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  Dark Side of the Moon

  4 Dark and Fanciful Tales of Portero

  Dia Reeves

  Dark Side of the Moon: 4 Dark and Fanciful Tales of Portero copyright © 2018 by Dia Reeves. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “Chickie Hill’s Badass Ride” first appeared in Corsets & Clockwork, copyright © 2011 by Dia Reeves

  “The Dark Side of the Moon” first appeared in Defy the Dark, edited by Saundra Mitchell, copyright © 2013 by Dia Reeves.

  Chickie Hill’s Badass Ride

  The more Sue Jean Mahoney listened to her boyfriend wax poetic about his newly remodeled 1958 Ford Thunderbird—the glasspack muffler and the whitewalls and the fancy-schmancy Motorola radio—the more she wanted to hop into the driver’s seat and run him over.

  She’d rushed here to the garage where he worked, upset about her parents and needing someone to listen to her, but Chickie only had eyes for his T-bird. Eyes and hands. The flash of heat that ignited Sue Jean’s blood as she watched him stroke his gorgeous white and candy-apple red car felt weirdly like jealousy.

  “And I put in all these dragster-worthy modifications,” he was saying as he herded her into the passenger’s side so she could appreciate all of his handiwork up close. He pointed to the center console, which contained numerous antique brass knobs and dials that seemed out of place in his modern, newly remodeled masterpiece. “There’s the usual stuff,” he said. “Like, you turn that knob to raise and lower the windows, and that knob turns on the air conditioning. But! When you turn that knob, fire shoots out of the—”

  “Chickie Hill, if I hear one more word about this silly automobile, I will have no choice but to set it on fire.” Sue Jean punched the center console and was about to punch it again when Chickie grabbed her fist.

  “Careful! You almost hit the compass. It’s very delicate. Very…special.”

  “You’re special,” said Sue Jean, and meant it. Chickie had qualities no one else had, certainly no one else in his family, who in the past had done their best to downplay his exploits. Like the time a five-year-old Chickie “fixed” the TV and made it impossible to watch American stations—only European ones. Or when, at seven, he fashioned robot legs for his pet frog. Mr. Hoppers leaped into the air on his new legs in 1952; it was nine years later, and he still hadn’t landed.

  But the day Chickie built a time machine in his closet, the day he had gone to lunch a ten year old and then gone to dinner the same day as a twelve year old, his parents decided to stop ignoring his abilities. They put him to work in the garage hoping to keep him too busy to build robotic limbs and time machines.

  “The most special boy I know,” Sue Jean repeated, “but you’re so shallow. Why are you more concerned about this car than about social injustice?” She pushed out of the T-bird, but didn’t feel any less oppressed outside. Their town of Portero, Texas was heavily forested, and the trees loomed over them at all times, hemming them in like prison bars.

  Chickie said, “Was that today? That thing?”

  “The freedom ride!” How could he call the most exciting trip ever a “thing”? People from all over, Sue Jean’s parents included, were caravanning to Washington, D.C. and from there, riding buses into the Deep South to protest segregation. The most exciting trip ever, and yet everyone was slouching along the busy street totally unconcerned that history was about to be made.

  “My folks just left,” said Sue Jean, ignoring Chickie’s wince when she slumped against his precious car, as if she were the one wearing greasy coveralls. “I tried to talk them into taking me, but they didn’t think it was ‘an appropriate venue for a girl my age.’ They’re so…parental. I have just as much of a right to protest as some old fogey.”

  “It’s 1961 not 1861,” Chickie said. “I don’t need anybody to fight for my rights.”

  “So you like having to sit in the colored section and being told where you can and can’t go?” When Chickie rolled his eyes and walked into the garage, Sue Jean followed him, willing to sacrifice her pristine saddle shoes to the grimy floor in order to make him care. “You know what we should do? Organize a sit-in! Just like those kids up in Greensboro and Nashville.”

  “We don’t have a Woolworth’s in Portero.”

  “There’s Ducane’s Department Store; we can start there. We can do so much!”

  “Or…” Chickie peered around the garage to make sure they were alone before pulling her into his arms. “Since your folks are out of town, we can go back to your place and neck all night long.”

  Sue Jean pushed him away. “Shallow!”

  “What? I’m just being realistic. You know how tricky it is upsetting the natural order? Let’s just keep everything nice and simple and go make out.”

  “The natural order? What’s natural about being treated like second-class citizens?”

  Chickie waved away Sue Jean’s ire. “I don’t mean segregation in particular. I mean any situation, in general, where you upset the status quo can have unintended consequences. Like the French. They were inspired by the success of the American Revolution to revolt against their aristocracy, right? So thousands upon thousands of people got beheaded, governments rose and fell, and families were destroyed or displaced all because a handful of cheapskate American bastards didn’t want to pay their taxes. What people do, even little things, can have huge bloody consequences. But what you wanna do ain’t little. You wanna change the world.”

  “For the better,” said Sue Jean defensively. Just when she thought Chickie couldn’t be more frivolous, he turned into a college professor.

  Chickie laughed. “The world according to Sue Jean Mahoney: a bunch of uptight missionaries doing good deeds. Uptight missionaries with long silky legs.” He lifted her circle skirt up to her thighs and got a smack in the face for his efforts.

  “Get outta there.” Sue Jean straightened her skirt as he reached across the workbench against the wall and switched on the oily Zenith transistor radio. When he heard the song “Manish Boy”, he cranked the volume. It was definitely Chickie’s theme song; he could be so adult about certain things (he had stolen an extra two years from the universe, after all) but a five year old about everything else.

  “You just don’t understand, Chickie. I don’t want to wait around and do nothing. I don’t want to hope things get better. I want to know.”

  “Knowledge is power,” he said gravely, rubbing his cheek, “but power corrupts.”

  “Why do you always use wisdom to irritate me?”

  “Beneath all this grease lies a complicated man. A main,” he emphasized, like the song on the radio. His untried schoolboy voice was so unlike Muddy Waters’ worldly growl that Sue Jean couldn’t help but giggle. This time when Chickie put his arms around her, she let him. Irritating mannish boy indeed, but he was her mannish boy.

  “So you wanna make the scene at the Old Mission tonight?”

  Sue Jean agreed, not just because she planned to talk him into helping her organize a sit-in, but also because she really liked making out. She had only recently discovered that she was very good at it, and Sue Jean liked doing things she was good at.

  “Cool, mama.” Chickie kissed the side of her neck and let her go. “Lemme just lock this dollhouse away in the back.” He grabbed
a large, tarp-covered object from the workbench.

  “A dollhouse?”

  He laughed. “Look at the way your eyes just lit up.” He set the dollhouse back on the bench and removed the tarp. “You gals say you outgrow dolls and stuff, but it’s all lies.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Sue Jean exclaimed, admiring the gables and the wraparound porch. “But it looks just like Mr. Peterson’s house.”

  “Yeah, this is his kid’s dollhouse. He asked me to electrify it for her birthday.” He undid the latches and opened the house so Sue Jean could see the interior. “See the switches in all the rooms? Flip one.”

  She did, and ooh’ed when the little doll kitchen flooded with light. “I would have died for that when I was ten.” Sue Jean was dying now as a matter of fact, but she wouldn’t give Chickie the satisfaction of admitting it.

  “Did you see the dolls the kid keeps in it?”

  There were three dolls, one in the bathtub, one on the couch, and one standing in the corner in one of the bedrooms, like a little kid that had been naughty. All three dolls were hideous, as tall as Sue Jean’s hand, bald and nude with gnarled skin. They looked like creatures out of a gross horror flick where old men had mutated into tiny trolls.

  But this wasn’t a drive-in. This was real life, and in Portero, reality was unnaturally thin. In addition to battling social injustice, Porterenes also had to confront the occasional monster or two that slipped through the thinnest places. Sue Jean preferred the monsters to the bigots, though; monsters were more easily destroyed.

  She picked up the doll from the bathtub. “My neighbor found one of these things in her mousetrap last week,” she said.

  “Maybe the kid found them roaming in her backyard, scooped them up in a jar, and made Mr. Peterson stuff them for her amusement.”

  “Morbid kid,” said Sue Jean as she put the doll back in the tub.

  “Morbid yourself. I remember when you put your Chatty Cathy’s head in a vise.”

  “That doll was defective. Or possessed. She wouldn’t shut up.” Sue Jean grimaced at the memory. “Ever.”

  Chickie tweaked her chin. “You’re a tough little mama, Sue Jean. Lucky for me I like—” He frowned and moved her aside so he could peer into the dollhouse.

  Sue Jean was about to ask what was wrong when she saw it herself. The light in one of the doll bedrooms was flickering. Chickie reached in to test the switch in that room, and the doll standing in the corner turned and launched itself at Chickie’s hand, biting it.

  Chickie screamed as blood streamed down his arm. He tried to fling the doll away, but its jaw was clamped tight.

  Sue Jean scanned the workbench and grabbed the first tool she saw—a pair of scissors. She grabbed the doll and neatly snipped its head from its body. The head was still clinging to the back of Chickie’s hand, though, so she had to dig it out like a stubborn thorn. Finally she placed the head and body back in the naughty corner.

  “Think the other dolls are still alive?” Sue Jean asked, using the tissues in her pocket to clean the blood from Chickie’s wound.

  “I don’t aim to find out.” He shooed away her attempts at first aid and closed and latched the dollhouse. He covered it with the tarp and carried it outside to his car. “This is going back to that kid today. That thing almost ate me!”

  “Your pinkie is bigger than its whole body,” Sue Jean scoffed, moving aside the toolbox he kept in the trunk of his car so he could set down the dollhouse. “Coward. Why did I ever get mixed up with someone who fails the test so miserably?”

  “What test?”

  “My ideal mate test,” she said, just to provoke him. “There’re only five criteria—twenty points for each one. You scored abysmally. Looks: ten—”

  “Ten? Out of twenty?”

  “Intelligence: twenty; bravery: zero; social conscience: zero. Even if you aced the passion criterion, you’d still fail.”

  “I’ll show you passion.” Sue Jean thought he was going to grab her, but there were too many people on the street. Instead he lowered his voice. “Just wait till we get to the Old Mission. I’ll melt the starch outta your petticoat.”

  “Don’t be vulgar.” But Sue Jean couldn’t wait to see what would happen to her petticoat.

  “You like that I’m vulgar.” Chickie leaned close to her, indecently close. “That’s the real reason you hang with me.”

  The proper thing to do in public would have been to step back and maintain her distance, but Sue Jean didn’t want to be proper. She wanted a kiss. So she stole one and said, “That and your car.”

  “I thought you said it was shallow.”

  Now that all of his attention was on her, Sue Jean was no longer jealous of his T-bird but admiring. She remembered when he’d brought it in from a salvage yard a year ago, wrecked and practically smoking from the accident that had mangled it. And now it was a work of art, a red and white confection gleaming in the spring sun.

  “I said you were shallow. Your car, on the other hand, is seriously righteous.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The Old Mission had been abandoned by Spanish priests centuries ago and now its ruins lay sprawled in a clearing deep in the woods. It had found new life as a popular make-out spot, and several cars were parked there, including Chickie’s; moonlight glinted on passion-fogged windows as far as the eye could see.

  Sue Jean checked her makeup in the rearview mirror and fluffed her hair. She had cut it recently, and it was short and incredibly chic, like Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones. She hated the vanity in her that made her care about such things as cute hairstyles when there were so many problems in world, but she didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t help her fellow man and look good at the same time.

  “Why’re you doing that?” Chickie asked, switching off the interior light. “I’m about to undo all that primping and preening and mess you up in a big way, mama.”

  “Don’t speak to me like that, Chesney Albert Hill.”

  “Hey!” He actually looked around as if he expected to see his cronies’ ears pressed against the windows. “Ix-nay on the Chesney business.”

  He thought he was so cool. Chickie’s own normally soft, curly hair was slicked into a ridiculously greasy pompadour. He’d exchanged his coveralls for black jeans and a T-shirt and his prized red letter sweater. She prized it too. If Chickie ever got around to asking her to go steady, she would get to wear it, and everyone would know they were a serious couple. But it was hard to get Chickie to be serious about anything.

  “Sorry, Daddy-O,” she told him. “I’d hate to think I was ruining your reputation.”

  “When you call me Daddy-O,” said Chickie, sighing in the dark, “I wish you wouldn’t sound so ironic.”

  A Studebaker pulled up next to them—right next to them, totally ignoring make-out spot etiquette. They realized why when the Studebaker’s windows creaked down, flooding the clearing with Little Richard’s raucous rendition of “Tutti Frutti” and Chickie’s basketball teammate’s incredibly loud voice.

  “Chickie Hill!” Nate screamed, leaning past his girl, Peggy, in the passenger’s seat. “What’s buzzin’, cuzzin’? Still trapped in the old wage cage?”

  Chickie rolled down the window and said, “Sadly, yeah, but I got time off for good behavior.”

  “So you can practice bad behavior?” Nate winked suggestively at Sue Jean, who rolled her eyes.

  “You know it, but what’s with junior?” Chickie nodded at the little boy in the backseat of the Studebaker who was wearing a cowboy hat and scowling. “Y’all giving him pointers?”

  “Very funny, peabrain,” Peggy said, offended. “It’s just that I have to babysit now that our folks are joyriding across the country.”

  “Joyriding?” Sue Jean asked. “Did they go to D.C.? For the freedom rides?”

  “Yep.”

  “Couldn’t you just die?” The sense of unfairness washed over Sue Jean anew.

  “Yeah.” Peggy looked wistful. “Be nice to stick
it to the man just once.”

  “I’m a man,” Nate told her. “Come stick it to me.”

  “This is grody,” said the little boy in the backseat, as Nate kissed his sister’s ear. Can’t we go to the zoo?”

  “The zoo’s closed, shrimp,” said Nate.

  The little boy turned to Chickie. “You’re the one who got stuck in a closet when you was five and came out all grown up.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Don’t lie to him,” Sue Jean said.

  “It’s not a lie,” said Chickie. “It’s a legend. Don’t hate me because I’m a legend.”

  “I like legends,” said the boy. “Peggy, tell me the legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

  “Peggy’s busy, kid.”

  Peggy pushed Nate away. “Whyn’t you go play hide-and-seek, Leo?” she said. “That way you can have fun and me and Nate can have some privacy.”

  “No.” Leo looked out of the window at the ruins, wide-eyed. “It’s haunted here.”

  “Betcha it’s not,” Peggy said. “Come take a walk with me, and I’ll prove it.”

  “You oughta take Sue Jean,” Chickie told her as she helped her brother out of the backseat. “She’s not scared of anything. This monster tried to attack me in my dad’s garage and she saved my life.”

  Leo grabbed Peggy’s waist tight. “A monster?”

  “It was this big,” said Sue Jean reassuringly, holding her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. “If you see it, just stomp it like a cockroach.”

  “Come on, Leo,” said Peggy. “Ain’t any monsters around these ruins. Everybody knows the Old Mission counts as hallowed ground.”

  “That’s why you hear so many people screaming, “Oh, God, yes!”

  “Little pitchers have big ears, Nate.” Peggy shot her boyfriend a speaking look and then led her brother off toward what remained of the Old Mission.

  Sue Jean was hoping that Nate would turn off his interior light and mind his own business now that Peggy was gone, but he seemed content to keep jabbering at her and Chickie.