Collected Short Stories: Volume III

by Barry Rachin

  "Would you like me to turn the volume off?"

  She reached for the clicker, but Elliot grabbed her hand. "No, that's not necessary. I just don’t grasp what you see in it."

  "I could say the same about some of the books you read." She lifted a hard-cover volume from his hands and, fixing her eyes on a paragraph midway down the left-hand page, began to read out loud:

  "Deconstructive fiction is parallel to revisionist

  history in that it tells the story from the other

  side or from some queer angle that casts doubt

  on the generally accepted values handed

  down by legend. Whereas metafiction deconstructs

  by directly calling attention to fiction’s tricks, - "

  She stopped reading but kept her eyes glued on the printed matter. "You obviously like this stuff or you wouldn't waste either your money or your time on it."

  Elliot could feel his ears burning. She handed him back the book, lowered the volume on the television by half and settled in with what was left of her game show.

  "How's the stiffness in your hip?" he said shifting gears. "You never mentioned it after the trip to Horseneck Beach."

  "Everything's fine now."

  "You went to Dr. Edwards?"

  "There wasn't any need. The pain went away."

  Elliot ran his finger over the spine of his book. "The red cloth miraculously healed your leg?"

  "I'm sure it helped," she said in an offhand manner.

  Elliot was more put off by her blind faith, her pig-headed guilelessness, than by the fact that something inexplicable might have occurred. "But there's no proof that anything happened."

  "The stiffness is gone." Again, her tone was bland and unquestioning.

  "Perhaps it went away of its own accord. A spontaneous remission."

  "Yes, that's also a possibility." Her mind was like a body of water flowing easily and smoothly around an immovable object.

  "Shiker ist a Goy, und nichter ist a Yid."

  "What was that?" Elliot told Marilyn the story of his Grandma Esther.

  After he had finished she kissed him on the cheek and said, "Now I understand why you are such a doubting Thomas."

  Tears glistened in his eyes, which he made no effort to hide. "I was thinking," he said in a choked voice, "of asking you to marry me."

  If the abrupt shift in both his tone and mood caught Marilyn off guard, she revealed nothing. "When were you planning to do that?"

  "In a month or so." Elliot rose and went to the window. There was a warm breeze. The smell of summer barbecues and fresh mown grass hung sweetly in the humid air. "I was wondering what your answer might be."

  "Hard to say. A month is a long way off and a lot could happen." Marilyn took an elastic band from her pocket, gathered up her hair and secured it in a cropped ponytail. "I suppose that, if things continue as they have, I'd agree to marry you." She rose and joined him by the window. "A word of advice, though. Between now and then, you might want to work at improving your delivery."

  Back to Table of Contents

  The Divined Comedy

  Monday afternoon a relentless, soaking rain whipped the vacant streets and business at the Texaco Gas Mart died away to nothing. In the office Ava Frick teased a Kierkegaard reader from her handbag, flipping to a page flagged with a scrap of torn paper.

  What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action...

  A metallic blue, Dodge Caravan pulled up to the full-service pump. “Oh, crap!” Ava groaned. “Not this asshole again!”

  Throwing a windbreaker over her shoulders, she trudged out in the sleeting rain. Ava worked second shift at the Gas Mart two blocks up from the Brandenberg Public Library. When the three-bay repair shop closed down around five p.m., the pumps stayed open until midnight. Since leaving high school, Ava drifted through a series of odd jobs before settling in at the gas station. It wasn’t that she particularly liked pumping gas and cleaning fly shit off of windshields; the work was simply less offensive than the other jobs she was fired from or quit on short notice.

  The driver rolled down the window. “Fill it with regular.” The middle-aged man was dressed in a black tuxedo. Through the open window, she could see an electric piano and pair of Xantech speaker columns stacked on the floor of the minivan.” He quickly rolled the window shut.

  With the rain slashing her face, Ava held her ground until the tank was full. “Could you also check the oil?” His eyes grazed her sternum never quite reaching the face. The glacial smile hinted at what was to come.

  Ava lifted the hood. Pulling the dipstick from the crankcase, she wiped it clean and returned the narrow finger of metal back into the engine block. “You’re down a quart.”

  “Yeah, well... I’m in a bit of a hurry,” he responded with an ingratiating smile, “so why don’t we take care of it next time?”

  The rain, which had momentarily abated, suddenly picked up again. Ava rested her elbow on the window, dripping rivulets of water into the car. “You wouldn’t want to blow a piston over a silly quart of motor oil.”

  “No, that’s okay.” He thrust an American Express Platinum credit card at her and leaned away from the wetness. “I’ll just take a rain check, no pun intended.”

  Was he being intentionally sadistic? “That’s what you said last time.” Ava pulled her soggy arms free of the car.

  The musician screwed up his face and jutted his chin indignantly. “What was that?” She went off to process the payment.

  Back in the station, Ava rubbed her stringy hair dry with a wad of paper hand towels. This was the fifth time the pianist had pulled the check-my-oil-but-don’t-add-a-single-drop ploy. Never once had he purchased a quart. Ava was certain that the stingy louse had a case of Valvoline 5w30 neatly stacked in his garage. In the morning, after a cup of mocha latte cappuccino with a hint of cinnamon and a flaky, buttered croissant, the limp-wrist bastard would sashay over to the garage and, without even bothering to inspect the level, add a quart of motor oil.

  What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. ...

  Ava wrestled with the Kierkegaard reader but lost interest after only a few, meager paragraphs. Her cell phone twittered. “Do you need anything?” Ava’s father sputtered in a gravelly monotone.

  “Like what?”

  “Weather’s pretty crappy. Maybe I could swing by with a spare raincoat… dry shoes.”

  “Actually I’m in pretty good shape,” Ava lied, “but thanks just the same.”

  Click. Mr. Frick hung up. The man never said I love you or resorted to mushy sentiment. That wasn’t his style. Rather, he would drive cross town in a driving rainstorm with a plastic bag full of dry socks and rain gear, throw them down on the counter, grunt some unintelligible farewell and hurry off.

  Around eleven, the rain picked up again. A young man with hair down to his shoulders and a wispy beard that petered out over his freckled cheeks filled his gas tank, bought a half dozen, instant-win lottery tickets and a can of Skoal chewing tobacco. “That stuff causes cancer,” Ava noted shoving the round, metal container across the counter.

  “Gotta die of something.” The man scraped the tickets with the edge of a nickel. A minute passed. No luck! He crumpled the stiff papers in a ball, tossed them into the trash and made a run through the pelting rain toward a rusty Subaru docked at the farthest pump.

  When he was gone, Ava noticed suede, pea-green pouch sitting next to the cash register. The bearded man set it on the counter while scratching his lottery tickets. She lifted the pouch, which was about the size of a small book and shook it. A metallic tinkling sound filled the room. Ava
shook it a second time and the musical clatter repeated. “Strange!” She tossed the sack into a bottom drawer labeled ‘Lost and Found’ just as a Ford pickup truck pulled into the station.

  When she got home later that night, Ava was too wound up from the crazy weather to sleep. She fixed herself a burrito in the microwave and settled in with the Danish philosopher.

  Humans cannot think our choices in life, we must live them; and even those choices that we often think about become different once life itself enters into the mix through pure subjectivity. Instead, they find it through passion, desire, and moral and religious commitment. These phenomena are not objectively provable—nor do they come about through any form of analysis of the external world; the type of objectivity that a scientist or historian might use misses the point...

  Ava understood that she was doing a relatively poor job ‘living her choices’. She had put her education on hold so she could pump gas in a driving rainstorm while ‘normal’ people hunkered down at home doing sensible things and structuring their lives in a manner that, like a well-managed stock option, provided the maximum return on investment.

  Eight o’clock the next morning, Ava Frick’s father shuffled into his daughter’s bedroom, eased down on the comforter and whispered, “The wallpaper hanger is steaming the vinyl paper from the sheet rock in the living room, so don’t go wandering about in your underwear.”

  There was no immediate reply. Ava was resting prone under the covers, a pillow propped over her head. Though she couldn’t physically see her father, the girl could smell his tart, Old Spice cologne. Nathan Frick, whose salt-and-pepper hair was thinning away to nothing on the top, would be wearing an ivory, brushed cotton, Van-Heusen dress shirt with khaki, polyester slacks. The pants were a bit out-dated, but with eighteen months to retirement, there was nobody in the business community the man needed to impress. Mr. Frick rested a hand on the small of his daughter’s back. “You got in late last night.”

  “Trucker pulled in at quarter to twelve. After he topped off with diesel fuel I still had to cash out and close up.”

  Her father lifted the pillow. Leaning forward, he kissed Ava on the nape of the neck then placed the pillow back again. “See you later.” He disappeared out the door.

  From the early sixties, Ava’s father sold washing machines for Sears Roebuck. He won salesman-of-the-year awards back-to-back more than a dozen times. The man was honest to a fault, never exhibiting the slightest compulsion to lie, exaggerate or misrepresent the product line in order to to close a shaky sale. During the Vietnam War, he wrote letters to the presidents – first to Lyndon Johnston then later Richard Nixon, demanding that they bring American troops home from Southeast Asia.

  Ava vividly remembered ferrying envelopes with the sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. address down to the mailbox. “You really think that fascist jerk is gonna read your stupid letter?” The fascist jerk Mr. Frick’s teenage daughter was referring to was Richard Milhous Nixon. Ava was going through a difficult adolescence. Everyone over the age of forty was a bona fide jerk; thirty-somethings weren’t much better.

  Mr. Frick’s anti-war, protest letters were quite verbose, sometimes running three pages single-spaced and typewritten on an old-fashioned Smith-Corona electric model. Ava read through several in which her father argued passionately against the domino theory, suggesting all of Southeast Asia would fall to Communism once the puppet regime in South Vietnam collapsed. The war was unwinnable, American soldiers cannon fodder for a lost cause.

  Mr. Frick churned out, on average, two protest letters a week. And that didn’t include the endless barrage of postcards mailed to congressmen, senators, and Joint Chiefs of Staff. The soft-spoken reformed Jew with the chicken neck and graying sideburns protested the war while raising a family, selling Kenmore-Maytag appliances and teaching aerobic exercise Thursday evenings at the Brandenberg Community Center. Following the freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Mr. Frick petitioned his records from the federal government and discovered that his subversive activities during the Vietnam War had been closely monitored as ‘a potential domestic threat’ by both the FBI and CIA.

  Subversive activities. Potential domestic threat. Did the government imagine that, when he wasn’t selling top-loading washers at the department store, Nathan Frick was hurling Molotov cocktails and inciting civil unrest? “If J. Edgar Hoover comes for supper,” Ava quipped one night when her mother was still alive, “do we put out the good China or go with everyday dishes?”

  After her father went off to work, Ava never budged. She could hear a radio tuned to a country and western station purring softly in the living room. In a creaky falsetto, the wallpaper hanger was crooning along to a Kenney Chesney ballad. Ava drifted back off to sleep. An hour and a half later she finally threw the covers aside. Pulling a sweatshirt over her head, she wriggled into a pair of jeans but couldn’t negotiate the button on the waist. No matter - the baggy sweatshirt would hide her late-night escapades with pasta and breadsticks.

  Truth be told, a nineteen year-old women with a little extra flesh on her bones was more voluptuous than slovenly. Her olive skin was still flawless, the breasts and hips in perfect working order. Ava dabbed Origins Winterbloom number-two eye shadow on her upper lids, applied a fine dusting of hypoallergenic powder over her throat to merge the real chin with its significant other and shuffled into the living room. “Good morning.”

  The wallpaper hanger, who had his back to her, was pressing the flat surface of a steamer up against the far wall. Lowering his arm, he pulled the tray away from the paper and a burst of scalding steam puffed up toward the ceiling. The man was tall and wiry with a droopy moustache and wire-rimmed glasses. The slender nose arched with an aristocratic flair. Like a rust-pocked car where the odometer has seen the hundred-thousand mile mark come and go, the face was pleasant enough but well-traveled. “I’m Rufus,” he smiled, turning back to the work at hand.

  “Can I get you anything?” Ava offered.

  He reached up with a putty knife separating a swatch of soggy paper from the wall. The sheet lifted away in a jagged heap. “Cup of coffee would be nice. Milk no sugar.”

  Ava headed toward the kitchen but pulled up short.

  “You remind me of someone, a writer from the psychedelic sixties by the name of Richard Brautigan. You’re his spitting image.” In high school Ava had read Brautigan’s A Confederate General from Big Sur. With the droopy moustache, lanky, angular body and bittersweet smile, Rufus, the wallpaper hanger, was a dead ringer for the minimalist author who was all the rage when Ava’s father was still a relatively young man. “Unfortunately,” Ava added as an afterthought, “Brautigan was a hardcore alcoholic who drank himself to death.”

  The man repositioned the steamer at the highest point where the wall and ceiling converged and leaned slightly forward, trapping the steam against the paper. “I got plenty of vices,” Rufus drawled cryptically, “but liquor ain’t one of them.”

  Ava retreated to the kitchen, where she fixed herself an asiago bagel with chive cream cheese. When the coffee was ready, she poured two cups and went back out to the living room. “Your timing’s perfect.” Rufus pulled the plug from the wall outlet and removed the cast iron venting plug from the top of the steamer. “The water’s pretty much run out so I have to break anyway.” He sipped at the coffee.

  “What branch of the service were you in?” Ava was staring at a tattoo on his right arm.

  “Grunts. US Army infantry.” He eased his rump down on a step ladder and nestled the coffee between his wide, calloused hands.

  Ava nibbled at the bagel. The pungent aroma of the asiago cheese titillated her senses. “Where were you stationed?”

  “Afghanistan… a godforsaken dump called Helmand Province in the southwest of the country. It’s the world's largest poppy-producing region, responsible for forty-two per cent of the world's total heroin production. We actually pay the local war lords not to grow the goddamn stuff.”r />
  “It’s always nice to know how government manages our tax dollars.”

  Rufus grinned darkly but had nothing more to say on the matter. Putting the coffee aside, he went and filled a bucket with cool water from the kitchen tap. Funneling the liquid into the steamer, he put the bucket aside when the water gauge read full. The wallpaper hanger plugged the electric chord back into the outlet and, while the metal plate was heating, moved about the perimeter of the room stuffing trash in a plastic garbage bag. “Got discharged from the army a couple years back but developed some problems associated with the war, so I had to go for counseling.”

  “What sort of problems?”

  Rufus grabbed a pile of sticky paper and wedged it at the bottom of the bag. “Anger management.”

  She nodded her head up and down digesting the information. The stoop-shouldered man who resembled Richard Brautigan seemed utterly harmless, like an overgrown teddy bear. “But you’re okay now?”

  “Oh sure! Once I got to the root of the problem, it was just a matter of a few minor adjustments,... tweaking my psyche, so to speak.”

  “Such as?”

  The steamer was beginning to sputter fitfully now, alternately dribbling then spitting small streams of tepid water from the vent holes. Rufus ran a palm over the orange rubber tubing feeling for the steaming as it crawled blindly through the coiled hose in the direction of the perforated metal tray. “With the help of Dr. Jacoby over at the Veterans Administration Hospital, I learned about my problem and how to cope.” Rufus reached into a leather tool bag and pulled out a foot-long brush with stiff black bristles.

  “Ten months of therapy taught me that I am basically an incorrigible misanthrope who relates much better to things than people.” He shared this in an affable, low-keyed drawl. “So I subsist off my veteran’s disability check, do odd jobs under the table, and pretty much sidestep the rest of humanity.”