by Sheri Holman
“It’s nice to be a corpse,” she says. “I like the star treatment.”
“Maybe another station would pick up the Creepshow?” Jasper is trying once again. “You can’t just let them kill you off.”
“You assume, dear boy,” says Eddie, “that I want to live.”
“Hey, what are you going to put on my tombstone?” Wallis asks, because for a minute they’ve forgotten who is center stage here. She hears the back gate of the hearse open and is jolted sharply as the casket hits the interior wheels and is rolled into place.
But no one answers. She’s just freight now, alone in her box in the back. They’ve taken the joke up front.
She waited until Thursday, one day of the week for each of Jasper’s fingernail clippings. In her left hand, she carries a candle, several straight pins, a box of matches, and the hair she stole from the bathroom sink. She grips the five fingernail parings so tightly that they cut into her as if they were the nails of her own clenched fist. None of her spells are planned, but come to her like snatches of poetry or a doodle on a napkin. She knows enough about how magic works to know they must be wrought at night and in secret. Better under a full moon. Better with fire. Fire is love but it is also revenge. She’s not sure yet which way this spell will go. Either Jasper should love her or he should disappear. There is nothing in between.
Across the new-mown lawn the grass catches between her naked toes. She looks back at the house where everyone is sleeping. All week Mom has made her dust and vacuum and mop and sweep. He’s your father and you should care that he’s been at something for twenty years, twenty years of anything is quite an accomplishment, you don’t even know. You don’t even know, Wallis wants to snap back. Every night after dinner, Mom folded the laundry into four separate piles, watching Eddie draw the highs and lows on his weather map. And she would groan as the poor man blithely forecasted a 70 percent chance of his own surprise party getting rained out.
Wallis moves through the soybean field and grazes a handful of fuzzy pods in the dark. Her father told her not to pick those beans, they didn’t belong to her, but they are fresh and green and she loves how they sheer in half between her teeth, like twin pebbles in her mouth. She comes out into the woods where the loosely planted trees suggest a dozen different paths, and she walks until she feels the soil beneath her feet change from pine needle to ash. The girls at school pay five dollars apiece for spells conjured by the daughter of Captain Casket. She takes their money and buys herself candy and watches the girls walk taller down the hallway, smile brighter for their secret knowledge. She feels the power in her own chest as they claim their own, and the boys feel it, and Wallis knows she put it there.
Wallis sets the nails and hair and candle and pins on a rock beside her and kneels to dig a shallow hole. With each handful of soil she creates an upheaval of earthworm, feels the singe-shut of pill bugs snapping tight. It’s all words for the girls at school, incantations in red ink ripped from spiral notebooks. But Wallis has real pieces of Jasper, forgotten bits, vulnerable and hers. By the light of the moon, she lifts one of the bayberry candles Mom had stashed in the credenza. Through its woven wick, she fixes Jasper’s hair with a straight pin. She strikes a match and allows herself to think his name. The flame jumps and in an instant, acrid puff, the hair is gone, leaving nothing but a carbon-black pin. Wallis sinks the candle in the dirt beside her and sows the five bits of nail in the trench she’s dug. No other words are coming to her, this is beyond the work of words; she can’t even remember what he looks like or why she wants what she wants. It comes to her then to lift the hem of her nightgown and pull aside her underwear and water what she’s planted. The night air is a hand between her legs and this is what she’s needed—to surrender to the quivering relief of all that power she’s been holding in. She closes her eyes and the first few drops prime the soil, the shower makes things bloom. But gentle is not her way, and Wallis pees for forty days and forty nights until the earth is flooded and all who imperfectly worship her are wiped away. Rocking back on her haunches, she looks up through the veil of trees. The house was dark when she left, but now Jasper’s bedroom window is a wide-awake yellow animal’s eye, and she imagines him having heard her sneak past and pulling the cord of the lamp beside his bed at the first violent splash. She imagines him sitting in the window even now, confronting his own reflection, having forgotten that to see out into the dark, you must turn off the light behind you. Can you see me, so far away? No, she thinks. You cannot. She steps off and the last remaining drops soak through her panties and roll down her leg. The earth bowl is full of her and its surface is frothy and the little bits of Jasper float on top like bait tossed out at the end of a fishing trip. Wallis kicks dirt into the hole with her bare toes and stamps it down, leaving a flurry of footprints. It is well past midnight but she takes her time walking home, back through the verdant soybean field, stealing pods and splitting them as she goes. She moves toward the light in his window, knowing full well by the time she arrives, it will be extinguished, whether or not he has returned to sleep.
The phone has rung steadily all afternoon—the caterers with a half dozen substitutions, and now, closer to dinnertime, the last-minute cancellations of semi-acquaintances who had told themselves up until an hour ago they’d pull together a costume but had decided if they were going to pay a babysitter, they’d rather catch a movie instead. (Mom: Well, tell him to please feel better, you know how heartbroken Eddie will be to miss him.)
With the phone cord stretching from the wall to the refrigerator, Ann talks with the receiver between her shoulder and ear, emptying the shelves to make room for all the backup beer people were sure to bring, though she had told them specifically it wasn’t necessary. Wallis watches her through the patio door. She has spent the last hour scrubbing the patio furniture of its purple bird droppings and now she turns the chairs upside down to dry as she hoses the suds from the flagstone. Mom will make her right them because if her dad drove up now he would instantly suspect something and sure enough, Ann, still talking on the phone, taps the window and makes the hand gesture, turn them over.
“I want you to get Jasper to help you,” Mom says, replacing the receiver when Wallis walks in. “Tell him there’s sand in the carport. I need you to fill the white paper bags and get the candles ready to line the driveway. Do it in the attic so your dad doesn’t see.”
“You ask him,” Wallis says. “He doesn’t like me.”
“Of course he likes you, he just doesn’t know how to show it,” Mom responds, handing Wallis a thick stack of white lunch bags. “Men are oblivious, darling. Jasper is in the den right now answering mail because he doesn’t know what to do and he doesn’t understand he should ask.”
“Maybe he’s answering mail because he feels like it,” Wallis says.
“Wallis, please,” says Mom. “He’s making me a nervous wreck. I just vacuumed in there.”
The phone rings again and Wallis walks into the doorway of the den where Jasper has spread several dozen letters and eight-by-ten publicity stills of Captain Casket across the rug. It’s a ten-year-old photo of Eddie stretched fetchingly on his coffin like a Playboy Bunny. With a black marker Jasper is signing each photo: Don’t let the bedbugs bite, C.C.
“Mom says you need to go to the carport and bring some sand to the attic,” Wallis announces.
“Why do I need to bring sand into the attic?” Jasper asks.
“To pour it into paper bags.”
“What for?”
“To hold candles to light the driveway.”
“I’m doing something important.”
“My mom thinks putting candles in bags is more important.”
Jasper has slit the envelopes carefully with a letter opener and unfolded all the letters and the crayon-on-loose-leaf-paper portraits of Eddie: in his coffin, floating in a graveyard, holding knives and assault rifles and cartoon bombs with lit fuses. Over the years his preteen fans have used Captain Casket to destroy school build
ings and blow up the planet. She’s seen it all. Jasper doles out Casketeer cards, fills in the names, and carefully forges Captain Casket’s signature. He is as concentrated and serious as if he were counting money in a bank.
“That’s so sad,” she says.
“What?”
“All those dumb kids writing to a fake vampire.”
“Eddie doesn’t think they’re dumb. They matter to him.”
“Maybe they mattered in the beginning, but it gets old. The only people who really matter to him are me and Mom. We’re family.”
Jasper slides a photo and a Casketeer card into a self-addressed stamped envelope. He licks the seal and sets it aside.
“It meant a lot to me to get a signed photo,” Jasper says.
“Check the signature,” Wallis says. “Who do you think had this job before you?”
Wallis takes the steps to the upstairs hallway, where the trapdoor string dangles from the ceiling. A blast of hot air drops with the folding ladder and before her head is fully inside her neck is running with sweat. Yesterday Mom switched off the attic exhaust fan so that it wouldn’t guillotine the helium balloons she bought for tonight and left to drift in the rafters. Up here, she has hidden papier-mâché sarcophagi and peanut cans of exploding snakes and all the other ephemera that she thinks makes the Captain casket-y. She collected and framed the congratulations of other horror hosts, among them a 45 of “Monster Mash” inscribed “Many Morbid Returns, Zacherley.” Wallis can’t remember her father ever throwing a party like this for her mother. She supposes he’s never really had the chance. By the time the dishes are in the sink on this one, Mom will already be planning the next.
She has set up the last row of paper bags when Jasper returns with the thirty-pound sack of contractor sand Ann bought at the lumberyard. She knew he would come but she doesn’t acknowledge it. Wordlessly, he rips a corner and pours while she squats to hold open the mouth of the first lunch bag. He tilts the sack and the cheap sand rushes out, exploding in a cloud of dust when it hits the bottom, making it even harder to breathe. Wallis wipes her eyes with the cleanest corner of her salty T-shirt. He moves to the next bag, letting the sand spill across the floor.
“Pay attention,” she snaps.
“To what?” he asks. “Is your mother going to come up here with a ruler and measure each one to make sure I got them exactly equal?”
“We can’t win with you, can we?” Wallis asks. “If we leave you alone, you think we don’t care. If we ask you to do something you act all put out. Tell me how I’m supposed to treat you?”
“Why don’t you tell me how I’m supposed to act?” he counters. “If I offer to do things, you think I’m sucking up and trying to weasel in. If I’m myself and relax for five minutes, I’m being ungrateful. I was fine sleeping at the station. I don’t even know why I’m here.”
“You’re here because Mom thinks Dad needs a son.”
“I don’t want to be Eddie’s son,” Jasper says.
“Consider yourself lucky you have a roof over your head,” Wallis says. “If you were sleeping at the station, where would you go when they sold it?”
That shuts him up. Jasper lifts the sand and begins pouring again, this time more carefully. She holds open a bag, he fills it three-quarters, moves to the next. She is conscious of her movements, graceful and balletic as she moves from bag to bag. If he is going to make her feel like she’s performing, he should appreciate the show.
“I’m not some starstruck kid,” Jasper says. He’s still back at her father. She shrugs.
“You’re inside now,” she says. “Can’t you see there’s nothing special?”
“I see things in Eddie you can’t see. Things you’d never understand.”
“Like what?” she challenges. Jasper shakes his head and moves to the next bag. He won’t give her anything.
“I thought so,” she says. He wants to believe there is something more there than what her father lets on. He’s trying to turn him into something larger than he is. “You’re going to wake up one day and be really embarrassed.”
He drops the bag of sand in frustration, sending up another plume of dust.
“Ask him why his mother killed someone.”
His violet eyes are slits in his face and his jaw is clenched. The summer sun has darkened his caul of freckles until barely any pink flesh shows through. “That’s right,” he says. “Ask him what she was.”
Eddie never speaks of his mother. Wallis only knows she died a long time ago. Her name was Cora, and she sent a coffin for a wedding present. Wallis has never seen a picture of her. Through the attic walls, she feels a tremor, a slight vibration to match the jumping in her stomach. The tremor becomes a heavy bass, shaking the floor; a few moments later, she can pick out a melody. She puts her face to the attic fan, peering out between the silver blades as Captain Casket’s hearse pulls up. Her father coasts to a stop, drumming the beat on the steering wheel. He has changed out of his weatherman clothes and is wearing instead a bright yellow, wide-collared shirt she’s never seen before, unbuttoned low enough to show his chest hair. The howl and sideswipe of guitar is music Mom would hate, but behind her, Jasper bangs the rhythm with his fists on the floorboards.
“That was a close one, kids!” Mom’s bright blonde head pops up from the hole beside him. She is giddy with the thrill of having almost been caught. “Now aren’t you glad I sent you up here? I always have to stay one step ahead of that man.”
She disappears and Jasper walks away from the bags of sand, leaving Wallis to place the candles. He dangles over the hole where Mom just was, showing off with a few chin-ups, the kind men do in prison.
“Why would Dad tell you things he hasn’t told me?” Wallis demands.
“Maybe I matter,” Jasper says, letting go.
The hearse windows are up for the interstate but as soon as her dad pulls off the University exit, cruising the tight, one-way streets in the shadows of tall federal buildings, he cranks them down and dials the radio to an R & B station. It is nearly sunset and the mood is summer peaceful among the black men who stand in groups of four and five on the corners. In the years since Wallis was a kid, coming to the department store to sit on Santa’s lap, downtown has become a ragged country crossroads where tree roots push up the pavement and men claim their squares of empty unmown lots like the front porches of feed stores. They shield their eyes against the low sun, raising paper bags to their lips. The glare is red on the windows of the check-cashing shop, swallowed by the drawn metal blinds of the Army Recruitment Center. The rest of the block is nailed tight with sheets of butter yellow plywood. Broken Christmas lights stretch between the streetlamps overhead, and at the center of each is a tinsel snowflake. Her father takes a right onto Plum Street.
“Some guys from school came down here one night and beat the shit out of a drag queen,” Jasper says.
“Behind the post office?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Jasper answers. “I just heard about it.”
My grandmother has killed someone and I have pissed on the boy beside me. What have you done? she wants to ask the men on the street corners, who have surely done things they are not proud of yet cannot say they regret. They earned their peaceful laughter and lost their women, for there are never women out here drinking beer; the women are drinking and laughing inside somewhere, Wallis guesses, as manless as these men are without women. It’s not how it’s supposed to be, yet somehow everyone seems relieved it’s how it is.
Her father pulls into a space down the block from Cary’s, in front of the Biograph, the last surviving non-mall movie theater. Built in the twenties to suggest a mosque in a town that would safely never have one, it once showed first-run movies but now it screens mostly foreign films in the evenings and porn during the day. Wallis tries to see through the door as they pass by but the windows are painted deep purple.
“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is playing next week,” Jasper says, reading the marquee. “We should
see it.”
“Cesare,” Eddie shouts. “How long do I have to live?”
“Never ask a somnambulist for a straight answer,” Jasper replies.
“What’s it about?” asks Wallis.
“You wouldn’t like it,” says Eddie. “It’s old and weird.”
Says Wallis, “Not like anyone else we know.”
“Eddie you old ghoul!” Cary shouts from behind the bar when they step inside. The TV station is only blocks away on Main, and Cary’s is the anchor’s haunt. It’s another building stuck in time, with round maple tables, round-backed chairs, and round red-parchment clip-on shades on all the low-hanging chandeliers. The divorcées crowd the bar laughing too loud and smoking. Last year Cary put in a salad bar, roofed with etched glass and a metal well that holds chilled plates; it glows like a Lucite spaceship in the middle of the room. Now every child’s an Artful Dodger of crackers and butter packets, her father says, every woman a war bride heaping her plate for her husband as if they’ll never eat again. Eddie always makes a point of ordering a Caesar salad mixed at the table. Let us politely converse over reasonable portions, he says, and let the waiters earn their money.
Cary pours bourbon into a highball. With his other hand, he wields the soda hose and fills a glass for her.
“Your table is ready. How are you, Wallis?” he asks, and turns to Jasper. “Dr. Pepper for you, right, young man?”
“Thanks,” Jasper replies. They take up their glasses, weaving their way to the back table near the bathrooms, and heads turn to see who, on a busy Friday night, merits the little “Reserved” tent. Oh, it’s Eddie from channel 8, and the grown-ups smile because old people love the weather, and the kids grab their napkins and beg pens off their moms.
“Can I have your autograph?” A boy about Wallis’s age is at the table before they’ve even sat down. He wears braces, the rubber bands stretch at the back of his mouth like a cobra.