Meet Me There
Three Louisiana men, all fathers of little girls, confront a dark secret that tests their morals and bonds them in unexpected ways. Will they serve justice or be consumed by their own hatred?
The sick coward Simon lived on a weak little neck of the Tickfaw and we were to bring him the trouble. Make him confess, watch him shiver. This was 5 a.m., and the truck was near out of control, my brother-in-law Benny driving like he was blind.
We were both sober and focused on strange and vengeful desires and I am generally one to give more tempered thought to these feelings than most of my family. In better days they called me a pacifist, as if I were Christlike and strong. Now they call me a snowflake, like I fell fragile and weak from the clouds. I try not to let this bother me, the hypocrites, the brainwashed, the Trumpers growing thick as weeds in my vision. I breathe yoga-like to avoid getting angry, take walks to get my head together, and yet that morning I was not unlike them in thinking of justice as a violent and physical thing. I wanted to get to the bottom of this mess, to get to the bottom of Simon, if need be, though I’d never fought a man in my life. Still, the story I’d heard the night prior was so fresh and so awful and dark. It changed my way of thinking.
Simon, a man we thought was a friend. A little off center, yes, but a guy you invite to Thanksgiving because he has no family, a guy you drink with because you are thirsty, a man you may fish with late springs because he has a boat and lives on the river and this is Louisiana and then, suddenly, these allegations. Benny’s little girl, six years old, and maybe some others.
Benny took a bend in the road at dumb speed, and I had to grab hold of the dash to not fly out the window. Coffee all over me. The wind through that cab like a turbine. The sun was not yet in sniper position but already hot and I’d not slept much on account of the news. I left my wife a note on the fridge that lied about where I was going and felt, even in that first moment of deceit, a terrible misgiving.
“Damn, Benny,” I said, as he fishtailed back on the road. “There are laws of physics, you know. There’s inertia. There’s momentum.”
We got along okay when we avoided the issues, talked the innocuous bullshit that had become harder to find, yet I respected him enough.
“You got that right,” he said.
How to describe Benny? Straight cropped hair and clean shaven while I was still rocking a top knot in those days, whatever scruff I could get on my chin. I was twenty-five with a toddler and wife and had been kicking around grad school for Poli Sci a few years, already having a stressful time with the bend of the world under Trump and this was before Covid. My spiteful pump already primed and yet I had no idea what was coming. Benny was thirty-two, a civil engineer with buckets of money, proudly conservative like nearly everyone else in my state. We got along okay when we avoided the issues, talked the innocuous bullshit that had become harder to find, yet I respected him enough. He was the brainy white-collar kind of Republican who treated my sister and niece well, thought Reagan should be on Mount Rushmore and so forth. He had no MAGA clothing that I’d seen but, in those days, I was often blind to nuance. In my heart I knew that if Benny wasn’t family, if my sister did not love him, I would not either. I would not see him at all. So, it was odd for us to both hate the same thing at the same time in the same moment and yet I know it was hate that brought us close on that day.
Up ahead, I saw a man on the side of the road. He was lit by the light of his phone in the dawn and waved it around like a beacon. I’d no idea who he was and yet Benny skidded to a stop. The dust we kicked up from the tires clouded the man as in smoke and I saw he was holding a briefcase.
“Scooch over,” Benny said.
“Who is that?”
“Quick,” he said, “he’s a friend,” so I slid to middle of the seat.
The man opened the door and got in and Benny took off speeding again.
It is odd to sit next to a stranger and so I offered my hand and my name. I judged this man, before he had either spoken or shook, as a roughneck who lived by the river. He had on a camouflaged T-shirt and blue jeans, leather work boots. I pictured him in a pickup truck that straddled the white lines of a parking lot, Punisher sticker on the back window, thin blue line flag beside it, even his vehicle aggressive to strangers. He was maybe forty years old and thick in the shoulders, his jaw so set in his aggrieved expression that I knew we would never be friends. When he shook my hand, I felt the gloves that he wore.
“This is Jack,” Benny said. “He’s one of the dads.”
“You’re late,” Jack said, and my suspicions were proved true through his accent alone. Me and Benny lived not a half hour away, in Baton Rouge, but you get on the Tickfaw and there’s a new way of talking. Same words but a different silted well that they spring from. He wore a baseball cap, broad and mesh-backed, and put the briefcase on top of his lap. He tucked a phone into his shirt pocket.
“It’s not far,” Benny said. “We’ve got time. He goes to work at six.”
“Not today, he doesn’t,” Jack said.
“What’s with the gloves?” I asked and got the first good look at Jack’s face. It was lean and square with brown eyes, a nose that may have long ago been broken. He looked the type who could build what he needed—engines, treehouses, bunkers. The kind of man who was hard to surprise. He flexed his gloved hands into fists.
He cocked it, eyed the safety, and stowed the case up under the seat. “If you want out the truck,” he said. “Now would be a good time.”
“I got a family to raise,” he said. “I’m not going to prison.”
“None of us are,” Benny said. “We just stick to the plan.”
Benny was dressed pretty nice in a button-up shirt and khakis, all ready to clock in at work after this, I guessed. I was in a loose T-shirt and shorts and some sandals and felt as if I might as well have been wearing a skirt between those two, sitting in the middle seat of the truck, fiddling with the radio knobs like a kid. I felt an odd shame, I still remember, having my toes exposed on such an occasion. I’d not thought this through.
“You said we were just going to talk,” I told Benny. “To find out the truth.”
“I’ve only got one thing to say,” Jack said, “and it’ll be quick.”
Jack then entered a code into the lock on the briefcase and opened it. Inside was a gun and I can’t even tell you the kind. A pistol, I know, but I’m not good with the calibers. I may fish but do not hunt because there is a difference in the stomach of those who do both. To me, all guns are just guns and guns are just problems and this one sat nestled in a padded grey egg-carton case. It looked shiny and new and unused.
“What the hell?” I asked. “Where’d you get that?”
Jack said nothing, my question neutered and useless.
“Benny,” I said. “I didn’t sign up for a gun show.”
“Relax,” Benny told me. He took a right off the highway onto a makeshift lane between trees. “The gun’s just a little insurance,” he said. “A little persuasion.”
Heat crawled up my neck like an illness. My stomach went unmoored. “I don’t mean to sound like a pussy,” I said, a word I never used, as if already losing sight of myself in their company, “but that gun’s persuading me to get out of this truck.”
“You don’t sound like one,” Jack said, and let the sentence just hang there. He then put the pistol together in a practiced way with his gloves on, feeding the clip with bullets he pulled from his pocket. He finished and cocked it, eyed the safety, and stowed the case up under the seat. “If you want out the truck,” he said. “Now would be a good time.”
“Settle down,” Benny said. “Carter’s all right. He’s just nervous. He’s got a little girl, too. He understands.”
“I do,” I said. “Benny’s girl is my niece. My sister’s kid. It’s terrible. I just don’t want to be too hasty. I mean, we’ve known Simon awhile.”
“We just thought we knew him,” Benny said.
I considered my times with Simon. These memories were still somewhat untainted, yet already dark in the manner of clues. Little things like his outdated moustache. A pair of jean shorts he wore that you did not want to see him in. Idiot things I’d gleaned from idiot stereotypes. But then a night by the river at a bar called Lizzy’s, some years ago when I was still childless and we had all gone tubing and hung out on sandbars with coolers of beer attached to our bodies by ropes. These were long Louisiana days of glorious drinking and sun and my girlfriend at the time, Jenny, who is now my wife, wore a light blue bikini which looked pastel against the brightening pink of her chest. And after we’d dried off and ordered beers at the bar and the band started up, she had put on a T-shirt and shorts and we all started dancing around in our flip-flops, hanging on to one another for balance. I left the group and went to the bar just to breathe as Simon took to dancing with Jenny. It wasn’t anything to make a guy jealous, just some scooting around in good fun, but when the song was done and Jenny came over, she took her bottle and tilted it back. She asked, So, how do you know that guy? and I said, He’s just always around. He’s in with Benny, and she finished off the whole beer. She sat down on a stool. Well, she said. I’m never dancing with him again.
Back in the truck, Jack stared out the windshield. “Your little girl,” he asked me. “How old?”
“Three,” I said. “Going on fifteen.”
“Can she talk?” Jack asked me.
This was a peculiar question, though it makes a terrible sense to me now. “Yeah, she can talk,” I said. “Kid talk, you know. Mommy. Daddy. I-pad.”
“She at the same school?” he asked.
“School?” I asked, then put it together. The Head Start school were Simon worked maintenance, where Benny’s girl went. Where Jack’s did, too, I guessed. A sort of specialized school for Benny’s kid who was, as my sister gently put it, speech-delayed. For other kids, too, I figured, who needed community. “No,” I said. “She’s still at home with us.”
“Innocent?” Jack said. He pulled the phone out of his shirt pocket, tossed it on my lap. “You should probably take a look at that before you say another word to me.”
“Aren’t you the lucky duck,” Jack said.
“Look,” I told them, “all I’m saying is innocent until proven guilty, right? He should have a chance to tell us what’s up.”
“Innocent?” Jack said. He pulled the phone out of his shirt pocket, tossed it on my lap. “You should probably take a look at that before you say another word to me.”
“Jack,” Benny said. “Take it easy. He’s here to help us.”
“Just look at it,” Jack said.
I hit the button on his phone and the glass brightened up. A picture of Jack and his girl on the home screen, him down on his knee and hugging her waist. He didn’t look so tough in this pose, though he was not smiling. His daughter had a swollen look to her face that made me guess about conditions I knew nothing of, her wide grin with thick glasses, and she appeared happy in an obvious way. She was seven, I figured, maybe ten, it was hard to tell.
“She’s cute,” I said. “I’m sorry about all this,” I told him. “I really hope it’s not true, but we don’t need to do anything stupid.”
I tried to hand back his phone, but Jack wouldn’t look at me. He stared out the side window, rubbing his cheek with his big, gloved hand and repeating something under his breath, all with a similar cadence, like he was rehearsing a speech. “Here’s your phone back,” I said.
“It’s not mine,” he said. “It’s my girl’s. Hit that Fire button.”
I looked back at the phone and saw that it was rigged different than most. The icons were large easy symbols, like happy faces and cartoon frowns, one with a house on it, one with the picture of a toilet, one with a police badge, and one with an icon of fire. I knew Benny’s girl had something like this, as well, to help her communicate when the words didn’t come. I put my finger over the fire.
“Just hit it,” he said.
I tapped the button, and the screen opened to a list of text messages, not unlike what I had on my own phone. It only took a second to see what he meant. There were several pictures of Simon to scroll through, all photos he’d taken of himself, some with his shirt off, others in those jeans shorts with no underwear. Between these pictures sporadic texts sent mostly from him and the replies from her, little more than unintelligible symbols like question marks and pound signs and animated gifs such as kittens floating frozen in bubbles. The most recent a pic from Simon of just his face, that face I thought I knew, with a smile. And, below it, a little pink heart that he’d sent. The words that he wrote, that read, “Our secret, ok?”
I said nothing and turned off the phone, set it face down on Jack’s leg. My heart shrank darkly for his girl. For him, too. For the world, I suppose.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How did he get her number?”
Jack put the phone back in his shirt pocket and said, “Isn’t that the mystery.”
Benny slowed the truck, and we sat mute. All sound was now gone but for the crunch of our tires on that thin dying road and we were moving so intentionally slow that my thoughts had time to travel completely out of that place to ponder scenarios of how this could have happened, moments Simon first got his ideas about these kids or any others, the mess his mind must be to pursue them. I pictured playgrounds and lunch boxes, invented words that only the closest few to this girl could interpret, until I’d completely forgotten where we were, where we were going, and forgotten even that Benny was still there until he stopped the truck and looked over at me.
But where was my girl in this picture? That, I somehow did not remember. Surely with my wife, I thought. Surely with me.
“Have you asked Daphne about him?” he said.
“Daphne?” I asked.
My daughter’s name. It sounded so strange to hear another man say it.
“About Simon?” I said. “No. She’s too little for all this, I think. She hasn’t had much contact. Jesus, Benny. What are you saying?”
“They’re all too little for this,” Jack said. “That’s what he’s saying.”
“He was around her last May, man,” Benny said. “Don’t you remember? Memorial Day. Our house. Motherfucker hanging around the kiddie pool like he was helping us out.”
I did remember this. All the children in swim trunks. Water guns galore. Two grills going on the side of the house. Daquiris spinning in blenders. The parents inside, laughing and happy like they were catching a break. I also remembered Simon splashing around with the kids like a goofball, in and out of the plastic pool as if everyone was having a nice time. But where was my girl in this picture? That, I somehow did not remember. Surely with my wife, I thought. Surely with me. And the longer life goes the easier it becomes to isolate the change in a soul, I think, to track the exact moment it either dies or awakens or transforms into whatever it may now be, and it was this tiny slip in my memory that did it to me, this omission of my girl from my past. Moreso than what I had seen on his phone, more than what I was about to see. It was this first moment of true and total uncertainty about my daughter’s whereabouts, at a time of unforeseen importance, that broke something major in me.
Had I asked my daughter about Simon, he wanted to know.
How had I not thought of this before, that it was perhaps Simon the physical man with my daughter, instead of Simon the wretched idea of a man with all daughters that made Benny want to bring me along? I’d no idea what to say. All that went clear in my head were simple sentences like yes, my daughter’s name is Daphne. Her clothes are so small I can ball them into my palm. She crawls into bed with my wife and I come mornings. She thinks the only men who enter your home unannounced are named Santa, and that heaven sits in the actual clouds.
I had no idea how much time had passed before I said, “No. We haven’t asked her about him.”
Benny killed the truck and the lights.
“Well,” he said, and laid out the plan.
I was to draw Simon out. “Ask him to borrow his boat,” Benny said, which he knew was kept in a shed by the water. Benny also knew Simon had a gun he might grab if he saw the two of them coming because Simon had to know that something was up. Benny had filled up his answering machine. Jack had asked the school for a meeting.
Simon suddenly had more people wanting to talk to him than he’d ever had in his life, Benny figured, and so he might be a little on edge. He and Jack would wait for him in the shed, Benny told me, at which time I was to go back to the truck and sit.
“I don’t believe this,” I said.
“You’re just asking to borrow a boat,” Benny said. “We’ll do everything else.”
We’d parked at the end of a road that then turned to grass at Simon’s lot. I looked up and saw a spindle of smoke from a campfire likely lit the night prior. Just a black hole in the green yard, surrounded by heavy stones. As we got out of the cab, I realized Benny had parked in a crooked manner to block him, in case Simon thought to drive his way out, and I had no idea where Benny got all this cunning. Movies, maybe. Nightmares. Necessity. I watched as he and Jack ran off into a slip in the tree line and I made my way to the yard.
As I started up the stairs, I saw Benny and Jack circle back toward the shed and my heart went on a scamper. I could smell myself sweating, feel my legs shaking.
Simon’s house was a prefab sort of trailer on stilts. It had a little deck at the top of the stairs, lime green shutters and a screened-in porch for the bugs that fly so thick on the river. It didn’t look any more or less twisted than any other place out here, where lots of folks have fishing camps and second homes. I walked by the dying fire and saw the edges of papers, blackened in lace-like patterns. What he had burned that night prior was not firewood, but instead looked like the stuff of a home. I saw the shell of a laptop turned in on itself from the heat, a scrap of small clothing with some simple strawberry design.
I looked up at the house and breathed deep and approached it. The pilings beneath it were marked by floodwaters and measured out in ink pen. Eight feet in ’96. Eleven in 2010. Ten in ’14. Fourteen in ’16, and I remembered those most recent rains. As I started up the stairs, I saw Benny and Jack circle back toward the shed and my heart went on a scamper. I could smell myself sweating, feel my legs shaking.
That’s when I noticed the flies.
A gang of about twenty bounced off the screen door, searching for the source of another smell that soon overtook me. The closest I can get is the smell of my daughter’s birth at the hospital, the rank tang of sweat and shit and human insides as the nurses kept after my wife to push. This is a smell that still visits my dreams when I’m anxious and one I’ve never, of course, mentioned to Jenny. Who would know better than her?
I looked through the screen door and the deck was a mess. Chairs turned over, pillows thrown about. The glass door to his place stood open and stained with dark and red streaks, and the first thing I thought was that someone else beat us to it.
“Simon,” I called out, and no answer. I wrapped my shirt around my hand and put it on the doorknob. “You in there?”
Still no reply, so both me and flies ventured in. They went about their crazy work on a pool of vomit congealed on the table and I pulled my shirt up over my mouth. I stepped around the pillows and chairs and saw that his outside TV was smashed, empty beer cans crushed and piled in the corners. I got to the open door of his place and the smears upon the glass were all blood, I knew, run around in long swipes of a hand and this is it, I thought. This is the time I see a dead body. I pulled out my phone to call 911.
Jack and Benny burst in behind me.
“What the hell?” Benny said. He was breathing heavy like he had been running, yet Jack seemed totally calm. They both wore gloves now. They had blue plastic booties on over their shoes.
“What are y’all doing up here?” I said.
“We heard you screaming,” Benny said.
“I was screaming?” I asked.
Jack walked past me and into the house, almost right through me, with the gun in his hand at his hip. His face had no expression. I’m not sure if he saw me at all. “Where are you going?” I said and waved my phone around. “We need to call somebody.”
He looked impossibly old and alien yet there he undeniably was, breathing in his awful and puny way. All visions of violence I’d had that morning were vanquished by violence itself.
Benny set his hand on my shoulder. “Put the phone away,” he said. “Go on back to the truck.”
I often wonder what type of man I’d be now had I done this. Had I followed this simple instruction. Happier, maybe. A little more likely to relax. But, instead, I put the phone in my pocket and followed them inside the house.
The place already looked like a crime scene. Plates smashed. Blood all over the counters. A tuft of hair on the kitchen island. I saw a bottle of pills on a table, an empty jug of vodka on its side. Next to this, a snub-nosed revolver.
Benny yelled out for Simon. No answer. Then Jack put up his hand and said, “Listen.”
All the lights of the home were still on, a ceiling fan ticking away overhead. The buzz of a freezer, the hum of the broken TV outside. Then something else. It was a strange sort of bubbling, a light moaning, a leak of air in the room.
“He’s here,” Jack said.
We found Simon collapsed on the floor in the kitchen, wedged in between the island and sink. He was shirtless and pale in the dark pools of his own making and no one else had beaten us there. His head was bloody and torn from where he’d fallen against the counter. His arm was gashed from where he’d tried with a knife, lips blue from where he’d tried with the pills. He looked impossibly old and alien yet there he undeniably was, breathing in his awful and puny way. All visions of violence I’d had that morning were vanquished by violence itself. I wanted harm for no one, for no harm to exist.
“He’s still alive,” I said.
Benny put his hand on my chest, tried to usher me away from the body. “Go on back to the truck,” he said.
“We can save him,” I said. “He’s still breathing.”
“Save him?” Benny said. “For what?”
“For what?” I yelled. My voice was high as a child’s and I knew I sounded afraid because I was afraid. I said things I did not know if I even believed but had long told myself that I should believe. “For justice, you idiot. Because he’s a human being. He needs help.”
“What do you want us to do?” Benny asked me. “Make our girls testify? You know how hard that would be on them? That was never the plan. Whose side are you on here, anyway?”
“Side?” I said.
“Hey,” Jack said.
We both shut up and looked over at him, breathing heavy and close to one another, but Jack wasn’t talking to us. He was squatting over Simon, now holding Simon’s revolver in his gloved hand, his own tucked into the waistband at his back. “Hey,” he said again, and used the muzzle of the gun to open one of Simon’s eyes. “Wake up,” he said.
“What are you doing?” I said.
I started toward him but Benny grabbed me hard around the waist, pulled me tight. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go,” but we didn’t go anywhere.
We looked down at Jack. His face was as steady and calm as if he were sifting through dirt and Simon began to move in the weakest of ways. A small grunt, the twitch of his lips. Jack reached down and opened both of his eyes with one hand. He held Simon’s gun up before him with the other.
“You like little kids?” Jack said. “Well, let me tell you a story.”
The tone of his voice was so flat and broken that I remembered his lips from the car, the way he’d been rehearsing something under his breath, the soft rhythm, the memory he was now making for himself.
The things we’d thought we could not talk about, me and Benny, the way we believed we had nothing in common. It was all rendered meaningless.
Jack hit the latch on the side of the revolver. “This little Piggy went to market,” he said, and popped open the cylinder, dropped a single bullet into his palm. “And this little piggy went home.” He snapped the cylinder back into place. “This little piggy liked little girls,” he said, and pointed the barrel at Simon. “But this little piggy would get none.”
Beneath him, Simon tried to come to. His eyes grew big and uncertain. His chest rose and fell in quick jerks. It sounded as though he were breathing through water and Jack gently forced open Simon’s mouth with the gun, pressed the barrel against his tongue. He then held up the single bullet between his thumb and forefinger, as if it was the tiniest thing.
“And so,” Jack said, “this little piggy went,” and dropped the bullet down Simon’s throat.
The sound that man made. The low and biological noise. To me it lasts forever.
I wanted to stop it. I tell myself now that I tried to. But Benny had me so tight around the waist and this feeling is what I remember. The way he held me as we watched our darkest desires come true. The way I gripped my own hand to his arm. The way we shook in the tenderless knowledge of all that we’d have to explain to ourselves, to our wives, to our daughters, and all that they would one day be compelled to tell us. The things we’d thought we could not talk about, me and Benny, the way we believed we had nothing in common. It was all rendered meaningless by the manner in which he held me so close. The way I did not wish to break free. From the river, I knew, if anyone were to see us, it looked as if we were hugging. As if we loved one another.
But this was not true.
What drew us close was what we hated. It was what we knew.
That in a world full of beauty, we’d chosen this as our gathering place.
About the author
