A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

Afraid All the Time NANCY PICKARD

Ribbon a darkness over me…”

Mel Brown, known variously as Pell Mell and Animel, sang the line from the song over and over behind his windshield as he flew from Missouri into Kansas on his old black Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

Already he loved Kansas, because the highway that stretched ahead of him was like a long, flat, dark ribbon unfurled just for him.

“Ribbon a darkness over me…”

He flew full throttle into the late-afternoon glare, feeling as if he were soaring gloriously drunk and blind on a skyway to the sun.

The clouds in the far distance looked as if they’d rain on him that night, but he didn’t worry about it. He’d heard there were plenty of empty farm and ranch houses in Kansas where a man could break in to spend the night. He’d heard it was like having your choice of free motels, Kansas was.

“Ribbon a darkness over me…”

Three hundred miles to the southwest, Jane Baum suddenly stopped what she was doing. The fear had hit her again. It was always like that, striking out of nowhere, like a fist against her heart. She dropped her clothes basket from rigid fingers and stood as if paralyzed between the two clotheslines in her yard. There was a wet sheet to her right, another to her left. For once the wind had died down, so the sheets hung as still and silent as walls. She felt enclosed in a narrow, white, sterile room of cloth, and she never wanted to leave it.

Outside of it was danger.

On either side of the sheets lay the endless prairie where she felt like a tiny mouse exposed to every hawk in the sky.

It took all of her willpower not to scream.

She hugged her own shoulders to comfort herself. It didn’t help.

Within a few moments she was crying, and then shaking with a palsy of terror.

She hadn’t known she’d be so afraid.

Eight months ago, before she had moved to this small farm she’d inherited, she’d had romantic notions about it, even about such simple things as hanging clothes on a line. It would feel so good, she had imagined, they would smell so sweet. Instead, everything had seemed strange and threatening to her from the start, and it was getting worse. Now she didn’t even feel protected by the house. She was beginning to feel as if it were fear instead of electricity that lighted her lamps, filled her tub, lined her cupboards and covered her bed — fear that she breathed instead of air.

She hated the prairie and everything on it.

The city had never frightened her, not like this. She knew the city, she understood it, she knew how to avoid its dangers and its troubles. In the city there were buildings everywhere, and now she knew why — it was to blot out the true and terrible openness of the earth on which all of the inhabitants were so horribly exposed to danger.

The wind picked up again. It snapped the wet sheets against her body. Janie bolted from her shelter. Like a mouse with a hawk circling overhead, she ran as if she were being chased. She ran out of her yard and then down the highway, racing frantically, breathlessly, for the only other shelter she knew.

When she reached Cissy Johnson’s house, she pulled open the side door and flung herself inside without knocking.

“Cissy?”

“I’m afraid all the time.”

“I know, Janie.”

Cissy Johnson stood at her kitchen sink peeling potatoes for supper while she listened to Jane Baum’s familiar litany of fear. By now Cissy knew it by heart. Janie was afraid of: being alone in the house she had inherited from her aunt; the dark; the crack of every twig in the night; the storm cellar; the horses that might step on her, the cows that might trample her, the chickens that might peck her, the cats that might bite her and have rabies, the coyotes that might attack her; the truckers who drove by her house, especially the flirtatious ones who blasted their horns when they saw her in the yard; tornadoes, blizzards, electrical storms; having to drive so far just to get simple groceries and supplies.

At first Cissy had been sympathetic, offering daily doses of coffee and friendship. But it was getting harder all the time to remain patient with somebody who just burst in without knocking and who complained all the time about imaginary problems and who—

“You’ve lived here all your life,” Jane said, as if the woman at the sink had not previously been alert to that fact. She sat in a kitchen chair, huddled into herself like a child being punished. Her voice was low, as if she were talking more to herself than to Cissy. “You’re used to it, that’s why it doesn’t scare you.”

“Um,” Cissy murmured, as if agreeing. But out of her neighbor’s sight, she dug viciously at the eye of a potato. She rooted it out — leaving behind a white, moist, open wound in the vegetable — and flicked the dead black skin into the sink where the water running from the faucet washed it down the garbage disposal. She thought how she’d like to pour Janie’s fears down the sink and similarly grind them up and flush them away. She held the potato to her nose and sniffed, inhaling the crisp, raw smell.

Then, as if having gained strength from that private moment, she glanced back over her shoulder at her visitor. Cissy was ashamed of the fact that the mere sight of Jane Baum now repelled her. It was a crime, really, how she’d let herself go. She wished Jane would comb her hair, pull her shoulders back, paint a little coloring onto her pale face, and wear something else besides that ugly denim jumper that came nearly to her heels. Cissy’s husband, Bob, called Janie “Cissy’s pup,” and he called that jumper the “pup tent.” He was right, Cissy thought, the woman did look like an in-secure, spotty adolescent, and not at all like a grown woman of thirty-five-plus years. And darn it, Janie did follow Cissy around like a neurotic nuisance of a puppy.

“Is Bob coming back tonight?” Jane asked.

Now she’s even invading my mind, Cissy thought. She whacked resentfully at the potato, peeling off more meat than skin. “Tomorrow.”

Her shoulders tensed.

“Then can I sleep over here tonight?”

“No.” Cissy surprised herself with the shortness of her reply. She could practically feel Janie radiating hurt, and so she tried to make up for it by softening her tone. “I’m sorry, Janie, but I’ve got too much book work to do, and it’s hard to concentrate with people in the house. I’ve even told the girls they can take their sleeping bags to the barn tonight to give me some peace.” The girls were her daughters, Tessie, thirteen, and Mandy, eleven. “They want to spend the night out there ’cause we’ve got that new little blind calf we’re nursing. His mother won’t have anything to do with him, poor little thing. Tessie has named him Flopper, because he tries to stand up but he just flops back down. So the girls are bottle-feeding him, and they want to sleep near…”

“Oh.” It was heavy with reproach.

Cissy stepped away from the sink to turn her oven on to 350°. Her own internal temperature was rising too. God forbid she should talk about her life! God forbid they should ever talk about anything but Janie and all the damned things she was scared of! She could write a book about it: How Jane Baum Made a Big Mistake by Leaving Kansas City and How Everything About the Country Just Scared Her to Death.

“Aren’t you afraid of anything, Cissy?”

The implied admiration came with a bit of a whine to it— any thing — like a curve on a fastball.

“Yes.” Cissy drew out the word reluctantly.

“You are? What?”

Cissy turned around at the sink and laughed self-consciously.

“It’s so silly…I’m even afraid to mention it.”

“Tell me! I’ll feel better if I know you’re afraid of things, too.”

There! Cissy thought. Even my fears come down to how they affect you!

“All right.” She sighed. “Well, I’m afraid of something happening to Bobby, a wreck on the highway or something, or to one of the girls, or my folks, things like that. I mean, like leukemia or a heart attack or something I can’t control. I’m always afraid there won’t be enough money and we might have to sell this place. We’re so happy here. I guess I’m afraid that might change.” She paused, dismayed by the sudden realization that she had not been as happy since Jane Baum moved in down the road. For a moment, she stared accusingly at her neighbor. “I guess that’s what I’m afraid of.” Then Cissy added deliberately, “But I don’t think about it all the time.”

“I think about mine all the time,” Jane whispered.

“I know.”

“I hate it here!”

“You could move back.”

Janie stared reproachfully. “You know I can’t afford that!”

Cissy closed her eyes momentarily. The idea of having to listen to this for who knew how many years…

“I love coming over here,” Janie said wistfully, as if reading Cissy’s mind again. “It always makes me feel so much better. This is the only place I feel safe anymore. I just hate going home to the big old house all by myself.”

I will not invite you to supper, Cissy thought.

Janie sighed.

Cissy gazed out the big square window behind Janie. It was October, her favorite month, when the grass turned as red as the curly hair on a Hereford’s back and the sky turned a steel gray like the highway that ran between their houses. It was as if the whole world blended into itself — the grass into the cattle, the roads into the sky, and she into all of it. There was an electricity in the air, as if something more important than winter were about to happen, as if all the world were one and about to burst apart into something brand-new. Cissy loved the prairie, and it hurt her feelings a little that Janie didn’t. How could anyone live in the middle of so much beauty, she puzzled, and be frightened of it?

“We’ll never get a better chance.” Tess ticked off the rationale for the adventure by holding up the fingers of her right hand, one at a time, an inch from her sister’s scared face. “Dad’s gone. We’re in the barn. Mom’ll be asleep. It’s a new moon.” She ran out of fingers on that hand and lifted her left thumb. “And the dogs know us.”

“They’ll find out!” Mandy wailed.

“Who’ll find out?”

“Mom and Daddy will!”

“They won’t! Who’s gonna tell ’em? The gas-station owner? You think we left a trail of toilet paper he’s going to follow from his station to here? And he’s gonna call the sheriff and say lock up those Johnson girls, boys, they stole my toilet paper!”

“Yes!”

Together they turned to gaze — one of them with pride and cunning, the other with pride and trepidation — at the small hill of hay that was piled, for no apparent reason, in the shadows of a far corner of the barn. Underneath that pile lay their collection of six rolls of toilet paper — a new one filched from their own linen closet, and five partly used ones (stolen one trip at a time and hidden in their school jackets) from the ladies’ bathroom at the gas station in town. Tess’s plan was for the two of them to “t.p.” their neighbor’s house that night, after dark. Tess had lovely visions of how it would look — all ghostly and spooky, with streamers of white hanging down from the tree limbs and waving eerily in the breeze.

“They do it all the time in Kansas City, jerk,” Tess proclaimed.

“And I’ll bet they don’t make any big deal crybaby deal out of it.”

She wanted to be the first one in her class to do it, and she wasn’t about to let her little sister chicken out on her. This plan would, Tess was sure, make her famous in at least a four-county area. No grown-up would ever figure out who had done it, but all the kids would know, even if she had to tell them.

“Mom’ll kill us!”

“Nobody’ll know!”

“It’s gonna rain!”

“It’s not gonna rain.”

“We shouldn’t leave Flopper!”

Now they looked, together, at the baby bull calf in one of the stalls.

It stared blindly in the direction of their voices, tried to rise, but was too frail to do it.

“Don’t be a dope. We leave him all the time.”

Mandy sighed.

Tess, who recognized the sound of surrender when she heard it, smiled magnanimously at her sister.

“You can throw the first roll,” she offered.

In a truck stop in Emporia, Mel Brown slopped up his supper gravy with the last third of a cloverleaf roll. He had a table by a window.

As he ate, he stared with pleasure at his bike outside. If he moved his head just so, the rays from the setting sun flashed off the handle bars. He thought about how the leather seat and grips would feel soft and warm and supple, the way a woman in leather felt, when he got back on. At the thought he got a warm feeling in his crotch, too, and he smiled.

God, he loved living like this.

When he was hungry, he ate. When he was tired, he slept. When he was horny, he found a woman. When he was thirsty, he stopped at a bar.

Right now Mel felt like not paying the entire $5.46 for this lousy chicken-fried steak dinner and coffee. He pulled four dollar bills out of his wallet and a couple of quarters out of his right front pocket and set it all out on the table, with the money sticking out from under the check.

Mel got up and walked past the waitress.

“It’s on the table,” he told her.

“No cherry pie?” she asked him.

It sounded like a proposition, so he grinned as he said, “Nah.” If you weren’t so ugly, he thought, I just might stay for dessert.

“Come again,” she said.

You wish, he thought.

If they called him back, he’d say he couldn’t read her handwriting.

Her fault. No wonder she didn’t get a tip. Smiling, he lifted a toothpick off the cashier’s counter and used it to salute the man behind the cash register.

“Thanks,” the man said.

“You bet.”

Outside, Mel stood in the parking lot and stretched, shoving his arms high in the air, letting anybody who was watching get a good look at him. Nothin’ to hide. Eat your heart out, baby. Then he strolled over to his bike and kicked the stand up with his heel. He poked around his mouth with the toothpick, spat out a sliver of meat, then flipped the toothpick onto the ground. He climbed back on his bike, letting out a breath of satisfaction when his butt hit the warm leather seat.

Mel accelerated slowly, savoring the surge of power building between his legs.

Jane Baum was in bed by 10:30 that night, exhausted once again by her own fear. Lying there in her late aunt’s double bed, she obsessed on the mistake she had made in moving to this dreadful, empty place in the middle of nowhere. She had expected to feel nervous for a while, as any other city dweller might who moved to the country. But she hadn’t counted on being actually phobic about it — of being possessed by a fear so strong that it seemed to inhabit every cell of her body until at night, every night, she felt she could die from it. She hadn’t known — how could she have known? — she would be one of those people who is terrified by the vastness of the prairie. She had visited the farm only a few times as a child, and from those visits she had remembered only warm and fuzzy things like caterpillars and chicks. She had only dimly remembered how antlike a human being feels on the prairie.

Her aunt’s house had been broken into twice during the period between her aunt’s death and her own occupancy. That fact cemented her fantasies in a foundation of terrifying reality. When Cissy said,

“It’s your imagination,” Janie retorted, “But it happened twice before!

Twice!” She wasn’t making it up! There were strange, brutal men — that’s how she imagined them, they were never caught by the police — who broke in and took whatever they wanted — cans in the cupboard, the radio in the kitchen. It could happen again, Janie thought obsessively as she lay in the bed; it could happen over and over. To me, to me, to me.

On the prairie, the darkness seemed absolute to her. There were millions of stars but no streetlights. Coyotes howled, or cattle bawled.

Occasionally the big night-riding semis whirred by out front. Their tire and engine sounds seemed to come out of nowhere, build to an intolerable whine and then disappear in an uncanny way. She pictured the drivers as big, rough, intense men hopped up on amphet-amines; she worried that one night she would hear truck tires turning into her gravel drive, that an engine would switch off, that a truck door would quietly open and then close, that careful footsteps would slur across her gravel.

Her fear had grown so huge, so bad, that she was even frightened of it. It was like a monstrous balloon that inflated every time she breathed. Every night the fear got worse. The balloon got bigger. It nearly filled the bedroom now.

The upstairs bedroom where she lay was hot because she had the windows pulled down and latched, and the curtains drawn.

She could have cooled it with a fan on the dressing table, but she was afraid the fan’s noise might cover the sound of whatever might break into the first floor and climb the stairs to attack her. She lay with a sheet and a blanket pulled up over her arms and shoulders, to just under her chin. She was sweating, as if her fear-frozen body were melting, but it felt warm and almost comfortable to her. She always wore pajamas and thin wool socks to bed because she felt safer when she was completely dressed. She especially felt more secure in pajama pants, which no dirty hand could shove up onto her belly as it could a nightgown.

Lying in bed like a quadriplegic, unmoving, eyes open, Janie reviewed her precautions. Every door was locked, every window was permanently shut and locked, so that she didn’t have to check them every night; all the curtains were drawn; the porch lights were off; and her car was locked in the barn so no trucker would think she was home.

Lately she had taken to sleeping with her aunt’s loaded pistol on the pillow beside her head.

Cissy crawled into bed just before midnight, tired from hours of accounting. She had been out to the barn to check on her giggling girls and the blind calf. She had talked to her husband when he called from Oklahoma City. Now she was thinking about how she would try to start easing Janie Baum out of their lives.

“I’m sorry, Janie, but I’m awfully busy today. I don’t think you ought to come over…”

Oh, but there would be that meek, martyred little voice, just like a baby mouse needing somebody to mother it. How would she deny that need? She was already feeling guilty about refusing Janie’s request to sleep over.

“Well, I will. I just will do it, that’s all. If I could say no to the FHA girls when they were selling fruitcakes, I can start saying no more often to Janie Baum. Anyway, she’s never going to get over her fears if I indulge them.”

Bob had said as much when she’d complained to him long-distance. “Cissy, you’re not helping her,” he’d said. “You’re just letting her get worse.” And then he’d said something new that had disturbed her. “Anyway, I don’t like the girls being around her so much. She’s getting too weird, Cissy.”

She thought of her daughters — of fearless Tess and dear little Mandy — and of how safe and nice it was for children in the country…

“Besides,” Bob had said, “she’s got to do more of her own chores.

We need Tess and Mandy to help out around our place more; we can’t be having them always running off to mow her grass and plant her flowers and feed her cows and water her horse and get her eggs, just because she’s scared to stick her silly hand under a damned hen…”

Counting the chores put Cissy to sleep.

“Tess!” Mandy hissed desperately. “Wait!”

The older girl slowed, to give Mandy time to catch up to her, and then to touch Tess for reassurance. They paused for a moment to catch their breath and to crouch in the shadow of Jane Baum’s porch.

Tess carried three rolls of toilet paper in a makeshift pouch she’d formed in the belly of her black sweatshirt. (“We gotta wear black, remember!”) and Mandy was similarly equipped. Tess decided that now was the right moment to drop her bomb.

“I’ve been thinking,” she whispered.

Mandy was struck cold to her heart by that familiar and dreaded phrase. She moaned quietly. “What?”

“It might rain.”

“I told you!”

“So I think we better do it inside.”

“Inside?”

“Shh! It’ll scare her to death, it’ll be great! Nobody else’ll ever have the guts to do anything as neat as this! We’ll do the kitchen, and if we have time, maybe the dining room.”

“Ohhh, noooo.”

“She thinks she’s got all the doors and windows locked, but she doesn’t!” Tess giggled. She had it all figured out that when Jane Baum came downstairs in the morning, she’d take one look, scream, faint, and then, when she woke up, call everybody in town. The fact that Jane might also call the sheriff had occurred to her, but since Tess didn’t have any faith in the ability of adults to figure out anything important, she wasn’t worried about getting caught. “When I took in her eggs, I unlocked the down-stairs bathroom window Come on! This’ll be great!”

The ribbon of darkness ahead of Mel Brown was no longer straight.

It was now bunched into long, steep hills. He hadn’t expected hills.

Nobody had told him there was any part of Kansas that wasn’t flat.

So he wasn’t making as good time, and the couldn’t run full-bore.

But then, he wasn’t in a hurry, except for the hell of it. And this was more interesting, more dangerous, and he liked the thrill of that. He started edging closer to the centerline every time he roared up a hill, playing a game of highway roulette in which he was the winner as long as what-ever coming from the other direction had its headlights on.

When that got boring, he turned his own headlights off.

Now he roared past cars and trucks like a dark demon.

Mel laughed every time, thinking how surprised they must be, and how frightened. They’d think, Crazy fool, I could have hit him…

He supposed he wasn’t afraid of anything, except maybe going back to prison, and he didn’t think they’d send him down on a speeding ticket. Besides, if Kansas was like most states, it was long on roads and short on highway patrolmen…

Roaring downhill was even more fun, because of the way his stomach dropped out. He felt like a kid, yelling “Fuuuuck,” all the way down the other side. What a goddamned roller coaster of a state this was turning out to be.

The rain still looked miles away.

Mel felt as if he could ride all night. Except that his eyes were gritty, the first sign that he’d better start looking for a likely place to spend the night. He wasn’t one to sleep under the stars, not if he could find a ceiling.

Tess directed her sister to stack the rolls of toilet paper underneath the bathroom window on the first floor of Jane Baum’s house. The six rolls, all white, stacked three in a row, two high, gave Tess the little bit of height and leverage she needed to push up the glass with her palms. She stuck her fingers under the bottom edge and laboriously attempted to raise the window. It was stiff in its coats of paint.

“Damn!” she exclaimed, and let her arms slump. Beneath her feet, the toilet paper was getting squashed.

She tried again, and this time she showed her strength from lifting calves and tossing hay. With a crack of paint and a thump of wood on wood, the window slid all the way up.

“Shhh!” Mandy held her fists in front of her face and knocked her knuckles against each other in excitement and agitation. Her ears picked up the sound of a roaring engine on the highway, and she was immediately sure it was the sheriff, coming to arrest her and Tess. She tugged frantically at the calf of her sister’s right leg.

Tess jerked her leg out of Mandy’s grasp and disappeared through the open window.

The crack of the window and the thunder of the approaching motorcycle confused themselves in Jane’s sleeping consciousness, so that when she awoke from dreams full of anxiety — her eyes flying open, the rest of her body frozen — she imagined in a confused, hallucinat-ory kind of way that somebody was both coming to get her and already there in the house.

Jane then did as she had trained herself to do. She had practiced over and over every night, so that her actions would be instinctive.

She turned her face to the pistol on the other pillow and placed her thumb on the trigger.

Her fear — of rape, of torture, of kidnapping, of agony, of death — was a balloon, and she floated horribly in the center of it.

There were thumps and other sounds downstairs, and they joined her in the balloon. There was an engine roaring, and then suddenly it was silent, and a slurring of wheels in her gravel drive, and these sounds joined her in her balloon. When she couldn’t bear it any longer, she popped the balloon by shooting herself in the forehead.

In the driveway, Mel Brown heard the gun go off.

He slung his leg back onto his motorcycle and roared back out onto the highway. So the place had looked empty. So he’d been wrong. So he’d find someplace else. But holy shit. Get the fuck outta here.

Inside the house, in the bathroom, Tess also heard the shot and, being a ranch child, recognized it instantly for what it was, although she wasn’t exactly sure where it had come from. Cussing and sobbing, she clambered over the sink and back out the window, falling onto her head and shoulders on the rolls of toilet paper.

“It’s the sheriff!” Mandy was hysterical. “He’s shooting at us!”

Tess grabbed her little sister by a wrist and pulled her away from the house. They were both crying and stumbling. They ran in the drainage ditch all the way home and flung themselves into the barn.

Mandy ran to lie beside the little blind bull calf. She lay her head on Flopper’s side. When he didn’t respond, she jerked to her feet.

She glared at her sister.

“He’s dead!”

“Shut up!”

Cissy Johnson had awakened, too, although she hadn’t known why.

Something, some noise, had stirred her. And now she sat up in bed, breathing hard, frightened for no good reason she could fathom. If Bob had been home, she’d have sent him out to the barn to check on the girls. But why? The girls were all right, they must be, this was just the result of a bad dream. But she didn’t remember having any such dream.

Cissy got out of bed and ran to the window.

No, it wasn’t a storm, the rain hadn’t come.

A motorcycle!

That’s what she’d heard, that’s what had awakened her!

Quickly, with nervous fingers, Cissy put on a robe and tennis shoes. Darn you, Janie Baum, she thought, your fears are contagious, that’s what they are. The thought popped into her head: If you don’t have fears, they can’t come true.

Cissy raced out to the barn.