Suzanne: A Mountain Witch Tale
1
“Where are you walking to?” Bill shouted over the idling motor of his rig.
Whatever the woman said blew away in the wind.
“Get in,” he shouted. “Awful dark and stormy to be out walking.”
She wasn’t dressed like a hooker, nor had she been acting like one, but a fellow could always hope. Especially when she hopped right up into the cab.
“Rivertown,”: she repeated, pointing forward.
Planning his move, stalling for time, Bill turned up the radio.
“Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river…”
“Are you hungry?” he shouted over the radio. “Can I buy you a hamburger?”
“That little truck stop in Rivertown, before you turn to go north?” she said. “Why not, if you wantto.”
“What’s your name?” he said. “I’m Bill.”
“Suzanne.”
Making it up, he thought. Definitely a hooker. They had to be subtle about it in these small towns.
“Tea and oranges that come all the way from China…”
“So are you from China?” he said jovially.
“I’m from Rivertown. My mother was from Korea.” She smiled inscrutably, smoothing her black hair. “Daddy was a good old local boy.”
“Married?”
“No. Are you?”
“Yeah.” He geared down to pull into the one little truck stop in Rivertown. The sky was already dark. A few houses scattered along the curve of the river,where the highway crossed over it, showed lighted windows. One other truck was parked outside. As Bill pulled in he saw the driver climb in.
Inside the truck stop the piped-in music was neither the country-western nor the classic rock he would have expected. Maybe it had been called folk, in the 1960s?
“Will you go and see pretty Suzie, the fairest of them all?”
Bill ordered hamburgers, fries, and coffee for two. The woman working the counter asked where he was going and what he was hauling.
“Pittsburgh,” he said, “with an empty truck, going to pick up a load of furniture.”
“Suzie charms the birds from the sky…”
“What kind of song is that?” Bill asked.
“Hahaha. Miz Wilmeth picks out these CD’s. I have no idea where she gets’em.”
The wind gusted; the rain pounded the window. Suzanne ate a fry. Thunder seemed to shake the building.
“Whoa. That was a close one.”
“Yessir,” said the woman cheerfully. “More than that.”
“What you mean?”
She pointed to a window. “Somebody’s truck just rolled over the bank.”
Somebody, Bill now remembered, had no clear sensory memory of having set his parking brake. Somebody had been assessing the jiggle factor as Suzanne slipped down from her seat. Somebody was saying a lot of things his father had once told him never to say in the presence of a lady, and it was Bill.
“You might as well spend the night,” said Suzanne, “at my place by the river.”
“Do what?” Bill barked, in no mood to appreciate what would have seemed his lucky break a few minutes ago. “Do you live alone?” he blurted.
“I do not.” She gavehim a cool, measuring look. For no obvious reason he shivered. “The others won’t mind. You can call anyone you need to call, take a taxicab in the morning when the drivers start answering the phone. I owe you. For dinner.”
2
Bill bolted the rest of his meal, not tastng it. Suzanne nibbled mindfully at hers. Bill went out to assess the damage. Pretty bad.
Inside, the plump woman took his place across the table from Suzanne. “I’ve seen him before. Friend of yours?”
“Some sort of cousin,” Suzanne said. “Has he treated you right, Misty?”
“Not bad for a Yankee. Not the kind that leaves tips, though.”
“I heard that.”
Misty held eye contact. “I heard something on the scanner.”
“Natalie Haynes?”
“Haynes, yeah, that was the name.”
“I shoulda known better than to take a ride with her,” Suzanne said. “I didn’t think she’d be planning anything worse than ugly talk.”
“Why would she do that, even? I mean, who is she?”
Suzanne curled her lip. “College kid with an eye on that boy that answered the job ad. And I must say, if I looked like that and was somehow able to convince myself that I had a boyfriend, I wouldn’t want him working for a woman either.”
“Did you have any words with her?”
“Not before she cooked up that crazy story.” Suzanne smiled faintly. “I did say I could’ve made up a better story than that when I was six.”
Misty looked up as Bill, in the doorway, stomped the water off his shoes. “You want a flashlight to walk home with?”
“He might need one. Looks as if his umbrella was in the truck.”
3
Rain was falling steadily as Bill followed Suzanne along the road. The road was slick with oil, full of shallow invisible puddles, rank odors—
“What’s that? Don’t step in it! It was a cat.”
“Was it?” said Suzanne.
Furious on general principles, Bill aimed the light directly at the severed hind legs, still bleeding, lying a tire’s width away from the body of the cat.
“Poor kitty.” Suzanne bent down.
“Don’t touch it! Gawww…”
“Poor Spotsie,” Suzanne crooned. “Oh, poor little Spotsie…I know it hurts. Don’t go up beside the highway again, Spotsie, will you?”
“What the…”
The cat was struggling to stand up.
“Don’t touch it!” Bill screamed.
“It’s all right.” Suzanne held out her arms, and the cat jumped up into them. Its hind legs were bleeding,b ut intact. “He’s a neighbor’s cat. He’ll find his way home.”
Bill fumbled to catch the light before it hit the ground, not liking the look of the blood-filled eye socket he’d clearly seen on the cat. He’d seen severed paws…another cat’s paws? He aimed the light where the paws had been. He saw a dark patch on the wet asphalt, loose gravel, but no paws.
Suzanne waited, juggling the cat and the umbrella. Humoring him. The cat’s eyes glowed back at the light: not green or yellow, but bright red.
“I just never did like cats,” Bill said lamely.
“Some people don’t.” Suzanne walked ahead, not needing the light, down a sloping footpath to a flight of wooden steps. “Have you ever seen a real oldfashioned swinging bridge before? Walk slowly, hold the cables in both hands, don’t look down; you’ll be fine.”
“Jesus.” Bill was swearing.
“Give you courage.” Suzanne was blessing him, walking onto the bridge, cat and umbrella in arms.
Bill shoved the flashlight into his pocket and crossed the bridge with his eyes shut, not liking the look of the wet wooden planks. He wasn’t liking anything tonight; why would he?
On the other side of the bridge the cat jumped down and raced away on four clean white legs.
Suzanne’s place by the riverwas completely dark. Somehow Bill no longer felt lucky. He wished the others were at home.
4
“Wet shoes on the porch, please.” Suzanne opened her door so fast Bill knew it hadn’t been locked. Inside she switched on a light. As Bill kicked off his shoes she was pulling a little flat drawer out from a table in the hallway. “Dry socks are in here. You can have this room, on the left, but I expect you’ll want to call home first. So I call dibs on the shower.”
“Uh…thanks.”
In between the increasingly frustrating phone calls it occurred to Bill that the slim bronze body in the shower no longer interested him any more than his mother’s body would have done. This was partly because of the impending problems of retrieving his personal belongings from the truck and explaining what had happened to the home office, and partly because, although they were obviously alone together in the house, Suzanne seemed no more alarmed or excited by that fact than his mother would have been. Though his mother, he thought bitterly, would have been carrying on about the probability that he no longer had a job. What kind of jobs were open to a trucker who’d parked on a high riverbank, in a thunderstorm, without setting the brakes?
Suzanne was singing in the shower; the tune reminded him of the theme from “Gilligan’s Island” but when he listened he could make out words.
“And if you choose to tumble down, your will I’ll not resist. Young Natalie Haynes, that jealous wench, would surely not be missed…”
No doubt the tune had belonged to some old Scottish ballad before the TV producers got their hands on it. Grimly he called his wife. Bill wasn’t sure that he loved his wife, that anybody loved anybody in this cold world, but it was some comfort to his mind that his wife seemed to be imagining a rock slide, rather than a sex-struck forty-year-old fool staring at a slim young girl. He calledhis son, too, at school, for a little more of the same.
After the phone calls he looked around what was obviously the sitting room. He saw no television set, no computer. He saw a piano, which he’d never learned to play. He saw a great horned owl—stuffed, surely? It seemed to be watching him—on a perch in a corner. He had been directed to an armchair in another corner, close to the shelf from which Suzanne had pulled out the phone. Three cats, black, gray, and calico, were watching him from a couch that faced an unlighted fireplace. All four walls, including the walls above and below the windows but not the chimney itself, were lined with shelves. All the shelves were lined with books, a wide variety: Shakespeare, encyclopedias, Peterson’s Field Guide, cookbooks, novels, music books on the shelves near the piano.
“I see you’ve met the housemates.” Suzanne had slipped into some sort of long loose dress or robe. The style looked wrong for her, Bill thought, and he asked himself why and he answered himself that she looked too young to own it. His wife had worn a dress like that ten years ago. Suzanne didn’t look thirty.
“Do you have any human housemates?”
“Not really,” she said. “My parents are dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I…Well. Dad was ninety. Mother was eighty-two.”
“How old are you?”
“Sixty-three in June.”
Again he had that feeling that something was weird, seriously weird, much stranger than a well-preserved older woman, and he wasn’t sure why, until the snake peered into his face.
It was the biggest black rat snake he’d ever seen. After holding eye contact with him for a few seconds it continued to pour itself down from the ceiling to the floor. The ceiling was low, but even so, when the snake raised its head from the floor, it was still balanced along the shelf below the ceiling. It was thick as his thigh.
“No worries,” Suzanne said. “He wants a rat, don’t you, pal? Here.”
Crossing the room, she took a large rat from a bin on a shelf below the owl’s perch and threw it toward Bill and the snake.
“I buy them at the college. That’s where I was today. Not buying rats. Looking things up in the library. I’m a writer by trade.”
The snake slithered across Bill’s foot to grab the rat. The owl had one too.
“He’s lived here longer than I have.” Suzanne didn’t specify whether she meant the snake or the owl. “Well…I suppose we owe you some entertainment, but what time would you like to go to bed? I suppose you’ll want to get back to your truck as soon as it’s daylight…”
Even if she was old enough to be his mother, it didn’t show. No real man would let this opportunity pass by…even if he did expect the “Twilight Zone” tune to start playing at any moment. “Why don’t we move to the couch?” he said, leering.
Suzanne took something from a shelf and handed it to him.
Was it a mirror? A trick mirror? Some kind of computerized gadget? What looked back at him was not a face. It moved when he moved. The diaper on which it seemed to be resting moved with it when he moved far enough.
“Well,” he said, “if that’s what I am, I’ll be a full-grown one. Get over here.”
“M’anam don sleibh.”
For a moment he saw her step out of the dress, as sleek and as bronze as he’d hoped, and then she was gone. He was looking at an empty dark-colored dress on the floor, below a sheer wall of curving limestone that jutted into the room.
Which had just been an ordinary indoor wall, beside a fireplace, a mantelpiece, a chimney.
Bill spent the night in the armchair beside the telephone; he slept, not much and not well, with the light on.
5
A flame moving steadily, quickly, through a dark passage downward. Looking more closely, he sees that it is Suzanne, radiant, her long loose dress the color of light, her little bare feet pattering quickly and quietly as a mouse’s feet, down and down, into what he recognizes as the heart of the mountain. This is a deep dark cave, not quite as dark as a literal cave. The being enthroned at the heart of the mountain has long snow-white hair and a face of anthracite. It is not human enough to have an obvious gender. Suzanne, bowing to it, says “Grandmother.”
“Child.” Does the grandmother have a body? Is the body limestone, or merely still and gray as limestone? Bill is not sure.
“I came to thank you for Spotsie.”
“A pleasure. Unlike what you told those poor reckless rocks.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be. You ought to have known that wretched girl would be missed. Humans that age have parents. Fools, of course. Their other child is worse than she.”
“Mercy.”
“Exactly,” says the grandmother. “Natalie Haynes will live…not drive.”
Suzanne bows lower. “My thanks that your wisdom is greater than mine.”
“The trucker,” says the grandmother, “Illa might take, but not from you. Let him go.”
“But then how long…?”
Bill looks down at himself and sees a tree. He perceives that his body is completely unable to move; the tree has grown around him.
“Illa knows.”
There is a horrible grinding noise, and a man screaming in pain or fear.
6
The screams, Bill recognized, had been his own, waking himself from the nightmare. At some stages of sleep, he remembered from some TV show he’d watched, the muscles refuse to move. He was stiff but unharmed in an armchair, in a stranger’s house, where he’d declined the offer of a bed. The four walls were lined with shelves. The shelves were lined with books. The grey dawn light from the windows gave a fine view of the river, where his truck lay on its side in the shallow water. The grinding noise had probably been the truck scraping as it settled further down into the rocks…
“Bathroom?” From the hallway, Suzanne pointed to a door.
In the bathroom he wondered how much of what he remembered had been part of thenightmare. That feeling that anything might turn into, or turn out to have been, some altogether different thing than it had been a minute before—it was gone. The bathroom was real and solid, though the toilet was a kind he’d not seen before.
“Does the toilet flush?” When he returned the sitting room was filled with morning sunshine.
“After its fashion. It’s the electric composting kind.” Suzanne’s black hair was drawn back in a smooth bun; she was wearing a sky-blue kimono. Even by daylight she looked hardly thirty-six, much less sixty-three. “No worries. We have tea and oranges—that come all the way from Florida!—and we can put the scraps in with everything else. How else could you have a toilet this close to a river this clean? Or, did you know Rivertown has its own newspaper?”
The tea set, newspaper, and plate of peeled oranges were on a table. Bill sat down and gulped his tea; he preferred coffee. The front-page headline news story was about a high school ball game. Below the fold were reports on a county board meeting, an historical reenactment committee. Page three’s headline was “Landslide on North College Road,” with blurry black-and-white nighttime photos of wrecked cars and scattered boulders. For no reason Bill could quite explain the line, “22-year-old Natalie Haynes was hospitalized in critical condition,” hit him like an icy wind.
7
As they walked back to the footbridge a large orange and white cat rubbed against Suzanne’s legs,. Suzanne stroked it and said, “Go home now, Spotsie.” It went back, toward the houses, away from the bridge. For no obvious reason Bill had to grab the porch railing, barely keeping down his oranges from Florida.
“So maybe it was food poisoning,” he said to himself, hastening toward his rig. The cab contained several things he hadn’t thought his wife and son needed to see at home. He didn’t think the company needed to see them, either.
Walking out was obviously not feasible, jduging by the speed of the current even on the surface of the rain-swollen river. Between the truck and the truck stop were about twenty feet of limestone cliff. On the other side of the footbridge, however, two hundred yards above the truck stop, the riverbank looked negotiable; he thought he might be able to get out to the truck.
“They might just have a rope, in the truck stop,” Suzanne said. “Just in case.”
Bill vetoed the suggestion. “No need to get them involved.”
She read his mind. “Likely the tow truck’s already on the way. They don’t get a lot of business in a town this size.”
The truck stop’s parking lot was full of small local vehicles. The drivers seemed to be inside. Hoping the locals were all spellbound by Miz Wilmeth’s eccentric CD collection, Bill walked faster. Suzanne was no longer with him; she was walking toward the truck stop.
The tow truck pulled in before Suzanne reached the parking lot. Bill saw Suzanne hop onto a guardrail and walk along it, skirting a minivan parked too close in a compact-car-sized space, as men came out of the tow truck. A flash bulb popped.
“You! Stay away from my car!” A woman was yelling at Suzanne. “You upset my sister, and now if anything’s the matter with my car…”
It was none of his affair, but the angry woman who’d come out of the minivan had to be at least twice Suzanne’s size, and they were at the top of a cliff. Suzanne dropped to the outside of the rail.
A big silent shape floated through the air between the women and the minivan. It was not the great horned owl, day-blind in the house. It was an osprey.
Suzanne stepped back up onto the rail and down on the inside while the other woman crashed down the cliff.
“Thirty-one to base,” one of the men from the tow truck said into his walkie-talkie, “we have a spectator that was apparently startled by a large waterbird and fell down the bank…”
The woman raised herself stiffly onto her hands and knees, tried to put her weight on a foot, and gave up.
Suzanne was looking down the cliff, one hand pointing toward the woman. “Safe and sound.”
The woman stood up and took an awkward step.
“And bound,” Suzanne said grimly.
“Are you Bill Stephens?” the other man from the tow truck was asking Bill.
8
After the contents of the cab of the truck had been found and dutifully turned in to the police, the only way out of the mess was straight through it. Bill admitted the pills were his, taking a chance. It paid. The judge put him on probation with a referral to a twelve-step group. Bill did not really think he was an addict—he hadn’t used any of the pills in the past week, nor had he wanted them—but he liked the fellows in the group. His boss seemed sympathetic, and rehired him as a nightwatchman immediately after officially firing him as a driver.
He never wanted to go back to Rivertown, and he never did.
He saw Suzanne again, quite often in the dreams he had during the first year after the incident.
“It’s like these dreams are telling a story,” he said, once, to some of the guys from the group. “It’s like somehow that woman caused me to stop, and to go to the truck stop and to park without setting the brake. Like there was this thing, this spirit, she was going to, I don’t know, sacrifice me to. In exchange for this other guy that she actually wanted. I don’t know who he was or what was going on. It’s a dream, right? Dreams don’t have to make sense. But that’s the way the dream is. The guy’s in some sort of bind, she wanted this thing to let him go and take me instead, but then they decided I’m not what it wanted. The thing picked someone else, let me go, and it let her man go and she’s living happily ever after. I hope. Weird.”
“This group is about sobriety,” said Dave, “though I wonder whether that dream is telling you more about your relationships with your wife or mother or both of them.”
Bill considered paying a psychoanalyst, but around that time the dreams stopped. He joked to the guys that they’d stopped when his subconscious mind realized he was about to lay out a lot of money.
Actually, the dreams stopped after he saw Suzanne, in real life, in Cleveland. First he thought the man beside her had sandy-colored hair, and then as they came closer he realized the hair was gray; apart from that, both of them seemed about seventeen.
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