Tag Archives: fiction

Tulips

by Josh Gray

My great aunt Elise, age eleven, walks through the streets of her ruined city carrying a basket of food. Dusk falls over Lyon, and Elise moves swiftly hoping to finish her errand before nightfall. The cold wind creeps through the wracked and riddled buildings as she makes her way around the craters that litter the streets. Elise imagines these craters as the holes her mother digs for tulip bulbs. The loose soil turning over easily, willingly, for the trowel. There must be giant bulbs for these holes, she thinks. A whole street lined with tulips as tall as trees.
 
The food is for her sister who is locked in the cellar of a château. When they came for her sister, they knocked politely. A mob with a courteous leader. Elise’s mother answered the door. Give us the girl, they said. Elise sat in the bathroom holding her older sister’s hand, tremors racing through their bodies. They paraded her sister through the streets where children hurled mud at her and women spat and the men called her a whore. In the square; they sat her on the lip of the fountain and shaved her head. The hair floated in clumps, like dark ciliated ships, in the fountain water. The people cheered. Some placed children on their shoulders so they could see. Elise stops. The château stands before her as large and looming as a cathedral. There are men outside the cellar door, smoking silently, their heads bowed like penitents.
 
The men notice Elise. They send a boy over, seventeen and angel-faced. He’s pale with beautiful, but cracked lips. He licks at them nervously. He tells her to leave, but she’s too scared to move. He trembles, feigns anger, finally pleads and begs. The men call him back where they speak to him and nod towards Elise. The boy returns to her and says in a forced voice, Leave the basket.
 
Later Elise understood. Whispers and the taunts of cruel schoolchildren enlightened her. She only knew then that something was happening, something that hurt.
 
Her sister’s cries echoing off the dark cellar’s cold, moist stones. The old wooden bedframe and its musty horsehair mattress creaking violently. The men whispering their acidic hate, so well preserved in their bowels from swallowing it as Elise’s sister passed by on the streets arm-in-arm with a lower-level officer. The conqueror’s concubine.
 
I don’t know if Elise told me this or if my imagination has created the details. The walk through the city, the men with their smoke billowing beneath the rising moon. The rape, Elise told me that, I know. Possibly seven men, possibly thirteen. Elise couldn’t remember exactly, and she told me so many gin-soaked versions that it was difficult to keep up.
 
I know the story so well that I can replay it in my mind as often as I want. Every scene is on request, along with every detail: the craters, the weight of the basket, and the dried lips. I can feel Elise’s stomach fall away when she sees the men and the heavy dread as she sets the basket down and turns away. This must be like the empathy pains husbands have while their wives are in labor.
 
Elise is dead now. I guess I’m carrying the flame. I used to tell her story at parties and on long drives with friends during the holidays, or occasionally in soft post-coital twilights. It got to the point people requested it. And in truth, I waited for it, played it up, acted like it no longer interested me. They’d beg and I’d finally, reluctantly, comply. One toff tried to pass it off as his own; he sent it to Esquire. They sent him back a rejection letter, not handwritten. Now I save the story for dinner parties, supper club socials, and the long cigarette break with an advanced undergraduate whose legs aren’t mapped with varicose veins, like those of my colleagues.
 
Elise moved to Seagate after she was liberated from Knoxville. She threw a drink in the face of her department chair; she was never a good drunk. I don’t know what he did, if anything. She didn’t like the mountains anyway; “the lumps” is what she called the Smokies. She got on at UNCW as a French instructor, which she didn’t care for, and my mother helped her find a house three blocks up from our own.
 
I was twelve; she was fifty-seven. She looked ancient. Wrinkled, fissured. Ascites just beginning to distend her belly. Rode hard and put up wet, is what father said. My mother visited her regularly, making the salvation of the old broad’s soul her march to martyrdom.
 
On days when my mother couldn’t carry her cross, I’d go instead and sit while Elise drank cocktails as her birds skirled and flew about. Her house smelled of gin, bird shit, expensive perfume, and lime rinds rotting at the bottom of glasses, the kitchen sink.
 
She adored the birds and hated menopause. She wouldn’t keep the birds in cages, and so kept her house a free range. My earliest memory of her involves the birds. I was walking to her house with my mother for a visit, and there she was in the front lawn, in a soft-blue kimono, shouting at a finch that’d escaped out the door, and was hobbling through the air on its clipped wings. Elise was shouting in French with her gimlet crashing in small waves over her glass’s rim. I speak only a little French, but I remember her shouting, “Albert, come down out of the goddamned tree! You are not deaf, you treacherous bastard!” She had a deliciously filthy mouth. Once, at our dinner table, after my father had scoffed at her story of handling a difficult student, she spat French at him. He asked her to translate and she replied, “It means you are a cocksucking swine.” He lunged at her, but she sat there, looking at him so coldly you could see his strength falling from him like bricks from a condemned building. She knew the weaknesses of brutal men.
           
I think of Elise now when I watch the news and hear talk of IED’s, surges, and the local hostility. In the other day’s newspaper, there was a photograph of bearded men burning an American flag and pointing and screaming at the camera. They looked angry and alive. Children were on the fringe, barely in focus, and they seemed to be circling the men, fluttering in excitement, their arms extended like wings. I wondered why there were so many kids around this flag burning. Don’t they have any other games to play? There’s a boy there, no older than ten or twelve, and he’s my favorite. He’s among the men, pointing at the camera, but he seems to be levitating. Maybe he’s on the shoulders of a pint-sized father, or maybe the excitement has lifted him into the photograph. Either way, his face is defiled, defiant. That’s how Elise looked at my father at the dinner table, defiled and defiant. I love this photograph. I cut it out and placed it in between the pages of a book and put that book back on the shelf.
           
I showed this picture to my favorite student. She’s blonde with bright eyes and a backpack stitched with left-wing political patches. I like her because she sat at the front of my senior capstone and asked questions, and laughed at my jokes. She’s sophisticated for her age, a rare treat who earnestly believes that the world is hers to save. When she spoke passionately in class about peace and famine and disease control, her words fell into a lisp, her eyes moistened. I had to lean against the lectern to hide my excitement. Sometimes on the weekends, I go to the café near campus, where she’s a waitress, a little before her lunch shift ends. She sits with me and talks before biking home to her townhouse. The townhouse is only a mile or so away from the café, very convenient. I’ve told her about Elise, but only about sitting with her. How Elise made me my first cocktail when I was twelve and how afterwards I walked home, saluted my dog, and slept for ten hours.
 
Oftentimes my mother came home with reddened eyes, Elise being too brutal and the birds too loud. I never came home crying. I never spoke, only listened. Elise told me that was a lovely trait for a man to have. She began to tell me stories. My favorite was why she got fired from that New England university, where the winters were so bitterly cold. Boston was it? Or perhaps Concord? Anyway. She was, like me, a young academic; she taught French history and at department parties told her stories of Paris. She was fired due to an affair with a young girl. Elise couldn’t help it. She told me once there was nothing as pleasant as picking the ripe, flawless fruit of youth, and tasting it fresh. The girl had a boyfriend she ignored while trysting with Elise. He snitched.
 
Treacherous bastard.
 
I asked Elise once, What happened to your sister, after the cellar? She was nodding off in her rocker, her eyelids nearly closed, and the gin in her glass creeping close to its edges as her hand slipped to the side of her knee. I assumed this was the safest time to ask. She looked at me, her left eye twitching as fast as bird’s wings, and then passed out. The glass fell and gin spilled onto the hardwood and a parakeet flew down for a quick nip. I placed the glass in a fold of the blanket that covered her. Elise died a year later. She left nothing to us.
 
 
I think about this young man with the cracked-dry lips. I’ve created a life for him: an uneventful adolescence spent on a dusty farm with bleating sheep, scraggly crops, and a simple father with stooped shoulders. A cliché? Yes, but it’s my fantasy and besides I never include this in the story. He’s probably a retired banker now, respectable. Then he was the youngest, and last in line. Surely Elise knew that. I pity him sometimes, for finding her sister soaked in the stew of bloody, sweaty sheets. I bet someone stood at the door to see that he finished the job. I think he trembled too, and very near whimpering as he undressed, even mumbling sweetly as he climbed on top of her, his eyes closed tight. I know his thoughts as he entered her, those honeyed ruins of her flesh—he thought about how, when he was a child helping his father with the slaughtering of the spring lambs, their gutted viscera lay in a pile of purples, blues, and reds, and how when he put his hand to the pile, it felt warm but grew cold so very quickly.
 
Elise never told me what happened after the cellar. The stories start again when Elise arrives in Paris, a country mouse come for university. Sartre’s Paris, and de Beauvoir’s. She knew them, stalked them as so many young students did. She hinted at having an affair with both, but never confessed. She spoke instead of the city’s bold youth, the arrogant young men who mimicked the tough actors of the American movies, and the coy girls, and how seducing them was as lovely and intricate as playing Scarlatti on a good piano. My student loves these Paris pieces; I know she imagines herself in them as another pixie-haired Jean Seberg.
 
 
When Elise died of a stroke at sixty with a liver rotted by cirrhosis, she gave her money, more than we thought she had, to the Wilmington Bird Club and asked that her ashes be spread in the Saône. My father said we didn’t have the money to fly to France to dump some old bitch’s ashtray.
 
The day they burned Elise, I cried. My mother, in a sweetly sensitive voice, had explained what cremation was and I was of course mature enough at fifteen to understand, but I still cried, even though I was miles from the crematorium and did not watch the shoveling out of her ashen remains. I cried because when I was five a bottle rocket lit by a truculent eight-year old ignited against me and burned a silver-dollar-sized scar onto my right ankle. I believe it to be the worst possible hurt I’ve ever known. At the hospital, my mother, as codeine covered me like a soft blanket of feathers, told me that the scar would heal into a magic button that, when pressed, would make me invisible. My father called her a fool but she ignored him and pressed her nose against mine and said, “I promise.” Still I remembered the burn, and the thought of Elise’s deflated body enduring that premature hell cracked me down the center.
 
We spread her ashes along the banks of the Cape Fear River. My mother would have flown to Lyon, alone, dandling her aunt’s urn in her lap, and emptied the ashes in the Saône, not out of a deep and sustained love but rather as the last act in her martyrdom. My father said no. So my mother and I dressed in our Sunday best and rubber boots and trudged down the muddy riverbanks after a series of summer storms had strafed the coast.
 
The ashes fell like blackened clouds too heavy for the sky to hold, and became fast-floating cinereal clumps headed for the Atlantic. On a sudden breeze a small puff of ash landed near my boot, on a pair of briar leaves. As my mother spoke a few words for the dear departed, I reached down in a quick furtive movement and palmed the ash. I rubbed the grit around in my fist and looked out on a river that shone like a current of broken glass from a sun creeping through the cracks in the clouds.
 
As we left the river, I asked my mother about the sister and the cellar. There was no sister, she said; Elise fibbed when she drank. My father would say the hooch wasn’t to blame; she was just a lying whore. How do you know, I asked my mother.
 
My mother, Elise’s cousin, never mentioned any siblings, but she said Elise was briefly sent to an institution at an early age, but later went to school in Paris.
 
A convent, I asked.
 
No, a psychiatric institution for children, a dreadful place, no doubt, for an imaginative child.
 
This conversation became a part of my story as well, a nice coda for the dinner party, and one that allows me to stare into my wine glass, pause for a moment, and attempt a reason for the story’s dubious authenticity. Why would any family want to discuss such a shameful thing? Who could talk about it, any of it? Or maybe Elise was half-mad and loved an audience? At this I release a long sigh and lean back and stare again at my wine glass, or perhaps coffee now, after dinner. If there’s a woman present I’m interested in, this is the moment I glance at her, make eye contact, and judge whether or not the story has moved her enough to allow me a kiss in the dark driveway, near the mailbox listed by a drunken fender.
 
 
I decided to tell Elise’s story of the château to my student. There was a protest that morning before her lunch shift, one against wars, occupations, financial fraud, austerity. I wagered her blood would be up, the soft face reddened beneath the blonde hair. There’d be no better time to tell her, as the café fell quiet in the late afternoon, of the cellar, the sister, and the boy with beautiful lips. Maybe even the coda on her townhouse sofa. But I found a young man waiting for her, a tall dandy with a mess of red curls and a simpering look of self-satisfaction. She introduced us; I didn’t stand. They excused themselves to the exit and I waited a moment before following. They biked and I kept a safe distance behind. At the townhouse, I lingered on the far sidewalk, covered by the low-hanging canopy of an oak. I could see through the first floor window into the living room, where they didn’t linger. I imagined them showering together and him carrying her, sopping wet, to the disheveled bed. Her flesh goose-bumped. Her blonde hair clinging in clumps around her fragile clavicle. I stood on the sidewalk, peeking through the leaves, seeing all of this before turning back the way I came, along a street lined with tulips as tall as trees.   

Back to Issue 38 Fiction.

Outside Wheeling

by Brandon Getz

His first wife.  Amber was his first wife.  She had brown hair she never brushed and curved-in toes like a dancer’s.  Nights in the cold house, moldy blankets, he would press the bubbled scars on her thighs and shoulders, touch his fingers to the pocks of burns on her hands.  There was no second wife.  Now, this third wife, breathing next to him in her naked sleep, what was her name anyway?  It rhymes with autumn, the way the leaves rustle before winter pushes its pale belly against the back of the Ohio Valley and the cold comes and the snow.  Josephine.  She keeps her hair cropped with sewing shears, no need to brush it, or wash it even, and her hair smells like her, like he remembers her, unwashed in that house outside Wheeling, when the water got shut off and the heat too.
           
The third wife crawls out of bed, ass flat like a pair of pants no one was wearing.  He hears the faucet, then the coffeepot, its bubbling and steaming.  She hums.  He doesn’t recognize the song, but there was never a radio in that house outside Wheeling, and anyway the electric was always past due, and the one time he’d had a car, a boatlike Buick with shark fins, the radio had been stolen and he had to hum to himself as he drove to keep from going crazy.  Amber would sing songs she’d learned in church, He’s got the whole world in His hands and Gimme that old-time religion, when she rode along to the lake or to the A-Plus Mart out on Route 2.  He wanted to say, Wasn’t it the old-time religion that made bad things happen?  What about the bad things that had happened to them both?  And where was He, and if He had the world in his hands, couldn’t He have saved them?  But they hadn’t been saved, and he had never asked those questions.  Amber, she had a beautiful voice, he remembered, he couldn’t ever tell her to stop singing.  And when he found her in that little house outside Wheeling, he wondered which piece of her held all those songs.  Was it just one piece, and could he scrape that piece off the wall and save it, save the best part of her, the part with all that music inside.
           
 
The second wife didn’t even have a name.  She took the Buick to get cigarettes and never came back.  They had been married two days, but when he showed the police the name on the marriage license, they said there wasn’t a woman by that name, and so there wasn’t a second wife, and no one has his Buick somewhere in Ohio or further west.  The third wife had been stuck with a flat tire in the parking lot of the library.  He changed it, and she said things about the books she’d returned.  When the spare was on, she told him to get in, and she offered him a cigarette, and they drove to her place, along the river, with the water running green to the left of them and to the right the black stone wall of the cemetery. 
 
 
 
Amber made coffee with a little bit of cinnamon.  She drank it with whole milk.  Two spoons of sugar.  The third wife—Josephine—drinks it black and likes to tell the waitresses, I’ll just have it black.  She drinks shots, too, when they have money for whiskey and pool and the jukebox at the bar off Route 2.  When Josephine comes back into the bedroom, she’s holding two mugs, steam rising around her breasts.  Nipples like wooden nickels.  Tits he can suck on to forget.  Josephine: why this third wife, and why does she bring him coffee as if she loves him, why is she in this bed.  Amber propped the shotgun against the foot of the bed.  That bed was real cherry wood, carved by her father, and how fucked up was it they had slept in a bed her father built.  Even if he was in prison, even if he’d been convicted and sentenced to twenty years in Northern Correctional, that didn’t mean they should be sleeping in his bed.  After Amber propped the shotgun, someone burned that bed.  He burned it.  After the investigation, he soaked the mattress in gasoline behind that house outside Wheeling and nobody slept in it ever again.
 
           
 
Amber’s father led the meetings in the church basement.  He’s the one who wore the white smock, and he’s the one they all called God, and he’s the one who took the church and the town and its children.  At first, it wasn’t like that.  It was just a message.  Amber’s father had that message, a message from God, and while he was giving that message, in the church basement, a storm came into the town dropping big gray tornadoes.  The Foodland collapsed and trailer parks were uprooted and splayed and cattle were found dead a dozen miles from their pastures.  They listened to Amber’s father then.  God had called them and told them to listen, because what else could a storm like that be but an act of God.  Amber was only a toddler, and Elias was only a toddler, and first Amber’s father took the church and preached for hours each Sunday in the white smock and he baptized the children.  Amber’s father took the church then he took its women, the wives and mothers.  And they felt God in him.  They felt God inside them.  And when he asked for their children, they knew the children would know God, too, and they would be saved.  And Amber was five or six by then, and Elias was five or six, and the other children were seven or nine or thirteen.  It happened in a church outside Wheeling, in a room with construction-paper sheep on the walls, with smiles on their white sheep faces.
           
Amber’s father was the man who was touched by God, and he touched the town with God’s touch, and he was the one who touched them with the love of God.  In that room in the church outside Wheeling with the sheep and the cardboard cutouts of Jesus and the Apostles and the big yellow crosses with all their names on them, one with Amber’s name and one with Elias’ name too, Amber’s father blessed the other men.  The other men were blessed and they had the touch of God, too.  In that room in the church basement, the lights were turned off and only a little slit of sunlight showed the sheep and Jesus and the crosses and the pale bellies of the men.
           
 
The burns were for their sins, because the only language Hell understands is fire.  Amber’s father said this.  His face flashed orange as he lit a cigarette.  He was smiling then.
 
 
 
In this new bed, not the bed built by Amber’s father, which was ash now, ash he had pissed on and spit on and thrown rocks at, until the coals were blue-gray and dead—in this new bed with this new wife, he sees the pink marks on the flesh of his arms and the raised scars shaped like crosses, like Amber’s arms and her back and her shoulders and legs, the way they had been when there was still Amber.  It was the burns that had saved them.  Somebody saw a boy’s hands at the bakery or the cigarette store, and that’s when men came to the church outside Wheeling, different men who didn’t know God or Amber’s father or that God flowed through him.  They didn’t know the church had guns in a locked room in the cellar, and they didn’t know how many children were inside when the shooting started, and they didn’t know how many people were dead when they came in and took the children from the room.  Amber’s father was touched by God and he was saved.  He stood with his arms above his head in his clean white robe until the men from outside pushed him down.  All the men with bellies were on the floor, and the floor was slippery with blood.  Elias almost couldn’t walk, his shoes slipping like that, and he felt Amber’s hand in his hand and they walked together, out of that church, into the white-white sun in the parking lot, where all the men with guns stood by their cars, the red lights going round and round.
           
The room testified against Amber’s father.  The room knew, and the room said, and the room told the other men what had happened there.  The sheep all knew, the room was saying, This is where He touched them, and This is where they felt God, and God was in them here, in me.  Amber’s father smiled because Amber’s father knew what had happened, and Amber’s father knew he was protected by God.  The mothers wept.  The room said Amber’s father was a bad man.  The other men said he was evil, too, and Amber’s father was sent away, and Elias knew he was still there, up at Northern, reading books and praying and smiling, that big fat fuck with that big fat fucking smile.  That God fuck, fucking God, fucking them, grunting fucking prayers they way he would, the way he probably still did, in his cell, thinking of them and the room. Amen, Amen, Amen.
           
Amber went to live with a family in Powhatan.  Elias they sent west to Jerusalem, to a big house where boys slept in rows of bunks and worked days in a chicken barn cutting the beaks and legs off the chicks, throwing the dead ones in a big garbage can for the grinder.  Elias was ten years old by then, eleven when Amber showed up with her hair cropped short like a boy’s, telling him to call her Adam.  She wore long sleeves.  They were thirteen when they shared a bunk.  When everyone else was asleep.  And Elias was the one who knew, Elias was the one who knew everything, everything that had happened and everything that would happen, and Elias was the one who knew her, and no one else would ever know her the way he knew her, in that bunk and after. 
 
 
 
There were pieces of her on the windowsill.  There were pieces of her on their sheets.  There were pieces of her on the curtains.  There were pieces of her on his shoes.  There were pieces of her in the mug he had forgotten on the end table.  There were pieces of her in the plastic flowers.
           
 
 
At fifteen, she couldn’t pass for a boy, and they left the big house in Jerusalem at night. Amber got the key from the man who watched the door, and Elias waited until she got the key, and both of them walked up Route 26, Amber with her thumb out and saying she wanted to be a veterinarian someday, how she would help sick horses and sick dogs and sick chickens to make up for all the chicks she’d cut up and thrown away. 
           
They got a ride as far as Clarington, then another, in the bed of a black pickup, up the river to Wheeling.  The door to Amber’s father’s house was boarded, and someone had painted pervert on the side of the house and someone had painted crosses and someone had painted Andrew Lynch is God and someone had broken all the windows.  That was the first night they slept in Amber’s father’s bed, in that little house outside Wheeling.  They slept with all their clothes on, on his mattress.  They slept without blankets or sheets.  They slept facing each other, her cold hand gripping his. 
           
 
 
Amber hung the curtains and found sheets for the bed.  Amber bought the plastic flowers and the plastic vase at the Goodwill in town.  Amber cooked dinner, and Amber smiled at him, and Amber married him at the courthouse on a Thursday morning, the day she turned eighteen, and Amber even loved him, probably, in that house outside Wheeling, with the words and crosses painted over by now and a little tomato garden in the backyard.
 
           
 
The new bed is her bed, and the house is her house.  Josephine.  She says he can call her Josie, like Josie and the Pussycats, and she purrs when she says it.  Her breath smells like smoke and black coffee.  She touches the crosses on his arm and asks, What are these.  She’s always asking as if he’ll answer.  I love you, she says.  She’s kissing his neck and he’s holding his coffee.  It’s so hot he can feel it through the mug, and if he could drop it, if it fell, if it burned ripples into her thighs and brought pink welts to the surface of her skin, maybe then he could love her.  She hums a song, and he knows this one.  And somewhere someone has the whole world in His hands.  And somewhere someone else is singing.

Back to Issue 38 Fiction.

Nocturne

by Okla Elliott

Her husband was working at the kitchen table. She could smell his coffee as she watched him flip through a case history book. He was studying for the Ohio Bar Exam. His thin arms and fingers moved about like the legs of an insect. His intelligence had always frightened her, made him seem alien, though she also admired him and enjoyed his cutting—and true—remarks about friends and family. Something about the way he saw the world faster and sharper than others had made her fall in love with him. He turned and saw her. She gave him a little wave and blew him a kiss, like she used to during math class in high school, more than a decade earlier, a lifetime ago.

She walked into their bedroom and looked at the bed. The comforter and pillows lay neatly in place. His mother had given him this bed when he went to college, and even though he was set to make a six-figure salary, he still refused to replace it. They had argued about this bed several times in the past month. How strange to argue over a bed. She pulled off her shirt and dropped it on the floor. He hated it when she didn’t put her clothes in the hamper. She kicked off her shoes and unzipped her jeans and left them on the floor as well. She took off her dull cotton bra and panties and stood naked.

She lifted her left breast experimentally and let it drop, then inspected the small wine-colored birthmark on her stomach. She rubbed her pubic hair and thought how some women shave themselves entirely, which seemed sick to her, for a man to like that, as if he wanted a prepubescent girl. Sick.

She liked her body. She had kept in shape as her friends had gotten fat. How can people let themselves get fat? It’s disgusting. Lazy. She felt bad thinking of her friends that way, but that’s how she thought of them. She opened the chest of drawers and pulled out matching midnight-blue bra and panties and put them on. She examined herself again. She looked out the door and down the hallway, to see if he had moved from his place at the table. He hadn’t. Then she found a sleek black skirt and a gray sweater that fit her in a way that accentuated her figure, as the women’s magazines she hated would have phrased it. And black high-heels, to make her taller.

In the bathroom she rinsed her mouth and made herself up. All this time, he sat at his table studying. He could have stopped her. If he had asked what she was doing, she would have lied and said she was trying on an outfit for the departmental party next week; she would have sat down to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which she was teaching that semester in her world literature course. It would have been pleasant to spread out on the couch and read about changes in people, so she lingered, looking at herself in the mirror, hoping her husband would stop her.

She walked down the hallway and said, “I’m going out.”

He looked at her, then at the digital clock on the microwave which read 11:38 p.m.

“I’ll be home in a few hours,” she said.

“Where are you going at this hour?”

“There’s a late party I was invited to.”

“I’d hoped we might watch a movie later,” he said. She loved watching movies, curled up under a blanket with him, but he hated it. Movies were a waste of time to him.

“That’s sweet,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow night.”

“Okay,” he said but didn’t turn back to his book.

She shut the door behind her and quickened her step. Driving to the house of a man she barely knew, she felt exhilarated. She had met him because he was one of the counselors assigned to help student athletes succeed academically, and one of her failing students was on the gymnastics team. They talked briefly about the student’s performance, and though it was unnecessary—against the rules, in fact—they met personally several times to discuss how best to help the student, what kind of tutoring would be best, and so on. When the semester ended, he asked her out for coffee. They discovered they lived in the same suburb, and he said she should come over sometime.

“How about next Friday,” she had said, “around midnight.” He was as surprised as she was at what she had said, but a date was set and smiles were shared.

She pulled into his driveway. The lights were on in nearly every room, and she wondered where he was, what preparations he was making for her. She thought about going back home.

He met her at the door. Over his shoulder she saw sports paraphernalia on the walls. He had played football for the university a few years ago and had taken the counseling job to stay involved with sports.’

“Come in,” he said. “You look beautiful.”

He led her to the kitchen and poured wine. Before she finished her glass, he pulled her to him and kissed her heavily. He ran his hand up her thigh. He pushed her against the counter, and her arm knocked a silver caddy filled with silverware to the floor. The shiny metal scattered everywhere.

“Let’s go to your bed.”

He led her impatiently upstairs. After he put a condom on, he pinned her arms playfully above her head. He was much larger than her husband, and it took a few minutes for her to get used to him inside her. She wanted to tell him to fuck her harder, to give herself over to this fully, which would have made this her fantasy, not his, but she didn’t. When they were done and the condom lay in the trash like the discarded skin of some alien creature, she wondered if she was going to cry.

“I should go,” she said and picked up her dark blue panties.

“When can we see each other again?”

“We’re not going to see each other again,” she said.

She hadn’t told him she was married. He smiled as she told him now.

She rolled down the window on the drive home. She knew she wouldn’t confess to her husband. The winter air burned against her face. She turned on the radio, set to the classical station as usual, and listened and steered the car with care. It was a nocturne by Chopin, but she couldn’t remember whether it was from Opus 9 or 32. Her husband would know. When she got home, she would walk upstairs and shower and lie down and sleep beside him. And in the morning—over their usual breakfast of egg whites and fruit with black tea—she would ask him what music she had heard.

Back to Issue 38 Fiction.

Three Days Two Nights

by Barbara Westwood Diehl

In the deep end of the Satellite Motel pool after dark, after the children are asleep in sand-gritty sleeping bags on the efficiency floor, Frank and Trish hang on opposite walls and kick at the black water full of LED starlight. They talk across the chlorine water about where they’re going to go when their three-days-and-two-nights Ocean City special ends on Sunday, now that there is no home to go home to.  This is Saturday, and Sunday check-out is at noon, and their daughter Dee starts second grade in two weeks in the neighborhood where they have no home now. They do have a couple of credit card statements as proof of residence if the school asks. Statements from April that show a “last payment made.” Minimum payment. Trisha flicks water in Frank’s direction, thinking that proof will be necessary and she will be the one who will have to provide it, considering how Frank is. The pool gate creaks open and shut in the August wind. Without any predictable pattern, the padlock Frank broke with the pipe wrench from the truck clinks against the chain link fence.

Frank ducks his head under the water and stares into the pretend stars, where Trish’s white body bobbles beyond reach. Then, when he has to breathe, he comes up shaking the water out of his hair and tells her, “We don’t have to go yet. We can still charge the three-days-and-two-nights deal on your Visa.” With no home for when the specials end, though, there is this ocean between them. On all sides of them, a jury box of blinking windows.

In the little light they have, Trish’s breasts, half submerged, half in thin black bra straps and night sky, pull him in moon tides across the water, and he kicks off from the pool wall toward her. Always, a little time without the kids, a little pushing of silky little things aside, a lock broken and gate opened, have gotten him home again. Closer to Trish now and seeing her eyes, her moon-blue lips, he says, “We have float time on the cards.” Trish says, “Float? This is our float,” and her thighs and toes rise up before her.

Trish stretches her body out into dark water where the neon “Vacancy” settles like a mandala on her belly, letting her body float away, and envisions everything back as it was when Frank worked at Goodyear Tire and Auto. She breathes, hears the gate swing open, closed, mindless as the mindfulness app she played on her iPad before she sold it. And when she comes back from her app-less mindfulness, feeling all her weight and not floating at all, she tells him, “I tried to buy us another three-days-and-two-nights, but the card was declined.”

The clerk at the motel desk had reminded Trish of the school secretary back at home, how she looked at Frank and asked for proof of residence on Dee’s first day. How she stuck out her hand with that big bright ring. Right in front of Dee’s eyes. And how Frank had punched his hand down on the secretary’s desk so hard the lady’s framed picture fell, cracking the glass on her family and their white picket fence house. Trish looks out at the chain link fence around them, the steel tips, barbed wire. “She wasn’t mean about it or anything.”

Frank slaps one hand on the slippery tile over Trish’s shoulder and encircles her throat with the other. He can feel the small bones give under his fingers and her minnow pulse. A shadow crosses a yellow window. A glass door slides open and up above them someone laughs. Frank drops his hand to her breast and squeezes, kisses her with his teeth.  Trish lets her body rise again, float, and her mind be mindless. She wraps her legs lit by LED stars around Frank’s chest, and he kisses the chlorine wet on the inside of each thigh. After he has made her tremble, he looks at her face, her blue moon lips. The gate with no padlock clinks closed. Frank says to her, “Nobody is mean deep down, right?” His legs straddle hers, feet on either side of her breasts, and then he kicks off against the wall, churning the pool water. Trish rubs at the chlorine in her eyes.

Frank looks at the numbers on the doors surrounding the pool and knows that in each of the rooms there is cash, and there are things that can be sold and there is food that no one would ever notice if it was missing, and there are cards that buy iPads and apps, but most importantly, there is cash, good old cash in wallets and pocketbooks that some ladies don’t want to get wet and sandy. He knows that not everyone at the Satellite Motel will lock their doors when they head to the beach in the morning with their towels and buckets and coolers full of Hawaiian Punch drink boxes and peanut butter sandwiches. So he says to Trish, “You take the kids to the beach tomorrow, and I’ll get us three days and two nights.”

What Trish sees clear as the “Vacancy” on her belly is Frank saying “ma’am, maybe we could” at the clerk’s desk with its plastic lighthouses and ships in bottles and crabs with bobbly eyes, and then Frank punching his hand on her desk and all of it broken. Because maybe the lady really is mean and Frank didn’t know. Because Trish didn’t tell him. Because this is their last three days and two nights, and it is a special. It is supposed to be special, and it is. But it is not a house. Frank must know this deep down. He is not a mean man. He wants to prove their residence.

Keeping her eyes on him across the water, she gropes over the side of the pool until she feels the pipe wrench. She lifts it just enough to not scrape the concrete, then tips it into the water and lets go. Lets it sink. Frank likely won’t return to the pool in daylight and see the silvery weight sunken and wavery on the blue floor.

Across the black water of the deep end of the pool, Frank and Trish stare at where the other should be in the LED stars and neon satellite, then swim together to the shallow end and climb the same ladder that their children had climbed up that afternoon, so they could jump in with eyes closed, noses pinched, in floaties blown up to their fullest, blown to almost bursting by Frank and Trish.

They pad in bare feet across the concrete to their bags on the lounge chair, with their declined cards and cards to activate and cards yet to be declined and black water and grit. Frank feels around for the pipe wrench in the lessening light. Trish takes his wrist and says, “Three days and three nights. Then somewhere else.” They gather their things. The gate will swing open and closed, clink, until September.

Back to Issue 38 Fiction.

Cowboys and Indians

by Donald Dewey

Playing with his plastic cowboys and Indians had relaxed Pfeiffer for more than 50 years. Off its horse, each figure was about two inches high, some with production spots suggesting facial scars, beards, or mustaches, all with eyes that looked squeezed closed. His mother and father had given him a first set of 18 on his eighth birthday, and from there he had used every spare dime for years to buy more. After periodic prunings of those that had lost an arm or a leg, he still had about 200 pieces left in the old cookie tin on the shelf in his closet.

The survivors had stayed with Pfeiffer through a half-dozen apartments, marriage, two sons, and the death of his wife. Neither of his sons had enjoyed playing with them as much as he had. The older, Jason, had been daunted by the ceremoniousness around the gift being handed down, ultimately sticking a couple of them on a bedroom bookshelf for show and burying the rest in a closet footlocker until he had needed the space and had asked Pfeiffer to take them back “for now.” Younger son Robby had shown none of that discomfit or reverence; he had simply not tolerated indoor games that didn’t include a joystick. So at the age of 58, Pfeiffer still had his cowboys and Indians all for himself.

He wasn’t sure how he should feel about it. On the one hand, the cowboys and Indians represented a reassuring continuity. Through all the rival distractions in growing up and starting his law career, through family joys and crises, in spite of one mover who had dropped them and another who had lost them for a couple of months, they hadn’t abandoned him, as he hadn’t abandoned them. They tickled his memory with the hours he had spent on the floor of his childhood bedroom, making shooting sounds as posses had charged after bad guys, bad guys had ambushed the heroes, or the Indians had wiped out the cavalry. Even as a child he had displayed no law-and-order prejudices: Sometimes the good guys had won, other times they had lost, and still other times there had been a heap of plastic tragedy because absolutely everybody had been shot to death.

Not that the years hadn’t exacted their tribute when it came to playing. With his arthritic hip, Pfeiffer was no longer comfortable sprawling out on a floor; no matter how many exotic wrinkles to the terrain the lamp stands, table legs, and lowest bookcase shelves might have provided, he had to stick to the dining room table. To add topographical character, he recruited items from the kitchen, strewing around the bread box, the microwave, and the small wooden house that held the herbs and spices. This still left two vast table expanses for chases.

Matching riders to horses had always been the most arduous chore. The legs of some figures were so splayed the rider could have straddled two mounts, others were so tight they trembled on the verge of breaking when they were wrapped around a saddle. The horses had their problems, too. A handful had manufacturing flaws—extra pieces of plastic hanging from a hoof that made it impossible to stand the animal. This called for careful filing, and Pfeiffer hadn’t always been the most careful of filers: Of the dozen or so horses he had been forced to throw away, half had met their fate because he had rasped the defective leg too much.

Once he had saddled up 20 riders on the table, Pfeiffer sat back in the chair where Robby had always sat for dinner to consider his scenarios. It was not his favorite moment. He felt grotesquely oversized, like some Monty Python foot that came down to crush miniature cartoon creatures. Once he had arrayed his horsemen, he didn’t like being reminded of his own dimension. He would have liked to blend into the action on the table: mount one of the horses himself and go charging off toward the spice tray house. He even knew the horse he would have chosen—the roan that had never lost its glaze. It was the same size as all the other roans, blacks, whites, and palominos, but it had always stood out. Aside from its look, it sat just about any rider he put on it. What production fluke had made that possible? Surely, the roan had come down a conveyor belt from its mold like millions of other horses. No foreman had ordered the lever man to climb to a special level for a single piece. And yet there it was, glistening more regally on the table than all the riders and other horses combined.

Because of where he was sitting, Pfeiffer wondered what plot Robby would have concocted for the figures. Unlike Jason, Robby had never been torn about their function—they were toys; boring toys, but toys. Pfeiffer thought it was that same unadorned outlook that had nudged Robby toward law school. He could picture Robby strolling the Yale campus that very night with a girl friend and saying: “The more you learn, the fewer colors you see. It’s all pretty humdrum, totally dependent on you for supplying the energy. But I seem to be pretty good at it.” Pfeiffer didn’t blame himself for so much grayness in his younger son. He had never pushed either of the boys toward a law career, and Robby in particular had spent most of his teens trying to prove Father Knows Worst. But then, little by little, his rebellions had brought him around to the path three generations of Pfeiffers had taken—the law, the Yankees, baked ham, and bourbon. For all he knew, Robby was also a leg man who didn’t like big breasts. How to explain it? Pfeiffer couldn’t. It was a production process as mysterious as the one that had turned out the roan.

He decided on Sundance as his hero. Pfeiffer had never warmed up to Sundance. His colors—dark blue hat, brown shirt, yellow chaps—were slapdash to the point of a Walt Disney toon, and, the roan aside, he wasn’t all that easy to saddle up. But what Pfeiffer particularly disliked about Sundance was a conspicuous hump, making him look like the Quasimodo of the Range. If there had been the least bit of quality control at the factory, Sundance wouldn’t have even made it to a retail box. Lucky for him, quality control in toy factories was as reliable as a hung jury, so Sundance had survived to fight another day.
And the setting for Sundance’s adventures? Pfeiffer chose the bread box as the main prop. It could serve as a mine, where the Indians were worked as slaves to dig out gold for the bad guys. He put a couple of dozen Indians inside the thing, imagining the rye and cinnamon aromas as sweat and pulverized rock. He stationed a half-dozen rifles atop the lid of the box and a few more mounted guards outside. By moving the spice house closer to Jason’s dinner seat at the table, he had an adjoining headquarters for the chief baddies. For these roles, he picked Link and Lassiter with their broken lassos. They seemed especially appropriate because those were the two Jason had kept on his shelf—evidence to his father that he appreciated his legacy, but also announcing they could not engage his fantasy.

Pfeiffer rode Sundance up to the spice tray. Link and Lassiter were waiting for him distrustfully. Sundance glanced over at the bread box and asked what was going on inside. Link said it was none of his business, to keep traveling. Lassiter wasn’t so benevolent; he pulled Sundance off his horse and began punching him. Link then jumped in, and the three of them went at it. Pfeiffer could still make good movie punching sounds. He had tried teaching them to Jason, but Jason had never gotten the knack, getting little beyond teeth clicking. He had given up the day his wife Catherine had suggested he organize a class for punching sounds at the Learning Annex.

Pfeiffer was sorry he had instituted his rule against drinking liquor while playing; he wouldn’t have minded a Jack Daniels. But drinking would have made it impossible to forget how he towered over his drama, looked down upon it from a human dimension. He concentrated instead on moving some of the mine guards toward the spice house as help for Link and Lassiter against Sundance. Sundance saw them coming, gave a final crack in the mouth to Link, and jumped up on his faithful roan. The arriving guards pegged shots after him as he fled to the other end of the table, and one of the bullets got him in the leg. It was time for an intimate interlude.

By the time Sundance reached the microwave, he was so weak from the loss of blood that he fell off his horse. Annie, the only cowgirl, and her handyman Red Elk rushed out to him and carried him into the oven. It was a wonderful place for Sundance to get his wound treated. Not only did his injury heal, but he had sex with Annie and learned from Red Elk how the Indians had been captured and led off to the mine as slaves by Link and Lassiter. How could he have found a better retreat for his wound?

Catherine had hated it when Pfeiffer had been so glib, had resolved a forest of thorny problems with one sweeping judgment. Her usual retort had been to deny him her eyes. At times she had averted her gaze for so long that when she had finally looked at him again, he had been dismayed she hadn’t given a great start and cried out: “Who the hell are you!” Possibly because she had never done that, he had usually promised not to be glib again—about them, the boys, world affairs, or the latest events on Mars. Whoops! There he went again! But she could take a joke, couldn’t she?

Pfeiffer needed action. Red Elk rounded up the Indians who hadn’t been enslaved and brought them to the microwave, prepared for battle. Some had tomahawks, some lances, some knives. Their bonnets and washboard chests said Sioux or Cheyenne. Sundance kissed Annie, sidestepping her demands to come along for the shooting by telling her to whip up a vat of beans for the famished slaves who would soon be invading the oven. Then he saddled up and led Red Elk and his warriors back across the dining table. There was thunderous music in the air as a lookout from the top of the bread box saw the heroes coming and shouted a warning down to Link and Lassiter. Pfeiffer tingled as he once had on his bedroom floor. Death galore was coming!
Pfeiffer increased the odds against the heroes. First he shut the bread box, so the Indians inside the mine couldn’t break free to make up a second front. Then he mounted Shorty and another dozen baddies as reinforcements for Link and Lassiter. The Indians inside the bread box began screaming because they had no air. He assumed they would have had the same reaction if the rye and cinnamon odors were still the strongest.

With Shorty in the picture, there were too many prominent villains so he took out Link with the first shot from the oncharging good guys. Catherine had never understood why he hadn’t thrown Link into the casket with Jason, anyway. She had given Jason the Yankees windbreaker he had worn down to a frazzle, and, according to her, it had been Pfeiffer’s duty to give him Link and Lassiter. But how could he have done that to the boy? Jason had never really liked Link and Lassiter, had accepted them only because he had felt duty-bound. To impose Link and Lassiter on the boy for eternity would have been cruel. Catherine had kept her eyes away from Pfeiffer for a very long time after that. As far as she had been concerned, he had been interested only in reclaiming the figures for himself. Hearing that accusation from her had been almost as bad as hearing that Jason was dead.

Killing Link cost the good guys dearly. Three Indians went down, and the rest had to scramble for the shelter of the spice house. Sundance got a couple of guards atop the bread box, but they were merely wounded, not dead, and so capable of further mischief. What Sundance had actually done was to lead Red Elk and the others into a trap. Already, some of Shorty’s reinforcements were making their way around the rear of the thyme and rosemary rooms for a sneak attack.

Sundance didn’t panic, but Pfeiffer needed a deus ex machina. He wasn’t ashamed of grasping after one. He had never wanted anything in his life so much as a deus ex machina the night the state trooper named Michael Flagg had knocked on the door to say that Jason and his two of his friends had been in a smashup on their way home from a party. It went against the grain, as he had reminded Officer Michael Flagg that night, that only old Greeks were entitled to a deus ex machina. Hadn’t he fought his entire life on behalf of equal rights for everyone—for young Pfeiffers as much as old Greeks? He hadn’t meant to sound fatuous about it, and he hadn’t held it against Catherine for rising up from some screeching hell to smash him in the face, but fair was fair, wasn’t it? Officer Michael Flagg, though, had been useless. Not only hadn’t he provided a deus ex machine—something as simple as saying he had misidentified the bodies in the car—he hadn’t uttered a single, intelligible reply, had just stood there in his dumb boots playing with the Mountie hat in his hand.
But now was the real deus ex machina test. He needed a dozen Officer Michael Flaggs—or at least his troopers with Mountie hats—to rescue Sundance and the Indians. He saddled them up quickly. They looked impressive streaking across the table toward the battle. The mere sight of them galvanized Sundance, who climbed to the roof of the spice house to trade shots with the outlaws still atop the bread box. For at least the duration of a few volleys, he stopped thinking about running back to Annie for more sex. She had her job whipping up the beans anyway. After eating only gruel for so long, the liberated slaves were sure to fall on her chow like wolves. None of them would have said to Annie what Cindy Robinson had said to Catherine when she had come back to the house for the funeral lunch after burying Jason and had seen the cold cuts on the kitchen table: “Salami! But, Catherine, he was your son!”

Lassiter saw how things were going. He ran back into the spice house and packed as much gold as he could into a couple of saddlebags. He didn’t bother watching the troops charge the mine and clear the roof. He didn’t care that a revived Red Elk and his two remaining braves were waiting for Shorty and his henchmen to stick their heads around from the oregano to get them chopped off. Thwack!

Pfeiffer felt sorry for Shorty. The gunman hadn’t had time to learn that life had a way of turning every loss into a lesson. When Catherine had died, Pfeiffer had learned enough from Cindy Robinson’s oafish outburst to take the mourners to a restaurant rather than back to the house for a homemade spread. By the time the menus had been devoured, nobody had jeered “Salmon steak! But, Pfeiffer, she was your wife!” By any measure at all, the lunch had been a success. He had gone home feeling proud that no thread had been left dangling. Even Robby had turned on the TV in his room as soon as he had returned to watch an ancient Perry Mason.

Lassiter was halfway out of the spice house with his gold when Sundance jumped him. The music swelled as they began bashing one another. No quarter was to be given, not after all the slaughter around them. Lassiter kicked Sundance in the face, Sundance retaliated with a kick in the balls. Red Elk came out from behind the spice house to see if he could lend a hand, but he knew better. Some scores had to be settled personally. Instead, Red Elk ran over to the bread box to help the troops open up the mine entrance. The misery of it! Not only had all the Indian slaves suffocated to death, but Slim, one of Shorty’s henchmen who had avoided Red Elk’s tomahawk, sneaked into the back of the spice house and found the dynamite plunger Lassiter and Link had prepared in case it was necessary to hide evidence of their crimes in the mine. For a moment, Slim didn’t know what to do: There seemed little point in blowing up those already dead.

Pfeiffer went for irony. Outside the door, Lassiter pulled a hidden derringer on Sundance. Sundance grabbed his hand before he could aim it, but Lassiter got off the shot anyway. The bullet went through the door of the spice house into Slim’s brain. Slim, who had been thinking only of his own escape, fell back down on the plunger, setting off the explosives in the mine. Red Elk and all the troopers nearby were blown to pieces.

Sundance beat Lassiter to death, and that took time. Finally, with Lassiter taken care of, Sundance backed off. He looked around him. There were dozens of bodies of all kinds, but none of them moved. Justice had once again commanded an exorbitant price.

Sundance pulled himself up on his faithful roan and, bruised and battered as he was, started the long ride back toward the microwave to tell Annie she could stop stirring her vat of beans, that they would be the only two left to eat them. He didn’t expect her to like that news, not after all the work she had put in.
Pfeiffer felt heavy with the burden Sundance was carrying back to Annie. He was glad he wasn’t in the hunchback’s boots. He wondered if he shouldn’t avoid such an unpleasant confrontation altogether. Maybe he could just send Sundance into the oven with Annie, then get an extension cord from the kitchen drawer and plug in the microwave. Tethered outside, the roan would have still been safe and ready for play another day.

Back to Issue 38 Fiction.

The Swami

by George L. Chieffet

Fred Glower has the bad habit of rubbernecking beautiful women, but tonight he limits himself to one quick glance when his buddy Phil introduces Frankie Serrano-Sanchez. Fred appreciates Frankie’s polite smile and responds with bland friendliness. In Maple Corners informality and friendliness are the preferred style. Indulging in long polite conversations with strangers is admired as tact. So Fred laughs earnestly when Phil announces that Frankie works at the local television station. Fred hesitates to say he teaches fourth grade civics. Then Fred and Frankie smile for no particular reason, and Jeannette, Fred’s long suffering wife, an angular woman who fancies herself an astute observer of the human condition settles onto the couch.

Last Christmas Phil’s wife, Sandy, a two-pack-a-,day smoker became a casualty of cancer, and Jeannette, her close friend, spoke at the funeral lauding Sandy’s dedication to marriage and friendship. Fred didn’t quite agree with Jeannette’s view, but he never offered his opinion to Phil. Privately, Fred believes Sandy was a pushy bitch who meddled with everyone’s life, and remembered that when her three kids hid her smokes, Sandy drove to the Seven/ Eleven in a snow storm and bought a new carton. In private Fred has told Jeannette that Sandy was a crooked gambler who thought she could swindle the house.

It is well known that since his wife’s passing “The Swami” has experienced a run of incredible luck. In the last year Phil’s real estate has tripled in value; his law practice has expanded. Recently he paid cash for an eighty-five-thousand-dollar white Mercedes convertible. He runs three miles every day. He paces himself well; he breaths through his great prow of a nose. The Swami takes long easy strides, and, as he glides around the track, he reminds Fred of a sailboat cutting through the ocean.  And now he ends his daily run sipping imported water beside the Mercedes’s polished fenders. Then of course he met Frankie. Frankie is Phil’s sweetheart. Her body is lean and tan. Her high fashion makeup and gold wrist bangles are calculated to turn heads; her gorgeous black hair in a French twist appears to have taken hours to arrange.

The host, Lou Sardow, his red-faced friend, enjoys the company.  Portly Lou wears his hair long like the hippies of old, but selling plumbing supplies and plastic tubing has made him quite rich. Business is good, and Lou, slapping his belly, appreciates being the king in his one family castle, and Fred, in response, makes an effort to appear affable, grinning as Lou sets out a table of chocolate candies, big cigars and fancy label bourbon.  Lou jokes and pours bourbon into squat crystal glass. He offers an array of Cuban cigars. Anita and Jeanette, ignoring his off-color quips, are quick to unfold the card table and break out two decks of cards.

“Are we playing some cards?” Frankie says sidling up to Phil who sits at the table shuffling the deck.

They play Gin Rummy, and Phil and Frankie win most hands. Phil loves to win and flashes a conceited smile as he shows his cards. When he gloats, he slicks back his shiny unnaturally blond hair and reveals his straight teeth. Then he shrugs off winning like he’s used to it. “You always win with good cards,” he says.

Lou, a fierce competitor hates to lose. He has a cigar clamped in his jaw. He scowls.

“Don’t chew your cigar,” Anita says. “It stains your teeth.”

“Jesus,” Lou says, tossing his hair. “Can’t we just have a good time?”

“No we can’t,” she says. “Not if you’re going to chew that cigar. I‘m the one who has to get up every morning and look at those teeth of yours.”

“Don’t look then,” Lou says getting red in the face.

Phil goes to his car for “the goods” and Lou tags along. “The goods” a special marijuana, called Panama Red, comes in a manila envelope. Fred arranges the livingroom carrying the straight back chairs into the foyer and pushing the couch and the big lounge chair against the wall leaving an open space on the rug.

Phil shows off the envelope stuffed with marijuana, and Lou shows off his pipe. The Panama Red resembles nothing more than long curly strands of reddish tobacco. The pipe resembles a souvenir Indian peace pipe. Phil seats himself cross- legged on the carpet and makes like he’s the Swami.

“The Swami will meet all the chick’s needs.”

“Swami, my friend, I would lay off the chick thing,” Fred says, “Jeanette doesn’t like it.”

“I can speak for myself,” Jeanette is scowling on the couch.  Jeanette is a tall woman with broad shoulders a long face and a supercilious bearing.  Once she had shiny black hair and a compact body.  Now her hair has faded to a dusty gray and her body though still lean has slackened in the strategic places.

“What the hell, are you married to a woman’s libber,” Lou says, forcing a tight little smile. Soon the whole room fills with smoke.

“How about Jeannette?” Fred asks.

“How about Frankie,” Jeannette says in her superior voice as she stretches over the couch cushions like a sleepy cat. ”She’s the guest.”

 

Fred inhales and belches up a smoke cloud. The tiny cloud floats around the room and breaks into fragments.

Frankie behaves like a sport, laughing along with the rest of them, but when Phil brags about her job at the television station, she looks away and her cheeks color. Phil goes on about her fans and claims that Frankie’s television people mistake him, too, for a celebrity. Everyone laughs at this pomposity even Frankie finds his claim ridiculous—but he’s serious. “They make me for Chris Mathews,” he says loudly in his own defense. “The Swami has a Chris Mathews sort of cool.”

The pipe goes around so many times Fred loses count. He sits there refusing another turn.

“You become a Republican?” Phil says.

“No I’m just not a big time user anymore. Quit the drugs long ago. Took a few drags for old time sake, but I can’t say I’m turned on.”

“Shit, man, you’re getting old.”

“Not a user,” Jeanette says in her put-off way. “Who the fuck am I married to? You should see him at home he buries his face in the TV!” She rests her elbow on the couch pillow and inhales on the pipe; then, offering the room an exasperated look, says. “Do what you want. Wish you still possessed a sense of adventure.”

For once Fred Glower doesn’t take the bait.

So Jeannette holds the pipe for Lou and he smokes the dregs.

“The Swami has a sense of cool,” Lou grunts.   With smoke trapped in his lungs Lou unleashes a barrage of harsh coughs.

“We need some more, oh Swami,” Lou says hoarsely. “Who’s got a mitch?”

“What’s a mitch?” Frankie says.

“He means his face and my ass,” Jeanette comments.

“You’re another bitch,” Lou says, rasping. “I need a glass of water.”

“Keep it civil, old man,” Jeannette says.

Without looking at him, Anita hands Lou his drink and he slugs it down.

“I know you’re only joking but show some respect,” Fred says.

“Of course, I was only making a feeble attempt at light-hearted humor.”

“Who’s got a match?”

“That’s the word I’m looking for.”

 

 

After cards and a light meal of small sandwiches, Fred tunes in the twenty-four hour cable news and falls in love with the beautiful news reader.  The news reader has fawn eyes, high cheekbones, and a wavy blonde hairdo. Her blonde curls remind Fred of his college sweetheart, a blonde who dumped him. After being jilted Fred went into a tail spin and flunked out of college. Drafted into the army like every fuck up in America, for thirteen months he carried a field radio on his back. Fortunately, the officers had him man the command post radio. They needed, as they put it, “someone with college”.

The party whirls around, and Fred daydreams—he’s dreaming that he is the news reader’s husband; her career impacts on their alone time; he imagines her in bed without clothes and make up. He invents dialogues; apologizing for hurt feelings, imagining he’s sitting beside her in bed watching the Emmys. And she, in turn, prepares to sacrifice her career for the sake of love and is begging Fred to screw her.

Suddenly, Lou and Anita stand up. “What they Hell!” they scream. On the ceiling a huge spindly mosquito hangs off the light fixture like a wire paper clip come alive spinning circles buzzing the light bulbs throwing a long flickering shadow against the wall. The bulbs seem like rain clouds ready to burst and the mosquito seems frantic. Anita and Lou are saucer-eyed and fascinated. “We’re done,” Lou says. He plunks his fat ass on the couch beside Jeannette. His butt lands smack on the seat cushion with a heavy bounce; the springs creak like arthritic bones, shaking Jeannette’s whole body. “I’ll just sit here,” Lou says loudly. He offers everyone a cigar and holds a big silver chunk of a lighter. As he draws down on the cigar, the mosquito flies off, and Fred, his daydream shattered, watches the lighter’s gas blue flame dance the Hula.

“We’re going to need a new couch,”Anita says.

“That’s okay,” Lou says. “Hubby can afford it. Don’t worry about the furniture folks. We’re having a party.”

He passes the pipe to Jeannette who wrinkles up her nose.

“Over here, “Frankie says. Her dark eyes beckon.

She’s so pretty she can just sit there holding her breath and gather in everyone’s stare.  When she inhales her tits swell up; she reminds Fred of a greedy little slut.

“Don’t watch me,” she says. “I don’t want you to look at me.”

“I wouldn’t watch,” Fred says. But he does.

Fred loves her dreamy expression the way her gold locket on a chain slides into her cleavage.

Fred imagines he is peering through a keyhole into her bedroom.

“You make me anxious when you stare,” she says.

To woozy Fred, her nipples seem like flower buds pressing against the silky dress. Fred’s stare is head on and obvious, and his friend Phil puts a hand on his shoulder.  “The Swami has not forgotten what a horny bastard you can be,” Phil says. He hugs her bare shoulders. Frankie slips deftly from Phil’s embrace to straighten her skirt but when she ducks down to fix her hem she elbows over the standing lamp. The skinny lamp with its big shade shaped like a bell crashes to the floor, and the bulb goes out with a pop.

“Just put it anywhere for now. The whole place is a trash bin,” Anita says.

Fred, sighing deeply, collects the pieces of the broken lamp and sets them on a closet shelf.

The Swami, snickers and staggers down the hall to the bathroom.

“Don’t honey me, bebe,” Frankie teases.

“I didn’t mean nothing,” Fred answers teasing back.

“You like the way I talk, sweetheart?”

“What are you saying?” Jeanette says from the couch.

Fred smiles to seem harmless, and Frankie with a flirtatious smirk puts him off just as her Swami, his hair watered and combed flat, returns.  Unconscious of people watching, he is zipping his fly. “I’m still the one Swami,” he says, after finishing the task. “No one has taken the Swami’s place?”

“No one, bebe,” Frankie says. Tears like little silver threads glide down her cheeks.

.

Later, somebody puts slow music on the CD player.  Fred slouches in one of the upholstered chairs working up the courage to ask Frankie to dance.  When the moment comes, he straightens the pleats in his slacks and fidgets with his collar. He forces himself out of the chair and walks pigeon toed toward her. She is sitting in a sultry way on the sofa arm with her legs crossed so that everyone can see the black seam of her nylons and the long slender shape of her legs. Of course she’ll dance, she says, and although Fred is a lousy dancer, he leads her to the center of the room. Scraping across the carpet he performs a clumsy little step out of time, but she seems to glide along with him perfectly. As she follows his jerky movement, her whole body sways. What excites him most is that she looks trustingly up at his face.

Frankie has on strong perfume; it is the scent of a flower Fred wouldn’t know by name. He imagines sitting in a garden.

“What are you thinking?” she says over his shoulder.

“I was thinking of flowers,” he speaks into her ear.

“Very Latin,” she says with a quiver of her lips. On a wobbly turn her hair brushes Fred’s cheek.

Fred thinks there is something about a woman in black seamed nylons.  He never forgot the B girls in the Saigon dives who wore them with high heels and slit dresses. They had beautiful faces, long legs, and rice-paper ribbons tied to little spit curls, and silky hair down their backs.

They’d cruise the boulevard in open cars soliciting GI’s.

Fred watches Frankie’s slim delicate ankles, and when she takes any little dance step she swings her hips.

“Give it a ride,” he says stumbling into a ballroom spin. He twirls her once and catches hold of her waist.

He would say something more but he’s winded.

Instead he watches her in her black seamed stockings. He watches her move.

 

He thinks Frankie is stunning close up, but under her powder she is innocent as a child, and for some reason this makes him sad. Sure, Fred feels her wet breath on his cheek, and his heart is hammering as if he is running a hard five miles in hot weather. But he knows she’s so young she still takes people at face value. She’s somebody’s sweet daughter somebody’s baby girl.

He takes a breath and lets out a deep sigh.

Then Phil all puffed up like a bullfrog steps in front him. “Cut it out,” he says.

“We’re just dancing,” Fred says. “What’s the big deal?”

“Big deal?” Phil says. He sticks out his formidable chin.

“She’s yours,” Fred says. “I just wanted a dance.”

He loses his balance, stepping over Frankie’s suede pumps.  She stops swaying when Fred mashes her toes. Then she cries like a baby.  Fred makes several efforts to apologize but she ignores him hobbles toward a chair. She collapses in it removes her pump to massage her damaged toes.

“Are you alright?” Phil asks her.

“He crushes my toes.”

“I’m sorry, I lost my step.” Fred explains.

“Don’t jou apologize, bebe, I’m okay.”

She raises her foot onto the cushion and rubs her instep. Fred standing there across the room observes her sturdy little feet, a high curved arch and cherry red toenails. The sexy little pump Fred just stepped on has a nasty scuff across the toe. The skinny heel is broken.  ”What a dumb thing,” she says to nobody in particular.

“What the hell got into you?” Fred says.

“You damn sneak.  If you try that again I’ll bust your face.”

“Don’t get so hot under the collar…If you want to fight we can take it outside.“

“You’re all mouth,” The Swami says.

“That’s enough,” Jeannette says. She stands between the two red-faced men who grit their teeth and glare. She holds them away like a pair of swinging doors. Fred feels her fingernails digging into the fabric of his shirt. He feels the nails cut his skin. “You behave yourselves,” she says. “Fred, you’re acting like a child.”

“What about him?”

“Calm down folks,” Anita says. “Cool it please. I’ve got a lot of breakables in the house.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Fred says.

“We should go a few rounds,” Phil says. “The Swami hits hard.”

“This is giving me the munchies,” Anita says.

“Let’s put the whole thing on the shelf,” Lou says. “Put the whole thing away—how about it boys. Ditch the sweet science. Spareribs, pizza?  What the hell—have a drink or a cigar?”

“People used to say the Swami had a quick right hand. We should box sometime.”

Frankie pulls herself together. “Don’t be macho, bebe. I can’t stand macho. Spoiling the evening for people. Fighting. You know my country everybody dances with everybody, sexy too—he nothing to me, bebe. Come sit.”  She gestures with a flick of her gold bracelet, and Phil slides in next to her and slips his arm around her waist.

“Screw your country and its customs. I don’t want you to dance with other men!”

“If that’s what you want bebe then I want it too.”

“I love you sweetheart. You’re my thing!”

In her bare feet, they get up to dance, and Fred stands in the corner out of their way and turns his gaze to the ceiling, noticing it is discolored by water stains. He realizes the mosquito came through the roof, and he feels giddy realizing the misery Lou must feel.

Later Fred sits back in a lounge chair sipping bourbon. Frankie draws on the pipe with tiny little breaths.  She has a smile no bigger than a button. Phil glowers when Fred glances her way.

“The Swami remembers when life was young,” Phil says.

Perhaps they all pause and remember that time. Everyone is serious for a moment. Fred feels a longing for something intangible. It tugs at his heart so that he feels momentarily weak enough to cry .  The feeling is so strong he can barely tolerate it. It irks him that Phil seems unaffected by the moment. Phil’s yawn stretches down to his shoes. In the lamp light his gold hair looks painted on.

Fred’s woozy and can’t see much past his white hand. The livingroom feels fogged over; wreathes of smoke like weeds climb his eyelids. Last year he ran the car off the road into a field. Mud up to the axles. Now he staggers out the doorway into the dark front yard leaving the party behind.  For a moment he breathes the fresh air and relishes being alone. Then he hears voices and noise and thinks of moonlight streaming into darkened windows where families are going through their routines of eating watching TV or sleeping—his neighbors and their routines. The thought makes him feel suddenly desolate as if trapped among strangers.  The night sky itself with its vast dark spaces and distant stars, seems even more desolate and to shake off the feeling he decides to run through the neighborhood.

He begins his run and feels a surge of energy that becomes exhilaration until he hears his heart thumping in his chest. His sudden confrontation with mortality frightens him and he slows his pace savoring the simple homes and the sedate lawns and the warm lights shining in the large windows. He catches his breath gulping down the cool sweet night air.  Suddenly, he is desperate for normalcy. He peers into the windows attracted by the warm orange light. In one large picture window where the drapes hang open, he sees a burly man hunched over on a long couch staring at a big screen television and on a nearby chair a woman basking in the screen’s orange glow staring blankly out through the window and into the dark. So caught up in her own thoughts, she does not see Fred passing by. She is an ordinary woman with a pretty face and small features but she is thin and worn and her expression is pained and lonely. Her mouth drawn down at the corners is scored with deep lines. The man so intent on the TV screen seems unaware of her presence. Fred glances in and then turns away, relieved to be alone as being alone feels more like who he was meant to be. He often feels trapped by his circumstance but now the world seems more pleasant being in his neighborhood observing the lives that go on about him in their simple routines and their small tragedies and he realizes, that safely inside their houses, not one of his neighbors ever notices a universe spinning above or the shape of the moon slinking through the clouds or Fred fleeing past their driveway.

Back to Issue 38 Fiction.

Olympia

by Richard Burgin

Olympia

By Richard Burgin

Lately, whenever I get up at night (for the usual reasons), I’ve gotten into the habit of writing down a line or two that spontaneously occurs to me as soon as I wake up. When I first write them down, these phrases often seem shockingly revelatory, but in the morning they invariably lose their impact and make only a small kind of private sense.

Opening my notebook, I see that last night’s entry was no exception. More babbling about time and death and infinity. As if that weren’t bad enough, I remember that Elle won’t be coming today to do any cleaning or cooking, and feeling unusually lazy and hungry, even by my standards, I decide to walk to Hooperman’s, a small Jewish delicatessen about a five minute walk from where I live. It’s still warm enough, even though it’s November in St. Louis, to sit at one of the tables outside where I can eat my brunch and temporarily feel more connected to the world.

While I’m sipping my coffee and eating my corned beef on rye, the oddest thing happens. A very expensively dressed women in black high heels  and a purple blouse walks past me into the store. She has exquisitely coiffed hair and expertly applied makeup (not something you see too often in St. Louis) and looks like she was plucked from a Park Avenue dinner party in New York, directly into Hooperman’s. Of course I thought of Olympia, who did live on Park Avenue, whereas I always lived on the Upper West Side among the struggling writers and perpetually arguing intellectuals though I, myself, was a mere commercial photographer who  kept his serious artistic aspirations largely to himself.

How did I meet Olympia? At a party in her honor in Sutton Place, where I had a kind of intermittent friendship with the host, Stephen Ivers, with whom I went to college back when it didn’t matter that his parents were ten times richer than mine because in college everyone believes they’ll eventually become wildly rich and famous. Stephen invited me essentially so I could photograph his event for very little money, which I still very much needed. There would also be many wealthy people from the art world, he assured me. He made it seem foolish or perverse to pass up such an opportunity.

Olympia, herself, was one of the more widely photographed women in the world and was almost as rich as she was famous. She’d also owned a lot of art though how many were gifts, how many paid for, was a subject of debate. She’d already inherited millions from her businessman father when he died, which she more than doubled as a Broadway producer, and then in her middle age (though no one ever thought of age as something that happened to Olympia) she went to Hollywood and produced several hit movies that made her considerably more money. There was a rumor that she was a silent partner with Stephen Spielberg in forming DreamWorks, but that was never completely confirmed.

Olympia was generally regarded as a kind of Renaissance tycoon. Many wondered that with her dark-haired beauty and extreme charisma (that she displayed on a plethora of talk shows) she didn’t act in movies herself. At times, it truly seemed she could do anything. But she also knew her limits. Perhaps her most indisputable gift, actually, and I say this without a hint of sarcasm, was as a creator of dinner parties where her exquisite taste in décor was only matched by her chef’s culinary creations. She was also regarded as an innovator for her unpredictable guest list and daring seating arrangements that often resulted in new deals of consequence being made before the evening ended. There were always famous show business people at her parties, but there would also be distinguished lawyers, scientists and writers—everyone from F. Lee Bailey to Woody Allen to Gloria Vanderbilt to Edward Albee. Olympia was a skilled conversationalist and a world class flatterer with the unfailing sense of just how risqué a joke to tell and, above all, how to act unfailingly interested in what her guests had to say.

Finally, Olympia was supremely gifted at cultivating the media (some of whom always attended her parties) so there was always a good chance that even her smallish dinners would be written about in the social pages of the largest newspapers, which people read then. (Television and the internet have since ushered in a different kind of less gentle gossip.)

Although Olympia had her share of controversies in both her private and public life, she never drank or took drugs, which made people admire her more, and because she was disciplined enough not to complain in public, people invariably sided with her and wanted to go to her parties even more. For many it was the social highlight of their year and, I suppose for many of them, one of the defining experiences of their lives.

I was putting away my camera toward the end of the evening when Olympia, whom I’d barely spoken to before, approached me.

“Marty, I’m so glad you could come. I adore your photographs. I’m just speechless with admiration.”

Having never received a compliment like that from anyone even close to her stature I was rendered pretty speechless myself.

“Marty, I wonder if, when it’s convenient for you, you could take a few more shots of me in my home. The publisher of my new memoir has been hounding me for some ‘personal images.’ You know, to compliment the text.”

“Of course, I’d be honored,” I said, immediately regretting how florid I sounded.

“Marvelous,” she said, flashing her most characteristic smile, the one always associated with a new success. “Then it’s settled. And by the way, I’ll make us a little lunch, if that’s alright.”

Then she gave me her card, and we agreed to meet three days later.

As soon as I was out of the building, I ran three blocks before getting a taxi, just to control my nervous energy. Then, ecstasy at my social coup was replaced by anxiety. I didn’t know what to wear; I didn’t know what to bring (beside my camera). I wouldn’t know what to talk about, either. Later, I sought council from my friends, whose advice widely varied. She had mentioned something about a bite to eat. Should I bring a bottle of wine?

Of course, too, I had read and heard the rumors about her amorous adventures with people who photographed or wrote about her, (sexually she was said to be quite wild) yet I didn’t let myself think too much about what she might want from me, beyond the shoot. It was just not the type of thing that happened to me, not that I was unattractive, just a bit unaggressive.

Finally, the grand day arrived as I entered her home—more like a palace than a townhouse. In the light of day, it was easier to see the intimidating photographs (all with tributes to her) of all the dignitaries and celebrities that lined the hallways. There was Elizabeth Taylor, Tennessee Williams. There was Brando and Arthur Miller. I think Olympia both enjoyed and sympathized with my situation as she poured me an exquisite Grey Goose vodka cocktail with a twist of lemon. The drink helped as did her fairly steady stream of compliments. She said she wanted most of the shots in her bedroom. After a few more minutes of conversation, we went there first.

Play it straight, I said to myself. If anything happens she must make the first move.

But did I want anything to happen? Clearly I’d love to have her as a friend, but beyond that I couldn’t imagine.

Though not overly large and more comfortable looking that one might have imagined—her room was imaginatively decorated as purple, orange, and red somehow co-existed harmoniously. There were none of her photographs on the walls, but I did notice two wooden dolls on her bed, one boy and one girl, each about 10 and dressed as if going to school. I assumed they were hand carved in Switzerland or some other Scandinavian country. They were beautiful dolls but had a strange, almost overly sensitive expression in their eyes, as if they were young actors in an Ingmar Bergman film. I was going to ask her about the dolls, but she looked a bit concerned when I mentioned them, so I never discovered their origin. Later, I noticed that they were always on the bed table when we made love but never when she threw her parties.

“Well, I think we’ve taken enough shots,” she said, looking me straight in the eye.

“Yes,” was all I could manage.

“Would you like to spend any more time with me?” she said, lightly. I noticed she was wearing her purple blouse. It was as if she suddenly came into focus as a beautiful woman, no matter how old she actually was.

“Sure. I’d love to.”

“Would you like to go to the living room or stay here?”

I  hesitated, as I often had when my mother would ask me a tricky question.

“Personally, I’d like to stay here,” she said, “especially if we could lie down.”

A moment later she shut off the lights, and we began kissing. A state of half-darkness was de rigueur for Olympia to make love. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the bed, the two dolls sat together as if conspiring.

When I got home and invariably thought about last night, I felt strangely happy, energized, even proud. But true to my worrying nature (that my father correctly told me I’d inherited from my mother), I began to see negatives and started to worry. There was not only the vast difference of fame and wealth between us but she was considerably older than me as well. The very thing that made our relationship possible (the fact that I was much younger than her, which made her desire me) also made it inconceivable. Her age was something we never mentioned, as if it were something that only happened to other people. But other people did discuss Olympia’s age, though mainly to marvel at how young she looked. She’d obviously had some world-class work done on her face so people naturally wondered who and where and how exactly it had been accomplished, as if it had been a kind of sacred miracle. To a certain kind of rich person, the doctors who could do that were only a step from God themselves.

Like so many things in life, our first days were the best. We talked much more easily—she about various celebrated people, me mostly about my family. I remember enjoying that Olympia (unlike my mother, who was a world-class monologist) listened to me and even remembered the names of people I told her about as well as their roles in my life. Still, the central thing in our relationship was sex, where she was extraordinarily giving and adept in her own way, (especially considering her age) definitely a kind of innovator, at least in my modest experience.

I told very few people about Olympia, instinctively, feeling she wanted it to be private. One friend I did tell actually shook my hand and said “congratulations,” as if I’d just gotten a great review in The New York Times.

In those first few days, our relationship quietly amazed me. I was grateful; I was touched; but I always thought about her age, could never forget it though she looked beautiful and 20-25 years younger than she was. Still, the number repeated itself in my head like a mantra.

“Darling, I love you in bed,” Olympia said one night on the phone, “but this has got to be more than that.”

I knew what she meant, of course, but said nothing.

“We need to start seeing each other more than once a week, sweetheart, don’t you think?”

“Of course,” I said.

A short time later, we started going to expensive restaurants for dinners that she quietly paid for by slipping me the cash for them just before we left for her place. Meanwhile, I continued to be her guest at all her dinner parties and accompanied her to various events ranging from art openings at the Met, to Broadway shows, to parties thrown by some of her endless stream of eminent friends. I was socially inexperienced, certainly by her standards, and once left her alone too long at a wedding reception in the Hamptons for which I was bitterly scolded by Olympia. Being alone for any length of time always seemed to terrify her. There was also the issue of my limited and therefore repetitious wardrobe. I remember that Olympia tried to partially remedy that situation by gifting me with an expensive sports jacket, cashmere sweaters and a black and gold romantically inscribed watch. Again, I was touched.  I was enjoying her on many different levels, but her age continued repeating itself inside my head accompanied by a strange sense of guilt. Neither of us ever talked about it. I sometimes felt like telling certain people at the parties who occasionally gave me skeptical looks that virtually all my past relationships were with age-appropriate women who weren’t multimillionaires either and that I was drawn, like most men, to women who were younger. Moreover, I’d had an essentially good relationship with my mother, though she was admittedly somewhat possessive of me and that I was, when all was said and done, a healthy heterosexual hoping to find a serious partner with whom I could eventually have a child.

Meanwhile, as I was having these thoughts, time was passing, and I was also getting older but without the cash to “halve” my own age as Olympia had. I hated myself for thinking about her age all the time, (How disappointingly bourgeois of me, I thought.) especially since I knew I had strong feelings for her of some kind, yet I couldn’t help it. And so I continued my New York social life with her as her, by now, absurdly undistinguished constant companion. My name began to appear occasionally in the notorious Page Six of the Post. Worse of all, chatting with Norman Mailer or Dianne von Furstenberg excited me in spite of the ultra liberal, almost Marxist way, I was brought up my by idealistic father.

“Are you being faithful to me, darling?” Olympia suddenly asked while we were lying in bed (next to her dolls) watching TV in the half dark.

“Of course,” I said, lying in a fairly convincing way, I thought.

“Well, I know how men are, and you’re such a sexual person that I guess I’d understand.”

“But I just told you I’m being faithful. Are you?” I said in an anxious voice that surprised me.

“Of course, sweetheart, I love being faithful to you. I think monogamy is a beautiful thing.”

I didn’t bring up, of course, the celebrated love triangles she’d been a part of, although those were years in the past.

“If I’d met you 15 years ago you wouldn’t give me the time of day,” I said.

“Of course I would. That’s a ridiculous thing to say and also quiet cruel, darling.”

“Olympia, we both know it’s true.”

“I would definitely give you the time of day and a lot more besides. Want me to show you right now, darling?”

I really didn’t “cheat” on Olympia much, and never with anyone that could lead to anything serious. When I told one woman that I knew Olympia, she seemed more interested in her for the rest of the night than in me, even after we had sex. I think there was a naïve or silly part of me that was fascinated that someone as renowned as Olympia could be cheated on by such an obscure being as me. But it wasn’t just that. The age thing was always there, too.

In bed, she often allowed me to be the dominant one (which excited both of us) as we explored numerous fantasies. When it was time for orgasms, however, ours became a largely oral arrangement. (Intercourse sometimes hurt her and so we eventually abandoned it.) She was, however, superb and open to all kinds of experiments as long as they happened in the half dark (which I quickly realized was her one admitted vulnerability, namely what she considered the slackness of her flesh) and so she used lighting and silk robes wrapped at strategic angles to camouflage it. It made for a little awkwardness but nothing serious. Besides, I was having all kinds of intoxicating taboo sex with a world-famous woman (and fame ultimately trumps age, especially when the older woman looks and often acts so much younger). I sometimes thought that famous people are more alive than the rest of the species because they’re the people the masses focus on so much. It’s odd to watch so many people giving over their time (the only asset they really have) to vampiristically following the lives of the stars, the expensively created and very expensively maintained “beautiful people” as they used to be called.

When we were alone in her apartment (she actually owned two in the building, but the street-level one was strictly for business) we often ate Chinese food or sometimes simple dishes that she cooked. We talked a lot about our pasts, then. She talked of her famous husbands (she’d had four of them) and her regret that she never had a child. I talked about my family, my always-traveling father, my sister, who I now rarely saw, and my mother who I saw too much, I suppose—at least Olympia thought so.

Once when I was drinking Grey Goose and talking about my mother, I started to tear up a little and Olympia got alarmed. Strong expressions of emotion that didn’t take place during sex alarmed her.

“Darling, please stop,” she said, putting her hand on my knee. “You have me now.”

I looked at her long fingers. I was struck by how thin they looked and how old. That was one part you couldn’t get work on to look younger, and so it was like they belonged to a different person, these aged pianist’s fingers that looked 25-years older than the rest of her. Yet they felt oddly comforting on my knee as if they’d always belonged there. Later, she told me how she’d been abused in two of her marriages. It was a heart-breaking story.

“I love you,” I heard myself say.

“I love you, too, darling.”

I was going to say some variation of if you met me 15 years ago, you wouldn’t give me the time of day, but I didn’t. (I knew it was true, anyway, and so just let it be.)

***                        ***  ***

Since I liked to watch sports or political talk shows and she old movies or reality TV shows, (one of which she had co-created or co-produced,) we often watched TV in separate rooms. Once, thinking she was lonely, as I was, I walked into her room. Her TV was on mute and her bed table light was off. I soon realized she was asleep. At last, Olympia alone and unprotected, unless one counted the dolls now positioned on her bed table that seemed to be guarding her. I gave in suddenly to a powerful urge to study her face up close and slowly approached her in her enormous bed. For several seconds I watched her sleeping face, now free of makeup. Her eyes were closed, but her face still looked lovely, though older, of course. I was fascinated, as if I were viewing a sacred exhibit in a museum.

Suddenly the bed table light went on as if her dolls had warned her.

“What are you doing?” she said, folding her hands over her eyes like a bird folding up its wings.

“I just came in to visit you.”

“You were staring at me, weren’t you? Did you take a picture, too? Others have, you know and then sold them.”

“God no. It was nothing like that.”

“Don’t ever do that to me again. Sneaking up on me while I was sleeping.”

“No, of course, I promise I won’t ever do that again.”

“I can’t bear it when people do that to me. That’s why I’ve stopped sleeping next to men. I thought we had an understanding about that.”

“I’m sorry.”

She turned, still covering her face. “I thought I could trust you but obviously not.”

“You can trust me.”

“So, did you get your money’s worth?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was it too terrible what you saw?”

“No, of course not. You looked beautiful.”

“You won’t get nightmares tonight?”

I laughed a little, “you looked beautiful. You really did. You always do.”

Finally she turned to face me, holding out her arms to hug me. “Oh, I can’t bear to be angry at you—you’re far too lovely a boy.”

At 40, it was the first time I’d been called a boy in years, and I kind of liked it.

“You must swear on your mother’s grave to never do that again,” she continued. “Knowing how important she is to you, I’ll know you’ll mean it.”

“I swear…on her grave.” (Although, my mother was still alive.)

“I’m sure from what you’ve told me she wouldn’t like it either.”

It was our worst fight, though not our last one. She sometimes correctly accused me of subtly flirting with a few of her younger female guests at the parties though she once sat in the back seat of a limo kissing and fondling a powerful director she’d once produced a movie with, while I just sat silently next to them trying to look at the street but for the most part failing.

When we finally got home (meaning her home, of course) I said, “You have quite the double standard, don’t you?”

She laughed one of her stage laughs.

“Do you mean in the limo?”

“Yes, I do.”

“That made you jealous?”

“I did feel a little neglected.”

She forced out another fake laugh. “But darling, he’s 81-years-old. You can’t be jealous of him. We kiss just as a kind of joke now, an act of kindness on my part.”

“He’s extremely powerful, famous, and wealthy.”

“But sweetheart, so am I. You’re being ridiculous. Now come into my room. I think I know just the cure for you.”

***                        ***  ***

“Darling, I’ve been thinking about your career and what can we do to get your work known by more people.” She was referencing to the work I secretly considered my “art.”

“There’s no magazine that will publish them and no newspaper, either,” I said, matter-of-fact.

“But sweetheart, you mustn’t think so small. Your photographs are too good for any magazines. They belong in a gallery. In Lee Withkin’s or Castelli.”

“Leo Castelli’s gonna have a show of my neo-realist work? Are you serious?”

“Yes, why wouldn’t he?”

“Because he’s the king maker of the avant-garde. Ever heard of Pop Art? He discovered it or was the first to showcase it.”

I looked at Olympia who appeared to be figuring something out.

“Well, maybe not Leo, though I always thought he rather liked me, but I’ve thought of someone else who’s just as good as Leo, if not better. Someone who owes me a favor.” (Olympia’s term for someone she had sex with.)

“Who’s this?” I asked, not believing her plan, based as it was on long-ago sex, with a socialite would amount to anything in an increasingly cash-needy art world.

“Just leave it to me, darling. I’ll take you there,” she said with quiet conviction. Except during sex she wasn’t one to raise her voice. She didn’t exactly take me there, but she did get me a kind of show. She found a respectable gallery owner uptown who agreed to a show of “Selected Works from the Collection of Olympia.” I was moved and bought her a scarf and an expensive necklace (At least expensive by my standards. I had always been determined to spend as much money on her as she did on me. I wouldn’t take advantage, I vowed to myself.)

The show featured seven of my works and also, as I expected, a much larger number of photographs and paintings of her friends from Annie Leibovitz to Robert Mapplethorpe. She said it was the gallery’s idea to feature so many works about her to give the show “thematic unity.” It was probably true but despite being dwarfed by such celebrated company, I was very grateful though I received only a mildly enthusiastic mention or two in the review, that mostly centered on Olympia’s “fabulous career.” (No one seemed to notice the fact that she had merely bought the art, not created it.)

As she had done with such skill in the past, Olympia had the uncanny ability to appear to be doing you a favor while actually benefiting more from it herself. This was extremely evident at the party she threw for the gallery. Though I was supposed to be the guest of honor, everything soon centered around Olympia. Shortly thereafter, I began to realize that my desire for her was waning. Part of it was her ever more frequent mood swings. As it was near Thanksgiving she blamed the dreaded holidays. The mood swings often occurred right after her parties, as if she were crashing from a drug and sometimes they culminated in quiet crying. Other times, in rages directed at various show biz rivals. I began to see her less and less as a vibrant spirit and more as a prima donna or in today’s parlance as a self-pitying diva. She was asking me less and less about myself, and when I answered a rare question about my life she seemed to be paying only perfunctory attention. Also, she wasn’t only looking older, she was clearly getting older, too. We still had sex, but not as often or as well.

I had been with Olympia over three years now and was getting older myself and began to think virtually every day about how I could extricate myself from her and return to my anonymous life as a low-level professor and moderately accomplished photographer living among my brethren in the Upper West Side. Someone who had a gallery downtown and who knew about me and Olympia offered me a show centered around “The Private World of Olympia.” My prime role, I surmised, would be to solicit art from her innumerable friends, which the gallery owner assumed I knew. Even if I did know many of them, it was an entirely superficial knowledge (I being more of a curiosity to them than anything else) and at any rate, I was now too proud and angry to accept the premise of the show.

Meanwhile, Olympia, who never liked Christmas, despite its accelerated social schedule, was complaining more than usual about “the horror of the holidays.” One night she told me why. Olympia had always wanted a baby (I knew that before I met her) but only one of her husbands was willing. While watching the news on TV, she’d just found out that that ex-husband had suddenly died. She was lying in bed, in her purple silk bathrobe, head up on three satin pillows, holding her favorite dolls up while she continued to stare at the TV, though the news item was no longer on.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, taking her hand.

She released hers after a few seconds. It felt cold like a mummy’s.

“I can’t believe Christian’s gone. He was the love of my life.”

I had heard her say this about at least three of her husbands. I didn’t think she’d seen Christian in at least ten years. He was only a minor actor in the movies—the least successful of her husbands which, it was rumored, was why they’d divorced.

“Christian was right,” she cried out, “why didn’t I see it?”
“Right about what?”

She looked at me as she’d never looked before, and I realized she wasn’t acting.

“We could have had a baby. He wanted one, too.”

I nodded, feeling especially stupid.

“I had so many chances and yet I didn’t do it. Instead I had three abortions,” she said, almost yelling as she held out three of her long, thin, fingers as if each were a chance or a child.

“Now I’m old,” she whispered. But because she whispered it, I wasn’t sure she’d actually said the word “old.”

She got up from the bed, and I followed her out to the living room.

I did my best to comfort her that night while I listened to her memories of Christian mixed in, like one of the masterful salads her chef made, with fantasies of herself as a mother. She described herself walking in central park with her little boy and girl “because,” as she said, “she always wanted one of each.”

“It’s funny,” she said to me later that night, “a mother is all I really wanted to be. And Christian saw that, he saw what was really inside me.”

I looked at her, standing by photographs she must have recently hung of Judy Garland on one side, Switty Lazaar on the other. It was hard to picture her sans her show business life.

“And for that crushing insight, I punished him horribly.”

“The abortions?”

For a moment she looked at a newly placed photograph Richard Avedon had taken of her.

“Of course. I felt such guilt about it, which people felt in those days. In my sillier moments, I used to worry that people thought I was frigid.”

“Frigid? You? Hardly.”

“Yes, but people might have thought so with four husbands and no children.”

“What would being frigid have to do with it?”

“That I wasn’t having sex because I didn’t like it, which is why I didn’t have any children. Don’t you see? I heard people gossip about it at parties.”

“You heard it.”

“Well, my spies did. You must always have spies when you’re well known in New York. Anyway, later as the press got freer…”

“You mean more vulgar.”

She smiled, “yes, more vulgar, they began to write or at least imply that I was infertile, when nothing could be further from the truth, of course. You have to understand, it was a different time, then.”

“No, not so different,” I said, softly, though secretly I agreed with her.

“Abortion was an unspeakable sin—it was regarded as nothing less than murder. And yet I did it for my husbands. They said it would ruin my career if I didn’t but what they really meant was their careers. Christian alone loved me for who I really was or could be, but I destroyed that, too.”

“Why?”

“Because he was too young and handsome. And I was jealous and people told me in one way or another, that he was only after my money. Someone is always after something, aren’t they? Of course I don’t mean you, sweetheart,” she added, in a strangely brittle voice. “But, fool that I was, I believed them because of my own ridiculous fears. Well, maybe not so ridiculous. People have always been after my money. Anyway, I felt I had to cheat on him to leave him. When he found out he cried like a baby and then took an overdose.”

“Did he die?” I asked stupidly.

“No, he was saved! But are we ever really saved? He lived all these years later and now he’s dead anyway. Though he did manage to finally marry and have three children, which is more than I can say.”

I used to think Olympia was like a fortress. Now I started to see gaps in her construction, some of which time itself had created.

We talked on into the night, not even turning on a light. Later I noticed that the dolls were gone, and I actually never saw them again.

…Something became still more profoundly different between us now. It was as if she no longer felt the need to act pleasant around me or to act at all. Was she still mourning Christian or perhaps was deeply regretful that she’d exposed herself to me. Was I, after all, the right kind of person to do that to? And if I were did it mean that in some way she needed me, perhaps in her own way was in love with me, something she feared as much as me. The possibility of that was disturbing, also the possibility that in some way, which would never be good for me, I might love her, too. I closed my eyes and pictured myself always escorting her to parties or museum openings, events at which I’d either be pitied or ignored. The next thing I knew, I was phoning my mother (who Olympia always said I worried about too much) and talked to her for a very long time. It was shortly after that I began pursing teaching jobs, however lowly and humiliating they might be, and would up taking one as a visiting lecturer at a junior college in Missouri.

I was very lonely that first year and didn’t expect to hear from Olympia (who was furious that I left New York) but she started writing and then calling me and eventually surprised me by flying out to visit. It seemed especially odd in a way since she’d only come to my apartment in New York a handful of times. There were reasons for that, however, just as there were reasons why she would only visit me in Missouri once. Despite my hiring a cleaning service in each state before her visits, there were too many amenities (Olympia called them “basics”) missing in each place. I.E.I didn’t have enough chairs—and no comfortable ones—my desk was buried under a chaos of papers, nor did I have much concept of a sofa and my kitchen in Olympia’s words was “like an undeveloped country.”

Still, her visit was far from a disaster, and I was glad for it. We did have one fight, shorter but also more bitter than we used to have. We also had what I considered essentially successful sex though we only did it once and found excuses that seemed relatively convincing why we couldn’t do it more often. I was surprised, at the end, when she asked me to visit her in New York, surprised, too, that I thought I saw her fingers tremble. It was obvious that I’d had to go and I insisted that I pay. Less than a week later she sent me tickets for the following week along with a new watch. This meant I had to buy her at least a bracelet, which nearly broke my bank account.

Nothing terrible happened during my New York visit, either, unless one counted her typical traumas endemic to her social circle. As usual, I stayed in the background at the parties though she seemed to enjoy showing me off in a physical sort of way. She no longer introduced me as a photographer or even as her collaborator (though, it’s true we’d collaborated on very little.)

After I returned to Missouri, she continued her habits of sending me clips from The New York Times with a brief note attached saying, “I thought this would interest you.” Often they were articles centered around the need for young adults to break away from their parents and not only physically but economically and to a degree emotionally, too. Apparently, Olympia thought I was still too close to my mother, though I was now three thousand miles away.

Time passed and I began to feel more at home in my job. (I was destined to be a steady but unspectacular professor.) Olympia and I still called each other once or twice a month. We always said we loved each other on the phone, yet I often felt we were like two actors playing the part of lovers whose affair was already over hundreds of nights ago and was now as absent as her dolls that were still hidden or perhaps lost but, in any case, missing, and which she never talked about again. (Once I dreamed they were in a bed with us and we were all waking up together, but I never told Olympia about the dream).

***                        ***  ***

…The elegant shopper finally leaves Hooperman’s holding a shopping bag, her jacket unbuttoned. I find myself turning to see her purple blouse. I also wanted to see her face, but she was wearing dark sunglasses. Now I felt a sense of frustration, though at my age, frustrations never last too long, except our frustrations at time itself, perhaps. A month ago my mother died, while Olympia, to judge by the social pages she occasionally still sends me without comment, is still going strong. Sometimes, I get the feeling that Olympia will live forever as she herself predicted (albeit half jokingly) several times. I used to think my mother would as well. Come to think of it, I never really pictured myself dying either. Now that my mother has died, my feelings about all this have changed, and I know that Olympia and I will also both die, though in very different ways with very different people near us. She with many famous people around her, of course, me with just my sister, if she’s still alive, and a college or two from my university. (I never married or had a child.)

Still, I marvel that Olympia and I are both alive (which sometimes puts a smile on my face) and that for awhile, at least, we managed to share an adventure that for some reason life decided we should go through together, or as together as people like us could ever be.

Back to Issue 38 Fiction.

Natural History

by David Ackley

Three deer have come out in the open to feed in alfalfa along the pasture woods, across acres of new-mown ground from the boy at the barn window. The cuttings are stubbled and strewn with yellowish chaff. Heat waves rise like spirits under a white mid-day sun. The deer are the color of dead leaves on the green. Barbed wire mostly keeps the cows out of the clover, but can’t hold the deer. It doesn’t matter. If cows get in the hayfields, Grandpa takes after them swinging a pitchfork handle, swearing in English tailed with the old country: Goddamshi Sonuvabitchtu!  But he doesn’t mind the deer. When the hunters come in the fall with their high-powered rifles he runs them off. He never says he likes the deer, but he lets them be. His land, he ain’t required to say if or why.

Woodchucks a different matter.  Grandpa reasonably hates a woodchuck. If a milk cow steps in one of their holes and snaps a shin, that’s it for your milker, a bullet in the ear for a mercy death and dumped into a seven foot pit by the front-loader that had dug it beside where she lay bawling.

The boy liked the fields better with the grass tall and the wind carving long arcs in the golden tips. Deep among the stalks, the woodchucks fattened up until the busy teeth of the mower laid the hay down in lapped bands to be gathered and piled in the barn. Afterwards, the boy, his uncle and Grandpa harvest the chucks nosing glumly through the stubble, picking them off from the barn window with twenty-twos. The rifle is steady in the old man’s hands. Grandpa was in the Russian army in the Great War, she’d told him once. Five of his own lifetimes ago. He imagines the white-haired, overalled farmer a young man in a foreign uniform and pointed helmet, holding a bolt-action rifle, waiting for other men to show their heads. Like the boy and his uncle wait in the old blue Plymouth for the one that ducked into its hole when it saw them bearing down through the cuttings. A few yards from the hole his uncle shuts off the engine and they sit with barrels out the windows.  It must be that a woodchuck always has to have another look. Soon, a brown head grizzled with white pokes up, one brown eye on the thing too hugely there to believe as the black eyeholes of the bores stare back. It sits up tall on its hind legs to take in all of whatever this is, big and bluer than the sky, death’s own taxicab parked on its doorstep. They pull at the same time. Get out and stand over it, his uncle toeing skin loose as a hand-down coat before tipping it with his boot into the dark hole it had dug to live in as lesson or warning. “Killed his self,” the uncle says, turning away, not seeing the boy flinch. Or maybe not caring. Another lesson.

Down there in the dark it would become what he once saw in a low hollow, a thick, twitching white pelt over the small mammal consumed with avid tremor and the seethe of small chewing. Such as Grandpa might have seen on the battlefield, best kept below ground.

 

A year from his last life, life now is the farm, with his Grandpa and young uncle. Herding cows up from the pasture for the sundown milking. Haying. Cleaning gutters. Feeding a scoop of grain to each cow each evening, with their dark, bottomless eyes, lowing and banging their horns against the stall. What do they see when he comes? Him? Or a scoop of grain? All winter long they were pinned by the neck in their stanchions, able only to stand or lie, dropping their great thumping weight on the hard oak floor to rest, standing to shit, piss, be milked and fed. He pulls their long teats like soft fingers, hissing milk into the pail between his knees, ducking the slap of a shit-soaked tail, cautious that the cleft hooves loaded with all their weight miss his feet. “Easy, Boss,” patting the warm hide. The first time they were let out in the spring, they thrashed and bucked, swollen bags flopping, wild and free. Remembering maybe another life when they were the deer.  His, before, feels like it was lived by someone else. Things left from it buzz around, at the edge of his attention, his mind like a loose screen door about to bang open and let them in. Captain Blood, the Crow brave and Deerslayer, his allies, his other selves, close ranks to hold them off.

Grandpa has gone out to the second barn to tend his heifers and bull calf. The only life visible now the distant deer, the blue swallows that nest in the loft and fly in and out through the missing panes above the barn door, looping low over the stubbled fields to pick off bugs, the cattle in their pasture. Not far from the deer, Belle, the lead cow, threads the piebald ribbon of the herd through maple and oak. Their hides flicker lighter or darker in the shade. He marks their course in case they stall and need to be chased up for the evening milking.

Though he has this urge to perform great feats, the results are usually paltry. The truth is he’s no good at most of the things other kids can do, good only at hunting and the games he invents, stories or plays of Captain Blood, high on the yardarm of the big pine tree, coursing over the bounding main to rescue the fair lady Ann from the clutches of doom. Or the lone Crow brave, hidden in a rank, fresh buffalo hide, stalking the herd over the open plain.  At least, in his year on the farm, he’s turned into a pretty good shot with the little Winchester twenty-two pump. He’s killed rabbit, woodchuck, even a pheasant. Doing it well, he wishes he liked it better.  He sometimes wants to take it back, to return the tenant of the small house gone slack in his hands.

Once, his shot missed a red fox, which slipped away in the woods. His uncle ran a trap line and could have sold the pelt to Joe, the Algonquin breed who lived in a shanty ripe with salted hides curing on stretchers along the smoke-blacked walls. But he was glad he’d missed once he came on her furball kits, too young to fend for themselves, tumbling and play biting at the mouth of their den. He’d watched them play for a while, then moved on so as not to drive her off for good. In his mind, he saw her trotting up, slumping in the den to let them suck and fall asleep against her warmth. He has the hunter’s eye but not the heart. He hears his uncle—if he knew: Jesus! Toughen up!

The deer have come deeper into the field, opening space between them and the cool shade of the pasture.

He’d left his young uncle at the kitchen table—only three years beyond him, but older yet in experience and knowing, shirtless, sun darkened, with his wrestler’s shoulders, and fierce blue eyes glaring at nothing, drinking coffee, thinking about girls or fighting or whatever he thinks about. Play some catch? Nope. Want to go up the big pine tree? He grunts, kid stuff. Even though they’d once done it gloriously together, his uncle leaving him behind to scale higher still to the very top and stand on a fragile branch holding the now slender trunk by one hand as it whipped in a gusting wind: He, the real, true Captain Blood, who I will follow to the farthest shore. Not this day, though, midnight tomcatting having left him slumped over his coffee and short with his answers.

The boy has yet to see a deer up close. Not alive out in the open like this, anyway. Once in a museum she took him to, there was a life-size buck hiding in a bush next to an Indian camp where a woman with a baby on her back bent over a fire next to the teepee and the brave working on his bow.  A deer wouldn’t be that close. It was all behind glass, still and unreal, glass-eyed and unseeing. Real deer like birds jitterly flush at nothing. Smells of danger. Sounds you can’t hear. They have to live ready to jump. All year round, the quiet is blasted by gunshots.  Every pickup holds lever actions; pump guns, lovers of venison. Even the dogs are hunters in their spare time:  He has seen a buck in a snowfall ahead of a pack of mongrel farm dogs fade into the whiteness. Chin on arms he watches. Starting them in the woods his breath would catch at the shapes they sketched on the air.

Before long, the day will be mowed into the past, and he will have done nothing to save it from joining all the other days of milking and lazing and dreaming he’s now forgotten. Across the plains, the Crow brave moves only when the buffalo graze and freezes when they lift their heads.  The skill was in stillness, soft movements, blending in. Is this something he’s good at? In school he sits near the back and practices the inner quiet that will make him invisible. Hide him from having to answer with clogged mumbles and hot face.  “Louder, Stevie, so we can all hear.” His voice fades to a choked whisper, his ears buzz.

He has a vaguely forming idea that he’d like to come to the deer unarmed, just to see how close he could get. Would he test himself, their sharp senses, or something between him and them? He doesn’t know yet but anyway goes out of the dusty shade of the barn between twin silos filled with the fermenting silage that smells like bourbon whiskey and into a fierce blast of sunlight, needing to move.

He is brown after standing atop the swaying loads of hay he drew underfoot with his fork fed by the loader in one long gold tongue from rows he’d turned with tractor and hay rake. Now brown after being burnt and peeled and darkened, his skin is armored to the blazing heat. He’d come here sniffling, pale and weak. Tender white rabbit.  The dust under his toughened soles now pleasantly hot and soft, fine from wheels going to and from the fields over these sixty years. Now all tractors, trucks, hay loaders but in the beginning, rakes, harrows and wagons pulled by big farm horses. She’d ticked off their names for him on her thin white fingers: Bud, Clarence. Pausing to breathe.  OneEye.  He slams that door shut.

The curve of the road hides him from the deer along a wooded low spot where the well that fed water to house and barns had been dug over a spring. Dropping into the deep shade down to the well is like entering a cave with blind worms and moles and woodchucks feeling their way along in the dark. Black mud squishes between his toes while he moves aside the wooden lid and dips the tin cup full and drinks. The water is cold as ice melt and tastes of iron.  He pours another cup over his head and rubs it through his hair. The cold pulls the skin of his scalp tight.  Back in the hard light, blue-fringed sunfish swim lazily across his vision. Dust cakes the wet black mud on his feet and then comes off a little with each step, the coarse rubbing pleasant to feel.  In breaks of the foliage he can make out the deer more clearly, a doe and two fawns coming into their growth.  He stops along the bushes that have hid him. The doe lifts her nose higher and gives a little hop. That is me she smells, this person watching her. At this distance they still seem like toys, pieces in his game.  He instructs them to ignore him. They drop their heads to feed.

A shallow gully runs away from them between mown ground and the tangled alfalfa they graze.  It would be the longer way, but if he takes it, the whisper of breeze will carry his scent away from them.  At the far end, when he turns toward them, it will put the pasture woods behind him and they might not pick him out from the backdrop of trees. He’s not sure, but thinks deer are keener to movement than shape. He drops to his bare belly and slides across prickly stubs of cut hay.  On hands and knees crawls along the gully’s sandy bed until he meets a spoked wheel of silk sewn from bank to bank. Sunlight glistens on the yellow spider tensed in the web’s bull’s eye. He could easily sweep this small monster from his path but is sworn not to take life without just cause. He crawls up the bank and around. The fair young girl in the tower smiles. Where the cleft deepens he stands and walks in a stoop, brushing through milkweed whose white-feathered parachutes drift lazily to ground in the still air of the gully.  He steps carefully over a sandhill and a file of red and black ants toting a dead comrade toward a small hole in crumbled ground. In the ant fortress they will fire ant volleys and play taps on a tiny ant bugle and fold the ant flag for the mother of his aphids.

The heat smears across his naked shoulders. Salt stings his eyes.  At the far end, one bank of the gully folded toward the pasture fence and when he reaches it, he sneaks his head up for a peek. It would be funny if they’d run off while he’d been blindly circling.  Circling nothing. But the three graze quietly just where he’d left them.  His heart thumps.  He wiggles under the barbed wire around the prison camp. A tine scores his back. A little blood and stinging. The wound to bear under the very noses of the vicious guards and cold-blooded commandant.  Cool green shade flickers around him like water.  He wants to pause and rest but his quest tugs him on. He makes his way through brush and trees until he can turn toward them with the woods at his back and slides again under the fence into the alfalfa. Rises to his feet slow, slow as a plant growing and begins his stalk.

Everything not in his field of vision fades away, the world narrowed to what belongs to the quest, time linked to his stops and starts, now quick, now labored, now stayed mid-step.  The stealthy Crow brave, alone with his prey. Clover blossoms pluck between his toes.  He shivers at the thought of the black snake he once stepped on, thick and charged under his bare foot. Goddamn!  Didn’t he jump!  Honey smell of clover blossoms and fat bumblebees circling his knees with a low rumble.  They won’t sting.  If they do he can stand it can stand anything now.  While the deer feed he slides forward one foot, then the other, not taking his eyes off them. Blue deep of the sky the high white sun hot on his neck the breeze that comes and goes shivering the leaves along the fence. The deer look up at him. He might be a tree that had grown in the field.  How long had it been there?  If they looked up and it was already there then it had always been there. Nothing to be scared of.  It is there. It doesn’t move. It is a tree. Their heads go back down. They have forgotten the tree.  Each time they look up it will be the same new puzzle. What is it? Does it move?

A black crow beats across the blue calling car car while a little bird dives at it driving it off that had tried to take her eggs. He is caught with one foot up and has to balance on the other while they stare stupidly, their ears stuck out to the sides. He thinks they know something’s there, but it tricks their eyes, like a heat wave, both seen through and botheringly seen. This is a new kind of game for him, where his opponent isn’t made up but real and alive, with the pleasure of the hunt and not the sadness of killing. The pleasure lies light and chill in his stomach, lighter than air, as if he could float up out of himself. From far above, the boy in the middle and the three deer at the end would be four specks, one nearing the others across the green, from three and one into four.

Closer. Their hides the color of dried leaves in the dust, the fawns’ white-spotted, on long spindly legs, knobs of bone showing under tight skin. They graze behind, slanting their ears back. But the mother’s ears turn separately on her skull, pointing here and there as she feeds.  She has the face of a large goat, a neck long enough to reach the grass without bending her forelegs, high shoulders, a knobby ridge that curves down then up to the muscled rear haunches, around which her tail flicks at stinging flies.  Carrying the two babies has swayed her back. The hair has pale thinned patches. Her knees are worn to the cracked, scabby skin. He urges himself closer, avid to know more.

Duke barks on the next farm over. The deer listen to that side. If a hunter with one bullet and you saw a dog running a deer, which would you shoot? The barking stops and their heads drop.  He tries to go quicker and freeze just before she looks up. He seems to be on a track through her mind, one she doesn’t know is there. Her hide shivers and flies whirl out from her side. She rolls her upper lip to crop. This close she is heavy and tired and as earthbound as a cow.  Not as he’d expected with the lightness of their movement. Her hard life chased and running. She raises her head with both ears cupped toward him. I am not here. No one is here.  She drops her head again. She has a long, pointed slab of a tongue like a cow’s that twists into the clover and pulls it between her square yellow teeth. He moves three steps then two quicker now. The ending seems near but he still can’t see it. If he gets close enough to touch, then what?

The doe’s head snaps up. She stretches her face toward him and takes his scent into her. In her plum-dark eyes swim a pair of small shirtless boys, white-haired and tanned. He is twice-born from the transparent air. For a fleet moment he feels what together courses through them invisibly, like the wind that bends the grass. But behind his floating reflections the dark bulbs swim deep back into darkness. She is big and close and when she stretches to smell him she is too big and too close with a flooding life of her own that scares him. His helpless hand moves. Scuts raised white, they loop and touch, loop and touch and are over the fence and gone. He is there with her in the light springing through the trees feeling how she runs.

 

The sound claps and is gone, sudden, dire, final. Knowledge rushes in on the smell of burnt powder. A twelve gauge. Time bumps ahead and recoils at once, thrusts him toward the fence, dragging his resistant self. This is what has been left out: His uncle at the kitchen window will have seen him walking through the fields and gone into the barn to watch for a while more, figuring. Moving through the woods at a dog’s lope, shotgun hanging in his left hand, he will have taken the short side of the pasture along the creek to wait inside the fence where he knows the deer will break.

Under the trees, his kneeling uncle has already turned the doe on her back with hind legs splayed on either side of his hips and drawn a long maroon stripe in the pale belly. She just now looking at the boy from deep in her own hidden life now this thing. This meat. That the life flies out of something so big so quick. His uncle has brought empty feed sacks. The fawns—yes, them too—flown on a sure and treacherous way that ends in the yelps of slobbering hounds. Hand over hand, his uncle hauls out of her wet pink ropes. The filled sacks will be sunk in the creek until nightfall. When milking is done and Grandpa has gone to bed, his uncle will retrieve them and take her hide and meat to the Indian who will buy the lot to sell to whoever he sells to.  Good going, Stevie, don’t tell Pa, his uncle says, grinning up at him over his knife work. The boy sickly knows he has brought this on. The buzzing outside rises to a shrill insistent whine. His forces have fallen, the door will bang open and all let swarm. From now on he can leave nothing out.

Back to Issue 38 Fiction.

All Fiction

Below is a list of fiction published in Per Contra since Issue 37. Older work can be found in the archive.

A Passport to the Old Country

by Cezarija Abartis

For Serena, it was like a radio station drifting in and out over another channel – voices disappeared under the dissonance, and the piano keys turned into hammering. She wanted to hear the song.

Serena rubbed her brow. Her mother came from Yugoslavia, a country that did not exist anymore. The memories should be in the frontal lobe of the cerebrum, the part that evolved most recently. But the memories were evaporating. Outside her window, the bronze oak leaves dropped to the ground; in another week or two, the trees would be bare.

She had used up all her serotonin, she thought, all her adrenaline, during the bout of bronchitis, and now just tiredness was left – not enough energy to pull her out of the sickness. Perhaps she would succumb, perhaps this was the end. Her mother had always told her to be strong and bold.

Where was Calvin? Why wasn’t he here to be sympathetic, at least? She coughed. She clutched her cardigan tight under her throat because she had a chill. She looked out the window, at the crisp leaves on the ground. But he died three years ago. No, no, that was the worst.

The lights turned on next door. There was still daylight, and the Johnsons shone all their lights as if it were a wedding celebration. A penny saved is a penny earned.  At her wedding to Calvin, she walked down the aisle beside her beaming father – he passed away decades ago. Now, out in the hall, her father’s face smiling, and beside him, her sweet mother, and there was Calvin, tall and straight and young, not arthritic and thin-haired as she last saw him. Outside her window, a squirrel hopped in graceful arcs across the leaves as it searched for something, food probably.

What she was trying to remember? Something. She went through her pants pocket and looked at the pieces of paper: a phone number with her name on it, a shopping list with chocolate at the top, a note to buy a birthday present for Calvin – his birthday was Halloween – but no, of course, he was dead.

The spirits were all around her; the memories had leaked out of her brain and into the hall under the lights, the faces of people she loved. Love, love, love was the answer.

“What was the question?” Calvin had wryly asked.

“What are we here for?” she replied. “What can save us?” she replied.

Calvin clapped his hands. “You answer your own question. You should be a teacher.”

She kissed him on the tip of his nose. “I am a teacher.”

He kissed her on the mouth and murmured, “Then you should be a judge – wait, I’m a judge.”

She remembered he was a judge, so maybe she did not have dementia. Her mother smiled and shrugged. “What does it matter what it’s called? We grow old, we grow old, we will never again be bold.”

“Mama, I will be bold.”

“That’s my baby! I’m proud of you.”

The squirrel scurried up the trunk of the oak tree. It had found what it needed.

The music snapped into focus. The voices inside her head and out in the hall sang together. It was a song about Barbara Allen that Calvin used to strum on the guitar. Her mother and father hummed along. Serena conducted with her hands as if it were band practice. How lovely it all sounded.

Back to Issue 38 Fiction.