by Jon Padgett
JOE
(In Mr. Vox’s voice)
Who is he?
MR. VOX
...you quietly asked it.
(The FACTORY set returns, and a filthy pallet rises on its foot behind JOE, giving the audience a bird’s eye view. JOE reclines on it and closes his eyes.)
And in the darkness of the Factory machine shop, you could feel a presence, hulking over you inside the control booth. (“What are you?” Mr. Vox asked.)
JOE
(eyes clenched closed, JOE writhes.)
I’m... I’m hurting.
MR. VOX
You imagine you’re hurting. You can’t get that dream out of your head. You imagine you miss your long lost animal-dummies, don’t you? (“What are you?” Mr. Vox asked.) You may well need help. You imagine you miss them, even—especially—that duplicitous, animal-dummy ex-lady friend of yours. What was its name?
JOE
(Eyes open, wide and staring. The pallet falls to the ground.)
Margaret.
MR. VOX
Yes, Margaret. (“What are you?” Mr. Vox asked.) Why not win it back? You could easily do that now.
JOE
Yes, Mr. Vox.
(JOE rises into the air, limbs akimbo, mouth ajar.)
MR. VOX
Thanks to your tremendous powers of Greater Ventriloquism, you can do almost anything.
(Blackout.)
What are you?
(SOUND: airplane passing over.)
Escape to Thin Mountain
Little Evie is singing again.
It began after we found the body in the train yard. We were making the rounds, looking for stray knickknacks, when we heard a tiny, chiming voice in the wind. It was coming from inside the compartment car of the old Whippoorwill express train, which hadn’t run for forty years or more. There was a moldy old tent kind of covering up one of the nasty benches. Smelled but not as bad as it must have once. The body, not much more than a skeleton, was holding Little Evie. That shook us all up something awful, even though the corpse face looked so peaceful, happy even.
Then Little Evie began to sing, and we took her as our own.
And now Little Evie is singing again. It’s one of her shorter ones—the kind we love, the kind we need. That lilting baby coo voice of hers, the ringing tones so familiar, like reading a diary you wish you had written but deeper, better than that.
Her song this time is an old one about a mountain far away from this close heat, these factories vomiting smoke out all day and night. We know the song so well. It takes place up in the altitudes where a body’s head can clear out and take in chilly relief.
Crooked trees and reedy light,
Thin stone fingers obscure sight,
Through mazy brush’s skeleton,
Creeps the dwarf who shows you in.
Oh, Little Evie knows where we want to be, and her chiming voice can almost take us there for real and true. She knows what we need.
Little Evie knows we need Thin Mountain.
We’ll try to take the train one more time. The train bound for Thin Mountain.
Lord knows we love a good train ride. Always have. Sitting up in that fine old dark wood compartment car watching the smog of the city just fade away into pinewoods, oaks, magnolias standing in a dirt clearing, reaching up untrimmed, like rows and rows of mushroom clouds springing out of the earth. Ugliness returns with every city you reach, the train stations always running in the bad parts of town, but then—
Little Evie is singing again.
She knows how much we love a good train ride, knows where we want, where we need, to go.
Thin Mountain. Not on any map we’ve ever seen or heard about. Only can be called there. Selected.
Up and up into open country where the wooded trees fall off and those foothills begin stepping up and up, big red and gray rocks like giant-children had stood atop the fingered peaks and pushed them down the side of the mountain to smash and sit forever in petrified silence.
Last time we took the train, oh, it was years back. We were traveling up to Nashville for Little Evie to become a star. We’d been telling everyone about her. That’s the place to go if you want to sing and make it stick. Now we didn’t do it to take advantage of Little Evie’s gift of voice, to make profit from it. We just wanted to share her special gift with everyone like us, wanted to hear Little Evie singing on top of one of those great fingers of rock above so high and clean above the filth of the world below. Wanted to see Little Evie get her due.
That’s the day we all first heard the name Thin Mountain, the day the man said it at the train station just before he threw himself in front of the Whippoorwill Express train, got cut in two but with that look of healing joy on his face.
And never did Little Evie sing so beautifully than she did as we rumbled, rocking back and forth, up north towards Thin Mountain.
Crooked trees and reedy light,
Thin stone fingers obscure sight,
Through mazy brush’s skeleton,
Creeps the dwarf who shows you in.
She sang so everyone in the compartment car could hear and see and feel the things she was singing about. Their heads, bald or styled or messy, turned, swiveled to listen to Little Evie croon. We knew at that moment that Thin Mountain must be real because every word that Little Evie sang that day came true in front of our eyes. We saw those fingerlike peaks and the lovely, crooked trees so old and wise looking below them. A friendly Wizard of Oz kind of dwarf grinned at us through the glass of the train car as Little Evie’s voice chimed in our ears. We were so close to Thin Mountain—we felt like we all were at that moment. A place for us to be.
Thin Mountain, Thin Mountain, Thin Mountain—
Then we had a bad dream, just like the ones we sometimes get. A policeman, that fat one we like, was pulling us down from the car, always so gentle that one, past the ruined seats, out of the train. Told us Thin Mountain wasn’t real. And then we were back where we started, somehow, in Municipal Park next to the old train engine. Little Evie had stopped singing. She was scared, and we gave that nice, fat policeman a good tongue thrashing and then felt bad for it. We scuttled back down underneath the highway overpass again and under the big cardboard box house. It gets cold during the paper mill days, and we cough a lot, though Little Evie doesn’t ever seem to care. We start thinking the gentle, big-bellied policeman pulling us off our train, even the train ride itself was part of the dream. We get confused sometimes. Little Evie won’t sing about it and sometimes we think maybe it didn’t happen at all.
We remember her song about Thin Mountain, though. Little Evie’s song—like the one she’s singing now—was all made up, spur of the moment like, never to return or be duplicated, melting away like one of those fancy ice sculptures you see sometimes. Those are special songs of hers, songs we try to sing ourselves from memory, but we always get the words messed up, and those ringing notes Little Evie can hit we doubt anyone else can, let alone any of us. No one can sing like her.
Little Evie gets real sad sometimes. She says her life is low and the light in the morning coming down through the interstate slats hurts her head. So much so that she doesn’t want to eat or even sleep some days. We hate those times because she never even sings, sometimes for so long, and when she doesn’t sing, we all get sad and become a sight to anyone passing by in their cars or the bus and sometimes even bicycles. They help us sometimes, feeling sorry, and we see the inside of the hospital rooms for a while, which Little Evie doesn’t like and then if she sings there it’s a hate kind of singing that makes the hospital people think their teeth are falling out or makes them feel her tiny voice is an insect-thing drilling into their brains. Little Evie can be real mean when she doesn’t care about anything.
Then again, sometimes Little Evie gets agitated like our own mama used to get so often. Like we can get too. It runs in the family maybe. Those times Little Evie kind of talk-sings fast, so fast we can’t understand the words or follow the
crazy melodies, and it makes her mad when we don’t understand or like her songs. And that makes us upset—our hearts beating so fast we’re afraid we’ll choke and stop breathing.
Sometimes we get real sick, and Little Evie starts feeling feverish to our hands (when she’ll let us touch her). She tells us to leave, that nothing and no one can help her. She won’t stop moving, can’t sleep, can’t find a moment’s peace. Then it seems like Thin Mountain is so far away and like nothing and nobody will speak or even look at us again. No one stops by our cardboard house under the overpass to give us a dollar, a nickel, even one penny at times like that.
And then Little Evie disappears altogether. Those are the worst times for us. We can’t reach her or hear her voice, and then she is all we can think about all day long, walking along the little park roads with our bags full of special knickknacks that Little Evie found for us once in a dumpster outside of the Indoor Swamp. We camp out in the park, swinging on the swings that Little Evie used to like so much back when she liked much of anything, watching the pushy squirrels beg for food. They made her laugh when she used to laugh. And then suddenly—
Little Evie is singing again.
Just when it seems everything is on the verge of just staying sad or upset or like nothing at all, Little Evie starts singing for us. And then everything is alright for a while.
Crooked trees and reedy light,
Thin stone fingers obscure sight,
Through mazy brush’s skeleton,
Creeps the dwarf who shows you in.
We’ve been all getting headaches lately, and Little Evie cries at night from it sometimes. She hates it here. We wonder if she ever liked it, if she ever likes us, at all. She understands us better than anyone does. We love her, and not just her singing. We are lost without her, and it hurts when those other voices tell us she doesn’t like us, doesn’t love us... maybe even hates us. And then we try to sing to her.
We pray We pray We pray
That Little Evie will never go away.
Not long back we woke up and saw what looked like Little Evie standing on the concrete teeth-fence thing on either side of the interstate above our cardboard house. We thought she was singing or crying in the rain. We were scared Little Evie would jump.
But when we ran so fast up the side of the entrance ramp and got up there to save her, trying not to slip and break our legs or maybe even our necks while we did it, it wasn’t Little Evie up there at all. Instead there was a dwarf, that grinning dwarf we saw through the window that time on the train to Thin Mountain, that time we were maybe dreaming, and he wasn’t singing like Little Evie either, but he was dancing, just kind of a herky-jerky dance on those crazy bowlegs with big flat feet, and he was laughing real low while he did it, thrusting out his tongue and those little hips in a kind of way that made us feel bad and shamed like.
We were drenched in the rain watching him, wanting to climb back down but wondering where Little Evie was and wondering if this dwarf had maybe done something to her something bad or something shameful, and so we climbed up with the intent to grab and squeeze and demand and there were cars and jeeps and buses and such honking and heads screaming out bad words. Once we made it to the top, we tried to get a look at the hateful little man but he wasn’t there at all, it was only ever us up there, and we were looking down down to the pavement below, real dizzy like, and it maybe seemed like Thin Mountain was down there, as if the pavement was a chalk drawing you could jump into like in Mary Poppins or maybe if we jumped the world would flip upside down and we’d find ourselves floating up like a feather, maybe all the way to Thin Mountain and wouldn’t that be nice.
We don’t know how we got back down inside our waterlogged box (it’s almost time to find another one), but—
Little Evie is singing again. She’s singing, but she’s not really here either. We can’t see her or feel her little hand in ours. Little Evie’s voice seems like the only thing left of her.
She’s been singing for so long now, but it’s a different kind of song than we’ve heard before. It’s soft like rabbit fur and sometimes sounds kind of inside-out too, maybe broken headed hospital-words like jumping off the interstate overpass and finding yourself on the top of a mountain. It’s the kind of half singing-half talking Little Evie does sometimes that you can’t understand, but it doesn’t stop.
It’s the kind of singing that makes us cry, not all sad kind of crying but mixed in with the sweet kind of crying, like remembering the dusky smell of a childhood friend who is gone gone passed forever now but still somehow with us at that moment. A friend who would never leave us, who loved us once but doesn’t anymore, and did leave at last and is gone gone passed forever now and yet is still haunted-house here somehow.
But Little Evie keeps singing and the sweet crying turns into something else, more like mad crying or throw up crying, like where are we why are we kill us kill kill us crying. And at that moment it seems like the concrete is bad quicksand gobbling up cars, buses, tilting buildings, and the paper mill days hide monsters we can never see only smell and the interstate overpass is draining or melting bit by bit and the molten looking asphalt and concrete of it will cover us and draw us down so far away from the thick air under the interstate overpass let alone the thin, cold air of Thin Mountain, and Little Evie is singing so loud and it is everything and it is too much.
And Little Evie keeps singing.
Now. Making our way, stumbling, falling, wheeling up the interstate ramp, a sight a sight a sight on the shoulder under the sun that can’t be seen through all the brown smoke trying to avoid the fog beasts and throw up skeletons and pavement quicksand all day long till we finally reach downtown and the train station and the train yard and we’re crying and screaming and howling, trying to drown out Little Evie’s song that we don’t want to feel anymore that we don’t want to be anymore. But it never ends, on endless loop like, and we love Little Evie so much we only ever wanted her to be happy healthy, but we know that this can’t be down here in smogtown, no it’s not possible down here with the church gargoyles staring, tongues out nasty like, eyes rolling, smog fat people grinning black eyed from their patrol cars at us.
And, all at once, there’s the old Whippoorwill express train, which hasn’t run for forty years or more, but is standing in the sudden sunlight gleaming black and new and polished and green, and a big-bellied dwarf-conductor is smiling at us not mean or nasty at all but friendly and funny, and he does a herky-jerky welcome jig as he takes our ticket, and we are all young, and it is quiet except for the shhhhh of the steam engine as it prepares for the journey ahead. We make our way through the train cars, and as we do, we can hear the singing.
The sound of Little Evie’s voice chimes in the air, cold and clear, makes us see and feel those deeply familiar things as only she can. And now I understand the words. Puppets dangling in a quiet void, their eyes rolling. Giant crab arm crooking out of fog. Whole worlds of quivering things and silent, broken things and colors so thick with light that they become a kaleidoscope of darkness. Mazes of screaming mirrors. Dreadful things. Wonderful things.
We enter the train’s fancy but cramped bathroom in the dining car and look into the mirror to smile at ourselves, not minding the spreading, black crack that appears from our hairline down to our jawline on the other side of our face. One bulb sputters and throbs to Little Evie’s voice. We can hear her, feel her, so close now, in the flesh (or what passes for it). Of course, she was waiting for us, calling for us, all this time. Pulling us on towards Thin Mountain with a song like no other.
We enter the empty compartment car, dark wood gleaming. Dark curtains and carpets, and a kind of tent covering one of the benches furthest from us. We walk towards the tented bench. Towards the singing. Towards little Evie.
“All aboard!” we hear the dwarf-conductor bellow through the window. The tent is closed and a thrill goes through the train cars as we reach to open it.
We can hear Little Evie. She’s inside.
Thin stone fingers obscure sight,
Through mazy brush's skeleton,
Creeps the dwarf who shows you in.
Thin Mountain, Thin Mountain, Thin Mountain—
Shhhhh.
Shhhhh.
Shhhhh.
Little Evie is singing again.
NOTES
“The Mindfulness of Horror Practice” - Inspired and informed by Bodhipaksa’s Mindfulness of Breathing.
“Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown” is a phrase from Clark Ashton Smith’s poem, “Warning.”
“Origami Dreams” - The “wise man” quote is paraphrased from A Course in Miracles, “Lesson 5.”
“Origami Dreams” - Donora, PA—the site of the terrible Smog of 1948—had a city limits sign that read “Donora. Next to Yours the Best Town in the U.S.A ”
When I was a child, my first ventriloquist dummy came with a pamphlet entitled “7 SIMPLE STEPS TO VENTRILOQUISM.” Though the following ventriloquist story went through a tremendous number of transmutations from its inception two decades ago (when it was first conceived), that pamphlet from my past proved to be the key to what “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism” would finally become. Practice the first seven steps enough, and you may one day be able to throw your voice with the best of the showbiz ventriloquists out there. Practice the rest of the steps at your own risk.