“No one outside the family knows this. Teryl was pregnant. First she said she’d been raped by several black men. Then she said the father was someone who was in prison. Then she admitted that the father was her stepfather, and they’d been having relations for years. She’d been put in a church-sponsored home for juvenile delinquents to keep her away from her stepfather. Her family says she seduced him.”
“How old was she?”
“She was just sixteen when she married Billy.”
“So she was barely a teenager when she was supposedly seducing her stepfather. That’s not seduction—it’s rape.”
“Either way, Billy married her knowing that it wasn’t his child, but he didn’t want them to keep the child, he didn’t want to raise her, so they told everyone it had died, and then my mother and my stepfather took the baby and we pretended she was our baby sister.”
“Pardon me?”
“Teryl’s child became my sister, and Teryl and Billy moved to Texas so he could be in the Air Force medical corps. Then they had Bill Jr. and Dijianet.”
“Did Teryl’s child—your ersatz sister—know the truth?”
“No, not until recently when a friend of the family told her. As soon as she found out, she ran away and hasn’t come back. The person who told her is Terry, an older married guy who was having an affair with her. He and his wife were friends with my mother and father—I call my stepfather ‘father’; that’s Earl, ‘Shorty’—anyway, my father got drunk one night and told Terry about my sister, that’s how come he knew.” There was a long pause; and then: “Actually, Terry was Teryl’s stepfather.”
“Wait a minute—Teryl’s stepfather slept both with her and with the daughter he probably had by her? And then he told the daughter that her parents weren’t her parents?”
“I don’t know, I don’t really know. All I know is now my sister—Teryl’s daughter—is with a guy who drinks and abuses her. And I think she’s thinking about joining the army.”
Feeling like you ought to put this book down and go take a shower? I wouldn’t blame you—that’s how I felt in talking to “Donny”. But I also started to feel just the wee littlest bit excited. I began to sense that if I dug deep enough, then everything about Bill would make perfect, tied-up-in-a-bow, sensible, inevitable sense. Maybe no one did notice what a ticking time bomb this guy was all the time he was growing up, but someone should have and everyone could have, had they bothered to look. The expression “smoking gun” came to my mind. I suddenly felt certain that I would someday be able to explain why Bill cut off the right breasts of some of his victims, and why he stabbed others through the heart in addition to strangling them, why he posed their corpses in exotic, erotic positions, mutilated their genitalia, left some nude while dressing others in clothes that were not their own, and the pièce de résistance: why on Earth did Bill Suff stick an energy-efficient General Electric 95-watt Miser lightbulb, intact, up the vagina and into the womb of one woman?
“There’s one other thing you might find interesting,” said Don Suff quite dramatically, “my brother Billy is a great writer. Let me mail you his short story, ‘Tranquility Garden’—he wrote it while he was in prison in Texas.”
Subsequently, all my wife could say was: “What, are you crazy? You gave these people our home address??”
3
“That Forever Tear”
(a poem)
and
“Tranquility Garden”
(a short story)
written by Bill Suff
The day had been warm and at 4:00 that afternoon, it was just beginning to cool off. A warm breeze blowing in from the ocean, coming over the mountains and through the open living room window.
Jeannie was sitting in a chair, facing the window to catch the breeze. She was totally absorbed in the magazine she was reading and didn’t hear the knock the first time. The knock came again and she set the magazine aside. The knock came again as she reached the open door.
The young man at the front door smiled and stood up straighter as the door opened.
“Hello, Jeannie. How are you?”
“Why, Lee! Hello. I didn’t know you were home. When did you arrive?”
“Oh, a little while ago.” He shrugged and looked down at the welcome mat. “Are your parents home?”
“Uh, n-no, Lee. They went to Riverside. They’ll be home soon. Why don’t you come in and wait.”
“No, thank you. I came to see you. Mom wrote me you’re get-ting married soon.”
“Yes, I am. Next Thursday. You remember Ricky. We went to high school together.”
“Yes, I remember.” He hesitated, then uncertainly asked, “Jean-nie, can you come with me? Just for a walk. We’ll be back before dark.”
“Well, I don’t know. I was expecting Ricky to call and…”
“It’s important, Jeannie.” He blurted out.
Jeannie thought it over and chewed on the inside of a lip. Lee stood on the porch with a pleading look in his eyes. Finally, Jeannie said, “OK Lee, but not too far. I promised to cook dinner tonight.”
She grabbed a light sweater and walked out of the house with a young man in a rumpled, army uniform.
They were crossing a small, grassy field. They had been talking about the wedding preparations and what had been going on in Lake Elsinore since Lee left two years ago, to join the Army.
“Lee, what did you really want to talk about? You didn’t come all the way here just to hear me talk about Ricky, the wedding and the goings-on around here. What do you really want?”
“I came back from… my assignment, to find out if you were really going to marry Ricky. To find out if you would change your mind.”
She stopped, hands on her hips and glared at him. “That’s an awfully foolish question! Of course I’m going to marry Ricky and I will not change my mind. What makes you think I would change my mind?”
“I was just hoping you wouldn’t marry him. That you’d… uh… marry me… instead.”
“Lee, you’ve been gone from here over two years. Things have happened. I like you Lee, but not as much as I did in school. I found out I was in love with Ricky. Why should I forget him and marry you?”
“Please, don’t get mad at me, Jeannie. Let’s continue our walk and talk a little longer.”
“No, Lee. I don’t think we should go any further. Take me back home.”
“Please, Jeannie. Let’s walk just a little further. I want you to see something. I know you’ll like it. It’s only a little bit further.”
She looked around to see where they were and was surprised they had walked so far. “Well, only a little bit further. It’ll be getting dark soon.” They started walking again. Slowly, yet they covered the ground so fast, it was unbelievable.
Soon they were in a small, grassy meadow with trees and a small stream in it. Jeannie looked around, astonished at the sight. “Why, it-it’s beautiful here. I didn’t know there was anyplace as pretty as this around here.”