Our media runs on two fuel sources: death and consumption. Can't have one without the other. Like PB and J. Hippies and stink. Teenage romance and heartache.
Paul J. Garth returns to the Gutter to discuss why what's always been will always be....
Paul J. Garth returns to the Gutter to discuss why what's always been will always be....
Dead White Girls by Paul J. Garth
 |
 |
There’s a dead girl on the news as I sit at the bar, her
picture floating on top of the black captioning boxes, white words scrolling,
police saying they’ve made an identification.
I take a pull of beer and study her face, wondering if she
was one of the kids who tried pulling a fake to get a room from me last week.
She looks to be the right age, and I wonder, maybe, if I shouldn’t have just
given it to them.
The TV says her name was Jennifer Whinegarten. Jenny to her
friends. Seventeen. She’d been found in the woods off the highway. They don’t
say much more, other than she was a good student, and that police were
considering her death a homicide. They’ve got what they’re calling a “vehicle
of interest,” a black Cadillac, but they won’t say what it has to do with her.
A video of her friends plays, eyes bugged out red and wet,
and I think, yeah, she was with that group.
Sarah comes over. “Horrible, isn’t it?”
I think about telling her how I’m pretty sure I saw her. How
she was with a group. Girls too young to really look sexy but trying anyways.
Nervous boys in letter jackets. I think about telling her how kids are always
trying to get rooms at the hotel, how I chase them out, but I’m worried I’ll
sound like some kind of law-and-order prick, so I just say, “Yeah. It’s fucking
sad.”
I look at him. He’s dressed better than anyone else in the
bar, wearing nice jeans and a collared shirt. His drink is whiskey and ice.
“You’re not from here, are you?”
He lights up a cigarette, apparently thinking he’s good enough
to ignore the state ban—yeah, the rest of us ignore it too, but we live here.
It pisses me off.
“Omaha,” he says, “But I travel a lot.”
I nod, like it makes all the sense in the world. Which is not
like saying everyone from Omaha is a prick, but sort of.
Sarah brings the Coors and sets it down, then runs off to
help someone else. I watch condensation grow on the bottle, colors from the TV
twisting in the little drops. “This kinda mess doesn’t happen here,” I say, unsure
why I’m keeping conversation with this asshole. “We’re not much more than five,
six thousand. We stay quiet.”
“It’s cause she’s a white girl.”
“The news?”
“Yeah.”
I can’t think what to do for a minute. I pull my beer, but
it tastes like copper and is actually a bit of work to swallow down. “Well,
there aren’t tons of people who aren’t white living here.”
The man looks at the clock over the bar. “Ten-oh-five. That
was the first story. The lead story. A dead pretty white girl in the middle of
nowhere. But I bet there were maybe two or three dead brown kids between Omaha
and Kansas City today. Think they’re coming up next?”
I look to the TV but it’s gone to a commercial for Stan
Olsen’s Hyundai, and I know when it comes back, it’ll probably be a story about
the Huskers and their game on Saturday. “Probably not,” I admit. “But shit,
this channel is from Omaha. Why’re you complaining?”
“Exactly.”
The man smiles.
I don’t like it. “How so?”
I don’t like it. “How so?”
“We’re all gonna die. We know that. But these,” he flings
his fingers at the TV, “these dead white girls. They’re treated special. Jenny
there will be on the front page of the Omaha paper tomorrow, guaranteed. Maybe
a photo of some of her friends laying a wreath. They’ll make her into the
Virgin Mary, say she was a sweet girl. But she wasn’t, otherwise she wouldn’t
have been there, right?”
He sneers into his whiskey. “Like it matters. Life out here
doesn’t matter. Never has. You can tell that by looking at the sky during the
day. All that blue above. You’re tiny under it. Massacres on the land. Under
that sky. They didn’t matter. Blood flows in the dirt out here. Shit. People
die and it comes to the same. Grief and faith. Convincing themselves there’s
good out here, still. Until a dead white girl comes along, and then it’s all in
their fucking faces.”
My beer is low and I think about raising my finger to Sarah
and ordering another, but she’s a nice girl I don’t want her to hear what this
guy is saying. Sarah probably wouldn’t know Jenny if she’d passed her inside
Wal-Mart, but she’d say she was a sweet girl who didn’t deserve this.
“That’s bullshit,” I say, trying to convince myself.
The man nods, smushes his cigarette down and stands,
throwing a twenty on the bar. “Fucking shit-kicker town.”
Sarah comes over, smiles her pretty smile, and asks, “What
was that guy saying?” but I shrug and throw my own cash down, tell her I’ll see
her tomorrow, and head out the door.
Late summer heat swallows me, and I feel the humidity wring
through my night-shift uniform. I light a cigarette and look up. The sky is
absolute black, and I wonder if it’s what Jenny saw when she was dying, or if
she saw stars.
The man from inside the bar glares at me as he pulls out of
the lot and into the night, and I try not to make much of his car, a Black
Audi, which, I think, could look an awful lot like a Cadillac.
