Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  He had dug something up. He waited over it, eyes fixed on Aunty Em.

  Aunty Em suddenly gave a kind of coughing, stricken cry. Her hand went to her throat, and she dropped the rope. Dorothy knew then that Toto had done something terrible.

  Aunty Em broke into a run. “Horrible, horrible animal! Horrible, horrible dog!” she said, sounding as if she were coughing. She ran toward him, trying to pick up a handful of mud, to throw at him. She slipped onto her knees and kept sliding toward the thing from out of the ground.

  “Rob Roy,” cried Aunty Em, sobbing. “Oh, Robbie! Rob Roy!”

  Toto barked at her, just out of reach. He ran around her, bouncing furiously.

  Toto had dug up the corpse of another dog. Dorothy walked up next to her aunt and stood watching.

  “Toto, stop,” she said weakly.

  There was bone with some wet and bedraggled fur still clinging to it, and hollow eyes, and a doggy smile full of teeth, a large skeleton with some skin still attached, a long, big corpse of a huge long-haired animal.

  Aunty Em knelt in the mud, sobbing, covering her face.

  Raf raf, raf raf, said Toto. He came hopping toward Emma. He was small and fierce and full of hate. You see, you see? Toto seemed to say. You had one too.

  “Toto. Leave her alone,” whispered Dorothy.

  Aunty Em spun around and grabbed Dorothy and shook her, thick spittle clogging her lips, gray eyes wild. “Look at it! Look at it!” she demanded. “See it? See it? That’s death. That’s what your mother looks like now, in the ground.”

  Dorothy looked and saw the hollow eyes, the somewhat surprised and empty face that seemed to ask what had happened to itself. Where had it gone? Dorothy knew it was the truth. Her mother had no flesh now, or eyes, in the ground. Aunty Em wept, and Toto trotted back away, revenge taken. Dorothy saw him go, his tiny legs strutting across the gray mud, between rounded gray humps.

  Uncle Henry kept a shotgun leaning in the corner.

  Toto did not show up for a day or two. Dorothy knew enough not to mention him. She thought he was hiding, keeping low for a while. He was such a clever dog.

  But how low can you keep without disappearing, until you fade into less than a memory? When almost a week had passed, Dorothy asked if Aunty Em had seen Toto while she was away at school.

  Aunty Em was scrubbing. “No, I haven’t,” she said, lightly.

  “He’s been gone a long time.”

  “I expect he’s gone away,” said Aunty Em, not looking at her.

  “He wouldn’t do that,” said Dorothy.

  “Well, he kept staying away for longer and longer,” said Aunty Em.

  But he wouldn’t leave her, he wouldn’t leave Dorothy, she knew that.

  “Why would he run away?”

  “Guess he didn’t like it here.”

  Dorothy slumped down onto her mattress. Aunty Em couldn’t stand it when anyone else cried. If anyone had a right to cry, it was Aunty Em. She looked around the edge of the blanket.

  “There’s no point going against the will of God, if that’s what He’s decided,” said Aunty Em. Aunty Em looked at the good little girl who was so unhappy and relented a bit.

  “Toto wasn’t happy here, Dorothy. That’s why he kept barking all the time and running off and did all those terrible things. So, I reckon he’s gone off to find somewhere happier. Maybe he’s gone off to find your old house in St. Louis. Maybe he thinks your mama’s there. He’s a dog and doesn’t know any better.”

  “He wouldn’t leave me!” said Dorothy.

  “Well he has, and there’s no way around it but to get used to it,” said Aunty Em. Dorothy heard her boots on the floor as she walked away.

  Dorothy waited for Toto to come back. Maybe he had gone away because he knew he was bad and would come back when he thought he had been forgiven. Maybe you could find out you were bad, and go away from shame and come back when you were good again.

  Every day after school, when she came to the track that led to the farm, she would expect to see him again. Maybe this time, maybe this time, she thought every day all through the rest of that March, into April, into the fullness of the Kansas spring. From time to time, she would call his name, expecting to find him lying close to the ground, ready to spring up and run yipping to her.

  She knew just how she would feel when that happened. She knew there would be a leaping up of joy inside her, and she would say “Good Toto, good boy, good Toto,” and he would roll over and over and over, like he always did when he was especially glad to see her. That would happen, and everything would be all right.

  Whenever she heard a dog barking at night, the sound coming across the Kansas hills, she thought it was Toto. She would get up.

  “Dorothy. Where are you going?” demanded the voice in the darkness.

  “I think it’s Toto,” she would reply. “I think he’s come back.”

  “It’s not Toto. Get back to bed.” The voice would order.

  And Dorothy would slink guiltily back onto her bed, in an agony in case Toto came back and found no one there to greet him. She learned how to slip out of the window, into the cool spring night in just her nightgown.

  “Toto?” she would whisper, teeth chattering, icy mud between her toes. “Toto?”

  She started hiding her boots under the mattress. She would go out and hunt for Toto at night, stumbling across the Kansas plain, following the sound of the dogs. She would be sure that he was just a field or two away, lost, not quite able to find the tiny single-room house in the wide flat valley.

  One day after school, Uncle Henry met her at the crossroads and they walked together.

  “You’re still worried about Toto, ain’t you?” He said. His kindness was inseparable from his smell. He still reeked, and there was food in his beard.

  “When he can’t find my mama, will he come back here?” she asked.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s possible that Toto is dead, Dorothy.”

  Dorothy saw the bedraggled fur, the empty eyes.

  “If he is, then he’s with all the other good little dogs in Heaven, and we should be happy for him.”

  Dorothy said nothing.

  “So maybe he has found your mama,” said Uncle Henry. “And your little brother. Maybe they’re all together, just like they used to be.”

  “Maybe Wilbur’s there too,” she said. She still thought of Wilbur sometimes.

  “I should think that’s right,” said Uncle Henry. “So you say your prayers, and be a good little girl, you’ll join them one day. They’ll be waiting for you at the gate.”

  “By that time I’ll be too old, and I won’t care,” said Dorothy.

  But she didn’t stop hoping. She just knew she had to hide it. Whenever she heard a dog bark, she would look up in hope.

  But in another sense, Toto was always with her, silent and invisible, bouncing and spinning around her as she walked to and from school, or sleeping by the rusty stove while Dorothy did her homework. She could almost feel him, tiny and coarse-haired, growing warmer next to her at night.

  She told stories to herself to account for why he was still there. She could see the stories happening very clearly. There were thieves and they came and tied Aunty Em up and were going to steal money from the tin box behind the flue, but Toto came back and saw them and fetched Uncle Henry, and the thieves were foiled, so Toto was a hero. Aunty Em let him lick her face.

  Dorothy daydreamed many things, walking back and forth from the crossroads. She daydreamed that an angel came down, right in the middle of school, where all the other children could see her. And the angel said that because Dorothy was so good, she could have three wishes. And Dorothy would wish that her mother was back, and that her father came back, and that they all lived together in St. Louis. And the an
gel would smile and say, “Your wishes are granted,” and there would be a great wind that would pick Dorothy up and blow her through the sky, back home.

  She daydreamed the size of gravestone she would have. She thought that gravestones were earned by goodness, rather than paid for by money, and she imagined her gravestone, as big as a house, with angels carved all over it. Then she felt guilty because she knew her mother didn’t have one like that.

  She felt guilty remembering her mother. To dream that her mother was back, rocking Dorothy in her lap, singing to her, divided Dorothy in two. Because the mother who Dorothy remembered, soft-faced with pursed lips, was nothing like the mother Aunty Em talked about. She wasn’t wild, she was hardworking. She had to practice the piano and she had to rehearse. She wasn’t a poor, silly little thing. She was sensible and kept a cleaner house than Aunty Em did. She was often away and tried to make it up to Dorothy. Dorothy remembered her mother kneeling down on the floor with her to make cakes in the shape of men with sugar faces. She was sure she could remember her mother and her father having a snowball fight in the park. She could also remember her mother on the settee, sobbing, clasping her hands and saying, “Dear God, please don’t let me ask him back. Don’t let me call him back.” Outside on the street her father was walking away.

  To imagine she was back with her mother would remind Dorothy that something was wrong. Aunty Em was wrong. And Dorothy loved her Aunty Em. She had to love her. Everything depended on Aunty Em now. Her mother may have been beautiful and kind and sometimes terrible, but she couldn’t help Dorothy. She wasn’t there.

  Dorothy would have to divide and find different places to keep things within herself. Memories here, love here, hate there, dreams here, school there. And hope?

  She talked to Toto as she swept the floor, as she told Aunty Em she loved her, as she greased Uncle Henry’s boots.

  “Toto, you bad, bad dog,” she would tell him, in imitation of Aunty Em. She would whup him, and he would cower in the corner, shaking. She would beat him mercilessly with the broom, kick him in the ribs and out of the door.

  “Sit up and beg,” she would tell him, and he did, feet pumping helplessly in midair, waiting for an answer that never came.

  On the wall, there was an old sample, slightly charred in one corner. It was signed in needlework: Millie Branscomb, aged 8, 1856.

  “There is no place like home,” it said.

  And there wasn’t, not anywhere.

  Culver City, California

  February 1939

  We have also seen, that, among democratic nations, the sources of poetry are grand, but not abundant. They are soon exhausted: and poets, not finding the elements of the ideal in what is real and true, abandon them entirely and create monsters. I do not fear that the poetry of democratic nations will prove insipid, or that it will fly too near the ground; I rather apprehend that it will be forever losing itself in the clouds, and that it will range at last to purely imaginary regions. I fear that the productions of democratic poets may often be surcharged with immense and incoherent imagery, with exaggerated descriptions and strange creations; and that the fantastic beings of their brain may sometimes make us regret reality.

  —Alexis de Tocqueville,

  Democracy in America

  If I only had a heart, lamented the Tin Man, close on half a century ago. In our contemporary fantasies, the androids are made of sterner stuff . . .

  —Sheila Johnston, in a review of the movie Robocop,

  from The Independent, February 4, 1988

  It was five-thirty when Millie got to work. Five-thirty in the morning, that is. Took the bus. Knew most everybody on it. They all worked for the studio too. She said Hello to them; they murmured back. She got a couple of minutes’ shut-eye, forehead on hand. She could feel the cough and throb of the bus through her elbow as it rested on the edge of the window.

  A few minutes before they arrived, Millie put a fresh piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint in her mouth, gathered up her bag and thermos flasks, and got up. She stood by the middle door, early, to avoid the exodus. Practically the whole dang bus got off at MGM.

  The morning smelled of unburned gas and it was dark. There were pools of light around the studio. Millie said hi to Joe at the gate. She always brought him a thermos of coffee.

  “Hi, Joe. Boys here yet?” she asked him.

  “Yup. They’ll be in the chair. Most of the kids are here too.” He thanked Millie for his coffee and passed her yesterday’s empty thermos.

  “Welp. Off to work,” said Millie. “Say hello to Joyce for me.”

  Millie had been over to their place. Lived in Santa Monica, right near her. Nice, ordinary people. Most of the people working at Culver were nice, except for the bigwigs and some of the actors. Even most of them were okay. So how many folks are wonderful at five-thirty in the morning?

  Sometimes actors were. There were some of them who were just never offstage. They’d talk to you and keep you entertained while you worked. It was one of the many good things about this job.

  Millie’s shoes clicked on the concrete as she walked to the trailers. Cold this hour of the morning. Her gum clicked too. Millie liked the sound of punctuation and of process. She liked things to move, for herself and other people. Why she was so good at her job. Lots of people around who could do makeup. But there was more to the job than that.

  Millie managed the team when Jack Dawn wasn’t around. She would check out her boys and girls, get them all lined up, schedules ready. They were good kids, hardworking. This danged picture is made of makeup, Millie thought, hours of it every morning. Latex and fur and all of that stuff.

  But nothing ever again, Millie thought, could be as bad as those darned Munchkins. One hundred and twenty-four of them all lined up in Rehearsal Hall 8, moving from chair to chair like it was an assembly line. Hard work, but the Little People were fine to work with. Millie had no time for the stories. Millie told her crew to treat them as adults, call them Mr., Miss, or Mrs. and to watch out for knives. Only one or two of them had knives, the real deadbeats, the drunks. Most of them were sweet and looked kinda lost. Like they woke up in the wrong world. But all this sexual business that people were saying. That was just their own dirty minds. The Little People were sweet as could be and as innocent as lambs. Heck, a lot of them had to be. There was something wrong with their glands. A lot of them had foreign accents and got totally lost in the studio. Had to be led around like a class of schoolchildren.

  Humiliating for them really. Dressed up in those horrible clothes that pansy had designed for them. Get you, sweetie. Put them in big collars, loose sleeves, to make them look even smaller. Costumes were so bad, they had to have people help them out of them when they had to pee. People were just so mean. One minder used to carry them to the john, one under each arm. “What am I, a nursemaid?” Insulting. They didn’t like it either, Big Man. That poor little fellow who fell into the john and couldn’t get out? We put big ugly red spots on their cheeks. Supposed to look like they were made of porcelain. Big deal. I just told the kids to treat them with respect.

  Lights on inside and warmer.

  “Hi, Millie.”

  “Hiya, Tony.”

  “Storm last night.”

  “Yeah, big wind. Any damage to your place?” Millie asked.

  “No. But we got a lot of sweeping up to do. Lots of eucalyptus, and you know how they shed bark.”

  “Not a problem we ever had in Missouri. Got all your gear?” Tony had been new, brought in to help handle the Munchkins. Jack had him stay on to train. “Got your pencils, spirit gum?” Millie asked. Her fingers rattled through the box.

  “Mmmm hmmm,” said Tony, sharpening an eyebrow pencil.

  “You mix this today?” The spirit gum.

  “Uh, no, that’s yesterday’s.”

  “Wel
l it looks like it. That stuff’s murder at the best of times. You better mix it new.”

  “Okey-dokey.”

  Nice ordinary people.

  Millie looked at the schedule. “How come you’re doing Frank?”

  “Jack and Harry and me switch.”

  “Oh, sorry, he did tell me. Slipped my mind this hour of the morning.” Millie thought of Frank Morgan. “Don’t light a match,” she warned the kid.

  Tony smiled. “I know.”

  Frank Morgan liked his tipple.

  “See you later.”

  “See you.”

  Just a quick hiya to the old hands. They knew enough to mix their gum fresh. Hi Tommy, Hi Mort, Hi Bill. Bad storm last night. Drains on our street’s all blocked. This city is not designed for rain.

  Millie got to her own locker and hauled out her kit. Looked like a toolbox. My little pirate’s chest of goodies, thought Millie. All kinds of colors, hard to get. If I lose this, I might as well close up shop for good. Now let’s see. Bit of mascara, eyebrows. Today is black-and-white, isn’t it, so the lips are going to have to be even lighter than usual or she’ll end up looking like Theda Bara. There now. Take all this over, have it ready, and pull back the Technicolor stuff so I don’t make a mistake.

  Millie loaded it all into a bag and walked down the hall away from the dressing rooms. She walked down the corridor, stepped outside. Everything was a beautiful blue color now, cool with quite a wind blowing. It whipped the back of her coat up. She walked onto Stage 27. Monkeys were all over the rafters, fixing lights. Paint was still drying on the Kansas backdrop outside the window. Twelve-foot-wide moat between the wall and the set, filled with a bank of lights. Thank God those lights were off for once. Millie was cold, but not that cold. She went to the stars’ dressing room, a trailer they had wheeled on to the stage, and opened it up. Millie had a key. She opened it up and laid the makeup out on the table.