Fiends (7 page)

Arne Horsfall had calmed down and was contemplating the slices of steaming chicken breast Enid loaded on his plate. But he glanced at Marjory as she took her place at the table and she felt the turmoil beginning again, like a bad gas pain below her heart. It was as if he sensed her fear and dislike of him, which somehow focused everything that was dark and unsettled in his personality on her. Ted had had experiences with all kinds of weirdos (of which Caskey County could claim more than its share); why couldn't he see that all of Arne's dogs weren't barking? But Ted was heaping squash with sweet peppers and au gratin potatoes on his own plate and chatting amiably about the good fishing to be found up around Paris Landing. Marjory settled into a dismal silence and, during the blessing that Enid asked, prayed contrapuntally that the day would come to an end without incident; she prayed Arne Horsfall would be returned to Cumberland State before the sun set on him. The silence she enforced on herself soon made her giddy, and she had fits of laughter about nothing much while trying desperately to avoid everyone's eyes. Enid studied her with a rocky forbearance and redoubled her efforts to make Arne Horsfall feel like one of their little family.

7

"Are you coming down with something, Marjory?" Enid asked her in the kitchen while they were doing the dishes. Ted had taken fishing tackle from the trunk of his car and gone down to the torpid green pond with Arne to see if any bream were biting in the afternoon heat.

"Now that you mention it, I guess not."

"You outdid yourself at the table. I mean, you haven't carried on like that since you were four years old. I was embarrassed for you."

"I'm sorry," Marjory said grimly, and mishandled a plate Enid gave to her dripping from the rinse water. She caught it before it hit the floor.

"Careful."

Marjory sucked a breath and said, as if she'd been accused of going to the devil, "It was your fault; I never have broken a piece of mama's best china, and I never will!"

"Oh, Marjory,
hush,
what is it with you today?"

"Him," Marjory said, doing a quick, overly frenzied impression of Arne Horsfall's sign language.

"I cannot
believe
you. Don't you have compassion for anyone but your own selfish person?"

"That's not fair!"

"Of course he acted nervous—to begin with. Don't you understand what a day like this means to him? To be accepted in our home, treated with kindness, afforded his dignity? That's the first thing they take away from you in an institution, Marjory, your dignity. And without it—do you see what I'm saying?"

"Yeh," Marjory mumbled. "When's he going back?"

"Tomorrow."

"Oh, Enid, you don't mean—"

"Yes, I do mean, he's staying the night, I've already arranged with—"

"Enidddd," Marjory moaned, "that's the dumbest—"

"Marjory Waller, shut up!" Enid said, in a tone of voice that Marjory hadn't heard for nearly two years. Marjory stared at her for several taut seconds, then turned and put the plate she'd been drying on the table, turned again and stalked out of the kitchen.

"You'd better," Enid called after her, a little shrill from temper, "just stay in your room until you get ready to act right again! And while you're at it—" She had reached the kitchen door, the better to make herself heard as Marjory hit the top of the stairs with a resounding thump and went down the hall so fast she was getting nylon burns from the carpet runner, "—you might open your Bible and read—" Marjory slammed the door on this suggestion hard enough to loosen a little more of the plaster next to the jamb and jumped on her bed, not thinking about how careful she needed to be in her piqué dress. It opened at the seams like a dropped sack of flour.

Marjory clubbed her fists into a pillow, expelling a few feathers that floated lazily in the hot slant of sun through open windows. Then she lay, rigidly, for a few minutes in a deepening bath of perspiration, studying the cracks in her ceiling, the shadowy shapes of expired insects in the milk glass of the lighting fixture. She heard Ted's voice from the pond. She felt awful, too wretched to cry. Not wrong, exactly, but guilty because she knew she ought to be outgrowing tantrums by now. After a while she got up and stripped soggily, blotted her breasts and shoulders with a corner of the nubby chenille bedspread, then pulled on shorts and a Grateful Dead T-shirt of a faded blue still dark enough to disguise the absence of a bra. She switched on the fan, which began swiveling its ugly old black head like a creature in a Godzilla movie, and fiddled with the antenna of the black-and-white TV set on the shelf of her armoire. There wasn't much to see this time of the afternoon but a gospel quartet—all of them wearing baggy silk suits and pompadours with bushy sideburns, none whom she would call cute—and
The American Sportsman,
with Curt Gowdy. Stalking bighorn sheep in Alaska was low on the list of things she hoped to do someday, ranking just ahead of communal farming in British Honduras, and autopsies.

Marjory returned her attention to the backyard. Enid had (unselfishly) finished doing the dishes and was strolling to the gazebo, accompanied by several cats, theirs and the neighbors'. She had a sketchpad and a box of colored pencils with her. Marjory yawned. A nap began to seem like a good idea. Then she could stay up all night with the lights on and her door locked, and she didn't care what Enid might think. The guest room where Arne Horsfall would be laying his head was right next to hers, while Enid was safely down the hall. Marjory tried to find enough nail on the pinkie of her left hand to nibble. Over by the pond Ted was teaching Arne Horsfall the technique of fly casting. She turned away from the glare of the windows, crept face down onto her bed, and took a pillow soothingly into her arms.

8

Marjory heard the train like a ghost in a well and saw, as she sat up in the back of their station wagon, the big, blunt yellow and blue diesel engine coming into view through the trees. The tailgate of the wagon was down, blurry asphalt unwinding behind them. She was apprehensive but not scared; Daddy Lee must have seen the train too, and he wasn't going to let anything happen to them: nothing bad ever happened to a Waller, they all just got very old and died of natural causes. Wizened fruit falling from the eternal family tree. But the wagon was getting closer to the intersection with the shining rails and the oncoming behemoth, its headlight flashing in broad daylight.
Daddy,
Marjory said, calmly and deliberately,
stop.
Then he turned his head and grinned back at her and she saw that it wasn't her daddy; Arne Horsfall was driving. No
brakes,
he said. Marjory began crawling toward the tailgate of the wagon. Behind them on the road Enid and Ted were bicycling, and they didn't seem to realize anything was wrong. They smiled and waved to Marjory. She tried to call to them, but couldn't utter a sound. Of course not, she'd forgotten she had been born dumb. Trouble and woe. Why had she let Arne Horsfall borrow the family wagon? Mama and daddy would never forgive her.
He
wasn't one of them. He didn't belong. But here he was, causing a peck of trouble after they'd gone out of their way to be nice. All Marjory wanted to do was to roll over the edge of the tailgate before the train hit them. But now, in addition to being voiceless, she couldn't move. Marjory lay on her back staring at the green woods flashing by, and she heard the train again, wild and dismal, she could smell the heat and oil and feel its power, but no thank you, she wasn't going to look—
God damn it—

9

Marjory, lying on her back on her bed, heart pounding right through the mattress, heard the door of Ted's Firebird shutting and then, a few seconds later, the throaty engine turning over. She felt, for a few panicky moments, incapable of movement, as if she had willed a state of paralysis as a result of the nightmare.

No, I wasn't there.

She raised a hand lethargically to her damp face and swallowed several limes as Ted backed around Enid's Corvair to the street. Probably he was working the six to two A.M. shift, Marjory thought. The sun had moved on, it was no longer shining directly into her room, and a whiff of breeze stirred the lace curtains framing the windows. Cicadas were loud in the locust tree that needed to be pruned back from the upper stories of the house; it dragged its branches across the roof and clapboards whenever the wind rose.

About four hours after the accident, with the house getting crowded, the kitchen table overloaded with all the food brought by the callers (Enid had been hospitalized for shock, but everybody apparently felt little Marj would be ravenous after hearing how mama and daddy had been snuffed out), she had sneaked away on her bike and gone over there to see for herself what it had been like. Carrying grief like weights around her wrists and ankles, a big lead collar enclosing her throat. Pedaling furiously down I he narrow curving road, wind in her face redolent of summer woods and the muddy creek bottom, the light below her handlebars barely peeking into the dark. At the scene of the accident tall corn grew in a wedge-shaped plot hard by the railroad right-of-way, and only in late summer was the view of the tracks obscured on the north side of Doylestown Road. The road was blocked in both directions by the train. Red and yellow dome lights on official vehicles streaked the sides of well-traveled boxcars. Wabash. Santa Fe. Chesapeake and Ohio. There were a lot of men around, some with badges, and one who smoked a cigar that was almost enough to make her sick told Marjory to get lost.

Marjory just ignored him, and when he wasn't looking she walked along the tracks until she came to the pair of back-to-back diesels a hundred yards south of the crossing. One of the generators was humming on low power. The headlamp was attracting a monstrous swarm of the kinds of bugs you never saw except around intensely bright objects. She walked around to the front of the lead engine, which had a big sooty smudge on it. The odor in the sultry air wasn't only train. Something else, like a barbecue grill that badly needed cleaning.

The family station wagon wasn't there.

It was as if she had been told a fantastic lie. Staring up at the dazzling mirrored headlamp that shone down the right-of-way for more than a mile, Marjory knew they deserved a miracle and one had been forthcoming, her parents were still alive. That's when she began to tremble in a kind of ecstasy. The next thing she knew the diesel engines were throbbing with a reciprocal energy that jarred the roadbed and a man who worked for the L and N railroad had come over to lead her off the tracks. He wore an old felt hat like her daddy wore when he was working in his shop.

"Honey, are you here with somebody?"

"My name's M-Marjory Waller; do you know where my mama and d-daddy are?"

She didn't mind that he was holding her hand; he seemed like a nice man and she was still shaking, teeth chattering. The train began to move and Marjory backed away, stumbling over something metallic. She looked down at her feet and saw it: twisted, blackened, but unmistakably part of the grill of a sedan or station wagon. She looked at the man's face. He slowly removed his hat and got down on one knee in front of her, smiling heartbrokenly. Marjory studied the train going by and with its passing realized the diminishing of hope for the miracle; and she felt a bone-deep nostalgic regret, how she'd felt upon finding out, conclusively, that there was no Santa Claus. A big crazed bug flew away from the train and hit her in the forehead hard enough to stagger her. Marjory's eyes got a little bigger, but it seemed futile to cry. She hated the bug, and she hated God, but she could never get even with either of them.

10

All the bad feeling from her dream had pooled in the tender places of Marjory's psyche. She rose from her bed, went to the windows and looked out. Arne Horsfall had joined Enid in the gazebo, and both were sketching, Arne with secretive head movements and quick glances into thin air, as if he were soliciting inspiration. Marjory went downstairs to the kitchen and ate a peach. She was thinking about calling someone to pass the time of day when the telephone rang.

The prescient bump at the base of her spine tingled warmly; she knew it was going to be Rita Sue.

"Hi, what're you doing?" Marjory said. She spat out the well-gnawed peach pit, caught it with a bare foot, and balanced it on her big toe.

"Nothing. Brenda McClanahan came over to show off her engagement ring. I never saw a diamond that little, it's only about half as big as bugspit. Did you hear Boyce was cleaning out their garage with his daddy and dropped a big old crankcase on his foot?"

"Break any bones?"

"No, but he can barely hobble around and, you know, football practice starts in another week."

"He'll be ready. Want to play miniature golf?"

"I guess so." Rita Sue sighed, bored to distraction.

"Pick you up in ten minutes."

"Marjory, you know I'm not going to ride around in that old car of yours! I'm so allergic to it, it must have come off a nigger car lot." She sniffed emphatically. "Not that I want to hurt your feelings."

"You never hurt my feelings, Rita Sue, that's why I'm still talking to you." Marjory flipped the peach pit across the kitchen, missing the opening of the trash can, twenty feet away, by less than an inch. "Okay, pick
me
up in ten minutes, I probably should get Enid's permission to go out."

"How come?"

"We have company, remember? Wait till I tell you about
him.
But I was acting like a ring-tailed snot most of the afternoon, Enid'll be glad to get rid of me. Oh, can I have my Joplin records back?"

"Do I still have those? Maybe they're under the bed. I'll look for them."

In the gazebo Arne Horsfall was bent over his sketchpad, hard at work. He drew almost desperately, hand twisted around the pencil as if it had wounded him. Drawing a barn, or something; but it didn't resemble Crudup's barn across the pond. Marjory, resigned, had the unjustifiable feeling he was like a stray dog that had come to their back porch and was just going to stay on, lurking out of the way and making no fuss.

Enid looked up coolly at her sister.

"I suppose it's all right—even though we have a guest. As long as you're back in an hour."

"I might be an hour and a half. Rita Sue dawdles all over the Pizza-Putt course. Will you be okay?" Marjory glanced again at Arne Horsfall, who paid no attention to either of them. Marjory was convinced that he was more than just a little hard of hearing, as well as speechless. Dissatisfied with what he was attempting to draw, he turned to a blank page.

Enid nodded as if, on Arne's behalf, she resented the question. Rita Sue had pulled up in her red convertible, radio on, Roy Orbison's unearthly voice filling the ear like clouds fill the sky.

"You might trouble to put on a bra," Enid said in a low voice, dismissing her. "This is Caskey County, not Woodstock."

Marjory glanced down at her perceptible nipples. But not all that perceptible—she decided she wouldn't bother with the bra and went running off to join Rita Sue.

"Marjory, doesn't it hurt to have your bubbies bouncing all over the place like that?" Rita Sue asked her.

"You'll
never know," Marjory said, with a smug look at the nearly vertical front of Rita Sue's sleeveless shirt. She sprawled happily in the seat with her knees up, dialed the volume of the radio higher with prehensile toes.