The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  There was a guy behind it wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a black bow tie. He had a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth. When he caught sight of Merle, he called in a puff of smoke, “Step right up.” An older man and woman sat at the bar, drinking martinis. “What’ll it be, sailor?” the bartender said.

  “Vodka on the rocks,” said Merle.

  “A purist.”

  “Is Ronnie Dunn performing tonight?”

  The woman turned and said, “Yes,” before the bartender could answer.

  Merle wondered if the old couple were the same people from Jack’s Diner. His drink came and he said, “So did you name this place after the Bobby Vee song?”

  “This place has been here long before that song ever came to be,” said the bartender. “In fact, that song was written by two women and a guy. The guy, Ben Weisman, who wrote songs for Elvis and dozens of other stars, came in here one night, and that’s where they got the title for ‘The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.’ ”

  “For real?” said Merle.

  “Yeah, there was this housewife from Passaic, Florence Greenberg, who started a record company around 1960, Tiara Records. She was on vacation down here that summer, visiting relatives, and Weisman flew into Philly and drove down here to try to sell her some songs for her artists. Greenberg’s niece, Doris, gave them directions to the Thousand Eyes as a place to get away, and they spent the afternoon into the night, doing business right at this bar. I was tending bar that night, and I clearly remember Weisman at one point asking Greenberg, ‘What rhymes with eyes?’ ” The bartender took a deep drag on his cigarette to emphasize the profundity and blew it out at the ceiling.

  After another round had been served, the bartender said, “You folks better get your seats for the show. It’s gonna get crowded in here in a few minutes.” Merle thanked him, took his drink and balled-up jacket, and chose a table set off in the back by the wall from where he could take the whole scene in at once. He sat there in the shadow, staring into the light of the candle on the table, sipping his vodka, feeling for the first time the damp chill of the place, when a thought popped into his head. First it struck him that he hadn’t seen Lew Pharo in a long while, and then came the memory flash that Pharo was, in fact, dead. It all came back—Lew had suddenly gone blind, couldn’t paint, and shot himself in the head.

  He smelled low tide, heard the cars pull up in the parking lot. The patrons shuffled in. That night the Thousand Eyes drew six couples in rumpled finery, a pair of girls a little younger than Merle, a creepy-looking guy with a wicked underbite, and a crazy woman in flowing pink gauze who danced to her chair. A waiter appeared and took orders. Merle was still trying to figure out, since he had to use the flash, how he was going to get a shot. He wondered how serious they were about NO CAMERAS.

  By eight thirty, everyone was juiced. The waiter had been twice to Merle’s table, and the bartender put on the jukebox a string of Jay Black and the Americans tunes. The crazy lady in pink and the guy with the underbite took to the dance floor and did a dramatic fake tango to “Cara Mia,” and everybody applauded. Finally at nine o’clock, the houselights went down and then out. A few moments later a spotlight appeared on the twelve-inch raised platform at the edge of the dance floor. It was the waiter, with a microphone hooked to a small sound system strapped to a hand truck. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said into the mic, which sparked with feedback, “now the moment you’ve all been waiting for.” While he spoke, two guys rolled a very small piano onto the stage from behind a curtain.

  The waiter stepped forward as they brought out a drum set. “As some of you might know, there’s an old Romanian tale about a man who, late in his life, becomes wealthy. This fellow thinks it’s a shame that he won’t live long enough to spend all his money. His rich friends tell him he should go to the Land Where No One Dies. So he does and takes his wife and daughter with him. Everything there is smooth as silk, plenty of sunshine, plenty of booze, no hangovers. What’s not to love? But then the wealthy man finds out that although no one dies, occasionally someone hears a persistent voice calling them. When they follow it, they never return. He realized this must be the voice of death. When his daughter hears its call, he tries to stop her from following it, but he fails. The voice is just too compelling.”

  The waiter stopped for a deep breath and then said, “Renowned critics, ladies and gentlemen, have likened the allure of our special guest performer’s voice to the voice in that very tale. So let’s hear it for RRRRRRonnie DUNN, the Voice of Death.” The guys moving the instruments had become the band—a bass, piano, electric guitar, and drum. They played “When Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and the stage filled with fog. It crept up around the legs of the players and billowed out onto the dance floor. When it cleared, there stood Ronnie Dunn, mic in hand. The band switched course into the intro for “Fond Wanderer.”

  Barney quoted to me Merle’s firsthand impression of the singer. “It looked like they dredged him out of the river. Gray complexion, and kind of barnacles all over his neck and face. His hair was white going yellow, like an old wedding dress, and he wore it in a moth-eaten wave. The tux was too tight. Ronnie wasn’t just Dunn, he was well done.” Still, he slowly lifted the mic and sang.

  “Fond Wanderer, where do you go?

  Fond Wanderer, I know you don’t know.

  Fond Wanderer, come to me now,

  Step into the shadow, and I’ll show you how.”

  Merle described Dunn’s voice as “If you took Little Jimmy Scott and Big Ed Townsend and sandwiched Johnny Ray between them and then lit the whole fucking thing on fire, it’d be a little like that.” He said Ronnie was out of tune and behind the count, low, menacing, but sometimes he’d hit a few sweet and beautiful notes. There was a rich resonance to the sound of his voice before it even hit the twang of the tinny speaker, like a song echoing down through a metal pipe from some strange other place. Off-putting at first, then intriguing, and eventually its appeal was hard to resist.

  “Fond Wanderer, please hear my plea.

  Fond Wanderer, you can’t ignore me.

  Fond Wanderer, it’s over and out,

  More like a whimper, less like a shout.”

  Ronnie creaked around with some mortuary footwork between stanzas and then hopped off the stage and approached the table with the two young women. “You girls busy tonight?” he said into the mic. The band waited for him, keeping the tune going. “Step into the shadow,” he said, “and I’ll show you how.” The young women grimaced, got up, and left. The crowd loved it.

  “Fond Wanderer, can I have this dance?

  Fond Wanderer, are you sleepy by chance?

  Fond Wanderer, this way’s the door,

  Out to the boat waiting down by the shore.”

  Merle had heard the song on the radio enough to know there was another stanza coming. He got the camera and put his jacket on. His strategy, born from momentary intuition, was to approach from the right, sweeping around the tables to that side and getting close to the stage, from where he could capture Ronnie, some of the patrons on the dance floor, and the reflection of the tea candles off the mirror and bottles behind the bar. He moved without hesitation.

  The flash made the singer lift his arm in front of his eyes and stagger backward, shrieking like a gull. In the fifteen seconds Merle had to let the film develop before he could rip it off and peel it open, the band stopped playing and Ronnie lurched through the spotlight. “You’ve ruined it,” he screamed, going green in the face. Dust fell out of his nose and his hair wave had broken. Abruptly he stopped, looked across to the bartender, and yelled, “Don’t just stand there, get the camera. Come on.” The bartender waved to the guys in the band, and they put down their instruments and stood up. Merle ran.

  He brushed past the couples on the dance floor and was heading toward the double doors. From the corner of his eye he noticed the bartender coming from behind the bar with a sap in his hand. He looked to the doors again, only to fi
nd that the waiter had, in an instant, planted himself in the line of escape. Merle put on speed, determined to make a go at just running the guy over. He had the momentum, but it never came to that, because from off to the right, the dancing lady in the pink gauze came twirling by like a dervish and smashed into the waiter. The two of them went over like sacks of turnips. Merle leaped and cleared them. He streaked down the hallway, his steps making a racket. Out into the cool night, he ran for the cattails, shoving the photo in his jacket pocket and draping the camera belt around his neck.

  It was dark, but he managed to find the bike pretty quickly. As his ass hit the seat and he pedaled, he looked back over his shoulder. Shadowy figures emptied out through the lighted portal of the Thousand Eyes. When he reached the path, a car started up behind him. His heart was pounding and the adrenaline was spurting out his ears. He pedaled with the belief that Ronnie Dunn’s flunkies really meant to kill him. “Like Superman,” Merle told Barney, “I was flying down that path, but I couldn’t see a fuckin’ thing. Behind me, I hear the car coming and they’re getting so close they’ve got me in their headlights.”

  In the midst of the chase, Merle reported having what he called “a moment of genius.” He bet that with the confusion of the flash in the dark, no one could see he had an instant camera. He took it from around his neck and threw it back over his shoulder, hoping they’d at least stop to pick it up and that would buy him more of a lead. In fact, it worked. Not only did they stop, but once they had the camera they broke off their pursuit. Later, on the safety of Frog Road, heading toward Jericho, he realized he’d gotten away and could laugh at the thought of Ronnie Dunn holding the camera, discovering that the shot Merle had taken was no longer inside it.

  A lot was riding on that one photograph: the foundation to the grand finale of the Bars of South Jersey series. As he discovered, once back in his apartment, the door locked, that picture was a success in every way. It had that Polaroid flash glare he’d come to love, sweeping vaguely down from the left corner. The hundred reflections of it off the glass behind the bar were like a distant constellation. Slow-dancing shadows with glowing red eyes. And Ronnie, eyes soulfully closed, with a corona of light around his head and bathed in white fire, his open mouth emitting a beacon of green mist. When he first saw it, Merle couldn’t wait to get down to work, but as it turned out, he put off starting the painting for nearly a year. He told Barney the photo had given him nightmares. And so the Bars of South Jersey series sat unfinished.

  In September 1967, Hurricane Doria, only a Category 1, made it to the Jersey coast. It wasn’t bad but for two tragedies it left in its wake. One made the national news; one made only the local radio station in Bridgeton. In the national news story, three people drowned when their boat sank off Ocean City. The local story, which Merle heard late at night while painting, was that the rising tide had swept away the Thousand Eyes. Upon hearing it, he immediately went looking for the Polaroid from his visit there and found it under a stack of drawings. The bad dreams hadn’t visited in months, and he laughed at his own foolishness, admonishing himself for not having already finished the series.

  The same week The Thousand Eyes washed into the river and Merle started the painting, he pedaled over to Milville for an art show opening late one afternoon. He got there early and was standing on the sidewalk, waiting for things to get started. Last time he was there they’d had a tasty white Zinfandel. Across the street, in the shadow of the sub shop, he noticed some commotion. Other people on the street were stopping and staring in that direction as well. It was the old couple from Jack’s and the Eyes. The woman was pulling herself out of the grasp of the old man. She yelled, “I got to go. He’s waiting.” She’d move away from him a few feet and he’d run and catch her by the arm. “Don’t go,” he said. “Please, I can’t stay,” she said, and pulled away again. “I’ll go with you,” he called. She didn’t look back, and he didn’t follow but leaned against the front of the sub shop and wiped his tears with a handkerchief.

  Merle got blitzed that night at the opening, was shown the door, and could barely pedal home. Still he went back to work on the painting of the Thousand Eyes, putting everything he had into it. Two weeks later all that was left was Ronnie Dunn’s weird left eyebrow, a couple of gray barnacles, and a small section of forehead. The rest was complete, perfect, capturing the Polaroid effects, the singer, and the grim, cold spirit of the lounge. Merle worked with a homemade squirrel-hair brush to render the up-twist of the pale hair, concentrating so hard he perspired. As he executed the final stroke on the eyebrow, he heard something odd. Backing away from the painting, he reached behind him with his free hand and turned the radio down.

  He listened, and eventually the soft noise came again. At first he mistook it for a mosquito, but then he remembered it was the end of October. He closed his eyes and, hearing it twice more, recognized it as a distant voice. Someone calling out on the street, he thought. He laid the brush down, went to the window, and opened it. He stuck his head out, and above the sound of the wind, he heard the voice of Ronnie Dunn, singing “Fond Wanderer.” He laughed, slammed shut the window, and went back to work, figuring someone in one of the buildings across the street was playing the old 45.

  But as he painted on, the voice got louder and louder. As Merle told Barney, “It was like Dunn was out in the street, then in the downstairs foyer, then out in the hallway, then in the corner of the room. And the closer I got to finishing, the closer he got to me. I was shivering scared, but I was damned if I wasn’t going to finish the series. I worked fast without giving up anything in the quality, hoping that finally finishing would put Ronnie and the whole mess out of my misery.” He finished the painting an hour later, “Fond Wanderer” booming in his head. The second he was done, he put on his jacket and headed for the door.

  Merle said he knew what was happening, and the drive to follow the voice was monumental, like two metal fingers were hooked in each of his nostrils and attached by a chain to the Queen Mary, which was pulling out of port. He got as far as the door and opened it. And here’s where my doubts about the story came in, because Merle attested to having another “moment of genius,” and my credulity can only accommodate one Merle moment of genius per story. Barney convinced me, though, that it all made sense. Anyway, Merle flung himself back into the room, grabbed the palette knife, and scraped off down to primer the last gray barnacle he’d painted on Ronnie Dunn’s forehead. With that, the voice abruptly stopped, and he was no longer compelled to follow.

  Two weeks later he tried again to finish the series, and again the voice returned. He scraped it quick before Dunn got too loud. He found that as long as he left that swatch of canvas bare, the voice was silent. The kicker, as far as Barney was concerned, was that Merle eventually tried to get a show with the paintings of the bar series that were finished. He saved up and made slides and took them around to the different galleries. The gallery owners were intrigued by the local subject matter, but every one eventually passed, saying something along the lines of, “Really pretty good, but there’s just something missing.”

  “And that,” said Barney, “is the real voice of death.”

  Somewhere around 1975, Merle said he sold off for cheap, sometimes as low as twenty dollars, each of the paintings in the series, except for the Thousand Eyes. He confessed their presence was turning him into an alcoholic. As long as he had access to the last, unfinished piece and could still complete it if he dared, it didn’t matter to him where the other paintings were. Once the series was properly finished, it would take on a power greater than the sum of its parts, and Merle would, of course, be dead.

  The painting of the Thousand Eyes hangs, as it has since 1976, above the booths in the back of Jack’s Diner. Jack’s son Dennis understands it’s just for safekeeping. Barney said Merle swears that he’s going to finish the piece any day now, but the old man does a lot more mumbling around town than painting lately, looking everywhere for that street that leads to the land whe
re no one dies.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Jeffrey Ford: When I got the request from Dominik and Navah to do a story that was to be a riff on a classic fairy tale for their anthology, they requested that I send, as soon as possible, which fairy tale I’d be working with, so I got up, walked five feet to a bookcase shelf where I have a lot of fairy tale anthologies, and picked a book at random. The one I came up with was Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book. I opened the book in the middle to the story, “The Voice of Death.” Without reading it, I wrote to them and told them that was the one I’d be using. Months later, when I had time to actually write the story, I read the tale. That morning, before reading it, I’d had a memory from when my mother died. I was in a limo with my wife and kids. In the opposite seat was this old Irish woman, Rose, who lived across the street from my parents and whose lawn I used to cut when I was young. The day was sweltering hot and my younger son, maybe two at the time, got carsick and puked. Right when that happened, I looked out the window and we were passing this old abandoned bar, all the windows busted out and partially burned. Its sign was still intact. The Thousand Eyes, it read. That memory mixed with the fact that I’d gotten a call the day before from my painter friend, Barney, who lives in southwest Jersey, by the Delaware River, which is a strange land unto itself. And the final influence was some of the true-life ghost stories old Rose brought from Ireland and used to scare the shit out of me with when we’d sit in her grape arbor after the mowing was done.

  GIANTS IN THE SKY

  Max Gladstone

  equisition Officer Log, 11887/quartz

  Honestly I can’t even with these motherfuckers and their magic beans anymore