CVC

by Gloria Vanderbilt

  I held my tongue and watched the babies in a tumul-tuous heap flapping their little arms and kicking their feet, until they grew weak and drifted. I held my tongue, until the mountains were levelled and the babies sank, and there was such a silence I could hear myself breathe. Then I climbed out of my window, stepped into the thick black mire and began fishing. I could feel the mud oozing up past my knees, over my thighs. How would I ever be able to clean all the babies? How would I ever be able to wash this away? I sank to my hips before I saw the place of the hole. The mud had covered it, slick and even – fresh as a newborn’s flesh, and before I retrieved the first little corpse, a thunderous laugh burst from my mouth and filled the great unrelenting void. It was the mud that brought the laughter, the mud that filled the hole, and suddenly, with its dirty certainty, convinced me that nothing I had ever cared about had ever been of any consequence.

  Leon Rooke

  SLAIN BY A MADMAN

  He was. He was slain by a madman. He was slain once all over and the madman wasn’t done and did him a second time, top to bottom. I won’t say it was not deserved. We all of us might have slain him, if we’d known we could get away with it. The whole town contemplated the act a thousand times, daylight through dark. This way, that way, which way ever we could think.

  A Day Pass! They let him out on a Day Pass. Who could have imagined such! That institution was asking for trouble. And where does he go on this Day Pass? He comes here. Of course he does. He comes home.

  So the actual hard-nosed slaying of him by the madman brought some easement to the local situation. But process and accomplishment are two different experiences is what I am saying. Like they are hardly even related. Like you have three sisters totally in disagreement as to character and dimension, and their mother in far orbit and the father so different from those others he’s hardly worth mentioning.

  The madman, who can talk a blue streak when he wants to, isn’t saying much. What he said, in a calm voice chilling to behold, was he didn’t do it. “Affliction’s giant foot is ever stomping down,” he said. “You want to know what marks humankind? That foot. The giant behemoth.” The next second he clammed up. “Now I’m going silent as the little lamb who made me” were his actual words to the authorities, by which I mean me. I’m the law around here. Running a pretty tight ship. Such is what I told this person when she came in, looking all fidgety and run down – strung out! – claiming the madman could not, could not, could not possibly! – be the guilty party.

  Did I know at that point she was the madman’s sweet-heart? No, I did not.

  What I said was, “Delores, dear little sister, why in God’s name are you here?”

  She said, “Because the party you’ve got locked up back there could not possibly be the guilty party.”

  I laughed. Delores is always eager-beaver about something.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “On account of his having been in my arms at The Only Motel when said deed was said to have been accomplished.” She sat right down in my chair, in that thigh-high red pokey-dot dress, saying this. Drinking this Slurpee drink thing through a straw. “He may well be a madman,” she said, “and I suppose he is in the minds of some thwarted, decomposing individuals, but no way would he pass up a good time with me to wreak what havoc you say he wrought on that other fella.”

  I said, “Now, come on.”

  She said, “You come on.”

  I said, “Honey, you are a lying cockroach. At the time of the deed you were teaching your six-year-olds how to hop, skip and jump, and not at no motel.”

  She said, “Every Wednesday at 2 p.m. for the past two years I been hopping on my bike and meeting my madman at The Only Motel. I give my little serpents the Bad Frog book to play out.”

  “Not the Bad Frog!”

  “People wanting to git that book banned left town. It’s back on the curriculum, hot as potatoes.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  She scowled. She hated cussing.

  I said, “All right. You can go on home now. But don’t say nothing to your mother about no motel.”

  “Oh, poor mother! It’s her wash day,” she said.

  She went.

  But first she said, “I know my man is no Goody Two-Shoes and that he seduced a nun in the long ago. It’s jealousy is what it is. All you randy he-hunks want to seduce a nun. Don’t try telling me different.”

  “Now, hold your horses,” I said.

  “He is the apple of my eye, my solace in the crippling storm, and I am up to here with certain people casting aspersions on his character. Just because he once made out with a dumb nun.”

  She sliced a hand up by her chin, saying that. The little pokey-dots bounced all over.

  Then she went.

  I sat a long time mulling over her words. He-hunk? But “havoc wrought upon that other fella” gave me pause. Did she not know this other fella bore her identical name? That, biologically speaking, he was family? Or was she, like the rest of us, bound to deny such until our dying day?

  Here he came on his Day Pass. Spotted the instant he steps off the bus. Baggy suit. Emaciated. Good. May he expire on the spot, we thought. Shoot him. Knife him. Next he’s seen peering into the new Subway. He’s taking gauge of changes since his departure ages ago. What is that he is carrying in the left hand? Is that a gasoline can? Is that a cigarette between his lips? Yes.

  Yes yes yes.

  I went, too. I got the lights spinning and the siren churning and I juiced right over. I went to The Only Motel.

  A short minute before arriving I passed the family ruins and the glistening enmity of Mink Lake. How I hated that lake. But the road was straight and I could close my eyes.

  A toxic wasteland, the sky ever-smoking black above it.

  A poetic line occurred to me: May the tears of ravaged angels cleanse my cheeks.

  “Explain your needs,” Ms. Fixit said to me. Ms. Fixit, what I call her, is one of three sisters running the place. She said, “It’s not Tuesday, why are you here?” She said, “Your usual room is occupied and, anyway, Vivian is in Buffalo.

  “Shopping,” she said.

  “You look terrible,” she said. “You need a good mud-pack ointment on that flesh.”

  Vivian is one of the three sisters. She doesn’t get along that well with the other two. What I say to that is who can.

  Me and Vivian, to make no bones about it, have a thing going. She was supposed to keep her trap shut about it, but, women, what can you say?

  “She’s buying a new mattress,” sister Fixit said. “A new man, a new mattress. Every time. It sure beats me.”

  “Never mind that,” I said. “I seek confirmation on a love tryst involving the madman and a certain redhead named—”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” is what I got in return. “I can set my clock by that pair. Dee zips in on that yellow bike, he zooms in on that red truck. Then you don’t hear a peep from in there until the six o’clock news.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “You might as well face it. Those two are practically wed.”

  “No way am I welcoming another madman into the family.”

  “Another would hardly be noticed,” she said.

  “Now hold on.”

  “You hold on.”

  Her hands and hips were covered in mud. So, too, the naked feet and in her hair.

  Smoke was rising from a barrel out back. “What are you burning out there?” I asked.

  “Your bed sheets?” Ms. Fixit said. She was a smart-mouthed, big-knuckled woman known far and wide. The black folds of history had not obscured her light. To hear her tell it. It seemed to me the flesh darkened under her eyes each time she spoke to me. I could remember holding her down when we were little. Maybe she remembered, too. Although Vivian said neither of her sisters remembered last week. You never know. I had held her down and got in a good bite on her neck. Then everybody else had piled on. The adults hadn’t minded. They thought we were having fun. What she had said wa
s I had a teensy weenie and only fruitcakes would ever look at me. She deserved those bites.

  This, of course, was before the mayhem.

  “Where’s Marlene?” I asked. Marlene was third in the sister trio and way older. Miss Moneybags, they called her, on account of her being the bookkeeper and payroll mistress and hard-nosed tyrant yard-boss who every day strode about in logging boots with her white mane flying.

  “In town getting her shots,” I was told.

  Shots?

  “Yes, shots, by God. One shoots off to Buffalo to buy a mattress, the other shoots into town to get her fanny pumped up with shots. Who, by God, is left here to do all the work?” She went red in the face, saying that.

  “Well,” I said, “you’d best get at it.”

  “I don’t like your tone,” she said. “I don’t like your tone one teensy bit.”

  The Only Motel dogs were snarling in a distant field.

  “Those dogs,” I said.

  She said, “Yep. Dogs.” And strode off to the lean-to where she makes her mud pots. Not mud, I’ve been told, but clay from the good earth. Sometimes, when they are talking to each other, you see the three sisters out there shovelling ivory-tinted clay into buckets, milky lumps from the high walls of the small stream quietly flowing behind The Only Motel. Mink Lake the wellspring. My water, in other words. It has taken, I’m told, ten thousand years for that clay to form. They slip and slide, they tumble, they swat at each other. Always one or the other, sooner or later, will throw down her shovel and crawl miserably from the ditch, shouting nastiness at the others and at any lodger who chances to be on hand.

  At times, the water in that stream runs the colour of blood, who knows why. Blood shades the favoured glaze.

  “This is preliterate clay!” storms Viv, when in one of her fits. “This is pre-agriculture clay! This clay predates the Age of Reason by thirty thousand years! All we needed was a big bonfire! While we’re at it, throw in a virgin child, why not!”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “You come on.”

  Way off there, in a grove of warped trees, sits the parental home, parents abiding mysteriously within, a chain fence in surround of this, No Trespassing signs dotting your every step. Keep Out Keep Out. Mind the dogs.

  “They are perfectly normal,” Viv has said. “You ought not broadcast these erroneous details.”

  Erroneous, my word! Meanwhile, drone planes fly invisibly overhead. Our nation’s on the watch.

  They’ve got suspicions, too, about those nuns.

  Sisters and parents had been visiting the day hell broke loose. Dinner! Ice cream! Dee, playing in a sandbox – chasing a cow? – had been spared. She was what? Two? I was eight. Nine? Did I yet know my arithmetic tables? No I didn’t.

  Is that right? In this backwoods hole, before the nuns, did we diagram a sentence that way? Yes we did.

  It was a woman’s shoe the dogs were arguing over. A black pump. Well, once black. Now it was mostly slobber. Slime. Grit. One dog had the toe, the other the heel. They were pulling and twisting, having a dandy time. What that shoe reminded me of was the madman’s befouled nun. In her nunnery period she had worn a man’s black, clumpy shoe. My men had done a lot of snooping on that nun. We knew everything about her except why she’d give up her virtue to a madman. Although that did, looked at in a certain way, make sense. She was still around, that nun. She had wanted to marry the madman back then, and have his children. She could be very specific about it, if you ran into her at the Easy-Go or the Drugs. “By God, I still do,” she’d say. “I’d toss up Chuck and my current crop of sweet babies for five minutes with that madman.” Chuck, he pulls on his suspenders, he laughs. “My simple tool,” she calls Chuck.

  Once, I was eating a footlong at our splendid new Subway and her boss shoves into my booth. I’m looking at his white collar the whole time he’s talking to me. Finally I have to ask him, “How do you birds keep those white collars so clean? Never a smudge. Nothing. Me, a dirt collarring the minute I don a shirt.” He looks surprised. “Why, my Lord, my flock sees to that! My nuns! Goodness gracious me!”

  Then he smiles, he says, “Or maybe we don’t sweat.”

  Next, the smile deepens and he says, “Or if we do, it’s the sweat of Christ reminding us that divinity and hard work are soul-brothers making our day.”

  What he’d been complaining about prior to that was his shrinking population. He’d lost three nuns – “Three!” – in the past year. What was it? Was it the air people breathed in this town? Was it creeping socialist criminalization of a disengaged citizenry? Was there a sex club afoot, their whole goal the claiming of his nuns? “I tell no lie, they catch sight of the madman, they go giddy. They waddle about like cracked eggs. They’d die to ride in his truck.”

  What could I say? The madman’s a handful. He’s no picnic.

  I thought about having me a slug from the bottle in the glove compartment when I got back to the cruiser.

  I could see Ms. Fixit working at her wheel was giving me long looks. The “V” in the neon over The Only Motel office was blinking. It had been blinking for about six months now. It couldn’t seem to make up its mind about giving up the ghost.

  I decided I really wanted that drink. I had enjoyed me a few on the drive out. Then pitch in the Dentyne, which I could get wholesale any day of the week through my friendship with Big Fred at the Easy-Go. Fred was doing okay now. He’d survived the institutions. He was giving the nun battalion the same deals he gave me. Our families had been tight all the way back to our grandparents, which was as far back as anyone dared remember. There hadn’t been any nuns around here in those days. There hadn’t been much of anything, truth be told. Just endless, soggy fields and a horizon so low you could pitch up a hand and feel moisture dripping down the wrist.

  I was back in the car by this while, having that drink.

  Drinks.

  The scarecrows, I noticed, had come down. Now I thought about it, it seemed to me a long time since I’d seen one. Used to be soybeans growing out here. Corn. Beans. Grazing livestock. Then a new season and flat uninterrupted land stretching to distant wood lines. Now we had houses and town and highways and Subway and The Only Motel. Oh, my! My, my!

  Our cherished Days of Yore. Such was the phrase occurring to me. My eyes wet, though don’t get the idea sentimentality had anything to do with this onrush of tears. You could say any fondness I had for those olden days was in relapse. In disrepair. I still wanted to chomp down on someone’s neck.

  I had the dog’s chawed shoe on the seat beside me. The tongue and heel was likely inside one of those dogs’ bellies. In my line, you never know when you’ll be needing evidence or how that evidence ought to constitute itself. I could look at that shoe and see CRIME written all over it. Which crime? What? Where? My evidence room was stacked with such as that.

  The “V” vacancy sign was making spitting noises. The word, in big orange letters, was spaced all along The Only Motel’s nine shed-like rooms. $19.95 the night. Hours negotiated. Wind had blown rags and fluff and plastic bags up there.

  My Daddy and Big Fred had burnt down the other motel. That project had been the bright idea of some guy from Ohio. Bar, restaurant, disco, pool, fountains! Up in smoke, I tell you! Three days it took our volunteers to smother those flames.

  About the same time in come three Greyhounds hauling those nuns. Into the lumber yard now known as the Olde Abby they move.

  The dogs were back, scratching at my doors, licking my windows, showing me their teeth. George and Martha, if you want me to give those dogs a name.

  I gave some thought to Viv in Buffalo buying that mattress. She liked firm, I liked soft.

  I was exhausted, watching her sister throw those plates. I had to eat off those plates at home plus at Big Fred’s, everywhere, don’t ask me why. Dinnerware kept those girls afloat.

  I had me a madman to nail, and somehow I knew that shoe on my seat featured in the crime. Anyway, my bottle was empty and I needed a
bathroom.

  I had a bit of the shakes but I was composed. Don’t go thinking otherwise.

  Now it was back to the lock-up to chat with the madman.

  But a detour was mandated. Today was payday for the caregivers. This little ditty popped into my head:

  Sex was on a rampage

  whence it lay

  with love

  in dewy glen…

  Or could be plot

  took each the other’s way.

  (So they say.)

  Such foolishness had lately been coming to me.

  Sleeping Estella, dear Mum, had been bedridden through driven years. First the fire, then sickness slouching in. She’d been out of bed once in the past year, that time to see Christmas lights at the Olde Abby. The crèche. She had looked but hadn’t seen. But she was pleased. Dee claimed she heard rumblings in her chest. We tried feeding her ice cream. Which was a mistake. Two churns were going the day hell broke loose.

  Today was bath day. The caregivers had her in the shower stall, propped up on a stool. They had wrapped themselves in black garbage bags. Estelle seemed to be smiling. Perhaps she retained a memory of what water was.

  I watched them carefully wash, rinse, and dry her hair. She had fine, lovely snow-white hair, the part that had grown back.

  Later on, they would dress the bed, salve the roughened skin, powder her. They would ever be talking to her. They delighted in thinking sometimes she laughed. They were good at their job. They had the expertise.

  “You drink that coffee,” they kept telling me.

  The madman had ordered in dinner. He was sitting at a table with a red checkered-cloth top, in the company of a few of my boys. They were all chomping down on something I soon learned was duckling a la chipolata. Or caneton a la chipolata, as he called it. “Here’s how Delores and I compose this dish,” he was saying. “I quote to you from the sixth printing, 1961 edition of Larousse Gastronomique. ‘Braise the duckling in the usual manner. When nearly done, drain and remove the trussing string. Return said duckling to the casserole, adding a chipolata garnish composed of ten braised chestnuts, ten glazed onions of rudimentary appearance, ten lean rashers of bacon, and eighteen lovely carrots diced to olive size. Boil down, please. Strain and pour. Over the duckling, of course. Cook. At the last moment, add exactly ten chipolata sausages.’”