Dark Places(38)
Ben didn’t help himself either: He had no alibi for the murders; he had a key to the house, which had not been broken into; he’d had a fight with my mother that morning. Also he was kind of a shit. As the prosecutors proclaimed that he was a Satan-worshiping killer, Ben responded by enthusiastically discussing the rituals of Devil worship, particular songs he liked that reminded him of the underworld, and the great power of Satanism. (It encourages you to do what feels good, because we are all basically animals.) At one point the prosecutor asked Ben to “stop playing with your hair and get serious, do you understand this is serious?”
“I understand you think it’s serious,” Ben replied.
It didn’t even sound like the Ben I remembered, the quiet, bundled brother of mine. Lyle had included a few news photos from the trial: Ben with his black hair in a ponytail (why didn’t his lawyers make him cut it?), wedged into a lopsided suit, always either smirking or completely affectless.
So Ben didn’t help himself, but the trial transcript made me blush. Then again, the whole thing left me feeling a little better. It wasn’t all my fault Ben was in jail (if he was truly innocent, if he truly was). No, it was a little bit of everybody’s fault.
A WEEK AFTER agreeing to meet Ben, I was meeting Ben. I was driving back toward my hometown, where I hadn’t been in at least twelve years, which had turned itself into a prison town without my permission. The whole thing was too quick, it gave me emotional bends. The only way I could get in the car was to keep reassuring myself I would not go into Kinnakee proper, and I would not go down that long dirt road that would take me home, no I would not. Not that it was my home anymore: Someone had bought the property years ago, razed the house immediately, crushing walls my mother had prettied with cheap flowery posters, smashing windows we’d breathed against while waiting to see who was coming down the drive, splintering the doorframe where my mom had penciled the growth of Ben and my sisters but been too tired to chart me (I had just one entry: Libby 3’2”).
I drove three hours into Kansas, rolling up and down the Flint Hills, then hitting the flatlands, signs inviting me to visit the Greyhound Hall of Fame, the Museum of Telephony, the Largest Ball of Twine. Again a burst of loyalty: I should go to them all, if only to smack ironic road-trippers. I finally turned off the highway, heading north and west and north and west on jigsaw back roads, the farm fields dots of green and yellow and brown, pastoral pointillism. I huddled over the wheel, flipping stations between weepy country tunes and Christian rock and fuzz. The struggling March sun managed to warm the car, blazed my grotesque red hairline. The warmth and the color made me think again of blood. In the passenger seat next to me was a single airplane bottle of vodka I planned to swallow when I got to the prison, a self-prescribed dose of numbness. It took an uncharacteristic amount of willpower not to gulp it on the drive, one hand on the wheel, throat tilted back.
Like a magic trick, just as I was thinking Getting close now, a tiny sign popped up on the wide, flat horizon. I knew exactly what it would say: Welcome to Kinnakee: Heart of America! in 1950s cursive. It did, and I could just make out a spray of bullet holes in the bottom left-hand corner, where Runner blasted it from his pickup truck decades before. Then I got closer and realized I was imagining the bullet holes. This was a tidy new sign, but with the same old script: Welcome to Kinnakee: Heart of America! Sticking with the lie, I liked it. Just as I passed the sign, another one arrived: Kinnakee Kansas State Penitentiary, next left. I followed the direction, driving west over land that was once the Evelee farm. Ha, serves you right, Evelees, I thought, but I couldn’t remember why the Evelees were bad. I just remembered they were.
I slowed to a crawl as I drove down this new road, far on the outer edge of town. Kinnakee had never been a prosperous place—it was mostly struggling farms and optimistic plywood mansions from a preposterously brief oil boom. Now it was worse. The prison business hadn’t saved the town. The street was lined with pawn shops and flimsy houses, barely a decade old and already sagging. Stunned children stood in the middle of grubby yards. Trash collected everywhere: food wrappers, drinking straws, cigarette butts. An entire to-go meal—Styrofoam box, plastic fork, Styrofoam cup—sat on a curb, abandoned by the eater. A scatter of ketchupy fries lay in the gutter nearby. Even the trees were miserable: scrawny, stunted, and stubbornly refusing to bud. At the end of the block, a young, dumpy couple sat in the cold on a Dairy Queen bench, staring out at the traffic, like they were watching TV.
On a nearby telephone pole flapped a grainy photocopy of an unsmiling teen, missing since October 2007. Two more blocks, and what I thought was a copy of the same poster turned out to be a new missing girl, vanished in June 2008. Both girls were unkempt, surly, which explained why they weren’t getting the Lisette Stephens treatment. I made a mental note to take a smiling, pretty photo of myself in case I ever disappeared.