Before I get into the whole Cowboy Stevie thing, which isn’t even really a thing, so much, but anyway, the person to talk to about this is really my grandma, because everything I know about it I heard from her, and while I’m on the subject, let me give you a little piece of advice. When it comes to the gathering of information, you don’t need the internet, and you don’t need government records. What you need is an old lady who belongs to a church group. Trust me.

No, no, no. Trust me. The church group is a living, breathing, stitching-and-bitching dossier on the lives and loves of your town — and it’s networked to all the neighboring towns, because the church group usually shares the bus to Atlantic City with another church group or two, if you know what I mean, and I think that you do. File-sharing city, baby.

And it’s not just that the church group knows everything, although you’d better believe that the church group. Knows. Everything. Ev-uh-ree-thing. Behind closed doors, out of town, off the record, doesn’t matter, the church group has heard about it — but that’s not the best part. The best part is that you can hear about it too, and all you have to do is show up. Now and then, you have to hold your arms out so your grandmother can wind wool. That’s it! So, if your grandmother belongs to a church group, offer to escort her, if she doesn’t, make her join one, and if you don’t have a grandmother, borrow one, because I’m telling you, if you think you know even half of the secrets cherished by your town, clearly you have not hung out with the bake sale committee.

As a kid, I did nothing but hang out with the bake sale committee. My mother worked, so after school, instead of going home, I walked over to First Lutheran, where Grandma basically lived, and I would hang out with her and her friends every day until Mom came to pick us up at five-thirty — and I loved it. I knew I wasn’t quote-unquote supposed to love it. I was supposed to pretend it was big hardship for me, like — oh, what was that girl’s name? There was this girl in my homeroom whose parents didn’t own a TV, and I don’t think she really cared, except that the other kids used to tease for not having seen Hawaii Five-0 or whatever the hell, and she’d have to act like she loathed her parents for denying her the gift of Jack Lord so the other kids wouldn’t make fun of her. God, children are wretched creatures. What was that girl’s name? Karen Krager? No, she’s the one whose mother made her clothes — and of course the other kids made fun of that, too, but she had one pair of bell-bottoms that, I swear to God, Mrs. Krager should have won a design award for those pants. They had this cascade of red rickrack around the hems…I coveted those bell-bottoms, I really did.

Anyway. Anyway, anyway — oh, right, so I had to pretend I hated spending every afternoon with Grandma, but I was the kind of kid who knew what rickrack was, for God’s sake, so nobody really believed me, and the truth was that I loved sitting on the floor with my math book, just listening, absorbing, learning. By the time I was ten years old, I knew where girls went to get abortions, I knew what a bender was and the name of every man in town who ever went on one, I knew who had slept with the babysitter — and for a while there, like around the seventh grade, it was more like who hadn’t slept with the babysitter, it would have turned into Fellini’s Satyricon around here if cable TV hadn’t come along.

Oh my God, and you know who slept with the babysitter, too, was Mrs. Krager, and that was a revelation. I held my breath when the subject came up, too, because I knew certain things about myself by that time, but these ladies were my friends, we’d spent so many hours together, and if they didn’t think two women should be together…so, Mrs. Shawn drops the bomb about Mrs. Krager’s girl-on-girl moment. I start holding my breath. There’s a silence. Mrs. Alton asks if the babysitter is over eighteen. Mrs. Shawn says she is. There’s another silence. I’m still holding my breath. Mrs. Alton says, “Now, not that it’s any of my business,” and Mrs. Wallace says, “Oh, please, Helen,” and I almost start laughing, because…exactly, but I keep holding my breath, and Mrs. Alton snaps, “If I could finish my sentence, Louise, that husband of hers is a horse’s ass and good for her, so there,” and God bless her, because…again, exactly, on all counts.

But then Mrs. Wallace yells out, “‘Good for her’? ‘GOOD for HER’?” Another silence, I’m still holding my breath, it is not looking good. And then Mrs. Wallace, God bless her, says, “Marcia Krager could do a LOT better than THAT skinny little thing, and BY the way, I can tell you for a FACT that that girl has a DRUG problem, and I DO not mean aspirin.”

And the next thing I know, they’ve got the quarterly review of all the drug problems in town underway, and I very quietly let my breath out, but the real punchline is that later on, my grandma tells me, “You know, I don’t agree with Mrs. Wallace at all,” and I’m thinking, ohhh Jesus, but she says — get this — “The girl’s not all that skinny, you know how Louise likes to exaggerate.”

Talk about an education. Everything I ever learned about human nature, about comic timing, about having faith in people, I learned in the activities hall of First Lutheran after school, and if you really want the scoop on Cowboy Stevie, I’m telling you, break in there and bug the place. It’s a different cast of characters now, but it’s still a church group and it is still going to know all.

Everything I know comes from when Stevie was still alive, and like I said, you should talk to Grandma because I only got it third-hand anyway — Stevie’s younger than I am, and the whole thing happened after I’d moved away, so there you go, but anyway, here’s what I know. Her real name is Stephanie Shipley. “Stevie” is a nickname she got from her family, but then when she got into high school, the captain of the football team, that Stevenson kid, was also called “Stevie,” and Stevie Shipley apparently had a thing where she wore a cowboy hat and jeans all the time, so then everyone called her Cowboy Stevie to tell the two apart. So that’s where the name comes from.

Anyway, Stevie had a younger sister — I think the sister called her “Stevie” first, actually, because she couldn’t pronounce the word “Stephanie” when she was little, but once they both hit puberty, the drama started with the sister. Cynthia.

Wilson! Cynthia Wilson! That’s the girl without the TV! Thank God, because that was really going to bug me.

I’m sorry, so the sister, Cynthia, becomes a total wild child with the drinking and the dating her teachers and whatnot, and the scuttlebutt on that at the time is that she’s quote-unquote acting out because she’s jealous of Stevie, and the scuttlebutt on that is that Stevie is her generation’s great beauty — she’s tall, she’s got great bone structure and that beautiful dark hair, why does she wear that hat all the time, it’s like she wants to hide herself from the world, blah blah blah blah blah. And apparently Cynthia is nice enough to look at, but she’s no Stevie…and I’m not the one to ask about that, really.

So the poor ugly duckling Cynthia is always in trouble, and her parents get fed up at a certain point, but Stevie is cool about it and she always bails Cynthia out of whatever situation, which just makes Cynthia sort of hate her more because Stevie never gets mad at her — typical sibling weirdness, really, just on an operatic scale.

Finally, one Christmas, Cynthia blows town with a guy twice her age. Fast-forward a month, it’s the end of January, middle of the night. Cynthia calls Stevie crying — the guy has started hitting her, it’s a movie of the week, can Stevie please come get her, she’s in Marwood at a bar on Route 22, blah blah. Stevie says okay and goes to pick her up, and she’s coming around that curve on 22 where there’s the merge from the left when she hits a patch of black ice, and her car slams into a light pole and she goes through the windshield headfirst.

Now, here’s where the church group comes in handy, because that story is plenty on its own. She’s on her way to help her sister, she dies in a car wreck, it’s very dramatic and very sad. But! Mrs. Alton’s granddaughter is married to an EMT based out of Marwood. See? I’m telling you — networked. One of the granddaughter’s husband’s coworkers was the first guy out there that night, and he said that when they got to the scene, they found the wreck, but at first, they couldn’t find Stevie — because she’d crawled a good fifty feet from where she’d landed when she got thrown from the car. The EMTs had to follow the blood trail to find her, she’d made it all the way to the ditch next to the shoulder. Unbelievable.

So why does she walk along Hilltop Road every night? She didn’t die on Hilltop Road, so what’s going on there? Nobody knows — not even the church group, and it pains me to tell you that, believe me. Not as much as it pains them, of course.

My name is Scott Steller. I died in an apartment fire March 2, 1993.

September 22, 2003

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