The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (23 page)

Regardless of the frustrations and obstacles concerning her research on Hammond, Denise still felt that by looking into the two anthropologists’ histories, she would find the solution to the puzzle of their disappearance. “I brought a healthy amount of suspicion with me when I looked to Grant, but then Grant’s life fell into place like dominoes, and then Grant led me right to Hammond.”

The now commonly held belief regarding Grant is that he merely wanted a chance to paint frescoes and make pottery and reinvent old techniques for creating art. Hammond, however, when compared to Grant, who could not bring himself to lie even about where he was from, who did not have the foresight to doctor school records or change his name, who just barely corroborated the story about saving Hammond from the icy depths off the coast of Alaska, Hammond is now considered nothing less than a highly skilled con artist whose main goal in the creation of the Sebali tribe was economic. Marcus Alexander Grant, as everyone now knows, never saved Joseph Hammond’s life off the coast of Alaska, but then again, no one believes that Hammond was ever in Alaska to begin with. While no one knows exactly what he did between the years he left home and the years he entered college, what we do know is that at the age of eighteen, Joseph Farrow enrolled at Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. He spent two years in Oklahoma before he left OSU (or was dismissed; no one is quite sure), after which he moved to Lubbock, Texas, where he enrolled into Texas Tech University as a transfer student. Originally a student of business administration, he changed his major to anthropology. Neither he nor Marcus Grant, however, completed their studies at Texas Tech, nor at any other American university. Farrow flunked out of school by the end of the fall semester of his senior year, and it was around this time, too, that he began calling himself by his mother’s maiden name. And when Hammond left, Marcus Grant left with him. Once Denise figured out the connection between Hammond and Farrow, it was not long before she came to the conclusion that the photographs, the artifacts, the rituals, and the degrees were fakes.

“Well,” she corrected me, “not fake. The artwork is real artwork, but the work is Marcus Grant, not Sebali.”

As soon as she felt she’d gathered enough evidence to explain the riddle of Hammond and Grant and the disappearance of the Sebali tribe, she called Dr. Stephens. “I told him that I thought the Sebali tribe never existed—that they were made up—and he was very quiet on the phone for a minute, and then asked, ‘What makes you say that?’ So I told him what I’d found out about Hammond, and then, once I’d finished, he told me that he’d get in contact with his colleagues on the island and tell them what I’d found out and that he’d make sure that, if I were right in this, that I’d receive full credit for my research here.” A few days later, Stephens called Denise. “They’re good forgeries,” he told her. “Damn good.” When she asked him what would happen next, he told her that everyone was coming home and that, once they’d returned, they’d put all of the pieces together and figure out exactly what happened.

VII.

To this day, however, nobody knows exactly what happened. The riddle of the Sebali tribe has been solved, but no one is sure why Hammond and Grant did what they did or, more importantly, what happened to them when they left the United States in 1977. In truth, no one knows if they even left. Their apartments, which have been searched more than once, failed to reveal any clues as to their whereabouts, and their things, left behind these many years, have since been confiscated by the FBI, and their old apartments cleaned out and rented. (Once it was revealed that the two had misused funds awarded them by federal agencies, the FBI joined the investigation, as did the Treasury Department.) Hammond and Grant have disappeared as cleanly as, so it would seem, the tribe they invented. There have been rumored sightings of Hammond, and Denise still finds herself looking closely at any old Chevy Fleetside pickup if she sees one at a rest stop along the New Jersey Turnpike, or parked behind Fenway, whether orange or green or blue. A few months before we met, Denise flew out to Akron, Ohio, after someone had sent her a clipping of an art sale advertisement that mentioned pieces of primitive pottery and stonework of the Sebali tribe for sale, but the works, ironically, turned out to be forgeries. Otherwise, aside from the interviews she has given me, Denise claims that she has done her best to put the mystery behind her, though even about this she seems at least faintly unsure.

I conducted one of our last interviews at her apartment. We had planned to meet at a local bar, but she had left a message for me with the bartender, who then gave me directions to her apartment, which was only three blocks away. She apologized when she answered the door. “I’m afraid I’m feeling a little fluish,” she told me, and I offered to reschedule, but she invited me inside instead. She offered me a drink, and we sat and we spoke about Hammond and Grant and about Texas and the anthropology program. I asked if she had continued to look for or wonder about the final whereabouts of the two men, and she was quick to say no. I was surprised by the swiftness of her reply, and perhaps the surprise, if not a measure of disbelief, registered on my face, because she then told me that a number of people, professors and colleagues and family, had expected her to continue to explore and then write about the Hammond and Grant episode, and had urged her to do so for some time. “It’s been kind of hard,” she said, “to get them all to drop the matter.” And then, for no other reason than that the question appeared fully formed in my head, I asked Denise if either of them—Hammond or Grant—had ever tried to contact her. “Not even a phone call,” she said with a bright and unaffected laugh. “Can you believe it? The nerve of those two.” And it was then that the phone on the table next to the sofa rang loudly, filling the apartment, and a startled look passed over her face before she smiled at me and quickly reached for the phone, and it was in that moment that I suspected that Denise was not quite free of Hammond and Grant, and that she might never be. It was her mother calling, and I sat quietly, waiting as she chatted amiably about her brother’s newborn baby girl, and after a few minutes, she said her good-byes and hung up and turned back to me. “Have you ever cooked a really big meal?” she asked. “Four or five courses? For a big party of people? You spend all day shopping for ingredients and then chopping and sautéing and roasting, and you’re excited about the meal, taking a bite here and there as you cook, and it smells great, and you finish it all and bring it all out to the table, and you’re proud of it, and everybody digs in, and they all love it. But you just spent all day cooking and running around and your back is sore from standing in a cramped kitchen for the entire afternoon, and you find that, all of a sudden, you just don’t have the appetite for anything you cooked. It looks good and smells good and you’re sure it tastes good, but you’re just not hungry anymore. That’s more or less how I feel about Hammond and Grant. No more appetite.”

“But sooner or later, you’re bound to get hungry again,” I said.

She laughed again and said, “Maybe some day.”

In May, Denise will graduate. When I last spoke to her, however, she was not yet certain what she would do after graduation. Princeton has offered her a postdoctoral position, and she has had two interviews with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. “I’m not sure, though,” she told me on my last day in Boston. We were walking along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. It was a bright, cold day. She stood staring quietly at the water as it moved sluggishly past. “I’m not sure what I want to do. Both of them—they’re both good opportunities, and my parents were happy to hear about them because, I think, in their minds, anthropology, when it comes to having a job or a career, isn’t any more promising than theater. But the academic world, it’s just . . . it’s so small, and now when people meet me, and at job interviews and job fairs, all they want to talk about is the Sebali thing. The more people talk about it, the more I think about what they did—Hammond and Grant—and what they’re doing now, whatever new con they’re playing now, and I find myself almost admiring what they did, the fact that they, by their own sheer force of will, invented a new life for themselves. And I’m beginning to think that, if there’s some way for me to do the same thing, I should maybe start working to find it.”

“Do you think they’re happy, whatever they’re doing now?” I asked her.

She was quiet for a moment before she looked at me and said, “If I ever find them, I’ll let you know.”

One-Horned & Wild-Eyed

A
Chinaman sold it to me,” Ralph told me as he led me through his garage toward the side yard. I thought about telling him that whoever sold him whatever it was he was going to show me probably wasn’t a Chinaman—most likely, considering Houston, some Vietnamese guy or maybe a Filipino—but I figured it didn’t matter really, that it would only upset him, make him think I wasn’t taking him or what he was going to show me seriously, which, in all honesty, I wasn’t. “You’re not going to believe this shit,” he said. “You’re not going to fucking believe it.”

Considering all the shit I was never supposed to fucking believe from our past—schemes, foolproof business ideas, or just the crap he’d bought or found or built—my expectations were pretty low, but I smiled at him encouragingly because we’d been friends so long.

We stepped out of his hot garage and into the even hotter morning, humid and suffocating, and we walked into the side yard. When he and Melissa first moved into the house, he set to work on this yard with considerable intent, building a small coop and clearing the brush and weeds that had grown there and setting it up for a half-dozen chicks he bought, telling me he planned to raise chickens. “Fresh eggs, man,” he told me, as if that alone were all the explanation anyone would need, but in a matter of days, a pack of wild dogs ran through his fencing and broke through his coop and slaughtered those chicks. A month or so later, he tore everything down and threw up an uneven chain-link fence, which had since rusted and half fallen over. It wasn’t much space, really, a dog run and nothing else, and he’d done little with it since except plant patches of sod there a couple of springs back, which had browned and died. The rest of the ground was made up of weeds or loosely packed reddish sand, and I figured he’d left it to the wild, but now in the middle of it there was a good-sized shed, which he must have only recently built.

“You’re right,” I told him. “That shed is, um, a pretty nice piece of construction.”

He shook his head. “Not the shed, jackass. What’s inside it,” he said. Then he smiled and looked at the shed and then back at me and said, “You don’t want to guess? Give you a hundred guesses and you’ll never get it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t care. Just open the shed. I got to get back home.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. Then he pretended to fuss over the lock and the door, stalling to build suspense and whatnot, until finally he opened the shed and then, with a sweeping wave, he stepped aside to allow me a good look, and for a moment all I could see was a bright white light, ethereal and ghostly and frightening.

Ralph then reached his hand right into that light, and I wanted to grab him, jerk him back from it, sure if he dipped any part of himself in there it would be melted right off, but then I heard him grab hold of some jingling contraption, and what he pulled out wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen, and certainly wasn’t what I expected to see. It looked like some kind of pearlescent undersized horse or overlarge goat or some bastardization of the two, with maybe something else—moose? sea lion?—thrown in for good measure. It stood just a head or so taller than Ralph, who wasn’t too tall to start with, and it was thin and sleek and strong-looking, with something rounded and unhorselike about its face. In truth, though, these observations came to me much later. At first, I found I couldn’t look right at it, like I was looking right into a flashlight or like I was driving into a rising sun, but judging by what I could see of it, it was an unsettling thing to look at, not ugly, but not pretty, either.

“What the hell is it?” I asked.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he said, and then he grabbed it roughly by the top of its head where there was a nearly translucent and wicked-looking horn growing there or planted there or something. “It’s a goddamn unicorn, Mano. Can you fucking believe it? I bought a goddamn unicorn off a goddamn Chinaman. And for cheap, too,” he said.

I was late getting home. The house was a minor disaster, as was Victor, our boy, who was wandering around the house in just his diaper, something—mac and cheese? whipped cream?—stuck to his chest. I found Sheila in our bathroom, half-dressed and half–made up.

“Jesus,” she said when she saw me. “You’re an hour late.”

“Sorry,” I said, and I picked up Victor, who’d grabbed me by the pants and then held his arms out to be lifted up. “You know Ralph. It’s hard to break away when he gets going,” I said. I played with Victor, peekaboo mostly, and I watched Sheila finish dressing, and then I asked, “You ready for this?”

She stopped fussing in the mirror and turned and smiled and posed, her hands thrown up and out, her hip thrust to the side, more like she was a cheerleader or some Hooters waitress than a real estate agent. “What do you think?” she asked.

She looked lovely, and for the first time I could remember, the sight of her made me sad.

“You look great,” I said.

“It’s my first open house, you know,” she said.

“I know.”

“I need more than ‘You look great,’” she said.

“You look so good, honey, I could take you and throw you on that bed right now—”

“Fine,” she said, interrupting me before I could finish my thought. “On the bed, okay. But would you buy a house from me?”

I laughed. “I would buy a house from you, and I already have a house.”

“You couldn’t afford it. You can’t afford the house you already have,” she said, but she smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “Next time, try not to spend so much time over at Rafael’s.”

“He hates it when you call him that,” I said.

“It’s his name. He should be used to it by now.”

“He goes by Ralph.”

She shrugged. “Ralph’s a boy’s name. What about Ralphie? Should I call him Ralphie?” She said this and went back to our room, and I would have had to holler to defend him, to remind her he hadn’t gone by Ralphie since we left middle school, and in the end decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Then she came out, an inch or two taller in her heels. She took Victor from me and kissed him, and then she kissed me, a long, deep kiss, and then she wiped the lipstick off my lips.

“Ralph’s got this new thing,” I said, taking Victor back from her.

“I’m sure he does,” she said. She found her purse and then her keys.

“This is,” I said. “Different.”

She was holding Victor again, giving him more kisses. “I shouldn’t be too late,” she said, “but if he gets hungry, there’s food for him in the fridge.”

“I mean, really, pretty different,” I said.

Then she handed me Victor again and said, “You can tell me about it when I get home. I have to go.”

“You won’t believe it,” I said.

“I’m sure I won’t,” she said, and then she opened the door and waved and said, “Love you two.” And then she was gone, and then Victor, who didn’t want her to be gone, started to cry.

I sat Victor on my knee and tried to distract him, tried to console him, but my heart wasn’t in it, and it wasn’t like crying was bad for him, and so I let him go at it for a little while.
After a while, he’ll stop,
I thought, but he didn’t, and then I got tired of the crying, but still had no idea what to do right then to stop it. I lifted him off my knee and held him so that his eyes met my eyes, though his were scrunched and wet and unseeing, and I said, “You want to go see something different?” I grabbed a cloth and wiped his chest and put a shirt on him and some shoes, then grabbed a couple of diapers to throw into the car and walked outside only to remember Sheila had taken the car. So I went back inside and grabbed the stroller, and twenty minutes and a few more crying jags later, we were back at Ralph’s house.

I walked us back around to the side yard and Ralph was there, and as far as I could tell, he hadn’t moved, not to go inside, not to go take a piss, nothing. That morning we had stood there looking at his unicorn for a good half hour not really saying much of anything, and then he had gone into the garage and had come back out again with two lawn chairs and a small cooler full of ice and beer. He was still sitting in his chair and the cooler was there, the lid open, the ice melted, the empty beer cans floating in the warm, dirty water.

He saw me and said, “You think I need to build a fence, like a real fence here?”

The sun was beating down on his high forehead, and he was sweaty and red. “I don’t know, Ralph,” I said.

“I think I need a fence,” he said.

I lifted Victor out of the stroller and set him on his unsteady feet and then opened the gate to the fence and nudged Victor into the yard. For the first time, Ralph noticed Victor was with me, and this brought him out of whatever state he’d fallen into, and he grabbed Victor, a little too roughly as far as I was concerned, as far as Victor was concerned, too, the suddenness of Ralph’s grab, how tightly he held Victor’s arm making Victor start crying all over again.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I said.

“Sorry, Mano,” he said. “Just. I don’t know what she’s like around really little ones, you know? I don’t want to spook her.”

What about spooking my boy? I wanted to say, but instead I just took Victor from him and sat him in my lap and tried again to calm him down, and then he must have seen Ralph’s unicorn because all of a sudden he became quiet and still, and all three of us sat there looking at it.

After he first told me it was a unicorn, and after I got over the initial shock of the thing, and when I was still just playing along, I asked him, “Does it have a name?” ignoring for the moment the unreality of the thing he was showing me, or, rather, the unreality of his belief in it.

“Yeah,” he said. “The Chinaman told me her name was Fable, but that name’s for crap if you ask me. So I’m thinking of changing it to Sabre Bitch,” and then he laughed, and then, slightly more seriously, he said, “Or maybe just Sabre, you know, ’cause of the kids.”

Then he pulled up a canvas bag, like a bag you might see in a cartoon expecting it to be full of oats or something, and he opened it and started rooting around in it with a scoop. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he needed to feed it soon, and I asked him what you were supposed to feed a thing like this, and he told me fairy dust, and I laughed and he said, “That’s no joke.” Then he opened the bag wide and showed me the fine, phosphorescent powder inside it. “The Chinaman threw it in as part of the package.”

“Fairy dust,” I said, my skepticism not even thinly veiled. “It looks like play sand you can buy at Walmart.” Then I spat on the ground and said, “Fairy dust” again.