Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  “Your daughter.”

  “Whatever she’s done, I’m sure it’s nothing an apology won’t fix. Shoplifting, right? She paid them back for the lipsticks. I’ll see that she never does it again. Just a moment. I’ll get her down here—”

  “Ma’am—”

  “She’s missing, Mrs. Satterwhite! She’s probably dead. She’s missing for two weeks. She’s dead.”

  Bernadette looked into her hands and tilted the sterling ring on her thumb. “I know what it is. She’s camping. At Coopers Rock, with her friends.” In distress, Kayla pulled her hair down from its ponytail and racked it up again. Her nose was blotchy. The sun moved out from its mountains of cloud. Bernadette looked between the officer and the girl again, possibly making some calculation, then laid her index finger across her lip.

  “You’re Marlon Whipkey’s girl, isn’t that right?” she asked.

  Everyone wanted to know: And where was Virgil on the night in question? Well, we had been in the VFW kitchen making coffee and like that for the wedding reception, of course. But it didn’t stop anyone from wondering, and it didn’t stop the detectives from asking him a lot of questions about his relationship with Jude. Jude and Virgil fought and broke up all the time, which had been true. Even I didn’t always know for sure what went on between them.

  People had always especially enjoyed gossiping about Jude and Virgil. They had been quite the couple. She would wear his Carhartt. He took her to homecoming, even though we Stoats do not, as a rule, attend dances. They were an infamous pair since he was a senior and she was just fourteen, unlikely and showy together like actors filmed by an invisible camera everywhere they went. As a private joke, they called each other Marilou and Cletus, and would discourse in the halls like high-toned rustic gentry. Jude wrote Virgil’s name on the straps of her backpack in Wite-Out pen. Virgil defaced the back wall of the choir room with glow-in-the-dark paint. It matched the white cinder blocks when the lights were on but spelled out MARILOU IS EVERYWHERE in green capital letters when the lights were off. I have no idea what it meant between them, although it remains to me the most beautiful piece of art ever made.

  Why, Cletus, if you aren’t just the dandiest piece of pie I’ve ever seen.

  Why, Marilou, if I could trouble you to sniff your wrist—

  It was sick, how adorable they were.

  Sometimes they parked at the calvary crosses on Centennial Hill to play the radio and listen to each other’s heartbeats, and look out at the hills that rolled like the backs of tremendous dragons. Jude romanced the idea of elsewhere: Coeur d’Alene, Lansing, Laramie, Greenwood, Rolla. Why not work in a diner by a highway? When Virgil pointed out that those places were probably going to be just as much raggedy back-assed nonsense as Greene County, she said it didn’t matter to her. Sometimes other places sound good just because they aren’t here, and Virgil missed the whole point of feeling that way. This was the reason they’d broken up for good, I think. He had no curiosity about what it would look like to paste his life into another run of hills somewhere else, use a different kind of hot sauce, call crawdads something different. Virgil was of the opinion that this is the only life, and heaven is yours if you’re determined to live in it. I won’t pretend I know how Jude felt, but it always made me furious when he said such stuff around me.

  But, Cletus, if I stay here, I’m afraid I might drown.

  What do you mean, Marilou? I would never let such a thing happen to you, sweetness.

  I’m already underwater. You don’t even know.

  I don’t see any water.

  That’s the problem, all right.

  VI

  When Jude disappeared, it became clear that practically no one had any awareness of her mother’s condition. Jude’s friends, it turned out, had not been inside the house for years. Bernadette Satterwhite was not especially befriended in the community, except among the other artists and burnouts who had migrated to the area in a great wave at the end of the seventies. They had moved in on the cheap acreage in an approximation of something radical and dreamy. They would live off the land, away from what Bernadette called the murderous and ever-humming instructions of capitalism. So great was the influx that there had even been, at one time, a commune called the Whole in the Universe at one of the former farmhouses, somewhere in Ned or Spraggs or Rutan, although nobody could remember where.

  After a decade or two, many of them blew off to more favorable cultural climates. I guess they hoped rural tedium would be a little more poetic, and not so much long winters of the snow chanting its death wish upon you. Those who stuck around picked up enough grit and crud and survival skills that they often could not be told apart from the rest of us, who were bent into catastrophe postures by poverty, black lung, heroin, WIC vouchers, fluoride, Miller Time, a caustic species of aloneness, perfectly well-intentioned social workers, postindustrial blight, single-A football, pepperoni rolls, and things like that. These things burned and bent the outsiders, too, the longer they hung around.

  But Bernadette retained much of her singular presence. The kids along our bus route had called her a witch—to her face, which made her hoot with delight. There was a rumor she had come to Greene County naked on horseback, although only some very unreliable types would swear to it. Still, it seemed likely enough. Once, she had subbed for the art teacher at the school, telling the seventh graders that flaws in artistry were really just portals for the sacred to enter, which inspired a graffiti of poorly executed wangs and coo holes on the drawing tables. Sometimes she worked crystal healing at the sandwich stand inside Sissy Pecjak’s gas station, right there in the particleboard booths scrubbed down to a foggy finish. You could pay her with half a hoagie or a few beers and she would lay the warm rocks where the hurts had collected in the body. It felt nice. It was mostly harmless, although Tamra Metheny and Dory Gitch and some other wives took a dim view of the practice.

  Like all people who are proud of their grit, Bernadette’s was mostly an act. She was born in Dallas, for godsakes. She had attended the Hockaday School, whatever that is. Before Alistair, she had briefly married the son of an aluminum magnate, when, as she said, “It seemed there might be some decent painting light left in Majorca and no other way to get at it.” Yet she emphasized any opinion or false flaw that would make her seem like a simple country girl. She would rattle off her old grandmomma’s skillet corn bread recipe at the mildest encouragement, even while she filled her shopping buggy with artichoke hearts and pomegranate juice and other things we all knew were high-tone.

  Gradually, though, Bernadette stopped laying crystals and tried to master other industries. She bought a small herd of dairy goats off Creekmurs. She stopped wearing belly shirts. She was driving a pickup, like everyone did, and had worked on her fences. It seemed to most people she was getting some sense, and they were sweet to her about the trouble she took in finally courting it. She was really in over her head with the goats in particular. She showed up at the feed store with baffling questions—did the boy goat really have to pee on himself? Could she bathe the does in the tub, and if so, how was she supposed to get them up the stairs? But generally, the less people saw of her, the more they presumed she was setting her life to rights and walking finally down the middle of the road instead of hosting troupes of so-called puppet artists, instead of dowsing for a river to the underworld or hitting shamelessly on the UPS man.

  Besides, her girl was liked at school. Jude had nice manners at sleepovers. She folded her blanket in the morning and helped make pancakes. She complimented the flower beds or whatever. Her mom couldn’t be all heathen, people reasoned—but nobody thought for a moment those nice manners might be Alistair’s doing, which, of course, they were.

  In time, Bernadette’s goat operation got to be pretty decent. She bought a Kiko bull from Preston County and linebred it with the Creekmurs’ Alpines. The kids were a beautiful marshy gray run through with strands of amber, and wh
ite blazes on their rumps and faces. Occasionally, an FFA boy whose prize baby had gone sick with something killing—white muscle disease, milk fever, listeriosis from eating moldy hay—would buy a goat from her the night before the Jacktown Fair livestock competition. Bernadette’s goats showed to great acclaim.

  And so she was tolerated for quite a while. She could turn a friendly joke with the boys who loaded round bales into her barn. She kept to her own. She’d wave, without looking, to anyone driving by, her long skirt sweeping behind as she trudged.

  But then, just the year before Jude went missing, Bernadette had leased a big parcel of gas rights. Her land was a stretch between two smaller plots that would support a well only if they were connected. Her neighbors on either side had gotten into the market too early and signed over for small royalties, but Bernadette drove the price up. This didn’t endear her to anyone, of course. The people who got bad deals blamed her, even though all she had done was hold out. Everybody blamed her for the sulfur stink or the heavy trucks that chewed up the roads. Once the well went in, the air all around it tasted a little like freezer burn. When a whole truck of fracking liquid spilled out in the bend by the Brant place, the gas company brought dozens of moon men in white suits to clean it up. Somebody had started leaving dead fish on Bernadette’s porch—although I couldn’t tell if it was a symbolic environmental thing or just intended to stink.

  Something changed in the house—all of Jude’s friends said so. Money is bad luck for dreamy people. And Bernadette had already been wealthy by Greene County standards, but now she had fuck-you money. Fuck-you money meant yes to all wants. Yes to sherry and yes to gin. Bernadette bought herself a Ducati she didn’t even know how to ride, a white leather jacket for Jude. She bought tables made of black marble and capes of green velvet and enameled flowers that did nothing, just nothing at all. Any goodwill she had built up over the last ten years was over, just like that.

  The day we first heard about Jude going missing, Virgil went down to Bernadette’s as soon as we had unloaded the mowers. He stayed till dark and went back the next morning. I didn’t understand at first why. It seemed nice enough, and Virgil did things like that. He brought big cans of coffee and bags of paper plates to people who had just buried family, or split wood when someone was in the hospital. But every day, every day, he was at Bernadette’s and I couldn’t imagine what all there was to do.

  Once I saw the inside of the house, I didn’t wonder anymore.

  Bernadette had not been all that extravagant before, but suddenly she found necessary the velvet paintings and jars of fish teeth and fancy ashtrays where two storks held your cigarettes over the impossible calm of their silver and unrippled lake. She bought up Ormus gold, chaga mushrooms, and seminars on tape for the vibrational being stranded in a body. And whole lineages of Peruvian amethyst, whose advice she sought on financial matters. Eventually, she claimed she would open a consignment boutique. Lofting this idea allowed her to buy and keep whatever she wanted, even though she soon branched out to sad-eyed stuffed animals and balding rabbit-fur bombers and other inelegant junks, which began collecting in drifts around the doorways, crawling into the center of each room. By the time I lived with her, it was a funny thing. You’d drink Crystal Light from a gold-leafed Turkish teacup and eat hot dog soup at the prow of a mahogany table, with Bernadette blasting Rigoletto in the next room, picking mealworms from the oats.

  And so it made sense that Jude had been acting strange before her disappearance. Amber and Kayla knew something was going on beyond the usual middle-distance stares on the school bus. Jude had threatened more than once to run away to her father’s house in Rochester. She had applied early decision to a tiny liberal arts college in Vermont where the phone lines were troubled and unreliable, where snows sank the campus in a blind gloom for more than half the year. She had not even gone to the prom, and it wasn’t because no one had asked. She had stopped listening to music. Something important in the middle of her life had gone still, or left her entirely, even though her mother was right there. It is a wonder to me what other people can miss in a life. It was so much easier to call Jude moody and teenage. And sensitive. And different. And all kinds of things like that.

  Virgil came home from Bernadette’s one day with a load of newspapers and two plastic grocery bags of weeds. It was almost dark already. It was a few weeks or so after we heard about Jude. He had sent Clinton and me to mow the Jollytown baseball diamond ourselves, so our moods were not so high that day. The newspapers were for following Jude’s case. The weeds, apparently, were for us to eat.

  “It’s fiddleheads. Bernie showed me how to scavenge them,” he said. “I figured we hadn’t had anything green in a while.” Clinton and I trudged into the kitchen after him, because apparently they had to be cleaned and such. Clinton especially found the whole thing ridiculous.

  “Like fucking fun am I going to eat this,” Clinton said. “This is some wild hillbilly shit.”

  “Come on,” Virgil said.

  “She’s just not a right woman. You couldn’t pay me enough to give her a foot rub or whatever you’re up to.”

  “I ain’t rubbing her feet, Jesus.”

  “There is nothing you can do for people like that.”

  “People like what?” Virgil asked, but I think we all knew what kind Clinton meant. It was not easy to pick scales from fiddleheads. Clinton cussed low and righteous over it. Virgil must have told her about our mother being gone, because she had also sent him home that day with all these weird cans of things, stewed mussels and artichoke hearts and fava beans, which we had certainly not heard the first thing about. Clinton meant people with gas money. People who heard you were starving and gave you cans of stillborn vegetables and a bag of weeds to eat. People like that.

  It was a proper disaster. They had grabbed up some nettles, which apparently Bernadette meant for us to eat, too, but we were throwing them in a bag on the floor instead. We yipped whenever we got stung on a handful of those by mistake. Virgil kept his eyes on his hands. He brushed a piece of hair back and left a streak of mud on his forehead, a permanent shadow. Clinton saw it, and winked at me. But I let the wink go. I didn’t catch it with my face. I imagined it shooting past my shoulder, the wink, miles and miles and light fast so it would soon be all the way out in space.

  “Tough cookie,” he said to me, and then turned back to Virgil. “Look, I get it. She’s sucking you off.”

  “Jackass. I don’t know. She’s always helped me out. She was good to me.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “What’s she like,” I said.

  They both jumped their shoulders. Sometimes I startled them without at all meaning to. I think they forgot I was listening.

  Later on, when the kitchen light turned yellow, I felt a horrible wash of drowse start up from my feet. It crushed my lungs, my guts. It was taking me on inch by inch, and I fought it hard, but the lights in the kitchen were so bright they went into spots. I knew, like you know in a dream, that I should not fall asleep. But I also knew, with awful dream certainty, that I would fall asleep anyway, and the dread dripped against the back of my throat, but it was sweet and sweet and sweet. I had been eating too much candy because we had some. And that was what I did when we had some, which is why we didn’t have some often, but Clinton and I had thumbed it to Pecjak’s that day, to get some black and red gumdrops for me specially. Not even any good, if you want to know. When I bit through them, I could see the grooves from how my teeth came in wrong. My teeth looked fluffy at the edges, like a cartoon cloud. And they left slick lines down through each gumdrop, which got caught in my snaggles, and I hated the black ones so much I couldn’t eat them at all unless I spaced them out, black red, black red. Coming to the end of each one, I was just doused in sadness.

  “She’s like a witch in a storybook, sweetness.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” Virgil said. “
She is a real honest witch. You can tell because she eats mice and wipes her boogers on the wall.”

  “Naw,” I said.

  “Don’t believe me? I saw her bury a Bible once.”

  “You got dirt on your face,” I told him.

  “That’s to keep me safe,” he said. “So I will know to follow where the lord leads me.”

  “That don’t make any sense,” Clinton said. “You fucking cocksucker.”

  And then Virgil began whistling a gospel, which is what he did when he wanted us both to hate him. What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul.

  Clinton pried a black licorice loose from the bag on my lap and caught it in his back teeth, his head cocked back like a bird’s. “I do believe she’s a witch, though. I’ll give you that.”

  “I bet she doesn’t wipe her boogers on the wall,” I said. “I bet that’s not real.”

  “Witches are women who do just as they please, so long as what they please is right in the ways of the earth,” Virgil said. They sounded like borrowed words, and I felt a cold fluid rise in my spine because I saw these were her words, the words of the witch, and they had reached through space and now they were in my ears and mind.

  “If you wanted to stay really safe, you wouldn’t go hang around a witch,” I said. But he didn’t answer me.

  I was too old to believe in witches. Or what I should say: I was old enough to know that I couldn’t go around confessing that I wanted to be one. There were witches in my book, and they were not usually bad, just particular. Or they could do strange things that made people afraid. They became, somehow, the same thing to me, that Jude had disappeared and her mother was a witch. I yearned myself toward them like a root striking down through a boulder. I was deadly, but just from tireless wanting. We boiled the fiddleheads in salted water. Clinton made retchy sounds while he swallowed. But I was determined to like them. I felt them bring a strength into my body. Maybe I was brave, even. Afterward, Virgil sat under the moon. Clinton watched the nightly lottery draw. When neither of them was watching, I went back to the kitchen and drank the fern boil water straight from the saucepan, all its green depth, and announced myself as a secret apprentice.