Sea Monkeys

by Kris Saknussemm

  When I finally saw the movie all the way through many years later, I realized it wasn’t a pond, but a creek, and the monstrous shape I’d been imagining all that time was really Joseph Cotten. He and the crooked Olivia de Havilland are trying to drive Bette Davis mad. What I’d been seeing in my mind and dreams was a supposedly drowned Joseph Cotten come back from the dead.

  Flashback to a summer night in Tahoe . . .

  My father’s friend Bill with the deep, smoky voice . . . his ballerina wife and their two children, Wade and Wendy, are there. Bill is going bald and his skin has a stained, leathery look like something left too long in the sun. He has liver spots. The wife’s hair is pulled back tight into a bun, her body is slender and petite, her face vaguely Spanish-looking. My mother never knows what to say to her unless they’re beating the men at bridge. She dislikes them because Bill and Dad slip off to Stateline or Reno and gamble all night. Bill plays blackjack and has won as much as $5,000 in a weekend. Wade is a weird kid and Wendy wets her pants and cries. We go to the movies. The drive-in in South Lake Tahoe. (My God, there are still drive-ins.) A Hammer horror film is showing, The Mummy’s Shroud. I cover my eyes throughout, only glimpsing up at the most terrifying moments, which two decades later I realize are actually quite ludicrous. It’s a hot, dark August night full of bugs thick like fog in the light, and far outside the glow of the giant screen and the cinderblock snack bar, the stars are trembling.

  I see now that it’s Bill I’m really afraid of. But back there in the car before the shining screen, I don’t know why. I only sense it. A darkness taking shape. I think what I’m afraid of is his deep, smoky voice and the curling lip of his laugh that I never know how to take—and the way he always says my mother’s name as if it’s a question. It’s not the colors of the movie that I close my eyes to hear . . . it’s the way he wants me to look, the way he likes that I’m afraid. The way he eats his Junior Mints with methodical calm.

  Wade whispers about penises and ladies’ things. Wendy sobs softly and the stars dissolve over the Sierras. The smell of popcorn and steamed hot-dog buns fills the car and for years I’ll be afraid of a bad movie, not knowing why.

  MAD MOUSE

  Fourth of July. Our pink napkins stick to the crystals of salt on the clammy baked ham. We’re surrounded by stuffed basset hounds and battery-operated back scratchers. “Not for the fainthearted,” the man who plays the killer ape in the Haunted Trailer tells me. Call it a mine car, call it a midget roller coaster—the name of the ride is the Mad Mouse.

  Two by two the passengers return, dazed by dizziness, still screaming for the dreaming crowd. Then the Mad Mouse begins to chug and grind again. Two fresh pilots without wheels to steer. A girl behind her gawky boyfriend catches my eye.

  I watch her grip the guardrail as they head into the first furious turn. I reach for something to hold, too. My body tenses in time with hers—but I’m a believer in the inherent stinginess of carnivals. Her ride will be over all too soon.

  Who could’ve foreseen the car derailing, launched like Fireball XL5 through the thin lattice of the trellis surrounding the track? Off she went, alone after impact. Destination . . . the solitary white booth that sold Polar Mist.

  She looks down at the corn dogs, the iron milk bottles and the dishes of dimes. And me. I think she’s singing, until I recognize the scream. Blue slush dripping down the splintered plywood.

  My sister had the sense to drag me away. But every summer for years to come, I’d see that girl in her crazy convertible without a wheel, wailing over the livestock and the whirligigs, on her way to the most magnetic of the poles. I’d hear her voice, thinking she was trying to tell me something.

  BAD HOMBRE

  My sister made stuff and made stuff happen, as I’ve said.

  Like a stuffed mouse for one of our younger cousins, Dennis.

  She made it out of a soft gray terrycloth towel filled with cotton batting. It had big ears lined with white pillowcase cutouts, black button eyes, a long nose with a black velvet tip, a black satin bow tie, and a red-and-white striped vest that came from an off-cut of the fabric from her bedroom curtains. It looked like a barbershop quartet mouse. She gave it to Dennis for his third birthday, when it seemed like the mouse was bigger than he was.

  Dennis took to the toy instantly. Actually, it was kind of creepy from the start, the way he hugged the thing so tightly—the way he identified with it so intensely—as if my sister had put her finger right on the great need in his life. A soft, cuddly friend who would never refuse his affection.

  Dennis was one of those shrimpy kids you could tell would one day (probably overnight) turn into a giant. Until that moment, though, he’d be undersized—in all ways. He was desperate for recognition, prone to tantrums and forever ignored by his father, a tall, bald man who enjoyed raking leaves. His mother (our mother’s sister), once a highly competent woman with a promising career at Procter & Gamble, chose motherhood and small town community leadership over corporate success. She became a champion in the strawberry shortcake and macaroni salad league. Dennis’s sister, Amelia, was my age and got all the parental attention. She played the cello from a very young age (and looked like a cello). Dennis was a breathless asthmatic runt who couldn’t compete. The mouse was just what he needed. My sister was very pleased with her creation.

  Dennis named the mouse Gus Gus and carried it with him everywhere during our visit. Then we went home, back to California, and thought no more of it.

  The next summer, however, we saw them again—and we met Gus Gus. The mouse was a little worse for wear, or love. The clean white insides of the ears had soiled, the velvet-tipped nose had been rubbed dull, and the red-and-white striped vest showed signs of fraying (we found out later that Amelia had tossed the mouse in a mud puddle in the spring), but generally speaking, the creature was holding up pretty well—considering that Dennis carried it with him wherever he went. This gratified my sister. At first.

  What took us all by surprise was the fact that Gus Gus now talked—in a high-pitched sleepy voice that was a little unnerving to hear. After a short while, it got really annoying. What was more surprising still (and I think you’d have to say outright disturbing) was that Dennis didn’t talk. Not anymore. Not to other people, anyway. He’d speak to Gus Gus, but when it came to communicating with anyone else, Gus Gus did his talking for him.

  Even our mother found this a trifle odd, and yet she went along with it, because it seemed like their family had given in and accepted this relationship as normal. Basically, if you wanted to talk to Dennis, you had to talk to the mouse. The added curiosity was that when you did start talking to Gus Gus, you found yourself starting to talk like Gus Gus.

  I could tell my sister was beginning to have doubts about the gift. But always a great rationalizer, my mother said to us privately, “Oh, well, he’ll grow out of it. The magic of childhood ends so soon.” This struck my sister and me as a very strange remark, given that we weren’t much older. I’d had this knitted cotton hat that I liked the smell of and kept with me all the time for comfort, and everyone had made a big deal of weaning me off it. But I didn’t talk to it! And it certainly didn’t talk for me. And I didn’t take photographs of it on family outings.

  Dennis had pictures of Gus Gus at Niagara Falls, on the steps of the state capitol, sitting in a wheelbarrow full of apples—even out in front of Radio City Music Hall when they’d gone down to the city for Amelia’s cello competition. Here I thought I was running strong in the odd-kid sweepstakes. My little cousin was in a class of his own.

  Our father found the whole thing “case-study material” (which, given some of his own tendencies, was a bit rich), but my sister and I remained open-minded. As long as Gus Gus didn’t start walking around on his own in the night, or wasn’t blamed for any mischief that Dennis got up to, we thought the phase would pass.

  Come the next summer, when they came out west to visit us, we had to revise our opinion. Gus Gus was starting to look seriously bat
tered by this point. He’d lost a button eye. The worn bow tie gave the impression the mouse had tried to hang himself. The striped vest was filthy and slit with holes and tears—and the stuffed beast stank like an old pillow. My sister couldn’t help but wonder if she’d done the right thing with this well-intentioned creation.

  More importantly, Gus Gus was still doing Dennis’s talking. My father found this somewhere between highly amusing and totally astonishing, and you could tell he wanted to make notes (any indication of eccentricity in my mother’s family was a source of profound delight and relief for him).

  My mother was not amused in the least. This was a situation that could no longer be ignored—and yet that’s exactly what Dennis’s parents did. They had completely accepted Gus Gus as a member of their family. Even Amelia. This rotting stuffed mouse that looked like a dog had gotten to it (which was in fact true) was still being photographed on the family’s travels. The helium voice was still the ventriloquist dummy for Dennis (or maybe it was the other way around).

  We were to find out over the course of their time with us that Amelia had, in a moment of insufferable irritation, buried the mouse in the back garden. Dennis simply dug his friend up—after all, who was going to talk for him, if not Gus Gus? Dennis’s father confessed to my father late one night that he’d contemplated plopping the mouse on top of a pile of burning leaves (how many people seriously enjoy raking leaves and have a special plaid shirt they only wear when doing it?), but after the exhumation, he was concerned that the destruction of the creature might cause “psychological harm.” Boy, did Dad’s ears prick up at that.

  My mother was infuriated at the reflection on her breeding, but couldn’t say anything, because her sister had recently won a first prize for her potato salad and made all our lunches. Aunt Orpha took the optimistic view that the mouse would one day have to fall apart in Dennis’s hands and then the crisis would be passed. The inevitable disintegration strategy. Besides, it was my sister who’d started the whole thing.

  I must say this for my older sis, she was never one to shrink from responsibility (at least not until she started manifesting signs of her own issues). The matter came to a head, so to speak, when we made a joint family pilgrimage to Virginia City, Nevada.

  The town’s motto is “Step Back in Time,” and whenever you hear words like that, you need to be on your guard, because translated, they mean, “Give Us Your Money.” To be fair, the town does have some real history, and some of it is intact (old churches, restored mansions, saloons and mine shafts from the gold and silver days of the Comstock Lode). But the plinky-plink player piano music coming out of the fake dancehalls starts to get to you. The plank boardwalks seem suspiciously new, the cigar store Indians too well varnished—and how many mentions of Mark Twain do you want within fifty feet?

  This was once the wild and woolly mineral strike town made famous by the Bonanza kings, who shipped in crystal chandeliers, gilt, brass, oriental carpets and Renaissance artwork from San Francisco, Chicago and Denver. What it was when we passed through, and what it is still, is a whole lot of expensive Western kitsch. T-shirts, ice cream, cowboy hats, rubber rattlesnakes, replica bullets, gold nuggets—any kind of souvenir you can name—from beer coasters to mining tins. Come see the old-timer who tells tales of shoot-outs on the main street. Take a stagecoach ride! And of course, since it’s Nevada, there’s a chance for the adults to gamble, while the kids are sucking down fizzy drinks or learning how to lasso a fencepost.

  What my sister saw in this extravaganza of pioneer bad taste was an opportunity to separate Dennis from Gus Gus in a seemingly authentic way (authenticity being the theme of the town). It happened while we were in line for the stagecoach, watching a grizzled man in costume trying to get a burro that was sitting down to stand up (I thought it not entirely impossible that the burro was in costume too). Dennis and Gus Gus went off to the restrooms with Aunt Orpha.

  My sister and I had each been given a small stash of rubber rattlesnake money, and she knew just what she was going to do with hers. She targeted this rowdy boy fooling around behind us—and she paid him off. He was an older fat kid who looked like he’d kill his own mother for another hot dog. He wasn’t hard to convince. All he had to do was wait until Dennis returned, then yank Gus Gus from his hands. Dennis would naturally resist this with all the inner strength of his damaged personality. My sister figured Gus Gus wouldn’t hold up to the tug-of-war and would split apart at the seams, never to be pieced together. Fat Boy would run off into the crowd, and we’d all be in the clear. There’d be no one really to blame and Dennis would just have to move on.

  My sister was very good with instructions (plus she added that she’d put an Eskimo Pie down Fat Boy’s underwear if he blew it). He pulled off his assignment all right. It all went precisely according to her plan. Dennis regained his place in line, clutching the foul-smelling mouse—Fat Boy made his move, with a few opening taunts to get Dennis braced for conflict ...

  “Hey, let me see that thing! This your little friend? Let me have a look, pip-squeak.”

  Wow. The sound Gus Gus made ripping apart. It was as if something inside Dennis had torn asunder. Cotton batting exploded, the striped vest ripped—and the head came right off. Fat Boy did just as he’d been briefed, and no doubt ran off to get his chili dog with extra fried onions. We assumed our best expressions of shock. Aunt Orpha reached for her kidney tablets (and probably a few aspirin too). Dennis went ballistic. Hysterical. It was all I could do to hold him back from running after Fat Boy, but at least he was too upset to see the setup. Tough love.

  And a tough time for the other folks on the stagecoach ride, with Dennis squealing and screaming the whole way around the town, as if someone had put a scorpion down his checked shorts. But any kid, even Dennis, can only cry and bellow so much. Eventually, he exhausted himself as much as everybody else, and just sobbed and hiccupped. I think he’d wet his pants in the commotion (that boy went to the toilet more than you can believe). He had to stand in the sun, and a root beer float helped calm him further. I don’t think the stagecoach people were too happy, but they’d seen kids crap their pants and upchuck before.

  All might’ve gone just as my sister had planned, if I hadn’t gotten what I thought was a funny idea. I don’t know what snuck into me. Maybe it was the bizarreness of the situation that had gone uncommented on for so long. In any case, while we were all strolling around trying to recover from the “incident,” and wondering if Dennis would ever talk to us again (as himself), I got distracted by two Mark Twain look-alikes having a dispute about who had rights to a particular corner, and I fell behind. Then I chanced to look down, and I spied Gus Gus’s head lying in the dust below the boardwalk. Fat Boy must’ve thrown it there.

  Well, right out in front was a concession that took a photograph of you and turned it into your very own genuine wanted poster, on fancy faded paper, no less. I hadn’t spent my tourist trap money. I had just enough. And no one was looking for me yet. It’s hard to get lost for long in a town like that. The wording was all set, so all I had to do was hand the photographer the ravaged head of the stuffed toy mouse—and they did the rest.

  WANTED

  $500 for this Bad Hombre, a bold Bandito

  and Cold-Blooded Killer, Horse Thief, Cattle Rustler,

  Claim Jumper, and all-around Notorious Character

  No questions asked. All they wanted was the money, and that was it. Within about five minutes, I had a full-fledged wanted poster featuring a dirty, one-eyed, shredded stuffed-animal head. Gus Gus actually did look like a bad hombre. I felt very proud. Then I chucked the head in one of the fake horse troughs, just in case Dennis had any ideas about pleading for some kind of repair surgery. Of course, when I caught up to the family again, I couldn’t resist showing him the poster. I knew it was wrong (and my sister later shoved an Eskimo Pie down my pants so that I was sure). I’d put her whole scheme at risk . . . but I just couldn’t help myself. I had to see the look on Dennis’
s face. Gus Gus really did look like a bandito—if there ever was one. I tried to make out that Fat Boy had made the poster, which I’d just happened to find and that I’d never seen the head, but I don’t think anyone believed me. And no one really cared, not even Dennis, because he’d gone off to some other place in his mind.

  That trip back to Reno has to be the longest, most painful drive on record for a family vacation. It was hot enough by that point to fry both eggs and bacon on the hood of the car, everyone stuffed in so tight we couldn’t move, sweaty and grumpy and sick from the food—and for all my sister’s careful engineering, Gus Gus was still with us, only now his voice was a little lower and he kept saying, “I’m a cold-blooded killer . . . I’m a cold-blooded killer.” The packed-out Rambler would get so quiet then, I could hear my father making mental notes.

  NO PRISONERS

  A cold blue dawn on the banks of the Tuolumne River. I’m snuggled in an old sleeping bag with a soft flannel lining that has pictures of deer and moose on it. It smells of sleep and smoke and pine needles, and the canvas of the tent is still cool from the damp.

  The old man has taken me along with Dave, my godfather with the close-cropped hair and the big, pointy nose he plays like a Jew’s harp when he’s had enough to drink. My father is already back from fishing. He’s whistling softly so I know he didn’t get skunked. He must’ve risen before the moon set. I rub the sleep out of my eyes and see him crouched against the lonely blue-streaked sky in the west. The east is going gold and his face is braced against the light, his boulder-shadowed body huge behind him. Then he begins to move.