I
Stevenson Crye—her friends called her Stevie—was nearing the end of her feature story on detection-and-diagnosis procedures at the West Georgia Cancer Clinic in Ladysmith when a cable inside her typewriter snapped and the machine began emitting a sound like an amplified raspberry. The disc on which the type characters were embossed refused to advance, and the angry blatting of the stalled element grew perilously louder. The typewriter seemed to be threatening to blow apart, a seven-hundred-dollar time bomb.
Stevie jabbed the on/off key and pushed her folding chair away from the desk, her entire body trembling as if the scream of an emergency vehicle had riven her peace of mind. She wanted to scream.
Instead she murmured, “Shit,” and exhaled a despairing sigh. Although that word was forbidden the lips of thirteen-year-old Ted, Jr., and eight-year-old Marella (the penalty for bad language being the forfeiture of a week’s allowance), ever since her husband’s death in the hospital next door to the clinic about which she had just been writing, Stevie had found frequent occasion to use the word herself. Bills falling due, deadlines missed, and now her expensive PDE “Exceleriter” breaking down and proclaiming its failure with a mechanical Bronx cheer. Shit. Thank God the kids were still at school.
Stevie went to the window of her second-floor study and leaned her face against the cold glass. The naked limbs of cork elms and dogwoods could not conceal the silver struts and lofty unpainted belly of Barclay’s water tower four blocks away. The town looked uninhabited. Who did you turn to on a bleak February afternoon when the instrument you and your children depended on for nearly every necessity went on the fritz? Dr. Elsa was fine at setting bones and incinerating warts, but probably not so handy at doctoring broken typewriters. You could romanticize small towns all you liked, but sometimes they were pretty damned inconvenient. Lots of work for a plumber and electrician like Ted, though. He had loved this place.
The Exceleriter, meanwhile, reposed in the middle of Stevie’s rolltop as if nothing much were wrong.
Her cheek still against the glass, Stevie stared at it. The typing element was canted at an unfamiliar angle, but otherwise the machine looked okay. Ted had given it to her for her birthday two and a half years ago, not long after she had decided to develop her latent writing talent and shortly before Dr. Elsa had diagnosed his gastrointestinal cancer. Ted was gone, but his gift remained, providential and indispensable. Maybe if she switched it on again, the type disc would click back into place and the machine obediently resume its lovely rotary-engine purr.
Worth a try, Stevie thought, leaving the window.
The typewriter, however, responded to her touch with a voice like a robot magpie’s. In self-defense she gouged the on/off control. In helpless anger she pounded the machine’s dark-blue hood. When she had finished, the only sound in the world seemed to be the propane hiss of her Dearborn space heater—that and the faint mockery of the winter wind clicking the leafless branches of the trees.
“Shit!” cried Stevenson Crye. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”