by Sheri Holman
Witches on the Road Tonight
Also by Sheri Holman
A Stolen Tongue
The Dress Lodger
The Mammoth Cheese
Witches on the Road Tonight
Sheri Holman
Copyright © 2011 by Sheri Holman
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9597-5
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
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For those of us who went to the woods
and found our way out again
And with enormous gratitude to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters,
the Ragdale Foundation, and the PEN Emergency Fund,
whose support meant so much
Witches on the Road Tonight
Eddie
NEW YORK CITY
MIDNIGHT
Of all the props I saved, only the coffin remains. Packed in boxes or tossed in the closet were the skulls and rubber rats, the cape folded with the care of a fallen American flag, my black spandex unitard, white at the seams where I’d stretched out the armpits, sweat-stained and pilled. I saved the squeezed-out tubes of greasepaint, the black shadow for under the eyes, the porcelain fangs. Of the gifts fans sent, I kept that bleached arc of a cat’s skeleton, the one you used to call Fluffy and hang your necklaces from, and a dead bird preserved with antifreeze. I kept maybe a hundred of the many thousands of drawings and letters from preteen boys and girls. There were some from adults, too, confessions of the sort they should be writing their shrinks or the police, and not a man who plays a vampire on TV. “Dear Captain Casket, Fangs for the memories.”
But in the move up to Manhattan, in the successive apartments Charles and I shared, everything has been lost or thrown away. Coming to me late in life, Charles has been pitiless in tossing my prehistory, usually while I am off at one of the twice-yearly conventions I attend as if having an affair we both tacitly refuse to discuss. Now everything has been scrapped but the coffin, too big not to be missed, too great a conversation piece even for Charles, a bit of memorabilia that you might send off to a regional horror movie museum or sell to some theme restaurant as the base of a fixin’s bar to defray a small portion of the funeral cost. We’ve been using it as a coffee table, pushed in front of the big picture window that overlooks the Chrysler Building, a view that accounts for three-quarters of the ridiculous price we paid for this apartment. It has held up well over the years, made of wormy chestnut, hand-planed and smooth as a wooden Indian. I used to keep it in the carport between Saturday shows, and you played in it as a girl. Sometimes when we couldn’t find you, your mother and I would look outside and you’d be curled up inside it, asleep, your hand bookmarking the eternally youthful and nosy Nancy Drew, your mouth brushed with cookie crumbs.
I have made it as comfortable as possible. It is lined with an old down comforter tucked inside one of Charles’s more elegant duvet covers, a dusky rose shot with gold thread. I have a pillow for my head and a scarlet throw to keep me warm. You might think I’d like to go out in full costume, but camp comes too easily these days. I’m wearing, instead, my most comfortable pajamas, the ones with the pug dogs you bought me for my birthday last year. They are about the only ones my chemo-blistered skin can bear. Before I put them on, I took a shower and washed what’s left of my hair. Maybe it was cowardly to wait to do this until Charles was out of town. His mother, who is only a few years older than I, is ill, too, and poor Charles hasn’t known whom to nurse more dutifully. He refuses to discuss my death, pulling, instead, all sorts of prophylactic voodoo like purchasing cruise tickets for next spring, or placing a down payment on a purebred mastiff puppy, if you can imagine, as if he can mortgage me back to life, keeping me on the ventilator of increasingly onerous financial obligation. I know he will be furious when he gets back from Philadelphia, but maybe he’ll take his mother with him on that cruise through the Cyclades.
My only real regret is not seeing you one last time. I left you a message before you went on the air, something light and innocuous, and I hope you’re not too shocked to hear it after you get the news. I want this good-bye to set the tone for all the memories that follow it. When people approach me about my show, they never want to talk about the cut-rate monster movies. Most can barely remember the titles. No, it is the irreverence of the interruption they cherish, the silliness and explosions. I made it my career for decades, but only now do I begin to understand the need to terrify, followed by the even greater need to puncture the fear we’ve called into being. It is a surrender and recovery that feels suspiciously like love.
The tea kettle whistles and I reach for my mayapple and burdock—those holistic Manhattan cancer quackeries that always bring me full circle back to the mountain—when I remember I don’t need them anymore and pour myself a whiskey instead. Yet that, too, reminds me of the mountain. I have come a long way from ghost stories and digging roots. Here at the door to the balcony, I can look out over the huddled city, as underdressed for the weather as I on this miserably frigid August night. I don’t like to think the weather has made my decision for me, but at my age, it’s difficult to face inclemency in any form—you can’t help but feel the world has given up, and yourself a bit with it. It has been the coldest, wettest summer on record, hasn’t it? At least that’s what you keep telling us down at your news network where you are always searching out new ways to panic us. Something to add to the wars and the stock market and the Depressions. Your twenty-four-hour cycle has grown more hysterical each year, that creepy crawl across the bottom constantly breaking nonnews. And now, with every inch of the screen filled and moving left to right, with no more hours left in the day, I wouldn’t be surprised if your people weren’t working on a particle gun to beam bad news directly into our dreams, stealing that last refuge where nightmares might still be personal. You’ve given us all sleep impotence, Wallis. But lucky for us, there’s a small blue non-habit-forming pill for that. Don’t think I haven’t noticed who sponsors your broadcast.
The fog over Manhattan tonight hangs like the fog in the hollow where I grew up, and maybe that is what has me stitching together memories of my own first horror movie—a grainy, convulsive thing projected onto the bedroom wall of our dogtrot cabin. I was in bed where Tucker’s car had put me. The sun had set but no lamp was yet lit and it was moving toward the shadow darkness that allows terror free play in the minds of suggestible young boys. He sat next to me on the counterpane with his hand-cranked projector steadied on our family Bible and fed the celluloid onto the reel. It’s nearly seventy years ago now, but I remember it like it was yesterday. Every work of art has its own cadence, he said, slowly turning the wheel, working into a rhythm that jerked
the movie along with it. Too slow, too fast, until he got it right. He was spinning a copy of Frankenstein, not the Boris Karloff classic, but a thirteen-minute Edison short, shot in 1910, the first horror movie ever made, he told me, though there was nothing so horrific about it—at least not to a modern boy in 1940 who’d been listening to Lights Out on the radio for years. It was clumsy and old-fashioned and the man playing Frankenstein’s monster shambled about like an oversized Christmas elf. And yet I remember being as afraid as I’d ever been that night, sitting in the dark, watching this odd series of pictures twitching to life on my bedroom wall. I had never seen a movie, you see, living where we did, just as I had never ridden in a car until Tucker Hayes, the man who brought the movie, struck me with his. And it was possibility that thrilled and scared me that night. A movie. A car.
Wallis, where are you tonight? Forgive an old man. I am afraid.
Fear has a dialect for every occasion, doesn’t it, dearest? The anxious lyric patter of fresh love where every sentence has the potential to reveal the unlovable self, the Atlas groan of a parent bent under the weight of his own immaturity; there is the fear of failure and nuclear annihilation and snakes, of getting up in the morning, and then, of course, there is the fear of the dark, which is, as they all are, the fear of Death, which we dare not examine too closely while in life, lest it ruin all the more pleasurable fears of living and loving; for why else fall in love or marry or have children except to trail our fingers along the deliciously dark hallways and blind corners of What Comes Next? What comes next for me? Well, if I can believe the empty bottle of sleeping pills on the kitchen counter, it is that which stands in the center of my living room. I am loyal to the end. Of course I asked my doctor to prescribe your sponsor’s brand.
Here we are, another Saturday at midnight, but this time, instead of the slow creak of hinges, the bloodless white hand reaching through a veil of dry ice and the zombielike mug for the camera, it is a climbing up, a lying down, a settling in.
I called you, Wallis, and left a message. Something light and funny. Remember that, won’t you?
I
Panther Gap
OCTOBER 1940
They are playing a game called Firsts that Tucker had made up to pass the time in the car that first week when he and Sonia barely knew each other, in the days before their first time, which should have imparted intimate knowledge, but had, in some indefinable way, made them feel even more like strangers than they were before.
“First word?” Tucker asks.
“My mother tells me it was ‘baby,’” Sonia says. “Yours?”
“Tipi. She was our nurse. Been with the family since Mother was a girl.”
“First book?” Sonia asks.
“That I remember? Our family Bible. It was big and red and I never saw it open. Yours?”
“Same. Only ours was big and black and open all the time.”
It is hot for October and they ride with the windows of the ’35 Ford rolled down, blinking against the dust from the ungraded road. The wind whips Sonia’s platinum hair across her eyes; she pushes it back to read their Esso map. The paper has given out at the creases from their folding and unfolding of it, and the route is covered in Tucker’s notes about churches and courthouses, the populations of cemeteries, the number of oysters shucked in an hour by a single Negro man in Hampton Roads. They are somewhere along the spine of the Blue Ridge, coming into the Alleghenies, as best she can tell.
“First house?” Tucker asks.
“Was not a house,” she responds. “It was a fifth floor walk-up on Rivington Street.” She doesn’t ask him about his first house but he volunteers it anyway.
“Mine was Folly Farm, fifteen miles north of Richmond. Like Tipi, it came with Mother. Of course Father lost it along with everything else. First assignment?” he asks.
“‘Gloves Make the Girl.’ Ladies’ Home Journal, October 1920.”
“A piece on shell shock for my college paper. My father was diagnosed in ’23, but Mother says he thought he could talk to animals long before he ever set foot in the Marne.”
He takes the switchbacks of the mountain fast, choosing dirt roads over anything paved. She is supposed to be logging their mileage but it has been hours since Sonia has seen a marker. She wrestles the map as it flaps in the wind.
“I’ve lost us,” she says.
“Put it away. We should drive as we would divine for water.”
“They’ll be angry if we get it wrong.”
“Oh, how the tourists shall whine,” Tucker says. “We’re doing them a favor.”
Their assignment was to chart a driving tour of this region for the Virginia Writers’ Project. Tucker was to describe landmarks and local history; Sonia was to photograph it all. Hundreds more, just like them, were mapping the other forty-seven states, one more public works project like the Civilian Conservation Corps whittling picnic areas on the Skyline Drive. Until now, no one had thought to sell America to Americans. Everyone’s sick of the dust bowl and raggedy babies, their field officer in Charlottesville told them. It’s time for this country to love itself again.
“Peel me an egg, would you, Mrs. Hayes?” Tucker says. Sonia takes a hard-boiled egg from their paper lunch bag and rolls it between her palms, flicking chips of shell out of the window. Her fingernails are permanently stained black from the chemicals she uses to get the cool, strong contrast she wants in her work. She holds out the egg for Tucker to bite.
“I’ve been proposing all my life,” he says, grabbing her hand and kissing each black nail. “There was Cousin Flora of the skinned knees and slipped hair ribbons. Cruel Bette, who broke my heart with her Matryoshka-doll figure and diminishing affections to match. But at last I’ve found the ideal wife, who forsakes the common obsession with matrimony for the more sacred institution of honeymoon.”
He bites the egg in half. “And she cooks, too!”
Sonia smiles and eats what’s left over.
The car has drifted and Tucker corrects the wheel, hugging the narrow shoulder nearest the rock. On Sonia’s side, the mountain drops away beneath a wide case-hardened sky. Lifting the Rolleiflex she wears on a strap around her neck, she points it out of her open window. She is notorious at Wealth magazine, where she works, for wasting film. Some of her colleagues say she doesn’t trust herself and so takes ten shots for every one she keeps; some say she’s voracious in the moment and her pictures are the photographic equivalent of owl pellets, just the bones and feathers of an experience. She doesn’t care what they think—she’s shot more covers than any of the men. Tucker fixes his attention on the hazy ridgeline.
“First love?” he asks.
They have been sleeping as man and wife since the third week of their assignment. It took him longer than most of the writers she’s traveled with. With the others, after a few days, two rooms were awfully expensive, weren’t they? We could sure save a buck if we were modern enough to share. They’d buy the tin rings at Woolworth’s and sign the register Mr. and Mrs., then over cigarettes and whatever bottle they could get cheap, they’d stay up late talking until at last his head would end up in her lap. God, you are so gorgeous. Why hasn’t some man made an honest woman out of you? What a beautiful mother you’d make. His finger would trace her calf and she would close her eyes at his idea of a compliment, remembering the sunken-eyed schoolboy in Berlin staring down at the kitten he’d finished off with a brick, or the little girl from Rivington Street, her first printing failure, who had emerged from the stop bath so poorly contrasted she was barely distinguishable from the tenement rubble behind her.
With Tucker it had not been words or whiskey offered up as seduction but, instead, a movie, projected on the cinderblock wall of a roadside motel in Harpers Ferry. For their six-week trip he had packed, along with his notebooks and clothes, a hand-cranked Pathé iron projector that had belonged to his father, and every night he showed her films, odd bits and pieces he’d collected, old Edison shorts, newsreels of famine, and scene
s of the war in Europe. She sat in the crook of his arm as he cranked the handle, the bulb flickering to life and the dim blue picture jittery against the wall. He chose a newsreel piece on the work of Käthe Kollwitz, whose etchings of mothers cradling their starving children Hitler had labeled as degenerate. I love these old films, he said. We have a hand in the speed of creation. Then, without breaking cadence, he leaned down and placed his mouth on hers. With his free hand he untucked her shirt and eased his palm along her ribs to the curve of her breast. His mouth moved down her throat, over her pillowed stomach then farther, never breaking rhythm, and she continued to watch—the children reaching up, wordlessly crying out for bread, mothers hunkered over dying sons—until the film spun through and battered against the reel. Could you ever love a wretched sinner like me? he whispered, covering her with himself. But none of these men knew the first thing about sinning, Sonia thought, they only desperately wished to, as they wished to know all the dark rooms of the world.
“First love?” she repeats, her camera trained out the window. “Why you, of course.”
She knows Tucker is Southern before he opens his mouth, by the way he spends the evening saying good-bye without ever leaving. He is already at the door when she arrives at Bennett’s party, pressed in on all sides by the actors and antique dealers and men Bennett meets in bus lines. Tucker stands with his jacket over his arm, his eyes cast down, nodding as the woman next to him shouts close to his ear. Normally, Sonia isn’t attracted to blond men, there is something pink and infantile about them, and their light eyes are always watering, but Tucker is blond like sandstone, softly eroded and a little abrasive. He wears a beige linen suit in a room full of black and brown jackets, and he slouches with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. The woman finishes talking and he speaks a few words in reply and kisses her on the cheek, moving even closer to the door, where another woman grabs him by the arm and draws her own concentrated nods. Bennett catches her watching them. There’s a lucky bastard, he shouts over Artie Shaw on the record player. His play flopped on Broadway so he signed on with the WPA back home. Now he’s gotten drafted. He’ll be swimming in peach till the day he leaves. Tucker takes his hands from his pockets and holds them palm up for the second woman as if to say, See, there is nothing left. No man is so appealing, Sonia thinks, as one who apologizes for himself in advance. Then, Speech, speech, someone shouts and he lets himself be pulled back into the room and passed a fresh drink, and he is convinced to drawl a little drunkenly, God bless this country where a man might so easily be transferred from one teat of Lady Liberty to another. Much later, when Sonia goes to retrieve her scarf and purse, she finds him drinking alone on their host’s bed, staring out the window onto Washington Square Park below. The cars race up Fifth Avenue and turn sharply when they reach the white triumphal arch. In the glass above him she catches a glimpse of her own tired face, she has talked and drunk away all but a red smudge of her lipstick. She takes a seat on the bed beside him and they sit in comfortable silence for such a long time that Sonia thinks she just might be asleep. But then he catches her off guard. What scares you? he asks, and she answers without thought, The Nazis have taken Paris, London is flattened. I’m scared everything exciting is happening somewhere else. She pauses and asks what is expected—What scares you?—knowing before he even suggests it that she will be leaving with him. Dying, he says. And women like you.
