“While I was reading it he was writing another. The new note said, ‘If you would rather kill me, it will be O.K.’ Elly looked at that note and drew a bead on his head. His hands came up and opened his shirt at the throat. He pulled it open and patted his bare chest. The veil came untucked and I could see the plastic bag that hung there and a section of hose hanging down. Elly sat with her elbows propped on our knee, both hands aiming the pistol. She waited a long time. The Bag Man was very still, waiting. Finally she just dropped the gun and looked at me. She said, ‘I wish he hadn’t knocked. I could have done it if he’d just opened the door without knocking.’ It was a lot worse for Elly than it was for me. She isn’t used to doing things that aren’t her idea.”
Arty heard the shot and was clambering into his chair when I roared in.
“Mama’s in there! With the twins! She just went in!”
“Quick! Push me! It’s faster!”
Rushing, terrified, I jammed a wheel on the door and nearly pitched Arty out on his head. The cry came, high and thin. The twins were screaming as we leaped through their living room and rushed the bedroom door.
Mama stood calmly beside the big bed. The soft pink light from the gauze lamps made her look lovely. Her face was bright and tender. Her hair drooped charmingly. Her robe and fluffy high-heeled slippers were oddly tidy; the sash of the robe, for example, was tied in a neat bow.
The twins were hunched in one corner of the bed. Iphy was blinking dazedly at Mama and wincing as Elly heaved her private sector of their guts out onto the carpet.
The Bag Man lay dead and pantsless on the filth-smeared bed. His long naked legs looked bony and floppy at the same time.
“Mama,” Arty said. She turned and nodded at us.
“I finally remembered where I’d seen him before.” She looked down at the dark gun in her hands. “Oly, dear, this looks like your Papa’s gun. Would you be so kind as to check the shelf next to my bed? And would you ask … Oh, here’s Al now.”
I’d been asleep when I heard the creaking. Peeking out of my cupboard I saw Mama, white hair glowing in the moonlight, passing through the twins’ unguarded door. I was pulling on a robe to follow her when I heard the shot. I jumped to get Arty.
From the files of Norval Sanderson:
Crystal Lil’s story, as told to investigating officers (transcribed from tape):
“I couldn’t sleep. The moon affects me. I was sitting up in bed, looking out through the small window on my side. Al has always insisted that I sleep on the inside, and he sleeps nearest the door in every bed we’ve ever shared. It’s his protective instinct. He feels that if an intruder were to come through the door he, Al, you know, could defend me. But I had lifted a corner of the curtain so I could look out.
“The moon throws a new and sometimes more attractive perspective on familiar objects, I’m sure you know. But that was how I happened to see this person approach the steps up to the platform. He strode past the window fairly close and the silver light of the moon on his shoulders let me really examine his gait. Gait and carriage, I always tell the children, are such powerful indicators of character. Suddenly I recalled where I had seen this man before, with his stooping head crouched down on his bent neck.
“I thank the merciful stars I was in time. My poor girls. But there, they’ll be all right. Quite a miracle that the gun had fallen to the floor where it caught my eye. The Bag Man must have stolen it. Imagine threatening those helpless girls. I meant to strike him in the heart, but it was an awkward angle with him on top of the girls, naked below and his shirt unbuttoned so it flopped and I couldn’t tell where to aim, exactly. I had to shoot from the side or risk the bullet piercing him and going on to injure the twins. Al always loaded a soft slug, though, for stopping power. Al was right as usual.”
Papa hunched over his hands as though his chest was ready to explode.
“Son, Arty, did you know that this was the guy who tried to kill you all? Did you know this was the guy from Coos Bay?”
Arty, grey-faced even under the warm gold light of his reading lamp, shook his head. “Of course not, Papa. We’re very lucky Mama remembered him.”
“Sweet, frosted globes of the virgin,” breathed Al. “Imagine him haunting us all these years. I’ll go batso thinking. All that time. All those chances. Me and my half-assed security.”
Arty leaned against his chair arm, head drooping in fatigue.
“Well, Mama was just in time.”
Elly’s face, twisted by revulsion: “But she wasn’t in time! He came when she pulled the trigger. He spurted like a cockroach oozing eggs as it dies!”
Iphy, calmly: “Normally we use a spermicide in our diaphragm, but we weren’t ready for him and he wouldn’t let us put it in.”
The police wore green wool uniforms. They came in large groups. The ones who were not actually taking notes, photographs, or fingerprints, or asking questions, took the opportunity to stroll the colorless midway at dawn. When two patrolmen discovered the redheads’ dorm trailers, three more cops sailed in to question these “important corroborative witnesses,” who happened to be making large pots of coffee while wearing various interpretations of the nightie, negligee, shortie pajamas, and so on.
The coroner drove away in the back of the ambulance with the medical examiner and the Bag Man’s body. The officer in charge of the investigation was a heavy, deliberate man with more cheek than neck, and small, steady eyes. He spent a long time with Crystal Lil in the sea-green/sky-blue living room of the twins’ van. Lil sat, ladylike and calm on the sofa, while the plainclothes officer leaned over his knees on the chair in front of her, listening, nodding, taking notes on a small spiral-bound pad. Speaking very little, checking his cassette recorder occasionally.
When a uniformed kid came in to hand him a typed sheet, the big man read it slowly, folded it carefully, and tucked the thin paper into his breast pocket.
“Mrs. Binewski …”
“Lily, please, Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, Lily. We’ve just received confirmation from Oregon. The fingerprints match those of Vern Bogner, who was convicted of attempting to murder you and your children almost ten years ago. My report will say that Bogner was killed while attempting felonious assault, specifically rape. No charges will be brought. Oregon’s been looking for this guy for eighteen months. He left his mother’s custody and didn’t report to his caseworker.”
“Is this Utah?” Lil asked. “Are we in Utah?”
“No, ma’am, Nebraska.”
“Why, I could have sworn Utah to look at your troops. So tidy. So disciplined. I would have thought Utah, with their boots polished just so. You must be very proud.”
21
On the Lam
Papa, old in his chair, and Mama, crocheting and dreaming with her eyes open, as we all pretended that this was a night of children and stories like the old days. Only Arty was missing, off alone in his van. The twins held Chick, who was reading aloud to them, and I sat on the floor with my hump warm against Papa’s bony leg.
“What makes you look so white, so white?’ said Files-on-Parade.
“ ‘I’m dreadin’ what I’ve got to watch,’ the Color-Sergeant said.”
Chick’s voice, sharp as glass in its chanting, stopped abruptly as he sprang off the twins’ lap and whirled around to look at them.
“Did a pin stick you?” The twins’ surprised faces opened. Chick shook his head, frowning.
“Ah, the boy’s tired of hanging Danny Deever. Too glum!” growled Papa. “Let him cremate Sam McGee instead. Come, boychik, begin, ‘There are strange things done!’ and give it a roll this time! Breathe from your crotch up!”
But Chick wouldn’t recite and he wouldn’t crawl up on the twins’ lap anymore but came and sat by me while Papa boomed through Sam McGee and we all did north-wind noises, dog-team yappings, and the ghostly voice saying, “Close that door!”
Papa tottered off to bed soon afterward and Mama went in for her shower. That’s wh
en the twins pounced on Chick. He blushed and stammered. He hadn’t meant to hurt their feelings.
“But why did you look like that?”
“I just didn’t know you had that little guy in there with you. It surprised me. Then I didn’t want to lean on him. I thought it might hurt him.”
The matching faces were as grey as old meat. “What little guy?”
“That one, asleep there,” and Chick pointed. Which is how the twins discovered that they were pregnant for sure.
“We’re not going to sit waiting in that fucking infirmary tent with all those slimy norms drooling at us!” So Elly said. Iphy pointed out that Doc P. refused to see them otherwise, and they had no choice.
“Come with us, Oly. Stay with us when she examines us. We’re scared of her.”
So we sat on folding chairs against the sunlit canvas wall and listened to the flies buzzing high up around the center pole, and to the twittering of the dozen or so amputees who were waiting in wheelchairs (if they were past the foot stage) or on folding chairs if they were still working on fingers and toes. Chick came and sat beside me with an exotic-bird coloring book and a handful of colored pens, whiling away his free hour by filling in the eyes on the peacock’s tail with slow, painstaking blue. “Doc P. says this is good for my hands,” Chick explained. None of Arty’s followers spoke to us but they all looked at us out of the corners of their eyes. I sat counting the fading yellow grass blades dying beneath the chairs.
When Doc P.’s nurse finally led us up the steps to the examining room of the clinic, Doc P. was not pleased to see us.
“If Chick says you’re pregnant and you’ve missed your period, there’s no use wasting my time. You’re pregnant. Anyway, I’m a surgeon, not an obstetrician. Your father is the one you should talk to. He’s got experience in this field.”
The twins leaned on the examining table, looking humble. She didn’t ask them to sit down. She sat, thick and puffy white, masked and gloved, behind her white metal desk, doing spider-mirror pushups with her fingers touching. I was afraid and the twins were afraid. Doc P. was not our turf at all.
“What they wanted,” I croaked, “was to get rid of it.” The twins nodded on alternate beats. Doc P. rose up slowly, her white masked face pushed forward, her thick glass lenses winking intently.
“Presumably these talented singers can speak. You have tongues?”
I glanced at the twins, half-expecting them to shove their tongues out in dutiful demonstration.
“Rid of it? Rid of it?” Doc P. crooned.
The twins nodded in miserable syncopation.
“And Papa wouldn’t like? Papa wouldn’t do it? No. Papa would want you to hatch the monster, wouldn’t he? It’s been years since poor old Al had a baby to play with, hasn’t it?”
The seeping acid in Dr. Phyllis’s tone wore at my bones, peeling my teeth. I tugged at Elly’s hand, wanting to leave, but they were staring at her as she sat back down and clasped her hands on the desk in front of her.
“No. I could nip it out of you in five minutes and no harm done. Don’t think I couldn’t. But I’m not going to, and I’ll tell you why. I have a contract with your Arturo, and young Arturo does not wish it. He is looking forward to being an uncle. It’s not for me to deny Arturo this pleasure. And it’s not for you to defy him. Drink milk. Eat greens. Your abdominal muscles are strong. It will be months before you show. And one last bit of healthful advice. Whatever you’ve been doing to make Arturo angry, stop it.”
We slogged out past the blank-eyed patients waiting to have their stumps examined.
“It’s odd,” Iphy said as we went toward the Chute, “that’s the first time we’ve ever spoken to her.”
“You never said a word,” I pointed out.
“We’ve never had anything to do with her or Arty’s crowd. Don’t they make you feel strange? They’re always around, underfoot. That slum camp stretches for acres, but we don’t really know what they’re doing or why. Should we find out? Are you going to vomit? Elly?”
And Elly did, in the dust between the refrigerator truck and the cat wagon.
“I was going home for lunch,” said Chick, “when the twins went boo from behind the cat wagon. I didn’t know they were there. They got mixed up with the cats in my head. Elly said would I pick that little guy out of their belly. Iphy too. They wanted me to. I felt kind of surprised thinking maybe I could help them, do something for them, not just moving furniture. Then I felt around, reached in to see what it was like inside, see if I could do it. I try not to go inside people. Sometimes it happens by accident, like sitting on their lap that little guy came out at me! That’s what I do for Doc P. and I try not to do it the rest of the time. But the little guy is in there, all right. I told them that I couldn’t do anything to the little guy, that you’d told me specially not to, not to do anything to get the little guy out of them. Iphy went away into herself but Elly scared me.”
“How?” asked Arty. “Did she yell? Or think hate thoughts? She didn’t hit you, did she?”
“No. She pushed OUT, like a thing that won’t die.”
“Did you ever get any lunch? No? Those girls in the office made pie. Cut me a slice too. And let’s see if you can tell whether I want banana cream or chocolate.”
“Arty, I can’t do that.”
“Try.”
“You know I can’t.”
From the files of Norval Sanderson:
Chaos rules—midway shut down for the first time in years—Arturo in a genuine frenzy—sweating heavily at the radio transmitter in his van—speaking calmly while his whole body twitches, jerks and writhes in his chair. His shorts and a green velvet shirt, sodden black with sweat, the vinyl of his seat smeared with sweat, Arty’s bald pate dripping sweat into his eyes. Little Oly stands by with an endless supply of tissues to mop his face, wipe his eyes. She runs errands. His voice stays clear, unhurried, precise as it goes out over the transmitter.
Big Binewski pops in and out with his mustache tangled—the mother’s collapsed in bed with a redhead in attendance—the youngest, Chick, is out with the posse—Arty, at the radio, is in direct contact with fifteen vehicles full of Binewski guards and other show employees—all looking for the twins, Electra and Iphigenia, who have run away from home.
Oly, the faithful watchdog, insists that the twins have been abducted. Oly keeps trying to shoo me out of the van, away from Arty, but I see enough. For example—Arty is sending the posse to clinics and doctors—the addresses found for him by Oly, who leafs through a stack of local phone books that may cover three states. Oly is getting testy at not being able to get rid of me and Arty evidently doesn’t care. I decide to let her shoo me. This looks like an all-day session.
Finally she nods me off to the door as though to give me a private word. Turns out she is changing tactics—wants me to go check on Crystal Lil, see if the old broad is still alive, and then—Oly the cool one—would I just drop in on the Admitted Office and see that the Arturans stay calm in the face of this unexpected interruption of routine? Arty is saying, “Chick, are you hearing me? What about the nurse practitioner service I gave you? … Should be within a mile of where you are now.…” with the voice of men discussing mild weather.
Standing on the step, I look down at Oly—teasing her that I may change my mind and come back in after all. “Tell me, Oly, why is Arty so upset? I’ve never seen him like this!” She shrugs her hump and twists her frog mouth into a pained grin, “Family. The Binewskis are big on family.”
I stroll over to the redheads’ dormitory trailers. They are deserted except for buxom Bella, with a chaw in her jaw, perched in an open door so she can spit at the next trailer while painting her toenails.
Bella snorts at the twins’ absence—explains that they’ve gone off with Rita (the redhead) and Rita’s sweetie, McFee, in McFee’s elderly pickup. The twins are knocked up, explains Bella, “probably by that pus sack, the Bag Man”—and the girls are looking to get “scraped out” (searching f
or an abortion) despite “His Armlessness, His Almighty Leglessness” having forbid it.
**** Redheads reading magazines in the Binewski van say Crystal Lil is asleep on pills.
**** The Arturan office queen, Miz Z., unperturbed, has her battalion of campers contemplating their stumps and meditating on P.I.P. (Peace, Isolation, Purity)—generally lollygagging in the sun and oblivious of the situation on the other side of the fence. As long as lunch and supper happen, they won’t notice.
**** Randy J.—a Binewski guard and ex-Marine who was driving the van when the twins were located. Randy says it was an Ob-Gyn office—Chick spotted the pickup and the Rita redhead smoking a cigarette out front. The vigilantes busted in.…
“They were up on the table on their hands and knees, bare ass sticking up in the air kind of pitiful with the nurse getting ’em ready. See us, they about go to the moon, jump down screaming, try to break out the window. I scared they’d hurt themselves, catch hell from the boss. But, Jesus, that little bugger, Chick, steps through and looks at ’em, down they go to sleep in a pile on the floor. We just sort through for arms and legs, tote ’em out to the van and the nurse and the doc dithering behind us. Rita and McFee gone. Jumped in that beat-up old Dodge and gone. Know they’re in up to their ass, see?
“Them twins sleep sweet in the back all the way here. That boy Chick did something. Some hypnotism, maybe. Tell you, it scared the shit outa me. You shoulda seen it!”
Which, I assume, means that the twins fainted. They’re locked in their trailer under guard now as we move on.
Arty is laid up. He’s staying in his trailer van. He’s got a bandage across one ear and on the cheek on the same side, and a thick dressing on his neck just below that ear. A thin scratch on his chest is visible—just the end of it—at the edge of his shirt collar. He is NOT explaining the damage. He’s moody—an anger that alternates with what I suspect is grief. All very controlled, of course. He discusses philosophy. Talks Arturism. Nothing personal allowed.
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