by James Ellroy
When we didn't respond, she said, "Your father may be dead. Do you understand what I'm saying? That was an important man from his company who called. He would not call unless he was gravely concerned. Do you children understand what is being said to you?"
Weldon brushed at the dirt with his tennis shoe, and Lyle looked into a place about six inches in front of his eyes. Drew's face was frightened, not because of the news about our father, but instead because of the strange whirring of wheels that we could almost hear from inside Mattie's head. I put my arm over her shoulders and felt her skin jump.
"He's worked like a nigra for you, maybe lost his life for you, and you have nothing to say?" Mattie asked.
"Maybe we ought to start cleaning up our rooms. You wanted us to clean up our rooms, Mattie," I said.
But it was a poor attempt to placate her.
"You stay outside. Don't even come in this house," she said.
"I have to go to the bathroom," Lyle said.
"Then you can just do it in the dirt like a darky," she said, and went inside the house and latched the screen behind her.
By the next afternoon, my father was still unaccounted for. Mattie had an argument on the phone with somebody, I think the man in zoot pants and two-tone shoes who had probably been her pimp at one time, because she told him he owed her money and she wouldn't come back and work at Broussard's Bar again until he paid her. After she hung up she breathed hard at the kitchen sink, smoking her cigarette and staring out into the yard. She snapped the cap off a bottle of Jax and drank it half empty, her throat working in one long, wet swallow, one eye cocked at me.
"Come here," she said.
"What?"
"You tracked up the kitchen. You didn't flush the toilet after you used it, either."
"I did."
"You did what?"
"I flushed the toilet."
"Then one of the others didn't flush it. Every one of you come out here. Now!"
"What is it, Mattie? We didn't do anything," I said.
"I changed my mind. Every one of you outside. All of you outside. Wel don and Lyle, you get out there right now. Where's Drew?"
"She's playing in the yard. What's wrong, Mattie?" I made no attempt to hide the fear in my voice. I could see the web of blue veins in the top of her muscular chest.
Outside, the wind was blowing through the trees in the yard, flattening the purple clumps of wisteria that grew against the barn wall.
"Each of you go to the hedge and cut the switch you want me to use on you," she said.
It was her favorite form of punishment for us. If we broke off a large switch, she hit us fewer times with it. If we came back with a thin or small switch, we would get whipped until she felt she had struck some kind of balance between size and number.
We remained motionless. Drew had been playing with her cat. She had tied a piece of twine around the cat's neck, and she held the twine in her hand like a leash. Her knees and white socks were dusty from play.
"I told you not to tie that around the kitten's neck again," Mattie said.
"It doesn't hurt anything. It's not your cat, anyway," Weldon said.
"Don't sass me," she said. "You will not sass me. None of you will sass me."
"I ain't cutting no switch," Wel don said. "You're crazy. My mama said so. You ought to be in the crazy house."
She looked hard into Wel don's eyes, then there was a moment of recognition in her colorless face, a flicker of fear, as though she had seen a growing meanness of spirit in Weldon that would soon become a challenge to her own. She wet her lips.
"We shall see who does what around here," she said. She broke off a big switch from the myrtle hedge and raked it free of flowers and leaves, except for one green sprig on the tip.
I saw the look in Drew's face, saw her drop the piece of twine from her palm as she stared up into Mattie's shadow.
Mattie jerked her by the wrist and whipped her a half-dozen times across her bare legs. Drew twisted impotently in Mattie's balled hand, her feet dancing with each blow. The switch raised welts on her skin as thick and red as centipedes.
Then suddenly Wel don ran with all his weight into Mattie's back, stiff-arming her between the shoulder blades, and sent her tripping sideways over a bucket of chicken slops. She righted herself and stared at him open-mouthed, the switch limp in her hand. Then her eyes grew hot and bright, and I could see the bone flex along her jaws.
Weldon burst out the back gate and ran down the dirt road between the sugarcane fields, the soles of his dirty tennis shoes powdering dust in the air.
She waited for him a long time, watching through the screen as the mauve-colored dusk gathered in the trees and the sun's afterglow lit the clouds on the western horizon. Then she took a bottle of apricot brandy into the bathroom and sat in the tub for almost an hour, turning the hot water tap on and off until the tank was empty. When we needed to go to the bathroom, she told us to take our problem outside. Finally she emerged in the hall, wearing only her panties and bra, her hair wrapped in a towel, the dark outline of her sex plainly visible to us.
"I'm going to dress now and go into town with a gentleman friend," she said. "Tomorrow we're going to start a new regime around here. Believe me, there will never be a reoccurrence of what happened here today. You can pass that on to young Mr. Wel don for me."
But she didn't go into town. Instead, she put on her blue suit, a flowerprint blouse, her nylon stockings, and walked up and down on the gallery, her cigarette poised in the air like a movie actress.
"Why not just drive your car, Mattie?" I said quietly through the screen.
"It has no gas. Besides, a gentleman caller will be passing for me anytime now," she answered.
"Oh."
She blew smoke at an upward angle, her face aloof and flat-sided in the shadows.
"Mattie?"
"Yes?"
"Weldon's out back. Can he come in the house?"
"Little mice always return where the cheese is," she said.
I hated her. I wanted something terrible to happen to her. I could feel my fingernails knifing into my palms.
She turned around, her palm supporting one elbow, her cigarette an inch from her mouth, her hair wreathed in smoke. "Do you have a reason for staring through the screen at me?" she asked.
"No," I said.
"When you're bigger, you'll get to do what's on your mind. In the meantime, don't let your thoughts show on your face. You're a lewd little boy."
Her suggestion repelled me and made water well up in my eyes. I backed away from the screen, then turned and ran through the rear of the house and out into the backyard where Weldon, Lyle, and Drew sat against the barn wall, fireflies lighting in the wisteria over their heads.
No one came for Mattie that evening. She sat in the stuffed chair in her room, putting on layers of lipstick until her mouth had the crooked, bright red shape of a clown's. She smoked a whole package of Chesterfields, constantly wiping the ashes off her dark blue skirt with a hand towel soaked in dry-cleaning fluid; then she drank herself unconscious.
It was hot that night, and dry lightning leaped from the horizon to the top of the blue-black vault of sky over the Gulf. Wel don sat on the side of his bed in the dark, his shoulders hunched, his fists between his white thighs. His burr haircut looked like duck down on his head in the flicker of lightning through the window. When I was almost asleep he shook both me and Lyle awake and said, "We got to get rid of her. You know we got to do it."
I put my pillow over my head and rolled away from him, as though I could drop away into sleep and rise in the morning into a sun-spangled and different world.
But in the false dawn I woke to both Lyle's and Weldon's faces close to mine. Wel don's eyes were hollow, his breath rank with funk. The mist was heavy and wet in the pecan trees outside the window.
"She's not gonna hurt Drew again. Are you gonna help or not?" Weldon said.
I followed them into the hallway, my heart sinking at the r
ealization of what I was willing to participate in, my body as numb as if I had been stunned with Novocaine. Mattie was sleeping in the stuffed chair, her hose rolled down over her knees, an overturned jelly glass on the rug next to the can of spot cleaner.
Weldon walked quietly across the rug, unscrewed the cap on the can, laid the can on its side in front of Mattie's feet, then backed away from her. The cleaning fluid spread in a dark circle around her chair, the odor as bright and sharp as a slap across the face.
Weldon slid open a box of kitchen matches and we each took one, raked it across the striker, and, with the sense that our lives at that moment had changed forever, threw them at Mattie's feet. But the burning matches fell outside the wet area. The blood veins in my head dilated with fear, my ears hummed with a sound like the roar of the ocean in a seashell, and I jerked the box from Wel don's hand, clutched a half-dozen matches in my fist, dragged them across the striker, and flung them right on Mattie's feet.
The chair was enveloped in a cone of flame, and she burst out of it with her arms extended, as though she were pushing blindly through a curtain, her mouth and eyes wide with terror. We could smell her hair burning as she raced past us and crashed through the screen door out onto the gallery and into the yard. She beat at her flaming clothes and raked at her hair as though it were swarming with yellow jackets.
I stood transfixed in mortal dread at what I had done.
A Negro man walking to work came out of the mist on the road and knocked her to the ground, slapping the fire out of her dress, pinning her under his spread knees as though he were assaulting her. Smoke rose from her scorched clothes and hair as in a depiction of a damned figure on one of my holy cards.
The Negro rose to his feet and walked toward the gallery, a solitary line of blood running down his cheek where Mattie had scratched him.
"Yo' mama ain't hurt bad. Get some butter or some bacon grease. She gonna be all right, you gonna see. You children don't be worried, no," he said. His gums were purple with snuff when he smiled.
The volunteer firemen bounced across the cattle guard in an old fire truck whose obsolete hand-crank starter still dangled from under the radiator. They coated Mattie's room with foam from a fire extinguisher and packed Mattie off in an ambulance to the charity hospital in Lafayette. Two sheriff's deputies arrived, and before he left, one of the volunteers took them aside in the yard and talked with them, looking over his shoulder at us children, then walked over to us and said, "The fire chief gonna come out here and check it out. Y'all stay out of that bedroom."
His face was narrow and dark with shadow under the brim of his big rubber fireman's hat. I felt a fist squeeze my heart.
But suddenly Sister Roberta was in the midst of everything. Someone had carried word to the school about the fire, and she'd had one of the brothers drive her out to the house. She talked with the deputies, helped us fix cereal at the kitchen table, and made telephone calls to find a place for us to stay besides the welfare shelter. Then she looked in Mattie's bedroom door and studied the interior for what seemed a long time. When she came back in the kitchen, her eyes peeled the skin off our faces. I looked straight down into my cereal bowl.
She placed her small hand on my shoulder. I could feel her fingers tapping on the bone, as though she were processing her own thoughts. Then she said, "Well, what should we do here today? I think we should clean up first. Where's the broom?"
Without waiting for an answer she pulled the broom out of the closet and went to work in Mattie's room, sweeping the spilled and unstruck matches as well as the burned ones in a pile by a side door that gave onto the yard. The soot and blackened threads from the rug swirled up in a cloud around her veils and wings and smudged her starched wimple.
One of the deputies put his hand on the broomstick. "There ain't been an investigation yet. You can't do that till the fire chief come out and see, Sister," he said.
"You always talked like a fool, Gaspard," she said. "Now that you have a uniform, you talk like a bigger one. This house smells like an incinerator. Now get out of the way." With one sweep of the broom she raked all the matches out into the yard.
We were placed in foster homes, and over the years I lost contact with Sister Roberta. But later I went to work in the oil fields, and I think perhaps I talked with my father in a nightclub outside of Morgan City. An enormous live oak tree grew through the floor and roof, and he was leaning against the bar that had been built in a circle around the tree. His face was puckered with white scar tissue, his ears burned into stubs, his right hand atrophied and frozen against his chest like a broken bird's foot. But beyond the layers of mutilated skin I could see my father's face, like the image in a photographic negative held up against a light.
"Is your name Sonnier?" I asked.
He looked at me curiously.
"Maybe. You want to buy me a drink?" he said.
"Yeah, I can do that," I said.
He ordered a shot of Beam with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side.
"Are you Verise Sonnier from New Iberia?" I asked.
He grinned stiffly when he took the schooner of beer away from his mouth. "Why you want to know?" he said.
"I think I'm your son. I'm Billy Bob."
His turquoise eyes wandered over my face, then they lost interest.
"I had a son. But you ain't him. Buy me another shot?" he said.
"Why not?" I replied.
Sometimes he comes to me in my dreams, and I wonder if ironically all our stories were written on his skin back there in Texas City in 1947. Or maybe that's just a poetic illusion purchased by time. But even in the middle of an Indian summer's day, when the sugarcane is beaten with purple and gold light in the fields and the sun is both warm and cool on your skin at the same time, when I know that the earth is a fine place after all, I have to mourn just a moment for those people of years ago who lived lives they did not choose, who carried burdens that were not their own, whose invisible scars were as private as the scarlet beads of Sister Roberta's rosary wrapped across the back of her small hand, as bright as drops of blood ringed round the souls of little people.
MEFISTO IN ONYX
1993: Harlan Ellison
HARLAN ELLISON (1934–) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and had various jobs, mostly blue collar, in all parts of the country before settling in New York to become a full-time writer. Within the next two years, he produced and sold more than one hundred stories and articles before being drafted into the Army. Soon after his discharge, he moved to Chicago to work as an editor at Rogue magazine and Regency Books. His prolific writing career continued when he moved to California to write for motion pictures (including the 1966 blockbuster The Oscar) and, mostly, for television. Ellison supplied scripts for many series, including Burke's Law, The Flying Nun, Route 66, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Outer Limits, and, most famously, Star Trek —his "The City on the Edge of Forever" is regarded as the best episode in the history of that series, named Best Original Teleplay by the Writers Guild of America; his "Demon with a Glass Hand," for The Outer Limits, and two other teleplays also won the award. He is among the most honored writers in America, especially among writers of speculative fiction, winning ten Hugos (World Science Fiction Society), including Grand Master; four Nebulas (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America); five Bram Stoker Awards (Horror Writers Association), including lifetime achievement; and two Edgar Allan Poe Awards (Mystery Writers of America) for his memorable short stories "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" and "Soft Monkey"; among many other genre and nongenre honors.
It is uncommon to find fantasy and supernatural elements mixed with crime fiction, but Ellison's work successfully bridges and encompasses those genres frequently, as with this novella. "Mefisto in Onyx" originally appeared in the October 1993 issue of Omni magazine; several minor emendations were made for its first publication in book form three months later by the California publisher Mark V. Ziesing. The text for this volume is taken from that publication.
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ONCE. I ONLY WENT to bed with her once. Friends for eleven years—before and since—but it was just one of those things, just one of those crazy flings: the two of us alone on a New Year's Eve, watching rented Marx Brothers videos so we wouldn't have to go out with a bunch of idiots and make noise and pretend we were having a good time when all we'd be doing was getting drunk, whooping like morons, vomiting on slow-moving strangers, and spending more money than we had to waste. And we drank a little too much cheap champagne; and we fell off the sofa laughing at Harpo a few times too many; and we wound up on the floor at the same time; and next thing we knew we had our faces plastered together, and my hand up her skirt, and her hand down in my pants...
But it was just the once, fer chrissakes! Talk about imposing on a cheap sexual liaison! She knew I went mixing in other people's minds only when I absolutely had no other way to make a buck. Or I forgot myself and did it in a moment of human weakness.
It was always foul.
Slip into the thoughts of the best person who ever lived, even Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, just to pick an absolutely terrific person you'd think had a mind so clean you could eat off it (to paraphrase my mother), and when you come out—take my word for it—you'd want to take a long, intense shower in Lysol.
Trust me on this: I go into somebody's landscape when there's nothing else I can do, no other possible solution ... or I forget and do it in a moment of human weakness. Such as, say, the IRS holds my feet to the fire; or I'm about to get myself mugged and robbed and maybe murdered; or I need to find out if some specific she that I'm dating has been using somebody else's dirty needle or has been sleeping around without she's taking some extra-heavy-duty AIDS precautions; or a coworker's got it in his head to set me up so I make a mistake and look bad to the boss and I find myself in the unemployment line again; or...