Bring Me Children

by David Martin

  “I play with him sometimes.”

  Quinndell grins. “So the aging slut has some maternal instincts after all. You’ll be needing those soon, won’t you, Mary?”

  She says nothing.

  “Put him here on the desk.”

  But the child’s fat arms cling tenaciously around Mary’s neck.

  “He won’t let go,” she tells Quinndell, who reaches out and takes the boy under his armpits, pulling him away from Mary and sitting him hard on the desk.

  The child whimpers and reaches for Mary, but Quinndell holds him firmly by the shoulders. “I know how to stop his crying.”

  Mary doesn’t like where this is going.

  “I could show you.”

  “Show me what?” Mary asks.

  “Show you how to operate on him.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, one small incision, two tiny snips …” The doctor’s fingers toy with the boy’s dirty neck. “… and we’d have his vocal cords disabled, never to be disturbed by the little bastard’s crying ever again.”

  Mary knows he’s capable of doing it.

  “His parents and his sister would be grateful to us.”

  The boy is reaching for Mary, who takes his hands and presses them in hers.

  “Come on, Mary, you’ve helped me with more difficult procedures. Why just this past March —”

  “No!”

  Quinndell chuckles. He finds the boy’s round cheek and pinches it, not hard enough to bruise the child but hard enough to make him start crying again. “Do you think his parents value him?”

  “Of course they do!” Mary says sharply, taking the boy out from under Quinndell’s grip, holding him in her arms, rocking the child back and forth until he stops crying.

  The doctor pauses, considering something. “Yes, but how much do they value him, how much would they take for him, how much could I get for him?”

  Patting the boy gently on his back, Mary doesn’t reply.

  “I like children,” Quinndell tells her.

  She snorts in contempt, immediately regretting it, then is surprised when the doctor insists, “I do like children, it’s after they grow up to be adults that I find them wanting. When toddlers like this one were brought to me in my examining room, they held me in awe. I often thought a child’s reaction to me in the examining room was exactly how a man would act when ushered into the presence of God: awestruck and trembling with fear.”

  The little boy has begun to cry again, reaching out over Mary’s shoulder, reaching toward the door, wanting to go home.

  “Oh, yes, Mary, in my examining room I was God to these people and their children. Then as soon as they departed my presence, I was out of their minds. Never paying their bills on time or in full. Never thinking about me. Do you know how that upsets God? Mary, if you don’t quiet that child, I swear I’ll cut out his vocal cords, right here on this desk.”

  She desperately rocks and bounces the boy in her arms but he cries all the harder.

  “Early in my practice here a woman came in and offered a dozen jars of jelly as partial payment on her bill. I said, ‘Madam, I do not operate on the barter system.’ Then I dropped her jars of jelly — blackberry, I believe — one by one on the floor. Then I sued her for nonpayment. The only asset she had was a cheap little shack of a house but I took it, I —” Quinndell’s face suddenly twists in anger. “Shut him up. I can not tolerate the sound of a child crying, not since I was blinded, that goddamn crying is an abomination, it’s —” He opens a drawer and takes out a scalpel. “Mary, put him down on the desk.” He waits a moment and then screams at her. “Goddamn you, Mary, put him down here, I’m going to slice his vocal cords and you’re going to help me do it!”

  “No.”

  Getting control of his anger, Quinndell manages a rough laugh. “Tell me dear, do you think I’m a tad too theatrical?”

  “I —”

  “Oh, he’s cute now, Mary, but what about in fifteen years when he’s raping girls in the backseats of cars, drinking himself stupid on cheap beer, another piece of useless, violent debris. Let’s save the world the trouble and slit his fat little throat right now.”

  She is shaking her head, moving away from Quinndell, the child howling in her arms.

  “I’ll stop that crying,” the doctor says, coming around the side of his desk, smiling broadly as if this might all be a joke, “I’ll stop it once and for all. Bring him here.”

  But Mary has stepped quietly to the double doors.

  “No one cares about children, thirty-five years doctoring them proved that to me. Parents starve their children, abuse them, abandon them. Why do you think that happens? Because no one cares. I cared, I tried to correct the inequities, and look what it got me, got me blinded!” He’s shouting now. “But I found out how to make people care, didn’t I, Mary, I found out how to make them pay—” He stops when he realizes he’s alone.

  Quinndell stands there a moment before returning the scalpel to the drawer. Then sits at his desk, the doctor once again seeing-remembering his office, gazing over the photographs, lingering on the one taken back when he had his own dark eyes instead of these unnaturally blue ones, a photograph of the doctor surrounded by his pediatric patients, several of whom are holding a homemade banner, Quinndell able to see each of those kids and each of the words scrawled on their banner.

  An hour later Mary is upstairs in her room, still shaking. From under her bed she takes out a little box she found on the front step yesterday morning. Six inches long, three inches wide, two inches thick, made of wood, painted white, and containing a crude wax figure covered with hair and feathers and the letter Q. If she tells Quinndell, he’ll go into a rage and then God knows what’ll happen. Mary has only twelve days left until she gets her soul back, she doesn’t want anything to go wrong. On the calendar by her bed, the days are marked off with big red Xs, the way a convict counts down to freedom.

  She first met Quinndell almost twenty years ago. He was on a business trip to New York, Mary was working as a hostess in a very expensive Manhattan restaurant, and they “dated” (a euphemism Mary clings to tenaciously) all during the week that Quinndell was in New York. They continued a sporadic “affair” for several years, the doctor arranging to meet her in New York or sending her first-class tickets to whatever city he was visiting, paying all of her expenses including a generous allowance for clothing. Mary would be insulted at any suggestion that she ever worked as a prostitute; she simply had occasional affairs with men who paid her way.

  She didn’t hear from the doctor for a period of fifteen years — until last July when he finally traced her to the restaurant where she was working (as a waitress then) and outlined The Deal.

  Quinndell explained that he had been blind for four years and wanted her, someone he knew from the old days, to come and live with him, read to him, chauffeur him, sleep with him. If she would do everything he requested, he would at the end of one year pay her fifty thousand dollars. Mary was forty-two at the time, lived alone, and had three hundred dollars in her checking account. She was in West Virginia the following Monday.

  Upon her arrival in Hameln, Mary was relieved to see that Mason Quinndell looked even more handsome, more distinguished, than he had in his forties, although she did find his overly blue eyes a bit unnerving. But it wasn’t the blindness that had disfigured Quinndell, he had turned ugly inside. When she knew him fifteen years ago, the doctor had always acted superior, disdainful of people he considered his inferiors — after all, he was a doctor. But even when he was making fun of someone’s ignorance or obesity or ugliness, he did it in a way that made you laugh. You might feel bad for laughing but, fifteen years ago, Mason Quinndell could be terribly funny and he had a zest for everything he did. He loved taking Mary to museums, recommending books to her. He was full of himself, full of life. But now, now something inside of Dr. Quinndell had turned rancid.

  Mary tried to be sympathetic and supportive, always keeping in mind the fift
y thousand she would receive at the end of the year, but Quinndell took such joy in humiliating her and treated her with such contempt that by the end of the first month Mary had had enough. Dressed to travel, she came down to breakfast one morning and announced she was quitting.

  “If you leave now,” Quinndell reminded her, “you don’t get any money. That was the deal, you get paid at the end of the year. Quitting now means that you endured an entire month with me for absolutely no compensation.”

  She told him she couldn’t tolerate eleven more months of the way he’d been treating her these first four weeks, eleven more months of his snapping his fingers and telling her to get down on her knees and “service” him or to bend over a chair and pull up her dress, eleven more months of belittling her, eleven more months of ridicule. She knew what the deal was but she would just write off the past month to experience. All she wanted from Quinndell was enough money to get back to New York.

  He thought for a moment and then announced that he was raising her compensation to seventy-five thousand. “In eleven months, Mary, you’ll have more money than you’ve ever had in your life.”

  She considered it. “Will you stop treating me so bad?”

  “So badly,” he corrected her. “And the answer is, I will treat you exactly as I choose to treat you — and in exchange for indulging me you get seventy-five thousand dollars. If your answer is no, then you can hitchhike to New York for all I care, I’m not giving you a dime.”

  “Make it a hundred thousand.”

  Quinndell laughed. “Let’s see now, if I were to request your sexual favors, such as they are, on the average of four times a week for fifty-two weeks, some two hundred sexual contacts in the year covered by our deal … at a hundred thousand dollars that comes out to roughly five hundred dollars per session. Mary. Not even in your dreams did you aspire to being a five-hundred-dollar whore.”

  “This is exactly why I’m leaving!” she cried. “The way you’re always humiliating me. It’s not the sex I’m complaining about, it’s the —”

  “The principle. Yes, yes, I know all about whores and their principles. All right then, a hundred thousand dollars.”

  That seemed too easy. “Are you serious?”

  “Stay with me for a year, do whatever I ask, and I’ll give you an envelope containing a cashier’s check for one hundred thousand dollars. I’ve never lied to you, Mary. Is it a deal?”

  With a hundred thousand dollars she could buy into a small restaurant and begin a new life.

  “Mary?”

  “All right.”

  Smiling, Quinndell reached out and found the quart bottle of maple syrup that was on the table, getting up from his chair and carrying the bottle to where Mary was sitting. He unscrewed the cap.

  She asked him what he was doing.

  “I’m going to pour this syrup over your head.”

  “This is my best outfit, I just had my hair done, I —”

  “Think of the money, Mary.”

  And with that he upended the bottle of syrup over her freshly coiffed hair, down the front of her navy blue jacket with the big white buttons, moving the bottle in lazy circles across her shoulders, and finally pouring the last of the sticky, viscous fluid right onto her face. Then he tossed the bottle into her lap and left the room.

  She sat there at the breakfast table with both of her hands drawn tightly into fists, crying from anger and humiliation, rigid with her hatred for him.

  After that, life with the doctor became even more hellish, the atrocities he performed and forced her to perform so sickening Mary that she awoke each morning convinced she would leave him today. But each day became an investment in her year-end payoff. To quit and walk away with no money would mean she had suffered in vain. So Mary endured, chipped away at day after day, using her hatred for the doctor as fuel to keep herself going, just hold on until the year was over.

  Then this past March, eight months into her year with Quinndell, he brought a baby girl into the house. He told Mary he was going to deliver the child to her new family and ordered Mary to drive him and the baby deep into the mountains, past a hermit’s shack, to a cave with a hidden entrance. Mary waited in the car while Quinndell went inside. He came out alone.

  Mary lies back on the bed.

  She tried to quit after that of course but Quinndell got her to stay by offering Mary an enticement she was unable to refuse: at the end of her year with him, Quinndell said, he would give Mary two envelopes. In one would be a cashier’s check not for a hundred thousand dollars but for two hundred and fifty thousand. In the other would be a name, an address, and twelve photographs.

  She asked him to explain.

  He did — and ever since then Quinndell has owned her soul.

  When the buzzer above her bed sounds, Mary gets wearily to her feet, crams the wooden box into her shoulder bag, and takes the bag with her downstairs. What now?

  “Yes?”

  “Mary? I heard you crying upstairs. Maybe it’s your vocal cords that need snipping.”

  She asks him what he wants.

  “All business, that’s what I like about you, dear. We need to find out if Mr. Lyon is playing games with us.”

  She glances at her bag containing the little white coffin. If Lyon is the one who put it on the doorstep yesterday then, yes, he’s playing games with Quinndell’s mind. Lyon must know how much the doctor hated and feared Claire Cept. Not that Mary is going to mention any of this to Quinndell. She doesn’t intend to do anything that’ll rock the boat for the next twelve days. Just twelve more days.

  “I was thinking perhaps you could seduce John Lyon and find out how vigorously he intends to pursue his inquiry. Do you think you could do that?”

  Yes. She saw how Lyon was looking at her legs when they met in the front yard. Going to bed with him would be nice — and Mary hasn’t had anything nice happen to her in eleven and a half months. But she knows better than to display any enthusiasm for the assignment.

  “I suppose I —”

  “Except seduction isn’t your forte, is it, dearie?”

  Here it comes, she thinks.

  “I mean, sexually speaking, you are rather Pavlovian, aren’t you. I lower my zipper at the cemetery and you’re immediately on your knees. You see the color of a man’s money and you’re on your back with your legs spread before he can count out the fifteen dollars you used to charge for your services — hardly what one would call seduction, is it?”

  Twelve more days of this, then I get my soul back.

  “No, I don’t think your servicing of Mr. Lyon will be required at all.”

  When the front doorbell rings, Quinndell activates a button that releases the lock. “Here comes the man I want you to seduce.”

  Mary turns toward the double doors just as they open. Quinndell can’t be serious, she thinks. Not Carl.

  The sheriff’s deputy is thirty years old, five feet eleven inches tall, weighing in at four hundred and thirty-five pounds. The fat covers his belt all the way around and hangs from his neck like a lard-filled cowl. His face has been obliterated by bulging flesh; there’s a nose in there someplace and a mouth and tiny pig eyes looking out at you. He walks in a lumbering gait, his legs forced apart by massive thighs, his arms pushed out to the sides of his body — a crudely mechanized and grotesquely overinflated doll that’s about to burst.

  “Hiya, Doc. Got your message.”

  “Carl, my boy, we were just talking about you.”

  “Huh?”

  He’s stupid too. Double-digit IQ. Ludicrous for him to be a sheriff’s deputy, he can barely get in and out of a car, but Quinndell arranged the job for him as a way of showing his contempt for the locals — and because Carl is dog-loyal to the doctor.

  “The thing is, Carl, Mary wants … well this is kind of embarrassing, I’ve never played cupid before, but Mary would like to go to bed with you. Only she’s afraid if she suggests it you’ll think she’s too forward so she asked me if I would find out if
you were interested.”

  Horrified, Mary looks from the doctor to Carl, whose mouth is open as he dully tries to comprehend what he is being told. Christ, there’s drool starting to drip from the corner of his lips.

  “Sure,” Carl says — and then finally closes his mouth.

  “There you go, Mary, your dream come true.”

  She’s standing well away from the deputy, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. “What’re you doing?” she asks Quinndell.

  “I’m arranging for you to have sexual intercourse with Carl, that’s what I’m doing. What do you weigh these days, Carl?”

  The deputy is red-faced (either from embarrassment or from sexual excitement, Mary can’t tell), stammering his reply, “Don’t … don’t know, Doc.”

  “Come now, Carl, no reason for shyness among friends. Have you topped five hundred yet?”

  “Don’t … don’t think so.”

  “Mary likes ’em big, don’t you, Mary?”

  She gives the doctor a murderous look.

  “Carl, you will have to promise to let her stay on top — all right?”

  “Whatever you say, Doc.” Now the deputy is leering at Mary, who feels nauseated because she realizes maybe this isn’t a joke, maybe this is just the sort of thing Quinndell would force her to do during these last twelve days.

  “I think he’s warming to the prospect, what do you think, Mary?”

  “I’m not going to bed with him.”

  “Fine, then you can pack up and get out of my house. Just saved me a quarter of a million dollars.”

  Against her will, Mary begins crying. This is what she hates the most about Quinndell, that he can still get to her, still make her cry.

  “Here come the tears, Carl. Next it’ll be nagging. She has a voice that would put a fishwife to shame. Nag, bitch, shrill, shrill — but in the end, Mary always spreads ’em on demand, don’t you, Mary?”

  He’s really serious, he’s really going to make me go to bed with that monster. No, Quinndell’s the monster; Carl’s just fat and stupid.

  “Something I should warn you about, Carl, before you let your fantasies get the best of you. Mary is … how shall I put this delicately … somewhat worn. Widely worn you might say. In fact, I’ve been meaning to ask you, Mary, did you ever perform on the stage? I’m thinking Tijuana. Donkeys.”