“Please come.”
“What about that doctor person had your kids on Sunday?”
“I can’t impose again. I can’t—” Stevie could not finish. Except for Sister Celestial—Betty Malbon—she had no ally who bought and partially understood her predicament. Her color notwithstanding, the Sister was flesh of her flesh. (Dr. Elsa a brick, Sister Celestial her sister.) They were made of the same stuff, Stevie and Betty. They shared the frequency of nightmare and broadcast to each other on it as if to tame that woolly wavelength with the Muzak of mutual sympathy. Let me get through to her, Stevie prayed. Make her say yes.
“Give me some directions. I’ve got to have me some directions.”
XLIV
At 10:35 P.M. (although, again, Stevie had the feeling that, like a chess queen in peril of capture, she had landed on the square labeled 10:35 P.M. not through her own agency but through that of a harum-scarum Game Player cowed by a faceless opponent), engine noises outside the house suggested that Sister Celestial had arrived from Button City. RRRRR-uhm, RRRRR-uhm, went this engine. Stevie tippled the last magenta bead of her Lambrusco and tottered to the window above the glinting twin basins of her stainless-steel sink. What kind of vehicle did the Sister drive? Stevie espied only the loaflike contours of her Volkswagen van, a silhouette like a gigantic package of Roman Meal bread on radial tires. Behind the van, though, the driveway stretched desolately moon-pebbled to the street. Maybe the Sister drove a Ghostmobile.
A knocking ensued at the door to the breakfast nook off the kitchen. Most visitors who came to that door had to park in the driveway and walk past the kitchen windows to get there; other approaches to the house led more easily to other doors—so that this visitor, whoever it was, had probably had to traipse through the yard next to the green apartments, duck beneath the berry-laden arms of the holly tree beside the porch, and climb to the wicker mat in front of this door as if emerging from a frigid jungle. Sister Celestial was a big woman. Stevie could not imagine her undertaking so bothersome a trek simply to gain entry to her newest client’s house. The straightforward directions Stevie had given her over the phone would have required far less exertion.
No matter, Stevie thought. The knocking sounds friendly enough.
She groped her way down the kitchen’s center island—had she taken more than one glass of wine during the thirty minutes after Sister Celestial’s call?—and found that a man was standing on the deck outside the breakfast nook; she could see him through the window in the upper half of the Dutch door. A young man in a perforated baseball-style cap with a squiggly insignia above the bill. Despite the hour, he wore an immense pair of mirrored sunglasses, their lenses like concave tracking discs. His parka, bearing on a breast pocket the same squiggly insignia as his cap, shone as blue as a South Sea lagoon under the naked porch lamp, and Stevie half believed that someone had inflated the parka’s sleeves with a bicycle pump. Between its ribbed collar and his funhouse sunglasses, overlapping and concealing at least three of the parka’s metal snaps, flourished a narrow black beard that fell to its squared-off tip in marceled waves, a beard, then, much in the tonsorial tradition of the Sumerian kings. It looked fake. Hoisting a small portmanteau into Stevie’s sight, her unlikely visitor glanced at his watch and then, in genial businesslike earnest, knocked again.
“Just a minute,” Stevie said. “I’m coming.”
She made her way over the breakfast nook’s red tiles and struggled with the latch joining the two halves of the Dutch door. Then, stepping aside, she swung the top half inward. It was now clear that the insignias on the man’s cap and parka represented a cockroach or some other six-legged varmint lying on its carapace with its feet in the air. The insignias looked hand-drafted and -sewn. You almost felt sorry for the poleaxed bugs they depicted—at which point Stevie realized that her visitor was breathing heavily, trying to regain his wind after crawling beneath the overburdened branches of the holly tree beside her porch. Each wheezy breath introduced a gasp reminiscent of Ted’s excited snufflings at climax. This man was the breather who had phoned her.
Stevie tried to shut the door’s top half, but the visitor put his portmanteau into the breach and lifted his cap, revealing white-blond hair in suspicious contrast to the black Sumerian beard. He did not look at Stevie when he spoke, but turned the huge discs of his sunglasses toward the screened-in porch at the eastern end of the deck. His halting voice was full of apologetic deference.
“I’m with the Greater Southeastern Ridpest and Typewriter Repair Service, ma’am. I know it’s late, but I’m an apprentice working the third shift.”
“Typewriter Repair Service!” Stevie exclaimed, her curiosity overcoming her fear. What cheesy gall. Such a man would walk uncircumcised into a Jewish nudist colony.
“No, ma’am. Tile Siding Referral Service. If you know anyone who’d like tile siding on their home, we’ll gladly refer ’em to associate contractors who do really fine work.”
“Tile siding doesn’t exist. You said Typewriter Repair Service.”
“Sorry you misheard me, ma’am. Tile siding’s the newest oldest thing. It’s sweeping the Sun Belt. Are you or any of your neighbors interested in tile siding, do you think?”
“I can safely say no.”
“Well, that’s not why I’m here anyway. I’m an apprentice for the Ridpest portion of the Greater Southeastern Service Consortium. We’re exterminators. I’m offering a free on-premises inspection for termites, cockroaches, silverfish, house beetles, book lice—”
“It’s almost eleven o’clock. Do you have any idea of—?”
“—and capuchin monkeys.”
“Seaton, I may be a tad tipsy, but I’m not stupid. No one makes free on-premises inspections at this ungodly hour.”
“Apprentices working the third shift do, ma’am.”
“Move that briefcase, Seaton. Get it out of my window so I can close it and call the police. You’re trespassing, disturbing my peace, and subjecting me to criminal harassment.”
“But my name’s not Seaton, ma’am.”
“Your name’s Seaton Benecke, and you’re the principal pest I’d like to be rid of, now and forever.”
“What about the monkey upstairs?”
“All right, yes. ’Crets and Seaton Benecke are the principal pests, plural, I’d like to be rid of.”
“My name’s Billy Jim Blakely.”
“What a load of monkey crap.” Plumes of anger wisping dramatically, draconically, from her nostrils, Stevie reached through the open half of the Dutch door, tweezered the tip of the Sumerian beard between her fingers, and plucked it from her visitor’s face. “Billy Jim Blakely, my eye. Your beard’s a piece of shoddy phoniness just like your name.”
“Ma’am, that’s not a beard,” said the apprentice Ridpest agent. “That’s my muffler—it’s mighty cold tonight.”
Stevie handed the alleged muffler back to her visitor, who crammed it into his parka pocket with the indignant air of a man falsely accused of passing counterfeit bills. But there was no doubt about his identity, whatever physical or solely histrionic disguises he assumed. Seaton Benecke—RRRRR-uhm, RRRRR-uhm—had come to her door at 10:40 P.M. pretending to be someone named Billy Jim Blakely and expecting her to swallow that preposterous lie.
“If I look like someone you know,’’ he added in a tone of aggrieved innocence, “it may be because I was separated from my twin brother at birth and adopted by the Blakelys later. People are always saying I look like so-and-so, you know, meaning this whatever-his-name-is you’ve no doubt mistaken me for. It happens all the time.”
“Seaton, you’re full of a mind-boggling lot of hot air, but it’s not warming my kitchen.” She jabbed him in the chest with her finger. “Get the hell out of here—off my porch and out of my life!”
“Why are you being so mean?”
Stevie went to the wall phone and began dialing. “I’m calling the sheriff’s office in Wickrath,” she said. “They’ll radio a patrol car in Bar
clay, and in three minutes there’ll be an officer here to arrest you for trespassing, or breaking and entering, or something. You’d better scram, Seaton.”
Instead he reached through the open half of the door, turned the knob, entered the breakfast nook, and rejoined the two halves of the door so that they presented a united front to the cold. Then he came and stood beside Stevie at the wall phone. “Is this Seaton Benecke an acquaintance of yours, ma’am?”
To Stevie’s dismay the number of the sheriff’s office in Wickrath returned a busy signal. She slammed the receiver into place and turned to face the young man nonchalantly tormenting her.
“Do you know this Seaton Benecke personally, I mean?” he asked again.
“Just what the hell do you want of me?”
“If you know him personally—and I guess you do if you’re on speaking terms with him, like you seem to be—why not let him give your house a free Ridpest inspection tour, just for the sake of your acquaintance? There’s no obligation, and he’d get credit with the Columbus office for performing that service. A new Ridpest field agent has to get so many credits to keep from being retrained or axed. You’d be doing your friend a really fine favor.’’
“He isn’t my friend. I mean, you aren’t my friend. This masquerade’s got as much credibility as I’d have dressing up as Queen Elizabeth. I’m dangerously weary of it, Seaton.” That was true. She entertained thoughts of taking a butcher’s knife from the upright wooden block into which several pieces of her kitchen cutlery were slotted. Never before had she seriously contemplated sliding a blade into another human being’s belly, but that abominable abdominal notion had just taken vivid shape in her mind. She glanced at her knife-holder. . . .
“Would you like me better if I said I was this Seaton Benecke person?”
“Didn’t you hear me ask him—you—to get out?”
“What if I rid your attic of that pesky capuchin? Apprentice Ridpest agents undergo special training for the removal of capuchin monkeys from such hard-to-reach places as crawlways, chimneys, and attics, and I’d be grateful if you let me put it to use. Then your children could sleep without you fearing some sort of bad thing might happen to them—the monkey sitting on their faces, or crapping in their beds, or that sort of unpleasant stuff.”
“Sucking their blood?”
“Yes, ma’am. Capuchin control’s very important in homes with small kids and teens.”
“Listen, if you got ’Crets out of the attic, would you leave? Would you take your little simian vampire and disappear forever?”
“Well, ma’am, my bosses’d be happier if you signed a long-term service contract. Our free inspections are really come-ons, you know.”
“I don’t want a service contract. I’m about to dial the sheriff’s again, but I won’t if you get ’Crets out of our attic and forget the Cryes forever!”
“I can’t forget the Cryes, ma’am.” Seaton took off his sunglasses and slid them into his pocket with his beard-cum-muffler. The skin around his watery eyes gleamed pinkly. Tonight he had a disconcertingly haggard mien. He refused to meet Stevie’s gaze, but cast a longing look at the dining room door and the stairwell beyond it. Maybe he sincerely missed his exotic familiar.
Stevie lifted the receiver and put her finger on the dial. “Do you agree to what I’ve proposed?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Seaton Benecke said wearily. “Sure.”
“Ah.” A sigh of relief as weary as her visitor’s grudging consent escaped Stevie. She cradled the receiver and led Seaton from the kitchen into the unheated part of the house.
Outside her study on the second floor, the phony Ridpest agent grabbed her arm, forcibly halting her. “How’s your typewriter doing? Does it need any work? I could do that too. No extra charge.”
“Extra? There’s no charge for what I’ve asked you here to do, remember? As for the Exceleriter, you’re never going to touch it again.”
Spoken with such bite and hostility, this intelligence seemed to dishearten Seaton. But he pushed her study door inward, revealing the cramped vista of her chair, her desk, and her typewriter (which she had left uncovered as well as disconnected from its electrical outlet). Although neither Stevie nor the intruder had turned on the light, they could see the room’s cluttered furnishings by the antique-gold patina surrounding the Exceleriter. In fact, the machine’s casing looked lethally radioactive. Anyone sitting at its keyboard for more than five or ten minutes would surely suffer an incandescent canonization as the Patron Saint of Post-Holocaust Typists.
“What have you done to it now?” Stevie demanded.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Crye. Sometimes they get out of control, sort of. They begin to have an exalted opinion of themselves.”
“Fix it!”
“Oh, no. I’m up here to fetch a monkey out of your attic. Besides, it’s busy sending oracular messages to rebellious typewriters all across our nation.”
“Seaton, you’re talking utter bilge.”
“It’s not my fault, ma’am.” He pulled the door to, but Stevie could still see an eldritch glow seeping out from under it and glittering palely in the keyhole. “I’ve got a job to do. That typewriter’s out of my hands.” Puffed up in his parka, he swaggered like a penguin toward Marella’s room.
Stevie flipped on her daughter’s overhead and pointed at the step-down closet. Although the light shining in Marella’s face did not awaken her, she turned and ducked her head beneath her blanket. “In there,” Stevie said. She helped Seaton move the rocking-horse and the hat tree and urged him to be quick about this business if he was going to be obstinate about the Exceleriter.
Seaton took a tin of Sucrets from the pocket containing his beard and sunglasses, unwrapped one of the lozenges, and entered the sunken closet. As he turned the wooden block on the plywood hatch to the attic beyond this walkaround area, a furry arm came out of his portmanteau and took from his hand the medicated tablet he had just unwrapped. Seaton swatted at the arm, which instantly snaked back into the bag. Grumbling, he seized another lozenge and peeled away its foil packaging. Then he pried the plywood hatch out of its moorings and ducked into the terra incognita of the timber-studded dark.
Stevie said, “You’re taking another monkey in there with you!”
Seaton’s head reappeared in the hatch opening. “Several, I’m afraid. These are ones I extracted from other houses on my free-inspection rounds today. I’ll just plop your pest in here with the rest of ’em.”
“The rest of them? You scarcely have room in there for one.”
“There’s four or five. They get cozy when you stuff ’em into a Ridpest extermination kit. Why don’t you shut off that light and go back downstairs? This one’s more likely to come out if there are fewer distractions.”
There came a pounding in the foyer below her office. It echoed through the stairwell and along the upstairs corridor like a midnight summons in her own worst nightmares of the coming police state. Jackbooted young conservatives and charismatic Bible thumpers were splintering her front door with the trunk of the last loblolly pine in the Greater Southeast. They did not care that a young man disguised as an apprentice exterminator was smuggling a briefcase full of monkeys into her attic.
“Here, ’Crets,” crooned this young man, vanishing into the abyss beyond the hatch opening. “Come and take your medicine. . . .”
Meantime, the posse at Stevie’s front door was working up a powerful kinetic potentiality. She could see these rabid battering-ram bearers smashing their way into her house and toppling on sheer momentum into the dining room. She would find them sprawled across the floor like bowling pins, their loblolly trunk penetrating a shattered pane of the French doors dividing the dining room from the foyer. Torn between the needs to oversee Seaton’s search and to prevent her house’s demolition, she turned out Marella’s light and hurried down the stairs to parlay with the zealots demanding entry.
XLV
She found only Sister Celestial outside. The black woman’
s vehicle—a foreign-made economy car, probably a Datsun—was parked beneath the tulip tree by the front walk, but the noise her formidable fist made rapping on the door bore only a generic similarity to the insistent thumping of a battering ram. Distressed by the incongruity between what she had heard upstairs and what was occurring down-, Stevie admitted the prophetess to the foyer.
“I thought you’d come to the kitchen door.”
“Well, I tried back there, child, but when getting no answer, I came around here to do my rapping.”
“Seaton Benecke came, Sister. At first I thought it was you. He’s upstairs trying to chase his monkey out of the attic.”
Sister Celestial was carrying a carpetbag even larger than Seaton’s extermination kit. She had on two or three raveled sweaters, a pair of fur-lined snow boots, and the same shawl and chemise she had worn yesterday. Her cologne diffused through the stairwell like the fragile scent of early gardenias, reassuringly.
“Better let him go about his business, then. You gonna take me someplace warm or we hafta stand in this beef locker all evening?”
“Did you hear me? Benecke’s upstairs and my typewriter’s glowing.”
“I know. So’s my Remington. I banged it good almost all day.”
“Literally glowing.”
“I don’t doubt you think so. Most writers get to thinking that way after a long spell at their helpmeets. It’s a delusion, though, child. Lately you’ve been the victim of dreams ’n’ delusions you just can’t tell from outright lies.”
A hand on the Sister’s arm, Stevie ushered her toward the warmth of the kitchen. She was still confused. The terms of the Sister’s last verbal equation did not seem to balance. Even the revivifying dry heat at the rear of the house did not enable Stevie to make them compute. So, to create a semblance of orderliness, she installed her visitor at the kitchen table and set before her a veritable smorgasbord of snacks, including cheese dips and wine.
Who Made Stevie Crye? Page 26