The Master Butcher's Singing Club (9 page)

Not that she ever railed at God. From the time she’d understood God wouldn’t give her her mother back, she knew that was a waste of time. Because it offended her to swallow as many as twenty or thirty lies per day, she quit school in her final year. God was all good. Lie! God was all powerful. All right, maybe. But if so, then clearly not all good, since He let her mother die. All merciful? Lie. Just? Lie. All seeing? Had He really the time to watch what her hands did beneath the covers at night? Did God really invade her brain and weep at her impure thoughts? And if so, why had He concentrated on such trivia rather than curing her mother of her illness? What sort of choice was that? Delphine counted and even wrote the lies down in the margins of her textbooks and library books. Lies! More lies! She wrote so fiercely that for the next five years the nuns would admonish their students both to disregard and to
bring to their attention any books bearing handwritten annotations.

Her father was pleased enough. As soon as he learned she’d quit school, he quit life and proceeded to pursue his own serious drinking, while Delphine went to work. Well, maybe she shouldn’t have been so smart, she admitted. Maybe better to endure the tyranny of lies than the series of jobs she had then, briefly, held. She had wrapped butter in the Ogg Dairy. She had worked cracking eggs, gasping at the sulfur whiplash of the rotten ones. For a while she had sorted cookies into metal troughs, survived on the crumbs. Ran a buttonholer in a dress shop. She ironed. Blistered her hands in bleach laundering sheets. All these jobs were tedious and low-paying. Besides, since she lived at home, her father tried to appropriate half her money.

The first time she split her pay cash, he quietly used it to drink somewhere else. The next time, he brought his buddies home. She arrived home—lame, dusty, exhausted, from sorting bricks at the brickworks—to find them drinking a case of skin tonic. Although she tried her best to ignore them, they made a ruckus, ate every morsel, even the last bit of the ham, and in a half stupor blundered into her bedroom, which was her only haven. She took a broom to them, cracking the handle against their legs. When they guffawed and refused to leave, a storm of white dots fell across her vision. At long last, she decided to clear them out. She walked out to the woodpile, yanked the ax from its block, strode back into the kitchen.

Hey, Roy’s baby
. . . , one of them mocked her.

She lifted the ax high overhead and brought it down, split the just dealt ace of diamonds, then tugged the ax from the wood and lifted it again. Her father yelped. She shook the ax and screeched back at him, which caused him to jump backward in boozy dismay, scattering the poker deck, and to declare that she had gone haywire. Mightily affected, he raced out the door, gasping for breath, flanked by his companions. Somewhere in the night he fell through thin ice and from his dousing got pneumonia, almost died, so that Delphine had to quit the brickworks and nurse him. The ax was the first time she had turned on him,
and he couldn’t get over it. All of his bluster had collapsed at the sight of her, striding through the door in her white rag of a nightgown,
hollering bloody murder
, as he put it, weak and feverish. That had been the gist of Delphine’s life, that and more of the same. Still, she could not burn the house. It was the house where she’d grown up and where, according to at least one version of Roy’s story, her mother had given birth to her. He said it happened right in the kitchen, by the stove, where it was warm.

“I suppose we should clean out the cellar,” she sighed.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” said Cyprian, but his voice was cheerful. He stubbed out his cigarette, slapped his pants, and laughed at the puffs of dust that swallowed his hands. Delphine wanted to tell him that she admired his capacity for brute labor. It was a thing people in the town valued, and she herself was proud of her own endurance. If she said as much, though, would she be admitting she’d once thought of him as a useless lug who couldn’t so much as grow a plant? Maybe, she revised in her mind as they walked toward the house, she’d had it all wrong to begin with. He was an artist. A balancing artist. Maybe while doing the show his whole being had concentrated on that one thing. Maybe now that he wasn’t balancing, he could display his more ordinary talents.

TO GET TO THE RING
in the floor, they had to chip away a seal of shattered jars of canned peaches, the turds of some stray locked-up dog, and strange handfuls of spilled red beads mortared into the peach juice. Once they had pried off this layer, they hammered on the stuck ring. Gradually, the sky grew dark and they had to stop, find a lantern. They stalled, took some time filling it with kerosene. Cyprian fussily trimmed the wick, finally lighted it. By now, they were determined to finish what they’d started. They used a crowbar and a can opener to pry up the hinged hatch in the floor.

Thinking back later, Delphine had the sensation that the door had blasted off, but of course, that couldn’t have been the case. It was just that they had been mistaken about the mighty odor they’d fought. That
smell was only an olfactory shadow. Now came forth the real smell, the djinn, the source. Both of them dived through the back door and rolled, addled, in the scroungy backyard grass.

“What the hell was that?” said Cyprian, once they’d crawled to the beer crates and lighted their cigarettes with rubbery fingers. It was as though they’d been thrown from the house by a poltergeist. They could not even recall exactly whether they had actually lifted off the hatch.

“I think we did,” Delphine said.

“I do too,” said Cyprian.

“There’s someone down there.” Delphine breathed out a long smoky sigh.

“Who?”

“Someone dead.”

She was right. There was someone, plus another someone, and maybe another person, too. It was hard to tell. They were kind of mixed together, said Cyprian later. Afraid of the consequences of calling up the sheriff—what
had
Roy done?—they gathered every particle of traumatized energy and ventured back. They raced in holding their breaths, grabbed the lantern, leaned over the open hatch, looked down, and bolted back outside, all without breathing. Far from the house, they stopped and gasped.

“Did you get a good look?”

“Yeah.”

“It was a person, right?”

“Monsters.”

Which was exactly what those pitiable bodies had become—huge of tongue and pop-eyed, brain blasted, green, bloated, iridescent with fungal energy, unforgettably inhabited by a vast array of busy creatures. The bodies were stuffed upright in the cellar surrounded by many empty bottles.

What
had
Roy done?

“Now is it time to burn the house?” Delphine was panicked.

“We can’t. If we do, it means that we suspected foul play. There’s no way if we burn the house the sheriff won’t come investigate, or the fire
chief. There’s no way to burn up the basement—I mean, what if even fire won’t destroy what’s down there? Then we’ll really be in trouble.”

Even at such a moment, Delphine was touched by his casual use of
we
. He could have ditched her right then, left her to handle her father and the stinking house and the bodies generating strange life in the cellar. But he stuck with her, uttered not a single word of exasperation with the mess. Besides this new competence, he is even
loyal
, thought Delphine, I would marry him if he did not have to do what he did with other men. It was an odd time to take his measure as a potential husband, perhaps, but as Cyprian faced this great challenge beside her, his brow furrowed in grave thought, Delphine observed that he had never looked more handsome. The planes of his sculpted cheeks were drawn and his eyes were somber. She liked this weighty, serious, considered quality he now displayed. She liked his patience with the problem.

“We will have to go back and tell Roy about the bodies,” he stated. “We need more information, Delphine.”

ROY BAWLED
in a helpless rage at the two of them upon their return. He’d inadvertently rolled himself up tightly in the bedsheets and believed that they had put him into a rudimentary straitjacket. He’d been through the d.t.’s in a sanitarium once, and as part of his treatment the staff had fastened him in a cold wet sheet. They had tightly pinned together the edges seam to seam. He was left to experience whatever he would experience. It had been lonely snaking out in a soundproof padded room. Spiders had leaked from the walls and giant lice had crawled underneath his skin. The experience itself had driven him back to drink, he said, and he never even contemplated quitting again. His mind couldn’t take its own power.

“Can you take this?” said Delphine, unrolling him. “There’s dead people in your cellar.”

“Release me! I implore you!” Roy begged. As usual, his manner was a mixture of pretension, low need, and melodrama. “I need a blast here. Can you get me a good blast?”

With a resigned gesture, Delphine directed Cyprian to offer her father a sip of the whiskey they’d bought for him on the way.

“We’re going to let you down slow, Dad,” she said. “You’re going to have to talk to us. There’s dead people in your cellar,” she repeated.

“And who might they be?” he asked huffily.

“Well, we don’t know who.”

“Perhaps you could describe them.” Roy’s eye gleamed with a mad fire upon the pint of whiskey. He grew slyly meek. “What, may I ask, do they look like?”

“Hard to describe,” said Cyprian, with a helpless glance at Delphine. “One had on a porkpie hat, I think. There was a bow tie, or maybe it was something else . . . you know, come to think of it, one was wearing a suit.”

“A black suit?” Roy was suddenly alert.

“Delphine, do you think one was wearing a black suit?”

Delphine paced the floor, shut her eyes to recover the hideous picture in her mind. “I do think so. A black suit,” she faintly agreed.

Roy jumped up in a sudden fit of energy. He grabbed the whiskey from Cyprian’s hand before the other man could react, and he swilled as much as he could before, with a struggle, Delphine and Cyprian wrested the bottle back from him.

“Oh God, oh God!” Roy swiped his sleeve across his mouth and staggered around the room twice before he stood before them, hands thrown wide. “It’s Doris and Porky and their little kid, too!”

“What? What?” Delphine grabbed his shoulders and shook him so hard his head snapped back and forth.

“Hold off!” Roy slumped onto the bed, held his hand out for the whiskey bottle, which Cyprian put instead to his own lips. With a feral swift movement Roy tried to grab the flask, but Cyprian plucked it out of his reach and brandished it high.

“Who are Doris and Porky?”

“And their little . . . what . . . boy?” added Delphine. She knew the family, but not that well. Her friend Clarisse was a relative. In fact, Clarisse had told her a few things about Portland “Porky” Chavers,
Delphine now remembered. Things so bad that she couldn’t feel sorry for him, at least.

“They were guests,” Roy said in a tranced voice. “At the funeral party.”

“Whose funeral?”

“Your girlfriend Clarisse’s dad. Friend of mine too, of course. He wanted a party, not a funeral, because he’s a Strub. I was the only one who would throw him a party instead of your typical funeral proceedings, which he’d attended all his life. I was the only one who would do it.” Roy paused, then spoke rather pompously. “You could call it an act of corporeal mercy.”

“Only you would think of that,” said Delphine.

“I was an extremely gracious host. We had tubs of beer,” Roy said in a longing, confessional hush.

“Bought with the rent money,” said Delphine in utter fury.

“It doesn’t matter about the beer,” said Cyprian. “Tell us about Doris and Porky.”

Roy gulped like a dutiful and panicked child, nodded, and went on.

“Weeks after, we did notice they were gone.”

“We who? Your stinking hobo friends?”

Roy gave Delphine a look of deceitfully gentle reproach, but he was too much in shock to carry out a more detailed act.

“Kozka and Waldvogel, Mannheim and Zumbrugge, all of those. Of course we wondered where they went. Porky wasn’t at the singing club. They just left everything. Their house was abandoned. Everything. Even their dog . . . it came back looking for them. It wouldn’t leave the pantry. Oh God! Now I know why!”

Roy bent double and began to weep, though with a soft intensity for which he needed no audience. “And here we thought they went down to Arizona,” he said softly, over and over.

Delphine and Cyprian felt themselves thump down like wooden beings, right on the bed, felt the breath leave their bodies. They tried to retrieve some sense, but it was too soon. Their nerves were shot. Cyprian went into the hotel bathroom, turned the bathwater on, and
motioned to Delphine to enter. He tossed the whiskey bottle out to Roy and then they locked the door shut on him.

“Let’s not think,” Delphine counseled.

Cyprian didn’t even answer. He made the bath very, very hot, and he added some strawberry bubbles that he’d bought at the dime store. While the water was getting good and deep he took off all Delphine’s clothes, then he took off his own. As he balled them up and laid them in the corner, he said, “We’re going to burn these.” They got in and with great care and speechless tenderness they washed each other, then they soaked themselves sitting cupped together for comfort. They kept the water going in and out. Their skin got very soft, then spongy white, wrinkled as a toad’s. Once Roy knocked, but then he mumbled some vague apology and went away.

“I never want to leave this tub,” said Delphine.

Cyprian added more strawberry bubbles, more hot water, and they sat there and sat there until the water drained out, then they sat there some more.

NOW THEY HAD
the problem of who to tell and what to do—there was family, there must be family for Doris and Porky, and, unbearable to contemplate, their child. And there was the infuriating prospect of getting the entire story out of Roy. They questioned him the next morning. He gave out bits and pieces. They learned, for instance, that he’d wandered off during the wake itself and slept in the abandoned coop that once housed the black rosecomb bantams that Delphine used to keep. In his grief over Cornelius Strub, father to Clarisse, he’d gone to live in the bum’s jungle down by the railroad tracks. Weeks had passed there, he thought, and when he returned he was so wrecked he was hallucinating. So he may have actually heard pounding, even awful noises coming from the walls and floors of his house, but at the same time, as he was plagued by the usual visions of snakes uncoiling from the lamps and dripping from the walls, he disregarded these noises.