Ben Day
JANUARY 2, 1985
9:13 A.M.
Ben was free-spinning over ice, the wheels of his bike shimmying. The path was for dirtbikes, for summer, and it had iced over, so it was stupid to ride it. It was more stupid what he was doing: pedaling as fast as he could over the bumpy ground, broken corn stalks on both sides like stubble, and him picking at the goddam butterfly sticker one of his sisters had pasted to the speedometer. It’d been there for weeks, buzzing in and out of his vision, pissing him off, but not enough to deal with it. He bet it was Debby who put it there, loll-eyed and mindless: This looks pretty! Ben had the sparkly thing halfway off when he hit a patch of dirt, his front wheel turning completely to the left, his rear bucking out from under him. He didn’t fly clear. He jerked up, one leg still caught on the bike, and fell sideways, his right arm scraping the corn shards, his right leg bending beneath him. His head smashed the dirt hard, his teeth sang like a bell.
By the time he could breathe again—ten tear-blink seconds—he could feel a warm trickle of blood snake down past his eye. Good. He smeared it with his fingertips down across the side of his cheek, felt a new line of blood immediately stream out of the crack in his forehead. He wished he’d hit harder. He’d never broken a bone, a fact he admitted only when pressed. Really, dude? How do you get through life without breaking something? Your mom wrap you in bubble wrap? Last spring, he’d broken into the town pool with some guys, and stood on the diving board over the big dry hole, staring at the concrete bottom, willing himself to flip in, really smash himself up, be the crazy kid. He’d bounced a few times, taken another swig of whiskey, jiggled up and down some more, and walked back to the guys, who he hardly knew, who’d been watching him only out the sides of their eyes.
A broken bone would be best, but some blood wasn’t bad. It was flowing steadily now, down his cheek, under his chin, dripping on the ice. Pure, round red ponds.
Annihilation.
The word came from nowhere—his brain was sticky, phrases and snatches of songs were always wedging themselves in there. Annihilation. He saw flashes of Norse barbarians swinging axes. He wondered for a second, only a second, if he’d been reincarnated, and this was some leftover memory, flittering down like ash. Then he picked up his bike and banished the idea. He wasn’t ten.
He started pedaling, his right hip knotted, his arm sizzling with the scrape from the corn. Maybe he’d get a good bruise too. Diondra would like that, she’d brush one soft fingertip over it, circle it once or twice and give it a poke so she could tease him when he jumped. She was a girl who liked big reactions, Diondra—she was a screamer, a weeper, a howler when she laughed. She made her eyes go wide, her brows almost up to her hairline when she wanted to seem surprised. She liked to jump out from behind doors and scare him so he’d pretend to chase her. Diondra, his girl with the name that made him think of princesses or strippers, he wasn’t sure which. She was a little of both: rich but sleazy.
Something had rattled loose on his bike, there was a sound like a nail in a tin can coming from somewhere near his pedals. He stopped a second to look, his hands pink and wrinkled in the cold like an old man’s, and just as weak, but could see nothing wrong. More blood pooled into his eyes as he willed himself to find the problem. Fuck, he was useless. He’d been too young when his dad left. He never had a chance to learn anything practical. He saw guys working on motor-cycles and tractors and cars, the insides of the engines looking like the metal intestines of an animal he’d never seen before. Now animals he did know, and guns. He was a hunter like everyone else in his family, but that didn’t stand for much since his mom was a better shot than he was.
He wanted to be a useful man, but he wasn’t sure how to make that happen, and it scared him shitless. His dad had come back to live on the farm for a few months this summer, and Ben had been hopeful, figuring the guy would teach him something after all this time, bother to be a father. Instead, Runner just did all the mechanical stuff himself, didn’t even invite Ben to watch. Made it clear, in fact, that Ben should stay out of his way. He could tell Runner thought he was a *: whenever his mom talked about needing to fix something, Runner would say, “that’s men’s work,” and shoot a smile at Ben, daring Ben to agree. He couldn’t ask Runner to show him shit.
Also, he had no money. Correction, he had $4.30 in his pocket, but that was it for him, for this week. His family had no money saved. They had a bank account that was always just short of empty—he’d seen a statement once where the balance was literally $1.10, so at one point his entire family had less in the bank than what he was carrying in his coat right now. His mom couldn’t run the farm right—somehow she was screwing it up. She’d take a load of wheat over to the elevator in a borrowed truck and get nothing—less than what it cost to grow it—and whatever money she did get, she owed. The wolves are at the door, his mom always said, and when he was younger, he pictured her leaning out the back door, throwing crisp green cash at a pack of hounds, them snapping it up like it was meat. It was never enough.
Was anyone going to take the farm away at some point? Shouldn’t someone? The best thing might be to get rid of the farm, start all over fresh, not tied to this big, dead, living thing. But it was his mom’s parents’ place, and she was sentimental. It was pretty selfish, when you thought about it. Ben worked all week on the farm, and then went back to the school on weekends to work his crap janitor’s job. (School and farm and farm and school, that’s all his life was before Diondra. Now he had a nice triangle of places to go: school and farm and Diondra’s big house on the edge of town.) He fed cattle and hauled manure at home, and pretty much did the same at school, cleaning locker rooms and mopping the cafeteria, wiping up other kids’ shit. And still he was expected to turn over half his paycheck to his mom. Families share. Yeah? Well, parents take care of their children, how about that one? How about not squirting out three more kids when you could barely afford the first one?
The bike clattered along, Ben waiting for the whole thing to go to pieces like some comedy routine, some cartoon where he ended up peddling on just a seat and a wheel. He hated that he had to bike places like Opie going to the fishing hole. He hated that he couldn’t drive. Nothing sadder than a boy just short of sixteen, Trey would say, shaking his head and blowing smoke toward him. He said this every time Ben showed up to Diondra’s on his bike. Trey was mostly cool, but he was the kind of guy who always had to get a jab in at another guy. Trey was nineteen, with long hair, black and dull like week-old tar, Diondra’s step-cousin or something weird like that, great-uncle or family friend or stepson of a family friend. He either changed his story a few times, or Ben wasn’t paying close enough attention. Which was entirely possible, since whenever he was around Trey, Ben immediately tensed up, got way conscious of his body. Why was he standing with his legs at that angle? What should he do with his hands? On his waist or in his pockets?
Either way felt weird. Either way would lead to jokes. Trey was the kind of guy that would look for something just slightly but truly wrong about you that you didn’t even notice and point it out to the whole room. Nice highwaters was the first thing Trey ever said to him. Ben was wearing jeans that were maybe, possibly, half an inch too short. Maybe an inch. Nice highwaters. Diondra had screeched at that. Ben had waited for her to stop laughing, and Trey to start talking again. He’d waited ten minutes, saying nothing, just trying to sit at an angle where his socks wouldn’t peek out too much. Then he’d retreated to the bathroom, unlooped his belt a notch, pulled the jeans down near his hips. When he came back to the room—Diondra’s downstairs rec room, with blue carpet and beanbags everywhere like mushrooms—the second thing Trey ever said to him was, “Your belt’s down to your dick now, man. Ain’t foolin’ no one.”
Ben rattled down the trail in the cold shade of winter, more flakes of snow floating in the air like dust motes. Even when he turned sixteen, he wouldn’t have a car. His mom had a Cavalier that she bought at an auction; it had once been a rental car. They couldn’t afford a second one, she’d already told Ben that. They’d have to share, which immediately made Ben not want to use it at all. He already pictured trying to pick up Diondra in a car that smelled of hundreds of other people, a car that smelled completely used—old french fries and other people’s sex stains—and on top of that, a car that was now cluttered with girls’ schoolbooks and yarn dolls and plastic bracelets. That wouldn’t work. Diondra said he could drive her car (she was seventeen, another problem, because wasn’t that sort of embarrassing to be two grades below your girlfriend?). But that was a much better vision: the two of them in her red CRX, with its jacked-up rear end, Diondra’s menthol cigarettes filling the car with perfumey smoke, Slayer blasting. Yeah, much better.
They’d drive out of this crap town, to Wichita, where her uncle owned a sporting-goods store and might give him a job. Ben had tried out for both the basketball and football teams and been cut early and hard, in a don’t-come-back sort of way, so spending his days in a big room filled with basketballs and footballs seemed ironic. Then again, with all that equipment around, he might be able to practice, get good enough to join some men’s league or something. Seemed like there must be a plus-side.
Of course, the biggest plus-side was Diondra. He and Diondra in their own apartment in Wichita, eating McDonald’s and watching TV and having sex and smoking entire packs of cigarettes in a night. Ben didn’t smoke much when Diondra wasn’t around—she was the addict, she smoked so much she smelled like tobacco even after a shower, like if she slit her skin, menthol vapor would ooze out. He’d come to like it, it smelled like comfort and home to him, the way warm bread might to someone else. So that’s how it would be: He and Diondra, with her brown spiraly curls all crunchy with gel (another smell that was all her—that sharp, grape-y sting of her hair), sitting on the sofa watching the soap operas she taped every day. He’d gotten caught up in the drama: big-shouldered ladies drinking champagne with diamonds flashing from their fingers while they cheated or their husbands cheated or people got amnesia and cheated. He would come home from work, his hands smelling of that dusty basketball leather smell, and she’d have bought his McDonald’s or Taco Bell and they’d hang out and joke about the spangly ladies on TV, and Diondra would point out the ones with the nicest nails, she loved her nails, and then she’d insist on painting his, or putting lipstick on him, which she loved to do, she loved to make him pretty, she always said. They’d end up in a tickle fight on the bed, naked with ketchup packets smashed to their backs, and Diondra would monkey-laugh so loud the neighbors would bang on the ceiling.
This image wasn’t quite complete. He’d deliberately left out one very frightening detail, just completely erased certain realities. That can’t be a good sign. It meant the entire thing was a daydream. He was an idiot kid who couldn’t even have something as small as a shitty apartment in Wichita. Not even something as tiny as that could he have. He felt a surge of familiar fury. His life was a long line of denials, just waiting for him.
Annihilation. Again he saw axes, guns, bloody bodies smashed into the ground. Screaming giving way to whimpers and birdsong. He wanted to bleed more.
Libby Day
NOW
When I was a kid, I lived with Runner’s second cousin in Holcomb, Kansas, for about five months while poor Aunt Diane recuperated from my particularly furious twelfth year. I don’t remember much about those five months except that we took a class trip to Dodge City to learn about Wyatt Earp. We thought we’d see guns, buffalo, whores. Instead, about twenty of us shuffled and elbowed into a series of small file rooms, looking up records, the entire day packed with dust motes and whining. Earp himself made no impression on me, but I adored those Old West villains, with their dripping mustaches and slouchy clothes and eyes that glowed like nickel. An outlaw was always described as “a liar and a thief.” And there, in one of those inside-smelling rooms, the file clerk droning on about the art of archiving, I jiggled with the good cheer of meeting a fellow traveler. Because I thought, “That’s me.”
I am a liar and a thief. Don’t let me into your house, and if you do, don’t leave me alone. I take things. You can catch me with your string of fine pearls clickering in my greedy little paws, and I’ll tell you they reminded me of my mother’s and I just had to touch them, just for a second, and I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me.
My mom never owned any jewelry that didn’t turn her skin green, but you won’t know that. And I’ll still swipe the pearls when you’re not looking.
I steal underpants, rings, CDs, books, shoes, iPods, watches. I’ll go to a party at someone’s house—I don’t have friends, but I have people who invite me places—and I’ll leave wearing a few shirts under my sweater, with a couple of nice lipsticks in my pocket, and whatever cash is floating inside a purse or two. Sometimes I even take the purse, if the crowd is drunk enough. Just sling it over a shoulder and leave. Prescription pills, perfume, buttons, pens. Food. I have a flask someone’s granddad carried back from WWII, I own a Phi Beta Kappa pin earned by some guy’s favorite uncle. I have an antique collapsible tin cup that I can’t remember stealing, I’ve had it so long. I pretend it’s always been in the family.
The actual stuff my family owned, those boxes under my stairs, I can’t quite bear to look at. I like other people’s things better. They come with other people’s history.
One item in my home I didn’t steal is a true-crime novel called Devil’s Harvest: The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee Kansas. It came out in 1986, and was written by a former reporter named Barb Eichel, and that’s all I really know. At least three semi-boyfriends have given me a copy of this book, solemnly, wisely, and all three of them were dumped immediately after. If I say I don’t want to read the book, I don’t want to read the book. It’s like my rule about always sleeping with the light on. I tell every man I sleep with that I always keep the lights on, and they always say something like, “I’ll take care of you, baby,” and then try to switch off the lights. Like that’s that. They somehow seem surprised that I actually sleep with the lights on.
I dug out Devil’s Harvest from a leaning stack of books in the corner—I keep it for the same reason I keep the boxes of my family’s papers and crap, because maybe I’ll want it someday, and even if I don’t, I don’t want anyone else to have it.
The opening page read:
Kinnakee, Kansas, in the heart of America, is a quiet farming community where folks know each other, go to church with each other, grow old alongside each other. But it is not impervious to the evils of the outside world—and in the early hours of January 3, 1985, those evils destroyed three members of the Day family in a torrent of blood and horror. This is a story not just of murder, but of Devil worship, blood rituals, and the spread of Satanism to every corner of America—even the coziest, seemingly safest places.
My ears started their hum with the sounds of that night: A loud, masculine grunt, a heaving, dry-throat wail. My mother’s banshee screams. Darkplace. I looked at the back-page photo of Barb Eichel. She had short, spiky hair, dangling earrings, and a somber smile. The biography said she lived in Topeka, Kansas, but that was twenty-some years ago.
I needed to phone Lyle Wirth with my money-for-info proposal, but I wasn’t ready to hear him lecture me again about the murder of my own family. (You really think Ben’s guilty!) I needed to be able to argue with him instead of sitting there like some ignoramus with nothing useful to say. Which is basically what I was.
I scanned the book some more, lying on my back, propped up on a twice-folded pillow, Buck monitoring me with watchful kitty eyes for any movement toward the kitchen. Barb Eichel described Ben as “a black-clad loner, unpopular and angry” and “obsessed with the most brutal form of heavy metal—called black metal—songs rumored to be little more than coded calls to the Devil himself.” I skimmed, naturally, until I found a reference to me: “angelic but strong,” “determined and sorrowful” with an “air of independence that one usually doesn’t find in children twice her age.” Our family had been “happy and bustling, looking forward to a future of clean air and clean living.” Mmm-hmm. Still, this was supposedly the definitive book on the murders, and, after all those voices at the Kill Club telling me I was a fool, I was eager to speak with an outsider who also believed that Ben was guilty. Ammo for Lyle. I pictured myself ticking off facts on my fingers: this, this, and this proves you jackasses are wrong, and Lyle unpursing his lips, realizing I was right after all.
I’d still be willing to take his cash if he wanted.
Not sure where to start, I called the Topeka directory and, most beautiful bingo ever, got Barb Eichel’s number. Still in Topeka, still listed. Easy enough.
She picked up on the second ring, her voice merry and shrill until I told her who I was.
“Oh, Libby. I always wondered if you’d ever get in touch,” she said after a making a throat-sound like eehhhhh. “Or if I should reach out to you. I didn’t know, I didn’t know …” I could picture her looking around the room, picking at her nails, skittish, one of those women who studied the menu twenty minutes and then still panicked when the waiter came.
“I was hoping I could talk to you about … Ben,” I started, not sure what my wording should be.
“I know, I know, I’ve written him several letters of apology over the years, Libby. I just don’t know how many times I can say I’m sorry for that damn, damn book.”
Unexpected.
BARB EICHEL WAS going to have me over for lunch. She wanted to explain to me in person. She didn’t drive anymore (here I caught a whiff of the real story—meds, she had the shiny coating of someone on too many pills), so I’d come out to her and she’d be so grateful. Luckily, Topeka’s not far from Kansas City. Not that I was eager to go there—I’d seen enough of it growing up. The town used to have a hell of a psychiatric clinic, seriously, there was even a sign on the highway that said something like, “Welcome to Topeka, psychiatric capital of the world!” The whole town was crawling with nutjobs and therapists, and I used to get trucked there regularly for rare, privileged outpatient counseling. Yay for me. We talked about my nightmares, my panic attacks, my issues with anger. By the teenage years, we talked about my tendency toward physical aggression. As far as I’m concerned, the entire city, the capital of Kansas, smells like crazy-house drool.
I’d read Barb’s book before I went to meet her, was armed with facts and questions. But my confidence was flattened somewhere in the three hours it took to make the one-hour drive. Too many wrong turns, me cursing myself for not having the Internet at home, not being able to just download directions. No Internet, no cable. I’m not good at things like that: haircuts or oil changes or dentist visits. When I moved into my bungalow, I spent the first three months swaddled in blankets because I couldn’t deal with getting the gas turned on. It’s been turned off three times in the past few years, because sometimes I can’t quite bring myself to write a check. I have trouble maintaining.
Barb’s house, when I finally got there, was dully homey, a decent block of stucco she’d painted pale green. Soothing. Lots of wind chimes. She opened the door and pulled back, like I’d surprised her. She still had the same haircut as her author photo, now a spiky cluster of gray, and was wearing a pair of eyeglasses with a beaded chain, the type that older women describe as “funky.” She was somewhere north of fifty, with dark, darting eyes that bulged out of a bony face.
“Ohhh, hi, Libby!” she gasped, and suddenly she was hugging me, some bone of hers poking me hard in my left breast. She smelled like patchouli and wool. “Come in, come in.” A small rag-dog came clicking across the tiles toward me, barking happily. A clock chimed the hours.
“Oh, I hope you don’t mind dogs, he’s a sweetheart,” she said, watching him as he bounded up on me. I hate dogs, even small, sweet dogs. I held my hands aloft, actively not petting it. “Come on, Weenie, let our friend get by,” she babytalked it. I disliked it even more after I heard its name.
She sat me down in a living room that seemed stuffed: chairs, sofa, rug, pillows, curtains, everything was plump and round and then layered with even more material. She bustled in and out a bit, calling over her shoulder instead of standing still, asking me twice what I wanted to drink. Somehow I knew she’d try to give me dirt-smelling, crystal-happy, earthen mugs of Beebleberry Root Tea or Jasmine Elixir Smoothie, so I just asked for water. I looked for liquor bottles but couldn’t spot any. There were definitely some pills being swallowed here though. Everything just plinked off this woman— bing, bang!—like she was shellacked.
She brought sandwiches on trays for us to eat in the living room. My water was all ice cubes. I was done in two swallows.
“So, how is Ben, Libby?” she asked when she finally sat down. She kept her tray to her side though. Allowing for a quick retreat.
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have contact with him.”
She didn’t really seem to listen; she was tuned to her own inner radio station. Something light jazz.
“Obviously, Libby, I feel a lot of guilt over my part in this, although the book came out after the verdict, it had no bearing on that,” she said in a rush. “Still, I was part of that rush to judgment. It was the time period. You were so young, I know you don’t remember this, but the ’80s. I mean, it was called the Satanic Panic.”
“What was?” I wondered how many times she’d use my name in conversation. She seemed like one of those.
“The whole psychiatric community, the police, law enforcement, the whole shebang—they thought everyone was a Devil worshiper back then. It was … trendy.” She leaned toward me, her earrings bobbing, her hands kneading. “People really believed there was this vast network of Satanists, that it was a commonplace thing. A teenager starts acting strange: he’s a Satan worshiper. A preschooler comes home from school with a weird bruise or an odd comment about her privates: her teachers are Satan worshipers. I mean, remember the McMartin preschool trial? Those poor teachers suffered years before the charges were dropped. Satanic panic. It was a good story. I fell for it, Libby. We didn’t question enough.”
The dog sniffed over to me, and I tensed up, hoping Barb would call it away. She didn’t notice, though, her eyes on a dangling stained-glass sunflower casting golden light from the window above me.
“And, I mean, the story just worked,” Barb continued. “I will now admit, and it took me a good decade, Libby, that I breezed over a lot of evidence that didn’t fit this Ben-Satan theory, I ignored obvious red flags.”
“Like what?”
“Um, like the fact that you were clearly coached, that you were in no way a credible witness, that the shrink they had assigned to you, to quote ‘draw you out’ was just putting words into your head.”
“Dr. Brooner?” I remembered Dr. Brooner: A whiskery hippie dude with a big nose and small eyes—he looked like a friendly storybook animal. He was the only person besides my aunt Diane I liked that whole year, and the only person I talked to about that night, since Diane was unwilling. Dr. Brooner.
“Quack,” Barb said, and giggled. I was about to protest, feeling defensive—the woman had basically just called me a liar to my face, which was true, but still pissed me off—but she was going again. “And your dad’s alibi? That girlfriend of his? No way that should have held. That man had no real alibi, and he owed a lot of people a lot of money.”
“My mom didn’t have any money.”
“She had more than your dad did, believe me.” I did. My dad once sent me to a neighbor’s house for a free pity lunch, told me to look under their sofa cushions and bring him any change.
“And then there was a footprint of a men’s dress shoe in blood that no one ever traced. But then again, the entire crime scene was contaminated—that’s something else I skipped over in the book. There were people going in and out of that place all day. Your aunt came in and took out whole closets of junk, clothes and stuff for you. It was all against any rules of police procedure. But no one cared. People were freaking out. And they had a strange teenage boy that no one in the whole town liked that much, who had no money, who didn’t know how to look out for himself, and who happened to like heavy metal. It’s just embarrassing.” She checked herself. “It’s awful. Tragedy.”
“Can anything get Ben out?” I asked, my stomach gone eely. The fact that the definitive voice on Ben’s guilt had changed her mind was sickening me. As was meeting yet another person who was positive I’d committed perjury.
“Well, you’re trying to, right? I think it’s almost impossible to undo these things after all these years—his time for an appeal, per se, is up. He’d need to try for habeas corpus and that’s … you all would need some big new evidence at this point to get the ball rolling. Like some really compelling DNA evidence. Unfortunately, your family was cremated so—”
“Right, well, thank you,” I interrupted, needing to get home, right then.
“Again, I wrote the book after the verdict, but if I can do anything to help you, let me know, Libby. I do bear some culpability. I take that responsibility.”
“Have you made any statements, told the police you don’t think Ben did it?”
“Well, no. It seems like most people concluded a long time ago that Ben didn’t do it,” Barb said, her voice going shrill. “I assume you’ve officially recanted your testimony? I’d think that’d be a huge help.”
She was waiting for me to say more, to explain why I’d come to her now. To tell her, yeah, sure, Ben was innocent and I was going to fix all this. She sat eyeing me, eating her lunch, chewing each bite with excessive care. I picked up my sandwich—cucumber and hummus—and set it back down, leaving a thumbprint in the damp bread. The room was lined with bookshelves, but they contained only self-help books. Open the Sunshine!; Go, Go, Girl; Stop Punishing Yourself; Stand up—Stand Tall; Be Your Own Best Friend; Moving On, Moving Up! They went on, and on, the relentless, cheerful, buck-up titles. The more I read, the more miserable I felt. Herbal remedies, positive thinking, forgiveness of self, living with mistakes. She even had a book for beating tardiness. I don’t trust self-helpers. Years ago, I left a bar with a friend of a friend, a nice, cute, crew-necked, normal guy with an apartment nearby. After sex, after he fell asleep, I started nosing around his room, and found that his desk was covered with sticky notes:
Don’t sweat the small stuff, it’s all small stuff.
If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a
pretty good time.
Enjoy life—no one gets out of here alive.
Don’t worry, be happy.