McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  The Witch’s Revenge nodded around the room. “As you see,” she said, “I’ve slipped off their skins, and they were all cats underneath. They’re as you see now, but if we were to wait a year or two, they would shed these skins as well and become something new. Children are always growing.”

  Small chased the cats around the room. They were fast, but he was faster. They were nimble, but he was nimbler. He had worn a catsuit for longer. He drove the cats down the length of the room, and The Witch’s Revenge caught them and dropped them into her bag. At the end, there were only three cats left in the throne room, and they were as pretty a trio of cats as anyone could ask for. All the other cats were inside the bag.

  “Well done, and quickly done, too,” said The Witch’s Revenge, and she took her needle and stitched shut the neck of the bag. The skin of the witch Lack smiled up at Small, and a cat put its head through his slack, stained mouth, wailing. But The Witch’s Revenge sewed Lack’s mouth shut too, and the hole on the other end, where a house had come out. She left only his earholes and his eyeholes and his nostrils, which were full of fur, rolled open so that the cats could breathe.

  The Witch’s Revenge slung the skin full of cats over her shoulder and stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Small said.

  “These cats have mothers and fathers,” The Witch’s Revenge said. “They have mothers and fathers who miss them very much.”

  She gazed at Small. He decided not to ask again. So he waited in the house, with the two princesses and the prince in their new cat-suits, while The Witch’s Revenge went down to the river. Or perhaps she took them down to the market and sold them. Or maybe she took each cat home, to its own mother and father, back to the kingdom where it had been born. Maybe she wasn’t so careful to make sure that each child was returned to the right mother and father. After all, she was in a hurry, and cats look very much alike at night.

  No one saw where she went: but the market is closer than the palaces of the kings and queens whose children had been stolen by the witch Lack, and the river is closer still.

  When The Witch’s Revenge came back to Lack’s house, she looked around her. The house was beginning to stink very badly. Even Small could smell it now.

  “I suppose the Princess Margaret let you fuck her,” said The Witch’s Revenge, as if she had been thinking about this while she ran her errands. “And that is why you let them go. I don’t mind. She was a pretty puss. I might have let her go myself.”

  She looked at Small’s face and saw that he was confused. “Never mind,” she said.

  She had a length of string in her paw, and a cork, which she greased with a piece of fat she had cut from the witch Lack. She threaded the cork on the string, calling it a good, quick little mouse, and greased the string as well, and she fed the wriggling cork to the tabby who had been curled up in Small’s lap. And in a little while, when she had the cork again, she greased it again, and fed it to the little black cat, and then she fed it to the cat with two white forepaws, so that she had all three cats upon her string.

  She sewed up the rip in the catskin bag, and Small put the gold crowns in the bag, and it was nearly as heavy as it had been before. The Witch’s Revenge carried the bag, and Small took the greased string, holding it in his teeth, so the three cats were forced to run along behind him, as they left the house of the witch Lack.

  Small strikes a match, and he lights the house of the dead witch, Lack, on fire, as they leave. But shit burns slowly, if at all, and that house might be burning still, if someone hasn’t gone and put it out. And maybe, someday, someone will go fishing in the river near that house, and hook their line on a bag full of princes and princesses, wet and sorry and wriggling in their catsuit skins—that’s one way to catch a husband or a wife.

  Small and The Witch’s Revenge walked without stopping and the three cats came behind them. They walked until they reached a little village very near where the witch Small’s mother had lived and there they settled down in a room The Witch’s Revenge rented from a butcher. They cut the greased string, and bought a cage and hung it from a hook in the kitchen. They kept the three cats in it, but Small bought collars and leashes, and sometimes he put one of the cats on a leash and took it for a walk around the town.

  Sometimes he wore his own catsuit, and went out prowling, but The Witch’s Revenge used to scold him if she caught him dressed like that. There are country manners and there are town manners, and Small was a boy about town now.

  The Witch’s Revenge kept house. She cleaned and she cooked and she made Small’s bed in the morning. Like all of the witch’s cats, she was always busy. She melted down the gold crowns in a stewpot, and minted them into coins. She opened an account in a bank, and she enrolled Small in a private academy.

  The Witch’s Revenge wore a silk dress and gloves and a heavy veil, and ran her errands in a fine carriage, Small at her side. She bought a piece of land to build a house on, and she sent Small off to school every morning, no matter how he cried. But at night she took off her clothes and slept on his pillow and he combed her red and white fur.

  Sometimes at night, she twitched and moaned, and when he asked her what she was dreaming, she said, “There are ants! Can’t you comb them out? Be quick and catch them if you love me.”

  But there were never any ants.

  One day when Small came home, the little cat with the white front paws was gone. When he asked The Witch’s Revenge, she said that the little cat had fallen out of the cage and through the open window and into the garden and before The Witch’s Revenge could think what to do, a crow had swooped down and carried the little cat off. They moved into their new house a few months later, and Small was always very careful when he went in and out the doorway, imagining the little cat, down there in the dark, under the doorstep, under his foot.

  Small got bigger. He didn’t make any friends in the village, or at his school, but when you’re big enough, you don’t need friends. One day while he and The Witch’s Revenge were eating their dinner, there was a knock at the door. When he opened the door, there stood Flora and Jack, looking very shabby and thin. Jack looked more than ever like a bundle of sticks.

  “Small!” said Flora. “How tall you’ve become!” She burst into tears, and wrung her beautiful hands. Jack said, looking at The Witch’s Revenge, “And who are you?”

  The Witch’s Revenge said to Jack, “Who am I? I’m your mother’s cat, and you’re a handful of dry sticks in a suit two sizes too large. But I won’t tell anyone if you won’t tell, either.”

  Jack snorted at this, and Flora stopped crying. She began to look around the house, which was sunny and large and well appointed.

  “There’s room enough for both of you,” said The Witch’s Revenge, “if Small doesn’t mind.”

  Small thought his heart would burst with happiness to have his family back again. He showed Flora to one bedroom and Jack to another. And then they went downstairs and had a second dinner, and Small and The Witch’s Revenge listened, and the cats in their hanging cage listened, while Flora and Jack recounted their adventures.

  A pickpocket had taken Flora’s purse, and they’d sold the witch’s automobile, and lost the money in a game of cards. Flora had found her parents, but they were a pair of old scoundrels who had no use for her. (She was too old to sell again. She would have realized what they were up to.) She’d gone to work in a department store, and Jack had sold tickets in a movie theater. They’d quarreled and made up, and then fallen in love with other people, and had many disappointments. At last they had decided to go home to the witch’s house and see if it would do for a squat, or if there was anything left to carry away and sell.

  But the house, of course, had burned down. As they argued about what to do next, Jack had smelled Small, his brother, down in the village. So here they were.

  “You’ll live here, with us,” Small said.

  Jack and Flora said they could not do that. They had ambitions, they said. They had plans. They
would stay for a week, or two weeks, and then they would be off again. The Witch’s Revenge nodded and said that this was sensible.

  Every day Small came home from school and went out again, with Flora, on a bicycle built for two. Or he stayed home and Jack taught him how to hold a coin between two fingers, and how to follow the egg as it moved from cup to cup. The Witch’s Revenge taught them to play bridge, although Flora and Jack couldn’t be partners. They quarreled with each other as if they were husband and wife.

  “What do you want?” Small asked Flora one day. He was leaning against her, wishing he were still a cat, and could sit in her lap. She smelled of secrets. “Why do you have to go away again?”

  Flora patted Small on the head. She said, “What do I want? To never have to worry about money. I want to marry a man and know that he’ll never cheat on me, or leave me.” She looked at Jack as she said this.

  Jack said, “I want a rich wife who won’t talk back, who doesn’t lie in bed all day, with the covers pulled up over her head, weeping and calling me a bundle of twigs.” And he looked at Flora when he said this.

  The Witch’s Revenge put down the sweater that she was knitting for Small. She looked at Flora and she looked at Jack and then she looked at Small.

  Small went into the kitchen and opened the door of the hanging cage. He lifted out the two cats and brought them to Flora and Jack. “Here,” he said. “A husband for you, Flora, and a wife for Jack. A prince and a princess, and both of them beautiful, and well brought up, and wealthy, no doubt.”

  Flora picked up the little tomcat and said, “Don’t tease at me, Small! Whoever heard of marrying a cat!”

  The Witch’s Revenge said, “The trick is to keep their catskins in a safe hiding place. And if they sulk, or treat you badly, sew them back into their catskin and put them into a bag and throw them in the river.”

  Then she took her claw and slit the skin of the tabby-colored catsuit, and Flora was holding a naked man. Flora shrieked and dropped him on the ground. He was a handsome man, well made, and he had a princely manner. He was not a man whom anyone would ever mistake for a cat. He stood up and made a bow, very elegant, for all that he was naked. Flora blushed, but she looked pleased.

  “Go fetch some clothes for the prince and the princess,” The Witch’s Revenge said to Small. When he got back, there was a naked princess hiding behind the sofa, and Jack was leering at her.

  A few weeks after that, there were two weddings, and then Flora left with her new husband, and Jack went off with his new wife. Perhaps they lived happily ever after.

  The Witch’s Revenge said to Small, that night at dinner, “We have no wife for you.”

  Small shrugged. “I’m still too young,” he said.

  But try as hard as he can, Small is getting older now. The catskin barely fits across his shoulders. The buttons strain when he fastens them. His grown-up fur—his people fur—is coming in. At night he has dreams.

  The witch his mother’s Spanish heel beats against the pane of glass. The princess hangs in the briar. She’s holding up her dress, so he can see the cat fur down there. Now she’s under the house. She wants to marry him, but the house will fall down if he kisses her. He and Flora are children again, in the witch’s house. Flora lifts up her skirt and says, See my pussy? There’s a cat down there, peeking out at him, but it doesn’t look like any cat he’s ever seen. He says to Flora, I have a pussy too. But his isn’t the same.

  At last he knows what happened to the little, starving, naked thing in the forest, where it went. It crawled into his catskin, while he was asleep, and then burrowed into his own skin, and now it is nestled in his chest, still cold and lonely and hungry. It is eating him from the inside, and getting bigger, and one day there will be no Small left at all, only that nameless, hungry child, wearing a Small skin.

  Small moans in his sleep.

  There are ants in The Witch’s Revenge’s skin, leaking out of her seams, and they march down into the sheets and pinch at him, down in his private places, down where his fur is growing in, and it hurts, it aches and aches. He dreams that The Witch’s Revenge wakes now, and comes and licks him all over, until the pain melts, the pane of glass melts, and the ants march away again, on their long, greased thread.

  “What do you want?” says The Witch’s Revenge.

  Small is no longer dreaming. He says, “I want my mother!”

  Light from the moon comes down through the window over their bed. The Witch’s Revenge is very beautiful—she looks like a queen, like a knife, like a burning house, a cat—in the moonlight. Her fur shines. Her whiskers stand out like pulled stitches, wax, and thread. The Witch’s Revenge says, “Your mother is dead.”

  “Take off your skin,” Small says. He’s crying and The Witch’s Revenge licks his tears away. Small’s skin pricks all over, and down under the house, something small wails and wails. “Give me back my mother,” he says.

  “What if I’m not as beautiful as you remember?” says his mother, the witch, The Witch’s Revenge. “I’m full of ants. Take off my skin, and all the ants will spill out, and there will be nothing left of me.”

  Small says, “Why have you left me all alone?”

  His mother the witch says, “I’ve never left you alone, not even for a minute. I sewed up my death in a catskin so I could stay with you.”

  “Take it off! Let me see you!” Small says.

  The Witch’s Revenge shakes her head and says, “Tomorrow night. Ask me again, tomorrow night. How can you ask me for such a thing, and how can I say no to you? Do you know what you’re asking me for?”

  All night long, Small combs his mother’s fur. His fingers are looking for the seams in her catskin. When The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he peers inside her mouth, hoping to catch a glimpse of his mother’s face. He can feel himself becoming smaller and smaller. In the morning he will be so small that when he tries to put his catskin on, he can barely do up the buttons. He’ll be so small, so sharp, you might mistake him for an ant, and when The Witch’s Revenge yawns, and opens her mouth, he’ll creep inside, he’ll go down into her belly, he’ll go find his mother. If he can, he will help his mother cut her catskin open so that she can get out again, and if she won’t come out, then he won’t either. He thinks he’ll live there, the way that sailors sometimes live inside the belly of fish who have eaten them, and keep house for his mother inside the house of her skin.

  This is the end of the story. The Princess Margaret grows up to kill witches and cats. If she doesn’t, then someone else will have to do it. There is no such thing as witches, and there is no such thing as cats, either, only people dressed up in catskin suits. They have their reasons, and who is to say that they might not live that way, happily ever after, until the ants have carried away all of the time that there is, to build something new and better out of it?

  How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman

  By ELMORE LEONARD

  The fate of a bank-robbing murderer resided in two scoops of peach ice cream on top of a sugar cone.

  Carlos Webster was fifteen years old the time he witnessed the robbery and murder at Deering’s drugstore. It was in the summer of 1921. He told Bud Maddox, the Okmulgee chief of police, he had driven a load of cows up to the yard at Tulsa and by the time he got back it was dark. He said he left the stock trailer across the street from Deering’s and went inside to get an ice-cream cone. When he

  identified one of the robbers as Frank Miller, Bud Maddox said, “Son, Frank Miller robs banks, he don’t bother with drugstores no more.”

  Carlos had been raised on hard work and respect for his elders. He said, “I could be wrong,” knowing he wasn’t.

  They brought him over to police headquarters in the courthouse to look at photos. He pointed to Frank Miller staring at him from a $500 wanted bulletin and picked the other one, Jim Ray Monks, from mug shots. Bud Maddox said, “You’re positive, huh?” and asked Carlos which one was it shot the Indian. Meani
ng Junior Harjo with the tribal police, who’d walked in not knowing the store was being robbed.

  “Was Frank Miller shot him,” Carlos said, “with a .45 Colt.”

  “You sure it was a Colt?”

  “Navy issue, like my dad’s.”

  “I’m teasing,” Bud Maddox said. He and Carlos’s dad, Virgil Webster, were buddies, both having fought in the Spanish-American War, and for a number of years were the local heroes; but now doughboys were back from France telling about the Great War over there.

  “If you like to know what I think happened,” Carlos said, “Frank Miller only came in for a pack of smokes.”

  Bud Maddox stopped him. “Tell it from the time you got there.”

  Okay, well, the reason was to get an ice-cream cone. “Mr. Deering was in back doing prescriptions—he looked out of that little window and told me to help myself. So I went over to the soda fountain and scooped up a double dip of peach on a sugar cone and went up to the cigar counter and left a nickel by the cash register. That’s where I was when I see these two men come in wearing suits and hats I thought at first were salesmen. Mr. Deering calls to me to wait on them as I know the store pretty well. Frank Miller comes up to the counter—”

  “You knew right away who he was?”

  “Once he was close, yes sir, from pictures of him in the paper. He said to give him a deck of Luckies. I did and he picks up the nickel I’d left by the register. Hands it to me and says, ‘This ought to cover it.’”

  “You tell him it was yours?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Or a pack of Luckies was fifteen cents?”

  “I didn’t argue with him. But see, I think that’s when he got the idea of robbing the store, the cash register sitting there, nobody around but me holding my ice-cream cone. Mr. Deering never came out from the back. The other one, Jim Ray Monks? He wanted a tube of Unguentine, he said, for a heat rash was bothering him, under his arms. I got it for him and he didn’t pay either. Then Frank Miller says, ‘Let’s see what you have in the register.’ I told him I didn’t know how to open it as I didn’t work there. He leans over the counter and points to a key—a man who knows his cash registers—and says, ‘That one right there. Hit it and she’ll open for you.’ I press the key—Mr. Deering must’ve heard it ring open, he calls from the back of the store, ‘Carlos, you able to help them out?’ Frank Miller raised his voice, saying, ‘Carlos is doing fine,’ using my name. He told me then to take out the scrip but leave the change.”