“I poisoned their Metamucil,” Jasper replies, and her dad stops reading his paper, waiting to see if it’s gone too far.
“They cut off her first tit when she was fifty,” he says. “A few years later they cut off the other, then a few years after that, she died. My dad lasted another year. He couldn’t handle me so he drove his car into a tree. They tried to sugarcoat it, said something about spinning out, losing control, but it was seventy-five and sunny that day and he left all his bank records out on his desk so I wouldn’t have to look for them.”
“That sucks,” she says.
“They were old,” says Jasper.
She catches a brief glance that passes between Jasper and her dad. Eddie’s face is round and soft with no strong nose or chin to distinguish it. His is a face of expressions rather than features, and it is rare she catches, through the mugging, a look of tenderness. Something this close to human is unsettling.
“We’re happy you’re here with us,” he says.
“Kids. Eddie,” Mom calls, more annoyed. “Lunch is on the table.”
“I’m washing my hands,” shouts Wallis. “Like you said.”
Wallis hoists herself up and walks to the half bath. This is one of the few concessions her parents made when Jasper moved in. She didn’t want to share her bathroom so they let him take over this one. Except for the damp towels, it would be impossible to say he lived here, in this house. He cleans up after himself meticulously, as if he wants to leave no incriminating evidence. If he fixes a sandwich, he sweeps away the crumbs and returns the mayonnaise to the refrigerator. There is never a smelly tennis shoe left under the sofa. Unless Mom forces them to play a board game or watch television together, he mostly stays in his room, emerging only to show her something. Yet even when his door is closed, Wallis feels his eyes on her. Nothing feels normal since he moved in, and she walks through her days as if she’s in a movie, playing the role of herself. Before he came, she took her life for granted but now, through his eyes, she is conscious of her place in the Happy Family and how lucky she is supposed to feel to have one.
Wallis squirts some of her mother’s new gardenia scented hand soap into her palm and rubs. She doesn’t look any different in the bathroom mirror. The same chin-length chestnut bob (If you’re not going to take care of it, I’m getting it cut short). The same pale skin and faint freckles across the bridge of her nose. She is one of the few girls at school without big hair, but Mom says it’s cheap and, anyway, Wallis doesn’t like to stick out. She likes that the other girls are vaguely afraid of the big, fat No of her, which comes with being the daughter of Captain Casket. She rinses her hands and holds her mouth under the bathroom faucet. A single frizzed strand of red clings to the pearl-pink basin of the sink. Here in the bathroom, he’s let down his guard. Now that she’s noticed the hair she sees, looking down at the nap of the rug, a brittle triangle of fingernail paring. And another. And another. In all, five forgotten snippets left for her to step on, and without knowing what she’ll do with them or why she wants them, Wallis picks the fingernail clippings from the rug and pushes them, along with the strand of hair, deep into her front pocket. Boys should be careful what they leave behind for girls, she thinks, and is startled by a sharp rap on the door.
“Hurry up,” her father says.
Jasper is already there when she takes her seat at the round Formica table. She sits more easily now, knowing that she has something of his. Mom asks him to pour the lemonade, giving him a chore to show she trusts him with responsibility. Mom is still uneasy having him in the house, though it was her idea that he come live with them in the first place. Later, Wallis would wonder if it had all been an elaborate trick, if Eddie had planned it all along, knowing Mom was incapable of turning away a stray, knowing once the idea had been mentioned she would have to pursue it, to show that anything was possible, that, as always, he gave up too easily. They were sitting at this very table the first time her dad spoke of the boy who hung out at the station, who took any job thrown his way, took it gratefully and did it well, seemingly having no place else to go. It was a Sunday in May, Mother’s Day, and later she would wonder if that, too, hadn’t been carefully worked into the plot, playing that particular day on Mom’s sadness about not having given her husband another child, a son, even though he acted perfectly content with Wallis (Mom: Oh, my poor daughter saddled with a boy’s name for life. God, I should have put my foot down). The three of them were sitting around the table and Wallis said grace and Eddie sliced a ham and he’d mentioned the boy so casually, too casually, saying, You know, he reminds me of myself at that age. Where are his parents? Mom had asked, and Eddie had shrugged, as if such a thing were unimportant. I don’t know if he has any. He’s been sleeping in the hall outside the control room.
Her mother set down her fork as if she’d been slapped. How could he possibly think she would allow a fifteen-year-old boy to sleep in a hall when they had all this extra room (When did she ever even go into the upstairs sewing room? Who sewed anymore?) and plenty of money. What sort of monster did he take her for? He never would have brought it up if he didn’t expect her to do something about it.
And then Mom had taken off, researching in her secretive Momish way, the methods by which they might legally take him in, because they could not be so casual as Eddie would have it, he always assumed things would just work out. If the boy was an orphan, he should be reported to the state and they could offer themselves as a foster family. If he was a runaway, his parents should be notified that he’d like to declare himself emancipated. Mom would have prayed he was an orphan, because if he were a runaway, she’d always wonder why he couldn’t get along with his parents—if the fault lay with him or them. She would have gone to the library and thumbed the card catalog and phoned the right agencies, all the while telling herself she was just collecting information, not committing herself to anything, and while Eddie was at work and Wallis was at school, she would have listed her sewing machine in the Trading Post and driven to Sears and bought an aqua blue bedspread and orange pillows and worried a bit that she had inadvertently bought the colors of some sports team he hated, but then she would have chided herself with worrying about nothing—for goodness’ sakes, I can’t know everything!—but still looked up orange and blue so that she might apologize if he didn’t like the Miami Dolphins. Mom would have thought she’d wait until the end of the school year before she told them that everything was taken care of, that Eddie could invite the boy to live with them. But then one night she would have decided that Eddie seemed especially distant and she just couldn’t take it anymore, his being angry with her, and that’s exactly how Wallis found out a foster brother was being test-driven for the summer. Her mother had led them both upstairs and flung open the door to the newly transformed sewing room and said, It would mean so much to me if we could take in that boy from your station, and her father had seemed really confused for a minute, as if the thought had never occurred to him, and had said, You mean Jasper? And Mom, having spent over a month surreptitiously decorating his room, replied, Jasper? That’s his name?
Waiting for Eddie to join them, they sit with their hands in their laps. Jasper stares at the tray of carrots and celery floating in ice on the lazy Susan at the center of the table, puzzled as to whether it is food or decoration. Everything Mom makes feels like a ladies’ luncheon.
“What’s the movie tonight?” she asks.
“Something about an alien,” Wallis answers.
“So, I spoke to Cary and we’re all set,” Mom says, abruptly lowering her voice conspiratorially. “He’ll have a table waiting for you at seven on Friday. You need to keep your dad there until at least eight-thirty so that everyone has a chance to get here. But make sure he’s home by nine at the very latest.”
Mom had begun planning the surprise party for Eddie as soon as she was done planning the surprise of Jasper. The party was the following week, and she had assigned Wallis and Jasper the job of keeping him away while the c
aterers set up so that he might return home to be surprised and delighted by the prop coffin full of beer, the novelty canapés, the coworkers dressed as vampires and madmen (Their wives: Where are we supposed to get costumes in August? Why does she always make things so hard?).
“I don’t want to sit through another dinner at Cary’s,” Wallis protests. “Couldn’t we do something else?”
Mom presses her lips tightly together. “Have you thought of something?” she asks.
Wallis looks to Jasper but he just shrugs. “You’ll have to ask him,” Wallis says. “He’ll never believe I want to go.”
“Thank you, kids,” Mom says, relieved. “I knew I could count on you.” Then, because she is done scheming and can give way to her exasperation, she shouts over her shoulder, “Eddie! We’re all waiting for you.”
“Tuna. Crudités. Ann, as always, our appreciation for this bounteous feast.”
Eddie is standing in the archway, surveying the table. Mom gives her half smile of acknowledgment and defensiveness.
“It has sweet pickle,” she offers. He sits and her apology for trying to please him is accepted. Wallis plucks the toothpick from her sandwich and licks the mayonnaise from the tip.
“Wallis tells me the movie tonight is something about an alien,” Mom says.
“An alien, yes,” Dad replies. “It’s about a quivering blob that oozes across the manicured side lawns of a neighborhood much like this one you found for us, imbibing koi ponds and belching out the bones of cement birdbaths, swallowing up any and all who stand in its way, until it finds its bottomless, tyrannical appetite finally sated with the unholy sustenance of tuna fish and sweet pickle.”
Mom sets down her napkin, pushing back her chair.
“Would you care for something else?” she asks acidly.
“Sit down, Ann,” he laughs. “You need to lighten up.”
She does, but the meal belongs to Eddie; he’s taken his shit on the ladies’ luncheon and now they can all relax. Jasper wolfs down his sandwich, Wallis spins the lazy Susan until it is a green and orange blur. Mom sips her lemonade while they joke about people down at the station that she doesn’t know, and her dad tells Jasper the story about how once, back in the early days of the show, when things were live and much more unpredictable, he set off a smoke bomb and almost got himself fired. “The kids loved that stuff,” he says. “Didn’t they, Ann?”
Mom replies, “Yes, Eddie, they did, the kids loved that stuff.”
“What are you going to show for the anniversary?” Jasper asks. Wallis kicks him under the table. Don’t get him started or we’ll be stuck here all afternoon.
“Frankenstein,” he replies. “It was the first movie I showed.”
“I know,” Jasper says. “It’s the first movie in the Shock! package.”
“Ann’s father bought the Shock! package very early on,” Eddie says. “It had all the classics—Dracula, The Wolfman, The Mummy, along with a bunch of crap—‘beware the gypsy’ and ‘don’t walk about on the moors’ sorts of things. Ann, you remember that, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” she says.
“Your mother is very modest,” he says to Wallis, “but Captain Casket was really her idea. Your granddad owned the station back then. When he bought the Shock! package, Ann insisted I host it. I hadn’t really thought about it. We had our own show, your mother and I, and, of course, I did the weather, but she thought it would be good for my career, it would advance me, you know. I wanted to call myself Bela LeGhostly, but she thought that was too obscure, by which she meant European. Something American and strong, she said. Something manly, that’s what you need. And then she sewed my tights and unitard and little cape. She designed my makeup and painted my set. Ann has always taken such good care of me.”
Eddie collects the plates and takes them to the dishwasher. He leans over Jasper and reaches across him for his glass.
“The love of a good woman shows us who we are,” he says. “Let those words be my gift to you, son.”
Jasper glances up and again Wallis sees something pass between them. It looks as close to pity as his last glance approached tenderness.
“Let’s hit the road, kids,” he says. “We still need to load the coffin.”
Wallis glances over at Mom, who will spend Saturday night here, alone, while the three of them go to the station. When she was very young she used to wake to the grind of the blender on Saturday nights, Mom making herself a half pitcher of frozen daiquiris. She would smell the invitation of strawberries and popcorn, and stumble to the kitchen where Mom would smile innocently—What are you doing awake?—and instead of leading her back to bed as she did on the nights Eddie was home, would pour her a shot glass of ruby slush and together they would sit nestled on the sofa in the darkened den, eating popcorn and watching Dad. Wallis was never sure whether she was awake or dreaming, the images came and went as the night wore on, shadowy faces on the screen, her mother’s still, lovely profile, Captain Casket’s manic patter bracketing commercials for furniture liquidators and used-car lots. All she remembered was the floating feeling of sleep and rum and safety.
Jasper stands at the patio door, her dad is already headed to the carport where he parks his long black Miller-Meteor hearse.
“Wait up,” she says.
The fog of the graveyard weaves between tombstones. The full moon hangs heavy in a jaggedly painted sky. The coffin, center stage, and the pale hand reaching up, opening the lid from inside. The deep groan, the rattle of chains. The bloodcurdling shriek. Mom, almost twenty years ago. They still haven’t found a scarier scream.
You do my makeup better than anyone in the world, he’d said to Wallis in the dressing room after he finished the weather, as the Soul Train feed ran, brought to them by the mysterious elixirs of Afro Sheen and Ultra Sheen. And it was true. This was something that was theirs alone. She took her time, as people do when making up someone else. She slicked his hair with the black shoe polish and drew in a widow’s peak. She stippled on the white greasepaint, feathering it into his hairline and over his eyelids and sweeping it down into the hollow of his throat; they wanted no trace of healthy human flesh peeking through. With her fingers she ran the greasepaint over his ears, where it blurred gray with the shoe polish, and then she shaded in dark shadows under his eyes, following the outline of the dark shadows already there. She drew his lips deeply red and sinister and left it up to his jokes to soften them. The more she put on, the more she erased, and soon the white moonscape of Captain Casket had reached its gibbous state and Eddie was nearly gone, and she had the fleeting wish that they were not her fingers moving on his slack cheeks, that she could be like other girls and just gaze up at her father’s face shining down over her bed as he tucked her in. And maybe her father could read her mind, because he caught her eye in the mirror and flashed her that reassuring Captain Casket grin, and she thought they were both a little relieved to see his reflection there and to know that, yes, he still had a soul.
The sirens go off and the noosed skeletons drop from the rafters, gyrating like go-go dancers. The disco ball, the blare of music, kids singing off-key—his first Casketeers. All her life she’s sung along:
Who’s the digger of the grave,
For you, and you, and me?
C-A-P
T-A-N
C-A-S-K-T
Come and squirm with all the worms,
And set your spirit free.
C-A-P
T-A-N
C-A-S-K-T
And her father, complete in his transformation, tumbling violently out of the coffin into a tight somersault, springing up in quick recovery, manic, alive, as spry tonight as he was in 1967. She stands just offstage in the wings with her toes on the glow tape for Quiz Kids, which shoots on Monday nights, entranced. Jasper holds a pitcher of water he’s poured on the pan of dry ice to create the fog. John and Jack, the cameramen who love Eddie, who have worked with him for twenty years now and are incorporated into his gags, pl
aying offstage voices—Corporal Bones, Cemetery Sam—all the characters he’s cooked up over the years to keep Captain Casket company, grin and nod. They’re game enough to ad-lib some bad lines if he swings toward them, get spiders down their shirts, fake blood on the camera lens. They love her father because when the movie is running, in between bits, he’ll play gin with them, comfortable in that guy’s world of cameras and cables. He is his best self here; for two hours he is completely free. It’s why all the kids love him. Even her. The camera pans in.
“I have a treat for you tonight, guys and ghouls,” Captain Casket purrs. “A film so perfectly dreadful, so agonizingly boring, it’s been held directly responsible for the deaths of sixteen middle school students up and down the Eastern seaboard. It’s a cyanide pill of a film, it’s so bad it will take you directly to your father’s bathroom sink for that rusty razor blade sitting in the pool of soap scum, or your mother’s underwear drawer for that little orange bottle of pills Dr. Whatzizfeld prescribed for when she wants to float away and forget all about you and your monstrous little siblings.”
“Here’s your cat,” Jasper whispers, handing her the wired-together feline skeleton she named Fluffy. “When Eddie laughs for the third time, after the cauldron has been brought in, toss it to him. Not too hard; underhand, like this.”
“I know what to do,” she says.
He is wearing thick work gloves and reaches into the red-rimmed canister for another triangle of dry ice. He places it in a metal pan just offstage and douses it with water. Wallis shivers as the cold wings get even colder.
“Would you rather freeze to death or burn to death?” he asks.
“I don’t want to do either,” she says.
“But if you had to?”
“I would freeze to death,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because it would be uncomfortable for a while but then I would start to feel warm and go to sleep and let my soul blow away like snow.”
“Freezing to death is for pussies,” he says. “I’d go out fast and fiery and get it over with.”