Dark Places(68)

BEN WAS WAITING for me this time when I came, sliding into view before I was prepared. He sat rigid in the seat behind glass, his eyes unfocused, a jumpsuited mannequin. I wanted to tell him not to do that to me, it gave me the creeps, but I didn’t say anything because why would he give me the creeps unless I still didn’t entirely believe he was innocent.

Which I didn’t, I guess.

I sat down, the chair still humid from someone else, the warmth of the plastic feeling grossly intimate in this place. I mushed my buttocks back and forth, making it mine, trying not to look repulsed, but when I picked up the phone it was still sweaty from the previous user, and whatever look I gave made Ben frown.

“You OK?” he asked, and I nodded once. Yes, sure, absolutely fine.

“So, you came back,” he said. He fixed on a smile now. Cautious, the way Ben always was. At a family party, on the last day of school, he looked the same, a kid who lived permanently in the library— waiting to be shushed.

“I came back.”

He had a nice face, not handsome but nice, the face of a good guy. Catching me assessing him, his eyes darted to his hands. They were big now, bigger than his small frame, piano hands even though we never played piano. They were scarred, nothing impressive, dark pink confetti strips of nips and cuts. He caught me looking, held one hand up, pointed a finger at one deep gash: “Polo accident.”

I laughed because I could tell he was already regretting the joke.

“Nah, actually you know what this is?” Ben said. “This is from that bull, Yellow 5, remember that little bastard?”

We had only a small operation, but we still never named our cattle, that was not a good idea, even as a kid I had no interest in getting attached to Bossy or Hank or Sweet Belle because they’d be sent to slaughter as soon as they were big enough. Sixteen months, that rang out in my head. Once they were a year old, you started tiptoeing around them, you started looking at them sideways with disgust and embarrassment like a guest in your home who just farted. So instead we color-tagged them during calving each year, matching cows with their calves: Green 1, Red 3, Blue 2, sliding out from their mothers, onto the dirt floor of the barn, those feet kicking right away, always trying to get a purchase in the slop. People think of cattle as docile, dumb, but calves? They’re kitty-curious, playful, and for that reason I was never allowed in the lot with them, just eyed them through the slats, but I remember Ben, his rubber boots on, trying to sneak, moving slow and deliberate as an astronaut, and then he got near and he might as well have been trying to grab fish. I remember Yellow 5, at least the name, the famous bull calf who’d refused to be castrated— poor Ben and my mom, day after day trying to get ahold of Yellow 5 so they could slit his sack and cut off his nuts, and each day coming to the dinner table as failures, Yellow 5 having outplayed them. It was a joke to be told over a ground round the first night, everyone talking to the steak, pretending it was Yellow 5: You’ll be sorry, Yellow 5. By the second night it was cause for chagrined laughter, and by the fifth it was grim mouths and silence, a reminder to both Ben and my mom that they weren’t good enough: weak, small, slow, lacking.

I’d have never thought of Yellow 5 again without Ben reminding me. I wanted to tell him to make a list of things to recall, memories I couldn’t pluck out of my brain on my own.

“What happened? He bit you?”

“Nah, nothing that dramatic, he pushed me into the fence right when I thought I’d gotten ahold of him, just haunched me to one side, and I fell full on, jammed the back of my hand right onto a nail. It was on a rail Mom had already asked me to fix, a good five times. So, you know, my fault.”

I was trying to think of what to say—something clever, commiserative, I still had no grip on what reactions Ben wanted—and Ben interrupted. “No, screw that, it was goddam Yellow 5’s fault.” He broke into a quick smile, then let his shoulders slump down again. “I remember Debby, she dressed it all up, my cut, put a Band-Aid on it and then put one of her stickers, those shiny stickers with like hearts or whatever, on top of it.”

“She loved stickers,” I said.

“She put ’em everywhere, that’s for sure.”

I took a breath, debated flitting over to some other harmless subject, the weather or something, then didn’t.

“Hey, Ben, can I ask you a question?”

He went shark-eyed, tight, and I saw the convict again, a guy used to being on the receiving end, taking question after question and getting attitude when he asked his own. I realized what a decadence it was, to refuse to answer a question. No thanks, don’t want to talk about that and the worst you get is someone thinks you’re rude.

“You know that night?”

He widened his eyes. Of course he knew the night.

“I remember, I may have been confused, about exactly what happened …”

He was leaning forward now, his arms stiff, huddled over the phone like it was a late-night emergency call.

“But, one thing I do remember, like stake-my-life-on-it remember … your light was on. In your bedroom. I saw it under the crack in the door. And there was talking. In the room.”

I trailed off, hoping he’d save me. He let me float, that freefall few seconds when your feet go loose on ice and you have just enough time to think, Oh. I am going to fall.

“That’s a new one,” he finally said.