Who Made Stevie Crye? (12 page)
Read Who Made Stevie Crye? Online
Authors: Michael Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #science fiction, #General
Stevie lifted her head and her eyebrows at the same time.
“He mentioned that some people, men as well as women, have what you call in five-syllable medical talk ‘adventitious nipples.’ These usually occur on a person’s milk line, a big old U goin’ from one breast down the flank to the groin and up the other side to the other breast. Most of the time they’re small, these adventitious nipples, enflamed-lookin’ puckerings of flesh, and they’re not all that uncommon. Old-timey country folks call ’em witches’ teats. You know why?”
“I’m dying to hear.” (Well, she was.)
“Witches used them to feed their familiars. That was the medieval belief, anyway, and it got over to Puritan America and pretty soon down the Atlantic coast to Appalachia and the Georgia colony.”
Dr. Elsa explained that familiars were minor demons that could assume the shapes of small animals—cats, toads, bats—to attend their witch mistresses on their missionary dunnings for the devil. The familiars got their nourishment directly from the witch who owned them, drinking her blood through a mole, wart, scab, or providentially concealed witch’s teat (supposing, of course, a satanic rather than a divine providence for the concealment of same). Dedicated witchhunters made it a point to disrobe suspected minions of the Unholy One and search their bodies for telltale teats. Womenfolk who had them often got burned in a faggoty bonfire or teetered into a half-frozen New England pool. This was almost as hard on the damned familiars as on the ladies undergoing these fatal purifications. It didn’t pay to have an adventitious nipple in the Bad Old Days.
“Seaton’s not female,” Stevie said.
“Male witches are warlocks, kiddo. Maybe this young repairman is a warlock. That monkey’s his familiar.”
“Stop it, Elsa.”
“It don’t mean much he didn’t nurse the critter on an adventitious nipple, either. A finger’s a good substitute. Any teatlike protuberance’ll do.”
“Elsa, that damned monkey ate an entire fried egg with a cocktail fork. Bloodsucking demons don’t eat fried eggs, do they?”
“Over-easy or sunny-side up?”
“Broken-yolked, Elsa. You’re making fun of me. You’re making fun of me the same way that blasted typewriter does.”
Dr. Elsa leaned over and caught Stevie’s wrists. “Honey, the boy’s weird. His brothers have done better than he has. One of ’em’s the supply company’s business manager, with a degree in accountin’ from Clemson. The other’s an airline pilot with Eastern. Seaton has an organ-grinder monkey he lets nibble on a finger lesion. It’s not safe nor sanitary nor pleasant to behold, but one thing else it also ain’t, honey, is supernatural.”
“
You
brought up familiars and adventitious nipples, Elsa. I didn’t.”
“Just to show you how all-fired silly the whole thing is. You need a break from your work. Tomorrow after church I’ll take Teddy and Marella out to our place for Sunday dinner and some cards or something. If Sam’s not hip-deep in
Long Before Columbus
or some other
In Search of Lost Lacrosse Sticks
volume, maybe he’ll take ’em fishin’. You just relax. Go to Columbus and shop—the stores are open—or drive up in the state park. Do you good and help you too.”
“No, Elsa, I —”
“Honey, it’s settled.” She released Stevie’s wrist. “I’ll be by tomorrow at twelve-thirty. You got that?”
Stevie nodded.
XXIII
Tell me about Ted. Finish my nightmare for me. If you’re my husband, talk to me as Ted talked.
That was what she had written before going downstairs to see Dr. Elsa. During her absence the Exceleriter had composed a reply, four lines of doggerel. This quatrain exhausted the space remaining at the bottom of the paper:
TED CANNOT TALK.
TED CANNOT WALK.
DONT BE MISLED:
YOUR TED IS DEAD.
“That I already know!” Stevie retorted. She yanked the page out of the machine, tore it into pieces, and dropped the pieces into her wastebasket.
Then she went back downstairs to prepare dinner. Hamburger soup and Syrian bread. Marella had asked for Syrian bread.
XXIV
Stevie coaxed her daughter into bed by ten-thirty
. Teddy took longer. He was of the impression that, as a teen-ager, he had the inalienable right to stay up on weekends until midnight or later. Stevie did not agree with him. Although she cited his basketball coach’s dictum about eating right and getting plenty of rest, and although she threatened to ground him for a couple of weeks if he didn’t stop smarting off and screwing around, it was nearly twelve by the time he trudged upstairs to bed. Some of his delaying tactics—overeager offers of help in the kitchen—had been amusing, but his experimental backtalk when she refused to let him watch either “Saturday Night Live” or the ancient Lon Chaney, Jr., film on another channel had not tickled her at all. That was when she had raised the ante with her grounding threat and so bluffed him up the stairs.
Usually Teddy was a good kid, but what if he had chosen to test her mettle by digging in his heels? Moral force was an effective bludgeon only if you waved it in front of people whose concept of morality coincided with your own. Teen-agers, meanwhile, sometimes seemed to be doing their contortionist dances amid the shards of the tablets that Moses brought down from Sinai.
Well, maybe it isn’t
that
bad, Stevie thought, running herself a tub of hot water in the downstairs bathroom. Teddy’s not into drugs or alcohol, and his interest in girls has pretty much been confined to flirtatious banter and long-distance ogling. I think. Anyway, he’s not ordinarily one for backtalk or armed resistance. He’s just trying to spread his wings. That’s hard to do in a twelve-by-twenty kitchen with a breakfast bar, a space heater, and an intractable mom. What he needs is . . . what he needs is a father.
—Ted, Ted, you ran out on me when I needed you to take care of these needs. Here I am wringing my hands over the deadly and tortuous naiveté of the teen-age male mind. You knew I would be. You knew I’d be cursing you for running out on us.
Stevie hated the winter. Because the space heaters in the kitchen and the den had to heat the bathroom too, she could not take a bath without leaving the door open. Maybe she would not have been in such a hurry to see Teddy off to bed had she been able to settle into the steamy waters of her tub behind a securely shut door. The heat of the water kept you from freezing for a brief bath, but if you closed the door, the bathroom quickly cooled, chilling the water by cold-blooded convection. When you stepped out, your body was helplessly aquiver and the joy of luxuriating in warmth for the first time since abandoning your electric blanket that morning had become a barefoot forced march through the storage lockers of a meat-packing plant. If the door stayed open, though, you could soak an extra three minutes and dry off feeling no colder than on a trick-or-treating expedition in October.
Immersed in the cooling water, Stevie lathered and shaved her legs. Dr. Elsa had offered to take the kids tomorrow afternoon, and Stevie had just about decided to let her. Tomorrow, if this evening’s Exceleriter experiment went as planned, she would be ready for some recuperative therapy: shopping, a movie, dinner in a Chinese restaurant, maybe even a cocktail. Whatever happened, she would need time to think about the results and Dr. Elsa’s selfless offer would give her that time. Stevie’s bath had become a preparatory ritual, beautifying and ablutionary. It was almost like getting ready for a date.
Afterward, in a flannel nightgown beneath which her torso and limbs felt sensually pliant, and a quilted robe that cloaked her in middle-aged frumpiness, Stevie passed through the unheated downstairs and climbed the steps to her study. She was Lady Godiva in a greatcoat last worn by a French soldier on the retreat from Moscow. Her Exceleriter, on the other hand, was not only naked but warm. She had left the dust cover off the machine. Further, although she had purposely
not
rolled any paper into place, it had been typing in her absence—presumably
after
the kids had gone to sleep, so scrupulous was it about concealing its ability from everyone but her. She could tell that it had been typing by the warmth of its metal cover and the illegible black-on-black letters encircling the platen, a jumble of struck-over, indecipherable characters.
“Damn you,” she said.
From her filing cabinet she extracted the story about Ted, Seaton Benecke in his role as “dosimetrist,” and the Clinac 18. One more time, she thought. She taped four more sheets of typing paper to the page ending,
“I fell apart down deep,” Crye said, a dead hand on his wife’s forehead. “If I appeared to give up, Stevie, it was only because it was time for me to pay.”
She positioned this train of pages so that the Exceleriter—if it had not already completed her dream without benefit of paper—could resume its transcription. Why, after all, was it time for Ted to pay? What debt had maneuvered him to his uncharacteristic surrender?
“Tonight,” Stevie told the typewriter, “you’re going to do what I want you to do. Tonight you’re going to
finish
this business.”
She checked the kids. They were sleeping soundly. She put her electric blanket on its highest setting—something she should have done earlier—and reluctantly shed her robe. Then she eased herself between the icy sheets (a lukewarm chicken filet, hey, in a pocket of frozen pita bread) and waited for her coverlet to begin to toast her. This took a while. Her feet tingled, and she moved her naked legs up and down knowing that the friction would only marginally boost the temperature inside the covers. God! how she hated this weather. It had been a long day, and to end it by galloping a hundred-meter dash flat on her back did not constitute a peaceful retirement. Some writers had winter homes in the tropics. Some writers never ventured any farther north than Saint-Tropez. Georgia was supposed to be in the Sun Belt, but tell that to her frost-bit tootsies.
Eventually the bed warmed, and Stevie left off her running-in-place for some goal-directed mental exertion. She was going to make the Exceleriter finish transcribing her nightmare by insuring that she
dreamt
that nightmare, sequence by eerie sequence, right to the end. You could influence the contents of your dreams, after all, by preprogramming your brain with the desired dream imagery. You thought hard about this imagery while still in that hazy hypersusceptible mental state just prior to sleep. Of course, to continue to think deliberately about anything during this unreal period was to dissolve its edges and prolong wakefulness. You had to balance conscious thought with the afflatus of either fantasy or unconscious desire. You had to drift without losing your direction.
Stevie drifted. She drifted past Ted’s chrome-plated steel-blue coffin on its bier at the graveside services in the Barclay cemetery. Faces melted and blurred in the rain; lilies nodded their heads like constellations of molting swans. Down in the soundproofed crypt from which the half dead were sometimes half resurrected, deep in the angry red ache of her confusion and disillusionment, there in the Ladysmith treatment room, Stevie drifted between the focusing points of the Clinac 18’s lasers.
And there, floating at the intersection of those laser points, drifted Theodore Martin Crye, Sr., half resurrected in order to dream. Righting himself beneath the eye of the linear accelerator, revolving out of the weightlessness of death to conform to the gravity-bound criteria of her own disembodied eyes, her husband approached her like a living man. . . .
XXV
Frightened, Stevie sat up in bed
. A figure stood in her doorway. She had a hunch, a briefly bloodcurdling intuition, that it had been standing there for a long time. It neither spoke nor moved, and the melancholy disposition of its head and limbs led her to believe that the threat it posed was not that of bodily harm or indiscriminate violence. It posed a threat, though, and her fear of the figure encompassed but did not define this unnamed threat. She squinted across the cold room, waiting for a sign. At last she said, “Ted?”
The figure in the doorway shifted.
“Ted?” Her voice sounded peeved as well as fearful. “Ted?”
“Ma’am?”
“Teddy!” she exclaimed sotto voce. “You just about scared me silly. What are you doing up? Are you standing there in your jockeys? You haven’t got the sense God gave a green snake.”
The boy did not move. He had his arms folded across his chest, his hands gripping his shoulders, but this feeble postural tactic was his only concession to the cold. In the yellow-green light coming into her room from the arc lamp on the corner of Hazel and O’Connor, just outside, he looked like Michelangelo’s David in a pair of bikini briefs. The foolish bumpkin.
“Teddy, what the hell’re you doing?”
“Mom,” he began uncertainly. Then again: “Mom, I heard you come up, I haven’t been asleep, I couldn’t sleep —”
Oh, my God, thought Stevie. He’s heard the Exceleriter typing away. He’s scared, and he wants an explanation. What do I tell him? Do I make up a lie about teleprinters and computer hookups, or confess the truth and risk estranging his belief as stupidly as I estranged Elsa’s. Or would he, maybe, believe? And, believing, help restore my own psychological equilibrium?
“Did you hear my typewriter, Teddy?”
His voice betrayed his puzzlement. “No, ma’am. You were only in your study a couple of minutes. I didn’t even think you tried to work.”
“I didn’t.” Well, that exchange had probably done little to lift her in the boy’s estimation. She had framed a ridiculous non sequitur of a question, received an honest if baffled reply, and followed that up with an even more baffling denial of the necessity of her original question. “What’s bothering you, then?”
“I’m sorry about sassing you tonight, Mom. You know, calling you a fogey and cursing under my breath.”
“Fogey I heard, the cursing I didn’t.”
“I said, ‘Oh, hell, what a crock of shit.’ ”
“Confessing the crime’s plenty—no need to reprise it for me. Senility’s rapid approach hasn’t completely destroyed my imagination.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. I just —” The articulation of this last sentiment stymied him. He shifted his weight, rubbing his instep with one bare foot and gently chafing his upper arms. Stevie marveled again at his disregard of the cold. Slowly, though, it was penetrating his defenses, the neglectful machismo of the teen-age boy: the cold and a worry still unvoiced.
“That’s not the only reason you came in here, is it?”
Teddy said nothing.
“Something’s bothering you. You’re an okay kid, but you don’t usually lose much sleep fretting about your mama’s wounded feelings.”
His dim silhouette disgustedly shook its head. His knuckles stood out from each arm like the tuning knobs on the neck of a guitar. “I wish Dad was here.
Damn!
do I ever.”
“Were,” Stevie corrected him. “You wish Dad
were
here. So do I, Teddy. For both our sakes.”
He turned to go, and suddenly Stevie feared that he would leave without revealing the worry keeping him awake. He would internalize it, letting it scarify him, a festering ulcer of worry. The boy wanted his father to talk to, but he had only her. He had come to her in the dark because it was easier than in the hard-edged, satirical light of day. At night, if not finally susceptible to the balm of sunny reason, worries were at least mockproof. She had to keep Teddy in the room or he would hide forever the mysterious source of his upset.
“Come back, Teddy—right now.”
Reluctantly he turned back toward her, now a silhouette, now a lamp-lit sculpture, beautiful in either guise, the room’s darkness a cloak he wore almost jauntily, its chill an ambient halo through which he moved in mute obedience to her command. When he paused at her cold bed’s foot, Stevie felt she was in communion with a phantom of her own consciousness, a revenant from the underworld of her desire. Teddy was alive, but momentarily he seemed the youthful ghost of his own dead father. Ghosts were always impervious to the cold.
“You’ve got something on your mind,” Stevie said. “This is as good a time as any to talk about it. Hop in.”
“Ma’am?” His
de rigueur
teen-age reluctance had become a
de rigueur
sonny-boy disbelief.
“It’s cold, Teddy. I’m not going to let you stand there nine-tenths naked in temperatures that would give a penguin pneumonia. The bed’s warm, finally. Crawl in and we’ll have a chat.”
He obeyed, and instantly Stevie could feel the cold of his body radiating through the comfortable oven of her bedding. How had he stood it? How could he haunt the winter night in only his underwear? Stevie shifted toward him, slid her arm behind his neck, and pulled him to her. His chin—a smooth knob of snowy marble—rested on her breastbone, just under her throat, while his eyes gleamed up at her like those of a captured animal, bright with suspicion and fear. Indeed, holding him was like embracing a statue with living eyes. Stevie chafed the boy’s upper arm with her hand for some time. Neither of them spoke.
Finally, Stevie said, “Now.” The boy turned to his back, and she released the pressure on her arm by slipping it out from under him. “Pretend I’m whoever you want me to be and tell me your troubles, Teddy.”
“Mom—” He moved his head back and forth on the pillow. “Mom, it’s embarrassing. I can’t. It’s silly and embarrassing, and I’ll probably be okay about it if I just let it go for a while.”
“Come on, Teddy,” she urged him. “Blurt it out. You didn’t edge in here just to play the part of Barclay’s resident stoic.”
Exhaling cavernously, Teddy shivered down the length of his body. He tilted his head back as far as it would go. “I’m still a boy,” he whispered. “I’m still a goddamn boy.”
“Of course you are. You’ve only recently become a teenager. You’re not supposed to be Christopher Reeve or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or whoever this week’s hero is. Even the Man of Steel started out as Superboy. The progression’s well established and completely natural.”
“I’m not Superboy. I’m
only
a boy.”
Stevie smoothed back Teddy’s bangs, stroked his head. “Not by my lights, you’re not. You’re growing into a handsome and helpful young man, and the rate you’re going’s plenty fast enough for me. I’m not quite ready to prefix my name with Grandma, if that’s okay by you.”
“Well, maybe that’ll
never
happen,” he said bitterly. “Maybe you don’t have a thing to worry about.”
His bitterness surprised Stevie. She propped herself on one elbow and scrutinized his chin-up profile in the ghastly light. “Teddy, you’re going to have to spell this out for me. It’s not coming together. You’ve just started to get a tickle of hair under your arms and you’re already worried about your ability to father children? Is that it?”
Another angry, exasperated sigh. “Something like that, yeah.”
“At your age, young man, you’d better be worried if you
do
father some gullible young thing’s baby. That’s what you’d really better worry about.”
“Mom, you still don’t understand.”
It was true, she didn’t. So far their mother-to-son talk had accomplished little but their mutual frustration. He was demoralized by her inability to deduce his problem, she by his refusal to blurt it out. Obviously the pangs of puberty had begun to rack him, and the trauma of these changes required that she give him her heartfelt sympathy, even if total understanding continued to elude her. Damn Ted for not being here. Damn him! . . . No, that was too strong. Besides, Teddy was flesh of his flesh, and in that mystical sense, at least, Ted was with her even at this moment . . . in the living, suffering wraith of his son.
“Explain it, Teddy. Explaining it can’t hurt worse than the problem itself.”
“I’m afraid I’m not maturing right.”
“That’s a troubling fear—but it’s not uncommon. At one point or another nearly everyone worries about looking right, functioning right. It’ll pass, Teddy. Dr. Sam gave you a complete checkup in January, and you came through without a hitch. The report suggested you’ll live to witness planetary colonization and the swearing-in of the first president of the world state. Maybe you’ll
be
the first president of the world state.”
“A doctor’s office isn’t a shower room, Mom.”
“I know it isn’t.”
“Dexter Johnson, Sonny Elkins, even Pete, my good buddy Pete—they’re
men
, Mom. I try to wait until they’re finished to shower. They snap towels at each other and put their jock straps on their heads and hold bars of soap between their buns and make jokes about the nubbins on the team. That’s Pete’s word. At school I’m a nubbin. Here in the neighborhood I’m his buddy.”
“They sound like men, all right.”
“You know what I mean.”
“All I know is that you’re equating manhood with the size of your genital equipment. I can quote a thousand and one reasons why that’s stupid, but all I’m going to say is stop worrying. Keep taking your showers
after
the fun-lovin’ fellas with the five-pound pendulums between their legs and stop worrying.”
“That’s easy to say.” Teddy turned his face toward her. “That’s especially easy for
you
to say. You’re a woman.”
“Yeah, and you’d be a boy even if you had to push your penis around in a wheelbarrow. Who are you trying to impress? Pete Wightman and the guys with jock-strap headbands? The
Guinness Book of World Records
? Who, Teddy? Whose instant admiration do you want?”
Teddy looked back up at the ceiling. “Just mine,” he said, still bitter. “I just want to stop feeling like a goddamn boy.”
“Then stop acting like one.”
“Good night, Mom.” Teddy started to slide away from her, out of the bed, but Stevie grabbed his arm and twisted him back to his previous supine position. He turned his diamond-bright eyes toward her, astonished as much by her strength as by her untelegraphed move to restrain him. “Mom, just let me go on to bed, okay? I’m tired of talking.”
Stevie leaned over her son’s face and kissed him on the brow. Her kisses descended casually to his eyelids, his nose, his cheeks, and finally the soft chilly bud of his mouth. She nibbled on his bottom lip and, using one arm to keep the electric blanket over them, slid her right hand down the porcelain smoothness of his chest and stomach. Her fingers curled back inside the elastic of his bikini briefs (the very brand that Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer, a hunk if Stevie had ever seen one, modeled in full-color one-page advertisements in a variety of national magazines), and her tongue flicked out to lay a trail of saliva from Teddy’s chin to the base of his throat. Eventually her fingers achieved purchase, closing on a masculine knot that burned her palm by exerting an acute reflexive pressure of its own.
“Mom,” the boy whispered. “Mom, what are you doing?”
“Ted, you won’t let yourself smile until you’ve ‘proved’ your manhood in the rut-driven, half-blind, immemorial masculine way. All right. If that’s the way it’s going to be, I’ll help you. It’s perfectly safe with me. Then you can stop your stupid worrying and get on about the business of growing up. Just relax and let yourself go, Ted. I’ll take care of everything else.”
“Mom, I don’t —”
“Shhhhh. I’m not your mother. You’re my lover. You’re my beautiful, passionate, ever-faithful demon lover. We’ve waited nearly two years for this reunion. Finally it’s here, Ted. Finally it’s here.”
Careful not to dislodge their blankets, Stevie mounted her demon lover and rocked him like an infant to a blissful, half-comprehending spasm. Warmth and water and armistice, a truce in the tropical swamps of his spasm’s aftermath. A little death, the English metaphysical poets had called the moment of orgasm. Well, that was what she and Ted, with Teddy as the bodily agent of their reunion, had achieved: yes, a little death, unspeakably sweet. Warmth, and water, and resurrection, all on a cold February morning . . .
Teddy was staring up at her, wide-eyed.
Stevie kissed him, slumped to his side, took him into her arms, and again began to rock him, this time to sleep rather than to spasm. What passionate bliss to have led this boy in pursuit and capture of the dead man who had once, long ago, loved him into being. She had outwitted the spiteful angels of mortality, won out over middle-class values, the unwritten tenets of universal mediocrity, and the strictures of her own provincial background. She had saved her son. Having fought through to these victories, Stevie found it easy to sleep.
Her son, her lover, slept beside her.