Monstrous Affections (25 page)

“Why, you lyin’ deceitful parson!” hollered swamp witch. With
her other hand she reached for her pebbles, intending to enunciate
peroxide or some other disinfectant canticle. But the pebbles were
gone — of course. Annabel and perhaps her brother Tommy had
leaned down from the top of stilts and pulled them from her pocket
while she slept in the Reverend’s church. “You’re in league with
him!”

Annabel leaned forward now, and when she spoke her Papa’s
lips moved with hers: “You ought never have been, swamp witch.
You ought never have come here and shut the world from this place.
You say you are protecting people but you are keeping them as your
human toys, like a she-devil in a corner of Hell. The angel will drive
you from here, madame! Drive you clear away.”

“Take your fingers off’n my dragonfly’s air holes,” she said. She
was most worried right now about her dragonfly. For blinking and
recollecting conclusions, she saw that she would not be spending
long now in the Reverend’s company. But her dragonfly wasn’t with
her either, and that caused her to suspect that the poor creature
would soon suffocate if she didn’t do something.

The Reverend, to her mild surprise, moved his finger up. Or
perhaps it slid. No, she thought, looking up, he meant to. His face
twitched and his lips opened.

“You should never have come,” he said. In his own voice — which
swamp witch had not heard in many years now. And behind her, the
breeze died and slivers of moonlight dissolved in the shadow of the
tea-drinking man.

The Reverend stood up then, and Annabel cried: “A miracle!”
and the Reverend took a step toward the edge of the porch, where
the yellow-suited tea-drinking man stood, smile as large as his eyes
were sad.

“O Angel,” Reverend said, his eyes a-jittering with upset snake
venom, “I have delivered her!”

“You fool,” said swamp witch. And she stepped behind the
Reverend, took hold of the jar that held her dragonfly, and said to
him: “Carry me to Albert.”

That was when the tea-drinking man bellowed. At first, she
thought he was angry that she was getting away — trying to sneak
behind the Reverend, climb upon her still-groggy dragonfly and
sneak out through a hole in the porch screen. If that were the
case — well, she’d be in for it and she braced herself, holding tight on
dragonfly’s back-hair.

But as she swirled up to the rafters of the porch, she saw this was
not the case. The tea-drinking man was distracted not by her, but
by Reverend Balchy’s sharp, venomous incisors, that had planted
themselves in his yellow-wrapped forearm.

Reverend Balchy stopped hollering then, on account of his mouth
being full, and Annabel took it up.

“Gotchya, you lyin’ sinner. Think you can use me? Think it?
When swamp witch come to town she took away most of me — you’ll
just take away the rest! Well fuck yuh! Fuck yuh!”

Dragonfly swung down, close past tea-drinking man’s nose, and
swamp witch could see the anger and pain of the Reverend’s ugly mix
of rattler venom and mouth bacteria slipping into his veins. There’d
be twitching and screaming in a minute — at least there would be if
tea-drinking man had normal blood.

Tea-drinking man didn’t seem to, though. He opened his own
mouth and looked straight at Annabel:

“What,” he said, “if you spoke up for yourself? What if you walked
the world your own girl, flipped — ” he grimaced “ —
flipped
your old
Papa the bird, and just made your way on your own-some.”

Annabel looked at him. Then she looked up at swamp witch, who
was heading for a rip in the screen where last summer there’d been
a fist-sized wasp nest.

“I’d never be on my own-some,” Annabel said. “Not so long as
she
protects me.”

And then swamp witch was gone from there, escaped into the
keening night and thanking her stars for the Reverend’s poison-mad inconstancy. The tea-drinking man bellowed once more, and
then he was a distant smear of yellow and the stars spun in swamp
witch’s eye.

Was it cowardice that drove swamp witch across the rooftops of her
town, then up so high she touched the very limits of her realm? Was
she just scared of that tea-drinking man? What kind of protector
was she for little Annabel, the Reverend, all the rest of them? Maybe
when the Reverend was faking out the tea-drinking man, when he
said “you should never have come,” he was right. For when she’d
come hadn’t she stolen away the Reverend’s faith and the comfort of
self-determination from her people and hadn’t she just kept them
like she wanted them? Had she ever thought through what it would
be if it come to this?

— Why’d you take me there? she said. Were you in league with
the Reverend?

Dragonfly didn’t answer.

— Did you know about the Reverend’s double cross?

They flew low through a cloud of gnats, who all clamoured — yes!
yes!

— Can I trust no one? swamp witch despaired.

— Hush, said dragonfly. It swung back through the gnats, and
swamp witch could see the mists of her home, the Okehole Wetlands,
rising from amid the stumps and rushes. Now let’s go home.

Swamp witch thought about how comfortable that would be. And
with that, she realized she wasn’t scared of the tea-drinking man.
She was scared of something else entirely.

Swamp witch dug her knees into dragonfly’s thorax and yanked
at dragonfly’s hair to make a turn.

— Uh uh, she said. After all that, I’m not lettin’ you make any
decisions. You know where we got to go.

Dragonfly hummed resentfully, and together they flew down —
down toward the business section at the east end of town. There,
the smoke and book waited for her, orange flickery light from its
sign illuminating a patch in front like a hearth fire.

She reached to the ground by the road, and picked up two pebbles
that seemed right, and stuffed them in her jeans, then in she went.

Albert Farmer sat in the front of the store, which was the nice section,
all scrubbed and varnished and smelling of fresh pipe tobacco. The
not-so-nice section, with the girly magazines and French ticklers
and the cigars from Cuba — that was in the back, and this part was
nothing but nice. Just some cigarettes and old-fashioned pipes in
a display case, and a magazine rack that held nothing to trouble
anyone —
Time
s and
People
s and
Archie
comic books,
Reader’s Digest
s
and a lot of magazines about guns and cars and fixing up houses.
Albert sat behind the counter, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and
sipping at a glass of dark wine he made for himself.

“Sweetness.” He smiled in his way as swamp witch slipped
through the mail slot and sat at the counter. “I thought you mightn’t
come.”

“The town is under attack,” said swamp witch balefully.

“I know,” said Albert. He pinched off the end of the cigarette, and
stepped around the counter. “Come here.”

He looked guilty as hell. But swamp witch stepped over across
the floor anyhow. Dragonfly, traitorous insect that it was, flew in
back to sniff cigar-leaf and browse pornography.

Swamp witch said: “You know anything more about that?”

Albert smiled. He had an easy smile — teeth too white to have
smoked as much as he seemed to, half a dimple on one cheek only.
It broke swamp witch’s heart every time she saw it. So when he just
stepped up close to her and held the palm of his right hand forward,
so it hovered over her left breast, she just let her broken old heart
bask in his heat. Her arms fell upon his shoulders, and then crept
down his arms, over the shortened sleeves of his summer shirt. O
Lord, she thought as he pressed hard against her middle, wasn’t this
what a Saturday night was for? Couldn’t it just be forever?

Swamp witch knew it couldn’t. One day a week was part of the
bargain.

She pulled back and looked at Albert levelly.

“Why did you bring tea-drinking man here? Why did you let him
in?”

Albert frowned. He started to deny it, but looked into swamp
witch’s eye and knew he couldn’t.

“How’d you know it was me?”

“I remember the future,” she said. “I remember the ends of
things.”

“There’s no joy in that,” said Albert Farmer.

“I know.” Swamp witch stepped away and shook the lust from her
head. “It’s not like the beginnings. Those are the real joys.”

Albert nodded. He leaned back against the counter; appeared to
think, but it was hard to say because the lights were low.

“Are they?” he finally said. “Beginnings, I mean. Are they the real
joys? You ever think much about ours?” Swamp witch looked at him.
“You don’t of course. Or else you’d never say that about beginnings.
Maybe you’d have killed me by now.”

It was true that swamp witch didn’t think about beginnings but
it wasn’t that she couldn’t.

“I loved you,” she said.

“You still do.”

“I still do. But we’re busting up. I know it.”

Albert’s smile faded and he nodded. “That’s how the night ends,”
he said. “Will you have a glass of wine with me?”

Swamp witch shrugged, like a sullen teenager she thought, and
mumbled, “
Mayuswell
,” and leaned her butt against the countertop
so she wouldn’t be looking at him. She heard the wine gurgling from
bottle to stemware, and Albert came around the front of her and
gave her the glass. She looked into it, swirled it a bit.

“You knew it had to come,” he said. “From the day we made this
place, you know this had to come.”

Swamp witch sighed. She did know — she did remember. But what
pleasure was there, in recalling a game of skill against this — this
roadside mephistopheles, during the worst afternoon of her life?
That was well hidden away, that memory.

At least it was until this moment — this moment, when she once
more recalled the crossroads, just to the south of town near the
sycamore grove where she sat, bruised and angry and waiting for a
bus or some conveyance to take her away. When she said:

I’d just like to send you to Hell
.

And when not a bus but a shiny little two-seater from Naples
rolled up, and he stepped out and set down the checker board and
said, “Would you now sweet mama?” and she said, “Maybe not
exactly,” and he said, “Well, care to play me?” and she said, “What
for?” and he said, “What do you want?”

“I wanted my town back,” said swamp witch, bringing the
wine glass from her lips, “just my town. And just Saturdays. Just
Saturdays. And I won it.”

“Fair and square,” said Albert.

Swamp witch set down the glass. “I cared for it here,” she said. “It
was mine and I cared for it.”

“Yes,” said Albert. “It was yours. And you cared for it, all right.
But not forever. You knew that.”

“Not forever?” she said.

“Only,” he said, “so long as I could keep winning.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, swamp witch. I was wandering, as I sometimes do, the other
day — and I came upon a crossroads as I often do — and there who
should I see but a sad old sack of a man. And I said to him as I must:
Want to play a game?” Albert took a long pull from his wine glass.
“And he said to me as he was wont to: I’d love a game this afternoon.
And so we set down and played.”

“Checkers?” said swamp witch unkindly.

“A word game — a remembering game. And oh, he was good, and
at the end of it — ”

“You,” said swamp witch, “are a sorry excuse for your kind. You
never lose a game you don’t want to. And now . . . You lost my town,
didn’t you?”

“There are those who’ve been hankering for it for some time
now.”

“Yes — but
you
.” She set her glass down. “You ought to know
better.”

Oh, he ought to. But swamp witch saw in Albert Farmer’s eyes,
the back of them where the embers sometimes smouldered, that he
didn’t. Couldn’t help himself truly. He was a kind man and kind men
helped others with the things they wanted. Fine if swamp witch were
the other. But nothing but hurt or betrayal, if it be someone else.

Now, swamp witch knew with regretful certainty that she would
not only lose Albert this night — but possibly the town as well.

“Others fight him, you know,” she said, thinking of the Reverend
and his poisonous bite. “Others love me better.”

“Oh, Ma — oh, swamp witch,” said Albert, correcting himself,
“you think I don’t love you well enough? That is a stinger, my dear.
I’ve as much love for you as is in me. Now come — ” he draped his arm
over her shoulder “ — there’s little time.”

“Is there?”

“Look,” he said and pointed between the gossamer window covers
to the street. There, sure enough, was the tea-drinking man — his
suit was a bit mussed and the skin around his eyes was dark with
snake spit, which was also why he was moving so funny, swamp
witch supposed. He stood a moment in the middle of the road, tried
to smooth his hair with his hand and stomped his foot like it was a
hoof. Then he looked over to the smoke and book.

Was there a sense in fighting it?

Swamp witch knew better. She leaned over to Albert, and
smothered the little space left between them with a kiss. He tasted
of salt and wine and egg gone bad, but swamp witch didn’t mind.
She let herself to it and lived in the instant — the instant prior to the
end, and when she pulled away, the tea-drinking man was there at
the big window, looking in with socketed eyes and a terrible, blood-rimmed grin.

“Why’d you let him win?” she said.

Tea-drinking man’s ankles cracked as he stepped away and
pushed open the door, jangling the little bell at the top. The sickness
was coming off him like a fever now. Swamp witch held onto Albert
harder and slid her hands into her pocket.

“I ain’ feeli’ well,” said the tea-drinking man.

“You ain’t lookin’ well,” said swamp witch. “That venom’ll kill
you.”

Tea-drinking man shook his head. “Nuh,” he said. “Nuh me.”