Sunglasses After Dark (Sonja Blue)

by Nancy A. Collins

  The funny thing was that he could have used the time to escape, but decided against it. There was too much he didn’t know, and like it or not, the woman laying inert on the futon was the only way he’d ever find the answers.

  As the shadows in the loft lengthen into early evening, the muscles in her arms, legs and face began to contract and relax. Claude was reminded of the dead frog he’d hooked up to a dry-cell battery back in high- school biology class. Her abdomen hitched sharply as her lungs shifted back into gear. The fingers of her hands, folded flat over her rib cage, stretched backward, the joints crackling like dry leaves.

  “Are you, all right?” he asked as she sat up. “I thought you were sick or something.”

  The first thought that crossed Sonja’s mind as she awakened was: I’m going to kill that bitch for what she did to me. But what she said was: “Yeah. I feel fine.”

  THE REAL WORLD

  “He’s as blind as he can be, Just sees what he wants to see.

  Nowhere Man, can you see me at all?”

  —Nowhere Man, Lennon & McCartney

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Catherine Wheele stood at the bedroom window and watched the night arrive. She wore the peach-colored negligee from the day before, her wig resting atop a Styrofoam skull on the night table. She fingered a strand of her actual hair as she sipped her highball.

  She remembered the day Zeb informed her that the wives of prophets and power brokers didn’t have hair the color of mice. The wig had been Zeb’s idea, like so many other things. He claimed the congregation wouldn’t sit still for a dye job, but a wig? Hell, their mamas wore wigs. And he’d been right, as always...

  Well, almost.

  She watched her ghost image in the window. Without her wig and makeup she looked a lot like her mother. The thought made her scowl, which made the resemblance all the more telling. Now she looked exactly like her mother.

  She didn’t like thinking about her family. Whenever she let her mind wander back to North Carolina, it triggered the things lurking at the corners of her eyes. The flickering shadows had been there as far back as she cared to remember. But now . . . now they seemed to have mass and substance, as well as recognizable features. She wondered about her sanity. Maybe she was going mad? Worse yet, maybe she wasn’t.

  A sodden groan emerged from the heart-shaped bed dominating her boudoir. She glanced at a pile of bedclothes the color of cotton candy. The shadows capering at the edges of her vision turned into mist.

  She’d almost forgotten about Wexler.

  The bedclothes stirred fitfully, and then were still. She snorted derisively as she finished her drink. What a disappointment he’d turned out to be. How could she have deluded herself into thinking he was worthy as a consort? Oh, he was adequate enough between the sheets, but he lacked Zeb’s savvy and Ezra’s devotion and common sense. She needed those a hell of a lot more than a spurting member.

  How could she have been so blind as to trust him with something as dangerous as the Blue woman? Ezra would have seen through Wexler’s media-celeb glamour within seconds. But Ezra was dead by the time she had been forced to co-opt Wexler and his sanitarium into her plans, murdered by the same abomination Wexler allowed to escape. She projected a splinter of anger at the bed, smiling as he whimpered like a drowsy child.

  She returned her attention to the nightfall outside her window. The photosensitive lights, set flush in the ground and nesting in the branches of the trees, switched on one by one as the shadows lengthened. She watched her employees, dressed in their identical dark suits and narrow ties, as they patrolled the perimeters of the estate. Most of them were her own elite guards, the ones Ezra had dubbed “Wheelers.” They were loyal to her, and all would gladly lie, cheat, steal or kill for her—and often did. Ezra had not approved of her method of conditioning the Wheelers, though. Poor old-fashioned, possessive Ezra.

  “If it wasn’t necessary when Zebulon was alive, why is it so damned important to do so now?”

  “A lot of things weren’t necessary when Zeb was alive. Paying them isn’t enough. I want to make sure no one turns state’s evidence in the future. I’m not doing this because I enjoy it; I’m doing it to protect the ministry.”

  Ezra didn’t really believe her, but he never forbade from doing it. Would she have stopped if he’d actually put his foot down? Probably not. As much as she’d loved Ezra, he could never inspire the same fear in her that Zeb had.

  One of the guards patrolling the garden terrace below halted, having spotted her in the window. Who—or what—was he associating her with? She tried to place the Wheeler and his pet obsession. So many of them were fixated on their mothers, it made them difficult to tell apart…

  Ah, yes, Denning. His heart’s desire had been Sophia Loren, circa Bocaccio ‘70. She moved away from the window. Denning shivered as if seized by a sudden chill, and then continued on his rounds.

  Spurring unquestioning loyalty among her Wheelers proved absurdly simple. All it involved was tapping into the right fantasy and constructing the proper illusion. She called this highly personal form of conditioning ‘Heart’s Desire’. And the best time for brainwashing was during sex. She particularly enjoyed the looks on their faces as they suddenly found themselves humping famous movie stars, heads of state or professional athletes, although nothing could compare to the horrified pleasure-guilt of those who found themselves erupting inside their mothers. The Oedipal desire was, by far, the most common, although there could be nasty backlashes if not handled carefully. Like the boy who’d put his thumbs in his eyes. That had been most unfortunate. But most of her “recruits” were men of questionable moral fiber to begin with, and being a motherfucker was nothing new to them.

  Following the Heart’s Desire conditioning, her Wheelers served her without question or qualm, eager for a replay of their ultimate fantasy. While she had no intention of ever permitting an encore, she encouraged the belief that repeat performances were possible if she pleased by them. The punishments she doled out to those who failed to please her, however, proved to be far more common.

  She moved to her combination wet bar and vanity table, pouring herself another Wild Turkey from the commemorative Elvis decanter. A larger-than- life oil portrait of her late husband grinned down at her its place on the wall.

  She’d come into the world squalling white trash, the daughter of Jeremiah and Hannah Skaggs, the third of eight children. She wasn’t Catherine back then. Her mama had named her Kathy-Mae, and she was just another snot- nosed, scabby-kneed, malnourished yard ape destined to grow up hard and ignorant in the Carolina hills.

  Jeremiah Skaggs worked the sawmill, when he could get hired. Papa liked to get a belly full of liquor and Jesus, and when he was like that, he wasn’t very careful. “God looks after His children,” he used to say. God must have been looking the other way when Papa lost his left pinkie, then the first joint on his right pointer. The sawmill boss refused to hire him again after he buzzed his left ring finger up to the second knuckle. Papa accused him of being a communist devil-worshiper.

  Mama took in laundry. Catherine could not remember her mother smiling or laughing. Mama’s voice, when she bothered to speak, was a nasal whine, like the droning of a giant mosquito. She was ten years younger than Papa, although you couldn’t tell it by looking at her. Both her parents seemed ancient, their faces seamed and pitted by years of deprivation. They looked like the apple dolls Granny Teasdale sold to the Yankee tourists during the summer.

  Catherine’s childhood consisted of dirt, hunger, backbreaking labor and fear. Violence, in the form of her father’s drunken tirades, was a daily occurrence— like breakfast and dinner, only far more reliable. She didn’t have much in common with her siblings, but she thought it was because she was her mother’s first girl child and the only one she’d named herself. Papa had been on a bender when she’d been delivered, and was scandalized when he found out Mama hadn’t picked a biblical name. She never played games with her brothers and si
sters, preferring the company of an imaginary friend called Sally. When she was involved in her make-believe games, pretending she was rich and living in a big house with running water and electricity, was the closest she ever came to experiencing childhood.

  When Papa found out she was holding conversations with an invisible friend, he hit the ceiling and her as well. She was possessed and needed the devil beat out of her or she’d be sentenced to eternal damnation. So he took her to a backwoods preacher called Deacon Jonas so she could be saved proper.

  Deacon Jonas was a big fat man with white hair and a lumpy red nose the size of a potato. He listened to Papa describe her relationship with Sally, nodding and grunting and looking at her with watery eyes. He told Papa that he wanted to pray over her and that Papa would have to wait outside until it was done.

  After Papa had left, Deacon Jonas opened his pants and showed her his thing. Even though she was only six, she had already seen several of them and was not particularly scared or impressed by the deacon’s. After the deacon rubbed on it for a little while, he buttoned himself back up, then said the Lord’s Prayer.

  Sally stopped coming to visit her and after that, and she eventually forgot about her imaginary friend. There was too much work to be done for her to waste time on such foolishness. She helped her mother take care of the house and look after the little ones, who tended to blur into an amorphous, nameless face with dull eyes and an upper lip caked with dirt and dried snot.

  Her life in the Skaggs household had never been good, but things started to get really bad after she turned twelve and started her monthlies. She noticed Mama looking at her funny. Papa was doing it too, but in a different way. He looked at her the same way Deacon Jonas had when he’d prayed over her, only not so timid.

  Sometimes Papa would come home liquored up and Mama would meet him on the porch and they’d get to arguing and then he’d use his fists. After he finished beating on Mama he’d be too exhausted to do anything besides sleep it off. Afterwards Mama would get in bed with her. They both knew it wouldn’t be long before Papa got what he wanted, but it was a ritual Mama felt obliged to perform.

  Maybe that’s why Mama finally confessed that Papa wasn’t really her father. Perhaps she thought it would take the edge off what was to follow.

  Thirteen years ago, back when Mama was young and only had two children, a stranger came to the house. Papa was working at the sawmill and Mama was in the dooryard, scrubbing clothes in the big washtub, when the stranger walked up from nowhere and asked for a drink of water. He didn’t look like anyone in particular, just another raggedy man wandering the countryside, looking for a handout. But his eyes . . . There was something about his eyes.

  The next thing Mama knew she had her skirts up and the raggedy man was humping her on the front porch in broad daylight. She couldn’t remember if she’d agreed to it or not. In fact, she couldn’t remember if the stranger was short or tall, fat or thin, dark or fair. It didn’t take him very long, even by Papa’s standards, and as soon as he finished, he was gone. Not even a ‘thanky kindly, ma’am’. Mama passed it off as a particularly vivid day-dream . . . until she saw her firstborn daughter had her daddy’s eyes.

  Papa repaid Mama for cuckolding him by giving her two black eyes and a busted lip before turning his attention to Kathy-Mae. She tried to run, which only made him madder. He punched her hard in the face, and the sight of blood geysering from her nose seemed to excite him further. He dragged her out to the tool shed behind the house and raped her on its rough plank floor until her buttocks were full of splinters. Once he was done, he left her huddled atop a pile of old burlap sacks, her eyes swollen and crotch bleeding. He informed her, through the locked door, that he didn’t want her “polluting” his real children and that he meant to keep her in the tool shed for the rest of her life, or until he got tired of her, whichever came first.

  At first she couldn’t think. Her brain felt like a lump of cold, insensate clay. She hoped it would stay like that forever, but knew it was too good to last. although ravenously hungry, she managed to cry herself to sleep.

  She had a strange dream that night.

  She dreamed Sally came back to visit her. She couldn’t see Sally very clearly, but she could hear her voice inside her head.

  “Do you want out of here, Kathy-Mae? I can take you away from the pain and the bad things. If you agree to that, it’s a bargain. I’ll always be here and you’ll never be able to leave me. Is that what you want?”

  “Yes.”

  Sally rushed forward, her arms open to embrace her, and for one brief moment she could see Sally clearly. She tried to cry out, to renege on her bargain, but it was too late. Sally’s arms closed about her shoulders and she seemed to sink into her, like a snowflake melting on her tongue. When she looked around, Sally was gone. Or was she?

  In her dream she could see inside the house, even though she was locked in the shed. Somehow, she knew it was Sally who was showing her these things. She saw Mama and Papa sleeping side by side in the old wrought- iron bed. Mama had the littlest one in the bed with her, cradled in the warm hollow between her right arm and breast. In her dream, Sally told her Mama to get out of bed, and her Mama got out of bed. Then Sally told Mama to go to the kitchen and fetch the butcher knife, and Mama did so. It was a big, ugly and very sharp piece of cutlery. Then Sally told Mama to slit Papa’s throat. Since he was full of squeeze and exhausted by his earlier activities, it was pretty easy. The blood escaping his throat formed a sodden halo around his head.

  Then 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, whimpering as Mama slit its tiny throat from ear from ear. Mama had butchering piglets down to an art, so this was fast and simple work for her.

  In her dream, Sally told Mama to unlock the shed. Funny how real it seemed, not at all like a proper dream. She could even feel the dew on the grass as she walked alongside her mother back to the house. Sally was walking on the other side of Mama, but she couldn’t really get a good look at her, as shadows seemed to crowd the corners of her eyes, obscuring her view. But it was just a dream, wasn’t it?

  Mama looked funny in the moonlight. She was wearing her old flannel nightgown, but the blood 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 joker’s grin. It scared her to see her mother that way, 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 Mama. No words passed between them. In her 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 in and lay down beside her butchered husband, cuddling the dead baby to her breast as she struck the match.

  She 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 curled up on the front lawn. The three-room shack that was the Skaggs’ home had been reduced to a jumble of charred timber. She 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.

  During the months following the fire, she 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 that 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 both
er 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, she ended up working one of the shill booths during the day and dancing the hoochie-coochie at night. Sometimes she sat in for the Gypsy Witch, reading the fortunes of popcorn-munching, goggle-eyed fish, which is how she met Zebulon.

  He called himself Zebbo the Great back then, and dressed like a third-rate Mandrake the Magician, right down to the patent-leather hair and pencil mustache. She thought he was the most debonair man she’d ever seen outside the movies. Every day she watched him from 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 her unrequited crush for long, as the mentalist 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 he started talking about her gift and all the things they could do together. Turns out Zebbo the Great really could read minds. Oh, he was nowhere as powerful as he liked to pretend, or even as facile as that sleazy Brit, but Zebulon indeed had a gift for low-wattage psychic receptivity. If someone thought about something fairly simple—like a color or a face card—Zebbo the Great could pick it up with minimum effort. Telephone numbers and street addresses, however, were beyond his limited retrieval methods. But it was enough for him to recognize Kathy-Mae as being ‘gifted’, too.