Don’t think about the blasted thing, Stevie advised herself.
She tried to concentrate on the book reviews. Today’s literary pages—both of them—were devoted to capsule notices of a dozen different midwinter horror novels. These books bore the following titles: Afterbirth, All Creatures Squat and Scaly, The Dripping, Edema, Gravid Babies, Lucrezia Laughed, Nightscrew, The Nimbus, The Puppets of Piscataway, Scourge, Shudderville, and The Terror According to Tyrone. The notices either hailed these offerings as masterpieces of chilling readability or castigated them as the latest throwaways on a summitless heap of opportunistic schlock.
Stevie counted up the reviews. Pans outnumbered raves eight to four, and the raves were by obituary writers and ambulance chasers all too conspicuously eager to abandon their ghoulish beats for a Sunday stroll through an imaginary graveyard or a nonexistent haunted house. The pans, meanwhile, consisted of energetic discussions of the novels’ blatant excesses, shameful borrowings, stylistic shortcomings, unbelievable characters, incestuous thematic resemblances, and delicious cheap thrills. Where were today’s Willie Collinses, Sakis, and M. R. Jameses?
Glancing at the week’s fiction bestsellers, however, Stevie found that four of the novels under review this morning had climbed into the hardcover list. Another two, paperback originals, had attained the second and fifth places on the paperback list. Only one of the horror novels on either of these lists had received an approving review in today’s paper.
Stevie held her coffee on the back of her tongue, bitterly contemplating the narrow eclecticism and salient graph-paper preferences of the American reading public. She wrote nonfiction, of course, but what chance had a regional writer with no predilection for purveying goosebumps of cracking the big-bucks barrier of bestsellerdom? Rightly or wrongly, she graphed her own literary progress in dismaying parallel with the rise and fall of her bank balance. By that standard, the accolades of her editors and a few distant relatives aside, she was a failure even as a hack.
“Two-Faced Woman: Reflections of a Female Paterfamilias,” said Stevie aloud, savoring the sound of it.
Not a bad title, really. Precolon, it titillated. Postcolon, it dovetailed into the realm of fuzzy sociological jargon, even if the juxtaposition of female and paterfamilias was supposed to wrinkle brows and pique curiosities. Maybe it would do just that. If the Briar Patch Press, Inc., of Atlanta, Georgia, accepted her book, however, it would receive only a limited regional distribution, and she would be lucky to find her title among the nonfiction bestsellers spotlighted in the Sunday Journal-Constitution. The uptown folks at The New York Times and The Washington Post Book World would never even hear of her. Their nonfiction specialists would be busy reviewing studies of American sexual mores, guides to market investment during the coming depression, the autobiographies of superannuated film stars, and the doomsday scenarios of various ecologists, military leaders, retired politicians, biological scientists, Kremlinologists, automobile executives, Sun Belt evangelicals, and anonymous quasi-literate terrorists who vowed in their prefaces to donate their royalties to the utter annihilation of the corrupt middle class.
So of course people read horror novels. The only other readily accessible medium of escape was television; and even Teddy and Marella, whose very eyeballs sometimes seemed to bristle with teletransmitted dots, could stand only so much of that sanctified diversion. If you wanted to make money, establish your name, and reap the rewards of your labors in this life (rather than in the musty halls of academe or the luminous meadows of paradise), you had to give the people what they wanted. Or you had to make them want what you gave them, an infinitely riskier and more time-consuming enterprise. Stevie scarcely felt she had the time, and a talent for intelligent pandering was not one upon whose development she had ever placed a high priority. The more fool she.
What was going to happen to her book proposal? The Briar Patch Press would sit on it two or three months and then return it with a cover letter praising her style but expressing grave doubts about the “commercial viability” of her subject matter.
Unless your late husband was a minister, a philandering international sex symbol, or a physician in either deepest Borneo or Darkest, Texas (the rejection notice would say), the A.R.P.—American Reading Public—has no overmastering desire to pay cold, hard cash for the down-home tribulations of a modern widow. Feminism is passé in this presidential administration. After all, a woman sits on the Supreme Court and Bo Derek can do anything she damn well pleases. Two-Faced Woman, catchy title notwithstanding, just isn’t going to be this year’s Roots or Shogun. In fact, lady, if we indulge ourselves and print it, most of the copies will end up on discount tables along with omnibus volumes of Willie Shakespeare’s plays, Edgar A. Guest’s poetry, and Jack London’s South Sea tales. And the omnibus volumes, Mrs. Crye, will sell better.
Ah, thought Stevie, staring moodily at the pen-and-ink likeness of a moist-muzzled werewolf illustrating Paul Darcy Boles’s contemptuous review of The Dripping; ah, the power of positive thinking. Your proposal’s been gone less than twenty-four hours, to a publisher outside the debris-littered millrace of the Manhattan biggies, and already you’re consigning it to editorial shipwreck. You’re supposed to be relishing this time alone, not worrying about your work or anticipating ugly setbacks. That typewriter upstairs has turned you into one pessimistic, paranoid lady, Stevie Crye.
“I’ve got to get out of this house.”
This statement echoed harshly in her empty kitchen. Stevie collapsed the pages of the book-review section, folding them no more neatly than she usually folded the road maps in her van, and upended this bulging packet into the big wicker basket containing her plastic garbage pail. As if she had just disposed of her pessimism and paranoia along with the book reviews, she brushed her hands together smartly. She would take Dr. Elsa’s advice and drive into Columbus. Shopping, as Arthur Miller had somewhere pointed out, was an established American cultural response to the blues. It was what you did when TV’s pale attraction faded, and you had to come up for air from horror novels like Gravid Babies or The Terror According to Tyrone.
Stevie turned down the space heater and climbed the stairs to her bedroom to change clothes. Though cold, it was another beautiful day. Navy-blue slacks, a virgin-white fishnet sweater, and her off-white winter car coat—that ensemble ought to make her presentable to the J. C. Penney crowd, even if she was almost a decade out of fashion. What the hell. Warmth was the word, not modishness. The Columbus beau monde, bless its collective heart, would never even notice. Half its elegantly coiffed representatives were undoubtedly cruising Atlanta’s swank malls, anyway.
At the top of the stairs Stevie paused. The Exceleriter was not typing. Good. That was a blessing.
But pulled into her study in spite of herself, Stevie went to the typewriter, reread its transcriptions of last night’s dreams, tried to reconstruct the spoken half of her conversation with the machine, and finally removed the long sheet of paper on the cylinder. She cranked in another sheet. Then she folded the Exceleriter’s most recent work into a packet, slipped this into a manila folder, and removed from her files the folder containing its first literary efforts. They were going with her, these stories, these fictions. She had no firm idea why, but they were going with her. She wanted them under her arm, within her sight, tangible testimony that she had not merely hallucinated their reality.
XXXI
Once in Columbus, Stevie put the folders under the driver’s seat and scrupulously locked the van every time she left it. The afternoon went well. She treated herself to dinner at the China Star restaurant, window-shopped through the labyrinth of the Columbus Square Mall, and bought a good supply of nonperishable grocery items at the Winn-Dixie store in the Midtown Shopping Center. (Chicken potpies, being perishable, she valiantly passed up, even though they were three for only a dollar-ten.) She purposely stayed out of the bookstores that popped up along her shopping routes, for she had plenty to read at home and a longing perus
al of the fiction racks would automatically provoke an outlay of ten or twelve dollars. She could not afford any nonessential expenditures this month; she could hardly afford the essential ones.
By four-thirty Stevie had virtually exorcised her fatiguing negativism. She felt good—happy, almost. Like magic elixirs, the stinging February air and the radiant blueness of the afternoon sky had purged her melancholy. She was able to smile at the people on the sidewalks and in the mall concourses, even the ones who bumped her in doorways and flaunted scowly-face buttons on their coat lapels. Buck up, she wanted to tell these aggressively morose citizens, we’re all downtrodden downscale consumers together. K-Mart is our temple, McDonald’s our commissary, and Burt Reynolds our crash-happy prophet. Hallelujah.
Until she climbed back into her microbus for the final time that afternoon and saw the corner of one of her manila folders protruding from beneath the seat, she had forgotten about her typewriter troubles. The corner of the folder reminded her, but she shoved it out of sight with her heel and put the VW in gear. Nothing was going to spoil this outing. She intended to arrive back in Barclay in contagious high spirits.
Before she fully understood what she was doing, Stevie found herself driving down Macon Road toward the Bradley Memorial Library and the original business district on the Chattahoochee River. She needed to be going the other way. Above the library, then, she swung the microbus hard to the right and in moderate traffic cruised down the meticulously landscaped hill to a busy intersection between a cocktail lounge, a flower shop, and two other catty-corner establishments. She was heading into a tree-lined area in which private residences alternated with isolated businesses of one sort or another. The studios of the local CBS affiliate were not too far away. (Right now the station was probably broadcasting post-football-season fare: a gymnastics meet or a figure-skating exhibition. Wow. Was she glad to be away from the set.)
Then Stevie realized that she was going to Hamlin Benecke & Sons. Jesus, gal, you’re returning to the scene of the crime.
Indeed, she was. She could not help herself. It was stupid, irrational, maybe even counterproductive—not only to her hopes of getting her Exceleriter repaired forever and ever but also to the entire point of her day on the town. She simply could not help herself. Her shopping, after all, had not really purged her of anxiety. It had merely chased her problem underground. Well, the problem would not stay underground. It stuck its nose back above the surface and stared at her with close-set empty eyes. Maybe if she went to Benecke’s, and saw Seaton again, and made him undo the terrible thing he had done to her machine, her life would get back on track again and the nightmare of the past few days would burn away like morning mist.
Her foot pressed the accelerator, her hands manipulated the steering wheel, and her van chugged up an avenue of naked trees and semidilapidated structures to the site of the office-supply company. She pulled into the asphalt parking lot of a neighborhood drugstore across the street from Benecke’s. Both businesses were closed today. The bricks of the office-supply company had been painted a color that Stevie thought of as “headache green.” In the bright afternoon sunlight they shone with Day-Glo brilliance, as if freshly shellacked. Stevie shielded her eyes and peered across the street at the gaudy building.
Leaning against the building’s uphill wall, supporting some of its weight on a bent kickstand, was Seaton Benecke’s big black motorcycle. Her nemesis, it seemed, was inside working on other unsuspecting folks’ typewriters. Stevie pulled her manila folders out from under the seat without taking her eyes off the building. Maybe she ought to go over, pound on the locked front door, and accost that weird young man with further evidence of his malign handiwork. The company had charged her only ten or eleven dollars for repairs that Pantronics Data Equipment would not have made for another forty. Nevertheless, those so-called repairs (even if her Exceleriter was still functioning, after a fashion) had caused her untold mental anguish, and she would be well within her rights to ask for her money back.
Stevie opened her door and dropped one foot toward the pavement.
Simultaneously the plate-glass door of Hamlin Benecke & Sons flashed open, and Seaton appeared in it wearing his white coveralls and a coat resembling an intern’s jacket. His nimble jersey-clad capuchin sat on his right shoulder. Stevie pulled her foot back inside the microbus, eased the door to, and slumped down into her seat. She was crazy to be here. She did not want to talk to the repairman. She did not want her money back. She wanted to get home to the kids without a pointless showdown in the supply company’s parking lot. Of course, if her typewriter would start operating normally again, that little bonus would round off the perfection of the day, and she would accept that, too.
Please, Stevie silently begged, don’t let him see me. I didn’t mean to come here. Don’t let him see me.
Through the bottom of her window she watched Seaton fumbling with a set of keys, trying to find one that would lock the family business behind him. His pudgy fingers had no agility in the cold, none of the nice expertise that permitted him to transform ordinary business machines into dangerous psyche-scribers. He looked as bland as a bowl of dry cornflakes. The keys slipped from his fingers and clattered on the concrete. When he bent to retrieve them, ’Crets jumped from his shoulder and ran along the curb like a man on a riverbank surveying the waters beside him for a runaway boat. Or for a gas-bloated corpse.
Stevie ducked lower to keep the monkey from spotting her and alerting Seaton to her presence.
The telephone in the office-supply company began to ring. Stevie heard Seaton mutter, “Oh, crap!”—sounds carried well today, like cannons booming over water—and lifted her head to see him retreat back into the darkness to catch the phone. “I’ll be right back,” he told his monkey from inside the building. “Don’t you run off now.” Then the plate-glass door closed, and ’Crets hopped from the low curb into the deserted expanse of the parking lot.
I swear, thought Stevie, slumping again—that damned animal’s seen me. There’s no one to blame but yourself, either. You could have driven on home, Stevenson Crye. You didn’t have to make this stupid side trip.
Peeking over the Volkswagen’s sill to see what the capuchin was doing, Stevie found ’Crets looking directly at her—out of that tiny death’s-head face, out of the indigo whirlpools of his eyeless eyes. Well, so what? How likely was a stupid monkey to reveal her whereabouts to Seaton? When the repairman came back outside, he would summon ’Crets to him, mount his motorcycle, and go roaring off to whichever ritzy neighborhood he and his parents called their own. The capuchin may have seen a woman in a vehicle across the street, but no monkey alive could equate her mostly hidden face with the angry countenance of the woman who had yesterday chased him from her upstairs bedroom. Or could he? Stevie began to suspect that the vision of primates was far superior to that of dogs and cats. Further, they had noses similar in structure to, but more discriminating in operation than, the noses of human beings. Maybe ’Crets did know who she was, and maybe he would find a straightforward way to blow the whistle on her spying. A confrontation with Seaton would ensue, and Stevie’s heretofore carefree afternoon would glug down the drain like a basin of greasy dishwater. Way to go, Samantha Spade.
This fear commenced to justify itself. The monkey crossed the parking lot to the street and perched above the sloping gutter with an eye on the afternoon’s traffic. A man in an American compact honked his horn at ’Crets, obviously nonplused by so ominous an apparition at curbside, but the monkey sat up on his haunches and screeched at the driver. He would not be bullied. A German shepherd might daunt him, but not a pip-squeaking K-car.
My God, he’s coming over here. He’s actually going to cross the street. Why? What does he think he’ll accomplish?
Stevie rolled her window tight and locked the door. ’Crets, meanwhile, bounded toward the microbus on a tricky zigzag. Another automobile horn blared at him, but the monkey reached her side of the street unfazed by his perilous passage. Th
e Falcon quarterback in Atlanta was not half the scrambler that ’Crets was: Poor old Bartkowski just didn’t have the monkey’s knees. This facile comparison briefly deferred Stevie’s realization that ’Crets had come for her, that his journey had a sinister purpose.
She flopped across the passenger’s seat to lock the other door. Glancing back out into the drugstore’s pockmarked lot, she was startled to discover it empty. ’Crets had vanished. Probably too close to the van for her to see him.
By this time, Stevie’s fearful uneasiness had become an ill-defined dread. She was sweating under her sweater, and a weight like an old-fashioned flatiron had settled in her bowels. Seaton’s goddamn monkey was after her. Several inches shy of two feet tall, dressed like a born-again professional athlete, possessed of almost exemplary table manners (leaving aside his penchant for bloodsucking), ’Crets still terrified Stevie.
She was afraid that this unlikely creature would attain hulkish dimensions and rip the heavy sliding door off her microbus. What he then might attempt she could not even imagine, although it would assuredly be violent and probably excruciatingly fatal. Why else would he bear on his diminutive shoulders a furry death’s-head . . . ?
Stevie crept between the two forward seats into the passenger section. Still no sign of ’Crets. She depressed the handle on the sliding door, locking it, and hastily checked the latches on all the windows. Still no sign of ’Crets. As for Seaton, he had not yet exited the murky interior of the headache-green building. If he came out within the next few minutes, he would look around for the capuchin, see her van, and ford the noisy street to make inquiries. The smartest thing for her to do now would be to goose this old wagon right out of town. Stevie hurried forward to do just that.
Who Made Stevie Crye? Page 15