The Wonderful What-Have-You

On Highway 17 just north of the Nassau River that night, they passed an old billboard. “Witness the Wonderful WHAT-HAVE-YOU,” it commanded. Smaller lettering beckoned: “Sensation of the Swamps – Peculiarity of the Piney Woods. Just 11 MILES.”

“Is that where we’re going?” asked the boy.

“It is,” said the man.

“This will help us find my mama?”

“I think so. I hope so.” The boy looked out the window as they passed from the protected riverbottom forest into the suburban sprawl of Yulee. “Wow,” he said. “It looks so different now.”

The man looked too. It was changed even from what he’d known. The old hardware store now sold antiques. The old Jiffy gas station now sold sheds. There was a new gas station where the feed and seed once stood, and all the underbrush had been replaced with manicured grass, a sure sign of forthcoming tract houses and yet more change on the way. 

North of Yulee the scenery transitioned into pinewoods, and within minutes, they’d pulled up to the home of the What-Have-You. The man parked far from any cameras. For all its advertised mystery, the place mostly looked like a regular gas station, although much bigger. The building and forecourt were dark, the only illumination coming from the sign above that assured travelers they were indeed in the right place to see the What-Have-You. Wisps of winter fog rose and played in the neon glare.

“This is it?” The boy grabbed the man’s arm. “Do we have to? I don’t like this place.”

“You want to see your mama, don’t you?”

“Yes. Do you promise it’ll work?”

But the man could not promise. He only had a hunch, a compulsion. In fact he’d only ever been here once, despite growing up less than 20 miles away. He remembered passing the place and seeing its ubiquitous road signs, but he had never bothered to stop by until a year ago. He was driving to Asheville with his teenage nephew, who had become fascinated with roadside attractions and the legendary creatures and artifacts that often inspired them. The signs hadn’t worked their spell on the man, but Evan was a different story. That kid saw magic under every shell, mystery behind every tree. How could he pass up the sensation of the swamp? And so the man assented to witness the Wonderful What-Have-You.

He hadn’t been prepared for what was inside. He saw the yellow eyes, always staring, and the black teeth protruding from pulled-back lips. He saw the chains. Even the glass of the display case seemed tempered with an invisible toxicity. The man found nothing wonderful about the experience; the emotion that filled him was anguish. Evan was speechless, stricken by some combination of curiosity and revulsion. He was much like his uncle.

“I can’t be sure this will work. But I think so. I really do.” He’d thought a lot about it. In fact, for a year the man had never stopped thinking about the What-Have-You, or else the What-Have-You had never stopped penetrating his thoughts. Its memory would come to him when he was drifting off to sleep or letting his mind wander. Still, he hadn’t seen particular significance in it until the boy showed up.

He had first spotted the boy up the street from home, where Tallulah Avenue crossed Pearl. The child was standing in front of Papa’s Produce in his unusual clothes, humming or singing to himself in the twilight. It seemed late for such a small child to be out by himself, but the man didn’t think anything of it until the boy started showing up in his backyard and on the dock. It took three days to convince him not to run away each time he was spotted, and another three to get him to say anything. Finally, the boy agreed to come inside, and he started talking. After that, he never shut up, although there were things he wouldn’t say, or couldn’t remember. When the man asked what had happened to him, he could only say, “I remember a fall. No, somebody pushed us down. Then we were okay for a long time, but I got lost. I can’t find my mama.” 

The man had struggled to think of ways to help the boy, but then one day the idea to take him to the What-Have-You came like a bite on the line. When the man told the boy about the thing, and that it might be the way to find his mother, the boy was excited at first. He was far less excited when the man described the What-Have-You’s appearance, and now that he was at its threshold, he was paralyzed with fear. “I’m scared,” he said. “I don’t like it. Please don’t make me go in there.”

“Look, I get it,” said the man. “I hate this place too. It is scary. But if you want to see your mama again, this is our best hope. Can you be brave for your mama?” 

The child nodded. 

“There’s a boy,” said the man. “Let me just get our key of entry.” He popped the trunk and pulled out the lug wrench.

Two blows from the wrench brought the glass door down. An alarm shrieked into the night so loud that it echoed off the trees. The lug wrench made short work of the speaker, but presumably there was also a silent alarm. They’d have to be quick. The man stepped through the doorframe and falteringly, the boy followed.

The man turned on his headlamp and scanned the entryway. He shined the beam over the convenience store items and tacky souvenirs – coconut monkeys and alligator heads and dried pufferfish fashioned into Christmas ornaments. Further in, past the rack of vials of water from “The True Fountain of Youth,” was a ticketbooth and the hallway to the exhibits. The What-Have-You was the main attraction, but it wasn’t the only one, and the walls were papered in bright, vaguely threatening posters of all the strange things to be found inside. The man led the boy onward.

“I feel funny,” said the boy. “Is it far?” The man’s heart fell when he looked back at the boy. He now looked horribly emaciated and his skin was turning colors, like his blood was slipping out of him. The man had a thought he hated: even if his plan didn’t reunite mother and son, perhaps it would still rid him of the boy. He shook the notion off. “Just a little further, brave boy.”

They stepped into a room filled with uncanny taxidermy. There were jackalopes and winged cats and an “ice gator” coated with white fur. The sign above read, “Fearsome Critters of Wild Florida.” The man didn’t like to be in the presence of so many dead things. It wasn’t the deadness that bothered him – he was a fisherman and sometime hunter and a regular dispatcher of pests – but it seemed to him the taxidermist’s artifice had infected these bodies with a tricksterish malevolence that might cause them to leap out the moment the headlamp was off them. He led the boy across this room as fast as possible.

The next room depicted an ersatz forest scene. Felt leaves were stapled into trees painted on the wall. The room was populated by dozens of Jenny Hanivers, foot-high ocean animals that had been mutilated into humanoid forms. Some hung from the branches of the false trees while others danced implike in a ring of foam mushrooms. The lettering on the wall read “The Little People of Indian Times.” The man didn’t like this at all. At best, the museum was trying to build a whimsical scene out of disfigured sea creatures, and at worst was pretending that these were the actual stuffed bodies of murdered fairy folk. 

Scanning the room with the headlamp, the man saw there were other forest creatures about. The light bounced back from the glass eyes of one such being, a massive skunk ape, startling him. The man laughed a little, and he motioned for the boy to show him the effect. He wasn’t ready for what stepped into his field of view. An eyeless, noseless form with bared teeth and skin the color of river water. Such a thing shouldn’t be able to speak, but he did. “Mister, I don’t feel good.”

The man tried to disguise his alarm. “We’re nearly there. Want me to carry you?” The corpse-boy nodded, and the man took his shriveled form into his arms. Just through the next door was their destination, the home of the worst thing of all. He steeled himself and crossed the floor, bearing one corpse through a hall of corpses. In the halflight the room seemed to come alive in the man’s periphery, dim shapes swirling, the forest animals stirring, the little people becoming the rays and skates they once had been and slipping through the air like angels on the aether. The antic motion of the room grew as the man drew closer to the door. The boy wasn’t moving now. The man took a breath and stepped over the threshold.

There it was, as awful as he remembered. The shape of a person, skin leathered and stained, its black teeth exposed into a permanent grin. Its arms were outstretched like they had been holding something, and in its eye sockets were two glowing yellow bulbs apparently powered by batteries. The body wore nothing but the chains holding it upright in its display case. Above was an unlit sign: THE WONDERFUL WHAT-HAVE-YOU.

Beside the body was another, smaller figure in its own display case, a slight and tattered little thing. Unlike the other, this one was suspended midair by chains as it was not in a standing position. It too stared into the darkness with its sham eyes. Between the bodies was a plaque:

Of the Wonderful What-Have-You, much is whispered but little is known. Its origin is shrouded in the mystery of a vanished race. The bodies are thought to be a young Indian mother and her child, members of a lost tribe who lived in these parts long before the coming of the Spaniard. Perhaps the victims of a bloody murder or savage rite of sacrifice, or possibly accidental drowning, they are said to have been found mummified in the black peaty mud of the St. Johns River near Hontoon Island. The specimens were bought by Doc Elsbury Sr. from a carnival sideshow in 1970 for the price of $80. With only their bodies to tell their story, the harsh truth of their lives and deaths may never be known.

The newest renovation has moved the What-Have-You’s child into its own case where its gruesome visage is on full display to educate and entertain guests on the mysteries of this bloodstained, blessed land.

In the man’s arms, the boy started to change, from a desiccated corpse to a sleeping boy and back again. Within the display case, the What-Have-You’s child was also changing back and forth in converse. As the man approached the case, the boy in his arms got lighter and lighter until finally there was nothing left. The man wondered if he’d been wrong, if this wasn’t helping. 

Then a voice came from within the case. The boy. “Oh, hi, there you are. So what’s next?”

The man laughed out loud. “Let’s get you back to your mama.”

He took the lug wrench to the boy’s display case, and then to the mother’s. He snapped the glowing yellow lights out of their eye sockets and crushed them under his heel. Then carefully he took the withered little body and placed him in his mother’s waiting arms. His vision was playing tricks on him. For a moment, the mother’s lipless grimace was a joyful smile.

“Thank you,” said the voice. “Mama says thank you, too.”

“Unfortunately, buddy, we’re not done quite yet,” said the man. He started unwrapping the chains that held the mother’s body upright and, this done, he took both bodies into his arms. Even together they weighed almost nothing. He was reminded of the cicada molts he used to flick off the window screens as a child.

“Where are we going?” said the boy.

“To a safe place.”

The boy smiled and nodded, or he seemed to; the man’s vision was now totally unaccountable. One moment he was carrying mummified bodies, the next he was watching two figures, clear as life, walking through the halls hand in hand. The boy-corpse-boy was humming a tune as they went. All around the rooms the taxidermies were moving freely. A million lives and a billion years whirled around the man’s every step. He couldn’t trust his perceptions, and so relied on his body to continue the plan.

Outside. No police, yet. In the car. On the highway, the What-Have-You and son riding backseat. The boy singing a song in a language the man could not know. Down Cedar Point Road. Down the road for miles. Down the road into the preserve and up the old forest track as far as the car could go.

The man wasn’t sure how long they’d taken, but it was still very dark. He cut the engine and turned on his headlamp. Out of the trunk he grabbed the shovel and the fine linen sheet he’d bought, then he carefully lifted the bodies from the back of the car. All around them was a tangle of branches and brambles so thick you could only see the stars in the thin channels between the limbs. The whole forest hummed and teemed with unfettered life.

“This looks more like what I remember,” said the boy.

“Glad there’s a shard or two of it left,” said the man. Guided only by the headlamp, he carried the bodies another half mile off the track, deep enough into the woods to locate a place that wouldn’t be found or disturbed easily. He chose a spot on a rise beneath a live oak and set to digging.

The man worked deep into the night. By early dawn he’d made a passable grave.

“Y’all ready?” said the man.

“Ready,” said the boy. 

As gently as he could, the man wrapped the two entwined bodies in the linen and then lowered them into the earth. “There,” he said. “How’s that?”

“Good,” said the boy. “Mama says so too. When you don’t have to breathe it’s really pretty nice. Safe and warm.”

“Well, that’s good,” said the man. “I should have asked, is there anything I should do? Do you have gods or anything you pray to?”

“Mama says their names are dust. And that anyway you probably wouldn’t know them.”

“Okay, maybe I’ll just say some words to the dust, and whatever else that’s out there.” He started filling the hole back in. 

The boy didn’t say anything after that. The man finished filling the grave. In this place, the trees dropped so many leaves and the scrub grew so quickly that within a week or two you’d never know what was here. Above the man echoed the songs of birds of many kinds. It was a world of wonders and mysteries. The man walked out of the woods never to return.