THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Yeah, well. Ten thousand just doesn’t go that far these days. Now what I was thinkin’, Bob, is you and me being partners. It wouldn’t have to involve any work for you. I’d run the place, keep it all in good shape, handle the bait and the boat rentals and all that.”

  “And I’d just supply the investment capital?” Glandier asked.

  “Wouldn’t hurt to discuss it, would it? Over a couple beers.”

  Glandier couldn’t trust himself to reply. He knew his wisest move would be to stall for time, but that required a friendlier tone than he could command at just this moment, when all he could think of was murder.

  “Unless you’d rather have me drive into the city. I could do that.”

  “No. No, you’re right—I could use a vacation. Tell you what, Nils, you see that my cabin’s in shape, icebox plugged in, some wood for the stove. I’ll drive up there tomorrow, or Tuesday at the latest.”

  “Hey, that sounds more like it, ole buddy. We’ll tie one on, like—” He paused, and in his imagination Glandier could see his gap-toothed smirk, the tobacco juices staining his stringy beard, the bleary eyes, the prosthetic hand. “Like we did last summer!” This time the hoot of Nils’s laughter was repeated in arrhythmic bursts.

  The point of the joke was that Nils and Glandier had not, in fact, tied one on together last summer, or at any other time. Nils had, however, provided Glandier with that alibi for the time he’d flown (out of Madison, in neighboring Wisconsin) to Las Vegas and murdered his wife. Glandier in return had bought a lakeside shack from Nils for over six times its original asking price. A perfectly straightforward business arrangement that had been concluded to their mutual satisfaction. Only now, Nils was telling him, it had not been concluded.

  “See you,” said Glandier coldly, and hung up.

  Sugar was waiting outside the kitchen door. The potholder was nowhere in sight.

  “Couldn’t stay away, huh? Well, come on in but don’t get comfortable.” He held the door open, and when the dog had come in he stooped down to unbuckle his collar. “How’s that, a little better?”

  The dog tilted his head sideways, eyes fixed on Glandier, alert with suspicion.

  Glandier slipped the collar into his pocket, intending to throw it into a different part of the lake from where he would dump the dog’s body. He would also need one of the large three-ply garbage bags and some rope. Though fishing line should serve as well as rope, and there was plenty of line in his tackle box.

  He scratched Sugar behind his ear. “How’d you like to go fishing, Sugar? How’d you like that?”

  Sugar barked and did a quick claw-clattering dance on the linoleum.

  Glandier eased himself back to a standing position with the help of a kitchen chair. In the glow of satisfaction that came from having found a new short-term goal and plan of action, Glandier unwrapped the cellophane from a fresh cigar and lit it off the gas burner on the stove.

  CHAPTER 45

  How nice it would be, Joy-Ann had thought at first, to be a nurse. Even the idea of bedpans hadn’t daunted her, though probably bedpans weren’t necessary in the afterlife. What she hadn’t imagined was this situation: Alice lying there comatose through all the long slow hours of eternity, never stirring, seeming not even to breathe, a bump on a log. If what Adah said was true and everyone’s first reaction to the afterlife was an expression of their most fundamental nature, then Alice Hoffman’s fundamental nature was certainly the opposite of peppy.

  Still, Joy-Ann enjoyed wearing the uniform. Anything was better than going around as a three-foot-tall Virgin Mary, which had been for all too long the aftereffect of having overstayed her visit in the world below. Now, except for a certain marblish quality to her complexion, Joy-Ann was herself again, and very grateful to Adah Menken for having gone down the heavenly escalator to Sears and rescued her from the revolving door.

  She did wish that Adah would return from her present errand of mercy to Mr. Berryman, since the comatose Alice did not provide much social stimulation. Indeed, to be brutally honest, Alice Hoffman had never been the life of anyone’s party. Still, neighbors are neighbors, and Alice certainly hadn’t deserved to be killed by that Scottish terrier of hers. Alice would not have been able to grasp the fact that Sugar hadn’t been acting of his own volition, and the dog’s attack must have seemed a terrible betrayal to poor Alice, who’d doted on him.

  Like many another nurse in the same situation, Joy-Ann turned to the TV for relief. Home Box Office no longer exerted quite the same irresistible fascination as when she had first started watching it. Too often her curiosity had made her witness things she would rather not have to remember: Giselle’s murder, Bing’s actual sexual practices, and even poor dear Dewey’s pecadilloes with a waitress who’d worked at a Rexall’s in downtown Minneapolis. There are some things you’re better off not knowing about your loved ones, and Joy-Ann had promised herself that she wouldn’t tune to Home Box Office in the future to spy on her family’s private lives.

  However, keeping in touch with their present situation was another matter, and Joy-Ann had no compunctions about flipping from channel to channel to see how matters stood with Bing and Giselle. Poor Bing was lying unconscious in a hospital bed, his head turbaned with bandages, his arm connected to an IV bottle with clear plastic tubing. The sight of him lying there made Joy-Ann feel like an imposter in her nurse’s uniform. Doubly an imposter, for there was as little she could do to help Alice in her hospital bed as she could to help Bing in his.

  She thought of Giselle and switched channels, but the only image that resulted was a perfectly static view, like a test pattern, of a shallow concrete pond in someone’s garden. The surface of the pond was stippled with raindrops. Beyond its farther rock-rimmed edge was a bed of tulips not yet in bloom, and beyond the tulips an expanse of lawn bounded by willows and suburban homes. It would seem to be the back yard of Glandier’s house in Willowville, though Joy-Ann had no recollection of such a pond.

  Again she thought of her daughter and switched channels. The image wavered and held steady. So much, thought Joy-Ann, for Home Box Office.

  Before she switched off the TV it occurred to Joy-Ann that since Robert Glandier was her son-in-law she might be able to use Home Box Office to find out what he was up to. Maybe she could even track down Giselle through him, if (as Adah had gloomily foretold) she’d gone back to haunting her husband.

  With a grimace of disclaimer (for it was not Joy-Ann’s fault that the man was her son-in-law; she’d warned Giselle that she was much too young and good-looking to be marrying someone that old and that fat), she thought of Glandier, turned the channel selector, and—blip!—there he was in more than living color: his face luminously green, his graying hair now neon blond. He was in a small, shabby room unpacking groceries from a cardboard box. HBO’s unearthly cameraman did a slow pan about the room, a technical feat that entirely escaped the notice of the program’s sole viewer; Joy-Ann took technology quite as much for granted now as when she’d been alive in St. Paul.

  The camera’s pan revealed: a linoleum countertop piled high with two six-packs of Grain Belt; bags of Cheetos, of garlic-flavor potato chips, of Doritos; a can, already popped open and sampled, of Frito Enchilada Dip; Ritz crackers; port-wine cheddar cheese spread; two frozen pizzas; a tube of liver sausage; Planter’s Beer Nuts; Land O’ Lakes butter, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise; two pounds of Oscar Mayer bacon; a loaf of rye bread, another loaf of pumpernickel; four fat hothouse tomatoes, a head of iceberg lettuce, and a large bottle of Baco-Bits.

  Her son-in-law had never seemed so alien to Joy-Ann as at this moment. To have made such a pig of himself at some grocery store and not to have yielded to a single sweet. No cookies, no ice cream, no Sara Lee cake—it seemed perverse and unnatural.

  But the camera did not let her ponder this judgment, for it moved on to show, through a doorless doorway, the foot of an unmade bed, then crept along a warping wall of painted planks that successive vacationers had transfor
med into a kind of commemorative bulletin board: Midge & Norm—Smoochin’ Heaven—June ‘63; Fargo Steamers 1965; Disco Sucks; Bobbi G; The Johnsons, Rapid City; Good Pussy 183-8351; and, once again, Midge & Norm—Can’t Get Enuf of Your Love!

  It dawned on Joy-Ann that this must be the lakeside cabin Bob had talked of buying just after Giselle’s death. “To help him get over the tragedy,” as he’d explained at the time. She couldn’t believe a fusspot like Bob would have bought such a dump as this. The camera glided by the last graffito and passed through a doorway into a cramped sunporch. The cardboard-and-lath ceiling was buckled and stained with rain, the screens were ruptured, and you could almost smell the mold in the old davenport. Just outside the windows was a rickety dock with one aluminum rowboat tied to it, and there at the foot of the dock, gnawing a large meaty bone, was Alice Hoffman’s Sugar. As the camera zoomed in on the dog, he looked up from his bone and growled, not just Sugar’s usual display of bad temper but a growl that Joy-Ann felt to be personally directed at herself. Behind her, on the hospital bed, Alice Hoffman stirred and murmured.

  Glandier passed in front of the window, carrying a rod and tackle box, which he stowed in the back of the aluminum boat. He left the dock and passed by the window and out of sight around the side of the house. The dog barely bothered to glance up at him as he went by. Glandier returned with the oars of the boat. After he’d passed by Sugar and just before stepping onto the dock, he dropped one of the oars and turned around, raising the other above his head and bringing the blade of the oar down, axlike, across the dog’s back.

  It was not a killing blow. Sugar began to yelp. As Glandier raised the oar again, Joy-Ann saw a bleeding child struggle to disengage its body from the body of the dog. The child’s legs were stunted, its face grotesque, the sort of face you’d only ever see in a medical book and then have to look away from.

  The oar came down across the dog’s head. Sugar collapsed, quiet and quite dead, across the bone he’d been gnawing, but the child, if it was a child, had pulled itself free from the dog’s corpse and was crawling over the mud and pebbles of the shore and into the reeds at the edge of the lake.

  Glandier, oblivious of the child, proceeded to stuff Sugar’s body into a black plastic bag.

  As though uninterested in detailing the dog’s interment, the camera looked up and out across the overcast waters of the lake. The child had vanished, but out beyond the reeds, wading on its spindly, stiltlike legs, was a heron. Joy-Ann remembered Glandier’s telling her that Rush Lake was famous for its herons, which nested on an island at the center of the lake and could be seen every day flying back and forth across the water or fishing along the shore, like this one, disdaining to notice their human competitors.

  The heron spotted a prey, dipped its long beak into the water, and raised its head so that you could follow, inch by inch, the progress of the swallowed morsel down its throat. The heron gave a single shudder of its body, then spread its wings and bore itself aloft into the air.

  As the heron flew away, Alice Hoffman began to choke convulsively. Joy-Ann went to her side and helped her sit up. The choking became more violent. Each spasm covered the starched sheets of the bed with a spray of wet black crumbles, like the soil sold for potting houseplants. After a final wrenching convulsion, Alice went limp in Joy-Ann’s arms. Joy-Ann eased her back against the pillow. What seemed a large tulip bulb was lodged in Alice’s wide-open mouth. Small maggots wiggled in the dirt spattering the sheets. Joy-Ann looked on with horror as her friend’s immaterial body began, visibly, to decompose.

  CHAPTER 46

  “Giselle?” said the frog, blinking up into the branches of the willow. “Are you there, Giselle?”

  In the sleep that was not sleep, in the grave that was not a grave, she stirred.

  “Giselle? It’s me, John Berryman. I brought you back your ring.”

  She seemed to be in bed beside her husband. He was trying to wake her. She did not want to be awakened. “Go away.”

  “First you have to kiss me,” said the frog, and chuckled.

  “No,” she said, curling into the whorled wood as into a cocoon of blankets on a heatless winter morning. “Go away, I’m asleep.”

  With its webbed feet the frog scrabbled at the loose dirt at the foot of the willow where the red-checked potholder had been buried. It was not buried deep. The frog gripped its hemmed edge in his mouth and tugged.

  “Stop it,” Giselle protested. Then all at once (as the potholder came free of its little grave) she was fully awake and aware of yet another impossible situation. “You’re a frog?” she inquired skeptically.

  “If you can be a tree, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to be a frog. It’s just as traditional.”

  “Am I a tree?” she marveled, turning herself around in the slim trunk of the willow as she might have turned before a mirror to model a new dress. The wind shivered her half-budded leaves. Her roots curled solidly in the clayey mud. She was a tree, and she felt terrific!

  “In fact,” said the frog in a rather pedantic tone, “you’re not a tree, precisely. You’re a hamadryad—which is to say, a wood nymph.”

  “I feel like a tree. And it’s a comfortable feeling.”

  “For my part, too, I’m much more comfortable as a frog than I was as myself the last time you saw me. If you remember any of that.”

  The leaves shivered, and she let her mind go completely blank. It was something one could do much more easily as a tree than as a human being, or even as the ghost of a human being. Thinking was no more than a kind of tune she could hum or not hum as she chose. The frog had begun talking again, but she didn’t pay it any attention. Ought she to? There was something so pleasant about having no thoughts at all. Rather like swimming under water, but without the need to hold her breath. Yet in a way she was thinking. Even this slow subaqueous drift of dim pleasure was a kind of thought, a tree’s thoughts, a way of swaying in the breeze and going nowhere.

  “Giselle!” the frog croaked patiently, over and over. “Giselle, please pay attention! Giselle!”

  “Please,” she said, rising briefly above the surface, where his words became meaningful again. “Can’t you leave me alone? I’m thinking. I’m thinking about thinking.”

  “You’re in danger,” the frog explained patiently, “of simply sinking out of existence. It can happen. Spirits aren’t indestructible. Adah Menken explained the whole system to me. You’ve got to stir yourself. Are you listening to me?”

  “There’s such a lovely breeze,” she observed. “Do you feel it?”

  “There are different levels of existence, and when you die you can rise to a higher level or sink to a lower. Or for a while you might just hold steady, which is what ghosts do. But right now, Giselle, you’re sinking. First to a vegetable level of awareness. Then, after that, you could end as a stone. As salts leeching into groundwater. You could end up just being part of the soup of the sea. There’s no awareness at that level, Giselle.”

  She sighed.

  “I’m not asking you to tear yourself up by your roots. Just talk to me, huh? Give me some sign of consciousness.”

  “Why do you want to bother me?” she asked. “What difference does it make to you?”

  “Oh, don’t ask me about my motives. Let’s say I owe you a favor—or owe one to your mother. It seems that after my unfortunate experience of midwifery, she actually got Adah to admit that she’d been unfair all this time in keeping me and certain other poets out of heaven. I have no idea how she did it. Adah Menken isn’t an easy person to persuade.”

  “So now you’re free to go to heaven?”

  The frog nodded happily, puffed up its cheeks, and croaked.

  “Then why don’t you go there? Why are you being a frog?”

  “Sheer magnanimity, my dear. I intend to rescue you from a fate worse than death. Also (it’s true), Adah did ask if I’d help. Or did you mean why have I chosen to be a frog in particular? Well, the answer to that lies in this.” H
e held up his right forelimb to show the tiny gold ring on his webbed finger. “The ring only lets me shift my shape into one that’s locally available, and here in suburbia there’s not a wide range of choices.”

  “But why not just be yourself?”

  “One reason is because this way I can see. Adah wasn’t able to cure my blindness—I guess because at some deep-down level I really want to be blind. And the other reason is so as not to be seen by your son the demon.”

  It was the wrong thing to have said. Giselle, reminded of the halfling, let her mind be resorbed into the bole of the tree. As a hamadryad she had the option, at any time, of simplifying herself into wood.

  The frog went on croaking all that afternoon and far into the night at the foot of the willow, but the willow refused to listen. Its leaves stirred in the wind, and tiny droplets of drizzling rain trickled down their veins to form larger droplets at the tips of the leaves, thence to plunge to lower leaves, to the matted grass, to the surface of the little pond.

  CHAPTER 47

  “Boy,” said Jack, sitting down and helping himself to the granola, “you would not believe the grotesque thing that happened yesterday at this fishing resort up north.”

  “They caught Godzilla,” Maryann suggested, not looking up from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” on which she was to be tested in her first-period class.

  “Oh, don’t encourage him, Maryann,” said Judy, darting her brother a look of sincere malevolence. Her experiences in combating abortion had lately confirmed in Judy Sheehy a natural predisposition to blame the male sex for everything she found disagreeable. As the member of the male sex whose presence she was most often forced to endure, and a person, moreover, inherently disagreeable, her younger brother aroused in her an antipathy that amounted, especially at mealtimes (she being a finicky eater), to horror.

  Jack sloshed milk from the carton into his cereal bowl and reported the rest of his news story through mouthfuls of moist granola. “No, honest, I’m not making this up. It was in this morning’s paper: BIZARRE TRAGEDY ON RUSH LAKE. There was this Vietnam vet, see, who was out fishing in this boat, and half of his body is prosthetic. Well, he’s standing up in the boat and casting, and then comes the weird part. This heron flies overhead and grabs the fishing line in the middle right while he’s casting, and the hook at the end of the line swings back and hooks itself right into the guy’s eyeball! So naturally he staggers back, the boat tips over, and he drowns. Isn’t that incredible?”