Who Made Stevie Crye? (32 page)

L

Stevie had a mission.
The hour when her PDE Exceleriter had broken down one week ago would soon be upon her, and she must destroy the machine then to escape the possibility of future torment at its invisible hands. This charge required preparations that she would undertake in a spirit of grim self-discipline.

Upstairs she found the .22 rifle that, against her wishes, Ted had bought for Teddy on his tenth birthday. She also found a box of cartridges and loaded the rifle’s magazine. With the safety engaged, she carried the rifle downstairs to the VW van and slid it beneath a passenger seat. She then trekked back upstairs to get her typewriter, which, on her second trip down, she nearly dropped. But, having at last achieved the transfer, she drove four or five blocks to Builders Supply of Barclay, a huge prefabricated structure, to buy a gallon of paint. This paint was fire-engine red, four quarts of crimson latex.

Purchase in hand, Stevie angled her microbus through a neighborhood of two-story clapboard houses surrounded by magnolia trees and leafless dogwoods. She soon arrived at the town’s white cemetery on the northeast side. Three narrow asphalt lanes gave entrance to the cemetery, a serene expanse of withered grass on which discolored, nearly illegible markers from the 1800s stood shoulder to shoulder with more recent marble headstones and a solitary mausoleum two caskets high and five wide. A few gnarled trees vied with a host of chipped granite angels for tallest-inhabitant honors, and, in the shadow of an arthritic-looking cork elm, Stevie turned left on the last of the three asphalt lanes. It had been almost two months since she had visited Ted’s grave. The angels staring down through her windshield wore expressions of lofty reproach, the severity of which was somewhat tempered by the pigeon crap streaking their eroded faces. Stevie felt a piquant affection for even the sternest of these shabby cherubim. They were only doing their jobs.

Apart from most of the others, Ted’s burial plot occupied the gentle downhill slope near the poniard-topped metal fence enclosing the graveyard on the east. Stevie parked, carried her typewriter to the low mound of her late husband’s grave, and placed the machine above his buried head. Then, with some difficulty, she tied the can of paint from Builders Supply to the limb of a dogwood hanging over the grave from the other side of the fence. The can made a quarter turn to the right, another quarter turn to the left, meanwhile glinting uncannily in the feeble February sun—just the sort of startling high-gloss image (thought Stevie, fetching her son’s .22) that a resourceful film director would find effective in the incongruous context of a small winter cemetery.

In the concealing lee of the microbus Stevie took a careful bead on the revolving paint can. Suddenly an asthmatic snuffling noise—a sound like the unnerving breather on her telephone—broke her concentration. Frightened, she lowered the rifle’s muzzle and quickly retreated to the shelter of her passenger’s door. This same noise recurred, and she heard dragging footsteps in the crinkly leaves on the other side of the van. How could anyone have followed her to this place? She had seen no one in the cemetery, and not even the quasi-omniscient Seaton Benecke could know what she was doing now or where she was doing it—for she was composing this compellingly suspenseful scene herself. Whoever approached her, then, had come into being out of thin air, perhaps for malicious reasons best left to the reader’s imagination.

Five or six seconds later, as Stevie stood gazing down the barrel of the .22 at the spot where the intruder must soon come around the open door, a pair of bloodshot eyes materialized. These eyes were pregnant with worldly sadness and strangely low to the ground. The body they trailed behind them was spotted black, brown, and white, with crooked appendages that seemed disproportionately small for the weight they must support. An involuntary cry escaped Stevie’s lips, and she put one hand to her heart.

“What are you doing here?” she asked the creature.

It was Cyrano, the Cochrans’ basset hound. Cyrano wagged his tail lethargically and came snuffling up her instep to her knee, leaving several strands of semenish slobber on her jeans. Stevie pushed the dog away, checked her watch, took aim on the paint can, and pulled the trigger. The report, echoing through the cemetery, sent Cyrano scampering around the Volkswagen for home. Happy with this result, Stevie put three more holes in the can, staggering them with some success from top to bottom.

Paint bled down the length of the revolving container and poured into the works of the typewriter. Gory gouts of paint inundated the arrogant machine. A Red Sea of retribution drowned it. Thus ensanguined, the typewriter sat atop Ted’s grave like a bloody head, all consciousness washed away in the rubbery artificial hemoglobin of the Glidden’s Exterior Latex. It was purgative, this nauseating sight, and once all the paint had dripped over and into the Exceleriter, Stevie averted her head and spewed a porridge of transmogrified Rice Krispies all over the unoffending grass. Now she knew how Marella often felt. . . .

A hand touched her elbow, and she started. She had heard no one approach. When she looked up, light-headed and embarrassed, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her jean jacket, she saw Larry Clovers, one of Barclay’s three police officers, eyeing her with wariness and disgust.

“Mrs. Crye, it’s against the law to discharge a firearm inside the city limits. This here graveyard’s inside the city limits.”

“I’m finished, Larry. I won’t do it again.”

“It’s also against the law to deface a grave site and to dump worn-out machinery in unauthorized places. This here’s an unauthorized place.”

“It had to be done, Larry. I’ll clean up the mess. I’m not going to leave that crap all over Ted’s grave.”

“Mrs. Crye, you’ve broken two or three laws, maybe more. I’m supposed to take you in.” There followed a burst of static and a stream of amplified, half-intelligible speech from the radio in Clovers’s police car, which he had parked behind the microbus. “Really, Mrs. Crye, I should arrest you.” Quite gently he took the rifle from Stevie and removed its magazine.

“Listen, Larry, you’re lucky you’ve even made an appearance in this book. I’ve only written you in as a kind of gift to your father’s memory.” The elder Clovers, Stevie recalled, had been good to Ted and her, selling them a gas water heater at cost and installing it for nothing. “Your dad wouldn’t appreciate you making a nuisance of yourself in the name of a couple of slightly bent laws. I haven’t hurt anyone. Why not get on your radio and ask Joe Dunn and Henry McAbee in the sanitation department to come out and haul my old typewriter off to the dump? I can’t take it home again.”

“Ma’am, I—”

“Listen, I’ll wipe most of the excess paint off before they get here. Later today I’ll come back and tidy Ted’s grave. He’ll forgive me this silly profanation of the site. He owed me one.”

Compelled by her unorthodox reasoning (and the lead in her insistent pencil nub), Officer Larry Clovers went to his police car and relayed Stevie’s message to the city truck in which, every Tuesday morning, Joe Dunn and Henry McAbee collected trash. Ten minutes later the truck arrived, Joe and Henry heaved the ruined Exceleriter into the growling jaws of the automated compactor, and Stevie tossed the empty paint can in behind the typewriter as a clattery afterthought. Then she tipped the trashmen, patted Larry on the arm, bade all three men goodbye, and drove back to her house.

Dr. Elsa awaited her in her driveway along with two men in coveralls, employees of Hamlin Benecke & Sons. Neither was Seaton. At Seaton’s behest, they had driven up from Columbus in a company vehicle (a wood-paneled station wagon with dusty Venetian blinds in the rear window) to make a delivery. Dr. Elsa explained that twenty minutes ago Seaton had called asking her to meet the deliverymen at Stevie’s house, for he could get no answer when he dialed her number himself. Someone—preferably a close family friend—should be on the premises to receive delivery. Although this request meant breaking or delaying an appointment with a patient already in the clinic, Dr. Elsa had complied out of loyalty to Stevie and the compelling suspicion that Seaton was working a wild-eyed practical joke at her friend’s expense.

Anyway, because the deliverymen had just arrived, Stevie need not fear that they had worked any mischief during her absence. The larger of the two husky visitors, a red-haired fellow with photogenic Yosemite Sam mustachios and an acne-scarred complexion, eavesdropped on Dr. Elsa’s explanations with great interest and an astonishing sequence of offended looks. His companion, a young black man, gazed over the station wagon with his arms folded on the roof and the point of his chin on the back of one hand. His expression conveyed more amusement than irritation. Clearly, he did not mind getting away from the Beneckes on a work assignment, particularly if he could watch his partner take puffy umbrage at an imagined slight.

Stevie turned to the red-haired man. “A delivery? Of what? I didn’t order anything, and I don’t want
anything
from Seaton. I’ve had just about all of him I can stand.”

“Yeah, we feel that way, too,” said the black man, still smiling. “It’s a job, though.”

“Of typewriters,” said Dr. Elsa before the red-haired man could speak. “They’ve brought you a shipment of secondhand typewriters.”

“Reconditioned machines,” emended the red-haired man. “Six of ’em. And a dozen reams of typing paper.”

“But I didn’t order these things. I’m certainly not going to pay for them.”

“Ma’am, nobody
expects
you to. We’re just here to make delivery. Ain’t supposed to leave until we’ve taken ’em inside for you. . . . And here’s something from the kid he told me to hand over once you showed up.” The red-haired man thrust a wrinkled legal-size envelope at Stevie as if serving a subpoena, and her fingers closed on it without her conscious volition. “Can we get started, ma’am? Grady and me haven’t had lunch yet.”

“Started what?”

“Taking the typewriters inside. Faster we do it, less chance of us pulling any mischief around here.” He smirked.

“Hold it. Let me see what this is.” Stevie fumbled with the envelope. After tearing off one end, she removed two sheets of typing paper on which Seaton had written a hasty crabbed letter in blue crayon.

Dear Mrs. Crye (Mary Stevenson),

I screwed up your Exceleriter so bad the fortune teller lady from Button City told you to get rid of it. She did right. It’s impossible to get them back once you mess them up that way. These repaired machines, though, they’ve got nothing wrong with them. I didn’t do anything to them except fix them, no matter what I told you before.

Anyway, they work okay. I want you to have them to make up for the machine I made crazy. If one breaks, you can move to another. Most of them their owners left and never picked up. Now they’re yours. So is the paper I sent.

I tormented you the way I did to take revenge on your husband who died. He was a jerk. You were too good to him and too good for him. So was my mother. The experience he dumped on me thirteen years ago turned me into a BAD SEED. I sucked up all the free-floating cosmic evil around and went totally weird. You got in the way of that weirdness when your typewriter broke. After you chased me off last night, though, I began to see what a drain on my energy bugging you day in and day out was getting to be. It’s hard work being a container for cosmic evil, harder than repairing typewriters.

Besides, you started reminding me of a middle-aged Sissy Spacek, the way she’ll most likely look eight or ten years on. I get infatuated with famous actresses on a regular basis, Mrs. Crye, and start writing them unsigned letters to let them know I’m around. It’s a jerky thing to do, but I can’t help it. If I stay in Columbus much longer, I’ll fall in love with you that way and give you the same obnoxious business in letters sort of like this one.

That’s why, later this week, I’m leaving for Arizona to enroll in the Mormon Lake Nondenominational Halfway House for Satan’s Scions (they sent me a brochure back in ’79), where I hope to shake my addiction and start a writing career. I think I’d like to do children’s books about divorce, street crime, teen-age pregnancy, and stuff like that. Anyway, say hello to ’Crets for me if he’s still hanging around your place, and I sure hope you can use these typewriters.

Goodbye,

Seaton

“You okay, honey?” Dr. Elsa asked. “You look a little confused.”

“Hunky-dory.” Stevie refolded the letter and slid it back into its envelope. “For the first time in a week everything’s hunky-dory, Elsa.”

“What about the typewriters?” the red-haired man asked. “Our instructions was to stay right in your driveway until we’d carried every last one of ’em into the house. Then you’re supposed to sign.”

“I’ll sign if you put them in my attic,” Stevie said.

The red-haired man threw an irritated, hopelessly put-upon look at his partner, Grady, who hunched his shoulders in a shrug without lifting his chin from his hands. But, the mustachioed giant grumbling and Grady silently mouthing the lyrics of a popular rap, they carried the typewriters upstairs and stashed them one by one in the nearly inaccessible attic off Marella’s room. In three additional trips (making nine altogether between the two men), Grady did the honors with the reams of Stenocraft typing paper—while his disgruntled partner sat slumped at the station wagon’s steering wheel cleaning his fingernails with the blade of his pocketknife. Stevie signed, and the two men left. Only one of them waved as they departed.