Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  “Seaton!” Stevie leaned forward.

  “Those pale mounds halfway along, sort of like crescent moons, they’re sweet ol’ Ted’s butt. Elegant Lynnette Benecke’s under there somewhere. That’s her bare feet sticking up in the foreground under the trousers bunched around his ankles. If you look close, ma’am, you can see Mama’s head thrown back against the inside of the other door and the tip of the duck call protruding from her mouth. ‘Quack,’ she went. ‘Quack, quack.’ And out the window, a pair of mallards with their wings spread getting ready to land on the lake.”

  Closing her eyes against the full-color evidence of Ted’s infidelity, Stevie leapt from her plywood island to the one on which her nemesis was narrating the slide show. When next she opened her eyes, Seaton’s grinning face bobbed only inches from her, and she delivered a right uppercut that glanced off his temple and knocked his cap into the cellulose insulation between a pair of ceiling joists. With a deafening crash a box of ancient cooking utensils also fell into this valley, but lodged there without plunging through the kitchen ceiling below.

  Stevie struck out at Seaton again, and this time the changer popped from his hand into a storm of dust motes and eddying fibers. Although she could not see where the changer had fallen, the impact of its landing must have depressed the button permanently, for the images on the torn sheet began clicking past at an alarming rate, like frames in a low-budget blue movie in which Ted and Lynnette had the dubious distinction of starring. Dim shots of Ted’s fanny going up and down were interspliced with vivid sequences of the ducks’ heads pecking away at the popcorn in the cardboard box. Stevie, to gape incredulously at this remarkable montage, pulled a punch—a lapse allowing Seaton to sidle between two pieces of dusty luggage and jump over several exposed joists to the island beneath the makeshift screen. Here he spread his arms and received upon his Ridpest parka the topographically warped projections of the next several slides.

  “They hadn’t seen me,” he orated. “I could have turned around and walked home. I didn’t, though. I went around to the tailgate and climbed into the load bed. The duck calls stopped, and eventually two faces appeared in the window in the back of the cab. I hated them both, though, and all I’ve seen in my mind’s eye when thinking about either one of them in all the years since their betrayal is just what you’re seeing now, Mrs. Crye. Peck, peck, peck. Wiggling and wriggling and tickling inside her. Perhaps, that day, I died. Perhaps I really did. I’ve been a sullen, vengeful, and sadly impotent demon ever since.” He laughed. “But this past week has been my glory, Mrs. Crye, the climax of my entire pathetic life!”

  “You bet it has,” Stevie said, trembling. “If you didn’t die that day, you twerp, maybe you will tonight.”

  “No,” Sister C. said, rising. “You don’t have to kill him. It’s not in the Chapter Forty-seven my Remington and I typed. You talk him into surrendering to the authorities for impersonating a Ridpestman, and they convince him to seek psychological help from the Bradley Center in Columbus—from which, of course, he’ll later escape for the sequel.”

  Still aripple with semicubistic visions of lakeside lovemaking, Seaton made a farting noise with his lips. “You didn’t buy that predictable finish, did you, Sister? It was a decoy to get you out of Button City on a cold February night. Besides, who wants a sequel? I’m not going to oversee a second marathon typing. This one’s it. We’re playing for all the marbles here tonight.”

  “God!” Stevie exclaimed. “He doesn’t give a damn about anybody, does he?” Like Cathinka taking on Waldemar, she hurried to engage her tormentor in hand-to-hand combat, tightroping the edge of a narrow joist and throwing herself toward the plywood island on which he haughtily awaited her. Raising his elbow, Seaton nearly blocked her advent, but she grabbed the upper sleeves of his parka, grappled her way erect, and shoved him into the curtain on which Ted was even yet energetically violating their marriage vows. “You couldn’t leave me my illusions, could you?” she hissed, staggering back toward the projector as he planted his feet and repulsed this new attack. “You know,” she managed, “you could have fixed my Exceleriter—really fixed it, I mean—and redeemed your pathetic life by . . . unh! . . . subduing your baser instincts.” She halted Seaton’s counterattack, gained purchase and leverage, and forced him to the groaning edge of the plywood, where nailheads had begun to work their way loose as a result of their vigorous seesaw struggle.

  “Knee him in the sausage works!” Sister Celestial cried. “Hit him where it hurts!”

  “I’m only baser instincts,” Seaton panted, bracing himself on the lip of the narrow abyss. “I sabotaged . . . unh! . . . every typewriter I ever worked on. Yours went first because . . . unh! . . . I wanted you to know the turmoil of its breakdown. I’ve known it, that turmoil, for . . . unh! . . . thirteen years. I’m bad, ma’am. I’m evil incarnate. Think of all the typewriters I’ve . . . unh! unh! . . . irretrievably corrupted.”

  “Fiend!” Stevie shouted. “Twerp!” She flung him off the plywood island into the trough between the joists.

  Geysers of linty cellulose billowed. Like a catfish finning its way into the turbid depths, Seaton disappeared into a layer of musty batting, whereupon the kitchen ceiling broke open under him and from a height of at least ten feet he crashed down, along with several bushels of blue-gray insulation, onto Stevie’s circular table. Dumbfounded, Stevie stared through this Seaton-sized rent at the spread-eagled victim of her heroics, a blond young man with cherubic lips and lizardly eyes. How peaceful he looked, the cynosure of a slow-motion blizzard.

  “Good for you,” the Sister said. “He was asking for it, playing with our lives. You gave him just what he deserved.”

  “Unplug the projector,” Stevie said. “For Pete’s sake, Betty, unplug that damn thing.”

  The Sister obeyed. The slide show ceased. The light filtering into the attic no longer came from the projector’s beam but from the hole in the kitchen ceiling. Stevie hunkered at the edge of the wobbly plywood to see if the fall had killed her adversary; she hoped that it had.

  As she looked down, however, Seaton opened his eyes, winked at her, rolled off the table to the floor, fumbled about, stood, gave her a smart-ass salute, and hustled limping out the breakfast-nook door into the dark. RRRRR-uhm, RRRRR-uhm. He had survived for the sequel.

  “Damn,” Stevie said. “What now?”

  “I’m not sure, child. Things didn’t work out that way in my Chapter Forty-seven. Not exactly, anyhow.”

  Her curiosity piqued by a sudden thought, Stevie worked her way back to the plank on which the end table with the slide projector rested. “He was quite a little paparazzo for a thirteen-year-old kid, wasn’t he? Today he could make a living selling telephoto bathtub shots of mastectomy patients to the sleazier men’s mags.” She removed the cover on the projector’s slide tray.

  A gasp of commingled astonishment and disgust escaped her lips.

  “What’s the matter?” Sister C. asked.

  “It’s empty,” Stevie said. “It’s absolutely empty.”

  (Imagine that.)

  XLVIII

  With Seaton gone, Stevie worried not only about the whereabouts of the monkeys he had left behind, but also about Marella’s inevitable response to the mutilation of her animals. She would be heartbroken. After ruining the stuffed animals, the capuchins had blent into the skeletal architecture of the upper stories as if they were tenpenny nails, pieces of lathing, bits of crumbling plaster. Their vanishing, after their bizarre vandalism of the toys, angered as well as bewildered Stevie. She wanted to shoot every member of their proliferating tribe and hang them by their heels from the rafters.

  “You only think you want to do that,” Sister Celestial said. “They’re his dupes, those monkeys. They do his bidding ’cause he’s all they’ve got. They’re laboratory culls and orphans, child.”

  “They’re demons from hell, just like their master.”

  The Sister was about to contradict this cruel definition of the ca
puchins when both women heard a moaning from Marella’s room. The sound penetrated to the marrow like a bone disease. Stevie’s entire body ached with apprehension. What midnight calamity had beset her frail daughter? Hadn’t they all suffered enough for one evening? Couldn’t the child simply sleep through to dawn in stuporous ignorance of Seaton’s visit? Apparently not. Besides, even if she did, at breakfast tomorrow morning Stevie would have to invent for Teddy and Marella a semiplausible explanation for the hole in the ceiling.

  “What chapter is this?” the Sister suddenly asked.

  “You’ve got the manuscript pages, Betty. To me, this is a continuing real-life nightmare. Come on. I’ve got to see about Marella.”

  “She’s all right, Stevie. I know it.”

  At the hatch of the step-down closet Stevie looked back into the attic at the dim, bulky figure of the prophetess. “Betty, even a seer can’t know everything. Surely you’ve learned that by now.”

  “Of course. But this Chapter Forty-eight has some muzzy correspondences with the one my Remington and I tapped out—something about Marella moanin’, you know.”

  As if on cue, Marella moaned again, a sound more like a hawk’s cry than that of a sick child.

  “What exactly do you remember?”

  “Has your darlin’ daughter ever sleepwalked?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, she’s started, Stevie. She’s somnambulating this very minute. She’s standing on her mattress revvin’ up her subconscious psychic energies with that eerie noise she’s making.”

  “Betty, please—”

  “Go in and look. She knows you’re upset about the monkeys and what they did to her animals, and she’s going to fix it—not so much for her sake, Mama, as for yours. She’s got the power, and she’s going to set everything to rights with her latent subliterary paranormal energies.”

  Thoroughly exasperated, Stevie did not reply. She ducked through the low door into the closet, shouldered her way through the hangups, and climbed out of the closet into her daughter’s room. What she met there exceeded in spectacular unlikelihood the bedchamber scene so crisply described by the prophetess.

  Marella stood barefoot in the center of her bed. Her nightgown sleeves were afloat beneath her outstretched arms, her eyes glowing with the same degree of heat and luminescence given off by the control on her electric blanket. She was facing the corridor leading to the stairwell, and her hands were lifting and falling together, as if asking the darkness to ebb away to the far recesses of the universe and an everlasting cosmic brightness to come flowing in. Meanwhile, she whined like a food processor cutting up cabbage for coleslaw.

  “Marella,” Stevie said. “Marella, I’m here.”

  The girl ignored her, and also Sister C., who was just now emerging from the attic into her room. Marella swayed in time to an insistent, inaudible melody. Her eyes glowed golden, golden, golden (the consequence of a condition not often seen in the offices of ophthalmologists). When, still undulating to her unheard music, she swung toward the two adults, they pressed themselves against the wall out of the direct line of her gaze.

  “I’ve never seen a sleepwalker like that before,” Stevie whispered.

  “Me either, child. Ain’t she something?”

  The closet door blew open, nearly striking the Sister’s left arm, and a devil’s-wind of cellulose fibers and shredded polyurethane foam eddied out of the attic like a cloud of ravenous moths. Marella directed them with lilting hand movements and rhythmic nods of the head. (She reminded Stevie of Mickey Mouse in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence of Fantasia . . . except that she seemed in stricter control of her breathtaking gale than poor Mickey had been of his broom-and-bucket brigade.) As the girl’s right index finger pointed first this way and then that, the winged attic debris swept in schools toward the pelts of her gutted animals, restored their false hides to full-blown corporality, and animated each cuddlesome creature so that it could march back into her room in stirring martial procession with its fellows. To calm her heart during this demonstration, Stevie slid her arm around Sister C., a gesture that Betty Malbon reciprocated. Locked in this embrace, they watched Kodak, Big Bird, Raggedy Ann, Purvis O’Possum, Peepers, Velvet Belly, the soft-shelled turtle Sweetcakes, and the doll baby Toodles execute a precision maneuver at the threshold, wheel in ranks around Marella’s bed, and retire in orderly fashion to the bottom shelf of the tray assembly in which the child routinely stored them. Long after the animals had relapsed into floppy-limbed immobility, insulation fibers continued to drift about and Marella to play at field marshal from the cold plateau of her mattress, seemingly oblivious to the miracle she had wrought.

  “I’ve never seen her like this,” Stevie said. “Maybe I should call Dr. Elsa.”

  “Never dare. It’s much too late. Anyway, she’s going to be fine, Marella is. She’s stronger than you care to think.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Look. The glow’s going out of her eyes. Her arms are startin’ to droop. She just needs someone to tuck her in again—you, Mama.”

  Stevie obeyed, for the Sister had spoken the truth: Marella’s eyes no longer hurled out light the way the Clinac 18 radiated electrons, and her body was crumpling toward the bedclothes. Tenderly easing her down, arranging her legs and arms beneath the blankets, Stevie mumbled comforting nonsense to the girl, meanwhile wondering whether she ought to set out newspapers and an upchuck bucket. Did telekinetically restuffing a half-dozen toy animals and then marching them to bed induce headaches, nausea, and neuralgia? That it might hardly seemed, to Stevie, an outlandish supposition.

  “When she wakes up,” she told the Sister, “she’ll be terrified by what she’s done. She may take sick again.”

  “She won’t even remember, Stevie.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I could tell by looking at her she didn’t know what she was doing when she did it. It’s not likely she’ll recall in the morning what she didn’t much mark in the doing.”

  “Maybe,” said Stevie, stroking Marella’s forehead. She straightened and looked at her friend. “You’ve got to be exhausted, Betty. Let’s go downstairs and put you to bed.”

  “I’m going on home to Button City, child, but I appreciate the invite.”

  “You don’t want to drive at this hour. It’s cold, and Kudzu Valley’s down the road, and you’re all by yourself.”

  The Sister opined that, having survived the last three and a half chapters in Stevie’s house, she would do beautifully cruising back down Highway 27 to her own cozy bungalow. Stevie would have enough explaining to do in the morning without an ample black lady popping in on the children to share their breakfast. Nor did the Sister much relish the idea of being introduced as a cook, maid, or cleaning woman. “Oh, no,” Stevie started to protest, but the prophetess declared she was only making a joke and reiterated her unshakable intention to leave. Together they had thwarted at least a portion of Seaton Benecke’s plot, although, the Sister must admit, he had dealt a brutal blow to one of Stevie’s most cherished memories; further, he had ruthlessly departed from the happier typescript in her carpetbag. Still, Stevie had acquitted herself well, and the Sister had no qualms about leaving her without a guest in their downstairs bedroom.

  “Two things I’d like to do before I go, though, Stevie.”

  “Of course.”

  “Take a peek at your son and another at your PDE machine.”

  A moment later, then, they stood together at Teddy’s bedside. The boy had slept through every scream, scuffle, cry, and alarum, and he continued to sleep beneath the half-speculative gazes of the women. So young, Stevie thought; so young. She resented the indignity to which the typewriter repairman’s malicious plotting had subjected them in an earlier chapter—when, in fact, Teddy and she had so clearly been surrogates for the thirteen-year-old Seaton and his attractive mother Lynnette. What an unsettling Oedipal fantasy Seaton had manufactured by imagining the episode from Stevie’s vantage. Unles
s, of course, she had dreamt the particulars of the unnatural scene herself. . . . The kaleidoscopic ramifications of the matter were so confusing that she sighed. Meanwhile, Teddy slipped in and out of her vision like a one-celled animalcule under the lens of a microscope, and her weariness did not permit her to bring him sharply back into focus.

  “Pretty young man,” Sister C. remarked. “Very pretty young man.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Looks just like his daddy, doesn’t he?”

  Stevie massaged her temples with her fingertips. “Yes. It’s not his fault, though. That’s the way the chromosomes coupled.”

  “Who said it was a fault?” The Sister hugged Stevie with one arm. “You wanted me to diagnose your nightmares, remember? You wanted to know why Ted gave up when your doctor friends found his cancer. Well, he gave up ’cause he thought it was a punishment—a long-last punishment, child—for runnin’ around on you when you had his namesake in the oven. He gave up ’cause he thought the Fates had caught him. He said in one of your dreams he died so you could fulfill yourself. Well, he really did believe his dying was a gift to you, Stevie, a way of paying off the debt.”

  “Some gift.”

  “What do we always say? ’S the thought that counts. Look at it like that.”

  Stevie found the Sister’s doubtful point so funny that she began to laugh. To keep from waking Teddy, she covered her mouth, but her sputtering laughter still seeped through her fingers. In self-defense she buried her face in the Sister’s shawl while the Sister chuckled mutedly in sympathy. Consoling companionship. How could she have endured the last few hours if Betty Malbon had not driven up from Button City?