The hell with Beckskill, she thought as she sped down the corpse-ridden street. The hell with all of you.
Dorcas and Vernon walked hand-in-hand through town, ignoring the old and recent dead whose bodies lay everywhere. They walked out of Beckskill and continued on in silence until they came to the River Road. Vernon smiled as he looked at the morning sunbeams dancing upon the icy surface of the river, but then the little man's cheerful expression sank into one of misery and sorrow. "Rinds go 'way," he moaned.
"I know, Vernon" she said softly, "but he wanted you do something for him. He told me about it that night when you brought me to the cave."
"Favor for Rinda?"
"Yes, a favor for Rinda. Will you do what he wanted you to do? Will you do a favor for him?"
"Vernon do, Vernon do!"
"Good." She smiled. "Rinda was very worried that after he went away, all the mean faces would be very bad to you, so he told me that he wants you to stay away from them. You remember the cave where you took me that night?"
"Remember."
"Rinda wants you to go to that cave and go inside and stay there by yourself, and never come out again."
"Never come out?"
"Never, Vernon. You never get hungry, do you? Or cold or hot or thirsty?"
"No."
"Then you never have to leave the cave, and you'll always be safe. And just to make sure, Rinds wants you to good-sit always. Do you understand me? Rinda wants you to good-sit always."
Vernon tried to understand. "You visit?"
"Yes, Vernon, I'll come to visit you sometimes. Do you understand me? Will you do what Rinda wants you to do?"
"Rinda friend for Vernon."
"Yes, your best friend, and he loved you very much. And now I'll be your friend. Is that okay?"
He grinned up at her. "Dor Dor friend."
"Yes, I'll be your friend now. Will you do what Rinda wants you to do?"
He looked at the woods that stretched out on the other side of the River Road. "Vernon do," he said, and then scampered off. "Vernon do!"
She watched as he went a little ways and then turned and called out, "You visit Vernon!"
"I will, Vernon, I promise," she called back. "Rinda want, Vernon do," he cried as he ran deeper into the woods. "Rinda want, Vernon do."
She sighed and whispered, "Me too, Mr. Patanjali. I'll do what you wanted. Every sunrise and every sunset, for the rest of my life."
Dorcas stood motionless, her braids fluttering in the cold wind, watching as Grogo the Goblin disappeared into the forest.
By Way of an Epilogue:
From Arthur Winston to the Reader
April 15, 1990
The manuscript ended with the words you have just read, and I must admit that the final scene, with Grogo slinking off to his cave, reminded me a bit laughingly of the end of "Puff the Magic Dragon." I was amused at the way the author took many events that I still recall with great clarity and wove them together within the plot structure of a rather bizarre story; I must also confess to a few pangs of nostalgia and not a little embarrassment at the portrait of my younger self. But as I noted in the Preface, the author's letter in which reference was made to her impending death struck me as being characteristically self-indulgent and melodramatic, and I ignored it. I made a mental note to write to the author as soon as I had a few spare moments, and then promptly forgot to do so.
A week after receiving the manuscript I received a letter from my old friend, which made me rethink my nonchalance. The text read as follows:
Dear Artie:
You're still alive, I'm sure, and so am I, for the moment. After I shipped the book off to you I had every intention of ringing down the curtain on myself, but the more I thought about it, the angrier I got about the whole idea, by the waste. I don't mean the waste of life, because I've already wasted my life; I mean that I got angry about the idea of wasting my death. Oh, I still intend to die, .and quite soon, but not by a handful of pills (a la Monroe) or a hefty dose of smack and liquor (like Janis and Jimi) or a belt looped like a noose over the closet door (that's how Phil Ochs did it). No, I've decided to let my death serve a purpose, and that purpose relates to everything you've just read.
You see, I hate you, all of you. I hate you for what you were and for what you are and for what you did to me, and the only thing I hate more than all of you is myself. I hate myself for what I was and for what I am and for what I have done to myself. So I'm planning to die quite horribly, and I think that after I'm dead I'll be able to kill you.
Are you catching my drift?
I haven't seen Dorcas for ten years, but I know that she has been saying that prayer, or chanting that spell, or whatever you want to call it, faithfully twice a day. I'm not sure where she is, though I know she doesn't live in Beckskill anymore. Of all the people we knew, I think only Becky Saunders is still there, a bitter old alcoholic cripple. Anyway, I have an old address for Dorcas, so I think I'll be able to find her; and when I do, I'm going to get her to go back with me to Beckskill. I'm going to go to that cave at the base of Clayton's mountain . . . I guess it's Becky's mountain now . . . and I'm going to see if Grogo is still there, which I think he probably is. Then I'm going to kill Dorcas and wait until Grogo realizes who he is and what he is. I figure that she'll say the prayer to Vishnu that morning, and I can kill her in the afternoon, so the shit will hit the fan at sundown.
I have a pretty good idea what will happen then. He, the Shiva-demon or whatever the hell he is, once chose Grogo's body as a permanent home because it was so hideous. That's why no matter what shape he took, he always went back to being Vernon Sweet. So I figure that when he awakens, he'll kill me and then become me; and when he realizes how much hatred I have inside, he'll keep my form forever. Do you get it? I'll be the new Vernon Sweet, the new Grogo the Goblin! And then what a bloodbath there will be!
I'm telling you this because I want someone to know. Don't ask me why. And also because, of all the assholes I knew twenty years ago, you were the least obnoxious: but don't get a swelled head about it.
Nothing else to say but this: remember the tandava. It may comfort you as you wait to die. It has comforted me somewhat over the years.
So I've told you everything, and that's that, and now I'm off to find Dorcas and go to Beckskill. It's a bit like the old Rip Van Winkle story, isn't it! Grogo has been sleeping for twenty years.
And I'm going to wake him up.
Lydia
I prefaced this book with the comment that you, gentle reader, would find my comment about its veracity an amusing if hackneyed literary device. ("The story you are about to read is true," etc. etc.) I don't know if it was amusing, but it certainly was hackneyed. Well, here comes another exercise in well-worn prose.
As I write these words to close the book on this tale I am sitting with Peter and Russell over a pitcher of beer and a few shots of bourbon in the Greenwood Tavern in Beckskill, New York, the bar that once in my youth was called the Browns' Hotel. They are sitting pensive and quiet, lost in their own personal reveries as I pen this closing chapter. I am remembering the events of twenty years ago, and I am attempting to reconcile them all with what I read in the manuscript.
I know it sounds silly, sounds so Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. You know what I mean. "As I sat in the same old bar, swilling cheap rotgut and smoking stale cigarettes, I thought back to those days in the past, and I remembered . . ." etc. etc. etc.
I can almost see the editor wince as she reads this.
But I can't help it. It's true. I'm in Beckskill, sitting with Peter and Russell in the same place I sat the night Alex went after Sean with a knife, and I'm trying to remember it all, trying to make sense of it all. (I was there when that happened, by the way. I don't know why the author left me out of that scene in the manuscript, but I can't ask her about it. She's dead. Besides, I am present in appropriate scenes in the rest of the book.)
Anyway, this is what happened over the past two days:
When I received the letter, I dismissed it as more foolishness from a strange and unbalanced person, and I tried not to think about it; but it bothered me more and more with each passing day, to such an extent that I wasn't thinking about anything else and was unable to get any work done, and I finally decided that I had to do something to get it out of my system. I recall thinking that I had to exorcise the demon. An odd phrase, in retrospect.
My wife was taking our daughters to visit her family up near Syracuse for a week anyway, so I was being left to my own devices. (I married Deirdre Duell, by the way. It's been twenty years since we met, and she is as beautiful today as she was when she was nineteen.) I don't usually have much time to myself without commitments or obligations, so I figured that it would be fun to spend a weekend up in New Paltz, where I went to college. Might just take a spin up to Beckskill, too, while I was in the area, just for the hell of it, you understand.
Sure.
I called up Peter and Russell and invited them along for the ride, and they both agreed readily. Peter is a lawyer now, and a good lawyer at that. He doesn't lie, cheat, steal, or kill, which as I understand it makes him a unique member of his profession. He became very involved in the legal side of the environmentalist movement about sixteen, seventeen years ago, and wound up in law school. We lived in the same neighborhood on Long Island until a year ago, when he and his wife and kids moved about three miles away. Russell still teaches high-school social studies, and he lives a bit farther away from me, about ten miles. Hop, skip, and a jump in both cases, though I don't see either of them that often, what with kids, careers, and so forth. You know how it is.
Peter's wife, Janice, is an understanding woman, so she didn't object to his going of for a weekend with his old friends. (Hell, she treated him to a solo week in London as a birthday present a few years ago.) Russell's wife, Debbie, encouraged him to join us, for a different reason. They had a child about six months ago, and Russell keeps tossing the kid up into the air screaming, "My son! My son!" until the poor little thing vomits all over the place. I think Debbie wanted Russell to go with us just to give the baby's stomach a chance to settle.
Russ is still far to the left politically, but like most of us he has abandoned any faith in utopian panaceas. He was a genuine Marxist back in the 1960's, while the rest of us were what I can only describe as half-assed socialists who didn't think about it very much. Today Russell is sort of halfway between being a liberal and being a cautious radical, while the rest of us swing back and forth between apathy and resignation, occasionally mustering up enough enthusiasm to vote for somebody. Peter and I both voted for Reagan. I voted for Carter in '76. I even voted for Nixon in '72, God help me. (But he ended the draft, didn't he? That was a major selling point to a twenty-two-year-old kid who had just graduated from college and had thus lost his student deferment. And anyway, my moral credentials are intact. I was clean for Gene in '68.)
There was a saying back in the sixties, "We are the people our parents warned us against." Well, we have become the people we used to despise in our youthful, arrogant ignorance. We have lawns and barbecue grills and kids and dogs and mortgages. We talk about pension plans and interest rates and taxes. And the funny thing is, life is pretty good this way.
Ah, well. Sic transit gloria mundi. But I digress.
I knew as I passed the New Paltz exit on the New York State Thruway and then pulled of exit 19 that I had to go and speak to the police about the letter I had received. Of course, I had no intention of saying anything about the sixties or about Grogo the Goblin or about a vengeful avatar of Shiva or anything like that, not only because I didn't want to end up in the drunk tank, but also because I knew that the person who had written to me was not, shall we say, a paragon of emotional stability; but the letter bespoke an intention to commit suicide, and I felt an obligation to report it to the local authorities.
As we drove up toward Beckskill I gave Pete and Russ a thumbnail sketch of the contents of the manuscript and the letter, and they agreed with my decision. "She was never really well, you know," Peter said. "She always had problems which I guess we didn't really think too much about."
"Yeah," I agreed. "None of us really gave much thought to the emotional side of things, especially the emotions of a girl as weird as she was."
"Bunch of sexists," Russell said.
"Precisely," I said. "Think we still are?"
"Probably." He laughed, and Peter and I joined in his laughter, knowing (or at least hoping) that we were not.
I paid the toll at the thruway exit and then headed my Datsun 310 for Route 28, which would take us to Route 42. "I guess we were sort of thick and callous back then," I said. "I mean, it should have been obvious to us all that something was wrong with her."
"Sure," Russell agreed, "if any of us cared or were paying attention. All we knew"—and he dropped into an absurd parody of himself twenty years earlier—"was that she was like one really fucked-up chick, you know?"
"That's like really heavy, man." Peter chuckled.
"Like wow," I added, asking myself if we ever really sounded this stupid.
"What are you going to tell the police?" Peter asked.
"The truth," I replied. "She wrote and told me that she was going to kill herself"
"That isn't exactly what she said."
"No, but that's what she meant."
Peter nodded. "I haven't heard a thing about her in years. Have either of you?"
"I have," Russell replied. "Suzie Kosloski still sees her, or at least still saw her, talked to her on the phone now and then."
"Suzie Kosloski!" I exclaimed. "You still see her?"
"Not exactly," he said. "She teaches special ed over in Kings Park. We met at a mainstream teachers' conference a few months ago."
"Small world," I mused. "So what did Suzie have to say about her?"
He paused before replying. "It isn't a pretty story."
"I think we can take it," I said as we drove through the little town of Catullus on our way to Haddlyville.
"Well," he said, "we all stopped going up to see Clay after he sold that land to the town, and apparently she left Beckskill at about the same time. Went down to New York City. She didn't have much education or any skills worth speaking of, so she got mixed up in the sex industry. Peep shows, one-on-one booths, stag films, that sort of thing."
"Jesus." I sighed. "That's a damned shame."
"Should be illegal." Russell nodded. "Anyway, she got involved with heroin and cocaine, got hooked on both of them . . . the kids call people like that smack 'n crackers, I think . . . and the last time Suzie talked to her she had just stopped working in a house. You know, a brothel."
"She was a prostitute?"
"That's what Suzie told me. She also told me that she stopped doing it when she got sick."
I took my eyes off the road for a moment to look at him. "Don't tell me she has AIDS. . . .
"Yeah," he said. "According to Suzie, anyway."
I shook my head. "That's horrible."
"Tragic." Russell nodded, and then asked, "What about those references in her book you told us about, the stuff about incest with her father. You ever hear anything about that before?"
"It was news to me," I replied. "I have no idea if it's true or not."
"Probably is," Peter muttered from the backseat.
Russell turned to him. "Why would you think so, Pete?"
He shrugged. "Why would anybody make up something like that?"
"Well," I said, "if it's true, it makes the whole thing even worse." They both nodded, sharing my thoughts about a life so terribly ruined. Molested by her father, abused by her lover, ignored (I blush to say it) by her friends, unable to pull herself out of the drug swamp in which we had all waded so foolishly, forced by circumstances and personality to live off her body, and at last falling victim to that horrible, horrible disease.
"Poor kid." Peter sighed. We were quiet for a while after that.
The st
ate police station is in Haddlyville, about ten miles south of Beckskill, and Russ and Pete remained in the car while I went in to tell my story. John Bauer, the trooper behind the desk, listened to me carefully and politely and then said, "Well, sir, I can file a report on this if you like, but I don't know if we can assign someone to do any investigating on the basis of some vague reference in a letter. The lady sure sounds ill, but—"
"Officer," I broke in, "there may be a human life at stake here. If she has gone to Beckskill to kill herself, she has to be stopped, confined, given help."
He tapped his pen on the desktop and thought hard. "You think you can find this cave she talks about?"
"I can try," I replied. "That is to say, I know generally where it would be, if it exists. As I told you—"
"Yes, she has a very active imagination," he finished for me. He thought again and said, "I tell you what. I get off duty in a half hour. We'll drive over to Beckskill and have a look. But I really don't think we'll find anything.
The lady could still be in New York City, or in Los Angeles or Paris, for all we know. This may even be some sort of sick joke."
"Maybe," I agreed. "But I don't want to take the risk that it isn't."
He nodded. "Okay. Come back in a half hour, and we'll see what's what."
Peter, Russell, and I had a few cups of coffee at the Haddlyville Diner and soon thereafter followed behind Officer Bauer's patrol car and drove to Beckskill. It is difficult adequately to describe the peculiar sensation I experienced upon entering that town again after twenty years. I had remembered Beckskill as the site of many adventures, many sorrows, and many joys, and reading the manuscript had reminded me of so much; and now, back in that town again, I felt as if twenty years ago had been just last month. Beckskill seemed larger than I remembered it, but my memory may have shrunk it over the years. The old general store was gone, replaced by a 7-Eleven, but Alex Brown's bar was still there. Different color paint, different name, different owners, same dumpy little town.
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