woman she was.
I wish we had her now. And I wish we had had her to pray over Darly before she moved away. Like I said, Momma had a bad feeling, and to tell the truth I did too. I thought maybe I was worrying about being lonely for my sister, so I told Darly I was proud she was moving off and going to college to be a nurse. It wasn’t long before she had a job and a husband and a house and all that stuff a woman’s supposed to get in this world. And it was good for a while. Then, on her way to work one morning, Darly disappeared.
You never believe it at first. You go looking for the simplest explanation, the thing you want to believe, like she just met up with a friend and forgot to call. But they found her white nurse’s cap on the shelf in a phone booth, her little white MG broken down by the side of the road. No signs of a struggle, just a car, keys hanging in the ignition. The car had had some kind of engine trouble. It was always getting her stuck on the side of the road. She’d probably be alive today if she’d done like my daddy always said to and bought a Dodge.
I had a dream the morning she disappeared. I was planting red tulips in black dirt, and Darly rode by the house in a black car. She was in the passenger seat in the dream. I didn’t see the driver. She just looked at me, so sad. I straightened up from digging in the dirt and said, “Darly doesn’t like this.” I woke up with those words. And I wondered why I was dreaming about Darly. I mean I’d seen her around, but we’d kind of drifted apart with me still back in Suck Creek running the Quick Stop and her off being a nurse and married and all. While I was pouring my coffee that morning, my momma called, told me about the phone booth, the car, the keys still there. I knew it was bad.
After the cops investigated her husband and did a half-assed job of a search, they gave up looking. Too many other crimes to get on to, they said, or something like that. I knew we’d find her in time, not Darly, but what was left. It’s a hard thing to learn to live with what’s left when so much is always falling away. A year later two hunters out for deer found Darly in the brush in the north Georgia mountains where only hunters go.
Police never found the facts, just figured it was some guy saw an easy target. Such a little woman, her nurse’s uniform bright in the predawn darkness. Did he snatch her from the phone booth? Or did he, smiling, offer her a ride? These are the questions that got me started. With answers I’ll always want to know. I tried to talk to Darly all those months she was gone, and I sent up prayers trying to catch a sense of her spirit. But Darly never answered. I guess I’m no Lillian Young because no matter how much I cried out, God just sat silent and shadowed as those deep, dark mountains back there. Once they found her remains, I gave up on God. And I couldn’t look at mountains without thinking what meanness might be going on. I used to love mountains, had no fear of any kind of wildness out there. But I got to where I couldn’t even get off our porch, so my momma thought I should visit my cousin in Wilmington. He ran a bar out on the beach. No mountains, just sea and sky and sand. I needed that. And it was good for a while. All those happy tourists, big beach homes and condos and parties and money and laughter flowing in and out like the tides.
But then this little girl went missing from town, from downtown, where it’s bad. Word was her momma was a crack whore, so the cops, well, you know cops. So I called and met the grandmomma, who was the one really raising that girl, who took her to church, kept her clean, made sure she did her homework. The girl deserved a search. Her name was Keisha. That was the first thing I did, make sure the city knew a nine-year-old girl named Keisha Davis was missing and needed to be found. Given the momma’s way of living, I had a feeling Keisha wasn’t dead; she’d just been stolen for a while. Taken by somebody who’d seen her in her momma’s house, somebody who knew how to snatch a girl without a sound. And I knew with enough word on the street we’d find her. I told every little dealer, thief, and hooker I could get to listen to keep an eye out. Waved a fifty-dollar bill at ’em, then put it back in my pocket. Said, “You get me the word that finds that girl, you’ll get this fifty, and you’ll be my friend. And you never know when you’ll need a friend like me.” Maybe I do have a little Lillian Young in me ’cause I got their attention. But you gotta cover all the odds and work fast when it’s a child lost. So I raised a search crew from her grandmomma’s church. We put up flyers and started asking questions and searching that city, one alley, abandoned home, and Dumpster at a time. Then we stretched the search to the banks of the Cape Fear River, with me thinking if she had gotten in that river, she was gone. Turns out one of the hookers got the word, some guy told her about some girl locked up in a room, said it wasn’t right doing little girls like that. Turns out it was an uncle who had her. I don’t even want to count how many times it’s some uncle doing these things. He had her in a house three blocks away. Another crack house, another uncle, another girl. You know the story. She was alive at least, but she was broken way past where anything could mend. I see a lot of this.
It’s a calling, really, what I do. The way some folks are called to the church. When someone goes missing, people do a lot of praying, and being from Suck Creek, I know a lot about praying and sitting around and more praying when something needs to be done. And, well, that bothers me. All that she’s in God’s hands and comforting talk and a whole lot of it’ll be all rights. There’s lots of times it won’t be all right. It’ll be hell, and my job is to get folks through it.
But don’t get me wrong, I think praying is a good thing. It’s a start. It gives some kind of comfort and a little bit of hope. But like my momma used to say, “You gotta put feet on your prayers if you want something done.” She said that was what Miss Young believed. And any woman who can knock two Suck Creek rednecks back from beating a boy, she’s got strength. When Momma packed me off to live here, she said, “You gotta get your prayers moving across the ground, Shelby Waters. You gotta set your prayers in motion instead of just letting them go floating out there in the air.”
I started my search for Keisha by raising money from the church where she went, then other churches, then just people. In time I started something that would make my momma, daddy, and Lillian Young proud. REV, I call it. Rescue Effort Volunteers. While lots around here are all about saving souls, I’d say my calling is saving lives, lives of the missing and the lives of those who get left behind. I’ve led those gatherings of searchers through fields, armed with guns, sticks, shovels, any kind of protection against the snakes that wait in weeds, the alligators lurking in marshes, where somewhere in miles of fields and woods and rivers and lakes a body can be found.
I always know when we’ll find them. My eyes tear up like from a chemical burn, my stomach heaves, and my head gets all thick and swimmy, like my whole body is saying it doesn’t want to see. But I push on through the bad feelings, keep walking, keep using my stick to push back the weeds. And then: remains, skin matted with leaves baked by the sun to the bones, ribs riddled with spiders, beetles, centipedes. And there’s the shirt sometimes clinging, a watch, a ring, a shoe.
I step in between the police reports and camera crews when a family discovers a loved one is lost. I see what most don’t, the story behind statistics and the news. I’ve seen the mother vomiting in a hotel room in the city where her daughter was last seen alive. I’ve seen the father who cried because he lost a flashlight while looking for the body of his son at the county dump. He was a big man, collapsed on a pile of cinder block. He sobbed the words, “I just had it in my hands. I just had it.” I found his flashlight, gave him a bottle of cold water to soothe him a little. Kept moving on.
I’m trying to tell you the story, but to give you the story would be like giving you the churning blue sea one bucket at a time. You might taste the salt, feel the cold, but the weight and wave of so much water, well, it’s lost.
Like Katy.
Like the woman who once walked on that leg hacked off and tossed to rot in a stream.
Bodies.
Joggers find them in the bushes by well-traveled roads.
Bodies
