Ana Simo - Heartland

A week after our arrival, I took McCabe on a Sunday stroll through Elmira’s derelict Main Street. Reconstruction had been a smashing success in Elmira. All the old shops were boarded up. Scraps of plywood and moldy particleboard had been slapped on by panicky owners who’d been first ravaged by strip malls, then had to flee a barbarian invasion. Only a Chinese takeout remained. A Wal-Mart thirty miles away had sucked dry the last holdouts, the Cantonese cook told us, and was now crushing the one half of Elmira’s female population it employed (the other half waiting at home until the Beast called them).

It was a miracle that the town was still hanging on by its grimy fingernails. Except for our state capital, site of the metastasizing National Penal Colony, all other towns in the heartland had been bulldozed years ago to deny shelter and food to the homicidal marauding gangs. An inspired decision: the gangs had migrated west and the countryside was pleasantly empty and pacified.

On the edge of town, I showed McCabe the ruins of the candy store where I got my first lesson in economics: quick butt squeeze, fully clothed = two gummy bears; longer squeeze half-clothed (pants off, but panties on) = four gummy bears; and letting stinky Dwayne slip his hairy hand inside my panties and rub my butt = one Milky Way bar. I didn’t tell McCabe anything about Glorita. Not even her name. I’m positive. Glorita got two Milky Way bars for letting Dwayne put his finger flat inside her butt crack. He offered her a bubble soap bottle to let him stick his pinky just a little inside her asshole, but she got scared of his big hands and ran away. Next day I saw Glorita blowing bubbles from her porch. She told me her godmother had bought it for her. I knew she was lying. This was the first time I felt a weight on my forehead and eyelids that made me lower my eyes, which I later discovered was shame. The dictionary, from which I got my sentimental education, told me that shame combined feelings of dishonor, unworthiness, and embarrassment. My shame at Glorita’s first lie was purely the shame of dishonor. I neither felt unworthy, nor embarrassed. Like Tirant lo Blanc, I would have killed a ferocious dog with my bare hands to cleanse my honor. But Glorita did not own a dog. Condemned to dishonor, I was freed to sink even lower: I began to watch Glorita from our attic window with a pair of toy binoculars I had stolen from Woolworth’s when my grandmother wasn’t looking. I kept a log of Glorita’s after-school and weekend comings and goings. Soon, there wasn’t much I didn’t know about her. It wasn’t hard: she lived next door, we were in fourth grade together, and took the same school bus every day.

Glorita had long legs ending in a tight little butt, and a small torso with tiny hard nipples that already showed under her tee shirts. Her skin was the color of light tea with milk, and as soft as my red velvet dress. Everybody always said that she had a very pretty face, a term I despised, perhaps because it was never applied to me (or to any boy, Rafael Cohen once sympathetically pointed out). I thought then that Glorita was ugly, with her big mouth that tasted like plum, slanted hazel eyes, strong nose and frizzy reddish-brown hair. Being near her always made my stomach a little queasy (I didn’t know the real meaning of “dangerous” then). Through my toy binoculars, she was at once repellent and fascinating, like the shellacked bees Ezequiel Cohen pinned into his insect collection with color-coded pins: purple for the queen, royal blue for the male consorts, forest green for the workers.

One night I was woken up by a faint squeak coming from next door. By then, I had developed a refined ear: I could tell whether Glorita was trying to sneak in or out of her godmother’s house through the kitchen screen door, her bedroom window, the garage, or even the front door. I ran to my window. Glorita was walking through our backyard, shoes in hand. She was wearing her old blue dress from third grade, now too short and too tight for her. “Are you nuts or what?” I whispered, softly so she wouldn’t hear. I climbed out of my window and followed her. She headed straight to the road that led to town. Fool! Scumbag Dwayne is going to kidnap and torture you. I’ll have to kill him. I’ll rescue you. Glorita looks me in the eyes, her soft arms locked around my neck, her lips quivering close to mine…. Half an hour later, Elmira’s broken sidewalks suddenly sprang up on either side of the road, now renamed Main Street. I immediately tripped on a crack and took a dive. Glorita walked past Dwayne’s candy store. She was walking fast now, running, and I had trouble keeping up with her. She was just a silly girl, but she sure could run.

When I caught up with her, she was approaching the back door of our school. Someone opened the door and Glorita slid in. I went around the building a hundred times that night, clockwise, and when I got dizzy, counterclockwise, sniffing at the bottom of the doors, hoping to catch Glorita’s scent, trying all the windows with my drug-terrier paws to see if any would give and I could jump in and carry her out on my back to safety. And licking the back doorknob, which she may or may not have touched. There wasn’t a sound, smell, or sight all night, except for my breathing and sweat, and my pee trickling over all four corners of the school building. I ran home at the first sign of light in the sky, afraid of my mother’s wrath. Ashy and exhausted, I pretended a stomachache that morning, but pity was a luxury my three-job parents couldn’t afford. On the sidewalk, waiting for the school bus, was Glorita, fresh as a morning gladiolus.

McCabe and I reached my old school. “It looks like a fucking prison!” her contralto boomed. I realized that she had not said a word during our walk. She stared directly into my eyes. I looked away, afraid she might be trying to read my mind (I don’t believe in mind reading, I’m a rationalist, a rabid Darwinian, I worship at the altar of logic, but one is most afraid of what one doesn’t believe in.) “Whatever happened to Glorita?” McCabe asked.

I had lured McCabe to Elmira to kill her. Picturing her death in Manhattan had felt fake. Shifting the scene to Elmira made it instantly true. Moved by such vigorous realism, I had picked up the phone, figurative tears still in my eyes, and asked McCabe to meet me at the brasserie. Soon we were flying to Elmira.

Pulling weeds in the Judge’s garden a few weeks later, I asked myself, Why here in Elmira? The question made me dizzy. Like looking at millions of stars in a black night above the Elmira cow fields, or coloring the picture of the Dove, the Eye inside the triangle, and the Rising Jesus.

To keep my head from cracking, I shifted from the bottomless “why here” to the modest “how,” as I attacked the dandelion roots with a sharp garden fork. I did not want to kill McCabe in her sleep, or from behind, or while she was looking the other way, or by surprise, not even if frontally. I wanted her to be aware of who was killing her and why. Even more: I wanted her to realize what monstrous harm she had done me, and to agree that her death could not even begin to repay her debt to me and to the natural order. In short, I wanted McCabe to judge herself, pronounce herself guilty, sentence herself to death, and beg me to carry out her execution. After much feigned hesitation, I would consent to this. It would be a big favor, a sacrifice on my part to commit a cold-blooded crime to improve her moral standing, even at the risk of lowering mine. That’d be the icing on her guilt cake: a new crime on her long list of crimes against my humanity to be atoned for by her, pre-mortem.

No dry, unilateral killing this one. No bilateral killer and killed, executioner and executed. This was to be an affair of universal truth and justice, our own private Nuremberg trial. Furthermore, McCabe had to fully agree to, even propose, all the steps that I must take to hide her corpse and escape the imperfect justice of men.