by Gorman, Ed
Now to cut into it. Always tricky. Always challenging. It made her nervous. Things could go wrong so fast, even after so much planning and work. Even after the mixing, stirring, baking, cooling, icing, things could still go wrong at the last minute. The cake could fall. It could fail to satisfy, could be too done, too dry, or not quite cooked clear through. She had stuck toothpicks into the very center of both layers while they were still in the oven, at the end of the baking cycle, and they had emerged clean. Nothing had clung to them. She had thrilled to see the toothpicks which suggested she had cooked a perfect cake this time. But there was still time for it to go wrong. It could still fall, all tumbled down in the middle as if somebody had punched a fist into its face. She hoped it wouldn’t fall or fail like that. She wanted this cake, her cake, this particular cake on this day, to be perfect.
Marcie picked up her special cake knife.
Silver-plated wedding gift from she didn’t remember who.
One of those people
Under the steeple.
She held the knife above her cake, hovering, anxious, afraid of messing up. Hard not to mess up. Easy to fail. Hard to lay a perfect thick triangle on a pristine plate. Glass plate, clear plate, what will be my life’s fate?
She held her breath as she lowered the knife to the frosting.
It hurt. It almost hurt to do that, to touch the chocolate, to move the knife slowly through the icing and down to the firmer substance, the cake below it. She wanted to hurry, to rush through it so she wouldn’t have to feel it, the pain of slicing through her cake. No push, no shove. That rhymes with love. Once she made the first cut, there was no going back. No taking it back, no changing her mind.
The knife slid through the cake until it struck the glass below.
So far, so good, Marcie thought, and began to breathe again.
The next bad moment would come when she pulled the knife out, so she delayed it. She stood there in the kitchen with her fingers around the silver handle, its shaft still stuck fully into the heart of the cake. Dead, dead, running red. When she pulled out the knife, she might bring too much cake and frosting with her on the knife, leaving a rough cut.
Slowly, with exquisite caution, she withdrew the knife.
It was a smooth cut. There was only a little cake and frosting stuck to the blade.
Marcie felt relieved. This could be a perfect first slice of cake.
After the initial cut, the next one was even harder, but she was ready for it. She had put a glass of water beside the cake, and now she plunged the sticky knife down into the glass and then slid one side of the knife and then the other side of it carefully over the glass edge to clean them off. Then she used a fresh dish towel to wipe the knife perfectly clean for the next stab.
Perfectly clear, perfectly clean, who was nice, and who was mean?
“I could write nursery rhymes,” she thought.
Heaven knew, she’d read enough of them.
Finally, the first piece of cake lay on her perfect plate.
Marcie picked up her fork.
She ate one bite, taking it from the thinnest tip of the slice.
Oh! It was delicious. It was the best cake she’d ever baked, or eaten.
Ifyou’re good, you’ll do what you should.
As she held the bite in her mouth, savoring its flavors, she thought about a news article she had read recently. Scientists claimed they had proved that the first bite of any food was always the best. They said every bite diminished in satisfaction after that. Marcie couldn’t remember why they said that was so, but she didn’t believe it, anyway. When she ate the second bite of her cake, it was just as good as the first one had been, and maybe better. It brought tears to her eyes, it was so wonderful to taste. It felt so good between her teeth, on her gums, and going down her throat.
“Oh.” She whispered a moan. “It’s so good.”
Every bite after that was equally scrumptious.
Delicious, delicious,
People are vicious.
She cut a second piece no bigger than the first one. She didn’t have to hurry. There was no cause to gobble the way she gobbled down the family’s leftovers before she stuck their plates in the dishwasher after meals. She had all the time in the world this afternoon, or at least until six o’clock when Mark came home from work. An entire world, a whole lifetime, could be contained in those two and a half hours. She wanted to savor every bite of it.
The second piece was better than the first, and she was still hungry after she finished it. Starving. Only a thick piece could begin to fill her up, she decided, but when she ate a third, thicker slice, it only seemed to whet her appetite for more. Good, good, knock on wood. She was glad she still felt so hungry. This was her cake and she wanted to eat all of it.
Marcie savored her fourth piece.
The phone didn’t ring to interrupt her.
Well, of course, it didn’t, Marcie thought, because she had unplugged it. One of the phones. She’d only had to kill one phone to kill all of them.
A noise, possibly a laugh, or maybe a sob, rose into her mouth.
It made her cough, which made her choke on the bite she was swallowing down while the laugh or sob was trying to get up and out. Marcie panicked, afraid she could choke to death on her own cake, leaving the rest of it for somebody else to find, and maybe even to eat.
She ran to the sink to spit out the cake in her mouth.
She took a long drink of water to wash away the coughing.
The water filled her up a little the way the cake had not so far.
Marcie put down the glass, so she wouldn’t drink any more.
Then she got back onto her kitchen stool, at the counter where the cake was, and cut the last piece of the first half of the cake.
Maybe it was time to bring the phones back to life?
So nobody would worry if they couldn’t reach her. So nobody would come over to check on her before Mark came home. They would worry, she realized, if they couldn’t at least get the answering machine.
She got up and plugged in the phone attached to the machine.
“Hi!” she whispered in a bright tone, “You’ve reached the Barnes Family!” Then she dropped her voice to a lower register. “Mark!” Then back up to her own voice. “Marcie!” And then she imitated her children, in the order in which they chirped their names, in order of their births, starting with, ‘Luke!” who was six, then “Ruth!” who was five, and then the twins, “Matthew!” and “Mary!” who were three. Then she yelled, “We’ll call you back!” just as they all did on the tape. Only the baby, John, wasn’t there. The baby was silent.
It startled Marcie to hear her own voice so loud in the quiet house
Her mother said they shouldn’t have a recording that yelled in people’s ears. Her father said it was annoying to wait for it to play through every time. Her minister’s wife said it was adorable.
Marcie started on the second half of her cake.
Her glass plate was not pristine clean any more.
Her two bathtubs weren’t clean anymore.
Some of the beds weren’t clean anymore.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said in her mother’s voice.
“What did you do all day?” her father’s voice chimed in.
“You’re so lucky you get to stay home,” her sister said.
“What did you guys do that was fun today?” Mark asked her.
“We missed you at circle meeting,” said her minister’s wife.
Wife, wife, for all of your life.
Mother, mother, smother, smother.
“Shut up,” she whispered. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”
Hands shaking, she dipped the cake knife in the glass of water that was murky now, and wiped it on the chocolate-y dish towel Then she cut the rest of the cake in even pieces so they’d be ready for her when she was ready for them. Time was running faster now. It wasn’t all that long before Mark would come through the door.
&nb
sp; At least the cake knife was clean again.
She held it up to let it shine in the light from the window.
Yes, it was clean as a whistle.
The word “whistle” made her think of the dog, who wasn’t barking. Wasn’t that the name of a story? About a dog that didn’t bark? It was supposed to be important, somehow, the fact that the dog didn’t bark. A clue. But to what? Maybe if she’d gotten her college degree, she’d know. Marcie wondered if it would be a clue to Mark. When he approached the house, when he stuck his key in the lock, would it be a clue when the dog didn’t bark?
Mark was smart, but she didn’t think he was that smart.
He’d probably need more clues than that before he ran to see what was wrong.
Marcie finished the first piece of the second half of the cake, and then laid the next piece on her plate.
She estimated there was a little over one quarter of her cake left to eat now. If it was more than a quarter, would that make it a third? She wasn’t sure. She’d never been good at math, or at estimating things.
Never been good, never been good,
Never done what they said she should.
Married before she ought to.
Had babies sooner than they said she should — but not as many as they said she could. (“Do you think our baby stuff will last through at least one more?” Mark had asked her last night.)
Kept the house too clean.
Vain, vain, window pane.
Didn’t keep it clean enough.
Make a mess, and then confess.
Spent too much money.
Never had enough of it.
Sang too loud. Talked too much.
Said the wrong things.
Dressed the wrong way.
Couldn’t please,
“Please,” Marcie whispered, remembering a Beatle’s songs. “Please, please, please me.”
She didn’t think it would please anybody to find out she had eaten an entire cake, but it pleased her. It pleased her so much to eat the last bite. Surprisingly, it only left her wanting more.
She glanced at the kitchen clock.
There was still time to mix another one. If she couldn’t bake it, maybe she could eat the batter and lick the bowl, all of the bowl, all to herself.
When Mark came home, she could give him a chocolate kiss.
She walked to the cupboard to pull out another cake box, but discovered to her dismay that there wasn’t another chocolate one. There was only vanilla. At first she felt deep disappointment, excruciating disillusionment. No chocolate! Only vanilla! But then she thought, No! That was all right. That was fine. It was great, in fact. She was the only one in the family who liked white cake. She was the only one left in the family who liked it ...
Marcie reached for the cake mix box.
Vanilla had its own special delights, in her opinion. It was tangy, it smelled wonderful, it looked so pure. And you could do anything with it. Put on any flavor or color of frosting. Sprinkle it with candy. Squeeze frosting into roses and squirt them onto it. Use it for weddings, for birthdays, for special days like this one.
Her mouth watered, thinking of the flavor of the batter that would be hers, alone. She was so hungry all of a sudden, so hungry, as if there was a huge hole in the middle of her. A huge empty space. She felt as if she were falling into the space, and that she might keep falling and falling forever with nothing making a sound around her, and with the space getting bigger and bigger until there was nothing in the universe except her and space.
Maybe another cake would fill it, if she could only finish eating it before Mark came home to their very quiet house.
• • •
NANCY PICKARD’S short stories have won Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, Barry, and Shamus awards, and are regular entries in “year’s best” anthologies. She is the author of eighteen award-winning novels, including the 2009 Kansas book of the year, The Virgin of Small Plains. Her latest “Kansas” novel, The Scent of Rain and Lightning, was recently launched to wide critical acclaim. She can be found at www.nancypickard.com and on Facebook.
TELEGRAPHING
By Marcia Muller
I have become the operator of a major way station on the moccasin telegraph.
Not by choice; gossip doesn’t interest me much, and that’s what we Indians mainly do on the wire. But as an investigative tool, it sometimes beats out the Internet.
“We Indians.” The phrase still doesn’t come easily. For most of my life, I thought my looks were a throwback to my Shoshone great-grandmother, and that I was mainly Scotch-Irish. But then I found out I’d been adopted and discovered a huge, new Shoshone family — some related by blood, some by virtue of just plain friendliness and acceptance. Mentally and emotionally I’m not Indian yet, and sometimes I doubt I ever will be; but I’m learning the legends and traditions, making friends, and becoming closer to my birth parents.
The latter of which sometimes is not all that easy.
Oh, Saskia Blackwater, my birth mother, is no problem. She’s an attorney in Boise, Idaho, and active in many Native causes. My half-sister, Robin, is following in her mother’s footsteps, going to law school at Berkeley. And my half-brother, Darcy, is just your garden-variety screwed-up kid. Then there’s Elwood ...
Elwood Farmer. A painter of national reputation. He lives on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, where he funds and teaches art programs in the schools. Elwood’s traditional, lives simply, and in the beginning was very hard to know. Now that he and I have gotten closer, I realize he can be cantankerous, obstinate, opinionated, and downright mean. But he’s also thoughtful, wise, insightful, and downright charming. Elwood’s the reason I’ve become a moccasin telegraph operator.
In case you don’t know, the moccasin telegraph is nothing more than a large group of Indians throughout the country who are connected by bloodlines, friendships, or past histories. And they love to gossip. The telegraph is a great investigative tool; at my San Francisco agency, McCone Investigations, it’s a fallback when all else fails. Here’s an example from a morning last week of how it works — and it’s only a small part of what I’ve recently been through.
“Hi, Elwood. It’s Sharon.”
“You’re calling early, daughter.” A match scraped; he inhaled. Smoking is Elwood’s only vice.
“I’ve been up all night working on this investigation for you.”
Exhaled. “Not good. You need your sleep. Have you found out anything?”
“A little. I need you to call Jane Nomee in Arlee. Ask her if she knows the whereabouts of an Eric Yatz. She can get back to me on my cellular.”
“Who’s Eric Yatz?”
“I’ll tell you later. Just call Jane, will you?”
“If you’d had more sleep, daughter, you wouldn’t be so surly.”
• • •
“Sharon? Jane Nomee. Your dad just called. I remember Eric Yatz from here in town, but haven’t heard of him in years. He does have a cousin, though — Carol Yatz, in McMinnville, Oregon. Here’s her number.”
• • •
“No, I haven’t heard from Cousin Eric in years. He was very close to one of our aunts, Bella Wilford, in Minneapolis. Let me look up her number.”
• • •
“Last Christmas Eric sent me a card postmarked Plymouth, California ... No, there was no return address ... You’re welcome.”
• • •
Plymouth was in the Gold Country. A small town; if Eric Yatz was still there, I was pretty sure I could find him.
Amador County is not usually considered Indian country. Most of those unfamiliar with the area in the Sierra foothills identify it with gold mining and, nowadays, quaint Old West tourist towns and vineyards. But the Indian presence is there, most notably in the Jackson Rancheria, a twenty-four-hour gambling casino and hotel on Miwok tribal lands near the small city of Jackson. Amador is not hospitable to casinos: not long ago, county supervisors rejected a proposal from the Buena Vista Rancheria that w
ould have put many millions of dollars into the public coffers as compensation for police and fire and water services — at the same time leaving the county free to continue the fight against the casino in court.
The majority of residents of Amador prefer to preserve the rural ambience. Meanwhile, Miwoks, Iones, and other small tribes continue to fight for their piece of the great gambling pie.
I drove past the town of Plymouth, where I had visited before, in a couple of eyeblinks. There was a Best Western on Highway 49 near there, and I’d made a reservation. The first-floor room looked out on an idyllic scene: an oak-dotted pasture with cows grazing. I sat down at the table by the window and took out the notes on the investigation I was conducting — gratis — for my birth father.
One of Elwood’s art students, a nine-year-old named Marcus Fourwinds, possessed an exceptional talent. He and his mother, Elise, had moved to St. Ignatius, near where Elwood lives, three years ago. Their origins were vague; they had no relatives in the area, and Marcus had little recollection of where they’d lived before. On that subject his mother was reticent, saying only that they “had some trouble with the tribe” and been forced to move.
Then, two weeks ago Elise had been brutally knifed at their home. In order to keep Marcus from being made a ward of the county youth authorities, Elwood had taken him in. Marcus said that a friend of his mother’s, Don Dixon, had been at their house the day she was killed. The tribal police had not been able to track Dixon down so, with their permission Elwood turned to me.
The Internet search engines that my agency subscribes to turned up a criminal record on Dixon, mostly for kiting checks and petty theft. Moccasin telegraph informed me he was a drifter who had appeared in St. Ignatius about six months before, taken a job at a convenience store in Arlee, and had been staying at the Fourwinds place on and off the whole time. I then traced Dixon to Reno, where he was in jail once more for petty theft. He admitted to having seen Elise Fourwinds that day, but claimed a man named Eric Yatz was responsible for her death. Dixon wouldn’t say why, except that it had something to do with Indian gaming rights.
Which was strange, because Montana is considered one of the worst places in the nation for tribal casinos. Most of the bars there allow gambling — slot machines, live poker, and keno — but the tribes’ efforts to persuade the state to permit them to offer such other games of chance as blackjack have fallen on deaf ears.