“Now you don’t want to shoot old Norbert, ma’am. Who’ll shine your shoes and bring warm milk when you can’t get to sleep at night?” His voice was shiny shoes and warm milk, lulling the terror and rage back to sleep, sighing and tut-tutting like the warders at the fancy private asylum used to do when she refused her medication, when they had to put the jacket on her.
A Devil had come into her Eden and tempted her mannequins, corrupted them with life. She saw the Devil now, sitting in her booth at the diner, eating her breakfast. He saw her too, and waved.
Him, she could kill.
Norbert stepped in her way. “Hate to do this to you, ma’am, but Mr. Felix, he insisted—” His hand sprocketed the leading end of the streamer of paper into Dora’s hand as it reached for the doorknob. She held it up but it wouldn’t come into focus.
“What is this?” She talked to the mannequins all the time—confessing to Friar Buck, shooting the bull with the Old Coots, gossiping with Dottie—but she always knew she was talking to herself. She wasn’t that crazy—or at least, she wasn’t that crazy yesterday . . .
“It’s, um, well, it’s your bill, Miss Moss. Mr. Felix thought it was time we put our house in order, so to speak.”
“I owe you money? How much?”
“Well now, you’ve been here for nigh on to two years, now. So, at the weekly rate of $10, back rent comes to—” he worked his way back down the tape, “—oh heck, you’ve been a good guest, we’ll call it a thousand even, gratuity not included, of course.”
“I owe you $1,000 for staying here. In my own damned town. Who the fuck is Mr. Felix?”
“Now, Miss Moss, no need to take that bellicose tone with me,” whispering and leaning close, he winked. “I’m on your side. I explained to Mr. Felix that, seeing as you were one of our finest customers, we should be kind of lenient with you. He’s a real understanding fellow, Miss Moss. So he said you had ’til the end of the day to come across. But from now on, it’ll be ten dollars cash, every Thursday.”
Dora stepped into the street, rubbing her eyes and giving her brain one more chance to take it all back. The sun was too bright, it felt like a bulb she could reach out and unscrew. She might’ve been a wooden cigar-store Indian, propped before the doors while Norbert was waxing the lobby floor. The townspeople and their orgiastic festival were real. No part of her was sick enough to conjure up such bestial acts. She wasn’t neurotic enough to deserve such torture.
Dora marched over to the diner, pointedly ignoring the scenes on the bus bench and her truck. Someone seized her by the hips and yanked her away from the door. Scratchy, the oldest of the Coots, manhandled her with most uncootlike strength onto his lap. His face reeked of sulfur and charcoal from all the matches she’d struck off his nose.
“Just sit a spell, Miss Moss, and we’ll talk about the first thing that pops up.” The Coots yukked it up as they crowded in to cop a feel, pulling at her housecoat to paw at her flannel nightshirt. Dora shrieked, but couldn’t hear herself over the jukebox and the merry screams of the town.
“Feel that, Missy? Not bad for an old placer, huh? That’s quality hardwood, yuk yuk. C’mon, Miss Moss, I won’t give you no splinters.”
“Unhand that woman, Scratchy, immediately.” Felix came out of the diner, pulled the plug on the jukebox and wagged a reproving finger at the Coots. “All of you should be ashamed of yourselves.” He had traded up again. He wore the mayor’s morning suit, down to the top hat and sash. Glutinous beads of chili bedecked the yellowed dickie, and the sheriff’s .38 revolver and several stale, half-smoked cigars were jammed in the cummerbund. “After all, she’s our guest. Our first and finest and so far, our only tourist.”
He held out his arm, as if to escort Dora Moss to join the festivities. Numb, she took his arm, dropped the shotgun into Buddy the Coot’s lap as he led her to the diner. A dozen mostly naked townspeople crowded in after them and seated themselves.
Dora could not look at them—and so was forced to look at Felix. She allowed herself to be boxed in by him in her corner booth. “Dottie! Another bowl of what I’m having for Miss Moss! You like good chili, don’t you, Miss Moss?”
“Of course I do. That’s my chili. And this is my booth, and my town. These are my mannequins. Who the hell are these people, and who the hell are you?”
Dottie brought Dora a bowl of piping-hot chili topped with sliced onions and shredded Monterey jack cheese and an iced tea with extra lemon, and hovered over them, doling out oyster crackers and spooning out Sweet’N Low.
Felix set aside the top hat and peeled off his gloves. “Miss Moss, I used to sell insurance, but now I just sell people whatever they want. If they want it, they sell what they have to me, and I give them what they want. Sort of like Pinocchio, isn’t it? I make dreams come true.”
Dora repeatedly pinched her earlobe, shoving gouts of blood into her brain. “You made them real. You made them come alive, and they sold you my town. That’s what . . . this is?”
“I sold them what they wanted. I don’t have any say over what that is, or how they get it. Heck, ma’am, I wouldn’t want that duty. I’m just a salesman.”
“But everything they sold you is mine. The whole transaction, whatever it was, is built on fraud.”
“You sure as shitfire didn’t own our town,” Mayor Mudd shouted. Naked but for an undershirt and sock garters, yet he still exuded righteous dignity. “All you had was squatter’s rights!” The rest of the town added its affirmation.
“But I own this land. . . . Everything you have—everything that’s here, I brought. Even you. This was a ghost town before I came . . .”
“Now you’re talking crazy, missy,” Sheriff Fudd spat, hauling out his nightstick and a pair of steel manacles. “We can’t have that kind of talk in this-here town.”
Felix put his top hat back on and screwed a monocle into his eye. “Sheriff, put those away. This is a friendly, civil town meeting. There’ll be all the time in the world to arrest her later.”
“Felix, tell them what they are! Tell them you didn’t give them life! You’re just a bad businessman who came into town with no pants on, and you sold my town something that didn’t belong to you.”
But it wasn’t her town. Dora had not created it. She had shaped its people and their lives, but she had no more godlike power than Felix. Felix was only a middleman to the Life Force. It was indomitable, it had to be obeyed. Felix had only brokered the Life Force for the hungry town, much as he would term life insurance or a corn dog for another customer.
“You’ve cheated them, Felix. And you’re going to regret it. Take it from someone who’s been in a few asylums: you don’t have what it takes to run one.”
“You really could afford to learn a bit about life yourself, Miss Moss. Like about how badly it wants to be lived, for one thing. What wouldn’t you pay for life, with the alternative staring you in the face?”
Dora looked over the gleaming faces of the townsfolk, filling every booth and pressed flat against the glass: struck stupid with the Life Force and gone hook, line and sinker for the traveling salesman’s pitch. They’d gleefully lynch her on Felix’s say-so; he’d have only to sell them the rope.
Felix’s monocle fell into his chili. “You understand, then? Good. I trust Norbert has ironed out the boarding situation, and any more you can contribute, we’ll just call an honorarium. Maybe name a street after you, someday. I won’t badger you about it, but it is rather important that we get the money today. The diner’s almost out of food, and the people have been pushing for some civic improvements.”
“Like cable TV!”
“And a swimmin’ hole!”
“And a bowling alley!”
“We want a burlesque house!”
“This town needs a church, goddammit!”
“Please, all in good time, folks. Miss Moss isn’t made of money. Miss Dottie, how much is there in the town kitty?”
Dottie removed Dora’s billfold from her apron and thumbed throug
h it, her other hand scooping out and dumping a mound of change on the counter. The townspeople made awed noises as they snatched up the coins. They were lost to the meeting as they jingled it in their hands and pockets.
“There’s only a hundred in cash,” Dottie said, “but her bank account’s fat.”
“We’ll have the Sheriff run you out to the next town right after breakfast,” Felix said.
Dora’s face flushed red at this final indignity. “In my own truck?”
“Of course, there are several other options we could consider. You could, um, work off your debt, here at the diner and over at the hotel. A lot of truckers pass through this area—”
“Go screw yourself!”
“Really, there’s no call for that sort of language,” Felix chided. The townspeople took it up among themselves, trying it out. “You should watch what you say around them. They’re still pretty impressionable.”
“Where’d they learn what I saw them doing this morning?”
“Didn’t you try out everything there was to try when you were a baby? I suppose if you had, you would’ve turned out a little, um, healthier, shall we say, than you did?”
“And you’d be left without a town. I don’t know how you changed all the rules, but you’re not getting anything more from me. I’m leaving—”
The sheriff’s gun was suddenly in her face. “I’m sorry, I have to have a check from you before you go. If I let you kite out on the bill you accrued here, what kind of an example would it set for the town? It’d be a cardinal violation of the code of the service economy. How could they provide for themselves? Do you expect them to take up highway robbery?”
“Isn’t that what you’re teaching them now? How to point guns at people?”
“Nonsense. I’m teaching them how to close a sale. Everybody, look at what I’m doing now. Most people won’t push you this far, but deadbeats only understand one thing, and it isn’t a polite smile. Sometimes, to get a handshake on the deal, you have to do the shaking with a gun.”
“We want guns, too,” Mayor Mudd brayed.
Mike the Milkman strode up to Felix and took hold of the gun’s barrel and yanked on it before Felix could do anything but jerk reflexively back. The gun went off, drilling Mike and spraying the crowd with his blood. Not sawdust and paint, but blood. Dora went white.
Mike the Milkman staggered and fell into Dottie’s arms. “That was aces, Mister,” he said. “Do it again,” and he died.
The rest of the town swarmed over Felix, either clambering for the gun or to be shot with it, and Dora slipped out unmolested to her truck. A heaping platter of Friar Buck’s dung sat on the hood. Dora frisbeed it through the diner’s picture window. With the sound of the gun going off still ringing in her ears, Dora fled her town.
Night fell on a town quite different from the one morning had seen, and still more from that of the previous night. Felix the Traveling Salesman had sold them life and thrown in a taste of death as a bonus, so they had a lot to chew over, and had cleared the street by dusk.
The townspeople were waiting in the street when she came back. Like a pack of hungry, lost dogs, they approached her, growling. One of the Old Coots brandished her shotgun, and the rest carried table legs, lamps, cutlery and torches. They looked angry, dumb and hungry. Felix was nowhere in sight.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“We’re going to take over the world. Mayor Felix was telling us as how everybody in the world is a sucker, and how he’s gonna buy and sell ’em all someday, and how easy it is to do what he does, so we’re gonna go out and do it. Then we can all have slaves and towns of our own, and we can make ’em do what we want.”
“And just what do you think you’re going to sell them?”
“Death!” The Old Coot punctuated his answer with both barrels of the shotgun. As he broke it open, Dora shouldered the shotgun she’d bought in Victorville only hours before and aimed at Sheriff Fudd’s comical bald head. She knew her resolution was, if anything, twice as insane as the situation itself.
Backing around her truck toward the bed, Dora flipped down the tailgate and let the smell hit them. “Well, before you go, maybe you’d like to have some pie . . .”
The French doors of the Honeymoon Suite flew open and Felix stormed out onto the balcony in a silk smoking jacket and fez. “What the hell are you fucking blockheads doing out on my street? I said lights out two hours ago!” Noticing Dora, he shouted, “Miss Moss! Come back on your own recognizance to settle your account. You can put down the gun, we’re all civilized, here.”
The townspeople didn’t hear him. They shoved Dora up against the back of her truck.
“Children,” Felix cried, “don’t talk to Miss Moss until I get down there. This is grown-up talk.”
As soon as he was out of sight, Dora climbed onto the hood of her truck, cradling the shotgun in one arm and holding the box of specially prepared shells she’d made at the public library in Victorville. She had to work fast. She couldn’t convince them to continue drawing breath so long as Felix had them trapped in his sights.
“He’s never going to teach you how to sell, you know. You’re always going to be his playthings. There’s only one way out.”
“We’re not supposed to talk to you, Miss Moss. Mister Felix said not to,” Mayor Mudd sheepishly cut her off. His eyes, like those of the rest of the town, were glued to her and the gun she held.
“You weren’t supposed to talk to him either. Now, do you think he offered you a fair deal? Do you?”
“It ain’t so bad, being alive, but—”
“But what good is it if you’re not free, right? Do you want to be free?”
“Yes!” the Life Force shouted out of the townsfolk.
“All you have to do is make me a deal. What’ll you give me for one of these pies?”
Felix pelted out onto the street just as the last pie pan was licked clean and fell clattering to the street. He crumpled in horror as he saw the bodies laid out on the tarmac like discarded dolls.
“What have you done? You crazy murderous monster, what have you done to my town?”
“You cheated them, Felix. You didn’t give them any reason to live except to worship you, and you were driving them insane.”
“You poisoned them! You killed my people!” He rushed her, hands splayed out for strangling, when something grabbed his foot. He recoiled in sputtering panic and slammed his head on the grille of Dora’s truck. Lying face to face with Dottie the Waitress, he screamed when her eyes opened. Felix scurried under the truck as the town began to rise.
“I fed them a reason to live.” She produced a crumb-crust cherry pie on a commemorative platter for Operation Just Cause. “I baked it for Mike the Milkman, hoping against hope that you might have been able to sell him back to life. I guess he had nothing more to offer you . . . what a waste . . .”
She cracked the pie shell and dumped out the filling. Buried in the cherry compote was a tiny, tightly folded pill of paper. Felix unrolled the cherry-stained scrap, looked it over. In near-microscopic print, the 10 Commandments, the Bill Of Rights, quotes about the dignity of labor and the virtues of humbleness—a lot of hollow platitudes that had passed his own lips more than a few times to prime a customer. At the bottom it said only: MIKE MILLIKIN, YOU ARE A MILKMAN. YOU LIVE IN A RENTED ROOM IN THE DOLLHOUSE HOTEL, AND LIKE IT THERE. THE ONLY THING YOU REALLY HATE IS SALESMEN.
Flipping it over, he gasped. The note was printed on the back of some kind of legal document.
Felix looked up at the resurrected townspeople, then back at her, speechless for once.
“The deed to this property and everything on it. It’s not so hard to sell, if you have something people really want.”
The townspeople circled round Felix, suddenly confident about how to use the weapons in their hands. A few of them appeared to have got mixed up. Norbert was wearing the Mayor’s top hat, and Dottie lit a cheroot off the sheriff’s badge on her tattered wa
itress’s uniform.
Felix looked up at the cloudless night sky. “Well, looks like you folks could use a little rain. Now, I’m not supposed to do this, but I’m having a special, I could give you a real gully-washer for $10 a minute . . .”
They ran him out of town after stripping him of the clothes. Turned him out into the desert as naked as he’d entered.
Norbert approached Dora, sheepishly twisting his new mayoral sash in his squirrelly hands. “Miss Moss? There is still the matter of the bill . . .”
Dora handed him a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills. “This should pay for you to get some billboards and some brochures made. You’re going to have to become some kind of tourist trap now, I suppose.”
“Will you be staying on awhile, Miss Moss?”
“No thank you, Norbert. This place is much too congested. Pack up my things, please.”
On her way out of town, Dora Moss stopped only to change the number on the roadside sign from 1 to 29.
NIGHTBOMB
VIOLET LEVOIT
The skyscrapers in THE DISTANT CITY were painted in grey and blue shapes, to confuse the bombers. The newspaper said the actress was still expecting.
“You know what I’d like?” he said. “I’d like to have a family of five kids, all of them cute as a button. And I’d take them to the circus to watch the dancing horses.”
She raised the blinds.
“Did you ever see the television program Nightbomb?” she asked. “It was a soap opera, in the town where I grew up.”
She reached for the lapel of his tuxedo. He grabbed her hand. “Don’t touch it. It’s a rental.”
There was a photograph in the newspaper, but it was out of focus. The dark blue sky in THE DISTANT CITY had searchlights crossing in white Xs. She was wearing her pearls.
“That actress is still expecting,” she said. “You know what I’d like? I’d like to have a family of five kids, all of them cute as a button. And I’d dress them in springtime colors for Easter services.” She counted on her fingers. “Green, blue, pink, yellow, and lavender.”
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 5
