1) I created a new blog for the comics I've been drawing. They're bad, I'll tell you right now. But you can find them by clicking on my blogger profile. The comics blog is called "Tree Talk."
2) Here is an imitation of an Amy Hempel story.
Duplex
Pam looks like she is ready to let Henry die. Henry is just an infant. He has a look on his face that isn’t scared so much as bemused. A quarter or something is lodged in his throat.
The look on Pam’s face tells me she is ready to run away from it. But you can’t give me the go ahead like that. For months we have been dreaming about leaving for the coast. We can’t let ourselves get caught up at the wrong time with the wrong thing.
The look on Pam’s face is the look that I want to give to someone who knows what to do. When Henry sits down on the carpet and starts to sway, I go to him and close my eyes as my finger goes into his mouth. I try to imagine that I’m scooping out a fingerful of peanut butter. It’s enough until I can pull out the blockage.
Henry chokes. This might be the last time we come here.
“Where did he get a coin?” I say to no one in particular.
“You should’ve seen your face,” says Pam.
From time to time Pam tells me that I look like my name should be Rosie, even though that is not my name. I guess it’s because of my red hair and pale skin. Alcohol makes my face blush a little bit.
She and I babysit Henry, the only child of a young and burgeoning Mormon couple living in the lower level of a duplex on Ivinson. The woman is pregnant again. Pam and I used to live in the upper level of the house until our landlord told us that we had to move. We had to move because we couldn’t pay all of our rent every time. He said that he was sorry to make us leave, that there was a young man of business who had just moved into town with money.
“Sorry,” he said quickly. “You know I like you girls.”
Then he paused.
“You have till next Friday,” he said.
Now Pam and I live in a single trailer across the tracks on the other side of town. We have a shed on the side where we keep our bikes because we have nothing else to put in there. The first time that I came home to Pam and the trailer Pam was sitting on the wooden porch outside making a wind chime out of a stick of wood, some string, and a bunch of old keys that she said she had found on a walk around town.
“I can’t believe I found all of these keys!” she kept saying. “In one day, in one day.”
When the Mormons found out that we had been kicked out, they were nicer about it than you would even think a Mormon couple to be. They said we could still watch Henry for them, like that was some kind of consolation. On the last day the wife gave us a pie that was partly resting on her giant belly.
“What a picture,” Pam had said.
“It’s boysenberry,” said the wife.
Five days a week I go to the call center where I work. A lot of people can say that they have worked there. Most of them can’t say that they worked there long. We have a saying at the call center. It goes We’re Always Here.
This saying is truer for some than it is for others.
Me, I’ve been Here for close to fifteen months. Twelve of those months were in the duplex. The other three in the trailer.
Pam’s job is a little different from mine. My hours working are spent on the phone asking people I would never talk to otherwise if they are satisfied with their lives. Most of these people hang up. Some say yes and then hang up.
Some say no.
Then I say, “Maybe if you had the proper insurance plan, you would feel more inclined to live a life of chances.”
The suits at the call center tell me that this works. I’m just thankful that I don’t work entirely on commission.
But Pam’s job. Pam works at a butcher’s shop. She absolutely is in love with her job at the butcher’s shop. There is a spectacle there that makes her giddy. She’s so in love with the job that she is great at being a clerk and a record keeper. She doesn’t have to cut anything. That’s not what she signed up for, she says. All this makes her indispensable. They let her choose her hours so that I could carpool with her to work during the week. What this means is that she doesn’t have to buy herself a car because she can use mine and just help pay for gas.
The car is fifteen years old. It is a Subaru. It runs well enough. In the mornings when we drive to work and in the evenings when we drive home Pam likes to say clever things to get us in the mood. Usually she just says old things in a dumb way. We Are Once More On Top Of The Road. Put On Your Hat, Partner.
I’m Tuning My Kazoo In The Rain.
That last one is for rainy days.
I usually don’t contribute to these sayings.
Pam and I have jobs. When we can, we also babysit for extra cash.
For months we have been dreaming of driving to the coast.
The Mormons come home just as the sun is starting to go down under the horizon. They come home and come in like trolls running from the moon. I got that one from Pam. I used to tell her that I thought trolls were afraid of the sun and turning into stone.
“That’s stupid,” she used to say.
The couple asks how Henry is doing. I say that he was fine. More than that, really, I tell them, the kid was an angel. Henry doesn’t do anything to spoil the story. He just sits there like still water. He is a baby.
After they give us our money, twenty dollars each, and after the wife has taken Henry into the bedroom, Pam tells the husband about a deer that she saw strung up at work earlier in the week. She tells him how it hung there and dripped blood down the driveway and into the gutter.
As long as it’s not Henry choking, I suppose she can tell him anything she wants. But in the car after it’s over I tell her that she shouldn’t mess with the religious people like that.
“I wasn’t messing,” she says. “It really was amazing to watch. It was like watching a spider trying to crawl out of the toilet you’ve just flushed. All that life just flowing away.”
“Still,” I say. “The man’s a man of God.”
“There’s only man, just man.”
She’s right, somehow. I don’t know. I don’t know what she means exactly or why I’m afraid of losing the babysitting job. I don’t particularly like the Mormons, I mean not enough to fear losing them. I don’t dislike them by any means. I guess they’re just another thing to do. They are just.
I keep driving. When we pass a convenience store Pam perks up.
“I Yell To You For Ice Cream,” she grins.
The thing about the coast is it is there, it is big, and what else is there. There is nothing else. Here there is a small town with low lights, so you can see the stars easily and fully. The starlight comes down like rain. Still at the coast is water. Ocean water that covers more of the earth than land does. The starlight doesn’t come down there like it does in small towns in the mountains, but instead the water reflects the stars so calmly that you can believe the stars actually live in two places at once. Suddenly you’re caught between heaven and heaven. This is the beach life, the kind of place that makes you think only one thing. That being, What in the world are we waiting for?
I asked that of Pam once while we were stopped at an intersection.
I said, “What in the world are we waiting for, Pam?”
She looked at me and said, “A Chevrolet.”
A Chevrolet.
“I’m So Excited,” said Pam, “And I Just Could Never, Ever Hide It!”
I tried to head to the coast one time, but I think I went for the wrong one. I never got there, anyway. In Kansas I was driving east. There was a tornado up ahead on the interstate, and highway patrolmen were there miles before herding everyone off onto the exits. They were trying to keep people safe.
In my car was everything that I cared about enough to take with me. Except Pam. Pam wasn’t there. This was during the time that we were in the duplex with the Mormon couple. She thought that she was in love with the Mormon husband. On some night he would stay up with her on the porch and talk about the planets they all would get in the afterlife. Pam thought that when he said they, he meant the two of them. That was not what he meant. I told Pam about it and she got defensive.
“You’re making it hard for me to believe,” she said.
“In what?”
“Do me a favor,” she said. “Stay away from my planet.”
“Pam,” I said. “This is the only planet you’ll ever see.”
I was even a little bummed out by this. So I took off. I had my clothes and my makeup. I brought my best dress so that I could wear it barefoot on the beach. But then I was stuck in a diner off some exit in Kansas, miles away from a tornado.
What happened is that I just kept ordering items off of the menu in the diner. I didn’t even realize it. I ate ice cream after ice cream, washing it down with coffee and a few beers. I was there for hours and hours. By the time the policemen came in to tell us all that we could slide on by the tornado, it was dark and I was low on gas money.
The tornado must have been dancing, I like to think. But I know that that is stupid. When I got back to town I told Pam that I was sorry.
“For what?” she said.
And then I took a job at the call center, always telling myself that a tornado, a sign that big, is not something that you can just forget about.
Pam’s love for the Mormon husband never really left. It just faded a little when we had to move out. That’s why she tries to sway him with stories of draining life and beautiful death. Sometimes I think that’s why she loves the job at the butcher’s so much. That being, because it allows her to pose as an expert for things that demand expertise.
She can describe a dead moose for hours. A dead duck for more, seeing that it once flew around the skies. Pam thinks this is similar to a religion. It looks to me like the Mormon husband is humoring her. This is something he is good at.
Pam just doesn’t really have an ex. I do. I have an ex. So I don’t feel desperate to know the feeling like Pam does. What it is about women, I don’t know, so hungry for the feeling of betrayal.
My ex was named Robert. I say was because I tell people that he is dead.
When they ask about my boyfriend, I say “He died.”
“Oh my god,” they say, “how?”
“He accidentally swallowed a tick,” I say.
Really Robert was a college student, and a little younger than me. He graduated and moved away to work at a business somewhere keeping their finances. The kid was just too scared to take me with him.
He had said, “We had a beautiful relationship. But if you come with me we might end on a bad note. Let’s just leave it at what we had.”
I wanted to suck him dry from the inside out. I settled for the next best thing.
The next time we are set to babysit for the Mormons is a Friday evening. We will go there after we are done at work, so around five or five-thirty.
I drive to the butcher’s to pick up Pam. I get there and she is standing outside, looking at a dog that is looking at the meat in the butcher’s shop. She sees me and comes to get into the car.
“What a boring day,” she says. “How was work?”
“Fine,” I say. “Same. Boring.”
“Yeah,” Pam says.
We drive a few blocks to the Mormons’ house. To that duplex.
“Rolling, Rolling, Rolling,” Pam sings.
I had said the day was boring to Pam, but it really wasn’t. Some of it was boring, but in the afternoon I made a call to a man who happened to live in Oregon. He was in Lincoln City, so close to the coast.
“Are you happy on the coast?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Does the water seem so beautiful that it’s scary?” I asked.
“What is this?” he said.
“I want to live there,” I told him.
“It’s kind of expensive,” he said.
We made big talk like that for twenty minutes. I swore that I could hear sand on his end of the phone. Why I didn’t tell Pam, I don’t know. I wasn’t sure that she could handle it.
We park in front of the duplex and I listen to Pam talk aloud to herself about the stories she will tell Henry. The ones about the buffalo that came in to the shop. The ones about the dogs that she sometimes feeds out behind the shop. She calls that one the Circle of Life. I’m not sure that that is the right title.
There is one other thing about the trip to Kansas that I haven’t told yet. It is really the only other thing that I remember about the trip. I try not to think about that failure too much, but like most failures there are one or two things that still and forever come through.
I was a little drunk at the diner, waiting for the tornado to move along somewhere else. Some sounds came through the open windows as I ate and drank. They sounded so beautiful and happy to me. I thought about the town that I had left, with the man on the downtown streets who played saxophone for free on summer nights.
“Is someone playing music out there?” I asked the man next to me.
“That’s a girl screaming,” the guy had said. “Probably Helen’s kids are running around.”
I remember that feeling while I am in the car with Pam, sitting out in front of the duplex. When a dog barks outside somewhere, I shush Pam.
“What was that?” I say.
“What?”
“It was a girl screaming,” I say.
“What?” says Pam. “What? Who?”
There is a silence as Pam and I sit in the car listening. The dog barks again, but that is not what Pam is waiting for. Pam will not get what she is waiting for.
We are surrounded by a town.
And there is a girl screaming. But only I can hear her.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
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Here's one. Well, it's a rough draft of one. I wrote it in two sittings. I think it's pretty clear where I stopped and picked back up.
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The guy stands next to a big cottonwood. The giant trees are everywhere and the cotton floats all around on the wind like homeless birds, some landing in the weeds or in the cactus. Some of the bigger pieces are stuck to the guy’s skin where he is greasy from all of the bug repellent. He glistens in the sun. I love the way he looks with those fluffy white pieces on him. I want to wear him like a shirt. I want him to cover me from the cold.
The guy approached me a little while earlier in the park near the small grove of trees. He was juggling these long black sticks three and then four at a time. I was there hoping to find the creek a little deeper than usual. I was just passing through the grassy area on my way to the creek. It had been raining more than usual and it was time to splash around in the water. But when I saw the guy juggling in the grass I couldn’t help just stopping to watch him. When he saw me he came over.
He said, “Do you want to learn?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh.”
“You just looked kind of musical,” I said. “The way your body was still but your hands were quick. I liked it, is all.”
He got this odd smile on his face. The guy had a bag with him, for the juggling sticks I guessed. He reached in and pulled out a bottle of water, taking a drink and making a pronounced show of how good the water tasted. His hands were brilliant and clean.
“Do you want to go for a walk or something?” I said.
“Do you want to walk through the trees?” he said. “Across the creek.”
“That’s where I want to go,” I said.
So we crossed the river and walked around in the brush. There weren’t any houses over there, not yet. The sun was starting to go down and the bugs came out of their hiding places. The guy pulled an aerosol can out of his bag and sprayed himself until he dripped. He offered the can to me, so I just held out my hands to him. He sprayed enough into my palms. I rubbed them together and wiped on my arms and bare shoulders. I held my hands out again, got some more spray, and rubbed my calves and thighs. My skin felt smooth and good.
When we got far enough away from the river I stopped and turned to the guy.
“What’s your name?” he said.
I told him, “Jane.”
Jane is not my name.
I said, “I don’t want to know your name.”
I tried to make a move out of saying this. I blinked in an awkward way and turned my head a little bit. I know that guys like that, the pretend silly girl. I appeared sweet. I can do that well. So then he kissed me when I did my little dance. That was what I wanted.
And now here he is with the cotton all over his skin, looking like an old teddy bear falling apart. I want to say that I love him just to see what happens. I know that in a little while it will all be over, and for us to have the silly fleeting romance would probably make the whole thing complete. As he kisses me, his hands work up and down my back, then up around my neck and face. He brushes some hair out of my eyes and he lightly runs a finger down the back of my neck. I pull his hips closer to mine. He does have really great hands, but he is gentler than I want him to be. I want him to cup his hand around my neck. But he is a juggler, like a musician, careful with his instruments and tiny in his own way. See what I want from romance? I want to burn shit down. Right now I want things to be sickly and perfect.
He steps away, tripping a little bit over his bag. The guy reaches down and takes another sip from his bottle of water. Everything he does seems planned out far ahead of time. He comes to me again and starts to kiss me.
“Take off your belt,” I say.
He looks nervous, but he listens to me. He looks nervous and apologetic like a young boy. For a second I wonder how old he is. Then I look at his clean and strong hands. Like a fool, he hands me the belt after he has taken it off. I smile and laugh inside a little, then I feel bright.
“Tie me to this tree,” I say.
“What?” he says.
“Tie me,” I say, “to this tree.”
“But why?” he says.
“Do it,” I say. “Come on. We’re here.”
He looks confused and I can tell that he isn’t just putting on a show. With one hand he holds his shorts up and with the other he carries the belt to the tree. I stand in front of that tree and put my arms around it. The cottonwood feels better than the guy does. It is bigger and thicker. I hug it until he wraps my wrists together and locks the belt.
“That’s not tight enough,” I say.
And so he undoes it and retries. The second time around he gets it tight enough so that I can’t escape from the tree.
“Now what,” he says.
“Save me,” I say.
I can’t see him because of the size of the tree, but I can tell from the moment of silence and stasis that he is thinking about his life in general. Then I feel his hands on my wrists and things getting looser.
“No,” I say. “Not like that. Make it real.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he says.
“I want you to save me like I am tied to this tree,” I say. “Now make it real.”
“Can we just take a minute,” he says. “What is this, anyway?”
“Help!” I scream.
“Are you okay?” he says. “Whoa, hey.”
“Save me!”
I think that the guy is starting to get it. He seems to panic a little bit and move around. Every time he goes back to undoing the belt from around my wrists I stop my pleading and just tell him no. Then I become a trapped young girl again and yell in a way that should make him feel like a savior.
He runs around the tree and looks at me.
“Help,” I plead. “Get me loose!”
I look over my shoulder to make it seem like someone is coming.
I say, “Get these ropes off of me!”
He looks at me with these eyes. These eyes! There is chaos in there. I glance toward his bag, and he goes there. He looks back up at me as he digs with his hands in the big bag.
“They’re coming,” I whisper in his direction. “Save me with your sword.”
He pulls out one of his juggling sticks, this big black thing, and runs to me. The guy looks behind me and ahead of me, then he goes to the belt and starts hitting it with his stick.
“Say something,” I say. “Talk to me.”
“I’ll save you,” he says.
“Louder,” I say.
“I’ll save you,” he says again.
Then suddenly my arms are free and the belt is on the ground. The guy comes around, looking different from before. He grabs me and kisses me a little. He picks me up and carries me to the next nearest tree, where he lays my body down on a small clearing of dirt and starts to undress me. This is, more or less, satisfying for me. He is on top of me for a while, looking like he can’t believe what he is doing. I look at the sky and think of drifting on the air currents and then settling on this person’s sticky arm, where I burrow myself deep.
When he is finished he looks at me and then gets up. The dirt has stuck to the parts of his body that were repelling insects.
“I need you to take me somewhere,” I say.
“Jane,” he says.
“I need you to take me somewhere,” I say. “Okay?”
In his truck we roll down Second Street until we get downtown. I watch the buildings as they go past. Within those buildings are people, strong people and weak people. They’re all separated. On a rooftop somewhere there has got to be a kid who climbed the maintenance ladder. He won’t find anybody from way up there.
Last week I found a newspaper on the ground. I took it as a sign. In the obituaries was my name. I knew that I was alive for the most part, and I knew that my name is not exactly a rare one, but still I was shaken by the whole thing. There was a part of me, somehow, in that paper. Somewhere I’d lost just a little bit of myself somewhere else in town and died, from old age or from gunshots, and then been written up in the tribune.
What you do after that? You wander around and you make dreams come true. People tell you to live sometimes. I thought about that when I saw my name in the newspaper. Since then I have been walking the streets looking for things that are meaningful. But I know that life is not meaningful forever, so I look for things that will be meaningful for a little while and then no longer meaningful. I look for the things that will resemble life, things that can just pick up life and hold it for a little while until they dissolve.
The guy’s truck is not a good one. It is old and dirty and full of junk. It is an automatic, and I think that that makes sense when I watch the guy drive with overwhelming timidity. I am bored with the guy’s truck. I don’t know exactly where we are going, but I see a classic-car show in a parking lot next to the movie theater.
“There,” I say. “Just drop me off.”
There is a big sign that says “Classic Cars 2009.” It hangs from the movie theater next door and has an arrow that points to the parking lot. The guy pulls over his truck and I step out. He rolls down the window.
“Hey,” he says. “What about? I mean, how can I reach you?”
His truck is a sore near this magnificent parking lot full of fine automobiles.
“It’s time,” I say. “Go on.”
The sun is almost completely down now. It looks as though I have gotten to the car show just before it closes up. Some of the drivers are getting into their cars. Two or three have driven off of the lot and gone home. I walk around and admire the machines. They are all sparkling and old as stones. They are older than I am. The men, they lean against the cars and look at them just as the passersby do. Some have their hoods up to reveal their massive engines. Some don’t.
I stop next to an orange car with a yellow interior. Two men lean against the side of the car and watch me watch the car. One tells me that it is a Woodie.
“1931,” the other one says.
“That’s old,” I say.
“Older than most,” he says.
The car has a spare tire above the front wheel rim. It looks very much out of place there. I run my hand along the wooden panel on the doors, and I can see one of the men get squeamish.
“Don’t touch the Woodie,” the other one says.
I don’t know exactly how to act at a car show, so I leave the men and keep walking. I don’t have anything to ask the guys with the Woodie car anyway. Car knowledge is something that I have never had.
A man touches my shoulder, so I turn around and face him.
“You look a little lost,” he says.
“I’m just looking at the cars,” I say.
This one is short and hairy. He has a thick beard and chest hair that crawls out of his shirt. His arms are big and his hands are dirty with grease.
“Let me show you my racecar,” he says.
It is just a little car, over in the corner of the parking lot. The thing is bright white, and has all of the accessories that I imagine a racecar has. There are roll bars, an American flag pasted on the window, big seats that sink low into the car, big headlights, a little wing on the back.
It is not a classic car, and I tell him so.
“Yeah,” he says. “It was made in ‘96.”
“Can you bring a car like that to a classic show?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says.
I keep looking at the car. He does not really say anything while I go around and around. The seats look so deep inside the car that they appear to be sitting on the ground underneath.
“I want to get inside,” I say.
He opens the door and lets me in, then he goes around and gets in the driver’s seat. I feel so tightly hugged in the seat that I am afraid to try to move. The seatbelt clicks when I really strap myself in. I can barely see over the dashboard. It’s a good feeling overall, like I’m being held by some larger-than-life mother. The guy looks at me and then buckles his belt as well. He puts his hands on the wheel and then brings one down to the gearshift. His legs are just long enough to reach the pedals below. He makes some racing noises as he pretends to drive.
The keys are in the console. I take them out and hand them to the guy.
“Let’s go,” I say. “Take me somewhere.”
He looks around in a cautious way and puts the keys in.
“It’s dark anyway,” he says. “Yeah, let’s just go.”
The car grunts to a start. It is a great roar as the guy puts it into gear. He goes slow as he weaves through the other parked cars and out to the street. As we are stopped, waiting to pull into that street, a man comes running up from behind us. He is yelling. The guy looks at me and then pulls out quickly into the street. He shouts as he does this.
“Who was that?” I say.
He finally gets to talking now.
“The thing about racecar driving,” he says, “is that it’s all instinct. You have to know when to punch it and when to take it easy. You have to be aware of what’s around you. A lot of drivers have co-drivers now, I think, these guys who tell you where the turns are coming from. A good driver doesn’t need any of that co-driver stuff. You just know.”
“This isn’t your car?” I say. “This isn’t your car. Okay.”
“How they did it in Two-Lane Blacktop? That’s how I do it. Did you see that?”
“I was just thinking about it, I think,” I say.
“Well,” he says. “It’s just like that. Just like that.”
He is going very fast down a main road, weaving in and out of other cars and other drivers. I start to feel a little excited with it all.
“It’s not all about speed,” he says.
“It’s not?”
“No,” he says. “Most think that it is. But it’s more about instinct than speed.”
He drives through a red light.
“But,” he says. “But you do have to go really fast too.”
We drive and drive and drive. The guy whoops from time to time and speeds up. On the highway we are mostly alone. I think that no one can see us. I say this out loud just to hear how it sounds in the air. The guy agrees with me and turns the headlights off for a few seconds and then turns them on again.
“Stealth,” he says. “We call that stealth.”
“Who does?” I say.
He thinks about it.
“You and me,” he says.
The road is supposed to be free. That is how it is talked about all the time. It feels that way for a little while, but then it is really a slow death. You can drive really fast, still it takes a lot of time to get anywhere. Sometimes it is little more than a waste. The guy and I drive until morning. We do not talk about much except for the car. I listen to him talk about what he dreams racing to be. He is probably right. We are all racing in a way.
In the morning we find a small town and pull over into a diner for some breakfast. We sit down in a booth and look at each other across the table. His hair is dirty. He might be the shortest man I have ever known. At least he is the shortest man to ever drive a car in front of me, especially in the sunken racecar seats. This amazes me somehow. I suddenly don’t know how he can even see the road from a perch like that. Maybe he wasn’t even thinking about the road.
I say, “I had a short grandfather.”
“What does that mean?” he says.
“I had a really short grandfather,” I say. “He married a taller woman. Then they had my dad, who was taller than his dad but still pretty short. My dad married a much taller woman, and they had me. I’m pretty tall.”
“How tall are you?” he asks.
“Almost six feet tall,” I say.
“Do you mind short men?” he says.
“No,” I say. “Weren’t you listening?”
“Yeah,” he says.
He looks around for our waitress, but nobody is really around the restaurant. The sun is about to come up and thinks are mostly empty around the town.
“Do you think we should’ve waited before seating ourselves?” he asks. “I thought in these places you’re just supposed to sit down somewhere. It’s morning already. Shouldn’t there be people in here, the old people who drink coffee so early and just talk?”
I am not really listening, but I look into his bearded face. I try to see through the hair and into his skin. I consider instinct for a brief moment.
“When my dad died I wrote the notice for the paper,” I say.
“He died?”
“He was skiing when it happened,” I say. “He hit a tree. I think that the sun must have blinded him or something, because he was a good skier. I don’t know for sure though.”
“And you wrote it in the paper?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“That’s rough,” he says. “Man, in the papers, those sad little pages. Like you could ever fill in a life in a small box like that. Not even a page.”
“I know,” I say.
“What did you write?” he says.
“I remember when I was a girl,” I say, “that my dad took me one time to California. We had a small shack on the beach for a little while. We walked inland and into a vineyard. He told me not to tell anyone what we did. We just got a bunch of grapes and walked out to the beach. The grapes smelled so good, and the smell just kind of flooded out when you bit into them. I lay on the beach and ate grapes while my dad waded around in the water.”
“So what did you write?”
“I don’t remember much else with him,” I say. “My parents divorced pretty early on. I didn’t see much of him. Why I was asked to write about him is so strange.”
“What did you write?” he says again.
I look at the short, bearded man.
“Don’t leave me,” I say.
“Tell me what you wrote in the paper,” he says.
I look at the racecar outside and think about being held in the sunken seats.
“Let’s just drive forever,” I say.
“Tell me,” he says. “Okay, but tell me.”
Show
The guy stands next to a big cottonwood. The giant trees are everywhere and the cotton floats all around on the wind like homeless birds, some landing in the weeds or in the cactus. Some of the bigger pieces are stuck to the guy’s skin where he is greasy from all of the bug repellent. He glistens in the sun. I love the way he looks with those fluffy white pieces on him. I want to wear him like a shirt. I want him to cover me from the cold.
The guy approached me a little while earlier in the park near the small grove of trees. He was juggling these long black sticks three and then four at a time. I was there hoping to find the creek a little deeper than usual. I was just passing through the grassy area on my way to the creek. It had been raining more than usual and it was time to splash around in the water. But when I saw the guy juggling in the grass I couldn’t help just stopping to watch him. When he saw me he came over.
He said, “Do you want to learn?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh.”
“You just looked kind of musical,” I said. “The way your body was still but your hands were quick. I liked it, is all.”
He got this odd smile on his face. The guy had a bag with him, for the juggling sticks I guessed. He reached in and pulled out a bottle of water, taking a drink and making a pronounced show of how good the water tasted. His hands were brilliant and clean.
“Do you want to go for a walk or something?” I said.
“Do you want to walk through the trees?” he said. “Across the creek.”
“That’s where I want to go,” I said.
So we crossed the river and walked around in the brush. There weren’t any houses over there, not yet. The sun was starting to go down and the bugs came out of their hiding places. The guy pulled an aerosol can out of his bag and sprayed himself until he dripped. He offered the can to me, so I just held out my hands to him. He sprayed enough into my palms. I rubbed them together and wiped on my arms and bare shoulders. I held my hands out again, got some more spray, and rubbed my calves and thighs. My skin felt smooth and good.
When we got far enough away from the river I stopped and turned to the guy.
“What’s your name?” he said.
I told him, “Jane.”
Jane is not my name.
I said, “I don’t want to know your name.”
I tried to make a move out of saying this. I blinked in an awkward way and turned my head a little bit. I know that guys like that, the pretend silly girl. I appeared sweet. I can do that well. So then he kissed me when I did my little dance. That was what I wanted.
And now here he is with the cotton all over his skin, looking like an old teddy bear falling apart. I want to say that I love him just to see what happens. I know that in a little while it will all be over, and for us to have the silly fleeting romance would probably make the whole thing complete. As he kisses me, his hands work up and down my back, then up around my neck and face. He brushes some hair out of my eyes and he lightly runs a finger down the back of my neck. I pull his hips closer to mine. He does have really great hands, but he is gentler than I want him to be. I want him to cup his hand around my neck. But he is a juggler, like a musician, careful with his instruments and tiny in his own way. See what I want from romance? I want to burn shit down. Right now I want things to be sickly and perfect.
He steps away, tripping a little bit over his bag. The guy reaches down and takes another sip from his bottle of water. Everything he does seems planned out far ahead of time. He comes to me again and starts to kiss me.
“Take off your belt,” I say.
He looks nervous, but he listens to me. He looks nervous and apologetic like a young boy. For a second I wonder how old he is. Then I look at his clean and strong hands. Like a fool, he hands me the belt after he has taken it off. I smile and laugh inside a little, then I feel bright.
“Tie me to this tree,” I say.
“What?” he says.
“Tie me,” I say, “to this tree.”
“But why?” he says.
“Do it,” I say. “Come on. We’re here.”
He looks confused and I can tell that he isn’t just putting on a show. With one hand he holds his shorts up and with the other he carries the belt to the tree. I stand in front of that tree and put my arms around it. The cottonwood feels better than the guy does. It is bigger and thicker. I hug it until he wraps my wrists together and locks the belt.
“That’s not tight enough,” I say.
And so he undoes it and retries. The second time around he gets it tight enough so that I can’t escape from the tree.
“Now what,” he says.
“Save me,” I say.
I can’t see him because of the size of the tree, but I can tell from the moment of silence and stasis that he is thinking about his life in general. Then I feel his hands on my wrists and things getting looser.
“No,” I say. “Not like that. Make it real.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he says.
“I want you to save me like I am tied to this tree,” I say. “Now make it real.”
“Can we just take a minute,” he says. “What is this, anyway?”
“Help!” I scream.
“Are you okay?” he says. “Whoa, hey.”
“Save me!”
I think that the guy is starting to get it. He seems to panic a little bit and move around. Every time he goes back to undoing the belt from around my wrists I stop my pleading and just tell him no. Then I become a trapped young girl again and yell in a way that should make him feel like a savior.
He runs around the tree and looks at me.
“Help,” I plead. “Get me loose!”
I look over my shoulder to make it seem like someone is coming.
I say, “Get these ropes off of me!”
He looks at me with these eyes. These eyes! There is chaos in there. I glance toward his bag, and he goes there. He looks back up at me as he digs with his hands in the big bag.
“They’re coming,” I whisper in his direction. “Save me with your sword.”
He pulls out one of his juggling sticks, this big black thing, and runs to me. The guy looks behind me and ahead of me, then he goes to the belt and starts hitting it with his stick.
“Say something,” I say. “Talk to me.”
“I’ll save you,” he says.
“Louder,” I say.
“I’ll save you,” he says again.
Then suddenly my arms are free and the belt is on the ground. The guy comes around, looking different from before. He grabs me and kisses me a little. He picks me up and carries me to the next nearest tree, where he lays my body down on a small clearing of dirt and starts to undress me. This is, more or less, satisfying for me. He is on top of me for a while, looking like he can’t believe what he is doing. I look at the sky and think of drifting on the air currents and then settling on this person’s sticky arm, where I burrow myself deep.
When he is finished he looks at me and then gets up. The dirt has stuck to the parts of his body that were repelling insects.
“I need you to take me somewhere,” I say.
“Jane,” he says.
“I need you to take me somewhere,” I say. “Okay?”
In his truck we roll down Second Street until we get downtown. I watch the buildings as they go past. Within those buildings are people, strong people and weak people. They’re all separated. On a rooftop somewhere there has got to be a kid who climbed the maintenance ladder. He won’t find anybody from way up there.
Last week I found a newspaper on the ground. I took it as a sign. In the obituaries was my name. I knew that I was alive for the most part, and I knew that my name is not exactly a rare one, but still I was shaken by the whole thing. There was a part of me, somehow, in that paper. Somewhere I’d lost just a little bit of myself somewhere else in town and died, from old age or from gunshots, and then been written up in the tribune.
What you do after that? You wander around and you make dreams come true. People tell you to live sometimes. I thought about that when I saw my name in the newspaper. Since then I have been walking the streets looking for things that are meaningful. But I know that life is not meaningful forever, so I look for things that will be meaningful for a little while and then no longer meaningful. I look for the things that will resemble life, things that can just pick up life and hold it for a little while until they dissolve.
The guy’s truck is not a good one. It is old and dirty and full of junk. It is an automatic, and I think that that makes sense when I watch the guy drive with overwhelming timidity. I am bored with the guy’s truck. I don’t know exactly where we are going, but I see a classic-car show in a parking lot next to the movie theater.
“There,” I say. “Just drop me off.”
There is a big sign that says “Classic Cars 2009.” It hangs from the movie theater next door and has an arrow that points to the parking lot. The guy pulls over his truck and I step out. He rolls down the window.
“Hey,” he says. “What about? I mean, how can I reach you?”
His truck is a sore near this magnificent parking lot full of fine automobiles.
“It’s time,” I say. “Go on.”
The sun is almost completely down now. It looks as though I have gotten to the car show just before it closes up. Some of the drivers are getting into their cars. Two or three have driven off of the lot and gone home. I walk around and admire the machines. They are all sparkling and old as stones. They are older than I am. The men, they lean against the cars and look at them just as the passersby do. Some have their hoods up to reveal their massive engines. Some don’t.
I stop next to an orange car with a yellow interior. Two men lean against the side of the car and watch me watch the car. One tells me that it is a Woodie.
“1931,” the other one says.
“That’s old,” I say.
“Older than most,” he says.
The car has a spare tire above the front wheel rim. It looks very much out of place there. I run my hand along the wooden panel on the doors, and I can see one of the men get squeamish.
“Don’t touch the Woodie,” the other one says.
I don’t know exactly how to act at a car show, so I leave the men and keep walking. I don’t have anything to ask the guys with the Woodie car anyway. Car knowledge is something that I have never had.
A man touches my shoulder, so I turn around and face him.
“You look a little lost,” he says.
“I’m just looking at the cars,” I say.
This one is short and hairy. He has a thick beard and chest hair that crawls out of his shirt. His arms are big and his hands are dirty with grease.
“Let me show you my racecar,” he says.
It is just a little car, over in the corner of the parking lot. The thing is bright white, and has all of the accessories that I imagine a racecar has. There are roll bars, an American flag pasted on the window, big seats that sink low into the car, big headlights, a little wing on the back.
It is not a classic car, and I tell him so.
“Yeah,” he says. “It was made in ‘96.”
“Can you bring a car like that to a classic show?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says.
I keep looking at the car. He does not really say anything while I go around and around. The seats look so deep inside the car that they appear to be sitting on the ground underneath.
“I want to get inside,” I say.
He opens the door and lets me in, then he goes around and gets in the driver’s seat. I feel so tightly hugged in the seat that I am afraid to try to move. The seatbelt clicks when I really strap myself in. I can barely see over the dashboard. It’s a good feeling overall, like I’m being held by some larger-than-life mother. The guy looks at me and then buckles his belt as well. He puts his hands on the wheel and then brings one down to the gearshift. His legs are just long enough to reach the pedals below. He makes some racing noises as he pretends to drive.
The keys are in the console. I take them out and hand them to the guy.
“Let’s go,” I say. “Take me somewhere.”
He looks around in a cautious way and puts the keys in.
“It’s dark anyway,” he says. “Yeah, let’s just go.”
The car grunts to a start. It is a great roar as the guy puts it into gear. He goes slow as he weaves through the other parked cars and out to the street. As we are stopped, waiting to pull into that street, a man comes running up from behind us. He is yelling. The guy looks at me and then pulls out quickly into the street. He shouts as he does this.
“Who was that?” I say.
He finally gets to talking now.
“The thing about racecar driving,” he says, “is that it’s all instinct. You have to know when to punch it and when to take it easy. You have to be aware of what’s around you. A lot of drivers have co-drivers now, I think, these guys who tell you where the turns are coming from. A good driver doesn’t need any of that co-driver stuff. You just know.”
“This isn’t your car?” I say. “This isn’t your car. Okay.”
“How they did it in Two-Lane Blacktop? That’s how I do it. Did you see that?”
“I was just thinking about it, I think,” I say.
“Well,” he says. “It’s just like that. Just like that.”
He is going very fast down a main road, weaving in and out of other cars and other drivers. I start to feel a little excited with it all.
“It’s not all about speed,” he says.
“It’s not?”
“No,” he says. “Most think that it is. But it’s more about instinct than speed.”
He drives through a red light.
“But,” he says. “But you do have to go really fast too.”
We drive and drive and drive. The guy whoops from time to time and speeds up. On the highway we are mostly alone. I think that no one can see us. I say this out loud just to hear how it sounds in the air. The guy agrees with me and turns the headlights off for a few seconds and then turns them on again.
“Stealth,” he says. “We call that stealth.”
“Who does?” I say.
He thinks about it.
“You and me,” he says.
The road is supposed to be free. That is how it is talked about all the time. It feels that way for a little while, but then it is really a slow death. You can drive really fast, still it takes a lot of time to get anywhere. Sometimes it is little more than a waste. The guy and I drive until morning. We do not talk about much except for the car. I listen to him talk about what he dreams racing to be. He is probably right. We are all racing in a way.
In the morning we find a small town and pull over into a diner for some breakfast. We sit down in a booth and look at each other across the table. His hair is dirty. He might be the shortest man I have ever known. At least he is the shortest man to ever drive a car in front of me, especially in the sunken racecar seats. This amazes me somehow. I suddenly don’t know how he can even see the road from a perch like that. Maybe he wasn’t even thinking about the road.
I say, “I had a short grandfather.”
“What does that mean?” he says.
“I had a really short grandfather,” I say. “He married a taller woman. Then they had my dad, who was taller than his dad but still pretty short. My dad married a much taller woman, and they had me. I’m pretty tall.”
“How tall are you?” he asks.
“Almost six feet tall,” I say.
“Do you mind short men?” he says.
“No,” I say. “Weren’t you listening?”
“Yeah,” he says.
He looks around for our waitress, but nobody is really around the restaurant. The sun is about to come up and thinks are mostly empty around the town.
“Do you think we should’ve waited before seating ourselves?” he asks. “I thought in these places you’re just supposed to sit down somewhere. It’s morning already. Shouldn’t there be people in here, the old people who drink coffee so early and just talk?”
I am not really listening, but I look into his bearded face. I try to see through the hair and into his skin. I consider instinct for a brief moment.
“When my dad died I wrote the notice for the paper,” I say.
“He died?”
“He was skiing when it happened,” I say. “He hit a tree. I think that the sun must have blinded him or something, because he was a good skier. I don’t know for sure though.”
“And you wrote it in the paper?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“That’s rough,” he says. “Man, in the papers, those sad little pages. Like you could ever fill in a life in a small box like that. Not even a page.”
“I know,” I say.
“What did you write?” he says.
“I remember when I was a girl,” I say, “that my dad took me one time to California. We had a small shack on the beach for a little while. We walked inland and into a vineyard. He told me not to tell anyone what we did. We just got a bunch of grapes and walked out to the beach. The grapes smelled so good, and the smell just kind of flooded out when you bit into them. I lay on the beach and ate grapes while my dad waded around in the water.”
“So what did you write?”
“I don’t remember much else with him,” I say. “My parents divorced pretty early on. I didn’t see much of him. Why I was asked to write about him is so strange.”
“What did you write?” he says again.
I look at the short, bearded man.
“Don’t leave me,” I say.
“Tell me what you wrote in the paper,” he says.
I look at the racecar outside and think about being held in the sunken seats.
“Let’s just drive forever,” I say.
“Tell me,” he says. “Okay, but tell me.”
Monday, June 15, 2009
A Tremendous Thing
Right, well. I haven't posted anything here lately because I'm submitting stories to journals that accept only previously unpublished work. "Published" includes blogs.
Thus far I am 0 for 6 on submitted stories. So I'll post the rejected ones here.
First up, "A Tremendous Thing."
A Tremendous Thing
I am standing in a house of bees. The house is mine. It smells like honey and love from the outside. Inside it just smells dead. For a few minutes I watch the clock, then when it is time I walk outside and stand on the porch, where I wait for the people come.
A bee stings me while I wait. I want to feel it but don’t.
Then fifteen minutes later people come. There is a woman with two young children. They walk from the gravel parking area a little ways away. I watch them intently as they come, checking myself over a little and shaking out any sleepy dumbness that might still be in me. Last night the bees seemed restless.
When she gets to me she stands and looks at me.
I say, “You’re looking for the bee-house? This is it.”
“I know,” she says. “I’ve been here before.”
A few months ago I quit my job. I was a wedding photographer. The thing is, a lot of people have dreams about their weddings, and those dreams include a certain kind of photographer. Brides especially seem to have a thing with photographers who are covered with red spots and aloe cream. I don’t know why. I guess I never asked them why. It’s just a blemish, I suppose, on the whiteness of things.
And we can’t have that.
Outside the house I wrap the children’s bare arms and legs with saran wrap, because it is all that I have that could work. I look at the woman.
“You’ve been here before?” I say. “Really?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know why I lied. I know people who have.”
“Next time cover yourselves,” I say. “I mean, Christ, there’s bees in there.”
The children don’t seem to mind the wrap or the duct tape that closes up their sleeves. I try to put some on the woman too, but she refuses.
“I think I should brave it,” she says.
“Sure?” I say.
“Don’t you?” she says.
“It’s all I know,” I say.
We go inside, and I show them around. The house is not a big house. It is more of a shack, really. Outside it is painted white. Inside it mostly looks like wood. If you dream really hard, you can imagine that you’re in the woods, even though you’re in a house.
The woman starts to examine the walls, and then she makes a noise.
“Yikes,” she said. “They’re real.”
She turns to the kids.
“They’re real, all right,” she says to them.
I take them first to the back bedroom, which has my bed and dresser. That’s about it in there. I tell them that this is where I live.
The bigger of the children says, “You live here?”
“Of course,” I say, and look at the woman because I want to make fun of the kid a little but know that I probably shouldn’t.
The woman understands, though, and nods.
The kid says, “I would be scared of the bees.”
“It’s not the bees that can hurt you,” I say.
The woman looks at me. I look back. I had meant to sound smart in front of the kids, wise like a wizard. The little one seems to buy it, the bigger one no.
The kid says, “No, it is.”
The woman waits for my reply. I guess she is on my side, and for a moment I think she’s gorgeous in her dumb look. I stay quiet for a second.
She says, “You only hurt yourself, right?”
And I think, these can’t be her kids.
Everyone lets everything go, and we move into the living bathroom. I tell them that it is usually wet and steamy in here and that the bees don’t like the walls around the bathroom. They nod.
Next is the living room, which has bookshelves and chairs.
“Go ahead,” I say to them. “Sit down and feel what it’s like.”
They do.
“If you stay real quiet,” I say, “you can hear them in the walls.”
For the most part this isn’t true, but people always buy it. They sit on the edge of their seats and try to point their ears in the direction that seems the most bee-like.
The woman says, “I can hear it! I can! Kids, listen.”
The big kid says, “I am. I just hear us.”
The little one says nothing. The big kid is right, because there is no noise but our silly human noise.
As we’re sitting and listening for the bees, someone knocks on the door. Outside there is insurance man that I called the week before. I tell him to wait and come back inside.
I say to the woman, “Okay, it’s time to keep moving.”
But they don’t listen. Up in the corner of the room some of the bees have come through a tiny crack and are flying around with a purpose. The visitors are entranced by this. I let them have their fill, and eventually the bees fly into the bedroom and land on the curtain that covers my bed.
So I take the three people into the kitchen and offer them some honey. I have big jars of it sitting all over the place. The people assume that the honey is from the house, but it’s not. It’s from a supermarket downtown. There is honey in the house, sure, but I don’t know how to get it. I’m not a carpenter or a beekeeper. I’m just a salesman and a guide.
The people eat some honey with crackers and then look around the kitchen.
“This whole place smells like honey,” she says. “That’s just, it’s really pretty.”
By the table the little kid is looking at a bee that has landed on his arm. For a second I think about what the kid would look like completely covered with bees. Then I think about him flying away, carried by bees.
I say out loud, “Someday this house will be carried away by bees.”
I try to say it like I was actually dreaming it first, and saying it out loud only by accident. This usually works. This was how it started. I think that lately I actually have been dreaming it.
The woman in her beautiful way nods in approval and then chomps a cracker with honey.
And then, shortly after they arrived, the woman and the kids are gone. After they pay me forty dollars.
Outside the insurance man is standing with a few people.
He says, “I hope you don’t mind, but I told them you were already on a tour.”
“We can wait,” one of them says.
“Thanks,” I say. “I don’t mind. Excuse me, people, but I need to have a meeting with this man.”
Inside the insurance man asks if the living room is the best place.
“I mean, with the bees and everything,” he says. “They’re real, right?”
I show him the stings on my arms.
“The bathroom might be better,” I say.
The thing is, people say that bees get used to the people who are around them all the time. This has not been my experience. For me, bees are bees. They sting you if you get in their way. It’s a price to pay for running a profitable house of bees.
The insurance man says, “How did you get into such a weird predicament?”
“I’m not sure I know what that means.”
“You run a house of bees.”
“Right,” I say. “Well, I’m not ready to go into all that.”
So instead we talk about insurance. It’s difficult to get insurance for myself and for my house. The house is likely to fall any minute, most think. In fact, most think the same for me the bee-man.
The whole time the man is just talking, on and on. I don’t recognize most of what he says, but I think he is on my side because of the way he smiles at me. After a while he sighs and quits with the insurance stuff.
He says, “I didn’t come here just for business.”
Then he stops, waiting for me.
So I say, “Okay.”
“No,” he says, “I think this place is a star. A real star. I’ve been here so many times that I’m sure the bees know me.”
“They’re just bees,” I say.
“Still,” he says. “I have something. What you do, I think I can do. What you do is what I will do.”
I look at the man. I don’t think he’s crazy. I should, but I don’t.
I say, “I’ve been in this house for a long time. You want to show me something? Show me. Please.”
So he does. He shows me. We sneak out the back window and run through the trees to the parking lot. I feel new again. We get in his car and drive away, laughing at the people who are still standing outside of the house of bees, waiting to get in and get my tired tour. In the car the insurance man talks hotly about life and beauty, and I listen because I have to say nothing. Halfway down the mountain, halfway back into town, a bee flies out of the man’s shirt.
“That bee didn’t sting you?” I say.
“Jesus,” says the man. “That’s a sign. That’s a sign if I ever saw one.”
And I believe him.
In town he takes me to a neighborhood that I have never seen before. It is on the south side of town. He drives deep into the place and then pulls over in an alley.
“It’s behind this building,” he says. “Follow me.”
So I do. I follow him. Behind the broken down building is a big pile of shopping carts. There are just a ton of them, stacked up and spread out on this empty expanse of cracking concrete. It is a tremendous thing. Just tremendous.
I say, “Dear God.”
“Right,” says the man. “Right?”
He leads me to the middle of the ornament of shopping carts. No, it’s a skeleton of something long lost, something beautiful and sad and ancient. I look at the man and feel thankful.
“I’ve been gone for a long time,” I say.
“In the mountains,” he says. “In a way, I have too.”
“Who knows about this?” I say.
“Only us and lost souls,” he says.
I look at the red marks on my skin.
“I think that my soul is lost,” I say.
“That has to be why we’re here,” he says.
He brings me to the center and has me kneel down there. I do gladly. He kneels next to me and tells me to wait, so I do. I put my hands together.
“Don’t do that,” he says. “That’s not right. Just wait.”
And I do. After a while a bird lands on one of the carts stacked on the highest part. Then a while later another bird lands nearby.
“Jesus,” says the man. “This is rare.”
“Oh, God,” I say.
I wish that it would rain. I wish that it would rain a rain that could wash me all away into the concrete cracks of the shopping-cart foundation. That is all that I want at this moment.
Sometime later I jolt up. I have been nodding off. Or meditating. I still don’t know the difference, but want to. I get up with the man and feel strong and alive. I feel good. And I know that in the days to come I won’t remember how many birds came that day to save me, to lift me away.
It could have been a thousand birds. Or it could have been a single bird. In the end, I know it wouldn't have mattered.
Thus far I am 0 for 6 on submitted stories. So I'll post the rejected ones here.
First up, "A Tremendous Thing."
A Tremendous Thing
I am standing in a house of bees. The house is mine. It smells like honey and love from the outside. Inside it just smells dead. For a few minutes I watch the clock, then when it is time I walk outside and stand on the porch, where I wait for the people come.
A bee stings me while I wait. I want to feel it but don’t.
Then fifteen minutes later people come. There is a woman with two young children. They walk from the gravel parking area a little ways away. I watch them intently as they come, checking myself over a little and shaking out any sleepy dumbness that might still be in me. Last night the bees seemed restless.
When she gets to me she stands and looks at me.
I say, “You’re looking for the bee-house? This is it.”
“I know,” she says. “I’ve been here before.”
A few months ago I quit my job. I was a wedding photographer. The thing is, a lot of people have dreams about their weddings, and those dreams include a certain kind of photographer. Brides especially seem to have a thing with photographers who are covered with red spots and aloe cream. I don’t know why. I guess I never asked them why. It’s just a blemish, I suppose, on the whiteness of things.
And we can’t have that.
Outside the house I wrap the children’s bare arms and legs with saran wrap, because it is all that I have that could work. I look at the woman.
“You’ve been here before?” I say. “Really?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know why I lied. I know people who have.”
“Next time cover yourselves,” I say. “I mean, Christ, there’s bees in there.”
The children don’t seem to mind the wrap or the duct tape that closes up their sleeves. I try to put some on the woman too, but she refuses.
“I think I should brave it,” she says.
“Sure?” I say.
“Don’t you?” she says.
“It’s all I know,” I say.
We go inside, and I show them around. The house is not a big house. It is more of a shack, really. Outside it is painted white. Inside it mostly looks like wood. If you dream really hard, you can imagine that you’re in the woods, even though you’re in a house.
The woman starts to examine the walls, and then she makes a noise.
“Yikes,” she said. “They’re real.”
She turns to the kids.
“They’re real, all right,” she says to them.
I take them first to the back bedroom, which has my bed and dresser. That’s about it in there. I tell them that this is where I live.
The bigger of the children says, “You live here?”
“Of course,” I say, and look at the woman because I want to make fun of the kid a little but know that I probably shouldn’t.
The woman understands, though, and nods.
The kid says, “I would be scared of the bees.”
“It’s not the bees that can hurt you,” I say.
The woman looks at me. I look back. I had meant to sound smart in front of the kids, wise like a wizard. The little one seems to buy it, the bigger one no.
The kid says, “No, it is.”
The woman waits for my reply. I guess she is on my side, and for a moment I think she’s gorgeous in her dumb look. I stay quiet for a second.
She says, “You only hurt yourself, right?”
And I think, these can’t be her kids.
Everyone lets everything go, and we move into the living bathroom. I tell them that it is usually wet and steamy in here and that the bees don’t like the walls around the bathroom. They nod.
Next is the living room, which has bookshelves and chairs.
“Go ahead,” I say to them. “Sit down and feel what it’s like.”
They do.
“If you stay real quiet,” I say, “you can hear them in the walls.”
For the most part this isn’t true, but people always buy it. They sit on the edge of their seats and try to point their ears in the direction that seems the most bee-like.
The woman says, “I can hear it! I can! Kids, listen.”
The big kid says, “I am. I just hear us.”
The little one says nothing. The big kid is right, because there is no noise but our silly human noise.
As we’re sitting and listening for the bees, someone knocks on the door. Outside there is insurance man that I called the week before. I tell him to wait and come back inside.
I say to the woman, “Okay, it’s time to keep moving.”
But they don’t listen. Up in the corner of the room some of the bees have come through a tiny crack and are flying around with a purpose. The visitors are entranced by this. I let them have their fill, and eventually the bees fly into the bedroom and land on the curtain that covers my bed.
So I take the three people into the kitchen and offer them some honey. I have big jars of it sitting all over the place. The people assume that the honey is from the house, but it’s not. It’s from a supermarket downtown. There is honey in the house, sure, but I don’t know how to get it. I’m not a carpenter or a beekeeper. I’m just a salesman and a guide.
The people eat some honey with crackers and then look around the kitchen.
“This whole place smells like honey,” she says. “That’s just, it’s really pretty.”
By the table the little kid is looking at a bee that has landed on his arm. For a second I think about what the kid would look like completely covered with bees. Then I think about him flying away, carried by bees.
I say out loud, “Someday this house will be carried away by bees.”
I try to say it like I was actually dreaming it first, and saying it out loud only by accident. This usually works. This was how it started. I think that lately I actually have been dreaming it.
The woman in her beautiful way nods in approval and then chomps a cracker with honey.
And then, shortly after they arrived, the woman and the kids are gone. After they pay me forty dollars.
Outside the insurance man is standing with a few people.
He says, “I hope you don’t mind, but I told them you were already on a tour.”
“We can wait,” one of them says.
“Thanks,” I say. “I don’t mind. Excuse me, people, but I need to have a meeting with this man.”
Inside the insurance man asks if the living room is the best place.
“I mean, with the bees and everything,” he says. “They’re real, right?”
I show him the stings on my arms.
“The bathroom might be better,” I say.
The thing is, people say that bees get used to the people who are around them all the time. This has not been my experience. For me, bees are bees. They sting you if you get in their way. It’s a price to pay for running a profitable house of bees.
The insurance man says, “How did you get into such a weird predicament?”
“I’m not sure I know what that means.”
“You run a house of bees.”
“Right,” I say. “Well, I’m not ready to go into all that.”
So instead we talk about insurance. It’s difficult to get insurance for myself and for my house. The house is likely to fall any minute, most think. In fact, most think the same for me the bee-man.
The whole time the man is just talking, on and on. I don’t recognize most of what he says, but I think he is on my side because of the way he smiles at me. After a while he sighs and quits with the insurance stuff.
He says, “I didn’t come here just for business.”
Then he stops, waiting for me.
So I say, “Okay.”
“No,” he says, “I think this place is a star. A real star. I’ve been here so many times that I’m sure the bees know me.”
“They’re just bees,” I say.
“Still,” he says. “I have something. What you do, I think I can do. What you do is what I will do.”
I look at the man. I don’t think he’s crazy. I should, but I don’t.
I say, “I’ve been in this house for a long time. You want to show me something? Show me. Please.”
So he does. He shows me. We sneak out the back window and run through the trees to the parking lot. I feel new again. We get in his car and drive away, laughing at the people who are still standing outside of the house of bees, waiting to get in and get my tired tour. In the car the insurance man talks hotly about life and beauty, and I listen because I have to say nothing. Halfway down the mountain, halfway back into town, a bee flies out of the man’s shirt.
“That bee didn’t sting you?” I say.
“Jesus,” says the man. “That’s a sign. That’s a sign if I ever saw one.”
And I believe him.
In town he takes me to a neighborhood that I have never seen before. It is on the south side of town. He drives deep into the place and then pulls over in an alley.
“It’s behind this building,” he says. “Follow me.”
So I do. I follow him. Behind the broken down building is a big pile of shopping carts. There are just a ton of them, stacked up and spread out on this empty expanse of cracking concrete. It is a tremendous thing. Just tremendous.
I say, “Dear God.”
“Right,” says the man. “Right?”
He leads me to the middle of the ornament of shopping carts. No, it’s a skeleton of something long lost, something beautiful and sad and ancient. I look at the man and feel thankful.
“I’ve been gone for a long time,” I say.
“In the mountains,” he says. “In a way, I have too.”
“Who knows about this?” I say.
“Only us and lost souls,” he says.
I look at the red marks on my skin.
“I think that my soul is lost,” I say.
“That has to be why we’re here,” he says.
He brings me to the center and has me kneel down there. I do gladly. He kneels next to me and tells me to wait, so I do. I put my hands together.
“Don’t do that,” he says. “That’s not right. Just wait.”
And I do. After a while a bird lands on one of the carts stacked on the highest part. Then a while later another bird lands nearby.
“Jesus,” says the man. “This is rare.”
“Oh, God,” I say.
I wish that it would rain. I wish that it would rain a rain that could wash me all away into the concrete cracks of the shopping-cart foundation. That is all that I want at this moment.
Sometime later I jolt up. I have been nodding off. Or meditating. I still don’t know the difference, but want to. I get up with the man and feel strong and alive. I feel good. And I know that in the days to come I won’t remember how many birds came that day to save me, to lift me away.
It could have been a thousand birds. Or it could have been a single bird. In the end, I know it wouldn't have mattered.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Movers
I started to expand a story into a novella. So I guess I haven't had much to post here. I wrote this story after reading some Tobias Wolff. The man must have had patience.
Movers
They were sitting on a couch in an apartment full of boxes of books and dishes and garbage bags full of clothes. The pieces of a disassembled bed-frame leaned up against the wall opposite the couch.
The new tenant for the apartment got up and said that the two of them should go back downstairs to get the last of the boxes.
The other said, “Again, already. All right, let’s finish it up.”
“You didn’t have to help out,” said the tenant. “I really appreciate it.”
The two shook hands.
“No problem,” said the other man. “I don’t mind at all. It’s really a pain to move, especially when you don’t know anyone around town to help you.”
The tenant had been right. The other man didn’t have any reason to help the first man. The other had woken up late one morning and gone downstairs through the back door of the apartment building to have a cigarette. Outside there was one man backing up a truck and another man, the tenant, guiding the driver. Furniture lay all over the bumpy asphalt. The couches and bed were in pieces. The boxes were stacked in threes and the bags were grouped in one big pile. In the corner were a bicycle and a bag of golf-clubs. In another corner were a television and a wooden stand.
The tenant had said, “Do you mind not smoking next to the furniture? Sorry, I just don’t want them smelling like smoke.”
The other man had said, “Not at all.”
Then the truck drove away, and the tenant looked back at his pile of stuff. The other man watched him.
“Do you want some help?” he asked the tenant.
“You don’t have to do that,” said the tenant.
“I have time,” he said. “I’d be happy to help you move in.”
When they finished getting everything into the new apartment, they sat again on the big white couch and drank some beers.
“It feels good to be done,” said the tenant.
“Yeah,” said the other. “Yeah, I bet it does. Where did you move from?”
“Denver,” said the tenant. “I lived there for about four years.”
“Why’d you move?”
“I followed someone out there,” said the tenant. “Then it didn’t really work out with her. I got a job out here, so here I am.”
The other man thought and then said, “Where were you from before that?”
“Manhattan, Kansas,” said the man.
“Oh,” said the other. “That’s not too far away. Not as far as Denver, anyway.”
“Nope,” said the tenant. “When I was driving, I felt like I was coming home in a way.”
“Did you ever have any tornadoes?” asked the other man. “I mean, did you see any when you were in Manhattan?”
“Sure,” said the tenant. “There were tornadoes from time to time. I guess I never saw any up close, but I’ve been through them.”
The tenant got up and walked to the refrigerator. He pulled out another bottle and then motioned to the other man on the couch, who nodded. Then the tenant came back with the beers.
“I wonder if people in Manhattan, New York, have ever been in tornadoes,” said the other man.
“Yeah,” said the tenant. “I was thinking about how funny it used to be in Denver when I told people that I was from Manhattan. They would always assume.”
“I would have too,” said the other man, “if you hadn’t been up front about it.”
They sat in silence for a little while, drinking the beer and generally just resting their tired bodies. The move had been hard, up three flights of stairs.
The other man said, “Have you been driving through most of the night?”
“Yeah,” the tenant said. “I left Denver yesterday evening, because I didn’t want to drive during the hot days. I thought the humidity would make the drive uncomfortable.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said the other. “Did it work?”
“I was still sweating and hot,” said the tenant.
The two laughed.
“I was soaked through,” laughed the tenant.
“Yeah, I bet you were,” laughed the other man.
The other man got up to get two more beers. There was a pile of bottles getting bigger and bigger on the floor next to the couch. In the tenant’s eye was a softening gleam, like his eyes had been open for too long. The other man’s face was getting redder.
“Another?” he said from the refrigerator.
The tenant said, “Yeah, thanks.”
The other man brought the beers back to the couch, handed them to the tenant, then said, “I’m going to go have a cigarette. Do you want one?”
“No,” said the tenant. “Not for me, thanks.”
“I’ll be right back, then,” said the other man.
Outside the other man smoked and looked around the parking lot. Most of the cars were gone. People were at their jobs or at their schools. He smoked slowly and with pleasure, like he was kissing a young girl. That was what he imagined outside.
Upstairs in the apartment the tenant was feeling good, but pleasure was not exactly the right name for the feeling. The drinks made him feel all right, but the end of the move was not a sense of enjoyment. It was something else. Probably it was just a sense of another thing done and behind him.
The two men, separated then, were momentarily very different. The tenant got up from the couch to christen the bathroom. He stared at the water in the toilet as it flushed down into the pipes below. As he did so, the other man came back into the apartment.
“You smell smoky,” said the tenant.
“Sorry,” said the other. “I’ll try not to sit on the couch and get my smell all over it.”
The tenant laughed.
“She used to get upset about smells like that,” said the tenant.
“Don’t they all,” said the other.
“I think it’s about time that we went out on the balcony,” said the tenant.
On the balcony the two men began to talk like friends might. The alcohol made them loose.
“You any good at golf?” said the other.
“I’m shit,” said the tenant. “I keep that around just for rare occasions. But I’m just shit.”
“I could’ve guessed that,” laughed the other man. “They say golf isn’t a man’s sport, but to have the patience to do it, you need to be more than a man.”
“Who says that?” said the tenant.
“I don’t know,” said the other man. “Someone had to say it sometime.”
They laughed at that.
“I can’t believe I have a balcony,” said the tenant. “I never thought I would end up with a balcony.”
“Mine’s on the other side of the building,” said the other.
Across from the balcony were an alleyway and then the rooftop of a wide building. There were groups of businesses under that rooftop.
Another pile of bottles had grown up now on the balcony, near where the men were standing and talking. They kept drinking beers until they were almost out of bottles.
Then the tenant said, “You know, I never liked our place in Denver. It never had a balcony. I never liked the couch or the TV. It was all shit.”
The other man said nothing.
“And the golfing?” said the tenant. “I’m not even a golfer. I never knew how to play golf.”
“I think I like baseball more,” said the other man.
“Yeah, baseball,” said the tenant.
He finished his bottle and then walked over to the bag of golf clubs. He unzipped a pocket on one side and pulled out a handful of golf balls.
As he did so, the tenant said, “I like baseball too, but I was usually shitty at it.”
The other man said, “I can’t hit for shit, but I can throw.”
They laughed at this. The tenant brought the golf balls to the balcony.
“Let’s throw these,” he said. “Let’s make a baseball game out of golf.”
The two men looked at the rooftop beyond the balcony. There were some columns coming up out of the flat rooftop. Two of them were on the left and on the right. On the far end was a big aluminum box, one that looked like it was there for a swamp cooler for the businesses. And nearest the two men was a small pipe for steam.
On the balcony, the two drunk men threw some practice balls at the four parts of the rooftop that looked most like a diamond. They decided that this would be the game. The two men took turns throwing the balls from the balcony.
After a few throws, the tenant hit the aluminum box on the far end. After another few throws, the other man hit the column on the right.
“That’s two on,” said the tenant.
“This is much better than golf,” laughed the other man.
“Golf is shit,” said the tenant. “Golf is not a man’s game.”
“That’s what they say,” said the other man.
“They must be right,” said the tenant.
The tenant threw another ball and hit the column on the left.
“That’s three on,” said the tenant.
The men kept throwing balls, trying to hit the pipe nearest them.
“I’ll tell you about Denver sometime,” said the tenant.
“Tell me about Manhattan,” said the other man. “I hear that Denver is shit.”
The tenant laughed.
“It is,” he said.
“We’ve got three on,” said the other man. “Just need to hit the plate. Hit the pipe to bring them home.”
And that was how it went, the two movers taking golf balls out of their pockets until there were no balls left, throwing what they had on top of a rooftop from a balcony, trying to hit the pipe there that would bring them home.
Movers
They were sitting on a couch in an apartment full of boxes of books and dishes and garbage bags full of clothes. The pieces of a disassembled bed-frame leaned up against the wall opposite the couch.
The new tenant for the apartment got up and said that the two of them should go back downstairs to get the last of the boxes.
The other said, “Again, already. All right, let’s finish it up.”
“You didn’t have to help out,” said the tenant. “I really appreciate it.”
The two shook hands.
“No problem,” said the other man. “I don’t mind at all. It’s really a pain to move, especially when you don’t know anyone around town to help you.”
The tenant had been right. The other man didn’t have any reason to help the first man. The other had woken up late one morning and gone downstairs through the back door of the apartment building to have a cigarette. Outside there was one man backing up a truck and another man, the tenant, guiding the driver. Furniture lay all over the bumpy asphalt. The couches and bed were in pieces. The boxes were stacked in threes and the bags were grouped in one big pile. In the corner were a bicycle and a bag of golf-clubs. In another corner were a television and a wooden stand.
The tenant had said, “Do you mind not smoking next to the furniture? Sorry, I just don’t want them smelling like smoke.”
The other man had said, “Not at all.”
Then the truck drove away, and the tenant looked back at his pile of stuff. The other man watched him.
“Do you want some help?” he asked the tenant.
“You don’t have to do that,” said the tenant.
“I have time,” he said. “I’d be happy to help you move in.”
When they finished getting everything into the new apartment, they sat again on the big white couch and drank some beers.
“It feels good to be done,” said the tenant.
“Yeah,” said the other. “Yeah, I bet it does. Where did you move from?”
“Denver,” said the tenant. “I lived there for about four years.”
“Why’d you move?”
“I followed someone out there,” said the tenant. “Then it didn’t really work out with her. I got a job out here, so here I am.”
The other man thought and then said, “Where were you from before that?”
“Manhattan, Kansas,” said the man.
“Oh,” said the other. “That’s not too far away. Not as far as Denver, anyway.”
“Nope,” said the tenant. “When I was driving, I felt like I was coming home in a way.”
“Did you ever have any tornadoes?” asked the other man. “I mean, did you see any when you were in Manhattan?”
“Sure,” said the tenant. “There were tornadoes from time to time. I guess I never saw any up close, but I’ve been through them.”
The tenant got up and walked to the refrigerator. He pulled out another bottle and then motioned to the other man on the couch, who nodded. Then the tenant came back with the beers.
“I wonder if people in Manhattan, New York, have ever been in tornadoes,” said the other man.
“Yeah,” said the tenant. “I was thinking about how funny it used to be in Denver when I told people that I was from Manhattan. They would always assume.”
“I would have too,” said the other man, “if you hadn’t been up front about it.”
They sat in silence for a little while, drinking the beer and generally just resting their tired bodies. The move had been hard, up three flights of stairs.
The other man said, “Have you been driving through most of the night?”
“Yeah,” the tenant said. “I left Denver yesterday evening, because I didn’t want to drive during the hot days. I thought the humidity would make the drive uncomfortable.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said the other. “Did it work?”
“I was still sweating and hot,” said the tenant.
The two laughed.
“I was soaked through,” laughed the tenant.
“Yeah, I bet you were,” laughed the other man.
The other man got up to get two more beers. There was a pile of bottles getting bigger and bigger on the floor next to the couch. In the tenant’s eye was a softening gleam, like his eyes had been open for too long. The other man’s face was getting redder.
“Another?” he said from the refrigerator.
The tenant said, “Yeah, thanks.”
The other man brought the beers back to the couch, handed them to the tenant, then said, “I’m going to go have a cigarette. Do you want one?”
“No,” said the tenant. “Not for me, thanks.”
“I’ll be right back, then,” said the other man.
Outside the other man smoked and looked around the parking lot. Most of the cars were gone. People were at their jobs or at their schools. He smoked slowly and with pleasure, like he was kissing a young girl. That was what he imagined outside.
Upstairs in the apartment the tenant was feeling good, but pleasure was not exactly the right name for the feeling. The drinks made him feel all right, but the end of the move was not a sense of enjoyment. It was something else. Probably it was just a sense of another thing done and behind him.
The two men, separated then, were momentarily very different. The tenant got up from the couch to christen the bathroom. He stared at the water in the toilet as it flushed down into the pipes below. As he did so, the other man came back into the apartment.
“You smell smoky,” said the tenant.
“Sorry,” said the other. “I’ll try not to sit on the couch and get my smell all over it.”
The tenant laughed.
“She used to get upset about smells like that,” said the tenant.
“Don’t they all,” said the other.
“I think it’s about time that we went out on the balcony,” said the tenant.
On the balcony the two men began to talk like friends might. The alcohol made them loose.
“You any good at golf?” said the other.
“I’m shit,” said the tenant. “I keep that around just for rare occasions. But I’m just shit.”
“I could’ve guessed that,” laughed the other man. “They say golf isn’t a man’s sport, but to have the patience to do it, you need to be more than a man.”
“Who says that?” said the tenant.
“I don’t know,” said the other man. “Someone had to say it sometime.”
They laughed at that.
“I can’t believe I have a balcony,” said the tenant. “I never thought I would end up with a balcony.”
“Mine’s on the other side of the building,” said the other.
Across from the balcony were an alleyway and then the rooftop of a wide building. There were groups of businesses under that rooftop.
Another pile of bottles had grown up now on the balcony, near where the men were standing and talking. They kept drinking beers until they were almost out of bottles.
Then the tenant said, “You know, I never liked our place in Denver. It never had a balcony. I never liked the couch or the TV. It was all shit.”
The other man said nothing.
“And the golfing?” said the tenant. “I’m not even a golfer. I never knew how to play golf.”
“I think I like baseball more,” said the other man.
“Yeah, baseball,” said the tenant.
He finished his bottle and then walked over to the bag of golf clubs. He unzipped a pocket on one side and pulled out a handful of golf balls.
As he did so, the tenant said, “I like baseball too, but I was usually shitty at it.”
The other man said, “I can’t hit for shit, but I can throw.”
They laughed at this. The tenant brought the golf balls to the balcony.
“Let’s throw these,” he said. “Let’s make a baseball game out of golf.”
The two men looked at the rooftop beyond the balcony. There were some columns coming up out of the flat rooftop. Two of them were on the left and on the right. On the far end was a big aluminum box, one that looked like it was there for a swamp cooler for the businesses. And nearest the two men was a small pipe for steam.
On the balcony, the two drunk men threw some practice balls at the four parts of the rooftop that looked most like a diamond. They decided that this would be the game. The two men took turns throwing the balls from the balcony.
After a few throws, the tenant hit the aluminum box on the far end. After another few throws, the other man hit the column on the right.
“That’s two on,” said the tenant.
“This is much better than golf,” laughed the other man.
“Golf is shit,” said the tenant. “Golf is not a man’s game.”
“That’s what they say,” said the other man.
“They must be right,” said the tenant.
The tenant threw another ball and hit the column on the left.
“That’s three on,” said the tenant.
The men kept throwing balls, trying to hit the pipe nearest them.
“I’ll tell you about Denver sometime,” said the tenant.
“Tell me about Manhattan,” said the other man. “I hear that Denver is shit.”
The tenant laughed.
“It is,” he said.
“We’ve got three on,” said the other man. “Just need to hit the plate. Hit the pipe to bring them home.”
And that was how it went, the two movers taking golf balls out of their pockets until there were no balls left, throwing what they had on top of a rooftop from a balcony, trying to hit the pipe there that would bring them home.
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