Twisting the Rope

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  Mr. Long took off his jacket, and his shirt. Looking at the creature again, he took off his raw-silk trousers also, and then he bent down and touched it.

  “Give me your hand,” he said.

  It struck at him with terror, and sickness, and with its smeary hands. He turned his face away.

  “None of that,” he told it, not too gently. Reaching under, he picked up the small body. Fearfully thin, it was. Frail. He peeled back the blankets. “Well, my boy,” Long said, giving the ugly thing the same bounce he had given his shining granddaughter. “We must begin somewhere.”

  The boy prodded with his blind head, burrowing under Long’s chin. He gave a child’s sigh and began to sniffle. By suggestion, that brought back Mr. Long’s cough.

  And with that cough, all the sick delusion, the emptiness and the error vanished from the room as though they had never been.

  Gone, gone, utterly gone gone without recall. O freedom.

  For a moment Long thought the boy was dead, but he was only asleep. He went out with the child on his shoulder, looking for Sandy and a bathtub.

  Martha’s patience was worn after twenty minutes of gunning the engine (but not too hard) and rocking back and forth in the ever-so-damned rut. She had let her voice get shrill: almost as shrill as Elizabeth’s. Now, by the grace of Something, they were out and continuing down the dirt track, knitting together the shreds of their manners.

  Where they had passed, an opaque beige cloud rose, obscuring rear vision completely, and though Martha had long since given up hope that anything useful lay at the end of this drive, she had to go on, for the van was too wide to be turned around. (They would have to pass the same ruts coming back too.) Meanwhile Elizabeth was mumbling to herself and biting little holes in an old airport parking receipt she had found on the dash.

  Martha caught a glimpse of figures on the road ahead and began to feather the brakes. The van fishtailed a bit on dust as slippery as mud. “What’s that?” she asked her daughter.

  “A man with a couple of kids,” answered Elizabeth without interest. “And…”

  She didn’t want to say that the other figure looked like an ape, but no other image occurred to her. It was hunched and it moved with a halting, sideways stride. She leaned forward.

  Martha recognized the silhouette of Long, walking like a king and like a dancer down the road, carrying something on each arm. “That’s him.” There was a kind of pride and triumph to Martha’s words that she herself did not understand.

  “Marty? He’s got Marty?” Elizabeth flung open the door and leaned out, though the van was still moving.

  “He has. And she’s drubbing his ribs with her heels, as per usual. But there’s another kid too.” She braked to a stop ten feet from the little procession and hopped out.

  There he was: her friend, student, paramour, road manager. Smiling at her as calm and as solid as a rock. There was Marty, very tired. And the other—there was the face of Marty’s illness: blank, blind, and without understanding. She saw the boy and nodded, as though something had been explained to her.

  And she saw poor bloody Pádraig.

  There was a clinic on Ocean Street, not far from the highway. Martha drove there first and stayed with the injured man, while Elizabeth nursed the temperamental van back to the motel. Mr. Long was more experienced at the driving of this vehicle, but he did not dare release he sleeping child’s hold around his neck. Marty, too, slept, curled in a ball on the bucket seat next to that of her mother. The seat belt twisted, biting into her middle, but she didn’t notice.

  “I wonder what we should feed him,” murmured Long to Elizabeth.

  “Hasn’t he told you?” asked Elizabeth in reply. She glanced in the mirror at him, and there was immense respect in her glance.

  “He hasn’t… told… me anything, exactly. I’m not a psychic, you know, Elizabeth.”

  She gave a little snort. Not a contemptuous snort.

  “Believe me. It is because I am not overly sensitive to things that I can help him. Strong back instead of a ready mind, you know…. “He chuckled at his wan joke, but then went sober again. “When he… communicates he can be terribly convincing, Elizabeth.”

  She spared a worried glance from the road. “That I am ready to believe.

  “We’ll have to call the police,” she added.

  Long waited a while before answering. “There is no hurry.”

  Each of them carried a burden in from the parking lot. Elizabeth Macnamara was happier in hers, and less thoughtful, for Marty’s face was pretty as she slept. Her mother pushed open the unlatched door with her hip.

  Elen was inside, alone. “Hallelujah!” she whispered, and clapped her hands softly in front of the sleeping girl. “I’ve done nothing but make promises to Jesus for you all since you left, and I was almost ready to give up chocolate! Did you find her yourself? Or was it another example of our road manager’s general usefulness?” She spied Long’s head through the crack in the door.

  “By the by—the Grand Inquisitor came back and he took away Teddy. I haven’t heard anything—”

  Long stepped in after Elizabeth, with the handicapped boy. He shut the door carefully with his foot and he looked at Elen.

  Her flying hands fell limp and her bright dark face went the color of putty. Elen made no sound.

  “Pádraig was shot,” Long told her. “He might well have been killed, by all this.” He turned to Elizabeth, who had lain her baby down on the bed. “Gather pillows and blankets to prop him up, please. He can’t breath when laid flat.”

  Elizabeth, without demur, went from bed to bed and pulled off all the pillows in both Long’s room and the other. It seemed odd to her that Elen Evans did not lift a finger to help, but she was too concerned to feel resentful. Together she and Long stuffed the little shape with the bulging head and blank eyes upright. She ventured to pat his hand, but felt a shock of fright when he grabbed it fiercely and would not let go. She sat down beside him, willing calmness. Waiting.

  Elen was talking to Long behind her. It was hard to hear from down on the floor. Elizabeth had to wrap herself up in her own arm in order to raise her head to see them.

  What she did see astonished her, for the drawling, self-possessed harp-player had both hands raised like claws, and she was shaking her head violently. “Oh no, not Sandy. Not Sandy,” she was saying. “With her stupid shotgun full of salt! And not Pat!”

  “It struck his back and the back of his neck. There was great pain and bleeding, but by good fortune, his spine and head were not damaged.” He might have been discussing the event with a stranger, for there was no warmth in his words.

  Still Elen shook her head. “Sandy did it?”

  “Confusion did it,” stated Long. “Fear and confusion. She could not endure Jude.”

  Jude? Elizabeth jerked against the hand that held her.

  Elen cried like a bird. “Endure him? No one can endure him, least of all me!” Her voice broke. “I couldn’t stand it the day I gave birth to him, and I swear it’s worse now!”

  Elizabeth’s mouth fell open. “Gave… birth…?” She glanced repeatedly from the ill-shaped head of the boy to Elen’s face: dark-eyed, smooth, delicate as a baby’s. As a baby’s ought to be.

  “This is yours? Your son?”

  Elen flinched from the word. She hit the lamp on the breakfast table and it fell crashing. “Mine. And George’s, goddamn him. He was born this way.” She stared hard at Elizabeth and added, “His name is Jude.”

  “Judy, you mean?” Elizabeth rocked back.

  “Judy,” Long stated. “After the patron of hopeless cases.”

  Elen took a breath and started again, more calmly. “I didn’t call him that; the nurses at the home did. I didn’t call him anything. I ran away.” She braced herself against the table edge and closed her eyes.

  Elizabeth gazed from Elen to Long, stupidly. Finally she fixed on the woman. “Why don’t you come here now, Elen. Don’t you want to touch him? He’s
been terribly unhappy.”

  Elen turned her head out the window. “Can’t touch him. When I do, he screams. Always has.”

  Quite abruptly, Jude fell asleep. It was as sudden as quick death, and his hand fell from Elizabeth’s arm. At first she was alarmed, but she made sure of his breathing and stood up.

  Elizabeth was not an inquisitive person, and she was well aware this was not her business. But she was a mother with one child, and she could not let the issue be. “Let me get this straight. This is the child that my mother talked about—that was stolen from the orphanage a couple of days ago?” Elen nodded, not meeting Elizabeth’s eyes.

  “And he’s also ‘Judy,’ the one who’s had Marty distracted for the last few days?” She glanced involuntarily to the door to the next room: Marty’s room.

  It was Long who replied. “I can think of no other explanation, Elizabeth.”

  But Elizabeth did not look at him. “Did you know it was him, doing that to my daughter?” Her voice rose as she spoke, angrily.

  Elen looked away—to the mirror and then down. “I… suspected Sandy had taken her to see him when she babysat, Friday. Not a clever thing to do. What can a little girl make of all that? I was afraid she had seen him as a hobgoblin, out to get her. Because he looks funny. But it was different from that: Marty’s such a… such a fine kid. And when she started wandering off, I felt—I felt… well, what do you think I felt!”

  Elizabeth’s square shoulders settled as her anger leaked away. She thought of her fine daughter, who might not have been so fine. “Why—why did you take the boy if you don’t dare touch him? He’d surely have been happier back—”

  Long’s deep voice cut in again. “I don’t think it was Elen who stole Judy from his home, Elizabeth. I think it was George St. Ives.”

  The Devil to Pay

  Long put out his hands, palm upward, together, in a formal, ancient-seeming gesture. The abnormal fingers made a woven bowl. He said to Elen, “It makes no sense any other way. You had not even arranged a place to keep him….”

  “Only with poor Sandy, who…”

  “Is no good at this sort of thing. I know. I have only wondered why you did not take Judy back to his home as soon as you found that George had him.”

  “George had him? Had who?” It was Teddy who spoke. He had come in silently and now stood staring at the entire scene. His biscuit-brown forehead was set in wrinkles.

  “George St. Ives stole a kid? This kid?” The tall man lowered himself onto the bed next to Elizabeth. In form, expression, and hairstyle, they looked like twins. His shoulder jostled her, but she didn’t notice.

  Elen sat at the breakfast table, her face lit from beneath by the light of the overturned lamp. Her snub nose bore a close resemblance to that of the sleeping boy, and there was also something about the eyebrows. Thoughtlessly, she ran her harper’s fingernail between the lamp base and its protective felt cover. “Yes, and yes.” She glanced at them all from half-closed eyes. “You get to hear it all. All about Judy and about George. It’s quite a tale!”

  “Maybe you should wait for Martha and Pádraig,” suggested Teddy, who was suddenly afraid of the story.

  “Better I should wait for the police,” she answered heavily, and as everyone sat silent in wonder, Elen picked up the telephone and called the station.

  It was a close little motel room, with eight adults and two children in it, for Martha had shown up with Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin only just after the arrival of a tired-looking Detective-Sergeant Anderson and his assistant.

  During the twenty minutes of waiting, Elen Evans had not moved once from her seat at the table. No one sat across from her, though Pádraig might well have done so, had he been able to sit in a chair. Conversation had been confused, and now that the police had arrived, had died entirely.

  The window was open, and the evening land breeze leaked in under the door and flattened the curtain against the screen.

  “I was sixteen when I got pregnant,” Elen began, and she kept her eyes on the tattered felt she had pulled away from the lamp base. “In Oakland, my first year of college. After three days in the company of George St. Ives. Sandy Frager introduced us, you see. That’s where she came into things. Her… karmic debt!

  “I was an idiot at the time.”

  No one spoke, though Teddy Poznan came closest to it. He made a wordless demurral and grinned at Elen. Pádraig was entirely hidden behind the bulk of the detectives. Perhaps, after the medication he had been given, he was not paying attention.

  I don’t come from the sort of family where such… originalities… pass. When I went back to Atlanta for Christmas there was a scrumptious, bang-up fight, with me cast in the role of bangee, and I left home. Never went back.

  “I didn’t have an abortion. Can’t now remember which of the many reasons I used to hand out to people was the one that mattered to me, but whatever. I didn’t. Maybe it was just because that’s what my father wanted me to do. Besides. There were always people crying out for little white babies. I thought.” As she talked the felt came away in pieces from the lamp. Elen did not look up, nor did anyone else make any noise.

  “I didn’t have an abortion but I didn’t go to an OB, either. I was full of the idea that women had been having babies for a long time before doctors got involved. Funny sort of attitude, wasn’t it? Goes with traditional music. And I was embarrassed all to hell. So I didn’t find out in time that… that he had had the clap.

  “I never got any symptoms of the disease. Or none I could divorce from the weirdness of pregnancy, which is a really extraterrestrial state of life.” Elen said the word again. “Extraterrestrial.” Her mouth pulled sideways.

  “Sandy delivered the baby for me. My best, most closemouthed friend. The only one who ever knew. She always felt so guilty about it, as though she could have helped what George was. What Jude was. Or what I am. Poor, poor Sandy.”

  Pádraig groaned, perhaps coincidentally. Detective-Sergeant Anderson gave his bandaged torso an interested glance. He was surprised how white the boy’s skin was. No sun at all.

  “From the beginning I couldn’t stand him. The baby. And he couldn’t stand me. If I’d been the violent type…”

  Anderson glanced back at her.

  “… I’d have thrown him into a wall. He just cried, and gushed shit, and screamed. Wouldn’t nurse. We didn’t guess that he was blind. And retarded.” Her voice broke quietly.

  “After a few days or so, it became unbearable. I drove him… drove him down to the Adventist Home and left him there. Ringing the bell. It was just like something out of Dickens.”

  Anderson made a little noise, as though warming up his vocal chords for speech. “You didn’t have to do it that way, Ms. Evans. It’s a perfectly accepted thing to place a baby, if you can’t handle him. Even a problem baby. Especially a problem baby.”

  Elen looked up and her eyes were bright. “Ah, but it’s much easier just to ring and run, Sergeant. Then the whole thing never happened at all. You see? And I had just turned seventeen and disowned my family. Does this all sound like the story of a girl who does things the best and most responsible way?

  “Anyway.” Elen yanked one more time, vengefully, upon the felt circle, which came away in her hand. She blinked at the little mess on the table. “What do you know? This thing is filled with little dead bugs. In the lamp all this time.”

  Everyone did look, as it was easier than looking at Elen.

  “Then I was just seventeen. Now I’m twenty-four.”

  “So am I,” said Pádraig, much to everyone’s surprise.

  “I thought you were twenty-one,” murmured Anderson over his shoulder.

  “Twenty-four,” said Pádraig obstinately, looking like a small, hunched bull. He glared at the sergeant. “And I’m not the Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin people think I am. I am my cousin. So now we will have no secrets, here, at all.”

  Mayland Long caught Pádraig’s eye and gestured toward Elen, giving him a chidin
g glance. Another glance shared with Anderson said very clearly that shock and medication affect people in strange ways.

  Elen had not noticed the interruption. “If I’m a fool now, it’s a very different sort of fool. Not so easily gulled, I hope. Not so quick to cut and run. I’ve been paying dues…”

  “The money that comes to Jude in blue envelopes?” asked Anderson.

  She smiled tightly. “That’s not what I meant, but yes. I sent it.”

  He gave a satisfied grunt. “That’s why we suspected that the boy had been taken by someone who cared. The money that came every month.”

  She nodded with a bit more animation than before. “The poor nurses. I’m assuming they care for him there. I know he doesn’t react to everyone as he does to me…. “She shot a covert glance at Mr. Long’s concerned face.

  “My… son doesn’t like me, still. I found that out this week, and in spades.” Her eyes drifted past Anderson’s legs and Martha’s skirt to where Jude lay sleeping, propped with pillows and looking almost at ease. “But then, why on this sweet earth should he?”

  There was another rustling, wordless response.

  “It was Sandy who got George involved again. Her fate, I guess. In San Francisco. He remembered her and her connection with me. Can you believe that? Considering it had been almost eight years, and the hot and cold running stream of girls and women…. And he said something that led her to believe he knew about Jude. Something about starting to take on his responsibilities. She didn’t know that was just his male menopause trip, or something.

  “So”—Elen took a breath and blew all the tiny dry insect corpses off the table—“she spilled the beans. The next thing that happens is Sandy hears on the radio about a kid like Jude being stolen and she calls to ask if I did it.”

  “St. Ives had taken the boy?” asked Anderson neutrally.

  Elen tried a smile. “Got it in one. It was all part of his quest for identity.” She shot a removed, very chilly glance at Ted Poznan, who did not look away. “He went out fight after the concert on Friday. We’d just had a very nice, well-aged battle in the basement, over a very smarmy little musical trick he’d played on… someone.”