Who Made Stevie Crye? (2 page)
Read Who Made Stevie Crye? Online
Authors: Michael Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #science fiction, #General
THE TYPING
One Week in the Life
of the Madwoman of Wickrath County
A Novel of Contemporary Horror
A. H. H. Lipscombe
THE BRIAR PATCH PRESS • ATLANTA
Seeking to contrive a way both to have
one’s cake and to eat it is indubitably
a shameful activity; but human, too, I fear,
so very, very human.
—A. H. H. LIPSCOMBE
I
Stevenson Crye
—
her friends called her Stevie
—was nearing the end of her feature story on detection-and-diagnosis procedures at the West Georgia Cancer Clinic in Ladysmith when a cable inside her typewriter snapped and the machine began emitting a sound like an amplified raspberry. The disc on which the type characters were embossed refused to advance, and the angry blatting of the stalled element grew perilously louder. The typewriter seemed to be threatening to blow apart, a seven-hundred-dollar time bomb.
Stevie jabbed the on/off key and pushed her folding chair away from the desk, her entire body trembling as if the scream of an emergency vehicle had riven her peace of mind. She wanted to scream.
Instead she murmured, “Shit,” and exhaled a despairing sigh. Although that word was forbidden the lips of thirteen-year-old Ted, Jr., and eight-year-old Marella (the penalty for bad language being the forfeiture of a week’s allowance), ever since her husband’s death in the hospital next door to the clinic about which she had just been writing, Stevie had found frequent occasion to use the word herself. Bills falling due, deadlines missed, and now her expensive PDE “Exceleriter” breaking down and proclaiming its failure with a mechanical Bronx cheer. Shit. Thank God the kids were still at school.
Stevie went to the window of her second-floor study and leaned her face against the cold glass. The naked limbs of cork elms and dogwoods could not conceal the silver struts and lofty unpainted belly of Barclay’s water tower four blocks away. The town looked uninhabited. Who did you turn to on a bleak February afternoon when the instrument you and your children depended on for nearly every necessity went on the fritz? Dr. Elsa was fine at setting bones and incinerating warts, but probably not so handy at doctoring broken typewriters. You could romanticize small towns all you liked, but sometimes they were pretty damned inconvenient. Lots of work for a plumber and electrician like Ted, though. He had loved this place.
The Exceleriter, meanwhile, reposed in the middle of Stevie’s rolltop as if nothing much were wrong.
Her cheek still against the glass, Stevie stared at it. The typing element was canted at an unfamiliar angle, but otherwise the machine looked okay. Ted had given it to her for her birthday two and a half years ago, not long after she had decided to develop her latent writing talent and shortly before Dr. Elsa had diagnosed his gastrointestinal cancer. Ted was gone, but his gift remained, providential and indispensable. Maybe if she switched it on again, the type disc would click back into place and the machine obediently resume its lovely rotary-engine purr.
Worth a try, Stevie thought, leaving the window.
The typewriter, however, responded to her touch with a voice like a robot magpie’s. In self-defense she gouged the on/off control. In helpless anger she pounded the machine’s dark-blue hood. When she had finished, the only sound in the world seemed to be the propane hiss of her Dearborn space heater—that and the faint mockery of the winter wind clicking the leafless branches of the trees.
“Shit!” cried Stevenson Crye. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
II
Downstairs, her tantrum spent
, Stevie sought to remedy the situation in a rational way. When a problem presented itself, Ted had always cautioned her, you didn’t spout curses, pound inanimate objects, or tear your hair. No, of course not. You made a list of possible solutions, either on paper or in your head, and you tried each of these solutions in turn until everything was hunky-dory again. Otherwise, according to this consummate handyman-for-hire, you went rapidly and counter-productively bonkers.
So be it. She would take her late husband’s advice.
Too bad you didn’t practice what you preached in bookkeeping and financial matters, thought Stevie involuntarily, with a twinge of the old resentment she had been trying to exorcise for months. She administered a reproving slap to her own forehead and put the thought out of her mind.
What to do about the broken Exceleriter? First, Stevie decided, she would try to borrow the clunky old Smith-Corona at the Barclay medical center to finish her article. So that she need not transport the typewriter back and forth in her van, Dr. Elsa would probably agree to let her work in an empty examination room. It might even be fun to turn out a story in a building where you could hear other human beings moving about.
Second, she would telephone the offices of Pantronics Data Equipment in Ladysmith to see about having her Exceleriter repaired. The last time something had gone wrong with it (a minor glitch in its timing), Ted had taken care of the matter while the machine was still under its original warranty. Really, then, she had no right to accuse PDE of marketing an unreliable product. In the twenty months since her husband’s desertion—
death
, rather; she didn’t mean
desertion
—she must have run nearly a half-million words through the Exceleriter. By that standard, it had been a bargain, the most astute investment in her future security Ted could have possibly made—with the inarguable exception of a decent insurance policy and a growing savings account. A good hand with a measuring tape and voltage meters, he had never been able to balance his checkbook.
Although eighteen miles away, Ladysmith was a local call for Barclay residents. Stevie found the PDE number in the directory, dialed it, and began explaining her trouble to a secretary who interrupted her anxious spiel to connect her with the service department. This time a man answered, and Stevie began again.
“Give me directions to your place of business,” the service employee interjected. “We’ll send someone over.”
“I’m self-employed. I work at home.”
“Do you carry a service agreement with us?”
“At three hundred dollars a year? Are you kidding?”
The man gave an ambiguous harrumphing laugh. “Well, we make house calls even for private individuals without service agreements.”
“For a price.”
“No different from anybody else, Mrs. Crye. You don’t work for free, I’ll bet. Neither do the folks at Pantronics Data Equipment.”
“Okay, okay. Apart from repair costs, what
do
you charge for a service call?”
“Just a minute.” Stevie heard the pages of a loose-leaf manual turning and the serviceman muttering half-audible computations. “It’s a mileage thing, Mrs. Crye,” he said a moment later. “To Barclay and back . . . well, about twenty-three dollars.”
“I’ll bring it in.”
“Fine with us.”
“That’s better than a dollar a mile,” Stevie accused. “Fine by me if I don’t pay your extortionist rates.”
“Actually, ma’am, it’s
less
than a dollar a mile.”
“You’re figuring this on a PDE calculator, I take it.”
“Not at all, Mrs. Crye. You used the Ladysmith directory to call us, but you’re talking to a Columbus exchange. PDE headquarters in South Georgia happens to be in Columbus, that’s where I am, and that’s where you’ll have to bring your typewriter. See how helpful we are? The magic of electronics has just saved you the cost of a long-distance call.”
Stevie’s sense of frustration mounted. South on I-185, Columbus was over forty miles away. Although she did not mind driving there on weekends for the grocery specials and some rueful window shopping, today was Tuesday. She could hardly put off the repair that long. She would have to gas up the VW microbus and drive down there tomorrow, forfeiting a large part of a valuable workday.
Indeed, if they asked her to leave the Exceleriter, she would have to waste a portion of another day fetching it home. The mock-affability of the man on the other end of the line heightened her frustration.
“Your thoughtfulness is a model for us all,” she told him.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“How much to replace the cable on my ribbon carrier? Can you give me an estimate, to sort of cushion the shock before I get down there?”
“Our hourly rates went up at the first of the year.”
Oh, no, thought Stevie. The PDE man had made this announcement as if declaring a stock dividend. From his point of view, maybe he had. Maybe he was a working-stiff shareholder with a vested interest in soaking the company’s clientele.
“Are you afraid to tell me to what?” Stevie asked.
“From forty-four dollars an hour, Mrs. Crye, to fifty-two. We don’t prorate that amount, either. Fifty-two dollars is the
minimum
charge for whatever may need to be done.”
“Fifty-two dollars to replace a goddamn carrier cable? Even if it only takes five minutes?”
“That’s not a ladylike way to talk, Mrs. Crye.”
“Listen, in January it only cost me thirty-five dollars to get complete physical checkups for both my kids, tests and lab work included. You don’t really think servicing an Exceleriter ought to cost more than examining two living human children, do you?” Her indignation gave her voice a murderous, unappeasable edge.
“Kids aren’t our specialty, ma’am.”
“Do me a favor. Never tell the American Medical Association what you’re charging, okay? If Dr. Sam and Dr. Elsa ever decide they want parity with you overpaid gadget fixers, I’ll have to start treating my kids with chicken-noodle soup and Band-Aids, no matter how bad they hurt. Really, Mr. Whoever-You-Are, this is outrageous.”
“Smith,” said the man, amiably. “John Smith.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Listen, I’d have to be out of my mind to bring my machine to you two-legged piranhas. You’ve made it very clear what PDE stands for. It’s not Pantronics Data Equipment, either. It’s—“
“— Pretty Damned Expensive,” said the man in the service department. “We hear that all the time.” And he hung up.
“Arrrgggghhhhh!” cried Stevie, slamming her own receiver into its cradle. Then she covered her face with her hands and hunched forward over the breakfast bar wondering how Ted would have handled that smart-alecky company shill. Better than she had, probably. Far better than she had. Ted had been good at handling problems, and in his work around Barclay he had encountered dozens of ticklish ones every day. The only problem he had not known how to deal with, money worries aside, was his illness. To his illness he had turned belly-up like a yard dog beset by a pack of vicious strays. Why, in the one conflict where resolve really mattered, had he proved so weak?
Stevie abruptly uncovered her eyes and lifted her head. “The typewriter’s the problem,” she admonished herself. “Not Ted; the
typewriter
. Stop this rotten sniveling.”
She dialed the telephone again.
III
With Sam Kensington, her physician-husband
, Dr. Elsa worked alternate days in the medical centers of Barclay and the nearby Wickrath community. Being in Barclay this Tuesday, she had no objection to Stevie’s popping over to commandeer the ancient Smith-Corona in the rear examination room.
“Come ahead, honey,” the older woman had said. “You might want to wear a surgical mask, though.”
Indeed, Stevie found the tiny facility’s two waiting rooms (once upon a time, whites had sat on one side and blacks on the other) teeming with flu victims, lonely pensioners in need of either prescriptions or official reassurance, and worried mothers with colicky babies. February always overburdened the Kensingtons, but, marvelously panic-proof, the fiftyish Dr. Elsa gave Stevie a smile from the doorway of one of the examination rooms up front, motioned her down the hall to the spare typewriter, and apologized for not being able to stop for a chat.
“Do whatever you’ve got to do, Stevie.”
“Thanks. I’ll try to be out of your hair in an hour or so. Marella expects me to be waiting for her when she gets home from school.”
Pounding out the final four paragraphs of her article for
The Columbus Ledger
, Stevie felt acutely uncomfortable. She had no real fear of catching a flu bug from one of the sufferers out front, but she did regret preempting the use of this room for the examination of patients. The little clinic was bursting at the seams, and here she was occupying space that rightfully belonged to the sick. Had Dr. Sam been on duty today instead of Dr. Elsa, she would never have thought to impose. Although she was taking advantage of the older woman’s friendship for several cogent reasons—the imminence of her deadline at the
Ledger
, the care and feeding of her family, the furtherance of her uncertain free-lancing career—she could hardly justify intruding a second time this week. Maybe she should simply take the Smith-Corona home with her. The Kensingtons, after all, had another typewriter, and she would be closer to her reference books, her files, and her telephone.
Unfortunately, Stevie
despised
the Kensingtons’ old machine. Frequent occurrences of type clash cut down her speed, the platen was loose, and ten minutes of playing the damn thing at the requisite energetic fortissimo reduced her arms to limp, sodden rags. Besides, the
c
,
q
,
u
,
o
, and
e
produced by the dilapidated Smith-Corona all looked like miniature bowling balls or piratical black spots, so greasy were the raised characters on the typebars. You came to such a machine only in an emergency. Because the Kensingtons put their other typewriter (a newer electric model) to regular daily use, Stevie could hardly ask to borrow that one. She had to get her Exceleriter repaired as soon as possible.
But where? And by whom?
At ten minutes to three Stevie shuffled her manuscript pages together, made more than a dozen hurried corrections with a leaky Bic pen, and prayed that her editor at the
Ledger
would forgive her the unconscionable messiness of the final few paragraphs. After arranging a dust cover patched with grimy strips of masking tape on the boxy machine, she bumped into Dr. Elsa in the clinic’s narrow hall.
“You’ve been a lifesaver, Elsa. I’ve got to drop this off at the post office and get home to meet Marella.”
“What about Teddy?”
“Oh, he’s got basketball practice at the middle school. Thirteen years old and Dr. Sam measured him at five feet seven last month, half a head taller than You-Know-Who. Seems like yesterday he was in swaddling clothes. Crap-laden Pampers, anyway. I don’t expect him until six-thirty or seven.”
Dr. Elsa, her habitual haggard cheerfulness giving way to a penetrating concern, gripped Stevie by the shoulders. “You all right, kiddo? Every time I see that vein ticking in your temple I want to take your blood pressure. Kids aren’t the only ones need checkups, you know.”
“All I’m sick about’s my typewriter, Elsa.”
“If you’re in a real bind, take ours. Not that clunker in there, the good one Sherry’s usin’ up front.”
“No. I couldn’t. I’m not going to.” Grasping one of Dr. Elsa’s bony red hands, Stevie squeezed it companionably. “I need someone to talk to, though. You think you could come by this evening? Drop in for some wine and cheese dip? I’ve had the wine since Christmas, but the cheese dip’s new—I promise.”
“You’re on. Look for me around eight. I’ll leave Sam home. This’ll be our own cozy little hen party.”
“Teddy’ll be there, Elsa.”
“That’s all right. He’s not a rooster
yet
.”
During her time in the clinic, it had begun to drizzle, a depressing histamine mist from on high. Barclay huddled beneath this drifting moisture like a toy city in the hollow hemisphere of a paperweight.
Back in her VW van, Stevie stifled a sneeze, swung past the post office to deposit her article in a curbside box, and eventually, behind a pair of yolk-colored buses, pulled into the elementary school’s oily-looking parking lot to pick up her daughter. Marella did not need to walk home in the rain. She was a willowy girl with a delicate constitution, a lively ballerina of a third-grader if you overlooked her occasional indispositions. Stevie usually did. Before Ted’s death she had smothered the child with affection. Since then, however, she had adopted a more levelheaded approach to raising her daughter, primarily to keep from spoiling her. Gratifyingly, Marella had never shown any signs of resenting this deliberate change in tactics. She appreciated whatever Stevie or anyone else did for her, and she would be pleasantly surprised to find her mother waiting for her outside the school in this icy mistfall.
Or so Stevie believed.
Perversely, then, Marella climbed into the microbus as if it were a taxi tardily arrived from the dispatcher’s. She slumped sideways in the seat next to Stevie’s and let her notebook drop to the floorboard with a rude resounding thump. Her eyes had the hungry cast of one of those children in a television commercial for the Foster Parents Plan. You came because you felt guilty, they seemed to say. Then they filmed over and seemed to say nothing at all.
“Marella, sit up!”
“Mama,” the girl managed. “Mama, I’m sick. I’ve been sick since lunch. Didn’t tell anybody, though.”
Stevie put her hand on Marella’s forehead and found it alarmingly feverish. “You didn’t tell anybody? Why in the world not?”
“So you could work, Mama.”
So I could work, Stevie mentally echoed her daughter. You didn’t tell anybody so your typewriter-poundin’ mama wouldn’t have to forsake her rolltop to fetch you home. The girl’s selfless, foolhardy bravery annoyed as well as touched Stevie, evoking the terrible suspicion that for Mama to ply her semireputable Grub Street trade in her upstairs study, maybe her children had to sacrifice more than she did. She ought to go back to teaching. Her hours would correspond to the kids’, she’d have summers off, and the local board of education would guarantee her nearly two weeks of sick leave every year. Most important, Teddy and Marella, not to mention Dr. Elsa, would no longer have to treat her like an emotional invalid just to keep her from falling apart over the slightest unforeseeable reverse in her daily schedule.
Like the snapping of an itty-bitty typewriter cable.
“Oh, baby,” Stevie crooned. “Oh, my silly, thoughtful baby.”
Once home, she lit the space heater in the den, folded down the sofa bed, and arranged Marella on its lumpy mattress with three or four quilts and a paperback copy of Beverly Cleary’s
Runaway Ralph
. (Now there was a woman, Stevie reflected, who had made a successful career of writing; unfortunately, Theodore Crye’s widow seemed to have no talent for fiction, not even the sort children might like.) Stevie also spread some newspapers on the floor near the sofa and positioned a yellow plastic bucket atop them in case Marella found her gorge rising faster than she herself could scramble to the bathroom. This was the quintessential winter ritual in the Crye household, and Stevie carried it out to the letter.
Thank God it wasn’t leap year. If February had had even a single extra day this year, she would have probably used it to take a header from the rustic stone viaduct up in Roosevelt State Park.
