THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

by Thomas M. Disch

  And tonight, as Diana Turney whispered the tale she’d never told before, it was as though a spear had been thrust through the pulsing layers of invisible lace. The cilia of the unseen anemone convulsed and thrashed about until the snake curled up for its wintry sleep beneath the floor of the smokehouse woke and flicked its tail, stiff with the cold, and felt a brief intense spasm of hunger.

  And in that spasm the unquiet soul of Wes Turney found, briefly, the breath of a new life.

  5

  She was still half asleep when he moved up against her, a welcome warmth even under the extra blankets. They nestled like spoons, his paunch in the small of her back, his thighs pressing against hers. Then, as his arms curled round her and he tugged her nightgown up over her knees, the anger she’d been living with every waking hour for the past few weeks lighted up inside her, as though he’d triggered some kind of alarm. She tried to pull away, but already he’d raised his higher thigh over her legs and pulled her over onto her back and was on top of her, his knees nudging her legs apart, his hands on her shoulders, his full weight bearing down, and there was no point now in struggling, no possibility really.

  She let him have his 5 a.m. fuck just as though it was still business as usual between them. There’d been enough other times when she’d let him use her the same way, yielding without desire, but without resisting him either. His cunt.

  She let it happen, and when he’d shot his load and rolled off her, she got out of bed and went into the bathroom, where she wiped herself off with a towel, then threw the towel in the laundry basket. Instead of washing the towel, she should burn it. And anything else with his sperm in it. The sheets. Her nightgowns. His underwear.

  His cock.

  But that was as far as her anger would take her. She wasn’t another Lorena Bobbitt. She’d shot him, that was a fact. And she hated his guts in a dozen different ways. They hadn’t spoken for three days, and she didn’t care if they ever spoke to each other again, and if he thought what had just happened was going to change anything, he was sadly mistaken. He’d raped her just now, is what he’d done. He was an animal, except that animals didn’t have to do it twice a day like clockwork. They had seasons.

  He seemed to think her being sent to jail was all a big joke. He’d been secretly smirking ever since the word had come, through her lawyer, that the judge meant to put her away for a year. The actual sentence wouldn’t be handed down till she went back to the courthouse on January 4, but Nancy, her fucking lawyer, said she had it on good authority (meaning, probably, the judge himself) that that was what the sentence would be. “And,” Nancy’d added, “you should consider yourself lucky. You could have been sent away for a lot longer.” Talk about rubbing salt in the wound.

  She got dressed by the glow of the nightlight that had to be left on in the bathroom for Kelly’s sake ever since Kelly had taken it into her head that she was afraid of the dark. There was something comforting in how the nightlight lit things up just enough so you could get around but not so much it sliced into you, the way the kitchen light did, especially when you had a headache.

  Which she did. With just the nightlight on, she could look at herself in the mirror without flinching. Without thinking, What’s happened, where’s it all gone? The face she could see in this softer light was pretty near the same face she’d had thirty pounds ago in high school.

  God, she hated growing old. She was barely thirty and she already looked more like her mother than Diana did. The way her hips had spread out. The way her breasts sagged if she didn’t wear an industrial-strength bra. The way her feet hurt inside any pair of shoes except her bedroom slippers. She could almost forgive Carl for his fooling around.

  Almost.

  Men got old, too, but it wasn’t the same. Carl still qualified as good-looking, even though he’d put on as much weight around his middle as she had. Until the incident at the motel, he’d still dressed the same as when they were in high school, in Levi’s and cowboy shirts that were tapered at the waist. Never mind that he popped the buttons on the shirts when he sat down. In his own mind he was still Elvis.

  Now he wore his uniform around the clock, and she hated it. It was as though he were saying to her, “This is prison. I’m the guard, you’re the prisoner—get used to it.” What was even worse, he’d gone and got his hair cut so he looked like a damned skinhead. She’d always cut his hair before. It saved money. And it looked better than any haircut he could have got locally. She had a natural talent that way. But right before the trial he’d got his hair buzzed down to next to nothing, and every couple weeks afterward he got it done the same again. To spite her, just to spite her.

  And now she was going to go downstairs and cook his breakfast?

  Yes, she was. Because if she didn’t act like his obedient fucking wife, he could have her sent back to the fucking county jail to wait for her sentencing there. She was under his fucking thumb, and he knew it. It wasn’t probation, but it amounted to the same thing. Nancy had told her to grin and bear it.

  She didn’t grin, but she bore it. She saw the bastard off to work in the uniform he lived in, and then, because this was Tuesday and on Tuesday Carl left her the car and carpooled with his asshole buddy Clyde, she got Kelly dressed up in her secondhand snowsuit from the last garage sale at the Methodist church and strapped her into the car seat in the back of the Chevy and drove to her mother’s place outside Leech Lake.

  The snow from two days earlier had melted off the road, and the radio was singing songs she could agree with more or less. She tried not to think about Carl. That had been the minister’s advice, Reverend Dubie’s: try not to think about him. She’d tried, but when you’re married to the bastard, it’s not that easy.

  Every day the same thoughts went round and round in her head, like a gerbil spinning an exercise wheel: I hate this situation, I’ve got to get away, there’s nowhere to go, what about Kelly? She’d thought of taking Kelly and putting her in the car and just taking off. But where would that get her? She didn’t know anyone beyond a radius of fifty miles. She had no money, and no one owed her any big favors. She had zero resources, not even a valid credit card, because Carl, the last time she’d gone on a shopping spree, had canceled their Visa card.

  And with Carl being part of the system, even if he was only a prison guard, she had the feeling that if she did try and exit the situation, the whole country would be on red alert looking for her.

  She was going to go to jail. A month ago she’d just refused to believe that could happen. But it was. So she had to ask herself: what about Kelly? Carl’s answer was a shrug. And when she’d insisted on talking about it, he’d told her that as far as he could see, the only answer was putting her into a foster home for the whole time Janet was doing her stretch.

  He’d like that. He’d have the place to himself. His lady friends could come visiting any time he asked them over. Mentally he was still eighteen years old. He could let rip. Poker nights. Beer blasts. Open house.

  But if Kelly were there, that wouldn’t happen. He couldn’t act up that much if his four-year-old daughter was around to remind him he was still her daddy and had to behave accordingly. But for Kelly to be there, there had to be someone looking after her, someone living right in the house.

  The big wooden sign planted in the front yard identified her mother’s place as NAVAHO HOUSE, AN ADULT RESIDENCE. The sign, which one of Carl’s convict friends had made at the prison shop, was probably the classiest thing about the operation. Except that, as Mrs. Boise, one of the old biddies in the home, had pointed out, Navaho was misspelled, and there had never been any Navahos, or Navajos, in Minnesota. But Madge said an Indian was an Indian, and she liked the sound of Navaho House a whole lot better than Chippewa House or Hiawatha Hall, which Mrs. Boise had suggested as alternatives.

  Her mother liked to call the place a nursing home, but could it be a nursing home if it didn’t have a single nurse working there? Her mother had put in a few years working as a nurse’s aide
in the late ‘70s when Janet was in junior high and things had got kind of rocky, and that, along with knowing Larry Haagman, the county clerk, had qualified her to open the place up. Basically, it was a warehouse for old folks from the area who couldn’t afford anywhere better to wait to die. They signed over their Social Security and county assistance payments to Madge, and Madge kept them alive as best she could.

  Madge insisted that there were other nursing homes in the area a whole lot worse than Navaho House, but if there were, Janet didn’t want to know about them. From the start she’d considered the whole idea a big mistake on her mother’s part, and she couldn’t believe it was paying off. Madge insisted it was, but she wouldn’t go into the dollars-and-cents side of it. By the look of the place, a little more dilapidated every year inside and out, Janet figured that Navaho House, like its tenants, was on its last legs. The bank would probably foreclose just about the time her mother was ready to become one of the residents instead of the managing director, which was what she called herself on the letterhead stationery she’d had printed up: MARGARET TURNEY, MANAGING DIRECTOR. Warden would have been more like it.

  Janet parked the Chevy on the street, because as usual the driveway hadn’t been plowed. Then she woke up Kelly, who started whining right away, and led her round to the back door along the sidewalk, now just one snow shovel wide. All through the winter the front door was kept sealed tight to save on heating bills, and the sidewalk up to the porch never got shoveled at all.

  There was no one in the kitchen but Louise, the old half-breed who did all the real work around the place in exchange for room and board and $50 a week. Janet left Kelly with Louise and went looking for her mother.

  The dining room table still hadn’t been cleared of the breakfast dishes, and from what was left in the different dirty dishes you could see just what the Navaho House inmates had had for breakfast, this morning and every morning—orange juice (canned, because that was supplied free by the county’s assistance program), oatmeal, scrambled eggs (regenerated from powder, also courtesy of Leech Lake County), and coffee. There was also a bowl full of apples that came from the Kellogs’ apple trees (not for free), which served as a table decoration. Truth to tell, they weren’t very good eating apples, but they had almost the same staying power as if they were made of wax.

  Janet lifted the lid of the coffee urn to see if there was anything left beyond the bitter dregs. Still two inches left at the bottom, so she drew herself a cup from the spigot and stirred in some of the powdered milk from the tin beside the urn.

  “I thought you was supposed to be in prison,” Madge said, entering from the hallway that connected to the stairs and the TV room. She was wearing an institutional-looking, khaki-colored pantsuit cinched round the waist by a wide patent-leather belt with an enamel buckle in the shape of a big daisy. It made her look more than usually bulgy. Janet hated seeing her mother get a little fatter every year, because she had the same basic body type, and she knew she was going to end up looking just the same.

  “I don’t get sent off till after the holidays,” Janet said. “I told you that before.”

  “So, to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

  “I had the car today, so I thought I’d bring Kelly over for a visit. She’s in the kitchen with Louise.”

  “Louise has got enough to do without acting as your baby-sitter. Today’s laundry day.”

  “Then I can help out by taking Louise there in the Chevy. Kelly loves to go to the Laundromat and put the quarters in the slot.”

  Madge dug a pack of Virginia Slims from the jacket pocket of her pantsuit and lighted one up. She repocketed the pack without offering it to Janet. After exhaling a meaningful spume of smoke, she said, “Well, aren’t you Miss Congeniality today. What is it you want?”

  “Just a chance to have a talk. We haven’t had a serious talk for a long time. And soon enough we won’t be able to.”

  “Have we ever had a serious talk, sweetheart? No, forget that. I’m just in a lousy mood. I’ve had diarrhea for two days running. No pun intended. And one of the old ladies is too sick to get out of bed. Plus Louise’s room has got a leak where the ice has built up under the shingles again. So you didn’t pick a very good day to be sociable. But if you want to help me clear up these dishes, and if you don’t mind running Louise over to the Laundromat, then, sure, we can have a serious talk.”

  6

  From where he hung above the prison and its grounds, riding the air in a long, down-winding spiral that was anchored, at its base, to his entranced human form, Jim Cottonwood could see all the way north to Leech Lake, where geese still congregated in the unfrozen middle-water. To the east lay the scrub timber and marshes of the “tribal lands” to which the Wabashas, Jim’s people, had been consigned for almost a century now, a cheaper prison by far than the twenty-four-story tower below him now.

  Westward stood the village of New Ravensburg, for which the prison was named—a rural tenement that once had served the farmers of the area. Now the houses that still stood were mainly given over to the prison personnel and a few local merchants. It was, as much as the lands of the Wabashas, another kind of prison, one that pent in those sentenced there without recourse to walls or guards or barbed wire. The local school, six taverns, and the New Ravensburg Lutheran church accomplished the same purpose for a fraction of the cost.

  To the south, beyond some four hundred acres of wasteland set aside for the future expansion of the state facility, the land wrinkled into hills—the timber cleared, the soil untillable—marked to be landfill.

  In every direction, then, a different kind of desolation, yet from this height Jim could look down on it as an angel might, with a vision ice could not chill nor poverty taint. This was the first taste of freedom he’d known in twenty years as a convict at New Ravensburg, and it made him giddy with delight. Had he surveyed the pit of hell he would have felt the same exhilaration—simply to have been so high above it, to be released.

  He had flown before this, but only in dreams or in visions of the sweat lodge—never as a shaman, in borrowed flesh. The crow had alighted before him, where he’d been resting at the far curve of the oval rooftop track, his chest heaving, lungs seared by the winter air. Their eyes had met, and it was as though the crow had come to him aware of her mission—like a handmaiden entering the darkened chamber and dropping her robes to the floor and whispering that her flesh was, for a little while, his, to use as he pleased.

  So he had entered her in that instant, without a nod of recognition. His arms became wings, and as he rose, stroke by stroke, into the upholding element, a cry burst from his throat—his own name: Crow.

  By some law that his new muscles—but not his mind—could understand, his crow nature remained constrained by the limits imposed on the human body he had exited. Though he could rise above the prison tower of New Ravensburg in an ever-widening spiral, riding the updraft, he could not break through the invisible boundary that rose over the prison like the funnel of a tornado. He would beat the air with his wings, trying to fly to the east, but the walls of the funnel deflected his flight upward and to the north. He felt like a swimmer caught in the eddies of a powerful river, whose most strenuous efforts never bring him nearer the shore.

  So he ceased to fight the current and let it carry him where it would. The sense of elation returned, diminished but still precious. If he could not escape the joint, he could transcend it. These wings were another kind of music. A gift, like music, briefly given but, while it lasted, all the soul needed.

  It was not to last long. He could feel the force of the updraft lessening, and his spiraling course along the funnel wall was now all downward, back to the roof of the prison, back—all too quickly—to the familiar flesh of Jim Cottonwood, stale with its prison sweat, rank with the smell of the cellblock.

  An eyeblink and he was himself again. The crow that had alighted on the gravel of the track gave a shocked caw of protest at this violation of the natural order o
f the crow universe, spread her wings in a gesture that said “Back off!” and then, when Jim’s response was only a smile—of gratitude and of chagrin—took to the air, clearing the razor-wired ledge beyond the track and dropping from sight.

  Jim got to his feet and approached the ledge so that he could see her further flight, over the sere lawn, still visible through the first dustings of snow, until she reached the one bare maple that had been left standing just beside the prison gate. There, braking with a decisive tilt of her wings, she alighted on a high, bare branch and lifted her head to give Jim one last look of flustered reproach. “No more of that, mister! Not with me.” Jim felt what he supposed a rapist must feel just afterward—that glow of supreme satiation that is willing to accept the trade-off of a life behind bars for just this fleeting instant of thirst perfectly quenched.

  Then, as the glow slowly faded, he could ask himself if it had really happened. Had he flown in that crow’s flesh or only in his own imagination?

  He smiled, because he knew there was no knowing, and because the answer didn’t matter. Either way he remained where he was and what he was, meat in the freezer. And either way he had to be grateful. His human body still tingled with the crow’s strength. His deltoid and trapezius muscles felt as though he’d just left the weight bench. His triceps and lats were gorged with blood.