Around quarter to eight, Dottie spotted the black dog only a second before her brother did. Their mother had it from the real estate lady that the animal’s name was Nox. “He’ll be coming soon,” Olen whispered as if the person they expected in the street could hear her. Through the glass, above the wind and the rustling of the leaves in the giant sycamore that shaded the Idawolf Arms, they could hear the high-pitched whistle that flew up from the shadowy street and caused the dog to freeze in midstep. Its master emerged out of the dark and into the glow of the streetlight in a black overcoat and black wide-brimmed hat. The ends of a long scarf were lifted behind him in the wind. Olen thought of him as a part of the night that stepped out of itself in the form of a man. Dottie thought of him only as Mr. Susi. They knew he was their upstairs neighbor. That simple name, though, had over the course of the last four Saturday nights come to inspire fear and wonder.
“Get the flashlight. I’ll turn the lights out,” he said. They scurried through the apartment and met at their mother’s bedroom door in the dark, a thin pen light illuminating Dottie’s face. Olen moved around the bed to the big window that looked out at the abandoned wooden building next door. Dottie followed. The sill for that window was a seat, with a ledge that came out four feet and a cushion on top. Olen noticed that Dottie had her blanket wrapped around her. He thought it a great idea and wished he’d gotten his, but the show was soon to start and he didn’t want to miss a moment of it. She sat always on the right and he on the left, each with their back pressed against the wide frame.
“Okay,” he said when they were both in place. She turned off the flashlight and there came the sound of M&M’s bags being torn open. All else was silent, and from where they sat, they could hear Mr. Susi use his key on the door in the lobby. They heard him on the steps, up all three flights, and heard the door to his place open and close. A moment later, they breathed deeply and a large circle of light appeared on the side of the old building not but ten yards away. A crisp bright circumference six feet wide and high. Following the light came music filtering down through the heating duct system, “Mr. Susi’s symphony music” their mother called it when she heard it whispering in the kitchen.
Olen and Dottie understood how it worked. After the first night they’d witnessed it, they were on the street the next day and happened to be in a position to see the upper story of the Idawolf Arms. On the top floor, in one of its rooms, there was a circular window, floor to ceiling. Olen explained to Dottie the effect. It all had to do with the way the room was lit. The bulb, no doubt set near the ceiling, projected whatever stood or moved in front of it as a silhouette, which appeared one story down on the worn gray wood of the building across the alley. The silhouettes came through so clearly in the circle, the detail amazingly precise. After the first few glimpses of Mr. Susi’s shadow passing by, the music somehow always took over and coordinated its slow, smooth rhythms to whatever was happening in the bright circle. It was only then that he appeared in full silhouette, standing at the center of the light in a shirt with long, puffy sleeves and a high collar. His hair was a tall wave about to break. They heard, very faintly from behind the music, the whistle that called the dog to him.
A thin, pointed stick appeared in his hand and he held it up like a maestro’s baton and turned slowly in circles. Dottie realized for the first time, from his profile, that Mr. Susi had a beard. Nox followed him around, carefully watching the stick as if his master was about to throw it. Somewhere the music jumped to a faster pace just as the dog jumped to his hind legs. He bounced around and Susi held the baton up high just out of the reach of the creature’s jaws. When he brought the baton down to his side, the music rolled slower, and as it devolved into a lullaby, it was as if the dog had gotten used to walking on its hind legs. He strode slowly back and forth in front of his master, stepping like a dainty clothes model. Both Olen and Dottie stopped chewing M&M’s as the face of Nox seemed to stretch and deform and then snap back into the silhouette of someone with long hair piled atop their head. In fact, the dog had transformed into the figure of a woman in a long dress. She opened her mouth wide and leaning toward Mr. Susi’s left ear vomited a torrent of tiny butterflies that came like a raging creek and after swamping him from view swarmed upward and around the room like a murmuration of sparrows.
The music swept along in an elegant discordant waltz. Olen and Dottie had seen all this before, saw the tendrils grow from the woman’s skin, saw the flowers blossom and their vines reach out for Mr. Susi, who, producing a scissor from his pocket, cut each feeler as it drew near. With every cut, agony registered in the woman’s body with a jerk, a heaving of the chest and the head thrown back to utter a whimper of toads that appeared on her lips and then leaped to the floor. Mr. Susi raised the scissor like a knife and stuck it in the side of the woman’s head. Smoke puffed out and as it did she shrank back into a dog with human legs and arms. The kids had no words to describe what the meaning of it was, though they’d seen the same before on other Saturday nights. An icy ball of confusion spun behind their eyes. All through the weeks the strange imagery of these movies twisted through their day and surfaced in their dreams. What came next, though, was something new.
Nox lunged, his teeth bared and snapping. Susi’s arms went up in the air and the dog-man took hold of his master’s throat. There was a lightning jerk of the snout and dripping blackness as if a bottle of ink had spilled everywhere. In profile you could tell that not only did Mr. Susi have a beard but that also his throat had been ripped out. It was Olen who screamed. At the sound of it, Nox’s head snapped to attention, and he dropped the lifeless body of his master to the floor. He undoubtedly drew toward the circular window, his shadow form gigantic in the bright circumference. “It’s looking down here,” whispered Dottie. “It heard you.” With those words, the light upstairs went out, the music went off, and the alley fell back into darkness.
Neither Olen nor Dottie had anything to say. Their hearts were beating so loud they wondered if Nox could hear. They moved to the bed and huddled there, numb with fear, listening for the sound of the floorboards upstairs. Instead of footsteps, they heard the tap tap tap of dog claws. A stillness settled in and lasted so long their immediate fears melted slightly before there came a soft knocking at the apartment door. They held each other’s hands and squeezed tight. Eventually, Olen moved, dragging Dottie along. He inched cautiously to the edge of the bed. They stepped down onto the floor as softly as possible. Neither wore shoes, only socks. They left their mother’s room and made for the safety of the bathroom. In their journey through the dark, they had to pass the apartment door. They heard the thing breathing heavily. In a quiet but resonating voice it called, “Children, open up.”
Dottie ran ahead to the bathroom and held the door, ready to slam it shut if she had to. Olen stopped in his tracks and turned to the dog-man’s voice. “What are you?” he asked.
There was a low growling sound and the answer came back: “Different…and hungry.”
A spark of fear shot through Olen and he sprinted to the bathroom. Dottie closed the door fast and locked it. Luckily the lights were working. They got in the tub and listened. Hours passed before they heard the tap tap tap of the dog claws on the way back up to the fourth floor. Mr. Susi’s door opened and closed and there descended a perfect stillness. It was only then that they dozed off to sleep.
They woke to the sound of their mother’s voice at the door. Olen got up and unlocked it. Dottie was close behind him. They hugged her as hard as they could. Willa begged them to tell her everything. She led the way into the kitchen and they took turns as she made coffee. They told about the movies, they told about Nox and Mr. Susi. They didn’t tell about that one night when Susi in silhouette appeared to be having sex with an octopus. Nobody mentioned that, or the one scene where a cat was devoured by master and dog. Otherwise they told her everything. She sat at the table with her cup and lit a cigarette. Olen and Dottie sat
across from her.
“Are you sure this is real?” said Willa. “It sounds like a monster movie.” She took a long drag, coughed, and a tiny yellow butterfly fell out of her mouth into her coffee.
LORDS OF THE MATINEE
Stephen Graham Jones
IT’S NOT THAT my seventy-two-year-old father-in-law is actually going deaf, it’s that he’s a, in my former mother-in-law’s words, “lazy-ass listener.” I say “former” for her because she passed three years ago, kind of right on schedule as far as I’m concerned, but my wife Sheila’s still kind of torn up…not so much about her mom being gone, her insides chewed up, bubbling up red down her chin, as that the two of them never made up proper before she went. Which, again: nothing all that surprising, this is the way things go about 99 percent of the time between moms and daughters, as far as I can tell.
Either way, the result of all this is that, with his wife gone, Sheila’s dad’s been kind of letting their apartment go to hell. Crusty dishes tottering on every flat surface, newspapers and engineering journals stacking up into fire hazard after fire hazard, the whole place an ashtray, pretty much. So, to pick up her dead mom’s slack—though it’s also her two brothers’ slack if you ask me—Sheila commits to cleaning her dad’s place up one Sunday. I offer to help, of course, it’s what you do when you’re married, when you’re shouldering burdens together, when it’s a team effort, and then it turns out that the best way I can help out is by ushering her father out of the apartment for the afternoon.
“So what do I do with him?” I say to Sheila. We’re standing before the open hatchback of her car, her mentally going through the two tubs of cleaning supplies arrayed before us. I haul one up, swing it onto my hip, and she takes the other, shuts the hatchback and beeps the lock in one efficient motion.
“He just can’t be there,” she says, already getting her grim attitude on for the coming mess.
I look out into the haze of the city, trying to imagine her father and me muttering to each other over a Chinese food buffet for four or five hours, or the two of us doddering through a museum or art gallery, neither of which we’d know what to really do with.
“Does he like movies?” I ask, some fake cheer to my delivery.
I should say here, he and my mother-in-law were at the wedding, of course, but that was sixteen years ago. I shook their hands and called them Mom and Dad and took all the necessary pictures that day, but, since then, I’ve successfully avoided any meaningful interactions with them. Just the usual holiday stuff, here’s a pot roast, thanks for the shoeshine kit I love it, no we don’t have any secret kids yet ha ha, yeah I like my new job too, your daughter’s the best, sure I can install that new washing machine, thanks, thanks.
Which is to say: Who was this musty geezer I was now to spend an afternoon with?
All the same, my time for this had probably come. You can only dodge bullets for so long. And, I told myself, it’s not like he’s completely checked in anymore, right? I might even just be a nurse to him, a helper, some shadowy presence holding him by the elbow, steering him away from traffic, saying completely unintelligible bullshit to him.
“He used to like action movies, yeah,” Sheila answers, a tinge of unexpected hopefulness to her voice, to match my fake cheer. It’s not for the afternoon I’m about to lead her father through, I don’t think, but for the father he used to be, who probably played his action movies too loud too late, his way of having the last word for the day.
It’s settled, then.
I haul my assigned tub of cleaning supplies up, Sheila keys us in, announcing our presence until her father creaks forward in his chair, his whole face squinting about us, and, after taking inventory, Sheila says back to me, “A long movie?”
“A loud one,” I tell her, since maybe her father is going deaf—I’m pretty sure he didn’t turn his head to the sound we are, but to the flurry of motion we were in his peripheral vision.
“Nothing scary,” she tells me, doing her important eyes.
“Luck,” I say, one hand to her shoulder, and kiss her on the side of her face, her eyes hard for the coming work.
Next I’m guiding her father down the dark hall of his building, to the elevator, and right before we get there he chicken-wings his arm out, the one I’m holding, effectively telling me he doesn’t need me to keep him from falling.
Still, when he’s stepping over that thin deep chasm between the carpet of the hall and the hard floor of the elevator car, I hover close, ready to be there should he need me.
“Where’s she having us go, then?” he says, aiming the unsteady rubber foot of his cane at the pad of buttons, which can’t be anything like hygienic for anyone else who might have to touch those buttons. Instead of helping, though—instead of interfering—I hang back, wait for him to find the L by himself, which is, I guess, both the third and fourth letters of hell.
Not that I’m thinking like that.
Yet.
“We’re going to the movies,” I tell him loud enough that he can hopefully catch at least part of it, and like that we’re descending down into the afternoon, which is where him being a lazy-ass listener comes into play.
* * *
By the second trailer—we’re sitting in the handicapped seats—he’s leaning forward to the screen, like that’s where all the sound is coming from. He turns his head to the side to better funnel these voices in, and the way his cane is spiked down in front of him, both hands on the handle to pull forward with, it’s like he’s hauling back on a big lever.
The theater is a four-screen job, kind of on the backside of thirty. It’s seen better days; the same sixteen-year-old who sold us the ticket also filled my popcorn bucket, and the carpet is all threadbare in the middle of the halls from thousands of shoes scraping, and the urinals are the kind that are those big yawning porcelain mouths that stretch all the way to the floor, so you’re practically standing in them.
We’re forty minutes early for the movie, but it’s the first showing too, so we sit there and wait, me crunching popcorn and watching the slideshow commercials and quizzes cycling on-screen, him nodding off since I’m guessing he can only see the static ads and questions up there, not hear them so well.
I don’t mean to make fun. Someday that’s me, I know. I already find myself sleeping through parts of television shows I would have been awake for ten years ago. It’s the natural progression, and so what. Bring it. I’m ready.
Not that I’ll ever have a son-in-law to dodder me down to the movies, but oh well. If I’m any indication, we’re overrated.
Anyway, if there was an usher making the rounds through the theater to keep everything kosher, I’d flag him or her down for assistance about this hearing problem, but as it is, I have to pat my father-in-law on the shoulder like telling him to stay put, then go to the concession stand to solve it myself, see if they have something to get him to hear the movie as well as see it.
When I come back, it’s to an empty house, an old-man-less house, and my heart thumps once in my chest, kind of lurches to a soft stop, my head already reeling excuses out to Sheila, a future version of myself already scouring the men’s restrooms and the other theaters for her father, then widening the search out to all the concrete and sidewalks of the city, and finally, inevitably, the hospitals and morgues.
But then I’m just standing in the wrong theater, because this action movie’s playing on half the screens here. I exhale from deep in my chest and rush fast to the right theater, where the next trailer is already booming.
My father-in-law’s sitting there squinting up at the screen in a way that tells me this is a bad idea, that taking him to a movie at this stage of his life, and a modern action movie at that, the third installment of a series geared for thirteen-year-old boys, is an exercise in stupidity. There’s nothing for him here, and there won’t be.
Still, it’s where we are.
I settle into my seat and offer him the assisted listening device they had behind the counter. He takes it, holds it up against the light of the screen to properly inspect it, then recognizes it as a version of the wireless television headphones Sheila got for him a couple of years ago, so he could blare his news at whatever volume he wanted, without including his neighbors.
He grunts thanks, ducks into the rig and looks up at the screen, waiting for the magic to happen. When it doesn’t, I reach over under his chin, click the green light on, and it must start receiving then, since his eyes change like he’s hearing something.
What his wife meant by “lazy listener” was, I have to think, pretty much the same thing Sheila says about me: that I check out a few words in, start thinking my own thoughts, only staying involved enough in whatever she’s saying to nod at the appropriate moments, pretend to play along. She’s right, I guess. Maybe it’s a man-woman thing, maybe it’s a husband-wife thing, or maybe she just, as happens, married a minor version of the asshole she grew up with.
Either way, with the movie piping directly into his ears now, my father-in-law is pacified. I can tell because the cane he’s still holding under both hands angles back and back, the curved handle at his chest now, which is kind of like a visual definition for “contentment,” which, to me, translates across as “success,” or, in the mental checklist I’ve got going, “two hours.”
After this it’ll be me swinging us by the corner store for any groceries he might need, which I trust will take another forty minutes and involve a carton of the cigarettes he’s not supposed to have. Taking travel time into account between here and there and his place, if we’re moving slow and careful like I plan to, that’s a whole afternoon, ta-daaa. We’ll come back to a rejuvenated apartment, a tired but satisfied woman, and then I’ll be free.
Final Cuts Page 22
