Dark Mondays (10 page)

Calamari Curls was having Talent Nite. The Early Bird specials were served, and senior diners went shuffling back to their singlewides, eager to leave before the Goddamned rock and roll started. Young families with toddlers dined and hurried back to their motels, unwilling to expose little ears to amplified sound.

Five pimply boys set up their sound equipment on the dais in the corner. They were the sons of tractor salesmen and propane magnates; let their names be forgotten. The front man tossed his hair back from his eyes, looked around at the tables crowded with chattering diners, and said in all adolescent sullenness:

“Hi. We’re the Maggots, and we’re here to shake you up a little.”

His bassman leaped out and played the opening of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” with painful slowness, the drummer boy joined in clunk-clunk-clunk, and the front man leaned forward to the mike and in a hoarse scream told the audience about his woes. The audience continued biting the tails off shrimp, sucking down frozen strawberry margaritas and picking at Kona Coffee California Cheesecake.

When the music ended, they applauded politely. The front man looked as though he’d like to kill them all. He wiped sweat from his brow, had a gulp of water.

Betty Step-in-Time wheeled his bicycle up to the door.

“We’re going to do another classic,” said the front man. “Okay?”

Ka-chunk!
went the drums. The keyboardist and the lead guitarist started very nearly in sync: Da da da.
Dada. DA DA DA. Dada.

“Oh Lou-ah Lou-ah-eh, ohhhh baby nagatcha go waygadda go!”
shouted the front man.

Betty Step-in-Time dismounted. Just outside the restaurant’s threshold, he began to dance. It began in time with the music, a modest little kickstep. A few diners looked, pointed and laughed.

“Nah nah nah nah asaya Lou-ah Lou-ah eh, whooa babeh saya whay-gachago!”

Betty’s kickstep increased its arc, to something approaching can-can immodesty. He threw his arms up as he kicked, rolling his head, closing his eyes in abandon. A diner sitting near the door fished around in pockets for a dollar bill, but saw no hat in which to put it.

“Ah-nye, ah-dah, ah ron withchoo, ah dinkabobsa gonstalee!”
cried the front man. Betty began to undulate, and it seemed a tremor ran through the floor of the building. A tableful of German tourists jumped to their feet, alarmed, but their native companion didn’t even stop eating.

“Just an aftershock,” he said calmly. “No big deal.”

“Ah rag saga leely, badoom badoom, wha wah badoo, jaga babee!”

Betty began to dance what looked like the Swim, but so fast his arms and legs blurred the air. The lights dimmed, took on a greenish cast.

“Who’s playing with the damn rheostat?” the manager wanted to know.

“Ayah ha Lou-ah Lou-ah eh, whoa ba-bah shongo waygatchago!”

Sweat began to pour from Betty’s face and limbs, as his body began to churn in a manner that evoked ancient bacchanals, feverish and suggestive. The green quality of the light intensified. Several diners looked down at their plates of clam strips or chimichangas and stopped eating, suddenly nauseous.

“Ya ya ya ya ah-sha-da Lou-ah Lou-ah he, Nyarlathotep bay-bah wey-gago!”
sang the front man, and he was sweating too, an—so it seemed—dwindling under the green light, and the carefully torn edges of his black raiment began to fray into rags, patterned with shining mold.

Betty’s hips gyrated, his little sailor hat flew off, and every curl on his head was dripping with St. Elmo’s fire. Several diners vomited where they sat. Others rose in a half-crouch, desperate to find the lavatory doors marked
Beach Bums
and
Beach Bunnies
. Half of them collapsed before they made it. They slipped, stumbled and fell in the pools of seawater that were condensing out of the air, running down the walls.

“Ah Lou-ah Lou-ah eh, ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”
wailed the white-eyed thing the front man had become, and his band raised reed flutes to their gills and piped a melody to make human ears bleed, and the mortal diners rose and fought to get out the windows, for Betty was flinging handfuls of seaweed in toward them, and black incense.

The pink and turquoise linoleum tiles by the bandstand popped upward, scattered like hellish confetti, as a green-glowing gas of all corruption hissed forth, lighting in blue flames when it met the air, followed by a gush of black water from the forgotten pool below. The first of the black tentacles probed up through the widening crack in the floor.

Betty sprang backward, grabbed up his sailor hat, leaped on his pink bicycle and pedaled away as fast as he could go, vanishing down the misty darkness of Alder Street.

The neon olive had become an eye, swiveling uncertainly but with malevolence, in a narrow scarlet face.

Watching from across the street, Mr. Bright laughed until the tears poured from his eyes, and slapped the arms of his wheelchair. He raised his bourbon bottle in salute as Calamari Curls began its warping, strobing, moist descent through the dimensions.

He was opening a new bottle by the time gray dawn came, as the last of the fire engines and ambulances pulled away. Tom Avila stood in the middle of the street, in gloomy conference with the pastor of St. Mark’s, the priest from Mission San Emidio, and even the rabbi from Temple Beth-El, who had driven in his pajamas all the way over from Hooper City.

Holy water, prayer and police tape had done all they could do; the glowing green miasma was dissipating at last, and the walls and windows of Calamari Curls had begun to appear again in ghostly outline. Even now, however, it was obvious that their proper geometry could never be restored.

Tom shook hands with the gentlemen of God and they departed to their respective cars. He stood alone in the street a while, regarding the mess; then he noticed Mr. Bright, who waved cheerfully from behind his window. Tom’s eyes narrowed. He came stalking over. Mr. Bright let him in.

“You didn’t have anything to do with this, did you, Peg?” the mayor demanded.

“Me? How the hell could I of? I just been sitting here watching the show,” said Mr. Bright. “I ain’t going to say I didn’t enjoy it, neither. Guess nobody’s going to raise no rents around
here
for a while!”

“God damn it, Peg! Now we’ve got us
another
vortex into a lost dimension, smack in the middle of town this time!” said the mayor in exasperation. “What are we going to do?”

“Beats me,” said Mr. Bright, grinning as he offered him the bourbon bottle.

But the present became the past, as it will, and people never forget so easily as when they want to forget. The wreck of Calamari Curls became invisible, as passers-by tuned it out of their consciousness. The green olive blinked no more.

Mr. Bright found that the black things that mewled and gibbered around the garbage cans at night could be easily dispatched with a cast-iron skillet well aimed. His customers came back, hesitant and shamefaced. He was content.

And mellowing in his world view too; for he no longer scowled nor spat in the direction of Betty Step-in-Time when he passed him on the pier, but nodded affably, and once was even heard to remark that it took all kinds of folks to make a world, and you really shouldn’t judge folks without you get to know them.

She knew the marriage had been a mistake by the time they stepped off the train.

All the same, she smiled and waited patiently as Bert got their suitcases from the porter. She had determined to make a life as different from her mother’s as was possible; that meant making the marriage work, whether or not Bert was the man she had envisioned him to be when she gave up college for him.

This was a pretty place, at least. There were big, green mountains and trees, and the little train station was quite rustic if not exactly charming. Lean men in overalls, red clay thick on their workboots, waited in a silent line as goods were unloaded: sacks of feed, sacks of fertilizer, wire cages full of baby chicks. The chicks peeped and poked their tiny beaks through the mesh. The heat was shimmering, sticky.

Bert approached with the luggage. She turned to smile at him but he was looking past her, grinning and hefting one suitcase in a wave.

“Pop!”

One of the lean men was loading cages into the back of an old truck. He turned and saw Bert, and nodded in acknowledgment. Bert ran toward him and she followed.

“Hey, Pop!”

“Hey,” the man responded, looking them up and down. “You’re early.”

“I got the train times wrong,” Bert said.

“Well, that’s you.” Mr. Loveland shook his head. His gaze moved briefly to Katherine. “This the wife?”

“Yes—”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Loveland, I’ve heard so much about you,” said Katherine, smiling as she twisted the strap of her handbag. He just nodded, considering her.

“We got your room ready, anyways,” he said.

“Oh, thank you—”

“You may’s well put those in the back,” he told Bert, gesturing at the suitcases. Bert stepped close and hoisted the suitcases into the truck bed. As he did so he kicked one of the wire cages and there was a pitiable cheeping from the chicks inside.

“Oh, Bert, you’ve hurt one of them,” Katherine cried, stooping down. “It’s this black one, look! I think his little foot is squashed. There’s blood—”

“Oh! Sorry—”

“Things happen,” said Mr. Loveland.

The ride to their new home was silent and uncomfortable. Literally; she rode perched on Bert’s lap, which would have been funny and romantic under other circumstances. They bumped along unpaved roads for miles, up into the mountains, far out of town, before turning down a gravel drive to a frame house set back among trees. There was an enclosed porch running the length of the front.

Katherine hopped out and waited, clutching her handbag, as the men unloaded the cages and carried them around to the chicken pen in the side yard. Mr. Loveland remained with the chicks, opening the cages and dumping their contents into the pen. Bert got their suitcases again and she followed him into the silent house.

To her dismay, she saw two cots set up on the porch and an old chiffonier, clearly intended for them.

“Are we living out here?” she whispered.

Bert looked down at the cots. “Oh,” he said. “I guess so. Well, it’s hot, ain’t it? We’ll be all right.” He dropped the suitcases and pushed through the door into the house. She followed him, wondering where she was going to put her things when they arrived.

“Ma!”

The kitchen was small and dark, and the woman kneading biscuit dough at the table filled it effectively. She looked up at them. She had Bert’s strong jaw. She did not smile as she said: “Oh.”

“Hey!” Bert edged forward and embraced her.

“You’ll get your good clothes floured,” Mrs. Loveland told him, looking over his shoulder at Katherine. “You’re Kathy, I guess.”

“Yes, Mother Loveland, Katherine,” she said, smiling and nodding. “I’m awfully glad to meet you—though I guess we’re a little early. I hope that’s not an inconvenience.”

“
Katherine
, huh?” Mrs. Loveland looked coldly amused. “Now, that’s funny. Bert told me you were born in Chapel Hill, but you sure don’t talk like it.”

“Well, I was,” Katherine stammered, “but I grew up in New York, you know. I studied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, did Bert tell you?”

“No,” said Mrs. Loveland.

She was miserably homesick, through the weeks of Indian summer. Without his football sweater Bert no longer looked much like Nelson Eddy; and he’d changed, as a son will change in his mother’s house. The other illusion, about coming home to the South and having a big, loving family instead of living in boarding houses with Mother and Anne—that was fading too.

She saw clearly enough that she’d better make Mrs. Loveland like her, but her attempts to help out were dismissed—she didn’t know how to cook. She and Mother and Anne had eaten in restaurants, or heated Campbell’s soup over Sterno cans in their rooms. She took on the task of feeding the chicks, but her decision to make a pet of the crippled black one earned her contempt even from Bert. She persisted; made it a separate pen, gave it special care, named it. It lived and grew, to Mrs. Loveland’s disgust.

Her things came, in far too many crates, and Bert and Mr. Loveland grumbled as they stacked them in the barn. With them came the letter from Mother, and she cried as she read it. She could hear the stern, quiet voice so clearly, she could see Mother looking up at her over her steel spectacles, as term papers waited for grading.

Beloved daughter,

I hope this finds you well and settling in. It may be difficult at first, as the life is not one to which you are accustomed. “I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty; I woke, and found that life was Duty.” Please believe, however, that I wish you happiness with all my heart.

I have sent all your books, and some of the things from the Goldsborough house that you loved, as well as the rest of your trousseau. If there is anything else you require, I will send it along at the first opportunity as soon as you let me know what you lack.

Your sister and I continue well. Anne is now understudy for the ingenue as well as in the chorus. I had occasion to meet Kurt Weill, the composer, who was dining at the table next to mine. His music is considered quite avant-garde but I found him to be a very nice little man, quite shy. What I have heard of his work so far impresses me mightily.

I must go now, but send sincerest wishes for your continuing joy, and the earnest hope that you will find with Bert the domestic happiness for which I know you have always longed. It is not given to all of us, but may it be given to you.

Your loving

Mother

So she couldn’t write to Mother about how miserable she was, not without seeming like a worthless failure. Mother would send another gloomy letter that talked around the shame and scandal of The Divorce while never actually bringing it up. She had never discussed it, never once in all the years Katherine and her little sister had been growing up, rattling around in the back of the Ford as Mother drove from teaching job to teaching job.