Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  Seaton’s face appeared on the other side of the supply company’s plate-glass door, a milky blur in the gloom. What horrendous timing. Why couldn’t his caller have kept him occupied another two minutes? Stevie slid down in her seat again and stared sidelong out the window to await the inevitable confrontation. She was doomed to be seen, no matter how far down she slumped or how fervently she wished otherwise. She must resign herself to an unpleasant meeting. She must think up some excuse, even though she had none. All because Seaton had dropped his keys and his idiot monkey had darted across the street.

  Well, she had asked for it. She had almost willed it to happen.

  The door to the green building opened, and Seaton Benecke came through it with his door key in hand and ’Crets perched easily on his shoulder. Yes, with ’Crets on his shoulder! Heedless of her own likely conspicuousness, Stevie sat up and gaped. Neither Seaton nor the capuchin saw her. Young Benecke closed and locked the door, shifted his clinging familiar to his hip, and strode the small distance beneath the building’s metal awning to his motorcycle. With ’Crets installed securely between his legs, Seaton started the big Honda, revved its engine a few times, and drifted almost effortlessly into the flow of traffic on the cramped avenue. He had never even seen Stevie. Like the demon who operated her Exceleriter, she had been invisible to him. So had her van. Maybe, like the capuchin whom she had just imagined crossing the street from the store, she and her vehicle had not even been there.

  “Nonsense,” said Stevie aloud. “You saw what you saw, and you’re most definitely parked across the street from Hamlin Benecke and Sons.”

  The steering wheel was cold under her hands, the gas pedal gently resisted the pressure of her foot, and the traffic moving on the street between the drugstore and the office-supply company clearly had both outline and substance. Stevie, bewildered and frightened, started her Volkswagen, headed it back toward the curving uphill avenue that debouched into Macon Road, and told herself that now, surely, she was going home. She would not be sidetracked again.

  XXXII

  Stevie decided to return to Barclay by an old state two-lane rather than the new federal interstate. The latter offered no services for nearly fifty miles, and she wanted the assurance of nearby houses, filling stations, and tiny rural businesses once it began to turn dark. Whereas the interstate often seemed a huge deserted autobahn through beautiful but unpeopled farming country, the winding state highway to Barclay took a traveler by secure if sometimes inconvenient stages through one shabby and/or picturesque community after another. To arrive safely at your destination, you negotiated alternating corridors of pine woods and variegated human settlements. If you had a flat tire on Highway 27, a Good Old Boy in a pickup or a member of the Wickrath County Sheriffs Patrol would stop to help. On the interstate, though, you could wait for hours for assistance or risk being victimized by a hoodlum while trying to do the job yourself. Therefore, Stevie headed home by way of Cataula, Button City, and Kudzu Valley.

  Twilight came early in February. Although it was only a little after five, the sun limning the pine needles on her left was sinking fast. Its rays winked through the trees like those of a failing flashlight. Grayness stained the eastern sky the way a spill of water discolors a linen napkin. It was cold and getting colder. Stevie had the heater turned up high. Its low roar and the warmth issuing from its blowers were partial antidotes to the psychological effects of the congealing gloom, but Stevie could not help thinking about the incident in Columbus.

  She had seen ’Crets crossing the street, and then Seaton emerging from the store with ’Crets on his shoulder. How could the animal be in two places at once? She had imagined either one or the other of these apparitions. There could not be two animals, she reasoned, because Seaton had shown no apparent distress at the absence of the capuchin with which he had first come to the door. That monkey, then, must be the illusion. She had imagined its clever sprint across the street. The real ’Crets had left the store with Seaton a few minutes later.

  “Nonsense,” Stevie said.

  The fear of a flat tire or a thrown rod or some other mechanical problem had not kept her from using the four-lane. She had come by way of 27 because she feared that Seaton had spotted her van and dispatched ’Crets to spook and intimidate her. On his prior command the monkey had hidden from Stevie, and Seaton had then left the store with a stuffed effigy of ’Crets. (Marella had three or four truly lifelike stuffed animals—it was not impossible.) Once she had driven off, confused and fear-stricken, Seaton had returned to pick up his pet, smirking in his plain-faced way over his ruse’s success. The only other alternative, and not really a credible one, was that ’Crets was clinging to the side or rear of her vehicle, a potential saboteur.

  Now that was paranoid.

  But Stevie half believed that ’Crets was traveling with her; indeed, that was why she had chosen this well-patrolled route instead of the barrens of the interstate.

  Cataula, here and gone. Look out for Button City, a smattering of mobile homes intersprinkled with a pair of roadside eateries, a convenience store, an abandoned brick motel, and an automobile graveyard, spines of dented metal rusting into the sere and leafless kudzu.

  On Button City’s northern outskirts, just as the road began to meander through another fairy-tale defile of wilderness: an illuminated sign that Stevie had never seen, maybe because it had been two months, back during the Christmas holidays, since she had driven to or from Columbus via Highway 27, and even small towns, given enough time, underwent some surprising changes. This change was not earth-shaking, just startling in the dusky context of pine trees and naked cork elms.

  Off to the left, in front of a chain-link fence around a small frame house half-hidden by trees, stood a mobile advertising signboard with colored light bulbs winking around its edges and a host of plastic letters arrayed in its display grooves. Stevie could not yet see what the letters said, but she remembered that once on this spot there had stood a crude wooden billboard featuring a big red hand and the legend Madame Pauline, Palmst (sic). Stevie had never stopped, and once she got past the sign, a glance in her rearview had always revealed that big red hand bobbing slightly, as if waving goodbye. A trick of the road, but it amused her that fortune-telling still thrived in the so-called New South. Some of its practitioners even touted their services in the Yellow Pages.

  Stevie slowed to see what sophisticated message had replaced the crudities of that original sign. There might be a feature story in the subject, one she had never explored in depth before. If her book proposal came back from the Briar Patch Press, Inc., as she believed it would, she had best have something else on the burner to keep her family fed. Maybe she could sell a piece on latter-day palmistry to the latest incarnation of Atlanta Fortnightly, a magazine with a far-reaching editorial mix and a competitive pay scale.

  All these thoughts sieved through Stevie’s mind as she tried to read the signboard’s message, but there were too many letters to catch while coasting by, so a hundred yards past the frame house she backed along the deserted two-lane to see what she had missed. The other side of the sign bore the same lettering. Stevie parked on the shoulder, twisted in her seat, and with a Bic pen wrote it all down on a manila folder:

  SISTER CELESTIAL

  PROPHETESS ** HEALER

  DAILY & SUNDAY 7 A.M.—11 P.M.

  SPECIALIZES IN: LOVE—BUSINESS—MARRIAGE

  HELPS SOLVE ANY PROBLEM AND ANSWER ANY QUESTION

  DELIVERS THE GUIDING HAND PLUS REALIZATION

  REASONABLE RATES ** FREE BLESSINGS

  KNOCK AND THE DOOR WILL OPEN

  A truly thorough program. And not one misspelling in the entire message! That colon after SPECIALIZES IN might not be altogether kosher, but usually with roadside soothsayers you got misspellings galore: PALMST, FORETUNE TELLER, ADVIZER, PROFETIS. Because most of these sibyls had trouble divining what letter came after another, Stevie never had any confidence that they could perform an analogous task with eve
nts. A dictionary was a book of spells, but either few of these ladies owned one, or they were too busy crystal-gazing inverted fishbowls or turning over marked playing cards to consult Webster’s.

  Eight lines without a spelling error. Wow.

  An orange light glowed in one of the windows of Sister Celestial’s clapboard house. A curl of smoke did a sinuous dance upward through the haloed trees. Stevie had parked on the shoulder facing oncoming traffic, and a car from the north swerved into the opposite lane and blew its horn to let her know that her van was not wholly clear of the highway. The blare Dopplered away like the warning claxon of a passing diesel locomotive. Stevie’s hands began to tremble. The flimsy lace curtains on the window with the orange lamp drew aside and then dropped back into place. Someone had spotted her.

  “Shit,” she said disgustedly. And thought again of ’Crets, who might still be perched on her rear fender.

  Behind the chain-link fence, forty or fifty yards away, a figure emerged onto the porch of the house, an imposing figure in a shawl and a dark chemise. Stevie could not see the woman’s face, but she had little doubt that this was Sister Celestial, trapped for now in a cunningly allocated surplus of earthbound flesh. A stranger had parked by her property, and she was peering up through the dusk to determine if it was a customer or an ill-mannered interloper bent on mischief. You had to put up with a lot of guff from young people when you were a prophetess.

  Stevie cranked her window down three inches (too small a crack for a monkey of ’Crets’s size to squeeze through) and shouted, “I was just admiring your sign. I’ll be going now. My kids are waiting for me up in Barclay.”

  “You sound like a woman in trouble,” Sister Celestial called from her porch, her voice curiously high-pitched for so big a woman—curiously melodic, too. “Untroubled folks don’t stop to admire my sign. They laugh their laughs and go on by.” Imperiously she descended her steps to a stone walkway in her dusty yard.

  “No, no, I’m not in any trouble.”

  “No trouble, gal? How come I hear a question in those words?”

  How has this happened? Stevie asked herself. You don’t need this. First a side trip to the office-supply company, now this colloquy with a black prophetess-healer. Highway robber, call her. Just another con artist exploiting a gimmick to keep from doing real work. Just like you . . .

  Aloud Stevie said, “You don’t see a monkey on my rear fender, do you? Or up on top of my van?”

  “You bring a monkey with you, child?”

  “No, I —”

  Sister Celestial laughed. “Do I look like Miss Jane Goodall?” She spread her arms. “Does this look like the Grant Park Zoo?”

  “No. No, it doesn’t. I didn’t really expect there to be a monkey on the van. It’s just that—” It’s just that I can’t possibly explain myself without typing out everything that’s happened to me since Tuesday.

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about monkeys then. Or lions or hippopotamuses, either. I don’t even got a dog, child.’’

  “Listen, I’m sorry I bothered you. I’ll be going.”

  Sister Celestial advanced up her walk between two rows of wire pickets bearing circular red reflectors . . . like a goddess stepping from island to island on a dark primeval sea; the reflectors were the eyes of the mythological amphibians cavorting at her ankles. To dispel this dicey illusion, Stevie had to glance again at the chain-link fence and the glowing signboard.

  Sister Celestial said, “You wanted to talk to me. That’s why you stopped.”

  “I stopped to copy your sign. That’s all. Madame Pauline used to live here. I was curious.”

  “You’re looking at Madame Pauline, child. Every seven years or so I got to be born again. Already I’ve been Prophetess Joy, Delphinia Promise, Mother Miracle, Madame Pauline, and Sister Celestial. Already I know who I’m likely to be my next changeover and the one after that. This is the fanciest sign I’ve ever had. Next one, though, liable to be neon and the one after that a parade of letters marchin’ back and forth over the highway. Look all you like. Copy all you want.”

  “I’m finished. I’ve copied it.”

  “My question’s why you want to. Answer me that. Why you want to copy some old crazy diviner’s flimflammy sign?”

  “I’m a reporter, sort of. I thought this might make an interesting story.”

  “Course it would. You up and change your mind about that?”

  “No, no. It’s . . . I’ve got to get back to Barclay.”

  “You’ll get there. You’re almost there now. Come in, child, and take a bead on your troubles getting this story down. It’s been better ’n three years since the papers done me, and that was only because a white man over in Ellerslie told Sheriff Gates I snooked him.”

  The verb sounded like snooked to Stevie. Sister Celestial spoke clearly and forthrightly, seldom swallowing the tails of her words—but the incantatory rhythms of her speech and an occasional colorful expression kept Stevie off her guard. She was afraid she was being snooked. She ought to nod goodbye and drive off, but middle-class courtesy and the mercenary instincts of her profession restrained her. Maybe there was a helluva story in Sister Celestial, outrageous Flannery O’Connor material to which she could apply the jaded journalistic cool of Joan Didion or the effervescent hipness of Tom Wolfe. Brock Fowler at Atlanta Fortnightly would snap up such an article and commission her to roam southwest Georgia looking for more. She would do a whole gallery of indigenous types, from the auto-mechanic archery champion to the dulcimer-making Ku Klux Klanner to the—

  “You coming, child?”

  “All right,” Stevie said. “Dr. Elsa shouldn’t be too upset if I’m a little later than seven. She’ll understand.”

  “I’m sure she will,” Sister Celestial agreed.

  Stevie opened her door, then hesitated and glanced up and down the shoulder for some sign of ’Crets. To cover this display of tentativeness, she said, “I can’t afford a reading, though. That’s one reason I didn’t just come up to the door and knock.”

  “Not much reason,” the black woman said. “What’s the next to last line on my glowboard say?”

  “‘Reasonable rates. Free blessings.’”

  “You got it, child. You got it. Now come in out of the cold and take you a chair in my shanty-castle.”

  Stevie started to climb down from the microbus.

  “You better get that box of yours all the way off the road. Else you better have some mighty fine insurance.”

  So Stevie maneuvered her VW van down the shoulder’s incline to a small graded area where most of Sister Celestial’s customers must park. Sister Celestial retreated into her house. Before dismounting and following her, Stevie rummaged through the manila folders for the transcriptions of her nightmares. These she carried through the gate and over the stone walkway to her unexpected audience with the cheerfully triumphant prophetess.

  XXXIII

  The house was cozy. A glance from the doorway showed Stevie that the front room served the Sister not only as entertainment area and business office, but also as a shrine to the beauty and achievements of her children. Framed photographs of four or five young people in Sunday finery, mortar boards, or military uniforms hung like religious icons in one corner. A plump paisley sofa and an upright piano partitioned the room into smaller “rooms,” among which Stevie could imagine Sister Celestial floating as the whims of memory, fortune, or will directed her. Because the piano’s gap-toothed grin blocked easy access to the recesses beyond, Stevie halted and stared at its dingy ivory keys.

  Sister Celestial was in the niche beyond the piano. Looking over the ferns arrayed in red clay pots atop it, she said, “You like to hear this baby play, child? Rattle you off a tune all by itself?”

  “Ma’am?” Stevie’s eyes widened.

  “Shut that door and come on in. This is a player piano. It runs through rolls. Sometimes I feed it a roll, sit back, and let some W. C. Handy or Leadbelly fill up my hungriness for blues. Can
’t play a nursery rhyme myself. You like to hear some automated jass, gal?” She said jass instead of jazz, and Stevie had the clear impression that the Sister was teasing her, both about the piano’s roll-playing capabilities and her own stereotypical tastes in music.

  “I didn’t come here to listen to the piano.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You’re a woman in trouble looking for a story. You came here to solve your problems. Come on, then. Get around here where we can do somethin’ for you.”

  Sister Celestial’s head, with its cap of tight iron-gray ringlets, disappeared behind the green-velvet plumes of the ferns. Stevie edged around the piano and found the woman sitting in a coaster chair of varnished oak behind a wobbly card table whose torn vinyl surface was patched in several places with masking tape. The vinyl itself was like a sheet of melted Valentine’s candy, sticky and red. To the prophetess’s right, wedged against the wall, was a typewriter stand on which the Sister had enthroned an ancient Remington. This machine appeared to be sixty or seventy years old, a model, Stevie surmised, not unlike the one on which Mark Twain had prepared the first typewritten manuscript ever submitted to a publishing company. What a deluge old Mark had precipitated. Now, even though word processors were threatening to make typewriters passé, Stevie had found an antique in active use. She gaped at it as she had gaped at the piano.

  “You type?” she asked.

  “I do a two-finger dogtrot, child. Sit down in that folding chair there. We’ll take your contentment temperature and try to bring it back up to ninety-eight-point-six.”

  Stevie did not sit. “Are the people who visit you crazy?” She wondered if Sister Celestial’s bulky Remington, a Platonic paradigm of the Typewriter (with a capital T) made manifest, were a phantom on the order of the monkey that had jumped down from Seaton Benecke’s shoulder. Maybe she was not seeing a typewriter at all. Maybe her mind was deceiving her again.