Who Made Stevie Crye? (30 page)

XLVIII

With Seaton gone
, Stevie worried not only about the whereabouts of the monkeys he had left behind, but also about Marella’s inevitable response to the mutilation of her animals. She would be heartbroken. After ruining the stuffed animals, the capuchins had blent into the skeletal architecture of the upper stories as if they were tenpenny nails, pieces of lathing, bits of crumbling plaster. Their vanishing, after their bizarre vandalism of the toys, angered as well as bewildered Stevie. She wanted to shoot every member of their proliferating tribe and hang them by their heels from the rafters.

“You only think you want to do that,” Sister Celestial said. “They’re his dupes, those monkeys. They do his bidding ’cause he’s all they’ve got. They’re laboratory culls and orphans, child.”

“They’re demons from hell, just like their master.”

The Sister was about to contradict this cruel definition of the capuchins when both women heard a moaning from Marella’s room. The sound penetrated to the marrow like a bone disease. Stevie’s entire body ached with apprehension. What midnight calamity had beset her frail daughter? Hadn’t they all suffered enough for one evening? Couldn’t the child simply sleep through to dawn in stuporous ignorance of Seaton’s visit? Apparently not. Besides, even if she did, at breakfast tomorrow morning Stevie would have to invent for Teddy and Marella a semiplausible explanation for the hole in the ceiling.

“What chapter is this?” the Sister suddenly asked.

“You’ve got the manuscript pages, Betty. To me, this is a continuing real-life nightmare. Come on. I’ve got to see about Marella.”

“She’s all right, Stevie. I know it.”

At the hatch of the step-down closet Stevie looked back into the attic at the dim, bulky figure of the prophetess. “Betty, even a seer can’t know everything. Surely you’ve learned that by now.”

“Of course. But this Chapter Forty-eight has some muzzy correspondences with the one my Remington and I tapped out—something about Marella moanin’, you know.”

As if on cue, Marella moaned again, a sound more like a hawk’s cry than that of a sick child.

“What exactly do you remember?”

“Has your darlin’ daughter ever sleepwalked?”

“Never.”

“Well, she’s started, Stevie. She’s somnambulating this very minute. She’s standing on her mattress revvin’ up her subconscious psychic energies with that eerie noise she’s making.”

“Betty, please—”

“Go in and look. She knows you’re upset about the monkeys and what they did to her animals, and she’s going to fix it—not so much for her sake, Mama, as for yours. She’s got the power, and she’s going to set everything to rights with her latent subliterary paranormal energies.”

Thoroughly exasperated, Stevie did not reply. She ducked through the low door into the closet, shouldered her way through the hangups, and climbed out of the closet into her daughter’s room. What she met there exceeded in spectacular unlikelihood the bedchamber scene so crisply described by the prophetess.

Marella stood barefoot in the center of her bed. Her nightgown sleeves were afloat beneath her outstretched arms, her eyes glowing with the same degree of heat and luminescence given off by the control on her electric blanket. She was facing the corridor leading to the stairwell, and her hands were lifting and falling together, as if asking the darkness to ebb away to the far recesses of the universe and an everlasting cosmic brightness to come flowing in. Meanwhile, she whined like a food processor cutting up cabbage for coleslaw.

“Marella,” Stevie said. “Marella, I’m here.”

The girl ignored her, and also Sister C., who was just now emerging from the attic into her room. Marella swayed in time to an insistent, inaudible melody. Her eyes glowed golden, golden, golden (the consequence of a condition not often seen in the offices of ophthalmologists). When, still undulating to her unheard music, she swung toward the two adults, they pressed themselves against the wall out of the direct line of her gaze.

“I’ve never seen a sleepwalker like that before,” Stevie whispered.

“Me either, child. Ain’t she something?”

The closet door blew open, nearly striking the Sister’s left arm, and a devil’s-wind of cellulose fibers and shredded polyurethane foam eddied out of the attic like a cloud of ravenous moths. Marella directed them with lilting hand movements and rhythmic nods of the head. (She reminded Stevie of Mickey Mouse in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence of
Fantasia
. . . except that she seemed in stricter control of her breathtaking gale than poor Mickey had been of his broom-and-bucket brigade.) As the girl’s right index finger pointed first this way and then that, the winged attic debris swept in schools toward the pelts of her gutted animals, restored their false hides to full-blown corporality, and animated each cuddlesome creature so that it could march back into her room in stirring martial procession with its fellows. To calm her heart during this demonstration, Stevie slid her arm around Sister C., a gesture that Betty Malbon reciprocated. Locked in this embrace, they watched Kodak, Big Bird, Raggedy Ann, Purvis O’Possum, Peepers, Velvet Belly, the soft-shelled turtle Sweetcakes, and the doll baby Toodles execute a precision maneuver at the threshold, wheel in ranks around Marella’s bed, and retire in orderly fashion to the bottom shelf of the tray assembly in which the child routinely stored them. Long after the animals had relapsed into floppy-limbed immobility, insulation fibers continued to drift about and Marella to play at field marshal from the cold plateau of her mattress, seemingly oblivious to the miracle she had wrought.

“I’ve never seen her like this,” Stevie said. “Maybe I should call Dr. Elsa.”

“Never dare. It’s much too late. Anyway, she’s going to be fine, Marella is. She’s stronger than you care to think.”

“Obviously.”

“Look. The glow’s going out of her eyes. Her arms are startin’ to droop. She just needs someone to tuck her in again—you, Mama.”

Stevie obeyed, for the Sister had spoken the truth: Marella’s eyes no longer hurled out light the way the Clinac 18 radiated electrons, and her body was crumpling toward the bedclothes. Tenderly easing her down, arranging her legs and arms beneath the blankets, Stevie mumbled comforting nonsense to the girl, meanwhile wondering whether she ought to set out newspapers and an upchuck bucket. Did telekinetically restuffing a half-dozen toy animals and then marching them to bed induce headaches, nausea, and neuralgia? That it might hardly seemed, to Stevie, an outlandish supposition.

“When she wakes up,” she told the Sister, “she’ll be terrified by what she’s done. She may take sick again.”

“She won’t even remember, Stevie.”

“How do you know?”

“I could tell by looking at her she didn’t know what she was doing when she did it. It’s not likely she’ll recall in the morning what she didn’t much mark in the doing.”

“Maybe,” said Stevie, stroking Marella’s forehead. She straightened and looked at her friend. “You’ve got to be exhausted, Betty. Let’s go downstairs and put you to bed.”

“I’m going on home to Button City, child, but I appreciate the invite.”

“You don’t want to drive at this hour. It’s cold, and Kudzu Valley’s down the road, and you’re all by yourself.”

The Sister opined that, having survived the last three and a half chapters in Stevie’s house, she would do beautifully cruising back down Highway 27 to her own cozy bungalow. Stevie would have enough explaining to do in the morning without an ample black lady popping in on the children to share their breakfast. Nor did the Sister much relish the idea of being introduced as a cook, maid, or cleaning woman. “Oh, no,” Stevie started to protest, but the prophetess declared she was only making a joke and reiterated her unshakable intention to leave. Together they had thwarted at least a portion of Seaton Benecke’s plot, although, the Sister must admit, he had dealt a brutal blow to one of Stevie’s most cherished memories; further, he had ruthlessly departed from the happier typescript in her carpetbag. Still, Stevie had acquitted herself well, and the Sister had no qualms about leaving her without a guest in their downstairs bedroom.

“Two things I’d like to do before I go, though, Stevie.”

“Of course.”

“Take a peek at your son and another at your PDE machine.”

A moment later, then, they stood together at Teddy’s bedside. The boy had slept through every scream, scuffle, cry, and alarum, and he continued to sleep beneath the half-speculative gazes of the women. So young, Stevie thought; so young. She resented the indignity to which the typewriter repairman’s malicious plotting had subjected them in an earlier chapter—when, in fact, Teddy and she had so clearly been surrogates for the thirteen-year-old Seaton and his attractive mother Lynnette. What an unsettling Oedipal fantasy Seaton had manufactured by imagining the episode from Stevie’s vantage. Unless, of course, she had dreamt the particulars of the unnatural scene herself. . . . The kaleidoscopic ramifications of the matter were so confusing that she sighed. Meanwhile, Teddy slipped in and out of her vision like a one-celled animalcule under the lens of a microscope, and her weariness did not permit her to bring him sharply back into focus.

“Pretty young man,” Sister C. remarked. “Very pretty young man.”

“Thank you.”

“Looks just like his daddy, doesn’t he?”

Stevie massaged her temples with her fingertips. “Yes. It’s not his fault, though. That’s the way the chromosomes coupled.”

“Who said it was a fault?” The Sister hugged Stevie with one arm. “You wanted me to diagnose your nightmares, remember? You wanted to know why Ted gave up when your doctor friends found his cancer. Well, he gave up ’cause he thought it was a punishment—a long-last punishment, child—for runnin’ around on you when you had his namesake in the oven. He gave up ’cause he thought the Fates had caught him. He said in one of your dreams he died so you could fulfill yourself. Well, he really did believe his dying was a gift to you, Stevie, a way of paying off the debt.”

“Some gift.”

“What do we always say?
’S the thought that counts.
Look at it like that.”

Stevie found the Sister’s doubtful point so funny that she began to laugh. To keep from waking Teddy, she covered her mouth, but her sputtering laughter still seeped through her fingers. In self-defense she buried her face in the Sister’s shawl while the Sister chuckled mutedly in sympathy. Consoling companionship. How could she have endured the last few hours if Betty Malbon had not driven up from Button City?

“Looks just like his daddy. You’re lucky you got him. Lucky you got
both
those pretty children.”

After saying she knew it and stroking Teddy’s head as if to acquire by touch an iota of his practical glamour, she led Sister C. across the hall to her study. The unplugged Exceleriter emitted from its contoured surfaces only the cold gleam of blue metal. The eldritch luminosity with which it had earlier burst on Stevie’s sight had wholly faded away.

A typewriter is a typewriter is a typewriter, Stevie thought, beholding it, almost feeling friendly toward it again. The
machine
had not conspired against her. It had suffered ill usage and demonic takeover at the hands of a pudgy blond fiend with great manual dexterity and a masturbatory fixation on his own mother. Sister Celestial had called him “a potion of free-floatin’ cosmic evil,” but everyone had good and bad days, and maybe the Sister had overstated the case to keep Stevie from underestimating her opponent during their showdown. In any event, you could not hold this unfortunate machine accountable for Seaton’s many despicable villainies.

Or could you?

“Plug it in and type on it,” the Sister said. “Before I leave, that is.”

Although Stevie grasped the advisability of having a friend nearby when she tried the Exceleriter again, her gut flip-flopped and her hands trembled. However, she had a clean sheet of paper in the machine (in an effort to comply with the Sister’s suggestion) when it turned itself on and rapidly typed out the following sentimental imperative:

GO TO HELL, YOU INTERFERING SLUTS.

Stevie yanked the paper free of the platen and the plug from the wall socket.

“You got to get shut of it, Stevie.”

“Shut of it?”

“Scrap it. Destroy it. Two choices only: one to drive to Columbus and shoot Seaton Benecke, and the other to take the typewriter he’s corrupted and put it out of your misery.’’

“It cost Ted seven hundred dollars, Betty. It’s my livelihood.”

“Murder a man or cast off a machine. It’s your choice. Either way you’ll find a type of salvation from this week-long nightmare you been suffering.”

“Do you plan to destroy your Remington?”

This unexpected question gave the Sister pause. “I don’t use mine the way you do—not usually. I’ll have to see. If it keeps misbehavin’, though, I’ll
hafta
scrap it, whether Emmanuel Berthelot gave it to my daddy for a heirloom or not, and he most certainly did.”

“Will you help me lose mine?”

“Stevie, you’ve got to do it yourself. I suggest tomorrow afternoon about the same time your typewriter broke down last Tuesday. That’ll round off the week ’n’ wrap up the whole episode nice and neat.”