Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (6 page)

Later, heading with her toward a rented room in a transient hotel, past open bars, the smell of sweat and stale beer dissolves into a childhood odor of fermentation: the sour, abandoned granaries by the railroad tracks where the single spark from a match might still explode. A gang of boys would go there to smoke the pungent, impotent, homegrown weed and sometimes, they said, to meet a certain girl.

They never knew when she’d be there. Just before she appeared the whine of locusts became deafening and grasshoppers whirred through the shimmering air. The daylight moon suddenly grew near enough for them to see that it was filled with the reflection of their little fragment of the world, and then the gliding shadow of a hawk ignited an explosion of pigeons from the granary silos.

They said, beware, a crazy bum lived back there, too, but if so, Martin never saw him.

Ant

She was dozing on a faded Navajo blanket with the filmy shade of a maple tree drawn like a veil across her skin. Her blouse was still opened to where he’d unbuttoned it down to the sky-blue of the bra she’d brought back as a souvenir from Italy.

Rob was lying just beyond the edge of the shadows thrown by her eyelashes. He had removed his shirt and spread it beneath him on the grass. It was hot, and lounging in her company seemed to intensify the light. Even the birds were drowsy. Only a single ant was working. It had him by the toe.

“Trying to tow me away,” he would have called out to her but for the lassitude, and her aversion to puns. The Woman Who Hates Puns, she sometimes called herself.

With his eyes closed and the sun warm on his lids, it seemed as if he and the ant were the only creatures on the planet still awake. At first, Rob was simply amused by its efforts, but after a while he began to sense a nearly imperceptible movement across the grass. He squinted up into the high blue sky, not caring really where he was headed. It was a day for such an attitude, but then almost any day spent with her could trigger a mood like that—could require it, in fact. Since he’d met her, Rob had increasingly spent his days in a trance for which he had no name. To describe this state of mind, he joked that he was living in Limbo.

This was Limbo: high, heavenly-looking clouds that threw no shadow and assumed no shapes. No wind, yet a faint hiss in the trees. Sunlight faintly weighted with perfume. In Limbo, where dream ruled, siestas were mandatory. The grass slid gently beneath him without leaving a stain along his spine. Grass blades combed his hair as he went by until his hair assumed the slant of grass.

So long as it was only a single ant, Rob didn’t mind. He wouldn’t tolerate them marching up his body in black columns, swarming, entering his mouth, ears, nostrils, and eyes in a pulsing stream, as if he were just another corpse to clean.

It was a morbid vision, not in keeping with such a lovely day.

Even here in Limbo, Rob thought, one apparently never recovers from having had “Leiningen Versus the Ants” read to him as a child.

He could still remember his anticipation—a mix of excitement and terror—on those Sunday afternoons in summer when his uncle Wayne would arrive with a storybook under his arm. Uncle Wayne would come to babysit for little Robbie while Rob’s parents went out to the backyard barbecues from which they would return “pickled,” as his father called it—though they looked more as if they’d been boiled—smelling of Manhattans, and laughing too easily and loudly.

“Remember,” his mother would caution conspiratorially before she left, “don’t ask Uncle Wayne about the war. He doesn’t like to talk about it. And don’t worry if he doesn’t talk much at all.”

As young as Rob was, it was clear to him that the babysitting was as much for Uncle Wayne’s sake as it was for the sake of Rob’s parents or himself.

Uncle Wayne usually didn’t talk much when his parents were there. He seemed shy, embarrassed, almost ashamed. His face was pitted from acne, which gave him the look of a teenager. Sometimes, Rob imagined that Uncle Wayne’s face had been pitted by shrapnel.

“Do you like stories?” his uncle had asked him during their first visit.

“Sure,” Rob said.

“Good. Stories are what kept me sane,” Uncle Wayne said, then laughed in the odd, stifled way of his as if at a private joke between them.

But reading aloud, his uncle lost his shyness. Uncle Wayne didn’t simply read stories, he lived them. During “The Most Dangerous Game,” Rob had to run from room to room while his uncle, reading aloud the entire time, stalked him, the storybook in one hand, and in the other a bow made from a clothes hanger strung with a rubber band and armed with an arrow fashioned from a cardboard pant guard.

When they read “The Monkey’s Paw,” Rob hid behind his bedroom door while his uncle mounted the stairs with the heavy-footed, ominous tread of someone dead who’d been summoned back from the grave. Nearly quaking with fear, Rob had tried to wish him back into his grave while his uncle Wayne pounded on the door.

His uncle would open the book by Edgar Allan Poe and turn to his favorite story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and the boy would force himself to watch his uncle’s face so as not to miss the instantaneous transformation when his uncle’s eyes assumed a maniacal gleam and his mouth twisted into a malevolent smile as he read the opening words: “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why
will
you say that I am mad?” And then he’d burst into a spit-flecked spasm of psychopathic laughter.

But of all the stories they read together, it was “Leiningen Versus the Ants” that was the most frightening and memorable. How many Sunday afternoons, while other boys watched double-headers or shot baskets at a hoop suspended above a carport, had Rob sat sweating and listening intently as Uncle Wayne read about Leiningen making his way through the jungle, evading the hordes of army ants?

The ants streamed past barriers of water and fire, relentlessly consuming everything in their path with their black grinding mandibles, mandibles that could strip a man down to his bones as neatly and savagely as a school of piranhas.

Rob ran from the ants through the house, pursued by his uncle, who was draped in a blanket that served as the amorphous shape of massing ants. Rob would race around the table with the ants gaining on him, knocking over chairs as they went. He’d gallop up the stairs with the ants at his heels, slam himself into his room, but the weight of the ants would force open the door. He’d jump on his bed with nowhere else to run or hide as the ants oozed over his feet and began to engulf him, while flushed and wild he’d beat at them with a pillow, tussling, wrestling, and finally, overpowered, nearly smothered by them, he’d have to scream, “Leiningen doesn’t die! The ants don’t get him! The ants don’t win!”

Only then, reminded of the authority of the story, would his uncle sink back, his acne feverish, hands shaking, and silently they’d both return downstairs, which was where Rob’s parents would find them, eating popsicles and watching the ball game, when they returned home.

*   *   *

Remembering his uncle, Rob had forgotten the ant. There was an obvious bad pun there at which The Woman Who Hates Puns would have groaned. But even had Rob said it aloud, she might not have heard him, for the ant had managed to work its way beneath Rob’s back and, seizing his belt with its mandibles, had lifted him off the ground the merest fraction of a millimeter, balancing Rob so perfectly that neither his head nor heels dragged. And having succeeded in carrying Rob across the boundary of Limbo, back into the ordinary world, the ant now proceeded at a considerably more determined pace.

They went along like that, hurrying away from his slumbering Love, like a grain of rice from a wedding.

Ransom

Once, in college, broke and desperate, I kidnapped myself.

Ransom notes were sent to all interested parties. Later, I sent hair and fingernail clippings as well.

They steadfastly insisted on an ear.

Marvelous Encounters of My Life

“You’re going to leave your watch on?” she’d asked as if it were an offense on the order of undressing down to all but his socks.

Had there been a teasing note in her voice?

Earlier in the evening, at the bar, on their third drink and discussing favorite films, she’d said that she loved Hollywood movies from the thirties and forties for the banter between men and women. Myrna Loy and William Powell in
The Thin Man
; Gable and Claudette Colbert in
It Happened One Night
; Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in
His Girl Friday
; and, of course, Bogart and Bacall in
To Have and Have Not
, where Bacall delivers her famous zinger: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”

“The America the women and men in those black-and-white movies staked out between them seems so different from the here and now,” she said, nostalgic for a time and country she never lived in.

“Different how?” he asked.

“Well, for starters, they meant something very different by
adult
entertainment. Movies today star cartoons. The culture’s been totally infantilized.”

Outside the bar, the thunderstorm that had made catching a cab impossible continued to rumble. Neither of them had an umbrella. His first sight of her face had been through the spattered glass panels of the revolving door she’d entered just before he did—both of them ducking out of the downpour into the hotel bar.

The bartender wore livery—white jacket, maroon bow tie. Behind the mahogany bar, a two-story slab of cobalt mirror reflected bolts of spring lightning. Three empty barstools away, her reflection sat sipping a flute of champagne. Instead of a beer, he ordered a martini, not a drink he ever drank alone, and between flashes of lightning sneaked glances at her until their eyes met in the mirror. She seemed about to smile before glancing down at the glass she was raising to her lips. It gave him the nerve to try starting a conversation.

Excuse me
, he might say,
I couldn’t help noticing that you celebrate rain, too.
That had the advantage of being true—he’d always loved the smell of rain—but as an ice-breaker, true or not, it sounded fake and nearly as precious as it would be to recite what he recalled from a poem about rain:

It’s raining women’s voices as if they’d died even in memory,

and it’s raining you as well marvellous encounters of my life …

He didn’t want the rain to let up.

What if he turned and said:
I was just sitting here thinking how I’d be willing to bet that in every life there must be at least one instance when fate came disguised as weather.

“No umbrella, either?” he asked her. “I wonder if that makes us optimists?”

“Actually, I left mine on the train coming in,” she said. “The hotel loans them out but I didn’t think to take one. I’m not sure what that makes me. Distracted, maybe.”

“The train from where?” he asked, rather than “Distracted by what?”

By last call they’d returned to the subject of umbrellas. She’d begun to touch him lightly, reflexively, as one might to make a point, while recounting the story of how, on her ninth birthday, when she asked her mother for a clear plastic umbrella so that she could watch the raindrops fall, her mother told her, “Clair, dear, you don’t pay enough attention to where you’re going as is, let alone without staring up into the clouds.”

They were tipsy and laughing as they left the bar, not through the revolving door, but by a side exit that opened onto the hotel lobby.

And later in her room, maybe what she had actually asked was “Do you always leave your watch on?” That was a completely different kind of question—not banter. That was a question about history.

The watch was from the thirties, with a Deco rose-gold face and a genuine alligator band complete with a tiny rose-gold buckle. Despite her nostalgia for that era, it obviously had not occurred to her that such a watch could have played a supporting role in one of those movies she loved: Cary Grant might have worn it to check if Katharine Hepburn was running predictably late. It was the kind of vintage watch that people assume must have a family history, otherwise why would one go through the trouble of winding it each morning? He’d been asked more than once if the watch had a sentimental value—if it had been passed down to him from his father or maybe his grandfather. When she asked if he was leaving it on, he considered for a moment telling her that the watch had belonged to his father and was the whole of the inheritance his father had left him.

That would have been starting off (if this was the start of anything) with a lie, the kind of finagling tale his father was infamous for. His father, a gambler—he referred to himself as a
joueur
—was a man who, if going to the track was impossible, would settle for bingo. He was still alive, a little demented—or was that just drink—and living in a retirement community outside Vegas. He had visited his father there once and the place struck him as a subdivision gated not to keep the riffraff out, but to keep its population of bookies, hustlers, and scam artists in.

He had actually bought the watch in a secondhand shop after an acupuncture session with Dr. Wu had left him euphoric. Dr. Wu was treating his spring allergies, allergies he’d inherited from his father along with a tendency to squander money as well as his given name, Julian. Like his father, he went by Jules; neither he nor his father could tolerate “Junior.” Dr. Wu’s office was downtown, and after treatment Jules would find himself at some pricey men’s store buying clothes he didn’t need. Perhaps Dr. Wu, in collusion with local merchants, was inserting a needle in a point that triggered buying sprees. One particularly radiant afternoon, Jules walked through downtown crowds feeling as if the vital force, qi, were emanating from his body. He noticed that women, and men as well, glanced as he passed as if the force were visible to them, too. On Jewelers Row, under the L tracks, he stopped before a window where a watch with a face the color of rose champagne caught his eye. An L train reverberated overhead like a drumroll. Until that moment he’d never considered buying a vintage watch, but suddenly he had to have it. When he entered the shop, the immediately attentive saleswoman stared at him in the way that people on the street had stared, while he described the watch in the window. “Yes, sir,” she said, “right away, sir,” and rushed to get it. Not until he saw himself in the mirror on the counter did he realize that Dr. Wu, who only an hour earlier had inserted a four-inch needle in the Baihui point at the top of Jules’s skull—a powerful point where all the yang energy of the body converges—had overlooked removing the needle, which was sticking from the top of his head like an antenna.