Knucklehead & Other Stories
Page 18
“You don’t declare children any more. They changed the rules years ago. You get a child tax credit. But it’s all wrong.” Colm watched a bald man rant on the television. He ran a hand over his own balding head and remembered the formula for a sphere. “You’re leaving me. You go to pick up the children and you don’t come back.” He licked his pencil and entered a number on the form.
“I think sometimes that’s what you want.”
“I wouldn’t blame you,” Colm said. He licked his pencil again.
“Why do you do that,” Beverly said. “Lick your pencil. I’m going to Gaddie’s to pick up Zelle and Will.”
“You’ll smoke in the car,” Colm said.
Bent over, her head stuck in the closet as she rummaged in the shoes, Beverly replied, “I don’t smoke, Colm. It’s you who used to sneak cigarettes in the car. Have you seen my rubber boots?”
“You’ll be gone two hours. Enough time to see another man.” He broke the lead off the pencil, watched the end skitter away onto the linoleum floor. He put the pencil into a sharpener shaped like a small globe of the world. On TV, an obese Asian man costumed like a Sumo wrestler sat on a man wearing sequined lavender tights. Colm examined the map on the sharpener and said: “They put Japan in the wrong place.” He tested the new point on the arborite tabletop, pressing down harder and harder until the lead broke off again.
Beverly walked in her boots across the kitchen and took a package from the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. “Can you pick up the table when you’re done?” she said.
“It’s tax time,” Colm said. “Do you love me still?”
“Yes, Colm,” Beverly said, and opened the door into the rain. “Still.” She closed the door after her.
“Still,” Colm repeated. “Come back,” he said to the closed door. He picked up the remote control and increased the volume. The crowd screamed and the canvas thudded drum-like as wrestlers fell. “Wrestling is fixed,” Colm said.
Towards a
Semiosis of Two-
headed Dog
Box
A plain wooden box. Pine. Not a coffin. Bigger than a breadbox. Footlocker. Address stencilled. Customs clearance affixed. Contains:
Square black bag
Surgical implements: bone saw, rib spreaders,
suture needles
Trumpet
Jewellery box with mother-of-pearl cufflinks
Waterman fountain pen with gold nib
Wire-rimmed spectacles
Military cap with oak leaf
Freemason apron
Hand-tinted photo of baby, naked on white fur rug
Snapshot: mother, wife and daughter under magnolia tree
Baseball glove (old fashioned with no pocket)
Gas mask
Fleece-lined slippers worn through the sole
Jazz records. Bill Evans. MJQ. Two dozen Miles.
Ornette Coleman. Bix and Louis on 78s, Dizzy, Duke,
the Count. Ella, Django Reinhardt. Trane. Bird.
The Harvard Medical Library, Volume III of the Recorded
Lecture Series, 1952; includes interview “Experimental
Transplant Surgery in the Soviet Union”
Imagine This
Soviet scientists, circa 1951, transplant the head of one dog onto the body of another. You learn this from a long-playing record found among your father’s possessions, right beside Sketches of Spain. You sit rocking in your favourite chair watching the record go around, stylus unwinding the two-language groove, Russian interpreted by BBC English. Sandy, faithful Sandy, curls at your feet, sleeping through his species’ holocaust historiography.
Head Graft
“We grafted the head of an Alsatian to the neck of another, attaching it just above the shoulders near the second vertebra. Naturally there was no neurological response in the second head, but we did ensure the circulation of blood … Both heads remained alive for almost forty-eight hours, at which time we performed autopsies …
“We also conducted heart and lung transplants and liver transplants on dogs and pigs. The subjects were maintained in a vital state for up to seventy hours … The potential for kidney transplants excites us. Subject pigs with functioning kidney transplants are alive to this day.”
Photos
He looks so soft in the baby photo. Hair—even then he had thick black hair—slicked back in the same style he would wear for the next seventy-four years. The hand-tinting lends his flesh a bright rosy colour, unnatural, but somehow more healthy than the swarthy jaundiced yellow he had as a father. The smile. Did he ever smile?
And the snapshot: Mother, wife and daughter, three generations of women beneath a magnolia. They are like aliens. Mother has grown smaller, has let her hair go white and plain. Wife is the same, eyes smouldering, hand planted provocatively on hip. Daughter almost an adult, she’ll be starting college next year, too beautiful, looks away from the camera, stares upwards at something over her head exposing the long slope of her throat. The Georgia sunshine falls on them, broken by the leaves above. The photo is recent: on the back, written in his hand grown spidery with age but still recognizable, is a date from just over a year ago. It unsettles me to think that there, a half a continent away, he took this picture that now even a year later shows them new to me.
Favourite dogs
A note written with a quick flowing hand. The purple run of faded ink from a fountain pen. The paper: the backs of two pages ripped from a desk calendar dated March 27 and 28, 1962. Found inside the sleeve of the Harvard Medical Lectures:
Two favourite dogs in literature from the Odyssey and Olaf Stapledon. Odysseus’s dog what was his name? Waits 20 yrs for master to return. Sick among houseful of conniving suitors he recognizes O. tho dressed as beggar. Raises head 1 last time, sniffs hand then dies as only Homer makes death. How much better a dog than 3 headed hell hound! Olaf’s dog—can’t remember if named Cerberus or Sirius—from ’30s sci-fi, read it as a boy. Dog with human brain transplant. Very funny, touching. No one understands him. Eventually kills master and runs with wolves. (Argus = O.’s dog.)
To M, to W, to D
to walk with you in the bright of noon, in our parents’ dark, in the uneven break of dawn, to walk along the water’s edge, the cold black water of night running a river, we walk so close I can smell your skin beneath the waves of wind, first you then I move ahead fall behind out of step, the flowing river sucking at the shore, a glance, a glancing brush of forearms, goosefleshed breeze along the river, we walk and the river flows and we walk and the river flows and the river flows, and we walk and our hands, put your hand, you put mine, we put hands, and the river flows and our hands held, not clasped, fingers not interlocking, and the river flows and your hand paper-dry holding mine, your hand warm and fleshy fitting tight, your hand light and soft flitting on my palm and a dog, a yellow dog, a golden retriever named Sandy, our dogs always yellow, always golden retrievers named Sandy, swims in the current to catch a stick and scrambles up the bank, shaking off from tail to head, splashing, and the river …
Understanding father
He developed chemical weapons at the Suffield Military Weapons Range during World War II. He ran away from there, to Atlanta. I ran back, to Alberta.
I take a deep sniff from his army cap, trying to smell something—there is only the camphor stink of mothballs. I finger the Freemason apron. Close my eyes, listening for cryptic messages. I spread all the things from the box on the carpet before me.
When I blow the trumpet only a harsh blat issues forth—one of the spit valves is missing. The twisted brass is like a gleaming intestine, and I think of his last hours as the peritonitis festered in the ulcers in his bowel. I lay the horn down on the Freemason apron, mouthpiece at the top, bell down. One by one I pick up the pieces of his life and arrange them, constructing a father. I position the cap, floating it above a head-spaced emptiness. For his right arm, the two photos, placed askew to approximate an elbow. The right hand the baseball glove. I place the ca
nister of the gas mask at his left shoulder, the hose trails as his arm, the mask at the end serves as his left hand. The surgical instruments and black bag become the bones of his legs, the slippers his feet. The pen and cufflinks are penis and testicles.
I put a stack of Miles on the turntable. First to cue is Live in Paris with Tadd Dameron, 1949. I remove the black vinyl disc of the Harvard Medical Lectures and place it as the head of my father, then spread the wire-rim spectacles across where the bridge of his nose would be.
Then I lie down at an angle, so that my head touches his, just above the shoulder. I watch the ceiling. I can hear Sandy barking in the back yard, almost in time to be-bop.
W. Mark Giles’s fiction and other writing have appeared in magazines and papers across the country, including The Malahat Review, Geist, The New Quarterly, NeWest Review, Grain, subTerrain, The Antigonish Review and Canadian Fiction Magazine. Mark currently lives in Calgary.