Editor’s Note: Freeline Media welcomes original works by authors around the globe. Here, we present the short story “Folk Art” by author Joseph Aisenberg.
FOLK ART
July 15th
Leslie dear,
Since you keep asking, since Billy and I are well away from that place; since I’ve had time to think things over—I suppose I ought to explain. Maybe you tell me what it means. The whole thing’s got me freaked. What a staggering Moronocracy we have populating the sticks of our great nation. Think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, except my imbeciles aren’t even resourceful enough to resort to cannibalism. Billy says I’m being unfair. In the final analysis I guess I have to admit my otherwise impeccable liberalism has been found guilty of hypocrisy as concerns the lower orders. I’m fine with it.
Context please. So I let Billy talk me into this stupid driving vacation because he’d gotten a bug up his ass about how frickin’ cool and horizon-expanding it’d be if we spent a summer photographing exotic specimens of Americana in the wild. That much I told you before we left. But about all we did the first couple days of heat-sweltering highways was snipe at one another and try to find places to buy sodas, whose contents we soon had to pull off the road and pee out again.
And did I mention it was hot? The whole time, town after town, plain after boring plain, it was like we were being watched by the white-hot eye of god two seconds before damnation.
Highway Travel: Pleasure or pain?
I kept pushing Billy to go farther, so we could finish up with all this looping, circling, zigzagging, backtracking, and get to the time we’d allotted ourselves afterward. A week recuperating in a placid lake-side luxuryesque spot where I planned to spend a selection of clear blue hours carefully shaded, lost between the covers of a thick novel, while Billy and a few other pot-bellied husbands grazed nearby.
Per the camping. For years I’ve been acting like I think this bullshit is fun. Truth is I hate it. I’m mortally afraid of coiled snakes, spiders, insects, not to mention roadside murderers. In prepping for this trip I therefore invested in some peace of mind, meaning I bought myself a Browning BDA 380 handgun (Jesus, the rush of plugging a target that first time at the firing range, orgasmic)—so that should any slithery reptile, or Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, dare to cross our paths he/it could count itself a goner, no matter how hysterically un-enviromental that sounds.
Speaking of which — my hysteria, that is — all this rusticity has been playing havoc with my sex drive, temperamental even at the best of times. And these were the worst. While I love Billy to death, hairy back, shoulders and all, once our car has crawled through another day of hellfire and brimstone; come to a sputtering halt outside some neon motel, macabrely cast against a radiant purple sky, my orifices and organs have pretty much closed shop for the evening. It’s put Billy in a foul mood for sure. At least he doesn’t pout it out like Jack … but let’s not open that can of Vienna Sausages, if you please.
Anyway, we’d been bugging the hell out of each other the better part of a week. He kept saying I drove too fast for him to properly document the decaying corrugated buildings littering the countryside, though they’re more or less legion — if you’ve seen one, as they say ….
And things got really nasty the day I refused to stop at some foul smelling trash dump that had been beautifully placed across from a strip mall; in which somebody had housed a shop for women’s evening wear. The easy, grisly irony of that one had just about given Billy a boner. We were still screaming over the missed opportunity two hours after it had fallen behind us in the rearview mirror.
Weirdness: the Roadside Attractions
Also, he hates I won’t ask directions. “You’re worse than guys,” he says. Thing is, if you pull over and dart into some wobbly-looking bait shop and ask how do I find this or that landmark, the proprietor — bald excepting six strands of hair traversing his dotted scalp — will immediately go into mouth-breathing mode. He’ll scratch his stubbled chin (causing it to make an audible sandpaper sound) and direct you to something regionally known as a “chocky” church, whatever that is. There you’re supposed to turn left until you hit an old graveyard with that marbled memorial to Victor Shlumard (you remember him don’t you?) or the biggest tree in the state, etc., etc.
In what seems like a couple thousand miles of travel I’ve now seen all the sights. “Biggest trees,” “smallest cows,” “Jesus-shaped cave entrances,” dog houses made to look like Disney Land palaces. I’ve touched so many weird vegetables, visited crumbling manses said to be haunted by the broken-hearted ladies whom suicide overtook on a gorgeously carved stairwell — not to mention that steak place where “them murders happened” — that if I ever see another roadside attraction I’m pretty sure I’ll puke.
Needless to say we’d been lost a couple days in one isolated field or hilly expanse after another, places so covered with dust even the wrinkles of the hardened natives appeared to have got filled with granules. Eventually we washed up in a town far outside civilization. It didn’t have streaming television, they said. And our phones weren’t working either. If this all sounds like the laborious expository setup for backwoods slaughter, forget it. As the wise victims of circumstance say, truth is stranger than fiction.
For the purposes of this missive (a series of separately mailed, glossy postcards purchased cheap at a gas station shortly after our getaway) I shall call that Village of the Damned, X. Excuse me, Leslie, while I momentarily step out on the motel’s landing for a … cigarette.
Stuck in the Village of X
So X. had everything I tell ya. There was a church and a dirt-stained school stranded in the midst of the usual brow-beaten meadow, with houses spread out around a kind of convenience store, which was also the town’s restaurant and hotel. In the store, above a clutter of racks containing loaves of white bread and sugary treats, hovered a room rented out by the place’s owner (a widow and an Elvis Presley fanatic), to people whose vehicles had broken down.
“Nobody ever stays here unless that happens,” the owner said with a snort, causing her bosoms and shoulders to heave beneath a tight fitting “COOL AS HELL” t-shirt.
The widow sent her husband-son-cousin Deke out to fetch our car with his dented, maroon-colored truck, dragging it along the isolated asphalt like felled game. He looked the thing over. He explained in dull, creeptastic fashion that he’d have to go to another town for parts. He just didn’t think he had the right stuff “over in the automobile graveyard” he maintained, near the aforementioned school. This meant we were stuck in X.
What bothers me is my having given that widow our home number and address. Had to when I registered in what looked like a padded leather photo album. Several ruled pages had been stuck to the stiff mounting boards, making writing difficult. Anyway, the woman glanced at my info and noted how close we lived. “Why it’d only take a few hours to get up there for a visit sometime,” she said around her smoldering cigarette, giving Billy a wink. What made this so mortifying was the woman’s special disfigurement. She’d kept a cigarette dangling from the same side of her mouth for so many years she’d imprinted her left cheek with a nicotine stain. It went from mouth to temple. When she smiled the dermal damage became starkly noticeable, a kind of brownish pleat.
We were not given a key or shown our room. Rather the widow told us ramblingly about how her husband had died (liver cancer) and the one saving grace left her life (Elvis); also how some huge nearby factory had collapsed, draining the population and leaving its remainder to be Wal-Mart employees the next town over. Afterward we were pointed toward a giant hole burst through crumbling sheetrock. An uneven set of wood stairs took us up to a dim landing of sorts. On the right was an open bathroom. The depressing equipment consisted of: a green plastic shower stall; a damaged sink; and a toilet so yellow it looked as if years of grease and filth had baked onto it.
A Sweltering Hovel
Cause it was hot up there. My neck started sweating and itching like hell. Billy had to force the closed door on the left. Its bottom edge was so splintered it scraped the wood floor as it opened. Our room was more cramped than it needed to be, due to all the decorative Elvis memorabilia (about which we had been sternly warned: if any went missing we would be charged for theft!). The double bed’s spread featured a faded picture of Fat Elvis. It hadn’t been tucked under the pillows but lovingly draped over them like a death shroud, so as not to crease The King’s face. At least there was an air-conditioner. Billy switched it to high and we made ourselves “comfortable”.
I spent my time trying to read a novel, Harvest Home. Billy took pictures of the framed Elvis album covers hanging in diagonalized patterns on the walls, as well as various ashtrays and dolls propped on the nightstand and dresser. Then he plopped down beside me, pulled out his phone and played music. The insect whine of Elvis irritated me no end.
This “relaxing” phase went on until a little after six. That’s when thumping music started to waft up from the establishment beneath us. It was the kind of stuff that makes one think of scraggly sideburns and confederate flags, classy. “What the fuck!” I said. “You think this place turns into a road house after hours?”
“I wouldn’t mind a drink.” Billy shrugged.
Bubbas in the Roadhouse; the gathering
We emerged from the blasted sheetrock downstairs. The store was empty but for a couple Bubbas. They strutted around a pool table back behind the shelves of food, where they bent in and out of light thrown off by a tainted Coors light fixture, hanging above the table. One of the Bubbas noticed us. He nudged his pal, pointed a pool cue and snickered, heaving his fat cowboy-shirted shoulders.
The music was coming from somewhere the right of the pool table. We walked by the Bubbas. They laughed and returned to their game. An almost hidden door led us to an old fashioned arcade. The space was crowded. Folks weren’t playing the games though. Got up in their Sunday best, they sat on folding chairs placed between the pinball machines and hulking video games. A few kids yelled and giggled. Some, mostly the women, stared straight ahead, toward the end of the room, where a cluttered table had been placed before a white door. The loud music was coming from a blue-and-red juke box flashing along a side wall. Billy and I exchanged glances.
A woman with big glasses, propelled by the large bottom she’d stuffed into her peach colored skirt, lumbered on white heels over to the juke box. She pulled its plug. “All right, ya’all!” she shouted. “Tonight has to be foreshortened. Phyllis is sick, so we’re not going over to Shorty’s trailer for potluck afterward. I talked to Babe, though. She says she and Ruth could do up some weenies over at Bludgeoning Pond. So just go on home, get your dishes and take ‘em over there. That way the kids can take turns sitting in Big Ricky’s old busted Model T. Oh my lord Trish, you’re so small now I almost mistook you for one of the kids.”
I assessed the audience with my usual sensitive eye for detail. Several women had uni-brows and harelips, raised at one another in succession. Among them a bored pregnant woman was applying lipstick. As soon as she had drawn a thick covering on, she wiped the gloss off again with a used tissue and took a different shade from her purse.
Having concluded this preparatory business, the woman with the glasses strode to the table at the front of the arcade. “Okay, everyone hush. That means you Jeanie. Quiet!” She turned, clicked her white-heeled way to the door behind the table and opened it. Dark inside. Some kind of shuffling or clicking in its depths. A slight gleam suggested the presence of a mirror. A bathroom, maybe?
A twangy, southern-fried voice shrilled, “Turn on the danged light, Rhoda!” The woman with glasses and white heels, who had seated herself by this point, got up again. She minced her way to the door and flipped a switch located outside. A rheumy light over a mirror came on — it was a bathroom. The sink under the mirror sagged forward slightly; an edge of toilet jutted into view from the right, on which stood the owner of the twangy voice. A smattering of applause sprayed from the audience like a sprinkler.
It took some doing for the woman in the bathroom to get down off the toilet. Partly because she was a dwarf; partly because she was working with an artificial leg. The thing was all metal and gears, grotesque. She was quite a sight. She had well puffed red hair. She wore what looked like an old-ass prom dress, tight in all the wrong places.
She exited the bathroom using a broom handle for a cane, and worked her awkward way toward the table. It held a harmonica, several half-empty glasses of water, a few cardboard boxes and an antique blender. Slowly, with a pink-painted smile, she moved her free hand back and forth in front of the blender as if to underscore its marvelousness. She turned it on. She turned it off. For a moment I thought maybe she was going to try to sell the crowd on it. Instead she poured a couple glasses of water into the blender’s clouded pitcher, and walked it into the “audience.” Everyone seemed to be riveted. The only sounds were bleeps and blats from the arcade games. At last the dwarfess stopped beside a man with crossed legs and a red face (think the imaginary bait shop owner mentioned in postcard number three, I think). She offered him the pitcher. He took it from her long-nailed hands very reluctantly and downed its contents. “I don’t recall last summer being so hot, do you, Oral?” the dwarfess asked him. “Course it isn’t as bad as that summer ten years ago when we had those hundred degree temperatures for nearly forty days straight but still…”
As if on cue the audience gasped. Apparently the dwarfess had said something of great significance.
“Are you sure?” the red faced man asked handing back the pitcher. There was a tremble of fear in his voice.
“Well I can’t be a hundred percent sure,” the dwarfess answered. “These days my memory gets all mixed up, like how Annie’s grandpa’s was at the end.” The red faced man went pale, let his shoulders droop. The dwarfess then turned a sweet grin on a nearby woman wearing a black-and-white polka dot dress (Annie?). Its shapeless, gauzy sleeves allowed impressive amounts of arm-flab to flop around unencumbered.
Pass the Pitcher
I don’t know what all the looks flying around meant, but something was going on and that shiny-dressed dwarfess, giant red hairdo first, limped her way back to the table before everybody. A roar of fake cheers erupted from a football-themed pinball machine in the corner, scaring the crap out of me. Behind the table, the dwarfess poured more water into the blender pitcher. She dumped what looked like a box of cherry-flavored gelatin in too, and stirred it with the harmonica. Once she’d finished, she sucked excess liquid out of the instrument, causing a few honks. Then she just spit the harmonica out onto the table, where it fell with an absurd crack. The pale unappetizing concoction she’d mixed was taken to the pregnant woman, now wearing rust-colored lipstick. Her face froze. She gazed at the dwarfess’ lumbering approach with something like terror (I may be projecting).
As the dwarfess tried to hand the pitcher to the woman, she casually mentioned she’d like a satellite television in her bathroom. The pregnant woman began to cry. “That can’t be right,” she said. She refused to take the pitcher from the dwarfess. She shouted, “I don’t want it! What’ll happen to the baby!?” Tears sprang from her eyes as she realized the full enormity of the dwarfess’ having picked on her. She slumped down in her chair. She wiped her lipstick off on the back of her hand. “It can’t be,” the woman continued. “It just cannot be. How could it?” She looked around her with glistening-orbed horror. “Don’t you see, you maniacs! It’s not true. None of it!”
The pregnant woman went right to pieces. She couldn’t pull herself back together either, so a couple sympathetic women shuffled forward, plied her with gentle whispers and led her away. They were followed by two distracted children. The audience applauded lustily. Thankfully, Billy and I were hidden behind the convenient jut of an arcade game, so no one noticed our presence.
Once the pregnant woman was gone the final act began. The dwarfess sighed, put an exhausted expression on beneath her bulbous red hair. “Now is the time when I again ask you to set me free,” she said in a quavering voice. She limped from chair to chair on her artificial leg and begged each person individually, to let her leave this place. There was no emotion in her voice. She was all dignity. It was as if she’d done this so many times she was beyond hope.
“Well Versa Mae,” the woman with glasses said standing on her white heels once more, “where would you even want to go?”
“I don’t know.” The dwarfess shrugged. “I heard somebody saying they put in a new pizza place over in Pink recently.”
“Trust me Versa Mae, you wouldn’t like it. They don’t do pepperoni well at all, I don’t think.”
A man in the crowd cleared his throat, signaling he wished to speak. “Well,” he said, “what if maybe we brought you over a couch we’re getting rid of? Would that help? It’s a little worn and saggy in the middle but still very comfortable.”
The dwarfess’ response was unexpected, frightening. She threw the blender pitcher against a wall. It busted and the contents splashed everywhere, thick drooling red bright as blood. Looking emotionally broken, she hobbled back into her bathroom and slammed the door. This was met with polite applause, suggesting it had been a fairly middling performance all in all. And just like that, the show was over. Chatting, people stood, left. “I never do get tired of those fits of Versa Mae’s,” I heard one woman say, possibly with irony.
What was all that about, you ask? Why did the pregnant woman become so upset? Why wouldn’t they free this lame dwarfess if she wanted to go? Suggested study questions for students and reading groups.
Billy and I slipped back up to our room. Since this was the weirdest place in the world I suggested we get the hell out of Dodge. But we had no car and miles to go, and it was so damned hot. Also, it seemed wrong abandoning that poor miserable woman, the dwarfess. Intent on acting like the sort of woman I’d resolved on being from now on (not just because of that business with Don) I told Billy we should wait until it got a little later and a little quieter. Using the protection of my trusty Browning BDA 380, I told him we’d go downstairs and see if the dwarfess was still in that bathroom. If she was, we’d liberate her. We’d steal a truck, anything, and get as far away from this town as possible.
A surreptitious exit? Or ending misery?
After one A.M. I stuffed Harvest Home back in my purse. I transferred my heavy, reassuring and legally registered weapon to my hot palm. Billy and I felt our way downstairs. Though no lights were on, the arcade games glowed for us. Billy and I bumped our way around them, to the bathroom door, under which a slit of light suggested our lady-in-distress’s presence. How long had she been a prisoner in this place? And for what purpose?
I rattled the door’s knob. Didn’t open so I knocked gently. That was when I remembered it locked from the outside. I sighed, clicked it open and found myself peering into what I realized was the dwarfess’ residence. Unadorned Sheetrock on the right, near the toilet, was cracked, water stained, a kind of companion to, well, everything. Under the sink the pathetic creature had lined up a small row of belongings, books, old magazines, records. She had a turntable hooked to a couple speakers positioned on either side of the toilet, playing classical music. The dwarfess herself sat in the middle of the floor wearing a frayed, yellowed slip and eating spaghetti off a discolored plate. She was absorbed by the text on the back of an LP cover. The mass of her red hair was contained beneath a pale blue plastic cap for the night, and her artificial leg, I noticed, leaned against the wall on the left.
My first thought was: She’s eating next to a toilet? Fucking gross! But I pushed that thought away. “Hey lady,” I whispered. “We’re here to help. We can get you away from here.”
She was none too grateful. “Who the hell is you? And what are you doing here? Who told you you could go busting in somebody’s bedroom at night? How would you like it if I peeked on you through one of Roy’s attic-peepers?”
“But you said you wanted to get out of here earlier,” Billy said.
The dwarfess rolled her eyes as if Billy were unsophisticated. “I always say that, duh. It gets boring the same way, I admit, but I have to say all those things in that order or else I wouldn’t be doing my job. Somebody might complain. Maybe where you come from it’s all right to shirk, but around here we make an honest living. And I care about my art.”
“Which is what, exactly?” I asked.
“She lives here,” Billy said with shock and wonder.
Looking at us both disgustedly, the dwarfess’ sour face screwed up with pure condescension, “Uh … my living is doing my job, that’s what. And if you don’t mind I’d like you to leave. Your husband, Miss, is making me uncomfortable with all his gawkin’.” She went back to reading her LP cover. A second later, though, she looked at me with real interest. “If you really want to know more about my work go ask Brother Tom. He’ll give you my resume. He’s the preacher. Only you’ll have to do it tomorrow because he won’t get out of his tank to talk to you in the middle of the night.”
I was about to ask what that meant, but the dwarfess hissed at us to leave. Something inside me sort of broke at that point. I have to admit Leslie, a truth I haven’t confessed to Billy, especially not to Billy. But I know you’ll understand. As I stood there taking in the dwarfess’ squalor, her record collection, spaghetti dinner, everything — I felt a sick pity verging on vomitous hatred. A horrible wave of revulsion urged me to raise my gun and shoot the bitch, put her out of her stupid misery. Vividly I imagined bullets entering her head, piercing her chest and stomach. I saw satisfying spurts of blood spraying the walls; and afterward, her dead eyes would focus blandly on me, conveying that her anorexic soul was free forever. This fantasy was honestly thrilling. I wanted to kill the dwarfess so much I could taste it. Like I was going crazy. But I didn’t, obviously, and at last I just shoved my nausea down, closed the door and locked the stupid dwarfess back up.
Through a swish of shadows, Billy and I found ourselves back in our room, jamming a chair under the doorknob, wondering as I hid several bits of Elvisiana under the bed if maybe someone named Roy wasn’t up in the ceiling, watching.
Early the next day, much to our relief, the mechanic got our car going again, and at a reasonable price. “Is it true you tried to get a late night session with Versa Mae?” The mechanic asked when he gave us back our keys. “I heard she’s a real hellion when folks interrupts her beauty sleep.”
Back in the convenience store/hotel I settled things with the widow behind the register. Her brown-stained cheek was more unsightly than ever. As she made change she laughed. “Versa Mae says you tried to save her at gunpoint last night. Funniest thing I ever heard. You get all kinds from the boonies or the woods of course, but I’d a thought you big city people wouldn’t be so ignorant.” She was absolutely smirking, the bitch.
Fat teenage boys pawing through candy on shelves nearby giggled in high pitched glee, a local custom apparently.
“I sure hope if I do come see you, y’all aint just a couple shut-ins,” said the widow. “But then I guess I won’t have no reason to come up there … will I?” Was there something threatening in this emphasis? I’m not sure. I thought of the Elvis trash I’d hidden with a flicker of worry but decided it didn’t matter.
Two men suddenly burst through the door, carrying a huge couch. They had a hard time maneuvering it around the racks toward the hall leading to the arcade. We got away before seeing how they managed the obstacle. Standing near our car was a sunburned woman, wearing pistachio-colored shorts. Her old thin legs dribbled like varicose-webbed stalactites. She asked me and Billy how we liked our home. She said loved the place personally, but that the nicest part was on the east side of town, the rich side. She crooned about the “lovely little park” she always visited when she came there. News sure travels fast, I thought with a shudder. They must all live in the same couple of shacks or something.
A few moments later we put X behind us.
Well now, seems this minor adventure has run nearly thirty postcards, to be put together by you, Leslie, in a single continuous narrative, though I feel the constant breaks will have added to my story quite a bit of old fashioned suspense.
Yours sincerely, N.
P.S. Please do not think I am playing unreliable narrator. I couldn’t possibly make this up. I wouldn’t know how. Imagine me and Billy frightened, existentially unsure, whizzing down the cracked, heat-warped highway under endless blue, through roiling red dust, vanishing into the real and strange bitterness of this vast country. When we get home we’re selling the house.
Joseph Aisenberg is an Oklahoma-based writer, film critic and historian. His noted works include the critical film analysis Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies in The Horror Film, which was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award, horror’s premier literary award. Aisenberg is also a regular contributor to film magazine Bright Lights Film Journal, has provided commentary tracks for Shout Factory’s 4K/BluRay steelbook special edition of Carrie, and is also the author of numerous other stories and novels. Freeline Media happily welcomes his contributions here.
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