Witches on the Road Tonight Page 4

“The lady’s name?”

  “Her name is Sonia. She’s a photographer and a goddess.”

  “Where’re you from?”

  “That’s a tougher question,” Tucker says. “Virginia via New York City then back to Virginia. Sonia? I do believe she sprang fully grown from the head of Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was suffering a violent headache on behalf of our dolorous country when Eleanor lifted a mallet and split his skull. Out leaped our dear Sonia, eyes flashing, camera ready to document all the world’s ills.”

  “Tucker,” says Sonia, joining them. “This boy needs his rest.”

  “Do you need your rest, Eddie?”

  “No, sir.”

  Sonia has brought a wet rag from the kitchen and uses it to wipe Eddie’s face and hands. He squirms at the attention; he’s not a little kid anymore. Tucker hated his mother washing behind his ears, too.

  “Did Mrs. Roosevelt really crack Mr. Roosevelt’s skull?” Eddie asks.

  “Don’t listen to a word Tucker says,” Sonia instructs, gently washing between each of his fingers. “Your daddy’s building parks and we’re writing the book that tells people where to find them. That’s how we came to be on your part of the mountain.”

  “You’re writing a book?” Eddie asks, blushing deeply. Tucker can tell he wants to say something.

  “What is it?”

  “I thought you might be movie stars.”

  “Why?” asks Tucker, with a laugh. “Because we’re so damned good-looking?”

  Eddie hides his face. “You’re different from anyone here,” he says.

  “You like movies, Eddie?” Tucker asks. The boy shrugs, even more embarrassed.

  “You’ve never seen one, have you?”

  He shrugs again.

  “I have something I think will fix you right up,” Tucker says, rising from the bed. “If you’ll excuse me.”

  “Where are you going?” Sonia asks in surprise.

  “Down to the car,” he says.

  “You can’t leave, Tucker,” she says. “What will I say if Eddie’s mother comes while you’re gone?”

  Tucker is already out on the porch, filled with the excitement of having something concrete, at last, to offer this kid.

  “Tell her you were driving,” he says over his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right back.”

  Of course he isn’t right back. She knew he wouldn’t be. Sonia tries to remember how long it took them to walk up, then doubles it in her head. She tells herself he isn’t lost or injured in the woods, she won’t be left to raise this orphaned child. She glances over to where Eddie is finally sleeping. In the first fifteen minutes, she made all the conversation she knew how to make with him. What grade are you in at school? How do you like your teacher? What do you want to be when you grow up? Eddie wanted to see the camera around her neck and she took it off and showed him how it worked; he peered through the viewfinder but she wouldn’t let him take a picture. That film belongs to the government, she said. When he was done with the camera, Eddie wanted to know more about New York, so she told him about the Cyclone at Coney Island and how in the middle of the most crowded spot in the city, a place called Times Square, a boy could sit in Chock Full o’ Nuts, eating cream cheese on date bread that had been untouched by human hands. Eddie thought Chock Full o’ Nuts was a funny name and she had to agree, and then she said, Okay, no more talking, you need to rest. His eyes drooped even as he struggled to stay awake to see what Tucker would bring. Sonia leaned her head against the iron bed frame, slowing her breathing to show him how it was done. In a matter of minutes he was asleep and at last she was free to orient herself in this strange house, to see where this collision had brought her.

  It is a spartan, clean-swept room. Plank walls nailed to plank floors and a plank ceiling. On three pegs beside the door to the breezeway hang three changes of Mrs. Alley’s clothes: a summer cotton shift with snaps up the front and a deep pocket patched with a cloth cabbage rose; next to it hangs the Sunday dress of charcoal bombazine, funeral respectable, remade from last century, with mended lace at the cuffs and collar; then there is the nightgown, hung on the peg closest to the bed. Washed thin as cobweb, Sonia can still make out every stain not quite removed—brown at the armpits and watermarked by old breast milk, the dark freckles of dried menstrual blood low at the hem from where she slept with it bunched between her legs. Sonia takes up her camera from where it lies on the bed and peers down the finder. It’s dark in the bedroom and she left her flashgun and light meter in the car. Glancing at the sleeping boy, she eases herself off the bed and reaches up to open wide the shutters, letting the late afternoon sunlight flood in. Under his covers, Eddie does not stir.

  Like Tucker fretting over the Sider Man, Sonia used to care who was on the other end of her lens. Then, in October ’29 she was early for a shoot with socialite Sarah Churchill’s husband, Winston, a comer in British politics. Setting up to take an exterior of the Savoy Plaza where they were staying, she heard a shout directly above Winston’s room on the fourteenth floor and, instinctively, she swung her camera around. Taking the picture had been like throwing her arm up against a punch, she remembered, she didn’t even know if she’d gotten it until later, when she developed the negative, but there he was—the anonymous businessman in his suit-and-vested free fall, his legs peddling, his arms wrapped around his body as if embracing a lover. Her grainy, blurred exclusive, the only confirmed suicide of those early days, was her first cover for Wealth. “Crash,” read the headline. And inside were the more carefully composed snapshots of his broken body where it landed on the hotel’s bank of Aucuba hedges.

  Tucker had asked her about that photo, which had made her an instant celebrity. They were lying in one of their first motels and the headlights from the road outside swept through the loose weave of curtain, casting a net of shadow over their naked bodies. She didn’t know why he brought up the suicide as they lay with their legs entwined, sharing a last cigarette, except that with each drag, she’d felt herself slipping away again and maybe he sensed death was the only thing more intimate than what they’d just shared. How did you feel about it? he asked her. Getting that on film? It had taken her a long time to answer. He waited. Just lucky, she’d said at last. Just lucky, I guess.

  She points the lens at the clothes on their pegs and pauses, listening for steps along the breezeway. Nothing.

  Click.

  On her dresser, Mrs. Alley has grouped her personal possessions so as to hide old water rings on the dark wood. A butterscotch Bakelite vessel for loose powder and a furry, store-bought puff for applying it. A man’s comb with a spine of white, compressed dandruff. Her leatherbound Bible with gilt edging, bloated from humid weather. A chipped bubble-ware dish holding four black bobby pins and a long curling hair. Gray. How old is Mrs. Alley?

  Powder and puff don’t belong, Sonia decides. They look too expensive. Other photographers have been accused of socialism and worse for altering a shot. Congress came down hard on Rothstein for moving a bleached cow’s skull in the Badlands ten feet to more dramatically cracked earth. But Sonia knows the New Deal depends on how it’s framed. Poverty. Want. Fortitude. In order for the world to change, first it must see what it has overlooked. It will be the same with war.

  She removes the powder and puff and opens the Bible to 2 Corinthians. We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair.

  Click.

  She listens again before turning to the only thing left in the room. Eddie sleeps under the amber blanket of the setting sun through his window. Too delicate for this place, he looks like a changeling from Botticelli, with soft, downy cheeks and full red lips. Sonia has never been able to appreciate children for the age they are, but always finds herself measuring them against the golden mean of adulthood, a third there, half there, three-quarters there, so she finds Eddie to be most beautiful asleep, when she might, in his repose, look for the man in him.

  Sonia may shoot any part of hi
m to give whatever impression she likes—his soft cheek to suggest vulnerability, his shorn hair that makes him look both stupid and mad, the full length of him under the covers that will grow to become that which covers another in a bed just like this. And any part of him she shoots will be true and anything she leaves out will be truth left out and it is the most burdensome responsibility, this, the art of documentation, because people expect objectivity when in fact all that word can promise is the devolution of what is human and myriad into a jack, a cube of frictionless ice. It’s what she couldn’t get across to Tucker that night when he asked her how she felt about the captured suicide. Lucky, she’d thought, for the accident of it. Lucky, for being absolved of the responsibility of choice.

  Eddie moans in his sleep. Is he in pain? Having a nightmare? She advances her film, ready to capture the wide dilated pupil beneath the blink as confusion gives way to waking life. This instant might say as much about the state of the world as a thousand war photos, she thinks, for what better sums up man than the thousand-mile journey contained in that split second between sleep and waking? She waits and the tension builds in her wrist and neck. Wake up, she wills. Wake up. But as if to spite her, he sinks deeper into his dreams, deferring the pain of consciousness just a little longer. After a minute, Sonia lowers her camera. As a picture it would be interesting, but she’s kidding herself if she thinks it’s important. Everything important is elsewhere, and once again the impatience of getting there wells up in her.

  Where is Tucker? she wonders flatly, moving to the bedroom door. The boy lies exactly as she found him, she has returned everything to its place on Cora Alley’s dresser. She takes a last look around and decides it’s impossible to tell she’s been in the room at all.

  Eddie opens his eyes to a word thrown against his wall.

  Frankenstein.

  “Wake up,” the man’s voice says close to his ear. “I have something to show you.”

  Eddie struggles up to sitting, forgetting the pain in his shoulder and ribs, mesmerized by the flickering light on the rough chestnut planks. Tucker sits beside him on the bed, an iron film projector balanced on the family Bible. Delicate as a birdcage, it has two flywheels on the back and a graceful wooden handle arching from the side. As Tucker cranks, the word on the wall gives way to a man and a woman in a parlor, dressed in old-fashioned fancy clothes. Is he dreaming?

  “This isn’t the Frankenstein every other punk kid has seen,” Tucker says. “This is Edison 1910. The first horror movie ever made.”

  Eddie thinks of Rosaleen. Calamus. Jimmy. DumbDon. He remembers their names and then he remembers the game they were playing. Still half asleep, he looks for his mother. He sees a lady cooking over a pot on the kitchen stove. The lamp has been lit and her hair shines in the shadows. She would not be there if his mother were home.

  Tucker reads the title cards. I’m not stupid Eddie wants to say, but it is so startling to have words on his wall, he worries he would say all the wrong things. Frankenstein Leaves for College. It might come out Stranger Chock Full o’ Nuts.

  “My father bought this projector off a traveling showman who used to crank stag films at the lodge,” Tucker says. “Got the lot cheap when the feds caught up with him.”

  “What’s a stag film?” Eddie asks.

  “All in good time, son, all in good time.”

  Two Years Later, Frankenstein Discovers the Mysteries of Life. A student’s room, now, and a skeleton sits at the table as if it had been invited to dinner. The man is pouring a potion into a big brass pot.

  “What’s he doing?” Eddie asks.

  “Making his monster,” Tucker explains. “The girl who wrote this story never says how it’s done.”

  “Girl?” Eddie asks, disappointed.

  “Girls can be very scary,” smiles Tucker. “You’ll learn.”

  Eddie’s mother tells ghost stories sometimes when she wants to make him mind. His dreams are haunted by avenging beasts and murdered children, women hanging themselves from trees over lost lovers. But those stories have never moved inside his bedroom, close enough for him to touch. Eddie wiggles his fingers before the bulb to make a looming shadow hand.

  “Look,” says Tucker. “Here’s the good bit.”

  Rising from the cauldron is a hint of creature. As Eddie watches, charred flesh attracts more charred flesh, it’s like his daddy at butchering time, tossing chops and ribs into a pail, rebuilding a hog in section slices. Suddenly an arm jerks up in salute and a misshapen head appears through the fog.

  Instead of a Perfect Human Being, the Evil in Frankenstein’s Mind Creates a Monster.

  “Eddie?” He hears his name over the rattle of the projector. “You’re not scared are you?”

  He doesn’t understand. There was nothing to show Frankenstein was a bad man. He went to college, he got a wife. Yet here is proof, just as his mother says, that wicked thoughts take on a life of their own. Why are you showing me this monster? Now it will always be hiding under the bed or lurking by the path. Waiting for him as soon as he’s forgotten about it. The monster moves through its master’s house and catches a glimpse of itself in the mirror. It draws back.

  Eddie looks to Tucker for help, but Tucker is looking across the breezeway to where Sonia stands over her pot, and there is something in his face that mirrors the mirror, that Eddie sees and recognizes. Set down your spoon and join us, he can almost hear Tucker’s thoughts.

  There is no point watching movies alone or with children. Movies exist, like music or poetry, only to explain oneself to women, to infiltrate women and call forth women. And the women are always too busy moving and pouring and chopping in the kitchen to want to be a part of him and so more movies must be made and poems and plays and novels written and songs composed to lure them away from work and into ecstasy or one will be left sitting with boys on beds in darkened rooms and worrying that one has by accident called forth a boy in place of a woman and now has him permanently attached like a shadow or a specter waiting for What Comes Next. She must have noticed because she steps across the breezeway to stand just inside the bedroom door, her arms crossed over her chest.

  “Dinner’s almost ready,” she says softly.

  Tucker’s face relaxes; that waiting, anxious look leaves him, and now he can smile reassuringly at Eddie.

  “You want to crank it?” he asks.

  “Can I?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Eddie moves forward on the bed, kneeling next to Tucker and the projector propped on the Bible. The picture bounces up the wall—the monster is terrorizing Frankenstein’s bride on the ceiling, until Tucker readjusts himself to give Eddie room. They bring the frame back down to eye level.

  “Put your hand over mine,” Tucker says, “and crank like this. It’s called the silent speed, the rhythm a film wants to go.”

  Eddie places his hand over Tucker’s. His daddy’s is horned and hard but Tucker’s is soft from driving and writing books and showing movies. Tucker slips his out from under and Eddie is gripping the wooden handle all by himself. The film slows and almost stops.

  “Keep cranking,” Tucker warns, “or it’ll burn through.”

  Eddie cranks fast, jerking the monster through the rooms, into the arms of his master, wrestling in double time. It’s funny and he wants to laugh, but more than that, he wants to get it right, and so he cranks a little slower, finding his pace. He’s doing it, he thinks with pride. Under his hand Frankenstein saves his bride; the monster finds himself back before the mirror and then, in some marvelous special effect, trapped inside it. For a brief second Frankenstein and his monster are locked on either side—reflections of one another—before the final title of the movie makes all things right again.

  The Creation of an Evil Mind, Overcome by Love, Disappears.

  Eddie keeps cranking but the film’s run through, the wall is now an unfocused square of bright white light. Tucker has moved to stand by Sonia, his arm around her shoulder. They are snug and smiling—at hi
m, but secretly for each other, like two children playing house. They cannot see the figure coming up behind them, her shadow long and thin along the breezeway.

  “Whaddya think?” Tucker asks.

  Eddie wants to answer but he cannot. Her face is dark and angry and then he knows she has been walking the woods searching for him even as he has been in bed watching a movie. He stops cranking and the room falls dark, but she is lit by the kitchen lamp she’s picked up. Behind her, he sees the flames of her stove where someone else has been cooking her food. Tucker and Sonia sense his fear.

  “I think someone best say who’s in my house,” says his mama.

  If she hadn’t come upon them like that—silently, in shadow, at the end of a monster movie—would he have formed the impression he did? Tucker asks himself. She startled them, that’s all. Yet his heart is pounding like a kid’s. He looks to Eddie for protection, but Eddie is cowering under the covers. What can he expect from her? Mountain people keep loaded guns, she must have one.

  “Come out of the bedroom,” she says. “It’s not proper.”

  She moves like a woman who has been walking all day as she lights them into the kitchen. She sets the lamp back on the table and crosses to the sink, leaning against the cool, white porcelain. Tucker thinks she might be a few years on the other side of thirty, though she may be younger. She wears a deep green dress that once fit a rounder self; the sleeves are rolled and her collarbones show sharply below the neckline. With her hollow cheeks and freckled, parched lips, Tucker thinks someone has found Mrs. Alley’s bunghole and let her juice drain out. Her skin has the dusty look of flattened snakes he has seen along the road.

  “You must accept our sincerest apologies,” Tucker begins. He had thought himself prepared for this moment, but this poor woman’s evident exhaustion and discomfort fills him with embarrassment. Once he’d determined Eddie was not gravely injured, he’d half-convinced himself they would all have a laugh over it, that his mother might even welcome the novelty of company.

  “What did he do?” she asks. Her voice is low so that they must lean in to hear her.