McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

  Two weeks later, on a spectacular summer’s Sunday afternoon, Janna’s doctor asked Suze to stop by his office for a talk. She had to ask a nurse for the correct door, and then had to allow the doctor to lead her to a chair. His news was good and bad.

  “I think Janna’s going to be ready to go home before too long,” he said, but before Suze’s heart could begin to sing, added, “We need to think about her care. She tells me you have glaucoma.”

  “It’s under control,” she said quickly, not a complete lie.

  “Who’s your doctor?” Suze told him, and his form shifted in a way she knew meant a nod. “A good man. But you can’t drive. And caring for Janna is going to require a lot of effort in the early days. Can you ask that girl to move in full-time, maybe for the first month?”

  Suze very nearly stood up and walked out. She’d stuck by Janna all these weeks, stretching the bonds between them far beyond the flimsy beginnings. She wanted to tell this man, “Look, I barely know Janna—I only met her in January, moved here on a whim. Really, it’s time I moved on.” Nearly told him, “If I have to live with that hymn-spouting child, I’ll go nuts.” Almost decided that she’d done her part as a faithful friend, and that now she’d seen Janna back on her feet, it was best to clear the way to putting two lives back on track.

  But she did not. She’d seen the beginnings of something real with Janna, felt the rare touch of a person who understood the forces that drove her. Janna had never once told Suze that she shouldn’t do something because of her sight, had even egged her on; who was Suze to tell Janna goodbye?

  “Her insurance won’t cover a full-time nurse?” Suze asked, not expecting much. She was answered by the rustle and shift of a shaking head.

  “Afraid not.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to try Courtney.”

  The child was overjoyed. They had ten days before Janna would be released, and Courtney spent it in a whirlwind of busybody virtue, overseeing Andy’s building of a wheelchair ramp (which Suze insisted be made temporary), rearranging furniture (each shift accompanied by multiple reminders to Suze to take care not to trip over the sofa, the table, the rug), fretting about throw rugs and wheelchair access and the cabin’s apparently inadequate water supply (which had been fine until the child had decided to launder every bit of bedding in the house on Monday morning). Spare furniture was stored in the shed, a bed was brought in for the girl, and Suze’s loom shoved as far into the corner as it would go. Suze knew damn well that they’d be hard put to get rid of Courtney when school started up next month, even if Janna was up and dancing.

  Janna was set to come home on the twenty-fourth of July, a Wednesday. With two days to go, the water tank again ran dry, and Courtney spilled over in shrill cries of distress and disaster. The rest of the day was taken up with Andy. He looked at the small tank behind the house, then at the big one near the road, and scratched under his baseball cap in puzzlement.

  “This here pressure pump’s working fine now,” he told Suze, who had driven down with him, more to escape the flurry of last-minute housecleaning than because she thought she could do any good.

  “Some kind of intermittent fault?”

  “Can’t see any. Sometime you get bugs on the contacts, breaks the flow of electricity. I’ve cleaned ’em off, gave ’em a shot of Raid— we’ll see if that does it. If it doesn’t, you’ll probably want to get the water people in, pull the well pump itself and see if it’s packing up.”

  “How many gallons did you say this tank holds?”

  “You got a five thousand–gallon tank here, five hundred near the house. That’s a hundred loads of laundry, or a couple days of leaving the hose running. Shouldn’t happen.”

  Suze looked at the green plastic monolith of the tank, her mind’s eye clearly seeing that length of PVC pipe cutting into the main supply line. She teetered on the edge of telling the old builder about it, of ratting out on her Thoreau. But Courtney would have a thousand fits, and Andy would take manly command, and Suze’s preferences would be trampled underfoot. So she’d think about it, before she said anything to Andy.

  Tuesday, Courtney arrived with Janna’s car crammed to the brim with boxes and bulging trash bags filled with clothes and essential teenage equipment. She spent the day settling in, having made no such proposal to Suze. At three that afternoon, she came out of the guest room, clearly intending to start dinner. Suze had other ideas.

  “Well, I guess we’ll see you tomorrow,” she said cheerily.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you come and get me in the morning, so we can go get Janna.”

  “But I thought I might stay here tonight.”

  “Oh, Courtney, I couldn’t ask you to do that. Your parents will be missing you so much in the next three weeks, before school starts, I really think you should let them have a last night with you.” She was at the loom, and kept her face down, her voice without guile.

  “I have most of my stuff here, now.”

  “That was foresighted of you. But I’m sure you could find a toothbrush and pajamas. I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, and continued working.

  Hurt, and making sure Suze knew it, Courtney flounced into the car and drove off.

  When she had gone, Suze poured herself a stiff drink and went out onto the porch, wanting to scream. She wanted to walk away down the road, never to look back. Wanted to get roaring drunk, take off for the Amazon in a canoe, leap out of a plane without checking to see if she had her chute on. Tomorrow the earth would sigh and settle onto her the combined weight of an invalid lover she barely knew, a good Christian girl with head-nurse fantasies, and a pair of dying eyes.

  Pressures all, and as her only release, the knowledge of digging in the night, ten thousand gallons of missing water, and a remembered conversation concerning the exorbitant seasonal cost of electricity.

  She swallowed the last of her drink, feeling the pounding of anticipation in her veins, thinking, Tomorrow the weight comes, but by God, I still have tonight.

  That night, Suze went for a walk in the woods.

  In her early days and weeks here, Janna had taken Suze on countless “blind walks,” as if those remnants of the touchy-feely days would make an actual blind woman feel better. The odd thing was, they did. The first few were terrifying: It was one thing to jump out of a plane able to see the ground below, quite another to step onto a moon-dappled path surrounded by vague shapes and incomprehensible motion. But somehow Janna had known that although she had to bully Suze out the door for their first five-minute outing along the drive, by the end of the week Suze would relish the challenge of setting off into the night with only three senses to guide her. The feel of the ground underfoot, the smell of the air, the sounds of creatures and the trees themselves guided her into an intoxicating foreign country. By the end of the second week, she was leading Janna.

  She didn’t know how far she’d go tonight, but following the stream, how lost could she get?

  She armed herself with the big flashlight; as she was headed out the door, she paused and went back, tucking one of the tall spools of black warp thread into the waist pack with the light. If she had to leave the stream, she could always lay an Ariadne’s thread through the trees. At the door, she picked up the thin, flexible stripped branch she sometimes used as a cane, and stepped off the porch to the ground.

  The full moon created a pale smear in her vision and a sense of texture to the night, as if she were entering one of her black-on-black hangings. It was distracting; she closed her eyes to concentrate on memory, and after a minute, found the drive in her mind. She set confidently off, her feet locating the defining patches of gravel here and soil there, her nostrils finding the tang of eucalyptus and the approach of the stream, until she was through the curve and standing on the misplaced oak leaves over the intruder’s pipe. Apprehension bubbled in her chest, and she waited: The old Suze Blackstock wouldn’t have panicked; would the new one? But the apprehension warmed her, like buc
kling on her helmet as the wind battered her body, like looking upward for her first sight of virgin rock wall; the welcome quickening of her heart was more excitement than fear.

  Suze smiled, and stepped off the road.

  The deer track ran along the hill above the stream, a faint flat trail cut by generations of delicate hooves. At first, Suze inched her way along, tapping trees with the stick-cane, not entirely trusting her feet, pushing back the fear that jabbered at her mind, You can’t do this, you’re nearly blind, you have to be sensible. . . .

  But she went on, and it became easier. Then suddenly, a mile along, the shrubs ahead of her exploded in a thunder and rush of movement, and she nearly leapt into the creek in terror before the noise resolved itself into the identifiable repeated thump-swish of a pair of fleeing deer. She leaned against a tree, weak with reaction, and tried to laugh.

  Another half mile, and she was beginning to wonder if she’d imagined the whole scenario, the electricity and water—

  And then she stopped. Between one step and the next, a peculiar tang brushed the air: not trees, not the odors of damp and stone from the creek. It was such an unexpected addition to the night, it took her a while to identify it.

  Chilies. Someone in the area had recently cooked a meal of chilies and cumin and tomato. Mexican food, and now the savor of coffee. It was incongruous, and brought in its wake a note of the ominous that kept her where she stood, undecided. What the hell did she expect, that the men illegally camping here would offer her a plate of rice, a cup of coffee, take her on a tour of their patch?

  Because she could smell that now, too, an acrid odor of exotic vegetation. The breeze that brought the odor also stirred up the rich susurration of plants, tall and full, rising up before her. Suze had smelled cannabis growing before, in hilltop patches in Mexico and South America. It smelled much the same here.

  It had taken her some time to put together all the threads. Courtney’s exclamations over the winter’s high electrical bills, when power stolen from Janna’s lines had warmed and illuminated someone’s well-concealed greenhouses. Digging in the night, but only when the cabin was dark. Ten thousand gallons drained from the tank, watering the crop when it had been transplanted into open ground, flowing into the roots once a week, on Mondays.

  And the other threads, those that stretched into the future, the unknown: How the local drug squad’s helicopters would be gearing up for its annual sky searches, while the stand, nearly ready for harvest, stood vulnerable to potential thieves. How paranoia would be at its height. How the boss man would not trust his year’s income to hired hands; he would be out here, keeping guard.

  How he would be armed.

  Suze’s recent, timorous self quailed at the thought of what she was about to do. Go back to the cabin, it urged; You can get a prescription, for Christ’s sake. Be sensible! But sensible was not what Suze Blackstock was all about. Suze Blackstock was a woman who wove darkness and walked into the unknown, a woman who used adrenaline to bleed off unbearable pressures. Who used near-suicide to keep her from the real thing.

  She straightened her shoulders and stepped into the luxurious growth, heading toward a dancing glow as if toward a lover’s eyes. When the stand was at an end, she held her hands up as if seizing the straps of a parachute, and took a last step out in the open. Her blood thudded through her veins as she prepared to weave herself, one way or another, into this place: On the one hand, the joy of Janna coming home; on the other, the terror that she, Suze Blackstock, was about to be shot dead; the two extremes acted as counterbalances, with her in the middle, standing firm.

  But the shot did not come, not with her first appearance from the plants. When the flurry of movement near the fire had ceased, she cleared her throat and sent some words out toward the indistinct figure that remained, wondering which way the words would tip the balance.

  “You guys are using kind of a lot of our water and power,” she said. “I wonder if you might be interested in a trade, once your harvest is in?”

  —With thanks to Susan Orrett and Zoe King

  Chuck’s Bucket

  By CHRIS OFFUTT

  Sometimes a man makes such a hash of his life that his only

  recourse is to bend the temporal fabric of reality itself!

  I pumped air into my bicycle tire and rode slowly across town, stop-ping twice to adjust my glasses. The cheap tape on the arms was giving out. To make matters worse, I could not see through the left lens, which naturally was my better eye. Such diminished capacity a year ago would have embarrassed me, but I am now undergoing what appears to be a midlife crisis of severe parameters. I recently broke all contact with my family except being cc’ed by e-mail betwixt my siblings. Next I left my wife but only managed to move a few blocks away. To top things off, my new place has a ghost that has begun to haunt me nightly.

  At the University of Iowa campus, I leaned my bike beside the Van Allen building, named for the physics professor who’d discovered the Van Allen belt in the night sky, and also inventor of the roc-coon—half rocket, half balloon. Several years ago, a Chinese grad student went on a rampage and murdered several physics professors here. Now the security is tight, but I’d recently taught fiction writing as an adjunct professor at UI and still had a faculty ID to show the guard. I waited half an hour for Professor Charles Andrews to emerge from his lab.

  I’d met Chuck in a local low-stakes poker game that had gone on for many years in Iowa City. He was the fish, the absolute worst player at the table, but charming and affable because he truly didn’t care about winning. He was there to study chance itself. He’d played cards with John Cage, Jasper Johns, and Richard Feynman. Chuck was impressed that I knew the work of all three men. Since the game, we met periodically for lunch and talked about my writing and his research.

  Last night the ghost had woken me several times, and at dawn I stepped on my glasses, which had fallen from the nightstand. Then my car wouldn’t start. I could get by on a single-speed bicycle and duct-taped spectacles, but the lens kept popping free of the twisted frame. I tried to glue the lens in place and only managed to smear the glass until it was translucent. I sat at my computer to work on a short story. It was about a guy who got himself cloned but the clone died and started haunting him every night. For two weeks I’d been unable to get past the opening.

  After half an hour of self-torture, I called Chuck, seeking information about clones.

  “Clones suck,” he had said on the phone. “The ultimate goal of clone research is to produce an army of Swoffies.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They cloned the most elite military specimen—a marine scout-sniper named Swofford—and now they just crank out Swoffies like a Xerox machine.”

  “Well, maybe I can use them in my story.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “It’s classified information just to know the term ‘Swoffie.’ You do and they’ll come after you.”

  “Well, it’s really a ghost story anyhow.”

  His diffident tone changed to sharp interest.

  “Why ghosts, Chris?”

  “It’s kind of complicated.”

  “So’s quantum physics, but I manage to stay afloat.”

  “It’s personal,” I said.

  “Try me.”

  “I think my place is haunted.”

  “Was it always?”

  “No, since about a month.”

  “Come to my lab as soon as you can.”

  I agreed and hung up the phone, surprised by Chuck’s curiosity about something as absurd as a ghost. Any excuse not to write was sadly welcome, and I rode my bike to his office.

  He came striding down the hall, his white lab coat billowing like an old-time cloak. He vouched for me at the first guard booth, then guided me through a series of security points to what was obviously his working office, an unbelievably cluttered mess reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s studio. A narrow aisle led through the knee-high debris of paper, books, drawings, empty pop can
s, and candy bar wrappers. The walls held chalkboards filled with equations. There was no tech equipment in sight, no machines, not even a computer. Chuck became visibly relaxed in the disarray, and upended a garbage can for me to sit on.

  “The ghost,” he said. “I want the whole story.”

  I laid it all out and the longer I yakked, the more preposterous it sounded. For the past four weeks I’d slept quite poorly, despite changing my mattress and the position for sleep. I tried hot baths, warm milk, deep breathing, valerian, melatonin, and shiatsu. I tucked pillows beneath my neck, between my legs, and under my hips until I lay in a cradle of shims. Nothing worked. The ghost still woke me every night. When I snapped awake, it was there, lurking just beyond my sight.

  Chuck demanded details of time, frequency, clarity, sound, smell, and temperature of the room. For the first time in our friendship, I had his full focus, like being scrutinized by a Cyclops. He inquired after my diet, alcohol and substance use, vitamin intake, family history of mental illness. When I finished, Chuck sat motionless, his eyes shrouded as if turning his gaze inward.

  “First of all,” he said, “there’s absolutely no such thing as ghosts.”

  “I know.”

  “Death means awareness ends and tissue decays. It is such a terrifying concept that we imagine an afterlife. Some form of immortality is the one common denominator of all religions and many superstitions. Nevertheless, I believe you.”

  “Maybe I’m nuts.”

  “Could be,” he said. “Are there any extenuating circumstances in your life?”