Dead Americans (2 page)

After the fire in the mosque burnt itself out, Pete Williams, Red Grove’s local representative from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s office, found himself staring at the cindered, broken skeletal remains of the building long after all others had left, the site lit by the bright headlights of his truck. It was a stark sight, coloured in blacks, grays, and whites, and boxed in by lines of tape that secured it from no one. He had been standing there for an hour: the splinter of moon above him had pushed its way through a portion of an ugly cluster of stars, but the shadows over the Calico Mountains to his left had yet to be disintegrated by the clean, bright light that would reveal it and the tangle of cheap housing, local owned stores, and dust that was Red Grove running beneath it. Until then, the only thing that punctured the long empty darkness were headlights coming off the I-10.

Williams’ solitude was due, he knew, to the remains that had been found inside the mosque. Unsurprisingly, the body had been burnt, but that fact was looking to be as if it were an event after the actual killing, an unpleasant attempt to disguise what appeared to be a brutal attack to the head of the victim. He’d asked Jesse, who doubled as mortician and coroner, to let him know for sure after the autopsy, which had been unnecessary given that they were identifying the body through dental records and he’d be receiving the paperwork anyhow; but Williams was the kind of man who said the unnecessary things at times. He liked to talk, and he did, muttering to himself when alone—“I don’t like this one. Something’s not right. Her
face
.”—a habit he had never tried to break. There was something about the body, about the anger that was written across its blackened head, that left within Williams a series of questions about the mortality of the individual that he couldn’t quite shake, and it was digging inside him. He had passed it off as a joke at first: being forty-one now came with a predisposition to linger over life and its meaning just as it came with a renewed interest in woodwork, but the joke didn’t stick. He made shit jokes, anyway. But yesterday, he would not have thought about how easy skin went black and crisp and when touched broke to reveal something so pink and red underneath; and he would not have thought how in death every expression was stripped back to a grimace, as if the recently departed knew that he or she was being taken away to some place worse, or taken away from the one good thing they had, the thing that they neither had to barter or earn, and it bothered him that the thought was there. He had been exposed to violent death before: car and farm accidents, mostly, but also to the suicides of men and women his same age and older, and kids who hadn’t gotten enough in life. It was part of his job and he had thought—when he had given it thought—that he possessed a coldness, an impersonality that allowed him to keep those thoughts from him.

“What if you couldn’t switch it off anymore?” his wife asked him, six months after they moved from L.A. to Red Grove, and settled into their small house. “What if you wake up and it’s not there anymore?”

“Why would it change?”

The memory was of the two of them lying on the bed, naked, smoking pot and drinking beer. It was hot outside, and that third element, combined with the previous two, left them uninterested in sex, wanting nothing more than to touch, to talk. That was seven years before she left, fifteen years before he stood before the burnt out mosque, fifteen years before the memory returned. His hair had been full, then, black as grease, and the skin under his jaw did not sag and he, in general, had not sagged; nor had his teeth been a partial plate that aged him another ten years in the mirror when he took them out.

“A moment.” He did not know what she looked like now, just what she was then: pleasantly plump and white, with dark hair, and a tattoo on her left shoulder in the shape of a paw print so bright and new that it was as if blood had seeped out of her skin to reveal an inner, bestial quality. Which is exactly what she wanted everyone to think. “A
moment
. Like an epiphany. A moment where something inside you just changes, where you lose something and gain something, but you’ll never be sure why it all changes, and why it means so much to you.”

“What am I going to do then?”

“Yeah.”

“I got no fucking idea.”

They had laughed, then, a good easy laugh aided by everything in the room, and despite the nature of their parting, and the cruelties that both had visited on each other since, Williams smiled faintly at the memory, though, so self conscious of his fake teeth was he that even alone, he did not smile wide enough to reveal them.

The burnt body had, only recently, been named Amanda Currie. She had been nineteen.

In the colourless bright light of the afternoon, Williams drove to where she lived, a spare key from the landlord, talking it out to himself—“Burnt down as a cover, killed cause she was too beautiful, maybe; beautiful to someone, anyway”—beneath the drone of the radio. Currie had a roommate, but no one had answered when the real estate called so, on instinct, he decided to go and have a look. Instinct, that was all. He did not know Amanda, did not know her family, and he took that to be a sign that she was a decent, reasonable human being, and someone who was not prone to burning down a mosque because she was too white and too Christian to leave the petrol can at home. Not that he thought she did that, anyway. The burnt out mosque was just a setting, a place where the event happened, where her burnt face had pressed itself into his mind, and he had not found a way to leave it behind, yet.

Amanda Currie’s place was a tiny, two bedroom, tin roofed house on Shepherd Street, the lawn a mix of dirt and dried grass, and the garden weeds and tiny cactus, like old, sun faded ornaments painted green and left to fade away in the front. They were the final vestiges of an attempt at a waterless garden, an idea that Williams himself had had for his similarly small house, but one that had never gotten to the point of killing the weeds that clung to it stubbornly. Inside, the differences between the two homes became even more pronounced: Williams’ place, while not empty, and certainly not cleaned regularly, contained very little outside the couch, TV, his bed, and an always made, never used spare bed in the second room. On the dining room table there were reports, each of them waiting for him to sit and complete, half-heartedly, while eating one of his limited recipes in the evening. Currie’s place, in comparison, was a cornucopia: three guitars lay in the living room, one on the old couch, two on the floor, all of them surrounded by CDs, cans of Coke and bottles of water, and empty plates, a jacket, and so on and so forth in such a way that all the items blurred to Williams as he picked his path to the bedrooms, murmuring the names of things that caught his eye as he went, forgetting them instantly until he came to the first. Inside, he found a fourth guitar, acoustic, two amps, broken and full strings on the dresser table, books of music, CDs, a tiny stereo, a notebook, and a single, unmade bed. With plastic gloves, he pulled open the draws and wardrobe and found a range of clothes. Blacks and reds, mostly. Everyone had a set of colours that they liked to wear, Williams had found, and it was when those colours began to change that you could find a corresponding change in the individual. At least, that was the theory he had developed, just over eight years ago, and it hadn’t failed him yet.

In the second bedroom, his slow, murmuring—“Door shows its been kicked at the bottom, someone smokes”—stroll found a dismantled drum kit, the snare covering stabbed in by a pair of sticks. The rest of the room was dominated by an unmade double bed with red sheets and the hint of perfume beneath the cigarettes. The closet, when he pulled back the flimsy wooden doors, was empty of everything but clothes hangers, two dozen of the metal holdings hanging from the bar like the petrified remains of ancient, ugly birds. It wasn’t proving difficult for him to have a suspect for the violent trauma to the back of Amanda Currie’s head and spine, it seemed. That didn’t surprise Williams: there had been five murders in Red Grove in the last fifteen years, and each of them had been done by a family member, either by blood or marriage, each of them done in that intense hatred that only having someone in your life so meaningfully could inspire.

From the bedrooms, he made his way across the thin red and brown carpet—“Where is the roommate?”—and into the white lino floored kitchen. There, the sink was empty. The fridge, too, or mostly. A can of Coke, a piece of meat going brown, a Babe Ruth. The cupboards were full of plates, cups, glasses, nothing unusual. There were some drugs—aspirin and the like—in the cupboard above the fridge. Nothing unusual there, either. In fact, the only unusual thing he found in the kitchen was a photograph, unframed, and with a curiously fragile nudity to it. A CD lay beneath it, the cover a collage of withered flowers. The photo, however, revealed two girls, twins, and identical; one held a guitar—she was in red and black—and the other held drumsticks. “Just black for you, then.” Williams picked up both CD and picture in his covered grip. The girls were pretty in that way that local teenagers often were in Red Grove: white, but browned in the sun, and with dark hair, nice breasts, and a figure that time and children would take from them. They were his type, but separated by a generation or two and a full head of hair and full set of teeth. One of them was Amanda Currie; the one holding the guitar, he figured. He was a little confused, however, by the fact that none of her personal details supplied at the office had noted that she had a twin. A mother, yes. A father, deceased. Nothing else. Strange, but not the first time, he supposed, and tragic if the sister was dead herself or responsible.

“Wouldn’t be the first time, either.”

The CD, which Williams opened with a casual flick, was for a band called Dried Flowers, and had the same photo on the inside jacket. The girls had a band of two, it seemed. A closer look at the actual album revealed it to be self-produced, the label listed as TwinsOne, the address for ordering was the house he stood in. With a shrug, he closed it, and kept both. He’d be back to dust the place, if he felt it necessary; but first he’d let the real estate know that they couldn’t come in, then call up Steve, the part timer on today—he had four part time sheriffs, each of them young and with brutally short haircuts as if they came from the same white kid machine—and have him tape down the house, and then he’d call Amanda Currie’s mother. That was a conversation he didn’t want to have.

Twisting the key to start the engine, he slipped the album into the truck’s player and, with half an eye on the road, listened to it for the fifteen minutes it took him to reach the office.

“Shit,” he said, five minutes into the drive, “you girls couldn’t play a note.”

Helen Currie, a small woman with discoloured teeth, and who had lost her looks to sag, expansion, and sun, sat on the white cushioned fold out steel chair in Williams’ stark office and held her leather handbag tightly on her lap, her knuckles a stark white against her white skin. “I don’t have to see her, do I?” she asked, finally, her tone suggesting that if the answer was yes, then she would do it only with submissiveness born out of loss. “Not like that?”

It was hard. It was
always
hard, these moments, but Williams had relied upon his ability to switch it off to get him through. He could view it abstractly, and from a distance no matter how close he was physically. He’d lost that, somehow, in the look of Amanda Currie’s ash stained teeth gritted so tightly, and without his distance, he was uncomfortable,
fucking uncomfortable
he murmured inside his head. What made it worse was that he could never predict how people were going to react. It was always different. Most cried, sobbed, needed to be held—and Williams did that, he held the ones, male, female, young, old, whoever, whatever, who needed to be held. Others were quiet and asked to see the body and stood there in silence and did their grieving elsewhere. In a few rare cases, people accused him of making a joke. A sick joke that he, Williams, came up with because he had nothing better to do than to sit around after work and think which family he’d be cruel to the following day. But he understood that. He understood all the reactions. He had distance. He could see the hurt. None of it touched him, except in the briefest, lightest touches of sympathy for a fellow human. Not here, though, he thought. No. Not here. He pulled open the drawer of his table, lifted out a slim bottle of Southern Comfort, and said, “No, you don’t have to see her. Drink?”

The only cups he had were plastic, from the coffee and water machine, but Helen Currie took one and held it with a frail sense of gratitude.

“I got some questions.” He was drinking himself. “That okay?”

She nodded, sipped from her cup, left her eyes on it.

“Mind if I record?” After a shake of her head to say she didn’t mind, he flipped the small recorder on, and said, “Who did Amanda live with?”

“Sarah.”

“Sarah who?”

“Her sister, Sarah.”

Not
, Williams thought,
my daughter, Sarah
. “You know where she is?”

“If she’s not at their house, no.” The plastic cup swirled, then she lifted it. Once lowered, she said, “I don’t know who her friends are.”

“You’re not close?”

She shook her head.

“Most of her stuff is gone.”

That made Helen look at him, a quick, but wary rise of her eyes from the cup. “Are you saying—”

“All I know is that she’s not there, but I’d like to find her. I’d like to speak to her.” He paused then, deliberately, to both catch his thoughts and let his words settle in Helen. He sipped the Southern Comfort, wished he had some Coke, wished he knew how long he’d been keeping a bottle in the drawer at work. Four years? It wasn’t more than five, he knew that. “Either of them got a boyfriend, girlfriend?”