Barking Man: And Other Stories (Open Road)

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Preston lived with Gil in a house right next to Mackie Loudon’s. The paint was peeling off the clapboards in long curly strips, and on the front door was a red and blue decal of a skull cloven by a zigzag lightning bolt. The windows, painted shut for a decade, were blacked out day and night with dirty sheets, behind which strange bluish lights were sometimes seen to flash in one room or another. There was no woman living there, though every so often one would visit, and sometimes little gangs of other scroungy children would appear and remain for a day or several, though the only one there permanently was Preston.

  Gil himself was tall and stooped, with thinning black hair and not much chin. He affected motorcycle garb, though it didn’t suit him. He was thin as from some wasting disease, and the boots and black leather and studded arm bands hung slackly from him like the plumage of some mangy kind of buzzard. He drove a newly customized black van with its rear windows cut in the shape of card-deck spades. He never seemed to go out to work, but he dealt in prodigious quantities of mail, getting and sending rafts of big brown cartons. Mackie Loudon would have thought he trafficked in drugs or other, bulkier contraband if she cared to think about it at all, but all these notions had been assumed by Eliel ever since the first time Gil had come to her door to fetch Preston. “Come out, Monk,” he’d said through the mail slot, his voice whiny and insinuating. “Time to come along with Gil …” And she and the demons had seen the thousand tiny gates behind Preston’s lips and eyes slide shut.

  Preston loved the Iliad, the Odyssey, he loved the story of Perseus and the Gorgon, though he flinched a little at Diana and Acteon, but he didn’t want to hear one word of Jason and the Argonauts. Indeed, at the first mention of the name a wracking change came over him, as if he’d been … possessed. He paled, he shook, he formed a fist of sharp white knuckles and smashed the little plasticine figure Mackie Loudon had made to represent the hero. Then he was out the back door and running pell-mell down the alley.

  Azazael was back in a flash. What did I tell you? he suggested. There’s something in this setup that is really, really queer.

  “Children take these fits sometimes,” Mackie Loudon said, for Azazael’s remark was only typical of the weak and cloudy innuendos he’d been uttering through that fall. She turned to Eliel for confirmation, but for some reason Eliel didn’t seem to be around.

  Preston didn’t come back for a week or more, but on the fifth day Gil came by to fetch him just the same. Mackie Loudon surprised herself by opening the door. Gil stood on the lower step, fidgeting with a dog’s training collar, the links purling from hand to hand in a way that obscurely put her in mind of something disagreeable.

  “The Monkey with you?” Gil said.

  “That’s no name for a human child,” Mackie Loudon said. “And no, I hadn’t seen him in a long time.”

  Gil nodded but didn’t shift himself. He stretched the chain taut, its end rings strung on his middle fingers, then shut it between the palms of his hands.

  “Didn’t know you had a dog,” Mackie Loudon said.

  “Hee hee,” said Gil. The front of his yellowing teeth was graven in black.

  “Does that boy belong to you?”

  Gil smiled again with his rotten teeth. “Yes, I believe you could say that,” he said. “His skinny little butt is mine.” He tossed the clump of chain and caught it with a jingle. “Old woman, I wouldn’t suggest you meddle,” he said, and turned to look back toward the street. “Nobody cares what goes on around here.” He withdrew down the weedy walk, his feet slipping loosely in his outsize boots. Reluctantly, she followed him a little way, and when she stopped to look about her she saw that what he said was true. The houses on the block were held by knaves or madmen, or by no one. The lawns were dead, the trees were dying, a frigid wind blew garbage down the center of the street. From half the houses, broken windows overlooked her like sockets in a row of hollowed skulls.

  On a cold blue morning Preston came to stand in the alley below the house again. For the first time Mackie Loudon noticed he didn’t have a winter coat. She had to go and take his hand and lead him, to get him to come in. Though he seemed glad to see her, he wouldn’t say a word. He sat in his usual wooden chair in the kitchen and stared at the pendulum swing of his feet.

  “Cat got your tongue, has it?” Mackie Loudon said, and placed a yellow bean cake on the table near his hand. She went to the refrigerator for the milk she’d bought the day before, in some demonic premonition of his return, poured a glass and set it by him, took the carton back. In the light of the refrigerator’s yellowed bulb she saw the faint blue photograph smeared on the carton’s wall, and looked at it, and looked at Preston, and looked at the carton again. A line of blue letters crawled under the picture: Jason Sturges of Birmingham, eight years old and missing since … She shut the door and leaned on it and breathed before she turned to him.

  “My God, boy,” she said at last. “Do you know who you are?” And though the child didn’t answer her, Eliel came back from wherever he’d been hiding and all at once returned to her the burden of her perception and her memory.

  You blew it, Azazael snapped at her. You bungled everything, like usual.

  Why couldn’t you have just kept still a little longer? Eliel said. God knows you stayed quiet long enough. Mackie Loudon didn’t answer them. She stalked from room to room, banging into the door jambs and the furniture. It was a long time since they’d been so angry with her, especially in concert, but she knew that they were justified. Preston, Jason, had bolted from the house the moment she’d asked that stupid question; she hadn’t been quick enough to catch him. After that she’d called the police, called them once, called them twice—

  That was pretty stupid too, Azazael said. Everything considered, that might have been your worst move yet. Mackie Loudon whirled on the parlor carpet and clawed one hand through the blank space where his voice came from. The Argonauts’ little wooden ship crunched under her shoe; she booted its doomsaying figurehead into a corner. She went to her window and thumbed back a corner of the blind. Across the way, Gil’s house hulked in the gathering twilight. It had taken the police all day and many calls to come—All for nothing, Eliel snapped. She had watched them come up to the porch and confer with Gil for a minute or two in the doorway and then leave.

  “Goddamn,” Mackie Loudon said, and let the blind fall back. She walked to the room’s center and whipped the sheet off her Medusa. What’s the point? said Azazael. She regarded the wooden expression of the broad blank face. The blunt heads of the snakes were blind because she’d never made their eyes. No power there, Eliel said sadly.

  Mackie Loudon flung the chisel that had come into her hand; it stuck between Medusa’s eyes and sagged. She was on Gil’s board-sprung porch, pounding so heavily on the door that she almost fell forward when he snatched it from under her hand.

  “The meddling old bat,” Gil said contemplatively. “The crazy old bat, as the cops would say.”

  “Where’s that boy?” Mackie Loudon said.

  Gil raised one hand directly above the bald spot on his head and snapped his fingers once.

  “Gone,” he said. He made a plopping sound with his loose lips. “You understand, he just had to go.”

  “What did—”

  “Never you mind,” Gil said, and his face hardened. He stepped across the door sill and shoved her in the chest with the butt end of his palm. His arm was weak and reedy looking, but somehow it sent her staggering a long way back, down the porch steps into the littered yard. A slow fine drizzle sifted into her hair from the dark sky.

  “I told you not to meddle,” Gil said, and gave her another skinny little shove. “What good do you think it did anybody? The police say I should let them know if you harass me.” He went on talking and pushing but Mackie Loudon wasn’t really listening anymore. She was wondering, what had happened to her strength. Her arms had always been powerful but now she couldn’t seem to lift them, she couldn’t speak a single word, and her legs seemed r
eady to give way and dump her on the matted grass and mud.

  “I’m telling you, old bat,” Gil said. “You want to stop messing in my business altogether.” He gave her a two-handed shove and she went over the edge of the embankment. She tumbled down and cracked the back of her head on the sidewalk, hard enough to jumble her vision briefly, though it didn’t knock her out. She lay with her left hand hanging off the curbstone, knuckles down. The rain fell into the corners of her open eyes. The quarreling demonic voices spiraled up and up away from her until they left her all alone in the silence of a vacuum, empty even of a single thought. Two or three people passed her by before anyone bothered to try and pick her up.

  “Oh Mackie, Mackie,” Nurse Margaret said from the height of her burnt-clay six foot two. Her hair was pinned back so tight under the white cap that it seemed to pull her sorrowing eyes even wider. “You last left here, you were talking so loud and walking so proud, I hoped to never see you back. “Under Mackie Loudon’s nose she shook two pills, one fire-engine red, one robin’s-egg blue, but Mackie Loudon would not take her medication. She would not use her skills in craft class. She would not go to therapy group, she would not interact with anyone. She would not even speak a word. She would not. She would not.

  With the demons gone the interior silence was deep indeed but Mackie Loudon was not aware of it. Human voices were distant and as completely unintelligible as the noise of the crickets in the grass. She let herself be herded from point to point on the ward, moving like an exhumed corpse made to simulate animation by a programmed sequence of electric shocks. She sat on a sprung couch in the dayroom and moved no more than a ledge of rock. All on its own her left eye opened and shut its lizard lid. An orderly pushed a mop before her, up and down, up and down. Behind her was the slap of playing cards and a mumble of voices blended into the static that came from the untuned TV. The season’s changes appeared on the shatter-proof glass of the front window as if projected on a screen.

  “Mackie Lou! Mackie Lou!” She heard, but it had been a long time since she’d recognized her name or any variation on it. A bluish plume of flame flashed up toward the darkened ceiling and went out. She sat up suddenly and turned. Two beds away in the long row, Little Willa was springing up and down on her mattress. Normally they tied her in; how had she got loose? But everything that happened next was even more improbable.

  “Mackie Lou! Watch me, watch me, Mackie Lou!” Little Willa stopped her simian bounce, squirted a stream of lighter fluid into her mouth and blew sharply across a match she’d struck. Another compact fireball rolled in midair toward the doorway, illuminating the trio of orderlies who came near to knocking one another down in their haste to pin Little Willa to the floor and stuff her arms into restraints and haul her kicking and shouting from the room.

  “Watch me, Mackie Lou!” But the demonic voices drowned her out. Azazael and Eliel were back, furiously arguing over the implications of what they’d seen, yammering so fast she couldn’t follow them. They jabbered at incomprehensible speed, but after an hour, when they’d come to some agreement, they slowed down and turned to her again.

  We’ve got a notion for you, said Eliel. We’ve thought of a way for you to solve your problem.

  Mackie Loudon gave her head a long sad shake against the pillow. “You’re not even real,” she said.

  You know better, said Azazael.

  “Well. But you can’t do anything.”

  Maybe not, said Eliel. But watch us show you how to do it.

  “All right,” she said. “At least I’ll hear you out.” And she listened meekly and attentively until almost dawn. As usual she got up with the others, shuffled in a line of others to receive the breakfast tray. But once they’d been sent into the dayroom, she called for Nurse Margaret and asked for her pills and began one more of her miraculously swift recoveries.

  It was spring when Mackie Loudon was released and the weeds were knee deep in her yard, but in the house nothing was much changed. She did a meager bit of dusting, then plucked the chisel from between Medusa’s eyes, licked her thumb and moistened the wounded wood. After a long considering moment, she went to the bedroom and snatched a big mirror loose from the closet door and propped it on a parlor chair. The reflection reversed all her movements, making her tend to cut herself as she worked. It took her the rest of the day to get the hang of it, and she stayed up with it through the night, but by next morning it was done and she wasn’t even tired yet.

  She taped her cuts and made herself a breakfast of dried mushrooms and dried minnows, drank a pot of coffee, had a spoon or two of pickled vegetables. She found her bottle of linseed oil and gave the finished carving a light anointment, then covered it once more with the sheet. When she closed her eyes and concentrated she felt her strong pulse striking tiny hammer blows; she felt the Gorgon visage pushing out on her brow as if embossed upon a shield. With care, she brushed her hair down over her forehead and went out.

  In the shed that faced the alley there was a lawnmower which, though rusted, looked as if it would probably run. She dragged it around to the front yard, then carried a gas can down to a filling station two blocks over and had it filled. At a neighboring hardware store she bought a three-foot crowbar, and came home with this awkwardly balanced load. She was cutting the front lawn when Gil came out and did a double take.

  “Well, if it ain’t the old bat back,” he said, shouting over the noise of the engine. Mackie Loudon gave him a cheerful wave and went on with her mowing. Cut ends of the tough privet stumps whirred around her head. Gil stared and shook his head and went down to his van. When its hind end had turned a corner, Mackie Loudon shut the mower off and went in her front door and out the back, collecting the crowbar on the way. One good jab and pry was good enough to break the flimsy lock on Gil’s back door. She went in and softly shut the door behind her.

  In Gil’s front room a video camera watched her from the gloom, like an insect eye extended on a stalk. A light flick from the crowbar’s tip shattered the lens into fine glass dust. She went through the whole house that way, smashing the cameras and enlargers, gouging out the works of the projectors and video decks with the hooked end of the crowbar. She didn’t look at the tapes or the films, but she couldn’t help seeing the big still prints, which showed children with children, children with grown-ups, children with assorted animals, a few children being tortured and killed.

  They sowed bones, said Eliel, and Azazael answered, They’ll have their harvest.

  She didn’t have long to wait for Gil, not much more than the time it took her to prepare. There was a two-gallon bucket under his sink, which she took empty to her house and brought back full. She dipped herself a ration in a mug and set it on a chair arm. Gil’s key was turning in the lock; she stooped and hoisted the bucket. His eyes slid greasily around the wreck of his equipment, and he made a quick move toward her, but once she tossed the bucket on him he stopped, perplexed, and sniffed. She took the butane lighter from the patch pocket on her dress and with her other hand pulled back her hair to reveal the Gorgon. Gil’s hands had just come up in supplication when he was turned to stone. She took a good swig from the mug and flicked the lighter’s little wheel. A long bright tongue of fire stretched out and drew him wholly in.

  It was a windless day and the house burned all alone, flames rising vertically into the cloudless blue sky. The firemen came, the police came, they blocked off either end of the street and soaked the roofs of the nearby houses, but there was nothing of the burning house to save. The people came out of the houses that were not yet abandoned and stood on the sidewalks with folded arms and grimly watched it burn. Mackie Loudon stood in her half-cut yard, leaning on the mower for support. Her other arm was tightly wrapped around herself, because in spite of the spring weather and the fire’s harsh heat she was feeling very cold. She waited to be taken into custody, but no one seemed to notice her at all, and when the fire had fallen into its own embers, she went into her house and shut the door.

 
For Catherine Mints

  II

  BARKING MAN

  A GRACIOUS DAY OF early spring began it. The weather was kind, soft, annealing, and the animals were powerfully aware of it. They felt it in their muscle and bone and it made them happy and active—the most cheerful animals Alf had ever seen inside a zoo. He moved from enclosure to enclosure, his books in a nylon backpack depending from a single strap that dragged down his left shoulder, and looked in. A pair of gorillas sat in lotus position on the lush green grass the winter rains had fed, combing each other’s fur with their big rubbery fingers. A warm broad beam of sunshine lapped across them. Of a sudden they both heeled over to one side and rolled over and over, closed in an embrace at first, then separating. Then they sat up again and resumed the long luxurious strokes of their grooming.

  Across a concrete moat the elephants were bathing, a baby-elephant and an adult, perhaps the mother? The pool was generously large and deep, and when the elephants went in their hides turned from dusty brown to a slick slate gray. The baby elephant went under the roiled surface altogether and after a moment erected a few inches of his little trunk to breathe; he could have stayed submerged forever if he’d cared to. The mother elephant snorted and made a move to leave the pool, then turned and floundered in again, sinking to one side with a huffing sound, throwing up a gleaming sheet of water that curved and dropped to rejoin its own surface.

  The lions were sluggish, having just eaten, and yet they seemed quite content, lacking the air of morose and silent desperation that most zoo lions exuded. They resembled the lions one saw in films of Africa, resting on the veldt after a kill and gorge. Adjacent, the tigers basked in the sun, fully stretched on their mappined terraces, each apparently content as a housecat on a window sill. Only one of the big males moved, with a kind of mechanical restlessness, loping back and forth on a track of his own devising, his yellow eyes hot and even a little crazed. He’d conceived some smaller circle inside his actual containment, and whenever he reached its limit he reversed his limber steps, conforming to a barrier which no one but himself could see.