Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

Have you seen Karen? Have you seen Karen? Have you seen Karen?

The Hi-Lo manager worked six days a week and waited for someone to come question him. No one did. Shouldn’t someone have asked him what he knew? He’d found the boy, he’d alerted the police. I could tell something was wrong, right away . He wouldn’t mention his initial anger — not that the boy was stealing, but that he was stealing so ineptly the Hi-Lo manager was obliged to collar him. He would describe the way the boy looked, hollow-eyed. A good kid , the Hi-Lo manager imagined saying.

Surely the Hi-Lo manager had a right. Before he found the boy, he’d had an idea that the one good thing in his life was his love for his ex-wife. Most people didn’t know what that kind of love was like. He hadn’t known himself back when they were married, when he felt only as though he were doing it wrong, as though there were a curtain between them. Divorce had lifted that curtain, and now when they spoke on the phone he could suddenly declare, in his truest voice, “I love you,” and he could hear the breath knocked out of her, and then her answer — matter-of-fact because she couldn’t deny it—“I love you, too.” Then they’d just breathe at each other a while, across the perforated tops of the phones, breathe, breathe, and then she’d say, “What are you cooking yourself for dinner? Tell me.” Mostly he cooked hamburgers, but he learned a few other dishes so he could tell her something else.

Then he found the boy. Shouldn’t that change his life?

A locksmith replaced the front door lock of number 13, then added a hasp and a padlock. An orange-overalled man nailed a piece of plywood over the broken window. Who had hired them? One at a time, a woman, two men, and a teenage girl left funereal flowers on the front steps of the ramshackle house. Who for? No one mourned the dead man. They were ghouls, those flower leavers. They wanted to attend a funeral but there wasn’t one. Nathan Blackbird’s body was still waiting at the morgue for someone to claim it. The boy had been sent away to live in a new home, a clean one, in another town.

Some fool — the manager of the Hi-Lo — came with a length of yellow ribbon to tie around a tree, like with the hostages a few years back. It was still in the early years of American ribbons. He was disappointed to see that there was no tree, and besides, someone had already tied yellow ribbon — but, no, that was just police tape. The Hi-Lo manager tied his ribbon around a bush.

One of the neighbor girls came out to talk to him. She was blond and chinless and rubber-mouthed, with a thick lower lip.

“He’s coming back,” she said to him.

“Who?”

“Asher Blackbird.”

“Yeah?” said the Hi-Lo manager.

She nodded. He had a sudden feeling of waking up in a hospital and knowing how bad your condition was by looking at your ward mates.

“You know Karen?” he asked cautiously.

She said, “Look.” She was pointing to a spot above her right eye, a blue-gray shadow.

“What?” he said.

“Pencil,” she said. “First day of school a kid slapped me on the back while I was erasing. Now, Karen,” she said, and flipped out her palm, “had the same thing, here.”

“Pencil.”

“In her palm. Right on this line.”

“Lana!” a woman called from the porch next door.

“Gotta go,” said the girl.

A piece of pencil in her hand! In the coming months, the Hi-Lo manager would look at his own palm, expecting to see it there, a pencil point beneath the skin, twitching like a compass needle.

Suddenly everything in the neighborhood, it seemed, was lost. Telephone poles were feathered with MISSING posters until you couldn’t see Karen Blackbird’s face. People didn’t take her down, they just tacked up their new losses over hers. Missing: A bobtailed German shepherd named Ponto. A watch with only sentimental value. A tabby cat named James who needed medication. Rodan, beloved parakeet. Please look. Please check your basements. Have you seen me? People wanted to help. They kidnapped the wrong animals, kept them in garages, and called phone numbers. “Are you sure it’s not Ponto?” a worried woman asked Ponto’s owner, who answered, “Lady, a dog is not a starfish. Tails do not grow back.” A neighborhood away, a ten-year-old girl wrote in block letters, Help find me! I am a German shepherd, I answer to “Auntie,” I am nervous and sometimes bite .

They found a body.

The body belonged — if that word made sense, if once you were dead your body still belonged to you — to a woman in her thirties or forties. She’d been lashed to a shopping cart and pushed into the Charles River. She was found three months after Karen Blackbird officially disappeared. Skeletal remains, they said. Someone had broken the dead woman’s cheekbone recently, and her femur some years before. She wore a T-shirt that said VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS. That survived, but anything else — tattoos, a bit of pencil in the palm, signs she fought back — had been boiled off by the river. There was Karen in the newspaper again, with her freckled shoulders.

But the coroner decided the next day that the body wasn’t hers; it had been in the river for a year. There was no evidence anyone had reported this particular woman missing. She’d only been found.

Someone always confesses eventually. In this case, his name was Manny Coveno. The mug shot printed in the paper convinced everyone: nose broken into several bends, a few days’ growth of black beard, a mole just below his right eye that looked like a thumbprint. He’d been picked up in Providence at the end of a week of heavy drinking: he’d wandered into the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel at three A.M. shouting, “I did it! I did it! I did it!”

Even Manny didn’t know what he was doing in Providence, but his confession seemed plausible. He’d known Nathan Blackbird. They’d kept rooms in a boardinghouse called the Hollis Hotel till the woman who ran it died and the property was sold. Manny, homeless, went on the march. The few people who knew him said they couldn’t imagine him killing anyone. Still, he’d confessed.

He was so drunk it took him two days to sober up, at which point he went into the delirium tremens. They sent a police stenographer to take notes.

I strangled her. I stabbed her. Threw her body off the bridge. The bridge, the bridge by the trackless trolleys. Blackbird, Blackbird, Nathan Blackbird. I hated him. She took him away and I followed. She picked him up. I waited. I waited ten, eleven, fifteen years. I caught her. I caught her and I killed her.

How?

Oh, any way at all. I bit her. Nathan Blackbird. There was a guy — you can’t believe the things he’d do. He’s the devil. I swear to you, sir, he’s the devil, and me, too.

Nathan Blackbird?

Of course. He helped me. I helped him. I bit her. I killed her.

Did you do anything else?

Plenty.

Did you rape her?

“Oh, Jesus, sir,” said Manny Coveno, shocked, “I could never do a thing like that.”

“Not that or the rest of it,” his sister said, trying to get him released. “He’s a child, he’s got an IQ of sixty-eight. I’ll show you his records. They loved him in school. He lost his way!”

“He lost his way, and we found him,” said the police chief.

For four days Manny Coveno spoke. On TV, as he was taken from the police car to the jail, he looked less convincing, a little guy with the kind of skull-baring brush cut mothers force on their sons in the summer. But he had a lot to say. He smothered her. He shot her. With what kind of gun? A bullet gun. Gun that shoots bullets. He wrapped her body in a sheet and put it on a train. A boxcar. A subway. She had gone to heaven and he’d gone, too. He’d killed her with a blunderbuss. He’d killed her with a credit card. With poison. He’d hidden her under his bed, she was still there, she’d been there for ages. He had been in love with her — wasn’t everyone? In love with who, Manny? With the girl. The girl. That girl.