by D. Foy
I choked down my shot and began to convulse…
When at last I came to from an apparent fit of speaking in tongues, Basil was standing above me, rubbing his eyes. He looked hideous and comical, encrusted with mud, it and that hat perched on his head like some ugly bird from the sea.
“Maybe you guys’ve got the skinny from the inside,” he said, “but I haven’t understood half the crap this whacko said.”
“So your question is…?” Lucille said.
“Hatchet Lady!” Hickory said.
“Nice,” Dinky said.
On the mantle, between a badly carved falcon and some frou-frou matches, stood a little doll from Mexico, huaraches, serape, sombrero, all. When you pulled the sombrero off its head, a giant boner sprang from its pants, only some wise guy had wedged a twig beneath the thing’s sombrero to keep the boner boned.
I held up the mannequin like some ventriloquist’s dummy. “This is not a prison,” it said. “Because if it is, what the heck is the world?”
Dinky coughed. “Well put, mannequin,” he said.
“You, my fat-headed friend,” said Basil as he whirled on Dinky with more savagery than he seemed able, “had better watch it.”
Dinky fell into another fit, his worst so far. Super had returned to fix the phone, I remembered. That’s what he’d been doing in the basement, working on the wires for the phone. If the phone worked, we could call for help, we could bring in a winch for Basil’s truck. And if the roads hadn’t been washed away like They were saying they might, we could run our friend to the doc’s and throw a celebration. And if the phone didn’t work, well, Super had got here somehow. If he was here, so was his truck.
Fancy ideas, and probable, too, had the phone not been made worthless for good. From the other room, the news warned folks trapped in the storm to remain inside with patience. Mr and Mrs Jones would love this, I thought, free of the flood in their cozy dens. They’d hunker round the tube with their top-shelf booze and gourmet ale to point and exclaim, taken for a time from gluing their models or paging through zines or waking from another nap.
Dinky was hacking so bad my friends couldn’t help but see. They gathered round him now, outrageous. They wouldn’t admit it, not yet, but the sons of bitches were scared. Dinky looked worse than he had in the rain. “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” Hickory said, and cried.
Pretty soon they got him on the couch, and pretty soon again he set into the lines from some old poem while making gestures no one could stop. “Dinky’s sick,” he said. “He must die—Lord, have mercy on us!” Then he’d cough or burble or whimper or sometimes even laugh. And then the tedium would repeat.
“That’s not funny, Dink,” Basil kept saying. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s no joke,” I said.
“Really?” Lucille said. “Maybe you could tell me what you’re doing with that mannequin then.”
“Not right now,” Basil told her. “Just don’t.”
“Well,” Lucille said, “then maybe you’ll let me know when I’ve got your permission, O Lord of Lords.”
“I’m serious, Lucille.”
I dropped the mannequin and kicked it. “Now you’re serious. It takes Stuyvesant getting like this for you to get serious.”
“That supposed to mean something?”
“Unbelievable,” I said.
“What, like you’ve been telling me something?” Basil said. He flung his hand toward Dinky. “I mean, look at the bastard.”
Hickory’s face had become a mask, not so much of sadness or despair, though these were plain, too, in a tired sort of way, but more of simple disgust. “Someone get me a towel,” she said. “And another pillow.”
We heard Lucille in the kitchen rifling through cupboards and drawers. From another room a door skreeked open, and Lucille returned with a rag and icky pillow.
“The situation’s evident,” I said. “But if we stay here much longer we might not be able to leave.”
“Anyone can see he’s sick, dork,” Basil said. “A fucking bat in a goddamned fucking cave could see that.”
“Dinky’s sick, he must die—Lord, have mercy on us!”
Hickory took the rag from the bowl and passed it over Dinky’s head. She caressed him with easy words.
“Anyone,” I said, “could’ve seen the guy was sick a-way back when, squeeze. But no one here gave a goddamn till the shit was in their face.”
“Who cares?” Lucille said. “The point is we give a damn now. At least I do.” She looked like she’d just been indicted for some heinous crime. Her eyes leapt from face to face. “I do care,” she said.
“Not enough,” I said, “to’ve ever been straight with him. Not when you had the chance.”
“I know you’re not talking about what I think you’re talking about.”
“Just how many were there before the Gladden brothers, Lucy? How many after?”
“That’s not fair, AJ.”
“Or what about telling us all why you didn’t care for Dinky enough to confess the fun you were having that summer he was away? Or any other time you couldn’t shrug off your seven-month itch.”
I was getting to her all right. She was crumbling. “That’s not fair,” she said.
“You think he doesn’t know all about your games?”
“You don’t know the half of it, you bastard,” she said. “I had my reasons.”
“You did,” I said. “And I know the hole they crawled out of.”
“That’s not fair. It’s not fair.”
“It’s a little hard to cry wolf when you’re one of them.”
“None of that stuff had anything to do with how I feel about Dinky. How would you know what he means to me?”
“I wouldn’t, Lucy. That’s my point. I can’t see you give a stinking straw for the son of a bitch.”
“You bastard.”
I ignored her and went on. “Is that what you told Basil last summer, fucking him under that Mexican moon? I know how you are, Lucy. Hang the cost! Shit. You care so much for Dinky you just sent him into a hurricane for a bag of ice.”
Basil rose. “I should cave your skull in right fucking now.”
My hands flipped up to frame my face with a set of waggling fingers. Somewhere in my heart I’d hoped to look like Munch’s screaming man. “I’m sooooo fwightened,” I said. And then I snarled. “You cock head. If you had anything in your skull to make it worthwhile, I’d have done you a lifetime back.”
Basil stood there in his suit of mud. He still had that blackface, and the hat besides, perched on his head like an ugly bird.
“I’m your boss,” he said. “Remember that? In fact, now that I think about it, I’m your former boss.”
“I never worked for you.”
“I suppose I’m not the one who’s been signing your checks these last eight years then.”
“You jerk. Everyone here knows your grandma owns the buildings. That she got from your grandpa no less. All of which makes you nothing but a trust-fund piece of crap with insurance and fancy clothes.”
My friend was fazed, I could see, but that didn’t keep him from shooting back. “It’s a hell of a lot better than being a talent-lacking toilet-scrubber,” he said.
“Dinky’s sick, he must die—Lord, have mercy on us!”
Hickory had stayed by Dinky throughout, hand-in-hand, passing the rag along his brow. Now she turned our way with liquid eyes.
“Please, you guys,” she said. “Stop.”
“Dinky’s sick, he must die—”
“Shut up!” Basil said.
“Dinky,” Lucille said, “we’re going to get you out of here.”
“After Pac Bell comes in to fix the phone we might,” I said.
“Dinky’s sick, he must—”
“Dinky,” Lucille said.
“He must die—Lord, have mercy on us!”
“He doesn’t even know what he’s saying anymore,” Hickory said.
“Maybe Super’s still ar
ound,” I said.
“What?” said Lucille.
“Fuck that guy,” said Basil.
“No,” I said. “I mean, if he’s around, so’s his truck. He had to get here somehow, didn’t he?”
“If we can find him,” Hickory said.
“Maybe we can. Me and Basil, I mean. At least we can try.”
“The hell I am. After what he did to me?”
“What he did to you?” said Lucille. “I thought you said he was just some old nut.”
“But you don’t know. The guy’s a freak, as in for real. It’s like he’s the actual devil or something.”
“That doesn’t mean he won’t help us,” I said.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Another fit had settled over Dinky, the coughing again, the same spewing again of blood and phlegm. I smoothed his blanket and dabbed his mouth. Hickory told me to kill my smoke, so I got up and took about fourteen slugs of bourbon. Then I went into the storm, hollering out for some wild old man, with his wasted monkey and bed of dolls and dog standing quietly by. An emptiness had opened up inside me. The night was wet and black and empty and cold, and I was scared, more so than I’d ever been. Maybe this is it, I thought, maybe this is where I’ll see the face no one but the dead have ever seen. But maybe I won’t be dead, just almost-dead, just passed out kind of in a forest of mud, curled up like some little bald worm in the mud.
THERE ARE TIMES YOU SEE THE ROT YOU’VE always been. My days were a trail of liquor-store bumblings and sunrise guilt, and every penny I’d earned these years had come to rest in a dirty glass. I’d ceased caring for others, and definitely for myself. The only things that mattered were booze and books. Scrubbing toilets—the very ones I’d puked into so many times—that was what I knew. The hurly burly of solitude that took me come each day’s midnight had stripped any cool I might still have owned a long time back. Night after night, in the chill of an empty school, my ambitions fell away like leaves from boughs in autumn. And wandering those halls, moving from bin to toilet to bin, the few kind trophies of memory that did remain floated by as evil nymphs—evil because angelic, angelic because there in the corridors of my past those trophies were safe from deeper ruin. And like angels they were accessible in only the cruelest of ways. What was the good in having something you could never hold?
Dozing behind the desks in that collegiate gloom, the times of my youth would tiptoe up with a sort of wary glee, now days of drowsing in my grandfather’s swing, now lightning in a field. Grape juice popsicles melted in my hand, beneath the shade of a swaying oak. My young mother would come to play in the wading pool. And rustling leaves, and tinkling ice, and the buzzing of bees, and pie…
And now? Now I was a shrunken head…
In the cabin some jazzy swing had commenced. Any other day it would’ve been a finger-snapping bop for Lucky Strikes and gimlets and velvet gowns on creamy skin, spiffed up wingtips and watches on fobs, dipping your darling with her mouth full of giggles and hot white teeth—Bobby Darin crooning for the sharks and the billowing blood. But that was not the case tonight. Tonight was a heckler in the dark.
I remembered in the midst of my shouting the light I’d seen through the trees when after the wreck Super brought us home. Dinky had said he had no neighbors, but if that were true, what was behind the light? A couple hundred yards down the road, I met another that spliced away, made just of dirt albeit. At first I couldn’t see zilch, much less a would-be light. The wind roaring as it was, the water coming down as it was, not from the sky at the moment, but from the trees, with needles and leaves and dirt, and the groaning of the trees and rush off the mountain of water still in sheets, it was all I could do to keep from turning back. It seemed to me the notion of a boob to walk up that road alone—surely I’d deserve whatever I got. Who knew what I’d find, if not Super or a neighbor then may chance a pissed off lion, as scared as I was scared and hungry as hell besides. And what if I did find a man, but that man was no neighbor or even a neighborly man, but the kind Basil had always feared, the freak in the plastic suit, with six fingers and toes and a penis on his chin, wielding a flamethrower and Sawzall both? Not good, not good, any way you sliced it, not a bit of it was good. On the other hand, who the frick cared what I found? If I did nothing, chances we all croaked up here on the mountain wouldn’t be so slim. Certainly Dinky wasn’t going to mend. The guy needed a doctor, pronto. Not to mention if I ran off now, down the line I’d have to live with myself, a prospect at its best unspeakably vile. Getting killed was preferable to such a fate, honestly. I hoofed it up the road therefore on a bit less than faith, my adrenalin pumping as I stumbled along. And then I saw it, like before, a single light shining faintly through the trees. So it was actually there. So I had not been totally tripping. And lights meant power, and power, human beings. My eyes swelled bigger, then, I was ready for the worst, though just what I’d do when the worst came down, the best could never say. The road wound toward the light, but dwindled soon to a shabby trail leading higher up the mountain than the light had had me guess. Oh well. I’d gone this far, and now I had to see it through. The trail wended on, this way and that, until abruptly it debouched onto a tiny glade crepuscular with the light of a bulb on a wire through trees about twenty feet up. In the middle of the glade was a grimy tent, that was all, shaking in the wind. I cast about, struggling to discern a figure or shape, something squirming hogtied in a bag near the edge of the glade, I didn’t care, I only wanted the what-was-what, even if that what was drastic. But I saw nothing but the rickety tent—not a clothesline, not a fire pit, not a chair or box or ice chest or stove, just a rickety, grimy tent. It simply didn’t make sense, this scene. What was the source of this odd light’s power? And who needed light to sleep in a tent, since pretty plainly nothing else was happening here? And why even a tent, in this of all wicked places? The last thing I wanted was to look inside, but knew I couldn’t do other. That no doubt would be the test. The tent could even have been booby trapped, I thought. The freak with his bear-hide cowl and dick-chin and bones could be lurking anywhere, really, patiently waiting me out, itsy bitsy fly that I’d then be. And that was all it would take, my stepping into the creepy glade, whereon the fiend could drill an arrow through my neck or maybe just wait snaggletoothed and grinning till I stepped in the jaws of the trap he’d camo’d at the front of the tent, then rush up to hack out the pieces of me he’d forthwith set to slobbering on while writhing in eldritch pain and eldritch horror I lay by watching, pathetic. A few minutes of this whimsy later, having been struck that I could stand there forever conjuring the scene of my demise, I set toward the tent, listening through the wrack for some atypical sound, however teensy, however bright, anything to presage if only by an instant my impending harm, pressing on through the aura the hammer of my heart had generated round me, turned by now half-puke/half-stone, my legs prehistoric sarcophagi. My vision had contracted into the space of the tent itself, buffered all around by a band of quivering mist. And the closer I drew, the farther away the tent seemed to get, until in the space of a step the distance vanished, and there I stood before the tent. It seemed almost a being itself, the tent, its canvas in the wind like the skin of a creature from the sea or the north, a leviathan, suddenly, hunkered in the mud, I could easily have believed. Somehow I’d taken the zipper in hand, itself already half undone, and slid it till the entrance material had crumpled at my feet. And yet when I leaned into the tent, expecting who knows what to materialize before me—a stack of corpses, a cache of grub, magazines of ammo, maybe, tent-top high—what should I find but… nothing. The tent was as empty as a dead man’s mind, not a scrap to be found, nothing so much as a wayward battery or dented cup, nor candy bar wrapper nor length of string nor nubbins of some candle. And it was then I saw the nature of terror, because it was then the nature of my predicament, like a toxic cloud, swallowed me utterly up. Terror, I realized, had nothing to do with time and space but with the absence of them, and with the incomprehensibil
ity of that absence. There before that rotting little tent empty in the night in the glade in the forest in the heart of a pulsing storm, the emptiness of my life, and of my aloneness in it, usurped my thoughts with cruelty I couldn’t fathom. A cipher just the moment before, the tent was now clothed in the powers of a totem, implausibly vicious, and I was numb head to toe, not a single atom free. I turned away in my deadness and broke through the night, blind, numb, thoughtless, empty, dead, Frodo in his fog of malice having donned that hideous Ring. I don’t know how long I ran, but only that I ran till the earth resolved to steal my feet. My face had hit the mud at the base of the trail. I’d tripped on a branch, and lay in the mud, now, gasping for breath as once again the rain came down. When finally I rolled over and planted my hand, instead of the sense of slimy mud, the crinkle of cellophane brought me to. And what should that cellophane be part of, I saw, but an empty pack of smokes, Pall Malls, no doubt, goddamn. I dropped the thing and ran up the road shouting once more for Super. I shouted and cried, but come the fork at the road to the cabin, I’d seen nothing, Super most of all. What was the use. There was no use. Nothing mattered. Uselessness ruled. The numbness had left me. I had returned, my body in woe, the wet and the cold and the bitterness of my presence in their midst. I put my hands in my pockets and chin on my chest and stumbled toward the cabin.
It wasn’t long before, unbelievably, he reappeared, that weird old man, hobbling up from a path to the lake, Fortinbras at his heel. My heart at first leapt with fright—after all I’d been through, my expectations lapsed, I no more thought I’d see him again than a witch. But there he came, lurching along with his earwig mouth, and I knew it would help little to speak of the tent and certainly of where he’d been. Super hadn’t been merely out there, but out there and everywhere else. He liked it out there. Out there was where the bastard lived.
“We hadn’t planned on leaving you down and friendless, young Horatio,” he said, “if that’s what brings you through this rage.”
