The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (36 page)

I have to break into the cellar. It’s clear that’s where they have him because it’s the one part of the house outside the living room (did I mention the white wall-to-wall carpet or the clear plastic slipcovers on the white furniture?), where we kids are forbidden to go.

The kitchen by night is a spooky place. Shafts of moonlight polishing Mother’s spotless floor. Naturally I assume the door to the basement will be locked but, surprise, it isn’t seriously locked, it’s only trip-it-with-your-credit-card locked. I do it with Dad’s discarded Discover card. When she decided we were spending too much Mom took it away from him and I happened to see where it went. I pull it out from under the Rubbermaid sheet in the kitchen silver drawer which is also where Mother keeps her Maglite. Good thing. When I slide the Discover card down the door and it falls open I expect the cellar to smell bad, don’t know why, just the vibe I guess, all that:
Don’t go down there, children, or else.

Instead the air smells like flowers. Flowers and, as it turns out, my brother’s sweat. I flick the Maglite around; it’s bigger down there than I thought. At the bottom of the steps I whisper, —Bill?

I locate him by the sound. It’s the sound you make when they’ve duct-taped your mouth.

—My God, Billy, what have they done to you?

I find him at the entrance to the chamber under our living room, they have duct-taped him to a post. He’s taped to a post and in the basement room behind him there is a bed that looks a lot like ours and the glow from my Maglite is dim but I make out figures in the bed and they are smiling, smiling, they look like wax replicas of Darryl—Darryl! and two other people I don’t recognize.

—Billy, what happened?

He grimaces. I pull the tape off his mouth and he gasps. —I thought you’d never come.

Quick as I can manage, I start unwinding, walking around and around him as the tape peels off his neck, his shoulders. When his arms are free I stop. —What’s going on? What’s that? I am looking at the bed.

—Oh, that. He gives me this strange smile. —They look perfect, right?

—What is it? Why are you here?

Bill turns on that warm Billy smile: —They haven’t gotten to me yet.

—But you look terrible.

—When they do, he says, and this terrifies me, —I’ll look like them.

I glance at the trio of statues or whatever they are. So pretty lying in the bed, so still.

—What, Bill. What?

—I told you, they haven’t gotten to me yet.

Come to think of it the figures in the bed don’t look like statues, they look more like Grandma in the coffin. Perfect. Shiny. Clean. I bite my wrist. —Oh my God, what are we going to do?

—Don’t worry, my brother Bill says: brave Billy. —I knew this was coming. I have a plan.

Elsewhere in the house I hear noises, or I think I do. I imagine Mother feeling around for me with those horny feet, I imagine her right foot making a swath over the empty sheet in my sector of the bed: I could swear I hear her growling —
Howard
. I wait for the terrifying
thump
as Dad lands in his boots. I imagine he is crossing the bedroom now, pulling the stun gun out of the dresser, I think I hear him pounding down the stairs and when he finds me, what will happen next? My face drains white all the way down to the knuckles, you bet I am freaking. —What are we going to do?

—Chill, he says. Bill’s arms are free and he continues unwinding, but he can’t bend over far enough to free his legs and feet. —First you have to get me down.

In spite of the fact that I am scared shit we will be discovered, I do as he says. I turn on the overhead and, as instructed, I unwind the duct tape. As instructed, I start at the feet. They must have used a gallon of it. It is taking forever to unwind and every time I go behind the post I have to look at the bed and the three
whatever they are
lying there in perfect peace and I am so frightened that my whisper sounds more like a wheeze. —They’re coming, I know it, they’re going to catch us and when they do they’ll put us in that bed with poor Darryl and … who are the other two?

—Howie, I think. We have been whispering but all of a sudden Bill is talking in normal tones. —And Duane. Did we know we had another big brother?

—Shh, they’ll hear you!

Too loud. He is talking too loud. —I think the third one’s Duane.

I am jittering, frantic. —Billy, shut up, they’ll hear us. Hurry, they’re coming!

But with that smile my brother just keeps on unwinding the tape. —No, he says. —No they aren’t.

—How do you know?

The smile melts into an amazing, joyful grin. —You didn’t drink the cocoa, right?

Smart Bill. My brother the genius. —How …

—I told you I knew this was coming. I doctored the cocoa mix yesterday, before they got up.

—Billy, you didn’t
kill
them or anything.

—Who, me? My big brother is grinning, grinning; he can’t stop. —Hell no, they’re
family
. They’re sleeping like baby bunnies, or mice in their sweet little nest. Now hurry, he says. —We’ve got lots to do before Vandella’s crew gets here to set up for the shoot.

So we have lots to do but thanks to Mother’s 9 p.m. bedtime, we have plenty of time to do it in. By the time Bill and I come up into the kitchen it’s barely midnight. It’s just that time passes so mortal slowly when you’re lying awake in the dark. The first thing we do is pour the rest of the dry cocoa into the DisposAl and turn on every light in the house—well, except in the bedroom, where the four happy Dermotts are in a profound, drugged sleep. In the morning we have to drag our sleeping family downstairs and out through the French doors in the living room and next we’ll move what I guess is all that remains of our three big brothers—Duane, we hardly knew ye!—up from the basement and lay them out next to the others on the grass, but before we do that we will pull all the bedding off Father’s super-king that he had specially built for us, because the mattress is way too heavy for us to move. We’ll lay out the bedding on our front lawn to make a simulacrum—gotta love that vocabulary!—of the bed. This is where the
TV
crew will find Mother and her
they’ll always be my babies
, all of them sweet and clean and sleeping snugly under the duvet with their heads on the fluffy down pillows out in broad daylight right in front of the house. When she comes for the live telecast, Vandella LeSpire will have so many questions to ask Mother about the three big brothers or what’s left of them, she’ll have so many questions about what Mother and Dad did to Howie and Darryl and Duane, and how they processed them to keep them sleeping like babies, that she won’t notice that two living Dermott children are missing. See, once we’re done setting up, Bill and I are running away on Dad’s Discover card.

We’re getting out of this paragon, our prison, this great American institution that mothers everywhere fear and admire and will—in the course of one broadcast—come to excoriate. They won’t come looking for Billy and me. Not after they see this ostensibly wonderful mothering tool exposed for what it is. Mother laid out with Dad and her babies in broad daylight, just exactly how she wants them. Inert.

Safe and obedient. Snuggled down in the Family Bed.

—
SciFiction
, 2004

The Singing Marine

It’s so hot in August in that part of Virginia that dogs die standing up and even insects stick to the asphalt. Flies buzz in place. Embedded, an overturned stag beetle waves its legs helplessly. The singing Marine has to move fast to keep his boondockers from sinking in and gluing him to the spot.

He may be singing to take his mind off what’s just happened—the tragedy, or is it disgrace that probably marks the end of his life in the service. The accident—his platoon. How many men has he lost, and how can a man facing court-martial ever hope to love the general’s daughter?

Putting one boot in front of the other, he goes along as if understanding is a place you can get to on foot, and as he goes, the song just keeps unfurling. “My mother m-m-m …”

If anybody asked what he was singing he would look up, surprised;
who, me?

But he sings “… m-m-m-m-murdered me …”

The road gets stickier. Heat mirages shimmer in the middle distance and rise up in front of him, thick and troublesome as cream of nothing soup.

Fuddled by the dense air, the Marine bows his head against the heat and goes into the dim rural drugstore. He is not aware he’s being followed.

“What’s that you’re singing?”

The Marine blinks. “Say what?”

It is a woman’s voice. “Mister, the song.”

Exploding afterimages of sunlight stud the dimness, so he does not immediately see the speaker. “Ma’am?”

The voice blurs suggestively. “Sit down, Lieutenant.”

He blunders against a large shape—leatherette booth, he thinks. He can still leave. “Ma’am, you don’t want me to sit with you.”

The woman’s hand closes on his arm and pulls him down. “You don’t know what I want until I tell you.”

“You haven’t told me your name.”

It becomes clear she isn’t going to. He hears the sound she makes inside her clothes as she crosses her legs; he can’t stop blinking. He thinks he can smell the warm air rising from the hollow at her throat.

What he says next, he says because he can’t help himself. The old threnody always bubbles up at times like this, when he thinks he’s close—to what? He can’t say. He just begins. “I was born of blood and reborn in violence. If you can’t handle either, you don’t want me sitting with you.”

She leans across the table. “You haven’t told me what you were singing.”

“It’s an old thing. I used to think it was sad, but now …” He’s hurtled into a complicated thought that he can’t finish. There’s no way to tell her he has bigger problems now. Instead he tells the old story: born late to a childless couple, mother dead in childbirth, wicked stepmother Gerda and the inevitable murder, if it was a murder. His father was away, he was never able to get the truth from his frantic half sister: “You were sitting by the door and your head came off; what can I tell you, your
head
came off.” They buried him under the linden tree, Marline and the stepmother, but he rose up, or something did, leached of memory and stark blind crazy with love; he thinks that was him flying overhead and singing, singing:

“My mother murdered me;

“My father grieved for me;

“My sister, little Marline,

“Wept under the linden tree …”

The woman snaps, “I thought it was an almond tree.”

“All depends where you’re coming from,” he says, blinking until her outlines emerge from the dimness—wedge-shaped face as beautifully defined as a cat’s muzzle, long hair falling over long white arms and that neatly composed face veiling her intentions; he thinks she may be beautiful—too early to tell. “Whatever it is, I can’t seem to get rid of the song.”

“You’re still singing?”

He says in some bewilderment, “It sings me.”

Even in the shadows the sudden, attentive tilt of her head is apparent. “And what do you think it means?”

But he slaps both hands flat on the table. “Enough. The stepmother got crushed in a rockfall. I came back. When being home got too hard, I joined up. That’s all you need to know.”

“Yes,” she says, perhaps too quickly. “It is.”

“So if you don’t mind …”

“You haven’t ordered.”

There is nothing on the menu that he wants. This isn’t a bar, where you can order something deep enough to disappear into; it’s an old fashioned pharmacy with a soda fountain and this is high noon, not the dead of night that lets
you go home with the lovely woman who found you. When he goes outside, it will still be hot and bright. “It’s not my kind of place.”

As he stands she rises with him; they could be executing the first movement in an elegant
pas de deux
. “It’s not mine either,” she says, drawing her long hands down his arms. “Let me take you someplace where it’s cool.”

Emerging from the air conditioned drugstore, he is staggered by the heat. When he looks for the woman, she is several paces ahead. “Where are we going?”

Her tone is suggestive; she does not look back, but the words reach him. “Someplace you already know.”