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Marty and Ed: Fiction — Edward Maitino

Feb 152013

The author and his wife Michele and daughters Sophia and Isabella in a cafe just off rue de Seine in Paris

Edward Maitino is one of those unsung, mostly unpublished, really interesting writers who should be known more than he is. He was a student in a graduate writing class I led at the University at Albany-SUNY, either in 1999 or 2000, I can’t remember, earnest, dressed for the office, slightly out of place, but also the best pure writer in the class, with a Raymond Carver-ish instinct for capturing the epic solitude of alcoholism. Whenever I get a chance, I publish him. He was in an issue of Hunger Mountain (Fall, 2003, the print edition, not online) for which I co-edited the fiction with Mary Grimm. And now, once again, I have tracked him down and winkled a story out of him. Read it. You’ll see. He has a unique style, deceptively laconic and stoic. But the story has shape and mystery. It starts, jumps forward, then loops back before the beginning and tells you the story of the story. And the two stories, the two armatures, are psychological and structural parallels, the whole thing as intricate as clockwork.

—

Part One

I met Marty Sutherland in a hospital emergency room on the night my father died. He was brought in on a stretcher under a pile of blankets. It was Christmastime and the place was mobbed. The ambulance driver left him in a hallway across from where I was sitting with my sister.

Marty wasn’t moving. His arms were at his side under the blankets and his eyes were closed. But I could hear him moaning. Someone had taken off his boots and placed them at the foot of the stretcher. Nurses kept bringing over warm blankets to cover him. He must of had ten blankets covering his body.

It was almost like he knew I was staring at him because he opened his eyes and looked right at me. He whispered that he was thirsty and asked for water. I jumped up out of my chair. I was only eleven-years old. I ran down the hallway to get the nurse.

Marty had this crushed look on his face and his eyes were sunken deep in his sockets. I had never seen a man so close to death until a few minutes later when I saw my father. The whole mood that night was grim. The doctors and nurses were trading anxious looks or avoiding looking at anyone at all. At the time I couldn’t understand why. It just made my stomach sick.

Marty was rushed through these huge metal doors. The doors swung open and closed automatically, which made it seem—to an eleven-year old boy—like Marty got swallowed up. Later the same set of doors ate my father.

I saw Marty again about ten years later during another low point in my life. It was my last semester of college and a few weeks after my girlfriend threw me out of the apartment we shared.

I was living in this dreary basement apartment that I was lucky and unlucky enough to find. There was a reason it was available half way through the semester. I was eating a lot of junk food, cutting classes, and watching TV in the dark. I guess the apartment suited my mood.

It was late in the day and I was sitting alone in a diner near my mom’s house when Marty walked in on crutches. He sat in a booth by the window and when his pants hiked up I noticed two prosthetic legs above his socks.

After I finished eating I walked up to Marty’s booth. I’m not sure what I was hoping to accomplish.

I said, “Do you remember me?”

He looked up and shook his head.

“I met you at the hospital the night you were brought into the emergency room.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

Marty went back to his plate, cutting a piece of grey meat, mixing instant mashed potatoes with canned peas, slurping a cup of coffee.

“I was a kid then, so you’d have to picture me a lot younger. I was sitting across from you in the hallway. You asked me for a glass of water.”

Then I said, “It was December 17th, 1982. I remember the date because it was the night my father died.”

Marty pushed his plate away. He lit a cigarette. I took out a pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket. Marty handed me matches. He moved the ashtray to the middle of the table. I sat down across from him.

I found out Marty had lived on Florida’s gulf coast for several years before moving back to Schenectady after his mother died. He survived on a monthly disability check and small inheritance. Besides his prosthetic legs, he had a heart murmur and the onset of diabetes.

He didn’t say much about the night we met other than he’d lost his legs from frostbite after leaving a Christmas party drunk and passing out in his car in the bitter cold. He sued the owners of the house who hosted the party and the city where he parked his car, but his lawyer filed the papers too late and the case got dismissed.

“That’s too bad,” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. “The system’s stacked against a guy like me.”

We paid for our meals separately and walked outside. He showed me how his car was rigged for him to drive using his hands. It had the throttle and the brakes on the steering wheel.

He pulled two cans of beer out of a cooler in the back seat. We drank the beer and smoked cigarettes under the streetlight. It was one of those warm spring nights that you appreciate after a long winter.

Marty said the next time he saw me at the diner he was going to buy me dinner.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“I want to,” he said. “You got me water, right?”

“Well, I told the nurse.”

“It’s the same thing.”

I watched Marty drive his car out of the parking lot, working the controls from the steering wheel. He had this wild-eyed look on his face, as if he was half-expecting the car to lift off the ground and disappear into the night sky.

I went home that night and sat in a chair in front of the TV with the volume turned down. The apartment had this horrible odor I was trying to ignore. I think it was in the carpeting. I was thinking about my father and how much I missed him. I wished he could have seen me grow up and graduate college. I was about to be the first person in my family to get a college degree. I think that would have made him proud.

I remembered how my mother would take us to visit my father’s grave on every holiday, his birthday, and the anniversary of his death. Those first few years were tough for everyone. Then my sister stopped going to the cemetery with us around the time she turned sixteen. On the next occasion—I think it was Memorial Day—my mom and I skipped visiting the grave. We never went together after that or seldom talked about my father. I don’t know why. I suppose grief has its own rhythm.

My mother started dating a salesman she met through her work. I was happy for her. They lived together in the house where I grew up. They were able to deny living together because he still paid rent on his apartment. But he was there almost every night. I told my mother to have her boyfriend give up his place and not worry about what other people think. But she was old-fashioned when it came to couples living together, especially a widow with children.

That summer I ran into Marty at the diner. I’d been over my mom’s dropping off laundry. I was looking for a full-time job and living in the same lousy apartment. My ex-girlfriend had moved back to Long Island and wasn’t too keen about me coming down to visit. I was putting a lot of pressure on her to get back together. I wanted to get married. I think she moved back home to get away from from me.

Then on my way to the diner I remembered Marty and wondered if I would see him. Sure enough Marty was sitting in the same booth, almost like he was waiting for me to walk in. And he bought me dinner, just like he promised. Being out of work, I was happy to oblige. But I didn’t take advantage of him. I ordered the daily special and nothing else, not even a soda.

He began talking about the experience of losing his legs. He said it had been years since he talked to anyone about it. I told him a little about my father’s accident.

Marty said it was stupid and reckless to leave the party as drunk as he was that night. But he often wondered why the owners of the house didn’t try to stop him from driving home. There were people milling around outside who had watched him stumble down the front steps and skin his knee.

Before the accident Marty figured he’d get married and have children. But after all these years he was comfortable being on his own and couldn’t imagine having a wife or the responsibility of raising a family.

“Life suits me just fine,” he said. “I realized long ago this was the way things were supposed to be.”

After we finished eating Marty asked if I wanted to go out for a few beers. I hesitated for a moment, not wanting to encourage him. He was too old a guy to be hanging out with. Then I remembered that I was the one who approached Marty in the first place. I kind of felt sorry for him.

“Okay,” I said.

I put his cooler and crutches in the back seat of my car and drove to a bar that he suggested. We sat in the back room near the pool table and took turns buying drinks.

After a while Marty asked the waitress to clear the empty beer bottles off the table. She wasn’t very friendly toward us. I watched the girl stack the bottles on the tray and put down a clean ashtray.

“No reason we have to look like drunks,” Marty said to her.

The waitress forced a smile.

While we were talking I noticed how Marty would tip his chair back on two legs and stare down at the floor as if his thoughts were somewhere else.

Marty talked about being in the hospital for several weeks, enduring multiple infections and surgeries, losing one leg the night he was brought in and the other leg the next day.

“Nowadays I bet they’d be able to save my legs,” he said.

“Today, sure,” I said.

He seemed to think about this for a moment.

“When I woke up from surgery, the first one, I told the nurse I wanted to see my leg.”

I moved around in my seat.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “But I felt like it was still mine. Attached or not, it belonged to me.”

“What’d the nurse say?”

“She called in the doctor, who said I was in shock. ‘Wait a while,’ he said, ‘and see how you feel.’ ‘I know how I feel,’ I said. ‘I want to see my leg.’”

Marty took a long drink of beer. I watched him close his eyes and tilt the bottle.

“Did you ever get to see it?” I asked.

“Never did,” he said. “The doctor told me there were health laws that had to be followed. Then the next day they took off my other leg and I thought, what the hell, who cares anymore?”

I looked at him closely. Unlike the first time I saw Marty at the diner, he was clean-shaven and his hair was washed and combed. He had a flat face, queer lips he kept wiping with his sleeve, and a wide nose like you’d see on a black man.

“I don’t think I could look at my leg cut off like that,” I said. “That’s crazy.”

“For months I kept having these awful dreams. I never spoke to anyone about them. They’re the most personal thing in my life. We all have those secrets.”

He shook his head in disbelief.

Then he said, “I was too ashamed to even look my mom in the eyes when she’d visit the hospital.”

We finished our drinks and left the bar. On the way back to the diner I stopped at a market so Marty could buy beer to put in his cooler. I felt uncomfortable—sort of exposed—under the bright lights in the market. The idea of people walking around filling shopping carts with food seemed brilliant. I was like, “Who invented this system of carts and conveyer belts?” That’s when I knew I was drunk.

I stood in the checkout line with a candy bar. Marty walked up struggling to hold onto a carton of beer and a bouquet of plastic flowers. I realized I should have offered to help him shop. He paid for a bag of ice, which we picked up on the way out. I had no idea why he wanted to buy the flowers, but it made me nervous thinking he was planning to give them to me. The woman ahead of us had coupons, which took time for the girl at the register to scan.

When we got back to my car Marty stocked the cooler. He put the beer in first and then emptied the ice on top of it. He opened a can of beer and handed it to me. The flowers were on the floor between his feet. He was looking straight ahead.

“You ever drive out to where your father had his accident?” Marty said.

“I used to go there when I first got my license. I’d drive by out of curiosity I guess. But I haven’t been there for a long time.”

“You think you could find it?”

“Yeah, I’m sure I could.”

“Let’s go put these flowers down,” he said. “I keep seeing these little shrines popping up along the road where someone’s died in an accident.”

“I’ve seen them too,” I said. “Sometimes there’ll be flowers or a wreathe. A lot of times you’ll just see a cross in the ground.”

We drove for miles on dark country roads. The sky was overcast and I couldn’t see much of anything beyond the shone of the headlights.

We began climbing up a long, slow-rising hill. On the other side of the hill the drop was much steeper. I noticed a sign near the top of the hill. There was a picture of a car dropping over a steep hill. I wondered if my father’s accident had something to do with the sign being put there.

“This is the spot,” I said. “Right here at the bottom of the hill.”

I pulled onto the shoulder of the road and cut the engine. We got out of the car. The road was built up several feet above the fields. There was a wire fence with wood posts at the bottom of the embankment on each side of the road.

I pictured my father speeding over the hill, his eyelids heavy, his jaw slack, a cigarette between his lips. I considered how much time he had to react before losing control of his car, the long-hooded sedan flying off the embankment and slamming into the ground, steam whistling out of the radiator.

I saw my father sitting passively behind the wheel, a gash opened on his forehead.

Marty was leaning against the side of my car without his crutches. Seeing him standing on his own two feet startled me.

I leaned into the driver’s side window and switched on the high-beams, flooding the dark field with light. Hundreds of bugs swarmed into the beams of light.

I grabbed two beers from the cooler. My hand went numb when I reached into the icy water.

Marty said he felt no pain tumbling down the stairs, tearing open his pants, blood trickling down his knee. “I should’ve realized right then and there how drunk I was,” he said. He tried driving home, but only made it as far as the city park. He managed to pull over on the perimeter road before passing out. Temperatures dropped into the single digits. A fresh snow fell that morning, covering his car. When he woke he was still drunk. He heard a snow plow pass by, the heavy metal blade rumbling on the pavement. Marty tried turning over the engine, but the battery was dead. He laid on the horn, but no one came to help. Hours later when the plow came by a second time to salt the road, he heard the pellets pinging against the side of the car.

“I wasn’t cold anymore,” he said. “I could’t feel a thing. When I tried to lift my arm, it felt like someone was holding it down.”

“I gave up,” he said. “I was done caring.”

That night an old man walking his dog through the park heard what he described later as “a human sound,” a whimper perhaps or a soft groan. He brushed the snow off the driver side window of Marty’s car and there in the dark interior he saw a man slumped behind the wheel.

I looked at Marty. His eyes were blinking fast. We stood a few feet apart. He lit a cigarette. When he struck the match, I could see his eyes shining.

I reached into the passenger side window and grabbed the bouquet of flowers. I set down my beer on the pavement and stepped in front of the headlights. I walked sideways down the embankment. I unlaced my boot, took off the shoelace, and tied the flowers to the fence post. I tied them tight so they wouldn’t blow away.

“How’s that look?” I said.

“Real fine,” Marty said.

“Can you see it from the road?”

“You sure can.”

I slipped coming up the bank. I could feel my foot moving around in the untied boot. I turned and looked at the bouquet of flowers. Marty was sitting in the car, leaning back in the seat smoking a cigarette. I got behind the wheel and sat for a moment.

I put the car in gear and drove until I found a spot to turn around. Coming back toward the hill I noticed the can of beer I set down on the shoulder of the road. I considered opening the door and reaching down to pick up the can, but I was finished drinking beer.

I slowed down and looked at the flowers tied to the fence post.

“I’d like to come back and see what it looks like tomorrow,” Marty said.

“Me too,” I said. “Things look different in the daylight.”

Marty seemed satisfied. He didn’t say another word driving back into town. He cleared his throat once. His face was turned toward the window most of the time. I noticed his legs stretched out on the floor. You could tell they weren’t real by the way his ankles were bent.

There was a beer can next to his crotch. When he finished his cigarette he dropped the filter into the can and swished it around. I pulled into the parking lot next to his car. Inside the diner I could see people sitting in booths by the window.

“I’m kind of hungry,” he said. “You hungry?”

“Not really,” I said. “I ate a candy bar.”

Marty wanted to give me his telephone number. I turned on the light inside the car so he could write it down. He folded the piece of paper and handed it to me. I tucked it in my visor. But I knew I wouldn’t be calling Marty or coming back to this diner. I had already decided that. I took the cooler out of the back seat and put it in his car.

“Give me a call tomorrow,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

Marty was going into the diner for a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. I tooted the horn as he crossed the parking lot. Instead of turning around, he picked up a crutch as if to wave goodbye.

I opened the window and lit a cigarette. The cool air rushing into the car woke me up. Driving back to my apartment I thought about the flowers tied to the fence post. I hoped every so often someone passing by would notice them and say a little prayer.

I realized it wasn’t much, just a handful of plastic flowers tied to a post on a road less travelled than most. But maybe people seeing it would wonder what happened down there. Maybe they’d ask themselves who was lost and who was left behind.

I drove slowly on the highway, making sure to stay between the lines. I kept my eyes on the speedometer. When a car came up behind me and flashed its high beams, I stuck my arm out the window and waved for it to pass.

Part Two

Ed was late picking up his children from school. The plan was to drop them off to their mother and go back to work. As a salesman, Ed was often out on the road making calls, which allowed him to drive his children to school and back. But he always seemed to be late picking them up. He was late so often that when the last bell rang his children reported directly to Mother Superior’s office where they sat by the window facing the street waiting for Ed’s car to turn the corner.

The nuns reminded Ed more than once that it was school policy to have all children out of the building at dismissal. They even went so far as to write him a letter, which was sent home with his son.

Mother Superior, in particular, disliked Ed. He wasn’t the kind of man a nun would admire.

When Ed’s car pulled up to the curb that afternoon, Sister Catherine took the boy and the girl by the hand and walked them out the front door. She stood under the portico staring at Ed through the snow flurries falling on the street.

Ed reached across the seat and opened the passenger side door. The girl, the younger of the two, ran toward the car and climbed in the back seat. Big white snowflakes stuck to her hair. The boy sat in the front seat next to his father.

The boy could see right away that his father had been drinking. His eyes were red and the car smelled of alcohol. The boy’s stomach began to churn, but he made an effort not to show any concern on his face. As they breathed inside the car the windshield began to fog. Ed rubbed the glass with his hand and rolled down the window. The boy looked back at his sister as they drove away. There was a book in the girl’s lap and her head was down. The wind was whipping her hair.

On the highway Ed got behind a slow-moving car. He tried to pass the car twice, but was stopped by oncoming traffic. Agitated, he threw his hands up in the air. He began tailgating the car, leaving about a foot of space between the two bumpers. In response, the car in front of Ed began speeding up and slowing down. Ed could see two young “punks” in the back seat turning their heads and laughing.

At that point something changed in Ed. He straightened up in his seat, gripping the steering wheel. The boy noticed the lazy look on his father’s face had disappeared. The crease running down Ed’s forehead seemed more pronounced.

The car in front of Ed accelerated again. The boy could hear the engine rev as the car moved away from them. But instead of letting the car drive away, Ed pushed down on the gas pedal. He got close behind the car again, but this time at a much faster speed. That’s when the driver put on his brakes. He just tapped them, but it forced Ed to react by stepping on his brakes hard enough for the children to be thrown forward.

Instinctively, Ed reached over and put his hand against his son’s chest. But the boy’s momentum carried him forward and he hit his forehead on the windshield. A bump instantly appeared above his left eye. The girl in the backseat landed on the floor and started to cry.

“You’re okay,” Ed said to the girl.

She nodded, but looked frightened. Ed reached back with one arm and lifted her back into the seat. She pulled the hair away from her face and wiped tears off her cheek. The boy smiled at his sister. He didn’t want her to be afraid.

At the next stoplight Ed shoved the handle on the steering wheel into the park position so hard the boy thought it had broken off. The boy grabbed his father’s arm and begged him not to leave. But Ed turned and got out of the car as if the boy wasn’t there.

Ed walked up to the car and leaned into the driver’s side window. The boy could see his father’s head and shoulders disappear into the car. Ed turned off the engine and took the keys out of the ignition. The boy heard voices inside the car. The voices were muffled, but full of emotion. Ed grabbed the driver by his shirt. The young man sitting in the passenger seat opened the door and sprung to his feet on the pavement. Ed stood up and pointed his finger at the young man across the roof.

The boy watched in disbelief. It was like everything was happening in slow motion. He pushed on the horn, but his father wouldn’t look in his direction. When Ed grabbed the car door handle with both hands, the driver started kicking his feet out the window. Then Ed grabbed the young man’s legs and one of his shoes fell off. He dragged the driver out of the car through the window and the young man fell hard on the pavement. Ed stood with his hands clenched in fists, waiting for him to get on his feet and fight. But the young man was too afraid to get up.

By now the stoplight turned green and traffic was backed up at the intersection. Several people stuck their heads out the window or beeped their car horns. Snow began to fall—big, heavy, wet flakes. As snow covered the windshield it grew dark inside the car. The boy turned on the windshield wipers. When the wipers cleared the snow he saw that his father was gone. He watched the young man’s car pull away. Just then the car door opened. Ed got in breathing heavy. His shoulders and hair were covered with snow.

The boy could see that his father was no longer drunk. Ed lit a cigarette and took a long drag. He put the car in gear and drove off. The girl settled back in her seat, relieved to be going home. The boy stared at his father. He noticed the knuckles on his right hand were scraped and bloody.

No one said a word on the way home. Ed pulled into the driveway and left the motor running. He kept his hands on the steering wheel.

“You two go in the house,” he said. “I’ve got a few more stops to make.”

The girl grabbed her books and ran inside. But the boy, sitting next to his father, didn’t move. The bump on his forehead tingled. He touched it with his finger. He asked his father to come inside the house.

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

Ed looked down at his hand. He took a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and cleaned off the blood.

“It’s nothing,” Ed said. “Now go inside and get your homework done.”

The boy opened the car door and got out. He could see his sister’s footprints in the snow. The tracks led to the garage. Snow was falling steadily. An inch or more already covered the ground. From the breezeway the boy watched his father’s car back out of the driveway. All he could make out were the red brake lights shining in the dark snowfall.

That evening, while his mother cooked dinner, the boy sat at the kitchen table watching television. The console television in the living room had a blown picture tube and while his parents saved to get it repaired, the little black and white television on the countertop was the only one there was to watch. The boy didn’t mind. He liked being in the kitchen with his mother. He liked the smell of the food she cooked and watching her prepare it. The girl was in her bedroom reading a book about horses that she had brought home from school.

Ed’s wife was on the telephone with a neighbor when the operator interrupted the call. They were talking about getting together one night the following week to bake Christmas cookies. Ed’s wife suddenly heard a terrible clicking sound and then a woman’s voice come on the line. The hospital had been trying to call this number regarding an accident her husband had been involved in, the woman said. When the neighbor heard the operator she hung up the receiver without saying goodbye.

“How bad is he hurt?” Ed’s wife asked.

The woman on the telephone said the only information she had was that the accident was serious and that Ed’s wife should come to the hospital immediately.

Ed’s wife hung up the receiver on the wall phone and stared at the boy.

“Get your pants on,” she said.

The boy was wearing pajama bottoms with a pattern of baseball gloves and bats that he had put on after his pants got wet shoveling the driveway. His cheeks were still flush from being outside in the cold. The boy turned off the television and stood by the counter. For a reason he couldn’t understand he felt foolish wearing the pajamas.

“What’s the matter?” The boy asked.

“Just do what I say,” the mother said. “And tell your sister to get ready to leave.”

The boy took his pants off the radiator where he had left them to dry and stepped into the legs. Parts of the pants were warm and other parts were still cold and wet.

Ed’s wife called for a taxi and explained it was an emergency. She took off her apron. She turned off the stove and moved the pots and pans off the burners. She helped the girl on with her boots. She went through this mental list of things she needed to do. The list made her feel more in control of things.

Then she stood at the front window waiting for the taxi, smoking a cigarette with an ashtray in her hand. When the taxi pulled in the driveway, they piled in the back seat and drove to the hospital.

Ed was on a gurney in a small, brightly lit examination room. When the family arrived there was a nurse standing next to Ed reading something off a monitor screen. Ed’s wife sat the children down on plastic chairs in the hallway before stepping through the curtain. The policeman who followed the ambulance carrying Ed to the hospital stood with his elbow resting on the nurses’ station.

When the nurse came out of the room the policeman straightened up. He said he was going to need her to draw blood to measure Ed’s alcohol level. The nurse’s face tightened. She stared at the policeman. When the nurse opened the curtain to wheel a machine in the room, the boy saw his father lying on the gurney. There was a gash across his forehead and blood on the front of his shirt.

Ed suddenly moved to get up. The nurse tried to get him to lie back down, pushing her hands on his chest. She was caught off guard by Ed’s strength and his ability to move around given his injuries. Then again, working in the emergency room for as long as she had, the nurse had seen many strange things possess the injured. She knew how desperate a wounded man could be.

For the first time in his life the boy saw fear in his father’s eyes. It gave him the goosebumps. Ed had fought in the war and told the boy stories. The boy thought his father would live forever.

Ed was larger than life in comparison to the other fathers the boy knew. He had never seen his father miss a day of work or stay home sick in bed. Many a morning Ed would come home from a night of drinking and playing poker to shave and change his clothes before going off to work.

The boy knew that if his father could just get on his feet everything would be okay. The doctor could stitch his cut and they could all go home.

He thought of the food his mother had left on the stove and imagined his family eating dinner. He pictured his father sitting at the table in a clean shirt and a bandage wrapped around his forehead like you see the wounded wear in the movies. His mother was there in this image too, standing over her husband in her apron holding a frying pan and filling his plate.

An orderly rushed into the room to help keep Ed on the gurney. His mother was off to one side. She was saying something to her husband. The boy could recognize but not understand the complex emotions on her face—concern, disappointment, anger.

Then all at once Ed stopped trying to get up. He let out a loud breath the boy could hear from the hallway. The doctor was called in to exam him. When the nurse saw the boy looking in the room, she closed the curtain.

A short time later Ed was wheeled into surgery by the orderly. The boy saw how grey and drawn his father’s face looked as he passed by.

The orderly was bent over the gurney, pushing it down the hallway in long, powerful strides. But what drew the boy’s attention—what he remembered all those years later—were the quick, little steps made by the nurse holding the IV bottle alongside the gurney.

There was something about the commotion in her steps that filled the boy with dread. He was so terrified he held his breath as the gurney went by. Then the nurse, the orderly and Ed passed through these huge double doors and the hallway was empty again.

—Edward Maitino

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Edward Maitino’s work has appeared in Hunger Mountain and Event. His short story “Blackbird” won the Eugene Garber Prize for Best Short Fiction at the State University of New York at Albany. He has taught at Hudson Valley Community College.

Triptych: Fiction — Rosalie Morales Kearns

Feb 022013

Rosalie Morales Kearns is a writer of Puerto Rican and Pennsylvania Dutch descent. She identifies three major childhood influences on her writing: fairy tales (unexpurgated) from all over the world; Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; and her parents’ well-intentioned efforts to raise her a Catholic, all of which gave her a deep appreciation of, and respect for, absurdity.

That special appreciation is much in abundance in her first book, the story collection Virgins & Tricksters (Aqueous Books, 2012), which contains an ecumenical cast of spiritual characters (gods from all over the world), and a diverse collection of humans (a psychologist, a biology student, and the wives of a pirate, a revolutionary, and a priest, to name only a few), all of whom range about a wide field of history. And throughout these stories Kearns offers equal opportunity to realism and its cousin, magical realism.

“Triptych” is the only story in Virgins and Tricksters without magic-realist elements, though it shares with the other stories a deep sympathy with misfits and a celebration of the potential for human connection. Many stories in contemporary fiction begin with a version of normal and then slowly break it to pieces; “Triptych” reverses this familiar plot pattern and instead offers the reader, brilliantly and with sweet empathy, three lonely souls who slowly find their way to each other. The writer Katherine Vaz calls this story “a little masterpiece of carefully observed lives–Larry with breathtakingly long hair emerges as one of the most memorable characters a reader can hope to find–and when divergent paths merge, the book concludes with a satisfying upsweep. Solitary beings settle inside mystery.”

—Philip Graham

Larry

Saturday midmorning Larry wakes up, enough to turn off the muted TV and worry that he’s forgetting something important, not enough to keep from falling asleep again. Hours later when the screen door opens, shuts, and he hears his daughter’s voice, it all seems part of the same long, pleasant daze. He keeps his eyes closed, can hear Molly in the kitchen. She’ll be unloading her school books, her laptop onto the table. Now she’s leaning over him.

“Dad.”

“Hey, baby.” He looks at his watch. Almost noon. He’s on afternoon shift now, and still hasn’t managed to adjust.

“You fell asleep on the couch again.”

He sits up, gives her a kiss on the forehead, lets her steer him into the kitchen.

“No offense or anything, Dad, but it’s kind of an old-man thing to do. Even Grandpa doesn’t fall asleep in front of the TV.”

Larry opens the refrigerator, considers his options.

“You want a sandwich, Moll? Eggs?”

“I ate already, I’ll just have coffee.”

Slowly he starts thinking straight, finding what he needs—spatula, frying pan, oil. As he feels more alert the nagging thought from the early morning comes back. Something he needs to remember. He almost has it.

It’s gone.

He opens the fridge again, takes out eggs, Canadian bacon, a package of shredded cheese.

“How’s your mom?” he says.

“Fine.” Molly switches the coffee maker on, takes two mugs from the dish rack.

“She says hi.”

Larry tries to picture Cynthia saying this, Cynthia at the wheel of her Mercedes. Have a nice weekend, honey. Tell Larry I said hi. He tries it different ways. Tell your dad I said hi. Say hello for me. None of them work. His imagination stalls right after Have a nice weekend.

Cynthia wishes him well. When she thinks about him.

She’s planning on taking Molly to Italy with her for a few weeks this summer. Time when, normally, Molly would be staying with Larry. But okay, he can hardly begrudge her. Italy instead of Globe Mills, Pennsylvania, population 316. Adjacent to Meiser, population about the same. And beyond that the livestock auction, open Wednesdays and Saturdays, and beyond that Route 522 will take you to Kreamer with its grain elevators to the east, and Middleburg the county seat to the west.

Molly lives with her mother and stepdad in the next county. Lewisburg’s a college town, but even that’s boring for Molly. She asks Larry sometimes, what he did at her age, and he doesn’t feel right telling her. Larry at sixteen was drinking beer, getting laid. Not taking SAT prep classes, drinking coffee at bookstores with her friends, volunteering on environmental projects to clean up the Susquehanna River. Not going to Europe.

Larry sits down at the table with his plate. “Well,” he says, “you tell your mom I said hi too.”

Molly nods, takes his fork, and picks out bites of scrambled eggs, avoiding the Canadian bacon.

He looks at her textbooks. Chemistry, pre-calculus. Another thing he wasn’t doing at her age.

“How’s it going with those?”

“Fine. I’m getting all A’s.”

Molly hands him his fork and he starts eating.

Just the other day he’d been sixteen himself. Back then he couldn’t imagine anyone more different from him than a sixteen-year-old girl, especially a smart one. Now here he is almost thirty-eight and one of them is sitting across from him at his own kitchen table.

“I never could figure out math,” he says, and the memory from the morning, the nagging thought, comes back to him now. The synapses have made their necessary connections. Perhaps his subconscious was counting up all the other things that are mysteries to him, and now he’s grabbed his keys and is rushing out the back door.

The truck.

He gets behind the wheel, pats the dashboard. “Okay, honey?” he says, and slides the key into the ignition.

The “service engine” light comes on, as bright and alarming as it looked last night.

Last night. When he’d decided, if he paid attention to her first thing in the morning, everything would be okay. No need for repairs that he couldn’t afford. And here it is noon.

“I take you in for maintenance regular as clockwork. Get your oil changed, your tires rotated.”

He pops the hood and goes round to inspect the engine, making sure to pull his hair back first. Ever since he let it grow long he’s been wary of anything that throws off sparks. He frowns, tries to convince himself he understands what he’s seeing. People expect him to know about cars, he expects himself to, isn’t sure where he was or what he was doing when other boys were learning about this stuff.

He gets back into the driver’s seat, tries to relax. He and the truck, they’ll relax together. “You’re going to change your mind,” he says. “I’m a patient man.”

He flinches, but only a little, when he hears a fist pound on the roof of the truck. The arrival of his neighbor, Dirk, is usually punctuated by loud noises: a door crashing open, stomping feet. Dirk leans down to the open window and bellows, “Got a cordless power drill I could borrow? Mine broke.”

“Sorry.”

“How about a Yankee screwdriver?”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Shi-ii-it. My kitchen window, hinges on the shutters’ve rusted off. If I ever buy another fixer-upper, take a two-by-four and beat me.”

Everything about Dirk, including his voice, is outsized. He’s six-four and two-forty, heavy beard and a full head of hair even though he’s over fifty. A man like this, Larry figures, has to know about car engines.

“Hey,” Dirk says, “they’re hiring at the UPS on Rt. 15. Pays more, I bet, than driving that ambulance. Plus benefits.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.” He might have to work two jobs, to get the truck fixed. “Can I ask you—”

“What’s on your face, man?”

Larry runs his hand over his cheeks, remembers the sofa and its burlap-like upholstery. “Couch pattern.”

“That’s sad.”

“Dirk, what would you do if you saw this light on your dashboard?”

“Service engine? Hell, I’d take it to a mechanic.”

“Should have checked her this morning,” he says to Molly later. “I knew there was something I had to do when I woke up.”

“How would that have made a difference? I mean, it’s not like the truck felt neglected, right? Dad. Right?”

“Okay, well. I thought maybe, if the engine, I don’t know, had a chance to rest overnight.” Or change its mind. He doesn’t say that out loud.

“That’s magical thinking,” she says. “We learned about it in social studies. Seeing connections between unrelated events. People have been doing it since prehistoric times. Like if there’s mist in the morning and you have a successful wooly mammoth hunt later on, you think the mist is the reason for it.”

Wooly mammoth—that would taste gamey. They sell bison burgers at the concession stand at Penn’s Cave and Larry hasn’t been able to bring himself to try one.

“Or if there’s a certain constellation of stars on a day when something good happens, you think it happened because of the stars.”

“How do we know it ain’t connected?”

“Dad.”

She stands behind his chair, kisses him on the top of his head. She runs her hands through his long hair, something she’s been doing since she was small. That, at least, hasn’t changed with the years.

“There’s no cause and effect relationship,” she says, slowly and carefully, “no connection between your attitude toward the truck and whether or not it has engine trouble.”

She saw the connection when she was little. If the yolk don’t break when I crack this egg, he would say, we’ll have perfect weather to go swimming down at the Middle Creek. Or If we spot the Big Dipper tonight, we’ll see a bear tomorrow when we drive over Shade Mountain. She played along enthusiastically, checking the night sky, or reminding him not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk. Cheering when the yolk didn’t break, or the engine started on the first try.

Patrice

Monday afternoons Patrice is allowed to close the fabric shop early. That way she can get to Lewisburg in time for the memoir writing class she’s taking at the YMCA. She doesn’t know what today’s assignment will be but she’s nervous about it already. She’s sure she didn’t do it right last time and the teacher seems like she’s losing patience with her.

“To explore a memory,” the teacher is saying when Patrice arrives, “it helps to start by focusing on something ordinary. Small, concrete, vivid details.”

Patrice lingers in the doorway. She doesn’t want to interrupt, and she feels shy around the others here though she’s normally outgoing. There’s a retired chemistry professor in his late sixties, but other than him Patrice, at 52, is the oldest person in the room. Also the plumpest. And from what the others have said about themselves, she knows she’s the only one there who hasn’t gone to college. One of the women is a full-time mom, another works as a personal trainer, and there’s also one who works at the college with an impressive-sounding title, dean of something or other. There’s only one other man, the owner of a café in town.

They’re clustered together along one side of a cafeteria-style table, listening to the teacher as she paces in front of them. They turn when they sense Patrice behind them, smile, make room for her. People used to do this for her in high school and on lunch break at the factory.

“We live our lives in our bodies, we touch things, we see things. It’s that ‘thing-ness’ that you want to always be aware of. Try to bring that into your writing, and it’ll lead you to more profound, interesting realizations. That’s what we want to do here, write honestly about ourselves, our lives.”

The teacher is wearing a flowing skirt and blouse, both black, with flashes of deep color, turquoise, forest green. Her bangle and bead bracelets make bright clinking sounds when she moves. She’s in her mid-forties and wears her long hair proudly undyed. The silver streaks against her dark hair look dramatic, sophisticated, unlike Patrice’s random swirls of gray, hidden somewhat with the help of Clairol’s Golden Medium Brown.

Patrice catches the teacher’s eye, but she responds with an overly bright smile that she holds up like a shield, and Patrice knows what the teacher is seeing: frumpy middle-aged woman in relaxed-fit jeans, lavender sweater. She’s probably particularly annoyed, Patrice thinks, with the appliquéd flowers at the collar. But why not wear flowers on your clothing, Patrice thinks. It’s spring.

The assignment today is to write about something they did over the weekend. “Concentrate on the sensory details,” the teacher reiterates. “What things looked like, sounded like, smelled like. Make the reader experience what you experienced.”

On Sunday Patrice had gone with some friends to a cemetery off Rt. 522, out toward McClure. Mildred and Gerri are old friends of hers from the bottling plant; they and her other former coworkers are still Patrice’s closest friends. You make connections with people you see every day for such a long time. Patrice had been there seventeen years before it closed and everyone scattered, squeezing themselves into other jobs here and there: convenience store, hair salon. Gerri got a file clerk job at the car dealership. Now that Mildred’s retired she’s thrown herself into family history. That day she was trying to track down the dates for some great-uncle. Patrice had gone along—her friends had gone with her to one museum after another over the years and never complained, no matter how bored they were. So while Mildred was taking notes, she and Gerri tromped around, looking at headstones and yelling to each other out of old habit, as if there were loud machinery they had to shout over instead of the headstones and neatly mown grass, so peaceful. One headstone in particular had interested Patrice, and she writes about it now:

“The last name, Huttner, is in big letters at the top of the stone, then beneath it on the left, John, 1918- and next to that, Blondine, 1918-. No death dates. I like to think they’re still alive, going strong at ninety-four. They bought the burial plot when they turned seventy, sat down with the funeral home director, a nice boy. They picked out the caskets and decided on a memorial service, chose a design for the headstone. I like to think they visit that stone now and then, John and Blondine, that they look at it and link hands and smile at each other, but they’re a little sad, too. So many friends, even the funeral director, have passed on in those intervening years.”

She stops writing when they run out of time, and when she reads her exercise out loud, another woman in the class says, “I think John and Blondine got divorced. John was probably unfaithful and Blondine kicked him out. They regretted it the rest of their lives, and they’re both buried somewhere else. Neither one could stand the idea of lying there alone underneath that marker.”

Patrice likes that version too, though it’s sadder than hers. The teacher gives them a strained smile and says something about Patrice’s writing being “speculative,” but then it’s time to go and she doesn’t say anything more about it, and Patrice is too embarrassed to ask. It’s clear to her she should have written about something else.

Later, since she skipped supper, she stops at the convenience store for an egg and cheese biscuit sandwich. The girl at the counter is talking to another girl who’s come in.

“I thought high school was boring,” the girl says to her friend. “I come in here every day and I feel dead from the neck up. I can’t believe this is my life.”

Patrice wonders, listening to them, whether she’d felt that way when she was nineteen or twenty, and if she hadn’t, and if she doesn’t feel that way now, is there something wrong with her?

She should write about things like that for her writing exercises, things that really happened. She could describe the sound of the girl’s voice, the dusting cloth she holds bunched in her hand, the way the glass and metal case where the hot dogs are roasting feels warm when you lean against it. The teacher likes details like that.

JulieAnne

JulieAnne feels like she’s been moving in slow motion ever since she opened the latest batch of photos. She’s only looked at the first one. It’s still in her hand, a picture of Amanda in black and white.

She has a color photo of Amanda in the same pose and right now she’s looking at the real Amanda in the same pose as in both pictures: sitting crosslegged on her bed, a mirror in one hand, mascara applicator in the other.

“So Mom and Dad said they’d try this low-carb diet with me,” Amanda says. “Isn’t that cute? And we’ve all gained, like, five pounds since we started.”

JulieAnne is only half listening. She has been in Amanda’s bedroom practically every day since they were seven years old. She knows it as well as her own: the dresser, made of some kind of quilted material glued over plywood, jammed up against the bed, the bedspread in shades of maroon with metallic gold threads running through it, the nightstand lamp with the mustard-gold shade that Amanda found at a yard sale. Amanda with her dark eyes, quick, businesslike movements of her hand as she applies eyeshadow, blush, lip gloss.

JulieAnne sees the real Amanda doing all this. She looks at the Amanda in the color photo doing the same thing. She raises her camera and looks through the lens at the real Amanda. She lowers the camera and looks at the black and white Amanda.

“I’m ready for the reality shows,” Amanda is saying. “All my life I’ve been having conversations with a girl who’s got a Minolta auto-focus stuck to her face. I know how to act natural in front of the cameras.”

JulieAnne hasn’t shown Amanda her black and white image. She knows she won’t be able to explain the difference in words. She wants to keep looking at the picture, studying the light and dark, the sharp edges and blurry shadows.

It was an accident, the black and white film. Amanda had bought it for her by mistake. People are telling her she should get a digital camera, how easy it is, how convenient, but her dad grumbles that he can’t afford a digital camera and JulieAnne doesn’t want one anyway.

She walks around Amanda’s house, looks at the rest of the pictures slowly, rationing them. When she stands in front of the real thing she pulls out a photo of it: laundry on the clothesline, pot of soup on the stove.

Color had always seemed so important. Why look at a photo of laundry if not for the bright sky behind the clothing, the contrast of a dark blue work shirt and a quilt patched with pinks and golds, and next to that a T-shirt faded to pale green? But in black and white she notices how they hang on the line, or curve and flap in a breeze, notices a splash of cloud and how much brighter it is than the clear sky around it.

She wonders if she should send some of these to her mother, or whether she’d find them boring. JulieAnne has never been good at letter writing. For years now, it’s been so much easier to send her mom photos. She tries to pick interesting images—a view of the Susquehanna River from the top of the bluffs at Shikellamy State Park, the small black bear she’d seen wandering through Mrs. Aumiller’s garden. Not the everyday stuff.

When Amanda is finally finished with her makeup they drive to Lewisburg for their after-school jobs, JulieAnne at a café and Amanda at the sporting goods store across the street. JulieAnne takes the photos with her. When things are slow she looks at the black-and-whites she’s taken here, shots of the customers, the cappuccino machine, the pastries in the lighted glass case.

The light is what fascinates her. It flashes off the ceramic mugs and varnished wooden tables like a live thing, like it should be dazzling the people sitting there sipping coffee, reaching for sugar. Instead they talk to each other or stare into nowhere; they look like they’re from a foreign country, another century. They seem kind. They’re used to shimmering light. That’s how their world is.

Larry

Tuesday afternoon is a slow day at work. They have only a few calls. A sprained ankle at the mall. A little later a possible concussion over at the high school soccer field. Mostly Larry plays cards in the dispatcher’s office with Kevin.

He asks Kevin about the truck, what the problem could be, how much it might cost.

Kevin says he doesn’t know. This is his response to almost everything Larry says.

Larry can’t decide whether to apply for the UPS driver job. He’s not sure how good he would be at it. If no one’s there to accept delivery you have to decide whether to leave a package, whether there’s enough overhang over the front door to protect it from rain, or go around to the side and risk running straight into an angry dog. Or you open the door to a screened-in porch and a jumpy homeowner opens fire on you. It’s harder than it looks.

He tries to hold onto a job as long as possible, no matter how bad it is, because he hates job interviews. They always ask you about the meaning and direction of your life. Where do you see yourself in five years? in ten years? and he can tell they’re asking because they’ve seen the questions in some management textbook. They don’t care how you respond. It’s just, they’re the boss and you’re a worker and that gives them the power to ask you a personal question and sit back and watch you squirm while you try to think up an answer that’ll sound good. Just once he would like to be able to be honest about those questions.

So, Larry, why did you leave your last job?

I didn’t actually leave. I’m a nice person, and I try, but I’m kind of scatterbrained.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

Well, in five years Molly will be 21, and finishing college, that’s how I figure time, ever since she was born. She’ll probably keep on with her schooling, become a professor or a rocket scientist or something. And I’ll be 43 and that’s a pretty good age, I think. It’s not the age when men have a midlife crisis, but that’s relative, isn’t it, midlife. And Molly’s mother will be 43, and still married, and still beautiful and we won’t have any reason to say anything to each other until Molly graduates from whatever, and then I guess there’ll be a wedding at some point, maybe baptisms and such. Oh, I guess you’re asking me about my job, what kind of work I see myself doing. Let’s see, I drive an ambulance now, so I guess the next step is EMT and then after that nurse, and then doctor. So yeah, I guess in five years I’d like to be a surgeon.

In the early evening a call comes in for an elderly woman with chest pains. They pick her up at one of those huge new houses over at what used to be Middleswarth Dairy Farm. Enormous picture windows, cathedral ceilings, heating bills alone that must be more than Larry’s rent. Cynthia has a house like that.

The place is in an uproar, everyone talking at once—the woman with the chest pains, her daughter, son-in-law, grandkids, dogs. The daughter’s yelling, she wants to go with her in the ambulance and the mother’s saying no, she wants to go alone, leave her in peace.

As soon as Larry backs out of the driveway, she says she feels better.

“We’ll just check your vital signs, ma’am,” Kevin says. He’s sitting in the back with her. “And we’ll have—”

“—Call me Virginia. It makes me feel like a fossil to be called ‘ma’am.'”

“Okay, uh, we’ll have the doctors look you over to be sure nothing’s going on.”

“I always feel better after I get out of my daughter’s house.”

“Virginia?” Larry says.

“Yes, young man?”

“Maybe it was a panic attack.”

In the rearview mirror he can see Kevin give him a look to remind him that he, Kevin, is an EMT and Larry is merely a driver and should keep his opinions to himself. Kevin had been a driver too, until he took the EMT training.

“Considering the patient is eighty-one,” Kevin says coldly, as if “the patient” can’t hear, “we’d better let the doctors decide.”

“I’m not too old to have anxiety, you know.”

Larry sees a slight movement by the side of the road. There’s no time to respond. A doe shoots out in front of them. Larry brakes, swerves hard to the right to miss her.

They careen onto the shoulder as the front tire hits something sharp and makes a loud hissing noise. They bump to a gentle stop.

“Jesus God,” Kevin says.

“I’m all right,” Virginia says. “Don’t have a heart attack on me.”

Kevin is out the back door of the ambulance and into the passenger seat next to Larry, sweeping his hands under the seat.

“Where are the goddamned flares?”

“Can we watch our language here?” Larry says.

“I would, but I don’t know a polite word for fuck-up.”

Larry and Virginia sit at the open back of the ambulance, legs dangling out, while Kevin rushes around setting flares and talking to dispatch. “Right,” he says into the cell phone. “Keep the patient calm.” He gives Larry another meaningful look.

“Well,” Larry says slowly, “I guess we should put things into perspective.”

“That’s an excellent idea.”

All kinds of ways it could be worse. One alternative is the ambulance flipping upside-down, spilling its contents of driver, EMT, and old lady all over the road, probably a dead deer somewhere in the picture too. And him fired. That could happen even without any injured humans or deer. For puncturing the tire with a patient on board. For being someone the supervisor doesn’t like.

He starts to tell that to Virginia, but changes his mind. She could be really stressed right now; she could get overexcited and her old, fragile heart would flutter to a stop.

“Why don’t I go first?” she says. “It’s a beautiful summer evening, and we’re sitting here on a country road surrounded by these lovely old oaks and maples and hickories. Your turn.”

“Okay. It’s almost the end of my shift.”

He decides there’s nothing quite like the sound of an old-lady laugh, dry and delicate. Impossible not to laugh yourself when you hear it.

“And do you always puncture a tire at quitting time?”

“Only every so often.”

“He also dents the fender,” Kevin says. “Leaves the windows down in the rain. Runs out of gas.”

That last isn’t quite true, but before he can argue, Virginia turns to Larry as if Kevin weren’t even there.

“I can’t help but notice,” she says, “you’ve got your hair tucked into the back of your shirt. Is it very long?”

“Yeah, pretty long.”

“You don’t see that so much these days. How interesting.”

He pulls his ponytail out and undoes it, without waiting for her to ask.

“Young man. My goodness.”

Some women love his hair, can’t wait to get their hands on it. It’s long, down to his waist almost, as thick and healthy-looking as when he was eighteen. His buddies hate him for it, the ones his age are already starting to thin out on top.

“It’s kind of a pain, takes forever to dry,” he starts to say, but she’s already reaching out, asking if she can touch.

“Go ahead.”

The old-lady tremor in her hands isn’t so noticeable while she runs her fingers through his hair. In fact she’s surprisingly strong.

Behind Virginia’s back, Kevin gives him a disgusted look. Larry grins. It feels good. He always likes to have his hair stroked.

“How daring,” she says, “to let it grow this long. When I was young it was considered quite bold. And getting a tattoo, that was the other thing no one did. Now all the young people get them.”

“Well that’s a funny story,” he says.

Suddenly he doesn’t have the heart to tell it. Back when he was with Cynthia she wouldn’t let him get a tattoo, said it was something only white trash did. Then when she dumped him, he went to a tattoo artist, feeling somehow he was declaring independence, he was starting over as his own self. Turned out he couldn’t decide what kind of tattoo to get.

Later his supervisor, Richard, asks him what he’s learned from “this incident.” Larry is thinking about tattoos, which pattern to get if he ever gets around to it. Maybe a leaping deer, or the letters MT for Magical Thinking. Also he’s feeling sleepy, which always happens when someone’s been stroking his hair. He makes a stab at answering Richard.

“You’re never too old for a panic attack?”

Richard looks tired. He likes “teachable moments.” He’s that kind of supervisor.

Larry tries again. “I shouldn’t swerve to avoid a deer?”

“Try to pay more attention when you’re behind the wheel,” Richard says. “That’s all. Just try.”

All told, the day went well, Larry decides as he heads for the parking lot. It could have gone badly, very badly, but it didn’t. He turns the key in the ignition, feels a surge of optimism.

The “service engine” light flashes on.

Patrice

It’s a slow morning in the fabric shop. An older couple comes in needing yarn. The husband took up knitting when he retired, jokes that it’s an excuse to socialize with his wife’s lady friends, but Patrice can see the artistry in his work, sweaters in intricate patterns of soft silvery grays, muted browns, grayish blues. She wonders what things would have been like if he’d been given art classes when he was young.

Margaret comes in, the owner of the bookstore around the corner. She’s a Civil War reenactor and needs blue wool cloth for a new uniform jacket.

People expect Patrice to know all about knitting and sewing. She kind of expects it herself, that somehow she would have absorbed this knowledge just by being female and living in Union County for five decades. When she first started working here, if customers had questions they would go to her rather than Tanya, her young coworker. Patrice would smile a lot, exude helpfulness. The regular customers soon caught on. Between them and Tanya and old issues of Fabric Trends and Quilter’s Newsletter, Patrice has learned all kinds of things. She knows exactly what weight and weave Margaret needs for her Union Army uniform, but she can’t resist pointing to another flannel nearby. “This plum color goes so much better with your complexion,” which makes Margaret laugh so hard she’s almost in tears.

“Nobody fought in plum,” she manages to say finally. She’s still chuckling over it later when she leaves the shop.

Patrice pictures a battlefield, infantrymen showing up in bright yellows and oranges, in polka dots, in macramé and feathers. They would cancel the war, naturally.

She writes up an order for rug-making kits, restocks the knitting needles. Tanya is straightening up quilt patterns on the sale table, and since no customers have come in, Patrice takes the opportunity to pull the hymnal out from beneath the counter and bring it over to her. She opens the book and sets it on a stack of embroidery kits.

“Tanya, honey, can you try this one?”

“Now what?” Tanya says, but she smiles. She reads the hymn through quietly, Patrice looking over her shoulder.

“It has a nice limited range,” Patrice says. “I can sing most of it except for the high notes here, and here.”

“Don’t—”

“I won’t, don’t worry.”

Tanya starts singing softly.

“What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul…”

Patrice has to close her eyes to imagine the way it would sound if a hundred people were singing it, and if those voices weren’t being absorbed by piles and bolts of fabric but were bouncing off a polished wooden floor and stained glass windows on a Sunday morning.

Being Unitarian Universalists, of course, they’ve changed the lyrics: there’s no reference to God at all, let alone his righteous frown, or cursed souls, or death. The UU version has blissful hearts, friends gathered round.

She knows that Tanya doesn’t much care for church music; most girls her age don’t, but she sang in her high school choir and she can sight read music.

“Thanks, hon.”

“Where are you going to put it?”

“I’m thinking of using it for the ‘greeting your neighbor’ part. That’s the part where everyone says hello, you introduce yourself if you haven’t met the person before. Only instead of speaking, everyone would just be shaking hands while we’re singing this.” Patrice still isn’t sure about this particular song. Beautiful as it is, she’s worried that it sounds melancholy.

Patrice is trying to imagine a church service that’s conducted entirely in song. She’s been giving it a lot of thought and outlining alternatives in her notebook. She hasn’t brought it up with her minister, but as she’s told Tanya, that’s the joy of being a Unitarian Universalist. Ministers there try pretty much everything.

The chimes ring as the mail carrier leans in and waves at them and puts the mail on the counter. Patrice bought those chimes herself and put them up, thin pieces of white quartz crystal that clink against each other with every movement of the door. They make Patrice think of the factory where she worked all those years, a bottling company that did specialty soft drinks like sarsaparilla that only gourmet stores and such wanted anymore. The workers were gentle with the bottles, but there was always something that set them to vibrating, rounding a curve on the assembly line or when they were hoisted in their wooden crates onto hand trucks, and bottle touching bottle made sounds like small glass voices. She likes having an echo of that old life in this new one.

JulieAnne

JulieAnne is in her bedroom, door closed, but it’s a flimsy door—the whole place is poorly constructed—and she can clearly hear her father on the phone shouting, something he hardly ever does.

She’s trying to distract herself by looking through a book of black and white photos, a pictorial history of Union and Snyder Counties that Tracy, her stepmother, gave her. You’re not going to cry, she tells herself, ignoring the tears she’s already wiping away. She wants to climb into this book, into the black and white world of fifty years ago, a hundred years ago. Color is for high drama. Yelling. Slamming doors. Black and white is quiet, undemanding. Over and done with.

“After twelve fucking years.”

Another thing her father hardly ever does: swear.

Not that people didn’t yell and slam doors back then, she’s sure, but you can see that people in this book stopped what they were doing to look at the camera. For a minute they let go of whatever momentary thing was bothering them—bills, injuries, ex-wives. As if they knew that someone would look at this picture long after they were dead.

“You think she’s a dog, she’ll just come when you call?”

JulieAnne’s mother, Kath, has asked her to visit her out in California. She can afford the airfare now, she told JulieAnne on the phone this evening. She’s got a guest bedroom in the place she’s staying.

JulieAnne looks at the framed photo of her mother on the dresser. She vaguely remembers her as enormous, probably because she wasn’t quite four when Kath took off, minutes ahead of the county sheriff, who swept in just hours before the federal agents arrived. Still she imagines her mother as towering over her father, a short, morose man, permanently stooped as if no matter what, he’s always ready to lean over a car engine and start taking it apart.

In her vague memory, her mother is not only large but also soft and warm, with long brown hair. In the photo Kath’s hair is now short and graying, and she’s wiry and fit, kneeling in front of a kayak by a mountain river.

I’m getting my act together, her letters would often say, when the letters started arriving after five years. I want to come see you honey, and then no word for months at a time.

Her father is still shouting, but not as loud. He’s running out of steam.

“Should’ve called the DEA when I had the chance, you hippie freak.” And then: “Leave my family out of it. Moonshine’s a different story. If pot were legal you’da had no interest in growing it.”

By the time she started getting in touch with JulieAnne, Kath was living on the West Coast, running a mail order business of hemp products and healing crystals. Soon she had a website (Harness the Healing Power of the Earth). Now she seems to be running a wilderness survival program. “Rich people pay good money for this,” she told JulieAnne. “It’s all those Survivor shows. People want to have that experience themselves.”

“Don’t talk to me about no statute of limitations. Is there a statute of limitations on abandoning your child?”

JulieAnne considers sending Kath a photo of Neil, so she has an image of something other than the angry man who’s shouting at her long-distance. JulieAnne’s favorite is one where her father has a big grin; he’s listening to Amanda reading the headlines from Weekly World News. “‘Moon to Explode in Six Months,’ Mr. K, what do you think of that?” “It could happen.” “What about ‘Hikers Find 20-Foot-Tall Gingerbread House’?” “You never know.”

Amanda moved in next door nine years ago, when she and JulieAnne were seven. She was there when Kath started sending letters. By then she was fiercely protective of JulieAnne. There she’d be, ten years old, eleven, sitting at the kitchen table with Neil, each one outdoing the other in indignation. Who does she think she is? What kind of mother would leave a kid like JulieAnne? They’ve bonded over their outrage at Kath.

Her father has hung up the phone. Now she hears him, almost shouting at her stepmother.

“Why now all of a sudden? Is she between boyfriends?”

“Neil, you hush this very second.”

JulieAnne realizes she has something much more immediate and practical to consider than abstract things like whether Neil will let her go, how she’ll feel, whether to be angry, what to say.

Her mother has no photograph of JulieAnne. Not a real photograph. Or rather, she has photographs of real people, but they’re not JulieAnne.

She doesn’t think of it as lying, precisely. It began as an accident. When her mother started writing to her she’d asked for a photograph, and JulieAnne wanted to send her one of a pretty, happy little girl. Her father and stepmother didn’t take many photos, and in the ones of JulieAnne she was usually in the picture by accident. She showed up in the margins, blurred, part of her face cut off by the edge of the picture, or else looking startled, called in from someplace else to pose for a family shot without having any time to comb her hair or arrange her face with the right expression, so that a faraway mother she’d never seen could look at it and admire the image of an intelligent, interesting child.

Back then Amanda looked kind of like her, except with shorter, more reddish hair, and her face a bit plumper. JulieAnne ended up sending her mother a picture of Amanda that Amanda’s mom had taken, curled up in her bed grinning up at the camera through a crowd of pillows and stuffed animals. It was close enough.

She knew that after that, her mother would expect more pictures. For her tenth birthday she asked her father for a camera and he got her one, to her surprise, that was sleek and silvery and easy to use. She started photographing her friends: Amanda on the swingset at the height of an arc, hair flying, face upturned; or Tiffany turned three-quarters away from the camera. They were prettier than JulieAnne anyway, and more photogenic, and the little differences would be easy to explain: her hair grew fast, or she had just cut her hair, or had tried a henna shampoo for highlights, or had gained a little weight recently, or lost it, and yes, wasn’t she getting tall fast? Her mother never pinned her down with pointblank questions, but every once in a while in her letters she would mention in an offhand way, “You know, honey, somehow you look different in every photo.”

JulieAnne has tried to put off sending her a recent shot. In the last couple of years Amanda has gained a lot of weight. Anyone else would get teased and called a fat girl. Not Amanda. She takes over a room when she walks in. Her low-pitched musical voice is loud and unapologetic. She’s a force of nature, too overwhelming a presence to be a fat girl. Meanwhile Tiffany has stayed as skinny as they all were when they were eleven. Even at odd angles, the two of them look too dramatically different from each other. JulieAnne could claim to have drastic fluctuations in her weight, but that would make Kath worry for no reason.

You have to be grown-up about this, she tells herself.

She has to tell Amanda and Tiffany what she’s done. She has to get a real photo of herself to send to her mother.

She looks in the mirror, tries to picture herself in black and white.

.

Larry

On his free afternoon Larry stops at Cynthia’s house. Hank, her husband, answers the door. His hair has been getting shorter over the years. It’s almost a crewcut now; it makes his receding hairline harder to notice. He’s a tall guy with a puffed-out chest like a gym teacher, a guy who’s used to giving orders. He’s bigger and stronger than Larry. If he tried to punch him Larry’s only advantage would be his quickness. He could sway and dodge out of the way of those stone fists and succeed only in looking ridiculous in front of Cynthia.

“Hi, Larry,” he says with a tired voice and carefully prepared smile. He goes back in, and Cynthia comes out with the same smile as Hank. She’s wearing a beige tank top and blue jeans, more like a college student than the VP of a bank.

“I…” He never knows how to start when he talks to Cynthia. “Molly says you’ve got all these plans for the summer.”

“I told her to let you know. She’s going to Italy with me for two weeks in July. In August she’s taking an intensive SAT prep course, Monday through Thursday all day for three weeks.”

“I won’t hardly see her.”

“Larry. This is important. If she’s going to do early decision at Harvard she needs to take the September SATs.”

“Harvard. That’s over in…”

“Boston.”

She steps out onto the flagstone-paved front patio. There’s a teak bench next to a stone planter, but she sits down on the step that leads down to the sidewalk. She motions for him to sit next to her.

“It’s not like you’ll never see her. You’ll have her on weekends, just like you do during the school year.”

He looks at Cynthia’s bare feet, the graceful arches and polished toenails. He can hear Hank’s lawn mower out back, coming closer, fading, coming closer. The two of them were doing yard work together after supper. Hank mowing, Cynthia probably planting some annuals.

Hank has a job Larry doesn’t understand, something to do with finance. He likes to give everyone, including Larry, a hearty handshake and a clap on the shoulder. No reason we can’t be friends, he’d told Larry right off. They’d even invited him to their wedding. And the weird thing about it is, Hank could be sincere. Larry has been watching him for years, waiting for some sign of hypocrisy.

Hank likes to give brief motivational speeches. He’s given Larry one every time Larry gets fired. He even gave a speech at his wedding, to some men Larry presumed were other businessmen: something along the lines of, When I get married, it’s for life. I’m in this for the long haul and so on. You don’t walk away if there’s a problem, you make it work out.

Larry still wonders how Hank would solve the “problem” if Cynthia sat him down one day and calmly, politely wrote him out of her life. You’re a nice guy. You’re a good person. But I don’t love you. The way Larry sees it, you have no choice but to walk away from a problem like that. But not before you beg and plead and cry. At which point you stagger away, or crawl. There’s no question of actually walking.

He tries to picture giving Hank a motivational speech after Cynthia dumps him. What’s more probable is him, Larry, comforting Cynthia a decent interval after Hank’s funeral. He’s a hard-driving man; guys like that get cardiac problems.

“How far away is Boston?”

“From here? About twelve hours by car.”

“Do you know how old my truck is? It’ll never make it.”

“Larry, maybe we could talk this over by phone.”

“What’s the matter with the colleges we have here? They’re expensive enough.”

“What kind of message would I be sending her if I don’t expect her to try for the best? Think what that would do to her self-esteem.”

Hank comes around the front of the house with a pair of hedge clippers. He starts working on a yew near the bay window, and says to Larry in his jokey voice, “She’s hired me as gardener. Keeps me out of trouble.”

One of Larry’s best jobs was working with a groundskeeping crew at the golf course. Things got complicated only after the Canada geese showed up. They wandered around in packs, left droppings everywhere. More geese arrived every day. Management wanted to get rid of the geese, didn’t care how—shoot them, poison them. Larry refused. It felt wrong to kill them, and what’s more, there wasn’t any logic to it. They had to live somewhere. “We should try to understand them,” he’d said. He meant they should try to figure out what the geese liked about the golf course, how the grounds crew could change that, or find a place the geese liked better. But they laughed before he could explain. “Great idea,” a supervisor said. “How do you say ‘Take me to your leader?’ in goose? How do you say, ‘We come in peace’?”

This was the same supervisor who’d told him another time, “You’re damn close to the border of mental defective, Larry. You’re barely on this side of the line.” Larry doesn’t even remember what he did to provoke that. “You ain’t stupid, son,” his dad tells him sometimes. “You just don’t pay attention.” They’ll be sitting in the living room and his mom will go stand behind Larry’s chair and drape her arms around his shoulders, kiss him on the top of the head. “He’s easily distracted, is all.”

All of which makes him forget what he wanted to say to Cynthia, and he doesn’t think about it until he’s in his truck.

Larry: This don’t have nothing to do with Molly’s self-confidence. Your family’s richer than God. She knows she can have the best of whatever she wants.

Cynthia: What are you going to do, Larry, guilt her out so she doesn’t leave?

The real Cynthia wouldn’t put it that way. This is all he can come up with.

Larry: I’m not going to guilt her out. She shouldn’t stay around here if she doesn’t want to.

She should see the world. Italy, Boston. Cynthia, as always, is right.

Patrice

That evening, the exercise for the memoirs class is to write about yourself in the third person.

“Patrice loves museums,” she writes, and it makes her want to chuckle to write about herself as if she were someone else. “Especially the furniture part. Not that she doesn’t like paintings, she does, but what she loves are the ‘period rooms’ with the authentic furniture that real people used in earlier times.” Patrice knows she’s supposed to focus on concrete details. “For instance,” she writes, “a parlor, with dark hardwood floors and plaster walls painted a warm rose color, and the ornate trim around doors and windows painted in a gleaming white for contrast. The mantelpiece is made of white marble. On it are fresh flowers in a crystal vase changed every day (the flowers, not the vase). There are floor-to-ceiling windows with gauzy white curtains that I, that she could pull aside every morning to enjoy the view of the gardens.

“Patrice dreams that she lives in a museum like this. She is allowed past the velvet rope keeping people out of the rooms. She can relax in the wingchair upholstered in maroon silk, or sit at a desk and write thank-you notes on linen stationery. She gets a little annoyed at the endless stream of visitors during museum hours, but she’s grateful for all the cleaning done by the custodial staff. And at night when everyone is gone the people in the paintings climb down from their canvasses, and stretch and smile, and serve her pastry and give her foot rubs. Sometimes she agrees to change places with them, and will climb into a painting and stand in the background, and then the next day they all watch to see whether any of the visitors notice. She feels most comfortable in the medieval paintings, the ones done in oil on wooden panels. The women are solid and sensible-looking, like she is, and she feels much more at home with them than with the skinny ballerinas, although she notices that some of the nudes are large and fleshy like her, and she wonders when she’ll have the nerve to show up in one of those paintings.”

The teacher obviously disapproves, but all she says, with that tight little smile, is, “Try and remember, everyone, this is a memoir-writing class, not fiction. We write about our real lives.”

“Patrice is confused,” Patrice writes in her notebook. If she wrote fiction she would give all the nice characters a happy ending, and every overweight woman would have delicate wrists and ankles and have artists begging to paint her portrait.

JulieAnne

The guidance counselor looks exhausted with boredom, as usual, and JulieAnne doesn’t blame him. She can never think of anything to say in these meetings. What do you want to do after high school? What are your interests? She shrugs, manages an occasional “I don’t know.” Now he’s telling her he doesn’t think she should sign up for Honors English next year; she’s been making only average grades with the non-honors track, and she wouldn’t want her grades to get any lower, would she? No, she wouldn’t.

She’s also thought about learning Italian. It sounds so musical. She doesn’t mention that.

He’s filling out her class registration form. “You’re doing well with your word processing and your business math,” he says. “That’s what they’ll want to see on your record. If you decide to go ahead and get that associate’s degree.”

“I like to take pictures,” she says, surprising herself. The counselor looks surprised too. His eyes just brush the surface of her and then flicker away. Like my camera, she thinks. But no, that’s unfair. She reaches for it where it rests against her, hanging from its vinyl strap around her neck. Her camera sees much more.

As she leaves the building she shows Mr. Giacinto, the maintenance man, the photo of the west corridor, afternoon sun shining through the large window at the end, lockers shut, floor gleaming.

“Look how clean it is,” he says. “No students around, that’s why. Ha! No offense, kid.”

She wants to take a picture of the same place but with him in it, with his mop and cleaning station. He lets her talk him into it though he complains a lot and she can’t make him understand that the picture is more true with him there, if that makes sense. That the mop and the angle of his stooping body make it perfect.

By the time JulieAnne gets home there’s a family meeting going on in the kitchen: her father, her stepmother, Amanda. They acknowledge JulieAnne, go back to talking among themselves.

JulieAnne leans in the doorway, watching them.

I’ve handled this all wrong, Kath said to her last night on the phone. Neil’s so sensitive, he’s like a walking bruise.

No one has ever used the word “sensitive” to describe her father.

“So her mother wants to see her,” Amanda says. “It’s about friggin’ time.”

“Too damn late, is what it is.”

“I’m not defending her, Mr. K.”

The three of them sip their coffee. Amanda is the only sixteen-year-old JulieAnne knows who likes Maxwell House instant, with hazelnut nondairy creamer, the drink of choice in Neil and Tracy’s kitchen.

Her father lights a cigarette, takes a few drags, then passes it down to Tracy, who takes one puff and then stubs it out. They’ve been doing this for six years now, it’s their attempt at quitting smoking. One of these days Amanda will grab the cigarette and puff on it and they’ll let her do it; she’ll be completely one of them.

“It’ll happen sooner or later,” Tracy says gently but firmly. “She’ll want to meet her mother, it’s only natural.”

Amanda breathes a long, drawn-out sigh, then a prolonged hmm, meaning she has pondered this, she concedes that Tracy has a point.

Neil looks down at his coffee. The three women have learned to interpret his silences. They lean in, listen to it, breathe it in. This one feels, if not relaxed, at least not too tense.

“She talks about my family being hillbillies,” he says after a while, “like her family ain’t every bit the same. Don’t give me none of that peace, love, and understanding crap.

“Mr. K,” Amanda says, delighted, “that’s Elvis Costello.”

Larry

One night Larry goes out on a date, sort of. A nurse at the Selinsgrove clinic has invited him for coffee at a place in Lewisburg. There’s a poetry reading going on that evening at the café, and Larry’s afraid he’ll be bored and confused, but it turns out people are reciting poems they like, real poems from books, not stuff they’ve written themselves. The only rule is you have to recite from memory, not read. People are standing up who didn’t plan to, they get brave and say stuff they memorized years ago and never forgot. “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” stuff from Alice in Wonderland. Everyone’s laughing and clapping. Yelling lines when a reciter hesitates. And then other people have prepared. They say stuff by Robert Frost or poets Larry’s never heard of, but good ones. He wonders if it’s easier to understand when you listen to someone saying it than when you read it quietly to yourself.

The nurse runs into an ex-boyfriend at the café and ends up going home with him. She apologizes to Larry, gives him a kiss on the cheek. Larry understands. He wonders whether Cynthia would be tempted, if she ran into him after not seeing him for a long time. She’s never had a chance to miss him. Maybe that’s the problem.

When Cynthia broke up with him he showed up at his parents’ house with a few cardboard boxes. He managed to get himself to work and back, but otherwise he stayed in his old bedroom, now the sewing room. He showered only when his mom reminded him, stopped shaving, stopped getting haircuts, even though his mom offered to cut his hair herself. What he mostly remembers from that time is long fits of weeping, staring into space.

The hair started growing. He’d kept it short all his life, but soon it hung down past his ears, grew down his neck, grazed his shoulders. He didn’t notice it except to sweep it back out of his eyes, but his mom started commenting on it. She’d convince him to let her wash it in the bathroom sink, and it felt good to close his eyes and feel the warm water and her strong fingers working the suds around. The shampoo was girly-smelling but he didn’t want to offend her by saying so. “You were born with an adorable head of hair,” she told him. “But first your dad and then you, kept it short ever since.”

Molly was twenty months old at the time of the breakup. Cynthia’s parents brought her over every weekend. At first the sight of her made him cry more. He was supposed to see his baby girl every day of her life, not just on visits.

“Honey,” his mom said, “You can grieve over her the rest of the week. Sunday through Thursday, cry all you like. But are you still going to cry when she’s right there in front of you?”

“Mom, you’ve never had this. You don’t know what it’s like to be a divorced parent.”

“You were never married.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean, and you were never married.”

He started to understand what everyone else had figured out from the start. Most likely his buddies and relatives had been making side bets over how long it would be until Cynthia threw him out.

He lay on the couch, watching his parents play with Molly on the living room rug. They’d bought her some little dinosaurs and there was this set of dominoes they had that she liked, and the three of them would make the dinosaurs talk to each other and move around and build caves out of the dominoes. Then there was this complicated situation where the dominos were standing up in a line and the dinosaurs pushed them over so that the toppled dominos formed a road that one group of dinosaurs needed to travel to another group. Why the dominos had to be stood up in the first place, Larry didn’t understand.

Molly would scamper over to the couch sometimes, gently take hold of a strand of his long hair. “Daddy pretty,” she would say.

“Molly pretty.”

He picked himself up, started walking upright, showering regularly. He started shaving again, but he never did cut that hair.

Molly continued to be impressed. “Look, Dad, your hair’s almost as long as my Barbie dolls.”

“Let’s call this one Larry.”

“That’s a boy’s name!”

“You know how your mom gets mad at me if I bring you home late? This is what she’s gonna do to me next time.” He picked up Larry and swung it around by its hair, its rigid plastic smile the only thing they could see as it whirled around faster and faster. Molly laughed so hard she started hiccupping.

People saw that hair and made all kinds of decisions about him. He was gay. He took drugs. He was a hippie. And here and there a woman who loved it. He couldn’t tell what Cynthia thought of it, though once when he’d dropped Molly off after a weekend visit, it was late and Cynthia had had some wine. She backed him up against the wall, pressed up close to him. “I’m confused,” Larry had said, and she’d laughed and shaken her head as if she’d come to her senses just that moment.

Confused was not sexy. Women didn’t want confused.

Patrice

The writing assignment is something the teacher calls an “inventory of the self.”

“Interpret it however you want, but try for rich description, close attention to detail. I want you to dig deep, write honestly and fearlessly. Remember, you don’t have to read it out loud if you don’t want to.”

Patrice begins to write. “On Nittany Mountain the rain seeps through crevices in the ground, drips through limestone and lands in Penn’s Cave. You take a boat through it, riding on all that accumulated rain. It carries your boat out through a little opening so you have to duck down, and then you shoot out into the open. It’s the beginning of Penns Creek that goes on for miles until it empties into the Susquehanna, but there at the cave opening, it looks like a pond. There are swans, beautiful and bad-tempered; they blare at you or ignore you with elegant scorn. Then you get out of the boat and go through the animal preserve. Elk, bison, white-tailed deer. Some of the deer are albino or recessive or something—all white. If you came across one of those alone in a forest you’d think you’d seen a ghost. Wolves, timber and gray, they point out which is the alpha male and the alpha female as if you couldn’t tell just by looking. And the black bears. One of them is a black-bear version of albino, they call him a cinnamon bear and that’s exactly the color of his fur. They tumble all over each other; they like people but you wouldn’t want them playing with you. They could snap your neck without even meaning to—oops, the toy’s not moving anymore. And then a mountain lion, just one can bring down a deer, where it takes a whole pack of wolves to do the same thing, and she comes right over to the chain link fence and you’re inches from those cool feline eyes looking into yours”—and time is up.

“Yes, but this is an inventory of the self,” the teacher says. “Where is the self in this piece?”

At first Patrice’s instinct is to back down, apologize, but she’s tired of backing down.

“The self is what’s looking at the animals,” she says. Polite but firm.

I’ve been on this planet longer than you, she thinks. That should count for something.

The teacher looks stunned. “We writers,” she says after a pause, “we’re artists, you know, we takes things in all different directions. That’s something I’m learning from you, Patrice.”

Sometimes, Patrice realizes, all it takes to stop a bully is to tell them they’re being a bully.

After class she meets three of her friends at the mall. Mildred needs something at the Dress Barn and Ruth and Gerri want to look at baking dishes at Boscov’s, and then they follow Patrice to the bookstore, their last stop. They’re tired by now. Mildred, Ruth, and Gerri settle heavily into armchairs near the religion section, where Patrice looks for the next title they’ve decided on for the book discussion group at church, something by the Dalai Lama. Gerri scans the titles she can see from where she’s sitting.

“When God Was a Woman. What’s with the was? Heck, she still is.”

“The title should be, God Is a Woman.”

“With gray hair.”

“And blisters on her feet.”

“And cellulite.”

The cellulite part makes them laugh. Patrice didn’t even know the word when she was growing up, none of them did. They still don’t care.

Later Patrice smiles at the memory, Gerri’s laugh like a loud hoot that she’s never self-conscious about, no matter how many people stare. Mildred does a kind of hee hee hee, a devilish cackle that makes the rest of them laugh more.

They can’t sing any better than Patrice. They’ve threatened to come to the UU church the day of her musical service “and join in the heehawing,” as Ruth put it.

It’s after nine when she gets home. She turns on the armchair lamp in the living room, then the kitchen lights and the little TV she keeps on the counter. No husband there to welcome her, never has been one. Then again, no husband to demand to know where she was, no husband to ignore her or criticize her for getting fat. Her friends have the whole range of husbands, and they leave them at home in the evenings, eat out together after work, and then go shopping or to a movie.

Patrice finds her notebook and writes down more ideas. For Joys and Concerns, they could divide it up. People who wanted to light a candle of concern could sing “There Is More Love Somewhere.” The line “I’m gonna keep on till I find it” is perfect for it. She hasn’t figured out what to have for people lighting candles of joy. But she’s decided she wants “Come Come Whoever You Are” for the opening hymn. They could even start it up while people are still coming in and taking their seats. It’s a round, so people could keep it going. She especially likes the line, “Ours is no caravan of despair.” It makes her imagine the early days when Universalism was getting started, back when all you heard from your preacher was hell and damnation, only a few predestined to be saved, the Devil lurking everywhere. If you took a sip of ale after a long day working in the fields, the Devil was there. He was there if you wanted to dance a few steps to the sound of a fiddle, if you wanted to lean against a split rail fence for a moment, put down the bucket of water you were hauling and enjoy a breeze or a sunset. Patrice imagines some circuit riding preacher showing up one day, riding from village to village, stopping at farms and mills, calling out, “Salvation is universal, brothers and sisters! God has saved us all!” and people cheering, tossing hats and babies into the air.

She gets up to make a cup of tea. The television is still on in the kitchen. There’s an interview, an old man with an English accent, and as far as Patrice can tell, he’s famous for being eccentric. He doesn’t look too good, his voice is shaking, and he seems to have on garish makeup. The interviewer asks him what he thinks about sex change operations. “Good heavens, I’m much too old for surgery. Now if they’d had that procedure when I was young…”

The kettle starts to boil. Patrice is looking for a lemon and when she closes the refrigerator door she hears him say, “I certainly shouldn’t tell anyone about it, you know! One sees interviews with people who have had it done. There was that famous tennis player, and a pianist fellow, rather recently, too, and it amazes me that they tell the world about it. If I’d had that operation I shouldn’t have told a soul. I should have changed my name, got a whole new identity. I’d have moved to some small town and worked in a fabric shop and lived a nice peaceful life, and no one would know I’d ever been a man.”

Patrice adds honey to her tea and laughs. While she’s been imagining so many other lives, someone is out there imagining hers. She feels sorry for the old man, wanting so badly the things she takes for granted, the simple fact of being born female and never having to think about it. Being able to paint her nails without getting disapproving stares, being able to wear flower-print dresses and a delicate gold chain bracelet and have a soft, high-pitched voice. Actually her voice isn’t that soft and she realizes the old man probably isn’t imagining someone quite as loud as Patrice. Tomorrow morning she’ll look through the hymnbook for a song of thanksgiving; they should be sure to have one in the service. Maybe she’ll send the old man a postcard, Greetings from the fabric shop. Enjoying the life you’ve dreamed up for me. Thanks.

JulieAnne

Amanda sits behind the counter, trying to stay out of JulieAnne’s way while she waits on customers. They’re hoping for a lull so they can take some photos.

“So I tell my parents I’m thinking of going to a service over at the Unitarian church. You know the one in Northumberland?”

“Mmm hm,” JulieAnne says. She pours mocha syrup into a latte. Checks on the milk steamer.

“And they’re fine with it. So I ask, What are we, in terms of what church or whatever, and they say we’re UCC. And I say, So what does that mean? And they go, Well, it means we don’t burn anyone at the stake for believing differently than we do. And I’m like, Well, that’s good to know.”

The last person in line takes forever to make up his mind. Finally he decides on green tea and a maple pecan scone.

“So that was it. They’ll talk about anything else. Drugs they told me about long ago. Sex too. But religion?”

The customer walks away and JulieAnne hands Amanda the camera.

“Go over by that pillar and focus over here. What do you see? Zoom in so it’s just my shoulders up. Now what do you see? No, don’t take it when I’m looking straight at you.”

They waste a lot of time before JulieAnne gets the idea to stand Amanda in her place while she figures out things like angle, distance, degree of zoom.

“Okay, stand right here and take the camera. On this spot.”
“I love it. This is the most you’ve talked in years.”

“Wait till I get back to the counter. Okay, now what’s the light doing?”

“What’s the light doing? Do you expect me to understand that?”

Also she’s not sure whether she wants the background to be blurry or sharp. She likes the idea of glass behind her, the tumblers for iced coffee, bottles of syrup. Glass is hard and shiny and beautiful and she’s hoping it will make her look sophisticated, artistic. Something. She tries to imagine her mother looking at the picture.

Amanda’s got the hang of it. She’s moving around, ordering JulieAnne to turn this way, look in that direction. Mr. Graybill doesn’t even ask what she’s doing. Amanda has worked across the street at the sporting goods store for two years and she refuses to quit there and come work for him, but she gives him advice and he always takes it, like painting the walls deep colors and putting a quartz candle holder on each table.

He asks Amanda what she thinks about holding the poetry recitals out by the river during the summer months. She’s skeptical.

“Traffic from the bridge,” she says. “Too much noise.”

“How about Selinsgrove?”

“Isle of Que in the summer? Do you know what the mosquitoes are like?”

He stands near Amanda as if supervising the photo shoot. Now two sets of eyes and the camera are looking at JulieAnne.

Mr. Graybill tells Amanda, “I’ve been trying to get your friend here to sign up to recite something, but she claims she’s too shy.”

“I happen to know that JulieAnne likes poetry.”

“Amanda!“

Amanda ignores her. “Me, I have no patience for it.”

“Neither do I,” Mr. Graybill says.

She must have been watching them, she thinks, in the picture she ends up choosing to send to her mother. She looks amused and affectionate. She’s figured out just before the shutter clicked that the approving smiles they’re sending her way are meant for each other.

Larry

Larry sits at his kitchen table with a cold bottle of beer and a stack of poetry books that Molly has brought over. It’s hard to concentrate. He feels giddy with relief and gratitude.

Nothing’s wrong with his truck. She’s fine.

Turned out the gas cap was loose, that was all. No engine damage. No big repairs that would require Larry to get a second job.

He’d been on a back road he hardly ever drove, and on an impulse he’d turned in at a sign for Neil Kerstetter, Auto Repairs. The mechanic was an odd guy, said maybe a total of ten words. He was short and skinny, hunched over, never looked directly at him but Larry could tell he was thinking all the time. He knows the look: the guy has too much time to think. Wouldn’t even accept any money. Larry had tried to insist: “You took the time to check it out, you did your job.” The mechanic walked away, raised a hand briefly, gesture of goodbye or dismissal or both.

Larry leafs through a poetry book.

Molly, out in the living room, yells over to him above the noise of her TV show.

“How’s it going, Dad?”

“Fine, no problem.”

He starts at the front but quickly decides to flip to the back, figures the newer ones won’t be so hard to understand.

“What makes it poetry if it don’t rhyme?”

She mutes the TV.

“Dad, it’s not a rule. Lots of people write poetry that doesn’t rhyme.”

From the sound of her voice he can tell that people have known this for centuries, probably, and she must be thinking what an ignorant hick he is.

She never comes right out and says it, though. Cynthia never did either; he has to give her credit. Her family, though, different story. When he and Cynthia were together, her brothers and father kept referring to Larry as a high-school dropout even after he showed them his diploma. And then what a scandal, what a disgrace that this redneck had gone and got their daughter pregnant.

What they didn’t know was that Cynthia was the one who had chased after him. She didn’t mind his lack of education when his body was young and lean. We fit together so well, she used to say. He’s begun to understand what a novelty he was back then, how rebellious she must have felt to sneak off to his apartment at midnight after being at some fancy charity event with her parents. In the morning he’d find the jewels and designer dress draped over his jeans and work shirt.

Never a personal insult. No sarcasm or deceit or mind games. I just don’t love you.

He turns pages. Anything with sunsets or flowers makes his eyes glaze over. He remembers “The Highwayman,” some awful story about people tying up a girl and shooting her. He wonders if they still make kids read that.

“How about Robert Frost?” Molly calls out. “‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep’—no, I can’t picture you saying that with a straight face.”

I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. He has no idea what it means but he likes the sound of it.

Something catches his eye. When you are old and grey and full of sleep…

“I like this Yeets person.”

“I know it looks like that, Dad, but it’s pronounced Yates.”

Yates. But one man loved… This can’t mean what he thinks it means. He tries to picture Cynthia in a bonnet and severe gray clothing, baking pumpkin pies, sewing by firelight.

“Honey?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t laugh.”

“What, Dad?”

“What’s a pilgrim soul?”

She turns off the TV and comes into the kitchen and explains that pilgrims are people who go on pilgrimages, like in the Canterbury Tales. They travel a long way to get to a holy place.

It doesn’t really describe Cynthia, but it’s a cool poem anyway and he’s proud of his kid. She knows this type of thing, she’ll be comfortable at a place like Harvard. And that makes him think about how she’s leaving in another year. Even this summer it won’t be the way it used to be. The day she leaves for college a huge expanse of time, the rest of his life, is going to open up in the space where she used to be, and he’s going to curl up on the couch and cry. You could call it a time-honored method by now. A tradition.

And she’s a trouper, this kid; she’s already been trying to cheer him up. I’ll be back for Thanksgiving, she’d said the other day, a whole month at Christmas, spring break, almost four months for summer. You’ll hardly know I’m gone.

In the backyard Larry starts up the grill—veggie burger for Molly, ground beef patties for him. While he waits for the charcoals to get going he walks over to talk to Dirk, tell him the good news about the truck.

The only thing separating their backyards is the small parking lot behind the gun shop, but while Larry rents a ranch house on a small plot, Dirk lives in a farmhouse that’s been there for more than a hundred years. The house was decrepit when Dirk bought it and he’s been working on renovating it ever since, evenings and weekends, plus he built a summer kitchen out back and always has a huge vegetable garden.

Like most big guys, he moves slow, but somehow he’s always moving, and Larry follows him around as he breaks up a wooden crate into narrow shards, carries armfuls back to the garden to stake up the tomato plants.

“Soil looks good,” Larry says.

“Rototilled it late, though. And I tell you what—” Dirk’s voice gets loud as he pounds in each stake with a mallet. “There better not be no damn woodchuck in my broccoli this year.”

The more time Dirk spends on his garden and other projects, the less actual work he gets done in his house, which is fine with Larry and Molly, though they don’t tell Dirk that. They like the farmhouse the way it is, the tilted floor in the front parlor and the low, crooked threshold into the kitchen.

Larry’s not crazy about the bearskin rug and the dead animals mounted all over the place, but he likes Dirk’s stories, like the time he was out hunting and got tired and climbed up a tall pine to take a nap, and when he woke he looked down and saw a bear and her two cubs moving past the tree, not making a sound. Larry was relieved to hear he didn’t shoot them; maybe it was deer season or turkey or whatever, but it does seem to Larry that after Dirk met him and Molly he hasn’t done as much actual killing as he used to. Then there was the story of the peacocks escaping from the livestock auction out on Rt. 522—there’s Dirk at home minding his own business and he looks out the window and there’s peacocks perched in his trees.

“Have to run chicken wire all around here,” Dirk says, but he seems to be talking to himself, or maybe the woodchuck. He sounds irritable. “Do you know Trent Heimbach, buddy of mine?”

“I don’t think so,” Larry says.

“Had a stroke couple of weeks ago. Still in the hospital. And two days ago a guy at work, his wife had a heart attack, died instantly. She weren’t much older than me. No, I lie. She was my age, 52.”

“That’s awful.”

“What the hell, we ain’t even old yet.” He straightens up, rubs his lower back. “Used to be I had these cookouts on that property my folks got on Shade Mountain, back behind Paxtonville. We had picnic tables up there, barbecue pits. I ain’t talking no burgers and hot dog thing. I threw parties that lasted for days—we had roast pig, ribs, kettles of chili, I don’t know how many kegs of beer. We’d easily have eighty, a hundred people there at any one time. And I don’t know when that all stopped. Suddenly we was all too busy. Jobs, kids, I guess.”

“Wait a minute,” Larry says. “I think I went to some of those parties. They were yours?” He remembers sleeping on the ground, waking up to yet another friendly stranger handing him yet another beer. Women would pick the pine needles out of his hair and laugh.

“I must have been in high school.”

“Shi-i-it,” Dirk says, but he’s laughing. He throws an arm around Larry’s shoulder. “I don’t remember you from back then, man. But I guess we was both pretty fucked at the time.”

“We can do one now,” Larry says. “How about Fourth of July weekend? I’ll help you, I know how to grill. Between now and then, we’ll invite everyone we know. Or even anyone who looks familiar.”

“Hell, anyone who looks fun.”

Molly yells over to them. “Dad, I’m putting the burgers on before the charcoals burn out.”

“You should make some of those, what do you call, caramelized onions,” Dirk says. “Put ’em on the burgers. I saw it on that food channel.”

Larry brings over the food. He’s made enough for all three, and they eat their burgers and sliced tomatoes from Dirk’s garden at the picnic table. Soon it’s twilight, and the bats that nest in Dirk’s barn come flying out, like planes taking off one by one. This always creeps Molly out, but Larry loves to watch them. He and Dirk stand downhill from the barn, directly in the bats’ flight path. They’ve been doing this so long they don’t even cringe any more as the bats swoop down at them. They stand there and grin when they feel the breeze from the bats’ wings ruffle their hair.

∞

It’s starting to fill up already for the poetry recital. Three college guys come to the counter and JulieAnne puts her book down to take their orders: mochaccino with no whipped cream, double cappuccino but go easy on the foamed milk. The last one orders plain black tea and JulieAnne feels like thanking him.

One of the college boys has noticed the book and asks, “Are you going to read something too? What is it, Emily Dickinson?” They smirk and JulieAnne can feel her face getting red. “Look at her, it is Emily Dickinson!” and the way they’re trying not to laugh is worse than if they came right out and laughed in her face.

“Let me guess: ‘I’m nobody, who are you’?”

“No offense,” another one says, “we’re not making fun of you. Really.” With his elbow he jabs at his friend. “It’s just that, every high school kid on earth picks that poem. It’s been done to death.”

JulieAnne feels so stupid she can hardly look at them, but she hears another voice, someone waiting in line behind them.

“Did you like that poem when you were in high school?” he says to the college boys, but friendly, in a making-conversation way. One of them says yes, and this other man says, “It probably meant something to you then, probably explained how you felt about things. So why not let her feel that way, too, the way you used to feel?”

When she finally looks at the man, JulieAnne’s first thought is that, much as she loves black and white film, she’d have to use color film to do him justice, not only for that amazing long hair but those eyes, the kindness in them.

As he drinks his coffee Larry thinks about who he’ll invite for the Fourth of July party at Dirk’s property on Shade Mountain. He’ll ask that shy girl at the counter, he’ll ask anyone whose poem he likes tonight. Tomorrow he’ll walk around town grinning like a fool and whoever smiles back instead of looking away, he’ll invite them too.

Last time they had this kind of recital thing, they’d had a flyer talking about the poetry collection at the college library, for people looking for stuff to recite. The librarian had been so proud of it. “We’ve got anthologies,” she’d said, “organized by theme, organized by time period, you name it. We have collected works. Poetry journals. We have little obscure books by people no one’s ever heard of,” and Larry smiled but didn’t tell her he hadn’t heard of anyone anyway. He pulled things off the shelf at random, figured he’d relax and see if anything grabbed him.

I stand in the cathedral of your house / humbled by your perfection. It should make him sad, it’s so hopeless, but he relishes having the lines in his head where he can get at them anytime, words someone else wrote, a stranger, feeling exactly like he does. I leave with my questions / still crumpled in my pocket.

The women at the next table are laughing, loud, and he recognizes one of them, a mom-looking type, though now he realizes he’s seen her at the last recital and at the library, and never seen her with kids. “I’m not nervous,” she’s saying to one of her friends, “I can’t wait to get up there.” Larry smiles at her and she smiles back, and he makes a mental note to add her to his invitation list. He wonders why he was so sure she was a mom, not that he noticed her much except in the background. Maybe because she was overweight and friendly and older than him, and he’s annoyed at himself for making assumptions.

Two of her friends are practicing their lines, from different poems, at the exact same time: “Whose woods these are I think I know.” “I’ll tell thee everything I can.” “His house is in the village though.” “There’s little to relate.”

What’s funny, Larry thinks, is that there are lots of couples that look like this woman and him. She doesn’t have many wrinkles, meanwhile Larry’s face is lined already and he walks bowlegged and slow like an old man. Town people would think of them as one of those hillbilly couples you see from way out in the country: dimwitted skinny guy with fat wife, stunned-looking red-faced kids straggling along behind them.

And then what he notices most, when she walks up to the little stage and starts to read, are her odd, greenish cat’s eyes, her heart-shaped face, her musical voice. Time wants to show you a different country.

He sits up to listen, and JulieAnne has the same reaction, these lines, she wants to grab them and hold on to them, You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness. When the poem is over JulieAnne leans against the counter, fights the urge to close her eyes, and Patrice is feeling energized; she’s done something she’d never imagined doing and her friends are congratulating her and she knows, clearly and all at once, that she should take up kayaking next, her and her friends squeezed into tiny boats paddling away on the Susquehanna and laughing whenever one of them capsizes, which is often.

She doesn’t really understand the poem she recited if she takes it apart line by line, but you shouldn’t do that anyway. It’s like breaking up a vase so you can pick up the pretty pieces and play with them. She notices the girl serving coffee, wide shoulders, like a swimmer’s—not fat, but clearly not comfortable in that big, strong body. She probably thinks she looks like a cow instead of realizing how lovely she is with that high forehead and those enormous hazel eyes, how beautiful especially when she’s listening to poetry with all her soul.

They won’t remember those first impressions, the three of them, soon they won’t even be able to imagine a time when they hadn’t known each other. But tonight they listen to more poems, drift into and out of their own thoughts.

Patrice is getting sleepy. The voices around her, rising and falling, finding a rhythm and then dispersing, make her think of her church service all in song. She imagines the soloist, the adults’ choir, the rounds that move from one side of the aisle to the other.

Larry daydreams about Cynthia. Hank’s out of the picture somehow: she’s sad and Larry’s comforting her, and he shakes out his long hair and she reaches for it and says, I’ve always wanted to do this.

JulieAnne remembers a dream she had this morning and forgot till just now. In the dream she’s playing with one of those magnetic poetry kits. She can hear somewhere, though she can’t see, small children on a playground. Their voices are an indistinct hum except that sometimes they rise into “they all fall down” and then their voices subside and she wonders whether they do fall down, they sound so weak and tired when they get to the word “down.” She sees that word, down, among the ones spread out before her and she picks it up, and it turns into a photograph of a star-pattern quilt. She picks up another word, rust, and that turns into a photograph of shutters on an old house. She’s trying to make a poem but the words, peach, fingernail, topaz, all turn into images and she wonders whether, if she tries to arrange the pictures into a collage, they’ll form a poem instead.

∞

“Can you sing?” Patrice calls over to Larry the next time they’re at a reading.

“Not hardly,” he answers, and soon he’s moved over to her table and he’s singing “Wreck on the Highway,” off-key, and she applauds boisterously.

“My dad loved Roy Acuff,” she says.

“So’d my granddad.”

They both applaud JulieAnne when she recites a different Dickinson poem. She’s flawless, and when she finishes she walks past the college boys like she doesn’t see them.

On her breaks she sits with Larry and Patrice. Soon she brings in her photos to show them, and then she’s bringing in her camera. They talk about camera angles and lighting and places they’d like to photograph. They listen to Patrice read her writing exercises, they talk over her plans for the church service in song. They hear Larry’s stories about the patients he meets driving the ambulance, ponder whether he should look for another job. JulieAnne would like to take a photograph of Cynthia, but she and Patrice worry that Larry might brood over it. They’ve never seen her but they’re sure of her unattainable beauty.

Amanda and Tiffany help JulieAnne get her photograph ready to send to her mother. It’s blown up to 8″ x 10″, protected by cardboard and bubble wrap. Her friends feel they’re Kath’s daughters too, in a way, now they know Kath’s been getting photos of them all these years, and that feels right somehow to JulieAnne; the two of them are like her sisters. She feels she hasn’t been hiding herself from her mother, her self is the one doing the looking, and the girl-daughters in the photos, after all, have been looking at her, JulieAnne, while she’s taking the picture. The smiles are for her, the expression in their eyes is something she’s earned.

The girls feel there should be some kind of ritual send-off of the picture, the True and Authentic Portrait, as Amanda calls it. It should go off in its own little boat, set loose on Penns Creek, or its own little propeller plane rigged up with popsicle sticks and rubber bands. The best they can do is accompany it to the post office, stand at attention while it goes into the “Out-of-Town” mail slot.

Something unblocks after that. She wants to make a portrait of everyone she knows, as themselves, not posing as JulieAnne or someone else’s long-lost daughter or anyone else they’re pretending to be in their ordinary lives before JulieAnne’s camera tells them, It’s all right, don’t be afraid, it’ll feel so good.

She and Patrice walk around town together, and Patrice drives her around the countryside. They look for interesting scenes, faces. Patrice has no shyness; she’ll ask total strangers whether JulieAnne can take their picture.

They go to Larry’s place, and he takes them over to Dirk’s to take pictures of the farmhouse. At twilight the bats come streaming out from under the barn’s eaves. If you stand downhill from them they look like they’re flying right at you, like they’re going to crash into your forehead, but at the last minute they pull up and fly over your head, just inches above. You can even feel your hairs stirring in their wingbeat. JulieAnne and Patrice love the bats as much as Larry does. They shriek and laugh and shiver but keep standing there, keep watching. JulieAnne eventually calms down enough to aim her camera at them. It occurs to her one day to turn to her left, and the picture she takes then of Larry, bracing for the next wave of bats, ends up in a juried photography show at the university art gallery.

Another photo of JulieAnne’s winds up at the Boalsburg arts festival. She takes it at the musical service Patrice arranges at the Unitarian Universalist church. You just barely see the tops of people’s heads in one corner of the photo, and the rest is the rafters, hanging lamps, stained glass windows.

Everyone attends the service: Larry, JulieAnne, Amanda, Dirk, the people from Patrice’s writing class, including the teacher, Patrice’s friends from old jobs and new, her landlady. Her fellow congregants, being less reverent than the visitors, make jokes about “UU-ism: The Opera,” and using charades rather than hymns next time, but the Drum Circle folks want to work with Patrice on designing a service, and the pastor asks her to be on the ministry committee.

Most of the people at the service end up coming to Dirk and Larry’s party the next weekend. When he sees the carfuls of Unitarian Universalists, Dirk sings in a surprisingly good baritone, “There is more beer somewhere,” and they get the joke, start singing other hymns with substituted lyrics that get raunchier as the night goes on.

Larry has also invited Virginia and other patients he’s met while driving the ambulance, his many coworkers from every job he’s been fired from, JulieAnne’s dad Neil, the mechanic who diagnosed Larry’s truck, half the audience from the last poetry reading, total strangers who smiled at him on the street in the last few weeks.

He and Dirk let Molly invite all her friends, also Cynthia and Hank and Cynthia’s parents, brothers, extended family. Some of them even come. Some of those even shake Larry’s hand.

After a while, people at the Shade Mountain Inn hear something’s going on further down the mountain, and so do customers over at the Moose and the Vets, the Country Tavern, the Middleburg Hotel. They all show up, as does anyone else who’s wandering around looking for something to do and just follows the noise and the smell of food cooked in the open air.

JulieAnne shows up early, bless her, to help with the food. She’s getting ready for the trip out to California. Her mom has sent her more photos and she’s brought them along, shows them to Patrice and Larry and Dirk while they slice onions, chop tomatoes, open cans of beans. “Here’s my mom at the lodge where she runs those wilderness trips. Here she is in her garden.”

Later that night Dirk gets to thinking about those photos. Larry too. It’s not only the beer that lubricates their memory, it’s Bob Seeger and Jeff Healy on the CD player, it’s being in the forest at night, and it should be feeling cool by now but there’s all these warm, contented bodies all around.

“I think I…met her,” Dirk says.

“I think I might have…met her too.”

“Picture her with long hair,” Dirk says. “Weren’t gray back then. Brown, kind of curly?”

“I… uh…I mean, what are the odds?”

“She was real friendly,” Dirk says. “A real…warm person.”

Dirk remembers that she’d shown up at parties with some quiet little guy whose face he can’t recall. Probably just as well, now.

She loved how big Dirk was, wanted to climb him, she said, like a bear up a tree.

Girl was on the run long before the federal agents came chasing her.

Larry remembers how fragrant she was, a potent combination of sandalwood and pot. Life is too short, sweetie, she’d said, strong warm hands caressing his hair, his face. Life is too damn short.

“I don’t recall a wedding ring.”

“Neither do I.”

They hadn’t been looking hard, though.

Maybe too many years have passed for them to feel like the wrong or the right of it matters much. You see someone running like that, flying past you, all you can do is hope she makes it safe to wherever she’s going.

“JulieAnne’s what, sixteen?” Dirk says.

“Yeah.”

“How good’s your math, boy?”

They strain to remember what year, what month. They do the math. They feel relieved.

∞

Patrice takes out her notebook and pen. The light from the campfire is enough to write by. Larry has fallen asleep next to his daughter’s sleeping bag. Patrice is afraid his long hair, fanned out on the ground, will catch a spark when a log shifts on the fire. She pushes him and he rolls further away, grumbling.

You should write a novel, her writing teacher told her on the last day of class. Patrice is flattered, but she’s not much good at making things up. She likes to write about what she observes, people she knows, the things they tell her about their lives.

She doesn’t know what they stand for. She’s not sure she can make meaning out of all these random fragments of people’s experiences; she knows only that she wants to weave their lives together, make good things happen to them.

It’s naïve and sentimental, she knows, to want this, as it is to get so much joy out of appliqué flowers, strong fingers stroking your hair, bats winging straight toward you at twilight.

It’s her life, their life.

She makes no apologies. She keeps writing.

—Rosalie Morales Kearns

———————————

Rosalie Morales Kearns has an MFA from the University of Illinois and has taught writing at the University of Illinois and the University at Albany. She is the founder of the Lake House Collective, a group of feminist writers dedicated to reviewing books by women. The story “Associated Virgins” from Virgins and Tricksters earned a Special Mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize volume.

Our guest introducer, Philip Graham, is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, his latest being The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon and the newly released Braided Worlds, co-authored with his wife, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, The Washington Post Magazine, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He is a co-founder of the literary/arts journal Ninth Letter and currently serves as the nonfiction editor. Graham teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His continuing series of short essays on the craft of writing can be read at www.philipgraham.net.

A brief survey of the short story @ The Guardian UK

Jan 302013

Here’s a 46-part short course on short story writers, beginning with Chekhov and ending with Roberto Bolaño. Each segment concentrates on a particular writer. Some wonderful biographical details and odd angles of vision. I love this bit on Robert Walser, for example.

Despite writing several novels, it is in the short form that Walser excelled. Many of his pieces defy conventional expectations of short stories – William Gass describes him as “a kind of columnist before the time of columns” – while he himself referred to them as “shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced up or torn-apart book of myself.”

Click the link below for the series.

A brief survey of the short story | Books | The Guardian.

There Might Be Angels — A Note on a DG Story from Long Ago

Jan 192013

It’s always nice when people say complimentary things about you. This is Marc Christensen on The Malahat Review site recalling a 1981 issue that contains a story of mine called “There Might Be Angels” — subsequently reprinted in my second collection Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon (Talonbooks) which, amazingly enough, is still in print. I wrote the story in Saskatoon and in Santa Fe in the winter and spring of 1980 before attending the Iowa Writers Workshop that fall. I was thinking of that George C. Scott movie (not the band) There Might be Giants in which a psychiatrist, played by Joanne Woodward, decides to enter her patient’s mania rather than try to cure him, finding the insanity more truthful than the so-called real world. The movie script was based in part on Don Quixote, which somewhat explains my long obsession with that novel. But the film also seemed to reflect the concerns of the great cracked Scottish psychoanalyst R. D. Laing, who treated his schizophrenic patients by honouring the truth of their delusions. So the ending of the story is an inversion of the normalcy/insanity discourse that governs the preceding nine-tenths of the text. There is also a nice little folktale I invented about three angels traveling incognito on a train together. And, of course, everyone in the story is an angel. When Christensen writes “abroad” he is, in part, referring to the fact that the story is set in Mexico.

…but it seems best to highlight the story written by Ontario-born Douglas Glover, who takes his CanLit background abroad both literally and figuratively to study and challenge the traditions of classical literature. His contribution begins as a railway encounter between an aging, comfortable abbot and a tramp, a set piece that exceeds the expectations inherited from both canon and context several times over – providing a brief but convincing case for the value of homegrown talent in a context of longer ages and wider places.

–Marc Christensen

via The Malahat Review.

Dogfights | Short Story — Richard Farrell

Jan 032013

Herewith a miraculous little story by Richard Farrell, a story I adore because it reaches beyond mere morality to what I think of as the higher calling of the heart. The hero is a deserter from the American Navy who is screwing his best friend’s wife. The friend dies, a dog dies, and yet the tone is sweet and sadly happy, infused with love, friendship and a deliciously amoral joie de vivre. The theme is captured beautifully in this wonderfully paradoxical sentence: “My friendship with Goethe—the evolution of it, the unraveling of betrayal and fear toward some grotesque, twisted loyalty—remains as strange a puzzle as anything I’ve ever encountered. And yet I would do anything for him, even stop fucking his wife, if only he’d ask me to.”

Goethe paces the cobby Pomeranian back and forth along a cement seawall overlooking the eastern Aegean until, after three or four passes, Charo settles on a perfect spot and squats. How I hate that dog. I am filled with shameful, violent thoughts toward it. My friend snaps the leash and the dog trots back toward us, leaving a steaming turd in the brown grass.

Goethe’s face appears heavy this morning. Our normally garrulous stroll has passed mostly without words. We scramble up mossy stairs from the seawall toward Isiodou Avenue in what’s become an increasingly awkward silence, as two-stroke mopeds crackle around corners like a hive of honeybees. It’s Tuesday, Port Day, and soon the cruise ships will arrive. A legion of sleepy young Greeks are zooming off to man their stalls for the onslaught of tourists.

The avenue snakes through hilly neighborhoods of the old city of Rhodes, then flattens out toward the park. We are headed for the ancient acropolis, which stands waiting in the shrinking shade of a tall cypress. The mopeds drone off into silence as we crest the hill. Endless sky tumbles toward a perfect blue horizon, a blueness broken only by myrtle shrubs and the Doric columns of the acropolis—half-a-dozen soot-stained columns with fluted shafts jutting into the sky like God’s craggy fingers. Goethe unhooks the dog and she darts off, running between ancient stones and red sage.

“They’ve discovered something in my lungs,” Goethe says. I know instantly it’s the worst news. He wouldn’t mention it if it weren’t.

“Jesus,” I say, uncertain about what follows.

“I’m going back to England,” he says. “I need to know you’ll stay and help Mary-Bell with the hotel.”

Mary-Bell is his wife and I’m fucking her.

Goethe knows about our affair. It’s one of his many charms—the fact that he doesn’t let this interfere with our friendship, our morning walks, our love of the ancient Greek island. I’ve been living with them a year, since abandoning my post as a division officer on the U.S.S. Austin P. Hall, leaving behind a locker full of khakis, half-a-suitcase of civilian clothes, two hundred bucks in cash, and a career of monotonous waves, gray hulls and loose discipline. Charmed by Mary-Bell. Charmed by Goethe. Charmed by Greece, by Rhodes, by the luminous sea. I walked away from that life and stayed.

“How long will you be gone?” I ask.

Goethe smiles. “I suspect I won’t be coming back. I suspect my departure from our island will be permanent.”

Goethe doesn’t look like he’s dying. Sixty-three and a few pounds overweight, he has only streaks of gray in his blond hair, and his skin remains taut and unwrinkled. There’s a sallowness about his face, a certain leathery hue. But then again, we all look a little yellow in the bright Greek sunshine. He walks three miles in the morning every day before coffee, and then walks again with the dog and me. He swims for an hour in the afternoon sea and runs around his hotel with the stamina and energy of a man half his age. It seems utterly absurd that he’s sick, beyond plausibility. But he’s not a joking man.

“When will you leave?” I ask.

“The day after tomorrow,” he says.

“I can’t stay here,” I say. I almost say “without you,” but choke this part back. “Maybe it’s time I faced certain things.”

“I don’t think so,” Goethe says. He lays his palm on my shoulder. “Let’s get a drink,” he says. “We need a drink. Sobriety is overrated at times like this.”

“Times like this,” I say. A beer is the last thing I need, but I won’t refuse his request. He whistles and the scruffy mutt trots back to us, its thin lips mocking me with a smile.

My friendship with Goethe—the evolution of it, the unraveling of betrayal and fear toward some grotesque, twisted loyalty—remains as strange a puzzle as anything I’ve ever encountered. And yet I would do anything for him, even stop fucking his wife, if only he’d ask me to.

Across the sea, a thin fog slowly parts, revealing the distant, purple shoulders of Turkish mountains. A massive cruise ship glides in toward Rhodes’ harbor. Two tugs churn out to meet the incoming ship. Wheezing plumes of sulfurous smoke rise from the tugs’ stacks and bend at right angles in the wind, forming parallel, black sevens against the cloudless sky as they mark time toward the luxury liner. I think about my father, the only man I ever loved the way I love Goethe. I’ve betrayed them both in different but profound ways.

We find an open bar and order beers on the patio. Charo snarls at me, then curls up at Goethe’s feet and falls asleep.

A year ago, when my ship arrived in Rhodes for some much needed liberty, Goethe walked in and found me doubled over his wife behind the reception desk of their hotel, her cigarette still burning in an ashtray next to the guest register. As I scrambled toward the exit, Goethe pumped shells into a shotgun chamber. I heard a crack, then a furnace blast of heat scorched my shoulder as buckshot penetrated my flesh. My skull smashed against the sliding half-door and I passed out.

I woke the next day at dinnertime with a throbbing headache and a flaming shoulder blade. Goethe turned away the shore patrol. He told them he had no idea where I’d gone. From my hotel bed, I watched as the Austin P. Hall weighed anchor and steamed out of port. I bid a silent but overdue farewell to my ship and its crew. The frigate cleared the seawall and disappeared. I was both set free and imprisoned.

While I healed, nibbling croissants and sipping ouzo beneath a sun porch, Mary-Bell delivered food and drinks to me on trays covered with pink hibiscus flowers. Twice a day, she changed the dressing on my shoulder. Twice a day, she nursed me back to health. Twice a day, she slid my boxers below my knees and gave me oral sex.

A week after the Austin P. Hall departed Rhodes—rendering me a fugitive, a deserter in a time of war—Goethe offered me a job at their hotel and I accepted. We were sitting on the patio, overlooking the sea. I was out of bed by then, stronger, though not yet healed. The sun baked against my bandaged shoulder.

He said the hotel needed repairs, and he spoke with humor of his ongoing battle against deleterious sea-air, a battle I was familiar with, a battle that every sailor knows must constantly be fought but can never be won. He said he couldn’t pay much but that I’d be a welcome guest.

“More than a guest,” he said.

I started to protest but he raised a hand.

“We will not speak of the unpleasantness between us,” he said. “A man comes to realize certain things about the ones he loves. There is a price to pay, but there is forgiveness on the other side.”

And though my shoulder burned, and the bruise on my skull had leeched from purple to yellow to green, I accepted his offer, the strangest one I’ve ever received. I had no other choice; going home meant facing disgrace, charges, shame, and quite likely prison. Staying meant something unfamiliar, something wild and new: sunshine, hibiscus flowers and the sound of Mary-Bell’s lips on me. I assumed, I believed deeply, that one day Goethe would kill me. But no one chooses the means, manner and moment of their death. So I shook his hand and accepted his offer. The rest, I told myself, was for the gods to sort out.

Back at the hotel, Mary-Bell lounges on a sofa and sips a fizzy orange drink through a straw. A small pink flower floats atop the slushy ice like a pink lily pad. Red hair hangs in long, ropy curls around her thin face. She is thirty-one but looks to be much older. The Mediterranean sun has raised dense freckles on her face and her breasts bulge from her shirt like whales breeching the sea’s surface. She takes in too much sun, drinks too much coffee and rarely has fewer than three drinks a day.

In a different century and climate, she might have been painted by Pissarro.

Pavlo, the hotel’s Croatian waiter, serves Goethe and me cappuccinos in tiny white mugs.

“She agrees with me,” Goethe says. “That it would be best if you stayed.”

Mary-Bell glances up.

“It’s impossible,” I say. “You’ve known since the beginning that I would eventually have to go.”

Mary-Bell sighs in an exasperated way.

“Nonsense,” Goethe says. “You have a home here. Go back and face what? Prison?”

She holds out a cigarette, which Pavlo lights, hovering over her like some colonial man-servant. I wonder, sometimes, if he’s sleeping with her, too. My own betrayals have made me vigilant for hidden signs: the length of their glances, the way Mary-Bell cups Pavlo’s wrist with her fingers as he leans in to light her cigarette. If she can cheat on Goethe with me, then why not cheat on me with Pavlo?

“I don’t understand why you can’t stay here for treatment,” I say. Mary-Bell is casting her fuck-me-now eyes in my general direction. It’s been over a day, a rare drought for us. She drives me wild, beyond the point of reason or logic.

“The Greeks stopped practicing medicine with Asclepius,” Goethe says. “Their doctors aren’t fit for goats. No, I’ll go home for this. Stewart will stay and help out. It is better all around. I won’t be gone long. A month, maybe two.”

His lies surprise me. But then again it’s all a web of thinly veiled deceit here. Everyone knows the truth but refuses to speak it.

He unscrews the top on a jar of nail polish and begins to paint the toes on Mary-Bell’s left foot. The paint color is tourmaline. I know this because the bottle sits on Mary-Bell’s night stand. I can see up her skirt—leopard print panties.

“I’m going with you, my love,” Mary-Bell says. “I’ve thought it over and I’ll not stay here alone. We’ll close the hotel. We are together in this.”

“You won’t be alone,” he says. “You two will stay and run things.” He nods to me and takes his wife’s other foot. “I’ll be back soon. We need the summer season.”

I object again, but Goethe silences me with a wave as if to say the matter is decided. Mary-Bell opens her legs wider, offering me a more expansive view.

In Goethe’s absence, everything will fly apart. I’m certain of this.

“You are a bad man,” Pavlo says as we walk into the kitchen. He wears a short white coat and a thin black tie. Were I to guess, I’d say he’s twenty-four, but he could be much older or younger. It’s impossible to say. “What will you do when Mr. Goethe is gone?”

“You just keep making the drinks,” I say. “Goethe will be back soon enough.”

“I must leave, too,” Pavlo says. “I need to return to my family.”

He’s never mentioned family before, and in two weeks it will be June. The hotel will be filled to capacity. I hope this is only a dramatic ploy, an attempt to grab my attention. Maybe he’s positioning himself for a raise in salary or an extra day off. Mary-Bell will need him here after Goethe leaves. She can’t run the place alone.

“Who will cover your shifts?” I say. “Don’t do this, Pavlo. Not now. Can’t it wait a month?”

He grins and shrugs his shoulders, and I realize again how much Goethe holds us all together.

That afternoon, when Goethe has gone to the market, Mary-Bell and I run off to their bedroom. She slaps my ass hard. She smells of gin and baby powder. I nibble the puckered blue dolphin tattoo on her ankle. The dolphin looks waterlogged, a time-stamped reminder that all of us, no matter how immortal we may feel on this island, are slipping away.

I kiss up her legs, one ear tuned for the sound of Goethe’s Citroen pulling back into the driveway, the other for the pitchy moans which mark her pleasure.

“You’re an ungrateful little shit,” she says. “You would leave me?”

“What choice do I have?” I ask.

“You’re so full of yourself,” she says.

“I’ve already stayed too long,” I say. “I have things to answer for. I have people who need to know that I’m alive.”

“What about me?” she asks. “Am I just a throwaway?”

I don’t answer, but kiss her harder, my tongue sliding up her leg. Her leopard panties are balled up on the floor.

Mary-Bell fucks like she’s on fire. I begin to understand why Goethe can’t die here. She’d mount his corpse. We collapse on top of each other listen for the sound of Goethe coming home. I won’t miss the fear, the sneaking around, the vigilance, but I will miss such burning passion.

Smitten. That was the word Goethe used to describe the moment he first saw Mary-Bell. She danced on the stages of a cruise ship. She glided on the waves for six months before coming to Rhodes. She must have seduced men by the dozen. Then one day she walked into the hotel and Goethe stood her a drink. The next morning, they married in town.

Goethe bought her one drink. That’s all it took. Me he had to shoot.

I rub my hand across her stomach and I swear she purrs, the heat from her body arousing me anew. Mary-Bell tells me often that she has only loved one man, Goethe, but could never be faithful to him. Goethe tells me he has loved many women but has only been faithful to Mary-Bell. I am their confessor, sinning and absolving in equal measure. I betray them both with every breath I take.

Goethe knows our affair didn’t end with the shotgun blast. He knows we fuck all the time, everywhere, every time he isn’t looking. When he goes for a swim, we do it in the bathroom. When he naps in the afternoon, she masturbates me on the couch. At night, when Goethe falls asleep watching the BBC, Mary-Bell and I sneak out to an empty room and do it again. I’ve never been with a more passionate woman, so constantly aroused. At the same time, I’ve never had a more honest trusting friend than Goethe. And he knows.

For reasons I may never understand, none of it matters to him.

I kiss her forehead and slip out of their bedroom. I need to leave this island. I need to go home and face my crimes. I need to hug my father and to apologize. I need to look him in the eye and tell him the truth.

I’m taking a shower when Goethe enters my cramped bathroom carrying a bottle of vodka and two shot glasses. He sits on the toilet as I rinse soap from my eyes and the remnants of his wife from my scrotum.

“Limassol?” he asks. “Let’s hire a guide and go for one last partridge hunt on Cyprus?”

“I can’t stay here,” I say. “You have to know that.”

“A hunting trip will help you decide. Say yes. Don’t deny a dying man’s final wish.”

Goethe and I have hunted partridge many times together on Cyprus, and each time, I expect him to shoot me in the woods. The water runs down my body and into the drain. It’s my body that betrays me, not my heart. I wonder what my father tells his friends. “What’s become of Stewart,” they must ask. “Is he still in the Navy?” “Has he made Commander yet?” His son, a disgrace beyond words, except for the only word that remains: deserter.

“I can’t stay,” I say. “I won’t.”

“Nonsense,” Goethe says. “Where will you go?”

He passes a glass of vodka to me in the shower.

“The morning ferry to Limassol?” I say, rinsing the last drops of soap and sin from me. I sometimes secretly hope that he will shoot me again. “Grilled squab at sunset?”

“Smashing,” he says. “I was hoping you’d agree.”

My heart belongs to Goethe, my body belongs to his wife, and my shame belongs to my father. I drink the bitter vodka and shut off the water.

“I have something to tell you,” I say. From time to time, I’m overcome by a need to confess. I need to tell him why, why I can’t stay away from his wife, even if he already knows.

He hands me a towel and shakes his head.

“No death-bed confessions, Stewart,” Goethe says. “They’re so contrived.”

I grab the towel and he pours more vodka.

“You lied to her,” I say. “You told her you were coming back.”

Goethe grins. His white teeth glow beneath his tan skin.

“Truth should never hurt,” he says. “Not to the ones you love.”

The next morning, my shotgun packed and hunting clothes on, I come downstairs to a maelstrom. Three thousand euro is missing from the hotel safe and Pavlo, the Croatian waiter, has poured out the alcohol from every bottle into the bar sink. The empty bottles are scattered on the floor and counter like some ancient battlefield. Only half a bottle of limoncello remains, standing alone on the long, tile counter like a glowing, yellow joke. Goethe calmly rights the overturned bottles. The entire room smells of stale booze. Mary-Bell is enraged and stomps around the bar, cursing.

“Take the dog out, will you Stewart?” Goethe says to me over her rants.

When a man has no exits, the only way out is to go deeper in. I tell myself that falling in love with Mary-Bell remains the most viable option. Suicide stands a close second. Neither option is as crazy as they sound. At least with Pavlo gone, I no longer fear that Mary-Bell’s affection may be further divided.

I grab the leash but can’t find Charo. I call the dog’s name all around the hotel, but she’s nowhere. I search, in the gardens, in the hallways and in the alley behind the service entrance for the better part of fifteen minutes before giving up. I don’t need this right now.

I return to the lobby and tell them. Pavlo must have forgotten to latch the gate in the midst of his dramatic departure.

“The dog has slipped out,” I say.

Mary-Bell collapses into a sobbing lump. She moans, over and over, that surely she will die. She begs Goethe to call the police. At last he nods to me and I do it. I phone the station to report the theft, the vandalism and the missing dog.

“Looks like the morning ferry is off,” he says softly. “I never anticipated such a scene.”

“What will we do?” I say. “She won’t make it if that damned dog doesn’t return.”

But Goethe offers no solutions. We head out to search for the dog.

We cover the seawall, scanning the eastern shores. Children play in the sand. Waves crash and roll.

“I’ll miss you,” I say. The words tumble awkwardly from my mouth. I’ve never said such a thing to a man before.

He stares out to sea and places his purple-veined hand on my shoulder. I think of my own father, how confused he must be by what I’ve done. I haven’t spoken to him in fourteen months.

“You can be happy here, Stewart,” Goethe says to me. “It’s a good place to spend your days.”

“I’ve been gone too long,” I say. “I have to go back. Surely you understand that?”

“We’re all running from something,” he says. “We run and run until the race ends. In this case,” he points to his chest, “a tumor in the lungs.”

“My father deserves an explanation.”

“He’ll understand,” Goethe says. “Once I’ve gone, you’ll write to him. Invite him here. For a man to see his son living here, that will be enough.”

“He’ll never understand,” I say. “You don’t know him.”

“He’ll understand, Stewart. I know it seems impossible. But you have no reason to leave here.”

I shake my head. “I have even less reason to stay.”

We look through a dozen or more alleys before I finally spot the dog, curled up next to half-opened bags of garbage. Goethe bends down and lifts Charo off the cobblestones.

“Must have been a car,” he says. “Poor little thing.”

He places the dog onto a clean spot in the alley then disappears around the corner. I stand there, unsure where to look. The view is bad all around: trash, graffiti, dead dog. A few minutes later, he returns, carrying two plastic bags. He carefully slips Charo’s body inside the first, then places the first bag inside the second. There is such tenderness in the way he treats the dead animal. For the first time, I realize how his own mortality must weigh on his mind. I glimpse, in his handling of the dog, some gesture of what he must hope for. The act of dying is grotesque, but the handling of the dead is always an act of mercy.

He turns toward me and smiles.

“We will celebrate tonight,” he says. “We need one last night out before I go.”

“But Mary-Bell,” I say. “She’ll need us now.”

“Tut, tut,” Goethe says. “Our job is to live, not to dwell on death.”

We walk off toward a secluded spot on the cliffs. He places the bag on the ground and slips two large stones inside and ties it off. He points to the bag and then to me.

“Why me?” I say. “I want nothing to do with this subterfuge.”

He puts his hand on his back and makes a cranky face. “Bad back.”

So I lift the dog and the stones and heave it into the sea. It splashes below us and floats a moment on the surface, then sinks out of sight.

“One can only hope for a burial at sea,” he says. “She was a good dog, Stewart. A man should have a good dog.”

We don’t tell Mary-Bell about finding the dog. We let her believe that Charo is still missing, let her hope awhile longer. We let her do whatever she wants, just like always.

“I’m worried about Mary-Bell,” I say that night at a bar. I don’t know how we’ll get back to the hotel. We are already too drunk to walk much less drive.

“You have a lot to learn,” Goethe says. “Mary-Bell is tougher than both of us combined.”

“I think you’re wrong,” I say. “I think she puts on a brave face.”

“It’s been a good life,” he says, picking up his beer. “I have few regrets. It’s the goal, my friend. When you get to the end, one shouldn’t be filled with regrets.”

“I was engaged once,” I say. I’ve never told him this before. “She wanted four kids, a dog, a yard with a pool and a picket fence. A midnight blue Grand Cherokee in the driveway.”

“And you didn’t want those things?” Goethe asks.

“I thought I did,” I say. “Who knows what I really wanted.”

“It gets easier,” he says. “When you’re young, life seems endless, full of choices. Then those choices narrow. Things that matter come into focus. It becomes clearer.”

“Do you love her?” I ask him. “Do you love Mary-Bell?”

“With every breath I take,” he says without irony. “And I love you, too. It will be hard to leave you both.”

“She’ll destroy me,” I say.

Goethe smiles. “There are worse ways to go.”

Goethe slides a greasy sardine into his mouth and orders more beer. Though my head throbs already, I don’t object. When have I ever been able to object to him?

“My father flew Spitfires in the war,” he says. “Battle of Britain. ‘Never was so much owed by so many’ — all that good stuff. He shot down a dozen or so Nazi planes. Heroic chap, in his own way. One day, when I was about fourteen, I asked him if he ever felt bad about it. About killing another human being. The war had been over for years, but I wondered if it ever kept him up at night. I remember it quite vividly. We were in Hyde Park and it was raining. He seemed so old to me that day, though of course, he was much younger then than I am now. He looked at me quite seriously, in a way he never had before. A man to man way. He didn’t answer for a spell. Then he said, very simply, that he’d never thought of it before. Not once. He’d always just accepted it, the war, the killing. There was no guilt in it, no shame, no regret.”

“What are you telling me?” I say.

He shrugs. “It’s just a story about my father,” Goethe says. He hands me another beer which I don’t need. Then he adds, “We can never know people, Stewart. The soul is vast, an unknowable cave that opens unto other caves.”

“This is the wisdom you’re leaving me with?”

“No,” he says, smiling. “This is the wisdom I’ll leave with you. Every man needs three things: money enough not to suffer, someone to come home to at night, and a good dog. With those three things, you can lead a happy life. Don’t be greedy for more. Don’t look back so much. You’re smart, Stewart. You’re young and strong. Run the hotel. It might, in the end, be more than you need.”

“What will you tell Mary-Bell about the dog?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer.

The next morning, a few hours before Goethe is set to fly off the island, I walk alone beneath the ramparts in Rhodes’ old city, where the Knights Hospitaller once defended the island against the Ottomans. Tourists stroll by, gawking as if these ancient walls were built only for their amusement. My head aches from last night’s booze and from all of this history. Rhodes is an ancient place. It’s been settled and conquered so many times. I sometimes wonder if the island has just grown tired. These days, it seems to yield its history and secrets up without a fight.

Back at the hotel, Goethe’s bags by the lobby door, I hear Mary-Bell on the phone. She’s talking to the police in Athens. They have arrested Pavlo trying to rob the cash register at another hotel. Inexplicably, Pavlo offered up Mary-Bell’s name as a reference and they called. Goethe whispers these details to me while Mary-Bell asks the detective if Pavlo knows about the dog. Pavlo must say, no. Nothing about the dog.

“In that case,” she says. “I’ve never heard of the little prick.”

She hangs up the phone and Goethe begins to laugh. Mary-Bell and I are soon laughing with him, all three of us in the kitchen laughing without restraint.

It is then that Goethe tells Mary-Bell that the dog is dead. He also tells her that there is no treatment for his condition. He delivers the bad news quickly, a one-two punch that I expect will knock her out.

But instead of coming apart, Mary-Bell takes the worst news with a stoic pride.

“I’m not dumb,” she says. “But you could’ve told me last night, before you two ran off to get drunk.”

I leave them together in the lobby. I watch Mary-Bell curl up close to her husband on a couch. He puts his arm around her shoulder and kisses her head. Goethe has refused my offer of a ride to the airport. We have already said our goodbyes and he will endure no further scene. I close the door behind me and leave them alone.

A cold and damp winter passes slowly until at last the rains let up. A crispness remains in the evenings but the days warm quickly now. I light a fire in the lobby and come back to our small apartment behind the front desk.

Mary-Bell wears a long robe and slippers. Her stomach pushes the robe out ever so roundly. The hotel is almost empty. We are still months away from the start of tourist season.

“Why didn’t he care?” I ask Mary-Bell again, for the thousandth time. “Why did he allow us to carry on as we did? Why didn’t he stop us?”

I ask her these questions over and over, but she never answers them. She holds to her secret knowledge the way she holds our child, as if caring for it is a woman’s work. I keep thinking that one time she’ll relent and tell me. But it’s equally possible that she doesn’t know the answers.

“Paint my toenails, Stewy,” she says, thrusting her foot towards my face. “Too many questions. You always ask too many questions.”

I reach for the jar of nail polish and unscrew the lid.

As I paint, Mary-Bell opens her robe and rubs palm oil over her stretched stomach. Her stomach is my favorite part of her body, that smooth shiny skin just below her navel. It never fails to arouse me, even more so since the child inside her has stretched the skin wider and made the surface smoother. The little boy she carries, my son, is due in a few weeks. She was pregnant then, when Goethe asked me to stay. He knew, but didn’t say anything. He wanted me to decide on my own. Mary-Bell said that he would never have told me about the child if I had chosen to leave.

Out in the hotel gardens blood-red anemone poppies have already bloomed over the spot where we buried a third of Goethe’s ashes. Another third stayed in Essex, buried with his mother and father, and the rest remain in a silver urn on the mantle. Mary-Bell has asked me to take the urn away before the baby comes. She says that it’s bad luck to leave the dead around when a baby arrives.

This morning, I wrote my father a letter and invited him to Rhodes to meet his grandson. I have no idea if he’ll accept my invitation, but I felt a great relief when I dropped that letter in the mail.

I finish painting Mary-Bell’s toes and reach for the other foot. I don’t believe her about Goethe’s remains. We both need Goethe close, and I know that when the time comes, she won’t ask me to move him. It would be impossible to erase his presence from our lives. It surrounds us like the sea air.

The puppy trots in from the other room and curls around its tail. We’ve named the dog Pavlo, at Mary-Bell’s insistence. I can only speculate on what secret pleasure this must give her. The dog yawns widely, wags its tail and looks up at me expectantly. It’s time for the dog’s nightly walk. Mary-Bell closes her eyes and drifts off to sleep as I finish painting her last toes. I rub her feet and I try to imagine what it will feel like to be a father. I try to picture my future son, what he will look like, what his interest and passions will be. I try to imagine what I will teach him about life, about love and desire and loyalty. I wonder what I will tell my son about Goethe and about all the many things that happened on this island before his birth. Is it even possible to explain? I pull a blanket over Mary-Bell’s round belly and turn off the light. The room falls quiet. In the distance, the slightest sound of breaking waves. I grab the leash and the dog jumps up, follows me to the door, wagging its tail with wonder at the many the adventures that wait on the other side.

—Richard Farrell

Richard Farrell is the Creative Non-Fiction Editor at upstreet and a Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq (in fact, he is one of the original group who helped found the site). A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has worked as a high school teacher, a defense contractor, and as a Navy pilot. He is a graduate from the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories. His work, including memoir, craft essays, and book reviews, has published at Hunger Mountain and Numéro Cinq. He lives in San Diego.

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A Cut: Fiction — Quim Monzo

Dec 112012

“A Cut” is a very short story, allegorical, if you will, mordant and slyly ironic in the modern mode, representing a clash of values, a clash of the new and the old, with the voice of tradition coming in the words of the teacher trying to keep control of his classroom, inhumanely and blindly reciting the former courtesies in the face of contemporary social realities (chaos and violence). “A Cut” is Catalan writer Quim Monzo‘s second appearance in Numéro Cinq (see his earlier story “Gregor” here). The story is excerpted from Monzo’s collection A Thousand Morons, translated by Peter Bush, and just published by Open Letter Books. See NC Senior Editor Richard Farrell’s review of A Thousand Morons here.

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Toni dashes into the classroom with a look of terror in his eyes and a gash in his neck. It is a deep, broad cut, spurting blood that is bright crimson rather than red. One would say, on the evidence of a glance, without a proper investigation, that, now that the flesh has opened up, the gash—that in principle should be no more than a millimeter wide—is two to three centimeters across. We might estimate its length at twenty to twenty-five centimeters, given that it starts under his left ear, goes down his neck, and ends level with his chest, slightly to the right of his sternum.

“They attacked me with a broken bottle.”

Blood is seeping down his neck, staining the white shirt of his uniform. His jacket collar is equally soaked in blood.

“Come on, boy. Is this any way to walk into the classroom, Toni?”

“Sir, Ferran and Roger got hold of a broken bottle next to the vending machine, stuck it into me, and . . .”

“How does one enter the classroom, Toni? Is this how one comes into a class? Does one enter any old way? Does one enter without saying ‘Good morning’? Is this what we have taught you at school?”

“Good morning,” says Toni, putting his right hand over the gash to try to staunch the flow of blood.

“Generally speaking, habits have been degenerating, and you are not to blame, I know. We are also to blame, in institutions that are unable to offer an education that shapes character with a proper sense of discipline and duty. But society is also to blame, and all the many parents who demand that school provides the authority they are incapable of wielding. You, Toni, are but a sample, a grain of sand from the interminable beach of universal disorder. Where is the discipline of yesteryear? Where are the sacrifice and effort? Where are the basics of education and civility we have inculcated into you day after day, from the moment you entered this institution? I know that many other educational institutions practice a much laxer form of education, and that, as it is impossible to totally isolate each individual, and being aware of the tendency of the youth to mingle and fraternize, I know, for all these reasons, that, however much our institution strives to educate you in exemplary fashion, if we are the only ones inculcating any norms, you have too great an opportunity to be polluted by the lax mores of others.”

“Sir, I’m soaked in blood.”

“So I see. And I can also see the dreadful mess you are leaving on the parquet. Not to mention your shirt and your jacket. You know by now that I like your uniforms to always be spotless. But we will leave that for tomorrow. Now go to reception and ask Mr. Manolo for a mop and a bucket of water and try not to splatter blood all down the corridor, as you will have to clean that too.”

—Quim Monzo

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Quim Monzo is an award-winning Barcelona based writer. He has written novels, story collections, essays and journalism. His short story collection, A Thousand Morons, translated from Catalan by Peter Bush, is available from Open Letter. Bush’s sharp and flawless translation brings together 19 stories and shorter fictions from one of Catalonia’s leading writers. Monzo’s short story “Gregor” can be read here at Numéro Cinq.

The Perfume Trees of Arkansas: Fiction — Garry Craig Powell

Nov 072012

Garry Craig Powell is a transplanted Englishman who seems to have found his Inner Arkansan. Or he has that Nabokovian gift of mimicry coupled with a fascination for Americana. “The Perfume Trees of Arkansas” is a short story about an Iraq War veteran nicknamed Jesus who drinks too much and doesn’t exactly WANT to die but doesn’t care much either which leads him to a stunning act of self-renunciation that is, well, oddly transformative. “The Perfume Trees of Arkansas” is funny without exactly being hilarious; it’s also immensely sad (with the sadness of all that lost, drug-polluted and under-educated underclass America that is yet human and oddly hopeful) without being depressing. The author lavishes much attention on his milieu — you think he must have grown up there, too.

——–

The night shift is over at Michel’s, and Nordic Jesus sweats in the Chariot of Doom, smoking a joint and wishing he could see real bright colors. Beyond the parking lot, in the lamplight, the brick boutiques, coffee shops and antiques stores of the Heights have the muted hues of a vintage monochrome photograph that has been artily tinted. Nordic Jesus feels that life has become remote, like a movie playing on a cell phone screen. He can see the world but he isn’t in the picture anymore. From the day his HumVee hit an IED on the airport road in Baghdad, it’s as if he never got over the concussion and what happened to Doug and the others. After the explosion his buddies joked that he’d risen from the dead and started calling him Jesus; when the 39^th returned to Arkansas the nickname followed him. Nordic Jesus, his friend Elijah dubbed him, when his orange hair and beard began to look like a Viking’s, and the moniker stuck. Owen has even started calling himself Nordic Jesus now, mainly because he finds blasphemy funny—it’s one in the eye for his dad, a Church of Christ preacher—but also because he’s just superstitious enough to hope that some of the magic of the man from Galilee might rub off on him. He wishes he would just wake up; so far it hasn’t been much of a resurrection.

Yalla, he coaxes himself in Arabic, Come on. When he hears the steel door of the kitchen slamming, he turns his head to see Michel locking it, then stumbling across the lot toward him.

Nordic Jesus likes his boss—Michel doesn’t piss him off, anyway, like most people do—and Michel’s accent and manners amuse him. He’s a genuine French chef, short, fat, dark and alcoholic, and plays the part to the hilt.

“Go home, Jesus,” he says, smacking his employee’s car. It’s an ’89 Chevy pickup with hand painted flames on the sides, the legend ‘Chariot of Doom’ in big black gothic letters across the rear window of the cab, and a bumper sticker that reads Jesus is Lord. “You have enough trouble with the police lately, I think,” Michel adds, pinching his assistant’s cheek and slapping it for good measure.

The hash is taking effect. The Heights are turning into a town in the South of France, the streetlights are Van Gogh fireballs, and Michel’s parting words are imbued with significance. “Sois sage,” Michel says, before staggering away and flopping into his car. Be good, Nordic Jesus thinks, remembering his high school French. But doesn’t sage mean ‘wise,’ too?

The Chariot of Doom starts with a smoker’s cough. Nordic Jesus finishes the joint and wishes he could die. The dogwood trees and crape myrtles that form a canopy over the parking lot are blooming, and their scent reminds him of women, makes him yearn for one again—it’s been months. It’s strange that his sense of smell has remained acute; maybe that’s why cooking is the one thing he still loves. Through the open window he breathes in the air that steams around him like a fragrant gumbo, and the aromas of the evening’s dishes linger in his nostrils: garlic, onion, sour cream, prawns, orange sauce. The lady who called him out tonight to congratulate him on his roast duck was wearing a sweet, tart perfume, as if it were made with oranges, and Nordic Jesus was so overwhelmed that he almost fell on her neck and kissed her.

He doesn’t exactly want to die, he realizes; he’s simply tired of living.

Every night he has the same sensations, the same thoughts. At work, he is absorbed by what Michel teaches him, but then come the long silent hours in his grandmother’s house. He can’t sleep. He watches the cooking channel, tries out new recipes, plays his guitar, drinks bourbon. Most nights he goes for a run to tire himself out, and finally falls asleep, drunk, around dawn. Other nights, when the river runs like the Congo through the jungle and tropical smells are swirling in a crazy cocktail in his skull, he feels the urge to do something reckless. He drives to Stiff Station, where the crack houses are. Elijah, who was in the National Guard with him and now makes the desserts at Michel’s, has warned him about venturing there alone—Don’t be gone where you got no allies or alibis, white boy—but Nordic Jesus reminds him that he’s been in a war zone; he’s seen children’s bodies charred like barbecued chickens, and brains splashed like vomit on the sidewalk. This is Little Rock, for God’s sake. Besides, he is the Son of Man. No one can harm him.

He’s cruising along Kavanaugh, the radio tuned to a jazz station, Coltrane’s saxophone coiling like a dervish in his brain, when he sees a white woman wearing a batik dress and one sandal, limping and looping past homeless men who wave bottles, inviting or threatening her. She’s carrying her other sandal and a denim purse. She has long legs and bare arms, tattoos and dreadlocks. He slows down. Right here a couple of weeks ago Nordic Jesus was passing three junkies shooting up on the sidewalk, when he saw a black boy, no more than thirteen or fourteen years old. He offered him a ride; the boy gave him the finger. Tired of playing the Good Samaritan and getting no thanks, Nordic Jesus has made up his mind to drive by, when the woman lurches into the street and freezes like a rabbit caught in the headlights. He stamps on the brake.

The Chariot of Doom comes to a slippery, screaming halt. The woman folds herself over the hood and throws up on it.

Nordic Jesus laughs aloud for the first time in months.

“Feeling indisposed, ma’am?” he calls out the open window.

She looks up, startled or scared. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I truly am.” She has both palms flat on the hood, as if she just pushed it down. She’s dropped her purse and sandal. With her head sagging over her sick, and drool dripping down onto her chest—she’s stacked, he can’t help noticing—she looks like some creature from the netherworld. He recognizes her all the same. He saw her on one of his nocturnal runs, yelling at a man on a lawn in Levy.

Nordic Jesus opens his door, drops out of the cab. “Need a hand?”

“Why, sir, you are a gentleman,” she says, in tones as thick and sweet as molasses, as ladylike as Scarlet O’Hara’s. Pity about the dreadlocks, tattoos and puke-spattered tits, he thinks. She pushes against the hood, but her hands are glued to it.

Nordic Jesus grabs a box of tissues—grandma likes to have some handy when he takes her shopping—and after prying the stranger off his car, dabs her face. Her smile is vacant and her features ordinary, but he finds himself liking her. Or maybe he just feels friendly because of the pot he’s smoked, and the Châteauneuf-du-Pape he’s been drinking at his own expense. He hands her the box so she can swab her chest. And then, though he knows it will mean trouble, and he is being far from sage, he hears himself asking if she could use a ride.

“I could.” The woman sways before him like a slow metronome. “But I don’t know if I should.”

“I don’t mean you any harm.”

“I heard that before,” she snaps. “But to tell you the truth, I’ve always liked men with red hair. And I think I seen you before. Where d’you live?”

“Levy. I’m staying with my grandma over on Texas.”

She opens her mouth as if she’s about to yell ‘oh!’ She takes a step forward; he has to catch her. Nordic Jesus hasn’t touched a woman since Whitney dumped him just after he got back—a year and three months ago now—and it feels real good, or would, if the chick didn’t smell like a Friday night frat-house party.

“I know!” she says. “I seen you running past my house on Arizona. You was near naked.”

“I get hot when I’m running.” He’s hot now, sweat streaming down his neck and back, his boxers damp, the insides of his thighs sore. It was a hundred and fifteen in the kitchen tonight, and it’s ninety-eight or nine now, outside.

She pokes his chest. “You didn’t have nothing on but shorts and sneakers. You’re buff, dude.”

“I lift weights.”

She staggers back, out of his arms, and looks him over. “Yep, I can tell.”

At the end of the street a police cruiser is approaching. They eye it apprehensively, and she says she might as well come with him. She stumbles around the front of the truck, swinging the denim purse and sandal he’s picked up for her, and collapses into the seat beside him. “Thanks, sweetie,” she says, sliding down as if she can’t stay upright. She sits with her legs apart like a little girl. She has rings under her eyes and her breasts sag. Still, when her dress rides up, her long white legs make him swallow.

He pulls away, taking the first turn before the cruiser can reach them.

“So what’s your name?” he asks.

“Honeysuckle. My folks were hippies. Came from Pennsylvania in the sixties. Lived in a tepee in the Ozarks till the locals chased them out.”

“I’m Owen, but they call me Nordic Jesus.”

“I can see that,” she says, cackling. “Well, I guess we both got funny names.”

A liquor store and a pawnshop slide by—GUNS GUNS GUNS, the neon sign blares—and in the sodium light the city looks like tarnished brass. “Where’m I taking you, Honeysuckle?”

“I oughta go home or Dwayne will be mad. Fact he already is mad ’cause we had a argument and he’s kind of psycho. He’s an ex-con. He sees me with you, he’ll kill us.”

“How come you’re on your own, then? What happened to you tonight?”

She explains: They were scoring shit in Stiff Station and Dwayne went off on her on account of he thought she was making eyes at some black dude—Nordic Jesus interrupts to ask if she was, and she giggles and says, maybe—and not long after that she passed out. When she woke up, the sonofabitch was gone.

They are crossing the Arkansas River, a broad band of mercury in the moonlight. When he was a kid, it made Nordic Jesus think of French trappers in deerskins and Davy Crockett hats; it always gave him a pang. Not any more, though. To their right, the girders of the bridge are a metal net and the Clinton Library looks like a doublewide. He wonders if Little Rock is pretty or ugly. In the rearview mirror it’s mostly glass towers, like any other American city.

“Your boyfriend sounds like an asshole,” Nordic Jesus says.

“He’s an asshole, all right, but I ain’t much, either.”

“You’re OK.”

“You don’t know me, Jesus.”

“Jesus know everybody,” he says, imitating Elijah’s accent, which is Little Rock street with Delta undertones.

She gives him a dopey grin that reminds him of how Whitney used to smile in high school. When he came back from Iraq, she still looked like a cheerleader: long blonde hair, heavy makeup, crop-top, low-slung jeans, high heels. But she seemed sillier than ever: all she talked about was movie stars, American Idol, shoes, her Spyder sports car. She was studying at UCA but he never saw her open a book—not that he cared, but it seemed like she was just going through the motions in everything she did. She wasn’t really alive. He thought she’d changed; she said he was the one who had changed. He was no fun anymore and he never brought her flowers or said he loved her. He just wanted to fuck her, not make love like they used to. What the hell was the difference? he wanted to know. He didn’t feel tender. He’d been a sniper in the Sunni suburb of Sadr City and had killed seven men. That was one video game he couldn’t get out of his mind. Draw a bead, hold your breath, squeeze. Jolt, crack, exhale. The guys never screamed. It was only up close, when you saw their faces, that it got to you. He tried to explain it to Whitney once, while she was watching Oprah, but she thought he was being morbid, told him he could leave if he couldn’t talk about something normal. He did just that, got up and strode out. Hasn’t spoken to her since.

“I don’t know as I want to go home just yet,” Honeysuckle says. “You got anything to drink at your place?”

“Just beer and bourbon.”

“That’ll do.”

“We’ll have to be quiet,” Nordic Jesus says, “or we’ll wake Grandma.”

“I’m sorry I’m not as beautiful as usual tonight,” Honeysuckle says out of the blue.

As far as he can tell, she isn’t making a pass. “You look fine,” he tells her.

In fact she looks pretty fucked up. She makes him nostalgic for the world he’s lost, when Arkansas always seemed to beat Texas at football, The Eagles played constantly on the car radio, America fought for freedom, and God was the nation’s CEO. Honeysuckle gives him a coy look.

“I don’t got no makeup on and I ain’t wearing underwear, either.”

A trickle of sweat runs down his back. Is she a tease? He can’t make her out. Hold tight, he tells himself. Pretend you’re on night patrol. Straightaway he is back in Al Sadr City, padding past white villas, his eyes scanning every wall, steel gate, and roof for gunmen. He switches off his feelings. Someone is pounding his heart with a steak mallet, but he’s not scared. It’s like going out to play football and knowing his dad and Whitney and the coach are all watching: you can’t mess up. If you stay alert, you’re more likely to survive. Yalla, he urges himself again.

He’s surprised to find they’re already in Levy. After the burnt ochre, orange and brown of the desert, Arkansas is a hallucination of heaven. The Chariot of Doom rattles past oaks and maples, azaleas, dogwood and hibiscus, magnolias and mimosas, crape myrtles and bougainvillea, all the perfume trees of Arkansas. White blossom, pink blossom, violet blossom—all dull, drained. With his window down Nordic Jesus can smell the feminine scents, although the odors in the car remind him of keg parties at U of A in Fayetteville, where he had a football scholarship for a year.

He draws up outside a nineteen forties brick dwelling, single story, with a porch supported by white wrought-iron ivy. A maple tree stands in the front yard and bougainvillea blooms on the trellis. He feels zingy, the way he used to when he played in an important game.

Nonetheless, although sex is clearly a possibility, the prospect doesn’t thrill him. “I only have a twin bed,” he says as he unlocks the front door and leads her through the cat-scented darkness of the living room. “I guess you can take it and I’ll sleep on the couch.”

He turns on the light in his bedroom. The floor is a swamp of sour clothes, the mattress a sinking raft, its sheets twisted and tangled like cypress roots. A Hogs pennant and posters of nineties grunge bands hang on the walls.

“We could share the bed,” Honeysuckle says, her expression unchanging, “if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind.”

He puts some alternative country on the stereo, so low that he can still hear the crickets and katydids through the open window, and Honeysuckle lifts her dress over her head. He turns off the light and takes a long pull on a bottle of Southern Comfort before stepping out of his clothes. In the radioactive glow of the streetlighting, Honeysuckle looks as if she has jaundice. She sits on the bed and stares at him. Not with desire, as far as her blurred features show, or even curiosity—she’s just staring like a cat. Nordic Jesus takes another swig of whiskey and hands the bottle to her.

“I can’t get to sleep if I don’t drink,” he says, lying beside her on the bed.

She takes a long swallow, sighs and leans back on her elbows. They haven’t touched yet. “That’s something else we got in common,” she says.

“Orange is my favorite color,” Nordic Jesus tells her.

“Oh yeah? That because you got orange hair?”

“Yes! How did you know that?”

“I may be dumb but I ain’t blind,” she says, misunderstanding him. He doesn’t try to set her right. She lifts one foot and places it on his leg. He tells her that when he was a kid he used to wear orange clothes and his dad painted his bedroom orange for him; he loved carrots, Cheetos, egg yolks, orange juice, apricot jam. He’d steal the orange pills from the medicine cabinet and eat them. Nearly killed himself once. Honeysuckle laughs, drinks, laughs again.

“I’m kind of drunk,” Nordic Jesus says, taking a good burning swallow, “but don’t you think that blossom in the yard smells kind of like oranges?”

She turns on her side to face him, then sits up with surprising swiftness and agility. “Didn’t see no orange trees outside.” She smells as though she’s made of Cheddar cheese.

The music drips in his ears for a couple of hours or more, but when she finally leans toward him and sucks at his mouth he tastes citrus and his blood stirs. A soft current pulses through him, electric, crackling and popping, and through his thoughts flit bright birds, blue jays, cardinals, orioles, and although his sensations don’t seem to fit or go together—cheese and slide guitar, whiskey and orange, throbbing and sweat and shock and awe and feathers—it’s like a jambalaya; it makes no sense but somehow it works. Yalla, habibi, the blonde whore told him in that stinky hotel in Dubai, come on, baby, hamdulillah, fantastic. Why did she keep speaking to him in Arabic? She was European, Russian or Romanian or something. Honeysuckle straddles him and goes straight into a frenzy, gyrating so fast and hard that he’s immobilized. He just hopes he can hold out. The bed bangs and creaks and Honeysuckle hollers as if Judgment Day has come.

Nordic Jesus doesn’t hear his grandma’s footsteps in the corridor, or the door opening, but there she is all of a sudden, four foot ten and bent like a bush in a storm. Mad as all get-out, too. “Out of my house, you little hussy!”

Honeysuckle freezes.

“You get off of him right now or I’ll flay you alive!” Grandma says, waving a limp claw at Honeysuckle as if she’s batting flies away.

Honeysuckle turns her head but keeps her seat. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“You will be, girl, if you ain’t out of here in ten seconds flat.”

Honeysuckle dismounts, stands, and gapes back at grandma, too dazed to cover her nakedness. She takes her dress and searches for the armholes for about five minutes. Nordic Jesus waits for his grandma to leave—she makes a feeble attempt to slam the door—then he pulls on his checked chef’s pants and greasy T-shirt. Although he didn’t even come, he’s relieved that it’s over.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Don’t matter. Dude, you’re a strong lover,” she says, to his amazement. It was little more than a feat of endurance.

As they step out the front door the fragrance of the trees crashes over him like a wave. “Take a deep breath,” he says. “Smell that blossom.”

“Man, I’m still wasted. I wouldn’t a noticed it if you wouldn’t of said. If you don’t mind,” Honeysuckle goes on, once they’re in the Chariot of Doom and pulling off, “we’ll go by my place and if the truck’s in the drive you better drop me off round the corner.” She sounds as if she’s just coming round after being heavily sedated.

“He got a gun?”

“You kidding? He was inside for armed robbery, only they let him out early on account of he was only sixteen at the time. I never knew a guy didn’t have him a gun, except my dad. But even he got himself one now. Don’t you got one?” Before he can answer that he doesn’t, she gabbles on. “Dwayne ain’t much good with his, though. Other day, during that thunderstorm, there was two copperheads on the porch banging their heads on the glass door, trying to get in. So Dwayne stomps out, drunk as a skunk, and blasts at ’em with his twenty-two. Never did hit the sonsabitches.”

“I hope we don’t run into him, anyway.” Nordic Jesus is out of patience for rednecks—even if he has become one, as his parents seem to think.

Little white frame houses drift through the trees. On a porch, short Latinos pass a bottle. In a driveway, two black dudes in baggy basketball outfits, beer cans in their hands, lounge against an eighties Oldsmobile that looks like it’s been flattened out by a steamroller.

“We’re in luck,” Honeysuckle says, pointing to a surprisingly neat place. “He ain’t home yet.”

Nordic Jesus almost expects to see a Confederate Battle flag, but there isn’t one, or a truck on chocks either. The drive’s empty.

She leans across the bench seat and kisses him. “Well, thank you, Jesus.”

He deadpans the verse: “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

She hoots. “Amen,” she says, and hobbles away, carrying the sandal that had come off. So that’s that. He’s already pulling away when he sees a pickup approaching and Honeysuckle running back toward him. Left her purse on the seat, goddamnit.

He considers driving off; he could always bring it back tomorrow. He hears thrash metal, a rage-filled roaring and guitars that sound like overworked machines. But he brakes and backs up. By the time he’s out of the Chariot of Doom, proffering the purse to Honeysuckle, the white truck has screeched to a halt and out jumps a guy even bigger than he is, with long, thinning hair, and tattoos. He’s wearing a tank-top, camouflage pants, and sneakers. And holding a pistol.

“Who the fuck are you?” Dwayne says, glowering at Nordic Jesus and pointing the gun at him.

“The Son of Man,” Nordic Jesus sniggers, still stoned.

“You laughin’ at me, boy?”

“No sir,” Nordic Jesus answers as if he’s back in Junior High: the more he tries to repress his grin, the more obstinately it asserts itself. He reminds himself that an enormous man—an enormous wronged man—is pointing a gun at his heart. It doesn’t escape Nordic Jesus that he’s been wishing he could die. This is your chance. All you gotta do is wind up boyfriend here a bit more.

“He’s just a friend, Dwayne,” Honeysuckle pleads. “He done give me a ride.”

“I bet he did,” Dwayne replies. “I see you, bitch, whored up like you had a mile of dick run through you.” He turns to Nordic Jesus again. “You screw my woman, asshole?”

Nordic Jesus draws a deep breath, as if he’s sucking on a joint, and his lungs fill with the scent-drenched air: crape myrtles, magnolias, wisterias, hibiscus and honeysuckle vine. For a moment it feels good to be alive. “I sure didn’t,” he says hopefully.

“Was you fixing to?”

“Nope.”

Dwayne frowns. “I bet you’d like to, though, wouldn’t you?”

Nordic Jesus glances at Honeysuckle and grins—his Huck-Finn-Grin, Whitney used to call it. Honeysuckle isn’t in the same class as Whitney, in fact to be honest she looks more like a truck-stop whore than a cheerleader, but she smiles back, kind of embarrassed, and gallantry compels him to say: “I sure would.”

“That right, smartass?” Dwayne cocks the pistol with his thumb; the safety is off. “I might could blow you away.”

I don’t have to lift a finger. “Do it, dude.” Yet even as he speaks it occurs to him how bizarre it is: facing death, all he can think of is perfumes and washed-out colors. Just one more time, he’d like to eat a meal cooked by Michel and see the world in the pure primary colors of the child’s paint-box.

“You don’t think I would, do you?” Dwayne rasps.

“Nope.” And know the love of a good woman. That’s all I’d ask for.

“Oh yeah?” Dwayne holds his pistol arm out straight and shaking, eyes bugging as if he’s seeing the ghost of General Sherman.

“You gutless bastard,” Nordic Jesus hears himself saying. “Why don’t you go ahead and shoot me if you’re going to? You can’t do it, that’s why.”

“I can’t do it?” Dwayne’s voice rises to a squawk. “You think I can’t do it?”

“That’s right. You ain’t got the balls, man.”

“I ain’t got the balls? You saying I ain’t man enough to kill you?”

“You got it.”

Honeysuckle is moaning like a sick dog, but Nordic Jesus is looking right into Dwayne’s eyes. He doesn’t see anything but confusion. The dumb fuck might actually pull the trigger. Dwayne tries to speak but is so worked up he chokes on the words.

“I told you, do it,” Nordic Jesus says. He grabs the barrel and pulls it against his heart. “You can’t miss.”

“Jesus, Jesus,” Honeysuckle groans, and he isn’t sure if she’s invoking him or his heavenly namesake. She makes a sound halfway between a yelp and a squeal.

What the hell, looks like I am going to die after all. He tells himself he doesn’t care, even finds it funny, but his heart is fizzing, blowing fuses, and he can’t kid himself any more. He wants to live.

“You’re nothing but a wife-beater,” he goes on in spite of himself. Dwayne’s eyes are popping and sweat pours down his face. “You ain’t a man,” Nordic Jesus sneers, remembering how his daddy used to look when he whipped his mother.

“Do it!” he roars.

Dwayne’s face twitches like an epileptic’s. This is the last thing I’m ever going to see. Nordic Jesus pictures his mother, her halo of white hair and pursed lips, stout, in a purple skirt-suit, a Church of Christ matron who smells of bleach and banana-bread. He feels the briefest pang of love and remembers what she said last time she saw him, two months ago: You’re bound for hell, Owen boy.

He feels a sharp prod, then nothing.

“Goddamn,” Dwayne says, his gun-arm drooping. “I can’t do it.”

Nordic Jesus’ right fist lashes out of its own accord, cracks against Dwayne’s forehead and sends him sprawling.

“Holy Moses,” Honeysuckle says. “He’s out cold.”

Lights are coming on in the neighborhood and sirens wail in the distance.

“Someone musta called the cops,” Nordic Jesus says. “Let’s get outta here.”

The Chariot of Doom careens around a corner as if they are under mortar fire. “Dude,” Honeysuckle says, “Dwayne coulda killed you back there.”

“Sure, if he’d had the balls.”

“You got balls, though, dontcha? You’re brave, man.”

“Brave? Nah, I just don’t care no more.” He tells her how he joined the National Guard after he lost his football scholarship, not expecting to find himself in Iraq, and describes some of the things he’s seen: women and children screaming and crying when the soldiers burst into their homes in the middle of the night and threw their men on the floors; his friend Doug with a glass dagger in his eye when the IED went off; the little boy hit in the leg, caught in the crossfire. Coming back from Iraq, he was looking forward to being out of harm’s way again, but it seems you can’t escape violence. The world is going nuts. “Hey, where you want to go?”

She looks at the clock on the dash, tells him she’s on the early shift at Shipley’s Donuts on Cantrell, and asks if he could drive her there.

Light is leaking through the leaves, seeping from the sky, soft blue and grey. The Chariot of Doom smells of beer, bourbon, sweat and marijuana. They drive through Burns Park, a fairytale of firs and blue hills, with luminous white cottages, then pick up the freeway and swish past road works, billboards, bougainvillea, fields. Life’s an Irish stew, Nordic Jesus realizes. You can’t just pick out the bits you like.

“Ever think about getting sober?” Honeysuckle asks him.

“Sure.”

It might be sweet to find a woman, settle down and have kids, but he knows he isn’t strong enough yet. One day he’ll have to stop drinking and doing drugs. One day he will face the bullshit on his own. If only there were dazzling colors, like the plumage of the birds in his mind; if only he could see the way he can smell. He feels more like Lazarus than Jesus: brought back from the dead, but already decaying, only half-alive.

The grey sky glows like a hotplate warming up as they cross the I-430 Bridge over the Arkansas River. Nordic Jesus recalls how he used to spring out of bed on Saturday mornings when he was a kid, eager to discover what the world held in store for him. The water shimmers and flickers and flashes, as if the surface is made up of millions of metal lights. Steel, silver, brass and bronze and copper, gleaming, glimmering, glinting as the sun bobs like an orange buoy on the river to their left.

“You think it’s worth it?” he asks Honeysuckle.

“Getting sober?”

“I mean life,” Nordic Jesus says. “Is it worth living?”

“Hell, I don’t know. You just keep on doing it, I reckon.”

“Yeah, you do.” He looks at her and she looks back at him, her face framed by the window and the river and the sunrise, and although she isn’t exactly pretty when she shows her stained teeth, although he doesn’t love her and will not spend another night with her, although or because he’s weary of nights like these—he has been neither good nor wise, he reflects—and sex with her was far from scintillating and he’s still kind of numb, he feels sorry for her, understands she’s in pain and isn’t a bad person, just weak, like him, and he finds himself smiling, with something akin to tenderness. Honeysuckle’s face is lit by a tangerine sky, the river blazes, and if only for a moment, he can see the colors once more.

Nordic Jesus turns onto Cantrell and drives into the sunrise, hoping he will be able to stay awake.

— Garry Craig Powell

——————————————-

Garry Craig Powell‘s novel-in-stories, Stoning the Devil has just been published by Skylight Press. Powell is an Englishman who lived for long periods in Portugal and the United Arab Emirates, and shorter ones in Spain and Poland. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Central Arkansas in the USA. For more information, visit his website where you can also find his blog about life in the Persian Gulf.

Your Dog Makes Me Smile: Fiction — Caroline Adderson

Oct 132012

This is a treat, a gorgeous, frank, lusty, ever so subversively comic (it’s always slightly comic when women take a good look at a man) love story about — no, not that kind of love, but about a woman and her dog. I have known Caroline Adderson since, oh, before 1992 when I included three of her stories in that year’s edition of Coming Attractions (co-edited with Maggie Helwig). I will never forget that experience — I read five lines of a story and KNEW I’d found a writer, not just someone who pushed words around on a page efficiently but someone who ELECTRIFIED the language. And she has never disappointed since. Later I also put her in Best Canadian Stories. So we have an editorial past together, Caroline and I, and a friendship, and that makes it doubly pleasurable to bring her into the Numéro Cinq fold.

The story is gorgeous, yes, I should repeat that. It is stocked with felicities, large and small. One of the loveliest is the way Caroline weaves in a reading and rereading of Chekhov’s classic short story “Lady with a Lapdog” — a tale of a woman, a man and a dog, though as Caroline’s protagonist notices, the dog is not altogether considered as a character and seems to fade out of the story, a shortcoming that is rectified in the present story. (And to nail the point we have, above, a photo of the author and dog.) Caroline further complicates the story by introducing a younger male lover, a former husband and a wonderfully irate new wife (there is an amazing set of scenes around this pair — the author does not make the mistake of hiding the fact that the protagonist and her ex have slept together since the ex married his new wife, the new wife knows, her hatred is dramatic and comic, the scenes are charged with mischief).

And, of course, the dog can read.

BACK IN OCTOBER Matt’s girlfriend had been out of town. Matt, unemployed, had hours (all day in fact) to lie around with Ellen who, living off her savings, was queen of her own life. Queen Ellen spread out in the loft on the hot twisted sheets, inhaling the tang of their exertions, while Matt scampered naked down the ladder to do her bidding. He brought her a glass of water, a wad of tissues to wipe the milty puddle off her belly, a cheese plate from the fridge.

She’d sold her house for a grotesque sum and inherited half of what her father had socked away in the life he cut short himself. Meaning Ellen could quit publicity and rent an old live-work studio in a Kitsilano triplex. One very large room, kitchen, bath, sleeping loft. She took up pottery again, put the kiln outside under an overhang. She took up with a man-boy in his twenties who wore shorts in any weather.

The things Matt said were so funny and sweet. Like the time he fell back on the pillows, his curls fanning out. “I need to ask you something really personal. I’ve never asked anyone before. I need the honest truth. Please.”

“What?” Ellen said. “What?”

“Is my cock too big?”

Now she was back. The girlfriend. Matt brought his cell phone up to the loft and left it turned on. Ellen pretended she didn’t see it tossed onto the clothes he’d so urgently shed. She pulled the sheet up to cover her body. Too much information, she thought.

What choice did she have? Ellen was 48. Too old to be anyone’s girlfriend.

Across the street from the studio was a corner store. This time of year Christmas cacti, poinsettia and little bonsai pines crowded the board and cinderblock shelves out front. Plants were the main business besides cigarettes and lottery tickets. Ellen worried it would go under so once a week she scooted across the street to buy something she didn’t need. Another plant to ignore to death. A can of corn. There was little else. The Frosted Flakes looked archeological.

She ran across in sweats and an old loose t-shirt scabbed with drying flecks of clay. The dog was shivering in a newspaper-lined box beside the till. She couldn’t tell its breed. The black kind with a goatee and plaintive eyes.

“Where did it come from?” she asked.

The owner of the store said, “My brother. Driving from Chilliwack? He saw it on the road. You want it?”

“I just came in for some corn.” Ellen set the can down, leaving fingerprints in the dust on top. “Maybe you should take it to the SPCA.”

He waved his arms back and forth like an air-traffic controller directing a 747 with batons. “Too busy!”

“Oh. Do you want me to take it for you?”

Ellen tucked the Niblets in the box with the small black dog and carried both across the street. Halfway, the dog reached up and licked her face.

“None of that now,” she said.

Hardly anyone got Ellen at first, but this dog did. He beat his feathery tail against the side of the box and smiled. When she shifted the cardboard carrier onto one hip and opened the door, he leapt right down, dashing circles around the studio, sniffing everything—Ellen’s pottery wheel, her dentist’s chair. He jumped onto the couch and tossed the cushions aside with his snout. Then he did what Ellen always did when visiting someone for the first time. He went over to the shelf and read the spines of all the books.

Matt didn’t come that day, or call—well, he never called. Normally this meant long unfocussed hours tied up in knots of hope, then, when Ellen could no longer deny he was a no-show, her dejected release from these self-wound coils. How pathetic to be waiting all day for a man as young as her daughters. Tear-stained, humiliated, she fashioned little monsters out of clay, then flattened them.

Today she put aside these pitiful recreations. She had to get a dog to the SPCA; to do that she needed a collar and leash. One thing led to another and, come evening, the dog was still there sniffing Ellen’s books.

She loved it too, that particular, melancholy odour of old paperbacks. It only followed then that the dog should have a literary name. (She had to call him something before she turned him in.) Tintin? Tintin was the boy, not the dog. What was the dog’s name? She googled it. Snowy.

Snowy would not do.

Lady with a Lapdog was right there on the shelf, perfumed in dust and sadness. The moment Ellen settled in the dentist chair to reread the story, the dog sprang onto the footrest, gingerly walked the double plank of her outstretched legs, then curled into a polite ball and fell asleep. A dog in the lap of a lady reading “Lady with a Lapdog.”

In the story the lapdog makes his appearance in the first paragraph, trotting along the Yalta promenade. No name, just a breed. A white Pomeranian. (This is ironic, for Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov thinks of the women he seduces as of the lower breed.) How many times had Ellen read this story of a passing affair that swells to a grand passion? Many, many times, and every time reminded her of her first reading at seventeen or eighteen, when she’d sobbed. With each subsequent reading, the sob returned, a ghost in her chest lodged too deeply now to release, her own heartaches grown around it, holding it fast. She’d been living with it ever since. Catharsis interruptus.

Tonight though, something was different. Something rang false.

A few days after first noticing Anna Sergeyevna, the lady with the lapdog, Gurov seats himself near her and the Pomeranian in an outdoor restaurant. He wags his finger at the dog and, when it growls, he appeases it with a bone off his plate. This way he secures Anna Sergeyevna’s acquaintance – through her dog.

After dinner, Anna and Gurov take a long walk, just as Ellen herself had done that afternoon when she returned home with the leash and collar and a hundred and twenty dollars worth of dog food and paraphernalia. What happened with Ellen was that the dog, the black one, the flesh-and-blood, tongue-and-tail one, made straight for the nearest tree and began to circle it, forcing Ellen to leave the sidewalk and slop around on the saturated verge. It was as though he was searching for something he had lost in the longer grass at the tree’s base, something he was desperate to recover. Finally, he found it, this precious thing invisible to Ellen, and when he did, he lifted a leg and pissed all over it. Then he romped ahead to the next tree where, evidently, he had also left something important in the grass.

After ten minutes of this Ellen grew impatient and tried to pull the dog along. He stiffened his legs, effectively putting on his brakes, and stared at her, ill-done-by. She had to coax and herd him, then pick him up and carry him. In other words, the entire walk had been about getting the dog to walk instead of sniff. More than once she got tangled in the leash, or he did. Yet when Gurov and Anna Sergenyevna go strolling after dinner, talking the whole time, marveling at the way the light falls on the sea, the dog isn’t even mentioned. Presumably he was there, or had they left him tied up back at the restaurant?

A week later, Gurov and Anna Sergenyevna retire to her hotel room to consummate their affair. Again, no reference to the Pomeranian. Does he object to their lovemaking? Is he jealous? Have they shut him in the bathroom? It doesn’t say. In fact, the dog is only mentioned once more in the story. Months after they both leave Yalta, Gurov finds he can’t forget the lady with the lapdog. He travels to her town, loiters in front of her house until, after a miserable hour, an old woman comes out with the Pomeranian.

Gurov was about to call to the dog, but his heart began to beat violently and in his excitement he could not remember its name.

Here Ellen lifted the real nameless dog out of her lap so she could return the book to the shelf. It was the first time the story had failed her.

Her epiphany came an hour later while she was brushing her teeth: the story was in Gurov’s point of view! It wasn’t Chekhov, but Gurov, who was indifferent to the dog beyond the purpose it could serve him in seducing a young woman. Whatever Chekhov may have felt about the canine species, Ellen knew this: if the story had been from Anna Sergeyevna’s point of view the dog would certainly have had a name. And a patronymic. And a diminutive, too.

So she settled on Anton. The resemblance was obvious by then—the longer black chin hairs, the compassionate tilt of the head. Couldn’t she just see him in a pince-nez?

In the studio window her pots flaunted themselves. Passersby could drop in and buy one. That was the idea anyway.

The next day Matt was out front getting rained on when Ellen and Tony returned from their walk. Her heart stuttered at the sight of his bare knees. According to the clock with movable hands on the back of her Come In sign, the sign she’d flipped to Will Return when she’d left with Tony, Ellen was late. This clock had proved useful in their affair, which was being conducted strictly on a drop-in basis; now it had provided Matt with a grievance. She pointed to her goateed excuse, though the goatee was not so obvious with the wet sock hanging down.

Matt asked, “What’s it got in its mouth?”

“A sock. Isn’t that cute?”

Before the door was fully open, Tony bolted in ahead of Matt, who threw back the dripping hood of his Gore-Tex and sampled Ellen, her mouth and neck. Only after they separated and shed their rain gear, did he ask whose dog it was.

“Well,” Ellen said, and she told him the whole story of bringing the dog home and the trip to the pet store. She might have been reading a script. Did he hear it? This was how she lived now, hovering above her own life, watching herself so that later, when she recounted her day to Matt, he would be amused.

“You would not believe what they had in that store. Look. Party balloon poop bags! I can coordinate Tony’s poop bag to my outfit. Or I can say, ‘I’m feeling existential,’ and take a blue one.”

Everything was in the box Tony and the can of corn had come across the street in. Matt reached for the plastic banana, squeaked it, and Tony snapped to attention.

“That’s a lot of stuff to take to the SPCA, Ellen.”

“And I hate shopping! I don’t know what came over me!”

“Let’s go up,” he said, starting for the ladder to the loft, pulling on her sleeve.

Ellen sashayed over to the sign and turned the hands of the clock forward another forty minutes, remembering how, not so long ago, their pleasure hadn’t been so stingily meted out, yet still feeling grateful, so very grateful.

She walked Tony to the vet, paid for shots and deworming, determined he was flealess. Wheaten Terrier, the vet thought, with a dash of Labrador. Maybe even a little Corgi. He lectured her on neutering.

Ellen said, “The thing is, I’m probably not keeping him.”

She should have been churning out Christmas pots, but couldn’t settle at her wheel. So restless! Ever since that debilitating conversation with her daughter Mimi, the one in Toronto, who had casually mentioned her Brazilian wax job.

“Everyone does it, Mom. No one would ever go around all hairy down there.”

Ellen was stunned. Another thing to fret about: her wild bush.

She started training Tony out of library books, glad to have found a use for all that corn. Tony was gaga for Niblets. Within days she had him sitting and lying down for Niblets, though no inducement would endear him to the leash. He was a free spirit and, respecting that, Ellen let him sniff along behind her.

On YouTube, she watched Pumpkin the beagle read. It really seemed that he could. When shown a picture of a cat and offered a selection of words printed on cards, Pumpkin selected C-A-T 100% of the time. Some old competitive streak surfaced in Ellen. She opened another can of Niblets.

Finally, finally, Matt dropped by. “Sorry,” he said.

“What for?” Ellen chirped.

“I couldn’t get away.”

Ellen pictured the girlfriend, not her ineffable face, but her tidy little Chekhov mound, pristinely waxed. All her thinking about the Russians had brought her to this unflattering comparison, that, pubically, Ellen was in the Tolstoy camp.

Matt said, “And I’m going home for the holidays. Did I mention that?”

One of the dog books explained stances, tail positions, barks. Ellen had noticed that, though Matt always said “I”, when he really meant “we” he cast his eyes down and to the right. And if she told him how desperate this news made her, would he ever come back?

“And where is home?” she asked.

“Spruce Grove. Outside of Edmonton.”

“Ah,” she said, feigning nonchalance. “I’m going away myself.”

He asked where, and she told him Cordova Island.

“Where’s that?”

“I used to lived there a long time ago. When I was married. My younger daughter Yolanda lives there now with her partner and their kids. She dropped out of pre-med to relive my life. The weird thing is, then my ex-husband moved back.”

“Oh,” Matt said. “Should I be jealous?”

Ellen laughed, but he didn’t. His face folded up in a way she hadn’t seen. He was always so uncreased, so playful, except when lamenting his penis size. It frightened her into blurting, “Oh! We’ve got something to show you!”

“We?”

It seemed he’d forgotten the dog until Ellen said, “Tony?” and the black head popped up among the couch cushions.

Ellen selected three books from the shelf—Lady with a Lapdog, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina—books the average undergrad couldn’t tell apart. She stood them up on the floor. Tony waited, shifting from side-to-side, licking his lips, which Ellen knew now was a sign of anxiety. She showed Matt the index card with its neatly printed question: Which book did Chekhov write?

“Read,” she commanded, holding the card in front of Tony.

He pranced over to Lady with a Lapdog and brought it back to Ellen. For this, she rewarded him with a palm full of corn. Then she turned to Matt so he might – she hoped – claim his reward, too.

Bus to Horseshoe Bay, ferry to Nanaimo, bus up island to German Creek. Ellen pulled her suitcase—stop-start, stop-start—stones jamming the wheels, through the gravel parking lot to the government wharf where the ramp was angled at eighty degrees. And she remembered how, all those years ago, whenever they left Cordova Island or returned, it had seemed so difficult. Inevitably it would be low tide like this and Ellen would have to negotiate the ramp with all their groceries and bags and Mimi, just a baby. Ellen had needed a sherpa. And where was Larry? Why couldn’t he sherp? She let the suitcase go first, clutching its strap and the railing, inching her way down, thinking of Tony pulling on the leash. She’d left him with her neighbor, Tilda.

It was the same ferry, a metal tub with a covered freight area, rows of wooden benches inside. Ellen loaded her suitcase on. Eventually other passengers began arriving with backpacks and Rubbermaid tubs filled with provisions or the Christmas presents they’d come to the mainland to buy, stacked on foldable dollies. A group of strangers. It used to be that whenever she took the ferry, she knew everyone and they knew her and half of them had slept with Larry.

Last year Ellen had slept with Larry at the Winter Solstice party at Larry and Amber’s house. Amber had gone to bed early with cramps. The island was full of this secretless type of woman, their menstrual cycles public knowledge. Ellen used to be one herself, though last year she took this information to mean that Amber’s body, if not Amber, accepted that these intermittent reunions between Larry and Ellen were, then, Ellen’s only opportunity for sex. That was Ellen’s point of view anyway, that she threatened no one.

And this year? This year Ellen was besotted with Matt, who kept coming around. Whatever his reason, apart from sex, was his secret.

The ferry backed out of its berth. A seal watched, head and shoulders out of the water, then ducked. Gulls screamed in a wheel above the dockside fish store. Ellen had quite forgotten the Solstice Party until now. During Ellen and Larry’s marriage, when she’d learned that friends of hers had slept with him, she’d shrieked, “How could you?” Very easily, it turned out. As easily as Ellen slept with Matt, rationalizing all the way: Ellen didn’t know the girlfriend. She was young. She would pity Ellen if she knew.

But Ellen knew Amber. She was practically related to her.

Tossed in the bag with the Christmas presents, Lady with a Lapdog. During the crossing, Ellen took it out, sniffed it, ran her fingers over the dog-Braille inside the front cover. She’d intended to reread the whole book, but instead found herself back with poor Anna Sergeyevna, stuck in love with Gurov, a man who classifies the women he sleeps with according to three types: Carefree, good-natured women, whom love had made gay and who were grateful to him for the happiness he gave them; those who made love without sincerity, with unnecessary talk, affectedly, hysterically; and two or three very beautiful women whose faces suddenly lit up with a predatory expression, an obstinate desire to take, to snatch from life, more than it could give.

This last type were no longer in their first youth.

And Ellen? Which type was she? Grateful and utterly sincere, yes. But it was true, too, that she was chatty in bed and freely voiced her pleasure. And that in two years she’d be fifty.

Then she felt it, the sob that could never be released, pressing hard behind her ribs. She put both hands over the place at the same time she glanced out the window, glanced at the precise December moment out on the open ocean with the solstice approaching when the colour of the sky and the colour of the water merged and there was no light anywhere to orient her. The great gray middle of her life.

The sob absorbed back inside her body. Next time she looked, it was night.

Her son-in-law, Sean, picked her up in the truck. They drove the main road, companionably, Ellen recovering from the shock of winter darkness. Off the grid, the island shut down on these long, overcast December evenings. They passed the Post Office, the Arts Centre, the Free Store, but Ellen couldn’t see them, only the forest in the headlights. She marveled that Sean knew on which rutted lane to turn. Then they bounced along, cedar boughs brushing against her window, spookily, like the memories of her former life here clawing to get in.

Eli ran out of the cabin when he heard the truck. “Nonny!” He was seven with wild clown hair he’d got from his father, who hid his under a toque. He dragged Ellen inside and when Sean brought in her suitcase and set it down, Eli looked from it to Ellen.

“Did you bring me a present, Nonny?”

Yolanda came over from the stove with baby Fern in a sling on her back, tsking at Eli, her glasses half-fogged from cooking, exhausted and angelic in her half-hearted ponytail.

“Give me that baby right now,” Ellen said in the middle of their hug.

Yolanda loosened the knot on her chest and Ellen waltzed Fern over to the couch lumped with sleeping cats. “Eli, come here,” she called. “I have some news. I have a dog staying at my house. His name is Tony. And you will not believe this, but it’s true. He can read.”

“I thought we were cat people,” Yolanda said, back at the stove.

“Where are our presents?” Eli asked.

“Don’t give in to him. He has to wait.”

“Why should you?” Ellen whispered. “Bring me that bag next to my suitcase.”

In it was Lepus arcticus. Arctic Hare.

At dinner, Ellen told them about her neighbour, Tilda, the fabric artist. “She knits iconic Canadian wildlife. She spins the yarn herself.” The white hare perched on the table dangerously close to Eli’s bowl of chili. “That’s why he’s so soft,” Ellen told him. “He’s got real bunny fur mixed in with the wool.” She didn’t want to say what the hare and the tiny Townsend’s Vole she’d bought for Fern had cost. “They’re not really toys. They’re works of art.”

Yolanda said, “The Solstice Party’s at Mason and Spirit’s place this year. And Amber invited us over tomorrow night. Do you want to go?”

Likely Ellen blushed. She fanned her face, pretending the chili was too hot. If she said no to Amber’s invitation they would wonder why.

Sean was trying to get Fern to eat a bean, washing the sauce off in his mouth, spitting out the bean and feeding it to the baby by hand. At the same time, he glanced at Ellen and smirked.

“What?” Ellen said.

Flapping his hands on either side of his toque, he cawed, “Amber alert! Amber alert!”

Yolanda slapped him on the shoulder.

“What does he mean?” Ellen asked, but Yolanda wouldn’t say.

Before bed Ellen read to the children, then stumbled in the starless dark to the outhouse and back. Calling goodnight to Yo and Sean, she retired to the tiny, frigid room, the one too far from the woodstove, less a bedroom than a pantry lined with dried beans and canned preserves. The cats joined her, bed warmers, slipping out later to kill.

Last year she’d lain in this same rack of a cot listening to the ocean’s restless exhalations, wondering what would happen between her and Larry. This year, the ocean was still exhaling, but the hands that moved over Ellen were young.

“When I say walkies he grabs something that smells like me. A sock. Once he headed out with my panties.”

Yolanda asked, “Are you keeping him or not?”

“I didn’t plan on it. Now I’m in something of a situation. Because I care about him. I can’t stop thinking about him. Like now. Talking about the dog counteracts the pointlessness I feel going for a walk without a dog.”

They were following a rocky trail through the woods down to the beach, Fern in the sling wearing a bright Peruvian cap with ties, twisting her head back to look at Ellen, Eli marching ahead pretending to shoot things while Yolanda intermittently called out, “Cease-fire!”

“I should give him up. I’m not getting any work done. I feel like I’m being dragged around by the hair.”

“Sounds like you’re in love,” Yolanda said.

Ellen halted in the middle of the path with her mouth open, her hand clutching her heart. Was she in love? The other hand reached for the support of a tree. She leaned in, pressing her forehead to the rough bark.

“Mom? What’s wrong?”

Yolanda hurried back and slipped an arm around Ellen. Fern’s small hand patted her head. It felt like the touch of a crow’s wing, over and over.

“Are you depressed?”

“No.”

“Last night I thought you looked so beautiful when you came into the cabin. You looked so happy.”

Ellen looked up. “Did I?”

“Yes. Sean even said so. He said you looked hot.”

“I love that man,” Ellen said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I’m—”

No, she was too embarrassed to confess.

“I know,” Yo said. “It’s the holidays. They get me down, too. Maybe we shouldn’t go tonight.” Her lips brushed Ellen’s cheek.

“Go where?” Ellen asked.

Yolanda went ahead with the kids in the truck while Ellen and Sean walked over with flashlights, Ellen hugging the ditch. Any old draft dodger with one headlight and a medicinal marijuana permit could round the bend, but Sean strode fearlessly up the middle of the road the way he would, on any dry day, streak down it in a death-defying crouch. He custom-made longboards and sold them on-line, or bartered with them. Somehow the boards, their Child Tax Benefit payment, and Ellen’s occasional cheques sustained them.

The glowing glass lantern of Larry and Amber’s house appeared through the trees, the opposite of Yolanda and Sean’s cabin. The opposite, too, of the shack where Larry had once lived with Ellen. For over twenty years Larry had written for television. This house, architect-designed, cathedral-ceilinged, powered by the sun, was built on sit-coms. You walked right into the heart of it where Amber was, at the stove talking to Yolanda, but falling silent when she saw Ellen coming over. She’d changed her hair, sheared the sides and beaded the long part on top. “Nice,” Ellen said, smiling and opening her arms.

On Cordova Island the standard greeting was a hug. You hugged the postmistress when she handed over your mail. You hugged the man who filled your propane tank. When Amber turned away, Ellen stood there, bewildered and stung.

She tried again. “What are you making?”

“Latkes.” Amber transferred one out of the pan onto a paper towel-lined plate.

The first thought that came to Ellen: “I have the best latke recipe. Grind the potatoes in the food processor. Then they’re fluffy instead of rubbery and don’t look so grey. Do you have a food processor?”

“No,” Amber said.

“Are we doing Chanukah?”

“No,” Amber said.

“Can I help?” Ellen asked, sincerely.

“No,” again, just as a latke slapped the floor. When Amber bent to pick it up, her thong showed.

“I see London, I see France,” Ellen said and Amber straightened with a look of such undiluted hatred her monotone trio of “nos” sounded furious in retrospect.

Ellen backed up all the way to where Yolanda had escaped to nurse Fern in the big armchair by the fire. She sank down on the hearth. Amber was never really warm with Ellen, understandably. Her best friend’s mother was also her husband’s ex-wife, but they’d always muddled through. Now Ellen, who had only expected to feel, along with the usual awkwardness, the guilt anyone would feel returning to the scene of a crime, was confronted with a hostility whose source she quailed to guess at. Amber was the one who’d invited Ellen. Yolanda had said so. Why would Amber do this if she knew what had happened between Ellen and Larry last year?

“Where’s your father?” Ellen asked Yolanda.

“I don’t know. Sean’s checking on Eli in the bath.”

They came over once a week for this purpose, Ellen remembered, trying not to panic. Because Sean and Yolanda would take a bath, too, probably together, while Larry hid in his study, like now, leaving Ellen alone and defenseless against Amber.

“Sure you’re okay, Mom?” Yolanda asked, touching Ellen’s knee.

Larry didn’t show himself until dinner. Unshaven, in slippers and a stretched-out cable-knit sweater, the kind on offer in the Free Store, covered with pills, he finally appeared. At the sight of Ellen, he drew his head back sharply, which confused her. Also, she didn’t know if she should hug him with Amber right there carrying the plate of latkes over to the table they were all gathering around and, instead of setting it down, letting it drop the last two inches so it clattered.

Ellen decided to behave normally and hug Larry. The sweater was pungent with old wood smoke. Strange how different his once-loved body felt when for all these years it was everyone else’s body that felt strange. All those lovers who weren’t Larry.

Then her second epiphany happened. Her second in as many weeks, when most people don’t experience two in an entire lifetime.

She took her place at the table, beaming.

Last year, and the year before, over the last quarter century, in fact, when she knew she would soon see Larry, she would always be in some kind of state. Excitement sometimes, often rage. At any rate, some form of passion would carry her away. But this year? This year all she felt looking across the table at the delicately made, silvering man who had ruled her heart for decades was a mild irritation that he couldn’t be bothered to put on something presentable.

She raised her wine glass. “Cheers.”

“It’s not you,” Yolanda told Ellen after they had got through the incredibly strained meal made bearable to Ellen by her own inane chatter. No one else would step up to the plate and talk. Except the children. Fern had blatted her few words, then guffawed as though she’d cracked a joke.

Ellen, with much nervous lip-licking, had explained how to teach a dog to read. “Take soap. Rub it on the card with the correct word. Rub the corresponding picture or object. Leave the other pictures unsoaped. What the dog is actually doing is reading the smell. That’s what smelling is for them.”

Eli asked what grade Tony was in.

(Lying with Matt, listening to Tony singing at the bottom of the ladder, she had used Lady with a Lapdog to teasingly fan his face. “Aren’t you curious how I taught him?”

“I know how you did it,” Matt had said. “That’s the book with teeth marks all over it.”)

Amber wouldn’t make eye contact, even when Ellen complimented her on the latkes, which were in fact rubbery and grey. Neither would Amber look at Larry. Instead, she shot secretive glances at Yolanda as though the two of them were teenagers.

Yolanda and Ellen volunteered to do the dishes. In the kitchen, the window ledge above the sink was crowded with driftwood and shells and coloured bits of beach glass. Also two rubber duckies, one with a bowtie, the other in a flowered bonnet. Ellen wondered about the pretty detritus, the shells and glass, things you’d pick up on a beach holiday to take home as mementos. What possessed Amber—it had to be her—to gather and display things so commonplace to island life? Ellen pictured her moping down at the beach, noticing a shell, and stooping. And in her mind’s eye, Ellen saw the thong again, the world’s most uncomfortable undergarment, and was glad, very glad, no longer to be young.

“Dad told Amber—” Yolanda whispered and the plate Ellen was washing very nearly slipped out of her hand, “—that he didn’t find her very interesting.”

Ellen exhaled, relieved. “Why is she so mad at me then?”

Yolanda said, “It’s not you. She’s mad at Dad. See how the boy is facing straight ahead?” She pointed to the duckies. “That means Dad wants to make up. But the girl has her back to him. So Amber is still pissed off.”

“Are you serious?” Ellen asked.

Yolanda picked a dripping plate out of the rack and, covering her face with it, giggled.

When the dishes were done, Yolanda went out to the greenhouse with Amber, ostensibly so Amber could smoke. Sean was in the bath with Fern. This left Ellen and Larry effectively alone, except for Eli, who was walking on Larry’s back.

“Why do you like to get stepped on?” Eli asked.

“It’s what I’m used to,” Larry said.

Ellen snorted. Soon Eli lost interest and scampered off to look for his arctic hare, leaving Larry face down on the rug.

“Those are great kids,” Ellen said. “It’s nice you see so much of them.”

“I’m wanted for my indoor plumbing.”

“More wine?” She went to the kitchen for it, found Eli crouching behind the island counter with the hare that had cost her $350, its face stained with chili now. He’d discovered chopsticks in a drawer and was carefully inserting them between the stitches into the animal’s body.

She returned with a glass for Larry, too. By then he’d resurrected himself and was stoking the fire, stabbing the burning logs with the fresh one. “Did you lose weight?” he asked.

“No,” Ellen lied.

Larry closed the fireplace doors. “You seem happier.”

“You don’t. And your sweater is ugly.”

She felt sorry for him, the way after seven or eight readings she began to feel sorry for Gurov, shackled by bitterness. Every new affair inevitably grew complicated and problematic; love always became an unbearable situation. When Yolanda moved here to be with Sean after Eli was born, Larry visited them. His visits to his own children had been infrequent, but now that he was a grandfather, he came. At some point he decided to move back, possibly when he met Amber. Ellen had never asked, but now she did.

There turned out to be a story. The way Larry offered it up made Ellen think he had been waiting a long time for someone sympathetic to lend an ear, and that no one had until now. Until Ellen. It concerned a play Larry had gone to see in L.A. five years before.

“A play everyone was raving about. By a young playwright.”

“A woman.”

Larry nodded. “It was pretty good. I liked it. The playwright was there so afterward I went over and introduced myself. She didn’t know who I was.”

Ellen sensed what was coming. She disguised her cringe with another sip of wine.

“I told her about Talking Stick and the awards it won and my TV projects.”

“Talking Stick was a great play,” Ellen said. “Your best.”

“I only wrote two plays,” Larry said.

“That was my favourite.”

He looked at her. Larry had a look like a taser. It disabled you with feelings of stupidity and self-doubt, but Ellen had been looked at by Larry so many times over the years she was as desensitized as a lab rat. “And?”

“That’s it,” Larry said. “I told her who I was. She didn’t have a clue. She’d never heard of A Principled Man. It ran two seasons. I was head writer. Curve Ball?”

“That was the baseball show?” Ellen asked.

“Curve Ball drew a blank, too.” He scratched his stubble then admitted that he had asked the young playwright to go for a drink sometime, not necessarily that night. “‘To talk about your play.’ I said I had a few suggestions. Well. She took gross offense. It was unbelievable how she over-reacted. Like I’d just said her play was shit, when I’d said the opposite.”

“Unbelievable,” Ellen said, thinking of Tony in full snorkel mode at the base of a tree. Now that she’d read all those dog books, she knew what he was so desperately seeking there. Some other dog’s three-week-old piss to dilute with his own.

Amber appeared out of nowhere then with Yolanda behind her. “I’m going to bed,” she announced.

“See you,” Ellen sang. “Thanks for dinner.”

Larry looked at Amber and, on her, it had its intended effect. She swung around and stomped off like a little girl, her beads clacking.

Yolanda said, “I’m just taking a quick bath, Mom. Do you want to walk now with Sean and Fern or come later with me and Eli in the truck?”

“We’re talking,” Larry told her.

“Well, don’t talk too much,” she said to Ellen.

“Gotcha,” Ellen said, sitting up straighter.

“The last time I wrote something decent was when we lived here,” Larry said, as though these discomfiting walk-throughs hadn’t happened. “That’s your answer. That’s why I came.”

“So how’s the play?” Ellen asked.

“There’s no play,” Larry said, and he turned and opened the doors of the fireplace and slammed another wood chunk in.

“Did you tell Amber about last year?”

Larry said nothing.

“Larry? You shouldn’t have. She’ll tell Yolanda if she hasn’t already. And now she hates me. Is that why she invited me? To show me that she hates me?”

“It’s a test,” Larry said.

Ellen threw up her hands. “It was nothing.”

“Was it?”

The way Larry looked at her then was entirely unfamiliar. There was a softening in his eyes. She saw his pain, too. His back, and now his play. Larry had always had a tortured process.

“My therapist?” Larry said. “The one in L.A.? He used to say, ‘Larry, you are addicted to Act One.’”

“What does that mean?”

“I like beginnings. When I lived with you? Here? That was the only time I ever finished a play.”

Ellen stared at him. The sweater made him seem shrunken. Both hands pressed the small of his back. Also, now that his legs were stretched out in front of him, she saw two different colour socks, black and brown.

Larry stood. Last year she’d followed him to his office, to his battered leather couch calicoed with the stains of his former conquests. But not then, not during any of the other times through the years that they had coupled up for old time’s sake, or relief, had he ever indicated that she might be his muse. Now he limped out, leaving Ellen by the fire in the lonely cathedral of the room wondering where everyone had got to and how they’d ended up this way, so miserable.

Well, the children were all right, and Sean, too. Yolanda was just tired.

“Nonny!” Eli called.

Ellen went to him, still behind the island. He held up the hare impaled with chopsticks; it resembled a voodoo doll. Laughing, Ellen lifted him and set him on the counter next to the sink.

“Look at these two,” she said, showing him the duckies on the windowsill. She made the girl ducky fight the boy ducky and Eli laughed. It was laughable. Pathetic.

Then she turned the girl ducky so it faced the boy ducky, so it seemed to be nuzzling the boy ducky’s neck.

Something happened just as they were leaving that changed the entire holiday for Ellen. Larry, when summoned by his daughter, shambled out to be hugged by her, then Ellen. Having helped the squirming Eli into his coat, Ellen pulled her gloves from her pocket. And something fluttered to the floor, something orange that Larry bent, wincing, to pick up. To her amazement, and Yolanda’s apparently, he straightened with a smile, his first that evening and, for all Ellen knew, that year.

A poop bag.

“I know what’s different about you, Ellen,” he said. “You got a dog.”

Did it count? Could this be a third epiphany?

She loved that dog! She would forget Matt. Forget Larry. What did they, or any man, ever do for her? She was always giving, giving herself away. No more, she decided. No more. She would get Tony neutered and live with him instead. Long slow walks in the morning, reading together every night. In between, a little bit of squeaky banana and some fetch. The second half of her life unspooled before her like a newsreel, its blazing headline: Contentment! Contentment!

After that Ellen just had to speak to Tony. She called Tilda from the truck.

Tilda said, “Yesterday there was so much corn in his poo. Today he’s better.”

“Have you been practicing with the Henry James?”

“Um,” Tilda said.

“Where is he?”

“Right here. He’s sleeping.”

“Put him on. Tony? Hi, Tony! Whatcha doing? Do you miss me, Tony? I sure miss you. What’s he doing, Tilda? Does he know it’s me?”

“He’s wagging all over the place.”

So who was Ellen’s grand passion? She wondered this after she hung up, in the truck bouncing back to Yolanda and Sean’s. Of course it was Larry. It had always been Larry, her Gurov. (But this was only her point of view. Larry, of course, would have a different opinion. He always did.)

Then this past October she found herself standing in line behind a man whose shirt tag was poking out the back of his collar. She tucked it in. He turned and said, “Your hands are cold.”

Your hands are cold. Your hands are cold. Let me. Warm them. Let’s go up.

She hadn’t told Larry, though she’d planned to. She’d planned to say, “See? I, too, can snatch this from life.”

Then, what with the Winter Solstice party and Christmas and visiting old friends who still lived on Cordova Island, Ellen did forget Matt. She barely thought of him after that night at Larry’s. Things were getting complicated between them anyway, especially now. Now that she had Tony.

When she got home to Vancouver, he was waiting for her. Tilda opened the door and he leapt against her legs and dervished all around her. The whole dog wagged. He wagged for Ellen.

She threw her bags inside and out they went. Tony sniffed and peed, sniffed and peed. Reaching the end of the block she turned; he was far behind. But all she had to do was call his name and he ran right to her, tongue out.

A child’s pink purse lay in the gutter in front of the corner store across the street. Ellen wiped it on the grass and showed it to Tony, who took the handle in his mouth.

In the next block, an elderly woman came along. “What in the world is he carrying?”

“We’re just coming back from Saks,” Ellen said. “Gucci’s on sale.”

“Well, he is cute.”

“Smart too. This dog can read.”

The woman’s face crinkled all over when she smiled in a way Ellen found very beautiful.

Back home, the mail was in a drift behind the door. She unpacked her suitcase first—she had bones for Tony—then checked the beeping phone.

“Ellen? Are you back? It’s Matt. I’ve been calling and calling. I really have to see you. I have to.”

She pressed the phone against her ribs, pressed it hard, but it wasn’t any use. It had been building all this time. And out it came. Out and out and out.

Tony laid back his ears and cocked his head to one side, but both of them knew because both of them had read the story. The end was still a long, long way away and the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.

—Caroline Adderson

Caroline Adderson is the author of three novels (A History of Forgetting, Sitting Practice, The Sky Is Falling), two collections of short stories (Bad Imaginings, Pleased To Meet You) as well as books for young readers. Her work has received numerous prize nominations including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist, the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Winner of two Ethel Wilson Fiction Prizes and three CBC Literary Awards, Caroline was also the recipient of the 2006 Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement. She lives in Vancouver.

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Unmeasured Depths: A Review of Steven Heighton’s The Dead Are More Visible — Richard Farrell

Sep 032012

The Dead Are More Visible (Stories)
By Steven Heighton
Alfred A. Knopf, Canada
ISBN 978-0-307-39741-6

“The virtue of good prose,” writes Steven Heighton in Workbook: memos & dispatches on writing, his meditative collection of aphorisms and memos on art and writing published in 2011, “lies mainly in this dishabituation: it triggers conceptual stammers in the mind, momentarily rerouting hard-set neural circuits, even laying the ground for new ones.” These conceptual stammers, echoes of what the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky called defamiliarizaton, lie at the center of Heighton’s latest collection of stories, The Dead Are More Visible.

From wrathful lesbians to lonely widows, from aging track stars to angsty teen-agers, Heighton pulls off a literary hat trick: he tells spellbinding stories in aching, melodic voices that demand to be read again and again. A female boxer falls in love with her sparring partner; a heroic fireman rushes back into a burning building to rescue a bag of snakes; a recovering drug addict wanders the Sonoran Desert pursued by a mythical, oxycontin peddling hallucination; these are just some of the stammering citizens of Heighton’s fictional universe.

Heighton is a prolific novelist, essayist and poet. With a dozen books already published, it should come as no surprise that his short stories resist easy labels. In his fiction, Heighton interrogates the liminal borderlands of prose and poetry, walking the fine line between lyrical richness and good old-fashioned yarns. Yet never do the intricate textures of his language get in the way of clear-minded, narrative straight-forwardness, a linearity born not of simplistic formulas but out of a long and careful examination of form and structure.

The Dead Are More Visible contains sad stories with happy endings, simple stories with complex themes, and ineffable mysteries of being told from the perspective and language of common folk.

One of the more heartbreaking stories in this collection is “Heart & Arrow,” a twenty-four page, third person story that hinges on the fallibility of memory. On the occasion of his sister’s fortieth birthday party, Merrick thinks back to when he was ten and he would drink alone in his parents’ long-neglected basement bar. He remembers the loneliness of that bar with its “kidney-shaped counter of faux marble with a brown buttoned vinyl fronting, set at the head of a low, half-finished rec room.” His parents drink upstairs and his sister, Laurel, is almost always out with her friends. Desperately isolated, Merrick tries to act grown up by mimicking them. He wants to recreate an imaginary social life with booze and stale mixers. Instead, he creates his own personal hell.

And now he reminds her of that ironic reversal, to encourage her, he thinks, to cheer her up. Or is it to punish her instead? And what is it that’s pushing him to guide her back down that long-demolished stairway into their childhood rec room, the basement bar where he first tried to drown his childhood self and play the hardened, hard-drinking grown-up, while she already seemed set to inherit the only earth that mattered then: a feral frontier of contraband mickeys and smokes, death’s head roach clips, classes skipped with a shrug, creatively varied expletives, first lays in junior high. Stoners, they were called, nobody sure if that honorific referred to the state they were always said to be in or to the flooded limestone quarry where they hung out and smoked up and chugged beer and threw themselves naked off the cliffs.

Condensed into a series of tangible objects imperfectly recalled, this paragraph works like a narrative map. Every image counts. The rec room and dope, the cliffs and quarry, the drinking, sex, and partying—none of these are throwaways. Neither is the reliability of memory itself. Like Chekhov’s gun, each image carries weight. All repeat again and again throughout the pages that follow, forming rich and complex visual and acoustic layers which grow and harmonize as the story progresses. Heighton is thrumming along, patterning images and splintering them off only to bring them back. And the reader is lost in a wonderful miasma of sight and sound, fully captivated and awake.

With a Heighton story, only the essential is conjured. There’s an efficiency in his writing, along with a sign posted at the door: No shaggy dogs allowed. But to call a writer efficient these days might imply some mechanical coldness—the latest anointed hipster, brimming with pocketfuls of detached irony and urbane wit. Heighton’s efficiency, however, is anything but sparing. His prose is lush, melodic and carefully cadenced. Note the alliteration in the above passage, the internal rhymes and the precise pacing of Merrick’s memory of his sister’s social life: “a feral frontier of contraband mickeys and smokes, death’s head roach clips, classes skipped with a shrug, creatively varied expletives, first lays in junior high.” Yet the musical quality of the words balances with abundant, honest and empathetic characters. The stories in The Dead Are More Visible operate with the efficiency of nature, like the recycling of energy and matter in ecosystems, a churning, vital antidote to the sleek, mechanistic packaging of our entertainment culture.

She came from a side of town where most women thickened dramatically in their thirties and before long outweighed their men. The men thinned to sinew, their faces got a wrinkled, redly scoured look as if the skin had been worked with sandpaper, their eyes grew raw and haunted. Ellen had been spared the puffy moon face of her older sisters, only to see her features grow meaty and masculine while her body consolidated, almost doubling itself, like a hard-working farm wife of another era.

In “The Dead Are More Visible,” the lonely Ellen works the night shift, flooding a local park in order to form an ice skating rink. Nearby, a deranged man stares at a twenty-five foot obelisk and channels the dead—once buried there but moved to make way for the park. One night, a menacing group of three men approach. “They had the Grim Reaper look—slumpy, faceless, in layers of dark, baggy hooded sweatshirts.” The men begin to harass, first the deranged man, then Ellen. One of them, Shane, is strikingly handsome, something that Ellen notices in spite of the danger. He casts insults and threats, but she stands her ground. They want to rob her, possibly rape her, and she knows it, but she continues to provoke them. When Shane lunges at her with ice picks, Ellen defends herself with the only weapon available, the hose head in her hand, “a half foot of steel tapered to a flanged hole an inch and a half in diameter.” Ellen impales Shane with the hose head, and rips out his eye. The rest of the story becomes a farcical search for the de-socketed eyeball on the ice rink.

But what happens after such a violent set up is quite remarkable, and I’ll not spoil the ending, except to say that a simple compassion returns to offset the gore. Along the way, Heighton reveals the hardscrabble reality of life in a modern big city, invites the reader to experience a lonely woman’s heroic stance, and, just for good measure, he treats us to the strange, quasi-mystical figure of the deranged man and the obelisk.

It is this deranged man, a seemingly irrelevant character (he has no agency, really, on the page) who serves as the story’s deeper consciousness. “The dead are more visible than we are,” the deranged man tells Ellen, referring not just to the literal dead—the displaced graves once buried below the park—but also to our own existences run down by mortality, progress and the inevitable sweep of time. His voice provides the story its chilling resonance. The reader perceives that this story is about more than just violence and a lonely woman flooding an ice rink. In Workbook, Heighton describes this layering effect as vertical resonance.

Vertical resonance means a downward echoing, the potential for soundings into a textual subconscious, the swimmer’s thrilling sense, when crossing a mountain lake, of unmeasured depths in the dark below the thermocline.

Like the swimmer crossing the lake, we feel only the forward narrative movement, the stroke-and-kick, what-happens-next stimulus of plot. But what differentiates literature from schlock is precisely this deeper, textual subconsciousness. We read along and enjoy the surface story, but something else is happening. The reader slowly becomes aware of a chilling depth, an awareness of the gap between the habituated, day-to-day routines and the deeper, more meaningful qualities of life. The well written story bewitches us this way, deriving power from its ability to wake us up, to shake us out of an automated existence. Or, as Shklovsky once wrote, it makes the stones feel stony again. When it works, and it works quite often within Heighton’s stories, we submit to what John Gardner described as the vivid continuous dream, that phantasmagorical wonder that is reading a well made book. Plot becomes story. Metaphor becomes meaning. We become, in Heighton’s own words, more intensely alive.

Perhaps Heighton’s greatest gift as a writer is a relentless commitment to variety. His readers need never fear boredom. In the collection’s eleven stories, Heighton employs first, second and third person points of view. He has female and male narrators, old and young, innocent and experienced. From sprawling, almost-novella length tales to compact, twelve page stories, Heighton shifts often. Don’t look for thematic unity here. Don’t look for simple structures or stereotypes. Instead, expect to be pulled and pushed in ways that will baffle and befuddle but never fail to satisfy.

The last story in the book, “Swallow,” swells to almost 50 pages, yet it reads—thanks to tight pacing and careful construction—like a story half that length. A Greek-Canadian woman, Roddy, breaks up with her boyfriend, loses her waitressing job and refuses to move home again. To earn money, she signs up for a weeklong human drug trial. The drug she will be taking is an unnamed sedative.

The clinic is a hangar-like structure, cinderblocks and green corrugated siding, on the edge of an industrial park in the wind-scavenged steppes of outer Scarborough. At the park’s entrance the bus drops you along with two women in matching peach parkas over grey sweats. A sunny sub-arctic afternoon. No sidewalks. Snowless lawns hard as Astroturf. Up the middle of the road the matched pals tow dark, wheeled suitcases as big as wolfhounds. You have only a daypack, yet they edge ahead, their trainers flashing, heads down, shoulders high and tight—the slapstick, puffin shuffle of Canadians in winter. You don’t mind the wind’s bee-sting assault on your skin. You haven’t felt so awake in weeks. Neither do you mind the industrial park, finding something here that mirrors your inert inner world, so that for now—for a change—you don’t feel out of place.

Suburban Ontario transforms into a kind of wasteland, yet somehow stays homey too. The puffin shuffle, peach parkas, the wheeled suitcases like wolfhounds, these details accrete. What should be cold and arresting becomes an object of curiosity. The reader, while filled with trepidation, is also called forward.

Bleak and dismal, with drug trials and female subjects locked inside a forbidding building, it’s reasonable to expect Solzhenitsyn, or at least some sort of Orwellian dystopia. But in “Swallow” the mood remains more tantalizing than terrifying. Through a series of drug-induced scenes, we grow closer to Roddy. (The use of a second person narrator is rarely done this well.) We come to feel a community forming between the other women and the providers in this strange place. A sort of humanity arises despite the setting and the fact that these women are being poked and prodded and filled with poisons.

Once again, the conceptual stammers begin to fire. Heighton plays against the expected. Rather than sedating, the experimental sedatives become portals into Roddy’s world. The grim setting and the unusual concept create opportunities for a rich, meaningful experience. It is, in many ways, a sort of cockeyed celebration, a party of misfits who seem somehow enlarged by their very entanglement. This is not what the reader might expect.

But then each of the eleven stories in this collection surprises and delights. Heighton blends structural complexities with a linguistic opulence into a dazzling array of styles. The Dead Are More Visible is a master performance of art and storytelling from a significant writer who has honed his skills to a sharp edge. “[A] yen for transcendence,” Heighton advises himself in Workbook, calling upon the younger writer he once was (and, perhaps, by extension, other writers and readers) “to surmount one’s inborn pettiness and laziness, to be worthy of life’s wonder and better able to frame it in the right words, rightly arranged.” Thankfully, he follows his own advice. The dead are indeed more visible here. The right words are rightly arranged. With neural circuits rewired, habitual concepts stammered, deep lakes crossed and soundings taken, the reader surmounts pettiness and gazes anew at life’s wonder.

—Richard Farrell

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Richard Farrell is the Creative Non-Fiction Editor at upstreet and a Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq (in fact, he is one of the original group who helped found the site). A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has worked as a high school teacher, a defense contractor, and as a Navy pilot. He is a graduate from the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories. His work, including fiction, memoir, craft essays, and book reviews, has been published at Hunger Mountain, Numéro Cinq, and A Year in Ink anthology. His essay “Accidental Pugilism” (which first appeared on Numéro Cinq in a slightly different form) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in San Diego with his wife and children.

The Diplomat: Fiction — Christy Ann Conlin

Aug 302012

Herewith a gorgeous, poignant story about love, loss and translation, about the strange world in which we find ourselves today, a world of exiles, guest workers, refugees, immigrants, and fractured cultures — we all leave home, it seems, but what of identity and love? Christy Ann Conlin is an old friend, dating from when I first read her wonderful first novel, Heave, when I sat on the Governor-General’s Award jury in 2002. I hadn’t met Christy Ann yet, but I was friends with her writing. Later, I put one of her stories in Best Canadian Stories when I edited that estimable annual anthology. Her fiction has lilt, it has swing, and it has heart. Nothing else like it.

—–

Wiedervereinigung, the German teacher said. Viola knew the Chinese student named Henry would translate just as he had since starting the class two weeks ago, always trying to help, but she already knew the word. It was impossible to be in Germany and not know. The teacher, a plump middle-aged woman, told them the fourth anniversary was approaching and she went around the circle and made them repeat, stretching their lips, raising their eyebrows, as though they were warming up for an opera.

Wie-der-ver-ei-ni-gung.

“This means reunification,” Henry said looking at Viola from across the table. In perfect English. With an accent just like hers. His eyes found hers and she blushed. His smile soft and careful.

“I know what it means,” she replied in halting German, her eyes closing. The Berlin Wall had come down four years ago.

Die Berliner Mauer, Viola said slowly. Apparently Henry interpreted this as confusion. “The wall,” he said in his remarkable English, as though he’d grown up down the road from her. “The Berlin Wall.” He stretched his arms out, as though showing her how big it was in case she thought it was a fence for goats like the one on the small salt water farm on Campobello Island, near her parent’s house, the farm where Nolen now was, without her, of course. The teacher clucked and reminded them to speak German. Henry smiled at Viola again as Fiona from Australia giggled as though they were still teenagers.

It was a small class in a small language school in the centre of Frankfurt, Im Zentrum, as the Germans said. Viola had been in the German class for three months. She took the train in every weekday from the small town she lived in with Ralf who she’d met on a trip she’d taken to Vietnam after finishing her history degree. When she spoke German at home Ralf would stroke her hair and say: “You are like a kitchen appliance, macerating every syllable. It’s very cute, Schatzie. You sound like a Turk.”

The director had brought in the new Chinese students that Monday morning. The director was an old German hippie, always winking and telling Viola to eat muesli. During introductions Fiona said Henry had smiled instantly when Viola said she was twenty-three and from Campobello Island. Viola hadn’t noticed–she often shut her eyes when she spoke German, and thought of home. Henry was from Beijing. He had been in Frankfurt for one month. He was thirty-one years old.

Every Monday they began with a new expression or word they had learned on the weekend. This class, Viola offered Heimweh. Fiona had told her on coffee break that Henry had nodded when she said she missed Canada.

“Homesick,” he said, nodding as though he could see the sea urchins and shells she saw behind her eyelids. Viola squinted thinking his name couldn’t actually be Henry. It wasn’t Chinese. He told her later it was a name he had taken for Westerners. His real name was Sun He Peng.

On coffee break Henry was talking with the other two Chinese men as she walked by. Henry smiled and looked down at his feet and then back at her. He was tall. He’d laughed later when she said she thought Chinese men were all short. He told her he used to think Caucasians wore sunglasses so their eyes wouldn’t change colour in the sun. “I didn’t know the colour of your eyes at first,” he said. “Your eyes were always closed when you were speaking. They are green like the ocean.”

Henry had worked at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. He’d worked at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa for one year, part of his training. He’d perfected his English there.

“A translator?” Viola asked.

He smiled back. “A diplomat. At first I thought you didn’t understand the language. You are just shy. Forgive me.”

Viola laughed and closed her eyes and her cheeks were suddenly hot.

After class Fiona had proclaimed them a mini UN. Fiona was an accountant from Sydney and she was living here with her fiancé, Helmut, a banker she’d met at a conference. He had a telescope. They were going to Australia soon to get married.

There was a young couple from Turkey, Gastarbeiter, guest workers doing industrial work there weren’t enough Germans for. They never stayed after class. Sixteen-year old Farzad from Tehran who mourned the fall of the Shah and with his large aqua eyes followed the every move of Kwan-Sun, seventeen and from Korea, a nanny for a wealthy German family. Padma was from Bombay, her husband an English investment banker. It was the second time they’d been married to each other and she anticipated another divorce and possibly a third marriage. They were made for each other, she said, but only incrementally. Padma laughed what Fiona called a deep curried laugh. It was Padma who said the Chinese were refugees. “The riots, you know, the massacre,” she whispered.

And there was Lucien from Burkina Faso, married to a German historian. He and his wife Helga spoke French together, he had told the class. They’d married in Ouagadougou, and now she had a position at the university in Frankfurt. Helga’s last name was von Feldenburg. In the olden days von was a sign of nobility, Lucien stated.

Yes, their teacher had nodded, but German nobility ended with the abolition of the monarchy in 1919.

“Ja ja,” Lucien had said, leaning back in his chair, his eyes sparkling and his skin like espresso against the creamy white wall. “But abolition does not mean the old ideas disappear. Ce n’est jamais si facile que ça, mes amis.” He looked at the teacher and then at Viola and winked. “Ja,” she said, eyes closing and in her mind sitting with Noel on the back porch of his family farm house that had come down five generations to him. They ate chèvre with sun dried tomatoes on homemade brown bread. Don’t go to Saigon, Nolen said, looking out over the beach, crying so quietly. Stay here and marry me. We’ll run your parents’ inn and my family farm, do the summer market for the tourists, go sailing on Saturday afternoons.

Henry would always come to the park after class with the others who would scatter to benches in the late October sun. He sat by the fountain with Viola. She told him she was living with Ralf, that they’d met in Saigon where she’d gone after graduating from university with what Ralf called a useless degree. She’d left Campobello because it as an island, there was nothing there. But her voice had caught then and Henry had nodded his beautiful head, knowing there were some things there. Ralf was a software engineer. He’d been married once before and had a daughter the same age as Viola. She lived in New York and would call sometimes, usually hanging up if Viola answered. I don’t recognize you, the daughter said once. You are just one more. Don’t think you are the only one even now. Ralf would say his daughter was jealous. She was insecure. She refused to grow up. Ralf was doing research on using the internet for telephone calls. It was the way of the future, he said. He travelled frequently so Viola was studying German, something to keep her busy. She had no work papers, no official status.

Henry smiled. “I have a great affinity for Canadians. They’ve been very kind to me.”

Viola told him the Canadian Embassy in Saigon had closed up shop in the night and fled just before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975. The Vietnamese who’d worked for the Canadians found an abandoned building in the morning. “That wasn’t very kind,” she said, looking at the sky.

Henry nodded and sipped his coffee. “Viola, no one puts their best foot forward when the army is advancing. Things did not go as Ho Chi Minh planned. He was hopeful after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in the first Indochina War. But the negotiations at the Geneva Conference in 1954 were not what Ho wanted. Zhou Enlai was the Chinese diplomat involved in these negotiations, assisting the Viet Minh. Zhou Enlai was brilliant. ”

Viola nodded. “Is he why you became a diplomat?”

Henry laughed and his coffee spilled on the ground. “Oh, Viola, I was selected and told I would be a diplomat, and like Zhou Enlai, my job would be to think of my people. You know, over a million Chinese died in the Korean Conflict.”

“I can’t imagine so many people,” Viola said, watching the coffee trickle through the dirt.

He closed his eyes. “Zhou’s main concern was keeping the Americans away. A permanent partition of the Vietnamese Peninsula suited China.” Henry paused and then, opened his eyes and looked at the pigeons. “The freedom of my people suited me.”

Viola slapped the coffee puddle with the toe of her shoe and Henry looked at her. “We have a saying: The general sees with only one eye, the diplomat with both. War may be the domain of soldiers but resolutions are always the purview of diplomats.” Henry smiled. “Uncle Ho discovered that even hope must be negotiated. But Vietnam was his home and he would not abandon it after he had returned after so many years in exile.”

Viola slapped the trickle of coffee again. “There is an American photojournalist buried on Campobello Island. He died on a helicopter that was shot down near Danang. He was twenty-nine. He had a baby boy who never knew him and puts flowers on his grave every Sunday afternoon even when it’s snowing. He’ll never know his dad but he tries. He’ll never leave that land.” She squeezed her eyes so she wouldn’t cry.

Henry took her hand. “In China we prayed to our ancestors. The old ways are slow to pass. My father was sad when I went to Beijing. He said to complete the circle of life one must bury one’s father. I laughed at him, Viola, but I laughed less as I grew older. It is our history with the people we love that binds us together. Being close to the graves of the dead has life in it even if you cannot see this.” He took out a tissue and dabbed her eyes and cheeks, and kept holding her hand.

She moved closer to him and he put his arm around her. “Nolen puts silk flowers there in the winter, not real ones because they’d freeze.” She could feel his body shaking as he laughed, and then she laughed too and felt a lightness then, as she had the first time Nolen had given her daisies when they were fifteen.

After lunch they would walk to the subway, the U-Bahn. It was always Fiona, Viola and Farzad who would walk together but these days Farzad and Kwan-Sun had been walking away in the other direction holding hands. Henry began to wait and walk with Fiona and Viola. He and Fiona would board the train on the left and Viola would take the one on the right to the Hauptbahnhoff , the main train station, taking the S-Bahn, a commuter train to Darmstadt, back to the empty apartment to wait for Ralf. On Fridays, some of the students would lunch at a cheap Yugoslavian restaurant near the school and Henry started to come along with them.

Ralf would be home on the weekends and they’d eat and then ride his motorcycle through the countryside. He knew she was homesick and hoped it would cure her. He would take her to ancient castles in the hills and as they’d climb the turrets he’d tousle her hair and tell her she was beautiful.

Ralf never approved of her housekeeping. He’d unpack his suitcase and then vacuum. It wasn’t a criticism; it was how he relaxed. You had to stay on top of the dust, he’d comment. And then he’d tie her to the bed and take a feather duster to her, from her toes, up her legs, over her breasts, her face, feathers soft on her eyelashes. And he’d be packing again on a Sunday evening, gone, before she awoke alone.

The day she went back to Henry’s apartment they’d been swarmed by an army of pigeons in the park. The pigeons of Frankfurt were nasty creatures and knew no discretion. They didn’t wait quietly for crumbs but hopped and leapt about in a frenzy, even the maimed birds, creatures with one eye, one leg, bald birds.

She wondered about how they got their injuries but Henry had laughed. “What is significant is that they survive them.” He joked they were ancestors of war birds–while the bombed-flattened zentrum of Frankfurt might be nothing more than a replica, the pigeons carried the DNA of the survivors. They would survive an apocalypse now. There were pigeons in China, he told her. But having pets was now considered bourgeois. “They are not in the parks like this,” he said.

Henry always wanted more stories of Campobello Island, and she told him it was near Maine, near Passamaquoddy Bay—it was easier to talk about the geography. Her hands fluttered in front of her face, in front of her breasts, up over her head, as she drew him a map in the air. She told him of Nolen and the goats, and the summer market where they worked together, how Nolen had wanted to marry her. “He thinks if his father had been a farmer and not a combat photographer, he wouldn’t have died, if he had done what his parents wanted. I went away to university but I came home every holiday, every summer. The autumn after I graduated I went to Saigon. I went because I saw his father’s photos. They spoke to me. Nolen said I’d never come back. And I didn’t. The island felt as though it was growing smaller everyday.” Viola asked Henry why he was in Frankfurt. He was so easy to talk to and yet shared so little. He’d been at Tiananmen Square, he told her in a matter-of-fact voice, as he watched the pigeons. He’d been in prison and then under house arrest. The Canadians had negotiated on his behalf, for his safety. His voice became very soft and she had to bend her head close to hear. His father had died during that time.

Could he ever go back, Viola asked, holding her hands up. His eyes followed her fingers as though they were wings in the sky and he reached for them, clasping her cold hands in his as he told her, no, he did not foresee that. And he put his hands on his lap, still holding hers. I can see nothing yet in the tea leaves, he’d smiled at her. He wanted to know again about Campobello and she told him of the beaches, Theodore Roosevelt’s summer place that was now part of a park. Viola’s family home was now an inn. Her father was ill, Alzheimer’s. He would have to be institutionalized. It was easier to be away, she said. Henry had nodded. It is nice you have a choice, Viola. She’d closed her eyes then but there was no judgment in his voice and he had held her hand tighter.

The refugee camp was not what she’d seen in the news, tents and jeeps and aid workers dolling out bowls of rice. Henry laughed. Housing was perhaps a better word than camp, saying her island view of the world was charming. She’d smiled. They had not discussed that she would come with him. It was a Friday but Ralf was away until Saturday evening. After lunch, they walked to the subway. Fiona got off at her stop, winking at Viola as the doors closed. And they’d carried on until his stop. The door opened and he’d held out his hand.

It was a tall generic building. Henry and the two other Chinese classmates shared the small, tidy apartment. Two bedrooms with one of them sleeping in the living room. The roommates had not been in class, away for the weekend, Henry said. Viola did not ask where.

Henry led her by the hand to a little bedroom with a mattress on the floor and a tiny table beside the bed, on it a photo of a smiling young Chinese woman holding a baby, and beside it, a black and white picture of a young boy and his father and mother, standing by a cow. Henry turned to Viola and took her face between his hands and kissed her, sucking her breath inside of him, her fingers all over his flesh, mapping her way to him. They made love on the thin mattress, his long hard body pressed down and in on hers, spreading over her as the shadow from a tree would. Henry was silent and when she cried out he covered her lips with his mouth.

He had asked her, after, as they lay there drinking tea, if she would stay and marry Ralf. Or if she would go home to her young man with the flowers. Frankfurt was not a city for her, he said. There were no beaches. “As the Germans say, Zu Hause ist es am Besten,” he said with a smile. The late afternoon sun tunneled in through the small window. No place like home, he said.

Henry told Viola they’d said his wife and daughter would be safe but only on the condition that he go into exile without them. It was the Canadian Embassy who’d arranged things with Germany. Henry hoped he could one day go to Canada. They were working on that but it would be years, and his life would be only in exile now, he knew this. There would be no visits to his father’s grave.

Henry brought her some noodles for supper and in the early morning he brought her persimmons and tea. Grey sky filled the window and she imagined she was on the shores of Campobello, the traffic outside the surf on the sandy beach. She held up her hand and spread her fingers out. “Did you know the starfish is a symbol for safe travel,” she said. She thought of Nolen and his goats, and his armful of wildflowers for his father on Sundays in July, her father now drooling in a chair.

“Viola,” Henry whispered, taking her hand in his, “Home is something we must sometimes negotiate. But it is always worth the negotiations, no matter how hard. You must not send yourself into exile when you can return and make your way. We Chinese have a saying: Your heart will lead you to a path and if you do not follow it, you will, as the years pass, find that you are still at its beginning.” It was then he glanced at the photo on the small table. He shut his eyes and was quiet for a moment before he took Viola’s hand, kissing the palm, his lips soft and warm on her cold pale skin.

— Christy Ann Conlin

———

Christy Ann Conlin is the author of the novels Heave and Dead Time. She is finishing her next novel, Listening for the Island. She hosts the CBC radio program, Fear Itself, a show that explores the whys, wherefores and what-have-yous of fear www.cbc.ca/fearitself/ You can learn more about the quiet country life of Christy Ann at christyannconlin.com.

Sometimes It Is, Sometimes It Isn’t: Fiction — Robert Day

Aug 292012

Robert Day is the best teacher I ever encountered, also one of the most amiable of men and author of The Last Cattle Drive, a novel I fondly reread every now and then for its rich comedy, its distinctively clipped and forthright voice, its deft and delicate puncturing of the myth of the west, and its humane decency. Bob and I met at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1981 when I was a student and he was a visiting instructor. The first day of class he walked into the room and wrote across the whole front wall of blackboard REMEMBER TO TELL THEM THE NOVEL IS A POEM. I have written about this in my essay “The Novel as a Poem” in my book Notes Home from a Prodigal Son. I include the opening paragraphs below (and I wrote about him from memory and no doubt reimagined or even fictionalized details for which sin I hope he will forgive me).

The best writing teacher I ever had was a Kansas cowboy named Robert Day who showed up at the Iowa Writers Workshop as a last minute, one-semester replacement for a sick colleague in January, 1981. The first day of classes he strode into the room wearing Fry boots, jeans and a checked shirt. Without saying a word, he picked up a piece of chalk and wrote across the full length of the blackboard in huge looping letters: “Remember to tell them the novel is a poem.”

At the time, Day had only published one novel, a book called The Last Cattle Drive. He was a tenured English professor at Washington College in Maryland. He had been one of the founders of the Associated Writing Programs. As a young man, he had worked at G. P. Putnam in New York and could recall for us the excitement over the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Summers he went back to western Kansas where friends ran a borderline ranch. He kept a horse there, a horse which at various times had eaten loaves of bread through the kitchen window, or Day’s hat. All summer long he would hang out with his friends, their cattle and his horse.

That semester we read Queneau, Musil, Rulfo, Achebe, Nabokov, Tutuola, Abe and Marquez. Day did not tell us what he meant–“Remember to tell them the novel is a poem.” Maybe he forgot. Half-way through the semester he read the second draft of my novel Precious, three hundred typed pages of plot, dialogue and scene that stubbornly refused to come alive. I still have the notes I made during our conference, fifty-four words. It took less than fifteen minutes. But like a skilled surgeon he had opened the novel up for me and shown me its heart still beating, its bones, nerves and veins.

The bit about AWP needs expansion (and even now I am not sure I have this right). But according to Bob’s friend and colleague Walton Beacham, in 1971 the infant AWP, then being run by its co-founder R. V. Cassill (George Garrett was the other co-founder), was about to go under. Cassill was bowing out and Brown University was withdrawing its support. Bob and Walton arranged a new home and financing for the organization, and Bob made the trip to Providence to retrieve the AWP archives from Cassill. Cassill handed him a shoebox containing some notecards, the full extent of the AWP archives at the time. Bob remained director and/or sometimes president until 1982.

Bob Day and I have not been much in touch since those days in Iowa, a hiatus probably due to the diffidence that exists between a student and an important mentor. But it’s a huge pleasure now to reunite on these pages — one of the best things about publishing Numéro Cinq is the number of friendships it has revived. When he wrote to me a few weeks ago, he reminded me about the last time we were together. “The last time I saw you we were looking a new jeeps as I was to buy one for the ranch where I worked; they had gone up scale and you said: Bob, they’re toys. Right you were.”

Now I am deeply pleased to be able to publish a new Robert Day short story, also to applaud his new book of stories coming out in September: Where I Am Now.

The hunting photo above is by Denise Low.

—–

I had not been a good enough high school student to go “East” for college. My father had hoped for a scholarship to Yale or Harvard: an Ivy League education was to a young man from Kansas as a wealthy marriage was to a young woman. As for my mother, she had discovered that any college in Kansas had to take you if you had graduated from a state high school.

“I think he should stay in our domain,” she’d say, using in context one of the ubiquitous words she was forever trying to teach me out of her dictionary.

“He should go East,” my father would say without–I would learn later–any sense of history or irony: “Go East,” you could hear him say summer evenings in our front yard as he drank a beer in his webbed aluminum lawn chair.

“I think he should stay in our environs,” my mother said through the open kitchen window as she cleaned up. That spring I was accepted at Emporia State Teachers College.

“William Allen White’s town,” my father said.

“Teachers and government workers are never without a job,” my mother said.

The summer before I left for Emporia, I life guarded at the local pool and helped at home: I mowed the lawn, painted the basement walls, cleaned out the attic, ran errands, and hung the laundry on the backyard clothes line. Some days I fixed flats, pumped gas and changed oil at my father’s repair garage and filling station. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, but I didn’t sit around looking into a gold fish tank.

At the swimming pool that summer, I saved a boy out of the deep end bottom but never said anything about it until my father saw it as a news item in the local paper. I was the kind of kid who did not explain himself. It seemed natural. The summer after my first year at Emporia I went back to work at the pool.

“Your uncle Conroy writes that he has a fellowship for you,” my mother said. I was home on lunch break from life guarding. “It pays wages and you get college credit. You need good grades in science.”

My mother has said this without much enthusiasm. She was reading the letter a second and third time.

Uncle Conroy was my mother’s older brother, a pediatric researcher of international fame. In the cultural gulf between our 1950’s linoleum-floor kitchen in Merriam, Kansas and Doctor Conroy Watkins directing a medical research lab in Berkeley, California, circa the mid-sixties, there was a pleasing pride–as if in our small house we had a first edition signed by Clarence Day.

“Let me see,” my father said. He had closed the garage for lunch and was also home.

“At the University of California at Berkeley,” said my mother handing him the letter.

I have an hour before I have to be back at work. After closing I am to take Muff LaRue to Winsteads for a Frosty. My plan is to drive back to the pool for a swim.

“That’s what it says,” said my father. “A fellowship in Conroy’s research lab that could lead to medical school. He should get there as soon as possible for training.” My father left the kitchen with the letter in one hand, his meatloaf sandwich in the other, and headed for the front yard to sit in his aluminum lawn chair.

“I don’t know that General Science counts,” said my mother through the kitchen window.

“Two semesters of A’s,” my father said, talking straight ahead.

They were referring to my freshman grades. I seem to be present only in the third person.

“I’m going to be a doctor,” I said to Muff LaRue as I unlocked the gates to the pool.

Muff dove in fully clothed and swam to the deep end. When she got there she pulled herself out and said if I’d turn off the lights she’d skinny dip. I flipped switches.

“I’ve never dated a doctor,” she said. “What kind of doctor?”

She walked to the end of the low board, took off her summer shorts and tossed them on the deck. Then she pulled her t-shirt over her head and threw it in the pool.

“A surgeon. I am going to Cal-Berkeley to be a pediatric surgeon.”

I was treading water beneath her.

“I’m going to Sarah Lawrence to study Classics,” she said as she dove in.

The next day it was agreed I should accept my uncle’s invitation even though Berkeley might have “agitators” –as my father called them, not unlike Dustin Hoffman’s landlord in The Graduate. On the other hand, my mother feared impertinence among the rich students. She told me to find the word in the dictionary she had given me when I left for college, along with instructions to learn three words a day: aplomb, domain, environs.

It took me a week to quit my job as a lifeguard, say good-bye to Muff, and pack. My uncle met me at the airport.

“So you want to be a doctor?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

We were driving over the Bay Bridge toward the East Bay. You have to be a young man from a small town in Kansas to understand how astonishing it is to see the San Francisco Bay for the first time. There is nonchalance about its grandeur.

When I said I didn’t know if I wanted to be a doctor to one of the most famous and accomplished physicians in America, a man who had no doubt made special arrangements to get me a fellowship, it sounds, even at this distance, something Californian-sixties: Mellow. Really, man. Yeah. Wow. Far out. That’s not what I meant. Perhaps I thought–as we crossed the Bay Bridge to the East Bay– that if I couldn’t be a doctor like Uncle Conroy, I didn’t want to be a doctor. I’d like to think that now.

“I don’t mean. . .” I said as we drove up Grove Avenue past the lab where I would be working.

“I understand,” he said. “Don’t worry about your future. It is always there.”

“Thank you,” I said.

From Grove we drove into the Berkeley Hills behind the Claremont Hotel to my aunt and uncle’s house overlooking the Bay.

My uncle’s laboratory was the Hansen Pediatric Research Center. My first week at work, I had met Hazen: Hazen Edmond Floren Reynald who was pleased to introduce himself by all or part of his name, just as it pleased him to pick one of his names (including his last) and use it for a week. Or this:

“My name is Hazen Edmond Floren Reynald, and you may pick the name you like and call me that from now on. I will remember. But sometimes I won’t.”

I picked ‘Hazen.’ My uncle and his step-father had picked ‘Edmond.’ His mother used Floren. Aunt Lillian picked ‘Howard,’ and no one had told her that was not one of her choices.

“You may change names as I do,” Hazen said. “This week I am to myself ‘Floren’. But you may call me ‘Edmond’. That’s what my step father calls me.”

Hazen grew up on Russian Hill where he still lived with his mother and stepfather, Doctor Milton Reed. He was a large-nosed, black-haired, stout-chested, short guy four or five years older than I was. He had dropped out of college after his freshman year to travel in Europe: a trust provided him with funds to “poke around the world and among the girls.”

“Hang up medicine unless it can create a Juliet,” he said when I asked him if he was going to be a doctor. “Hang up medicine unless it can create a Juliet,” he’d say as we worked medical experiments for the researchers who used my uncle’s lab.

“Do you have a girl friend back in Kansas?” Hazen asked me one day.

“Muff LaRue,” I said.

“’Rue’ means ‘street’ in French,” Hazen said. “My mother is French. So was my real father. I understand we are all coming to dinner at your aunt and uncle’s house. Very formal. Mother usually brings her favorite hors-d’oeuvres: pâté de canard.”

I must have looked puzzled because Hazen went on, as if to reassure me.

“Just remember, it is impolite to take the last hors-d’oeuvre, which, if you think about it, means you can’t take the second to last piece because you’re being impolite to the poor bastard who is stuck with not being able to take the last piece. And if you think about it from here to eternity, you can’t take anything off the plate. You just starve.”

My mother’s fear of impertinence had come true.

“Doesn’t he look good, Conroy?” said my Aunt Lillian. I was wearing a tuxedo borrowed from my uncle. I had seen myself in a mirror before coming out of my room and thought the same thing: not bad for a rube from Kansas.

“Very good,” said my uncle who, I understood, did not put much stock in the formalities of social life but had come to a routine acceptance of it.

The reason for the dinner party was Hazen’s step father’s Nobel prize for experiments (done a number of years before) in which he had taken the amino acid “package” off proteins, then put it back on. At least that is how I understood it at the time.

Aunt Lillian was wearing what my mother would have called “a cocktail dress.” Not the kind of dress you saw Harriet Nelson wearing on television in those days (and not the kind my mother owned), but the kind that Olivia de Havilland wore in the movies. It was pale green with tiny gold flecks that seemed to have been woven into the fabric. I had never seen anything like it. Later in the evening I would notice that her dress matched in a subtle way the dinner plates, goblets, and even a small glass dinner bell that were put out by Bella, my aunt’s maid.

“Now use your forks from the outside in,” said Aunt Lillian, taking me to the table. “‘Outside’ being the fork all the way to the left. And do not use the spoon or the fork above the plate until the plate has been changed, and then use the outer one first; in this case that will be the spoon for the sorbet, then the ice- cream cake fork for the ice cream cake that they make at the lovely bakery on Shaddock where they make so many fine things. When you are finished with your courses, put your knife and fork at four o’clock on your plate. That way Bella will know you are finished. And hold your wine glass by the stem, although Howard’s mother takes hers by the bowl and puts her—I must say—rather large nose—into it. And sniffs quite loudly.”

By this time my uncle had escaped to stand in the driveway to wait for his friend.

“Hazen,” I said. “His name is Hazen.”

I had never been to a formal dinner party, much less in the presence of a Nobel Prize winner. And I had never worn a tuxedo. My brother rented one for the high school prom. My sister’s boyfriend picked her up in one for the same dance. I wore a dark suit, went without a date, and stood by the record player and watched Muff LaRue dance to Dean Martin’s Memories are Made of This.

Living with my aunt and uncle when I first got there had its pleasures. Even after I moved to an apartment on Derby near the University in the fall, I was always welcome. If they were away (to a medical conference or to a retreat in Mexico in which they owned an interest), I had the run of their house with its splendid view of San Francisco Bay. I was well fed, and when necessary, could use one of their cars. For this, my uncle asked only that I drive Aunt Lillian to the store and on errands in her large green Cadillac, complete with fins and air conditioner scoops.

“Let him drive,” my uncle would say. “That way he can learn his way around Berkeley.”

When he had me aside he said:

“Lillian is many fine things, but while she can set an excellent table for a dinner party she cannot cook a breakfast egg nor drive a car.”

“Your uncle thinks I am a poor driver because I am alert,” my aunt said one day as we left for errands and to drop me off at the lab.

“That is why he wants you to drive. He has told me more than once I am dangerous, but ask him how many tickets I have gotten? None. Or how many accidents I have had that were my fault? None. It is just a prejudice he has about women drivers because we are cautious.”

Aunt Lillian had stopped for a green light on Durant because–as she explained amid the honking of horns behind her–men sometimes run red lights.

“You must be defensive in your driving. Defensive and alert. Not alarmed. But alert to what is coming at you from all sides: front, back, right, left. I am perched high and straight in my seat and I am always alert and defensive.”

She achieved her “perch” by sitting on a folded pillow so that her head was well above the steering wheel, and not all that far below the car’s headliner. From there she could see as well as any present day SUV soccer mom.

“You must be careful of rocks rolling off the mountains,” Aunt Lillian said one day when she came to a full stop in the middle of West View Drive, not far from the end of their lane. I looked up the hill at a large rock protruding from underneath a few scrub trees. It had probably been deposited by an ice age.

“Would you like for me to drive?” I said.

“Not at all. You think that rock has been there a long time and will not roll down. That is what Conroy says. But because it has been there a long time means it is more likely to roll down. Hills flatten into plains because rocks roll off them and grind themselves to dust. That is what happened in Kansas. It can happen in California. We have earthquakes. There was a famous one years and years ago that started a fire. They still talk about it. You must be watchful wherever you are in a car. On the small roads. On the highways. In traffic. In the hills with rocks on them. Just because we are very close to the house doesn’t mean an accident can’t happen. Most car accidents happen close to home.”

“Did she stop at the top of the hill by the rock?” asked my uncle when I told him I had not been able to drive her that day.

“Yes.”

I drove Aunt Lillian very little, and I never understood why some days she was pleased to have me do so, but on most days she was insistent that she drive. Nor could I determine why she stopped at some green lights (and ran red ones), but not at others.

“Has Lillian pulled off the road when a truck is coming?” asked my uncle on another occasion.

“No,” I said.

“She thinks some trucks are too big for the roads so she’ll drive off the shoulder to let them go by. Once I had Triple A pull her out of a ditch, and all she would say was that it was better to be in the ditch than ‘squished like a beetle.’”

A few days later Aunt Lillian veered the Cadillac onto a lawn because a large cement truck was heading our way, very much on its own side of the road.

“Better up on a lawn than squished like a beetle,” she said as we came to a thud of a stop in a well-tended yard. “A wreck involves the police and smashed fenders and a broken windshield and medical bills. Just because your uncle is a doctor doesn’t mean we get hospital care free. “

Aunt Lillian looped back onto Stuart just ahead of a woman dashing across the lawn shaking a vacuum cleaner attachment like a fist. At the next green light we made a full stop. At the next red light we drove through.

“When Bella serves a new course,” my aunt continued, “it is polite to change the direction of your conversation. You will be sitting between Doctor Reed on your left and Madame de Ferney on your right, and if you have been talking to Doctor Reed for the first course, you then talk to Madame de Ferney during the second course, then back to Doctor Reed for the next course. Madame de Ferney may not converse this way. She has a habit of talking to whomever she wants.”

Aunt Lillian paused for a moment and looked at the table, first at one chair, then another, slightly nodding at each, as if more than counting.

“At home we just ate,” I said. I thought I should say something by way of thanking Aunt Lillian for telling me how to behave.

“It is all a bit fussy,” she said. “Conroy doesn’t much like it. He says dinner parties are “fork fetish feasts”. I suppose he’s right, but we women have to keep up standards. Do you see a young lady in Kansas?”

“Muff LaRue,” I said, thinking I didn’t know the meaning of “fetish”.

“When did you last see her?” said my aunt, now circling the table to make some adjustments in napkins and silverware.

“At the swimming pool where I work.”

“How nice.”

“Yes,” I said.

Aunt Lillian stepped back to look the table over at some distance. “Everything is in its place,” she said, more to herself than to me.

Then: “One more thing. Madame de Ferney always brings the hors-d’oeuvres. A duck pâté on toast points. I will put them on a large plate and we will have them in the living room with some white wine before dinner.”

“I know it is not polite to take the last one,” I said.

“Yes,” said my aunt, and seemed pleased. Then, looking past the table and around the dinning room and into the living room where Bella was putting out napkins and wine glasses on the coffee table, she said: “Madame de Ferney has kept her curious name even though she has been married all these years to Doctor Reed, who as you know, is Howard’s father, just as Madame de Ferney is Howard’s mother, even though she doesn’t have the same last name as Doctor Reed. Or maybe Doctor Reed is Howard’s step-father and Madame de Ferney is his mother. I think that’s what Conroy once told me. She came to America when he was very young and brought Howard with her.”

“Hazen,” I said.

“And for some reason I think Howard doesn’t have the same last name as either of them because Madame de Ferney named him for an uncle for whom a French village is named. Or maybe she is named for the village. Howard is an only child so I suppose it is easier to do that when you are an only child. And Madame de Ferney always calls Doctor Reed, “Doctor Reed,” not by Milton as the rest of us do. So we all call her Madame de Ferney and have for so long by now I don’t remember her first name, but I think it’s Mimi. You should ask Howard. Very curious.”

“Here they are,” said my uncle from the doorway.

“There is something else,” Aunt Lillian continued, but in a lower voice. “Madame de Ferney keeps both her hands on the table, sometimes even her elbows. She is French. They have peculiar manners. And her English after all these years is still odd. A bit of French mixed in with English. Very odd.”

“My mother said I should cut my food with my elbows down, not up. And that I should bring my food to my mouth and not my mouth to my food,” I said, again trying to reassure my aunt. But this time she seemed not to hear me and said: “I am thinking maybe I should seat you. . . but no I can’t. . . that would disturb the arrangement.” I could hear my uncle at the door saying come in, now, come in and they all did.

“Is it the case,” Madame de Ferney said as Bella was clearing the table of the second course, “that in Kansas. . .how shall I put it? . . .comment dirais-je? Je ne sais pas…”

She said something else in French to her husband. I saw Hazen frown. I saw Doctor Reed frown. Doctor Reed said something in French. Then Madame de Ferney said to me:

“Is it ‘provincial’ in Kansas? Provincial?”

She pronounced her second “provincial” with a certain prairie flatness, as if to make sure I understood. Not that it mattered: It was not a word I had learned from my mother’s dictionary: Rube. ff.

While it was true that Madame de Ferney had used her forks according to Aunt Lillian’s rules, she had not–as my aunt had predicted—abided by the formalities of conversation; also, her elbows had been on the table repeatedly, and–my mother would have been shocked—Madame de Ferney had removed her bread from the bread-and-butter-plate and put it on the tablecloth where it left crumbs. And she not only stuck her nose into the wine glass, she swirled it around before holding it to the light and said: It is the first duty of a wine to be red.

“Don’t you agree?” said Madame de Ferney to my Aunt.

“Yes, indeed.”

“And also from what you call the environs. Is that the right word Floren?”

“Yes,” I said. Everybody looked at me for a moment and then Madame de Ferney asked me what kind of wine we drank in our environs.

“My mother has a glass of Mogen David as she fixes dinner,” I said. “My father drinks Coors. My mother is Polish. My father Irish.” In the small silence that followed everyone took a sip of wine.

“I ask about Kansas being provincial,” Madame de Ferney said, “because I am told they were provincial ici in San Francisco before the gros earth cake. The gros earth cake and the fire did them a great good because the rebel lost their shanties.”

“Rabble, mother,” said Hazen.

Madame de Ferney paused only to mouth the word rabble silently with what seemed to me impatience toward the English language.

“Mother’s ‘gros’ is French for ‘large’,” Hazen said to me. “The Great Earth Quake.”

“Thank you,” I said. And to show I was going to learn French I repeated ‘gros’ out loud.

“You’ll need to work on your ‘r’,” Hazen said. I had no idea what he meant.

At this point Bella came to serve another course, while Madame de Ferney continued:

“The families whose furniture came “around the Horn” began to assende and that gave the city its culture. Some people who first arrived in San Francisco brought their furniture with them over the prairie ground in wagons. It must have been very hard on chairs. Not to mention desks and tables. All of Doctor Reed’s family furniture came “around the Horn.” Our chairs are very solid. Tres solide.”

Madame de Ferney had been speaking to the table at large, but then she turned to me:

“They have no earth cakes in Kansas to make matters better. C’est tres mal in that regards, don’t we all think so? Maybe a dust storm or a prairie bison fire could do the same thing. Does your family have the particle?”

“’Quakes’, mother,” said Hazen. This time Madame de Ferney did not mouth the word.

“They have tornadoes,” said my aunt. “Tell Madame de Reed about the tornadoes. How Dorothy went to see Mr. Oz on the Yellow Brick Road. That might be just as good as earth quakes.”

I was about to ask “a particle of what?” thinking Madame de Ferney might have wondered if we owned a bit of farm ground when Doctor Reed coughed loudly a number of times to my left and we all looked his way. My uncle patted him on the back and asked if he was all right?

“I was telling our nephew the other day,” Aunt Lillian said when Doctor Reed’s coughing spell stopped, “about that big rock at the top of the road, and how it might fall down if we had another earth quake like the one Madame de Ferney has mentioned.” My aunt stopped and seemed befuddled for a moment.

“You were about to say something about the rock, Lillian,” said Doctor Reed.

“Yes! Well, if it rolled down the hill it would squish that nice bakery on Shaddock where we got the dessert for tonight.”

“Ah oui!” said Madame de Ferney. “It is a lovely bakery and Doctor Reed always get something from it whenever we are coming to the University. There is rien like it even in San Francisco.”

“’Rien’ means ‘nothing,’” said Hazen. I nodded. “‘Rien,’” I said, this time doing no better with my “r” judging by Hazen’s look.

“’Nada’,” in Spanish, said Doctor Reed.

“’Nada’,” I said, thinking at least there wasn’t an‘r’. Again a moment of silence while everyone took another sip of wine and Bella bustled.

“And they probably don’t have a bakery in Kansas like the one on Shaddock that we all like so much,” said Aunt Lillian. “Just like they don’t have hills down from which rocks might fall because they already have fallen down and that’s why it’s flat. And maybe that is why Madame de Ferney has asked about it being provincial. No quakes. No hills. No rocks. No bakery.”

“Ah oui,” said Madame de Ferney, at which point Aunt Lillian rang the bell for Bella who was standing beside her.

“Maybe I should not have asked about Kansas being provincial,” said Madame de Ferney. “It is of no matter, but sometimes those of us who live la vie de chateau cannot imagine remote places in the United States as being other than provincial. That is true in France as well. We have peasants in many places south of Paris. Some of them harvesting their own ‘poulet.’”

“’Chicken’, mother,” said Hazen.

“I know it is “chicken” in English,” said Madame de Ferney. “But I prefer the French. Who can like a word like “chicken” instead of “poulet”? Or “duck” instead of “canard”?

“It is what we had this evening,” said Aunt Lillian. “A recipe right from France. Chicken Cordon Bleu. Not that we raise chickens or ducks here in Berkeley. I expect there is some kind of rule against it. I know there is one about hanging your clothes out to dry, isn’t there Conroy?”

“There is indeed. It is called a ‘covenant’,” my Uncle said to Doctor Reed who smiled. “As if good taste were a religion. No rabbits in cages. No chickens. Or ducks. No horses or goats. It was quite a list they gave us when we moved here. No clothes line, as Lillian says.”

“In Kansas we have a clothes line,” I said. “I do the hanging out when I am home.” Uncle Conroy looked at me and smiled. I was about to say the Simms down the road had both chickens and ducks, as well as pig they fed out but Madame de Ferney said:

“It is our own limitation, I suspect, and I would be pleased to learn otherwise. How did your parents’ furniture come to Kansas?”

“Here is dessert!” Aunt Lillian said, and once again rang the bell, even though Bella had returned to the table.

The arrival of dessert and the clatter of plates and forks and the general talk about the bakery on Shaddock changed the course of the conversation and as we ate Madam de Ferney turned to Hazen and asked:

“Do you remember when you were an adultlesson and we took you to Paris?”

“‘Adolescent’, mother,” said Hazen. “It is the same in French.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Madame de Ferney. “It is just that we were showing you where I was reared—is that the word? You raise cows but rear children. Do I have that right?”

“Yes,” said Doctor Reed to Madame de Ferney, and then to the table: “Edmond was born in Paris as was Mimi, but after her husband died they moved to America and he was reared here.”

“Conroy and I have not reared any children,” said Aunt Lillian. “This is our nephew,” nodding toward me. Aunt Lillian seemed either to have forgotten my name or was continuing my family’s tradition.

“Ah oui,” said Madame de Ferney to Aunt Lillian.

“Ah oui,” said Aunt Lillian. “But do tell us about your rearing in Paris.”

“We lived in the Sixth, but below Saint Germain. The Sixth goes all the way to Boulevard Montparnasse, but my father would not admit that. For him it only went as far as Saint Germain. So I was reared in that domain. Is that the right word?” Madame de Ferney asked me.

“Ah oui,” I said. I saw Hazen smile. “Or you could say ‘environs’,” I said. Madame de Ferney seemed pleased at this information and this time said environs out loud with a peculiar guttural sound on the “r.”

“My father was tres formal and would not even ‘tu’ my mother. Of course he did not ‘tu’ me or my sister.” Madame de Ferney paused for quite awhile and looked away from the table. The only sound was Bella putting out coffee cups in the living room.

For my part, I imagined Madame de Ferney was thinking of her days growing up in Paris; I imagined this because in between the rocks tumbling down and squishing the Shaddock bakery, the tornadoes that might be as good as earth cakes, covenants against chickens and clothes lines, I had been thinking in bits and pieces about home. About my father’s webbed aluminum lawn chair and how he took my uncle’s letter and his meatloaf sandwich outside and read the letter while my mother cleaned the kitchen counter where on summer evenings we “just ate”, my mother having her glass of Mogen David wine while she cooked with no idea about the wine’s duty, my father with his beer in a bottle after dinner as he read the paper or, on Fridays, watched boxing on television.

And it wasn’t when Aunt Lillian asked me about a girl friend that I thought of Muff LaRue. It was when Madame Ferney was talking about chicken and poulet and duck and canard. How, after both Muff and I got dressed, not having gone “all the way”, we sat in two chairs under my life guard stand and talked into the night about our futures: me to California to become a doctor, she going East to Sarah Lawrence to major in Classics–and I thought then that studying classics at a fancy East Coast college for girls and skinny-dipping in a Kansas municipal pool with the life guard whose father had a car garage didn’t go together. But I did not say so. And how later I drove Muff home and we promised we’d meet again over Christmas break—at the swimming pool, cold and snow or not.

“Thank you,” my uncle said to Bella as she began clearing the table of dessert plates, all forks now at four o’clock.

My aunt fingered the spoon on the top of her plate. She picked up her wine glass by the stem and studied the color. She started to ring for Bella even though Bella had just left.

“Maintenant that you are ici in Berkeley,” said Madame de Ferney, “do you think it provincial in Kansas?”

My uncle was about to speak and so were Hazen and Doctor Reed when I said to Madame de Ferney and, with considerable aplomb, to the rest of the table:

“Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t.”

“Ah oui!” said Aunt Lillian.

“Did you miss Kansas?” Muff said to me. We are sitting in my father’s lawn chairs that I have taken to the pool and put beneath my old lifeguard stand. It is snowing. The pool has been drained, but not to the bottom. There is a skim of ice on what water remains. “I did not,” said Muff before I could answer.

“I did,” I said.

“Are you going back?” she said. “To Berkeley to be a doctor?”

“Hang up medicine,” I said. “Unless it can create a Juliet. The guy I worked with at the lab used to say that over and over again.” She seemed not to hear me and said:

“I learned that Socrates took up dancing in old age. So I’ve started dancing. Modern dancing.” She got out of her chair and did a small pirouette in the snow in front of me.

“I’ve never dated a dancer,” I said.

And then there was a long silence between us. I took a sideways glace at her. She was looking at the space just in front of us where she had done her pirouette. The snow was falling faster now and it was filling her footprints. I never knew her well enough to guess what she might be thinking. But I was thinking I would not see much of her ever again, and I would be right about that.

“You haven’t said if you are going back.”

“In Berkeley,” I said, “you don’t just eat, and you can’t hang your laundry on the line.” Again she seemed not to hear me and said nothing but got up from her chair and did a second pirouette, this time putting her toes into the same place where they had been before, and in so doing her feet made their marks in the same place where the snow had almost filled in her previous pirouette. And in coming back to her chair she stepped into the same footprints she had made before, and smiled at being able to do so.

When I drove her home Muff asked me if it was true I had once saved a boy from the deep end.

“Yes,” I said.

And it was at the door of her house that she told me where Hazen had gotten his saying, and that was not about medicine, but about philosophy and that when Hazen said it over and over it became his mantra–a word I did not know until I came home that night and I looked it up in my mother’s dictionary.

—Robert Day

——————————

Robert Day’s novel The Last Cattle Drive was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His short fiction has won a number of prizes and citations, including two Seaton Prizes, a Pen Faulkner/NEA prize, and Best American Short Story and Pushcart citations. His fiction has been published by Tri-Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Kansas Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, and New Letters among other belles-lettres magazines. He is the author of two novellas, In My Stead, and The Four wheel Drive Quartet, as well as Speaking French in Kansas, a collection of short stories.

His nonfiction has been published in the Washington Post Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Forbes FYI, Modern Maturity, World Literature Today, and American Scholar. As a member of the Prairie Writers Circle his essays have been reprinted in numerous newspapers and journals nationwide, and on such inter-net sites as Counterpunch. Recent book publications include We Should Have Come By Water (poems) and The Committee to Save the World (literary non-fiction).

Among his awards and fellowships are a National Endowment to the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, Yaddo and McDowell Fellowships, a Maryland Arts Council Award, and the Edgar Wolfe Award for distinguished fiction. His teaching positions include The Iowa Writers Workshop; The University of Kansas; and the Graduate Faculty at Montaigne College, The University of Bordeaux.

He is past President of the Associated Writing Programs; the founder and former director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House; and founder and publisher of the Literary House Press at Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland where he is an Adjunct Professor of English Literature.

Where I Am Now, a collection of his short fiction, will be published in September, 2012 by BkMk Press.

A Flame, a Burst of Light: Two Douglas Glover Stories in An Unfinished War, a War of 1812 Commemorative Anthology

Aug 182012

The poet John B. Lee has collected a splendid new anthology of poems, original documents and fiction commemorating the Canadian part of the War of 1812 (200th anniversary this year, at least the start of conflict). The book, entitled An Unfinished War, War of 1812 Prose & Poetry (Black Moss Press), is imminent, pre-orders available, and contains two short stories by dg, “A Flame, a Burst of Light” which was first published in The New Quarterly last year and “Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm’s Mills (now Oakland, Ontario), November 6, 1814” which first appeared in Gordon Lish’s magazine The Quarterly in the late 1980s (dg still has the ms with Lish’s hand-written editorial notes). This story was subsequently selected by Margaret Atwood for inclusion in the New Oxford Book of Canadian Stories. It also appears in dg’s collection A Guide to Animal Behaviour.

Though written far apart in time, the stories reflect dg’s ongoing obsession with the history of the bloody ground where he grew up, Norfolk County, Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Erie. The Battle of Malcolm’s Mills took place six miles up the road from the family farm; the McCall mentioned in the story is a relative. The return of the prisoners of war took place on Long Point Bay where dg’s Loyalist ancestors settled a few years before. Both events took place in 1814.

In his long effort to parse the historical and geographical grammar of the place where he grew up, dg has collected an anthology of quotations Long Point, a Geography of the Soul: An Anthology of Quotations about Long Point and Norfolk County.

———–

from “A Flame, a Burst of Light”

Of the reasons for our lengthy and fatal sojourn in the swamps of Sandusky, there are several theories. 1) The Americans wished to exact vengeance for atrocities committed by Capt. Crawford’s Indios on the Raisin River. 2) The Americans wished to prevent the men from rejoining their regiments before the close of the summer campaigns. 3) To supply the want of souls in the afterlife.

We were seven hundred dreamers starving and shivering to death in this gateway to the City of Dis.

Of the reasons for our deaths, there are no theories. Ague, fever (quartan, intermittent and acute) and the bloody flux carried us away. Old wounds, opened from damp and lack of common nutriment; pneumonia, dropsy, pthithis, galloping consumption, gangrene and suicide account for the rest. An alarming number of walking corpses attended the fallen like Swiss automatons in a magic show, then tottered off to expire face down in the bulrushes.

In the swamps of Sandusky, there were more corpses than souls. We had a surfeit of bodies. They were difficult to bury in the washing ooze.

Kingsland and Thompson, wraiths and daredevils, murderous on the day with Springfields we borrowed from the Americans at Detroit, mounted amateur theatricals though much bothered at delivering their lines on a stage of sucking mud. Sgt. Collins, of Limerick and the 41st, took the female roles, warbling a sweet falsetto. I mind he scalped Kentuckians with his razor at the Battle of the Raisin, along with Tsenkwatawa’s unspeakable Shawnee….

from “Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm’s Mills (now Oakland, Ontario, November 6, 1814”

In the morning, the men rubbed their eyes and saw Kentuckycavalry and Indians mounted on stolen farm horses cresting the hill on the opposite side of the valley. The Kentuckians looked weary and calm, their hollow eyes slitted with analysis. We were another problem to be solved; they had been solving problems all the way from Fort Detroit, mostly by killing, maiming and burning, which were the usual methods.

The Indians were Cherokee and Kickapoo, with some Muncies thrown in. They had eagle-feather rosettes and long hair down the sides of their heads and paint on their faces, which looked feminine in that light. Some wore scalps hanging at their belts.

They came over the hill in a column, silent as the steam rising from their mounts, and stopped to chew plug tobacco or smoke clay pipes while they analyzed us. More Kentuckians coming on extended the line on either side of the track into the woods, dismounted, and started cook fires or fell asleep under their horses’ bellies, with reins tied at their wrists.

General McArthur rode in with his staff, all dressed in blue, with brass buttons and dirty white facings. He spurred his mare to the front, where she shied and pranced and nearly fell on the steep downward incline. He gave a sign, and the Indians dismounted and walked down the road to push our pickets in. The Indians had an air of attending their eighty-seventh-or-so battle. They trudged down the road bolt upright, with their muskets cradled, as though bored with the whole thing, as though they possessed some precise delineation of the zone of danger that bespoke a vast familiarity with death and dying….

—Douglas Glover

—————

Order An Unfinished War: In the US here; in Canada here.

Bird Nights: Fiction — Jane Eaton Hamilton

Jul 192012

Jane Eaton Hamilton: Photo by Shawna Fletcher

HERE IS A STORY. It is true, but it is also full of lies. And small axes, the kind that make tiny cross-hatchings on hearts.

A surgeon flayed open my wife’s chest and removed her breast: stiches and staples. This was several years ago. While she sleeps her scar unzips (top tape extension, top stop, slider, pull tab), her flesh unfolding like a sleeping bag. Some nights I only see the corset bones that girdle her lungs, gleaming moon slivers in murky red sky, and I say a prayer for them, those pale canoe ribs, those pickup sticks that are all that cinch her in. I wish I could do that: I wish I could hold her together. Some nights I think she may fly away in all directions, north, east, south, west, a huge splatter. She will go so far so fast I will only be able to watch with my mouth fallen open. She’ll be gone, and all I’ll have is a big red mess to clean up and a sliver of rib sticking out of my eye.

Quiver trees are weird enough anyhow, but add a Sociable Weaver nest and you’ve got a real visual pickle. Warty, sponge toffee boils, these bird condos of dry grasses have upwards of 100 different holes for individual families; the nests can house 400 birds. Interestingly, Sociable Weavers are polyamorous, even, apparently, with barbets and finches.

In Namaqualand, Cape Weavers go it individually. The males court females by weaving testicular-like sacs, and if a female remains unimpressed, the male builds a second sac under the first, and etcetera, until a wind knocks the whole shebang down.

Bird-land, human-land—it’s all pretty much just jostling to get and keep the girl.

Some nights when my wife’s incision unzips, a rib extends and on it sits a yellow bird, swaying as if in a great wind, feathers ruffling to lemon combs. I love birds. It makes me happy to hear her song, the same way it makes me happy when my wife sings. (Once when we were fresh, my wife danced naked through our kitchen belting out girl group songs from the 60s.) The little bird warbles and trills, then launches off the rib to fly around our bedroom. She grabs a mosquito near my ear. She flits into the corners, around the light fixtures, and carries back bits of yarn pulled from sweaters, spiderwebs, plastic pricetag spears, dust bunnies. She constructs a nest, shivers down into it, and lays little gelatinous eggs, eggs that I trust, with a simple, guileless trust, will grow up to be lymph nodes for my wife. These bird nights, I am happy, so happy. On some inchoate level, I know the little yellow bird has our backs, and I drift off to trills of sugary bird song.

I hang out on bird-lover websites, where questions abound: Why are my lovebirds changing colour? Aphids–my bird is okay with them, but I’m not? Lovebird feather plucking?

Feather loss, says Avian Web, is a difficult problem to cure when the picking behaviour is already established. Birds should be presented to Dr Marshall at the first signs of picking. My wife and I are feather-plucking. We didn’t go to Dr Marshall and maybe that’s our problem. Our relationship has thrush, bacteria, poor nutrition. My wife and I were once lovebirds. Once, for a nanosecond, We Two Were One. Then, for years, We Two Were One and A Half. Eventually, We Two Were Two. Now, the evidence suggests We Might Be Three.

Birds enchant me. Once we took our daughter to a free flight aviary, the Lory Loft in Jurong Bird Park, Singapore. Having a 20-hectare hillside park entirely devoted to birds is guaranteed to make someone like me giddy. Lories look like small parrots, and in the aviaries, as you whoop and wriggle and scream over suspension bridges high in the treetops, they land on you, they cover you. It’s as if the keepers are up on the rooftop squeezing tubes of oil paint all over you, cadmium orange and cobalt blue and carmine and viridian, screechy territorial colours with a lot of wing flap and pecking.

Ornithologists at the park answer such questions as: Will an ostrich egg support the weight of an adult human? I grapple with this one: Will my human heart support the shifting weight of my wife’s loyalties?

Foraging: The Way to Keep Your [Wife] Mentally Stimulated and Happy

It’s me that forages. Watch me some nights, thumbing through theatre tickets (Wicked! The Vagina Monologues! Avenue Q! My Year of Magical Thinking!) and museum exhibitions (Dali: Painting and Film; Picasso and Britain; Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own) and the detritus that falls from her scar, stirring through wind-up rabbits and plastic zombies and voodoo dolls that tumble free, all the secrets and suffering that she hoards deep inside.

What am I looking for? Something to eat, maybe. Bird seed. A steak.

We met a woman in Namibia who lost most of one breast to a crocodile attack. She was a member of a polygamous tribe, the Himba, whose women wear only loincloths. She bent down at the river with her water gourd, breasts hanging as breasts will do after a bunch of kids, and a croc’s teeth snapped closed on the right one.

Who knows what this woman’s husband thinks when he takes her shriveled, croc-mangled right breast into his hand? Does he trace her history with reverence? Does he spit in disgust and choose another wife?

There are local stories of wives who change in the bathroom, wear bras and prosthetics to bed, and husbands who shun them. There are stories of marital disintegration, and by that I mean what you probably assume: straight marriage. I don’t know the stats for queer marriage breakups after breast cancer. I do know that even after twelve years, when my wife or I drive past the Cancer Agency, not even thinking about what happened, on our way to other appointments and sometimes in the midst of great happiness, one or other of us will burst into tears.

Vancouver has murders of crows, and our house is on their flight path. If you go outside in the dawn gloaming, such as when you are going for chemo, they fill a Hitchcockian sky with black shrieks, and if you could count them, you would run out of numbers before you’d run out of birds. Crows are not protected in BC, and their forest roost was recently ripped down to build a Costco; now tens of thousands roost in a tangle of electric wires and pallets of home building supplies. Their noise is deafening.

10)

Magic realism aside, my wife’s scar is really just a scar, plain, unremarkable, faded with time. (Plain, unremarkable. I tell you. Plain and unremarkable.) Here is the pedestrian truth: she is sort of concave there where her breast once was, a hollowed-out nest. She opted not to have a reconstruction. Her one breast is very small and she goes braless without a prosthetic, which is a loud story, actually, the only blaring part of the reality-struck, pedestrian story: she is obviously one-breasted, especially in t-shirts, and manly anyway, so people stare. Last week at an art opening, a little boy about seven stopped from a dead run and ran his eyes up and down her, up and down her, up and down her, trying to make her make sense.

(These days, I do the same thing, rake my eyes across her. The little boy is right: she no longer makes sense. She is always saying goodbye with her actions while she smiles hello with her lips.)

11)

My heart is a big old blood pump with places engorged like a balloon (I’ve got a big old cardiomyopathy for you, I tell my wife sometimes, but it’s actually heart failure.) My heart is giving up, and has necrotic spots like measles, dead bits which have been dead now for 25 years, what an anniversary: let’s have a cake and candles, happy necrosis to me!). Referring to my circulatory system, a cardiologist once said to me: The tree of you is dying. No doubt too many polygamous weavers? How does this feel for you? my therapist asked about our lives (relationship) going—yes—tits up, three tits up I guess, instead of four, and here is the answer, my letter to my pain: It feels exactly like my heart is failing. Right now it’s stuttering along arrhythmically, but it can’t pump through all these emotions and old, ruptured scars, so it may just keep engorging till I pop like a—

12)

Tumour?

13)

Once I co-owned a grey cockatiel named Hemingway. Hemingway would hop around my scapula and peck food from my teeth while molting grey feathers onto my breasts. He was a happy bird with a yellow comb, but he never wrote a great story as far as I know.

14)

At the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, my wife ran at ostriches while the wild Benguela current tossed waves on the beach. Ostriches have a nail on each of their feet that is capable of slicing a person open as efficiently as any surgeon’s blade. I was up on my toes with alarm, but the ostriches didn’t fight, they only ran, their stunted wings extended. Then the male turned and knocked my wife flat. He danced on her chest until his pea-sized brain got bored.

Just a game, just a game, she assured me afterwards, brushing off, none the worse for wear. I wasn’t really dead.

(This is a lie.)

15)

At Okonjima for cheetahs, I was fascinated instead by the hornbills—those bills and casques! Female hornbills use their droppings to seal themselves into their nests. I did this too, when my wife was diagnosed, but I used an alarm system instead of poop. I’m doing it again, now, but I’m using perimeter lighting, as if shining sunbeams into my wife’s shadows will keep my marriage intact.

16)

My wife’s skin is numb, did I mention that? That’s how her spirit must have healed from all that trauma (PTSD), don’t you think, with a big old numb spot? On the outside of her, cut nerves sometimes go crazy, like a pain orchestra, a violin screech, a flute shrill. Yowey. When I lay beside her and trail my finger across her chest, through her armpit, across the skin near her arm on her back, she can’t feel a thing. Here? I say and she shakes her head. Nothing. Here? Still nothing. Here? Nope. Here? Kinda, sorta, not really.

Does anyone ever really heal after being pushed out of the nest? Things repair, things scar, we go on, but eventually, we find ourselves in free fall anew. Our beaks impale the ground so we’re stuck flapping upside down like cat-lollipops. All the old wounds break open, the old puncture holes (insect bites, that time we fell off our bikes, the tendonitis, the hernia) ooze. We’re all leaking pain. We’re all bloody oozers, in the end, aren’t we?

17)

One night as I lie beside my wife, her chest opens and I watch Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza. The acrobats use my wife’s ribs as tightropes; the contortionists bend double through her ribs and poke their heads back out, like Gumbies. The acrobat stacks chairs one atop another atop another atop another, and then climbs atop himself, fearless, while the chairs shake. I laugh aloud in pure childish glee, and my wife awakens, coughs, and resettles as the performer tumbles.

When he’s scurried away, I rest my cheek in my wife’s loss, my sudden weight causing her to panic and sit bolt upright. She rubs her eyes and peers at me. You have the imprint of a zipper on your cheek, she mumbles.

I reach up and touch the corrugations.

18)

I am at the “my this hurts” age, where “this” is really any body part you want to interject at random: ear, elbow, knuckle, knee, uterus. What relationship do I have to my pain? I find it hot like a combustion engine. I find it has very droopy eyes, and shoulders that slope. It sees me as prey, mostly, I’d guess, and comes at my heart with its little axe, cross-hatch, cross-hatch, like a Kite in the Serengeti dive-bombing to steal a sandwich from an unsuspecting tourist’s hands, talons gashing a cheek. What relationship do I want to have in the future with my pain? I want to be its gay divorcée.

19)

My wife drummed for a PSA a few weeks ago with a group of breast cancer survivors. A murder of breast cancer survivors, they freaked me out with their black feathers and cawing. I can’t handle what’s coming for them (for my wife). The prognosis for my wife’s breast cancer is good, but the last months she has had pain on swallowing, and the chant arrives in the rhythm of the children’s song: Eyes, ears, mouth and nose! Except for breast cancer mets it’s: Liver, lungs, breast and bone! I’m not sure what the song for infidelity is….okay, I am, but I can’t sing it here.

20)

Some nights my wife’s scar opens like Monet’s water lilies at L’Orangerie, a long wide strip of art that is all blue meditation and green silence.

Intending… to… heal, intones a monk in a saffron robe.

I must sit through my pain and gird my back. I must go into my pain and through and beyond my pain.

And come out into art.

My own rendition of my wife’s lost breast is sliced into sections and presented like upright pieces of toast, the tumour glowing in phosphorescence across five slides. Anatomical, direct, confrontational, weeping blood tears.

My Wife’s Breast, by Georgia O’Keefe: a striated red flower full of motion, a rib protruding at the nipple line. My Wife’s Breast, by Pablo Picasso: a spiral breast sprouting hair, a breast with an eye instead of a nipple, a tumour instead of his model’s head. My Wife’s Breast, by Emily Carr: breast as swirling dark tree, tumour as bird’s nest. My Wife’s Breast, by Savadore Dali: a breast sitting on a rib, melting, a clock face ticking down her remaining days. My Wife’s Breast, by Frieda Kahlo: my wife and I completely clothed, hand in hand, a large shadow to my wife’s left, our injuries showing through our t-shirts, a long red, swollen gash on my wife’s right side that pumps blood across a thick vein to my over-huge, engorged, arrhythmic heart while it pumps it back–a perfect silver tea service and a lorikeet on a table to one side.

—Jane Eaton Hamilton

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Jane Eaton Hamilton is the author of Hunger, a 2002 collection of short fiction. She is also the author of Jessica’s Elevator, Body Rain, Steam-Cleaning Love, and July Nights and Other Stories. Her books have been shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, the MIND Book Award, The Pat Lowther Award, The VanCity Award and The Ethel Wilson Prize in the BC Book Prizes.

Short pieces, which have appeared in such places as the New York Times, Maclean’s, Canadian Gardening, Fine Gardening, The Globe and Mail and Seventeen magazine as well as in numerous anthologies, have won the CBC Literary Awards, the Yellow Silk fiction award, the Paragraph fiction award, the Event non-fiction award, the Prism International fiction award (twice), the Belles Lettres essay award, the Grain non-fiction award, the This Magazine fiction award and The Canadian Poetry Chapbook Contest. Stories have appeared in the Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Short Stories, Tarcher Putnam’s The Spirit of Writing: Classic and Contemporary Essays Celebrating the Writing Life, and The Writer’s Presence (Bedford/St.Martin’s USA). They have been short-listed for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories.

Jane blogs at janeeatonhamilton.wordpress.com.

Fault Lines: Fiction — Gerard Beirne

Jul 062012

A widow, an Irish wanderer, a house built on a fault line and a mysterious light form the essential furniture of Gerard Beirne’s fine new story “Fault Lines.” Beirne is an Irish writer and you can hear the fierce rhetoric of the Irish in his opening cadences, the insistent lists and parallel constructions. The story is dark, almost noir in its atmosphere of eroticism and constant menace. Gerard Beirne and I don’t know each other except in our email interchange over this story, but we have tread common paths. Beirne was the Writer in Residence at the University of New Brunswick where I also have been Writer in Residence; he is the fiction editor at The Fiddlehead where I published some of earliest stories, yea, these many years ago; and he just published a poetry collection, Games of Chance: A Gambler’s Manual, with Oberon Press in Ottawa, a publisher with whom I have had a long association including a decade of editing the annual Best Canadian Stories. So he and I exist in almost parallel universes that have somehow flowed together on this page. Read the story.

You could look at it this way. You could say I was the one real beneficiary of his death. Not so much the car as the air conditioning, the house as the pool, the cellar as the wine collection, the lady as his wife.

As a lady she brought with her charm, sophistication, impeccable dress sense, a taste for good food. But as his wife she brought with her everything. His fortune, his lifestyle, his foul mouth, and his filthy mind.

* * *

“We’re all so much better off without him,” Maybelle told me on that first night we ended up in bed together. I was drinking his champagne, eating his caviar, lying passively beneath his gyrating wife. “He was cruel. He was fucking cruel. Cruel to all of his previous wives. Cruel to their children. Cruel to himself. And, worst of all, cruel to me. Irrespective of his ability to increase his fortune we are all so much better off without the bastard.”

She tipped over her champagne glass and poured his 1975 Dom Perignon along my chest, then bent over, extended her tongue, and licked that expensive liquid up in one long sweeping motion. And in that prolonged salivating moment, I knew just how wrong she was. How it was I, and not anyone of his close or distant family, who was the better off.

I fed her with his caviar, and she sucked it from my fingers. I appraised her firm body as it pincered me from above, grateful for the multigym he had purchased on its behalf. Then I thought of the swimming pool outside where earlier we had stripped and swam in the moonlike glow of the veranda spotlight. It was the first time we had seen each other’s bodies. The first time I had seen the naked flesh of a widow of barely forty-eight hours. The yellow glare of the spotlight jaundiced her pale skin. A light breeze blew in from the canyon, that large empty gulch that stretched ahead of us, carrying the smell of creosote bushes. The dry desert dust landed softly on the flagstones and tiles, on the surface of the shimmering water lit from below, on our warm flesh lit from we knew not where. We were exposed not just to each other but to the world if the world had cared to look.

The only lights to be seen were those dotted around the property for security, a row of house lights eighty miles to the east, and the stars they could barely be distinguished from. We scarcely glanced across at one another before diving on in. If I could help it, I was determined never to resurface. But resurface we did, together, in a hardened embrace.

Maybelle’s toes curled against the white sheets. She grasped my shoulder blades tightly with her fingers. Her long manicured fingernails scratched across my skin. “Cruelty is the worst sin of all, don’t you think?” she whispered close to my ear. Then she did something with her body that might not have been thought possible. “This was the only way I could hurt him in return.”

I almost screamed with the excruciating mix of pleasure and pain. The white curtains billowed out from the half-open shutters. A solitary star twinkled within my line of vision. Maybelle shuddered violently. Her strong legs gripped my thighs. Her fingers clawed at my torso. The star plummeted through the black sky. Died before my eyes.

Later as Maybelle showered, I stood by the window in his study and looked up, as he had looked up on so many occasions, at the constellations with his telescope. Orion. Pegasus. Ursa Major. What would happen if one of those stars died? I wondered. What sort of hunter would remain, what sort of winged horse, what sort of furrowing instrument? What would become then of the great design? How would we read the night?

I turned the lens towards the darkened desert, the canyon. That other great void. From deep within the canyon I witnessed an uncertain flash of light shooting upwards for which I had no explanation. To the east, the distant houselights flickered. Outside the glare of the security lights reflected against the lens. In the bathroom a flow of water spread in rivulets down Maybelle’s hard body.

How had I come this far?

* * *

Leaving Ireland had been easy. Leaving a small Donegal town. A small landholding I had no interest in. Leaving home.

I was happy to fill a hold all and empty it on the bed of a YMCA on the other side of the world. Happy to be paranoid on the streets of New York. Happy to work the graveyard shift washing dishes in an all-night cafe. Happy to tire of all that and board a Greyhound for Los Angeles.

Happy to get work with a landscape firm cutting lawns and trimming hedges in Santa Monica. Happy to meet Maybelle in one of his holiday homes by the side of his pool in a pastel orange bikini. Happy to peruse her shapely body. Happy to amicably converse. Happy to return to his secluded mansion in the Mojave Desert to replace his Mexican gardener who had flown the coop with immigration on his tail. Happy to inhabit his property. Happy to rise through his ranks. Happy to become, on his request, her personal assistant. Happy to follow her wherever she might go. Happy to assist in his early demise.

* * *

Maybelle pulled at my shoulder, woke me up. She sat up in bed distraught. The moon shed its light through the shuttered window. “Did you feel that?” Her face was pale. She crossed her hands over her chest like a corpse and held on to herself.

“What?” I looked for my watch on the table next to the bed. It was twelve minutes past three.

She turned angrily. “Didn’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“The shaking.”

“No.”

“It was an earthquake.” She pushed her head slightly forward as though listening intently. As if something might be heard that would confirm her suspicion.

“I didn’t feel a thing.” I tried to put my arm around her to comfort her, but she brushed it off. She turned suddenly to the empty champagne bottle on the table beside her. “Look.”

“What is it?”

“It’s vibrating. Can’t you see that?” She got up out of bed, and walked to the window. “We’re on the fault here. Right on the fault. Any moment the Big One could come, and when it does we’ll be swallowed up whole. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“It was nothing,” I said. “A small tremor at the most.” We had talked about this before, but never at such intimate quarters, never so close to death.

“The bastard. The fucking bastard.” She looked out into the dark. In the breeze the light material of the curtain wrapped itself around her naked body. “That’s why he built it here. Goddamn him! Because it was so fucking cheap. His one great ambition in life — to buy up the fucking fault lines!”

“He’s dead now,” I said. “Everything can be undone.” I held my hand out to her. “Come back to bed.”

“Bed,” she repeated. “The great undoing.” She pulled the shutters closed as if they could somehow protect her. She came back over and got in beside me. The shutters rattled. Maybelle heard them and jumped.

“It’s only the wind.”

She glared at me. “Did we really screw?”

“Yes we did,” I assured her. “Like there was no tomorrow.”

* * *

Maybelle honoured his wishes and had him cremated. A simple ceremony had been arranged. Three of his previous wives showed up and six of his children. Maybelle was unclear how many wives there had been before her and was equally unsure about the number of children. She had none by him that much she knew. He had insisted on that. He told her he did not want her destroying her body like all of the others. That she was his last chance.

“His last chance for what?” I asked.

Maybelle shrugged. “I have no idea.”

She did not speak to any of them, but she assured me they would be as glad to see the back of him as she was. He had treated them all despicably. “There are no bruises I can show you,” she told me one time sensing some slight doubt of mine. “Not on this body, but up here,” she said pointing to her head. “There’s where the damage lies.” At his cremation I looked at his array of wives and children and considered the cumulative internal injuries.

Afterwards I drove Maybelle and the urn with his ashes home. Keeping the urn with her, Maybelle went up to lie down. She did not reappear until evening. She ate a light dinner and asked me to send the staff away. She said she needed time alone. They would be paid of course. I asked if her dismissal of the staff included me also, and she told me not to be so foolish.

After dinner she asked me to drive her to the canyon. She held the urn in her lap as we drove. The orange dust swirled up from the wheels past the windows. The hot evening air wafted in shimmering waves distorting all that was visible. I looked out at the wavering yellow sneezeweeds and desert trumpet. A Jackrabbit leaped dangerously across the road in front of us clambering for shade. I put my hand on the urn, our fingers touching accidentally. Maybelle appeared not to notice, although she told me later that her heart for a moment ceased to function. The urn and Maybelle’s fingers were cool to the touch, his air-conditioning keeping all of our temperatures low. I felt the cold waves sweep over me, their calming influence, as our fingers parted.

Maybelle drummed on the lid of the urn impatiently. She glared through the front window. “You never talk about Ireland.” She tightened her lips and brought me under her gaze.

“I’d rather forget it,” I told her. A viscous green and orange sunset soaked through the widening sky.

“Yes,” she agreed pulling the urn in against her stomach, “there are certain things best forgotten.” She glanced through the window at the vast expanse of gleaming desert. “I’m sorry. I’ll never ask you again.”

But Maybelle was right. In the three years I had known her I had never willingly spoken of Ireland. On a few occasions in the beginning she had alluded to it, but I skilfully deflected the conversation. I was living a new life now. Perhaps the first I had ever really lived. At its worst Ireland was a womb, a time pre-birth. At its very best it was a uterine contraction forcing me out into the life I now lived.

A shaft of light speared the road in front of us. I steered his car deliberately towards it. Permitted the light to dissect the metal car, and us within it, like a laser cutting tool. It shone brilliantly through the front windscreen, sparkling on the side of the urn, and leaving a line of gold along Maybelle’s toned body. She shielded her eyes with her hand, stared absently ahead.

“A meteor fell to earth here one time.” I had not heard mention of this before. “Some time in the sixties.”

“A lot of things from outer space were visible in the sixties,” I reminded her.

Maybelle ignored me. “The marks are still visible although the meteor itself was broken up and removed for scientific evaluation. The crater is somewhere around here.” She twisted the lid of the urn in a half-circle. I thought for a moment she was going to take it off to check if he was in there still. “He used to speak about it. He said he wished they had left it where it had fallen. He said he could have made a fucking fortune out of it.” She gritted her teeth as though constraining a further obscenity.

The car bounced on its suspension over a series of ruts in the surface of the road. A plump turkey buzzard swooped low and flew past the front of the car flapping its black wings viciously. We watched it circle the rotting trunk of a lone pinyon tree.

“Vulture.” Maybelle seemed in awe of it. She chewed on the side of her mouth. I looked at her fluffed out hair, her carefully applied eye-shadow, mascara, lipstick, and face powders, her slinky black mourning dress, her high heels. I surveyed the flat expanse of water-starved decay that surrounded us. Maybelle seemed more out of place here than I. More removed. I wondered about her past. She had never spoken openly about that either.

The road turned directly into the blazing sunset. The sky was engulfed in flames before us. We could have been driving into hell itself. A hundred yards or so up ahead a dirt track veered off to the left leading down to the canyon. I slowed down, pulled off the road, and followed along the rough surface until the earth opened up before us.

I got out and opened Maybelle’s door for her. She swung her long shapely legs out, and placed her high heels on the desert soil. I took her arm, and we walked slowly out towards the canyon. Her shoes scuffed on the loose stones. Maybelle twisted on her heel, her left leg buckling beneath her. I supported her weight and helped her to rebalance. Then we walked together right up to the edge. The yellow and red ochre walls of the canyon dropped sharply downwards for thousands of feet. Giant stalagmites of crumbling rock pierced upwards from the canyon sides and floor. Maybelle showed no fear.

“He’s been down there,” Maybelle said. “At least that’s what he told me.”

I steadied myself and looked down into the dry gulch. In all the time I had lived here I had never been this close to the canyon before. Obscure trails wound their way along narrow switchbacks making me feel dizzy.

“He’d stay overnight,” she said kicking some loose soil over the edge. I watched it fall lightly through the air. “He said it felt good to be sleeping in the bowels of the earth. Of course he might have been anywhere fucking any one of his lady fucking friends.”

Maybelle smiled and swiftly drew back her arm with the urn. She swung it through a wide arc and, letting out a grunt like a hammer or discus-thrower, she flung it as hard as she could out into the ravine. The urn soared through the air then dropped swiftly downwards. It struck a ridge a few hundred feet below and bounced outwards.

“MIND YOUR BIG FUCKING HEAD!” Maybelle’s shrill voice echoed through the walls of the canyon before returning to haunt her. She laughed hysterically. The urn fell deeper into the gulch crashing into one of the sharp peaks. A dull thud like broken bone sounded upwards. Pieces of ceramic splintered and showered. Heat hardened clay shattered against the earth it had been raised from. His ashes gusted outwards. A cloud puffed up past our faces and over our heads. A mixture of sobs and laughter bellowed from Maybelle’s open mouth and ricocheted back out of the throat of the canyon. Her make-up was smudged with tears, and her black dress was covered in red dust. She rocked on her high heels. I held onto her fast, afraid she would topple over the edge, and it was then we kissed for the first time, even as his ashes continued to swirl about us. We may have tasted them, him, on our pressed together lips, our pro-offered tongues. I was aroused and repulsed at once. Our mouths separated, and we clung together at the edge of the great divide.

We drove home in the dimming light. Maybelle’s fingers trailed across the back of my neck. The tyres churned over the dirt road. I observed the silhouette of the buzzard atop the decaying tree. I knew that Maybelle had been watching out for it too. I drove on quickly. Miles of road disappeared behind us. We approached the huge outcrop of his mansion. I pressed the remote control and the heavy metal gates opened at my fingertips. Maybelle watched them shut securely behind us in the rear-view mirror. Inside the house she reached immediately for the champagne and brought it out to the pool. She popped open the cork. A gush of champagne spurted into the air. The veranda spotlight switched on automatically. Maybelle filled our glasses. Frantic bubbles spewed over the edges. “To life,” she said raising her glass. We tipped their fragile edges together and drank thirstily washing the dust down. Then Maybelle turned her back to me and instructed me to unzip her dress.

I pulled the zip downwards along the ridge of her spine. I was still in her employment, still serving as her personal assistant. My assistance in his death could even have been construed as a part of my service. Likewise our trip to the canyon. But surely the kiss had changed all that. Unless the provision of comfort and release for a grieving wife was a part of my duty too. For yes, despite her relief at his demise and despite her contribution to it, Maybelle was grieving, grieving for something as yet unclear.

She flicked her shoes off her feet into the swimming pool and slipped her dress off her shoulders. I watched the shoes sink heel-down into the warm water. She cocked a glance at me, and I knew that I was expected to undress too. The low howl of a distant coyote lingered in the dense air. We teetered for a moment unclothed on the edge of the pool, then dived in.

* * *

Until the very end I had little contact with him. He was hardly ever there, always jetting around on one business concern or another. Whenever he was present, I was usually too busy with his wife’s life to intervene in his. We nodded from distances, exchanged casual remarks.

“You take care of her,” he told me early on establishing the nature of our relationship, “like you took care of my gardens. Trimming, pruning, watering. Keep her neat. Keep her beautiful. It’s what she wants. Pay attention to her whims, but be wary. There’s a certain wildness in any good garden that ought to be cultivated but contained.” He held my wrist firmly. “I don’t need to tell you this, you do your job and I’ll pay you well, you don’t, and I’ll kick your fucking ass all the way back to Ireland.”

I took no offence in these latter remarks. He was a business man adopting a sensible economic position. He was paying me good money after all. Incredible money. He had a right to certain expectations, and I was not an unwilling party to all of this. As for comparing his wife to a garden, it could easily be interpreted as the stuff of poetry, love even.

Whatever about the first kiss, or the first glimpse of Maybelle’s naked body, the instance of our coition, I knew, should have represented a moment of catharsis in my life. But just as my departure from Ireland was welcomed but left me none the wiser, this moment too escaped me. Nothing could ever be the same again, and yet beyond the champagne, the caviar, the sex, the selfish indulgences, the difference eluded me.

Our first night together became two, became three, became four. I slept in his bed, I ate his food and drank his drink. And, yes, I fucked his wife.

His phone was disconnected, his staff were excused from their duties, and his guard dogs prowled the perimeters. Maybelle was raucous, crude, and undisciplined. She was burdened with grief. But I, I was free to savour the delights. The champagne, the caviar, the grinding of our bodies. Although I barely knew him, he bequeathed me all of that.

The remaining dispersal of his fortune had still to be determined however. Maybelle was not ready for lawyers just yet she said. Nor the relatives. Not ready to face the swarm that would descend to pick over his bones. She felt certain she would come into the most of it, but the others would surely contest. Apart from his unnumbered previous wives there were any number of women out there who may have borne his children she said. Any number of individuals who would lay claim to his past. For now she didn’t want to have to deal with that. She wanted a few private moments of dignity.

We awoke hot and clammy at four in the morning after a fiery night of cavorted passion. My limbs ached. Maybelle tossed and turned. Flipped her pillow over, beat it flat. She turned on her back and kicked the remaining sheet off of us.

“He hated nights like this,” she said. “They were somehow my fault.” A trickle of sweat ran down the side swell of her freckled breast. Maybelle started to cry.

“Maybelle.” I reached over and curled up against her. Our bodies meshed stickily. I stroked her tear-stained cheek. The heat between us was unbearable, and yet we clung on. Over her shoulder through the open window, the sky was filled with burning stars. The light breeze swished through the palm leaves. Maybelle convulsed in my arms, sobbing heavily. She began to curse him loudly. All manner of crudities slipped off her tender lips.

“Shh!” I brushed the hair off her forehead. I took her hand and helped her from the bed. I led her into his study and brought her to the telescope by the window. I positioned the eyepiece on Venus. I stood behind Maybelle and clasped my arms about her waist. Her body trembled against me as she leaned in to look.

“It’s startling,” she whispered.

“Venus, the most brilliant of all.”

“In all our years together he never once let me look through this instrument.” She swung the telescope through the heavens. Took it all in. Then she lowered it down to the black horizon. “My God! Look!”

I lifted my head from her neck which I had been gently kissing. Even with my naked eye the flame of light was visible flaring brightly upwards. The guard dogs began to whine. The padded beat of their paws as they ran in circles around the compound punctuated the stillness.

She pulled her head back from the telescope. “It’s coming from the canyon,” she said. in that moment it died away. It was the same light I had seen a few nights previous. Maybelle looked at me horrified. “What is it?”

“It could be anything,” I said. “Anything at all.”

I knew she was thinking of the urn arcing through the air, of its body shattering against the rock, and his ashy remains scattering in the winds. The whining of the dogs lowered in pitch and volume until it disappeared, and the rhythmic beat of their paws came to a standstill. Maybelle turned in my arms. She pressed her bristling goose pimpled flesh against me.

We would go back to the bed now I knew, and she would hurt me. Harder than ever before. Doling out her vengeance in the only way she knew how.

The following afternoon we sat out by the pool on the veranda eating a late breakfast. We drank the orange juice I had freshly prepared and ate a mix of dates and figs. A full pot of Colombian coffee waited beside two white cups and saucers. We looked across the flat desert to the canyon. The sun shone down, and a light breeze trickled through the scattered low brush. A green and yellow lizard slipped over the balcony. Maybelle bit lusciously into a fig and spoke as she chewed.

“Do you think we should check the canyon?” She looked at me seriously.

I laughed. “It’s too vast, Maybelle. There would be no point.”

Maybelle stared at me, annoyed by my laughter. She deliberated on something. “The telescope is pointed directly at the spot.” She shrugged. “It was only a thought. It would ease my mind.”

Her response intimidated me. We were not on equal footing yet. An element of authority persisted in her tone. I would have to proceed more cautiously.

She took a drink of orange juice and peered over the balcony. I saw something give way within her. “I was scared last night, that’s all.” She smiled back at me. “The light was unusual, don’t you think?”

“It was curious,” I replied.

“But you’re right,” she said. “It could have been anything. It would be pointless to investigate.”

The empty cups rattled in their saucers. Maybelle looked to them and then to me. The tremor ran through both of our bodies. Maybelle gripped my hand. The water sloshed in the pool, broke in waves against its sides, and splashed over the edge. Then the tremor subsided as quickly as it began.

“It’s alright,” I said. “It has passed.”

Maybelle looked terrified. We sat there waiting for more, for the aftershocks, but nothing more came. “In all my time here, I’ve never got used to it.”

I looked across the flat country, followed the line of weakness with my eyes. “It’s the earth coming together,” I told her, “not renting apart. That’s its saving feature.”

“It will be the death of us,” she said. “Believe you me.”

The water continued to ebb in the pool. For the first time since his death Maybelle mentioned what had occurred.

“We did no wrong, did we?”

I shook my head. “We administered his medicine, that’s all.” And that was all we had done. I had no regrets about that. “Irrespective of what you thought of him, he was in great pain. We did him a service. A final act of loving generosity.”

In the end all we did was hasten up his dying. People did it all of the time. The dose was greater than the recommended one, but his passage out of this life was eased considerably.

“It was the least we could do. If you had left him in pain, if you had deliberately done that and had taken pleasure from it, that would be something else. That might give you something to trouble your conscience with. And even then who is to say whether you would have been right or wrong?”

Maybelle ran her finger across the table top. She disturbed a light covering of dust. She held out the coated tip of her finger. “A part of him? It has to be possible.”

I didn’t answer. She looked hard at her finger then ever so slowly pushed it into her mouth and sucked on it suggestively.

I looked away as though I had caught her engaged in a personal act. I firmly believed we had done the right thing, but it was true our motives had to be questioned. When Maybelle initially discussed it with me I had felt it a part of my duty. But did I also hope that we would end up together like this? Did I conspire to partake in his fortune? And yet he was going to die anyway within a matter of days or weeks, a month or two at the outside the doctor had said. So what had I altered? But of course what I had altered was the nature of our relationship. Together, we had plotted the taking of a life. Conspirators. Implicated by each other’s actions.

As for hoping we would end up like this or that I would partake in his fortune, I honestly could not say. I could not remember consciously aspiring to any of that, still can’t, and yet a part of me pleaded guilty on this behalf.

“Depending on how this turns out I intend to sell this property,” she said.

I nodded.

“In some ways I will hate to see it go.” She got up and leaned over the balcony where the lizard had earlier crawled. The bright blue cloudy sky sloped to meet the seared horizon. Maybelle turned to face me. The front of her white silk dressing gown flapped open. Her pale lightly freckled flesh, as if the scorching Californian sun was incapable of touching it, was exposed above and below the knotted belt.

“What do you see?” she asked.

I responded with a puzzled look.

“In me? When you look at me what do you see?”

I poured myself a coffee, tasted it. “A strong woman. Someone capable of surviving out here. Like the odd rare plant that intrudes into the desert, that has no place belonging here, but somehow makes it this far. Survives against the odds. And with a fresh fall of rain blooms magnificently, beautifully, brightening up the dullness in a way unimaginable to the natural habitat.”

Maybelle laughed harshly. “My god! You do have the gift of the gab, no doubt about it. You’re a rare bloom yourself.” She turned back to the dry expanse and spoke quietly, almost to herself. “If I asked you to take me back to Ireland with you, would you? For me, would you return?”

“That would depend,” I said considering my reply, “in which capacity you were asking me to return. As staff or as something else?”

Maybelle brushed out her hair with her fingers. “What would be your choice?” .

“As staff I would return, for a while at least. But I would not remain indefinitely.”

“And as something else?”

“I suppose it would depend on the something else.”

The lower half of her gown had slipped open further and her muscular right thigh was now exposed to the hip. The inner curves of her firm breasts were clearly visible.

“What have you got in mind?”

I took another drink of coffee. Maybelle’s collar bone protruded like a primitive neck adornment. “That is up to you,” I said. “I have no mind of my own.”

Maybelle quickly pulled her gown in around her. “That’s where you are so wrong.” She was agitated, upset. “He did not buy that. He was never able to buy minds. He could bruise them, but he could not own them. That was his mistake. That was always his mistake. He thought he could recognise something flawed, something imperfect that would be available for less, and then work on it, renovate it, pretty it up to be admired by all and make a handsome profit. But the trouble was the flaw would always be there, could not be painted away, and as sure as God the weakness would finally break through to the surface bringing him and everything around him down with it.”

She clutched the lapels of her gown tightly about her chest. The knuckles of her clenched fists showed through as white as weather exposed bone.

“You are right,” I said. “Right about it all except for in one respect. What you say he recognised as flaws were not flaws at all. They were not weaknesses but strengths. Not to be hidden away but to be revealed and revered.”

A sharp wind gusted across the veranda. Maybelle braced herself against it. Out above the horizon the blue sky darkened upwards to grey as a wall of swirling particles rose like a curtain of gauze.

“Dust storm,” I said. “We better get inside quickly.”

Maybelle steadied herself. I reached across, took her arm, and led her indoors.

The storm lasted throughout the afternoon. Maybelle and I watched it from the bedroom window. The pale particles of dust repulsed and attracted one another. We could see nothing outside of ourselves. As though we too were swirling somewhere out in the universe at some point in its infinite existence where something, a planet or a star, some heavenly body, was either being created or destroyed. We held on to one another. From time to time Maybelle wept.

The storm blew over. Lifted like a fog departing. Maybelle kissed me on the cheek as if something had lifted within her also. Something that had caused her to wonder if the storm would ever pass on, if we would not be lost within it forever. She took my hand and we walked outside.

The figs, the dates, the white cups and saucers, the empty jug of orange juice, the table and chairs were covered in a shroud of yellow and red dust. The veranda, the trees, the shrubs, the carefully watered lawns. Particles floated on the pool water, dispersed beneath the surface in a murky haze. Maybelle looked at me, and in a single movement shrugged off her dressing gown. This time we understood each other perfectly. I nodded my assent and undressed. I took her hand and together we jumped into the dust-filled water.

That night Maybelle and I withdrew silently to his study. We stood either side of his telescope watching the night sky. I listened to Maybelle’s heavy breathing, and she listened to mine. The stars flickered on and off. We waited patiently until we finally saw what we had come to see. Like a meteorite burning upwards, returning to bring order to the cosmos. Maybelle bent her head into the telescope where it was trained. She raised her head and nodded her confirmation. The light extinguished. She led me back into the bedroom and made angry love.

* * *

I set out alone the following morning while Maybelle slept. I took his car and drove down to the canyon. The morning haze clung lightly above the desert. The yellow sun had begun its upwards curve. Already the day was hot. I had decided the previous night after our rough lovemaking to go out and take a look at the canyon. To see, for Maybelle’s sake, if I could find anything that would explain the light.

I looked through the telescope before leaving to where it was pointed. I observed the prominences, the distinguishing features that might help identify the exact location later.

As I drove I turned the air-conditioning off and rolled down the side window. The hot air wafted through. The skyline was tinged in pink. The soil all around warmed to an orange gleam. A kangaroo rat hopped out from a clump of sagebrush across the road in front of me. I felt the soft bump of its body beneath the front wheel. I looked back and saw its innards spewed across the road. I recalled the turkey buzzard Maybelle and I had seen the time we had been out here together.

I reached the canyon about three quarters of an hour later. I went over to the edge and looked down into the canyon where Maybelle had previously cast the urn. There was no sign of its fragments anywhere. I glanced along the canyon floor and tried to gauge the location the light had flared from. I looked back to identify the position of his house. Although the house itself was not visible, I recognised the landmarks around it. I turned again to the canyon and took my directions from the features I had observed through the telescope. I estimated that I’d need to travel another two or three miles along the canyon rim.

I drove as far as I could in the car, about another mile and a half, before the track ran out. I pulled in, turned off the engine, and began to walk through the dry dirt and brush. The gouged out gulch fell sharply to my right. The large gaseous sphere of the sun ignited high in the sky. Perspiration broke out from the pores on my forehead and underarms. My throat was already dry. I should have set out earlier. I was crazy to have come without water. It was a basic rule in the desert to always carry an extra two days food and water. The body could lose up to a gallon a day. Even when you are not thirsty you need to keep drinking. I knew this only too well, and yet I ignored this ingrained knowledge. I hadn’t even bothered to take his emergency pack from the car. Flares, first-aid and snakebite kit, matches, compass.

I walked labouriously across the baked earth. I wiped my brow and scanned back across the flat desolation to where Maybelle lay in bed sipping, no doubt, from the remainder of his champagne. We had drunk fourteen bottles between us in the last few days. Maybelle told me she was developing a taste for it, that it was becoming an obvious part of her future.

The sudden buzz of a rattlesnake stopped me dead in my tracks. A number of rocks were scattered out to my left-hand side. It could well have been hiding there in the shade. I listened keenly to trace the sound, but the rattle abruptly stopped. For a while I stayed where I was watching and listening. Then I cautiously pushed on.

I finally made it out to where I believed the light had come from. The muscles in the backs of my legs ached. My shirt sleeves were soaked with sweat. It clung to my back. I wondered if Maybelle could possibly be watching me. Looking, from his study, through the great lens seeking out my human form.

The sun scorched downwards relentlessly from high in the sky. I was exhausted by the energy I had expended walking in its heat. I rested on my hunkers and looked down into the wide gulf where the earth had once been cut through by a surging flow of water. Layer upon layer of rocks receded downwards, through time, to the oldest strata at the dried out river bed. I thought of the flash floods that could sweep through in a moment, higher than a person, careening destructively through the gullies.

I stood up and walked to the rim. I viewed the crags and razor-back ridges eroded by wind, water, and extreme cycles of heat and cold. The sun caught on the phosphorescent tint of mineral deposits and flashed back a myriad of minute glinting rainbows.

I ought to have taken binoculars along to bring the bone-dry gullies and washes closer. To look for anything out of the ordinary. Staring down this distance scared me though. I felt genuinely fearful that I would be drawn over the edge to fall helplessly like the urn which held his ashes.

I walked along the rim for over an hour forcing myself to look between the buttes and ridges, but I could see nothing unusual. I knew I would have to go down. I would have to overcome my fears and find a trail winding over the switchbacks down into the heart of the canyon.

It was approaching noon, and without water it would be reckless to attempt it. And yet I didn’t want to go back to Maybelle without having tried. It would be the death of whatever we had between us to do otherwise. To lie, to pretend I had been down there and had seen nothing that would give any explanation, was not something I would have been capable of doing, was not something she would have believed.

I searched for another fifteen minutes and found the beginnings of a trail along the side of the canyon. It could have been formed by the feet of a past nomadic tribe or by miners seeking out the minerals stored beneath the earth’s surface. It might not even have been a trail at all but the basic lie of the land.

I inhaled steeply and stepped cautiously out onto the pathway. I tried not to look down. I walked as far away from the edge as possible, clinging to the rough canyon wall, shuffling each foot along. My throat contracted with thirst and fear. A gust of wind caused me to teeter momentarily. I leaned in against the canyon wall for protection. My heart pounded deep within my skeletal frame. I felt the hard rock pressing into my spine. No more than five feet away the sheer drop below veered up to meet me. I caught my breath and held it. I stood erect, my body straightening away from the angled wall. I exhaled slowly and began to move again.

I had only come a few hundred yards. The top of the canyon was not far above my head. I had a long way to go. I eased my way along, looking straight ahead of me, until I reached the first switchback. The trail curved steeply through a sharp U-turn, narrowing at the point of curvature to less than three feet. The dry soil and loose fragments of rock scattered beneath the soles of my shoes. The worn grips of my light footwear slid dangerously over them. Particles of grit and dust trickled over the edge. I had come completely unprepared for this. The temperature was rising into the nineties. I had no water, no headwear, no decent footwear, and not enough nerve. I was weak and sweating profusely. I stopped at the curve of the trail and leaned once more against the hard jutting wall. Against my better instincts I looked down. The vast depth of the gulch was fearsome. I felt dizzy and nauseous, parched with thirst. My sense of balance wavered. I could hardly believe how irresponsible I had been. I knew the dangers of desert country as much as anyone.

The sun flashed in my eyes and dazzled me. My body swayed lightly. I tensed with the overwhelming terror of my mortality. The buzz of the rattlesnake shook loudly in my ears. The dark wide span of the vulture’s wings cast its shadow across the whole of the canyon as the vicious trembling began.

The ground shook violently beneath me. It shook its way through the base of my feet up through my spine to my skull. I thought of Maybelle lying in bed gripped with fear. I heard the loud rumble of earth and rock as it loosened and fell away. I watched it shower down around me. Then I closed my eyes, wrapped my arms tightly around myself, and listened to the catastrophe of my quaking body.

* * *

I drove back to Maybelle wondering where it would go from here. Although I could always try again, I knew I wouldn’t. Even with the right equipment, even taking the necessary precautions, I would not descend again into the canyon. His fortune, his air-conditioning, his pool, his wife were not worth that to me. Had I finally reached a moment of catharsis in my life? Had something of magnitude about my existence finally been revealed to me? Would everything be different from here on out?

But deep within me I knew that this was no different from my decision to leave Ireland. That there too I had forsaken a livelihood people would kill for. There too I had forsaken the people closest to me.

I drove along the winding desert road realising that nothing had changed, that my life would go on as it always had done in a way I would never comprehend, that the mysterious flame from the canyon was as deep as any mystery got and that understanding left you nothing but the flat logical explanations.

I looked out my side window at the solitary tree where the buzzard had been, and whether it was a trick of the light, a desert mirage, or not, I believed I saw an enormous crater just beyond it, one I had not noticed before. I would take Maybelle out to that in the early morning, I decided. Before the sun came up. And whether the crater existed or not, we would make love there and watch together the fiery dawning of a new day. I would tell her of my decision to leave and allow her, in her lovemaking, to hurt me as she had never hurt me before. Not by any act of violence, but by an unprovoked act of tenderness. Assuming we were permitted that final grace.

— Gerard Beirne

————

Gerard Beirne is an Irish writer who moved to Norway House, a Cree community in Northern Manitoba, in 1999 where he lived for three years. While living there, he interviewed Elders in the community and edited for publication an anthology of those interviews. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and is a past recipient of The Sunday Tribune/Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick 2008-2009 and is a Fiction Editor with The Fiddlehead.

His novel The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars Publishers, London, 2003) was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2004 for the best book of Irish fiction and was selected as Book of the Year 2004 by The Daily Express. His most recent novel Turtle was published by Oberon Press, 2009.

His short story “Sightings of Bono” was adapted into a short film featuring Bono (U2) by Parallel Productions, Ireland in 2001 and released on DVD in 2004.

His poetry collection Games of Chance: A Gambler’s Manual has just been published by Oberon Press- Fall 2011. His collection of poetry Digging My Own Grave was published by Dedalus Press, Dublin. An earlier version won second place in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award.

Vee: Fiction — T. Greenwood

Jun 102012

Herewith, a short story about the horror of habits, about the crush of daily life and the way mundane things can multiply into tragedy. Set amongst California wildfires and searing Santa Ana winds, a young couple struggles to balance love, work and sanity in the swirling aftermath of becoming new parents. Tammy Greenwood’s “Vee” is a tale of survival, a domestic war story whose battles lines are drawn around sleepless nights, diaper changes and the unflinching demands of the modern American parent. Greenwood’s novels have been called “heartbreaking, thrilling and painfully beautiful” and “Vee” is no exception. The author of seven novels, Greenwood was born in and often writes about Vermont, but now lives and works in San Diego, California. She is a teacher, a mother, and full-time writer and tireless supporter of the arts. Her most recent novel, Grace, was released this spring by Kensington Books. Read an interview with her here at Numéro Cinq.

—Richard Farrell

Backwards. This is how you live your life now. Beginning with that moment (the only one that matters anymore) and moving in reverse. Backtracking, rewinding, tripping and snagging on every single other moment that distracted you, that precipitated this. You are haunted by the neon clothes hanger sign at the dry cleaners, by your cell phone, by the piece of trash on the ground that you could not ignore. The world mocks you with its endless opportunities to avoid this disaster.

You ache.

This is the morning, every morning, that morning. Bleary-eyed a little hung-over from one glass too many after dinner and not enough uninterrupted sleep, you piss and then make your way downstairs. Despite having been up crying most of the night, the baby is wide awake in the high chair. Her face is round, dimpled, dirty. So similar to yours. She ignores you as you make your way to the kitchen to the coffee, preoccupied by her own small hands. Your wife, the one you still love though you can no longer always remember why, is standing at the sink, and her hips are wider. You don’t know this body. Sometimes you’ll be sitting on the couch or in your bed and she’ll move past, and you’ll think, just for a second, Who the hell is that? And then you remember: it’s Rachel. Your wife. And that knock of recognition makes you feel sad. Arrogant. As if you haven’t changed yourself. And then as a reprimand, a reminder, you run your hand across the top of your head, acknowledging for the third time this week that your hair is thinner. Coffee? She hands you a cup, you smell toast and the musty scent of her breath, see the newspaper laid out like a lover on the table. She has already pulled out the Business section and put it on top for you. You know underneath is the Arts section and beneath that is the front page. The toast is buttered, the juice has no pulp and fills three quarters of the glass. She has made sure that your phone is charged.

You are victims of habit.

The baby. There are Cheerios scattered across the smooth white expanse of the high chair tray. You glimpse something brownish-orange congealed on the edge of the plastic, sweet potatoes or apricots from a different meal, and you resist the disgust. You are still learning tolerance to filth. The smells of shit and powder, the presence of curdled spit-up on Rachel’s clothes. The sweet smell of breast milk on everything. It has been seven months, and yet you still get nauseous every time you wake up to the sour smell of milk-soaked sheets. “Vee,” you call the baby. She returns your greeting with a small sucking sort of giggle and you notice there is a Cheerio stuck to her cheek. You feel momentarily embarrassed for her, as if she is a full grown man who has been walking around with his fly down or someone who has been yapping on endlessly unaware of a bit of black pepper between the teeth. And then you think, correcting your thoughts as you so often have to do, she’s a baby. It’s cute. But there is something about her obliviousness that tears at your heart.

Vivian.

This is the name Rachel suggested as if she were really asking your opinion. It makes you think of the woman who lived down the street from your family when you were growing up. The one whose hands reminded you of gnarled roots. The one whose house smelled like vegetables: potatoes, rutabagas, dirt. The one who called you dear and pressed wheat pennies into your reluctant palm, the copper green at the edges. But you failed to make this connection for Rachel, to reveal this to her. Instead, you nodded, distracted by something on TV. That’s nice, you said, shrugging. And suddenly Rachel was ordering blankets embroidered with that old woman’s name. Cooing it to her belly. Vivian, Vivian. And all you could think of was creamed corn in chipped ceramic bowls. Salt-n-Pepper shakers shaped like dogs and accordion lampshades.

It’s too late. Vee.

You were ready for a baby in the way that anyone without children thinks they are ready. Meaning, you were thirty-two. Rachel was thirty and not getting any younger, she said. And when she said it, she didn’t touch you. As if it were your fault and as if you had already said no. Her eyes filled up and she had to look away. But what were you waiting for? Half of the things you thought you’d have by then you didn’t have and probably wouldn’t have any time soon (a house of your own, a career you loved, a car that didn’t have 100,000 miles on it and a piece of shit muffler). And so when you said, Why not? You meant it. And you have to admit that the way Rachel’s face lit up, the way she pressed her body into yours in a way she hadn’t in at least a couple of years, made you feel like this might be the start of something new between you. And, remarkably, a few things did fall into place because of the baby. For one, Rachel’s father gave you the down payment for the house, no questions asked. And because of the house, because of the mortgage, you suddenly found yourself working harder at the office, applying yourself, and because you weren’t being lazy anymore your boss started to notice you. You got a raise. You sold the old car and bought a used version of what you’d always wanted, washed it in the driveway every Saturday morning. And all the while you watched your wife swell. You watched your life swell. You put your hand across Rachel’s stomach and felt a sense of ownership. It was primitive and proprietary. Sometimes at night you dreamed that you swallowed her and the baby whole. Don’t forget, Rachel says from the kitchen. I’ve got a dentist appointment this morning before I go to the office. The daycare says Vivian can come early today. And you nod.

The hole.

There is a tear in your shirt. You don’t notice it until after you are dressed and showered, smelling clean and feeling prickly. It is hot outside, and inside. You deny yourself the luxury of air conditioning, but the Santa Anas have made it almost unbearable lately. There’s a sewing kit in the kitchen drawer, Rachel says. I’ll get Vivian in her car seat. It seems strange not to be leaving them behind at the house, Rachel standing in the doorway with the baby on her hip, waving as you back out of the driveway. Rachel has started to work again, just two afternoons a week. On those days she drops the baby off after lunch at the daycare, the one with the painted sign with Raggedy Ann and Andy out front. The one whose yard is littered with palm fronds and rusty tricycles. You drive past the daycare on your way to work every day and feel badly that you can’t send her someplace better. But childcare is one expense that your father-in-law has not offered to pick up. Rachel’s father doesn’t think she should be working yet. Only you know that it makes her feel good to put on makeup and heels and get away from the house a few hours every week. Only you know that without the job things would be even tighter than they already are, that without this job you might not be able to make that car payment.

You find the sewing kit. The only thread left is purple. Shit. Instead of trying to fix it, you decide it might be easier just to change. Bring the shirt to the dry cleaner to repair; you’ve got some pants to pick up anyway. Love you, she says, as you each get into your cars. And, rolling down the window, she asks, Can you also pick up the challah?

Vivian, asleep, nestled in the car seat. And you envy her.

It is Friday. Shabbat. In your family only your father is Jewish and not a very good Jew at that, but Rachel is. Every Friday night her parents come over fromLa Jolla to your house and your father-in-law leads the blessing, a dreamy artifact of Friday dinners with your grandparents when you were small. You are expected to light the candles, whisper the prayers. You feel as though you are trespassing, but these traditions matter to Rachel. These rituals. They are, she says, what bind a family together.

On Fridays, you have your staff meetings. Today you are going to present your idea for the new website for the client you somehow managed to convince to go with your company instead of that place in LA. You know this may be your last chance to redeem yourself. It may even be your last chance to save your job. Because since the baby came, your work has suffered. You are too tired. Sometimes, the images on the computer blur and spin and all that ambition and drive you had when Rachel was pregnant has been sucked away by the sleepless nights, by the demands. Sometimes you close your office door and put your head down, waking up like a kid caught sleeping in class, a puddle of drool at your cheek and your heart pounding. They have let four of your twenty-five co-workers go in the last three months. There is no reason why they should keep you. This is the other reason you do not sleep.

Asleep.

Some days you drive to work and realize you don’t remember getting there. You heard about this once, this fugue state. The way a body remembers while the brain vacates. Rachel says it happens to her too. She says she’ll get in the car, turn on the radio, and then suddenly realize that she’s in the grocery store parking lot and can’t remember getting there. You share these somnambulant stories. Wonder at how it is you’re still alive.

The phone.

You reach for your cell phone to find out how late the City Deli is open. You hope you can grab the challah after work. If not, you’ll need to go during lunch. But you’ve forgotten your phone at home. You picture it sitting next to the bowl of brown bananas and wrinkled apples, the black umbilical of the recharger crawling across the countertop. Without it, you feel, momentarily, like an amputee. The sense of absence, loss, bigger than it should be. It’s just a phone, you remind yourself. You have a phone at work. But something nags at you, and then you remember the tear in the shirt, and the rest of the dry cleaning that needs to be picked up. And so you take a different route than usual, turn left instead of right at the end of your street. There is a detour: orange cones against so much gray asphalt. It is labyrinthine, this path away from your neighborhood, unfamiliar but familiar at the same time. Each house you pass could be your own.

But finally, you find yourself at the strip mall, the one with the cleaners’. You are running late now, but you stop and run inside and ask the old woman at the counter to mend the hole, exchange the torn shirt for six pairs of your pants swaddled in soft plastic. But just as you are about to toss them into the backseat, you see a candy wrapper someone has discarded on the ground. Litter pisses you off. The arrogance of it. The carelessness. You bend over to pick it up with your free hand and then bump your head hard on the side view mirror when you stand back up. The sting and warm trickle tells you it’s not just a bump but a cut as well. And so you get in the driver’s side, toss the pants on the passenger’s seat, and tilt the rearview mirror toward your face to examine the wound. You dab at the blood, shake your head.

It is so hot.

You start the car, and sweat rolls down your sides in cold beads. Have you forgotten deodorant? You wrack your brain, remember the shower, the sting of aftershave. You try to remember whether or not you opened the medicine cabinet door, try to recollect the smooth roll under your arms. You can’t. Shit. You glance at your watch. The meeting is at 9:00. There isn’t time to go home. You imagine yourself standing before the expectant faces of your boss and his boss. Your co-workers who are all hoping it will be you next instead of them. You touch the tender spot on your head again and are glad it’s stopped bleeding. The air conditioner blows cold air through the vents, numbing your knuckles as they grip the wheel and your way to the freeway.

Windows rolled up.

When you do sleep, your dreams are filled with disasters. You see your fears like bullet points in a Powerpoint presentation. Enumerated and illuminated.

A sink hole swallows the house.
Elevator cables snap.
Brakes fail.
You fail.
Things catch on fire.

All of the ways that everything can come undone. When you wake up, trembling and sweating, Rachel is sometimes already awake, sitting in the glider by the window, nursing Vee, both of them bathed in blue light. And this pulls you back to reality. Back to the safety of the moment. You feign sleep and watch her, watch them. And it is in these moments that you remember. It is so overwhelming sometimes it feels like falling through an open window.

A pang of guilt hits and you know you should do something to show her that you do still love her. That you love Vee more than you thought possible. That you are a good man. A good husband. A good father.

Vivian. The baby. Vee.

Sometimes when you hold her and she is sleeping, her lips puckered into a pink pout, her black eyelashes kissing the tops of her cheeks, you feel happiness so deep it is almost the same as sorrow. You don’t know how to tell Rachel this without sounding crazy, and so you keep it to yourself.

By the time you get off the freeway and navigate the traffic to the office park, you have cooled off and have mentally prepared for the meeting. You practice your speech in your head. You park the car at the far end of the lot in the shade. You lock the car door.

They are waiting for you. No time to call the deli about the challah, no time to check the messages, though the red light is blinking on your office phone. In the conference room, the men sit around the table with their coffee cups and sarcasm. “Look what the cat dragged in,” they joke at your expense. Then you get started.

By noon when you spill out of the conference room, your boss slapping your back, “Good work,” he says, and you are overwhelmed with relief. Safe for now. The sun is beating in through the one window in your office. You have to adjust your computer monitor to avoid the unfortunate glare. You think about pulling the blinds, but you worry that darkness will only make it harder to stay awake. You glance out the window at the parking lot. This is when you see the Bloodmobile and are suddenly filled with purpose. The wild fires have been raging in the mountains east of here for two weeks. The Santa Anas and this incredible heat are to blame. Your blood type is O-. You are the Red Cross’s dream.

Normally, you bring a lunch. Rachel packs leftovers into Tupperware, throws in a bag of carrots, a bottle of water. But on Fridays you and Logan Jones take your car to a place down the road and get cheese steaks and chicken wings. Sometimes you’ll have a couple of beers too and come back to the office happier than when you left. But today just as you are about to check your messages and then call the deli, Logan comes in, “Ready?” and you say, “Not today. Giving blood.” The messages can wait. Instead you take the stairs two at a time and open the door to the hottest day of the summer. You loosen your tie and make your way to the Bloodmobile.

In your mind you imagine telling Rachel that you gave blood today. What a good guy, she’ll say. And then you’ll give her the challah and a bouquet of flowers from the flower shop next to the deli. Daisies maybe. Irises in a cloud of baby’s breath. You’ll tell her that you’ll say the blessing tonight at Shabbat. That you’ll get up later when Vee cries.

Paralyzed.

You are paralyzed whenever Vee cries. Powerless. In the first few weeks, sometimes Rachel would look at you, waiting to see what you’d do, challenging you, which made you even more reluctant to respond. And then, exasperated, she’d shove you aside and go to Vee, latching her onto her breast, eyeing you angrily, swaying and whispering secrets into her small ears. You used to worry they were conspiring against you. But tonight, you will go to her. You will not pretend to be asleep. You will whisper, Shhh, I’ve got it, don’t get up. And you will go to her crib, pick her up. Make her stop crying, hold her until she falls asleep.

You close your eyes as the needle goes in and as the blood drains from your arm, you feel sleep coming on. An undertow of exhaustion. You lean your head back on the crinkly tissue paper, opening your eyes only when the needle slips effortlessly out of your arm and the nurse hands you a plastic cup of orange juice. You glance at your watch, there’s still time to run to the deli. To get the bread. The flowers. Maybe even a bottle of wine to celebrate.

There are waves of heat rising from the pavement. You are light-headed, your knees weak. You go to the car and think maybe you shouldn’t be driving. You put your hand on the hot trunk, to steady yourself. Shake your head, stretch your neck. Look in through the rear window at the back seat.

The car seat.

Paralyzed.

Vivian. The baby. Vee.

Windows rolled up. It is so hot.

The phone.

Asleep.

Vivian, asleep, nestled into the car seat.

And you envy her.

The hole.

Vivian. It’s too late. Vee.

You are victims of habit.

You ache.

Backwards. This is how you live your life now.

— T. Greenwood

———————————

T. Greenwood is the author of seven novels. She has received grants from the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and, most recently, the Maryland State Arts Council. TWO RIVERS was named Best General Fiction Book at the San Diego Book Awards in 2009. Five of her novels have been BookSense76/IndieBound picks; THIS GLITTERING WORLD was a January 2011 selection, and GRACE is an April 2012 selection. She teaches creative writing at for San Diego Writer’s, Ink. She and her husband, Patrick, live in San Diego, CA with their two daughters. She is also an aspiring photographer.

The Valley of the Shadow: Fiction — dee Hobsbawn-Smith

Jun 032012

dee Hobsbawn-Smith is a curious being, poet, chef, chef-author, newspaper columnist (about food), eminent food person, and farm girl from Saskatchewan (she now lives on the family farm outside Saskatoon). Her latest book is called Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet, just out, yes, and you can read an early and most complimentary review here (I particularly like the Raymond Carver references). But dee also a fiction writer, about to launch herself into an MFA program. And for your delight and delectation, we offer a foretaste (smallish pun) of that new career, a short story about a girl who takes a job as prep-cook (there is a chef, too) in a ski town to escape a murky past. (NC multiple contributor Dave Margoshes took the photo.)

“I’m lookin’ for work. Know of anything?”

The guy behind the motel counter hands over my key with shaking hands. He looks twice my age, stained skin under hazel eyes, a few grey strands in tangled auburn hair. The sweet reek of stale booze permeates the office. “The ski hill’s always hiring.”

“Can’t ski. How ‘bout supper, then? Is there a restaurant in the motel?”

“It closed last year. Try the lodge up the ski hill. You can’t miss the signs.”

I’m dubious. ‘Can’t miss the signs’ usually means the exact opposite. “Nothing closer?”

“You can get a decent steak or grilled cheese at the Night Hawk, they’re open late. On the east edge of town.”

“Thanks.” I lug my backpack upstairs and look longingly at the bed. My eyes ache. I’ve been driving through a blizzard since Cranbrook, not many road lights and the pavement hard to see, haven’t eaten since my bitter breakfast in Vancouver. I turn up the thermostat and head back to my car.

Hank Williams is sighing through the sound system at the Night Hawk. The cook grins and says, “Sure, why not?” when the waitress slaps my order through the window. I slide into the back booth and ask for a Johnnie Walker.

I’m halfway through a rare rib-eye when the motel clerk walks in and swings onto a bar stool. His hoarse voice carries above ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart.’ “I sent some girl here. Kinda cute, short black hair.” At the waitress’s jerk of her head, he spins the stool around. “Hey, you made it. Rowena takin’ good care of you?”

I nod, my mouth full of meat.

“Buy you a drink?” The glass lands on my table with a clatter.

“Thanks.”

He talks sporadically to Rowena as she polishes tumblers, but I feel his gaze sliding off me. When I sigh and push my plate away, he pats the stool beside him.

“Andrew James.”

“Constance da Silva. Call me Connie.”

“A drink for my friend Connie, please, Rowena.”

“How long you been in Fernie, Andrew?”

“Forever.”

Up close, crevasses run from his hairline to shaggy eyebrows, from his nose to the corners of his mouth. Under the rubble of whiskers, his cheeks look like crepe paper. The sleeves of a tattered sweater hang over his knuckles, but his fingernails are smooth and clean.

Rowena keeps his glass topped up, and raises her eyebrows at me with each visit to our end of the bar. He catches me studying him and blushes. I’m charmed. What kind of man blushes? “So…who is Andrew Brown? You single?” He nods. “Why you still here?”

“Got no desire to travel.”

Rowena turns off the stereo as we leave. Andrew holds his car door open. “A drink? I have a room in the motel. Just a drink.”

The narrow slice of sky above me is wheeling much too rapidly. “Long day. Thanks, but no.”

“Welcome to Fernie. See ya ‘round.”

The road is black velvet. I’m grateful to follow his taillights through the falling snow to the motel, and topple onto my bed fully clothed.

I land a job at the ski hill as a prep cook, no experience needed. No cooking, even, just peeling potatoes and carrots by the case, chopping sacks of onions. I keep my turtleneck on, wrap the huge white cook’s jacket around me and cut myself within an hour. The chef clucks as he wraps gauze around my thumb. We’re in his office and I concentrate on his tidy desk to counteract the wooziness. He watches my eyes find the photos. Two girls, teenagers, dark as a magpie, one frowning.

“Mes petites filles,” he says proudly as he pulls the tape snug. “Bien sur, Connie, you pay attention, eh? No more hack-cidents.” His silver moustache rises with his grin. “Maybe this keep you off the ski hill, eh?”

“I don’t ski,” I mutter, my face turned away from the seeping blood. “I paint.” The kitchen window is filled with grey clouds.

“Merde. Everybody ski here. You learn right quick, you’ll see, young miss like you. Some ‘andsome boy, and you be ‘otshot ski, tres vite. Best you bring him to me first, eh, I tell you if he is good boy.”

Laughing, I go back to work, feeling warmer.

There’s not much to this town. This is Snow Valley— the snow is famous— and everyone skis. There’s not much light either. The valley, almost a gorge, is defined by mountains, the Rockies on one side, the Purcells on the other. The grey rock-faces towering above the valley floor eat what little light there is, and the pale sun vanishes over the horizon by mid-afternoon. The clouds are a weight, leaking dampness that permeates everything.

I work evenings, two ‘til eleven, long hours on my feet, and Chef winces when I drag a chair across the tiles to the counter. “Cooks stand, ma belle,” he says, but he forbears saying anything stronger. There’s no name embroidered on his jacket, just his title. Chef. He pats the shoulders of all the cooks, male and female. No one seems to mind. He likes me, I can tell. He regularly strays past my station with his coffee, watching my hands clutching a knife, and finally says, exasperated, “Voilà, there is a better way, ma fille.” With a few quick motions, he shows me how an onion falls apart under the right strokes.

When he asks for the sixth time what brings a good girl like me so far from the bright city life, I nearly laugh. “A man and a dog,” I say. It’s the truth, but I don’t think he believes me.

Anywhere would have done. Leaving Vancouver was easy— no mortgage, no house, no kid— all those ropes that tie you down rather than guide you. I left a throw-away job as an office temp and an interminable waiting list into art school, my pockets empty, just heaved my easel, my paints and my backpack in my Chevy, and drove out of the rain without looking back. It was impulsive, and I ended up in winter.

To distract Chef, I point through the window, to the cordons on the mountainside, thin nylon ropes strung along a succession of metal spikes. “What’re those, Chef?”

He waves over a redhead whose jeans cling to muscled legs. She looks sixteen. “Sadie fais du ski, she explain, eh, Sadie?”

Sadie looks me up and down. “You the new cook? Rowena said she met you at the Hawk. Ya don’t ski? You’ll learn, there’s nothin’ else to do in this shithole town?” Every second sentence ends on an up-tilt, as if she’s unsure of herself. “Those ropes? They’re s’posed to keep newbies like you safe.”

I’m not reassured. The ropes won’t actually stop a skier, especially if she’s tumbling at any speed. But they give the illusion of safety.

Sadie grins impishly at me. “Where you stayin’?”

I drive to the Night Hawk each night after work, hoping to see Andrew. Something about him makes my fingers itch and tingle. I want to stroke the pale skin on his hands and smooth the lines etched in his cheeks. I want to paint the life back into his face. There’s a smart man beneath the sodden exterior. What’s kept him in Fernie?

He’s slumped on a barstool when I arrive. When I slide onto the stool beside him, his back straightens.“Hey, Con.” His hand, lightly brushing my upper arm, is quickly withdrawn.

One night, I recount how I left Vancouver. My lover, drunk, speeding along the tree-lined road past Second Beach. Some faceless woman, out walking her dog, the wet leash slipping though her fingers. Spinning car wheels and rain.

“It was an accident. He’d never kill a dog deliberately. I know that.”

“Wait a minute. That’s why you left? Because your guy had an accident? And killed someone else’s dog?”

“No, not really. We were done already, the accident was just the last straw. I just didn’t know how to let go. Thought I had to leave the city instead of just leaving him.”

He sighs and briefly rests his hand on my shoulder. “Did you forgive the guy?”

“He didn’t mean to. Dunno.”

“But he was drunk. That’s the hard part, hmm?”

When I sniffle, Andrew pulls a tissue from his pocket and offers it, then rubs his forearms, his arms forming a cradle across his chest.

“I’ve never had a dog. I used to want one. Grew up here in the valley, I told you that. My mom married a miner when she was sixteen.”

I have my voice under control again. “So young. A kid, hmm?”

He nods. “Yeah, knocked up. He burnt the place down when he was drunk one night, his cigarette fell outta his hand.”

“Oh no!”

He shrugs. “I was still a baby. We all got out alive. Mighta been better if we hadn’t, though. She died later anyhow, she was twenty-nine. If I’d been there, she mighta had a chance.” He finished his drink. “And my dad, well–” He lifts his hand to waggle two fingers at Rowena.

I’m silenced. Later in the women’s room, Rowena fills in the missing bits. Andrew’s dad died three years after his wife. “Silicosis. Lots of miners buried up behind the old coalmine,” she says, examining me in the mirror. “Did he tell you how his mom died?”

I shake my head, feeling ghoulish. “I don’t want to know.”

Rowena doesn’t pay any attention. “It was a big scandal. Andrew was taken away from them when he was twelve, he was gone for nearly a year. His dad had been beating him. And worse. He’s got burn scars all over his arms.”

“Oh no!” I picture Andrew, his arms embracing each other through his sweater. Rowena passes me a paper towel, then relentlessly continues.

“His mom was tiny, couldn’t have stopped a mouse. While he was away, she died. A broken neck. His dad claimed she fell from the balcony trying to change a light bulb. There was an inquest, but never any charges, the guy was already pretty sick. Andrew’s always blamed himself.” She looks at me sideways in the mirror. “You know, he never talks to anyone. Just drinks. Plays Hank all night. You’re the first one who’s heard him say boo.”

I go back to the bar, pity and revulsion two-stepping in my gut. When we leave at midnight, I try not to gawk at his forearms as he pulls on his gloves. In the parking lot, he brusquely declines my offer of a lift. “No. I need the walk.”

“Andrew, don’t be an ass, it’s twenty below. Just get in, will you?” I drop him at the motel. He reaches out and touches my hair where it juts out under my toque.

“Thanks, Con.” He scrambles out of the Chevy without looking at me.

I move my car to the parking lot behind a row of dun-coloured apartments, and leave my easel folded on the back seat. Rowena and Sadie, the two waitresses, adopt me. I’m only three years older than either of them, but they seem like gum-chewing kids, talking nonstop about boys, movies, clothes, but mostly about when they will leave the valley. They’re completely baffled that I left Vancouver and ended up here. A man, I say again, a man and a dog. They look at me disbelievingly.

“No one wants to be here, Connie,” Rowena says over spaghetti and beer. “This place is the armpit of the world.”

I tilt my head, considering. Each day, I drive over the bridge and through downtown Fernie on my way to work. En route, I pass a drug store, a post office, the Night Hawk, a realtor’s office flogging unbuilt condos on the ski hill, and a grocery store. Nothing to disprove Rowena’s claim. Nothing I want to commit to canvas. I shrug. “It’s enough. For now.”

Sadie’s head bobs, her mouth full. Rowena keeps talking. “When I have enough money saved, I’m moving to Calgary. That’s where the real livin’ is… Hey, we’re going skiing tomorrow, why don’t you come? Sadie’s a crackerjack teacher, she’ll get you started, won’t you, Sade?”

“I’m still working evenings,” I say, and nod to Chef as he makes his way to the exit. He grins at me and makes ski-pole-like gestures with his hands.

Sadie wipes her chin. “Perfect? We’ll go at nine? You’ll be off the hill by two. Chef won’t mind if you’re a bit late, he likes you? And those cute lifties from Australia are working on the back slope? We’ll go over there after the bunny hill.” She giggles and glances at the corner table where the lifties are hoisting beer glasses.

Wait a minute. My mouth shapes the words, but I can’t get them past my roommates’ enthusiastic planning. “But what about skis? Boots? Poles? I don’t have any of that stuff.”

“Rent it all at the hill, Connie. Staff rates. No worries.”

The sky is a black ruin when I walk to my car, leaving the other two flirting with the Aussies. The drive down the mountainside unnerves me, two miles, narrow turns like a jackknife. No lights, just the eerie reflection of headlights off the walls of snow. I edge down the ice and brake abruptly when a deer shoots across the road. As my car swerves, all I can focus on is the white flag of the deer’s tail.

By the time my front bumper comes to rest against the hard-packed snow, the deer is nowhere in sight. I get out of my car and peer at my fender.

A car comes around the corner and slides to a shuddering halt at the toes of my boots.

“Jeez, Connie! Are you crazy?” Andrew leans out of the open window.I can barely see his face. “This is a terrible spot to stop. What are you doing?”

“I think I hit a deer. There’s blood on my fender.”

“There’s dozens of deer around. You okay?” I’m shaking, but I nod. “Get back in your car before someone broadsides you. Here, I’ll turn around and lead you down.”

We creep down the slope, my hands trembling on the wheel, the nose of my Chevy almost nudging his Dodge so I can benefit from his high beams. At the turn to town, he pulls over, gets out and walks back to me. “Let’s have a drink. It’ll calm you down. Meet me at the motel. I have some rye in my room.”

I’m still shaking. “Yeah.”

I’m sprawled on the cold tile floor in Andrew’s cramped bathroom, fully dressed. I hobble to my feet, my head clanging, my mouth lined with spiked fuzz. I wash my face and use my fingers to smear Andrew’s toothpaste over my gums. When I stagger into the bedroom, Andrew is nowhere in sight.

I’m late getting to work. “Sorry, Chef.” His knife blade on the wooden chopping block pounds a tattoo.

Chef watches me for a minute, then tilts his head at the back wall. “Eh, ma fille, aspirin in the cupboard.”

The afternoon drags and clatters. Chef sends me home early. “You better tomorrow, oui? This, this not so good, hmm?”

I grimace and wonder vaguely about his daughters. Surely he’s seen hung-over girls before. “Sorry, Chef.” His knife is making short work of my onions as I swing the door closed.

The morning’s forgotten ski lesson surfaces as I enter the apartment. My roommates look daggers at me. Sadie’s voice is one long exhale. “We waited ‘til nearly noon, we missed half the day, all the gorbies got there before us, the snow was ruined?”

“I hit a deer last night coming down the hill. Andrew invited me for a drink and I slept in.” I surprise myself when I hear what comes out of my mouth–apologizing as if I’m twelve. I haven’t felt so defensive in years. What is it about this valley?

“Andrew. He’s pathetic. Why’d you want to hang out with him?”

“Sadie, how can you say that? You know what he’s–”

She steamrollers me. “You know how old Andrew James is?”

I think briefly of Andrew’s lined face. His dead mother who couldn’t protect him. “Sadie, what does it matter? Thirty-five?”

“Twenty-two.”

My knife skills are progressing. No bandages for at least a week. Chef teases me about my long fingernails until I capitulate, trim them short and strip off the nail polish. As reward, he sets a work table beside the window so I can peel carrots in sunlight. But the pale rays don’t help my mood, nor does realizing that no one else seems glum. Line cooks chatter as they flip steaks and burgers, the salad girl flirts with the servers as she chops anchovies for the Caesar dressing, and the baker whistles nonchalantly over the oven’s hum.

A week passes without a sign of Andrew. When I drive to the motel, the day manager is irate. “He hasn’t been around for days. You tell that sod to get his ass back to work, will ya?”

I contemplate asking Chef to help with a search. But Sadie sticks her head into the kitchen during dinner service.

“All right, pouty-face. Let’s try this ski lesson thing again? Tomorrow morning? Get your lift pass from the office.”

The bunny hill is glazed with ice. Sadie, a nimble jack rabbit on her skis, orders me around like a born leader. Up the rope tow, snowplow down the hill, up the rope tow, snowplow down. “Lean forward, Connie! If you can stop, if you can snowplow a turn, you can go anywhere?” I stop counting the falls and try to ignore the bruises coagulating on my left hip. After I make my first decent run without falling, Sadie crows with triumph and leads me to the T-bar.

Side by side in the load-up zone, the T-bar comes up behind us, scary-fast. The lifty steps back, glances at Sadie, still chattering, and winks at me. The knot in my gut loosens a little.

“Squat? Don’t look down!” At the top of the lift — “Lift your toes?” — too late. My ski tips catch and I pitch off the T-bar. I struggle to my feet and my skis immediately slide out from under me. “Snowplow! Point your toes down the hill. Lean forward?”

I’m exhausted when we return to the lodge. My thighs ache, and the bruises feel like bone chips. At work my hands are so shaky that I cut myself again.

Chef, exasperated, sets a slice of chocolate pecan pie beside me and ruffles my hair. “You go ski today? First time? Before you go work? You crazy girl. Next time, eat first.” I don’t have the energy for a rejoinder.

I sprawl my bruised body on the couch after work while Rowena eats popcorn and watches the news. She wakes me to rant. Paul Bernardo has been arrested. “How can a man look like a human being and abuse helpless kids like that?” I have no answer, fall asleep and dream of Andrew’s arms seething, raw with open burns.

I hardly make a dent in the endless sacks of onions, but their pungent bite clings to my clothes and follows me home. After more falls on the bunny hill, I collapse on the couch, a glass of scotch balanced on my ribcage. Rowena calls to report Andrew has surfaced. “He’s been AWOL before, Connie, this isn’t the first time.”

“Why’s he do it? Where does he go?”

“Dunno. But I hear he holed up with a couple old miners, guys who don’t have families.”

“What about work? Will they give him back his job?”

“Yeah. The manager knew his dad. They worked together in the mine.”

Sadie meets me at the hill, flat light barely illuminating the morning. “No bunny hill,” she says sternly. “Let’s just get to the T-bar?” I get on and off without mishap, and we start slowly down the slope. “Down there,” she says, pointing with her ski pole, “I’m going on ahead. Follow the green run? It’s nice and level. Keep out of the trees. I’ll meet you at the bottom?”

I nod without looking up, trying to remember my turning mantra. Weight down, turn, shift to other leg, straighten. Or is it reversed? I can’t keep it straight.

Sadie vanishes, a sleek shadow sprinting down the hill. A breath of fog blows across the hillside. I lose my rhythm. Fall. Get up and lock my legs into snowplow, chug down the track.

At the fork, the signs are fallen, fresh ski tracks running in both directions. I hesitate, then choose the flat track to the left. A few hundred yards along, it drops steeply beneath my skis, the trees closing in. I stop, Sadie’s thin voice in my head. Point your skis down the hill, keep your weight forward. Surely not down this monster of a slope. But I can’t see any other way down. Twenty minutes crawl past while I hesitate on the brink, hoping someone will come down the hill behind me. The cold trickles under my jacket where snow has lodged. My toes are numb when I aim my skis across the incline and descend a few feet on the oblique. At the far side, I shift my weight, begin the turn and hesitate, my skis slipping out from under me.

I roll, bump, crash, poles flying loose, skis unhinging. “Damn it!”

When I sit up and wipe the snow from my face, I spot my poles, jammed against a tree trunk, my skis at the bottom of the slope, tangled in the ropes. I grab the poles and slide down the ice on my butt to my skis. I stamp my boots into my bindings and snowplow through the flattened meadow to the lodge, ignoring the lifties at the T-bar when they wave. My gear clatters onto the counter of the rental shop.

I’m in the lounge, on my second hot chocolate and brandy when Sadie shows up, pink-cheeked and bright. I glower at her. “Never again, Sadie. Not after you ditched me like that.”

“All right, sorry? The lifties said you looked pissed off.” She wriggles, puppy-like, but draws back when I shake her hand free of my arm.

“Pissed off? I damn near broke my neck.” I wave at the waitress.

“All right. Be a bitch.”

The light is fading when she returns. “I just took my last run, Connie. I gotta start work. You still mad?”

“Give it up, Sadie.” She snorts and stomps away. Andrew comes in later, his parka dusted with snow.

“Hey, Con. It’s late. Rowena told me you hit the hill again.” He appraises my face. “Didn’t go so good, eh?”

“Have a drink with me?”

I lean on him on the way to the parking lot. My keys fall into the snow.

“That Sadie, she ditched me.” I crawl along the ground, find my keys. “Don’t think I’ll—” Find my blue car, find the ignition. “Can I come home with you, Andrew?” He puts an arm around my neck, his cheek tight against me. The steep road falls into the darkness.

At noon, I get up and look in Andrew’s mirror. Red-rimmed eyes gaze back at me. Hands shaking, I pull on my turtleneck. Beyond the window, greyness. Bits and flashes surface—Andrew flaccid and limp, his face fallen, kisses that go nowhere and taste of despair. His muttered voice. “Forgive me, Con.”

He’s still sleeping. Halfway through my second cup of coffee, something stirs in my memory. I plunge outside without gloves or hat or jacket. The Chevy sits in the parking lot, its block heater cord dangling loose, the right front fender dented so deeply the wheel is immovable. I have no memory of driving down the mountainside.

I leave Andrew sleeping and walk home. Above me, the sky telegraphs bad weather. The phone jangles as soon as I walk into the apartment. Rowena, on the couch under a quilt, lifts her head. “Get it, will ya, Con. Sadie has whats-his name, Chad, the Aussie—” A languid arm waves at the bedroom down the hall, then vanishes under the covers.

I catch the phone on the fifth ring. “Connie? You work today early. Banquet tonight.”

“I can’t drive, Chef. My car—”

“I pick you up, oui?”

I sit at the kitchen table, head pounding. My stomach heaves. When the door buzzes, I jab the entry button. It buzzes again, and Chef stands in the doorway. His face tightens as he looks around the apartment, taking in my half-empty scotch bottle and its galaxy of glasses on the television. Empty beer cans on every surface, table and sink stacked high with dirty dishes. Heaps of newspapers and takeout boxes. A laundry basket by the kitchen door. Rowena tangled in the quilt, snoring on the couch.

The place looks tawdry. I stare at my feet, too embarrassed to bring up my car’s dented fender.

Chef is silent on the drive to the lodge. In the parking lot, he turns to me. “Connie. What happen, hmm?” His capable hands, palms up. “You one smart cookie. You need help?”

I shake my head, blink away the tears. “No, Chef. No help needed. Thanks.”

On Friday night after work, Andrew is propped on the Night Hawk bar. He won’t look at me and drinks his rye in silence. I buy a mickey of Johnnie Walker and slip back to the apartment.

The clock-face reads noon when I wake in pain, unable to move, my belly shrieking.

“Rowena, wake up, there’s something wrong.”

“What is it?” Her voice fades. “Go back to sleep.”

I grab my remaining safety line and dial the ski hill’s kitchen. “Chef, Chef, I need to go to the hospital.”

The bearded young doctor perched on the edge of my bed is unequivocal and kind. “Nothing showed up in the gastroscopy, Constance. Nothing is physically wrong with you. So. What’s going on in your life?”

I mutter answers. Work, yes. Exercise, sporadic. Drink? Uh huh. Every day? Yeah. How much? Hmm. Happy? Silence. Hobbies?

I think of my easel, ignored in my car, shake my head.

He stands up and sighs. “There’s nothing happening in your body that a good dose of sunshine and happiness won’t cure. You need to get yourself a life, Constance. And quit drinking. I’ll check on you later.”

Chef appears, bearing chocolate tarts and thick meaty stew. He pats my hand, rubs his moustache until he finds his voice. “Your car, I fix ‘er. You take better care, ma belle. Oui?” I squint, rub my nose so I won’t cry again.

Sadie and Rowena arrive together. Sadie’s face is pale, her mouth pursed. I hug her. “Sadie, eat this tart, Chef brought too much. Rowena, how’s Andrew?”

Rowena shrugs, her face impassive.

I have lots of time in between the nurses’ coming and going. I’ve never been much for praying, but I try. All I see are grey mountains and grey sky, closing in.

Andrew doesn’t stop by. I make one long distance call, to Vancouver, and wipe away my tears as I hang up.

My belongings are jammed into my backpack. I embrace Rowena, then Sadie.

“Here’s my cell number. Call me, both of you, when you’re ready to get outta here, okay?”

In the parking lot, I walk around my car. No dents. Chef has kept his word, and more. He’s found me a job peeling vegetables at a private club in Calgary until I get into art school. At the ski hill, I hug him when he gives me a brown lunch bag.

“Smoke boeuf, remember to eat it!” I peek inside and spot a roll of twenties tucked inside the plastic wrap encasing a clutch of cookies. He scribbles his email on a card. “In case you change your mind, ma belle. Or if the job is no good.”

I stop at the motel. Andrew isn’t at the counter. I make my way down the dim corridor and knock. I don’t waste any time when the door opens.

“I’m packed, Andrew. I’m leaving. You should go too. This place—it’s killing you.”

“Connie, I can’t leave, it’s all I know. And I’d never forgive myself if I drag you down. Sorry. I can’t come.”

“You don’t have to come with me, Andrew. You just have to get out. To anywhere.” He’s wearing a t-shirt, the first time I’ve seen his bare arms in daylight. I stare at the evidence, scars like silver moons on his pale skin, then at his face. “Rowena told me about your dad. None of what happened back then was your fault, you were just a kid. You couldn’t have saved her, and you don’t have to forgive him. But forgive yourself!”

“I can’t, Con.”

I draw in a breath, but my gut still trembles. “I can’t stay.”

“So you’re going back?”

I grimace. “I called him, yeah. I’m not going back. I’m going to Calgary. If I’m lucky, I’ll start at art school in the fall. But I’m leaving—this.”

Andrew gently touches my cheek. “Connie. I’m not much to leave behind.”

I head east through the pass toward the high mountains, the Chevy’s tires whining on the ice. My easel rattles on the back seat. For the first time in months, as a flicker of sun chases across the snow-packed highway, I wonder about how to translate shadows into paint.

—-dee Hobsbawn-Smith

————

dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s poetry, fiction and food writing has appeared in magazines, newspapers, anthologies and literary journals in Canada and the USA. She is an award-winning freelance journalist, a retired chef and culinary educator. After 27 years in Calgary, she now lives in the family farmhouse west of Saskatoon with her partner, the writer and poet Dave Margoshes, and their pets. A four-time alumna of Sage Hill Writing Experience, dee begins studies in September, 2012, in the University of Saskatchewan’s MFA in writing program. Her fifth book, Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet, has just been published by TouchWood Editions.

Heidegger, Floss, Elfride, and the Cat: Fiction — Leon Rooke

May 072012

I spent the summer of 1968 in Freiburg. Martin Heidegger was still alive, living in a retreat in the Black Forest in an odor of disrepute on account of his Nazi sympathies during the war. I had a fantasy that I would meet him hiking in the woods. I never met him. I did meet Friedrich Von Hayek, the great economist, but he was easy; he had an office at the university and I walked in one day with a mutual acquaintance and shook his hand. My brush with history, my personal relationship with the god of Paul Ryan and the austerity-cats of the Republican right.

Heidegger is a particularly difficult philosopher to read because he thought he was inventing a new language to talk about the thing he couldn’t talk about. You can’t tell sometimes if he is being mysteriously impenetrable or just impenetrable as in opaque. He had a vast nostalgia for Being which he thought of as something we couldn’t access by perception or thought. This vast nostalgia seems sometimes to have been more felt than reasoned; he was of that generation who still mourned the passing of the Greek gods. He also slept around a lot and had a more or less open marriage with his wife, Elfride. Somehow his nostalgia for a thing you can’t reach and his many love affairs seem comically and humanly self-contradictory. He is ripe for literature.

Enter Leon Rooke.

Leon Rooke is an old and dear friend. He was in my head long before I met him because of his books, Shakespeare’s Dog in particular in those days, a novel that has stuck with me as a license and an inspiration — William Shakespeare as observed by his dog (who is telling the story), a brilliant book, a tour de force of point of view construction, an example of how literature thrives by making things strange. I put Leon in Best Canadian Stories regularly (as often as Alice Munro) over the decade I edited that anthology. I’ve reviewed his books at least a half-dozen times. I wrote an essay about his (also brilliant, eerie, and wonderful) novel, A Good Baby, which you can find in my book of essays, Attack of the Copula Spiders. Rooke was born in North Carolina but lives in Toronto. He has an actor’s voice and presence and is an amazing performer of his own work. He’s also a painter — we have been lucky enough to publish images of four of his paintings on NC.

In “Heidegger, Floss, Elfride, and the Cat” Leon Rooke gives us Heidegger with his pants down (metaphorically), straining to compose the impenetrable prose of Being and Time while shuttling to and from his lover’s house and fending off the jealous and passive-aggressive intrusions of his long-suffering wife (I have inserted photographs of the real Heidegger and Elfride below). All this is relayed through someone named Floss, another one of those odd point of view inventions Rooke is so good at. In this case, Floss might be a philosophy student reading Being and Time in a library or he might be Heidegger, or rather, I think, Heidegger’s Being (which we might have called his Soul in the old days). Heidegger, of course, can’t know Floss, but Floss knows everything about Heidegger. And when the story is done, Floss trundles home to his wife and kids (being Heidegger’s Being is like a job). And, of course, it’s very late and I might have got this wrong.

As far as I know, no animals were harmed during the composition of this story (despite what happens to the poor cat).

Lights that flickered, curtain at a certain pitch in the summoning, the rendezvous with Frau Blochmann now concluded, Heidegger clamps his trouser legs and bicycles home.

Floss withholds opinion on the Master’s affair with the eminent colleague, which he knows will continue another few decades. What he wonders is what Elfride will say when the philosopher king comes through the door. That Jewish bitch again? Or will she say nothing, having just dispatched her doctor friend through that very door. This love business is a bit tiring, is Floss’s thought. Get back to work, he tells Heidegger. Not that such is required. After swallowing a bit of Elfride’s tasty stew Heidegger will be at his desk. Being and Time, thinks Floss, page 355. Quote, Resoluteness, by its ontological essence, is always the resoluteness of some factical Dasein at a particular time.

Floss, in his cramped library carrel, has no argument with that. Well and good. Floss and resoluteness and Heidegger, Floss believes, are one and the same.

They are together, he and the Freiburg sage, working the deep trench.

Heidegger now writes, quote, The essence of Dasein as an entity is its existence.

Without entity, no essence: well and good, remarks Floss to himself. Particles afloat in space, what purpose they?

Quote, The existential indefiniteness of resoluteness never makes itself definite except in a resolution. Page 346.

Here Floss wants to say Hold the phone. Floss wants to put his foot down.

Floss’s mind is rapidly scribbling notes to himself. These notes are scratching like a dog inside Floss’s brain. Hold the phone is but one of the dog’s bones.

Floss’s index finger is rapidly scanning the lines, speed-reading Heidegger as the master composes. Are not he and Heidegger that close? Are they not twinned with respect to Being and Time? Are they not brothers?

Floss can quote aloud, at any time, Floss can, any one of Heidegger’s current or future thoughts. The text is spread open on the desk for company only.

Photographic. That’s what Floss’s mind is.

Never mind that he has scribbled into his notebook the erroneous page reference. His hand did. Floss’s mind knows the difference.

Not 346. 355. Floss has jumped ahead. He always knows where Heidegger is going; often he arrives at the destination while the King of Thought is still clearing his throat.

Quote, Only by authentically Being-their-Selves in resoluteness can people authentically be with one another.

Ah! Floss thinks. Let’s not get too, you know, personal. Like.

In Floss’s view this statement is another Hold the phone. This is Heidegger fighting a headwind.

That someone has just this moment walked into Heidegger’s study is radiantly clear to Floss. Being with one another is an untypical Heidegger sentiment. The Master has been thwarted in his goals. Ergo, the line’s impurity.

Who is the culprit this time?

Excited, Floss thumps his knees.

Elfride, of course.

This is Heidegger being influenced by Elfride. This is the wife calling the tune. It is Elfride saying, If you are going to be with me, then be…with me.

Floss can see Elfride hovering over the great man’s shoulders. He can see her whisking dandruff from the great man’s shoulder with a tough whisk broom.

—Don’t mind me, Elfride is saying.

Heidegger doesn’t like any of this. Naturally, he doesn’t. Her very presence fills him with distaste. She has destroyed his flow of pure thought. Be with one another? How has that monstrous phrasing got onto his page?

Four a.m. Heidegger never sleeps, that explains him. But must Elfride do her dusting at this hour?

Floss thinks not. Floss thinks Elfride must have something up her sleeve.

—Dearest soul, the great man says — can’t you go away? Can’t you leave the room and quietly close the door?

—You know what happens if I don’t dust, don’t you? Elfride says.

Heidegger doesn’t know what happens if Elfride doesn’t dust. He is pretty certain Elfride means to tell him.

—Can’t you make a guess. Oh, go ahead. Go out on a limb.

Heidegger is thinking he has always been out on that limb. He was out there first on the limb with the Jesuits when he was a boy, then with Husserl, the so-called father of phenomenology; he was out on the limb with Elfride, then with Hannah, then with Elfride and Hannah jointly. And don’t forget colleague Blochmann. Occasionally the Stray Other. Now he is back on the limb with Elfride. Elfride is dusting the limb.

—I do not intend to engage in your theatrics, dearest soul, he says. I intend to sit here and work on this passage on page 355 until I get it right.

—It’s right, dear one, Elfride says. I’m here to tell you it is already right. You get it any righter, then I won’t know what to do with myself.

Floss, hearing this exchange, leans back in his tight carrel chair. He crosses his arms over his chest. He closes his eyes.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” Floss says.

Heidegger spins his head. Elfride ignores Floss. Floss is a pest; he pops in at inconvenient times; otherwise, he is nothing to Elfride.

—Keep out of this, Floss, she says.

Heidegger sighs. These sighs are magnificent. They express his full contempt of those who would make the philosopher’s already impossible task that much more difficult.

Elfride, normally the most anchored of women, is subject to flights of fancy. Now she’s whisking her broom at vacant air. She has even given that vacancy a name: Time Being. There was a time, Floss recalls, when Elfride was more besotted with Heidegger than some now assert is the case. It is all that Hannah’s work. Months before Elfride and her future husband met Elfride had carried in her pockets notes destined for the magician of Frieburg. Don’t deny it. Yesterday I saw you looking at me. Or: Last week I blocked the doorway and without a word you swept by me. Or: I beseech you. Love me. She still retains these undelivered disintegrating missives under lock and key in a wooden chest buried beneath the floor. They prove her love. They prove her love existed prior to his. This makes her proud. Not even the great can be first in every regard. These notes will be published after her death. The instructions are contained in a sealed envelope affixed with her granddaughter’s name. Not in this envelope or in the locked chest is the narrative describing the gypsy fortune teller’s role in their haunted lives. Well, are not all lives haunted, Floss, who has never loved, reminds himself.The gypsy said to Elfride, On the first rainy afternoon, following your economics class, stand beneath the first blooming tree your steps venture upon. The lover meant for you will appear. Cold rain dripped, afterwards she caught a cold that endured through many weeks, and periodically through each wheeling year, this existing as nothing because love’s astonishing light penetrated the drooping boughs and stormed her heart. Heidegger, under a black umbrella, indeed appeared. Through wet lashes he imagined he saw a dying tree where nothing had stood days before.

—You. What is your name?

—Elfride Petrie.

—Why are you standing in the rain?

—Waiting for you. I am your fate.

Heidegger believed in fate as he did in Plato, with suspicion, particularly with regard to the monumentally salient question What is truth, but he was impressed. She was also pretty, though with rain pouring over her face he would reserve opinion on that. Yet when this schoolgirl fitted her body against his, his heart which was three quarters stone fragmented and certain sounds issued from his mouth never until that moment heard by himself or by any other. Fortunately only children on a dilapidated school bus, there to witness ancient Marburg splendours, were present, and they were too distracted to absorb any image of the historic coupling. This was because rain had become sleet, sleet had become snow, which in minutes had blanketed the lovers, flakes ascending and descending a second and third time, and then repeatedly, in abstract harmony with their movement. Floss, who was there and could have sought the better view had he been that kind of person, was mostly concerned with Heidegger’s black umbrella which gusting wind ripped into sundry pieces, the cloth flitting hither and yon like unruly crows, if crows were ever to attempt flight in such weather.

Heidegger has put down his writing pen. He is leaning back in his chair. He is crossing his arms over his chest. He fits his tongue beneath the upper lip; he can see clearly his thick Fuhrer’s moustache. The sighting gives him strength, although he distinctly prefers his own. He is reminded that theirs is a nation-building task. The moustache renews him in the impossible goal.

He sighs anew, leaning further back. He closes his eyes.

His sighs now, however, are obviously feigned. They exist merely as an admonishment to his wife. Feigned, they express his resignation. His disappointment with married–the assailed– life. The sighs are meant to convey to Elfride that he has given up. How can he work with a loudmouth duster in the room, chattering non-stop?

Gone from his head is that trail he was tracking re resoluteness.

But that quickly does his mind seize again upon the trail. His shoe soles hit the floor. His burden has lifted. The pen flies into his hand. Once more he is at work. He is already scribbling again.

He is scribbling, Floss thinks, quote, The resolution is precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time.

Hold the phone, Floss is thinking. The projection is termed disclosive only because the thought has just this second revealed itself to the sage. Ditto, factically.

But Heidegger is breaking his pen’s point underlining this significant line. It is imperative that the line be printed in the italic. If the line is not set in the italic then readers fifty years from now, speedreaders like that dunderhead Floss, will fly right by it. They will be blind to its pertinence, as he himself is blind to the dust, the dandruff–as he would wish to be blind to Elfride’s galling presence.

—That’s good, Martin, Elfride says. I love that factically possible line. It makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Indeed one of them in the room is sweating, though it isn’t Elfride. Heidegger is sweating because writing a new philosophy, bringing the axe to old traditional philosophical walls — that, mein Fuhrer, is hard work. Plus, there’s the other problem: the window, the cat. How hot and stuffy this room is. If he raises the window, he will be wasting heat. Heat the Volk must not waste. Only a Jew saboteur would waste the nation’s heat. So he is stymied on that front. Yet — and now he is getting to the essence of the situation — yet if he raises the window, the simple solution sans heat, the loathsome cat which always plops itself down on the sill, will come in. Thus, he keeps the window shut. He sweats.

Architects, he thinks, truly are a repellent tribe. They can get nothing right.

Floss swings in his chair. His shoe soles strike the floor. He sees Elfride poised. Resolute Elfride is ever on the job.

—Were you saying something, darling? says Elfride. It isn’t the architects, it’s me. Don’t blame the architects for your stinginess. Blame the war. Or better yet, yes, blame me.

She parades curvaceously around the sage’s desk.

—Although of course, she says, you would be perfectly justified if you blamed the cat. I’m with you there. I hate that cat. That cat is the ugliest creature I, for one, have ever seen. Are you for two — if I may phrase the question so? — in thinking that cat is the most frightful creature ever to walk on four legs?

—Three, Heidegger says. If we are to speak of the cat, then let’s speak precisely. The cat has but three legitimate legs. The fourth, as you can distinctly see, is so foreshortened as to scarcely exist.

—Foreshortened? says Elfride. Do you mean to say the leg in question existed that way in the womb? Perhaps in the very exchange of seed? Oh, I think surely not foreshortened, because I clearly remember that leg was perfectly normal until you crushed it when you caught the cat coming through your window.

Heidegger lowers his head. He kneads his brow. He is thinking, I have stayed up all night for this?

He is thinking, Hannah, thank God, was not a chatterbox. Her head was on my chest whenever I spoke.

—Yes, darling, Elfride is saying. As much as I despise the creature, it is criminal what you have done to that cat. You all but pressed that cat flat. Martin, I hardly know what to say. I hardly do. I am speechless, listening to your infirmity on the subject of that cat.

Floss sees the philosopher’s eyes narrowing. He sees him looking with utter hatred at this wholesome, proud, meandering wife. Heidegger’s defence collapses. Elfride has described the scene exactly as it occurred.

—It was an accident, Floss says.

—It was purely accidental, Heidegger says.

Elfride snubs this excuse. She whisks it away with her broom.

Floss has his attention elsewhere. He is focusing on the sleeping cat. The cat, to his eyes, has altered itself somehow. That the cat suffers deformity is true enough. But it is no longer the bony, undernourished cat. The cat has been eating. It has found food somewhere. The cat is fat.

As for Heidegger, already he is scribbling again. Quote, When what we call “accidents” befall from the with-world and the environment, they can be-fall only from resoluteness.

Floss forsakes his study of the cat. Hold the phone, he says. Hold the phone. Hello, hello. Bravo, my friend.

But Elfride’s broom is stabbing the air.

—You could kill the cat, Elfride is saying. Yes, my lamb, you could finish the job. Then you could raise your window, if only for a moment. Surely not a great deal of our precious heat would escape if you raised your window for one mere moment. Our war resources would not be sorely depleted. Fresh air, Martin! Glorious health! With the window open, even so little as a tidge, you would not be forced to wrestle there in heavy sweat. You could be comfortable. Surely your work would go better if you were comfortable. Kill the cat, my good soul. With the cat dead, your Being and Time will be concluded in nothing flat.

—Enough, Elfride. Enough!

—Shall I kill the cat for you, Martin? I would be happy to kill the atrocious cat if you tell me you believe I should, and can morally justify my performing the act. Issue the cleansing command. Think! She is only a cat.

—She? That cat is female?

—Oh master, groans Floss.

—Yes, and rather resolute, by the look of her.

Heidegger sinks low into his chair. He hoods his eyes.

—Are you done, Elfride? Dearest soul.

—Done?

—Yes, done. If you are not done, Elfride, then I am leaving my desk. I am leaving my house. I will walk this night all the way to my cabin in Todtnauberg, if that is what it takes to be quit of your tongue.

Floss, at his desk gnawing a fingernail, allows himself a smile. The sage is tempting fate with this mention of the cabin, of Todtnauberg. He has stepped with both feet into Elfride’s trap.

—Todtnauberg? Elfride says. Your cabin? But, darling, the cabin is mine. True. I gave it to you. But quit my tongue? Oh, heavens, you can’t mean I have disturbed you. I rattle on, certainly, but only because I know how much my rattling improves your mood. If I did not rattle, you would go about eternally under your famous black cloud. You would never be able to look anyone in the eye. Your students would hardly hang on to your every word. Oh, I think it is fair to say, Martin, that without me and my tongue, and my Nazi boots, and just possibly the cat’s presence at your window, you would never get your work done. You would never write a line. Most assuredly your opus would never be completed. Fame would elude you. Not a person outside Frieburg would ever have the pleasure of hearing your name. You can admit that to yourself and to me, can you not? I’ll not hold it against you. You do not have to prove yourself to me, not ever. Certainly not the way you had to prove yourself to that schoolgirl, Hannah Arendt. And to take her to my cabin in Todtnauberg to prove it, well, my word!

—So that’s it, is it? That’s what this eternal dusting is all about. This mouth disease. So you can harp night and day on my little Hannah fling.

—Little, darling? What would poor Hannah think if I repeated to her what you have just said? Did you not write to her that she was your life? Did she not reply that you were her every heartbeat? That your paths would haunt each other until the death? Oh, I think so, darling. I believe those were the two sweethearts’ very words. ‘My homeland of pure joy.’ Was that not your latest encomium?

Floss applies a handkerchief to his eyes. His eyes are wet. They ever get so each time he sees Hannah and Heidegger together in the cabin at Todtnauberg. Strolling together after class under the singing trees. The decades of love to come. How thrilling it must be, Floss thinks, to possess these loves.

Still. Still, Floss altogether shares Jasper’s view when it comes to that Hannah relationship. Resolute, yes, but messy, messy. Cataclysmic love: Hannah defending him at the French de-Nazification committee hearings: scrambling to hawk his manuscripts to Columbia: through the years never one syllable from the master’s mouth as to the beloved’s own work which he read in secret and secretly believed ephemeral if not deliquescent. Her head ever lowered to his chest.

Elfride is thorough. Not all has been said:

—Or perhaps the precipitation in your eyes has as cause your forthcoming tart Princess Margot of Saxony-Meiningen. Will your rendezvous signal this time be flashing lights or will it be your shades hanging at a certain depth, as was the case with banal Hannah? Which? Will she hand-copy your every hour’s text, as I do?

Floss is astounded. He is giddy with excitement. He has not heretofore perceived that Elfride’s capacity to see into the future matches his own. He sees her now, as one day she doubtlessly will, hands clasped in an unrecognized lap, confused by the vague sense of warfare between aching joints, an old woman of 92 awaiting death in a caretaker home. Will she see her two sons on Russian soil, prisoners of war? Has she yet seen the Delphic oracle rescuing from rubble manuscripts housed in what previously was a Messkirch bank? Hiding them in a cave?

Not at the moment, in any case. At the moment what both Elfride and Floss are seeing is the Master frantically bicycling 16 miles to Todtnauburg, flinging off his clothes, now dressed only in an absurd Tyrolean cap, Elfride, Hannah, the Princess, and scores of other women panting in pursuit, flinging off theirs. For Floss, madness promotes the vision. For Elfride, a confirmation of enduring love.

A thousand letters, cards, over the decades, informing Elfride where his Divineship is, not one suggesting who he is with. What a challenge this marital devotion, these conjugal splits. Send in your party membership, dearest soul, thinks Floss. In resoluteness is strength.

“Get back to the cat,” Floss tells Elfride. Forget Hannah. The cat, after all, has meaning; it is both a real and a symbolic cat. In light of the great man’s post-war silence on the issue of certain atrocities, personal betrayals, I could tolerate additional intimate details re his treatment of the cat.”

—Shoo, shoo, says Elfride. Stop harassing me.

Heidegger is distracted. Once more, Elfride is communicating with vacant air. But perhaps this is good. Perhaps her nasty obsession with Hannah has for the moment exhausted itself. Elfride, he thinks, with her everlasting can of worms. Essence of spite. Why can’t my two great loves, my sprites, be friends? I must see to that, however imbecilic it may appear.

He looks at the cat, asleep on the window sill. Even curved like that, one can see the leg’s deformity. The crippled spine. The cat should be killed. It is doing that cat no favor to let it live.

He would give Elfride the order. He would say to her, Elfride, kill the cat! Do it now.

But he and she are locked in this struggle. They are irresolute. The cat, if it is to die, must die under Elfride’s own initiative. If he were to give the order, the cat would ever survive intact in his memory. Whereas, if she killed it outright, slicing its throat with a knife from the kitchen or beheading it with the hatchet on a woodblock in the back yard or merely trampling it to death, then the cat would be gone forever. It would disappear totally and entirely from his mind and from the world. Its essence would have been annihilated, its entity denied.

He thinks: what Elfride is hoping is that the weather will get extremely cold this winter — Frieburg under ice, the cat stiff as a rock in the freeze. Certainly there is not the remotest chance that she will allow the cat inside the house.

Unless she does so in punishment of me. Unless she does so out of revenge for my taking Hannah to Todtnauberg. Such a stupid impulse, despite its having led to excruciating reward.

One, it had led Hannah out of drabness. It had transformed her overnight into a bewildered passionate vehicle of sex. Wrought, her mind had unloosened, her brain cells uncoiled.

God forgive me the moments I even have wondered she wasn’t the better thinker than me.

Heidegger is close to tears. The shame of this.

—Oh, she’s bright, Martin, Elfride says. I have never denied you her brightness. But — she snaps her fingers — she isn’t you.

Floss leans back in his chair. He removes his glasses, polishes them. Elfride’s face is flushed. Always, with that flushed face, any wild remark is apt to burst from her mouth. He wants his glasses clean, that he may see her clean, when next she speaks.

“Tip the scales, Elfride,” Floss says. “Show the great man how bright you are.”

—Martin, darling, Elfride says. She is laughing. —Look what I am doing!

Martin has been cleaning his glasses.

Floss, putting on his glasses, sees Heidegger putting on his.

As for Elfride, Elfride is at the study window. She is poking the cat with a stick. Heidegger keeps the stick there for that very purpose. Enter a line in Being and Time, then jump up and poke the cat. Enter another, poke the cat. Day after day, poke the perfectly stupid, ever returning cat. That is how his opus is being written: Elfride’s dusting, Eflride’s interventions — but whenever alone he has been poking the cat.

So Floss figures. Floss has figured it out. Just as he has figured out — flipping the pages, speed-reading the familiar text — the nature of the breeze. He must wipe his fingertips of glycerine, that’s how much speed he needs. He has learned the dark secrets of this book. Floss knows precisely each line, each phrase, where Heidegger has got up, flung himself across the room, picked up his stick — tortured the cat.

But today, to Floss’s mind, there is something different about this cat.

“A moment, Elfride. Consider. In my view, that’s a pregnant cat.”

But Elfride is in action. Elfride has the stick. She is poking the cat.

—-Da!(poke) Da!(poke) Da!(poke) Da!

The cat is squalling; it is meowing, hissing. Clawing the glass. It can’t get in, it can’t get out.

Heidegger, cannot, will not, look. He turns his back to this scene. He claps hands over his ears. Elfride is capable, reliable. When the deed is done she will dispose of the corpse. He need never be appraised of the how or where. Philosophy need not concern itself with a being’s single specific fate. It has steered fathomless circles since the Greeks established the course. Well done, Greeks. Now those old walls must crumble. With certain exceptions, work to date has been rubbish in the wind. The ground is soggy, diseased, repellent: it releases a fetid odour. Original thought is now required. Already the cat’s presence, Elfride’s resoluteness, is slipping from his mind. The pen flies into his hand; it flies across the page. Quote, ‘Irresoluteness’ merely expresses that phenomenon which we have interpreted as a Being-surrendered to the way in which things have been prevalently interpreted by the “they”. Sweat pours down his cheeks. He pauses. He wonders if he may permit himself a footnote excluding Plato, Holderlin, Nietzsche from this “they”. Probably so. Why promote their cause?

He works on. He is unaware that Elfride’s Da! Da! Da! has catapulted into shrieks. Something about the cat. Something about something inside the cat. Let her deal with the matter. The cat is a household problem. That’s what marriage is for. For wives to deal with them.

Floss isn’t fooled. He knows Heidegger’s deeper thought: This wife, this hellcat, distorts the providence of being.

“Do you wish to whack the cat, Martin.” Elfride is whacking with each shriek.

Floss cannot sit still in his chair. His every nerve is shot. He cannot witness any more of this. He is shouting at Elfride, “Put down the stick! Filthy Hun, put down the stick!“

Already she has dropped the stick. Blood has splattered on the carpet, on her lovely night-dress. Her hands are covering her face. On the sill the dying cat is wrenching its body one way and another. Gore is leaking from the torn fur. Blood pools on the window sill. A slimy wedge of kitten protrudes beneath the crooked tail.

Never mind. Soon, reaching towards sixty, Heidegger will be out on the hinterlands with young and old, digging trenches to delay the advancing enemy. Floss hurriedly assembles his books. He hitches the backpack over one arm. Rushes down the stairs. The library is exceptionally well lit. Fluorescent tubes quiver and spit. In the entire building no other individual is stirring. The universe is silent. Dawn has arrived, an ascending quilt. His own cat will be crying. His cat will be saying, Why have you not been here to let me purr in your lap? What have you been doing? His wife and children will be in tears. Where have you been? Who are you? (Dearest soul), resolute being, explain yourself.

— Leon Rooke

———————————

Leon Rooke has published more than 30 books, including novels, short story collections, plays, anthologies, and “oddities,” and more than three hundred short stories. Rooke’s many awards include the Governor General’s Award for Fiction (for Shakespeare’s Dog, 1985), the Periodical Association of Canada Award for the English-Language Paperback Novel of the Year (for Fat Woman, 1982), a Pushcart Prize (1988), the North Carolina Award for Literature (1990), and the Canada/Australia Literary Prize in 1981, for his body of work. Also the W. O. Mitchell Literary Award, for his writing and his mentoring, and the ReLit Short Fiction Award. Rooke has taught at more than a dozen Canadian and U.S. universities. He lives in Toronto.

The Lights of Henderson: Fiction — Martha Petersen

May 032012

Here’s a terse, compelling little fictional tour de force by Martha Petersen, her first published story. It starts and ends, with practically no context or backfill, in the super-heated Arizona desert at night in July and stays tightly focused on a man and a woman in the cab of a truck, both runaways, both strangers to one another — the man has a gun. Repressed violence, desperation and an aura of intense (but not explicit) eroticism explode off the page. The dialogue is immaculate — obsessive, repetitive, dramatic and full of implication. Wonderful to read.

JONATHAN RAKED HIS FINGERS in the sand, and pushed air out from his chest as hard as he could. He found his t-shirt and wiped his hands off. He stood. The ankle was tender, but he could put a little weight on it. A sprain probably, but there would be no more running tonight.

A pickup shot by him and up the road a little way. The brake lights came on, it screeched to the side off the asphalt, then circled around and came back toward him. Someone inside put on the blinker, crossed the center line and turned back around. The truck skidded to a stop just ahead of him.

Jonathan felt inside his pocket and found his gun. He pulled it out and wrapped his t-shirt around it. He limped toward the pickup, fingers on the gun, ready for anything. The passenger window was down. Accordion music was playing.

“Are you getting in or what?”

Jonathan stopped still. If it had been any other kind of person, he would have climbed right in. But it was a girl’s voice.

He leaned in the window. “Just a phone. You got a phone? I need to make a call.”

“A dead one, that’s it,” she said.

He thought about things for a minute, but there was no other choice. There was no other way to get where he was going. “I’m going to Henderson,” he said. He opened the door and pulled himself into the truck. The ceiling light was dim, but Jonathan could tell that this girl belonged anywhere else but out here in the cactus and dust, at night and in the middle of the Nevada desert. She had light hair pasted to her cheeks, a delicate curve to her jaw and chin, a thin neck. The cap she wore shadowed her eyes and most of her face.

Jonathan placed his t-shirt, with the pistol inside, on the floor between his feet. He was suddenly aware of what he must look like, filthy, smelly, shirtless. He sucked in his stomach. His legs stuck against the vinyl seat. “Too damn hot,” he said.

“It’s July,” the girl said. She let off the clutch and the pickup lurched and then caught, and jerked out onto the highway. Jonathan watched in the rearview mirror at the road behind them. It looked the same as the road ahead. The desert was like that, letting you think you were getting somewhere, when really you were always staying in the same place.

The girl flipped the station from the accordion music, to pop music that had been popular when Jonathan was young, to someone talking in Spanish. She stopped it there. “Nothing on out here,” she said.

“When we get to Henderson, just drop me anywhere,” Jonathan said, over the wind and the radio.

“I’m not going to Henderson,” she said back. “I’m driving by.” She sipped on a Coke through a straw. “Want a drink? You look thirsty.”

Jonathan picked up the cup and pinched the lid to take it off.

“Don’t worry about that,” the girl said. “Drink from the straw. It’s all right. Go ahead.”

He did what she said. He sucked it down. The soda was warm and watery, and it burned his throat, and there was nothing in the world Jonathan wanted more. He pulled off the lid and gulped, spilling some of it on his chest. He emptied it all the way to the bottom, then placed the cup back in the holder.

“Sorry, it’s gone,” he said. “I spilled it.”

The girl had a package of candy worms on the seat next to her. She picked one up and put it between her lips and sucked on it. It slipped into her mouth. “What’s your name anyway?” she said through pieces of gummy worm.

Jonathan shifted in his seat, pushed on his ankle, which made him wince. “I’m Jake. My name’s Jake. Where is it you said you’re going?”

“I’m running away, Jake.” The girl slurped down another worm. She drifted off to the right, then pulled the wheel over and bumped along the center line. When she’d straightened out, she said, “You won’t tell anyone, right?”

Jonathan grabbed onto a handle above his window. “How about letting me drive?”

“It’s all right, Jake. Where I’m from it’s hotter than here. In Wellton it’s more than a hundred degrees at night.”

“I’ve never heard of the place.” Jonathan felt his ankle swelling. He needed ice and a stretchy bandage. His needed to wash his hands, to get the dirt out of the cuts. “You like it there?”

“I guess it’s nice if you like dirt and sweat. That’s about all there is there, that and lettuce farms in the winter. That’s why I’m running away. I don’t like lettuce.”

They were flying by sand hills. The black land spread all around them and the glow off the road looked like slick oil. Both the windows were open, and a hot, dirty breeze blew in. Jonathan wondered what Laurie was doing now, whether she was sleeping or had called the police. She imagined them finding his car on the side of the road, calling it in, coming after him. He had to get to Henderson.

Jonathan twitched the foot that didn’t hurt. “You can drop me at the next gas station. There’s a few coming up soon I think. They’re everywhere. I’m sure there’s one coming up.” Jonathan scanned the road ahead, but there was nothing. The only lights that blinked through the dust were the moon and the stars.

The last sign he’d seen said Henderson 210. That was before his car broke down. By his best guess, they had another 130 miles or so left to go. Less than that for a gas station. The girl kept speeding up, then slowing down, like she hadn’t figured out how to keep her foot steady on the gas pedal. “It’s 55 here,” Jonathan said. “It’s not the interstate here. Over there it’s 75, but not here. Pull over and I’ll drive.”

“That’s all right, Jake. I’ve got it. I’ve got my boyfriend in Reno, and after I get him we’re going to California, all the way down the Pacific Highway.”

The blared Spanish. Three people on there now, and sounds in the background like gongs. “Do you understand this stuff?” Jonathan pointed at the radio.

“What stuff?”

“Spanish.”

“Do I look like I speak Spanish?” One of the girl’s straps slipped down her small and white shoulder. The lights from the dash outlined the curve of her collarbone.

The girl drove to the side, across the line. She braked to a hard stop. “I got to pee,” she said. “Don’t look.” She took the keys with her.

He opened his door and pulled himself out. In the distance he saw, just barely, an orange glow. Henderson. His friend. A place to rest.

“Don’t look!” the girl called from behind a cactus.

Jonathan put a little weight on his ankle. The pain exploded up his leg. He couldn’t drive, even if he got the keys. This stick shift took two feet, which he didn’t have.

She was done, and she walked back to the truck, zipping her shorts.

Jonathan pulled himself back in. “I’ll drive,” he said.

“Aww, Jake, that’s all right. I’m not allowed to let other people drive the truck.” She rattled the keys in her hand. They both sat there, not moving.

Jonathan felt very thirsty. His leg throbbed.

“Did you look?” she asked.

“Let’s go. Please. I’ve got people in Henderson to help me. I need to get to a phone. See, I hurt myself.”

“You wanted to look, didn’t you?” The girl flipped her cap onto the dashboard. The keys were still in her hand.

“What’s your name again?” he asked.

“I can’t tell you, Jake, because then you might tell someone that I’m running away. Back in Wellton, there’s things going on that shouldn’t be. So this morning, I took these keys here, and now I’ve left that place forever.” She brought out some lip balm that smelled like bubble gum. “After I get my boyfriend in Reno, me and him are going to go down the Pacific Highway. Did I say that Jake? We’ll go down it, then we’ll stop in Chula Vista. Or maybe Tijuana. Want some?” She held out the lip balm.

Jonathan said no thanks.

“You ever been to Tijuana? Where I’m from is pretty close to there, so you’d think I would’ve been. But nope. This is the first time. We’re going to live on the beach. What do you think about that, Jake?”

The girl scooted toward him, turned her face up. The moon was at the top of the sky, and he could see her full face. She was younger than he’d thought. She might have been fourteen years old. She was not attractive. Her eyes were outlined in black, and her face was hawkish, in the way skinny girls’ faces are of that age. The straps of her shirt had slid down both her shoulders. If Jonathan looked, he could’ve seen straight down her chest. She was small and lost, and Jonathan could do whatever he chose with her.

He thought about his wife and what he’d done. His ankle was most likely broken, he was sure of that now, out in the middle of this desert, and he didn’t know what to do. His eyes watered.

“Please,” he said. “Just drive. See up there? That’s where I need to go. And when you drop me off, you need to turn right around and go home.”

She started the truck and they jerked forward, back onto the road. The lights ahead burned the atmosphere. It was because they were getting close that Jonathan decided to put his shirt on. He grabbed his t-shirt from the floor, and the pistol, which he’d nearly forgotten about, dropped in his lap. He snatched it up quickly.

The girl was driving fast, and when she saw the gun, she jerked the wheel and threw both her hands up. She screamed out Jesus’ name. The back of the pickup yanked to the side, pushed itself out in front, and then they were hurtling toward cholla with those needles, which shone like silver hypodermics. He wondered if the police would put it all together once they found the pickup with him inside. They’d tell his wife he was just another one of those guys who’d found a girl to run away with. Just before they rolled the first time, Jonathan watched the lights of Henderson pass across the windshield and thought how beautiful they were, a halo of orange against the blue night.

— Martha Petersen

Martha Petersen lives in Tucson with her husband and four children. She graduated from the University of Arizona, Summa Cum Laude, in creative writing and is currently attending Vermont College of Fine Arts as a graduate student in fiction. She plays classical piano and, over the years, has had a series of jobs including graphic artist and accountant and many others. “The Lights of Henderson” is her first publication.

The Jailed Wizards: A Tale — Mike Barnes

Apr 302012

Once there was an ogre who was like all other ogres except in one respect: he was reasonable. He could see more than one point of view, and he liked to argue and discuss. People seldom realized this, however, since he looked like any other ogre, huge and frightening, and he spent his time doing what every other ogre does: grabbing passersby and stuffing them in his mouth. He lived in a cave by a crossroads, where he slept away most of the day; but if he was awake and heard footsteps, he rushed out with a roar and planted himself in the roadway. No matter how loudly the person screamed (they always screamed), he snatched them up in his great hairy hand and ate them in two or three bites, cleaning his teeth afterward with branches he’d torn off trees. — Mike Barnes, The Reasonable Ogre, Tales for the Sick and Well

Mike Barnes is a prolific and startlingly innovative writer of stories, poems, essays, novellas and memoir. “The Jailed Wizards” is yet again a leap into the wild frontier of the imagination, a beautiful, odd, disturbing, bleak, slyly comical, modern fairy tale (that is also about storytelling), written by an author who has encountered all sorts of darkness in his own life — he has written a a stunning memoir of his own struggle with psychosis The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis. “The Jailed Wizards” is from Mike’s forthcoming book The Reasonable Ogre (Biblioasis, 2012), with amazing illustrations by the Toronto artist Segbingway.

A little background: I met Mike Barnes years ago at The New Quarterly WILD WRITERS WE HAVE KNOWN CONFERENCE (see the famous 400-page double issue Volume XXI, Numbers 2 & 3) in Stratford. He appeared twice in Best Canadian Stories during the decade I was editor (which tells you what I think of his fiction). He has already contributed some excerpts from a novel in progress and a novella — Ideas of Reference — to Numéro Cinq.

The Jailed Wizards

A wizard caught a rival wizard and locked him in a dungeon beneath his castle. First he stripped the captive of all his magical powers. Then he left him in a small, bare room, cold and damp and almost completely dark except for a bit of grayish light that leaked through a tiny barred window high above the floor. The stone walls were so thick that the imprisoned wizards—who were numerous, for the powerful wizard made war on anyone whose magic he felt threatened his own—could not even hear each other’s screams.

“How long will you keep me here?” the prisoner asked before his captor shut the stone door.

“How long does a wizard live?”

“Forever,” said the prisoner.

“That is how long you will remain,” said the powerful wizard. And he closed the massive door with a crash, and sealed it with an unbreakable spell.

Years passed. Twice a day a slot beside the door clanked open. The first time, a dirty hand pushed through a lump of stale bread and a cup of water; later, another dirty hand took back the cup. Nothing else occurred. Until one day the massive door creaked open on its ancient hinges, and the powerful wizard stood before his former rival, now filthy and wretched and listless with despair. “I have decided forever is the wrong sentence for you,” he announced. “There is a crack in the wall that lengthens a little each year. I am sure you have studied it. When it reaches the floor, I will let you go.”

“I thank you,” mumbled the prisoner.

“Don’t,” said the wizard. “This is not mercy. I want you to suffer as much as possible. Those who lose all hope do not suffer like those who still believe their suffering may one day end. That is all. Goodbye.”

Years passed again, but now they passed with the constant measuring of a tiny crack. Many times a day, the jailed wizard reached up and ran his hand over the break in the stone, wondering if it had lengthened by a hair or if he was only imagining that. It did, in fact, grow longer, but it did so with horrible slowness. Once, he did not allow himself to measure the crack for a hundred days—two hundred openings and closings of the slot—and when he measured it again, he was sure it was a finger’s width closer to the floor. Ten years passed in this way. Then twenty years. Then thirty. Now the crack in the wall had reached the level of his eyes. Now, he thought, I know I will get out one day. But when? In five hundred years? A thousand? I mustn’t think of that. One day I’ll leave.

Many long years later, the jailed wizard was standing next to the wall where he spent his days, examining the crack with his eyes and fingers to see if it had changed, when he was startled by a tiny movement just above him. Something very small and dark was moving within the crack. As the wizard watched, an ant stuck its head out of the crack, its tiny antennae moving in the stale air. Tears filled the wizard’s eyes to find his absolute loneliness broken by a visit from another creature, even an ant. Tears of joy and misery ran down his wrinkled face and into his long, dirty beard. Despite his extreme hunger, in the coming days he put little pellets of bread in the crack, and soon he had a line of ants he could watch, coming to get his crumbs and carrying them along the crack and out the window back to their nest. The sight brought joy and endless interest, and it stirred guilty memories.

Long ago, in one of the endless wars that are a wizard’s life, he had defeated a very minor wizard. The defeated wizard had been a storyteller, which is one of the lowest and most common grades of magic. Cruelly, out of sheer contempt, the victorious wizard had taken the defeated wizard’s strength and long life, though he had left him, as a power not worth stealing, his storytelling art. Now the jailed wizard struggled to remember what he had once known of this lesser magic. A story was at least a way of reaching other ears. This, after freedom, was what he longed for most.

Tiny animals, he remembered, were often used to gather stories and return them to the storyteller. Since the animals couldn’t speak our language, people told them things they would tell no other person, secure in the knowledge they could not repeat it. He couldn’t remember exactly how it was done, but even without a wizard’s magic he still had a wizard’s cunning, and he invented a way. He placed a tiny pellet of bread inside his ear and stood with his ear against the crack. Soon he felt the tickle of an ant entering his ear. He turned from the wall and plugged his ear with his finger. He felt the ant touch his finger and then, finding no way out, turn the other way and explore the inner chambers of his ear, walking around the words of the story in his head. When he judged that enough time had passed, he unplugged his ear and stood with his ear against the crack and let the ant find its way out. He watched it carry the pellet of bread and his story away up the crack toward the window high above. Would it carry it to someone who could understand? Would it be crushed under a careless foot? Perhaps he would need to tell a thousand stories to a thousand ants before one would find a listening ear. He could do that. Before his imprisonment he had lived a long, eventful life, each day of which had teemed with stories. Sitting with his back against the stone wall, he began to prepare the next one.

Some weeks later, in the village near the powerful wizard’s castle, an old, sick storyteller was sitting, as he always did, by the window of his hut. A line of bread crumbs and sugar led from his window to a stone covered with black ink, and beyond that to a sheet of clean white paper. The storyteller no longer had the strength to make up stories on his own, and he lived in the shrinking hope that one would come to him by itself. Day by day, ants walked over his trail of sugar crumbs and over his ink and paper. But the marks they made with their tiny inky feet spelled chaos, spelled nonsense—spelled nothing. Still, he had always done all he could do, and all he could do now was wait.

On this day, an ant came in across the window sill, walked down over his ink stone, and across his paper. Around it went in a circle—O—and then down, and up, and across a short curve, and down again—n. O . . . n . . . c . . . e—“Once,” the storyteller murmured with excitement, “once . . . and then?” Gently he sprinkled more sugar crumbs on the page, and waited, while the ant waved its antennae, and continued tracing letters with its feet.

I knew, I knew, I knew, whispered the storyteller. I knew there was no better place to wait than near a castle filled with jailed wizards, souls with endless tales to tell and no one but the ants to tell them to.

—Mike Barnes

—————————-

Mike Barnes is the author of Calm Jazz Sea, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Aquarium, winner of the 1999 Danuta Gleed Award for best first book of stories by a Canadian, The Syllabus, a novel, and the short fiction collection Contrary Angel. His stories have appeared twice in Best Canadian Stories, three times in The Journey Prize Anthology, and won the Silver Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards. He lives in Toronto.

Segbingway is an artist who lives in Toronto.

The Artist: Short Story — Lindsay Norville

Apr 142012

Lindsay Norville was out with her family for Chinese food one night when she snapped open a fortune cookie and read the words “One day you will write a book.” She says she knew she was going to be writer when she was ten. She wrote and self-published her first novel — Cracked Up — when she was thirteen. She’s a woman in a hurry. She is from Albany, NY, just down the road from me, where she has been studying creative writing privately with my friend Gene Garber who brought her work to my attention. This fall she plans to start in the MFA program at Syracuse University. But the plot thickens, as they say. Lindsay suffers from sickle cell anemia, she’s already had a liver transplant. You can read about this on her web site. I’m not revealing secrets. It makes my heart sore to read about this and yet see that smile on her face (look at her site — she smiles a lot) and to think of the struggle she has been through to get her words out. It’s a deep pleasure to publish her here. “The Artist” is a painfully real story of a child/girl/woman lapped in the doubtful bliss of a nuclear family from hell. The word “artist” is meant to be both true and ironic: the artist is the girl’s father, a musician who murders his wife in a spasm of long accumulated love-hate, a dramatic, intimate dance macabre of obsession. Victim and unwilling co-conspirator, the girl, as is the nature of such children, is a minute observer of her parents’ faults. Her telling is chilling and courageous — in our politically correct era you rarely see a woman’s self-obsessed evil dissected so carefully. We’re in Mommy Dearest country here. But the mother is a dream compared to the father who does his best to enlist his daughter’s sympathy and complicity, undermining her sense of self and reality from the padded cell where he lives, really and metaphorically.

———

When they questioned him, my father only said things like, “The first time I saw her there was a smile in her eyes.” Of course this frustrated the authorities, and later the doctors, but that was how my father talked. He was an artist.

They kept him in seclusion. He had padded white walls with a thin metal cot and a twelve-by-ten floor space to pace hour after hour, day after day. He could only leave to go to the bathroom down the hall, flanked by an attendant the nurses on the ward called Big T.

I smiled a little when I imagined my slim father taking on someone named Big T. My father didn’t even kill insects. He was the gentlest person I knew. “Violence is for animals and the unloved,” he would say whenever he caught me in my room punching pillows and stuffed dolls, picturing the girls at school who made fun of my brown skin and knobby knees.

He never fought them. He let them take him away. He let them lock him up. He never had to be sedated or tied down when they pointed their fingers and made their allegations. The lawyers said my father couldn’t even manage an eye twitch or an agitated tone when responding to the bailiff. It was his perpetual calm, his unwavering refusal to testify, the way he regarded his cuffed wrists and my mother’s weepy relatives with a slightly irritated indifference that convinced the members of the jury he belonged with the criminally insane. In their estimation, only a psychopath could methodically clean his reading glasses while blown-up photographs of my mother’s body were displayed and discussed at length.

During the trial, one of my favorite fantasies involved watching understanding ignite in each juror’s eyes as I stood before the court with my own evidence. I would pass around the blue bow tie my father wore to the spring formal his sophomore year of high school. As a shy and introverted musical prodigy, he disliked school dances, but he took Patricia Himmel that year because she had just lost her father to cancer, she wanted desperately to go, and the fact that she had Down Syndrome discouraged other boys from asking her. He paid for her dress, called her a princess, and didn’t skip out on any slow songs. How could such a gentleman be anything but cooperative and composed when confronting his accusers? He was ashamed when he found out I spit on Nurse Mason, the head attendant of the ward.

Nurse Mason was a massive woman with big, blonde, teased hair and a smile with many meanings behind it. She acted sympathetic toward me at first, patting my shoulders and slipping me cellophane-wrapped sweets from her pockets. She held my hand in the halls so I wouldn’t be afraid of the other prisoners and the bars that clanged shut behind us. Then one day, while she talked to another attendant behind the desk where the medications were kept, I heard her refer to my father as “that ape.” She said it softly and meanly, sliding the words out with disgust. I could tell by her tone that it was something she said often. The next time she came to take me to him she received a mouthful of saliva in thanks.

My father shook his head, looked at his idle hands and said, “Corinne, you are fighting the wrong people.” He never stopped talking in riddles, even when our situation became desperate.

I say “our” situation because I believed then we were one person. Whenever I visited I would find him sitting on the cot, body limp, looking as black as night against the backdrop of his white prison. He would be right where I left him the previous visit. I tried to savor that hour and took in everything about him. I noted the new lines in his face and how much weight he had failed to keep on his already thin frame. I studied the stubble on his chin and the slope of his shoulders when he heaved sighs of resignation. I watched how he absently shifted his wire-rimmed glasses and the way his empty hands shook. He was used to holding a guitar or a saxophone and plunking away on a piano, his fingers moving with such speed and agility my eyeballs grew tired trying to keep up.

When they weren’t making art, his hands had always been busy taking care of me. He practiced perfecting recipes for chicken piccata and beef stroganoff. He carefully shampooed my kinky hair during bath time, lining up his rings on the edge of the tub so they wouldn’t catch in the tangles and make me cry out. He remembered to surround me with pillows to keep away the boogies when he tucked me in at night. He taught me how to strum his favorite acoustic, promising my sore fingertips would harden over time. He used both thumbs to squeeze playground splinters out of my palms, wincing whenever I whimpered.

It was torture for me, watching his fingers twitch from lack of use. My skin felt each tremor and broke out in goose bumps, as if his hands were grazing the sensitive spot on the nape of my neck instead of tapping his knees.

I wondered all the time if musicians could lose their gift. I was too afraid to ask. I didn’t want to remind him. Instead I would go home and touch my lips to his mouthpieces, letting the pulpy taste of his wooden reeds linger on my tongue. I would run my fingers over the black and ivory keys of his ancient upright, memorizing the scars cut into the wooden sides by time and use. I willed him to fly out of the hospital and momentarily possess my body.

He was in everything I did, everything I felt. I talked to him in my head, believing if I concentrated hard enough, the message would reach him. That way he was the first to know my eleventh birthday wish was to kiss Ollie Coulsen on the lips. Even though I couldn’t explain it to the school psychologist, my father knew why I slapped Hannah Malone after her prosecutor father did a presentation in front of the class during career week. When I stuck a tampon in the wrong hole during my first period he was the only person I told. He agreed that I looked best in black or purple in dressing room mirrors, and he didn’t care that I failed freshman biology. I knew he understood when I took a scalpel to dissect the frogs and rats and how the memory of my mother’s smooth sandalwood coffin in the funeral parlor paralyzed me.

I only excluded him from my mind when I thought about my mother. If my father knew how much I thought about her, it would have killed him. When I wasn’t worrying about him in his blanched cell, I remembered the way she would smile at nothing, as if her happiness floated in empty air. If I closed my eyes, images of her dancing in our kitchen filled the spotted darkness. She wore loose linen pants, long skirts, and flowing dresses; anything that billowed out when she moved, giving her a majestic quality. She had the kind of beauty that hurt. The kind that made people stare after her in the street. The kind that is too rare for a daughter to inherit. She kept her cinnamon brown shoulders bare and rolled back. She loved to laugh and did often, even when things were serious. Even when my father caught her slinking in during the quietest hours of the night, his mouth stern, but his eyes melting.

“Don’t be so dramatic, Reginald,” she would say, fluttering her hand in mild annoyance, dispersing faint traces of a stranger’s cologne into the air. Then she would beam at him and saunter over. “Come kiss your wife hello. Or good morning. Whichever you prefer.” And he would. He always obliged.

Standing at the top of the stairs in my cotton nightgown, watching this scene play out over and over, I learned to take my cues from my father and kept my distance, at least as much as a needy child could but, “Come brush Mama’s hair” or, “Watch Mama sew this shawl” were words I craved. Though most of the time she would send me away. “You’re cramping my style, kid.”

One of her favorite games was copycat. “Do like this, Corinne. Watch Mama and be a copycat.” I would be eating breakfast or watching cartoons when suddenly my mother would call me over to perform with her. She would strike some elegant pose from her brief modeling career or break out a complicated move from her childhood dance training. She made it impossible for me to mirror her, but I was never allowed to give up until she was thoroughly amused. She criticized my form and my inflexibility. She pointed out how hard I strained in my clumsy efforts while her movements came naturally. “What an ugly face you’re making. You look constipated, Corinne.”

My mother would assess me with one long finger prodding her pouting bottom lip. “How did I end up with her? Would you guess she’s mine? If there’s a god, I must be on punishment—Ma always said my wild teenage years would come back to bite me in the ass.” She took special pleasure in making my father agree with her comments.

“She’s mostly me,” he would say, keeping his gaze on my mother. “That’s not so bad.”

“And what man wants you?” was a typical response my father couldn’t get around. But he was always there when I dissolved into tears later on, away from her scornful smile. He never explained her behavior or tried to make excuses, but the shoulder I leaned on was solid and the hand that rubbed my back felt sure. I was grateful for these things.

My father’s older sister, my Aunt Flo, moved in right before his arraignment. She took it upon herself to rid the house of my mother’s presence. After the detectives swept through for evidence everything went into cardboard boxes, sealed and stored in the basement. I couldn’t tell Aunt Flo that I longed for just one picture of my mother.

One day, when I should have been fretting over pimples and my first homecoming dance, Aunt Flo showed me an exercise one of the doctors had assigned my father. On a yellow legal pad, his doctor had written “Sacrifices” at the top in ink. Using a blue crayon, my father crossed out the doctor’s title and replaced it with “Tradeoffs.” Directly below it he had scrawled “1.) Freedom.” Number two read, “Sanity.” Then there was a rough sketch of a dancing figure, more a flame than a person.

Aunt Flo shook her head. “He’s delusional.”

I bit back the reply my father would have given: “Love goes with delusion. Love welcomes delusion. It helps make it effective.” Instead I tried to match my aunt’s disgust with indignation. “They could’ve trusted him with a pen.”

But as always Aunt Flo saw through my attempt. I made it clear from the beginning whose side I was on. The day after my mother’s funeral, when my maternal grandparents tried to coax me into a hug, Aunt Flo watched with an open mouth as I pulled away. I said I never wanted to see them again because they looked and sounded just like her. Before that, I had always been Aunt Flo’s Corinne-baby-doll. After, Aunt Flo started to watch me out of the corners of her eyes.

“I’m waiting for his kind of crazy to come out. I know it’s in her. I’ve seen it,” Aunt Flo confessed to a friend over the phone. Aunt Flo thought she was being discreet shut up in the spare bedroom, but I was accustomed to listening through doors.

Once, my mother had pinched my arm until she drew blood, attempting to scare me onto my tip toes to practice pointe with her. My father sat me on the lid of the toilet, my heels not quite touching the floor, and handed me a Band-Aid covered with Big Bird’s face. Sighing into his cupped hands, he frowned at his reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink.

“She was the first thing I ever really worshipped. She isn’t even human. Your mama’s a…a creature. How can I tame that? How can I muzzle her spirit? I’m just so blessed to be a part of her world.” There was a longing in his voice I mistook for sadness at the time. I wanted to believe he was sorry for our fate—that he knew he cleared the way that led my mother’s path of destruction straight towards us.

“Our first date she asked me how I planned on making her happy—that day and every day after. She said I would need to come up with something new every morning if I wanted to wake up beside her. I was dazzled. We were in a coffee shop and she asked me this. Didn’t even know my last name. Her words were too big for that place. She was too big for everything. Always has been. If we’re snowflakes, Corinne, she’s blizzard. You’ve got to remember that.”

The way she treated my father served as a constant reminder. She called him “my little drummer boy” in front of his students who came to the house for private lessons. Whenever he hosted struggling colleagues for weekend long stays, she would interrupt their jam sessions, drinking too much wine and saying things that made my father cough and clench his teeth. If he was receiving an honor, she was impossible. When they couldn’t find a babysitter, I would become a spectator alongside my father. It would start with my mother leaving me alone, scared and shaking, among strangers while she filled up at the bar. My father would follow the sound of my sobs and come and gather me in his arms. He always knew.

“Don’t cry. Salt is for the sea, not little girls in pretty dresses. Did she leave you again? She must be off misbehaving.”

That’s what he called it: misbehaving. He made it sound so simple, but I was always confused by what ensued. Usually, as my shy and modest father did his best to work the room, my mother would find a man or two to spend the evening with. Pins and needles were in her voice when she told me to wipe my mouth or not to wrinkle my outfit, but her words were syrupy sweet with the men. Suddenly, her feet couldn’t support her. Instead of her usual poise, she swayed into them and clasped their arms. Everything they said was funny. If she wasn’t laughing, she was telling secrets, her mouth dangerously close to their earlobes. My father pretended not to notice, but once we were trapped together inside the walls of our home my mother became, “loose” and “a disgrace” and “a bad influence.”

“Why do you insist on sabotaging our happiness?” he would ask after his short-lived rage melted down to anguish.

“You say it with such feeling, as if our happiness was more than a myth. Cry a little next time and maybe I’ll believe there’s something for me to sabotage.”

Later, he would interrupt a bedtime story to insist her cold response was the effect of alcohol. “She only sounded sober,” he would say as if the Berenstain Bears needed convincing.

She was careless about who called the house when my father was home. If it was a strange man my father would confront her, sometimes with tears in his eyes and sometimes with a raised hand that she confidently ignored. More than once, I witnessed my mother crying and pleading, her lithe body collapsing into him in such a way that he had to hold her in his arms to keep her off the floor. She clutched at his neck and pushed her lips against his collarbone, talking into his shoulder. “I’ll go. Say you don’t love me and I’m not worth it and I’ll go. Say it, Reginald. Say it just once and I’m gone. No more wife for you, no more mother for Corinne. Either you say it or we move on from this right now.”

My mother rewarded my father’s silence by leading him to their bedroom. If he held back or flat-out refused, asking for time and space to think over her latest betrayal, he was irresistible. “Jesus, not in front of Corinne. How can you be thinking about that right now? How can you expect me to with all this sitting in our laps, weighing us down?” As my father scolded, she would start to undress, limbs playful, prancing out of arm’s reach if he attempted to cover her. To preserve my innocence my father ended up in the bedroom before too much skin was revealed.

Everything my mother attempted, she mastered. The first time she picked up a tennis racket she managed to play with the same amount of style and moxie that she put into posing for a picture. Her vintage sewing machine was a Christmas present and by Valentine’s Day of that same season she was putting the finishing touches on my Christening gown. When she decided she wanted to sing, only an award-winning opera singer would do for a vocal coach. My father was in constant awe of my mother’s inclination towards perfection, but she wielded it like a weapon against him. “Golf is not rocket science. I’m the one with the bad shoulder and look at my swing. You’re such an embarrassment, I almost want to tell people you have a defect.”

All the ways in which my mother was superior replaced nursery rhymes and bedtime stories and hand games. Instead of cookie recipes and the secret of where babies come from, my mother shared my father’s shortcomings with me. “Six years of Spanish in high school and college and that’s how he pronounced it! The first time I walked in France, the natives thought I was one of their own. And I picked up the language in the dressing and work rooms of designers.”

Her honey-do lists were usually composed late in the evenings after she had drained her fifth gin and tonic and filled an ashtray with butts. While brushing his teeth in front of the bathroom mirror the next morning, my father faced post-it notes with tasks like “Grow a pair” or “Ditch the nerdy tweeds” written in an angry scrawl.

If he had to travel for performances, my mother suddenly forgot how to take care of herself and a child. “You’re leaving me, again? How can you do this, Reginald? What do I do? What do you expect me to do?” During those trips, neglecting me served as his punishment for choosing to go. My mother didn’t seem to care that she was punishing me as well, but what bothered me more was that my father never ceased to be surprised when he came home to empty pantry shelves and the rank smell that wafted from my unwashed armpits.

If he needed to be alone with her—if he needed just one kind word or glance or touch to get him through the day—she became as frigid and dense as a statue. She pretended not to know how to read his body language or his thoughts. He became a stranger. “Don’t look at me like that, Reginald. You’re like a creepy old man at a dark bus terminal or something. If those are bedroom eyes then I’m the Virgin Mary.”

Everything he was passionate about she found fault with. “Reginald composed a piece the other day. It’s cute, I guess. Kinda long and drawn out.” A shrug and a smirk. “He tries.” This was her small talk when asked about her husband and his life’s work. If someone praised him she would tilt her head to the side and furrow her brow in mild perplexity until the person grew doubtful and trailed off. If they talked about his awards and titles and recognition, she looked away like she was listening to a buzzing in her ear until the subject changed.

Slowly and painfully, my father became as dull as she wanted him to be. The lively jazz compilations he was known for were replaced by somber marches and overtures suited more for high school bands than dance clubs. His friends dwindled and he spent his weekends shuffling through files that didn’t need organizing or using a good portion of the kitchen table for games of solitaire. His jokes became ordinary and obvious and when Aunt Flo came to visit she would say things like, “Are you taking your vitamins, Reginald? You look so flat.”

At the time, I didn’t see any danger in his deliberate retreat. Like an obedient daughter, I followed in his footsteps. We became mundane to make room for my mother’s brilliance. Our lives revolved around my mother and we accepted this. We accepted this because she would dish out her cruelty with a smile and a laugh. She made light of every pain she inflicted on us with a kiss and a broken promise. This was what my father chose for us. She was what he wanted, and I wanted everything he wanted. I would have lived out my life and perished in her shadow, but one day she never came out of her bedroom to make her morning espresso.

Instead, my father shook me awake when the light on my bedroom floor was still gray. As he helped me dress, his gaze kept trailing over to rest on the wall separating my room from the one he shared with my mother. After my sandals were strapped on, we stood by my window, taking turns imitating the early morning birdsong. Our whistles filled the air, replacing the heavy silence of new death. When the sun was higher in the sky my father sent me over to the next-door neighbor’s to play with their dog. The next thing I knew, I was attending my mother’s funeral. I was only nine and she would have been thirty the next month. Now I lie awake in bed at night—guilt strangling the deep breaths I struggle to take—wondering why I chose not to hear the sirens over the wooden fence as I let my hands become sticky with canine kisses.

My first therapist once asked if I missed my mother and I considered my last visit to see my father. I kept probing for details about the progress of his trial that I wasn’t allowed to sit in on. The adults that made the decisions in my life—Aunt Flo and the lawyers—felt it was too traumatizing for a ten year old. All my father wanted to talk about was juror number seven’s habit of smoothing the edges of her hair with the flats of her palms just like she used to. “It’s mesmerizing. I can’t concentrate on anything else.”

“Missing her would be a treat.” I tried to make my voice as deadpan as possible but the therapist told me not to resort to passive aggressiveness in our sessions. Then, remembering my age, she explained what passive aggressive meant. I told her I needed a new therapist.

“Your mother ages me,” he would say whenever she failed to come home in the evening. He was much older than her. At the time of her death he was in his late fifties. Even in my earliest memories, my father’s hair was pepper gray. He preferred expensive Italian loafers over sneakers and shaved with an old fashioned blade.

He was too old to put up with it all. He was too goddamn gentle. Every week I would visit my father. His eyes would lose their fear when they locked on mine. “Hello, cupcake,” he would say with gravel in his voice. It was probably the first thing he uttered on those days. Those two words and those eyes that he softened just for me left me speechless sometimes. I just stared as the unshed tears backed up in my throat. Several visits ended with me straining against the arms of the attendants. I considered myself more useful than the lawyers and so I welcomed the feeling of my muscles growing tired. I measured our success by how many bruises I collected from firm handgrips. On bad days they threatened to have me banned from the ward. I later found out he wouldn’t eat if they didn’t let me come. That was his only rebellion over the years.

I fought for him in so many ways. After he opted out of the appeal process I believed for a while the incident with the fire was a part of our crusade to clear his name. The thing with my wrists was harder to explain to my psychiatrists. When I told them I had to spill enough blood for my father to feel my love for him despite the distance, they suggested time apart. They considered keeping me away from him beneficial to my mental stability, but I saw it as another test.

“I did it, cupcake. I did it and nothing you do can undo it. We are all guilty of something in life and this is my guilt to live with. Stop trying to prove my innocence.”

His voice was even and steady, yet I had to clutch the cold metal of his cell door as the floor pitched beneath me. I couldn’t get over the shock of this contradiction. It distracted me as he searched my face, trying to gauge my reaction, as if it mattered anymore.

I was seventeen by then and my father was becoming frail. Aunt Flo and my doctors had kept us apart for almost a year. In preparation for the time of our reunion I chopped off my hair, using a razor blade so it sat on my head in nappy tufts. I spent hours in the sun, darkening my skin to a burnt black. I skipped meals to keep my hips and chest from filling out to match my mother’s curves, feeding my hunger with sugarless gum and cotton balls. My father would not find any traces of my mother in me.

“I would have believed in you forever,” I said. I would have believed you were innocent until I died,” I whispered, looking at my bandaged wrists. The gauze wasn’t necessary anymore, but I wore it like a name tag. Hello, my name is Reginald’s damaged goods. I forgot who I was without it.

“Well, now you can move on. We can move on.”

I touched the thick sleeve of his hospital robe with my fingertips and resisted the urge to ask him where he thought we could possibly go. I had learned long ago to synchronize my breathing with the hum of the radiator beneath his barred window.

On the long car ride to outpatient therapy later that day, Aunt Flo felt like trying to understand us. Occasionally, she would get homesick for a healthy family. “How did it happen? How did they happen? How did you happen, Corinne?”

I thought puzzling out reasons and searching for meanings was pointless. I still embraced my self-abasement like a swooning lover. Accepting that everything was partially my fault made it easier to bear the weight of his hand covering mine.

I could’ve told Aunt Flo about how my mother and father met. He spotted her in a crowded bar after his set and when he finally approached she gave him a once-over and said around her cigarette, “I’d ruin you.”

My father proposed eight times before she said yes. She was a year and a half into her modeling career and was already tired of the competition. She confessed matrimony was a way to pass time.

“Everybody had high cheekbones,” she used to say. “Everybody had a dancer’s body. Everybody, everybody, everybody—it got so that they were looking for the freaks among us. Who had the twiggy legs, the androgynous face structure, the fish lips? Plain old stunning wasn’t enough for those pricks.”

But maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe these intricacies were created by time and for the love of my father.

I was eight and a half the day my mother decided she wanted to color with me. It must have been the middle of winter because more than anything, I remember the sound of her thick wool socks sliding across the wood floors. She ordered me to bring out my markers and crayons and set my father’s newest composition in front of me. It was one he had struggled over for months and his only full copy. My mother gave me her best and brightest smile but I smelled the trap. The excitement that lit up her face had a disturbing sheen to it. I refused and we argued until her sharp reproaches produced tears. Scoffing, she took up a marker and scribbled by herself.

When my mother grew bored with coloring she rooted in my toy chest until she found glitter, glue, and stickers. As the stiff black marks dotting the bars of music disappeared beneath her work, she hummed over the sound of my sniffles. When she had destroyed all fifteen sheets of music she placed them back on the piano bench where my father quickly found them.

She let him scream and rage at me for what seemed like an eternity before stealing into my bedroom and putting her color-stained fingers between me and his fury. “What do you think? Am I the next Matisse? Or maybe it reminds you more of a Picasso?”

My father said nothing. His chest heaved from trying to catch his breath and his eyes rolled everywhere around my room but in her direction. My mother’s presence used to captivate my father so much that watching her had been an occupation that absorbed him completely. Yet that afternoon he couldn’t study her collarbone and her calves to dodge the messy reality she threw in his face. The idea of her no longer served as his own personal oasis.

“Well, Reginald, what’s next? Are you going to punish me? Make me sorry?” She laughed. “You won’t be able to. You can’t make me feel responsible for your hurt feelings. You came to me with your internal weaknesses—batteries not included.”

I knew even then by the way she squared off in front of my father—her shoulders stanch while his sagged—that they had reached someplace beyond the damaged music.

The next week when I went to the hospital, I could tell he wasn’t present. I caught him standing by his window, looking over the grounds.

“I had a dream,” he said, “that your mother forgave me and you were better. You were better and it was beautiful.”

I didn’t respond. The suffering that usually tumbled from his slumped shoulders to sprawl across the space between us was missing.

“They let me out to use the piano in the rec room sometimes. It needs some tuning, but it’ll do. It’s going to get better. We’ll be okay. You’ll see, cupcake.” He smiled her smile—full of broken promises.

I donated his instruments to a local middle school and dumped his Oxford ties at a Goodwill. Now I dream of gangly boys with braces blowing spit into his trumpets and homeless men on corners causing the pedestrians to wonder why someone in designer loafers would need their spare change.

I have learned to converse with myself, think comforting thoughts when I can’t stop tugging at my earlobes, or after I realize I laughed too loud at something that wasn’t funny. When I remember to eat three solid meals a day my therapist smiles and says the equation is working: me + distance from the white cell = progress. But my heart throws up the word progress and grasps the memory of that day when he told me about the piano in the rec room with the same tenderness and need that dripped from his mouth whenever he uttered “cupcake.”

I never went back. I don’t know how to live with his truths. If people ask after him, I say, “My father is dead.” If people who read the papers and followed the news updates ask about what he did, I remember how important it is to look them in the eye as I say, “My father was an artist.”

—Lindsay Norville

——————–

Lindsay Norville received her B.A. from Emerson College with a concentration in Writing, Literature, and Publishing and a psychology minor. She graduated magna cum laude within three years. During her freshman year of undergrad, she self-published a novel entitled Cracked Up with a small local press, The Troy Book Makers. She wrote Cracked Up when she was thirteen. She recently had a short story published in PANK. This fall she will start in the MFA program in fiction at Syracuse University.

A Nation Plays Chopsticks: Short Fiction — Mark Anthony Jarman

Apr 112012

Confessional: Years ago, some time in the mid-1990s, I took up hockey again and played for two years in the nascent Saratoga Springs men’s hockey league. At the time this was one step up from pickup games. Mostly we played in an ancient barn-like wooden arena that, as it turns out, had been built on PCB-contaminated land that is now vacant (forever, possibly) and sewn with grass. I got so serious about this, I would drive to Troy once a week for skating lessons in a tiny private rink (also inside a barn). We would practice edging by skating round and round holding onto a metal hoop anchored at the center, first one way, then they other. One summer I went to a hockey camp run by professional hockey players. Of such things an old man still dreams. Four years ago I went back to the league and played one game. Awful.

Here’s is a Mark Anthony Jarman short story about playing Oldtimers Hockey in New Brunswick. (Okay, more confession: Once, long, long ago, I won the Canadian Oldtimers Hockey League Sportswriter of the Year Award — the high water mark in my literary career.) Mark is an old friend dating back to our days at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’s from Alberta, lives next to the Saint John River in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he teaches at the university. He plays hockey, wrote a hockey novel, has three sons, and was a regular pick when I edited Best Canadian Stories. He is the subject of my essay “How to Read a Mark Jarman Story” which originally appeared in The New Quarterly and can be found in my essay collection Attack of the Copula Spiders. He writes the wildest, most pyrotechnic stories of anyone I know. This particular story appeared earlier in Mark’s story collection My White Planet.

———

Drive the night, driving out to old-timer hockey in January in New Brunswick, new fallen snow and a full moon on Acadian and Loyalist fields, fields beautiful and ice-smooth and curved like old bathtubs. In this blue light Baptist churches and ordinary farms become cathode, hallucinatory. Old Indian islands in the wide river and trees up like fingers and the strange shape of the snow-banks.

It’s not my country, but it is my country now, I’m a traveler in a foreign land and I relish that. The universe above my head may boast vast dragon-red galaxies and shimmering ribbons of green, and the merciless sun may be shining this moment somewhere in Asia, but tonight along the frozen moonlit St. John River the country is a lunatic lunar blue and the arena air smells like fried onions and chicken. We park by the door, play two 25 minute periods, shake hands, pay the refs, knock back a few in dressing room #5, and drift back from hockey pleasantly tired, silent as integers. And I am along for the ride.

Why do I enjoy the games so, enjoy the primal shoving and slashing and swearing and serious laughing at it all afterward? In these games I have taken a concussion, taken a skate blade like an axe between my eyes and I jammed brown paper towels on the cut to staunch the blood. Stitches, black eyes, and my nose is still broken from a puck running up my stick on its mission. Might get my nose fixed one of these days. One opposing player, when younger and wilder, is reported to have bitten another in the meat of the eye!

Today the inside of my thigh is a Jackson Pollock splatter painting: yellow green purple nebulas under the skin, flesh bruised from pucks hitting exactly where there is no padding (the puck has eyes). At night my right foot pulses and aches where I stopped a slap-shot years ago. My elbows are sore and they click when I move my arms. My joints are stiff when I climb the pine stairs, especially now, since yesterday I took the boys skiing and then I played hockey at night. Rub on extra horse liniment. My neck won’t move freely and a check wrecked my shoulder last April and for weeks I had to sleep on my back or the pain awoke me. Never got the shoulder looked at. I pay money for these injuries, these insults to my spirit.

So why pay, why play the game? As the Who sing, I Can’t Explain. Hockey is my slight, perverse addiction. Certainly I crave the physical side, especially versus working at the desk on 300 e-mails or doodling in a dull meeting. I enjoy the contrast, the animal aspects. I crave a skate, a fast turn on the blades.

And I play because I am a snoop. I learn things I would never otherwise know about New Brunswick, receiving a kind of translation, a geography lesson mile by mile, a roadmap, gossip, secrets, an unofficial oral history of this place’s lore and natives. My team translates and I am along for the ride, a spy in Night-town.

We ride the highway down from Nackawic where we always lose to the Axemen or the Bald Eagles, millworkers on both teams up there. I’m deep in the backseat of Al’s 4×4, but I spy a deer waiting by the shoulder like a mailbox. I point it out to Al at the wheel. The deer is hunched, nose out, poised to run across the busy lanes, its dark eyes inches from my face as our metal box blows past its snout and ears and private insects.

“I seem to hit one of those every two years,” Al says. “Wrecked more damn vehicles.” Al, as did his father, works fitting people with artificial limbs. The passengers in our 4×4 all hold bags of gas station chips and open beer — what we call travelers. I take up their habits.

Powder the goalie says, “I hit a deer last year and it was stuck across the windshield, this stupid face staring in at me in the damn side window. Damn deer’s fault, up in grass above, everything hunky-dory, and doesn’t it decide to cross right when I’m there. I must have drove 200 feet before the deer finally dropped off.”

“You keep it?”

“Didn’t want to get busted. 3 a.m. and I was drinking.”

“That’s when you keep them. Toss it in your freezer.”

“Ain’t got no freezer. Had to stop later at the gas station, headlights all pointed every which way.”

People are killed every year hitting moose on the road to Saint John. Off the highway there’s a moose burial ground where they drag the carcasses and scavengers have their way with the organs and bones. First they offer the dead moose to the Cherry Bank Zoo for its lions or tigers, I forget which. The moose the lions don’t eat end up in the pile off the highway.

Dave the RCMP says, “Man, when I was in Saskatchewan I was driving to Yorkton and came across this guy who had hit one cow square on, killed it, and he clipped another and it flew down in the ditch. It was still alive and I had to dispatch it. I come back up and this guy is crying about his van, some red Coca Cola van, vintage I guess, front all pushed in, big V pushed in, crushed the grill, and this guy is just fucking crying about it and I said, Mister, I’m here to tell you you’re lucky to be alive. But my van! Just fucking crying about his little red Coca Cola van.

Powder the goalie is in possession of beer stolen from the truckload of Spanish Moosehead ale. I’d like to have one can as an illicit souvenir.

“I’ll bring you some,” he says to me one game.

We do not let Dave the RCMP know this. Dave, also known as Harry and the Hendersons for his furry back, also known as Velcro for the fur on his back, gets a hat trick one night, four goals the next game. Velcro works hard. “Come hard or don’t come at all,” he says. Bad games he smashes his stick out of frustration, famous for ruining expensive sticks. Powder’s goalie gear is chewed up by his dog, same dog that ate his rug and his plants and his pet iguana.

After the game in the locker room no lockers, but a cooler full of bottles and ice or if there is no ice then snow from the Zamboni. My team stocks Propeller Bitter just for me.

“Any pussy drinks there left?” Thirsty the defenceman asks. “Pass me over a wildberry.” 6 or 7 empty bottles by him. He’ll drink anything. Takes a traveler with him for the drive. He’s not at the wheel; someone else is driving.

Thirsty was at the wheel on the road to Campbellton when his truck nearly went off the highway in a snowstorm, truck going sideways, going in circles on ice, his hands in deft circles on the wheel. They laugh about it now.

Big Billy says, “Thirsty’s arms were going like crazy, he looked like a cat digging in the litter box.” Both are good rushing defencemen, often way ahead of the forwards. Coach yells at them to stay back and play D. Thirsty complains of a lack of fellatio at home, complains that he’s living what he calls a no hummer zone. Or was that Big Billy the traveling salesman? They sit side by side and joke and laugh and drink.

“Getting no leather,” they complain, “getting no skin. Boys I tells yas, a woman gets married and she stops giving hummers.”

My wife says she likes the way I smell after hockey.

Get home late and buzzing and I can’t sleep, try to watch TV: Ringo says to an overturned rowing scull: “Come in #7, your time is up.” I am 50; how long can I keep skating? An 87 year old still skates for the Stinkhorns team. I am still waiting for the Oilers to call, say they need a stay at home D man.

Funny that I didn’t really start playing hockey until I was about 30, playing with jazz musicians on Sunday nights in Calgary. No helmets, few pads. I was a pylon. My nickname was Snepts. Then I played nooners with the Duffer Kings at Oak Bay Rec in Victoria for a dozen years. More and more pads, a helmet, then a visor. My nickname was The Professor. Same name here in NB. Maybe I should take up a pipe.

Some games are lighthearted, a lark, others are grueling, violent.

Across the river in Nashwaaksis I chase a loose puck behind our goal. #16 shoves me from behind, shoves me face first into the boards, exactly what players are told over and over not to do. Neck or back injuries, paralysis, broken teeth, concussions, low self esteem, etc. I get up yelling and pointing at #16 for a penalty, but it doesn’t matter as our team calmly gathers the puck, takes it down the other way and scores a goal. The ref points into the net.

In Burtts Corner two of us race to a puck rolling in our end. Different angles. If he gets the puck he’s in on net. I get close, swing my lumber and knock the puck away from their player, #10. He knocks my stick right out of my hands, yells, accuses me of hacking him. I played the puck, I know I made a good play. He’s just pissed off I caught up. When we’re all shaking hands after the game their goalie tells me, “#10 has gout. He was owly before the game even started.” Maybe he thought I was whacking his gouty ankles. What is gout? Some games I don’t shake hands.

“What are you doing to them back there?” a forward asks. “Someone is always after you.”

Ted says, “He gives as good as he gets.”

They all join in. “Oh he’s hacking and whacking, he’s clutching and grabbing like an octopus back there.”

I am innocent of all charges.

“That’s ok, boys,” says Ted, “that’s how we win games.”

Am I not a gentle soul? Am I not always on the side of angels? As Melville says in The Confidence Man, Many Men Have Many Minds.

A mining town. Some regulars are missing from our team: a wonky knee or sun-tanning in Florida. We look at the subs and judge our chances. If we can just keep it close, respectable.

Clean ice and we skate in circles warming up, loosen our legs and bad backs and eyeball the team at the other end as they eyeball us. Their goalie: is he good with his glove. Go low? Go high? Jesus didja see the size of his pads? I try to find reasons to dislike the other team. They ran up the score last game, made us look bad, they’re chippy, they probably like Bush, they probably kick orphans, their jerseys are too nice. The ref blows the whistle and we line up, see what the first shift reveals to us, the mystery of the first two minutes.

The last two minutes tick so slowly when you’re hanging on to a lead; the last two minutes slip past too fast when you’re trying to scrabble for that one goal, to change that arrangements of bulbs glowing inside a scoreboard.

We get mad when Barker’s Point runs up the score on us. A week later we run up the score on Munn’s Trucking and they get mad at us. Some nights we’re piss-poor, but some nights our A-team shows up and we’re smooth, raised on a diet of ball bearings and motor oil.

Drive the night, drive the hills and hollows and bridges. Ancient apple trees descend hills to the river in troop formation; arthritic looking, hunched over and no apples anymore. As in New England to the south, many pioneer farms are grown over or subdivided into Meadow Lanes and Exit Realty signs, which my bad eyes translate as Exit Reality.

Drive the daylight to a hockey tournament and huge potato barns rise out of the earth, doors into cavernous earth, part of the hill. JESUS HAS RISEN. Spavined barns sulk, sun and snow destroying each fissured shake and shingle and hinge, molecule by cedar molecule.

The boys like the tournaments up in Campbellton, the North Shore of New Brunswick. There they can cross a foggy bridge to take in the peeler shows on the other side of the water, watch what they term the Quebec ballet. More strippers and neon signs than in bible-belt New Brunswick. Last year Thirsty the accountant had a few and climbed up on a table and shimmied his own stripper dance, was disturbingly convincing. He likes a dark dancer, stares and ruminates. “Brown shutters on a pink cottage,” he says tenderly of her labial vicinities. “Man she’ll get you going, get you up so a dog can’t bite it and a cat can’t climb it.”

Balmoral, Matapedia: Scottish names and Acadian names on the highway signs and Franglais spoken in the bars.

A business-minded player on another team queries a woman as to how much money she makes in the Quebec ballet.

“125 a night, and ten of each dance is mine. I have a pager and a cel and hook for 150 an hour. I clear 140,000 tax-free in a year.”

One of the strippers writhing at the pole tosses off her leopard-skin g-string and Thirsty at ringside grabs her garment and hides it under his ball cap. Later she searches the stage for her undies. Where oh where is my g-string? He saves this item as a souvenir. Such behaviour is frowned upon in my other worlds, and this may be why I get a kick out of time lost in this world.

The ice is Olympic-sized, hard on the d-men with all that room to roam. But we don’t want to win too many games, we don’t want to get into the tourney’s final game because we’ll crawl home too late Sunday night. It’s a long drive from the North Shore. Ted misses an open net.

“Bet you boys were relieved,” he says. Ted is a tall drink of water, long reach, can corral the wildest passes. In the city he runs an old family car dealership. We lose 2-1 and are happy.

A crowded motel room, bodies stretched everywhere, hockey equipment everywhere, hockey on TV. Thirsty places a ketchup pack at the base of the closed bathroom door and stomps hard on the ketchup pack, trying to spray Big Billy inside the bathroom. The ketchup sprays all over Thirsty and in a fan up the beige door and wall.

My bottles of Propeller Bitter are gone down my throat. I steal the last Heinekin from Thirsty. He sits on a bottle: “Try and get this one,” he says. The second day we have a very early game at the tournament: some of the guys are already drinking at 7 a.m., bottles beside them as they don gear. Too early for me. We stink in that early game, but are giant killers in the afternoon game, knocking out a very good team that planned to roll right over us. There is no predicting.

Sugarloaf Mountain looms over the town. The Restigouche River, the Bay of Chaleur, ice-fishing shacks lined up like a little village. Snowmobiles worth hundreds of thousands of dollars are parked nose to nose outside our motel rooms; an intergalactic gathering, wild plastic colours and sleek nosecones and fins, looking like they’d rocket through space rather than over the old railroad routes that cover the snowy province. Someone is killed that weekend on a Polaris going 90 miles per.

The lazy joys of beer after we win. Griping and grousing and the lazy joys of beer after we lose. I see an eagle on the way home, arcs right over my windshield.

Limekiln, English Settlement Road, Crow Hill, Chipman, Minto, Millville. Narrow logging streams, dead mill towns. Elms fit the world, the winding country roads to country arenas, our headlights on the underside of sagging power lines, wires painted by our light.

Coach’s car slides a bit on black ice by the Clark hatcheries where the wind and snow scour the low road. Coach often gives me and Dave the RCMP a ride to the arena. Coach is a burly retiree in a ballcap and windbreaker, a former goalie and back catcher, ferociously competitive when he played and he cannot understand those who aren’t the same.

“Jesus I’m sick of it, they show up and don’t have a stick, they don’t have skates. Before I went out the door I’d make sure I had everything.” His relatives are buried around here, a graveyard in a cliff. He is a good driver.

“Been on these roads since I was a young fellow. Ice in the same places every year. Water runs off Currie Mountain and then freezes up.” Coach keeps a supply of mints in his glovebox. I sit in the back.

We skate our warm-up, Dave the D gazing up into York Arena’s old rafters, soon to be demolished. Dave is my new partner on D, works for Purolator, not to be confused with Dave the RCMP. Dave the D seems mild enough, is not imposing, but he is famous to older players as a former berserker. They talk about how he used to get right out of control fighting in the industrial league. Played in this arena for years. Now he skates around and looks about in a contemplative manner.

“Lot of memories?” I ask at the bench.

“A lot of punches to the head,” he says in a quiet voice.

Dave the D gets flattened late in the game. When he picks himself up I can tell he is calmly considering how to take it, what to do.

“Pick your spot,” I say.

“No, too old. I’ll get hurt and I’ll hurt someone else.” He sounds plaintive but smart.

After the game he dresses and leaves. We think he’s gone home. He flies back in the door later with a bottle of pop, surprising us, allows he was out in the parking lot.

“Thought I left that foolishness behind. Guess I didn’t.”

We look at his knuckles; is he kidding? Did he tune the guy?

“We wrestled a bit,” he says lightly.

I still don’t know what happened in the parking lot. In the summer Dave tossed his hockey equipment into a dumpster downtown; he decided it was time to stop, his body was telling him to stop, but he worried he’d keep playing just one more winter unless he physically got rid of his gear.

Rough hockey at Burtts Corner two weeks ago. A series of chippy games really, and I like them, I play better when there’s some turbulence, some contact. I don’t want to glorify being moronic, but it’s an adrenalin charge, a cheap thrill that makes me interested in what’s underneath the mask, the visor, underneath the charges and swearing and grand gestures. Is this a meaningless masculine pose; are we wanna-bes? Or is it what Ken Dryden calls learned rage, what is taught and approved? Or is it what waits in all of us just below the civilized veneer? I find it so easy to summon. It’s masochistic and childish, but I have to admit the threat of imminent violence is alluring (it’s fun until someone gets hurt, some childhood guardian intones inside my head). Maybe it just beats paperwork.

“You don’t belong in old-timers,” Coach shouts at the player who hacked me.

After the game we tease him. “Coach, you going out to the parking lot after that guy?”

“I could handle it. Growing up in Zealand no one’s a pansy, it was a tough life.”

He continues on the drive home.

“I have a cousin three miles up the road, he’s got to be over 70 now, but talk about tough, big big hands and long arms. Five years ago, so he’d be about 65 then, five years back two young guys from Kingsley were after him in Bird’s General Store, he was at a table, they knew his rep, he kept warning them and they kept after him and finally he gets up and BAM BAM, flattens both of them. He used to fight every Saturday night at the dance on Stone Ridge.”

Coach stares ahead and talks as he drives and hand out mints. The white river to our right, stars undulating above, and clusters of mercury vapour lights like coals spread to cool on a snowy hillside. In the back seat I clear a tiny porthole in the frosted window and feel like a child listening to stories.

Coach says, “When I was a kid my parents would go to the Stone Ridge dance. We had an old International half-ton and I spent a lot of time in that, sleep on the seat or get up and wander around, maybe the crowd would wake me up rushing out of the dance. They’d go this way and that way following the fight. I guess word got around and guys used to come up from Fredericton to fight him.”

It’s hard to imagine Coach as a little kid sleeping in the International at the Stone Ridge dance. Navigator has known Coach a long time, Navvy has played with some of our players since they were in grade school. He has horses, sulkies, and a bad back that’s making him miss most games this year. He works in a halfway house. Man coming back in the evening sets off a metal detector. Navigator navigates him to the doctor who will examine him. The doctor says there is a snub-nose pistol up his rectum. The doctor says to Navigator, “Want me to pull the trigger and save us all a lot of trouble?”

Navigator tells prison stories, says, “50% of women in jail are lesbians, 50% are dykes, and the rest are just wild!”

Powder the Goalie says a woman who lives down the road calls him up, bit of a burning smell in her trailer, she says. Powder goes over to see. The panel is hot, smoking, what to do? Goalie turns off the breaker, but the lights stay on.

“Oh, oh,” says Mike the insurance agent.

“Don’t call me, call 911. Three fire-trucks come out, and two hydro trucks.”

“She was a looker in high school,” says Danny.

“Field dressed she’d be about 350 pounds. Knees like this.” Powder holds out his hands as if around a fire hydrant.

Mike winces, shakes his head. “Field dressed.” Mike’s been on the team from way back, a slick skater. Mike and Ted play well together on a line. Big Billy calls them The Golden Girls. “Coach, who’s playing with the Golden Girls tonight?”

Our goalie puts the puck in our own net; he has done so several times. Bad game. Mike gives the goalie a dirty look. Ref skates over, plucks the puck from back of the net for the seventh time, says to our goalie, “Well the beer will still be cold.”

“You sir are correct.” Laughs.

Coach is not laughing, wants a new goalie. “He doesn’t have his head in it!” He’s going to watch other teams, look for a new recruit.

Coach is tossed out of the game in Oromocto. He stepped on the ice to yell “Fucking homer” at the ref. A bad ref. You can swear at the refs, but you can’t step on the ice. Automatic suspension. He walks off the ice in his city shoes: “Fucking homer! Fucking homer!”

The other team is puzzled; most old-timer teams don’t have a coach. “Who was that?”

Ted says, “You don’t know Scotty Bowman?”

Wheel! Wheel! Man on you!

Slow it down. Make a play.

That guy couldn’t put a puck in the ocean.

Up the boards, up the boards, the glass is your friend.

Don’t put it up the boards; make a play.

Got time! Got time!

Short passes, guys.

No centre line – hit the long pass.

16 slashed me, I’m going to kill him.

This goalie goes down right away; hang onto it and shoot high.

Shoot low boys, right on the ice.

I have to skate, love to skate, the action, the speed, feel physically uneasy if I don’t get a skate in. Navigator has to quit his hip is so bad. Pinky quits, Jerry quits, Mike quits, all the originals. When will I stop — that moment with your gear poised at the lip of the dumpster.

They don’t know your life, but they know whether you back-check, whether you try, whether you can pass on the tape, whether you paid your beer bill, who is the weak link, who to give the puck to, who has the touch, who is cool under pressure (not me), who has a cannon (not me also), whether you can be relied on.

The group can be superficial, callous, sexist, racist, homophobic, insensitive, but I don’t feel motivated to correct anyone. The range of our conversation, what is safe, is incredibly narrow and repetitive, i.e. Don’t bend over in the shower. We don’t discuss the new CD by Arcade Fire, we don’t dissect books or Hamlet’s worries, we don’t display our worries. There is a kind of censorship, but that is also true of my other worlds. In the group some may dislike me, but we are intimate, tied up in a camaraderie that is worth something, to shoot the breeze, use stupid nicknames, tell bad jokes, drink cold beer together in boxers, laugh at stupid stories, and delay going back to dress shoes and duplexes. Laughter is good, the doctors tell us. And win or lose, I laugh more with these guys, strangers really, than anyone else I know. When I moved to New Brunswick I wondered if it was a mistake, but I get home from hockey still laughing at some goofy story and think, This is a life, this is doable.

Gord Downie, the singer for The Tragically Hip, is hanging in Fredericton, auditioning for a hockey movie re-enacting the 1972 Canada-Russia series. He wants to play Ken Dryden or else Eddie Johnston, the backup goalie. I hope he gets a part. If I met Einstein at the Taproom I’d likely have little to chat about. Gord and I could talk hockey; hell, we could even play hockey. The crews film at Aitkin Centre and Lady Beaverbrook Rink will be the Russian arena.

“They still need Yvan Cournoyer for the movie. Anyone look like the Roadrunner? Know any French?”

My TV last year, before the NHL lockout; Vancouver was playing, maybe the playoffs; it all seems so long ago.

“Naslund is open. The offside forward has to collapse and help out.”

I can collapse. I can try to help out. But this is not our language. Coach just yells “C’mon boys!” over and over in a disgusted voice, an exasperated voice. This is the extent of our playbook.

“It’s such a simple game,” he moans. Coach gets mad almost every game, folds his arms over his chest and turns his big back on our game, refuses to run the door. It’s a simple game and a complex game.

Our cars cruise the Loyalist countryside, Acadian land, Maliseet land, prehistoric land; our cars drive up the river and turn into snowy corvid valleys, over covered bridges, past dark mills and swaybacked railroad stations where no tracks run, the rocky country the Thirteen Colonies dismissed as the tail and hooves of the ox. Over and over we line up at the circle. We pay 200 in November, we pay 200 more in January. We are driven. It’s like a devotion to winless horses.

Lace them up in an unheated pig barn. There is no crowd noise, no music. We play the game in silence except the players yapping at each other or at the refs. There are no cameras, but we play our parts, hit the marks. No one watches us, there is no first place, no last place, it all means little, really, but we keep playing. Our skates glide in silence and noise, we step lightly, fleetly, fall into each other’s airspace until the rink melts into grass. We don’t watch, we drive to the net. We drive and we play.

—Mark Anthony Jarman

—————————————–

At Work in the Fields of the Bulwer-Lytton: Short Story — Bill Gaston

Apr 022012

Herewith a hilariously good story (the hilarity darkly edged with care) about bad writing (the 57-year-old manager of a hockey rink trying to write the perfect bad sentence for a fictional version of the real annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest) from Bill Gaston who has, yes, contributed already to Numéro Cinq and has laboured mightly in the fields of fiction yea these many years–during the ten years I edited the annual Best Canadian Stories, I included Bill Gaston stories three times. Bill is a prolific author of novels, plays, stories and nonfiction. His seventh novel, The World, will come out this fall with Hamish Hamilton. He writes about the human comedy with gentle irony, grace, poignance, and an earthy sense of humour.

His sister’s phone call interrupted him composing his next bad sentence:

Her thighs pulled apart with the sound of

Raymond let Elizabeth talk. When she was done he dropped his phone from a height and with a noise that made him check for broken plastic. He couldn’t take it anymore. Leaning back in his chair he balanced on the two rear legs and on the verge of toppling, a position he found comfortable. He had learned not to hear the muffled booming of pucks in the six rinks outside his office’s glass door, but he heard them now. Moaning low and long, he built it nearly to a shout. As always, he was damned if he said something and damned if he didn’t. After a week’s research, his sister, who was only 53, was convinced not only of having Alzheimer’s, but a particularly swift kind that attacked the young. His sincerely-intentioned comment–that if she had Alzheimer’s she couldn’t have done such excellent research on Alzheimer’s–caused her to announce, “You just abandoned me,” and hang up.

He didn’t know what to do. It hurt to think about. Because he loved her, he supposed.

Raymond let his chair fall forward. He picked up his pencil. She’d be crying now. The one up side to these more explosive conversations was that she likely wouldn’t call him for a week. Unless…she forgot. No, he mustn’t make light of this. She did display more memory loss of late, more than just the name-forgetting kind, and both their parents had gone daffy before they died. Her condition was probably real, but her panic was unbearable. Today asking him, all a-fever, if she should check her iron levels again, because they can point to arterial blockage and oxygen depletion in—her voice was shaking and what’s he supposed to say?

Raymond never panicked. It dismayed him that his older sister could be so different in this way. They were only two years apart. They had the same curly ginger hair, the same swelling cheekbones with unfortunate small eyes. They were both high-strung and made impractical life decisions. Their tastes were so similar that it didn’t surprise him, for instance, to learn Elizabeth disliked Chilean wine and had taken to Spanish and that her reasons were exactly his.

Shaking his head minutely, in the kind of spasm that did mean to abandon his sister for a week, Raymond leaned over his foolscap to read his latest. This was the best time of year, these spring weeks leading up to the deadline. He finished reading it, hesitating on a breath to pencil-tap it with approval. Fixing a few circled bits as he went, he committed this to his computer screen:

Her thighs pulling apart with the sound of a low-grade adhesive, Jungle Jones eyed his next conquest, tried and failed again to grunt like one of his idols, a Silverback, rose to his feet and leapt to the liana vine, from which he fell because he was tired, from all the conquesting.

It wasn’t his best but it was a keeper he’d enter in the Romance category, under one of his pseudonyms. Marvin Gets. Westley Winns. Thomas Smother. It was Thomas Smother who won a Dishonorable Mention two years ago in the Detective category. Raymond had that one committed to memory:

As they lay waiting in the alley, involuntarily spooning, for the thugs to run past, his overcoat could not cushion him from the press of her Luger, which made his own gun feel like nothing but a Mauser in his belt—because that’s all he had, a lousy Mauser—so he was glad his back was to her.

He could recall the spreading glow in his stomach when notified. He remembered how surprised he’d been that this one had won, it was nowhere near the best of the thirty or so he’d submitted that year–and the contest itself dissuaded the use of the dash.

He copied his sentence to the body of a new email and popped Send, nostalgic for the days it was done by letter. One entry per envelope. Stamps did get expensive but everything about good old mail—the labour of addressing, the folding of paper and taste of glue, the frisky walk in all kinds of weather to the mail box, not to mention the primal sliding a letter through a spring-loaded slot—suited the contest’s archaic soul. Apparently there was a torrent of complaints when it changed.

This year Raymond’s goal was one hundred entries. He was at fifty-seven. He no longer cared much if he won. The goal was the path.

As on-site manager of ArenaSix, Raymond was content enough with his job, it being understood that work was work and one would rather be elsewhere. He kept the ice surfaces near to booked and between sessions resurfaced, the two Zambonis in repair, the monthly schedules publicized, the bar/restaurant staffed with nubiles (as Nabokov had called them), and the hockey parents away from the throats of the parents of figure skaters (though the skaters’ parents, especially mothers, tended as a species to be the fiercest, and blind to compromise). And though his job also oversaw the losing battle to keep beer out of the changing rooms during men’s late-night hockey, it was, as jobs went, not torture.

Though on occasion he had to fire someone. This morning it was Mr Fernandez, one of his two maintenance men. Through his damnable glass door Raymond had been eyeing Mr Fernandez perched out there on the bench, waiting in the cold. No-one should have to wait in the cold on a bench like that one, wooden and skate-mauled, let alone someone about to be fired. Raymond was further disappointed that the man hadn’t had the good graces to come alone. As always, he’d brought Paytro (likely the name was Pedro, but it always sounded just like “Paytro”), as if he didn’t know his son was the heart of the problem. Paytro had Down Syndrome, was perhaps in his adolescence, and he never stopped fidgeting, especially a grand rolling of one hand around the axis of his wrist. The boy held his twirling hand out from his body in a way that suggested ritual, and because each roll made the faintest click, Raymond knew it nauseated the patrons of this place just as it nauseated him. Despite two warnings, Mr Fernandez insisted, intermittently at first and then always, on bringing Paytro with him to work.

Raymond re-read the sentence on his screen. He popped it black.

He stood, stretched, then opened the door to Mr Fernandez, who, predictably, ushered wrist-rolling Paytro in first.

The whole affair was predictably uncomfortable. Mr Fernandez nodded when asked if he knew why he was being called in, and then he demanded that Raymond explain things to his son.

“I would like to hear you say to Paytro why we are not wanted any more,” is how the glowering maintenance man put it.

Why explain what Fernandez already knew, that the problem was the “we”? Fernandez had proved an excellent painter, cleaner and, most of all, fixer. In the shop he’d used a grinding machine to shape a piece of scrap metal that somehow fixed the number two Zamboni. The problem was solely the “we.” Paytro was never not with him. More and more, Fernandez gave him jobs to do. Sometimes, the father simply stood watching the son sweep or rake or polish.

“Your son gets in the way of you doing the job you were hired to—”

“Say this to Paytro. Look at him when you say it.”

Now Fernandez was only being cruel. Fine.

“Paytro, I’ve asked your father to come to work alone, and he refuses. I’ve asked him formally, twice. We call them warnings. He ignores—”

“Tell Paytro why you want me to work alone.”

“Fine.” Raymond swung his gaze back to the son. The boy watched him back. He was hard to read. It was hard to know what he understood. “Your father is a good worker, a highly skilled worker, and that is what we pay—”

It came out shouted, sloppy, but with equal emphasis on each word: “I’m a good worker too.”

“Yes, but—”

“He’s teaching me.”

What struck Raymond most was the boy’s utter lack of accent, seeing that his father’s was so thick. Paytro had hidden his twirl-hand in his windbreaker and it humped around in there, shushing the nylon. Raymond recalled times he’d spied on Fernandez as he supervised Paytro scrubbing solvent on puck marks or, outside, sweeping the leaf-blower in scythe-like arcs. Fernandez would interrupt and take over his son’s slow job, demonstrating proper pace, then hand back the gear. Raymond suspected that the father-son team was productive enough to justify Fernandez’s salary. It was that he’d been told to come alone and he’d blatantly ignored the order. A boss could not just ignore being ignored. In a hierarchy, insurrection demanded—no, created–consequences. It was nothing but natural, and Raymond must let nature take its course.

He spoke clearly and met Paytro’s eye.

“You are a good worker. I am glad he is teaching you. But, as manager, I have to end your father’s employment here. The reason? I told him to come to work alone, and he didn’t obey me. I told him twice. Then I told him three times.”

Looking at Fernandez, he once again explained that insurance didn’t cover his son who, if hurt, could sue both of them. Surprising himself, Raymond added that, once fired, Fernandez could apply again for his job. Finally, he said he could supply him a good reference letter if he wanted, but Fernandez was already shaking his head in automatic disbelief and leaving, guiding Paytro out the door ahead of him.

But first Fernandez stopped, turned to face Raymond, ponderously held his eye to say, in his heavy accent, “Look at youself,” then left.

Raymond respected Fernandez enough to do this, so he sat down. The instructive silence grew louder with the man gone. He sat with this task for several minutes, then flipped open his laptop. It was likely the start of an entry for Romance:

“An unexamined life,” she said, naked of irony as well as clothing,

He saved it and closed his machine. Raymond had learned that when he memorized an opening fragment and then went about his day, some part of his brain kept working behind the scenes and came up with good bad ideas.

Down an employee, he had to scrape and flood three ice surfaces himself. It was a chore he found more meditative than anything else, though skaters did complain, especially the old-timer hockey players who, though hardly speedsters anymore, demanded the most pristine surface, like they were fairies of the pond, not chuggers. But he couldn’t quite find the knack, or settings, and he left grooves. He wished he could have accelerated hiring a new man, but you couldn’t very well advertise before firing, could you?

“An unexamined life,” she said, naked of irony as well as clothing,

Riding high on the Zamboni, he let phrases simmer as he drove an oddly rectangular oval, old mauled snow disappearing under the front bumper while a strip of shining water followed. He tried to work up more:

as they rode together on the Zamboni, its engine beneath their bare, cold bottoms droning deeply but blindly, like a massive phallus asleep but prowling in its dream

Bad-on-purpose was anything but easy. It had to be knowing. It had to be subtle in its build to looniness. (He mentally crossed out the massive-phallus-asleep line, which was somehow both too cheap and too poetic.) Its clauses had to invert and sometimes buckle and then flow horribly on. Its clichés had to be the right ones. Puns were discouraged unless they stretched pun-logic to snapping. The best entries tended to rise in limp-frenzy and end not on a punchline but a downbeat, like tobacco spittle after a hillbilly whoop–which was how it might indeed be described in Bulwer-Lytton language. It was a near-impossible contest to win, with its thousands upon thousands of entries. This despite no cash reward at all. Detective, Western, SciFi, Romance, Historical, Fantasy—all categories had their aficionados, their style-mavens. Sometimes Raymond knew the entrants before reading their names.

Cruising rink number three he came upon another bit. After parking and shutting down (he simply left the snow to sit and melt in the Zamboni’s back bin instead of dumping it outside; Bernie was on in an hour and he’d do that chore, grumbling and swearing), he hurried back upstairs to type:

“An unexamined life,” she said, naked of both irony and clothing, as they rode atop the Zamboni, its engine beneath their bare, cold bottoms droning deeply but blindly in its work, which when you thought of it was nothing but eating snow at the front and spewing water out the back, “is

Is what. Nothing more came. He opened a new file. He was hungry, and it was almost time to go, but he had a palpable sense of time running out. It was getting down to the wire. He stood hovering over the keyboard, shifting foot to foot on his office’s weird rubber floor, stepping in and out of two pools of water under his shoes. It wasn’t just taking a good idea one bad step too far. It was rhythm, too, it was building a good sentence with a tin-ear clunk to sabotage it.

After ten minutes he had this:

Her heart’s desire ran in two directions, the main one leading to her husband, the other to Jungle Jones, but her lust ran in even more directions, so many that the word “direction” lost all meaning, like when you said it over and over, say, a hundred or, in her case, four hundred and sixty-three times.

Raymond had no idea who the hell Jungle Jones was, what he looked like, or what readers—if there were any–made of the name. It just sounded right. It was funny in that slightly gut-churning way.

He pressed Send. Submitting entries he knew wouldn’t win felt a bit like throwing letters at a closed mailbox. Or—like pissing at a tree protected by glass! He typed is like pissing on a tree protected behind glass to the end of An unexamined life. He read it a couple of times. Then deleted it. It was too abstract, however astute it might be philosophically.

He was closing his laptop, anticipating his nicer screen at home, when the phone rang. Elizabeth’s bouts of solitary depression did usually last a while, plus she did tend to respect his request not to call him at work, so he was surprised it was her a second time this afternoon. Her tone of saying hello told him she was beyond instructing, so he kept censure from his voice when he told her how nice it was to hear from her again today. She ignored him, interrupted him in fact, and what she said sat him up straight.

“Raymond. I want to kill myself, sooner rather than later, and I want your help.”

“My help, to…”

“To do it, yes.”

He could picture the musty brown couch she was probably sitting on, its fabric one that reminded him of haunted theatres, and it made him sadder than her words had. He asked her to repeat herself, and she did so, word for word, including his name with the period after it, as if to make sure he knew he could not escape.

After the call, Raymond sat for a while. He neither moved nor intended to. Pucks boomed meaningless pronouncements outside his door. He promised himself he would not feel guilt when he opened his laptop. When he did, he typed this:

Jungle Jane wasn’t given to cheap sentiment, but she wondered, fingering the noose around her neck, test-rocking the rickety chair beneath her feet, thinking disturbedly of the empty pill bottles scattered like Hansel’s bread crusts along the sidewalk all the way to her house, if he would still respect her tomorrow.

With the deadline creeping ever closer, over the next weeks Raymond finished thirty-nine more sentences, taking him to ninety-six. Five he considered exceptional, with a solid chance at a prize or a mention. He’d been coming to work distracted. He wrestled awkward phrases in his dreams and a good dangling modifier could wake him. One Saturday night he stayed up till dawn and one weeknight he slept in and was an hour late for work, two things that had never happened before. He stopped taking Elizabeth’s calls and she did try to kill herself, half-heartedly and without his help, displaying both her indecision and impatience in this as in all things. Since taking up residence in the psych ward she seemed more stoically content than she had in years. She was proud to have improved at Sudoku and she thought her memory disease was getting better but Raymond could tell it wasn’t and suspected it was just the structured regimen of hospital life, though of course he said nothing. He lost half of the pinky finger of his left hand while trying to adjust the height ratchet of the scraper under the number two Zamboni, and now it hurt like the devil to type, but almost a ghost pain, because his pinky never had touched keys in the first place and it certainly didn’t now. Several times he saw Paytro out on the main street near the arena complex, quite alone, walking steadily as if pulled by the propeller of his rotating hand. Mr Fernandez didn’t reapply for his job, though Raymond continued to wish he had, because MacLean, the new fellow he’d hired, scared him with a latent insubordination so severe he thought it could some day become violent. Maybe it was MacLean’s prison tattoos on the knuckles of his hand, “JESUS” or not, the “J” almost unrecognizable there on the thumb. The man made good ice, but could barely bring himself to nod when Raymond wished him good morning or have a nice weekend. So Raymond stopped saying these things.

And, God knows why but tonight, the night of the deadline and with four more entries to make one hundred, he went on the date he’d found excuses to put off for months and months. It was his first date in easily a dozen years, more like fifteen and perhaps closer to twenty. It had also been that long since he’d had sex. It was in the back of his mind that, Yes, he was probably giving it one last chance. Not just romance, but everything, anything. Her name was Leslie and she lived on the same floor; theirs had been an elevator relationship since she moved in. She was shy to the point of being monosyllabic. He suspected correctly that it would make her even more nervous, but because he never went out himself he took her to an absurdly high-end seafood place that had recently opened, called only small “s,” a simple unlit woodblock affixed to the cement wall. (Apparently the famous chef’s previous restaurant had been called only “sea.”) He could tell one part of her wanted to make some kind of racy joke out of ordering the raw oysters appetizer but couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead she ate them non-theatrically and as if embarrassed. He picked one up with his injured hand, the bandage only recently off, knowing it would look ugly, and he positioned it near his ear and knit his brow for a few seconds, them simply put it back into its open shell, on its bed of ice. In a kind of answer to her own non-delivered joke, he had decided not to say, “Listening for pearls,” and instead made a promise with himself that if she was sensitive enough to know exactly what he’d just done, and what his joke had been, he would ask her to marry him. But she pretended not to have seen him do it. The food was very good, in some sense desperately good, and they spoke respectfully about each different dish, and how good the merlot was. That and careful politics, from which he could gather that she was the more liberal. He knew he could have sex if he wanted, but he didn’t. Nor did he want to analyze why.

After he stumbled over her name while saying goodnight to her outside their elevator like always, he got home, turned on his computer and read items from his favorite news sources. Headlines abounded concerning what some were calling “the most perfect storm,” wherein reports of final, irrefutable proof that ocean levels would indeed rise, combined with several countries colluding to default on their debt, appeared to be nudging global markets past anarchy toward total collapse. Next, he read local weather forecasts. Any dramatic change in temperatures meant he needed to adjust settings at work, for ice conditions. The next week appeared stable.

Raymond opened his files, found the sentence and typed:

“An unexamined life,” she said, cold naked ironic bum blah blah blah, “is like keeping your wings tucked, is like staying in the nest, is like staying in the egg, is like never being born.”

Thus completing that problem sentence. Which, for reasons too obvious to think about, he didn’t send.

Midnight was the deadline. He did reach ninety-nine, typing three more in a final flurry, sitting there at his laptop, sweating, good clothes still on and pinching at the throat and crotch, sentences that had been percolating throughout dinner. These he wrote without strategizing much, sentences a habit and certainly a pattern now, and after fixing a punctuation error he considered them finished. He simply pressed Send, three final times. He deemed them neither good nor bad, because you couldn’t tell anymore, you truly couldn’t. Especially in recent years, when even irony was used ironically, when bland-on-purpose square-danced with cool. Not that these were that.

In the restaurant so fancy it had no name at all, never blinking at him once she slowly slurped several slippery bivalves in an attempt to seduce him, which eventually would have worked, had she not had to pay a visit to the little girls’ room, where she sauntered to, to vomit.

“Well if it’s grizzly bears you’re after,” Jungle Jane lisped at him from the dank, musky cavity of her cabin window, batting her one eyelash as she did, because one of her eyes lacked a lid, having been sliced off sometime during the squirrel-roast, “why don’t you just head round to my backyard and shoot one?”

It was the final climatic enormity whose name no one dared breathe, the news of which struck terror in the hearts of all men, and animals too, and sometimes even fish, who, though they generally lived under water, and lacked ears, could pick up on the hubbub and general nervousness of all the humans and animals stomping around in terror up there, especially on the beach.

—Bill Gaston

———–

Bill Gaston’s seventh novel, The World, appears this fall. Previous novels include The Good Body, The Order of Good Cheer, and Sointula, which earned a “Discover Great New Writers” bump from Barnes and Noble. Recent collections are Gargoyles, and Mount Appetite. He lives on Vancouver Island.

Douglas Glover: A Brief Reading at the Celebration for the Literarian

Mar 232012

Here’s the video of the tiny 5-minute reading I gave March 15 at the Celebration for the Literarian at the Center for Fiction in New York. Four little pieces, including three complete short stories (do not even THINK flash fiction).

A Man Walks Into A Bar: Fiction — Kate Reuther

Mar 212012

Kate Reuther

A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR. He orders a beer and tries to pay with a five-dollar bill.

“You can’t use that here,” the bartender says.

“Why not?” the man says.

“Because this is a singles bar.”

“Very funny,” the man says, reaching for the glass.

A man walks into a bar. He sits down next to a blonde with a Pomeranian dog on the next stool. The man waves at the bartender who keeps polishing the taps.

“Does your dog bite?” the man asks.

“Never,” the blonde answers.

The man reaches out to pet the dog and the dog bites him. Hard.

“I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite!” the man says, wrapping his hand in a dirty dishtowel.

“He doesn’t,” the blonde replies. “That isn’t my dog.”

The man kicks the counter so the pint glasses ring. “Can I get a fucking beer over here?”

A man walks into a bar with a slab of asphalt under his arm. He places the asphalt on the stool beside him and flexes his red, ragged hands.

“What’ll it be?” the bartender says.

“A beer please, and one for the road.”

The bartender’s eyes flick to the clock on the wall.

“What?” the man says. “You’re not open?”

“I thought you were back at work,” the bartender says.

“I’m on break,” the man says. “Jesus, you’re worse than my wife.”

“Just take it easy today,” the bartender says, plunking down two frosty bottles.

“Yes, dear,” the man says.

A man walks into a bar and orders twelve shots of tequila.

“Go home, man,” the bartender says. “Your wife’s been calling every fifteen minutes.”

“I said twelve shots!” the man repeats. “Line ‘em up!”

The bartender starts pouring and the man pounds them as fast as he can. He doesn’t even taste the tequila anymore, although his eyes begin to water.

“Maybe you should slow down,” the bartender says. Most days he would argue that a man’s life is his own to do with as he pleases, but in this case there is the crying wife. Pregnant too. “Let me call you a cab.”

The man sways and knocks back another shot. “You’d be drinking too if you had what I have.”

“What’s that?” the bartender asks. Suffering follows this man like a hungry dog.

The man slurps the twelfth, amber glass. “Fifty cents.”

A man walks into a bar carrying a duck.

“Get that pig out of here!” the bartender shouts.

“It’s not a pig, you idiot!” the man replies. He staggers a little, although he’s only had two or three. The problem is the duck, which is surprisingly heavy.

The bartender reaches for the baseball bat under the counter. “I was talking to the duck.”

“I think we better go,” the duck says.

“I’ve got money today,” the man says, fumbling for his wallet. He splays it open with his free left hand. “Twenty bucks.”

The bartender grabs the wallet from the man’s outstretched fingers, extracts the Jackson, and tosses it back empty. The duck catches it in his beak.

“I’m gonna be nice and say this covers the mess you made last night,” the bartender says.

“But what about now?” the man says. “Just one beer?”

“Get the fuck out of here, pig,” the bartender says, patting the bat against his palm.

“Did you see that?” the man shouts. The other bar patrons stare decisively at their coasters. “He robbed me. You’re all witnesses!”

“Let’s just go,” the duck says through a mouthful of leather.

A man walks into a bar and orders a beer. It’s early, quiet — the air still smells of fresh Lysol over old piss.

“Nice shirt,” a voice chirps to his right.

The man turns, ready to bark that it’s a uniform, that he has to wear it or the manager will dock his pay, and a man’s got to earn for his wife and future child, even if it requires stuffing his gut into a lime-green Cellular Circus polo, but then he realizes there’s no one else sitting at the bar. He’s alone with the dishwasher-hot glasses and the fresh bowl of peanuts.

The man takes a long swig from his beer. He holds the cool bottle against his forehead.

“Nice pants,” the voice says.

The man swivels around on his stool, making the metal shriek. He looks left and right, behind him, under the seat, in back of the bar, but the only other customer, a giraffe, is busy feeding quarters into the cigarette dispenser. The man reaches for his beer with a shaking hand.

“Nice shoes,” the voice says.

“Shit,” the man says, knocking over his beer. The puddle rushes towards the edge of the bar and dribbles onto the man’s shoes, which are, in fact, cheap, imitation-leather penny-loafers, minus the pennies. When he takes them off at night, his socks are sweat-wet and brown.

“Everything all right?” the bartender says, coming over with a dirty towel.

“There’s this voice,” the man whispers. “It keeps making comments about my appearance.”

“Oh, that’s the nuts,” the bartender says, gesturing towards the plastic dish. “They’re complimentary.”

“Shit, if I wanted to talk to nuts, I could do that at home,” the man says.

“We were just trying to be nice,” the nuts say.

“So you were lying?” the man says. “You don’t like my shirt?” He grabs a handful from the bowl. The salt stings the cuts on his palms.

“It’s a very bright green,” the nuts say.

The man raises his fist towards his open mouth.

“Please,” the nuts say. “Don’t.”

“Say something nice about my teeth,” the man says, crunching the nuts between his molars. “Tell me about my beautiful tongue.”

A man walks into a bar with an alligator under his arm. Or rather, he tucks the spiky tail under his arm and drags the heavy, gray body behind him.

“Do you. . . . do you serve lawyers here?” the man asks. He can’t catch his breath. He misses the asphalt and the duck which, compared to the alligator, were light, compact, and good conversationalists. Maybe he can devise a harness for transporting the alligator. Maybe he can borrow the stroller until the baby is born.

“I’m sorry, man, but you’ll have to leave,” the bartender says. “Jacket and tie required.”

“Jacket and tie?” the man says. “Since when?”

“Since always,” the bartender says, hooking a thumb at a party of tuxedoed chickens shooting pool. A red hen makes a tough bank shot and the chickens cluck appreciatively.

“I’ll be right back,” the man says, heading for the door.

The alligator hisses.

“Hey, you can’t leave that lyin’ there!” the bartender says, but the man is already crossing the road. He rips open the door of his station wagon and dives into the backseat, hideously festooned with Cellular Circus coupons, empty beer cans, penguins, moldy sandwiches, newts, tinfoil, and ragged pieces of string. Finally he finds the jumper cables, tangled around the ribcage of a lawyer’s skeleton.

The man walks back into the bar, the jumper cables looped around his neck. The alligator is lurking underneath the pool table amidst a spray of white feathers.

“Do you serve lawyers here?” the man asks the bartender again. One of the metal claws on the jumper cables is crusty with battery acid. The man wonders what would happen if he licked it.

“I’m good,” the alligator mumbles.

“Shut up,” the man says. “I wasn’t talking to you.” He was only supposed to stop for one drink, then he could still be home early, like he promised his wife. Right about now she’ll be setting out the placemats, whisking some sauce with orange peel or capers, sweating and humming and rushing around in their little shit-brown kitchen where none of the cabinets close all the way. He’ll be late, maybe just a little, but then he’ll trip over the welcome mat, and she’ll start crying. A Niagara Falls of tears and him in the barrel. The man will take her in his tired arms and tell her what she wants to hear: that he’s finally got the drinking out of his system, that he’s ready to come home early, to put together the crib, to throw his dirty clothes in the hamper, to help her choose a baby name. And his wife will sigh and mash her face into his lime-green chest, anointing his shoulder with her slippery snot. He can bear her weeping but not her forgiveness.

The alligator belches.

The bartender looks the man up and down – his waxy shoes, his bandaged hands, his dirty polo, his neck hung low by dirty cables. Rumor has it that Cellular Circus finally fired him after he came back from “lunch break” and tried to lick a lesbian Eskimo.

“You can have one drink,” the bartender declares, setting a glass under the tap, “but don’t start anything.”

“Why would you say that?” the man asks. “I’m one of your best customers.”

The phone behind the bar rings.

“I’m not here,” the man says. “You haven’t seen me.”

A man walks into a bar carrying a goldfish, a parrot, a baby kangaroo, and a fifteen-inch pianist. The bar is loud and crowded, with a rabbi, a priest, and a nun reenacting the highlights from their softball victory, a party of polar bears blowing their bonuses on top-shelf single malt, and Shakespeare’s here tonight, punching hair-metal songs into the jukebox.

The man shouts, “Can I get a…” but then his feet slip out from under him and he smacks down on his tailbone in an unseen puddle of vomit. The goldfish, the parrot, the baby kangaroo, and the fifteen-inch pianist go flying.

“Can somebody give me a hand?” the man says, struggling to his knees, but no one moves. The man is bad luck, they agree, the type who will eventually insult a tribe of hungry cannibals, or leap from a plane wearing a book-bag instead of a parachute, and even if he survives there is the matter of the weeping wife, who still loves him despite the lies and debt and the moldering-liver smell.

“A beer,” the man says, finally heaving himself onto an empty stool. His soggy pants squelch against the cracked leather. “Keep ‘em coming.”

The bartender, a pony, coughs and pours.

“Busy tonight?” the man asks, squeezing his trembling hands together as in prayer.

The pony nods his extensive face but does not reply, only stares at the floor with wet eyes. The man knows he ought to inquire as to the pony’s sadness, but he really isn’t interested, besieged as he is by his own problems, and what’s more, there is a fresh beer sitting before him. The man drinks.

“Water,” the goldfish gasps from underneath a stool.

Each sip of beer is a reprieve, the jaggedness made smooth, the broken made whole again. The man wants to be a better man, and three sips into his beer he can see the possibility of change: first thing in the morning, a new résumé, then a new job. He’ll clean out his car, buy salad greens and yogurt, replace the Brita filter, fix the kitchen cabinet doors. He’ll even change the way he talks to his wife. It’s important, when the baby comes, that their voices be soft, tender, with rounded corners.

There is a knock at the door.

The bar patrons look up from their drinks, confused, because the door isn’t locked, is it?

“Honey?” calls a voice from outside. “Are you in there?”

The man hunches his shoulders and ducks his head, a humiliated gargoyle.

“Sweetheart?” she says again. “Baby, it’s me.”

The man grinds his teeth on the edge of his glass. Why is his wife here? He’s not even late yet, not very. And now the rabbi, the priest, and the nun have put down their mitts and are staring at him with those sanctimonious eyes. It’s only a beer. A man should be allowed to have one beer, to relax a little with his friends. His wife is so absolutist about everything. A more reasonable solution would be to cut back, to limit his drinking to one or two a night, except for special occasions. She can’t really expect him to stop entirely, can she? With all that he’s carrying?

Knock-knock.

His wife moves away from the bar door and begins pacing in front of the frosted window, shadow arms cradling a shadow basketball-belly. “Have a little faith in me,” the man always says, and she does, she still does. She has faith that her husband is going to come striding out of that bar any minute now. “Just settling my tab,” he’ll say. “These roses are for you.”

The pony coughs.

“You sick?” the parrot asks, extracting a cigarette from an abandoned pack.

The pony shakes his head. “No, I’m just….”

Hinge-squeals cut through the bartender’s answer as the door swings open. The man closes his eyes. He feels the blood rising in his neck, like hot rain in a clogged gutter. If only he could stab himself with a fork, cut off his head with a guillotine, anything rather than face this humiliation.

The bar is silent except for someone’s slow jingling steps.

The man opens his eyes. It is not his wife; it is a cowboy. The cowboy is so muscular, he cannot rest his arms at his sides; they perch like mug handles above the painful shine of his belt buckle.

“Howdy,” the cowboy says. But suddenly he is falling, his boots skidding left then right then up, like a newborn colt, and finally the seat of his hard-creased blue jeans lands in the vomit puddle.

“I just did that,” the man says, smiling for once. His misery may not love company, but it does enjoy her rare moments of attention.

The cowboy stands. He picks his hat off the floor. He removes a piece of partially digested carrot from the brim and places the hat back on his head. Then he grabs the man by his polo collar and tosses him against the side of the pool table.

“No, wait,” the man says, “you got the wrong idea…”

The cowboy does not wait. He cocks his alligator boot and releases it into the man’s stomach. The cowboy kicks him carefully, methodically, stepping back between blows to gauge the distance and effect. The man feels the rotten apple that is his body crumble and break. It does not hurt. Not yet. What bothers him is the bar patrons’ unwillingness to help. Where are the friends who say, “Break it up, break it up,” who wedge between the fighters like spatulas?

Knock-knock.

Kick. Kick.

“Have mercy,” the man croaks. “I’ve got a family.”

The cowboy spits, grabs the man by the ankles, and begins swinging his body in a circle like a hammer. This room has spun for the man many times before, but never so quickly. It is beautiful, almost, the kaleidoscope of gold taps, turquoise feathers, white fur, black habit, waxed wood, window shadows, and glass. The man’s loafers slip off. The air cools his wet socks.

The cowboy lets go and the man arcs through space, an Olympic record surely, if not for the light bulb above the pool table, which his head shatters, and then the less permeable jukebox. On impact, it whines, shudders, and begins playing Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You Got (‘Till It’s Gone).”

“Honey?” his wife says from outside the door.

The man is bloody, shattered, and thirsty. He cries. He is a man who walks into bars. A nothing. A drunk.

“Hey,” the pony says, “why the long face?”

The bar patrons begin to laugh. The fifteen-inch pianist gasps and wheezes and clutches his gut. The cowboy stamps his foot so hard his spurs ring. Shakespeare pees in his pants a little. The goldfish, dead, does not laugh. But the rest of them, once they’ve started, cannot quit their rhythmic, vocalized, expiratory and involuntary actions.

“Stop it,” the man says.

They don’t stop. They laugh harder.

Twenty-five chuckling Polacks march in from the back room, all carrying a single stepladder. They approach the broken light bulb.

“Darling, come home,” his wife pleads and pounds.

The baby kangaroo snarfs his beer.

“It’s not funny!” the man cries. “It’s not funny at all.”

—Kate Reuther

Kate Reuther‘s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Madison Review, Brain Child, Salamander, and The Ledge. She is a graduate of Yale and the Vermont College MFA in Fiction program. A life-long New Yorker, she lives in Washington Heights with her husband and two boys.

Le lit de Procuste: des nouvelles par Gilles Pellerin

Mar 052012

In 1988 I was invited by the Soviet Writers Union to do a little tour (Moscow, Tbilisi, Kiev, St Petersburg). My traveling companion, whom I did not meet till we arrived in Moscow, was a charming French-Canadian writer, journalist and publisher named Gilles Pellerin. We were a pair. He had learned a thousand words in Russian, I had learned none (the eternal naif). He wore a very cool black leather jacket; I was dressing preppy in those days (inward shudder). We were provided with cars and drivers and French and English translators. We wandered around the place meeting writers and publishers, going to parties, eating at banquets, tired out, confused, alert and alive. It was in fact a wonderful adventure, a brief glimpse of a culture that was changing, on the cusp. Gilles and I became friends. Thrown together like that–you never know. But we’ve stayed friends. His wonderful publishing house Les Éditions l’instant même printed the French translations of my novel The Life and Times of Captain and my short story collection A Guide to Animal Behaviour.

Here now we have a handful of twitter stories and a longer story (still pretty short) written by Gilles Pellerin. I am publishing them in French without a translation, a first for Numéro Cinq. Time to publish in another language, beauteous and unto itself. Translations are wonderful, but they tend to make us forget the flavour and intelligence of the original. Translation also elides difference. There is always a barrier between people who speak different languages, and the only way to break down that barrier is, well, to break it down. And so, in French, we have Gilles’ slyly erotic wordplay, for example, in “Sa langue au chat” which would not work in English, I think. Or not as well. And his comically peremptory last words — “We only die once and I want to make the most of it.” — in “En peine.” Lovely little stories.

R. S. V. P.

Le téléphone, je décroche, c’était tellement chou ta soirée, il me remercie au nom de toute la bande, décline gaiement les noms. Or je n’ai invité ni reçu qui que ce soit.

Retour de balancier

Enfant, j’ai tardé à comprendre que les parents préféraient les enfants matinaux. Adolescent, j’ai tiré grand parti de mes grasses matinées.

Toute frénésie vient à son heure

On sonne, je sors de la douche, dégoulinant, « J’arrive… », l’autre est déjà là, sort du frigo une bière qu’il boit sec au goulot. Je sèche.

Sa langue au chat

Elle donne sa langue au chat, ce qui m’arrange : je fais le chat. J’ai des idées d’enroulement, elle ferme les yeux. Le bonheur est mouillé.

Le lit de Procuste

Le dénommé Procuste m’a couché sans ménagement sur un lit. Mais il m’a tout de suite relâché, contrarié : j’étais l’homme moyen en personne.

Vous n’auriez pas dû

Un linge à vaisselle à mon anniversaire, vraiment c’est trop. Ce qui me touche le plus : que vous vous soyez mis en groupe pour me l’offrir.

En peine

On ne meurt qu’une fois et j’entends en profiter au max. Je les laisse larmoyer, sangloter, pleurer et se moucher au-dessus du lit. Quand ils me croient passé de l’autre bord, ils s’en remettent aux formules d’usage, « C’est toujours les meilleurs qui partent en premier », « Considérant son état de santé, c’était la meilleure chose qui puisse lui arriver », mais je ne suis pas tout à fait mort, j’ouvre les yeux avec l’air de dire « coucou ! » Si ça pouvait les faire rigoler. Mais non, c’est reparti pour les larmes, sanglots, etc.

Je retiens mon âme autant que je le peux, tout dépend maintenant d’elle, je serre les dents, me bloque l’épiglotte, je la sens qui cherche un autre orifice, ça non, je ferme tout. N’empêche, j’en échappe des bouts, en entend des bruits, le petit de Lise est pris de fou rire. Quand ton heure sera venue, petit, tu découvriras comme pépé que les âmes secondaires s’évadent. Seulement, j’ignorais qu’il y en eût autant, les derniers espoirs, les doléances insatisfaites, les souvenirs, la prudence excessive qui a réglé ma vie, ma foi en l’humain, si bien qu’à la fin il ne me reste plus que l’âme principale, l’âme en peine. Ça ne vaut plus la peine, je lâche pr

—Gilles Pellerin

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Depuis 1982, Gilles Pellerin a publié cinq recueils de nouvelles, le plus récent étant ï (i tréma), paru en 2004, dans le prolongement duquel sera i (i carré). Son travail récent l’a amené du côté de l’essai, conséquence logique de son engagement dans la diversité culturelle et la défense de la langue. Membre de l’Académie des Lettres du Québec et de l’ Ordre des francophones d’Amérique, il a été fait chevalier des Arts et lettres de la République française et reçu le prix du Rayonnement international des lettres de Belgique. Né à Shawinigan, Gilles Pellerin habite Québec depuis près de 40 ans.

The Road: Fiction by David Helwig

Feb 282012

Over the last decade David Helwig has published a number of books, ranging from novellas such as The Stand-In and Killing McGee to the longer narratives in his story collection Mystery Stories. All these explore the possibilities of middle length narrative forms. “The Road,” another of these continuing explorations, comes from David’s new book, Simon Says. Simon Says is made up of seven stories in dialogue that take place at moments throughout the life of one man, Simon McAlmond (1935-2010). They present his life through the complex texture of dramatic speech in which nothing is merely told in narrative form, but a great deal is overheard. What is said by Simon, to Simon, and about Simon creates a subtle and complex portrait of a life; the reader is set to learn by observation, to draw conclusions that are never forced.

David is an old friend and an amazingly prolific author of poems, translations, stories, novels and a memoir. In 2007 he won the Writers’ Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Prize for distinguished lifetime achievement. In 2009 he was appointed to the Order of Canada. His book publication list is as long as your arm. He founded the annual Best Canadian Stories which he edited for years. Biblioasis will publish in 2012 a collection of David’s translations of Chekhov stories, one of which appeared on Numéro Cinq. See also his poems on NC here and here and here and here! His new fiction book, Simon Says, from which this story is taken, will be published later this year by Oberon Press.

The Road

(1985)

We should go back.

Fuck off, Simon.

This is crazy, Janice. It’s pitch dark. You’ve already fallen down once.

I’ll have a black eye and my face will be covered with bruises, and I’ll tell everyone that you hit me.

Don’t be ridiculous.

And everyone will believe it, Simon.

No they won’t.

You have a reputation.

Not for that.

You have such a reputation. You remember that concert at the university you took me to last year. When I went off to the toilet. I just wanted to be alone. Sometimes it was like that when I was with you. I felt so crazy I couldn’t stand anyone to look at me. And while I was sitting in my little cubical, just letting myself be quiet, two girls came in, you know, chattering, and the one said to the other, ‘So what else are you going to do this year while you’re writing your thesis?’ and the other one said, ‘I’m going to have an affair with Simon McAlmond.’ I started to shiver, like I was freezing. I couldn’t come out until I knew they were gone. Then I thought I should have opened the door, so I could see who she was. Who was going to have an affair with you. I knew ever since then I couldn’t stand it any more.

People talk. It doesn’t mean anything.

They know if anyone gives you a look, you’ll look right back.

Let’s stop this now, my love, and go back to the cottage.

I’m not your love. So just fuck off, Simon. Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off.

You really think we’re going to walk all the way to the city?

Well, the battery on my car is dead, and yours is trapped there in that little narrow driveway, so what else can I do?

You should have remembered to turn the car lights off.

Well I didn’t. Stupid Janice. I had things on my mind. I finally worked up the courage.

In the morning we can get your car started.

Go back if you want. I’m not.

This is crazy, you know. You’re going to trip and break that long elegant neck.

Crazy Janice. Well it’s better than going back to the cottage and letting you get me into bed. I’m never doing that again. It’s over.

Some things are never over.

That’s what you’re going to tell me. Kiss me on the eyes. Run your hands through my hair.

Some stories end and some stories don’t.

You and me I suppose?

That’s right.

Bullshit, Simon.

No.

If you thought that you should have stopped passing your dick around the community.

You said ‘Leave your wife,’ so I left my wife. What else is it you want?

You were with Catherine last week.

We have children. I visit them.

Until three in the morning.

You’re making that up.

No. I have evidence. I have reliable testimony.

You have your own jealous suspicions.

I have spies, Simon. They watch you and report to me.

Private detectives, I suppose.

Very private. And they do it just for me.

I greatly hope all this nonsense isn’t true.

It’s true, Simon Dippydick. I have you watched.

And just who would do this watching and besetting? I suppose they hide behind trees and garbage bins.

Henry.

Who’s Henry?

Cerise’s son. She brings him into the store to move boxes of books and tidy the back room. He adores me.

Who doesn’t? I’m sure that’s why half the customers come to the bookstore. All the men who claim they want you to tell them about the newest John Irving or Tom Wolfe or Margaret Atwood, and they really just want you to talk to them.

Henry’s very loyal, Simon. He’s my little horny robot. I used to notice how he’d bump into me sometimes, sort of by accident, out in the stock room, and I’d just smile and send him out for coffee. I knew what he was doing and I let him, and now he’ll do whatever I want.

You’re trying to convince me that you sent some pathetic juvenile out to dog my footsteps.

He’s very good at it. He makes notes.

And as a reward you permit him to cop a feel now and then in the storeroom.

Don’t be crude. He thinks I’m beautiful.

You are.

Oh you say so. You always say so. It’s part of your technique.

We all think you’re beautiful. Every man you pass on the street.

Except the ones who think I’m ugly.

You just tripped again.

How do you know?

I could hear.

I didn’t fall down.

You could.

So? It’s dark.

Watch your step, and stay in the middle of the road.

Just leave me alone.

This is dangerous, Janice, walking along here in the dark. Apart from being insane. We should go back.

My first boyfriend thought I was kind of ugly. ‘You’ve got a really weird face,’ he used to say.

Why did you bother with him?

He was very popular, and I was this misfit who studied dance and couldn’t talk to anybody. I liked it that he paid attention to me. I thought he was cute. He said the way I wagged my tail when I walked gave him a big hard-on.

All that dance training.

Muscular ass.

What about your husband?

What about him?

Did he think you were beautiful?

For a while. Then he kind of lost interest. That was when I started dance classes again. And then he moved to Dawson City and I didn’t.

I’ve often wondered whether beautiful girls become dancers or whether dancing teaches them how to be beautiful.

So have you had sex with a lot of dancers, Simon Dippydick?

Only you.

So you say.

The truth.

How far is it to the highway?

Another couple of miles.

How far is that in kilometres?

Three and a third.

Do you remember the night we spent in a motel somewhere up here? We didn’t sleep. Hardly at all. When you first got me and you were showing off.

I don’t remember.

You must.

No.

Really?

Dreams are like that.

You think it was a dream? Seems like it now. Long hot night. Do you think this is a dream, the two of us stumbling along on a dark road through the woods, you begging me to forgive you?

I haven’t begged you to forgive me.

Why not?

There’s no reason.

So easy to forget. Oh so easy.

Watch your step, the hill’s getting steeper.

I don’t care if I fall down again. Just more evidence that you abused me. Threw me on the ground and dragged me over the stones.

Why do you say those things?

Because that’s what you do, you abuse me. You can’t keep your eyes off other women. We walk into a room, and it’s like we’re in a brothel, and you’re checking out the selection. ‘Is she to your taste sir, or would you like something a little more plump and comfy? More heft in the bosom?’ Can’t keep your eyes off them. Or your hands either. ‘What are you going to do this term?’ they all say. ‘Oh, I’m going to have an affair with Simon McAlmond.’

There’s been nobody else for two years.

Except your wife, and probably a couple of late afternoon quickies with obliging undergraduates.

While you’re in the back room letting Henry fondle you.

I don’t let him go that far.

There’s been nobody else.

I’m going to quit the bookstore anyway. I don’t need him anymore.

You’ve been there what? Four years?

I’m tired of working for Cerise.

It’s not a bad job.

I know just what I’m going to do. I’m going back to school and become a dental hygienist. They make good money, you know, and they’re in demand. Everyone is obsessed with perfect teeth. Imagine me bending over some sweet-looking young thing, her mouth’s wide open, and I push aside that dainty pink tongue, to scrape away the gumbo, and whenever I want to, if she makes me mad, looks like some girl you’d like, I scrape a little too hard, so it hurts her. ‘Just another couple of minutes,’ I say, and go back to tormenting her. Poking away at the sensitive places. Or it’s a big guy with tobacco breath and a thick red tongue who thinks he can handle pain, until I find an exposed root and go to work on it. I see the panic in his eyes as he lies flat out in the chair, me safe behind my white mask, my rubber gloves. And I imagine it’s you.

The first time I saw you, I thought to myself, ‘She is so very lovely, but she might be a little strange.’

You couldn’t wait to get me into bed. You thought I’d be so hot.

That’s right.

Simon! What’s that noise?

A bird.

Scared me half to death.

A whip-poor-will.

A what?

Whip-poor-will. That’s the sound they make.

What’s it doing out here in the night?

They’re night birds.

They’re damn loud.

Yes. You don’t hear them all that often.

There he is again. ‘Whip-poor-will.’

They’re members of the goatsucker family.

You’re lying.

No.

Goatsuckers?

Yes.

Go suck a goat, Simon.

They fly above the trees at night, eating insects. Huge open mouths. I suppose that’s how they got the name.

Go suck a goat. Oh ouch, ouch . . . damn.

What?

I twisted my ankle.

We really have to go back.

Far enough now that there’s no point.

It’s not that far.

No, Simon, you reach a certain place and you can’t go back. I learned that when I finally quit dancing.

Maybe.

Your children never liked me, did they?

They don’t really know you.

I’ve been around for quite a while.

But you hardly ever see them.

Kind of spoiled. That’s what I thought the day we went to that movie with them, that Indiana Jones thing. Spoiled brats. Especially Lorna.

As are you, my love. A spoiled brat.

I’m not, and I’m not your love, not any more, Simon. It’s finished.

So you tell me.

I came all the way out here to say it, and I did.

Yes.

And I’m not spoiled. I pay my way. I wanted Henry to spy on you so I let him bump up against me in the back room

Very romantic.

I know what’s fair. And you don’t.

You don’t think I pay my share.

That`s just money. You always pay the bill in restaurants. But that just makes me feel like a whore.

You keep changing your rules. What I’m supposed to do or not supposed to do.

There are no rules.

No?

You think you have rules. You think you have all kinds of rules.

I try to have certain standards.

Standards.

Yes.

What about the sex standard? Am I good?

Yes.

Am I the best you ever had in your life?

Probably.

No other girl gives it like I do.

True.

But you don’t care enough to say so.

I’m sure I have.

No, you just take me to Toronto to nice restaurants and pay the bill, and we shack up in some classy hotel. Or we go to Montreal and you offer me hand-made leather boots. At first I liked being your whore, but now I don’t.

It seems I can’t do anything right.

God, I’d like to have you in the dentist chair. I would put that steel tool so far into the sensitive roots of your teeth that you’d scream and beg and cry like a baby.

Why?

Because you sneak off and screw your wife.

Your friend Henry is a liar. He tells you what he thinks you want to hear.

You never loved me, not once.

So what am I doing out here on this dangerous steep rocky road through the Laurentian Shield in the middle of the night, stumbling along with you while you try to walk all the way back to the city? Which you will never be able to do. And which is insufferably stupid.

So I’m stupid. I was never smart enough for you, was I Simon? Not like those little university geniuses in their lace panties.

I didn’t say you were unintelligent. I said you were being stupid.

And you think I’m a weakling.

No, I just think it’s twenty miles or more and your feet will give out.

What about yours, Simple Simon?

I’m sure they’ll give out too.

Well why don’t you just go back now?

Because I don’t want to drive along here in the morning and find you lying on the road wounded or dead.

You could handle it. You have that boy scout emergency pack in the trunk of your car. You can deal with anything.

That’s for winter.

If we’re talking about stupid, what about that plastic case with the folding shovel and the candle and matches and a chocolate bar.

Prepared on the best advice.

So stupid.

Whatever you say.

Maybe when I get to the highway I’ll hitch-hike.

It’s two o’clock in the morning. There won’t be anybody on the road.

There’s always somebody.

Not somebody you should be accepting a ride with.

You mean it might be some big bad man who expects little Janice to put out in exchange for the ride. Well little Janice is prepared to take down her pants in those emergency circumstances. Better than going to some motel and letting you put the moves on me.

Maybe we should stop talking for a while.

So stop. I don’t care. Turn around and go back to your cottage and settle in there for the winter.

We’re selling the cottage.

Why?

Splitting things up. It seemed simplest.

So where will you take your women?

I’ll take them to Toronto, and we’ll shack up in some classy hotel.

And you’ll give them the whole routine.

Probably.

‘Oh you’re so beautiful, and you’re so unusual . . . take off your clothes’

Perhaps.

Oh fuck you, Simon. Go back to your cottage and jerk off. Phone the next girl on your list. Do whatever you want, but leave me alone.

Out here at night in the dark.

Yes.

I don’t think I can leave you here in the middle of the woods.

Well you have to leave me somewhere. You have to listen to me and understand that. You have to leave me somewhere, even if you truly think I’m the most beautiful woman in the world.

When we get to the village I’ll get two separate units in the motel, and in the morning we’ll find a garage and get your car going.

Don’t be so helpful. Just go.

In the morning.

Oh fuck off, Simon. Just fuck off.

—David Helwig

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Human Resources: Fiction by Connie Gault

Feb 142012

Here’s a funny, sad, warm, deft, sweet, generous and human little story, a Valentine’s Day treat about couples and the wars they have to fight together. Not a romantic story, but a story about a couple watching and caring—in the welter of the public sphere and the private when they seek solace and comfort. As I have said before (since this is her second appearance at NC), Connie Gault is an old friend from my early teaching days when I used to migrate from one summer writing program to another across Canada. For a few lucky summers I taught at the Saskatchewan School of the Arts at an old tuberculosis hospital called Fort San in a dramatic geological trench called the Qu’Appelle Valley cut through the Prairie. That’s where I met Connie Gault. She is a playwright and the author of three books of fiction, including, most recently, Euphoria, which came out in 2009.

♥

One night we dined with an Amateur Thespian. We had cocktails before dinner in front of a fire flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the park and the lake. I didn’t have to worry about making conversation because the Amateur Thespian was happy to entertain us, although he said he’d come a long way from his theatre days. He sat in silhouette against the sun that was dipping into the lake, and told us all the things he no longer did. Besides no longer acting, he no longer taught high school drama, he no longer golfed on municipal courses, or skied on crowded runs or (I deduced) paid for his own dinner. The Amateur Thespian had become a Professional Consultant in Human Resources. He told us all about his journey from education, where Human Resources techniques were in vogue, all about the workshops he’d attended as a high school drama teacher, and all about seeing where his talents could take him. Intuitively, he’d appreciated the human desire to simplify and he’d understood that his own proclivity to enjoy a little limelight could work for him. Now, as he sat far back in his comfortable leather chair, his head haloed, he didn’t mind telling us it had been a stroke of genius to sell his vision to people with money, not in the relatively restrained arena of education, but out in the wide-open field of business.

“You could be successful, too,” he said. “Anyone can.” There were three perhaps not easy steps. He knew himself. He believed in himself. And his goals were well-defined.

He’d formed a company. His wife became vice-president.

Besides the Amateur Thespian, we were to dine with my husband’s boss and the boss’s friend. They arrived too late for cocktails, she a little out of breath, both shiny from the shower.

The Amateur Thespian had a name: Ted. The boss had a name: Hank. And she, the beautiful friend with the long, sleek, clean arms and legs, the well-defined cleavage and the honey-coloured hair, was Sophie. Alex, my husband, had met Sophie once before. He’d described her as friendly.

Most of the evening, as dinner progressed through its courses, was spent discussing Initials. Initials were Ted’s way of dividing and conquering people.

“I’m a DI,” Hank told us. “Heavy on the D. Sometimes I hate myself. I’m working on the I.”

Sophie was a DS, he said. Apparently it caused her a good deal of internal conflict, although she barely looked up from her squid to acknowledge this.

Alex, I was told, scored very high on the I scale; that was why they had moved him from the accounting department to Human Resources. As well as an I, he was an S, an almost unheard-of combination for an accountant. Accountants were supposed to be Cs. Mainly Cs. With only a small bit of another Initial.

“You should have your profile done,” Hank told me. The test would take no more than twenty minutes. It had two parts, the adaptive and the natural. In the adaptive part you were to choose, by circling a number, what you were most likely to do in a given situation. In the natural part you were to pick what you would least like to do. The thought occurred to me that if going to dinner with your husband’s boss, his friend, and an Amateur Thespian was listed, I would have to lie.

At any rate, I didn’t have to take the test. Ted could tell I was a CD.

“Good,” I said. “Alex and I cover all the bases.” There were only four Initials. Sophie looked up at that. She and Hank did not, together, cover all the bases, and for all I knew, that might auger ill for them as a couple. Not a C between them.

Finally, as he’d been waiting to be asked and we hadn’t picked up on the cue (perhaps there should have been a P for perceptive on the scale), the AT revealed that he was a DI. Just like the boss. This meant that I was sitting at a table with four other people, and I held the lone C. I just knew C wasn’t trump.

Most creative people, Ted declared, are Cs. But C didn’t stand for Creative. C was something like “Careful” or “Cautious” or “Conservative”. I probably looked surprised to hear it. Most creative people were C’s, Ted explained, because it took discipline to create. D was not for disciplined. D was for “Dominant”. That was why bosses were Ds. They’d better be. And Amateur Thespians turned Professional Consultants had better be too. I was for “Influencers”. People persons. S meant “Security”. Or maybe “Stability”. Which you might think would put those folks pretty close to being Cs. But you’d be wrong. The profile was different, subtly different. It took a Professional Consultant to see the difference; it took him days sometimes to make the distinction and to make it look easy. Making it look easy was part of the job. If it looked easy, that was because of all the time and expertise he’d invested and besides, if you’d bought his package, you’d paid for it to look easy.

The conversation went like this:

Sophie: Could someone please pass the HP sauce?

Hank: That’s her S there. She can’t eat a steak without HP sauce.

Sophie: (Objecting when he poured the sauce on her plate) I can do that myself.

Hank: Oh-oh. D.D.D. Boy, it’s a hard combination. See, she’s assertive but she wants me to look after her. But she doesn’t want me to smother her.

Pause.

Sophie: (Mustering her dinner-party skills) Honey, I wonder what the janitor of our condo would be. He’s so funny.

Ted: (Eagerly) What’s he like?

Sophie: Oh, he’s a very creative person, I think. Friendly. And dedicated, you know? He’s not afraid of doing a good job.

Ted: CI.

Sophie: (Beautifully serious.) CI. I bet that’s right.

Hank: (To me.) We have a lot of fun with this. (To my husband.) Don’t we, guy?

Alex: Yeah.

Hank: And I’ve noticed a Huge Improvement in the company since we started on this. A Huge Improvement. (To the AT.) Haven’t you noticed a Huge Improvement?

Ted: I have. I have noticed a Huge Improvement. Even on the phone. Even the difference in talking to people on the phone.

Hank: That’s your I talking.

Ted: We need I.

Hank: (For my husband, via the AT) That’s where this guy comes in.

Ted: That’s right. (To my husband.) Isn’t it, guy?

Alex: Yeah.

We went home finally and I had a large scotch while I got ready for bed. I was pleased with myself. I had not drunk too much at dinner. I had not said too much.

Me: I did okay, didn’t I?

Alex: Yeah.

Me: I didn’t drink too much. Or say too much.

Pause.

Me: Did I?

Alex: You were fine.

Me: That’s not just your I talking?

Alex: Let’s never speak of this again.

I recognized a disparity between my husband’s adaptive (what he wanted to do or thought he should do) and his natural (what he didn’t want to do) inclinations that might cause him some trouble in the future. But I gave his solution a big S for Sensible, downed my scotch and climbed into the sack beside him.

While we lay there staring at the ceiling side by side, I thought about him working in the human resources environment every day now. At one point during dinner, his boss had leaned across the table and said, “How is he at home?” I answered something like: “Uh, I think he’s… happy.”

Boss: How do you feel about the new job?

Me: I think it’s great to have a change. He seems to be enjoying it.

Boss: He’s flying. I see him flying. It’ll be interesting to watch him. See where he lands.

Me: (With the straightest face I could muster.) I don’t care where he lands as long as the journey is good.

Lying in bed beside my husband, I thought about him spending hours, days, the rest of his working life in human resources. It seemed to me he might have been better off in accounting where the formulas were with numbers. I wondered how he could survive. I wondered how I’d feel if I had a new job and he didn’t respect what I was doing.

To the ceiling I said, “It’s important work. Seeing that people are employed in the right jobs, that their job descriptions are accurate, their salaries fair, their benefits adequate. All of that is very important to those people.”

He rolled over and pulled me to him. I was going to say I threw Caution to the winds and let him Influence me, but the truth is all my levity had fled and I burrowed into him. I’d have buried myself in him if I could.

—Connie Gault

————————————————————————-

Connie Gault is the author of the novel, Euphoria (Coteau Books, 2009), as well as two story collections and numerous plays for stage and radio. Euphoria was awarded the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction and was short-listed for the High Plains Fiction award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book of Canada and the Caribbean. She is a former fiction editor of grain magazine. She lives in Regina.

Blue Clouds: Fiction — Cynthia Flood

Feb 012012

“Blue Clouds” deals up predatory males, mothers and daughters, betrayed and doubly betrayed women (an ancient story told with freshness and aplomb with just a hint of perverse eroticism), against an ironic backdrop of political engagement — even more ironic because it’s all told through the eyes of the cleaning help. Cynthia Flood writes like a telegram — terse, elliptical — but creates fictional worlds dense with character, drama and a sudden crimping of emotion. Cynthia Flood’s stories found their way into Best Canadian Stories twice (1997 & 2001) in the decade I edited the book; it’s wonderful to have her on the pages of NC. (The author photos are by Dean Sinnett.)

The pattern often isn’t noticed till a man’s in his thirties, even forties. By then he’s had several — serious relationships, the comrades say. Serial monogamy, they say that too. If his teens were examined there’d be no surprise finding he’d favoured girlfriends with dear little sisters, but here at the hall people mostly arrive in their twenties. Their time before the movement is hidden, except what they pick to tell, and telling is cleaning.

Back up. Such a man, when he falls for a woman she has a daughter. Maybe two. Could be sons also, but he’s not aiming for importance in the life of a small man. It’s the small woman he wants. Oh, not to rape, though maybe a hug she’ll remember on a birthday, or when she’s back from summer camp. No, he wants to implant his image, so if she thinks Man it’s him. He puts his arm round her mother, tongue-kisses, turns to smile. This is how it’s done. Your mum likes it. Seen it, seen it, the offer to babysit. The young mum goes off smiling to her CR group. This guy really wants her to be liberated! He plays with the girl, helps with homework, is fun with her friends, and if she’s in her teens lets her know sideways that boys haven’t much to offer. He and she chat about how immature they are, how the girl deserves better. Then the break-up: he’s charmed by a fresh girl/woman combo. Stale mother, alone again. A child missing him can be comforted but a teen turns sour, specially to revolutionary mum.

Exceptions, yes. Roy’s a carpenter, in his late forties. On him, those years look good. He and Marion and her daughter came to Vancouver from the Calgary branch ten years ago. At the Friday suppers R and M are side by side at the big table. They dance, they picket and poster and go to conventions. Marion’s a lifer at the post office, friendly, considerate. Not much for theory. Jennifer just finished high school. Hasn’t joined the Youth. Comes with the grownups to the Oct Rev and May Day banquets, that’s all. Sullen.

Her father?

“None of your beeswax,” says the old one.

The true sign of no nastiness with Roy is that he and Marion and Jennifer don’t live together. To be under the same roof — the girl-hunters engineer and plot to get there, but this mum and her daughter keep their own place.

Enough chit-chat. The bathrooms at the movement hall are Monday. After every weekend, vomit’s here and there because the Youth can’t manage booze yet. Not only them, either. The divided bucket: dip mop in cleaning solution on one side, then in water so hot it hurts. Use the side-press wringer. Repeat, repeat. Disinfect the wheezing toilets. Smear abrasive cream on porcelain. Sprinkle deodorizing powder on the floor, sweep it up. The bathrooms won’t ever look like ads, but they’re better than the Cavalier’s. That’s down the street, Monday’s next job. Pub washrooms take twice as long to clean. Shovel, more like. Stinking loops of paper that never reached the bowl, condoms, underpants, butts, coke, bloody pads draped over the pedal-cans, smashed glass, the red crushed wax of lipstick.

The problem of the strong women is different.

The old one’s in her sixties. Pushy as hell to survive and support her girl (near forty now) and do the political. Husband? AWOL decades back, couldn’t manage her. Such a life, rebelling through Depression War Cold War, struggling for abortion and birth control, still at it, startled and happy to meet today’s young libbers. Hardworking beyond hardworking. Known to every lefty in the city, admired.

“No point any man sniffing around thank you very much. I like my independence.”

Used to be, her typewriter rattled on for hours. Arthritis now. Hates help.

Her daughter’s the opposite. When she comes round, not often, always for money, the old one’s sad after. Hides in a bathroom to re-braid her hair, the tiara brown still with grey woven in. Out again. Slam. “Jake, you call this sink clean?” Marion sometimes sits with her, talking quietly. A hug round the shoulders.

Back up! Women like the old one don’t mean harm. They’re just big. Breathing normally, they suck out all the oxygen. Beloveds can suffocate.

Enough. Cleaner, that’s the job here at the hall. And handyman.

Why can’t the TU comrades — revolutionary electricians carpenters fishermen longshoremen — shim the filing cabinet, rewire the ceiling light, put a new ribbon in the Remington when the old one’s fingers won’t? Because they’re not here weekdays. They work. Or, in this period of intensifying struggle, they’re on strike. Locked out. A demo, a flying picket, a union meeting.

The men on staff here were mostly students, before. They can’t put a handle on a pencil-sharpener, let alone finesse the old Gestetner. The present Organizer once took twenty minutes by the clock deciding whether to phone Toronto Centre long-distance. (No.) Swivels his chair about, reads, wouldn’t notice a mass uprising at the front door. Recently the old one reamed him out when a still-meaty chicken carcass vanished from the fridge. “There’s petty cash in this hall, too,” shouting. “Typewriters, easy to pawn. Open your eyes, asshole!”

Back up back up back up. Girl-hunters, strong women — these are types. Learning to identify, over two decades of cleaning here. Others too. The too-enthusiastic contact who toils at the hall night and day for months, then gone without a word. “Here on a visit,“ the cdes state.

The misfits, so-called, those with a serious lack, a family it may be, looks, social ease, fluency in English, even a job. They want compensation.

So do those mourning a religion or a love. Mourning a baby, once, but after two years dying of grief she revived and left.

As for the nut-cases, no one here or elsewhere knows what to do. Some cdes, forcibly removed in ambulances, come back to rant and throw furniture.

Back up!

Roy too lives in the old three-storey building near English Bay. The Sandringham. Good construction, not like now. Solid wood doors, brass carpet-rods on the stairs (tricky to clean), small delivery cupboards outside each apartment door. For milk, long ago, by horse-drawn cart no doubt. Roy’s on the top floor. Says Hello. Chats at the mail boxes, or by the laundry next to the small basement suite. In exchange for interior maintenance, reduced rent. A deal. Ideal.

Once Roy wisecracked about the old mole Revolution, underground. Nothing to say occurred. The place in fact is bright.

Most tenants are elderly, female, alone. Some dodder. Not Mrs Wolfe. That Saturday she came over because she’d been away a day or two, on Bowen, lovely weather, and was now afraid for Miss Nugent above her, who did not answer door or phone.

“But I heard a tap on my ceiling.”

To the second floor. In Mrs W’s bare spare kitchen, listening upwards to silence.

Then to the manager’s apartment, but Russell’s almost always sozzled since his wife died. Couldn’t locate a key. What a jeezly mess. Mrs W’s eyebrows up to the hairline.

The stairs with her again, third floor, seeking Roy’s skill and strength. Also he might know locks. Rap, rap.

Mrs W wondered, “That milk cupboard. Could someone get through?”

Broad male shoulders the problem, not only Roy’s.

He said, “I’ll phone Marion. Jennifer might.”

Not long till the two arrived. The girl slender as celery.

Roy broke through Miss N’s milk-door.

Mrs Wolfe’s trill. “Emily! Emily?”

Nothing.

The girl’s arms, head, shoulders into the aperture, Marion lifting legs to help. Jennifer’s bum, compressed, wiggling through. Roy’s gaze. Savouring. A tumble, a scramble. The latch clicking open.

What was expected. Not dead, out cold, one hip at a wrong angle. Ugly breathing. The kitchen floor puddled. Been there two days anyway, the ambulance guessed.

Miss N gone then, feet first as the saying goes, unlikely to return. Siren fading. Mrs W weepy, Roy and Jennifer slipping out, useless Russell barging in.

Marion. “A cup of tea, Mrs Wolfe? Your place? Best to take your friend’s keys.” Poking through the shabby purse, more tears.

Alone to clean up, also as expected. Floor soon done, but Roy to be all rethought. Marion too. The girl didn’t arrive alone. Not allowed? Separate apartments. What went on in Calgary?

Each Monday, the quality of the previous evening’s branch meeting is palpable.

Attacking the bathrooms, even a humble contact — a man who’s never joined, never paid dues, invented a party-name, raised a hand, spoken his word, taken to the streets, held a banner, waved a leaflet, a man who only cleans for statutory hours as he cleans all the rental spaces in this building, offices, storage rooms, cubbies for solo notaries accountants psychics — even that man can smell the night’s doings. Fear sometimes. Anger, agitation. The tang of power.

To sense.

Long long ago, a so-called friend of the mum whispered she hadn’t wanted this baby. Tried to have it out, failed. Illegal then and still. This whisper heard at thirteen, approx. Why tell? Mean. A child’s word, correct. Rancid with meanness. Much thought given to that whisper.

Life alone with her, scanty hard rough, tempers lost voices raised but never an unwanted feel, not even with the school troubles, abc and xyz and all between. She wasn’t a big person, either, plenty of air. Though large when gone.

Years later, realizing that teller’s envy. Of the mum. With her failure by her side. Warmth ran all the way back through the shared time.

Back up back up.

The hall, one morning — like sniffing leftovers from the fridge, Nose declaring On the turn. Irrevocable. Trouble.

At big tables, cdes fold, staple, lick stamps, smoke. From the back room, no printing sounds because the monster’s on the fritz. This week’s forum leaflet is just a ditto. Nobody’s pleased. Waste-paper all over the O’s office, the basket full. His plaid shirt stiff with sweat. What a reek. The worker daily handling dirt grime scum cum dust rot grit mould ooze shit pee grease slime puke scuzz grunge — that one, his body’s clean. Fresh overalls. On such a day, routine sustains. Ammonia. Baking soda. Snaky wet-mop whispers, swirling over lino. The power of bleach. New rubber gloves. Where not pitted, the chrome shines.

Tired.

The old one isn’t talking. Sternly brings coffee. Not enough sugar. After twenty years she should know.

At last, check the stuck Gestetner. Ink can’t be forced through. Roller, drums, something inside, invisible. No time now to take it apart.

Tired. A nap on the fold-out cot? Better to exit this bad air. The Cavalier’s dirt a relief.

Late afternoon, going home.

Mrs Wolfe outside the Chinese grocery. Holding a turnip. “Jake, that Jennifer is in the building.”

Clarification. Mrs W has gone up to air out Miss N’s place, launder the lonely tea-towel and undies in the hamper. Has seen the girl.

“I’ve never liked that man’s looks. Trouble coming.”

In she goes, to pay for her vegetable. So she too has a list of types. If she and the old one met? Scorn, to start. Prim proper, tough coarse sharp. They’d find links though. Care for others, disapproval. Mrs W was once a crack typist.

Looking up at Roy’s windows. That girl in his bed, bum and all. The mother alone.

Telling should have happened then. A word to the old one. To the women’s fraction leader, not that Ms Loose Tits ever notices a cleaner’s work. To the O, even. Should, should, telling is cleaning, but. But she was under the Sandringham’s roof, night after night. Close by. Wake, sense. Once, up the carpeted stairs. Silence. Stained glass backlit by the moon. The corridor still, by Roy’s. No vibrations.

Some days later, he’s in the laundry room. Cross. Shoving sheets into the dryer.

“Nothing but meddling old women here.”

They find somewhere else. At night, the building’s different.

On Wednesday the off-smell at the hall is overlaid by tension, like before a demo, or a bitter forum where all know the TU cdes will haul some yelling sectarian out. What? There’s been no announcement.

Kitchen.

After the big Friday suppers it’s late when cdes clean up, all are tired, the fluorescents cast distorting shadows. Mondays, bathrooms take precedence. Thus, today’s task is to degrease. On counters, sinks, oven racks, shelving, baking pans, soup-kettles, sharp liquids force soft fats to huddle into little orbs while hard ones slide off like scabs. The new spray-can foams penetrate where a soapy rag can’t. Skin itches. Eyes hurt. The old one reads aloud the cans’ contents, but she’s no chemist. Familiar cleansers are harsh anyway. Over time, steel wool blurs fingerprints.

Now all squeaks clean, but the sink won’t drain. A wire hook fishes up carbonized macaroni thick with tapioca cement. Still water won’t rush down. The cut-off valve. A bucket. Hands and knees, to the j-pipe. Wrench. Open. Scrape, but the foul blockage lacks any spoon, bottle-opener, pencil. No obvious blame. Back painful, twisted. The Gestetner can wait.

Work socks, cheapest at Army & Navy. Parcel in hand, out to sunshine, and on the corner a group of women. Not young, not libbers. The light’s hard on used skin, bare arms. A chocolate bar, shared. Laughter in the sun. Downlines by the lips curl way up. The old one’s daughter waves her cigarette in the air, a big circle, more giggles, affection all round. Watching them, a fellow on crutches. Once a logger? Skid row’s full of broken men. Coal dust ground into every old miner’s cheeks, forehead, ears, into the eyelids’ red linings.

“Jennifer is eighteen.” The old one speaks through tight teeth. “A woman grown.” Purple eye-bags. “Won’t listen, naturally. Little fool. As for him. . . .” She goes on scalping potatoes for supper.

The big machine releases the coils of its hose.

To run the vacuum is to be doubly invisible. From room to room the roaring goes without a glance from cdes rolling out paper tablecloth, slinging cutlery, setting up chairs and lectern and the lit table. Fridays aren’t as important as Sundays, but they do matter. Suppers and forums draw contacts.

The cord’s too short to do the whole place in one go, so pull from one outlet, plug into another. The beast snorts up dirt. In the noise-gaps comrades go on talking loudly as they pin up the regular decorations, posters of screaming naked child, screaming kneeling woman, man shot dead in the ear, a president’s snarl, women holding sky.

Someone surprised those two in Stanley Park. Movement behind bushes. Not just someone. Marion. She made a scene at the branch exec.

Jennifer and Roy moved the girl’s stuff to his place, meanwhile. Every single thing.

Jennifer wouldn’t listen to the old one. Laughed at Marion. No, the mother slapped the daughter. True, both.

Roy’s quitting the movement. No, he refused to quit. Cited women’s liberation, the girl’s right to control her own body, choose lovers freely.

At this the mother shouted, “Bullshit! God damn you to hell.” Lots of atheists still curse by God. The women’s fraction mostly on side with the mother. Two leading women against.

The O’s torn. Roy might be expelled. Mightn’t.

As the vacuum noses towards its cave, the old one wades into the hissing gossip. “Shut up, the lot of you! Can’t you see it’s a tragedy?” Throws down her apron, blunders weeping to the door and out into summer rain.

About this work. After the vacuuming, no one says, “Wow, look at the floors!” Cover given by the noise is unnecessary. Stocky, not tall, not authoritative, not admired by any girl. Who’ll observe a toilet’s blanching? An unspotted mirror, shelves unfurred? Young cdes assume things clean themselves. Telling is cleaning. Without, the inexorable slide from malfunction to breakdown, mess to filth.

Rare, to eat supper at the hall. This evening the tables packed, loud. Who peeled the spuds after the old one left? No matter. Plain food, plentiful. All await, none saying so, the arrival of — Roy? He’d have the nerve. Jennifer? Raging Marion?

None.

Staying to hear the speaker is beyond rare, but to leave feels incomplete. Plus disloyal to the old one, still AWOL.

The draft-dodger at the lectern is black Irish, his family raw from Dublin to New York somewhere in the 19th c. Witty yet dead serious. A vocabulary to stun. Vietnam his theme. His topic, divisions in the anti-war movement over slogans. With vigour he parses Victory to the Vietcong, Bring The Troops Home, Stop Canadian Complicity, U S Out Now, arrives at the right conclusion — and leaps off again, soaring to a prosecutor’s summing up of capitalism’s bellicose crimes. Then a paean to the brave Vietnamese. To the sacrifice and glory of the workers’ movements around the world. Their history. Their future.

When with a startled look the speaker ceases, applause. Spontaneously all rise to sing the Internationale. He blushes. Then the old one’s up the aisle, tiara and clothes damp with rain. She claps him on the back, the first of many.

Not including the old one’s daughter. Snuck in. Nearby. The bleak face hateful, scornful of hall, speaker, song, applause. Oh why tonight, her mother happy? How to get rid? The forum over, everyone in motion. Hand to pocket but too slow. Those two pairs of eyes find each other.

A kind of finish. The day not yet over, though.

To the Cavalier, as a customer. Alone, to consider that young man’s exultation. The old one’s sorrow. Days of blame before she’ll be anything like herself. If hand quicker to pocket, all changed? No. For sure that daughter wants to wound.

Back up. No, no, this isn’t like not telling about the girl. That wasn’t for sure. Might have changed things. Coward. Worse.

A second beer. The daughter’s contempt aims at her mother, but it’s common these days on the call-in radio shows, TV, the talk on buses. Loathing. Fear. But what if no young rebelled? Just grew old? Before departure, a visit to the men’s room. Disgusting, though scrubbed savagely this morning. There’s the answer to What if.

Then the dark hike down to English Bay. Will Roy’s bedroom light be on? No, dirty coward. They’re elsewhere.

Sunset.

Here on the beach at English Bay, a sharp curve in the seawall makes good shelter to watch the sky split into gold and orange feathers. People come round that point squinting westward, don’t see someone almost at their feet on the grey sand.

Can that be Roy, hungry, hang-dog?

Be certain!

Up from beach to path, scurry ahead of the pair. Dip down by shrubs.

She’s in view first. Cat got the cream, look at me! Not a glance at that desperate figure by her, starved. Watching a handsome man thus, pure pleasure. Hot tasty spite. Meanness. Typical.

The colours in the sky go on for hours, as they do in summer.

Weekly, the Bissell beats as it sweeps as it cleans the carpet-runners on the first floor of The Sandringham, the second, third.

Dust banisters. Dust the sills of the stained-glass windows, nearly colourless by day.

Behind Miss N’s door, silence.

Behind Roy’s too.

Neither he nor Marion appears at the hall, their absence a sore licked by sixty tongues a day. Other cdes take on their assignments. The O studies his documents. For no reason the old one’s arthritis lets up, and at 110 wpm the Remington’s carriage-bell rings madly. Newspaper copy, minutes, letters, drafts of leaflets and pamphlets.

The Cavalier’s lino is so scarred and broken that cleaning the floor is ritual only, but the front windows still do respond.

What? The old one’s limping down the street toward the pub. Well-known of course, Red Annie, local character.

Out of the boozy dim, vinegar rag in hand.

“Jake, it’s Jennifer. Get Marion.”

In the struggle towards reading, some words are fireworks. War, for example, even if it comes up as raw, once learned isn’t forgotten. Same with hearing. That name’s a floodlight.

Run.

“Good comrade!” cries the old one.

Seven blocks downtown, hot bright streets, breathless.

At the post office, the mother’s on a break, where? Run upstairs, the cafeteria, panting, not there, down, corridors, where? Doors, counters, asking. At last Marion’s surprise, terror.

“Quick,” she gasps, exiting the PO.

Vinegar rag waves for a taxi.

Arrival. Marion headlong into the hall.

The cab waits.

From the Gestetner room, the O’s swivel chair emerges. Slumped in it, Jennifer, eyes half-closed. The old one pushes the chair forward, kicks at Roy, elbows him off.

“Mummy?”

“Right here, darling.” An embrace. Marion grabs the chair, heads for the door. Roy trails.

With the old one, a shared stare at the print-room. The Gestetner to be eviscerated. The ditto machine. Folded-out cot. Silkscreen. Splats on the lino.

“Later!” she cries, pulling an arm. “They’ve been in there for weeks. He’d got a hall key somehow.” Passing the O’s office. “Damn fool never noticed.”

Out to the sidewalk.

“Bastard, how could you?” The mother spits.

Roy’s chin drips. “It wasn’t a quack I took her to! I’d never do that, Marion, you know me! I love her.”

“In we get, darling.”

Taxi’s off to Emergency. The not-father-to-be runs after. “Marion, come back!” Slows. Slinks off.

Double-quick, to the Cavalier for a mickey. The swig’s sharp, hot.

Back. Into the kitchen, at the big table by the old one.

She swallows.

Again.

Calmer now.

In a bit she’ll go over to the Remington, won’t notice the bucket’s clank. Cleaning solution this side, pink water that.

“If the cops don’t come down on us for aiding and abetting, we’ll be lucky. Procuring, even. Bloody irresponsible.” She doesn’t know the half of that. “And you heard, he quote loves her. Typical.” Sighing, she sets the flask aside, smoothes her hair.

At the PO, Marion puts in for a transfer and returns to Calgary.

Strong Jennifer moves to Toronto. Bum never seen again.

At the next branch, Roy shoves in to argue his case. TU cdes strong-arm him out. In this the old one doesn’t exactly take pleasure, but she doesn’t not either.

Russell manages to locate the Apt For Rent sign, pens 2 clumsily before Apt.

A day later, a summons from Mrs W.

“Look what that man did before he left.”

The Sandringham’s garbage cans, tossed. Newsprint all over the alley, cat-litter, tins, jars, peels and grounds, bacon-fat, tea-bags. Slimy leavings coat the cans’ insides. After tomorrow’s pickup, scrub. Russell won’t do it. Somebody has to.

“He even threw these out.“ Wet white papers stick to asphalt, drift under parked cars. She holds out a handful. “From when Jennifer was a little girl.”

Artworks, back through elementary. One picture has a strip of green along the bottom, red flower-dots above, a white sky thick with paint. Along the top are plump blue clouds with scalloped edges.

“Poor girl. She got that all wrong too.”

This doesn’t cover the whole situation, yet nothing to say occurs. Mrs W stoops to gather up more refuse.

—————————————————

Cynthia Flood’s latest collection of short fiction is The English Stories (Biblioasis 2009). Her stories have appeared in many Canadian magazines and anthologies and in Best Canadian Stories, and have won the Journey Prize and a National Magazine Gold among other awards. She’s at work on a fourth collection of stories and has published recently at FoundPress.com and Joyland.ca After decades in a house on Vancouver’s East Side, she now lives in a 7th-floor apartment overlooking Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Heaven!

The Orange Bird: A Story by Gladys Swan

Jan 302012

“The Orange Bird,” by Gladys Swan, is a sly, knowing, witty, gorgeous story about a so-so painter becoming a true artist. It’s rare in fiction to find a text that conveys the mystery, torture, befuddlement and absolute joy of the moment of transcendence. I think of passages in Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, maybe some bits in Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence. Gladys Swan, who is herself both a writer and a painter, is very funny, yet very wise. Even her character doesn’t know what’s happening to him or where he’s going. And, as often is the case with an species of grace, art comes to him from a completely unexpected source.

This story is excerpted from Gladys Swan’s new book The Tiger’s Eye: New & Selected Stories, published by Serving House Books. The author photo above was taken by Harlan Mack at the Vermont Studio Center. Gladys is seated on a Harlan Mack work called “The Aftermath”—the photo was taken in Harlan’s studio during an “Open Studio.”

The crate from Spain, long awaited, arrived at the gallery that morning. Mildred was all agog, a kid getting a birthday present, hovering over Mark as he cut the wires and pried up the planks. Carl and Antonia stood by, witnesses of the grand opening. She’d been on pins and needles for months—would the shipment arrive, would Diego come through? This was her baby. She winced as the nails came out, as though Mark might damage something, and it would be hell to pay if he did. He worked loose the lid, took out the packing. A blast of color struck him in the eye. Careful of the baby, he lifted the top canvas and set it up on a chair. The four of them stood back appraising. There it was: a vase of red and yellow flowers like fried eggs, a drape to one side; in the background an amorphous mauve shape next to what could have been a corner of the Alhambra. In front, a lobster, cooked and coral. On the other side, a basket with clusters of grapes spilling out, two apples in the neighborhood, an orange bird behind. As a finishing touch, the surface offered a crackled effect. Breathtakingly awful.

“It’s beyond imagination,” Mildred enthused. “Just look at the color.”

Mark caught Antonia’s eye, but her expression was neutral. “You can certainly see the Spanish touch,” she said. He covered his mouth to avoid some expression of horror, to still the laughter that threatened to double him over. Mildred shot him a glance, dismissed him. If she’d caught his disloyalty, it didn’t matter.

“Well, Diego’s really done me proud,” Mildred said, turning the paintings over to Carl, who did most of the framing. Eleven more lay in the crate, looking as though they’d been cranked out by a machine. “A black frame,” Carl said, “to lock in the color. Or maybe silver.” Carl, expert at measuring and cutting, never had an opinion about anything he was asked to frame. Just so there were no complaints from the customer. Antonia was a different kettle of fish.

“I’m just thrilled,” Mildred said. “It’s so hard to get a still life that’ll go over. People get bored with the same old stuff. I’ve seen too many pumpkins in my time. I’ve got to call the Steens.” She went off to do so at once.

Thrilled. To have hit upon Spanish kitsch instead of the mere domestic species. No doubt offering employment to how many struggling, or maybe not so struggling, Spanish artists.

“Thrilled? She can’t believe that’s art,” Mark said to Antonia after Mildred had left for the bank. It belongs in Wal-mart.”

“Does it matter?” She was a small energetic woman in her fifties, a photographer, who supplemented her income by working part-time in the gallery and by doing weddings. She liked the connection. She and Mildred had been on friendly terms for years. A few prints of her photographs, studies in light and shadow, offering haunting contrasts, hung on the walls, attracting an occasional buyer. To Mark, these were the best work in the gallery. “Believe me, Mildred knows what she’s doing. She’s had to learn the hard way.”

He tried for a title. “‘The Afternoon of the Lobster Quadrille’—how does that grab you?”

“It’s a pretty inert lobster.”

“A more Daliesque approach? ‘The Cornucopia’s Lament.’? ‘Sancho Panza Strikes Again’ or ‘The Persistence of Indigestion’?”

“You haven’t quite caught the essence. It has a certain genius,” Antonia said, cocking her head, as though to capture it more fully. “A genius of badness—that’s hard to come by.”

“I think Mildred’s outdone herself.”

Transcending the typical, the banal, the decorative, this was their bread and butter. Landscapes of houses and trees decked in summer green; seascapes with foam, and sometimes dramatic clouds; the snows of a New England winter—the “yesteryear stuff,” he called it—what would go well in a dining room or over the mantel of a fireplace. Technical skill to the grommet. (”Don’t knock it,” Antonia said. “Considering the way they come out of some of the art schools these days. Can’t draw for shit.”—“I don’t.” he insisted.) Still anybody could have painted them. No character, no signature. Early Motel. Late Professional Building. For the suburban nests of the up and grasping, fine for bank or doctor’s office. It didn’t offend—maybe even convinced people there was a place for art. For artists. For himself—or so he hoped.

He figured he’d hit it lucky when Mildred took him on his first year out of art school. Except for the one or two who’d landed on their feet, who’d somehow gotten connections and were consistently selling their work, most of his buddies had either gone into advertising or some form of computer graphics. A wonderfully talented water colorist was taken on by a greeting-card company. Left to his own devices, he’d managed to cobble together various part-time jobs. For a time, he worked nights in a bakery, after which he threw himself exhausted into bed. Then the gallery job opened up, offering him a glimpse into the art scene and actually allowing him time to paint on his own. For the moment, at least, he felt he was struggling in the right direction. If most of the stuff Mildred sold was nothing he’d ever paint himself, at least he didn’t have to think about it. His work there was varied enough to be interesting: talking to potential buyers, trying to connect them with what they were looking for, whatever it was, or else setting up the shows. These were often the work of artists who combined fabric and flower arrangements, did playful treatments of animals, or water colors of river, lake, and rocky abutment. Occasionally Mildred took in a painter who moved in the direction of abstraction or did something unusual with color. He’d hung a couple of shows that moved toward the pretty good.

So far the only work that genuinely interested him was Antonia’s photographs. When he tried to tell her how good they were, her face reddened, as though he’d discovered a secret that couldn’t bring her any benefit. “I’m very grateful to Mildred,” she’d say, as though her talent was owing to her as well. “She actually has one hanging in her living room.”

Her first years Mildred had taken up young and promising artists and given them shows, even though their work mostly didn’t sell, and more than once she’d been left in the lurch. She hadn’t done that for quite a while, but had subsided into success She had, in fact, hit the jackpot several years back when she’d been the one to handle the contract for the paintings and assorted art objects for a cluster of condominiums going up. A number of artists both in the area and outside had been commissioned to do paintings, even a few sculptures, suitable not only for living and dining rooms, but for bedrooms and hallways. Mildred had made it into a real competition, had worked up a lot of publicity in the papers. Artists had submitted slides for the project, and Mildred had made the selections. They’d filled up the place with beach scenes at sunrise and sunset, flower arrangements, birds in flight. Pinks and peaches, vibrant greens and blues and lavenders going from sultry to misty. The impression apparently, was to make the Midwestern city dweller believe he’d been transported to Florida. “Mildred made a bundle,” Antonia had told him. “Really expanded her collection. You should see that place of hers.”

By all descriptions a real showplace. Expensive woods, stone fireplace. One of the best private art collections she’d seen in the city. Not just prints and ceramics by Matisse and Picasso—the Names—but lithographs by Romare Beardon, paintings by Wayne Thiebault, Alice Neel, Chuck Close, and other notables. Work that took not just money—apparently she had plenty to throw around—but an eye too.

Mildred was a puzzle to him. Her little-kid excitement over the hopelessly bad seesawing with her aim to live with the good stuff. For investment purposes? To show she had class? She knew how to make a buck—you had to give her that. But beyond that? He wanted a way past equivocation, to where their sympathies might join—especially when she said just before the shipment arrived, “Hey, what are you painting these days? I’d like to see your work.”

He was flattered, yet reluctant, at the same time curious to see what her response might be. Actually, he felt pretty good about what he was doing. He hadn’t found an approach that satisfied him; he was still trying to break loose from the school stuff he’d done, mostly abstract expressionist displays with heavy impasto and a lot of surging shapes, work that now struck him as turgid and derivative, whatever praise he might have received. Now he was working into a more figurative mode, trying to use color with more finesse. After a long love affair with the German expressionists, Bonnard had become his idol.

Then she mentioned it again. “When are you going to bring something in? When he did, taking in half a dozen of his recent canvases, Mildred set them up along the wall, regarded them with a critical eye. “You’re working out of the dead stuff,” she told him. “That’s good.” Hardly the enthusiasm that met the Spanish still life, but better than nothing. “Keep moving. Bring some more when you get them done.”

He couldn’t help an occasional fantasy—her giving him a show, inviting him to her house to see her art work . . . . All very unlikely, he told himself.

“Twelve of them,” he said to Antonia. “How in the hell can she sell twelve of those? Impossible.”

“You want to bet on it,” Antonia said, giving a little ironic smile.

“Okay,” he said. “You win, I’ll buy you a beer at Stefanelli’s.”

“If I lose.”

“I’ll buy you a beer anyway.” If he could manage it. Right now he was pressed from all sides—student loans, a car going bad, a nagging weakness in the chest he hadn’t yet taken to a doctor.

She laughed. “You’re on. Only if you win . . . ”

“Trade me one of your photographs for one of my paintings.”

“A deal. You look like you could use some coffee. I’ll make some.” She moved toward the back.

“Thought it was my turn.”

“You can do it next time.”

He was bone tired. He’d stayed up most of the night working on a painting that refused to jell. Tonight he’d take a break, head off to Stefanelli’s and sit around with the old Italian men still in the neighborhood who frequented the place. For some reason he felt more at home with them than with the young guys that hung around. They were no longer trying to prove anything—a relief. Especially if you had everything to prove yourself. It was his only social life, as much as he could afford. As it was, he made barely enough to pay the rent on an apartment in a rundown, blue- collar neighborhood, the living room serving as his studio. He’d rigged up a set of lights so he could work nights after he got home. Usually Mark managed a couple or three hours of painting, but sometimes stayed up till all hours when he really got going. He dared not do it often—he couldn’t risk falling asleep on the job. He lived for his two days off, Sunday and Monday, when he could work uninterruptedly, sleeping late and working all day. He’d lost touch with most of his college friends. When one of them called, he was eager enough to talk on the phone but was vague about future meetings—at least for the time being. To all intents and purposes, he’d gone into hibernation. He had work to do, had to see what was in him.

The first of the Spanish still-lifes sold the next week. It was just what the Steens wanted. He drew a quick sketch of them in the little book he carried in his pocket: a large, hearty woman with graying hair, who wore huge earrings with smiley faces, and her balding mate, who spoke in quick explosive bursts: “Terrific color—light up that north wall come winter, won’t it, hon? Terrific color.”

“I was sure you’d like it,” Mildred said.

Antonia gave him a significant look. Okay, one down. Mildred hung up a second and sold it the same week, this time to a woman who came in with a handsome full-size poodle. The sketches became a series, expanding like a rogues’ gallery. As a preface, he’d written, What do these faces have in common?

After the eleventh had sold, in less than three months, Mark conceded that he owed Antonia a beer. That is, if he could afford it. He’d just gotten his car out of the shop, the eighteen-year-old TransAm he’d taken over from his uncle. Twelve hundred bucks on his credit card, not to mention the interest. The zeros on the bill haunted him. More out of desperation than hope, he decided to ask Mildred if she’d give him a show. His work was taking shape; it had some flashes here and there. If he could sell a few paintings. . . make a small debut. He went back over her responses as though he were counting credits. “Nice color going there.” “The shapes in that one—very organic.” Had anything impressed her?

He approached her at her desk cluttered with catalogs and brochures, the last Spanish still life emphatically occupying the wall just behind. She looked up from a catalog she was examining.

“An exhibit?” he asked.

“Old friend of mine from school,” she said. He drew up to look over her shoulder, while she turned the pages. Mountains, cactus-studded landscapes, horses. Portraits of Hispanics. Nothing new, but genuinely well done. “She’s got something,” he said, leaning forward to read the name. Heather Duncan.

“A lot of talent. She used to do things like you’d see in a dream. I’ve got one in my bedroom. Went out to Santa Fe a few years back. Now they’re selling everything she paints. Yeah,” she said. “She’s finally done it.”

“Some great artists have gone out there to the New Mexico. Such a powerful landscape.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. “All she needs are a few cows’ skulls.”

“You going out for the opening?” he said, feeling some idiotic need to put off what he wanted to ask her.

“Too many things pressing,” she said.

Then she said. “Sit down. There’s something I’ve been thinking about. I just wanted to be sure it was the right moment.”

His heart took a sudden leap, even as the Spanish still life met his eye and the orange bird seemed to stare right through him.

“Can you paint one of these?” she asked him, gesturing toward the painting.

You’ve got to be kidding, he almost blurted out. He was struck dumb. “Nobody’s ever asked me,” he said.

“I’m offering you a chance,” she said. “There are lots of young artists around who could use the money.”

Including himself. “Well, I . . .”

“Of course you can,” she said, suddenly beaming at him. “I know you can—I’ve seen your work. Two hundred apiece,” she said, “plus,” she added indulgently, “an allowance for canvases and paints. I want another twelve of them.”

Enough to get himself out of hock and have a little to float on. Would it be selling his soul? But then, maybe he could actually learn something, improve some of his techniques. Like the apprentices in the old days. The idea was beginning to appeal to him. “I’ll give it a whirl,” he said.

“Good boy,” she said. “I knew you had it in you.”

He spent the next Sunday stretching and gessoing canvases. He’d brought home the still life and hung it up on the wall, where, with the lights on it, it gave off an unholy garish sheen. He planted himself in front of it and tried to figure out the colors. Mix and match. When in doubt, lay on the cadmiums. Orange, red, yellow. After his initial drawing and painting classes, his struggling beginner’s efforts, he hadn’t done any close copying. But he figured he’d go about it the way he’d seen it done in the text books: make a grid, block out the forms, sketch in the details, set up some good background colors. Since this was a production job, he could try laying in the larger areas, moving from one canvas to another. He did the drape, the slab of building, the ambiguous mauve shape, then back to the first, working toward the more challenging objects. The flowers he found monstrously difficult—gaudy, truculent, but somehow elusive, innocent even in their vulgarity. He thought of Mildred. He had to keep the colors clean, pay attention to the parts but not neglect the whole. In its way, it all had to work—flowers, basket, grapes, apples, lobster, bird. As Antonia suggested, there was a certain genius in it. You had to find your way into that, on the terms it demanded. Harder than he thought—more time-consuming than he expected. For when he got through the first, the painting stood inert before his eyes. Still life indeed—nature morte. So what was wrong?

Every night he came home from work and after a quick supper—a sandwich, a can of soup heated up, or a frozen pizza he popped into the oven—he approached the painting with a certain dread, while the rest stood lined up against the wall. For two or three hours he tried to meet it on its own terms. He had to wipe away any trace of a smirk, humble himself; otherwise it wouldn’t yield. Sometimes he wanted to weep with vexation—the damned thing wasn’t worth the effort. Then one night when he’d almost despaired, it all came together. Just like that, as though something had sneaked in when he wasn’t looking. He worked in a frenzy till four in the morning. Then it was finished, sweet Jesus—it was done. He collapsed into bed but couldn’t sleep, fueled awake by a curious sort of excitement, even triumph. When he finally awoke from an exhausted sleep, he had to go immediately to look at the painting. It held, cohered, made a world, out of which the orange bird met his eye with a certain fierce partiality, seemed to follow him around the room, as though he’d somehow claimed it. He couldn’t bear its gaze.

“Perfect,” Mildred said, when he took it in. “Absolutely perfect. Look at this, will you,” she said, calling over Antonia. “I think you’ve even improved on it. Those flowers have a certain subtlety.” She considered. “Maybe with the rest you could give the bird just a few more touches.” He didn’t know whether to laugh or weep.

The subsequent paintings went more quickly. Mildred thought it best that he work from his own copy rather than the original. Let there be a few distinctive touches, so long as the painting had the same impact. He was learning quickly, discovering something from each one. Now that he’d got the colors down, he began to work up a kind of shorthand, laying in some of the areas almost without thinking. He’d got the flowers under control; the grapes had taken on a kind of fullness, as though they might explode into flavor on the palate. The apples, too, more and more appealing, were almost seductive. Now it was the bird that gave him fits. What was it doing there in its orangeness? Was there such a creature? Or a figment of dream caught in a landscape it too found unreal?

Now he painted in his dreams as well as his waking hours, painted endlessly in a kind of Sisyphean labor, so that he was more exhausted when he woke than when he went to sleep. Sometimes he was in an undersea realm, trying to paint a lobster as it disappeared in a mass of undulating bodies and snapping claws. Sometimes he found piles of wormy apples he had to sort through to find the two he needed to paint. And many a night he spent looking for the orange bird, who continually eluded him, at times leaving behind a single glowing feather. The bird challenged him in some uncanny way, and just when he’d given it up, it would appear for an instant, remote and formidable. On one occasion it landed on his shoulder, its voice in his ear, almost a human voice, but so gentle and caressing, it seemed more than human. When he woke, he felt he had gained something of incomparable value, though what he couldn’t have said. When he looked at the painting, the bird confronted him as imperiously as ever, returning only his stare; and could it have uttered a sound, he would have expected a voice harsh as a crow’s. From the finished canvas its eye followed him relentlessly around the room.

He wanted to be rid of its dismaying presence, wanted to be done with the whole ungodly mess. He worked as though under sentence, as though he’d entered a dimension where his dreams were part of the trial. Even as he brought in the canvases one by one, to Mildred’s extravagant praise, he had no sense that he was emerging from his predicament. Then when he brought in the twelfth—they had been selling almost as quickly as he could paint them—she said, “I want a dozen more.”

He broke into a sweat. It’s killing me, he wanted to protest. His mind leapt into consequences and options. She might can him—and anything else he found had the prospect of being worse. “Let me think about it,” he temporized.

“What’s there to think?” she said. “You’ve got it down to a fine science. You don’t have some foolish notion you’re prostituting yourself?” She looked at him in amusement.

What could he say that she’d be willing to hear? That the job had been a stop-gap affair. That he was going stale with the repetition? That he had to give his energy to his own work. “Mildred,” he said, “I’ve done twelve.”

“So you want to bail out, eh? Sick of it—up to the gills with it, eh? Yeah, I’ve seen them, all the little boys and girls who want to do art. Do something original. Burn with a hard gemlike flame—I’ve even given a few of them house room.” She gave a little sniff. “How many go on and do anything worth pissing on? Answer me. One in a thousand, when all’s said and done—maybe one in ten thousand. I know—the rest have their go at it. They paint their little canvases and write their little plays and audition for acting jobs, and scribble out their passionate prose. And you know what? I was among them. Can you feature that? I even won prizes.” For a moment she seemed to dip down into the some memory of herself that brought her to a shrug and a small ironic dismissal.

She looked at him sharply. “And what do you think you’ve got that’s so special? Even if you had the talent, you haven’t got the moxy to . . . ”

“Wait a minute,” he said, blindsided by her attack. What was eating her? “I thought you liked what I was doing.”

“Do you know how many are operating at that level of talent? Dozens. And not a drop more. No, you don’t have it. And if you ever do, it’ll surprise the hell out of both of us.”

“So who the hell are you?”

“I’m trying to do you a favor,” she said. “Save you some grief. Reputations are made in New York,” she said. “How many have got what it takes to hack it there? You may as well paint still lifes. It’ll get you farther than anything else you’ve done.”

It was all he could do to keep from hitting her. Only there was no arguing, no proof to offer. Only the nagging suspicion that she might be right. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll just do that.”

“Twelve more,” she said.

The next week he was fueled by some sort of fever that turned days and nights into one continuous reel of shifting images in his head—all with the intensity of the Spanish still life, but of a reality heightened beyond it. He hardly knew what he was doing. He called in sick, went to bed and slept and sweated for hours. When he woke, wrung out, thirsty beyond belief, he didn’t know day from night. He went to the sink and poured water down his throat until he felt bloated and mopped his face. For a time he sat staring at his hand, as though it were a strange attachment for which he had not yet discovered the use. He felt an overwhelming urge to paint.

He seized a canvas he had primed and set it on the easel. From the wall where the model hung the orange bird hunched as though it were shivering in its feathers. He hardly glanced at it. He could have painted the whole thing from memory. He had grown into habit and laid in the colors he’d used a dozen times before. No sweat. Then as he surveyed the pulsating blobs of color on his palette, he was seized by something equivalent to the fever that had taken him before, and from that point on he painted like a man possessed.

Whatever object he shaped with his brush took on a life its form could hardly contain. From the grapes, a bursting fullness—within each a small universe exploding into being. The apples rolled from their position lethal with temptation as the lobster moved in, straight from the sea, in its claw a wriggling frog with a human face. Beneath his hand, the drape and backdrop turned to rocks and trees, an original garden writhing with copulating human and animal forms. Monkeys swung from the vines. He struggled for order amid the riot of color and movement. Before he collapsed altogether, the eye of the orange bird caught his and wouldn’t release his gaze, as though they had made some sort of pact. It looked ready to take off for some other dimension.

He woke early, for the first time in days breathing easily. It took him a while to remember where he was or to collect any of the pieces of the previous days . He had no idea how long the fever had engulfed him. His head was cool, and he felt as though a sweet breeze was playing around him. He remembered he’d been painting. It was only six, he saw from his watch, of whatever day was dawning. He slipped on his clothes, stepped outside to breathe the air. Then he went back in, turned on the lights and stood in front of the painting. He couldn’t believe it. Someone else had painted it, not himself at all—taking inspiration from some source that lay beyond him. Well, he thought. Well. For all its madcap flourishes, it seemed more real than anything he’d painted before.

When Mildred arrived at the gallery, he was ready for her. As she walked in the door, he stood naked but for a hastily devised loin cloth, his hair matted and falling into his face—holding up the painting.

It required a moment for her to take him in. “What is this, some kind of joke? Look, I’ve got things to do. Are you out of your mind or what?”

“Number thirteen,” he said. “The lucky number.” He danced around the room with it. “I changed a few things.”

Suddenly there were monkeys everywhere, cavorting through the gallery hanging from the fixtures, crapping on the floor, monkeys somersaulting, hanging by their tails. The orange bird had risen from immobility and was flapping around the room. He saw in the middle Mildred’s face forming The Scream, best painted by Munch, the clock melting down the wall, courtesy of Dali, the chair she stood in front of suddenly grabbing her and closing around her ankles, thanks to Remedios Varo. The copulating figures tumbled through the gallery, while the red and yellow flowers grew gigantic as cabbages. “Get out, get out,” she yelled at him. Naked through the gallery he streaked, blowing her a kiss. Naked into the alley, monkeys clamoring around him.

—Gladys Swan

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Gladys Swan is both a writer and a visual artist. She has published two novels, Carnival for the Gods in the Vintage Contemporaries Series, and Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices, nominated by LSU Press for the PEN Faulkner and PEN West awards. News from the Volcano, a novella and stories, set mostly in New Mexico, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. The Tiger’s Eye: New & Selected Stories is the most recent of her seven collections of short fiction and has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her stories have been selected for various anthologies, including Best of the West. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in the Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review , Chelsea, Ohio Review, New Letters, Southwest Review, Hunger Mountain, Hotel Amerika, and others. Her paintings have been used for the covers of three of her books and for those of other writers and literary magazines.

She has received a Lilly Endowment Open Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship to Yugoslavia, as well as a Lawrence Foundation Award for fiction and a Tate Prize for poetry.

Hallway Snowstorm: A Very Short Story by Mark Anthony Jarman

Jan 272012

This was only a few years back, snow fell and fell and blinding winds heaped huge drifts around my old house and at night it seemed some furious kingdom of darkness had descended on us, our sedate world overtaken and altered permanently.

The problem is that our old-timer team has a hockey game, a game miles away in a country arena. Do we go out on a night like this? The few vehicles visible are spaced out in hesitant convoys, roads looking terrible and blurry and the ditch beckons.

Coach phones with the word, the game is on and he will pick me up at the usual time. We may be the only old timer team with a coach.

We drive back-roads and loopy hills and hollows where sawmills once buzzed beside rivers and now the mills are gone. Coach is a good driver and we make it to the old sheet-metal arena that smells of chicken fries and our goalie’s Tiger Balm and, a bonus, we win the game and, another bonus, Darcy invites us afterward to his garage, to his iron stove and beer and deer sausage sizzling. He played pro for Montreal and Ottawa and has some good stories. He played pro, but we are bringing him down to our level. We stay up late and devour all of his victuals as the storm rages.

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