Southern Legitimacy Statement: Married to a woman from Ocilla, GA (featured here in childhood). Also, previously published in the Dead Mule and that’s southern forever.
Don’t Mention the Mole Men
IT HAD BEEN a long, hot summer. They hadn’t taken the usual two-day car trip back to Georgia – Daddy was lost in Dissertationland, walled-in behind a vast stack of books and papers on the kitchen table – so Sissy spent most of her time indoors, at least until things cooled off a bit in the evenings.
She didn’t much like her Easy Bake Oven (she wanted the Hotwheels she’d asked for) and it was way too hot in Texas. Heavy Baby, too, had returned to the Turk girls. Mimi was still at camp, and she was bored. She supposed she could reread The Witch of Blackbird Pond, but then what would she read when they finally went to Ocilla? Daddy said it was 976 miles. There was only so far PB&J, orange cartons and cow-poker could take you.
‘Goddammit! Amelia!’
Mother had told her to stay out of the kitchen. She swept past and through the door, pulling it closed as the phone slammed down. Sissy traipsed into the family room. She could still hear Daddy through the wall. His school seemed to make him awfully mad.
‘The goddamn dean of students – doesn’t see – students!’
Sissy was a good student.
She hadn’t yelled at her school, even once.
*
A thousand miles away, Mimi was half-listening to Goofus explain the proper way to saddle a pony. Normally this was Doodle’s department – at least last year – but the other lady was nowhere to be seen. Camp Gonawanda shimmered, nut-brown in the North Carolina sun, and Goofus’s spindly legs weren’t far short of that dusty colour; a sort of bark-like shade contrasting with her white knee-high socks. Goofus looked ancient, dry as a string-bean withering on the porch, or some mummy in a late-show movie.
Still, she was nice enough and clearly knew her business. The pony settled at her touch with a small whinny. Mimi could almost feel the horse’s solid motion between her legs, the wind wicking away sweat and the long fields’ rumble.
She paid attention.
*
‘Sissy,’ said Mother. ‘Baby, you remember we’re going out tomorrow, Daddy and me?’
‘Why?’
‘To a party.’
‘Where?’
‘Oh, across town. Daddy’s had a diffi– well, we won’t be gone long. Sylvia’s coming.’
Sissy put down her crayon (Burnt Sienna, not quite right for her pine tree, she thought) and flipped over the sketchbook. The fat metal rings purred like a waking cat. Sylvia Garcia was Sissy’s babysitter. She lived across the street and brought her Glen Campbell records, and they played them, and sang along, and drew pictures of Glen Campbell until she fell asleep.
Sissy hugged Mother. Her skirt smelled of coffee and hot paper.
‘Okay,’ she said.
*
Camp was almost over, and she didn’t want to leave, but was level-headed enough at eleven to realise everything had its time and place, and she would need to find something else to occupy her time. She liked it, if truth be told: a place for everything, and everything in its place, as her grandmother Mildred liked to say. Of course, she had people for that sort of thing.
Camp, summer – the bloom of dander and nightwind between the warped boards of the cabin, watery eggs, the crickets’ endless songs – was then; this was now.
Mimi cinched the top of her duffel bag and went out to wait for the bus to Ocilla.
*
Another boring day, what with Mother bustling between kitchen and bedroom. The layer of smoke above the table rose in a circular blue cloud to the ceiling. Mother came out in several outfits and seeing it grow with another pair of furious jets, pivoted in the doorway. Eventually she settled on red. Daddy was crashing around in the garage when the doorbell rang.
‘Oh, that’s Sylvia. Sissy! Be sweet and do what she says.’ A spritz of Chanel No. 5, some furious revving, and they were gone.
When Sissy woke, sometime after Glen Campbell, the room was dark. Sylvia had wrapped her in an Afghan, then fallen asleep in the armchair. On television, KATV had leapfrogged the late news and funnymen into a movie. Rubbing her eyes, Sissy sat up to watch. The picture was clear and bright in the evening cool.
From the throat of an immense tunnel came three adventurers – two men, one lady. They wore funny helmets, and their clothes were dirty and torn. They held lanterns in front of their faces. Strange shapes bobbed in the wavering light. From somewhere came a nasty dripping, the ploink! of fat drops falling onto flooded ground.
Sissy shivered, drew the Afghan around her.
‘Dean!’ said the lady. ‘Are you sure it’s this way?’
Dean remained silent, brooding. Instead, his companion spoke.
‘I believe so, Maureen.’
‘I didn’t ask you, Harley!’ she snapped. Suddenly, something more solid than waterdrops cast a looming shape. Sissy shuddered.
‘Run!’ she whispered, but it was too late.
Maureen shrieked as a horde of fat shadows stumbled from a side-cavern. They were deep, night-black, yet furry and waddly and wiggly with all kinds of horrors, as well. As Maureen fainted Dean came out of his shell, brandishing a blunderbuss. Sissy sat up in terror.
They were icky!
Their awful claws were horny and sharp!
But worst of all, she thought, as she began to scream – eclipsing Maureen and the blasting shotgun, the febrile scuttling of the men – were their hideous questing noses, thrusting blindly into the damp air of the tunnel, snout-fingers waggling and groping, searching like deadmen’s digits bursting through the walls.
Their noses had fingers!
*
After the bus to Ocilla, a day or so with the Turk girls – Heavy Baby’s voice box grinding like the Creature from the Black Lagoon’s, now – Mimi got into the station-wagon with a bag of sandwiches, juice carton and the latest Southern Equestrian. It would be a long two days, but bearable.
As soon as they left Ocilla, Daddy looked back over the front seat with his serious face. Mother was lost in a cloud of face-powder.
‘Did you enjoy camp, Mimi?’
‘Yes, Dad. I’d like to get a horse.’
He watched the road for a mile or two, then said into the rear-view-mirror, ‘Well, we’ll see about that when we get home. But there’s something – ah – ’
‘Sensitive,’ said Mother. Her dark eyes floated in Mimi’s direction.
‘Yes, thank you, Amelia – something sensitive we need to tell you.’
‘About what, Dad?’
Mimi had a slurp of juice, flipped to the pony centre-fold.
‘Not what – who.’
When he had finished, she looked from the back of his head to the back of Mother’s, then simply nodded.
‘Okay.’
*
The Austin house wasn’t big. They moved so often, with Daddy in the Air Force, that each place seemed to blend into the next. But this one, at least, had a nice long hallway, and nice brown wallpaper; closer to black, really, when the lights were low. Perfect.
In Sissy’s room, Mimi noticed, sounds from the hall were audible and clear, as though channelled inside by some unseen hand.
Now she crept into her own room at the near end of the corridor, stowed her duffel behind the door and turned out the lights. Their parents had gone right out to something-or-other at the college. There would be time enough for reunions tomorrow. Through the nut-brown gloaming, she took a step towards Sissy’s room. In her hand was a bit that broke in the second week of horse camp. Doodle had said she could keep it, like a souvenir, and she’d tossed it from palm to palm all the way back across the southeast. The metal was smooth but tarnished, and reached a wicked point where the break took place.
She dragged it lightly over the wall like a claw.
There was a small whimper from the far end of the corridor.
At the door to Sissy’s room she paused, pushing it gently inwards. She made out a mound of quivering bedclothes, one terrified aperture. It would be child’s play to turn on the hall light then wiggle three or four fingers around a high, proud thumb, perhaps throw in a throaty snuffle for good measure. Mimi smiled. With the narrow space under Sissy’s bed, the possibilities were practically endless!
She pulled the door closed, went to the kitchen for a glass of Nesquik.
At camp, her cabin-mate had disclosed how as a child she’d escaped punishment for cracking the ceiling-plaster in her parent’s bedroom by pointing out she wasn’t jumping on the bed, she was jumping off the bed.
As Mimi stirred the powdery milk, she thought it couldn’t hurt to rehearse her lines.
‘No, of course not, Dad. I haven’t mentioned them at all.’
