See How Small. Scott Blackwood
in the late sixties, even given all the turbulence. Even partly because of it. Her parents had participated in freedom marches and seen violence up close. Her dad had had his nose broken. Someone had hit her mother in the head with a D-cell battery. On her dad’s desk at the Tribune she remembered a photo of him between the writer Alex Haley and the actor and activist Ossie Davis, smiling broadly.
Occasionally in their neighborhood someone would overturn a car and set it on fire, which secretly thrilled Rosa — she could often see the glow from her upstairs bedroom window. Her dad took great pains to explain to her that this was a symptom of an illness. Like the chicken pox or a rash? she asked. That’s right, her dad said, a warning on the surface about what was going on inside. There was so much anger that maybe it couldn’t be contained. Better a car than a passerby, he said. Better things than a person.
She doesn’t think it happened that way. Her dad wouldn’t have allowed her to get so close to the dead woman. She would have heard about the nose and ears most likely from someone at school, or maybe her dad talking to one of the local politicos on the phone. Or possibly she’d imagined it. She’d even looked in the Tribune archives to find the story, but couldn’t find any mention of mutilation. She wondered if this was like her memory of her dad one day cutting the TV power cord with a pair of gleaming shears while she was watching it, or the time she was forced to leave for summer camp while her Labrador, Ali, was dying on the living room floor — memories she suspected she made up to confirm what she already believed about her dad. Some lack in him. What had she believed? That he was high-principled but cruel. A gifted journalist who abused his talent. A secret racist who helped black people so that he could feel better about bitter feelings he harbored against them. He was guileless to a fault. He’d eventually driven off Rosa’s mother with his various lost causes and under-the-table funding of his younger brother, Bill, who was constantly strung out on back pain medicine and running from creditors. Much of what she’d accepted about her dad when she was younger she was unsure about now, which had both helped and hurt their relationship, she suspected. She can see her dad’s hands, their neatly trimmed, milky nails, the lump on the outside of his left hand where a benign tumor made the bone brittle and caused him to break the hand half a dozen times. How could the tumor be benign, she wondered, if it ate away the bone? On a recent visit to Chicago, she’d asked him if he’d had his checkup, his scheduled colonoscopy and PSA blood work. He said to be honest, he couldn’t remember when he’d last seen a doctor. He smiled a little boy’s smile that pretended not to know. On the table in front of her, his left hand seemed frail, the lump more pronounced. She loved his guileless eyes, the way they took in everything and denied it all.
It would have happened this way: Her dad takes her hand, leads her away from the vacant lot and the dead woman. Rosa never sees what she thinks she did — holes where the woman’s nose and ears should be. Voids. The woman’s skirt hiked up, the greenish glass of the Coke bottle stuck between her legs. When Rosa begins pointing near the fence, her dad makes light of what they see there, someone asleep in the weeds. Siesta time, he’d say, then make a snoring sound and pull Rosa away. The woman’s body sprawled languidly on the ground as if she were in her own bed and not a vacant lot. Her compact mirror open beside her, a quick powder touch-up when she wakes. Lazy bones, Rosa’s dad would say. Get up and get on your way. Don’t stray from the path. Don’t tarry.
He would have protected her.
HOLLIS OFTEN CONFUSES what’s already happened with what’s to come. He knows this. Still, they feel the same.
The light was like a sudden blow to the head. It filled the interior of Hollis’s art car, made night into day. He could make out the titles of his books stacked between the seats, the three-legged metal horse with its Civil War rider and the shellacked horned frog perched on the front dash. Along the ceiling of the car, his pale green topographic maps of Austin with their concentric patterns. Blown-up photos of the three murdered girls, their faces so exaggerated in scale and singularly focused on one element — the convolutions of an ear, a forest of lash reflected in a green iris, a knuckle against the sly corner of a mouth — that they might be mistaken for abstract paintings.
His dazed first thought was that his mother had come for one of her rare visits, her headlights leaping against the back wall of their father’s den, and he felt alone and spiteful. He would not go with her, he decided. He would punish her. Every other Saturday, Hollis and his brother, Blake, would call their mother in Corpus Christi on the free long-distance line in his father’s downtown feed and grain brokerage firm, their father sitting in his swivel desk chair near the window, looking out at the tops of buildings along Congress Avenue, his face plowing a dark field. Blake, who would always talk first, told their mother how he’d gone over his handlebars on a bike ramp and knocked out a front tooth, and that Peter Parker knew he wasn’t a clone because he still loved Gwen Stacy even though she was dead and clones could never feel that kind of love, now, could they? Blake’s face shone with a need that made Hollis want to punch him. Their father handed Hollis the phone, and Hollis let the receiver drop and dangle by its cord at his feet. His father’s face crumbled like a dirt clod. He could hear their mother’s tinny voice down there calling his name. When he finally lifted the receiver to his ear, their mother asked if he’d forgotten about her visit. She exhaled and smoke rose into the ocean-blue sky of an open window somewhere. In his imaginings their mother looked like Gwen Stacy and he dressed her in Gwen Stacy’s black hair band, dark top, and purple skirt. The sun was unbearably bright against her bare legs. She pinned the phone between her chin and shoulder and painted her toenails pink, like seashells. Gwen Stacy had their mother’s crooked pinkie toes. Her body glistened and made him wince. On the phone, his mother told Hollis she was taking them to Six Flags on Saturday. His mother said, “You remember that crooked house?” She waited for Hollis to remember. “Casa Magnetica,” he said, grudgingly. A whole house tilted crazily so that water flowed backwards and oranges rolled uphill. She mentioned a few other exhibits and rides and got the names wrong and he corrected her. She said, “You were always better than me with names.” He was quiet. “We’ll have ourselves a time,” she said. Then that Saturday, their mother, who was so, so very late, stood in the driveway eclipsed in the Monte Carlo’s headlights, afraid to turn off the engine because it had died on her so many times on the way. Smoke rose above her head and at first Hollis thought her hair was on fire but then he could smell burnt oil and plastic and their father said, Carole, we better have a look at that, but when he opened the hood, fire rose up and burned the hair off his father’s forearm. His mother made a low, animal sound deep in her throat and held Hollis and his brother against her, and Hollis wanted to pull away because she smelled different and her breasts were larger and she had colored her hair ( frosted, she’d said) and he hated his brother, who touched strands of it with a kind of reverence. And the fire melted all the engine wires and blackened the hood, and their mother had to stay two extra days at a motel, where he and Blake swam in the pool and got sunburned and Hollis prayed for the Monte Carlo never to be fixed.
There was a banging on the driver’s window. “Mr. Finger?” a man’s voice said. Hollis didn’t say anything, lying very still under a blanket in the backseat, his body intensely aware of the coarseness of the weave, hoping the voice would just go away. He thought of the boy who’d busted his lip and committed the egregious theft of the conch. And he thought of Truck pulling his brother Trailer alongside Barton Springs Road, and the ways people were linked to one another in time and space by something just outside it, hidden from them always but intuited like the stars in the daytime. Or made into a likeness so that you saw differently. How could he string the everyday beads of his life from this? He didn’t know. But the voice outside wanted him to. “I don’t have anything you want!” he screamed, and realized it was true but also that he’d never be able to convince them of it. And a terrible light shone down and revealed his nakedness and shame.
A YEAR AFTER THE murders, Kate puts the house up for sale. Friends nod sympathetically, say they understand, all those memories. The girls. The marriage to Ray. A few mention different