Man With a Squirrel

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Fred flipped the bacon with a fork and turned the heat down.

  “I saw the rest of your painting, Fred,” Molly said. Fred raised his eyebrows.

  “Cover-Hoover had brought it with her, rolled in a mailing tube. I forgot to mention it. She carried the tube before her like the Ark of the Covenant, climbing the stairs to the third-floor apartment. I didn’t know what it was.”

  Fred said, “What did they do, worship it?”

  “They cut it in half.”

  “Oh, shit!” Fred said. He put his bacon on paper towels to drain. “Suffering sweet shit! What are those assholes doing?”

  “I’m trying to tell you,” Molly said.

  “These people don’t know your connection to me, do they?” Fred asked. He dropped bread in the toaster.

  “Not from me.”

  “Excuse me interfering, but these are not nice people.”

  “I know it.”

  “Where are the pieces? They cut lengthwise across the head, I assume? Even though they know the thing’s worth at least ten thousand bucks to someone?”

  “The cut’s vertical, not through the head. Ann did the cutting, with Cover-Hoover holding her hand to give her healing strength, when the time came. They used a Skil-knife and they followed a line already drawn in charcoal. There was method to it, and premeditation. They kept the pieces too, when the ceremony was done. Ann rolled them up together and put them back in the tube. Is that toast for me?”

  “I reckon so,” Fred said. “I’ll make more for myself. Ann Clarke walked away with my last piece, which is now two pieces. Right. Fuck. For the hell of it, if you saw it that close, was there a signature?”

  Molly said, “Here’s what I saw: ‘I. S. C. Pix’ next to the head. Beautiful man, by the way. I. S. C. Pix. Doesn’t sound like John Copley.”

  “Wait a minute. You had someone in your library a while back, last week maybe, asking about Pix, remember?”

  “I did?”

  “You called and asked me about it and I made a joke, one x or two?”

  “Two. Over easy,” Molly said. “Oh. The joke. Yes, I recall. I didn’t see the client. Billy handled it. It was a telephone inquiry. We note the question and telephone them back if we get the time and if we find an answer.”

  Fred broke two eggs into the pan for Molly. “If that note exists, get ahold of it tomorrow, would you?” Fred asked. “Also, I left a note for you, hoping you could help identify the sitter. Ten to one the query only leads to Kwik-Frame; but if not—but go on with your story. I can explain Mr. Pix later.”

  “Let me start again. It was eight-thirty. Cover-Hoover led the way upstairs. Ophelia, at her obsequious best, followed her. Then Ann and Sandy and then me. We sat on a couch or on chairs, as Cover-Hoover directed us. She had to give a speech, mostly to clue Ophelia in. Ophelia sat there with future TV programs flashing across her eyes. She’d dressed all in black. We all had, following Cover-Hoover’s directions. Therefore Sandy stood out. White party dress with frills and a fat sash a girl of ten would be ashamed to wear.

  “Cover-Hoover told us, in a we-are-gathered-together intonation, that this was to be Sandy’s night. She, the younger sister, had been the most abused one. ‘We are here tonight in loving-caring, and hopeful-healing, to set this victim free. From now on she will be known as a survivor. Whatever happens here tonight, Sandy, we will be here for you. And you will be safe. The only way to purge the abuse is to bring it forward.’”

  “Sandy started to shake and tremble. My goddamn scar started burning. ‘He’s here,’ Sandy said. ‘Not yet, but he will come,’ Cover-Hoover told us. ‘And when he comes, you will prevail.’”

  Fred put Molly’s eggs on toast and sacrificed his bacon to her. He started more bacon.

  “They really said ‘prevail,’” Molly said, taking a bite of fried egg on toast. “We all had to repeat, ‘You will prevail,’ like cheer-leaders from the seventeenth century. Everyone worked themselves into a state. We turned the lights down low—no candles or incense but you get the idea. Everyone watched Sandy moan for five minutes, this being her night.”

  “You did not take to Sandy?” Fred remarked.

  “We were told her traumatic past induced multiple-personality disorder. Of all the ones she tried, she didn’t find one I liked. Anyhow, Sandy’s function was to be the mascot or medium. I gathered Ann went through a similar process a few years back, though she doesn’t show the same histrionic flair. Blasted is more her style. She sat through the whole evening looking like, I told you so, never astonished. She’s older than I am, Fred. Really old enough to know better.

  “Anyway, the stage having been set, Sandy thrashed in her party dress, lolling on the couch next to Cover-Hoover and groaning, ‘I can’t.’

  “Everyone told her she could, it was the only way, and she’d be safe, no one would leave her. Ophelia ate it up. You could see her thinking camera angles. The victim has beautiful long black hair and a great body.”

  “I know that,” Fred said.

  “You understand, the assumption is I am attending this event to pick up pointers for when it’s my turn to get the call, after I remember enough.

  “Suddenly, down Sandy goes onto the floor, in her white party dress, jerking as if she’s been shot, and she moans in a little-girl voice, ‘He’s here. He’s here.’

  “Everyone looks around. You couldn’t help it, peering into every dark corner of the room. Her terror was so riveting, the way she’s rolling on the floor. You see the rest of her costume includes accurate little-girl white cotton Spanky Pants. My scar burns and throbs. Everyone feels an alien presence in the room. He’s a big, looming, stinking, hairy thing with horns.”

  “Everything you want in a guy,” Fred whispered.

  “The scene called for extensive nudity,” Molly went on. “But we were spared. Sandy, in her trance, moaned, ‘The dark man. No. I won’t. It’s too much. It’s too big.’

  “She gasped and heaved like someone being raped; someone small. It was horrible, Fred. You couldn’t help but believe it. I mean, there it was! The poor child. Such suffering. Such anguish. Such hideous abuse. We all sat transfixed by the awful privacy of the little girl’s pain. You accepted she was a little girl.”

  “The dark man,” Fred said. “In Cambridge you get this PC circumlocution even in a state of trance?”

  “‘Mr. Pix, Mr. Pix,’ Sandy whispered in a tiny, wounded, last-gasp voice. That’s when Cover-Hoover unrolled the rest of your painting. I almost peed my pants I was so surprised. You’d told me about it but still I was not ready for it.

  “When Sandy saw this thing, which Cover-Hoover and Ann held out, the patient went cataleptic. She lay on her back with her legs open, her arms raised to fend something off, staring at the face of Mr. Pix.

  “Cover-Hoover murmured in her gentle, gentle voice, ‘Annie and I are holding Mr. Pix, dear. If we are holding him, it cannot be Mr. Pix on top of you, dear. Who is it on you, dear? Look at him. Look at his face!’

  “‘I can’t!’

  “‘It’s a face you know, dear.’

  “‘He’ll kill me! He’ll kill me!’

  “‘Look at him!’ Cover-Hoover commanded.

  “Sandy crumpled into an agony that seemed, if anything, more real than what she had been showing us. She resisted a while longer but the dominance of the situation she was in, as well as Cover-Hoover’s skill and her older sister’s prompting, forced it out of her. She stared in a cold, adult way, and screamed, ‘I see. It is my father on me.

  “‘And all his friends are waiting.’”

  27

  “Explain how doing further massacre on the painting helps the situation,” Fred said. “I gather that’s the next event on the program?”

  “First we had the blubbering aftermath of breakthrough,” Molly said. “And never have I seen so confident an exchange of emotional matter. It was a release, a true catharsis: a good cry. We all joined in, even Ophelia, though she was mostly thinking money because
as entertainment this self-help shtick has it all.

  “After Ann had taken her younger sister downstairs—sorry, Fred, they had the painting with them—for Manny to take them wherever they go, I could see Cover-Hoover was disappointed in me because I didn’t get swept up in the contagion, start feeling my daddy at his priestlike task, and have to make my own retreat along with Sandy back to their halfway house.

  “Anyhow, as Cover-Hoover explained later, it is one thing to know the abuser in theory, but until you can add your corroborative recalled emotional trauma, your understanding is incomplete and you cannot be healed. It must be lived again.

  “Sandy has known for years she and her sister were offered ritually and regularly—widespread and commonly—in rites of satanic worship. Everyone had agreed long since that their dad was a chief organizer of these chowderfests. But Sandy had to fully experience it herself in order to surrender—Cover-Hoover’s term—to the truth of her own history, and to reclaim her body.

  “Ann led the way. Then, after Sandy started having her own flashbacks, after Cover-Hoover pitched in to help, she recovered repressed memories of being violated on their living-room rug by a dark, ominous presence who brought with him a familiar spirit—a little animal.”

  “Oh, come on,” Fred said. “My squirrel?”

  “It sounded more malicious as Cover-Hoover described it. More like a weasel or a monkey on a chain. They saw a ‘dark man,’ but they couldn’t point a finger at anyone black not having mixed with anyone of that persuasion. That’s a lucky break for someone. People haven’t forgotten how to do one kind of lynching or another. For every victim there must be a perpetrator. But they put it together that the dark, ominous presence was a picture that hung in their house, and so they had to be wrong about the character in the picture doing these things to them. A picture is worth a thousand words, but there are limits.

  “So, they concluded, if the painting didn’t do it, somebody else did. That’s logical. They looked around, and tried hypnosis and role playing and so on, and sooner than you might think, they found another candidate.”

  “Daddy,” Fred said. “Was your dad in the same satanic group as theirs?”

  “Theirs belonged to a Brattle Street coven,” Molly said. “And here’s where Cover-Hoover may be right to fear reprisals. They are starting, at least among themselves, to name names. They’ve got perps from the Divinity School, and a former assistant secretary of state: no riffraff, no city counselors or anything tawdry like that.”

  Molly put her head in her hands and was silent. The silence was like thunder crashing through the room. One moment she had been her cynical, cheerful self. The next, a quiet loomed out from her that filled the house. She sat like that for three minutes. When she spoke again, her voice was dull, and she did not look up.

  “You have to be a criminal or hero to deny what everyone around you sees. Most of us are neither. We depend on each other to affirm our most common experiences. It’s dangerous what she’s doing. That older sister’s a zombie, and the younger one, the fruitcake, is heading in the same direction once Cover-Hoover finishes wearing down her independent streak.

  “If something else had weakened me already—I don’t know, suppose I’d lost my job, or lost a child, or couldn’t get loose from a bad marriage. If I were desperate and couldn’t find anything better to do, I could see myself…” Fred let her silence linger. The kids were moving upstairs. There wouldn’t be much time before the nature of the day changed. Molly said, “Once you’ve decided on that road, what happens next? What about the old geezer who fostered these two late, late adolescents? Does Cover-Hoover think about him?”

  “I fear he was a major part of her thinking,” Fred said. “I have to find out, I guess, though it’s not my job. His name is Martin Clarke; is or, as I fear, was.”

  “Martin?” Molly said, looking up with big tears in her eyes. “You think that was our Martin, standing outside the house at night, looking for the daughter he had misplaced?”

  The telephone rang in a timely way. “Jeff Blake here.” Fred signaled to Molly that this might take a minute. Molly started rattling dishes. Fred said, “Thanks for calling. Let me think where to start.”

  “If the subject is my ex, most any place you start will get you somewhere you don’t want to be,” Jeff Blake confided. He used his voice as if he wanted you to conclude he’d passed the bar but found the insurance business far more stimulating and rewarding.

  “Why don’t we do this over a drink, or coffee?” Jeff Blake said. “I’m open until two o’clock. What’s the exchange I called you at, Arlington? I’m J.P. Tell you what, my lady is out of town. Conference. I got nothing to do until this after. And I am aching to eat grease. Split the difference. I’ll be in the Watertown Diner in Watertown—you know it?—in about thirty-seven minutes, eating hash and eggs. I’ll be the one in the suit. If you want to come by and talk, we’ll talk. I’m easy. Something comes of it, fine. Nothing comes of it, that’s fine too. Like I say, I’m easy. See the suit is because I have a wedding at two o’clock. Did I say that already? And it’s no use getting dressed twice when you can get dressed once.

  “I’d as soon not talk on the phone, you know? I like to see the whites of their eyes. So. You want to talk, we’ll talk. At the diner. Half an hour, give or take a few. That good for you?”

  “You bet,” Fred said.

  Terry and Sam came in, preceded by sounds of intense discussion. They fell silent when they saw Fred in the kitchen. Sam said, “You said you thought one time you would be a pitcher, Fred. In those days did the pitchers use the same dorky gloves they do today?”

  “Some did. I always preferred a fielder’s glove.”

  “What color?” Terry asked.

  “They all come out about the same after you use them awhile,” Fred said.

  Sam and Terry nodded. Fred divided the comics into sections and handed Terry the portion containing Garfield. Her week was ruined if she did not read Garfield before Sam did.

  “I have to go talk to this guy,” Fred told Molly. “After, depending on what develops, I may go check in on Marek Hricsó; or the guy I’m going to see now, Jeff Blake, who was married to Sandy Blake for ten minutes once according to my informant, may point me in another direction.

  “Cutting that painting up. I still don’t get it.”

  “They called it weaning, or transimaging,” Molly said. “The abused child, revolting against the enormity of what she knew, shifted the blame onto an innocent icon—the painting—and the blame must be shifted back where it belongs, by the ritual dismemberment of the mistakenly selected alternate surrogate.”

  “And they don’t care they’re wrecking a quarter-million dollars worth of painting? A real icon?”

  “Presumably they don’t believe that. Who is Mr. Pix?”

  “He’s not a problem. I’ll tantalize you now so you’ll want to stick with me. I’ll call if I can’t make it back for the hoedown with Byron Ponderosa and Ophelia.” Outside the window it was dark and damp. The lilac bush at the foot of Molly’s garden looked like a bad dream about insects: not a sign of a leaf.

  “Gloomy today,” Molly said.

  Fred started out to the living room to put the bed up and get his jacket.

  “I’ll do the bed,” Molly said.

  Terry and Sam markedly paid no attention.

  “Wait a minute,” Fred said. “You say Manny was watching for someone they called the Stalker?”

  “Correct.”

  Fred stalked out.

  * * *

  Once you have made it successfully past the age of twenty, it is hard to follow eggs on toast (which Fred, in solidarity with Molly, had eaten for breakfast) with hash and eggs. Fred ordered coffee, sitting in a booth at the Watertown Diner, and watched for Jeff Blake, who should be a man in his late twenties or early thirties wearing a suit on his body and a handshake in his smile.

  Blake did not show up until almost noon. Fred knew him right away. He was five f
oot five and already had a well-advanced paunch, which accentuated the almost-baby-blue double-breasted suit with the pink carnation. Blake’s face was less pink than the carnation, but it was working in that direction and, by evening, if the wedding reception went well, who knew?

  Fred stood, and a mysterious unseen power, common and widespread, caused him to reach out his hand in welcome. “Fred?” Blake said. “Good to see you. I’m running late. If you don’t run, something bites you in the tail.”

  He laughed. The waitress behind the counter looked over. Jeff Blake held his hand up. “They know me here,” he said. By now they knew Fred, too. They’d been watching him drink coffee for an hour, wondering if he didn’t have a place to live. The waitress came over. “What’ll you have?” she asked.

  “The usual.”

  “The usual what?”

  Blake attained the color of his carnation. “Hash and three eggs over easy, extra side of home fries, whole-wheat toast, coffee, grapefruit juice,” he said.

  “I guess she’s new,” he told Fred. “No offense. See, people remember me. I don’t know what it is about me. Women especially. Because I make people feel good, my lady says, and if they don’t want to feel good then the hell with them.”

  Fred said, “I called about Sandy Clarke.”

  “She still uses Blake,” Jeff Blake said. “You can’t blame her.”

  “What happened?” This did not seem a person who would respond to less than an accurate blow with a hammer.

  “She was a fucking introvert,” Jeff Blake announced. “That’s to begin with. Then she got turned off of sex. And frankly, between you and I and the bedpost, I did not have time for all the whining. Still, no hard feelings. What does she want?” His friendly, open look was immediately canny.

  “I don’t represent her in any way.”

  The waitress brought Blake’s order in two trips. He decided not to send anything back or say, Thanks, honey. Instead he took a bite of hash and leaking yolk and said through it, “You talk. I eat.”