The boy was not ugly like the ogre, but beautiful like his mother. The ogre was angry because he wanted a son who was just as vile as he, so he said to the princess:
The woods, five years earlier. Snow falling, slowly concealing the newly disturbed ground.
‘If I cannot make a boy who is blighted on the outside, then I will make him foul on the inside. I will be cruel to him, and in doing so I will cause him to be cruel unto others.’
A man walking away, a pick and shovel over his right shoulder, his long hair trailing behind him in the wind.
‘I will be violent with him, and in doing so I will cause him to do violence. I will be merciless with him, and in doing so he will deny mercy.’
Darkness and dirt: a grave.
‘In this way, I will form him in my image, and I will make him my son …’
3
Cadillac, Indiana, was about as far from interesting as a place could get without fading entirely to gray. It had the basic infrastructure required for a minimal level of human satisfaction – schools, bars, restaurants, gas stations, two strip malls, a couple of factories – without anything approaching a heart or soul, so it was less a town than some revenant version of the same, restored from seemingly inevitable decay to a simulacrum of life.
A sign on the northern outskirts advertised its twinning with Cadillac, Michigan, although it was whispered that this relationship might have come as an unwelcome surprise to the citizens of the latter city, like the discovery of a previously unsuspected sibling living wild and feeding on passing travelers, which perhaps explained why no similar claims of association were advertised in Michigan.
Or perhaps, Leila Patton thought, the twinning arrangement was agreed before anyone from Michigan had actually bothered to visit the Indiana kin, and only when that failure was rectified did the Michiganites realize the error of their ways, prompting Cadillac, Michigan, quietly to drop any mention of interconnection. All anyone in Cadillac, Indiana, knew for sure was that nobody from Cadillac, Michigan, had responded to a communication in many years, and it didn’t seem worth sending someone to find out why, northern Michigan being a long way to go just to be given the bum’s rush.
Cadillac, Michigan, Leila knew, was named after the French explorer Antoine de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, the founder of Detroit, but that was only since the latter part of the nineteenth century. Prior to this, Cadillac, Michigan, had been known as Clam Lake, which was a shitty name by any standard. On the other hand, no one in Cadillac, Indiana, knew how the town had come by its honorific. The best guess was that a Cadillac had once appeared on what was now Main Street, and some rube was so taken aback at this manifestation of progress that it was all he could talk about for the rest of his days. By the same token, Cadillac might just as easily have been christened Airplane, or Feminist, or Jew.
Okay, Leila conceded, maybe not the last two.
Leila Patton was twenty-four, going on fifty. If the youth of Cadillac naturally divided into two camps – those who hoped (or were resigned) to work, marry, settle, sire, and be buried in Cadillac town and those who intended to get the fuck out of at the first opportunity – then Leila occupied the extreme wing of the second cohort. Her father had died when she was seventeen: an aneurysm on the floor of the sheet metal factory in which he’d performed shift work all his life, gone before the ambulance even managed to reach the gates. Leila’s mother was less fortunate. Her dying – leukemia – was long, slow, and ongoing. There wasn’t enough money to employ a home care provider for her mother, so it was left to Leila to take on the burden herself, assisted by an assortment of friends and neighbors. Consequently, Leila had been forced to defer a scholarship admission to the Jacobs School of Music at IU Bloomington. She’d been assured that the scholarship would still be waiting for her when circumstances finally permitted her to commence her studies, but Leila was beginning to feel this possible future fading into nothingness. That was what life did: it slipped away, minute by minute, hour by hour, faster and faster, until at last it was gone. You could feel it drifting from you – that was the curse – and the harder you tried to hold on to it, the quicker it went.
Which was why Leila Patton had invisible rope burns on the palms of her hands.
The whole experience – death, disease, opportunities delayed or denied – hadn’t caused Leila to become any more enamored of her hometown, especially since she continued to hold down a waitressing job at Dobey’s Diner. This meant serving, on any given day, at least half the assholes in Cadillac, and the other half the following day. But Leila needed the money: the scholarship was generous, but not so generous that additional funds wouldn’t be required if she wasn’t to live solely on rice and beans. She was saving what she could, but her mother’s illness sucked up money like a vacuum, and the poor died harder than the rich.
So this was how she spent her time: cleaning, cajoling, cooking, sleeping, waitressing, and practicing on the piano at home; or, thanks to the indulgence of her former high school music teacher, on the superior instrument in the school’s music room. And praying: praying for a miracle; praying for her mother’s pain to end; praying that Jacobs would continue to be patient; praying that someday she’d see Cadillac receding in her rearview mirror before it disappeared altogether, never to be glimpsed again.
Oh, and simmering. Leila Patton did a lot of simmering because, in case it wasn’t already clear, she really fucking hated Cadillac, Indiana.
It was coming up on nine-thirty on this particular Saturday night, and Dobey’s was winding down. Leila was one of the last waitresses working, which was always the way on weekends. It didn’t bother her much; Leila didn’t have so many friends that weekends were any kind of social whirl. She also got on well with Carlos, the chef, and particularly with Dobey himself, who never took a day off and lived in one of the trailers behind the diner, where he occasionally entertained a local widow named Esther Bachmeier.
Dobey was a short, portly man in his sixties, with a full head of very fine hair that was prone, on those occasions when the weather forced the wearing of a hat, to standing on end upon the hat’s removal. Dobey had been born in Elkhart, but moved to Cadillac in his early teens when his mother hooked up with a mechanic named Lennart, who was part owner of what was then the town’s sole garage. Dobey started out working for Lennart’s brother, the proprietor of what was then one of eight restaurants in Cadillac, although now only four remained. By the time Lennart’s brother decided to retire from the dining business, Dobey had long been his anointed heir.
Dobey was the only man in Cadillac to have The New York Times delivered to his door each morning, and he also subscribed to both The New Republic and the National Review, as well as the New Yorker, from which he would clip cartoons to stick on the plexiglass surrounding the register. Dobey owned, in addition to the big trailer in which he lived, three smaller trailers that housed his library and associated books, Dobey being an accomplished seller of old and rare volumes. These trailers also contained camp beds on which, over the years, various waifs and strays had been permitted to sleep in return for performing light household duties. Some stayed only a couple of nights, others a week or two, but few remained for longer than that. Most were very young women, and all were worn down and scared. Leila had made friends with a couple of them, but it didn’t pay to pry so she rarely learned much about their lives. There were exceptions, though: the girl named Alyce, who showed Leila the burn marks on her belly and breasts where her father liked to stub out his cigarettes; Hanna, whose husband enjoyed punishing her more extreme transgressions, real or imagined, by removing one of her teeth for each offense; and then there was—