She chatters on as he enters the kitchen, opens the icebox and takes out a tray, finds two tall glasses and loads them with cubes. The tea is in a pitcher on the counter, next to the radio. In here the Muzak is deafening, but he doesn’t dare turn it down, though it makes the glasses chatter in his hands.
“Who’s looking out from under the stairway? Everyone knows it’s—”
“Donny!”
He forces his fingers to relax before they crush the glasses. His teeth are clamped together, there is fog in his eyes and fear on his breath. He stands in darkness, fumbling for a way back to the light. His hands encounter a drawer.
“Donny, come in here!”
He walks toward her voice like a servile mummy, stiff-legged, carrying drinks; the gleeful Muzak dictates his steps, sets the pace of his heart. He reaches the coffee table and starts to set down the drinks, only to find that he is not holding beverages after all. In either hand is a knife: not as sharp as his special knives, being for domestic use, but still sufficient for his purposes.
On the screen, to which Mother draws his eyes with a bony finger, is frozen a frame from his video: a flayed corpse in a cemetery. TCM. He almost drops the knives.
“I put on the Care Bears,” she says.
His hands begin to shake as the Muzak blasts at his shoulders, pushing him closer to her. Closer.
“Aren’t they wonderful?” he whispers. “Such feeling. Such care…
“Why, yes,” she answers, looking past the knives that almost touch her throat. She doesn’t see them. She smiles at Donny. “I thought we could watch them together. What’s this cute fellow’s name?”
He looks at the screen and lowers the knives. “He never has a name. But later…” He sets the knives on the coffee table, iced tea forgotten, and seats himself beside her. “Later, you’ll meet Leatherface.”
“Leatherface? And is he very nice?”
“Oh yes,” he says. “Very, very nice.”
“And these are the Care Bears you watch every day?”
“That’s right.” He nods eagerly, amazed by her blindness. She must see only what she wants to see. How could she believe anything but the best of her son? Her first sight of the corpse— where she had expected to find an animated teddy bear—must have snapped her mind. What a relief! It means he can finally be honest with her: after so much furtiveness, he can tell her his secrets and bask in her praise. She should be as proud of him as she’d be if he’d found a job or built a birdhouse.
The video player whirrs, begins to move again.
“Oh, Donny, I see,” she says in high-pitched merriment. “I’m so glad we’re together, just you and me.”
“So am I, Mom. I have to tell you—”
The confessions are ready to come bubbling up, but she interrupts him.
“It was you who poisoned Gracie’s noisy little dog, wasn’t it?” Her tone is comforting. “And set the fire?”
He blushes, but when she gives his knee a gentle squeeze, he nods shyly. “Yes, Mom, and—”
“You don’t know how relieved I am to hear it. And it’s you who’ve been taking out Dad’s truck late at night, isn’t it?”
He straightens. “Oh no, Mom, honest! I wouldn’t do that without asking, you know I…”
Her eyes begin to wander. “Then I must be losing my mind,” she says gently. “Try to Remember” filters in from the kitchen. “I’m so old I’ve started hearing things.”
“No, Mom, don’t say that.” He chokes back a sob. “Okay, I have gone out. That was me you heard. I won’t do it anymore, though. I promise I won’t use the woody.” That’s a true lie; he’ll have to use the other car from now on, since the woody was spotted.
“I know where you’ve been going, Donny.”
“Do you, Mom?”
“Of course I do. I’m not senile, you know.”
“No, Mom, you’re sharp as a tack. I was going to tell you about it, really I—”
“Hush, I know you better than that.” She puts a finger to her lips, rises from the sofa, goes to the stereo. She takes out an album and puts it on the player. He’s so excited that he doesn’t even care that it’s Lawrence Welk. As the schmaltzy music fills the air and a slaughterhouse on the television brightens the room, she comes back and kisses him on the crown.
“I’ve heard them, you see,” she says.
“Oh, that,” he says, feeling awkward.
“Now be honest. I’ve heard them come in with you, and the noises. You make them squeal, don’t you? They like you very much, isn’t that so?”
“Like me?” He stretches his collar, clears his throat. “You don’t think I…”
“I’ve told you not to lie to me, Donny,” she snaps. “What’s been going on in my house? Something dirty? Something shameful?”
Black champagne bubbles float up and gather against the ceiling, filling the room from the top to the bottom. That music— Muzak.
“Take off this record, Mom, please.”
“Are you doing wicked things in there?”
“No, Mom, no… it’s nothing like that.”
“Vile things? Evil?”
“Mom, I kill them! That’s all, I swear. I keep them tied up for a while and then I chop them into pieces.”
“Don’t lie to me, Donny.”
She glares at him, one finger tapping in time to Lawrence Welk. There’s nothing else in the room, none of the comfort of the TV massacres; only Mom and her accusations, which are brutal as blows because unjust. He tries to rise but the music beats him down. Where are the knives? He squints through the black ballooning air, but the only blades he sees are in her hands.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No, Mama, I’m not lying. Please don’t punish me, I’ll be good.”
Muzak thicker than murder. He bolts through his muddled thoughts, escaping in the only direction open to him with his body paralyzed and his mother waiting for him out there in the land without feelings. This proves to be a dead end, but by the time he has backed out to consciousness, he is truly immobilized. Ropes cut into his wrists and ankles. He lies cramped on his side in a cold coffin. Is it only a movie? he asks himself.
“—never, never do it again,” his mother is saying. “You’ll never—”
“I won’t,” he tries to promise, but his mouth is plugged with a kitchen sponge. He opens his eyes to stare at a shiny white wall high as a cliff, all porcelain. Mom stands looking down at him, humming to a saccharine tune from the other room. He fights the Muzak’s spell, but he cannot fight the ropes.
“You’ve been a very bad boy,” she says. “I have to see to it that you don’t bring any more trouble to this house.”
Over the cliff, the lip of the tub, the edge of the barrow appears. Her shoulders strain to lift it. Not cement, he thinks.
Oh no, not cement. A grey flood drools steadily toward his face. There’s a sickly sweet smell. “Just to fill you up,” she says. The basin reverberates with the sound of his struggles as the clammy mixture spreads across his cheeks. What a stupid sound!
And the last thing he hears, as oatmeal seals his ears, is pure schmaltz.
“Muzak for Torso Murders” copyright 1986 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Cutting Edge (1986), edited by Dennis Etchison.
SHUCK BROTHER
Mama had been good all day, but at suppertime she went mad again and spoiled everything. It was the chicken that did it this time, the good chicken Pop had killed that afternoon by stepping on its head with his boot heel and yanking up on the talons, everything happening in slow motion under the August sun, as if the whole world wanted Jory to see exactly how it was done: the sound of the spine pulling apart, and the taffy-stretched squawk, the slow drizzle of blood on the green grass where the dead cock flapped and twitched among the hens while their heads gawked and eyes and beaks gaped as wide as they would go in the bottom of the bucket that Pop gave Jory to dump in the crick. They hadn’t gone out to kill the rooster, but it’d given Pop a few good scratches when he went in the coop for a couple-three hens, and Pop had just gone crazy himself right then and swore like hell, grabbed that cock and stepped down…