Gradie sprawled on his back, skinny legs flung onto the floor, the rest crosswise on the unmade bed. The flashlight beam shimmered on the spreading splotches of blood that soaked the sheets and mattress. Someone had spent a lot of time with him, using a small knife—small-bladed, for if the wounds that all but flayed him had not been shallow, he could not be yet alive.
Mercer flung the flashlight beam about the bedroom. The cluttered furnishings were overturned, smashed. He recognized the charge pattern of a shotgun blast low against one wall, spattered with bits of fur and gore. The shotgun, broken open, lay on the floor; its barrel and stock were matted with bloody fur—Gradie had clubbed it when he had no chance to reload. The flashlight beam probed the blackness at the base of the corner wall, where the termite-riddled floorboards had been torn away. A trail of blood crawled into the darkness beneath.
Then Mercer crouched beside Gradie, shining the light into the tortured face. The eyes opened at the light—one eye was past seeing, the other stared dully. “That you, Jon?”
“It’s Jon, Mr. Gradie. You take it easy—we’re getting you to the hospital. Did you recognize who did this to you?”
Linda had already caught up the telephone from where it had fallen beneath an overturned nightstand. It seemed impossible that he had survived the blood loss, but Mercer had seen drunks run off after a gut-shot that would have killed a sober man from shock.
Gradie laughed horribly. “It was the little green men. Do you think I could have told anybody about the little green men?”
“Take it easy, Mr. Gradie.”
“Jon! The phone’s dead!”
“Busted in the fall. Help me carry him to the truck.” Mercer prodded clumsily with a wad of torn sheets, trying to remember first aid for bleeding. Pressure points? Where? The old man was cut to tatters.
“They’re little green devils,” Gradie raved weakly. “And they ain’t no animals—they’re clever as you or me. They live under the kudzu. That’s what the Nip was trying to tell me when he sold me the skull. Hiding down there beneath the damn vines, living off the roots and whatever they can scavenge. They nurture the goddamn stuff, he said, help it spread around, care for it just like a man looks after his garden. Winter comes, they burrow down underneath the soil and hibernate.”
“Shouldn’t we make a litter?”
“How? Just grab his feet.”
“Let me lie! Don’t you see, Jon? Kudzu was brought over here from Japan, and these damn little devils came with it. I started to put it all together when Morny found the skull—started piecing together all the little hints and suspicions. They like it here, Jon—they’re taking over all the waste-lots, got more food than out in the wild, multiplying like rats over here, and nobody knows about them.”
Gradie’s hysterical voice was growing weaker. Mercer gave up trying to bandage the torn limbs. “Just take it easy, Mr. Gradie. We’re getting you to a doctor.”
“Too late for a doctor. You scared them off, but they’ve done for me. Just like they done for old Morny. They’re smart, Jon—that’s what I didn’t understand in time—smart as devils. They knew that I was figuring on them—started spying on me, creeping in to see what I knew—then came to shut me up. They don’t want nobody to know about them, Jon! Now they’ll come after…”
Whatever else Gradie said was swallowed in the crimson froth that bubbled from his lips. The tortured body went rigid for an instant, then Mercer cradled a dead weight in his arms. Clumsily, he felt for a pulse, realized the blood was no longer flowing in weak spurts.
“I think he’s gone.”
“Oh God, Jon. The police will think we did this!”
“Not if we report it first. Come on! We’ll take the truck.”
“And just leave him here?”
“He’s dead. This is a murder. Best not to disturb things any more than we have.”
“Oh, God! Jon, whoever did this may still be around!”
Mercer pulled his derringer from his pocket, flicked back the safety. His chest and arms were covered with Gradie’s blood, he noticed. This was not going to be pleasant when they got to the police station. Thank God the cops never patrolled this slum, or else the shotgun blasts would have brought a squad car by now.
Warily he led the way out of the house and into the yard. Wind was whipping the leaves now, and a few spatters of rain were starting to hit the pavement. The erratic light peopled each grotesque shadow with lurking murderers, and against the rush of the wind, Mercer seemed to hear a thousand stealthy assassins.
A flash of electric blue highlighted the yard.
“Jon! Look at the truck!”
All four tires were flat. Slashed.
“Get in! We’ll run on the rims!”
Another glare of heat lightning.
All about them, the kudzu erupted from a hundred hidden lairs.
Mercer fired twice.
The Bingo Master
Joyce Carol Oates
Suddenly there appears Joe Pye the Bingo Master, dramatically late by some ten or fifteen minutes, and everyone in the bingo hall except Rose Mallow Odom calls out an ecstatic greeting or at least smiles broadly to show how welcome he is, how forgiven he is for being late—“Just look what he’s wearing tonight!” the plump young mother seated across from Rose exclaims, her pretty face dimpling like a child’s. “Isn’t he something,” the woman murmurs, catching Rose’s reluctant eye.
Joe Pye the Bingo Master. Joe Pye the talk of Tophet—or some parts of Tophet—who bought the old Harlequin Amusements Arcade down on Purslane Street by the Gayfeather Hotel (which Rose had been thinking of as boarded up or even razed, but there it is, still in operation) and has made such a success with his bingo hall, even Rose’s father’s staid old friends at church or at the club are talking about him. The Tophet City Council had tried to shut Joe Pye down last spring, first because too many people crowded into the hall and there was a fire hazard, second because he hadn’t paid some fine or other (or was it, Rose Mallow wondered maliciously, a bribe) to the Board of Health and Sanitation, whose inspector had professed to be “astonished and sickened” by the conditions of the rest rooms, and the quality of the foot-longs and cheese-and-sausage pizzas sold at the refreshment stand: and two or three of the churches, jealous of Joe Pye’s profits, which might very well eat into theirs (for Thursday-evening bingo was a main source of revenue for certain Tophet churches, though not, thank God, Saint Matthias Episcopal Church, where the Odoms worshipped) were agitating that Joe Pye be forced to move outside the city limits, at least, just as those “adult” bookstores and X-rated film outfits had been forced to move. There had been editorials in the paper, and letters pro and con, and though Rose Mallow had only contempt for local politics and hardly knew most of what was going on in her own hometown—her mind, as her father and aunt said, being elsewhere—she had followed the “Joe Pye Controversy” with amusement. It had pleased her when the bingo hall was allowed to remain open, mainly because it upset people in her part of town, by the golf course and the park and along Van Dusen Boulevard; if anyone had suggested that she would be visiting the hall, and even sitting, as she is tonight, at one of the dismayingly long oilcloth-covered tables beneath these ugly bright lights, amid noisily cheerful people who all seem to know one another, and who are happily devouring “refreshments” though it is only seven-thirty and surely they’ve eaten their dinners beforehand, and why are they so goggle-eyed about idiotic Joe Pye!—Rose Mallow would have snorted with laughter, waving her hand in that gesture of dismissal her aunt said was “unbecoming.”
Well, Rose Mallow Odom is at Joe Pye’s Bingo Hall, in fact she has arrived early, and is staring, her arms folded beneath her breasts, at the fabled Bingo Master himself. Of course, there are other workers—attendants—high-school-aged girls with piles of bleached hair and pierced earrings and artfully made-up faces, and even one or two older women, dressed in bright-pink smocks with Joe Pye in a spidery green arabesque on their collars, and out fron
t there is a courteous milk-chocolate-skinned young man in a three-piece suit whose function, Rose gathered, was simply to welcome the bingo players and maybe to keep out riffraff, white or black, since the hall is in a fairly disreputable part of town. But Joe Pye is the center of attention. Joe Pye is everything. His high rapid chummy chatter at the microphone is as silly, and halfway unintelligible, as any local disc jockey’s frantic monologue, picked up by chance as Rose spins the dial looking for something to divert her; yet everyone listens eagerly, and begins giggling even before his jokes are entirely completed.
The Bingo Master is a very handsome man. Rose sees that at once, and concedes the point: no matter that his goatee looks as if it were dyed with ink from the five-and-ten, and his stark-black eyebrows as well, and his skin, smooth as stone, somehow unreal as stone, is as daddy-tanned as the skin of one of those men pictured on billboards, squinting into the sun with cigarettes smoking in their fingers; no matter that his lips are too rosy, the upper lip so deeply indented that it looks as if he is pouting, and his getup (what kinder expression?—the poor man is wearing a dazzling white turban, and a tunic threaded with silver and salmon pink, and wide-legged pajama-like trousers made of a material almost as clingy as silk, jet black) makes Rose want to roll her eyes heavenward and walk away. He is attractive. Even beautiful, if you are in the habit—Rose isn’t—of calling men beautiful. His deep-set eyes shine with an enthusiasm that can’t be feigned; or at any rate can’t be entirely feigned. His outfit, absurd as it is, hangs well on him, emphasizing his well-proportioned shoulders and his lean waist and hips. His teeth, which he bares often, far too often, in smiles clearly meant to be dazzling, are perfectly white and straight and even: just as Rose Mallow’s had been promised to be, though she knew, even as a child of twelve or so, that the ugly painful braces and the uglier “bite” that made her gag wouldn’t leave her teeth any more attractive than they already were—which wasn’t very attractive at all. Teeth impress her, inspire her to envy, make her resentful. And it’s all the more exasperating that Joe Pye smiles so often, rubbing his hands zestfully and gazing out at his adoring giggling audience.
Naturally his voice is mellifluous and intimate, when it isn’t busy being “enthusiastic,” and Rose thinks that if he were speaking another language—if she didn’t have to endure his claptrap about “lovely ladies” and “jackpot prizes” and “mystery cards” and “ten-games-for-the-price-of-seven” (under certain complicated conditions she couldn’t follow)—she might find it very attractive indeed. Might find, if she tried, him attractive. But his drivel interferes with his seductive power, or powers, and Rose finds herself distracted, handing over money to one of the pink-smocked girls in exchange for a shockingly grimy bingo card, her face flushing with irritation. Of course the evening is an experiment, and not an entirely serious experiment: she has come downtown, by bus, unescorted, wearing stockings and fairly high heels, lipsticked, perfumed, less ostentatiously homely than usual, in order to lose, as the expression goes, her virginity. Or perhaps it would be more accurate, less narcissistic, to say that she has come downtown to acquire a lover…?
But no. Rose Mallow Odom doesn’t want a lover. She doesn’t want a man at all, not in any way, but she supposes one is necessary for the ritual she intends to complete.
“And now, ladies, ladies and gentlemen, if you’re all ready, if you’re all ready to begin.” Joe Pye sings out, as a girl with carrot-colored frizzed hair and an enormous magenta smile turns the handle of the wire basket, in which white balls the size and apparent weight of Ping-Pong balls tumble merrily together, “I am ready to begin, and I wish you each and all the very, very best of luck from the bottom of my heart, and remember there’s more than one winner each game, and dozens of winners each night, and in fact Joe Pye’s iron-clad law is that nobody’s going to go away empty-handed—Ah, now, let’s see, now: the first number is—”
Despite herself Rose Mallow is crouched over the filthy cardboard square, a kernel of corn between her fingers, her lower lip caught in her teeth. The first number is—
****
It was on the eve of her thirty-ninth birthday, almost two months ago, that Rose Mallow Odom conceived of the notion of going out and “losing” her virginity.
Perhaps the notion wasn’t her own, not entirely. It sprang into her head as she was writing one of her dashed-off swashbuckling letters (for which, she knew, her friends cherished her—isn’t Rose hilarious, they liked to say, isn’t she brave), this time to Georgene Wescott, who was back in New York City, her second divorce behind her, some sort of complicated, flattering, but not (Rose suspected) very high-paying job at Columbia just begun, and a new book, a collection of essays on contemporary women artists, just contracted for at a prestigious New York publishing house. Dear Georgene, Rose wrote, Life in Tophet is droll as usual what with Papa’s & Aunt Olivia’s & my own criss-crossing trips to our high-priced $peciali$t pals at that awful clinic I told you about. & it seems there was a scandal of epic proportions at the Tophet Women’s Club on acc’t of the fact that some sister club which rents the building (I guess they’re leftwingdogooder types, you & Ham & Carolyn wld belong if you were misfortunate enough to dwell here-about) includes on its membership rolls some two or three or more Black Persons. Which, tho’ it doesn’t violate the letter of the Club’s charter certainly violates its spirit. & then again, Rose wrote, very late one night after her Aunt Olivia had retired, and even her father, famously insomniac like Rose herself, had gone to bed, then again did I tell you about the NSWPP convention here… at the Holiday Inn… (which wasn’t built yet I guess when you & Jack visited)… by the interstate expressway?… Anyway: (& I fear I did tell you, or was it Carolyn, or maybe both of you) the conference was all set, the rooms & banquet hall booked, & some enterprising muckraking young reporter at the Tophet Globe-Times (who has since gone “up north” to Norfolk, to a better-paying job) discovered that the NSWPP stood for National Socialist White People’s Party which is (& I do not exaggerate, Georgene, tho’ I can see you crinkling up your nose at another of Rose Mallow’s silly flights of fancy, “Why doesn’t she scramble all that into a story or a Symboliste poem as she once did, so she’d have something to show for her exile & her silence & cunning as well,” I can hear you mumbling & you are 100% correct) none other than the (are you PREPARED???) American Nazi Party! Yes. Indeed. There is such a party & it overlaps Papa says sourly with the Klan & certain civic-minded organizations hereabouts, tho’ he declined to be specific, possibly because his spinster daughter was looking too rapt & incredulous. Anyway, the Nazis were denied the use of the Tophet Holiday Inn & you’d have been impressed by the spirit of the newspaper editorials denouncing them roundly. I hear tell—but maybe it is surreal rumor—that the Nazis not only wear their swastika armbands in secret but have tiny lapel pins on the insides of their lapels, swastikas natcherlly... And then she’d changed the subject, relaying news of friends, friends’ husbands and wives, and former husbands and wives, and acquaintances’ latest doings, scandalous and otherwise (for of the lively, gregarious, genius-ridden group that had assembled itself informally in Cambridge, Mass., almost twenty years ago, Rose Mallow Odom was the only really dedicated letter writer—the one who held everyone together through the mails—the one who would continue to write cheerful letter after letter even when she wasn’t answered for a year or two), and as a perky little postscript she added that her thirty-ninth birthday was fast approaching and she meant to divest herself of her damned virginity as a kind of present to herself. As my famous ironing-board figure is flatter than ever, & my breasts the size of Dixie cups after last spring’s ritual flu & a rerun of that wretched bronchitis, it will be, as you can imagine, quite a challenge.
****
Of course it was nothing more than a joke, one of Rose’s whimsical self-mocking jokes, a postscript scribbled when her eyelids had begun to droop with fatigue. And yet… And yet when she actually wrote I intend to divest myself of my damned virgini
ty, and sealed the letter, she saw that the project was inevitable. She would go through with it. She would go through with it, just as in the old days, years ago, when she was the most promising young writer in her circle, and grants and fellowships and prizes had tumbled into her lap, she had forced herself to complete innumerable projects simply because they were challenging, and would give her pain. (Though Rose was scornful of the Odoms’ puritanical disdain of pleasure, on intellectual grounds, she nevertheless believed that painful experiences, and even pain itself, had a generally salubrious effect.)
And so she went out, the very next evening, a Thursday, telling her father and her Aunt Olivia that she was going to the downtown library. When they asked in alarm, as she knew they would, why on earth she was going at such a time, Rose said with a schoolgirlish scowl that that was her business. But was the library even open at such a strange time, Aunt Olivia wanted to know. Open till nine on Thursdays, Rose said.
That first Thursday Rose had intended to go to a singles bar she had heard about, in the ground floor of a new high-rise office building; but at first she had difficulty finding the place, and circled about the enormous glass-and-concrete tower in her ill-fitting high heels, muttering to herself that no experience would be worth so much effort, even if it was a painful one. (She was of course a chaste young woman, whose general feeling about sex was not much different than it had been in elementary school, when the cruder, more reckless, more knowing children had had the power, by chanting certain words, to make poor Rose Mallow Odom press her hands over her ears.) Then she discovered the bar—discovered, rather, a long line of young people snaking up some dark concrete steps to the sidewalk, and along the sidewalk for hundreds of feet, evidently waiting to get into the Chanticleer. She was appalled not only by the crowd but by the exuberant youth of the crowd: no one older than twenty-five, no one dressed as she was. (She looked dressed for church, which she hated. But however else did people dress?) So she retreated, and went to the downtown library after all, where the librarians all knew her, and asked respectfully after her “work” (though she had made it clear years ago that she was no longer “working”—the demands her mother made upon her during the long years of her illness, and then Rose’s father’s precarious health, and of course her own history of respiratory illnesses and anemia and easily broken bones had made concentration impossible). Once she shook off the solicitous cackling old ladies she spent what remained of her evening quite profitably—she read The Oresteia in a translation new to her, and scribbled notes as she always did, excited by stray thoughts for articles or stories or poems, though in the end she always crumpled the notes up and threw them away. But the evening had not been an entire loss.
Dark Forces: The 25th Anniversary Edition Page 13
