THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

by Thomas M. Disch

  He’d felt the same about the old ladies on the porch at Navaho House. Sorry, but at the same time a little queasy about any kind of contact, as though there were some kind of contagion in them. He’d no more have thought of asking them to take out a subscription than he’d have considered approaching the Good Shepherd Funeral Home two blocks farther down the street for the same purpose.

  Which made it seem all the stranger to have become almost a regular visitor to the place. Unless you thought about it. Because wasn’t that where he always wound up? In the same take-it-away box with the people no one else had any use for? The nerds who can’t get a date to the prom, who can’t make it as jocks or as brains? Who have skateboards they can’t ride and computers they can’t fathom? If he ever got a tattoo, it should be BORN TO LOSE. Or maybe just LOW AVERAGE.

  Boy, was he in kick-me mode today. If self-pity were snow, he’d have been part of the landscape. One blizzard after another with no thaws in between, all piling up and turning into ice, so if you didn’t get out there and shovel every time, it got to be like this pathway. There was no telling how thick the crust of ice was over the concrete. No telling if there even was a sidewalk down there at all. The old ladies were trapped inside Navaho House. Only they were so decrepit they probably didn’t know it. Even in summer the porch was probably the farthest from the place they ever got.

  He knocked on the back door, waited awhile, and knocked again. Unless there was someone in the kitchen, a knock wouldn’t do any good, so he opened the door and called out, “Mrs. Cottonwood?” When there was no answer, he called out louder, “It’s Alan Johnson.” When there was still no answer, he scraped his boots on the welcome mat and went inside.

  His glasses misted instantly, solid, like hoarfrost on a storm window. So when the old lady who owned the place came in the room, he had only the blurriest impression of her face. She looked like a raccoon, with black rings around the eyes.

  Even blurred there was no mistaking her for anyone else. “Mrs. Turney,” he said, “I was looking for Louise.” He took off his cap.

  Mrs. Turney removed the cigarette from her mouth. Alan couldn’t recall ever seeing her when she wasn’t smoking. “Yeah, I heard you shouting. So you’re back to being Alan Johnson again? Last I heard you was Cottonwood, like Louise. The name didn’t stick?”

  Alan blushed. He didn’t want to get involved in the whole explanation of how he meant to have his name changed back to what it had been, which he still hadn’t done legally. There weren’t that many people who knew him as Cottonwood anyhow, and he hadn’t thought Mrs. Turney was one of them. Louise must have told her.

  Mrs. Turney didn’t wait for the explanation. “Well, Louise had to go out to the Shop ‘n’ Save, and she won’t be back for a bit. We’ve run out of almost everything, and when there was a chance of a lift to the store, she took it. You don’t look like you did when you was here last. When was that? No more than a week ago.”

  “I got my hair cut.”

  “I can see, I’m not blind. This one’s an improvement. I’m not against long hair on principle, but some people it don’t suit that well. Butch Larsen was your barber, wasn’t he?”

  Alan nodded.

  “I could tell. Well, it’ll grow out. It was the right basic decision, just the wrong barber. You must be looking for a job.”

  “Yeah, I have been. Louise told you that?”

  “No, I’m psychic.” She snorted out a derisive stream of smoke from her nostrils. “Any kid with long hair gets a haircut like you got, he must be looking for a job. But up here, this time of year, it’ll take more than a haircut. I’m surprised you haven’t moved down to the Twin Cities. That’s what everyone else does, as soon as they finish high school. If not before.”

  She emitted a mirthless caw of a laugh and plopped down on a kitchen chair. “Well, don’t just stand there. If you want to wait around for Louise, wipe your glasses off and sit down. I’d offer you some coffee, but the urn is dry. And the icebox is empty. We are living on Lipton’s tea and mustard here.”

  “Thank you,” said Alan.

  He sat down, unzipped his parka, and de-iced his glasses with the flannel of his shirt, doing this at a discreet below-tabletop level. When he had his glasses back on, Mrs. Turney looked less like a raccoon. She even looked sexy in a weird way. Usually he wouldn’t have associated sex with a woman of her age, but she did have big breasts, and the sweater she was wearing seemed to make a point of the fact. Plus, her face had a lot of makeup, which must have been the reason she’d made him think of a raccoon. All that mascara, but also some of the skin around the eyes was kind of purple in the same direction.

  Mrs. Turney didn’t say anything, just puffed on her eternal cigarette and waited for him to take the initiative. Which, for Alan, was never easy, even with people he knew well.

  He went for the old standby. “This is some winter, huh?”

  She lowered her eyelids and then raised them, as a comment on his powers of conversation. But then she agreed, “Uh-huh, some winter.”

  Alan tried to think of something else to talk about than the weather, but before he could, Mrs. Turney said, “It’s going to ruin me.”

  “I hope not,” Alan offered. When that got no response, he ventured, “The heating bills?”

  She shook her head. “I wish that’s all it was. The county picks up those. It’s creeping ice.”

  He gave a blank look.

  “You don’t have creeping ice? Then you’re lucky. I should have had the gutters cleaned in the fall, I guess. But it never happened before, or never as bad as this. See, what happens is the gutters fill with ice, and then, because of the heat in the house, the snow closest to the shingles melts, then turns to ice, and the ice backs up into the shingles. And a leak starts. The heat in the house keeps melting the snow on the roof, and the melt-off penetrates the roof, and starts coming down the walls—inside the house. And all that snow that’s up there, instead of going down through the gutters, it comes into the house.”

  “Damn,” said Alan.

  Mrs. Turney focused her raccoon eyes on Alan in a calculating way. “Poor Louise. She’s got the worst of it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The wall of her bedroom is like a waterfall anytime the temperature rises even a little.”

  “You should do something,” said Alan. “Take off the ice that’s built up.”

  “I’ve tried, I’ve tried. But you know what they want? Seventy-five dollars an hour—where am I going to find that? Just to go up there and shovel off the snow that accumulated.”

  “Up on the roof?”

  “It would probably just slide right off,” said Mrs. Turney, “if you gave it a nudge.”

  “Maybe I could do it,” said Alan.

  “Hey,” said Mrs. Turney, “I bet you could!”

  He was suckered into it as easy as that. A few minutes later—with the help of a wonky aluminum ladder, which first got him up onto the roof of the porch and from there, by a real exercise of his utmost, onto the main roof of the house, snow shovel in hand—he was there, feeling capable and a little scared.

  Never before in his life had Alan been up on the top roof of a house this size. A porch roof, yes. And a garage. But this was so high up that, with the rise of ground that Navaho House stood on, he could see, through the bare branches of the trees, as far as the water tower at the other end of town. The whole world looked different from this high up.

  “I feel great,” he thought, which for him, these days, was not a feeling he was used to. It wasn’t just the elevation. It was knowing that he could do something for someone that might actually make a difference. He could solve the problem of creeping ice.

  Standing spraddle-legged on the rooftree, he chunked the shovel down into the crusted snow and pried up a solid mass of it, which slid, with satisfying logic, down the steep slope of the roof, to impact on the drifted snow below. He proceeded, chunk by chunk, across the rooftree, releasing with each decisive til
t of the shovel another satisfying whump! as, unseen by him, the mass of the loosed snow hit the snowdrifts along the side of the house.

  It felt good, as the exercise of power generally does. But then he hit a stretch where the snow, more impacted, did not as readily yield to his shovel’s insistence.

  He insisted more. He changed his footing. Only slightly, but enough. An avalanche resulted. An immense mass of snow cascaded down the roof.

  Very impressive. He advanced and tried the same maneuver, but the shovel stuck. He waggled it. He changed his footing slightly and pried. It began to give.

  He tried harder and it yielded, but as it did so, so did his footing. He tried to adjust, but he was slipping with the snow, and he grabbed for what was there, which was a long-defunct TV antenna.

  The antenna snapped at its base, and he found himself sliding down the roof in the mass of loosened snow, riding it on his belly like a toboggan, still clutching the snapped antenna. He tried to jam the toes of his boot into the snow still left on the shingles, but that only had the effect of swiveling him round so that he was sliding down headfirst. He could hear the first hunks of hard snow hit the drifts two stories below, and then just before he figured he’d go over the edge of the roof himself, he could see the snow hitting the ground some thirty feet below.

  And then, with his head and his left arm already beyond the lip of the frozen gutter, he stopped sliding. A few more hunks of snow spilled over the edge and dropped to the mound created by the avalanche from the roof, but he didn’t go with them.

  The antenna, still firmly gripped in his mittened hand, had saved him after all. He twisted his head sideways and squinted (he’d lost his glasses as he fell) and could just barely make out the taut length of wire connecting the antenna to the brick chimney at the center of the rooftree.

  Okay, he told himself, I can do this. I’ve just got to swivel round to where I can pull myself back. The wire’s secured to something up there, it’ll hold.

  If only he could get a grip on the gutter with his left hand and just push himself back a few inches from the edge of the roof. He shook off the mitten from his hand gently and then felt around for some kind of handhold. But the gutter was smoothly crusted with the ice that had built up all winter long, and the only result was that his left hand was soon stiff with the cold.

  He was going to need help. He took a deep breath and bawled out, “Mrs. Turney! Hey, Mrs. Turney! Can you hear me? Hey, Mrs. Turney! Phone the fire department—please!”

  His yelling didn’t do a bit of good. The house was sealed up tight for the winter, and the old ladies, those who weren’t completely deaf, were probably watching TV along with Mrs. Turney herself. There was nobody outside in this weather, and he was on the side of the house facing away from the street, so even someone driving by wouldn’t have seen him. He might as well save his breath.

  The thought finally couldn’t be avoided: he could die. If he sledded over the edge of the roof headfirst, he could break his neck. If he didn’t die, he might be paralyzed for the rest of his lousy life. Maybe the snow would cushion his fall, but that didn’t seem a good bet. The snow that had come off the roof was as hard as ice. He could see it just below him, piled up in jagged hunks like the ice alongside a river after the first thaw. That snow was no featherbed.

  He knew what people would say. “Did you hear how that Johnson kid killed himself? He shoveled himself off a roof.” And they’d laugh. There was no one who’d feel the least bit sorry for what had happened. His mother might pretend for a while, but all he’d get from Grandpa Johnson was a final scowl.

  It actually helped to think of Grandpa’s reaction. Alan didn’t want to give the old fart the satisfaction of presiding over his funeral, and from the reservoir of family hatred he drew new strength. He still had a grip on the antenna wire. If he rolled to the side and got his other hand on it, he could haul himself back to the top of the roof, hand over hand.

  He thought each motion through a couple times, and then, as smoothly as he could, he shifted himself over onto his right hip and grabbed for the wire with his left hand. His body started sliding again, but both hands had a grip on the wire, and the wire took his weight.

  It was the chimney that gave way. The mortar was old. A bad wind could have knocked it over. First it was just a few bricks, but then as the wire stapled to the side conveyed the force of Alan’s desperate effort, the whole thing yielded at once.

  Alan could see what was going to happen, and he let go of the wire. Before the chimney could hit him he was over the edge. And out cold.

  15

  By the time they got back to Navaho House with the groceries, Diana had had it with Louise Cottonwood. The expedition to Shop ‘n’ Save had been as exasperating as a field trip with a busful of second graders. Louise was stubborn as a mule. Diana would point out that rutabagas were going for only twenty-nine cents a pound, but Louise just shook her head and said the old ladies wouldn’t eat rutabagas. Diana told her that she knew a wonderful way of fixing up rutabagas with evaporated milk and nutmeg so that you’d never know what they were, it would be like a pudding, but no, Louise wouldn’t hear of it. Louise wouldn’t hear of anything that wasn’t already graven on her mental shopping list like one of the Ten Commandments. She insisted on buying a big cellophane-wrapped package of corn muffins at a ridiculous price even after Diana had pointed out how much it was possible to save by making corn muffins from scratch. Of course, at Shop ‘n’ Save you couldn’t buy corn meal in bulk, and organic produce was not an option. And that was probably just as well, since from Navaho House’s point of view the object was to cut corners and pinch pennies. But Louise actually favored canned vegetables over frozen, even though Diana could show her, from the unit pricing, that some of the frozen ones were cheaper. No, she would say, the old ladies prefer canned. And since Louise was the expert on what the old ladies would or would not eat, there was no arguing. Finally, Diana had just given up and gone out to her Camry and waited for Louise to get done.

  They would have driven home in silence, but Louise (who, typically, refused to buckle up) turned on the radio, and there, on a station Carl must have tuned to the last time he’d appropriated the car, was Rush Limbaugh. So for the whole fifteen-mile stretch they were regaled by the wit and wisdom of America’s number-one male chauvinist pig. Louise didn’t even seem to be listening. She sat with her hands resting on her kneecaps, staring at the highway (which was treacherous the whole way), stony-faced.

  This is the last time, Diana told herself, that I go out of my way to do a favor for her, Native American or not. Between Limbaugh and the recollection of all the good suggestions that Louise had categorically refused to heed, Diana was in a really foul mood by the time they got back to Navaho House.

  “There’s a visitor,” Louise remarked as Diana pulled up in back of a rust-pitted Olds, which had occupied the only parking space on the road that accessed the shoveled path. (The driveway hadn’t been plowed since early January.) “It’s that Johnson boy. Good Lord.”

  “What Johnson boy is that?” Diana asked, forgetting to maintain the blockade.

  “The one who thinks Jim is his daddy. He’s a nice kid, but he’s a dumb sonofabitch.”

  Diana had to repark, because Louise’s door was blocked by the mound of snow the plows had built up along the street. Then Louise declined to take two bags of groceries up to the house, though it would have meant half as many trips, and Diana, miffed and careless, almost took a spill on the icy path.

  Louise set down her bag on the kitchen table and returned at once to the car. Diana called out, “Mom?” and her mother appeared at once, with her usual cigarette. Talk about secondhand smoke: Navaho House was a plague pit.

  “Is that kid here who parked his car outside? Maybe he could help bring in the groceries. We’ve got eight bags.”

  “The kid? Oh, right. I thought he must have gone off. Isn’t he on the roof?”

  “On the roof?”

  “He wen
t up there to shovel off the snow.”

  “When was that?”

  “I don’t know. While you were away. He came by, wanting to see Louise, and I told him about the creeping ice, and he volunteered to help out. Then he disappeared. I forgot all about him, to tell the truth.”

  Diana went back out into the cold and trudged into the deep snow to a point where she could see the whole roof. There was no one there, but something seemed wrong. She could see that some of the snow had been cleared from the very top of the roof, but that wasn’t it.

  The chimney wasn’t there.

  Christ, she thought. He’s toppled the chimney over and now he’s disappeared. But then why was his car still parked in front of the house?

  She walked round to where she could see the roof of the porch, and there was the aluminum ladder, propped against the main rooftree. Which meant that whoever had used the ladder should, logically, still be up on the roof. Christ, she thought again, and this time she could feel her adrenaline kicking in.

  Adrenaline or not, the snow made it impossible to run round to the other side of the house. The crust was hard enough in places to take her weight, but then, after three or four strides, she’d smash through it and be up to her knees. She trudged on grimly, with more snow getting into her galoshes each time she broke through the crust.

  Rounding the corner of the house, she could see what she’d been dreading. There was the boy who’d been up on the roof, belly down in the snow, and the chimney, too, the pieces of it, right beside him. She paused where she was, undecided whether to go back into the house and call for an ambulance or to trudge the extra distance through high-drifted snow to see if an ambulance would be necessary. He might already be dead.

  Louise solved the problem. Returning with a second bag of groceries, she’d seen Diana head round the side of the house and followed her. “Miss Turney, is something the matter?” she called out from close by the kitchen door.