The Scamp (19 page)

I had dressed her up in a fur coat and nothing else. Took her for a ride in my truck. Promised her a surprise. The coat, real rabbit from a consignment shop as far
away as Soddy-Daisy. In the road, at night, staggering, she looked like an animal, like a deer. Looming. The speed limit there was forty-five. There wasn't a split second to stop.

Jesus Christ, said a woman at the bar. She was big assed, with a red ponytail. She repeated what the reporters, the police had said, that the dead girl looked like an animal, in that fur coat. So small. She was just an itty bitty thing.

College girls, the bartender said. They ought to teach them how to cross the road.

I asked for a vodka, neat.

Yes, ma'am, she said. The bartender, a tall blonde with a sleek ponytail and muscled shoulders, a freckled décolletage in a leather vest.

She was the sleekest-looking thing out there. These aren't city dykes. Even the straight women are less than dainty. There's a toughness to them, from working a farm, from raising four kids. Everyone with a coat of sun on her shoulders. A wrinkle in her eye from the wind.

The music was good and loud. The food, lousy deep-fried frozen stuff. Chicken tenders, mozzarella sticks, and fried mushrooms. There was beer on tap, and a full wall of liquor. All I wanted was vodka. And maybe a casual fling.

And then Georgia walked in.

She was tall, and broad in the chest and shoulders, with meaty arms. She had nearly black hair that was styled like a bob if she wore it in front of her ears, but
she tucked it, giving her a boyish cuteness. Her eyes were bright green. Her eyebrows, expertly shaped.

She sat a bit before she said anything. Cracked peanuts and threw the shells on the floor. Drank a double bourbon with two cherries, ice. When she looked over at me, I was already looking at her.

You look like sunshine to me, she said.

I'd be your sunshine, I said.

What do I look like to you? she said.

You look like a Georgia to me, I said.

I mimicked their sound, their peculiar inland drawl, my voice higher in that strain, sweet, like honey.

Georgia! she said, and laughed. Her teeth were straight and white. Her lips, glossed clear.

I shrugged a little, lowered my chin, looked up at her. I like a girl with a state name, I said. You don't look like a Virginia.

I ain't been a Virginia in a long time, she said.

We sat kitty-corner at the bar, her feet on the rungs of my stool, for another drink. I listened to her mumble along with a Toby Keith song. Then she asked if I smoked.

Sure do, I said.

She had a pack of orange American Spirits and a big silver Ford F-150. We sat in the cab with the motor running, smoking through a crack in the window, softer, moodier music on the radio. It was January. Everyone said it was colder than it had been in years. It would warm up for a day and then dip right back below
freezing, everything that had thawed out slicked over with ice in the moonlight.

You want a ride? Georgia said. Her eyes looked lit under the sign that said
LAYLA's
.

Sure do, I said.

We drove through town, around the village green, past the Fina and the diner and the drugstore. It was dead. Past one in the morning. Not a soul moved. Outside of town, we parked at an empty baseball field, the moon shining down on the diamond. She left the truck running under the trees, for the radio, the heat.

We kissed and writhed in the front seat. The extended cab of the truck, bigger than most. I buried my hand in her jeans, digging with my hard hands.

I don't know why I didn't see it coming.

She had my pants off me, my shirt undone. Her face in my pussy, my feet up on the dash. And then she turned me around, my arms over the passenger seat, my face against the heated leather, and before I could catch my breath, she was way up inside, pumping away, fucking me with a dildo.

I didn't want to think it was great. I didn't want to throw my head back and yowl, my hips backing into hers. But I did. She caught me off my guard. Off my game.

Someone else might have stayed. Another woman might have been swept away by Georgia and her swagger, her truck. The cigarettes and the country music.

After, I smoked two of her cigarettes while she leaned back in the driver's seat, pushed away from the steering
wheel, her pants still undone, her hair mussed and over her ears like a blunt bob. Like a silent movie star. With those eyes. Those lined, lovely green eyes.

I stroked her face. You're something else, I said. Her head tipped back under my touch.

No one ever expects me to be as strong as I am. For there to be that much power in my hands, big, blunt, wrapped around your neck.

I can strike too.

I rummaged in the toolbox in the bed of the truck, wearing Georgia's own gloves, heavy leather gloves meant for hard gardening, in thorns or brambles. In the box there were typical tools, a hammer, a ratchet set, screwdrivers, and pliers. At the bottom, I found what I was looking for. A seven-piece deer-processing kit with knives of varying sizes, the biggest, curved with a black plastic handle.

I took the whole kit into the front seat. The truck was still running. I pushed the driver's seat back even farther and perched on the edge of the seat, my cunt still sore from her.

I drove a long ways. Out that far, it's trees and ravines and river. I parked the truck, buried in thick brush at the bottom of a dirt road that led to the riverbank. I left it running with the windows closed, but it wouldn't look like a suicide.

Not after I took the head.

The river never freezes. Back home, the creeks we had would come close, the ice creeping out from the shore, leaving a soft middle, the sides of the creek thick and gray with ice.

The water was bone-aching cold, fast-moving. The edges of the river defined by the jutting of flat red rock, places to stand and fish, to lie naked on a hot summer day and brown your skin on a warm rock.

The head lodged. The way the rocks lean out over the water like a dock, things get snagged in them. Branches, leaves. Ducks and beavers build nests in the crevices.

I don't know how long it sat there. Who reported her missing. When they found the truck, or where they looked for the head, or when they discovered it, licked clean by fish and animals and rapid river water.

I took the processing kit.

And the dildo. I couldn't risk leaving it behind.

The trailer wasn't worth keeping. I'd sublet it for six months from a guy who was working construction. I gave him the name Ashley Dunn. He liked the idea of a couple of girls living there to keep it up while he built houses out of town. But the trailer was run-down when I moved in; wind blew in where the door wouldn't shut. All around us, when people moved, they left the trailers behind, empty, sinking. Outside the park, a circle of new houses, the sounds of bulldozers and nail guns. But I'd housed Carolina in that trailer for weeks over the winter
break that she didn't want to go home for. She wouldn't tell me why. She didn't need to.

I laid my hands on her small, mousy head. Her skin said
dead
to me. Dead already. For years. I saw the thumbprints of brothers and cousins on her. She was broken inside, unhinged and hemorrhaging.

She slept in my bed, small, quiet, while I stroked her spine, her limbs.

When they found her in the road, wrapped in a rabbit-fur coat, bleeding out on the icy pavement, she looked like a small deer. Hit and left to die. Under the coat, her skin was rubbed clean, shaved smooth.

Some winters are worse than others.

fifteen

RAYELLE

I try to imagine who any of them might have been, before. A kid, abused by her dad, or her mom, even, running as fast as she could from the home that hurt her, and failed to protect her. A woman with a baby, living out in rural Indiana, with a husband who was rough on her, and not enough money to pay the bills each month. A woman misunderstood. A woman alone. A woman looking for company. For love. For recognition. I get it. I might have run too. And nearly did, more than once, in the middle of a blue-black night, leaving a screaming, colicky Summer in her rocker seat on the living room floor. I might have gotten in my car and just driven, crying, down a dark rural road toward something, who knew, that might have killed me. Might have left me in pieces on a riverbank, my head miles away, lodged in the water. Rinsed.

I think about their pictures, posed with babies, or beside a car. Alyssa's teenage face, blue already, mottled in death.

And Florida. She might haunt me the most. Just the word, typed in the middle of the page. Not a picture left of her. Just the word. Florida.

She sounds to me like a dark-haired beauty, the kind of hula girl you put on the dash of your car, who swivels her hips and dances. Flowers in her hair. Nothing on her feet. Her belly curved like a little fairy's.

On the way to Sugarwood Park, we hit a blank spot of straight, flat road where nothing goes past except one old wood-paneled station wagon. There's no phone service, no radio stations. Just miles of hot white concrete.

How do you know when you're on the right track? I ask Couper. With anything, I think. The girls, the story. Me.

I don't, he says. I watch the sun come through the trees, dappling his face. I love so much the way his eyes crinkle in the light, the way his mouth curves up in a smile. The way his cheeks go slack when he's sleeping. Sometimes, when I think about Eli, the guy I was with the longest, and the only guy I lived with, I can't remember a thing about his face, his smile, the way he smelled.

Sometimes I have to just see when I get there, Couper says. It might be nothing.

I imagine an empty lot, a vacant field. And worse, no connections. Just a random scattering of dead girls.

What will we do then? I picture myself, dropped off at my mom's, with no room for me anymore. No job
waiting, my car towed. Couper pulling away, headed to another state, another case.

When my lungs constrict, I try laughing. Doesn't that make you crazy? I say. It feels like we're driving in slow motion, but I know he's going sixty. On either side, ancient-looking trees, cows clustered in the shade, or near a low pond. Houses that are white turned gray, peeling to reveal raw but dried and brittle wood siding, with deep front porches piled with burlap couches and rocking horses, dirt yards.

We stop at the train track, like the waitress said we might have to, and wait ten minutes while a long
CSX
goes by, car after car, empty and see-through, or filled with barrels, cable, steel beams. It blinks, the space between cars a flash of light as each one chunks past.

No, Couper says, answering me finally. Then he smirks. Sweetheart, that's not what makes me crazy.

Sugarwood Mobile Park sits, low, flat, and awful, in the middle of a newly developing area. One deteriorating road through the last few rickety trailers and, all around it, land that has been bulldozed and dug out. The movement of cranes and backhoes, earthmovers and men in hard hats with trailers of their own that they disappear into to get coffee or have lunch, to run paperwork or print out invoices. Their work trailers, better than most of the trailer homes.

The foundations for new homes gape open like graves of cement, poured and left waiting for houses to be
plopped on top of them, and beyond that, nothing but a row of trees they've left between the new houses and the little circular track of trailers. The guys look up, they tip their hard hats to see. We must look like we're moving in.

Maybe there's an open spot for us to park the Scamp and stay, instead of a
KOA
or a Walmart parking lot under bright lights. And maybe this is the kind of place I'll find Khaki finally, in a row of tin homes, where we can go back to being girls again, running in the grass, wandering down to the creek to catch snakes or frogs, a shoe box full of crickets. Sneak off into the trees to smoke a cigarette, or sip from a plastic bottle of vodka or bourbon.

The movement of the car is like a big-hipped woman's; I can feel it there, in my waist, swiveling as the car navigates potholes in the dirt road. My hips rise and fall, the weight of the car, of the Scamp in tow behind, like my own body.

Couper parks half on the grass at the top of the street and we walk to the first trailer. The road in a loop like a suburban cul-de-sac, but dusty and closer, with cars and kiddie pools and a cluster of mailboxes all together in one bank on the grass in the center. All at once it makes me long for home. Not my mother's trailer, with its broken appliances, its empty beer bottles and piles of old mail and newspapers. Something older, from longer ago. Something the color of an old photograph, pink and yellow. It smells like a sprinkler, and feels like summer dusk on your skin, warm, misty, sweaty.

Where I come from.

I ask Couper, Did you ever live in a trailer?

Ha, no, he says, which annoys me.

You do now, I say.

I do, he says. He pulls the notepad from his pocket while we walk up the side of the road.

You always lived in a full-fledged, free-standing house, I say.

No, he says. I lived in an apartment, in college. And after too.

Where? I say.

Seattle, he says.

Washington is a state we never made it to. It seems a world away, high in the mountains, all pine trees and ocean and weed.

How did you end up here? I say.

Here? he says, and points to the grass. Here is a long story. I ended up on the East Coast for work.

Detective work? I say.

No, he says.

What, then?

Newspaper work, he says. He tips his head and smiles at me. I was a reporter, he says.

Crime? I say.

Some. I did some beat writing. Some regular news, and then longer projects, investigative stuff. That's how I started doing book-length projects.

This is not your first, I say.

No.

I push his arm. Are you fucking famous? I say.

He laughs. Not so much, he says.