Magic Terror (14 page)

He lowered his hands and got to his feet. “Now leave the room, Fee.” He removed his jacket and hung it on one of the bedposts and rolled up his sleeves. He tucked his necktie into his shirt. He stopped to give his son a disturbingly concentrated look. “We’re going to take care of her by ourselves, and we don’t want anybody else knowing our business.”

“Yes, sir,” Fee said.

His father jerked his head toward the bedroom door. “You remember what I said.”

2

His father never asked if he wanted to kiss his mom, and he never thought to ask if he could—the pale woman lying on the bed with her eyes closed was not someone you could kiss. She was sailing out into the vast darkness within her a little more every day. She was like a radio station growing fainter and fainter as you drove into the country.

The yellow bruise faded away, and one morning Fee realized that it had vanished altogether. Her cheeks sank inward toward her teeth, drawing a new set of faint pencil lines across her face. One day, five or six days after the bruise had disappeared, Fee saw that the round blue shadows of her temples had collapsed some fraction of an inch inward, like soft ground sinking after a rain.

Fee’s father kept saying that she was getting better, and Fee knew that this was true in a way that his father could not understand and he himself could only barely see. She was getting better because her little boat had sailed a long way into the darkness.

Sometimes Fee held a half-filled glass of water to her lips and let teaspoon-sized sips slide, one after another, into the dry cavern of her mouth. His mother never seemed to swallow these tiny drinks, for the moisture slipped down her throat by itself. He could see it move, quick as a living thing, shining and shivering as it darted into her throat.

Sometimes when his father prayed, Fee found himself examining the nails on his mother’s hand, which grew longer by themselves. At first her fingernails were pink, but in a week, they turned an odd yellowish-white. The moons disappeared. Oddest of all, her long fingernails grew a yellow-brown rind of dirt.

He watched the colors alter in her face. Her lips darkened to brown, and a white fur appeared in the corner of her mouth.

Lord, this woman needs Your mercy. We’re counting on You here, Lord.

When Fee left the bedroom each evening, he could hear his father go about the business of cleaning her up. When his father came out of the room, he carried the reeking ball of dirty sheets downstairs into the basement, his face frozen with distaste.

Mrs. Sunchana from the upstairs apartment washed her family’s things twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday mornings, and never came downstairs at night. Fee’s father put the clean sheets through the wringer and then took the heavy sheets outside to hang them on the two washing lines that were the Bandoliers’.

One night, his father slapped him awake and leaned over him in the dark. Fee, too startled to cry, saw his father’s enormous eyes and the glossy commas of the mustache glaring down at him. His teeth shone. Heat and the odor of alcohol poured from him.

—You think I was put on earth to be your servant. I was not put on earth to be your servant. I could close the door and walk out of here tomorrow and never look back. Don’t kid yourself—I’d be a lot happier if I did.

3

One day Bob Bandolier got a temporary job as desk man at the Hotel Hepton. Fee buffed his father’s black shoes and got the onyx cuff links from the top of the dresser. He pulled on his own clothes and watched his father pop the dry cleaner’s band from around a beautiful stiff white shirt, settle the shirt like armor around his body and squeeze the buttons through the holes, coax the cuff links into place, tug his sleeves, knot a lustrous and silvery tie, button his dark suit. His father dipped his knees before the bedroom mirror, brushed back the smooth hair at the sides of his head, used his little finger to rub wax into his perfect mustache, a comb no larger than a thumbnail to coax it through the whiskers.

His father pulled his neat dark topcoat on over the suit, patted his pockets, and gave Fee a dollar. He was to sit on the steps until noon, when he could walk to the Beldame Oriental Theater. A quarter bought him admission, and fifty cents would get him a hot dog, popcorn, and a soft drink; he could see
From Dangerous Depths,
starring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino, along with a second feature, the travelogue, previews, and a cartoon; then he was to walk back down Livermore without talking to anybody and wait on the steps until his father came back home to let him in. The movies ended at twenty-five minutes past five, and his father said he would be home before six, so it would not be a long wait.

“We have to make it snappy,” his father said. “You can’t be late for the Hepton, you know.”

Fee went dutifully to the closet just inside the front door, where his jacket and his winter coat hung from hooks screwed in halfway down the door. He reached up dreamily, and his father ripped the jacket off the hook and pushed it into his chest.

Before Fee could figure out the jacket, his father had opened the front door and shoved him out onto the landing. Fee got an arm into a sleeve while his father locked the door. Then he pulled at the jacket, but his other arm would not go into its sleeve.

“Fee, you’re deliberately trying to louse me up,” his father said. He ripped the jacket off his arm, turned it around, and jammed his arms into the sleeves. Then he fought the zipper for a couple of seconds. “You zip it. I have to go. You got your money?”

He was going down the steps and past the rosebushes to the path that went to the sidewalk.

Fee nodded.

Bob Bandolier walked away without looking back. He was tall and almost slim in his tight black coat. Nobody else on the street looked like him—all the other men wore plaid caps and old army jackets.

In a little while, smiling Mrs. Sunchana came up the walk carrying a bag of groceries. “Fee, you are enjoying the sunshine? You don’t feel the cold today?” Her slight foreign accent made her speech sound musical, and her creamy round face, with its dark eyes and black eyebrows beneath her black bangs, could seem either witchlike or guilelessly pretty. Mrs. Sunchana looked nothing at all like Fee’s mother—short, compact, and energetic where his mother was tall, thin, and weary; dark and cheerful where she was sorrowing and fair.

“I’m not cold,” he said, though the chill licked in under the collar of his jacket, and his ears had begun to tingle. Mrs. Sunchana smiled at him again, said, “Hold this for me, Fee,” and thrust the grocery bag onto his lap. He gripped the heavy bag as she opened her purse and searched for her key. There were no lines in her face at all. Both her cheeks and her lips were plump with health and life—for a second, bending over her black plastic purse and frowning with concentration, she seemed almost volcanic to Fee, and he wondered what it would be like to have this woman for his mother. He thought of her plump strong arms closing around him. Her face expanded above him. A rapture that was half terror filled his body.

For a second he was her child.

Mrs. Sunchana unlocked the door and held it open with one hip while she bent to take the groceries from Fee’s lap. Fee looked down into the bag and saw a cardboard carton of brown eggs and a box of sugar-covered doughnuts. Mrs. Sunchana’s live black hair brushed his forehead. The world wavered before him, and a trembling electricity filled his head. She drew the bag out of his arms, then quizzed him with a look.

“Coming in?”

“I’m going to the movies pretty soon.”

“You don’t want to wait inside, where it is warm?”

He shook his head. Mrs. Sunchana tightened her grip on the grocery bag. The expression on her face frightened him, and he turned away to look at the empty sidewalk.

“Is your mother all right, Fee?”

“She’s sleeping.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Sunchana nodded.

“We’re letting her sleep until my dad gets home.”

Mrs. Sunchana kept nodding as she backed through the door. Fee remembered the eggs and the sugary doughnuts, and turned around again before she could see how hungry he was. “Do you know what time it is?”

She leaned over the bag to look at her watch. “About ten-thirty. Why, Fee?”

A black car moved down the street, its tires swishing through the fallen elm leaves. The front door clicked shut behind him.

A minute later, a window slid upward in its frame. A painful self-consciousness brought him to his feet. He put his hands in his pockets.

Fee walked stiffly and slowly down the path to the sidewalk and turned left toward Livermore Avenue. He remembered the moment when Mrs. Sunchana’s electrically alive hair had moved against his forehead, and an extraordinary internal pain sent him gliding over the pavement.

The elms of Livermore Avenue interlocked their branches far overhead. Preoccupied men and women in coats moved up and down past the shop fronts. Fee was away from his block, and no one was going to ask him questions. Fee glanced to his right and experienced a sharp flame of anger and disgrace that somehow seemed connected to Mrs. Sunchana’s questions about his mother.

But of course what was across the street had nothing to do with his mother. Beyond the slowly moving vehicles, the high boxy automobiles and the slat-sided trucks, a dark, arched passage led into a narrow alley. In front of the brick passage was a tall gray building with what to Fee looked like a hundred windows, and behind it was the blank facade of a smaller, brown brick building. The gray building was the St. Alwyn Hotel, the smaller building its annex. Fee felt that he was no longer supposed to
look
at the St. Alwyn. The St. Alwyn had done something bad, grievously bad—it had opened a most terrible hole in the world, and from that hole had issued hellish screams and groans.

A pure, terrible ache occurred in the middle of his body. From across the street, the St. Alwyn leered at him. Cold gray air sifted through his clothing. Brilliant leaves packed the gutters; water more transparent than the air streamed over and through the leaves. The ache within Fee threatened to blow him apart. He wanted to lower his face into the water—to dissolve into the transparent stream.

A man in a dark coat had appeared at the end of the tunnel behind the St. Alwyn, and Fee’s heart moved with an involuntary constriction of pain and love before he consciously took in that the man was his father.

His father staring at a spot on the tunnel wall.

Why was his father behind the hated St. Alwyn, when he was supposed to be working at the Hotel Hepton?

His father looked from side to side, then moved into the darkness of the tunnel.

Bob Bandolier began fleeing down the alley. A confusion of feelings like voices raised in Fee’s chest.

Now the alley was empty. Fee walked a few yards along the sidewalk, looking down at the clear water moving through the brilliant leaves. The sorrow and misery within him threatened to overflow. Without thinking, Fee dropped to his knees and thrust both of his hands into the water. A shock of cold bit into him. His small white hands sank farther than he had expected into the transparent water, and handcuffs made of burning ice formed around his wrists. The leaves drifted apart when he touched them. A brown stain oozed out and drifted, obscuring the leaves. Gasping, Fee pulled his hands from the water and wiped them on his jacket. He leaned over the gutter to watch the brown stain pour from the hole he had made in the leaves. Whatever it was, he had turned it loose, set it free.

4

The box of popcorn warmed Fee’s hands. The Beldame Oriental Theater’s luxurious space, with its floating cherubs and robed women raising lamps, its gilded arabesques and swooping curves of plaster, lay all about him. Empty rows of seats extended forward and back, and high up in the darkness hung the huge raft of the balcony. An old woman in a flowerpot hat sat far down in the second row; off to his left a congregation of shapeless men drank from pint bottles in paper bags.

This happened every day, Fee realized.

MOVIETONE NEWS
blared from the screen, and a voice like a descending fist spoke over film of soldiers pointing rifles into dark skies, of a black boxer with a knotted forehead knocking down a white boxer in a brilliant spray of sweat. Women in bathing suits and sashes stood in a row and smiled at the camera; a woman in a long gown raised a crown from her head and placed it on the glowing black hair of a woman who looked like Mrs. Sunchana. It
was
Mrs. Sunchana, Fee thought, but then saw that her face was thinner than Mrs. Sunchana’s, and his panic calmed.

The grinning heads of a gray cat and a small brown mouse popped onto the screen. Fee laughed in delight. In cartoons the music was loud and relentless, and the animals behaved like bad children. Characters were turned to smoking ruins, pressed flat, dismembered, broken like twigs, consumed by fires, and in seconds were whole again. Cartoons were about not being hurt.

Abruptly, he was running through a cartoon house, alongside a cartoon mouse. The mouse ran upright on his legs, like a human being. Behind him, also on whirling back legs, ran the cat. The mouse scorched a track through the carpet and zoomed into a neat mouse hole seconds before the cat’s huge paw filled the hole. Fee brought salty popcorn to his mouth. Jerry Mouse sat at a little table and ate a mouse-sized steak with a knife and a fork. Fee drank in the enormity of his pleasure, the self-delight and swagger of the mouse, and the jealous rage of Tom Cat, rolling his giant bloodshot eye at the mouse hole.

After the cartoon, Fee walked up the aisle to buy a hot dog. Two or three people had taken seats in the vast space behind him. An old woman wrapped in a hairy brown coat mumbled to herself; a teenage boy cutting school cocked his feet on the seat in front of him. Fee saw the outline of a big man’s head and shoulders on the other side of the theater, looked away, felt an odd sense of recognition, and looked back at an empty seat. He had been seen, but who had seen him?

Fee pushed through the wide doors into the lobby. A skinny man in a red jacket stood behind the candy counter, and an usher exhaled smoke from a velvet bench. The door to the men’s room was just now swinging shut.