Who Made Stevie Crye? (29 page)

“I stayed out of the way when he came around,’’ Seaton was saying. “I stayed out of the way when anybody came around, but Mom let me know she
liked
me out of the way when Mr. Crye showed up. And he showed up
lots
of afternoons. Sometimes I’d huddle in my room with a pencil and a notepad and write down all my wishes ten times each, to make ’em come true, and what I used to write most was ‘Let Mr. Crye die.’ Yeah. It took a long, time for that one to work out, and by the time it did, my mother had already just missed killing herself taking too many aspirins and drawing a razor across her wrists. . . . Anyway, Daddy kept it out of the papers, him and his big-shot buddies in Columbus, but Mom’s crazier than I am now.

“If me wishing ‘Let Mr. Crye die’ had worked when I wished it, if it had kept Mom from screwin’ your precious Ted silly, well, I don’t know, maybe she wouldn’t have turned into such a slut. But my magic didn’t work so well in those days. I didn’t know how to give it a . . . a special twist. So Mom dropped her britches and let ol’ Ted wiggle and wriggle and tickle inside her, perhaps she’ll die. One day, when it’s too late. It’s too late already, though, your husband a cooze hound and my mama a slut.”

“Seems to me,” said Sister C., “you and Stevie here are in the same boat, Mr. Benecke. Your mama hurt you, acting how she did, and you’re trying to even things up by hurting this woman. Doesn’t make much sense, young man. You’ve got things in common. You could be friends.” To Stevie she said, “I’m supposed to say that. He won’t listen, though. He’s not just a young man-fella disgusted by his mama’s passions and browbeat by his daddy’s put-downs. Oh, no, he’s a potion of free-floatin’ cosmic evil, Satan’s personal Ridpestman. And to Satan, I’m afraid, pests to be got rid of always include honesty, kindness, and all such halfway decent folks as happen to have ’em.”

“Sister —”

“I’m just saying you’re playing for high stakes against a dangerous foe, child.”

Stevie ignored this extraordinary aside to address the twenty-six-year-old potion of free-floating cosmic evil: “Listen, Seaton, it’s possible you’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion. They were seeing each other, Ted and your mother, but they never . . . maybe they never had relations.”

“You don’t
want
to get to the nitty-gritty,” he said. “You don’t
want
to go deep to see what makes people tick.”

“Seaton, they may have turned to each other for companionship. I looked like a water rat with a stomach tumor that summer. I was always irritable, always worried about money, not an attractive or sympathetic partner at all. And your mother . . . well, she may have wondered if your father cared about her, letting her go off to spend every summer alone on Scottsdale Lake.”

“She wasn’t alone.”

“No, I know she wasn’t. Without adult companionship, I should have said. Ted and she deceived me and your father, that’s true enough, but it’s possible they were using each other to reestablish their personal senses of . . . of self-esteem.”

“I’ve never heard anything so stupid,” Seaton replied. “Never. You must have been born in Disneyland.”

“I’m too old to have been born in Disneyland.”

“Then you’re old enough to watch the rest of my slides. They’re X-rated, and
they’ll
open your eyes—outdoor porn for menopausal Pollyannas.”

“Notice how his vocabulary’s improved this chapter,” Sister Celestial advised Stevie. “He’s drawing on reservoirs of Satanic strength.”

Clicking the changer with ruthless energy, Seaton narrated a slide program like no other Stevie had ever seen. He began with a middle-distance shot of the Benecke cottage, pointing out that on this afternoon Lynnette had asked him to keep watch on the spaghetti sauce in her slow cooker while she and Mr. Crye went down to the lake to check a broken irrigation pipe. This was followed by an interior shot of the ceramic pot, which, in turn, yielded to a rear view of the GM truck in which Ted and Lynnette left for the lake. The irrigation pipe, Lynnette had explained, lay some distance from their pier.

The couple had been gone only about fifteen minutes, Seaton continued, when the cottage’s electricity went off. The refrigerator ceased humming (a shot of the fridge), the clocks stopped at 3:48 (a sequence of stopped clocks, the only kind a photograph can show), and the soap opera on Channel 9 dwindled away to a magnesium-bright dot that, even without electricity, lingered for thirty seconds (documentary proof of the lingering dot). What now? Seaton wondered. As a precautionary measure, he unplugged the slow cooker.

Then he set off after his mother and her handyman to ask the latter if he could do anything about the power outage at their cottage. (This narration was accompanied by a shot of Seaton’s schoolboy shadow rippling over a hillock near the lake.) After all, Mr. Crye was an electrician as well as a plumber, and unless the spaghetti sauce cooked a good two hours, his mother would not be able to serve it. They’d have bologna sandwiches and fruit cocktail for supper, a meal that Seaton despised. (A slide of a hypothetical bologna sandwich, garnished with a wilted sprig of parsley, beside a plastic cup of fruit cocktail.) No one should wonder, then, that Seaton had set off in quest of adult aid and consolation.

“
Quack, quack
,” the young man with the slide-remote said. He made these syllables sound vaguely like the blatting of a broken Exceleriter or the bleating of a smoke alarm whose battery is about to fail. “
Quack, quack
.”

Stevie and Sister C. exchanged a puzzled look, but the Sister, having already read her Remington’s version of Chapter Forty-seven, was merely feigning puzzlement.

“I
quack
because you can’t show a noise on a slide,” Seaton explained, “and I don’t have a tape recorder. You see, some folks near the lake were using a duck call, quacking to get the ducks to come up to shore so they could feed them. My mom always kept a couple of bags of stale bread crumbs and sometimes even a box of old popcorn in the back of the pickup. Then we’d go to a secluded part of the lake, quack the ducks to shore, and feed them whatever stuff we’d brought with us. Today, I realized, Mom had gone with Mr. Crye to feed the ducks. They’d forgotten about the goddamn irrigation pipe. There
weren’t
any goddamn irrigation pipes where that goddamn quacking was coming from.”

The next sequence of slides excerpted the highlights of Seaton’s trek from the cottage property: a road bordered by cattails; a pine copse traversed by wheel ruts in which pools of muddy lake water stood; a sequestered clearing far from the usual recreational thoroughfares. Seaton pointed out that the intermittent bleating of the duck call had led him to this clearing, where, as the next slide showed, the red GM truck occupied stage-center, its port side parallel to the lake shore, the door to the cab’s passenger side standing completely open, and neither his darling mother nor the annoying Theodore Crye anywhere in sight.

“The duck call had stopped,” Seaton said. “I’d begun to think it’d been a real duck making the noise. Down by the lake, you see, someone had set out a big shallow box of popcorn, and a flock of ducks—some the tame white kind you see on farms, some mallards with green heads—this flock was fighting to gobble down the popcorn. The ducks’ heads went up and down, up and down, pecking, pecking, pecking. It reminded me of typebars going up and down in the basket of an old-fashioned typewriter. Peck, peck, peck. Peck, peck, peck.”

“It would,” murmured Stevie.

“More ducks kept coming up from the lake. Some flew in from the other side, dropping their silly webbed feet for landing gear and flapping to a standstill just offshore. The early birds had typed their way through a couple of reams of popcorn, though, and most of the latecomers didn’t get any. I couldn’t understand why the person blowing that duck call—my mother, your husband, whichever of ’em—had just kept blowing the damn thing. Then it quacked
again
, and it was coming from the truck cab—which, until then, I’d thought nobody was in.”

“Why don’t you stop now?” Sister Celestial asked Seaton.

“I can’t do that, Sister. It’s nitty-gritty time again.” He closed his eyes in self-reproach. “I’ve probably shilly-shallied around too long as it is.”

“Get it over with, then,” the prophetess urged him. “You don’t have any feel for healthy eroticism, only the guilty kind, and Stevie’s done suffered enough at your hands.”

Stevie dug her fingernails into her palms and rose from her chair. “I’ve withstood every bit of it, too, haven’t I? But if you persist—if you go on to the next slide—I swear, Seaton, I’ll kill you.”

“Sex and violence,” he replied. “But you’ve taken the wrong approach, ma’am, because I’ve never, ever got enough of them. I’ve been deprived that way.” His thumb depressed the changer button, and a grotesque image—an interior of the GM cab with two ill-defined human figures horizontally disposed on the Leatherette-upholstered seat—replaced the tight panorama of the truck in the clearing. “Here’s what I saw walking up to the open door on the passenger side. It tore me up. I’d never seen anything like it before.”

“Seaton!” Stevie leaned forward.

“Those pale mounds halfway along, sort of like crescent moons, they’re sweet ol’ Ted’s butt. Elegant Lynnette Benecke’s under there somewhere. That’s her bare feet sticking up in the foreground under the trousers bunched around his ankles. If you look close, ma’am, you can see Mama’s head thrown back against the inside of the other door and the tip of the duck call protruding from her mouth. ‘
Quack
,’ she went. ‘
Quack, quack
.’ And out the window, a pair of mallards with their wings spread getting ready to land on the lake.”

Closing her eyes against the full-color evidence of Ted’s infidelity, Stevie leapt from her plywood island to the one on which her nemesis was narrating the slide show. When next she opened her eyes, Seaton’s grinning face bobbed only inches from her, and she delivered a right uppercut that glanced off his temple and knocked his cap into the cellulose insulation between a pair of ceiling joists. With a deafening crash a box of ancient cooking utensils also fell into this valley, but lodged there without plunging through the kitchen ceiling below.

Stevie struck out at Seaton again, and this time the changer popped from his hand into a storm of dust motes and eddying fibers. Although she could not see where the changer had fallen, the impact of its landing must have depressed the button permanently, for the images on the torn sheet began clicking past at an alarming rate, like frames in a low-budget blue movie in which Ted and Lynnette had the dubious distinction of starring. Dim shots of Ted’s fanny going up and down were interspliced with vivid sequences of the ducks’ heads pecking away at the popcorn in the cardboard box. Stevie, to gape incredulously at this remarkable montage, pulled a punch—a lapse allowing Seaton to sidle between two pieces of dusty luggage and jump over several exposed joists to the island beneath the makeshift screen. Here he spread his arms and received upon his Ridpest parka the topographically warped projections of the next several slides.

“They hadn’t seen me,” he orated. “I could have turned around and walked home. I didn’t, though. I went around to the tailgate and climbed into the load bed. The duck calls stopped, and eventually two faces appeared in the window in the back of the cab. I hated them both, though, and all I’ve seen in my mind’s eye when thinking about either one of them in all the years since their betrayal is just what you’re seeing now, Mrs. Crye. Peck, peck, peck. Wiggling and wriggling and tickling inside her. Perhaps, that day, I died. Perhaps I really did. I’ve been a sullen, vengeful, and sadly impotent demon ever since.” He laughed. “But this past week has been my glory, Mrs. Crye, the climax of my entire pathetic life!”

“You bet it has,” Stevie said, trembling. “If you didn’t die that day, you twerp, maybe you will tonight.”

“No,” Sister C. said, rising. “You don’t have to kill him. It’s not in the Chapter Forty-seven my Remington and I typed. You talk him into surrendering to the authorities for impersonating a Ridpestman, and they convince him to seek psychological help from the Bradley Center in Columbus—from which, of course, he’ll later escape for the sequel.”

Still aripple with semicubistic visions of lakeside lovemaking, Seaton made a farting noise with his lips. “You didn’t buy that predictable finish, did you, Sister? It was a decoy to get you out of Button City on a cold February night. Besides, who wants a sequel? I’m not going to oversee a
second
marathon typing. This one’s it. We’re playing for all the marbles here tonight.”

“God!” Stevie exclaimed. “He doesn’t give a damn about anybody, does he?” Like Cathinka taking on Waldemar, she hurried to engage her tormentor in hand-to-hand combat, tightroping the edge of a narrow joist and throwing herself toward the plywood island on which he haughtily awaited her. Raising his elbow, Seaton nearly blocked her advent, but she grabbed the upper sleeves of his parka, grappled her way erect, and shoved him into the curtain on which Ted was even yet energetically violating their marriage vows. “You couldn’t leave me my illusions, could you?” she hissed, staggering back toward the projector as he planted his feet and repulsed this new attack. “You know,” she managed, “you could have fixed my Exceleriter—really fixed it, I mean—and redeemed your pathetic life by . . .
unh!
. . . subduing your baser instincts.” She halted Seaton’s counterattack, gained purchase and leverage, and forced him to the groaning edge of the plywood, where nailheads had begun to work their way loose as a result of their vigorous seesaw struggle.

“Knee him in the sausage works!” Sister Celestial cried. “Hit him where it hurts!”

“I’m
only
baser instincts,” Seaton panted, bracing himself on the lip of the narrow abyss. “I sabotaged . . .
unh!
. . . every typewriter I ever worked on. Yours went first because . . .
unh!
. . . I wanted you to know the turmoil of its breakdown. I’ve known it, that turmoil, for . . .
unh!
. . . thirteen years. I’m bad, ma’am. I’m evil incarnate. Think of all the typewriters I’ve . . .
unh! unh!
. . . irretrievably corrupted.”