Logorrhea

by John Klima

  “Don’t like to hit any folk before dinner,” I say.

  He doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even crack a smile.

  There’s something about him I don’t trust, but he’s old and it’s still up near a hundred, and when I look for a Hannibal Lecter glint in his eyes, all I see is a grateful smile, and I realize it’s his frailty I’m most afraid of.

  “Can you give me a ride?” he asks.

  “Where you headed?”

  He straightens out his jacket and pulls a folded sheet of paper from the pocket. “Into town,” he says. “To the Valley Church.”

  “You headed for the service?” I say, more an observation than a question. It explains the suit.

  “In a matter of speaking,” he says.

  I’m puzzled. “Did you know Becky’s boy, then?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  I don’t like this answer, but it’s too hot to hold a thorough roadside inquisition, and I don’t want to be late. “Get your stuff. I’ll give you a ride in,” I say.

  “Much appreciate it,” he says. “I just need to grab something from the car.” He hobbles over and opens the back door. He pulls out a duffel bag and a rainbow sign on a wooden stake. He looks over at me to see if I’m watching and smiles and nods and calls, “Only be a second.” He’s about to cover up the sign with his jacket when I notice it says “TOO LATE TO PRAY,” and then I see bumper stickers on his car that say “godhatesfags. com” and “America Will Burn in Hell.” I get it then that he’s one of them, one of those protestors, here to picket the funeral. An electrical storm builds inside me. Before me stands a man who brings tsuris to the world and doesn’t care. He even expects me to chauffeur him to the funeral of my good friend’s son.

  My blood is a barometer and the pressure’s rising. I experience hate in a way I don’t understand. I don’t know a thing about this man, why he believes what he does. I still want to hurt him. Kill him. Torture him first. A Rolodex flips open in my brain, listing every way I could accomplish the deed, starting with pinning him up against his Buick with my Ram. But then the lightning flashes on this side of the canyon, and for the first time that day, the thunder is close enough to hear. The racket blasts some much-needed clarity into my brain. I can’t do it—help this man. For Becky’s sake, I can’t help him. He is trespassing on our lives and I cannot aid his passage. A storm is gathering and the rain will come, sooner or later. Just in case it’s later, I take a bottle of cold water from my cooler, open the cab door, and roll it over his way. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go to that funeral,” I call, before closing my window and flattening my pedal to the floor.

  I park and pretend to ignore the protestors as I pass through their ranks to cross the street. They number a dozen or so—men, women, and older teens. The younger ones wear athletic clothes and shoes; the older ones dresses or suits. Each holds a sign silk-screened with hate. Townspeople avert their eyes and walk past the demonstration and I watch as their expressions change from sorrow to anger. How long before that anger is expressed by hate?

  I’m furious with these strangers. Why can’t they let us give this young man the honor he deserves? Interrupting our grief is no business of theirs. I read in the paper that the leader of their church told a reporter he felt no sympathy for parents. “The family’s in pain,” he said, “because they haven’t obeyed the Lord God.”

  Their hatred is as visceral as the electricity in the air. I see it on their faces, in their signs, in their presence. There’s something very wrong with this picture. A young man dies so an old one can have his say. I’m tempted to gloat and confess to one of them that I’ve left the old man on the road. I come close to making that confession, until the most human of emotions washes over me. They don’t belong here and any trouble that comes of this could have been prevented if they’d stayed away from our troubles. Let his own kind rescue him. The temperature feels cooler by a few degrees, but the air is so heavy it takes effort to walk through it. I’m ashamed. My heart feels as heavy as my step. I keep walking.

  The Patriot Guard Riders seem to be the only ones wearing black. The bikers stand between the sidewalk and the street to block the mourners’ view of the protestors. Some of the Riders hoist oversized American flags. Denny’s at one end of a line of reinforced blue tarps that stretches like a theater backdrop across the walkway.

  “Thanks,” I say to the first Rider I pass, a man I don’t recognize. “Where you from?”

  “Idaho Riders,” he says. “Glad to be here.”

  He smells like cigarettes and wet leather. He’s missing half his front teeth and his hair is wild and thin. His face is gaunt, so the skin hangs like a leather mask over his skull. In another situation, he’d be scary. He looks about the right age to have served with Denny in Vietnam. I don’t ask because it doesn’t matter. Their community is here and now, no matter where each man came from.

  Becky’s up ahead, walking with her husband. She’s wearing a plain white dress and matching bolo jacket with a scalloped collar and eyelet embroidery on the sleeve caps. The pastor clasps her hands and holds them for a moment. She collapses enough that he slips his arm around her to help her walk the rest of the way down the sidewalk toward the chapel. Her husband’s grief is strong enough to hold him upright.

  Denny is sweating beneath his leathers and looks ill. His face is molting; his black vest sprayed with silver speckles. His once-blue eyes have specks of yellow. I both pity and resent him. I deserve more than this monster as my mate. I have cold water in the truck, but to get it means walking back, past the protestors. I can’t do it now. Maybe I’ll find strength after the service. “Are you okay?” I ask, and he nods and when he does, he sprinkles skin and sweat drops from his brow. I’m glad he has the Riders. Even when he’s fully transformed, even when his skin has fallen away and he is fully armored by the scales of a dragon, he’ll be welcome.

  God punished Miriam for speaking against Moses, covering her body with snow-white scales. Once her impurity was made visible, she was forced to leave the tent and live outside the community. This isolation was the punishment, more than the disease. And once she had atoned for her evil tongue, she was healed, allowed to return to the fold. Only then was she truly healed. The Bible story isn’t about a skin ailment—it was about kinship.

  There’s shade at the top of the stairs. The assistant pastor’s welcoming the mourners inside the foyer. The men’s group stands near the entrance to the chapel and passes out one-page programs that have been folded in two. On one side of the program are black and white photos of a child with his cocker spaniel; a teenager in swim trunks, swinging from a rope swing over the pond; PFC Hinton in his dress blues. A caption says, “Say not in grief ‘he is no more’ but live in thankfulness that he was.”

  Prepubescent boys, cheeks blushed from heat and the excitement of wearing grown-up blue jackets with brass buttons, usher us to benches. The scents of lilies and roses mingle with baby-powder deodorants and cedar aftershave. Becky and her husband sit up front. Her parents flank her, leaning over in a way that hides her from me. It’s just as well, for I can’t bear to look directly at the face of grief.

  We hear something then, like a pebble being thrown against the window. Then a rock, followed by more. There’s the sound of horses galloping on the roof. At first I think it’s the demonstrators, but someone announces, “Hail,” and the thrum of it so overpowers the service that most of the congregants scoot from the pews and rush to the foyer doors, pressed against each other, to look outside. A lucky few crowd outside the entrance, where the Riders have taken shelter. The hail is round as quarters. Two boys go out and whoop and holler until one gets clipped on his lip by a hailstone the size of a charcoal briquette and cries for his mother. We stand and watch for several minutes, transfixed by the shower of hail that grows brittle and shatters when it touches down on earth.

  “What about them?” someone says, with a glance toward the demonstrators, who cower, heads covered by placards.

&
nbsp; “Invite them in,” Becky says, humbling the rest of us with the charity of her grief. Our pastor nods, then steps through the crowd and motions for the trodden group to gather beneath the eaves.

  A few of the children and a pregnant woman accept his offer. The others stand their ground and face their signs toward the church.

  I look for the old man’s face in the crowd, and when I don’t find it, feel a wash of shame and pride and anger and worry. Whatever happens, I’m to blame.

  The organist plays “Rock of Ages.” The medley of coughing and sniffing and weeping and whispers transforms into a chorus of muted singing. The pastor invites us to stand and offer a prayer for forgiveness. Jesus is merciful. Jesus is just. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden. And I will give you rest.

  I recite the words without questioning them. I know what I believe and what the Westboro Church believes and what the Valley Church pastor believes. I know what Denny believes, even Becky. Instead of comforting me, this knowledge leaves me terrified. For all I’ve studied about religion, I don’t have a clue what God believes, and it is this fearful ignorance—not the tsuris of our lives—that finally makes me break down and weep.

  There’s a meal of condolence in the community room. No one tries the crab dip except me, and Denny—who eats a few bites after prompting. I should have brought something more familiar. I stay late with a woman named Kath to clean up. Kath isn’t from here, either. It takes an hour to wash dishes and clean up garbage and fold tables and chairs. How hard we try to fit in.

  It feels late by the time we meet up with everyone at Ned’s Place. Ned stands behind the bar, sees us, and lets his glance linger on mine long enough to show it means something. He can look at me longer than I can look at him without feeling shame.

  He takes two chilled pint glasses from the cooler and leans them up against the PBR tap. Denny comes up behind me and gives me a kiss. His dry lips scratch my cheek. I imagine a strip of his skin stuck to mine and my hand goes to my cheek to wipe at nothing. Denny’s already too drunk to notice. He pays, gets change for video poker and leaves a bigger tip than Ned deserves. Ned will defend him if anyone says something, but not because, as Denny thinks, he’s given him hush money through his loyal consumption of Pabst. Ned will defend him out of kindness to me.

  “Be there in a few,” Denny tells me.

  I sip off enough foam to carry the glass without wasting a lick of PBR.

  Kath’s boyfriend Joe is waiting at our usual table. Joe farms corn and pumpkins, saving out two acres for an autumn maze. He and Kath hooked up at a support group after both lost their spouses to cancer. “How’re you folks?” Joe asks.

  “Never better,” I say. The wet heat’s harder to take than a dry one, and I feel trampled, like the stick-figure grass. I slide into the booth and fit into my spot against the wall. I pick up the menu from habit, not because I plan to order anything I don’t already know about.

  Alice takes the order. She wears a pencil behind one ear and a cigarette behind the other. She reaches for the cigarette, holds it between her fingers for a second before replacing it and switching ears, for the pencil. She does it on purpose and sometimes gets a laugh. It’s been so dry this summer the sheriff warned us all not to smoke outside, but that’s made it hard for addicts like Alice, who don’t like smoking in the break room because it makes her feel like she’s being quarantined. “Your man gonna join us?”

  My man. I don’t know who that is. Denny’s at his lucky poker machine, and since I hear neither cursing nor hollering, I let him be.

  “Burger well done with salad, ranch dressing on the side, and he’ll have a double cheeseburger, medium, with onion rings and macaroni salad. And a couple more pints.”

  “You got it,” Alice says.

  “What was that hail all about?” I say.

  “God’s way of telling us to listen,” Joe says.

  Kath is about to hush him, but I flash her a look because I like to hear what people believe.

  “You think the hail is a sign?” I ask.

  “Everything’s a sign,” Joe says. “We just don’t get close enough to read, or else we ignore the instructions.”

  I remember helping Denny put together a toolshed. The instruction sheet was poorly translated Chinese and it took the two of us half a day to figure it out. “Maybe the instructions are written in another language,” I say. “Like tzara’as.”

  “Czar who?”

  “Tzara’as,” I say. “It’s a Hebrew word for a diseased soul.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Joe says. “I only know what the Good Book tells me.”

  But whose good book—Joe’s, the old man’s, or the Hebrews’? Or Bridget Jones’s, for that matter. How does anyone know which book to follow?

  Denny picks a good time to join us. “You order for me?” he asks.

  “What do you think?”

  He slides beside me in the booth. “That’s my girl,” he says, happy.

  He doesn’t see the things I see, doesn’t know I’ve left him. I look past Denny to the bar and the man who stares back at me. I should feel shame, thinking about Ned even as I sit beside my husband and curse the vows we shared, vows I’ve renounced a thousand times when nobody was there to witness.

  I don’t know what I want, just that I don’t want this. There’s too much tsuris in my life, not enough joy. I signal Alice to hurry up with our refills. Denny rests a hand atop my thigh. With this much beer in him, he’s brave enough to risk public rejection and slips an arm around my waist. His nails are thick, pitted, and yellow, scalloped by peeling cuticles. Another symptom of psoriasis. I suck in my breath and hold it inside. Alice takes our glasses, walks them back to the bar. Ned tilts the pints and hits the tap. I hold my breath until Alice returns, and then I gasp and take another. I feel faint. The heat. The beer. Everything. The glasses are sweating.

  There’s a thunderclap and a sudden hard, steady rain and the air thins and lightens and I find myself jumping to my feet. The bar turns inside out as everyone pushes outside to cool off in the rain. Denny swaggers past to lean over the rail. He tilts his chin to slurp up the new rain. There’s a tang of wet mud mixed with alcohol. Cool breezes flit between the raindrops.

  Ned sidles up behind me. “What you doing later?” he asks.

  Electricity pulses through me, starting with a tingling heat in my crotch and bursting into hot sparks in my belly. I barely manage to stop myself from kissing him here and now. I don’t care who sees, except for maybe Denny.

  But Denny is drunk and happy and in another world.

  This morning, so far away from this night, Denny watched me with a sorrowful expression that should have melted my resolve. Instead, it further hardened my heart. I looked at him as the monster he’d become and in my weakness, let him see my true feelings.

  “I’m still me,” Denny said.

  I didn’t believe him then.

  Now, I see things as they are. Denny spoke the truth. Dragon or not, he is still the one I married. His transformation is only skin deep. It’s my soul that’s changed. I’ve become a monster. Here I stand, alone in a gathering of people who will always be strangers. Unlike Miriam, I cannot be forgiven and return.

  Denny stumbles back to the table. He’s going to need a ride home. I lean back and whisper into Ned’s ear, “Wait for me. I’ll be back to help you close up the bar.”

  Ned grins. He clicks his tongue and turns back. When the rain slows to a steady pour, the rest of us follow him inside. There we eat, gamble, drink, and find whatever merriment we can find before closing down the bar, driving home through fresh mud, and waiting for the sun to rise again and scorch the new day.

  * * *

  E•U•O•N•Y•M

  eu·o·nym y–o–o-e-'nim

  noun

  : an appropriate name for a person, place, or thing

  * * *

  The Euonymist

  NEIL WILLIAMSON

  CALUM KNEW THERE WAS a wor
d for it. This sick feeling that had been accreting stealthily in his gut since the transport burned down from the orbital and lit in over the North Atlantic; that had formed a discernible kernel over Arran and bubbled up to his chest when they landed. When he set foot on Scottish tarmac again, he felt it tickle his heart in a most unwelcome way. It was like anticipation of something you knew you should be looking forward to but suspected might not turn out the way you wanted at all. Anticipation, yes, and there was an element of leaden fatigue to it too. There was definitely a word. Calum pondered it as the government car shushed him southwards out of Prestwick on the rain-glittered expressway heading down the Ayrshire coast. If anyone should have been able to come up with the name of this feeling, it should have been him, but even with the implants off, his head was still mired in the Lexicon mindset. None of the words that came to him out of the residuals created in his flesh brain by the thousand-language database were quite right.

  It was a human feeling. It needed a human word. He was sure it would come to him in time. Now that he was home.

  Scotland in July. The lazy, wheeling polka of sun and rain, baking the earth to oven stillness before dousing it with steaming flash showers. Chasing the clouds down past Ayr, heading inland via Maybole, the car’s windows were slapped with wet foliage so lush and luminous green that for a disorientating moment Calum could have been back in Ghessareen’s island jungles. To stop from thinking about that he mouthed the names of the roadside plants to himself—the thick ferns, the wide-leafed sycamores and chestnuts, the tall, purple foxgloves springing erect, relieved of their burden of water by the car’s passing. Calum enjoyed the foursquare precision of the Latin, the quirky, old folksiness of the English. On Ghessareen nothing had a name until he had given it one. Here, it had all been done centuries ago. Foxglove, he thought. Whoever it had been that came up with that, they had a sure gift for euonymy. The name fit perfectly. Of course it had originally been “folk’s glove,” but whoever had decided that the little bell-shaped blossoms might have been used as faerie mittens had created a lasting image. Calum sometimes wondered what it would have been like if the Unification Bloc had come here before humans had evolved language. What would a foxglove have been called then? If the influence of the Integrated Machine Intelligences had been ascendant at that point it would have been something horribly functional like, “flowering-plant-of-average-height: 0.7m-with-many-blossoms-of-hue: 400nm-wavelength.” Thank Christ Earth had been overlooked for long enough for uniquely imaginative names like foxglove to rise up, get spread around, and achieve acceptance through established use and their own organic rightness.