Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (10 page)

They could sit, sipping from cool glasses and talking about something as uncomplicated as weather, gabbing like painters, not because they lacked for more interesting things to talk about, but because it was summer and hot and she seemed not to have dressed for the heat.

Instead, when she crossed her legs in a way that hiked her dress higher and moved her body toward him, he touched the bruise with his fingertip, and pressed it more carefully and gently than one might jab at an elevator button.

Oh
, her lips formed, though she didn’t quite say it. She exhaled, closing her blue eyes, then opening them wider, almost in surprise, and stared at him. They were sitting very close together, their faces almost touching.

When he took his finger away she stretched the nylon over the bruise so he could better see its different gradations of blue. A pale green sheen surrounded it like an aura; purple capillaries ran off in all directions like tiny cracks, like a network of rivers on a map; there was violet at its center like a stain.

“It’s ugly, isn’t it?” she asked in a whisper.

He didn’t answer, but pressed it again, slowly, deeply, and her head tilted back against a cushion. This time the
Oh
of her lips was audible. She closed her eyes and moaned, uncrossing her legs. They were sitting so close together that the sound of her nails scraping along nylon seemed to him almost a clatter the painters would hear. Her legs opened and he placed his palm against her and felt through the nylon heat, actual heat, like summer through a screen door.

He pressed the bruise again and again. Each time she reshaped her lips into a vowel that sounded increasingly surprised.

Outside, the house turned progressively whiter. The summer sun dissolved into golden, vaporish rays in the trees. The bruise—he never asked how she got it—spread across the sky.

Ravenswood

The Nun rides the streetcar named Asylum to the end of the Asylum Lake line. There’s no lake there, never was, but at least the buckled acres of parking lot becalmed before the abandoned shopping mall reflect the gliding shadows of circling gulls.

“End of the line, Sister,” announces the Conductor; his name tag reads
Martin
. Conductor Martin rises from his seat in order to crank another name, the return destination, onto the front of the streetcar.

“I’m not in the habit of doing this,” the Nun says from behind him. The Conductor hears the clack of the rosary beads girdled about her waist, and a rustle crackling with static electricity as she discards her woolly black robes, and as he turns still holding the crank, she knocks him silly with a blow from her missal.

When he regains consciousness the Conductor finds himself hanging from a hand strap toward the rear of the streetcar. The rosary binds his wrists. He’s dressed—draped would be more accurate—in the Nun’s black robes; her sensible shoes, untied, pinch his feet. At least she has pinned the
Martin
name tag from what was his conductor’s uniform onto what is now his habit.

At the front of the streetcar, cranking a new destination, the Nun wears his uniform and conductor’s hat. The blue jacket is too long for her arms; her breasts strain against the brass buttons. A shock of red hair tilts the hat at a rakish angle.

“When I was a child, I thought nuns must be bald,” Martin recalls, and speaks the thought aloud in hopes of making conversation. “How wrong I was,” he adds in what he hopes is an ingratiating tone.

She looks so jaunty as she thumbs tokens from his coin changer in the sunlight streaming through the front windows that he can’t be angry with her. Gulls caw and yipe excitedly as if out on Asylum Lake the smelt are rising. Sparrows gang on a single tree and make it twitter. He suddenly realizes that yes, it’s peaceful, even beautiful here at the end of the line to be a conductor stacking tokens in the sunlight. She reminds him so much of himself that he wants to emulate her. From his new perspective of dangling like a sausage, a rush of the pathetic emotion that a victim sometimes feels toward an oppressor overwhelms him: the illusion that such brutal attention is misguided love. He finds it poignantly flattering that this strange, undoubtedly fervent, religious woman has been driven to take such risks and employ such desperate measures to subdue him. What made her snap? he wonders. How often must she have sat unnoticed yearning for his attention? How many times at vespers did his name obliterate in her heart the name of the Lord?

“
Te amo
,
te amo
,” he calls out to the Nun. It’s as close as he can come to speaking Latin, a dead language that he hopes will sound sacred to her.

A miscalculation, for the Nun evidences little, if any, feeling for either dead languages or the Conductor—make that the ex-Conductor. Apparently, she has not confused him with the streetcar any more than a hijacker confuses the pilot with the airplane. Apparently, it is the streetcar itself she desires, that incredible conveyance with blue voltage sparking at the junctures of overhead cable, a vehicle part city, part dream.

Ding, ding. A blue spark crackles, electricity enough to depopulate Death Row jolts the rear wheels, and the streetcar embarks toward the destination she has chosen.

Swaying from the hand strap with his bound hands clasped as if in prayer, Sister Mary Martin can make out the lettering the Nun has cranked at the front of the streetcar, although, as it appears backward, he must decipher it letter by letter. D-O-O-W-S-N-E-V-A-R. Doowsnevar. R-A-V-E-N-S-W-O-O-D. That was never on his route! He’s never heard of such a street or neighborhood before.

But then, he can’t help wondering if he’s experiencing partial amnesia from that concussion with the missal. The blocks the streetcar rattles down look only vaguely familiar, but perhaps that’s because he’s been displaced from his customary perspective gazing down rails of narrow-gauge track from the front of the car. Careening from the hand strap as the streetcar races between corner stops, he thinks the ride seems more herky-jerky than he remembers.

“Move to the rear!” the Nun yells over the hiss of pneumatic doors opening and slamming shut on the surprised faces of commuters who have not been given the chance to board.

In the rear, the ex-Conductor twirls from the hand strap, abstractly fingering his beads, feeling disoriented, forgotten, suffering like a martyr on the verge of a mystical experience.

“
Je t’aime
,
je t’aime
,” he whines.

No answer. Clearly, the Nun couldn’t care less about Romance languages. Through the rear window, among the crowd of commuters that wildly pursue the streetcar, futilely grasping for the grillwork on the rear platform, he can see vaguely familiar faces. Isn’t that flushed gentleman furiously waving a transfer in his fist as if bidding farewell Mr. Hedmund, his old English teacher who used to warn him, “Martin, you’re a dreamer and when dreamers wake, sometimes they find themselves digging ditches or punching transfers on streetcars”? And that gimpy black man trying to hook the grille of the streetcar with his cane, isn’t that Coach Bender, complete with his old football knee, who used to warn him, “If you don’t open your eyes and smell the coffee, Marty-boy, you’re going to blindside yourself.” And that heavyset bleached blonde who’s just tripped over her purse and is now being trampled by the others running down the curving streetcar track—take away twenty years and forty pounds and she might have been the woman who used to sign her letters to him
the Girl of Your Dreams
, a name she later shortened to
GOYD.

He can’t recall GOYD’s real name anymore, but the mere thought of her now in the context of his current situation leaves him no choice but to reevaluate his relationship with the Nun. Tears, unsuccessfully searching for tracks on his face, roll helter-skelter down his cheeks as he realizes that now, when he has finally discovered that love is surrender, he’s been wasting his time trying to surrender to the wrong person. It’s not the Nun herself but her example that he should identify with. She’s obviously a woman with the courage of her convictions, unafraid of commitment no matter the sacrifice it entails, someone willing to discipline her life around a vow. Had he committed himself to the streetcar when he was its conductor, perhaps it would have remained faithful to him and never seduced the Nun. His sins all become achingly clear—his insensitivity, his blindness (those letters the Girl of Your Dreams would write to him came, after a while, to be addressed to
Dear Mr. Oblivious
—later abbreviated to
Dear Mr. O
, as if she were writing love letters to a cipher), and the worst sin of all, lack of passion: he’d taken being a conductor for granted, treated it as merely a job, an identity he stripped off with the uniform, when, dear God!, it was his life.

Dear Mr. O strikes his head despairingly against the chrome handrail. Advertisements to which he’s long been oblivious swim before his eyes. So these are the daydreams of silkier hair and ageless complexions upon which the hordes filing past him each day dwelled as they embarked on their journey together. He remembers all those days, weeks, years that he and the streetcar, now improbably named Ravenswood, have shared, intimately connected no matter how much traffic or how large the crowd. While commuters sat gabbing, or lost in newspapers, or gazing blankly out the window, Martin had registered, just below the threshold of consciousness, each nick in the track, hitch in the cable, surge of current, subtle whir, and shifting of gears. Oh, for those luminous hours between morning and evening rush, merrily clanging along on schedule down sunny streets.

He becomes bitter, glares at the Nun bouncing and chuckling on
his
air cushion seat, and wishes he could beat her knuckles bloody with a ruler, could make her stand in a corner with aching arms outstretched balancing a Bible on each palm, could deprive her of recess and banish her to the wardrobe closet.

But the Nun, now no longer a nun but a conductor in her own right, seems oblivious to all but the streetcar. Throttle open, bell clanging, and a fine sweat gathered like a mustache along her upper lip, suddenly boisterous as a gondolier, she breaks into song, its melody a cross between “funiculi funicula” and a hymn, its lyrics a psalm.

Although the Lord be high above

    
He doth recall the lowly

And deep within the secret heart

    
The Lord shall surely know thee

Her flashing teeth bite into the apple from the Conductor’s lunch bag. Each crunch of the apple seems transmitted to the streetcar as if spikes of electricity were driving it forward in a more and more abandoned way, and Martin remembers drives down a country two-lane in his old Camaro with the Girl of His Dreams beside him, unzipping his trousers, urging him,
Faster, faster
, as if the way she touched him were actually propelling the car. If a motorcycle cop had been pursuing them then the way cops are pursuing the streetcar now, it would have looked to him as if the female passenger suddenly vanished, and though Martin was gripping the wheel and it was his foot on the gas, the Camaro was responding to what her tongue was doing.

I’ll love Thee with mine own true heart

    
Before the world I’ll praise Thee

Your love was there before the start

    
Thy mercy doth amaze me

With an enormous jolt, haloed in blue lightning, the streetcar leaps the track, and as it hurtles airborne Martin glances out the back window to see if he might catch one last glimpse of that woman who’d reminded him of GOYD. Instead, he sees the motorcycle cops pitching headfirst over their handlebars and the crowd pulling up in a way that’s almost ceremonious, like a procession of mourners who have allowed the hearse to escape, as the streetcar plunges through a canopy of trees.

Ex-Conductor Martin, who was once so aware of any imperfection in the smooth steel rails, now feels the streetcar grinding savagely over earth, kicking up dust, crashing through bush. He feels his connection with the machine of whose identity he was once a part, slipping away, its familiar track a fading memory. He thinks of all the streets they’ve been down together, streets with their misleading, disappointing names: Blue Island—just an asphalt aisle through bankrupt factories; Sunset—a street perennially in the shadow of tenements; Tree Haven—an artery of concrete paved in broken glass. Why don’t those streets bear the names that tell their stories? Grand View with its pawnshops, bars, and crack houses should be called Dead End. When was the last time the stains on treeless Mulberry actually came from ripened berries? Better to call it Blood Street. And that noble-sounding intersection of Lincoln and State deserves to be Hooker and John. But Ravenswood is Ravenswood.

The doors whoosh open long enough for the commuters of the woods to file on. Their somber dress makes Martin grateful for the first time that he is wearing the black robes of the Nun. The shadows of their cloaks darken shafts of sun. The Nun who has become the Conductor continues her hymn:

How precious are Thy thoughts to me

    
How great Thy loving kindness

How blind the man who cannot see

    
That God will ease his blindness

But the commuters of Doowsnevar can only croak in a split tongue that must be older than any dead language.

A blur of vegetation streams by, limbs whapping the windows; humidity beads into sweat on Martin’s shaved head and streams down his wimple. He joins with his fellow commuters in croaking a hymn he didn’t know he knew, like when he was a child and prayed in Latin, never really understanding the words or what it was for which he prayed.