Witches on the Road Tonight
Page 30
All week the station ran farewell commercials for Captain Casket. They showed you climbing into your coffin while a disembodied hand nailed the lid shut. I wanted to come with you to do your makeup one last time, but you told me no, you didn’t want to leave Mom alone again.
She made no popcorn or daiquiris that night, she was worn out from being on the phone all day making arrangements for Jasper’s funeral. The opening credits rolled on the TV. The Creepshow’s dripping letters, and the Casketeers’ warbling theme song. I’ll be so happy never to watch another horror movie again, Mom said. I said nothing. It was the end of summer but the air conditioner was on and I was curled under a blanket.
The camera panned in on your coffin, center stage, and we waited for your hand to appear, raising the lid. We waited but the casket remained closed. The dry ice evaporated and the fog disappeared. In the dead air, Mom’s body tensed beside me. Then, after what seemed an eternity, you stepped out from stage left carrying Tucker Hayes’s old projector. You were not in costume or makeup, you wore your raw, fallen face and your weatherman’s liver-colored leisure suit.
This is our last show, guys and ghouls, you said, after twenty long years together. It’s been an honor to thrill and dismay you, but all bad things come to an end.
We heard nervous laughter offstage. None of the crew knew what you were doing. That Eddie, they were whispering to each other. You never know what’s coming next.
In a few minutes, we’re going to roll our feature—Boris Karloff’s Fran-kenstein. It was Captain Casket’s first film. But Eddie Alley had his own first. A friend left it for me before he vanished. I thought it was lost and later I thought it was stolen. It came back to me in the mail today, a gift from beyond the grave.
When you set down the projector, I saw you were holding a padded envelope. Jasper had written you so often over the years, goofy and sincere, starting from the age of nine. He sent you drawings of his pets and descriptions of his mother’s hospital bed, and asked if you’d please write back. I imagined you walking into your dressing room before the show and finding that envelope propped against your makeup mirror. You would have instantly recognized the handwriting and the postmark. But for the first time, you would hesitate before you opened it. Jasper was a boy who played with fire and blew things up. Did he love you anymore? Did he want to hurt you?
Now, onstage, you unlatched the cover and threaded the film through the intricate mechanism of the projector.
It’s not very scary, you said, but firsts have a way of haunting you.
You nodded for John the cameraman to dim the lights and you steadied the projector on the old family casket and began to turn the crank. John panned over to the wall above the news set that had been rolled aside and zoomed in so that he could capture the whole frame. I had only seen the end, that night through the slats of the barn, so I watched along with all your other fans, the silent comings and goings of the monster. I closed my eyes, but the creature was replaced by Jasper climbing the marble steps to the post office downtown. He turned and showed me the nail between his eyes. I opened mine again only when I heard ragged weeping beside me. Mom, on the far end of the sofa, was reading the last title card. The Creation of an Evil Mind, Overcome by Love, Disappears.
When John the cameraman panned back to you, the stage was empty. You were gone. Not knowing what else to do, after a brief, confused silence, John ran the feature.
Mom held out her arms and I crawled across the space between us.
“It’s all over,” she sobbed.
Eddie
NEW YORK CITY
DAWN
When Charles and I moved to New York you were here in college, squinting out at the city through the raccoon eyeliner you used to wear, your hair spiked blue, green, red, it was different every time. When we used to visit, you’d introduce us to your boyfriends—the tattoo artist, the skinhead, the Jew for Jesus you met on the subway, the drug addict. You liked trying to shock us with them as much as you liked trying to shock them with us—your gay dad, and Charles, so well brought up in his oxford cloth shirts and penny loafers, looking more like Dad’s CPA than Dad’s lover. We’d been up to see you a dozen times before we decided to move here ourselves, and I remember you were none too happy about it. I was crowding you, you said. In a city of eight million people. We took our first apartment on the Upper East Side over an Italian restaurant that became our living room, we entertained there so much. Those were heady times, just coming out, and I used to embarrass Charles by groping him in public just because I could. I would walk through the streets and smell burned pretzels and burned sugar and the clean laundry steam from pipes jutting up between taxis. Everything was new and clear.
One night, walking home from your apartment on the Lower East Side where you had made me sit at your folding card table eating vegan chicken and sprouts, listening to God-knows-what gamelan and chainsaw music you’d just discovered, trying to talk to your boyfriend without staring at his track marks, I left your building and passed a group of homeless men who had broken apart a school desk and were feeding the wooden top into a barrel. I looked down the median on Houston Street and I saw five or six more of those flaming barrels and men standing around them and such desire sprang up in me, Wallis, such shaking desire, the thought of going back to my third-floor walk-up where Charles would be waiting up, reading a military history, his white ankles crossed on the ottoman, a glass of wine on the side table by the chair, the apartment dark except for the spot of light under which he read—I thought, after all this time, I have finally accepted myself and I should be able to run amok like King Kong, shoving myself into the ass of every man I meet, sucking and stroking and exploding out into a million fragments of sex, and here I am at the moment of acceptance, for all purposes married again. I love that man, but I want to be down here, warming my hands over a flaming barrel, a man among men. I want to be broke. I want to be free.
What came next that night was the cold of the sidewalk through the soles of my shoes and my feet numb from standing and staring, and I turned away and got on the subway at Second Avenue and made my transfers and climbed the steps and found the lock with my quivering key. Charles was where I expected him to be, reading what I expected him to be reading, and smiled when I came in and made a joke about your awful boyfriend, and silently I blessed him for giving up everything and moving here with me so that I might have the freedom to imagine leaving him as many times as I needed to imagine it. I kissed him long and deep and was restored.
There is no past, my butcher told me. There is no future. There are only sirens on the avenue and the comforting knowledge I live at last in a city full of emergencies not of my own making. Somewhere far away, I hear pounding in the hallway and a distant shouting. I hear the splintering crack of a door broken wide and wonder how Charles will ever explain this to the co-op board.
Then there are capable hands and instruments and incantations and the painful, electric, convulsive reanimating of my corpse. I am lifted and transferred and am once again in motion. And somehow, Wallis, I know you have heard me.
Wallis
NEW YORK CITY
DAWN
Jeff waited with her on the cold elevated platform until the train’s headlights swung down the track. The night had softened to a pigeon gray but she knew the rain would keep falling, as it had every day all summer. The train pulled away and Jeff, without a backward glance, took the steps down to the street.
Wallis leaned her head against the cold glass window behind her seat and felt an echo of the same crick she’d felt driving up the mountains the night of her father’s anniversary party. Drawing her legs up under her pink skirt, she lay down on the triple bench and immediately felt more comfortable. Through the windows in the door, she could see neon advertisements for car parts, glowing boxes of low-end grocery stores, cascading traffic lights haloed in the fog. Rain ran down the panes but she couldn’t hear it over the clack and crash of the train hurtling toward Manhattan. It was
over an hour ago that she had called the ambulance from Jeff’s bed, and surely it had arrived by now. The paramedics had broken down the door of his apartment, found his half-alive, barely breathing body, administered CPR, charcoal, hooked him up to tubes. She wondered if she did the right thing in calling them, if it wouldn’t have been kinder, so near the end, to just let him have his way. But if he hadn’t wanted her to try, he shouldn’t have left her a message.
Let it go, she thought. I’ll find what’s there to be found. Sleepily, she thought of something her mother told her, trying to comfort her after Jasper’s death. Some people are just too damaged to live. It’s natural selection, sweetheart. I’ve never read Darwin, but I’m sure he would agree.
The train hurtles on and she is flying high above the city. She tucks her legs closer, pulls her damp pink jacket tight around her.
Dad, you pathetic drama queen, wherever you are between here and there, I love you.
The rhythm of the train is rocking her to sleep. She struggles to stay awake. She doesn’t want to miss her stop.
Eddie
Wallis, my little girl. Love comes for us all. We run from it, we hide from it, but in the end it finds us where we are cowering. We creaky old monsters are returned to life. That’s why all the best horror movies have a sequel.
It really wasn’t necessary. Any of it. All of it.
But thank you.