Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  Danny dropped the needle and bolted from his chair when his mother began coughing and choking in the other room.

  He discovered her folded almost double in her chair, hacking, gagging up phlegm from deep in her chest. The cigarette lay on the yellow Linoleum, a pale thread curling from its ashy tip.

  Danny stood paralyzed in the doorway. This was different from any time before. The whole trailer seemed to shudder with the sound of his mother tearing her lungs out. She hawked with a terrible ripping sound and spat a gob of black phlegm onto the floor.

  Danny shivered, thinking he had made a terrible mistake.

  Then she sat up in her chair, her eyes red and bleary, her face pale as curds. Her lips trembled as if she wanted to say something. Suddenly her eyes rolled up white, quivering. Dark gray smoke seeped heavily from her mouth and nostrils, formed a dense little cloud and drifted sluggishly out the window.

  His mother swayed forward and caught herself on the edge of the table, blinking and shaking her head like someone emerging from a trance.

  “Mom?”

  “God,” she said. “I’ll never light up again.”

  She noticed the burning Marlboro on the floor and flattened it under her shoe like a cockroach.

  *

  On his way to school the next morning the Old Woman stopped him.

  “You can climb a tree, I guess,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Then climb one for me.”

  He followed her to the yellow doublewide with the cracked cement porch. He went under his own power. Already he was stronger than the Old Woman’s ability to compel him. She grabbed him roughly by the arm and he let her drag him around behind the trailer. She pointed up at the branches of a flowering cherry tree. What looked like a clot of tar was hung up in the branches.

  “Get that down for me. I need it.”

  Danny didn’t move.

  “Do it, boy. Or I’ll see that it goes back where it came from.”

  He doubted she could actually do that. Her powers were weak; that’s why she needed him to be her apprentice (slave?). But he wasn’t certain. She might have enough wickedness in her to do as she threatened. Thinking of it, Danny felt hot and cold at the same time. He slipped his backpack off and reached for one of the lower branches. She stopped him, clawing her ugly gnarled fingers into his arm again.

  “You’ll need these.”

  She handed him a bag and a pair of crudely stitched gloves. They felt terrible, like dry skin, and he tried to give them back. She wouldn’t take them.

  “Go on,” she said, leaning into him, fixing him with her black moon eye.

  Danny tucked the gloves and skin bag under his belt and started to climb, hauling himself nimbly up the living cherry-scented limbs. He halted within grasping distance of the black thing.

  “Good, good,” the Old Woman muttered below him.

  No, he thought, it’s very bad.

  “Go on,” the Old Woman said. “What are you waiting for?”

  The pink blossoms trembled all around him. What did they want him to do? He couldn’t let it go back where it came from. This had been the first morning in his memory that he hadn’t woken to the wet ripping coughs of his mother, not found her at the kitchen table with black coffee and cigarettes and smoke wreathing her like a ghostly shroud in the making.

  Danny tugged the gloves and skin bag from his belt. The feel of them was repellent and before he could stop himself he cast them away. The breeze rippled approvingly through the pink blossoms.

  “Idiot!” the Old Woman croaked.

  “What do you want it for?” Danny asked.

  “It’s a cowl, if that’s any of your business. And it’s for someone who deserves it,” she replied, spitting like a cat. “Now bring it to me. Use your bare hands, you little beast.”

  She wanted it for the nephew, Danny understood—the one who yelled and hit like her father used to.

  He reached with his bare hand, a new strength within him mastering his fear. Inside the tar-thing a vague iridescence glimmered. Pinching his fingertips on a fold of the thing he tugged it loose, light as a silk handkerchief. A mummified bird that had been trapped under it fell to the ground, startling Danny so much he almost fell after it.

  “Bring it to me, boy.”

  The tar-thing had begun to drift around his hand, clinging hungrily. It was a cowl and it was meant for someone who deserved it. The Old Woman had been right about that. There were no coincidences. Her life had directed her to him; she was to be his teacher.

  Danny snapped his wrist sharply, flinging the thing down and away. It found the Old Woman’s upturned face and molded itself there like a damp cobweb. Her mouth stretched wide in silent protest, and the silky thing sucked down her throat like a bat into its secret hole. She collapsed.

  Now I’m like her, Danny thought, his eyes filling. But he knew it didn’t have to be that way.

  He climbed down through the cherry blossoms and dropped lightly to the ground next to the Old Woman’s body. He had little time and there were things he must do. His mom would be mad that he missed the school bus but that couldn’t be helped.

  The back door of the yellow trailer was unlocked. It smelled bad inside. Tiny flies hovered around the piled dishes on the kitchen counter. Under the sink Danny found the Playtex gloves he’d hoped would be there. He put them on. They were way too big for his boy’s hands, but he didn’t want to touch the horrible skin gloves and bag again with his bare fingers.

  It took only a short time to bury them under the cherry tree. The tree didn’t mind; it was a good place and over time the skin gloves and bag would return to their useful elements.

  He went back inside one more time. The room where the Old Woman had slept was the worst room of all, even though it didn’t smell of stale beer and sweaty misery like the rest of the trailer. The window was covered over with black poster board. There were candles all around, and the empty light in the ceiling watched him like a skull’s vacant socket.

  He found the box wrapped in a blanket on a shelf in the closet. Two snakes forming a mystic eye. Snakes didn’t always have to be bad. When Danny was four he had been friends with a garter snake he discovered living in his backyard.

  Outside he tucked the box in his backpack and shrugged the straps over his shoulders. Snakes didn’t have to be bad and neither did he. Pausing a moment, he looked at the Old Woman. He knew she had been wicked but he also knew that after a while people couldn’t really help what they were. He scooped up a double handful of pink cherry blossoms and sprinkled them over the Old Woman’s face to help gentle her into death.

  Then he ran all the way home and when he got there he told his mother that he’d missed the bus.

  Everyone Bleeds Through

  A Denny’s at two o’clock in the morning. I tried to contract my world down to a cup of coffee. Stirring in the cream and sugar, focusing on the cup, I was more or less successful at not thinking about Marci back in that hotel room in Seattle. More or less. Okay, less. But past experience suggested it would get easier.

  Then a girl-voice said: “Hey, fuck you!”

  Not to me.

  I turned. So did the trucker in a red baseball cap sharing my counter space, and a booth of high school boys.

  The “Fuck you!” girl was outside, yelling at the taillights of a black F-250, the reflectorized Oregon plate flashing when the pickup jolted over a flowerbed on its way out of the parking lot, too fast. The booth kids laughed. Red cap, laconic as hell, turned back to his eggs and USA Today.

  The girl came in, shouldering through the glass door, fumbling a cigarette. Black leather bomber jacket, a mini, net stockings with stretchy Swiss cheese tears revealing very white thighs, ankle boots. Pixie hair. Too much make-up, and it was streaking around the eyes. A safety pin pierced her right eyebrow. She noticed me staring and stared back, briefly, something hot and mysterious clicking between us. Then she looked away and grabbed a book of matches out of the basket by the
cash register.

  She sat at the counter, leaving one stool between us. Ordered coffee, lit her cigarette, tapped bitten nails.

  “What’s your name?” she said to me.

  “John.”

  She breathed smoke. “I’m Rena.”

  “Hi.”

  “I need a ride,” Rena said.

  “Hmm.”

  “Over the pass,” Rena said.

  “I’m not going that way, sorry.”

  Without another word to me, she swiveled around and said to the trucker: “I need a ride.”

  He was going that way.

  A short time later he got up to use the bathroom. I felt the girl looking at me, so I looked back. Her face was too pale, shiny damp, the eyes bright in their rings of smudgy black liner.

  “I’m Rena,” she said in a dreamy-drugged voice.

  “Yep.”

  “I want you to drive me. I don’t like that guy. Dale or whateverthefuck.”

  “I’m not going over the pass.”

  She wavered, and I thought she was about to faint. “Fuck me,” she said, slid off the stool and stumbled to the bathroom.

  A minute later the trucker reappeared. He looked around then asked me where the girl went. I told him. He paid his check, waited, got cranky, asked was I sure, waited some more. He was forty or so, thick through the shoulders, heavy-bellied. Still waiting, he splintered a toothpick digging between his molars.

  I said, “She was sick.”

  Dale or whateverthefuck scowled. “Sick?”

  “Yep.”

  “How sick?”

  I pointed a finger down my throat.

  “Screw it,” Dale said. He glanced in the direction of the lady’s room then quickly rolled his newspaper tight under his arm and stalked out.

  I finished my coffee and ordered one to go. The counterman brought it in a white Styrofoam cup with a lid. I paid but lingered at the door. Rena had been in the bathroom a long time. Her fainty look bothered me. Other things bothered me, too, but I couldn’t identify them yet.

  There were no other women in the restaurant. So I stepped around to the lady’s room and knocked softly.

  “Hey, you all right? Rena?”

  There was an odd sound on the other side of the door. Like a machine humming, an electric motor. Something. I pushed the door inward. The volume increased. It wasn’t a machine.

  “Rena?”

  I pushed the door open wider and there was Rena in some kind of meditative posture (lotus?), legs pretzeled, backs of wrists on knees, smudgy eyes open and staring at something not in the room. The electric machine humming sound came from her throat. All of that was weird but okay. What bothered me was that she was hovering about eighteen inches above the gray tile, casting a little offset shadow.

  Eventually I closed my mouth.

  Rena’s eyes refocused and shifted to me. “I need a ride.”

  “I know.”

  She stood up, but not the way I would have done it. Rena sort of flowed to her feet, lithe as a fairy, if you know any fairies with ripped stockings and smudged eye shadow—I mean any outside certain red-light districts.

  She stood inches away, chin pointed at my chest. Her eyes were big and brown and intense.

  “John,” she said, “you’re supposed to take me.”

  “I know that, too,” I replied, and strangely believed it.

  *

  We drove north less than a mile and caught the 90 east toward the Cascade Mountains. Freezing rain speckled the windshield and the wipers swept it clear.

  “Where exactly are we going?” I asked.

  “After my boyfriend.”

  “The guy in the pickup?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Something has to happen.”

  “Like what?”

  She leaned close to me, her face practically on my shoulder, and she sniffed me. Did it a couple of times then sat back.

  “You’re bleeding through,” she said, “but I don’t think you know it yet.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Try closing your eyes.”

  I looked at her then back at the road.

  “Close your eyes,” she said. “Go ahead. The road’s straight, right?”

  “Pretty straight.”

  “So do it. Close them tight for about two seconds. Not like blinking.”

  Silver rain needled in the tunneling high-beams. My body felt weird, like I was in a vivid dream. I closed my eyes.

  And . . . saw.

  Daylight, a cloud-blown autumnal sky. The road was narrow and muddy. The countryside opened wide, green desaturated to something approaching dun. There was a forest in the distance, rising up into foothills out of which thrust the brutal face of a mountain. And it was more than seeing. I felt cold wind on my face and hands—hands that were gripping a polished wooden handle. Whatever contraption I was sitting on jolted over the muddy road. Rena sat next to me wearing a heavy wool cloak with the hood drawn up. She pulled the hood back and smiled. A white scar intersected her left eyebrow. Something whistled and I felt hot steam on the back of my neck.

  I opened my eyes.

  The wipers swept the windshield clear. My heart pounded with thrilling intensity. The vision translated to freedom in my blood.

  “What was that?”

  “Smell me,” Rena said.

  I swung the car into the breakdown lane, stopped, turned the dome light on, looked at her.

  “Smell you,” I said.

  “Yes.” She grinned and pulled her shirt open at the throat. “Come close.”

  I unbuckled my seatbelt and let it retract, then leaned over, my face close to her exposed neck, my nose practically touching her collarbone. I wanted to touch her with everything I had but kept my hands, awkwardly, hovering away from her leg, her breast.

  “What do I smell like?” she asked.

  A girl, youth, promise, joy, temptation without consequences, FUN. I said, “It’s pine and something else. Cinnamon?”

  “Oh you smell the cinnamon!”

  “More like I can taste it. What’s it mean, what happened when I closed my eyes? Tell me.”

  “There are other worlds,” Rena said. “A lot of them. All running more or less parallel. Events run parallel, too. Motifs endlessly repeated. Even the people are the same. You and I, here and now, there and then. A thousand theres, and thousand thens. Ten thousand. All occurring simultaneously. Once in a while your core personality bleeds across from the home place, the center. It happens to everyone eventually. They’re the ones who look like they know something nobody else knows. It’s kind of complicated. And—what’s wrong?”

  I said, “For a second I remembered you. I mean really remembered you.”

  Rena’s face turned into a huge smile and a pair of drowning pool eyes. She flung herself at me and kissed my mouth. And I was gone, immortal, no longer contingent. Then she bounced back to her side of the seat and laughed at me.

  “Johnny,” she said, “I knew you would.”

  *

  Now picture a woman named Marci Welch back in the Kennedy Hotel, Seattle, Washington. Her hair can be long or short (it’s short) her eyes blue or green or brown, it doesn’t matter. The main thing to picture about Marci is that she’s alone. Maybe she’s finishing off that bottle of room service Merlot. Maybe she’s in that big bed, occupying a fractional portion of mattress space, drinking the wine and watching pay-per-view. Or you could think of her lying there in the dark by herself. Or standing in the shower. Or at the mock Edwardian writing desk concentrating over a note. A woman with twenty-five years of unhappiness named Roger crowding her toward fifty. In fear of her lost powers, her loneliness, her shrinking future. Alone in the Kennedy Hotel where she thought she’d flown from misery at last. Marci the trapeze artist. Flying without a net, leaving Roger behind forever. Flying with the trapeze artist’s faith that her companion, the one who was so good in practice, would catch her chalked hands when show ti
me arrived. So, in or out of the bed, drinking or not drinking the Merlot, in or not in the shower, sitting at the writing desk or not sitting at the writing desk. It doesn’t matter. That was maybe the smallest room she had ever been in but with the biggest exit.

  *

  Now Rena. Parked in the breakdown lane I’d gotten a flash. Not even really a memory. More like a sudden pulsation of significant emotion. It started when I smelled her throat. Add the quickening of my blood while we sat there and she explained about simultaneous worlds. Then something electric surged through me and ignited an image. That’s a lake. And sunlight on a white-painted porch. Rena in a flowing thing apparently woven out of light. Rena herself. This is our place. We made it, outside and beyond all other illusions. And the non-verbal operatically proportioned emotional theme? Love. As in, I’ve known you forever and I love you. Wholly and without reserve, all barriers down, the moat drained, guards sent home, portcullis raised and locked open, all my defensive weapons acquired in life (lives?) reforged to plowshares. It smells nice here. Piney. And the flavor of cinnamon tea.

  *

  We came up fast on a tractor-trailer rig. The Subaru’s headlights glinted on the plates, Washington, Idaho, Montana. I swung into the opposite lane and accelerated to pass. In moments I’d tucked back into the eastbound lane, which climbed and curved until the rig all strung with amber lights was lost behind us.

  *

  “He’s going to be stopped. Just a little farther.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “I just do, dear.”