Even More Nasty Stories

by Brian McNaughton

  “Come on, Suzy.” He had gripped her arm more firmly than necessary, for she seemed willing. “We're going home."

  “He's got Marticora!” the children shrieked out the bus windows. “Marticora!"

  The attendant stood in a puddle of gas that the forgotten nozzle kept spreading as he gawked, but he was the one who asked: “What do you think you're doing?"

  The driver looked even more foolish, with his red and gold skirts hiked up, his sandals slapping the tarmac as he raced to cut them off. Phil might have laughed if the man had been a little older, smaller and slower.

  He slung Suzy over his shoulder. Willing was the wrong word. Pliable, more likely, twisted into complaisance. Grief for the lost years blurred his sight.

  Her weight threatened to buckle his knees, but he forced himself to stagger faster. He dumped her in the car, slammed the door and turned to catch a punch in the belly.

  “Love your enemies,” he gasped, retreating from the bus driver. “Don't they teach you that?"

  “No.” A clumsy blow clipped Phil's ear.

  His right fist felt massive with anger and loss, as if it could fell the other like a sledgehammer. A cold voice assured him that it could not. A fight would only delay him, to their advantage. He sprinted for the left-hand door.

  He screamed at his own stupidity when the other sprang for Suzy's door, but she voted for escape by depressing her lock-button. His heart swelled. She was still his little girl.

  “

  What's your name, sweetie?"

  “Marticora."

  “That's a mouthful,” the weathered redhead said. She was curious, either because of Suzy's getup or because customers were a novelty in her fly-blown cafe. “You don't look Mexican."

  “That's a game,” Phil said. “Her name's Suzy. Susan."

  “That's right.” Suzy smiled shyly. “I forgot."

  “You don't like your burger?” the woman asked.

  “It's okay.” Her large, pale fingers had torn it into neat bits, which she had shuffled, drowned in ketchup and forgotten.

  “I think the dog's making her nervous."

  Whining and grumbling and casting furtively hostile looks, the collie would have made anyone nervous, but the woman ignored the hint to put the damned thing outside.

  “Sheena wouldn't hurt nobody. Want to see her pups?"

  “Oh, yes!” Suzy's doughy face lit with enthusiasm. For the first time he caught a glimpse of the happy child he remembered. She turned to him. “Can I?"

  “Sure, honey."

  “They're out—Sheena!" The proprietress turned from the screen door to fend off the dog as it rushed up with fangs bared. Unperturbed, Suzy slipped out. “God damn it, Sheena, you lay down! You hear me?” She called: “Out by the back door, Suzy.” She threw Phil a sheepish smile. “She's touchy about her pups."

  “Aren't we all."

  “The puppies are Leos. What's your little girl's sign?"

  Alice would have seen nothing perniciously silly in that question. She had believed: astrology, tarot, witchcraft, and from witchcraft to the Waywarders—not wayward persons, as they surely were, but guardians of an imaginary way to some other dimension. After Suzy's birth, Alice grew fanatical.

  In a rational world, his wife's kinks would have been ironed out in a mental hospital, and she never could have absconded to the cult's retreat with their daughter. Nor could she have denied him his court-ordered visiting rights by fleeing across country to hide Suzy in another commune, where he had just tracked her down after two years. But this world, as Phil had learned at great expense of cash and spirit, was not rational.

  Suzy would escape the trap that still held her mother. While her little friends skipped off to Sunday School to have their minds bulldozed and paved for the conveyance of any and all chimeras, she would be reading Lucretius and Gibbon. If she insisted on fairy tales, she would get Voltaire and Swift. And anyone who mentioned gods, devils, UFO's or ESP within her earshot would find himself capable of levitation: through the nearest door, at the end of her father's foot.

  The redhead stared at him. His bitter laugh had offended her. At times he could admit that resentment had made him the flipside of Alice's broken record.

  Before he could apologize, she dashed into the kitchen, where the dog had begun barking furiously at the back door.

  As he stood to count bills from his wallet, a shimmer in the grimy window caught his eye. Down the long desert road, a harlequin blob contracted and elongated in the heat-haze. The bus was on their trail. He told himself wryly that their pursuers must be psychic.

  “Suzy!” he shouted as he ran to the car. He blasted the horn. “Come here, quick!"

  She whipped around the corner of the cafe more gracefully than he would have thought likely. Hearing a fearful din erupt behind her, he expected the odious dog to appear on her heels. He flung the door wide and jerked her in. The rear end slewed in a spray of gravel as the woman came screaming after them, her red face now a match for her hair. He had no time to explain that the money was on the counter. The bus was pulling in.

  The driver had somewhere exchanged his load of children for adults. In the rearview mirror, Phil saw Alice alight from the bus, her elegant posture transforming her foolish outfit to the robe of an enchantress. He felt suddenly hollow. He had forgotten how much he once loved her.

  Gazing back, Suzy said, “Mama,” with cool detachment.

  He stole another look. It was a fleeting glimpse through dust, but the cultists seemed to be comforting the woman from the cafe. Was she one of them, and had this been a trap?

  He forced himself to say, “Will you miss...?"

  The last word could not be forced, but she said, “No. You won't tie me up at night, will you?"

  “Of course not! Did they do that?"

  “They said I was bad."

  “You have to forget everything they ever taught you."

  “Okay.” She giggled and plucked at her sleeve. “What do you call this color?"

  It took him a moment to understand her joke, but he didn't laugh. His child had become a person in his absence, a stranger with her own sense of humor. It shocked him.

  “

  Marticora,” he pronounced thoughtfully when they were on the plane. “Is that Spanish?"

  In the pinafore and braids he had thought right for her age, she looked even bigger and more ungainly. The flight attendants showed reserve, as if she were his bizarrely costumed mistress.

  “No. What's that place? Not Asia. Persia. It's a name from Persia."

  She didn't look much like a Suzy. Maybe she should keep the name if she liked it. “What does it mean?"

  “It's like a manticore."

  That she should know such an odd word pleased him, but his pleasure faded. She knew it only because the Waywarders believed such nonsense. His daughter would not bear the name of a mythical monster. He fell silent, and she resumed her rapt contemplation of their world's wooly floor.

  Too keyed up to sleep, but apparently content in his apartment, Suzy watched television in the bedroom he had lovingly prepared for her. In the living room, he watched the telephone. On the thirty-third ring, he picked it up.

  “There's nothing you can say—"

  Alice interrupted: “Phil, it's not your daughter."

  “Not even that. Damn you, I know my own child!"

  They had said these things before. Their conversation could have been conducted just as well by a pair of answering machines. “If you want to see her—without your co-religionists—you can. But I—"

  “It's—"

  "It? God damn it, Alice, stop referring to our—"

  "It, Phil, and it's dangerous. You don't know. Evil."

  “Is that why you tied her up at night, you crazy bitch?"

  The facing window reflected movement in the dim hallway behind his chair. Backlit by shifting cathode beams, Suzy's form was gross and indistinct, but he glimpsed the ball that she repeatedly tossed and caught. With everythi
ng from a child-sized Raggedy Ann to the latest video games to divert her, she had dug out one of his tennis balls, an oddly soiled one, to play with.

  Alice yammered on. He tried to bore her into hanging up by reciting a favorite maxim: “Ignorance is the only evil."

  The sudden hiss of the radiator startled him. The ball landed in his lap. He checked a shameful impulse to vent his anger by yelling at Suzy.

  “Is it midnight in New York yet, Phil? Phil?"

  It struck him that the radiator would not hiss like that in August; nor would a tennis ball, even though its fuzz might somehow become matted with blood, have ears like a puppy.

  Suzy hugged him so tightly that he dropped the phone, so tightly that he couldn't cry out. Or even breathe.

  The phone tinnily repeated, “Phil?"

  * * *

  Fragment of a Diary Found on Ellesmere Island

  March 15, 1886:

  Wheeler lost the draw. He called us cheating dogs and took up the ax, but five to one is no contest, even weak as we are, and we disarmed him. Redmond is a joker, he says do not bruise him, it will spoil the meat, and Wheeler says I hope you choke on me, you son of a bitch. Capt. Daniels held him and told me to cut his throat. We dressed the carcass and put most of the cuts outside, where it is snowing again, reserving the left leg and foot which we cut up and boiled. I thought I would never be able to eat this, but the smell of cooking made my mouth water, and I fell to with a will when Jackson says it is done.

  This is where it got strange. It was crowded around the pot, and I took it into my head to count us. Each time I came up with six, but Wheeler was dead and there should be only five. I was used to this, for the past month I have not known if I was waking or sleeping, but I forced myself to concentrate and counted each man by pointing with my finger.

  What are you doing? Wheeler asks.

  Everyone stared in horror at the dead man, sitting there large as life beside me and sharing in the feast. Capt. Daniels took up the ax and hit him, but Wheeler laughed. He did not bleed like a live man, and the blow did not distract him from eating.

  March 20:

  The bear was back and stole the meat we had stored outside, causing us to despair. Wheeler said we must draw lots again. Look at me, he says, it is nothing to be afraid of. He is ghastly, with his split forehead and cut throat like a grinning mouth below the real one.

  March 21:

  Jackson lost the draw which was unfortunate as he is the cook. He came back and partook of the meal but he was more surly than Wheeler and cursed us for killing him.

  March 25, :

  The dead men stay by themselves, knowing they are different. They do not sleep, which is worrisome. They eat, however. If we kill another one, the dead will equal the living.

  March 31:

  We did not need to draw since Redmond volunteered. I will not have to worry about dying when I am like Wheeler and Jackson, he says. The dead had a laugh at this. Capt. Daniels strangled him with a rope. He came back, too.

  April 1:

  Now it is Capt. Daniels and young Hodgson and me. I would like to talk with them about our predicament, but you cannot swing a cat in the shack we cobbled from salvaged timbers and the dead would put in their two cents. They are not like they were in life. I do not understand Redmond's jokes. We cannot go outside, for the cold is deadly and the bear is prowling constantly.

  April 10:

  We woke up to find Capt. Daniels dead, strangled in his sleep. Redmond did not deny killing him and said it was the best way, he would not have to fret now about losing the draw. Capt. Daniels did not take this view himself when he came back and was very bitter, but he sits with the other dead men while Hodgson and I keep to ourselves.

  Wheeler will not leave off staring at me. He says he does not hold it against me, but I was the one who put the knife to his throat.

  April ?:

  My name is Abel Hodgson and I set pen to paper in Jimmy's diary as he does not want to write no more now that he says he is dead. He says it is alright to write in it if I do not write lies. The bear tore a hole in the wall and Jimmy drove him away with the ax. It does not sit well with him when I ask him why he bothered to fight off the bear if he is dead already. I pray that some kind person will take this note to my mother Mrs. Sarah Hodgson of Portsmouth, N.H., who knows that I do not tell lies although Jimmy sure does. I pray someone will tell Miss Amelia Manning of Portsmouth that I was thinking of her to the last and wish I had never succumbed to the lure of the sea.

  Dear Jesus, Jimmy is getting restless again.

  * * *

  Malpractice

  Mom told me that I'd catch something if I hung out with Oona. Not only was she far too thin and pale, Mom said, but she looked weird.

  Mom was right. Oona Ghourfane had a babyish forehead, sunken eyes, a petulant lower lip and markedly pointed ears. She had no body to speak of, but she moved like tall grass, or like the snake within it. She looked pale, weird, unhealthy, maybe even vicious. I was nuts about her.

  Mom's real objection was to Oona's father, who would have been considered unsavory even if he hadn't murdered his wife. Eighteen years ago (I was in diapers, so I got this second hand), Oona's mother disappeared. She was young and pretty, and Dr. Ghourfane looked like a vulture that a taxidermist had messed up and hidden in a damp basement for fifty years, so nobody doubted that she had run away with the gas man.

  Except the gas man's wife. They were no ideal couple, she said, but he was crazy about their two kids, and he never would have left home without his bowling shoes. She nagged the cops until they went to question the doctor.

  The cops were just trying to get the wife off their backs, and anybody with a shred of tact could have sent them away happy, but Dr. Ghourfane's personality affects some people like a bad smell. After ten minutes of his sneers and wisecracks, they went for a warrant to dig up his yard and disassemble his house.

  This was the climactic event of the decade in our town, a Woodstock for rubbernecks, and a couple of hundred people gathered with sixpacks and sandwiches to watch the cops at work. An icecream truck parked across the street and tootled its merry little tune while they dug for bodies.

  The doctor strolled around his yard as bold as brass, in Mom's words (but after all, it was his yard), making typically snide remarks until a cop got mad and hit him. The crowd booed, so the police chief made him put up his shovel and go direct traffic.

  They found no corpses, but they carted away a ton of books they considered obscene and took samples of suspect chemicals and herbs. The books were old enough to be respectable, it turned out, and the other stuff was either legal or defied analysis at the Connecticut State Police Laboratory.

  I never gave Oona a second thought in grammar school. She was just a weird girl at the far edge of reality. At a loss how to dress her, the doctor had apparently disinsterred a trunk from his grandmother's childhood and figured that solved her clothing problem forever. Her dresses would have been perfect for Little Lord Fauntleroy's tea parties if they hadn't been wilted, or if they had fit.

  I remember only one time she drew attention to herself in class. All through first grade, she carried a rag doll. She tried bringing it along to second grade, where Miss Cranston had a rule against everything. After warning Oona to leave it home, the teacher locked the doll in a supply closet.

  Oona raised hell, but she seemed more scared than angry. She screamed that part of herself was inside the doll, and locked with it now in the dark and airless closet. Miss Cranston looked scared, too, thinking she had a genuine loony on her hands.

  Years later, when I was going with Oona, I read something in one of Keats's letters that made me think I understood. He describes watching a sparrow and “taking part in its existence,” so that he seemed to be pecking in the gravel himself. It made me sad, reading that, to remember the lonely little girl whose imagination was so vivid that she could think her way inside a tattered old doll.

  At the time, of course, i
t just sounded nutty. Everybody laughed, but I was the one she singled out for a dirty look as she was dragged, kicking and screaming, to the principal's office.

  Oona got her doll back a week later from a substitute teacher. Miss Cranston had fallen and hit her head on the edge of her bathtub with the hot water running. After a month in the hospital, she died from the complications of her burns.

  According to the most popular theory, Dr. Ghourfane got away with murder by putting his wife and her boyfriend through a meatgrinder and freezing them as hamburgers, which he and his daughter still ate. A kid could get a laugh by yelling, “Hey, Goon, what's cookin'?"

  One day I saw Greg Moffett and some other guys following her from school. Greg was my friend, but he was a born-again cretin. He was asking loudly if she and her father had tried all the ideas in his dirty books yet.

  Even before Oona caught my eye, I meant to make him cut it out. But when our eyes met, she looked so hurt, so helpless—forgetting that Greg was twice my size, I hit him.

  The fight lasted maybe three minutes. I was wondering how to give up gracefully when Greg beat me to it.

  I didn't expect a medal, but she could have stuck around to watch. I told myself I was glad she hadn't thanked me: she was weird, and I didn't want to be seen with her. But her face, so thin and hollow-eyed in that moment when she had looked to me for help, was like a song stuck in my head. I began dreaming of her every night.

  Throwing rocks at the Ghourfane house was a test of guts. Off by itself on a dirt road, it looked like a brown fungus that had started to melt into the ground: not what you would expect for a doctor, but patients weren't exactly beating down his door. You hung around until he came to a window and yelled, which could be funny—later, far away, when you were falling down laughing at Ghourfane-impressions. Besides all the usual words, he would shout things like “gormless killcrops” and “shitepolls” when he was in good form. He once told Bucky Hogan to “go sard himself.” But when you were right there, it wasn't funny. Maybe I've made him seem like a harmless crackpot, an innocent victim of gossip. He was neither harmless nor innocent. One of his stone-blue stares could soil your shorts at fifty paces.