by Leni Zumas
Do your spells really work? I asked the witch. A bunch of us were having beers at the VFW, where the manager doesn’t believe in underage drinking laws. If you’re old enough to stop a bullet for the U.S. government, you’re old enough to get blinkered, he says. I am not old enough to stop a bullet for the U.S. government, but I drink there anyway.
They work, she said vaguely. Destruction of love bond—it’s a common rite. But it might take some time.
I wanted her to hurry, before my sister did something stupid like marry him.
On the third morning, the stranger doesn’t come. We sit in the cool air stirring packets of sugar into burnt coffee. When Kasko gets bored of telling my sister how hard he’ll get up in her snatch, he informs me I’m a brainless baby bitch and if I don’t learn to keep my mouth shut he will shut it permanently. Kasko never can come up with his own phrases. He just repeats what people say on cable. I wait for Sarah to defend me. After he calls me bitch a second time, she goes, Shut up, Kask, but in a dozy voice, not fierce at all. I sit there hating them both.
At noon Kasko leaves for his shift at the Vietnamese café. The Morning Star begins to crowd with grown-ups on lunch break from the bank, the pharmacy, the courthouse. I think of the stranger folding blue-stained shirts into a suitcase at the Red Roof, digesting his unsatisfying continental breakfast, driving his rental back to the airport. He will not find Egg Boy. The grown-ups of Wolvercote don’t know any Egg Boy; they think his name is Earl.
Davey, I say, lemme borrow your truck for a minute.
How long is a minute?
Short. And I’m a good driver.
You are a good driver, he has to admit. Next year, when I take the learner’s permit test, I will surely get a perfect score.
I find the stranger in the Red Roof parking lot, trash bag in hand, picking coffee cups and candy wrappers off his car seats. He is sweating like a hog.
I was worried you’d’ve checked out already.
Checked out? Hardly, he says. There is more to investigate. For instance, there’s not a single bridge within a fifteen-mile radius of Wolvercote—hence, Egg Boy cannot live under one.
But he could still be retarded, I remind him.
Is he?
I look at the stranger’s finger, the one with the ring. He’s actually smart as hell, I say. He was in Sarah’s class at school. She said he wrote English papers that made you want to cry they were so beautiful.
And he, in his intelligence, might be familiar with witchcraft?
Well, maybe not so much the craft as the witch, I say.
The stranger flinches. Now we’re getting somewhere.
She showed up last spring, I tell him, at the VFW with a band Kasko had booked at the last minute. They seemed to be big fans of death. Strips of white cotton wrapped tight around their bodies made them moving mummies. Plastic half-knives were Velcro’ed onto their chests and stomachs, trickling red thread. Their songs, which came out of a computer, sounded like people getting hit with violins and hammers. The girl sat at a table overseeing their tapes and stickers while they stood on stage pressing the buttons. Nobody bought any merchandise, but Egg Boy went over and made conversation. She was pissed-looking and pretty in her Egyptian makeup, her see-through net dress, her boots that climbed all the way up her thighs. Egg Boy was pissed-looking too.
The band left and she stayed. For a week the two of them holed up in his apartment above the packie. When they came down again, he told Kasko, his best friend since seventh grade, that he was going to marry her.
What name did she go by? asks the stranger. He seems like he might be about to throw up. His eyes are blinking very fast.
Are you really writing a paper on this?
What was her goddamn name?
Morrigan, I say.
The stranger nods, rubs his neck, stares down at the mottled Styrofoam in his hand.
So you’re not writing a paper. Are you even in graduate school?
I am admiring the guy’s ability not to cry when his eyes are so full of tears.
This Egg Boy, he says slowly, she was fucking him.
Well, they got married. What do you think.
He says nothing.
The majority of couples, I inform him, keep having sex regularly for at least the first three years of marriage.
Who told you that?
My sister. She read it in a magazine.
Did an actual ceremony occur? Was anyone official presiding? As in someone over the age of twenty-one?
No, but it was a real wedding. And they took their clothes off.
Lovely, he says, all cold.
The wedding was held at midnight in the back room of the Vietnamese café. Morrigan brought in a bunch of black lace and told me and Sarah to tack it up over all the windows. We didn’t have any tacks so we used electrical tape. From the stereo came groaning organ music; from the rented dry-ice machine, fog that smelled like strawberries.
The kids gathered. Some of the older ones, Kasko’s age, were about to turn into grown-ups; they had jobs and goatees and sometimes, by accident, babies. We stood around the room in our fanciest outfits. I wore my father’s tuxedo pants and a sleeveless white T-shirt and a long black tie. My hair, stiff with Ivory, shot straight into the air. Sarah was in a vinyl dress that crammed her breasts up, and I tried not to look at them.
Kasko was the priest. He waited under the exit sign, which Morrigan had hidden with a wreath of plastic orchids, in the three-piece suit he wore to his mother’s funeral last year. I was thinking he should have worn a cape instead, something not so Christian-looking, but Sarah explained that the suit brought him closer to the Dark Side, where his mother was, and thereby invested him with the powers necessary to preside over the ritual.
Morrigan and Egg Boy came out of the kitchen in bathrobes. Morrigan’s midnight-blue hair was tied into clumps with little rubber snakes, and her eyes were painted in the shape of Cleopatra’s. Egg Boy looked like he normally did—bald, angry—except for the bathrobe. They stood in front of Kasko and everybody got quiet.
Why are they wearing bathrobes? I whispered to Sarah.
Because they’re doing the ceremony skyclad, she answered.
The robes dropped, making terrycloth pools at the feet of the bride and groom. I blinked at the sudden flesh. Morrigan had pointy shoulders and pimples on her back but her butt was plenty—I mean it was beautiful—round, soft, tilted up. I stared at its surging, the high curving slice, the two dents at the bottom of her spine. Her little pale legs were shaking. I pictured my hands on her waist, lightly clamped. I kept my eyes away from Egg Boy, afraid of seeing what a handsome guy’s butt looked like. I was sure it would not resemble mine.
I could not see their fronts but Kasko’s stupid lizard eyes crawled down, looking at what he shouldn’t. He saw it on my sister—wasn’t that enough? He stared until Egg Boy kicked his suited leg.
Consulting the script Morrigan had written out for him, Kasko bellowed, There are those in our midst who seek the bond of handfasting. Let them be named and brought forward.
Morrigan and Egg Boy each took a tiny step, but there was not much room to go before they hit Kasko.
Are you Gwyll? said Kasko.
I am, said Egg Boy. (Morrigan had told him he needed a name more appropriate to the ceremony.)
What is your desire?
Egg Boy looked down at his arm, where he had written out his part. To be made one with Morrigan in the eyes of the gods and the Wicca.
Kasko said to Morrigan, Are you Morrigan?
I am.
And what is your desire?
To be made one with Gwyll in the eyes of the gods and the Wicca.
After taking one more glance at her tits, Kasko reached behind him for the plastic sword that had been borrowed from Davey’s uncle, who did seasonal work at the Delaware Historical Society acting out the Revolutionary War. He raised up the sword then handed it to Morrigan and Egg Boy, who grasped it between them.
Here b
efore you, boomed Kasko, stand two of your folk. Witness, now, that which they have to declare.
In my version for the stranger, I don’t mention looking at their butts. I don’t tell about seeing Kasko, after the whiskey toasts, put a finger on my sister’s nose and softly say, What about a handfasting for us? Sarah laughed and shook her head so his finger slipped off. Not for us, she said.
Let’s get in the car, Giles, says the stranger. This heat’s not fit for man or beast. We climb in and he turns the key; the air conditioning comes blasting. His eyes are wet but they still aren’t dripping. I wait for him to say something. What he says finally is, I’m John. We haven’t been properly introduced.
Can I smoke in this car?
You may. The ceremony you describe is a Wiccan marriage rite. I’ve come across it in my research.
What’s the research for, if you’re not writing anything?
The bride, he goes on, happens to be someone quite, that is to say extremely, dear to me. Her name is Abby.
From his shirt pocket he takes a postcard, creased and soft. It is a picture of the Wolvercote courthouse in the fall, with leaves piled red on the square. On the back there is only one sentence: Everything in this town reminds me of falling down.
How do you know she wrote it? I ask.
It’s in her hand. She has a very accomplished, a very graceful hand.
The letters are spidery, slanted, curled—the writing of a person who wants people to think she is mysterious.
He gets something else out of his pocket. It’s a photograph of a girl standing on a lawn in a light green thin-strapped dress with yellow flowers stamped all over it. She seems embarrassed and is not smiling. This girl looks like your average girl, maybe a little prettier than your average girl. Her hair is dark blonde. Her lipstick is pink. If this is Morrigan, she’s deep undercover.
That’s her? She looks all normal and shit.
This is her—before, says John. I ask before what, and he says before she got the idea in her head that college and hamburgers and having sex in the missionary position were going to extinguish her soul. And this was her sunsuit, he says, that I bought for her two summers ago. She called it a dress, but it was more of a sunsuit.
She definitely wasn’t wearing that when she came to Wolvercote.
I imagine not. She burned it shortly before she left me. I got home from class one night and she had this little bonfire going in the kitchen sink. The sunsuit was in flames; so was the phone bill, a letter from her mother, and our marriage certificate.
That sucks, I say.
Her witch phase had been going on for a few months by that time. The books and herbs and amulets—but mostly the new wardrobe. She jacked hell out of our credit card. Started doing a kind of Halloween-on-the-banks-of-the-Nile makeup routine. Made a witchy friend at the New Age bookstore. She thought about joining a coven, but the nearest one was a ninety-minute drive.
She needed a change, I conclude.
John taps a pen against his lips and says, What confuses me is why your fellow members of the rural underground are so secretive about her having been here. Is it from boredom? The need to build drama where there is actually rather little?
Kasko is his best friend, I explain. He won’t let him be disgraced any further. He says Morrigan was a fatal gash in the vein of Egg Boy’s manhood.
The vein of his manhood?
The chick made a fool of him. It amounts to a castration.
So says Kasko?
I shrug. I don’t like talking about Kasko. His name brings up pictures of Sarah without any clothes on, eyes shut, writhing on a gritty sheet and making noises like the girls on the videos Davey keeps in a cooler in his parents’ garage. But I want John to understand his terribleness. Did you know he tortures squirrels? I say. He rigs traps where they strangle slowly until he lets them go. They make horrible little coughing sounds, after. And he shot a dog once in the foot and bragged about it. And his name sounds like a gas station.
That’s awful, says John, but he isn’t paying attention. Will you take me to see him?
Who?
Humpty Dumpty. He of the manly vein.
He’s not really into visitors, I mumble. But okay.
After the witch agreed to cast a spell for me, I looked hard for evidence of success. If my sister slept at home for two nights running, I thought Morrigan had triumphed. If I detected a grain of irritation in Sarah’s throat when she said Kasko’s name, I silently congratulated the Dark Side. But nothing, really, when it came down to it, was changing. I still caught them kissing behind the counter when I stopped at the Morning Star after school. I still heard him whisper, in public earshot, about sticking it in her.
I went by the apartment above the packie. I wanted to ask her why the spell wasn’t working. She might need different herbs, or a frog to grind up. (I would offer to catch one.) In the stairwell I heard screaming.
What’re you talking about? What the fucking fuck are you talking about?
HOW CAN YOU BE SO MORONIC YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT?
I waited on the landing until the screaming stopped. It stopped and I kept waiting and then Morrigan came gunning out the door, black dress afloat. Oh, she said, it’s you! but did not stop. I followed her down two flights into the bright wash of beer light.
Can you please do that spell again? I said. It’s not working that great.
What? Fuck, I have no cigarettes.
Here. I held out my pack. The antilove spell, remember? For my sister and the asshole.
She filled her chest with smoke and said, Look.
With that one word, I understood.
I’m sorry, she said. I’m just not a very good witch.
You’re a fake witch, I corrected.
Morrigan glared back at me, then turned to squint up the block. There was nothing to see. Will you get your parents’ car, she said, and take me to the nearest train?
On the highway, John drives slowly and keeps readjusting the rearview mirror. Davey is going to be mad that I abandoned his truck at the Red Roof. But I’m not afraid of Davey. He’s too little to break anyone’s bones.
She was a waitress, says John, as if answering a question, at the diner down the street from my apartment. I had breakfast there twice weekly before my sociology class. I was very shy. You’ve seen her, so you understand my reasons for shyness. She noticed my books on the table. She was in college too, a psych major. She had never heard Brazilian music. I took her to hear it.
This is before she got all dark and shit?
He nods. This is when her favorite meal was cole slaw and hamburgers. When she enjoyed her sitcoms.
And when you were fucking her, I add, relishing the chance to say this word without lowering my voice.
John snaps, I would really appreciate your not talking like that about my wife.
But you said—
Stop it! His upper lip is twitching. Red spots jump in his cheeks. Have some goddamn respect.
Sorry, I say, and I am. He is doing pretty poorly, this John. He does not seem well. His face has the same quivery, fish-skinned look my mother’s gets right before she refills her prescription.
He parks in front of the neon beer signs. Two floors up, we stop at a door hung with a huge poster for a band Kasko has been trying to book for years but who are too good to come here. The ones who come have no place better to play. John looks disapprovingly at the screaming corpse on the door, its bony hands raised in pleading.
Egg Boy opens at our knock. He is shirtless, in black sweatpants, and obviously hasn’t bothered to shave his head in several days. Soft shoots of gold are growing in. His chest, which I’ve always envied for its hardness, does not look so hard. The belly swells out from under the ribs.
Giles, he nods.
Can we come in for a second?
Egg Boy shrugs, stands back. The room, painted a dark streaky red, with black plastic sheets tacked over the windows, smells like toe lint. The only places to sit
are bed and floor; we all stand.
How you been keeping? asks Egg Boy.
Fine, I say, and look at John, because I can’t think of a way to introduce the topic. The smell in the room is making me breathe through my mouth.
John, says John and reaches to shake Egg Boy’s hand. I’d like, if I may, to ask you about Morrigan.
Egg Boy sticks out his chin. I remember how he clocked a boy once in the grocery store parking lot, a clean quick smash, and the boy didn’t get up for half an hour. That little cunt? What about her?
John coughs. She’s my wife.
She’s my wife. My cunty wife.
I think of my bike leaned up against a bench on the square, under the maples, where I left it this morning. I want to be on it, riding. I want not to see the skin under Egg Boy’s eyes sagging weirdly.
Are you the college motherfucker she used to live with? She told me about you. I pictured you with little granny glasses.
John reaches to dab sweat off the sides of his nose. She didn’t tell you we were married?
Uh, no.
Ah, says John. He sounds very tired. She left me in February, and I’ve been looking for her. I just want to know what happened. I want to tell her she can always come back.
The coming-back part changes Egg Boy’s face. A shudder unclenches his jaw. You would take her? he says. After she dicked you so royally?
I can’t hate her. I’ve tried. I can’t.
It’s easy, says Egg Boy. Just think of how she put her head on your stomach at night and said This is so much better than anything and how she talked about the kids you’d have, how you would dress those kids in tiny black boots and the kids would have your sexy blue eyes. Think of how she said We’ll go to Scotland where they have castles. Think of how pretty she was.
She was pretty, agrees John.
Egg Boy sits down on the bed. John kneels to the floor, leans back against the minifridge. I feel stupid standing. I’m gonna take off, I say.
You mind running by the Star to get us some sandwiches? says Egg Boy. Tell your sister to put them on my tab. Turkey club, no lettuce.
Ham and swiss, please, says John. I notice he has quit sweating.