McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [44]
“Take off your skin,” Small says. He’s crying and The Witch’s Revenge licks his tears away. Small’s skin pricks all over, and down under the house, something small wails and wails. “Give me back my mother,” he says.
“What if I’m not as beautiful as you remember?” says his mother, the witch, The Witch’s Revenge. “I’m full of ants. Take off my skin, and all the ants will spill out, and there will be nothing left of me.”
Small says, “Why have you left me all alone?”
His mother the witch says, “I’ve never left you alone, not even for a minute. I sewed up my death in a catskin so I could stay with you.”
“Take it off! Let me see you!” Small says.
The Witch’s Revenge shakes her head and says, “Tomorrow night. Ask me again, tomorrow night. How can you ask me for such a thing, and how can I say no to you? Do you know what you’re asking me for?”
All night long, Small combs his mother’s fur. His fingers are looking for the seams in her catskin. When The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he peers inside her mouth, hoping to catch a glimpse of his mother’s face. He can feel himself becoming smaller and smaller. In the morning he will be so small that when he tries to put his catskin on, he can barely do up the buttons. He’ll be so small, so sharp, you might mistake him for an ant, and when The Witch’s Revenge yawns, and opens her mouth, he’ll creep inside, he’ll go down into her belly, he’ll go find his mother. If he can, he will help his mother cut her catskin open so that she can get out again, and if she won’t come out, then he won’t either. He thinks he’ll live there, the way that sailors sometimes live inside the belly of fish who have eaten them, and keep house for his mother inside the house of her skin.
This is the end of the story. The Princess Margaret grows up to kill witches and cats. If she doesn’t, then someone else will have to do it. There is no such thing as witches, and there is no such thing as cats, either, only people dressed up in catskin suits. They have their reasons, and who is to say that they might not live that way, happily ever after, until the ants have carried away all of the time that there is, to build something new and better out of it?
How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman
By ELMORE LEONARD
The fate of a bank-robbing murderer resided in two scoops of peach ice cream on top of a sugar cone.
Carlos Webster was fifteen years old the time he witnessed the robbery and murder at Deering’s drugstore. It was in the summer of 1921. He told Bud Maddox, the Okmulgee chief of police, he had driven a load of cows up to the yard at Tulsa and by the time he got back it was dark. He said he left the stock trailer across the street from Deering’s and went inside to get an ice-cream cone. When he
identified one of the robbers as Frank Miller, Bud Maddox said, “Son, Frank Miller robs banks, he don’t bother with drugstores no more.”
Carlos had been raised on hard work and respect for his elders. He said, “I could be wrong,” knowing he wasn’t.
They brought him over to police headquarters in the courthouse to look at photos. He pointed to Frank Miller staring at him from a $500 wanted bulletin and picked the other one, Jim Ray Monks, from mug shots. Bud Maddox said, “You’re positive, huh?” and asked Carlos which one was it shot the Indian. Meaning Junior Harjo with the tribal police, who’d walked in not knowing the store was being robbed.
“Was Frank Miller shot him,” Carlos said, “with a .45 Colt.”
“You sure it was a Colt?”
“Navy issue, like my dad’s.”
“I’m teasing,” Bud Maddox said. He and Carlos’s dad, Virgil Webster, were buddies, both having fought in the Spanish-American War, and for a number of years were the local heroes; but now doughboys were back from France telling about the Great War over there.
“If you like to know what I think happened,” Carlos said, “Frank Miller only came in for a pack of smokes.”
Bud Maddox stopped him.