Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull ShortLit) Read online

  in his flannel pajamas, his eyes

  shrunken and bleary without

  his glasses. He sits on the edge

  of the bed, speaking quietly into

  the tapped phone. Stop calling,

  he says. Please leave us alone.

  SOME QUESTIONS

  THE GAP

  Consciousness

  does not appear to itself

  chopped up in bits,

  William James

  once said.

  It appears to itself as continuous.

  But there can be

  holes in time

  the mind tries

  to ignore, holes

  that perforate

  the felt of

  the night sky.

  An aching gap,

  James said, trying

  to describe

  the space made

  by a lost word.

  To fill it up

  is the destiny

  of our thoughts.

  What transpired

  for five and

  a half hours

  between Jane

  and her murderer

  is a gap so black

  it could eat

  an entire sun

  without leaving

  a trace. Listen

  hard enough,

  James said.

  You can hear

  the rhythm

  of the ache.

  THEFUNERAL

  It is not the time to ask why these things happen,

  but to have faith, the reverend said,

  and four hundred people wept.

  Thirty years later the morning is quiet

  and faithless. It is time

  to ask questions.

  (1966)

  Questioning is healthy-opinions that are unstable are great.

  Pseudo-certainty is the worse crime. Nothing is absolute.

  No one has all the answers. Pretense is hideous.

  This whole essay is a bunch of crap.

  THE ARGUMENT

  There was an argument going on, one with subtle terms.

  Can anyone like blood the way one likes the mountains or the sea?

  Two slugs turn the light of the mind into dull meat.

  Answer me.

  SOME QUESTIONS

  If you walk late at night

  pray where you like

  do you feel free?

  Will I ever understand; otherwise

  am I part of this world

  or not quite.

  TWO BULLETS

  The skull

  may flatten

  the metal, but

  the metal

  will win. It

  wedges in-to

  the seat of

  thought, uses

  the pink tissue

  as its envelope.

  Two bullets:

  one in front,

  one in back

  quickly speak.

  They tell the heart,

  No more beats.

  AT DENTON CEMETERY

  Fresh tire tracks

  and the heel print

  of a man’s shoe,

  the only clues.

  THE CALL

  My mother remembers something about Jane

  making a call for help-

  a frantic call from a public phone.

  But when I ask whom she called

  or from where, my mother admits

  her memory on this point

  is far from clear.

  I’ve looked and looked,

  but there’s no record

  of any call. No:

  when Jane disappeared,

  she disappeared whole.

  It’s a fantasy, I suppose-

  a way of breathing air

  into the cramp

  of that night. It gives

  my mother another chance

  to fail; Jane, a chance

  to fight.

  SERIALS

  One girl in 1967,

  another in 1968.

  Jane in March of ’69.

  The next girl just four days later-

  then one in April,

  one in June,

  one in July.

  “Each of the girls was killed

  and her body left off some lonely road

  in or between two towns

  whose outskirts are only two miles apart,”

  explained the Detroit News.

  On maps and records,

  each girl gets a number;

  Jane is number three.

  My family remembers the fourth

  as a prostitute, but really

  she was just a junkie, aged

  sixteen. Her body was simply

  destroyed, as if

  making up for

  whatever Jane was spared

  a few days before.

  My grandparents had no interest

  in talking to the other families-

  There were differences between us, they said.

  Just as you’d expect, some wanted vengeance,

  some wanted to sue the University,

  some talked a lot about God.

  My family folded in on

  itself, accepting the case as unsolved,

  shuttered the windows of that house

  and sternly commanded themselves

  to count their blessings

  and move on.

  TALLY

  I am grateful that a three-inch nail wasn’t hammered into her head.

  I am grateful that her face wasn’t beaten beyond recognition.

  I am grateful that her breasts weren’t corroded with acid.

  I am grateful that her fingers were not cut off. I am grateful that her toes were not cut off.

  I am grateful that her forearms were not cut off.

  I am grateful that her skull wasn’t cracked in three places with a wooden club.

  I am grateful that she wasn’t raped with the branch of a tree.

  These are some of the things that were done to the other girls’ bodies.

  (FEBRUARY 11, 1961)

  Bet it seems like I’ve forgotten you.

  I haven’t and my thoughts go on with the same confusing never-ending pace.

  ONE LINE OF REASONING

  “Had the killer been prepared to force intercourse upon [Jane], only to abandon the effort upon realizing she was on her period? The question that this reasonable deduction did not answer was whether she was already dead at the moment, or whether it was this discovery that drove him to murderous retaliation.”

  -The Michigan Murders

  Retaliation: To return like for like, especially evil for evil.

  REASONING, CONTINUED

  “At least three of the slain females were known to have been having their periods when killed, and while this had not been certifiable in the other four cases, in each it was listed as possible. Could their menstrual condition have been the salient common factor, inopportune discovery of which in each instance had set the killer off? It could, if they were dealing with someone who had a paroxysmal fetish about this ‘disgusting’ feminine impairment!”

  -The Michigan Murders

  REVELATION

  So they guessed she wasn’t raped

  (but maybe killed)

  because she had her period;

  the newspapers reported that

  her “sanitary napkin”

  was found in place.

  So what blood

  is blood-

  head-blood, cunt-blood

  Black clots,

  red streams.

  How we’ve fooled ourselves,

  we who’ve split blood

  into that which pollutes,

  and that which redeems.

  (1966)

  Anger is a terrible terrible thing.

  It causes hate.

  I wish I could talk this over with someone.

  There’s no one to talk to lately

  and my h
eart and chest are tense with anger too often.

  DEMOGRAPHICS

  “All the victims have been independent and politically liberal,”

  the paper said, i.e. girls who would be God.

  Three “coeds,” a graduate student in art, an eight-grader, a runaway,

  a law student.

  The world is ours, but we walk in it

  noticed.

  NEVER WALK ALONE-NOT EVEN IN THE DAYTIME

  “Some coeds did not seem so concerned that they might be raped or robbed, but only that they might lose their lives. ‘Just as long as we don’t get killed, the rest is not so important,’ one girl explained.”

  -Michigan Daily, student paper, March 26, 1969

  A CASE THAT TURNS OUT TO BE UNRELATED for Margaret Phillips

  A sociology student is helping an ex-convict get back on his feet.

  One night he comes by her apartment, shoots her in the head and leaves; somehow she manages to call the police.

  Alive but incoherent, tomorrow she’ll be dead.

  When he gets home, he tells a friend:

  I keep seeing small brown holes

  coming from nowhere

  but landing in her head.

  (APRIL 15, 1960)

  I’ve not written for awhile and it’s unfortunate for I’ve been

  filled with happiness.

  No troubles.

  I’m getting along well in school, don’t sass Mrs. Ingalls any more.

  The girls have been nice to me, happiness at home,

  a feeling of oh-I don’t know-

  I feel like reading the Bible.

  I’m interested in it and of knowing more about God and Jesus.

  I’m glad spring is coming, glad Easter’s here, glad to have a family and friends-

  Glad to be alive! Happiness!

  “All agree that in an extremity we are to seek God’s guidance and help. There probably are not only one or two, but hundreds upon hundreds or even thousands upon thousands of Christians here in Ann Arbor who would be willing to make [apprehending the killer] a matter of prayer.”

  -Letter to the Ann Arbor News, June 17, 1969

  GOD’S COUNTRY

  I had not quite a dream though it was something equally sinister. There was a large church behind closed doors and a gate. I knew this church promised salvation at the hands of a row of white preachers and a choir of black singers who mooned into the evening. It’s guaranteed, the preacher screamed. Behind the closed doors I could hear the shouts of people in rapture, see the shadows made by the legs of running children. I walked by with my collar pulled tight around my face; I was wearing a thin blue jacket that could not keep out the cold. Read the red parts! a woman guarding the door whispered to me. Read the red parts! And it would be there that love would redeem, and that redemption would be love.

  I stay outside the gates. The dirt of the street is bone-white. I hang out with some hunchback mourners, eating seeds, rolling marbles between our fingers.

  LEFORGE ROAD

  It was an abandoned barn off LeForge Road

  the kind of place where teenagers go

  to drink and fuck

  where the police found traces

  of “fairly fresh, human blood.”

  Also found:

  one girl’s plate-gold earring;

  another’s mohair sweater;

  strips of another’s “drip-dry” white blouse;

  and the cut end of a black electrical cord

  used to strangle the fifth girl

  a few days before.

  Soon after the barn is staked out

  it burns down, and someone lays

  “five plump lilacs”

  in front of the smoking debris.

  A local kid later confesses to the arson;

  the flowers remain a mystery.

  ASIDE

  I am copying all these details

  from The Michigan Murders, a book

  that sickens me. Its subtitle:

  The Most Barbaric Sex Crimes of the Century!

  Somehow I need to make it clear:

  none of these details belongs to me.

  STAKEOUT

  After the seventh girl was found dead in a gully,

  the police chose not to notify her family immediately.

  Instead they replaced her body

  with a mannequin from J. C. Penney

  in case the killer returned to the scene,

  an apparently common activity.

  A man did appear in the woods that night,

  a young man in a loose light shirt.

  But in the August downpour, the police fumbled

  with their walkie-talkies

  as the man ran to his car, his headlights

  disappearing into the woods.

  HEADLINES

  The case gets stranger and stranger.

  A group called the Psychedelic Rangers

  brings a psychic in, who says things like,

  Her face was beat, beat, beat. It was wrinkled like a monkey’s.

  A curfew is imposed on all local college women;

  the governor finally asks the FBI to step in.

  Then on August 1st, 1969

  a photo of a man walking on the moon

  appears on the front page

  of the Ann Arbor News.

  The caption:

  “Two Apollo 11 astronauts romped

  in an eerie, unreal world of tortured gray terrain....

  Above was a coal-black sky.”

  But above this photo was a much bigger headline:

  SLAYING SUSPECT HELD:

  Collins Is Called “Quiet, Nice Guy.”

  ONE MISTAKE

  John Collins was a junior at Eastern Michigan University.

  His major was education.

  His uncle was a police sergeant

  who, after returning from a family vacation,

  noticed some large patches

  of black varnish

  sprayed on his basement floor. Curious, he scraped

  the stains up, and found

  what he thought were spots of blood.

  They weren’t, but an investigation had begun.

  Before long, the police did find blood,

  over by the washer.

  In time the police also realized

  that the thousands of short hairs

  littering the basement floor

  from clipping the family’s hair

  might match those found on

  Karen Sue Beineman’s underwear