by Otto Penzler
Dwayne felt his ire rising, but said nothing.
“I said, she’s a whore!”
“Well, she’s no business of yours, because she ain’t around here anymore.”
“Then who was that on the telephone?”
Dwayne threw his sandwich on the plate and reared back on the chair, scraping against the new vinyl tile floor. “You tell me. Probably some yo-yo out of your past.”
She picked up the plastic dishes and clattered them angrily into the sink. “It was a woman.”
“Thought you said she hung up.”
“Before. The one that called while you was cutting slabs.”
The thought of the chain saw brought bloody images to Dwayne’s mind, and he judged he’d best go back outside till this whole thing blew over. When he came back in, Sheila was asleep with an issue of Cosmopolitan on her huge stomach.
MAGGIE HAD TO warm her cold hands and breasts. She had to transfer some of the energy from this world, the world of the clearing, the town world, back into the forest mulch. That way the rich soil would yield an abundance of mayapple, adder’s tongue, and blue cohosh come spring. Otherwise her coldness, and that of the withered life in her womb, would blast the forest floor. So she reasoned. So she explained her journey into the suburban development.
Most of the houses had no landscape plantings, or where they did, they were still spindly shrubs, set next to a painted rock at the end of the drive, or maple saplings in a bed of pebbles, attended by a plaster fawn. It wasn’t hard to find Dwayne and Sheila’s house.
“DWAYNE. DWAYNE!”
At first Dwayne thought he was on midnight turn again and had overslept. But he squinted at the red glowworms that spelled the time, and it was 3:27, not time to get up for any shift. Sheila turned on the light.
“Dwayne, there’s something wrong. It hurts.”
Dwayne rolled over and discovered the bed soggy and warm. He at first thought Sheila had added bed-peeing to the idiosyncrasies of her pregnancy, then remembered what else a wet bed could mean.
“Dwayne, I’m scared!”
Dwayne rolled to a sitting position and scrubbed his bristly face with his knuckles. “For God’s sake, Sheila. You’re in labor.”
This day will see the birth of my son, thought Dwayne. Or maybe my daughter. Without panic, he bundled Sheila into the pickup and drove her to Clay River Memorial Hospital. She began screaming before they got her through Admissions.
MAGGIE BATHED IN a stream and put the filthy clothing back on. The stream didn’t seem cold, though she had to break the ice. It was hard to wash her hair, which was matted with twigs and black woods soil. I am now the wood sprite, she hummed. Herbs and flowers spring from my body. The wind whipped her wet hair, freezing locks to her cheeks, but it would dry, even in this weather. Her lacy stretch top and purple jeans were dirty and torn. She headed for her sister Kathy’s house. A pretty spring dress would be nice.
KATHY WRAPPED THE afghan around her. She wasn’t used to the cold yet this year. Hadn’t it been around this date—? She put the thought of her missing sister out of her mind and flicked the remote control to another channel. She watched, fascinated, for a while. The program was about runaways, kids that became junkies and prostitutes in big cities. Her sister—her feelings caved in on her. She wished Ken and the boys were home, to distract her from thoughts of where poor Maggie might be. Angrily, she swallowed tears and flicked to another channel. This one was better, a sitcom about morticians.
Darn, the house seemed drafty. She huddled the afghan around her and went to check the thermostat.
On her way, she noticed the back door was standing open.
DWAYNE GOT HOME around four p.m. The nurses had encouraged him to be in the delivery room when the baby was being born, and he was elated that he had been. It was bloody and violent, as he expected, but it moved very fast for a first birth. Sheila had done a lot of yelling, maybe more because he was there to hear it, and toward the end she cursed like a shop foreman. But that was all irrelevant. They had a daughter. The kid looked just as bad as the nurse had warned them she would, with her tiny dried-fruit face and head lopsided like a bruised grapefruit, and he decided she was going to take after Dwayne’s mother, instead of Sheila, and be a beauty.
Stripping off his sweatshirt, he noticed that the weather was gray and threatening. That seemed wrong for the occasion, so he made himself a sandwich with the bologna in the fridge, drained a can of lite beer, changed the sheets, and went to bed.
SOMETHING WOKE HIM.
A shape stood quietly between him and the cold light leaking through the drapes from the neighbor’s security lamp. A human form. He examined it, frozen with alarm. The Smith & Wesson was in a cardboard box under the bed. He told Sheila they’d have to come up with a better place for it once the kid got old enough to crawl. And when the kid, his daughter, got a little older, maybe nine or so, he’d teach her to use it.
The shape had a cloud of unkempt hair, dark in the twilight of the bedroom. Whoever it was, it was watching him.
“Dwayne.” The voice was low, full of painful music.
“My God,” he whispered finally, “Maggie.”
The figure stirred, but didn’t answer.
IN THE GREENISH light of the door to the hospital corridor, Sheila saw what had wakened her: a nurse, carrying something. The something was her baby, and the baby was crying feebly, like a kitten. “Feeding time,” said the nurse.
“MAGGIE,” DWAYNE WHISPERED, full of muted glad awe. “I thought you was living in Denver. You ran off.”
Maggie shrugged. “You expected me to stay, after all you said?”
Dwayne pulled the covers around him, not against the cold, but out of sudden shame. “I couldn’t be sure. You weren’t sure yourself, even.”
She shrugged. “Are you sure with this one?”
“Yes. Mostly. Anyway, she’ll have my name. She’s legitimate. Where did you hear?”
“News travels fast.”
“I guess I should say I’m sorry. I loved you, then afterward I loved Sheila. Now I guess it don’t matter.” He felt pangs of remembered tenderness. “God, Maggie, it’s good to see you.”
“How was the birth?”
“Hell, I could have delivered the kid myself.”
She laughed, out of season with the time and place. “Always the farm boy. Close to the earth, huh?”
Dwayne laughed, reluctant, not understanding the joke. “But where have you been? Where did you run to? Your sister thought you went west, to that guy in Denver, but she never heard.”
Maggie was silent. He saw only her silhouette, lovely and vulnerable against the faint light from the window. Then her lips curved, parted. “Can I use your shower? I’m cold, and I haven’t had a decent bath in a while.”
THE HOT WATER gradually warmed her night-cold flesh, until her heart began to beat, slowly, then quicker. She washed her hair again, lathering twice with shampoo that smelled like strawberries. The water’s heat oppressed her, yet she knew she needed it.
She left the spring dress hanging on the back of the door and wrapped herself in a big pink towel. For a moment, she flicked on the light, wiped steam from the mirror. Even the hot water had not brought color to her face, so she smoothed on blush and powder from the vanity. Sheila’s cosmetics. Dwayne’s wife’s stuff.
Dwayne was sitting on the bed, his back to her, face buried in his hands. She slipped up to him and brushed his warm neck with the back of her cool hand.
“Maggie, Maggie,” he sighed. “What do you want with me?”
She had prayed for this reprieve, this moment, in the last moments before the pills had washed the world away. It hadn’t been Dwayne who had buried her, then. It must have been the biker and his friends.
AFTER SHE WAS gone, Dwayne knew she had not really given her body or her love, but taken something away from him. He made instant coffee and drank it, scalding. Maybe, long ago, he had made the wrong choice, but something told him that now i
t was way too late.
Then he remembered that he hadn’t found out where she had been those two years. He had forgotten even to ask her if she had gotten the abortion.
THERE WAS A cold place in the rafters of the garage. Maggie propped a ladder against the wall and lugged a tarp up to the place where the hundred-watt bulb would not cast too much light should Dwayne look into the garage during her brief stay. The position of the ladder itself Dwayne would lay to absentmindedness or a neighbor’s borrowing and returning it without asking. She pulled two one-by-eights together across the rafters and sank down on them, wrapping the tarp around her, not for warmth, but for concealment. The false heat leaked slowly from her body.
SHEILA AND DWAYNE named the baby Melissa. It wasn’t really a family name, but Sheila liked it. Melissa was an early rising baby, and Dwayne wasn’t surprised that Sheila gave up breast-feeding shortly after they brought the kid home. They took turns with Melissa’s night feeding. At first, they tried to get her to sleep later in the morning by giving her a three a.m. bottle, but Sheila had a tendency to sleep through the clock radio. Melissa’s increasingly healthy wails in the early morning were harder to sleep through.
Sheila had a cold. Both she and Dwayne were exhausted. It wasn’t Dwayne’s night to feed the baby, but Sheila had taken a double dose of cold medicine and stirred only slightly when the baby cried.
Dwayne groaned. It was only one thirty; maybe if he lay still a little longer, the baby would go back to sleep for a while.
He dozed. The baby whimpered. Maybe she had a touch of her mother’s cold, too. He told himself he ought to feel pity for the wet little bundle of warmth and discomfort, but so far she seemed barely human to him. More like a calf or a baby bird than another person. In theory, she would grow into a human, his daughter, somebody he would teach things to, somebody to take to school and ball games. But now, she seemed no more human than the clock radio. Or the time clock at the plant.
Sounds, stirring, from the hall, then from the baby’s room. The creak of the crib rail being lowered. The baby wailed louder, then stopped, as if suddenly attached to a nipple.
MAGGIE HAD SOUGHT this moment since waking in the woods. Soon, she could go back, fulfilled. The baby nuzzled her and she opened the buttons of the spring dress. The baby’s mouth was hot and eager against her breast, groping, finding.
Together, their hearts slowed. At length, she laid the baby back in the crib.
DWAYNE WOKE, SHIVERING, after what seemed only moments. It was late, almost nine, and no sound came from Melissa’s room. “Sheila?” Sheila stirred, snuffling and groaning. “Did you open a window when you got up to feed the baby?”
Sheila rubbed her face into the pillow and looked at him blearily. “Feed Melissa? When?”
MORT (ON) CASTLE (1946– ) published his first novel in 1967 and has always worked at two primary jobs: writing and teaching, with forays into being a musician (banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, and dobro), stand-up comedian, stage hypnotist, writer of advertising copy, and editor of magazines (fiction editor for Doorways magazine) and comic books (executive editor of Thorby Comics). In addition to eleven years as a high school teacher, Castle teaches at Columbia College in Chicago and conducts an annual writing workshop at the World Horror Convention; he claims that more than two thousand of his students have seen their work in print. He has written and edited Writing Horror: A Handbook by the Horror Writers of America (1997), revised as On Writing Horror (2006). His experience as a stand-up comic has made him a desirable keynote speaker at conventions, where he has made more than eight hundred presentations.
Castle’s more than three hundred and fifty short stories and seven novels have been nominated for numerous prizes and awards, including six Bram Stoker Awards. His literary fiction has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes. Among his novels are Cursed Be the Child (1990), The Deadly Election (1976), and The Strangers (1984), which has been optioned for a motion picture by Whitewater Films.
“The Old Man and the Dead,” an homage of sorts to Ernest Hemingway, was first published in Book of the Dead 2: Still Dead, edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector (New York: Bantam, 1992).
I
IN OUR TIME there was a man who wrote as well and truly as anyone ever did. He wrote about courage and endurance and sadness and war and bullfighting and boxing and men in love and men without women. He wrote about scars and wounds that never heal.
Often, he wrote about death. He had seen much death. He had killed. Often, he wrote well and truly about death. Sometimes. Not always.
Sometimes he could not.
II
MAY 1961
MAYO CLINIC
ROCHESTER, MINNESOTA
“Are you a Stein? Are you a Berg?” he asked.
“Are you an anti-Semite?” the psychiatrist asked.
“No.” He thought. “Maybe. I don’t know. I used to be, I think. It was in fashion. It was all right until that son of a bitch Hitler.”
“Why did you ask that?” the psychiatrist asked.
The old man took off his glasses. He was not really an old man, only 61, but often he thought of himself as an old man and truly, he looked like an old man, although his blood pressure was in control and his diabetes remained borderline. His face had scars. His eyes were sad. He looked like an old man who had been in wars.
He pinched his nose above the bridge. He wondered if he was doing it to look tired and worn. It was hard to know now when he was being himself and when he was being what the world expected him to be. That was how it was when all the world knew you and all the world knows you if you have been in Life and Esquire.
“It’s I don’t think a Jew would understand. Maybe a Jew couldn’t.”
The old man laughed then but it had nothing funny to it. He sounded like he had been socked a good one. “Nu? Is that what a Jew would say? Nu? No, not a Jew. Not a communist. Nor an empiricist. I’ll tell you who else. The existentialists. Those wise guys sons of bitches. Oh, they get ink these days, don’t they? Sit in the cafés and drink the good wine and the good dark coffee and smoke the bad cigarettes and think they’ve discovered it all. Nothingness. That is what they think they’ve discovered it all. Nothingness. That is what they think they’ve discovered. How do you like it now, Gentlemen?
“They are wrong. Yes. They are wrong.”
“How so?”
“There is something. It’s not pretty. It’s not nice. You have to be drunk to talk about it, drunk or shell-shocked, and then you usually can’t talk about it. But there is something.”
III
The poet Bill Wantling wrote of him: “He explored the pues y nada and the pues y nada.” So then so. What do you know of it Mr. Poet Wantling? What do you know of it?
F—— you all. I obscenity in the face of the collective wisdom. I obscenity in the face of the collective wisdoms. I obscenity in the mother’s milk that suckled the collective wisdoms. I obscenity in the too easy mythos of all the collective wisdoms and in the face of my young, ignorant, unknowing self that led me to proclaim my personal mantra of ignorance, the pues y nada y pues y nada y pues y nada pues y nada. . . . In the face of Buddha. In the face of Mohammed. In the face of the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob.
In the face of that poor skinny dreamer who died on the cross. Really, when it came down to it, he had some good moves in there. He didn’t go out bad. He was tough. Give him that. Tough like Stan Ketchel, but he had no counter-moves. Just this sweet, simple, sad ass faith. Sad ass because, what little he understood, no, from what I have seen, he had it bass-ackwards.
How do you like it now, Gentlemen? How do you like it now? Is it time for a prayer? Very well then, Gentlemen.
Let us pray.
Baa-baa-baa, listen to the lambs bleat,
Baa-baa-baa, listen to the lambs bleat.
Truly, world without end.
Truly.
Not Amen.
I can not will not just cannot no cannot bless nor sanctify nor affirm
the obscenity the horror.
Can you, Mr. Poet Bill Wantling? Can you, Gentlemen?
How do you like it now?
In Hell and in a time of hell, a man’s got no bloody chance, F—— you as we have been F——ed. All of us. All of us.
There is your prayer.
Amen.
IV
“Ern—”
“No. Don’t call me that. That’s not who I want to be.”
“That is your name.”
“Goddamn it. F—— you. F—— you twice. I’ve won the big one. The goddamn Nobel. I’m the one. The heavyweight champ, no middleweight. I can be who I want to be. I’ve earned that.”
“Who is it you want to be?”
“Mr. Papa. I’m damned good for that. Mr. Papa. That is how I call myself. That is how Mary calls me. They call me ‘Mr. Papa’ in Idaho and Cuba and Paris Review. The little girls whose tight dancer bottoms I pinch, the little girls I call ‘daughter,’ the lovely little girls, and A. E. and Carlos and Coop and Marlene, Papa or Mr. Papa, that’s how they call me.
“Even Fidel. I’m Mr. Papa to Fidel. I call him Señor Beisbol. Do you know, he’s got a hell of a slider, Fidel. How do you like it now, Mr. Doctor? Mr. Papa.”
“Mr. Papa? No, I don’t like it. I don’t like the word games you play with me, nor do I think your ‘Mr. Papa’ role belongs in this office. You’re here so we can help you.”
“Help me? That is nice. That is just so goddamn pretty.”
“We need the truth.”
“That’s all Pilate wanted. Not so much. And wasn’t he one swell guy?”
“Who are you?” persisted the psychiatrist.
“Who’s on first?”
“What?”
“What’s on second! Who’s on first. I like them, you know. Abbott and Costello. They could teach that sissy Capote a thing or two about word dance. Who’s on first? How do you like it now, Gentlemen? Oh, yes, they could teach Mr. James Jones a little. Thinks he’s Captain Steel Balls now. Thinks he’s ready to go against the champ. Mailer, the loud mouth Hebe. Uris, even Uris, for God’s sake, the original Hollywood piss-ant. Before they take me on, any of them, let them do a prelim with Abbott and Costello. Who’s on first? That is good.”