Truth Toy Box Dancing Consequence

THE TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES DISPATCH: FALL EDITION

By Jenny Maloney

“Vulnerability is not something I often feel.”

We arrive in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, in the dark. Whatever bright paints or desert stripes or stars might be in front of us are shadowed, much like our drive after stopping for gas in L—, where we saw the men in the black van. The gas station in L— seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, cars need fuel and we had about a hundred miles to go. The station, lit with glaring LEDs, glows like a bath of white light in the middle of a pool of the navy-blue nighttime. I pull up to the pump and Beth, my friend and companion for this trip, heads into the station to use the ladies’ room. 

Beside me is a van and at first I think nothing of it. A van is a van is a van. This one is filled with five men. Tattoos bloom over their skin, the once-black ink having faded to a shade of indigo denim. The driver wears a tank top and a crooked smile and a baseball cap worn so high it looks like it will fall off if he turns his head too quickly. I see three other silhouettes stirring in the vehicle. A fourth climbs out and this one is about four hundred pounds, with tats of tentacles creeping up his neck and onto his cheeks. When I meet his eye, I smile, because that is what you do to diffuse a situation before one begins. And there’s something electric, something suddenly shooting through the air. 

As he moves past me toward his friend, the driver in the tank top, who has returned from paying for his gas presumably, I want nothing more than for my own pump to finish. I’m already mentally prepping what I’ll do as soon as the gas stops flowing. Door is open. Climb in. Don’t waste time with seatbelt. Drive to station entrance so Beth doesn’t have to cross them. 

In The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker says, “We think conscious thought is somehow better, when in fact, intuition is soaring flight compared to the plodding of logic. Nature’s greatest accomplishment, the human brain, is never more efficient or invested than when its host is at risk.”

I know my intuition has picked up on something before my conscious brain can articulate it. I’ve started paying attention to details of these men because maybe one day, or one moment soon, I’ll need those details. 

My plan doesn’t work quite the way I want. The men head into the station—again—another oddity—right as Beth is heading back out. The one with the tentacle tats and the bare feet and the cracked yellow toenails says something. One of the other men laughs. She rushes out, some sixth sense telling her the same thing mine told me. I pull away from the station, watching my rearview the whole time. Then we do a circle, looping around a couple interstate exits, to make sure they didn’t follow us. I wonder if tomorrow we’ll hear about that gas station being robbed. 

Packs of men have never been a safe space. 

This lingering sense of threat looms over us until we reach T or C. 

When we enter our room at the spa, my first evaluation of the place is colored by the encounter with the men in the van. The bed feels too close to the door. I don’t know how effective the lock is—and the door is made primarily of glass. I pull the curtains. 

The room itself reminds me of a small apartment I visited when I did a ride-along with my local police department many years ago. Both spaces contain a tiny kitchen, bright cheerful furniture. Creative and varied paintings on the wall. (This is something I notice throughout Truth or Consequences—every space seems to have a collection of abstract art, portraiture, and landscapes). This motel room is painted yellow and purple; the apartment from years before was painted with mint-colored vines. 

During the ride along, we’d been called to the apartment because the woman who lived among the painted vines had been attacked by her partner. I don’t know what the fight was about. But a lamp was knocked over. Her hair was tangled. There was a bruise on her temple. She tried to change her mind about sending the cops after her partner, but domestic violence calls were automatic charges in that time and place.

I don’t want to feel this memory, but it comes.

Vulnerability is not something I often feel. 

Anxiety, sure. Overwhelm, overwork, stress. Those primal emotions aren’t strangers to me. But they’re normally triggered by modern stressors. Will I hit my deadlines? How can I get this project done? All the corporate or business elements have stepped in for the lions, tigers, and bears. 

But I don’t feel vulnerable or exposed when I look at my calendar and see a due date. It’s just paper. 

Now it feels like eyes are watching me and the sensation continues through the weekend. Sharing personal stories with new friends and writers. 

Everyone so exposed, like live wires. 

One of my new writing friends, now knowing that I scribble science fiction and crime, tells me about a serial killer from Truth or Consequences. David Parker Ray is known as the Toy Box Killer. In the late ’90s, he built a $100,000 torture chamber under his trailer, which he called the toy box. He kidnapped teens and young women and physically and psychologically tortured them. Several of his victims have never been found. He was caught because one young woman escaped the toy box, naked, and ran open and exposed to a neighbor’s house, where they called 911.            

Truth or Consequences is desert. Heat. Scrub brush. At night, it’s open stars and wispy silver clouds. There’s the town and then…open space. For hundreds of miles. I think about that young woman, exposed and vulnerable to the elements, and I know she’s suffered the nightmare I only imagine when I see men in vans.

On the Saturday of our trip, sirens go off. The afternoon screams with sound. My heart, which has been racing for the past twenty-four hours, speeds up more. Beth hears it too. We step outside, half expecting the town to be on fire. Instead, a parade greets us. Fire trucks and police cars and truck after truck of teenagers. The sirens call the town to the streets. It’s spirit week. 

Homecoming.

We wave and smile and clap. The sirens loop around the neighborhood. We know where the parade is, even as it falls out of sight. 

That night there’s a disco party and some of the teenagers who were on the trucks earlier dance on the black and white checked floor. One of the girls, Hannah, is having a birthday. She’s sixteen. And it’s clear she wants to dance—she’s doing some cheerleading moves at the edge of the dance floor. Her friends hesitate though. At first, it’s only Beth, dancing in the center of the room like no one is watching. Everyone else seems cautious, not wanting to be exposed. 

The dance floor leaves you open, vulnerable. Even though it’s really not a threat. Most of the people watching have no bad intentions, they’re just shy themselves. But you have to allow yourself to be seen. You must become visible in order to dance. 

Eventually, the dance floor is crowded, filled with off-beat teenagers and neon lights. A couple of moms—one with a fanny pack glowing in the black light, another with small glowing sticks in her hair—have jumped in, providing a safe space for the teens to take their risks. 

On the night of my ride-along, my supervising officer and I responded to three or four more calls. It was an overnight ride along and the shift ended around six in the morning. The sun was coming up. The officer said he wanted to do a quick check on the woman who lived among the painted vines. Her partner was still on the loose. No one had located him. So, we drove to the apartment complex, and she was outside, standing in her small yard next to a flower bed. She poured water over the flowers. If I hadn’t known what had happened the night before, I wouldn’t have suspected anything dark or violent. It was just a woman, watering flowers in the dawn light. An impressionist painting that might hang on any wall in Truth or Consequences. She was out in the world, open, exposed, vulnerable. And we were checking on her. For one morning, she was safe. 

Jenny Maloney writes dark fiction her mother hates. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from CSU-Pueblo. Her short stories and essays have been published internationally and appear in Dissections, All Worlds Wayfarer, NewSapiens, Across the Margins, Shimmer, and others. When she’s not writing fiction, essays, or poetry, she’s creating theater as a writer and performer in Colorado Springs. You can see what she’s up to (or pondering) at otherworldsandthis.com