Who Made Stevie Crye? (16 page)
Read Who Made Stevie Crye? Online
Authors: Michael Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #science fiction, #General
XXXI
Once in Columbus
, Stevie put the folders under the driver’s seat and scrupulously locked the van every time she left it. The afternoon went well. She treated herself to dinner at the China Star restaurant, window-shopped through the labyrinth of the Columbus Square Mall, and bought a good supply of nonperishable grocery items at the Winn-Dixie store in the Midtown Shopping Center. (Chicken potpies, being perishable, she valiantly passed up, even though they were three for only a dollar-ten.) She purposely stayed out of the bookstores that popped up along her shopping routes, for she had plenty to read at home and a longing perusal of the fiction racks would automatically provoke an outlay of ten or twelve dollars. She could not afford any nonessential expenditures this month; she could hardly afford the essential ones.
By four-thirty Stevie had virtually exorcised her fatiguing negativism. She felt good—happy, almost. Like magic elixirs, the stinging February air and the radiant blueness of the afternoon sky had purged her melancholy. She was able to smile at the people on the sidewalks and in the mall concourses, even the ones who bumped her in doorways and flaunted scowly-face buttons on their coat lapels. Buck up, she wanted to tell these aggressively morose citizens, we’re all downtrodden downscale consumers together. K-Mart is our temple, McDonald’s our commissary, and Burt Reynolds our crash-happy prophet. Hallelujah.
Until she climbed back into her microbus for the final time that afternoon and saw the corner of one of her manila folders protruding from beneath the seat, she had forgotten about her typewriter troubles. The corner of the folder reminded her, but she shoved it out of sight with her heel and put the VW in gear. Nothing was going to spoil this outing. She intended to arrive back in Barclay in contagious high spirits.
Before she fully understood what she was doing, Stevie found herself driving down Macon Road toward the Bradley Memorial Library and the original business district on the Chattahoochee River. She needed to be going the other way. Above the library, then, she swung the microbus hard to the right and in moderate traffic cruised down the meticulously landscaped hill to a busy intersection between a cocktail lounge, a flower shop, and two other catty-corner establishments. She was heading into a tree-lined area in which private residences alternated with isolated businesses of one sort or another. The studios of the local CBS affiliate were not too far away. (Right now the station was probably broadcasting post-football-season fare: a gymnastics meet or a figure-skating exhibition. Wow. Was she glad to be away from the set.)
Then Stevie realized that she was going to Hamlin Benecke & Sons. Jesus, gal, you’re returning to the scene of the crime.
Indeed, she was. She could not help herself. It was stupid, irrational, maybe even counterproductive—not only to her hopes of getting her Exceleriter repaired forever and ever but also to the entire point of her day on the town. She simply could not help herself. Her shopping, after all, had not really purged her of anxiety. It had merely chased her problem underground. Well, the problem would not
stay
underground. It stuck its nose back above the surface and stared at her with close-set empty eyes. Maybe if she went to Benecke’s, and saw Seaton again, and made him undo the terrible thing he had done to her machine, her life would get back on track again and the nightmare of the past few days would burn away like morning mist.
Her foot pressed the accelerator, her hands manipulated the steering wheel, and her van chugged up an avenue of naked trees and semidilapidated structures to the site of the office-supply company. She pulled into the asphalt parking lot of a neighborhood drugstore across the street from Benecke’s. Both businesses were closed today. The bricks of the office-supply company had been painted a color that Stevie thought of as “headache green.” In the bright afternoon sunlight they shone with Day-Glo brilliance, as if freshly shellacked. Stevie shielded her eyes and peered across the street at the gaudy building.
Leaning against the building’s uphill wall, supporting some of its weight on a bent kickstand, was Seaton Benecke’s big black motorcycle. Her nemesis, it seemed, was inside working on other unsuspecting folks’ typewriters. Stevie pulled her manila folders out from under the seat without taking her eyes off the building. Maybe she ought to go over, pound on the locked front door, and accost that weird young man with further evidence of his malign handiwork. The company had charged her only ten or eleven dollars for repairs that Pantronics Data Equipment would not have made for another forty. Nevertheless, those so-called repairs (even if her Exceleriter was still functioning, after a fashion) had caused her untold mental anguish, and she would be well within her rights to ask for her money back.
Stevie opened her door and dropped one foot toward the pavement.
Simultaneously the plate-glass door of Hamlin Benecke & Sons flashed open, and Seaton appeared in it wearing his white coveralls and a coat resembling an intern’s jacket. His nimble jersey-clad capuchin sat on his right shoulder. Stevie pulled her foot back inside the microbus, eased the door to, and slumped down into her seat. She was crazy to be here. She did not want to talk to the repairman. She did not want her money back. She wanted to get home to the kids without a pointless showdown in the supply company’s parking lot. Of course, if her typewriter would start operating normally again, that little bonus would round off the perfection of the day, and she would accept that, too.
Please, Stevie silently begged, don’t let him see me. I didn’t
mean
to come here. Don’t let him see me.
Through the bottom of her window she watched Seaton fumbling with a set of keys, trying to find one that would lock the family business behind him. His pudgy fingers had no agility in the cold, none of the nice expertise that permitted him to transform ordinary business machines into dangerous psyche-scribers. He looked as bland as a bowl of dry cornflakes. The keys slipped from his fingers and clattered on the concrete. When he bent to retrieve them, ’Crets jumped from his shoulder and ran along the curb like a man on a riverbank surveying the waters beside him for a runaway boat. Or for a gas-bloated corpse.
Stevie ducked lower to keep the monkey from spotting her and alerting Seaton to her presence.
The telephone in the office-supply company began to ring. Stevie heard Seaton mutter, “Oh, crap!”—sounds carried well today, like cannons booming over water—and lifted her head to see him retreat back into the darkness to catch the phone. “I’ll be right back,” he told his monkey from inside the building. “Don’t you run off now.” Then the plate-glass door closed, and ’Crets hopped from the low curb into the deserted expanse of the parking lot.
I swear, thought Stevie, slumping again—that damned animal’s seen me. There’s no one to blame but yourself, either. You could have driven on home, Stevenson Crye. You didn’t
have
to make this stupid side trip.
Peeking over the Volkswagen’s sill to see what the capuchin was doing, Stevie found ’Crets looking directly at her—out of that tiny death’s-head face, out of the indigo whirlpools of his eyeless eyes. Well, so what? How likely was a stupid monkey to reveal her whereabouts to Seaton? When the repairman came back outside, he would summon ’Crets to him, mount his motorcycle, and go roaring off to whichever ritzy neighborhood he and his parents called their own. The capuchin may have seen a woman in a vehicle across the street, but no monkey alive could equate her mostly hidden face with the angry countenance of the woman who had yesterday chased him from her upstairs bedroom. Or could he? Stevie began to suspect that the vision of primates was far superior to that of dogs and cats. Further, they had noses similar in structure to, but more discriminating in operation than, the noses of human beings. Maybe ’Crets
did
know who she was, and maybe he would find a straightforward way to blow the whistle on her spying. A confrontation with Seaton would ensue, and Stevie’s heretofore carefree afternoon would glug down the drain like a basin of greasy dishwater. Way to go, Samantha Spade.
This fear commenced to justify itself. The monkey crossed the parking lot to the street and perched above the sloping gutter with an eye on the afternoon’s traffic. A man in an American compact honked his horn at ’Crets, obviously nonplused by so ominous an apparition at curbside, but the monkey sat up on his haunches and screeched at the driver. He would not be bullied. A German shepherd might daunt him, but not a pip-squeaking K-car.
My God, he’s coming over here. He’s actually going to cross the street. Why? What does he think he’ll accomplish?
Stevie rolled her window tight and locked the door. ’Crets, meanwhile, bounded toward the microbus on a tricky zigzag. Another automobile horn blared at him, but the monkey reached her side of the street unfazed by his perilous passage. The Falcon quarterback in Atlanta was not half the scrambler that ’Crets was: Poor old Bartkowski just didn’t have the monkey’s knees. This facile comparison briefly deferred Stevie’s realization that ’Crets had come for her, that his journey had a sinister purpose.
She flopped across the passenger’s seat to lock the other door. Glancing back out into the drugstore’s pockmarked lot, she was startled to discover it empty. ’Crets had vanished. Probably too close to the van for her to see him.
By this time, Stevie’s fearful uneasiness had become an ill-defined dread. She was sweating under her sweater, and a weight like an old-fashioned flatiron had settled in her bowels. Seaton’s goddamn monkey was after her. Several inches shy of two feet tall, dressed like a born-again professional athlete, possessed of almost exemplary table manners (leaving aside his penchant for bloodsucking), ’Crets still terrified Stevie.
She was afraid that this unlikely creature would attain hulkish dimensions and rip the heavy sliding door off her microbus. What he then might attempt she could not even imagine, although it would assuredly be violent and probably excruciatingly fatal. Why else would he bear on his diminutive shoulders a furry death’s-head . . . ?
Stevie crept between the two forward seats into the passenger section. Still no sign of ’Crets. She depressed the handle on the sliding door, locking it, and hastily checked the latches on all the windows. Still no sign of ’Crets. As for Seaton, he had not yet exited the murky interior of the headache-green building. If he came out within the next few minutes, he would look around for the capuchin, see her van, and ford the noisy street to make inquiries. The smartest thing for her to do now would be to goose this old wagon right out of town. Stevie hurried forward to do just that.
Seaton’s face appeared on the other side of the supply company’s plate-glass door, a milky blur in the gloom. What horrendous timing. Why couldn’t his caller have kept him occupied another two minutes? Stevie slid down in her seat again and stared sidelong out the window to await the inevitable confrontation. She was doomed to be seen, no matter how far down she slumped or how fervently she wished otherwise. She must resign herself to an unpleasant meeting. She must think up some excuse, even though she had none. All because Seaton had dropped his keys and his idiot monkey had darted across the street.
Well, she had asked for it. She had almost willed it to happen.
The door to the green building opened, and Seaton Benecke came through it with his door key in hand and ’Crets perched easily on his shoulder. Yes, with ’Crets on his shoulder! Heedless of her own likely conspicuousness, Stevie sat up and gaped. Neither Seaton nor the capuchin saw her. Young Benecke closed and locked the door, shifted his clinging familiar to his hip, and strode the small distance beneath the building’s metal awning to his motorcycle. With ’Crets installed securely between his legs, Seaton started the big Honda, revved its engine a few times, and drifted almost effortlessly into the flow of traffic on the cramped avenue. He had never even seen Stevie. Like the demon who operated her Exceleriter, she had been invisible to him. So had her van. Maybe, like the capuchin whom she had just imagined crossing the street from the store, she and her vehicle had not even been there.
“Nonsense,” said Stevie aloud. “You saw what you saw, and you’re most definitely parked across the street from Hamlin Benecke and Sons.”
The steering wheel was cold under her hands, the gas pedal gently resisted the pressure of her foot, and the traffic moving on the street between the drugstore and the office-supply company clearly had both outline and substance. Stevie, bewildered and frightened, started her Volkswagen, headed it back toward the curving uphill avenue that debouched into Macon Road, and told herself that now, surely, she was going home. She would not be sidetracked again.
XXXII
Stevie decided to return to Barclay
by an old state two-lane rather than the new federal interstate. The latter offered no services for nearly fifty miles, and she wanted the assurance of nearby houses, filling stations, and tiny rural businesses once it began to turn dark. Whereas the interstate often seemed a huge deserted autobahn through beautiful but unpeopled farming country, the winding state highway to Barclay took a traveler by secure if sometimes inconvenient stages through one shabby and/or picturesque community after another. To arrive safely at your destination, you negotiated alternating corridors of pine woods and variegated human settlements. If you had a flat tire on Highway 27, a Good Old Boy in a pickup or a member of the Wickrath County Sheriffs Patrol would stop to help. On the interstate, though, you could wait for hours for assistance or risk being victimized by a hoodlum while trying to do the job yourself. Therefore, Stevie headed home by way of Cataula, Button City, and Kudzu Valley.
Twilight came early in February. Although it was only a little after five, the sun limning the pine needles on her left was sinking fast. Its rays winked through the trees like those of a failing flashlight. Grayness stained the eastern sky the way a spill of water discolors a linen napkin. It was cold and getting colder. Stevie had the heater turned up high. Its low roar and the warmth issuing from its blowers were partial antidotes to the psychological effects of the congealing gloom, but Stevie could not help thinking about the incident in Columbus.
She had seen ’Crets crossing the street, and then Seaton emerging from the store with ’Crets on his shoulder. How could the animal be in two places at once? She had imagined either one or the other of these apparitions. There could not be
two
animals, she reasoned, because Seaton had shown no apparent distress at the absence of the capuchin with which he had first come to the door. That monkey, then, must be the illusion. She had
imagined
its clever sprint across the street. The real ’Crets had left the store with Seaton a few minutes later.
“Nonsense,” Stevie said.
The fear of a flat tire or a thrown rod or some other mechanical problem had not kept her from using the four-lane. She had come by way of 27 because she feared that Seaton had spotted her van and dispatched ’Crets to spook and intimidate her. On his prior command the monkey had hidden from Stevie, and Seaton had then left the store with a stuffed effigy of ’Crets. (Marella had three or four truly lifelike stuffed animals—it was not impossible.) Once she had driven off, confused and fear-stricken, Seaton had returned to pick up his pet, smirking in his plain-faced way over his ruse’s success. The only other alternative, and not really a credible one, was that ’Crets was clinging to the side or rear of her vehicle, a potential saboteur.
Now
that
was paranoid.
But Stevie half believed that ’Crets was traveling with her; indeed, that was why she had chosen this well-patrolled route instead of the barrens of the interstate.
Cataula, here and gone. Look out for Button City, a smattering of mobile homes intersprinkled with a pair of roadside eateries, a convenience store, an abandoned brick motel, and an automobile graveyard, spines of dented metal rusting into the sere and leafless kudzu.
On Button City’s northern outskirts, just as the road began to meander through another fairy-tale defile of wilderness: an illuminated sign that Stevie had never seen, maybe because it had been two months, back during the Christmas holidays, since she had driven to or from Columbus via Highway 27, and even small towns, given enough time, underwent some surprising changes. This change was not earth-shaking, just startling in the dusky context of pine trees and naked cork elms.
Off to the left, in front of a chain-link fence around a small frame house half-hidden by trees, stood a mobile advertising signboard with colored light bulbs winking around its edges and a host of plastic letters arrayed in its display grooves. Stevie could not yet see what the letters said, but she remembered that once on this spot there had stood a crude wooden billboard featuring a big red hand and the legend
Madame Pauline, Palmst
(sic). Stevie had never stopped, and once she got past the sign, a glance in her rearview had always revealed that big red hand bobbing slightly, as if waving goodbye. A trick of the road, but it amused her that fortune-telling still thrived in the so-called New South. Some of its practitioners even touted their services in the Yellow Pages.
Stevie slowed to see what sophisticated message had replaced the crudities of that original sign. There might be a feature story in the subject, one she had never explored in depth before. If her book proposal came back from the Briar Patch Press, Inc., as she believed it would, she had best have something else on the burner to keep her family fed. Maybe she could sell a piece on latter-day palmistry to the latest incarnation of
Atlanta Fortnightly
, a magazine with a far-reaching editorial mix and a competitive pay scale.
All these thoughts sieved through Stevie’s mind as she tried to read the signboard’s message, but there were too many letters to catch while coasting by, so a hundred yards past the frame house she backed along the deserted two-lane to see what she had missed. The other side of the sign bore the same lettering. Stevie parked on the shoulder, twisted in her seat, and with a Bic pen wrote it all down on a manila folder:
SISTER CELESTIAL
PROPHETESS ** HEALER
DAILY & SUNDAY 7 A.M.—11 P.M.
SPECIALIZES IN: LOVE—BUSINESS—MARRIAGE
HELPS SOLVE ANY PROBLEM AND ANSWER ANY QUESTION
DELIVERS THE GUIDING HAND PLUS REALIZATION
REASONABLE RATES ** FREE BLESSINGS
K
NOCK AND THE
D
OOR
W
ILL
O
PEN
A truly thorough program. And not one misspelling in the entire message! That colon after SPECIALIZES IN might not be altogether kosher, but usually with roadside soothsayers you got misspellings galore: PALMST, FORETUNE TELLER, ADVIZER, PROFETIS. Because most of these sibyls had trouble divining what letter came after another, Stevie never had any confidence that they could perform an analogous task with events. A dictionary was a book of spells, but either few of these ladies owned one, or they were too busy crystal-gazing inverted fishbowls or turning over marked playing cards to consult Webster’s.
Eight lines without a spelling error. Wow.
An orange light glowed in one of the windows of Sister Celestial’s clapboard house. A curl of smoke did a sinuous dance upward through the haloed trees. Stevie had parked on the shoulder facing oncoming traffic, and a car from the north swerved into the opposite lane and blew its horn to let her know that her van was not wholly clear of the highway. The blare Dopplered away like the warning claxon of a passing diesel locomotive. Stevie’s hands began to tremble. The flimsy lace curtains on the window with the orange lamp drew aside and then dropped back into place. Someone had spotted her.
“Shit,” she said disgustedly. And thought again of ’Crets, who might still be perched on her rear fender.
Behind the chain-link fence, forty or fifty yards away, a figure emerged onto the porch of the house, an imposing figure in a shawl and a dark chemise. Stevie could not see the woman’s face, but she had little doubt that this was Sister Celestial, trapped for now in a cunningly allocated surplus of earthbound flesh. A stranger had parked by her property, and she was peering up through the dusk to determine if it was a customer or an ill-mannered interloper bent on mischief. You had to put up with a lot of guff from young people when you were a prophetess.
Stevie cranked her window down three inches (too small a crack for a monkey of ’Crets’s size to squeeze through) and shouted, “I was just admiring your sign. I’ll be going now. My kids are waiting for me up in Barclay.”
“You sound like a woman in trouble,” Sister Celestial called from her porch, her voice curiously high-pitched for so big a woman—curiously melodic, too. “Untroubled folks don’t
stop
to admire my sign. They laugh their laughs and go on by.” Imperiously she descended her steps to a stone walkway in her dusty yard.
“No, no, I’m not in any trouble.”
“No trouble, gal? How come I hear a question in those words?”
How has this happened? Stevie asked herself. You don’t need this. First a side trip to the office-supply company, now this colloquy with a black prophetess-healer. Highway robber, call her. Just another con artist exploiting a gimmick to keep from doing
real
work. Just like you . . .
Aloud Stevie said, “You don’t see a monkey on my rear fender, do you? Or up on top of my van?”
“You bring a monkey with you, child?”
“No, I —”
Sister Celestial laughed. “Do I look like Miss Jane Goodall?” She spread her arms. “Does this look like the Grant Park Zoo?”
“No. No, it doesn’t. I didn’t really expect there to be a monkey on the van. It’s just that—” It’s just that I can’t possibly explain myself without typing out everything that’s happened to me since Tuesday.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about monkeys then. Or lions or hippopotamuses, either. I don’t even got a dog, child.’’
“Listen, I’m sorry I bothered you. I’ll be going.”
Sister Celestial advanced up her walk between two rows of wire pickets bearing circular red reflectors . . . like a goddess stepping from island to island on a dark primeval sea; the reflectors were the eyes of the mythological amphibians cavorting at her ankles. To dispel this dicey illusion, Stevie had to glance again at the chain-link fence and the glowing signboard.
Sister Celestial said, “You wanted to talk to me. That’s why you stopped.”
“I stopped to copy your sign. That’s all. Madame Pauline used to live here. I was curious.”
“You’re looking at Madame Pauline, child. Every seven years or so I got to be born again. Already I’ve been Prophetess Joy, Delphinia Promise, Mother Miracle, Madame Pauline, and Sister Celestial. Already I know who I’m likely to be my next changeover and the one after that. This is the fanciest sign I’ve
ever
had. Next one, though, liable to be neon and the one after that a parade of letters marchin’ back and forth over the highway. Look all you like. Copy all you want.”
“I’m finished. I’ve copied it.”
“My question’s why you want to. Answer me that. Why you want to copy some old crazy diviner’s flimflammy sign?”
“I’m a reporter, sort of. I thought this might make an interesting story.”
“Course it would. You up and change your mind about that?”
“No, no. It’s . . . I’ve got to get back to Barclay.”
“You’ll get there. You’re almost there now. Come in, child, and take a bead on your troubles getting this story down. It’s been better ’n three years since the papers done me, and that was only because a white man over in Ellerslie told Sheriff Gates I snooked him.”
The verb sounded like
snooked
to Stevie. Sister Celestial spoke clearly and forthrightly, seldom swallowing the tails of her words—but the incantatory rhythms of her speech and an occasional colorful expression kept Stevie off her guard. She was afraid she was being snooked. She ought to nod goodbye and drive off, but middle-class courtesy and the mercenary instincts of her profession restrained her. Maybe there was a
helluva
story in Sister Celestial, outrageous Flannery O’Connor material to which she could apply the jaded journalistic cool of Joan Didion or the effervescent hipness of Tom Wolfe. Brock Fowler at
Atlanta Fortnightly
would snap up such an article and commission her to roam southwest Georgia looking for more. She would do a whole gallery of indigenous types, from the auto-mechanic archery champion to the dulcimer-making Ku Klux Klanner to the—
“You coming, child?”
“All right,” Stevie said. “Dr. Elsa shouldn’t be too upset if I’m a little later than seven. She’ll understand.”
“I’m sure she will,” Sister Celestial agreed.
Stevie opened her door, then hesitated and glanced up and down the shoulder for some sign of ’Crets. To cover this display of tentativeness, she said, “I can’t afford a reading, though. That’s one reason I didn’t just come up to the door and knock.”
“Not much reason,” the black woman said. “What’s the next to last line on my glowboard say?”
“‘Reasonable rates. Free blessings.’”
“You got it, child. You got it. Now come in out of the cold and take you a chair in my shanty-castle.”
Stevie started to climb down from the microbus.
“You better get that box of yours
all
the way off the road. Else you better have some mighty fine insurance.”
So Stevie maneuvered her VW van down the shoulder’s incline to a small graded area where most of Sister Celestial’s customers must park. Sister Celestial retreated into her house. Before dismounting and following her, Stevie rummaged through the manila folders for the transcriptions of her nightmares. These she carried through the gate and over the stone walkway to her unexpected audience with the cheerfully triumphant prophetess.
