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Psychology and Other Stories

Page 8

by C. P. Boyko


  When Slim awoke, she was alone in the car—even the dog was gone. Through the windows she could see nothing but vertical bars of blackness against granular swaths of grey. Trees and snow. She was shivering and had the feeling that she had been doing so for some time.

  She remembered falling asleep. Anyway, she remembered the warmth of the car, the headlights scrubbing the highway clean before them, and the reassuring flow of speech from Mr. Custard beside her. As long as he went on talking she could keep an eye on him, as it were, even with her eyes closed. He’d been telling them about his first fight, the first moment he realized that he had a rare gift for knocking people down. It had not been a violent story. He had spoken almost lovingly of his opponent, a big, dull-witted boy three years older than him. The way Mr. Custard told it, the fight had been nothing but a dance followed by a sleep.

  Where was she? She quickly corrected the pronoun in her mind (she would not yet face the fact that she was alone): Where are we? She did not remember turning off the highway, though she thought she recalled the gramophone-like crackle of gravel beneath the car’s wheels. She remembered, she thought, waking briefly, and asking him where they were going. “To get gas,” hadn’t he said? She’d fallen back asleep.

  A thought, or the prospect of one, blinked on in her mind, like the status light on the radio at home that came on when it had warmed up and was ready to be played. She ignored it, scratching her arm instead.

  The inside of her head felt hot and sticky, like a feverish mouth. She could not peel apart individual ideas. The seeping cold, the black bars of pines, Missy’s absence, and the matter of how she—they— had come to be here, all had to be taken together, in one unmanageable clot.

  She remembered walking towards Rosie’s Roadhouse with Missy, feeling quite sure of themselves. Then Missy held the door for her, and Slim hesitated, realizing that her friend did not, after all, know what they were going to do, what they were going to say.

  He was at the counter with his back to the door, talking to two waitresses.

  “‘War hero’?” he said, shaking his head with slow, measured scorn. “No, I don’t think I care for the term. After all, what’s a hero? How’s it defined, that’s what I want to know—and who’s defining it? A person of exceptional powers or extraordinary abilities? Exceptional compared to what? Extraordinary compared to who? Once you realize most folks are monkeys or crazy you realize it don’t take much to be a hero and won’t thank no son of a bitch for calling you one. Shitfire. And never mind what’s a hero—what’s a war?”

  Slim sat down two stools to his right, leaving a space for Missy. But Missy did not take it, sitting instead on Slim’s right. That, then, was how it was going to be: Missy was going to just go on holding the door for Slim.

  Well, to hell with that.

  “Howdy,” she said. Her voice was calm, but she realized she was scratching her arm. She took off her glasses and began to wipe them with a napkin.

  “Get you girls something?” asked one of the waitresses, leaning against the refrigerator like she was keeping it upright.

  “Why, these here ladies are my nieces!” cried Mr. Custard, slapping the counter with unfeigned joy. “Ladies, these here are Lorna and Lola, friends of a friend of mine and therefore friends of mine and friends of my friends.”

  “How do you know Irene anyhow?” asked the other waitress, slumped over the counter and peering sideways at Mr. Custard as if he were some clever, skittish animal in the zoo.

  “I come in here all the time,” he said.

  “Then how come I never seen you,” she demanded, charmed by his furtiveness.

  Mr. Custard turned to Slim. His gaze went into her and she felt for a moment, till she tore her eyes away, that she had never seen anyone so happy to see her in all her life. He was not in the least alarmed or embarrassed by their arrival.

  “You ladies want something to eat?” he asked. “They got the best damn burger in town here. In fact, I’ll have one of them fellas myself. But hold the mushrooms.”

  The waitress leaning against the fridge said, “Our burgers don’t ordinarily come with mushrooms.”

  “They’re extra,” said the other.

  “Then I’ll have mine with mushrooms. Make it double mushrooms.” He turned to Slim and cupped a hand to his mouth in a mock whisper. “That way they got to make it fresh.”

  “We make everything fresh!” cried the one slumped over the counter, pleasantly scandalized.

  “I’ll have the same,” said Slim, blushing in anticipation of their laughter, “… but hold the burger.”

  They didn’t laugh, so she kept her face straight and pretended it hadn’t been a joke.

  “Something for you, honey?”

  Missy grunted, then grunted again, annoyed that the first grunt had not carried her meaning. “The same,” she clarified.

  “Same as him or same as your friend?”

  “As him,” she said, with a grunt of impatience.

  Slim emitted a grunt of her own. They had come in here allied against him, but now it seemed that Missy had abandoned both their alliance and their grievance. For a moment she keenly hated both of them, Missy and Mr. Custard. She wanted to crush something, but had nothing to crush but her own feelings, her own desire to crush something. She lashed out by lashing inwards, and did the last thing she wanted to do, which was stay put and smile, and said the last thing that would normally have entered her head: “And I’ll have one of those,” she said, pointing her finger like a gun at Mr. Custard’s half-finished beer. “Same as him.”

  “You old enough for that, sugar?”

  “Eat the rich and shit the poor,” said Mr. Custard with placid indignation, “these ladies are my nieces. They’re nineteen and twenty years old. Old enough to drink, old enough to get married, by God.”

  “What about you, angel?”

  Missy glumly shook her head, and Slim felt a flush of triumph.

  They ate and drank and Mr. Custard, through an ever-present mouthful of half-chewed burger, regaled them with tales of his childhood. It took all of Slim’s attention and ingenuity to correlate what he was saying now with what he had told them in the car. Now he had only five siblings—but she reasoned that earlier he had been counting himself. Now his family lived on a milk farm—but she supposed they must have milk farms in Hawaii too. Again the most salient figure of his youth was his mother, but it was not easy to reconcile the woman as he described her now with the one who had called him “selfish.” Now he said that she had been dissatisfied with all her children except for the youngest—namely, Mr. Custard himself. He never came right out and said that he had been her favorite, but he was conspicuously absent from the litany of disappointments she had suffered at the hands of her offspring. One had died in the war; one had died in childbirth; one had married the wrong kind of man; one had dropped out of high school and run away from home; one had been arrested on charges of “unmotivated assault”; one had ended up in the booby hatch. There were more sins than there were children—but Slim figured that some of his siblings may have committed more than one.

  That he might be lying occurred to her only fleetingly and abstractly. He showed none of the hesitation or embarrassment of a liar, and the details he furnished were too richly embellished to be the product of anyone’s mere imagination. She supposed that some facts had possibly become garbled or confused with the passage of time and through numerous retellings, but she did not seriously doubt that the stories he told had a firm foundation in his own personal experience. Where else could they have come from?

  And unlike any liar she had ever known, he did not seem at all concerned that you believe him. He did not swear, or repeat himself, or say “honest.” He contradicted himself and neither blushed nor took any pains to resolve these contradictions. The fact that he didn’t even bother to be consistent proved that he wasn’t lying; the stories he told must be, in some fundamental way, true. She even began to question her earlier doubts. Wasn’t it
possible that he might need a dictionary of names to write a book on psychology? Wasn’t it possible that he was both a psychologist and a salesman? Maybe he sold psychological supplies; or maybe he drove around recruiting new patients, and it was just easier to say “salesman” to a simple-minded waitress than to explain.

  But then he did lie. After they finished eating he patted his belly, then his pockets, and told the waitresses that his cheques were in the car. He asked Slim and Missy to help him bring the books in for their friend. But when they were outside, he told them to hop in. Then he’d driven off without a word.

  So she knew what he looked like when he lied. He looked the same. Nothing changed. They were miles down the highway before she even realized that they weren’t going back.

  “We didn’t pay,” she said.

  “You girls have any money?” asked Mr. Custard. “Didn’t think so! So you see, we couldn’t’ve paid, even if we wanted to.”

  There was none of the exultation that she’d felt when she and Missy had run out of the first diner. She felt now only a sucking emptiness in her chest. She felt like a cheat.

  “Is that why you ditched us? You didn’t have any money?”

  He nodded deeply, like someone making a long-overdue confession. “Of course,” he said thoughtfully, “even if that wasn’t why, I’d probably say it was. But it was,” he added quickly, “it was.”

  In the back seat Missy made a perturbed sound, and added the gloss: “Why don’t you have any money?”

  Mr. Custard shook his head slowly and sadly. “My hospital.”

  Missy made a sound indicative of the inadequacy of this reply.

  For a long time he stared out the windshield at the rolling highway.

  “It burned down,” he said at last.

  Slim had felt better as soon as he opened his mouth; it was some time before his meaning caught up with her relief. She realized now that it hadn’t mattered what he’d said, only that he’d said something. He’d taken the trouble to justify himself. It was like the answers her teachers had offered to so many of her questions about the universe: she was happy to accept just about any answer other than “I don’t know” or “Because.” To be told that atoms were composed of sub-atoms or that things fell because of something called gravity was satisfying because these were explanations, because they were answers. Knowing that her questions had answers was enough. The only insupportable universe was a universe in which things happened for no reason.

  “Is that true?” she asked softly, naively imploring him to reassure her, even though she knew what he himself had admitted: that his answer would be the same whether he told the truth or not.

  She had seen him lie to those waitresses. Had she seen him, at any time, tell the truth?

  The outline of the thought that had blinked on in her mind now returned, and this time she looked at it. Her gramma was going to kill her—because Mr. Custard was going to kill them both. This realization came to her in her gramma’s voice: He’s a psycho.

  He was not a psychologist. Those were not his books. This was probably not his car. He had taken her and Missy out into the backwoods in the middle of the night. Missy was already gone. He would come for her next. He would have a knife or, what was somehow worse, a rope, and someone opened the car door and she screamed.

  “Jumping Jesus, what the hell, I thought you were sleeping,” cried Missy, startled into loquacity.

  Slim jumped out of the car, holding her hands up like blades. “Where is he?”

  Missy groaned at Slim’s ignorance. “Went to find gas,” she said at last, getting into the seat that Slim had vacated. “Thing’s below E already.”

  “This ain’t a filling station. This ain’t nowhere.”

  Missy hunched her shoulders for warmth. “He went to siphon some out of some goddamn tractor or something I guess. He had a, you know, a gas can.”

  They could see their breath in the yellow light that spilled from the car onto the snowy gravel. Slim wanted a cigarette, then felt dizzy at the returning thought: Gramma would kill her.

  There was a sound in the distance, a sharp crack like a branch snapping in the wind.

  Had he shot the dog?

  “Get out the car,” Slim said.

  “You’re crazy.”

  Slim knew she was not being reasonable. He’d only stopped to find gas, she told herself; he’d gone off with a jerrycan, not a gun. But it was no use. The certain dread she’d felt moments ago had not had time to dissipate, and was still being pumped around inside her by her heart.

  Slim heard his footsteps, quick little crunches like a mouse gnawing at a wall, before she saw him. He was running towards them, clucking to himself like a hen, and every so often bubbling over into some shout of jubilation: “Oodilolly!” or “Holy coyote!” He was not carrying a jerrycan. Slim took a step back from the car.

  Before he could reach them, a black shape came bounding out of the woods and attached itself to his leg. It was the dog. Mr. Custard let out a scream—not of pain or even anger but sheer incredulity. He whipped and thrashed his leg madly, and with a whimper the black shape came loose and fell skidding to the ground. Almost without breaking stride, Mr. Custard lunged and kicked the dog with all his might, then threw himself into the car, started the engine, and slammed it into gear. Slim jumped back, shielding her face from the spray of gravel and ice. Missy, who had had one foot out the door, shouted incoherently, perhaps to Slim. Then, to keep herself from falling out, she had to pull the door shut—and just in time, as the car fishtailed, shot down the road, and disappeared into the pines.

  Slim stood listening to the roar of her own heart; then, as her pulse subsided, she could make out another sound in the distance, a drawn-out rasping sound, like someone continuously sliding open a window that had not been opened in a long time.

  She went to the dog, and was at first relieved, then only doubly frightened, to hear it whining. If it was hurt, if it was dying, she would have to do something.

  She crouched and placed a hand on its lumpy skull until the animal stopped growling.

  The moon was overhead, but, in the direction from which Mr. Custard had come running, a dim orange glow had appeared above the black outline of the trees. She walked towards it. The dog followed, at a distance.

  The road curved and began to widen, the gravel gave way to deep tracks of frozen mud, and the pines parted to reveal a farmyard, littered with hulks of machinery and tufts of grass, all bathed in the same undulating orange light. The rasping sound grew louder until it became a crackling roar. She rounded the farmhouse and saw the fire.

  It was a barn, or had been. The fire had consumed all the structure’s details in the brilliance of its blaze, so that it looked like a child’s drawing of a barn: thick black lines for walls, a gaping black opening for a door, and clumsy black triangles for rafters, which had already begun to sag. Shivering, Slim walked towards it, and imagined she could feel its heat.

  A man stood motionless, as if suspended in gelatin, halfway between the house and the conflagration. A stick lay in his outstretched arms like a dead thing that he was afraid to touch. As Slim came nearer she saw that it was a gun.

  He looked at her, and at the house, and at the barn. His eyes were wild and unseeing, as if he’d just been struck blind.

  “What happened?”

  “Burnt my barn,” he said thickly. “Burnt my goddamn barn.”

  “Why?”

  He peered at her then, flames in his eyes. “Who’re you? Where do you come from? What do you want here?”

  She opened her mouth but nothing would come out. She shook her head and looked around dismally.

  “My dog,” she blurted at last, scratching her arms till they bled. “My dog’s hurt.”

  Dr. Yard was talking to him but Mr. Custard was finding it difficult to concentrate. He had never felt so sleepy in all his life. There was a prickly pain in his leg where the dog had bit him, and a clenching pain in his shoulder where he supposed th
e crazy man had shot him—actually shot him!—shot him! He’d never been shot at before, not in his entire life! He hadn’t felt anything at the time but a cold wet sting, neither pleasure nor pain; but now it felt as if his stomach had relocated to his shoulder and begun digesting itself. His blood, too, was everywhere. He was surprised at how dark and rich and thick it was, almost like oil. He was disappointed to find that it tasted like salt, only salt.

  The girl had her face pressed against the window like she was trying to draw air through it. Everything was slowing down, time was coming in drops—the better to help him register the situation’s novelty. But every so often the highway snapped its neck suddenly to one side as if trying to buck him off. Dr. Yard was talking to him—not, he thought, altogether without approval—but he could not distinguish the words.

  The same thing had happened at the hospital. Whenever Dr. Yard spoke to him at any length, his words dissolved into mere gabble, strings of isolated syllables more like Morse code than human speech; and even his face, as Mr. Custard watched, would gradually fragment into its constituent features, so that he found he could attend to the man’s spongy nose, or to the scraping of his eyelids over his flat grey eyes, or to the flapping of the dewlap beneath his chin, or to the slick, darting movements of his wet tongue, or to the flecks of spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth; but he could never attend to all of them at once. The harder he tried to make the sounds fit together into words or the words into sentences, the more they disintegrated, and it was the same with the face. Two eyes plus one mouth plus one nose equals one face, he assured himself. But it wasn’t true. Two eyes, a nose, and a mouth did not make a face. Something was missing.

  The car was almost out of gas. He was amazed that it hadn’t run out already. What would he do when it stopped? He didn’t know, and the not-knowing excited him. Anything could happen! He was open to experience. His mother called it “selfish,” but Dr. Yard, a professional psychologist, had called it being “open to experience.”

 

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