The Plant Page 15

  “Where were you when she died, though? Where were you when she had the six or seven little heart attacks leading up to the big ones? Where were you when she had all those little strokes and got so funny in her head?”

  “Oh, he was in New York,” Floyd said cheerily. “He was employing his fine arts degree scrubbing floors in some white man's book-publishing office.”

  “It's research,” I said in a voice so low I could barely hear it. I felt all at once as though I might faint. “Research for the book.”

  “Research, that explains it,” Evelyn said with a sage nod, and put the cash money carefully back into the tin box. “That's why she went without lunches for four years in order to pay for your schoolbooks. So you could research the wonderful world of custodial science.”

  “Oh, ain't you a bitch,” I said... just as though I had not written many of those same things about my job at Zenith House, not once but several times, in the pages of this journal.

  “Shut up,” Maddy said. “Just shut up and listen to me, you self-righteous, judgmental prig.” She spoke in a low, furious voice that I had never heard before, had never imagined might come from her. “You, the only one of us not married and with children. The only one with the luxury of seeing family through this... this... I don't know...”

  “This golden haze of memory,” Floyd suggested. He had a little silver bottle in his pants pocket. He drew it out then and had himself a nip.

  Maddy nodded. “You don't have the slightest idea of what we need, do you? Of where we are. Floyd and Sophie have got kids getting ready to go to college. Evvie's have gone through, and she's got the unpaid bills to prove it. Mine are coming along. Only you—”

  “Why not ask Floyd to help you?” I asked her. “Mama wrote me a letter and said he cleared a quarter of a million last year. Don't you see... don't any of you see what this is? This is robbing pennies off a dead woman's eyes! She—”

  Floyd stepped up. His eyes were deadly flat. He held up a clenched fist. “You say another word like that, Riddie, and I'm going to break your nose.”

  There was a moment of tense silence, and then from down below Aunt Olympia called up, her voice high and jolly and nervous. “Boys and girls? Everything all right up there?”

  “Fine, Aunt Olly,” Evelyn called back. Her voice was light and carefree; her eyes, which never left mine, were murderous. “Talking over the old times. We'll be down in a wink. Y'all stay close, all right?”

  “You're sure everything is okay?”

  And I, God help me, felt an insane urge to scream: No! It's not okay! Get up here! You and Uncle Michael both get up here! Get up here and rescue me! Save me from the pecking of the carrion birds!

  But I kept my mouth shut, and Evvie shut the door.

  Sophie said, “Mama wrote you all the time, we knew that, Rid. You were always her favorite, she spoiled you rotten, especially after Pop died and there was no more holding her back. You got plenty of how she saw it.”

  “That's not true,” I said.

  “But it is,” Maddy said. “And do you know what? The way Mama saw things was pretty selective. She told you about all the money Floyd made last year, I've no doubt of it, but I doubt if she told you about how Floyd's partner stole everything he could get his hands on. Hi-ho, it's Oren Anderson, off to the Bahamas with his chippy of the month.”

  I felt as if I'd been sucker-punched. I looked at Floyd. “Is that true?”

  Floyd took another little nip at the silver flask that had been Pop's before it was his and grinned at me. It was a ghastly grin. His eyes were redder than ever and there was spit on his lips. He looked like a man at the end of a month-long binge. Or at the beginning of one.

  “True as can be, little brother,” he said. “I was rooked like an amateur. I think I'm going to be able to sail through without getting in the papers, but it's still not a sure thing. I came to her for help and she told me how she was broke. Never got over putting you through Cornell is what she said. How broke does that on the bed look to you, little brother? Eight thousand in cash... at least... and twice that in jewelry. Thirty thousand in stocks, maybe. And she wanted to give it to the library.” A glare of contempt closed his face like a cramp. “Jesus please us.”

  I looked to Evvie. “Your husband Jack... the construction business...”

  “Jack's had a hard two years,” she said. “He's in trouble. Every bank within fifty miles is carrying his paper. How much he owes is all that's propping him up.” She laughed, but her eyes were frightened. “Just something else you didn't know. Sophie's Randall is a little better off—”

  “We keep even, but get ahead?” Sophie also laughed. “Not likely. Floyd helped all of us along when he could, but since Oren double-crossed him...”

  “That snake,” Maddy said. “That fucking snake.”

  I turned to Floyd, and nodded at the little flask. “Maybe you've been taking a little too much of that. Maybe that's why you didn't mind your business a little better when you had a little more business to mind.”

  Floyd's fist came slowly up again. This time I stuck out my chin. You get to a point when you just don't care anymore. I know that now.

  “Go ahead, Floyd. If it'll make you feel better, go on ahead. And if you think twenty or even forty thousand dollars is going to bail y'all out, then go ahead with that, too. More fools you be.”

  Floyd drew his fist back. He would have hit me, too, but Maddy stepped between us. She looked at me, and I looked away. I couldn't bear what I saw in her eyes.

  “You with the quotes,” she said softly. “Always with the quotable quotes. Well, here's one for you, Mr. Uppity: 'He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune. ' Francis Bacon said that almost three hundred years ago, and it was folks like us he was talking about, not folks like you. Not folks that take twenty or thirty thousand dollars to get educated, then have to do research in floor-polishing. How much have you given back to your family? I'll tell you how much! Nothing! And nothing! And nothing!”

  She was standing so close and spat each nothing so hard that spit flew from her lips to mine.

  “Maddy, I—”

  “Shut up,” she said. “I'm talking now.”

  “Tell it!” Sophie said happily. It was a nightmare, I tell you. A nightmare.

  “I'm getting out of here,” I said, and started to turn away.

  They wouldn't let me. That's like nightmares, too; they won't let you get away. Evelyn grabbed me on one side, Floyd on the other.

  “No,” Evvie said, and I could smell booze on her breath, too. The wine they were drinking downstairs. “You listen. For once in your stuck-up life, you just listen.”

  “You weren't here when she got funny, but we were,” Maddy said. “The strokes she had affected her mind. Sometimes she went wandering, and we had to go find her and bring her back. Once she did it at night and we had half the town out looking for her with flashlights. So far as I could tell, you weren't there when we finally found her at two in the morning, curled up on the riverbank fast asleep with half a dozen fat copperheads down there not four yards from her bare feet. So far as I know, you were up there in your New York apartment when that happened, fast asleep yourself.”

  “Tell it,” Floyd said grimly. All of them acting as though I live in the Dakota, in a penthouse, instead of my little place in Dobbs Ferry... and yet my little place is nice enough, isn't it? Perfectly affordable, even on a janitor's salary, for a man with no vices and no hostages to fortune.

  “Sometimes she messed herself,” Maddy said. “Sometimes she talked crazy in church. She'd go to her book-circle and rave half an hour about some book she'd read twenty years ago. She'd be all right for awhile... she had plenty of good days until the last few months... but sooner or later the nutty stuff would start in again, each time a little worse, a little longer. And you didn't know about any of it, did you?”

  “How could I?” I asked. “How could I, when none of you wrote and told me? Not so much as a word?”r />
  That was the one shot of mine that went home. Maddy flushed. Sophie and Evvie looked away, saw the treasure scattered on the bed, and then looked away from that, too.

  “Would you have come?” Floyd asked quietly. “If we'd written you, Riddie, would you have come?”

  “Of course,” I said, and heard the terrible stiff falsity in my voice. So, of course, did they... and the moral advantage passed away from me. For tonight, most likely for good, as far as they are concerned. That their own moral stance was at least partly an excuse for reprehensible behavior I do not doubt. But their anger at me was genuine, and at least partly justified—I don't doubt that, either.

  “Of course,” he said, nodding and grinning his red-eyed grin. “Of course.”

  “We took care of her,” Maddy said. “We banded together and we took care of her. There was no hospital and no nursing home, even after she started to wander. After the riverbank adventure I slept here some nights; so did Sophie; so did Evelyn and Floyd. Everyone but you, Rid. And how did she thank us? By leaving us a worthless house and a worthless barn and four acres of nearly worthless land. The things that were worth something—money that could pay off the credit cards Floyd uses for his business and give Jack a little more breathing-space—those she denied us. So we took them. And you come in, Mr. Smart Northern Nigger comes in, and tells us we're ghouls stealing the pennies off a dead woman's eyes.”

  “But Maddy... don't you see that if what you take isn't what she wanted to give, no matter how much of a tight place you're in or how bad you need it, that's stealing? Stealing from your own mother?”

  “My own mother was crazy!” she cried at me in a whispered shriek. She pistoned her tiny fists in the air, I think expressing her frustration that I should continue to balk over a point that was so clear to her... perhaps because she had been there, she had seen Mama's craziness at its fruitiest, and I had not. “She lived the last part of her life crazy and she died crazy! That will was crazy!”

  “We earned this here,” Sophie said, first patting Maddy's back and then drawing her gently away from me, “so never mind your talk about stealing. She tried to give away what was ours. I don't blame her for it, she was crazy, but it's not going to stand. Riddie, you just want to take all your Boy Scout ideas on out of here and let us finish our business.”

  “That's right,” Evvie said. “Go on down and get a glass of wine. If Boy Scouts drink wine, that is. Tell them we'll be down directly.”

  I looked at Floyd. He nodded, not smiling now. By then none of them were smiling. Smiling was done. “That's it, little brother. And never mind that oh-poor-me look on your face. You stuck your nose in where it didn't belong. If you got bee-stung, it's nobody's fault but your own.”

  At the last I looked at Maddy. Just hoping. Well, hope in one hand and shit in the other; even a puffick idiot knows how that one turns out.

  “Go on,” she said. “I can't bear to look at you.”

  I went back down the stairs like a man in a dream, and when Aunt Olympia laid her hand on my arm and asked what was wrong up there, I smiled and said nothing, we were just talking over old times and got a little hot under the collar. The Southern family at its finest; paging Tennessee Williams. I said I was going into town to get a few things, and when Aunt Olly asked me what things—meaning what had she forgotten when she stocked for Mama's last party—I didn't answer her. I just went on out, marching straight ahead with that meaningless little smile on my face, and got into my rental car. Basically what I've done since is just keep going. I left a few clothes and a paperback book, and they can stay there until the end of the age, as far as it concerns me. And all the while I've been moving I've also been replaying what I saw as I stood unnoticed in her doorway: drawers pulled out and underwear scattered and them on the bed with their hands full of her things and the cover of her tin box set aside. And everything they said may have been true, or partially true (I think the most convincing lies are almost always partially true), but what I remember most clearly is their overheard laughter, which had nothing in it of absconding partners or husbands teetering on the edge of insolvency or credit card bills long past due and stamped with those ugly red-ink warnings. Nothing to do with kids needing money for college, either. The rue count, in other words, was zero. The laughter I overheard was that of pirates or trolls who have found buried treasure and are dividing it up, perchance by the light of a silver dollar pancake moon. I went down the stairs and down the back porch steps and away from that place like a man in a dream, and I am still that dreamer, sitting in a train with ink splattered all the way up my hand to the wrist and several pages of scribbling, probably indecipherable, now behind me. How foolish it is to write, what a pitiful bulwark against this world's hard realities and bitter home truths. How terrible to say, “This is all I have.” Everything aches: hand, wrist, arm, head, heart. I am going to close my eyes and try to sleep... at least to doze.

  It's Maddy's face that terrifies me. Greed has made her a stranger to me. A terrible stranger, like one of those female monsters in the Greek fairy-tales. No doubt I am a prig, just as they said, a self-righteous prig, but nothing will change what I saw in their eyes when they didn't know I was seeing them.

  Nothing.

  More than my book, I find it's the simplicities of work that I long for—Kenton's endless self-analysis and agonizing, Gelb's amusing fixation with the dice, Porter's even more amusing fixation with the seat of Sandra Jackson's office chair. I wouldn't even mind having it off with her again, starring in one of her fantasies. I want the simplicity of my janitor's cubby, where all things are known, normal, unsurprising. I want to see if that pitiful little ivy is maintaining its toehold on life.

  Around moonset, the Silver Meteor crossed the Mason-Dixon line. My sisters and my brother are on the other side of that line now, and I'm glad.

  I can't wait to get back to New York.

  Later/8 A. M.

  Slept for almost five hours. My neck is stiff and my back feels like a mule kicked me, but on the whole I feel a little better. At least I was able to eat a little breakfast. I thought the idea I woke with might go away in the dining car, but it has remained clear. The idea—the intuition—is that if I were to go into the office instead of switching trains for Dobbs Ferry, I might feel better yet. I feel drawn there. It's as though I had a dream about the place, one I can't quite remember.

  Maybe it's the plant—Zenith the ivy. My subconscious telling me to go in and water the poor little thing before it dies of thirst.

  Well... why not?

  From the dispatches of Iron-Guts Hecksler

  Apr 4 81 0600 hrs Pk Ave So NYC

  Zero hour approaching. I plan to make my entry into the Publishing House of Satan across the street in 2–3 hours. “Crazy Guitar Gertie” disguise put away. Respectable businessman in weekend clothes now, HA!

  Look out, you Designated Jew. I will be in your office by noon, waiting

  On Monday morning your ass is mine.

  No more dreams of CARLOS. He may be gone. Good. One less thing to worry about.

  from THE SAKRED BOOK OF CARLOS

  SAKRED MONTH OFAPRA (Entry #79)

  Saturday morning. As soon as I finish this entry, I leave for Zenith House of Kaka-Poop. Have my “special suitcase” with all sakred sacrifice knives. They are “plenty sharp,” too! I am dressed nice, like a business-man on his Saturday in the city. I should have no problems penetrating into that house of thiefs and mockers.

  Wonder if Kenton got my “little present.”

  Wonder if he knows what's happening with his girl-friend or should I say ex girlfriend. Too bad he'll be dead before she can give him anymore “pussy.” Innocent blood! Innocent blood from her if no other first!

  Myself I will die a virgin and I am glad.

  I hope and expect to be locked away in Kenton's office by noon today. I have plenty of snacks and two sodas in with my knives and I will be able to “hold out” until Monday just fine.

  No mor
e dreams of “The General” and his Designated Juice. That's a load off my mind.

  And now for you, John Kenton. Betrayer of my dreams, thief of my book. Why wait for the abbalah to do what I can do myself?

  COME DEMETER!

  COME GREEN!

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Following next month's installment of this story—next month's very long installment of this story—The Plant will be going back into hibernation so that I can continue work on Black House (the sequel to The Talisman, written in collabo-ration with Peter Straub). I also need to complete work on two new novels (the first, Dreamcatcher, will be available from Scribner's next March) and see if I can't get going on The Dark Tower again. And my agent insists I need to take a breather so that foreign translation and publication of The Plant—also in installments, also on the Net—can catch up with American publication. Yet don't despair. The last time The Plant furled its leaves, the story remained dormant for nineteen years. If it could survive that, I'm sure it can survive a year or two while I work on other projects.

  Part 6 is the most logical stopping point. In a traditional print book, it would be the end of the first long section (which I would probably call “Zenith Rising”).

  You will find a climax of sorts, and while not all of your questions will be an-swered—not yet, at least—the fates of several characters will be resolved.

  Nastily

  Permanently.