Capote in Kansas Read online

  Nelle barely knew what to say, even in the dark of night, when truth was easiest. But she didn’t have to say anything, because Truman rambled on, trying to come up with a too-late remedy for his own salvation or, at the very least, sleep.

  “And I would, too. Give him every last penny of mine. Every last penny of ill-gotten gain . . .”

  Perry was Truman’s, not hers, and always had been; trying to get between the two of them would be like trying to come between two lovers. Even worse: two lovers who knew they shouldn’t be together, but couldn’t break apart. Truman had tried to argue that Perry was a victim himself, in his own right—of a miserable childhood. “Victim?” Nelle had argued right back, having predicted that Truman would fall in love with Perry the moment he laid eyes on him. “He’s a killer. In Cold Blood. It’s your title, can’t say it any plainer than that. Victim my ass.” There was nothing Nelle could say or do about Perry and there never had been, so she let Truman ramble on, as her gaze went once again to her face in the mirror.

  Instead of the craggy old thing she usually saw there—looking back at her as if asking, “What do YOU want?”—she saw the bright, hopeful young woman she had been in her twenties, when she had been alert and eager to please. It had been a forthright, friendly face, hadn’t it, one people liked, before she’d taught herself to be so Goddamn scary? Before she’d turned herself, intentionally or not, into Boo Radley, her Frankenstein, made up of bits and pieces? What were the bits and pieces that had made her up, and brought her to this place where people were afraid of her—but she was even more afraid of them? That was Boo’s secret of secrets: he was even more afraid of them.

  Nelle saw, as her mind traveled back, her young face looking into Truman’s even younger face; if she looked to be in her early thirties, which she was when their true haunting began, he looked to be about twelve.

  Twelve with a bad French accent.

  It was almost twenty-five years ago.

  “I’d like to purchase two round-trip tickets to Kansas, s’il vous plait.”

  France, by way of the deep South.

  Truman’s delicate little hands—Nelle could swear he’d had a manicure, his fingernails were so shiny and pink—plunked down two wads of money on the counter of the airline reservations desk where she worked in New York.

  “Truman, what are you doing here?” And then, under her breath, “I’m busy. I’m working.” Her emphasis on the word made it clear it was something he should be doing, as well, but as he was already the published author of several novels and short stories, she didn’t really know what his work now entailed.

  “I AM working, for your information, just like everyone else here . . . even though I’m NOT like everyone else. Here or elsewhere.”

  With a scarf wrapped around his neck and trailing, Isadora Duncan-like, at least three feet behind him—fluttering magically when there was no breeze, as if he had his own wind machine—that was abundantly clear: he WASN’T like anyone else.

  “I’ll see you after I get off. At five.”

  “I’m serious. I’m here for the purpose of commerce. I want to buy two tickets to Kansas.”

  “It’s flat. You won’t like it. I’ve seen the brochures.”

  “Two tickets. One for me, one for you. We’re going there, to look into the heart of darkness.”

  That got her attention, in a way his bizarreness couldn’t. She’d known him since childhood. She was used to his bizarreness.

  “A murder . . . a murder has been perpetrated, four members of the same family gunned down, knifed, in cold blood. Mr. William Shawn of the esteemed New Yorker magazine is sending me there to write about it. That, or follow a housecleaner around Manhattan, and write about the people she works for, based on what’s in their apartments. I decided a bunch of rich people in this town is far scarier than anyone in Kansas, killers on the loose or not. And you’re going to help.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I need an assistant.”

  “An assistant.”

  “A consort,” he amended, afraid his choice of words would anger her and queer the deal, because the whole plan was contingent on her going. He conveniently forgot to tell her that someone else had already passed on the assignment; that she was, literally, sloppy seconds. He reached over the counter and picked some remnant from her lunch break off her collar. The task at hand was scary enough—a murderer on the loose on the fruited plains—but it would be impossible without Nelle by his side, greasing the wheels, using her particular small-town charm to get people to open up to him, and, when push came to shove, using her sheer size to scare the interviews out of the good folks of Holcomb, Kansas.

  “I’ve got a job, in case you haven’t noticed; it might not be the one of my dreams, but for now . . .”

  “A ridiculous job, in an equally ridiculous uniform.”

  “I’ll tell the president of the company you think so, next time he’s in town.”

  She hated to admit Truman was right: it was a ridiculous job, a ridiculous uniform, and she hated it. But since her long-in-the-works book might never amount to anything, it was a ridiculous job she needed.

  Truman continued. “It’ll take your mind off things, while you’re waiting for your bird book to come out. And it’ll be like old times, us solving a mystery together. Besides, I think we’re still engaged. We should put in an appearance together, just for propriety’s sake. People are beginning to talk.”

  Their engagement, enacted when she was six and he was an older man of seven years old—will you marry me? yeah, I guess, a quick peck on the cheek, forgotten until he returned to town the next summer—was the stuff of local legend, back in the town from which they had both escaped.

  “I’ve already written your letter, asking for a leave of absence. I’ll even autograph it, if you like. We leave in three days.”

  “Three days,” Nelle said, appalled but intrigued. Truman’s siren song of murder was deep calling to deep. She wanted to quit right there on the spot, but she couldn’t let him win.

  Truman always won.

  As he sashayed out of the building, his victory all but assured, he added over his shoulder, “And of course, you’ll need to buy a gun. As much to protect us against the good people of Kansas as the real killers.”

  “If you’re ’fraid enough to need a gun, then why go?”

  He had to, he said; the Clutters were calling him, he could hear them already.

  Three days later, Nelle was on her way to Kansas with him, gun slyly, dutifully purchased and packed in the bottom of a suitcase. They were on a train instead of a plane, even though she could have gotten them her employee discount.

  “Get the fuck away.”

  “What?” The words made Nelle furrow her eyes in the mirror, as she saw she wasn’t a girl of thirty anymore, but an old woman, talking to a man who had abandoned her long ago.

  Truman was still going on about Perry.

  “He won’t go. He’s got a noose burn around his neck, and an erection. I can see it through the fabric of his pants. It happens when they’re hung.” He laughed at his own joke, then started choking. “Why am I joking? They’re expecting a book, but it’s not done. What am I gonna do?”

  Nelle was about to say “Quit drinking” in her no-nonsense way, but out of the blue—as out of the blue as Truman’s call had been—he had switched subjects, to the thing he was really afraid of.

  The real reason for these calls late at night, when the cover of darkness could camouflage the truth.

  It was the truth of a little boy who was all alone, who knew he was different, who knew his mother hadn’t loved him, no matter how hard he tried to not let on to anybody else.

  Who knew he couldn’t write anymore.

  “I try, I try so hard, I wake up and my hands hurt so much from all the writing I do . . . these beautiful hands, there’s a blood blister the size of one of your golf balls on the finger where my pen scrapes against it all day long and comes up with nothing . . .”r />
  A call, a call for help, late at night, when the world was at rest and he was too drunk to tell anything but the truth: “I’ve burned page after page. They’re just no good. The burning’s the only thing that has any juice left in it.”

  There, in the middle of the night, her sister asleep in the next room, Nelle revealed her truth, as well: “Me, too.”

  “I can’t write anymore, Nelly. There’s no drama left. Just the drama of my life. But I can’t get that down on the page anymore.”

  That was the scariest thing in Truman’s life—not Nancy Clutter or Kenyon Clutter or Perry Smith, who had killed four people in cold blood.

  This was a whole other kind of ghost story.

  “You’ve gotta help me. Be my . . . consort, just like in Kansas. Don’t let them take my book. Don’t let them find me out.” A pause, then, “Remember Kansas?”

  “Of course I do. What else have we been talkin’ about?”

  “I need that, I need the past right now, just hold me over the phone and tell me a bedtime story about Kansas . . . tell me about the past, Nelle, tell me about the last good time. Tell me about our childhood, when we weren’t scary or scared and we’d hide in the graveyard . . .”

  And then the phone slipped from his fingers.

  After a pause—“Truman? Tru? You still there? Don’t go, it’s okay, give me your number”—someone gently hung up the receiver on his end.

  Whether it was Myrtle, Truman’s maid, or Perry Smith, back from the dead, or one of the Clutter children, Nelle couldn’t even begin to guess.

  Chapter Two

  Truman was in love with the air-conditioner man.

  Myrtle didn’t approve, but there was nothing she could do about it. If he wanted to run around on Mr. Jack, his friend back in New York, that was his business, not hers. Her only business was that it was Palm Springs, it was hot, and the AC never worked worth a tinker’s damn. Leave it to a white man like Truman to go and pay all that money for a fancy little cracker box of a house, complete with a swimming pool, then go and have the AC break down every time you looked at it. And with the sun blazing through the one wall that was all plate glass window, there was nothing to do but practically make the air conditioner man part of the family—even if he already had one of his own, with a wife and two sons.

  The AC man came once, he came twice, and soon, he was coming all the time. Truman roared when Myrtle said that; she didn’t know why. When she asked, in all innocence, what kind of “power tools” he had at his disposal, Truman snorted so hard his orange drink came spurting out of his nose.

  Danny. She might as well get used to his name, looked like he was gonna be around for a while; Truman was already paying to buy him a set of new teeth.You’d think Truman would have his pick of the litter, just go around town, flinging his money left and right at any of the good-looking young boys who were killing time there, but no, he had to go and find himself the plainest-looking man/boy on God’s green earth: a trucker’s tan covering ropy arm muscles, the rest of him doughy as Casper the Ghost, with buck teeth that looked like something off a ventriloquist’s dummy and more hair on his chest than his head. He was a “man’s man,” Truman kept saying; Myrtle said he sure wasn’t a “woman’s man,” because she wouldn’t look at him twice. (Another thing Myrtle said, mainly to herself: “Who can understand what goes on in the hearts of white folks?”)

  Maybe he was just there to fix the AC. Once, Myrtle went into Truman’s bedroom, not realizing anybody was home, and found them both up on the bed, fully clothed and the spread not even turned down, cutting pictures out of Truman’s fancy magazines. Truman invited her to hop up on the bed and help out as well, tossed some National Geographic at her and said, “Have at ’em.” He liked to tease her by pointing out the pictures of nearly naked African natives and saying he’d send her to the “dark continent” for a vacation one of these days. She’d say, “Now why the h-e-double-hockey-sticks would I want to go off to a damn fool country like that, where it’s hotter than the blazes?” and he’d say, “Myrtle, that’s where your people came from.” She’d sass right back, “My people come from Enid, Oklahoma, and ain’t no two ways about it.”

  As she and Danny cut out pictures, Truman began pasting them onto plain white paper kites he had bought, the plainer the better, to show off his homemade decorations. A man rich as Truman, gluing his own ornaments onto cheap little paper kites, cutting out letters that spelled his name, and Danny’s. If you didn’t know better, you’d think a child had adorned the kites; they had childish things on them: birds and bees and cats and dogs and clouds and trees and suns and moons and happy things. You wouldn’t know they were the work of a big famous important author. (That’s what Truman called himself, so Myrtle did, too, even though she’d never read one of his books. She tried to once, but it gave her a headache.) He said that’s how he made kites when he was a child; it was good enough for then, and it was good enough for now.

  His were better than anything he could buy.

  But after he began calling that woman the other night, he’d started hoarding some of the cut-out pictures for something he called “top secret!” That’s what he’d say with a giggle, slapping Myrtle’s hand and wagging his finger at her if she tried to sort through those pictures, discern any rhyme or reason to them. Danny just accepted whatever Truman said and didn’t ask questions: “top secret!” didn’t scratch and fester at him like it did Myrtle. But she’d worked for Truman long enough to know that “top secret!” was really just an invite to “dig in!” so she did, first chance she had when he was out of town.

  And what she found in Truman’s office was as weird as any of his books.

  He’d pasted the second set of pictures onto cardboard snakebite kits, which had been emptied of their razors and tubes and suction cups.The scenes he came up with seemed to have some kind of elaborate design only he understood; they sure weren’t the Moon and June kinds of things he put on the kites.

  No, these were scary: snakes and buzzing, preying insects; wasps with their stingers pulled out, their wings torn; tribal chiefs covered in war paint; even Hollywood stars, but cut up in strange ways. Like Fred Astaire’s body—Myrtle could tell because he wore a tie for a belt—but with a raven’s head instead of his own, or Grace Kelly, her face atop the long neck of a swan, but with the neck stretched out and bit in two by a snake, fangs bared, just where the box opened. Swans and snakes, he used a lot of those. If he found a snake or swan picture he liked in some magazine, he’d have Myrtle go and buy up all the copies of it she could find. It’s almost like the pictures, taken together, told some kind of story, but one so bizarre you didn’t want to spend much time figuring it out.

  At least Myrtle J. Bennett didn’t.

  When she finally got up the nerve to ask Truman about them—and admit she’d been snooping—he said they were his “Garden of Earthly Delights.” Myrtle didn’t know what that was, but said the pictures didn’t look all that delightful, and as for gardens, she preferred the kind you could get something to eat out of.

  Once he was finished decorating a box—Myrtle asked how he knew when he was done, and he said he just knew, just like he knew when he was finally finished writing something—he dropped it inside a clear, Plexiglas shell: a Garden of Earthly Delights encased in plastic. (Just try keeping your fingerprints off those; they were hell to keep clean.) Then he stacked them on the shelves in his studio, like something in a museum.

  “So what do you do with them now?” Myrtle kept after him. “Just look at ’em? Nobody knows they’re here but me, not even Mr. Danny.”

  “They’ll know soon enough. She’ll know, and she’ll forgive me. She has to. Everything’s counting on her,” he said, as mysterious as he had been when he first started talking about his “top secret!” project.

  When he got to talking like that, all Myrtle J. Bennett knew was what she didn’t know, which was: who knows what goes on in the hearts of white people?

  Chapter Three
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br />   On the fourth day, Nelle finally told her older sister Alice about the calls.

  The two old women buttered their toast at the breakfast table, and with each ferocious, precise scrape of the knife against the bread, Alice made her feelings clear. “Nelle Harper, you know”—scrape—“I don’t”—scrape—“approve.” No one who knew her sister worth a lick called her Harper. They called her Nelle, or if they were family, Nelle Harper, but stretched out, southern style. Calling up and asking for “Harper” was a dead giveaway you were a stranger.

  Alice put her knife down lest she start stabbing it into the air, the way she’d like to stab into Truman. “He ruined your life once; I don’t want him doing it again. Ghosts indeed. I hope when I’m gone the good Lord gives me leave to come back and haunt him.” Nelle had told Alice about Truman’s ghosts, but not about her own. But surely Alice felt them, as well, coming for her, so much older? Two spinsters, one near the end of her life, the other gaining on her, and not telling each other their secrets.

  Nelle didn’t respond, just poured juice for the both of them, as she had ever since they’d moved in together. Sometimes Nelle thought it hadn’t been a good idea, them living together the half of the year she lived in Monroeville instead of Manhattan, but it really had made the most sense. Except now, half the year had stretched into most of the year, as Alice needed more help getting around. Their old house, the one so many pilgrims came to find, was long gone, a soft-serve ice cream shack in its place; what were the sisters going to do, throw away good money on two separate houses when they barely needed a room each? No, the one-story brick ranch house suited them just fine, and if it meant Nelle had to contend with Alice’s breakfast recitals every morning, then so be it.

  Alice sipped her juice and continued. “He dumped you. You did all that work for him, he gives you half a dedication, then goes gallivanting on those talk shows taking all the credit . . .”

  “He paid me.”

  “Not enough. Still makes me sick just to think about it.”