So Much Pretty (2 page)

The first and last “TV reenactment” I was interviewed for was during the early days of the search for Alice Piper. A studio interview for which I was asked to wear contact lenses.

“You arrived at the same time as the police,” the interviewer asked by way of statement.

“Yes.”

“Five months had gone by since anyone had seen Wendy White,” he said, softly emphasizing the word “months.” His face was tense, telegraphing the response I was supposed to give. A
brief holding-forth through silence in which I could suddenly smell his cologne. Then he said, “It must have been a horrifying scene.”

He was only out of character for a moment; he raised his eyebrows and gave a nearly imperceptible nod. I had a sudden sense that his next question might be about whether it was hard for me to stand in the woods in high heels. Whether my boyfriend had to come pick me up after I puked or peed my pants. I knew I wasn’t a source, wasn’t telling him any story—I was part of the story.

Then he said, “Were you frightened?”

I remember the feeling of wanting to stand up and walk out. I remember the heat of the fill light and thinking,
I will never do this again
. And the vague sense of paralysis that prevented me from leaving but unfortunately didn’t prevent me from rolling my eyes and making an impatient “wrap this up” gesture, which was not the kind of press I needed, considering my “situation.”

In the footage I am wearing pale pink lipstick and a black turtleneck. The interview lasted eight minutes, but they had to do several takes because they said I squinted. I smirked. Kept shrugging.

When I watched it, I couldn’t get further than my answer before turning it off, disgusted with my own face, ashamed I had ever agreed to talk about it again.

“Well,” I exhale, shake my head slightly. “I don’t get what you mean.”

“Let me ask you this . . .” the interviewer begins. He would ask me what I was really brought there to answer. What made me a subject instead of a peer.

“Why?” he would ask. “Why did you write what you wrote after Wendy White was found?”

I want to put this event in context. If you just want to read about April 14, you can go buy one of those paperbacks they sell in the checkout line at Wal-Mart. But if you want to know what
really happened, you need to know where it happened. And you need to know why. You need to know who Wendy White was and that I made some mistakes. I didn’t intend to become part of this story.

I took this job when I was twenty-four. White was nineteen the night she walked out of work at the Alibi and never came back. I am not trying to avoid my responsibility, say that I was too young to see the things I saw. I’m just making sure the details are straight.

Prior to taking the job, I was writing for an independent in Cleveland, and I had a pretty good little scene going on. I lived on Schiller Street, where there were still a lot of family duplexes and old houses and where the abandoned mills and meatpacking plants were being converted into studios or bright, high-ceilinged offices for start-ups that had moved into the neighborhood. My apartment was a tall efficient box of exposed brick and leaded-glass windows that buzzed when trucks drove past, cool in the summer and cold in the winter, with a fire escape overlooking garbage cans. There was a renaissance of strangeness going on in the neighborhood. Sculptors, painters, art students, and businesspeople rented space alongside old Jewish and Slavic and black families, several generations living in the same sprawling houses divided up into apartments. Grandparents on the porches and wiseass scruffy kids on the sidewalk. It was a neighborhood in the process of being converted and would soon morph into a business and tourist district. At the time I didn’t like it, the gentrification, but a few weeks after moving to Haeden, I longed for the life of my old neighborhood badly, especially the sounds; traffic, parties, kids on the street. The utter silence of my new home woke me up at night.

I stayed in Haeden at first because I was committed to writing my big-picture story. And because I wanted the word “editor” on my résumé. But I did not stay there comfortably.

Haeden was the whitest place I had ever been. And it was a
specific kind of whiteness, a blankness I’d never experienced. Apart from the musicians, who played at the Rooster and the Alibi, and the guy who made stump sculptures of bears and eagles, and the ladies who knitted afghans or painted landscapes on rusty saws, there wasn’t much of a scene.

Before I took the job, the
Free Press
was run by a guy named Stephen Cooper. He had been the paper’s editor, reporter, and photographer for thirty years. Everyone called him “Scoop.” Nice nickname, if not exactly accurate. A weekly paper in a one-paper town rarely gets the chance to break news, and the major competitor usually has the word “swapsheet” or “pennysaver” in its masthead. Still, his was one of the few important professions left in town: chief of police, head of public works, town judge, volunteer fire chief, and Scoop. A tight affiliation of people who kept the place from becoming just a point on Route 34 you’d miss if you closed your eyes for eight seconds while driving by. My job was to write all the content for the paper, making it folksy and general enough so that it could be reprinted in five other local papers if the need arose.
Free Press
was owned by
Weekly Circular
. My paycheck came from Syracuse, New York, and was not signed but was stamped by a name I was unfamiliar with. Despite the fact that I had clearly replaced Scoop, he liked to act as though he were my boss. He had after all interviewed me for the position.

Scoop smelled. Fried onions or peppermint or sweat. He wore yellow suspenders and a flannel shirt nearly every day, like a uniform. In winter he wore long underwear under the flannel, and in summer he just rolled up the sleeves. He was tall and very thin and had an unruly salt-and-pepper beard to which crumbs stuck; he would let it grow up his face to just beneath his eyes before finally shaving. Scoop would come around the office once a week or so to see how things were going. And things were going dull and well before the White thing happened.

For the most part, Scoop was a good guy and a decent writer.
He left Haeden for J-school in the sixties, then came back and took over the paper from some other old guy who was retiring. That was the longest Scoop had been away from home. Upon his return, he moved into the house in which his grandfather was born. Also the house in which his father and he and his brothers were born. He married the girl he’d dated in high school: a smart, round woman who taught third grade. All this background is just a way of saying Scoop wasn’t a guy from whom I was taking reporting advice.

A couple days after White disappeared, Scoop took me target shooting, a local pleasure for which I had no aptitude. Then he took me to the VFW for beer, gave me a can of pepper spray to keep in my pocket, and told me to keep an eye on the White case. I was not happy about the impromptu meeting. I had my own story ideas and hadn’t thought much about White. I had assumed she ran away because she was bored, something I felt I might do at any minute. I had to keep reminding myself that Haeden being boring was actually part of the reason I was there. The perceived tranquillity, the silence, the old family homes, the meth labs and poverty and giant swaths of corn-infested, shit-covered nowhere, lives intersecting and connecting through pure habit. The meanings of things having been shaken loose half a century ago.

I understood that this was Haeden: Apart from the lake and the river and the little chunks of forest, the town itself had evolved into a strip of highway that doubled as the village’s main road. This was lined with a strange mix of houses, old brick buildings, and a little farther out, chains and big box stores: Home Depot, Subway, Wal-Mart. The edge of Tern Woods was a parking lot, a wide black expanse of asphalt with a grid of yellow lines covering what had once been the fullness of a forest. The lot was often empty, and during the hours when people were shopping, it was barely half full.

Haeden was supposed to be farming country. I thought maybe
I’d see sheep and cows wandering around on the hillsides, but this was no country I could reconcile with my imagination. And this became the main focus of my reporting—the disparity between what things were called and what they actually were. In a million ways, this little town was getting fucked over just like the low-income neighborhoods in Cleveland—environmental problems, food prices, bad mental-health services, disproportionate numbers of returning veterans, poverty, obesity—but unlike in Cleveland, these people were isolated, scattered throughout the county roads where the sound of a rifle report or a tractor motor was more common than a neighbor’s voice.

When I first took the job, Scoop said I would need to get off the main roads to see some of the big farms. Which I was very happy to do. He told me I should drive out to see the Haytes dairy and gave me directions. Told me that the Haytes and three other farms were what constituted the real local economy, unlike what he called the franchises, by which he really meant multinationals.

I was waiting for the rain to stop before I scouted for farms. It seemed to rain constantly in central New York, and I had yet to get used to it. The sky was often a solid white-gray color for days at a time. The first sunny day that came along, I set out on County Road 227 in the direction of fucking nowhere with the windows down and the Pretenders playing on the radio. Haytes Road was five miles in that direction, and I found it easily, as the dairy could be seen from miles away, atop the low green hillside, from the winding road below.

Part of the road had washed away and collapsed into a ditch filled with mud and stones and grasses. The air was lush and humid. I stuck to the middle of the road, where it crisscrossed the gentle incline. As I got closer to the dairy, gravel gave way to a new, shiny black asphalt drive as wide as a highway, leading all the way to the central complex, the slate-and-silver-colored pole barns separated by narrower roads and footpaths comprising the
enormity of the Haytes empire. From the top of the hill, you could see the entire farm. It took up what would have been four or five city blocks. You could also smell it.

Three metal buildings like storage units or warehouses, as big as football fields, were butted up to one another, windowless and silent. There were two massive lagoons of liquefied manure, millions of gallons stored in dark blue two-story open tanks flanking the operation. A chemical smell hung over the surrounding area, not like cow manure but something else, something rancid and chlorinated. It was nauseating, and even up on the hill, it made your eyes burn. Driving back through the valley and past the buildings, the smell was worse, but oddly, there were no flies. I heard no insects or birds at all. And the land around the warehouses was all poured concrete that appeared smooth and almost polished. The low grasses near the various pole barns and modern concrete structures were yellow and powdery white. I stopped the car and looked up at the buildings and contemplated the vast scale of the manure tanks.

Scoop had told me this was the oldest farm in the county, here before the town was even built. Owned by the Haytes brothers. I realized, standing there, that I didn’t know what a farm was.

And driving along the dirt roads back to town, I realized I didn’t know what the countryside was, either. Mile after mile of lost places. Old wind-and-rain-battered houses, the windows empty of shades or curtains and sometimes glass. You could look right into these houses, right through them. Piles of garbage and furniture stacked up to the ceiling were visible in the upstairs of one rickety colonial, the porch crumbling, filled with empty paint cans, rusting tools, tarps, and canvases. It was like the owners or tenants had just disappeared, or might have died there and no one had happened along to find out. Farther down the road, five weathered school buses were up on blocks outside a barn with a caved-in roof, the paint faded to white and peeling from the sides. There must have been a school bus auction at one time,
because I’d seen buses on property closer to town that looked like they had been converted into trailer homes, and old Ross had a school bus on his land, too. There also must have been a fire sale on American flags and prisoner of war paraphernalia.

Beyond the buses and some silent stretches of corn and soybean fields was an overgrown rectangular weed yard filled with junked tractors, lawn mowers, and agricultural equipment, some of it antiquated; a hand-painted sign on weathered plywood in front of the wreckage read tractors wanted dead or alive. The wide frame of a sprayer was tangled in a bale of chicken wire; the broken and twisted necks of hay balers, threshers, and metal objects that couldn’t be identified were scattered and forgotten, nothing but rust exoskeletons of their former selves. Broken machinery as far as the hills.

Beyond the farm-equipment boneyard sat a quasi-neighborhood of double-wide trailers, all slate green and dank gray-white, sidled up to their driveways close to the road. The yards held satellite dishes of various sizes, one nearly as big as the metal swing set that stood unoccupied beside the septic tank. Some yards sported tall white flagpoles flying American and black POW flags. Others were replete with painted white tractor tires, makeshift flower beds in which marigolds grew. One of the trailers had Christmas decorations laid flat in its crabgrass yard. Jesus and Rudolph, wide-eyed and partly covered with mud. Two feet of white picket fence, made of wood-textured plastic, stuck out of the ground on either side of the cinder-block stairs. A wreath hung on the dented metal door. No one played or worked outside. And apart from the occasional silhouette of a human form in front of a television, no one was visible inside the trailers that day.

Farther down the road were vinyl-sided ranch houses with attached garages. Then a variety of smaller restored farmhouses, and enormous vinyl-sided mansions with oversize Palladian windows, and newly dug ponds. Closer to town, a square white
Greek revival stood blind at the end of a winding drive, overlooking a meadow of phlox and chicory. Long driveways housed tarp-covered boats on trailers parked off to the side under open carports.