Witches on the Road Tonight Read online

  It wasn’t until you wrote that you were coming back to take the anchor position that I began to worry. A straightforward suicidal impulse, that I could understand, its directness suited you—but this new turn of events? You were getting married, you wanted to start a family? Finally, Charles confessed what happened and it all made sense. Your friendship with that woman whose brother was killed in the city square. The powerless, powerful prayer meetings and long, anguished talks of revenge. The trip into town, both of you dressed in full burqa, and the explosion, as Charles told me you described it—so close you couldn’t tell if it was her or yourself shattered to bits. Jasper was long dead, but you had fallen in love with another bomb waiting to go off. You could have won a Pulitzer but the story hit too close to home. The suicide bombing became one of a hundred random, unreported attacks.

  The first weekend you were to anchor the news, Charles and I settled on the living room couch; Charles put his hand on my knee and said, Isn’t it nice to have her back? The commercial ended, the music swelled, you were so pretty and bright sitting next to that asshole with the plastic hair—not too distant, not too familiar. I thought to myself, Maybe this will work out. Maybe I don’t need to be afraid for her anymore. Then you read your first story. It was about missing uranium rods and their suspected links to weapons of mass destruction. Next came bird flu. The missing blond child, the deadly bacteria in our kitchen sponges. I pictured you in the editing room, choosing which truths to include, which ones just confused the story. Mixing in your anxiety music, conjuring your bold and commanding graphics. You had claimed your full Alley family inheritance. A ghost story in the mountains, a monster movie on TV—mere local, minor terrors. But you—you have the influence to back the whole world into a corner until it lashes out from pure survival instinct. Would you have become this creature had Jasper lived? Would any of us be here had Tucker Hayes not shown me my first horror movie before he disappeared? Do you believe in witches?

  I know you haven’t forgotten what tonight is. And knowing that and knowing you, Wallis, I would wager, wherever you are, you are not alone.

  Wallis

  NEW YORK CITY

  MIDNIGHT

  She saw the message from her father as she was finishing makeup. It was just like him to call when she was about to go on air. Dying had only made him needier. Charles deserved a halo and gold cock ring in Gay Heaven for putting up with him.

  “I know a secret about you.” The new cameraman pops his head into the dressing room, interrupting her. MaryAnn presses powder into her cheeks. Wallis’s face is always too tight until she loosens it with talk.

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  “Find me when the show’s over,” he says.

  “Tell me now,” she says. “I have to leave when the show’s over.”

  MaryAnn gestures for her to look up, powders under her chin. Wallis checks him out through lowered lids. His brown hair curls over his forehead in a reassuring, sensible way. He has the firm and reliable body of a fireman, a good Irish, union-contract body.

  “No, I want to show you something,” he says with a grin and saunters off. How cheeky of him to flirt with her just as she’s about to go on. This is his first week with them; he came from that horrible morning talk show Wallis catches only if she’s home sick or hungover. MaryAnn shields Wallis’s eyes with her hand and sprays her hair.

  “He’s cute,” MaryAnn says.

  “He’s a kid,” says Wallis. “What’s his name?”

  “Jeff, I think,” MaryAnn answers, dabbing on her lipstick. “He’s older than he looks.”

  “Then he should have a better job than this,” says Wallis.

  In the mirror she sees herself looking good. Calm and together. Her highlighted and lowlighted shoulder-length hair lies perfectly, her pores are closed. She scans for flaws. That woman in the mirror has none.

  MaryAnn removes the cape from her neck and brushes stray powder from around the collar of her pink tweed suit. Tweed in August. But it has been raining nearly every day for a month and the temperature has not broken sixty. Has it been forty days and forty nights? Global warming? She had experts lined up on both sides. And next week: experts to refute the experts of the week before.

  Tonight though, she’ll be interviewing via satellite and with a translator. She needs to concentrate.

  I want to show you something, he’d said.

  “We’re having trouble with the feed,” Lou says as she walks to the set. “We haven’t been able to get him yet.”

  “Is it us or them?” Wallis asks.

  “I think it’s them. Could be us.”

  “Make sure the others are ready to go. Jesus,” she swears. “He’s the one we’re here for.”

  It had taken her weeks to get the interview, working all her old contacts. The boy was supposed to be dead. He did everything right but his bomb failed to explode. I am my own ghost, they said he cried when the feds caught him and whisked him away. They didn’t have to torture him; he was so humiliated he immediately began naming names. What does it matter, he said, when I am already damned.

  “I don’t know how people do shit like that,” Lou says.

  “You don’t?” asks Wallis.

  She goes on air in under three minutes. Alone at the table on the set, she looks into the monitor and sees the other guests, in other studios, fumbling with their mikes, licking their lips, looking off into space. They lined up an Australian backpacker who had been ordering a falafel when the second bomb went off. A talking head from Whatever-the-Fuck Middle East Think Tank, and a shrink with theories on learned helplessness. The fourth feed was supposed to be him, live, from where he was being held. It is nothing but gray static and the time signature.

  Jeff, the cameraman, is smiling at her. What’s his problem? She lets Lou clip on her mike. She goes over her hard copy quickly, making sure she knows how to pronounce all the names. She remembers her cell phone in the dressing room and the waiting message from her dad. They all feel entitled to interrupt her whenever it suits them. She thinks of Olivia at home with an ear infection and wonders if Laurence has remembered to give her the antibiotic. She imagines Ollie screaming herself to sleep.

  Jeff counts them down. The heads in the other monitors stop fumbling and licking. They intently watch their feed of her, the one who will ask the questions and redirect them if they ramble and keep them from looking stupid. They watch her take three deep breaths and they feel calmer in their own bodies. Wallis Alley, their host, is in control. Even when she glances over at the fourth monitor, empty of its guest, her eyes betray nothing. She’s an expert at working around what should have been.

  Her phone is ringing and this time she picks up. Hold on, she mouths to Jeff, who is leaning against her at the bar. It is after one in the morning and they’ve all gone across the street, as usual.

  “I told you,” she says into the phone. “Neil’s going-away party. The Paris bureau.”

  Ollie woke up and was crying for her. Over the laughter and music in the bar, she can’t hear a thing Laurence is saying about it. Putting her hand on Jeff’s arm, she gestures, Save my place.

  Even with the traffic on Columbus Circle, it is quieter outside. She pulls a broken black umbrella from the corner trash can and opens it to stand under. “Can’t you get her back down?” she asks. “Did you give her Tylenol?”

  The lights are shining on the steel globe across Broadway, the traffic lights smudged red and green down the wet street. Do you want to talk to Mommy? Laurence is asking. Wallis stares into the dark entrance of Central Park, where all the horse and carriages have gone home. Once, she saw a driverless horse racing down Ninth Avenue with its buggy careening after it. A woman was inside screaming, her husband and the horse’s driver chasing behind. The horse kept pace with the green lights for blocks and blocks, until it finally ran a red. Wallis caught up and saw the overturned carriage, the lady sobbing on the curb. The horse was making for its stable, for rest and food.

&nbs
p; “Hi sweetheart,” she says when the two-year-old gets on the line. “How are you feeling?”

  An hour ago she was on a set talking to strangers. Now she is in the low light of Ollie’s bedroom where Laurence is rocking their daughter in his lap, holding the phone to her good ear. Wallis sees the stuffed turtle on the floor, the blanket pulled out of the crib, a half drunk sippy cup of apple juice on the dresser. She hears her daughter’s ragged breathing over the line and she says, “You don’t have to talk. I’ll sit with you until you fall back asleep.”

  She leans against the exterior plate window of the bar. The music throbs against her back and the rain rolls off the sagging fabric of her umbrella. She is floating from the two whiskeys she’s already had plus the beer chaser. Wallis rarely drinks whiskey in the summer but she is pretending to be in Ireland tonight. It’s so cold.

  Laurence has her on speakerphone to make sure she can hear him breathing, too, and the rhythmic creak of the rocking chair where she should be. He only calls when he wants her to feel bad, and it always works. He has the power to pull her through the phone line, across the river, into the bedroom lit only by light from the cracked closet door. Ollie is whimpering in his lap, softly speaking her name. Mommy. Mommy. Wallis will stand outside all night if she has to.

  “I’m here. Just go back to sleep,” she says.

  “When are you coming home?” Laurence asks. His voice is hollow and suspended over the speaker.

  “Soon.”

  She turns her head to look back through the window. Her staff is there, young and unmarried; Lou who fancies himself the Apollinaire of cell phone apps, always showing off his clever programming to bored girls in bars. MaryAnn who knits and bakes and is too kind to keep any boyfriend more than a few months. The interns are here, too, and a bunch of strangers crowding the long wooden bar and grouped around the jukebox with its deep list of blues and bluegrass. You are here, late at night, attracting each other to make sure you will never spend late nights here again, she thinks. Jeff sits next to an empty stool, holding her place.

  You handled that really well, he’d said before she stepped out. Their guest never showed, or maybe he was there on the other end of the disconnect, but who could say? She had to throw out half her questions and let the shrink and backpacker talk longer. Several times during the broadcast she had paused to ask aloud, Do we have him yet? The answer was always no.

  I have some experience with suicidal boys, she told Jeff. I had some questions I really wanted answered.

  You were in Baghdad, weren’t you?

  And Syria and Sierra Leone. But I wanted a family. So I came home.

  “Mommy?” Ollie asks.

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  There is no question, just the need to know she’s there, which Wallis supposes is the only question. Her daughter’s voice is softer and less anxious and Wallis feels the letting go in her whole body. She remembers the early days before she went back to work, when time stood still for them both. I am teaching you not to need me, she thinks. Even as I need not to need you.

  After her first whiskey she said she had to go home, the car was waiting. Do you live in the city? she asked Jeff, who shook his head. Willets Point, on the 7 train, he said. It’s the end of the line.

  I know, she said. I used to ride to the end of all the lines just to see what was out there. Willets Point is an auto body shantytown. No one lives there.

  I do, he said, leaning in. Don’t you want to see?

  Ollie’s breath evens out on the other end of the line. Wallis hears the rocking chair slow and Laurence rise. He has the phone tucked between his shoulder and chin, and he carries their daughter back to her crib. Wallis hears the soft sigh of real sleep and knows Ollie will be okay for now. She has tomorrow off and will take her to the doctor. There is no emergency, she reminds herself. It’s just an ear infection. Like she had a million times as a kid herself.

  Laurence says, “Your father called. I was with her and didn’t pick up.”

  Wallis remembers the message she never retrieved. “I need to call him back,” she says.

  “Tell Neil I said bon voyage,” Laurence says.

  Wallis looks back through the window where one of the interchangeable interns with the long straight hair and a spring break tan is approaching Jeff. She is sipping a Rolling Rock and easing herself onto Wallis’s stool.

  “I will,” she says. “Get some rest yourself.”

  Wallis ends the call and looks at the time. It’s too late to call her father. She tosses the broken umbrella back into the trash and steps into the bar. Ignoring the girl in her seat, she strides up to Jeff.

  “So what was it you wanted to show me?” she asks.

  The card, when he pulls it out of his wallet, is creased and worn almost to lint. It has been through the washer and dryer more than once but, even faded, she recognizes it immediately. Pale and blue, the size of a social security card, it has the exaggerated cartoon head of her father on one side. On the other it says, Jeffrey Walton Reece: Official Casketeer.

  “No fucking way,” Wallis swears.

  Jeff hums the tune that is too much of a rip-off of the Mickey Mouse theme to ever be legal today.

  Who’s the digger of the grave,

  For you, and you, and me?

  C-A-P

  T-A-N

  C-A-S-K-T

  “He ruined spelling for an entire generation of children,” says Wallis. “Where did you get that?”

  “My father was in the navy and we were stationed in Norfolk when I was in fifth grade. I am a card-carrying fellow traveler.”

  MaryAnn was right. Captain Casket was canceled in 1980, so to have this, Jeff must be about her own age. He is grinning as if he’s given her the best gift. It’s not a secret Wallis is the daughter of a campy, former horror show host. He was regional and one of many, but people remember him. It used to bother her; now she just rolls her eyes.

  “Your dad was my hero,” he tells her.

  The intern has moved on. Lou and MaryAnn are saying their goodbyes, looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow. Wallis perches on her stool with her face close to Jeff’s as they read over the card’s fine print. THIS ENTITLES THE OWNER TO ONE KIDNEY, HALF A BRAIN, AND A SCREAM TRANSFUSION. TO BE REDEEMED AT ANY CITY MORGUE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF MIDNIGHT AND HALF PAST MIDNIGHT, NIGHTS OF THE FULL MOON ONLY. VOID IN CANADA.

  “It was so stupid,” says Wallis.

  “It was great,” Jeff says. “It gave boys like me something to do while our older brothers were out getting laid.”

  Wallis smiles halfheartedly and reaches for his beer. The intrusion of her father on this night is not what she wanted. She shouldn’t have let her car go after the second whiskey, she thinks. The thrill has worn off Jeff and she wishes she were already home in bed.

  “You want another?” Jeff asks.

  “I’ll finish yours.”

  “I remember everything about that show,” he says. “I remember the coffin and the saw he played. He had that skeleton cat, and toward the end there, I remember some creepy redheaded kid who would do skits with him. I was so jealous.”

  “That boy was Jasper,” Wallis says. “He lived with us for a while.”

  “Lucky bastard,” Jeff says.

  Wallis is suddenly feeling the nausea of too many drinks. She doesn’t want to think about her father or Jasper. She is irrationally angry at Jeff for bringing them up and she hears in her head, like an echo, the Australian backpacker she interviewed an hour ago. He was telling her that the suicide bomber, the boy who stood her up, was young and handsome and spoke perfect English. Your leaders are liars! Your women are whores! he screamed just before he malfunctioned. You are afraid of all the wrong things!

  “We could transfer to the 7 at Forty-second Street,” she says.

  He holds her gaze for a long minute and slowly puts the card away. He pulls out a $20 bill and leaves it on the bar.

  “Sure,” he says.

  “My dad is dying, you
know,” Wallis tells him, standing up. She rebuttons her pink tweed jacket like she does in between commercial breaks.

  “I didn’t know that,” Jeff says. “I guess I thought he was already dead.”

  “Let’s walk downtown,” she says. “I need some air.”

  She kissed him somewhere over the East River in a subway car that had an advertisement for her show. It was months old and someone had erased her pupils and redrawn them cross-eyed. They had given her a scar across her forehead and a speech bubble with a phallus inside.

  “Wow,” said Jeff when he saw it. “You want to move to another car?”

  “Why?” she asked. “It looks just like me.”

  A dark-skinned man in a janitor’s uniform stepped in and then out when he saw them. Jeff’s hand was up her skirt, her hand was on him. They were laughing. It was a long ride out to Queens.

  She doesn’t know exactly how she got to the illegal loft above the Mexican coffee shop. She remembers a walk over an iron bridge and corrugated Quonset huts and the updraft of pigeons along Roosevelt Avenue. She remembers his mouth all over her and reaching back to lead him along a dark footpath. There were no streets or sidewalks in Willets Point, there was no infrastructure at all. Every mayor from the time she moved to the city threatened to clear it away, but the scrappers and chop shops held on. Through the fog, the neon lights of Shea Stadium glowed red like a flashlight shone through the palm of a hand. Jeff told her he moved here to see games from his roof, but could only see what took place between third base and home plate.

  “Wow,” says Jeff now as he rolls off of her. “Wow.”

  Where she lives, in her much more established Brooklyn neighborhood, someone had spray-painted that word on all the lampposts along her avenue. Wow. And underneath it, its mirror: Mom. WowMom. WowMom. Strolling Ollie down the street to the playground or to go shopping, she would find herself chanting it like a mantra. Wow. Mom. Wow.