Monstrous Affections (29 page)

He stepped into the vestibule of Giorgio Piccininni’s apartment.
There was a mirror hanging there. He smiled into it and he smiled
back out of it. Mitchell Owens thought he could tell exactly what
was inside him, just by looking.

So Mitchell looked away from there and into the dark room in
front of him. He started toward the darkest part, and as he went he
whispered:

“Trudy.”

It drifts through your vision, a detached retina on patrol. You blink,
you rub your temples, you think about seeing the eye doctor real
soon. But you look again, and you realize, no, you were wrong. There’s
nothing remotely retinal about this thing. Six stickly legs, disco-ball
eyes, a big hairy ass, brown-tinted wings stretched akimbo. Just
looking through ’em makes you want to scratch.

Crawled inside through your tear-duct while you slept. Happens
one time in a hundred when a tourist goes down to that place, stays
one night too many in a room where the fumigation hasn’t took.
The locals have a name for those flies — translates either to Sneaky
Devil Bat, or Mean Little Eye Mite, depending on which edition of
the Fodor’s you got.

Maybe given time, it’ll decompose. Surely it couldn’t be alive in
there — you don’t know much about flies, but one thing you’re pretty
sure about is that flies do not have the right gills for extracting
oxygen from eyeball juice. The fact that it’s always in a different
position when it drifts past your iris doesn’t prove anything. What
you’re seeing’s an optical illusion — fly tilts this way or that, wings
seem to have moved, proboscis extends a little further, sucks a bit
back. Truth is, that fly’s drowned. And drowned means dead, and
before long dead has got to mean decomposition. It’s only a matter
of time.

You decide to wait it out. Don’t much feel like leaving the house,
so you order in some groceries. The phone’s getting awful jangly, and
you pull it out of the wall. And who needs cable television when you
got yourself a fly to watch?

So garbage day comes around and you take the TV and the
telephone and your hi-fi stereo set while you’re at it, and lay them
all out neat as you please on the curb. They’re gone before the truck
arrives, but you don’t see who took them.

You start to wonder how big that fly in there really is. Some
days, it fills your whole vision — everywhere you look, there’s the
fly, looking right back. Other times, it’s a teeny little speck. If you
weren’t looking, you wouldn’t even notice it was there.

Mail comes every morning, mostly bills. But you stopped reading
it, after the fly switched eyes.

You woke up that morning, and it took you the longest time to
figure out what was so unusual.

First you thought, maybe someone rearranged the furniture,
but as you looked that didn’t seem to be the case. Then you were
thinking, if not that, then maybe somebody painted the walls. But
no, they were the same dirty beige as they were when you moved in
here. And finally, it hit you.

It was the fly.

Floating there in your other eyeball — the clean eye, the empty
eye, the eye that had no fly or so you’d thought — brown-tinted
wings pressed back all sleek and smug against the bristly little curve
of its rump. Fly moved, and that’s all it took: overnight, it changed
everything
.

So you closed your eyes and thought to yourself: the mail can
wait
. And you kept ’em closed, covered ’em up, because that way you
don’t have to look at that Goddamn fly anymore as it jumps from
one eye to the other, alive and well against all reason.

Awhile goes by. You don’t have many friends, but the few you do
have come calling, wondering if you’re okay. You pretend you aren’t
home, and it seems to work: they leave.

Why don’t you go to a doctor? Somehow, you just can’t get your
head around the idea that this fly’s a simple medical condition.
Maybe the Fodor’s had it right — the first edition, not the new one —
and this fly’s a Sneaky Devil Bat, come straight up from Hell to steal
your soul. What’s a doctor going to do for that?

You’re just about ready to go to a priest this morning when you
figure it out. You jump out of bed laughing, pull the bandage off
your eyes. The fly’s gone — you can tell it without even looking! It
was
only a matter of time.

You fling open the curtains and watch the light stream in.
Beautiful morning, isn’t it? Middle of summer, sunshiny day, birds
flying through the trees. It’s a shame you can’t hear their singing,
over the buzzing in your ear.

The horror in the sawmill wasn’t far from his mind the night he
saw the giant. He’d thought about it briefly in Los Angeles, after
he saw the telegram announcing his father’s death. He considered
the slow swing of barn-board doors across the mill’s great black
belly, each of the three times he’d had to stop to change flat tires
on his brand new Ford Coupe. He thought about it again, stopped in
the afternoon sun at the top of a steep slope just west of the Idaho
line, to deal with his boiled-over radiator. The water steaming from
under the hood made him think about how the rainwater dripped
from the tackle and chains in the sawmill’s rafters as he lay face-down in damp sawdust. He retched yellow bile into the roadside dirt
and started, maybe, to cry. The horror of that night was clearer in
his mind then than it had been for years.

But a hundred miles ahead when the sun had at last set, the spruce
trees at the side of the road spread apart like drawing curtains and
the nude giant stepped into his path. The sight of it drove The North
Brothers Lumber Company and its terrible sawmill from James
Thorne’s thoughts like a spurned beau.

The giant clutched a splintered rail tie in front of him like it was
a baseball bat. He glared into the Ford’s headlamps with a single
eye — a great green orb flecked with yellow around a pupil wide and
deep as the Idaho sky. It hovered in the middle of his skull, beneath
a great curling mass of black hair. James slammed his foot on the
brake pedal and the Ford’s tires bit into the road, sending stones
rat-a-tating into the depths of the wheel well.

My God
, thought James.
He’s big as trees
.

He leaned forward in the seat to get a better look. The giant
crouched down too and leaned towards the car. A leathery lid crossed
his eye as he peered in. They studied each other in that instant. James
felt as though that eye was looking through him: drawing the rest of
his terror from him like sweet liquor at the bottom of a dark glass.

Then the giant made a noise like a dog’s barking, his lips pulled
back from teeth that seemed filed to points. With a swing of the rail
tie, he splintered the tops of two trees on the far side of the road and
disappeared again into the wood. Crickets chirped and tree limbs
cracked, and James Thorne’s heart thundered in his chest.

“He’s big as the trees.” He said it aloud, with a bit of a laugh. He
wanted to say it to his pal Stephen Fletcher, a lean young black-haired colt of a boy who dressed sets back on
The Devil Pirates
. For the
past month he’d spent many of his after-hours undressing James.
Stephen was smooth and young and eager to please — and James
wished Stephen were here now. But he couldn’t take his lover home.
Not any more than he could admit to having him in Los Angeles.

James set his mouth and engaged the clutch. The Ford Coupe
crunched across the gravel with a noise like breaking glass. He
rounded a bend, and came out in the great bowl of valley in the
Coeur d’ Alene mountains. The road was still high enough that he
could see the dim etchings of the familiar peaks against the night
sky that surrounded Chamblay. In the valley’s middle, miles distant,
James could make out a glow among the trees.

This was new for him. When he’d left home, the Grand Coulee
Dam wasn’t even half built, and the only light in Chamblay came
from candle, kerosene and the sun. James smiled bitterly.

After dark on a moonless night, Chamblay could hide in itself.

The road carried James down a sharp slope and drew alongside
the Northern Pacific line that served the town. The tracks gleamed
silvery in his headlamps for an instant before he turned back parallel
to the line.

That was the line that, according to his mother’s cryptic
telegram, had something significant to do with his father’s sudden
and untimely death.

“Mmm.” He smiled a little, and thought about the giant in the
road again — not just the eye, but his immense, sculpted thighs, the
dark beard that tumbled halfway down the broad chest . . .

“What a thing,” he said. “What a marvellous thing. Put that in a
picture, no one would believe it.”

The giant, of course, would be the perfect thing for the pictures.
Particularly pictures like
The Devil Pirates
. In the person of the brave
and over-energetic Captain Kip Blackwell, James had battled a giant
octopus, not one but two carnivorous gorillas, a host of man-eating
midgets from Blood Island, and of course, several of the fearsome
Devil Pirates themselves. For all that battling, Republic still wanted
another batch of a dozen episodes before the serial ran its course.
The giant man in the road, with the peculiar eye in the middle of his
forehead, naked as the day he was born — he’d fill out four of those
episodes, maybe more, all by himself.

James thought about that — about unsheathing his rapier against
a giant more than twice as tall as he — leaping across the otherwise
unconvincing deck of the
Crimson Monkey
, dodging the blows of
the giant’s papier-mâché club, slashing out theatrically with his
sword to bring a dozen yards of sailcloth onto the monster’s roaring
head. Perhaps, to be true to the plotline, they’d be battling over the
honour of the lovely Princess Rebecca, who had disguised herself as
a cabin boy back in episode three to join Kip and his crew on their
frenetically eventful voyage.

“Wouldn’t do to lose that fight,” said James, thinking for a
moment of what would become of his co-star, tiny Alice Shaw, in
the amorous clutches of the giant. He slowed down as he drew
through the closed-down business section of Chamblay, past the
Episcopalian church his parents frequented, the schoolhouse where
he’d learned to read — and finally outside the old clapboard house
where he’d spent the first seventeen years of his life. James smiled
and shook his head: the preposterous picture of a twenty-foot-tall
man mounting a five-foot-two-inch woman provided a comic, if
grotesque, distraction to the matter at hand.

He was still thinking about it — or about the giant, the
magnificent giant that he might have seen or might, the more he
thought of it, simply have dreamed — as he pulled his suitcase from
the Ford’s trunk, let out a long sigh, and made his way up the path to
his mother’s front door. The telegram that had brought him here sat
folded in his jacket pocket and he made himself think of it. It was a
reminder of what he ought to be feeling.

DEAREST JIMMY STOP I HAVE TERRIBLE NEWS TO DELIVER
STOP YOUR FATHER HAS BEEN KILLED IN ACCIDENT ON
TRACKS STOP PLEASE COME HOME STOP ALL IS FORGIVEN I
LOVE YOU STOP YOU ARE THE MAN OF THE HOUSE NOW STOP
PLEASE COME STOP LOVE ALWAYS YOUR MOTHER STOP

“Oh.”

That was what James had said when the script girl had handed
him the slip of onionskin paper from Pacific Telephone and
Telegraph. He’d set his glass of water down. Read the words from the
telegram once, and then again. Endured the girl’s hand on his arm,
the sympathetic cooing noise she made. He gave her a smile that was
meant to look strained — the smile of a grieving son, bravely facing
the death of his beloved old dad.

“Well,” he said. He unbuckled the leather belt and scabbard. He
draped it over the canvas back of his chair. He walked back behind
the false adobe wall of the Castillo de Diablo set. He found a spot
where no one could see him. Crossed his arms. Put his hand on his
forehead, and waved away a carpenter who’d stuck his head back
there to see what was wrong. Then laughed, silently but deeply, until
tears streamed convincingly in little brown rivers down the layers of
orange pancake encrusted on his cheeks.

His dad was dead. Some terrible accident on the tracks. Well,
wasn’t that rich. The town would probably be having a parade for
Nick Thorne, his strapping, iron-jawed Paul Bunyan of a father . . .
And now —

— now,
he
was the man of the house.

There was only one word for it.

Rich
.

Three days after the telegram, in the middle of the night, James trod up the front steps to the family house. He didn’t know much
more now than he did then: he’d just sent off one telegram before
packing up his car and heading off. He found that he didn’t
want
to know more than his mother chose to reveal in that fifty-word
telegram. So he just composed one of his own:

DEAREST MOM STOP I WILL BE HOME IN THREE DAYS STOP
DO NOT WORRY ABOUT THE COST OF BURIAL I WILL PAY STOP
YOUR SON JAMES STOP

There was light inside the house. He was not surprised to see
that it was not electric. His father hadn’t worked a decent job since
the last time the North Brothers had run their mill, and that was
years ago.

But the kerosene flame gave James an odd sort of comfort.
The yellow, flickering light was proper and right for a town like
Chamblay. Electricity was for New York and Los Angeles. This little
place wasn’t ready for it.

He paused to look inside. There was his mother, sitting in one of
the hard, high-backed chairs. She held the black covers of the family
Bible in front of her face like a fan. She heard him coming — he knew
her well enough to tell that — but she pretended not to. As he watched
through the window, she licked a forefinger and turned a page.