. . . from
The Water Tower Club,
a novel by
BK Mayo
Chapter 1
YOU SEE IT all the time on the news. The shaking heads. The startled looks.
The stammered declaration: “I just can’t believe it.” What they can’t
believe is that their next-door neighbor, the unassuming Mr.
Wouldn’t-Hurt-a-Fly, is a serial killer. Or their boss at the electronics
factory is a spy for the Chinese government. Or their minister, who refuses to
preside at gay weddings, is sleeping with a male prostitute. We are stricken
with incredulity when someone we know acts in a way that is outside our
understanding of who they are.
I was one of those dumbstruck
disbelievers when I got word via a late-night phone call from my
hysterical mother that my little sister had been arrested on suspicion of
attempted murder. “They’re gonna hang her!” Mom said. She sobbed in my ear with
Wailing Wall fervor. “Darryl, you’ve got to come home.”
My mind lurched with the news, and
I might even have muttered, “I just can’t believe it.” But all
I could think of to say was, “Mom, they don’t hang people in Kansas
anymore.”
Mom screamed into the phone. “You know
what I mean!”
I did and I didn’t. When
I was growing up, my mother said things to me all the time that
I didn’t understand. That’s because she always spoke in hyperbole. Life
was never good or bad on a sliding scale. Everything was life or death. If
I made a mistake, like forgetting to haul the garbage out to the curb
before seven o’clock on a Thursday morning, it wasn’t simply a disappointment
to her; it was another nail in her coffin. “You’re killing me,” she’d say. And
I would wait, trembling, for her to keel over dead. When she didn’t, I’d
gaze at her with wide-eyed wonder, as if witnessing a miracle. She’d wag a
finger at me and say, “Don’t pretend you don’t understand.”
Some things change, but one thing that
doesn’t is that mothers will always be mothers and sons will always be sons.
So, at the age of twenty-eight, ten years removed from her loving domination,
I said to my mother the same thing I’d always said to her when confronted
with her gaudy insistence. “Yes, ma’am.”
As I hung up the phone, my hand
was shaking and I was breathing hard. Precious Libby in jail? It was a
jolting thought. But more troubling to me was my mother’s plea for me to come
home.
It was the overarching theme of all
our telephone conversations—conversations that had become less frequent and
more strained over the years of my absence from my hometown. “Mom, I am
home,” I would tell her. To which she would respond with an invective that
expressed what I took to be a latent desire to wash my mouth out with soap.
But, for once, her entreaty had a real-world rationale
I couldn’t easily dismiss: Libby arrested on suspicion of attempted murder?
Attempted murder of whom? When I’d put the question to
my mother, she’d responded with another classic Motherism—“What does it
matter!”—before flogging me with a reprise of “You’ve got to come home!”
I paced around my apartment
barefoot and in my underwear, feeling stripped of more than just my clothing as
I reflected on that dreadful possibility. If it had been anyone but Libby
in trouble, I wouldn’t have exercised a single brain cell contemplating
going back to Grotin. I hadn’t set foot in my hometown since boarding a
Greyhound bus the day after my high school graduation. Desperate to escape the
cycle of misfortune that plagued me there, I did the only thing
I could think of doing: I sold my most valuable possession, a
collection of Avengers comic books, and bought a one-way bus ticket to the
farthest destination south my funds allowed, which turned out to be San
Antonio, Texas. I hadn’t ventured north of the Red River since.
My only regret during the intervening
decade was that I hadn’t taken my little sister with me. I’d left her
behind in the care of a mother whose reaction to life’s disappointments was to
withdraw to a place of emotional isolation that made it nearly impossible for
her children to reach out to her. The concoction of professed love and
demonstrated detachment my mother doled out, especially after my father’s
tragic death when Libby was six years old, was a bad prescription for my little
sister’s welfare. I knew this even as I enacted my hasty retreat from
my hometown.
But how could I have rescued her?
Libby was only nine years old at the time of my departure. And, at eighteen,
I was just a kid myself—a screwed-up kid at that. The best thing about
childhood is that you only have to go through it once. I had survived the
rock tumbler of my youth and had the emotional scars to prove it. What
I didn’t have was the slightest inkling as to the working of the cosmos.
If experience truly is the best teacher, what I had learned during my
minority was to forego trying to make sense of things.
Even so, it hadn’t taken the wisdom of
age for me to realize that if I were to have any shot at a normal
life—whatever that entailed—I had to put Grotin and the twisted wreckage
of my past behind me. I had only a shadowy conception of what existence
was like outside the communal dome of my hometown. But as I stood upon the
promontory of a failed childhood, peering through the telescope of time,
I glimpsed my future, and what I saw was that if I stayed in
Grotin my life was destined for deposit on the scrapheap of personal
destruction.
So I made my escape via Greyhound
Bus Lines. I landed in San Antonio as if by shipwreck, disgorged onto the
big-city streets with nothing but a scuffed Samsonite suitcase I’d bought at a
garage sale for two dollars and the determination to divorce myself from my
past and wed myself to the future. And that’s exactly what I did.
I got a job and an apartment, put myself through college, became an
accountant, and when the time was right, found myself a steady girlfriend. It
wasn’t easy, but I did it. I altered the trajectory of my life.
I put the pieces of my shattered self-esteem back together. I worked
my way up the ladder of respectability. I forged a new existence for
myself.
And I did one other thing:
I bottled up the memories of my childhood and kept the bottle stoppered.
I relegated my life in Grotin to a time and place as remote and recessed
as the Roman catacombs. The last thing I wanted to do was to return to my
hometown and roam those ancient burial grounds.
But now my beloved little sister was in trouble, and I could
do nothing to help her from seven hundred miles away. My mother was
right—I had to go home.
Chapter 2
“HOME WHERE?” Charlotte said, her face a tapestry of question marks.
We were at her courtyard apartment in
Alamo Heights, a step up from the southside efficiency she’d lived in when we
began dating nearly three years ago after a cat-and-mouse pursuit at the
accounting firm where we both worked. I had stopped by her place on my way
out of town, which seemed preferable to jangling her nerves with a midnight
phone call. Before I’d had a chance to explain the lateness of my visit,
I found myself in bed with her. It was where we were most comfortable with
each other. Some relationships are that way.
“Kansas,” I said in answer to her
question.
Charlotte still looked puzzled.
It was no wonder. She knew little
about my personal history. During our time together, I’d made only passing
references to my Midwestern upbringing. She knew I had a younger sister
whom I adored and kept in regular contact with: she’d seen the photos of
Libby prominently displayed in my apartment. She knew my mother was still alive
and my father was not. But I’d shared with her little else about my past. I’d
never spoken at length about the small Kansas town where I’d grown up, or
recounted any of the sad tales of my youth. We all live with battle scars from
our childhood, painful memories we’d prefer to blot out of our consciousness.
I had hoped that by not talking about my own youthful misadventures
I could forget they ever happened.
My early life was forgettable,
I had informed Charlotte at the outset of our relationship, and she seemed
satisfied with that explanation in a way no other woman I’d been with had. This
was, I suspected, because her journey to adulthood had been no joyride
either. In her teens, she had become estranged from her family, she told me
once. “They live on the West Coast, or did, last I knew,” she said. That
was the extent of her openness. The remainder of her past she glossed over the
way women hide ugly toenails with bright-red nail polish. “I was a foolish
girl with foolish dreams,” she declared, without bothering to explain. And
I respected her desire to leave it at that, because I had no right to
ask questions I didn’t want to answer myself.
So we accepted not knowing certain
things about each other’s past. But over time, an element of unease about the
not knowing engendered a mutual lack of sure-footedness in our relationship
that had kept it from progressing beyond its current state—this bedroom
connection we had.
“Kansas?” Charlotte said. She looked
at me with hooded eyes, as if her vision had turned inward. “Ahh—home—a
place far off but never far away.”
I sensed a personal revelation
teetering on the brink of her remark but had neither time nor inclination to
divine it.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be
gone,” I said.
She responded by rolling her lithe
nude frame on top of me, straddling my midsection. In the sparse light that
seeped into the room through the window sheers, the delicate features of her
face, the hollows at her neckline, the swell of her breasts were cast in
shadow. But her intent was not. When she leaned down to kiss me, strands of her
raven hair cascaded over her bare shoulders and brushed across my nipples. An
inner light flashed in her coffee-colored eyes.
“Then take this moment with you as
remembrance,” she said.
And the lovemaking was easy because it
was something we knew about each other.
I LEFT SAN ANTONIO in the dead of
night, intending to drive straight through to Grotin. Bleary-eyed even before
I’d exited The Lone Star State, I pulled into a truck stop off the
interstate just north of Fort Worth in search of a caffeine fix. I took a
seat at the counter in the truck stop’s diner, where a buxom waitress wearing a
red bandanna and a heart-shaped nose stud poured me coffee that tasted more
like burnt motor oil. I stayed there the better part of an hour, hunched
over my coffee cup, my butt planted on a round swivel stool, trying to work up
the courage to spin the stool around and leave.
By the time I got back on the road, a reddish smear of light
was calling attention to the eastern horizon. Traffic was flowing freely on the
interstate between Fort Worth and Denton—the lull before the commuter storm.
I had filled up with gas at the truck stop. I’d also bought two bottles of
water and placed them in the cup holders built into the console of my Explorer.
This would be my sustenance for the balance of my journey home.
Home? Was I truly going home? Home
is where the heart is. There’s no place like home. A house is made of walls and
beams; a home is built with love and dreams.
No, I wasn’t going home any more
than a soldier does when, years later, he visits a battlefield he’d warred in
and survived.
Libby. I had left Libby on the battlefield of our childhood in
Grotin. Was she about to become its next casualty?
I drove on in a mindless stupor.
The eager August sun showed its face, its radiant beams bathing the landscape
in the golden glow of a newborn day. Before long a halo of blue ceilinged the
heartland of America. The monotonous horizontal countryside of north Texas
eventually gave way to the monotonous horizontal countryside of southern
Oklahoma. I hit Oklahoma City post-morning rush hour and gave thanks for
that small favor.
I opened a bottle of water,
sipped from it, splashed some of its contents on my face, and motored on. The
genial undulations of northern Oklahoma whizzed past me in a blur of torpid
non-cognition. Before long I was being welcomed to Kansas by amber waves
of grain. I didn’t feel patriotic.
I stopped for fuel in Wichita
and, while I was at it, called my employer. Late morning on a Tuesday, and
my absence would have been noticed.
Leaning against my car at the gas
station, feeling heady from the fumes wafting from the pumps, I took out
my cell phone and dialed the number for the accounting firm of Campbell and
Associates. Ruth, the receptionist, answered in a voice with just the right
amount of honey in it. “Oh, Mr. Coombs, there you are,” she said. “I have
messages for you.”
I took mental note of my
messages, then told her to cancel all my appointments for the next several
days. I wouldn’t be able to make it in to the office. A family emergency.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d be gone. But she could reach me on my cell
phone.
“I hope everything will be all
right,” she said.
“So do I,” I told her.
I got back in my car, and that’s
when my resolve stalled. I knew I had to go on to my intended
destination. About some things in life you have a choice; about others you
don’t. But there’s always a part of you that tries to rationalize its way out
of facing up to a difficult situation. It’s that inner voice that says, “It’s a
lost cause” or “You’ll only make things worse” or “What good can you do? You are
powerless and inept.”
I sat there and listened to that voice tell me that my sister
didn’t need me so much right now as she needed a good attorney. And doubtless
there was some truth in that. But that wasn’t why I was balking at
returning to Grotin. The real reason was that I was terrified of the
reawakening of my dormant memories. Already the corpses of my dead-and-buried
past had begun their zombie journey back into my consciousness, and I knew
that I was defenseless against them.
Chapter 3
GROTIN IS A small farming town
set on a windswept plain in north-central Kansas. The surrounding countryside,
open and oceanic, is a monument to flatness. Grasslands and crop fields—planted
mostly in wheat, corn, and soybeans—dominate the landscape, along with a
scattering of farmhouses, each a testament to humankind’s (often miscalculated)
desire to partner with the land.
I approached Grotin from the
south on a rural, two-lane highway, the interstate on which I’d traveled for
most of my journey north having wisely veered off in the direction of more
populated and more promising communities.
A mile or so short of my destination,
my progress was slowed by a John Deere harvester whose bulk unavoidably hogged
the roadway as it rumbled along the pavement in front of me. I did not
resent the delay. The harvester driver hugged the shoulder of the road for a
quarter mile or so, kicking up swirling plumes of chaff and dust, before
turning off the highway into a farmyard that provided a snapshot of grange life
in Harbin County: surrounded by sweeping fields of hay and grain, a homestead—a
tree-sheltered wood frame house with wraparound porch, a red barn, dual metal
silos, a Quonset-style shop building, and a menagerie of bladed and tined farm
implements awaiting their season of use.
With the roadway ahead of me clear
now, I was presented with a panoramic view of the horizon. Visible against
a backdrop of azure sky was the imprint of my hometown, looking like an
artist’s rendering of small-town America, Midwest style.
I could see it with my eyes open
or closed: the clapboard houses lining streets laid out in perfect north-south
and east-west grids, as if on a giant game board; the weather-worn commercial
buildings clustered like a bull’s eye at the town’s center; the cooperative
grain elevator rising missile-like into the air; and the most conspicuous sight
of all, the city water tower—that pot-bellied, iron-legged colossus mounted on
its lofty perch as a symbol of humanity’s needs and aspirations.
I tore my gaze away from the
hulking water tower, but not before the pull of memory forced me to acknowledge
the shape of all my fears. If you never look down, you might as well be two feet
off the ground. And for a few woozy moments
I could hear in my head the raw-egg-tossing voices of scorn, taunting me
during one of the beat-down moments of my youth. . .
