I mean, I’m a man. What am I supposed to do? I’ve got a job on a farm outside of town. I work with my hands. These days that means pulling levers and pushing buttons on giant machines, but I try to keep some pride in my life. It’s been hard lately. I’ve been lonely since Molly left. She was the only girl I’ve ever loved. I’d always thought we would be together forever, but I guess she had different plans. Every winter seems colder than the last, and the bills only get longer. And on top of all that, I have to deal with a neighbor who doesn’t have an ounce of respect for me or my property? What am I supposed to do?
I just want someone to tell me what I’m supposed to goddamn do.
THINGS LEFT OUTSIDE
I wish it was me who had found her and not my husband. I kept wondering what she looked like in her natural state, so to speak. What if Gerald had moved her around?
Gerald didn’t notice me when I got there. He was walking around in a semicircle as if he wanted to get closer, but her body was letting off a magnetic force that kept him away.
“Who does she belong to?” I said. I was out of breath and leaned against a tree.
“What?” Gerald said, turning around. There were a few cows nearby. They were looking at the three of us with large eyes.
“I mean, she’s half on our land and half on the Smiths’ pasture.”
“Ah,” he said. “I’m not sure it matters.”
“The head is on our half,” I said. “I think that should count for something.”
I had been folding laundry when Gerald called. I liked doing it right when it came out, when it was so hot it almost burned my hands. I could feel his excitement through the little speaker beside my ear. Gerald told me he had been walking near the edge of our property and found our cat, Mitzy, chewing on a dead woman’s face.
We’d lived on this backwoods land for two years, Gerald and I. It was a twenty-minute drive from town. If you walked through the woods, you’d come across a cow pasture cut out from the forest with rusty barbed wire. When we first moved in, we used to drink a bottle of wine and go and stick our hands through the fence so the cows would lick our palms for salt.
Gerald had already placed his bandanna over the woman’s head. He said it was the Christian thing to do.
“Oh, Gerald,” I said, and threw my arms around him. “Who would do something like this?”
“It’s deer season,” Gerald said. “She was probably shot by a hunter who realized his mistake and fled.” He was looking past me. He had a large beard at that time, and his face seemed to be shrinking into it as he talked. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably what happened.”
The woman was on her belly beneath the barbed wire, legs jutting into the cow pasture. You could tell by the color of the dirt that there had been a lot of blood, yet her jeans and green button-up looked untouched from the back. They could have been pulled fresh out of the dryer.
“I think I have that exact same shirt,” I said. “I bought it on sale at Gap.”
I squatted close to the body. I thought she would look peaceful, and that I would feel a spiritual calm spread through my veins, but it didn’t happen. With her head hidden under the bandanna, she looked more like a mannequin. I wanted to reach out and bend her limbs into a livelier pose.
Gerald squeezed my collarbone with his hands. He bent down and put his dry lips against my cheek. “The cops said they’d be here soon.” He said it so matter-of-factly. She was already passing out of our hands. “We should go back to the house.”
“No,” I said. “We need to be with her till they come.”
My husband sighed and sat on a stump with his hands on his knees. I stayed in the damp grass near the body. The woman was laying belly down, with her arms curled in front of her head. I could imagine sleeping like that, with a pillow under my head instead of mud. I kept hoping the wind would blow the bandanna off her head. There were a few bugs crawling over her body. One flew onto my foot, and I flicked it away.
“I’m getting kind of hungry,” Gerald said after a bit.
Not much normally interrupted our eating out here. We inherited the house from Gerald’s parents after his father died of a stroke and his mother gave up and moved to Florida. It was a quiet place, but close enough to town that we weren’t hillbilly hermits.
Gerald and I had met in high school. He had been on the state champion football team, although I always forgot which position. We’d been together for long enough it felt like nothing at all.
It was already getting dark when the police arrived. They turned the forest upside down with lamps and walkie-talkies. They took Gerald aside, and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He seemed to be giving a description of our cat.
I watched the police dump out the woman’s backpack. There was a bag of trail mix, three tubes of beauty product, a bottle of red wine, and a digital camera. All objects I own and use myself. They put these in plastic bags that they zipped shut. At one point I thought I saw Mitzy, her eyes bouncing beneath a bush like glow-in-the-dark balls.
The police only asked me if I’d heard any unusual noises. I said no, and they said they might need to talk to me down the road.
After that we had to leave the area.
When we got home, I went to the bathroom. I flushed the toilet and then looked in the mirror and tried to cry. I walked around the house, calling for Mitzy. She kept darting under different pieces of furniture.
Gerald was snacking in front of the TV. I sat down next to him and took a handful of chips.
“Was she beautiful?” I asked.
“What? I didn’t know her,” he said quickly.
“But you saw her face before you covered it up,” I said. “What did she look like?”
“Christ, Carol. I dunno. Normal?”
“That’s it?” I said. “You don’t remember her eye color or anything?”
Gerald stood up and walked over to the trash can and spat out a plum pit, then walked back and sat down.
“She had brown hair,” he said. “About your length. I dunno if you’d call her pretty. Pretty enough I guess. Her face was wide open and stuck in the mud. I didn’t want to keep looking at her eyes.”
“For some reason I want her to be beautiful,” I said.
I could have been doing anything when it happened. Slicing an apple, napping on the porch, wrapping my fingers around Gerald’s privates. And out there, she was breathing her last breaths. The police had taken the body away in a dark bag, but I kept wondering about her. I would try to imagine her face, and it would be the face of a sister of mine. A twin sister I never knew I had, a mirror reflection I had failed to protect.
I didn’t dream about her, or didn’t remember the dreams, but I also didn’t sleep much. I rolled onto my side and watched a small pool of saliva leak out of Gerald’s red mouth.
At breakfast, I couldn’t help myself. “Would you say she was older or younger than me?”
Gerald was dipping pieces of bread into his runny eggs. He took the piece that was halfway in his mouth and placed it down on the rim of the plate.
“It’s in the past,” he said. “Death is just a part of life. I think we should let it go and move on.” He put the toast back into his mouth. I got up to refill my coffee.
It was a bright day outside. A ladybug flew into the window. I thought I heard gunshots in the distance.
“Hey, maybe we could go in and see a movie later tonight,” Gerald said. He scraped a large chunk of butter across his toast. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”