Margaret Millar
Banshee
To Carol and Ralph Sipper
Chapter One
The princess skipped down the garden path accompanied by her court. The larger of her two attendants had thick black hair and allegedly came from Newfoundland but this was never proved. The other was a brown-haired German. Both were loyal and affectionate (though frequently inclined to ignore commands that seemed impractical or unnecessary) and both listened attentively. Newf’s fat silky belly made a soft pillow for the royal head when its owner wished to lie under the oak tree and watch the little worms twisting and turning at the tips of the leaves like high-wire performers in a circus.
Shep too was very useful. He pulled the royal roller skates around the driveway and licked dirt and blood off scraped knees and elbows so the princess wouldn’t have to go inside the house and be fussed over. Shep did just as good a job as the housekeeper, Mrs. Chisholm, with her washcloths and soap and cotton balls dipped in alcohol. Moreover, Shep’s tongue was very gentle and didn’t sting.
Mrs. Chisholm was always suspicious, of course. “Looks to me like somebody had another fall, that’s how it looks to me like.”
“I don’t hurt,” said Annamay, admitting nothing while not actually lying.
“Bet a dollar to a doughnut that’s what happened. And you let one of those creatures spit all over you again. One of these days you’ll perish from some dread disease carried by dog spit.”
Mrs. Chisholm frequently lost points by exaggeration, hitting the ball so hard it landed in another court and her opponent won by default.
“If I were your mother I’d send samples of dog spit to a laboratory to be tested for pernicious germs. Maybe I’ll do it on my own.”
“No, you won’t, Chizzy.”
“And pray, why not?”
“It might cost a lot of money. They might charge you for every single germ. And what if they found a million of them at a penny each?”
Chizzy did some quick arithmetic and retreated with dignity. “I would send the bill to your father.”
The princess continued on down through the cutting garden, past the lath house and the koi pond to the palace which had been especially built for her. The palace had seemed enormous at first but every year it shrank until now there was hardly room, when her attendants were allowed inside, for Annamay to entertain friends and look after her favorite children.
Both children required skilled care. Marietta had lost half her hair, not to some dread disease but to Newf who finally upchucked most of it in the vegetable garden along with one of Luella Lu’s glass eyes. Luella Lu’s eye, miraculously intact, was retrieved, washed and glued back in place but it remained fixed in its socket while the other eye moved, and Luella Lu ever after looked quite mysterious, as though she could see things others couldn’t. A repentant Newf often carried her around in his mouth by way of apology and there were no hard feelings within the royal circle.
Not many princesses managed without a maid but Annamay did. She cleaned and cooked, she entertained her friends and Chizzy and her mother and father and their friend Benjamin who had designed the palace. She served peanut-butter sandwiches and orange juice. On these occasions Newf and Shep had to be evicted to make room for the guests. They would stand outside peering into the windows, drooling and reproachful. Although the dogs didn’t care for peanut-butter sandwiches they were strong on principle and it seemed patently unfair for them to be excluded from the palace merely to make interlopers more comfortable.
Sometimes the princess, disguised as a commoner in shorts and T-shirt, went off adventuring. These excursions usually started down by the creek below the avocado grove. Here, while the dogs ate avocados, seeds and all, Annamay caught tadpoles and water walkers. She picked canyon sunflowers the color of her hair and periwinkles the color of her eyes, and practiced jumping from shore to shore.
In one of her storybooks a little lost boy had followed a creek downstream because he knew that eventually it would lead to civilization. And sure enough it did, not only for the little lost boy but for Annamay, who ended up at the Cunninghams’ swimming pool.
Mr. Cunningham was lying on a canvas mat stark naked. Annamay had never seen a naked man before and it was quite interesting what with one thing and another. Then Mr. Cunningham grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his waist.
“What do you mean creeping up on me like that, you crazy kid?”
“I wasn’t creeping,” Annamay said. “I was following the water downstream seeking civilization.”
“Well, you sure as hell came to the wrong place.”
Mr. Cunningham stretched, yawned, scratched his pink glossy scalp. Annamay wondered if he had been born with his hair in the wrong places which would make him, in Chizzy’s vocabulary, one of God’s little mistakes.
“There are,” he added, “savages lurking behind every tree.”
“I don’t see any.”
“There wouldn’t be much point in their lurking if you saw them.”
Mr. Cunningham’s mother called out from the house, “Who is it, dear?” She sounded quite drunk, not surprisingly so since Chizzy said Mrs. Cunningham had a great thirst. “Who is it, Peter dear?”
“The Hyatt girl.”
“What does she want?”
“Civilization.”
“How peculiar.”
“I don’t want civilization,” Annamay said. “I was only testing the story about the lost boy going downstream and coming across civilization.”
“Next time,” Mr. Cunningham said, “try going upstream.”
Sometimes the princess had unexpected callers, like the bearded man with the tambourine strapped to his back. He was stealing avocados but came up to the palace to see if a midget lived there.
The dogs barked at him furiously but just as furiously wagged their tails, so the man wasn’t scared until Chizzy came charging down the path waving a broom and shouting. Every living creature in the neighborhood was afraid of Chizzy with or without a broom because she had, according to Annamay’s father, Howard, a voice that would shatter glass. The prospect of such a delightful occurrence kept Annamay at Chizzy’s heels for several days after she received this information. But no glass was shattered except by Annamay herself when she helped with the dishes.
The bearded man came again later in the week, but not right into the grove or up to the palace where he could be spotted from the house. He stayed down by the creek and took off his shoes and let the water run over his feet. Since this was precisely what Annamay and Newf and Shep liked to do, it was almost inevitable that they should all meet.
Paws and feet dangled companionably in the water.
“What’s that thing on your back?”
“A tambourine.”
“Why?”
“It is a tambourine because that’s what it was destined to be.”
“I meant why do you carry it around? Does it make music? Do you have to take lessons and practice?”
“No lessons or practice. No music either. It makes a noise when you shake it. Shake it a little bit for soft, a lot for loud.”
He was almost as hairy as Newf with his long beard and moustache and thick bushy eyebrows.
“Why do you want to make a noise?”
“To attract attention.”
Annamay couldn’t understand this since she herself had all the attention she could tolerate, what with parents and relatives and Chizzy and the teachers at school. “Do you like attracting attention?”
“It’s a necessary part of my system. It brings me an audience. Then I predict something weird and they all think I’m loony and they give me money to go away because I make them uncomfortable.”