welcome to volume 63 (October 2008) of
down in the dirt
Self-image mirrors
In my grandfather’s day, all men smoked, and most drank. He tended to do both to excess, and by the age of forty, had been a barely functioning alcoholic for most of his life, and had radical surgery for throat cancer.
Here is Buddha,
Here is Christ,
Here is Mother Nature,
Bloody stools, thought Lester Moore, his moist lips puckering each time as he whispered the second word to himself. Bloody stool—the Bloody Stool. The Bloody Stool. Ye Olde Bloody Stool.
Take-off had been delayed for forty minutes for some reason, but the pilot assured them that twenty of those minutes would be made up by strong tail winds. Whoopee-shit! thought Lester. As people began to queue up for the restroom, he wondered what he might name an airline in a cartoon or joke. Clarke and Kubrick had invented the name HAL for the super-computer in their sci-fi movie, he recalled, by choosing letters one notch down from those of IBM. Could this be done with TWA? he wondered. He pulled out his little notebook and wrote “SUZ” and then corrected it by darkly writing a V over the U. Sleep deprivation, he thought. Emergency! Emergency! Get up, Will Robinson. Get your ass out of the sack—get your dick out of Bonnie—get on the phone for tickets to Virginia!
“The fire rescue people were here within ten minutes—they must’ve worked on him for half an hour,” said Beth Moore before Lester had taken off his coat. “They thought they got a heartbeat for a minute, but then they lost him. I just looked down at your father and told him, ‘Michael, you can’t do this to me!’ I don’t know how I’m goin’ to manage now! I don’t know what stocks we own or what payments are due. I haven’t even written a check myself for the past seven years. When I needed cash, he handed it to me. Other things I just put on charge cards. I’m so mad I could spit.”
At four a.m., Lester awoke with Daisy on his chest, purring and licking his nose. He went to the kitchenette and put half a can of catfood into a sauce dish for her. Then he went to urinate before crawling back into bed.
Lester awoke at 2:20 a.m. He had dreamt that he was back in college taking an economics final exam and had not read one word in the text or attended a single lecture. Beside him in the auditorium was his ex-wife, breezing through the final with ease, humming off-key and grinning to herself. As the professor came toward him to take his examination booklet, Lester had jerked his legs and sat up.
The funeral service went smoothly. Eight people who lived in Beth and Michael’s condo attended it, and the minister gave a short, cheerful sermon. Beth repeated her tale about her anger to six of these people as they greeted and hugged her and wished her well. The minister agreed to find a home for Michael’s computer if Lester would bring it over to him the next day. Lester and Beth then had soup, salad, vegetables, fried chicken, and pecan pie at a local restaurant. On the way home, they dropped off his father’s used prostheses and then filled out forms at the local Social Security office.
At 3:20 a.m. Lester again awoke with his legs entangled. He had been dreaming that he and his mother were pushing half-filled grocery carts up a steep, icy hill. His father had suddenly come running past them, faster than Lester had ever seen him move, pushing a full cart. He reached the top of the hill and stood there silently with his back turned, apparently waiting for them. Puzzled, Lester looked at his father and recalled that he had given away all his father’s artificial legs and wondered where his father had found the one he was running on. Is it too late to get his legs back from the guy I gave ‘em to? Lester had tried to run faster up the hill with his cart, but his feet felt as if he were wearing leaden shoes or had hobbles on his ankles.
Two days before Lester was scheduled to fly from Charlottesville to Baltimore and thence to New York and Providence, a blizzard struck the east coast. Thirty-three inches of snow covered western Virginia, and in the states north of Virginia it was even deeper. After three days, the small Virginia town had cleared most of its main streets, and the state had cleared most of its main highways. Although the Charlottesville airport was still closed, Lester made new reservations for his flights home. The best they could give him was a flight to Baltimore five days later than he had originally planned to leave.
Of greater interest to him was a tale titled “It’s Never Too Late to Mend, with Apologies to Charles Reade.” It began:
My name is Ernest Hemingway and I’m a writer. I’m not the Ernest Hemingway, but a man you probably never have heard of. Out of courtesy to the other fellow with my name, I always write with many a pen name. The chief one I write under the name Guido Jones.
“Been rummaging through the garbage, have we?” said Beth as she padded into the living room in slippers and bathrobe. “Every one of those was rejected, you realize, don’t you? Think of the wasted hours—and the wasted postage!”
Lester reconfirmed his flight to Baltimore the day before he was to leave. After washing his clothes a third time, he put on his overshoes and heavy jacket and asked Beth if she needed or wanted anything from a small shopping center which was half a mile from her condo.
After Beth retired, Lester made a dozen half-page sketches of Daisy with his felt-tips, varying her coloring each time. With his scissors, he cut a pair of large cardboard L-shapes from an empty cereal box and used these to experiment with the ideal way to balance each sketch before it would be cropped.
Following an early breakfast of eggs and sausages with Beth, Lester retraced his route to Charlottesville. As he drove down the eastern slope of the mountain pass, he saw a jackknifed trailer truck in the median strip, its cargo of new compact cars strewn about in the snow drifts like cheap toys. He smiled ironically to himself, thinking how lucky he was to have learned to drive in New England where (1) they knew how to clear snow quickly and (2) most of the people knew how to drive properly on slippery roads.
Next morning, shortly after the shuttle bus dropped Lester back at the airport, he learned that backlogs of flights into the New York area had caused numerous cancellations. He was offered the chance to try flying standby on another airline’s turbo-prop commuter, but he declined. When it became clear that the larger jets were only entering JFK from “hubs,” he booked passage southwest to the nearest hub—St. Louis, Missouri—and then passage northeast to New York.
At St. Louis, for half an hour Lester watched a nearly bald young man in faded jeans romp on the carpet with a little fourteen-month-old girl as dozens of planes taxied back and forth behind them. The man played “hide and peek” around one of the concrete pillars near the plate glass, and when his daughter began poking a zinc-plated electrical outlet on the floor, the man gripped her hand and pulled it away, saying “ouch.” Then he melodramatically touched the outlet with his own fingers a dozen times, saying “ouch” and jerking violently away each time. The little girl, a blonde in a teal snowsuit, laughed delightedly.
Four hours later, flying in darkness toward New York, Lester again looked down upon Ohio. The lights and streets of Cleveland formed a pattern that interested him. He recalled his computer-chip notion and jotted down a memo to himself to try doing a series of pictures of cities viewed from the air at different times of day and night. Then he fell asleep again.
On the train from New York to Rhode Island, Lester looked at the Van Gogh and Gaugin pictures upside down, squinting to blur details so that he could analyze how these painters had arranged their chief masses of colors. With his large pad, he made crude color sketches and notes to remind himself what he wanted to do when he had time to concentrate and a stable surface to work on. From time to time the whole car lurched unexpectedly, and he smiled as he recalled the quip a friend had made thirty years ago on a train to Chicago: “The last time they straightened these tracks was when they brought Lincoln’s body home for burial!”
Lester phoned Bonnie shortly after he let himself into his apartment, petted all five cats, and sorted through his mail to see what bills had arrived while he was away. Ten minutes into their conversation he told her he had made a major decision that would affect her and he therefore felt obligated to tell her about it now so that she would be able to deal with it.
We take the house as it offers itself—
The ceiling crumbles for our collection
We’ve strung ourselves together with glances
Josh Price pulled up his arms and screamed. Sweat was in his eyes, dripping into his mouth, soaking his clothing. His body was in spasm, like muscle fear.
I clutched the enemy in the palm of my hand. Its dirty face defied me with a dozen knobby eyes. I wielded the knife, peeling the gritty skin away in curly strips that twisted toward the floor. As each waxy yellow knob emerged, I dropped it into a bucket of water. My hands ached. I didn’t dare sit down. Grandmother had taken care of that.
On Halloween, Miss Bell’s classroom smelled like fire. It smelled like fire and a little like pumpkin pie from the candle that burned too bright in the jack-o-lantern. The room was draped in black and orange crepe paper that flickered in the breeze from an open window and Miss Bell sat at her desk reading aloud from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Cynthia Scrogg sat in the back.
In 2006, Rachel Luria received her MFA from the University of South Carolina. Currently she is an Instructor in and the Assistant Director of University of South Carolina’s MFA program. Her writing has received several awards, including being chosen as a winner of the 2006 South Carolina Fiction Project and being named a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction contest, and has been published in Yemassee, The Charleston Post and Courier, The Carolina Reader, and Tallahassee Magazine.
only i could find something
draw the knife long and deep
finding muscle and sinew
flows like a warm blanket
wet and red and sleek
slow and wet
no more longing
peace
“Stop!” Leslie screamed as Mark grabbed her by the throat and pinned her against the wall. She stared into his flaming opened wide eyes.
Cameron Rue has a bachelor degree in Criminal Justice. His current published books are, “Mission Box Fly,” “Owl’s Skull,” “Stranger in the Mirror,” “Suicidal Girl” and coming soon “Rattle the Cage.”
Even if I had said something, I’m not sure it would have made any difference.
It seems my organs are falling out and there’s nothing I can do to stop them from their squirming. The city squints with disbelief; many men are taking notice. Today one walked by kind of funny, said, Damn girl, I don’t know what to look at, the jacket, the spleen, or the eyes. Then suddenly I was in Walmart, having wandered in unknowingly. A man with a mop stopped and said, What’s your secret? Your lungs are so pink! Next it appears I was in a donut shop. The boy behind the counter asked me where I went to high school. I said I didn’t, that I was turning 27 in a month. He demanded proof, so I showed him my driver’s license. He noticed the donor sticker and asked if he could have one, referring to my kidneys that had fallen to the floor. They look like a giant beans, he said, might I trade you for a dozen glazed, or perhaps a cow? And it’s a happy metamorphosis—my whole body thinks it funny. I’m home now, gazing at my gallbladder. Outside, people are screaming. My stomach sits on the couch, staring at me and grumbling. It’s evening time; outside the people are laughing. They have real appetites and they are eating me alive. Their voices want to scare us, the ones with the lights on, the ones with body parts coming out in great amounts. You are somewhere else, breaking the day over my body. It pours out lava hot and it’s only raining in the mountains. An older man takes out the trash, watches me from the balcony. I’m Juliet with a healthy liver in hand. This day is a boogie; my parts want to jitterbug. Organ-joy, I wash them with rosebud body scrub and a bath brush, lay them out to dry and place them through the most precise, mysterious incisions into my body.
My sister takes the string from our tin can phone and uses it to make a tightrope. The stampede of technology, which tells us we should use walkie-talkies instead, is pushing everything thinner and thinner. Her cord thins out too, and snaps.
When I let her try on my high heels, she walks all the way out to the edge of her flat world and tumbles from the edge in pieces like our alphabet block towers, A apple and O owl thumping out across the carpet.
Our father made girls without knowing what to make of them. His attempt to nurture us is like the makeup he can’t tell we are applying all wrong: too thick, and so atonal, any woman would know it’s fake.
Artie seemed like the perennial tourist, right down to the shorts, tropical shirt, and camera carried in his pocket. This was in spite of the fact that he had actually been a Manhattan resident for over thirty years now. He had adopted the tourist lifestyle ever since his wife passed away over ten years ago.
a head,
Denny, Scott, and Brown descended into the restricted area. “Like goin’ into the abyss,” said Denny, the tallest of the three. Scott nodded, but Brown added: “Yeah. But I like workin’ down there. It feels good.”
Above, in the non-restricted area, Captain William A. Eddy and Graf, AKA the Artist, met privately. The room was small but well lit. Captain Eddy was about 6 feet tall. Graf was about 6'6" and towered over the captain. The two monolithic men filled up the tiny room, leaving little space between them.
They went to see the variety show in the non-restricted area. The performer sang night club songs and danced exotic dances. She was the most attractive and sweet smelling entertainer they had ever seen. Certainly, she was the most flamboyant, for she wore big diamonds which glittered and long, taloned nails.
In the next three weeks, Officers Eden, Coon, and Darlan each went into the restricted area at different times. They were three ordinary men about 5'7" or 5'8" who looked alike. They could have been brothers. Denny, Scott, and Brown knew them. Sometimes, they chatted with the visitors. At this point, the three men worked alone in different sections of the restricted area. Although they were engrossed in their work, they’d call out to one another from time to time, or stop to talk with the others, especially if they hadn’t taken a break in a while.
On the holiday, the three officers visited the restricted area. Eden arrived at 10 AM and gave Scott a bottle of bourbon. He didn’t stay long for Scott was a boozer, not a talker. At 3 PM, Coon arrived with a bottle of bourbon for Brown. They had five shots together. Coon left the bottle behind with Brown. Later, about 5 PM, Darlan arrived with a bottle of bourbon for Denny.
Later, Graf received a message from the captain to meet him in the restricted area. While Graf was heading for his rendezvous, Dusko, AKA Popeye, was busy getting dressed. He had decided to leave the hospital. And since it was a holiday, no one noticed what he was doing. The medical staff was already celebrating. Soon, the short, sinewy man strolled down the corridor with his cane, invisible to the jovial but intoxicated staff.
As Graf scurried by Denny, the intoxicated fellow cried out: “Whatya doin’ down here, Graf? Captain Eddy told you it’s off limits.”
“What kept you so long? Been waitin’ for you a while, captain.”
Dusko, AKA Popeye, sauntered toward the restricted area. Now, he was about 100 feet from the area. He was aware that something horrible had occurred. Indeed, over the years, he had developed his other senses to compensate for his disabilities.
In the morning, Captain Eddy paced back and forth. He had already interrogated each man individually. Now, he had all three of them in his room. Suddenly, he turned to Denny and said: “So the only one you saw aside from Graf was Eden?”
Later, Captain Eddy saw part of the show. Then he visited Dusko in the hospital. Before speaking to Dusko, the captain asked the doctor: “What is he doing here?”
Captain Eddy figured out Darlan was the killer. He was 5'8" and wore a huge ring which could rip a guy’s insides out. Then Captain Eddy spoke to Brown and Popeye again. Brown mentioned Darlan’s voice had been too sweet. And Popeye recalled the faint scent of lilacs. Now, Captain Eddy really figured out the identity of the killer.
Graf’s murder on October 31 had been solved. Popeye’s nightmares ceased when Captain Eddy solved the murder. And the passenger ship New York continued on to Hawaii.
Dr. Mel Waldman is a licensed New York State psychologist and a candidate in Psychoanalysis at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies (CMPS). He is also a poet, writer, artist, and singer/songwriter. After 9/11, he wrote 4 songs, including “Our Song,” which addresses the tragedy. His stories have appeared in numerous literary reviews and commercial magazines including HAPPY, SWEET ANNIE PRESS, POETICA, CHILDREN, CHURCHES AND DADDIES and DOWN IN THE DIRT (SCARS PUBLICATIONS), PBW, NEW THOUGHT JOURNAL, THE BROOKLYN LITERARY REVIEW, HARDBOILED, HARDBOILED DETECTIVE, DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE, ESPIONAGE, and THE SAINT. He is a past winner of the literary GRADIVA AWARD in Psychoanalysis and was nominated for a PUSHCART PRIZE in literature. Periodically, he has given poetry and prose readings and has appeared on national T.V. and cable T.V. He is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Private Eye Writers of America, American Mensa, Ltd., and the American Psychological Association. He is currently working on a mystery novel inspired by Freud’s case studies. Who Killed the Heartbreak Kid?, a mystery novel, was published by iUniverse in February 2006. It can be purchased at www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/, www.bn.com, at , and other online bookstores or through local bookstores. Some of his poems have appeared online in THE JERUSALEM POST. Dark Soul of the Millennium, a collection of plays and poetry, was published by World Audience, Inc. in January 2007. It can be purchased at www.worldaudience.org, www.bn.com, at , and other online bookstores or through local bookstores. A 7-volume short story collection was published by World Audience, Inc. in May 2007 and can also be purchased online at the above-mentioned sites. I AM A JEW, a book in which Dr. Waldman examines his Jewish identity through memoir, essays, short stories, poetry, and plays, was published by World Audience, Inc. in January 2008.
what is veganism?
A vegan (VEE-gun) is someone who does not consume any animal products. While vegetarians avoid flesh foods, vegans don’t consume dairy or egg products, as well as animal products in clothing and other sources.
why veganism?
This cruelty-free lifestyle provides many benefits, to animals, the environment and to ourselves. The meat and dairy industry abuses billions of animals. Animal agriculture takes an enormous toll on the land. Consumtion of animal products has been linked to heart disease, colon and breast cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes and a host of other conditions.
so what is vegan action?
We can succeed in shifting agriculture away from factory farming, saving millions, or even billions of chickens, cows, pigs, sheep turkeys and other animals from cruelty.
We can free up land to restore to wilderness, pollute less water and air, reduce topsoil reosion, and prevent desertification.
We can improve the health and happiness of millions by preventing numerous occurrences od breast and prostate cancer, osteoporosis, and heart attacks, among other major health problems.
A vegan, cruelty-free lifestyle may be the most important step a person can take towards creatin a more just and compassionate society. Contact us for membership information, t-shirt sales or donations.
vegan action
po box 4353, berkeley, ca 94707-0353
510/704-4444
MIT Vegetarian Support Group (VSG)
functions:
* To show the MIT Food Service that there is a large community of vegetarians at MIT (and other health-conscious people) whom they are alienating with current menus, and to give positive suggestions for change.
* To exchange recipes and names of Boston area veg restaurants
* To provide a resource to people seeking communal vegetarian cooking
* To provide an option for vegetarian freshmen
We also have a discussion group for all issues related to vegetarianism, which currently has about 150 members, many of whom are outside the Boston area. The group is focusing more toward outreach and evolving from what it has been in years past. We welcome new members, as well as the opportunity to inform people about the benefits of vegetarianism, to our health, the environment, animal welfare, and a variety of other issues.
The Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology
The Solar Energy Research & Education Foundation (SEREF), a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., established on Earth Day 1993 the Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (CREST) as its central project. CREST’s three principal projects are to provide:
* on-site training and education workshops on the sustainable development interconnections of energy, economics and environment;
* on-line distance learning/training resources on CREST’s SOLSTICE computer, available from 144 countries through email and the Internet;
* on-disc training and educational resources through the use of interactive multimedia applications on CD-ROM computer discs - showcasing current achievements and future opportunities in sustainable energy development.
The CREST staff also does “on the road” presentations, demonstrations, and workshops showcasing its activities and available resources.
For More Information Please Contact: Deborah Anderson
dja@crest.org or (202) 289-0061
internet issn 1554-9666
(for the print issn 1554-9623)
Alexandira Rand, Editor
http://scars.tv - click on down in the dirt
Untitled Haiku
Shaun Millard
an ocular travesty
(built so much in vain.)
My Frankenstein Grandfather
Vickie Clasby
I remember my grandfather as Papa. Papa was a very large man. My earliest memory of him is when he came back from the hospital after surgery. He’d had a laryngectomy and, although I did not understand what that meant, I was very aware of the hole in his throat, and the fact that he could not talk. A large section of the left side of his neck had been resected, and had also undergone radiation treatments which burned his skin a bright red. In those days, there were no electronic devices which simulated speech. He had to learn to speak by swallowing air and burping it back. It was called esophageal speech, and only his family members were ever able to understand what he was saying.
If anyone ever had a reason to drink to excess, it was my Papa. My grandmother had often said Papa’s father was a mean old drunk, and had regularly beaten all his children. And Papa, even after surviving advanced throat cancer continued smoking, and drank more than ever before because he was no longer able to work. He’d worked as a welder all his adult life, but with a tracheostomy, couldn’t handle the smoke and dust, and not many other jobs were available for people who couldn’t talk, so he collected disability payments for the rest of his life.
At least since he was unable to work, he took on all sorts of home improvement projects. Unfortunately, power tools and alcohol don’t mix. Luckily most of the accidents were fairly minor. Except for the ceiling fan. My grandfather decided one day to install a ceiling fan to help cool his workshop. In those days, ceiling fans had metal blades and powerful motors. He had been drinking while installing the ceiling fan, and after completing the task, walked out the door of the workshop to admire his work. When he came back into the workshop, with me following close behind, he discovered the hard way that the fan was too low. The blade hit him in the forehead and peeled the skin back like the skin of a peach, half way to his crown. Thankfully I was young when this happened, maybe six, and just have faint memories of this event. I do remember lots of blood. Papa had wrecked the car several months before, and they had no phone, so my grandmother wrapped a towel around his head and he walked a half mile to the doctor’s office. The doctor drove him to the hospital.
He recovered from the concussion and had a nice jagged scar the width of his forehead. Combined with the burned and scarred neck and the tracheostomy hole, he was quite a sight to behold. The hospital physician didn’t take much care sewing him up, and I guess it wouldn’t matter much how nice the scar looked.
I remember another instance in which the workshop got the best of him. My uncle, who was just a teenager at the time, was walking out the glass storm door from the kitchen into the workshop, with my Papa right behind him. Papa had been drinking most of the day, and didn’t catch the glass door as my uncle let go of it, and the door crashed into Papa’s face, severely cutting his nose. Even though my uncle was able to drive him to the hospital immediately, the skin of his nose could not be reattached. To repair the wound, the surgeon took a skin graft from the back of his leg. If you know much about alcoholics you’ll know that after all the years of drinking, Papa’s face was permanently red, especially his nose. And the skin taken from his leg was shockingly white. And hairy. When Papa came home, the hideous scars on his neck and the jagged scar on his forehead could not compare with the poorly sutured patch of white skin on his nose, sporting several black, curly hairs.
As frightening as he may have looked to other kids, he was my Papa. Despite his drinking problem and fairly minor accidents, I have mostly fond memories of him. I could understand everything he said, and remember him calling me his baby, and telling me how pretty I was. I do remember some of his darker moments, and wonder what my mother’s childhood must have been like, the oldest of five children with an alcoholic father and a mother who had no way out. I know it profoundly damaged her, and try to remember this when she behaves in ways that defy any sort of explanation.
Physical scars are often so much less significant than the scars we carry inside.
Megalomaniac
Gary McGee
The only true Buddhist,
Wiggling in his fat.
A pumpkin filled with seeds.
Little bees,
Or stars lost in space.
The only true Christian,
Squirming upon the cross: nails attached.
A scarecrow spilling sin.
His plucked eye a crow luncheon.
His god is nowhere around.
The only true God,
Mocking man his reason.
Her be-all-end-all is uncouth with truth.
She love-hates with neither rancor nor pity.
And creates worlds as easily as she destroys them.
...Only one part of this story appears in this issue of Down in the Dirt, but we are placiung the entire story here for you to view (so you will not have to go between the September 2008 issue and the October 2008 issue for the entire story). Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-aged Caterpillar
Pat Dixon
Lester glanced furtively at the bartender and was relieved to see that she was busy taking the order of another customer. Sipping his beer while his insteps pressed on the rungs of his barstool, he glanced over the poster-sized price list behind the bar, stared again at the words “Bloody Mary,” and slowly pulled a small vinyl covered notebook and felt-tip pen from his jacket pocket.
Adjusting his reading glasses, he flipped past dozens of sheets covered with words and sketches to one that was blank and wrote “The Bloody Stool—Ye Olde Bloody Stool” in small neat letters. Around these words he added slowly, with pauses as he thought, sketches of two 18th-century pub signs. Below these he rapidly sketched a dozen cobblestones and a three-corner hat. Below these he wrote “cartoon? or joke??—old London pub/Dublin pub/N.Y. gay bar?” After a long pause he added the words “Ye Olde Bloody Piles??” Closing and repocketing his notebook and pen, Lester took another sip of his beer, made eye contact with his reflection, winked at himself, and smiled mirthlessly at the reflection of his wink.
He rubbed the short gray stubble on his chin and plump cheeks. A faint twinge of heartburn reminded him why he’d given up beer thirteen years ago, two years after his divorce. He surveyed his double critically in the bar mirror—twenty to thirty pounds overweight, grayish thinning hair, old corduroy jacket, blue plaid flannel shirt, short stubby fingers, and—when their gazes met—an unblinking brown-eyed stare over the top of his gold-rimmed half glasses. He looked at the puffy circles below his eyes and thought, Sleepless in Seattle, with a faint smile as he recalled the past night, adding, Forty-six years old but looks sixty-four—at this rate I won’t make it to seventy-four like dad.
He studied his own face again, trying to pick out the features of it which to some degree resembled those of his recently deceased father—the nose, the hairline, the ears, the jawline with the plump and sagging cheeks, and, to a lesser extent, the expression in the eyes. He recalled that, starting in his teens, his voice had often been mistaken for his father’s when he had answered the phone. Lester sighed, glanced at the bar’s clock, compared the time shown on his wristwatch, and then paged through his packet of plane tickets for the sixth time.
“Thirty-five minutes till that birdshit they call ‘preboarding,’” he whispered. He glanced twice more at his take-off and arrival times, folded the packet, and crammed it deep inside his breast pocket. “Hop, hop, hop,” he whispered. “Like a big sparrow. Seattle to St. Louis to Baltimore to Charlottesville. A big, fat sparrow.”
“Care for another, sir?”
The bartender was standing before him in her white shirt and black bow tie, cheerful and perky and large-breasted and blonde and overly made-up.
Lester was not sure whether this was a hint to drink up and leave or pay rent on his stool by ordering another beer. He glanced up into her expectant blue eyes for five seconds before replying.
“I’d like a glass of skim milk if you have any,” he said.
“I’m sorry, sir. Perhaps one of the snack bars near gate—gate 42 or something might have some.”
She doesn’t have a clue, thought Lester. Comes to work and doesn’t know where anything else in this effing place is—except the ladies’ room.
“Thanks,” he said with a brief smile.
He stood up and put three quarters on the bar for a tip.
He tried letters that were one notch higher and wrote “UXB” and smiled at this result. He tucked the notebook and pen back in his pocket. UXB—code letters for Unexploded Bomb during the London blitz—great name for an airline—perhaps too subtle for most readers—like most of my humor. Lester gently chewed on his lower lip for a minute and smiled ironically.
“Don’t give up y’ur day job,” he whispered to himself, quoting what Bonnie Coleman had told him three years ago, the day he had first spent the night with her. She had come into his second-hand bookstore in Providence one Sunday afternoon while visiting an old college roommate who was getting divorced. She had asked him if he would buy three boxes of used romance paperbacks, and he had said he could pay her a nickel apiece for those that were in good shape. He would not put them on the shelves, he said, but out front in a fifty-cent bin he filled with paperbacks and shabby hardbacks to attract customers. She told him that she did something similar in her own bookstore back in Seattle and accepted his price. These belonged to a friend, she added, and weren’t worth shipping out west to herself.
Gazing down at the sun-lit clouds beneath the wing, Lester recalled their meeting. Bonnie and he had brought the boxes in from her friend’s car on his hand-truck, and, while he looked over the books and counted them, she had glanced over the stock on nearby shelves. Then she had met Queenie and fallen in love.
Queenie was an elderly all-black female cat with three fangs and one badly torn ear. She was also a slut who rolled around on her back and begged customers to rub her round belly. Bonnie, who had three cats in her own store, was hooked at once.
“What’s it’s name?” she had asked.
“I call her Queenie,” Lester had replied. “It’s short for Queen of the Night.” Then he had pointed to a large cartoon poster he had drawn two years earlier. On it were five cats with their names penned in large block letters beneath each: Queen of the Night, Figero, Don Giovanni, Papageno, and Donna Anna.
“I was going to call her Astrifiammente, but it turned out to be too much of a mouthful and didn’t shorten very well,” he had added.
“Astrifiammente,” Bonnie had repeated. “Definitely. Queen of the Night. What about the others?”
Lester pointed up above her.
“There are Figero, the fat tabby, and Papageno, the chirpy little Abyssinian, on that high shelf. Queenie has an attitude problem—and it’s not a small one—so in defense they have an altitude problem.” Here Lester had attempted to imitate the voice of Sylvester Stallone, and Bonnie had smiled. Encouraged, he had continued.
“I was tempted to give the name Highly Amusing or Highly Intelligent to the Abyssinian—spelled, of course, like the first name of Haile Selassie, the emperor. Of course, he was Ethiopian, not Abyssinian. But it seemed close enough for a joke.”
“Ethiopia is actually just another name for Abyssinia, so the pun is practically flawless—which is highly appropriate,” Bonnie had said. “And Haile Appropriate was, as you probably know already, Haile Selassie’s Minister of Etiquette—and Haile Intelligent was—was the Ethiopian Minister of Education. He was a civilian, of course, and he had to deal with two members of the military—General Education, who was in charge, and Private Education, who really did all the work. Well, actually, he also had to deal with another officer as well—Major Funding, who handled the Finance Corps for the whole Ethiopian government.”
Lester had grinned broadly throughout this performance.
“Really? Seriously—right—‘seriously’—the pun works even better than I knew?” he had said, resolving to check a reference book as soon as she left. He added with a shrug, “Anyway, I decided to stick with Mozart names for them all.”
“My three all have Klingon names: Kang, Kor, and Worf.”
“Those are great names. My other two are in the back somewhere. I can take you on a mini-tiger hunt, if you’d care to meet them.”
“Yes. Yes, I would.” And she had soon been introduced to Don Giovanni and Donna Anna, a neutered pair of red tabbies—brother and sister—who were grooming each other in the Philosophy section.
Nearby, under a sign labeling the Natural History aisle, Bonnie saw a large hand-drawn cartoon with the heads of two saber-toothed tigers. The one on the left was saying, “Canine teeth, my ass! These are feline teeth!” She smiled.
As they walked past Mysteries and Spy-Thrillers, she glanced at another cartoon. A flag with a hammer and sickle was on the wall of a prison cell, and a soldier wearing a fur pile cap with a red star on its front was telling a bound prisoner, “You have the right to remain silent, but it’s my duty to warn you—everything I attribute to you can and will be used against you.” At Sci-Fi and Fantasy, a third cartoon portrayed Star Trek’s Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise: on their view-screen, against a totally black sky, two dozen stars formed a constellation in the shape of the symbol for infinity, and Mr. Spock, one eyebrow raised, was saying, “Frankly, Captain, it is my professional judgment that we have boldly gone as far as we can go.”
“Did you do these cartoons?” Bonnie had asked.
“Yes, and many others.”
“You have a good sense of line and form,” she said.
“I got a Master’s in art, long ago and far away—as the world turns. I even taught art for three years at a small college you’ve never heard of—in the wilds of—of Inner Oklahoma.”
“I minored in art myself. In high school I spent half my days in the art room doing elves and trolls and such.”
Lester had glanced down at Bonnie’s attractive chest for a second and then back up at her friendly smile and her large horn-rimmed glasses. In the background, his CD player sent the opening notes of Mozart’s 24th symphony to the far corners of his store.
“In high school,” he had replied, “I did the same. I was hoping to become the next Frank Frazetta. There’s a guy who can really convey motion! Just about everyone else working in the sci-fi and fantasy field paints figures that look like department store mannequins—absolutely no sense of movement. If I’d had a better sense of color, I’d have focused on doing oils. Pencils and inks are what I can do—though it’s just a pastime now. I suppose I could be a lightweight Charles Addams or Gary Larson. I’ve sold a dozen of my cartoons to nothing magazines, and a few folks have bought some of my caricatures. And some of my caricatures got me into trouble—them and this big fat mouth, that is.” He had frowned for a few seconds, then shook off a distasteful memory and smiled at Bonnie and shrugged. “Done is done.”
While Lester spent six or seven minutes assessing the books she had brought, Bonnie had broused through the aisles looking for more of his cartoons. Out of a dozen others, three had amused her. At Archaeology, a humorously drawn old man in a pith helmet was telling a group of young colleagues, “Clearly this is just a forgery of an Inca temple—since I am able to insert my knife blade between these two 15-ton stones.” (Below this caption, Lester had typed a footnote quoting four different texts, all claiming that Incas had fitted their massive stones so closely that a knife blade could not be inserted between them.) At True Crime, a prison guard with a small round mirror and a dental drill was forcing a man in a striped suit to open his mouth and was saying to another guard, “Mind your own business! Warden Jenkins insisted I do a full cavity search on this guy!” And in Lester’s Anthropology section, Bonnie had chuckled at seeing a small Cro-Magnon girl and boy painting beautiful bison, horses, and hunters on a cave wall as a huge Cro-Magnon man with a torch appeared behind them and shouted, “You little brats! Defacing a public cave! Just wait till I tell your parents!”
There had been seventy-one paperbacks in the three boxes, some of them badly damaged. Lester dug a five-dollar bill from his billfold, handed it to Bonnie, deliberately overpaying her, and wrote her an invoice “for used books.” She had shrugged, saying that her friend trusted her. Lester then had offered her a cup of tea, and she had accepted. Before she left two and a half hours later, they knew that they were both divorced and both enjoyed elaborate puns, natural history, Japanese art, science fiction, cats, tent camping, opera, and long walks. Lester had also been given the phone number of Bonnie’s roommate and had made a date with Bonnie for Chinese take-out on Tuesday night. Thereafter they had visited each other four or five times a year and were in almost daily contact via E-mail.
Now, thirty-nine months later, he was flying from Bonnie’s home turf—the land of pale people, coffee bars, Mount Rainier, the Space Needle, and restaurants with fresh-caught salmon—to help arrange his father’s funeral and help his mother get her feet on the ground. His mother had phoned him last night while he and Bonnie were engaged in what they jokingly called “friendly friction” and had started to leave the news on her answering machine. Bonnie had handed Lester the phone, and he had agreed to drop everything and help his mother for at least a week. The next four hours were spent arranging connecting flights and reserving a rental car in Virginia. Bonnie had helped further by taking the phone number of his cat sitter to inform her about his change in plans while Lester drove to the airport.
The remaining legs of his trip were uneventful. When he arrived in Baltimore, Lester learned that the St. Louis airport had closed down shortly after his plane had flown out of it, thanks to a small snowstorm. If his flight into St. Louis had been any later, he might have been stranded there overnight.
In Baltimore, Lester boarded a small commuter prop plane with his single piece of carry-on luggage, and in Charlottesville he found the car rental people had stayed late to accommodate him. With a local map and some special instructions, he drove to a nearby mall where he bought an inexpensive dark suit, black shoes and socks, and a white dress shirt. With these purchases he headed west forty miles across the Blue Ridge Mountains, and then drove north thirty more to the small town where his parents had bought a condo after retiring nine years ago. The eastern slope of the mountains had been socked in with heavy fog or low clouds, but he had clear and easy driving on the downhill slope. Heavy, huge flakes of snow began to fall five minutes before he reached his destination.
Lester put his arm around his mother and softly bit his lower lip.
“We’ll figure it out, mom. Step by step we’ll get stuff taken care of for you. You’re a survivor!”
“He wanted to be cremated, you know. I’ve had our minister check on that for me, and he’ll hold the service day after tomorrow, and your father’ll be cremated right after that. I don’t know what it’s all goin’ to cost. I’m just glad, Lester, that you told me where I could reach you.” Beth paused briefly to think. “I’m so glad, too, that you were able to get down here to see us just before you went out to Seattle. Your father—I think you know it—he was so glad that you came here to spend Christmas with us. We both were. It’s just a damn’ shame that he’ll never read those books you brought him. Maybe you could take them back with you.”
“Sure, mom. We’ll take care of whatever you want. How are you doing?”
He bent down and stroked the fat tri-color long-haired cat which was rubbing the corners of her mouth against the shin of his jeans.
“You see her?” said his mother. “She’s been so upset since he died. She really misses him. He’d get up at four a.m. when she wanted to be fed. And he’d clean out her cat pan every time she’d do a little business in it. I can’t do that, by the way. She has to wait till I get myself up for breakfast, and that pan gets scooped once a day. She just wanders around looking lost, And some times she’ll hiss at me or nip my foot. Other times she’ll want me to hold her, but she slept in his bed on his pillow all last night. She just freaked out—is that the phrase? When they put him into the body bag, she freaked out and ran all over the apartment, jumping up on tables and shelves, knocking things over.”
Lester picked up the fat cat, Daisy, and cradled her in one arm. As he stroked her belly, Daisy began to purr loudly. He plucked at her long white fur and nodded sympathetically to his mother.
“Animals know,” he said. “They can grieve, too.” Daisy began to lick his hand.
“Did they feed you on the plane?” his mother asked.
“Some pretzels and orange juice. I had a fish sandwich in the Baltimore airport between flights, but I’m O.K. I also had a slice of pizza in the St. Louis airport, which, by the way, closed down just after my flight took off. I was really lucky to make it here. It went like clockwork, but I was lucky.”
“There’s some lemon cookies in the cookie jar, if you want ‘em. I know you like lemon. Help yourself to whatever you see in the fridge. I didn’t sleep at all last night, and I was worried about you coming over the mountains. The weather report said they had fog there and there’d been a pile up somewhere.”
“Not bad where I drove through. Just a little fog on the uphill side. There’s a little snow coming down now, did you know?”
“Snow? Oh, it-shay. What’s that goin’ to do to the funeral plans? Jesus H. Christ.”
“We’ll manage somehow, mom. I was in the Artillery over twenty years ago and was a real take-charge kind of guy. Do you want to talk, or would you rather try to get a little sleep?”
“I’m glad you’re here, Lester. We can talk things over tomorrow. You probably need to get some sleep, too. Look, you know where everything is. I may try to read the paper for a few minutes, but let’s call it a day. I—did I tell you I’ve never been so furious at your father as when he was lying there dead? I said to him, ‘You can’t do this to me! How am I going to cope?’ He left me completely unprepared.”
After his mother went into her room, Lester changed Daisy’s cat litter and phoned Bonnie Coleman to reassure her and tell her briefly about his journey. Bonnie asked him if he were all right, and he replied that everything was fine, that he and his father had not had any unfinished business. He did not mention that he felt tired and somewhat numb.
As he lay on the hide-a-bed in the living room, Lester recalled his father’s living will with its “do not resuscitate” instruction. He felt glad that the Fire Medics had not been able to revive his father. If they had, he was certain, his father would have been just a human vegetable the way his own father, following a major stroke, had been for three years. He then thought about Bonnie and the first time they had made love.
He had flown to Seattle three months after their first meeting and, arriving after one a.m., had spent the first night on her futon in her living room. They had spent the next day at her shop where he sketched a large poster of her cats, taking special care to render Worf, a large Maine Coon whose huge pink tongue often protruded from the front of his mouth for half an hour at a time. During short breaks, Lester observed Bonnie’s hippy-looking customers, and mentally compared her stock and price ranges to his own.
Throughout the day, Bonnie had played an assortment of classical, rock, R & B, and gospel on her CD player. Taped to the side of her large box of CDs were old photos of herself wearing pointed Vulcan ears and a long shining blue dress while attending various Star Trek conventions.
Atop the glass display case which served as a customer counter, Bonnie had a huge viney plant in a large brass teapot. A hand-lettered sign taped to the counter beside it read: “WARNING: The Botanist General has determined that too much H2O can cause Mr. and Mrs. O’Dendron’s son Phil to sicken and die.” Lester had smiled as he read this.
“Mr. and Mrs. Rexia and their tiny daughter Anna,” he whispered to Bonnie. “Mr. and Mrs. Raphone and their noisy son Mike.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Peerior and their snooty daughter Sue,” she whispered back.
“What’s the name of Darth Vader’s sister?” Lester asked.
“Ella!” replied Bonnie within three seconds. Lester nodded and made a mental note to write this last pun down and use it somehow in a cartoon.
Early in the afternoon a well-dressed woman in her mid-sixties had come in and asked Lester if he had Willy Wonka for her grandson. Bonnie had smiled and fetched her a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. When the woman had protested that it was the wrong book, Bonnie patiently explained that the film’s title was different and showed her that Willy Wonka indeed owned the factory Charlie visited. When she had left, Bonnie convulsed with laughter.
“Do you—have—Willy—Wonka—for my—grandson?” she asked Lester.
“I don’t get it, Bon,” he replied, smiling uncertainly.
“Roald Dahl—who had a warped sense of humor—was playing an in-joke on the publishers and readers of juvies! And those twits who made the movie were even more in the dark, I think, than the publishers! What does ‘willy’ mean to you?”
“Nickname for a boy named William?”
“It’s British slang for penis—like our slang word dick—or peter. And what does ‘wonka’ mean?”
Lester had shrugged and asked with his eyes.
“I thought you guys were either born with this knowledge or picked it up just after you were born through some male-thing network. W-h-a-n-k-e-r and w-a-n-k-e-r are Brit words, too—slang for masturbator. Dahl, as a joke, named this main character Penis Masturbator—and his publisher and Hollywood and most readers in the U.S. haven’t a clue! Probably if he’d named someone Richard Liqueur and had other characters call him ‘Dick’ but never ‘Dick Liqueur,’ not one person in ten million would be swift enough to notice. Here—look ‘em up in any of these unabridged dictionaries!”
Lester smiled. “I believe you. How did you come across this arcane knowledge, if I may ask?”
“I spent my junior year in Wales and made it my business to learn some English-English while I was there,” she grinned. “I’ll bet three-fourths of them got it.”
“So much for subtle, sophisticated British humor. What about ‘Wee Willie Winkie’?”
“I’ve no idea. I actually asked a Cambridge undergrad about it, and he just laughed and said that only his literature prof would suggest such a thing. Here—try some American trivia. If Robert Bloch wrote a prequel to Psycho, how would an ultra-proper butler have addressed little Norman?”
“He’d call—him—he’d have to call him ‘Master Bates,’ of course.”
“Of course,” Bonnie had said. “Sophisticated American humor!” And they laughed easily, like a pair of happy five-year-olds playing in a sandbox.
After closing her store at 6:15, Lester and Bonnie had eaten dutch to a Greek restaurant where he had shown her two dozen of his recent cartoons, and they had discussed the fact that no magazine had been interested in them. When he had mentioned having a large file of original one-liners and spoke of becoming a stand-up comic, she had laughed brightly and warned him against giving up his day job. He did not mention that he had tried selling off-color jokes and cartoons to sexist, homophobic “adult” magazines and had been, in a five instances, successful. A Frazetta parody captioned “The Layer of the White Worm” was his most recent sale.
Back in her third-floor apartment, Bonnie had poured them each a large glass of white wine, and, while she sat on the sofa watching local ten p.m. news, Lester had sat on the floor between her knees, had taken off her shoes and socks, and had given her a twenty-five-minute foot rub.
His thumb nails had gently scratched the calluses of her heels and the balls of her feet. With his index fingers, he had scratched the tips of her toes and between her toes and up and down the tendons on the insteps of her feet. With both hands, he squeezed and massaged Bonnie’s soles; with his knuckles he pressed firmly against the arches of her feet. His nails traced little circles around her ankles and up and down her Achilles tendons. She was, she told him, in heaven, and this activity became one of their rituals whenever they spent an evening together.
At 2:30 a.m., while he lay awake on her futon listening to street and building sounds and trying to acclimate to a pillow that differed from his accustomed one, Bonnie had come in with an extra blanket for him. By the reflected light of a couple of street lamps Lester could see that Bonnie, like himself, was wearing just a tee-shirt and a bikini brief.
“Hi, babes,” he had whispered.
“Are you warm enough, Les?” Her charming breasts were less than a foot from his face.
“Fine—I think.”
“You think?”
“Perhaps I’m—if anything—feeling a little too warm right this minute.” He sat up on one elbow and kissed her on the mouth. Caught off guard, Bonnie pulled back suddenly, paused six inches from his face, and then grasped his head with both hands and planted her own hard kiss on his mouth. In two seconds, they were in each other’s arms, discovering after nearly a dozen years what a sexual embrace felt like. In two minutes, they were exploring the bare flesh beneath each other’s clothing. In five minutes, they had removed each other’s bikinis. In a move which they would refer to as “lickety split” during breakfast the next morning—and many mornings thereafter—Lester began to tongue the inside of Bonnie’s upper thighs, moving upward and continuing for ten minutes until, trembling and husky-voiced, she begged him to stop. Then, tracing little circles around her erect nipples, he mounted her and experienced what he would later call “the joys of Bonnie.”
Lester had added “lickety split” to the small notebook he had brought with him, thinking that he might use the phrase later in some cartoon or joke that he might sell someday to a magazine.
After breakfast, Lester scooped out Daisy’s litter box, completed the arrangements for the funeral, and phoned a capsule biography of his father to two regional newspapers. His mother phoned a dozen relatives, giving them all a full description of the circumstances, including an increasingly elaborate account of what she had said to Michael after his death.
After lunch, Lester borrowed a broom and snow shovel from the building super and cleared three inches of snow away from the rental car. Then, although the parking lot had not been plowed at all and the town’s streets were poorly plowed, he drove his mother to her bank to open the safe-deposit box. With many expressions of sympathy to Beth, the local branch manager personally carried the box to a cubicle for them. Inside it they found three life insurance policies for varying amounts, a copy of his father’s will making Beth his sole beneficiary, and four large envelopes filled with stock certificates—more than half of which were solely in Beth’s name.
On the way home the roads were somewhat clearer, and Lester and his mother stopped at a supermarket where they bought an assortment of “gourmet” cat food and a large box of chocolate cream candies.
One of the women in the market reminded Lester, from the back, of Bonnie. Her hair, like Bonnie’s, was long and dark with auburn highlights. Her face, however, when he saw the woman again in the check-out line, was quite different and was hard looking, and he observed that this woman had a bottle of hair coloring in her shopping cart.
When they got home, Beth told her son that she was exhausted and needed to nap. While she did so, Lester scooped out the litter box again and then browsed through the six hundred books on his father’s shelves, noting, as he had not done on earlier visits, that at least half of them were ones he had brought down for Christmases or had mailed down for birthdays. In several of the books he could see slips of paper, and he pulled these books down and discovered that his father had made notes about passages which had interested him. In no cases had his father actually written in a book itself.
Lester was sitting beside the shelves reading slips of paper when Beth got up.
“I have no interest in any of those,” she said. “You can take whatever you’d like. Most of ‘em are ones you gave him, anyway.” She laughed wheezily. “My son the book dealer.”
“Maybe I’ll pack up a few of them and mail ‘em back to myself,” he said.
“They’re all just taking up space. We’ll need to go through his clothes, too, and see what you might use and what can be given to a charity—and what should just go down the trash chute. He never threw away a thing. If he’d had his way, he’d still have every piece of string he ever owned. I used to sneak some of his old shoes out to the chute when he was shopping—probably for more shoes. And we need to get rid of his prosthesises—you know—his artificial legs. Who else but your father would have three left legs? And also that god-damn’ computer he bought two years ago. He used to spend hours sitting with that, typing with two fingers. That stuff can be sold or given to the church—unless you want it. Christ knows what he needed that thing for! It’s one more dust catcher I’d like cleared out.”
“We have plenty of time, mom, to take care of that. First thing tomorrow I’ll call the lawyer who made up his will and find out what the next step should be. If you’ll locate his Social Security number for me, we can also try to find out what you’ll be getting from the government. And I’ll call the retirement office in Philadelphia and find out what percentage of his pension you’ll get. He worked for the state of P-A for at least thirty years, I think, but I don’t know what plan he retired under, do you?”
Beth shrugged and opened the box of chocolates.
“I took care of the cooking and the cleaning. The car and yard and money were always his responsibilities. I’ve got no idea.”
They were interrupted by the phone. A neighbor in the building asked if Beth was all right and whether she wanted any company. Beth told her that she was feeling fine and went on to describe Michael’s death and her anger in considerable detail. Lester walked into the kitchen and picked up Daisy who was waiting beside her empty dish. He plucked at her belly fur again and received a nip on the webbing between his thumb in index finger. He set Daisy down gently and refilled her bowl with wet food. Then he went into the living room and turned on the local 5:30 news.
When Beth got off the phone, Lester offered to take her out to dinner. She accepted, and they had third-rate lobster at a nearby restaurant. Afterwards, while Beth ate half a pound of chocolates and watched a situation comedy on television, Lester took a load of his father’s medicines and toilet items to the trash chute, keeping only the old man’s shaving brush as a memento. Then he sorted his father’s books into three categories—keep, donate, and dispose of. The last included his father’s old college accounting texts and a vast array of old books with tips on filing tax returns. Lester vaguely wished that there was some way the paper might be recycled as he carried thirty-two heavy books to the trash chute and dropped them down, two or three at a time.
Sic transit, he thought as he gently closed the door to the chute.
When he was finished, Lester sat down on the sofa beside Beth and watched a re-run of an old Lawrence Welk program. She offered him the box of chocolates, and he took two.
Bonnie phoned him at nine p.m.
“Seattle to Virginia. Over. Come in, Virginia.”
“Virginia here, where Les is still Moore. I’d like to come in, Seattle. Wish you were here. Over.”
“How’s it going, babes? You sound tired.”
“Lots done. The service is for one p.m. tomorrow. We have some appointments lined up for the day after. The prosthesis people can’t use the socket parts of my dad’s three left feet, but they said they’d be glad to recycle the hardware. How be with you, little sweetie?”
“It be lonely. We all miss y’ur sweetness—especially my sweetness misses y’ur sweetness. Can you talk?”
“Not really.” He glanced at his mother, who seemed absorbed in the program.
“I’m touching myself,” said Bonnie playfully. “Oh—oh—oh. I’m thinking about y’ur manly member. Manly Member—you know who he was, don’t you?”
“Who was he?” said Lester quietly.
“He was the person in charge of—recruitment—at the Y.M.C.A.!”
Lester chuckled softly.
“I know that’s a bit of a stretch,” continued Bonnie. “But it wasn’t as bad as some of my other jokes—or some of y’urs.”
“Humph! What’s that supposed to mean? Love me, love my jokes.”
“Don’t get cranky-wanky.”
“Cranky Wanky? Who is he?”
“He was—he was the—the manufacturer of—the inventor—of late 19th-century wind-up dildos that had—that had giant steel springs inside them. Am I correct?”
“Correct as always, your majesty.” He glanced again at his mother. An image of Bonnie’s naked breasts briefly flashed into his mind.
“So,” he continued, “what are the Seattle Areoles doing this evening? I think the game was canceled due to snow or something, wasn’t it? Wish I could see them now.”
“They are waiting for you, big guy, to come here and play nine innings with ‘em. And also nine outings, too, between the nine innings. Right now they’re standing up and craning their necks to hear the sound of y’ur voice better. If they get any higher, they’ll rip open the front of my blouse. Ooops, there go two buttons. Can you stand up now?”
“Frankly no. I hope that won’t—become a problem.”
“Well, in that case, maybe you’d better call me back tomorrow night when it’s more convenient. I’ll be here, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.”
“That would be a good idea—very good idea.”
Bonnie and Lester each made a couple of kissing sounds into the phone and then hung up. Beth glanced over at her son.
“Still in the mushy-lovey-dovey stage, I see.”
“It’s been a long time for me,” he said softly.
“It’s been a longer time for me, you can bet,” she replied.
Nearby, Daisy sat in the dimly lit living room, grooming herself. Outside it was quiet. Lester went to the bathroom and then drank a glass of warm tap water. As he lay back down, he recalled coming home from a hard day at the loading dock and finding his house in Oklahoma empty. It was not merely that Linda, his wife, was not there. The car, the furniture, the appliances, the rugs, the pictures, the books, the dishes, the tools, the kitchen clock, all his clothes—everything—were missing.
A note in Linda’s handwriting had been taped to the glass door of the built-in oven: “Am moving to Lincoln to be near my folks. My attorney, Mr. Darrel Sweet, will fill you in if you care to call him.”
He had looked up “Sweet, Darrel” in the local phone book and learned that Linda wanted the house sold. He, Lester, could keep his beat-up motorcycle but nothing else. In a way, it had come as a great relief to him to hear that Linda wanted a divorce. Let the flaying cease, he had thought.
Four months earlier he had not been renewed to teach art at the local college. He had been unable, despite sending out over three hundred copies of his C.V., to find any other teaching position. He was untrained in and unfit for commercial art, as several greeting card companies and department store chains pointed out to him.
Linda, he now recalled for the first time in seven years, had hotly blamed him repeatedly during his final year of teaching for not being more cautious and solicitous—even sycophantic—as far as G. Arthur Peterson was concerned, and Lester felt his stomach tensing up as he remembered half a dozen incidents which must have led directly or indirectly to his non-renewal.
Before one department meeting began, several members had been chatting about the meanings of their given names, and G. Arthur had proudly asserted that he had once looked up his own first name—George—and learned that it meant “spear carrier” or “spear thrower.” Lester, who had taken two years of Greek in high school, had been tactless and foolish enough to point out that the name instead meant “farmer.”
A few months later, their department head—Dr. Wilton—had expressed indignation to Lester when forty of G. Arthur’s recent collages were displayed in both the campus library and the administration building (with price tags affixed) and their significances were explained in a two-page interview in the campus newspaper. Lester had wryly replied that this was “merely one more example of Art for Art’s sake.”
And when it became known that G. Arthur and the newly hired Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences were playing racquetball every afternoon, Lester doomed his own career. Dr. Wilton angrily remarked one afternoon that G. Arthur was in the gym “giving Dean Thomas a blow job for favors,” and Lester had smiled mildly and quipped, “It’s a real-life Fellatio Alger story.” His department head had nearly expired on the spot from laughter and had clapped Lester on the shoulder, dubbing him “a true wit.” Predictably, however, after Dr. W. had repeated Lester’s comment at a cocktail party, it made its way to the dean, and Dr. W. found it politic to dissociate himself from Lester and his “unconscionable, totally unprofessional crudity.”
Linda was not amused by Lester’s cartoon captioned “Expulsion from Paradise” showing her and Lester, nude, trudging away from caricatures of three irate, curly-haired campus divinities—G. Arthur Peterson, Dr. Wilton, and Dean Thomas.
At the settlement conference, Linda’s lawyer had demanded that Linda be given half the value of Lester’s cumulative social security payments, half of whatever his current and future earnings might be, and half of whatever retirement he might someday receive. Lester’s lawyer countered that Linda was a healthy woman with a teaching certificate and a Master’s degree in education, had no children to care for, and should therefore “not expect to get blood from a stone.” Linda, who had been staring fixedly at the opposite wall throughout, suddenly leaped up, startling both lawyers, and screamed that Lester’s lawyer had just called her “a bloody mess.” Darrel Sweet tried to calm her, and Lester’s lawyer vigorously pleaded his innocence. Negotiations were postponed for two months but proceeded without incident at the second conference where she was awarded the house, its furnishings, the car, and nothing else. Two months after that, Lester moved from a one-room apartment in Oklahoma to a one-room apartment in Connecticut and began working in a bookstore owned by a college friend.
After reflecting on his past for over an hour, Lester got himself another glass of water. When he came back to bed, Daisy was there wanting to keep him company. At dawn he awoke himself again, kicking at the blanket and sheet that were tangled around his legs. This time he had dreamt that he had been teaching art to an auditorium full of laughing students and that he had suddenly realized that some were pointing to a four-inch-wide wet spot on the front of his pale gray slacks. He had tried to walk behind a lectern, but his feet would not move for some reason.
That afternoon, before Lester packed his father’s computer and printer for the minister, he looked up the directory on the hard drive. There he found the first eight chapters of an unfinished autobiographical novel and twenty-four autobiographical short stories of various lengths, most of them written in the first person and many of them dealing with some kind of learning experience Michael had undergone as, step by step, he had evolved or blossomed into whatever he was when he was cut short by an unexpected death. There were no “hard” copies of this writing anywhere to be found, and Lester asked his mother if she wanted him to make copies for her. She said no.
Lester made two copies of these works on disks for himself, cleared the hard drive of everything, and packed the printer and computer into their original boxes, which his father had saved in the back of a clothing closet. While his mother took a nap, Lester drove to local thrift shops and bought a dozen cheap books which he thought he could resell when he got back to his store. At a supermarket he got twelve large cardboard boxes and bought two rolls of reinforced adhesive tape. Before his mother awoke, he had wrapped and labeled four boxfuls of books to mail to himself and filled seven and a half others to donate to the church or to local thrift shops.
After his mother had gone to bed, Lester phoned Bonnie, charging the call to his Providence number. He described the service and mentioned the fiction he had discovered.
“Had you ever known y’ur dad had literary ambitions?” Bonnie asked.
“Not at all. My mom had no idea either. And she was right in the same room with him most of the time.”
“How bad is it?”
“Quality? Pretty mediocre to bad, I guess. I haven’t read most of it, but I sampled sentences here and there, and there didn’t seem to be much difference as he went along. It was folksy, a lot like the six- or ten-page letters his own dad used to mail him—or all of us—when I was a kid. Kind of a folksy diary style with a few attempts at epigraphs from Bartlett’s, most of ‘em drawn from Shakespeare.”
“You’ll let me see them, won’t you?”
“Of course. There were fifty or sixty letters, too, indicating he had mailed copies of his stories out to magazines. He kept a log about this, and though I haven’t found any rejection slips or letters anywhere, he must have got plenty of them.”
“How do you feel about y’ur dad? And y’ur mom. Are you all right, hon?”
“Not a problem. As I told you when I left, there’s no unfinished business. My dad thought I’d effed up my teaching career and wasted five years of college back when Linda and I split and I went to work as a bookstore clerk—but he got used to it after I got back on my feet again. He couldn’t help but notice how the economy and job market worsened during the ‘greed is good’ decade—and after. In a way, he was proud of me for being able to readjust. He’d grown up during the ‘thirties and knew that this was something like that. And a lot of his neighbors had their kids still living at home at age thirty or forty, and he was probably proud I was different from their kids in that way, too.”
“No shit? Proud of you for that? Are you kidding me about that last part?”
“A little. I’m feeling a little smart-assy, I think, and I’m sorry if I misled you. On the phone you can’t see me winking or feel my elbow nudging you as a clue. Sorry.”
Lester did not add that he had his own secrets about his creative efforts and had never told his father about any of the jokes or cartoons that he had sold to men’s magazines. As before, Bonnie and he ended with a little love-talk and some kissing sounds. Lester then hand-washed his socks, underwear, and flannel shirts, changed the cat litter and put out food for Daisy, and unfolded the hide-a-bed and climbed in.
Awakening, Lester got up to urinate, as he had on previous night. When he returned to the bed, Daisy lay down against him. He began to stroke her large belly and pluck her long stomach fur. Daisy purred loudly as he did so, and when Lester happened to rub his hand where her tiny nipples stuck up, she began to lick his hand with her sand-paper tongue. She thinks I’m her kitten, Lester guessed, and in the half dark, as an experiment to test this hypothesis, he sought out two of her nipples and gently rubbed them both at once. Daisy’s purring grew louder, and she began to writhe around.
If I rub four or more, you’ll blow up, he thought. Already I can smell smoke coming out of your ears. He smiled drowsily at his little joke. Suddenly he stopped and gently pushed Daisy to one side. In the dark he located his notebook and pen and then turned on a table lamp and seated himself on the edge of the bed. With quick strokes of his pen he drew Batman and Robin in the style of the ‘sixties TV program. Nonplused, the Dynamic Duo ran onto a nude beach. In the foreground, making eye contact with the viewer, lay a nude woman with a Julie Newmar-type face and six small breasts on her torso. Lester penned in a caption—“Holy Portuguese person o’ war, Batman! We’ll never be able to find the Catwoman with her costume off!”
Lester closed his notebook, put it back in his jacket, and turned of the light. When he awoke in daylight, his day and the next and the next were pretty much the same. His phone calls to Bonnie were much the same, too, but his nights were not broken again by any more dreams that woke him.
For a good profit, local tractors plowed out the condo parking lot, and Lester, for a ten-dollar-bill, had borrowed the super’s snow shovel for two hours to dig his rented car out of its four-foot-high drifts. Then he drove Beth to the local courthouse where they gave Beth an array of forms to complete and a list of things to do within the next sixteen months. After that, he took Beth to see his father’s lawyer, who recommended an accountant in his office who explained what tax obligations and options she had.
On the way back to the condo, Lester stopped at a supermarket for more cat food and cat litter and then bought a cheap snow shovel for twice its normal price. As he had predicted to his mother, the parking place he had excavated earlier was filled by another car. He dropped his mother off at the front door and spent two and a half hours clearing another place to park. After he showered, he did the routine cat chores, hand-washed his clothing again, and heated himself a small can of chicken soup. Then he tore the label off the can and put it into a small recycle bin under the sink. As he stooped to throw the label into the kitchen waste basket, he noticed two large manila envelopes lying on top of other rubbish.
Curious, Lester turned them over and saw they were addressed to Mr. Michael B. Moore in his father’s own handwriting. When he lifted them up for a closer look, Lester found two similar envelopes beneath them. All had been torn open before being discarded.
Lester took the four to envelopes to the living room and sat down in an easy chair near the window. Each envelope contained two or three short stories written by his father, and all were accompanied by a relatively tactful rejection notice. Lester shrugged his aching shoulders, sighed softly, and perused the opening sentences of each story. One was titled “Time and Tide Waits for No Man” and began with a quotation from Julius Caesar:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of this life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
The narrator of this story—a man named Charlie Williamson—told how his father, a postal employee, had sacrificed his dream of becoming a doctor rather than put his wife and four children through years of hardship and want. Charlie, learning from his bitter father’s error, earned a Master’s degree in accounting and passed his C.P.A. before he himself got married. Lester recognized his father and grandfather thinly veiled in this tale.
One tale was heavily nostalgic and thinly humorous, portraying a middle-aged narrator reminiscing about large family picnics in the woods near Worchester, Massachusetts, and boyhood romps and pranks and after-school adventures in which many wars with wet and dry horse-turd ammunition figured prominently and repeatedly. Lester recalled hearing his father tell about most of these incidents at least five or six times.
Mind you, I wasn’t always a writer. Once I was a C.P.A. I was very good at my job and was a great provider for my wife and young son. My wife used to say “Make money, Ernest” when I would leave for work in the morning, and I did and was very happy to do so. And I always did my work “earnestly,” which, given my name, Ernest, was my trademark.
But I was not completely happy doing this. Inside me burned a little candle which never went out. When I was in high school I wrote a short story based on something my father and I did when fixing the roof of a barn. My high school English teacher told me I had a way with words. “Evocative” was what he said to me and I have never forgotten his praise.
For over forty years I, Ernest Hemingway, kept this bright flame of creativity burning brightly inside me! I did not let anything extinguish it! Perhaps it could not be put out! In my spare time at the office and in the wee hours of the long dark nights when Morpheus did not have his way with me I would make up stories inside my mind and sometimes jotted them down in the back pages of a large leather bound ledger. No one would ever find them there I surmised correctly.
After I retired to Florida with my aging wife, Mary, I bought a computer and taught myself how to use it. A simple thing, really, for anyone who is not as stupid as a chimp. I began writing my stories on my computer under my new pen name and sending them out to dozens and dozens of magazines and to big publishers of books. I even wrote a best selling novel based on what my accounting background had shown me of the world of high finance and politics in government. Perhaps you may have read some of my opuses without knowing I—the other Ernest Hemingway—was behind them.
Now that I have become famous under half a dozen aliases I am writing this brief memoir about myself to reveal at last the real truth. As the great English novelist Charles Reade so aptly observed, “It is never too late to mend.” Here now is my story about this truth, taking you step by step through the funny times and the hard times (“The best of times, the worst of times,” as Charles Reade’s good friend and fellow novelist, Charles Dickens, so aptly characterized them) as I made the transition and molded my self into a more modern master of English prose fiction than he.
When I first began to write, it was a slow dual digit process and I had to look at the key board all the time to search for each letter. But within a single fortnight it became a task of love to me. “Blessed is he that has found his work” says the great writer Thomas Carlyle and I had, at last, found my work. Like Martin Eden, the title character in the novel by that great autodidact Jack London, I began to rise up like a phoenix from the chilled ashes of my former profession to take pen in hand. I—
Lester smiled amiably and set the stories on a nearby footstool.
“Are you interested in dinner yet, mom? I’d offer to take you out, but I’m afraid that somebody’d grab my parking spot as soon as we leave—and I just don’t feel up to digging out another one today.”
“Thanks anyway, Lester, but I can heat up some frozen veggies and cook those boneless chicken boobs that’ll go bad if we don’t have ‘em tonight. I know you like baked chicken boobs. Would you turn on the TV for me, please?”
Later, after Beth had gone to bed, Lester briefly described his father’s stories to Bonnie. When he told her about “It’s Never Too Late to Mend,” Bonnie said nothing. After a ten-second pause, Lester prompted her.
“Well?”
“How did you feel when you read it?” she asked.
“Like I was seeing a new facet of my dad that I didn’t know existed. It was more than just finding out that he had tried his hand at writing after he retired.”
“But what did you feel? Not just what you understood but the feeling you had.”
“Hmm. I felt glad to understand that he had found a way to enjoy himself—glad that he was feeling fulfilled. I have some pity for him that he’d taken so long to get around to doing something he secretly wanted, and I felt lots of pity that his stories were so shitty that everybody was flicking him off. But, I guess, I was also relieved that he didn’t seem in any pain about the rejection. For whatever reason he seemed to have confidence in himself and wasn’t being hurt.”
“Yeah. And he was following his bliss,” interrupted Bonnie. “He had joy in the process and didn’t focus on the outcome. He was ‘being here now.’”
“Bliss? His ‘bliss’?”
“That’s a Joseph Campbell term,” she said. “I think it means ‘whatever turns you on in a really big way.’ Not like having drugs or sex all the time or pigging out on candy, but doing whatever it is that gives you y’ur own personal high and makes you feel fulfilled in your life, regardless of what everybody else is doing or telling you should be doing to make them happy.”
“Isn’t that a bit Newage?—I mean New Age. Not that that is bad, of course.”
Bonnie was silent again. Lester regretted what he had just said. Newage, rhyming with sewage, had been a put-down word he had adopted from the skeptic-magician Teller, and he had trod on Bonnie’s toes with it three years ago.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said. “It just slipped out. I’ll try to be better.”
“Y’ur dad probably just got a big kick out of what he was doing, and it didn’t matter if anyone else cared for it. He was offering them the chance to enjoy it, too, but if they didn’t, then it really didn’t matter—and it didn’t change how he felt about it. That’s just my opinion, by the way, spoken as a person who has vast learning and experience, but who could possibly be wrong—though I personally doubt it.”
She paused for five seconds before continuing.
“I studied and trained with Haile Sensitive for fifteen years. He was Dean of the School of Psychotherapy at Addis Ababa University, as you no doubt remember.”
Lester began to laugh, and Bonnie joined in.
“I’m going to be flying to Providence for y’ur birthday in March, Mr. So-much-Moore. Start thinkin’ what you be wantin’ me to bring you.”
“Be wantin’ you, for bed and breakfast both, Ms. Cole-but-warm-inside-person.”
“Of course, Mr. Prognosticator-who-probes-the-unknown-more-deeply-than-Nostradamus-or-Teiresias. But what about a thing to unwrap?”
“If your thing is wrapped when it arrives, I won’t leave it wrapped for long.”
“For Captain Long? We both know who he is. He’s the one-eyed stiff-legged pirate that’s always giving me the willies when we meet. The thought of him now is making me wet—with terror, of course. I speak metaphorically, as you know, drawing my metaphor from whaling.”
“Even if Captain Long were totally blind,” laughed Lester, “he’d know the future—and the depths of your spirit, for his love is a spiritual thing, on the whole, of course. And you know, of course, why he knows all, even in the darkest depths and nooks?”
“Because he uses a divining rod?” she guessed.
“Very close, O Bonnie One. Because he is learnèd in all the ins and outs of augury and when push come to shove you might say—?”
“He augers well?”
“You hath read my mind, O Fairest One.”
Again they laughed together.
Before they hung up, Bonnie reminded him to begin thinking about a present she might get him—for his “bliss.”
“Just a couple more pounds of candy, a quart of low-fat, and two more packages of boneless boobs. Why are you going alone?”
“I’m going to walk—just to stretch my legs a bit. And I don’t want to vacate that parking place I dug out until I drive out in the a.m. tomorrow. The lovely people in this building are as quick to take what somebody else did—as a—as any New Yorker or any Rhode Islander! My back and arms are still killing me!”
“Why not just park in the plowed lane like most of the others? My son the big book dealer has to have his own parking place off the main track?” She began to laugh. “Just kidding you, Lester. You should see your face. Can’t you tell yet when I’m just kidding? Have a good time, and look both ways before you cross streets!”
She patted his arm as he bent over and kissed her cheek.
The temperature was in the fifties as Lester walked out of the parking lot. Large slushy puddles lined the streets next to deep banks of dirty snow. No sidewalks had been shoveled, and he walked on the edge of the puddles until approaching cars forced him to step into them. At the shopping center he found a small stationery store and entered it.
In the school supplies department, Lester found a large pad of unlined white paper, a blue pencil, a small pair of scissors, a large gummy eraser, a fine-tip black pen, and two plastic envelopes containing selections of colored felt markers. With the help of one of the clerks, he located a cheap plastic ruler, a plastic protractor, and a tinny compass to draw circles. After paying for them, he walked next door to news store and studied its magazine rack. He thumbed through three photography magazines, bought two of them, and walked two doors down to the grocery market.
On the way back, halfway across an intersection he narrowly avoided being hit by the car of an elderly man who made no attempt to stop for a red light. His coat and jeans were drenched by a shower of dirty slush.
“Pervert!” Lester muttered. “Whenever there’s a change in the weather, you take it as a sign that laws an’ rules are all suspended. You must have moved down here from Rhode Island!”
After handing the candy to Beth and putting the food in the refrigerator, Lester changed to dry jeans.
Beth asked him what was in his packages, and he showed her.
“What for?” she asked.
“I feel like drawing again—and I want to try to get good at colors. I was never any good with colors—not the way I wanted to be, at least.”
“Those are just kids’ things you have there—and what about the magazines?”
“I think I’d better start with baby steps before I try to run. I’m going to read what they tell photographers about color options. Maybe they have some tips I never heard about. In any case, there are some photos in each magazine that I could analyze for color and copy in a dozen different ways—you know, by changing a blue to an orange or a red to a yellow—just to see what the effect is and how well I like it.”
“Sounds like a real thrill,” said Beth, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue. “Have fun.”
At 12:15 a.m., he realized that he had not phoned Bonnie and did so. He told her of his hike to the shopping center and expressed relief that at last the airports were open again. He did not, however, think to mention his new coloring set. Bonnie told him to get some sleep and told him to call her again when he got home tomorrow.
For the next two hours, working from the sketch he felt looked best, Lester did four versions of a full-page portrait of Daisy. He set the final version on the kitchen table for his mother and packed the other three in his overnight case. Then he took his new vinyl zipper-bag filled with clothing on hangers and laid it on the floor near the front door so he would not forget it.
Too-too-too, he repeatedly whispered to himself as he passed—or was passed by—other drivers on the long slope. To Lester, this meant that nearly everyone else was driving either too fast or too slow for the conditions of the road.
At Charlottesville he made the mistake of taking the route through the city instead of around it and soon became lost. After twenty minutes he pulled into a filling station and asked the young brunette behind the counter how to find the airport. She directed him back to the state highway where he correctly made his turn the second time. A light snow began to fall.
Lester glanced at his watch and said aloud, “Charles Reade was wrong. If you screw up and your plane takes off without you, it’s too late, period.”
The woman at the car rental desk agreed that Lester should not be charged for the extra days while the airport was shut down, and he hurried across the terminal to get his tickets and go through the security gate. Upstairs, he paused to wince as he passed the airport’s display of oil paintings by local artists. Draftsmanship, brush technique, balance, and color sense were lacking in various combinations. Studying forty of them more carefully, he smiled at the enormous prices the artists had put on the little cards next to their canvasses. He smiled as he recalled a comment Bonnie had once made when they had gone into a little gallery in Providence. She had criticized several paintings there in a voice that carried, and the owner had come over to her and asked her, “Don’t you like art?” “As a matter of fact, I do,” she had replied, “—if and when I’m lucky enough to see any.”
At the departure gate for Baltimore, Lester confirmed that all was well with his tickets and received a specific seat assignment. Half an hour later, the monitor on the wall informed all passengers that the flight was delayed, and forty minutes later he found out it had been canceled because of fog in Baltimore. Fifteen minutes after that, he was re-booked on a flight that would take him to Pittsburgh where he would board another flight for JFK and easily make his connection to Providence.
When the plane took off for Pittsburgh, the snow had stopped and the runway was clear and drying in the warm sunlight. At Pittsburgh, Lester received unpleasant news: his flight to New York had been canceled and no others would be going there until late the next morning. The good news was that he was able to get a seat on an early afternoon flight and re-book connecting passage to Rhode Island—all at no extra charge.
At a large board with lighted hotel advertisements and courtesy phones, Lester was able to find relatively inexpensive lodging for the night close to the airport. He boarded the courtesy shuttle bus with eight other people, including three airline hostesses and two pilots, and was driven over slushy highways in the dark afternoon. Twice, through the filthy side windows of the bus, he saw low dark stores with large white signs on them: ADULTS. He recalled that fifteen years ago, in a different part of Pennsylvania he had walked into a similar store and had looked over its array of magazines, books, video cassettes, rubber garments, and various toys for some twenty minutes before walking out empty handed, curiosity satisfied.
In his hotel room, Lester found flyers for food delivery services. The Chinese order-out restaurant was closed, but the pizza place promised to get a medium sausage with a cola to him in forty minutes. Then he phoned Sue Leach, the college student who was cat sitting for him, to explain that he would be delayed at least one more day.
“Bummer,” sympathized Sue. The good news was that his five cats were all well and apparently happy, even Queenie. The bad news was that the front window of his store had been smashed again by someone. Nothing appeared to be missing, but some people had thrown snow inside, and some of the books displayed there had been soaked. Sue had found a carpenter who had been willing to nail large sheets of plywood over the hole for a reasonable price.
“Thanks for taking that initiative,” said Lester dully. “Are any of the cats near to hand?”
“Papageno is rubbing my elbow even as we speak. And Figgy is up on the table here, licking my supper plate. Would you like to talk with them?”
“Yeah. Please put the Papa-guy on, if you can.” Overhead, Lester could hear the sound of a large jet.
As Lester called out the cat’s name and said “hi,” Papageno began to make little high-pitched wirping sounds and rubbed the side of his lips against the receiver.
“He knows it’s you,” said Sue with a laugh. “Here—I’ll put Figgy on now.”
As Lester spoke to him, Figero looked around Sue’s apartment with wide, Kliban-cat eyes and purred in a deep bass tone. Lester understood that he was not responding to his name or the sound of Lester’s voice—Figero was inclined to purr wide-eyed just because it was his nature to do so.
Lester thanked Sue again, and she agreed to be flexible about his arrival time.
As he dialed Bonnie to update her, he could hear another jet flying low overhead, preparing to land. Lovely—right on the glide path, he thought.
Bonnie was very sympathetic about both the delay and the damage to his store.
“It may be about time I thought about relocating to a more congenial spot. At my age I have interest in avoiding a lot of rays when I’m out walking around. We both know that there the phrase ‘a healthy tan’ is an oxymoron. Know of any place where I could move where the sun don’t much shine?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I do—and I confess that it always feels really good. Oh—pardon me—do you mean where you could relocate your business? Dear me, did I say ‘your business’? I should wash my mouth out. But what’s a girl to think! Somehow, you seem to force my thoughts into that one groove whenever we talk. “
They laughed at her playfulness for a moment, and then Lester asked her to think about how she would feel about him moving to Seattle.
“We might consider a down payment on a house together. I have no idea how long it would take to liquidate what I have here—or what it would cost to ship some of the stuff I don’t want to just sell for a loss. We could start thinking about it.”
“This is pretty sudden, isn’t it? Give me a minute or two.”
While she was silent, Lester opened his little vinyl notebook, sketched the Space Needle against a skyline, put a pair of long-fanged vampires in the foreground, and printed “moved from Transylvania to Seattle to avoid the sun.”
Bonnie answered abruptly, “Why not? In this economy, two can starve as cheaply as one. If it comes to it, I’d be happy to move into a cardboard box with you. The only problem will be our cats—will they get along? An’ then there’s a Seattle ordinance that reads ‘It is dangerous and unlawful for more than six cats to occupy one home.’ But I’m sure that a pair o’ sharp kids like us will figure a way around that!”
They talked for twenty more minutes, interrupted briefly by the pizza delivery.
“It’s like going three steps backwards to go one step forward, but it’s the only dance we can play for you today,” said the ticket agent with a smile. “At least we will do it without charging you a cent more than a direct flight to JFK would have been.”
“Better than that, I get credited with all those extra frequent-flyer miles,” said Lester with a smile of his own.
“Of course. Absolutely.”
Three hours later, as Lester flew west over Dayton, Ohio, he looked down at the snow-covered ground and the grid of streets and lights and buildings.
Looks just like some huge computer chip, he thought, and then paged through a magazine for half an hour until he dozed off.
The man’s wife appeared carrying a paper bag filled with burgers, fries, and colas, and the man sat down beside her to eat. While their daughter continued to play around a nearby pillar, Lester took out his new art supplies and made a rapid pencil sketch of her, silhouetted against the window with three small planes behind her. He changed the color of the rug from deep red to a tawny gold and her snow suit to a royal blue. Her red-knit cap became deep orange, and he made her hair a very pale green. Lester chuckled at the result, and cropped the drawing with the aid of his two cardboard L’s.
Near the little girl, a portly young man in jeans sat down on the carpet and plugged his cellular phone into a socket, saying, “I can hear you better now. What was that price quote again?” The little girl ran over to him, pointed at the outlet, and began to shout “ouch—ouch—ouch.” The heavy young man smiled and beckoned to the child’s father to come get her away from him. As the father ate his third burger, the girl’s mother went and picked up her daughter.
Behind him, Lester heard a voice say loudly, “Hey, that’s pretty good! C’mere, lady. See this guy’s picture of your kid!”
The young woman—a tired face with dark, greasy looking hair, wearing a soiled long-johns shirt—smiled as Lester held it up for her to see. Her husband, cramming the remainder of the bun into his mouth, joined them.
“Are you an artist,” the woman asked.
“Used to be,” said Lester. “Would you like to have this?”
“Sure,” said the woman, as her husband said, “How much?”
“It’s all yours,” answered Lester.
“What’s your name,” asked the woman. “It isn’t signed yet.”
Lester took out his blue felt-tip pen and held out his hand for the picture. He smiled slightly and wrote “E. Hemingway” diagonally in large cursive letters across the lower right corner.
“What’s the ‘E’ stand for? Ernest?” asked the woman. Lester smiled and nodded. Then he glanced at his watch, picked up his bags, and went in quest of some food himself.
When the plane landed at JFK, Lester learned that no flights would be going to Providence, but he found that he could take a train from the airport to New York City itself and from there could get another train to Rhode Island around noon the next day.
It was after midnight when he got into the city. He made a withdrawal from a nearby cash machine to pay for his train ticket, then checked his bags in a locker, gave Bonnie a brief collect call, and went in search of a Chinese restaurant that was open. After eating, he bought a copy of the Times and looked up what movies were playing, found nothing of interest, and walked back to the station. There he walked around for several hours, looking in the lighted windows of dozens of closed shops.
At six a.m., Lester bought two fried eggs, three warm bagels, and a cup of hot coffee and went for a walk in the early daylight with his bagels in a small paper bag. As he reached the street, a young man with filthy clothes asked him if he had any spare change, and Lester stared into the man’s eyes for several seconds and then gave him the bag of bagels and a dollar bill.
Interesting face, thought Lester, rubbing his own unshaven cheeks. He put on his gloves. There but for the grace . . . .
He wandered toward Broadway, looking into shop windows and thinking about living full time with Bonnie. The move and the work entailed with selling out made him somewhat apprehensive, but he felt, on balance, it would be for the best. It would be a longer flight each time to visit his mother, but it would also mean no more flying back and forth between the coasts to see Bonnie for a week here and a week there.
Through the front window of a large Barnes and Noble bookstore, he saw a display of art calendars and coffee-table art books featuring dozens of famous painters. To kill time, he felt that he wanted to browse through these, and when the store opened Lester was the first customer to go in.
After half an hour, he decided to purchase two half-price calendars with pictures by Gaugin and Van Gogh. He had briefly looked at coffee-table books featuring art by Sargent, Turner, Modigliani, and H. R. Giger and had jotted down a cartoon idea: an Alien dentist looked in a man’s mouth and said, “I’m very sorry, Herr Giger. I can’t make you a secure set of uppers because your palette is too limited.” Lester suspected that the pun on palate might be over most people’s heads, but it would be something else to place in his shop—or Bonnie’s—or theirs.
Lester was feeling slightly groggy from lack of sleep, and that, he had long thought, could produce what he called his more creative moments. As he glanced into a sale bin, a large book filled with photos of natural disasters produced a cartoon idea for the geology sub-section of his science shelf. He found a browser’s chair near the bin and began to write: “smug claims adjuster in an insurance office tells weeping customer with a NO FAULT policy, ‘You must face facts, Mr. Wilkins—technically, the quake that wiped out your family and business was caused by the San Andreas Fault.’” And a book on Roman Britain gave him another cartoon idea which he rapidly added to his little notebook: “sign on the south side of a long wall reads, ‘Beware! There will be no Roman in the gloamin’ per order of Emperor Hadrian!’”
As he drew a centurion atop Hadrian’s Wall, Lester’s eyes glazed, and he recalled a cartoon he had first drawn during grad school and had redrawn several times thereafter: a woman in a bed with Roman columns for posts says to a man who is wearing a toga and smoking a cigarette, “O.K., Julius, how about putting ‘I came’ last once in a while.”
For a second he pictured his ex-wife’s face. When he’d proudly shown this to her, Linda—whom he had married in his senior year—had angrily told him he should not be wasting his time on such things as cartoons, and he had begun drawing most of them in secret. When he had first clerked in his friend’s bookstore, he had redrawn this one and, with permission, had posted it near the sex books.
Bonnie’s face came into Lester’s mind, and he began to smile. The afternoon after he and Bonnie had first made love, Lester had drawn another version of this cartoon for her while they talked in her store. She had laughed and then quipped, “Is it coincidence that the Roman word for ‘I came’ is pronounced exactly like the English word weenie? Is this something that etymologists—and feminists—should look into? Definitely sexist language!” There were no customers in her store at the time, and Lester had spun her around and begun kissing the back of Bonnie’s neck. She had pressed his hands over her breasts and then reached back to feel the front of his jeans.
“The rise of Caesar. Totally awesome, dude!” she had said.
“Do you think I’m too easy?” he had replied with a little smile.
Unexpectedly, she had begun to laugh, and Lester had ceased caressing her in bewilderment.
“Sorry—something goofy just popped into my head,” she explained, turning to face him. “If we nickname y’ur willy ‘Julius’ and you ever say ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” when you’re entering, I’d—well, I’d totally lose it. I’d laugh y’ur willy inside out and probably propel you onto the ceiling!” Bonnie then pulled her sweat shirt up, baring her breasts, and embraced and kissed Lester in a firm, writhing way. They then had changed the sign on her front door from OPEN to CLOSED, and for fifty minutes, although they laughed together at frequent intervals, they spoke no more about cartoons.
Lester glanced up as a woman’s voice shrilly commanded, “Tommy! Wait for me! Don’t run with that soda—you’ll spill it!”
The boy made three more running steps and halted beside Lester’s seat. He stared at the colored pages on Lester’s lap.
“Wha’ cha doin’, mistah? Makin’ a comic book?”
Lester guessed that the short red-haired boy must be about seven or eight.
“Something like that,” he answered. “I’m trying to learn how to color better.”
“Tommy, what are you doing? Who are you talking to there?”
“Some ol’ weird guy who’s tryin’ to color,” said the boy, spinning around in circles as he spoke.
“Well leave him alone. You know what I’ve told you a million times.”
“I’ve got a new comic, mistah,” said Tommy, reaching into a plastic bag and spilling his drink on his own shoes, the sleeve of Lester’s jacket, and Lester’s Van Gogh calendar. “Ooops. See? Archie an’ Jughead an’ Reggie an’ V’ronica an’ Betty an’ Mistah Weatherby an’ . . . .”
“Tommy! Look what you did! Come with me so I can wipe your good shoes off!” And she pulled him after her by the sleeve of his wool coat.
“‘Bye, mistah!”
“‘Bye, Tommy.”
Lester opened a small pack of tissues and dabbed the calendar which now had large ripples where the liquid had swollen the paper. He frowned slightly, though his eyes were unfocused. He recalled drawing a Jughead cartoon six years ago and submitting it to a men’s magazine.
In it, Jughead was wearing his usual saw-edged felt cap, but his eyes and mouth were mere dots, his face was almost circular, and in place of a nose he had a large red nipple. Miss Grundy was chastising him before his classmates: “Jughead! In all my forty years of teaching, you’re the biggest boob I’ve ever seen!” Two years later, when the editor paid him and published it, Lester had been furious to learn they had made some changes: Jughead’s nose and the breasts of Betty and Veronica had been enlarged to twice their previous sizes, an obscene participle had been inserted before the word boob, and the phrase mentioning Miss Grundy’s forty years of teaching had been completely deleted.
Even more offensive to Lester was when the same magazine had drawn huge penises in the hands of five big prison inmates whom Lester had portrayed reaching toward the zippers of their jeans. As in the original, they were in a prison laundry room, surrounding a slightly built inmate wearing wire-rim glasses. Lester’s original caption had read “Whoa! Stop, guys! A philatelist is just a stamp collector!” but the editor had altered his wording, too, making the point with obscene explicitness.
Today Lester felt his old anger returning, augmented now by anger with himself. He took his small notebook out of his jacket and began paging through it. From the eighty-odd pages which were covered with joke and cartoon ideas, he tore out seven which he might use in a bookstore. Then he turned to the front of the notebook and tore out the page with his name, address, phone number, and offer of a hundred-dollar reward to the finder.
He put the seven pages with ideas into his billfold and crumpled the other loose page into his jacket pocket. Then he took the rest of the notebook to the men’s room, tore its pages out, and tossed some into the toilet and some into the waste
“What’s that?” she asked with slight apprehension at the way he had phrased the preliminaries.
“I’ve decided what I’d like you to bring me for my natal anniversary when you come here in March.”
“Really! You prune face! You nearly gave me heart failure. O.K.—you have my full attention. What do you want?”
“I’m trying to get back to learning what I couldn’t learn in school about colors. I’ve been doing some things these past couple days with some kiddy felt tips, and I have some other plans beyond that. If you approve of the idea, babes, I’d like you to get me a couple of cheap canvases and a small starter kit of oils. Maybe that will be—besides your own wonderful, adorable, intelligent, witty, and totally succulent self, of course—maybe that will be my bliss.”
“Really! You dirty stick in the mud, that’s great! I’ll go look for some tomorrow.”
Strange Ways
Mary Block
in pieces. The elevator
knob’s in your pocket
with loose tiles from the stairs.
of plaster stones. The dry light
empties on the floor, and we
collect it in buckets.
and string from the kitchen.
We speak in similes curved like tungsten—
We speak like filaments curved to burn.
Robot, art by Mark Hudson
Workout With Run After
Kevin Cole
He jumped from the exercise machine, grabbed a towel. What a workout this had been. He wiped his face, immediately picked up his cellphone. No messages, disappointing. Well, it was Sunday, lazy Sunday.
On the near wall was a full length mirror. In it, he saw the Josh he wanted to see, forty, fit, formidable. There were a few grey stubble flecks in his buzzcut hair, but there wasn’t a trace of softness. All was capable hardness.
He grabbed an energy drink from his office size refrigerator and gulped it down. After that it was a quick strip and shower, then a twist into his running suit and speed sneakers. It was time for his Sunday sprint, and he sprinted from his condo.
Josh lived in a residential Queens neighborhood that was currently in a surge of housing change. He lived there to be in the front lines of development, the foundation trenches of new profit. A local real estate group had recently met with strange and disastrous results, but this meant nothing to Josh. His real estate business, “Cashland Properties”, was in a spiralling boom.
He jogged up a side street, then right on a main avenue of stores. Here, neighborhood change was in full display.
He ran past a fast food outlet, formerly the home of burgers and fried chicken. Now, a large sign in the window proclaimed: “NEW ALL VEGAN MENU!! GET LOTS OF GREEN!!”
Another sign invited everyone to Tuesday family night when the kids could meet “The Big Stalker”, a cuddly celery character.
Josh ran on, increasing speed. At the next corner, he tripped, forced his way to balance, kept going. This sidewalk had serious repair issues. This was the sight of a former tavern, a place of smoking drinkers. Now, thanks to the state law barring bars, it was a medical center. A sign in the window reminded passersby that April was National Colon Exam Month and that all men over thirty were required to undergo a complete rectal check with result forms mailed to the appropriate agency. A smiling cartoon duck held a scope that looked like a fishing rod and reminded everyone: “A LITTLE HURT FOR HEALTH!!!”
This was a smooth run, body and mind in rhythm. Josh was in focus, thinking of upcoming deals to close. Suddenly, he passed the local cemetery gates, ornate, discolored, forbidding iron. To his disgust, he had a superstitious chill, and a surge of memory.
There had been a funeral, an uncle’s gravesite service. He had wandered off, five year’s old and curious about the headstones. It was a rainy day, and his mind conjured up a shadowy skeleton figure with taloned hands, a filthy smell, a withered face. He had cried and run. His father found him and slapped him for this embarrassing actout.
Josh ran by the cemetery wall with satisfaction. A new law was finally going to pass. This city cemetery and all city cemeteries were going to be subject to eminent domain. Hundreds of square miles of wasted land would now be open to development. Families with cemetery plots would have the option of having the graves emptied or letting them remain as a foundation part of a new city.
Josh pushed it, moved into a power sprint. He was motoring! Suddenly, he was impossibly passed by another runner. It was a woman in tank top and shorts who winked at him going by. It was Jody Payne, another real estator. Since when could she run like this? Quickly she put distance between them and Josh got a trailing look at the back of her shorts and her bobbing ponytail. He tried to step it up, but even full throttle, he was losing ground to her. Jody looked back at him, laughed, and disappeared into a driveway between houses. As soon as he could get there, Josh followed her in.
The driveway was narrow and shadowed, walled on two sides by private homes. Josh ran through this tunnel towards the garage area at the rear. Something about Jody bothered him. Why was she running at all, and running back here? He was startled and stopped running.
At the end of the driveway was another building. This was a neighborhood anomaly, usually a residential dwelling behind a business. In front of this one stood a small mild looking man in a gold sweatsuit. He was talking to Jody. “Customary good work, Jody,” he said. “Bringing in a new client. Of course, it’s 5% for you.”
Jody disappeared into the building.”I’m Harry Harder,” the little man said. He advanced on Josh, hand outstretched for a business shake. His grip was precise, neutral.”Josh Price, Cashland Properties,” Josh responded. “I’m online where you’d expect.”” You’re a fellow real estate carnivore,” Harry said. “Tell me about it.”
Josh gladly gave him just enough information. This Harder guy might be an unwanted competitor in a seriously overentered market, or he might be a hot new contact. It was time to find out which.
Harry motioned Josh toward the building.”We’ve got a unique and challenging situation here,” he said. “A very select few of us have founded a local business and exercise enterprise with mouth watering early results.”
He guided Josh into the building with a gold sleeved arm.
“Do you work out?” Harry asked
“Are you kiddin’?” Josh was incredulous.
“You look a little soft.” Harry frowned. “We can help you with that.”
The gold sleeved arm of Harry led Josh into a dark hall. Josh noted the welcome throb of exercise machines. There was the varied chorus of active cellphone rings. This always sounded like Business Christmas music to Josh.
There was also an intermittent unbusinesslike smell and a mental antivirus alert about Jody.”Before we go any further, Harry,” he said, “I need a lot more information here. I’m interested, but you’ve got to keep me interested.”
Harry smiled. He gestured ahead with the golden sleeve.”Let’s go ahead to our conference room. Our staff is having a power meal, and we can demonstrate what we’re about,” he said.
Josh walked ahead like an aggressive self-starter. He opened the door indicated by Harry. Inside, four people were around a functional conference table. At one end, Bill Plumber sat punching information into a laptop with one hand while twirling a dull grey chart baton with the other. In the middle of the table, Max Lander peered through thick glasses, worked at a text message with a strange looking stylus. At the far end, Jody Payne leered at him. She had applied magazine red lipstick.
The fourth member of the conference wasn’t present at the table. He lay sectioned, seasoned and medium rare on an adjacent gas grill. There was the smell of underrot. Dirty plates were stacked in a utility sink with a light coating of flies.
“The flies are a concern,” Harry said.
Josh realized what the concern was with Jody. She had been missing for two years. He remembered missing person posters taped to streetlamps.
Bill Plumber hadn’t been seen in at least six months. Hadn’t he retired?
Max had tripped out and been confined to a mental hospital. Hadn’t he?
Josh turned on Harry.”This isn’t business!” he screamed.
Harry gripped Josh’s arms, immobilized him.”This IS business,” he said calmly. “It’s time you met our personal trainer. He’ll get you in shape.”
The conference door opened and a shadowy skeleton figure entered. It had taloned hands, a filthy smell, a withered face.”This is your personal trainer,” Harry said.
The trainer grabbed Josh, tucked him like a struggling pet under one arm.”You got away from me when you were a kid,” it said. “You’re old and fat, now.”
The trainer carried Josh into the corridor and across the hall to another room. The others followed. The door opened into a small cubicle that contained a workout machine. On it was a skeleton in torn workout clothes.
Harry entered, mouth downturned in disgust. “He just couldn’t multitask,” he said. You’ll do better, Josh.”
He kicked the skelton off the machine. It clattered to the floor in a disarray of hollow bones.
The trainer lowered Josh onto the machine, strapped him in. It began to move. Josh was forced to walk and lift a left handed weight at the same time. A laptop zoned in on his right side. A programmed shock got Josh to turn it on and begin looking at noted property listings.
Josh cursed, struggled. Additional shocks encouraged him to return to work.
“Very good,” Harry smiled. “There’s just one more thing, Jody’s commission.”
Jody stepped forward. Josh could see that her red lipstick was a totally organic dried blood.”Pick your five percent,” Harry said.
Jody looked Josh over carefully. Picking five percent was a no brainer.
Before I Knew Their Names
Kathleen Fitzsimmons
“Was it worth it, girl?”
My lower lip jutted. I focused on the flashing blade.
Plop.
Plop.
Meanwhile, the staccato chopping of the butcher knife rang through the kitchen, the handle driven by her silent, seething fury. Grandmother could have cleaved a stone. A large Dutch oven waited on the burner to receive the ingredients for Brunswick stew. At least, that had been her plan for dinner.
Tears stung grandmother’s eyes as she reduced the wobbly chaos of onions into diced, peppery cubes. Her mouth was pulled in a taut, grim line.
“You are selfish, girl.”
The last of the garden’s yield lay piled on the sideboard: puckered lima beans, sad, shriveled tomatoes and a bowl of mostly tough peas that I picked and shucked after lunch. I flicked some babies in my mouth when grandmother wasn’t looking, their bright, green sweetness exploding on my tongue. It was a good thing she hadn’t seen me.
I was glad I took the bowl outside to work. Otherwise, I might have missed it. Oh, Grandmother’d be mad at me today, definitely next week, probably next month, too. I would have never forgiven her.
Grandmother muttered to the hot stove, her back turned to me as she cooked. The sweet-spicy sauce for the stew was thickening in a separate pan, the perfect matchmaker between vegetables and meat. Her wooden spoon scraped the bottom of the pot. She had made far too much sauce for what she had left to put in it.
I swung the broom wildly. Lily had hissed and flapped her wings. I nearly swatted her across the yard before she took off. Not a moment too soon, either. I was worried she didn’t know how to fly.
“I told you not to name it, girl. It wasn’t yours. You shouldn’t hold a fondness for things you can’t keep.”
Crazy old woman. I had never wanted to come here.
“How long’s the girl going to stay?” Grandmother asked.
Mama said it would only be a little while.
“LouAnn, growing girls eat a lot. We can barely feed ourselves as it is.”
Mama told me she would be back soon. That had been two Christmas and one birthday card ago. She still owed me one.
The sizzling surged as chopped ham tumbled into the pan with a metallic percussion. Smoked pork wafted through the air. My mouth watered but my stomach clenched. I would be having none. Not that I would have wanted any that night.
“Are you done with those potatoes?”
I blinked, holding back the threatening flood.
“Yes.”
“Wash up and set the table. Then you get to bed.”
I put the paring knife down on the stool and fumbled with the strings on my apron. The bow tugged loose. Jerking it over my head, I hung the apron on the nail by the back door. I bent down, scooped up the pile of dirty scraps and slipped outside. I sighed with relief. I had come very close to crying in the kitchen. I would not let her see me. I would not even shed tears for myself, though I would be hungry at sundown.
My first trip was to the pen where Daisy waited. Her once white coat was dusted cinnamon with reddish clay. She clambered up to balance against the top rail of the fence and regarded me solemnly. Her reflective amber eyes held more sympathy than any human I had encountered that day.
“Here,” I said, lifting my cupped hands to her.
Daisy made quick work of my offering. She flicked her long ears, tilted her face and stared at me. She only ate scraps and weeds. I patted her head and scratched her neck. She knew. All goats were wise. I pulled away and walked down the fence to the end.
The hatchet still stuck out from the corner post of the fence. When grandmother saw what I had done, she sank it there. Then she went inside and fetched the rug beater. I slid my fingers gingerly down my backside. The skin still prickled, fiery and hot.
I glanced at the cage at the end of the fence. The door hung ajar. The gray goose feathers stirred on the floor in the late afternoon breeze. I pivoted on my heel and scanned the four directions. The afternoon haze stretched unbroken by clouds, relentless and hot. Lily could be miles away. I hoped so.
“Girl, where are you? Get those plates on the table!”
I walked back to the water pump and worked the rusted red handle, my sinewy arms straining. The lever ran the piston up and down in long, squeaky strokes. When I got here, I asked where the faucet was. My cousins laughed. The first time I tried, I couldn’t pump a drop out. My toes scuffed the ground with each pull.
A trickle of water flowed. Barely. I rubbed my hands briskly, getting off the dust. Nobody seemed to know when the rain would come again. Right after I arrived, the couple of cows we had got sent to slaughter. Grandmother said hay was too expensive to keep them anymore. It was before I knew their names.
Dirty Fingers
Rachel Luria
Cynthia always sat in the back and tried the best she could to disappear into the wallpaper. No matter how quietly she sat, however, her classmates always seemed to know she was there. Her presence prickled their skin like pins and needles against their necks. They felt her eyes always watching, watching.
Her strange effect could not be explained by her appearance. To look at Cynthia was to look into a saucer of milk. She wore plain white shirts and pleated gray skirts to the knee; her face was clean and pale. But still, she burned with a strange fire from the back of the room
Miss Bell finished reading. She closed the book with a sigh and drummed her fingers against the jack-o-lantern. In the quiet classroom, the hot thumps of her fingers sounded like heart beats. The children watched her with open mouths, some with fingers pressed to their cheeks, and shuddered at the sound.
“That was pretty spooky,” said John Blake from the second row.
“It was meant to be,” said Miss Bell. She continued to drum her fingers.
The quiet held for a few beats more, but then the students began to stir. They whispered and giggled and scooted around in their seats and the noise swallowed Miss Bell and her tapping fingers, though she stayed seated at her desk with a far off look in her eyes.
Cynthia grew restless with the rest of them. She brushed her fingers along the fringe of crepe paper that hung from the wall beside her. She pulled a piece off, wound it around her fingers until it snapped and then she tore it into tiny pieces. Cynthia watched Miss Bell and the grinning pumpkin. Her expression said she wanted to push the pumpkin to the floor and pummel it, wanted to feel its goopy flesh mush through her fingers, but instead she just tore another strip of paper and stuck it in her mouth.
“Good God, Cynthia,” said Lindsey Jones, who had turned all the way around in her chair to look at Cynthia. “Hungry much? It’s almost candy time. Can’t you wait five more seconds?” Lindsey giggled and her friends giggled too.
Cynthia spat the paper out in a wet blob. It landed inches from Lindsey’s feet, who shrieked and whirled around in her chair. She leaned over to the girl beside her and said, “What a full-blown freak.” The girls continued to whisper until Miss Bell quieted them with a disapproving look.
“OK kids. Listen up,” said Miss Bell. “It’s time.” She stood up from her desk, walked around it, and paced before the waiting class. She looked around the room meeting every anxious eye. “It’s time,” she said, “for what I think you have all been waiting for.” Miss Bell stood at the head of the classroom, grinning and clasping her hands beneath her chin. Every head but one snapped forward and a collective scrape was heard as twenty-three desks jerked forward. “It’s spelling test time.”
The classroom erupted in protest: feet kicked the back of desks, fists pounded desktops. Miss Bell gasped with delight and held her hand over her mouth, stifling her laughter. “Settle down. I’m only teasing. It’s time, of course, for the candy exchange. Everyone, quietly, get your candy out of your knapsacks and we’ll start from the left of the classroom and move to the right.”
Cynthia felt her stomach knot and turn inside out. She began to tear more intensely into the crepe paper and stared at the wall as, one by one, each of her classmates filed past and deposited a piece of candy. As the pile grew, she could smell the chocolate through the wrappers. It made her sick and she hid her face in her hands to try to keep her stomach from heaving. Finally, the candy stopped coming and it was Cynthia’s turn. She looked out at the expectant faces of her classmates.
“Well, Cynthia? Are you ready to share your treats with everyone?” asked Miss Bell. She leaned back against her desk and crossed her legs at the ankles. Cynthia picked up her knapsack and held it to her chest. She felt inside for the bag from her mother and wrapped her hand around the stack of tiny pamphlets.
She thought of her mother in the early light of that morning. She’d stood, as always, at the kitchen counter making Cynthia’s lunch. Her mother fixed a jelly and butter sandwich and trimmed the crust from the bread with a paring knife. The light through the window lit her hair in a silver halo, like sun through a storm cloud.
Cynthia had watched her. She’d watched her mother in her faded bathrobe and counted the soft folds of skin at her eyes and mouth. Do I have to, she’d asked. Can’t I stay home just this year?
No, her mother had said. No, we must tell them. They have to see, she’d said as she reached across the counter and took Cynthia’s hand. Cynthia remembered the feel of her mother’s skin as she held the tissue pages of the little books.
Cynthia looked up from her desk and to the waiting Miss Bell. Miss Bell uncrossed her ankles and nodded her head. “It’s OK,” she said. “Go ahead.”
Cynthia turned her eyes away and said, “No. I’ve got nothing.”
Miss Bell dropped her head and watched the floor. Still leaning against the desk, she drummed her fingers again against the metal top. The class looked from Cynthia to Miss Bell and waited for the verdict. At last she looked up and said, “So that’s that. The candy exchange is done.”
“That’s not fair,” complained Lindsey.
“I knew she’d hold out on us,” said John. “The little freak does it every year.” Soon the other students added their voices to the complaint and their whispers and clucking tongues sounded like flames licking kindling.
“Quiet down,” said Miss Bell. “It doesn’t matter. Everyone has plenty already. It’s all right, Cynthia.”
Cynthia couldn’t meet Miss Bell’s eyes and began stuffing the candy on her desk into her knapsack. As soon as the bell rang she bolted out of her chair and ran for the door. She didn’t stop running until she was blocks away from school, alone, bent over and panting by a dirty neighborhood canal. She collapsed to her knees and dumped her knapsack out in front of her.
She picked up one of her pamphlets and flipped through it. Stern faces, wagging fingers and frantic warnings filled the pages. She opened it to the middle, a page depicting a dark-haired woman handing a razor-laced apple to an innocent looking little girl. The caption read: Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
The woman in the picture looked a bit like her mother, Cynthia thought. She looked weak and soft and the longer Cynthia looked at the page the more she felt a yearning for home. She wanted to quiet the roar of blood in her ears and to stroke her mother’s hair until they both drifted into sleep. But Cynthia stayed where she was and read again her mother’s pamphlet. That girl looks hungry, she thought. That little girl looks like everyone I know. After a while, Cynthia took a piece of chocolate and folded it into the pages. She mashed the paper together, oozing brown paste over her fingers and knees.
She stayed like that for an hour, then two. When the sun was low enough to cast a flickering red glow over the streets, Cynthia tossed the wadded chocolate and paper into the canal. She reached into her knapsack and pulled out a packet of sewing needles. After some consideration, she picked up a handful of candy and began slowly inserting needles, making certain that no part was visible and crinkling the wrappers to disguise the tiny pinpricks before putting the candy back in her bag. She picked up the rest of the pamphlets by the fistful and threw them all into the canal. They floated a moment on the murky water before being pulled under and were lost. Cynthia licked some melted chocolate off her dirty fingers and listened as the streets slowly filled behind her.
Bio
No Where Else
Darren W. Love
deep inside me
my fingers pulling and searching
bone and blood
across my body
I am floating
at last asleep
or so much trying
sweet peace
Leslie of Phillipsburg
Cameron Run
“Why aren’t you done with my dinner,” he scowled as his heart rapidly pumped heated blood through his veins.
She tried to explain, but his grip congested her esophagus and suffocated her. All she could do was point at the over flowing pot of macaroni and cheese. However, he was too enraged to notice this.
When her face became the color purple, he released his grasp and stormed into the living room, where he smashed the lamp, phone and their wedding pictures.
She curled up in the corner and cried. She wanted to leave him, but didn’t know how to. It would only create more problems. He would track her down and batter her, maybe to death...
He stormed out the house and minutes later cooled off at the local bar. He drank nine bottles of beers and took six shots of rum. This thinned his blood, but also increased its speed.
He stood up and began to pick fights with other customers. The bartender, whose name can not be mentioned, attempted to relax him, by giving him free drinks.
When I interviewed her she said, “I didn’t know he was going to do that to Leslie. He was a regular customer. He always got a little heated here and there. I can’t imagine him going home and hurting Leslie.”
Well, that’s exactly what he did. According to the Phillipsburg Police Department report, when Mark arrived at the house, Leslie wasn’t home. Where was she? No one knows, but what is; Mark was hiding behind the front door when she opened it. He held on his right hand a halfway filled bottle of vodka. As soon as she entered the house, he grabbed her by the throat again and body slammed her on the floor. She tried to fight him, but he knocked her on unconscious by shattering the bottle over her face. Pieces of glass were discovered on the front porch, doorway and even stuck through the wooden door.
Detective Moore said, “We know that he dragged her into the kitchen and forced himself on her.”
However, according to forensics, Mark did not drag her into the kitchen, but instead picked up her middle finger, which had been decapitated by the bottle as she used her hand to protect her face from its impact.
Intelligence gathered from criminologist claim that Mark, saw the finger jumping up and down on the floor. He became terrified of it, grabbed it and threw it out the backyard window.
Neighbors maintain that the finger landed right in front of the only tree in their yard, a weeping willow. A black owl resting above it, with healing skin covering its left eye picked up the vibrating finger and swallowed it in one gulp.
State officials have found feathers of this creature with ashes surrounding the tree.
A local police officer Shawn states, “There were tons of black feathers found, but forensics already, said, ‘They belonged to crows.’”
I asked him, “So no owls were responsible?”
He snapped, “Forensics said that the feathers belonged to the crows. You have seen our town; there are many cornfields out here. Ravens are responsible for eating every dead meat, whether, from a raccoon to a human.”
What local police officers, newspapers and residents all agree upon, is that Leslie was still alive, when Mark dragged her into the backyard. He was so drunk, he thought, she was dead and buried her nine feet deep, right in front of the weeping willow.
What no one seems to be able to explain, is how Mark’s corpse was discovered on the bed. It was crispy black and what most residents describe as over cooked by the flames of hell. Hundreds of black feathers in the living room against the wall. The white wall had the words inscribed in an unidentified animal blood, as Revenge will be sweet but not until he repents his sins. In addition, the thousands of maggots, with Leslie body parts found scattered down the stairs.
About the author
Mainline
Geoff Ralston
I found her lying on her side in the bathroom, curled up into a little ball. Her arms crossed her chest, palms grasping her belly, grasping that last shred of life before she finally choked on her own vomit. Her toes were caked with dried blood; she must have broken them kicking the toilet in frantic spasms of pain. The track marks along her legs stood out like some kind of pox, speckled signs of slow decay and jaded indifference.
Her eyes were closed. She must have died sometime after midnight.
When I found her, I just sort of stared at her there, sprawled across the pale tile of our hotel bathroom. She finally looked peaceful, and it was odd seeing her that way.
I could only imagine her in anguish.
She would wince very time I tied her off. Even after so many times, she still hated the sight of blood. Every flush would elicit little squeals of discomfort from her lips. In fact, she hated the very concept of blood. When the pressure built up in her veins, her face cringed into a sour grimace and her breath came in weak pants. I think she just despised the idea of blood, the idea of what it was and what it stood for. She hated the way it flowed, she hated the way her appendages felt when it stopped flowing. She hated the sight of it on her palms when her cough got bad and she hated how it arced through the air when I had tied her off too tightly.
And she hated that there was so much of it. She hated how important it was to everyone when she wasn’t worth shit to anyone.
Not even me.
She didn’t even like when I ran my hands over her skin. Every time I did she would withdraw, claiming that she could feel the blood pulsing in my fingertips.
Christ, the woman couldn’t even bear her own period. She would bawl for hours when it came and I would have to somehow calm her down without touching her or making her heart beat too fast.
I kept thinking to myself, standing there over her body, that she would have liked death. She looked so goddamn peaceful.
Within ten minutes of snapping out of my daze, I was on the freeway headed west. We had checked into the hotel under a false name, so they wouldn’t know who to look for when the cleaning lady found her in the morning. They wouldn’t even know who she was; she had no record, which is why I liked to bang up with her.
We’d find a room and bomb out for hours together, watching television and fucking to pass the time. Lately, I thought she had taken a bad dive because she was always clutching her stomach and puking the second she came out of it. I’d usually just let her ride it out, because after all, it was none of my problem.
I didn’t realize how wrong I was until I walked in on her like that.
So there I was, pushing 90 toward the State line with a crumpled, hastily scrawled suicide note in my hand that I had found near her dead body:
I’m pregnant and it’s yours. Fuck you, and see you in Hell. – Jude
And I thought to myself, recalling her last words, how appropriate it was. She’d like Hell, I thought. After all, with all that fire and brimstone, how much blood could there possibly be?
It was another 100 miles to St. Louis.
The Obvious Break-Up
Lisa Markowitz
A Woman Could Show You How
Meredith Thompson
Gifted
Ken Dean
Life hadn’t always been so easy. His father had been a poor meat packer and times were rough growing up in Brooklyn. He remembered poor times and thin dinners with his family. It was always a struggle for his parents to divide what little income they had between bills, food, rent, and the children’s needs.
One day in school during a boring class, Artie was twiddling his pencil between his fingers. That was when he discovered his gift. His family was never poor again. His father never questioned his gift. They kept it a family secret and enjoyed the good life.
Hirosho was always dressed in impeccable business attire. His family was quite wealthy. He and his father owned an upscale Manhattan brokerage house.
Hirosho didn’t start out with the good life. He had suffered a rough start as well. He had been born to a poor Tokyo fisherman. Their family always ate rice and some of the fish his father caught; what was left after selling the rest to the local market. Their father made just enough to keep up with shelter, clothing, and school demands.
Many times Hirosho would come home crying after being teased of being hosoboso, or poor, due to the second hand clothing he wore.
One day Hirosho was walking through the market after school on the way to his father’s fish stand. A well dressed businessman was walking the other way and dropped his newspaper in front of Hirosho, who always trying to be the polite child, reached down to pick it up. The businessman reached down at the same moment and accidentally touched Hirosho’s hand. Hirosho handed the newspaper to him, they both bowed to each other in proper acknowledgement of mannerly behavior. The man turned to go on his way, took about six steps, and fell down face first. Hirosho ran to get his father as a crowd gathered. An ambulance was called and Hirosho and his father watched as they loaded the businessman into the ambulance and took him away. The next day’s paper said he had died of a sudden brain aneurism.
Life went on for Hirosho’s family. One evening while doing his schoolwork, Hirosho noticed he had absentmindedly drawn some funny symbols on his writing pad. He asked his father what they were. His father had an idea of what they were, but went to a businessman living in the village to be sure. The businessman was shocked, because what he saw were stock trends. Not just any stock trends, but ones from the Tokyo Stock Exchange that showed a possible futuristic pattern.
Hirosho’s father was encouraged to take some of their meager life savings and invest in the stocks. He did so, and to his amazement, reaped earnings equal to a year’s wages in a few weeks time. Hirosho wrote down more of the stock symbols and values for his father and the trend continued.
Hirosho’s family was soon wealthy, leaving all the trappings of near poverty behind. By the time Hirosho was eighteen their family was so wealthy that they moved to New York where his father purchased his own brokerage house. Hirosho’s family never had to worry about financial matters again.
Artie and Hirosho wound up sitting on the same park bench in Central Park, both of them breathing in the spring odors beginning to emerge this time of year. Sunlight was trickling down through the rustling trees above them. Springtime in Manhattan, at least in Central Park, was worth waiting for. People with gifts always have a sense, an unspoken feeling about one another that enables them to tell when they were in the presence of another gifted.
Hirosho bowed towards Artie. “My name is Hirosho Nakamoto.”
“Pleased to meet you, Hirosho. Mine is Arthur Midaska, but please call me Artie.”
“So what’s your gift?” Hirosho asked Artie.
“So you’re sure I’m one?” Artie asked cautiously.
“Yes, I can tell.”
“Okay, watch this.”
Artie bent over the side of the park bench and picked up a small branch. He held it in one palm, reached up and touched it with his index finger and - gold. The branch had turned golden, but not just any gold; it shined with a luster that would have been tested at almost pure quality.
“Nice trick, huh?”
“Impressive. I’m assuming you have a comfortable lifestyle with such a gift.”
“Yes, it’s financed myself and my family since I was eighteen. My father saw the potential immediately and never questioned how I was able to do it. We kept it quiet from the rest of the family for secrecies sake, saying only that father had come into some lucrative business ventures.”
“Were there ever have any problems turning pure gold into cash?” Hirosho asked incredulously. “That much pure gold sold outright would surely raise some eyebrows.”
“You have a good point,” Artie answered, excited to have someone to tell his story to. “The pure gold was hard to fence, or sell, and we couldn’t use normal markets means to get rid of it. My father knew a few mob connections. He inquired and found they were all too happy to take gold off our hands at half the cost that they could make through fencing and other methods. And we still made pure cash profit at the selling price. It’s a method I’m still using to this day; the arrangement has worked out quite well. Our family has even enjoyed mob protection over the years due to the long partnership.”
“That’s quite an arrangement you have.”
“Thank you. So Hirosho, you must have a gift also.”
“Yes, you’re correct. In fact, I have several.” Hirosho said proudly.
“Several?” Artie replied in amazement. “The most I’ve ever heard of is one per gifted. So show me.”
“Okay.” Hirosho looked around one way and another to make sure they were relatively alone. He gestured towards a trash can a few feet down the walk path. It began to lift into the air.
“Telekinesis, huh? How heavy can you lift?”
“I’ve lifted heavier, but I’m not sure what my upper limit is.”
“Really good trick, what about the others?”
“See that pigeon over there by the pond?”
Hirosho pointed towards it and a thin bolt of lightning shot out and fried it in an instant.
“And now for the real eye opener.”
Hirosho snapped his fingers and everything froze. The rustling in the trees had stopped, birds were motionless in midair, and people across the pond had stopped still in their tracks. And the quiet; there was no sound whatsoever. It made your ears ring with the absence of sound. He snapped his fingers again and everything returned to normal.
“Hirosho, I’m quite impressed!” Artie said incredulously. “Never have I seen so many gifts in one individual.”
“I have one more. It is my favorite.”
“Show me, friend.”
Hirosho reached over and grasped Artie’s hand. Artie convulsed, shook, and collapsed. He hung over the side of the park bench, blood leaking from his nose and his dead, gaping mouth. Hirosho let go of Artie’s hand, reached over the bench and picked up a rock. He watched as it turned to pure gold in his grasp.
He smiled. “I take others.”
coming into being
Devin Wayne Davis
f’in
empty.
some fear left
—to think.
growing
into, then out of itself ...
and all the while,
recreated;
created,
before that.
Eyewitness
Mel Waldman
“What feels good?” asked Denny, his azure eyes glaring at Brown, who stood almost half a foot shorter.
“The darkness. Yeah. Love it.”
“Can barely see down here,” complained Denny.
“Can see well enough. An’ we got the lights if we need ’em. Right, Scott?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re crazy, Brown,” accused Denny.
“Never said I ain’t,” Brown said proudly. “Still, I love the darkness. An’ the solitude. Hardly no one comes here. No one onya back. Feel free. Free!”
“Whatya got tasay, Scott?” asked Denny.
“Nothin’,” said the taciturn man, about an inch shorter than Denny.
“You guys bug me! Free, eh? I say this place spooks me. Free? Free to rot in Hell!”
Outside, the dog-day afternoon was oppressive. The others called the heat of the sun Hell, and waited for the interminable day to end. But this was only the beginning. Even the soil was a seething cauldron. And the rhythmic sound of footsteps reverberated as they marched on the fiery land. They marched forth under the relentless rays, almost to eternity, almost...
Captain Eddy gazed harshly at Graf and announced: “You’re under my jurisdiction now, Graf. Get it?”
“Yeah.”
“The big boys sent you to me,” continued Captain Eddy. “I hear you’re VIP.”
“Could be.”
“Terrific! They asked me to watch over you. You need watchin’ over?”
“No.”
“Well, you’ll be watched very carefully, Graf. Get it?”
“Yeah.”
“Gotta keep you alive. Now, any idea who might want you dead?”
Graf gazed quizzically at the captain.
“Yeah. Didn’t expect you tatell me what’s goin’ on. See, it’s this deep, dark secret. Right, Graf?”
“What did they tell you?”
“Nothin’ Just keep him alive so he gets the job done. My ol’ buddy Ray Pepper back in New York said to treat you with kid gloves but watch you with a thousand eyes. So that’s what I’m gonna do. Understand?”
“Sure. Ya gonna follow me into the john too?”
“You betta pray I do, Graf. Someone wants you dead!”
Outside, the sun was setting. In the distance, the vast sea seemed tranquil as it rolled timelessly into infinity.
In the middle of her performance, Graf slithered off into the restricted area. Even a thousand eyes and a beautiful entertainer could not restrain him. He vanished into the vortex of darkness. Later, Denny, Scott, and Brown discovered him and reported him to the captain.
Outside, they breathed the salty air. In the distance, the leaves fell to earth.
Denny enjoyed talking the most. But even Brown, who considered the visitors interlopers, didn’t mind the occasional interruptions. “Long as I can return to the solitude,” muttered Brown. “And the darkness.”
“Ain’t you guys got nothin’ but bourbon for us?”
“It’s free. So what’s the gripe?”
“Hate it down here. An’ Johnnie Walker Red would suit me better.”
“Lotsa guys love bourbon.”
“Yeah. But not Denny.”
“Want me to take it back?”
“No.”
“It was the only thing I could grab hold of.”
“Yeah. So you comin’ back later?”
“Maybe. There’s gonna be a big celebration.”
“Drop by tonight for a drink and bring me some Johnnie Walker Red.”
“Sure, Denny,” Darlan smiled sardonically.
“Yeah. But I got this note from him. Says to meet him down here. Just beyond Brown’s area.”
“Let me see the note.”
Denny glanced at the note and let Graf continue on. He was ready for the next shot of bourbon.
In a little while, Denny saw Eden coming into the area. “Betta hurry up, Eden. Scott’s getting’ restless.” Eden nodded and hurried off.
Later, Scott saw Coon coming into the area. “Brown’s waitin’ for you. Got some good stuff in your bag?” Coon grinned and continued on.
Then Brown saw Darlan coming into his area. “Got lost, Darlan? Denny’s back a ways.
“Got a message from Captain Eddy for Graf. Didya see him?”
“Yeah. He’s in the next area behind me.”
Darlan nodded and hurried past Brown. Just before Darlan passed into the other area, Brown cried out: “You sound funny, Darlan.”
Without turning around, Darlan replied: “You look funny, Brown.” And then he vanished.
“Hello, Graf.”
“What?”
“Just hello.”
“You sound funny...Captain Eddy? Is that you?”
“We asked the Germans for assistance. They sent you on this very special mission. But you didn’t deliver.”
“I’m on my way back to...”
“Back? Oh no, Graf. Oh no!”
“But...I’ve got the information.”
“Don’t bother lying, Graf. We know you’re working for the British and Americans. How very elegant!”
“Let me explain.”
“Explain? You’re a magnificent mole. You deceived the Germans. But not us.”
“Who are you?”
“Death, Graf!” The stranger removed the Mauser from the bag. “My German friends gave me this pretty baby with the silencer. Goodbye, Graf.”
“Please...”
The stranger pulled the trigger. And it was over. Smiling triumphantly, the killer picked up the bloody note and headed back.
Suddenly, the killer emerged from the restricted area and rushed toward him. Dusko sensed the stranger but continued on. Instantly, the killer collided with Dusko, bruising the disabled man. Together, they fell to the ground.
Then the killer rose and momentarily pointed the Mauser at Dusko without pulling the trigger. Curiously, the stranger removed Dusko’s dark glasses, realizing that the man was blind.
“Shall I kill you?” whispered the killer. Dusko stared blankly into space. “Goodbye, my dumb fellow. Goodbye.”
The killer rushed off to assume another identity, leaving behind one dead spy, three drunken officers, and one wounded eyewitness.
“Yes, sir!”
“And Scott, you saw Coon and no one else?”
“Yes, sir!”
“And Brown, you saw Darlan and no one else?”
“Yes, sir! Except for Graf, of course.”
“Of course.”
In the next few hours, Captain Eddy continued to interrogate the three officers on duty and Eden, Coon, and Darlan. Finally, he announced: “Either one or all of you are lying or the killer is an adept impersonator and a practical joker. Happy Halloween, gentlemen! We’ll meet again tonight.
“We’ve been giving him a battery of tests. By the way, his I.Q. is over 180.”
“I see. Now, how did he get down there?”
“He just wandered off. Apparently, the man is touched. He’s governed by other senses.”
“Don’t give me that hocus-pocus. Just tell me how I’m gonna communicate with him.”
“There’s a translator inside. He knows how to sign with Dusko.”
Soon, Captain Eddy spoke to the blind, deaf mute through the translator. “Dusko, I am Captain Eddy. I gotta ask you some questions about the murder.”
“Didn’t see the murder, captain. And please call me Popeye.”
“Sure, Popeye.”
“Well, captain. I believe I saw the killer. Cut me up a bit.”
“Did he stab you with a knife?”
“Don’t think it was a knife. Something sharp but not a knife.”
“Can you describe the killer?”
“Hands like claws and a foul but familiar smell.”
“A foul smell?”
“Yes. Used on...furniture. No, not sure. And there was another scent. A faint one. Can’t think of the name.”
“What else?”
“The killer is probably about 5'7" or 5'8". I’m 5'5" and I sense the killer was only slightly taller and much lighter. And...”
“Yes?”
“A gentle, merciful soul who kills out of necessity or...revenge!”
“You’re contradicting yourself all over the place.”
“I know. But that’s what I see.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. I dreamed of the murder a few days ago. That was my first dream.”
“And the second?”
“The planes came and dropped the bombs! I died!”
“Well, it was just a dream, Popeye. Just a dream.”
He visited the killer who was expecting him. “Come in, captain.”
“You were magnificent today.”
“Oh, but you missed most of my performance.”
“I caught the main act.”
Suddenly, Captain Eddy started coughing violently. “Excuse me, captain. My nail polish remover is quite potent. Forgive me.”
“Of course. And by the way, your sweet smelling perfume is delightful.”
“Yes. It’s called Lilac.”
The captain gazed at the killer and said: “Why?”
“Graf was a traitor!”
“How do you know?”
“We have sources.” She smiled at Captain Eddy. “And how is the blind, deaf mute?”
“Popeye will be fine.”
“That’s good.”
“How did you impersonate Eden, Coon, and Darlan?”
“Makeup and masks. The masks are in the dresser. All four of them. And they’re all about my height. I also impersonated you when I killed Graf.”
“Incredible! But didn’t Denny, Scott, and Brown suspect anything?”
“It’s dark down there. And they were drunk. Only Brown noticed something. Yet I slipped past him.”
“How did you fool Graf? I’m considerably taller than you.”
“He wasn’t entirely fooled. But I changed into elevated shoes before meeting with him. So when he saw me, he was confused and puzzled.”
“Why did you impersonate my men?”
“To create confusion and chaos.”
“And you executed this elaborate scheme in that dark, dank tomb we call the restricted area?”
“Yes, I was trained to do many things. How fitting for Halloween night!”
“Indeed.”
Suddenly, like an adept magician, she waved her left hand and revealed a tiny pill hidden in her hand. She swallowed it.
“And now I must inform you that I will be going on a long trip.”
“But...”
“I just took a cyanide pill.”
“What is your name?”
“Yoko Sato.”
“Goodbye, Yoko Sato.”
“Perhaps, we’ll meet in the next life.” Yoko Sato smiled sardonically and died honorably.
On December 5, it arrived in Honolulu.
On December 7, 1941, at daybreak, 360 Japanese aircraft appeared over Pearl Harbor. In a short time, many lives were lost. Captain Eddy and a visionary named Popeye were among the casualties.
BIO
Mel Waldman, Ph. D.
