Who Made Stevie Crye? (8 page)
Read Who Made Stevie Crye? Online
Authors: Michael Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #science fiction, #General
She was
not
insane.
As she proved by returning to her bedroom and quietly talking herself into a deep, restful, and (apparently) dreamless sleep.
XVI
Saturday morning broke chilly but fair
. The sky was baseball-summer blue, the air football-autumn brisk. Stevie was grateful for the good weather because the kids were home for the weekend and she needed to work. If Teddy could coax Marella outdoors to roller-skate on the quiet street in front of the house, or accompany her on a bike ride, or convince her to tag along when he went over to Pete Wightman’s, Poor Old Mom might be able to type up a submittable copy of her proposal for
Two-Faced Woman
. She needed to get that done. The post office closed at twelve-thirty on Saturdays, and she did not want to wait until Monday to get her work in the mail. Except for the article on the Ladysmith cancer clinic (the original deadline for which she had badly overshot), this past week had been, to succumb to cliché, An Unmitigated Disaster. Getting her proposal off to the Briar Patch Press, Inc., might mitigate it a little.
At breakfast both kids balked. Teddy did not want to babysit, and Marella wanted to invite Tiffany McGuire over to make up for having to leave her party yesterday afternoon. She and Tiff (she said, pleading her case) would stay in the den playing dolls, Outwit, Kings-in-the-Corner, and other such stuff, and they would both be Very Quiet. Teddy, on the other hand, said that Pete Wightman’s younger sisters would not be at home today (they were visiting their grandmother in Atlanta), and, anyway, he didn’t want Marella standing on the edge of Pete’s patio complaining about her cold feet while Pete and he played off the last round of the H-O-R-S-E tournament that darkness had interrupted Friday evening. Teddy therefore felt that Marella’s having Tiff over was The Perfect Solution.
“For you,” Stevie said. “That way you can go gallivanting off while I’m left to entertain your sister.”
“She and Tiff will entertain each other, Mom.” He was sitting at the breakfast bar, applying muscadine jelly to a piece of toast, and he tossed off this opinion as confidently as a big-shot city lawyer concluding his final arguments before a jury of untutored country folk.
“That’s what
they
say, and that’s what
you
say, but that’s
not
the way it works. I end up refereeing spats, cleaning up after ‘tea parties,’ listening to an impossible horde clomp up and down the stairs for Marella’s dolls and stuffed animals, and wondering what the hell they’re up to when it’s suddenly so quiet I could really get down to business if I weren’t worrying about the worrisome silence!” Stevie took a breath. “If you expect this household to survive—young man, little lady—I need some cooperation and a smidgen of help. We’ve had this discussion before, and I’m damn tired of it.”
Teddy’s look—the ill-disguised sneer of a would-be stud temporarily under the thumb of an uppity female—shocked her. It was eloquent of a gamut of bigotries. It drained the reservoir of tenderness she had replenished last night at his bedside. That it was altogether unlike her son and probably the consequence of a single moment’s disappointment and thoughtlessness did not lessen her anger. He knew better. She would teach him better.
“Listen, Herr Hotshot, H-O-R-S-E player of the year,” she said, pulling the hair at the nape of his neck, “I won’t be insulted in my own house by big-britches kids who spend the money I make, eat the food I bring home and prepare, and think they’re God’s own gift to the world for not being any more stuck-up than they already are! Do you hear me, Theodore Martin Crye the Living?”
Teddy ducked to extricate his neck hair from her fingers, while Marella, sitting over a bowl of Cheerios at the kitchen table, merely gaped. Their mother had seldom gone off the handle like this before.
“
Do you hear me?
”
Faintly: “Yes, ma’am.”
“Did you say something, Master Crye?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Teddy more loudly, still uncertain how to respond to this barrage. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you think you’re indispensable?”
“Ma’am?”
“Because
nobody’s
indispensable, and if you’re ever crazy enough to try to be, then you have to
do
something to qualify. No one becomes indispensable sitting on his butt. Or shooting baskets over at Pete Wightman’s house while barbarians sack his own.”
“I said we’d be quiet,” Marella interjected, indignant. “I said we’d be quiet, Mama, and we really will.”
“What you’ll be, daughter mine, is outside with your brother. Both of you together. At least until noon. No ifs, ands, or but-we’re-gonnas.” She stopped snatching at Teddy’s hair, picked up a plastic jug of milk with a dramatic flourish, and slammed it back into the refrigerator. “Besides, it’s a beautiful day. A gorgeous day. I wish I could be outside in it. But I’ve got to work, and you two are going to help me do that. Understand?”
Neither of the children said anything.
“
Understand?
”
“Yes, ma’am,” they murmured together, genuinely chastened. Two years ago a scolding like that—a
performance
like that—would have elicited tears from Marella and a ritual sulk from Teddy. But the death of Ted, Sr., had endowed them with resilience. Looking from one to the other, Stevie could see that they were trying to bounce back, to accommodate their dependent lives to her goals and priorities. As well they should. Still, maybe she had come on too strong, hitting them with nukes when a dose of napalm would have sufficed. Forward Air Controller Stevie “Killer” Crye . . .
“We’ll throw the Frisbee in the back by the swing set,” Teddy said. “She needs to learn how to hold it. She holds it like a girl.”
Stevie chuckled mordantly. Marella asked if please couldn’t she just watch cartoons instead, that would keep her out of Mama’s hair, but Teddy pointed out that she had traded two hours of Saturday-morning cartoons for two hours of Friday-evening programming and that Mama wanted her outside in the fresh air. In his deliberate reasonableness he sounded uncannily like his dad, and even Marella surrendered to his arguments. If Big Brother and the Female Paterfamilias were against her, who could be for her?
As for Stevie, a few minutes later, she stared out the window over the kitchen sink regretting that she could not join the children in their game. Tossing a Frisbee would be fun, more fun than sitting at that damned—yes,
damned
—typewriter doing the dog work of a final copy. But the kids were cooperating, and maybe she could finish by noon.
XVII
She finished by eleven-thirty
. She had even provided her proposal with a cover letter listing her previous credits, championing the relevance and marketability of her “package,” and offering to supply several more sample columns if her present selection whetted editorial appetite without yet convincing anyone in authority to send her a contract. A thoroughly professional performance, Stevie congratulated herself, slipping her morning’s work into a mailer. And the Exceleriter, her post-midnight bugaboo, why, it had cooperated fully, just as the kids had been cooperating. Indeed, she had found that during most daylight hours the Exceleriter was a sweetheart.
Time to get to the post office before closing. Stevie neatened her desk, put the dust cover over her machine, and went trippingly down the stairs and through the house to the VW van.
Teddy and Marella were no longer throwing the Frisbee (the joy of this activity apparently dissipated over a three-hour period), but playing with a neighborhood dog, a lovelorn basset hound that had developed an erotic fixation on Teddy’s pants legs. The boy was trying to interest the animal in taking a strip of paint-spattered dropcloth into its teeth for a game of Swing About, but the dog’s misdirected ardor was greater than its hankering for a platonic romp. Marella, poor child, seemed to be jealous of the attention it was bestowing on Teddy. She kept grabbing at the basset’s droopy scruff and speaking futile blandishments into its even droopier ear.
“Dear God,” said Stevie, laughing behind her hand. Then she shouted, “Send Cyrano home, Ted! I’ll be back from the post office in a few minutes, and we’ll eat lunch!” The children waved as she backed the microbus out of the driveway.
The post office was crowded, people trying to buy stamps or pick up mail before the weekend closing, some purchasing money orders, others insuring their packages or asking about special rates—with the result that Stevie spent twenty minutes in the narrow customer area before Mr. Hice, the postmaster, was able to wait on her. When she finally got her proposal off, she hurried out to her van for the three-block trip back over the railroad tracks and Barclay’s surprisingly busy main drag to the Crye house, a landmark Victorian structure that had been in Ted’s family since the days of the Great Depression, their one steadfast bulwark against poverty and rootlessness. It had saved Stevie and her small brood as it had once saved the elder Cryes and their children, all of whom had either died or moved away.
Ted may have been bad with money, disorganized and spendthrift beyond belief, but he had always had sufficient sense to protect his interest in the house, and to that happy orphan scruple Stevie probably owed her otherwise foolhardy attempt to support herself and the kids through free-lancing. If she had had monthly house payments to meet, or even rent for some cheapjack Barclay apartment, she would have been obliged to take another salaried job, resuming her teaching post at the middle school in Wickrath or perhaps applying for a teller’s position at the Farmers and Merchants Bank here in Barclay. Sometimes, in fact, these alternatives seemed more attractive than her labors at the typewriter, a career of such unremitting uncertainty that she wondered both at her arrogance in sticking to it this long and at her luck in simply being able to. Today was a highlight of sorts: she had just made a significant step toward becoming an author of
books
. If the Briar Patch Press accepted her proposal, the mists of uncertainty would begin to evaporate and she would perhaps never have to worry about her choice of careers again.
Pulling into the Crye house’s gravelly drive, Stevie even had the fleeting idea that she might be able to replace her Exceleriter with either a word processor or a better typewriter. She was through with PDE, though; they were opportunistic bloodsuckers.
But where were the kids? Twenty, twenty-five minutes ago they had been playing with Cyrano (if you could call that animal’s unavailing thrusts at Teddy’s leg a form of play), but now their side yard near the garage was deserted, empty but for Marella’s bicycle and a pair of weathered sawhorses.
Well, maybe Teddy and Marella had gone inside to fix lunch. Hot dogs they were good at, and she had given them such a lecture about being helpful and pulling their weight that maybe they were trying hard to recapture her goodwill. These attacks of practical conscientiousness seldom lasted more than a day or two, but Stevie was grateful for them, and she got out of the microbus feeling tender toward her children, magnanimous and cheerful. The entire brisk, sunny afternoon lay ahead. After lunch they could take a drive through the Roosevelt State Park to Warm Springs to visit the federal fish hatchery there. Teddy and Marella both liked to do that.
Then Stevie heard her daughter’s uneasy laughter, a giggle that suggested doubt as well as amusement—not from inside the kitchen, but instead from near the swing set, around the corner of the garage. Had Teddy been unable to shoo Cyrano home? Was Marella giggling because Teddy had explained the meaning of the basset’s infatuation with his kneecap? Stevie’s cheerful mood turned sour. Marella was only eight. She would kill the boy.
Stevie stalked to the corner of the garage. Peering into the backyard at the dilapidated swing set under the big pecan tree, she suddenly went cold. A strange man had driven a motorcycle all the way into the yard and parked it beside the swing set’s squeaky glider.
Meanwhile, a small manlike creature in a red-and-white football jersey scampered back and forth along the crossbar from which the glider and the swings depended. The children were watching this creature as if bewitched by it, Marella hanging on to her brother for protection.
Stevie tried to take in the whole scene, but her eyes kept going back to the thing on the crossbar, a ghoulish little figure with a white face, deep-set beady eyes, and nostrils like those you would expect to see on a death’s-head. The animal also had a tail, but Stevie’s dawning realization that it was some kind of monkey did not excuse its trespass or diminish her angry dread of either it or the stranger who had apparently brought it.
“What do you want?” Stevie shouted. “What are you doing here?” She was trembling. Maybe it would have been wiser to call Barclay’s police than to issue this direct challenge. Too late. Besides, her children’s safety was at
hazard
, and she could not leave them even to make a phone call.
Teddy, Marella, the monkey, and the mysterious intruder all turned toward Stevie, their faces as blank as unstamped coins. For an instant the three human beings looked as ghoulish as the white-faced acrobat on the crossbar.
“Hi, Mom!” Teddy called, breaking into a grin. “Look, it’s the man who fixed your typewriter! And he’s brought his pet monkey!”
Who else? thought Stevie, disconsolate and anxious, convinced that she was being persecuted. Who else?
As for Seaton Benecke, dressed today in combat boots and fatigues, he gave her a shy, imperceptible nod and looked right past her with eyes as distantly pretty as the February sky.