Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Page 13

  “More? I’ll give you what I got, just stop dinging that bell,” Old Martin says into the water glass. He unclasps his change purse and extracts the rosary he was saving to braid through his fist. What use is a rosary now that the coin he was saving to light a vigil candle has been stolen? On his side of the door, Martin inserts the cross like a key into the keyhole, and works the beads out behind it.

  The Bellboy drops to his knees and cups his hands. If not a miracle, then a rosary worming from a keyhole is, at least, a metaphor. A rosary begins and ends with a cross. Fingertips trace the beads as if treading the Via Dolorosa from one Station of the Cross to the next. Even in fog you can’t be lost once you understand the journey takes you from Station to Station. The Bellboy puts his lips to the keyhole and whispers, “Gracias.” With his ear beside the keyhole listening for a reply he can hear a muffled bong of clappers, a window imploding, and the thud of a body reeling against the walls. The bells of St. Martin de Porres, the looted church across the street, haunted by a priest said to have hanged himself after being accused of molestation, are tolling.

  Kneeling beside the broken water glass, Old Martin, his head pounding apart with each concussion, plugs his ears. On the back stairs the Bellboy has arrived at another Station of the Cross: the Maid, scourged, her throat peeled back like sliced liver. When he covers her with his velvet jacket and braids the rosary into her hair, the severed hand beside her opens to offer him a coin. He would refuse it were it not stamped with his face on one side and a cross on the other. Shivering, his guts cramped, he carries her down the stairs into the furnace room where he sleeps, and slides the spike into his vein, and nods back against the furnace, which clangs through the corroded pipes.

  When Old Martin regains consciousness the fog has settled in his chest. Blood is crusted around his nostrils and ears. His battered cardboard suitcase sits unopened on a chair. An envelope has been slipped under his door, a message from the Desk Clerk: Will he be paying the bill for another night?

  Better answer yes, Martin thinks, I don’t have long, but this might take more time than I figured. He draws the shade like pulling down the night.

  Since the Maid vanished and the Bellboy has stopped answering the bell, the Desk Clerk doesn’t sleep. Maybe they’ve absconded together. On top of everything else the furnace has died and the plumbing is backed up, no doubt thanks to the bag lady in 1414—actually 1313 if the hotel allowed unlucky numbers. She claims disability but skates on her walker like a Roller Derby queen through the alleys at night and, contrary to hotel policy, sneaks in strays. The cat litter she’s been flushing down the toilet for years has turned to concrete and the hotel is constipated. His bowels feel like concrete, too. The Desk Clerk shakes the bottle of Pepto-Bismol as if he has the bag lady by the throat. He chug-a-lugs, then from the corners of his mouth licks what looks like rabid foam. He was told that when he was a child with a stomachache he called the medicine Pepto-Dismal. His lips have calcified into the grin of a clown.

  Too many worries, too much responsibility, and now the Desk Clerk must perform the Maid’s and Bellboy’s duties as well, and do so with the proper air of dignity so as not to seem to be a Desk Clerk demoted to a lesser office. No labor is as exhausting as that which one feels is beneath him. The buzzing bismuth-pink neon sign that hangs in the lobby window flickers its letters across the Desk Clerk’s body: TRANSIENTS WELCOME. Soon the flickery buzz of neon will be the only heat left, he thinks. And that old man who checked in earlier concerns him, as well. He’s not as transient as some the Desk Clerk has seen and could be trouble, like that priest who checked in long ago and who continues to reappear, leaving a slick of Extreme Unction. What does the old man want? Not a woman, not a boy.

  Recalling the old men from his childhood who gimped along towed by gimpy old mutts, the Desk Clerk unlocks the door to the flyblown Lost and Found. The mutt a deadbeat guest left as collateral has been sleeping there. The Desk Clerk presumes that all who find their way to this hotel are lonely, but the old are lonelier still. He regards the menagerie that Lost and Found has become: a parakeet whose gibberish sounds like a forgotten name, the goldfish with piranha teeth that smiles sardonically as it rises to its fish flakes, the turtle with BUDDY crudely carved into its shell, and the hand-trained flies performing their x-rated aerial show—all emblems of loneliness. The Desk Clerk sends the dog up to the old man.

  Were it the old woman he would have sent up a cat—although she probably had one already.

  Were it a dog he would have sent up an old man.

  There’s a logic to the term EQ that a manager in the hospitality industry needs to master. What, for instance, would he send a child?

  The Desk Clerk’s gnawed thumbnail cracks the seal on a fifth of vodka. He pours vodka into the Pepto-Dismal bottle and swishes it around. He’s thinking of the children he never had, of children no one wanted, and of his own fatherless childhood. He has become the stepfather of his childhood self. What would he have sent himself that might have changed his life enough so that he didn’t end up behind this dead-end desk? When he swallows from the Pepto-Dismal bottle, the vodka tastes pink. He exhales and his breath hangs pinkish over the desk. He’s never understood why people say you can’t smell vodka. No one claims you can’t smell Pepto-Dismal. The conventional wisdom is to send children puppies, kittens, bunnies, hamsters, gerbils. But do animated stuffed animals teach a child the way of the world? Knowing what he knows now, the Desk Clerk would send himself what most terrified him—a spider.

  And what would he send a spider?

  The question buzzes in his head like an iridescent neon fury trapped between window and shade. He’s lived a nocturnal life behind this desk for what? To be rewarded with a demotion to Bellboy? And why? Because in working the night shift, I have relinquished my dreams. Because I have welcomed in phantoms the world pretends are real. Because I have ascribed to cause and effect—believed that diligence results in success, that obsequiousness precedes advancement, consoled myself with proverbs such as: We are all guests in a transient hotel. Because of expedience, because of timidity, because of constipation, because of logic—that misnomer for an utter lack of imagination.

  He stands on the desk noosing night in the guise of a phone cord around his windpipe and when he sees the priest blessing him from the doorway of the Lost and Found, the Desk Clerk swings his body off with no excuse other than that he would have sent a spider a trained fly.

  Fuses blow. Drains stop up. Upstairs, Old Martin lights the candle he packed in his suitcase. He suspects it has been night for more than twenty-four hours, but he won’t pull up the shade. No one has come to collect. He zips his empty change purse. Does this mean he is through paying bills? He hears paws scratching at the door, a muzzle snuffling, a whimper. He hears the prolonged vowel of a loyal creature that has caught the scent of death.

  Martin holds his tin cup over the candle, heating rusty tap water. He takes his used tea bag from the plastic baggie. The night is getting cold. He sets his suitcase on fire and huddles beside it. He lights a smoke from his snuff can of butts and coughs up a taste of green pennies. He’s beginning to feel at home.

  Flies

  It was cool in the Lion House, acrid with the urine of tigers. Roars reverberated like the shouts of kids under a viaduct. The air hummed: flies swarming dung and raw meat. Between the guardrail and cages, zappers grilled in tzz tzzz bursts.

  “Is there something sweet on the wires?” I asked my father, who was holding my hand as if we were about to cross a busy street.

  “No, a light we can’t see attracts them.”

  At each cage I watched, trying to glimpse the light that only flies could see, concentrating on that instant when the flies crackled into the blue sparks that jolted through electric coils into charred piles. A stunned few on their backs propelled in circles through frazzled corpses like tiny motorboats out of control.

  “Let’s go,” my father said, giving my hand a tug, and we stepped out squint
ing into the sunlight, back on the walkways crowded with Sunday, on our way to see the giraffe, before I realized I’d missed the cats.

  Aria

  Shhhh … you’re tipsy, you’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.

  Shhhh, yourself. And why shush me and not the nighthawks? You think if their squawking doesn’t wake people, that I’m going to? Are you implying my voice is more strident?

  It’s not a fair comparison. Sleepers unconsciously accept nighthawks as part of the night, like crickets.

  And we’re not like crickets?

  Not to the poor sleepers. I remember as a kid waking in the middle of the night to voices laughing or arguing or sometimes singing out on the street. I’d catch snatches of conversation but never enough to figure out who they were or what they were doing up. And I’d lie there envying them having the world to themselves while everybody else slept, until from some window somebody’d yell, “Hey, shut the fuck up!”

  See, thanks to us, now you know how the people on the street felt with the night all to themselves. And nobody’s even yelled shut the fuck up at us yet.

  They will.

  You’re starting to sound like my mother, except instead of “You’ll wake up the neighborhood,” she’d say, “You’ll wake up the dead.” Maybe because we didn’t live in a neighborhood. We lived in a ’burb. “You have to be careful,” she’d warn me, “women in our family have voices that project.”

  It’s a mother’s job to make daughters self-conscious.

  Actually, she was right, our voices do project. We got them from her. My mother studied voice for years before she got married. She got a scholarship to Oberlin. It’s family lore how, when she was valedictorian for her high school class in Grundy Center, Iowa, and got up to give the speech at graduation, the microphone wouldn’t work. They had graduations outside, on the football field, and where the end zone ended, farmland began. During her graduation, there was a guy plowing with his tractor, and overhead a crop duster was spraying. My mother had worked on her speech for weeks, and hated it, so she took the broken microphone as an act of God, an omen not to give the speech. Instead, she shrugged at the audience, then threw her head back and belted out an aria—in Italian. She told us that when people congratulated her afterwards, they didn’t say it was beautiful, but rather that she could be heard in the next county.

  What did she sing?

  “Vissi d’arte” from Tosca—I lived for art. What else? She was seventeen. When she sings in choir I can always hear her voice hovering above all the others. It used to embarrass me as a kid. She was always a little disappointed I didn’t go to Oberlin and study voice like her.

  I never heard you sing.

  You don’t recall it, but you did.

  I did?

  I sang to you in a dream—actually, a nightmare—God! I’d nearly forgotten. Remember that time in Chicago, looking for a bottle of wine at two in the morning? Everything was closed except a few package liquor stores that only sold cheap booze and finally we found a place way on the North Side.

  Malek’s. On Bryn Mawr. We bought a dusty bottle of champagne.

  Right. And when we drove up we thought the place had just been robbed. There were two squad cars and they had a guy across the hood of one of them.

  A Hispanic kid with rolling eyes.

  Uh-huh. He looked scared, and whatever they had him for didn’t have anything to do with robbing the store. But it reminded you of one time back in college when you were walking toward some L station from a girlfriend’s house and you saw the cops working over a kid and suddenly realized it was your best friend from when you were ten years old, in your old neighborhood.

  Yeah. Andy Cardona. They’d caught him trying to stick up a gas station on Wilson Avenue. It was weird. They had him in cuffs and getting in the car he looked my way and recognized me, too, and grinned.

  Well, about a month after that night when we found the champagne, I had this dream I never told you about: It was night and I was waiting in the car and there was a robbery. I saw two huge guys in ski masks and black leather coats run out carrying guns, and for a second I was terrified they were going to come to the car where I was waiting because I’d seen them, but they changed their minds and kept going, and then I suddenly remembered you’d gone inside to buy us a bottle. I could hear an ambulance wailing and I couldn’t seem to get out of the car. To protect me, you’d locked the doors somehow with the key. Blue dome lights from police cars and red lights from ambulances bled over the plate glass. I kept trying to see out the window, which kept fogging with my breath; I kept hoping, waiting for you to come out. The ambulance attendants ran inside. They wheeled someone out under a sheet. I couldn’t see who. I watched them drive away. And after that the liquor store sign went out. The street was empty and dark. Suddenly, the locks pinged and I could get out of the car. I looked into the window of the dark liquor store just to make sure you weren’t there. I didn’t know where I was. It was your city, not mine. So I just walked along the streets. It began to snow, but I walked all night and came to your old neighborhood. I recognized it from what you’d told me. There were the Mexican murals and gang graffiti on the walls of viaducts, there was the church with twin steeples where you’d gone to school. There were cars lined in front of the church doors. I went inside. The church was lit by candles, all these candles. Everyone was dressed in black. All the people in your family I’d heard about. I recognized them, your mother in a black veil, your father, your aunts and uncles and cousins, the ones who were priests, the ones who were war heroes or crooks or butchers or drunks, the blessed deserters, none of whom knew anything about me. You were dead but I was the ghost. They were having a funeral mass. The coffin surrounded by candles was in the middle of the aisle and I knelt in the back of the church and then I suddenly couldn’t help myself, it was as if the wind was blowing through my body and emerging changed to song. I began to sing this aria I didn’t know I knew. It was so beautiful, I remember that, but I don’t remember the melody or the language I was singing in. Not English. This tremendously sad sweet song came out of me and filled the whole church and I knew you knew it was me singing for you. Everyone turned toward where I knelt in shadow and listened. And when I was finally finished I walked back outside into the snow. There wasn’t anything left for me to do once I knew you’d heard my song.

  Belly Button

  What was it about the belly button that connected it to the Old Country?

  Perhaps Busha’s concern for its cleanliness. Those winter bath nights, windows and mirrors steamed as if we were simmering soup, my hands “wrinkled as prunes,” the slippery water sloshing as I stepped from the tub into her toweling embrace.

  Outside, night billowed like the habits of nuns through vigil lights of snow. Kraków was only blocks away, just past Goldblatt’s darkened sign. Bells tolled from the steeple of St. Casimir’s, over the water towers and smokestacks, over the huddled villages and ghettos of Chicago.

  And at the center of my body, Busha’s rosary-pinched fingers picked at that knotted opening that promised to lead inward, but never did.

  Ice

  They stepped carefully onto the pond as if they were about to walk on water. Its surface was inscribed with a cursive of scars resembling those faintly visible on the daylight moon frosted to a faint blue sky. The farther out they walked, the more flawless the ice became.

  “I think we’ve gone far enough,” she said, gazing down, a mittened hand shading her eyes. Wind, nearly unnoticeable so long as they kept moving, blew her hair. “Ice this clear can’t be safe.”

  “It’s thicker than you’d suppose,” he said.

  “Can you feel the pressure of our weight forcing up water? Each step makes the bottom bubble up. You can see the bubbles frothing against the underside of the ice,” she said. “Let’s go back.”

  “Those aren’t water bubbles,” he told her.

  “Then what are they?”

  “Last summer, during a wedding in the park, a
fter the bride and groom cut the giant palace of a cake, instead of waltzing, they turned their backs on the orchestra and set sail across the pond in a rowboat. They left all their gifts behind except for a Methuselah of champagne that was supposed to be for toasts. It was propped in the stern, poking up like a lopsided chimney on a transatlantic steamer, and the boat listed under its weight, but they’d have made it across the pond if not for a sudden summer storm that blew up and capsized the boat. The bottle, Taittinger, if I remember correctly—I’m never sure how to pronounce it—sank to the bottom. It must have just popped its cork. In our honor.”

  They walked farther out. The pond wind had a skating quality. It slammed against their calves when she stopped again suddenly. “Oh, my God!” she said. “There’s a huge, dark fish rising from the bottom, a giant catfish or a carp, something too big for this pond. Look at it, just beneath us, opening its enormous maw as if to swallow us whole once the ice gives way. I can see its grinning teeth. Please, we must turn back.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s not a monstrous fish. It’s the distortions in the ice that make it appear to be. At that wedding last summer, during the storm, when the rowboat capsized, the distraught, drunken guests wheeled the concert grand with its black tuxedo finish from the pavilion and down to the pond, and launched it to save the bride and groom. It floated out, but sank before it reached them. It’s still submerged, playing Strauss, perhaps. What you thought were teeth is the keyboard.”

  They walked out farther still. The wind they hadn’t noticed on shore felt round, like the pond, resisting their progress even as it pushed them from behind. If not for the pond, there’d have been no awareness of there even being a shore.

  “I see a candle flame following us, rising from below like that line of poetry from Dr. Zhivago you are so fond of. I can’t recall the words exactly, but I see it flickering just below.”