The Diviners (58 page)

“I can’t look after you all day, Edwin.”

“Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about the money or the rent or anything for right now.”

“I don’t want you coming back here telling me not to worry about money and bleeding from a gunshot wound in your shoulder!”

Vern, who has given up trying to lift the pan, gets a grip on one of the turkey legs and rips it off. He pauses at the sight of his good fortune at first, as if there’s some built-in hesitator in him. And this is when we hear Bennett’s voice for the first time, back in the other room, and Bennett is saying, “Is he going to die, Mommy?” At the word, the camera slowly tracks back from Vern, back toward the kitchen. With a Hitchcockian uncanniness, it enters the bedroom, where, in afternoon light, the tableau is as in the Northern Renaissance. The potential is for another missing father, like all the fathers missing from the life of young Bennett Adams, who once had a real father, and who found a replacement father in Mike Woodwell, only to suffer when his mother could no longer live with Mike, because of Mike’s paralyzing sadness, and now here is Edwin, lying wounded on the bed, and Bennett is unable to lose another father. Felicia says, “No, he’s not going to die; he’s going to live so that I can yell at him some more,” at which point she looks out into the hall and calls, “Vern, you put that back in the pan right now! Darn it! We’re
not
going to eat that turkey. We’re going to take that turkey down to the church and we’re giving it to people who really need something to eat.”

“Oh, come on now,” Edwin says.

“I’m not eating the turkey if it’s an ill-gotten turkey,” she says. And then, looking out into the hall, “Vern!”

And Edwin says, “Look in the coat, at least look in the coat. A neighbor gave me those, I swear. Look in my coat.”

The camera closes in on Bennett, who is nearest to the bloodstained bomber jacket flung on a chair. And he reaches into the pockets and pulls out . . . three turnips.

Edwin says, “No Thanksgiving holiday is complete without turnips.”

What to make of these root vegetables, in the eyes of Jeanine Stampfel? She knows these are not stories well told, if judged against a Chekhov or an O’Neill, but she has cried at commercials for antidepressants and at medical programs with deformed children on them, even though she knows better. Should she be judged for crying at this moment because of turnips, and because of Vern, who can’t get up without his crutches and who is laid out sideways next to the turkey, dutifully refraining from any pilfering? You would think Ranjeet would be crying, too, but he’s not crying, he’s saying, “Root vegetables! Root vegetables! Of course! The root vegetable is the symbol of the thing that is being forged in this family, which is a provisional family, but which is nonetheless better than many biological families! They must eat the roots to feel the roots! The thing which is born of the earth! A tuber!”

A motel just off the interstate in the great swing state of Ohio, the interstate that goes all the way from coast to populous coast, this is the place that two miscreants, Lois DiNunzio and Arnie Lovitz, have holed up for the past five days, imagining that if they lay low and pay for everything in cash they will not be traced to this motel. They imagine that every day spent in this way is an improvement on the day on which they ran off with the funds. It is a part of their every transaction with the world, the money, not as a guarantor of ease, but of ultimate condemnation. They have this money, but sooner or later they are going to be found out. Is it possible for them to love each other with the stolen monies hanging over them? Is it possible for them to love each other in a sequence of motels with names like Defiance Motor Court? The answer to these questions is yes, they don’t seem to have a problem loving each other, at least so far. They put the dread about the money in one compartment and they put their love in a different and more roomy compartment. They try to keep the two separated as much as possible. And so they love each other and they worry, and tonight they are loving and worrying in front of
The Werewolves of Fairfield County,
except that so far Arnie has been expressing some disappointment with the episode because, he says, when there’s not enough werewolf stuff in the program he just doesn’t like it as well. He’s got control of the remote. He clicks it relentlessly. While dragging on a Gitane cigarette, his third in a row.

“Lay off. I want to watch the end,” Lois says.

“Checking the scores.” He exhales deeply. “Anyways, how can you have a show that’s supposedly about werewolves and you don’t have any werewolves in it?”

“If you’d be patient, you’d probably get what you want.”

When the show comes back from the break, it’s one of those transitional sequences that is mainly a teaser for the ongoing serial narrative, namely, a sequence of Bob Gallace and Clay Goldberg talking on the phone as the light dwindles. Bob is calling Clay because he’s worried. He’s in his little house in Norwalk, and his kids are out in the yard, throwing a football, and he’s got the game on, and he’s whispering.

“Clay,” he says, “I’m feeling really fatigued today. I just feel like . . . well, I don’t know what I feel like. I feel like I can barely stand up without . . . without fainting or something. You feel okay?”

“I feel okay, partner, I sure do. I can give you the once-over before the moon crests, if that’ll help. Running a fever?”

“I am, Clay. Nothing serious yet, but it’s a little bit of a fever. And I’m just incredibly thirsty, you know. I just can’t stop drinking. You don’t think I have that wasting disease or anything, do you? I mean, it’s not like —”

“Creutzfeldt-Jakob? I think that’s a big stretch, Bob. I think our . . . our particular genetic differences might protect us from stuff like that, and anyway, the incubation period on human spongiform encephalopathy is ten years. Talk to me about it when you’re on Social Security, okay? In the meantime, be sure to hydrate.”

Bob cradles the hands-free receiver. He’s pacing in the living room nervously, and while he is pacing it comes over him, the convulsion. The kids are visible through the window, throwing the football, and the football spirals in slow motion in the shot while a shank of mammalian fur trembles in one corner of it, and a long, desperate howl freezes everything.

“Excellent!” says Arnie.

Thaddeus Griffin, screen actor, turns on the show in the middle, just in time to see Bob Gallace suddenly overcome by supernatural transformation, and the cannabis he just smoked is so powerful, so much stronger than it was when, long ago, he was a teenage doper wannabe, that he’s not sure if he can watch this show without freaking out a little bit. It’s a bad idea to watch these shows without anyone else around. Like if you are smoking a lot of pot, for example. Like if you are a guy whose wife has just moved back in with her parents, or say you are a guy who has pretty much walked out on his producer’s job and who is just waiting around to go make some piece-of-shit movie in Morocco, it’s a bad idea for you to be buying dope on the street, where you could be photographed doing so by some tabloid. Bad idea. There’s something about that image of the wolf’s fur coat that’s so
freaky,
and Thaddeus starts to feel like, what does he feel like, he just feels really high, and he quickly changes the channel; he has to remember not to watch this fucking show, it’s too fucking scary, definitely he should not be watching it when he’s . . . so he changes to some reality thing; there are these people, and they are, where are they, they’re on some island, and they all look like they need to . . . they look so skanky, like they really need to bathe, and the guys all have these beards and everything, it’s like, uh, actually the guys kind of look like werewolves, if you really want to know the truth, and suddenly Thaddeus is kind of worried that maybe one of them
is
a werewolf, maybe that one guy, maybe he’s . . . He flips the channel back to the
Werewolves,
but he can’t even stand a minute of the thing, can’t stand it, but if he doesn’t watch it, then he’s just thinking about it, which is even worse than watching it, in a way, and now there’s some, uh, some black kid going to . . . he’s going to a keg party or something, nothing so bad, it’s just a party, see? It’s just a party, it’s nothing to get so freaked out about. But soon Thaddeus starts feeling like something really horrible is going to happen to the black kid, and soon there’s going to be that kind of music, you know, dissonant chords and stuff, and you know, and he can’t take it, he thinks the whole thing is just really freaky, and he shuts off the television because his breathing has become erratic, it’s all about his hyperventilations, if he can just get his breathing to settle down, then he won’t go on with this thinking that he’s, um, he just doesn’t even want to think it, but he’s looking at his arms, and his arms are incredibly hairy, his arms are all covered with this fur, he never really noticed it before, and if it weren’t for the perfect blond locks that the colorist gives him, wait a second, it looks like it must have got darker, he thinks it’s getting darker, the hair on his arms, and he tries to calm himself down, and he thinks he should call someone, maybe he could call his wife and tell her, and his stomach is bothering him, and maybe that’s the first sign, maybe stomach pain is the first sign, and he could call Annabel, he should call someone, come on, don’t be ridiculous, he’s just being ridiculous, but no, it’s not ridiculous, it’s incredibly serious. Nothing has ever been more serious. He starts peeling off layers, feels better if he takes off some clothes, his skin just needs to breathe a little bit, that’s it, his skin needs to breathe, it’s like everything is constricting, so he takes off his sweatshirt, it’s like a three-hundred-dollar sweatshirt, but he takes it off, drops it on the floor, and he takes off his T-shirt, that’s a lot better, things are better when he is not wearing a shirt, and then he takes off his jeans, and this is okay, at least for a moment it’s okay, until the
panic,
and he’s looking at himself, in the recessed entertainment den of his over- or underdecorated apartment, and there is no other conclusion, there is no other way to think about it. Yes, he is even more hairy than he was just a few minutes ago, he’s almost sure of it, and there’s the stomach pain, and he feels like he’s almost doubled over with the stomach pain, and he takes off his socks, because a man should never appear anywhere, not even in the privacy of his own home, in Y-front briefs and dark socks. The question must now be asked, there is no avoiding the question:
Is mine the body of a werewolf?
Has Thaddeus gone from being an actor in action films, highly regarded action films, to being a werewolf? Is this the fitting and karmic end of an actor in action films who has been prone to infidelity, like that singer who was unfaithful, and his wife waited until he was soaking in the tub one day and then she brought in scalding water and dumped it on him? At once, Thaddeus strips off his Y-front briefs, and now he’s nature in all its glory, he’s the animal in the human animal. Five hundred stations of cable and a hundred more radio stations, and even cable Internet hookup, joystick, and gaming options, and he cannot be distracted from thinking that there is definitely some kind of wolf taking over in him, because he is hairy everywhere, he is lupine, hair all over his back, all over his nipples, and the fur on him is thicker than it ever was, and he is going to need what a wolf needs, he’s going to need sides of raw beef, and he’s going to need woman flesh, and he’s going to have to go out tomorrow and have the whole wolf hide waxed off of his body, because, you know, he can’t show up on a movie set in Morocco looking like a wolf or he never will be able to work in the business again. Maybe if he showers he can calm down somehow. He’s not a wolf. Just go take a shower and put on some Yanni or something, one of the cable radio stations will have Yanni, all Yanni all the time, maybe there’s that video of Yanni playing, that always calms him down, when no one is around, he can put on Yanni and wait for the cannabis to wear off, Yanni will have the proper effect. The swelling repetitions of pan flute will move through him, and the lycanthropy will fade. When the sun comes up tomorrow it will all have been some horrible mistake.

Felicia has forbidden her strong-headed son Bennett Adams from going to the party at the Burns residence. Because of the trouble with Edwin. But that’s not the kind of forbidding that’s going to keep any teenager from doing exactly what he means to do. Felicia has to go out “to work,” or that’s what she tells Edwin and the kids, and there’s a van waiting at the curb, driven by Rose Liggett, also a werewolf, and it takes Felicia into the woods, where she will meet the thirty-five other members of the pack. The boys are left behind to finish the washing up, and Edwin is slumbering in Felicia’s bed, moaning in pain. Vern, who might have a little touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder, is lining up the flatware on the countertop in the kitchen, the knives with the knives, the spoons with the spoons. He doesn’t even see when his brother goes right out the front door.

Bennett telephones for a cab on the corner, and he gets in the taxi, spending money from his part-time job at the sporting-goods store at the mall in New Rochelle. He ditches the taxi on the road a block over from the Burnses’ house. He’s going to walk in the front door as if he’s come from the wilderness or as if he’s the hero from a Maupassant story, which he sort of is. He comes from New York, not from Connecticut, he comes from the disadvantaged part of Westchester County, but he can put on a good masquerade, and he’s putting one on now, having dressed up in the wardrobe of the kids of Fairfield Academy, featuring the threads of J. Crew and Banana Republic. He passes between the antebellum columns of the Burns residence, and then he crosses the imperial threshold. Inside, the kids are hanging off of every piece of furniture, and the music is blasting, the kind of music that occurs only at the parties of television shows.

Meanwhile, back among the audience, in the Park Avenue apartment of Madison McDowell’s parents, who, like the Burnses, are away for the night, Madison tells Zimri Enderby that she doesn’t know why they can get so much right on television, things that the movies can never get right anymore, like discomfort and awkwardness between people, and the long, slow development of characters, the ups and downs of long-term relationships, but they can never get the music right. Zimri doesn’t know much about it, since he was never allowed to go to parties as a kid, except parties where they served ginger ale and there was bingo and sing-alongs. He doesn’t know what the music should sound like. Zimri is sitting on the floor, so he can get closer to the television, and Madison is touched by the fact that he is on the floor and still wearing his impeccably polished loafers. Her cell phone rings, and she looks at the number, and she realizes that it’s the Vanderbilts calling. They always call during
The Werewolves of Fairfield County.
The Vanderbilts are just really pissed that this stuff is happening, that there are these shows, you know, that are just, like, really popular, and they have nothing to do with this popularity, mainly because the producer is, like, such a bitch. The Vanderbilts could really give her some
phat
ideas about guest stars, like models and recording artists who should definitely be on the show, but Madison doesn’t answer the cell phone, she just flings the phone across the room and then she tumbles back into the middle of the story.