Capote in Kansas by Kim Powers

Author:Kim Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press

Nelle wanted as far away from that cemetery and its pictures as sleep would take her, but dreams wouldn’t come. They remained far away, displaced by waking images of tombstones and snake men and ugly plastic flowers on graves, trembling walks toward coffins and a mother and brother lying flat and still and a Reverend who offered death instead of comfort.

Maybe those were her dreams.

They were all crowding her head, until a ghost showed up and shooed them all away.

Nelle was looking out her bedroom window at a perfectly round moon. That’s strange, she thought; she’d looked at the almanac, and it hadn’t predicted a full moon. She reached to the bedside table and patted down the objects on it until she came to her glasses; she picked them up by the stems, careful not to smear the glass with fingerprints. She put them on; it took a few seconds to adjust to what she thought was the light of the full moon.

Instead, she decided it must be a yellow smiley-face balloon that had floated out of someone’s hand and gotten entangled in the tree branches outside her window. She smiled to herself at the revelation, although she wished it was the moon. She needed a moon right now. I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you, she thought; I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing a smiley face, just didn’t have the same ring.

And then she did see a smiley face, in her room. Smiling at her.

She stopped breathing.

She tried to pull air into her lungs to yell for Alice, but couldn’t. She couldn’t think, let alone breathe. It wouldn’t matter anyway; Alice wouldn’t hear a peep because she barely heard anything anymore, except what she wanted to.

One of Truman’s crooks was in Nelle’s room to be her dispatcher. It was an automatic response: one of her hands flew to her throat, the other reached to the bedside Bible to ask the angels to watch over her, to not let death hurt, whenever, however it came.

Maybe she could let the intruder have whatever he’d come to steal, and he’d leave. (He’d already stolen her life and pasted it on a box; what else was there to take?) But bargaining like that—here, take what you want and leave, I won’t tell—never worked. It’s what the Clutters had tried, and look what happened to them.

The person in her room was in no hurry; he was just watching and waiting.

So was Nelle. She saw a flare of red, but it wasn’t blood: it blossomed, crinkled into ashy gray and white, like a firework dying in the sky, then blossomed red again.

It was the draw on a cigarette. She knew it well. She craved it, after a three-pack-a-day habit.

Her intruder was smoking.

Then another pull, another flame of red, and the face behind the cigarette was illuminated.

Now she knew who it was.

Kenyon Clutter, the boy she’d only ever seen in photographs.

Kenyon, the four-eyed geek with the strange name,

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