by C M Muller
So there’s my story, friend. Take a look at the pictures that day in the Cartage Garage, why don’t ya? The real pictures, I mean, if you can find them, not those staged phonies, the ones where Hollywood actors were brought in and laid on the ground with a daub of blood at the corners of their mouths. Anyone with a nickel’s worth of sense can make those out as shams; the story that each mobster was riddled with at least fifteen bullets apiece on Valentine’s Day don’t even match the images, let alone how they really ended up lookin’. Anyway, it is what it is, I guess, and folks say history is only what we agree it to be.
And I don’t know any more than that. I’m just an old mortuary man.
White Elephants
Malcolm Devlin
Jimmy watched as Penny the Pocket Lady walked through the village fair. She was an unfamiliar figure: bright and varied of color, moving with confidence through the drab and familiar local crowd.
“A pound in my palm, a prize in every pocket.” Her voice was sing-song and accentless. As she walked, her skirts and apron—buoyed up by acres of angel-white petticoats—sashayed before her like the sails of a tall ship pitching in a squall.
She was, Jimmy decided, the most beautiful person he had ever seen in his life. Being only nine, he wasn’t sure if this revelation had any weight, but it didn’t matter. He was completely entranced and little wonder: she had a flurry of blonde curls and round pink cheeks that shone like polished apples in the mid-afternoon sunlight. She smiled too, all the time, at everyone, and surely that was a sign of beauty? Or maybe that was inner beauty. Something important, he was certain.
Her apron was a patchwork of pockets, a matrix of brightly colored pouches that gaped open invitingly, each heavy with the weight of something precious stowed inside. The kids from the village followed her with a guileless fascination they would ordinarily reserve for the new and the unexpected. Obedient to her sing-song command, they paid in coins that she’d spirit away, and agonize over which of her pockets to choose until, eventually, they stepped forward and reached deep inside to find what they had won.
“Must have got the idea from that book,” Jimmy’s father said. “What was it? That treasure hunt one. The hare? Remember the hare?”
Jimmy’s mother was looking across the green where stalls had been set up on trestle tables.
“Moira’s on the White Elephant,” she said. “Jimmy, aren’t your friends around?”
She didn’t wait for a response to her first comment, nor an answer to her second before she was off, pitting the dips and furrows of the village green against her bright red patent leather shoes.
The White Elephant stall sold everything and anything, and behind it, there was Mrs. Moira Mercer from down-the-way. Her arms were crossed and she wore the look of someone who had been saving all her conversation and analysis for the right outlet. She watched Jimmy’s mother approach expectantly.
Jimmy and his father stood together on the edge of the green. His father was a thin man with a thinner mustache and he was wearing a grey tweed suit that seemed more appropriate for the church than for the fair.
“Well, sport,” Jimmy’s father said, patting his son on the top of his head, an automatic gesture calibrated for a boy who had once been shorter. His eyes flickered around the gathered crowd. “Was there something you wanted to see?”
Jimmy shrugged. The fair was mostly the same as it was every year. The same layout of the stalls, the same games that sounded like orders: Throw The Hoop, Climb The Rope, Kill The Rat. There used to be a small Ferris wheel that arrived on the back of a truck, its hanging carriages sheltered with brightly colored awnings. But that hadn’t been back since it stalled two years earlier, stranding Mrs. Tunney in the car at the top for three hours until the fire brigade had arrived to rescue her like a cat stuck in a tree.
The White Elephant stall was Jimmy’s favorite. Two years earlier he’d found a tattered board game missing most of its pieces and all of the rules. He’d salvaged what was there to make his own game that he was pretty sure would have been exciting if only he could have found someone willing to play it with him. He didn’t dare approach the stall while his mother was there because she’d think he was following her and she hated it when he did that.
“Isn’t that Kim over there?” his father said. “Don’t you want to go play?”
Jimmy felt his father’s hand on the nape of his neck. A gentle push, a less gentle intent.
He glanced back to see his father’s smile being slowly eclipsed as he surveyed the assembled tents for something specific.
“Can I have my pocket money?” Jimmy said.
His father’s expression crinkled in annoyance, but he didn’t look down.
“You’d better ask your mother,” he said. “Now then, run along now.”
And it was his turn to be off, stalking across the grass to the private-looking tent beside the old cricket pavilion, the one with the sharp smell of spilled beer coming from it, the one with the men standing outside, smoking and looking morose.
Kim lived two doors down on Miller’s Lane. She was older than Jimmy by nearly a whole year, and while Jimmy didn’t have a sister, Kim would sometimes pretend she filled the role, often to the extent that made Jimmy think he probably didn’t want a sister after all.
“Have you been to the Pocket Lady yet?” Kim said when Jimmy got near.
Jimmy shook his head.
“I think she’s sexist,” Kim said. “She gave me this and I think she only gave it to me because I’m a girl.”
She held out a small pink tube that glittered ever so slightly.
“Glue?” Jimmy said.
“Lip gloss.” Kim shook her head in disgust. “Ben got a torch. Just a small one, but a proper, working torch. It’s very unfair. Next time I see my Aunty Pat, I’ll tell her.”
Idly, she scratched the back of her hand and Jimmy noticed how it looked a little red, a little shiny.
“Have you cut yourself?” he said.
Kim shook her head.
“I must have walked past some stinging nettles or something,” she said. “It’s only itchy. It doesn’t really hurt.”
She always had been brave. She could climb trees and jump over the brook behind the churchyard while Jimmy was content to just watch and admire. He didn’t even want to imagine the look his mother would give him if he hurt himself.
“But you should really have a go,” Kim said. “There might be good things in there, you just have to know which pocket to pick.”
Jimmy looked at his feet.
“I don’t have any money,” he said.
Kim looked sympathetic, it was a new expression of hers and it looked like she’d been practicing in a mirror.
“Well obviously, I would lend you something,” she said. “But I can’t because I’m saving up.”
“What are you saving for?” Jimmy frowned, it sounded like a very grown up thing to do.
“An automatic label machine,” Kim said. “You can type in little messages and it prints them out on black sticky tape.”
“What do you want one of those for?” Jimmy said.
“So I can label things, of course,” Kim said. “And leave messages. And letters. And ransom notes no-one would be able to trace.”
Jimmy sighed. It did sound like something worth saving up for. He wished he earned enough pocket money to be able to save up for something worthwhile. As it was, he only really got anything when he badgered his parents, and even then he got so little, so rarely, that he spent it as soon as he could for fear it would just get tidied away when he wasn’t looking.
Kim scratched her hand again.
“Well you’ll have to hurry,” she said. “You don’t want to be the last and she doesn’t have all day. She might run out of things in her pockets. Did you hear what Stan got?”
“No,” said Jimmy.
“He got one of those little tools for getting stones out of horses hooves.” Kim hooked
her finger to demonstrate.
Stan didn’t have a horse, but tools were always useful. Then again, it might not have been true at all. Kim sometimes said any old thing just because she knew Jimmy would believe her.
Once, she’d told him how the night sky was dark because it was actually full of spiders.
“Really, it’s sunny all the time,” she’d said, “but when it’s night, all the spiders crawl across the sky and block out the light. Billions and billions of them, all crawling over each other. All those legs and eyes and teeth. You can sometimes see the sun glinting through the gaps in them and people think those are stars. That’s why stars flicker and shine. Because the spiders which surround them are moving all the time.”
Jimmy hadn’t slept for a month after that. Even now he insisted on a nightlight and made sure the curtains were properly closed before he went to bed each night, so he couldn’t see even an inch of the dark outside.
“Well, you should get some pocket money,” Kim said again. She looked a bit distracted, like a fly was buzzing around her. “You should talk to the Pocket Lady. She’d like that.” She scowled at something Jimmy couldn’t see and waved her hands ineffectually. Then without another word, she turned her back on him and walked away into the crowd.
Jimmy didn’t want to go near the Pocket Lady until he had the means to have a turn himself. He didn’t want to risk being sent away, disappointed as she flashed that smile at him.
So he watched from a distance as little Susie who lived above the Post Office turned in a coin and contemplated the choice before her, absently tugging at her pigtails, her brow furrowed.
He watched as she reached a decision and her hand hovered over one of the blue pockets on the top row. Then he saw how she plunged her arm in deep, her face creased with concentration before she withdrew her prize.
He saw her look of exaltation as she held up the pack of playing cards she’d won in her red and shining hand. And as he turned away from the scene, he buried his own hands deep in his own pockets but felt only the seams of their empty linings, sharp along the backs of his knuckles.
Jimmy tried his mother first. She was still at the White Elephant stall, talking to Mrs. Moira Mercer from down-the-way. He tried to be stealthy. He started at the far end of the crowded table and, feigning an interest in the things the stall was selling (old wooden nutcrackers, yellow ivory chopsticks, pots with missing handles, handles with missing pots), he crept closer.
They were talking about the allotments, where they had neighboring plots of land and how, across the path, Mr. Cromwell had planted something new.
“It’s beautiful,” Mrs. Mercer said, “but it’s invasive. I don’t like the way it seeds.”
“I’ll have words with the committee,” Jimmy’s mother said. “Perhaps they can make him see sense.”
She and Mrs. Mercer had their backs to Jimmy and their voices were curiously muffled in that adult way, engaged in subjects that children tune out of by default. Jimmy edged a little nearer, his hands tracing the wares before him (old hardback books with faded color covers, horse irons, dominoes, napkin rings with old family crests on them) but even as he got closer their conversation struck him as guarded and opaque.
His mother was a tall woman, taller than his father, and she seemed tall in more than just her height. Even when she was standing next to Jimmy, she sometimes seemed such a long way away, and she often spoke to people with her head tipped back as though, by doing so, she could make herself appear grander still.
Now they were talking about Mr. Cromwell’s new bride, who was much younger than the wife who had died.
“She’s beautiful,” Mrs. Mercer said, “but she’s intrusive. I don’t trust her motives.”
“I’ll have words with their landlord,” Jimmy’s mother said. “Perhaps he can make her understand.”
Jimmy continued pretending to be fascinated by the bric-a-brac, (a pocket calculator with the “6” button missing, a box of assorted chess pieces, a candlestick holder, a compass, a fire shovel), until he was close enough to reach out a hand and gently tug the fold of his mother’s skirt as though it was a bell pull.
A broad hand descended from his mother’s lofty heights and gently batted him away.
“Jimmy, dear,” she said, looking down at him, “you know I don’t like it when you follow me around like a lost little dog.”
“I just wondered if I could have some pocket money,” Jimmy said. “Please,” he added, being careful not to stretch the word out to two plaintive syllables because he knew from experience it would only make things worse.
His mother sighed.
“You should ask your daddy,” she said. “It’s his turn to give you pocket money, he is an accountant, after all. I’m talking to my friend, and you’re being very rude indeed.”
Moira glanced down at Jimmy and gave him a brief this-is-how-it-is sort of smile.
“Daddy said to ask you,” Jimmy said. “There’s a lady with pockets and everyone else is doing it. Stan got a tool for getting horses out of hooves.”
“Well bully for Stan,” Jimmy’s mother said. “Go and find your daddy and tell him that mummy said it was his turn to give you pocket money. Go on now, run along. Off you go.”
And she turned back to Moira and they were talking again like he hadn’t been there at all.
The tent into which Jimmy’s father had disappeared was on the far side of the green, just next to the old cricket pavilion. Jimmy tried to look through the tent’s doorway, but a large red-faced man in a green wax jacket blocked his way and muttered something disparaging about his age. Jimmy retreated, craning his neck to peer inside, but he saw only a black fabric screen that blocked his view.
Around the back, there was a stack of barrels and wooden pallets and behind them, Jimmy found a split in the tent where the canvas hadn’t been tied down properly. Confirming he was alone, he resolved to be brave in a manner that might impress Kim when he next saw her.
The canvas was heavy and blackened around the edges, but the split was just about big enough for him to crawl through on hands and knees.
Inside, it was darker than he’d anticipated, heavy black masking drapes hung around the interior walls forming a private arena in which a small congregation of men were sitting on assorted wooden chairs.
Most of the men had their backs to him, but from his hiding place in the folds of the heavy curtains, Jimmy recognized a few faces from the village. Mr. Halter from the school was there, and so was Mr. Newson from the garage. No one was talking, the men just sat patiently ignoring each other as though they were waiting for their turn in a barber’s shop. Mr. Halter was staring into the middle-distance and Mr. Newson was playing a game of patience, his cards stacked into columns on the grass before him.
None of the men were paying much attention to the raised stage area at the back of the tent, which was curious, because Penny the Pocket Lady was standing on it.
Or so Jimmy thought until he looked closer. The dress was certainly hers. It was big and layered, its wide, expansive skirts patchworked with many, many colorful pockets, each heavy and ripe and so beautiful he almost wanted to break from his hiding place and explore them all. But it was only the dress and nothing else. Penny the Pocket Lady didn’t seem to be inside it anymore, and instead, her empty garments stood unsupported, like a headless, handless mannequin.
As he watched, it started to sag and deflate ever-so-slightly. At first, Jimmy assumed it was because dresses weren’t supposed to stand so straight on their own, but then he noticed a hand grasping its shoulder, squashing the fabric down and misshaping it, so the personless costume lurched to a stoop, listing to its side like it was reaching down for something it had dropped. Another hand joined the first, flattening the dress further as they pawed at its ribbons and folds, and then a figure emerged from behind the billowing cloth, a thin man in a grey tweed suit.
“Daddy,” Jimmy said. Quiet enough that no one heard him,
loud enough to convince himself that what he was seeing might be real.
The other men in the tent didn’t seem to be paying much attention to what was happening. Sitting on a barstool, closest to the stage, sat a younger man whom Jimmy recognized as Mrs. Givens’ eldest boy, who was spending the summer working on the farm. The lad looked up from his paper to glance briefly at the stage and check his watch before he returned to the sports section. His expression was serious, but also incurious.
On the stage, there was something altogether changed about Jimmy’s father. His face was bright and red and glistening like he’d been too-long in the sun, and there was a hunger in his eyes that Jimmy didn’t like at all. He watched as his father worked feverishly with a vigor that was quite uncharacteristic of the man he knew. With flailing arms, he smoothed and flattened the dress so it lay across the stage in a broad circle like a lily pad. Then he was on all fours, crawling across the ruched fabric, burying his face in the mass of pockets. He moaned in a peculiar happy-sad way and his body racked with angular convulsions. When he came up again for air, cords of saliva snapped at the corners of his mouth and his eyes looked wild and bloodshot.
Mr. Newson sighed. He scooped up his cards; he shuffled them and dealt himself another game.
Jimmy’s father crawled his way to the centre of the dress where the bodice had flattened into a ruffled O. He wrestled free of his jacket, sending it sailing offstage. He was still struggling with his shirt when he reached the inky hole where the Pocket Lady herself had once emerged, but it was empty now and without hesitation, Jimmy’s father started to crawl inside.
Headfirst he went, greedy and eager. With an unpleasant urgency, he dragged his way deep into the dress and it was as if there was a tunnel underneath the stage, because even as his feet disappeared, flapping into the gaping neck-hole, the garment itself remained resolutely flat across the wooden boards.
Jimmy didn’t move. It was only when the empty costume started to stir that he began to back away, hiding himself deeper into folds of the curtains. As the garment grew on the stage, as if something was inflating it from the inside, billowing outward, then snapping upright, Jimmy had retreated so far, his back was tight against the white canvas of the tent’s exterior.