You don’t know it, this painting. Rockwell never struck you as being much, even during the war when he was booming. At the time, composing your own stark but layered compositions while painting portraits on the side to make the money your deeper art wasn’t providing didn’t require the influence of adept, albeit superficial illustrators. It was only after coming home that the impossibility of ever doing portraiture again quickly became apparent. When you have Prosopagnosia, humanity’s collective face is a legion of mannequins. Individual features become unrecognizable. And while you could still illustrate bodies and settings at a high level of competence and grace, the faces were a mess—unremarkable, lifeless caricatures. How an alien might interpret a human face.
More often than not however, they were annihilated, grotesque aberrations you wouldn’t show a soul.
One day some oddball happens to see these at your yard sale, and offers a huge sum for what he considered revolutionary, avant-garde work. Especially the more gruesome pieces. Having already spent your GI Bill money that you’d intended for art school on therapy for your face-blindness, you sell him everything you have, put the cash in a saving’s account, and never pick up a paint brush again.
“We’ll APB the car and sticker as soon as we get back,” says Hiram. “Good thing Lacy had some taste, huh?”
You smile. “She still married me though.”
Route 380 slithers ahead against the Capitan Mountains with their perpetual dapple of cirrocumulus clouds pluming from their summits. At the 220 junction, the blacktop starts to break down, and the Plymouth’s suspension protests the inefficiency. In the back seat, the box containing the syrettes from the campaign murder scene rattle like hail. You reach behind you and pluck one out.
Holding it up to your eye: “Do we know for sure what’s in this?”
Hiram frowns at the syrette. “Supposed to be morphine, isn’t it?”
You squeeze the empty plastic ampule. “Normally, yeah. But we should send them to Albuquerque for testing, just to be certain.”
“What the hell for? Those Doll lunatics probably pop themselves so they don’t feel a damn thing before getting down to their psycho business.”
Hiram being dismissive. Every time you think he’s done being that way...
“That’s just it though,” you say. “With morphine you’d go numb fast and eventually lose consciousness. You wouldn’t be able to shoot up a place and make off with all those kids.”
~ ~ ~
Over the next ten minutes, you sip your coffee and watch Celine as she stalks the new strangers from behind the counter, the ones you figure for GIs. At one point she mutters something across the counter to her trucker suitor, and his one-word response snarls back clearly: Swishes.
You only realize the old timer with the dollhouse and pie-dish face is looking your way when he doffs an imaginary hat and says, “Morning.”
“Morning,” you echo.
You take in the Victorian dollhouse. Lovely craftsmanship if nothing else, though the front door’s scale still looks off.
“You make that?” you ask him.
The man inhales slowly and says, “Yes.”
“Very nice.”
“Thank you kindly, son. Making them twenty years now. My sister, Hazel, she makes jam. Huckleberry and boysenberry. Along with my pension, we do alright. The name’s Byron.”
Chatty codger. You return the hand and introduce yourself, wincing at the discomfort you no doubt flared up in his snarled knuckles with your Limey-lineage grip. His stoicism on the matter however tells you you’ve done right by him in hoarding your guilt and not apologizing, so you take to skimming the merchandise on the walls—all the framed quilt squares, shadow-boxed DiMaggio figurines, and Packard hubcaps.
And yes, the Rockwell war bond images and several other standards are there too, though none fit the bill.
You notice the GIs have moved over to the jukebox now, and Celine has shifted down the counter to stay close, Chiclets popping between her teeth.
Whatever song that had been playing which you hadn’t noticed before anyway, ends, and a new one starts, no doubt selected by the GI with the heavy left foot who’s now snapping along to it. Matchbox. Carl Perkins.
Back to Byron’s dollhouse. “You selling it?”
Byron’s listing head suggests forlorn love to you. Or maybe he’s just a bit dim.
“Yes, sir. Pity to see it go though. Built it for my boy way back when.” He reaches over to the rather bloated, powder-blue door and raps a gentle knock. “A little man’s behind it.”
“Yeah, huh?” you say, your eyes volleying between Celine and the pair of former soldiers who seem to be giving the place a good looking-over.
You don’t see it, but you feel the old man lean closer to you. One of your many sensory compensations as a direct result of your affliction.
“Would you like to see him?” he whispers in your ear...
~ ~ ~
Three days before you’re slated to return (officially) to duty, you poke your head into Hiram’s office to check in.
“Crown Vic that best matches is registered to one Clarence Sheppard, retired doctor,” Hiram says. “Wife, Florence Sheppard. No children. Jesus, I wonder if it’s the same people.”
“What people?” you ask.
You don’t step in fully. Hiram’s in one of his moods. His Red-Sox-have-lost-three-in-a-row-again moods. He rocks back in his chair until he’s certain the creaks and whines have reached all the offices.
“My old partner, Max, got the call a few years back. This woman’s water broke in a post office. Florence Sheppard. Well, when he got there, it turned out to be a miscarriage. The fetus, it just spilled out on the linoleum. Was dead before the ambulance arrived. Still wrenches at my heart to think about it.” And he flaps a hand at invisible flies. “Anyway, they’re dead too now, so...”
“Jesus,” you say.
“Oh yeah, before I forget...” he says, plucking something off his desk. “Here...”
He tosses you a brown evidence envelope stamped with the city of Albuquerque forensics department seal. Inside is one of the syrettes from the campaign crime scene with requisite lab report.
“Epinephrine...” you mutter.
“Get that, huh?” says Hiram. “I guess they weren’t dulling their senses after all. Our Dolls need a boost.”
Random notions carom through your belly that refuse to consolidate.
“Any line on that bumper sticker?”
Hiram starts to yawn. “Bupkis,” he says. “Any one of a thousand places can probably score you a sticker like that.”
The dynamo cranking up in your brain is just enough to drown out Hiram’s insolence.
“Do you know if that place next to the church out on 285 still sells all those sundries and such?”
Hiram frowns. “How should I know? Only time I ate there, I got the poops.”
“Lacy liked them. They’re partial to Rockwell if I remember right.”
“Celine’s,” says Hiram, snapping a finger. “A fine specimen of womanhood she still is...”
“Think I’ll head over tomorrow,” you say. “Snoop around for the day. See if anything bites.”
~ ~ ~
Byron’s about to open the blue dollhouse door for you when his sister, finally returning from the bathroom, asks him what he’s doing.
“Showing him the little man,” Byron says.
She squints holy-hell at him before turning to you. “My brother tends to forget his wits sometimes. Been talking up extra-terrestrials since we drove through Roswell last summer. I’m Hazel, by the way.”
Another round of handshakes, though you’re extra careful this time as hers are all marbles and bird-bones under your grip.
The GI’s have split off, each moving to the furthest ends of the dining room, and when one of them—the one with the draggy foot—reaches into his duffle, you slip your own hand into your jacket to grip your .38.
You only relax some when a
pamphlet comes out of the duffle, which he hands to a diner.
The other’s doing the same at your end of the room, eventually moving towards you and laying a religious brochure on the counter and saying, “God bless you,” in a peculiar, high-pitched voice.
Hazel lemon-puckers, and as soon as the man has moved out of earshot, mocks his voice to Byron, which he bats away as if it had wings.
You don’t want to turn back to the blue-hairs. You want to keep tracking the two soldiers. But neither can you be rude, and it’s when you regard Hazel again that you finally notice the badge pinned to her jacket’s lapel.
“You working for the campaign?”
Her plucky expression turns somber. “Just volunteered the other day. Replacements, you know, for that horribleness a few weeks back. I pray you find those beasts.”
“Likewise,” you say, and slide off the stool. “That the bathroom?”
“Sure is,” says Hazel. “Well, I think we’ll be going ourselves. It was nice meeting you, Mr. Dewey.”
In walking past her, you happen to glance into the bag next to Byron and see the tops of about a dozen jars.
“Byron tells me you make jam,” you say.
She gathers her bag, sliding the straps gingerly over her shoulder, and smiles. “Just my way of preserving the wholesomeness of young hearts and minds. Perhaps you’d like to buy some? Only a quarter per jar?”
You have no sweet-tooth to speak of, but to tell her that is a heartbreak in the making, so you go with a noncommittal but safe, “Maybe next time.”
Byron groans as he lifts the dollhouse, and though you’re tempted to offer a hand, you hold your place and watch them shuffle slowly out the door and into the brewing storm.
The bathroom’s tight and drafty, and your stream’s long to flow. You prop an arm against the wall and roll your forehead against it, and you think about Lacy’s last day and the bad way she’d left it with her sister over which final arrangements would best please their mother. If there were two more harboring, entrenched people on Earth, you’ve yet to meet them. Primo clingers; eternal keepers of the pettiest, shallowest worst of our species.
Your eyes wander to the small window, and out to where the chapel across the lot sits. The view isn’t all that different from the one through the end dormer of the bedroom you shared with Lacy.
It’s Andrew Wyeth’s Wind from the Sea, if only half the size and with a tattered roller shade instead of billowing sheer curtains.
Nearing the end of your dribble, and your thoughts shift to Casey for the stretch run. At sixteen, she’s the oldest of the missing. The youngest, seven. The horrors of what may have befallen them flipbook through your brain, and lurking between the pages is the notion that what frightens you more than the times you live in is having some future generation look back upon your epoch as sanguine and ideal.
By this point your eyes have drifted enough that they fall upon Boy and Girl Gazing at the Moon on the bathroom door.
A sticker. Same as the one on the suspects’ sedan.
As you stare at it, you can’t help ponder how even more suspect you’ve come to find Rockwell’s work since the war. How your hewn conditioning has you searching out the sanctimonious, snickering, sadistic spirit surely lurking behind each stroke—every sugary suckle to authority, every aggrandized slice of piety, every biblical notion of corporal recompense—even when gut and brain protest that nothing of the sort exists. But you’re so compelled to spot the bill of goods nesting within that you’ve ascribed cynicism and meaning into a thing self-consciously conceived with a precise lack thereof—
A colossal blast erupts from the dining room then. So powerful is the report that you tumble back against the window, fracturing it.
Screams and panic follow, then more blasts, which in turn yield less screams, and you’re scrambling to your feet in the bathroom and drawing your gun and edging forward because you’ve done this before.
Movement through the spider-cracks of the window you’d inadvertently elbowed halts you however, and what you ultimately see in the rear lot between the diner and the chapel, jump-starts your adrenaline: the two-tone Crown Vic, parked not twenty feet away.
The sticker on its bumper, a perfect match.
How you’d missed it not moments earlier...
You crouch down and ease open the door, and beyond the prong of your gun-sight stands something out of a fever-dream: Two life-sized Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, sawed-off shotguns braced at the hip. Andy in a western duster over his blue overalls and red-white checkered shirt, twin Colt Peacemakers cross-holstered at the belt. Ann in her white smock over blue gingham dress, a fierce Indian war bonnet crowning her masked head.
You dive behind the counter just as Andy unloads where your head was a second earlier. Plaster and wood explodes against your ear, and when you start to crawl to the other end of the counter to head them off, some customer’s decapitated body blocks your path.
“Let’s go!” you hear one of them bark.
Soon as the door jingles, you’re on your feet, nearly slipping several times on spilled food and blood. You allow yourself a cursory look at the bloodbath, and it’s enough.
If Pollock had done Autumn Rhythm in blood, this is what you would’ve glimpsed.
Outside you’re all but blinded by hurling sand, and only the subsequent gunshots from behind the diner orient you. No sooner do you round the corner that you nearly trip over another body. You see enough to know its Celine’s paramour, the truck driver; despite the shredded crater of his chest, his hat has somehow stayed on his head. There are other bodies about, but you can’t tell if they’re Celine, or the GIs, or that old couple, and you wonder which of them is still inside, or dead, or...
You spot The Dolls running through the parking lot, just as they’re splitting up. Ann heads towards the open desert, swallowed instantly by the brown-out. Andy bolts for the chapel. You hesitate a moment as your foot crushes one of the Epinephrine syrettes before taking off after Andy.
~ ~ ~
III
George—he was your squad’s medic—he told you once that the femoral artery is about the diameter of an adult male pinky. An interesting fact at the time. Less so now that you’re using said digit to staunch the flow from your own mangled leg.
Bottom line, the full-bore slug had only grazed you. An inch in and your leg would be lying somewhere around the chapel’s entrance.
The shot blew out from the other side of a door adjacent to the altar. Whether it leads to a rectory or private office, you can’t say, only that in the exchange after chasing Andy into the church, and prior to his diving into the room, you’re sure you’d scored a hit before his return volley punched you back.
Now you listen to the whimpers spilling through the door as you work off your belt —laments that seem borne less from pain than melancholy. Occasionally the gibberish crests, and only then does the mantra turn clear.
“Where’s the kid? Where’s the kid...?”
The gall’s just too much, and the rage wells up from your toes and spools in your stomach until you can’t check it anymore.
“Where the hell is Casey!” you holler back. “What have you done with her?”
If Dali’s The Visage of War had been painted in pure emotion, this is how you feel.
No sooner do you start to tourniquet your leg that the door behind which Andy cowers erupts in a geyser of splinters.
Your eyes and tongue burn instantly from the burst of cordite and pulverized oak unleashed by his six-shooters.
“Where’s the boy?”
The words snivel through the door, screechy and crackling.
“Tell me where Casey is!” you scream back. You grip at the petaled wound on your leg, but the tapered break of your femur keeps stabbing into your palm, prompting your initial pinky-plugging of the exposed artery. Blood still laps between your fingers in rolled sheets though, and in a single breath you howl out all the foiling and lies of all of your years.
Gathering your bearings, you say, “Are they still alive? Is Casey...?”
Slow, broken breaths from behind the door.
“No more or less...than you or me,” Andy’s voice hisses back, giggling.
If Ernst could’ve done L’Ange du Foyer in sound, this would be Andy’s voice personified.
You’re set to retort his woolly horseshit when the wall over your head explodes.
Movement through the ensuing smoke and debris; someone juking to see through the same haze. To this you train your .38 and fire.
Another shotgun blast high and to the right. In the empty church, it thunders like a howitzer.
Behind the door, Andy starts yelling again for the boy.
“You alright!” hollers the new shooter. Ann, no doubt. Gravelly and aggressive is the voice, and yet the familiarity...
“Get the boy!” shrieks Andy.
“He’s in the car, idiot! We gotta hop!”
You think: getaway driver?
“Bring him here!”
A possible third shooter?
Muted grumblings from Ann, then, “Alright goddammit—hold tight!” And he/she lumbers back down the aisle.
You cycle through the voices you’d heard not fifteen minutes earlier, then press down again on your shattered leg and roar.
There’s no painting you can think of for this level of agony.
“Hurtin’ much, friend?”
You realize you’re being addressed through the door once you rotate back to the world from the pain hell that’s your thigh.
“No,” you say. “How about you, asshole?”
More giggles, sniffles, and more giggles, then, “I’m used to hurtin’,”
You’re feeling yourself wane. Your eyes cross and re-cross, and you wonder, Jesus, how much blood have you lost?
“Just please tell me...Are they alive? Those kids...?”
Multiple hammer clicks from the shredded door. Andy’s empty. The hammy groan that follows verifies it, and you take this interval to reload your own weapon.
“In one’s heart, nothing ever dies, does it?” Andy says, chasing it with muted whimpers. “Ooh-wee, gosh-darnit, that smarts! Hey, friend, I’d offer you some pain-poppers, but I’m plum out myself.”
American Nightmare Page 3
