Turn Down the Lights

by Richard Chizmar (ed)

  “Didn’t think I’d be out that long.”

  Bubba raised his heavily-gloved hand and pointed at the binoculars hanging from Jackson’s neck. “Bird watchin’, I reckon.”

  Jackson patted the binoculars. “Yeah. You got me there. Kind of a hobby, but I bet it seems goofy to you.”

  Bubba didn’t look happy. He pulled his yellowish lips back to expose a large row of teeth that made a beak-like edge. “Some kind of lookie loo, ain’t you?” he said, and the air whistled sharply through his teeth. That’s what folks around there called fellows who stared too much. Peeping Toms. But the way Bubba said it, that whistly “lookie-loo,” made it sound like some kind of rare and despised bird.

  “I honestly wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.” Jackson knew immediately how lame that sounded, since it was exactly what he’d been trying to do. He felt seriously in trouble now. People down here were territorial; they’d had too much taken away from them.

  “Don’t worry none.” The big man grabbed him by the arm. “Me and my brothers, we’ll be giving you a ride.”

  Jackson was afraid to ask where they were taking him. They weren’t headed back toward town, but farther up the mountain. The Smokies had some of the highest peaks in the Appalachians, but Jackson had never been one for heights. He was jammed between Junior in the passenger seat and Walleye behind the wheel. The smell was nearly overwhelming. Beyond what he had smelled before was this older, underlying stink like old and moldy cardboard.

  Bubba was in the back of the pickup, standing in the bed, not holding on to anything. He had his arms outstretched as if flying, and the way the truck bounced when it hit some of the ruts, maybe some of the time he was.

  The truck screeched to a stop so abruptly Bubba went flying over the hood, but still somehow landed on his feet. Nobody showed any concern. They were near the top of the mountain, at a small clearing bordered by tall trees, mostly white pines, and some of them a hundred fifty feet high, maybe close to two hundred. Junior grabbed Jackson by the arm and dragged him into the center of the clearing. The brothers started chanting this high-pitched, loony singsong, “lookie-loo, lookie-loo, lookie-loo.”

  They stood around him, stretching, jumping up and down, looking increasingly excited about what was about to happen. They started making soft little scraping sounds way down in their throats, which after a few seconds became screeches and calls. One by one they shrugged out of their coveralls, great masses of oily black feathers popping out and spreading as their constrictive clothing slipped farther down their bodies. Finally the garments lay in rough pools beside them, and they stretched their muscles and fluttered, their immense black wings spreading until the shadows of them darkened much of the open ground between the trees.

  Junior took off, whooping, climbing high and then swooping down, one edge of his wing tracing Jacksons left cheek and ripping it open. Walleye’s turn was next. He kept low beneath the trees, his broad wings creating a wind that initially felt soothing against Jackson’s overheated face, but then froze him in terror as the hard wings beat against the sides of his head and drove him onto the ground.

  Finally Bubba dived in and lifted Jackson as if he weighed nothing, climbing parallel with the tallest tree to reach the top in a rapid ascent that stole Jackson’s wind away. Breathless, Jackson viewed the mountain in a way he’d never seen before, the Ocoee Series of peaks spread out before him, ancient results of that collision of the great tectonic plates, and he was thinking what a perfect way that was to begin his book, which might now include the true story of the legendary Madisonville Tennessee bird men, when Bubba let him go.

  The boys’ mother was looking down at Jackson when he woke up. This was the old woman he’d seen a few days ago, topless and with the scarred back. That feathered hat he’d thought she’d been wearing had actually been her head, covered with a thick layer of feathers that started around the eyes and flowed down around that jutting jaw and made a soft and luxurious, Renaissance-like collar around the neck.

  The feathers had been partially removed from her torso, scarred and hacked at like the brothers’ faces. Quills were thicker, tougher than hair, and would be a lot more troublesome to remove. You couldn’t do it without a lot of scarring, a lot of pain. But she’d kept much of her plumage, so he supposed she’d stayed at home and let her boys forage for her. In her case the scarring was apparently decorative, or maybe tribal.

  Forage. He’d been foraged. The bird watcher had the tables turned on him. Lookie-loo. She strutted around him, her head jerking back and forth. She made a soft and dry scraping noise deep down in her throat. She stank of birds and what birds ate.

  He’d been in enormous amounts of pain. He’d passed out, and come back numb, then passed out from the pain again. Now he was riding a returning wave of pain—he could feel it rising from deep within him.

  He told her, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. They never sing, but die with all their music still in them.” He was delirious, but determined to have his say in the end. He had no idea if she understood him.

  Her boys had joined her at the dinner table. He giggled, thinking it was a kind of Thanksgiving. They’d left their coveralls behind, and now preened in all their feathered glory.

  Once he’d seen a bird eat a frog. You couldn’t call it cruel because it was an animal. The bird had picked the frog up and dropped it several times, played with it to soften it up. The frog was still alive, but then the bird attacked it with its beak.

  ELLIE WAS FIFTEEN THAT YEAR, AND IT WAS THE unhappiest year of her life. Her mother had died in the early spring, worn out by having too many babies, and loving them; by hard work, by the hopelessness of everything. The sky here was so big, and the dirt so dark, and though sometimes there were kind warm rains out of that sky, and sometimes the dirt gave up a little crop of potatoes, life was as hard for the family as life could be.

  Towards the end, Ellie’s mother had started to talk about how life had been back in Virginia, before they came out West. How fine the people were, and how gentle the air. Ellie didn’t remember much of this. She’d been a tiny baby when they’d left. All she knew was Wisconsin: the bitter, bitter winters, the wasting summers. She knew how to write, a little; read, a little; but not enough to understand the family Bible, which was the only book in the house. There was nothing else to occupy her mind. Her only plaything was a wooden doll, which her father had made on her sixth birthday. Over the years she’d lost the crude features that her father had painted on her little head; she was just a naked shape. After her mother’s death, her life became even harder for Ellie. She had to keep house in her mother’s stead, cooking for her brothers and her two younger sisters and her father, doing her best to make what little food could be grown or hunted to feed six hungry mouths. She was neither happy nor sad most of the time. She had no expectation for her life.

  One day, her father said: “That doll of yours. Get rid of it.”

  “Why Papa?”

  “You’re not a child anymore. Get rid of it.”

  She feared her father when he was cross, so she did as she was instructed. She told him she’d put the doll in the fire, but this was not the truth. She went down to the river, to a little strand of old oaks where she’d played as a child, and she hid Dollie in a hole between the roots.

  The next year, there was a man from Boston called lack Matthews, who asked to marry her. She didn’t like him very much, but it was a chance to get away from the house, and maybe begin a better life.

  She married Jack Matthews in the summer, and he took her back east. Barely a week passed before she began to see a side of him he’d hidden from her. He didn’t want a wife, he wanted a servant, and when she didn’t jump to it fast enough for him, he became violent. She wasn’t a weeper; she took his abuse in silence, and only she’d a tear when his back was turned. In bed, he was virtually useless, for which he also blamed her, finding further reason for violence. But what was she to do? There was nobody to turn to for help. S
he had no money of her own, and she was very far from home. And even supposing she’d upped and left, to try and make her way back to Wisconsin: what awaited her there if she made it? More days of dirt and sky? Better, she thought, to endure her husband. Perhaps he’d mellow as the years went on. Perhaps she’d even learn to love him a little.

  But life didn’t get any better. They went from town to town, and he’d get a job for a while, she’d do some laundering, and there’d be a few weeks of calm. Then things, for one reason or another, would start to fall apart. He’d get in a fight and be fired, or they’d have to move on because he owed somebody money after a night of gambling. Sometimes she wanted to kill him. She even thought of ways to do it, while she laundered. A pillow over his face while he was in a drunken stupor; or poison in his coffee. Would God blame her so much if she ridded the world of Jack Matthews? Surely not. But the plans never came to anything. However much she hated him—and she hated him to her marrow—she couldn’t bring herself to kill him.

  The only pleasure in her life came from an unlikely source. She often laundered the bed-linen that came out of whore houses (which was the lowliest form of a lowly profession), and through her coming and going to these disreputable places, she got to know some of the women. Though she had neither the looks nor the confidence to do what they did, she had much in common with them, not least a deep contempt for the opposite sex. Many, like her, had seen life out in the wilderness, and had fled from it. And most would not have cared to return to the life they’d left. To be sure, whoring was no great pleasure to them, but even a modest bordello provided its little luxuries—clean linen, perfume soap, sometimes a fancy gown—which they would never have had out on the frontier.

  She learned to laugh with these women: she learned to voice her rage at the stupidity of men. She learned a great deal else, besides, that she would have blushed to admit. She had never known, for instance, that often women pleasured themselves (and sometimes one another); nor that there were devices made for such pleasurings. Toys made of polished wood shaped like a man’s sex, but more reliably hard. One of the women she met had quite a little collection of these things, including one carved from the tusk of an elephant, which she said was the best, because it was so silky smooth. One night, she offered to show Ellie how she used it to best effect, and Ellie sat and watched while the woman gave her what would turn out to be the most important lesson of her life.

  Two years went by. The nomadic life continued for Ellie and lack, a by now predictable pattern of arrival, hard labor, violence and quick departure. As her husband’s state of mind slowly deteriorated, thanks to drink and innumerable beatings, his abuse of Ellie escalated. But—though the women she knew advised countless times to part from Jack before he killed her—Ellie couldn’t bring herself to leave him. He was pathetic, yes; but he was all she had in the world. Then, one night, after Jack had been particularly brutal, she had a strange dream. She was back in Wisconsin, standing on the doorstep of the cabin, and she heard a voice calling to her. It was a sweet, familiar voice, but it was neither that of a man or a woman. She went out looking for whoever it was who was calling her, and the journey led her down to the river. Now, as she walked beneath the ancient trees that drooped their summer boughs towards the water, she knew who was calling her. Her dream-self knelt down beneath the oldest of the oaks, and she dug between the roots. There in the dark earth was dollie. As her fingertips grazed the familiar form, she heard, somewhere close by, the sound of somebody gasping for breath. It was a horrid, desperate sound. She glanced back over her shoulder for a moment but she could see nothing, so she returned to the business of unearthing dollie. But the choking sound got louder and louder, she began to feel some force buffeting her.

  “Let me alone!” she said.

  The din just grew worse, the buffeting stronger. The dream began to recede. Dollie fell out of her fingers, back into the ground.

  And suddenly she was awake, and the bed was shaking, and Jack was jerking around, with his hands to his throat. She got up out of bed. It was just about dawn. There was enough light to see his agony: the way his body thrashed, and his eyes started from their sockets in terror. There were flecks of spittle around his mouth, and a dark patch at his groin where he’d voided himself.

  She did nothing. He seemed to see her there, watching him in this terrible state, but she wasn’t sure. The seizure, or whatever it was, had such a grip on him that eventually it threw him off the bed, and he died there, on the floor before her, with the stink of his bowels and bladder rising from him.

  She took virtually nothing with her. She just left, without saying a word to anyone. Who was she going to tell? And who would care anyway? Perhaps God had had some use for her husband: but if so, then He was the only one.

  It took her seven weeks to get to Wisconsin, and almost every night she heard dollie’s voice in her dreams. Had she not done so, she would not have gone.

  When she got back she found the cabin deserted. There was still some furniture, but the few possessions the family had owned—a kettle, some pots and pans, a broom, and so on—had gone. She slept on the floor that night, and the next day went around the neighborhood to find out what had happened to everyone. They'd moved away to Oregon, she was told, about three months before. Nobody had an address of course, because the travelers hadn’t known where they were going. She never saw any of them again; or even heard news of them.

  Folks were kind to her. They supplied her with the bare essentials so that she could get settled back into the cabin, and that’s what she did. A few people said she could come and live in town, but she didn’t want that. She’d live alone, she said, and see how it suited her.

  As it turned out, it suited her very well. She got herself a job at the feed store in town, and that made her enough money to fix up the cabin, and put food on the table.

  For company she had dollie. Shed gone down to the river the day after she arrived, and her doll was there, where she’d hidden her years before. A little damp from being hidden in the earth, of course, but she dried out quite nicely. One night, sitting by the window watching the sun go down, a queer little thought came into her head. The next day she bought a whittling knife in town and set about refashioning dollie so that her company might be more pleasurable. She didn’t hurry; this was a job she wanted to do just right. Off came the arms and the legs; off came the ears, and all but a tiny nub of nose. The body she thinned out a little, but not too much. A sense of fullness was important, her friend the whore had instructed. She put some little furrows here and there, just to add some spice to the sensation. Then, sitting peacefully in a rocking chair (which had been her only concession to luxury) she hoisted up her skirts, and had a little party with dollie. It was perfectly grand.

  She lived to be eighty-nine, and never had any other person, man or woman, under her roof for company, right to the end. Nor, she would have said, needed any.

  The present volume presents in chronological order every known short story written by Frederick “Freddie” Prothero. Of causes that must ever remain obscure, he died “flying solo,” his expression for venturing out in search of solitude, in a field two blocks from his house in Prospect Fair, Connecticut. His death took place in January, 1988, nine months before his ninth birthday. It was a Sunday. At the hour of his death, approximately four o’clock of a bright, cold, snow-occluded day, the writer was wearing a hooded tan snowsuit he had in fact technically outgrown; a red woolen scarf festooned with “pills”; an imitation Aran knit sweater, navy blue with cables; a green-and-blue plaid shirt from Sam’s; dark green corduroys with cuffs beginning to grow ragged; a shapeless white Jockey T-shirt also worn the day previous; Jockey briefs, once white, now stained lemon yellow across the Y-front; white tube socks; Tru-Value Velcro sneakers, so abraded as nearly to be threadbare; and black calf-high rubber boots with six metal buckles.

  The inscription on the toaster-sized tombstone in Prospect Fair’s spacious Gullikson & Son Cemetery reads Frederic
k Michael Prothero, 1979-1988. A New Angel in Heaven. In that small span of years, really in a mere three of those not-yet eight-and-a-half years, Freddie Prothero went from apprenticeship to mastery with unprecedented speed, in the process authoring ten of the most visionary short stories in the English language. It is my belief that this collection will now stand as a definitive monument to the unique merits—and difficulties!—presented by the only genuine prodigy in American literature.

  That Prothero’s fiction permits a multiplicity of interpretations supplies a portion, though scarcely all, of its interest to both the academic and the general reader. Beginning in 1984 with childish, nearly brutal simplicity and evolving toward the more polished (though still in fact unfinished) form of expression seen in the work of his later years, these stories were apparently presented to his mother, Varda Prothero, nee' Barthelmy. (Baathy, baathy, momma sai.)In any case, Momma Baathy Prothero preserved them (perhaps after the fact?) in individual manila files within in a snug, smoothly mortised and sanded cherrywood box.

  As the above example demonstrates, the earliest Prothero, the stories written from his fifth to seventh years, displays the improvised variant spelling long encouraged by American primary schools. The reader will easily decipher the childish code, although I should perhaps explain that “bood gig” stands for “bad guy.”

  From first to last, the stories demonstrate the writer’s awareness of the constant presence of a bood gig. A threatening, indeterminate figure, invested with all the terrifying power and malignity of the monster beneath a child’s bed, haunts this fiction. Prothero’s “monster” figure, however, is not content to confine itself to the underside of his bed. It roams the necessarily limited map of the writer’s forays both within and outside of his house: that is, across his front yard; down Gerhardie Street, which runs past his house; through the supermarket he, stroller-bound, visits with his mother; and perhaps above all in the shadowy, clamorous city streets he is forced to traverse with his father on the few occasions when R(andolph) Sullivan “Sully” Prothero brought him along to the law office where he spent sixty hours a week in pursuit of the partnership attained in 1996, eight years after his son’s death and two prior to his own unexplained disappearance. The commuter train from Prospect Fair to Penn Station was another location favored by the omniscient shadow-figure.