Dastardly

by Lorraine Ray

Marsha has seen where I live, the wrecked courtyard called Don Francisco Apartments, hundreds of times in all the years we’ve known each other, whenever she asks me to take care of Bailey for a coupla hours in emergencies. Today, a few days after I’d been remembering how we first met, I pull out my phone and she’s calling me for help.

  “The damn babysitter didn’t show up again, Vig,” she says the way she often does on the phone. “Do you think there’s any chance…?”

  “Oh yeah, sure. Bring her over. I’ll take care of her,” I promise. My heart leaps around like crazy and a madness grips me. To my closet I flee for a session of staring at my shirts for five long minutes in utter despair and frustration. Why hadn’t I bought some better shirts? I put on an old plaid shirt with mostly red, change to a solid black shirt with lines you could only see at certain angles, and end with a blue plaid I’d gotten a compliment on once from another woman. Hurriedly, I rehang the shirts I’ve tried on and look at myself in the mirror at various angles, all the time telling myself I’m looking for spots to make sure I don’t wear a spotted shirt on a date sometime. I try some new gel on my hair and make it into a messy man-bun, which I have been experimenting with. I’m not sure my blonde hair works in a man-bun, but I want to try it. I will be wearing socks when I greet her so it looks like I was casually waiting for her. At the last minute before she arrives I notice one sock’s enormous hole, but it’s too late to change.

  And when they arrive I yank the door open too quickly and Marsha sort of gushes at me. “Oh, Vig. You’re an angel.”

  “Don’t go that far.” My arms are hugging me. Such a nervous gesture; I hadn’t done that in years. I put my sock foot on top of the other because of the hole in the bottom sock. Why do I want to hide that from her?

  “I hate to ask you since we fought. At the dinner. Sorry about that.” Marsha pushes her hair out of her eyes. Beautiful eyes.

  “Fought? That was a friendly disagreement. I shouldn’t have been so sensitive about the tin horn thing. I’m getting sensitive. In my old age.”

  “Old age, ha!”

  “You aren’t old, Uncle Viggy,” says Bailey, coming through the door and hanging on my arms. She lost both her front teeth before Christmas. She has dirty dishwater hair and her mother’s blue eyes.

  “Sorry to tell you, but I am old. Old age approaches rapidly. Thirty is right around the bend.”

  “You’re not old. Are you fishing for compliments?” Marsha says.

  “No, but do you like my shirt?” I begin chewing my fingernails again when they stand in my room. It comforts me.

  Marsha laughs. “Yes, a shirt without a dead clown on it. That is a big improvement for you. Did you put that on for me?”

  “Yes. Do you have something against dead clowns?”

  “Clowns scare me. And you’ve got a man-bun! Trendy!”

  “I try.”

  “So cool. Hey, is that it?” asks Marsha, glancing up at the battered horn hanging on my wall. “I never noticed it before.”

  “Yeah, that’s the tin horn of legend. And ridicule.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t you think it’s great?”

  “Sure. Anyway, you’re an angel, Vig. You’re always there for me.”

  Yeah, good old angel Vig. Whenever a babysitter didn’t show and she had to go to work, or there was some other disaster, she calls me. Good old reliable Vig. She never calls Rodney, I note with glee.

  From all the times she’s visited her Uncle Viggy, Bailey could attest that the battered horn I’d talked about with Marsha and Rodney was almost the only thing on the wall in my depressing dump on the ground floor of Don Francisco Apartments on Frontier Avenue, the dust center of Dustville, U.S.A. I do have scenes from the Henry Crabbe beheading and spots where I squished crickets and a coupla fine girly calendars I acquired recently, but I try to whip one of them from Bailey when she arrives and I see her holding it.

  “Don’t be looking at that, sister,” I warn.

  “Why not? You do,” says Bailey.

  “Uhhhh…” I rip the calendar from her hands and shove it in a space between the trash can and the wall. “And don’t try to get that out. Don’t look there.”

  My apartment is such a dilapidated hovel and the other apartments are rented by the biggest assortment of odd balls you’ve ever seen, so it is entertaining for a lonely kid like Bailey who spends most of her afternoons at after-school daycare.

  “Listen, quit pulling the curtain back,” I admonish her, “the crazy Canasta ladies have their eyes on us. I think they’re going to come out and try to sell me some more of their damn Divinity. That candy will bankrupt me,” I exaggerate.

  “Oh, I hope they do come over with the candy. You always throw it out before I get to try it. I want to see how bad it is.” Bailey jumps around my couch eagerly, while I’m trying to edit a page of prose.

  “That is something you wouldn’t want. Besides, your mother would kill me if I poisoned you.”

  “Ha ha! Have you played Canasta again with them, Uncle Viggy?”

  “Oh yes. Maybe not since I told you about it, though, no. They wanted me as a regular, but I can’t make the time commitment.”

  “Did you win?”

  “No. They are dedicated cheaters.”

  Bailey freezes, working out what dedicated means, and laughs hysterically. “Ack! You are so funny, Uncle Viggy.”

  “I try. I sincerely try.”

  “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “We ought to go on a spying mission. That’s what a writer should do.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah. A writer has to be peeping out of peepholes all the time at people. Watching them when they don’t know it and finding out all the things they do so they can write about it in their creepy books.”

  “You’ve got it all figured out. Even the creepy part.”

  “Sure. So let’s do it. You and me.”

  “Spy?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bailey convinces me we ought to drag out lawn chairs to the courtyard of the apartment building and spend all afternoon spying on the other tenants, which is more exciting for Bailey than me, but I enjoy myself too. Pretending to sun ourselves in a small patch of dormant Bermuda, we sort out what apartments I can see from my windows and who lives in each place.

  “There’s the nut with the red wig. She is walking around the stairs near your apartment, Uncle Viggy. Wait. Oh, my god. Her lips are moving! She’s talking to herself,” says Bailey, making huge eyes at me. “She is. Like this.” Bailey mimes someone carrying on a conversation with themselves while they tend plants.

  “What’s she saying?” I yawn placidly. I sit on the lawn chair with my arms folded across my chest, sunglasses on, shoes kicked off. The dormant Bermuda grass feels warm on my socked feet.

  “I’ll find out!” Bailey cries. “I’ll do a spying mission for you. I shall cross the frontline for you. Wish me luck.”

  “Good luck. Cross the frontline safely.”

  I watch with true amusement as she scampers to the stairs and hides underneath them on the side opposite to where the old lady is watering her begonias and picking off the dead blossoms. In that position Bailey reconnoiters until she signals her success with a thumb up. She comes running back to me in a crouching stalk.

  “Oh, you won’t believe it,” Bailey exclaims. “She’s talking about someone named Nora who is not doing what she ought to about flying out to Palm Springs to see her son Melvin when he’s having such horrible troubles. But I don’t know what the troubles are...she doesn’t say... Nora is doing all the wrong things, though. She’s sure of that. This Nora sounds like a real jerk.”

  “Hmmm,” I say. “Interesting. We’re getting good results.”

  “What else do you wanna know? Give me another mission.”

  “Well, uh, why don’t you find out who drives the black Mustang. I’m hoping it’s a foxy chick with big t—um, big foxy eyes.”

 
; “Awesome! I’ll find out.” Bailey skulks around the complex and out to the dumpster, which I can see, where she tries to figure out which tenant owns which car, especially that Mustang which is parked near the street. Within fifteen minutes she’s back at my side, flopping into the lawn chair with such enthusiasm it nearly flips over backwards and I have to grab it to steady her.

  “Oh golly, I’ve got bad news, Uncle Viggy. I asked this old guy who was dumping his trash and he said he was sure it is a dude who owns the Mustang. A tall, bald dude named Clark Something-Or-Other.”

  “Damn,” I say, clicking my fingers. “I had hopes. I have seen that tall dude, but I didn’t connect him with the Mustang. What a pity.”

  “Are you sad?” Bailey tries to push the corners of my mouth down as she peers behind my sunglasses.

  “No.”

  “Aren’t you?” Bailey pulls down harder on my mouth as I try to smile against it.

  Bailey tells me some of her interesting ideas about the former occupations of some of the older residents. Bailey figures they were crooks, morticians and strippers. She thinks the Canasta players were the strippers. I never found out what they did in the past, not that it is any of my business. Well, authors are naturally spies at heart anyway and so are kids.

  When it is finally getting cool out and too dark to do much good spying, because the old ladies, at least, always draw their curtains, Bailey and I come back into my apartment and she notices the old tin horn again, the one on my wall and I’m telling the little kiddo about how it is an antique which was once used on old Western stagecoaches by the driver to warn any oncoming traffic on blind corners.

  “Hey,” cries Bailey out of nowhere, “you ought to put that horn in one of your books! Like have this creepy vampire guy who is all creepy and stuff.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. And have it be that he blows that horn on a stagecoach because he’s the driver or something, but nobody knows he’s a vampire, too, you see, secretly. They don’t even know he’s the vampire, poor suckers (get it, suckers!)”

  “Brilliant pun.”

  “Thanks. But all these people are getting murdered like and having their blood sucked out. All along the stage stops. That would be cool. He bites all the people in the stagecoaches and stuff whenever they stop some place out in the wild.”

  Shazam and damn. That idea of hers has the germ of a fucking great story! Out of the mouth of babes, dude. Out of the mouth of babes. I swear that little kid, like most kids, has no inhibitions, like an adult would, and she lets her mind roam freely and think of the next thing that jumps out at her from an idea or a situation with no judgment about whether it will be good or bad and that’s the kind of thinking you need in order to be able to write and that is something to fucking envy, man, that freeness is what artists need in whatever endeavor they pursue. The ability to think freely is only available to children and the drunken adult who is freed up enough to think in a flow and not let that flow stop no matter what comes in their mind to distract them. And they can make good decisions about art. It is surprising to say that. Kids have freed up brains, sure, and they know how to think about a subject and come up with something nobody else has ever thought of before. The way I figure it, they don’t have to fill up a lot of their brain with schemes to manage to get the next month’s rent, so they have a lot of time to think of creative ideas. So from what this little kid said, tonight, after Marsha picks up Bailey, I plan to work on the idea of having a stagecoach driver as the narrator of a story, and making it authentic the way the guy talks about his stagecoach, and all the people he takes around to towns in the west and all the adobes and the coyotes and junk. The driver blows the horn all the time to warn other coaches when he comes around steep and narrow passes in the mountains and then the reader slowly, slowly learns that the narrator himself is the vampire! What a trick! Snap! And so the driver, who is the storyteller, turns out to be the vampire preying on coach riders. It could all take place in the west.

  The idea Bailey gives me excites me so much I can’t wait to write it. When Marsha swings by to pick up Bailey I don’t care that she doesn’t have time to come into the apartment. Bailey and I stand at the curb in the dark and see her off.

  “Oh, thanks so much, Vig,” Marsha says when Bailey opens the door of their SUV and clambers in.

  “We had a great time. We were detectives,” I explain. “We haven’t had dinner yet. I’m excited about a new story idea Bailey gave me. I’ve got to get going on it right away before I forget my ideas.”

  “It’s about his tin horn, Mom,” says Bailey.

  “Oh. That. The tin horn.”

  “Yes, Bailey thought of a great idea,” I say, when I’m about to close the door. “Bye, kiddo.” I thump the car lightly.

  “Bye, Uncle Viggy,” calls Bailey out the open window as they drive off.

  I’m proud of the twists in that story. It’s two a.m. and I’ve finished it. I enjoy the voice of the vampire/stagecoach driver who kinda fools the listener, who is going to be another victim, of course. And now that I’ve finished the story I decide I will send it out right away tomorrow or the next day. I figure I don’t need to edit it fourteen or fifteen more times the way I usually do, but I almost hate to send it off; it’s like sending your kid off to college or something.

  Vampire love scenes are what I like to write best. When I write those I like to include a lot of gratuitous sex acts and crap, dripping wax burning people’s genitals and nipples and their toes and stuff. This is my favorite purview. I see horror everywhere in the Southwest. That’s what I see, and I have to write what I see, the way I see it.

  I’m lying when I say the tin horn is almost the only thing in my room. Above my desk there are these four color copies mounted in frames on one wall. The panels show the events in the life of Henry A. Crabbe, an American idiot extraordinaire. He is this nutty putz who thought he could invade Mexico without anything happening to him, and these panels illustrate the story of the idiot’s downfall. The first panel depicts Crabbe and the Americanos marching triumphantly upon Caborca, Mexico. The next shows Juan Hernandez declaring Death to the Filibusters. The following shows Crabbe’s head served on a platter at the Feast of the Demons. In the last panel Crabbe’s head, briefly preserved in a jar, is fed to the pigs. Yum-yum. The Southwest is good about providing stuff like that for horror writers. It’s fertile grounds with good grist for the literary mill appearing nearly everywhere I look, and I’m awfully glad I’d taken the time that night in the bar with Rodney to look up that grist crap and get it right once and for all.

  “Weird,” said Bailey one time I babysat her and she saw those four pictures, “That is weird, Vig. Why do you like that in your room?” I had to admit for a second I felt a little ashamed. I challenge myself, “What are you doing with these gory things on your apartment wall?” They aren’t exactly attractively painted or artistically wonderful or anything, to be frank about it.

  “I’m different,” was what I’d said to Bailey at the time, “I like to celebrate reality. I like the way the world is evil, you know. The way other people like to think of the world as a place of kindly people. I like to think of it as evil. I like to think of the battles in the world and how things want to kill us and eat our food.”

  Bailey was interested in the battle idea, and how all these things wanted to kill us, but I tried not to scare her too much and I only told her sort of vaguely that day, which was when she was much younger than now, about my interest in writing stories with vampires in them. Yes, it might have been that day when she commented on the Crabbe pictures when I told her that my dream was to become a famous author of vampire stories, set in the Southwest.

  I also haven’t told Bailey or Marsha, but I keep a journal in which I record daily deeds of mayhem from the past when I learn about them. They will be useful for horrifying stories which I will write in the future. April 28th, for example, the Camp Grant Massacre, is a day I made note of. That was when a bunch of l
ocals got together and slaughtered innocent Apache women and children. And I wrote about any weapons that interested me which were involved with the mayhem. Like an unusual murder weapon used in the Camp Grant Massacre was mesquite root clubs, so I dutifully wrote that. These hard mesquite root clubs were also favored by the Yuma Indians who brandished them in a lot of depredations. For example, the Yuma killed some stupid Spanish who were pleasure-cruising in a paddle steamship up the Colorado River. The Spaniards had traveled that way a coupla times until the Yuma decided, ‘hey, that’s enough of that’ and attacked them. Head whoppers, those mesquite root clubs proved to be real brain busters. I guess it took a long time and energy to dig up a mesquite root if you didn’t find it lying around, which seemed unlikely unless a tree fell over, which they didn’t do much, but once you got it dug up, you’d have yourself a real brain basher of the first order. It would reorient your enemy’s thinking, pronto.

  And what about my own thinking? Maybe I am too into gore too and maybe I don’t appreciate the things I have. As I down a few too many ales tonight after babysitting Bailey, I think in some befuddled drunken fashion that besides this antique stagecoach horn, I have something else which is special—what is it? Ah, yes, Marsha and Bailey.

  Yes, he have an ultimate funny friend/foe and her kid, and I remember a few years earlier when I would show up at the Warehouse District Writers’ Friday night reading circle only to say something hideous to Marsha, to say she was putting on weight, to introduce her to a new member as the author of “a new series of incredible garbage.” But the funny thing was I hadn’t had to sit around and worry about whether she was taking offense from my insults; she dished them right back with equal force at me, without a pause at all and without getting all huffy about it. I had to admit I still hated her sweet novels with their morals and modern mistresses in distress. A smirk breaks out on my scarred face whenever I think about those literary efforts. Maybe it’s true as well when Marsha says that a smirk shows on my face in firm superiority and malice for every other mortal almost all the time. Well, none of us can see ourselves the way others do. That is true.

  But going back to what I’d noticed. Bailey and Marsha are special to me. Now Bailey had even given me a good idea for a story. And what had I given them? Nothing, I’d taken their money in fact. The babysitting was purely fun for me, honestly; Marsha didn’t need to pay me, even though I’d said that when I was drunk and angry. No, I hadn’t given them anything but trouble.

  I vow tonight I’ll do something about that situation. I’ll come up with money to help Marsha and Bailey. But not a second job.