The Best of Talebones

by edited by Patrick Swenson

  “And the train conductor says take a break driver ache, take a break driver ache, ’cause the train conductor says.”

  She remembers, clearly, the furry blue monster dancing on a train, wearing a hat with an eight on it. “’Cause he ate everything,” Maddy’s mom explained, before they put up the checkpoints. Maddy mumbles the chorus to the song, remembering how Hungry Monster stopped the train and gobbled everything.

  Far away, as if behind a wall, guns pop, a siren fades, a helicopter passes. Maddy’s feet scuff the gravel as she skips, head down, pauses on the tie, skips again.

  Arthritic old houses crouch hunchbacked on one side of the tracks; comatose factories lie still on the other. Maddy slides between them, skip, pause, skip, pause.

  She continues on until a brick-sized chunk of concrete blocks the middle of the tracks. She strains to lift it, heave it out of her way. It falls on the rail, ringing like a church bell. Another fragment of concrete bars her way, so she steps across it, and then a slab. Finally, she lifts her eyes.

  The highway overpass has been destroyed, blocking the railroad tracks beneath. Maddy balls her fists, thumbs inside her fingers, and shrieks at the pile of rubble.

  It doesn’t move.

  She grimaces at this inanimate mass. She will not go back, will not retrace her steps. But she fears what may happen if she steps out of the safe, confining rails.

  She stamps her feet. “Get out of my way!”

  The rubble doesn’t budge.

  So she climbs it instead, gingerly picking her way from slab to slab, using the rusted rebar for handholds, imagining always that the rails are right beneath her, holding her in tight on either side.

  The mound is a node of broken movement where highway once crossed rails, dividing the city into quadrants. Downtown, among the darkened skyscrapers, anti-aircraft guns vomit fire at the sky like wounded dragons raging against airborne foes. In the foreground sits a neighborhood where trees no longer rise above the lightless rooftops. Far away to the north, suburbs with electricity ring the hillsides like strings of Christmas bulbs on shrubs, long out of season. The fourth quarter is just over her shoulder, but she doesn’t want to look at it. She is almost over the top of the mound when she slips. Chips of the old highway skitter away beneath her feet, and she slides down the side.

  A flash of light, a sudden throbbing roar, a kaleidoscopic blur of transient color shoots above her head amid the thrumthumtum pause thrumthumtum pause of wheels on rumble strips. She screams, flinches, and slides further.

  The ground throbs beneath her and the echo of a train whistle shivers through her, blowing her hair back.

  She shrieks and ducks, rolling sideways down the slope, until she touches the bare ground, and all the apparition of speeding cars and train blank out of existence.

  Straightening up, she looks around.

  She’s stepped outside the safety of the rails.

  She has landed in the fourth quarter.

  Forty acres of concrete are all that remain of an old factory complex, slab after slab of abandoned flooring, a patchwork quilt of squares and rectangles stitched together by little seams of dessicated weeds. A single catalpa tree rises in the center, or just slightly off. Seed pods hang like bony brown fingers from its leafless branches.

  A fat man sits cross-legged at the base of the tree.

  Thinking that, maybe, he can tell her how to get back to the tracks, wherever they lead, Maddy stumbles to the chainlink fence. With her fingers tugging at the links, she walks sideways, never taking her eye off the old man. Her first impression was that he was fat, though now he only seems unspeakably old. When she reaches a crippled post, canted sideways, and a hole she can squeeze through, she squeezes through.

  Her footsteps falter as she approaches him. He wears faded jeans and scuffed work boots. A blanket rests across his round shoulders, the bare skin of his chest and belly as gray as stone in the unlight. One meaty hand taps his fat knee impatiently.

  Without looking up, he says: “Going to stand all the way back there?” Then he chuckles. “Well, that’s okay.”

  Maddy eases closer. Her heart skips like a rock across a pond. She comes close enough to see his ears, huge and saggy like two overstuffed coin purses. And his nose. One time, Maddy’s dad gave her a tadpole, and they kept it in a bowl until it became a frog, and the frog grew until it filled the bowl, and sat there, so squat and flacid it could barely move. The old man’s nose fills the bowl of his face that same way.

  “Or come closer if you want to,” he says. “It’s all up to you.”

  His mouth frowns, all scary and angry. Somehow she knows he is not angry at her. He reminds her of her grandpa, when they went to see him at the restaurant, after Maddy’s mom went away. “Hi, Grandpa,” she says. Testing him.

  He nods. One hand taps his leg, just above the knee. Still he doesn’t look up. “So. What do you want?”

  “Nothing,” she blurts out. Suddenly she’s scared that he will give her something.

  He lifts his head toward her, and gestures at his chest with his massive hands. “No, seriously. Tell Grandpa what you want.”

  She screams at him. “I don’t want anything!”

  “You sure?”

  Her lower lip projects just slightly. She hesitates, then nods yes.

  He shrugs. The blanket shifts on his shoulders. “You’re a good girl. But now, you know, I do want something.” He waves his oven-mitt hand at a catalpa pod that has fallen to the ground. “Be a good girl and bring that to me.”

  She inches forward, crouches, watching him the way she watches Wayney when he’s drunk. She snatches up the brittle brown pod. It’s as long as her forearm. Holding it at the edge of her fingers, she shuffles forward, tosses it into the old man’s lap, and skips back again.

  He chortles, and his jowls shake, as he picks up her gift. “Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘like peas in a pod?’”

  “Ah-Ah-Ah-Alix!” she stammers nervously, trying to remember the name. “Alix had a Pea-In-The-Pod doll.”

  He pauses, waiting for her, so she continues.

  “Alix, she was my friend, and she had the doll, and we-we-we used to play with it, over at her house, across the street.”

  He looks at her sideways. “Do you miss her?”

  She nods. “All the friends are gone now.”

  The old man’s fingers palsy as the shell snaps in his hands. “Let’s see if we can find her.”

  He pulls apart the pod. Maddy leans in close, though not close enough to be grabbed. Little feathered seeds fill one half of the shell. A few spill out on the ground. Forgetting that she doesn’t want to be grabbed, Maddy steps closer to look at the seeds: each one is a diminutive, feathered homonculus, a tiny fetal-curved person with an agonized expression on its wrinkled little face.

  “Do you see yourself in there, little girl?”

  She jumps at his rough voice. “No —”

  One of the miniature heads turns and stares at her, mewing like a kitten that’s been stepped on. Maddy’s stomach twists, and before she can recognize the face, she screams and runs away. When she stops and looks back, the old man is laughing, his great round shoulders quaking as he scatters handfuls of seeds into the air.

  “Go find yourself, girl! Go on!”

  A seed falls from the sky and a man suddenly appears in front of Maddy. He is like a moving picture made in stained glass, wearing striped blue coveralls, his hands and face smudged as dark as the suddenly nocturnal sky. He bends over a piece of translucent machinery. When he looks up, two stars twinkle in his eyes, and he says something Maddy cannot hear because she backs away.

  He fades to nothing, but as more seeds fall people appear everywhere around her, making a constant hum.

  Last year, on the week of her birthday, when she turned five, locusts poured from the ground. It looked like they were everywhere, but it was only their amber shells, and the noise they made came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Maddy was supposed
to have a picnic with her friends, but she stayed inside and cried and Alix said she wanted to go home, until Maddy’s dad made Maddy go outside and touch the locust shells to prove she was brave —

  “Mom? Is that you?”

  She chases a woman with dark hair and her mom’s wide bottom. The woman flits out of existence before Maddy reaches her.

  Maddy spins around. “Mom? Dad?”

  The buzzing peaks to an interminable pitch as one after another, almost-familiar ghosts flicker into existence and melt away. Like bait drawing fish across the bottom of a lake, the apparitions pull her to the street at the edge of the concrete.

  The swirling, crawling mass of people-shells starts to blow away like the locust shells did in the storm.

  “Mom! Dad! Momdad? Momdad!”

  But no one answers her cries. She stands alone again. Even the old man is gone behind her. Across the street, a huge green building with peeling sides and a flat roof reminds Maddy of the shoebox they buried her frog in. A smaller structure sits in its shadow. It reminds her of a school, of pictures that she’s seen of a school, with its dark red bricks and large white-framed windows, and she runs to it for safety. A flagpole stands out front beside the open door. Strips of tattered cloth hang limply from the top, dirty white and red like old bandages.

  Maddy enters the broken door.

  Opaque windows surround a single, open room, one last seed spiraling in circles up near the ceiling. A delivery bay stands open opposite Maddy’s entrance. One familiar silhouette staggers into the middle of the space.

  “Dad?” Maddy whispers to it.

  The figure shuffles toward her, dragging a stiff leg. A light falls through the clerestory, illuminating Wayney’s haggard face. His S.W.A.T. jacket has new holes in it, including a fist-sized one just over his heart. His face shifts from side to side as if he can’t see her.

  “Hail, conductor,” he says. “Is this my station on the underworld railroad?”

  His voice echoes off the walls like a little frightened bird trapped inside a house. Maddy thinks maybe it is a bird, the dark shape bouncing among the rafters. She steps back, ready to run away, and pauses. There’s no one else to answer him, and the direction comes to her, like a whisper from Pastor Rod at the checkpoint. She points to the open bay.

  “I think it’s over there,” she says.

  “Thank you, Ma’am,” he answers, more politely than she’s ever heard him speak. “I appreciate your help.”

  He steps in that direction, stops, and spins abruptly as if he finally recognizes her. He presses his face into his hands. One sob wracks his body, which comes apart, twining up like smoke from a cigarette until he’s gone.

  Maddy’s heart pounds in her throat, and her legs shake, and then she hears a whistle — a train whistle! She runs to the bay door and sees rails. The tracks slant off in either direction.

  The dark shape of the bird swirls frantically around the room, growing ever larger. Maggie bends her knees to jump, and the bird dives at her. At the same instant, the whistle pierces the sky as an errant bomb slams into the ground nearby.

  Maddy leaps. The earth lifts up and shudders—her body feels light in the air, and then the bird slams into her back, driving her down.

  For a split second, worlds spin beneath her, like a wheel on a board game. Then, as debris rains all around her, she crashes into the ties between the rails.

  You lie on the ground, your mouth filled with the taste of ashes. It tastes like your dad’s ashtray. You are thirsty and hungry. All you can think about is one sticky, juicy apple. A heavy weight presses on you and you can’t move. Something shifts. A woman’s voice shouts. “We’ve got a live one here!” Then more gently, “Don’t move, darling.”

  “Live one!” the cry echoes farther out.

  You struggle, twisting like a worm in an apple.

  A horn blats. Through the ground you feel something shudder along the tracks. It can’t be a train; the trains have been silent all these months. The tracks are blocked.

  The load on you lightens — dust and gravel spill over your head. “Don’t move,” the woman says, “or you may hurt yourself. It’ll just be another moment —”

  But you kick and squirm out the pelvis of the wrecked house, with its corner posts thrust up like broken legs, to struggle into the woman’s arms. She’s wearing a fireman’s uniform, and someone somewhere is saying something about a gas leak.

  What world is this you wake to? Maple trees still overreach the rooftops, there is a ladder propped up against your neighbor’s freshly painted house, there are new stores around the parking lot by the soccer stadium, and cars zip this way and that. People tug at you, but you cling to the woman’s neck like you will never let go and she hugs you the same way.

  “It’s okay,” the woman reassures you. “There was an accident. It should never have happened. It’s okay. You’re a brave girl.”

  But you’re not brave. You don’t want to be brave. It’s not fair that you have to be brave. You’re scared and disoriented. A horn blats again, closer, and you hear your own voice crying.

  Hail, conductor, the cry says, is this my station on the underworld railroad?

  And the voice inside you answers, pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease, while the coal cars and flatcars go rumbling past.

  I took a Creative Writing class a number of years ago from Jack when he taught at Pacific Lutheran University. I saw him here and there at readings and the like after that. Then sometime later, out of the blue, he sent this story. Jack passed away a few years back, but I’ve always loved the man’s writing and the man’s grace and kindness. Wish ol’ Nicky here in this story could have turned back the clock a little bit for Jack. For issue #27, the last with the original bone font logo, Robert Pasternak gave us his unique, surreal cover art.

  THE PARABLE OF SATAN’S ADVERSARY

  JACK CADY

  It’s supposed to work this way:

  Imp-Apprentices cruise the street at the lowest and most uninteresting level. They collect soul-remnants of pimps, pickpockets, and such other city sweepings. After an Imp-Apprentice bags a thousand such, It is promoted to Imp Third Class.

  Third Class deals with slightly more advanced levels of scumsuckers, i.e. drug dealers and Hell’s Angels. By the time an Imp has progressed to First Class, It gets to handle the true toe-jam of humanity: Presidents of great nations, and television evangelists. When a First Class Imp bags a big one — say, for example, a plank owner in The Moral Morality, It is promoted to Demon.

  Demons, of course, are the main handlers in the Hot Place. The Demon Third Class, if pushy and ambitious, gets to start His career barbecuing small-fry used car salesmen, that sort of thing. He gradually moves up to stoking fires beneath CEOs of corporations and, of course, members of The Senate. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Sooner or later, though, every business runs into labor trouble.

  That is why The Devil (Old Nick, or Nickie to his friends, if He had any) sat head in hands with his bottom firmly pressed against a lump of glowing anthracite.

  Coal prices were up, don’t even think of oil. He hadn’t found a re-putable pitchfork supplier in two centuries. Immorality had turned seedy, and standards had deteriorated to the point where even rock stars were going to Heaven. Now the Imps (goaded into it, He suspected, by the Demons) were talking Labor Union and Strike.

  All around Him, Hell was just plain going to . . . but, that makes no sense. Think of it this way: Things were not working out. The Devil (Nickie to his friends, if He had any) knew it was time to take a break . . . maybe try to start a war somewhere, or put new life into the white slave trade . . . something . . . and then He bethought himself of Westwind Retirement Apartments.

  He told himself he had been saving those souls back for just such an occasion; prime sinners held in reserve for times when a fella needs a little cheer. Then he shuddered, actually shivered, like before a chill breeze. Still, a guy had to take a chance.

  The Devil (Nickie et
c.) took the form of a slight, but distinguished-looking man: a college administrator, perhaps, or a midlevel executive, or maybe a high-level social worker. He smoothed his black hair, adjusted his eyes from red to greenish yellow, brushed a little flaming dandruff off the sleeves of his business suit. He strode forth on polished shoes. His collecting bag for souls lay hidden in an attaché case.

  Westwind Retirement Apartments stands defiantly beside a manmade lake (only a little rancid), where ducks cohabit with joyful abandon. Pine trees surround the lake, while young poplars stand on each side of a road leading to the front of the building. Westwind looks for all the world like a rundown Junior High School untimely ripped from a seedy part of town.

  It has charms, though, because it attracts clients of a type who regard it as homey, and who The Devil considers bait. Nickie parked his limo, strode through the front doors, and changed into vapor. He drifted along hallways, sniffing around, and hopeful. He took up residence in the dayroom by hiding in a clock. From that clock He could watch those souls who he considered rightly his, and they were bitching, as usual . . . .

  Whoever designed the hallway of Westwind Retirement Apartments . . . “home of shuffleboard, old broads, and bald duffers,” according to Deke, who is a bald duffer, himself . . . whoever designed that hallway showed the sensitivity of rock, probably dolomite.

  “. . . because,” as Miss Victoria-Elizabeth Simpson often claims in a lady-like voice that contrasts with her words, “every step you take down that hallway is one more tick, one more nick, on your gravestone. Thank God I’ll not die a virgin.”

  And ‘tick’ that hallway does. A polished floor of yellow oak leads between walls painted lunatic-asylum green. At the end of the hall, swinging doors to the dayroom stand beneath an antique clock doubtless bought . . . “stolen, most likely,” according to Deke . . . from some now defunct telegraph office.

  In the dread halls of Westwind Retirement, that clock ticks, ticks, ticks so inexorably that even those without hearing aids feel their last days passing on its indifferent meter.