MIRRORSI’d always been terrified of mirrors. I don't quite remember why, but it's been that way since I was a child.
Since I could remember, I've never had a mirror in my bedroom. I remember that looking into them as a teenager made me uncomfortable. I’d always assumed that it was because I didn't like the way I looked, typical teenage things like that, but it always felt like more. I figured, the only way to understand where this irrational fear came from, I’d have to ask my mother. Sitting in front of her, a hot drink in hand and our present conversation on the verge of lapsing into silence, I decided that there was no better time. “Mom.” I started, catching her attention. “Why am I afraid of mirrors?” She stilled for a moment and her eyes seemed distant, as though I sparked some long forgotten memory. This only made me more curious. “Well, you were afraid of what was on the other side.” Her words were careful, almost like she was searching for the correct words to say. I frowned, not fully understanding her meaning. “On the other side?” I repeated. She nodded. I scoffed and sipped at my coffee, strong but sweet washing over my tongue whilst my brain picked through her words, searching for clarification. “Must’ve been the aftermath of a horror movie.” I mused. Horror movies had been ‘my thing’ as a child and all through my teens. I still enjoyed them, only they were a little more terrifying now upon growing up and realising all the horrible things the world had to offer. Then I frowned, realising that my first horror movie had been something I’d caught on the TV when I was 6 years old. It hadn't scared me at all, in fact, I’d watched it at every opportunity I could. The problem was that I don't ever remember having a mirror in my room then, either. “That’s strange.” I muttered to myself. “What?” “Well, I think I was afraid of mirrors before I watched horror movies.” I told her, desperately trying to remember. My mother shrugged but didn't reply. I looked at the mirror behind her and placed my cup to the side. I stood and walked towards it, feeling her eyes on me the whole time. Stopping in front of the mirror, I stared at my reflection. There was a feeling of unease settling deep in my gut and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. A cold chill seeped into my bones. For some reason, in a house that felt so safe, with the woman that raised me, I felt so full of terror I could feel myself begin to shake. I shook myself out of it and turned my back to the mirror and walked back to my seat. My mother watched me carefully and I shrugged upon catching her gaze. “Nothing to see, it’s a silly little superstition,” I told her, carefully camouflaging my fear as indifference. The feeling I’d had stayed with me the rest of the day and as I returned home, I felt the unflinching feeling to go back to my mother, anywhere I wouldn't have to be alone. As I lay in bed that night I sifted through my memories, trying my hardest to remember what had caused such terror. There were flashes in my memory, moments I’d remember where the mirrors scared me, but none of them felt like the beginning of my fear. A noise from the bathroom startled me from my thoughts and for a moment, my heart leapt into my throat and I froze. After a few minutes of assuring myself it was just the cat, who quite enjoyed sleeping on the bathroom mat due to the warm pipes underneath, I eventually settled back into my thoughts. That's when it hit me. A brief memory of me as a child, still afraid of the dark. I used to leave the curtain open slightly so the streetlight outside could shine in. It used to shine against the pink framed rectangular mirror I used to have in my bedroom. My whole body tensed in fear and I felt my eyes tear up as I remembered staring at the mirror as something shifted, slowly crawling through the reflective surface and settling in the corner of my ceiling, watching me with bright eyes that shone in the dark. After that, I'm sure I put up quite the fuss against having a mirror in my room. I tried to calm myself down. I was a child and I'd most likely imagined it. I took a deep breath and rolled over in my bed. A sob choked me as I stared into those bright amber eyes, watching me from the edge of my bed.
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Kristina Brightharp is an alumni of Full Sail University, where she received a Bachelor's Degree in Creative Writing for Entertainment and was granted the honor of Valedictorian. She's currently making strides to break into the medical field, but she'll forever be a writer at heart. In her free time, she's an avid reader and artist, living in Queens, New York with her parents and two cats, Chloe and Blue. You can find Kristina on DeviantArt and Wattpad. |
Motel Party
While Donna quietly settled on the bed closest to the door, Jackie bounced on the edge of hers, lugging her backpack onto the mattress behind her.
“This is it!” she said, her smile bright as the sun as she looked about the space.
A 40’’ television sat atop a dresser across from them. Beside that was a desk and chair. On either side were the doors to a bathroom and a closet. She jumped up to throw open the ceiling-to-floor black curtains, exposing an enclosed balcony, complete with a table, two benches and a fake, potted plant.
“Fancy,” she said over her shoulder, her expression completely smug.
“Shall we get started?” Donna asked, peeling her jacket off.
“Right down to business, hmm?” Jackie said, dragging her bag towards her and unzipping it. She pulled out a bottle of champagne, biting her lip in anticipation. “Man, I really wish we would have gone for the hotel room.”
“What’s the point?” She went to the desk and opened its sole cabinet, pulling out a plastic bag of paper cups. “This serves our purpose just fine.”
“You’re just as boring as I’ve always known,” Jackie said, rolling her eyes as she snatched a proffered cup from Donna’s fingers. “I honestly thought it would be nice to do this with a bang. Act bougie for a night. We could have ordered room service, taken a luxurious shower together, dance and drink in our towels – out of real champagne flutes?”
“Are you delusional?” Donna asked, watching Jackie wring the cork out of the bottle with an aggressive twist. “Did you really think I’d do all that nonsense with you?”
“Oh, come on!” Jackie said, pouring herself a cup before passing the bottle. “There wasn’t anything special you wanted to do when you got here?”
“That’s what the cigarettes are for,” she said, pouring her troubles and placing the half-emptied bottle on the nightstand. She looked to Jackie, who was frowning at her, eyes narrowed.
“I thought we weren’t bringing the past with us,” she replied, her cup suspended at her side. “Not our nasty habits, or how much we loathe each other.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Donna said with a shrug. “I can’t fake it until I’m drunk.” A sardonic smile curved her lips as she held her cup toward the other. “That’s what the champagne is for.”
Jackie stared at her, her brow twitching with barely repressed hatred. Then, with a smirk that mirrored Donna’s, she raised her cup and toasted her, both women knocking it straight back. Each cup found their bodies looser and their demeanors more open. Soon enough, they were laughing like two timeless friends, embracing and clambering drunkenly against each other.
“The alcohol is gone,” Jackie said, her voice full of remorse as she upturned the third bottle, her tongue extended to catch whatever residue may fall. Donna seemed to sober considerably as she sat up on her bed.
“It’s time,” she said, and Jackie turned her head, leering toward her.
“I’m not ready,” she replied.
“Well, I am,” Donna said, standing and snatching the bottle from her. She smashed it against the nightstand, the sound jarring their ears. Carefully, she extracted the two biggest shards, handing one to Jackie, before going into her backpack and removing the two envelopes that contained their wills.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Jackie said, her face beginning to contort.
“Don’t you dare cry,” Donna said, her voice a hiss. Jackie’s face snapped back like a rubber band, her eyes wide, red and water logged. “We agreed we wanted to do this. We agreed it should be right here, together, because no one hates us more than we hate each other.”
“I really do hate you,” Jackie replied, the laugh that followed sounding more like a sob as a tear rushed down her cheek.
“I hate you more,” Donna said with a small, sad smile, bringing the shard to her throat. “Are you ready?”
Jackie mirrored her motion, staring her right in the eyes before she gasped. “What about your cigarettes?”
“Forget them. This was perfect,” she replied, taking a deep breath. “On three, okay?”
Jackie nodded, more tears marring her cheeks.
“One . . .” Donna said.
“Two . . .” Jackie replied.
“Three,” they both said. Donna’s eyes widened as she watched Jackie drag the blade across her flesh, her warm blood shooting across onto her face. Jackie watched Donna with the same expression as she choked on her own blood, realizing her betrayal as she finished the deed, the jagged glass falling from her hand.
“See you in Hell, Jackie,” Donna said, still in shock as she dropped her shard and leaned toward her, reaching into the backpack to retrieve her cigarettes. Jackie gaped at her, her gurgling filling the room. As Donna pulled away, she fell over to bleed out on the lavender scented floor. Donna stepped squarely into the blood soak, trailing it across the room as she opened the patio door and stepped outside.
It was chilly when she sat on the padded bench. Her eyes were full of tears as she brought a cigarette to her lips, lit it, and took a pull. Her hands shook uncontrollably as she stared at the walls that enclosed her, the smoke she exhaled drifting away on the breeze.
THE LITTLE RED FOOTSTOOL
“Dr. Gill and Sarah”
The plans and expectations people have upon coming to a small town often turn out to be contrapuntal, especially for educated city people. Each town has its own personality with each one being distinguishable among natives; but they have in common the smaller scale on which everything works. Initially charming, the scale forces new ways of looking and feeling that may grow either to be a comfort or a type of madness.
Dr. Bradley Gill had half-heartedly tried to adjust to his new life in Terkel, Texas, in 1943. He wanted the quick prosperity of a small town practice but was bored with his slender blonde wife, the twenty-bed hospital, the Plains landscape and most sorely his social life. Trim and well-formed at six feet tall with brown hair and eyes, his pretty forehead and cheekbones, dimpled chin and straight nose reminded some people of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was charismatic on some days and disheveled on others, and patients complained that he seemed distracted.
Like most doctors, he had experimented with drugs. Stimulants in pill form and by injection were used at the parties he had attended at medical school in Galveston and he still often injected himself in the morning to conquer the almost immobilizing narcotic of his ennui. But he was more addicted to the remembered stimuli of his love affair with a little woman with a hard body, dark hair and large, dark eyes. Sarah DesHotel had worked as a nurse in the hospital where he took his residency and he still thought of how she looked at him in the elevator one day, gazing up seriously yet with a mirth that made his palms and belly sweat.
They met at a party organized by older medical students. Sarah had attended regularly and met Brad at the first one he was invited to after transferring from the University of Texas in Austin. They saw each other again the next day and by midnight had a full-fledged love affair going. It was his first really passionate relationship and Sarah was pleased by his fervor. Sometimes he stayed overnight in her second story apartment near the Gulf of Mexico, where they left the windows open to the ocean breeze. Evenings, nights and mornings were not enough, so they met in empty rooms at the hospital.
His ardor began to subside after three months and when he told her in a studied lovers’ conversation that he had no immediate plans to marry, she distanced herself in favor of another doctor. He tried to revive the affair and she saw him a few more times; but in the end she said, “I like being with you, Brad, but this guy wants to get married. I got to look out for the future.”
He told her again he first wanted to establish a practice, but the truth was that he was uncomfortable with the idea, knowing his family in Fort Worth wouldn’t approve. He told himself as he left the apartment that it was just an affair that was over, but he felt more confused and disturbed than he had expected.
She had since been out of his mind for long periods, but in the tedium of life in Terkel she returned with more ferocity than ever. He dwelled on the memories of her low, uncultured voice, the heat of her breath and body, her breathy exclamations and the scents of her hair and perspiration. He thought about her in this mode for almost a year before calling her that summer.
Chapter Two
“Harry’s Wedding”
Sarah DesHotel of New Orleans was one of five children in the family of a merchant marine. She became a nurse for the purpose of marrying a doctor and went to Galveston for the medical school and parties. She was there for eight months, having two carefully considered but unproductive affairs, until meeting Dr. Gill.
She began with a rush but realized within a few weeks that he would not work out. She continued for as long as she could, risking trouble with the new resident, because it was her most enjoyable affair, Brad’s being quite handsome and newly or freshly awakened. She loved his contoured body and the way he savored her. She would not accept a man who wouldn’t give her what she wanted; but she submitted more thoroughly than she ever had, discovering new things about lovemaking and feeling
more knowledgeable and fulfilled, to have become truly the woman whom she had often been only trying to portray.
She let him go with some regret but more resolution because Dr. Harry Arnott became obsessive about her even before she took him as a lover. He was a little taller than Brad but pudgy at over two hundred pounds and plain with round wire-rim glasses and a brown felt hat with a short, flat brim. He had more of the proverbial “doctor’s look,” the slightly off-center, introspective mien suggesting highly developed sensibilities, than did Brad.
Dr. Arnott had done what was necessary, no more, to navigate the curriculum and was ready to take a wife, having denied himself until he was near enough to finishing that he would not be hindered. Not being smooth with women, he had hired prostitutes and inspected them himself to ascertain that they had no diseases, preferring them because he could get better looking ones than the women who were socially available. He had never thought he would become legitimately involved with a woman as pretty and passionate as Sarah. He knew money and social status were his part of the bargain but was happy to make the trade because apart from a culturedness he feigned more than possessed, he was an earthy man who liked coarse women if they were polished enough to put up a social front.
Sarah had hoped for a doctor like Brad but expected one like Harry. She committed to him after the overlap, teaching him to trust her, and they married the next year when his residency was over and he returned to East Texas to practice in Bosque (pronounced Bos-key), near his hometown of Cullum. His father had the best practice in Cullum, a town of thirty-five hundred to
Bosque’s fifteen hundred, and he planned to move back one day if it looked like he could make more money.
They had a grandiose wedding in the St. Barnabas Methodist Church -- the first event Sarah had thoroughly enjoyed since meeting Harry. She was the focus of hushed speculation as gossip circulated, but the prominence and power of the Arnotts was such that it was kept clandestine. Harry was considered to be marrying a trollop of some type and the event had an undercurrent of titillation because he had until then kept his randiness concealed in his hometown.
He sensed what kind of interest there was but didn’t care. He considered himself superior to the townspeople and knew Sarah’s pedigree would be less important in Bosque and obscure in ten or fifteen years. His relatives kept any dismay to themselves and greeted the couple with complete approval, partly because of the weight he carried as a new physician but also because there was a side of him that made disapproval of his choice unwise. He was normally cheerful and affected an easy-goingness, but he was a hater who, once alienated, could be intractable.
Harry LePoiner Arnott developed an emphatic and sometimes bitterly expressed enmity for the Japanese and Germans, but it was in a way disingenuous. His real hatred was for injuries to his pride. Unbeknownst to all but a few citizens of the state, he was, if sufficiently provoked, one of the most dangerous otherwise sane and productive members of the social upper class in Texas.
He had two sisters and was the only medical person in the family other than his father and grandfather. His dad, Dr. Anthony Arnott, had indulged him greatly because he showed an early interest and apparent aptitude that was for the most part faked. His mother, the half-French, red-haired Genevieve LePoiner of Houston, was often distressed by his behavior but left him more in his father’s charge. Harry knew he had abnormal emotions at times, but he never got into trouble and did not think of himself as a potential criminal. Indeed, with a modicum of luck, he might have gotten through life with his failings and vulnerabilities being no more than a family secret, as many men do.
Chapter Three
“New Orleans Romance”
“Sarah?” “Yes?” “It’s Brad.” “Uh. . .” “How’re you doing?” “Okay. How’re you?” Pretty good. I keep thinking about you.” “Where are you?”
“A little town in the Panhandle, Terkel.”
Brad’s call was welcome. Harry had been proffering a kind of conviviality that she tried to reciprocate, but his intensity and the dull small town had made her restless. She had often reminisced about Brad in the long, silent days in the big brick house and now her pulse surged in her head and made her slightly dizzy.
“I should have married you, Sarah.”
“Nothin’ we can do about it now.”
“I can’t forget you. I think about us all the time.”
“Brad.” She looked around, but of course Harry was at the office. She started to tell Brad she could not resume their affair, but she suddenly wanted to. Her body warmed and became more fluid and graceful as she stood there breathing slowly into the phone.
“Sarah?”
“Call me tomorrow. I need time to think.”
“I’m not asking you to give up anything. I’d just like to see you again. . . a few times.”
“Call me back.”
She asked the next day if he could meet her in New Orleans the next month when she visited her family. He said he’d contrive to. “Who did you marry, Brad?”
“A girl from Fort Worth. I’m fond of her, but we don’t fit like I thought we would.”
“You remember Harry.”
“Sure.” Remembering Harry was part of what gave Brad the confidence to call her. He had been cordial to them after the breakup but stayed away from her, not wanting to be rebuffed again. But he felt much superior to the other man and hoped the difference was by now reason for Sarah’s wry regret. “How’s he doing?”
“Okay. People been goin’ to Cullum to see his daddy, so they took right to him.”
She had originally thought Brad was unwilling to marry her because of her unculturedness and he would choose another woman in deference to his family of doctors and other rich people. She still felt as though she were somewhere below him looking up but now took heart in knowing she had a stronger hold on him, in an important way, than his wife.
Brad made the excuse of going to New Orleans to look for medical equipment and Sarah arranged to go for a couple of days during the week so Harry could not accompany her. Marty had left the previous weekend to see her family and Harry resolved to visit New Orleans with Sarah in the future.
Sarah saw her mother for a few hours to cover her trail in case Harry called but spent the rest of her time with Brad at the rococo Saints Arms Hotel. It was the most concentrated
debauchery either of them had ever undertaken. Brad brought stimulants with which they injected themselves periodically, balancing that with room service wine and whiskey. They went out to eat but were staring into each other’s eyes before the dinner was brought and cut short the outing to return to the room.
They broke away once a day to call their spouses and lie enthusiastically. Marty was nice to Brad, but Sarah thought there was a trace of malice in Harry’s voice. She went back to Brad smoothly enough but resolved to be careful when she went home.
It was the kind of extended other-worldly experience they had both long wanted. As much danger as there was in it, their time let them discover the “two become as one” phenomenon. In their debauchery as it should have been in their marriage, the difference between male and female was negligible. They were not themselves or each other anymore; they were one thing, more than double what they had been apart and less overwhelmed by the drugs, alcohol and carnality than by the revelation of one of the essential secrets of the universe, the power and beauty there is in the resolution of “a two.”
Even if Brad never wanted to marry her, Sarah was still glad she had done it. Paying critical attention to his eyes when he said he loved her, she thought maybe she was fooling herself, but it really seemed like he meant it. He was so enraptured that she could not imagine his ever letting her go again. They lay still for awhile before hunger overwhelmed them and they leaped up, laughing as they dressed, to rush to a streetside restaurant and eat seafood and drink chablis. They strolled through Andrew Jackson Park just after dark, stopped, embraced under the radiant moon and kissed. “I love you, Brad,” she said.
“I love you, too. This is romantic.”
He felt a strong attachment but had no intention of leaving Marty because his family would have disapproved and he planned eventually to go back to Fort Worth. What he loved was the eroticism. He took a genteel approach to sensual matters and treated Sarah politely, almost like a formal acquaintance, except in their intimate sphere.
He wanted one more time with her, but his flight was leaving for Dallas and he had to go right after they returned to the Saints Arms three blocks off Bourbon Street. She waved goodbye as he gave her a thumbs-up through the taxi’s rear window. She came down five minutes later to hail a ride to her mother’s big apartment near the Mississippi River. Brad was going to lay over in Dallas to rest and collect himself and she needed to do the same.
Chapter Four
“Home with Harry”
Sarah concocted a series of strategems and counter- strategems to use with Harry or that he might try on her. They seemed endless the more she thought about it, but she was just trying to be prudent and was not really apprehensive because she was prepared to leave if he ever threatened or hurt her. His idiosyncracies would have been less vexatious if he had not been so disturbed. She wouldn’t have been so susceptible to Brad if Harry had been more normal, she thought.
“Hi, honey!” she called to him behind the rope on the runway. He waved back, smiling artificially. He took her suitcase and hugged her sideways in a tentative, exploratory way that made her skin crawl. “I hope you didn’t mind me takin’ a couple o’ extra days,” she said. “It’d been a long time since I seen ‘em.”
“I didn’t. Been looking forward to getting you back.”
He goosed her under the arm by her breast, but she had braced herself and did not flinch. She fell asleep when they got home and he left for the office and she did not awaken until he gingerly woke her, naked and cuddling.
“Are you glad to see me?” she asked.
“You bet! I’m always glad to see you.” He did not know what was wrong with her trip but was suspicious. She had sounded nervous on the phone and stayed too long. But he did not want to believe she was two-timing him on so little evidence and would wait to be sure.
Chapter Five
“Unfinished Business”
Brad and Sarah rendezvoused twice more during the next year. They waited six months between times and resolved to make the third time their last for a longer period. Sarah started staying more at her mother’s and going to the hotel to see Brad, who even returned with some medical equipment to validate his story. Sarah took Harry with her between assignations to see her relatives.
Harry thought he knew what she was doing after the second trip and was certain before she was back from the third. Mulling his suspicions, he tried to think of whom she could be seeing. He had made her tell him her sexual history after they married. She had deleted parts of it, of course, but told him about Brad because she thought he might already know.
Harry called Brad’s office in Terkel when Sarah left for the second time and was told Dr. Gill was in New Orleans on business. He thought it could be a coincidence, but after her third departure and another report that Dr. Gill was in New Orleans, he was sure.
What affected him worst was the realization that both Gill and Sarah must see him as the less exciting, less attractive man. The thought of their derision made him feel hotter and meaner than he had ever felt. He considered going there and killing them but played the scene through in his mind and realized he did not want to kill Sarah, just Gill. His writhing brain told him he could only get even with Gill by killing him. The imperative to kill Dr. Gill had him grunting and making rhythmical movements like an animal in his big leather chair in the den.
Harry was pleasant and made light conversation upon her return, soft-shouldering the dark blue Buick out of Dallas and over the forest-sided roads of East Texas to Bosque. He waited until they were sitting in the den with drinks to say, “I know you’ve been seeing Dr. Gill, but I still want us to stay together.”
Sarah had been preparing for this and was not going to lie first and tearfully repent. “Don’t think I don’t regret it because I do. I won’t see him anymore if that helps. It’s over.”
Brad had finally told her he could not marry her. In their last hours together they stupefied themselves with liquor, two final injections and lovemaking in which Sarah turned her head. “I don’t know what to say,” she said, puffing a cigarette and sipping her drink. “I’m sorry?”
“You don’t have to say anything. Sometimes old flames take awhile to die out.”
“That’s all it was, unfinished business. I’d like to forget it if I can.”
“It’s already forgotten as far as I’m concerned if he’ll do one thing -- apologize.”
“You mean go see him?”
“I could get over it better. I won’t get mad.”
She had never been able to read him very well and was afraid he was being false. She couldn’t tell anything as he sat there placidly with one hand under his chin, bobbing his head as he talked.
“I’d rather not,” she said.
“I know, but you won’t have to do anything but call him. It would help me,” he said, patting her knee.
Eerie as it was, his being too nice was hard for her to be skeptical about because she hadn’t expected him to be conciliatory or even rational. She thought he might be playing some sinister game that she had to play along with without knowing what it was.
Chapter Six
“Something Maddening”
Marty Gill had long felt something maddening was forcing its way into her life. She was trying to disguise the intermittent depression she felt but thought it must be related to the war with the Germans being on the verge of defeat. Drs. Arnott and Gill had been exempted from service because they practiced in rural areas where there was a dearth of doctors. The phone started ringing at ten o’clock that night.
“Hello,” said Marty.
“Is Dr. Gill there?” Sarah asked.
“Yes. Honey!”
“Ask who it is.”
“Whom shall I say is calling?”
“Mrs. Arnott, Sarah.”
Brad had expected no more than some type of embarrassment if Harry learned of the affair, but he still did not want to take the phone to talk to Sarah in front of his wife. “They’re old med school friends,” he said, getting up. “I wonder what they’re up to now. Hello,” he said brightly.
“Brad, he knows.”
“Where are you?”
“Phone booth outside town.”
“Oh? What have you been up to?”
“He made me come up here. He wants to talk.”
“Right! I’d invite you to stay, but we don’t have the room.”
“Who is it, Brad?” Marty asked.
“Just a minute,” he told Sarah before shielding the phone and telling Marty, “They’re passing through on vacation. They’re staying at a motel here, old party friends,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Hello, Sarah?”
“He’s settin’ there watchin’ me. I don’t think he’s goin’ back unless you talk to him.”
“I’m sorry, Sarah. I’m bushed. Why don’t I come by in the morning?”
“He’s just gonna keep makin’ me call. I don’t think he’ll do anything but talk.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t make it tonight. Tell Harry next time. Good night.” He hung up.
“Harry Arnott,” he said to Marty. “He’s tying one on and wants me to drink with him.”
“Is he a doctor?” “Yeah, in East Texas. They’re on the way to New Mexico.”
“Go over and see him if you want to.”
“I really don’t. I’m tired. I don’t want anything to drink.”
Harry made Sarah call every fifteen minutes for an hour and a half and Marty had to keep answering in case it was the hospital. Sarah made each call more insistent than the last, finally making a reference to Brad’s med school reputation as a voluptuary to shorten the ordeal. Marty grew more and more distressed and prevailed on Brad to talk to Sarah again at half- past eleven after going to bed herself and getting up twice.
“Sarah, I don’t feel like going out.”
“Please, Brad.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I agreed with him, he deserves an apology. I thought you’d come.”
“All right!” he said, muffling his mouth with his hand. “But I don’t ever wanta see or hear of either one o’ you again!”
“Couple o’ miles out o’ town, Texton highway.”
He hung up, really perturbed and thinking he might just break old homely Harry’s nose. He can learn not to mess with me! he thought.
Chapter Seven
“Don’t Tell Anybody”
Just after midnight on that starry April night, Brad parked his gray Packard coupe behind the Arnotts and he and Harry got out into the sweet night air. There was no question of Brad’s punching Harry, though, because Harry unhesitatingly brought up a pistol and fired, shouting, “Don’t you know this is my wife?” The first bullet missed the left side of Brad’s head by fewer than six inches and the second almost hit him squarely in the belly button, going in an inch low and to the right.
Being a young man in good condition, he saved his life by not falling but running to his right away from the cars and into the darkness of the cotton field. With Sarah screaming and Harry cursing, the Buick whirled and shone its headlights into the field. Harry swept the field, urgently seeking Dr. Gill because he did not intend to leave him alive; but a car was coming down the two-lane asphalt highway and he left the scene.
With her terror when Harry started hunting Brad after pulling the big long-barrel police model .38-caliber revolver from under the seat and shooting him, Sarah was for the first time in her life so scared that she could not move or say anything. She was afraid Harry would kill her, too. She had seen Brad hit and thought he was dying. She didn’t realize Harry had made her an accomplice. She had seen Brad grimace, fall halfway to the ground and, face agonized and pathetic, stagger away. Harry
was holding the pistol in his lap with one hand and steering with the other as she gauged the distance in sidelong glances, gathering her nerve to try to grab it, when he said mellifluously, “I’m sorry, Sarah.” He turned and gave her what he meant to be a look of perfect compassion. “I didn’t want to deceive you, but I just had to get him and I knew you wouldn’t go along. I hope you know I wouldn’t hurt you. Can I put the gun up? I’m going to throw it away as soon as we get to a lake.”
“Hell’s bell’s, Harry, don’t you know we’re in trouble?”
“Maybe; we’ll get out of it.”
“I never thought you’d do somethin’ like that.”
“I’ve got plenty o’ money, lot o’ friends. I might do some time, but not much.”
“What about me?”
“You won’t do any time, Sarah.”
She sat stiffly as he turned on the radio, tuning in a favorite big band station, and stayed that way while he stopped at a lake near Ploughman to throw the gun in. They ate in an all-night restaurant in Early and were home, with his pushing the Buick haphazardly to eighty miles an hour as the night shortened, by daybreak.
Brad had run as far as he could and watched Dr. Arnott’s car, wriggling into the soil and pressing his right cheek down with his palms flat on each side of his head until the Buick left. He crawled out of the field on all fours, holding his abdomen and crying, and lay on the roadside until another car came and he hailed it, pushed up sideways on his right shoulder and feebly waving both arms and hands in front of and slightly above him. “I’m a doctor,” he said. “Some people robbed me.”
“What do you want me to do?” asked the motorist, a slick- haired salesman in a wide-lapel suit.
“Take me to the hospital. Don’t tell anybody.”
Chapter Eight
“Official Bi’ness”
He did not want to give the factual account of what had happened, of course. But after surgery and two days at Birdsong Memorial Hospital in Texton during which the attack was reported and became the subject of gossip over much of West Texas and parts of New Mexico and Oklahoma, Brad saw he couldn’t stay with the story he told at the hospital, that he had been out driving and stopped to help two men who shot him and fled without robbing him. Victory County Sheriff Tag Tankersley knew that was not the real story and on the afternoon of the second day cajoled him into telling the truth.
“If you know who shot you, you better tell me so we can pick him up. Besides that, you don’t want to perjure yourself.”
With great alarm, Brad thought he could have made up a better story if he hadn’t been so shocked and in so much pain. He felt absurd protecting Dr. Arnott. Who would have thought he was such a maniac? Along with recognizing the untenability of his account, he knew what the other man was now and was afraid he would try again. He told the sheriff who the assailant was but maintained he did not know why Dr. Arnott had shot him. He was in such emotional and physical anguish that he was blubbering in spasms of remorseful sobbing.
Hanging his head, Tankersley left to issue a warrant for Dr. Arnott. Marty met him in the hall and asked, “What did he say?”
“He’ll have to tell you. Give ‘im awhile an’ go in.”
“It was Dr. Arnott, wasn’t it?”
“You can get it from your husban,’ Miz Gill. Excuse me now. I got to go do some official bi’ness.”
She had immediately known what happened. She remembered the strained, peculiar conversations with Sarah, whom she knew only as a vulgarian and an emotional rapist, with disgust. Marty hated the scandal she knew was everywhere but regretted the personal aspects of it more. She was not surprised that Brad had had an affair. She was just sickened by its extraordinary salacity and dismayed that he had so publicly besmirched himself and come so close to being murdered. She had no familiarity with any of this and was bereft of her natural bearings as she went down the hall and into the room. “Did you talk to the sheriff?” Brad asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did he tell you?”
“I guess. . . I know.”
“I’m sorry, Marty,” said Brad, bowing his head and trying to regurgitate some of the remorse he had shown to Tankersley. “I must have been crazy, but good God!” He sobbed and looked at her with tears refilling his eyes.
He was in periodically excruciating pain and it grabbed him now, making him howl in earnest and prompting her to embrace him, crying and stroking his hair. She was normally a pleasant, hopeful-looking woman with well-shaped cheekbones, blonde hair cut short and big, wide-open green eyes. But it was not the natural woman who was talking to Dr. Gill as the warrant was going out for Dr. Arnott but the haunted, fragile one she had been evolving into that day.
“She said he just wanted to talk,” Brad said. “That’s all we thought he was doing. The affair was over. I won’t ever do it again. You won’t divorce me, will you?”
“Now is not the right time to ask.”
Chapter Nine
“The Couples”
Marty bore most of the scrutiny because Dr. Gill stayed indoors most of the time for two months. She hated her trips out
because of people’s expressions when they stared or stole glances. They looked so repulsive. She was discomfited but not embarrassed because she hadn’t done anything wrong. Brad’s parents evinced unflagging support, waiting for the uproar to die down and hoping it would one day be forgotten.
Being in a town like Terkel was in a way helpful because its few doctors were looked on as almost godlike by much of the citizenry and as too indispensable to be dealt with on an ordinary plane by the rest. Dr. Gill had patients not just in Terkel but from miles around and while he wasn’t as beloved as some had been, he was a competent physician and a usually congenial man who still held the sensitive place in people’s lives that doctors do. He found all he had to do was play “doctor,” be serious and businesslike, and he had no more than a few annoying remarks or questions, quickly or softly spoken, that he could easily ignore.
Sarah was charged with attempted murder a few days after her husband was arrested and released on bond. It was an event from which Marty, remembering Sarah’s remark that she knew how much Brad liked parties because she “used to be his girlfriend,” derived much secret satisfaction. Harry was going to be tried first and the district attorney told Brad he thought it would be a year. The Gills’ life calmed as the weeks passed and at times seemed almost irenic. Brad was very solicitous, fearing Marty would divorce him. Their little girl Katy was fortunately not school age, so they refined an insular, if somewhat brittle, new life.
Harry and Sarah passed their time similarly, but Harry was cheerier than Brad and Sarah glummer than Marty. Their tack
was that they were in Bosque all the time and did not know why the Gills were making such accusations. Dr. Arnott told it around town that Dr. Gill was a drug addict and must have been shot by some underworld character. He said Dr. Gill and he had been rivals for Sarah and he won, fomenting Dr. Gill’s enmity. By saying Dr. Arnott had shot him, Dr. Gill could cover the seedy truth. The Bosqueites of course took the Arnotts’ side and their support made it easier for Sarah. What bothered her was that she saw the same looks on people’s faces that Marty did. It was a situation people in neither place knew how to deal with. It was disturbing but fascinating because the people understood, regardless what they said to the principals, what had happened.
The Gills were nominal Methodists who only went on Easter and Christmas, but the Arnotts were First Christian Church members who attended weekly. They found religion useful to mollify their image and listened in an ostensibly attentive way but with total self-absorption one Sunday morning as the bushy white-haired Dr. Marshall Menzies preached on the availability of inner peace. Invoking Philippians 4:8-9, he said, “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things. The things which ye both learned and received and heard and saw in me, these things do and the God of peace shall be with you.”
Chapter Ten
“He Don’t Squeal”
The fifteen months between the shooting and trial were a kind of solstice. The Gills turned to each other with a desperation that made them closer and more comforting to each other than ever while the Arnotts indulged in experiments that, not surprisingly, Harry found more enjoyable than Sarah. Brad was anxious to prove himself and please Marty at levels he had never taken the trouble to reach. She responded and her spring-wound cleaving engendered a new tenderness in him. They dreaded the trial but looked forward to its aftermath as a time when the ordeal would be over.
In their concentration on each other as a form of security, Brad introduced Marty to the things he most enjoyed. They left Katy in Fort Worth and vacationed in Santa Fe. She did not need liquor or drugs, but he persuaded her to let him inject her in the motel room as they drank and laughed through the hazy interludes. She understood better now what made him happy and would do anything to put more certainty into their lives, although she found drugs and alcohol a hindrance.
Harry knew Sarah would not leave him now so long as he didn’t get too rough. She had been charged, too, and needed him to pay her legal expenses. With his new confidence, he coaxed her into letting him tie her up and put her in hiding places around the house. Giggling and baby talking, he would look for her as though he did not know where she was, covered with a black cloth. He liked to tie her on the bed and once made her threaten to leave by getting out a new .38 he had bought. For a long time, Sarah did not understand her life anymore. But with her cooperation, Harry started to behave normally more of the time. It was a strange rapport from which they took a perverse
comfort. Really hurting her would not have fit into Harry’s mode of reason, but not letting Dr. Gill win out, no matter what the cost, made sense. If he were convicted and imprisoned, that would again put Gill one up in their humiliation contest.
No one in town questioned his defense, but the real core of sympathy was not based on their acceptance of his account. It was on the perception of him as a justifiably enraged cuckold. Many felt that, doctor or not, he had responded in the proper masculine manner. Some told him they remembered seeing him in town that day. Others said to his discouragement that they had seen his car parked outside his home all afternoon and night and volunteered to testify that he could not have been four hundred miles away in the Panhandle. His story was that Sarah and he had taken a ninety-minute drive that late afternoon and early evening and his attorneys did not want to put any obvious liars on the stand.
Harry took a call one day at work from someone whose voice sounded familiar but who requested anonymity. It sounded like a man named Ritter whose family he treated and who had just gotten out of the penitentiary after serving two years for stealing lumber in a neighboring county. “There’s a guy in Dallas could help you,” the voice said. “A pro, real coldblooded.”
“Oh? What’s his name?”
“Tex Wilkie. You can get ahold of him through his brother, got a garage.”
“A professional, you say?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I don’t know what I’d need him for, but I appreciate it.”
“I know him. He don’t squeal.”
“Oh, he doesn’t?”
“Naw.”
Harry thanked the man and hung up. He was near the end of the day and had sent his nurse home. He leaned back with a daydreaming look and thought of his trial, a month away. He had been less hopeful because the Gills were going ahead with their testimony. He would have let it drop if he had been exonerated, but he thought, Gill is healthy and happy again, probably doesn’t even know the difference. His people’ll back him like mine do me and they’ll convict me. The trial would in Terkel.
Harry thought Gill would not be alive and about to send him to prison if he had used a professional killer. The conversation he had just had was convincing and he found himself, as when he had raised the pistol to shoot Gill, mechanically and somewhat surrealistically picking up the phone, getting information and writing the number of Wilkie’s Garage in Dallas.
He felt it would be naive to think he could start arranging it that easily, but he was sure that if what he had been told was true, Tex Wilkie’s brother would not betray him. The brother must provide protection, he thought. He was confident the call
had been from an ex-convict who told the truth as he knew it because there was real advocacy in his voice. He had thought of asking him to make the contact, but that would have been too risky. He wanted to make the call but was afraid it would be too unconventional in the criminal world and be discounted. He sat back and thought of everything that had happened, sharpening his fighting mood and trying to clear his mind and make it agile. Then he relaxed and smiled, thinking, I’ll ask my lawyer about this man. That’s the kind of thing lawyers are good for.
Chapter Eleven
“Tex”
Tex Wilkie was proof in the living flesh that rather than being anything, evil is more essentially the absence of things. His was a real killer’s look, not the demented one that sometimes came over Dr. Arnott but the insouciant, mildly chuckling one that says, I know secrets few people know and what you think is awesome is really more like a joke.
He was five feet, nine inches tall with sandy blond hair, dark blue eyes, long, full features and tight, waxy skin. He had weighed one hundred eighty-five pounds when he shot it out in 1943 with a Blackland County deputy on the Texas High Plains, trying to kill a man scheduled to testify against him in a burglary case; one sixty-five after jumping furlough and one-fifty or less at times when in jail. More average-looking in his healthier forms, the skinnier he got, the more reptilian he looked. His eyes became more prominent with hard, dark pupils and flat lids across the tops so he looked like what he was, a human snake.
The people most afraid of him were those who knew him best: criminal associates, relatives, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends and lawyers. One who had represented him often was Ronald “Jelly” Barnes, who regarded him as “a man who has no feelings.”
After breaking into the underworld as a gunman in the Texas and Louisiana bootlegger wars of the 1920s, Wilkie prospered as a burglar and killer, specializing in dynamite-rigging cars. He only had convictions for assault, attempted murder and burglary, but the Texas Rangers estimated he had killed more than twenty people, mostly other hoodlums.
He had attended Texas Baptist College in his hometown of Corsairs in Southeast Texas for two years with the ambition of becoming a physician. He worked in various jobs at the medical school and during three years in prison was a valued nurse and operating room assistant, learning the use of chloroform for the later purpose of knocking out burglary victims.
Wilkie was drafted out of college in 1917 but did not go overseas to fight. He never returned to school but took to the criminal lifestyle and at forty-six had had no more than minor convictions and incarcerations. He was one the most feared criminals in the state in knowledgeable circles but had been so polished that he never got much publicity and was not seriously sought after when he failed to appear at the end of his sixty-day furlough for treatment of a leg wound inflicted by the deputy. He was in Dallas with a barmaid who was not known as one of his women. He’d been hoping for work when, two weeks before Dr. Arnott’s trial, he learned Harry wanted to meet him.
Harry had hired a lawyer in his East Texas hometown of Bosque and top Dallas criminal attorney Hal Harrison after shooting Dr. Gill. He called Harrison ostensibly to talk about his case and asked about Wilkie, saying a friend had told him the man would be a likely choice if Dr. Gill hired someone to kill him. The lawyer confirmed the gravity of anything pertinent to Wilkie and gave Harry a sketch of what he knew.
Harry took his Sarah with him to meet Harrison and called Wilkie’s brother Jack from the hotel. He surmised he would be taken more seriously if he related his legal trouble, so he told Jack Wilkie he would go on trial for attempted murder in two weeks and would pay well “for a job.” He left his number and Tex called that night.
“Dr. Arnott,” he said pleasantly.
“This is Tex,” Wilkie said in his softly modulated voice.
“Uh, yes,” Harry said, smiling at Sarah. “I was wondering if we could talk.”
Wilkie told him to park fifteen yards past the gate at the Pearly Gates Cemetery at ten o’clock. He arrived thirty minutes early, stopped nearby and hid behind a monument. He had called a lawyer he knew in Texton after setting the meeting and learned there was such a case about to be tried. He was sure it was legitimate, so to speak, but wanted to look Dr. Arnott over first.
Harry arrived, emerged and lit a cigarette, illuminating his face. It would be risky, but Tex wanted a big pay day so he would not have to work for awhile. He did not smoke, drink heavily or
gamble except for small stakes. He’d never been prone to waste money because it was one of the things he liked best along with expensive clothes, good cars and easy-going, closed-mouth women. He perused the richly attired physician and his heavy new car and knew this would be his biggest score ever. He moved through foliage and approached Harry from around a corner in the road with a composed expression but with eagerness in his heart like a teenage job applicant.
“Doctor,” he said with a deliberate lilt, not offering his hand out of deference.
“Yes!” Harry held out his hand and warmly shook Tex’s. “Shall we get in the car?”
They settled into the Buick and sat silently with Tex looking out the front and Harry glancing at him. “Should I tell you about the job?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s Dr. Bradley Gill in Terkel, Texas. I shot him and he’s fixing to testify on me.”
“Has he got a family?”
“Wife and a kid.”
“How old is the kid?”
“Little, shouldn’t be a problem.”
“The woman?”
Harry paused. “Do you think it’ll be necessary?”
“Could be.”
“Do it if you have to.”
“Do you know where he lives?” Wilkie asked.
“Never been there.”
“I’ll find it.”
“The fee?”
“Fifteen thousand in advance.”
The amount surprised Harry. He had brought part of it and would have to borrow the remainder, having depleted his bank account for legal fees. But he didn’t argue because Tex never identified a client, no matter what the pressure.
“A doctor is bound to bring heat. I may need a lawyer. Once I’m paid, I never contact you again.”
“Well, I guess you get what you pay for,” said Harry, pulling an envelope from his coat. “I’ve got five thousand on me. Can I meet you back here with the rest?”
“Any time,” said Tex, taking it with a light heart and agreeing to meet in the cemetery in exactly a week. “Any preference on the time?”
“After the trial in two weeks. It’d be too obvious if we did it before.”
“How long after?”
“Any time. The sooner, the better.”
Chapter Twelve
“The Night of His Return”
Harry still might have called it off if he had been acquitted because he knew Gill’s murder would cause a furor and he would be widely blamed. He had little hope, though, and thought it best to deal decisively with Wilkie while he had the chance. His blood lust was up and while he would have written off the money with an acquittal, he was better prepared to see it through to the logical conclusion. At the end of his reasoning, he still felt the other man deserved to die. He met Wilkie in the cemetery again and gave him the money in one hundred dollar bills in a spare doctor’s bag. “When do you think it’ll happen?” he asked.
“Two or three weeks after the trial. I don’t like to work too fast, but I’ll do it as soon as I’m ready.”
“Well,” said Harry, offering Wilkie his hand. “Good luck.”
Tex disappeared into the cemetery and Harry backed out and started home. Feeling more placid than he had in a long time, he clicked on the radio and hummed to Whispering Jack Smith’s “Crazy Rhythm” as he drove south out of town. Tex had wanted his money in advance so he would have no trouble collecting it and to leave it with someone he trusted until the heat was off. He certainly didn’t want to be caught with it and lose it.
Conducted in the week of the Tehran Conference and thus upstaged by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, the trial went as Harry expected. Brad said Dr. Arnott had shot him but maintained he didn’t know why, although he testified Harry had shouted, “Don’t you know this is my wife?” and left no doubt of the motive.
A half-dozen Bosqueites swore Harry was in town at times when it would have been impossible for him later to have driven to Terkel. Dr. Gill’s wife Marty said a woman identifying herself as Mrs. Arnott called numerous times that night and forced Dr. Gill to meet her on the Texton Highway. Neither Harry nor Sarah took the stand.
The jury deliberated for two hours and came back with a five- year term. Harry took care not to look vindictive, standing around the courtroom and in the hall outside and commenting for all to hear, “Well, I’m not too surprised. I figured we’d lose up here in Dr. Gill’s home territory. We’ll reverse it on appeal.”
The Gills were in extreme discomfiture throughout the trial and left immediately. “I guess we’re lucky he got anything,” said Brad in the car.
“Do you think she’ll get anything?” Marty asked.
“The DA doubts it.”
Tex drove to Terkel from Dallas five days later and never got out of the car except to check a telephone directory at a service station for the address. He drove at twilight to look at the Gills’ beige-blond brick house on the city’s nicest street, six blocks west of downtown, and the dark neighborhood. He stayed just long enough to get the layout and visualize his movements for the night of his return.
Chapter Thirteen
“The Little Red Footstool”
To Francis “Tex” Wilkie, it was just another criminal adventure, albeit the biggest of his life. He took a few days to spend some of the money and stayed in Blackland a hundred miles away. He put up in a cheap hotel and contacted a garageman whom he had known for a long time, Blackie McNeese. McNeese well knew what Wilkie was but knew he was a professional who would protect him. McNeese had a teenage son from whom Wilkie bought a pair of black tennis shoes and he came back at night when no one was in the garage to buff the tread off. Tex had a former girlfriend who was living with an ex- convict he knew and he arranged to rent one of their cars, a 1940 black Ford, for Thursday night. The couple knew Tex was using them to advance a criminal enterprise, but it had been a long time since anyone who knew him had told him “no” about anything. Knowing his reputation better than anyone, he used
his easy charm to smooth his operations, approaching politely, smiling often and making quiet, wry jokes to soften the effect.
He had supper at a cafe near his hotel and lingered over coffee and the newspaper, the Blackland Pictorial. He went for the car at eight, parking the tan 1939 Dodge he had borrowed from his brother, and drove south at a leisurely pace. He had called a woman in Houston the day before and said he would see her in two days. He chose her because he had used her in a killing four years earlier and was certain, based on her dummied-up response to officers then, that she would tell investigators nothing. He got into Terkel at ten-thirty and drove southeast toward Texton to kill another thirty minutes. He timed fifteen minutes and headed back, enjoying the car’s peppiness.
The alley behind the house was as dark and quiet as usual when he wheeled slowly into it from the east. He shut off the ignition and coasted to a stop, opening his door. He sat there to see if anyone would investigate, but no one showed. He had stopped between the Gill house and the one next door so the people in each might assume he was visiting the other. He had taped the interior light switches flat inside the doors and there was no light when he got out wearing the tennis shoes and carrying Dr. Arnott’s bag with his burglary tools.
Tex circled the house again and again, peeking into windows until he was sure everyone was asleep and the child would not wake up. He found an unlocked window and stretched to push it up far enough to get his head and shoulders through. There was nothing outside to boost himself off and he had to jump, catch himself on his arms and look in through the curtains. In his most athletically demanding feat of the night, he came down on the
windowsill on his belly and grunted to himself, straining fiercely to maintain silence. Right under the window was a red footstool with a scowling blue cat’s face across the top. He looked around the room, saw the five-year-old girl sleeping in her bed and then saw the footstool. It was a foot high, so he got it and dropped back to the ground.
He put on rubber gloves, not surgical gloves but thicker laboratory worker’s gloves, flesh-colored and snug. He wanted to move with dispatch now that everything was in order. He set the footstool and stepped on it, jumped, put the bag in and wriggled slowly through the window and onto the floor. He lay there for a minute, listening, and only heard Katy’s breathing. He sat up meticulously and then got up and moved into the hallway. He opened the bag and put on his mask, which covered his whole head with slits for the eyes and mouth. He took out his heavy short barrel .44-caliber revolver, closed the bag and carried the pistol in his right hand and the bag in his left.
He passed a bathroom on the left and knew the open door at the hall’s end was the doctor’s bedroom. His eyes adjusted to the gloom with the pupils crowding out the irises. He made out Brad’s face on the other side of the bed and moved deliberately around; but coming within six feet, he stepped quickly, pressed the muzzle between the beatifically sleeping eyes and pulled the trigger. Marty awoke in a state of perfect emotional suspension, started to rise and was hit hard in the head. She could not rise again but, though essentially unconscious, was terrified at the most basic level and started moaning and making agonized movements as if having a nightmare.
Tex put down the bag, took out a roll of packing twine and began wrapping Marty to Brad. He wrapped and wrapped until he did not think she could get loose. He didn’t finish her because he was wearing the mask and she could not identify him. It was just a commercial job and he would not do any more than the contract called for. Marty kept moaning and moving slightly, tied tightly Brad back to back. Tex had stepped into the shadows by the dresser when he heard the little girl.
Katy had awakened when the gun went off. It was plenty loud enough to wake her, even muffled by her father’s head. She toddled in in her white nightgown, sucking her thumb, and the man in the mask grabbed her. He opened his chloroform bottle and carried her into the hall, opened the closet, pushed her in and splashed the liquid on her. “Don’t, don’t!” she cried, fighting with her arms. He piled clothes, laid her on them, closed the door and returned to the bedroom.
Marty was quieting down and becoming part of the gruesome bundle. Tex watched for awhile and realized with the little letting-go he sometimes felt that she would die, too. He put everything into the bag, went into Katy’s room and closed the window. He peered outside and went out the back door. Looking all around, he ran in a dog trot to the car, turned on the lights when he was out of the alley and met one slow-moving farm pickup on his way north out of town.
Katy woke up at seven a.m., opened the closet and went in to see her parents. At first she could not understand. Then her eyes got bigger, popping out more, her mouth opened wide and she just stood there looking. The incredible look in her eyes was still there years later. The conventional description would be that it
was horrified, but it was more than that. If you had looked right into her eyes, you would have seen that something had been murdered in there. Wilkie had been merciful in his way, but the worst murder took place in those flashing instants as the innocence in Katy Gill’s beautiful blue eyes throbbed, shrank and died.
She thought of going to a neighbor lady’s, reared back, slowly whirled to the open door and walked stiffly through the hall to the kitchen door. Mrs. Chumley was outside getting her newspaper and saw the child coming across the lawn. “Katy, is something wrong?” she called. Seeing her expression, the woman asked, “What in the world?” Something caught her eye above and to the right of the little girl’s head. It was where Tex had left it, standing with its red oak legs pressed into the dirt: the little red footstool.
Chapter Fourteen
“Big Daddy”
Tex gunned the Ford to eighty and better most of the way to Blackland and switched cars. The Dodge was a souped-up number he knew would run relentlessly and he drove it hard through the night to reach Houston by noon Friday. He stopped on a bridge at Tonkawa Creek Reservoir south of Corsairs and dropped in the bag with the burglary tools, gun and tennis shoes, cutting it with his knife to make it sink. He had told the woman, a skinny but buxom dark-haired creature named Ronni Dale, that he might need her for an alibi. “Sure, Tex,” she had said. “You know you can count on me.”
Sheriff Tag Tankersley was unready for the Gills’ bedroom and left when he felt the nausea. The child was taken by Dr. Gill’s parents and Tag shut the house after the bodies were removed. He had interviewed Katy, recognized chloroform was used and called the Texas Rangers. He checked the alley and made casts of partial tire prints, but the alley was hard and the prints were indistinctive.
Ned Tomes was in his middle fifties and known, among other things, for having been among the half-dozen lawmen who ambushed Bonnie and Clyde in Louisiana in 1934. At five foot- ten and mostly bald with a small pot belly, he still played the part of a Ranger with elan. With the rest of the Bonnie and Clyde party, he had fired and fired his high-powered rifle at the small figures in the car and done his duty as well as the others. But it was with disgust that the pair had created the necessity and at length he found it so disturbing, especially the day and night of waiting and the banshee death screams of Bonnie Parker, that it made his face look even more like the death’s head it already had resembled.
Tex had not presented a threat to the public like Bonnie and Clyde, but the Rangers had discussed making an all-out search for him when he disappeared following the Blackland shootout. But they had had greater priorities and they circulated a notice that he should be picked up if his whereabouts became known. He was a high-grade criminal but a low-grade fugitive who until then had never killed anybody that they knew of but other shady characters. Some lawmen may be prone to a level of friendliness with well-known criminals who play the game intelligently and with a little humor and some had that kind of relationship with Tex.
Alerted by the report of chloroform, Tomes had two top investigators leave Austin and Texton for Terkel while he directed the hunt for Tex and other suspects. Ronni Dale’s name came up with twenty other Wilkie associates. The Rangers fanned out to check them all and by nightfall found her apartment. She was at work and Tex did not answer the door. They found the bar she worked at and Ned was called in Austin when she told them yes, Tex was staying with her. They took her back, but he had left.
Tex was glad he was in Houston because he wanted to go to a nightclub he knew, Big Daddy’s. He left ten minutes after the Rangers and took a cab. He was comfortable with Gene “Big Daddy” Cromartie, having let his hair down there two or three times. He had rarely been a heavy drinker but had considerable experience with drugs and once or twice a year would drug himself into oblivion by injecting heroin or a powerful pharmaceutical like a post-operative sedative if no heroin was available. He didn’t do it often enough to be an addict and took care not to let it become a regular habit because he would have then had less credibility as a killer.
He went in and waited for Big Daddy because the six foot-six, two hundred-ninety pound black man could procure the heroin and two or three attractive women. He still had seven hundred dollars of Dr. Arnott’s money and flashed some to motivate the bartender to send for Big Daddy.
Cromartie had been a nightclub man for most of his life and killed a couple of men himself. Tex and he locked eyes across the table with a look of what could only be described as mutual dark
knowledge. “Well, sir, what can I do for you this evening?” he asked, shaking Tex’s hand.
“Aw, I want some action,” said Tex. The juke box churned out rhythm and blues as men and women danced, drank and talked. “Girls, heroin, clean needle.”
Big Daddy filled Wilkie’s requests along with a case of beer, some trucker’s pills and an untraceable nearby motel room, having been told he was on the run. Tex usually had either booze and women or drugs because the drugs were so powerful, but he wanted everything at once tonight. He took a big shot of heroin at nine and a smaller one at three in the morning. He took pills to get from getting sleepy and the hazy, liquid experience of the drug never nudged him toward sleep. The beer tasted good because he was dehydrating and needed fluids. The room was sultry but reasonably well-furnished and comfortable.
It must have been the beer that did it because that was what he had the most of after three-thirty. He didn’t typically drink a lot because a number of times he had gotten drunk and come close to killing someone when he did not want such a reaction. He killed a half-dozen black people and Mexicans on mean drunks in the early ‘30’s and evaded punishment each time either by covering it up or because it was easy for a white man to get away with killing minorities in those days. At a little after five, he got out his lock-blade knife and grabbed the nearest woman by the hair.
The others looked at his brutal expression as he held the knife to Regina’s throat, pinking holes in her neck with the hot-sharp
tip and making her bloody. They had thought he was a mean- looking old man but were used to rough people and had had no indication he would get violent. Screaming and hitting with their arms, they fought each other to get the bolted door open and were further panicked by Wilkie’s crushing up behind them and stabbing their backs and hips as he held Regina in his left hand, grunting like a beast.
The first two women opened the door and escaped. Not deeply cut, Regina broke away with a desperate application of strength, leaving a ball of hair in Tex’s fingers, and ran faster than she had known she could, falling on the far side of the driveway but bounding up to find Big Daddy.
Cromartie knew who Wilkie was but knew he only had a knife and looked at it about the same as he would have with any old crazy dude. “Mister Tex?” he called through the open door. He had a .44 Derringer and he had been a boxer and might let him lunge, sidestep and clip him with a little knockout punch. “Can I come in?”
He nosed into the room and saw Tex standing on the other side where the beer was, drinking with the knife nearby on the floor. “I didn’t hurt anybody, did I?” Tex asked.
“Naw!” Big Daddy asserted, smiling. “They all right.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Whatta Ya Heard ‘Bout ‘Ol Hoodle?”
Ronald “Jelly” Barnes was one of the best lawyers in Texas. Six foot one and fairly trim with dark curly hair and a Boston
Blackie mustache, he thought so hard and yet so fluidly that people could watch him think, moving his face and body and using his skills in a constant flow. He was a flawless courtroom tactician and an imaginative and moving speaker with a dominating presence. But as such attributes may, Jelly’s drew as much opprobrium as praise. He was hated by lawmen, the families of his clients’ victims and various other law enforcement-minded people because he was so often successful, in their minds, at thwarting justice. He took it with studied bemusement and a little grief, knowing, even if no one but his wife and other attorneys seemed to, what he was. He was obliged to make ethical allowances at times, but he was a lawyer, not a criminal, and it was regrettable that so many people didn’t appreciate the difference.
Barnes was the first to learn whom Tex had given the money to. Tex never mentioned the man except when Jelly needed money and Tex would have the lawyer contact him. Tex had left fourteen thousand dollars in cash with a man he had known in the Huntsville prison, now a wheat farmer in southwestern Oklahoma, Hoodle Jones.
The Rangers got Ronni Dale to admit she had not seen Tex until mid-day after the crime. They traced him to Blackland, the garage and the borrowed car. The alley tread matched the tires, but it was a common type and the casts weren’t good enough for court. So they could not prove he had been in Terkel. A particularly offended Terkelite offered to testify he had seen Tex in a cafe there that night, but the Rangers did not believe him.
They were further flummoxed by Ronni Dale, who disappeared with determination and some evident imagination,
taking a few belongings and vanishing from Houston and, as far as the Rangers ever knew, from the earth. They made unsuccessful searches for her before each of the three trials.
They knew Wilkie had done it; they just couldn’t prove it. He never testified, but his statement to investigators was often repeated in the newspapers: “Boys, I have an alibi, but I can’t say who I was with that night because she’s a married woman.” The juries of hard-faced farmers in Terkel, Favorite and Whittle Nock over the next three years knew he was guilty, too, twice giving him the death penalty and the last time life. But each time, the state appeals court in Austin looked at the evidence and kicked it back.
The tormented Tomes drove himself through nights and weekends and even in his dreams. He whipped and lacerated himself to drive and drive, concentrate and push, think of nothing else until by virtue of his suffering new evidence would emerge, Tex Wilkie would be convicted and executed and the world would again be in order. He sat down after supper one night, got halfway up, made a half-cry to his wife in the kitchen and died, pitching over sideways with a final moan over the case.
They made Tex do hard time all right, keeping him in the air- tight new county jail in Blackland and basically on a bread and water diet for four years. Jelly protested, but the jailers always stayed just within the rules. Tex responded toughly and didn’t complain. The sheriff and jailers harbored the hope he would break and admit Dr. Arnott had hired him, but he was a pro and that would have abrogated his whole history and whatever future he had left. He was still Tex Wilkie and that would have made him nothing. Because of what he had done and because they
knew his convictions wouldn’t stand up, they never let up on him. They saw it as loyalty to the Rangers and Ned Tomes, so they had him under one hundred-thirty pounds and looking snakier than ever when the third appeal finally came down and Jelly got him out on bail.
Tex was down to a level not even he had known he could reach. The days, months and years had been a fog of interminable discomfort and hunger, aching bones in the seemingly always cold cell, no cellmate and no one visible for hours on end, nothing to read, no cigarettes, no time outside in the fresh air, a chicken wire bed with no blanket, no mattress, no pillow and a bucket to defecate in that went unemptied for days.
It was a different Tex than had ever existed whom Jelly faced on the morning he got him released on ten thousand dollars’ bail. The authorities were saying they’d try him a fourth time, but the delay would be longer and the bond denial was no longer tenable. “Whatta ya heard ‘bout ol’ Hoodle?” Tex asked, moving from side to side but keeping his eyes on the lawyer.
Jelly shrugged, gauging his client’s response, and said, “I heard he bought three new combines.”
Tex said nothing, did not react at all except that astonishingly, as pale as he was, he turned even paler.
Chapter Sixteen
“Hoodle and Tex”
Tex was on the loose and out of control like he had never been. They gave him back his lock-blade knife and he was going
to gut Hoodle like a steer in his own living room. The news that Hoodle had betrayed him made something pop in his mind so that now, though maintaining an outward calm, he was on the attack in as blindly destructive a fashion as a bullet hawk or a fighting bull. He was so focused on reaching and killing Hoodle that he took no precautions at all.
Nobody ever knew if someone tipped Hoodle or if he was just edgy and watching. Whatever the reason, chubby little Hoodle Jones was ready when Tex flung open the screen door that morning and came in moving fast and stiff-legged like a monster. Hoodle was scared of Tex but was a tough guy himself, an ex- shotgun man in the bootlegger wars, and he knew that anybody, Tex included, would die if they walked in with him aiming his double-barrel sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun. Squatted behind the cocked hammers and big barrels when Tex came in, he was like a boxer dispassionately delivering a one-two. He put one charge in Tex’s chest and the other in his face. The buckshot reversed Tex’s direction and blew him back into the screendoor. He fell onto his left side on the back of the doorway over the concrete porch.
Hoodle was overjoyed in his white frame house ten miles west of Big Toe Lake and twenty-two miles north of White Buck, Oklahoma. He could imagine his ghoulish fate had Tex gotten the drop on him. Wilkie’s reputation was such that Jones only had to say he saw him coming and didn’t know why Tex wanted to kill him to be exonerated. Throughout the tri-state region among lawmen and criminals who had crossed Tex and woke up in a cold sweat, the news was absorbed with exquisite relief and even pleasure, including at the dinner Jelly Barnes took his wife Georgia to that night.
Nine months after killing Tex, Hoodle opened his dynamite- rigged mailbox and died even faster. Whoever it was used a method that explained what it was about because Tex had pioneered in Texas the practice of dynamite-rigging cars.
The Arnotts kept to themselves and resurfaced only once more. The charge against Sarah was reduced to “aiding in the commission of a felony,” for which she paid a fine and received a suspended sentence. The appeals court waited two years to reverse Harry’s conviction because Judge Errol Nix had erred by allowing a distant cousin of Dr. Gill’s onto the jury. He was retried another year later, anticlimactically after Tex’s death.
Smiling often and laughing with his lawyers, Harry coasted through the trial, having only to contend with the Gills’ affidavits, and got two years. He had taken care to bely the accusations in every way he could in Bosque and after nine months in which he helped to run the prison hospital and spent his free time painting landscapes, he returned to Bosque and Sarah.
FIRSTBORN
Beth left her home and her parents at seventeen and moved to the country. It was her first spring in the canyon, and she thought there had never been such a beautiful day. The new green leaves on the cottonwoods by the creek looked fluorescent in the sun and the red canyon walls against the blue sky looked like a postcard. Through the window of her trailer, she saw several trees with flowers near the main house. Maybe it was an old orchard, but she couldn’t be sure. She didn’t know one tree from another, much less what a fruit tree looked like.
She was in love and had no doubt she’d made the right decision, in spite of what her parents said. Leaving them to live with Caleb and his family on the ranch had been like wiping the slate clean and starting over. Why she’d needed to start over at seventeen was another matter.
She dreaded telling her parents she was pregnant, but Caleb was excited about it. He’d started pestering her to move as soon as she broke the news. Her infatuation with Caleb began when she started high school, but he was a year ahead of her and seemed unattainable. She’d heard that Caleb brought sheep to the Sale Barn on Saturdays, so she started going there for lunch with her friend Gail. After many bowls of green chili stew, she finally caught his eye. Now that her dream had come true, she wanted to do all she could to make him happy.
Caleb’s parents, Isaac and Rebecca Tucker, had been kind to her since she’d arrived. Caleb was their oldest child at eighteen, and they had seven other children, so there hadn’t been many long conversations. In fact, there’d been no mention of the pregnancy yet. Food was not plentiful at their ranch, and she worried about the Tuckers having to feed yet another arrival.
Caleb and Beth lived in a rusted, white one-bedroom trailer across the way from the house. The Tucker house had been built a hundred years ago and didn’t look big enough to sleep seven children and two adults, but somehow, they made it work. The main room had two long tables that took up most of the space. When all the family came in for dinner at the end of the day, everyone grabbed a folding chair from the stack in the corner.
The Tucker family labored from sunup to sundown on the ranch, and most of the work was centered around the crops and the animals. There were water gates which controlled the roaring flow in the main ditch which then led to the cross ditches. A complicated system of lesser ditches followed, finally ending in hundreds of small rivulets providing water for the acres of grass and alfalfa. Much time was spent getting the water to flow the right way. Sometimes Caleb was out there with a shovel all day.
The younger children took care of the animals. There were chickens, goats, and sheep to feed, horses to grain, and cattle to hay. Two spotted pigs ran wild, and large birds called guinea hens flew from tree to tree. There were assorted cats and dogs; some with names and some just referred to by their color.
She tried to do her part. When she’d struggled to milk the cow, five kittens had gathered round. One of them climbed in the pail and got sprayed by the one small trickle she finally coaxed from the udder. The kitten licked its fur and waited for more, but Beth was unable to produce it with her small hands. Caleb said not to worry because milking was hard and there were plenty of easier chores. She was disappointed because she’d always wanted to milk a cow.
Beth had a lot to learn. She found that even the simplest chore like gathering the eggs could be difficult. One morning a hen had pecked her hand and drew blood when she tried to get the eggs from her nest. Beth could see from the steely look in the hen’s eyes that there was no moving her, so she went back to the trailer with only a few eggs to show for her labor. Caleb laughed, went back, picked up the squawking hen and found twenty eggs underneath her. He told Beth all about broody hens when they got back.
Her favorite dog was a Rottweiller-mix named Gus. He let the five kittens climb all over him and go to sleep on his back and across his shoulders. She’d taken a picture with her phone and sent it to her friend Gail in town.
Everyone she knew lived in Cortez, a town on the border of the Navajo Reservation, where Beth grew up. Beth and Caleb both went to Cortez High School, which was thirty miles from the Tucker ranch in McElmo Canyon. Cortez was a small town with two hunting stores across the street from each other and a few bars and pawn shops on the periphery. McElmo Canyon was right underneath the Ute Mountain and one of the oldest settled areas in the region.
Beth’s father was an archeologist, originally from Denver, who worked exploring the Native American ruins in McElmo Canyon, and her mother taught American history at the high school. Beth had grown up with discussions of ranchers, public lands, and Native Americans at the dinner table.
Her family hiked on the weekends, but Beth was disappointed they didn’t camp. They had a sheepdog briefly, named Dusty, who Beth loved when she was a child, but they weren’t able to housebreak him so they gave him away. She never felt her parents were totally comfortable with animals or with the outdoors.
When Beth first started dating Caleb, her mother made an appointment so she could discuss birth control with a doctor. Her mother even picked up the birth control pills from the pharmacy every month and left them in Beth’s room.
Beth punched them out and flushed them down the toilet since Caleb didn’t want her to use them. She was happy to go along. She figured that way she would have him forever.
Her parents shed lots of tears when she told them she was leaving. They were standing in the kitchen making breakfast when Beth finally had the courage to tell them she was moving. It took both of them by surprise.
Her mother, who was usually so calm and collected, said, “You’re crazy! You can’t possibly want to do that.”
Beth said, “I’m not crazy. I want to live with Caleb.”
Her father said, “Moving to the Tuckers is a terrible idea. They’re religious fanatics who barely eack out a living. If they didn’t have land, they’d have nothing.”
Her mother wept and her father tried to comfort her. Beth was surprised to see him crying too. He took off his glasses to wipe his eyes.
Eventually, her sad parents finally accepted the inevitable. They even volunteered to give her one of their old cars so she could come back and visit. She felt guilty driving away and wished she had a sibling so they’d have somebody else to worry about when she was gone.
After the move, Beth decided to limit her time with her best friend Gail to only their classes, because she didn’t want anyone to know she was pregnant. Gail asked lots of questions about Caleb and the Tuckers because of their reputation for being backwards and religious, but Beth was so stingy with information that she finally gave up. Gail even asked if she could come and visit the ranch, but Beth said she needed to get to know the Tuckers better first.
Gail and Beth had been best friends since grammar school. They both loved animals and dreamed of having farms when they grew up. Gail was excited to come with Beth to the Sale Barn on Saturdays because she loved to walk around the dirt stalls to look at the sheep and the cattle. They carefully chose the clothes they were going to wear ahead of time. They pulled on Wrangler jeans, wore Carhart shirts, and tried to act like they belonged.
It felt awful to have such a big secret, but Beth figured it was going to be easier for everybody if she kept the pregnancy to herself. That way, when her parents asked questions, Gail could be truthful when she said she didn’t know the answers.
Beth wondered when her parents were finally going to realize that she was living the life of their dreams. Why couldn’t they see that the Tuckers were American history? They had waist-high caves on their ranch where their ancestors hid from the Indians, eating grass and hunting prairie dogs for weeks at a time. And the Native American ruins that her father studied stretched out right behind their fences.
The Tuckers belonged to a religious sect called the Church of the Firstborn and didn’t believe in doctors or the modern world. All eight children had been delivered by their father Isaac at home. Actually, there’d been nine children. The last baby got stuck, and after Isaac pulled him out, he was only able to move his head. They tried hard to keep him alive at home, but he died after only one month. Rebecca spoke often about the loss.
Beth knew about the home delivery and baby’s death before she’d ever talked to Caleb. After the baby died, the news traveled fast from the Sale Barn. People felt it was a tragedy that didn’t have to happen, so it was common knowledge in no time.
Beth and Caleb hadn’t discussed where she was going to have the baby yet.
One morning, Beth was absentmindedly looking out the trailer window at Gus with the kittens on his back when she noticed one was missing. She went outside and looked for it everywhere, but it was nowhere to be found. When she mentioned it to Caleb that afternoon, he said a coyote or a mountain lion had probably gotten it. Beth found that hard to believe since she thought the dog would have raised a ruckus if a mountain lion or coyote were inside the fence.
Over the course of a week, three more kittens went missing and she was distraught. She searched for them all over the farm and mentioned it to Caleb, but he didn’t seem too interested. Gus wasn’t too bothered either. The one remaining kitten seemed not to notice and continued to sleep on his back or in the crook of his leg.
The next week, Caleb came in laughing and said, “I figured out what was going on with them kittens you’ve been worrying about. Gus has been eating them himself. I saw him chomp down the last one this morning on the way to the barn.”
Caleb was a big, handsome young man with his mother’s brown eyes and olive skin. That afternoon was the first time she’d seen his father in him; a hard, defiant man determined to be as tough as any Tucker who came before.
At the beginning of May, there was much discussion during the family dinner about going to ‘sheep camp’. From what Beth could gather, they needed to move the sheep up to the mountains where it was cooler in the summer and there would be more grass for grazing. Some of the Tucker family was going to herd the sheep up there on horseback, a trip of thirty miles that took several days. And some would go in the truck with the supplies and set up camp in the high meadows.
Beth was too nervous to ride a horse that far and had never herded anything in her life. She also figured it wouldn’t be safe with the pregnancy. She pretended to be just as excited as the rest of them and secretly wondered about where you went to the bathroom and where everyone would sleep.
The land in the Rockies where the Tuckers had their summer grazing rights had been the same for over fifty years. These were different from their ditch rights, which set down in writing how much water the ranch was allowed. Since water was sometimes scarce, it was a constant topic of conversation. The Tucker ditch rights took precedence over almost everyone else in the canyon since the family had lived in the same place for so long.
Every rancher was responsible for taking care of the fences on his summer grazing land, so his livestock stayed where they should. He was also responsible for maintaining his portion of the ditch, so the water flowed freely. Those who didn’t were bad-mouthed and threatened with guns.
Beth had figured out this much so far, but she often got confused during the heated conversations about who did what to whom.
She rode in the truck with Rebecca and three of the boys to the sheep camp. They towed a horse trailer full of supplies down endless dirt roads, each with a steeper bend than the one before, and finally arrived at a meadow near the top. It was covered in blue Columbine flower and red Indian Paintbrush, and the white aspens formed a wood of shimmering leaves on the far side. The simple cabin and fire pit were dwarfed by the towering Rockies behind them streaked with spring snow.
The first order of business was to check the fence before the animals got there. The bottom two strands of barbed wire needed to be tight because the sheep were notorious for escaping and getting into trouble. Isaac always said that sheep were born looking for a place to die.
Beth set off with confidence to check the fence, following it for a long distance until she found a strand of broken bottom wire. But how could she describe where it was located when she didn’t even know which direction she was facing or what field she was in? She wandered back to help Rebecca unpack the truck. She didn’t mention the broken fence because she figured someone else would find it.
She asked Rebecca, “Where’s the bathroom? Inside the cabin?”
“Come with me,” Rebecca said. They walked over to a tree that had a deep hole covered by a toilet seat behind it. “There are two of these. The other is over there,” she said and pointed to another small tree. “You can always find them because you’ll hear the flies in the daytime, and you can smell your way to them at night,” she laughed.
“And does everyone sleep in the cabin?” Beth asked. Her bathroom and bedroom in the trailer had changed in her mind from seeming sad to seeming luxurious.
“Oh no. No one does. There are way too many mice. They’d run over you all night long, not to mention the snakes. We sleep outside in sleeping bags this time of year, right near the fire, so we don’t get stomped on by a bear.”
In the late afternoon, the rest of the Tuckers rode in with the sheep. Ellie, the youngest at six, was excited because she had ridden in front of Caleb on his horse all the way for three whole days. When she gave Beth a kiss, Beth noticed that the scar on Ellie’s forehead, from falling off a horse last year, was red from the sun. Beth winced remembering the story of how Isaac made Ellie lie down on the kitchen table and stitched her up with a needle threaded with dental floss. Rebecca said Ellie was so brave she didn’t even cry.
Isaac told Rebecca that herding the sheep along the roads went pretty much as usual, with one of sheep getting injured on the way. He slit its throat, then Rebecca and her daughters did the butchering to cut it into smaller pieces. Isaac took the boys scouting for wild herbs, and they cooked the sheep with the herbs for supper over the fire. Beth had a hard time eating it after watching it die. She told herself that it was more honest than buying it from the grocery store, but she still had no appetite for the meat. She ate a few bites, put the rest in her napkin, and threw it out with the plate.
The family sat around the fire in the moonlight after dinner and told stories about this trip up the mountain and all their memories from the trips before. Gus came and leaned against Beth’s legs. She patted his head, but it was hard to feel the same about him after he’d eaten all those kittens.
Caleb grabbed Beth’s hand and announced, “I want everybody in the family to know we’ll be adding another Tucker in just a few months. Beth’s pregnant!”
Various shouts of Congratulations! and Hooray! followed. And Samson, the brother closest in age, got up to shake Caleb’s hand. Beth smiled with relief. She knew it would be a different story when she finally told her parents.
Rebecca said, “This is a miracle. I was so sad when my baby Gene died after only one month in this world. A grandchild will be a blessing and will help heal our loss.”
During the summer Beth’s pregnancy got to the point where hiding it was no longer possible. It was her first summer without any air conditioning and an unusually hot one at that. She’d started wearing low cut jeans and peasant shirts, but no matter what she wore, her clothes stuck to her sweating stomach.
Gail sounded happy when Beth called and asked if she wanted to meet at the Dairy Queen for ice cream. It was a place where they used to hang out, and Beth was dying for ice cream.
Gail looked worried when Beth told her she was pregnant. “You’re not going to deliver out there are you?” she asked as she licked her cone.
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet,” Beth said. She couldn’t believe how good the ice cream tasted. The freezers were so stuffed full of meat, there was no such thing as ice cream at the Tucker ranch.
“I watched my mother have Ben when I was little, and I still remember how painful it looked. At least in the hospital, you’d have medicine if you needed it. Caleb may want you to have the baby out there, but he’s not the one who has to do it. You are.”
“I’ll think about it,” Beth promised Gail and headed to her house to see her parents. The driveway and front garden looked so pretty and well-organized when she drove up. And the one-story, wood paneled house was spotlessly clean inside. It seemed so quiet and cool with the air conditioning instead of the noisy fans in the trailer. Her parents met her at the door with big hugs. She could tell they both noticed her stomach.
Her parents weren’t surprised when she told them, so it wasn’t as bad as she had expected. But when Beth admitted she hadn’t seen a doctor yet, they went ballistic.
“No way,” said her father, jumping up from the couch.
Her mother said, “Beth, pregnancy can be really dangerous if you don’t know what’s going on. You have to see a doctor. I don’t want you to take any chances.”
Beth said, “Everything feels fine to me.”
“But you don’t know for sure. In the old days, lots of women and babies died during birth without doctors. And I heard it took hours for Isaac to pull that last baby out. I can’t imagine how much pain Rebecca was in,” her mother said.
Her father said, “Honey, Isaac has no experience compared to a real doctor. You see what happened the last time—the baby died. You should get better medical treatment than a cow.”
Beth told her parents she would think about it just like she told Gail. She was being totally truthful because the baby’s delivery was all she’d been thinking about lately. She didn’t know how to tell Caleb she was too frightened to see what God had in store for her on the Tucker kitchen table, especially when, as far as she was concerned, there was good help right in town.
A month before she thought she might be due to deliver, Beth didn’t feel the baby move for an entire morning. She decided to drive the hospital to make sure everything was okay. She knew Caleb was out in the fields and wouldn’t miss her. Nor would anyone else around the ranch since she was so useless with most of the chores.
When Beth heard the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor, she couldn’t stop crying. The nurse ran down the list of routine questions and was alarmed that Beth didn’t have a doctor. When Beth said the words Church of the Firstborn, the nurse gave a nod of resignation and asked, “Would you mind having a doctor look things over? It would be a lot safer for both of you.”
Beth said that she’d be more than happy to have that happen, but she had to be home by five so no one would know about the visit. The nurse said she would do her best to find a doctor who could come right away.
By the time Beth returned to the ranch at five, she’d had all the routine pregnancy bloodwork, an ultrasound, and a pelvic exam. She now knew lots of things that she hadn’t known before. She knew that the baby was healthy, that it was probably due on the date she’d figured, that it was a boy, and that his head was not at the bottom of her stomach as it should be, but he was in the flipped around breech position.
That night after dinner, Beth sat at the tiny kitchen table in the trailer peeling the loose strips of orange linoleum off the side and wondering what to say to Caleb. When she heard him come out of the bathroom, she said, “I need to tell you something.”
He came in and sat down, worried it was bad news.
She said, “Everything’s okay, but I went to the ER today because I was worried. The baby stopped moving and I panicked.”
“Why didn’t you come and get me?” he asked.
“It didn’t seem safe to walk that far if something was really wrong. I was so relieved when they said the baby looked healthy. It’s a boy.”
His eyes teared up.
“There’s one other thing,” she said, “The baby is bottom first and the doctor doesn’t think it’s safe for me to deliver at home.”
Caleb said, “The doctor was going to tell you it wasn’t safe whatever happened. That’s why we don’t see doctors in this family.”
“I know,” Beth said, “but while I was waiting, I called my mom. She and my dad agreed with the doctor, and they’re my family too.”
Caleb looked stunned. He said, “We have our babies at home around here.”
Beth said, “I’m sorry but I’ve made up my mind. I’m scheduled for a C-section next week,”
“Unlike those fancy doctors in town, my father can actually deliver a breech. He’s done it plenty of times with the sheep, and it’ll save you an operation,” Caleb said.
Beth stuck to her guns and won the argument around midnight.
Caleb was in the operating room for the delivery. Despite his previous objections, the scrubs, mask, and gloves really seemed to suit him. He watched the surgery with interest and was proud to help the pediatrician cut the umbilical cord to its proper length when the baby was in the bassinet.
The baby boy was beautiful, and they named him Daniel. He had Beth’s full mouth, Caleb’s dark hair, and eyes so dark they were almost black. Caleb was the only Tucker who was ever at the hospital, but Beth’s parents were there every day. It was the most time they’d ever spent with Caleb. The three of them were polite to each other but they didn’t have much to say.
Since the birth happened right before Thanksgiving, Beth decided to take the rest of the school year off and restart after the Christmas break. When she got back to the trailer from the hospital, she missed her mom’s help and everything the nurses did for her. It turned out she had no better luck getting milk out of her own breasts than she had with milking the cow.
When Rebecca saw little Daniel, she told Beth that she was astonished at how much he looked like Gene, the baby she lost. The Tucker family passed him through nine sets of arms when Beth brought him home.
Rebecca was disappointed when she found out Beth was bottle-feeding. And she was adamant that Beth use only natural remedies for pain, so she’d be sure to wake up when Daniel cried at night. Isaac found cause to mention that babies belonged in cribs, not in bed with their parents like he’d heard some lazy young people had them now.
Daniel was always hungry, so Beth trod back and forth to the kitchen all night to warm the bottle then feed him. Her incision hurt worse with every step, and she wondered if it was ever going to get better. Occasionally, she took Extra Strength Tylenol in defiance.
Since the baby didn’t have a fixed schedule, no one else did either. Beth’s catchup sleep often happened around the time Caleb woke up, so he started having breakfast with his family in the main house. The trailer refrigerator was almost empty since Beth wasn’t able to drive to town to get food. And Caleb was only interested in playing with Daniel and left all the work to her. She often wished he’d feel sorry for her and give her a hand, even if his old-fashioned religion said it was ‘women’s work’.
Rebecca was too busy to be able to help Beth in the trailer during the day, but she said that Beth could always bring the baby to their house when she was tired. Beth wanted to be as self-reliant as the rest of the Tuckers, so she didn’t ask for any help.
The trailer was poorly insulated, and the wind blew through it in the winter. One day when Beth was feeding Daniel, she looked up from their pile of blankets and saw a three-legged cat looking for food. She grabbed a piece of cheese and called to it from the door. It sprung up the steps and came right inside.
She wondered if one kitten had escaped after Gus had only eaten a back leg. The cat finished off two slices of cheese, settled itself in the blankets, and purred when she rubbed its ears. When Caleb got back from feeding the cows, she told him the cat would help get rid of some of the mice in the trailer. Caleb said, “That cat couldn’t catch a mouse if it tried.”
The cat caught so many mice during the day that Beth lined them up on paper towels to show Caleb when he got home. He said a three-legged cat should still be put down, and Beth was just wasting cat food. One of the reasons she loved Caleb was his quiet competence around animals. She hadn’t known it also included cruelty. The cat was gaining weight so fast Beth wondered if she might be pregnant. She pitied her if she was.
As soon as she could drive again, Beth took Daniel to town to spend a day with her mother. There was a fire in the wood stove, and the smell of coffee cake in the air made it feel like heaven. The kitchen seemed huge to her now compared with the one in the trailer. It had so many cabinets and full-size appliances. She sat down in her old chair and dug into the coffee cake at the big wooden table.
Her mother fussed over Daniel and encouraged Beth to take the day off. She spent most of the day in her room looking at old photographs and sleeping. She’d never noticed how comfortable her bed was before. She pulled the quilt up, snuggled down into her pillows, and was happy to have nothing else to do.
When Beth went back to school, Rebecca volunteered to take care of Daniel while she was away. Sitting in classes seemed hard at first because Beth missed both the baby and the cat and the naps they took together. Seeing Gail again cheered her up, but when Gail talked about things like football games and parties, it seemed like another world to Beth. She wondered, even more than before, what relevance school could possibly have to real life.
As time went on, Rebecca became more and more attached to Daniel and earnestly believed he was the reincarnation of little Gene. When Beth mentioned to Caleb that his mother’s belief seemed strange, he said, “Reincarnation is one of the main things we believe with our religion. Having faith in God’s healing and staying away from doctors is another. And we always give birth at home, no matter what.”
“I guess I failed you on the last two,” Beth said.
Caleb said, “We weren’t surprised since you weren’t raised as one of us.”
Getting the ditch ready to start irrigating the fields in the spring was such a big event that Beth took a few days off school in March to help. Everything was as beautiful as her first spring in the canyon. The same trees bloomed by the main house, and the sky was the same brilliant blue. She felt different though. Her childhood innocence was long gone, and she knew it would never come back.
As numerous as the Tuckers were, they still needed extra help for burning the ditches after the winter to get rid of any growth that might slow down the water. They needed enough men to form three crews: two men in front with propane torches to set the fires, a few behind them with equipment to stop any fire that got out of control, and a clean-up crew in the rear to remove all the burnt debris. The women were generally left to run messages back and forth since the work was so rough.
At the break of dawn, four Navajo men, who helped burn ditch for all the ranchers up and down the canyon, showed up. They tested the propane torches to make sure they had enough fuel and were working well. Caleb went out to get everyone else set up so they could finish before noon when the wind usually started blowing.
Beth left Daniel with Rebecca after his morning feed and joined them. She found Caleb and his brother Samson walking in the ditch to clear out the charred grasses, and she followed alongside them. There was hardly any wind that morning, so the crew advanced quickly with only a few stray fires to tamp out along the way.
Caleb said to Beth, “Will you go and tell Mama that we’ll be ready for lunch around noon? And let her know that the four Navajo want to stick around since they like her food.” The two Navajo on his crew turned around and gave him a thumbs up.
Beth walked quickly and was happy to feel useful. She was almost to the house when she heard the screams. She ran back to the field and saw Caleb thrashing on his back with convulsions. Samson was trying to hold him down and move any dangerous equipment out of the way.
“What happened!” she screamed.
“He just ate a bite of one of them wild carrots Daddy showed us growing up at sheep camp last time we were there.” Samson handed her the root.
One of the Navajo men looked at the root and said, “He’s going to die.”
“No, he can’t die! cried Beth, stuffing the root into her pocket. “Try to get him as close to the road as you can. I’m going to run and call an ambulance.”
The hospital said that it would take at least thirty minutes to get an ambulance there, since the ranch was twenty miles from town. Beth decided to take him instead. She jumped in her car and drove to where the road came closest to the field. Caleb’s convulsions were so violent that, in the struggle to get him over the barbed wire fence, everyone got cut up.
The noise from the backseat was unbearable. Caleb thrashed around and screamed out at times, and otherwise moaned like he was in terrible pain. Samson did his best to keep Caleb from hurting himself. “Stay here! Just keep living!” he cried. About halfway to the hospital, Caleb stopped making any sound at all.
Beth asked, “Is he okay? Is he better?”
There was no answer from the back seat.
“Is he okay?” she pleaded.
Samson sobbed, “I think he’s passed.”
Beth stopped the car. There was blood everywhere, Samson was crying, and Caleb was pale and totally still. She put her head on his chest and didn’t hear his heart beating, like she usually did at night before they went to sleep.
Samson said, “Please take him home. We don’t believe in doctors and they can’t save him now.”
She turned around and drove back to the farm.
When they got back, the whole family came running to the car and cried out in grief when they saw Caleb had died. They carefully lifted his body from the car and took him inside the main house.
No one paid much attention to Beth so she went inside the trailer. Still in shock, she did a quick search on her phone and identified the root as wild hemlock. It was so dangerous that you shouldn’t even touch it. Why would Isaac not have known that? How could he have told his sons it was an edible wild carrot when he had never eaten it? She threw it as far away as she could outside the back of the trailer and washed her hands.
Isaac called the men in the canyon to help him dig a grave and made a simple wooden coffin for the funeral the next day. Rebecca washed the body and dressed Caleb in his best clothes. Beth brought the clothes over to the house from the trailer, but she wasn’t able to help. She was so upset that she couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Caleb’s body another time, even though it might be the last. She cleaned the blood from the inside of her car instead.
She called her parents to let them know what happened. They wanted to come and get her immediately, but she was too exhausted. She told them that the funeral was tomorrow because the body needed to be buried within twenty-four hours in the ranch graveyard. She promised her mother she’d be okay, and she’d see them at the funeral after she got some sleep. But she couldn’t sleep.
Daniel stayed overnight with the Tuckers because Beth didn’t feel safe taking care of him. She knew it was better for everyone, but she’d never felt so alone. Nothing felt real without Caleb there. When she sat at the trailer kitchen table with its peeling linoleum, it felt like she was in the middle of nowhere. She wondered how she was going to go on with her life without him.
The next day everyone gathered at the lonely corner of the ranch where the Tuckers had always been buried. The older graves had engraved stones with simple names and dates. The more recent ones, like baby Gene, had only carved pieces of wood because stone had become too costly.
They lowered the wooden box carefully into the grave with ropes. The men in the Tucker family then covered it and packed the soil, while the rest of the family and friends sang Amazing Grace. Beth was too upset to sing so she stood in silence. She was surprised when she looked up and saw her parents joining in. Her mother was wearing a dress and her father had on a dark suit. They looked so out of place that it seemed strange they knew the words.
Isaac read a passage from the Bible, then Rebecca spoke.
“Caleb was such a special soul that I’m sure he’ll be reincarnated soon, and I hope I’ll be able to meet him again before I die. God gave me one miracle when he brought back my baby Gene as baby Daniel, and I give thanks every day when I see his angelic face. I know I shouldn’t be asking for so much, but this family has seen its share of tragedy and I know God has mercy. I pray to Jesus that we all see Caleb again before we leave this life. We will all miss him so much.”
Afterwards, her parents asked Beth if she’d like to come home for dinner and to spend the night. She went to the trailer to grab some clothes and hugged all the Tuckers before she drove away. She took the cat with her and left Daniel with Rebecca.
Despite her parents urging, she never went back.
Shauna Gilligan is a novelist and short story writer from Dublin, Ireland. Her short fiction has been published both sides of the Atlantic including The Stinging Fly. Her latest book, Duality, with artist Margo McNulty is an exploration of shrinking buildings and land memory in The Curragh, Kildare. She enjoys hosting writers and artists as part of her "Writers Chat" Series at https://shaunagilliganwriter.com/ |
TINA, TINA, TINA
The man who had introduced himself as Donal, pulled himself up to a sitting position on the lounger, pushed his sunglasses back on his head.
You live on a farm? He repeated.
Tina knew by the look on his face that he’d guessed she was no longer in her thirties. He was probably wondering how she – at her age – could run a farm. She adjusted the lime green bikini top that was a little on the skimpy side and smoothed down the sheer black kimono that partly covered it.
Yes. A farm, Tina said loudly. She pulled her dyed black curls into a low ponytail and said, but I don’t keep many animals. It’s just hens now. Chickens. She didn’t tell Donal how they were company, or the hen named for her followed her around and stood by the clothesline when she was hanging out the sheets, how the same hen, when she cuddled her, made soothing noises like the purr of a cat, and visibly relaxed in her arms.
Donal looked distracted before asking her who was looking after them while she was – and here he laughed and leaned in closer to her – lounging around in this Lanzarote paradise?
Tina felt the blush rush up her neck, crowd her cheeks. She glanced around the hotel pool. In the corner six young women, all curves and gleaming skin, were sucking colourful cocktails through transparent straws. Tina recalled the women she’d seen in Penneys. Snatching bikinis of many hues, grabbing something flowery to go over them. She supposed that they wanted to display themselves in triangles of colour but also hide beneath layers of flowers. After watching them, she’d plonked three bikinis, size 16, into the grubby mesh basket. Yellow, pink, and lime green. Now she plucked at the thin line of latex and cotton digging into her chest. What she wanted was to be unremarkable. And to be unremarkable you had to be the same as everyone else.
So? Donal said, poking her arm with his square fingers. What about those hens?
She laughed. My hens are fine. The neighbour, John-Joe, is taking care of them.
John-Joe. Donal said, raising his eyebrows. Sounds like a match made in heaven.
He sounded American, Donal did, the way he turned what he said into a question, or the way it seemed like he’d made up his mind about her before she’d even explained who she was. But he hadn’t left her for the women in the corner, and he was the one asking questions.
She shook her head. No, she said, there’s no match there. He’s my parent’s generation, well, if they were still alive. John-Joe likes the hens, understands them.
Donal apologised for being such a city boy. I’ve been in New York for the last thirty years, and am Dublin bred so, well, what can I say, I’m a city slicker.
Tina knew it was her turn to ask the questions. Why had he left New York? Was he divorced? Her mother had constantly reminded her that there were social norms she had to engage in. That was, if she didn’t want to be left alone, or to die on the farm and have the hens pick out her eyes and the cats gorge on her insides. Yes, mammy, she’d said. Now she sat up straight and looked right at Donal’s face.
Isn’t it difficult for you living in Ireland after all those years in New York?
He ran those perfect hands through his silver hair, short back-and-sides, and let out a long sigh. Well, he said. My parents died within weeks of each other so I’m living in my childhood house, a good area of Dublin. It’s actually not that difficult.
Tina looked at his chest, the entwined curls of black and white hairs, the toned muscles, the creases on his neck that spoke of age, and a life well-lived.
He reached out and took her hand. May I?
She bit her bottom lip, nodded.
Am I ruining the mood? Shall I continue my story?
Yes, she said. Continue, I mean.
So – and here was that sigh again – my father was nursing my mother – she had cancer – and he called me to come home. They’d said she had a week left and, well, of course I came home. Stopped my life, got the first plane to Dublin.
Tina nodded and stopped biting her lip. Here they were, two adults – older than every other guest in this hotel it seemed – who had been orphaned in the same month. And here they were, in this sunny resort in the second week of February. She leaned closer and was glad when he did the same.
So, you can imagine what happened, he said.
Yes, Tina said, I can. And you know why? Because the same thing happened to me.
She wanted to smile – had she found her soulmate? – but knew that was the wrong thing to do so she looked down at her legs. They were covered in goose bumps though she didn’t feel cold.
He let go of her hands. The same thing? He reached back for his orange coloured drink that had become diluted and dull in the heat. He took a long drink and licked his lips.
Not precisely the same thing, but my mother died just last month and my father a few years ago so –
–so that’s not the same. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he raised his voice. My father had a heart attack on Christmas day, and my mother struggled on for two weeks in palliative care. Everything was my responsibility.
You don’t have siblings? Tina whispered.
He shook his head.
She felt her stomach flip. Another thing they had in common.
I was their only child. He scratched the back of his head. I guess I always knew that when I returned, it would be to death. He looked up. But what can I do, now, Tina, except to live a little?
Live a little, she whispered, yes, that’s what you have to do now.
That evening Tina was first to arrive for dinner. She smiled at the handsome waiter who pulled out her seat. He moved to take her shawl. Her slip of a black dress was such a snug fit she’d had to go without a bra, and she was suddenly conscious of the tiny straps which were fraying at the edges. She pulled the white shawl in towards her chest.
Oh no, gracias, she said, tengo frio.
The waiter smiled politely and said something she didn’t understand. Probably agreeing that the evenings were chilly this time of year and that Señora was right keeping her shawl wrapped around those fine shoulders.
Sonia, the hairdresser, had told her that people go on trips to heal their grief. It was Sonia who’d also advised her on bikinis and recommended her own beautician. Now Tina wiggled in her seat, thanking God that the redness on her bikini line and legs had finally disappeared. She’d screamed when the beautician pulled the strip away from her skin, and with it, the hair that had appeared, unwanted, all those years ago. After, when the beautician heard that Tina was Mona’s daughter – Mona who had just died – she made her a hot chocolate with marshmallows, sat her down in the cerise pink armchair in reception and told her to take her time. Tina had felt glorious; she’d felt cocooned.
Now, sitting in the hotel restaurant in Lanzarote, she remembered how her mother’s friends had embraced her and whispered that Mona had died lonely and without grandchildren. Dry-eyed, Tina had thanked each person for coming. You do realise, another one said, that Mona never wanted you alone in that big old farmhouse. She wanted you to find love. Tina took a sip of iced water, considering that all through her life with every task she’d completed on the farm or in that big old farmhouse, she’d never had the time to stop, or even to smile. She jumped at Donal’s arrival.
I’m so sorry, he said, brushing his lips against her cheek quickly and sitting down opposite her. I’m not that late, am I?
I was too early, she said, and she heard the crispness in her voice. Her dress strap slipped down, and when she pulled back up onto her shoulder, the material gave a little more. Donal checked the time on his silver watch.
It’s okay – she began – but he was still talking – I’m not late, well a minute or two but you see, my estate agent rang and they’ve got another offer on the house and I just couldn’t rush this decision. There’s a war – a bidding war – can you imagine!
She said she couldn’t imagine. She’d never sell the farmhouse where she lived. It was home for them – her and the hens.
The waiter came and called out the specials.
Want me to order for you?
Tina wanted that warmth again, like she was being cocooned. Yes, order for me, she said, feeling a little lighter.
You like asparagus? Meat?
I eat everything, remember, I grew up on a farm.
Tina understood that behind every beautiful dish there was a death. She relaxed back into the wicker chair and watched Donal joke in Spanish with the waiter, hum and haw about which wine to order. She waved her hand when he offered her the wine menu, let him pick; she settled back into the warmth of her smile.
The waiter disappeared and came back with crusty white bread and a carafe of red wine which he poured into their tall glasses.
Love, he said, love is in the Spanish air.
The waiter looked about her age and she wondered if he had a wife, children. Gracias, she said, hoping it would make him happy to know that his efforts were being appreciated. Tina clinked glasses with Donal and drank generously. It was a strong red he’d ordered. Until the starters arrived, they mused on the quality of the hotel and the professionalism of the staff.
As she cut into the smooth white asparagus on her lime green plate, she told Donal she’d been planning a few trips. They all left the hotel early in the morning and returned to the hotel in time for dinner at 8.30pm.
He took a drink of wine. Hmm, he said. This is good stuff. Setting down his glass gently on the white tablecloth he said, Cesar Manrique’s house and museum is definitely on the cards for me. He twirled his fork in the spaghetti in the large white bowl.
They were all about contrast on this island, Tina thought. Yesterday the green spinach omelette arrived on a black plate. She watched Donal push the pasta into his mouth and chew loudly.
That’s on my list too, she said. She took another forkful of food, ate quietly, carefully swallowed, and said, we could also just watch the sunset on one of those remote beaches. I want to feel the ridges of black, volcanic sand between my toes. She thought about it. She’d always wanted to know what black sand felt like. To lie down in it, immerse her body in its blackness, like a dream.
We?
Her throat went dry. She said, if you’re interested in going, with me, I mean, I’m not presuming anything.
Donal wiggled his wine glass at her. I know, I know. Here we are, two orphans, alone on a tropical island. What could possibly be on the cards for us?
She blushed. There’s the cactus garden, too.
He mopped up the pasta sauce with a hunk of bread. I’ve heard that’s beautiful.
The food was passable, but it was the wine she enjoyed the most. She watched the liquid roll in the glass, counted the alcohol tears that it left, and swished it in her mouth. It’s really quite fine, she said, holding up the glass to the light.
Donal agreed. The local wines were so different from anything he’d had, even compared to New York fine dining, with work, of course. Lunches. Dinners. Deals. He’d worked as an accountant for a well-known legal firm and the job had worn him down. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it, he stressed, it was just that, you know, too much pressure just gets to a person. This is the sort of life I want now, he declared. Living more. Working less.
Later, after a night cap, they stopped at her bedroom door and kissed, slowly. When Donal leaned on her, the force of his weight pressing on her, telling her she was so special, she knew she would not let him into her bed that night. She would wait. He would wait for her. Love could wait one more day.
We’re up early, she said, for the trip. She wiggled her toes in the high heels she’d squashed her feet into. So, she said, running her finger down his cheek – like she’d seen a woman do in an old black-and-white film – we’d better not.
Something in his face hardened. Fleetingly. Then he kissed her again. You’re right let’s not rush things. He looked at his watch. It’s nearly midnight. We’d better get some sleep.
She stayed with her back pressed against the white door, and watched Donal go backwards down the corridor blowing kisses as he walked. He took a left turn towards the lift which would take him to his room on the floor above hers. When he was out of sight, she swiped her key card in the door, and it sprung open. Standing on the threshold, she let the shawl fall to the floor. The left strap had finally broken, and the slip of a dress fell open, exposing her full pale breast to the empty room.
The next morning Tina woke late, feeling she’d hardly slept. Her cheeks were wet and she pushed the thought out of her mind that she’d been crying in her sleep again. She hurriedly showered and pulled on a dress with solid straps – wide and secure. She stood in front of the mirror alternatively smiling then frowning. Mammy had loved that dress on her, said it was perfect dress with its blue flowers on a base of buttercup yellow. She patted on the sunscreen and applied a light pink lipstick. She plaited her hair and secured it with a yellow elastic band before slipping her feet into plain brown sandals.
Today they were going to the cactus garden and after a light lunch, they’d get a tour of a volcano. This whole island was a volcano, she thought, as she made her way down the wide staircase. Donal was waiting for her in the lobby, linen trousers with beige loafers and a cream jacket on his arm. His hair was gelled again, and his smile was wide. He asked her if she slept okay.
Like a log.
Good for you he said, I hardly slept at all.
Why ever not?
Because, silly, I was thinking about you. He moved closer, put his mouth to her ear and whispered. Really thinking about you.
Tina didn’t know what to reply but then she heard her name and turned to see that the receptionist was calling her. The woman held the telephone receiver in her hand and pointed to it – call, she was shouting, I’ve got a call for you, Miss Tina.
You’ve got a call? Donal asked, rubbing his chin, at this hour?
Tina walked to the side of the desk.
I was trying your room, the receptionist said, but you’re here now so that is very good. Very good, she repeated, beaming.
Tina felt like she was underwater as she lifted the receiver to her ear. Hello?
It was Dervla in the Post Office telling her that John-Joe had died in his sleep. Tina blessed herself, feeling something catch in her throat. There she’d been, kissing a stranger last night, when John-Joe was dying. May poor John-Joe Rest In Peace, she croaked into the phone. Dervla said Sonia had arranged a flight back for her; the travel agent had been so accommodating. She was lucky, she was saying, there are only two flights out a week.
Of course, tomorrow is fine, thanks so much – hmm – yes.
She glanced over at Donal pacing. She’d have to hurry.
No. I don’t mind cutting the holiday short. I want to be there for John-Joe.
Thank you, Tina said as she handed the receiver back to the receptionist. There’s been a death and I’ll be leaving tomorrow. She heard her voice as if she were playing a part in a tragic film on the big screen. She blinked away the threat of tears.
Two days early? Oh I am very sorry. The receptionist gave a little bow and cocked her head to the side. I am very sorry, she repeated.
Tina took Donal’s elbow, explained the developments.
Your old neighbour, he said, sure he’s dead! He won’t know you’re not there to bury him. You can’t cut your holiday short. Didn’t you tell me this was your first real holiday, I mean your only holiday, ever?
But she had to be there – for John-Joe, for herself, and for her hens who would be already lonely without the company. It’s already arranged, she said, I fly out in the morning. Eleven O’clock flight. I was lucky to get on it.
He stared at her and then took both her hands in his and said he would make their last day in Lanzarote one to remember. He ran to the receptionist, told her in hurried Spanish that they’d be changing their trip this morning. They would be taking the Cesar Manrique day tour.
The volcanos and cacti will wait for us, he said rushing back to Tina, we’re going to spend the day basking in the heat and genius of Manrique. Today you’ll forget your grieving, forget those farm people, and open yourself to the beauty of the world.
Tina heard herself agreeing, it might be nice, she said.
They would walk the same white steps Manrique once walked, see the views he admired, and sneakily – because it was a museum, and this was forbidden – dip their toes in the cool water of his sunken pools.
Somewhere inside Tina wondered what Donal would do if she were to cry. Cry for all the words she did not know, words that could name what was snaking and slowly pushing through her.
And then, Donal said, still talking – though she had missed most of what he’d said and already agreed to another trip, a weekend away – we’ll enjoy our own country. I’ll book a special place for us. He clapped his hands. Oh, what plans I have for us, Tina.
Tina followed Donal up the steps of the coach, feeling the touch of sun on her calves. She paused and closed her eyes for a second. Heat, she thought, that could be a word to describe what she was feeling. Heat.
***
John-Joe’s funeral was a quiet affair at which Tina gave a short speech. She spoke about how generous a man he’d been. While he might have kept himself to himself – as the saying goes, she said lowering her voice – and was therefore less known around the village, John-Joe really was a pillar of the community. After her own parents died, she continued, he was the one who provided the support she needed to look after the hens and maintain the farm. He had kept her company over pots of tea. John-Joe was a great man full of stories. He would be sorely missed.
Tina bowed and carefully stepped down off the altar. She felt muffled in her black polo neck, dress, tights and shoes. She slipped back into the front pew, alongside a great-niece of John-Joe’s, of whom he’d never spoken. The woman, dressed in a smart skirt suit, sat with her gaze fixed on the coffin. Disbelief, Tina thought suddenly, the young woman’s face was filled with disbelief. She had lost a great-uncle she never knew and suddenly gained a farm. But that was life; the coin always falls or is flipped.
The rain stayed away until John-Joe’s oak coffin had been lowered into the ground and then it came, with great big gusts of wind, belting into their faces. The great-niece let out a few sobs. Sonia put her arm around her. Tina couldn’t bear to look at the girl who would – of this she was sure – quickly disappear back to wherever she’d come from without a care for the land, the animals, or the house. She put her head back, her face to the rain. She found it refreshing; a reminder that she, Tina, was still alive.
She followed the group down the hill towards the town, where they congregated in the small hotel. After curled sandwiches and vegetable soup that was too hot to eat, Tina reminisced about John-Joe with Sonia and a few of her mother’s old friends who lowered their voices when they praised her for cutting her holiday short. She didn’t mind, she said, didn’t mind one bit. Home was where the heart was. They nodded, and said she was like a reincarnation of her mother, so she was. Tina managed to avoid the great-niece. After a while she left them to their rounds of whiskey and slowly walked home.
The rain had turned to sleet and the road felt longer. She wrapped her mother’s coat a little tighter around her middle, clutched it with her mittened hands and looked at her breath in the freezing air. She remembered that she was going away with Donal at the weekend. He’d arranged for them to stay in an old Georgian house where they’d eat all their meals. A chef who’d worked in a Michelin Star restaurant in Paris was the head chef there. It would be fine dining and proper pampering, what she’d need after the funeral, he’d said. She’d grown to like the idea, but with John-Joe gone she’d nobody to mind the hens and she worried about her favourite, one she’d named for herself. She couldn’t ask Sonia; she was too busy with the salon. There was no question of changing her mind about the weekend; Donal had expectations that she’d helped to set. And though she might not admit it aloud, Tina knew she, too, had those same expectations. She tried to imagine Donal opening the door for the last time to his parent’s house in Terenure; the house had moved to sale agreed. But she couldn’t picture him. She could see him by the pool in Lanzarote, or at their table in the hotel restaurant, and she could, just about – strangely, as that was where they’d spent their last day together – picture him at Manrique’s house. The house that had seemed to her full of light and promise.
She looked up to the grey sky and across the empty fields. A crow called and dipped and flew high again. She kicked a stone along the narrow road. For a few minutes snow fell lightly. It landed like dust on the road but didn’t seem like it would stick. She listened to the sound of her feet as she walked. There was something hypnotic about walking. The movement was simple and pure, one foot in front of the other. In the distance she could hear the call of cattle. The crows circled above her, screeching. They knew, she thought, that behind the heat inside her was the coldness of death. She stopped walking and took in the clarity that came to her. There was only one way she could let love come into her life, there was only one way she could love Donal.
***
On Saturday Tina woke before the alarm went off. It was early morning and the light had not yet come. She pulled on a woollen jumper that had belonged to her father and stepped into an old tracksuit bottoms. She wouldn’t – couldn’t – eat. There was a job to be done. She walked down the stairs, slowly, and was glad that she was able to see herself as she’d be this very night: in a lace nighty, waiting for Donal on a large four-poster bed. He’d be brushing his teeth, freshening himself up. He’d know that no woman wanted foul breath. The sheets would be white – classic – the bedspread heavy satin or brocade. The original wooden floor would be covered by a thick-pile cream carpet. They’d have dined on veal and drank red wine and their bellies would be full and their hearts satisfied. She shook her head. No. That was ridiculous. Their hearts couldn’t be satisfied, not at that point. Their hearts wouldn’t be satisfied until later.
In the kitchen she pulled on her wellington boots, pushed open the back door, making a mental note that she’d oil the squeaking hinges after the weekend away with Donal. She stepped out into the yard. Good. It hadn’t snowed overnight; the early morning air was cold and dry. She walked across the yard to the hen house.
In the stillness she pressed the latch down on the door. She called out. Tina, tina, tina. She stood in the darkness. Without silhouettes or shadows, they might be wary. She called out again and then she heard the movement, the rustling of feathers; of course, they were answering the familiarity of her voice. She lifted the bag of grain, shook it. They squawked with excitement. She reached up to the ledge on the left where her father had always kept the Stanley knife. She slid it off the shelf, into her hand. She backed out of the hen house slowly, soundlessly.
A dull light had started to creep across the yard. Tina scattered some grain, creating a trail from the hen house to the middle of the yard. She shivered as she waited. She heard them coming towards her. She reached into the semi-darkness, searching for warmth before quickly drawing the blade across each of their scrawny necks. Warm spurts of blood hit her face. She found it hard to breathe.
Don’t panic, she said aloud. You’re preparing for love.
She began listing out the tasks she had to do before she’d be lying in Donal’s arms.
Pluck the hens.
Chop them into pieces.
Bag the pieces.
Label the bags.
Place them in the free-standing freezer.
Order a taxi to get to the man who loved her.
This spring, she thought, as her breathing returned to normal, was more like a winter. A full freezer would serve her well. She pictured Donal’s face and how he would gaze at her after they had made love; this is what freedom would feel like. She looked up to sky where the sun struggled through. She swallowed down the taste of metal. She took a deep breath. She had not said kill the hens in her list. She had not said that.
The last and the hardest kill was Tina. She chased her namesake across the icy yard, both of them skittering and skidding. She dropped the knife in the chase. When she finally caught the hen, she held her in a tight grip, shivering so much her teeth chattered. She felt the hen relax; she hugged her like she always did. Then she spoke to her.
I don’t want you to die alone, Tina, I want you know love.
There was a pause – she, Tina, felt it – the air became thick and pungent and then she wrung Tina’s neck, quickly, the way her father had taught her.
Silence spread over the yard.
She held Tina’s legs until the twitching stopped. Across the long field a light went on in John-Joe’s house. That great-niece of his must be living there. Already. The woman hadn’t disappeared, after all.
Tina’s insides twisted. What is a farm without animals, she whispered, looking around at the small, scattered corpses she’d soon pluck and chop and freeze. What was this place, now?
A farm?
Brothers
When Arnold parked his car on his brother’s new street the sky held the last gasp of sunset, a soft golden light gilded everything he saw. Arnold liked knowing that this time was called the magic hour. Filmmakers would wait weeks for the lights and clouds to work together so they could film for a few minutes like this.
Tree branches, a cinderblock wall and the windshields of the parked cars all shimmered with yellow, orange and red tones. The red glowed in the lights on top of a parked police car until Arnold had to blink to see that that car was empty, parked there on some mission. As he walked to the apartment house door he checked the fold of the collar of his black silk shirt. He had a bottle of red wine, not the cheapest, tucked under his arm. A proper dinner guest, he congratulated himself. He was just the fellow for this moment. Two, or was it three? Martinis burned in his veins. This trip, twenty minutes across town to bridge four years of silence, had taken some preparation. He was prepared. He was so prepared he had to measure carefully when placing his feet on the steps into the building.
The street door’s latch had been taped open with duct tape, but the lobby was quiet. No hurried angry voices floated down the stairs to the lobby. He heard no murmurs of fights from behind the closed apartment doors. The lobby elevator was broken. So yes, this was the kind of place that Gerald would live. Arnold jaunted up two flights of stairs and stopped in front of apartment number 23. He raised his hand to knock, but paused, his knuckles waited at the brink of the next arc of his relationship with Gerald. Twins know each other too well. Arnold had written that to open a psych essay twenty years ago. He still thought it, at least once a day. Last chance to bail out. The last time Arnold saw Gerald thick plexiglass kept them from touching. Gerald said it was all Arnold’s fault. He wanted Gerald to fail so he could at last claim first place. Arnold said never mind. Just rot in your own doing. He went away and stayed away for four years, until last week an email from Gerald showed up. Reunion it said. Then an address, this one, and a time. Now. This very second. The time on his phone slipped to 6:37. Just the time specified in the email. That was Gerald, pointless precision. Arnold’s right fist tapped lightly on the door.
A tall red haired woman holding a grey tabby cat opened the apartment door. She was what Arnold had expected. The kind of stunner who does not have to work at it, wearing a small bronze medallion set against the rust tones of her blouse and jacket, all of it working to set off her hair. Her thin nose was a tad long; the imperfection highlighted her cheekbones and the curves of her neck. Her clear blue eyes and steady jaw betrayed the patience of the truly intelligent.
How did Gerald do it? A life of stumbles punctuated now and again by full on Luciferian falls and yet Gerald always got the real ones. The women Arnold was able to meet were all hidden behind frightening tans and jewelry designed to distract you with thoughts of its expense.
“Welcome. I am Rita.” The woman tucked the cat into the crook of her arm so she could slide a hand to meet his. Arnold felt at a loss for words. His hands stayed at his sides.
“And you are Arnold.”
“Indeed I am.” He shook her hand. It was warm. He held on, felt the soft surge of energetic connection.
“Nice to meet you.” She pulled her hand free.
“Is this your place?”
“As long as I send them their money.” Across the room a window that had been squeezed between two bookshelves looked out on the tops of trees, the roofs of houses and the hills across the river. The tree tops were deep red, the end of the day light bleeding away into the purple of the distant hills.
“It’s a nice place,” Arnold said, that being what you say about an ordinary apartment with a used couch of some sort of tweed-like material, an abstract painting over the couch that featured globs of green hovered over by clouds of yellow, a couple old bookshelves so stuffed with books that they had to be piled sideways on top of the neat rows and now from across the room Arnold’s twin brother Gerald coming at him with his hand out to for a shake.
Gerald still limped. He had gained weight and grown his hair long during the time they were lost to each other. Meanwhile, Arnold had lost fifteen pounds running marathons and had his hair trimmed every other Thursday. Still, when they shook hands it felt to Arnold like meeting himself. A version of himself.
All their lives the twins had sorted their possibilities into congruent patterns. The rogue wandered because that felt like the most solid truth and the conformist yearned for something he could never understand or even name and hoped that his yearning meant at least a part of him was free. Arnold realized that was on old thought. An observation from that college psych paper. Meeting My Self. “A solid B, it might have been brilliant if it had been in any way a discussion of the assigned topic,” the professor had written at the top in red pencil. So many things had stayed with Arnold. Not his brother though. He had lost his brother and he had missed him. When he had ordered that third martini he had vowed, solemn as a parish priest turning from the devil’s temptations, not to show how much he missed Gerald.
“Glad you could come,” Gerald said.
“Hey,” Arnold said.
Gerald was five minutes older than Arnold and had always assumed the mantle of elder brother. “You just hang around me hoping that the girls might talk you. You are an appendage.” Those were Gerald’s words, pronounced to a room of their friends at the climax of an epic drunken night when they were college freshmen. Both of them had been shy and lost, but Gerald was an academic rising star and Arnold was just another about to be poly-sci major looking to find a career in law or politics or both. Back then Arnold’s greatest fear had been that his facility with math would determine the course of his adult life. That fear had come true, mostly. But now the film people had come into his life. On that long ago night their friends had all concluded that Gerald was cruel, but truthful. Arnold would always be the guy who came along with Gerald.
“Here,” Arnold said, holding up the bottle of wine.
“That looks nice,” Rita said.
“It might not peel the paint off the walls.” Arnold handed her the bottle. The wine was called Randy Scallywag Pinot Noir. The red label showed a black silhouette of a man with goat horns peeking around the trunk of a tree.
“Sweet. I’ll open it with dinner. You two get reacquainted while I take care of the last bits.” Just like that Arnold knew this reunion was Rita’s idea. Probably part of Gerald’s endless healing process.
“You know wine?” Arnold said, but Rita had already stepped into the kitchen, turning her hips so she could get to her chopping and leaving him facing his brother.
“Let’s sit down,” Gerald said. “I get dizzy.”
“Are you on new meds?”
“Always. They try and they try. Some days I am sure I have a brain tumor. But maybe it is just an imbalance of the humors. I’m fated to always look for what is wrong. I was injected with too much melancholy. Our mother…”
“Did her damn best.” And there she was, between them the way she would always be between them. “Don’t try so hard. You’re not your brother.” She would say to Arnold and he would let that mean everything. What did she say to Gerald? Nothing. She would go on for an hour to Arnold about Gerald’s brilliant future and then to Gerald say nothing at all. She was starving him into greatness. Just like she starved their father into a drunken shadow of himself. During college days when Gerald had a few he would wind on and on to Arnold about how their mother, Jeanne he called her, seeking some power by using her first name, about how Jeanne would never give him one moment’s rest, one moment’s approval. Yet when Arnold called home Jeanne would go on and on and on some more to Arnold about the wizardry and genius of Gerald. How does he do it? How is it that the two of you are so different? Your mind so practical, she said it like a curse, and his so mysterious. The wonder in her voice was like an iron claw ripping out Arnold’s heart and holding it up for the assembled multitude to see. Behold my ordinary son, I offer him to average life so his brother might flourish!
Of course she said nothing of the sort. Not really. It was all tone of voice. And Arnold succeeded, making good money and only occasionally drinking just a bit more than necessary for good companionship. Gerald remained at the center of the drama, but by any scorecard Arnold was the winner. Arnold felt the thought hover at the base of his tongue. He would not speak that truth. Not tonight.
“She did her best,” Arnold repeated himself.
“As do we all.” Gerald lifted a glass of wine he had kept discretely tucked into the book shelf. He took a sip and held it out to Arnold. “Would you like one?”
“Should you?” Arnold asked, eyeing his brother’s wine glass.
“Not for perfect compliance. But I granted myself an indulgence for the evening. The great event.”
“I saw a police car out front.”
“Really.”
“It was parked. Empty.”
“They haven’t been here yet.”
“I didn’t mean.”
“Yes you did. But you are forgiven.” He clasped a friendly hand on Arnold’s shoulder, fingers digging into his brother’s neck just a bit too hard, like a frightening uncle taking liberties.
“Rita. A glass of the best for my brother. Returned from his long journeying.”
“He just drove over for dinner.” Came her voice from the kitchen.
“It was a longer than that. It was a drive through time and custom.” Gerald said.
“Get it yourself.”
“Alas. I carry no authority.” Gerald went to the kitchen and returned with a carefully filled glass and an open bottle of a supermarket merlot.
“To our reunion,” Gerald said and held his glass out for a touch.
“Are you working?” Arnold asked, cutting to the chase the way he did when he had nothing to say. He felt a sheen of sweat on his forehead, an ominous clenching in his bowels. Why had he come? Why had he stopped taking his Xanax? Alcohol always came back on him, like Gerald’s scorn. He was thinking too fast and too much. He swigged the chalky wine as if he could drink his way past its taste.
“I sort packages in a big warehouse by the airport. I make sure they get into the correct bin on the correct cart so they can be delivered to the proper truck.” Gerald said.
“Have you been there long?”
“Almost four months.”
“That’s terrific.”
“It’s everything I ever dreamed about.”
“Rita’s very lovely.”
“She picked me up when we were sorting packages. She is an angel of the lowlands. Putting herself through college, rising above her upbringing to study English Literature. I am her fallen prince.”
“Well she’s lovely. Damn hot.”
“I can hear you two,” Rita called. “I am not an object for your amusement.”
“Sorry,” Arnold called back. He turned to face his brother, took a proper sip of the merlot, managed not to choke and settled into a tale.
“I’m getting into film. An independent production. I’m executive producer in charge of writing occasional checks. They let me hang around when they shoot. Once I got to stand in a certain spot while they got the lighting just right.”
“Will I have a chance to see this epic?”
“Maybe if you go to the prefestival screenings at the Boise Festival of the Arts.”
“Mmhum.” Gerald let his response trickle into a vague hum. Arnold felt his brother’s gaze chill his spirit like a wind across a frozen lake. He thought about mentioning that while drinking with the director after a shoot he offered an idea about the lead character. It had seemed to Arnold that she loved life more than she loved any person, than she could love any person, and so she was doomed to loneliness in a world that could never live up to what she felt inside. The director wrote it in a notebook. Dialogue had shifted the next day to show how the heroine’s loneliness was at the heart of the story. In a profound and subtle way Arnold had contributed. How to say this. What was there to say? Nothing. Nada.
He took another sip of the wine. Now it tasted of twigs with a whisper of something crude, perhaps an unfortunate mouse caught in the picking equipment.
“Still practicing law?” Gerald asked, like they were twenty somethings who could change their life paths every six months.
“It’s what I can do,” Arnold said. Through the door to the kitchen he saw a flash of Rita’s hair, then her legs as she pulled something out of the oven.
“I like this brand. It’s drinkable for its price,” Arnold finished his glass in two swallows and poured another, the red wine going almost to the brim of the glass.
He held the bottle out to his brother, but Gerald laid a hand over his glass.
“I will be fine.”
“I sincerely hope so,” Arnold raised his glass but did not wait for Gerald to respond before downing half the wine in one gulp.
“Any chance you can get back into academics?” Arnold asked.
Gerald winced and Arnold noticed the lines on his forehead that betrayed the babyish quality of his cheeks. Of course it was a cruel question. Gerald was forty four years old with seven commitments to mental hospitals and at least five arrests that Arnold knew about over the last twenty years. He had long ago crossed the line from interesting romantic to scary guy. Gerald’s main life skill was talking about the poetry of the romantic era. But not even Samuel Coleridge himself, if he was mysteriously transported through time and space to head the humanities department at a directional university, was going to hire Gerald to teach anything to anyone ever. Arnold castigated himself for asking.
Back in the day Gerald’s star had risen until all that was left was finishing a thesis to become a real scholar. Then came the first breakdown. A woman had left him under particularly cruel circumstances and he started shouting in a seminar with seven other grad students and his thesis advisor. Gerald had tried to calm himself by drinking that night and ended up hospitalized after he marched into a faculty meeting the next morning and accused the chair of his department of ordering the implanting of devices in his brain that caused his thoughts to scatter when cars drove past his apartment. For years Gerald had insisted at the slightest provocation that that department’s one and only goal had been to prevent him from finishing his thesis and showing them all the mark of true genius. Arnold had been a new associate at a large law firm in those days. The calls to his office as Gerald plummeted from intervention to hospitalization had been quite embarrassing.
“I made us chicken,” came Rita’s voice. “Gerald, can you set the table?”
Set up the table was more accurate. They ate off a card table covered by red and blue and yellow paisley tapestry that Gerald let flutter down like a parachute. Arnold saw what looked like a spaghetti stain beside his plate. Rita had opened the wine Arnold brought and poured it around after they sat down. He took a thirsty sip, wished the better wine could wash away the memory, presence and very existence of the cheap stuff he had slugged down. He settled for erasing the taste. Settle back boy, Arnold thought when he noticed his simple taste had taken off half the glass. You ran thirteen miles this morning. Don’t overdo it. But even that thought had a fuzzy quality. He was already past the turn around and heading farther up an unknown path with every thought.
“Home is where the heart breaks,” Arnold said, realizing he had said it out loud. Gerald smiled. Rita sipped her wine and sat the glass on the side of her plate closest to Arnold. In this apartment random insanity would not disrupt the flow of a nice dinner.
“This wine is a nice change,” she said. “We tend to rely on the minimum.”
Rita had cooked chicken thighs in lemon and soy sauce, mashed potatoes with cream cheese folded into them and carrots glazed with brown sugar and butter. They toasted the reunion of the brothers and Rita talked about her new job at the big bookstore downtown. “We have five branches, it’s really a regional chain, it’s how we survive. No, thrive. Internet sales.” She said this with the firm authority and boundless faith of the newly hired. Arnold smiled at her and lifted bites carefully, calmly and with what he calculated was the calculated rhythm of an average person at a nice dinner.
“Rita has her own section. Napoleonic history. She keeps it stocked with books arguing over the outcome of the battle of Waterloo,” Gerald said.
“I thought that one was settled. The French lost,” Arnold said.
“It’s the how, not the what, that’s at issue. Arguing over what time the Prussians arrived and how Wellington influenced the narrative to hide their contribution in later years fuels quite a frolicsome academic industry,” Rita said.
“History is a story, to be written and rewritten.” Gerald said. “There is no such thing as objective reality, only narratives composed of facts selected from an ever changing constellation of points of view. That is the elephant in the room of the discipline of history.”
“It makes it fun. Keeps the wheel turning,” Arnold said.
“History is a nightmare scholars are happy to rewrite,” Rita said.
“Just argue,” Arnold said.
“Excuse me?” Rita asked.
“It’s a legal saying. If you have the facts argue the facts, if you don’t have the facts argue the law, if you don’t have the facts or the law just argue.”
“I see.”
“I’m agreeing with Gerald. The world we live in, the real world of our thoughts and feelings is not something that is just there, like the set of a play. It is constantly created by all of us bumping up against each other, trying to get what we want. ”
Arnold felt her foot brush his under the table. He hoped it was not an accident. He was having that moment when his appreciation for the lines and curves of a woman’s face and figure add up to something greater than the parts, when they add up to the kind of desire that starts organizing his thoughts around itself. A woman like Rita would not be with Gerald long. He could just wait. Stage a meeting. Oh what a surprise! I just popped by to buy a new art book for my coffee table. Carravagio. It’s pricey but I just couldn’t help myself. It was so nice. And so nice to see you. Has it been that long since that dinner at your apartment? No, I have not heard from him. I’m due to be in touch. Maybe help him out. Would you like to go for coffee after your shift?
“Did Gerald ever tell you about his time as a poet?” Arnold asked.
“Not in any detail.”
Gerald set down his fork and tried to stare his brother into shutting up. Arnold took another slug of his twenty five dollar a bottle wine, put down the glass and wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin.
“He was quite the success. His poems were everywhere. You’d bump into them in the pages of magazines. Discussions ensued on websites. He was the man of the moment in the world of poetry. ‘Raw intensity and shimmering insight,’ said one review of his book. But then once more he decided his medications, the ones prescribed by his doctor, not the ones he bought who knows where from god knows who, were the problem. We were all conspiring to keep him from the great truth that had always been there, just beyond his glimpse. He was arrested without any pants outside a bar. They charged him with a sex crime because the complaining witness had her kids with her. No poet’s exemption for Whitmanesque enthusiasm. He nearly did real time in a real prison. That mess cost me seven thousand dollars.”
“When so proudly you wept as my spirit fled to heaven,” Gerald recited. He looked at the two of them in turn, held his napkin to his mouth and touched it to his lips with a soft gesture like granting himself benediction.
“That’s the last line of Iphigenia Comes Home in Time for Supper. My prize winner. My Citizen Kane,” Gerald said.
“I know,” Rita and Arnold said at the same time. They touched their wine glasses and Arnold took a proper sip, let himself taste the wine this time. Raspberries. Chocolate. Hope.
“Well then.” Rita said, reaching out and taking Gerald’s hand. “He always says he has a lot to thank you for.”
“Could I have another helping of food?” Arnold asked.
Gerald and Rita were gazing at each other, holding hands. As Arnold watched they moved their heads together, their lips touched in the guileless way of new lovers. They kept at it, held each other in an awkward embrace only made possible by the length and flexibility of Rita’s torso.
“I’ll get it myself.”
When Arnold returned from the kitchen with a plate heaped with twice as much food as he had intended to take, Rita and Gerald were sitting up straight watching him approach.
“I see what you mean,” Rita said. She explained that Gerald had been saying Arnold was one of those people who make a religion of working out. Fighting time like a gladiator.
“I need five thousand calories a day.” He sat down and set to work on the food.
“I have something to show you,” Gerald said. He stood up, almost knocking over the chair when his left leg caught on it. The leg had been stiff since Gerald had decided stop signs did not matter and he ended up under the right front tire of a Chevy. Nobody was quite sure if it was one of his suicide attempts. That was the week after their mother died. It took a year and an eviction proceeding to get Gerald out of the house so it could be sold and the estate closed.
“Gerald is so shy. I’m trying to work with him on that. He’s been looking forward to seeing you. To telling you what he’s been thinking.” Rita stretched her arms above her head and wriggled a bit in her seat.
“Did you know that William Blake and his young wife used to take off all their clothes and romp in their garden pretending they were Adam and Eve?” Arnold asked. He really needed to eat this food. He needed to anchor himself with meat and potatoes.
“Is that true?” Rita asked.
“Maybe. I think I read it somewhere.”
Gerald fussed at the bookshelf. Arnold thought he heard his brother cursing under his breath and his stomach clenched. He took a chicken thigh in his fingers and gave it an engulfing bite, scraping his teeth on the bone. Gerald’s muffled muttering was something he had learned to dread. It was the trickle before the flood.
“Aha!” Gerald said. He pulled a book off the top shelf.
“Here,” He dropped the book on the table in front of Arnold, who had started on his third of four chicken thighs. He kept chewing while he read the cover.
“Where did you get this?” Arnold asked.
The book had a bright yellow cover lettered in the amateur typeface of the long ago self-published. Mass Murderers in White Coats was the title. The author was Lenny Lapon; he was identified on the back as a former mental patient. Arnold had the thought that in America there was no such thing as a former mental patient.
Former mental patient. That was a lifelong judgement. There was a line in this world and once you crossed it you could never come all the way back. That was not fair, nor in any real way true, but Arnold knew he was not the only one thinking that way.
“That book tells the whole story. How after world war two the OSS, FBI and AMA helped all the good doctors who ran the Reich’s mental hygiene program come over here. And the Herr Doktors helped us set up our mental health system.”
“Where did you get this?”
“It was in the donation box at a clinic where I stayed for a while last year.”
“That’s a healthy choice.”
“I’m learning the truth here. About the men who built our psychiatric industrial complex. Who do you think came up with the notion that walls without windows, razor wire fences and numbing medications were what would help sensitive minds that had lost the power of making sense of what they saw, heard and felt? Ideas are subtle and powerful Arnold. What have I been punished for all these years?”
“Your behavior. If you can fix your behavior you can think and feel whatever you want. That’s how it works.”
“I’ll clear up,” Rita said. She gathered the dishes and took them to the kitchen. Arnold noticed his plate was empty. He had lost the memory of eating the food, but felt a new pressure and heaviness in his belly.
“There’s a great reckoning coming,” Gerald said.
“Here it comes.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some sweeping pronouncement. You are not part of any life that matters so you think that makes your anger and generalizations even more important.”
“C’mere.” Gerald stood up, steadying himself on the table.
Under the food and the wine Arnold felt a panic wake up, ready itself for an assault on his thoughts. Who the hell are you to think anybody cares what you think?
Why did he hear that in their mother’s brittle voice? She never said anything so cruel, not with her words. She just thought it. Who needed words when silence and a look can crush the souls of the ones you profess to love. The hell with panic. Arnold thought. He owned two rental houses, a luxury condo that was mostly paid off and had seven hundred fifty k invested. What did he have to fear?
“Are you coming?” Gerald asked.
Out the window all traces of the sun had vanished. Street lights and head lights shredded the lower darkness. Arnold realized his brother was talking, lecturing really.
“I’ve been thinking about this. There is something we all know but want to tell ourselves we have forgotten. The impulse that comes before thought. The thing that moves us to live. We are dying. We live alone inside our skin and yet we are all part of the same thing. And we are losing that thing, that connection. We cannot see that it is more wisdom and sensitivity we need, not less. Our culture is dying because we are afraid to look at our world and what we have made of it, done to it. We are so afraid of the truth we feel in our guts that we think the only escape is to do more nothing faster.” Gerald crossed his arms on his chest and gazed out the window with a fixed, but calm, expression.
“Speak for yourself,” Arnold said.
“You’re not following my point.”
“I am following it too well. You are convinced the world is going to fall into an abyss because you are afraid for your own future. Well, buddy, the world keeps on going. We are the ones who fall in the end.”
“How can I not be part of the world?” Gerald asked innocently, his tone that of a grad student nailing a nemesis with a Quod Erat Demonstratum.
“By running into your weakness and hiding there,” Arnold said and having said it felt the panic melt in his chest like dew from a violet. He was really saying it. This time he would not back down. “You can’t have it both ways, failing and mattering because you fail. Look out there. Do you think anyone cares?" He was about to add what we think or do? But his speech was interrupted when a sweeping gesture of arms and shoulders that he was making to amplify his point brought his temple into collision with the sharp corner of one of Gerald’s overstuffed book cases. Arnold dropped like a knick knack tumbling off a shelf. In point of fact a couple knick knacks accompanied him on his fall. A plexiglass paperweight bounced off his chest. A framed picture of Rita and Gerald smacked to the floor beside his head. That could have done some damage, Arnold thought with the distant clarity of a fallen drunk.
Arnold noticed that he was looking up at his brother. He touched the place on his forehead where a pain pounded at him like a bad memory. His hand came away wet and red.
“Oh my goodness.” Rita’s voice was like tragic music. As they lifted him to the couch and put a cold compress on his forehead Arnold sorted out recent events. Where was his car? Down on the street. The sunset had gone but would his car be there? Did he have a date later or was this dinner it for the evening? Perhaps he had drunk too much. Mother had warned him about something. No that was some other time. Some other me. It was nice to sit here; this was really a very soft and welcoming couch.
As Arnold sank into the couch, Rita’s soft hands grazed his forehead. He felt a sting on his head and a twist of nausea in his belly. He did not want to puke while Rita ministered to him. His vision was blurred; Gerald wavered briefly into two Geralds, one solid, the other empty, transparent, but just as real, as if Gerald’s possibilities were trying to be born. Arnold blinked and the figures shifted back into one, his brother sitting on the edge of the couch; his forehead creased by concern. Rita placed a large band aid on Arnold’s forehead. As he watched her face watching her fingers at work he was suddenly angry, viciously angry, ready to take on the world with a shield and a sword angry. Why was this world not ready for his big brother? Why could he not find a place? And easy as having that thought his belly untwisted. Rita stood up to admire her work. All was better now. This bit of time was enough. He could stay here forever.
Forever lasted twenty minutes. By then Arnold was clear enough to walk, but not sober enough to drive. The decision was made that they would call him a ride home and he would come back tomorrow to eat brunch and pick up his car. As the hired driver pulled into traffic, Arnold felt the warm traces Rita’s hands had left on his forehead. He remembered standing by the lake at the family cottage and watching his brother untangle his fishing line. They had been about thirteen, not quite boys anymore. “This is going to be fine. We’ll get the big one. He’s out there.” Gerald had said. Arnold relaxed into the seat and let the weight of the cab’s motion soothe him. It was nice to have a big brother.
James Mulhern’s writing has appeared in literary journals over one hundred and thirty times and has been recognized with many awards. In 2015, Mr. Mulhern was granted a writing fellowship to Oxford University. That same year, a story was longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His recent novel, Give Them Unquiet Dreams, is a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2019. He was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2021 for his poetry. |
Evidence
"Help!" I yelled.
A crowd surrounded us.
"Someone, call an ambulance," Nonna screamed. "Don't no one touch me." Her coat and pants were torn.
The bank manager said, "Let me assist you."
Nonna said, "Keep away! Your maintenance person must be a bombast. He should be fired for leaving that ice." She moaned, mascara a dirty mess on her wet cheeks.
"I've got your wig," a hunched-back elderly woman said. "Do you want me to put it back on?"
"Are you crazy?! What's a wig gonna do for me? What I need is an ambulance."
"Ma'am, an ambulance is on the way," the manager said. He reminded me of Robert Redford, the good-looking actor.
"I was only trying to help," the lady said, handing the wig to a twenty-something woman with bright red lips and oversized tortoiseshell sunglasses. She looked disgusted and passed it to a short, gray-haired man who twisted it with his hands.
He gave it to a fat prim woman in a green dress. A game of Hot Potato, I thought.
Nonna wiped her mascara-stained face. "My poor granddaughter. I'm sure she's gonna have emotional damage."
She whimpered. "I really coulda died! Molly's last memory of her Nonna woulda been my brain splattered on ice." She crossed herself.
The lady with red lips sized me up, then glanced at Nonna, and smirked.
Nonna looked down. "Jesus! My leg is bleeding." Her breathing quickened. "I'm having agita!"
"Relax, ma'am." The manager kneeled and tried to hold one of her hands. Nonna pulled it away.
"So now you think you're a doctor? Keep your paws off me."
The ambulance arrived, and the crowd made way for two burly men who checked Nonna's vital signs and lifted her onto a stretcher. Nonna kept saying, "What nice boys." As we drove away, the siren sounded. Nonna covered her mouth to suppress laughter. I turned away because I knew I would laugh too. "This is just awful. Just awful," she said to the young man beside her.
"We'll take good care of you."
Through the ambulance window, I watched the crowd disperse. The woman with red lips stared as we drove away. I stuck out my tongue.
At the emergency ward, the doctor ordered x-rays, which showed no fractures. A timid nurse cleaned and wrapped the leg wound; then we took a cab to Nonna's place.
In her bedroom, Nonna threw her ripped velvet pantsuit onto the floor. She stared at her naked self in the mirror and traced the bruises on her body. "We need evidence for the lawsuit. Grab the Polaroid from the left bottom drawer of my dresser. . . . These pictures are gonna be the icing on the cake." She laughed. "That's funny. 'Icing.' Don't you think, Molly? Considering how it happened."
She stared into my eyes. I could smell her sweat, her oldness. "I know what you're thinking."
"What?"
"You're thinking your grandmother has sagging breasts and a sagging ass." She flapped the skin underneath her biceps. "You don't wanna get old. . . . Aging is a terrible thing. Get as much out of life as you can, mia bambina." She kissed my forehead. "Now pretend you're a photographer for Vogue and snap some pictures after you rub some of this shit on my back." The label on the cosmetic read "Oil of Life, Intensely Revitalizing Gel Cream."
Touching her old body made me nauseous.
"This bruise looks like the Vatican." She pointed to her right shoulder. "What do you think?"
"I don't know what the Vatican looks like."
She eased herself onto the bed and patted the area beside her. I sat down.
"Like a fancy palace. It's where the pope lives." She positioned my chin, so I was forced to look at her hazel eyes. "What we did today, some people would consider wrong. Certainly, the pope." She laughed. "Grab the cigarettes from the bedside table, will you?" I reached over. "And the ashtray. . . Oh, and the lighter." She placed the ashtray beside her, lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew smoke rings. "See those puffs of smoke." I watched them float in front of her face.
"Yes, Nonna."
"Look at that one in the corner." She pointed. "It's disappearing already. Here one minute, gone the next."
"So what?"
She slapped my face.
"Why'd you do that?" I teared up.
"To make you tough. You don't get nothing in this world the easy way."
"Don't you look away!" She grabbed my face. "And don't you dare utter a word to anyone about our plan today. You understand?"
"Yes," I mumbled.
"Say it louder."
"Yes!"
"Your Nonna and you were walking to the bank. I slipped on ice by the front door." She laughed. "And I got bruises to prove it." She stood and pointed to the Vatican. "As God is our witness."
"How much money do you think we'll make?"
She gazed at her body in the mirror, as if making an appraisal. "I'd say about ten grand. Those hotshots at the bank won't want bad press about an old lady falling on ice." She moved the ashtray to the top of her dresser, then tamped out her cigarette. "Go downstairs and make us some coffee while I wash up."
On my way to the kitchen, I wiped the disgusting, smelly cream on the stair railing.
I heard her fall down the stairs. "Oh shit!" was the last thing she said.
There was a pool of blood around her head. Her arms and legs were twisted in grotesque angles. I stepped over her body.
In her bedroom, I lit a cigarette. I watched the smoke rings dissipate. Nonna was right. "Here one minute, gone the next."
I dialed 911. "My grandmother," I screamed. "She fell down the stairs. I think she's dead!"
Before the ambulance arrived, I wiped the evidence off the railing with a Viva paper towel.
Bennie lives in the high desert of Central New Mexico where he writes short stories, flash fiction, novels, and drama. His writing will appear in an upcoming Grey Borders Anthology entitled “Daddy: A Cultural Anthology” and was recently published in Dream Pop Journal, New World Writing, The Writers Club, Barrio Beat and others. |
Micro Boy Never Loved Christina
We might deny it, but most of us don’t like who we are. Maybe we pretend we’re someone else. Maybe we don’t know, or, maybe we just don’t care. Take me for instance. My name is Carl. But it wasn’t when I returned home from work that hot June day in Troy Hills; it was Frank, Frank Stanley.
#
I’m no genius, but it didn’t take one to figure the power was out. I knew my condo would be an oven, and it was, so I grabbed a Schlitz Lite from the dead refrigerator and dragged a kitchen chair out to the balcony. I needed some air.
Just as I tried to take a deep breath, the wind came up and I got a mouthful of sand for my trouble, proving beyond a doubt that keeping your mouth shut, in general, is a good idea, not that I’ve ever put much stock in good ideas.
Oh, and my can of Schlitz Lite, it tasted like shit, so I threw it as far as I could into the parking lot below.
Boris Yemenski, the short stocky Russian with the pencil moustache who ran the condo complex, ran past my balcony, holding his arms up. I wanted to whine about the power outage but he ran too fast. He flexed his gun tatts without breaking stride.
I could see Mrs. Mannering flailing away on her balcony, pushing about seventy in her half-opened kimono that flapped in the wind like a Japanese flag of conquest. She kept pointing at the steel curlers in her hair and waving at Boris to come up and fix her situation. Her dull yellow hair looked like wet straw and her skin was thin and crispy like fried cellophane. She usually wore very tight dresses.
Before I knew it, she disappeared into her condo and so did Boris. I didn’t see him after that. Management can often be a complex system of tradeoffs and compromises, but I had confidence in Boris.
The storm arrived. My three girlfriends that lived along the river, Justine, Josie and Jewel, were all being shaken like rag dolls by spoiled children. Even trees can become girlfriends when you haven’t had a date in a long time. I wondered if Boris was enjoying himself. Something sharp hit my face.
A trickle of blood came out of my right cheek and down the front of my shirt. I looked around to see who threw it. The minute I realized the wind did it, I decided to take it like a man. I impressed myself with my grace under fire as I wiped the blood away, keeping my finger on my cheek. I must have looked precious.
All the lights came on, and went off again. Boris still had time. I started thinking pornographically about Mrs. Mannering. Her skin became soft and firm, her breasts became larger and pinker. Her husband worked the night shift at the Walmart on Heath Place.
I could hear Sol Stein's deep booming voice next door. He was blowing word bombs at his son Billie to study hard and make something of himself. Even I knew it was pointless. It was the same speech I'd heard myself, years before, by my own Sol. It was pointless then.
My can of thrown beer had somehow landed on the roof of Sol's new SUV, his pride and joy, the shiny black one with the Tech Package. For a split second I convinced myself that I threw the brew for Billie. I made believe I was Billie's hero and that I could save him.
The roaring wind muffled the rest of Sol's monologue, but not the slamming of the door. I knew Annie Stein was pleading with Billie to stay.
At most, the whole death scene took five seconds. I’d heard gunshots before, so I ducked behind my balcony wall and watched Billie became an instant memory, unbeknownst to Billie. The passing storm buried Billie in dead leaves and garbage. Hard to know why, but the last thing Billie did was embrace the left front tire of Sol’s pride and joy. Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are what we drive, after all.
I decided not to waste my time consoling the Steins. I didn't like them anyway and I was pretty sure the feeling was mutual. Besides, I could hear the cops' canned consolations, so why bother.
The Steins once told me to leave Billie alone and stop giving him bad ideas. I told them how to raise him right. They told me to be the Jew I really was and to stop hiding from the truth. That was the last conversation we ever had, because I thought I’d discovered something new, that there were hypocrites everywhere, which turned out to be a good place to hide for a while.
When I legally changed my name from Stanley Frankowitz to Frank Stanley, I became Frank Stanley, and that was that. The air conditioning came on.
When I woke up the next morning, I found myself guilty. Somehow, I killed Billie myself. Somehow, everything changed right then.
I dropped my last moldy bagel into the toaster and hoped for the best, followed by a lame promise to myself to enjoy my morning despite the slideshow of death that kept shuffling and reshuffling itself in my head. It wouldn’t quit, even when I went back to the balcony to see if it had all been a bad dream. But there was Sol, in the parking lot, cleaning the Schlitz off the roof of his SUV. He was standing on the chalk outline of Billie’s head.
I went back inside and Googled myself, anything to stop the slideshow. And then that loop started all over again.
It took a while, but I finally found myself. I was number 68 of 12,761. I was on page four. Then I read my mother’s fake maiden name and the loop stopped.
#
Like most home security companies, ‘Tracers’ was a scam. The day I was hired by ‘Tracers’ as a Programmer, I had 'opted out' of sharing any of my personal information. To be on the safe side, I planted a marker in my data in case they didn’t comply with their promise of confidentiality. Sometimes it’s better to be stupid than naïve.
Pete's Open-Door Policy, Peter Browning, CEO of Tracers, went like this: My door is always open but I'm not, so come on in. What angered Pete wasn't that I walked in unannounced or that I angrily threw a printout of my Google ID on his desk, it was that I replaced his face on the twenty or so screens in his office with my own Personnel Profile.
"What's that?" asked the CEO.
"It's me… Pete."
"So?"
"I opted out of sharing my personal data."
Pete speed-dialed Personnel. "Cut Frank Stanley's last check and have it ready for him in five minutes. He's on his way."
As he ended that call, he looked up at me and smiled. The streaks of sunlight that came through his windows made broken diamonds across his face and grey streaked hair. "You know what your problem is Frank?" I refused to answer. He waited and waited and waited some more.
"Values Frank, you've got values." His white teeth glistened in the sunlight as he smiled at me and extended his hand from behind his desk. I smiled back and walked out.
Charlie and Mike met me at Payroll and handed me a cardboard box with my stuff. They were the two Security Guards who escorted me out and made believe they didn't know me. I tried to think like they must have been thinking at that moment, but I couldn't.
I was free now, except for one thing. That damn loop came back!
#
There were still a couple of weeks left before the new school year would start.
Ten years hadn’t changed anything. New York City smelled the same. I didn’t get why the hope I was feeling felt like anger. But then I got it right away when I passed a head-phoned man walking up the stairs at the Union Square Station. For no apparent reason, just the sight of me must have pissed him off. He told me to go fuck myself. I thanked him for his feedback and continued down the stairs.
As I waited for the train to take me back to Brooklyn, I tried to guess what the ‘L’ in L Train stood for. ‘Loser’ became my only choice when I realized that journeys back are never multiple-choice.
The hissing of the closing doors sounded final. I looked up at an ad above the doors. It showed an older man and maybe his granddaughter walking by themselves on a snow-white beach. The caption read: ‘Don't let your retirement stop you from enjoying your life.’ The sky above them was a blue I’d never seen before. A palm tree bent away from the water.
It was now me and my backpack, riding an empty subway car, holding on as the train picked up too much speed and started rocking like a laundromat washing machine.
The old man from the ad was walking towards me, but he kept looking over his shoulder at the young girl wobbling her way towards him in the careening train. She held her arms out aiming herself at him.
The screeching train jolted to a stop and the doors flew open. When I looked around, the two of them were gone.
The sign at the Saratoga Avenue Station was decorated with that colorful, confident graffiti, the kind they now call art even though it isn’t. I could see from the platform that the old neighborhood was still filthy and necessary. The flying white horse was now full of bullet holes, but still flying above the gas station, now abandoned.
The heavy thumping beat coming from Camacho’s Latin Music Store gave everything a pulse and the screaming sirens crying wolf gave it a voice.
Everything I owned was in my backpack. The weight of it pushed me down the elevated subway station stairs faster than I wanted to go. Three Puerto Rican Billies surrounded me at the bottom of the stairs. One of them squeezed my backpack like a mango. As a chorus they asked me if I was Jewish. I told them no and they laughed and asked me for money. I thanked them for their request, but would they like to die because I kill for dope. They flicked their cigarette butts at me and walked away.
As I walked, the smell of plantain chips frying in rancid oil hit me hard. Then the stench of rotting garbage and backed up sewers took over, it was fresh. I witnessed what happens when you take recycling too seriously as the scavengers ate the garbage and the drunks drank the sewage.
I turned the corner and there it was, 945 Dumont Ave, which used to be 945 MLK Boulevard, which used to be 945 Ithaca Ave.
A busybody woman in curlers, no comparison to Mrs. Mannering, was yelling at the top of her lungs out of a 4th Floor window at maybe her son to stop talking to hoodlums and go to work already before they’d fire him. She looked at me to see if I agreed. My pretended neutrality was weak and no match for her eyes and the smile on her face which thanked me for agreeing with her.
Right away I remembered that it didn’t take much to live there, or die there. But I didn’t have a coin to flip to see which one was mine. The buzzer that lets you in was on permanent buzz, so all you had to do was push, which I did. I should have known better.
I couldn’t tell where he was from, but after some sign language like opening a door with a key, the dirty t-shirt landlord gave me the key to the dump I was about to call home. The sound of my footsteps echoed off the stone walls like bad acid trip elevator music. The one lyric to the song was on the wall. ‘Micro Boy loves Christina 4eVer’.
Apartment 202 caught me by surprise. I’d forgotten about Alex. He used to live there with his mother. He moved back to Poland after she killed herself. Not that I was an expert on the subject, but since then I’ve learned that people die all the time.
202’s brown metal door was stuck shut. I kept hitting it with my shoulder.
A young black kid was running up the stairs. He gave me a smirk of approval. I smirked back and told him to go fuck himself. He grabbed his crotch at me and glided up the stairs, four steps at a time. I couldn’t figure out why his footsteps were silent.
#
Principal Marcia Kaplan hadn’t aged gracefully, but her arrogance must have discovered the fountain of youth.
“Had I known it was you, Stanley, I wouldn’t have hired you. But since it’s too late to do anything about it right now, I’ll have to live with my decision, for now.”
“Marcia, if I can call you Marcia, I can teach these kids. I know I can.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, you can’t call me Marcia. You can call me Principal Kaplan. Familiarity breeds contempt, and so on.”
The pencil she was stabbing the air with broke as she stabbed her desk with it. Her arrogance had morphed into road rage, not easy to do when you sitting behind a desk. She pumped the brakes a little.
“Tell me, why did you change your name Stanley?”
“Well, your name isn’t Principal Kaplan, is it Marcia? Why should I call you something you’re not, Marcia?”
That goosed her. She stood up and rearranged her black outfit and curled her finger at me. She hadn’t changed and the Intermediate School 242 that used to be Junior High School 242 hadn’t changed either. And although I thought I knew the answer already, I was about to find out if students had changed.
She fast-walked me up to my classroom where the students had already made themselves comfortable. As the door opened in front of her, she poked her head in.
"Class, I want to introduce Mr. Stanley. He’s your new Homeroom teacher. Please make him feel welcome."
Marcia was still pretty strong. She shoved me in from behind. A loud fart came from the back of the classroom and many of the students laughed, a few didn't.
"Yep, smells like Stanley," said a female voice from the back.
Kaplan slammed the door.
They all had smartphones which they held like crucifixes.
"If you're going to throw stuff at me when I turn around, do me a favor and wait a second so I can take my selfie with you first."
Nothing came next. I sat on my chair with my legs up on the desk while they played video games with each other. I ignored them. When it was time for them to go to their next class, I ignored them. As they walked out, a few of them tried to look at what I was doing on my phone.
On my second day I found my way into their social media. For a while, my meme was anonymous. Then they got it and they were good with it. In fact, a few of them thought it was pretty funny and then a few more wanted to know how I did it. These were the naturally curious ones. Maria, Maria Gomez, was one of them. She was bright, inquisitive, positive, and everyone's friend. I figured out quickly that gaining her trust was critical. She quietly spread the word that they needed to give me a chance to prove myself. It worked. Even the die-hards gave in but it took a full two months, which put them behind in the school curriculum.
I made sure I told them as often as I could that I would never betray their trust, no matter what, but, I had to prove it.
Then we flipped roles. They taught me their Family Rules. Rule #1 - Every member of the family had to be available to all the others 24/7, not the fake 24/7, the real 24/7. So, I made myself available to all of them whenever they needed me.
Curriculums, not the reasons for why they exist, have to be followed. I worked the curriculum into our social media. At first, they snapped to it but ignored it. But when I turned it into a video game called Beat the System, their test scores zoomed to the top of all the other classes in the school, they actually beat the system or curriculum or whatever you want to call the thing that was intended to keep them down. People took notice. Marcia thought I had taught them how to cloak their cheating.
Unfortunately for Marcia, the students actually started learning. Unfortunately for me, success breeds contempt.
Dejuan Howard earned his living as a PE teacher, but, earned his favor by snitching. He was the self-appointed hall monitor that spent all his free time, including lunch breaks, roaming the hallways and looking, for opportunities.
The School Policy of ‘No open windows for the safety of our students’, could not, under any circumstances, be broken. What we needed at that moment was air. The students couldn't breathe, let alone think. So, I decided to open the windows.
"In case any of you are planning on jumping out of these windows, please don't."
The two-cough warning from Ersie Jefferson made it clear, the snitch was looking. Everyone ignored the snitch but knew exactly what was coming. I saw him. I was in the middle of a Social Studies lesson on the Declaration of Independence. In less than two minutes Marcia in red appeared at the door, doing her finger curl.
"And don't forget students. At the same time that George Washington, the Father of our country, was declaring that all men were created equal, he was wearing dentures made from the teeth of his own slaves."
"Can I see you for a second Mr. Stanley?"
"Certainly Marcia. Excuse me for one second class.”
"Mr. Howard, please take over while I speak to Mr. Stanley in my office."
The smirking snitch glowed.
At that point in the school year, my six-day suspension was the end of my career. So, I walked home as the texts poured in. The one that made me feel the best was the one from Maria. It was uplifting and kind and thanked me for standing up for all of the Family members and that they were all behind me. I thanked her for her kindness.
I felt funny walking home. The heat wave in the city smothered everything. There was one window in my apartment that could be opened. It led out to the fire escape. Unfortunately, there was no fire and there was no escape, so I waited for more words. None came.
Two hours later, a text came from Ersie. It said that Maria had been killed by a speeding taxi as she crossed Saratoga Ave. 'She was texting you, Mr. Stanley, and not paying attention to the traffic. She was killed just before sending you the text.’
I texted the Family that I was on my way to Maria’s home. I knew that no matter what I would tell her parents it couldn’t be heard. The death of a child is deafening and unfair. The tears of her friends couldn't console Sixto and Soledad, Maria's parents. Everyone told me it wasn't my fault. But, the look in Sixto’s eyes became a weapon.
Marcia fired me in her office. None of her words made their way into my brain except 'you caused this' and 'irresponsible'. Those words I knew.
As I passed the family in the hallway, I turned off my phone. I couldn't look at them.
#
I didn’t like it much, sitting on a park bench, getting rained on, off and on.
"You should listen to him, you know. He's got something important to tell you," said an old man in a Mets cap who had stopped in front of me. He pointed his umbrella at a nearby tree.
“That bird, the little red one up there in the tree. His name is Silhouette.”
Then he sat down next to me and introduced his Chihuahua. "His name is Cupcake; in case you're interested."
"I'm not."
Looking up at the sky didn’t work. The dog gave a low growl, which was amusing since he had no teeth. I tried the sky strategy again.
"I bought the ashes of Somerset Maugham years ago at a Flea Market on Pitkin Avenue, tripped out in India and found myself selling digital Christmas lights to Tibetan Monks in the Himalayas. To this day, mind you, to this day I have no idea how I got back home." He shrugged off his own words. The dog growled at me again.
"What’s his problem?"
"Nothing. It's just that you remind him of someone. He's seen a photograph of this person for his whole life so he thinks he knows him." He paused for a second and cupped his hand over his mouth and whispered to me like we’d known each other forever. "But he doesn't really know him. But, I have to agree, there is a resemblance." He very gently patted the dog's head and said "He's ok baby, he's ok."
He continued on. "I spread the ashes on the heating rocks of a Brighton Beach shvitz and inhaled as much of it as I could. But in case that wouldn't work, I kept some in a shot glass in my kitchen cabinet as a backup. I thought that if I put it in a glass of warm tea, one day, and drank it, I could channel Maugham, when I finally got around to writing my novel, which I never did, by the way."
"Why?"
"Why, because after I drank that glass of tea, I debated with myself for twenty-three years about whether or not drinking his ashes was the same thing as cannibalism. Couldn't figure it out, so, well, here I am, still debating... But if I do, I’ve got the title for it. It will be called ‘Sanity as a Second Language. The User Manual.’ He nodded slightly as if he agreed with his own indecision.
I had a feeling he wouldn’t stop.
"My story cannot be stopped. It's like this rain.” And right on cue the rain started again. He opened his umbrella over both of us. “It feeds my flow, which is an out-of-control river. It goes on forever, whatever forever is." He caught his breath. "You would think that by now I would have figured it all out, being the broken-down piece of shit that I am. It's unfortunate, though. Too many things to figure out when you get old."
I thought I’d finally reached my limit, so I stood up to leave. But the old man gently pulled me back and handed me what looked like a plain white business card. It read 'Murray The Bitch, F.B.A.'
"What's an F.B.A.?"
"Freelance Bullshit Artist. I'm a salesman. I create it and sell it. For instance, for you, here's what I would tell you. You can't feast on life if your dessert is regret. And I'm sure you're thinking to yourself, that's bullshit, which it is, but maybe not. And that's my point. The truth is I can't stop lying. So, no matter what I tell you, even if I tell you it's a lie, you’ll still want more."
"Listen, I lie to myself all the time. I don’t need any help from you."
"Actually, you do", insisted Murray. "You'll see. Oh, and in case you want to know, I'm also on the web. Actually, I used to have my own You Tube Channel until they deleted it, which is too bad really. No matter though, because now I live in the Dark Web under the alias ‘Jack Webb in Drag’, not dragnet. All Jack wanted were facts. Not me. Why, because facts are bullshit. All I want are lies that sell, the hell with facts. So, if you’d like me to regularly lie to you it'll cost you a flat $15/Month, which is my entry level Plan called UB, Unlimited Bullshit. Want another free sample?"
“No.”
"Ok, remember, that everything I'm going to tell you is bullshit. So, here you are, sitting on this bench and I decide to sit down next to you, right?"
"Yeah, so?"
"Then I told you about my journey through my Hindu Hell and my cannibalistic tendencies as a neophyte writer, right?"
I couldn’t respond because I became paralyzed by my boredom.
"O.k., listen carefully because this is the crux. Are you sure you're listening?"
"Yes."
"O.k., Cancer is nothing more than a manifestation of Schopenhauer's Will. That's right. It's the force that’s everywhere, all the time. Everyone gets some of it, but some people, for whatever reason, get an excess amount because that Will has a mind of its own? Example, no one is immune from insanity which arrives like thunder from within and when it arrives it can't be stopped. So, what happens when insanity fights cancer? Simple, you have Communism in a no-revolution takeover. Everything works for the good of the people. So, if you die, so be it."
"So what?"
Murray answered. "Exactly. Because Communistic entrepreneurs like myself control their own destinies, for the good of the people of course. The sample I just gave you was a teaser. There's more, in fact there's always more. And, if you doubt me, remember this. Once you become a subscriber, it will be, I promise you, all about you! So, just keep that in mind. You will be your own addiction, and you’ll never be able to get enough of yourself, which is covered by the fee. You will become the dope of you."
#
Eternity can come in many sizes. Mine came in a two-week package of boredom and self- pity, not to mention isolation. I talked to no one, including the old man and his chihuahua, who happened to be walking by my favorite bench in Betsy Head Park. No telling what would come out of his mouth.
"Hey. Hey you, Murray, I'm ready to be a member."
He gently stopped. "If you are, remember, that everything I'm going to tell you is bullshit." He held up one finger and added, "But, included with your UB are ‘free’ nuggets of what is known as The Truth. However, there's a kicker. The amount of Truth will change from time to time."
I couldn't tell if Cupcake was nodding in approval or just breathing hard. Murray wanted to talk about Add-Ons.
"The percent of Truth you get depends on the level you're buying. Your basic UB, Unlimited Bullshit, comes with a standard plus or minus ten percent Truth. But you can buy up to one hundred percent Truth if you choose, but even I have to admit, it’s a little pricey. And the truth about the Truth is that it's never revealed. And, if you recall, even Truth is bullshit."
"I recall."
"OK, are you ready?"
"I am."
I took out my last ten and five and handed them to Murray. He wouldn't take it and smiled with a quiet "Don't worry about that now." It took him a while to sit down on the bench and put Cupcake on his lap.
"O.K., there was a time when I was my own Rorschach Test. I lived in a world of robot memes. No matter where I went, they surrounded me. When I left the Himalayas, I found myself in Plato's Cave. Shadows of Reality are Greek for bullshit. By the way, it’s actually in Turkey not Greece, the cave I mean. Did you know that Turkey exists in dual but separate parallel dimensions? One exists in the pre-dawn apocalypse and the other in a totalitarian agnostically religious state of semi-democracy. Is it Troy or Gobekli Tepe? Who knows, but my point is that I saw tracers from my inner bitch directing me away from the real me which was dead or didn't exist, take your pick. And did you know that these things die as soon as you think about them? That fast." He snapped his fingers in my face.
"Ok Murray, who the fuck are you?"
"Who am I? Good question. I’ll tell you who I am. I’m the Fourth Stooge, that’s who I am. It was Moe who christened me Bitchy. Don’t let anyone tell you that Shlep was the Fourth. I met Moe at a Think Tank in Santa Barbara where we were both submerged in a viscous liquid of Hollywood Showbiz urine and raw sewage from San Quentin. Believe it or not you can actually think in that shit, but don't ask me how. Anyway, we were finally flushed out of there and we found ourselves in the Cemetery State known as Popularity, as defined by the Wikipedia Encyclopedia of Illiterate Excuses. And what I learned from that experience is this; I should have taken Moe's slaps, not as Hate from an Asshole, but as Love from a Corpse. So, I left that cemetery as a mist in the twilight and started my own career as a Freelance Bullshit Artist. Does that answer your question?"
After I answered "Yes", I walked home shaking my head like an old Chihuahua.
#
He had a truthy way of dealing with questions that weren’t questions. For instance, I decided to ask this, since he said it would be all about me;
"What's worse, knowing the Truth or dealing with it?"
"The Cult of The Ignorant is populated by the Goat People of Stupidia. I learned this in the Sudan where a local tribal chieftain bought my ass on the black market, which, by the way, is not restricted to blackness. He believed I was a white shaman in a reverse dream sequence of never-ending fantasies fueled by drugs, intellectual pomposity and linguistic slights-of-hand. The Truth, which for you is now Thirty Percent, is that as a slave to him I learned the true value of freedom - which, by the way, ain't much, despite what you’ve probably been told."
“What I’ve already learned is that freedom has no value and neither does truth. They just are.”
"Exactly, because Freedom is Fear. The only Freedom you will ever know is and can only be, Experience," Texted Murray.
"I'm pretty sure I know Fear."
"No, you don't."
"Oh yes I do."
"I was in denial once myself, when I lived with a cult that believed in Vegetarianism as a way of life. They sacrificed their children to their Great God, Algo Rithma, who predicted with great accuracy when and where each child would die by the hands of their parents. So, their mantra, which at that time was 'Eat a Carrot, Kill a Kid' took hold of me for ten years until I actually realized that they had it all wrong, backwards in fact. It actually was, and this ended my denial, which is where I am right now, 'Eat a kid, Kill a Tree'. My Maugham Smoothie was my validation."
"And you denied that it was the right thing to do?"
"No, I was in denial that it was part of Schopenhauer's Will and that I had absolutely no say, per se, in denying it. See?"
"Not really."
"Well, take my latest self-hack for example. I'm going to build a giant phallic symbol out of Legos and start a new Fund Me campaign for Phallic Freedom of Thought. And what, you might ask, is Phallic Freedom of Thought? It is the promotion of an intellectual environment wherein you will be able to think and live phallically without religious, governmental or social recrimination of any kind."
"Sounds pretty useless.”
'Well, we all do it in anyway. Why not do it without fear or worry?"
"I thought you said Freedom is Fear."
"Being free isn't always desirable. We're all hooked on Will as our permanent addiction anyway, so, methodoning our addictions with a little fake freedom is o.k. My Fund Me campaign is just a minor intervention, just a minor diversion really. And, of course, a few extra bucks never hurt."
#
Sometimes, the sound of laughter can either make you sick or make you wonder why you didn’t get it.
I was sitting on my rusty fire escape when I heard it from the fire escape above.
It was Murray and Cupcake. The old man was laughing and his dog was lip-syncing. They were like an old married couple finishing each other's thoughts and mouthing each other's words. No wonder they were laughing.
"That you Murray?" He kept laughing.
"We were just discussing how easy it is these days to make a buck. A man has to earn a living you know. No getting around it. Look at me. I sold my TV, bought a laptop, got a smart phone, changed my look, got subscribers and now look at me. I'm living off the land."
"There's no land in Brownsville."
"Oh yes there is." He raised his left eyebrow. "It's the land of where you really live, that is, of course, if you choose to live there. You can GPS your ass or live in the big Strip Joint in the Sky getting lap dances from the Grim Reaper, that's where. Ever see a ninety-three-year-old Brooklyn Jew in skinny jeans?"
"Nope."
"Take a good look." He stood up and showed me his trendy jeans, electric orange sneakers and tight-fitting T- Shirt that had something written on the front in large black letters. “See?"
"What's it say?"
He pointed to the words. "It says, 'Nothing but Net Bitch'." He very slowly crawled back through his window and into his apartment. I had no idea that he lived right above me, in 302, the apartment I grew up in.
He poked his head back out of his window and said, “It was a gift from my so-called friends.”
#
I found out soon enough that his ‘so-called friends’ were mostly The 369.
Who they were didn’t matter much, to them or anyone else that lived in the building. Most of them hung out in front of Murray's place, a few in front of the building. As far as I was concerned, I had enough stuff to worry about so I never gave them much thought.
They were mostly young men and a few girls, and if reputations mattered, they were supposed to be ruthless. They had a lot of money from whatever they did. Was killing included in whatever? Probably.
At first, I couldn't figure out why they tolerated me. All I knew was that their friendly nods felt good. Maybe it was Murray. Maybe it was the Family. One thing I soon realized was that it wasn’t dumb luck.
By July 4th my independence and freedom ran out. I ran out of money and food. I couldn’t pay my rent.
Then things started appearing at my door, like food in cardboard boxes. A loose twenty, usually tucked in there somewhere, or sometimes folded into a paper airplane, in case I needed some entertainment.
#
I couldn’t accept the gifts. I left them with a note thanking them for their kindness.
I ambled around the Super 3 like the unprofessional shoplifter I was. The owner wasn’t fooled for a second and slammed me up against the chicharron rack. The roll and lunch meat fell out from under my shirt.
“Call the cops Frankie. I’m sick of these assholes stealing everything I’ve got. I’m sick of it.”
Frankie the security guard at the Super 3 was an off-duty moonlighting cop that had worked the neighborhood for a long time. He pulled the owner aside and whispered in his ear.
The owner picked up the roll and meat and shoved it in my chest. Then he told me to get the fuck out and don’t come back, ever again. I didn’t say a word and I didn’t apologize. Hunger equalizes everything, including humiliation. I’d never tasted anything that good before or since.
I decided to go to Murray’s for dessert.
"I had a friend once," said Murray as his eyes teared up. "His name was Carl. We drank schnapps together. We organized Unions and even joined the Merchant Marines together. But he decided to die first and I've been waiting for his phone call ever since." He paused for a minute. "You may be Carl and I can't take the chance that you aren't so allow me to put a little schnapps in your tea and give you a welcome home hug."
He poured some whiskey in my tea and we spent the rest of the afternoon talking about the differences between law and justice and about the last man to actually think one completely clear thought, Socrates, who by the way, according to Murray, wasn't as smart as people thought he was. But, his one clear thought, 'nothing to be preferred before justice' was pure genius, but the rest of his so-called philosophy wasn't much.
"When you live in the Dark Web," said Murray, "you’re homeless. This is a fact that can't be denied and everyone who lives there, well, they're all homeless. It’s actually a requirement for living there. It only asks for one thing, your Social Security Number. Then you get the Code of Life."
#
Whenever I couldn't sleep or whenever I felt the sorriest for myself, I somehow found myself in Murray's apartment. As usual his door was wide open and there were a few 369's hanging out. One of them, I found out later it was Micro Boy, was sitting next to Murray on his old worn-out brown corduroy sofa. They were having a Rap Chat, tapping out the beat on the sofa. It went something like this:
Murray - "Tell me why you die.
Tell me why you die."
Young Man - "The Truth Bitch
The Truth Bitch
The Truth Bitch"
Murray - "All I do is lie about the Truth
The Truth ain't shit.
This shit's gotta go.
This shit has got to go."
Young Man - "Tell me bitch, I ain't shit.
I ain't shit and I'm crazy.
I love her and I'm crazy.
Crazy kills babies.
Crazy lives till you die."
That conversation went on for another thirty minutes. They could see me standing there, listening, but it didn't matter. The young man got up, kissed Murray on the top of his head and said. "I feel you Bitch, I feel you."
Murray answered. "O.K., but don't fuck with me. You feel me now?"
The young man didn't answer right away, but after he thought about it, he smiled and said, "Yeah, I feel you." As the young man started to leave, Murray pulled him back, gave him a hug, slapped him on his ass and sent him on his way.
Everyone, except for one guard, left, because they could see that the old man was tired. I hung out for a while. Murray sat back down and closed his eyes. He slept deep and free. I kept an eye on him for a while and thought about how much I loved teaching children, like he did.
When Murray finally woke up, he said, "I'm going to call you Carl from now on and all of my so-called friends will also call you Carl. Why? Because Carl would have liked that." He fell asleep again. I left the front door open, as always.
#
August is technically not a month, and here’s why.
It was August 11th, and Murray’s door was closed, that’s why. I knocked on it loud enough to wake the dead, which, in this case, turned out to be Bertha Sexton, Murray's next-door neighbor.
"If you're looking for Murray, don’t waste your time. He's in jail. The old fool."
"Thank you, Bertha. I found Cupcake barking in front of my door."
"That dog's as stupid as that old fool, maybe stupider."
The Legion Street jail was in the back of the Police Station. I talked my way in to see Murray, who looked happy to see me. He grinned out a big smile and flashed gold braces that covered his dentures. Some kind of a code was printed on them.
He looked like he needed a straight man, so I volunteered.
I pointed to his mouth and said, "What the hell is that?"
"It’s The Code of Life, which is now my message to the world. As soon as you see it you immediately get it. But if you don't, well, then you’re not one of my so-called friends."
He whispered it in my ear. "Now you know, Carl."
The cops released him to me, pending further investigation. There had been a sting operation on The 369 and Murray got caught in the net. None of The 369 said they knew him and that he just happened to be walking by.
As we left the station there were reporters waiting. Murray flashed The Code of Life smile and pointed to his mouth with a peace sign. We got on the bus that took us home and when we got off the bus he paused for a moment and gently put his finger on my chest. "Don't ever believe that FDR was a Fellow Traveler. He force-fed America gold-plated gag-proof geese that were cooked in the heat of battle, not the one from WWII, but the real one called Economic Instability, false work for fake money to cure a sickness caused by greedy capitalists who jumped out of windows and landed on pillows filled with counterfeit fortunes."
We walked home slowly from the bus stop. "Come have lunch with me and bring You-Know-Who. I miss him."
I retrieved You-Know-Who, Cupcake’s new alias, and gave him back to the old man and when I did, the old mans’ eyes smiled. We ate soft-boiled eggs, Gruyere cheese triangles, the kind that came covered in foil, pumpernickel bread and butter and, of course, hot tea. It was good. I was hungry again. I left Murray's door open when he fell asleep. I didn’t want to look back.
#
With the new school year approaching, Tweets poured in from the Family wanting me to teach again. More stray twenties from someone kept finding their way under my door. I needed answers.
Murray was sitting on his corduroy sofa in his underwear and Mets cap. He was rereading another faded copy of The Daily Worker.
He laughed out loud as he read it and looked up at me over his reading glasses. He said, "The silence of the deaf is the symphony of the blind. Slowmo Livin’ said that. Of course, that wasn’t his real name. His real name was Shlomo Levin. I changed it for him to protect the innocent. He lived right here on Strauss Street and he was a very smart man. He was a Yiddish philosopher, smarter than Socrates actually. He told me this once: 'Give me a good piece of Gefilte Fish and I'll tell you the correct time." He's gone now, but he was a very smart man."
He stopped his monologue and returned to his reading. I read the back page while he read his memories. It was a full-page ad for a Trade Union Meeting of Furriers in the Garment District. Whoever went to that meeting was probably dead by now.
Murray looked up at the ceiling. "It's easy to Stalinize a Rockefeller bum. All you have to do is throw him a dime and promise him happiness and security." He closed his eyes. "In 1938, Stalin and Gandhi had a bromance, a little-known fact. It developed rapidly from there and they had an illegitimate son named Murray. Want some tea?"
"Yes".
"I learned how to brew tea in Cambodia when I was part of a Kibbutz in Phnom Penh. I was hired as a Cultural Envoy for the Cambodian Government, by Slowmo, believe it or not, who had been contracted by the Cambodian Government to unconfuse Confucianism for the people, the Cambodian people that is. The Chinese weren't confused, because they invented it, which I'm still not totally convinced of. Anyway, I was supposed to start the first Cambodian Kibbutz. And I'll tell you this, Kibbutz's not located in Israel are hard enough to establish, but in Cambodia, well, you can just imagine. Then, for whatever reason, we thought we could homestead in Angkor Wat which had been designated at that time as a Dead Zone. Well, we succeeded for a while and besides learning how to brew tea we also learned how to cry in Tongues. I eventually left Cambodia when a comic, who shall remain nameless, did USO Shows for all Jews left behind in Concentration Camps that had been converted into Kibbutz's by the Russians. But then, as fate would have it, his bird became paralyzed and his mind froze when he lost his shtick, more commonly known as the ability to make people laugh. And when he started his own Cable Show, Demolition Derby for Washed-Up Catskillians, the same thing happened to me. I didn't have any shtick to lose but I used to have what is known as sanity. I lost my sanity to a girl named Sheila who twisted my arm to become a Catholic. She lived somewhere in Indiana. When I finally told her no because I was a Hindi of the lowest caste sweeping up cow shit and calling it my pleasure she cried like a baby and kicked my ass out into the street, a full twenty feet to the curb mind you. I call it Demolition Derby, Murray style. "
He took a breath but kept staring at me, like he all of a sudden recognized me. I went along with my new identity and slept well that night. In the morning when I woke up, I found another twenty under my door with a note attached to it. It read:
"Carl,
Thought you could use this.
My so-called friends are working
on your situation. I anticipate
good results.
Murray
P.S. Great to have you back"
I didn't see much of Murray after that. Occasionally I would pass by his door to see how he was doing and would usually see him Rapping with different kids, texting on his phone or reading his Daily Workers. He looked frail and sadder. Cupcake wasn't around anymore.
#
The summer went by hot and slow. I got by somehow with help from friends and 'so-called' friends. Two weeks before the school year was supposed to start, a grass roots campaign started to have me reinstated to my old teaching position. There were student protests in front of the school and in front of Kaplan's home.
Maybe Kaplan and the Board had had enough. They offered to reinstate me if I would relent in my use of social media to teach. I told them 'no' and walked out of her office. The students somehow knew I declined her offer and cheered me as I left. Over the next few days, the protests grew.
I kept to myself as much as possible as the new school year approached. Two days before the school year began, the heat forced me out on my fire escape again. There were low murmurs coming from Murray's place so I went upstairs and saw a small group of his so-called friends who had gathered around him. When I entered, the crowd put their arms around me. I looked at Murray and knew he was dead.
#
If you're free, you should be afraid, according to Murray. I felt free and afraid. That's why I legally changed my name again. I was now Carl, officially. I bitched about everything to everyone.
Maybe, just maybe, I became a consultant to the New York City Board of Education on their New Ventures in Education Through Social Media. Or, maybe I became a liaison to the Dark Web. Or maybe we're all Thirty Percent Subscribers. But, as long as we can make our own decisions, we can decide for ourselves who we are and who we want to be. That’s Freedom, Murray Style.
{END}
STUPID CITY
Ami drives her Smart Car through her modern subdivision to the nearby park. Around the perimeter of the park is a multi-use paved path. Rather than jog or walk, she skips the 2 and a half kilometers around. She has no idea how many miles this amounts to, because years ago made a life-choice not to use miles, but kilometers instead, like they do in Tibet. As she skips along the path she always stays to the right as the yellow signs indicate, even though this staying to the right seems like a Republican conspiracy to her, and she wonders why they could not stay to the left. This especially bothers her when she sees children with mothers and how the mothers always force their children to stay to the right, which seems to smother the children’s natural creativity.
When she gets home, she showers, after asking the water’s understanding to be treated in such a way, and then gets dressed: an ankle-length hemp skirt with Celtic belt, an aurora borealis colored pull-over with real lavender petals woven into it, and Guatemalan sandals. No bra, of course. Then she fixes herself a couple of eggs that she bought from a nearby farm. At this farm, all the labor and profits are shared equally among the chickens. There is a swimming pool, playground and aerobics classes for the chickens. The chicken dwellings are air conditioned, piped with classical music and equipped with big screen televisions on which are aired films from the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday nights. Nothing from Fox news is ever allowed on these tvs because of a special filter.
After eating, she sits down to write the city another letter, because in her neighborhood they recently put in a speed bump, when in her first 10 letters she had specifically requested a speed “hump.” Stupid city.
When the letter is safely deposited in the mailbox, she looks at Facebook for a while, posts a meme that says: “Only boring people get bored.” It gets 4 likes, which pleases her. Then she notices some guy using the word “hillbilly” in a post, a guy who will remain nameless. She wonders how she could have become “friends” with such a sort, and blocks him right away. She laughs at some kitten photos, almost cries over a picture of a gorilla and some poor people in China, then laughs again at a video of a parrot dancing to “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen.
She goes out to her patio and looks at her vegetable garden which she has planted in a WWII ammunitions chest that she bought on e-bay for 1,500 dollars. She has a tomato plant, cilantro and Czechoslovakian mint. She begs pardon from the tomato plant for its pain, thanks it for its selfless giving nature, then picks a tomato with an empathetic wince. In her heart she prays for all the hungry people in the world, but in a non-denominational way, of course. If she had to give a definition of her religious beliefs, if a gun was put to her head, so to speak, she would say they are probably closest to “Buddhism without the buddy system.”
She sits on her patio and thinks about the dolphins. One day the dolphins will teach us their wisdom, she thinks. Hopefully one day a dolphin will run for president and everyone will know peace.
After this she goes to the natural foods market, buys 6 items that cost 120 dollars, which she pays for from her never-ending trust fund. Only fools worry about money, she thinks. After paying she chats with the check-out guy for 5 minutes about the diesel truck parked in the parking lot and its offensive odor. Then she buys 2 ounces of wheat grass juice, makes sure everybody sees her while she drinks it, and goes back outside to her Smart car.
At home she makes a sandwich made from whole wheat corn bread, hummus, tofu-sea-bass, mango and chia seeds. She shakes on some brewer’s yeast for good measure. Before she eats it, she takes a picture of it to post on Facebook.
Then it is time for her online jewelry making class. Every piece of jewelry she makes she then selflessly gives to homeless people on 4th avenue. Sometimes she runs out of homeless people to give jewelry to, or the homeless people scuffle off as she approaches, and when this happens she just drapes her jewelry over the parking meter outside of Bisonwiches.
The jewelry class wipes her out, and she goes to the refrigerator and pours herself a quarter schooner of beer that Zoroaster hand-crafted himself. He fermented the beer from 4- leaf clovers that he picked in the community garden and flavored with chili pepper blossoms from Yachualtecoclteisl when he went to study the rare Gleeking Spider last spring.
She goes back out to the patio to enjoy her beverage, and notices the neighbors are swimming in their pool again. And, again, they are allowing their 14-year old girl to swim without a helmet. In her head she composes another letter to the city, but is too tired to write it. Instead she writes a poem with a sustainable-squid-farm squid ink pen. What the poem is about, exactly, she can’t say, because the muse speaks THROUGH her, not TO her. The muse answers to no one. The muse flies on huge white wings and does not bother with silly questions.
Above her, chem trails streak across the sky. She chokes and gags a little, sighs, then puts on her natural fiber doctor’s mask. She lifts the mask every once-in-a-while to sip her beer.
She meditates. Meditation is the practice of making your mind blank, which has always been easy for her, and is a sign that she is close to the true heart of the universe, according to her mentor and spiritual guide Swami Guey. She wishes she could speak to Swami right now, or at the very least sit in his glowing presence, but he is on a quest in Cabo San Lucas for six weeks. Swami is the kindest man she has ever known, he wouldn’t harm a living thing, not even the insects jumping in his dreadlocks, not even a Gleeking Spider if it crawled into bed with him. Of course, her life-partner Zoroaster is kind too, in fact it was Zoroaster who introduced her to Swami. But Zoroaster is busy at his job at the tattoo parlor, and afterwards he’ll have to go home and smoke his medicine.
No, today she’s all alone. Alone, alone, alone!
She looks at her toes, wiggles them, giggles at their loveliness. She thinks, only a few more weeks until her sabbatical in Amsterdam. And after that, she will go to the writer’s retreat on the shores of Lake Fruitvale. She will miss Zoroaster, to be sure, but he’s promised to wait for her. He’s also promised to water her tomatoes, and to tell them they are lovely so they don’t get depressed.
She issues a sigh of self-contentment. Then she passes out from the beer and begins to snore like a truck driver.
END
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