St Simmons Island, GA
Tuesday, 4:49 AM
The nighttime picture I'm taking is of a young woman, belly down, face down, on the bedroom hardwood. Snap.
She's naked and shower damp, her warm body beading with moisture. The length of it all is soft and tropical brown.
An arm is running along side, palm up, at an upturned angle showing off light, pillowy meat inside the curve of elbow. The other one is reaching for something under the bed. It's missing from the picture. In the same way, head head is missing. Hiding under the bed. I can't see it above her shoulders. Not here directly over her looking down like I am.
I can't turn on the lights. I won't, or something. It's enough to know what has happened tonight in the dark. So I'm here standing above her. I'm letting my eyes adjust to the room, a weak mercury color washing through the wooden shutters from the street lights. Dusky light for highlighted hair to catch just right, to shimmer down shoulders and spine, wet ribbons spreading out and shining like fireworks.
Her slim waist's wrinkled, snaking itself under the bed. One knee's bunching up, bent low into action as if she's hurrying under barbed wire.
A picture familiar with motion.
What's the girl looking for under there? What is it this time? An earring? sunglasses? a shoe?
In this picture the girl's running late, in a hurry, her plan's losing time.
She's running late again for another somewhere. Her next somewhere even more elegant, transendant and mad.
*
St Simmons Island, GA
Tuesday, 5:51 AM
She was dead. There's nothing to do for her. I felt for my phone and punched the three numbers.
"What is your eee-mergency?. Do you need police, fire or ahhm-bulance?"
I tell her why I called then the phone falls through my fingers onto the floor.
5:53 am
"Sir, Sir! You there? Sir...you need to stay with me. Sir...are you still there? The po-leece are on their way. Sir...you have to stay on the line. Sir! Do you hear me?"
The cell phone was glowed green on the floor. Yes, I could hear her. Word escaping the mouthpiece coming `from a tin-roofed shack a very long way off, but I heard it, like rain in the night you cant' see.
"Sirrr....CAN YOU HEAR ME?"
I considered picking up the phone to tell her that I could, but instead I whispered words out into the air to mix with wall shadows, scents like lavender and mango and warm candle wax, and that coppery smell as heavy as uranium.
"Yes, I hear you. Don't worry, she's dead now... so..'um, so nobody's going anywhere. I'm here... with her."
The Nokia glowed, covering her quiet, naked body in beautiful monster green.
*
Under the bed it smelled like the War, cordite, like oyster shells burning on a grill. The unsentimental after-burn from using a gun indoors.
I pulled her out from under the bed where she had buried herself.
I imagined her head in my arms, the alive one, the whole one, the one that had carried around the watercolor eyes and the eager mouth and pink clumps of high cheekbone....but that one was missing by half.
Everything there, every part her, was wet. I was wet, my shirt sleeve I used for a cradle dripped with a slow dark colored honey; it collected at my elbow where the drips jumped off, one by one, tapping a count on my shoe. Pat, pat, pat.
The windows of the bungalow were all open, the way she liked things. I was hearing engines droning and tires running hard on dry black pavement out in the night. They were racing closer and closer to where Amanda used to live.
Cars were parking, doors slamming. Blue and red lights reached through the shutters and inside Summerfelt House scrolling theselves across the walls. Hard leather duty shoes slapped the steps.
'Police Department! Open up! This is the Police Department! Open up!'. I didn't, but they came in just the same, pouring inside in one noisy blue commotion.
The first man I saw was standing in the bedroom doorway wearing a plastic rain jacket over a gray suit. I watched him. He wore a gold badge on a chain around his neck - as if that sort of thing were necessary to guess his chosen profession.
I watched him glance at Amanda's green glowing body. He quickly surveyed the room, but only the candle was burning so I don't know what he saw.
In the precise manner used by a man defusing a bomb, he said, "Sir, come this way."
One last frame of mental film was loaded. I composed the shot of her, lying there half-under her bed, and focused and then, snap. Last picture.
The cell phone on the floor suddenly powered down, and the beautiful green monster was gone
*
"You don't want to play it like this Nick, believe me, you really don't." Lt. Eddy Baines inched the steel chair closer, he lowered his voice. "You're on the edge, no return, walk it back. Games just make it take longer."
"Walk it back? from where?' I said.
I wasn't playing games, he was wrong about that. After hours of cigarette breaks and coffee, I still hadn't been booked. So I decided if I was playing games, I was winning; if there is such a thing six hours after you've wet your arms up to the elbow, in a black pool of warm blood of the girl next door with a hole in her head - my girl next door.
Baines stayed planted in his chair, leaning forward with elbows to knees and wringing his hands. He the fan in the cheap seats watching his team getting muddied, trounced, but who faithfully expects things to go his way before the whistle blows. Now he nodded to to whoever was behind the double-mirrored glass that it was time for a break. A pack of cowboys was already out of his pocket.
"Want anything?
"Yeah, I want to go home. I you want to believe I don't-know-what-happened, which... is why I can't tell you. And most of all, don't miss this, I want you to understand what an asshole you're are."
Baines was waiting with his hand on the steel knob, then he wasn't..
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