American Girls(11)

Aside from the call to Doon, Delia was being a real monster about letting me use her phone—even though she couldn’t use it herself when she was filming. After the first day on set, the zombie film had lost its charm. My sister was right about the dialogue being idiotic. It was almost like the director had decided that if he filmed every scene at least twenty times, the words coming out of the actors’ mouths might magically become interesting. Wrong. So I started to read the book that Roger had given me.

I found a relatively quiet place near the food table and cracked Helter Skelter open to the pictures in the middle: mug shot after mug shot of Charles Manson, lined up beside each other to show how he’d changed with each passing term in jail. The pictures reminded me of when parents lined up school pictures to show how their toothless second grader gradually became their peroxide-at-the-beach ninth grader. Over the years, the short-haired, clean-cut con man of the 1950s became the dead-eyed, swastika-tattooed, homicidal maniac of the sixties. There were also pictures of bad furniture, the rooms where the victims were murdered, and the various household objects that had been used against them: electric cords, beams in the ceilings, roasting forks from family dinners. The bodies were whited out, almost like after they were murdered they’d been erased from the scene.

And then there were the girls: long-haired and without makeup, looking like they all knew some juicy secret that they weren’t going to tell you. A group shot of five of them talking intently, heads shaved, worried brows, like they were getting ready to go on a cancer walk, not waiting to be sentenced to death. It was hard to believe that crimes that horrible had actually happened, in regular living rooms on regular evenings. Manson’s battalion of zombie-bimbos were the kind of slow-moving death that scared me more than any dumb Hollywood movie. If you wanted a go-to for “At least he’s not…” and Hitler was taken, Manson was a pretty safe second choice.

I’d been reading for three hours, which meant thirty dollars. I would have to read for fifty hours to make back the plane ticket, and fifty more to get home to Atlanta again. Or maybe I’d be like some sleazy lawyer and start charging Roger for whenever I thought about the Manson family. I mentally gave myself five extra dollars for having to read about the murders twice, just to get the details straight.

On the night of August 8, 1969, Charles Manson sent Charles “Tex” Watson and three of the Manson girls, including head psycho Susan Atkins, to 10050 Cielo Drive with instructions to murder everyone inside in the most gruesome way possible. They killed five people, including the eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant actress Sharon Tate. But the murders didn’t stop with Tate.

The next night, six more of his “family” members killed a married couple, the LaBiancas, in basically the same way but in a different part of Los Angeles. The killers even showered and changed into new clothes from the victims’ closets at the crime scene. Then they hitchhiked back to the Manson compound and treated the person who drove them home to breakfast. The whole city of Los Angeles locked its doors, bought guns and guard dogs, and started concocting theories about orgies in the Hollywood Hills and roaming bands of Satanists. Everyone panicked. And those weren’t even the only murders Manson was responsible for. Evidently there were plenty more, bodies in the desert never found, close friends who couldn’t cough up money on demand. He sat around this abandoned film set, baking in the sun, like some psychopathic film director yelling “Do this!” and “Go there!” to dozens of hippies who seemed to think that they were making the world a better place by slicing off ears, gutting women, or just sleeping with the latest hitchhiker who stumbled by. Susan Atkins, the woman who helped kill Tate, said that it took “a whole lot of love to kill someone.” Bat. Shit. Crazy. They left forks in the stomachs of the LaBiancas and on the walls of both crime scenes they wrote in their victims’ blood.

Pig.

Healter Skelter.

Rise.

Death to Pigs.

And carved in the stomach of the last of the victims: War.

Healter Skelter, misspelled, made me think of the chicken scratch in my sister’s purse: Whore.

When Delia put a hand on my shoulder, I jumped. The book was making me more nervous than I’d expected. Then when I looked at her face, I almost had a full-on freak-out. When I’d last seen her she’d had on her pre-zombie-apocalypse makeup, but now blood was trickling down her cheek and her left eye was completely black. A bruise that looked like a handprint wrapped purple-blue around her neck.

“I know,” she said. “The makeup artist is a genius, right?”

That was one word for it. Fingernail marks dotted her collarbone, and when she smiled two of her teeth had been painted gray. Another three had been blacked out entirely.

“Dare me to drive home with this on?”

I thought about the Manson family, driving around with blood on their hands, and how in Hollywood, you couldn’t tell the killers from the actors. If there was a stranger place on earth, I didn’t know where.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

*

When we came home from the set a miracle had taken place—my phone, which I had almost given up for dead, was plugged in and ringing.

“You going to answer that?” Delia asked.

I picked the phone up and looked at the number. Atlanta. My mom.

“I don’t want to,” I said.