Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (2 page)

“So, where to?” he’d ask.

“Baby, just drive.”

I Never Told This to Anyone

I never told this to anyone—there wasn’t anyone to tell it to—but when I was living with my uncle Kirby on the Edge—the edge of what I never knew for sure (“Just livin’ on the Edge, don’t worry
where
,” Uncle Kirby would say)—a little bride and groom would come to visit me at night. Naturally, I never mentioned this to Uncle Kirby. He’d have acted as if I’d been playing with dolls. “A boy should play like the wild animals do—to practice survival,” Uncle Kirby always said. “You wanna play, play with your Uzi.”

The bride wore a white gown and silver slippers, and held a bouquet. The groom wore a top hat, tails, and spats. Their shoes were covered with frosting as if they’d walked through snow even though it was summer, June, when they first appeared. I heard a little pop—actually, more of a
pip!
—and there on my windowsill was the groom, pouring from a tiny champagne bottle. “Hi! I’m Jay and this is Trish,” he said by way of introduction, adding confidentially, “We don’t think of one another as Mr. and Mrs. yet.”

They had tiny voices, but I could hear them clearly. “That’s because we enunciate,” Trish said. She was pretty.

“It’s these formal clothes, Old Boy,” Jay explained. “Put them on and you start to speak the King’s English.”

I remember the first night they appeared, and the nights that followed, as celebrations—like New Year’s Eve in June. There’d be big-band music on my shortwave—a station I could never locate except when Jay and Trish were over—and the
pip! pip! pip!
of miniature champagne bottles. You should have seen them dancing to “Out of Nowhere” in the spotlight my flashlight threw as it followed them across the floor. I’d applaud and Jay would kiss the bride. But each celebration seemed as if it would be the last.

“Off for the honeymoon, Old Boy,” Jay would say with a wink as they left. He’d sweep Trish off her feet and carry her across the windowsill, and Trish would laugh and wave back at me, “
Ciao
—we’ll be staying at the Motel d’Amore,” and then she’d toss her small bouquet.

I didn’t want them to go. Having their visits to look forward to made living on the Edge seem less desolate. Uncle Kirby noticed the change in me. “What’s with
You
, lately?” he asked—
You
was sort of his nickname for me. “I mean, why
You
goin’ round with rice in your pockets and wearin’ that jazzbow tie? And what’s with the old shoes and tin cans tied to the back fender a your bike? How
You
expect to survive that way when the next attack comes out a nowhere?”

I told him that dragging shoes and cans built up my endurance and the rice was emergency rations, and he left me alone, but I knew he was keeping an eye on me.

Luckily, no matter how often Jay and Trish said they were off, they’d show up again a few nights later, back on the windowsill, scraping the frosting from their shoes. And after a while, when they’d leave, walking away hand in hand into the shadows, Jay hooking his tux jacket over his shoulder rather than sweeping Trish off her feet, and Trish no longer carrying a bouquet to toss, neither of them would mention the honeymoon.

I didn’t notice at first, but gradually the nights quieted down. “A little more sedate an evening for a change,” Jay would say. Trish, especially, seemed quieter. She said that champagne had begun making her dizzy. After dancing, she’d need a nap.

“
I get no kick from champagne
,” Jay would tell her, raising his glass in a toast, “
but I get a kick out of you
.”

Trish would smile back, blow him a kiss, and then close her eyes. While she rested, Jay would sit and talk to me. He had a confidential way of speaking that made it seem as if he were always on the verge of revealing a secret, as if we shared the closeness of conspirators.

“Actually,” he’d say, lowering his voice, “I still
do
get a kick from champagne, although it’s nothing compared to what I feel around Trish. I never told this to anyone, but I married her simply because she brought magic into my life. The most beautiful songs on the radio came after she turned it on. She made the ordinary seem out of this world.”

It wasn’t until the sweltering nights of late summer, when Jay and Trish began to bicker and argue, that I realized how much things had changed. The two of them even looked different, larger somehow, as if they were outgrowing their now stained, shabby formal wear.

“I’m so tired of this ratty dress,” Trish complained one evening.

“Now it’s nag nag nag instead of
pip pip pip
,” Jay replied. “And please don’t say ‘ratty.’ You know how I despise the term.”

Jay would harangue us on the subject of rodents in a way that reminded me of Uncle Kirby on the subject of Commies or certain ethnic groups. Jay had developed a bit of a potbelly and looked almost as if he were copying Trish, who was, by now, obviously expecting.
Expecting
was Trish’s word. “Out of all the names they give it, don’t you think ‘expecting’ sounds the prettiest?” she’d asked me once, surprising me, and I quickly agreed.

Their visits had become regular, and they showed up, increasingly ravenous, to dine on the morsels I’d filched from the supper table at Jay’s suggestion. “Old Boy,” Jay had said jokingly, “you can’t just take the attitude of ‘Let them eat cake.’ After all, cake isn’t a limitless resource, you know.” I was glad to pilfer the food for them. It made mealtime an adventure. Stealing rations in front of Uncle Kirby wasn’t easy.

After I served their little dinner, they’d stay and visit. Jay would sit drinking the beer that he’d devised a way of siphoning from Uncle Kirby’s home brew.

“We could use a goddamn TV around this godforsaken boring place. It would be nice to watch a little bowling once in a while,” Jay would gripe after he’d had a few too many.

“Maybe if you’d do something besides sitting around in your dirty underwear, drinking and belching, things wouldn’t be so BORrrr-ing,” Trish answered.

Once, after an argument that made Trish storm off in tears, Jay held his head and muttered, as if more to himself than to me, “I never told this to anyone, but me and the Mrs.
had
to get married.”

By the time the leaves were falling, they had shed their wedding clothes. Trish wore a dress cut from one of my sweat socks, boots of bumblebee fur, and a hat made from a hummingbird’s nest. Jay, bearded, a blue-jay feather poking from his top hat, dressed in the gray skin of an animal he refused to identify. He carried a knitting-needle spear, a bow he’d fashioned from the wishbone of a turkey, and a quiver of arrows—disposable hypodermic needles he’d scavenged from Uncle Kirby’s supplies. He tipped each arrow in cottonmouth venom.

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.