Capote in Kansas Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Author’s Note

  Copyright Page

  Praise for Capote in Kansas

  “Kim Powers has not only written but has crafted an engaging narrative that sensitively explores the intricacies of transgression and forgiveness within friendship.”

  —New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “Well-written. . . . Raises thought-provoking philosophical issues about how writers should use the lives of real people.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “[An] exceptional first novel. . . [Powers] succeeds brilliantly in blending fact and fiction to produce a sensitive portrait of two lost souls. Heartily recommended.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Intriguing opening. . . . Fans of In Cold Blood and To Kill a Mockingbird will welcome this off-beat novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Compelling and intense. Powers’s glimpse into the world of two of America’s most respected writers sheds light on the burden of fame and great talent.”

  —Sulphur Springs News-Telegram

  “Capote in Kansas not only mines new territory, but it does so in such a compelling way that I was sorry it was only 250 pages long.”—Out Front Colorado

  “An engrossing, fantastic blend of strong characterization and gripping plot. Any who would categorize this as simply quasi-biography, fiction or ghost story will find its power and enchantment simply undeniable: an outstanding recommendation for general lending collections strong in fictionalized facts.” —Midwest Book Review

  “Touching and often hilarious. . . . A deft and clever rewriting of what is known and fabricated about these two mysterious authors.”—Bay Area Reporter

  “A richly detailed story that incorporates so much fact into the telling it acquires the harsh light and intimate detail of documentary. . . .” Echo Magazine

  “Part mystery and part literary homage, Capote in Kansas is a tale about ghosts both literal and figurative—and a tribute to an enigmatic friendship. . . . This is an incredible ‘what might have been’ story.”—Tucson Citizen

  For Jess, as always . . . And in loving memory of Frieda Badian Goldstein

  Chapter One

  “She’s back. She’s after me.”

  Those were the first words Nelle had heard from him in—God, twenty years? However many years it had been, it was so long ago she couldn’t remember. She just knew that it had been another time, another place.

  She also knew immediately, even with the call coming in the middle of the night, who it was. Even a deaf and nearly dead old person—which she wasn’t, but getting there—could tell who was on the other end of the line, the high-pitched, nasal whine as unmistakable at age fifty-nine as it had been fifty years earlier.

  “Truman?”

  “I’m in trouble. Terrible, terrible, terrible trouble.”

  “Truman. Good Lord Above, I can’t believe . . .”

  “Trouble like you won’t believe. Oh, Nelle, Nellynellynelly, I’ve messed up, you’ve gotta help me.”

  “I believe all the trouble I hear about you, but let’s start with how dare you call me outta the blue when you haven’t called in . . .”

  He cut her off, unrepentant, nothing like a little “I’m sorry we haven’t talked in twenty years” to stand in his way.

  He was in trouble and he needed help now.

  “You’re the only one I can trust. I’ve written a book, my masterpiece, all my secrets, all their secrets, and now she’s trying to steal it, take it from me ’fore it’s ready . . .”

  “Who? Where are you?”

  “In Palm Springs. In Cold Blood,” he added, a giggle, a postscript. “Oh, Nelle . . .”

  Now he was crying.

  “First it was all those bitches in New York, the ones I wrote about, who practically drummed me out of town. Now it’s her. I can’t get her to leave. I don’t want her here.”

  “Who are you talkin’ about?”

  “Nancy. I told you.”

  No, he hadn’t, and Nancy who? She didn’t know any Nancy.

  “She’s come here every night in a row now, and I’m scared.”

  “Who has been comin’?”

  An exasperated sigh. “Nancy. Nancy Clutter. Remember?”

  “You idiot,” he might as well have said.

  Nancy Clutter.

  From In Cold Blood.

  The dead teenage girl who loved horses.

  Jesus H. Christ.

  His coming couldn’t have been any more surprising.

  “She’s here. In this very room, over in the corner. Just staring at me. And I’m scared witless. Shitless,” he said, giggled again, then cried. Again. “She’s just staring at me—ohsweetJesusLord—now she’s at the foot of the bed. How’dshegethereshit.”

  “Throw a bottle at her. Sounds like you’ve got a few lyin’ around.”

  Nelle was not having any of this, no matter how drunk or scared or famous he was. Not a word of explanation for disappearing on her—blaspheming her—years ago. She was not a retiring woman, about to roll over and accept table scraps. Just read her book—she had one too, you know—and find out. She’d been a tomboy, tough as nails, able to punch out anybody on the playground, and she still had it in her. It was old, and tired, and arthritic, but it was still there. Tough. It took being tough to deal with all the requests and questions and letters that came her way.

  But this—from a man half her size, half her strength, a voice way higher than hers, one call—and she caved.

  “Now she’s jabbering . . .”

  “What? What’s she saying?”

  Like the dead Nancy Clutter was actually talking to Truman. Nelle could not believe herself. What indeed.

  “She’s blaming me. And you, too . . .”

  “Me?”

  “. . . You were there, too, Miss Don’t Think You’re Gonna Get Outta This So Easy.”

  “Blamin’ us? For what?” (Indignant at a ghost that wasn’t there. Nelle was losing her mind, same as Truman.)

  Finally, a pause on the other end, as if Truman couldn’t quite believe what Nancy had just said, and was trying to process her words before he repeated them to Nelle.

  “Blaming us because . . . I made her famous. We made her famous. She says she never wanted to be famous. Would you wanna be famous for getting killed?”

  Famous.

  Mad at being famous—the only thing Truman had ever wanted to be.

  The only thing Nelle had never wanted to be.

  That shut all three of them up.

  For a second.

  “What the fuck do I do now?” he hissed, more angry than scared at the ghost of the young girl whose murder had made him a household name and destroyed his life.

  “Truman, it’s the middle of the night. Go to sleep, call me tomorrow . . .”

  “Go to sleep? I might not be here tomorrow! I’m about to get murdered in my sleep and you’re worried about missing out on some dreams, which, if they’re anything like mine, are terrifying enough to begin with without some specter intruding . . .”

  There was a pause; Truman was shifting around, moving the receiver.
/>   “Here, you talk to her. You’ll know what to say. You always did. You’re the one who sweet-talked those Kansas hicks in the first place. She’s just another Kansas hick, even if she’s dead. Do it again.”

  For one second, Nelle thought: how insensitive could he be, calling Nancy Clutter a Kansas hick to her face—her dead face—then she remembered you couldn’t offend someone WHO WASN’TTHERE.

  Nelle heard the receiver on the other end get shuffled around; Truman was holding it out to Nancy.

  Nancy Clutter, back for him.

  He deserved it.

  They both deserved it.

  Then, another voice; it was muffled, but it was there, and Nelle almost dropped the phone.

  It WAS Nancy Clutter, speaking from the grave.

  No—how STUPID could Nelle be—it was just Truman’s maid; a black woman’s voice, Nelle heard that clearly enough. You didn’t grow up in the South without being able to hear that.

  “This Myrtle Bennett, Mr. Truman’s girl?”

  “Girl my ass,” Nelle heard Truman snort in the background; he wasn’t too drunk or terrified for sarcasm. “You’re old! And you’re fat! Just like me! Now GO AWAY!” That was Truman, yelling not at his maid, but at Nancy, followed by the sound of a bottle crashing into a wall.

  “He’s sick, awful sick, drinkin’ to beat the band . . .”

  “I have just had a few drinks, no more than normal, and you would, too, if a ghost . . .”

  “. . . and you’re all he’s been talkin’ ’bout for hours so I dug through his things and found your number and . . .”

  The phone went dead, just like Nancy Clutter.

  Nelle wasn’t going back to sleep now; there were ghosts everywhere she turned.

  And they were coming for her, as well.

  She’d been having her own night visitors lately, and not just Truman, with his tales of Nancy Clutter. For a Southern girl, with the swampy, hazy bayou at her feet, it was strange that she hadn’t believed in ghosts before now, but she hadn’t. She’d gone to law school, for God’s sake. Ghosts played no part in the practice of the law. It was only as she became older—hell, got old—that she had come to believe so fervently in them. They haunted her sleep now, what little sleep came: ghosts of her mother and father and brother Ed—who had died so suddenly and unexpectedly, the one she missed most of all, even after all these years. People kept asking if she still wrote; that’s almost all they ever asked. It would amaze them to know she’d been writing every day and night for the past forty years—one long, unbroken letter to her brother Ed, every single day.

  Ghosts.

  A call in the middle of the night.

  This isn’t how she wanted it to be.

  Her first words from Truman in years—this “pocket-sized Merlin,” as she’d anointed him in The Book—and he was drunk and hallucinating. No apology, no catching up, no explanation, just “Save me” . . .

  No.

  She was old, and couldn’t move that fast anymore. She wanted, she needed, time to reflect, time to drift into a reverie about their shared childhoods, about barefoot summers and feet so calloused by the hot earth nothing could hurt them, about lemonade and cake and talcum powder smells and starched white linen, which he always wore, even on the hottest days, but . . .

  No.

  She was too old for this, an unwelcome voice from the past.

  Anybody’s voice, dead or alive, or just dead to her.

  A flat dial tone came from the phone she still gripped in her hand. An old person’s hand, she thought, drifting into writer’s mode: blood veins ridged like highways that dropped off on both sides, liver spots melding into a tan, turkey skin that wouldn’t fall back into place after you pinched it up.

  She replaced the receiver on its cradle—no clue how to get Truman back, no clue if she wanted to get Truman back—and sat up straighter in bed, her face rising into view in her bureau mirror, against the wall.

  She was in her late fifties, but looked older because of all the time she spent out in the Alabama sun: wrinkled, leathery skin as dry as those hot summers when she’d first met Truman. No amount of fancy moisturizer or suntan lotion her sister Alice tried to force on her would change all that, a trophy from Nelle’s days on her beloved golf course.

  Nelle often saw Truman’s photograph, and knew the years had been as unkind to him, even with all his reported nips and tucks: his skin was just as leathery and parched and thirsty as hers, no amount of surgery could make up for that. A sad homecoming for someone who had been the most beautiful, flawless child she’d ever seen. Strange, she knew, a child, especially a tomboy like her, knowing another child was beautiful, but she did. Everyone knew that about Truman, who had the most perfect skin anyone had ever seen, an ageless alien in their midst. But then you moved past his perfect skin and cellophane-clear hair to his eyes, and saw that all the worry and age had gone into them. They were ancient, primordial. He was an old soul, always had been; it was clear he knew things, had seen things, even at seven years old.

  He had lived next door to her, at least for three months out of the year, for most of her childhood. Every summer when he came to Monroeville—deposited with relatives there by his socialite mother, who lived in New York and had Better Things to Do, and no time or use for her lone (and lonely) child—they would fall back into their familiar pattern of cub reporter and recording secretary; he had the words, she had the typing skill (learned on the old Underwood typewriter her father kept at home). And, as befitting the tomboy daughter of a lawyer father, and a little boy whose most loyal companion was his imagination, their favorite stories were crimes, the gorier the better. Truman, puffing out his lower lip and blowing upward to get his spiderweb-fine hair out of his eyes, would write them down in a little notebook he always carried; Nelle would do the legwork.

  When they didn’t have a real mystery to solve—which was most of the time, even though everything was a mystery to a lonely and sensitive southern child—they’d make one up, each adding gruesome twist after twist to the plot, the better to out-spook the other. One particular summer’s story had repulsed, and thus fascinated, them, even more: a man’s body, puffed up and bloated, had been found in the river, the unfortunate victim of a cottonmouth snake. They decided the bloating was in equal parts from being waterlogged and from the snake’s deadly toxin. They couldn’t decide which was worse—or, in their lexicon, better.

  What ghoulish children they had been, salivating over the details of how some poor soul had met his Maker.

  And now, they had come full circle: Nancy Clutter—who had met her Maker in a spectacularly horrible and public way—was back for them.

  She wasn’t alone.

  Truman called Nelle the next night as well.

  This time, the ghost belonged to Kenyon, Nancy’s fifteen-year-old brother. At first, Nelle wanted to laugh: so that’s how Truman was going to play this, have the whole Clutter family haunt him, one by one; but he was so terrified she knew it was real, if only to him.

  Kenyon, as described by an hysterical Truman, was different from Nancy. He didn’t say a word—no blame for fame, at least—just silently threatened Truman with the glowing tip of a cigarette, no doubt an invitation to remember the scene Truman had invented in which Kenyon’s father, Herb, caught him smoking in the basement, the basement where they would spend the last few moments of their lives. (Truman invented a lot of scenes; not many people knew that. Maybe that’s why Kenyon was so smoldering.)

  When Truman called a third night in a row, Nelle wasn’t surprised. She’d been expecting, even looking forward to, the voice that sounded more southern with each successive call, forcing herself to stay awake even though her pills had begun to kick in and draw her to sleep. By now, Truman’s ghosts were becoming hers as well; she was afraid of sleep for almost the first time in her life, afraid those same phantoms might be on the other side of her closed eyelids. She had been with Truman in Kansas, after all, had seen and heard the same things he had. Wh
y should she be exempt from a ghost or two?

  She was only surprised at who Truman’s phantom was this time.

  “Perry,” he said.

  That was a switch.

  Perry Smith.

  No longer one of the Clutters, part of the family, but one of their killers.

  Truman sounded even more drunk than he had the first two nights.

  “Son ’bitch is right here, rubbing his crotch in my face. Says I should’a saved him, got my big city friends to save him, but I didn’t, and now I’m going down just like him . . . he’s calling me a ‘little faggot.’”

  Now Truman was crying.

  Nelle had heard it all before. She had heard it—and said it—during the endless, agonizing years when Truman was trying to finish his masterwork, delayed by the unfortunate slowness of reality, and the legal system, when appeal after appeal kept the killers from the gallows, and he didn’t have an ending. She’d nursed Truman with her words then; she would nurse him with the same words now.

  “Nothing could have saved him, Truman. You know it and I know it and he knows it.” (“He does NOT know it, because he’s not THERE,” she thought to herself, even in the midst of talking to Truman.) “He confessed.”

  The tears were flowing.

  “I’m dreaming of the Clutters’ house—WHEN THEY FUCKIN’ LEAVE ME ALONE, THAT IS, AND I CAN ACTUALLY SLEEP FOR TWO GODDAMN SECONDS—and of poor little Nancy and Kenyon, Perry killing them, their parents, too, all for money he thought was in the house but wasn’t, and I just get sick, physically sick, I wake up covered with vomit, the thought of him putting the pillow under Nancy’s little head, making her more comfortable for . . . makes me wanna puke.” (“AND I DO,” he yells at the ghost.) “I wanna give him all my money and say, ‘Here, Perry, take it, just leave them alone. Leave ME alone.’”