Stacking in Rivertown (11 page)

A police car appears, lights and siren whipping the air. I swerve, hit a side street, and shoot away toward my one big play.

Ben taught me well. I watched him work them for ten long years, seeing his last play created all for me. Tonight he’ll see my play.

The river comes into me again. The water moving, the shush, the low thunder. I feel tears pouring for Violet because I’ve hit some place beyond, a place gone haywire. I’m bent on one thing.

I slice apart the night.

The van and the Caprice follow me the whole way as I cut down through Manhattan, ignoring the stop lights. It’s the only time I’ve driven through there that I didn’t get stuck in traffic.

Behind our threesome, like a lengthening snake, we pick up several squad cars, wailing and whipping their lights. As I speed through, I put on the windbreaker one arm at a time, weaving as I almost take out a lamppost.

I hit the ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge doing about eighty, bottoming out at a dip. I weave, passing cars like they’re stopped in time.

If nothing else, it’s going to be quite an exit.

I near the Brooklyn shore, freaked now, not sure I can do it. Maybe I should just drive on by. I can lose Ben and Bates easy. I can disappear.

Then I remember the box. I think of all those whippings. I feel the whack of Ben’s rubber hose.

I slam on the brakes, skidding and fishtailing, coming to a stupendous halt. Leaping out, I jump up on the sidewall, balancing with my hand on a fat cable. Cars are stopping and people are getting out.

“Stay back,” I scream, now leaning over the water. I look down. Nothing but black that way, but I feel it in my chest and heart. The river wants me. It’s been waiting. The van screeches to a stop behind the blockade of cars. I see Ben and another guy spill out.

“Beth,” he yells and starts throwing people out of his way, making a beeline for me. The sirens shriek. I look down again, turn back, and see all those people once more, all frozen, all silent, just like in Rivertown.

“Sigh no more,” I say.

I step off the bridge.

Afterlife

Kat

I see Violet in green grass by the river. She stands with her back to me. I watch her dress loosen, rippling in the breeze. She draws one arm free of her sleeve as the wind crosses the river and reaches the leaves of trees on the far shore. Cottonwoods tremble. Branches lit by sun go gold and green.

A cloud covers the sun, and Violet darkens, pulls her other arm free, and presses the dress to her chest with her forearm. Twisting at the waist, her back is revealed, her breasts from the side, and her dark eyes grown blacker raise, shift to the side, and settle on mine.

The skin at her temple beats. In her lips, chin, throat, and eyes, I read her death, our second shape from which we draw back, avert our eyes, and learn to pretend.

Her dress falls. She turns and steps forward fresh as spring, and enters the water as the cloud passes and the river goes bright, flushing her skin rosy, her hair amber and from the center, gleaming.

This is my love then, the surrounding air of a body submerged. An air that scatters, evaporates, and disappears.

She bends low, pushing forward, swimming alone. I watch as she follows the water beyond my sight. I lift and smell her dress, draping it as I go walking the bank down.

*      *      *

I straighten my body. Listing to the side, I panic, regain balance, and drop like a rock. Pressing both hands over my face, I pull in my elbows tight. The windbreaker whips in the roar. It can’t be more than a few seconds. The drop seems forever.

I can’t remember hitting the water or going under. But at times, just as I’m falling asleep, a fire runs from my toes to head. My brain goes like a pipe bomb.

When we enter the river, our bodies change form. Arms and legs are more like wings.

But in my dreams, I am limp in the East River, my body rising white, blue in lip and finger, my eyes locked open and gone to mush, my skin saturated and over-rinsed, now sloughing off. Barges and cranes describe shorelines like spider’s nests. And behind, Manhattan’s famous skyline, man’s monuments to man, looks to me just like the stones at Rivertown.

I wake in the water, numb in the head, and I go wild, flapping my arms and legs like some African bird. I break surface and suck in air, stabbed clean through from side to side. Hearing shouts, I look up and see blurry lights, then gasp and drop back into the cold.

I’ve died. I’ve committed suicide, that wild ride, and lived to tell the tale.

Holding my breath as I’ve practiced for so long, I stretch forward, swimming underwater.

My laps pass by as I fight the tide, arms and legs numb. Sirens scream. Slithering onto the pilings, I jump the seawall and lie flat in the weeds, my chest heaving, shaking so hard it hurts me. Back over the bridge, a helicopter whaps the air, nosing its way downstream, its spotlight coursing the river.

I force myself up. It’s at this point, because sensation is returning to my feet, that I notice I’m missing a shoe. I shoot across the grass and scramble up the chain link in a clatter, then drop to the other side. Falling down, I grind my palms into broken cement and glass. I scoot across the street in a crouch, wiggling like a hognose under an old wooden loading dock. As I lie on my stomach, I search for my switchblade and press it open.

From my vantage point, I can see most of the bridge arching its way to Manhattan. TV crews have arrived on site. I count my breathing one to five, but tonight, no ghosts but Violet’s haunt me.

I remember her breath wetting my cheek as she slept next to me, and how she said so quiet you’d think it was in your head, I love you. Love you.

Hours pass. My chest is still quaking, but I have feeling back in my limbs. As I comb my hair with my fingers, dirt drops on my face. Crawling out, I stand and zip my jacket, pulling the hood over my head.

Shaking like an alcoholic and walking without a shoe, I become invisible to people on the streets. I slip underground, the shock setting in and the berserks in my head. The train brings me to upper Manhattan just as the sky is starting to go light. I stumble into the garage where the Taurus is waiting and lock the door.

Now I think I’m going to throw up. Now all I can do is lie across the backseat of the Taurus shaking again.

I wake myself up moaning. I think my body must be one big bruise. Like some kind of drunk, I get myself into the front seat and check the clock. It’s about five. I change clothes in the manner of some kind of remedial nutcase. I slap on my new hair, then a pair of sunglasses. Why didn’t I add “bottle of Gatorade” to my list?

Then I drive off as though I’m in a Ford, for God’s sakes.

Imagine it. Me in a family car.

After being caught in rush-hour gridlock, I cross into Jersey, where I stop to pick up hamburgers and a copy of the
Times
. It’s June 21. I died about one in the morning, near as I can figure. Maybe I should hold a wake.

I search the front page, finding it in the lower-left corner. Shit. Where’d they get that picture of me?

I think back to holidays with the cheerful Jeremy clan all scattered warmly around a seared and puffed-up turkey. It was Jeremy’s sister and that damn camera of hers. She was always snapping away like she was poking you in the eye.

BRIDGE CLAIMS AUTHOR
’
S LIFE
, the headline screams. Below it says, “Woman plummets, feared dead. No body recovered.” I consider this for a moment, wondering what it would be like if they did recover a body. I’m thinking about the impact on me.

Later in the article, they mention Jeremy and how he was found taped to a chair and beaten. The police are investigating. They won’t reveal the details. They have suspicions.

I think of the crumpled Detective Bates. He’s a worry.

So I jettison myself out of fast-food heaven and tool along on Highway 80, putting miles between me and all my “friends and family.” I head west through Jersey, listening to Joplin wail about her ball and chain.

She carries me into Pennsylvania, where I pick up a late dinner at Scranton. All the people I see have very white faces, a little puffy and stale.

No wonder people live in New York. The world out here is loaded with freaks. Maybe they’re all cousins, I think. Maybe they’re just sisters and brothers.

People used to say that about Violet and me. They’d ask if we were sisters. Maybe it’s some guy that just got done screwing both of us.

“Hey, are you two sisters?”

What’s the polite thing to say?

Some of Ben’s clients asked for “the sisters.” Maybe that gave them a special thrill.

Violet was lean, though, making her look tall. I was medium height, but solid and tight. We both had olive skin and deep-set eyes. Her hair was black and coarser, mine tending toward auburn after hours of sunning on the roof.

I buy a Scranton paper and take a room at a hotel. When I get to my room, which is, by the way, smelling of prison disinfectant (I remember from my days incarcerated for shoplifting), I open the paper. There I am again, my face staring out of the front page.

God. This is making me nervous. I read the article, which says the same as the one in the
Times,
ending of course with that distasteful reminder. The police are investigating.

Walking to the bathroom, I look in the mirror, taking the wig off and slapping it back on, trying to see if it really works. And I’m worried about the Taurus. Now that the inimitable Detective Bates is investigating, as I’m sure he is, I think of the car and license registered under the name Elizabeth Boone.

Next morning, after choking down a glass of fermented orange juice and the white toast offering in the lobby, I ask directions at the desk. First, I hit the Goodwill, where I pick up some men’s clothes that are too big for me. I find a Chicago Bulls baseball-style hat and a ripped pair of sneakers.

At some generic “mart” store, I buy a road atlas, a duffel bag, a couple blankets, an Ace bandage, a slick pair of sunglasses, and a zippered bag. At the beauty supply shop, I get a bleaching rinse, a pair of scissors, and a buzz clipper.

Returning to my room, I get busy.

I cut my hair in handfuls, dropping it in the wastebasket. Then I buzz it all over and bleach what’s left. I wrap the Ace bandage around my breasts to flatten them, and I try on my new oversize clothes, the baseball cap turned around backward, and the new sunglasses. I strut and posture like I have a wanger between my legs.

Kat and I used to do it for fun. I think of Kat now like I haven’t for years.

We’d dress like boys and tool around the Village, whistling at girls like we were stupid. One time we ventured into a men’s john. We stood on either side of this short guy squirting into the urinal. Kat and I took turns commenting on his style, his method, and aim. I had a dildo in a harness that I whipped out and started slapping from side to side. The guy ran out of there, stuffing in his poker as he went.

I check in the mirror. Yep. I can pull it off. My identity, however, is beginning to fade.

Switching back into my Rebecca Cross wig and clothes, I clean my stuff out of the car. I hook the body holster onto the back of my jeans, then check the clip and slide in the semiautomatic. I practice drawing it a few times. Over that goes a flannel shirt. My extra IDs and my writing go in the zippered bag. I pack the guns in the duffel bag, then throw it in the car, checking out of the hotel.

At the Ford dealership, they make a nice bid on the Taurus, but they’re sad that I don’t want to buy a car. I’m sad, too. I’m thinking about my Porsche left running on the bridge.

After signing the title, I take the check, slinging my duffel bag over my shoulder. About a half mile down the road, I cash the check at a bank. Then I eat more hamburgers, feeling a little sick to be doing this so-called food two days in a row. In the bathroom, I change into a guy.

Out on the road, I stick out my thumb, slouching, acting like my musculature has possession of me. A trucker picks me up. He’s heading south on eighty-one.

I toss in my bag and set off, chatting with Jack, the truck driver, about manly things as we barrel along the highway toward God knows where. It reminds me of hitchhiking to New York fifteen years ago.

I slept under bridges, ate out of Dumpsters, and shoplifted my way to the city. I got caught one time, but I’m a fast runner. I left the hefty security guy in my wake, his stomach bouncing like it was made of water.

Back then, I still carried the weight of Rivertown. I talked the talk of the river. I walked like I was made of iron, like I was Gedders, banging at life like a hammer.

Kat changed all that. I always wondered about her, where she came from, because she was so different from the rest of us that Ben picked up off the streets. Kat was like silk and the rest of us were wool.

I took to Kat like a puppy dog, always edging up next to her. She never pushed me away. She petted me, curled her arm around. When I first came out of the basement and couldn’t talk, she read Dickinson and Shelley to me, slow and singsong.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few.

And revery, and revery, she’d say like you were dreaming.

While I was in training, Ben taught me how to please a man. Kat taught me the pleasure of women. She would come into my bed at night and undress me, teaching me the lips, the tongue, the skin along the back, how to press a nipple, how to tug, how to tease it with the tongue. She taught me her clitoris, the proper way to stroke, how to enclose it with the lips, the use of fingers, and how to thrust.

Kat’s face was square, with high cheekbones and amber eyes. Her hair, the color of sand, fell the length of her back. She let me braid it for the plays so that it lay like rope showing off her spine, the elegant lines of her body, her rounded thighs. She looked good in the cuffs, her head high, her full breasts much to be desired.

She taught me lace bras and camisoles. She taught me corsets and hosiery. She dressed me in silk and jewelry, teaching me to walk, to sit, how to lie waiting, how to curve the back, to flush the lips.

Just as I practiced on Violet with the whip, Kat practiced on me. Not that I think Ben ever made her. She chose me herself for her own pleasure. I thought of it as a way to be near her.

Kat would pack me in the box sometimes for no reason. So that you’ll mind me, she said. It made me draw nearer, need her, look to her. I couldn’t bear for her to leave without me for even a few hours.

Kat started throwing up blood one day. When Ben came in, she turned halfway toward him, then collapsed on the floor. I started crying, trying to get Kat to wake up.

Ben left the bathroom and came back a few minutes later with a blanket. He wrapped her in it and carried her out the door. I never saw her again.

He kept me near him then. He knew how it hurt me. It was always bad whenever we lost one of the family.

Sitting in the big rig, wheeling south toward Harrisburg, I think I can smell her clothes and her skin. I remember Kat’s laughter, how it fell like rain.

The night I first hit New York, it was storming like crazy. A trucker with a load of caskets from Ohio, my made-up birthplace, picked me up in Jersey, riding me all the way into Manhattan. It was one in the morning. Seemed like a good time to be delivering caskets.