by Laird Barron
A bloated creature in her sixties, she prowled the boardwalks for handsome, tanned young men, solicited them with cash and gifts to come up and swamp the scummy pool and to hack at a halfacre garden, which had been overgrown for some thirty years. Royce was nine or ten and didn't know much, but he figured from their behavior Aunt Carole Joyce gave them the creeps too. She certainly went through a number of the strapping lads in the three months Royce spent in captivity. He never discovered whether his aunt tossed them aside, or if they cut and ran of their own accord.
Whenever Royce caught sight of Agatha Ward, he instantly revisited that summer with Aunt CJ and shuddered, but couldn't look away. Indeed, Royce cultivated a morbid preoccupation not only with Mrs. Ward, but the whole tribe of female elders. Mrs. Tuttle and Mrs. Fox, the inseparable canasta partners; Erma Yarbro, an emaciated wasp from Yonkers who made no secret her dislike of the Far East and its inhabitants; Mrs. Grant, who'd lost her legs to diabetes and trolled the quadrangle in a motorized wheelchair; and solemn Mrs. Cardin, an inveterate smoker with a button in her trachea. He fixated upon their poolside klatches, knitting parties and weekly luncheons at the community annex.
These women brought to mind so many seniors he'd known over the years, familiar in the interchangeable way of babies; they were the ghosts of teachers, librarians and neighbors who'd populated his childhood, although they didn't behave in the torpid, desultory manner of other seniors. Their movements seemed vigorous, their interactions lively. Occasionally, he caught a strange sign pass among them as they played at cards, or reclined poolside, soaking up infrequent sun; an occulted ripple of intention, a shibboleth that spoke of subterranean things; and some late nights, he spied their movements in the courtyard as they formed in disorganized groups and filed out of the compound. He felt like an anthropologist stealthily documenting the customs of an alien culture; scientist and voyeur in one pathological bundle.
He recorded hours of footage of Mrs. Coyne doddering about the courtyard, kibitzing with her friends. Occasionally, he paid one of the teen criminals loitering at the bus terminal three hundred Hong Kong dollars and a carton of cigarettes to follow the ladies on their weekly excursion to the shopping mall. He gave the kid a belt buckle cam and told him to stick tight and note if Mrs. Coyne talked to anyone besides her associates or the vendors. Royce studied these films in the bleakest hours of night, chain-smoking while lumpen, blue-haired women clumped on subways and tour buses, soundlessly jittered through boutiques and gift shops and food courts and traded gossip like a covey of magpies.
Chu, his agent in this intrigue, revolted after the fifth mission. They'd rendezvoused at night on a train platform. Rain hammered the shell of the station's slanted, plastic roof, poured from the lip of the overhang. Mist absorbed the fluorescent glare, the shuffle and scrape of commuters knotted in small groups, heads down and listless as cattle.
"I don't like them," Chu said. The boy was tall and whip-lean with black, spiked hair and a nondescript face. He wore a Houston Rockets warm-up suit and numerous cheap, death's head rings and was rumored to be affiliated with the Tong.
When Royce handed Chu his money and asked why he was quitting, Chu stuffed the bills into his jacket and lighted a cigarette. If Royce closed his eyes, the kid's voice would've conjured an image of any of the chess club nerds he'd known in high school. But Chu was way past all that; he slumped against a lamp post, shoulders hunched, his posture that of a razor half-folded. He looked a lot like an exchange student Royce tangled with his sophomore year. A real hardcase who brought the mean streets of Seoul with him. The Korean had worn rings, too.
"You want more money," Royce said.
"No. I'm done."
"You're done. Why are you done? Because you don't like them? The old women?"
Chu spat. His teeth weren't pretty. He sucked on his cigarette, almost panting. "Yeah."
It was suddenly so clear to Royce. "You're scared of them . . .you probably get sick to your stomach from old folks' smell. That stink of urine and sweat. The way they smack their lips and quaver when they talk. Yeah, very unpleasant, I'm sure. So much for revering your elders."
"C'mon, Whitey don't count."
"I thought you were tough, Chu."
Chu laughed, squeaky and hoarse. "Stupid Yankee." He flicked his cigarette over Royce's left shoulder into the surrounding darkness.
Royce didn't give him the satisfaction of flinching. "Then you must do what's best for you. I'll give the job to one of your associates. They look hungry."
"Not as hungry as you think, Yankee-doodle. Good luck with . . .everything." Chu raised his hood and slunk away, giggling. He was certainly correct regarding his friends—they uniformly ignored Royce's efforts to recruit them; none even acknowledged his halting attempts at Cantonese, and he soon abandoned the effort. In the days to come, Chu disappeared from his usual haunts; one of the shopkeepers thought he'd been arrested, or dragged off by rival gangsters. In either case, the disgruntled merchant didn't much care. He spat and professed joy at the hoodlum's absence; gods grant it be a lengthy one.
Later that week of Chu's defection, Royce staggered into the Rover after an evening of crashing from one strobe-lit dance hall to another in the wake of James, Shea and an entourage of yes-men, call girls and assorted hangers-on, all in the name of entertaining a visiting dignitary who owned a piece of the company, or wanted to buy one, it was difficult to recall.
He slid into an empty seat, nodded greetings to Gerald, the late-shift barkeep, and ordered a whiskey sour to match his mood. He'd downed the first and started on the second when he noticed the woman who resided in the unit across from his own standing near the end of the crowded bar. He'd gotten her name from one of the guys at work and switched into spy mode.
He ran her name through his formidable network and soon amassed a dossier. Shelley Jackson recently signed on as a cultural attaché for Coltech, her specialty being an interpreter of several Chinese dialects. The job dispatched her to points hither and yon on frequent diplomatic junkets; it was highly implausible he'd ever run into her at either of the factories, her sphere being of another cosmic order altogether. Her parents were well-off. She'd graduated from Western with honors and routinely traveled abroad since high school. She was single, although she apparently took frequent lovers—older, affluent men as a rule. Royce figured her for a pleasure seeker, a woman who thrilled in the proximity of power, rather than possessed of any agenda so mundane as gold digging or career advancement.
Tonight, she wore severe business attire—a gray skirt and white blouse—and chatted with an older fellow in a loose, silk shirt and suspenders; tall and lean with unruly black hair to the waist of his baggy, linen pants in a manner Royce identified as pure Eastern Euro-trash; a Balkan gangster prince at least a decade too old to dress as he did. Manny Poe, Manicevic Poe, something similar. An investment banker who occasionally frequented the billiards room. He put his mouth close to Shelley Jackson's ear and she laughed.
Shelley Jackson's dark hair was cropped in androgynous affectation, a style his old girlfriend Jenny had adopted near the end of their stormy run, and when she briefly glanced at him, Royce's cheeks warmed from the sensuous quality of her appraisal, the carnal thrill of his secret knowledge of how she glistened beneath her buttoned-down exterior. She returned her attention to the executive and didn't glance back again; not even to acknowledge the drink Royce had Gerald set before her.
He ordered a revolver of bourbon and tracked down Coyne in the billiards room. The man lay sprawled across a leather divan, his hair tousled, shirt unbuttoned to the breast, shoes propped on an ottoman. He smoked a Cohiba cigarette and watched two other men playing a game of baccarat. Royce didn't recognize either of them, they were in the fog that enveloped the world two feet beyond his center of gravity. He flopped across from Coyne and steadily gulped his stein of booze.
Coyne whistled softly. "Well, there's a sight. You look like a tiger what's gotten free of its pen."
T
hey made small talk, reminiscing about college and their families back in the States, and as each spiraled deeper into drunkenness, Royce deftly steered the discussion to mother Mary and her social ring. Coyne expressed annoyance regarding his mother's newfound hobbies. "The damned busybody crones," he said.
"Who?"
"That's what Mom calls them. There's about a dozen of them—a tea party club without the tea. I asked her, 'Mom, isn't that a bit derogatory, referring to them as crones?' and she says, 'Oh no, that's what they call themselves.' I guess one of the ladies, Agatha, is a hard-line feminist. Agatha goes on about patriarchal oppression, ageism—especially prejudice against old women—and similar natter. She convinces her elderly chums to take back the so-called epithets, like hag and crone and treat them as tools of empowerment." Mary spent a majority of her time with the ladies, which should've been a relief for Coyne, considering how worried he'd been to locate companionship for her in this new, alien environment; yet as the months had worn on, some indefinable element of their communal bonding disquieted him.
"Bingo and knitting," Royce said with boozy assurance. "I doubt it's anything to get stirred up about."
"I dunno. They resent my lifestyle choices; Mrs. Grant—you know, that wretched woman with the wheelchair—says it's a rejection of the female as partner and mate. Mom stays out till all hours—I caught her sneaking into the apartment around dawn last week. She acts like a rebellious teenager."
"Second childhood. Sounds like Agatha's reliving the Women's Movement and bringing your mom along for the ride."
"Maybe. Those friends of hers . . . I found out Agatha hired on with a company as a clerical administrator so she could move into the Arms—"
"You spied on your poor mother's friend? You devious fellow."
"She flew halfway across the world to live in this exact building. What the hell is up with that?"
Royce said, "I've seen them go out at night. Very late. Kind of odd, I thought."
"Oh, yeah. That's the procession. Crazy bitches."
"The what?"
"The Procession of the Black Sloth." Coyne puffed on his cigarette and exhaled toward the lazily revolving blades of the ceiling fan. "Agatha's a religious nutter; thinks of her group in spiritual terms. Mom says the sisterhood originates here in the East. A sort of passive-aggressive protest against centuries of male dominance, which seems rational enough, all things considered. Rebellion against foot-binding and the like. There's a concentration of true believers in this area come to make obeisance to a guru who lives in one of the slum tenements."
"Black sloth? I don't get it. Why a black sloth?"
"Jeez, Hawthorne, you should ask them. I don't even remember if it's a sloth. It might be a black weasel or a marmot."
"Yeah, never mind. I probably don't want to know anything about a black weasel," Royce said.
Coyne swished the ice in his whiskey, concentrating on the glass with utter melancholy. "Anyway, Agatha's into these late-night strolls. Moon goddess nonsense, or some such effing crap. I'm not much for religion."
"Me neither. Sunday school hangovers lasted a lifetime."
"Soon as I escaped parochial, I burned my boy's suit and never looked back. Mom was raised Catholic, see; she goes to mass at the cathedral on Bonham. This hoodoo isn't like her."
Mama's boy. Royce filed that away, too. "Don't worry. My own dear mum went through a New Age period. She wanted to commune with Atlanteans." Which was a convenient lie to put Coyne at ease, to cement their bonding moment. His mother had been an Easter and Christmas Lutheran and that was the extent of her spirituality. She'd been more interested in the PTA and the little wine and cheese parties her friends held while pretending to have a weekly reading circle. His dad referred to it as her weekly "get loaded and gossip" circle. "Before you know it, it'll be back to bunt cakes and macramé. Just this morning I saw a bunch of them huddled outside playing canasta."
"Yeah, maybe. Say, c'mon over for lunch with us tomorrow. I'm barbecuing. You like ribs, don't you? Mrs. Ward and a couple of her cronies will be there. You can meet my mom, see what I mean."
"Uh—" Royce hurriedly considered possible excuses.
"For the love of Baby Jesus, I'm begging you," Coyne said. "You can't leave me alone with them."
Royce grudgingly agreed, although he actually welcomed the opportunity to chat with Mary Coyne and Mrs. Ward. Perhaps some unexpected providence would result.
He fixed an Irish coffee and sipped it while sitting in the gloom of his kitchen. The kitchen was spotless except for his dinner plate in the sink, a segmented trail of cigarette ashes on the table, and a mussed edition of the I Ching he'd accidentally kicked under a chair. Its pages were coming unglued and he'd left thumbprints on them, but couldn't call to mind anything of substance. The symbols were pretty and meaningless. He'd bought a dozen similar works when he first arrived in the city; just went to the biggest chain bookstore he could find and swept them into his basket along with tourist pamphlets, cookbooks and a couple regional histories in hardback. Eastern philosophy wasn't his bag; he did it because that's how it went wherever he stayed for any real duration. Being the perfect social chameleon demanded attention to the minute.
Presently, the familiar, discordant strains of Mrs. Ward's flute filtered through the wall and drew him into the clammy, dank air. When he stepped through the sliding glass door, the awful piping ceased mid-note, as if to accentuate a dramatic pause. He stood on the balcony and regarded the spectral façades of the Raleigh Arms. The pool glowed dully, a cradle of stagnant phosphorescence like mother of pearl embedded in black mud on the sea bottom. The water reflected upon the surrounding tile, the iron slats of the courtyard gate and the abutting concrete walls. Across the way, Coyne's apartment lay dark. However, a dim lamp flickered in the Jackson woman's window, and he waited a long time in the damp smog to catch a glimpse of her. The light snuffed abruptly. He lingered a moment, then went unsteadily inside.
He dozed in his chair, flicking through the five hundred channels advertised in his digital cable package. Old war movies and serials from America, big-game hunting and sports fishing, talk shows, the regular junk. He waded through the weird local stuff shot in low def at raves, and incomprehensible talent shows that were a cross between performance art and improv. Then there was the Asian horror cinema, which was gaining popularity abroad, but left Royce cold. He lingered on one bizarre scene: A man in office clothes shuffled into a vast cavern and approached what soon resolved as a mountain of knife blades. The man raised his hands, fingers bent into claws, and threw his head back and wailed, an Asian Charlton Heston. The man fell to his knees, still wailing, and crawled to the mountain of knives. On all fours, he began to climb.
Royce really, really hated horror, and the Eastern garbage wasn't any better than the kind they served in Hollywood. He surfed to a game show. Everyone was Asian: the audience, the announcer, the contestants, except for an American, a white guy in his fifties who wore a ten-gallon hat, a bolo tie and a well-cut suit. He was the spitting image of a guy who'd operated a salvage yard in Royce's home town. The contestants were taking turns answering questions highlighted on large board. When somebody got a question right, a rabidly grinning hostess in a polka-dot summer dress hopped in place and waved her tiny hands in abject joy. The words on the board were Chinese characters. Royce found he could get the gist through body language and deduction. It was surreal to watch the American cowboy's mouth move and hear Chinese come out. The man answered enough questions correctly and lights flashed, klaxons blared and parti-colored streamers billowed down in a storm. The grinning hostess scurried to the American and pinned gaudy ribbons to his breast while the host leaned on his podium and gabbled frenetically. The curtains slowly raised to reveal a shiny new jet ski.
Royce thought he'd cheerfully kill anybody who drove a pin through his twelve-hundred-dollar suit. The cowboy looked down at his breast, apparently sharing Royce's sentiment. The cowboy grabbed the hostess by her ponytail and je
rked her toward him. He began punching her head. It was a farce, it couldn't be real, not with the way her arms and legs flew around like a crash dummy pitched through a windshield.
The TV image wavered and shrank and the people were folded into themselves. The lights in the apartment went out. The air conditioner whined to a stop and the room lay as dark and silent as a vacuum. He dopily marveled at the feeling of being cast adrift. Little by little, his eyes adjusted and signs of life penetrated the blackout: disjointed voices echoing from afar, the dim thump of bodies moving in the apartments above his own, the sullen orange glow of the city skyline.
A series of malformed thuds rattled glasses in a cupboard. He lay there, groggily staring into the gloom, trying to shake the lethargy of booze and bone-weariness, the quicksand gravity of his recliner. There came another sound, a low, raspy warble: a frog calling from the dark. The little beasts often hopped in from the surrounding parks, the encroaching marshland, and made their homes in the wet shadows along the pool until housekeeping came along with nets and buckets and carried them away. This vocalization was much deeper, more resonant and suggestive of inordinate size. However, as the sound repeated, its utterance was more a croak than the glottal wheeze and gasp of some other creature; almost a moan.