B000FC0U8A EBOK (14 page)

The snow fell outside, onto minivans and wagons in the school lot, and the air had taken on the smell of slush and impatience. A baby began to howl. The rubber-capped legs of the fold-up chairs creaked on the hardwood. Snow boots squeaked on the three-point line.

We studied our handbills, the drastic fonts, letters bleeding and spilling into one another, claiming impossible and remarkable things: See the Metal Eater who eats scrapped tin, an entire outboard motor, never the same act twice. It was difficult to believe that the little man at the table was going to do anything. Duck came in with the produce manager and found seats near the back, their big thighs sagging over the edges of their chairs.

Then the sequined back curtain floated aside and out came a woman who could only have been Griselda Drown. She was all thighs and calves in a shiny slit-legged dress, heels ridiculously high, tapering down to minuscule points—how did she walk on those shoes, how could she even stand in them?—those long calves scissoring and her dress sparkling madly. A few men whistled. She moved like a giraffe, tall but appropriately graceful, unimpeded by her body. Her hair was yarded back in rows like someone had clamped it in a vise, eyes like whirlpools, long-fingered hands wheeling a cart over the uneven boards of the stage toward the table where the little man sat.

She dwarfed the metal eater, her breasts strapped into that glittering dress, the line between them soft and dark. She took a white napkin from her cart, held it above the metal eater’s bald and shining head, snapped it, lowered it, and knotted it behind his neck. In turn she took a butter knife, a fork, and a tin plate from her cart, dinging the knife and fork—to prove they were made of metal—and then dinging them against the plate—that’s metal, too. She laid them down, setting the table. Fork, knife, plate.

The metal eater sat, implacable, in front of his table setting. Griselda turned, a flourish of sparkle, and rolled her cart back the way she came. Her thighs flashed under the slit gown, long and thick and suntanned. Her cart rattled, stopped. She disappeared behind the sequined back curtain. The metal eater sat alone at the table under the raw light of humming gym bulbs.

What would he eat? Was Griselda going to wheel out some awful metal repast, a chainsaw or an office chair? The papers claimed that the metal eater had eaten a lawnmower, swallowed down the wing of a Cessna. How could something like that be possible? What would she put on his plate? A nail? A razor blade? A measly thumbtack? We had not paid twenty-five bucks to sit hip to hip and watch a tiny man swallow a thumbtack. The produce manager announced he would ask for his money back if they didn’t bring back Duck’s sister-in-law in the next ten minutes.

The metal eater sat smugly, napkin around his neck. He took the knife and fork in his little pink fists. He held them against the table, upright, ends down, like a petulant child awaiting supper. Then, with a certainty and casualness that was almost appalling, he took the knife and slid it down his throat and closed his mouth behind it. He sat, natty, unruffled, staring at the crowd, some of whom missed the feat entirely and were only now swinging their heads around as brothers or uncles tugged their sleeves. The metal eater had a fraction of a smile on his lips. His Adam’s apple was the only part of him that moved. It jerked freakishly up and down and side to side, like a muscled and angry monkey chained by one ankle.

He followed the knife with the fork, nudging it down. While he swallowed the fork, he folded the plate into quarters, his throat straining wildly, his shoulders perfectly still, and put that into his mouth, and poked it down with one finger. His Adam’s apple jerked, seized, thrashed. After a half minute or so, it slowed, then restored itself to its original, sedated state. The little metal eater unknotted the napkin, dabbed at the corners of his mouth, stood
up from the table, and bowed. He tossed the napkin into the first rows of the crowd.

Applause started slowly, just the produce manager and some others in the back bringing their hands together, and then others joined in, and it mounted and soon we were beside ourselves, hooting and hollering and pounding the floor with our boot heels. How about that? the produce manager was shouting. How about that?

When the ovation began to subside, three large men in utility belts hustled out, lifted the table and hefted it offstage. The applause faded. The great overhead dome lights in the gym went out, one by one, ticking as they cooled in the growing silence. Over the doors, red exit signs cast the only light.

Finally one blue spotlight switched on, a single shaft of light falling from the ceiling to illuminate the center of the stage where a tall figure had appeared in a suit of plated armor, complete with visored helmet, an ostrich plume canting off the peak. Another spotlight came on, yellow, and shone on the metal eater, stationed like a tiny well-dressed peasant beside the armored figure. He held a stool, which he set down and squatted on, facing the crowd. He withdrew a ball-peen hammer from his suit pocket and twirled it in his palm. Then he removed the shin legging from one foot of the armored figure and folded it and banged it flat against the floor of the stage. He folded it again and banged it flat again. Then he pushed it down his throat, swallowing contentedly on his stool, his Adam’s apple flailing madly. Beneath the removed armor, in the ray of blue, we could see one long calf, a bare foot.

It took the metal eater less than a minute to swallow down the legging. He promptly moved to the other. How about
that,
whispered the produce manager. Is
that
for real? He was shaking Duck’s shoulder. The crowd began to get into it, clapping as the metal eater removed each subsequent piece of armor, the thigh pieces next, and when it was clear that the thick, suntanned legs
belonged to Griselda, we stood and pounded the floor and chanted and cheered and everyone was grinning and enjoying the show. The metal eater swallowed on, his frenetic Adam’s apple riveting each swallow home.

Within twenty minutes the metal eater had done most of his work. He was standing beside the stool and tenderly sliding off the second gauntlet. All that remained to eat were the helmet and massive chest piece. Griselda held her arms out from her body, palms to the sky, had in fact held them there during the entire spectacle. We stomped the floor to match the rhythm of the metal eater’s swallowing.

When he had choked down the last gauntlet, the metal eater slid his stool behind Griselda and climbed onto it. The boots pounded the floor. The metal eater brought his arms above both his head and hers and gently tugged the ostrich plume free, letting it float to the stage in front of them. Then, with a flourish of wrists and fingers, he removed her helmet. Her hair, orange and long, slipped free, and we were rapturous, screaming and cheering and whistling. The metal eater climbed off his stool, took the helmet and flattened it under one dazzling wing tip. He folded it and banged it flat again. Then he lit into it with his teeth. It took him over two minutes to eat it and we were at frenzy pitch by the time he finished, one great and frothing roar quaking the rafters of that old gym. The produce manager was hugging Duck and tears were on his cheeks. If that isn’t something, he shouted. If that isn’t something.

The metal eater climbed back on the stool, stretched as widely as he could and ran his hands along both of Griselda’s arms, over her biceps and onto her shoulders and under the chestpiece. He dislodged it, held it in front of her for an unbearably long moment, and finally raised it high over their heads into the trembling blue spotlight, and we beheld Griselda, her broad and flat belly, her navel, her breasts and her outstretched arms—a masterpiece of a woman, a marble column fixed in a blade of light, a
golden-blue monument. Amid salvos of ovations, the metal eater folded and flattened the final piece until he could fit his mouth around it. He gulped it down. The big men in utility belts appeared and wrapped Griselda in a red kimono and carried her offstage.

In the aftermath—the pandemonium subsided, bows demanded and demanded again, the gymnasium lights burning once more at full, lacerating power, the men in utility belts already dismantling the stage—Duck sat shaken and sweat-damped. He gathered himself into his big puffy coat, stood, and tottered into the headlight-swept parking lot, shuffling through the new snow, over the slushy curbs.

Rumbling at the back of the parking lot was an eighteen-wheeler, its wipers sliding slowly over the windshield, running lights glowing yellow across the top of the cab and down the lines of the trailer. From bumper to bumper the truck was painted an extravagant green, the metal eater’s logo laid lustily across it and before Duck knew what he was doing he walked past his car, to the end of the lot, and rapped on the window of the cab.

Griselda herself answered, leaning through the open door, one foot on the running board, stooped so she could push her head out, orange hair framing her face. She looked like a very tall Rosemary, squinting at him like Rosemary did when she was trying to figure something out. I’m Duck Winters, Duck said. I know all about you. He stammered, he smiled, he asked if she would like to come over the house for tea, or beer, or whatever. I think you should see your sister, he said. It might be good. I lost my job today. He tried for a smile that was more like a shrug. Griselda smiled back. Okay, she said. Once the truck gets loaded.

So that’s how it came to be that Duck Winters drove through the snowy and quiet residential streets of Boise’s North End, steer
ing slowly and cautiously home, after midnight, with a lurid eighteen-wheeler inches from his rear bumper, its roof knocking snow from overhanging branches.

Rosemary woke to airbrakes sighing in the street. She heard boots on the front walk, low voices, and the refrigerator door unstick as it opened. She pushed herself up in bed. Duck appeared, prancing down the hall, tracking snow along the rug. His hair was slicked down with sweat, his cheeks flushed. He put his mittened hands on her shoulders. Rosie, he hissed, you awake? You’re not going to believe it. He was bursting over. You’re just not go-ing to be-lieve it.

He took her by the wrists, pulled her out of bed, her hair frizzed, wearing only a tight T-shirt and green sweatpants. He hauled her down the hall, through the melting tracked-in snow, to stand in the kitchen doorway and behold her sister, seated at the kitchen table, towering and radiant and glittering in a red kimono, holding hands with a little man in a black tweed suit with an awkward look on his face. On the table, in front of each of them, stood an unopened can of beer.

Rosemary found it impossible to look at Griselda—her presence was too solar for this kitchen with its cracked countertops and veneered cabinets, a box of stale doughnuts, a wilted amaryllis slumped out of its plastic pot, a porcelain Santa on the windowsill that should have been put away weeks ago. Moonlight fell in parallelograms through the kitchen window. In the basin of the sink sat a bowl half full of sludgy cereal.

Duck squeezed past her, fussing, twitching about with little jumps, his belly quivering under his jacket. This is your sister, he gushed, and her husband, Gene. You should have seen them tonight, Rosie, the
show
they put on. It was incredible! Incredible! You’d never believe it! You guys should talk, Rosie, you and your sister, is what I was thinking, it’s her first time home in twenty
years! She said she wrote a letter. It was nice of them to come, wasn’t it? Their truck’s outside. They actually
live
in their truck! We have tea if you guys don’t like that beer.

Out the kitchen window Rosemary saw many of us—maybe two dozen neighbors—laboring across the lawn, figures examining the cab of the metal eater’s truck, faces peering in the living room window. Griselda asked Rosemary if she’d been getting the letters and Rosemary managed to nod her head. Griselda said something about the new light fixture above the sink, about how it was nice. Rosemary watched a slushy bootprint turning to water on the kitchen floor.

Duck was toddling around the kitchen, rummaging through the fridge. He offered the guests summer sausage, noodle salad, pushed a can of beer into Rosemary’s hand and announced that the metal eater had an entire suit of armor inside his stomach, right here, Rosie, in our very own kitchen. Isn’t it something?

Rosemary stood rigid and barefoot in the doorway. Her sister, the men, the peeping neighbors and the eighteen-wheeler outside—all this loomed in the outskirts of her vision. She blinked her eyes several times. The beer can in her hand was cold. The bootprint of snow on the kitchen tile was turning to water.

She moved through the kitchen, set the beer on the table and tore a paper towel from the rack under the sink. She swabbed at the bootprint on the floor, watched the paper absorb the gray slush. Duck and me, she said, we’ve been married fifteen years. You know that, Griselda? Her voice didn’t shake and she was glad for it.

She stood and leaned on the table, the damp and crumpled paper towel in her fist. You know Mom would go to sleep with one of your volleyball trophies in her arms? You know that after she died we poured out her ashes in the backyard? Did you know that? At work I dye giant sheets of linen and guide them onto spools all day. That’s what Mom used to do; she used to do that while we were at school. Every day.

She took Duck’s hand and held it. I used to want to leave, she said. I used to want to get out of Boise so bad. But this—she gestured at the kitchen, the bowl of abandoned cereal, the amaryllis and the porcelain Santa—this is a life at least. This is a place to come home to.

Griselda had begun to cry, quiet sobs like whispers. Rosemary stopped. A moment like this—the four of them around the table under the sad, dusty kitchen lamp—could never accommodate all the things she had to say. She went to the metal eater and took him by the wrist and led him out the door, into the snow. Hey, she yelled, at the eighteen-wheeler, at the foothills standing up white under the moon, at all of us standing there on her lawn. Here he is! I want you all to get a good look. Look at him! She was screaming. You think eating metal is any harder than what I do, than what each of you do? You think this man is amazing? Look at him!