“It’s a verse form,” she said, proudly. “Like me.”
“You’re a poem?”
She smiled, and looked down and away, perhaps bashfully. Her profile was almost flat—a perfect Grecian nose that came down from her forehead in a straight line. We did Antigone in the school theater the previous year. I was the messenger who brings Creon the news of Antigone’s death. We wore half-masks that made us look like that. I thought of that play, looking at her face, in the kitchen, and I thought of Barry Smith’s drawings of women in the Conan comics: five years later I would have thought of the Pre-Raphaelites, of Jane Morris and Lizzie Siddall. But I was only fifteen then.
“You’re a poem?” I repeated.
She chewed her lower lip. “If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose world was swallowed by the sea.”
“Isn’t it hard to be three things at the same time?”
“What’s your name?”
“Enn.”
“So you are Enn,” she said. “And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?”
“But they aren’t different things. I mean, they aren’t contradictory.” It was a word I had read many times but never said aloud before that night, and I put the stresses in the wrong places. Contradictory.
She wore a thin dress made of a white, silky fabric. Her eyes were a pale green, a color that would now make me think of tinted contact lenses; but this was thirty years ago; things were different then. I remember wondering about Vic and Stella, upstairs. By now, I was sure that they were in one of the bedrooms, and I envied Vic so much it almost hurt.
Still, I was talking to this girl, even if we were talking nonsense, even if her name wasn’t really Triolet (my generation had not been given hippie names: all the Rainbows and the Sunshines and the Moons, they were only six, seven, eight years old back then). She said, “We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again.”
“And then what happened?”
She looked at me with her green eyes, and it was as if she stared out at me from her own Antigone half-mask; but as if her pale green eyes were just a different, deeper, part of the mask. “You cannot hear a poem without it changing you,” she told me. “They heard it, and it colonized them. It inherited them and it inhabited them, its rhythms becoming part of the way that they thought; its images permanently transmuting their metaphors; its verses, its outlook, its aspirations becoming their lives. Within a generation their children would be born already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather than later, as these things go, there were no more children born. There was no need for them, not any longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known.”
I edged closer to her, so I could feel my leg pressing against hers.
She seemed to welcome it: she put her hand on my arm, affectionately, and I felt a smile spreading across my face.
“There are places that we are welcomed,” said Triolet, “and places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does contagion end and art begin?”
“I don’t know,” I said, still smiling. I could hear the unfamiliar music as it pulsed and scattered and boomed in the front room.
She leaned into me then and—I suppose it was a kiss. . . . I suppose. She pressed her lips to my lips, anyway, and then, satisfied, she pulled back, as if she had now marked me as her own.
“Would you like to hear it?” she asked, and I nodded, unsure what she was offering me, but certain that I needed anything she was willing to give me.
She began to whisper something in my ear. It’s the strangest thing about poetry—you can tell it’s poetry, even if you don’t speak the language. You can hear Homer’s Greek without understanding a word, and you still know it’s poetry. I’ve heard Polish poetry, and Inuit poetry, and I knew what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like that. I didn’t know the language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and in my mind’s eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of the palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean.
Perhaps I kissed her properly. I don’t remember. I know I wanted to.
And then Vic was shaking me violently. “Come on!” he was shouting. “Quickly. Come on!”
In my head I began to come back from a thousand miles away.
“Idiot. Come on. Just get a move on,” he said, and he swore at me. There was fury in his voice.
For the first time that evening I recognized one of the songs being played in the front room. A sad saxophone wail followed by a cascade of liquid chords, a man’s voice singing cut-up lyrics about the sons of the silent age. I wanted to stay and hear the song.
She said, “I am not finished. There is yet more of me.”
“Sorry love,” said Vic, but he wasn’t smiling any longer. “There’ll be another time,” and he grabbed me by the elbow and he twisted and pulled, forcing me from the room. I did not resist. I knew from experience that Vic could beat the stuffing out me if he got it into his head to do so. He wouldn’t do it unless he was upset or angry, but he was angry now.
Out into the front hall. As Vic pulled open the door, I looked back one last time, over my shoulder, hoping to see Triolet in the doorway to the kitchen, but she was not there. I saw Stella, though, at the top of the stairs. She was staring down at Vic, and I saw her face.
This all happened thirty years ago. I have forgotten much, and I will forget more, and in the end I will forget everything; yet, if I have any certainty of life beyond death, it is all wrapped up not in psalms or hymns, but in this one thing alone: I cannot believe that I will ever forget that moment, or forget the expression on Stella’s face as she watched Vic hurrying away from her. Even in death I shall remember that.
Her clothes were in disarray, and there was makeup smudged across her face, and her eyes—
You wouldn’t want to make a universe angry. I bet an angry universe would look at you with eyes like that.
We ran then, me and Vic, away from the party and the tourists and the twilight, ran as if a lightning storm was on our heels, a mad helter-skelter dash down the confusion of streets, threading through the maze, and we did not look back, and we did not stop until we could not breathe; and then we stopped and panted, unable to run any longer. We were in pain. I held on to a wall, and Vic threw up, hard and long, into the gutter.
He wiped his mouth.
“She wasn’t a—” He stopped.
He shook his head.
Then he said, “You know . . . I think there’s a thing. When you’ve gone as far as you dare. And if you go any further, you wouldn’t be you anymore? You’d be the person who’d done that? The places you just can’t go. . . . I think that happened to me tonight.”
I thought I knew what he was saying. “Screw her, you mean?” I said.
He rammed a knuckle hard against my temple, and twisted it violently. I wondered if I was going to have to fight him—and lose—but after a moment he lowered his hand and moved away from me, making a low, gulping noise.
I looked at him curiously, and I realized that he was crying: his face was scarlet; snot and tears ran down his cheeks. Vic was sobbing in the street, as unselfconsciously and heartbreakingly as a little boy.
; He walked away from me then, shoulders heaving, and he hurried down the road so he was in front of me and I could no longer see his face. I wondered what had occurred in that upstairs room to make him behave like that, to scare him so, and I could not even begin to guess.
The streetlights came on, one by one; Vic stumbled on ahead, while I trudged down the street behind him in the dusk, my feet treading out the measure of a poem that, try as I might, I could not properly remember and would never be able to repeat.
night they missed the horror show
joe r. lansdale
If they’d gone to the drive-in like they’d planned, none of this would have happened. But Leonard didn’t like drive-ins when he didn’t have a date, and he’d heard about Night Of the Living Dead, and he knew a nigger starred in it. He didn’t want to see no movie with a nigger star. Niggers chopped cotton, fixed flats, and pimped nigger girls, but he’d never heard of one that killed zombies. And he’d heard too that there was a white girl in the movie that let the nigger touch her, and that peeved him. Any white gal that would let a nigger touch her must be the lowest trash in the world. Probably from Hollywood, New York, or Waco, some god-forsaken place like that.
Now Steve McQueen would have been all right for zombie killing and girl handling. He would have been the ticket. But a nigger? No sir.
Boy, that Steve McQueen was one cool head. Way he said stuff in them pictures was so good you couldn’t help but think someone had written it down for him. He could sure think fast on his feet to come up with the things he said, and he had that real cool, mean look.
Leonard wished he could be Steve McQueen, or Paul Newman even. Someone like that always knew what to say, and he figured they got plenty of bush too. Certainly they didn’t get as bored as he did. He was so bored he felt as if he were going to die from it before the night was out. Bored, bored, bored. Just wasn’t nothing exciting about being in the Dairy Queen parking lot leaning on the front of his ’64 Impala looking out at the highway. He figured maybe old crazy Harry who janitored at the high school might be right about them flying saucers. Harry was always seeing something. Bigfoot, six-legged weasels, all manner of things. But maybe he was right about the saucers. He said he’d seen one a couple nights back hovering over Mud Creek and it was shooting down these rays that looked like wet peppermint sticks. Leonard figured if Harry really had seen the saucers and the rays, then those rays were boredom rays. It would be a way for space critters to get at Earth folks, boring them to death. Getting melted down by heat rays would have been better. That was at least quick, but being bored to death was sort of like being nibbled to death by ducks.
Leonard continued looking at the highway, trying to imagine flying saucers and boredom rays, but he couldn’t keep his mind on it. He finally focused on something in the highway. A dead dog.
Not just a dead dog. But a DEAD DOG. The mutt had been hit by a semi at least, maybe several. It looked as if it had rained dog. There were pieces of that pooch all over the concrete and one leg was lying on the curbing on the opposite side, stuck up in such a way that it seemed to be waving hello. Doctor Frankenstein with a grant from Johns Hopkins and assistance from NASA couldn’t have put that sucker together again.
Leonard leaned over to his faithful, drunk companion, Billy—known among the gang as Farto, because he was fart-lighting champion of Mud Creek—and said, “See that dog there?”
Farto looked where Leonard was pointing. He hadn’t noticed the dog before, and he wasn’t nearly as casual about it as Leonard. The puzzle-piece hound brought back memories. It reminded him of a dog he’d had when he was thirteen. A big, fine German shepherd that loved him better than his Mama.
Sonofabitch dog tangled its chain through and over a barbed wire fence somehow and hung itself. When Farto found the dog its tongue looked like a stuffed, black sock and he could see where its claws had just been able to scrape the ground, but not quite enough to get a toehold. It looked as if the dog had been scratching out some sort of coded message in the dirt. When Farto told his old man about it later, crying as he did, his old man laughed and said, “Probably a goddamn suicide note.”
Now, as he looked out at the highway, and his whisky-laced Coke collected warmly in his gut, he felt a tear form in his eyes. Last time he’d felt that sappy was when he’d won the fart-lighting championship with a four-inch burner that singed the hairs of his ass and the gang awarded him with a pair of colored boxing shorts. Brown and yellow ones so he could wear them without having to change them too often.
So there they were. Leonard and Farto, parked outside the DQ, leaning on the hood of Leonard’s Impala, sipping Coke and whisky, feeling bored and blue and horny, looking at a dead dog and having nothing to do but go to a show with a nigger starring in it. Which, to be up front, wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d had dates. Dates could make up for a lot of sins, or help make a few good ones, depending on one’s outlook.
But the night was criminal. Dates they didn’t have. Worse yet, wasn’t a girl in the entire high school would date them. Not even Marylou Flowers, and she had some kind of disease.
All this nagged Leonard something awful. He could see what the problem was with Farto. He was ugly. Had the kind of face that attracted flies. And though being fart-lighting champion of Mud Creek had a certain prestige among the gang, it lacked a certain something when it came to charming the gals.
But for the life of him, Leonard couldn’t figure his own problem. He was handsome, had some good clothes, and his car ran good when he didn’t buy that old cheap gas. He even had a few bucks in his jeans from breaking into washaterias. Yet his right arm had damn near grown to the size of his thigh from all the whacking off he did. Last time he’d been out with a girl had been a month ago, and as he’d been out with her along with nine other guys, he wasn’t rightly sure he could call that a date. He wondered about it so much, he’d asked Farto if he thought it qualified as a date. Farto, who had been fifth in line, said he didn’t think so, but if Leonard wanted to call it one, wasn’t no skin off his dick.
But Leonard didn’t want to call it a date. It just didn’t have the feel of one, lacked that something special. There was no romance to it.
True, Big Red had called him Honey when he put the mule in the barn, but she called everyone Honey—except Stoney. Stoney was Possum Sweets, and he was the one who talked her into wearing the grocery bag with the mouth and eye holes. Stoney was like that. He could sweet talk the camel out from under a sand nigger. When he got through chatting Big Red down, she was plumb proud to wear that bag.
When finally it came his turn to do Big Red, Leonard had let her take the bag off as a gesture of goodwill. That was a mistake. He just hadn’t known a good thing when he had it. Stoney had had the right idea. The bag coming off spoiled everything. With it on, it was sort of like balling the Lone Hippo or some such thing, but with the bag off, you were absolutely certain what you were getting, and it wasn’t pretty.
Even closing his eyes hadn’t helped. He found that the ugliness of that face had branded itself on the back of his eyeballs. He couldn’t even imagine the sack back over her head. All he could think about was that puffy, too-painted face with the sort of bad complexion that began at the bone.
He’d gotten so disappointed, he’d had to fake an orgasm and get off before his hooter shriveled up and his Trojan fell off and was lost in the vacuum.
Thinking back on it, Leonard sighed. It would certainly be nice for a change to go with a girl that didn’t pull the train or had a hole between her legs that looked like a manhole cover ought to be on it. Sometimes he wished he could be like Farto, who was as happy as if he had good sense. Anything thrilled him. Give him a can of Wolf Brand Chili, a big Moon Pie, Coke and whisky and he could spend the rest of his life fucking Big Red and lighting the gas out of his asshole.
God, but this was no way to live. No women and no fun. Bored, bored, bored. Leonard found himse
lf looking overhead for spaceships and peppermint-colored boredom rays, but he saw only a few moths fluttering drunkenly through the beams of the DQ’s lights.
Lowering his eyes back to the highway and the dog, Leonard had a sudden flash. “Why don’t we get the chain out of the back and hook it up to Rex there? Take him for a ride.”
“You mean drag his dead ass around?” Farto asked.
Leonard nodded.
“Beats stepping on a tack,” Farto said.
They drove the Impala into the middle of the highway at a safe moment and got out for a look. Up close the mutt was a lot worse. Its innards had been mashed out of its mouth and asshole and it stunk something awful. The dog was wearing a thick, metal-studded collar and they fastened one end of their fifteen-foot chain to that and the other to the rear bumper.
Bob, the Dairy Queen manager, noticed them through the window, came outside and yelled, “What are you fucking morons doing?”
“Taking this doggie to the vet,” Leonard said. “We think this sumbitch looks a might peeked. He may have been hit by a car.”
“That’s so fucking funny I’m about to piss myself,” Bob said.
“Old folks have that problem,” Leonard said.
Leonard got behind the wheel and Farto climbed in on the passenger side. They maneuvered the car and dog around and out of the path of a tractor-trailer truck just in time. As they drove off, Bob screamed after them, “I hope you two no-dicks wrap that Chevy piece of shit around a goddamn pole.”
As they roared along, parts of the dog, like crumbs from a flakey loaf of bread, came off. A tooth here. Some hair there. A string of guts. A dew claw. And some unidentifiable pink stuff. The metal-studded collar and chain threw up sparks now and then like fiery crickets. Finally they hit seventy-five and the dog was swinging wider and wider on the chain, like it was looking for an opportunity to pass.
Farto poured him and Leonard up Coke and whiskys as they drove along. He handed Leonard his paper cup and Leonard knocked it back, a lot happier now than he had been a moment ago. Maybe this night wasn’t going to turn out so bad after all.
The Humanity of Monsters Page 18