by Andrew Hood
The pile tries to collect his huffiness, arrange it into something big and threatening. His little claw looks like it’s trying to grip air while his other hand keeps adjusting the hang of his shoulder bag. Some sort of panicked dew has settled onto his lip beard, making it glisten.
“I don’t know what the hell your deal is, kid. I don’t know what kind of shit you’re trying to pull, but trust me, I’m not the guy you want to be pulling it with.” The pile sputters this out and all I can think of is shit being pulled on one of those machines like taffy.
“I’m not pulling any crap. There’s no deal. The card’s just not for sale.”
“Well why the hell isn’t it?”
I take another look at the card, at the mid-swing of Rance Davis, of everything behind him and everything in front of him.
“Because I want it,” I tell the pile without looking at him. I don’t know how much more I can stand to look at him. “I like this one.”
The pile opens his mouth a few times, like he’s imitating someone talking. He stops gulping and puts his good hand into one of the boxes and takes out a wad of cards. “Well what about these ones? Huh? You like these ones? Are these ones for sale? Huh?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t had a look at those ones. Maybe they are.”
“Then have a look,” the pile says, and he winds up and chucks the wad of cards at me.
For an impossible instant, this wad of maybe a hundred or so cards about the thickness of a junior hamburger holds its shape in the air, coming at me like one complete block ready to hit my face like I hit it first. But right in front of me each card catches its own influence of air and they pull apart and go their separate ways. All the cards fall, and flutter, and spin, and swoop down, each of them with someone’s whole life, some heavy moment, on it.
We stare at each other, the pile and me, like we can’t believe that what just happened just happened. As if two other people were doing this, and we were just two guys that watched it. My eyes flit back to the pile’s claw and whatever pause button got pushed gets pushed again to make things play. “You’re cleaning that up,” I say, which I guess presses the pile’s own play button, because his mouth opens to say something and his baby penis hand goes to readjust his bag, but before he can say anything, my mom does.
“Pickle!” she yells, and drops to her hands and knees to gather up the scattered cards. There may as well be hundred dollar bills all over the ground. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” she’s mumbling.
What can anybody do but watch something like that? The pile and me set our differences aside like soldiers on Christmas and watch my mom scramble around on the ground. But then I get a glimpse down her shirt and that’s enough of that.
“Mom,” I say. “Get up. Jesus.”
She wobbles onto one knee and reaches to the pile for help up. Her hand grabs at the empty air where a person without a deformed hand’s hand would be. She looks up and she sees the claw, in all its shine and sheen, so she gets up just fine on her own. Up, she has that dizzy, frazzled look of someone just spun ceaselessly in a chair.
“So who wants to tell me what the fuck this is?” she says. I can smell on her the cigarettes she doesn’t smoke anymore. “Pickle?”
“This is your kid?” the pile wants to know. “These are your cards? This is your table?”
Mom looks at the pile, and then at the mess of cards that she didn’t even begin to clean up, and then at the pile’s sweaty claw, and then at me, and she seems actually unsure of whether anything here is actually hers. “And you are?” she asks the pile, maybe to bide some time while she figures out who all this stuff belongs to exactly.
“I’m the guy your kid is trying to screw.”
“Pickle?”
“I didn’t lay a hand on him, Mom, I swear,” I say, and though she doesn’t, I can tell that my mom wants to smile at that one.
“Listen. Are these cards for sale or aren’t they?”
“What? Of course they’re for sale.”
“Then why won’t this kid of yours sell me this card?”
“What card?”
“That one.” The pile makes a motion in my direction with his claw, to Rance Davis. “He says it’s not for sale because he likes it.”
I shoot the pile one hell of a look, as if he’s betrayed some confidence.
Mom takes the card and I let her take it. She looks it over, stares seriously at it, like someone staring at the engine of a broken down car they have no idea about, as if seriousness will fix the car.
“I don’t get it,” she says. She turns to me. “What is there to like about it?” Like Sean, she’s never taken a look at any of these cards but is so stupidly sure of their worth.
Not knowing what to say, I shrug my shoulders. With my face I do my best to explain about the card, about what’s on there to like, but trying to say anything on purpose with your face is like trying to perform a song you hear in your head on an instrument you just barely know how to play.
It goes to show that you never know what anybody is ever thinking. But you can guess, if you know the person. For all I know, my mom isn’t thinking about the card right now at all, but about whether or not this pile of human being uses his damp claw to pull his pud. But I don’t think she’s thinking that. It is probably only me who’s thinking that. What I think she’s thinking about, seeing the way her face gets full and soft from looking at however my face is looking, has to do with Sean. I bet dimes to dollars that she’s suspecting that I don’t want to sell the pile this card, or any of these cards, because they’re Sean’s. Like this is all I’ve got left of that bag of dicks, and so letting go of his cards would be letting go of him. I think that’s the way that someone who watches too much TV’s mind tends to work. So she nods at me, having gleaned all she’s gleaned from whatever my face had to say. Like, “It’s okay. I get it.” All I know is that whatever she gets, it can’t be it.
My mom turns dramatically to the pile. “I’m sorry,” she says, with this weird, fluffy confidence. “The card,” she pauses, “is not for sale.”
“I’ll give you one hundred dollars,” the pile says.
“One hundred dollars?” she asks.
“One hundred dollars,” the pile confirms.
She can’t even afford me a piteous, I’m sorry look. “Okay,” my mom says.
Now, anyone that’s spent any time being nine years old knows that in any instance of wheeling and dealing you have to see the money before letting someone put their claws on what you’re selling. Because even if they do take off without paying you, you at least know that they’ve got the money to make it worth chasing them down and beating it out of them. Without seeing a nickel, my mom hands over Rance Davis. As soon as the pile has it clutched in his baby penises he brings the card up to his claw, as if to feed an animal he’s got in a headlock, and tears the card in half and lets the halves flutter stupidly onto the ground with the rest of the mess he’s made so far.
“Fuck you,” he says to my mom, pointing an erect baby penis at her.
“Fuck you,” he says to me, pegging me with the same baby boner.
“So fuck us both, then?” I ask.
The pile smiles at me, his mustache like an eyebrow over a sick yellow eye. “That’s right.” We finally understand each other.
Giving his shoulder bag one final, absolute adjustment, the pile galumphs away.
All the other men in all their other fanny packs are staring at us. I’m looking at my mom, trying to decide whether or not I can hate her for the rest of my life because of this, if this one time is enough of a reason. Every last Sunday I come here with her, for her—not that I have anything better to do—and entertain this insane delusion of hers. All this for her, and she’s ready to sell me out in an instant. People have hated people for less.
I guess because someone has to say something, my mom t
urns to me and, instead of “I’m sorry,” she makes a gross face and says, “Did you get a load of that asshole’s little hand?”
“Yeah,” I agree. “It was disgusting.”
Like we’d rehearsed it before, we both, at the exact same time, screw up our faces and distort our left hands and make this guttural noise—like, “Grarrrrrrrrrr”—and this is going to go on to be a shared thing that we do whenever something’s disgusting or unreasonable in life. We make the hand, do the noise, and know exactly where all that came from.
He came out onto his porch and there was some hippy mother changing her baby on his lawn. On a Hudson Bay blanket the mother was wiping and dabbing at the muddy rolls and creases of her little girl. A gust of wind whipped up leaves around the two, and it was like last night on TV. Some pear-shaped Spanish grandma had been crammed into this glass booth with money going nuts all around her. The grandma had grabbed at the bills, stuffing her clothes with money, this twisted look of desperation on her leathery face. She had looked so stupid. He couldn’t tell if the point was to degrade the grandma, but he could tell that this grandma didn’t care. When the wind in the booth was turned off all the money dropped and lay in a pile at her feet. All that money just right there, but not for her. She had gotten some, but not enough. Never enough. Not quite like money, brittle and wet leaves stuck to the felt of the hippy mother’s dreadlocks and onto the swamp of the little girl.
“I’ll just be a sec,” the hippy mother said when she saw him there on the porch. He took a sip from his mug and nodded, slid a hand into the pocket of his housecoat as a sign of being a-okay with things.
The hippy mother stood up with a bundle in her hand and walked to him. The baby writhed on the blanket like it was trying to crawl along the air.
“Hi,” the hippy mother said. She had one of those cute, tired, hippy-dippy faces that would have been ugly if she had tried to pretty it up with make-up, he thought.
“Morning,” he said.
The mother winced at the sun high above them and looked back at him, squinting still.
“Listen,” she said, “I’m sorry to do this, but I’ve got nowhere to toss this.” She held up the bundle. “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind taking it for me.”
“That’s shit in there?” he asked, gesturing at the bundle with his mug.
“Pretty much.”
“I don’t know why,” he said, “but I always think that babies have those things that birds have. Now, what are those things called?”
The hippy mother didn’t know.
“You know. It’s that thing that birds have where they do a combination of shitting and peeing so you can’t tell what the hell it is that’s coming out. Just a bunch of disgusting stuff that doesn’t make any sense. It’s called something, what they have. It’s like ‘The Cloister,’ only it’s not. It’s got ache in it somewhere I think.” He shut his eyes tight and gritted his teeth, trying to force the word to the surface. “And it’s right there, too.”
“Fuck,” he said, popping open his eyes. “It’s frustrating, huh? When you can’t think of a word you know. It’s like having one of those sneezes where you can’t sneeze. Do you ever get those?”
The hippy mother did get those. She was smiling still, but it was a smile that didn’t mean anything, like when a car in front of him would forget to turn a turn signal off.
“Do you mind if I just leave this here?” she asked, and anyway bent down and set the soiled bundle on the bottom step of his porch.
“Just so long as you don’t set it on fire,” he said, and laughed.
“Right. I promise not to,” she said. “But thank you. And, again, I’m sorry. She already… And I was just going to… Anyway, I’m sorry and thank you.”
She turned and walked back across the lawn, picking leaves out of her hair.
“Don’t forget your baby,” he called from the porch. He took another sip from his mug and made a surprised, sour baby face, expecting it to actually be coffee, forgetting about the Canadian Club. The only club he’d ever belonged to, his wife used to say. She had thought she was just a riot, that woman. Now, there was someone he’d like to cram into a booth. But not a booth with money. Maybe a booth full of razor blades or something. How easily could those become airborne?
“Got her, thanks,” the mother said, gathering up her squirming girl.
He watched her put the kid into one of those hippy slings that he was starting to see regular people use now, too, and he watched her go, watched her bum as she went.
“Cloaca,” he said.
“Cloaca!” he yelled. “It was the cloaca!” he yelled at her. Down the sidewalk, the hippy mother turned to look at him, then turned away and moved off a bit more swiftly.
“Cloaca,” he said, feeling good, feeling like he had sneezed that sneeze out, or like he had suffered water in his ear all day from a swim and finally it was trickling out now, all hot and amazing.
“Cloaca,” he said.
He had come out for the paper when he saw the shitty baby on his lawn. Now he squatted and sorted through the rolls that had built up by his door and found the one with the most recent date. All these people had died somewhere because of something, he read.
He picked out the business section, shook it out as he stepped down the steps of his porch, fluffed the paper, and then spread it next to the bundle the hippy mother had left him. With his bare toe, he nudged the wad of cloth onto the paper and wrapped it up.
He breathed in. There was the sweet and pungent smell, the complicated scent of baby shit. Any smell you miss, even if it’s a bad one, is a good one.
Wadding the newspaper and the cloth full of shit into a ball the size of a softball, he walked to the end of the driveway, and then he threw it. The wad landed with a light heaviness onto his neighbour across the street’s roof.
Opening his nostrils and opening his lungs, he hoped for that autumn smell, but still it was baby stench. He smelt his hands, but it was not his hands. It was all over the air now, that baby smell.
Another whirl of wind came and tossed the salad of dead leaves on his lawn. The leaves flirted around him, and he began to grab at them. He snatched all he could out of the air, stuffing them into the pockets of his bathrobe, and then into his robe so they scratched his bare chest.
The wind died and he stood there with the heap at his feet, his pockets full and his chest bulky. A leaf had landed in his mug. He could drink around that.
“Cloaca,” he said, feeling pretty okay about himself.
The Shrew’s Dilemma | 2
For something like five years now the man who was what amounts to this woman’s first love has been dead, and she’s only finding out now. To alert her, there was no shiver along an ethereal web of life connecting everyone, as there maybe should have been, or as this woman at least hoped there would be when something like this happens. Her heart didn’t even murmur in sympathy the moment her one-time heartthrob’s own heart quit its throbbing. This woman’s sister had to tell her, mention it—his passing—in passing.
“There’s something with you,” says this woman’s boyfriend that night.
“Jonathan Brandis is dead,” she admits. “He hung himself.”
“Hanged,” her boyfriend whispers, then fits his hand back between this woman’s thighs, his hot, wet face back into her neck.
The day after she finds out about Jonathan Brandis, this woman’s subway is delayed. An expensive-looking woman on the platform beside her explains that someone has jumped. “Don’t worry,” the expensive woman says, trying to be nice. “It happens so much that they can clean the mess up like that.” And she snaps her fingers.
This woman is late for her interview at the gallery. A reception job for the summer. “I’m so sorry,” she says, rushing finally to the reception desk. “My train was delayed.”
The current receptioni
st looks up from a crossword puzzle, a woman this woman remembers meeting through her boyfriend. “The buses, too?” the receptionist asks, not recognizing this woman. Her head is shaved bald and she has a spider web tattoo there where her hair would be and she is not sympathetic in the least. “And the taxis?”
The receptionist has filled in only one clue of the puzzle, this woman can see. “Torpor.”
This woman doesn’t get the job. Not because she was late, necessarily. She blames her unsuitable phone voice. Callers never know whether they’re speaking with a fancy-ish man or a gravelly woman, and they get uncomfortable. Her boyfriend uses words like throaty, and smoky, and loves the daylights out of it.
She takes the streetcar to her apartment and showers without getting her hair wet. Smoking the shake of her stash mixed with tobacco, she watches the news for some mention of the man who jumped. On the news there is nothing but death reported, just not this one death. Maybe there wasn’t any man after all. Except that expensive woman had seemed so sure.
Come sunset, her boyfriend arrives with sushi and beer. In their circle this woman calls him either her lover or her partner, or simply by name, but she still can think of him only as her boyfriend. Those other terms sound too pretentious to her. They suggest a level of intention and participation that this woman is not yet willing to consider, or at least not yet willing to admit.
Always she wakes up before him. She waits around in bed for him to rouse is the sort of woman this woman is. She will read a book or sketch or just lie there. This morning she watches her boyfriend sleep. This is the first man she has seriously shared a bed with ever. At the start she watched him as a kid will incessantly inspect the first dollar they’ve earned for themselves, and a little of that disbelief and fascination still lingers. He looks to her like he sleeps as if he knows he’s being watched is how perfectly and quietly he sleeps.
She checks in on his penis. Mostly the thing will be as asleep as its owner, but this morning it’s awake and beating. This woman conducts a test. She puts her ear to her boyfriend’s chest with the attention of a safe cracker but can’t discern a delay between when his heart thubs and when his wiener throbs. That’s how fast his blood must travel.