THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

by Thomas M. Disch

  He finished his martini at a gulp, then pulled the paper wrapper off his chopsticks and began to wolf down the shrimp. Diana signaled to the waiter and handed him her Visa card. By the time John was done, Diana had her receipt.

  “Finish that off, too,” she told him, nodding at the hellbroth. Which he did, quite as though he were already entirely under her dominion.

  “My place or yours?” he asked as she led the way to where she’d parked her Camry, out of sight behind a Dumpster at the far, dark corner of the lot. When they got there, she clicked open the trunk with the remote on her key chain.

  “How about a kiss?” she suggested, standing in front of the door on the passenger side.

  “You don’t waste time, do you?”

  He bellied up to her and, as their tongues said hello, she opened his fly and got hold of his cock. He squealed with surprise, and then, when she whispered into his ear, “You know what you are, don’t you?” and answered her own question, he squealed more loudly as his forelegs, cocooned in his gray silk summer sport coat, slid down the smooth sides of the Camry.

  Diana couldn’t help laughing at the spectacle he made, splitting out of his clothes. He shook his head frantically as though that might restore him to his human shape.

  “Into the trunk,” she told him, lifting the lid so he could get in.

  It took him more than a single lunge, tangled as he was in his clothes, and Diana had to help get his hind legs inside along with the flapping trousers.

  She hadn’t considered the problem of closing the trunk. A Camry’s trunk is not designed to accommodate the girth of the hog John Klepfennig had become. It took all the strength she had to press down the lid so the lock would engage. Poor John must have felt like a can of Spam.

  Halfway along the drive home Diana became aware of an odor familiar to her from her dealings with Carl. John had emptied his bowels in the trunk, and the smell had penetrated the interior of the car. She turned off the air conditioner and rolled down all the windows, but even then the stench of the pig shit was inescapable. She decided that it would be wiser to conduct any future swine-hunting forays closer to home, and preferably in Carl’s Chevy.

  35

  Since he’d started with Hamlet, Alan continued in the same vein when he christened later pigs who came to live in the sty. The next one, who was already in residence when he returned with Kelly from Mankato, became Gravedigger, because that was the role Billy Crystal had played in the Branagh movie of Hamlet, and for some reason the cute new pig, with his humorous snout and Porky Pig–pink coloring, put Alan in mind of Billy Crystal. It was also the case, Alan had learned at a Web site called www.pigfancier.com, that the ancient prohibitions on eating pig flesh sprang from the fact that wild boars were gravediggers. They would dig up fresh graves and eat their contents. So in eating a pig, you might have been eating an ancestor at just one remove.

  Hamlet and Gravedigger were good buddies so long as they were by themselves, but when the third and fourth pigs came to live with them—Laertes and Fortinbras—things got hairy. It seemed to be with pigs the way it is with people: two’s company, three’s a crowd, and four’s warfare. Pigs in groups have to establish a pecking order, and they do that by fighting. They chew off each other’s tails and shred each other’s ears and butt into each other like the bumper cars at an amusement park. They would probably be as bad as Serbs and Bosnians if they were better equipped for killing, but they can do harm enough the way they are, especially if their tusks have never been clipped, which was the case with Fortinbras. Fortinbras quickly established himself as king of Denmark, and poor Hamlet wound up at the bottom of the pecking order, eating whatever scraps were left him when the other three pigs had had their fill. In short order Hamlet had developed a mopey, woebegone demeanor, cringing when Fortinbras would make a sideways swipe at him for no good reason except to be mean.

  Alan was fascinated by the pigs’ behavior. It was just the way he remembered high school, where he’d always been low man on the totem pole. You had to feel sorry for the Hamlets of the world, the ones onstage and the ones in the sty, but in both cases it was hard to look the other way while the spectacle was going on, with its foregone conclusion death, and on the way there, assorted slings and arrows, such as when Diana read in her book on pig raising that the traditional solution to the problem of excess aggression among older penned males was castration. She called up a vet in the Bunyan area, and he got all four pigs tusked, ringed, and castrated in a single morning. The pigsty was a lot quieter for the next few days while the four stags (which is what you call a boar who’s lost his balls) recuperated from the trauma of surgery.

  Diana had helped the vet with the tusking, securing a noose over each pig’s snout while he cut back the tusks with his hoof nippers, and she’d stayed around as a witness while Alan and the vet did the castrating, which was not as gruesome a procedure as Alan had feared. First, you wound a kind of tourniquet with fishline all round the scrotum, then you made a slice down the middle with an old-fashioned single-edge razor blade. The testicles popped right out. Then, when they’d been pulled out, the wound was plastered over with baking soda to prevent its getting infected. The vet scolded Diana, in a playful way, about not having had the job done sooner. The best time to castrate was before a piglet was weaned. “It’s no more trouble then,” the vet declared, “than squeezing a big pimple.”

  On the night of the four castrations, Diana came into the bathroom while Alan, who’d never felt so filthy in his life, was in the tub. She had one of the thick blue rubber bands that had held together stalks of broccoli from the Shop ‘n’ Save and wanted to put it around Alan’s scrotum, as though he were going to be next in line for the vet’s services. Alan was still shy enough about her touching him down there as it was (she’d never managed to help him get a full erection, to his considerable embarrassment and chagrin), and when she wouldn’t lay off, they both got drenched in the scuffle. She was laughing like it was all some kind of prank, but Alan became rather upset, and instead of spending the night there, as he’d planned, he drove back to Navaho House and spent a long time playing hearts with the old ladies. He felt like he was right where he belonged, in a human scrap heap of the stupid, the ugly, the incapable and impotent.

  Love, when you are impotent, is more of a torment than a pleasure. To have the opportunity and lack the means is so shameful. Diana had gotten to be so beautiful lately, and she swore it was all for him, to rouse his passion, for which, of course, he had to be grateful. She looked so sexy, with her hair like some movie star, and the way she had of twisting round at her hips to look sideways when she might have just turned her head. He’d memorized her body, all her little gestures, the way she walked, the flick of her tongue across her lips before she began to eat. The softness of her flesh, so different from his, as though she were made of butter. He adored her body the way the ancient Greeks and Romans adored the naked statues in their temples (a subject which his grandfather had dwelt on in many of his sermons), but he was just as unfit to make love to her as if she’d been carved from stone herself.

  No wonder she had fantasies of cutting off his balls. In some deep Freudian way that was probably what she’d like to do with him at this point. Her frustration must be equal to his. Sometimes he had suspicions that on nights when she brought Kelly to stay over at Navaho House she went out to a bar or the big casino on Mille Lacs Lake. She would only volunteer some vague excuse, like she was “seeing a friend.” He couldn’t have blamed her if she was having sex with some stranger in a motel, because she wasn’t getting anything from him, but even so the thought tormented him. He would keep coming back to it, the way you have to keep scratching poison ivy until your arms are bloody.

  At ten o’clock that night, desolate, he phoned to say he was sorry and to beg to be allowed to come back and spend the night. But the line was busy. He decided he would wait ten minutes before he called again—but before the ten minutes had elapsed, the phone rang, and he pic
ked it up in a flutter of thankfulness, thinking it must be her.

  But it wasn’t Diana, it was Lucille McGrath, the wife of Jim Cottonwood’s lawyer, calling to explain why Alan hadn’t heard from her husband for the past week. He’d gone on vacation and had a skiing accident and was laid up in a hospital in Utah. Mrs. McGrath assured him that he had nothing to worry about on Jim’s account and that he would be released in due course, and that the system was deliberately dragging things out because, at Bruce’s advice, Jim was refusing to sign a waiver of his rights to sue the state for false imprisonment. She added that with regard to his own legal problems concerning his grandfather’s estate he should contact a local lawyer. The whole tone of her conversation was Stop bothering us!

  Alan had mixed feelings about that estate. Ever since Reverend Johnson’s desiccated corpse had been discovered curled up inside his pulpit like a mummy in a mummy case and the county coroner had declared him a suicide, Alan had been unable to cope except by pretending nothing had happened. If it hadn’t been for his feelings toward Diana and a lingering sense of responsibility toward Jim Cottonwood, he would have probably pulled a disappearing act just like his mother. Reverend Johnson’s insurance and savings hadn’t amounted to that much, and while the church and the house might have been worth a tidy amount, they would probably go to his mother, in the absence of a will. And if his mother didn’t show up, they would just sit there till the county decided to auction them off to pay delinquent taxes. Alan didn’t really give a hoot about all that. He would have been happy to see both buildings burn to the ground. He had no wish to inherit anything that man had owned. It was bad enough having his genes.

  But Diana felt otherwise. She thought he should sue to take possession of Reverend Johnson’s estate as next of kin, and she knew a lawyer who would take up his case on a contingency basis, only taking a fee when and if Alan was able to sell the house or at least get a second mortgage. If nothing else, such a windfall might pay his way through college (except that he had no plans to go to college).

  But if Alan took the old fart’s leavings, he would feel even more like he’d murdered him than he already did. No matter how righteously Alan presented himself before the court of his conscience, the fact remained that it was his actions that had driven the man to kill himself. And the man had been his father! In the Greek legend, it’s Oedipus who kills his father. In Alan’s case, it’s Oedipus’s son who kills Oedipus. But either way it’s a sorry situation, and Alan wasn’t coping all that well with the aftershocks. He was not, in one of Diana’s favorite phrases, dealing with life on life’s terms.

  The job with CyberWeb, for instance, had so far cost him money, because to earn the basic hundred-fifty-a-week salary, he had to connect up a weekly quota of new customers, and there weren’t that many people in the area who wanted to be on the Internet who weren’t there already. Which meant that his franchise fee had to come out of his own pocket. Thanks to the work he’d been doing for Diana, he’d put enough aside that he could afford to pay for the privilege of having a job, but the job itself had begun to look like just one more humiliation.

  Sometimes it seemed like his grandfather had had the right idea but it had just taken him too long to implement it. Alan had snuck into the house once after Reverend Johnson’s body had been discovered and the house was locked up. He resented not being allowed to use his own key, and he’d always known how to get in through the window over the back porch, so he went there one night in early summer in violation of whatever law had put the place off-limits and just looked around inside. Nothing much had changed except for there being almost nothing to eat in the pantry. But the one interesting thing he found was an instruction book on how to commit suicide without hurting yourself. It must have been the book his grandfather used to do the job.

  Alan took it away with him and read it cover to cover, and late at night, when he would lie in bed awake, he would imagine different ways he might kill himself. Sometimes he would see himself getting dressed up for it like it was a holiday occasion. There’d be a bottle of champagne to wash the pills down with, and candlelight, and E. Power Biggs playing something sad and solemn on the organ.

  But then that approach began to seem like bullshit, and the scenario changed to a shotgun in the mouth, like Ernest Hemingway. Blam! He would do it somewhere fairly public, where they’d be sure to find the body soon afterward, because he didn’t like the idea of lying out in the open a long time all wormy so that when he was discovered people would just be disgusted. What he really wanted was for people to feel sorry. A funeral with people crying quietly and asking each other why he’d done it and whether there wasn’t something they could have done. And Diana would be standing at the back of the chapel, dressed all in black, with a veil over her face so that no one but Alan could see her tears.

  He knew it was a ridiculous fantasy and nothing but the worst kind of self-pity, but he kept returning to it, alone in his bedroom, in the dark, crying to himself as though he were watching the saddest movie ever made.

  36

  It was a distance of seven miles as the crow flies, or twelve miles along the connecting roads, from the rock under which Merle had buried his half-breed cousin Bonnie Poupillier to the Kellog farm. Merle had made that journey only as a crow, and so he had no idea how to get there in his own skin. Nor did he feel the magnetism that the place exerted except as a crow, among other crows.

  Wes had no such difficulty abridging that distance. The geometry of the afterlife is non-Euclidean. From the smokehouse where his spirit was centered to the rock beneath which Bonnie rotted was a hop, skip, and jump from Wes’s vantage point, and had been even before Bonnie’s interment, and before his own recent invigoration, when he had been a mere blind vapor sniffing out some taint of evil like a dog trained to detect drugs. For Bonnie’s rock had served the young men of the rez as an altar on which a hundred virgins had been sacrificed. It was well suited to that purpose, thanks to the solitude provided by the crescent of swampland that made a natural moat about it, and by its spooky beauty, which gave it a B-movie glamour. Mists rose from the swamp even in otherwise clear weather, and loons emitted their little foghorn hoots and coos from dusk to dawn. If you were going to lose your innocence anywhere, this was the place to do it.

  Now, at midsummer, a sweet rot of decaying pines scented the moist air—and disguised whatever scent of Bonnie Poupillier that still lingered. Lying atop the rock, with crows overhead, Merle had the beginning of his buzz for the day and was trying lazily to draw them close enough to grab a free ride. The crows were wary, but curious, because the idea he was using for bait was an image of Bonnie the way he’d seen her last, her face bloated beyond recognition and frozen solid. Crows are drawn to carrion in all its grossest manifestations, just as some children are. They wanted to know what Merle knew.

  Merle had killed three women in his life, but Bonnie was the first he’d killed just for the sake of killing. The first couple of times he’d simply done what the situation required; they were crimes of caution or retribution, not passion. But with Bonnie there had been no practical necessity for what he’d done. She wasn’t a witness who had to be silenced or a motel whore with sticky fingers, just another junkie out for fun. For her share of Merle’s booze she would spread her legs and even go through the motions of pretending to love it. “Oh yes, oh baby, oh Merle, you make me feel so good!” Merle had always been curious about what it would be like to kill someone at the same time you were screwing them, since the movies made such a big deal about it, and what he’d found out was that all those movies were pure speculation. Murder wasn’t more exciting than an ordinary fuck. That had to be good news, since who wanted to be a serial killer, always wanting something that could get you put away for life? That was one degree worse than being a junkie, and Merle had always had the good sense to resist that temptation. But good news or not, it had left him with the problem of what to do with Bonnie’s corpse. For a while he’d stashed it in the deep freeze
in his garage, along with some fifty pounds of venison that had been there a couple years. Then, late in March, a small tornado had solved the problem by toppling a pine that had stood close by the rock. The pine came to rest on the rock’s natural overhang, and when the ground was softened by the spring rains, the weight of the fallen tree gradually tipped up the other end of the rock as though it were a teeter-totter, making a natural niche underneath just the right size for Bonnie. Merle had hauled the frozen, bundled body along the path in a wheelbarrow on one drizzly April night, wedged it in place beneath the rock, and then lowered the rock back to its original position by sawing through the pine. When he was done, he felt like some pharaoh who’d put the finishing touches on a monument that would last a thousand years or longer. That rock would just sit on top of Bonnie until a new ice age arrived and a glacier pushed it somewhere else.

  The bait finally worked. A crow glided down and lighted on the top of a sumac to study Merle. He was not the carrion but the source of carrion signals. Where was the carrion? the crow wondered, and then it wondered nothing at all, for Merle had pushed its keen, meager mind to one side and established his own temporary residence in the crow’s body. He flexed his wings, flicked his tail, and then lifted off, with an awkward flap, flap, flap, like a camper from the city who’s rented a rowboat and has to learn how to work the oars all over again.

  Ah, but what glory once he was well above the trees and circling with the others in the dance hall of the sky! Was there any higher pleasure, any finer freedom? It didn’t come without a price, of course. He had to be empty of other purpose, a blank slate, weightless and without ambition. But wouldn’t he have been all of that in any case? Merle could never hold a job. He liked money, but he would rather steal it, so long as his thievery did not become another kind of job. He liked sex and had sowed his share of wild oats, but he would never have considered settling down and becoming the paternal compost in which his own little family took root. No, he’d lived loose, and this was his reward. Shamans didn’t have to be good: loose was enough.