Dastardly

by Lorraine Ray

Half an hour later, sitting across the table with its red paper tablecloth at Mi Hawaiano’s Mexican/Hawaiian restaurant in a red brick ranch-style house with a glass of lemonade and beer mixed. I’m eagerly devouring the chips and salsa and looking at Marsha sitting happily beside that fucking friend of mine named Rodney. I keep thinking the two of them should not be allowed on the face of the earth much longer. Darting clever little cutting glances in Marsha’s direction, I sweep my strawberry blonde hair out of my pock-marked face. She doesn’t speak to me. I’m thinking I don’t belong with this group of writers for whom I’ve nothing but disdain anyway.

  And sure enough it’s a fiasco so far. Our waitress is a walking, talking Diego Rivera painting, and I can’t take my eyes off her. Marsha has noticed this.

  “Vig, are you in love with our waitress?” asks Marsha.

  “She’s amazing,” I say. “I want to use her in a story. I think she might be a goddess or something.”

  I look at that big lady, walking around the tables like she’s royalty and nobody in the place sees she is an Aztec or Toltec princess. It’s so obvious to me. I use my phone to look up the pictures of Aztec and Toltec princesses and I get it straight once and for all. Olmec is what I want. Shit. Olmec.

  Fellow writers are such incredible Dumbos because they sit there ignoring the best character as she wends her way around the tables. She bulls her way around the conference room dropping baskets of freshly-baked tortilla chips and red squeeze-bottles filled with salsa here and there, ignoring anything anyone says to her or asks for. I think her broad brown face with high cheeks and bosomy chest ought to have been carrying a load of cotton in a Diego Rivera painting, maybe that isn’t p.c., though. Broad chest and broad face. The eerie face of a jungle temple stone carving exposed from beneath the clinging vines by some explorer for the first time in thousands of years. A big, wide scary face with huge lips that seemed to want to…do something…ah yes, she wants to devour the world. Oh, that’s perfect. This big woman is eating the world in enormous bites and no one can stop her! And like those huge lips, her eyes take control of me and the world. How had her eyebrows become so powerful and her eyes so huge? Huge eyes, big enough to take in everything. Big upper arms and back and hairy black forearms with a man’s wristwatch and black orthopedic shoes. A mustache on her lip. Tight black pants. A pencil behind one ear. Hair in a flip. A walking stone temple carving, frightening, fierce. Big ear lobes dripping with turquoise. The band of the ruffle on her embroidered top cutting into the flesh of her arm. Huge strange black rimmed glasses, reflecting the tableware and glimmering glasses of ice water. The room is filled with dark black bark plates with pictures of women in dugout canoes making offerings of flowers. Crudely carved wooden plates painted with red roses. The arches of windows filled with stained glass showing donkeys and carts. I sketch the waitress and the room in words in my notebook while the other writers around me continue talking blithely. They have no idea when a good character comes up to them and bashes them on the head and says “fucking use me in a story, will you?”

  So that night I plan to write another horror short story (not that I need another story to have to write, god help me, I can’t control the ones I have! but how can I stop them when they want to come?) about a waitress who is preparing victims for sacrifice. Sort of the Barber of Fleet Street, except set in the Southwest. And now that I think of it again I need to get the plot in my notebook muy pronto. Might be a great idea. She is a fantastic character. I take my notebook out again the moment I’ve put it into the pocket of my black jeans.

  After all the food arrives and most people are at least half-way through their tamales, the eager group of dip-shits at the monthly meeting grow strangely quiet, as though they all have disturbing gas. The moment they have waited for is at hand. An elderly lady writer stuffs rice hurriedly into her mouth and has it scatter over her skirt.

  “There he is,” says Marsha to Rodney.

  “Who?” I ask, butting into their conversation.

  “The speaker. Melvin Wainwright.”

  “Where?”

  “Beside Honor Brown.”

  “Is that him?”

  “I had no idea he was so old,” says the old lady who is still dropping her rice.

  “I suppose he’s going to tell us about serious novel writing,” I say snottily.

  Everyone at the table sniggers. Melvin Wainwright is a hack writer of westerns.

  “Let’s don’t get catty,” says Rodney. I notice Rodney has his arm resting casually near Marsha’s. I hate seeing that. In fact it makes me furious to see that!

  “Oh, let’s do get catty,” I reply.

  A woman with bug eyes and pert hair stands up slowly. This is Honor Brown. She rustles peppers around on her plate and bends over to tap the microphone. “Now, now, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentleman. I know you’re enjoying your food,” she gasps, “but now is the time for our keynote speaker. Many of you know him, our speaker,” she says in a spooky voice, extending an arm toward a bewildered man beside her. He tries to finish his food quickly, wolfing his tamale and jamming rice in afterwards. “Our good friend. One of the More-Than-Occasional Winter Wild Bunch. Mr. Melvin Wainwright.” She lightly slaps her extended hand in a timid clap as he stands in a stupid stoop and, as I see it, the dumb-ass audience of writers take the cue and applaud like the crazy dip-shits they are. I am applauding the loudest. Marsha and Rodney frown at me.

  Mr. Tall Tweedy Twat stands up. The smear of fucking refried beans on the broad lapel of his old jacket is like a mysterious stigma, fleshy and pink. The same smears, with one or two encased beans, surround his plate as it is whisked away by the scary Olmec stone goddess/waitress, and I say to myself, “look that up in google and get it right about which stone Olmec goddess she would most resemble. Have to have specific names of these Olmec goddesses.” Can’t I get anything done, I admonish myself?

  “Well, I’m back in the desert again!” The applause is loud and sustained and rising and falling and someone even stomps their feet. Someone wolf whistles, too. Well, to be honest, it’s me stomping and whistling and trying to annoy people, and I see it is working because out of the corner of my eye Marsha is now glaring, with deep disapproval, at my ridonkulous clapping and whistling. I love it when she glares noticeable in my direction.

  “Every year I delight in coming to The Old Pueblo. My delight involves seeing again those things which made me a writer of westerns,” says the old coot mildly. “So many things have changed, though. Where, for example, are those burlap bags we once used to hang off our radiators? Does anyone else remember those?”

  “Sure, Mel,” hollers someone, a stupid-ass clown who doesn’t remember those burlap bags, but is humoring Mel to get on his good side in case he’ll introduce unknown writers to a literary agent. Yeah, you guessed it, it was me hollering.

  “And do you remember the interesting roadside novelty stops run by small children? Those used to be everywhere out west. Gosh I miss those funny places. I always stopped to see the oddities and paid my quarter! I wanted to tell you an incident in my earliest remembrance of one of those places in the desert. I left my car to be filled with gas at a time when all stations were full serve.” The audience laughs.

  “Full serve! Ha!” I repeat loudly.

  Marsha and Rodney sneer at me. Oh fuck them.

  “There was a sign at this garage which proclaimed it had a museum of desert oddities. I paid my fifty cents, I guess I must have been flush with cash, and entered the small room. Two large fat lizards slept in a crate; it was like something from a Lovecraft story, you know. A roadside reptile garden displaying hideous lizards to impress the visitors.”

  “A little boy snuck up behind me. ‘They never have sex,’ says this fat little boy proudly. “I keep looking and I’ve kept a diary for six months!’”

  “Ha!” I shout as the crowd laughs and claps.

  “He kept a diary,” repeats one of the inane writers near me.

  “I swea
r I’m not making this up!” protests Melvin. “Another time while visiting the saguaro forests near town I saw a woman and decided to speak to her. ‘I’m impressed by your native saguaro cacti,’ I said to this woman. ‘I suppose you’re proud of them.’ ‘Saguaros? Yes, umm,’ she said. ‘Wonderful things,’ I said. ‘A gift of the gods,’ she replied. ‘Yes. We like to think so. When I was a little kid we all used to drive out to a real big one, and dad would gather up some mesquite limbs and we’d pile them at the base of a saguaro. Well, we’d set it afire,’ she said proudly, ‘And they burned like candles. For hours.’”

  The audience groans. Laughter swells, then peters out.

  “Mel, good god Mel, say it ain’t so!” someone hollers. Me again.

  “Enough amusing details. My impressions of the 1950s are neither here nor there, for my writing focuses on the West of an earlier era, the West of the 1890s. Here I found your various historical societies, historical buildings and private collections of inestimable services to me, a man who was after all only an Easterner, a dude at that, trying to tell and retell the stories of your vicinities.”

  “And you did an excellent job,” says the perky woman, rising to lean into the microphone. The audience claps.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, thank you. It is time for my much promised reading. Now, as a treat for you I thought I would let you in on one of my newest offerings.”

  The audience applauds lightly.

  “Therefore I will be reading from ‘When a Man’s a Stronger Man.’ Ah hem.”

  The old boob rustles papers around and plucks at drooping skin which is like dewlaps hanging from his neck. He clears his throat, horribly again, and says: “Before I read I want to give you a little background about the character, a young woman. You see, she is growing into womanhood and is experiencing the terror of male potency, and it seems all the more dreadful to her because of its mysterious nature. By accident she witnesses an act of evil on the part of her cowboy-lover and afterwards she realizes she must submit or flee from it and this defines her role as the pivotal one. Is this a hopeless passion, she asks? It’s the anxiety of femininity, the spirit of a child-woman’s heart. Yes, her secret prayers will be answered. Her angel is on the horizon.”

  I make a gagging noise and the writers around me snicker. “Until he screws someone else,” I say out of the side of my mouth, cracking up the writers around me, as I knew I would.

  The speaker rolls his eyes upward to the ceiling for a moment.

  “Divine inspiration,” I say to more suppressed snickers.

  The man at the podium licks a finger, weirdly, and begins to read aloud in a booming voice while he pulls a mechanical pencil in and out of his blue blazer’s chest pocket: “The great dark brown eyes, blank and tragic, appear to note nothing in the quiet snow scape. The quivering of ripe scarlet lips and the brimming tragic eye sockets were mute testimony to the six-gun violence so recently visited upon her precious familiar adobe. The miraculous was happening. Someone was coming to meet her! And while they came, she made a darling picture with the slight suggestion of a forlorn soul lost in her.”

  Wild applause for this sappy crap from the sappy crap master! I clap the longest and loudest and everyone around me glares and chuckles at me knowing that I consider the speaker’s writing to be some of the worst ever and I think it sucks and stinks and rots from the head. And the speaker is still blabbing. He ends by saying: “The West is in my soul and I am in the West. When I die I hope to have my ashes planted somewhere in the mountains above the desert.”

  “Oh God, planted in the mountains above the desert? Yippee,” I crow.

  The writers go back to eating.

  “I keep telling you guys there’s no point in writing anything other than horror out here. No one will ever write a good story of this place unless it’s horror,” I tell them.

  “Never is a long time, Vig,” says Rodney.

  “I’m certain of it.” I cross my arms on my chest.

  “You’re so certain, Mr. Smarty-Pants Viglietti. How long have you lived here? Two years or something?” asks Pam Rose, a young writer seated near me.

  “Six.”

  “Oh, whoopee,” she replies.

  “I tell you this place is ripe for the production of horror books, but not much else, not realistic literature because who would believe what you told them. The rest of the country isn’t interested in what is here. You’d have to explain an entirely un-American way of life to the country. It couldn’t be done successfully. And it will remain that way. It’s inevitable.”

  “Why?”

  “To begin with this desert is devoid of people and people make stories interesting.”

  “I object!” cries a male writer.

  “Yeah, Vig. We’re people,” says Marsha.

  “Not a large enough population. And not an educated population.”

  “You don’t need that,” says Rod.

  Everyone around his end of the table hoots loudly and claps. I know I’m attracting too much attention, but I love it anyway.

  “Secondly, it’s devoid of thought,” I explain.

  “My theory is we are stuck in a past with too popular a vision which is world-wide in scope but fragmented and misunderstood,” says a crazy man with a bald head and red stubble on his chin.

  “What does that mean?” asks the frail old woman.

  “They’re both full of it,” says Rodney. “That’s what it means, Mrs. Green.”

  “You don’t know the genre. You gotta know your genre. All of you ought to be writing horror,” I say.

  “Horror?” says the crowd around me.

  “There is tons of material for first class horror stories out here, but everyone goes back to that same old worn-out cowboy stuff or now the Native American angle, but they’re playing the same worn themes. When I moved here the first morning, the first thing, I said to myself was: ‘Horror! That’s it! That’s all this place has going for it. Don’t even try writing anything else. Forget anything of any lasting impact. The place is full of horror.’ Who’s thinking about eternity? I bet you couldn’t find a single citizen of Arizona who’s thinking about eternity,” I claim.

  “Well, now—”

  “I’m serious. They’re interested in football games and basketball teams and—”

  I’m getting more excited. I can feel myself losing control of my mouth and I don’t like the result. I know any instant information will spill out, information I won’t want to reveal, yet I can’t help talking. I know I’m doing it for Marsha’s benefit, and that seems so stupid of me, but I still want to impress others in front of her. She’s known me a long time and I don’t need to do this, but there seems to be no stopping my damn mouth!

  “Horror surrounds us! It’s everywhere. There’s a thousand and one tales of horror. All the glorious scalping. Authentic scalping. The creepy melting adobe homes and the spiders! Tarantulas, scorpions, lizards that are poisonous. Weren’t they created for horror? Old newspapers around here are full of ideas. We need a whole genre of horror Westerns, modern and historical. Blood in the creosote. Stage coaches. Sneaky people. Painted ladies. Devils dancing with club feet.”

  “Club feet?” says Rodney slyly.

  “Yeah,” I say in a belligerent manner. “Club.”

  “Don’t you mean cloven feet, Vig?” asks Marsha. The writers around me are cracking up when Marsha corrects me on that mistake. What a funny blooper. I make a million of em. Damn, why am I so retarded?

  “Uh, yeah, I guess so. That was a slip-up.” I feel a seething anger and horror at making a mistake in front of Marsha. It’s like that damn tin horn thing again. All I do is blunder. And that sickening Rodney douche, erstwhile friend of mine; why did he have to be among those cracking up at me?

  “Ha!” says one of the wild bunch of writers. “You are hysterically funny, Vig.”

  “Thanks, I try. But I mean it. All of you ought to be writing horror stories. There’s tons of potential horror ideas out here. The sou
thwest is dripping with blood. Take your scalping parties, Indian attacks, gambling disputes, border battles, duels, devil worship, soldier buried alive by mistake—” I begin lecturing them again. I noticed my mouth moves more than my brain wants. And I’m talking lists again.

  “What the crap! Who worshipped the devil out here?” says one of the writers at my side.

  “Cowboys, that’s who!” I exclaim happily.

  “What?” shouts the incredulous crowd around me.

  “Why do you think they wore ten gallon hats?”

  “Uh, what?” Rodney dissolves into laughter. He bends over closer to Marsha while stuffing a tortilla chip into his mouth. “For fuck’s sake, I can’t take the suspense. Tell us, the ignorant bystanders, pretty please, Vig, why did cowboys wear ten gallon hats?”

  “To hide their horns, of course, hombre,” I say happily.

  “Their horns!” Everyone exclaims that together in horror. A chatter of laughing comments follows and several people who are finishing up their meals drop the fillings from the last of their tacos on their shirts and plates because they are giggling so hard.

  “Great big ones,” I add.

  “No!” People around me fall over laughing.

  “Whole outfits of men with horns. Take my word for it.”

  “You do say the funniest things, Viglietti,” says someone at my left, shaking their head in disbelief. “For pure amusement you’ve got everyone else beat.”

  “Finally, an appreciation of me!” I say.

  “Oh, Vig. Everyone knows you’ve got a gift for wild imaginative thoughts. I would go with that idea of yours. Brainstorm it out and you’ll have something. Devil worshipping horned cowboys. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone doing it before. So you go ahead with it.” That is Marsha’s voice. Marsha is always in there, cheering me on. Sure, she is the first person to say something positive about what I said. She’s always there for me and maybe in the past I didn’t see it before. Or maybe I did. Maybe I saw it all along. I blush when she says that, and my heart squelches up, because it makes me feel so good to hear her praise me in front of everyone in the group.

  She said I have a gift. A gift for wild imaginative thoughts. Dude, what she said, that makes me glow. And she said it in front of a table of other writers making me feel ten feet tall. And she said she’d never heard of anyone expressing my idea. So she thought it was original. It meant a lot to hear that, because she’s better read than I am in any genre. Even Rodney is sipping his beer and closing his eyes, because he doesn’t like hearing Marsha praise me. Sure enough, Rodney looks agonizingly perturbed by what Marsha has said.

  “Go ahead with it. It’s good,” Marsha adds.

  “I plan to,” I say, downing more of my beer in a big happy gulp. But I hadn’t wanted to tell them the devil cowboy idea.

  Oh shit! What is coming out of my damn stupid trap? Truth isn’t supposed to come out of my mouth because these people are my competitors and they can’t be trusted. I don’t want them knowing what I’m up to. I don’t want to tip them off to what I’m doing or give them a great idea. I’d forgotten that devil cowboy idea; it must have been floating around in the back of my brain. And now it’d come back into the front of my brain while I was drunk and it had come spilling right out of my fucking mouth.

  “So I was thinking of possessed cowboys. The reader only gradually notices the cowboys are a little odd. Visiting with the devil, or something,” I stumble on verbally developing my idea, though I wish I would shut up.

  “Cowboy devils,” muses the writer at my side. “Or cowboy devil worshippers?”

  “Either are amusing ideas. Work with them,” says Rodney. He has given it his fucking stamp of approval and that makes me furious. I don’t need the stamp of approval of some stuck-up creep who wouldn’t know a good idea if it hit him over his head, and that creep was successfully stealing my girl!

  I like Marsha encouraging me, but when these other writers speak up I suddenly feel angry and annoyed. Crappy conceited jerks. Telling me to work with it? What the fuck do they think I do all the day? I can assure everyone I do nothing but write and think about my fucking writing. I do not need to be told to write!

  “I assure you I have already begun it.” I open my second tamale by pulling off the corn husks and after dropping the husks on a spare plate, I neatly cut the tamale body in two up the middle and pour salsa into the cavity. “And lots of other devil stories.”

  The elderly woman who was throwing so much rice on herself and who had gone to the restroom plunks down nearby in time to hear the last sentence. “Oh dear. I must have missed something—”

  “Vig says there were cowboy devils,” says Rodney, drolly filling her in.

  “Look at the horns on those early steers. Devilish things,” I mention.

  “Well, now that was in Texas and early on. I don’t think any of them, or many of them, got out as far as Arizona,” says another male writer. “You mean longhorns, don’t you?”

  “Yes. There weren’t many in Arizona?” I ask intently.

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Good. I need to know junk like that. Although honestly the people who read horror do not read for historical realism. I mean if they did, would they be responding to horror at all? Let’s face it, logic escapes them. If you gave them two pieces of wood they couldn’t nail them together at right angles.”

  “I’m not so sure I could do that, Vig,” says Marsha, chuckling.

  “An old time western Faust tale set in Arizona would top anything Europe ever had to offer. What’s so horrible about Germany, I mean? Besides the Nazis? It’s green and covered with meadows and full of deer and cuckoo clocks,” I say, rambling on as I quickly eat my tamale and finish up some salad.

  “That’s Switzerland,” Rodney observes.

  “Same difference,” I shoot back.

  “Oh Vig,” says Marsha. “Well, I think cuckoo clocks are pretty horrifying.”

  I smirk, “Oh yeah?”

  “Those weights on the chains always make me think of severed gonads.” Marsha looks archly at me. “Like someone’s been castrated and their balls hung out to dry.”

  “Nice image. I’ll have to use it somewhere,” I shoot back.

  Marsha genuflects in my direction. “Oh, and if I can ever be of more service.”

  “Speaking of good ideas and cuckoo clocks,” says the writer who knew about long horn steers, “I did happen to read an old Arizona Highways with an interesting story about some writers who owned a cuckoo clock and a pet roadrunner. Well, it seemed the roadrunner was a real character and the minute they let him out of his cage he immediately claimed the top of the cuckoo clock, which was in their library, as its territory. It made a home up there.”

  “Roadrunners are the desert’s clown. Sort of a Falstaff of the desert fauna,” I say.

  “Oh God preserve us. Roadrunners are now characters out of Shakespeare,” Rodney groans.

  “That’s so funny because the roadrunner and the cuckoo are of the same family,” says Marsha.

  “I know. Anyway,” the original writer continues, “this pet roadrunner would attack anyone who sat under the clock and whenever the owners had parties—he would swoop and peck the head of the pitiful person stupid enough to sit underneath. I’ve been thinking that would be good in some modern western story.”

  “The vengeance of time angle,” I say.

  Marsha and several other writers groan audibly. I have to admit I’m being stupid and annoying tonight.

  “I suppose you have something there, Vig,” says the writer. “The roadrunner becoming a sort of symbol of the wrath of time. Always popping down to rap someone sharply on the head.”

  “Tempos fugit,” the elderly writer says.

  “They do have beady little eyes,” someone else adds.

  “Vicious,” says Rodney.

  “I heard that when they’re eating snakes they sometimes leave them hanging out of their beaks and swallow them slow
ly as their stomachs digest the snake. They go about nonchalantly racing here and there while this snake hangs out of the side of their beaks, glassy eyed and limp,” says another writer.

  “You see—no matter what image you come up with here it evolves into some sort of splendid horror! The material is endless! The untapped material is endless!” I proclaim triumphantly.