The Tin Woodman, who'd tired of counting after lightning that was never coming, cleared his throat impatiently.
"Don't think she'll wait forever, Tip," he said.
And that was true, what with Charlotte tap-tapping her tennis shoes somewhere in the shadows and the thunder rolling off the tin roof like bowling balls. Alvin hurriedly picked out a hat, a velvet red cloche, something Clara Bow or Lillian Gish might have worn, tugged down the narrow brim.
"One day, lady, one day you're gonna learn," Charlotte said, and her fingers brushed the nape of his neck, trailed up to the zipper's dangling tab just below his hairline. She tugged gently and it felt like a loose tooth or an old scab pulling free as the metal teeth parted the tiniest bit.
Before he slapped her hand away.
She laughed as he closed the trunk, hiding the mirror, all the old clothes and the stolen makeup, his silverfishchewed notebooks and comics, checked the latches twice and carefully replaced the camouflage of paint-splattered drop cloths and the moldering rolls of calico wallpaper.
"Oh, so careful, box girl, trunk secret girl, shhhhh ..." whispered Charlotte. "Watch your skinny ass, box girl."
And the Tin Woodman and Jack Pumpkinhead and the Woggle-Bug and the Walrus made a circle around him, naked Alvin, face drawn and eyes shaded perfect and the hat on his head, and together they walked slow, in stately, measured step, between the attic country trees of discard and throw-away. Charlotte's warnings grew faint, and then fainter, and finally were lost completely in the distance and dust and the clanking jangle of the Woodman's footsteps.
Past the tiny window, glass gone to milky cataracts with cobwebs and cloudy age, the world out there blown and buffeted beneath the storm-feathered wings of the birds, and phantomwise, Alice moving under crow black skies.
"Pay that no mind, Father," said Jack. "She went through and there's hardly ever any coming back."
And before he could answer, they had already stepped over the ladder and the trapdoor, past forgotten bundles of Reader's Digest and Progressive Farmer trussed in shiny baling wire. Off of the white and onto the red, and here was the crimson king, bleeding quietly to himself; he watched them pass in silence.
Behind them, the jackdaws had found the attic window and slammed themselves furiously against the glass. Thunder and blackbirds falling like the hail before a twister and his aunt Dora, calling him down for dinner. Alvin tried looking back, caught a mad blur of pecking beaks, birdshitty smear, and it won't bold them all out, it'll break, before the Walrus seized his head roughly in both blubbery fists and twisted it back around.
"That's what she wants," the Walrus snorted between his nicotine-stained tusks. "That's exactly what she wants."
And then the wardrobe. His mother's oak and cherry wardrobe, and before that, his grandmother's; treebone cut and carved, stained rich and dark as menstrual tea. And wrapped selfish in chains that slithered and scarred the varnish skin, that knotted themselves tighter as Alvin approached, so tight finally that the wood began to pop and splinter.
Alvin tried to push between Jack Pumpkinhead and the Walrus, hurled himself at the wardrobe.
"Make it stop," he wailed, and "Please, before they hear," but already there were voices downstairs, concern and anger, his aunt demanding to know what was going on up there, demanding to know right this minute.
"No, Mother," Jack whispered urgently. "That's what she wants."
And behind them, as the Tin Woodman lifted his ax high above his head, glass shattered, and the world filled with the howling whoosh of wind and the roar of a thousand charcoal wings.
And one gray winter morning, when Alvin had been thirteen and away at school, his mother had gone looking for a misplaced box of Ball Mason jars in the attic and instead, she'd found the trunk. She had almost forgotten about it, hidden away up there for so many decades, since sometime just after the war and her grandmother's death. She'd been feeling low all morning, her usual bout with the January blues, but suddenly she'd felt a little better, had begun to quietly hum "Bringing in the Sheaves" as she'd cleared away all the junk and clutter piled on top of the trunk. It hadn't been locked, just the two latches that had creaked loud like barn doors in wet weather.
And hours later, when Alvin had come home, he'd seen the smoke all the way from the road, wisp thin, almost white against the sky, rising up from behind the house. The bus ride home from school had been especially bad that day. When he hadn't been looking, when he'd been busy trying to keep Dewayne Snubbs from grabbing his lunch box, one of the Harrigan boys had taken his social studies book, Our Foreign Friends Around the World, and drawn pictures, dirty pictures in ballpoint ink, so that he'd have to rip out five whole pages of the chapter on South America.
And as he'd trudged toward the house through the wind and ice-scabbed snow, the smoke had seemed anything but important; so many things to burn on the farm, empty Purina feed bags or the old papers his father let pile up for weeks on end until they buried the back porch beneath a sprawling drift of newsprint.
Inside, the house had been very dark, no lights on and only the dimmest anemic day filtered through the drawn curtains. Dark and empty and almost as cold as the walk from the road. Alvin had wandered from room to shadowy room, still carrying his books and lunch box, until he'd found his aunt Dora sitting alone at the kitchen table, smoking, tapping ashes into a saucer.
"Auntie Dora?" he'd whispered, setting his school things down on a countertop, suddenly very much afraid; the cold had found its way inside him, had slipped past his teeth and down his throat, had pooled in his bowels like molasses sludge.
"What's happened? Where's Momma?"
She'd said nothing at first, had seemed to watch him from somewhere outside of herself, high up and far away, and then, "She's out there, boy," and she'd motioned toward the back door with the softly glowing tip of her cigarette. "But maybe this time you'd better just consider turning around and ..." but she'd stopped, sighed smoke, and crushed her cigarette out in the saucer.
"She's out back, child."
Alvin had stepped past as she'd fished another Marlboro Red from the pack lying on the gingham tablecloth. Had opened the back door and the screen storm door, and stood shivering on the porch.
His mother and the black circle of earth, scorched and muddy where the snow and frost had melted from the heat. And almost everything already laid inside, already gone to unrecognizable cinder, all the gifts from Charlotte, the thrift store dresses and plastic pearls. The five-and-dime cosmetics and a yellow-green bottle of tea rose. And what little remained, the books and magazines, his comics, a single, burgundy evening glove like flayed velvet skin, in a careless pile at her feet.
A sudden gust had ruffled pages and the fake fur collar of her overcoat, had caused the fire to flare and gutter. She'd turned, fierce eyes loathing him, loathing herself for having made him. Her lips had chapped and cracked open in the cold, and blood flecked her mouth and chin.
"YOU," she'd howled over the prairie wind, "YOU ARE AN ABOMINATION, ALVIN ROBERT CALEB MANN, IN THE BENEVOLENT EYES OF THE LORD YOUR GOD AND THE HOLY HOST OF ANGELS, YOU ARE FILTH AND CORRUPTION AND AN OBSCENITY!"
The paperback dangling in her brightly mittened fingers, The Land of Oz, had fallen onto the fire, and he'd watched its cover blister and darken around the edges, curling back on itself, exposing dog-eared pages, vulnerable words. And Alvin had said nothing, had not cried this time or begged her to stop, had only stood silent and watched.
And when she'd finally dropped to her knees in the slush and turned her face up to the sky, praying for his immortal soul to merciless clouds the color of frostbite and lead, Alvin had knelt on the porch, his hands pressed into the same penitent steeple as hers.
But his eyes had never left the fire.
Charlotte, who'd lain laughing on railroad tracks until the train was so close that Alvin could see the panic in the engineer's eyes, and the ties and rails and limestone ballast had danced in time to the spinning
razor wheels. Charlotte, who wore black lipstick and everyone at school called a witch because she carried an old pack of tarot cards in her purse.
Charlotte, who'd learned to handle rattlesnakes and to drink strychnine mixed with tap water from hanging out at tent revivals, who'd been born two hours and a day and three weeks before him. Who lived with her crazy mother in a lopsided avocado house trailer in the middle of another soybean field, a few miles away from the one where they were lying now, listening to the grind and diesel rumble of the combine harvester, feeling the ground shudder and spasm as the pickup wheel turned and drove row after dirt-clotted row of steel teeth forward.
And it wasn't his life that was rewinding itself behind Alvin's eyes, it was Charlotte, Charlotte, who knew everything, all the writhing, twisted secret things he'd kept shackled inside, because he'd told her and afterward, she'd held him while he'd cried, had cried until he'd thrown up on her bedroom floor, and still she'd held him even after that.
Charlotte, who knew.
She smiled, tear-streaky smile, raised the hand mirror, her cracked Woolworth's looking glass held together by its shell of tawdry, pink plastic, held it like a periscope up above the beans. Inside, there was room for nothing but the red machine's reflection, metal the color of fire trucks and fresh blood.
This is no trick, Alvin screamed, screamed for her to move her ass, to run, pried his fingers free from hers. Above them, the big crow was back, shrieking, and his mind was trying to make words of its noise, imagined desperate, absurd warnings. She dropped the mirror, arms spreading wide, and Charlotte only shook her head no, not yet, something sad and relieved flashing hot across her face, settling in her eyes.
And he let her go, rolled, and was scrambling on all fours, still screaming her name, crushing row after row of the dead, brown plants flat beneath him, until he was somehow up and on his feet, running. Running, and running through fields and pastures, crossing empty highway and dirt back roads, through autumn-leafed stands of cottonwood and sycamore and dry creek beds.
Until at last he tripped, foot snagged by a root or a furrow or a gopher hole and tumbled, landed hard and the air knocked out of him, and lay, choking on the nothing filling his lungs, his lips still forming screams his voice was no longer able to follow through.
Alone in the diner rest room, alone with the stink of Lysol and piss and little blue cakes of toilet cleanser, Alvin leaned over the sink again and splashed his face with the icy cold water gurgling halfheartedly from the tap.
"C'mon, bubullah, you gotta pull this show together now," and he groped blindly for a paper towel, but there was nothing within reach but a tampon dispenser. And that was funny, so he laughed and let his face and soggy red hair drip into the sink.
And behind him, the softest sigh and rustle, frantic, caged flutter of wings, and the slow scrape of something sharp across the tiled walls or floor. He did not turn around, looked slowly up and into the big mirror bolted above the sink. And there was no one and nothing else, just the row of empty stalls, his too-thin sixteen reflection, acne and cadaver greenish skin in the unforgiving fluorescence. Faint hints of stubble shadow and the jutting Adam's apple like a rumor.
But not his parents, come to drag him back, and not Laurleen, come to tell him to get his fag butt out of the ladies' room or she'd call the cops.
And no ghosts, no zombie Charlotte dripping lastminute wisdom like maggots and formaldehyde.
All the ghosts you 're ever gonna need, Alviekins, and he made a pistol of index finger and thumb and pressed it firmly against his right temple. Crammed right in there.
Alvin dried his face on his sleeve, ignored the homesick smell of fabric softener and flannel, and went back out into the diner to wait for the bus.
" 'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now,
here,you see, it takes all the running you can do,
to keep in the same place. If you want to get
somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast
as that.'"
--Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
In memory of Elizabeth Aldridge (1971-1995),
who must have known Despair better than me.
AN EXTRA SMIDGEN OF ETERNITY
Robert Rodi
Bob Rodi wrote a book called What They Did
to Princess Paragon, which was a hilarious
satire on the world of comics--Stephen
King's Misery meets the Chicago Comics
Convention. It's a very funny book. It has a
minor British-writer character in it who
dresses a lot like me, but thinks more like
Alan Moore circa 1984, and behaves like
Grant Morrison (two other strange British
people who write fine comics).
This is a beautiful story, technically de-
lightful, and funny, and sad. Darren isn't the
only one who would like to hear how the
story ends.
The room was still and quite dark when Wanda stuck her head through the door, so she softly called out, "Knock, knock."
Something stirred against the far wall; she could just make out a silhouette as it traversed a murky blob of window.
"Just a sec," said a voice--Ray's voice. A heartbeat later a thin white light hummed into the room, and Wanda caught Ray fingering the light switch that was draped over one arm of Darren's bed.
"That's better," he said, and he scooted around the bedside to greet her with a kiss.
She pecked him on the lips in return, then dropped her import car-sized purse behind the door and followed him into the room. "How's he doing?" she whispered as she gave Darren the once-over.
"Some bad patches," said Ray, running his fingers through his mass of dirty blond hair. "I've just been sitting, holding his hand. Hours. Didn't notice the sun go down." He plopped back into the hideous, off-beige chair. "Actually thought he'd have gone by now. Yesterday, even. We've taken him off everything but morphine. He's running on stubbornness alone." He smiled, somewhat unconvincingly.
Wanda made a move to sit on a corner of the bed, then thought better of it and remained standing. "He looks-- peaceful," she said. She'd almost said "good," but that would've been too gross a lie. Darren's arms and legs were twiglike and gray. His mouth was hanging open like a broken latch. His eye sockets were as deep as billiard pockets. The onslaught of one disease after another had winnowed away bits of him till this was all that was left.
Wanda held her hair from her face and leaned over to kiss him on the forehead. When she did so, he emitted a watery, ancient-sounding sigh.
"Didn't hurt him, did I?" she asked, straightening up quickly.
Ray shook his head. "Course not."
She took a good, hard look at Ray. He wasn't looking so hot, himself. Eyes teary and crimson from lack of sleep. Cheeks hollow from worry. Bit of crusted food at the corner of his mouth. A sour milk body odor.
Wanda had evidently arrived just in time. She went to him and rubbed his shoulders. "When was the last time you ate?" she asked maternally.
He wobbled beneath her ministrations, as though he were made of cloth. "Dunno," he said. "What time's it now?"
"Nearly eleven." She squeezed his neck affectionately. "Off you go, then. Commissary's closed, of course, but there's a pancake house two blocks down. Open all night. I highly recommend the peach cobbler. Tasty, and almost nontoxic."
"Not hungry," he said, rubbing his eyes.
She lifted him by the armpits and put him on his feet; she was so much taller and bulkier than he that it wasn't even an effort. "I don't care if you're not hungry," she said in a mock-stern manner. "I have a right to feel needed and validated, too, and I'm not about to let you deny me that by not letting me watch Barren while you go grab some grub."
He smiled and rubbed his smarting armpits. "Ow. You're a tough bitch."
"Sorry if I hurt you. Bette
r go before I do it again." She settled into the chair while Ray donned his black leather jacket. "Should I read to him, or what?"
"Up to you." He flipped up his collar. "Doubt if he hears a word."
She tsked. "I can't believe that. I have to believe he understands what we're saying. On some level."
He sighed. "Hope you're right."
She brightened. "I'll tell him a story! Everybody loves a good story."
"You got one?"
"With my sordid past? Dozens. Hundreds, even."
He gave her a thumbs-up. "You're a good guy, Wanda."
"Girl, please," she said sharply. "I am in preoperative therapy, you know. And even if I weren't!"
He threw his hands in the air. "Mea fucking culpa!" Then be blew her a kiss and shambled out.
Darren heaved another sigh--this one significantly more bone-rattling than the last. Wanda placed her hand on his (so hot!) and cooed, "Oh, hon, you miss him already? He'll be back in a flash. Meantime, how's about I tell you a nice story?"
She waited for a response, then fancied she saw a twinkle in his eye, and continued. "Got a good one, too. A nice, dishy, scandalous one that has the distinct advantage of being true. What'll I call it? How about--um--'Wanda and the Apparent Errant.' " She paused for a reaction, in vain. "Well, I'm sure you're excited, deep down. Now." She crossed her legs and folded her hands in her lap. "It starts about two years ago. In that old rat trap I had on Avenue A. 'Member?"
No response. Barren stared toward the ceiling, a film over his eyes.
"Wiped it from your memory, huh? Wish I could say the same. Anyway, this pair moves in just around Halloween. Remember the date 'cause there was a smashed pumpkin on the doorstep, all the movers kept having to scoot around it--this big choreographed ordeal while they're carrying, you know, dressers and stuff. I kept thinking, why don't they just spend two minutes sweeping it away? Anyway. Distractions.
"The woman--now, she's the dramatic type. You know? Failed actress. Hell--probably failed acting teacher. Kaftans with big prints. Peacocks. Water lilies. Wearing lots of makeup. Hair pulled back so tight, her lips are cracking. Sees me in the hallway and throws her hands in the air. At first I think she's gonna hit me." She paused, grimaced. "Well, with my history, you blame me?"