A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (8 page)

Ruth Wellner gave me the hardest ride with her eyeballs I’d ever had. “Hi, everybody!” I said. “How’s the township?”

Story smiled at me, which is great about her. She always smiles at me at first. Then, of course, she said, “What’s going
on,
Dan?” I thought for a moment that she had read my mind or had seen the two lumps of jade in my pocket, but then she went on: “What have you done to the house?”

“Oh! Yeah.” I hadn’t thought of an answer, especially in front of the county attorney. “It’s a conceptual piece I’m trying.”

“Garlic?”

“This one’s garlic.” I said, wishing I’d grabbed a beer. “It’s been done with apples.” I nodded, believing what I’d said myself. “It’s only a temporary piece,” I explained, waving my hands as a kind of truce. Ruth leaned back and shook her head imperceptibly, a subtle gesture they all learn in law school which means: “I don’t believe a word of it, you lying bastard.” But Story smiled at me again, a new smile this time, the ancient smile of women who know their men.

“You missed your class, you know.”

“Oh, sure,” I said affirmatively. “Sure, sure. That’s wonderful.” And it was wonderful in my crazy head. I could see my students waiting for the keys to unlock their lockers, grumbling and then drifting away. Mary Ann Buxton would have drifted right to the department chairman’s office to offer him most of an earful, but it was wonderful. I smiled. I put my hand over the two charms in my pocket and I realized that I was moving through the most centered and affirmative period of my life. And though I couldn’t see them all clearly, there were still things to do.

NINE

IN THE
morning, I placed the thermometer in Story’s mouth and sang three minutes from the theme song of
High Noon,
making the “Do not forsake me, oh my darling!” really mournful, and then read the little gauge: “Ninety-seven point nine. Or ninety-eight flat, I can’t tell.”

I felt an almost impossible intensity, an anticipation that ran me with chills. All my magic was aligned for tonight, all my preparations.

“You’re in a . . . mood,” Story said cautiously, giving me an odd side glance.

“Good night’s sleep,” I said trying to suddenly appear mature. I stood and the song rose into my throat. “On this our we-e-edding day-ay!” I sang and headed for the bathroom.

In the shower steam rose around me rife with garlic, the very smell of babies hovering in the air. There was nothing wrong with us. Tonight was the night.

Story came into the bathroom just in time to hear the best rhyme in my song:

“He’d made a vow while in state prison,

Vow’d it’d be my life or his’n!”

“Oh, this garlic!” she yelled. “This garlic has got to go!”

“Tomorrow,” I answered. “Just one more day.”

“You know what Ruth thinks?”

“That she could get me off with insanity?”

“That you’re having an affair.”

I poked my head outside the shower curtain and stared at Story. She was naked, brushing her teeth, and the way she bent to the sink burned across my heart. “What?”

Story tapped her brush and looked up. Such a smile. “You’re not having an affair. You’ve got your secrets, but you’re not having an affair.”

Before Story left for the office, I grabbed her lapels and said, “Listen, try this: get the township business out of your head, okay? If you have to, delegate some authority, make a new committee, but get it out of your head. And Story.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Come home alone. No Ruthless Ruth. No complicated preoccupations. Just you. Seven o’clock.”

“Is there something I should know, Dan?”

I showed her my palms and waved one up at the garlic doorway fringe. “You know it all already. I’ll see you at seven.”

She gave me a funny, get-well-soon look, and I thought what it must be like for the mayor to be married to a wizard-master of the dark and light arts, but I also thought:
it’s worth it.
She’ll go and worry about me for thirty-five minutes, until township troubles hit the fan, and it’s worth it.

After Story had left, I ran up to the campus for my ten o’clock life class, arriving just in time to let Tim, our model, in early. An irrepressible townie, he sits for the group bareassed in a buckskin jockstrap on a wooden stool, one knee drawn up to his chest, his heel on the stool seat. As he passed by me to go change clothes, he said: “One more time! Tomorrow I’m in Virginia Beach, and,” he pointed at me and smirked, “art class is history.”

I had forgotten: it was the last day of school. I was surprised and for the first time in weeks, time became real. My students filed in around me, and I had to smile; this was certainly a waking dream, but a good dream.

Mary Ann Buxton was waiting for me as I drifted among the easels. Seated directly behind Tim, she had drawn an incredibly precise version of the stool and had skipped up and drawn his shoulder axis and neck.

“Where were you yesterday?” she said. “The studio class, all nine of us, waited forty-five minutes. Is this what we pay tuition for?”

I wanted to say: Truce; it’s the last day of school. Cease further hostilities. But I did say: “I’m sorry, Mary Ann; I was away.” Before she could start again, I interrupted her with this whisper: “Mary Ann. What’s he going to sit on?” I pointed to the blank space on her paper where his ass should have been. “Don’t be shy,” I said. “This is art.” I couldn’t stop myself; I winked. “Go ahead, really.”

I was in a daze the whole hour. The volleyball at home. I couldn’t see a thing but the ball and the three paintings emerging in my mind. I wandered the studio muttering, “Good, good,” to everybody, even Mary Ann Buxton and her feathered fluffy version of Tim’s posterior. It was a tangible relief when Tim himself stood up, stretched, and said, “Okay. That’s my twenty bucks. Anybody looking now pays overtime.”

Oh, Bigville! You sweet township! What I did the rest of the day was seen through eyes blurred by heat and vision. I shook hands with my fine young painters and headed out, running across campus, gathering a hundred stares in my wake. If any dean had been looking out the window, I would have received a letter.

At home, I retrieved the ten-pound bag of rice and the fifty pounds of birdseed from the basement and spread them in a blinding flurry of thrown handfuls across the backyard, and incidentally my hair, the roof, and the raingutters.

I went to see Mr. Cummings at the Food Center and he had my two chickens, that is, their innards, and he handed me the plastic pail without a look, my eccentricity gone ordinary in his eyes. At home, crackling across the birdseed and rice, I tossed gloopy handfuls of the intestines, et cetera, around the yard. I stripped off my shirt and made circles on my belly with the blood. I bent and tried to read the throws. I’m not sure what they said, but they looked authentic. I went into the basement and drew on the furnace room walls with charcoal briquets: sperm entering the egg, wiggling tails, hash marks of excitement, seven stars, the blistered moon. When I came back upstairs, blinking into the light, I saw Buster and Sadie, Mudd Miller’s two dogs, rolling on their backs in the chicken guts. It dismayed me at first until I remembered that Sadie had already thrown three healthy litters of five puppies each, and I debated whether to go out and writhe around with them for a while.

The doorbell rang, and it turned out to be Mary Ann Buxton, in her traveling clothes, her little Volvo packed to the windows, still running on the driveway. She looked at me in a three-part glance: my charcoaled face, my bloody belly, and then, stepping back slowly, the aboriginal whole. There was nothing I could do.

“Hello,” I said.

“Mr. Baldwin,” she said finally. “Thank you for the help and encouragement in art this year. I’ve learned a lot. It was one of my favorite classes, and in appreciation, I brought you this little present.”

It was a prepared speech or she wouldn’t have gotten through it, and she managed a “Thank you and good-bye,” handing me something and backing down the stairs with a look of frenzied relief on her face. She was glad to have left the car running.

I looked in my hand. It was her painting of the four birches near the Dean’s garden. My eyes burned inexplicably, and I went back into the house and sat on the floor in the hallway for a moment. Mary Ann Buxton had squatted outdoors for three days frowning at this canvas, chewing her lip, and it was a good painting, two steps beyond representational. I looked at it for five minutes, as if I was counting the strokes. Those damn trees. I love those trees.

In my studio, my three paintings rose to me like live things. I buried my heart into the third and final canvas. I didn’t look up again until I heard Mudd Miller on his porch calling the names of his children, the ones he could remember. Oh, it was a bellow full of love! I looked at myself, covered with blood and paint and charcoal, my face a savage smear in the mirror. “Oh, Bigville,” I moaned aloud. “It’s all going to work.”

I showered and began to cool down. I called the office and Ruth Wellner said the meeting would go another hour. I stood in the dining room looking out through a window ringed by garlic at my yard littered with chicken waste, rice, and birdseed, and I had the momentary thought: “You fool, you’ve ruined your own home.” But it was a fleeting doubt and to quash it, I did an errand. I drove the Sportcraft volleyball over to Luther Allen’s and left it with the groundskeeper.

Story did not arrive home until after ten. I had roamed the house for a while, cruising my new paintings with a hot, fond confusion. I liked them even if I didn’t know what they were. Finally I settled in the living room with Mary Ann Buxton’s four birches propped against the mantel where I could see them, and
Life Before Science
on my lap. In the new darkness, the volume put my legs to sleep and I followed soon thereafter. It was a heavy book.

I was dreaming of Dr. Binderwitz scolding me, pointing his unwashed finger in my face, when Story woke me, bumping me softly with her leg. “Hey,” she said. “Did you eat?”

I checked my watch: ten-thirty. “What happened?”

“Want some chicken?” she said. “I brought you some chicken.”

So we ate cold chicken and drank Piels Light on the rocks at the kitchen table like two characters in a good short novel while I woke up and Story gave me the details of the meeting.

As Story told me the tale, she laughed and ate chicken and we drank cold beer, and the moment in the kitchen light reminded me in a primal way of why and how much I loved her.

“I’m painting again,” I said.

“I knew you would.” She reached and took my forearm.

“Wait here,” I told her, and I rose and fetched my two jade friends from the bureau. I put one around her neck and one around my own. Chin down, Story examined her necklace.

“You need to wear it tonight, while we . . .”

“Interact sexually?”

I nodded.

“Well, you are dear, aren’t you,” she said. “Confused, but dear.”

“Can you get the township out of your head long enough to conceive a baby?”

“Come here,” she said. “Come get me.”

WE DIDN’T
make it to the bedroom. She started playing Eva Marie Saint in
On the Waterfront
and sliding down the hall doorframe, her arms around my neck, and by the time we were on our knees, no one was playing anymore, or rather, now we were playing in earnest. Several times we stopped and shifted to gain leg room, and we rolled, twice, three times, I don’t know, but then we were under the piano in a pane of moonlight, and I don’t know, her flesh, her breath, I was on my back and I could see the round moon just like an egg sliding down the blue-black tube of the sky. We were gathering the pieces as she held me, three hundred million coiled swimmers in a garlic sea, and in a rush that grabbed my throat like a fist, they were flying.

The first thing I saw when I took my mouth from Story’s was the grouping of my three fingers over her white shoulder, those three bald men come to greet us, but then as my eyes rinsed once more I saw them again and this is when I saw it all: they weren’t three old men at all, but three babies I had seen somewhere before. My eyes filled. Three babies. I had painted these guys for the last week, each on a canvas of his own.

Story reached her arm around my neck and turned on her side. “Are you going to get us a blanket?” she said. “Or shall we go to bed?”

I got her the quilt. In my study the only light came from the children. Not one: three. I painted until blue dawn and they focused like photographs: three babies. From my window I could see the sun about to burst over Mugacook Mountain; the trees stood out in chromosomal pairs. My heart was swimming. I could see the children, do you see? In her arms. One. Two. Three.

BIGFOOT STOLE MY WIFE

T
HE PROBLEM
is credibility.

The problem, as I’m finding out over the last few weeks, is basic credibility. A lot of people look at me and say, sure Rick, Bigfoot stole your wife. It makes me sad to see it, the look of disbelief in each person’s eye. Trudy’s disappearance makes me sad, too, and I’m sick in my heart about where she may be and how he’s treating her, what they do all day, if she’s getting enough to eat. I believe he’s being good to her—I mean I feel it—and I’m going to keep hoping to see her again, but it is my belief that I probably won’t.

In the two and a half years we were married, I often had the feeling that I would come home from the track and something would be funny. Oh, she’d say things:
One of these days I’m not going to be here when you get home,
things like that, things like everybody says. How stupid of me not to see them as omens. When I’d get out of bed in the early afternoon, I’d stand right here at this sink and I could see her working in her garden in her cut-off Levi’s and bikini top, weeding, planting, watering. I mean it was obvious. I was too busy thinking about the races, weighing the odds, checking the jockey roster to see what I now know: he was watching her too. He’d probably been watching her all summer.

So, in a way it was my fault. But what could I have done? Bigfoot steals your wife. I mean: even if you’re home, it’s going to be a mess. He’s big and not well trained.

When I came home it was about eleven-thirty. The lights were on, which really wasn’t anything new, but in the ordinary mess of the place, there was a little difference, signs of a struggle. There was a spilled Dr. Pepper on the counter and the fridge was open. But there was something else, something that made me sick. The smell. The smell of Bigfoot. It was hideous. It was . . . the guy is not clean.

Half of Trudy’s clothes are gone, not all of them, and there is no note. Well, I know what it is. It’s just about midnight there in the kitchen which smells like some part of hell. I close the fridge door. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever done. There’s a picture of Trudy and me leaning against her Toyota taped to the fridge door. It was taken last summer. There’s Trudy in her bikini top, her belly brown as a bean. She looks like a kid. She was a kid I guess, twenty-six. The two times she went to the track with me everybody looked at me like how’d I rate her. But she didn’t really care for the races. She cared about her garden and Chinese cooking and Buster, her collie, who I guess Bigfoot stole too. Or ate. Buster isn’t in the picture, he was nagging my nephew Chuck who took the photo. Anyway I close the fridge door and it’s like part of my life closed. Bigfoot steals your wife and you’re in for some changes.

You come home from the track having missed the Daily Double by a neck, and when you enter the home you are paying for and in which you and your wife and your wife’s collie live, and your wife and her collie are gone as is some of her clothing, there is nothing to believe. Bigfoot stole her. It’s a fact. What should I do, ignore it? Chuck came down and said something like well if Bigfoot stole her why’d they take the Celica? Christ, what a cynic! Have you ever read anything about Bigfoot not being able to drive? He’d be cramped in there, but I’m sure he could manage.

I don’t really care if people believe me or not. Would that change anything? Would that bring Trudy back here? Pull the weeds in her garden?

As I think about it, no one believes anything anymore. Give me one example of someone
believing
one thing. I dare you. After that we get into this credibility thing. No one believes me. I myself can’t believe all the suspicion and cynicism there is in today’s world. Even at the races, some character next to me will poke over at my tip sheet and ask me if I believe that stuff. If I believe? What is there to believe? The horse’s name? What he did the last time out? And I look back at this guy, too cheap to go two bucks on the program, and I say: it’s history. It is historical fact here. Believe. Huh. Here’s a fact: I believe everything.

Credibility.

When I was thirteen years old, my mother’s trailer was washed away in the flooding waters of the Harley River and swept thirty-one miles, ending right side up and nearly dead level just outside Mercy, in fact in the old weed-eaten parking lot for the abandoned potash plant. I know this to be true because I was inside the trailer the whole time with my pal, Nuggy Reinecker, who found the experience more life-changing than I did.

Now who’s going to believe this story? I mean, besides me, because I was there. People are going to say, come on, thirty-one miles? Don’t you mean thirty-one feet?

We had gone in out of the rain after school to check out a magazine that belonged to my mother’s boyfriend. It was a copy of
Dude,
and there was a fold-out page I will never forget of a girl lying on the beach on her back. It was a color photograph. The girl was a little pale, I mean, this was probably her first day out in the sun, and she had no clothing on. So it was good, but what made it great was that they had made her a little bathing suit out of sand. Somebody had spilled a little sand just right, here and there, and the sand was this incredible gold color, and it made her look so absolutely naked it wanted to put your eyes out.

Nuggy and I knew there was flood danger in Griggs; we’d had a flood every year almost and it had been raining for five days on and off, but when the trailer bucked the first time, we thought it was my mother come home to catch us in the dirty book. Nuggy shoved the magazine under the bed and I ran out to check the door. It only took me a second and I hollered back
Hey no sweat, no one’s here,
but by the time I returned to see what other poses they’d had this beautiful woman commit, Nuggy already had his pants to his ankles and was involved in what we knew was a sin.

If it hadn’t been the timing of the first wave with this act of his, Nuggy might have gone on to live what the rest of us call a normal life. But the Harley had crested and the head wave, which they estimated to be three feet minimum, unmoored the trailer with a push that knocked me over the sofa, and threw Nuggy, already entangled in his trousers, clear across the bedroom.

I watched the village of Griggs as we sailed through. Some of the village, the Exxon Station, part of it at least, and the carwash, which folded up right away, tried to come along with us, and I saw the front of Painters’ Mercantile, the old porch and signboard, on and off all day.

You can believe this: it was not a smooth ride. We’d rip along for ten seconds, dropping and growling over rocks, and rumbling over tree stumps, and then wham! the front end of the trailer would lodge against a rock or something that could stop it, and whoa! we’d wheel around sharp as a carnival ride, worse really, because the furniture would be thrown against the far side and us with it, sometimes we’d end up in a chair and sometimes the chair would sit on us. My mother had about four thousand knickknacks in five big box shelves, and they gave us trouble for the first two or three miles, flying by like artillery, left, right, some small glass snail hits you in the face, later in the back, but that stuff all finally settled in the foot and then two feet of water which we took on.

We only slowed down once and it was the worst. In the railroad flats I thought we had stopped and I let go of the door I was hugging and tried to stand up and then swish, another rush sent us right along. We rammed along all day it seemed, but when we finally washed up in Mercy and the sheriff’s cousin pulled open the door and got swept back to his car by water and quite a few of those knickknacks, just over an hour had passed. We had averaged, they figured later, about thirty-two miles an hour, reaching speeds of up to fifty at Lime Falls and the Willows. I was okay and walked out bruised and well washed, but when the sheriff’s cousin pulled Nuggy out, he looked genuinely hurt.

“For godsakes,” I remember the sheriff’s cousin saying, “The damn flood knocked this boy’s pants off!” But Nuggy wasn’t talking. In fact, he never hardly talked to me again in the two years he stayed at the Regional School. I heard later, and I believe it, that he joined the monastery over in Malcolm County.

My mother, because she didn’t have the funds to haul our rig back to Griggs, worried for a while, but then the mayor arranged to let us stay out where we were. So after my long ride in a trailer down the flooded Harley River with my friend Nuggy Reinecker, I grew up in a parking lot outside of Mercy, and to tell you the truth, it wasn’t too bad, even though our trailer never did smell straight again.

Now you can believe all that. People are always saying: don’t believe everything you read, or everything you hear. And I’m here to tell you. Believe it. Everything. Everything you read. Everything you hear. Believe your eyes. Your ears. Believe the small hairs on the back of your neck. Believe all of history, and all of the versions of history, and all the predictions for the future. Believe every weather forecast. Believe in God, the afterlife, unicorns, showers on Tuesday. Everything has happened. Everything is possible.

I come home from the track to find the cupboard bare. Trudy is not home. The place smells funny: hairy. It’s a fact and I know it as a fact: Bigfoot has been in my house.

Bigfoot stole
my
wife.

She’s gone.

Believe it.

I gotta believe it.