Dark Forces

by McCauley, Kirby

  Above the bar the sharply tilted television set crackles with machine-gun fire, and indistinct silhouettes, probably human, race across bright sand, below a bright turquoise sky. Joe Pye, annoyed, turns and signals with a brisk counterclockwise motion of his fingers to the bartender, who lowers the sound almost immediately; the bartender’s deference to Joe Pye impresses Rose. But then she is easily impressed. But then she is not, ordinarily, easily impressed. But the fizzing stinging orange drink has gone to her head.

  “From going north and south on this globe, and east and west, travelling by freighter, by train, sometimes on foot, on foot through the mountains, spending a year here, six months there, two years somewhere else, I made my way finally back home, to the States, and wandered till things, you know, felt right: the way things sometimes feel right about a town or a landscape or another person, and you know it’s your destiny,” Joe Pye says softly. “If you know what I mean, Olivia.”

  With two dark fingers he strokes the back of her hand. She shivers, though the sensation is really ticklish.

  “…destiny,” Rose says. “Yes. I think I know.”

  She wants to ask Joe Pye if she won honestly; if, maybe, he hadn’t thrown the game her way. Because he’d noticed her earlier. All evening. A stranger, a scowling disbelieving stranger, fixing him with her intelligent skeptical stare, the most conservatively and tastefully dressed player in the hall. But he doesn’t seem eager to talk about his business, he wants instead to talk about his life as a “soldier of fortune”—whatever he means by that—and Rose wonders if such a question might be naïve, or insulting, for it would suggest that he was dishonest, that the bingo games were rigged. But then perhaps everyone knows they are rigged? —like the horse races?

  She wants to ask but cannot. Joe Pye is sitting so close to her in the booth, his skin is so ruddy, his lips so dark, his teeth so white, his goatee Mephistophelian and his manner—now that he is “offstage,” now that he can “be himself”—so ingratiatingly intimate that she feels disoriented. She is willing to see her position as comic, even as ludicrous (she, Rose Mallow Odom, disdainful of men and of physical things in general, is going to allow this charlatan to imagine that he is seducing her—but at the same time she is quite nervous, she isn’t even very articulate); she must see it, and interpret it, as something. But Joe Pye keeps on talking. As if he were halfway enjoying himself. As if this were a normal conversation. Did she have any hobbies? Pets? Did she grow up in Tophet and go to school here? Were her parents living? What sort of business was her father in? —or was he a professional man? Had she travelled much? No? Was she ever married? Did she have a “career”? Had she ever been in love? Did she ever expect to be in love?

  Rose blushes, hears herself giggle in embarrassment, her words trip over one another, Joe Pye is leaning close, tickling her forearm, a clown in black silk pajama bottoms and a turban, smelling of something over-ripe. His dark eyebrows are peaked, the whites of his eyes are luminous, his fleshy lips pout becomingly; he is irresistible. His nostrils even flare with the pretense of passion…Rose begins to giggle and cannot stop.

  “You are a highly attractive girl, especially when you let yourself go like right now,” Joe Pye says softly. “You know—we could go up to my room where we’d be more private. Would you like that?”

  “I am not,” Rose says, drawing in a full, shaky breath, to clear her head, “I am not a girl. Hardly a girl at the age of thirty-nine.”

  “We could be more private in my room. No one would interrupt us.”

  “My father isn’t well, he’s waiting up for me,” Rose says quickly.

  “By now he’s asleep, most likely!”

  “Oh no, no—he suffers from insomnia, like me.”

  “Like you! Is that so? I suffer from insomnia too,” Joe Pye says, squeezing her hand in excitement. “Ever since a bad experience I had in the desert… in another part of the world… But I’ll tell you about that later, when we’re closer acquainted. If we both have insomnia, Olivia, we should keep each other company. The nights in Tophet are so long.”

  “The nights are long,” Rose says, blushing.

  “But your mother, now: she isn’t waiting up for you.”

  “Mother has been dead for years. I won’t say what her sickness was but you can guess, it went on forever, and after she died I took all my things—I had this funny career going, I won’t bore you with details—all my papers—stories and notes and such—and burnt them in the trash, and I’ve been at home every day and every night since, and I felt good when I burnt the things and good when I remember it, and—and I feel good right now,” Rose says defiantly, finishing her drink. “So I know what I did was a sin.”

  “Do you believe in sin, a sophisticated girl like yourself?” Joe Pye says, smiling broadly.

  The alcohol is a warm golden-glowing breath that fills her lungs and overflows and spreads to every part of her body, to the very tips of her toes, the tips of her ears. Yet her hand is fishlike: let Joe Pye fondle it as he will. So she is being seduced, and it is exactly as silly, as clumsy, as she had imagined it would be, as she imagined such things would be even as a young girl. So. As Descartes saw, I am I, up in my head, and my body is my body, extended in space, out there, it will be interesting to observe what happens, Rose thinks calmly. But she is not calm. She has begun to tremble. But she must be calm, it is all so absurd.

  On their way up to Room 302 (the elevator is out of commission or perhaps there is no elevator, they must take the fire stairs, Rose is fetchingly dizzy and her escort must loop his arm around her) she tells Joe Pye that she didn’t deserve to win at bingo and really should give the $100 back or perhaps to Lobelia (but she doesn’t know Lobelia’s last name!—what a pity) because it was really Lobelia’s card that won, not hers. Joe Pye nods though he doesn’t appear to understand. As he unlocks his door Rose begins an incoherent story, or is it a confession, about something she did when she was eleven years old and never told anyone about, and Joe Pye leads her into the room, and switches on the lights with a theatrical flourish, and even the television set, though the next moment he switches the set off. Rose is blinking at the complex undulating stripes in the carpet, which are very like snakes, and in a blurry voice she concludes her confession: “…she was so popular and so pretty and I hated her, I used to leave for school ahead of her and slow down so she’d catch up, and sometimes that worked, and sometimes it didn’t, I just hated her, I bought a valentine, one of those joke valentines, it was about a foot high and glossy and showed some kind of an idiot on the cover, Mother loved me, it said, and when you opened it, but she died, so I sent it to Sandra, because her mother had died…when we were in fifth grade…and…and…”

  Joe Pye unclips the golden cock, and undoes his turban, which is impressively long. Rose, her lips grinning, fumbles with the first button of her dress. It is a small button, cloth-covered, and resists her efforts to push it through the hole. But then she gets it through, and stands there panting.

  She will think of it, I must think of it, as an impersonal event, bodily but not spiritual, like a gynecological examination. But then Rose hates those gynecological examinations. Hates and dreads them, and puts them off, canceling appointments at the last minute. It will serve me right, she often thinks, if… But her mother’s cancer was elsewhere. Elsewhere in her body, and then everywhere. Perhaps there is no connection.

  Joe Pye’s skull is covered by mossy, obviously very thick, but close-clipped dark hair; he must have shaved his head a while back and now it is growing unevenly out. The ruddy tan ends at his hairline, where his skin is paste-white as Rose’s. He smiles at Rose, fondly and inquisitively and with an abrupt unflinching gesture he rips off the goatee. Rose draws in her breath, shocked.

  “But what are you doing, Olivia?” he asks.

  The floor tilts suddenly so that there is the danger she will fall, stumble into his arms. She takes a step backward. Her weight forces the floor down, keeps it in place. Nervously, angril
y, she tears at the prim little ugly buttons on her dress. “I— I’m— I’m hurrying the best I can,” she mutters.

  Joe Pye rubs at his chin, which is pinkened and somewhat raw-looking, and stares at Rose Mallow Odom. Even without his majestic turban and his goatee he is a striking picture of a man; he holds himself well, his shoulders somewhat raised. He stares at Rose as if he cannot believe what he is seeing.

  “Olivia?” he says.

  She yanks at the front of her dress and a button pops off, it is hilarious but there’s no time to consider it, something is wrong, the dress won’t come off, she sees that the belt is still tightly buckled and of course the dress won’t come off, if only that idiot wouldn’t stare at her, sobbing with frustration she pulls her straps off her skinny shoulders and bares her chest, her tiny breasts, Rose Mallow Odom, who had for years cowered in the girls’ locker room at the public school, burning with shame, for the very thought of her body filled her with shame, and now she is contemptuously stripping before a stranger who gapes at her as if he has never seen anything like her before.

  “But Olivia what are you doing…?” he says.

  His question is both alarmed and formal. Rose wipes tears out of her eyes and looks at him, baffled.

  “But Olivia people don’t do like this, not this way, not so fast and angry,” Joe Pye says. His eyebrows arch, his eyes narrow with disapproval; his stance radiates great dignity. “I think you must have misunderstood the nature of my proposal.”

  “What do you mean, people don’t do… What people…?” Rose whimpers. She must blink rapidly to keep him in focus but the tears keep springing into her eyes and running down her cheeks, they will leave rivulets in her matte makeup which she lavishly if contemptuously applied many hours ago, something has gone wrong, something has gone terribly wrong, why is that idiot staring at her with such pity?

  “Decent people,” Joe Pye says slowly.

  “But I— I—”

  “Decent people,” he says, his voice lowered, one corner of his mouth lifted in a tiny ironic dimple.

  Rose has begun to shiver despite the golden-glowing burn in her throat. Her breasts are bluish-white, the pale-brown nipples have gone hard with fear. Fear and cold and clarity. She tries to shield herself from Joe Pye’s glittering gaze with her arms, but she cannot: he sees everything. The floor is tilting again, with maddening slowness. She will topple forward if it doesn’t stop. She will fall into his arms no matter how she resists, leaning her weight back on her shaky heels.

  “But I thought— Don’t you— Don’t you want—?” she whispers.

  Joe Pye draws himself up to his fullest height. He is really a giant of a man: the Bingo Master in his silver tunic and black wide-legged trousers, the rashlike shadow of the goatee framing his small angry smile, his eyes narrowed with disgust. Rose begins to cry as he shakes his head No. And again No. No.

  She weeps, she pleads with him, she is stumbling dizzily forward. Something has gone wrong and she cannot comprehend it. In her head things ran their inevitable way, she had already chosen the cold clever words that would most winningly describe them, but Joe Pye knows nothing of her plans, knows nothing of her words, cares nothing for her.

  “No!” he says sharply, striking out at her.

  She must have fallen toward him, her knees must have buckled, for suddenly he has grasped her by her naked shoulders and, his face darkened with blood, he is shaking her violently. Her head whips back and forth. Against the bureau, against the wall, so sudden, so hard, the back of her head striking the wall, her teeth rattling, her eyes wide and blind in their sockets.

  “No no no no no.”

  Suddenly she is on the floor, something has struck the right side of her mouth, she is staring up through layers of agitated air to a bullet-headed man with wet mad eyes whom she has never seen before. The naked lightbulb screwed into the ceiling socket, so far away, burns with the power of a bright blank blinding sun behind his skull.

  “But I— I thought—” she whispers.

  “Prancing into Joe Pye’s Bingo Hall and defiling it, prancing up here and defiling my room, what have you got to say for yourself, miss!” Joe Pye says, hauling her to her feet. He tugs her dress up and walks her roughly to the door, grasping her by the shoulders again and squeezing her hard, hard, without the slightest ounce of affection or courtesy—why he doesn’t care for her at all!—and then she is out in the corridor, her patent-leather purse tossed after her, and the door to 302 is slammed shut.

  It has all happened so quickly, Rose cannot comprehend. She stares at the door as if expecting it to be opened. But it remains closed. Far down the hall someone opens a door and pokes his head out and, seeing her in her disarray, quickly closes that door as well. So Rose is left completely alone.

  She is too numb to feel much pain: only the pin-prickish sensation in her jaw, and the throbbing in her shoulders where Joe Pye’s ghost-fingers still squeeze with such strength. Why, he didn’t care for her at all…

  Weaving down the corridor like a drunken woman, one hand holding her ripped dress shut, one hand pressing the purse clumsily against her side. Weaving and staggering and muttering to herself like a drunken woman. She is a drunken woman. “What do you mean, people— What people—?”

  If only he had cradled her in his arms! If only he had loved her!

  On the first landing of the fire stairs she grows very dizzy suddenly, and thinks it wisest to sit down. To sit down at once. Her head is drumming with a pulsebeat she can’t control, she believes it is maybe the Bingo Master’s pulsebeat, and his angry voice too scrambles about in her head, mixed up with her own thoughts. A puddle grows at the back of her mouth—she spits out blood, gagging—and discovers that one of her front teeth has come loose: one of her front teeth has come loose and the adjacent incisor also rocks back and forth in its socket.

  “Oh Joe Pye,” she whispers, “oh dear Christ what have you done—”

  Weeping, sniffing, she fumbles with the fake-gold clasp of her purse and manages to get the purse open and paws inside, whimpering, to see if—but it’s gone—she can’t find it—ah, but there it is: there it is after all, folded small and somewhat crumpled (for she’d felt such embarrassment, she had stuck it quickly into her purse): the check for $100. A plain check that should have Joe Pye’s large, bold, black signature on it, if only her eyes could focus long enough for her to see.

  “Joe Pye, what people,” she whimpers, blinking. “I never heard of— What people, where—?”

  Children of the Kingdom

  T. E. D. Klein

  “Mischief is their occupation, malice their habit, murder their sport, and blasphemy their delight.”

  —Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

  “They are everywhere, those creatures.”

  —Derleth, “The House on Curwen Street”

  “It taught me the foolishness of not being afraid.”

  —rape victim, New York City

  On a certain spring evening several years ago, after an unsuccessful interview in Boston for a job I’d thought was mine, I missed the last train back to New York and was forced to take the eleven-thirty bus. It proved to be a “local,” wending its way through the shabby little cities of southern New England and pulling into a succession of dimly lit Greyhound stations far from the highway, usually in the older parts of town—the decaying ethnic neighborhoods, the inner-city slums, the ghettos. I had a bad headache, and soon fell asleep. When I awoke I felt disoriented. All the other passengers were sleeping. I didn’t know what time it was, but hesitated to turn on the light and look at my watch lest it disturb the man next to me. Instead, I looked out the window. We were passing through the heart of yet another shabby, nameless city, moving past the same gutted buildings I’d been seeing all night in my dreams, the same lines of cornices and rooftops, empty windows, gaping doorways. In the patches of darkness, familiar shapes seemed strange. Mailboxes and fire hydrants sprouted like tropical plants. Yet somehow it was stranger beneath
the streetlights, where garbage cast long shadows on the sidewalk, and vacant lots hid glints of broken glass among the weeds. I remembered what I’d read of those great Mayan cities standing silent and abandoned in the Central American jungle, with no clue to where the inhabitants had gone. Through the window I could now see crumbling rows of tenements, an ugly red-brick housing project, some darkened and filthy-looking shops with alleys blocked by iron gates. Here and there a solitary figure would turn to watch the bus go by. Except for my reflection, I saw not one white face. A pair of little children threw stones at us from behind a fortress made of trash; a grown man stood pissing in the street like an animal, and watched us with amusement as we passed. I wanted to be out of this benighted place, and prayed that the driver would get us through quickly. I longed to be back in New York. Then a street sign caught my eye, and I realized that I’d already arrived. This was my own neighborhood; my home was only three streets down and just across the avenue. As the bus continued south I caught a fleeting glimpse of the apartment building where, less than half a block away, my wife lay awaiting my return.

  Less than half a block can make a difference in New York. Different worlds can co-exist side by side, scarcely intersecting. There are places in Manhattan where you can see a modern high-rise, with its terraces and doormen and well-appointed lobby, towering white and immaculate above some soot-stained little remnant of the city’s past—a tenement built during the Depression, lines of garbage cans in front, or a nineteenth-century brownstone gone to seed, its brickwork defaced by graffiti, its front door yawning open, its hallway dark, narrow, and forbidding as a tomb. Perhaps the two buildings will be separated by an alley; perhaps not even that. The taller one’s shadow may fall across the other, blotting out the sun; the other may disturb the block with loud music, voices raised in argument, the gnawing possibility of crime. Yet to all appearances the people of each group will live their lives without acknowledging the other’s existence. The poor will keep their rats, like secrets, to themselves; the cooking smells, the smells of poverty and sickness and backed-up drains, will seldom pass beyond their windows. The sidewalk in front may be lined with the idle and unshaven, men with T-shirts and dark skins and a gaze as sharp as razors, singing, or trading punches, or disputing, perhaps, in Spanish; or they may sit in stony silence on the stoop, passing round a bottle in a paper bag. They are rough-looking and impetuous, these men; but they will seldom leave their kingdom for the alien world next door. And those who inhabit that alien world will move with a certain wariness when they find themselves on the street, and will hurry past the others without meeting their eyes.