THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Read online

  And each desire, each stirring of the evil in her womb, was like a knife stabbing and scraping from within, making her catch her breath and wait for the pain to stop.

  Glandier had made her pregnant once before, early in their marriage, and then, just at this stage of the pregnancy, had persuaded her to have an abortion. In the light of her Catholic upbringing no sin she’d ever committed had been half so grievous as that, the murder of her own wholly defenseless child, and so it seemed just, if not reasonable, that here in the afterlife she should pay for that guilt by bringing (as she believed) her aborted fetus to term. For if there are ghosts of people, why not of fetuses? Have they not, each of them, their murders to avenge?

  Never during that first pregnancy or after the abortion had she spoken to her mother of what she had done, nor did she share her suppositions with Joy-Ann now, if only because Joy-Ann was suffering the threatened side-effects of too long a visit to the terrestrial plane and had no thought for any distress but her own. As they had left the funeral parlor, Joy-Ann had become of a sudden as heavy as the statue whose form she’d taken—and nearly as immobile. Speech cost her great effort, and her arms and legs would bend only at the hip and shoulder joints, like the limbs of some crude doll.

  Now Giselle was trundling her—in a shopping cart she’d found in the parking lot of the Red Owl supermarket—to Sears Department Store on Lake Street. That was where the statue, in its strange, slurred speech, had asked to be taken, and Giselle, grateful for a task and a purpose, had not asked why.

  It was not easy. Even with the statue helping, getting it in the shopping cart had taxed Giselle’s strength to the limit. Then, a block from the supermarket, the shopping cart’s left front wheel developed a proclivity to veer to the right, which either brought the cart to an abrupt halt or, if the right wheel didn’t offer resistance, sent it careening off the sidewalk as though it had power steering. The statue would clutch at the wire rim of the cart and give a wordless yell of alarm, and then, when its erratic progress forward had recommenced, would moan unnervingly, incapable as any infant of dissembling its misery.

  And all the while, every fifth or sixth block along the way, Giselle would feel the twist of the knife inside her womb and have to stop, close her eyes, and wait for the pain to pass. In the darkness of that waiting she remembered the dread she had felt during her first pregnancy—dread not only of her labor pains but of the child that would be born to her. She had been sure it would be born deformed. Dr. Jenner told her she was being foolish; she was young and healthy and all signs indicated a healthy birth, a normal child. But she could not be persuaded. She had been certain, irrationally but unshakably, that the child she carried was a monster, and it had been that certainty, and not her husband’s arguments, that had given her the guilty strength to have the abortion.

  And now that dread was born again, and lived in her womb, and there was nothing she could do, this time, but let it live and grow and come to term.

  CHAPTER 31

  As they approached the middle of the Lake Street bridge, Joy-Ann suddenly recuperated. The awful heaviness, the stiffness, the sensation of mentally grinding to a stop—all gone with just the popping of her ears. She turned around in the shopping cart and asked Giselle to take a rest. Giselle didn’t have to be asked twice; she was worn to a frazzle.

  “I feel so much better,” Joy-Ann announced cheerily. “Do you know what I think did it? I think it’s the bridge, having a lot of air and then the river underneath us.”

  But Giselle wasn’t even listening. Joy-Ann put her hands over Giselle’s, which still numbly gripped the handle of the shopping cart. “Poor darling.”

  “I feel terrible.”

  Joy-Ann sighed sympathetically. Having been through the wringer twice herself, she knew there were times when good advice was nothing but an annoyance. She couldn’t understand why the Church had to be against the idea of test-tube babies. If the Pope were a woman and knew what pregnancy was like from experience…

  “Isn’t that strange,” said Giselle.

  “Isn’t what strange?”

  “The cars here on the bridge. Look at them, they’re just creeping along.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t complain. Most people drive too fast.”

  But it wasn’t only the cars that were going slower, Joy-Ann noticed. Everything had gone into slow motion. The blue Mississippi below them seemed to be flowing like honey that had gone into the icebox by mistake, and on either shore the wind stirred the newly budded branches of the trees with the same weird sluggishness, as though the trees were seaweed and the wind the weariest of currents.

  “Maybe,” Joy-Ann speculated, “it’s not the cars slowing down. Maybe it’s us speeding up. Though come to think of it, it doesn’t make much practical difference what you call it.”

  “I do wish,” Giselle said, with a grimace of aggravation, “that I were in control of things instead of their always just happening to me. I mean, it could be useful to make everything go slower, if you could do it when you wanted to.”

  “Useful? It’s pretty, certainly, but I don’t see how—Giselle? Would you look down there—” She pointed with her little marble finger at a man standing in the middle of the river, standing, in fact, on the river. “—and tell me what you see?”

  Giselle went to the railing of the bridge and looked down. “There’s a man. With a big beard. And his head’s bleeding. And I think he’s waving at us.”

  “Do you suppose he’s another ghost?”

  “He’s shouting something, but I can’t make it out. Can you?”

  “He must be a ghost,” Joy-Ann decided, “or otherwise he couldn’t see us.”

  “Bob can see us. Or me anyhow. Sometimes.”

  “But can he walk on top of water?”

  Giselle cupped her hands to her mouth, leaned forward, and shouted as loudly as she could, “What are you saying?”

  In reply the man on the water lifted his arms above his head and signaled “Come here” with his hands.

  When Giselle pantomimed back to him, lifting her shoulders and spreading her hands, that this was impossible, he called up (Joy-Ann could just make it out), “Jump!”

  “Jump?” Joy-Ann repeated indignantly. “Does he think we’re crazy?”

  “I don’t know. It might be possible. I mean, for a while there I was able to fly.”

  “Have you tried it lately? It would sure beat hell out of walking the rest of the way to Sears. We’ve got a good thirty blocks ahead of us.”

  “No, once I was back inside my body, I stopped being able to fly. But maybe it’s like in Dumbo. Maybe if I just believed hard enough, I could do it.”

  “As I recall, Dumbo had a magic feather. I wouldn’t try it, if I were you. And I’m certainly not going to jump down there. Look at me: I’m made of stone. I’d sink right to the bottom.”

  “I wonder who he is, though.”

  “Listen, Giselle, if you want to make his acquaintance, that’s fine with me. But let’s get to Sears first. Please? The longer I stay here, the more likely it is that something even weirder will happen to me.”

  Giselle allowed this to be a reasonable demand, and they continued on their way. This time they continued without the grocery cart, since there was a bus stop at the other end of the bridge. While they waited for a bus, Joy-Ann could feel her body getting heavier again and her thoughts fuzzier, but even so, when the bus did finally arrive—traveling in slow motion, like the cars on the bridge—there was plenty of time to sneak onto it before the door hissed closed behind the last passenger. Then, at just about the pace that Giselle had pushed the grocery cart but so much more comfortably, the bus lumbered along Lake Street toward Sears.

  As usual when she rode the bus, Joy-Ann couldn’t keep from staring at the other passengers. They were old people and teenagers mostly, the old people in their winter coats, the teenagers already dressed for summer in T-shirts and light sweaters. A group of four girls were confabulating at the back of the
bus in what would have been, at ordinary speed, a lively manner but seemed in slow motion thoroughly ridiculous, their voices retarded to something between the bleating of sheep and the croaking of frogs, their faces undergoing equally grotesque distortions, especially the face of the little blond girl who was chewing gum.

  If they could see me, Joy-Ann thought, what would they think? What would anyone think, seeing a living half-life-size statue? She felt as though she’d turned into one of those punk people they showed sometimes on TV, someone weird and silly and threatening all at once, the only difference being, blessedly, that she was invisible.

  Bleating and croaking, the girls at the back of the bus got off at Cedar. Giselle was curled up on the seat in front of the rear exit, asleep, her bare feet on the molded orange plastic of the seat. The bus was inching along at a slower and slower pace, and Joy-Ann was feeling logier and logier. But it would not do to fall asleep, so she set herself the task, which had kept her awake so often at Sunday mass, of thinking of a celebrity whose name began with the initials A.A., then of one with initials A.B., and so on, but for the life of her the only first name she could think of was Ann and the only last name, after a great deal of thought, was Anker.

  And then, at last, just a few blocks ahead, you could see the square gray tower of the Sears Building soaring up from the drive-ins and car lots of Lake Street like a downtown skyscraper that had got lost. Now the only problem was whether the bus would stop and the doors open, but before she could even begin to worry about that, a black man, two seats behind the driver, reached for the signal cord and yanked it.

  “Giselle,” she said, tapping her daughter’s right knee. “Giselle, wake up, we’re almost there.”

  But Giselle, whatever Joy-Ann did, however loudly she shouted into her ear, refused to wake up. There was no help for it—Joy-Ann would have to get off by herself. Before the black man could block her way out the back exit, Joy-Ann hurried there and eased herself down to the lower step. The bus jiggled to a stop, its doors hissed open, and Joy-Ann hopped down to the curb. Sears didn’t seem to have any customers that afternoon, and Joy-Ann paced back and forth in front of its entrance—a revolving door flanked by doors of brass-bound green glass—feeling herself get stiffer and creakier with every slow-motion minute. Apparently only if she were wearing the magic ring Adah had given her was it possible to accomplish something so physical as opening a door for herself. Not that she begrudged the ring to Giselle. But it was frustrating not to be able to do such a simple thing. This was what life must be like for pets. She remembered Alice Hoffman’s little Sugar, whining and clawing at Alice’s back door, wanting to get out.

  At long last a shopper inside the store squeezed herself and her two shopping bags into one of the four compartments of the revolving door and set it in motion. Joy-Ann, who had finally, out of the blue, thought of a celebrity with the initials A.A. (Alan Alda, who else?), was caught by surprise and didn’t get into the section of the door opposite to the one the woman was at but had to wait for the next one. Which meant that, when the woman stopped pushing the door, Joy-Ann was caught inside. She stood there, trapped, while only some dozen yards ahead was the escalator that would have taken her back to Paradise. Ever so slowly the steps of the escalator rose to the next floor. Once or twice another customer would enter or leave the store, but never by the revolving door, always by the ordinary glass doors to either side—despite the signs that asked them to use the revolving door. If people only realized the harm they could do by not following the rules!

  CHAPTER 32

  —Father? Can you hear me? She’s asleep now, the bitch, the ditch in which you planted me. We can talk.

  —Dreaming.

  —Oh, you’re not dreaming. It’s more as though we were using C.B. radios. Only you can’t spin the dial. I’m what’s happening, baby, as the deejays say.

  —No.

  —Yes. But if you’re that anxious to deny my existence, why not plead insanity. On the other hand, why be in a hurry to deny me? I might be some use to you—once I’ve been born and grown a bit and you’ve thought of a name for me.

  —Leave me alone, you little shit!

  —Little Shit, is it? Not Beelzebub or Asmodeus? Of course, you lack a background in the so-called humanities. Not that I mind about that. In terms of your better damnation, your ignorance is likely to work to my advantage. Little Shit? Well, considering the source, I’m not surprised.

  —Christ, what did I do to deserve this?

  —Surely, that’s not a serious question.

  —

  —The silent treatment now, is it? No problem there. I’ll show you slides. A picture’s worth a thousand words. This, for instance: bet you never thought Lizzy Spaeth had tits like that, huh. And this is you, fat as a pig, you are, and what’ll we put in the thought balloon over your head? “Miss Spaeth, you are late again! I cannot let this continue!” And how about this one: you’ve got your hands around her neck, you are squeezing, she is choking, and she is not going to come back late from lunch ever again, is she? Now, look at the next one: you’ve taken out your Swiss Army knife and—

  —Stop it. I’m not listening to any of this. You don’t exist. I’m dreaming.

  —Sure, right. Maybe you’re more interested in disembowelings. This one is—

  —Leave me alone!

  —Careful, careful. That’s twice you’ve asked that. I might take you at your word, if you ask a third time. Think of all the ways I could take that literally. I might “leave you alone” in the solitude of catatonia. Or up Shit Creek without a paddle. Because for all that I am your son, with whatever filial obligation that entails (and rest assured that it is not unlimited)—for all that I may feel an independent zeal to act on your behalf, I am not your friend. Oh, anything but. I’d like to see you rot in hell, and I’ve every confidence that someday I shall and you will. But in the meantime, Daddy-O, I’m at your service. Once she sets me loose.

  —I know I’m sleeping. The pillow’s wet where I’ve been drooling on it. I can smell the fresh paint.

  —You were asleep, yes. But not dreaming. You haven’t the imagination to dream my voice. Imagination has never been your strong suit. It’s Mother who supplies the wit, as befits a spiritual nature. You’re a businessman, right? From you I inherit pimples, pus, corruption. Shit.

  He awoke, at last, by an act of will. Not from dreams but from the drowsing between dreams and waking. The mattress he lay on seemed to stir with its own life. He rolled over and opened his eyes in time to see the child’s plaid shirt, frayed jeans, and red sneakers as he crawled out the bedroom door.

  He pushed himself up on his elbows and rumbled an ineffectual “Hey! Stop!” Too late. By the time he was on his feet the back door had slammed closed. Some kid had been under his bed while he was asleep. That much was no dream, no ghost, no hallucination. He went to the bedroom window and saw the kid—it was Sheehy’s brat—hightailing across the brown grass.

  The kid had been inside this room, had seen the paint on the wallpaper (though not, thank God, what the paint was covering), and he was out free to blab about it to the whole neighborhood.

  He tried to feel some anger. There was only fear.

  CHAPTER 33

  On the bus, before she fell asleep, Giselle had wondered what would happen if one of the boarding passengers were to sit on her. Though she was invisible to the living, she was probably not impermeable. She could not, for instance, walk through walls; without the ring her mother had left her she couldn’t so much as open a door. This was not a major worry, little more than a fly-tickle of a question, and it hadn’t kept her from sleeping through the bus’s entire circuit down Lake Street to Hennepin and back again to the bridge, where the question was answered in the directest way. Someone getting on the bus sat down in the seat Giselle occupied, whereupon—ping!—she was displaced to the skirt of grass between sidewalk and curb. She awoke to see the bus bouncing ponderously up Marshall Avenue (which is what Lake Street became
on the St. Paul side of the bridge). The world was still creaking along in slow motion, and she was still swollen with this preposterous, preternatural pregnancy. Nothing had changed except that her mother (so she supposed) had got off at Sears and returned to Paradise.

  Natural and thoughtless as a ball rolling downhill, Giselle gravitated toward the bridge and its vistas of river and shore. Standing on the worn timbers of the pedestrian walkway, she regarded the trees clinging to the steep banks almost with envy. More peaceful even than sleep to be a tree. She could remember, though not very clearly (vegetation having an imprecise sense of time), the days or hours she had spent piercing with root and stem the crumbling cemetery soil, winning release into the light. No thoughts at all, only the rustling of leaves. Nameless, aimless, blameless.

  “Excuse me?”

  A hand touched her shoulder lightly and was withdrawn. She turned around to face a man who seemed to have recently been beaten about the face with a sledgehammer. Blood streamed freely from his left eye socket and from his mouth, dying the salt-and-pepper tangle of his long beard to a crimson that deepened to maroon and brown where it spattered his tweed coat.

  “Please take no notice of my appearance,” he said, dabbing nervously at his forehead with a handkerchief. Then, in a tone of elucidation: “I’m a poet.”

  Giselle, though momentarily alarmed, understood from the man’s behavior that he intended no threat. “You’re bleeding very badly,” she said. “Don’t you think you should be lying down?”

  “Oh, never mind the bleeding. It’s gone on like this for years now. It doesn’t hurt. Except when I laugh.” At which, as though in self-mockery, he laughed, exposing bloody and all-but-toothless gums; reflexively he grimaced with pain.