Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Read online

  They never appeared now without first scavenging Uncle Kirby’s storehoused supplies—at least, they called it scavenging. Uncle Kirby called it guerrilla warfare. He kept scrupulous inventories of his stockpiles, and detected, almost immediately, even the slightest invasion. Yet no matter how carefully he protected his supplies, Jay found ways to infiltrate his defenses. Jay avoided poisons, raided traps, short-circuited alarms, picked locks, solved combinations, and carried off increasing amounts of Uncle Kirby’s stuff. Even more than the loss of supplies, Jay’s boldness and cleverness began to obsess Uncle Kirby.

  “Hey, You,” Uncle Kirby told me. “You’re about to witness something you’ll remember the rest a your life—short as that might be, given the way you’re goin’ at it. Kirby Versus the Varmints!”

  It was the season to worry about supplies, to calculate the caches of food and jerry cans of water, the drums of fuel oil surrounded by barbed wire, the cords of scrap wood. Each night the wind honed its edge sharper in the bare branches. Each night came earlier. Lit by the flicker of my kerosene stove, Jay plucked the turkey bow as if it were an ancient single-stringed instrument. He played in accompaniment to the wind and to Trish’s plaintive singing—an old folk song, she said, called “Expectations.” The wind and the wandering melody reminded me of the sound of the ghostly frequencies on my shortwave. The ghostly frequencies were all I could pick up anymore, except for a station from far north on the dial that sounded as if it were broadcasting crows.

  “Listen,” Jay said, amused, “they’re giving the crow financial report: ‘Tuck away a little nest egg.’”

  While we huddled around the stove, listening to the newscast of crows, Uncle Kirby was in his workshop, working late over an endless series of traps, baited cages, zappers. He invented the KBM (Kirby Better Mousetrap), the KRS (Kirby Rodent Surprise), and the KSPG (Kirby Small Pest Guillotine), which worked well enough in testing to cost him the tip of his little finger. Some of these inventions actually worked on rodents, and Uncle Kirby took to displaying his trophies by their tails. He devised trip wires, heat sensors, and surveillance monitors, but when Jay’s raids continued despite Uncle Kirby’s best efforts, the exhilaration of combat turned nasty. We were sitting at the supper table one evening over Kirby Deluxe—leftover meat loaf dipped in batter and deep-fried—and I’d stashed away a couple of bites along with a few canned peas for Jay and Trish when Uncle Kirby suddenly said, “All right, You, what’s with the food in your cuffs?”

  I tried to think of some reason he might believe, and realized we were beyond that, so I just hung my head over my plate.

  “Look, You,” Uncle Kirby said, shaking his bandaged hand in my face, “there’s something mysterious going on here. I don’t know what little game you’re playin’, but I think a preemptive strike’s in order.”

  He left me trussed to a kitchen chair, and that night he handcuffed my ankle to the bunk. It was the night of the first snow. Jay appeared late, kicking the snow from his moleskin boots.

  “Trish asked me to say goodbye for her, Old Boy,” Jay said. “It’s getting a bit barbarous around here, you know.”

  I turned my face to the wall.

  “She said to tell you that she wants to name the baby after you, unless it’s a girl, of course, in which case Old Boy wouldn’t be appropriate.”

  I didn’t laugh. When you’re trying to hold back tears, laughing can suddenly make you cry.

  “This isn’t like us going off on a honeymoon, Old Boy,” Jay said. He was busy picking the lock on the handcuffs with his knitting-needle spear. “We never did get to the Motel d’Amore, but that time we spent here in summer, that was the honeymoon. I never told this to anyone, but maybe someday you’ll understand, if you’re lucky enough to meet someone who’ll make you feel as if your heart is wearing a tuxedo, as if your soul is standing in a chapel in the moonlight and your life is rushing like a limo running red lights, you’ll understand how one day you open your eyes and it’s as if you find yourself standing on top of a wedding cake in the middle of the road, an empty highway, without a clue as to how you got there, but then, that’s all part of coming out of nowhere, isn’t it?”

  When they didn’t return the next night, I knew I’d never see them again, and I picked the lock as I’d seen Jay do with the knitting needle he’d left behind, and cut the cans and shoes off my bike and took off, too. It wasn’t easy. Uncle Kirby had booby-trapped the perimeter. I knew he’d come looking for me, that, for him, finding me would seem like something out of the only story he’d ever read me—“The Most Dangerous Game.” But I knew about my own secret highway—I never told this to anyone—a crumbling strip of asphalt, a shadow of an old two-lane, overgrown, no more of it left than a peeling center stripe through a swamp. I rode that center stripe as if balanced on the edge of a blade. It took me all the way to here.

  Fridge

  At midnight the expedition of the bride and groom arrives at the Fridge and pauses to get its bearings from the pale, arctic twenty-watt sun before proceeding across a border there is no need to map.

  Before them lies the taiga where the wolf vowel of wind penetrates the heart with the aim of a winter draft through an uncaulked bedroom window—a draft that feels its way down corridors of sleep, its Freon breath scented with the rotten moss of unmade salads and wilted scallions.

  And beyond the taiga, a tundra stretches that, from its smell, must be the snow-blinding white of sour milk.

  There’s a sadness locked away here that emerges slowly like the freezer-burned flavors from some glacial past molded into cubes of ice. There’s a cheese never meant to be blue. There are undesired dreams and memories preserved in an isolation in which dream and memory have become indistinguishable from one another, both smoldering like ghosts of cold around a temperature dial forced beyond its lowest subtraction.

  Here are the silent regions of rock-hard meat frozen into obscene postures like the dead around Stalingrad, regions where body heat has vanished beneath a crust of frost, where breath hangs although the breathers are long gone; dangerous regions where, even after the plug has been pulled, love can still be smothered as if it were a child playing hide-and-seek in a junked appliance.

  Midwife

  It was Martin who kidnapped the French doll with her bald skull fractured beneath a wig of spun gold and her chipped blue eyes that clattered up into her brain. He kidnapped her from his cousin, Terra, after Terra had raised the doll’s red velvet frock and pulled down its yellowed muslin undies in order to demonstrate the differences in anatomy between them. She had asked Martin, who was younger than she was, if he wanted to see what girls looked like and when he said okay Terra led him into her bedroom and closed the door behind them.

  “It’s too bright,” she said. “Pull down the shades.”

  Martin pulled down the shades, and now the room smelled of the shades as well as the dozens of bottles of perfume atop Terra’s dresser.

  “It could be a sin. I thought you wanted to be an altar boy someday and wear a lace surplice. Are you sure you want to see?” Terra asked in a whisper.

  “I do,” Martin whispered back.

  Terra threw herself down on her bed and lay seized by a fit of laughter. When she recovered, she brought the French doll down from its place on a bookshelf.

  It wasn’t her favorite doll, Terra said. It was too old-fashioned and there was no wardrobe for it, so it wore the same dingy clothes day after day. The doll’s name was Terri. Terri from Paris. It rhymed if you pronounced Paris like the French. Terri from Paris was special because she’d been the favorite doll of Terra’s mother when she was a girl. And before that Terri had been the favorite of Terra’s grandmother. Terra had never met her grandmother.

  Terri from Paris ran in the family, Terra said. Terra’s father had told her that someday Terra would pass the doll down to her own daughter.

  “That’s why you took her from Mom, isn’t it?” her father had asked. “Because you wanted to pass her on to your
own little girl.”

  “Mom forgot she gave her to me,” Terra had answered.

  Actually, her mother had never given her Terri. While her mother was alive the doll had lived in a hatbox on top of a shelf in her mother’s closet. Terra told Martin that she’d lied to her father, because she wasn’t about to agree to passing a doll on to a little girl of her own since she had no intention of having a little girl of her own.

  Terra had never met her grandmother because, like Terra’s mother, her grandmother had died young, of breast cancer. When Terra’s mother was dying, she’d asked that the doll be buried with her. Terra sneaked Terri from Paris out of the coffin.

  “So you want to see something I discovered?” Terra asked Martin.

  This time Martin said nothing. He didn’t want to be laughed at again.

  Terra showed him anyway. She lifted the doll’s frock and pulled down the yellowed muslin underpants.

  “I don’t know if my mother ever took these underpants down, but maybe it’s why she kept Terri in a hatbox,” Terra said. The space between the doll’s legs had been cracked as if someone had tapped it with a hammer. In the middle of the crack a jagged hole opened on the hollow interior of the doll. The hole was surrounded with the same cotton candy frizz of gold hair as once seemed to grow from the doll’s head before it became unglued and now looked like a wig.

  “I think my uncle Bella did that,” Terra said. “I think he did that when he was a boy. He always tickles me. I hate him.”

  *

  Martin kept the potato even more secret than he did the doll. Wearing the doll’s golden wig, the potato was hidden away behind the tubes in his makeshift dollhouse, an ancient TV set half gutted in the basement. The potato troubled Martin, but Martin couldn’t forget it or leave it alone. At night, while the family slept, he crept down into the basement, turned on the bare bulb above the workbench, and clamped the potato in the vise. Sometimes he put his own finger in the vise and tightened it to see how long he could take the pain. He selected screws and nails of various sizes from the mayonnaise jars in which his father had them organized. Then he screwed and hammered them into the potato. He daubed the wounds they made with Mercurochrome from the tiny clotted bottle that had been stored away on the top shelf of the medicine chest for as long as he could remember. Some of the Mercurochrome ran in streaks down the wrinkled potato skin and dripped like orange drops of blood to the dusty floor.

  Finally, he stripped off its wig and buried the potato in a narrow corridor of sunless dirt between the house and the garage. He could bury it, but he couldn’t stop worrying about it. So he found himself digging it up just at dusk one Sunday after dinner. The screws were already rusting, the nails turning black, festering. Sickly white fingers sprouted from the eyes. He squirted it with lighter fluid and watched it char in a ball of blue flames, then he peed out the fire.

  After that it was no good simply burying it again. He put it in a brown bag that he taped shut with tape from the roll of white adhesive tape that had been stored on the top shelf of the medicine chest for as long as he could remember. Whenever he swung the mirrored door of the medicine chest shut he would watch for his face to appear, trying to catch its expression before his reflection met his eyes. When the mirror swung he could feel his eyes roll like a doll’s, minus the clatter, but he couldn’t catch that eye roll happening to his reflection.

  It was Sunday night. Martin stood before the mirror on the medicine chest. He’d taken his clothes off and was daubing himself with Mercurochrome around his wounds—his nipples, his navel, the tip of his wiener. With the tiny scissors his father used to clip hairs from his nostrils, Martin snipped strips off the roll of adhesive tape and taped them over his Mercurochromed scars. Orange streaks ran from the tape. It reminded him of Christ on the cross and he stretched his arms out pretending the nails were in his palms. Then he taped his mouth. He wanted to imagine what the doll would feel in the time to come when, staked to the workbench, she would give birth to the potato.

  Confession

  Father Boguslaw was the priest I always waited for, the one whose breath through the thin partition of the confessional reminded me of the ventilator behind Vic’s Tap. He huffed and smacked as if in response to my dull litany of sins, and I pictured him slouched in his cubicle, draped in vestments, the way he sat slumped in the back entrance to the sacristy on cold mornings before saying morning mass—hungover, sucking an unlit Pall Mall, exhaling smoke.

  Once, his head thudded against the wooden box.

  “Father,” I whispered, “Father,” but he was out, snoring. I knelt wondering what to do, until he finally groaned and hacked himself awake.

  As usual, I’d saved the deadly sins for last: the lies and copied homework, snitching drinks, ditching school, hitchhiking, which I’d been convinced was an offense against the Fifth Commandment, which prohibited suicide. Before I reached the dirty snapshots of Korean girls, stolen from the dresser of my war-hero uncle, Uncle Al, and still unrepentantly cached behind the oil shed, Father B knocked and said I was forgiven.

  As for Penance: “Go in peace, my son, I’m suffering enough today for both of us.”

  The Kiss

  She lies bluish in a puddle that looks like it has seeped through her skin. The Lifeguard with bleached hair and white zinc cream nearly washed off his nose, wearing a soaked red tank top with a white cross on the front and his name—well, his nickname—Mars, on the back, is giving her the kiss of life. He holds her nose pinched, comes up for air himself, and then fits his mouth over hers. It sounds as if he’s blowing up a rubber raft.

  She just kept swimming when he blew his whistle. He rose in his tower chair and blew repeated blasts as he watched her stroking out past the buoys. By the time he’d raced across the sand to his boat, scattering shorebirds as he went, and was rowing out after her with the gulls screaming and swirling overhead as if he was chumming, she was going under.

  A sunburned guy in cutoffs, a backward baseball cap, and mirror-lensed sunglasses pushes through the crowd repeating, “I’m a doctor, excuse me, I’m a doctor.” The doctor kneels beside her, feeling for a pulse, and the Lifeguard, between breaths, asks him, “Who the fuck are you really?”

  “A med student, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  The Lifeguard leans back toward her lips but at that moment a cough jolts her body, she spits up water and snot, and opens her eyes.

  Now that she is no longer a corpse, the boys in the crowd press in to memorize the shriveled nipple of the breast popped over her hot-pink bikini. An ambulance, its siren dropped to a pitch that resonates more in molars than ears, churns toward them across the sand.

  “Why’d you do it?” the Lifeguard asks softly.

  The med student scowls at him, shakes his head in disapproval, then removes his sunglasses as if it is important to his bedside manner that the girl sees his eyes, and asks, “Feel dizzy? Nauseous? Do you want to throw up?”

  “You’re so pretty … so young … why?” the Lifeguard repeats, nudging the med student aside, although, even as he asks, he knows the question is wrong. But the invisible imprint of the kiss on his lips is shaping his words. There’s a sudden, compelling bond between him and this girl just back from the dead, an intimacy of a kind he’s never felt before, an urgency to keep saving her that is ruining his judgment. He has to resist the desire to take her in his arms, hold her close, and resume kissing her. For the moment whispering is as close as he can get.

  “Why’d you do it?” he whispers, as if to reassure her that her secret will be safe with him.

  “Do what?” the girl asks, and looks at him dazed, lost, her trembling fingers tugging at her tangled, waterlogged hair.

  It’s clear from her confused blue eyes that she’s brought back nothing she can share, no forbidden secrets to confide to the living. She doesn’t remember where she’s just been; her few moments of death are harder for her to recall than a fleeting dream. She doesn’t remember the mouth on hers tha
t brought her back, or his breath searching for her through the darkened corridors of her body, trying dead end after dead end until he found a pathway to her will. She doesn’t remember the kiss. It has remained a part of her total absence from herself. Soon, no one will remember it but the Lifeguard, and he’s right to suspect that it’s the one kiss he’ll recall for the rest of his life. The connection between them is slipping away and the Lifeguard lets it go as if releasing her body back to the water.

  “Any of you her friends?” he asks, looking into the crowd that’s reflected on the med student’s sunglasses.

  She accepts a half-smoked cigarette from a hand in the crowd, and the Lifeguard, still able to feel the terrible press of coldness against his lips, rises from his knees in the sand. He stands watching, no longer necessary, as they bundle her in a faded beach towel, and she leaves without so much as a thank-you, or a wave goodbye.

  Córdoba

  While we were kissing, the leather-bound Obras completas opened to a photo of Federico García Lorca with a mole prominent beside a sideburn of his slicked-back hair, slid from her lap to the jade silk couch, and hit the Chinese carpet with a muffled thud.

  While we were kissing, the winter wind known locally as the Hawk soared off the lake on vast wings of snow.

  While we were kissing, verbs went uncommitted to memory.

  Her tongue rolled r’s against mine, but couldn’t save me from failing Spanish. We were kissing, but her beloved Federico, to whom she’d introduced me on the night we’d first met, was not forgotten. Verde que te quiero verde. Green I want you green. Verde viento, verdes ramas. Green wind, green branches. Hissing radiator heat. Our breaths elemental, beyond translation like the shrill of the Hawk outside her sweated, third-story windows. Córdoba. Lejana y sola, she translated between kisses, Córdoba. Far away and alone. With our heads full of poetry, the drunken, murderous Guardias Civiles were all but knocking at the door.