Ed Gorman: Nightmare Child

The wooden box had never looked more like a coffin. Cheap pine, unpainted. He opened the lock with such force that he cut his finger. Throwing back the lid, he shined the light inside.

She lay as he recalled, bound, gagged, blinded in her virginal white blouse, her loose jeans, her white anklets, and her new blue Reebok hightops. Blond and slender, she was the daughter every man wanted to have and so few would ever know.

Staring at her now, at her frail, unmoving chest and her tiny pale hands, he could hear her on another gentle Summer night, creaking in her rocker with her doll held tenderly to her beautiful cheeks, a sweet lullaby coming from her perfect pink lips.

"No!" he shouted.

And began undoing all the restraints Mindy had put on her during the day.

Off came the blindfold.

Off came the gag in her mouth.

Off came the cords wrapped around her wrists and legs.

He was just lifting her from the box when Mindy, coming around the car, said, "Oh, God, Jeff. I really didn't want to have to see her again. I really didn't. It's just going to make it all the harder. For both of us."

He sat on the ground, Jenny in his arms, as if she weighed no more than an infant. He rocked her gently as he kissed her face and spoke soft, insistent, meaningless words to her.

Finally Mindy sat plumply down next to him and put a soft hand gently on his shoulder and said, "Hon, I'm sorry but she's dead. She suffocated."

But far into the night, he rocked the little girl and sang to her, there in the buffalo grass with the crickets, which were later joined by barn owls and Savannah sparrows in crying tribute to the warm, starry night.

Finally, the little girl began to smell and Mindy, quieter than he had ever seen her, took Jenny from Jeff's arms and put her back in the box.

"We'd better get it over with," she said.

Nodding, numb, Jeff took a brand-new shovel from the trunk and followed Mindy down the hill.

They buried her where they planned to bury her, beneath a stand of heavy scrub pine where nobody would find her for a long time. The grave was four feet deep.

Jeff, exhausted, sat in the car running the air conditioning. He didn't care if he later got a chest cold. He needed relief and now. The digging had been incredibly exhausting.

In the shadow-light of quarter-moon, he saw the lumpen silhouette of his wife as she stood near the grave site. She was talking. To herself or to Jenny, he wasn't certain.

When she came back, she got in the car and quietly shut the door.

"You all right?" he said.

She said nothing.

"Honey," he said. She had taken care of him. Now it was his turn to take care of her.

"Please," she said. "Drive."

Forty-five minutes later they came to the DQ again. It was an oasis of light against the prairie night.

"You want a DQ?" he said.

"No, thanks."

"A nice big one?"

"No, thanks."

"A Buster Bar, then?"

"No, thanks. I don't want to look like Dr. Goldberg's wife," she said.

And then she started crying.

He had never heard her sob this way. She sobbed all the way back home. Once, he put his hand on her, hoping to stop her. But she pushed it gently away. Another time, he started saying "honey" there in the roaring highway darkness sweet with the smell of corn and grass and alfalfa, but that did no good, either.

She spoke only once. She said, "She was my little sister."

Today Mr. Culhane had a new diamond ring. In case you failed to note this fact, Mr. Culhane made it easy for you by rolling his pinkie finger back and forth and examining the ring the way a jeweler might.

Of course, if you did remark on it (and, by God, you'd better), he'd play coy and say, "Oh, it's nothing much. Just something my old football team gave me at the University Club last week when Hank…er…I mean the vice-president was in the city."

This disclaimer conveyed three important pieces of in-formation: 1) the "nothing much" told you that Mr. Culhane, though a millionaire many times over, still thought of himself as a self-effacing man of the people; 2) the "old football team" told you all over again that Mr. Culhane had been the star running back of the 1939 team at the U, the one that had gone to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl, and to the record books forever; 3) the "vice-president was in town" told you that Mr. Culhane knew the vice-president of the United States well enough to call him Hank…er…V. P..

He was fat, pink, bald, usually dressed in a black pin-striped suit that only a Mafioso could love, and an indefatigable user of Binaca breath spray. He was also two other things: 1) the Foster Dawson Agency's largest account; and 2) Jeff McCay's wife's uncle, which, in some people's cynical minds, came to explain how a mediocre account executive like Jeff McCay came to handle the Reddy Teddy Dog Food account, Reddy Teddy being the four-decades-old drawing of a cocker spaniel that appeared on every can of RT food and every RT TV commercial.

"Gosh, that's a great ring."

"Oh, it's nothing much."

"Nothing much? Hey," Jeff said, "as if I didn't know the circumstances surrounding it. You guys hear about the dinner at the University Club last week?"

In the formal conference room, replete with Eames chairs, a mahogany table as long as a basketball court, and Impressionist paintings by a nineteenth-century French artist whose name no one could pronounce-three men shook their heads.

"God, Mr. Culhane, you didn't get another award, did you?" Ken Miner said.

"How many does that make this year? Twenty? Thirty?" Bob Conroy wanted to know.

"Is it another one from that organization for crippled kids?" George Hart inquired.

Mr. Culhane shook his bald head and put on his after dinner-speaker smile. "You boys just insist on flattering an old man like me."

All four agency men laughed along with Mr. Culhane's usual protestation of modesty.

So Jeff, enthusiastic as a game-show host, walked the other guys through all the brownie points: the football team's 1939 triumphs (heard at every meeting), and calling the vice-president "Hank" (heard at every other meeting and usually alternated with Mr. Culhane's story about having a date with Jane Russell right after World War II, and "making Howard Hughes damned mad, let me tell you").

The social amenities out of the way, Mr. Culhane leaned forward, steepled his pudgy fingers, and said, "Now I want to see some goddamned good advertising from you boys."

Reddy Teddy Dog Food had a problem. Three years ago it had changed formulas, and, while it was nutritionally a better dog food than ever before, it stank. Dogs would point their wet, black noses at the food bowl and then back away slowly and inexorably, never to eat the stuff no matter how long their masters starved them.

Reddy Teddy went from number one in its category (meat-based, medium price range) to number three, which scared the hell out of everybody involved, Mr. Ray Culhane included.

A year ago, finally perceiving the situation correctly, Reddy Teddy chemists found a way to leap all the new nutritional benefits while going back to the old texture (the new stuff goopy in the way diarrhea was goopy) and the old smell.

So Reddy Teddy was in phase two, phase one having been a successful campaign that told consumers the old smell was back.

But now Mr. Culhane wanted the agency to be bolder. Where before they'd been merely informational (You remember the good old smell of Reddy Teddy? Well, it's back and nobody knows it better than your dog), now he wanted them to sell the sizzle, the goddamned, you know, magic.

Jeff, trembling slightly, rose and walked to the rear of the conference room where a draped easel stood.

"I know you don't like any preamble, Mr. Culhane, but if you don't mind, I'd like to pay my respects to our creative department in advance. They hunkered down for this one. They hunkered way down." One of Mr. Culhane's favorite phrases was "hunkered down," so Jeff used it whenever possible. (Over beers one night, wanting to impress Mr. Culhane-he never called him Ray-with how much he loved Mindy, Jeff had said, "When I met Mindy, I knew I'd have to hunker down to win her love, Mr. Culhane, hunker way down," a piece of ass-kissing that had left him vaguely disgusted with himself for months after.)