Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales

by Norman Partridge

  Of course. I'd have probably been more impressed with the look of CD #1 if I'd known that Rich was a college kid who was flying on a wing and a prayer. I don't think too many folks knew that back then. I especially love Rich's story about putting that first issue together in the days before most people had PCs and printers sitting on their desks: "We laid out #1 in the college computer lab and also printed it there. We were renegades because we weren't supposed to be in there, much less working in there; we hit PRINT and sprinted from the room because we knew how pissed all the other students would be when they found out someone sent almost 100 pages—we printed it twice—to the spooler or whatever it's called; there was only one printer for the entire lab; we snuck back in an hour later and did a grab-and-run...."

  Like I said, I didn't know any of that then. Hell, I was an unpublished writer. I didn't know much. I didn't know if I was ever going to manage to sell a short story or get one published. I didn't know if there would be a second issue of Cemetery Dance. I certainly didn't know that a few years later I'd find a story of mine slotted behind one by Stephen King on CD's table of contents page, or that a couple years after that Rich would publish my first novel (Slippin' into Darkness), or that he'd go on to become one of the leading small press publishers in the horror genre.

  All I knew was what my gut told me: that maybe this guy Chizmar was trying a little bit harder than some of his small press contemporaries, even if his first issue did look pretty rough. From the beginning, I sensed that Rich's efforts were serious.[16] The table of contents page for CD #1 told me that he wasn't afraid to go after writers who had made their way out of the small press pool. He wasn't afraid to put his money (or his student loans!) where his mouth was to publish his magazine and promote it, either.

  In short. Rich seemed hungry as a publisher, the same way I was hungry as a writer.

  That was enough for me. Dave Silva had just rejected a story called "Save the Last Dance for Me," and I was looking for another prospective market. I thought, "Hmmm... 'Save the Last Dance for Me'... Cemetery Dance...."

  It certainly wasn't the most brilliant marketing strategy ever conceived, but I went with it. Rich called me on the phone a couple weeks later and accepted the story. "Last Dance" was my first published fiction, and it took the lead slot in CD #2.

  If you want to chart a very minor coincidence, Cemetery Dance #2 bore the same cover date (June 1989) as the final issue of The Twilight Zone. According to Rich, readers enjoyed my debut story, and I sold seven more stories to Cemetery Dance as we worked our way through the nineties. In those days, a lot of readers thought of me as the house writer at CD, though a look through my back issues tells me that Bentley Little and Gary Braunbeck could lay claim to that title, too. These days Tim Lebbon's work appears frequently, and I'm glad to see him making his mark in CD; Tim is a writer with a bucketful of talent.

  Myself, I was pretty lucky from the get-go with CD. Rich and I were on the same wavelength. We'd grown up on the same books. We admired the same writers and the same kind of stories. Or, to put it another way, I had Mr. Chizmar's number. As an editor. Rich was looking for exactly the kind of story I was writing. We want tales that are powerful and emotional— creepy, chilling, disturbing, and moody. Suspense/mystery/crime tales with a horror element ore always welcome. That's how CD's submission guidelines read today; it's also a pretty fair description of the stories I was writing in the nineties, many of which were horror/crime hybrids.

  One thing I'm sure about—my early appearances in Cemetery Dance helped me gain a foothold in the business. How do I know that? Simple. I know because people who mattered in the industry told me. I'd find myself being introduced to an editor or a publisher at a convention, and I'd hear a comment that went something like this: "Oh, yeah. Norm Partridge. I really liked that story you had in the last Cemetery Dance...."

  It wasn't unusual for those conversations to end with an invitation to contribute a story to a professional anthology, or an offer to look at my first novel when I managed to finish it. In those days, that kind of offer spelled Motivation... most definitely with a capital M.

  But I've been extremely lucky that way—not only with opportunities that have come my way, but also with my dealings with the small press. Most of the publishers I've worked with have not only grown and prospered, they've become powerhouses in specialty publishing. Rich Chizmar published my first short story and my first novel. I've worked with Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press since he started his company, and we have a longstanding relationship that continues to this day. Night Shade Books, one of the most ambitious of today's new presses, published my last short story collection, The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists.

  Yep. I've been lucky with the small press.

  Extremely.

  Now a word of warning (and you probably figured this was coming, didn't you?).

  If you're an aspiring writer, don't count on luck.

  The following is a bit of one-size-fits-all advice, and it applies to every writer. Whatever your chosen field of endeavor—whether you want to write screenplays, short stories, novels, or comic scripts—it's wise to remember a point Jack London made a long time ago: the works you produce as a writer are marketable goods.

  Your stories (or novels, or scripts) are commodities. You're selling them. To do that, you need a game plan. The tried-and-true one most writers stick with is simple: when you finish a project, submit it to the highest paying appropriate market first and work your way down the list of other appropriate markets until you make a sale.

  Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. Sometimes you'll just flat out take a chance on an unproven market, especially when you're starting out. And sometimes you might be looking for another kind of payoff besides cash. You might want to crack a prestigious anthology or magazine that doesn't pay enough to fill a Prius' gas tank but will give your work good exposure and get you noticed."[17]

  So it's not always about the money. Sometimes that's okay. There are steps you'll take on your career path as a writer that won't put dollars in your pocket. But you always need to concentrate on moving forward. If you want to be a writer, your fiction is the vehicle that will take you for that ride.

  You need to learn to pick your shots. You need to learn to make those shots count. If there's one thing being a writer isn't about, it's instant gratification. I've seen too many new writers dragged down by that particular ball and chain. If you give away your best story to your buddy's webzine before trying to sell it to a well-paying market with a high circulation because you're too impatient to wait a few months for a professional editor's reply, what good has that story really done you? If you "sell" a story to a POD anthology that pays in shared royalties (and that maybe twenty people will read), how has that advanced your career? If you spend a year writing a novel, and you cut a deal with the first small publisher who buys you a beer at a writer's convention instead of working to find an agent who can represent your book or a publisher who will treat it as more than a cool hobby he can tinker with on weekends (unless it's football season, that is)...well, don't say I didn't warn you.

  Be patient. Pick your shots. Make them count.

  If you're an aspiring horror writer. I'll give you the first one for free. Let's say you just finished a new story. You've revised it, and then revised it again, polishing it to the best of your ability. The story's got a little bit of a mystery angle, and you think it's pretty good. In fact, you think that maybe it's the creepiest, most powerful thing you've written.

  Take my advice. Submit it to Cemetery Dance.

  It just might get you noticed.

  SAVE THE LAST DANCE

  I guess the biggest thing that Carl Hart ever did was shoot those people down at radio station KTCB. At least that was the biggest thing I ever saw him do. Anyway, we buried Carl next to Mary Lyn McCarthy last week, and yesterday KTCB knuckled under to Reverend Tim and changed the format of its midnight-to-six show. I keep requesting "Save the Last Dance for
Me," but the chickenshit disc jockeys won't play it anymore.

  Holding Carl in minimum security was a big mistake. He escaped ten days ago, on Mary Lyn's birthday, just like I said he would. The chuckleheads up in Fresno didn't even know that Carl was gone when he rammed his '57 Chevy into the Fiddler 7-Eleven and died with a ton of red-and-green cinder blocks in his lap. Mr. McCarthy said that someone must have jammed a few of those blocks up under Carl's rib cage with how heavy his coffin was and all, and I don't disagree. My shoulder is still sore from carrying that big metal box.

  It rained a little the day of the funeral, just enough to kill the dust around the cemetery and make everything look a little cleaner. Reverend Tim didn't seem to know what to say about Carl. First he had Mr. McCarthy say something, and then Tim managed a few words about fate and love in that deep, John Carradine baritone of his. Sherry, Mary Lyn's niece, busted down in tears. I damn near lost it myself when I saw that.

  It was a damn shame. Sherry seeing all that death so young. Everyone said so.

  Carl's Chevy sat in the 7-Eleven parking lot for a couple days, full of bloodstained comic books and those pantyhose that come in plastic eggs. Some 7-Eleven big shots came out in a Cadillac and looked over the store, but that was just for show. Fiddler ain't exactly the best place for a chain store; most people around here are loyal to Millie's Liquors when it comes to buying cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and beer. They'd rather let someone they know gouge them than pay an extra buck to some outsider who gets pissed off if he's got to make change. I can't blame 'em—I hate to get cussed out in Vietnamese myself. Anyway, the 7-Eleven people have been looking for an excuse to close down their Fiddler store for years, and Carl finally gave them one. Now you can't get a Slurpee around here anymore, and you've got to drive to Fresno or Bakersfield to buy Dark Mistress Magazine because Millie won't carry it. She says carrying Hustler is bad enough.

  Anyhow, I was going to tell you about Carl's Chevy. If you want to know the truth, the Chevy was in worse shape than Carl after the accident. The 185-horsepower engine was all bashed up, the frame was bent, the heavily waxed, iron-blue paint-job was scarred and rutted. About the only thing that wasn't scratched or dented was the rear license plate, and the only reason I decided to keep that was because it said MARYLYN. I didn't feel funny about keeping it — hell, I was supposed to inherit the whole damned car.

  Dennis Wichita down at the junkyard gave me a hundred bucks for the Chevy. Out of respect for Carl, he didn't charge me for the tow.

  I was walking out by the cemetery when Dennis hauled the Chevy down Highway 63. The sun had just dipped below the horizon, everything was kind of purple, and it was so quiet. After Dennis pulled out of view, I jumped a ditch choked with hamburger wrappers and beer bottles and went down to the road. Little bits of the Chevy's windshield dotted the blacktop, reflecting purple sky. I followed the glimmering trail for miles, until it petered out and ended by the McCarthy's almond orchard. There's only so much broken glass can come out of one Chevy, I guess.

  Folks around here say that it's over, but I don't think so.

  The night it happened Carl and me and half the guys from the tire factory were down at the Iron Horse to watch the Mike Tyson fight. Bill, the owner and bartender, has a satellite dish that can pick up just about anything you'd want to see; I think he's single-handedly responsible for keeping HBO out of Fiddler. Anyway, Iron Mike chopped his man down in two rounds, and a bunch of drunken Mexicans were hogging the pool tables, so Carl and me settled into a booth for a couple extra beers.

  Must have been more than a couple, though, because I don't remember leaving the Iron Horse — next thing I remember is having a burger down at the Sno-White Drive-in and seeing Sherry drive by in Mary Lyn's old Mustang.

  We finished our burgers and headed out Highway 63 toward my place, which is closer to the factory than it is to Fiddler. "Mind if I turn on the radio?" I asked, trying to sound like I didn't care one way or the other.

  Carl grunted an okay from behind a Marlboro. "I want you to hear my new speakers, anyway. They're Jensens. Just put 'em in this morning."

  I twisted a knob and tuned in KTCB. A doo wop song —something by the Platters, I think — was just finishing up. "Sounds good," I said.

  A throaty voice drifted out of the speakers. Fact is, the Jensens made it sound like someone was sitting in the back seat of Carl's '57. “This is your lonely girl, the Dark Mistress, coming to you from midnight to six on KTCB, radio-free Fresno. I hope all my bad boys out there are listening tonight, especially my lovely crying boy. I’ll have something special for you in just a few minutes, but first we must do some business."

  Carl shot a bleary glance my way. "Listen to this stuff?"

  "Uh-huh. Helps me get through the long, lonely nights."

  Carl flipped on his brights, pulled across the solid yellow line, and passed a semi. "Ain't this woman kinda sick?" he asked. "I mean. Reverend Tim had a petition against this show. I think he cost KTCB a few sponsors."

  I grinned. "If she's sick, KTCB doesn't care. They're making a pot of money off her. Just listen to this ad." We quieted for a minute, listening to the sexy-voiced DJ pitch a series of Dark Mistress videos. Carl blushed at her suggestive come-on. You know the one: ‘‘I love getting into my work, and sometimes it gets into me."

  "See what I mean?" I said, opening a beer. "She buys up all the ad time from midnight to six. That's a lot of money, Carl."

  "But Reverend Tim's petition says — "

  "Hell, I bet half those old farts who signed Tim's petition are jackin' off to this show right now." I swallowed beer. "Maybe Tiny Timmy is in the church bathroom with a portable radio, hidin' out from Eloise — "

  Carl's expression soured. "Jack, I'll have no talk like that in this Chevy."

  I just smiled and drank beer.

  The Dark Mistress laughed. “How's my crying boy tonight? Are you lonely, like I am? I haven't seen you in such a long time. You used to come to me every week. With roses, remember? You'd come to the cemetery and sing our song."

  I recognized the familiar bass intro to "Save the Last Dance for Me." So did Carl. He tromped on the brakes and we skidded down Highway 63 just as Ben E. King started singing; whitewalled Firestones screamed, beer splashed across the dashboard. "Christ, Carl, you — " I yelled, and the rest of my words were cut off by the blaring horn of a semi coming fast from behind.

  Carl bit his lower lip; the Marlboro flipped out of his mouth and landed in a fold in his jeans. I grabbed for the door handle and missed just as the semi hit its brights and shot around us. Demon-red tail-lights swam through the darkness; wind sucked after the truck, buffeting the Chevy. Carl's big hands didn't move from the steering wheel. His foot slid off the clutch and the Chevy lurched and died.

  I started in on him again. "Carl, you crazy bastard, you want to die?"

  Tears were in Carl's eyes. Blood ran from his lip. He said, "Yes."

  I pulled off my T-shirt and wiped down the dashboard; Carl got rid of the Marlboro and brushed ashes off his jeans. Suddenly the greasy hamburger in my gut didn't feel very good. "Christ, I hope I haven't screwed up your car," I said, just to say something.

  Carl twisted the key and the Chevy roared to life. The final notes of "Save the Last Dance for Me" faded out and Carl flipped off the radio. "Mary Lyn loved that song," he whispered. "She said it was ours. After she died, I used to go up to the cemetery late at night and sing it to her. I'd bring her roses that I stole from Mrs. Castro's garden."

  Hell, everyone in Fiddler knew about Mary Lyn and the song. But Carl had never told me about the roses before, or his midnight cemetery visits.

  I raised the beer bottle to my lips, but there wasn't even a trickle left. "Jesus," I said. "How do you think the Dark Mistress knew?"

  Carl eased off the clutch and the Chevy kicked out. The car notched RPMs; Carl shifted, hit the gas and shifted again. We turned onto Old Howard Road, which was (and is) famous for the biggest potholes in Tulare County. I sho
uld have told Carl to slow down. Instead, I opened another beer and stared out at the midnight fields. Drinking made my stomach feel a little better, and I reached into the grease-spotted bag between us and grabbed a handful of cold fries.

  Carl took the beer out of my hand and chugged it down. "I got to see Mary Lyn," he said.

  Everybody around Fiddler remembers Mary Lyn's funeral. The casket was metal, silvery-pink, and the funeral parlor was so full of roses and carnations and lilies that Reverend Tim took a carload out to those less-fortunate folks at the senior citizens' home in Dinuba. Someone at the wake said that the florists up in Fresno must have made a fortune, but I imagine that the fellow who rented Mary Lyn's dad the white, horse-drawn hearse made a good bit more. A lot of folks whispered that Mr. McCarthy was turning Mary Lyn's funeral into a circus, but he just said that his daughter was too special to go to the grave in a black limousine.

  He was right. I remember Mary Lyn in that silvery-pink coffin, yellow velvet all around her. Her blonde hair was just so, curling like she liked it to, and her skin was so white. White like the ivory cross on Father Tim's pulpit.

  I know I shouldn't say it, but they should have left Mary Lyn's eyes open. Her eyes were so blue and pretty. I don't know what they'd remind you of—it sure wouldn't be anything you'd find in a place like Fiddler. And they really did sparkle, especially when Mary Lyn was enjoying herself.

  I never told Carl about this, but I guess it won't hurt to mention it now. On weekends back in high school, I used to borrow my cousin's pickup and follow Carl and Mary Lyn. Usually they went to the drive-in outside Visalia, which is closed down now. I'd park a couple rows behind Carl's Chevy and get some popcorn. Then I'd watch them. I usually left before they did, and every now and then when I hit my lights I'd catch the glint of Mary Lyn's blue eyes through the Chevy's back window as she rested her head on Carl's shoulder. And that's how I remember her: sparkling eyes in the dark.