Death of the Black-Haired Girl

3

CROSS INN, WHERE Maud and Shell lived, afforded beautiful views of city and campus. In the twenties and thirties it had been the best hotel in town. Over time, like everything else downtown, it degenerated, eventually becoming a ratty dope-and-suicide hotel. In the end, the college acquired and renovated it for a dormitory, keeping some of the art nouveau pieces and paneling of the original. To Shell it still looked depressing. She liked to say that the place accommodated as much dope and nearly as many suicides as a dorm as it had as a welfare hotel. This was an exaggeration. But the dim-lit hallways, dusty mirrors and portraits of scholarly immortals were, Shell thought, a bringdown. She knew a cheapo hotel when she saw one. One tip-off was the smell of insecticide and garbage awaiting incineration. Shell and her mother had lived for a while in a welfare motel on the edge of a river running brown across from a stretch of woodland.

On her way back from her poetry class, Shell had gotten a call on her cell phone from her ex-husband, John Clammer. She promptly switched it off. Then he called her on the college’s automated service line. It seemed humiliating to go through the business of taking the phone off the hook and trying to ignore the cacophony and wanga-wanga that would ensue. And she would be goddamned if Crazy John Clammer would drive her into the cold weather.

Shell had a restraining order against her ex, but it seemed to provide no practical release from his phone calls. In any case, when he referred to it, he tended to laugh in a way she found unpleasant. To actualize the legal abstraction, Shell had purchased a Sauer Luftwaffe-style automatic pistol, which she kept on her knee during Crazy John’s phone calls to remind her of the syllogism that stated all men were mortal.

“Hello,” she said sweetly in one of the British accents she had been learning on tape for an audition piece.

“Ma’am,” said Crazy John, “may I please speak with Miss Shelby Magoffin?”

“That,” Shelby said, “is forbidden, I’m afraid.”

“Forbidden?”

“Hello, John. You ain’t supposed to telephone me. Send a e-mail.”

“Shelby? Honey?”

“How come you’re being affectionate? I thought you hated my poor guts. You said that.”

“I thought you wanted a real man. I wasn’t gonna hurt you.”

“Don’t you treat me like I’m your little girl punk, Johnny. Don’t think I can’t get you arrested from up here. When you gonna grow up?”

Shelby was subject to goofy telephone calls at the college, and not only from her ex. For the most part she slipped under the radar of C-list paparazzi, but the year before she had made a screamer called The Harrowing of Hell, and since then she got calls from admirers who told her they liked imagining her dead in various costumes and wanted a date. Her agent had provided her with a “personal-representative number” to dead-letter such calls, but no matter how often she changed numbers the bastards seemed to slip through, and Crazy John too. The calls weren’t frequent but, depending on her mood, they imposed a certain gloom.

“Remember when you said I was a good man?” John asked.

“Oh, you are a good man, Johnny. It’s just”—she thought of what it might be with Crazy John—“it’s just your ways are not my ways. And my ways are not your ways and the center will not hold and the past is forever past and… you know, man. Leave me alone, will ya?”

She had been warned about John Clammer back home. He had been older than she — as it turned out, older by nearly ten years. He was crazy too, inasmuch as he and his family struggled a lot with emotional illness. But he was gorgeous to look at, especially for sixteen-year-old Shell. He sang and looked like one of God’s personal sunbeam angels. He had curly black hair and rosy cheeks and a nose that turned up to show more of his nostrils than you regularly saw of someone’s, and — don’t ask why — she thought that was cute too. She believed, in her teenage years, that he looked and sang so like an angel he might actually be one. He played the guitar and sang in church and when he spoke regular words his voice was joyous and delightsome. In fact, some boys from Middleboro let him pay to make a prayer CD called Worship for the Challenged in Vision. He had his and Shell’s picture on it, showing them in prayer with their eyes closed, but when you tried to play it, it didn’t, and when he reached the boys in Middleboro, they told him only blind people could hear it. John had paid them $150. Still, never knew though, but that picture of her on the CD might have led to great subsequent success. For her, not for him.

Because as Shell grew older and John got crazier, Shell persuaded her mother, who had started as an online psychic and graduated as a psychiatric nurse, to get John Clammer confined. Then Shell’s life changed. She became an actress and went off to the college in Amesbury, which he called Hell House.

John’s hope was that she be saved and they perform Christian music together. Shell’s hope was that a stone be tied around John’s neck and he be cast into the depths of the sea. It was John’s equally crazy but well-spoken aunt Calla Lily who made them get married. A dreadful idea.

“You yourself told me I was a good man,” John whined to Shelby on the phone. “I can sing and we’ll pray together.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Shell. “Please, John.”

“Look, I’ll forgive you,” John said. “Just let me take you home.”

Best not to mention the restraining order, she thought. But she was losing patience.

“I forgive you too, Johnny. Just… let me have my life.”

Crazy John scorned her new life. When he began to tell her about his new job, she rather lost it. It was a damn good job too, in Boone National Forest, he said.

“Doin’ what, John? Cooking crank? Cutting up bear bladders? Poaching ginseng? Growing dope? Ain’t you too old for that shit?”

Not that he was capable of any of it. The methmeisters considered him a snitch and a thief. He couldn’t tell ginseng from poison ivy (you could trust her on that). He didn’t have the wherewithal to maintain a weed crop. And a bear would have his bladder for lunch before John found the safety on a Mossberg.

“You’re a damn bitch, ain’t you?” John asked. “Fuckin’ little bitch movie whore, ain’t you?”

“Now John,” she said, “that’s unfair. John, listen to me. Do you know what a Personal Threat Assessment Team is?”

“What is it?”

“A Personal Threat Assessment Team is a security force the industry provides. They’re monitoring our conversation now. If you persist, I’ll have to ask them to step in.”

She took advantage of the ensuing silence to hang up.

Thankfully he did not call back. While she was at the computer, she e-mailed her mother in Whitesville. Her mom didn’t care for her much but always wanted to go to the festival at Sundance when Shell was featured. Mom had become a nurse, raising herself in the world. She had never talked to Shell from one year to the next until the two films came out, the first one at Sundance.

MOM HOWARU JCLAMMER STILL LOCKED UP? KEEP ME INFORMED HEAR?

Shell did not like e-mail. She always felt there was someone listening, reading. She trusted the telephone more, even to buy weed. For all she knew John Clammer might somehow be out there. He was timid but clever and resourceful in a way.

Her mother got back to her in half an hour, as she had taken to doing of late.

HONEYBUNCH JC GOT TOOK TO THE ART SHOP TO PAINT PLATES THIS MORNING AND HE COME BACK WITH THE BUS. HE’S NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE HIS CELL PHONE BUT THEY USE OTHER PEOPLE’S. FONDEST LOVE MOM.

Fondest love, Shell thought. Right, I’m fine, Mom. She made a mental note to ask John for one of his painted plates. A religious one might be nice. God Bless Our Happy Home, maybe. She might give it to Maud for Christmas.