Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull ShortLit) Read online

  is in the knowledge that whereas you may

  lose a few, there are plenty more to win-

  And, like I said, there is plenty of time.

  THE SCRIPT

  I am performing in a play as a child star. The play calls for me to run away on a horse that comes galloping in from upstage left, to throw my body onto it. The horse is a little off, but that’s OK, it makes for good dramatic tension. The script then calls for me to have a huge accident. After the crash, I wake up in my childhood bed, and find I have obliterated the back of my head. It feels terrible, I can’t touch it, all I can do is lie in the bathtub and let the blood unclot in the water, let the water sift through the matted hair and blood and brain. After I’m all cleaned up I get tucked into bed: fluffy pink sheets, a yellow bedroom. I accept flowers, people come to see me. They assure me that this is all part of a larger plan, the plan for my return to the starring role.

  THE ORACLE

  Go down to the dumb

  oracle. Bring an offering

  of sorts-a pear, a cuticle, a block

  of quartz. Kneel down

  on the cold slab of marble

  wedged in the dirt.

  Concentrate. Let the sun vault

  over its dial.

  After a while a question

  will come. But as

  I already mentioned, the oracle

  is dumb. So trudge home

  to your room where

  candles make shadows

  of fruit. Ask the shapes,

  ask the dark city,

  Am I to live this life

  with a blameless ferocity?

  Then wait

  for morning to bring

  the bright sediment of things

  into focus. It

  comes clear.

  A SIMPLY STATED STORY

  THE LIBRARIAN

  When I tell my mother

  I’m going to Michigan

  to trace the end of

  Jane’s life, she

  surprises me, says

  she wants to go

  with me. Says

  it’s about time.

  As we’re planning the details

  of our trip, she repeatedly insists:

  I don’t want you to get obsessed with this.

  I dream I am in the library

  doing research on the Manson Family.

  I try not to let anyone see me, but

  the librarian is onto me. When

  she confronts me, I desperately

  try to explain that it’s part

  of a larger project, it’s not

  just about the Manson Family.

  A TRIP BACK

  Our plan: to meet in Chicago,

  fly together to Grand Rapids,

  then rent a car to Ann Arbor.

  But huge thunderstorms strand me

  all day at LaGuardia. Didyou think

  it was going to be easy? I can hear Jane say.

  There’s no way to get in touch

  with my mother, so when

  I don’t arrive at the gate

  she goes on without me, stays

  the night in Muskegon with

  her father. When we finally talk

  on the phone, I tell her,

  This whole trip feels fatally

  flawed, and some god’s

  telling us not to inquire further.

  But I go back to the airport

  at dawn, get to Chicago OK,

  then board a little propeller plane

  to take me the rest of

  the way. I watch the woman

  I take to be our flight attendant

  as she pulls in and secures

  the door; I’m shocked

  when she climbs into

  the cockpit-I’ve never flown

  with a female pilot before.

  Once we’re airborne

  everyone moves

  to sit by the windows,

  but I stay in seat 1A.

  From here I can see

  all the controls, how

  simple they are, and

  how she uses them.

  IN THE MOVIE VERSION

  I am chic, smart, and ambitious—

  a young CIA agent who likes

  to run alone in the woods.

  A city slicker, I come to a small town

  and unintentionally prod

  old wounds. I order martinis

  in the local bar; the regulars

  don’t like me. I learn more and more

  about her murder, though no one

  really wants to talk to me.

  What I don’t know is that

  I’m increasingly in danger—

  the killer’s hot on my trail.

  One night I come home to find

  a toothpick shoved in my lock;

  as I fumble with my keys, he abducts me

  into a truck, then traps me

  in a dark cellar

  where I am forced to play the cello

  in a sexy black outfit

  and confront my feelings

  about the death of my father.

  In the end I kill my captor,

  even though my back-up

  doesn’t arrive on time.

  In the parting shot

  I look safe, happy, and tan

  but the audience knows

  I’ll be forever haunted

  by the crime.

  RESTLAWN CEMETERY

  My mother drives our rental car right to it, though

  she wasn’t sure she’d remember the way.

  She used to come here and sit for hours, tell her sister

  about all that had happened, about her two children.

  Jane’s buried next to her mother now;

  both graves are extremely plain. Just

  flat granite plaques in bright green grass.

  And Jane’s marker says Janie, not Jane.

  I remember when we buried Grandma,

  sneaking looks at Jane’s grave. I never dreamed

  I’d be sitting cross-legged on it today, my mother

  facing into the sun. As we sit and talk

  I get a sunburn I will have for weeks

  on the back of my neck and my arms.

  We leave three white peonies

  we bought at the local supermarket-

  two for Jane, one for her mother-

  before continuing on our way, stopping

  to pick up some wrappers from McDonald’s

  the wind has scattered over their graves.

  LEFORGE ROAD, REVISITED

  There are still barns out here, solitary red barns

  suspended in the fields. Each one

  has a dirt road leading to it, cutting white

  through the rib-high grass.

  Every so often, a pickup drives up,

  trailed by a ball of dust.

  I tell my mother to turn off

  onto one of those dirt roads.

  Suddenly it’s marshy and quiet;

  a corridor walled in by blades.

  The sun weirdly dappling the road.

  I directed my mother to drive here,

  but I can’t manage to tell her why.

  How dark it must get, I say instead,

  out here at night.

  A SIMPLY STATED STORY

  “Small dots simply state the story of tragedy which has unfolded in the Ann Arbor area over the past two years.”

  -Ann Arbor News, July 28, 1969

  Imagine a map

  studded with

  numbers, each

  corresponding

  to the location

  of a dead girl,

  the words Figure 4.1:

  Death Map Expands

  at the top of the page.

  Such a map

  I am holding

  in my lap,

  thirty-odd years

  after the fact,

  navigating

  our way. We

  he
ad east on

  Route 12, a road

  lined with dismal

  strip malls. None of this

  was here before,

  my mother swears.

  It gets more rural

  as we get farther

  from the cluster

  of other numbers

  and closer

  to Number 3.

  Suddenly I see

  an old metal sign

  tacked onto a chain-link

  fence: Denton Cemetery.

  Turn here, I say quietly.

  KOAN

  Not yet, says

  a scrap of garbage

  floated by

  the wind.

  Not yet, says

  a limb of

  lightning,

  shrouded by

  clouds.

  A girl in a boat,

  the boat full of holes.

  Closer.

  A slit sky.

  A slit sky and a bowl.

  Almost.

  (OCTOBER 28, 1961)

  Masque gave a play tonight-Diary of Anne Frank.

  I worked backstage on costumes. Got to know the cast very well.

  The star was Gwen Giubord. She was wonderful. She was Anne.

  I feel like I became a friend of hers. I don’t quite understand it-there was a bond there. Maybe it was just the play, the lights, the mood; but oh she was so sweet.

  She was sad, happy, triumphant, subdued. And I think I, in a way, understood. Maybe that was it.

  In any case, it was fabulous. I loved every minute of it and I love Masque with all my heart.

  I hope someday I can star-but it’s too early to even consider that.

  All I can say is that I was thrilled to be a part of it all and thrilled to just be there, amid the activity and fun. You can’t truly enjoy or understand this until you’ve been there...

  Humor, gratitude, and joy overflow and brim and yet I know no words to describe it.

  The spirit of this play has touched deep into my heart and I know I shall never forget it.

  I can only imagine what the players must have felt-if I feel like this and was only a costume committee member...

  I’m so happy-!

  A PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION (REPRISE)

  Does it matter if I tell you now

  that Jane was not beautiful?

  She was not beautiful. Her skin was

  white and chalky, her eyes

  set close together, recessed

  with disappeared lids. In my new favorite photo

  she is fifteen, around the time

  her childhood journal falls into scraps,

  then silence. Her face and torso loom up

  against a deep blue sky

  a great, momentary albatross of cloud

  hovering nearby. A bright block of light

  bleaches out half her face, whitening

  her forehead and her tough, freckled

  nose. The whole picture

  is beautiful.

  DENTON CEMETERY

  Parallel to the highway, there runs a narrow gravel road

  that used to be a lovers’ lane.

  The road empties out to a field of corn, home

  to a huge red barn, once flanked by white silos.

  Along one side of the gravel road, ten houses or so,

  a big brick one at the end of the way.

  On the other, just a few yards away, lies Denton Cemetery-

  a square cluster of no more than thirty graves.

  The cemetery opens out to grass, then the highway.

  It’s so quiet here, this gorgeous June day

  and the whole world feels shrunken to this:

  sun, big clouds, green fields, red barn.

  So much talk about the possible significance

  of the name on the headstone where her body was found

  but “William Downing, Sr.”

  turns out to be just the grave

  closest to the entrance, the first inside

  the chain-link fence. So there’s

  no plot. Here is just where

  he dumped her, on a night of cold rain

  and where my mother and I stand today,

  listening to the birds.

  This kid doesn’t know anything.

  She’d like to sleep the childish slumber of a baby and yet live in a world of complexities.

  Now she’s going to bed-to wake up to Monday-to go home Wednesday-to come back to school Sunday.

  Think of summer days gone by and dream of you.

  Thank you. Therapy is over.

  Love, Janie.

  EPILOGUE

  Quiet now. Done with her letter she claps the notebook shut, stuffs it in her bag. As she wanders out of the bakery, the entrance seals up behind her, and is gone.

  Along the road, she picks up the perfectly round pebbles, impressed by the luminosity of their everyday gray. Feeling the return of the slightest ache in her head, as if it were the end of a long day of fresh pollen, she tries pressing a stone to her forehead.

  Feels good. Pushes it further.

  The stone sticks, like a third eye, a moon with the pocked memory of its seas. That’s good, for here she can polish it. Not with gauze-with breath.

  And she may need to, for the world in which she moves can threaten blindness.

  Indeed, she no longer sees it, but the last of the light is dribbling out in thick, sticky drops of phosphorous.

  I go on and I don’t know whether I’m going into darkness or into light and joy, she thinks as she walks further down the road.

  Above her, the sun is still trying to burn through the mist. Strange, she thinks, how the sun so often appears as a pale circle, not the orgy of unthinkable fire that it is.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment to the editors of LIT and jubilat, where excerpts from this book first appeared. Five Fingers Review and Salamander also published individual poems.

  Sources: Edward Keyes, The Michigan Murders (NY: Pocket Books, 1976); Joseph C. Fisher, Killer Among Us: Public Reactions to Serial Murder (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997); the Crime Library website (www.crimelibrary.com) ; the Michigan State Police in Ypsilanti; the Ann Arbor News, Detroit News, Michigan Daily, Detroit Free Press, and New York Times; The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath; The Oxford English Dictionary; Edgar Allan Poe, “A Philosophy of Composition”; Benedict & Nancy Freedman, Mrs. Mike; Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being; William James, The Principles of Psychology; André Breton, “The imaginary is what tends to become real,” from “Once Upon a Time to Come” in Earthligbt, translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow (LA: Sun & Moon Press, 1993); Simone de Beauvoir, “Can anyone like blood the way one likes the mountains or the sea?,” from “Must We Bum Sade?,” translated by Annette Michelson (The Marquis De Sade, NY: Grove Press, 1954); Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “I go on and do not know if I am going into darkness or to light and joy,” spoken by Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Gamett (NY: Signet Classic, 1980).