Robert Coover - John's Wife

The dawn movie on Veronica’s screen was more like a horror flick, or the fluttering tails of one, it was still ripping through her consciousness, shredding her sleep, leaving her too shocked and exhausted even to pry open her eyelids, which were mucky from crying all night. Everything was mucky, her whole body felt covered in slime from the awful thing. It seemed so real! She’d come across it while cleaning house, or dreaming that she was cleaning house. It was hunched down in the dirty place behind the refrigerator, where sometimes she was frightened by mice. She pulled out the ironing board and there it was with its large eyeless head like a cowled mendicant and bent shriveled limbs with little clawlike hands and feet. Veronica knew immediately who it was, of course: “What are you doing here?!” she’d screamed, holding the folded ironing board in front of her like a shield. No reply, just a wet raspy breathing as it huddled there in the dim niche, all curled up, throbbing faintly. Her first impulse was to throw the ironing board at it, but she was too terrified to move, her limbs were like stones, her heart, too, and she felt something hurting down deep behind her navel somewhere. She wished Maynard were home to shoot it (where was he?), but at the same time she was relieved he hadn’t seen it. Not yet anyway. He’d been in such a rage of late, this thing could make him dangerous. Yes, she had to get rid of it before he came back, but how? She realized that this was a question she had asked before, in real life, and all the guilt and pain of that came rushing back and made her scream again: “No! I didn’t mean it!” The thing in the corner cocked its high-domed head like it was trying to hear through the puckery hole in the side of it. Snot dripped from its nose and when it breathed it made a bubbly sound as if it were breathing underwater. She heaved the ironing board up against the space between the wall and the refrigerator so it couldn’t escape and went scrambling for the phone to call the doctor at his home. He wasn’t in; she left a message on his answering machine, still screaming, she couldn’t stop herself. She was afraid to go back to the kitchen, she needed help, she couldn’t face this alone. Help came. Ringing the door chimes. A miracle! “ Yes! I’m coming!” she screamed. It was what’s-her-name, John’s wife. She used to be one of her best friends, probably still was, she told her all about it. About what was behind the refrigerator, about where it came from and how she got her bottom smacked in the motel shower after, about everything. Even about how she celebrated what would have been Second John’s birthday every year. “He would have been seventeen in March!” she cried. “The same age I was that night at the drive-in!” The drive-in? She told her about that, too, it all came shrieking out, high-pitched and delirious, like something had burst inside, even Ronnie didn’t know what she was saying half the time. “ I was so scared!” John’s wife was very understanding. She said she was there to help. On behalf of the PTA, she said. Okay. Ronnie began to calm down. But she was still screaming. “Come, look! It’s horrible!” She ran into the kitchen to show her, but it wasn’t there any more. The ironing board had been pushed aside and there was a gleaming viscous trail from the refrigerator to the head of the basement stairs. “Oh no!” It was lying in a squishy heap on the concrete floor at the foot of the stairs. But it was still breathing. Sort of. John’s wife explained that it would be all right, its bones were too soft to break. This was not a consolation. Veronica wanted to smash it with something and put it out in the garbage, but instead she had to help John’s wife carry the slippery mess back up the stairs between them. Yeuck! It was oozing gunk and it got all over her. John’s wife wrapped it in a sheet (had she taken it off the bed upstairs? was that where Maynard was?) and together they took it out to a supermarket shopping cart John’s wife seemed to have brought along for the purpose. The swaddled creature’s wet strangled wheezing was terrifying and pitiable at the same time. Veronica felt like crying she was so sorry for it, but she also felt like throwing up. Then John’s wife told her something very important, so important Veronica stopped crying and carrying on and just watched, stunned, as the woman disappeared down the street, pushing the shopping cart with Ronnie’s unborn son in it. But when she woke, she could not remember what it was John’s wife had said. She lay there with her eyes closed, listening to Maynard’s bubbly wheezing beside her, trying to remember. It was so important! Something about — uh-oh. Wait a minute. Bubbly wheezing? Maynard—? Oh no …! It can’t end this way! she thought confusedly, trying to go back to sleep, or else to wake up again. She could hear the thing snorting and whuffing as it cuddled closer, blindly reaching out its slimy monkey’s paw. Oh my god! Was it trying to suck her breast—?! She screamed and, her eyes still glued shut, leapt from the bed.

Barnaby’s eyes were wide open. He had never been more lucid. It often happened this way at the dewy end of a night. The two halves of his cracked brain slid together like train cars coupling, and he could see clearly, if only for a short time, about as long as it took the dew to rise, what a fucked-up old ruin he was. In these dawn moments he had no confusions, understood everything: how Audrey, dying too soon, had undone him utterly with her bastardized will, how John had pushed him to the edge, then over, imprisoning him here in this cheap pre-cremation motel after the stroke, how his beloved daughter, literally all he had left in this world, had drifted away from him, probably blaming him for everything that had happened, how even his old friend Alf had lost interest (and, hell, who wouldn’t?), patronizing him at best and leaving him pretty much in the hands of that dotty old lady who liked to pretend she was Audrey. Alf at least took his side on the civic center controversy, even if he supposed Barnaby wasn’t listening when he talked to him about it, and, living in one of Barnaby’s houses, praised his craft in his dour taciturn way: “You built things to last, Barn. Trouble is, that scares people. Nowadays, they need things around them that wear out faster than they do.” Sanctuaries of the family, that was what Barnaby was building — solid foundations, rational structures you could trust, tasteful neighborly details, a principle of restraint and comfort and proportion throughout — but people didn’t have families in the old way anymore. If they ever did. Just an illusion maybe, a mere veneer. Look at his own. A damned catastrophe and heart irreparably broken after. Figuring out the real world made you want to kill yourself — in fact, come to think of it, he’d meant to, he had rescued his old handgun for the purpose, holstering it under his armpit so he wouldn’t forget where it was, but it wasn’t there anymore. John’s sponge-brained mother must have hidden it; maybe her son had told her to. He was as good as dead anyway, why not prolong the agony? Watch the old boy twitch and wobble, have a few laughs. So why hadn’t he shot himself when he had the gun in hand? Because he’d wanted to explain himself to his daughter before he died. Warn her about what was happening. Tell her how much he loved her. He no longer believed he was able to do that. Even in these sounder moments, the words that came out were not the ones he was thinking. Dying was about all he was able to do now, and that wouldn’t be easy. Barnaby had come to understand that dying was not acquiescence to something inevitable, quite the contrary — life was what was passive. The body could go on forever, or nearly; to die it had to be instructed. This was the function of what men called spirit, nihilism was after all man’s truest instinct, this was the ultimate message of his acids: turn it off. His own self-destruct switch had been flicked, the instructions had been passed, but the circuits had shorted out. At this rate of staticky disintegration it could take forever. So where the hell had that stupid old woman hidden the goddamned thing? Probably in the bottom of the laundry basket, said his daughter. Right. Good idea. The laundry basket. He sidled, dragging his dead leg, toward the bathroom door. This was hard work. He felt like he was struggling against strange impersonal forces. Like the sort that ran the town now. Used to be one big family. No longer. What John had done, in effect, was take the roof off. Neighbors and strangers were the same thing. Locks on all the doors now. Burglar alarm systems. Even though no one stayed home. He poked around, found a shirt he’d been looking for. Here all the time. Not why he’d come in here, though. He struggled to pee and dribbled on his bedroom slippers. Just a trickle, didn’t really need to go. So that wasn’t it either. His medicine maybe. He fumbled with the cap on the plastic vial. When it finally popped off, everything spilled into the sink and on the floor. To hell with it. Wouldn’t kill him to do without until Audrey came, and if it did, he’d have done himself a favor. Where was the old bag anyway? It was getting light outside. The birds were going at it. Was his daughter just here? Had he been able to tell her anything? Why was there all this dirty laundry all over the floor?