It took six days for them to find the body of The Stick. It took a man who ran a liquor store praying a little bit and then just looking into the woods on his way home to find her. All the police in two counties never did the dead body of The Stick any good in getting found.
I am writing this story in between the hours of four and five at the end of a cold year, and a cold apartment.
I used to get up around now; it’s the kind of early in the morning where it’s daylight but there’s no sun. When I was little I used to think it was stupid how they put on the TV when sunrise started, because it was already daylight before. I also knew, in the same way, that in H.G. Wells’ stories about the hidden civilizations at the middle of the earth, that all their daylight was like it is this early in the morning. Nowadays my jobs are only during the day or early in the night. Which is a lot better than getting up in that hollow earth morning.
The Stick was a little girl—she had a real bad eating disorder, like Karen Carpenter bad. I don’t know it for sure, but I know somebody once told me that she looked into a mirror and announced that her shoulders were getting too big. As in, too fat. I just believed that because it sounded true. When they showed her pictures in the newspaper—her parents crying and asking for help, for tips on where she had gone or if she had been seen with somebody in particular—she didn’t even look like the same girl. She looked happy and sane and not like Karen Carpenter.
She was so skinny I called her The Stick. I called her that, because she was so skinny her pants were always almost falling off her ass, because she had no ass. You could see the high bones of her pelvis, and I guess some other bones, too. I don’t know what they are because you’re not meant to; down here we get enough to eat to cover up all our bones, unless we’re too messed up to do it right, and starve ourselves.
The Stick didn’t like me very much, which was fine, because I didn?t like her either. We worked at the same bar. The first night I met her—before she came to work—I knew I didn’t like her. She staggered up really late one night, one or two o’clock. We were closed, real obvious, and last call was at least a half hour before. She wanted a beer, and I told her to beat it. She was drunk enough that it was one of those things where she thought she was getting all persecuted. In my memory now, she cussed me, but I think that really she was just kind of a jerk about it. But that stuck with me.
The Stick was a little different than Karen Carpenter: she drank a lot.
I was a little mad when she was hired. I told my boss that she was a jerk to me one night. I said her ass is always showing out of her pants. I said she looked like a stick. What I was really trying to say was, can’t you please hire a beautiful girl like that last waitress, the one that broke my heart? The one with the doe eyes, and the soft brown hair, and the potato-chip-crackle laugh, who made me so sick I drank ten pounds off myself?
The difference between me and Karen Carpenter is: I like to drink. And you can’t see any of the secret bones of my body, even when I’m drinking so much I don’t need to eat.
So I worked with The Stick, but we just never got along. She was always underfoot, bumping into me, and kind of tip-toeing about the whole time. I hate that. She was probably doing it because I am a bit of a snob. She tried to play up to me, mentioning obscure records she was sure I knew of, or books she had seen in my bag. But I never warmed up. She got drunk once, and cussed me for real, in front of customers, and that was pretty much it for me. There’s not many rules in a bar—the most important one being, get them a beer and make sure they like you enough to tip well—but cussing somebody else that works in the same place as you do, in front of strange customers? Well, that has to be against some kind of rule.
I wrote her off even more after that, even more than I had when she wasn’t some beautiful girl that would laugh and break my heart and wear her pants low but tight on fine chubby hips. The Stick even asked me once, a few days after cussing me like that, why I didn’t like her. She was drunk when she asked it. I never saw her when she wasn’t drunk, unless she was working. She was always asking me why I didn’t like her. I didn’t call her The Stick to her face, of course. I would always call her by her name, and say, “of course I don’t have anything against you.” But, in what was probably a rather special skill, she always knew that wasn’t quite true. Because it wasn’t that I didn?t have anything against her, it was just that I didn’t care about her. Most people can’t tell when I am lying to them, but she could. And it hurt her feelings.
She had a real bad need to be liked, which is fine; most of us do. I know I do. But mine is subtle and unobtrusive; at least I like to think that. Hers was a blatant need, a hunger in a stark contrast to her never putting a burger or a chicken leg in her mouth. She was so hungry she was just trying to fill up on people liking her. So after a little while of working, she knew all of my customers very well. They would light up when they saw her, and she would run up and hug them.
I hated that. So many people liked her that, by the time they buried her, it took two hours for her parents to shake the hands of all the folks in the receiving line. Two hours is a long time.
The Stick did herself in. She was always drinking too much, and was so little—she wasn?t just skinny, she was little, too. I bet she only weighed like ninety pounds, although I am not real good at estimating weight like that. I saw her the night she killed herself. People say she talked to me, but I was drunk—I was throwing a party for a lot of friends at the bar—and I don?t remember. I kind of made a point of ignoring her.
She left our bar, which was packed, and made her way to a late-night place downtown. She drank there until they closed, around two. The bartender, who I know—and I’m not sure at what point I learned the names of so many bartenders in this city—walked her to her car and made sure she got into it. Human eyes did not view her again for six days.
That was a Thursday night. By Sunday I had heard. No one has seen The Stick, a friend told me. I was laying in my bed, reading something or another. I was sick with a hangover. She hasn’t been seen since Thursday, they said. A boy she had been kind of seeing tried to file a missing persons charge. The police ignored it. I figure if you let all the dumb boys in this city file a missing persons charge for the girl they liked that’s already run off with their best friend the police would have little else to do other than move paperwork and console confused and broken-up boys. When her momma and daddy wanted to file missing persons a day or so after that, they didn’t ignore them.
She’d ran off before, but never without any word. And her bank account and credit card hadn’t been used. A lot of people were worried. A lot of people thought that maybe somebody had gotten her. Where she was at downtown, people got stabbed. People got gotten.
A TV reporter asked the man who owns my bar if he thought that serial killer down in Baton Rouge was involved. Now, I am not sleeping tonight, and sleep sometimes deserts me, but for that TV reporter, I hope it is an infrequent and careless thing, a bitter and mournful ex-lover who visits every few months or so, when she feels like it, but that you can’t ever hold hands with, or pick out a movies to watch. Even the way I felt about The Stick, I think that. Where did he think we were? Atlanta, New York City? Things are not done that way here.
There were things on the TV, and articles in the paper. She looked so different with all the smiling and how she wasn’t all skinny. How are we supposed to recognize her when nobody that knows her nowadays ever saw her with so much meat on her, I thought. But I didn’t say that.
It took that old fellow reading about it in the paper one day at the liquor store and praying that maybe he could just spot something to crack the case. It wasn’t a serial killer, or a rapist, or any of the horror show stuff that got her. It was an on-ramp.
One thing I have learned as I get older is that things not said can mean more than what is said. So I knew that when the newspapers said she was partially ejected into the woods where she had crashed her car, that they meant she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. I also figured that it meant she either smashed up through the windshield or that her door might have come undone. That is a horrible thing. When the papers said that she was identified by dental records, I knew that meant her face was probably all gone. That is a horrible thing. I don’t know what a body looks like after being outside in the woods for six days, but it is probably not very good. That is a horrible thing as well.
The family did not hold an open-casket funeral. That is a very horrible thing.
For days later, people asked me about it. They just assumed that because we worked together we were friends. I’m friends with everybody. How was the funeral? and, I didn’t see you there, were you up in the gallery? Isn’t it just such a horrible thing. There were so many people. But I never lied to them and said I wanted to go. I told them the truth.
I didn’t like her very much, and she didn’t like me. But people loved her and she ought to be remembered for at least that.