The alternative was to swear to tell the truth and look totally ridiculous at my trial for one klutzy half-baked manslaughter. Any little Miss Hottie Hot Pants could tell an erect penis from a regular dried-out dog poop. I imagined my Swiss classmates following my trial live by satellite. Even getting the electric chair would be better than going back to boarding school with everybody giggling behind my back. In Locarno, girls would chase me down hallways, forever menacing me with their fecal-looking candy bars.
Nobody would believe my side of the story. My explanation would be endlessly joked about as the “Dog Doo-doo Defense.”
Every direction I could see to go was just a different nightmare.
My nana’s voice came down the hall, around a couple corners, faint from where it started in the parlor. First came a tickling sound: a fast dash followed by a quiet rattling of tiny clicks. This I recognized as a finger dialing their old rotary telephone. Yes, my grandparents had a telephone, but just barely. It was a phone like the Pilgrims might use to check their voice mails from Plymouth Rock, connected to the wall by a cord you couldn’t unplug. The rattling dial sound went on for seven long times, and my nana’s voice said, “Admitting, please.” I imagined her toying with the curly cord that held the receiver to the ringer part, trapped on the parlor sofa by the short length of that cord. Her voice said, “I’m sorry to bother you…” and it was light, singsong, the tone you might use to ask a stranger on a street corner for the correct time. She said, “My husband ain’t come home yet, and I wondered if there’d been any accidents reported?”
She waited. We both waited. If I shut my eyes I saw my fingerprints dotted on a dirty toilet behind stretched-tight Day-Glo crime-scene tape. In my fantasy, state patrol detectives in wide-brimmed Canadian Mountie–style hats held walkie-talkies alongside their lantern jaws and barked all-points bulletins. Stripes ran down the outside legs of their uniform pants, leading to polished shoes. I envisioned a forensics expert wearing a white lab coat as he lifted a thumbprint using a piece of clear tape; holding the print between his face and the upstate moon, he studied the whorls, saying, “Our suspect is an eleven-year-old girl, four-foot-six, pudgy, a little dumpy, a real fatty-fatty-two-by-four, with hair that never does what she wants it to….” He’d nod sagely, reading the finer details. “She’s never even kissed a boy, and no one likes her.”
At that, a police artist standing nearby and sketching wildly on a large pad would say, “Based on the evidence I think I have your killer.” The artist would whip his pad around, and drawn on the white paper would be a portrait of me, my eyeglasses restored to my nose, my freckles, my giant, shiny forehead. Even my dreaded full name would be written across the bottom: Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer.
From down the hallway my nana’s voice said, “No, thank you.” She said, “I’ll hold the line.”
Covering my tracks hadn’t occurred to me. It wasn’t until lying there that I thought about the Beagle book and my stained shirt. My murder weapon. Moonlight stretched a white rectangle into my bedroom, the shape of it flaring from my windowsill to almost fill the far wall. Under the moon’s scrutiny I scrambled from the quilts and covers and donned my second-best pair of eyeglasses. I knelt beside the bed and wedged an arm between the mattress and box spring, feeling until my fingers dug out the book wrapped by the incriminating chambray shirt. Even in just moonlight you could see the stains had set in the fabric. They made larger and smaller blob shapes across the front of the shirt, trailing but close to one another, like a cloth map of the Galápagos Islands. In the middle of the Beagle book, around Tierra del Fuego, the pages were stuck together. With my fingernails I picked at their edges. Like a forensic investigator lifting a fingerprint, I pinched each of the two center pages and slowly peeled them apart. The paper felt heavy, gummy, and the pages came apart with a sound like a Korean aesthetician waxing my mom’s legs, ripping out all her hairs by the roots. The sound of incredible pain.
From down the hallway my nana’s voice told the telephone, “I see.” She said, “Yes’m.”
My hands spread the book’s pages like you’d part curtains, and spattered there was a psychology test in dark splotches. Made more or less symmetrical by the book’s being shut, the dark parts looked like a butterfly… or a vampire bat. While my eyes were trying to decide, the rest of me saw the white shape down the middle of the book where the two pages met. There, still white and printed with Mr. Darwin’s thoughts, a longish narrow shape pointed straight at me. Under the moonlight the blotchy black parts you could tell would be red in other light. Tomorrow they’d be blood. The ghost shape in the middle, the void where nothing was, that was an outline.
Still kneeling there beside my bed, I heard a breeze that was really my nana gasping, loud. With the air of that same inhale she told the telephone, “Thank you.” She said, “Give me twenty minutes to get there.”
The shape at the heart of my book was my papadaddy’s dead wiener. As heavy footsteps approached down the hallway, I slammed the book shut. In less than two footsteps I buried my stained shirt deep in the dirty-clothes hamper. In another two approaching footsteps I stashed the book under my pillow and leaped back into bed among the Mom-smelling teddy bears. By the last footstep my eyes were closed and I was faking a deep, peaceful slumber when the truth came knocking at my door.
DECEMBER 21, 9:25 A.M. CST
Grand-patricide
Gentle Tweeter,
That first night my Papadaddy Ben went missing, my nana had to drive us to the hospital to find out something the police refused to reveal over the phone. Something that I already knew. In her car she lit each new cigarette off the last. She dropped the butt of the smoked cigarette out her window, a tiny meteor flaring orange sparks into the dark. The way a falling star foretells a death. Mostly, back then, it felt weird for me to ride in a front seat next to where a chauffeur should go. Thusly, we followed our headlights into the grim future.
I wanted to impress upon Nana the social stigma of secondhand smoke and littering, but decided to swallow my gripe. This chore-haggard woman was about to become a widow. No doubt the melodramatic reveal would take place in front of a crowd of strangers in the autopsy suite of some medical examiner. Probably she would collapse into a dead faint still wearing her calico apron getup paired with a faded gingham housedress, a smoldering butt pinched between her careworn lips.
Farm fields lined either side of the highway, and our headlights skimmed over an occasional soiled upstate cow garbed in distressed, low-quality leather.
For our midnight foray I chose to wear flannel pajamas, pink flannel, under my junior-size, stroller-length chinchilla coat. The feeling was glamorous, like posing as a Miss Hooky von Hooker, with my bare feet in bedroom slippers made of pink fuzz sewn to look like floppy-eared bunnies with black button eyes. My nana hadn’t given my snazzy ensemble a second glance. Her attention had a ten-mile head start and was waiting impatiently at the emergency room for the rest of her to catch up.
Our route skirted one side of the infamous freeway traffic isle, and as we passed I saw police cars nosed up close to the cinder-block bathrooms, all their spotlights aligned to bathe the squat, ugly building like a stage. The uniformed officers who stood in that glare looked like actors drinking coffee out of paper cups and underplaying the drama of their scene. Papadaddy’s pickup truck with its cracked windshield and patched taillight still sat in the parking lot, but now it was roped off with sawhorses and twisting swags of police tape. People stood outside those barricades and stared at the truck like it was the Mona Lisa.