“Tell me I'm right,” Mandy Somebody says, “and I can get you on the Today show in the morning.”
Maybe even the A Block . . .
She'll break the story. Create public sympathy. Maybe get Amnesty International involved. This can be the next big civil-rights battle. But global. She's already identified the other communities, tribes, groups around the world most likely to carry her theoretical monster gene. Her breath, the smell of beer, saying “monster” loud enough so the orange road-crew guys look over.
She's got guys all over the world she could be flirting with. Even if this date is a bust, she'll find somebody who'll tell her what she wants to hear.
That werewolves and Bigfoot exist. And that he's both.
Guys have listened to worse shit, trying to get a piece of ass.
Even Chewlah guys with their dicks on their face.
Even me. But I tell her, “That thirteen-year-old, her name was Lisa.” I say, “She was my little sister.”
“Oral sex,” Mandy Somebody says, “is not out of the question . . .”
Any guy would be an idiot not to take her home to the reservation. Maybe introduce her to the folks. The whole fam-damnly.
And, standing, I tell her, “You can see the reservation—tonight—but I really need to make a phone call first.”
18
In Miss America's dressing room, in the gray concrete and bare pipes, kneeling beside the one twin bed, Mrs. Clark is saying how having a child isn't always the dream you might imagine.
The rest of us, we're in the hallway to spy. We're all afraid we'll miss some key event and be forced to take another person's word.
Miss America curled on her bed, curled on her side with her face to the gray concrete wall, she doesn't have any lines in this scene.
And, kneeling beside her, Mrs. Clark's huge, dry breasts shelved on the edge of the bed, she says, “You remember my daughter, Cassandra?”
The girl who looked into the Nightmare Box.
Who cut off her eyelashes and then disappeared.
“When she disappeared is the first time I noticed Mr. Whittier's advertisement,” she says. Tucked in a book, in the bedroom she'd left behind, Cassandra had written on a sheet of blank paper: Writers' Retreat. Abandon Your Life for Three Months.
Mrs. Clark says, “I know Mr. Whittier has done this before.”
And Cassandra was here—trapped in this place—the last time.
Kids, she says. When they're little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you're the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it's just the opposite. After that, you're either a liar or a fool or a villain.
With the rest of us scribbling, you can almost not hear for the noise of our pens on paper. We're all writing: either a liar or a fool.
From the Earl of Slander's tape recorder, we hear, “. . . or a villain.”
All Mrs. Clark really knows is, after Cassandra was gone for three months, they found her. The police found Cassandra.
Kneeling beside Miss America's bed, she says, “I agreed to help Whittier because I wanted to know what happened to my child . . .” Mrs. Clark says, “I wanted to know, and she would never tell me . . .”
Poster Child
A Story by Mrs. Clark
Three months after Cassandra Clark disappeared, she walked back. A morning commuter driving inbound on the state highway saw a girl limping, almost naked, along the gravel shoulder. The girl seemed to be wearing a dark loincloth and dark gloves and shoes. She had on some kind of bib or a black kerchief tied around her neck and hanging down to cover her chest. By the time the driver had turned his car around and phoned for the police, by then the sun was bright enough to see the girl was actually naked.
Her shoes and gloves, her loincloth and bib were just dried blood, dried thick and black and swarming, buzzing, busy with black flies. The flies crawling on her, thick as black fur.
The girl's head was scraped and scabbed. Ragged tufts of hair sprouted behind her ears and around the crown of her bare head.
She limped because the two small toes had been amputated from her right foot.
The bib, that layer of blood on her chest, that fur of flies, at the hospital emergency room the doctors swabbed it with alcohol and found a game of tic-tac-toe carved in the skin above her breasts. The X player had won.
When they swabbed her hands, they found the smallest finger missing from both. On the rest of her fingers, the nails had been pried up and torn away, leaving the fingertips swollen and purple.
Under the dried blood, her skin was blue-white. The girl's face was the bony knobs of her chin, her cheekbones, and the ridge of her nose. At the temples and above her jawline, the skin sagged into shadowed holes.
Inside the curtained walls of the emergency room, Mrs. Clark leaned over the chrome rails of her daughter's bed and said, “Baby, oh, my sweet baby . . . who did this to you?”
Cassandra laughed and looked at the needles stuck in her arms, the clear plastic tubes stuffed into her veins, and she said, “The doctors.”
No, Mrs. Clark said, who cut off her fingers?
And Cassandra looked at her mother and said, “You think I'd let someone else do this to me?” Her laughter stopped, and she said, “I did this to myself.” And that was the last time Cassandra ever laughed.
The police, Mrs. Clark said, they found evidence. They found slivers of wood, thin as needles, embedded in the walls of her vagina. And her anus. The police forensics people dug slivers of glass out of the cuts on her chest and arms. Mrs. Clark told
