Witches on the Road Tonight

by Sheri Holman

  A knotted sheet is tacked up for a curtain over the window beside his bed. The floodlights of the scrap yard next door blind her when she sits up. Wallis looks down at the pale silver stretch marks across her belly from Ollie and the ropy veins of her hands that halfheartedly cover a clipped patch of pubic hair. No point in hiding it now. He’d fucked her forty-year-old body and still said, Wow.

  “Would you like something to drink? I have some beer in the fridge,” he says, raising up on his arm.

  Wallis glances at the clock. “Sure,” she says. “A beer would be great.”

  He walks naked to the other side of the room where a stainless sink and two burners constitute a kitchen. To her surprise, his refrigerator is not the forlorn bachelor cliché of a six-pack and carton of Chinese takeout, but neatly arranged milk and carrots and Tupperware containers of what looks to be soup and actual meals. She is suddenly ravenous.

  “Would you mind if I had something to eat?” she asks before she can stop herself. “I haven’t had anything since lunch.”

  The thought of feeding her seems to delight him, and he reaches into the sink for a saucepan and pours into it something from one of the containers. He turns a knob and calls up the spiny blue flame of a tenant’s stove.

  “So now you’ve defiled the daughter of Captain Casket,” she says. “How does it feel?”

  “Like every Casketeer’s dream come true,” he answers.

  She looks around the loft with its unpainted plywood floor, the exposed I beams and conduits. The absence of furniture is something other than poverty, for poverty, out of pride if nothing else, gluts itself with stuff. She wonders why Jeff has chosen to live so far away with so little. Across the street, a crane swings a load of scrap metal from one pile to another like a giant metal insect building and unbuilding a nest.

  “Do they work all night?” she asks.

  “You get used to it.”

  In the kitchen, Jeff dumps stew into a bowl for her and a plastic Mets cup for himself.

  “Smells good,” she says.

  “It’s lentil and tofu. I’m a vegetarian. I hope that’s okay.”

  He climbs back into bed, passing her the bowl and a beer. They eat in silence, watching as the crane parts the rain, sluicing a waterfall of aluminum. “Who taught you how to cook?” she asks.

  “My girlfriend. She’s upstate at the Culinary Institute.”

  Wallis looks at him with new respect and lets the comforter fall away from her chest. She’d been working too hard to nurse Ollie for long, and her breasts still sit high and firm. The rain has washed away the shellac of hairspray and her hair falls naturally around her shoulders. She feels pretty enough to compete with anyone at the Culinary Institute, for chrissakes.

  “When’s she due back?” Wallis asks.

  “Day after tomorrow,” he says.

  Wallis remembers why she stopped riding the subway to the end—what she found when she arrived was never all that interesting. She drains her beer and scrapes the last lentily carrot from her bowl.

  “Well, I hate to fuck and run, but I should get going,” she says, surrendering the warmth of the comforter. “I’m assuming you don’t get many taxis out here. Would you be a sweetheart and call me a car?”

  Her lined pink tweed skirt and jacket are damp and flaccid when she pulls them on, and she shoves her bra and panties into her pocketbook. Laurence will be asleep when she gets home and she can step straight into the shower. She gave up a night with Ollie for this, and she suddenly feels very old and tired. Wordlessly, Jeff climbs out of bed after her, pulling on his own boxers. He finds his cell phone, gives the car service his address, repeating it twice, and quotes her the price as if it makes a difference. Then the long standoff begins. In this rain, in this neighborhood, it could take half an hour for the car to arrive and Wallis can’t bear another minute here now that she has her clothes on. He is watching her with that searching, expectant look she gets from men she shouldn’t be sleeping with, men she works with who, like herself, are married with children, whom she goes out with and jokes with and drinks with. It’s the same look Ollie gives after an especially good push on a swing, a grateful yet still needy look, and Wallis realizes she is expected to stand there bored and pushing for hours. Jeff leans against the window and she shivers at his nakedness touching the cold glass. He’s not sure what he’s done wrong.

  “Maybe we could find the opportunity to do this again sometime?” he says.

  Wallis smiles warmly, the smile she flashes for the camera to signal the transition between a double homicide and a puppy trapped in an elevator shaft. Standing in the oversize window with his tousled hair and square jaw, he is quite handsome, but more than anything else, she wants out of the playground.

  “Maybe,” she says.

  Jeff turns his back to her and looks out at the claw in the scrap yard chewing another load of damaged metal. He sets his shoulders like he doesn’t care.

  Good, she thinks. He hates me. Now I can go.

  She has been waiting under the awning outside his apartment for close to twenty minutes. The neighborhood cesspool has overflowed in the rain; it smells like the streets of Damascus. She could be in any third world country, she thinks. The door to the Mexican coffee shop is locked, the glass cases holding aguas frescas and open cartons of milk are dark. Beyond is nothing but glass replacement and auto body shops where racks of multicolored car doors are stacked tight as library books. Water and brake fluid flow over the rutted pavement; somewhere behind a chain-link fence several blocks away, a guard dog barks a warning. They call this neighborhood the Iron Triangle and, standing in the rain, Wallis feels she could rust in place, never to move again.

  I want to show you something. She still falls for it. Ever since Jeff uttered those words at the station, she’s been thinking of the boy who used to say it all the time. Then to have him pull out his card and talk of the redheaded kid who showed up toward the end. Wallis is a woman with a profound respect for the conventions of stories. In the ghost stories her father told, things never happened on any night, they happened on this very night. It was tonight, thirty years ago. Somehow Jeff knew, that’s why he approached her. Why she’s here in this crotch of Queens. She chides herself, stop being stupid. He couldn’t have known.

  Overhead a plane banks low and loud, its landing lights shining into her eyes, flashing her reflection blue and bright into the flooded road. The dog barks again. Is it her imagination or is it closer than it was before? Maybe it wasn’t a guard dog, maybe it was part of a pack. Wild dogs prowl the Iron Triangle, she knows, they’ve even been spotted on the subway. Wild dogs haunted the back lanes of Baghdad, but they never barked. Considered unclean, they had to learn the art of silence or would be routinely shot. While she was on assignment there, she’d adopted a pup she’d found behind Al Kadhimain mosque and, back home, the poor thing hid under the bed whenever it heard the call to prayer, even in a teaser spot on TV.

  Wallis pulls out her phone to check the time again—2:45. Her car is not going to come. No one lives here, they think they’re being set up for a robbery. She’ll give them ten more minutes and then she’ll have to find her way back to the train. It’s not that far away, she can see the purple 7 glowing through the fog as it rounds the elevated bend, but it seems a world and a lifetime stands between her and the way back home. She sees the old voicemail message from her father, still unretrieved, but she knows now why she has avoided listening to it all night long. Wallis, it’s Dad.

  “I might be out of touch for a while, darling,” he slurs, though he’s given up booze for the chemo. “I’m going on a ginseng hunt.” That’s all, but she knows what he means.

  A troubled boy we tried to help, a damn bright kid. We thought we were getting through to him. Sonofabitch. We thought he was learning to trust us. That’s what he told the police the night they stood in the doorway of their Cape Cod, her dad’s elastic face flashing red/blue/red/blue in the patrol-car light. Dad, Mom, Wallis huddled
in her pajamas, shaking from the adrenaline rush of being awakened mid-dream by sirens to learn they’d found his body in the swamp, his flesh teased to rope by snapping turtles, his stomach full of pills. Her father stood there and lied to the police while Mom reached for the appropriate tears she kept on reserve for every occasion, including Sudden Death of Foster Child, and Wallis stood between them, twelve years old and vibrating with rage—rage she hasn’t put down since, just spent decades finding different excuses for—and saw in her mind’s eye the primitive carving she had made of Jasper’s face on the swamp oak and the nail she’d driven dead center between his eyes.

  A ginseng hunt, his message said. It was the phrase they used for any unexpected adventure, walking into the dark woods without knowing what they’d find. She hears the click of nails coming closer, the heated breath nearby. She hears a soft, low growl.

  “You motherfucker!” Wallis screams and throws her phone hard into the night. “You cannot leave me alone with this!”

  “Wallis!” Jeff shouts from his open window. “Are you still down there?”

  “Jeff?” she pleads, not caring who hears, as if there were anyone here to hear. “No one’s come for me.”

  He is down the steps and opening the front door and then she is in his arms, sobbing like a child. She clutches him tight, breathing in his clean skin, the reassuring vegetarian absolution of him. You are one of us, she thinks. I can talk to you.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks in shock.

  “That creepy redheaded kid. Jasper. My father and I killed him. Thirty years ago tonight.”

  Wallis

  AUGUST 1980

  Her arm is stretched in front of her, the black plastic comb quivering on the back of her fist. She’s got Jasper fixed, holding his eyes steadily, waiting for any flicker of movement to give him away. He’s a heavylidded foe, drowsy, a genius of this game, dissociated from his body, his hand able to grab the comb and rake the teeth across her knuckles before she can jerk it away. They sit cross-legged on her pink, littlekid bedspread faced off: Wallis the brown-bobbed girl with gray eyes, reflected back as a pale, freckled boy with a carroty afro.

  The goal is to draw first blood, not to flinch but to retaliate, the goal is to take it. Why they play the game, she doesn’t know. He suggests it. She goes along. He’s a guest in her house.

  She’s lost three times in a row, but this time she’ll be quicker. Though her muscles are screaming, she can outlast this boy. A minute passes, two. The curtains are drawn and the window unit, set to high, blasts cold air across her bare arm. A grudging respect settles on his face, the shadow of a smile. He has underestimated her. His gaze softens a bit, he flinches; she flinches but does not give. Her arm is not part of her, it belongs to someone else. He is lazy, his hands in his lap; she has all the power because she can endure. He must feel that.

  As though he has read her mind, he opens his eyes wider, naked and raw. In them there is confusion, desire, need. This is what making love must be like, she thinks. At twelve years old, she understands little more than that it will begin with loss—the loss of virginity, the loss of innocence—but that at some point there stands to be a gain. She knows he has lost everything in his short life, his parents, his home. They are perfectly balanced. Help me, his lips part slightly. I need you.

  She blinks. The comb comes down savagely over her already swollen knuckles. She bleeds, four weeping drops.

  “Bloody knuckles,” Jasper says, standing up. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

  She hates this boy who has invaded her house and stolen her summer, who finds her wherever she goes to escape him, proposes to her, I want to show you something. What he shows her always hurts. He is mean and trailerish in the thin gray and green baseball shirt he wears, the ragged fringe of his cutoff jeans, the tip of his black comb peeking out of his back pocket. I hate you. She rises and follows.

  Outside of her darkened bedroom, the day is bleached flat. He walks across the yard, grasshoppers corkscrewing from the grass clippings bounce off his shins. It is her yard but he leads as if he’s lived here all his life. Across their neighbor’s soybean field, into the stand of woods behind the house, he guides her down a path he’s tramped himself to where he has hidden the gasoline and Styrofoam. He’s found the packaging from a stereo she got for Christmas; the inserts she turned into doll beds when she was a kid only a few months ago, before she became this new, awkward thing. He found them with the trash in the garage along with the red gas can for the lawn mower, and brought them here hidden inside a garbage bag. He slit the bag and spread it like a picnic blanket, set out a metal bucket, a paint stirrer, a pair of work gloves. He squats down and begins tearing rough squeaking chunks of Styrofoam and dropping them into the bucket.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You’ll see.”

  He shakes the gasoline like the sputtering end of a great long piss, and melts the chunks to glue. More Styrofoam, more gas, he stirs. It’s hard to breathe, as if someone has pulled the plug on the day’s oxygen. When he arrived, besides the two changes of clothes and a photograph of his dead parents in his duffle bag, he had brought hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide and Methyl salicylate (which was nothing but wintergreen oil) and naphthalene pounded from mothballs. He had flash powder mixed from potassium perchlorate that he kept in a mason jar and aluminum he ground up from the bottom of a soda can. Later, after he’d initiated her into the mysteries of combustion, he’d smacked his scrawny ass like an underfed porn star and said, “The finer the ingredients, the more unstable the mix.”

  Jasper is done stirring the Styrofoam and gasoline, and now he pulls the comb from his back pocket, dips the tip in the sludge, and strikes a match. The color is up in his face. His Adam’s apple is a gooseflesh knot.

  “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” he says, grinning.

  A flick of his finger and the fireball scuds across dead leaves. She leaps forward to stamp it out but he moves quickly and has her pinned, his elbows digging into the sides of her sore, pathetic breasts. She can’t breathe.

  The napalm burns for half an hour, but after about five minutes, it’s pointless to struggle. She gives in and he lets go and, together, they stand and watch.

  Mom is calling them in for lunch. She stands at the patio door in her blue oxford shirtwaist dress, her frosted hair pulled back in a patrician ponytail, her lips and nails frosted pink. Wallis suspects Mom rose fully formed from the foam wearing a pair of espadrilles and clutching a Brooks Brothers charge card. Because Eddie is home today, she’s made his favorite, tuna-fish sandwiches with sweet pickle that seeps like little green mold spores into the Wonder bread. She spears each sandwich with a pimentoed olive on a toothpick.

  “Wash your hands, kids,” she says brightly.

  Wallis ignores her, walking deeper into the dark house and flopping down in the den where Eddie is reading the newspaper, tilted back in his recliner like an astronaut at ignition. Her father looks crisp in his plaid Bermuda shorts and a kelly green polo shirt. His thinning hair is damp from a shower and crazed on top of his head from toweling it. Tonight he’ll shellac it with black shoe polish, but now it stands up soft and fine like babies’ hair. The wall behind his chair is a shrine to Captain Casket. Captain Casket with Zacherley. Captain Casket with Ghoulardi. Captain Casket with M.T. Graves. With Sammy Terry. Bowman Body. Sivad. Morgus. Jeepers Creepers. Chilly Billy. Svengoolie. Count Gore De Vol. Dr. Paul Bearer. Asmodeus, and a recent one of him leering at Elvira’s cleavage. She has nothing on Vampira, the original, he told Wallis. Maila Nurmi. Rumor had it she wore out James Dean.

  “What have you kids been up to?” he asks.

  “Mischief and mayhem,” Jasper answers.

  “Marvelous,” he drawls, turning back to his paper.

  Jasper heads to her dad’s collection of Famous Monsters of Filmland, two bookshelves of issues carefully preserved in plastic. He’s working his way through every original her dad has collected sinc
e 1958, the pointed teeth and saddlebag eyes of Lon Chaney in London After Midnight, the sexy space women invaded by tentacles of the green slime, all the monsters and aliens that hid behind her shower curtain as a girl.

  “That’s mine,” Wallis says when he pulls out September 1967. On the cover a beefcake Wolfman rips his shirt to tatters, though the main headline reads “Vampire of the Opera.”

  “Sorry.” He tosses it at her. “Didn’t know you were so possessive.”

  “I mean I’m in it,” she says, flipping to page thirty-four. There is the picture of Eddie in whiteface and his same black cape and unitard, holding a baby swaddled in fake cobwebs. The caption reads: Daughter of Captain Casket. Horror Host Spawns Baby Ghoul, 6 lb. 5 oz.

  “She made a great prop,” Eddie says.

  Jasper studies the picture. “You were an ugly baby.”

  She wants to argue, but he’s right—she was born premature and spindly with bulgy puggish eyes. In the picture, her father holds her like a mongrel puppy, supporting her bottom with one hand, the other behind her neck, while Mom stands behind him in a sequined strapless gown, her frosted hair worn in a sleek French twist. She leans over Dad’s shoulder, slim and glamorous, as though he and not she had given birth. They made a gorgeous interracial couple—monster and debutante—and her dad knew it.

  “What happened to your parents?” she asks Jasper. He has a snapshot of them in his bedroom. A fat, gray-faced man with a crew cut and an extremely skinny woman with drawn-on eyebrows, wearing what Mom would say was obviously a wig. And not a very expensive one.

  “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to ask an orphan that question?” Jasper says. He barely moves his lips when he speaks, like a ventriloquist, she thinks. She wonders if he practiced that.

  “Why? Did you murder them?”