Back in the USSA

by Kim Newman

  I became a vegetarian.

  I think it was 1960 when I read in a magazine how some of the bigger cities were having problems because their cemeteries were full up. The solution was clean, it was efficient, it fitted the sharp new technological image that Nixon's government was trying to project. Yes, I know the history books say Goldwater was Party Chairman, First Secretary and President, but, as we now know, Nixon was working the levers.

  I clanked over to Gutman's place to tell him about my idea.

  "A crematorium, here in Waushara County?" he said, astonished.

  "Sure," I said, "why not? It'd show them city slickers that we're not

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  hicks and hayseeds. It'd be a big feather in Plainfield's cap, too. It'd be the first crematorium in the whole state."

  "But wouldn't it be expensive? The budgets for the coming year are...

  "Got it covered," I said, handing him the cyclostyled price-list from the Acme Crematorium and Blast-Furnace Collective of Pittsburgh.

  Gutman took out his spectacles and examined the paper closely. He was definitely a little thinner than he'd been before Ed had decreed he'd be allocating the meat supplies. "It would mean making sacrifices on certain of our budgets."

  "You can have twenty percent of mine, Comrade," I volunteered. "If we burn our dead instead of burying 'em it'll solve a lot of my problems."

  He looked at me over the top of his glasses. I could almost hear the cogs creaking inside his head. Suddenly he smiled. "Yes, Comrade Sheriff, I understand. I do like a man who can make sacrifices."

  The day that the first crematorium in the state of Wisconsin was opened was a gala occasion. Everyone in Plainfield was there in their best clothes, genuinely happy that the next members of their families to die would be safe from Ed Gein. Half the party brass in the state showed up, too, partly for the free feed (naturally, Ed saw to the catering), and partly because they hoped something would foul up and they could laugh at Gutman.

  Nothing did go wrong. I saw to that. I'd worked late with the engineers from Acme to see that everything was okay. The only thing missing was a corpse. At a Committee meeting we'd discussed all the possibilities. Maybe doing a trial run with a cow or hog (we'd decided that city folks might joke about us. Besides, unless it was carrying bubonic plague or something, everyone'd rather eat it). We thought about asking the State Pen if they were hanging anyone, but to make our first customer a criminal didn't seem worthy somehow.

  Finally, Jimmy Worden had the good grace to have a fatal heart attack three days before the Grand Opening. Jimmy used to run Plainfield's Post & Telegram Office and so he was a Party Member in Good Standing. Short of roasting Kaspar Gutman himself, Jimmy was the perfect candidate. Just to make sure that Ed didn't spoil the party, I moved Jimmy's mortal remains into the jail. We put him in a bathtub and covered him in crushed ice. Me and Jimmy's son Frank took turns at keeping watch round the clock. Frank was a good boy and I later took him on as a Deputy. I still had Lou Ford, but Frank I knew wouldn't snitch on me.

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  Back in the USSA

  So Jimmy got sent on his way, everyone applauded when they saw the smoke coming out of the chimney and everyone agreed that the new crematorium was just dandy. In the months after, people came from all over the county, and even from further afield, to have their relatives burned, or to just look at this amazing new technological wonder. Despite the best efforts of the local Committee, the crematorium had the indecency to make a profit, all of which found its way into the pockets of Gutman and his cronies.

  Everyone in Plainfield now had their loved ones cremated. I'd won this round with Ed. I knew he'd be back, though.

  In the months after that, Ed's production figures didn't fall. He redoubled his efforts at livestock-rustling and his production figures actually went up. He won a Hero of Socialist Labor Citation (first class) signed by Chairman Goldwater himself. They had a big presentation in town; Ed accepted it. Since there were photographers from some out of town papers Gutman had persuaded him not to show up in his Ma get-up. He wore a suit and tie, and the pains in my hand, shoulder, head and missing foot became almost unbearable.

  Late that evening, Ed came up to me in the street. He'd been wearing this same fixed smile all day. He had a hunting rifle with him. He unslung it as he looked into my eyes, seeing that my pain was getting in his way, saving me from him.

  In a way, I guess he respected me. I guess he saw the world much the way I see it. Through a magnifying glass of pain.

  Ed shot me in the chest.

  I lost the use of a lung, and half my face—the half with the eye that works, of course—froze immobile. Nerve damage. After that, I couldn't breathe so easily, especially in the cold, but some of the pain was dulled. Losing a couple of those nerves might just have kept me going.

  Ed claimed he'd mistaken me in the near-dark for the counter-revolutionary who'd dynamited his barn years back. I got removed from office, for inefficiency. This time, Lou Ford had to become Sheriff. He was the hero who had shot it out with Elmer the Capitalist Mastermind in a pitched Wild West gun battle.

  For a while, I considered becoming town parasite. But, as a veteran, I was entitled to work. There's no unemployment in the USSA. Just redeployed manpower.

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  Gutman appointed me to the post of dog-catcher and pest control officer. With my one lung and tin foot, I could hobble after most critters with an even chance of catching up, and my monocular, non-stereoscopic vision flattened everything into a picture book puzzle. How many animals are hiding in this forest? I couldn't tell you.

  In twenty years, I've never caught anything. Round here, stray dogs disappear.

  And stray middle-aged-to-elderly ladies.

  It came as a shock when Ed shot Frank Worden's mother and roped her to the hood of his pick-up. He hauled her out to his place and apparently played his chainsaw pinata act on her, showering himself with fresh guts.

  Frank tried to get Sheriff Ford to do something. Then he hanged himself. That was convenient, because Lou Ford was then able to construct convincing proof that the Wordens had been secret subversives, nestling close to the heart of the Party, sapping our precious socialist strengths. Bernice Worden was a dangerous ringleader and, without her diabolical cunning, Frank was lost and unable to live with the self-loathing and guilt.

  Gutman left the bullet-hole in the wall of the Party Store, and put up a plaque commemorating Ed Gein's swift-thinking, fast-draw defence of his community and his ideals.

  Erskine Cooney was appointed Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Ideology. He orchestrated nationwide Drives Against Counter-Revolution, modelled on the Plainfield Operation, in '64 and '72. He wrote a book about "flying cigars" claiming that those glowing things people saw in the skies in the '50s were a Russian secret weapon, and that comrades abducted by the unidentified flying objects were replaced with exact doubles skilled in subversion and sabotage. That got made into a movie and a TV series.

  Sheriff Lou Ford stayed in office until 1964, though he avoided making speeches at town meetings. One night, he vanished and I figured Ed had got him. Ten years later, he came back from Alaska and it turned out Cooney had got him sent to an oil-drilling camp just in case he ever decided to tell the truth about Elmer. By then, Andy Taylor was Sheriff, but Lou Ford got his old Deputy's star back. He's hanging on until retirement, and doesn't like to talk about anything much. If it weren't for his wonky jaw, you wouldn't recognise him as the same man who disappeared in 1964.

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  Back in the USSA

  Things in Plainfield changed a bit after Goldwater died. When Nixon took over in person he worked hard and buddying up to the Ivans and the Brits who were having problems of their own in Indochina. Nixon got some military production re-deployed to consumer goods, and if you worked hard and kept your nose clean you could eventually get on the waiting-list for a refrigerato
r, washing-machine or an automobile. Everyone got televisions because the TV could spend a lot of time telling us what a great guy Trickydick was. People still disappeared of course, plenty of'em in the first couple of years after Roy Cohn elbowed Hoover out and took over the FBI, but they were mostly city types and almost all Party members.

  Kaspar Gutman had a heart attack through being too damned fat and was forced off the Committee, but his fat son took over and is still running the county, eating as much as he can.

  Ed, he was still around of course, just getting a bit older, that's all. Ed was born in 1909 and jumping people or steers in a lonely place late at night started getting a bit more than he could handle.

  That's when he discovered modern agricultural methods.

  When Nixon set his mind on turning the country into a consumer paradise, he directed that a lot of money and know-how be spent on scientific breeding of livestock.

  I'd always figured Ed for semi-literate at best, but when I discovered him spending more and more time in the county library I was more than a little curious.

  Turned out he was reading government booklets about growth-hormones and steroids and stuff like that. Next thing I know, he's taking shipment of these chemicals.

  Shortly after, he started asking old ladies over to tea. He'd serve 'em tea and coffee and applejack and sandwiches and dainty little cakes he made himself. But always, one of 'em would get extra-special treatment.

  Got so's it became a kind of joke around town. An elderly widow or spinster would suddenly start putting on weight and folks'd say to each other, "looks like old Mrs. or Miss so-and-so ain't gonna be with us much longer." Sure enough, after six to nine months, the lady in question would just disappear.

  'Course all the ladies who showed up to his little parties—and the big one he held every second Sunday in May (Socialist Motherhood Day— used to be known as Mothering Sunday before the Revolution)—knew

  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  perfectly well what was happening. A lot of women turned down his invitations flat, but a few went along because he was such a nice boy, so polite, so attentive, so happy to chat with them about their aches and pains and how their worthless kids didn't visit them often enough. I don't think any of these biddies consciously made the connection between tea at Ed's and their ultimate fate, but they still knew. I guess some of 'em were just so tired, or so lonely, or just reckoned they weren't going to be around for much longer, that they figured Ed's dishonourable intentions were a price worth paying for having a part-share in a perfect son.

  My job gave me an excuse to prowl around, after Ed. When he sat in the park, making up to old ladies, or trying to seem like an old lady, I would look for strays to round up. As near as I could, I saw to it that he never hurt a fly. When he was out at his place with his power tools, I was in the woods, tracking wildcats. I kept children away from him.

  Of course, people kept children away from me. I guess I look pretty frightening.

  I've got more parts missing: Doc Cook misdiagnosed my stomach ulcers in 1965 and hauled out a couple of yards of large intestine, someone lopped off my right thumb while I was flat-out drunk one night after the invasion of Cuba in '68 and all my teeth fell out in the early '70s thanks to that sugar-laced party-issue orange juice.

  I couldn't stop Ed altogether. In fact, I might not have done anything much. He slowed down in the late '60s. In the last fifteen years, I don't reckon he killed more than five or six folks. Most of them old women not long for the world. In '75, he carried off Abby and Martha Brewster in a tender double-embrace. As a joke, when he was finished with them, he chopped off their heads and swapped them around.

  Here we are in 1984—the year in which George Orwell predicted the world would be run by tyrannical capitalists, and citizens would all be the slaves of big Russian and British corporations—and they're burying Ed with full honours. He just keeled over of natural causes, struck down while in the act of sexual congress with a week-dead pig. It would be a proper tribute to him if they cooked and ate that pig at Ed Gein's wake. I trooped past the coffin with all the others. By popular demand, he lay in the Party Hall for a few days, so folks could pay their last respects.

  I made my way through crowds who were respectfully remembering the great man and took a look into the open coffin. I guess I wanted to make sure he was dead. As I stood over him, a fly crawled over one of his

  open eyes. I shooed it away. I'd thought there might be some satisfaction in seeing with my one good eye that the corpse-maker was a corpse himself. I was wrong.

  Looking down on that thin old man with his thin satisfied smile, lying in his mother's best dress and with his favourite cap, I realised that he had escaped. Wherever he was, he was as happy as a pig in shit; and whatever his life had been like out there on the Gein Place with his power tools and dead bodies, it had been as fulfilled and delightful as any man's who had ever lived.

  ABDICATION STREET

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  1972

  "Perfect place to plot," commented Isaac Judaiovich as they were admitted into the Happy Guys Club, "this nest of parasites, old guard, nouveau money, witless younger sons, yankee Reds, perfumed exquisites and mad Jews. We Russians love to plot, Cinzia. I scry this was where they plotted to sack poor Georgi."

  Though it was early, the function room was athrong with fashionably-dressed writers, actresses, poets, and wireless and televisniks. Cinzia Davidovna Bronstein saw a lot of silver lipstick mouths and silver foil mini-dresses. All the men had hair down to their bums, Tartar plaits threaded with ceramic beads.

  Half the people at the party were drunk. Customarily first to the bar, the guest of honour was very drunk. Three quarters of an hour ago, on the early news, Georgi Sanders was noticeably squiffy as he quoted Duma leader Kissinger's latest denials.

  1972 had not so far been a good year for Old Russia. Maybe '73 would be better. She should ask Isaac. He was supposed to be the seer.

  "It's a marvel ITV were satisfied with giving the old soak his cards," Isaac muttered to her through a long-range rictus of ingratiation directed at program planners across the room. The grin disturbed his fiercely generous sideburns and set payesses jiggling under the rim of his conical cabbalist cap. "Something permanent with poison would be more in the style of our new masters."

  Back in the USSA

  Georgi, news anchor for as long as she could remember, was staggering, unable to coordinate his long body, dark vodka spots on his electric blue velvet evening jacket. In the centre of the room, he held court for the last time. After tonight, it was off to Siberia or into the library with a bottle and a bullet.

  "I'm wrong," said Isaac. "The decision to axe Georgi would have been taken at a much higher level."

  "At a board meeting?" said Cinzia.

  "No my dear, at the highest level. BatiushkaT

  "The Tsar?" she whispered.

  "He's majority shareholder in ITV. There was a time when politicos could have stopped him, but the Duma are tearing themselves to bits over Indo-China and the scandals."

  Isaac arranged fingers against his forehead and fluttered his eyes shut, as he did on tele before uttering his popular predictions.

  "I foresee that Nicholas III will wrestle the Duma. He dreams of winning back the power Nicholas Alexandrovich had to give up in 1916."

  A young man in a white polo neck kaftan and sparkly smoked glasses wound through the revellers towards them. Before he could speak, Isaac flung out a hand to fend him off.

  "This is Harlan," he said. "He's supposed to be a cultural attache, but everybody knows he's a spy."

  The American was devastated by Isaac's perception.

  "Just because I'm from the USSA doesn't mean I can't be a swinger, Ike."

  "'Ike'" Isaac spat, delighted with disgust. ut Ikef Harlan is a godless communist barbarian for all his democratic hipster threads. Admit it, you come here for the secrets."

  "All the best girlchiks are here, comrade citizen."


  Harlan was looking at Cinzia over his silly spectacles.

  "Are you a model, sister?"

  She didn't have to have cabbalist powers of insight to recognise that for flannel.

  "Make-up girl, actually. With this lighting, I'd use Number 5."

  "Cinzia has no secrets, Harlan."

  "Nichevo" the American mispronounced. He was distracted, eyes pulled to one side.

  Cinzia turned. A ballerina was walking by in a backless dress, a face painted in red on her elegant shoulderblades, blind eyes rolling over taut back muscles.

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  Harlan was off in pursuit.

  "Is he really a spy?"

  Isaac smiled mystically, losing his hands in the sleeves of his symbol-spotted robe.

  "The United Socialist States of America doesn't have a culture, so what would be the point of a cultural attache?"

  "He doesn't seem like one of those ascetic Caponists."

  "He's been corrupted. That's Petrograd for you. Varoomshka is the mistress of Admiral Beria. Bound to be with SMERSH."

  Harlan tried to French kiss the small of the ballerina's back. She turned in his drunken embrace, showing predatory teeth, and dragged him onto the tiny dance-floor. They spasmed about in an attempt at the new French dance, le Bompe.

  "Interesting people you meet in this business."

  Television was not her first choice career. She had wanted to be a doctor, but abandoned college for a clarinet player. Now, at 23, she was a paint-slapper for Imperial Television. She had not stopped telling herself it was temporary.

  Applause exploded from the main door. Someone special must have entered to make the glamorous people of Petrograd's closed little world of tele abandon their normal collective pose of languid boredom.

  It was Brynner, striding in baggy trousers, soft leather boots and immaculately-cut moujik smock. Though it was spring, he had a heavy military coat draped over his shoulders. Nobody knew quite how much the coat was an affectation; the star wanted to fight in Indo-China, and had volunteered to take the place of a conscript soldier. The army turned him down as too old, but he continued to wear the coat.