David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

“He’s big as the trees.” He said it aloud, with a bit of a laugh. He wanted to say it to his pal Stephen Fletcher, a lean young black-haired colt of a boy who dressed sets back on The Devil Pirates . For the past month he’d spent many of his after-hours undressing James. Stephen was smooth and young and eager to please — and James wished Stephen were here now. But he couldn’t take his lover home. Not any more than he could admit to having him in Los Angeles.

James set his mouth and engaged the clutch. The Ford Coupe crunched across the gravel with a noise like breaking glass. He rounded a bend, and came out in the great bowl of valley in the Coeur d’ Alene mountains. The road was still high enough that he could see the dim etchings of the familiar peaks against the night sky that surrounded Chamblay. In the valley’s middle, miles distant, James could make out a glow among the trees.

This was new for him. When he’d left home, the Grand Coulee Dam wasn’t even half built, and the only light in Chamblay came from candle, kerosene and the sun. James smiled bitterly.

After dark on a moonless night, Chamblay could hide in itself.

The road carried James down a sharp slope and drew alongside the Northern Pacific line that served the town. The tracks gleamed silvery in his headlamps for an instant before he turned back parallel to the line.

That was the line that, according to his mother’s cryptic telegram, had something significant to do with his father’s sudden and untimely death.

“Mmm.” He smiled a little, and thought about the giant in the road again — not just the eye, but his immense, sculpted thighs, the dark beard that tumbled halfway down the broad chest…

“What a thing,” he said. “What a marvellous thing. Put that in a picture, no one would believe it.”

The giant, of course, would be the perfect thing for the pictures. Particularly pictures like The Devil Pirates . In the person of the brave and over-energetic Captain Kip Blackwell, James had battled a giant octopus, not one but two carnivorous gorillas, a host of man-eating midgets from Blood Island, and of course, several of the fearsome Devil Pirates themselves. For all that battling, Republic still wanted another batch of a dozen episodes before the serial ran its course. The giant man in the road, with the peculiar eye in the middle of his forehead, naked as the day he was born — he’d fill out four of those episodes, maybe more, all by himself.

James thought about that — about unsheathing his rapier against a giant more than twice as tall as he — leaping across the otherwise unconvincing deck of the Crimson Monkey , dodging the blows of the giant’s papier-mâché club, slashing out theatrically with his sword to bring a dozen yards of sailcloth onto the monster’s roaring head. Perhaps, to be true to the plotline, they’d be battling over the honour of the lovely Princess Rebecca, who had disguised herself as a cabin boy back in episode three to join Kip and his crew on their frenetically eventful voyage.

“Wouldn’t do to lose that fight,” said James, thinking for a moment of what would become of his co-star, tiny Alice Shaw, in the amorous clutches of the giant. He slowed down as he drew through the closed-down business section of Chamblay, past the Episcopalian church his parents frequented, the schoolhouse where he’d learned to read — and finally outside the old clapboard house where he’d spent the first seventeen years of his life. James smiled and shook his head: the preposterous picture of a twenty-foot-tall man mounting a five-foot-two-inch woman provided a comic, if grotesque, distraction to the matter at hand.

He was still thinking about it — or about the giant, the magnificent giant that he might have seen or might, the more he thought of it, simply have dreamed — as he pulled his suitcase from the Ford’s trunk, let out a long sigh, and made his way up the path to his mother’s front door. The telegram that had brought him here sat folded in his jacket pocket and he made himself think of it. It was a reminder of what he ought to be feeling.

DEAREST JIMMY STOP I HAVE TERRIBLE NEWS TO DELIVER STOP YOUR FATHER HAS BEEN KILLED IN ACCIDENT ON TRACKS STOP PLEASE COME HOME STOP ALL IS FORGIVEN I LOVE YOU STOP YOU ARE THE MAN OF THE HOUSE NOW STOP PLEASE COME STOP LOVE ALWAYS YOUR MOTHER STOP

“Oh.”

That was what James had said when the script girl had handed him the slip of onionskin paper from Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. He’d set his glass of water down. Read the words from the telegram once, and then again. Endured the girl’s hand on his arm, the sympathetic cooing noise she made. He gave her a smile that was meant to look strained — the smile of a grieving son, bravely facing the death of his beloved old dad.

“Well,” he said. He unbuckled the leather belt and scabbard. He draped it over the canvas back of his chair. He walked back behind the false adobe wall of the Castillo de Diablo set. He found a spot where no one could see him. Crossed his arms. Put his hand on his forehead, and waved away a carpenter who’d stuck his head back there to see what was wrong. Then laughed, silently but deeply, until tears streamed convincingly in little brown rivers down the layers of orange pancake encrusted on his cheeks.

His dad was dead. Some terrible accident on the tracks. Well, wasn’t that rich. The town would probably be having a parade for Nick Thorne, his strapping, iron-jawed Paul Bunyan of a father… And now—

—now, he was the man of the house.

There was only one word for it.

Rich .

Three days after the telegram, in the middle of the night, James trod up the front steps to the family house. He didn’t know much more now than he did then: he’d just sent off one telegram before packing up his car and heading off. He found that he didn’t want to know more than his mother chose to reveal in that fifty-word telegram. So he just composed one of his own:

DEAREST MOM STOP I WILL BE HOME IN THREE DAYS STOP DO NOT WORRY ABOUT THE COST OF BURIAL I WILL PAY STOP YOUR SON JAMES STOP

There was light inside the house. He was not surprised to see that it was not electric. His father hadn’t worked a decent job since the last time the North Brothers had run their mill, and that was years ago.

But the kerosene flame gave James an odd sort of comfort. The yellow, flickering light was proper and right for a town like Chamblay. Electricity was for New York and Los Angeles. This little place wasn’t ready for it.

He paused to look inside. There was his mother, sitting in one of the hard, high-backed chairs. She held the black covers of the family Bible in front of her face like a fan. She heard him coming — he knew her well enough to tell that — but she pretended not to. As he watched through the window, she licked a forefinger and turned a page.

James leaned over and rapped twice on the windowpane. His mother looked up. Widened her eyes in unconvincing delight, as though he were the last person she’d expect to see at the window on an August night some four days after the death of her husband. “Jimmy!” Her voice had a far-away sound to it through the windowpane. She shut the Bible on its marker, set it down and hurried to the front door, which she flung open with a clatter. “Oh, Jimmy!”

James patted his mother’s back. “Hello, Mother,” he said, as she buried her face in the crook of his shoulder and moistened his shirt with tears. “Hello.”

“Now tell me what happened,” he said, as they sat across from one another in the dining room. “What happened to Dad?”

His mother smoothed out her print dress and looked down. “I’m sorry, hon — I guess I didn’t put too much in that telegram. Thought you might have read the newspapers. About the derailment and such.”