The Mannequins of Big Sur

I remember she was overweight. She wore black and billowing clothes. Her skin was pale and grey. She ordered a shot and a beer and while the bartender was busy with her drinks she walked in my direction. Our eyes met and held. But I cannot remember her face, now. A sfumato, deliberately indistinct. The clothes, the fat, the ashen flesh remain clear. And yet her face is lost to the wind.

The place began to fill. Divers, wobbly from the morning's charter. Families. Tourists. Regulars. Waitresses arrived, strapped on aprons and retrieved pens from secret places. A typical start to a typical Sunday at the Monterey pub I once owned.

That dark and pallid girl quietly slipped away, unnoticed.

I told [retired] Sheriff John about this, about the girl, about her sister's phone call, the following evening. "She was trying to blame me," I said. "I had nothing to do with it. I mean, I understand her sister's out of her mind--"

"Grief is more questions than answers," Sheriff John said. "Especially in this type of case." His hands were uneasy and there was no humor in his eyes. "What did you tell the sister?"

"She was demanding to talk to the owner. I said I was and that I'd already told the police everything I knew. Which wasn't much." I sipped from a fresh pint of Newcastle, flicking at a coaster that clung to the bottom of the glass.

Sheriff John regarded his vodka tonic, tracing after beads of water that slid down the sides. He gave an unhappy laugh. "Yeah," he said. "People are funny in these situations..."

Then he said this: "Did I ever tell you about the mannequins? No? Well, it must have been, shit, twenty years ago or better. I picked up a teenage girl down by the River Inn. It was late, she was a little drunk and she was trying to hitch a lift back up to town. I offered her a ride home, she thought I was going to take her to jail. I told her I just wanted to see her home safely. So she gave up and hopped in.

"Her house was in the Highlands. Big place. I walked her to the porch and rang the bell. Her father opened the door, took one look at us, and started screaming at me. All of this, 'You motherfucking cops! Don't you have anything better to do than pick on kids? What's your God damned badge number...' That sort of thing. When he'd finished, I said that I'd given her a ride because hitchhiking is dangerous, more so at night. The girl's father took her into the house and slammed the door in my face.

"Well, now, a week or so after that I get a call from someone up in Pajaro. First, they thought someone had thrown a body into a dumpster. Then they realized it was a mannequin, but I was still asked to have a look. The thing in the dumpster wasn't a mannequin. It was the remains of a beautiful young woman. Someone had done a careful job of dismembering her body. And weeks later, there was a report of another mannequin that had been thrown over the cliff just before Bixby Bridge. This second body wasn't so easy to recover. I found her head last. And wouldn’t you know..." Sheriff John removed his glasses and wiped away thin tears. "It was that same girl I'd picked up down at Big Sur," he said. "At the funeral, her father wouldn't even look at me, the motherfucker."

We enjoyed a long, silent spell. John's demons kept him in troubled company. I thought about my own.

She'd had two shots of tequila and'd never finished the single bottle of Corona she'd ordered. A taxi picked her up around 11:00am. They stopped at a liquor store up the hill and she bought a handful of travel-sized spirits. She told the hack that she wanted to go Big Sur. They pulled over at the southern end of Bixby Bridge on the drive down; the girl'd said she needed some air. The hack busied himself with the Sunday crossword. And when he looked in his rearview mirror, she had vanished. He got out of the cab and looked up the highway. She wasn't there. He turned his gaze southward. No one; just a slow, meandering procession of cars and pickups caught behind a lazy motorhome. The hack approached the bridge and peered over the side. Hundreds of feet below lay the girl's body, arms and legs bent at impossible angles. Although an inquest was made, the cabbie was absolved in the matter. It was determined that she'd committed suicide by leaping from Bixby Bridge.

She'd thrown herself away.

The feeling in the air, here, now, so many years later, tells me that in a couple of hours the sun will scatter the oppressive fog. It'll be a good day to be out of the house. Away.

I haven't seen Sheriff John for too long. Nothing a short drive down to Carmel won't cure. I know I won't need to knock, but I'll do it anyway.