by Brad Watson
You have your arm back.
I never missed it too much, after I learned to write again.
You stayed old. I believe I’m younger.
I was happier, old.
They went to an old house falling in upon itself in the downtown as it used to be, seventy years before. Inside in a parlor where the old sweetly rotting wallpaper peeled away in poor light, in front of a cold fire, there was a reunion of sorts of the Urquharts, her tormentors. Their teapot sat cold on a little serving table, their hair thick and brittle with growing in upon itself and no outlet. A thickening and coarsing so that it became more like the fur of animals than human hair, and their features swollen like with some long night of debauchery, a permanent hangover of sorts it seemed. And no solace. At their entrance a barely audible low and mournful howl seemed to seep from one of them, she couldn’t tell which. Old Junius squatted near the cold fire in a set of dirty white long johns, his pointed bald head with just the wisp of white hair on top no more than a bushy eyebrow’s worth, and his mean little eyes unfocused and blind.
Who’s there? he said.
His lascivious eyes put out, no light there, Pappy said. Remember how he used to could cry at will, get people to buy life insurance from him. He leaked the life out of them.
It’s the old loony son of a bitch, Merry said, her voice like the dry discordant wheeze of an old squeezebox.
I don’t like living in this house, little Levi said. He was that little boy again she’d had to carry all around Mrs. Urquhart’s house, something wrong with his legs, or so he said. Must’ve been he almost had polio.
Was always a little actor, that one, Pappy said. And wanting to be taken care of.
I don’t like this house, Levi said again. It was the repetitive tone of a pull-string doll, a simple recording he was reduced to, Levi.
She could have peeled away their gossamer clothing as easily as cobwebs. They were no more than a feather in weight, any one. This was just dust gathering into the bygone shapes, held together by her and Pappy here.
All time is in a moment, Birdie, Pappy said. These shapes are just the forms of memory and imagination.
Merry wheezed her disgust. She waved her hand and a little comet trail of dust motes suspended. She looked up at Birdie. Don’t you think yourself so pretty, she said. I held up better.
Birdie became aware of something, the dry-rot stench of Merry’s breath, even now unextinguished. If she’d known her herbs she could’ve chewed some parsley during her days anyway, she thought.
I could use a drink, Merry said.
Junius groaned at that, looked out the window, so dust-filmed the day outside seemed overcast and dull.
I think you all owe Birdie here an apology, Pappy said. All she ever wanted was peace on this earth, and to get along, and all you ever did was set upon her with lies, and jealousy, and thievery, and attacks upon her good name and character. I’ll not have it, though. God will forgive you. Apologize and let’s all go, now.
As he finished there became evident to her such an undercurrent of groans and something near quiet weeping, though all their faces remained unchanged, they dissipated into little shifting mounds of dust, sifting over the edges of their seats, and the dust of old Junius swirling in an indoor dust devil and gently up the chimney. She and Pappy followed him roaming down the deserted streets of town in which there was no one grown or prosperous but only streets full of tattered and beautiful angelic little beggars tugging and nipping at his fine suit, asking him for pennies and grabbing at his crotch and bottom, licking his hands as if to get some sweetness or else in a perversely erotic dumb show, who could say? He grew distant and diminishing, a fading figure slapping about himself as if beset with biting flies, a mere whirl of black and white receding below her and changing beyond her perception as there are ineluctable shifts of time and place in dreams, she was slipping from her own skin and felt an easy and effortless unmooring of her self here in an openness and was not fearful at all.
Finus Melonius (the Ratio of Love)
THE WHITENING SUN up at the midmorning mark and black-rimmed. Finus felt its heat already prickling at his sensitive skin. He left the office, headed to Ivyloy’s just down the block. A faded, pea-green Chevy stepside trundled past the courthouse, the figure inside but a shade in a town Stetson raising a hand. Finus waved, hardly noticing. Laughter made him look up and across the street at the courthouse lawn where a bob-haired teacher in a peach sundress gathered her small charges in the lean shadow of the monument, the little ones hopping like grounded fledglings. The young teacher’s slim shoulders, white against the straps of her dress, gave shaded suggestions of her lovely bones. In the hard yellow morning light against the bright green centipede, they were all, teacher and little children, in motion and indistinct as a dream. He had turned to walk on when from the slanting scant shadow of a lamppost materialized Euple Scarbrough, the Man Who Knew Everything Because He Knew Nothing, wouldn’t it be a skit writing him up one day, and couldn’t be too far off. Euple now had that turkey look, head notched forward on the neck, mouth open, expression like a man just saw something mortally shocking, must’ve been his own shadow. Here he came, the mechanics of his walk resembling more and more that of an old steam locomotive, arms crooked like tie-rods and pumping, and moved as if on a track, no sharp turns. Here he was. Worked his jaw a silent moment to jar speech back into commission.
-Hello, Finus. His larynx a hollow dried corncob.
-Euple.
Didn’t want to say anything more, get him started. Euple chewed his gums, blocking the walk and staring at Finus, looking all over his face like he didn’t recognize him after all, in spite of speaking, his mind putting his memory of Finus back together in pieces. Worked his jaw a moment more.
-Well I’m never eating another can of pork ’n’ beans if I live to be a hundred’n two.
Finus paused, to see if this one would die on the vine. But no.
-Was looking at the sauce. You know they use that gum from a special tree in South America, xanthan gum, drain it in little pipes look like your water faucet on the side of the house, naw, like they did the turpentine down here. Can turn it off anytime they want to, stuck in the bark of the—pause a long moment for a synaptic misfire—xanthan gum tree. Get buckets of it and that’s what they use to make the sauce of things like pork ’n’ beans. Called xanthan gum, I believe, I think I read that on the label. Seen it in salad dressing, even. And in stuff you can’t even eat, like bug spray. It’s an adhesive, something. They boil the bark, I believe. Euple paused again, his eyes wandered off into the park though his head didn’t move, and Finus for a moment thought he’d fade out and allow an escape. The teacher in the peach sundress was now standing in front of the historical marker, the children clustered around her and moving something like Mexican jumping beans in a jar.
-Or could be the guar gum, they got that, too. Changes the texture of the skin of the bean, changes the chemistry of the skin of the bean, makes it like plastic, won’t digest in your stomach, changes the bean meat into something like goat cheese, some kinda dairy by-product, something like bean curd. Harder to digest. And the gum in the sauce, with a little ketchup and sugar in there for color and flavor, it’s a binder makes it hard for the stomach to absorb water at the same time, and working against digestion, and can lead to the spastic colon, you never know what’ll come of that.
The two men stood there a moment.
Finus said, -Say you been thinking on beans.
-Yes I have.
-I tell you, Euple, I hadn’t thought about it much, but you’ve truly been studying the bean.
-Guar gum, Euple said, looking over at the park as if distracted now. -No, it’s xanthan. You look at a label, see it in just about anything. That’s the key to life. Simple observation. It’s what the scientist does. He might be watching in a microscope or he might be just setting beside the crick, but he’s watching. He’s looking at his little wife bending over to pick up the young’u
n, he’s thinking fulcrum, lever, distribution of weight, density of bone, muscle mass. He’s thinking all them things. If he’s a philosophical scientist he’s thinking about the ratio of love.
-The ratio of love.
-You’d know what I mean, eh, Euple said, his gaze wandering.
-Say I would, now.
-I believe you would.
The ratio of love: amazing and beautiful, whatever it meant. Maybe the ratio of love over longing, or longing over love. By God. That’s why he’d given him the op-ed column, Finus remembered. The occasional weird jewel like this. He regarded Euple, who then nodded at him as if to confirm his thought. Finus said he had to go on. Euple nodded again and shuffle-turned to watch him go. For all Euple’s turkey buzzard exterior there was still a glinting light in the old gent’s eyes, they were still a hard blue and clear, as if his hard wiring were still clean and new, which maybe it was, maybe his particular imaginative visioning though of no practical value at all was genius of a weird sort. Even so, shoot me if I ever, Finus thought. So many things Euple had enlightened him and others on, from the invention of the shoelace eyelet to the reason birds can’t swallow but just must raise their beaks to drain it down. A dog turns three times about his bed before lying down because it puts him in sync with the rotation of the earth, to which he has been on angle during his wanderings of the day, and it’s why dogs are so easygoing as a rule and forgiving of others, because they are in sync and harmony with the world and the heavens. Clocks go clockwise because there is a natural gravitational pull to the right, though in England it is slightly to the left, just a hair, which explains things. A crack in the asphalt is the manifestation of one of the zillions of tiny natural fault lines in the rock formation miles deep in the earth, communicated by minute wave action to the surface, cracking the asphalt like chocolate frosting on a jostled cake. Finus let him write a column in the seventies, but after a while people just couldn’t stand it anymore. Finus had titled the column Euple’s Views. Privately he’d called it Euple’s Screwy Views though he had never said it out loud to anyone but Lovie. Of course he would be the first to acknowledge that screwy views fit right into his paper, given his own whimsical approach to journalism.
He regarded Euple, who was standing there looking across the street at some pocket of air and working his jaw in a minor fashion, old desiccated lips parted and a crust of something pale in the corners, running through the grainy film of his days. He moved on.
Euple’s discourse on beans had dislodged a pocket of breakfast gas stuck around Finus’s ribs and it rumbled like a bubble in the bathtub making for the surface, but downward through Finus. He stopped, leaned a little against a building wall and let it brattle out, went on his way. He hardly bothered to conceal a fart anymore, and hardly dealt more than one or two a day anyway. They rarely seemed to have much odor beyond something akin to the sweetfeed you give a horse—corn, with dank rich molasses. He could track their progress through the tract. Sometimes on one side of his abdomen a creaking would begin, and sound really like the joyous squawks and burblings and intermittent drumming of a woodpecker on a grubby old tree in the woods. Then directly on the other side of his abdomen would answer the bird’s mate, a little higher on the scale, of a different warble and rhythm, as if they were just letting each other know where they dined. And then brrraaapppt! like they’d both found the hot spot and hammered away. Back before his surgery and the moderation of his diet he’d had a big problem with gas, seemed sometimes his body existed for nothing more than to produce it, as if he were fossilizing and mineralizing like some ancient buried dinosaur in the brief span of his earthly years. In that time he figured he’d produced just about every variety of methane odor a human is capable of producing, until Orin Heath had assisted Mack Modica in the removal of several malignant polyps from Finus’s colon, including a large section of the colon itself. Before they’d done this they’d irrigated him, cleaned him out with a pressure hose, it felt like, and what had at first been simple discomfort, and then grave discomfort, had then progressed into a kind of relief, a sense of a cleansing, which had then become a sort of euphoria, a moment of absolute clarity, which had then intensified to the point that he felt like his brain was on fire, tiny geysers of flame were firing from the pores in his head, couldn’t they see it? And also he had a pain down lower, but not in his ass, instead in his groin, and he peeked down to a teen boner, one of those threatened to split the skin. He tried to reach down to hide it but his arms were gently pressed back to the sheet by the firm soft hand of a fleshy nurse whose breasts he could see straight through her clothing, like X-ray vision, saw her nipples grow hard and erect before his gaze, and he looked into her eyes and saw it was Adelphia Morrisette, the daughter of Blaise Morrisette, the druggist, a girl he’d often watched bend over to stock the shelving when she was just a teenage girl helping out after school, and in that moment during the visionary irrigation he could imagine with astonishing reality his rejuvenated prick poking its way through her wiry blond pubic hair and into slick glandular softness, young tight softness, and he felt her fingers press into the flesh of his head in a grip that could have been her manifest ecstasy.
-What’s he trying to do? a nurse said.
-Hold him, he’s bucking.
They held him. Lying there, in exquisite pain, he was recalling something from school, as a boy. Fellows out in the schoolyard, describing relations of the garden variety. Finus, who’d thought himself imaginative, was astonished.
-Come on, Bates, the farm boy twanged, back on his heels, a derisive squint, you can’t tell me you’ve never fucked a melon.
HERE WAS IVYLOY’S shop now, Finus’s own ectoplasmic reflection in the glass overlaying the image of Ivyloy himself, who stood at ease with one arm on the back of his barber chair in a dream, like a heron seeming to gaze at nothing just above Finus’s head. He woke up, smiled and raised his eyebrows, just about the only hair on his big round head set up on a long skinny neck and tall bony frame. Must be a hard irony to live with, a bald barber, Finus thought, and walked on in.
-Hey, boy, have a seat. Ivyloy popped the apron out and when Finus sat he draped it over Finus’s lap while he fastened a trimming collar around his neck, then he tied the apron, swung Finus around to look in the mirror.
-What’ll it be, just a shave, or a trim, too?
-Shave, Finus said, appraising himself. -Used to be I needed a haircut every other day.
-Used to be lots of things I needed every day, Ivyloy said. He leaned Finus’s chair back and laid a hot towel across his face. -Then I got married. He hummed to himself as he worked up a lather in the soap cup. Finus could see the TV reflected in the mirror. Three women were on a talk show set, fighting, two burly men trying to keep them apart. The big woman threw her chair at the littlest one, who deflected it with her own like a swashbuckling lion tamer.
-Why don’t you ever turn on the sound? Finus said.
-I don’t want to hear it, Ivyloy said. -Just like to have the pictures moving around.
Ivyloy bent to the task, stretching a bit of cheek here and there, taking care around the jawline, stretching the skin on Finus’s neck where it dewlapped. He concentrated on the jawbone behind Finus’s right ear. On the television two muscle-bound men came up behind the two women and put them into something like half nelsons. Ivyloy’s razor skritched down into the low part of his neck, near the shirt collar, and gave Finus a pleasant prickling. He closed his eyes, to the television, to Ivyloy’s fluorescent lightbulbs, to the slanted golden light through the barbershop’s window. And in some space of time could have been years he felt the tug of a new hot towel dabbing the shaving soap away from his skin. He opened his eyes, back in time.
Ivyloy dried Finus’s face, slapped a little Mennen onto his cheeks and under his jaw and chin, then rinsed and dried his own hands as Finus stood up and palmed out a ten, received his change.
-I heard you tell about Birdie and Midfield this morning, Ivyloy said.
&
nbsp; Finus said, -I been writing them up.
-What’s the high points?
-Nothing spectacular.
-Hmph, Ivyloy said, looking out the window. -I know you. Be writing it, She once stood accused of poisoning her husband, her crazy in-laws threatening to dig up his body and hash it out.
Finus just stared at him.
Ivyloy said, -Don’t get riled, now.
Finus looked away. In a moment, he said, -And how’s Miss Sadie?
-She’s like you, you can’t kill her. You could run that woman over with one of them big things flattens out fresh pavement, one of them big flatteners, you’d just have you a new pothole when she riz’ up, shape of Sadie.
-Say she’s a tough one.
-I done tried to kill that woman a thousand times.
-Go on, now.
-Run her over, shot her, tossed her off a cliff up in Tennessee, give her rat poison and buried her in the backyard, she just comes back in that evening while I’m having my coffee, whups my ass like a stray dog. Woman’s tough, now. No, she’s gone kill me with time, her life’s mission is to outlive me.
Finus stood there nodding, looking at him.
-Now, I know you love that old gal, he said.
-Like my own life, Ivyloy said. -What there is left of it. Hey, you must a written me up years ago.
-I have not, Finus said. -You may be brain-dead but I can wait till you stop breathing, anyway.
Ivyloy looked a little pained, but he laughed.
-Aw, hell! he called out then, as if singing a note. -I don’t believe it. You got files on ever one of us.
Finus ignored him and glanced into the mirror.
-You didn’t even comb my hair.
-Did I cut it?
-No.