Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly

by John Franklin Bardin

  And brush away the blue-tail fly.

  Against the humming, somnolent sound of his voice, the twanging chords of the guitar, faint but clear despite the distance in time and space (for the room where this was happening was not only beneath her but in some way in back of her, too, and she felt she must crane her neck to keep it in sight, to keep from losing it, to keep from putting it some place where she might never find it again) – against this sound that rose from the room, replacing the deathly music that had been a part of her, she heard an orchestra, a brassy blare of a band, ‘swinging’ the melody that Jim was singing – for the man was Jim, she had no doubt of that, and the girl was herself – making a blatant mockery of it. This noise she could not have called it music – grew louder and louder, drowning out the plaintive insinuations of the guitar, drowning out Jim’s melancholy tenor, climbing up into a blasting fanfare with a flourish on the drums and a snort from the trombones. And, as the fanfare rocketed to its climax, she lost her footing among the clouds, the moon was eclipsed and the clouds turned into black spirits that hastened to smother her. Down, down, down, she plunged, oppressed as she felt weight and substance return, drawn to the lodestone earth with dizzying velocity. Falling faster and faster, the blackness commenced to spin about her, to take shape and thickness, to become solid and palpable. Terror struck at her heart when she saw a bright blue dagger of light streak down from above, fly past her like lightning, and end in a lake, an ellipse, a shiny stain of blue fire. Panic mounted in her throat, claiming the scream that had begun there, devouring it, as the shiny stain of blue crept towards her across the blackness, getting closer and closer, seeking her and knowing where she could be found, advancing to engorge her. She went rigid, cold as lunar ice, her ankles tense, her toes arching; she balanced on a point, holding her breath, her arms out, her head back, her eyes on the blue maw. Then, as it grew near, it sprang, drenching her with witch colour and bawd light, stigmatizing her: it, the accusing hammer; she, the accepting, submissive anvil. She stood, on her point, poised for another instant, a blue houri, as she looked up and back, following the bludgeon stroke of blue to its source, a splinter of sapphire fire, acknowledging its mastery – then a chord on Jim’s guitar released her, she levelled her head and looked out at what she knew was there, would hear in another heartbeat but would never see: the crowd. And, at the second chord, before Jim’s voice came in, she began to dance, hesitantly, delicately, to the plangent sound that entranced her. Like a skirmish, and then a battle, and then Armageddon, the great animal applauded, striking together its thousands of palms, stamping with its thousands of feet, whistling and shrieking its approval. But she continued to dance, inventing steps as Jim repeated chords, until the crowd quieted and they could go on with their act.

  Later, she sat alone in their dressing-room, wondering, or pretending to wonder, why Jim had not joined her as he usually did after the last performance. It had been a half-hour since she had bowed to the crowd and run past the bandstand, through the narrow corridor to the dingy room where they dressed. Jim should have followed her a few minutes later – he always sang one more song after she danced ‘The Blue-Tail Fly’. But he had not come just as he had not come several nights that week. She had sat in front of the spotted mirror, a kimono thrown over her bare shoulders, buffing her finger-nails and waiting for him. She had smoked cigarette after cigarette, knocking the ashes on to the linoleum floor until there was a ring of grey smudges all around her chair. Still Jim did not come. Finally, she sighed and stood up, letting the kimono slip off her shoulders and fall in a silken wave to the floor. She glanced at her made-up face in the mirror, noting the dark circles that even Max Factor’s make-up did not hide, then pawed at the cold cream and splashed it on her cheeks. Of course, she could go out and find him, as she had done the other night; he would be at the bar or at somebody’s table. She did not mind that – if he were just at the bar or having a drink at some stranger’s table – what she feared was that he would be at Vanessa’s table. That was where he had been the other night. She had almost gone up to him, had come within an ace of speaking to him, before she had seen that the woman who was with him was the specialty dancer whose act preceded theirs. Then, as she stood there in the midst of the crowd on the verge of speaking his name, she remembered how on the first night of their engagement she had found him in the shadows of the bandstand watching Vanessa. She had seen the look in his eyes as the tall, auburn-haired woman did her ridiculous dance with the macaw – she danced nude except for a G-string, but she had trained the macaw to cling to her body as she posed and postured, clothing her obscenely with his great green wings and scarlet-and-yellow breast. Yet Vanessa had only one macaw, and it had been trained to cling to that part of her body which she displayed to the crowd; as she turned and pranced and the parrot preened, anyone in the bandstand or lurking near it could make out the secret places of her form in the clarity of the rose-coloured spotlight she favoured. As she had remembered this, she glanced at Jim, sitting across from Vanessa at the table, and she saw the same look in his eyes that had been there when he leaned against the bandstand and watched her pose with the parrot; her face had flushed with certainty, she had not spoken, but had turned and left the night club, had gone to their hotel room and to bed, lying awake half the night until Jim returned – but even then not telling him what she had seen, what she suspected.

  She had no claim on him. This she knew, just as she had known earlier that year when she had given in to his advances, had run off from the conservatory without a word to anyone, had let him buy her the blue costume and teach her the dance, that it would not last, that she was only an episode to him, a silly schoolgirl who happened to have enough talent to work into the act. Knowing this, she had gone off with him anyway, partly because when he was near her, when his eyes held hers the way they had that first night at the bar when she had not been able to look away, she felt an excitement, a sense of being alive, of feeling herself and knowing herself to the fullest extent that she never had at any other time – but also partly because of her father, because of the rage he would fly into when he received the telegram from the school, because at night, when she lay beside Jim in the aura of his warmth, she thought of her father’s impotent anger, his empty moralizing, and was sure that at last she had triumphed over him.

  But, although she had known that some day this would happen, that the time would come when Jim would meet someone else and she would be faced with the choice of leaving him or staying with him and ignoring his infidelity, she had not yet allowed herself to reckon with the predicament. Nor did she now. Instead she rubbed at her coldcreamed face vigorously, threw the dirtied towel aside, pulled open the closet and squirmed into her dress without taking off her costume. She did not care if it did get wrinkled – let him worry about getting her another! Hadn’t the whole affair been his idea in the first place? Hadn’t it been he who had thought of the dance, who had insisted on the special costume, who had made her stay up night after night until she could do it with precision and professional polish? Well, if he wanted to throw her out, she didn’t care. Let him teach that fat pig and her damn parrot to toe-dance – she was fed-up!

  She shrugged herself into her coat and left by the back door to avoid seeing Jim. Outside, it was windy and cold and damp; August was ending in blustery weather. She burrowed her head into the gusty breeze and walked in the direction of the hotel, her skirts fluttering and the fine, misty rain wetting her face like tears. But before she reached the hotel the wind’s cold fingers had investigated her legs and found the metalled cloth of her costume, her body had grown stiff and icy, her teeth were chattering. The blinking neon sign of an all-night lunchstand caught her eye, so she pushed open the door and walked into its steamy interior.

  She had seated herself at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee before she realized that all the other customers were men of the roughest type. Next to her sat a great hulk with a bulbous nose, a thatch of reddish hair and
protruding eyebrows; he was blowing on his soup and seemed to be oblivious of her. She looked the other way, and saw a small, shivering man with a face like an axe and watering eyes, one of which was lowering itself in an exaggerated wink. Her hands clutched the marble counter convulsively and she looked neither right nor left; even so she saw in the streaked mirror that all the rest of the men in the lunch room were staring at her. A cup of coffee slid in front of her, stopping abruptly as if it had reached the end of its tether, slopping a chicory-smelling, sticky liquid over the saucer and one of her hands. Its sudden appearance and its novel mode of locomotion startled her; despite her resolve not to look around, she did glance down the counter, and saw the dirty apron and silently heaving belly of the man to whom she had given her order – she even glimpsed his toothy grin.

  Picking up the cup, separating it from its saucer and placing a paper napkin in the slop, she decided to take her time, to sip the hot, sugary stuff slowly, not to let the men frighten her. She had dealt with worse than them. In another town, and earlier in the summer, a man had followed her to her dressing-room, had pushed past the open door and stood silently behind her while she changed. Her first knowledge of his presence had been the awareness that someone else was breathing in the room. She had turned around and looked at him, had made no attempt to grab her clothes, had simply confronted his eyes with her own until he turned and fled. Jim had caught him outside the door and had cuffed him, but she had always regretted that this had occurred. She had handled him on her own, and Jim’s action had been superfluous.

  So she drank her coffee now, slowly and ostentatiously, and pretended not to hear the remarks that were passed. When she had finished, she lighted a cigarette and smoked it long enough to be convincing before she placed a nickel on the wet surface of the counter and walked to the door. But as she reached the street, as the cold wind struck her face and she once again felt the discomfort of the costume beneath her dress, she became less plucky. She had walked only a few steps down the street towards the hotel, when she heard the door bang shut behind her and she sensed that she was being followed. And when she heard a toneless, tuneless whistle, she knew that it was true.

  She tried to take longer steps, to move her feet more rapidly, but the costume was too rigid. Perhaps it was better to maintain a steady pace so that whoever it was who was behind her would not know that she was frightened. Which one, she wondered, had made up his mind to accost her? It would not be the counterman, his very girth disqualified him, and he would have to stick with his job. The shifty-eyed one with the rheumy eyes and the sharp, rabbity face? She sincerely hoped not, although, if worst came to worst, he might be better than the lumpish one with the beetling brows and the rotten nose. The footsteps behind her sounded closer, they were all but running.

  It was then that her clothes fell from her, dissolving away like spume in the surf. She stopped, ashamed and yet proud. The wind that had been cold now seemed warm and caressing. A great flush spread over her, tinting her flesh with the hue that typifies both embarrassment and the heights of ardour. The gauze wings, which she thought she had removed before putting on her dress, which she must have removed but which now amazingly appeared again just when all decent covering vanished, these wings began to shimmer ecstatically in the warm wind. They gave her a sense of power, a knowledge of freedom, and instead of running madly on down the street – she turned to face whoever had been following her. It was her father.

  Or rather it was not her father, but a faceless thing dressed in her father’s clothes, the long-lapelled, black serge suit, the black velvet tie and rolled-brim black homburg, the tightly furled black umbrella. Where her father’s sombre countenance should have been was an empty space, a hole in time, a whistling fissure. As the figure advanced towards her, she felt herself drawn towards it, and the sound that she had mistaken for a masher’s whistle rose in volume and pitch, became a hellish lament. The wings at her shoulders at the same time gained weight and strength, they ceased quivering and began to beat; but just as she felt that she had the power to rise off the ground, to soar and escape her father, he was upon her. His long, black flags of arms shrouded her in a tenacious grasp – they reached for her beating wings, tore at them, sought to pinion them. She did not succeed in escaping him, but he failed to hold her down to earth: locked in hideous struggle, they both began to rise, and for an instant hung dizzyingly high in the air. Then the shrill sound of doom that issued from the abyss of his face mounted to a scream, a howl, quickly surpassing itself in volume, encompassing her in its violent clamour and, once more, she fell into the pit.

  Around, up, on all sides and down, there was only blackness. She existed in a vast, frigid whirlpool of nothingness. Spinning with sickening celerity, she felt that she was disintegrating, that this vertigo that was now her only consciousness was the prelude to oblivion, destruction itself. She could no longer see, since all about her there was nothing but night; she could no longer hear, because the banshee cry stopped her ears. Her sole sensation was that of a horrendous, plunging oscillation; time’s flow had frozen, became glacial, space and the objects that had defined it had been swallowed by the vortex. Yet when she gave up, submitted to the frenzy, she saw light.

  At first it was just a point, the merest pinprick of radiance, a splinter of brilliance. Still it grew, as she watched in hope and with a wild, hysterical joy, to a mote, and then a ray, and then a beam. It had the lustre of sunshine, the confident yellow warmth of morning. As it expanded, infusing the swirling night with first a glow and finally a blinding illumination, she felt herself breathe again, her pulse begin to beat and time’s ice begin to melt, to trickle and ultimately to flow. Four walls settled down about her, and a ceiling – a surface marred with cracks, an enigmatic map of an undiscovered continent. Somewhere a child cried. Footsteps sounded near and yet far – they were in the hall, and she was lying in bed in a hotel room. But – and now she raised herself to another level of wakefulness – something had been happening, a spinning blackness, a sense of shame, her father. As she tried to remember, an image suddenly existed in her mind, an image of her own nudity, of a tall black figure standing near her reaching out for her, of a whirling blackness that fed upon her fear with the voracity of a beast. She sat up in bed, her eyes wide now, awake but still terrified by her nightmare. And as she stared at the door, a metal door varnished brown to look like wood, at the keyhole with its key and its dangling, red, fibre tag, she knew that she was in some place where she had never been before, and yet she knew that a terrible thing was happening again.

  It could not be. She could not awaken twice like this, she could not die twice in that pit and yet survive, yet on surviving turn and look and find, twice – that! This time she would not turn, she would not look. She had been tricked, she had been dreaming about that old time (bit by bit it came back to her now), about that night, when she was a girl, that she had fought with Jim, when things had happened that even now she was uncertain had actually happened, that even today, this very moment as she sat up in this strange bed afraid to turn, afraid to look, she did not know whether she had dreamed them then, whether she dreamed them now.

  And as she stared at the brown-varnished door that she was certain she had never seen before, even as she made sure in her own mind that that, at least, was real, she remembered Dr Danzer’s words when, after the first of her ‘treatments’, she had recalled that confusing night, remembered wholly that terrible awakening. ‘I want you to think about what you have told me,’ he had said. ‘I want you to note its equivocal nature. I want you to decide whether what you remember is a dream, an imagined re-enactment of an early childhood conflict, or whether it did actually occur. But I also want you to know that since you have told me, I have checked with the authorities of the city you mentioned, and they have no record of such a violent death that month, that summer, that year.’ And it seemed to her that Dr Danzer was speaking to her, his words echoed so loudly in her ear. ‘The guilt you feel is
an imagined guilt. The crime you did is an imagined one. It is no less real for all that. To you it is even more reprehensible because you desire it deeply. In your mind, in your imagination, you have committed this crime against this man, have through him struck at your father. He is dead for you, but the guilt you feel is not for this imagined death but for the real death that occurred that summer while you were away from home with this man, the natural death of your father. You have told me that he died of a heart attack, unattended – that they tried to reach you, but the conservatory did not know where you were, that all the dean could say was that you had not been at school for months and that he had understood that you had gone home. This is the guilt you feel: that you desired your father’s death and that your father died because of your neglect. This is what you must face. Once you have faced it, I think you will discover that the other memory is but a distortion of this one, a punishment you have devised for yourself.’

  She settled back in bed and shut her eyes again, reassured once more by Dr Danzer. He had told her many times that whenever she became confused, whenever there seemed to be a gap, when she had forgotten something that had happened and wanted to recover the memory of it, that all she had to do was to think back to the beginning of the chain of events, to recall each link and finger it in her mind until she came to the one that was missing. So she knew that this was what she must do now. First, she had to disentangle the truth of that August night from the dream of it – to the extent this was possible. For although she knew that Dr Danzer must be correct, that it only made sense of what she thought had occurred that night had actually never happened except in her imagination, she had never been able to dispel a modicum of doubt. Then there was the dream she had just had, which in many ways corresponded exactly to the reality of that summer and its climax, but which distorted other parts of it unnaturally. It was true that she had visited the Black Cat by herself, that she had met Jim Shad there but had not told him who she was until she had allowed him to make love to her. And it was also true that she had kept on seeing him without letting either Molly or Ann know what she was doing, that she had run away from the conservatory with him because she loved him and because she wished to be free. She knew it was a fact that he had taught her to dance and had used her in his act, had had a special costume made for her that fitted the name of a song he liked to sing. But, of course, in the dream she had just had these events, that had taken months to occur, had slipped into one another in a night, fitting together one inside the other like a Chinese puzzle. Still, it was true that Jim had taken up with Vanessa, that she had grown jealous of her, that one night when Jim failed to return to the dressing-room after the act she had flown into a rage and had decided to walk back to their hotel alone. She also remembered growing cold on the windy street and stopping at a lunchroom for a cup of coffee, and that when she had resumed her walk someone had been following her. But there the dream became fanciful, losing itself in a maze of symbols and a nightmare terror. And it was at just this point that she lost track of reality altogether. She knew that she had begun to run, that whoever it was that was following her – or whatever it was – had come closer and closer…