Classics Mutilated

by John Shirley

  Skeletons rise from barrow mounds in an ancient graveyard and engage in a macabre waltz. A wolf in a bloody nightgown chases Little Red Riding Hood through a glade, while Hansel and Gretel run ahead of giant ravens to a gingerbread cottage, the doors of which are flung wide open to devour the train. Inside, the cackling witch sharpens a cleaver as we turn to our final destination, the yawning mouth of a red glowing oven.

  The train bursts out of the tunnel into full daylight and hysterical screams. Dixon claps my back as most of his guests cover their eyes, blinded by the sight of Fairyland.

  Centaurs and satyrs and a great white unicorn frolic in a rainbow sherbet Elysian Field of wildflowers. The Fairy Kingdom opens its butterfly-winged gates to disgorge a parade. Thumbelina is brought to the train in a tiny golden coach. The audience holds its breath to hear her tiny voice singing "Bigger Than the World,” her Oscar-winning theme song. Ray lifts the fourteen-inch princess up onto his shoulder and feeds her lunch with an eyedropper. Hummingbird food and opium.

  The Senator’s daughter asks me what it was like to fly. I tell her it was wonderful, and that I wish I could fly in real life. I don’t tell her about the panic attacks, or the morphine I got hooked on after shooting three flying sequences on a broken leg. I don’t tell her that Will Dixon was as good as his word. In his kingdom, there is no pain.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” she says. “My mother says, when I grow up, all of this will seem very silly to me. But you get to stay here forever.”

  I pose for a picture with her and the next governor, and then rush off to the nearest employee restroom. I take out the steel syringe with its twelve-gauge trocar needle, and inject a bolt of bliss into the cluster of blood vessels behind my right ear.

  I know it’s dangerous and stupid to fix while serving as His Master’s Voice, but I cannot face what I have to do next without a shot.

  If any die-hard fans were to get past the moat, the electrified fence and the razor wire, the armed guards and the dog-men, they would find the Barnyard a big disappointment. The quaint, rickety old sets and stables still stand for VIP tours, with pampered humanimal specimens set up to perform for anybody Dixon wants to impress.

  After the checkpoint, I get out of the plumbing truck that serves as my limousine. The guards all tip their hats and smile. One asks for my autograph.

  The shower stalls in the main stable are all freight elevators. The underground complex was more than just Dixon’s answer to Burbank’s refusal to let him snatch up any more cheap real estate. Since the war made his studio a strategic target, Dixon moved all his operations and his treasured children into a massive, hundred-acre bunker.

  The guards below ask for my autograph, too, on a triplicate sign-in log. It smells like Noah’s Ark, down here. Waves of carbolic acid and alcohol and bucket brigades of manure-hauling squirrel-men fight a losing battle against the ripe stench of the jungle.

  Dixon can’t stand the stink himself; it brings back his squalid early childhood near the Chicago stockyards, rather than the idyllic later years on a Kansas farm.

  I close my eyes, and I am back in the ravine.

  The echoing cries of predators and prey in adjoining cells, of rivals auditioning for the same part, shiver the rank air. The Master balked at remaking lower animals after a few disastrous experiments, but Dixon has found that many of them take more readily to humanity—or some uncanny semblance of it—than mammals. Unlike his volcanic screen persona, Darn Old Duck is quiet and thoughtful, and writes almost all his own scripts. Algy Gator has a car dealership and an honorary law degree from the University of Florida.

  And Dr. Hiss, who slithers out of a hole in the wall to uncoil before me, has risen, without hands or feet, to become the chief of genetic research, the humanimal master of the Knife and the Needle.

  “He doesss not come among ussss,” spits Hiss, venomous with insinuation. “Perhapssss he isss sssick?”

  No one is looking. I step on Hiss’s neck. “He is still the Father of us All, and always will be.” Crushing him into the sawdust, I remember what it was like to be pinned by Darius, who is now a moth-eaten coat in my closet. “You were born only to serve this family.”

  “I only meant,” wheezes Hiss, “that it might be necessssary to ssselect a sssuccesssor.” Behind the bloated dome of his skull, Dr. Hiss’s green-black coils stretch around the corner. “Sssome sssay it will be you … but only through a human puppet. But we could fix you … trunk tuck … earssss, of courssse. Skin graftssss and a shot of human serum…. We have Douglasss Fairbankssss. But if you could sssecure a sssample of our Father’sss ssseed….”

  While he talks, I stomp down the length of the anaconda’s wiggling sixty-foot span to find his tail, which has another head. This one’s whispering our conversation verbatim into a telephone.

  “Who is this?” I shout. Expecting a tabloid hack or a G-Man stooge on the other end, I am stunned by the voice that comes crackling down the overseas trunk line.

  “I am the Sayer of the Law.”

  I hang up and throttle Dr. Hiss II with my trunk. “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know! He isss no one.”

  “Where’s the screen test?”

  “Ssstage 4! Have merssssy, Master!”

  When Pan, the old satyr, died last month of cirrhosis, I became the last of the Master’s original children, out of the forty-nine who left the island with Will Dixon. In the sixteen years since, our new Master has created almost three hundred of us. Nobody knows how many he made for the war.

  Virgil was the original Moxie Monkey. Dixon was as good as his word, and grafted a new tail onto his stump as soon as he’d perfected Moreau’s transplant formula. But Virgil was crushed in an accident on the set of the sequel to Monkey See, Monkey Do. The second was electrocuted while swinging from power lines for the climax of Monkey in the Middle, but Dixon had a clone bred and ready to finish the stunt before the smell of burned fur was out of the air.

  The third Moxie had to be gassed after he got drunk and threw feces at Vice President Truman at a White House dinner. (The joke around the studio was that Dixon was pissed he missed Roosevelt.) The fourth escaped his cage while on a USO tour in Italy, and was never found.

  The fifth and current Moxie is not a spider monkey at all, but a five-year-old Mexican orphan named Rico. Discovered at one of the Will’s House orphanages, Rico was reborn in the Barnyard with a tail and a shiny fur coat. He takes direction far better than the other Moxies, and Dixon still owns him outright.

  The soundstage is manned by two more guards. They don’t want to let me in, but I’m Will Dixon’s eyes and ears.

  Screen tests for the next big feature. This one is a thorny challenge, because the script calls for naturalistic woodland fauna, but with big expressive eyes and oversized craniums to hold human-sized brains.

  The soundstage is framed in towering California Redwood trees, the floor a riot of wildflowers. All are hand-carved and painted. Real flowers wilt under the lights. More real than any real forest, it puts the humanimal actor into character.

  A skeleton crew mans the cameras and lights from behind a shaggy blind of fake undergrowth, so the actor thinks he’s alone with his mother, a lovely unmodified doe who has nursed him since birth. The little spotted fawn with eyes the size of headlamps wobbles up to his mother, great love and wonder in his adorable face.

  “I’m gonna have nightmares about this for years,” the director grumbles. “Cue the hunters!”

  With that, two men in checkered coats jump out of the wings and shoot the doe. The bullets blow her breast wide open and send her teetering around the set before crashing to the floor in front of the baby deer.

  This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. All the careful breeding, rearing, and brain surgery will be a waste if our talent cannot act.

  “MAMA!” he shrieks, eyes grown wide as dinner plates. The fragile, birdlike body jolts backward as if cattle-prodded, and I swear I can see his heart visibly break ins
ide the prison of his ribs. “MAMA! NOOOO!”

  “Cut!” The director wipes a tear from his eyes. “Now that was perfection.”

  I douse his flame before he can even light a cigarette. “No, sorry. Uncle Will was quite specific. He wants his pathos laced with helpless defiance, and I’m afraid we just don’t see it.” The crew looks stricken. The fawn continues to scream. From the cover of the lighting cage overhead, a gaffer mutters, “Cold-hearted bastard.”

  “Gentlemen, if it were up to me, we’d be tickling them with feather dusters. But unless you’d rather tender your resignations, get a mop and another doe on set. And let’s try the fawn with the 6% bull terrier and wolverine mix next, shall we? If that’s not too much trouble.”

  We’re a happy family. Dixon rewards loyalty. Most of these men worked on Banjo. We know each other too well.

  The fawn is led off, still howling his grief. I have to admit, it’s a powerful performance. We'll have to wipe his memory if we want to get it fresh, but definitely a top contender. Worth sedating and trying again. Dixon needs to see the footage.

  “Shake a leg, humans!” I trumpet, as the last hint of motherly blood is erased. “Oscar season is right around the corner!”

  I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.

  (Burbank, 8/20/44)

  Mr. Dixon dips his plain cake donut in a mug of scotch. He’s watching an impounded Republic newsreel in his private screening room with J. Edgar Hoover.

  “You know America is eternally grateful for your services, Wilbur, as are the countless fighting soldiers and sailors whose lives were spared by your heroic contributions to the war effort. But perhaps it was a mistake to attempt to send your most celebrated stars into the theater.”

  Dixon doesn’t want to see or hear this. He asked for the Director’s discreet help with another matter entirely.

  It seems that Algy Gator escaped from his paddock in Orlando and went on a mating spree in the Everglades. None of our natural offspring has ever shown any signs of our hard-won intelligence, but Hoover’s got forty teams of G-Men combing the swamp for Algy’s bastard eggs.

  The swamp people say the gators are building a city and stockpiling guns. But Hoover brushes the Algy issue aside.

  On the screen, Moxie Monkey and Darn Old Duck and some star-struck GIs play football in the ruins of Berlin. The ball is Hitler’s severed head.

  Dixon fumes, even though he’s seen this footage before. It’s having to explain himself to Hoover—a "snake-eyed sodomite" who knows and controls everyone and everything that really matters in America—that galls him.

  “I frankly don’t see the problem, Edgar. Even if the footage were to get out, this country has had to fight a hard war, with much bloodshed and sacrifice, and we all deserve to see that little troublemaker pay for what he’s done … though I’d be even happier to see them playing with that little Commie scumbag Chaplin’s head. It’s subversives like that you should be rooting out….”

  Hoover looks sidewise at me. I sit doodling on a memo pad, but he knows about my eidetic memory. No doubt he also knows about my numerous drug addictions, my questionable associates, and perhaps even my silent disloyalty to my Master.

  But we know a thing or two about Mr. Hoover. One of the earliest projects at the Dixon Studios in Burbank in 1932 was a top-secret private commission. Outwardly human, but with the germlines of a Great Dane and an albino boa constrictor, Clyde had made his companion very happy for over a decade, and had risen to the position of Associate Director of the FBI.

  “Our principal concern is that the returning subhuman hordes will bring their laudable savagery—which so swiftly and decisively ended the war in Europe—back home.”

  What he can’t bring himself to express, even in our most privileged company, is the fear that the returning veterans will demand rights, even citizenship. The Barnyard Bonus Marchers have become the new bête noir of the radical right, even after the guerilla leader and onetime Barnyard Ballads lead Sgt. Lummox was gunned down by a Dixon-bred Rat Patrol.

  Dixon nervously taps a monogrammed sterling silver pill case against the arm of his chair. “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop, I know. The loyal ones who return will be kept busy on our new projects. So long as there are no further interruptions.” A venomous glare as he gobbles a donut disintegrating in scotch. He sets the mug down and lights a cigarette.

  “You won’t have any more union trouble in Florida. If you embodied the courage of your convictions, you’d abandon California altogether. Let the Communist vermin wallow in their syphilitic cesspool.”

  “The film industry is my life’s blood, Edgar, you know that. Lord knows I haven’t gotten the recognition for the innovations I brought, but I can’t walk away from it. My boys—my family—would never forgive me.”

  He looks fondly at the screen. Darn Old Duck catches the severed head and his feathery fingers get caught in Hitler’s toothless mouth. Mugging and cursing, he dances into the end zone and spikes der Fuhrer’s face into the cracked concrete.

  Hoover stands up and brushes donut crumbs off his pinstripe suit. I like Mr. Hoover more than I should, because when he’s not wearing his lifts, he’s the only human I know who’s shorter than me. A product of constant mental surgery, with a House of Pain inside his head, Mr. Hoover is an inspiration. A triumph of humanity over its own nature.

  This tiny upright pug projects the crushing weight of his superhuman virility onto Dixon’s quaking shoulders as he rises from his chair. “We stand ready to assist you, Wilbur, if you cannot maintain order in your own backyard.”

  After the meeting, Dixon wants to go home and relax with his model trains, but there is business to discuss.

  Filming on Alice in Wonderland has been delayed yet again, after the scenarist, a dangerous British intellectual I could’ve warned Dixon about, dosed the Tea Party scene with mescaline. “Mr. Huxley has been deported and all the humanimals have been treated with thorazine, but … the March Hare has escaped again, and we think he’s been … that is, he’s gone over to the Animal Liberation League.”

  “Orwell! Tell me again, why can’t we deport that black-lunged agitator! No, I’m sick of hearing about the films. Tell me about the park.”

  With opening day still a week away, Dixonland is a shambles. Half the rides don’t work. There was a broken slide on the Li'l Black Sambo flume ride. Two log boats were trapped underground, and a woman was mauled by a tiger. “Thank goodness it was an employee,” he grumbles. “Next.”

  He busies himself with his new toy, a clockwork scarlet macaw. “It can learn and repeat up to two hundred phrases,” he preens, “and it never poops.”

  “Please, sir. This is serious.” A lawsuit was filed last week by a Mr. Lee Nussbaum of Anaheim. His son was bit by several squirrel litter-pickers when he attempted to climb the fence to get a peek at the park.

  “Haven’t even opened yet, and the parasites and the vermin are already sucking my blood.” He lights another cigarette and sucks half of it to ash. The doctors want to take out his left lung, but still he sucks in that smoke, like the atmosphere of his lost home planet. “My squirrels don’t have rabies. Perish the thought.” Dixon dips another donut and then coughs. “Nussbaum. Squirrels. Ha!”

  The complaint gets a bit vague, but the boy has grown a tail and outsized incisors, and lost his thumbs.

  “We should counter-sue him,” Dixon muses. “He’s stolen our proprietary, patented process. Shame about the little boy, but we can’t allow our property to slip into the public domain.”

  We split the difference. Offer little Nussbaum a chance to audition for the Moxie Monkey Club, a new project being developed for ABC’s embryonic television network. He dictates a letter in his windy, emphysemic tenor, then has me sign it. His world-renowned signature, with its trademarked whimsically swooping initials, is the effect of my fluid trunk penmanship. His own signature, even when sober, looks like a spider smashed into the paper.

  His facial tic star
ts up again. “Spare the rod and spoil the child … I should’ve listened to Moreau. All these problems you filthy, ungrateful creatures brought to my door. It’s enough to make me think about going back to animation. When a drawing goes wrong, you just erase it.”

  He wants to show me his new tabletop model. Dixon’s World breaks ground in another month, and he’s got so many plans. Flying ahead of schedule on the backs of bull and baboon slaves, it will take only months to build the 2,000-acre park and miles of hotels and walled suburbs. There have been daily discipline problems and a few uprisings, but beast men are not unionized contractors. Gunning them down in a ditch or burning them in ovens isn’t genocide. It’s inventory reduction.

  “The new park will be bigger and cleaner than this one, Gene. And it'll have a little portion for every corner of the globe, so you can go around the world in a day, without all the unrest and germs. And all the inhabitants will be humanimals from each region. I’ve got Hiss working on Komodo dragons and panda-men, and….”

  “What about the Cowboys and the Lummoxes, sir?”

  “Well, what about them? Who’d pay to see them? They’re trained killers, they’ve tasted human blood. And—” He catches himself rationalizing to me, and lights a cigarette to go with the pair in his ashtray. “And as it happens, they'll be staying in Europe. Soviet Union’s licking its chops over the mess Hitler left. Someone has to hold the line.”

  “Where will they stay? Some of them will … want to come home.”

  He bites a nail and looks away. “In the old German facilities. As it happens, Hitler had a lot of accommodations that will work perfectly for our extended family.”

  I’ve wanted to ask him about this for some time, but Uncle Will has been on edge, firing loyal workers for using profanity, sending half the staff to spy on the other half. Enemies are everywhere. Trying to steal us from him, even now. Even my position is not invulnerable. “You love us … but you sent us to war. To die….”