短篇小说｜Robert Coover：Treatments
Dark Spirit
They are on a film lot, walking through a pre-shoot reading of a script that calls for a brave traveller—“That’s you, kid,” the director says, leading her forward with an arm around her shoulders—to be lured to the edge of a deep, mysterious forest, known portentously as the Forest of Time. The forest is fake, deep as a painted scrim, but the director has told them that a real forest from Transylvania will be pasted in later, and they have all been asked to bat at the air around their faces, as if to brush away foliage, bugs, bats, clinging cobwebs. “Out, out, damned spot, I say!” an actor screams in falsetto, batting wildly, and everyone laughs. The actor, who has a bit part in the film, as the enchanted prince, smirks shyly, blinking his long lashes. He’s a cute boy, but too full of himself. And just a runt. He’ll have to stand on a chair for their happily-ever-after smooch once she’s freed the Beast from his spell and let the prince out. The industry is obsessed with this hackneyed tale, once inflicted upon young virgins to prepare them for marriage to feeble old buzzards with money. She used to raise hell about such things. Now she doesn’t really care. “The gutsy heroine knows that many have perished here,” the continuity girl says, reading from the script, “victims of the absolute evil that is believed to pervade the treacherous Forest of Time.” “Oh, the horror, the horror!” growls the actor playing the Beast, wearing his shaggy gorilla suit, but holding the head on his knee like a trophy. “Who wrote this shit?” an actress wants to know. One of Beauty’s ugly sisters. Already into her sneering role. “I put the words in,” the writer confesses, “but the producers told me which ones to use.” They are all laughing, she is laughing, if you can’t laugh you’re fucked, she knows that, but she doesn’t feel like laughing. It’s the damned Beast, messing with her mood. Not the costumed actor, a beardy creep given to chummy slaps on the fanny (she’s learned to keep her back turned away), but the maddeningly empty eyes in the hairy head on his lap. “I think this is going to have a bad ending,” she says to no one in particular, and with effort looks away. She is Beauty, though she’s no longer beautiful, if she ever was (makeup and wardrobe will do what they can), and it is she, just by being who and what she is supposed to be, who moves the tale along, making the inevitable happen. It’s her destiny. The trap she’s in. “Sure you’re ready for this?” her father asks beside her. The actor playing Beauty’s father. “Why shouldn’t I be?” Decent enough old fellow, showing concern. But what does he really want? She feels vaguely threatened. “The scary part,” she says with a shudder, “is when you realize something truly horrible is happening—and you still want it.” “Oh, wow!” It’s that falsetto voice again. Heavy foot on the reverb pedal. A guy is roving about with a camera on his shoulder. She wonders if they’re already shooting. “I remember doing this kind of thing in my back yard with my first camera, when I was a kid,” he says. At the same time, he seems to be asking her if she’s all right. “All I want,” she tells him, entering the forest, “is to live happily ever after.” “You are living happily ever after now,” he shouts. “Don’t get lost!” “Toilets are back to the left!” someone calls. “Let’s get out of here,” Beauty’s father whispers, and takes her elbow, but she shakes him off. “I’m doing this for you,” she says, trying to memorize each step forward so she can retrace her path, but forgetting each step as soon as it’s taken. He’s still there at her side, but then he isn’t. It’s growing darker, the deeper she goes. That’s all right, she likes the darkness. Like time itself, she thinks, having no idea what she might mean. Though nothingness is part of it. She hesitates. She knows that she has reached an awful place because of the smell. Has she been here before? Life was so funny. Now it’s not. She is lonely and afraid. Is that hollow laughter that she hears? No, she does not want to do this. She has to find the exit while she still can. As she turns to flee, the forest leans after her. In threat. In longing: he’s here somewhere. She can hear him, rustling about in the depths, can feel the haunting presence of his vacant eyes. She bats against them, striking wildly at the night, like a fucking comedian. “Oh, I don’t care,” she says, and turns back, stepping deeper into the darkening woods. She’s not afraid. She comes upon a door. She opens it. He enters her. She can hardly breathe.
Desperate Hours: The Musical
A ruthless gang of escaped convicts, led by a psychotic killer, is holding a couple hostage in their own suburban home. The gang’s not sure what’s supposed to happen next, but the boss has a plan. First, they need money, and there’s some coming from somewhere; they have to wait for it. Waiting makes them nervous. Though the intruders are not very friendly, the lady of the house, hoping for the best, timorously offers them coffee and a plate of home-baked cookies. The snarling gang leader belts her one, sending her sprawling. The other two hoodlums snatch up the scattered cookies and chomp them voraciously with their mouths open, spewing crumbs, so as to further annoy the tearful housewife at their feet. They make vulgar remarks about her underwear, but when one of them lifts her skirt for a closer look, the gang leader slugs him. In that moment of distraction, the husband grabs the phone to call for help, but it’s ripped from his hands and he is mercilessly pistol-whipped. Their two children come in to find both parents on the floor, their mother weeping, their father’s head bloodied, three unshaven red-eyed bozos looming over them, their guns out. The thugs take an interest in the girl, but are wary of their puritanical boss. The boy takes an interest in the thugs, their scarred fists, their cocked weapons. He asks them if they’re real desperadoes, and in reply the leader launches into a gruff aria in praise of pure, unmotivated violence. The other two join in for the chorus, which is a tuneless thuck-thuck-thuck, repeated rhythmically, while they smash their fists against their palms and shuffle menacingly around the room, side by side. One of them is the leader’s portly kid brother, the other a sullen cop killer who joined them on the breakout. Their round bellies bounce to the rhythm of their shuffle, and, feeling the ecstasy of the harmonious moment, they drop their jaws and roll their eyes back. But their dance is interrupted by the sudden bonging of the door chimes. They freeze, shrink back against the walls, eyes asquint, their revolvers pointed at the captives. The boss grips the boy’s neck in his clawlike hand, and walks him to the door. It’s only a feeble old geezer on a cane. He cranes his neck around the gangster and the boy, trying to see what’s going on inside. When the gang leader asks him how old he is, he grins a gap-toothed grin and says he’s eighty-five, probably, or else eighty-six, he’s not sure. “That’s pretty fucking old, all right,” the gangster says with a sneer, nodding at the other two, and they escort the old man through the kitchen into the attached garage. Two shots are heard. When the thugs return, they find their leader crumpled to his knees, clutching his head in both hands, gripped by a sudden insane craving for sugar. The terrified wife says she used up all the sugar for the cookies, but she’ll go ask the neighbors. The leader rears up, whining with pain, and slaps her to the floor again. “Nobody leaves!” he bellows, pointing his gun at her. In a mad rage, whimpering pathetically, he spins around and, everyone ducking, shoots all the pictures on the walls. His kid brother, picking himself up after the rampage, tells him to cool it, he’ll go find some goddam sugar, and, holstering his revolver under his armpit, he slips out the back. He’s greeted next door by a gloomy housewife in an apron, a knotted bandanna on her head. He asks for a cup of sugar, showing her the gun, ready to kill her if necessary, but she shrugs and, pointing toward the kitchen, tells him to go help himself. He passes the bedroom and decides to rifle through it before getting the sugar. He finds jewelry, money, food stamps, a fur coat. He has both hands in her perfumed underwear drawer (feels so good, been so long) when she walks in on him. “Are you still here?” she asks wearily. He whips out his revolver, robed in fragrant silk, aims it at her. She ignores it, flopping down on the bed, forearm flung over her brow. “I’m so tired,” she says, and breaks wistfully into a song about life’s disappointments. “It’s such shit!” she sings. He is also disappointed and joins her in the sad song. He has a sweeter, more mellifluous voice than his brother. A deep chord is struck between them. Her husband comes home and finds his wife lying naked on the bed under pounding hairy buttocks. He quietly backs out. He is confused. Life, he has always believed, is a comedy, but this isn’t very funny. He packs a bag, joins the Foreign Legion, goes off to a distant war. There are flashes of his faraway devil-may-care heroics, while in the bedroom the thug is telling the housewife that, yes, he’s had to kill a few people, but don’t hold it against him, it’s not who he really is. Back at the house next door, the boy has tried to run away, and the other thug, the cop killer, has shot him. Not fatally. The boss has a soft spot for rebellious kids. He removes the bullet and, as he hasn’t seen his kid brother for a while, takes the boy into his gang in his brother’s place. He’s grown tired of waiting for the sugar, as well as the money, so he decides to leave the remaining thug with the family and go hold up a church instead, it being the day for it, taking his newest gang member along. The boy asks if he can shoot somebody, and the leader says sure he can. “There are more fucking churches than people in this state,” he tells the kid, handing him a gun. “It’s the least these creeps deserve.” Will the cop killer back at the house rape the boy’s sister and knock off the rest of the family? Probably. Can’t keep an eye on everything. At the church, the lead gangster finds his kid brother in the congregation, holding hands with some broad. They’re praying together. What the hell? The brothers draw their revolvers on each other, baring their teeth, but finally family is family. “This is who I really am,” the kid brother croons, as they lower their weapons. The leader grunts and grinds out his own sinister version of the same song, their discordant duet joined remotely by the woman’s ex-husband in the Foreign Legion, also now a seasoned killer and a fair-to-middling baritone. The congregation stands and hums along, swaying in rhythm. This is . . . who . . . I really . . . am. . . . Meanwhile, the boy shoots the preacher, but it’s not as much fun as he thought it would be, so he gives the gun back to the boss, and asks if they can go get an ice-cream cone instead. “Chocolate-raspberry crunch,” he says when asked. “With sprinkles.”
The Lone Ranger
On a rise within view of the isolated mining town of Striker, where the Cavendish gang is holed up, the masked man known and feared throughout the Territory as the Lone Ranger, the only survivor of the infamous Cavendish ambush, is questioning, in a monologue to his savage sidekick, the miserable lives the two of them have been leading. Virtuous, sure, heroic, taming the lawless West and all that, but the filth of it, Tonto, the poverty, the endless killings. He longs, he says, scratching his scraggly, infested beard, for the gentler pleasures of civilization. Hot baths, for example. “We’re growing old, Tonto, and we stink.” Tonto says he doesn’t give a dung beetle’s fart for the white man’s civilization, which has never done him any favors, but he is not satisfied, either. He tells the Ranger the story of the time Coyote got bored with life and crawled into his own asshole and all the world went dark, but the Ranger says he is tired of stories with happy endings, and he peels off his mask (an experience not unlike pulling your pants down in church, he remarks with an embarrassed wince as it rips away), exchanges his white hat for a black one, and borrows Tonto’s bandy-legged old paint, Scout, to hobble down into the mining town and raise a little hell, announcing himself, guns blazing, as a wild-ass Cavendish cousin. When the Ranger asks a terrified citizen about Butch Cavendish, he is sent to the church, where he finds his brother’s killer in the pulpit, delivering a sermon on Jesus as a man of peace and understanding. It seems that Butch and the rest of the pack have got religion; their cousin will have to raise hell on his own. Butch asks him why he’s wearing a white mask. “It’s not a mask,” the Ranger says. “It’s a disease I caught from a woman of pleasure who was exciting herself on my nose.” “A woman of pleasure? Cavendishes don’t never call them that, cuz,” Butch says, squinting suspiciously. “I know, but Cavendishes don’t get religion and preach in churches, either. Come out on the street with me for a little whoopee, Butch, and we’ll call them by the Cavendish way, and use them like that, too.” Butch gazes sad-eyed upon him as upon a dying cowboy. The members of his gang, hands pressed together in prayer, rock softly from side to side behind him, chorally humming a melancholic church tune. “God bless you, my son,” Butch says with a sickeningly beatific smile, clasping his Bible to his breast, “and may He wash away your sins with the blood of the Lamb, like He done mine.” And he turns his back. Wearing his Cavendish hat, the Ranger could put a hole through that damn back, but under the hat he’s still a Ranger and his Ranger creed won’t let him. So, feeling somehow cheated, he goes outside and robs the bank, shoots out the grain-store windows, sets all the horses loose, kicks over the water troughs, and torches the courthouse, and, while he’s at it, takes on a houseful of painted women and treats them in nasty ways. It feels good after being bottled up all these years. In fact, he hates to give up the disguise, but justice must be done, so he pockets a couple of bars of whorehouse soap and pushes old Scout back up the hillside to the encampment, where Tonto is waiting for him in his usual peyote haze. While lathering himself up in the shallow brook that trickles past, the Ranger tells Tonto about Butch’s conversion and new career. “He’s a man of the cloth now,” he says, “of the sanctimonious sort. But he killed my brother and all my Texas Ranger pals; not even Jesus can wash that away. He’s still the black-hat guy, and he must pay for the meanness of his ways. Anyhow, that’s what I think, Tonto.” “Thought, kemo sabe, is a dark cloud out of which the rain of words falls.” “You ought to lay off that cactus pudding, Tonto. It’s melting your brain.” The Ranger shaves, cleans his fingernails, gets back into his white duds and black mask, whistles for Silver, and returns to the mining town to avenge the crimes committed by himself as a Cavendish and to round up Butch and his villainous gang. Before hiyo-ing his way back up into the hills, the Ranger addresses the citizens of Striker on the subjects of public service, water rights, immigration, the godliness of manly adventure, and the innateness of good and evil. “The Cavendishes are to be pitied,” he says, looking down upon them, bound and noosed, “for they could not escape their inborn fate.” The people acknowledge his wisdom with rousing cheers and throw their hats into the air. The Lone Ranger, like Jesus, is a man of peace and understanding, sworn only to wound, never to kill, so he lets the townsfolk hang them.
作者：Robert Coover
来源：纽约客（2018.04.30）
讨论：你一口气读完了这篇小说吗？
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