2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  “And now?” I say, turning down the radio low so it’s just a murmur.

  “Honey, I don’t know what now is. A way station maybe. A pit stop on the Road to Somewhere Else. Who knows how the rules work? I’m just happy to be playin’ the game a bit longer before…” She tosses her hair and the copper-red of it gleams in the buttery light. “I’m cold,” she says.

  The sun has been baking the Arizona desert all day and inside the house, even though I’ve got the air conditioner cranked up and it’s past midnight, it’s still so hot I worry that the windows might crack. It’s been known to happen.

  But she’s cold. And I’m a gentleman.

  “Warm me up?” she says.

  And I love Juney. I’ve loved her since the minute I laid eyes on her. But this is something else.

  So I go with her. She tastes the way the desert smells after the rains. Like creosote. The black taste of tar. Her skin freeze-sticks like an ice cube, but she’s my lady of Good Times.

  She’s my lady of I’m Only Human.

  She is beautiful in the moonlight streaming through the window as I lay her down on the bed. As I kiss the curve of her breast.

  She is wearing garters. I know this should mean something to me, but in that moment it don’t.

  I slide my fingers up the silky surface of her stockings. I can feel the muscles underneath. I dream I can feel her pulse. My thumb catches on the hook.

  She’s just a way station, I think. Just a pit stop.

  She is beautiful but now her eyes are black. Whatever it was that’s underneath her skin, that coldness, that oily sweet smell, it’s getting stronger. I don’t know what she is. It’s starting to scare me. But I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. I want to touch her. I want the feel of her stiffening nipple between my fingers, the clench of her legs around my waist…

  And that’s when the door to the house busts open.

  Because I have left the phone off the hook.

  Because Juney has been worried. But pleased too. Pleased about me pouring all the booze down the drain. And she don’t want me to fall off the wagon. Not this time. Because this is my last chance. I know that. I know I can only break her heart so many times. And Carl knows that too. Carl knows how close Juney is to the edge. How close to breaking she is with that shit-drunk husband of hers.

  None of this is a mystery novel. None of this takes much guesswork.

  So he hears the noises coming from the bedroom. He knows what those noises mean. And he knows Juney’s still on shift at the Dunkin’ Donuts.

  And, best of all, he knows where the Colt is.

  • • •

  Carl’s got a sour smell to him. Like sweat mixed with old bacon. I can smell him.

  There’s a hot breeze that’s tugging at my hair.

  I can feel the muzzle of the Colt pressing into my back.

  “Turn around slowly,” he says.

  I am struck because I have heard this line so many times. I want to ask him, “Is this a stick up?” I want him to say, “Reach for the sky, pardner!”

  I can’t help it. I let out a snort, and he hears it. When I turn—slowly!—his face is running from stunned to hurt to angry.

  “I can explain,” I told him, but now that we’re face to face I know I can’t. What do I say? What part of this can I tell that would make sense? Carl is not a smart man. Carl is not a forgiving man. Carl will not buy whatever line of bullshit I want to sell him.

  I open my mouth. I close it again. He leans in closer. His teeth are pressed tightly together, the little nubs of them rubbing together. He is angry, but I think he is also curious about what I will say. A dull curiosity. The same look he gives the flies as they bumble around the inside of the jar. How long will this one last?

  When my mouth opens the second time, I am just as curious about what will come out.

  Because a drunk will say anything to get a drink. And a cheat? A cheat always has a happy tune to whistle.

  “I can explain…” And I surprise myself. “No. I can’t. I love her,” I say. “I love Juney.”

  “I know,” he says and his mouth twists. There is something that goes across his face—and if I stared hard enough I could catch exactly what it is—but I’m not looking that hard. I don’t what to know.

  Because by then I am moving. Because, then, I think, he has moved in close enough. There is just enough room. If I am just fast enough I can—

  And then there is a noise like a thunderclap.

  • • •

  It is late when I find myself back in the house. I don’t know what time. Close to dawn because Juney has just got in. Her hair is mussed. Silvery-grey strands coming undone from her neat bun. Her Dunkin’ Donuts uniform is creased a little. She somehow looks pretty. Worn, but pretty.

  My lady of Half ’n Half. My lady of How Do You Take It?

  “Smiley,” she says. “Did you just get in?”

  I allow that I did.

  “And are you sober?” she asks.

  “Yeah, Junebug,” I tell her. “Sober as a priest.”

  And it’s the truth.

  “Good,” she says. And then: “You look good.”

  She’s dead on her feet. I can see her swaying a little, her hands on the kitchen table, keeping her steady. But she’s smiling and that makes me happy. I’m glad for that.

  “Come to bed,” I tell her, and take her in my arms. I can feel her weight sagging into me.

  “S’cold,” she says, but I don’t say anything. Somewhere off Route 66 my body is waiting for the sun to scorch it crisp and black. Somewhere Carl is washing the blood out of his shirt. He is careful. Gentle, even. But there is a part of me that is here. Maybe the better part of me.

  I take Juney to our bedroom. I help her peel off the uniform. I kiss her gently on the forehead where she still tastes like icing sugar and cinnamon.

  I want to tell her about Carl. About how she must be careful around him. How there’s bad news coming for her. I want to tell her so bad it’s burning up like bad liquor in my gut but somehow I can’t. Maybe it’s cowardice. Maybe it’s just that I can’t stand the thought of that forehead of her’s creasing, that same old fight we spent twenty years on, same as every other fight.

  Maybe I shoulda. Maybe.

  The thing is, the dead can’t see the future any better than the living. They have to drive down that same road. One mile at a time.

  And this is just a pit stop for me. Maybe. A way station. I can’t stay.

  I don’t want to.

  There is something growing in me. Something cold. Something heavy and black as tar. Is this death? Or is this something else?

  And it is cold. And she is warm. I lay down next to her. I do not want to touch her. I can’t help wanting to touch her.

  “G’night, Smiley,” she says.

  “G’night, Junebug,” I say.

  THE SLIPWAY GREY

  by Helen Marshall

  First published in Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I (2013), edited by Michael Kelly

  • • • •

  SIT BY ME, my bokkie, my darling girl. Closer, yes, there.

  I am an old man now, and this is a thing that happened to me when I was very young. This is not like the story of your uncle Mika, and how he tricked me in the Breede river and I almost drowned. It is also not like the story of my good friend Jurie Gouws whom you called Goose when he was alive, which was a good name for him. He used to hitchhike all across Rhodesia until he blew off his right thumb at that accident at the Selebi mine, which I will say something about. Afterward the trucks would stop anyway, even when he wasn’t trying to hitch a ride, because of the ghost thumb, he used to say, which still ached with arthritis when it rained.

  These are what your father would call fables or fancies or tall tales, and perhaps he is right that they have grown an inch or two in the telling, but the story I will tell you is a different sort of story, my bokkie, because it is my story and it is a true story. It has not grown in the tell
ing because I have never told anyone about what happened except for your Ouma, God rest her soul, to whom I told all the secrets of my heart and let her judge them as she would. Still, even she did not know what it meant, and neither of us could ever come to much agreement on this.

  I am getting older, and I can feel the ache Jurie complained of in his thumb. It lives in every part of me, but my lungs most of all which the doctor tells me are all moth-eaten by the mining work, even though that was many years passed. Perhaps you will say that moths are not made for lungs. They are made for closets and for fine things such as the silk your Ouma wore on our wedding day—white silk, the finest Tsakani government silk, so fine it felt like water in my hands, but then after she died and I went to see to her things, there it was, so thick with moths in the crawlspace she had hid it, so thick it was as if she had made the dress of these little white-winged creatures with their dark nesting eyes, and maybe she had, maybe there had been nothing but moths on her as she walked down the aisle to marry me. But the way that dress looked when the moths had scattered—all coming to pieces in my hands, this beautiful thing, this beautiful thing I had loved so much when I had seen it that day, the doctors say that is what my lungs are like now, from the mine dust.

  When a man gets older a man starts to think about all the things in the world—like you, my bokkie, the things that he loves and the things that he will leave behind—but then he also thinks about the place that he might be going to and the people he might see there, like Jurie and the others and especially like your Ouma who has had to wait far too long for me to catch up with her.

  The story goes like this, and I know you have not heard it before, but even so, if you have heard parts before or heard something like it then keep still, my bokkie, keep still and listen, for a thing that starts the same does not always end the same.

  I first met Jurie at Howard College when I was studying. He was an Afrikaner like I was and he was also studying engineering. From that first look, I judged Jurie to be something of a NAAFI, which is to say, No Ambition and Fuck-All Interest, if you don’t mind me saying so and please don’t repeat it to your father, but that is the kind of man he was. Skinny as a bushwillow, with a mess of bright red hair. He had the look of a travelling man, and that is an untrustworthy sort of look. As it happened, though, I spent much of my time studying and Jurie spent little enough time at the same endeavour, still when our grades were posted he consistently beat me. I knew he was not a more diligent student than I, and I guessed he was not a smarter one. I confess this rankled somewhat, particularly because I was only there because your Uncle Mika had paid my way to University instead of going himself, and even then he had just been drafted into the National Service, though it was as a cook, thank God, and not a proper service man because he had flat feet.

  So it was that near the end of term, after I had had a somewhat ill-informed dalliance with a particular lady who was not your Ouma, because this was before your Ouma and before I found out what love was, that my grades started to slip. You see, my bokkie, the thing about women is that they have a power about them that is not unlike that story Jurie told you about his thumb. Women are like that, they’ve got the power to stop you in your tracks. You will be the same, my bokkie, just you wait.

  But I won’t go further into that matter here, for the sake of your Ouma who, if she was listening, wouldn’t like to hear it much repeated. The important thing is that I found myself in a somewhat precarious position in terms of my schooling. I had watched Jurie, who, as I say, seemed no smarter than I was, rise higher and higher in the postings while my own place suffered. As the end of term stepped closer and closer, I found myself in what you might call desperate straits, so it was then I approached Jurie and inquired in what might have been rather ruder terms than I shall repeat as to the nature of his successes.

  Jurie did not answer in the manner I expected. He was, you see, used to that sort of line of questioning, and had developed a limp and the occasional black eye from answering badly. That smile of his, well, I’ll tell you that it didn’t hang quite so straight on his face back then. Remember, I wasn’t an old man and so all this skin you see hanging off my bones and my lungs raggle-taggled, well, it wasn’t much like that. It had been remarked more than once that I could have been a champion boxer if I had applied my mind to that instead of engineering. I confess I might have asked Jurie in such a way that he considered it wisest to answer quickly. So he tells it, anyway.

  He told me that he had learned a special trick to train his mind.

  Now I know, my bokkie, that this might sound something like those other tales I started off with, but I swear to you that isn’t the way of it. What Jurie could do I had seen with my own eyes, and this is it: he would sit in a certain chair suited to relaxation, and then he would take a certain word, which I shall not tell, and he would repeat it over and over and over again. He described the sensation to me as standing at the top of a stairwell partially submerged in water, and as he would say the word, he would take a step further and further downward until such time as he had drifted into the water, until it reached his knees and then his belly and then his shoulders and then his chin.

  When he was deep into the water, so deep he was floating and he could feel nothing but the warmth of the water and all weight had left him, then he would imagine three boxes adrift in the water. As he continued to say the word, he would swim one stroke closer until at last he had reached the boxes. Then he would open each box and he would place inside each box some part of the day’s lessons. Once the whole process was complete, he would begin to stir again, and his eyelids would flutter wild and delicate, then the rest of him would stretch and yawn, but the knowledge would be lodged firmly in his memory.

  I thought this sounded a fine thing. When I saw it at work it seemed no harm so I asked him to show me how it was done.

  Jurie was reluctant. He said that it took time to master the skill properly, but after some time and some insistence eventually he relented. It is difficult to tell you exactly what the experience of that meditation was like, as I have never felt its likeness at all except for, perhaps, the look in your Ouma’s eyes after we had come to the decision together about what should happen, which was a thing both frightening but somehow also calming in the end.

  That is what the experience was like.

  I stepped into the water, lower and lower, but he had not told me how lifelike it would be. For Jurie’s eyes had a furious calm to them, as if he was stepping into a bath, but for me the water was strange and dark. Instinctively, I did not want to go into it.

  To understand this properly, I must tell you something about your Uncle Mika and the Breede River. I know, my bokkie, that he has told you this story before, but as I said earlier, a thing that starts the same does not always end the same.

  There was a time when we were much younger and we lived along the Breede River. As boys, he and I would go diving in the waters because unlike most of the waters in those parts it was free of crocodiles and mosquitoes and hippopotamuses. Because we were boys, and because I was bigger than Uncle Mika even though he was older, he would often make challenges to me. He would say, “I expect you cannot swim as fast to the other side of the river as I can,” or, “I expect you cannot take that man’s prized rod and tackle,” and so forth. That day, he said to me that he reckoned he could stay under the water longer, and I, of course, reckoned otherwise, and so it was set that we would swim out a ways and then we would both go under together. Your Uncle Mika was a damn sight smarter than me in those days, and he took with him a straw he had fashioned for the purpose of breathing under water. The Breede, you see, was so murky in that part that though I could see him, I couldn’t see anything like the straw he had fashioned.

  So down we went, the two of us boys, and out came your Uncle Mika’s straw, and he blew and he blew until it was cleared of water and he could breathe as if he were upon dry land. Down I went, and I sank right to the bottom because I was heavier than he
was, and I kept my cheeks puffed out and I stared at your Uncle Mika, so close to the surface and I confess I might have laughed to myself, I confess I might have thought him something of a moegoe or a coward as you would say it, so close to the surface where he could just pop his head up when he was tired. Even then I knew it is not good to have the thing you want too close to you, not if you want to resist it. No, I knew I would do better in the depths where I would forget what sunlight looked like and forget the taste of the Sunday morning air.

  Of course, as you would have guessed it your Uncle Mika could hold out for far longer than me, what with his straw, and though I sat at the bottom, heavy as a stone, smart as a crocodile and laughing in my head at him, I began to feel a burning in my lungs. A little thing at first, but need is need and the need for the Sunday morning air was not likely to diminish. Your Uncle Mika sucked away at it, but me, down there in the darkness with the weeds, I had to live off only what I had taken down with me. So my lungs got to burning, and my lungs got to burning, and all I got see was your Uncle Mika happy near the surface and looking like he might go on forever.

  There is only so much a man can take, my bokkie, and I had long past reached it. So finally when I tried to push to the surface, my lungs feeling like they’d take in the water as happily as the air and my vision all gone strangled and dim, well, wouldn’t you know it but down there in the muck I had managed to hook myself well and good on the trunk of an old yellowwood, it being, as I have said, a sight murky at the bottom.

  It wouldn’t have been a difficult thing to get free of. I was a strong boy and a good swimmer, but I was weak from holding in my breathing, and the first thing to set upon me was a panic so strong and so terrible that I flailed like a mad thing.

  Your Uncle Mika, he was just about getting tired of playing that old game anyway, and he looks down and he sees me flailing about, and all he can think is the tales the old fishermen used to tell him about the things that lived in the water, the things that none of us quite believed would ever come so far inland. So your Uncle Mika, he hightails it out of there, thinking I’m already dead, thinking that the thing, whatever it is, has already got me. I can’t fault him for it, even if he were my own brother, but still to this day I think that is why he sent me off to university even though I was never quite as clever as he was. He always felt the shame of tricking me with that little straw and then leaving me to drown.