Posted by ProfX on March 04, 2001 at 16:08:17:
by ProfX (c) 2000
If I lie here still long enough, naked in the snow, I might feel it. I might feel what she did. I want to forget my name. I want to keep my eyes open. I want my last breath to be hers. If I sit still long enough, I will kiss the pinhole through which she left the planet.
Nothing of me is still. I am a fat mass, fidgeting. A chorus in my mind mumbles a lifetime of shopping lists. Wet prickles pierce my skin.
The sky cocooning me is the same rising blue, fresh after the snow with cotton wisps, as it was yesterday. It betrays nothing of the imminent twilight. I need only sit still.
Was it yesterday? As on many other afternoons, I was in the town's sport utility, parked in some brush off Main Street at the Vermont border, pretending to wait for speeders and drunks. To my good fortune I am easily occupied, because nothing ever happens. Which is not to say that a speeder never comes. But when the weather is clear, as it was after the brief snow, I can sit and watch the sky, and look for the first tinge of purple that will melt the day and blur the horizon. No matter how you concentrate, you never capture the moment the color starts changing. It's just there, suddenly. Nature, the great abstractionist, covers over her classical landscape, her hills with dappled-on pines, with a unity of color that admits no question. Nothing ever happens.
Except now. The radio cracks the silence with the voice of Ralph, one of my deputies. He says, "We've got a dead female here, Pete, a body, a few yards down the hill off the A3." His words are edgeless, sober, like the TV cop he always wanted to be. As though he is telling me a truck broke an axle, a student lost his house keys and has a dogbite.
But I know it is Ginger. Obviously it is Ginger.
My heart surrenders. Am I dreaming? Am I breathing? Ralph speaks. "She's thirty or so, Pete, exposure. About a mile this side of the North Adams line. Just past the old electric plant. Come in." We haven't had a surprise corpse inside the town limits for three years, no homicides or traffic deaths, two cases of illegal firearms, a few dozen fights reported, drug possessions, a burglary a month, accidents, lots of drunks. And now my Ginger is delivered to me by Ralph like a dead porcupine. I see myself emptying a cartridge into his face, then sliding in a second clip. I am not a violent man. He asks again, "You coming?"
I am robot. I tell him, "I'm on my way." Against regulations, I switch off the set. I am soot outlined in the snow, waiting for an overdue notice of my vaporization. I was born in 1945. Fifty-four years dissolve into one absurd thought: Don't be Ginger. So speaks every cell, every heartbeat. I haven't seen a body. The dead girl doesn't have to be Ginger. Obviously it is Ginger. I know the spot. It could only be her. But I have seen nothing. Nothing need be.
I am floating above the vehicle. A body that is mine moves a stick and a steering wheel and presses pedals with its feet. In even strips the road slips off behind a motionless car, trees and snow snake their way around it. Driving at a legal speed - I always set the good example, even now, lest I go off a cliff - I have ten minutes of purgatory. An infinity to pretend that Ginger is alive. Lips that are mine murmur an echoless prayer into the embers of my soul. Don't be Ginger. Don't be Ginger.
Hit the brakes, turn around, and it will never be. But my body drives. Houses and road signs keep moving around the vehicle. I try to remember my mother's prayers, the forgotten church hours of my childhood, the mysteries of the Eastern rites. Every Sunday morning I show up for forty silent minutes at the Episcopalian service. That is where my voters congregrate. They've tried to read my impossible name, and none of them can pronounce it. Don't they know I don't belong among them? Perhaps it is because I never correct them. I think: Don't be Ginger.
Ralph has called me out to the place by the town road where I found Ginger two months ago, in the snow. That was in mid-November. The snows started early this winter and haven't let up since. I had just served up support papers for a mother and child in North Carolina to Jarvis. He lives in a shack off the forest-ranger road, on the other side of the valley from the town. He has a wood heater and not much else. For laughs we call him Grizzly Adams, and sometimes Unabomber, because that's what he looks like. But he is harmless, whatever the stories. He lacks the inner fire of the ruthless bastard, which I can tell because I know it well.
On that November afternoon, Jarvis just took the papers at the door. Then he thanked me. Trudging back to the car, almost laughing, I spotted what looked like a prone body in the snow on the opposite slope, on the town side, off the main road. I jumped into the car and made a lot of snow fly off the tires pointlessly, and finally slipped around to the right spot about ten breathless minutes later. It was at the bend in the A3, where the road runs along the ridge with a patch of trees on either side, and you lose sight of the buildings and get a glimpse only of the valley and the far hills. And Jarvis's shack, if you look long enough.
Feeling queasy already, I heaved myself over the guard rail and practically slid down thirty feet of wet brush to find her. She was curled up inside the hole she had dug in the snow bank. I saw that she had made an angel, like when we were kids. She had flapped her arms and legs to get an angel shape in the snow. Now she was curled up inside her angel, in her convenience store coat. Ankle-length and gray, it looked like a big corduroy rag with black lace boots, all shiny, sticking out on one end, and long straggly hair, almost the same sheen as the boots, sticking out the other.
Was the subject already frozen? I was pretty sure it was a female, because of the hair. I almost moaned, thinking: I can't deal with this. Call it in.
But she stirred. Remembering the authorities entrusted in me, I spoke up: "Hey there, what are you doing?" Brilliant.
She practically screamed, jerking instantly into an upright seated position, pointy boots facing me, hands deep in the snow to either side, her hair fell back and there a white face emerged to look at me, astonished. My heart jumped. I took a step back and tapped at my hip, forgetting I wasn't carrying a sidearm. Whatever for? I exhaled a short laugh at myself.
She said, "What's so funnee?"
The voice was high pitched, girlish. She seemed disoriented. Obviously. I was, too. Her face was long, and pale as a blue-white china plate, as though she had achieved the effect with makeup. Big dark eyes, black-rimmed, long lashes, a large forehead and severe straight nose, a long bright lipstick line now held straight and tight, pointy chin, bony cheeks, a gray and pained look under the eyes. Heart-rending. Beautiful. Everything around us was still and white.
I suddenly felt very large and stupid, and at the same moment she put her head down into her knees. She spoke again. "I'm fine, actually. There's no need." There was no girl in her now, the voice had the depth to carry an old farmer's burdens. I gulped, clenched my fists, and thought it was about time I got control of the situation. A lot of stupid things to say ran through my mind. Finally I said: "Can you get up, miss? Are you all right?"
She looked up again, pulled in her feet, and the old coat rose up straight, with the grace of a ghost or a marionette being pulled up to stand. Delicate gloveless hands with long bluish fingers appeared at her sides. She tossed back her hair and stood in front of me, imperiously tall and thin, not much shorter than me, but looking half as wide. She brought her eyes down on me, and again I was stone.
"I am all right, thank you."
Ask her for ID, you idiot. "What is your name, please?"
She was silent, then: "Radunski. Ginger." Having a name that was both pedestrian and sweet seemed to break her spell. Suddenly she was not the ice queen with fire-eyes, just the half-frozen girl, very wet indeed. My dully charismatic machinery of business - "Listen to Pete," as the slogan went - reconnected with its gyroscope.
"You're going to have to come with me now," I said, surprised that I could still assume the same character I play every day, and play so well. "Can you walk up the hill? Are you all right?"
What my secret is, I don't know myself. She bent to the voice, just like the good voters of Williamstown, Massachussetts. She sullenly marched up the hill ahead of me, as though teacher had assigned a week's detention. This was all wrong. She was probably wet to the bone, although she hadn't shivered, and I hadn't assessed whether she was in shock, or dangerous. I had no ID and no idea.
It's good this sort of thing never happens in our town, anyway.
At the vehicle she stood silently by the passenger door as I lugged myself back over the guard rail. There was no sign of another car around. She must have walked. I could always just ask her. Shit, I'm the Sheriff.
"You must be freezing. Let me get you a cover." I was warming up, getting more solicitous. I beeped the hatch open with the key and rummaged in the back while she stood rooted, and finally I presented her with the standard issue blanket from the county clinic, grown a bit moldy from its long marriage to the spare tire. "Here, take off your coat."
She stared. I said, "Now, you have to get in the car and you can't do it all wet like that." But she was already unbuttoning the coat, and before I was finished it had dropped to the ground, revealing a tight black top with two thin straps over bony but well-trained, broad shoulders. A black skirt, with the same sheen as the boots and the hair, snugged against her lean and wing-like hips. I held off a series of helpless gulps, felt my stomach hollow out, and tried to ignore the hairs wrapping around my testicles and warning of the imminent downward rush of blood that would make me feel and look the fool. If she was here to kill herself, then she'd sure decided to look her best.
Now she was opening the door herself. The front door! She got herself seated and held out a hand out to take the blanket from me. "We can leave the coat," she said. "I need a new one, anyway." Wondering whether the coat was evidence of something, I still did as I was told. Why didn't I just give her the keys and my badge? I closed my eyes and tried hard to remember five minutes before. What was it like, being a cop? Then I went around to the driver's side and got in. This close to her, but without needing to look, I felt much stronger. She was really wet, still holding the blanket in a bundle on her lap. Had anyone driven by? I hoped no one would see us.
I decided the sound of the engine would help, so I started the car and shifted it into motion. This got her moving, too. She put the blanket over her shoulders and worked it down around her back. I got back to my investigation.
"Miss Radunski. You seem to be distressed about something." Actually she seemed totally apathetic, but it was a way of hinting at the obvious. She said nothing. "You're going to have to explain what you were doing back there, in the snow. You could have frozen to, to. First thing, we're going to take you to the hospital."
She gasped. Her hand shot out, yet landed gently over mine on the gearstick, held my fingers firmly for a moment. I was lost again, for good. I knew that she didn't want a hospital or police reports, and I knew that I would protest and then end up driving her wherever she asked.
It was the only time she touched me.
Two months later, on the way to Ralph's dead-body call, I remember my decision, or my capitulation to the great desire I felt, and I realize I was only giving her a second and third chance to kill herself. How could I have been so blind? Thinking about her, seeing her in town practically every day, calling by surreptitiously with a baker's dozen of cream cookies, devising impossible honeymoon plans, and yet never again recalling, after that first night, where and how I had found her, and the great danger? Now I can almost feel her hand over mine on the stick. My heart twists and my eyes blur.
Then I lose about five minutes. Just blacked out. Nothing like this has ever happened before. I don't even drink. I kept driving through it. The next thing I know, I am wobbling out the passenger door, already parked neatly behind Ralph on the side of the road. And Ralph approaches, a tall man with meaty shoulders, block-jawed, blonde locks trailing out beneath his deputy's hat. He holds his hands at his hips and points them flat at me, as though to say: Don't blame me, I only found her. Somehow I'm standing, trying not to look at my feet.
It's Ralph's cue. He says, "DOA, Chief." As though he's practiced the line for a year and a half while smoking behind the wheel on traffic watch. Again one of me wants to kill him. Another of me, always clever, wants to tell him the body hasn't been taken anywhere, so she hasn't arrived and must be dead on the scene. The business me manages to croak out a word that must be, "Where?" As though I don't know. Ralph turns and points back fifty feet to the hillside, then takes a few steps in that direction. Something starts moving my legs forward. I can't feel my stomach, or a chest or a crotch, just a head with a thousand voices and a thick throat stumbling off on four shaky limbs.
"Grizzly Adams saw it from his shack the other side of the river and called us. I got right out here, twenty minutes ago." I try not to think, but nothing shuts up. The wind laughs, the snow roars as though aflame. Ralph was supposed to call me first, not drive out here! What a buffoon. Twenty-five and a dream to the local girls. (Don't be Ginger.) His grades were too poor to get him into the College, which must have been very lousy, because his uncle is the President of the College. But what the President lacks in pull with the Admissions Department, he makes up for in power over town politics. (Don't be Ginger.) Taking on Ralph was the deal that gained my re-election in a close race against Dick Ford, the favorite with the hunters. Dick was stiffer than a churchman's collar and would have turned the place back into Salem, except for the stroke that finished him off a month after the election, anyway. (Don't be Ginger.) Four or five times since I've stopped myself from firing Ralph, or from slipping a plane ticket to Malibu into his paycheck, to see if he gets the message. I think all this, in my last moments of hope, because this is the first time I ever wanted to just shoot him in the back.
It is Ginger. I almost stumble into the angel before I see her, naked, blue, and stiff. I jerk away as though blinded, and concentrate instantly on Ralph. How did he get behind me? "Ralph, you've put bootprints all over..." I almost say all over her angel but recover and finish: "...the scene. Get the fuck back up to your car, call Doctor White, and sit there." He is stung, reaches for words, then obeys my voice like a cow who has felt the prod. He turns around and practically bolts uphill.
Where are her clothes? I keep my back to her and edge my way blindly around the spot where I saw the body lying, flat on the slope, her head uphill, her feet downhill. When I hear that Ralph must be back up on the road, I turn suddenly and fall to my knees at her feet.
She is magnificent, my dream of forty nights, my bride-to-never-be. I was just a minor interruption, as I should have seen from the first. While I spun castles with curlicues in the sky, she was resolute. She has gone into her abyss with open eyes and a proud will. Naked. This time she didn't curl up. She just kept making her angel, until her arms and legs gave out. At her hips loose fists look up at the sky. Her long toes point upright and almost cross. Her back arches in a last defiant reaching of the body for more life, now still, thrusting a rich diamond bush towards me as an inhospitable crown. A crown too the full splaying of long straight hair around her head, like a saint's halo in an icon. Her eyes are wide and glazed with blue, her mouth opens to nothing. A frozen tongue peeks out just behind the lips. She is an alien blue, from head to toe. The determination she put into her death still echoes off each leaf and snowflake. You will never know me. My head is bowed, my hands are clasped in prayer, I breathe heavily and shut my eyes, but the vision of her has burned its way through me. This is not the sad girl of two months ago, who went out to die in the snow, this - it - she - if - I - but -
"Pete, you old rascal, it's sad but you can see it every week at County Central if you like. Get a hold of yourself, Sheriff." Doctor White's scratchy voice shatters the still of winter. It must be twenty, thirty minutes later. And by now my pants are all wet. I don't want to look.
Coming Up in Part Two:
More flashbacks and blackouts, Ginger's former career, a murder, an unholy desecration, more murder, and Sherriff Pete prepares his next campaign!
(If I ever write it, of course...)