Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  “I wasn’t paralyzed. I was sleeping.”

  “I know paralysis from sleep!” Stevie snapped at her daughter. To Dr. Elsa she said, “I took care of the problem myself. There was no need to call you.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I pulled her covers back for her and . . .”

  “And what, honey?”

  “And . . .” Stevie glanced at Marella in sudden overmastering bafflement. She could not have seen her daughter as she remembered seeing her. A person whose body has been reduced to a living head atop a field-stripped rib cage does not regenerate her internal organs and her entire epidermis in a single night. She certainly does not arise and go walking about the following day. “And I covered her up again,” Stevie lamely concluded. “She was perfectly all right. There’d never been any reason to worry.”

  “Wait a minute,” Dr. Elsa said. “You convinced yourself she could move just by foldin’ down her covers and then flippin’ them back up again?”

  “I didn’t have to convince myself,” Stevie said, tacking about, running against a wind that had blown up from some squally gulf of consciousness. “She was asleep when I went to check on her. She never had a chance to complain about not being able to move. I wasn’t even worried about that, Elsa.”

  “Mama, listen to you!”

  Dr. Elsa pulled her arm from Marella’s waist and tipped another teaspoon of sugar into her earthenware mug. “Stevie, kid, your scriptwriter’s got to be either Salvador Dali or Groucho Marx. None of this makes a lick of sense.”

  No, it didn’t, did it? For a minute there she had gone off on a side trail to which linear reality denied her access. She had traveled down that trail until hit between the eyes by the irrefutable fact of its inaccessibility. Coming back was not easy, either. People watched you scrambling toward them as if you were a defector from the Soviet Union, a potential untrustworthy spy.

  “My scriptwriter’s upstairs,” Stevie muttered.

  “Mama, you only dreamed you heard me saying those things. Your dream mixed you all up.”

  Stevie smiled at the girl. “That’s right, daughter mine. I had a vivid nightmare. I almost started to believe it.”

  “You did believe it,” Dr. Elsa accused.

  “Well, I’m back now, Elsa. I’m back by way of Franz Kafka Country, and you and Marella can get off my case.” She left the table to pour another cup of coffee from the percolator, another unhealthy dose of caffeine. Dr. Elsa and her daughter exchanged some whispered badinage, at the conclusion of which Marella grabbed her coat and went outdoors again. “What was that about?” Stevie demanded, coming back to the table.

  “I just gave her a clean bill of health.”

  “Why don’t you give me a bill, Elsa? I owe you—”

  “Kiddo, you couldn’t possibly pay me what you owe me, that’s what a nuisance you are.” She toasted Stevie with her mug, smiling her beautiful bone-weary last-hour-of-the-telethon smile. “And one bill it would be knuckle-headed folly to give you is a clean bill of health. You don’t deserve it. You deserve a kick in the can for not calling louder for help. ’S far as that goes, I deserve one for not giving you a complete checkup yesterday.”

  Stevie sipped her coffee, which tasted bitter even after two dollops of sugar. A kind of languidly revolving, galaxy-armed caffeine slick made a mirror in her mug. She could see her face in it, or her eyes anyway, and if her haggard reflection had even an iota’s correspondence to the face it reflected, why, she was sick indeed. She belonged in emergency care. She required immediate treatment. They should strap her under the Clinac 18 and fire away. She looked so bad—to use a quaint expression of her father’s—that she would have to get better to die. Of course the iridescent scum on a mug of coffee hardly qualified as the most flattering of looking-glasses, but Dr. Elsa’s look confirmed the coffee’s bleak assessment. Dr. Elsa thought she had deteriorated since yesterday. Dr. Elsa thought her the Madwoman of Wickrath County.

  Neither woman spoke. They sipped their coffee and nibbled on the vanilla wafers that Stevie had set out. Their silence persisted, without discomfort, for five or six minutes.

  Stevie and Dr. Elsa had a relationship predicated on mutual esteem and support. Dr. Sam was himself in ill health, although he tried hard to carry his half of the burden of the Kensingtons’ two-town practice, and sometimes his failing stamina as doctor and husband placed heavy physical and emotional demands on Stevie’s friend. According to Dr. Elsa herself, she and Dr. Sam had not been lovers for three or four years (they had never been superstars or even journeyman performers in the bedroom), and of late the unassuming, conscientious Dr. Sam had begun to show more interest in Cherokee and Creek artifacts than in his wife. He preferred shambling around an archeological dig in Muscogee County to taking her to dinner in Columbus or to a college theater production in Ladysmith. He kept a box of arrowheads and stone tool points under their bed in the same spot where, as a younger man, he had kept his Sheik prophylactics.

  Stevie had listened to these melancholy confessions in the same spirit that Dr. Elsa later lent a sympathetic ear to her own tales of woe during the difficult months immediately before and after Ted’s death. Now they could sit together without talking, secure in their friendship, their moods subtly buoyed by each other’s presence. Five, ten, or even twenty minutes could pass before either of them felt compelled or even distantly moved to speak. Stevie had seen men sit in this fashion for hours—Ted with Dr. Sam, her father with a hunting buddy—but in all her friendships with other women, no matter how young or old the friend, urgent conversation or frivolous chatter had always precluded the possibility, even the thought, of these long moments of calming silence. She had had to lose her husband to discover that they could in fact occur.

  Finally, casually, Dr. Elsa said, “Did you get your shelving paper in?”

  Stevie started. “What?”

  “Your shelving paper. Stuff I gave you yesterday. Did you install it?”

  “No, I—”

  “Where is it? I’ll help you. Won’t take us half an hour to put down if you let me help.”

  “It’s . . . it’s upstairs.”

  “Upstairs? You’re not puttin’ shelving paper in your bookcases, are you?”

  Stevie told Dr. Elsa that she had cut up the examination-table paper to use for rough drafts. She did not tell her that she had halved these sheets so that her Exceleriter, once the pieces were taped together, could continue to generate copy long beyond the eleven-inch limit of a leaf of ordinary typing paper. Her inability to admit this fact made her apprehensive; it seemed to undermine the foundation of trust on which she and Dr. Elsa had built their closeness.

  “You that hard up, kiddo? You have to beg rough-draft paper and cut it up in strips so you can get it in your typewriter?”

  “I’m not that hard up. I just . . . I just like the way it feels.”

  “You and the cockroaches.”

  “I like the way it works in the typewriter.” The two women stared at each other, yesterday’s conversation in Wickrath flashing between them, reenacting itself in their eyes. Stevie knew what Dr. Elsa was thinking, and Dr. Elsa had penetrated the secret of the examination-table paper, although she obviously believed that Stevie was toting a grotesque illusion pickaback, staggering beneath its weight. “Speaking of my typewriter, Seaton Benecke was here today.”

  “Marella told me. She and Teddy were both pretty snowed by his monkey. I didn’t even know he had such a creature. His mother wasn’t the sort to go in for pets, if I remember her right.”

  “Tell me about Seaton, Elsa.”

  Dr. Elsa vowed that she knew very little about the Beneckes. Twenty years ago Dr. Sam had met the clan’s patriarch, Hamlin, during a Columbus-wide search for a secondhand typewriter for the Barclay clinic. That long ago Seaton, the youngest of the Benecke boys, was five or six and not yet in school, so his daddy often took him to the office-supply company, a pudgy little boy with hair the color of white gold and eyes lik
e cracked blue aggies. When Dr. Sam first saw him, he was sitting in the back with the used and broken typewriters, peering into the works of a newer model and poking at the typebars in their semicircular orchestra pit. Sam’s first glance into the work area made him think that Hamlin Benecke had hired wizened midgets or gnomes to handle delicate repairs, but he soon recognized his error and gazed in wonder at the five-year-old, a white-haired Rumpelstiltskin who engraved a lasting picture on his memory.

  The typewriter Sam bought that day was the very one, a Smith-Corona, with which Seaton had been fiddling when the physician entered the store. In twenty years that machine had given seven different secretaries at the Barclay clinic its heart and soul. Although it no longer worked terribly well, it was still an acceptable backup, and over the years Dr. Sam had often attributed its long-term reliability to the keen ministrations of five-year-old Seaton on that fateful first day. That Seaton was now a full-time typewriter repairman hardly surprised Dr. Elsa. A real wizard, he had been born with a typewriter ribbon in his mouth.

  “Elsa, he’s strange.”

  “Oh, I know he’s not your usual knock-back-a-few-beers repairman type, but I’m not Dr. Kildare, either.”

  “I don’t mean he’s eccentric, Elsa, I mean he’s strange.”

  “Yeah, I know. Never lookin’ at you when he talks. The monkey. The motorcycle. Never bein’ satisfied at the job he’s so good at. He’s one unhappy kid, Seaton Benecke.” The two women stared at each other. “Something to do with his homelife when he was smaller, I think. Hamlin and Lynnette didn’t always live together. He’d be one place, she’d be another. Not divorced or legally separated or anything like that, just a going-of-their-own-ways until they took a notion to meet again and act like husband and wife for a few months before they started all over in the apartness part of their relationship. That confused Seaton some. It may have made him strange. But he’s not so strange, Stevie, he could make your typewriter work by itself. He’s homegrown strange, not Martian strange.”

  Stevie slammed her mug down. Shards of murky liquid sloshed out on the table. “By which you mean I’m Martian strange, don’t you?”

  “Bad choice of words, honey. Misplaced modifier. Dangling antecedent. Something like that. English was never my strong suit.”

  “Let me tell you how strange Seaton Benecke is, Elsa.” And with angry animation Stevie recounted the young man’s extraordinary postprandial behavior with ’Crets: how he had lied about cutting his finger yesterday, how he had let the capuchin suck blood from the tip of that finger, how he had admitted that bloodsucking was “just something ’Crets liked to do” (as if this shared activity were no less commonplace than playing checkers in the park), and how the monkey’s empty stare seemed a kind of proxy for the direct gaze Seaton himself could not usually manage. That was how strange Seaton was. If that was not Martian strange, Stevie did not know what might qualify.

  Despite the heat of this outburst, however, she coolly declined to accuse the young man of sabotaging her Exceleriter, even though he most certainly had.

  Laconically Dr. Elsa said, “ ’S that gospel, Stevie?”

  “I’m Martian strange—I’m an unreliable witness—but ask Teddy and Marella. They’ll corroborate my story.”

  After a while, having cleaned up Stevie’s spilt coffee with a paper towel, Dr. Elsa mused, “Once upon a time a body behaved that way would get herself—himself seems really strange—a far-reachin’ reputation as a witch. Outer space wouldn’t enter the matter at all.”

  “What’re you talking about, Elsa?”

  “Just an anecdote I remember a professor at Augusta Medical College tellin’. It was in an anatomy course, and sometimes this old bird got backtracked, thrown off-trail, by these little historical acorns his mind squirreled away. I’m mixin’ my metaphors, aren’t I? Anyway, I remember this digression very well because he was talkin’ about mammaries.”

  Stevie lifted her head and her eyebrows at the same time.

  “He mentioned that some people, men as well as women, have what you call in five-syllable medical talk ‘adventitious nipples.’ These usually occur on a person’s milk line, a big old U goin’ from one breast down the flank to the groin and up the other side to the other breast. Most of the time they’re small, these adventitious nipples, enflamed-lookin’ puckerings of flesh, and they’re not all that uncommon. Old-timey country folks call ’em witches’ teats. You know why?”

  “I’m dying to hear.” (Well, she was.)

  “Witches used them to feed their familiars. That was the medieval belief, anyway, and it got over to Puritan America and pretty soon down the Atlantic coast to Appalachia and the Georgia colony.”

  Dr. Elsa explained that familiars were minor demons that could assume the shapes of small animals—cats, toads, bats—to attend their witch mistresses on their missionary dunnings for the devil. The familiars got their nourishment directly from the witch who owned them, drinking her blood through a mole, wart, scab, or providentially concealed witch’s teat (supposing, of course, a satanic rather than a divine providence for the concealment of same). Dedicated witchhunters made it a point to disrobe suspected minions of the Unholy One and search their bodies for telltale teats. Womenfolk who had them often got burned in a faggoty bonfire or teetered into a half-frozen New England pool. This was almost as hard on the damned familiars as on the ladies undergoing these fatal purifications. It didn’t pay to have an adventitious nipple in the Bad Old Days.

  “Seaton’s not female,” Stevie said.

  “Male witches are warlocks, kiddo. Maybe this young repairman is a warlock. That monkey’s his familiar.”

  “Stop it, Elsa.”

  “It don’t mean much he didn’t nurse the critter on an adventitious nipple, either. A finger’s a good substitute. Any teatlike protuberance’ll do.”

  “Elsa, that damned monkey ate an entire fried egg with a cocktail fork. Bloodsucking demons don’t eat fried eggs, do they?”

  “Over-easy or sunny-side up?”

  “Broken-yolked, Elsa. You’re making fun of me. You’re making fun of me the same way that blasted typewriter does.”

  Dr. Elsa leaned over and caught Stevie’s wrists. “Honey, the boy’s weird. His brothers have done better than he has. One of ’em’s the supply company’s business manager, with a degree in accountin’ from Clemson. The other’s an airline pilot with Eastern. Seaton has an organ-grinder monkey he lets nibble on a finger lesion. It’s not safe nor sanitary nor pleasant to behold, but one thing else it also ain’t, honey, is supernatural.”

  “You brought up familiars and adventitious nipples, Elsa. I didn’t.”

  “Just to show you how all-fired silly the whole thing is. You need a break from your work. Tomorrow after church I’ll take Teddy and Marella out to our place for Sunday dinner and some cards or something. If Sam’s not hip-deep in Long Before Columbus or some other In Search of Lost Lacrosse Sticks volume, maybe he’ll take ’em fishin’. You just relax. Go to Columbus and shop—the stores are open—or drive up in the state park. Do you good and help you too.”

  “No, Elsa, I —”

  “Honey, it’s settled.” She released Stevie’s wrist. “I’ll be by tomorrow at twelve-thirty. You got that?”

  Stevie nodded.

  XXIII

  Tell me about Ted. Finish my nightmare for me. If you’re my husband, talk to me as Ted talked.

  That was what she had written before going downstairs to see Dr. Elsa. During her absence the Exceleriter had composed a reply, four lines of doggerel. This quatrain exhausted the space remaining at the bottom of the paper:

  TED CANNOT TALK.

  TED CANNOT WALK.

  DONT BE MISLED:

  YOUR TED IS DEAD.

  “That I already know!” Stevie retorted. She yanked the page out of the machine, tore it into pieces, and dropped the pieces into her wastebasket.

  Then she went back downstairs to prepare dinner. Hamburger soup and Syrian bread. Marel
la had asked for Syrian bread.

  XXIV

  Stevie coaxed her daughter into bed by ten-thirty. Teddy took longer. He was of the impression that, as a teen-ager, he had the inalienable right to stay up on weekends until midnight or later. Stevie did not agree with him. Although she cited his basketball coach’s dictum about eating right and getting plenty of rest, and although she threatened to ground him for a couple of weeks if he didn’t stop smarting off and screwing around, it was nearly twelve by the time he trudged upstairs to bed. Some of his delaying tactics—overeager offers of help in the kitchen—had been amusing, but his experimental backtalk when she refused to let him watch either “Saturday Night Live” or the ancient Lon Chaney, Jr., film on another channel had not tickled her at all. That was when she had raised the ante with her grounding threat and so bluffed him up the stairs.

  Usually Teddy was a good kid, but what if he had chosen to test her mettle by digging in his heels? Moral force was an effective bludgeon only if you waved it in front of people whose concept of morality coincided with your own. Teen-agers, meanwhile, sometimes seemed to be doing their contortionist dances amid the shards of the tablets that Moses brought down from Sinai.

  Well, maybe it isn’t that bad, Stevie thought, running herself a tub of hot water in the downstairs bathroom. Teddy’s not into drugs or alcohol, and his interest in girls has pretty much been confined to flirtatious banter and long-distance ogling. I think. Anyway, he’s not ordinarily one for backtalk or armed resistance. He’s just trying to spread his wings. That’s hard to do in a twelve-by-twenty kitchen with a breakfast bar, a space heater, and an intractable mom. What he needs is . . . what he needs is a father.

  —Ted, Ted, you ran out on me when I needed you to take care of these needs. Here I am wringing my hands over the deadly and tortuous naiveté of the teen-age male mind. You knew I would be. You knew I’d be cursing you for running out on us.