The Best American Mystery Stories 2001

Michael Hyde Her Hollywood

From Alaska Quarterly Review

The girl was Mary Alice Bunt and they found her by the river. My brother Wade and I thought we’d see the print her body made but rain came and the river jumped its banks before we could find the spot. It’s a good thing the search party found her when they did. She’s liable to have been washed away and lost because everything came rushing in that brown flood: flat tires, TV antennas, a doll carriage like one I used to push.

The dead girl before she was dead lived in Tobo. In wagon train days there used to be a Tobo Hotel. That’s how the place got its name. It was a layover for travelers, someplace for them to steal a breather, get a drink, maybe spend the night. But the hotel’s gone now and it’s nothing but cheap trailers — one lived-in box after the other — lined up along Tobo Road.

Mary Alice Bunt was pretty. I know this for two reasons. Reason number one is because her picture was front-page in both morning and evening Dispatches. Next day they put her picture in the obituary section, too, except smaller. Reason number two I know Mary Alice Bunt was pretty is because Mom said so. Wade and I’d just come home from school and there Mom was bawling her eyes out.

Her makeup wasn’t smeared so I figured she hadn’t been crying long. “Always the pretty ones that die” she was saying over and over and didn’t have to say anything else because I know she was thinking I was safe as could be. Plain Jane she liked to call me, teasing me to get me shouting my lungs that my name was Connie not stupid Jane. She got a big kick out of it and laughed like it was the joke of the century. Even when she’d let me sit down beside her at the vanity she’d start comparing our faces, hers with mine, and she’d always throw in “You can thank your father for that nose.” The way she said it I knew I didn’t need to be thanking anybody.

When Mom was crying over Mary Alice, Wade and I tried to give her a hug because that’s what I thought she was expecting but she pushed us out of the way and started walking around the kitchen — her head bent a little bit to the side — moving like a statue would move if it could. I don’t need to tell you that Mom was an actress at the community theater. She taught me and Wade from the very start about drama, which she said translated into English as meaning “larger than life.” Thanks to her, Wade and I were drama experts. We’d have to be, the way she changed moods like clothing. We all remember Mom’s Mary Alice act as one of her final performances because ten days later she left us for Hollywood. It’s strange how those two things happened, boom-boom, one right after the other, that girl dying and my mother going away.

I didn’t know Mary Alice Bunt but she was a junior at my school, two grades above me and in the same grade as my brother Wade. Wade didn’t know her either but that was because Wade didn’t know anybody. He wasn’t smart about people or in general but I still loved him in the way you have to love dogs that can only stare at you when you’ve thrown a stick for them to fetch. At school the kids called Wade LD. He was in the special class for kids with Learning Disabilities. There were only three other LDs at our school. Wade and them had class in one room painted bright yellow over the cinderblocks. “Hey LD,” kids said when they saw Wade in the hall. “Hey, LD, what’s one plus one?” Wade was older than me but I always thought of him as my little brother. Like Mom said once: Wade’s head’s just not what its supposed to be. He’ll never be like other kids, no matter how hard he studies or practices or tries.

When she was alive I never would’ve cared who Mary Alice Bunt was. Or anyone like her. And since Wade wasn’t smart about people and since I didn’t care about them, he and I were always together. I’d find him each lunch period standing at the front of the cafeteria, straining his neck 180 degrees until he’d see me. The kids at school made fun of us both because we were together so much. Somebody saw me dragging him by the hand one time home from school, so after that everybody called us boyfriend and girlfriend and sometimes made kissy noises so loud the teachers could hear. The teachers didn’t do anything and I stopped expecting they would.

Except for the kids bugging, I didn’t mind Wade. He needed somebody and I was the only somebody left. When Mom left for her Hollywood, Dad turned into a ghost and sat all the time in front of the tube, watching talk shows and how-to programs on the public channel. He stopped brushing his hair. It stuck together and shot in all directions, it was so oily. He let his beard grow out too and would sit rubbing his hand across his face, making that sandpaper sound I can’t take for a minute. He only moved for the bathroom. He’d make it to bed at night sometimes but usually he stretched out on the couch and cloaked himself with that ratty black afghan. He was like an invalid, he loved Mom that much.

I tried not to notice but our house was falling apart, creaking and complaining anytime you’d move. The barn got a big hole in the roof and let in rain. Wade and I had to take care of the cows but we stopped shoveling their shit every single day. One heifer would stare at us and bawl when she couldn’t find a warm place. I used to take pride that we didn’t live in one of those cheap Tobo trailers but after Mom ran off that pride shriveled up to nothing.

That’s when I got the idea to look for where Mary Alice Bunt died. Finding it wasn’t easy. First Wade and I tried piecing together pictures from the news and the papers. We spent whole afternoons zigzagging from our farm to Tobo and the Tunnel Bridge further downstream. It was exhausting even though our river was more like a creek. You only needed twelve steps to get from one bank to the other.

When mine and Wade’s searching didn’t work we tried talking to Tobo kids. The ones I asked acted like they never heard of Mary Alice. Her living seemed as forgettable as the plastic milk jug some were kicking around because they didn’t have a ball. A part of Mary Alice — a memory, I mean — had to be somewhere. After all she’d lived her life there, under those stupid pink and yellow and green pool-party lights hung from the trailers that tried to fool you into thinking Tobo was a happy place.

Mary Alice’s little brother was the one finally that showed us the way. We didn’t know it was him at first so he was a lucky find, sitting in the street, pushing a toy submarine across gravel. He was eight or nine and dusted white from the shale. Wade said to him, “Do you know where they found that dead girl?” and I looked at Wade queer for saying it that way but that’s when the boy nodded and told us he was the dead girl’s brother.

“Can you show us where they found her?” I asked.

He led us down to the river like we were visiting tourists who’d never been before. I watched the thick band of dirt around his neck when he ducked under briars and jumped over the black logs in our way. Wade had trouble keeping up because he was tall and sort of large and said a couple times that he was gonna go back. “Shut up, Wade,” I said. And he did.

The boy took us to a place where the river snaked hard around a bend. Three gray trees leaned at the water, their roots and the bank had been worn away so. You could tell there’d been the flood even though the high water was gone. A lawn chair with all the stringing busted out sat up straight in the shallows. In other spots fallen branches made it look like somebody’d been trying to build a bonfire the way the branches had stacked themselves. The boy ran for the chair and kicked it over into the water.

“There’s where,” he said. He pointed with his submarine at a small green island halfway across the river. He was proud to be showing us.

Wade ran ahead too and bent over the lump of land. He was wearing his cutoffs and creek-shoes and at its deepest, the water came up to Wade’s knees. “I think this is where her head was. I can see her skull-print,” he said.

I followed him, looked to where he meant, but he was seeing what he wanted to see, trying to impress me. His face was wrinkled and stupid with excitement. I wanted him to go away. Suddenly all I could think about was that: how I wanted to be alone. In this place where Mary Alice Bunt had spent the last seconds of her life I wanted to be by myself. The small green island probably not much bigger than Mary Alice had been was somehow mine.

“No, that’s not it,” I said. “The boy’s lying.”

This was all it took for Wade to shove Mary Alice’s brother. “I’ll teach you for lying,” Wade said. He snatched the submarine and zoomed it through the air high above the squealing boy’s head.

“Give it back to him,” I said. Wade looked at me ashamed. Finally he gave the toy back then yelled after Mary Alice’s brother, who ran off toward Tobo.

I looked at the green island, the size of a coffin, and imagined Mary Alice there face-down like the newspaper mentioned. I imagined her underwear yanked to her ankles, her shirt pulled up over her head, her goodies — as my mother called them — showing. I wanted to be alone with her. What was it like, living and dying in your pretty body? I wanted to ask.

The next day after school I told Wade I was going for a walk without him. “Why, Connie? Why?” he asked.

I told him I was sick of him hanging around all the time. I told him I needed space and that I didn’t want to be his girlfriend anymore.

He was about to turn on the waterworks so I walked off quick enough so I didn’t have to see. I heard him following, so I ran. “Go away! Leave me alone!”

In Tobo four kids were playing Maypole with snapped clothesline and the pole it was tied to. They ducked in and out of one another’s way until they tangled and ended up arguing over whose fault it’d been. I could hear the sound of the river humming just under their angry voices.

Across the street two boys my age were rolling tires around a car they’d set up on blocks. They had their shirts off so I could see the tattoos on their arms. They watched me, stopped what they were doing and watched me. I stared them straight in the eyes.

The one boy’s face looked like you were supposed to see it from one side. The other half was all messed up and pushed together like it’d been smashed by a brick. His mouth had space where teeth were supposed to be and when he smiled a black nothing spread between his lips.

The other boy’s face was wide open like a book and red with freckles that matched his hair. His right arm was bigger than his left. “Woo-hoo,” he whistled. I just stared at him, thinking how easily he could’ve been the one that’d killed Mary Alice, thinking you are the one you are the one you are the one until the boys and their car were no longer in sight. Until I’d walked so far they disappeared along with their litterbox trailers.

I got to the spot where the river turned. The chair Mary Alice’s brother kicked over was still on its side. Small crayfish scooted when my shadow came near. The only difference was that one of the three leaning trees had finally given up and fallen. Its branches speared down into the water a few feet from Mary Alice’s island.

The water was cold and I could feel mud and pebbles squishing inside my creek-shoes. The water swallowed me to my knees but I didn’t care. Mary Alice’s island was in front of me, so bright and green and with a single strand of blue chicory that looked more a silk flower than real poking up for the sun. I lay down like the island was a bed I hadn’t slept in before. I could feel it resist me, me resisting it until I stopped caring about mud and dirt and resistance dropped away.

Putting together the lost life of a pretty girl, I started with her killer. Was he fat? Thin? Bald? Tall? All the men I’d ever seen flashed in my head. It was like choosing the right color to paint a room. Lighter or darker? Brown? Black? Or red? Red, yes it would be red, and I thought of the boy fixing the car. Not the boy with the smashed face. The pretty girl’s murderer would not be so ugly. He could be plain but not so ugly as to be scary and not so scary as to make the last moments of her life unbearable.

So I thought of the red-haired boy. He was easy to make in my mind. I had him standing over me: his face dripping red gums dripping red freckles dripping. He was hurrying to undo his pants with his thin arm. He pushed me down. He told me he was going to kill me and that I might as well enjoy it. I might as well enjoy it while it lasted and ride the rest of my life out in a limousine. His hands were on me pressing together my breasts, his fingers fumbling. I was there on the point of something when he turned me over and pressed my face into the green-grass island, into the fish silt and the smell of the river and I couldn’t breathe anymore. Inside my head I was screaming: “You’re dead, Connie. Now you’re dead.”

My hands were where his hands had been and for a second my heart stopped. It wasn’t a complete stop but more like my heart couldn’t decide whether or not to keep on beating, like somebody waving her arms to keep balanced on a circus wire.

After that first time at the river I’d been murdered many times. And never the same murderer twice.

There was a big man covered with thick hair across his chest and down his back. Dark eyebrows lowered like feathers over his eyes.

There was a man with a hump.

A man with twisted teeth.

A man who whistled the entire time it happened.

They’d all tell me what they were going to do before they did it. They weren’t horrible men as people might imagine. They were just men.

When I couldn’t get to the river I’d stretch out on my bed, turning my head into the pillow and breathing it in like it was Mary Alice’s island. Once Wade walked in on me when I was being murdered. It was raining. The river was so far away in the colored party lights of Tobo. I was on my bed and waiting to die. Mr. Farris, second-period algebra, had forced me onto my stomach right away. He held me by the hair. I knew with one flip of his wrist he could push my face into the mud and make me breathe the river into my lungs. He made me repeat again and again that I loved him, that I’d never leave him, that I’d follow him anywhere. I kept thinking of his hand clutching my hair, his gold watch wrapping his wrist just below that hand, the gold watch I had to notice every time he bent over my desk smelling good or wrote on the board. I heard that watch tick-ticking in my ears. “You’re dead, Connie,” I started to say when he finally pushed my head into the mud.

That’s when Wade walked in. I’m sure I looked strange to him, my nightgown pulled over my head, my legs swim-kicking at the bedroom air.

“Help me,” I said to him, before the river found its way to my throat, before it drowned my voice.

He pulled my arms, slid the pillow from under my face, but he was too late. I told him so. “I’m dead,” I said. “You let me die.”

“What are you talking about, Connie? What?” His breathing was hard. He was staring at my breasts.

For a crazy second I started memorizing Wade’s face. His fat nose. His marble-blue eyes. His open mouth that could change from pain to pleasure in a second. He’d never yet been one of my murderers. I felt him taking shape in my mind. But the more I looked at him the more impossible he seemed and I said “No.” Wade couldn’t be a murderer no matter how hard I imagined.

Then came word from Mother. The postcard she sent was plain white and said GENERIC POSTCARD on the front and on the back along with our address she’d scratched a message in big letters. She was reading for several things, she said. Quite a few “independent films,” she said. “Acting is hard life,” she said. She signed the card Francine Barlowe. Meaning her the actress. Not Francine Pratt my mother.

I got a sheet of paper and pen to write her and tell her all the things that’d happened. Like how Dad was going out nights. Or how Wade’s teacher sent home that note saying he wasn’t progressing like he should. Then I remembered Mom hadn’t told us where she was going exactly; Hollywood was all. I looked on the postcard, thinking she’d squeezed her new address into a corner. The only thing I found was the postmark — Norristown, PA, not Hollywood, CA — smudged over the stamp of an orange-bellied bluebird.

I shoved that postcard way back in the kitchen junk drawer — behind the Scotch tape and screwdrivers and worn-out batteries — so no one would ever have to know about it but me.

One day, on our way home from school Wade and I were walking along the road, kicking up gravel. We walked to school every day just so we wouldn’t have to ride the bus with those Tobo kids. I was listening to him tell about how he’d been the only one left at dodge ball during gym and no matter who threw the ball he’d been quick enough to dodge it. The game couldn’t start over until he was got, so this guy came running at him — into the circle where he wasn’t allowed! — and blasted the ball into Wade’s face. Wade got a bloody nose, had to go to the nurse, but the game kept on going. “No harm done,” was what Wade’s gym teacher said.

I was staring at Wade’s bandaged nose and thinking how it could mean No harm done when Arnold Berry drove up beside us and honked. Wade jumped in his skin but I’d seen Arnold coming. It was hard to miss his dark green Thunderbird skulking along the empty road.

“You want a ride?” he said wagging his hand out the window to get our attention. He was a senior at our school, the kind of person like me and Wade you passed in the hall for four years but wouldn’t take good notice to. The funny thing was I’d noticed him. He’d killed me before. I don’t remember how he did it but I know I was staring into his pimply face and feeling his wild sideburns scratching at my skin. He had nice green eyes. Which is the main reason I chose him. His eyes made him a standout to me when he was a nobody to everybody else.

“So you want a ride?” he said again. Wade, all of a sudden deaf and dumb, just stared at him. Wade was afraid of older kids, especially seniors who drove their own cars. When I looked at Wade he was shaking his head at me. I knew he was saying “No no no no” inside but I told Arnold “Yes.”

Wade climbed into the back seat where two giant speakers spit out loud music. I looked at him in the side mirror, could see him covering his ears, so I decided not to look anymore.

“You like Bon Jovi?” Arnold said to me.

“Sure,” I said though I couldn’t tell a Bon Jovi from a White-snake, a Whitesnake from a Poison. I started to bob my head too like I was into it.

Arnold drove with one hand on the steering wheel, the other hand behind my shoulder, his arm propped along the back of the front seat. I kept waiting for him to grab me but he didn’t. I guess because Wade was in the back.

Arnold didn’t say anything the entire ride home. I figured out he smoked from all the cellophane wrappers on the floor. They crunched every time I’d move my foot. The pine air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror had faded. The car windshield was filthy except for two half-circles where the wipers had washed clean. Arnold chewed at something and kept leaning out the window to spit. He would’ve been the worst boyfriend but as a murderer he was fine.

When he dropped Wade and me off at our lane I stalled a few minutes by the car door. Arnold just kept chewing whatever it was that was in his mouth and looked straight ahead at the road.

“You want something?” he said finally. He turned his head like he was watching the words form inside me.

“I want you for a date,” I told him, “but you have to ask me first.”

Arnold’s eyebrows raised up a bit but lowered then like he was enjoying the taste of what I’d said. I could see Wade fidgeting at the side of the road. Finally Arnold nodded. “OK. How ‘bout Saturday?” he answered me, his voice thick.

“One o’clock,” was all I said back, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

When Arnold drove away I knew that I’d be going somewhere I’d never gone before. No going back. Wade asked me to explain it to him but I couldn’t. He’d never understand.

On Saturday Arnold came only fifteen minutes late. I could tell he’d tried to doll himself up. His straggly hair was greased back and he was wearing a shirt I was sure his mother’d pressed for him. “Sorry I’m late,” he said.

“No biggee,” I told him and got into the car. I’d spent all morning getting ready. I wanted everything to be perfect: the short skirt, my underwear.

My father didn’t even argue when I told him I was going out. Before Mom left he would’ve pitched a fit if he knew his twelve-year-old daughter was going on a date with a senior. But not this version of my father. He didn’t even get up from his couch to wave goodbye. He just raised a glass of pop to his mouth, held an ice cube between his lips, then spit it back into the glass.

Wade followed me out to the car. I know he was wanting to go along or not wanting me to go at all but I said “Bye” and that was that. When Arnold drove me away I could see Wade trying to hide himself behind the maple tree in our front yard.

Arnold and I went mini-golfing. He was clumsy and not so good at aiming the ball. I played even worse than he did because I didn’t want him to feel bad, like he was any less a man. I watched his ropy hands draw the putter back. The ball went bouncing out of bounds. Arnold got frustrated and whacked the ball so hard it almost hit a woman’s face. Seeing this I knew he’d be perfect.

We didn’t have much to talk about so over ice cream when I told him I wanted to give him my goodies, he looked shocked. “You’re crazy,” he said at first.

“No, I’m serious.” After that he looked at me and smiled like it was what he’d been wanting all along.

I took him down to the river. To my favorite spot I told him. I didn’t tell him why. I sat on Mary Alice’s island, the grass pushing up under my skirt. I could tell Arnold was thinking that I only wanted kissing. He was sticking his fat tongue into my mouth and grabbing my breasts but he didn’t try any of my clothes so I told him to. He started mumbling about not having a rubber.

“I don’t care,” I said.

That was all he needed. He dropped his pants and I could see the dark stains on his white underwear. This made me think he hadn’t planned to get this far, that maybe he’d respected me. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be Mary Alice. I wanted his rough hands to touch me, to take me from me.

Soon he was rocking back and forth on top of me and it wasn’t at all as I’d imagined. He was like a fish floundering and flapping his arms like he didn’t have any control. The sharp pain was there as I’d expected but he kept saying love things like “Oh Connie oh Connie.”

I said to him what I knew he wanted to hear: “I’ll never leave you. You’re so beautiful I could never leave you.”

His breathing got heavy and he whimpered. Then he altogether stopped. I felt wide and dirty and new and that’s when I said it to him. “Kill me.” Calm and serious. “I don’t care how,” though I wanted him to push my head into the island. But really who could tell killers how to kill?

“Ha-ha,” he laughed.

I repeated myself and he stopped laughing. “You’re one crazy girl,” he said. He started to put on his clothes that were wet in places from the river.

“You have to,” I said again. I didn’t move from where his body had left me. I’m sure my print was pressed into the island.

“Are we gonna go?” he asked zipping his blue jeans.

I didn’t move and looked at him thinking you are the one you are the one you are the one.

“Listen. I can’t do it again if that’s what you want.”

“I want you to kill me.”

“Come on. Get up.” When I didn’t he shook his head, slinging his shirt over his shoulder. “See ya,” he said.

“You can’t go.” I grabbed him by the arm.

He jerked away. I dug in my fingernails, dragging them along his skin, leaving red scratches from his elbow to wrist. He looked at his arm, then at me, and shoved the side of my head. I fell so that my hands and chin pressed into the silt.

All I could do was lie there, my breath hard and caught in my chest like a trapped bird. I thought Arnold was getting ready, wringing his hands, preparing his strength but then I heard walking, his feet shuffling across water and rock. He was leaving. My body expanded but didn’t relax.

A car engine started, revving so loud it beat its way into my mother’s voice who was saying over and again — chanting almost — that always the pretty ones got killed. I tried to picture her overhanging a balcony, under hot Hollywood sun, reading for a director she might sleep with to become an updated Juliet. “Romeo, Romeo,” she would say dragging out the Os like she did. I wanted to see her writing to me and Dad and Wade from a yellow hotel room where someone important was in her bathroom taking a shower. But she was somewhere else, somewhere in Norristown, living in a trailer maybe, reading for no one but herself.

I rolled over to face the horrible sky as the sound of Arnold’s car became smaller and smaller along Tobo Road. “Murderer,” I said. Like it was a proper name.