Bring Me Children

by David Martin

  She’s actually got him trembling.

  “You’d better answer,” Claire warns, putting it in her mouth again, taking it out, drawing back her lips to show him those teeth he continues to worry about, bringing them together with the distinctive click-clinck of enamel on enamel. “How … much … do —”

  “Damn you,” he groans, can’t take being teased like this anymore, grabbing the back of her head and forcing himself deep into that dangerous mouth. “You want children? Make me invisible …” holding her head with both hands now so he can thrust in and out of her mouth. “Make me invisible tomorrow …” rolling on his side and taking her with him, the better to buck his hips against her, both white legs locked around her black shoulders, “I’ll do it, goddamn you, Claire, I’ll dig ’em up and pile them at your feet!” fucking that mouth which shields its teeth from him as it sucks back hungry to be fucked.

  Lyon soon ejaculating in great clenching spasms that seem to be draining his spinal cord in gulps, Claire going after it with the eager grateful sounds of someone who moments before had been starving.

  Because if African warriors honor enemies by eating their hearts, who are we to argue lovers should do any less?

  CHAPTER 28

  On that Wednesday morning, July 4, John Lyon wakes up still sore from Claire — his stomach bruised ugly, his blood on the bedclothes — but feeling good. He wants to marry her. Crazy? A fifty-year-old white man, a white bread white man, marrying a twenty-six-year-old black woman, he suffers from crying spells and she believes in magic, of course it’s crazy, but no more so than anything else that’s happened to him in the past ten days, Lyon whistling in the shower, which is something he hasn’t done in he can’t remember when.

  By 8 A.M. he’s showered, shaved, dressed, and packing his suitcases when Claire comes in from the kitchen where she has been cooking another breakfast. She hands Lyon a cup of coffee and leans against the wall, crossing her arms.

  “Thanks,” he says, sipping from the cup and looking at Claire’s outfit. “Where do you keep coming up with these different clothes?”

  She glances down at the sleeveless white dress she’s wearing but says nothing.

  Putting the coffee cup on a bedside table, Lyon leans back from the waist to unkink his muscles. He winces because of the stomach wound and is aware that she is watching him closely. “Breakfast smells good.”

  “Where’re you going?” Claire finally asks.

  “I thought we could get an early start. I have to close up this place and then stop in town to turn in the keys.”

  “An early start to where?”

  “Back to New York.”

  She thinks about it a moment. Then: “Last night you promised —”

  Claire is cut off when Lyon shoots a look that warns her not to start in on any more of her nonsense. She leaves the bedroom and Lyon finishes packing.

  When he comes into the kitchen he can still smell the food — after last night, Lyon is voracious — but breakfast has disappeared. Two frying pans are soaking in a sinkful of water.

  “Couldn’t wait for me, huh?” he asks jokingly.

  She says nothing.

  “Ate everything yourself, did you?”

  She’s leaning against a counter, her arms still crossed.

  Lyon steps over to the garbage pail, opens the lid, and sees his breakfast.

  “All right,” he says with a show of exasperation, “here’s what I’m doing. I’m going back to New York and getting an appointment with a doctor, a psychiatrist, try to find out why I keep losing control. Then I’m going to the network brass and say that I’m under a doctor’s care, my breakdown is behind me, please take me back. They’ll ask about these strange reports they received regarding my behavior in West Virginia and I’ll tell them it was all a big mistake, a misunderstanding.”

  “A mistake,” Claire says as if experimenting with that explanation, to see how it plays, to see if it works. “A misunderstanding.”

  “Yes. Nearly thirty years working as a newsman, that’s got to be worth something. They won’t let me go back on camera but I can produce or write, something, anything, I don’t care. I’m going to put my life back together. That’s it, that’s my plan. And I want you to come with me.”

  “To come with you.”

  “Yes.” Then he almost asks her to marry him.

  “Last night you promised that if I made you invisible today, you’d dig up one of those graves.”

  “Don’t start in on that shit again.”

  “You didn’t think it was shit last night.”

  “All right. Okay. Make me invisible, do it.”

  “I will. At two this afternoon, just as I said I would.”

  “I plan to be halfway to New York by then.”

  “Either you’re going to keep your promise to me or you’re not.”

  Lyon rubs his eyes with the fingertips of both hands. “Try to be patient with me, Claire,” he says wearily. “I don’t understand the point. Okay. You’re going to make me invisible. Now is that like a metaphor for something, for example what you were talking about last night, how you become invisible at dinner parties when people ignore you? Do you understand what I’m asking? Invisible as in what?”

  “As in people can’t see you.”

  He steps to the counter and embraces her, but Claire keeps her arms crossed between them.

  “Sometimes you seem so small.”

  “Black diminishes size.”

  “So perfectly black,” he says running his hands over her slim shoulders and down her bare arms.

  “Were you lying to me last night?” she asks stubbornly. “And if you were lying, were you lying about everything? Lying about loving me too?”

  Lyon turns away from her and sits on the edge of the kitchen table. “All right. All right. I’ll stay. I’ll stay and let you play out this game — okay?”

  “Okay.” She gives him a big smile. “Time for your bath,” Claire says, coming to Lyon and unfastening his belt.

  “I already took a shower.”

  “But I have to wash you again, use unscented soap this time. You should brush your teeth with baking soda and salt too, because I can smell the toothpaste. You must have no scent, nothing anyone can detect. Just because you’re invisible doesn’t mean people can’t smell you.”

  “Of course.”

  By this time Claire has his belt unbuckled and his zipper down, pulling up Lyon’s shirt and gasping. “My God, did I do that to you?”

  He joins her in looking at the multicolored wound on his lower belly. “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.” Claire sinks to her knees, tugging down his trousers and underpants. She takes his limp dick in her hand and wiggles it back and forth. “John? There seems to be something wrong with it, John.”

  “All right, all right,” he says, hauling Claire to her feet.

  She surprises him with a tender kiss.

  “Whatever little experiment or performance you have planned for two this afternoon,” he tells her, “I’ll go along with it. But if I don’t become invisible, then you have to promise me something. You’ll come back to New York with me.” And marry me. “And stay at my place at least until after I see a doctor, until I find out if I’m crazy or have some kind of weird crying-laughing disease, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Claire.”

  “I promise.”

  Claire makes him another breakfast but continues evading questions about where she hides when other people show up and what she did with that crate and how she got to Hameln from New York City.

  They go back to bed and make love. Then Claire does indeed bathe Lyon with unscented soap, careful with his belly wound.

  Around one that afternoon Lyon asks about lunch — he’s been so constantly hungry since he met her — but Claire says she doesn’t want the odor of food to be on his person. Besides, it’s time to leave. “I’ll drive,” she tells him.

  “Where is this invisibility trick suppose
d to take place?” Lyon asks as he follows her out to his rental car.

  “You’ll see.”

  They drive off the mountain and to a state highway, which they travel for half an hour before turning onto a blacktopped road, then a dusty, rutted lane, Lyon still asking questions about where they’re going and how his invisibility is going to be accomplished, Claire still refusing to explain.

  Then she stops the car. “Get down.”

  Lyon looks out the window. Pastures on both sides of the road, no houses in sight.

  “Get down and lie across the seat here, you can put your head in my lap.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  “But if I’m invisible,” he says, thinking himself clever, “why are you worried about anyone seeing me?”

  She grabs him by the hair and pulls him down.

  “That hurt damn it, you’re always hurting me,” he complains.

  She tells him to stop being such a baby. Claire moves the car forward as Lyon turns facedown in her lap and finds a space between the buttons of her dress, a space large enough for him to get his tongue through. She starts to slap the back of his head but then reconsiders it, easing her legs apart and humming tunelessly as she drives.

  Ten minutes later Claire stops the car and tells Lyon he can get up. They are parked in the driveway of a simple one-story house in need of paint. No other houses in sight. The yard is overgrown.

  “Who lives here?” he asks.

  Claire is acting nervous, telling Lyon, “You must promise not to embarrass me.”

  “Me embarrass you?”

  “I’m serious, John. In that house you’re going to be invisible, you have to keep that in mind at all times. You can’t suddenly clear your throat.”

  “Claire —”

  “Please! You agreed to this, you promised.”

  “I’m not going to walk into someone’s house and pretend I’m invisible.”

  She tells him he won’t have to pretend, he will be invisible.

  Claire gets out of the car, goes around to his side, opens the door, takes his hand. “Come on.”

  Shaking his head, Lyon goes with her.

  After leading him to the house and knocking on the front door, Claire turns to Lyon and points a finger right in his face as she raises both eyebrows meaningfully, warning him one last time.

  A pleasant woman in her early fifties answers the door. She seems overdressed for the country, a string of pearls around her neck, long teardrop pearl earrings, two brooches on the bodice of her dress, makeup applied with a heavy hand. “Claire?”

  “Yes! How are you, Barbara?”

  “Fine, we’re both doing just fine, come in, please.”

  Lyon smiles and is about to bring up his hand and introduce himself when he realizes the woman can’t see him.

  After Barbara turns and walks into the house, Claire grabs Lyon by the front of his shirt and pulls him in after her. Once they are over the threshold, Claire shuts the door behind them and then positions Lyon in the center of the living room. All the windows are heavily curtained, the interior of the house as dark and cool as a movie theater.

  Lyon can’t make his mind work.

  Another woman walks in from the kitchen. In her early sixties, wearing a housedress with an apron over it, she also is decked out in a surplus of jewelry. “Who is it, Barbara?”

  “It’s Claire Cept. Remember I told you she was coming over.”

  “Claire Cept?”

  “Not the nurse, honey, her granddaughter.”

  “Oh.”

  Claire goes over to the older woman and takes her hand.

  Lyon is rigid in the middle of the living room, measuring his breathing, wondering if either of these women can hear him shift his weight or smell him or somehow detect his presence. Neither one of them can see him, that much is obvious. He tries to signal Claire — get me the hell out of here — but she refuses to look at him.

  Claire is chatting with the two women while Lyon, standing no more than ten feet away from them, becomes increasingly agitated — until, like some character from a screwball comedy, he begins tiptoeing toward the door. Except how’s he going to get it open without their hearing him? Lyon tries turning the knob slowly, grimacing with each click it makes.

  Claire finally catches Lyon’s eye, seeing such anguish that her heart feels suddenly weighted, as if someone has put a brick on it. None of this is working the way she thought it would.

  Lyon starts to cry.

  “Oh,” Claire says softly, in pain.

  The woman who met them at the door — Barbara — asks Claire if she’s okay as the woman in the apron reaches out to touch Claire’s face, asking, “What is it, dear?”

  “I’m sorry,” Claire tells them. “I have to leave.”

  “I thought you were going to have lunch with us,” Barbara says.

  But Claire has already gone to the front door and is turning the knob for Lyon, who is trying his best to remain silent, trying not to make any crying sounds even though the tears have already arrived and his belly is quivering with muffled sobs, the migraine summoned by the crying and by Lyon’s efforts to suppress the crying. He bends over a little, becoming crippled with pain.

  I’m sorry, he mouths to Claire.

  She gets the door open and ushers him out onto the front step, Lyon immediately breaking away from her and running crouched over to the car.

  Before Claire can follow, Barbara’s hand finds her shoulder. “What’s wrong with your friend?”

  Claire’s mind is scrambling. “He’s got a mental problem, some kind of breakdown, strange delusions.”

  “Really?”

  Claire says, “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you introduce him?”

  “I couldn’t. Poor man thinks he’s invisible.”

  “I see,” Barbara says, smiling — but as soon as Claire leaves, the smile fades and the woman’s face sets hard. She marches into the house and makes her way to the telephone where she angrily punches in a number.

  CHAPTER 29

  “Barbara, calm down. What? No, I didn’t — Barbara, if you don’t lower your voice I’ll hang up. No one harangues me, no one. All right then. Start over, calmly.”

  As Mason Quinndell listens on the telephone, asking the occasional question to encourage his caller to greater detail, the massive Carl waits in a chair in front of the doctor’s desk. Quinndell is tapping his fingertips but Carl remains unmoving, tapping nothing, neither his fingers nor his toes, sitting there large and ugly like something badly carved.

  After Quinndell hangs up he pauses a moment, fingertips still tapping, finally telling Carl, “Our Mr. Lyon apparently was not lying about a woman being at the cabin.”

  Carl grunts and tries to cross his arms, a surplus of fat making the maneuver impossible. “Wasn’t no woman there.” Still struggling for position in the chair, the deputy settles for rather daintily grasping his fingertips together, both hands resting on one of the upper belly rolls. “He called to her, called her name, but he’s crazy, wasn’t no woman there.”

  “Yes, well, you obviously missed her. And what’s more, this woman is passing herself off as Claire Cept’s granddaughter.”

  “The nigger nurse?”

  Quinndell allows himself a small sigh. “Yes, Carl, the one and the same.”

  “But she’s dead.”

  “Lyon is with her granddaughter.” Quinndell is forced to take conscious control of his temper. “Or with a woman claiming to be the granddaughter. I remember that little girl, she came to live here in Hameln when she was only eight or so.” Quinndell smiles, showing his small yellow teeth. “Of course. I examined her once.”

  With the doctor lost in some memory, Carl does what he does best: sitting and waiting.

  “Well. Well. I see it all now, see it clearly. This … conspiracy arrayed against me. Carl, my boy, the center will not hold much longer.”

  Carl doesn’t have a clue.

  Q
uinndell takes out a handkerchief and wipes at the moisture collecting around his beautiful glass eyes. “Of course.” He’s curiously delighted with what he takes to be the ingenuity of his enemies. “Except where does the hermit fit into this scheme? You said he wasn’t home, is it possible he left with Sheriff Stone?”

  Carl tries to think of an answer.

  “You did search the hermit’s shack, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah!” Carl lies enthusiastically. No way was he going to get out of the patrol car at Randolph’s shack, then have them dogs come tearing ass around the corner and catch him out in the open, no way.

  “Yes, well you have been a disappointment, Carl,” Quinndell says as he stands, straightening his suitcoat and adjusting his red tie. He walks around and leans against the front edge of the desk, the doctor’s posture casual but perfectly correct. “I suppose we should have disposed of the hermit five years ago but I was hoping that the rather bizarre reputation he enjoys among the locals would keep people from wandering around out there. Do you suppose he somehow got in the cave?”

  “Don’t see how, Doc. You had me build that door ’cross the opening, padlocked it and all.”

  “Hmm. And Sheriff Stone still hasn’t checked in?”

  The deputy shakes his head.

  “CARL!” Quinndell thunders.

  “No.” The deputy releases his fingertips and tries to straighten up in the chair. “Nobody’s heard from him, his house looks same as always, nothing missing from what I could tell, his pickup still in the driveway.”

  “If he’s gone over to them, that will be troublesome indeed.” Quinndell leans away from the desk, standing erect now, turning one way and then the other, almost as if he’s posing. “All right, Carl, let’s try this again. You will drive out to the rental cabin and you will bring Mr. Lyon and the granddaughter back to me.”

  “Told you,” Carl whines, “ain’t no woman there, just Lyon and he’s crazy.”

  Quinndell steps to the deputy’s chair, places his fine clean hands on its arms, and moves his handsome face to within an inch of Carl’s. “Listen to me, you imbecile,” the doctor says in a shockingly coarse voice, “if you don’t do exactly as I tell you, I will slit your fat throat.”