Phantom Strays

by Lorraine Ray

First, before Mr. Wayne and our attempt to give him LSD, which was one of my long-lost hooks to this story, there had to be simple movements forward, the thrust into teenager years, accomplished by the day at the Beatles movie, the sighting of Smitty and his gang, the nights at CYO dances, and the worship of radios and long playing recordings. Further acts of growing up, swift rebellions and triumphs followed. Meredith, Jack and I undertook a series of disastrous missteps: drug doses, failed friendships, and local catastrophes containing essential and epic teen elements.

  Before dinner Mother always read the afternoon newspaper. This would be in the hour before our father arrived from the architectural firm where he worked, before he drove the green station wagon partway around the fan of gravel and parked. One afternoon she sat in the living room (hadn’t I seen something important once out of that window, something marvelous twirling in that gravel when I once played with blocks?) and I lay on the rug, now a yellow shag carpet instead of the gray flat wool carpet I had known as a child, reading the newspaper’s black and white comic page slowly. That day she snapped and fluffed the front page section about aggressively while in the kitchen the pot roast stewed in the pressure cooker, the sizzling sound of the valve letting off steam, ready to blow, if something interesting appeared to really make the pot boil.

  The Citizen’s headline stood several inches tall and it read: Teens Viewed Body. Mother studied the accompanying article carefully, the way a competent librarian would, memorizing information. “Well, by cracky, kid,” she said to me finally as I struggled to make sense of the comic strip Prince Valiant, which now contained a crocodile when I thought the last time I read it the action took place in England and I wondered what had happened at Camelot recently in the strip, “this is incredible. What an article. Good thing I saw through him right away when he was there at the asthma clinic with you kids. Boy, what a tough character he was. I sensed it right away. I have a sixth sense for evil, you know. It’s something that runs in the family. The Indiana family. I knew at a glance that he was up to no good. Sure, he didn’t fool me. All those people thinking he was something special. Fascinated by him. Well, I tell you, he was something all right. Something evil. I could tell at a glance that that kid was up to no good. Imagine people thinking he was doing anything but pure evil. You can’t fool an Indiana girl from the farm. In Central Indiana we’ve really seen pure evil. A pretty face won’t fool us and an interesting manner won’t make up for pure evil housed in their heart. What in tarnation were those kids thinking? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  I glanced up from my confusion at the action in the Brenda Starr comic. What was up with Basil St. John and his black eye patch? Why had the circus fat lady phoned Brenda? Though I had heard Mother’s words, nothing she said made much sense. I wasn’t sure who Mother was talking about. I thought I might give up on what she said and try Steve Canyon, though I had never had much luck understanding that comic either.

  “Murdering that girl. Dagnabbit. Luring her out of the house for the sole purpose of murder. Do you remember him, kid? At the asthma clinic? He was there as big, or as little, as you please, actually (because he was so short) sitting against the wall, oh, I don’t know that we saw him every time we were there. Maybe only twice, but he was hard to ignore. The girls hung onto him. He clomped around in boots. Smitty, they called him. Crazy blue eyes and a mole he drew on his face. About the size of a quarter. Very weird to have put a thing as large as that on his face.”

  She snapped the paper again. “By cracky, I never. That Smittendorf boy. It was him that murdered the girl and buried her in the desert. Found the body last Saturday, do you remember him? And then two others. Golly. Told someone about it and showed them the body as it was, half-buried in the desert. Holy Toledo. There they were, going out to see a dead body and not telling a soul about it. What went on in their minds? Those darn kids. I blame the music. That rock and roll is corrupting them into a complete disregard of the norms of society. That’s what the Mafia wants. They control the recording industry and that’s what they want. A complete breakdown of morals. Nothing regulating human behavior. Then they can make their money off of people’s foolishness. Sure, they have the young in their grips. You can’t break all the molds in a society. Don’t want to wear girdles, huh? Don’t want to be restricted? Well, those kids were down-right evil. What a story and the thing is we had been seeing him on and off the entire year at his parents’ asthma clinic. He was that peculiar kid with the big mole on his face and the gang of kids gathered around him like a security blanket. His poor parents, or I should say adopted parents. There’s a story there. What in the world must they be thinking? I’ll be doggone if it wasn’t him there all those times. Smitty. Sure, looking at his pictures, I’m certain it was him, even with the pack around him I got a good enough look at those blue eyes of his. Wow, what a story. This is putting us on the map. Not that I wanted a thing like this to do it, no, there are hundreds of wholesome stories in Arizona and Tucson. Now we have to have everybody interested in this awful murder. But that Smitty kid went and did it. I tell you, I never liked the appearance of him. I knew there was something about him—sure—something suspiciously bad. Evil, that’s what that kid was, kid. Sitting there like a horned toad on his anthill. He had no regard for others. You could see that right away. Couldn’t say what it was that bugged me. And his parents were good people just from the Midwest from a good part of the Midwest as good and honest as you please. Just read about this murder stuff in the paper. Can you imagine it? There we were going to an asthma clinic and their adopted kid murdered young girls. And only half-burying them! In the desert. Oh, imagine it. It was you, kid, there at that asthma clinic with Jack only a few months ago. We did the whole course of treatments. You were running across the room as free as you could be and I’ll be doggoned if it wasn’t that adopted kid of theirs that had murdered all along. I knew something was a little bit off with him when I noticed the pancake makeup. What are those kids doing hanging around at the Drive-Ins and chatting about nothing all the live long day? That’s what this article says happened to those kids. Why didn’t they have tough chores at home? Why didn’t they have a lick of sense? Why didn’t their parents give them a lickin when they needed it? Why didn’t they have a list of chores and a long enough one that they couldn’t run out of chores? They could have picked weeds. Even if their parents were prominent doctors and everything they still should have had difficult chores to keep them at home, especially on weeknights and summers. Where were their parents to tell them to stop all that nonsense? Living in the foothills, that’s where their parents were. Their parents are surgeons. Tsk, tsk, what a pity. What an absolute disgrace. The poor Smittendorf’s, too. Though his parents were well off, he was an unsuitable person for them, I think. An adopted boy and all that. What must they think? Heavens. He had them all under a spell that’s all there is to it, that was what was going on. Reading between the lines of the article. Wow. This is bad stuff.”

  “They’re calling him the Pied Piper of Tucson. That is disgraceful. Us appearing in the news magazines. I’m going up the Star Drug to get a few of them tomorrow. Hope they don’t sell out this afternoon. That kid has shamed the town with these murders and those teens, brother, they were a tough group. You wouldn’t want them to get hold of you, kid. Oh, I suppose this sort of thing is as old as the hills. As old as the Pied Piper stealing the kids away and that’s pretty doggone old.”

  The writer must follow the Pied Piper to see where he’s taking the kids. The writer must stare into the eyes of death and love it and write it. The writer must be willing to steal corpses since it is such a part of the work, the very essence of a writer’s mixed-up makeup, and the act of the taking and coveting, of madness spread on the page, the pinning of the deed, the mocking of the meaning, taking everything out of context and mixing it and merging it into fiction without mercy. Cutting into the gist of things and strangling the content, strangling the life out of the past, turning every emotion int
o text, robbing graves, looting the past, disinterring the dead, staring into their eyes without fear in order to write what the writer imagines they felt. Looking for monsters, waiting for them to come out, the way I did one day on a drive to find, yes, a dead saguaro cactus, that was it, that was what I had done all those years ago! The heart of the story held a strange curled animal, maybe vicious in the case of Smitty, or maybe there was nothing there staring back at you at all. And the truth always was that the emptiness might be as scary as the presence of something. Staring into the dead cactus in the back of the station wagon, I had waited for a vile thing to emerge. It never did, but the waiting nearly drove me mad, until I screamed silently when Jack saw me and said…sure, his favorite phrase, up jumped the devil. Like the chicken and the egg, the Itty Bitty Cocky Baby, always in a state of ripe readiness, always fruitful, the writer must be waiting to pounce on the morsel that makes the difference, the ideal hook, the telling detail. Like a murderer waiting to pounce, looking for an advantage with the reader, hoping for an opening into their emotional life, trying to take life off the surface of the earth and kill it on the pages of a book. Sneaking up on the unsuspecting reader, using cover to advance toward them and bring them the hook they want. Relishing the corpses you create and displaying them. Fixated on the dead time of the past, lifeless, terminal, preserved with all kinds of incorrect surrounding details, which the vain writer remembered wrong.

  I ought to go back to describe the girls with Smitty and pretend that one of them that I saw at the clinic was the one he strangled, as Mother claimed. Which one would I pick as his victim? Which one would get lured out of her house one night and murdered? And how can this be construed to be a treasure of the desert?