Fiends (34 page)

Somewhere, in some form, Theron survived. And they would all live to regret it.

October, 1970:

Alastor and Enid

October 15 1970

Hi, Duane, it's
me again.

Can you believe it? First Jimi Hendrix, and now Janis. When I heard about it I drove over to Rita Sue's and borrowed my Joplin albums back. Naturally they were scratched. Rita Sue said they were scratched when she got them. I never will learn not to loan her stuff, I guess. I was going to sit up all night listening to Janis, and burn some incense, you know?

I wanted it to be a spiritual experience, not a wake, a night I would remember for the rest of my life. But I couldn't even make it through "Summertime." I don't mean I fell asleep, although I was tired like I've been lately, worse than tired. It's just that, aside from sorry, the same as I'd be sorry if the mailman's wife died, I didn't feel anything really powerful. I don't know if it was Janis's fault, for dying without having anything true or important to die for, or my fault because there's something wrong with my character. Since I was a little girl I've had this strong feeling that, there are an awful lot of people in the world whom I will never meet, probably, but who are closer to me than even my own sister, close spiritually, I mean. Soul mates. I've had goosebumps sometimes, hearing a voice, seeing a face, maybe somebody famous like Janis but not always. (Might even be somebody not so famous with the initials D.E., who knows?) The first time I heard Janis, I thought, wow, she's exactly like me! Sort of on the homely side, mad and fed up with all the dirty treacherous things going on in this world that she can't do much about, but trying anyhow, letting it all hang out, making them pay attention—That's me, Marjory Waller, that's what I feel, what I'm all about, that's how I would do it if I could sing! I wrote her

a couple of letters once but you know how it is, all you get back is a photo where it looks as if she halfway tried to comb her hair, a photo somebody else probably signed. But I didn't care. It was the spiritual aspect, the giving of love and knowing some tiny part of that gift might get through to her even if she never consciously realized it, that mattered. Whatever I gave to Janis, whatever tiny cosmic thing we shared, I guess it wasn't enough. That's what got me so down, finally. That feeling of helplessness. Do I really count? Can I change anything? What difference does it make, if I love somebody?

Well, Duane, I didn't intend to say all that, didn't even know I was thinking it. Didn't intend to write you another letter, for that matter. But it's two letters you haven't answered and three phone calls you haven't returned. Maybe I'm too stubborn for my own good, or maybe all that went on between us, before Dante's Mill, didn't mean that much to you, that it's a flaw you have I was never aware of (because I had scales on my eyes, like daddy used to say), a big flaw lots of boys have in common, as I am learning to my sorrow. Anyway, in baseball you get three strikes and this is it, Duane, your third strike!!! After tonight I give up. I know what Janis would do, I mean would've done, load up on Southern Comfort and hotfoot it down there to Franklin and do something smelly on your doorstep like you deserve. But she was from Texas and I guess Texans are more crude than us Tennessee Waller girls, who have a certain amount of dignity to their names.

Okay, I read over what I just wrote, and I'll leave it in, about you being flawed; I guess none of us are very perfect, are we? I realize it might be something else: maybe you're as scared as I am. Or worse scared, because so much happened you couldn't tell anybody about. If that's the story, morning glory, okay, I understand. I don't blame you for not wanting to see me again, particularly if there's a curse on our heads (I mean on Enid's and Marjory Waller's heads), which, not only because of the stuff that was in the papers and the dreams I've been having, but because of other

I don't know how to say it so anything makes sense. God, this letter is getting to be such a mess! It would be so much easier to talk to you.

Try again. Maybe I'll do better if I go back to the beginning, put it all down, what I actually remember, what's just a lot of spooky shadows. Bear with me? That is, if I'm not already in the wastebasket after that remark about your doorstep.

Hospitals. They give me the creeps, even nice modern ones like Wingo County Memorial. Which, of course, is where I woke up almost exactly seventy-two hours after we left my house for a Saturday picnic. Lucky to wake up at all, I guess, and not be a vegetable. I thought we'd all been in a car wreck or something. I might've freaked out, except for all that medication dripping into my veins: hypothermia, then high fevers, a convulsion or two, cardiac arrest, but you know what I'm talking about: I know you weren't in much better shape except I don't think your heart stopped until you got home and decided to stay away from Marjory Waller forever—there I go again. Maybe my brain is part freeze-dried turnip after all.

Still paying attention? Okay, once they allowed I was well enough to sit up in bed and shuffle nine steps to the pottie by myself, and Ted and Enid and a couple of doctors answered my questions, like, where's Duane (parents had him transferred to that private hospital in Nashville because of all the satan-cult stuff in the papers) and Rita Sue (nothing bad ever happens to Rita Sue; I've always thought that hysterics were good for her complexion), and Boyce—I'll get back to Boyce—then they figured I was strong enough to answer some questions myself. The TBI guys came around (one of them was kind of cute, like Paul Newman with blackheads, but I digress), and I told them at least twenty times what I knew: that I got lost in a cave after looking for you and Puff, who were looking for Arne Horsfall, the Grundig radio thief. You found me, but we took a bath by accident in some very cold water, and both of us had to be rescued. Three dumb kids getting lost in a cave, and unlucky Puff is still lost, which I know is not your fault. And that's it.

Except for getting scared purple-pissless that night at Wingo Memorial when those TV maniacs got into my room somehow and woke me up shining bright lights in my eyes and this woman with a microphone and porcelain teeth was smiling at me and asking me what I knew
about the mass execution of the old-time folk of Dante's Mill and satan cults and ritual mutilation of animals like the one Boyce finished off with a golf club on the porch of the park lodge. How would I know anything about that? But it may have something to do with the case of the spooks I'm having lately, and Rita Sue and Boyce splitting up and the funk he's been in (he was intercepted five times the other night at Waynesboro, and they beat us 19-zip).

Maybe I should digress again. They say now (they being adults with all kinds of impressive initials before and after their names, signifying how much more qualified they are to be idiots than the rest of us common people) that it was some kind of poor mutant albino bear cub that got into the lodge looking for food after its mother abandoned it. Good thinking on the part of the mother, I'd say, but you know something? It's fas. Nobody really knows what it was, and thanks to the incompetence of some other expert who took the thing away in a plastic tarp afterward and then "misplaced" it, we'll never know for sure, will we? Rita Sue says I ought to be glad I was somewhere else drowning in the dark at the time, and didn't see it.

But I've got news for Rita Sue: I've seen worse since. And you're the first one I've told. Because somehow I have enough confidence left in you to hope you won't think I'm crazy.

You know about Arne Horsfall and how Enid met him. How upset she was when he disappeared, like it was all her fault. What happened to him in the woods at Dante's Mill was horrible; I don't know how anybody, even devil-worshipers, or ordinary homicidal freaks stoned out of their skulls like the Manson gang, could have done what they did to Mr. Horsfall and that other guy, the hippie from Florida who was traveling with Puff. But Enid's determined to feel guilty about that too, maybe for the rest of her life. She held a memorial service for Mr. Horsfall at Cumberland State, then went into a funk that makes Boyce Bledsoe seem positively giddy. I have to make her talk to me at the supper table, force her to eat a few bites. She doesn't feel like going to work. From what shows up in the laundry basket, she's not changing her unmentionables very often. That is not like Enid!!!

She sleeps, this is no lie, fifteen or sixteen hours a day. When she's not sleeping, she stays in her room with the door shut, drawing. She's had me bring her a couple dozen charcoal pencils and five bottles of white shoe polish from K Mart— but I'll get to that, what she's been doing with all the shoe polish. Poor Ted, he tried and tried to snap Enid out of it, but he's been at his wit's end all week. Yesterday he gave up and said he was going on a hunting trip, good-bye! I thought deer season started in November. But I don't blame Ted. The last few years us Wallers have been poor as churchmice, but if I hadn't lucked into that job at the Toddler Shop, we wouldn't have a dime in the house. Or electricity. Does Enid care? I know I must be boring you with all this. The point is, I'm worried sick she's had a nervous breakdown. It's getting chilly now with fall around the comer, but she sleeps on top of the covers in a flimsy nightgown, if she bothers with a nightgown at all, and with the windows wide open. I tiptoe in and shut them, an hour later they're all open again. Her complexion's bad and her hair's starting to fall out—found a hunk of it under the washbasin today. Until a month ago, my sister was Miss America material! And it's not just her looks. Two nights ago I woke up (not that I've been doing much sleeping myself) and checked on Enid, which I do three or four times a night. She wasn't in her room. You probably noticed there was a full moon yesterday. So it was as bright as twilight on the lawn at one in the morning. And there she was, not a stitch on, ribs sticking out, hair like a mare's nest, just wandering around with the cats and looking up at the sky like she'd totally flipped! Maybe I'm not doing the right thing, waiting and hoping she'll come out of it by herself. Oh, God. Maybe what she needs is a stay at Cumberland State. Maybe you'll think we both do, when I tell you what happened, what I saw, last night.

I don't think I ever showed you a portrait that Arne Horsfall did for one of Enid's art classes at the funny farm. "Portrait" is probably not the word. It's a woman, I assume, but she has no hair—no eyebrows, either. Her face is white, like liquid shoe polish, which is what he used for paint, and her eyes are pale blue, the only spots of color in the picture. She's holding her head with both hands, and screaming, I guess—it looks like she's totally
wigged out. That's all. No, I forgot one detail. The little finger on one hand is black and pointed, like a thorn. I hate that picture!!! The first time I saw it, I told Enid she'd better throw it away. But it's still in her room, and Enid's painted maybe sixteen more that are like it, only better than Mr. Horsfall could hope to do: naked, hairless shoe-polish people, surrounded by (I hope you're ready for this) hundreds of luna moths!! Remember that night we prowled around the yard looking for cocoons? I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we've got lunas again, if only for decoration, or whatever reason Enid had for drawing them.

What I have is bad dreams: of caves, and shoe-polish people who glow in the dark, and other shoe-polish people, lying on the floor in one of those caves with a lot of holes in the walls. Only this time they're black instead of white, blacker than any negro I've ever seen! Black, I guess, because they've been burned to death, like Mama and Daddy Lee in the train accident. I wake up shaking, Duane, and I swear I can't calm down for at least an hour after one of those. I've probably had the cave dreams six times in the past two weeks, and I had them when I was in the hospital, too.

Last night I dreamed something else, for a change. It's embarrassing, but I need to tell you.

When I finally doze off after feeling so awful about Janis, I'm dreaming about being naked too, and flying in some strange place where there are volcanos and glaciers but no trees, flying with a bunch of shoe-polish people who are friends of mine. The white ones. Not such a bad dream, at first: flying's a lot of fun. The trouble is, God doesn't like us. I don't know why. But he's angry, and the weather gets rough. There's lightning all around the sky, and suddenly I'm up there alone, my flying friends are gone. Then I simply forget how to fly. Falling is not fun!!! The volcanoes were gone, nothing but trees below, and I crash through one of them to the ground. I don't die. You can't die in dreams, can you? But it's real hairy anyway. Knocks the breath out of me. The next thing I know, there you are! Good old Duane. It's kind of a tropical place, palm trees and Africa critters. Giraffes. Spotted cats hiding in the long grass. The sun's very bright; I don't know why, but I'm afraid of the sun.

Afraid of being burned. But I'm in the shade, lying flat on my back. I can see perfectly well, I just can't move. I'm frozen. My toes, fingers, bubbies, everything. Frozen solid, can't draw a breath. There's something around my neck too, choking me, but you untie it and pull it off. It's a big green vine, Duane, which you put in your pants pocket just as it's turning into a snake. You don't want me to see that, but I do see it—

And then I woke up in a corner of my bed against the wall. . . and I was . . . I just decided not to tell you the most embarrassing part.

This was last night, or today I guess. About three in the morning. When I say I woke up, it wasn't all the way awake. I was really groggy, out of it. I went to the bathroom to get a drink of water. Then I heard Enid. Talking in her room. Or someone else talking: kind of a childish voice. I walked down the hall and the closer I came to Enid's room, the colder I was. I could see my breath. When I opened the door I swear it must have been below freezing inside. Sort of foggy, like the inside of a big meat locker. The windows were wide open, as usual. Enid was on the bed and she looked unconscious, not asleep. I saw something move; it leaped off the floor on the other side of Enid's bed, tangled in a sheet, and hopped twice. God, it scared me! It jumped up on a windows///, leaving the sheet behind. I saw it hanging from the sill for a couple of seconds with both hands, or paws—I couldn't tell which. It looked a little like one of Enid's portraits she has stuck up all over her walls, but much smaller. Then it jumped into the tree there in front; it was just a quick white blur in the dark. Another albino mutant bear cub? Or something that might be even worse? I know I was wide awake by then, but Lord, I sure hope I was hallucinating!!! I'm so used to looking at those creepy people Enid draws, seeing them again in my dreams, it's probably affected my mind. I just can't be sure what I saw was real. I know I had a heck of a time waking Enid up. She's. . . it's as if she's slipping away from us, a little more every day. Duane, what's happening to us is so awful! We don't deserve this. Beginning tonight, I'm going to take my sleeping bag to Enid's room, and stay with her. I'll make sure the windows stay closed. When Ted gets back from his hunting trip, if she isn't better then we'll drive her straight to Cumberland State Hospital. There must be a doctor smart enough to figure out what's happening to her, who can make her well.