Matt Bell - How They Were Found

The gas station is on a wooded stretch of gravel road between Punter’s house and the outskirts of town. Although Punter has been here before, he’s never seen it so crowded. While he waits in line he realizes these people are here for the same reason he is, to be near the site of the tragedy, to see the last place this girl was seen.

The checkout line crawls while the clerk runs his mouth, ruining his future testimony by telling his story over and over, transforming his eyewitness account into another harmless story.

The clerk says, I was the only one working that night. Of course I remember her.

In juvie, the therapists had called this narrative therapy, or else constructing a preferred reality.

The clerk says, Long blond hair, tight-ass jeans, all that tan skin—I’m not saying she brought it on herself, but you can be sure she knew people would be looking.

The clerk, he has black glasses and halitosis and fingernails chewed to keratin pulp. Teeth stained with cigarettes or chewing tobacco or coffee. Or all of the above. He reminds Punter of himself, and he wonders if the clerk feels the same, if there is a mutual recognition between them.

When it’s Punter’s turn, the clerk says, I didn’t see who took her, but I wish I had.

Punter looks away, reads the clerk’s name tag.

OSWALD.

The clerk says, If I knew who took that girl, I’d kill him myself.

Punter shivers as he slides his bills across the counter, as he takes his carton of cigarettes and his candy bar. He doesn’t stop shivering until he gets out of the air-conditioned store and back inside his sun-struck car.

The therapists had told Punter that what he’d done was a mistake, that there was nothing wrong with him. They made him repeat their words back to them, to absolve himself of the guilt they were so sure he was feeling.

The therapists had said, You were just kids. You didn’t know what you were doing.

Punter said the words they wanted, but doing so changed nothing. He’d never felt the guilt they told him he should. Even now, he has only the remembered accusations of cops and judges to convince him that what he did was wrong.

Punter cooks two venison steaks in a frying pan with salt and butter. He sits down to eat, cuts big mouthfuls, then chews and chews, the meat tough from overcooking. He eats past the point of satiation on into discomfort, until his stomach presses against the tight skin of his abdomen. He never knows how much food to cook. He always clears his plate.

When he’s done eating, he smokes and thinks about the girl in the freezer. How, when walking her out of the pond, she had threatened to slip out of his arms and back into the water. How he’d held on, carrying her up and out into the starlight. He hadn’t saved her—couldn’t have—but he had preserved her, kept her safe from the wet decay, from the mouths of fish and worse.

He knows the freezer is better than the refrigerator, that the dry cold of meat and ice is better than the slow rot of lettuce and leftovers and ancient, crust-rimmed condiments. Knows that even after death, there is a safety in the preservation of a body, that there is a second kind of life to be had.

Punter hasn’t been to the bar near the factory since he got fired, but tonight he needs a drink. By eight, he’s already been out to the garage four times, unable to keep from opening the freezer lid. If he doesn’t stop, the constant thawing and refreezing will destroy her, skin first.

It’s mid-shift at the factory, so the bar is empty except for the bartender and two men sitting together at the rail, watching the ball game on the television mounted above the liquor shelves. Punter takes a stool at the opposite end, orders a beer and lights a cigarette. He looks at the two men, tries to decide if they’re men he knows from the plant. He’s bad with names, bad at faces. One of the men catches him looking and gives him a glare that Punter immediately looks away from. He knows that he stares too long at people, that it makes them uncomfortable, but he can’t help himself. He moves his eyes to his hands to his glass to the game, which he also can’t make any sense of. Sports move too fast, are full of rules and behaviors he finds incomprehensible.

During commercials, the station plugs its own late-night newscast, including the latest about the missing girl. Punter stares at the picture of her on the television screen, his tongue growing thick and dry for the five seconds the image is displayed. One of the other men drains the last gulp of his beer and shakes his head, says, I hope they find the fucker that killed her and cut his balls off.

So you think she’s dead then?

Of course she’s dead. You don’t go missing like that and not end up dead.

The men motion for another round as the baseball game comes back from the break. Punter realizes he’s been holding his breath, lets it go in a loud, hacking gasp. The bartender and two men turn to look, so he holds a hand up, trying to signal he doesn’t need any help, then puts it down when he realizes they’re not offering. He pays his tab and gets up to leave.

He hasn’t thought much about how the girl got into the pond, or who put her there. He too assumed murder, but the who or why or when is not something he’s previously considered.

In juvie, the counselors told him nothing he did or didn’t do would have kept his mother alive, which Punter understood fine. Of course he hadn’t killed his mother. That wasn’t why he was there. It was what he’d done afterward that had locked him away, put him behind bars until he was eighteen.

This time, he will do better. He won’t sit around for months while the police slowly solve the case, while they decide that what he’s done is just as bad. This time, Punter will find the murderer himself, and he will make him pay.

He remembers: Missing her. Not knowing where she was, not understanding, just wishing she’d come back. Not believing his father, who told him that she’d left them, that she was gone forever.

He remembers looking for her all day while his father worked, wandering the road, the fields, the rooms of their small house.

He remembers descending into the basement one step at a time. Finding the light switch, waiting for the fluorescent tubes to warm up. Stepping off the wood steps, his bare feet aching at the cold of the concrete floor.

He remembers nothing out of the ordinary, everything in its place.

He remembers the olive green refrigerator and the hum of the lights being the only two sounds in the world.

He remembers walking across the concrete and opening the refrigerator door.

More than anything else, he remembers opening his mouth to scream and not being able to. He remembers that scream getting trapped in his chest, never to emerge.

When the eleven o’ clock news comes on, Punter is watching, ready with his small, spiral-bound notebook and his golf pencil stolen from the keno caddy at the bar. He writes down the sparse information added to the girl’s story. The reporter recounts what Punter already knows—her name, the school, the abandoned car—then plays a clip of the local sheriff, who leans into the reporter’s microphone and says, We’re still investigating, but so far there’s no proof for any of these theories. It’s rare when someone gets out of their car and disappears on their own, but it does happen.

The sheriff pauses, listening to an inaudible question, then says, Whatever happened to her, it didn’t happen inside the car. There’s no sign of a struggle, no sign of sexual assault or worse.

Punter crosses his legs, then uncrosses them. He presses the pencil down onto the paper and writes all of this down.

The next clip is of the girl’s father and mother, standing behind a podium at a press conference. They are both dressed in black, both stern and sad in dress clothes. The father speaks, saying, If anyone out there knows what happened—if you know where our daughter is—please come forward. We need to know where she is.