The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  However, there are those in the pack who are not worrying about turkeys. They are shocked by what the camera reveals now. There was trouble last night. The adults gather by the bodies of the two fallen hunters, where the young pups are shocked by what they have done. They all agree that someone is going to have to dig graves for the two men. And yet a woman moaning nearby alerts them to another tale, just as dark. Liz Carter, the very young, newly accredited English teacher from Fairfield Academy, took the arrow that one of the hunters managed to fire off before his demise. She’s pinned against a maple, impaled at the shoulder, still bleeding.

  It’s Bob who calls out, “Oh my god, Liz!”

  Vanessa says to the intern, over at her place to watch, while they eat Cajun pizza, “It’s great that they’re willing to let the women fight just as violently as the men. There should be, I don’t know, bruises on their cheeks, and they should have to shake off the hurt and get back into the fray and stuff. I mean, look at her. She’s a mess.” That is, look at Liz Carter, pale, fatigued from loss of blood, but very much alive. She’s going to have to go to her English class and explain why she has a very deep puncture wound in her left shoulder. And that’s after she goes to the hospital and has a large composite arrow, only inches from her heart, removed by the region’s best surgeons. When Clay and Bob and Mike Woodwell attempt to carry her out to the road, she lapses quickly into unconsciousness.

  The action cuts away to Felicia Adams, who arrives back at home, in tattered jeans and sweater, to find her lover, Edwin, waiting for her at the door. He takes one look and shakes his head with a knowing weariness.

  “I’m still supposed to believe this line that you have some kind of overnight job three nights a month, and that this is what happens to your clothes every time you go to this job? This is what I’m supposed to believe?”

  Felicia says, “You can believe what you want. Remember when I told you that I was a woman who had some issues? Well, one of my issues is work. One of my jobs isn’t terribly pleasant.”

  “If you’re carrying on with another man, Felicia, you know it’s going to come between us.”

  “I’m not carrying on, as you put it, Edwin, I’ve told you already. And if I was, this wouldn’t be the outfit that I’d be wearing to see him! I don’t have time to carry on, I don’t have time to love anyone but you and the kids. That’s all I want to do, and I can barely keep up with it. C’mon, Eddie, it’s Thanksgiving, and we don’t have any of the stuff we need for Thanksgiving dinner! We don’t have any turkey and we don’t have any cranberry sauce. We don’t have anything for the kids!”

  Felicia’s disabled son, Vern (played by an actor who actually has cerebral palsy), walks, in his rickety way, into the shot. As always, he understands more than he’s saying. He says almost nothing. With his crutches, he drags along his withered legs. Felicia and Edwin lay off the fighting at the appearance of the boy with the preternatural calm.

  On Eleventh Street, in Brooklyn, Allison Maiser argues that the moment is, she says, just like in Ibsen, just like A Doll’s House. That is, the moment is rich with dramatic irony. Edwin thinks Felicia Adams is a gentle homebody who works hard at the bar, but actually she’s trying to cover up that she’s just been out in the woods eating deer from the bone with a pack of wolves. Every character, Allison says, knows something that no one else knows. This is the law of the pack, which is therefore the secret of the show, that you cannot give away the secret knowledge of the group. Those who have given away the pack have mysteriously vanished or met a grisly fate. Felicia can’t tell Edwin about it and she can’t tell him about what has really been worrying her for months —

  “The kids,” Vanessa says.

  The intern says, “Shhhhh.”

  It’s what they all worry about, the adults of the werewolf pack. That their precious kids, the towheaded snowboarding or water-skiing teens of Fairfield County, growing up with all the comforts and advantages of affluence, might turn out to be bloodthirsty animals. They might be playing Pop Warner football one afternoon at dusk, they might be at driving school one afternoon, and, to their horror, they will begin to sprout an ungainly growth of facial hair. They will dispatch three raccoons and somebody’s favorite house cat, and they will howl. The pack lives in dread of this familiar turn of events. Though the pack looks after its own, the pack wants only that the gene for its mutation should be recessive. The pack would have its ranks remain thin. In the meantime, the members worry.

  Felicia is no exception. The younger boy, Vern, is just twelve, and should he become a werewolf, he will be a werewolf eaten by the others the first night out. And then there’s the older boy, Bennett. She’s so happy that Bennett is fifteen already, because fifteen is quite late to discover the lupine truth about yourself.

  Back to the main action! Edwin, the boyfriend, is furious with Felicia’s meager excuses, or so it seems, and he announces he’s going out, to where we do not know. We see Edwin at a pay phone in town, where, with a furtive expression, he dials what is clearly a bad-news telephone number.

  “Yo, brother. Yeah, it’s your man, E. Watson. No doubt, no doubt. Had to take care of a few things. Some obligations. Letting the heat die down. But now E. Watson is back, real deal. Look, yeah, I’m going to pay what I owe, my brother, know what I’m saying? Most certainly. Thing is, can you be fronting me? Today is Thanksgiving Day, bro; I need to bring home something for my girl or else I just cannot show my face no more. Have pity on a brother. You will get the first part of the profit, for sure, the second part will be going toward a turkey, then I will work for you for free until all is forgiven.”

  Edwin has gone back to dealing? On this day of all days! He’s such an ineffective drug dealer! And there’s no doubt something horrible will transpire the minute he arrives at the house of the evil drug dealer, Alfonse Tilden, who lives in the projects over by the railroad station. (Mike Woodwell, the lineman, tangled with Alfonse last season in one of the two episodes in which no one at all changed into a werewolf.)

  Now there is a commercial break.

  Vanessa and the intern cannot stand the narrative tension, can’t stand the waiting, can’t stand not knowing what’s going to happen, can’t stand the time between episodes, can’t stand the time between seasons, can’t stand the time during the commercials. Though they are tacticians of story, they are taken in by the sweep of narrative, and they want to know what happens more than anything. And this narrative tension somehow brings them together onto the same couch. Until moments ago, Vanessa was on the couch, eating her lukewarm wedge of pizza, and the intern was on the floor, plucking the black olives off a slice and eating only these scarabs, and now the intern is on the sofa, too, as if the sad truth that Edwin is going to suffer retribution, gangland style, on this, Thanksgiving Day, is too much for them. The distance between their bodies begins incrementally to diminish, as though they were glaciers drifting ominously toward each other in a great arctic sea. To Be Continued . . .

  27

  Ranjeet exclaims, “This is the most important moment of the entire season, this moment when these characters must sit down for the Thanksgiving meal! It is the region of New England, and they have nothing for the Thanksgiving dinner, they have only the cold cut variety of turkey, such as you might find at any delicatessen! You could get it anywhere, and it is always inferior! It’s a loaf of turkey, nothing more! This is all they have! This is meant to be the feast that proves that America is most bountiful and can survive the entirety of the winter with its bounteous harvest, and yet all these persons possess is the cold cut turkey, and they are attempting to make instant potatoes from a box of potatoes, and they have the Jell-O and it has small bits of fruit floating in it, and this is the great bounty of America! It is not even real food. It is chemicals. And this is what they have because they are disenfranchised by reason of their color and by reason of a disadvantageous political system.”

  Jeanine tells him: Put a lid on it, because the moment is poignant, and he is a
ctually talking through the program, and she wants to see what the kids are going to say. Because the kids are gathered around the character named Felicia Adams in the kitchen, which is tiny, with just a couple of cupboards that will not close because they have been painted over too many times, and inside these cupboards is her great collection of mismatched plates bought mostly from tag sales. And yet despite the grimness of the Thanksgiving, the Adams boys are gathered around their mother. They know, even if she doesn’t say so, that she’s trying hard. That counts for a lot on Thanksgiving. Even Bennett, the older boy, is attempting to be kind of generous. Still, young Vern asks, “Mom, this all we’re going to have?”

  “It’s what we’ve got for now,” his mother observes. “You think the Pilgrims had Jell-O? They didn’t have any Jell-O. They didn’t have one piece of fruit or anything. Orange slices in that Jell-O? Oranges come from Florida, probably. Florida was a swamp back then. The Pilgrims all had scurvy. Their teeth were falling out, and they never flossed.”

  Bennett says, “It’s because we’re poor.”

  “We’re not poor,” Felicia says. “We’re busy. And sometimes we’re too busy to manage. Folks are penalized for being busy these days, at least in our tax bracket. There are a whole lot of people who are a lot poorer than we are.”

  The doorbell rings.

  In the Means of Production office, in the conference room, with the tiny little office television on the brand-new conference table, Jeanine shifts in the arms of her Sikh lover, thinking not about the poignancy of Felicia’s attempts to fix dinner for her family, and not about how family is always capable of rising above grim circumstances. No, Jeanine is thinking about her lover’s wife and son, and the Thanksgiving they are going to have this coming week. This ushers in a sinking feeling. It’s a sinking feeling that she imagines is not unlike the feelings of the television character Felicia Adams, who is in a race against time to fix Thanksgiving dinner by 2:30 so that she can get the dishes cleaned, including the pots, before moonrise. Because as soon as the moon rises, Felicia will not be in the mood for housework. Jeanine imagines that her situation is like Felicia’s situation, in that their lives harbor secrets. And this is the way that The Werewolves of Fairfield County does its job, not through the richness of its screenwriting, nor through able performances, but by virtue of the simple human tendency to see one’s vulnerabilities in others, to be, in these instances, full of pity for the frailty of both human beings and werewolves.

  At the sound of the bell, Felicia goes to the door, and there, framed in it, is Edwin. Down the corridor, she can see neighbors peeking out of their own units. They all gander at Edwin because Edwin is carrying the most enormous turkey, the most enormous turkey Felicia has ever seen, housed in a beautiful new turkey pan. It’s as if he stepped out of a Dickens tale.

  Felicia says, “Where did you get that turkey?”

  As smiling Felicia attempts to take the pan from him, hefts it out of his arms, Edwin slumps to the floor. Bleeding. Yes, Edwin is bleeding from a gunshot wound in his left shoulder. Edwin has been shot.

  Felicia Adams cries out. Because it’s one more thing. Because she just doesn’t have time. Because the meal is not ready, and if the meal is not ready, we can easily surmise, the meal will not be done on time, and if the meal is not done on time, Felicia will turn into a werewolf before it is done. And so there is no time for more catastrophe. And yet here it is. Now Bennett and Felicia (the latter having set down the turkey pan in the front hall) drape Edwin’s arms around their shoulders and they drag him into the apartment. He’s groaning in pain, and it’s a sort of feral moan. Mother and son drag the injured man through the corridor and into the bedroom, where they lift him as best they can onto the bed. Felicia hurries into the kitchen to make a compress. She seems to suspect immediately what’s going on.

  “You want me to call the doctor?” she says with a frosty reserve.

  “No doctors,” Edwin says, according to his part.

  Then, in a moment that is so artful it doesn’t seem to belong on television, the audience realizes that the enormous turkey, in its enormous Williams-Sonoma turkey pan, is still out in the hall. The camera has paused upon this culinary item. A beautiful amber light shines upon the turkey. The camera is panegyrical. We hear Felicia and Edwin in the bedroom, and Felicia is whispering, “What did you get into? Did you get into what I think you got into? What were you doing down there? Do you have something you want to tell me?”

  “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. All I wanted was to provide, I swear to you. I wanted to provide something. For you and the boys. For the dinner. All I wanted to be was the man who provided.”

  The camera has never once strayed from the turkey in the hall, and gradually we are aware that there’s some kind of scraping taking place in the hall, right behind the camera, and only incrementally do we realize that it’s the sound of crutches, crutches edging into the shot. And then Vern is everywhere in one margin of the frame, like a seal pup on dry land, flopping in the hall. It’s just Vern, trying to get himself down to the level of the turkey, which involves dropping the crutches. Now he tries to lift up the pan. He tries in different ways, to no avail. Soon he tumbles weakly onto his side, on the floor, beside the turkey.

  Felicia says to Edwin, “What am I supposed to do with you?”

  “It went clean through,” Edwin says. “Just leave me for a few days. It’ll be fine.”

  “I can’t look after you all day, Edwin.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about the money or the rent or anything for right now.”

  “I don’t want you coming back here telling me not to worry about money and bleeding from a gunshot wound in your shoulder!”

  Vern, who has given up trying to lift the pan, gets a grip on one of the turkey legs and rips it off. He pauses at the sight of his good fortune at first, as if there’s some built-in hesitator in him. And this is when we hear Bennett’s voice for the first time, back in the other room, and Bennett is saying, “Is he going to die, Mommy?” At the word, the camera slowly tracks back from Vern, back toward the kitchen. With a Hitchcockian uncanniness, it enters the bedroom, where, in afternoon light, the tableau is as in the Northern Renaissance. The potential is for another missing father, like all the fathers missing from the life of young Bennett Adams, who once had a real father, and who found a replacement father in Mike Woodwell, only to suffer when his mother could no longer live with Mike, because of Mike’s paralyzing sadness, and now here is Edwin, lying wounded on the bed, and Bennett is unable to lose another father. Felicia says, “No, he’s not going to die; he’s going to live so that I can yell at him some more,” at which point she looks out into the hall and calls, “Vern, you put that back in the pan right now! Darn it! We’re not going to eat that turkey. We’re going to take that turkey down to the church and we’re giving it to people who really need something to eat.”

  “Oh, come on now,” Edwin says.

  “I’m not eating the turkey if it’s an ill-gotten turkey,” she says. And then, looking out into the hall, “Vern!”

  And Edwin says, “Look in the coat, at least look in the coat. A neighbor gave me those, I swear. Look in my coat.”

  The camera closes in on Bennett, who is nearest to the bloodstained bomber jacket flung on a chair. And he reaches into the pockets and pulls out . . . three turnips.

  Edwin says, “No Thanksgiving holiday is complete without turnips.”

  What to make of these root vegetables, in the eyes of Jeanine Stampfel? She knows these are not stories well told, if judged against a Chekhov or an O’Neill, but she has cried at commercials for antidepressants and at medical programs with deformed children on them, even though she knows better. Should she be judged for crying at this moment because of turnips, and because of Vern, who can’t get up without his crutches and who is laid out sideways next to the turkey, dutifully refraining from any pilfering? You would think Ranjeet would be crying, too, but he’s not crying, he’s s
aying, “Root vegetables! Root vegetables! Of course! The root vegetable is the symbol of the thing that is being forged in this family, which is a provisional family, but which is nonetheless better than many biological families! They must eat the roots to feel the roots! The thing which is born of the earth! A tuber!”

  A motel just off the interstate in the great swing state of Ohio, the interstate that goes all the way from coast to populous coast, this is the place that two miscreants, Lois DiNunzio and Arnie Lovitz, have holed up for the past five days, imagining that if they lay low and pay for everything in cash they will not be traced to this motel. They imagine that every day spent in this way is an improvement on the day on which they ran off with the funds. It is a part of their every transaction with the world, the money, not as a guarantor of ease, but of ultimate condemnation. They have this money, but sooner or later they are going to be found out. Is it possible for them to love each other with the stolen monies hanging over them? Is it possible for them to love each other in a sequence of motels with names like Defiance Motor Court? The answer to these questions is yes, they don’t seem to have a problem loving each other, at least so far. They put the dread about the money in one compartment and they put their love in a different and more roomy compartment. They try to keep the two separated as much as possible. And so they love each other and they worry, and tonight they are loving and worrying in front of The Werewolves of Fairfield County, except that so far Arnie has been expressing some disappointment with the episode because, he says, when there’s not enough werewolf stuff in the program he just doesn’t like it as well. He’s got control of the remote. He clicks it relentlessly. While dragging on a Gitane cigarette, his third in a row.