Bob Thomas has worked as a professional writer/communicator within the business community for many years. Six Hours Till Midnight is part of a collection of related short stories entitled Anachronisms, which are portraits of people out of step with their times. He is currently completing a novel (Divided States) and co-authors a relatively new blog related to business communications at: https://brandbuildingforsmallbusiness.com/. Six Hours Till Midnight |
Joseph Vito Romano was born and raised in Albany, New York and is a graduate of the University at Albany where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in English. Since completing his undergraduate program he has hitchhiked South America and bicycled down the east coast of America. He currently lives in Vail, Colorado where he reads, writes, and works as a Ski Patroller. |
yet. It’s fall in upstate New York and the colors
of the world bleed out like an open wound
the rotten deck we’re seated on wishes to give up
to return to the forest, to oblivion. Loud creaky joists
call out and red sugar maple leaves whisper welcome
home. You talk once more about leaving. How we’ll
break the lease, flip over the beds to hide the stains,
patch drywall, wrench out copper pipes to pay
for our move. You ask me what I think
tell me how things will be different in our new
home. It’s our ninth place in as many years.
How neatly a lifetime can fit in a duffel bag.
Desperation tricks us into thinking the same sun
on a different latitude is freedom. It has us believe if we
rot colorfully enough we may cheat cold grey winter.
You tell me once more we’re leaving
You ask me what I think
I want to tell you I need a place to call
home. And then I’ll tell you where my heart is
I’ll tell you where my heart is
I’ll tell you--
I tell you I’ll start packing. From the deck
the warm smell of ripened leaves comforts me.
I look out one last time as the late fall
sun moves beyond the rolling hills.
Night takes back bleeding colors of the world
still young, but I swear I hear it slipping away.
Inheritance
in the basement,
a sunken concrete room with a singular bulb
and a sea of boxes
I squint at each lid
to trace the dusty outline
of your old hands.
Coming away with boxes now, heavy with
age like sunken ships,
I organize them searching
for something passed on
I’ve been at it for hours yet
I don’t know what it is.
From the depths I haul up a short cracked plastic case
the handle busted and the rusty latch bent
eyes closed I remember-
I unload from the case a projector and film
and set to feeding the film
through locks, and dials, and plug it
in and switch it
on, but it’s in reverse,
and the burning 8mm smells
like a funeral pyre.
The projector fan hums in low forgotten decibels
a pitch not meant to be heard again
the projector bulb comes alive
dust motes caught like trespassing stars
I get the film feeding forward
silent images flicker on the dim concrete wall:
The ocean a grey blue,
the suns reflection a broken mirror,
old bathing suits, old women, old thighs
wrinkles, chest hair, bald heads
smiles. No sun screen, no towels
No care. They wave but I don’t wave back.
A shot of hundreds of them
wading into it
pushing it back.
A long shot of July 1958
drawn in the sand
the next shot the ocean foam
sweeping it all away.
A singular silent image of my father
a year old smiling
buried to his head in sand, and
for just a moment there’s a world
in which my father waits to be unburied.
I ask, “How do you turn this off?”
Through the low hum and flickering
inaudibly from somewhere else
he tells me only, “Keep going.”
John’s Song
glazed moonlight, grey vignette forms
in the dark a coyote calls out and its pack answers like
a breaking wave, a formless choir, a
single silhouetted hymn that would echo
if not for the blasted desert caliche.
They celebrate a kill, maybe
warm blood evaporating quick
in the heat, or
they scream to mark their territory
a welcome to what they know
and a warning to what lies beyond.
I read once that Song Dogs sing
when they lose one of their own.
A cry for more
a call to friends
a plea to ancestors
there’s no joy in this chorale.
Their dead siren song
is one I know. They sing:
he was too young
we could’ve done more
it’s our fault.
They sing that there must be something
beyond grief.
I want to sing your song but I don’t know the lyrics
I want to bring it forth so the world can see
that you couldn’t be a cynic that
you had too much love.
I want to sing you a song but I don’t know the lyrics
so I do my best to keep the
rhythm in my heart.
The wind carries all voices down range
until their lost
the song is sung
the pack moves on
the world spins again
I keep the rhythm only
it’s slower
greyer
without you.
NGOZI OLIVIA OSUOHA is a Nigerian poet/writer/thinker. A graduate of Estate Management with experience in Banking and Broadcasting. She has published over one hundred poems/articles in over ten countries. Her first two longest poems of 355 and 560 verses titled THE TRANSFORMATION TRAIN and LETTER TO MY UNBORN published in Kenya and Canada respectively are available on Amazon. She has also featured in over ten international anthologies/books/blogs. She is a passionate African ink. |
STORMS
And the waters we drink,
None is the food we eat
Rather, the flood that did defeat.
Of the earthquakes that destroy
And the landslides that toy,
None can our joy deploy
Because there is no peace to employ.
Of the winds that blow
And the storms that grow,
None can our love flow
For they bring us so low.
Storms so strange
Local and foreign, at range
Storms that change
Stories, histories, eternal.
LINGERING EFFECT
It comes like worm,
If we paint the picture
It dribbles our nature,
If we make a collage
We study it at college,
A perfect lingering effect.
We do not want to die
Hence, the knot we tie
We love to live
So we cherish what we give,
We defeat the battle
Even without our cattle,
For we must move on.
The path of tide
And the length of time
The part so wide
And the strength against crime
There, we pitch our tent
For life is so bent
Even as we pay rent.
FLAMES
Thundering and thunderous sea,
Noisy wind and restless breeze
Troubled land and besieged souls,
Only God understands.
Weeping voices and wailing victims
Floating houses and sinking homes,
Hopeless people and dying nation
Only God knows.
Animals and beasts that raze
Humans and beings at gaze
Souls and spirits ablaze,
A world in flames
Losing her games
Evil gaining names.
NOT WITHSTANDING
Mingling down the Nile,
The European gears
Going extra mile
The African fears
Haunting the file
The Asian wears
Flowing the tile,
The American years
Curing pile,
The Australian bears
Not looking fragile.
A lingering effect
Disasters, natural and devastating
Yet never frightening her
As she hopes life never ends
Loving life to wait for hope
Living it lively to the fullest,
The Caribbean hope
Across that tiny rope
Reaching heights and highs
Nervous with sighs,
The hurricanes not withstanding.
Let her under your skin
Kimberly Wickstrom is a grateful mother to three lovely daughters, but she lost her own mom when she was only twenty years old, and working through that loss has been the focus of most of her writing. “Let Her Under Your Skin” came from thinking how nice it would be to meet someone who had known her mom when she was a young woman waiting for her life to begin. Kimberly’s favorite thing about writing is its power to create life and the world just as you would like them to be. |
I found her crying on the bathroom floor the day her straight black hair first fell out. She had a clump of it in her hand, but a few strands had fallen onto the yellow tile. My mother had beautiful hair. Straight Creek Indian hair.
I laughed when I first saw my mother in her wig. She laughed a little bit, too, but sometimes it hurt her too much to laugh. She used to let me wear her new hair around the house. A Farrah Fawcett wig. “I’ve always wanted to be a blonde,” she told my dad when he came home. “And it’s now or never.” My dad didn’t like it when she talked like that in front of me.
I was only seven. She let me pick out her first wig. We ordered it from a special catalog.
Once I saw the scar where her breasts had been. I ran into her room to ask if I could play with my friends, and she was sitting in front of the mirror with her nightgown unbuttoned. She wasn’t crying. She followed me into my room and tried to talk to me, but I wouldn’t listen. I wanted to go to the park with my friends. They made me happy, made me laugh.
When she finally went into the hospital, my mother wasn’t beautiful anymore. They didn’t let her have the Farrah Fawcett wig, and she was fat. Her belly was so swollen that she looked like she was going to have another baby – another me. My dad made me promise that I wouldn’t stare at her. Her breath was bad, and I wouldn’t even kiss her on the cheek.
Lying in her coffin, my mom had long straight hair again. Like the picture my dad had given the funeral home. Her lips were painted red and her eyes were closed. She was beautiful. My dad touched my shoulder and said, “This is how you should remember your mother, Suzanne.”
Her smell, her scars, her death. These are the things that I know about my mother.
What she was like when she wasn’t sick, before she was too weak to get out of bed, before her arms were black and blue from the needle shots, before she could only drink her food. What made her laugh. What made her happy. What she was like, really.
Her first kiss. The night she lost her virginity. What she thought when she fell in love, when she first met my father, when she had me.
What she was like when she was my age. If she would like me. If she would be happy.
These are the things that I don’t know about my mother.
*****
I come to the city again to see Thomas, my mother’s first boyfriend.
She never talked about him, not to me. At least, not that I remember.
I found the box of his letters in my mother’s lingerie drawer. A year after she died, I was packing all of her clothes into boxes to send to the Salvation Army. “It’s what she would have wanted,” my dad told me, but I knew that he was getting rid of all her clothes because Janice was about to move in. Janice, my new mother.
Still, he couldn’t box them up himself. He called me from his office one summer afternoon and asked. “I’m just too busy to do it, Suze,” he said. But I knew the truth.
The box of letters was underneath her mastectomy bras and silky nightgowns. I lifted the gowns to my nose and breathed their smell in before I dropped them into the box. They smelled like my mom and roses, and reminded me of the days before she sick, when I would crawl into bed with her early in the morning. I would curl into the crook of her arm, feel her breath on my ear, and fall asleep again. I must have been so small.
On the day I found the letters, I read just one of them. They were too full of details – about Vietnam, his company and commanding officers and how much her thought about her.
Just touching them made me feel sad. Sad for my mother.
I remember that as I looked through the box I was careful not to wake her. Part of me was listening for her deep breathing and the rustle of her sheets. I remember waiting for her to scold me for going through her things. But I didn’t hear anything.
I didn’t put the letters in the Salvation Army box. I didn’t throw them away. I didn’t even show them to my dad. They were a secret between my mom and me, the last secret. I tucked the box onto the top shelf of my closet, next to my books and stuffed animals. A safe place.
I was fourteen years old before I touched them again. I was cleaning out my closet, found the box, sat down on my bed, and opened it, holding my breath. I had forgotten how many letters there were. They were tied with ribbon, by season. Spring, summer, fall winter. Another spring, another summer. 1969. 1970. There were so many of them.
I read one each day, just like my mom had. I pretended that I was her. I was my mother when I read about his first day in Vietnam. Things seemed so easy. Green and friendly and easy. He was sure that he could stay the whole eighteen months. I was my mother when I read about the villagers he met, the old man who gave the soldiers water, and the children who gave them massages and cleaned their guns, and I worried about the pretty girls and dangerous men, just like my mom had. I smiled with her when I read about the guy in Thomas’s outfit who taped a picture of Joan Baez to the inside of his helmet. “Thinks it’ll protect him,” Thomas wrote. “Like the V.C.’ll be able to sense one of their own, I guess.”
In my mind, I wrote a reply to each letter. I told him about my classes, about my friends, about how much I missed him, how proud I was of him. And I wondered if he had saved all of my letters, too.
His last letter was written from a base in Washington. He had just arrived there from Vietnam. He would see my mother in a few days, he wrote.
There was nothing else. My mom kept the only reminders of Thomas McPherson tied with ribbon and tucked into her lingerie drawer.
*****
He is a writer now. He still writes about Vietnam, just like his letters. He writes about innocence, about children cleaning guns, and about Joan Baez. He doesn’t write about my mother.
Tonight, like last night, he reads from his latest novel. Another novel about Vietnam. “People will always want to read stories about Vietnam,” the book review in our paper wrote. “Just not the same stories.” The reviewer wrote that instead of buying Thomas’s new book, people should just reread his first one.
Tonight, like last night, white folding chairs cover the back room of the bookstore, and half of them are empty.
Last night I sat in the back row by myself and watched the people surround him after the reading. I help his new novel in my lap, but couldn’t walk to the front of the room to have it signed. I watched him talk with a girl my age, a girl with long blond hair and long firm legs. Talk, smile, listen, then laugh. I watched her sit in the front row, and when the line of people had disappeared, I watched him sit next to her, and I wished that he was sitting next to me. Behind me, someone called his name, and when he turned around, he saw me and smiled.
I didn’t tell anyone that I was coming to see Thomas. They wouldn’t understand.
My dad worried about me. On my dresser at home I have a picture of my mom. I found it in her jewelry box, and I think it looks like me. Once my dad walked into my room and found me looking at it. I was fixing my hair just like hers.
He sat down on my bed and folded his arms across his chest. “Suzanne, honey, don’t you think it’s time you let her go?” he asked. My dad never talked about her much.
I wanted to tell him that I can’t. I wanted to tell him why, but he wouldn’t have understood.
Thomas looks like the picture I found in her jewelry box, in an envelope underneath her bracelets and earrings, just older. He is smaller than I imagined, and he is wearing a baseball cap.
I watch him talking to the lady in the front of the room. He doesn’t smile. He folds his arms, fidgets with his pen and his cap. His eyes are looking over the lady’s shoulder, and I try to imagine them looking at my mom, when she was beautiful. I imagine them reading her letters.
I watch him for a while, and then I sit in the back row as the lady steps to the microphone to introduce him. Thomas McPherson, one of the best writers of his generation, she says. My mother’s first boyfriend.
I imagine that he sees me in the back row, that he sees my mother.
*****
When I was little, I didn’t want to look like my mother. I didn’t want to be bald. I didn’t want to be sick, so think and pale that people could see the blue veins underneath my skin. I didn’t want to have scars where my breasts should have been.
My mother needed people to bathe and dress her. The nurse had to help my mother go to the bathroom. She would hold her as they walked. Sometimes she almost had to carry her. Sometimes my mother couldn’t even wipe herself. “You’re so brave, Lynda. You’re doing really well,” the nurse would say to her. I stood in the hallway, hidden by the door as I watched her shuffle from the bed to the bathroom, and I remember thinking how ugly my mom was. Not brave.
My dad would come into my bedroom at night and stroke my hair.
“Remember how used to be, Suzanne,” he would say to me.
But I couldn’t. My mom was sick and bald and ugly.
Sometimes I wonder if she got sick when she had me.
Sometimes I prayed that she would die.
I remember the May before she died, we made Mother’s Day presents at school. We made stationery, pretty cards and envelopes. I drew hearts and flowers on mine, wrote “I love you Mom,” and “Happy Mother’s Day,” all over them, and threw them away as I walked home from school. My mom was too weak to write letters. The stationery would just have made her cry.
*****
Janice was the first woman I ever saw putting on her own makeup.
Sometimes I would sit in her lap and she would put blusher on my cheeks, color on my lips. She would spritz her perfume on me and drape one of her silk scarves around my shoulders. My mom had pretty clothes too. I would stumble around the house in Janice’s high heels and admire myself in the mirror. I looked so pretty, so healthy.
Janice was the one who took me school shopping. She bought me 501 jeans and beautiful dresses. “I know how important it is for you to fit in, Suzanne,” she said.
Janice was the one who helped me pick out my first bra, who taught me how to shave my legs and pluck my eyebrows. Janice was always perfectly made-up. My dad took her out to dinner every Saturday. “It’s our special night,” he told me. My dad liked to look at Janice.
Janice was the one I went to when I started my first period. It was a Sunday – I’ll always remember that because we were getting ready for church. I was embarrassed about the blood on my panties. I didn’t want to tell my dad. I didn’t want to tell Janice, and I didn’t want to go to church. “I don’t feel good,” I said, lying in bed.
“You look fine,” Janice said. She was wearing the locket that my dad had given her for Valentine’s Day. It fell perfectly between her two breasts, and I couldn’t stop looking at it.
“Come on, Suzanne,” she told me. “You know I’m singing a duet this morning. We can’t be late.”
I held the sheet up to my chin and started to cry. I was the first of my friends to get a period. I was only eleven. I had to tell Janice.
When I told her, she hugged me and started to cry too. She led me to the bathroom and cleaned me up and placed a pad in my underwear. I hated it.
She made me go to church. I hated that more.
I hated having to tell Janice. Not being able to tell my mom.
I hated that nobody ever talked about her.
Every Mother’s Day, the church had a mother-daughter luncheon. The ladies would dress up and wear flower corsages. My friends would tell me about the luncheon the next day, but I never went. “Why do you want to hurt Janice that way?” my father would ask. “After all he’s done for you.” I could hear Janice crying in the next room, but I never answered him.
My mom’s birthdays were the worst. I think my dad and Janice hoped that I would forget, but I didn’t. All I could do was remember.
*****
Thomas reads from his new novel, and it reminds me of the letters he used to write my mother.
I close my eyes and listen, imagining that I am her. In my mind, she is young like me, and beautiful again. She looks like the picture I have on my dresser at home. She has a thick braid of black Indian hair. She is looking at me over her shoulder, and laughing. Her eyes are dark, and happy.
When he is finished reading and looks into the audience, he sees her in me, and that is why he smiles.
He knows.
He knows, and that is why he smiles again when I hand him my book at the signing table.
“Name?” he asks. He is surrounded by people.
“Suzanne,” I answer. I have the last letter he wrote to my mom tucked into my purse.
“Suzanne,” he repeats as he signs the front page. He looks up at me for a moment, his hand resting on the book.
He waits for me to say something, but I don’t. I just smile.
He watches me as I walk away. I can feel his eyes on my back, and I shiver.
I stand in the corner, his book still in my hand. I don’t talk to anyone, but I tell myself that is all right. “You should be more outgoing, Suzanne,” Janice used to tell me. “A pretty girl like you shouldn’t be so shy.” She thought she was helping, but I like to think that my mom was shy too.
I look down at the bracelet on my wrist and think of my mother. Were there times when she felt uncomfortable in her own skin, and as she walked down did she wish she were invisible? Did she shiver when strange men looked at her? Were there times when she could only smile at people when they talked to her, too scared to say anything?
I wonder how much of me is my mother, and how much of me is the lack of her.
For a moment I want to leave again, but then I see him coming towards me. Thomas McPherson. He is unwrapping a package of cigarettes, and smiling at me.
“Hi,” he says. “Suzanne, right?” He lights a cigarette and takes a long drag off of it.
I nod. “Hi.”
He knew my mom, before she was sick. When she was young, and beautiful. When she laughed over her shoulder at cameras. He knew my mother better than I ever will.
“I saw you here last night, didn’t I?” He stuffs the package of cigarettes back into his jacket pocket. “Good to know someone appreciates me.”
I just smile. Say something, Suzanne. There are so many things that you want to say.
“’Course, I probably wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be.” He sits down, and I do too. He is shorter than me.
We don’t say anything to each other. I can feel him watching me, but I don’t turn my head.
“You’re a shy little thing, aren’t you?” He blows smoke out of the corner of his mouth and coughs back a laugh. “That’s a nice change.”
I look at him finally. He looks older than forty-eight. His skin is dry and sallow. Too many cigarettes. Too much war.
“Thank you.” He has nice eyes. Just like his picture.
He looks around the room, now almost empty. “Another small crowd, eh, Suzanne? You should have brought a few of your friends this time.”
I smile, and then say, “It was a wonderful reading.”
Thomas flicks his ashes onto the floor and cocks his head at me. “Hey, at least when she speaks, she speaks the truth.”
We watch a lady hurrying towards us.
“Mr. McPherson,” she begins. Her hands never stop moving, but her face is pretty. “We need you to come over and get your picture taken for our newsletter.” She stares at his cigarette.
He nods his head at her, and she leaves.
“Never write a book,” he says. He leans into me and touches my shoulder with his, as if we are sharing something private. “You end up spending most of your time with a bunch of idiots. He grinds the butt of his half-finished cigarette into the seat of his chair. “Haven’t been able to finish one of these all day,” he says and his voice is hoarse, tired.
“Wait here,” he tells me before he stands up.
I watch him as he poses for the newsletter photograph. He is in the middle of a large group of people, and everybody looks happy. Even he looks happy. Most of the group is holding his new novel. He looks like the picture he sent to my mom. His arms are folded across his chest. His weight is shifted onto his left leg. Except now he doesn’t have a military uniform on. He is wearing jeans and a dark blue t-shirt. A white-sox baseball cap.
After the picture is taken, he shakes everybody’s hand and thanks them. He sits down, takes a piece of paper from his wallet and begins to write on it.
He is writing to me. I know that he is writing a note to me. Linda’s daughter.
When he puts it into my hand, it is folded up into a little ball. “You can read this later,” he whispers. The lady with the moving hands is standing right next to us.
“Okay,” I whisper back.
“Great to meet you, Suzanne,” he says, more loudly now. “It’s been nice talking to you, but the bookstore here is taking me out to dinner.” He smiles at the lady.
I shake his hand and thank him for the autograph.
At the café next to the bookshop, I drink two cups of hot chocolate and read the first three chapters of his new novel. I walk twice around the block, sit on a bench in front of the bookstore and uncrumple Thomas McPherson’s note.
“Meet tonight? Beach Street Hotel, Room 201,” it says. It is written on the back of a restaurant receipt. I tuck it into my purse, behind the last letter he wrote to my mother.
*****
My mom died when I was eight years old, almost nine.
She died the kind of death that no one likes to talk about. You could only tell that she was a woman if you looked at the name on her chart, or if you knew her. She had no hair, no breasts. She looked scary.
Right near the end, before she went into her coma, she couldn’t talk anymore. My dad said that he understood her, but I could only hear grunts and moans. My dad told me the last thing she said. “Take care of Suzanne,” she said.
I’ve never believed that though. I think he said it to make me feel better; make me believe that she was thinking of me still.
When she went into her coma, my mom’s arms and legs would flail about, pulling our tubes and IVs. “See Suzanne, she’s still fighting,” my dad would say. “She doesn’t want to leave you.” My dad liked to sit near her bed and watch her, but I hated it. I was glad when the doctor told him that I had to leave.
Her ugliness, her sickness, her death. These are the things that I remember about my mother.
The rest I have to imagine.
Now, when I lay in the bathtub, after I have washed myself and after the bubbles have evaporated, I feel my breasts, her breasts, for the lumps that killed her. I have my mother’s breasts, and somewhere inside of me I have her cells, the cells that killed her. I wish them away, I pray them away, and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I want every part of her, and the disease is the part I that know best.
When I was younger, I would lie on my bed and think about my mother. I would pull Thomas McPherson’s letters from my top closet shelf and think about my mother, the woman who opened letters from the soldier in Vietnam.
I would imagine how they met. His letters never talked about that.
She was just twenty-two when he went to Vietnam, the same age as me. Just twenty-one when she last saw him.
I didn’t have any pictures of them together, so I would place the pictures I had of my mother and Thomas side by side and imagine them together.
They were happy. They talked and laughed. He promised that he would always love her, that he would come back from Vietnam and marry her, that he would never marry anyone else.
I wondered if they ever slept together. Sometimes, reading his letters, I was sure that they had.
I would imagine why they broke up, why his last letter is the one from the base in Washington.
I wondered a lot of things, and I hated wondering. Because imagining isn’t knowing.
*****
I sit in the lobby of the Beach Street Hotel and place Thomas’s two letters side by side on the table in front of me. I lean forward with my elbows on my knees, and read them both, over and over again. The handwriting is the same, just older. Even the ink color is the same. Blue, one more faded than the other.
The bells on the front door jingle, and I turn to look, but it is not Thomas. He must be upstairs already, in Room 201.
My mother’s note is much larger than mine.
I gaze at them, and think. I squint my eyes until the letters blur and cross into each other. Then they become one. Her note envelops mine. My letter disappears, and somehow that comforts me.
When I fold the letters back up again and place them in my purse, her letter is holding my note. My note disappears, like an unborn baby.
My mother was just a year older than me when she read his letter from Washington. She was my age when she last saw him. When he last saw her.
I am wearing pink because she wore a pink sweater on their first date. He thought about the pink sweater every night before he fell asleep, he wrote in his letters, and I wondered how that made my mother feel.
My hair is long and straight and falling down my back because he wrote that he liked hers best that way.
I should go see him now. I’m sure that he must be waiting for me.
For a moment, as I stared in front of his hotel room door, I think about leaving. I look down at my wrist and touch the bracelet that encircles it. Silver hearts dangle from the thin and tarnished chain. The bracelet was nestled in the corner of my mom’s jewelry box, resting on top of the envelope containing Thomas’s picture.
When I knock on the door, the small silver hearts jingle together, and their soft tone calms me.
Thomas blinks a couple of times when he opens the door and sees my face, as if he had been sleeping. And then he laughs. A small laugh. “Suzanne, hi.”
I tuck a stray piece of hair behind my ear. He knows who I am. I think he must. “Hi,” I saw. I want to say his name. Thomas. Thomas. But I can’t.
He looks younger now, at nighttime. In the dark, he could be my mother’s first boyfriend again. In the dark, I would only hear his voice. The voice she heard.
I am still standing in the hallway. “Is this okay?” I ask. “I wasn’t sure if I should come.”
He steps back, opening the door wide. “No, I’m glad you did. I wanted you to come.”
I peek into his room, lit only by a small lamp near his bed, and I shiver. I can’t help it. I know that I should say something. He is waiting for me to say something, and I wait too. He wants to know that he picked the right girl to invite up to his hotel room, that I deserve to be here, he wants to know that I am grateful. But what do I say?
He looks at me funny and says, “You know, Suzanne, I could use a drink, and it looks like you could too. I know a good place down the street, you want to go?”
I don’t really drink, but I smile and nod my head, glad that I don’t have to step into his hotel room, not yet.
“Most of the time, I think everyone needs a drink, Suzanne,” he says as she shuts the door behind us.
*****
We walk down the street, and sometimes as we step our shoulders bump into each other. My shoulder is taller than his, making me wish that I had worn different shoes.
The streets are dark and cold, but he is not wearing a jacket. His cigarette keeps him warm.
“I bet I haven’t been on this street in more than twenty years,” he says. “But before I finally moved away, I probably came to Harry’s every day.”
Harry’s is a corner bar about a block away. I can see its dimly-lit sign flickering.
We cross against the red light and he says, “You know I used to live here Suzanne? Went to high school about twenty miles from the city.”
I lie and say no, even though I know almost all there is to know about Thomas McPherson. I know that he was born here, that he left his girlfriend to go to war, and that he never came back for her. I know that he moved to the West Coast to go to graduate school, that he’s been married twice and is in the middle of a divorce, that he doesn’t have any children. I know that he has written three books – all about Vietnam – and that his second novel won an American Author Award. I even know that he likes younger girls, girls with firm legs and young skin.
“I used to hate coming back here, but it gets easier each time I do. No offense to my good friend Thomas Wolfe.”
He continues to speak and I am thankful for the sound of his voice, the feel of his shoulder next to mine, thankful for his attempts to charm me and make me laugh, thankful that I don’t have to talk, but can just be there, listening, taking it all in, as if I am reading one of his books. And even though I know that I am just another girl to him, that he is probably only thinking of me in his bed, that he has said these things before and will probably forget me next month or next week or even tomorrow, even though I know all these things, I am still touched by his attention.
Harry’s is smoky and deserted, and we sit up at the bar. I would usually be afraid in a place like Harry’s – so quiet and dark – but I’m not afraid tonight.
The bartender raises his eyebrows at us and Thomas holds up two fingers. “Chivas rocks,” he says. “With a twist.” He looks at me. “Is that okay?”
I lie and say yes. Maybe Chivas is what he used to drink with my mother.
Thomas narrows his eyes, watching the bartender. “You know, that could be the same bartender that worked here when I came in all the time.”
“Harry?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “Nobody really knew Harry. Rumor had it that he was forced to leave the country after he killed a customer at one of his strip clubs. But who really knows?”
The bartender sets our drinks down in front of us, but Thomas doesn’t ask him his name, just hands him a ten dollar bill and waves him away.
I sip my drink through the straw; Thomas gulps half of his in one swallow and then reaches for his cigarettes.
“Wanna see a trick, Suzanne?” he asks.
“Sure,” I smile.
He smiles too, and pulls a box of matches from his pocket. Matches from the Beach Street Hotel.
“Magic matches,” he tells me, sliding the box open. He takes a match out and touches it to his tongue. He closes his eyes for a moment, and then stands the match upright on the back of his hand. “Abracadabra.”
The match is still standing when I say, “Thomas, I could do that.” It is the first time I’ve said his name. Magic.
“Sure, but could you do this?” he asks, turning his hand over so that the match is hanging upside down.
“I could if you showed me.” My drink is almost half-finished now too.
He looks at me from the corner of his eye for a moment, then holds his empty glass up to the bartender. “Suzanne here is doubting my talent, do you believe it?”
But the bartender doesn’t say anything, only shrugs his shoulders as he pours more Chivas.
“Show me another,” I tell him before I bring the glass to my lips for another sip.
“You like that Chivas, eh?” His eyes are watching my mouth as I play with the tiny red straw.
I hold the glass to my lips, bite the tiny red straw and smile. “Show me another.”
Thomas nods his head and lights the match that was standing upright on the back of his hand. Holding it in his left hand, he stretches his arms wide and blows down the sleeve of his right arm. The fire on the tip of the match snuffs out.
He flicks the used match into the ashtray and picks up his cigarette. “Abracadabra.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Yeah, well, Suzanne, you’d be surprised at all the things you learn when you spend half of your life inside a bar. Isn’t that right, bartender?”
He takes a long drag off of his cigarette and is quiet for a while.
“You liked the reading tonight?” he finally asks.
“Very much.”
“You liked the reading very much. And last night’s, too?”
I touch my bracelet under the cuff of my pink sweater and nod my head.
“Is that why you came back a second time?” he asks before finishing his drink.
“Yes,” I whisper.
He grinds the butt of his cigarette into the ashtray. “And here I was hoping that you came back because you wanted to see me again.”
I smile. “That too.”
“Two more Chivas,” he says to the bartender, and when he takes my glass from me, our hands touch for the first time.
“You’ve read all my books, Suzanne?”
“Yes. Every one of them,” I say, tucking my hair behind my ear.
“A true fan.” His knee touches mine under the bar. “And you don’t have any manuscript you want me to read? No story you want my opinion on?”
We turn towards the door as it opens. A young couple walks in. They look happy and cold.
“No, I don’t.” I only have a letter, tucked into my purse. A letter he wrote to my mother more than twenty years ago. The bar is getting colder, and I wrap my arms around my chest. My sweater feels soft and warm. “Should I have one?”
No, I’m glad you don’t,” he smiles, adjusting his baseball cap. “So you don’t have anything you want me to read? Nothing you want me to pass on to my publisher? Then what are you doing here, Suzanne?” He seems younger now, sweeter, and I can pretend that he is just eighteen, that he is leaving for Vietnam tomorrow, and that I am my mother. His first love.
“I don’t know. Maybe I like you.” His eyes are a pretty green color, and I can see my reflection in them. “Why did you invite me to your hotel room?”
He coughs back a laugh. “You think I do this kind of thing all the time, don’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“Why do you think I invited you up to my hotel room?” he asks. He is not looking at me, but at the box of matches in his hand. “You think I was coming on to you? That I wanted a one-night stand or something?”
I remember the girl at the reading last night with the blonde hair and long legs, and almost say yes. And then I think of my mother, her pink sweater and Indian hair, and I want to say no.
“Maybe,” I say.
“I don’t know,” he shrugs before taking another drink. “I guess it depends on what you want.”
But what do I want? I don’t know. I’m not even sure that I ever knew. I want to know my mother. I want to know what she was like, to feel what she felt. I want to know who she was.
“Suzanne?” he asks, nudging my shoulder. “You okay?”
I try to smile. “Mmm-hmmm.”
“Suzanne, if you just want to talk, that’s fine. It’s been nice,” he says. But if that’s true, we should probably be leaving. Don’t want you to get home too late.”
I stir my drink, thinking. “I want to stay, Thomas. I want to stay.”
“Okay,” he answers.
We are quiet for a while, pretending to watch the television as it flickers in the corner. The new couple at the table behind us are loud and talkative. Laugh. Laugh. They make us seem even more silent, and for the first time I begin to feel uncomfortable. Nervous.
Then I feel it. His knee against mine, then his hand on my bare thigh. Just for a moment, but that is enough.
“I invited you up to my hotel room because you remind me of someone. Someone I once liked a lot.” He swirls the ice in his glass. Signals the bartender for another drink.
Even though I know, I still ask him. “Your wife?”
He winces, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “God, which one? No, not either of my wives. Someone I knew a long time ago.”
“Pretty?”
“You’re pretty, aren’t you?” he says. Our hands are on the top of the bar, holding our glasses of Chivas, and moving closer and closer to each other. They touch, then separate. Touch, then separate. “You’ve got her hair and eyes. Pink sweater.”
Thomas lights another cigarette. He tilts his head up, closes his eyes and holds the smoke inside his lungs for several seconds.
“I don’t do this kind of thing all the time, Suzanne,” he finally tells me, and I believe him.
“What was she like, this girl like me?” I ask. Our hands are touching now. Back to back, and his are softer than I thought they would be.
“She was just a girl I knew in college, Suzanne. You don’t want to hear about her.”
I slide my chair closer to him. We are touching now, our legs and hands, huddled together against the cold.
“I do. Maybe she’s my long-lost aunt or mother or something,” I say, and he laughs. He laughs.
“Suit yourself,” he says, taking another long drag off his cigarette. He blows the smoke out of the side of his mouth and asks, “So what do you want to know?”
“You went to college with her?” He nods, and I ask, “How did you meet?”
He sets his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and rubs his eyes. “God, how did we meet?” He turns and stares at me for a long time. “How did we meet?”
My thumb touches the top of his hand. Touches it just like hers would have.
“I met her in college – the start of my second year. I remember because I had just gotten my draft notice.” He smiles for a second. “Probably wouldn’t have met her without it.”
I smile too. “What do you mean?”
“We had a class together. Biology.” He takes a drink. “Linda Bailey. That was her name.”
I know, I want to tell him. I know.
“Linda wore the shortest skirts I’d ever seen. Great legs. She would sit by the window in class and spend the whole lecture gazing out at the trees and stroking her legs. Up and down, like she’d never felt them before. God, I wonder if she knew what that did to all of us horny nineteen-year-old boys.”
Thomas and I are turned toward each other now. Our knees are touching.
He shakes his head. “I was such a kid then. The only things I thought about that fall were my draft notice and Linda Bailey’s legs.”
“Tell me more,” I say as I touch my silver necklace, rub its heart between my fingers. His eyes follow my hand, and I can tell what he is thinking.
“I remember …” he begins. I let go of my necklace, and his gaze returns to mine.
“I would see her playing the piano at lunch every day. We had an old upright in the corner of the cafeteria. She only played one song – “Hey Jude.” She played it every day for weeks and weeks, and could never get it right,” he laughs. “I mean, it’s a simple song. You could barely recognize her version, but nobody really cared. She was so pretty, and it was a good song.”
He is touching my leg now, feeling the small scar on my knee. “You’ve got pretty legs, Suzanne,” he says.
“Tell me more,” I say.
“Well,” he starts. “You’ve got pretty hands too.”
“No,” I smile. “More about her.”
“Oh,” he sighs, still holding my hand. “More about her. Sure.” He glances over at his cigarette, now almost burned out, and picks it up from the edge of the ashtray. “I thought about her all semester, watched her all semester, listened to her all semester, but didn’t talk to her until the last day. That night, a whole bunch of us went to the little bar around the corner from school to celebrate, and she was there. Playing ‘Hey Jude’ on the piano.” He hears my laugh, and looks at me. “Can you believe it?”
“So anyway,” he begins again. “I was really drunk that night. Knew I wasn’t coming back to school. Thought I would never see her again …”
“So you finally talked to her?” I ask.
He looks at me sideways for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, I finally talked to her.”
“What did you say?” I lean forward as I ask.
“I told her to quit playing that damn song.”
“Did she?” I laugh.
Thomas grinds his cigarette into the ashtray. “Yes, she did. Then she went home with me.”
“Really? Just like that?”
He squints his eyes and nods. “Just like that. We were both pretty drunk.”
He looks around the bar. The bartender is leaning over the cash register. It looks like he might be asleep. “What do you say we get out of here?” Thomas asks.
I glance at my glass, then turn back to him. He looks tired, and a little drunk. “Okay. Just let me finish my drink.”
He nods his head and tosses a few dollars onto the countertop.
“In between sips, I ask him, “When did you go to the war?”
“Just a couple of weeks after that.”
“Did you miss her? While you were there?”
“Thought about her all the time.”
That makes me happy. That he missed her too.”
“Did you write her letters?”
“Almost every day.” His eyes are on my legs, my short skirt. He touches its hem. “You needed to write to someone over there.”
“What happened after the war? Did you ever see her again?”
“Linda? No, I never saw her again.” Both hands are on my thighs now, keeping them warm. “Until tonight.”
“Didn’t you want to see her again?”
Thomas looks at his watch, then down at my glass. “Suzanne, they’re going to kick us out of here soon.”
Picking up my glass, I ask again, “You didn’t want to see her again?”
He stands up, waiting for me. He looks around the bar, not at me. “Course I did. Still would, probably. But no, I never saw her after the war.”
“Why not?”
He laughs. A laugh that sounds more like a cough. “Geez, Suzanne.” He takes the pack of cigarettes from his pocket, but it’s empty. “Maybe she didn’t want to see me.”
“Really? Why not? What happened?”
He looks at me from the corner of his eye. “You sure you’re not writing a book?”
“Yes,” I smile. “So you can tell me. She told you why she didn’t want to see you in her last letter, didn’t she?”
“I don’t know. She probably would have, but she never wrote me.”
I choke on the last of my drink. “She never wrote you? At all?”
“Nope,” he says, taking my hand as I stand up. “Not once.”
“Why not?” I whisper, and I wonder if he hears me.
“Don’t know,” he answers. “Don’t know. Is there anything else you want me to tell you, Suzanne?”
“No,” I say as he opens the door for me. The night air is windy and cold, and I shiver, wrap my sweater around me. Tighter.
“Come on then,” he tells me. “Let’s go get a pack of smokes.”
*****
In his second novel, Thomas wrote about the soldier who taped a picture of Joan Baez inside her helmet, hoping it would keep him safe. Jay Holman was a nineteen-year-old private from Paris, Texas.
Joan Baez had been in Jay’s helmet since boot camp. He needed a good-luck charm and didn’t have a St. Christopher’s Medal or a rabbit’s foot so he used Joan. Most of the people in Jay’s hometown hated Joan Baez, but Jay grew to love her. He carried a picture of his girlfriend Becky in his knapsack too, but he knew that it was Joan who protected him.
She made him invisible as he trudged through the jungles of the Batangan Peninsula; she deflected bullets meant for him; she guided his steps as he walked through the valley of the shadow of death. She even kept his dreams safe and happy.
Jay had been in combat for six months when he added a new picture -- Muhammad Ali speaking at a college peace rally. “He’ll keep ol’ Joan company,” he told Thomas. His sister had clipped the picture from their local newspaper and sent it to him along with a box of stale oatmeal cookies that he shared with his platoon.
Thomas was the only one who knew about Jay’s pictures. He and Jay were good friends.
Every night, the first summer in Vietnam, they would climb out of their hole, sit on the cool wet ground, and talk. They flicked the bugs away from their faces and listened to muffled explosions, hoping that they were very far away.
That first summer, Thomas was kept awake by the heat. He would sit outside under the trees and wipe the sweat off his body with an extra shirt. Jay sat with him most nights.
Jay liked to talk about his girlfriend Becky. She had just been crowned the Crepe Myrtle Queen of Paris at the town’s Bastille Days. Jay let Thomas read her letter describing the ceremony and the parade. “Frank Robinson took me to the dance, but don’t worry,” she wrote Jay. “I didn’t let him kiss me and I thought about you the whole time.” Jay and Becky had been dating since they were sixteen.
Thomas liked to listen to Jay talk about their summers together. Every night Jay would walk across his back field to Becky’s house and find her waiting on her porch. She would look up at the sky and point out planets and constellations for him. “Becky’s a real smart girl,” he told Thomas. She and Jay liked to stay out all night and watch for falling stars. In August, when the nights got too hot, they went inside. They would lie on Becky’s hardwood floor in front of the open screen door, turn the fans toward their faces, and suck on ice cubes. Jay described in loving detail the way Becky’s ice cubes melted. She held the cube between her lips, tasted it with her tongue, sucked it into her mouth, and popped it back out again. Jay would watch the melted ice slip from her mouth and glide down her cheek, past her ear, and into her hair. He watched it slide down her chin and collect in a little pool at the base of her throat. “Sometimes the ice and the fan gave her the chills, and I could her … you know, Mac … I could see her nipples through her shirt,” Jay said. “I always wanted to reach over and touch them, but couldn’t. Her mom was usually in the room with us.”
Thomas and Jay sat outside under the trees that first scorching summer in Vietnam and dreamed of girls, of melted ice in the hollow of their throats, and of untouched nipples.
Thomas and Jay had been in Vietnam almost a year when Jay stepped on a hidden mine and was instantly killed. They were walking through a rice field, and Jay had just turned back to Thomas and said, “Mac, doesn’t this remind you of that scene in ‘The Green Berets’ …” when there was a loud explosion and then, nothing. Everything was still and lovely. It was the most peaceful moment Thomas ever experienced in the war, he later wrote. It seemed to last for more than five minutes, and then it too was gone, replaced with panic and nausea. Screaming. The sound of helicopter blades.
“Not quite like ‘The Green Berets,’ eh, Mac?” his sergeant grunted, patting him on the shoulder. Jay was the fifth guy they had lost that month.
Before the medics came to put Jay in his body bag, Thomas pulled the pictures from the inside of his helmet. They still felt warm. Thomas held them in his hands and watched as the medics zipped up the bag and carried Jay to the waiting helicopter.
It was more than an hour before Thomas realized that he was bleeding. A shard of Jay’s bone had gone through Thomas’s jacket and imbedded itself in his shoulder. He bandaged the wound, but never had the piece of bone removed. It is still with him.
Thomas always meant to send the pictures of Joan Baez and Muhammad Ali to Jay’s girlfriend Becky, but he somehow never got around to it, and they spent the rest of the war tucked between the pages of his notebook.
*****
I am awake before Thomas in the morning. I sit on the chair in the corner, put my feet on the bed, and watch him sleep. I tell myself that he looks peaceful. Younger and sweet. But I know that it’s not true. Even in the dusky light of morning, he looks older. His skin is dry, his hair gray. I watch him and wonder when he will wake up.
From here I can see the scar on his shoulder. The piece of Jay Holman that Thomas always carries with him, under his skin. The spot that I kissed last night.
“Does it still hurt?” I asked him.
“No. No, it doesn’t hurt,” he answered. “It’s just always there.” And I kissed the spot again.
I look around the room now, in the morning light. Look for the things that I couldn’t find last night, but all I can see are rumpled clothes on top of a suitcase, notebooks piled high on the nightstand, cigarette wrappers and a couple of dumbbells. Things that mean nothing to me.
Last night, I wanted to tell him that even though she never wrote him, my mother still kept all of his letters. In her lingerie drawer, tied with ribbon. I don’t know why she did. I don’t know why she didn’t write him. But if he knew she thought of him, that she kept his picture and his bracelet in her jewelry box, I thought if he knew these things, it would have made him feel better.
But I never got the chance to tell him. I don’t think I wanted to tell him.
We stopped at a corner store to pick up more cigarettes, and Thomas bought a six-pack of beer. As we walked back to the hotel, he held my hand and told me stories. “Keep your mind off the cold,” he said.
He told me about the night he left for boot-camp. He spent it with my mother. “I hadn’t even kissed her since the night of the party,” he said.
Thomas was in love with her. He wanted to carry her picture in his backpack. He wanted to come home from the war and marry her. He wanted to spend his last night with her.
“We went to an old theater downtown that was still playing ‘The Graduate.’ She sang with Simon and Garfunkel through the credits. The Sound of Silence. Really softly, but I still heard. I spent the entire movie thinking about her tan thighs. Every once in a while, when she shifted in her seat, her leg brushed mine, and it only made me want to feel them more.”
He asked, “You okay, Suzanne?”
I nodded my head, and he put his arm around my shoulders. He didn’t seem as short then.
“What did you do after the movie?” I asked him.
“We went to Harry’s for a while.”
I stopped shivering, and looked at him. “Harry’s? The place we just left?”
“Yep,” he said.
I smiled, and he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “We need to get you inside,” he told me. “Your teeth are chattering.”
“Tell me another story,” I said. “Keep me warm.”
And he did. He told me about their ride home from Harry’s. They took the last bus home, and sat in the back, even though they were the only people on it. “Linda was wearing a short black skirt and a pink sweater, like this one,” he said, rubbing his hand up and down my arm. “We had been drinking, and she wouldn’t stop talking about her pantyhose.”
“Her pantyhose?” I asked. I could see the Beach Street Hotel from where we were. I was so cold.
He stopped for a moment and lit another cigarette, cupping his hands around it to shield the wind. “Yeah,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “She had a run in them, she said. Had to take them off. So she swung her feet up on the seat in front of us, lifted the hem of her skirt and began peeling off her nylons. She did it so carefully, like they were silk or something, and as she did I could see the tips of her white panties peeking from under her skirt.”
We were in front of the hotel now, and he stopped me before I opened the door. “Let me finish this, Suze,” he said, holding up his cigarette.
I leaned against the wall, tipped my toes into the air. Looked at him. Not my mother’s first love. Just someone who looked up her skirt. Someone who slept with her once.
He stood in front of me, blew the smoke out of his mouth and kissed me. Warmed me up.
He is not my mother’s first great love. But he knew her once. He knew her when she was my age. When she laughed over her shoulder at cameras and tried to play “Hey Jude” on the piano. He kissed her once. And now he is kissing me.
“You’re warm,” I tell him. “You feel good.”
“Let’s go inside, Suzanne,” he says.
“First tell me what happened next.”
“Next?” he says, touching my cheek. “She fell asleep, and I watched her. I held her stockings in my lap.”
“Did you spend the night together?” I ask, and take his hand.
“My last night? Yeah, we did.”
“Tell me about the last time you saw her.”
“The next morning? She came with me to the bus. In the same pink sweater. She kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘Take care of yourself, Thomas.’ That’s what everyone said. Then she placed one of her stockings in my hand. ‘And take care of these too,’ she said. Not everyone did that.”
“No,” I smile. “And did you?”
“Nah,” he shrugs. “Someone stole them at boot-camp.”
“Too bad.” He is still standing in front of me. Wants to kiss me. “And I remind you of her?”
“Yeah. Yeah, you do,” he breathes, leaning in to kiss me again, and nothing could be nicer than that. Nothing could be nicer than what he said.
*****
The room is filled with light now, but he is still asleep. The sunshine streams across my bare legs and warms them. If only he could see them. But he sleeps so still, and I don’t want to wake him.
I put on my shoes, gather my things and look at him once more. I want to leave him something. But I only have the letter he wrote to my mother; her silver bracelet; the note he wrote to me. Things I don’t want to part with.
I want to take a shower, but am afraid the noise will wake him up. I want to watch the cigarette smell off my skin. Out of my hair. I want to wash his breath off of me.
I peek out the window. The day looks so new and pretty and I want to be out in it, feeling the sun on my skin.
Thomas stirs, and I turn again to him. He is still asleep. He threw the blankets off his body, and I can see the outline of his legs under the sheets. His chest is bare, and I watch him breathe. He hand is over heart, and touches the small scar on his shoulder. Strokes it softly. Even in his sleep.
I kiss him on the cheek before I leave, but he doesn’t wake up. In the middle of the night, strands of my black hair had fallen onto the white sheets. I can see them now in the bright morning light and I brush them onto the floor.
Day Shift At The Bookshop
David was still unused to being dressed and productive at this time on a Monday morning. For most of the year he was confined to the spare room of his parent’s house, ever scince his contract with the Folklore muesum had not been renewed due to budget cuts after the government pulled funding. Monday mornings were always the worst, on Tuesdays he went to the jobcentre and had a pint on the way home. Wednesday was the weeks pivot David could see the light of the weekend ahead. He went to his ‘job club’ on Thursdays that sometimes took up a whole afternoon. Friday was the start of the weekend and no one reasonable could expect you to find ruminative labour on a weekend. But Mondays were the worst on Mondays you had to face the fact that you had one wasted week behind you and possibly another one ahead of you. David always found it more difficult to get out of bed on Monday mornings. Normaly he was out of bed and had toast cooking by 8:30, on those Mondays he was sometimes still in bed at ten listening to the television news seep up from the kitchen below his bedroom. This job was only casual just a few hours a week. Still when a drowning man was offered a lifeline, he grabbed it with both hands.
One of the few perks of lone working at the bookshop was that David got to pick the music that would be played that day. A small black recoard player was placed on a chair behind the front desk. David had begun to bring his own albums from home. Today’s offering was Neil Young’s Comes A Time, lyrics about coming down from a misty mountion and sowing seeds in the field of opportunity seemed charged with an intrusive fragile optimism. David stood by the first box of new stock waiting to hear the first warm soul-stuffed blast of Young’s harmonica which would signal the real start of the working day.
David was sat behind the counter trying to use the computer to work how much to charge for a second-hand biography of Salinger when the bell on top the door rang. Standing at the door was Anna McKnight, her coopery curled hair was tied into a bun she wore a combat jacket and black doc martins coverd in mud. David had not seen Anna scence they had left school and memories of their last encounter still made his ears burn and turn the colour of cooked bacon. He buzzed her in maybe he could do her a deal on the biography, Anna had always been intrested in literature bringing the good news of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Synder back with her from holidays in California.
“Morning Anna if you just bear with me for a minute, I be with you till then feel free to browse”.
She was on her phone and did not look up when David addressed her.
“I’m not really looking for a book, but I was wondering if you had a printer I could use it’s sort of important.”
It was only then that Anna looked up, her eyes widened, and she bounded towards the counter and hugged David.
“Sorry I didn’t recognize you for a moment what happened to your hair?”
“What can I say when you stare into the abyss the abyss plays chicken with your hairline until it retreats.”
“At least you dress better than you used to I still have nightmares about the time we went to rent a suit for the formal.”
“Don’t pretend you did not enjoy skipping the school dance and hanging out at my Uncle’s flat?”
“Yes, I loved sitting next to you on that awful busted green sofa watching John Carpenter movies while waiting for that late pizza. On the other hand, that evening was the last time I ate meat and between us sometimes I still miss it.”
“Oh yeah that was the time you started on your green kick. How did that work out work out for you?”
“In the end I pleased Mummy and Daddy by doing Medicine at Queen’s which I failed after a year. I then went to study Environmental Scince in England and now I’m back saving for a postgrad. All of which you would know if you ever did social media and let people who aren’t in your circle of tedious hipsters keep in touch with you.”
Anna picked up a bookmark from the counter and slapped David on the arm with it.
“Anyway, did you say you needed a printer”?
“It’s funny you should ask me about my ‘green kick’ tell me what do you know about the logging of the Great oak forest that used to order school?”
“Yeah of course what about it.?”
“Well about a third of it has been sold off loads of these ancient trees are marked to be cut down. I’m spearheading a group that is trying to prevent this. We are waiting on an injunction but while the court process it we are having a rally. I was wondering if I could maybe use your printer? I have a poster on a pen drive here.”
“Yeah, no worries we have a jet printer in the office it should not take long.”
“Cool listen I hate to do this, but I have collect some T-shirts from a place around the corner. Is it ok if I leave my pen with you and pick up the posters later?”
“Yes, no problem”.
“No problem.”
“Cool I will be back around one maybe if you’re free I could buy you lunch. Oh hey maybe if you’re free you could come down and join us. That’s how I always remember you at protests. I always think back to the student fees occupation, you sitting on the front steaps of the council offices under that red flag reading Chomsky. Just something to think about.”
With that she turned around a speed out the door. If she’d left any faster she would have left a smoky outline of herself smouldering in front of the till. But then Anna was always like that recklessly dashing from one thing to the next. She was a perpetual motion dynamo powered by her own passions. David was different for too long now he had been running on an empty tank. He still performed the basic functions eat, drunk and kept himself entertained but it had been ages scince anything in life was charged with any significance or meaning. Outside the fog had lightened and the day was frost-clear. Across the empty blue distance David imagined her could hear the whirl of chainsaws. He had waited long enough and now it was time to follow Anna back into life. Everything was waiting outside the bookshop door.
Dead Woman In A Red Dress
My mother died but refused to stay that way. We buried her, two days before her sixtieth birthday, in a dark blue dress and matching jacket made of rayon. The outfit was from a spending spree at Lord & Taylor, the last one we took together. After that, the cancer made her too sick and frail for retail expeditions. It was not her style at all. Mama favored bold and bright colors like a favorite red dress that she designed and made herself. Everyone started talking about what she wore and that red dress after she died. It was her go to outfit as my parents celebrated some of their happiest moments together, pairing it with red shoes with four-inch heels and white panty hose. We briefly considered burying her in that dress, but decided it was too festive for the occasion and left it hanging outside the door of my parents’ bedroom closet.
So many had questions about my mother’s, Henrietta, last words. What did she say? Did we have a sense of what was coming? The answers lay somewhere in between, like Henrietta herself, hovering between life and death. The interrogations were common. They once centered on Henrietta’s health: What’s wrong with her? How much weight has she lost? What did the doctor say? What kind of cancer? And the question we dreaded most: How much time does she have left?
We assumed Henrietta would lay her waters to rest. That was what she told us, but she also promised to exact revenge if her husband, our father, Winston, found love again.
“Don’t worry if your dad gets a girlfriend. I’ll handle it,” she said as from her hospital bed as strangled to breath. “I’ll come back and scratch her eyes out.”
She had shared few words as she lay dying, and this statement bordered on the bizarre. My sister and I thought she was delirious or loopy from the morphine. We exchanged glances, and I hunched my shoulders in a gesture of confusion. Henrietta caught me, rolled her eyes, and attempted her signature stare. The look was more painful than a belt whipping, more powerful than a slap or verbal reprimand. It could subdue the devil and petrified us as kids and into adulthood. That day, Henrietta’s eyes were vacant and weak from fighting the cancer. Her signature glare wielded no power over us, and for the first time in our lives, we ignored it. It was like Samson losing his strength after Delilah cut his hair. She died three days later.
One question we could answer with certainty; Henrietta never shared her plans to terrorize his new love with my dad. She lied during their late-night heart-to-hearts, lying side by side in bed, her body racked with pain. My father said they spoke of how he wished he could take the cancer for her. That they were happy and lucky to have met and loved each other. That she desperately wanted to live. They were both crushed that their love story was ending, cherishing the good times and the bad. All the fights. All the laughs. The love that ripened and flourished over the years. Henrietta was not ready to let go of life or her husband. After the chemo and radiation failed, she entered a clinical trial for a new drug, only to discover that she was among the group given a placebo.
Dad confirmed Henrietta’s lie two years after her death, announcing over a plate of meatloaf and garlic mashed potatoes that his bride of 35 years wanted him to find, if not true love, at least a supportive companion. The meal was leftovers courtesy of a steady rotation of neighborhood women offering culinary comfort to the widower. Nothing, it seemed, made a man more desirable than dedication and care of a dying spouse. They wanted to replace my mother and consoling our dad provided the opening. They delivered food, washed his clothes, cleaned his house, and even chauffeured him.
“We discussed it,” he said. “Whoever went first, didn’t want the other left alone and lonely. She wanted love for me, as I wanted love for her.”
My sister and I both rolled our eyes, knowing this sentiment did not fit into our mother’s stated plans.
“Daddy, I hope you don’t believe that,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like Mama. She probably meant that if you died first, she wanted to find love again. I don’t think that applied to you, if she died first.”
He slammed down his fork and said, “I know my wife and what we discussed. I’ll never love like that again or trust anyone like that again. I know what was in my wife’s heart. You all don’t know everything about our life together.”
I said nothing. Henrietta had ascended to sainthood after her death. It wasn’t my job—and I lacked the power — to return her to mortal status for my father.
Six months later, he took up with Pecola. She was a 25-year-old ex-con, twice married and divorced, a former stripper and recovering alcoholic. Even with that background, Pecola was no match for Henrietta.
My mom was a lovely but jealous woman, at least about her Winston. Before they wed, she smashed a beer bottle over a lady’s head for daring to dance too close to her Winston at a nightclub. Her victim ended up in the hospital with dozens of stitches. My mother miraculously avoided a jail sentenced. Henrietta was not the type to share a husband and, nothing or anyone could separate her from him, not even death.
Poor Pecola.
We did not know if my mom would strike, but my father’s five sisters launched an immediate attack. They ridiculed Pecola reveling in bringing up her past as if she needed reminding about her troubled life.
“Pecola, are you still working the pole? Is that where you hooked my brother? At a strip club?”
“Did men pay you for lap dances?”
“Pecola, were you a prostitute?”
“Pecola, I can’t believe your son doesn’t live with you. Lord, you must be a mess. No judge would deny a fit mother custody of her child.”
“Pecola, did you have a female lover in prison? Do you prefer, men or women?”
“Pecola, are you turning my brother out? Do you and Winston have three-ways with other women?”
“Pecola, what are you doing with that decrepit old man? He’s my brother, and I love him, but he’s way too ancient for you.”
“Pecola, what are you going to do when that ex-boyfriend of yours gets out of prison? Bet you won’t want Winston’s old ass then.”
Daddy ignored their taunts. And so Pecola did the same. They ignored too much, and it cost them dearly.
Pecola was walking to a restaurant to meet Winston for an early dinner when the sidewalk collapsed, trapping her in a sinkhole with cat-sized rats for over two hours. She feared screaming for help, afraid that the rodents would crawl inside her mouth. As she waited for someone to save her, the rats nibbling her flesh, she heard a woman repeating: “Leave my Winston, alone. Leave my Winston, alone.” She spent two weeks in the hospital. Daddy visited her every day. She did not tell him about the woman’s warning, believing stress had caused her to hallucinate.
A month before their three-month anniversary, and still mending from her accident, Pecola lost her vision. Her bedroom felt chilly, so she got up to close the window. She noticed a woman down below staring up at her. The woman wore a red dress with white stockings and red high heels. Pecola shook her head in disgust, thinking the woman was looking to sell her body, and wondered with a pang of sadness when prostitutes had invaded the neighborhood. No one else was around, so she assumed that the woman would move to a busier area. She went to bed seeing the bright stars light the night, but awoke to darkness. Something had clawed her eyes out as she lay sleeping. Pecola didn’t know what happened, except that she felt a searing pain. A piece of red fabric was the last thing she saw.
Winston promised to stay by her side, but she dumped him.
He rebounded about a year later with Camila Rothmuller, a 63-year-old retired nurse. She had dated a married man for 20 years, waiting for him to leave his wife as he had promised to do for years, but Camila no longer wanted him once he was free. She was ready for a new romance, and my father wanted to provide it. His sisters deemed her only slightly better than Pecola. But this time, they muted their opinions.
Camila dreamed of my mother wearing that red satin dress. It had a handkerchief hem with sheer, diaphanous sleeves. My mother added them to hide her dimpled, fleshy arms. It was an ugly dress that haunted our father, reminding him of happier times.
One night he saw Henrietta sitting in a chair in their bedroom wearing that red dress. She said nothing, but smiled and winked at him. Winston did not know if he was dreaming, or if Henrietta had really returned. He asked us to remove the dress because he could not bear to touch it.
“I see that dress and think Henrietta is coming home to wear it again,” he said, as his eyes watered.
We tucked it deep inside their bedroom closet.
Henrietta told Camila to leave her husband alone. My mother came to Camila five times in that outfit. Odd things started happening to Camila. One night she ran screaming out of her apartment after spotting a cat eating her parakeet, a gift from Winston. The cat belonged to a neighbor. She did not know how it had entered her apartment.
One day she went to take a shower and before stepping inside, she noticed her bathtub flooded with poisonous red widow spiders. They crawled out of the tub and chased Camila out of her apartment. The superintendent and exterminator said her apartment was bug free. Once she came home to find bats flying around. Winston told her to move in with him. On her last night there, Camila woke up screaming. She could no longer see, and her eyes burned with a blistering ache. She swore the last thing she saw was Henrietta standing over her with one long nail aiming toward her left eye. Henrietta’s eyes were empty sockets and her skin covered with blisters and sagging. She hissed at Camila, “I told you to leave him alone.”
Dad visited Camila daily in the hospital and, later, in the rehabilitation center that was helping her adjust to life as a blind woman. Despite his devotion, the romance faltered, and Winston was once again single. He did not believe Henrietta caused Camila’s blindness or the other incidents, and they argued over it. His Henrietta was incapable of such cruelty, but my sister and I were not so sure. The dead coming to visit the living wasn’t so unusual in our family. Dead relatives often visited Henrietta while she was alive, so why couldn’t she return? We also remembered her promise.
My father, lonely and aching for his dead wife, searched for love again and again and again and again. Each girlfriend had a troubled past and went blind right around the time of their third month anniversary. I sometimes wondered if my father selected those women because it was his own way of remaining faithful to Henrietta. My mother would always outshine them. They could never really replace her.
Each girlfriend swore to seeing Henrietta wearing that red dress before everything turned to black. Some said Henrietta had no eyes, and her skin sagged. Some said that the red dress was torn and tattered, and her voice had a low-growl as she ordered them to leave her husband alone.
Seven years after Henrietta’s death, Winston met a 65-year-old widow, Bernadette Mortis. They dated for six months before marrying. We all thought Mama had given up and let go of her husband, that she had found peace in the afterlife. But then, my father died in his sleep on the night of his honeymoon. Henrietta knew what we did not. Winston’s heart was weak, and he would not survive the honeymoon. She was by his side as he took his last breath. And they made their last journey up yonder together.
And that red dress reappeared, once again hanging outside our parents’ bedroom closet door.
Dave Earnhardt is a native of Denver, Colorado, USA. He’s been writing poetry, short stories and novels, for several decades. His work has been published in numerous reviews, including Wabash Review, Casaba Review, Lyrical Voices, The Occasional Review, ERAS, Encore, Earth Rare Art Society, Voices International, Visions of the Enchanted Spirit, The Poet Fine Arts Society, Dreams, Famous Poets Society, Black Bear Publications, The International Library of Poetry, Whaleane, The Sound of Poetry, The Voices Network International Poetry Competition, ERAS Review, EWG Presents, Pulse29, The Aurorean, Encircle Publications, Driftwood Press and Tenth Muse. He’s also had five short stories published, some internationally, in Black Bear Publications, The Climbing Art and Heist Magazine. Most recently, his short story, “Let the Red Devils Come!” was published online by Frontier Tales. He’s also written two novels, one of them historical, on the Salem witchcraft trials, as well as five plays. Dave is also a composer, having produced a CD of his own piano music, “Classically Blue.” Professionally, he taught English at several high schools and for twelve years at a local community college. He holds a master’s degree in literature and language from the University of Northern Colorado. |
BEST FRIENDS
Sam and Dianna Black made a handsome couple, as their friends and families generally agreed, he with his broad shoulders, sleek, jet black hair, and dark, inquisitive eyes, and she with her svelte gracefulness, her golden hair, that was usually set in a high ponytail, and her topaz eyes—the kind that, with their deep intensity, struck the observer hypnotically. They had both done well in college. Sam had one more year to get his bachelor’s degree, and Dianna had two. With a future that looked very promising and feeling joyfully liberated for the while, free from the burden of studying, as it was the middle of July, they now found themselves happily driving their cherished, cherry red, nineteen-sixty-nine Volvo PV544 the five-hundred-and-forty miles from Denver to Salt Lake City to visit Sam’s father, Harold.
Before they knew it, they’d slipped through two-hundred miles of gray and pink sands into a landscape where hill upon dark ashen gray hill seemed to have been bulldozed into long, sweeping piles drooping with sloth resembling brontosaurs. Caught in the hypnotic lull of the long, boring amorphous stretches, the travelers hadn’t spoken for over two hours. But they’d yawned a lot, and when one yawned the other was unable to suppress a yawn, a pattern that repeated until Dianna caught Sam’s eye, and the pair had then laughed hilariously, and their yawns ceased.
Still silent, onward they traveled. Suddenly, out of the long shadows small patches of snow began floating by, and soon the indigo mountain range rose in stark elevation, in continuation of the Rockies, which had begun in Colorado and would continue, unaccompanied by the couple, to Canada.
Sam was the first to speak—“We’re getting close.”
“Thank God!” Dianna replied. “My sciatic nerve is killing me!”
“I could always pull over and let you stand up for a while.”
“No. I just want to get there as fast as possible! This ride has been dull as hell!”
Sam chuckled, answering, “Well, I guess we get used to the fact that Swedes aren’t big on comfort.”
Dianna laughed, adding, “And Utahans aren’t big on landscaping!”
The previous year the couple had married, when Sam was twenty and Dianna nineteen. Sadly, one month later, Sam’s father, Harold, had divorced Sam’s mother, Irene, then, when she had suddenly died of a heart attack, Harold had succumbed to his previously well-hidden desperation, writing checks for groceries and gasoline from her closed account. He’d gotten caught, and received a three-month sentence. Sam and Dianna had picked him up when he’d gotten out of jail in Denver that November, but, instead of “Thanks” he’d asked irritably, “What took you so long? I was processed at noon and it’s two! Do you think the people in the waiting room are the kind it’s fun to hang around with? That bunch of losers!” Miffed that he hadn’t been more humble or gracious the couple had avoided seeing him for the entire year that followed. Yet, because it seemed, after he’d moved to Salt Lake City, away from everyone he knew, in effect becoming a recluse, that he was going to grow old entirely alone, they felt sorry for him, and decided to forgive him and give him a second chance.
In fact, the year that Harold had lived alone, he seemed, from the few phone conversations he’d had with Sam, to have changed from an aggressive, opinionated, in-your-face-looking-for-a-fight-over-just-about-anything sort to a quiet, brooding loner who seemed to have embraced anonymity, a change so drastic it caused Sam to think he might commit suicide. This situation gave Sam a sense of urgency to go to see him in person. Sam worried about his will to live to even greater degree when he agreed to leave his apartment unlocked so that he and Dianna could get in if he was out at the time—a thing when he’d been a policeman that he’d warned others never to do, as he’d witnessed the terrifying results of their noncompliance.
Nightfall was only a few minutes away when the young newlyweds arrived at “Wood Creek Apartments” and exhausted with traveler’s fatigue, though energized by finally being free from the monotony of travel, they plodded heavily up the two flights of stairs and down a barren, gray hallway, to apartment 9. Sam was somewhat alarmed that the number, though a nice one, of polished brass, was hanging upside-down, as recorded in the faint shadow left behind in the wall, because at one time his father had been a neat freak–in fact, so mysophobic he even used to go around his house picking up every speck of lint or fallen thread on the carpet after having thoroughly swept it. The apartment number was not only degraded by its positioning, but stylistically misshapen, reminding Sam of a shoe, at which he had to laugh.
Finally, he knocked at the door out of habit and having manners. Perhaps Harold had merely forgotten to lock it, and was napping inside, after all. After the third knock, however, he was confident his father was out, and turned the knob. As he and his young wife attempted to enter the darkness through the doorway the dead silent air seemed, somehow, to push in vast emptiness back at them, and the tarry odor now suspended inertly left from massive clouds of cigaret smoke to fill their nostrils to the verge of gagging them.
However, determined to learn his father’s living condition, Sam groped along the wall closest to the front door until he felt a light switch, which he flipped on, causing a floor lamp to flare into life on a small table next to a brown Naugahyde Barcalounger that sat across a sea of loose-woven rust-colored Berber carpet flared expansively at the couple’s feet, on the opposite side of the room. The large room combined family room, living room, breakfast room and kitchen, and, besides the lounger, its only furniture, was a coffee table, a fake, dust-covered rubber tree in a pea-green pot, and two chrome-legged bar chairs at the dividing counter. With this prison-like barrenness, the walls seemed to be closing in, punctuated by the imposition of the dark brown door of the single bedroom that resembled a close eye sitting at the end of a hallway opposite the front door.
The travelers’ hunger waned quickly as they met the cold and uninviting kitchen, with its barren wooden counter beset by two plain bar chairs, white refrigerator, and hardwood cabinets that had been painted white, all of which merely extended the dimensionlessness of the place. Following their sudden impulse to escape, they were drawn to the curtain, that, though drawn closed on the sliding door to a balcony, seemed to beckon them with its wild dancing as one of the recurrent breezes characteristic of Utah played with it. Sam pulled the curtain back enough to look out the narrow space of the open door, hoping to discover something inspirational visible from the balcony, but, as a parking lot that could hold two-hundred vehicles filled most of the immediately-visible area that must once have been a field, he let the curtain go with a jolt of ennui and despair.
As Dianna found the switch for the plain hanging lamp rather than even the most minimally-ornate chandelier, that hung in the center of the ceiling in what would have been the dining room, but where a set of table and chairs were absent. From this vantage, the lounger seemed shinier than previously, well-polished, something at least somewhat hopeful—like a lost, wet cow.
This starkness was now wearing on Sam, as he imagined how much more inviting this place would have been if his mother had remained with his father, as she would not only have furnished it fully, but have decorated the walls, which were all blank, with paintings, and had a coffee table on which she’d have put a nice vase of flowers! As he felt the vacancy left in his spirit by her absence, he felt a surge of anger at being reminded of what had always seemed the unfairness of her death, which had been sudden, when she was only forty-six, but he could only muster a half-hearted, grousing cliché, “This place sure could use a mother’s touch!” Yet, his anger, as usual, was slowly supplanted by his own guilt for his irrational sense of blame for his parents’ divorce. Somehow, even though he knew it wasn’t true, he wanted to believe that his having left home to go to Washborne College at the time when his parents been fighting the worst had sealed the deal.
Yet, that was where he’d met Dianna, for which he wanted to feel anything but guilty. But guilt, rational or not, was damned difficult to shrug off! The truth was, in fact, that all of his life, because his father didn’t like him, he’d tended to feel guilty for any good fortune he’d received, and was therefore justified at any chance to feel sorry for himself. Continuing to feed his guilt, and knowing that this was a sore subject for her, he told Dianna anyway, “I think that if my parents had tried harder they could have saved their marriage. Apparently, they didn’t think their grown children would be affected. Now, as he’s pretty much written everyone he’s known off, Dad has to learn that the worst thing that can happen to a human being is to have to go through old age solo.”
“But I thought you told me your parents fell out of love,” Dianna reminded him. “How do you try harder when that happens?”
“I think . . .” Now he hesitated, wanting to be accurate. “They just used that clichéd expression to keep others from asking too many questions. I don’t think they were ever in love. But they did sort of love each other like a brother and sister.”
“But haven’t you said the official complaint they both made in their divorce papers was mental cruelty?”
“Yes. He bullied her, and she refused to talk to him, sometimes for several days at a time.”
“But didn’t he knock her down the stairs to the basement, when she was pregnant?” she asked with an accusatory tone.
“Yes. I was there.”
“Like I’ve told you before, that’s beyond mental abuse! But she never attacked him with a knife or even her fist, right?”
“No. I mean yes, she didn’t.”
“Was she ever treated for depression?”
“Like I’ve told you, her generation generally thought that if you went to a shrink you were admitting you were nuts. Or else rich and frivolous and just wanted attention. I guess to brag.”
“But I thought you also said once she feared he might kill her.”
“Not exactly . . . It’s complicated. Like I’ve said, I don’t think he would ever have gone that far. He wasn’t cold blooded. He just grew up very hard, poor during the Depression.”
“But . . . didn’t she go through the Depression, too?”
“Yes, but she had wealthy parents, and could weather it out.”
“All the more reason, as I’ve said a million times, for her to have been . . . normal!”
“Well, like I’ve said, she wasn’t! I think something traumatic happened to her that she never talked about—maybe she was molested by a family member. All I know is she was often very difficult to live with, when not just Dad, but the rest of us, wanted to ask her important questions, and she would just sit frowning, staring into space, and wringing her hands!”
“That would be frustrating, I admit. But I also always thought your father seemed immature to you, so maybe some of his requests to her were unreasonable.”
“Well, he was only nineteen, and Mom was only eighteen, when they got married.”
“Oh? You mean like us?” Dianna quipped.
“Well, hopefully we won’t make bad decisions like they did.”
“Not us!” she joked, feigning imperiousness.
Sam was getting uncomfortable since the conversation seemed to be moving toward ever-greater condemnation of his father, who he felt he’d never really known, any more than his father had known him, and leaving his mother sounding more innocent than he felt she was, so he finally had to tell Dianna, “I . . . really don’t like talking about the dead, as that kind of thing always seems to gravitate toward judging them. They are simply out of reach of the considerations of the living, not only unable to speak for, but to defend, themselves. My mother was simply a very private, unassuming being who’d just wanted to live a while in relative peace. Her biggest fault was that she’d trusted others who meant her no good—a trait I seem to have inherited.
“Get off it!” Dianna scoffed. “You’ve talked about the dead plenty! But I won’t mention your mother any more, since I know we’ll get nowhere analyzing her, okay?”
“It’s not that,” he told her now with rising pique. “I feel that I don’t even have a right to judge the living. And I didn’t really know either of my parents well. Besides, that, to tell you the truth, I had my own disappointments and frustrations to deal with. At one time, I thought I might even have become psychotic.”
“Because your dad never forgave you for not being a good football player?”
“That was part of it. But, then, looking at it from his point-of-view, isn’t it kind of unforgiveable when a guard, like I was, apologizes to his opponent every time he hurts him trying to protect the quarterback?”
“Like you’ve told me a thousand times, you just didn’t like hurting people. What’s wrong with that?”
“In a culture of violence, it forecloses you from the Name-of-the-Father.”
“Now you’ve lost me!”
“We all have an ego, but the superego is its development in imitation of the father, who represents the law, which is supposed to be just, so there’s something wrong with you if you go against it.”
“You don’t have to feel bad you weren’t like him, especially when he tried to hurt you! Do you forget what you told me about the belt spankings he gave you—so bad you had bruises on your face and your mother kept you home from school for two or three days because she was embarrassed and afraid?”
“I can’t deny they were unforgiveable. But I can still understand that to guys like my father my attitude was an insult to their way of dealing with life.”
“Sure!” she scoffed. “Didn’t you tell me that football didn’t make sense to you, that it was just a bunch of sado-masochists bouncing off of each other, just to get a stupid little ball over the goal line! You’ve said that so often I’ve memorized it!” She complained, though grinning, punching him gently in the shoulder.
“The real men!” Sam groused under his breath.
“Well, just remember your dad’s perspective will never change, so if he brings the topic of football up just let him keep talking. If you keep your responses minimal he’ll soon change the subject. As you know, since you’ve followed this routine quite often!”
“He knows, though, when I’m shining him on. I don’t want him to feel bad.”
“Has he ever worried about making you feel bad?” Dianna asked incredulously.
“If I was vengeful I might let him have it. But, as you’ve said, he’s not going to change, so why get into an argument? I’ve just come to accept the fact that I don’t think like other people, in general. In fact, there wasn’t a single man in my upbringing who I wanted to be like.”
“So? Weren’t they all assholes?”
“Yes! Flaming! My male models all came from literature. Have I told you that Benvenuto Cellini, in his biography, was most like a mentor to me than anyone?”
“Yes. But you don’t know what he was really like. Didn’t you tell me he fought as a swordsman for the Médicis? Weren’t they evil? As in the Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre? But they sponsored art, which he benefitted from! I think there’s a lot you don’t want to admit about him just to support a blind ideal!”
“You’re right. And my hang-ups aren’t your problem.”
“Yes, they are my problem, because they’re your problem! But we’re running out of time—I just have one favor to ask for now.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t act like you’re desperate for your dad’s approval. Always let him know you’re your own man.”
“I thought I generally ignored him,” Sam answered contentiously.
“There are subtle signs, though, like I’ve told you before, that signal your unconscious fear of him.”
“Right!” Sam scoffed. “Like what?” he challenged irritably.
“I’ve told you before—you cower when he gets adamant about a point he’s making.”
“Well, I’ve asked you before—why don’t I realize it when I do it?”
“I don’t know. I’m just relating what I’ve witnessed.”
“What else do I do?” he challenged.
“You stand with your right shoulder noticeably lower than your left.”
“Anything else?” glaring he asked.
“You wring your hands . . .”
Interrupting, he yelped disbelievingly, “Wring my hands?”
Unsmiling, Dianna nodded silently now.
“Well, I certainly have a lot to keep track of, don’t I!” he scoffed. “I suppose I shouldn’t tell him I had another poem published last week?”
“No! You tell him! Proudly! He needs to know who you are, whether he cares or not!”
“Okay,” Sam replied nearly whispering now with resignation. “Can we change the subject?”
“Look,” Dianna said, not yet finished with subject. “You should pity him. In a way, he’s like a child, wanting everything his way. You can humor him without letting him dominate you, though. Just . . . just get him laughing.”
“Yeah, you’re right, as usual,” he replied now unemotionally. I think he has undiagnosed dyslexia and maybe even ADHD.”
“Well, that would explain why he hates to do ‘paperwork’, as you said he calls it.”
“Yeah. I’m sure he’s been embarrassed plenty because of that, though he never says anything about it.”
“Bullies are bullies because of low self-est . . .”
Dianna’s reply was lost to the sudden screeching, electric explosion of cats that had startled each other into a fight nearby. And now, in the deep moonless darkness that had infused the world unnoticed by the couple, the wind rose, floating up and amplifying two men’s voices in mid-conversation from a nearby sidewalk next to the parking lot, as the curtains danced sedately, yet somehow sensually, from side-to-side in the tight embrace of themselves. The rediscovery of human presence caught in nature’s embrace lent a sense of wildness, even chaos, to the unseen distances, and, as though nature understood this inversion of power, and very soon the wind was pulsing with the hissing rush of giant wings, speeding toward some disastrous unforeseen consequence or mystery. A rumbling crack of distant thunder echoed tangentially through the rushing disruption, now, as well.
“Sounds like a heck of a storm coming,” Sam told Dianna. “It’s a good thing they don’t get tornadoes here! At least not yet!”
Dianna was so intent on deciphering the promise of danger in the rumbling undercurrents of the mounting noise she forgot to answer.
And now one of the distant men’s voices whined, “No, John, I don’ wanna hur’cha. ‘Fi don’ hafta.”
In the darkness Sam and Dianna each went to an end of the balcony door, and peered silently through the glass. The dim streetlamps gave them little more than the murky outlines of the arguing men.
And now the second man answered the first—“Yez ya do, Jim. Bud you gan’t. Schtoopid drungk! Gan’t e’en wog straid! So whud does id all brove? Juz whud?”
“Hey! I wanna b’lieve ya. Godda b’lieve id. Z’this mage shensh, Jhawn? Zwear i’does.”
“Tha’ss up da you!”
Jim’s voice grew louder, now—“Hey! Loogkee here! She’s ma wive! Gotta ‘fend ‘er!”
Yet John continued to whine—“ ‘Fend ‘er ‘til a cows gum ‘ome! ‘Til hell freezens o’er!
Whud in a name o’ Chrise ya tellin’ me vor? Hey—d’I juz say freezens?” Now, as he was laughed impishly to himself.
“Whudever! Say! We been bes’ frien’s now . . . how long? I know’z a long dime!”
“ ‘Fen’ away, bes’ frien’! Ged it? Fen’ frien’?” He laughed again. A sudden, dull thud followed.
Expecting to see two clownish pugilists swinging and missing each other with their fists.
Sam commented, “I suppose no news is good news.”
Dianna was laughing so hard that she couldn’t answer him, though.
From this point on the newlyweds watched in silence, laughing so hard the whole while the drama developed they couldn’t have said anything if they’d wanted to.
The men, having fallen to the ground, had become a pair of grubs rendered naked and pink by the glow of the street lamp that towered over them like a strange flower on a black, steel stalk. And now, with the tactile assertiveness of exhausted athletes, the pair, groping to help each other, managed to crawl up onto hands and knees, and finally face each other nose-to-nose. After a few unmoving moments they continued to struggle upward, mirrors of each other’s diminished being, until they could embrace and help each other stand erect. When they were finally standing, in order to maintain their still-precarious position, they continued to lean into each other, pawing at each other’s shoulders.
Jim suddenly quit wobbling and stiffened into a statuesque pose, with his hand on the John’s shoulder. Then he held up a warning index, his head tilted, jaw thrust out, but said nothing, apparently still thinking about something, or else a thought had suddenly eluded him.
As John continued to sway rubber-kneed, his head wobbled like that of a boxer who’d been punched once too often, yet, at regular intervals, he still managed to continue lifting his free arm intermittently to take a drag on his cigaret.
“If id was ‘nyone elz, Jhawn, ‘nyone’d all,” Jim finally said, “I woulda . . . I woulda . . .
you know whud . . .you gan feel id, gan’t ya?”
“Oh yeahsh, I vfeel id!” dramatically sarcastic John retorted. “Yeah! Ooh yeah! Bud I never e’en feld her up!” Now he laughed, blubbering at his own inflated wit, waving one arm high, causing the lit eye of his cigaret to loop in an eloquently-flourished curlicue. “ ‘Felded!’ Z’that a real word?”
“Hey--loogit!” Jim barked angrily, reeling.
“I know I know I know—I know you know I know you know!—Din’t put a han’ on ‘er.
Or a foot—I swear on’t!” He laughed—“Ya hear? A foot?” Now he was laughing so hard his gleeful spasms were coming in gasps.
“Vunny’z ‘ell! An’ mine’s gonna go ubp yer butt . . . ox!”
“Butt ox?” Now he laughed hilariously. After half a minute of laughing he continued, “Thing you mend butt! But kig away, chump! Ya coon’d hid a barn door!”
“Don’ keep movin’!”
“See?”
“Juss swear!’
“I did, got-damnidall!”
“Zwear!”
“Jus’ did, stoobid!”
“A-gain!”
“Okay! keeb yer zhorts on!”
“No, a ‘mean ya godda really zwear!”
“On a stag o’ bobbles—a snag o’ boddles—a sag o’ birdles—a bag a boobles!! Ah hell, you know whud I mean! On ma granny’s gravy yard . . . or whudever!” John blubbered, reeling.
Jim made no reply.
John nearly begged, “Loogit! Jim! Are you liz’nin’ a me? HEY!”
“If ya trus’ me, WHY DON’ . . . YA . . . JUS’ . . . TRUS’ ME? Tha’s all!” Trying to keep his balance, John was suddenly thrown into a spasmodic, snaking twitch, which, as he flailed his arms to regain his composure, forced him to accidentally shove Jim away from himself.
“Hey! I said don’ poozh yer lug!”
“Yer a one poozhin’ it! Thad was’n agzident! An’ ‘sides, with her—she’s some kin’a ugly a‘yway—U . . . G . . . L . . . Y—so why ya worry so mush?”
“You’re jushta ‘bouta go way way way too far!” Jim warned.
“I only mean . . . I’m nod her . . . mean she’s nod my . . . type! So zhair!”
“Boy’re you a dumbass drungk! Don’ e’en know she’s b’yooful, an’ ev-er-y-one says so!
D’I say ‘drung-k?’ ”
“Yeah! Don’ e’en know whus gumin’ ouda yer mouth! But hey--whud air you zay, bud!
S’godda be true you zay sho! Bud ya godda know’f I’da wanud ‘er, I’da jus’ . . . you know . . .
Gan ya vfeel it? Whud I’d do . . . to . . . ?” John said, cutting himself off as though unable to finish.
“Whud?”
“Done it, ‘zall!”
“Done whud?”
“Jush toogen ‘er.”
“Oh, jus’ lige thad, eh?” Jim scoffed.
“Yeah! Hey! I ain’t no sneagk!”
“So, you’d o’ juss toog ‘er, huh? Where wou’ja a toog ‘er to? France, francy pants? Or mays be you’d a gone shoodin’ rads in a dump, juss ta show ‘er whad a good shod y’are, or how mush of a man y’are! Hey—mays be you’d o’ toog ‘er bowlin’!” he mocked. “Show’er a whole bunja new balls!” He laughed.
John made no answer.
“D’I juz say ‘mays’ be?” Jim finally said, laughing uproariously now.
“Wrong! I’da toog ‘er juss ‘bout anywheres—how would I know where? Ya don’ know! An’ anyways, I tole you I don’ care, ‘cause she ain’t appealin’ a me anyways!”
“She wouldn’a went anyway, no madder whud you’d a done!” Jim shouted triumphantly and laughing, as though having just then realized a confession couldn’t be irrational.
“Oh shure, f’you zay sho!” John laughed.
“You god id, Jhack!” Jim retorted, as he continued to wobble in short half-circles.
“Oh yeah?” John leaned forward, stuck his jaw out, and raised a clinched fist.
“Clown!”
“Bo-zo! Hey—whud I zay?”
“Nothin’, Glarabell! I knew I wasn’t wrong ‘boud you! No, nod in a leasht!” Jim declared bravely. Suddenly, he leaned back and, without warning, launched his fist roughly in John’s direction, but in an instant the thrust, like that of a poorly-thrown rock, took a nearly-vertical trajectory, inevitably missing John, and he was spun around with centripetal force a full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees and fell, landing on the ground onto his back with a thunderous “OOF!” with a simultaneous explosive fart.
Now John stood over Jim, frowning but ready to laugh, as he shook and wobbled, tipping slightly to and fro on his toes and heels, fists clenched; finally, he laughed in singsong, “Humbdy dumdy sad ona wall, humbdy dumdy had a gread vfall!”
Jim was finally able to push himself up onto his own knees, where he challenged—“See, you ain’ nobo’y’s bes’ frien’, ‘cause a real frien’ don’ laugh a’s frien’ when ’ese down! An’ a bes’ frien’ if he thod I was guildy would o’ made zhure a catchoff me! “D’I say catchoff?” Somehow, he didn’t laugh, though. Finally, he groused, “An’ I ain’ fvat, e’er!”
“Twat? Cunnet hear! Bear ass me ‘gin, gotta bad ear infucktion!” John answered sarcastically, his voice having risen with incredulity. Nevertheless, he offered his hand to help Jim get up.
But Jim refused to take it.
John thrust his hand out further, demonstratively, several times—“Iniot! You tagke airything I zay serious? Don’ you thingk I mide only be tryin’ a juss shage hans wi’ you now?”
Finally, Jim took his friend’s hand and, as he submitted the mass of his body utterly to gravity, he was pulled the rest of the way to his feet. Immediately he reached out his hand and declared, “Zo le’me shage id anyways! For ole time sagke! Maybe you listen for once you’ll ‘gree!”
“ ‘Gree? On whud?”
“You gonna give me a chanz, now, or do I have a wade for’t?”
“Gowon gowon!” John wiggled his fingers in the air as though tickling it for emphasis.
“Now juss hang on!”
“Aw quid sudja sdoobid game!”
“You know, you’re a clazzic drungk! Typal tykipal alchy! Yeah—ya won’ shud up, ya tell stoobid joges, zen ya ged angry an’ won’ talgk! Bud, juss wade! Pre’y soon you won’ e’en be able a answer adall!”
“Whud?”
“Firs’ ya wanna be a buddy, talkin’ an’ tellin’ jokes, zen, all’va sudden ya wanna fide alla
dime, an’ you ged full o’ neg-a-div-i-dy! Nex’ you’ll be suizidal and beggin’ for zymbathy!” Jim
scoffed.
“You cgrazy?”
“Aw, quid za game!
“You fool aroun’ too--damit! ‘Mean amit id, damn id!”
“I don’ ‘dulterate, like some ‘dult-er-er . . . whudever! If tha’s whud ya mean!”
“You thing jus’ ‘cause you ain’ married you’re ‘mune?”
Jim was swinging his head, now, to measure his vehemence, in wide arcs, left and right.
“Nudts!” he finally shouted, fists clenched overhead, into the sky.
“D’you fine oud whud you’re a mizzin’?”
“Cud id out!” Jim said, then, suddenly, began laughing.
“Now wha’s zo fvunny?”
“This’s zo sdoopid!”
“How can it be sdoopid if’s’funny? Funny should be shmardt!”
“Ged offa yer high horze!” Jim implored felicitously now, with a broad grin, reaching his right hand out again to shake hands with John. “I truss ya! Who elz’my gonna truzd?”
But John refused his hand, shrugging as he ducked away, tucking his hands under his
armpits and finally turning to face in the opposite direction. “You sdill thingk I been alone with Mary a whole bunja times, an’ doan truss me, but, allva zudden you do?” John whined.
“ ‘Cording da you how d’you ever really know any any any body truzd you? Allz I g’n do’z shay zo, an’ I juss said I did, so tage id or leave id!”
“I thing i’ss her you don’ trusd!”
“Aw bull!” Jim declared, but tentatively and without conviction. He turned now, and began hobbling toward Main Street, tossing his nearly-spent cigaret so violently that when it hit the ground it bounced several times, sending out a meteoric trail of sparking red. Then, with apparent afterthought, the young man thrust his hand up high over his shoulder flipping John the bird.
John now dropped with a hard thump to sit on the ground, where he remained crossed-legged, his head propped on his palms, his elbows against his knees; he seemed, now, to be moaning, his voice eerily high-pitched.
“I think he’s crying!” Sam whispered, moderately surprised, to his bride.
“Yeah—his face looks like a big red moon, too, under the streetlight!” Dianna
scoffed, adding, “Perfect, for a phony—I didn’t believe a word he said!” She didn’t laugh.
“Well, I feel sorry for him. I think he was telling the truth,” Sam replied.
Dianna scoffed, “If he was innocent he would have just gotten away from Jim instead of staying to argue!”
“But drunks aren’t in control of their emotions,” Sam objected.
“True, but they also tend to reveal things they’d want to hide!” Dianna countered.
“But how could he have proven his innocence?” Sam challenged.
“He couldn’t have! And Jim couldn’t prove he wasn’t innocent, either!”
“So, this was just another tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
“I can’t believe you just said that!”
“Why?”
“It always matters whether we believe each other or not!”
“But we don’t know either of these guys,” thinking quickly he complained. “And it wasn’t even clear what, exactly, they were talking about!”
“Weren’t they speaking in English?” sarcastically she admonished.
“Is that what you’d call it? Okay. But anyway, Miss Smarty Pants, what would you advise them to do if you could?”
“For starters they should never drink together. And they need to include Jim’s wife in the discussion, if they’re really serious and not just acting out a classic male drama in order to feel important!”
“That’s all well and good, but . . .” Sam started to say, stopping when his wife disappeared from his range of vision to go and sit in the Barcalounger.
The young man continued gazing out the window, content to end the silly discussion in exchange for silence, and unable anyway to think of anything reassuring to say to her.
Suddenly, Dianna sniffled loudly, as though she wanted him to hear her.
Knowing better than to let her sit alone for long, Sam now went to her, and seeing that she was crying, he leaned down—“What’s wrong?”
Yet she only held up one palm to hide her already-reddened eyes and to keep him away from her, wiping her cheeks dry with the back of her other hand.
“Seriously! What’s wrong?” he asked again, unable to think of anything more to ask.
“I can’t help it.”
“Did I upset you?”
“No. It’s not you.”
“Then, what is it?”
“Those guys make me sad.”
“Why? They’re strangers to us—unknowns to be forgotten the minute they stop arguing!”
“It’s because they represent the human condition—why do some people have to get drunk to tell each other what they really think of each other? Why is truth such a difficult thing?”
“Because truth forces us to admit each of us is both good and bad by nature, but we’re rarely willing to suspend our inhibitions in order to become humble enough to admit it.”
“You’re talking about men. Women don’t generally have that sort of hang-up.”
But now, although he agreed with her that women were more apt to tell other women what they thought of them, that they were often as reticent to as men, but, having had enough of arguing for the day, Sam held out his arms, feigning a pout, and asked, “Would you like a hug?”
Apparently tired of argument too, Dianna now stood, hastening to her husband.
Embracing, the couple kissed.
Still embracing Dianna, his loving smile pressed into her neck, Sam said softly in her ear, “I think, despite the silliness of the show, we just proved at least that we’re each other’s best friend!”
“We did, didn’t we,” Dianna replied, through her hidden smile, into his shoulder, lovingly as well.
Suddenly, in the near distance, a man cleared his throat deeply and resonantly.
The newlyweds jumped and disengaged, shocked and embarrassed.
Sam’s father, who’d always been able to materialize this way, stood in the open door, and, laughingly joked, “Glad I got here before things got out o’ hand!”
Allowing a smile of surprise quickly to displace her frown of irritation, Dianna asked, “How’d you get in here so quietly?”
“Don’t you remember he used to be a cop?” Sam told her, chuckling.
Harold quickly added, “Yeah, cops’re like Santa Claus—they see everything you do, then, when they c’n catch you doin’ somethin’ you probably shouldn’t, pop up out o’ nowhere!” Harold replied, turning to set the sack of groceries he’d been carrying onto the counter.
“Come on, Dad! Cops don’t bring gifts and they don’t go down chimneys!” Sam joked.
Harold challenged him—“Are you sure? I seen some hide in pretty tight places!” Now he laughed, and, nodding at the grocery sack, added, “An’ you talk like that you might not get t’ eat! You know, I consider food a gift these days!” Quickly, now, he went to the entrance door and pushed it shut. Returning to the couple, as he held out his arms, he added, “Like I always say, you two don’t hear real good, either!” Now approached Dianna for the first hug.
After he’d embraced her for ten seconds, the young woman quickly patted his back, then, mildly embarrassed, pushed herself away from him.
Harold’s eyes were watering, his smile saturated with sadness, when he turned and shook Sam’s hand, and said half-jokingly, “Don’t ever argue with a cop, if you know what’s good for you!” Finally, he gave his son a hug.
“We’re not arguing about anything,” Sam told his father, adding, humorously, “Trust
me—since we’d obviously have nothing to gain!”
“Well, be sure you keep it that way,” Harold quipped, then added, “As a cop, too, ‘cause you learn you can get used to just about anything, nothing surprises you, but you do always tend to worry you might of missed something, so the downside is if you sleep at all, it’s with one eye open!”
“Maybe you’ve just needed glasses all these years,” Sam joked. “Didn’t you once tell us for a while once you kept seeing people you thought you knew, but when you got closer to them you realized you were mistaken, but it was too late for them not to get mad, since you’d already called them by the wrong name?”
Ignoring his son’s affectionate impudence, with sudden seriousness Harold declared, “You know your mother never dreamed I’d find her out, though!”
Although this implicit insult to his mother’s memory, spiritually bullying and possibly revenge for his having teased the old man, since she couldn’t defend herself, sent a wave of hot nausea through Sam’s cheeks and flashed through his body down to his feet, so that he glared at his father, he held his tongue. This condition, nonetheless, caused him to recall the ride to the House of Memories where his mother would be entombed in white marble for eternity, where, closed in by the thick padding of the hearse’s walls, the dead, non-resonant silence seemed to intensify the emotional content of conversation. At that time Harold had told his nephew, who was his own third cousin on his mother’s side, “She’s definitely someone I’m not going to miss!” The fact that Harold hadn’t shed a single tear during the service didn’t surprise him, but he was thoroughly shocked that after having said this his father had even laughed, albeit humorlessly, shaking his head listlessly to himself. Sam imagined that this ironic situation meant he was possibly feeling great secret chagrin, shame and guilt for his having implicitly disparaged someone he actually felt he could never have matched morally or intellectually.
Although he felt that his mother had been faithful to his father, one factor that made him somewhat uncertain about his father’s faithfulness was his jealous suspicion of her, which he might even have actually feigned, out of guilt. She couldn’t even go to the grocery store without him grilling her afterwards—“Does that bald-headed little manager still watch you walk down the aisle and tell you you’re lookin’ good?” Although some might have considered it admirable and manly that he was ever ready to fight for her honor, in fact, he was always ready to fight for just about any reason. Sometimes Sam wondered if his father’s having grown up in the Great Depression, wherein fighting was a way of life, might have given him PTSD. Yet, he’d always made his motives for fighting sound imminently reasonable. After all, how many times had he said that when another man had angrily asserted to him that he’d never liked cops because they were all mean, or that everyone lied from time to time, and wouldn’t back down, he’d always ended up feeling the moral obligation to tell him, “Well, just meet me behind the building later, and we’ll settle it!” A few times, too, he’d gone to the grocery store and confronted one or another bewildered guy who, as he’d later bragged, had begged him not to fight him.
As though having read his son’s mind, Harold suddenly told him, “You know, I miss your mother like hell.”
Sam was bewildered by this revelation--this was the last thing he thought he’d ever hear!
“Really?” he asked, genuinely confused and fearful his father was, at least in part, joking, as he had such an odd sense of humor.
“Yeah,” Harold replied, unwilling to share his son’s feeling. Surprisingly, Harold suddenly stated, “Well, I’m no angel, an’ gI’m zhure you won’t mizz me. How g’n you resbeck someone who lost three houses at the horze tragk?”
Now Sam felt the despairing sadness and sorrow for him that he often did, a feeling exacerbated by the speech impediment the old man seemed to have developed recently, but, not wanting to appear to want to humiliate him, genuinely wanting to feel better about him, he declared cheerfully, “But you’ve changed—didn’t you quit gambling?”
“Yeah—gamblin’s not easy to do iv you don’t have ‘ny money!” the older man scoffed, with a humorless chuckle, then, immediately, with the same harsh voice, asked, “Whadda you two wan’ vor dinner?”
“We really don’t know what restaurants are here,” the young man stated.
Dianna smiled passively, shrugged her shoulders and asked Harold, “Would you pick something for us?”
Harold, without looking at either of his guests, offered, “I know a pretty good Messican restaurant, an’ I’ll dell you that’s more than anyone’d expect in thiz good ole Mormon town.”
Although he didn’t want to humiliate him to keep him docile, Sam couldn’t let such an obvious problem he was having with speaking go untended, so he asked, “Dad, now don’t get mad, but, is there something wrong with your teeth?”
Ignoring Sam’s affectionate insult, Harold continued, “I think it’s called ‘El Torcido’ or ‘Toril-ly-o’—somethin’ like that.”
“Maybe ‘El Torito’,” Dianna suggested, laughing now—“I’d hate to eat at ‘The
Pervert’, but the Little Bull is okay! And, come to think of it, Torillo means the same thing.”
“Come on!” Harold chided, frowning with embarrassment—“Perzonally I’m zo hungry I don’t care if it’s ‘El Torpedo’! ‘Course, what could go wrong there?” Now he laughed, adding, “All’s I know’s they got good fvood!”
“Well, Dad, we know what beans and jalapeños always do to you!” Sam teased.
Once again, the older man ignored his son and asked the couple, “You two need to change your clothes, or are you ready to go the way you are?”
“We’re as ready as we’ll ever be,” Sam answered.
“You don’t need to take a shower or anything?” his father persisted.
“No, we’re fine,” Sam replied.
“But you don’t have air conditioning in that old heap of yours, do you?” Harold asked knowingly.
“No. But trust me, Dad, we didn’t sweat,” Sam replied, wanting to end the discussion. Why
did Harold suddenly care about such personal aspects of his and his wife’s lives? When Sam, his
brother Will and his sister, Melody, were young, however, he had demanded that they wash up
and wear clean, tidy clothes to dinner. More than likely, though, currently feeling guilty about
his failure as a father, he wanted to be nurturing, but didn’t know how to. In fact, it had always
seemed to Sam that his frequent boasting about his accomplishments was, from his self-centered
perspective, an attempt to make himself appear worthy of respect as a father.
While he wanted to sympathize with him, Sam still had to fight back the sadness and resentment he felt as he perceived he’d cheated him, since, rather than when he’d wanted his guidance on how to resolve personal problems, like how to deal with so-called friends who were two-faced, his father had always seemed to want to discuss something merely utilitarian, such as that he needed to change his spark plugs. Not that he hadn’t had good conversations with him, such as when his father caught a ten-pound trout and he hadn’t caught anything, and, rather than humiliating him by saying he wasn’t fishing correctly, he’d explained that his bait was landing on the water too noisily, so that if he jerked slightly upward on his pole just prior to its hitting, he would likely catch a nice fish. Yet, when he’d brought home a report card with straight A’s or when his school journal had published one of his poems, the old man had only stared silently, as though not knowing what to say.
But now, driven by the hunger he shared with his guests, Harold, as he was always wont to do, immediately led the way out of his dwelling, stopping to turn and lock the entrance door. “By the way, there’s just one catch—you gan’t get margarítas at this restaurant—only wine. They expect you to take your own boddle o’ booze to bars here, too. We could stop at a liquor store, though, if you want. No matter what, you see, the powers that be in this place don’t mind the revenue! A damn funny town!” he concluded with mild disgust, shrugging his shoulders, as he turned to lead his guests the rest of the way down the hall.
Realizing that Harold had probably offended Dianna with his gruffness, to reassure her he was sympathetic and watching out for her, Sam reached for her hand, which she eagerly gave him for the rest of the walk. The only sound now was that of three pairs of feet shuffling with zipping scratchiness across the painfully-thin, beaten-down, industrial carpet of the narrow tunnel of a hallway that led through the building to its rear, where the parking lot hovered darkly. Since everyone breathed shallowly, too, to avoid taking in the dead, musky air as much as possible, nobody spoke any further, until they’d emerged into the open.
As the trio finally crossed the parking lot toward Harold’s silver Dodge Dart, two animal screams suddenly echoed from out of nowhere, and with such a singular shrill that everyone fell silent on the verge of fear, stopping to look around themselves as though for attackers.
Now Harold snapped, “Damn cats! They’ve been gedding worse lately! Even with my airgondizhioner magin’ a steady hum that should blot it out, bud they’re so loud that they keep me awage a lod o’ nides!”
“Dad, I think those were raccoons,” Sam corrected, though he knew what the older man’s reaction would probably be. As he considered it, too, he added, “Dad, really—are your teeth okay? Are they loose or something?”
But Harold ignored his question, replying with a little heat, “Bull! I think I know a ragoon when I hear it! There was a ness of ‘em just last winner livin’ in the roof of this abartment building!” Finally, he repositioned his teeth, and said, presumably to make sure to humiliate his son for questioning him, “Watch out, Dianna—Old Sam’s imagination’s goin’ wild!” Finally, bent over his car’s passenger door, with oblivious fixity and fumbling with his laden key ring, he got the key in the keyhole, so with a singular click all four doors unlocked. “Come on!” he declared, disappearing into the interior.
Briefly, the couple gazed at the sky, which was known for spectacular displays of stars and a few planets, since Salt Lake City was still small enough that it projected a fairly low level of ambient light. But that didn’t matter, as the moon was currently a sliver, and the sky black.
As Sam and Dianna continued to stare hope against hope at the sky for celestial signs, Harold warned, though politely, “We godda get goin’, t’avoid a crowd. The resaurant’s pobular.”
Yet, just as they started to duck into the back seat of the car, they were stopped and stalled in place, as Jim’s voice, having long been lost, floated back up on the gusty breeze in broken snatches—“Got-damn liar! . . . If I’d o’ wanted . . . no sonabitch gonna keep us apart! . . . Even so with your got-damn dirty mind! . . . Who’d o’ thought anybody’s . . . but my bes’ frien’! . . . not e’en him! . . . so whud’s the use?”
Since the back door of the car was still open Harold had heard Jim, and hissed “Nuts!” adding, “There seems to be more and more people around here with mendal problems! I hear ‘em at night alla dime, arguin’! Gome on! Ged in!”
Sam and Dianna didn’t move, though, as they were still listening for more from Jim or John, ready to call an ambulance, or the police, if they felt it would have been necessary.
From the dark hollow expanse of the car’s interior, cigaret smoke now swept through the open door into the shadowy atmosphere, as Harold barked, “If you two don’t get in ‘ere, I’m taygin’ off withoud you!” Sam remembered how often he’d also said this to Irene before actually driving off, so he knew that the old man meant it!
Harold hadn’t asked Sam to sit in the passenger seat, though he would have any other male, so, like children, the young man and woman now finally ducked into the Dart’s back seat.
Harold turned the key in the car ignition for twenty solid seconds, forcing the starter to whine in ratcheting surges, as he angrily pumped the gas pedal. But the motor didn’t start. From out of the blue, too, he finally answered Sam’s question of two hours previous—“An’ yes! I do have falz teeth! Two sets! Tha’s whad habbens when you get pyorrhea! So . . . I don’t wan’ to hear ‘boud it ‘gain, ogay?”
At the same instant that Sam told his father, “Sure,” a wind gust slapped the car so that it rocked once. Down at the horizon, a single flash of lightening revealed a band of black rain clouds, but so far away the travelers heard no thunder.
“That storm seems to be heading south,” happily Sam declared, adding “Let’s hope it stays there!”
“Well, we need some rain,” Harold told him with a corrective tone, as the ignition continued to whine and he pumped at the accelerator for twenty more seconds, without the desired result—“Damn!” he hissed under his breath, then paused for a few seconds. Finally, he said, to no one in particular, “She’ll start. I just flooded the garburedor.”
“Are you in a drought here?” Dianna asked Harold.
“You could say thad,” Harold answered, as he turned the ignition a third time and the engine roared into life. He chortled, “They zay the third dime’s a jarm!”
Sam said, “Hip hip hooray!” with a fist pump toward the ceiling.
“Gyou always were weird!” Harold told him.
“You should talk!” Sam teased—“A man driving an antique car!”
“What about your old heap?” Harold scoffed, adding, “Lige father lige son!” “You just bedder not tell me I need a tune-up!” though he nodded with a grin in his direction, as he smashed his cigaret butt, which was already nearly-spent, into the ash tray. Immediately, then, he pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from his breast pocket, quickly packed the pack, then tapped out a new long white tooth. Swiftly and deftly then, his stainless-steel Zippo lighter flickered up a blue flame, which he applied to the end of the cigaret, which had suddenly appeared in his mouth, tilting his head and cupping his hands around the glowing orb of captive fire as intently and artfully as he’d have tied a fishing hook onto a leader. Taking a long drag, he snapped the lighter cap shut to extinguish the flame with a hollow, tinny, “ca-ching,” precisely in the manner he had since Sam had been an infant. Now blue smoke filled the air, creating what had always seemed to Sam to be the old man’s personal, fabricated atmosphere, as it groped and snaked outwardly to form a living cloud that soon obscured the windshield.
As the car moved, now, slowly toward the exit of the parking lot, Harold joked, “Well, I guess id’s obvious where you god your weirdness!” Harold finally joked in reply to Sam’s most recent insult. “But you do know that old saying, don’t you—‘The abble don’t fall too far fvrom the tree!” With this, he lifted his chin and blew a stream of smoke from his mouth so forcefully that it seemed to gather and punch the windshield.
But having heard this expression once too often, Sam had a quip ready—“Unless some dumb sonofabitch picks it up and throws it!”
His father laughed heartily at this, shaking his head, and declared to Sam, “I never thought you could get weirder, son, but you did!” Still laughing, he added, “I gotta take what I said back, then, as you just proved you were the milgman’s son!” He exhaled a cloud of smoke, and held his cigaret out to the side, now. Quickly, then, he reached up and adjusted his lower plate of teeth.
As Harold had referred to him this way since he was very young, he no longer felt its demeaning sting, but, instead, found it humorous as a feeble attempt at humor. In order to rub in his sublimated disdain, Sam replied, “And the milkman was so dumb he didn’t even remember the time he got hit over the head when someone tried to rob him--right?”
“Absolutely!” Harold replied, still joking, then added, “You got a hard row to hoe, buddy!”
Sam had to tell his father, though, “But Dad, there are no inherited characteristics!”
“Bull! You gan’t dell me peoble don’t inherit their brains!” Yet, leaving his cigarette to hang, stuck in place, off of his lower lip, he was still laughing, therefore joking, so he’d clearly meant no harm.
“They inherit the genes, Dad,” Sam scoffed humorously, laughing too.
“Well, he had gene damage!” Harold said, finishing the joke, blowing smoke out of his nose and mouth at the same time.
Dianna suddenly asked, a little testily, as though she was tired of listening to the banter between father and son, and hoped, by changing the subject, to be taken seriously, “Mister Black, you sounded like you might know who that guy was who was yelling tonight. Do you?”
“Do me a favor, Dianna—call me Harold. Okay?” the old man replied, exhaling a little cloud of cigarette smoke.
“Okay,” the young woman answered her father-in-law.
“How did I sound like that?” he asked now.
“You said you heard him and the other guy arguing all the time,” she replied.
“Do either of them live in your complex?” Sam asked his father, too, wanting to show support for Dianna.
Harold replied glumly, “One did. But I should say I don’t know ‘im, juss of ‘im. Unfortunately. I guess he losht his job lasht monthv. He used to live in an abartment here. The other one, gthough, I never saw bevore.” He now pursed his upper lip, so that the smoke he blew out of his mouth splayed downwardly, like a waterfall.
“Did you ever talk to him, though? How did you know he lost his job?” Sam asked, hoping there was a chance he hadn’t lost it, as he was weary of bad news.
“Naw!” Harold replied, forcefully exhaling a plume of smoke. “I got nothin’ to say to someone lige thad! He’s . . . he’s just plain nuds! All ‘e dime ‘e walks aroun’ the barkinglot talkin’ to himself! He argues, I guess, with himself, since you’ll hear ‘im yellin’ all’ve a sudden every other minute how his boss haded ‘im when he was a good worger, but he just had it in for ‘im,” Harold explained, with a hint of resentment in his tone, presumably for being questioned on something he considered irritating because it was a waste of time. The smoke cloud that he emitted from his mouth this time hovered in a ball in the air for several seconds, before evaporating.
“That explains a lot,” Dianna remarked under her breath, as though she was afraid to pursue the subject further, seeing that it seemed to irritate Harold, which might cause him to insult her to make sure she’d drop it, to which she would have fought back, and helped spoil the evening.
“Well, it sounds like both guys are out of work,” Sam told his father now, glad, at least, to be able to have a serious, if brief, discussion with him about a life event.
Harold adjusted his teeth, then told him, “Birds of a feather would be my guess. But they’ve been goin’ through this routine forever, so it shouldn’t be a zurbrize--ev-ery frig-gin’ Sataday!”
They were doin’ it the last dime you came oud here, too, an’ you di’n’t say a word!”
Sam told him, “Dad, this is the first time we’ve been out here.”
“Well, maybe it was your brother, Will, who came out, then,” Harold replied, without
apologizing for his mistake.
Wishing to avoid an argument, which would only have gotten everyone upset and resolved nothing, as Harold never admitted when he was wrong, rather than rubbing his mistake in, Sam refrained from pursuing the subject.
As a sign of praise for his restraint Dianna now squeezed Sam’s hand. Nonetheless, as his Dad always making him feel insignificant as an individual, for which he always forgave him, he fell into what seemed to be an unavoidable funk. Suddenly, though, as he caught a brief glimpse through the car window of a little fireball streaking across the sky, he was jolted from his depression, so that he sat up quickly, pointed at the external world, blurting with enthusiasm to no one in particular, “Hey! I just saw a meteor! I hear that’s supposed good luck!” His deferential laugh, however, betrayed him.
Dianna answered him with affectionate sarcasm, “I’m glad you’re not serious, Dear!”
“But didn’t you see it?” he asked, pretending to be hurt by her sarcasm, wondering how she could have missed such a thing.
Grinning as though she thought his wish was silly and immature, she answered, “I’d like to say I did, just to see you happy, but . . . no, I missed it. Don’t’ worry, though, there will be more, as there always are!” But now, as though still preoccupied with previous thoughts, she asked no one in particular, “Do you think that guy—wasn’t it Jim—really got hurt?”
“Neither one of those guys ever gets hurt!” Harold scoffed in answer to her. “Don’t let ‘em fool you! They just like attention--believe me, they know people are lizenin’ to ‘em! I even used to wonder if they were actors!” Now he adjusted his teeth, as previously.
“What are they, then?” Dianna asked him seriously.
“Did you look at their clothes?” Harold asked her.
Sam, wondering to himself why his father was concerned again about clothes, merely deferred, for himself and his wife, “We couldn’t see them very well.”
“They’re all tore up!” Harold declared, with a scoffing little laugh. “That should tell ya somethin’!”
Sam now considered that perhaps clothes represented class distinction to his father, a subject with which he was obsessed because he’d grown up so poor. In this context, he ventured an interrogative reply, “They’re construction workers?”
“No!” Harold scoffed. “They’re homeless! I told you one lost his job, an’ why would he hang around with another guy if that guy had a job? They’re plain up to no good!” He was silent for a half a minute, as he shifted his jaw from side to side. Then he concluded, “The fight they put on is fake, believe me! It’s so people’ll give ‘em food, which they do all‘e time! They sure don’t deserve id, an’ don’t gmean a thing they say! They’re con-men!”
“Then, weren’t they really drunk?” confused, Sam asked him.
Dianna now posited to everyone in general, “You know . . . now that I think of it, there was a theatrical—phony and insincere—aspect of Jim’s tone! Maybe he actually wasn’t depressed!”
Sam disagreed, though—“No, I heard real pain in his voice!”
“Hell—life’s tough all over!” Harold muttered soberly, adding, “But things c’n ged a hell of a lod worse, believe me!” Now, with greater determination than previously, forming a sort of set of pliers with his thumb and forefinger, he pinched his lower plate of teeth between his thumb and forefinger, twisting from side to side to seat it better.
Sam had to ask him, “Dad, I realize I agreed not to talk about your teeth, but . . . well, don’t you think you should get your dentures adjusted?”
“Since you godda be so damn nosy—I ran out o’ Polident!” he replied.
“But can you chew okay?” Sam persisted.
“Hey! You cjhew your way an’ I’ll chjew mine!” Harold replied with a little heat, pointing his finger to the side, unable to aim it the full necessary two-hundred-and-seventy degrees, before, once again, jiggling his lower, then his upper, plate, vigorously, to seat them.
“Why don’t we just stop somewhere so you can get some?” Sam asked innocently.
“I will later. My teeth sdill have some on ‘em, juss nod ‘enough to hold ‘em for more’n ten minutes or so.”
“Okay,” Sam replied, deciding, though sadly, to drop the subject, for the greater good.
“If they fid ride in ‘e first place, they’d o’ been fine! Bud the deniss never sized ‘em right in the first blace!” Harold explained.
“I’m sorry,” Sam answered.
“Don’t feel zorry’ for me!” Harold warned him. “They’ll go bag in blace! What you fail to understand is my health inzuranze ran oud a month ago, so I have to cut down on my esbenses!” This time he held his teeth in place with his fingers longer than previously.
Sam didn’t feel like talking to his father now, since every discussion with him usually led to disappointment and angst anyway.
Suddenly Harold was grinning, and asked nobody in particular very cheerfully, “Did I ever tell you the sdory ‘bout the time I was a detegtive, and me an’ my buddies answered a call to a house on a missing person rebort?”
“I don’t think so,” Sam said, leerily, as he was imminently alert to his father’s perverse delight in telling stories that tended to kill the fun of the upcoming social activity—a trait he felt came from his father’s youth, when happy events rarely turned out as people wished, so that, psychologically, he got the jump on them in their inevitable disappointment, which, vicariously, made them feel luckier than they were, and thereby to like him.
“Well, this was another one that shows you just what can happen when people fall asleep at the switch . . .”
“I hope it isn’t about motorcycle wrecks, to teach us why we shouldn’t ride!” Sam scoffed half-seriously, grimacing as he tried to grin purely in the spirit of hopefulness the goriness would be avoided.
“Naw!” Harold replied chuckling, as though delighted so far merely to torment his son with uncertainty. Still laughing, he quickly added, “Nothin’ ‘bout guys with their head cut off or car wrecgks with mutiladed babies! But I am proud you seem to remember the lessons in the file photographs from wrecks I brought home!” he declared with authoritative pride.
“Yes,” Sam answered, not wanting to think about such horrors.
“Well, this case toog the cake! You won’t be able to help laughin’!”
Sensing the distress she’d probably suffer if she heard the rest of the story, nervously Dianna stared straight ahead, though a grin flickered as quickly as lightning through her somber expression, suggesting, “Harold, maybe you should save it for another time.” Then, more overtly suggesting that she sensed he might be putting her and her husband on, she joked, “You’re not trying to spoil our appetites, are you? You know we can afford dinner!”
“Hey! I’m paying! But no, it’s not that bad—I promise!” the older man told her, stifling a smirk, before continuing, “Anyway, we went to this guy’s house—a real nice house, probably a million dollars—an’ rang the bell. But we go no anszer. Zo we banged and banged on ‘e front door—for a solid fifdeen minuds! Sometimes when they don’ hear the bell they’ll hear knockin’. But nobody came. Finally, my partner, old Jerry Hudson, said id at the same time I thought id—“Somethin’s wrong—we better break in!”
Zo we broge down ‘e door, an’ ‘mmediately we were blazded by a wall o’ heat! We thought at first the houze was on fire—it was a good four-hundred degrees! An’ talk about a smell!
“I really don’t think I want to hear the rest of this,” Dianna told Harold genuinely nervous, now.
“Come on!” her father-in-law told her. “This i’n’t any worse ‘an what you see in three quarters of all the TV zhows, so don’t give me that bull about spoilin’ your abbedites, scarin’ you or makin’ you sad!” the older man persisted. “Besides, I’ve never seen a time when either o’ you gouldn’t eat someone oud ‘o house’n home! An’ what was that movie you both wajhed the last time you came to my place?--Hellbender, wa’n’t it? Where they tore bodies down and rebuilt ‘em from skeletons? How could my story ever be worze’n that?”
Feeling it would be no use to remind him again, Sam refrained from telling him verbally, “Dad, this is our first time here!” though he did it with his eyes.
Presumably not wanting to argue Dianna merely advised, “All I’ll say, then, is I hope this has a point—something we can learn from.”
Harold asked her, “Or what?” Chuckling, and not waiting for her reply, he continued, “Well, we foun’ this guy in ‘e sauna.”
“I think I know what’s coming!” Dianna declared, covering her ears.
However, when Harold got started with a story nothing between Heaven and Earth could
stop him. So, screwing up his face into a grimace of nearly-painful intensity, and gesturing with his forefinger as though giving someone instructions, “He musd’ve been there cookin’ for a good week! That’s dead body times ten!”
“Thanks, Dad!” Sam quipped. “You’re succeeding at getting our appetites good and stirred up!” He still remained open to the possibility that, since it was common social practice for a parent, like a boss or a friend of the greatest wealth, that Harold would cover the tab for dinner, and, having little money, he may very well have been, though likely unconsciously, attempting to insure that the bill was minimal!
But now Harold’s forceful voice obscured all other considerations, as obviously enjoying the stultifying effect on his captive audience, he persisted, “This guy was just like a broiled chicken!”
“I think I might throw up!” Dianna now muttered to no one in particular.
Sam felt frozen in place, and remained in stunned silence.
Determined not to be deterred, however, Harold continued, “So, whadda you thing happened when we went to pick ‘im up?”
“The gas still in him made him explode,” as though disgusted Sam muttered under his breath.
“His head fell off!” Harold said, apparently refusing to let Sam have the satisfaction of getting the final word. He shook his head, chuckling mirthlessly, then continued, “an’ it rolled clear across ‘e floor! Well, ad this point we should o’ guessed his arms’n legs’d fall off, too, even before we had time to drop what was left of ‘im!”
“I don’t want to hear any more of this!” Dianna said seriously, angrily pulling her hands from her ears.
Smirking mischievously, Harold told her, “You can’t hear any more, ‘cause that’s the end of the story. Forensics game in ride afder thad, to clean ub.” Now he was laughing to himself in wheezy gasps, each heave like the autonomous boom of an exploding depth charge, and soon went into a coughing fit so violent his eyes were watering.
Sam waited until he was silent to tell him, “Thanks for that inspiring story, Dad!”
“I bed you think I made that ub!” Harold told his son, glancing at Dianna to include her as a recipient of his statement.
“I don’t think that’s something you could make up,” Dianna replied. “It’s just too . . . bizarre!”
After he’d adjusted his teeth, insouciantly Harold continued, “All I can say is I would o’ hated t’ve been on the cleanup crew!”
Just as the car jolted forward through an intersection so Harold could clear a yellow light,
Sam was slammed backward into his seat just as he asked, “Who had to tell the guy’s family?”
Harold told Sam, “The Notification Officer. An’ I sure wou’n’t a wanded his job either.”
“Why? Do they get threatened?” Sam asked him.
“Worse than that,” Harold told him. “Their the ones thad get shod at all ‘e time!”
Dianna asked Harold, “I bet it’s hard sometimes not to get emotionally involved with the cases you got. Don’t you feel sorry for that guy you found?”
“Sorry! This may sound cold, but it’s kind of hard to feel sorry for some guy who didn’t have enough sense not to tage a nab in a sauna! In fact, he was so fat, he shouldn’t of been allowed in a sauna ‘th‘out a doctor’s note—he was just askin’ for a heart attagk!”
Suddenly Sam reminded himself, as he considered he and Dianna might well have been suckered by the old man, as he’d always made up shocking stories only later to laugh, at those who’d been more than willing to be his audience, for their gullibility, finally declaring he’d made the whole thing up just to see how they would react. Ironically, too, he always seemed imminently believable because he also told true stories of horrific suffering and death. Despite the deviousness of this practice, Sam believed that he may have relieved himself of some of the actual horror through this muddling of truth and fiction. What he truly resented was that Harold had never refrained from telling true stories about his job, no matter how gruesome they were, in front of his children, no matter how young they’d been! He just couldn’t keep a good story to himself for long! Yet, as his father had never told him the story about the man in the sauna before, he suspected he’d concocted it. Hoping to catch him contradicting himself, he asked him innocently, now, “So, when did the sauna story take place?”
“Oh, let’s see . . .” Harold thought aloud for half a minute, then said, “It was about . . . oh, five years ago.”
“I was fourteen then, and I’d never have forgotten a story like that. But this is the first I’ve heard of it.”
“You probably weren’t baying attention,” the old man replied.
“No. I wouldn’t have been bored by that story!” Sam replied with rising pique at the game his father was playing—especially in that it was to no clear purpose.
“I guess I could o’ forgot to tell it,” Harold replied, poker faced.
But since Harold never would have forgotten a story like that, Sam realized—chortling, he told him, “Okay--you got us, Dad!”
“Got you?” Harold asked his son, as though confused.
“In the first place, who would ever believe a story like that, anyway?” Sam asked.
“That’s the point o’ telling it! Because it’s so un-believable!” Harold admonished.
“Come on, Dad! It’s unbelievable because it shouldn’t be believed!” Sam disagreed. “Besides that,” he continued, “you’ve never ever criticized crime victims—that was something I always admired—that you sympathized with them!”
“I guess I’m the one that’s been got!” Harold finally admitted to Sam, with a laugh. “You wouldn’t’ve made a bad detective!”
Dianna, suddenly angry at the deception, told both men at once, “So now I suppose the joke’s on me, since at first I thought it was a joke, then later, as it got really gruesome, I bought the story hook, line and sinker! And you two just let me sit here and suffer!”
Sam, sympathetic to her sensitivity, rubbed her shoulder and told her, “Not exactly.”
“Not exactly what?” still angrily she asked.
Sam told her, “Well, if it makes you feel better, even after all the times he’s suckered me with his stories, you’d think I’d have wised up—but he suckered me this time anyway, as well!”
“The joke’s still on me!” Dianna nearly yelled with anger.
“Dianna Dianna Dianna! You take life too seriously!” Harold informed her. He continued, “It was my way of getting Sam back for his comments about my deeth.”
Dianna stared at Harold, then replied, “At first I even thought you two were playing the game of who would blink first, so, I guess I got doubly suckered!”
Harold was laughing as, humorously incredulous, and replied to his daughter-in-law, “In effect! You just gotta always remember in life to keep things in perspective! Sam told you the real truth in the matter, though, that he was never sure ‘til the very end of what I was up to.”
“Then you weren’t actually offended by the joke about your teeth, but just wanted to pretend you were?” Dianna demanded interrogatively of Sam’s father.
Sam answered for his father—“Of course! It would take a lot more than that to offend him!”
Harold, still laughing, now punched his son affectionately in the shoulder. “Actually, that’s a story we used to tell our new recruits when I gwas on the Denver Force, to see if they had what id took to be a cop!” Quickly now, he reached up and adjusted his teeth, once again.
Suddenly, the approaching lights of a strip mall snaked with the imposing brightness of a squadron of UFOs onto the horizon.
Dianna asked Harold, “But that story you just told really could happen, couldn’t it?”
In his most convincingly-smug, authoritarian voice, Harold growled, “Yes. Actually, it did happen, just not to me—my sergeant told me about it. Supposedly it habbened in Chigago. Of course I gouldn’t ever tell if he was putting me on. So, I kept it, as a kind of test of . . . how much a person could tage before he had to stob lizening to it.” After a few moments of silence, he asked, with a tentative tone, as though he couldn’t remember, “Son, what was it you asked earlier, about the restaurant?”
Realizing that his father was urging him to make up a story, to thoroughly tease Dianna, as there had actually been no such earlier question, Sam replied, “Oh yeah, I looked up El Torillo on my phone, just to check out the menu, which is pretty standard, so I didn’t bother you or Dianna with it. However, there’s a unique game they let you play, for free drinks.”
“Sure!” Dianna scoffed, shaking her head. “And it was on the menu, right?”
“Seriously!” Sam replied. “I . . . I actually called them. So, what happens is they blindfold you after you order, then, when your meals come to the table they switch everyone’s entrées, then give you one try to guess what it is. But you have to sit still and not taste it, and all you’re allowed to do is lean forward a little, but no more than necessary for you to inhale deeply to smell the plate in front of you. If you guess right, you get a free carafe of the wine of your choice—even the really expensive ones, if that’s what you like.”
“Hey, that sounds like fun!” Harold declared, but with a little too much fun-loving enthusiasm.
“It is, it is!” Sam replied with a little too much reassurance.
“You two!” Dianna scoffed, now. “Who would fall for that? Why don’t they just give you a long stick and have you hit a piñata? It would be a lot more fun! Maybe they could fill it with gift certificates! Or sopapillas, covered with honey! How much fun would that be! Or . . . think of this! Someone might hit you in the head and knock some sense into you!”
Through his own laughter, too, Sam replied, “A brilliant idea!”
Harold declared joyfully, “You know, Dianna, when you and Sam first got married I wasn’t sure about you, but you’re all-right!”
Dianna, getting used to his roughness and that he didn’t often think his responses through completely, decided to let the insult, which Harold didn’t even recognize as an insult, go this time, for the sake of a harmonious meal.
The three travelers were still laughing hilariously when they entered the adobe structure where they eventually had one of the best meals they’d ever had.
THE END
John Lane’s fiction has appeared in 101 Words, Bright Flash Literary Review, Boston Literary Magazine, The Disappointed Housewife, The Drabble, Visual Verse and other venues. John’s fiction has also appeared in several horror anthologies. John’s story about a tragic playground incident was featured on the Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai: 100 Days, 100 Supernatural Stories podcast. Member of the Horror Writers Association. Army and National Guard veteran. |
THE MEETING
Joe B. even remembered what Nathan G. said. “If you’re serious about your recovery, you’ll treat this as life and death. For starters, no more jeans and a T-shirt; Only suits. Also, you need a total of three people to help you stay sober. Your higher power, which we call God at the meetings. Your sponsor, who will do the thinking for you. And you, in order to follow directions.”
Finding himself in his Mercury Mountaineer parked in the Brethren Church parking lot, Joe B. waited for the meeting to start. He checked his clothing to make sure he had on his choice of attire for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, the same style of French blue suit that his now ex-sponsor once wore. At least, it wasn’t a T-shirt and torn jeans.
Joe B. had only found out that Nathan G. passed away through the obituary in the back of the local paper. His former sponsor had gone back on the wagon after twenty-five years of sobriety the day after his wife passed away from a heart attack. After Nathan G. stopped going to meetings and lost contact with Joe B., the once old-timer lost his life a short time later, unable to stop drinking. While the Monday night Alcoholics Anonymous meeting wrapped up, Nathan G. had died in the hospital from complications due to cirrhosis of the liver.
Joe B. took the mobile from his pocket and dialed his only sponsee, Ben H. It went right to voicemail. Or maybe Ben H. quit Alcoholics Anonymous and refused to talk to his sponsor. In either case, it slowly dawned on Joe B. that he might need to finally move on from all the sponsoring.
From his inside jacket pocket, he pulled out an old, folded Alcoholics Anonymous document - a precursor to the organization’s bible, the Big Book. More than the sum of its yellowed pages and faded ink, its worth was measured in its basic instructions which kept hundreds of members sober up over the course of many decades. Joe B. always felt that his sponsees should write an essay to know the history of Alcoholics Anonymous to reinforce their recovery, but most of them quit before Joe B. got to that point. Dave H. would only call after getting drunk. Zach M. refused to do step work. Jim T. hated going to meetings. Henry J. stole money from the collection plate.
He blamed himself for each of his relationship failures.
Joe B. stared at the main entrance to Brethren Church, three concrete steps in front of open white doors. For the first time since his first day in recovery meetings, he lacked any interest in Alcoholics Anonymous. He’d secretly harbored a grudge against AA since Nathan G. died, wondering why Nathan G. couldn’t stop. Joe B. strongly considered this to be his last meeting. Reluctantly, he opened his SUV door, slipped out of his seat and made his way to the Monday night meeting.
Joe B. entered the room. Stagnant air inside the church’s cluttered basement carried a mixture of odors - incense, mildew and a hint of urine. For the twenty-five members of the “Happy-Go-Lucky” group of Philadelphia Alcoholics Anonymous, the Monday night meeting kept them sober and saved their lives for another week.
The aroma of french roast coffee carried through the air until the members’ noses caught a whiff. A dozen day-old glazed donuts from a convenience store were opened in its thin cardboard box. Tonight’s facilitator of the meeting thumped the gavel on the desk as the signal to start, which silenced the talkative crowd. One member at a time helped themselves to coffee and donuts until the meeting began. He slumped in the chair at his usual place in the corner of the room while he waited for his only sober sponsee, Ben H. to show up.
Joe B., twenty years sober and one of the first “Happy-Go-Lucky” members, used to like this particular meeting due to speakers sharing their “war stories”. Every week, he wore a french blue two button suit with unhemmed, open bottom pants. He had worn the suit to his first meeting here on the tail end of a two-day binge. Joe B. wanted to remind himself that he still identified as an alcoholic. Now, the pain of losing his sponsor coupled with the possibility of losing his sponsee made the choice to leave Alcoholics Anonymous less difficult.
During the meeting, members of various lengths of sobriety read the twelve steps and traditions, picked up the appropriate aluminum and bronze colored chips and listened to Samantha A. share how she went from being a prostitute to a registered nurse. When Samantha A. announced her twentieth year anniversary, she received a round of applause. Joe B. covered his mouth as he yawned, a signal to the other members that he lost interest.
By the time the group stood up from their metal chairs, held hands and read the “Serenity Prayer,” Joe B. heard a meek voice behind him call his name.
He turned around, expecting Ben H. in a suit and tie but was shocked to see Ben H. in a torn T-shirt and ripped jeans. The smell of deodorant barely masked the stench of a bacteria’s feast. Still, Joe B. was even more shocked that Ben H. came back.
As the members folded the metal chairs, cleaned the table and removed the empty box and coffee pot, Joe B. stared at him. “People in recovery show up on time. Every time!”
Ben H.’s hands started to shake. “I want a drink.”
“We all want a drink. That’s why we’re here.”
Ben H. couldn’t look Joe B. in the eye. “Not like this. My wife threw divorce papers at me. I thought being sober would save my marriage.”
Joe B. and Ben H. were the only ones left in the basement. Joe B. said, “I’m sorry about what happened, but I need to get something through your thick skull. Do you think alcohol will ever fix your marital problems?”
Ben H. slowly shook his head.
Joe B. pointed his middle finger at Ben H. “Remember what I asked you.”
The sponsor pulled an old manuscript from his inside jacket pocket. “I’ve thought about this for a long time, but I’ve decided to give it to you. If you plan to drink, you have much bigger issues, and you need to leave my gift here. I want to read what I circled on page 27.”
Joe B. observed his sponsee’s reactions. Ben H.’s brown eyes opened wide. The yellowed pages had faded ink but the words were still legible. It was one thing to hear about the history of the organization from the old-timers in the meeting. The basic purpose of one drunk helping another was never forgotten. It was an entirely different thing to actually hold history in one’s hands.
Joe B. turned to page 27 and read the sentence highlighted in yellow marker. “If you are not convinced on these vital issues, you need to re-read the book to this point or else throw it away!”
He watched the tears stream down Ben H.’s eyes. Joe B. said, “I’ll wait for you outside.”
Ben H. replied, “Thank you.”
Joe B. stopped at the top of the concrete steps. He breathed in the still air, then stared directly across Ninth Avenue. The same “For Sale or Lease” sign was where the Donut Hole coffee shop had once been. He could almost hear the coffee being poured in the cup. Joe B. sat down to wait for his last surviving sponsee.
Maybe he would stay a little longer as an Alcoholics Anonymous member.
Randal A. Burd, Jr. is editor of Sparks of Calliope, an online poetry magazine, and a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee. He received his M.Ed. from the University of Missouri. He spends most of his days and evenings providing education to disadvantaged youth and adults. His latest poetry collection, Memoirs of a Witness Tree (Kelsay Books, 2020), is available from Amazon.com. You can find him on Twitter @colonelrandal. |
What Will Stay?
With sightless eyes on futures never seen,
The cold, dead stone contrasting with the green
Of life renewed and thriving all about.
Their likenesses, once known, are now obscure,
As will be those who we now cast in bronze.
Our kings and queens, our bishops, knights, and pawns,
Torn down by those who’ll find our thoughts impure.
What will it matter, when we’ve gone away?
We primitive and unenlightened lot
Who’ve squandered time and grace so dearly bought,
What dear to us will fade, and what will stay?
They’ll view us with a condescending air,
Interpreting what wasn’t ever there.
Encroaching Weeds
Among the flowers raised from seeds
In beds meticulously kept
Beyond the stable, neatly swept,
Across from where the light recedes.
But lately there’ve been other needs
Demanding time, and thus proceeds
Her garden to appear unkept.
She’d not allow her lesser breeds
To pair with her prize-winning steeds,
But in the dark and shadows crept
The vines and crabgrass while she slept
Committing one of many deeds
She’d not allow.
The Air Grows Cold
Turn yellow, orange, and gold between
Brief moments spent outdoors. The call
Of birds of prey makes forests crawl
With anxious creatures seldom seen.
Close by, as in some magazine,
A brook completes the perfect scene.
As humid summer yields to fall,
The air grows cold.
Soon winter comes: first Halloween,
Then heaters run on kerosene,
A knitted scarf and hat, a shawl,
But well before the snow and all,
The air grows cold.
Physician of the Mind
Will keep close secrets told secure,
Unlike that friend who in the end
Is quick to judge and less mature.
What troubles whispered through the years
Have bounced off these unhearing ears,
Unburdening a client’s soul,
Absolving guilt, allaying fears?
This true physician of the mind,
Compassionate, unduly kind,
Is counselor, confessor, priest,
Conservator, and more—combined!
Bad News
Neglected at the table where she sat
Before her father tenderly explained
How nothing can be done, and that is that.
Oh, how can one so quickly lose all hope?
She asked herself as numbness settled in.
And as she wondered how she’d ever cope
He thought about the places he had been,
The accolades he’d hung upon the wall
In black and silver frames, advanced degrees,
Group photos from his days of playing ball,
His membership in nine societies…
With all of these and more he was undone
By forces far outside of his control
Accomplishments, hard-earned, now felt unwon,
Despair crept in and grappled with his soul.
He’d trade it all if he could ease her pain.
He hadn’t meant to make his daughter cry.
His life was lived too fully to complain,
Yet still he wasn’t set to say goodbye.
Categories
All
AADIL FAROOK
ALAN BERGER
ALEXANDRA BAFF
ANDREW HUBBARD
ANTOINETTE BOYD
APRIL MCDERMOTT
BEN GILBERT
BOB THOMAS
BRETT MORALES
BRIAN RIHLMANN
CAPTAIN RON PICKETT
CATHY BEAUDOIN
CHRISTIAN WARD
CLINT BOWMAN
CONSTANCE JOHNSON
COREY SHIELDS
DAVE EARNHARDT
DAWN RONCO
DHARMPAL MAHENDRA JAIN
DONNA PUCCIANI
DOUG HAWLEY
DOUG WESTENDORP
DR ANGELA JOHNSON
DR. HARMEET KAUR
EATON JACKSON
ENDA BOYLE
GARY MORSE
HALEY OH
IAN WENZEL-GARAY
JIM WOESSNER
JOHN BALDWIN
JOHN LANE
JOHN MURO
JON CARTER
JOSEPH VITO ROMANO
KELLY PINER
KEN ALLAN DRONSFIELD
KEONA GINGRAS
KIMBERLY WICKSTROM
LEO AYLEN
LOIS GREENE STONE
MARGOT HUGHES
MATTHEW MCAYEAL
NDABA SIBANDA
NGOZI OLIVIA OSUOHA
RANDAL A. BURD JR
RENA ROBINETT
ROBIN WYATT DUNN
RON KATZ
ROSALIND KALIDEN
SALONI KAUL
SANDRA CLOUGH
SHARON SINGLETON
SHOUNAK REZA
SPENCER GODFREY
STEPHEN MEAD
SUCHOON MO
S W BRACKETT
TONY OSGOOD
WILL NUESSLE
WRITER GO HYEE