The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed (5 page)

I set my jaws and kept my eyes on the narrow gravel road. He was working up to something, and I had an idea it concerned me.

“Remember after the fight, when the boy got tangled in the fence, you said that ten years from now I’d be ashamed. What did you mean?”

“I … I don’t remember.”

“See? You had something then. I remember seeing you get on the school bus in the mornings with your chin held high, looking aloof and cold. But with green fire in your eyes. You’d date older boys and I’d feel like you feel when you see a boob on a magnificent horse. They didn’t appreciate what they had.” He paused. “You’ve changed. You’ve fallen victim to life’s leveling process. You go to the store in the mornings and talk with housewives and deliverymen. Your terms become those of Ethel and Gladys and Sandy—”

“Oh, Curt—!”

“In the afternoons you go home and … what? I’ll bet you’ve started a dozen hobbies in the last ten years.”

I thought of my sewing machine, my guitar, embroidery, sketchpad, typewriter … “What are you, a detective?”

“An observer. Things have to fit together. I see certain facets of your character—impatient eye movements and excessive smoking, for example—and I deduce that you’re restless and bored.”

“Well, deduce something else. You’re wrong.”

“Okay. The hobbies indicate an active, searching mind. Is that better?”

“I … yes.”

“Same thing. Active mind. Unoccupied. Gets bored. See?” He laughed shortly. “It’s only a word game. Don’t give it a thought. You can stop here.”

We’d reached the point where the road passed the summit of Bald Knob, highest point in the county. Ahead it descended into Lake Pillybay. I pulled onto the shoulder and Curt got out.

“Want to walk up to the top?”

I gripped the wheel and shook my head. “Curt, you’re still playing games with me. You said not to worry, but you didn’t mean it. I’m supposed to worry. I’m supposed to feel desperately bored, I’m supposed to say: What can I do, Curt? And then you’ll say, Well, you can help me solve this little murder….”

He smiled faintly. “No, just think about it. You’ve had it buried twelve years, Velda. Think of Frankie. Could he have done it?”

I watched him walk up the hill and I thought about Frankie. He was the second youngest of the four boys, next to Curt. He was also the craziest. He had a strong jaw and curly auburn hair which grew thick and wild. I used to feel about him the way I’d felt about Curt the morning before: this man doesn’t care; he’s on an emotional roller-coaster, he makes me edgy and nervous, the way I get around strange animals. My image of him is of running and shouting, and something to do with violence … a powerful force unbottled—quite the opposite of Curt, who left an impression of steely control. Frankie was violent, yes, but I never thought he was cruel. I’ve seen him tear a beer joint apart with a whoop and a holler, but he never stopped laughing. Marston and I were parked along the highway late one night when Frankie roared by on his cycle. He must have been going a hundred and twenty; he was just a blur. A moment later another blurred shape roared by. It was Curt. He was barely in his teens and he followed his brother everywhere. I was afraid for Curt, because I figured Frankie would kill them both….

Frankie went with my sister Anne all through high school. She was prettier than I: big hazel eyes and black hair glinting with blue highlights. She had a sleek windblown look which made you think of the girls they put on hood ornaments. During the war Frankie became a flier and was lost over Germany. They’d planned to get married after he came back, not knowing they should have done it before. My dad was to blame for what happened next; the baby became obvious and we’d been told to presume Frankie dead. Dad told Anne to get a husband and she picked Johnny Drew, a reckless kid who’d been discharged from the marines after getting malaria in the Pacific. For six months afterward he sauntered around town in his dress uniform.

I drew my impression from that: an egocentric fathead who’d carried his bluff this far and run out of gas. I was right, but I got no joy out of it. The baby was stillborn, and instead of getting a sensible divorce, Anne went to hell. If Frankie had come back … but none of the Friedlands came back. The oldest, a Navy frogman, was killed at Eniwetok. The second oldest survived the war as a paratrooper, married a French girl, and settled down in Algeria. After Frankie’s release from prison camp he flew for oil companies in Arabia and South America. Around 1948 he went to Alaska and started a flying service for hunters and prospectors. Curt quit school and joined him; started flying at sixteen. Sherman was dull without the Friedlands, but in a sense they were still with us. Anne had become a lovely whore. Every family seems to have one member who goes to hell; I remember Anne during those five years as a dull ache in the heart. She never acquired the bloated, baggy look of a honky-tonk queen—which is the usual way for a girl to go to hell in this part of the country—but she was working on it. She made her home in the Club 75, a rambling roadhouse near Lake Pillybay where tourists and Brushcreekers fought and played together. Know that it was an after-hours’ place and you’ve got the scene: booze-red faces and thick smoke; neckties and denim shirts and black leather jackets jostling together; blood and broken bottles in the parking lot; teenagers getting stoned in the parked cars on booze carried out by older cronies; the sound of retching, the muffled thump of thrashing bodies in back seats and the
squee-squee-squee
of car springs; women with dresses up squatting carelessly between parked cars; men’s voices thick with guttural rage and a woman’s strident screech:
You suvvabitch I’ll go home with whoever I damn please—!

Queen Anne held court in a knotty-pine booth next to the bar, selecting her escorts with the unpredictability of a royal whim, letting them understand there was nothing in her of permanence or love …

Then came Korea, and Curt went over to fly jets. A year later Frankie drifted home to sweat out the war, saying he couldn’t run his business without Curt, since only Curt knew how to keep books and make a profit. And Frankie took up his strange affair with Anne. They seemed to fight against being together; each night they’d go in separate directions with separate groups; each morning around three a.m. they’d be sitting together in a booth at the Club 75. Neither of them had the sense to wipe the slate clean and start over….

Frankie, meanwhile, was playing baseball with a local league, whooping it up around the district, and jousting with the law. It was part of a Brushcreeker’s heritage to have law trouble. Frankie was jailed for a week in St. Joe for throwing two bouncers out of their own dance hall; he drew another week in Omaha for tearing up a nightclub; he drew thirty-days in Franklin County Jail for resisting arrest. (He’d taken Deputy Hoff’s guns from him and thrown them in a grader ditch, then kicked the deputy in after them. Nobody blamed Frankie; the deputy was a vicious little brute who wore two ridiculous forty-fives low on his hips. He used to walk into the Club 75 slapping his club in his palm, daring somebody to step out of line. Frankie hadn’t been able to resist taunting him, and the deputy had been waiting when he left the club.) A week after Frankie’s release he was sitting in the club with Sandy when Gil Sisk said Anne wanted to see him in the car. At the trial, Frankie explained it when he took the stand in his own defense:

I usually met Anne at the club and took her home. I just figured she didn’t want to come in for some reason, so I went out. She’d parked in the dark and I didn’t see anyone in the car. I opened the door and saw her lying across the seat. I reached in to touch her and something blew up in the back of my head. I don’t remember anything after that.

Defense Attorney: You made a statement to the sheriff after your arrest that you could remember nothing that happened the night before. Is that true?

Sure, but it all came back to me later. The bump on the head blacked out my memory.

You weren’t drunk?

No, I felt good.

What do you mean, you felt good?

I wasn’t mad at anybody. I was having a ball.

In the cross-examination, the prosecutor asked:

Isn’t it true that in the past your idea of having a ball had led to violence, fighting, destruction—

Objection, which was sustained. The prosecutor then asked why he’d run when they came to arrest him.

Frankie: Hell, I didn’t run. Those bastards came out to the house, got me out of bed, and asked me to come with them. My head was splitting and I had a bloody lump on it. I decided I’d busted up some joint the night before and there’d be a stink. I got in and the sheriff took off into the hills, driving slow, asking me questions about the night before. Deputy Hoff had his gun out and was trying to look tough. Little by little I realized somebody had been killed. I got jumpy. I knew the deputy would set me up if he got a chance. So when we stopped—we’d been riding a couple of hours, and eventually you gotta stop—

Who wanted to stop?

The sheriff was driving. He just stopped. We all got out and stood there, you know, taking care of our own business, and I looked at the trees ahead and thought, well, what the hell? So I took off. Blam! Right in the back. Two days later I woke up in the hospital handcuffed to the bed.

Frankie had been found guilty. His family had gone broke appealing the sentence, but it had stuck. Now Curt wanted to open it up. I couldn’t see that he had any chance at all.

I got out and walked toward the summit of Bald Knob. Years ago, somebody had cut off the oak and hickory timber in the hope of growing crops, but rain and wind had stripped away the soil and left only jumbled rocks and boulders. Curt sat on a large boulder, smoking his pipe.

“Safest place in the world,” he said as I came up. “A barren hill.”

I looked at the terrain dropping off in all directions. To the east a glint of light marked the Sherman watertower; to the west I saw tiny patches of silver which were the coves of Lake Pillybay. I could make out the gray roof of the Club 75, squatting in a patch of yellow gravel.

I sat down on the boulder facing away from him. A breeze whispered across the summit, stirred the dead weeds, and teased up my skirt. It felt like cool fingers lightly caressing my thighs. My nose filled with the masculine smell of his tobacco; my back touched his arm, and I felt the warmth of his body through the sweatshirt. A knot of tension formed deep in the pit of my stomach; he had brought me here for some reason. Why? I wondered, knowing that if he tried anything, I’d resist him to the last breath; bracing for him but at the same time waiting, curious to see what he’d do….

Finally I said: “Why do you say safest?”

He waved his hand. “Visibility. You can see trouble coming for miles.” I stared at him. “Are you that scared?”

He smiled. “That’s not a good word. I’ve just developed certain habits, never walk into a dark room with your hands full, never stand in a lighted widow, never tell all you know….”

“But you used to be so … reckless.”

“Yes. Well, that’s something I lost.”

He looked down at his feet a moment, then gave a short, humorless laugh. “Anyway, I wasn’t really. Look there, remember that dive Frankie used to do?”

He pointed his pipe toward the lake. I saw the sparkle of water below a limestone cliff, and the low ledge from which we used to dive. My gaze drifted up … up to the very top of the cliff, nearly seventy feet above the water. I remembered Frankie racing across the plateau and leaping off with the chilling scream of an eagle. His tanned muscular body had plummeted past the gaping boys on the ledge and struck the water like a rock. A moment later another shape soared off the cliff and streaked down like a pale arrow, passing the ledge so closely my heart stopped, then knifing the water with hardly a ripple. That had been Curt, outdoing his brother but doing it so quietly that few people noticed; they were busy watching Frankie splash toward shore.

“I remember Frankie’s dive,” I said. “I also remember yours.”

“Yes but … did you know that Frankie made it the first time at night, in absolute darkness? Hell, he didn’t know he could clear that ledge below, he just jumped down into the darkness and hoped. You know what I did? I measured the ledge, and I figured I had to leap out fifteen feet to clear it. I practiced the jump from lower down until I was damn sure I could make it.”

“Yours was better,” I said. I looked at him and he was smiling. “It was. Really.”

He shook his head. “Not for me. I only did what I knew I could do. Frankie threw his fate into the lap of the gods and jumped. When he made it he knew they were on his side. I didn’t understand that for a long time. Gaby did, though. We had a little cliff on our island, oh … twenty-five feet high. Water roared into a narrow crevice below it. Gaby used to stand there and time her dive so she’d catch a swell at its peak, otherwise she’d land in three feet of water. Well, the night I decided to come back here—I’d been getting the county newspaper and they’d just brought the one which reported Bernice Struble’s death—we had a terrible argument. She didn’t want me to come back. She went off mad and was gone until dark. I was about to search for her when I saw her silhouetted against the sky at the top of the cliff. My heart jumped into my mouth. She’d never jumped at night and I thought: Lord, even if she catches the wave right she could hit a chunk of driftwood. Off she went. I met her as she came out of the water and said if she felt like that I wouldn’t go. She said no, but that if I wanted to deliberately risk my life she’d do the same.

“Then it hit me. Coming back here was my own jump into darkness. I wasn’t sure I could succeed. I knew I’d bump heads with the law, not to mention becoming a target for the real killer. Thinking about it … I was scared, but I was exhilarated too. I was shoving in all I had. I was taking the big jump and at the bottom I’d find either life … or death. Everything was simple.”

I looked at him and saw the excitement shining in his eyes. I understood the look I’d seen earlier, of not caring. He’d taken his fate out of his hands and now he was free. And in a way I envied him….