by Marc Laidlaw
“No, thanks, Mom. I’m stuffed.”
“You just go watch TV. I’ll do the dishes and come join you.”
“Okay, Mom.”
He slouches into the living room, turns on the VCR, and takes an oft-handled cassette out of the rack. It is labeled: “The Care Bears in the Land Without Feelings,” a title he was sure would never interest his mother when he glued it to the cassette. He slips it into the player, turns on the set with the sound down low, listens to the dishes clinking in the kitchen. The remote control stays in his hand, in case Mom should come in at a bad time.
And in this movie, all times are bad. Outside of a fever dream, the Care Bears could never have found themselves in a land so devoid of human or ursine sentiment as the one on the screen. Images swim out of his memory, merging with the light that plays across his eyes. It’s only a movie, he tells himself. What have we here? Cross sections of red meat, stumped limbs or trunks? No, it’s the infernal sun, with flares strung out and heaving across the void—the raw stuff of violence on a cosmic scale. The sight of it makes him feel significant, attuned. His breathing comes swiftly, in shallow gulps. The miasma of night begins to gather in his eyes and the pit of his gut, as if he’s about to black out. He can hardly see the TV anymore; the volume is turned down so low that his mother’s Muzak overwhelms the ominous sound track. Strings and synthesizers sigh; a chorus of castrati whimpers, “Please, mister, please,” as Texas Chainsaw Massacre buries itself in his eyes.
“Donny, how about some iced tea?”
He jerks and switches from video to live TV. A news anchorwoman mouths at him, apparently concerned for his wellbeing.
“What was that?” she says.
“Ad for some shocker, Mom.”
“Oh, those horrid things. I swear I don’t know what the world is coming to.”
“Who does?”
To the left of the newscaster’s head, bright letters appear beneath a stylized cartoon toilet bowl whose rim is stained red: basin butcher. He taps the volume control slightly, until he can hear the TV over his mother’s voice.
“—fifth in a series of apparently linked murders. Police say the body of another unidentified male was cut into pieces, wrapped in Mylar, and embedded in cement inside five antique porcelain sinks.”
“Did you know that someone set fire to Gracie’s poodle? The poor little thing, really. First the poison bait and now this.”
The TV news team switches to field coverage, the same it showed last night. He sits up to appreciate this replay; Channel 2 has the best footage. Policemen scramble down a dusky shore of the bay, stumbling among concrete blocks and rusting wrecks of old cars. The camera zooms in on five gleaming white sinks, standing out like porcelain idols against the choppy water. Sea gulls dive to peck hungrily at the basins. The taps and handles gleam in the light of the setting sun, and so does he. An ambitious trick, but not as neat as the tub will be. The toilets had been a coarse guffaw of a murder, an attention-getter. Soon he will run out of the fixtures left over from his father’s business; after one more tub, the next stage of his work will commence. There are dozens of statuary molds waiting to be filled with his homemade cement-and-flesh porridge, and more than enough cement powder to fulfill his dreams for the indefinite future. He need never expose himself by purchasing supplies.
“I hear that another poor woman was mugged at Safeway yesterday—right at the checkout counter,” his mother says.
“The search continues for the person or persons responsible for the killings. Police seek information regarding a vehicle seen in the Bayshore area Wednesday night. An old-model truck with wooden paneling—”
He switches the channel quickly, unnerved, and looks at his mother to make sure she hasn’t been paying attention. She watches him steadily over her bifocals.
“What’s wrong with you, Donny? You haven’t been yourself lately.”
"I don’t know what you mean, Mom.”
“You don’t talk to me anymore. You’re a stranger. You’re tuckered out all the time and I never see you when you’re working. What are you doing out there, anyway?”
“I told you, Mom, it’s a surprise. You’re not supposed to know.”
She smiles, a prim expression that reassures him that she won’t press any further, never fear. He gets up and gives her a kiss on the cheek. “I love you, Mom. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll bring you some iced tea.”
“Would you? What a darling. All right, I’ll plump my fat old fanny down and take a rest.”
She chatters on as he enters the kitchen, opens the icebox and takes out a tray, finds two tall glasses and loads them with cubes. The tea is in a pitcher on the counter, next to the radio. In here the Muzak is deafening, but he doesn’t dare turn it down, though it makes the glasses chatter in his hands.
“Who’s looking out from under the stairway? Everyone knows it’s—"
“Donny!”
He forces his fingers to relax before they crush the glasses. His teeth are clamped together, there is fog in his eyes and fear on his breath. He stands in darkness, fumbling for a way back to the light. His hands encounter a drawer.
“Donny, come in here!”
He walks toward her voice like a servile mummy, stiff-legged, carrying drinks; the gleeful Muzak dictates his steps, sets the pace of his heart. He reaches the coffee table and starts to set down the drinks, only to find that he is not holding beverages after all. In either hand is a knife: not as sharp as his special knives, being for domestic use, but still sufficient for his purposes.
On the screen, to which Mother draws his eyes with a bony finger, is frozen a frame from his video: a flayed corpse in a cemetery. TCM. He almost drops the knives.
“I put on the Care Bears,” she says.
His hands begin to shake as the Muzak blasts at his shoulders, pushing him closer to her. Closer.
“Aren’t they wonderful?” he whispers. “Such feeling. Such care . . .
"Why, yes,” she answers, looking past the knives that almost touch her throat. She doesn’t see them. She smiles at Donny. “I thought we could watch them together. What’s this cute fellow’s name?”
He looks at the screen and lowers the knives. “He never has a name. But later . . .” He sets the knives on the coffee table, iced tea forgotten, and seats himself beside her. "Later, you’ll meet Leatherface.”
“Leatherface? And is he very nice?”
“Oh yes,” he says. “Very, very nice.”
“And these are the Care Bears you watch every day?”
“That’s right.” He nods eagerly, amazed by her blindness. She must see only what she wants to see. How could she believe anything but the best of her son? Her first sight of the corpse— where she had expected to find an animated teddy bear—must have snapped her mind. What a relief! It means he can finally be honest with her: after so much furtiveness, he can tell her his secrets and bask in her praise. She should be as proud of him as she’d be if he’d found a job or built a birdhouse.
The video player whirrs, begins to move again.
“Oh, Donny, I see,” she says in high-pitched merriment. “I’m so glad we’re together, just you and me.”
“So am I, Mom. I have to tell you—”
The confessions are ready to come bubbling up, but she interrupts him.
“It was you who poisoned Gracie’s noisy little dog, wasn’t it?” Her tone is comforting. “And set the fire?”
He blushes, but when she gives his knee a gentle squeeze, he nods shyly. “Yes, Mom, and—”
“You don’t know how relieved I am to hear it. And it’s you who’ve been taking out Dad’s truck late at night, isn’t it?”
He straightens. “Oh no, Mom, honest! I wouldn’t do that without asking, you know I . . .”
Her eyes begin to wander. “Then I must be losing my mind,” she says gently. “Try to Remember” filters in from the kitchen. “I’m so old I’ve started hearing things.”
“No, Mom, don’t say th
at.” He chokes back a sob. “Okay, I have gone out. That was me you heard. I won’t do it anymore, though. I promise I won’t use the woody.” That’s a true lie; he’ll have to use the other car from now on, since the woody was spotted.
“I know where you’ve been going, Donny.”
“Do you, Mom?”
“Of course I do. I’m not senile, you know.”
“No, Mom, you’re sharp as a tack. I was going to tell you about it, really I—”
“Hush, I know you better than that." She puts a finger to her lips, rises from the sofa, goes to the stereo. She takes out an album and puts it on the player. He’s so excited that he doesn’t even care that it’s Lawrence Welk. As the schmaltzy music fills the air and a slaughterhouse on the television brightens the room, she comes back and kisses him on the crown.
“I’ve heard them, you see,” she says.
“Oh, that,” he says, feeling awkward.
“Now be honest. I’ve heard them come in with you, and the noises. You make them squeal, don’t you? They like you very much, isn’t that so?”
“Like me?” He stretches his collar, clears his throat. “You don’t think I . . .”
“I’ve told you not to lie to me, Donny,” she snaps. “What’s been going on in my house? Something dirty? Something shameful?”
Black champagne bubbles float up and gather against the ceiling, filling the room from the top to the bottom. That music— Muzak.
“Take off this record, Mom, please.”
“Are you doing wicked things in there?”
“No, Mom, no . . it’s nothing like that.”
“Vile things? Evil?”
"Mom, I kill them! That’s all, I swear. I keep them tied up for a while and then I chop them into pieces.”
“Don’t lie to me, Donny.”
She glares at him, one finger tapping in time to Lawrence Welk. There’s nothing else in the room, none of the comfort of the TV massacres; only Mom and her accusations, which are brutal as blows because unjust. He tries to rise but the music beats him down. Where are the knives? He squints through the black ballooning air, but the only blades he sees are in her hands.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No, Mama, I’m not lying. Please don’t punish me, I’ll be good.”
Muzak thicker than murder. He bolts through his muddled thoughts, escaping in the only direction open to him with his body paralyzed and his mother waiting for him out there in the land without feelings. This proves to be a dead end, but by the time he has backed out to consciousness, he is truly immobilized. Ropes cut into his wrists and ankles. He lies cramped on his side in a cold coffin. Is it only a movie? he asks himself.
“—never, never do it again,” his mother is saying. "You’ll never—”
“I won’t,” he tries to promise, but his mouth is plugged with a kitchen sponge. He opens his eyes to stare at a shiny white wall high as a cliff, all porcelain. Mom stands looking down at him, humming to a saccharine tune from the other room. He fights the Muzak’s spell, but he cannot fight the ropes.
“You’ve been a very bad boy,” she says. “I have to see to it that you don’t bring any more trouble to this house.”
Over the cliff, the lip of the tub, the edge of the barrow appears. Her shoulders strain to lift it. Not cement, he thinks.
Oh no, not cement. A grey flood drools steadily toward his face. There's a sickly sweet smell. "Just to fill you up,” she says. The basin reverberates with the sound of his struggles as the clammy mixture spreads across his cheeks. What a stupid sound!
And the last thing he hears, as oatmeal seals his ears, is pure schmaltz.
* * *
“Muzak for Torso Murders” copyright 1986 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Cutting Edge (1986), edited by Dennis Etchison.
SHUCK BROTHER
Mama had been good all day, but at suppertime she went mad again and spoiled everything. It was the chicken that did it this time, the good chicken Pop had killed that afternoon by stepping on its head with his boot heel and yanking up on the talons, everything happening in slow motion under the August sun, as if the whole world wanted Jory to see exactly how it was done: the sound of the spine pulling apart, and the taffy-stretched squawk, the slow drizzle of blood on the green grass where the dead cock flapped and twitched among the hens while their heads gawked and eyes and beaks gaped as wide as they would go in the bottom of the bucket that Pop gave Jory to dump in the crick. They hadn’t gone out to kill the rooster, but it’d given Pop a few good scratches when he went in the coop for a couple-three hens, and Pop had just gone crazy himself right then and swore like hell, grabbed that cock and stepped down . . .
“I can taste it,” Mama said. “It’s in the flesh now, Henry. It’s got in their feed.”
Pop put down his fork, slowly, while Jory crumpled the napkin in his lap and wished he couldn’t remember so well what Pop’d looked like when that cock had upset him, because it was kind of the same look he had now. The cock hadn’t intended to spur him, Jory was sure of that; it had only been a dumb creature. And likewise, Mama didn’t mean any harm; she couldn’t help herself, she was always tasting the badness. But it made Pop angrier each time, and Jory more worried, and baby Tad—who didn’t know what any of it was about—closer to tears than usual.
“Now look,” Pop said, in his levelest tone of voice, “you don’t start that again. I don’t want to hear it.”
Tad was looking between the two of them while he tore at a drumstick. Jory saw Mama catch him looking, then she reached out suddenly and took the leg from his fingers.
“I don’t want you eating this now, you hear?”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? The boy’s got to eat.”
When Tad got over looking stupid, he shut his eyes and started crying.
Pop pushed back his chair and stood up, and Mama raised the drumstick as if it were a club. He came around the table, put his hand on the back of Tad’s highchair, and then stood there scowling at Mama. She met his look with one of her own, a fiercer one, Jory thought, and he wished again he could stop thinking about the way that rooster had looked, the craze in its dumb eyes, and finally the lack of anything in them, when they were just staring out of the muddy water in the crick.
Mama moved first, but not to give in. She did her second crazy thing; threw the drumstick over Jory’s head, bang into the closed cupboard. Pop grabbed her wrist and Tad screamed, and then she was crying, “You know it’s true, Henry, God damn you for lying! Unless you’ve taken in so much of it up there spraying that you can’t taste it no more—”
“Hasn’t no more flavor than rain,” he said. “You listen—”
“Rain never made the greens in the truck garden taste like this.” She shoved at the ladle in the salad bowl, spilling lettuce and tomato wedges onto the red-and-white checkered tablecloth.
“Like nothing.”
“Bitter as tin, you mean. It’s got in the tomatoes, the squash, the potatoes—living things suck it right up, even though it’s dead. And that’s what we’re going to be, Henry. You, me, your children. All of us like that stunted corn we shucked last week. They’re gonna have to come throw us all away someday soon.”
He threw down her arm. Tad reached for a tomato wedge but she slapped his hand away. “No you don’t.”
Tad sniffed.
“Look at your brother,” she said. “You don’t see him eating. Jory knows better, don’t you, Jory?”
“Let the boy eat,” Pop said.
“I know,” Mama said, suddenly brightening in such a wrong way that he knew she was going to do another crazy thing. She started to get up. “We'll go out. Jory, get you and your brother’s coats. We’ll take a drive into town and have us a nice hamburger at McDonald’s, then we'll have some watermelon on the roadside.”
“Sit down,” Pop told her. Jory hadn’t moved. “What do you think, they don’t spray melons in this county?”
“Some fine buttered corn,” s
he said, not hearing him, no longer looking at anything. She stumbled a little but caught herself on the corner of the table.
“Sit down!” he yelled. “We’ve got a good supper laid out here from our own farm, and we’re going to eat it among us, with no wasting money we can’t spare in town.”
“And after that,” she said, almost whispering, “while there’s still light, we'll go take a look at the Rockefellers’ cattle . . .”
With a little choke and rattle of breath, she fell. Jory winced, hunching his shoulders when her head struck the edge of the table. Tad stared down from his high chair, but Jory couldn’t see her. He wished Pop would help her; he wished they would be good to each other, so that he could remember what it had been like before last summer, and the coming of the bugs, and the new sprays meant to take care of them.
Finally Pop bent and saw to her, lifted her in his arms and carried her like a doll out of the kitchen. Jory helped Tad down from the high chair, wiped his brother’s face with a rag, then went through the back porch into the yard, no longer hungry.
He could see his parents’ bedroom window, the shades drawn halfway, but his eyes got no farther than the sill. It was covered with dead bugs: flies and spiders, cicadas, grasshoppers, a few wicked-looking mayflies.
He had planned to climb up in the old apple tree where he usually went to think and be alone, but something happened before he got very far. In the crotch of the tree, where three thick branches split out from the gnarly trunk, he put his hand in something that crunched like cellophane and clung to his fingers. It was dry as paper, bluish-grey in color, and it had big bug eyes. It looked like the husk of a housefly, split open down the back, except that it was as big as his foot.
Backing out of the tree, he wondered where it had come from. He didn’t need an answer, though. There had been a buzzing in the eaves last night, as if a hornets’ nest were flying around by itself. A fly that big might have made the sound.
Mama would blame it on the poison. The vegetables, she said, were shrinking—like the dwarf corn they’d picked recently—but the bugs were getting bigger every year. Each time Pop came home from the county office with another canister of the latest spray and a leaflet marked with the skull and crossbones, she talked crazier and crazier about stuff like that. Pop’s truck was right now parked out front with a couple of the silver tanks in the bed. New poison, stronger, for stronger bugs. He’d be up in the plane spraying it tomorrow.
