The Rib From Which I Remake the World

by Ed Kurtz

  They reenacted key moments from her sixteen years in a pasteboard house. She saw a mama doll give birth to a baby doll (the shot vividly recalled the startling last scene of Motherhood Too Soon). There was a reverend doll speaking to a congregation of dolls, all packed awkwardly into pasteboard pews; the smallest doll was at the front, rapt with her father’s fiery speech. Later, the reverend doll and little Margie doll stood shaking around a well made of paper—a trio of other dolls was straining to lift out the doll that had fallen to the bottom with a length of thread. They would never know if it was an accident or suicide.

  From then on, Margie watched through blurry eyes as the reverend doll grew more and more restless and isolated in the wake of his wife’s death; she saw her own avatar grow to the size of the other dolls and sneak furtive cigarettes behind the pasteboard church and drugstore; she forced herself to watch a greasy, fat doll called Marcus Nims flail on top of her doll on a Sunday afternoon after worship. All these things she remembered with bitter tears and quivering lips. What happened next, however, was wholly new to her.

  Her father’s doll, sitting cross legged on the church’s cellar floor, a small hole dug out of the dirt there. He held something in his fingerless hand, some sort of charm or amulet. The amulet was caked with dirt and rusty with age and neglect, but its shape was discernible enough. The doll’s faceless head turned one way and then another, taking in all sides of the strange artifact, before standing up and slipping into the open stitching in his side. He had something, Margie knew, something to change the way he perceived his world and the world beyond it. Something that made his status as Litchfield’s resident clergyman a joke known only to him, a private joke at which he spent most of his time inwardly laughing even when he cried. And whenever he was alone with his secret talisman, he pressed it tightly to the side of his head and listened carefully to whatever it was only he could hear.

  The sigil seemed to glow when the doll did this; its dull grey burned gold as though it lay directly in the sunlight. Margie could not hear what it told him, but for some reason unknown to her she imagined it was something like Your life is a lie; you are praying to no one.

  Something she had always known, and hoped her father would never figure out.

  Then, a curious scene: the doll representing Reverend Jim Shannon seated at a pasteboard table in what Margie took to be their kitchen, bending over a tangled nest of cloth and thread and dried herbs—the doll was constructing dolls, the latter doll-sized to him after the manner of Russian matryoshka figures. Upon stitching one up to completion, he produced the amulet, which he rubbed over the body of the doll like some mystic salve. Margie expected something incredible to follow—or something horrifying—but the reverend doll merely set the figure down on the paper table and began working on a new one. She could not make sense of it.

  Not until, a moment later, he touched the sigil to this new doll as he had the first and then ripped the head clean off of it. The picture cut to the pasteboard drugstore, where the Margie doll surreptitiously dragged on a tiny toy cigarette and exhaled smoke made of cotton. She leaned up against the wall, one jointless leg curled back, and in an instant her head popped off, leaving a trail of bright red yarn dangling down from the open neck.

  Margie yelped, and as if her cry caused it, the screen cut abruptly to a crackly old silent film, sepia in colour, of some magician performing hackneyed tricks on a ramshackle stage. She snapped back to reality, to the dark auditorium where Scooter sat beside her, hugging his knees and giggling like an infant. More alarming than this was the woman in the fourth row who was screaming her head off, something no one but Margie seemed to notice at all. The dark-haired woman behind the screaming lunatic was sobbing into her hands while the cop—she could not remember his name, but knew to avoid him—pounded the seats on either side of him with his fists and grunted every breath.

  Others behaved erratically, as well; in fact, nearly all of the dozen or so people who freckled the theatre’s seats either wept, yelled, or acted as though they were terribly frightened. As far as Margie could tell, Scooter was the only one having a good time. Despite the clamour made by the increasingly agitated audience, he kept on snickering and rocking back and forth on his seat. She furrowed her brow at the pressure building in her head and shook Scooter’s knee.

  “Scooter? Scoot?”

  Without taking his eyes from the screen or altering his gleeful expression, Scooter slapped her hand away, even as he squealed with delight at the second-rate magician . . . or whatever it was he thought he was seeing. Because it occurred to her then that nobody else among the suddenly lunatic filmgoers around her would have seen the strange little melodrama of her life in dolls—only her. What they saw was something only each of them could say, their own private delight, in Scooter’s case, or mind-destroying horror, as with the still shrieking woman in the fourth row.

  Margie got to her feet and edged along the row until she reached the lighted aisle. From there she could take in the whole crazy scene, including the screaming woman who had stopped screaming but was now disrobing in front of her fellow lunatics.

  She tried calling out to Scooter one last time, and as she expected he paid her no mind. Nobody in that theatre would have; they were each in their own private cells, trapped and isolated by what they saw, or thought they saw. Margie swallowed hard and ran for the doors.

  She needed to get back home; she needed to know what her daddy had done.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The midnight show ended just before one o’clock in the morning, whereupon the screen went dark and the auditorium lights blinked back on. The audience, all but Margie Shannon, sat still and dazed for several minutes thereafter, groggy as if having just woken up, and eventually staggered out to the lobby, one by one, and then out to the dark, humid street. Dean Mortimer walked to the sheriff’s office rather than going clear out to his house, where he slept in one of the two holding cells. Georgia May Bagby drove back to her house; she ran over a raccoon along the way, though she was not consciously aware of it, nor was she aware of the fact that she was stark naked. Scooter only vaguely wondered what became of his date during his long walk home—his thoughts were more focused on the notion that Litchfield may be in trouble, that the war in Europe might have spilled over and infected his own hometown. It occurred to him, hazily, that there was a conspiracy afoot that was rooted in Reverend Shannon and his bullshit church, but that is was much broader than that. It occurred to Scooter that probably his parents were deeply involved.

  So Scooter went home, arriving just after two o’clock, and made a beeline for his father’s gun cabinet. He mulled over his choices for a few minutes and settled upon the Browning Auto-5, which was the old man’s preferred fowling weapon. He loaded it with three shells from the cabinet’s bottom drawer, made sure one was in the chamber, and climbed the stairs to the second story. John and Mary Beth Carew were sound asleep in their queen-sized bed when he entered their bedroom and switched on the lamp. John did not stir, but Mary Beth cracked one eye open and mumbled something incomprehensible. Scooter figured it was probably German, which was enough to seal his mother’s fate. He raised the shotgun, bracing the butt against the meat of his shoulder, and blew her head apart from three feet away. The headboard was spattered with red-black blood and lumps of skull and brain, some of which struck John on the side of his face. He was awake by then, scrambling out of the bed before he even knew what had been the source of the thunderous report. Then his bleary eyes found what remained of his wife and John Carew let loose a long, shrill scream. He turned to look upon his only son, who turned the shotgun upon him, and said, “Scoots?”

  Scooter shot him in the gut, knocking his father back with a spray of buckshot and blood, and then calmly walked over to where the old man fell before expending the last shell, which obliterated John’s neck and nearly severed the head completely. Sniffing the air, his nostrils stung from gunpowder and the
tangy, faintly metallic odour of his parents’ blood. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, laid the Browning down beside his father’s mangled corpse, and went back down the hall to take a cold bath.

  His skin shrank in the chilly water, budded with goose pimples. From the window above the tub, he heard a breeze pick up, rustling the leafy branches on the trees in the yard. Briefly, Scooter wondered if a storm was coming.

  He dreamt that night of righteous vengeance.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Theodora stood in the middle of the street for a long time and cried. She felt both lost and trapped, as though contained in an invisible box, a showman’s cage. She knew that she could move if she wanted, that there was nothing from which she needed to escape, but she knew just as well there was no place to escape to. Home was an anathema, a faraway place of hurt and lonesomeness, black magic and children’s bones. Little ugly dolls that killed people when she touched them . . .

  She was stumbling down the street before she realized it, moving east for no reason at all, struggling to get her thoughts in order. She felt drunk. Or brain damaged. Her ankle screamed at her, carrying waves of hot pain through the telegraph wire of her nervous system to her fluttering brain. Though she was less convinced now that the bones were broken, every ungainly step still agonized.

  When the first blast of cold air arced down from above and chilled her, she figured she must have been mistaken, that she hadn’t left the Palace at all—she was still smack in the middle of Barker Davis’s midnight show. It was, after all, the middle of July, and the sweat was rapidly cooling on her brow. A dream, a chimera induced by the picture. She walked a little faster, more assured of herself, and braced herself for the next scene.

  But nothing happened. Apart from the quickly dropping temperature, the street was silent and still, the singing insects the only sound she heard. Half a block ahead of her, the Litchfield Valley Hotel loomed sorrowfully, a mid-rate hotel on the fast track to a no-rate flophouse. Slowing her gait, she approached warily as if coming upon a haunted house. Somewhere in the back of her muddled mind she was aware that this was not only Jojo’s hotel, but the place where that poor man died so horribly . . . where she had inadvertently killed him.

  Though she strode slowly, Theodora approached the cracked, circular drive in front of the hotel a few minutes later. Saffron light glowed from the front doors like honey, intensifying when a young coloured man in a bellhop’s uniform opened one of them and held it open as he fixed a kind gaze on her. She froze halfway up the drive and looked at him.

  “You coming in, ma’am?” Charles asked.

  “I—” she started, preparing to explain that she was merely passing by. In mid-thought, she realized that wasn’t true; she was precisely where she needed to be. “Excuse me, but isn’t this where . . . I mean, does a man named Jojo Walker work here?”

  The bellhop smiled and laughed. “Work here? Why, he lives here.”

  The smile was a kind and easy-going one, but Theodora paused, her uncertainty about the world around her nagging at her, waiting for the bellhop to sprout fangs or transform into her father. These things did not happen. The young man only raised his eyebrows and let the smile melt a bit.

  “Are you all right?”

  “What? Oh, yes. Yes, I’m all right. I wonder if I might come in and see Mr. Walker.”

  “Of course you can come in,” Charles answered, more than a little surprised at the woman’s humility before him, “though I dunno if Jojo’s ’round. I guess he’s off tonight. Tell you the truth, I ain’t seen him at all.”

  Theodora nodded and glided through the door Charles held open. A cold draft followed her into the stuffy lobby and she shivered. She asked him, “Do you feel that?”

  “Feel what, ma’am?”

  “Nothing.”

  He let the door swing shut and moved around her toward the cashier’s cage. A dark, bearded man sat inside the cage, still as a mannequin.

  “Say, Mr. Thomas? This here lady’s looking for Jojo; you seen him ’round?”

  The man Charles called Mr. Thomas leaned closer the mesh and studied Theodora. She watched him as he did so and felt mildly uncomfortable beneath his gaze, particularly when a phlegmy laugh spilled out from somewhere in his wiry black beard.

  “Looks a might too pale for Jojo Walker, don’t you reckon?”

  Charles frowned and gazed down at his shoes, avoiding the look of shock that crossed over Theodora’s face. It did not, however, last long. She was not entirely sure what drew her from the bizarre show at the Palace to this less than desirable hotel, but she knew it had everything to do with Jojo, which was enough for her to feel strangely protective of her new friend. Her brow creased and shoulders jumped as she stomped across the lobby to the cage. Startled, Charles stepped away and passively observed.

  “Now you listen to me, you laughing hyena,” she snarled. “I didn’t come here to suffer slights about my propriety or Mr. Walker’s private life, neither of which are any of your damn business. I happen to be a personal friend of his and I’ve come to see him about a private matter, and if you think you’re going to have a nasty little laugh at either of our expenses, you’re sorely mistaken, Mr. Thomas.” She pronounced mister like it was the filthiest word in the language.

  For his part, Mr. Thomas gaped and stuttered before he managed to collect himself enough to ask, “And just who might you be?”

  “As it happens, I don’t have to answer to you. That’s why I’m standing out here and you’re in that lousy little cage like that baboon you are. So shut your mouth unless you want to come on out here and say something directly to my face, you hear?”

  Charles covered his mouth with his hand and turned toward the wall. Theodora saw this and decided that she liked him.

  Mr. Thomas sighed heavily and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Door right over there. That’s his office. Have at it, lady.”

  “Thank you,” she said with a sardonic smile.

  Taking leave of the ugly little man in the cage, Theodora went directly to the half-hidden door he’d indicated and looked to Charles, who nodded. She knocked. There was no answer. She knocked again and the results were the same.

  “I didn’t think he was in his office,” Charles said. “On a night off, there ain’t no telling where Jojo might be. Sometimes he goes all the way down to Hot Springs to bet on the horses.”

  She narrowed her eyes, remembering the tickets Jojo gave the moon-faced “doctor” at the Palace. “He’s not in Hot Springs,” she explained. “He was with me less than two hours ago. He went to . . . see a man. And he didn’t come back.”

  “Maybe he’s still with that man,” the bellhop suggested.

  “What’s your name, young man?”

  “Charles, ma’am.”

  “Charles, I think our Jojo is in trouble.”

  He stiffened up, his face registering concern and puzzlement. His eyes trailed from Theodora to Mr. Thomas and back again. A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead, which Theodora could not understand for the life of her. She was chilled to the bone.

  “Where were you?” he asked. “When Jojo went to see the man, I mean.”

  “The Palace Theater, just up the street.”

  “You think he’s in real trouble?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Charles pursed his lips and swept the round red cap from his head.

  “Mr. Thomas,” he called out without turning around, “this nice lady needs some help and I aim to give it to her.”

  “Mind your place, Charles,” Thomas warned.

  “Mind your ass, Mr. Thomas,” Charles said as he strutted over to the door to open it one last time.

  Theodora’s eyes popped wide as the former bellhop gestured toward the world outside and said, “After you, ma’am.”

  “I’m Theodora,” she said on her way through the door. “T
heodora Cavanaugh.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Ms. Cavanaugh.”

  “It’s missus,” she corrected, “but please call me Theodora.”

  Charles laughed.

  “You must be good friends with Jojo,” he explained. “You’re the only two white folks in Litchfield that ever told me to use their first names.”

  He shook his head as he chuckled and dragged a sleeve across his face to divest it of sweat. Half-consciously Theodora touched her own face—it was tight and cold.

  Charles led the way, and they walked side by side back to the Palace.

  The theatre was dark and locked up. Under the cover of the triangular marquee, not even the moonlight illumined their faces. Charles cupped his hands on either side of his eyes and peered through the glass.

  “I don’t think there’s no one in there.”

  “Russ never shut down this quick. There’s a lot to do, I guess. Machines to shut off and receipts to tabulate. Cleaning up.”

  “Maybe they was in a hurry.”

  “A hurry for what? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I seen all sorts of crazy things people do in the middle of the night. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “I’d believe practically anything tonight.”

  “Let’s go around back.”

  “What for?”

  In lieu of answering, she limped around to the side of the theatre, the pain registering less and less, and vanished into the shadows. Charles followed.

  Behind the building was pitch black night, and he had to feel along the rough brick wall to make his way. He heard a jarring crunch, metal against metal, and gasped.

  “It’s just me,” Theodora said from the darkness. “Sometimes the back door gets stuck, doesn’t lock. Kids sneak in all the time on account of it, though I doubt Russ ever caught onto that.”