999

by Al Sarrantonio

  They were married in the woods in back of the house on a cloudy June afternoon, while Mr. and Mrs. Fairfield were away to talk to their lawyer in Grand Junction. Dampy wore a red-and-white checkered kitchen towel that Hooter said made him look like a Palestinian terrorist. Hooter himself was all in black. It was the first time they’d been in the woods together so far from the house that you couldn’t even see the roof. For all they knew they were lost!

  Dampy took the stub of Hooter’s wing in his paw and said, “I thee wed!”

  To which the owl replied, “For better or for worse.”

  “In sickness and in health.”

  That was as much of the ceremony as they could remember, except for the kissing. Then there was the problem of what to do with the ring now that it was theirs. Dampy wanted to return it to Mrs. Fairfield’s jewel case, but Hooter got such a hurt look that Dampy at once came up with an alternate plan. They buried it under a stone out in the woods, marking the very spot where they’d been wed.

  When they got back to the house, Mr. and Mrs. Fairfield’s lawyer, Mr. Habib, was there with them, as well as two policemen and a lady, Mrs. Yardley, with yellow hair like a movie star’s who wanted to talk to them. At first Mr. Habib said she was being ridiculous, the boy was autistic and delusional. Nothing could be gained by speaking with him, and in any case that would be a hopeless task. The boy could not be made to answer questions. Mr. Habib had tried, and so had the police.

  “But I understand, from remarks that Mr. Fairfield has made in his deposition, that he does speak to, or through, his teddy bears. And I see he has them with him now. I’d like to speak to the teddy bears. Privately.”

  “You want to speak to a pair of rucking teddy bears!” jeered Mr. Fairfield. “Maybe give ‘em the third degree?”

  “For the record,” said Mrs. Yardley, “we have reason to believe that the child’s welfare may be in danger. There has been a history of abuse.”

  “All those charges had to do with the deceased,” Mr. Habib pointed out. “And this boy is surely not fit for a formal interrogation.”

  Mrs. Yardley smiled a sweet smile and scrunched down beside Hooter. “But I don’t want to talk with the boy. It’s this little fellow I’d like to meet. And his friend.” She gave Hooter’s beak a gentle tweak and patted Dampy on the head. “If someone would introduce me.

  Dampy turned his face away, but Hooter was not quite so shy. “I’m Hooter,” he confided in a whisper. “And this is Dampy.”

  Mr. Habib protested vigorously as to the irregularity of Mrs. Yardley’s questioning, but she just ignored him and went on talking with Dampy and Hooter, telling them about other teddy bears she knew and respected, an Evangeline, who lived in Twin Forks and was as well-dressed as any fashion model; Dreyfus, who always wore a little bow tie and was knowledgeable about mutual funds; and Jean-Paul-Luc, who spoke French, which made it difficult for Mrs. Yardley to get to know him very well, since she’d only had one year of French in high school, long ago.

  She was a really nice lady, but the nicer she was the ruder Mr. Fairfield became, until finally she had to ask the two policemen to escort Mr. Fairfield out to their car. Mr. Habib accompanied Mr. Fairfield to the police car, and Mrs. Fairfield went upstairs.

  When they were alone with Mrs. Yardley, she shifted their conversation away from the other teddy bears she knew and wanted to know all sort of things about the Fairfields. Hooter tried to be cooperative, but there wasn’t much he could tell her about the first Mrs. Fairfield. Dampy was not as trustful at first, and there were lots of things that he claimed he couldn’t remember, especially about the night the first Mrs. Fairfield had died.

  Gradually, Hooter realized that Mrs. Yardley thought that Mr. Fairfield had murdered his first wife and was looking for some way to prove it. When she was done asking Dampy questions, Mrs. Yardley asked Hooter the same questions, even after he’d explained to her that he’d been living at the Dutch Reformed Church when Mrs. Fairfield was killed.

  “Ah-ha!” said Mrs. Yardley. “Why do you say ‘killed’? Is it because you don’t believe it was an accident?”

  “I don’t know” Hooter protested, close to tears.

  “I guess she must have killed herself,” Dampy said unprompted. “That’s what Mr. Fairfield says.”

  “Oh, really? Who did he say that to? To you?”

  “No, to me he always says it was an accident and not to think about it. But I heard him say to the new Mrs. Fairfield—”

  “To Pamela Harper, that is? The lady who just went upstairs?”

  “Mm-hm. He told her that no one can take so many sleeping pills by accident. He said he thinks she must of mashed them up in her Rocky Road ice cream. Sometimes she would eat a whole pint of Rocky Road all by herself. Especially if they had got in a fight. He’d apologize by bringing home the ice cream. No one else ever got a bite.”

  The more Dampy explained to Mrs. Yardley about the ice cream and the liquor and the different arguments there’d been, the clearer it became to Hooter that Mr. Fairfield had probably killed his first wife by mixing up her sleeping pills with the ice cream. Then putting a bottle of whiskey somewhere she’d be sure to find it when he left her by herself. Clearly, Mrs. Yardley suspected the same thing.

  Then there was a great ruckus when the new Mrs. Fairfield came storming down the steps and out of the house to accuse her husband of having stolen her four-carat diamond ring from her jewel case.

  Hooter looked at Dampy with alarm, and Dampy tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling’s intricate pattern of overlapping water stains. Mrs. Yardley could coax nothing more from either of them, so she left them to themselves and went to stand in the front door and watch Mr. and Mrs. Fairfield scream at each other until Mr. Fairfield went from just verbal abuse to a whack across the face, and that was all Mrs. Yardley needed. Dampy and Hooter spent that night in a foster-care residence forty miles away from the Fairfield home, and they remained there all through Mr. Fairfield’s trial for the murder of his first wife. They were not qualified, legally, to be witnesses at the trial, and Hooter, for one, was glad to be spared such an unpleasant duty. What could he have said that would be any help to Mr. Fairfield? For all his faults, the man had been like a father to him, and Hooter would not have wanted to be there when the jury brought in their verdict of Guilty of Murder in the First Degree.

  At the foster-care residence Dampy and Hooter had been discouraged from seeing much of each other. When they could get together it would have to be in the laundry room when no one was washing clothes or up in the attic, where they weren’t supposed to go. Even when they were able to spend a few minutes together, away from the other residents, they were both at a loss for words. Dampy was gradually slipping back into the sullenness and depression that had kept him from talking to everyone at the time before he’d met Hooter. And Hooter for his part spent a lot of his time, as he had in the basement of the Dutch Reformed Church, practicing the multiplication tables.

  Neither of them would speak to Mr. Fairfield when he tried to phone, and Mrs. Fairfield never did ring up. Maybe she wasn’t really Mr. Fairfield’s wife, but just a girlfriend. Anyhow, she moved somewhere that didn’t have an address.

  “Do you miss her?” Hooter asked Dampy one cold November afternoon when they were sitting behind the clothes dryer in the laundry room.

  “Not really. Watching all those programs on the Home Shopping Channel got to be pretty dull. I didn’t like the first Mrs. Fairfield that much either, but she was more fun to be with.”

  Hooter studied one of the big lint balls on the floor with a look of melancholy. “You know what? I miss him.”

  “Oh, we’re better off this way,” Dampy assured him.

  “I suppose so. Will he have to spend a lot of time in jail?”

  “The newspaper said twenty-five years at a minimum.”

  “Goodness! He’ll be, let me see …” Hooter did the arithmetic in his head. “… almost fifty-five when he gets out. Well, I su
ppose it’s what he deserves. If you kill someone, you have to pay the price.”

  Dampy gave Hooter a funny smile. The matron at the residence had sewn up the wound in his neck and now his head tilted in the other direction in a way that was sometimes unnerving. “True,” he agreed. “But you know he didn’t kill Mrs. Fairfield.”

  “Yes, yes, it’s like Mr. Habib says, there was nothing but circumstantial evidence.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant.”

  “You mean, she really did kill herself?”

  “I mean I killed her.”

  Hooter looked shocked. “But you couldn’t! You’re just—”

  “Just a teddy bear?” Dampy asked with a smile. “And do you think teddy bears are just stupid cuddly dumb animals?”

  Hooter shook his head.

  “We may not live in the woods, but we are bears.”

  “I’m an owl!” Hooter protested.

  “And I’m a pussycat. But we’re both bears. Don’t deny it—look at your ears. Mr. Fairfield is best off right where he is, and as for us, I expect we’ll be adopted soon by someone nice. Mrs. Yardley says there have been lots of applications.”

  And that is just what happened. They were adopted by Curtis and Maeve Bennet and moved to a house on the Jersey shore and there, just as in the poem

  … hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

  They danced by the light of the moon,

  The moon,

  The moon,

  They danced by the light of the moon.

  But their wedding ring is still where they left it, under the rock in the woods, marking the spot where they were wed.

  Stephen King

  THE ROAD VIRUS HEADS NORTH

  What can I say about this guy Stephen King? I won’t mention his novels, since most of you have already read them all; most of you have also seen the movies made from the hooks, and listened to the audiotapes, and maybe even own the refrigerator magnets and T-shirts and God knows what other ancillary paraphernalia based on them.

  I won’t talk about the shorter tales, except to say that some of them (here I’ll name names: “Apt Pupil,” for example) are still overlooked as some of the finest American stories, period.

  I won’t talk about the critical writings King has produced, such as the many informative and iconoclastic book introductions, essays, and the collected wisdom of Danse Macabre; I also won’t talk about his basic support of the art of reading, or his boosterism of freedom of thought and expression; and finally, I won’t discuss the fact that he virtually invented the modern horror movement out of thin air in the 1910s.

  So what can I say about this guy?

  Actually, I think I’ll just shut up (no clapping please) and let Mr. King do what he does best: which is to throw down his own portable campfire in front of you, lean close so the flames dance across his features—ana tell you one hell of a story.

  Richard Kinnell wasn’t frightened when he first saw the picture at the yard sale in Rosewood.

  He was fascinated by it, and he felt he’d had the good luck to find something which might be very special, but fright? No. It didn’t occur to him until later ("not until it was too late,” as he might have written in one of his own numbingly successful novels) that he had felt much the same way about certain illegal drugs as a young man.

  He had gone down to Boston to participate in a PEN/New England conference tided “The Threat of Popularity.” You could count on PEN to come up with such subjects, Kinnell had found; it was actually sort of comforting. He drove the two hundred and sixty miles from Derry rather than flying because he’d come to a plot impasse on his latest book and wanted some quiet time to try to work it out.

  At the conference, he sat on a panel where people who should have known better asked him where he got his ideas and if he ever scared himself. He left the city by way of the Tobin Bridge, then got on Route 1. He never took the turnpike when he was trying to work out problems; the turnpike lulled him into a state that was like dreamless, waking sleep. It was restful, but not very creative. The stop-and-go traffic on the coast road, however, acted like grit inside an oyster—it created a fair amount of mental activity … and sometimes even a pearl.

  Not, he supposed, that his critics would use that word. In an issue of Esquire last year, Bradley Simons had begun his review of Nightmare City this way: “Richard Kinnell, who writes like Jeffery Dahmer cooks, has suffered a fresh bout of projectile vomiting. He has tided this most recent mass of ejecta Nightmare City.”

  Route I took him through Revere, Maiden, Everett, and up the coast to Newburyport. Beyond Newburyport and just south of the Massachusetts—New Hampshire border was the tidy little town of Rosewood. A mile or so beyond the town center, he saw an array of cheap-looking goods spread out on the lawn of a two-story Cape. Propped against an avocado-colored electric stove was a sign reading YARD SALE. Cars were parked on both sides of the road, creating one of those bottlenecks which travelers unaffected by the yard sale mystique curse their way through. Kinnell liked yard sales, particularly the boxes of old books you sometimes found at them. He drove through the bottleneck, parked his Audi at the head of the line of cars pointed toward Maine and New Hampshire, then walked back.

  A dozen or so people were circulating on the littered front lawn of the blue-and-gray Cape Cod. A large television stood to the left of the cement walk, its feet planted on four paper ashtrays that were doing absolutely nothing to protect the lawn. On top was a sign reading MAKE AN OFFER—YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED. An electrical cord, augmented by an extension, trailed back from the TV and through the open front door. A fat woman sat in a lawn chair before it, shaded by an umbrella with CINZANO printed on the colorful scalloped flaps. There was a card table beside her with a cigar box, a pad of paper, and another hand-lettered sign on it. This sign read ALL SALES CASH, ALL SALES FINAL. The TV was on, tuned to an afternoon soap opera where two beautiful young people looked on the verge of having deeply unsafe sex. The fat woman glanced at Kinnell, then back at the TV. She looked at it for a moment, then looked back at him again. This time her mouth was slightly sprung.

  Ah, Kinnell thought, looking around for the liquor box filled with paperbacks that was sure to be here someplace, a fan.

  He didn’t see any paperbacks, but he saw the picture, leaning against an ironing board and held in place by a couple of plastic laundry baskets, and his breath stopped in his throat. He wanted it at once.

  He walked over with a casualness that felt exaggerated and dropped to one knee in front of it. The painting was a watercolor, and technically very good. Kinnell didn’t care about that; technique didn’t interest him (a fact the critics of his own work had duly noted). What he liked in works of art was content, and the more unsettling the better. This picture scored high in that department. He knelt between the two laundry baskets, which had been filled with a jumble of small appliances, and let his fingers slip over the glass facing of the picture. He glanced around briefly, looking for others like it, and saw none—only the usual yard sale art collection of Little Bo Peeps, praying hands, and gambling dogs.

  He looked back at the framed watercolor, and in his mind he was already moving his suitcase into the backseat of the Audi so he could slip the picture comfortably into the trunk.

  It showed a young man behind the wheel of a muscle car—maybe a Grand Am, maybe a GTX, something with a T-top, anyway—crossing the Tobin Bridge at sunset. The T-top was off, turning the black car into a half-assed convertible. The young man’s left arm was cocked on the door; his right wrist was draped casually over the wheel. Behind him, the sky was a bruise-colored mass of yellows and grays, streaked with veins of pink. The young man had lank blond hair that spilled over his low forehead. He was grinning, and his parted lips revealed teeth which were not teeth at all but fangs.

  Or maybe they’re filed to points, Kinnell thought. Maybe he’s supposed to be a cannibal.

  He liked that; liked the idea of a cannibal crossing the Tobin Bridge at sun
set. In a Grand Am. He knew what most of the audience at the PEN panel discussion would have thought—Oh, yes, great picture for Rich Kinnell; he probably wants it for inspiration, a feather to tickle his tired old gorge into one more fit of projectile vomiting—but most of those folks were ignoramuses, at least as far as his work went, and what was more, they treasured their ignorance, cossetted it the way some people inexplicably treasured and cossetted those stupid, mean-spirited little dogs that yapped at visitors and sometimes bit the paperboy’s ankles. He hadn’t been attracted to this painting because he wrote horror stories; he wrote horror stories because he was attracted to things like this painting. His fans sent him stuff—pictures, mostly—and he threw most of them away, not because they were bad art but because they were tiresome and predictable. One fan from Omaha had sent him a little ceramic sculpture of a screaming, horrified monkey’s head poking out of a refrigerator door, however, and that one he had kept. It was unskillfully executed, but there was an unexpected juxtaposition there that lit up his dials. This painting had some of the same quality, but it was even better. Much better.

  As he was reaching for it, wanting to pick it up right now, this second, wanting to tuck it under his arm and proclaim his intentions, a voice spoke up behind him: “Aren’t you Richard Kinnell?”

  He jumped, then turned. The fat woman was standing directly behind him, blotting out most of the immediate landscape. She had put on fresh lipstick before approaching, and now her mouth had been transformed into a bleeding grin.

  “Yes, I am,” he said, smiling back.

  Her eyes dropped to the picture. “I should have known you’d go right to that,” she said, simpering. “It’s so you”

  “It is, isn’t it?” he said, and smiled his best celebrity smile. “How much would you need for it?”

  “Forty-five dollars,” she said. “I’ll be honest with you, I started it at seventy, but nobody likes it, so now it’s marked down. If you come back tomorrow, you can probably have it for thirty.” The simper had grown to frightening proportions. Kinnell could see little gray spit-buds in the dimples at the corners of her stretched mouth.