Witches on the Road Tonight

  Eddie is gracious. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Clay,” says the boy.

  “Clay, are you O positive or A negative? I’ve ordered a Bloody Mary and the bartender needs to know.”

  The boy cackles and the rubber bands fill with spit. Eddie signs four more autographs while Jasper watches, slumped in his chair. He plays with the salt shaker, rolling it back and forth, showing off his unblemished knuckles. Wallis’s are healing but she keeps them in her lap; the scabs feel as shameful out in public as a hickey. She never knows where to look when other kids are making idiots of themselves, so she turns her eyes to the bar, and the news channel playing on the TV. News twenty-four hours a day and it’s all about the hostages in Iran. It’s August 1980, but in the alternate news-dimension, it’s Day 284 of the crisis. Jasper reaches for his Dr. Pepper and gulps until there’s nothing but ice.

  “How did Cary know what you drink?” she asks him.

  “We’re regulars,” Jasper says.

  Eddie overhears. “Before Jasper moved in, we’d come for lunch,” he says. “We needed to fatten this boy up.”

  “Mom and I used to meet him here before the show. But Mom doesn’t like driving downtown.”

  Cary arrives with the menus as Eddie signs his last autograph. Comparing napkins, the kids push past him back to their tables.

  “Wallis always checked the price and ordered whatever was most expensive,” Eddie says proudly. “When she was only seven, she’d order a sirloin and eat the whole thing.”

  “What’ll it be, boss?” asks Cary. He’s trying to catch Wallis’s eye, but she doesn’t want to play the game I-know-what-you-know. His name is on Mom’s guest list. She’s surprised he’s still here.

  “The usual,” Eddie says.

  “Sirloin well-done,” says Jasper.

  “I’ll have the salad bar,” says Wallis.

  She’s happy to have an excuse to get up. The kid with the braces is getting lectured by his father about interrupting other people’s dinner. He looks up as she passes, wondering whether her autograph is also worthwhile, and decides it isn’t. She waits in line for her chilled plate but most of the stuff on the salad bar is disgusting—three-bean salad and shredded carrots with raisins. Back at the table, Cary is gone. Jasper leans in, laughing with her father as if they are trading more secrets. He’s dropped the sullen act now that he has Eddie all to himself. What he said about her grandmother is nothing more than napalm in the woods, she thinks, another way of seeing how much damage he can do. If her grandmother had killed someone, Wallis would know. Her mother would have let it slip, or she would feel it somehow. But then she realizes, she does feel it and always has—in how much further she is willing to go than other kids, at least until Jasper arrived. He makes her feel halfway normal by being so much further beyond her. Standing in line in the middle of the restaurant, Wallis is suddenly aware of a dozen different conversations taking place at a dozen different tables, but she is standing outside them all. She heaps her plate with romaine lettuce and croutons, then sprinkles on some Parmesan cheese.

  “There’s nothing older than Caligari,” Jasper is insisting when she gets back. “It was the first.”

  “I tell you, Edison made Frankenstein in 1910; I saw it as a kid. If I still had it, it’d be worth a fortune. Every copy’s been lost.”

  “That’s convenient,” says Jasper.

  “You saw it as a kid?” Wallis interrupts. “Where?”

  The sparring stops and Eddie looks over, annoyed. He hadn’t meant to talk about being a kid. Now that Jasper has pointed it out, it seems to Wallis that Eddie not only hasn’t spoken of his boyhood, he’s gone out of his way to avoid it. Why had she never thought to ask?

  Eddie looks around the restaurant, hoping to be rescued by food. An elderly lady with a walker knocks over her chair getting up to leave. The noise is swallowed by the worn green carpet.

  “A man came through Panther Gap with a hand-cranked projector,” Eddie says. “The movie had been his father’s.”

  “Panther Gap?” Wallis asks. “That’s where you lived? It sounds made up.”

  “It sometimes felt that way,” Eddie says. Jasper is watching his face as if for clues.

  “So what happened with the man?” Wallis asks.

  “What makes you think something happened?” Eddie asks. He glances darkly at Jasper.

  “Something did, right?” she pushes.

  “As a matter of fact,” Eddie continues, “he was supposed to report to Fort Dix but apparently he went AWOL.”

  Wallis can tell from the way Jasper is looking down that he has already heard this story. She doesn’t know much about World War II but she knows everyone wanted to go. It was the one good war.

  “Something must have happened to him,” she says. “Everyone wanted to fight Hitler.”

  “This was before Pearl Harbor,” Eddie explains. “No one had directly attacked us. It was hard to know what was real. But how do you ever know until it’s too late?”

  From the kitchen Cary appears with a rolling cart. On it is Jasper’s gray steak and a bloody plate of prime rib for Eddie. Cary whisks together lemon and garlic and a splash of Worcestershire, tosses it with some lettuce, and cracks open a raw egg. Pietro, the maître d’, follows with a covered plate.

  “I’ve got somewhere I have to be tonight,” Cary announces, with a wink at Wallis, “but I’m leaving you in good hands.”

  Pietro, with his dyed black hair and stained burgundy tuxedo, lifts away the silver dome to reveal a slice of cake and a lit candle. The guests at the tables nearby turn to look.

  “Twenty years can’t go uncelebrated, you old fiend,” says Cary.

  In his broken English, Pietro begins, “Happy Birthday to you …”

  The old lady on her walker pauses by the door. Her husband smiles back with his squared-off dentures. The parents contemplating infanticide are grateful for the interruption, while their children sing just loudly and off-key enough to make them reconsider. Only at the bar, where the divorcées are ordering Stingrays, and flags are burning in Iran, are they disinterested. Now’s your chance to tell them you’re cancelled, Wallis thinks. That soon you’ll be nobody. Or worse, you’ll be the man who used to be somebody. Jasper has joined in—Happy Birthday, dear Captain—and Wallis imagines the cars pulling up at home, parking in neighbors’ driveways so that Eddie won’t suspect anything. Will he tell them tonight? Will they even care, and if they don’t care that he’s cancelled, why are they bothering to sing to him tonight?

  “Make a wish, Eddie,” says Jasper.

  Her father smiles up at everyone and blows out the candle. The flame sputters and sparks and relights itself.

  “Very funny,” he says. Cary slaps him on the back and he indulges the joke three more times before dousing Captain Casket’s trick birthday candle with his highball. Wallis glances at the watch on Cary’s wrist. It’s eight o’clock. Mom expects them home in half an hour.

  “We should eat,” Wallis says loudly. “It’s getting late.”

  They don’t return to the subject of Frankenstein or the man who showed it, but Eddie’s mood has changed. When he picked them up, the night had the energy of a first date; now, with his third drink, Eddie is dull and quiet. This feels more like old times, when she and Mom came to join him on Saturday nights before the show, when Wallis would provide the only entertainment by ordering her large plates of meat. He pays the bill and they leave, walking past the Biograph again. A couple is buying tickets for something called Die Blechtrommel. They pass their money through a cage and the heavy Moorish doors swing open, but all Wallis can see is the marble floor and the blown-plaster pillars of the lobby. A tripod holds a poster of a shrieking blond boy beating a drum.

  “We used to be afraid of monsters,” says Eddie, “now it’s children.”

  “What’s the difference?” asks Wallis.

  “None of those movies are scary,” says Jasper. “I’ve never once been scared.”

/>   “Then why do you watch the Creepshow?” asks Eddie.

  Jasper shrugs. “I keep hoping to feel that thing everyone talks about,” he says.

  Eddie unlocks the passenger door of the hearse and Wallis slides into the middle. Jasper follows, letting no part of his body touch hers, which means he’s thinking about it. Soon they’ll be home and she’ll be passed along to entertain all the TV station brats while the grown-ups drink, all those little girls who will paw through her old Barbies and the boys who will camp out in front of her television. She’s the oldest one now, not a kid at all anymore, and sometime around eleven, when the news comes on and the substitute weatherman lets them know the front passed to the north, she’ll round them all up and lead them outside to the backyard, still awake but jittery, all strung out on soda and someone else’s toys, up so far past their bedtimes, and it will finally be her turn. She’ll take her stage, sitting on the picnic table as is her oldest girl’s right, and softly, she’ll tell them the one about the babysitter who is alone in the house, who gets the phone call, Go check on the twins. Go check on the twins. And Jasper will be among them, listening in the dark, leaning against the carapace of the oak tree, unaware of the pieces of him buried just beyond in the woods. Get out now, the operator will say. We’ve traced the call. He’s inside the house with you.

  “Where are we going?” she asks, suddenly realizing the hearse is hurtling in the opposite direction from home.

  “I want to show you something,” her dad replies. “It won’t take long. Unless it takes all night.”

  “Dad, we need to go home,” Wallis says, truly nervous now.

  “It’s your mother’s fault for not asking me if I wanted a party,” Eddie says low. “She should know by now how much I hate surprises.”

  The hearse’s headlights rasp the dark as they speed along an unfamiliar road, scattering rabbits and turning the night-grazing deer to statuary. The windows are down, the radio off. They pass empty fields and glassy obsidian ponds that float upon their gauze of reflected clouds, repeating pearls of moon. They ride for miles in this hushed, rolling darkness, not talking, Wallis trying hard not to think about her mother greeting the guests—You know Eddie, always unpredictable, that’s what we love about him—sucking the ice cubes of her third drink to delay pouring herself a fourth. Wallis has failed her mom but the paved road gives way to dirt and there is the music of cracked gravel and the night-sweet smell of honeysuckle. She lets her body relax until her shoulder brushes Jasper’s. The ride has softened him, too, he doesn’t lean into her but he doesn’t flinch away.

  About ten miles out of town, Eddie pulls the car onto the side of the road and cuts the engine. There is still the aroma of honeysuckle, but now it is accompanied by orange and brown trumpets, sweetly rotting into the decay of swamp. They’ve taken the back way, which is why she didn’t know where they were. In front of them is a rusted NO TRESPASSING sign hung on a chain across a path. Her father cuts the headlights and they are plunged into darkness.

  “The trains have always run by this swamp,” he says, and his voice hangs disembodied. “Twice a day and twice a night, they’ve been coming by for years. Once, long ago, an old conductor rode this route, a bitter, gaunt old man. He had no wife, he had no child. His whole life was this trip, up and back, up and back, hauling freight. Nothing had ever happened to him—he’d lived a tight, ordered, solitary life, and now he was close to retirement. I suppose there are some men who can slip through life without a single tragedy, but mostly we don’t like to hear about them. We like our stories to be full of bad luck and undeserved misfortune, don’t we? So here’s this old conductor, on the verge of retiring when, suddenly, late one night, he spies a bundle left right in the middle of the tracks. Oh no, he thinks. It can’t be. Truly, it was too far away to know for sure, but then, as fate would have it, the bundle began to squirm.

  “Hit the brake! he shouted, but you know how long it takes a train to slow to a stop. And this was a heavy, barreling old thing. The squeal was deafening. The conductor fell, the coal in the hopper slid to the ground, they shuddered to a long, aching stop. It was too late, they had passed the spot where the baby had lain. What kind of mother would have walked off and left her child on these cold metal rails? What monster would have made him—an old and blameless man—responsible for the death of a child? He put his head in his hands and sobbed, knowing his life was over. He could never live with the guilt. Just then, suddenly, in the dark, he heard a tiny desolate cry. He was saved—the baby lived!

  “The conductor snatched up his lantern and leaped from his post, swinging his light all around. It flashed on the tall swamp grasses and glittering black eyes of bullfrogs. It flashed across the green scum of pollen and lily pad on the swamp below, the sickle heads of snapping turtles. He swung his lantern under the carriage of the heaving train. Was it there? He heard it crying louder. Was it there? He peered deep underneath, reaching along the rail, when—

  “SNAP! The train rolled forward and off came his head.”

  Her father bolts from the hearse and leaps the NO TRESPASSING sign. Suddenly, it’s all a game, and Jasper bounds off after him with Wallis close behind. She hops the chain herself, following the wake of them in the dark. This sign was here back then, Wallis knows from her father’s telling and retelling of her parents’ first kiss, before Captain Casket or the weather or Sailor Eddie or any of the characters he’d played over the years, back when he was just Edward Alley, an intern hailing from the mountains, judging by his flat-foot accent, who was determined to get a job at the new television station. Even then, he wooed with ghost stories, and her mother, the daughter of his boss, sat cross-legged and enraptured, not believing a word he told her, yet wanting to believe, and falling in love with this odd looking, not-tall, plastic-faced boy, who would not even tell her his age.

  One evening when she was sitting in the station manager’s office he’d brought her a cup of coffee like she liked it—black, which was charmingly pretentious in a schoolgirl of seventeen—and he had leaned against the gunmetal desk where she worked. Her yellow hair had been pulled back in a ponytail and her sleeves were rolled up. There was a story he’d heard, he told Ann, about a decapitated conductor who walked the railroad tracks of an old line just west of here. Ann had shivered and smiled up at him from underneath her bright hair and he had invited her to come with him to look for those lights and she had accepted without hesitation. The next night she had concocted a lie for her parents about sleeping over at a friend’s house that came out so easily and well she wondered why she hadn’t thought to tell one before; and then she was speeding down the same dark nothing that the three had just driven, hopping the same NO TRESPASSING gate that they just hopped, onto the same private property, already known as a make-out spot, for who wouldn’t want to press tight together when faced with a decapitated conductor wandering a desolate track?

  Jasper and Wallis scramble down the embankment to the tracks where Eddie waits, a shadow among shadows. That night, hand in hand, he and her mother had walked the line, talking softly about the lives they’d lived before this night, for both felt themselves to be in the midst of the most glorious reincarnation; they’d walked and talked for hours, despite a light drizzle that pulled at her mother’s ponytail and brought out, like salt in a soup, the vegetal highlights of the nearby swamp. Then, wanting him to kiss her but not knowing how to make the request, Ann had stopped and, with eyes full of trust and complicity and something just a little challenging, asked Eddie the question Jasper now poses like a smart-ass, here, years later, in place of her whom they had left alone with guests, humiliated and drunk now, asking Cary once more what time he left, if Eddie had ordered dessert. Jasper asks the question Wallis knew had been her mother’s part of the script that night, Are we supposed to believe this? and her father answers it in the same way he had answered her mother that night, as they stood in the center of the railroad tracks that disappeared in each direction off into the woods; he said, an
d he says: Now, once a year, on this very night, the conductor walks these lonely tracks, swinging his lantern, searching for his missing head …

  As if on cue, far away, a point of light appears in the woods. And as her mother and father watched, as they watch, it advances slowly, flirtatiously, bobbing like a cork on water. Wallis has heard of will-o’-the-wisps and swamp lights, but nothing prepares her for this inexplicable thing coming straight toward her, growing larger with each bounce. It is a light like a rubber-band ball with no edge or ending, luminous, diffuse, just a brilliant exhalation of the night.

  Sweat breaks out on Wallis’s forehead and under her armpits. She tries to remember how the story of her parents’ first date ended, but fear has erased memory and all she can see is her mother back home pulling her sweater around her, watching the children of her guests racing from tree to tree in their backyard playing Ghost in the Graveyard—one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, the children shout, on till midnight—her eyes scanning the road for Eddie’s car. At Wallis’s side, Jasper stiffens, trying to make sense of what he is seeing, willing himself to hold ground. It has passed through and swallowed her father. The light is mere feet from them now, taking up their entire world. It should be thrilling, but it is too real and she can’t let it touch her, she doesn’t know what it is, so she turns and runs like a little kid and remembers now how her mother had, too, that night, racing down the railroad tracks, leaping the wooden ties. It is not after her, it just is, but she can’t help running. There is pounding close behind her, then beside her, then overtaking her, and then she is running after his shadow, Jasper the bold, and he’s lit by the staccato flashes of moon on the worn metal tracks. She runs, not glancing back, running in a straight line as she always screamed at people in the movies never to do—you can’t outrun it, use your head, leave the path and lose it in the woods—but she can’t think, she can only try to keep up with Jasper, whose legs are twice as long. In the story, her father caught up with her mother and spun her around to face the conductor’s lantern, the headless man himself, who dissolved into the mist like the light, which was coming, which had definitely been coming, but which no longer existed, if it had ever existed; and in its absence, he had kissed her, as the rain picked up, no longer a drizzle but fat, cold drops, and he kissed her for a very long time until her heart raced not from fear but from his kisses—though for the rest of her life, she would later tell Wallis, the two feelings would be too closely intertwined for her comfort.