Dead Americans Page 2

  In the colourless bright light of the afternoon, Williams drove to where she lived, a spare key from the landlord, talking it out to himself—“Burnt down as a cover, killed cause she was too beautiful, maybe; beautiful to someone, anyway”—beneath the drone of the radio. Currie had a roommate, but no one had answered when the real estate called so, on instinct, he decided to go and have a look. Instinct, that was all. He did not know Amanda, did not know her family, and he took that to be a sign that she was a decent, reasonable human being, and someone who was not prone to burning down a mosque because she was too white and too Christian to leave the petrol can at home. Not that he thought she did that, anyway. The burnt out mosque was just a setting, a place where the event happened, where her burnt face had pressed itself into his mind, and he had not found a way to leave it behind, yet.

  Amanda Currie’s place was a tiny, two bedroom, tin roofed house on Shepherd Street, the lawn a mix of dirt and dried grass, and the garden weeds and tiny cactus, like old, sun faded ornaments painted green and left to fade away in the front. They were the final vestiges of an attempt at a waterless garden, an idea that Williams himself had had for his similarly small house, but one that had never gotten to the point of killing the weeds that clung to it stubbornly. Inside, the differences between the two homes became even more pronounced: Williams’ place, while not empty, and certainly not cleaned regularly, contained very little outside the couch, TV, his bed, and an always made, never used spare bed in the second room. On the dining room table there were reports, each of them waiting for him to sit and complete, half-heartedly, while eating one of his limited recipes in the evening. Currie’s place, in comparison, was a cornucopia: three guitars lay in the living room, one on the old couch, two on the floor, all of them surrounded by CDs, cans of Coke and bottles of water, and empty plates, a jacket, and so on and so forth in such a way that all the items blurred to Williams as he picked his path to the bedrooms, murmuring the names of things that caught his eye as he went, forgetting them instantly until he came to the first. Inside, he found a fourth guitar, acoustic, two amps, broken and full strings on the dresser table, books of music, CDs, a tiny stereo, a notebook, and a single, unmade bed. With plastic gloves, he pulled open the draws and wardrobe and found a range of clothes. Blacks and reds, mostly. Everyone had a set of colours that they liked to wear, Williams had found, and it was when those colours began to change that you could find a corresponding change in the individual. At least, that was the theory he had developed, just over eight years ago, and it hadn’t failed him yet.

  In the second bedroom, his slow, murmuring—“Door shows its been kicked at the bottom, someone smokes”—stroll found a dismantled drum kit, the snare covering stabbed in by a pair of sticks. The rest of the room was dominated by an unmade double bed with red sheets and the hint of perfume beneath the cigarettes. The closet, when he pulled back the flimsy wooden doors, was empty of everything but clothes hangers, two dozen of the metal holdings hanging from the bar like the petrified remains of ancient, ugly birds. It wasn’t proving difficult for him to have a suspect for the violent trauma to the back of Amanda Currie’s head and spine, it seemed. That didn’t surprise Williams: there had been five murders in Red Grove in the last fifteen years, and each of them had been done by a family member, either by blood or marriage, each of them done in that intense hatred that only having someone in your life so meaningfully could inspire.

  From the bedrooms, he made his way across the thin red and brown carpet—“Where is the roommate?”—and into the white lino floored kitchen. There, the sink was empty. The fridge, too, or mostly. A can of Coke, a piece of meat going brown, a Babe Ruth. The cupboards were full of plates, cups, glasses, nothing unusual. There were some drugs—aspirin and the like—in the cupboard above the fridge. Nothing unusual there, either. In fact, the only unusual thing he found in the kitchen was a photograph, unframed, and with a curiously fragile nudity to it. A CD lay beneath it, the cover a collage of withered flowers. The photo, however, revealed two girls, twins, and identical; one held a guitar—she was in red and black—and the other held drumsticks. “Just black for you, then.” Williams picked up both CD and picture in his covered grip. The girls were pretty in that way that local teenagers often were in Red Grove: white, but browned in the sun, and with dark hair, nice breasts, and a figure that time and children would take from them. They were his type, but separated by a generation or two and a full head of hair and full set of teeth. One of them was Amanda Currie; the one holding the guitar, he figured. He was a little confused, however, by the fact that none of her personal details supplied at the office had noted that she had a twin. A mother, yes. A father, deceased. Nothing else. Strange, but not the first time, he supposed, and tragic if the sister was dead herself or responsible.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time, either.”

  The CD, which Williams opened with a casual flick, was for a band called Dried Flowers, and had the same photo on the inside jacket. The girls had a band of two, it seemed. A closer look at the actual album revealed it to be self-produced, the label listed as TwinsOne, the address for ordering was the house he stood in. With a shrug, he closed it, and kept both. He’d be back to dust the place, if he felt it necessary; but first he’d let the real estate know that they couldn’t come in, then call up Steve, the part timer on today—he had four part time sheriffs, each of them young and with brutally short haircuts as if they came from the same white kid machine—and have him tape down the house, and then he’d call Amanda Currie’s mother. That was a conversation he didn’t want to have.

  Twisting the key to start the engine, he slipped the album into the truck’s player and, with half an eye on the road, listened to it for the fifteen minutes it took him to reach the office.

  “Shit,” he said, five minutes into the drive, “you girls couldn’t play a note.”

  You Never Knew Her Mother (Who Did Not Weep)

  Helen Currie, a small woman with discoloured teeth, and who had lost her looks to sag, expansion, and sun, sat on the white cushioned fold out steel chair in Williams’ stark office and held her leather handbag tightly on her lap, her knuckles a stark white against her white skin. “I don’t have to see her, do I?” she asked, finally, her tone suggesting that if the answer was yes, then she would do it only with submissiveness born out of loss. “Not like that?”

  It was hard. It was always hard, these moments, but Williams had relied upon his ability to switch it off to get him through. He could view it abstractly, and from a distance no matter how close he was physically. He’d lost that, somehow, in the look of Amanda Currie’s ash stained teeth gritted so tightly, and without his distance, he was uncomfortable, fucking uncomfortable he murmured inside his head. What made it worse was that he could never predict how people were going to react. It was always different. Most cried, sobbed, needed to be held—and Williams did that, he held the ones, male, female, young, old, whoever, whatever, who needed to be held. Others were quiet and asked to see the body and stood there in silence and did their grieving elsewhere. In a few rare cases, people accused him of making a joke. A sick joke that he, Williams, came up with because he had nothing better to do than to sit around after work and think which family he’d be cruel to the following day. But he understood that. He understood all the reactions. He had distance. He could see the hurt. None of it touched him, except in the briefest, lightest touches of sympathy for a fellow human. Not here, though, he thought. No. Not here. He pulled open the drawer of his table, lifted out a slim bottle of Southern Comfort, and said, “No, you don’t have to see her. Drink?”

  The only cups he had were plastic, from the coffee and water machine, but Helen Currie took one and held it with a frail sense of gratitude.

  “I got some questions.” He was drinking himself. “That okay?”

  She nodded, sipped from her cup, left her eyes on it.

  “Mind if I record?” After a shake of her head to say sh
e didn’t mind, he flipped the small recorder on, and said, “Who did Amanda live with?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Sarah who?”

  “Her sister, Sarah.”

  Not, Williams thought, my daughter, Sarah. “You know where she is?”

  “If she’s not at their house, no.” The plastic cup swirled, then she lifted it. Once lowered, she said, “I don’t know who her friends are.”

  “You’re not close?”

  She shook her head.

  “Most of her stuff is gone.”

  That made Helen look at him, a quick, but wary rise of her eyes from the cup. “Are you saying—”

  “All I know is that she’s not there, but I’d like to find her. I’d like to speak to her.” He paused then, deliberately, to both catch his thoughts and let his words settle in Helen. He sipped the Southern Comfort, wished he had some Coke, wished he knew how long he’d been keeping a bottle in the drawer at work. Four years? It wasn’t more than five, he knew that. “Either of them got a boyfriend, girlfriend?”

  “Amanda didn’t have time for relationships.” Helen settled the plastic cup down on the table, a thin layer of liquid able to be seen staining the bottom through the bright light of the room. “She had music to write. Music to play. That’s all she cared about. I don’t even think she’d kissed a boy.”

  “Sarah?”

  She shrugged.

  “Helen,” Williams said, “I need your help here.”

  She nudged the plastic cup towards him, a signal. “Do you have children?”

  “I have a son,” he replied. Southern Comfort slipped out in a wet line into the cup. “He lives with his mother in L.A..”

  “Do you ever feel like he isn’t yours?”

  Williams shook his head. “No.” Even though he hadn’t seen Samuel for six years, hadn’t spoken to him in five—if you could call speaking to a then three year old a conversation, he didn’t know—and though he told himself that it was for the best that he kept his distance, that he didn’t track down where they had moved a second time, not after the letter that told him about the new man, the new family, and that it would be a kindness if he didn’t confuse the boy, a kindness she was going to force upon him . . . no, not after all that, had he ever thought that his son wasn’t part of him.

  “I look at that girl,” Helen said, drawing the cup to her slowly as if it were full of bitter pills. “I look at her and I can say I don’t know her, that she’s a stranger to me. That I feel nothing towards her. Isn’t that awful? It should be. It should be awful. It’s an awful thing to know. But I don’t feel bad about it—I just don’t feel anything about the girl. With Amanda it’s different, but with Sarah?”

  “I’m not—”

  “And it’s returned,” she continued, her voice a monotonous recital of thoughts she had had for years. “I’m nothing to Sarah. She said that to me, once. She told me that I wasn’t her mother, that I was nothing to her. I couldn’t even argue.” She looked up at him then, the confusion in her eyes seeking justification, salvation, or absolution. “I don’t even have a birth certificate for her. I lost it. What mother loses her daughter’s birth certificate? A mother who knows that she has had something that’s not right, that the daughter she gave birth to is not part of her, that—that it’s like she’s been forced on me, somehow. I don’t know. I just—I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I don’t even know if this is making sense to you.”

  A little, he thought, a little to piece together motivation, but you can’t tell a mother that. You lie to her about that. “How was her relationship with Amanda?”

  “She loved her.”

  “And the music?”

  “Amanda was the music. Sarah loved it all.” She drank the Southern Comfort with one swift movement, the medicinal way. “Their world was music and each other, like they were born in it.”

  “You ever hear them play?”

  He couldn’t help it: the words slipped out, a mistake born out of curiosity, but when Helen Currie met his gaze, there was, in her pain and confusion, an acknowledgment of what he had heard on the way to his office.

  “Yes,” she said, softly.

  You Never Knew Her Sister

  (Who is Lost)

  Dried Flowers played in Jacob’s Barn two weeks before the fire in the mosque.

  Jacob’s—the Barn was habitually left out—was Red Grove’s nothing bar, a place that was a long, dirty passage between two restaurants, one serving cheap Italian food, and the other greasy pizza, also cheap. Williams had been to all three more than once, the pizza place more than twice and, if he were being honest, Jacob’s more than both put together. The inside of the latter was a long bar with old wooden stools lined up against it, cigarette troughs on the floor, and dead animals on the walls. Trophies hunted in catalogues. There was an old TV beneath a dusty bull’s head, and at the very end, a tiny stage next to an old jukebox. It was the kind of place that thrived because it had cheap drinks and, in Red Grove, cheap drinks brought in the men and women who couldn’t find steady work and the kids who weren’t legal and didn’t have the money, ID, or appreciation for the other two bars in town. Music also brought in the last group: Jacob’s was the only local place where a local band could get a spot on Friday night and show their stuff, guaranteed.

  “Yeah, I remember Mandy. Fuck, but she was shit on stage.” Mike Carey, owner of Jacob’s, was a big white guy covered in coloured tattoos of snakes and skulls down his arms and across his chest, so thick and heavy a collage of blue, green, and red that not a hint of his white skin was exposed except on his hands and neck and face, where a greying, but still mostly brown beard, and long, balding hair hid most of the skin. “Kinda surprised me that they were so fucking awful, I have to say. She was so fucking intense on it. You should’ve seen this girl, Pete, she had nothing but music in her. I thought I was going to find the next big fucking thing.”

  “You didn’t get her to play first?”

  “That’s not how Friday night works.” Carey placed a beer in front of Williams, asked for nothing in return. “You put your name down, you get up, you start. We get shit, we get fun, we get okay—we never get good, but that’s not the point. It’s a place to start, if you’re serious; a place to have some fun if you aren’t. It’s just something to do on a Friday night. Thought I was going to get more this time, though.”

  Williams drank his beer and Carey kept talking, profanities lacing the details of a bad set. A real bad set, yeah, no surprise. Both men had known each other for a long time and were friends, which was why Williams drank for free, and why he overlooked the underage kids drinking when bands played (and when they didn’t). The last had never got him too troubled, anyhow: in Red Grove kids either stole their parents liquor, had older kids buy it to drink in empty paddocks, or drank in Jacob’s. Stop the last and there was still the other two. Stop the first and there was still the second, and there would always be the second. “What was the sister like?” he asked, eventually.

  “The sister?”

  “Yeah.” He paused, sucked on his false teeth, a habit just developing, then pulled out his notebook. “Sarah. That’s her name.”

  “Right. Fuck. I blanked on that for a second.”

  Me too. Odd, but nothing worth worrying about. “Remember her though?”

  “Yeah, she was the drummer.” Carey nodded at an elderly, heavily lined man who entered the otherwise empty bar. “She was an angry girl, that’s what she was. Her sister got on stage, had disks they wanted to sell; started off all right, since she was comfortable on stage. But five minutes into it and they were being booed and told to fuck off. They must’ve known it would happen. It happens once a month here, and I’d seen Mandy before, Sarah too, I reckon, but maybe I just only ever saw one and not the other. But Friday is Cheer or Boo night and once the booing started, it was Sarah who cracked it at the back and started abusing the audience.” />
  Half a glass left. Williams said, “That always works well.”

  Carey laughed. “Just makes them boo more. Got so bad that Mandy ran the fuck off stage, leaving her sister up there. Sarah hung ‘round for a bit then gave everyone the finger and went after her.”

  “You see them after?”

  “Yeah, and that fucking surprised me.” He finished pouring a beer, placed it down in front of the old man, collected the money. “She—Mandy, she’d been crying, like you would, but when I found them out back, she still had that intensity. Still that want in her eyes. Kept telling me it was nothing but a minor setback. That she’d get it right soon. That I could expect to see her back, which is kinda admirable, in its own way, but seemed to me like she was ignoring the truth of the situation. Seemed she was kinda blind to it, y’know?”

  Williams left shortly after that and on the street said, “Not making sense.” It wasn’t: according to Carey, Sarah had been standing at the back, nodding in agreement with Amanda, completely supportive. The anger that she had shown on the stage was simply not there, he said. Evaporated. Summer dams in a drought. Who knew? Certainly not him, and he half wished that Sarah would show up now, so he could talk to her and figure out how she went from that to killing her. Instead, as he stood under the clean, colourless light of Red Grove sun, Williams stared at the cafe across from him. In there, he knew, worked Emily, a girl who had just turned nineteen and who had gotten married on the same day to Robert Parson, a year older than her. He knew about it because it had made the paper, the lean white girl in her wedding gown making the front page because it was one of the few Red Grove weddings of nineteen year olds not to be done under the influence of pregnancy or religion. She would have been in the same year as Amanda and Sarah, would know the pair of them, might even know some of the latter girl’s friends. Worth the walk, anyway.

  Inside the cafe, Williams introduced himself to Emily who, having caught her between the breakfast and lunch crowds, was sitting at one of the tables with a glass of juice and reading an old paperback thriller, her tiny strip of a name badge before her.