thought, No, he won’t unless he wants to, but I think he wants to….

I didn’t mention him to my husband that night; I didn’t want to get involved with Curt Friedland, even to the extent of talking about him.

The next day I stood at the window of the store and saw Curt Friedland drive by in an old car, throwing off a pinwheel of dirty slush which stuck to the parked cars. My husband followed in his pickup with his dark-furred arm out the window. He saw me and drew a circle in the air with his finger, then pointed in the direction Curt was going. That meant he was going to show some property and wouldn’t be home for dinner. Lou had at least ten places listed but I was sure which one it was: the old Friedland place back on Brush Creek, vacant since the elder Friedlands had moved near Jeff City so they could visit Frankie on weekends.

We would become involved with Curt, I could see that. I wanted to tell Lou, don’t sell to that man, but it wouldn’t make any difference. Lou would go on selling, buying, dealing, making money regardless of what I did. Regardless of what
he
did, even; Lou was like a snowball rolling downhill which picks up a gob here and a gob there and suddenly you find it’s enormous and what can you do with it all …?

A hubbub down the street announced the school’s morning recess. Sharon came in like a whirlwind of thick black hair and gave me a hard sell about having supper with Sue before the basketball game. She said her current boy friend would drive her home afterward; I put forth a token resistance but in the end I relented and off she went, a darkly exotic fifteen-year-old image of her father. A group of boys in a parked car called out an invitation, and I felt a tingle of pride at the way she handled it—no kittenish play-anger, just a cool no-thank-you. I thought of my own self-conscious adolescence; I could see myself in worn shoes getting off the school bus from Brush Creek and walking that long fifty yards to the schoolhouse door. My stomach would knot when I saw the cluster of boys around the foot-scraper: I couldn’t ignore their taunts. I felt I had to insult them in return or else pick up a handful of rocks and let fly as I passed. Well, Sharon had the advantage of what passed locally for wealth. I doubted that she’d have gone through the same ordeal even without it, having inherited her father’s … what? Self-centered poise? Selfishness? Not a kind word at all….

A curious feeling of discontent crept through my mind. I started to add up the tickets on the morning deliveries but my attention dwindled away. A car passed with the sound of fat frying in a skillet and I saw that it was Bill Struble coming back from the depot. Life goes on, I thought. Bill still met the trains, but he’d been dazed and withdrawn since his wife’s accident. Nobody knew him well and if he had any suspicions about his wife’s death he wasn’t saying anything. He’d locked up his house and taken a room in own; he’d put his place up for sale and asked for a transfer, so it was clear he had no love for the city of Sherman.

Across the street I saw that the old men had moved from the inside of the pool hall to the slatted bench outside. Harbinger of spring…. Old watery eyes trailing the young girls drifting in threes and fours toward the schoolhouse. Twenty years ago I’d made the same walk; there’d been different faces but the same ragged Mackinaws, same speckled hands on gnarled canes, blue smoke puffing up from corncob pipes. The town didn’t change much; it dried up and got smaller, and each Saturday night a few less people came to town. When I was young, Saturday night had brought clusters of men in faded overalls, faces sunburned up to the middle of their foreheads, dead-white from there to the hairline where their hats had held off the sun. Women in wrinkled stockings lined the benches before the stores, talking in tired murmurs while babies fed from white breasts spilled out through flowered print dresses. There were brawls in the alley behind Cott’s dance hall (closed during the war and never reopened) and once there was a shooting. (The date was July 4, 1936, a year of drought and despair and desperate gaiety, free government flour with Dad on the WPA and brother in the CCC. I was sitting on the fender of our old Model-? feeling sick because I’d just seen a boy stick a firecracker in a toad’s mouth and light it. I saw the man running up the street with the sheriff behind him. Sheriff Wade was young then but heavy; he was falling behind. Then his forty-five roared twice and echoes thundered through the summer night. The locusts stopped chirring and the dogs slopped barking. In the sudden hush the running man spread his arms in a swan dive and fell on his face. He kicked while blood gushed from his month. It was the first time I’d ever seen a man die, and I realized that in death man has no more dignity than a dog kicked by a mule. The dead man had left another man in the alley behind Cott’s with his stomach slashed open. The man got his stomach sewed up and was talking and smoking a cigaret an hour later. But the dead man was a dead-broke drifter and nobody grieved.)