Dark Places

he knew something or heard something, or if maybe his debts had triggered some horrible vengeance. Maybe I could believe in Ben again, which is what I wanted to do. I knew now why I’d never gone to visit him. It was too tempting, too easy to ignore the prison walls, and just see my brother, hear the Ben-specific cadence of his voice, that downward slope at the end of every sentence, like it might be the last thing he was ever going to say. Just seeing him, I remembered things, nice things, or not even nice. Just regular things. I could get a whiff of home. Way back when everyone was alive. Man, I wanted that.

I stopped at the 7-Eleven on the way out of town, bought a map and some cheese-flavored crackers that I discovered were diet when I bit into them. I ate them anyway, heading south, the orange powder floating through the car. I should have stopped for a meal on the way to Oklahoma. The air on the highway was thick with tempting smell-pockets: french fries, fast-food fish, fried chicken. But I was in an unnatural panic, worried for no good reason I would miss Runner if I stopped, and so I ate the diet crackers and a mealy apple I’d found on the corner of my kitchen counter.

Why was the note, that dirty note that wasn’t addressed to Ben, mixed up in a box of Michelle’s stuff? If Michelle had found out Ben had a girlfriend, she’d have lorded it over him, all the more if he tried to keep it a secret. Ben hated Michelle. Ben had tolerated me, had dismissed Debby, but he’d hated Michelle actively. I remembered him pulling her out of his room by an arm, her whole body almost sideways, Michelle up on tiptoes, moving with him to keep from being dragged. He tossed her out and she fell against the wall, and he told her if she ever came in his room again, he’d kill her. His teeth flared whenever he talked to her. He screamed at her for always being underfoot—she’d hover outside his door day and night, listening. Michelle always knew everyone’s secrets, she never had a conversation that didn’t have an angle. I remembered that more vividly since discovering her bizarre notes. If you don’t have money, gossip isn’t bad leverage. Even inside one’s own family.

“Ben talks to himself a lot,” Michelle announced at breakfast one morning, and Ben reached across the table, knocking her plate into her lap, and grabbed her by the shirt collar.

“Leave me the fuck alone,” he screamed. And then my mom calmed him down, got him to go back to his room, lectured us, as always. Later we found bits of egg that had catapulted up onto the plastic chandelier over the table, the chandelier that looked like it came from a pizza parlor.

So what did that mean? Ben wouldn’t kill his family because his little sister found out he had a girlfriend.

I passed a field of cows, standing immobile, and thought about growing up, all the rumors of cattle mutilation, and people swearing it was Devil worshipers. The Devil lurked nearby in our Kansas town, an evil that was as natural and physical as a hillside. Our church hadn’t been too brimstoney, but the preacher had certainly nurtured the idea: The Devil, goat-eyed and bloody, could take over your heart just as easily as Jesus, if you weren’t careful. In every town I lived in, there were always the “Devil kids,” and the “Devil houses,” just like there was always a killer clown driving around in a white van. Everyone knew of some old, vacant warehouse on the edge of town where a stained mattress sat on the floor, bloody from sacrifice. Everyone had a friend of a cousin who had actually seen a sacrifice but was too scared to give details.

I was ten minutes into Oklahoma, a good three hours to go, and I started smelling something overpoweringly sweet but rotten. It stang my eyes, made them water. I had a ridiculous quiver of fear that my Devil-think had summoned the beast. Then in the distance, the churning sky turned the color of a bruise, I saw it. Paper plant.

I turned the radio on scan—station 1, station 2, station 3— blasts of unpleasant noise, static, and ads for cars and more static, so I flipped it right back off.

Just past a sign with a picture of a cowboy—Welcome to Lidger-wood, Oklahoma, Pardner! —I pulled off the ramp and headed into the town, which turned out to be a busted-down tourist trap of a city. It had once fashioned itself as an Old West locale: The main street was all frosted glass and faux-saloons and shoppes. One storefront called itself The Olde Photo Stoppe, a place where families could commission sepia photos of themselves in frontier garb. In the window hung a poster-sized print: the father holding a lasso, trying to look menacing under a hat too big for him; the little girl in a calico dress and bonnet, too young to get the joke; the mother, dressed as a whore, giving an uncomfortable smile, her arms crossed in front of her thighs where her petticoat was slit. Next to the photo hung a For Sale sign. Another matching sign next door at Daphne’s Daffy Taffy, more For Sales at Buffalo Bill’s Amazing Arcade and a storefront with the ridiculous stretch of a name, Wyatt Earp’s Slurpies. The whole place seemed dusty. Even the defunct waterslide loop-de-looping in the distance was plugged with dirt.

Bert Nolan’s Group Home for Men was just three blocks off the downtown drag, a square, low building with a tiny front yard infested with foxtail weeds. I’d always liked foxtail as a kid, it appealed to my literal brain, because it looked like it sounded: a long, thin stem with a length of fuzz at the top, just like a fox’s tail, but green. They grew all over our farm—entire meadows were given over to the stuff. Michelle and Debby and I would break off the tops and tickle each other under our wrists. My mom taught us the colloquial names for everything: lamb’s ear, coxcomb, all those plants that lived up to their titles. A lamb’s ear is as soft as a lamb’s ear. Coxcomb actually looks like a rooster’s red comb. I got out of the car and fluttered my hands across the tops of the foxtail. Maybe I’d grow a garden of weeds. Windmillgrass actually fans out at the top like windmill blades. Queen Ann’s lace is white and frilly. Witchgrass would be appropriate for me. Some devil’s claw.

The door to Bert Nolan’s Group Home was made of metal, painted dark gray like a submarine. It reminded me of the doors in Ben’s prison. I rang the bell and waited. Across the street two teenage boys rode their bikes in lazy, wide circles, interested. I rang the bell again and gave the metal a bang that failed to reverberate inside. I debated asking the guys across the way if anyone was home, just to break the silence. As they were looping closer to me —watcha doing there, lady?—the door opened onto a pixie-sized man in bright white sneakers, ironed jeans, a Western shirt. He jiggled the toothpick in his mouth, not looking at me, flipping through a copy of Cat Fancy magazine.

“Don’t open for the night til …” he trailed off when he saw me. “Oh, sorry honey. We’re a men’s hostel, you have to be a man and over eighteen.”

“I’m looking for my dad,” I said, leaning into my drawl. “Runner Day. Are you the manager?”

“Ha! Manager, accountant, priest, cleaning boy,” he said opening the door. “Recovering alcoholic. Recovering gambler. Recovering deadbeat. Bert Nolan. This is my place. Come in, sweetheart, n’re-mind me of your name.”

He opened the door onto a room full of cots, the strong odor of bleach rising up from the floor. The elfin Bert led me through the rows of thin beds, each one still indented from the night, to an office just his size, just my size, which held one small desk, a file cabinet, and two foldout chairs we sat down on. The fluorescent light was not flattering to his face, which was pocked with dark, dimpled pores.

“I’m not a weirdo, by the way,” he said, flapping the Cat Fancy at me. “I just got a cat, never had one before. Don’t really like her much so far. She was supposed to be good for morale, but so far she just pisses in the beds.”

“I have a cat,” I volunteered, surprising myself with my sudden, intense fondness for Buck. “If they go outside their litter box, it’s usually because they’re angry.”