Craft Essay #6 - Carter/Carey

Craft Essay #6:

Saints and Strangers by Angela Carter

meets

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

I.

Angela Carter’s story collection Saints and Strangers is about language—crazy, glorious, spinning, glittering language. She hangs her language like technicolor laundry across the sturdy clotheslines of such iconic tales as Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the legend of Lizzie Borden, the sad life of Edgar Allan Poe, and Baudelaire’s infatuation with Jeanne Duval. Carter uses language and other techniques—summary, tone, point of view—to subvert these stories and twist them to fit her view of the world.
Behold the heightened language of “The Fall River Axe Murders”: “the dark, satanic mills” (p. 9), “a stangulatory neck tie” (p. 9), “this burning morning” (p. 9), “domestic apocalypse” (p. 11)—all in the red-hot first few pages! And the accumulation of adjectives: “sweet, sensual, horizontal thing” (p. 9), “the large, accusing, blue stare” (p. 17), “her soft, warm, enormous bum” (p. 22). And the alliteration: “In a blue serge suit one look at which would be enough to bring you out in a prickly heat, Andrew Borden will perambulate the perspiring town truffling for money like a pig” (p. 10); “For he held himself upright with such ponderous assertion it was a perpetual reminder to all who witnessed his progress” (p. 19). The repetition: “Hot, hot, hot” (p. 9), “Bustle! bustle! bustle!” (p. 9), and
Still, all still; in the house nothing moves except the droning fly and the stillness on the staircase crushes him, he falls still. Stillness pressing against the blinds, stillness, mortal stillness in the room below, where Master and Mistress share the matrimonial bed.
All this linguistic hysteria and yet, at the same time, Carter’s language grounds us by, in effect, rubbing our noses in the smell, taste, and feel of what it was like to be in the Borden household on that fateful August day. Then, perversely, after setting us up like a chicken with its neck stretched out on the block, she does not even document the murders! Her narrator—a modern observer jaded enough to acknowledge that the presence of a Borden family friend (one John Vinnicum Morse) is inconvenient to a story designed for “the maximum emblematic effect” (p. 11)—is more interested in the potential causes of Lizzie’s violent outburst: an unspecified form of mental illness (bipolar disorder?) synchronized with her menstrual cycle.
Carter repeats this cause-and-effect theme in “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe,” where her savvy third-person narrator demonstrates how Poe’s unfortunate childhood inspired his dark poetry and tales of death, not to mention his fatal alcoholism. Her weapon of choice in this endeavor is, of course, language. Here’s how she (for this narrator is a woman just as surely as Philip Roth’s is a man) describes the birth of Edgar’s little sister: “They heard the shrill cry of the new-born in the exhausted silence, like the sound of the blade of a skate on ice, and something bloody as a fresh-pulled tooth twitched between the midwife’s pincers” (p. 73). Again, there are those pile-ups of adjectives: “Veins as blue as those on Stilton cheese but muscular, palpitating, prominent, lithe, stood out on her forehead” (p. 74). When poor Edgar’s actress mother dies and the three Poe children are doled out to various foster homes, the narrator wonders when they will meet again: “the church bell tolled: never, never, never, never, never” (p. 75). How could Poe not have grown up to write “The Masque of the Red Death”?
“Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a tongue-in-cheek setup for Shakespeare’s comedy, narrated by the magical fairy adopted by Titania. As in the other stories in the collection, the language is a head-spinning combination of timeless poetry and contemporary lingo. “Child of the sun am I, and of the breezes, juicy as mangoes” (p. 91) rubs up against lines like “Puck is no more polymorphously perverse than all the rest of the sub-microscopic particles” (p. 90). The narrator is at once a sexually ambiguous sprite and a modern academic type who goes on at length about the difference between the English woods known to Shakespeare and the “necromantic forest” where the Bard’s comedy is set (p. 87). Paradoxically, as in the other tales, these linguistic and intellectual flights of fancy not only amuse and entertain but also somehow grab our lapels and yank us into her bizarre world.
“Peter and the Wolf” ignores the Prokofiev folk tale in favor of a dark, disturbing version held together by the author’s total command of language: “The howling of the wolves mutilated the approaching silence of the night” (p. 59). Here is a description of the wolf-girl’s genitalia as glimpsed by Peter: “a set of Chinese boxes of whorled flesh that seemed to open one upon another into herself, drawing him into an inner, secret place in which destination perpetually receded before him” (p. 63).
Like the other stories, “Peter and the Wolf” relies heavily on summary, as several years are compressed into eight short pages:
A girl from the village on the lower slopes left her widowed mother to marry a man who lived up in the empty places. Soon she was pregnant. In October, there was a severe storm. The old woman knew her daughter was near her time and waited for a message but none arrived. After the storm passed, the old woman went up to see for herself, taking her grown son with her because she was afraid. (p. 59)
This technique is consistent with the old folk tales and legends the author is upending. But then she will pause and describe something in a prose so sharp it cuts:
If they had not been the first wolves he had ever seen, the boy would not have inspected them so closely, their plush, grey pelts, of which the hairs are tipped with white, giving them a ghostly look, as if they were on the point of dissolving at the edges; their sprightly, plumey tails; their acute, inquisitive masks. (p. 60)

This contrast is echoed by the narrator’s tone, which careens throughout the book from the wildly eccentric (“He saw the primitive, vast, magnificent, barren, unkind, simplicity of the mountain” [p. 67]) to the authoritatively concrete (from “Axe Murders”: “Bridget’s lopsided shoes stand together on a hand-braided rug of aged rags” [p. 12]) to the amusingly vague (that same authoritative narrator admits, when describing the Bordens’ Saturday meal, “I don’t know if they had greens or not” [p. 20]). This stark contrast—between summary and specificity, and between several tones—creates a weirdly pleasurable frisson.
The dichotomy is most boldly clear in the collection’s final piece, “Black Venus.” From pages 111 to 118, the third-person narrator tells the story of an exotic black dancer/prostitute and her poet lover. Few specifics are given—no names (just “she” and “Daddy,” as in “sugar daddy”), and even pinning down the time frame requires some math skills (thanks to a reference to Josephine Baker’s fame “a hundred years later” [p. 114]). But there are plenty of fireworks in the language: “She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off” (p. 111); “Night comes in on feet of fur” (p. 112); she had “the voice of a crow reared on honey” (p. 118). Then, on page 118, the narrative suddenly transforms from what feels like another legend into a factual account of the relationship between Charles Baudelaire (the poet) and his muse, Jeanne Duval (the dancer). Dates are provided, places named. Baudelaire’s notes are referred to (pp. 118-9). But even as the narrator grounds us in facts, she continues with the stunning poetic language. On page 121, she describes the Antarctic: “Down there, far down, where the buttocks of the world slim down again.” When Baudelaire was aroused, “his Lazarus arose and knocked unbidden on the coffin-lid of the poet’s trousers” (p. 122). And of course there are the adjective-mad descriptions: “She walked beside him like an ambulant fetish, savage, obscene, terrifying” (p. 122).
Like Peter staring at the wolf-girl’s “forbidden book,” we are at once repulsed by and attracted to these stories with their raw, glistening words; their unflinching descriptions of bodily functions and their high-falutin’ poetry; their intellectual analysis and their slangy informalities. There is a staggering intelligence behind it all, someone with a clever intellectual agenda, but what pushes these stories under our skin is the language.

II.

Like Saints and Strangers, Peter Carey’s picaresque novel True History of the Kelly Gang derives much of its power from language. But unlike Carter’s erudite narrators, Carey’s first-person narrator, infamous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, is a semi-literate character whose limitations are his strength.
For example, because of Ned’s near-total lack of formal education (though he has read R.D. Blackmore’s classic adventure, Lorna Doone), he does not bother with such formalities as commas or quotation marks. More than illustrating the narrator’s grammatical ignorance, this lends the storytelling a headlong, propulsive quality appropriate to Ned’s adventures. It also forces the reader to concentrate, so as to make sense of such sentences as
She prayed Almighty and merciful God who has commissioned Thy angels to guide and protect us command them to be our companions from our setting out until our return to clothe us with their invisible protection to keep us from all danger of collision of fire of explosion of fall and bruises. (p. 242)

Another grammatical issue is Ned’s tendency to misconjugate the verb “to be”: “It were during Sgt O’Neill’s hateful reign…” (p. 13); “We wasn’t finished tending to the pigs” (p. 13). This beguiling quirk lends Ned’s writing the quality of everyday speech, and somehow makes him all the more likable.
Another of Ned’s more charming limitations is self-imposed. Because the novel is primarily composed of episodes he has written down for his young daughter to read, the polite bank robber and horse thief avoids offensive curse words. Sometimes he does this with the use of dashes (e.g., “bastard” becomes “b-----d” [p. 115]). At other times, he resorts to the well-known substitutions of “eff” and “ess, ” as in “It was eff this and ess that” (p. 9) or “What’s he effing want?” (p. 111). Most resourcefully, Ned often replaces “fucking” with “adjectival,” as in “Get out of my adjectival chair” (p. 34). This last technique creates an odd effect for the reader, who must take the extra nanosecond to re-place the original word. It both pulls us out of the story—in a way that reminds us that this was written by a “real-life” person—and pulls us in by forcing us to write the story with him.
Despite Ned’s limitations—or perhaps because of them—he is capable of dazzling and colorful wordplay, particularly when employing similes: “Peering sideways at her like a chook about to peck a cabbage stalk” (p. 108); his parents were “ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history” (p. 92); “as peaceful as a broody hen” (p. 57). These and the liberal use of quaint phrases (e.g., when the family cows were unable to produce, it was because “the milk had gone up into the cow’s horns” [p. 99]), and unique Australian terms (“bowyangs” [p. 94]; “mia mia” [p. 73]) give the tale a palpable sense of authenticity, and root us in the time and place.
Throughout the novel Ned also makes use of abbreviations such as “v.” for “very” and “cd.” for “could.” Toward the end of his story, as seemingly all of Australia’s police force is closing in on him, Ned employs these abbreviations even more, since he doesn’t have the luxury of writing out full words (“Time is of the essence daughter” he writes on p. 353). This technique, like the lack of punctuation, helps propel the story forward, and it also bolsters the charming conceit that these chapters are actual transcripts quickly scrawled by Ned Kelly himself. This marks another major difference between True History of the Kelly Gang and Saints and Strangers: whereas Carter’s narrators seem to be speaking from a place outside the story (even the first-person ones, such as the fairy narrator of “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” who uses the language of a modern intellectual), Carey places Ned firmly in his time and place. He even goes so far as to precede each of the thirteen “parcels” of manuscript pages with a brief description of the type of paper used by “their author” (e.g., National Bank letterhead, for Parcel One) and their condition (e.g., “dust soiling along [the] edges” of the pages of Parcel Two), much as a museum or a bookseller might describe an actual historical document.
Occasionally, Ned will resort to alternative techniques in order to round out the sweeping story. He includes newspaper accounts of the Kelly Gang’s exploits (complete with snarky annotations made by his girlfriend, Mary Hearn [p. 303]), or scenes reported (in first-person) to him by friends or family, such as Joe Byrne’s vivid retelling of Ned’s boxing match with Wild Wright (p. 106). There are also a few mysterious scenes of Ned’s mother, Ellen, written from Ned’s point of view even though he is miles away and not a direct witness. While it’s possible that Ellen later recounted these episodes to Ned, who then included them in his narrative, the impression is that there is some sort of telepathic element at work (the two of them are especially close, so much so that one of Ellen’s beaus calls Ellen Ned’s “girlfriend”). This impression is reinforced by the spooky nature of these scenes, which include the appearance of the dreaded Banshee (p. 91) and the curse of Kevin the Rat Charmer (p. 173). Thus, even as he switches point of view, Carey is technically agile enough to convince us that this is a first-person narrative told by a simple man in 19th century Australia.
Carey bumps up against the built-in confines of the first-person narrative only when it comes to the wounding and capture of Kelly by police, since Ned is unable to write down the details of the event himself. The siege at Glenrowan comprises the only third-person sections wholly independent of Ned’s account (I don’t include the newspaper clippings because Ned has made it clear that he has pasted them into his notes). The novel includes two separate descriptions of the siege. The first is an “unsigned, undated, handwritten account” placed at the very beginning of the novel (p. 3). The second is placed at the end (p. 357) and includes a scene with Thomas Curnow, the schoolteacher responsible for Kelly’s capture. This second version of events is credited to an “S.C.” (Curnow’s wife? She would be the only one privy to the scene with her husband, though how she would know what went on elsewhere during the siege is unclear). Carey’s thorough devotion to maintaining “authenticity” in these sections—by, for example, providing convincing notes (complete with references to the library where the accounts can be found)—lends even more believability to Ned’s first-person narrative.
In both Saints and Strangers and True History of the Kelly Gang we are in the hands of great storytellers. While their techniques may be wildly different on the surface—Carter’s heightened, heavily saturated legends vs. Carey’s more grounded “true history”—their stunning narrative techniques are both held together by authenticity of detail and, most of all, language.

49 LOVE LANE - Section 4

7. Windows

I was at the playground, pushing Daisy on the swing set and thinking about how to tell Abby about losing my job, when I recognized Kevin Prince, the previous owner of 49 Love Lane. We’d met briefly a few months earlier, when we had the house inspected. The place was empty at the time except for some tools he was removing from the garage. He’d been pleasant enough, wishing us well, but he had also seemed distracted and in a hurry.
“Kevin?” I called. He looked up from helping his young son climb some steps up to the slide. He clearly did not recognize me. “Carl Hammond,” I said. “Forty-nine Love Lane?” His face registered the information. He nodded and waved while his boy careened down the metal sliding board.
I scooped Daisy up and walked over, dodging several rambunctious children as they tore around the playground. It was the most elaborate playground I’d ever seen, with slides and jungle gyms and swings and zip lines. The ground was covered with a soft black layer of recycled rubber, which absorbed the heat so that I could feel it through the soles of my sandals.
“It’s Carl,” I said again, holding Daisy tightly as she squirmed in my arms. She was upset I’d interrupted her play.
“Of course,” Prince said. “I remember now.”
His face was fleshier than I remembered, and a pot belly pushed at the fabric of his polo shirt. His khaki shorts revealed a pair of knobby and weirdly hairless legs.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Good, thanks. Hey, I had a question about the house, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure.”
Daisy continued squirming so I set her down on the sand, where she crawled to the foot of the slide. She smiled at Prince’s boy as he zoomed down the board.
“Were you very familiar with the history of the house?” I asked.
“Not really. We didn’t even meet the previous owners. Why?”
“Just curious.”
I grinned with disproportionate pride as Daisy pulled herself up onto her feet and grasped the side of the slide, where she hung on for dear life.
“We heard a crazy story about the place is all,” I said to Prince.
“What kind of story?”
“Well, apparently, some numbskull murdered a little baby in the house.”
From the look on Prince’s face I could tell he hadn’t heard this story.
“Jesus. When did that happen?”
“Twenty-some years ago.”
“I’m glad I didn’t know.”
His son climbed up the stairs and swished down the slide again. Daisy watched, fascinated.
“So you never noticed anything strange about the house?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“Well, a neighbor told me that some people thought it was haunted.”
Prince watched as his boy went down the slide head first.
“Careful, Grayson.” Then, to me: “I never noticed anything.”
I was struck by the emphasis on the pronoun. “How about your wife?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You’d have to ask her.”
“Is she around?”
He snorted. “We’re separated at the moment.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear that.”
“Shit happens, right?”
“That’s for sure.”
For some reason I was tempted to tell Prince about losing my job. Maybe I thought he’d understand my dilemma. Maybe I just needed a guy friend who would take my side. But I held back, and instead asked if he’d ever noticed anything odd about any of the neighbors.
“Like who?”
“I guess I was thinking of the Johnstons,” I said.
“Not really. But then I didn’t socialize much. My wife—or whatever you call her now—she’s the one who got around like that.”
So your experience with the house was a good one,” I said.
“Honestly? We never should’ve bought the place.”
“Why not?”
“Everything changed somehow.”
“Well, that happens when you have a kid,” I said.
“It was more than that,” he said. “She changed.”
“And you blame the house?”
“No, you‘re right. I guess I just associate all that crap with the house because that’s when things started falling apart.”
He gazed off toward a teenage girl watching her two younger siblings. He girl’s jeans hung so low you could easily imagine what lay beneath the zipper.
“Damn,” he said. “All these little foxes.”
“Now, now, Kevin.”
“Right—like you don’t feel the itch when you see that.”
The girl lifted up her little sister and a three-inch expanse of smooth skin shown between her jeans and her blouse. I didn’t say anything.
“You’d better watch out with this one,” Prince said, nodding at Daisy.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, with a boy—“ he pointed at his son, “—I only have to worry about one penis. With a girl, you have to worry about every penis.”
I laughed, but I also pictured a fourteen-year-old Daisy in those low-riding jeans, smiling at the boys who—I remembered—wanted nothing more than to pull them down.
Prince’s son tore down the slide head first again, his feet flailing over the side. One of his sneakers caught Daisy on the head, and down she went.
“Grayson!” Prince cried. “Be more careful!”
Daisy sat on the ground, her face blushed and her mouth open wide, but no sound emerged. I picked her up and checked her ear. It was red, but there was no blood.
“Sorry about that, Cal,” Prince said. “Is she okay?”
“I think so.”
“Grayson—say you’re sorry to the little girl.”
The boy, who was a lean version of his father, mumbled an apology.
“C’mon, we gotta go,” Prince said. “We need to get you back to your mother.” He turned to me and said, “Good seeing you, Cal. Good luck.”
“It’s Carl,” I said, but he didn’t hear me as he walked away.
Daisy had still not uttered a sound. She quaked in my arms, tears streaking her pink cheeks. Finally, she let out a choked breath, and started bawling.
*
By the time we arrived home Daisy was sound asleep. I lifted her from the car seat and carried her in to the house. Her skin was hot from the sun, her sweaty thin hair pasted across her head. She seemed heavier than usual as I lowered her into the crib, where she rolled onto her side, snorted, and continued sleeping.
Feeling tired myself, I made my way to our bedroom, only now noticing that Abby was nowhere to be seen. I’d expected her to be in the yard working on the garden when we returned, but there was just a rake lying on the grass next to a pair of gloves. Then I saw the bedroom door was shut. I hesitated. I’d been avoiding Abby as much as possible since the meeting with Berk two days earlier. When I’d returned from the meeting that afternoon, after driving around for to hours, she noted how long I’d been gone but didn’t ask how it went, and I certainly didn’t want to talk about it. Now, with every passing moment, it was getting more difficult to even think about bringing it up. Of course the truth had to come out, but I kept telling myself I needed time to process it and to make a plan. Which I hadn’t yet done.
I pushed open the bedroom door as if I were entering a dark, cobwebby cellar to investigate a strange noise. I was hoping Abby would be sound asleep and I could slide in beside her unnoticed. But when I peeked in I found her lying on top of the sheets completely naked, wide awake, with a grin on her face. This was something she used to do years ago, long before Daisy arrived, when she was feeling especially amorous.
“Well, don’t look so disappointed.”
“No no no. I’m just surprised is all.”
It seemed like ages since I’d seen her naked in the daytime. She was always quick to throw on her clothes or a robe, as if exposure to daylight would singe her bare skin. I’d forgotten how long her legs were, and though she’d lost weight her figure had retained some of its youthful hourglass shape.
“Are you gonna just stand there like an idiot?”
I wasn’t exactly in the mood, but I knew this was a rare opportunity, so I quickly pulled off my clothes and lay down next to her.
“How’s my Daisy?” she asked, putting her face close to mine.
“Good.”
“She had fun?”
“Yes.”
I had to admit it was a little intoxicating to feel the heat coming off her naked skin. She kissed me softly while running a finger around my chest and down my belly.
“Mmm,” she said, glancing down at my crotch. “I see Carl, Jr., is awake.”
The lying naked on the bed, the finger, the Carl, Jr., reference—it was like making out with an old girlfriend. When we kissed I felt that familiar tingle rolling around my skin.
“What’s gotten into you?” I asked as she kissed my stomach en route south.
“Are you complaining?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Then shut up already.”
With that she took me into her mouth and my head shot up on my neck as if I’d been given a pleasant shock. That’s when I noticed, through the open window, Monica Johnston in her yard. She was sitting on a folding lawn chair in her cut-off jeans and a frilly white blouse, sipping from a can of Coke and talking to someone I couldn’t see. Holding my breath, I tried to listen but all I could make out above Abby’s soft moaning was a buzzy chatter punctuated by the occasional laugh. At first I worried that the girl could see us, but it was bright outside and the bedroom would surely appear dark from there. Then the idea that she could see us became sort of exciting, and I felt ashamed, and like the inevitable thunder after a flash of lightning I saw the pale, unblemished face of Okay Peterson looking up at me while doing exactly what Abby was doing now. I lay my head back down and tried to re-enter the moment, which was fairly easy since Abby was working on me with an enthusiasm I hadn’t seen in years. Then, as if I couldn’t feel guilty enough, I started to feel bad about passively lying there enjoying myself.
“Hold on,” I said. “Don’t you want me to do you a little bit?”
Abby sat up and, wearing a determined expression, straddled me.
“I can’t wait,” she said.
She reached down, slipped me inside her, and started riding like a jockey on the final straightaway. Though it felt fantastic I was having a difficult time losing myself. She was behaving so differently, writhing atop me and grunting—this was not the usual quiet, perfunctory performance of a long-married mother. For a moment I became anxious, remembering a steady girlfriend in college whose reinvigorated libido was due, it turned out, to an affair she was having with her English professor. But I couldn’t imagine Abby sleeping with someone else. She had a powerful sense of loyalty, which had made things all the more traumatic when the Okay Peterson thing exploded.
“Oh God,” she groaned, and I became very aware of the open window.
“Shh,” I said, smiling, trying to make it funny, but she didn’t even acknowledge me. Her face was red and sweaty, and that weird combination of sexy and ugly that happens when inhibition is gone.
“Oh God!” she repeated, even louder. Then she suddenly stopped and climbed off. “C’mon,” she said, getting onto all fours. She positioned herself facing the window, so I knew she could see Monica out there, still on the lawn chair.
“Not so loud,” I said, kneeling behind her. From here I could see that Monica was chatting with her father as he tinkered with the lawnmower. He looked comical in a bright red and blue Hawaiian shirt. Neither of them seemed aware of what Abby and I were up to.
“Come on!” Abby said, reaching down between her legs to grab me. As I slid in she let out a loud groan and I couldn’t help it, I had to look out and see if Arnie and Monica had noticed. They continued talking as before.
By now I was so self-conscious that I was completely outside myself. I pushed and pulled and went through all the sticky motions but I may as well have been out in that yard with the Johnstons, listening. Still, it felt good on a purely physical level, and looking down at Abby, at the flare of her hips, I was able to feel a tinge of the joy that used to come with sex.
“Oh God!”
I was sure they heard it this time. Arnie looked up from the lawnmower, and it seemed he was looking right into my eyes. Maybe they could see into the room. Then he looked over at Monica. I couldn’t tell if he was simply gauging her reaction or confirming that she’d heard it also so they could snigger about it. How does an incestuous father and daughter react to such a thing?
“Oh God, oh God!”
That’s when I understood: Abby was doing this on purpose. She wanted Arnie and Monica to know that she knew about them. Even back when we’d great sex she was never like this—she never yelled “Oh God!” She would grunt, she’d groan, she’d whisper little words that came out in puffs of air. “Oh God!” was what Monica said during sex.
“Abby,” I said. “Be quiet.”
“Oh God!” she cried, even louder.
“Stop,” I hissed.
“Oh God!”
I stopped moving, but she didn’t care. She slammed herself back at me, our sweaty skin thwacking, and reached down to touch herself. I considered pulling out but I could tell from the way she was breathing and moving that she was close. She always came quickly in this position.
So I just knelt there like some kind of sex doll while she pounded at me, and just before she finished she swallowed her breath for what seemed like a long time, so that I wondered if she would ever breathe again, and then she let out a long growl, and I felt her contract inside, her body vibrating as she ground her ass against my hips.
“OH GOD!” she shouted one last time.
Outside, the Johnstons were giggling.
I sat back on my heels. Abby collapsed onto the bed.
“You don’t want to come?” she asked between gasps. Her face was pink and filmed with perspiration.
“What was that about?” I asked, picturing Arnie’s grin.
“What?”
“’Oh God!’” I mimicked. “’Oh GOD!’”
“You’re angry because I enjoyed having sex with you?”
I could tell this was going nowhere. I lay down as far as possible from her. She reached over and grabbed me.
“You want me to finish you off?”
I was still pissed and a little disgusted. It wasn’t like her to go so far to make a point, to expose herself in such a personal way. But her hand felt good on me. I didn’t push it away.
*
“Carl!”
The voice was vaguely familiar and seemed to come from inches away. I opened my eyes expecting to see a face—whose, I didn’t know—but there was no one, only a pillow where Abby had been lying.
“Hey, Carl!”
It was said in a way that would attract little attention while also being loud enough for me to hear.
“Carl! Out here!”
Then I recognized the voice: it was Arnie’s. Through sleepy eyes I saw him standing at his fence, his hands forming a funnel around his mouth.
I climbed from the bed and slipped into my boxer shorts. The events of the afternoon came back to me—the sex, the “Oh Gods,” Arnie and Monica laughing.
“Carl!”
I went to the window but somehow my perception was a little off and my head butted up against the screen, knocking it right out of the frame and onto the ground below. Feeling clumsy and foolish, I decided to climb down and retrieve it, forgetting that the bedroom was not at ground level but a few feet higher to accommodate the not-quite-underground basement. I realized this only after I’d dangled a leg out the window; it seemed that no matter how far down I stretched my foot there was only air. Finally, in order to give the impression that I knew what I was doing, I pulled my other leg out and hung by my hands from the window before letting go and falling the twelve inches or so to the ground. Fortunately, no blood was shed.
When I turned to face him, Arnie wore a bemused expression.
“Nice shorts.”
I looked down and noticed I’d put them on backwards.
“You know, you didn’t have to come outside,” he added.
“I know.”
Then I thought of Abby, who would disapprove of me having this conversation, seeing as Arnie was having sex with his own daughter, who, thank God, was no longer in the yard.
“How can I help you, Arnie?”
“Frannie and the kids are going out tonight to some terrible movie, and I thought you might want to come over and share a little doob.”
“Me?”
“Jerry’s coming, too. You know Jerry, right?”
I pictured Jerry Winters making that elastic face at Daisy. “Of course,” I said.
“Eight o’clock okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, so pleased to be included in something that I didn’t stop to think how I’d explain it to Abby.
“Alright, then. See ya later.”
As I watched him turn and walk up the deck stairs, something caught my eye in an upstairs window. At first I thought it was Frannie looking out at the yard, but then I wasn’t sure. It may have been Monica, or the boy, Ellis. Suddenly aware that I was standing there in my underwear, I held the window screen in front of me. Then the face disappeared.
“Carl?”
I turned to see Abby at our bedroom window.
“What are you doing out there?”
“Oh. The screen fell out.” I held it up to show her.
“How’d that happen?”
“I sort of bumped it out. Anyway, I had to come out and get it.”
“In your underwear?”
I had no serviceable explanation. So I shrugged.
“I thought I heard you talking to someone,” she said.
“Me? No. I was just cursing.”
She looked up at the Johnston house as if she’d just seen the face too. I could tell she was thinking of Arnie and Monica. She had that look she got when contemplating something distasteful. This made me think of Berk, for some reason. For a second I considered telling her the bad news, if only to get it over with. Perhaps she’d take pity on me in my vulnerable, nearly naked state. But her face seemed so hard, I knew her heart would be equally immovable. I’d tell her later. For now I concentrated on how to get out of the house at eight o’clock.
As it turned out I did not require a clever ruse. By eight, both Daisy and Abby had fallen sound asleep on the sofa. This was a lucky break as I had not come up with any decent excuses to leave. I never took walks by myself, and a run to the store would necessitate an actual run to the store, leaving no time to stop by the Johnstons’ house. I spent much of the evening reminiscing about my bachelor days, when I could go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted, even to an incestuous neighbor’s house to smoke marijuana.
After double-checking the sleeping girls, I tip-toed out the back door. The sun had just dipped below the far hills, turning the clouds a deep orange. A quarter moon hung in the blue sky. I knocked on Arnie’s door and it immediately swung open, as if he’d been standing there waiting for me.
“Carl!” he said, looking surprised.
“You said eight—correct?” I made a show of checking my watch.
“Yeah, yeah. Come on in. I just thought you were somebody else.”
Just then the burgundy Cadillac that had nearly run me and Daisy over pulled into the driveway.
“Speak of the devil,” Arnie said. He ran down the steps to the car. The driver, who looked even younger than I’d thought—he was maybe twenty-five—smiled and exchanged a few words with Arnie. Then Arnie handed him something and received in turn a plastic sandwich baggy. Arnie stepped back and the young man pulled out and tore off. He had never turned off the engine.
“Who was that?” I asked when Arnie reached the door.
“Him? That’s Charles. He lives across the lake.” He dangled the baggy and grinned. Inside was a thick green clump. “C’mon. Let’s go out back and sample the merchandise.”
On the way we paused in the kitchen, where Arnie grabbed a couple beers from the refrigerator.
“Sorry,” I said. “I should have brought some beers or something.”
“You’re a terrible guest, Carl,” he said, laughing.
We sat at the table out on the deck, under the striped umbrella. I wanted to ask where Jerry Winters was, but I suddenly felt shy, like I shouldn’t ask questions. Arnie, too, was silent as he methodically packed a small amount of pot into the bowl of his little pipe.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m supposed to thank you for having us over last week. That was great.”
“No need to thank us.”
“But it was just so nice of you.”
“No, I mean your wife already thanked us.”
“She did? Abby?”
“No. Your other wife. Yeah, Abby stopped by a couple days ago.”
I was flummoxed. I could have sworn she’d vowed to never speak to the Johnstons again. I took a long swig of beer.
The sky had darkened visibly in the brief time since I’d arrived, the clouds now a fading pink, the moon sharper and more detailed. Crickets chirped among the shrubs, and from the lake came the occasional cry of a goose. I’d noticed that, despite the algae, water fowl still populated the lake, families of Canada geese and a trio of stately swans who moved as if on unseen wheels across the flat, green surface. Daisy liked to point to them and burble, recognizing their shapes and colors from one of her books.
“Hey!” Arnie shouted, startling me. Then I saw that Jerry Winters had appeared at the back door, having let himself in. He’d also helped himself to a beer.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I was dealing with a septic situation.” He thrust his hand at me and said, “Jerry Winters.”
“Yes. We’ve met,” I said, shaking his hand.
“Carl lives next door to you, Jer,” Arnie said.
Jerry laughed. “That’s right. You have the little girl.”
“That’s me.”
“Sorry. Must be the fumes.”
“Speaking of fumes.” Arnie pulled out a long-necked propane lighter normally used to ignite grills.
Jerry clapped like a child about to be served ice cream and cake. He was squat and round-shouldered, but with powerful arms and wrists—the guy you turned to when you needed to unscrew a stubborn jar lid. Under what was apparently a ubiquitous baseball cap his face was chubby-cheeked and youthful despite a five o’clock shadow. He seemed to have dressed for a slightly more formal occasion in a pristine long-sleeved white shirt and unfaded blue jeans. He looked like a man on a date.
Arnie held out the pipe to me. “Here ya go.”
“Me?”
“Guests always go first.”
I took the pipe and the lighter. I stared at them as if I’d never seen such things before in my life.
“Go on, Carl,” Arnie said. “It won’t bite.”
I inserted the pipe into my mouth and lit up.
“Don’t forget to inhale,” Jerry laughed.
With the first hit, the smoke scraped my throat like steel wool. I held it in till my lungs were about to burst into flames, then pushed it back out into the night.
“Good man,” Arnie said, taking the pipe and handing it to Jerry.
When I stopped coughing, I felt my brain come loose from its stem and float, balloon-like, at the top of my cranium. My head, so much lighter now, tilted up of its own accord, and I saw how the moon had lodged itself in a tree, where it dangled from a branch by its upper pincer.
The pipe came back around and the smoke rolled over my calloused esophagus into my lungs. Two hits and I was useless. Arnie and Jerry were talking but I had a hard time holding onto their words. Normally this would have been frustrating but instead the situation struck me as amusing. I felt my cheek muscles stretch into a grin.
“Carl’s happy,” someone said.
I giggled and cooled my throat with a swig of beer. Arnie went inside and returned with three more beers and a package of baloney.
“We’re all out of chips,” he said, but no one cared. We grabbed at the clammy meat and ate. I bit patterns into one slice, creating a baloney star. Jerry rolled his into a baloney cigarette. We laughed and laughed.
Time stretched itself out. If a minute was a stick of gum, the pot had pulled one chewed-up end out and out until it was three feet long.
Somewhere a baby was crying. This reminded me of something I’d wanted to ask.
“Hey Jerry,” I said, “Do you remember a guy named Arliss Taylor?”
Both Jerry and Arnie, who had been giggling like girls, became quiet.
“Sure, I remember Taylor.”
“Do you remember when he killed that baby?”
“Aw, Carl,” Arnie said. “Not now, man.”
“I remember,” Jerry said.
“What was he like?”
“He was an asshole,” Arnie said.
“He was that,” Jerry said.
“There’s a lot of assholes,” I said. “They don’t kill their own baby.”
It was brief, and in my drug-addled state I almost missed it, but the two men exchanged glances.
“Well,” Jerry said, “he was a strange guy.”
“How so?”
“Didn’t he lose his job?” Arnie asked. “Over at the dump?”
“Sounds about right,” Jerry said.
“That’s not so weird,” I said, seeing Mr. Berk’s lizardy head.
“He was just a fuck-up, I guess,” Jerry said.
“The newspaper said something about weird goings-on,” I said. “In the house.”
“What newspaper?”
“The local one.”
“You looked it up?” Arnie asked.
“Something about weird religious practices.”
Jerry moved his hands around as if trying to grab hold of old memories. “I think what’s-her-name was into some kind of cult-type shit, I don’t know.”
“Annette Bingham?”
Jerry was surprised by the name. “Annette Bingham. Remember her, Arn?”
“Course I do.” Arnie pursed his lips as he thought of her.
“What kind of cult?” I asked.
“She wasn’t into that crap,” Arnie said. “That was Taylor.”
“What crap?”
“Who knows?” Jerry said. “It was all rumors.”
“Rumors about what?”
I saw Jerry turn to Arnie. The pot was wearing off now, my mind clearing like a field after an evening of smoky fireworks.
“It was weird sex stuff, supposedly,” Arnie said. “Orgies and shit.”
“Orgies? In my house?”
“It was just rumors,” Arnie said.
“Somebody must’ve seen something,” I said.
“Taylor liked to brag about shit,” Jerry said. “He probably made it all up.”
I looked over at our house.
“Did you guys ever hear or see anything?”
“That I would remember,” Jerry said.
“Not much you can’t hear in this neighborhood, Carl,” Arnie said with a grin. I felt my face burn. “You dog,” he added.
“Did you know the house is haunted?” I asked Jerry, wanting to force the conversation in a new direction.
“I’ve heard that.”
“But you’ve never witnessed anything yourself?”
“Like what—a ghost or something?”
“Whatever.”
“No. But there was that one family—what was their name? With the little boy?”
“The Princes?” I asked.
“Maybe. Or the people before them.”
“They had a baby, too?”
“Whoever. One night they’re out in the garden with a flashlight, right outside the baby’s window. I was walking by—I think I was coming home from here—and I asked what was up. I thought they’d lost something. The mom says she saw someone looking in the window. The husband was sure it was an animal—a deer. The eyes were red, he said.”
I remembered the buck out on our lawn, its eyes glowing.
“Yeah?” I said.
“There were these hoof prints in the dirt, around the bushes.”
“So it was a deer,” I said.
Jerry paused.
“What?”
“Two problems with the deer theory. First, that window is too high for any deer to look through, unless it’s on stilts.”
I pictured the window. Like our bedroom, which I’d nearly killed myself climbing from, Daisy’s was definitely too high up for a deer—or even a man—to see into.
“And the other problem with the theory?” I asked.
“Well, I’ve hunted deer all my life. I’ve tracked them all over this area. Those prints in the dirt, they…”
“What?”
“They were inconsistent, let’s say.”
“What’s that mean?”
He sighed, as if I should understand what he was getting at.
“The prints were not made by a four-legged animal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Whatever was outside that window,” Jerry said, “walked on two legs.”
“What?”
The two men looked at one another. I couldn’t tell if more information was coming.
“You mean it was a person?”
They continued to stare at one another until Arnie’s lip started quivering.
“A person with deer hooves,” he said.
Jerry, still stone-faced, put a hand over his heart. “All I kow is what I saw, man.”
Arnie waved his fingers around and made a spooky noise. “It was SATAN.”
Jerry didn’t laugh, but I could tell he appreciated Arnie’s joking around. So did I, actually. There was still enough pot in my system that I managed to laugh.
“Beelzebub,” I said, and we all cracked up.
“Carl?”
The familiar voice came out of the darkness.
“Speak of the devil,” Arnie said, and we laughed some more.
“Carl?”
“Yeah?” I couldn’t tell where she was.
“What’re you doing?”
“Just drinking a beer.” It sounded like she was in the bedroom, but with the light off.
“When are you coming home?”
“Soon. Is Daisy in bed?”
“Of course.”
“O-kay,” I said, drawing it out. “So do you need me to do something?”
“No.”
Arnie and Jerry were looking away, avoiding my eyes.
“I just like to know where my husband is,” Abby said. “It’s a little quirk of mine.”
“Well, I’m right here, hon. I’ll be home in a bit, okay?”
There was no answer, but I could tell she’d moved away from the window. The invisible malevolent laser beam had turned off.
“Wow,” Jerry said.
“She’s a little tense,” I explained.
*
Dear Daisy,
As I write this I’m sitting next to your crib, watching you. You continue to hiccup, even as you sleep, trying to scoop some air into your raw little lungs. Thank God you have finally stopped wailing. I’m still a little shaky but I want to write down my thoughts and feelings before your father returns from his mysterious errands. Reason tells me you’re fine but I can’t imagine every forgetting that split second when you slipped from my fingers and the sickening sound that followed. This is what happened. Yesterday, while you were with your father at the playground, I uncovered a strange box while working in the garden. It was buried just inches below the surface, in an area that was not even a garden until a week ago, when that section of the yard was tilled. I pulled the box from the dirt and cleaned it off as best I could. It was the size of a cigar box and made from some sort of solid, heavy wood. There were no carvings or decorations. In fact, I couldn’t even find a hinge or an opening of any kind. Still I could tell it was hollow because there was the sound of something rattling around inside when I shook it. I took the box into the basement and poked at it with a screwdriver, but I couldn’t find any way to open the thing. Finally, feeling frustrated, I put it away and went back to gardening. But for the rest of the day and all night long it gnawed at me: what’s in that box? Who buried it? Today, it continued to bother me to the point where I had a hard time concentrating on anything else. And so I waited until your father left before heading back downstairs. You didn’t want to go but I don’t like to leave you unsupervised for even a moment. Your father says it can be dangerous to be too cautious. Maybe he’s right. Nonetheless, I picked you up and you squirmed and whined but I was determined. It would only take a minute to get the box and bring it back upstairs. I had put it in a cupboard so your father wouldn’t find it. I don’t know why, really. I just didn’t want him to know about it—not yet. When you grow up and get married you’ll understand the importance of harmless secrets. I opened the cellar door and switched on the light. You started crying and I held you close and tried to calm you. But you can be stubborn sometimes, and you know what you want—and don’t want. I nearly dropped you on the way down the wooden stairs, but somehow held on. I managed to open the cupboard and remove the box. It felt heavier than I remembered. I positioned the box under one arm so that I could hold onto to you. You squirmed and cried as I turned to go back up the stairs. I was about half way up when it happened. You made a sudden move to break free the box started slipping from under my arm. I tried to catch it, and then you were no longer in my arms. The difference was startling. Not holding you, I felt so light and inconsequential that I could have floated up against the ceiling. Meanwhile, you were falling. What does that feel like, Daisy? You are 29 inches long and you fell more than four feet onto your head. That would be like me falling ten feet. I was shocked but somehow managed to bend down and catch you on what seemed like the first bounce off the step. You didn’t cry at first. Your eyes were enormous as they took in what must have been my horrified expression, and then you let loose. I forgot about the box and ran back upstairs. There was no blood, thank God, but I could see an egg growing on your forehead, right at the hairline. I know that bumps are a good sign—we want the swelling outside the brain rather than inside—but there’s something terrifying about seeing our skin stretch like that to accommodate blood and swollen tissue and what must be a fiery ball of pain. You screeched so loud I was sure the neighbors would show up at the door with the police. Tears were leaping from your eyes an inch into the air before dropping onto your face. I tied to apply a piece of ice but you kept pushing it away with your little hands. So I rocked you, I paced, I sang to you, I cried along with you, all while hoping your father would not come home to lecture me on child safety, to pry into my secret. So for now it remains between you and me, little sweetheart. And later, when you wake up, and your booboo has gone down, we’ll try again, and find out what’s in that box in the cellar.