Sunglasses After Dark

by Nancy A. Collins

  Sally told Mama to go and visit each of the sleeping children and make sure their dreams never ended. The baby was the only one who woke up; it whimpered as Mama slit its tiny throat from ear from ear. Mama had butchering piglets down to an art.

  In her dream, Sally told Mama to unlock the shed. Funny how real it seemed, not at all like a proper dream. Kathy-Mae could feel the dew on the grass as she walked alongside her mother. Sally was walking on the other side, but Kathy-Mae couldn't really focus on her. Shadows seemed to crowd the corners of her eyes, obscuring her view. It was a dream, wasn't it?

  Mama looked funny in the moonlight. She wore her old flannel nightgown, but the Wood made it look different. She still clutched the dripping butcher knife in one hand. Her eyes were blank and glassy, but her cheeks were wet with tears and nervous tics twisted her features into a rictus grin. That scared Kathy-Mae, but not enough to make her stop dreaming.

  Sally climbed into the bed of Papa's pick'em-up truck and handed the can of gasoline to Kathy-Mae's mother. No words passed between them. In Kathy-Mae's dream, Mama knew what to do.

  The gasoline fumes made Mama's eyes water even more as she doused her nuptial bed. Then Mama got back into bed and lay down beside her butchered husband. She cuddled the dead baby to her breast as she struck the match.

  Kathy-Mae experienced only the slightest twinge of guilt as she watched her home go up in flames. After all, it was only a dream, wasn't it? Not even a nightmare, really. Besides, Sally was the one responsible, not her.

  When she woke that morning, she found herself shivering on the front lawn. The three-room shack that had served as the Skaggs' home was a jumble of charred timber and smoking brick. Kathy-Mae knew she should scream or cry, but there was nothing inside her. At least nothing that was sad.

  The nearest neighbors were the Wellmans, three miles up the road. She figured she could work up, some passable tears by the time she got there.

  Despite her claim that she'd never leave, Kathy-Mae could not find any evidence of Sally's presence. She did feel kind of different, as if there was something glowing in her belly, sometimes. Kathy-Mae didn't think it was Sally. During the months following the fire, Kathy-Mae gradually forgot Sally's oath and convinced herself that the reason she alone had escaped the horrible blaze that had claimed her family was that she'd chosen to sleep on the porch that night.

  Being an orphan wasn't too different from the life she'd known before her family was destroyed. The state put her in a succession of foster homes, where she was mistreated and malnourished, until she ran away for good at the age of fourteen. She doubted her "parents" would bother to inform the state, since that meant they'd stop receiving maintenance checks.

  She hooked up with a passing carnival and, since she could pass for sixteen and lie about being eighteen, ended up working one of the shill booths during the day and dancing the hoochie-coo at night. Sometimes she sat in for the Gypsy Witch, reading the fortunes of popcorn-munching, goggle-eyed fish. That's how she met Zebulon.

  He called himself Zebbo the Great and dressed like a third-rate Mandrake the Magician, right down to the patent-leather hair and pencil mustache. Kathy-Mae thought he was the most debonair man she'd ever seen outside the movies.

  Everyday she watched him from her place behind the Hit-the-Cats booth, too terrified to even talk to him. She was afraid she'd come across as a crude, unschooled hick, so she kept her adoration to herself. She didn't have to suffer unrequited love for long, since Zebbo the Great could read minds.

  Oh, he was nowhere as powerful as she would eventually become, or even as facile as that sleazy Brit. Zebulon had a gift, and that gift happened to be low-wattage psychic receptivity. If someone thought about something fairly simple—like a color or a face card—Zebbo the Great could pick up that thought with minimum effort. Telephone numbers, street addresses, and the like were beyond his limited retrieval methods.

  Kathy-Mae was astonished and incredibly flattered when Zebbo the Great started paying attention to her. Zebbo was as dashing and romantic a figure to be found on the midway, and he could be relied on to say things like "your love called to me with the voice of angels. We were meant for each other."

  She was fifteen, Zebulon thirty-two, when they got married.

  They hadn't been married two days before Zebulon started talking about her gift and all the things they could do together.

  Kathy-Mae wasn't too sure about whether her gift was real or not, since it was tied to Sally and her dream and she didn't like thinking about that at all. Zebulon was insistent. She knew the power was still inside her, that it hadn't gone away, but she was afraid of it. What if it got away from her and she ended up hurting Zebulon? She tried to explain her fears to her husband, but he couldn't understand her hesitancy. She'd never been able to bring herself to tell him about what happened the night her family died. Maybe if she'd broken down and told him, maybe things would have worked out differently. Knowing Zebulon, probably not.

  Zeb finally coerced his bride into serving as a "psychic transmitter" in his act. The marks filled out index cards, listing their addresses and the names and ages of their next of kin, then handed them to Catherine—Zebulon renamed her on their honeymoon—who "broadcast" the information to her blindfolded husband on stage. On the occasions when she attempted to dip into the minds of the audience for additional, unsolicited information, she unwittingly triggered epileptic fits or temporary paralysis among the rubes. Zebulon insisted she stick to the note cards.

  Their act was successful, but Zebulon wanted more than top billing at the state fair's sideshow. In 1960, two years into their marriage, he hit on the idea of becoming an evangelist.

  "Honey, this racket's perfect for us! All we need is a tent, some folding chairs, a podium, and a secondhand pickup truck. We'll have flocks of suckers lined up, practically begging us to take their money! What do you say, sweetie? You think it's okay?"

  Of course it was okay. Anything Zeb wanted was okay.

  The early days were the hardest. There was hardly enough money to feed them, much less pay for the gasoline to get them from town to town. When it was hot and the tent was full of sweaty, reeking crackers and Zebulon's voice boomed on about damnation and the sins of the flesh, Catherine thought she could see Papa sitting in the audience, his eyes full of whiskey and the Lord and his throat a ragged, blood-caked mess. Sometimes Mama was there, cradling a butchered infant to her blackened breast as she rocked in time to the gospel music. That's when she took to drinking.

  Zebulon disapproved at first, although he never went so far as to actually forbid it. Maybe he was afraid she'd cut off his "pipeline to the Lord."

  During their second year on the hallelujah trail, Catherine became pregnant. Zebulon was less than thrilled. A baby meant added distractions and hassles. Catherine was convinced that once it was born, Zebulon would change his mind. The miscarriage occurred in her second trimester, triggered by stress and drinking. Zebulon refused to take her to a hospital. It wouldn't look right for a miracle man to have to take his wife to an emergency room. Instead, he fed her handfuls of aspirin and wrapped her belly in warm towels.

  After their third year as the Wheeles of God, things began to change. Zebulon's reputation grew, thanks to his ability to "call out" the faithful. Believers flocked to their tent shows, eager to witness even the tattiest of miracles. Professional debunkers would occasionally sit in on the services and observe Catherine as she distributed "healing cards" among the congregation, telling them to write down their specific "prayer needs," as well as names and addresses. She enjoyed the look of confusion on the unbelievers' faces when she did not take the cards backstage or make hand signals to her husband while he was on stage.

  Zebulon's healing gift, however, was a product of his years as a stage magician. His greatest success was a variation of the old man-who-grows carny trick. In order to heal someone with a short leg, all he had to do was find an appropriate mark with loose shoes, place his hand beneath the mar
k's feet when they sat down, and twist his hand so that the shoe on the farthest foot was pulled slightly off and the shoe on the nearer foot was pressed tightly against the sole.

  Then, by reversing the twist, the farther shoe was pushed on against that sole, giving the appearance that the two shoes—and, more important, the feet inside them—were the same length. The marks hobbled away, convinced they were cured, and the love offerings doubled with each show.

  Catherine was amazed at how little was needed for the faithful to justify their belief in Zebulon's claim that he was a conduit to God. Most of the time there was no need for sleight of hand or carny scams. Zebulon simply bullied them into thinking they were healed. The people who attended their revivals weren't humans; they were sheep. Sheep to be herded in and fleeced as quickly and as efficiently as possible. By the time the Wheeles of God came back through town again, everyone would have forgotten how they'd kept their arthritis but lost their savings.

  The radio ministry came in '64, just in time for Zebulon to rant over the air about the Communist/Jewish conspiracy orchestrating Kennedy's assassination and allowing four long-haired, homosexual foreigners to pollute America's youth.

  Their first real church—with solid wood floors and walls made of something besides canvas—materialized in '66. This gave Zebulon a bit more respectability among the evangelical crowd and enabled him to ally himself with a loose coalition of fundamentalist churches somewhere to the right of hard-shell Baptists and Seventh-Day Adventists. Zebulon was forty and Catherine twenty-three when they bought their first Coupe de Ville.

  The years became an endless succession of radio appearances, revival tours—held inside air-conditioned public auditoriums instead of tents—and incoming checks and money orders made out to their home ministry. Zebulon already had hopes of expanding into television and broadening the church's power base.

  During those years Catherine's understanding of her powers grew. Zebulon didn't approve of her using her gift outside the routine, and she knew better than to displease him. Zebulon's wrath was frightening and his healer's hands could be cruel. So her drinking grew heavier in order to keep the power inside her damped. It didn't work too well.

  If she looked at the sheep too long, she could see what was wrong with them: lungs the color of soot and sticky as fresh asphalt, tumors buried deep inside the folds of the brain like malignant pearls, cancer creeping like kudzu, bones twisted by arthritis into abstract sculpture… Well, at least her parents no longer made appearances during services.

  Her feeling for Zebulon had always involved awe and fear; he was an emotional man, prone to acts of extreme temper, although he learned to control it in front of the cameras. As the years passed, the love she'd once felt for him was replaced by respect for his canniness. Although Zeb never got beyond eighth grade, he had an innate understanding of the best way to bilk a sucker.

  Since his acceptance as a messiah figure, he'd revised his past so it would better fit God's gift to a suffering world. He'd received his calling as a barefoot, dirty-faced boy in rural Arkansas. No mention was made of his years on the carny circuit as Zebbo the Great. He'd somehow grown a war record, acquiring two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, even though he was only fifteen when World War Two was declared. He also managed to squeeze some missionary work in an obscure China province into his resume". Catherine's past also underwent radical fictionalization: she'd somehow become the eldest daughter of one of the oldest and most respected Tidewater families.

  Their life-style was far from ascetic; by the mid-'70s there were no fewer than six cars in the Wheeles' personal possession, the most humble being the Coupe de Ville. Catherine owned five fur coats, and Zeb's wardrobe boasted dozens of expensive silk suits, although he always made sure he was photographed in the powder-blue three-piece polyester outfit that had become his trademark.

  Their last sexual act, as man and wife, occurred sometime in 1971. Although she knew he was sating his carnal desires with a succession of sweet young things culled from the secretarial pool, Catherine wasn't concerned about losing her husband. By her parents' standards, their marriage was perfect.

  In 1973 Zebulon introduced Ezra into the entourage. Ezra was everything Zebulon wasn't: formally educated, from a good family, and adept at handling the business needs of a rapidly growing television ministry. He became her lover a year later.

  It was Ezra who talked her into trying to control and fully exploit her powers. She openly confided in him, revealing the secret of Zebulon's "gift of knowledge" in blatant disregard of her husband's orders.

  Acting under Ezra's advice, Catherine tried dipping into the minds of the audience for the first time since the carnival days. She discovered that if she pushed too hard, she ran the risk of triggering convulsions. Skimming the upper layers of conscious thought proved fairly easy, as long as the sheep had their attention focused on Zebulon. The names of doctors, medicines, and hospitals were quickly snagged and broadcast to Zebulon for use in the act.

  When Zebulon realized what she was doing, he was very upset.

  "I told you to stick to the script! No freelancing. You want to blow it for us now? After we've come so far and have so much to lose?" He raised his hand, and, out of habit, Catherine cringed, but her voice remained defiant.

  "What are you making such a fuss about? Nothing went wrong, did it? Hell, the arena's full of old geezers with heart problems, so what's so unusual about one or two of them having fits? Most of them think they're experiencing some kind of religious ecstasy, for Pete's sake! You're the one that comes off looking like God's gift to backwoods hicks, so what are you bitchin' about?"

  The hand wavered but did not fall. For the first time in their relationship, something akin to uncertainty flickered in Zebulon's eyes. Uncertainty… and fear.

  That's when she felt the balance of power first shift in her direction. It wasn't long before things began to change between the two of them… and inside them as well.

  The truce between the Wheeles was uneasy. Zeb didn't like being reminded that without his wife he'd still be doing a bottom-of-the-barrel mentalist act in some godforsaken carny. And he especially didn't like the idea of Catherine using her gift whenever and however she liked.

  Catherine reveled in his fear. It made her feel good. So good, in fact, she almost didn't mind it when her parents reappeared, although she was dismayed by the fact they'd brought the rest of the family with them.

  Zebulon's miraculous new ability to divine the nature of a supplicant's illness simply by looking at them drew more and more followers. Their television ratings soared. The other televangelists considered the Wheeles beneath their dignity and dismissed them as "tasteless." Zebulon said they were jealous of his ratings share.

  Catherine's drinking problem reached chronic proportions. Ezra begged her to stop, but she couldn't. He didn't understand. The alcohol kept the things at the edge of her vision safely blurred. After a couple of years, the sexual side of her relationship with Ezra puttered out, although he remained devoted to her. Bored, she began seducing the hired hands and, by accident, discovered the process she later developed into Heart's Desire.

  His name was Joe. She couldn't remember his last name, not that it mattered. He was Joe, and that was enough. He was one of Ezra's underlings, handpicked by her former lover as a suitable proxy. Everyone in the organization knew that Ezra served as her panderer and that spending a few hours in "private meditation" with Mrs. Wheele often proved financially rewarding.

  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary that night. They engaged in ritual small talk while enjoying a drink together. Joe knew what was expected of him; he was to play the adoring servant, confessing his long-denied passion to the lady of the house. The seduction occurred with clockwork precision.

  He was in the saddle, grunting and sweating his way through a workmanlike act of coitus, when something inside her head reached out on its own volition and snared Joe's mind. His eyes glazed and his face went slack, yet his pelvis pick
ed up its rocking-horse pace and his grunts became rougher. A weird moan escaped him as orgasm took him. After a few seconds the glassiness left his eyes, to be replaced by an expression of extreme revulsion.

  Joe pulled himself from her, his face twisted into a horrified grimace, and stumbled into the bathroom, where he was noisily sick. More intrigued than offended by her partner's attitude, Catherine peeked into his mind.

  I could have sworn she was Carolyn… just for a minute, that's all. That Carolyn's eyes were looking at me while I… Another spasm of nausea overcame him and she lost the thread of his thought.

  Later that evening she ordered Ezra to bring her Joe's personnel file. In it she discovered that Joe's younger sister had been named Carolyn and that she'd died of leukemia at the age of thirteen. Understanding and exploiting this newly discovered power soon became her favorite hobby.

  She and Zebulon seldom spoke anymore, outside of their folksy scripted banter in front of the cameras. Catherine had become so adept at maintaining the facade of the constantly cheerful, sloppily sentimental, and unswervingly loyal country preacher's wife that crying and laughing on cue was instinctual behavior for her.

  Zebulon was a great believer in playing every angle, but the heavenly contact scam was a big mistake. If his congregation had ever gotten wind of what he was doing, it would have ruined the ministry for good. Zebulon's sense of self-preservation was very acute, but on this occasion his greed was stronger.

  Since he'd been raised ignorant of the Gospel, he had no idea how the faithful might react to the news that their beloved minister was holding seances, a form of witchcraft condemned in the bible!

  Although he might have been foolhardy, he certainly wasn't stupid. The heavenly contacts were never mentioned, much less discussed, in the computer-generated "personal letters" to his followers. Only select members of the Wheeles' Hub Brotherhoods—those who'd donated over five thousand dollars at one time—were extended the offer of relaying personal messages to their dearly departed through the powers of the Reverend Wheele. All Catherine had to do was lift enough personal data from the minds of those present to convince the sheep that Zebulon was in touch with the correct spirit.