The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Judge Beecher gives the young man a wintry smile. ‘You needn’t worry about that, son,’ he says. He looks toward the window, and the Gulf beyond. His face is long and thoughtful. ‘Those names … I can see them yet, jostling each other for place on that bloodred dune. Two days later, a TWA plane on its way to Miami crashed in the ’Glades. All one hundred and nineteen souls on board were killed. The passenger list was in the paper. I recognized some of the names. I recognized many of them.’

‘You saw this. You saw those names.’

‘Yes. For several months after that I stayed away from the island, and I promised myself I would stay away for good. I suppose drug addicts make the same promises to themselves about their dope, don’t they? And, like them, I eventually weakened and resumed my old habit. Now, Counselor: do you understand why I called you out here to finish the work on my will, and why it had to be tonight?’

Wayland doesn’t believe a word of it, but like many fantasies, this one has its own internal logic. It’s easy enough to follow. The Judge is ninety, his once ruddy complexion has gone the color of clay, his formerly firm step has become shuffling and tentative. He’s clearly in pain, and he’s lost weight he can’t afford to lose.

‘I suppose that today you saw your name in the sand,’ Wayland says.

Judge Beecher looks momentarily startled, and then he smiles. It is a terrible smile, transforming his narrow, pallid face into a death’s-head grin.

‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘Not mine.’

Thinking of W.F. Harvey

Life is full of Big Questions, isn’t it? Fate or destiny? Heaven or hell? Love or attraction? Reason or impulse?

Beatles or Stones?

For me it was always the Stones – the Beatles were just too soft once they became Jupiter in the solar system of pop music. (My wife used to refer to Sir Paul McCartney as ‘old dog eyes,’ and that kind of summed up how I felt.) But the early Beatles … ah, they played honest rock, and I still listen to those old tracks – mostly covers – with love. Sometimes I’m even moved to get up and dance a little.

One of my favorites was their version of the Larry Williams classic, ‘Bad Boy,’ with John Lennon singing lead in a hoarse, urgent voice. I particularly liked the exhorted punchline: ‘Now Junior, behave yourself!’ At some point, I decided I wanted to write a story about a bad little kid who moved into the neighborhood. Not a kid who was the devil’s spawn, not a kid who was possessed by some ancient demon à la The Exorcist, but just bad for bad’s sake, bad to the bone, the apotheosis of all the bad little kids who ever were. I saw him in shorts, and with a propeller beanie on his head. I saw him always causing trouble and absolutely never behaving himself.

This is the story that grew around that little kid: an evil version of Sluggo, Nancy’s friend from the funny pages. An electronic version has appeared in France and also in Germany, where ‘Bad Boy’ was no doubt a part of the Beatles’ Star Club repertoire. This is its first publication in English.

Bad Little Kid

1

The prison was twenty miles from the nearest small city, on an otherwise empty expanse of prairie where the wind blew almost all the time. The main building was a looming stone horror perpetrated on the landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century. Growing from either side were concrete cellblocks built one by one over the previous forty-five years, mostly with federal money that began flowing during the Nixon years and just never stopped.

At some distance from the main body of the prison was a smaller building. The prisoners called this adjunct Needle Manor. Jutting from one side of it was an outdoor corridor forty yards long, twenty feet wide, and enclosed in heavy chainlink fencing: the Chicken Run. Each Needle Manor inmate – currently there were seven – was allowed two hours in the Chicken Run each day. Some walked. Some jogged. Most simply sat with their backs against the chainlink, either staring up at the sky or looking at the low grassy ridge that broke the landscape a quarter of a mile to the east. Sometimes there was something to look at. More often there was nothing. Almost always there was the wind. For three months of the year, the Chicken Run was hot. The rest of the time it was cold. In the winter, it was frigid. The inmates usually chose to go out even then. There was the sky to look at, after all. Birds. Sometimes deer feeding along the crest of that low ridge, free to go where they pleased.

At the center of Needle Manor was a tiled room containing a Y-shaped table and a few rudimentary pieces of medical equipment. Set in one wall was a window with drawn curtains. When pulled back, they disclosed an observation chamber no bigger than the living room of a suburban tract house with a dozen hard plastic chairs where guests could view the Y-shaped table. On the wall was a sign reading KEEP SILENT AND MAKE NO GESTURES DURING THE PROCEDURE.