by James Thomas
And on summer nights, after the young stones are asleep, the elders turn to a serious and frightening subject—the moon, which is always spoken of in whispers. “See how it glows and whips across the sky, always changing its shape,” one says. And another says, “Feel how it pulls at us, urging us to follow.” And a third whispers, “It is a stone gone mad.”
THE ONE SITTING THERE
I threw away the meat. The dollar ninety-eight a pound ground beef, the boneless chicken, the spareribs, the hamsteak. I threw the soggy vegetables into the trashcan: the carrots, broccoli, peas, the Brussels sprouts. I poured the milk down the drain of the stainless steel sink. The cheddar cheese I ground up in the disposal. The ice cream, now liquid, followed. All the groceries in the refrigerator had to be thrown away. The voice on the radio hinted of germs thriving on the food after the hours without power. Throwing the food away was rational and reasonable.
In our house, growing up, you were never allowed to throw food away. There was a reason. My mother saved peelings and spoiled things to put on the compost heap. That would go back into the garden to grow more vegetables. You could leave meat or potatoes to be used again in soup. But you were never allowed to throw food away.
I threw the bread away. The bread had gotten wet. I once saw my father pick up a piece of Wonder Bread he had dropped on the ground. He brushed his hand over the slice to remove the dirt and then kissed the bread. Even at six I knew why he did that. My sister was the reason. I was born after the war. She lived in a time before. I do not know much about her. My mother never talked about her. There are no pictures. The only time my father talked about her was when he described how she clutched the bread so tightly in her baby fist that the bread squeezed out between her fingers. She sucked at the bread that way.
So I threw the bread away last. I threw the bread away for all the times I sat crying over a bowl of cabbage soup my father said I had to eat. Because eating would not bring her back. Because I would still be the one sitting there. Now I had the bread. I had gotten it. I had bought it. I had put it in the refrigerator. I had earned it. It was mine to throw away.
So I threw the bread away for my sister. I threw the bread away and brought her back. She was twenty-one and had just come home from Christmas shopping. She had bought me a doll. She put the package on my dining room table and hung her coat smelling of perfume and the late fall air on the back of one of the chairs. I welcomed her as an honored guest. As if she were a Polish bride returning to her home, I greeted her with a plate of bread and salt. The bread, for prosperity, was wrapped in a white linen cloth. The salt, for tears, was in a small blue bowl. We sat down together and shared a piece of bread.
In a kitchen, where such an act was an ordinary thing, I threw away the bread. Because I could.
CROSSING SPIDER CREEK
Here is a seriously injured man on a frightened horse.
They are high in the Rocky Mountains at the junction of the Roosevelt Trail and Spider Creek. Tom has tried to coax the horse into the freezing water twice before. Both times the horse started to cross then lost its nerve, swung around violently, and lunged back up the bank. The pivot and surge of power had been nearly too much for Tom. Both times he almost lost his grip on the saddlehorn and fell into the boulders of the creek bank. Both times, when it seemed his hold would fail, he had thought of his wife, Carol. He will try the crossing once more. It will take all the strength he has left.
This is not the Old West. It is nineteen eighty-seven, autumn, a nice day near the beginning of elk season. Two days ago Tom had led the horse, his camp packed in panniers hung over the saddle, up this same trail. He had some trouble getting the horse to cross the creek but it hadn’t been bad. This was a colt, Carol’s colt and well broke to lead. It had come across without much fuss. But that was before the nice weather had swelled Spider Creek with runoff, and of course the colt had not had the smell of blood in his nostrils.
Tom’s injury is a compound fracture of the right femur. He has wrapped it tightly with an extra cotton shirt but he cannot stop the bleeding. The blood covers the right shoulder of the horse, the rifle scabbard, and the saddle from the seat to the stirrup. Tom knows that it is the loss of blood that is making him so weak. He wonders if that is why his thoughts keep wandering from what he is trying to do here, with the horse, to Carol. She has never understood his desire to be alone. From time to time, over the years, she has complained that he cares less for her than for solitude. He has always known that is not true. But still it seems vaguely funny to him that now she is all he wants to think about. He wishes she could know that, hopes he will have a chance to tell her.
Perhaps it is being on this particular horse, he thinks, the one Carol likes better than any of the others. Maybe Carol has spent enough time with this horse to have become part of it.
The horse moves nervously under him as he reins it around to face the water again. Tom wishes there were a way to ease the animal through this. But there is not, and there is clearly little time. There is just this one last chance.
They begin to move slowly down the bank again. It will be all or nothing. If the horse makes it across Spider Creek they will simply ride down the trail, be at a campground in twenty minutes. There are other hunters there. They will get him to a hospital. If the horse refuses and spins in fear, Tom will fall. The horse will clamber up the bank and stand aloof, quaking with terror and forever out of reach. Tom sees himself bleeding to death, alone, by the cascading icy water.
As the horse stretches out its nose to sniff at the water, Tom thinks that there might be time, if he falls, to grab at the rifle and drag it from the scabbard as he goes down. He clucks to the horse and it moves forward. Though he would hate to, it might be possible to shoot the horse from where he would fall. With luck he would have the strength to crawl to it and hold its warm head for a few moments before they died. It would be best for Carol if they were found like that.
Here is a seriously injured man on a frightened horse. They are standing at the edge of Spider Creek, the horse’s trembling front feet in the water and the man’s spurs held an inch from the horse’s flanks.
THE LAMPSHADE VENDOR
It was typical. The door was open. It was summer. The TV was on.
A white-haired man dressed in a black and frayed tuxedo came to the door selling lampshades. He was a dignified man transformed by the loss of his hands. He picked up a shade with one of his metal claws. “Sell you a new lampshade?”
I didn’t like the shade. I had never even given much thought to the lampshades I already had. I wondered how he lost his hands. I tried to make conversation. “A man knocked on the door yesterday selling mops and brooms. Do you know him?”
He put the lampshade back on his cart. “No relation. I sell shades. You want one?”
I’ve always loved human activities that are on the way out. I asked him how long he had sold lampshades.
“Fifteen years ago, I had a sideshow at all the big fairs, a flea circus. But I was hit hard by hygiene and taste.”
“I saw a flea circus once, but no one believes me,” I said. “I keep it to myself. But I’d swear I remember a tiny flea wedding and a flea riding on a bicycle.”
“I had a little table for the stage, and I would only allow a few chairs for the audience. I had a ballet sequence, a tightrope walk, and a wagon train race. The secret was all in the human flea. They are the only ones with the necessary power to tug and push with their back legs. My fleas were incredible. What stamina. They could perform hundreds of shows a day, and continue for weeks. And at the end of my show, I would roll back my sleeve and invite the performers to dine.” The man raised his chrome hooks in the air.
“I read that in Mexico, the Church supported flea art,” I said. “Nuns made and sold miniature models of the Stations of the Cross fashioned out of flea corpses and scrap materials. The fleas kept them from having to carve human figures.”
“I had a flea,” he said in a quiet voice. “I kept
it as a pet. It was the only one I let suck the palm of my hand. I fastened it to a chain of gold no longer than your finger. I attached a perfectly shaped coach of gold to the chain for the flea to pull.”
I thought I’d seen everything. But the way he talked about this pet flea and the perfect gold coach got me to thinking. “Yes,” I said, my voice rising, “do you think you could tell me about it again?”
He stared at me. “No,” he said, cautiously. “It’s hard on me to remember.”
I tried to think of a proper response. “I understand,” I said, finally.
The man rubbed one of his metal claws against the skin under his chin. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Get me something to write with.”
He picked up one of the plain white lampshades. I placed a pen in his left claw. It was a felt tip that I had forgotten to return to the clerk when I wrote a check at the A&P.
He drew the whole flea circus on the shade, the wedding, the tightrope walker, and a flea ballet. He drew scenes we hadn’t even talked about. Finally he drew what I knew had to be the flea on the golden chain, for it rested on the palm of a hand. The hand was perfect.
From time to time I tried to explain to people why I bought the lampshade. After a while, I moved the lamp next to my bed and shut the bedroom door.
ROSEVILLE
Karen Dunkle had been browsing Paradise Mall’s annual antique show and sale. She’d been looking carefully at a piece of Roseville pottery she was thinking of buying—a small blue bowl in the white rose pattern from the ’40s, an object you could turn in your hands to feel the cyclic pattern of roses and vines in their imperishable frieze—but was that a chip in its base or just a natural kiln-fleck of some kind that wouldn’t affect its value?—she’d been browsing and concentrating on white roses when Konrad Glimmerman, walking past her, slipped on a spot of mustard and knocked her forward against three tiers of glassware and pottery while he himself fell not on his back with his feet thrown up in front of him as is usually depicted in slapstick cartoons, but, somehow, as we’ve observed, to Karen’s side, his left leg striking her in the back of her knees so that she seemed, as the antique glassware and pottery swept over them in a wave of shards and slivers, to be planning to sit on Konrad, which she did. By the time the smashing and tinkling of breakage had stopped, when the last carnival glass tumbler had rolled to a still-point and the last cut-glass ashtray had stopped cracking and spinning, Karen—the Roseville bowl that Konrad would later buy for her intact in her hands—looked down at Konrad, who was afraid to move, and said, “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
To make a long story short, it is a week later. By now, Karen and Konrad have exhausted all jokes about their first meeting, have told and retold those few seconds to both circles of their friends in such slow motion and with so many variations that it seemed only natural to them that Karen should end up sitting on Konrad’s buttocks in Paradise Mall in the way she had, bits of amethyst glass sequinned on her bouffant—miraculously, however uncomfortable such fleeting notoriety might have made them, neither had been even slightly hurt during this adventure—while Konrad could think only of the dog ordure into which he must, he thought, have stepped, could only hope that said dreck was not beneath him at that very moment. After three dates, Karen and Konrad have worn the story out. In fact, they swear to one another that they will never again tell this story to themselves or anyone else, that it will remain their own silent secret, that if they ever argue or find themselves glum or heartbroken they will look at one another and smirk, knowing what the other is remembering.
To make a very long story much shorter, however, we now see them on their golden anniversary. As life would have it, it is after dinner and frail Karen is standing at a microphone behind a three-tiered wedding cake at the Senior Center, which their children and friends have rented for the celebration. Just tall enough to see over the cake, she is looking out at this congregation and beginning to say a few words. Konrad, who broke his left hip a few months before, forgetful now and beginning to lose track of things, prone to wandering aimlessly about, stands up from his chair at the head table and begins walking behind Karen. A curve of blue begins to form in the back of his mind. He is thinking of telling a story.
PENDERGAST’S DAUGHTER
Leann and I were driving to her father’s new A-frame on Lake Nacogdoches, and I was nervous about meeting her folks for the first time.
Relax, Leann said. Drink a few Old Mils with Dad, maybe catch a large mouth or two off the dock Saturday. When I got the nerve Sunday, she said, I could spring the news on the old man about wanting to marry his little girl. Then the two of us could get the hell out, head on back to Dallas. Lighten up, she kept saying.
When we got there her kid brother ran to my car, flinging his arms all around. An acre lot across a little inlet was being cleared, flat red clay and loblollies tied with red ribbons. A bulldozer was ramming one of the pines without much luck. Hurry, Leann’s brother said.
The lake house was all glass in front so from the gravel drive we could see Mrs. Pendergast inside, slapping the old man’s face. Once, twice, then again. She shouted something about him not having any goddamn imagination, about some girl, twenty-six years old, young enough to be his goddamn daughter. He took her flat palms rigid-faced, just stood there blinking at her. Then his face fell all apart, and he hit her in the sternum with his fist. She staggered back through the open door and up to the balcony rail as he hit her over and over again.
Do something, Leann shouted at me. But I just stood there. I just watched till the old man pushed his wife over the rail.
At the hospital in Lufkin I told Leann, I don’t know what the hell happened to me. But then an intern came into the waiting room and said her mom would be all right, just some stitches, some bruised ribs.
Next week I must have left a hundred messages on Leann’s answering machine. I’m sorry, they said, you got to believe me.
I remember we used to shower together every morning I stayed at her garage apartment in University Park. I’d slick her taut brown shoulders with Zest and I’d think, Jesus, this is good.
PONDEROSA
Jimmy’s father said to come by the church, they should have a talk. Everybody knows what that means. But what his father said was that he had been out to the Ponderosa Restaurant on Saturday and there were all of Jimmy’s classmates from Bible college with their wives and children and they were all happy, why wasn’t he? He wanted Jimmy to get down on his knees and pray right there and Jimmy wouldn’t and his father accused him of betraying his wife Linda and running around with that other woman—were these rumors true or untrue? They were untrue, said Jimmy. So his father said: do you have doubts? And Jimmy said he did, and then agreed to pray with his father. He decided to take the church at Mount Hebron and renounce the other woman—about whom he had lied to his father.
But then Linda came to his father the very next week to complain that Jimmy was cruel to her—he ignored her, and said cutting things to her, mocked her—was that any way to treat a Christian wife? Jimmy’s father threw up his hands in despair. Was he expected to deal with everything? Were not his troubles with his own congregation enough?
He went over to see Jimmy with a shotgun in his hand, said it was only a symbol of God’s potential wrath, he had no intention of using it, no, but it went off accidentally. Blew off half of Jimmy’s jaw. It was only God’s mercy that Jimmy didn’t die—and afterwards Jimmy was a man possessed by the spirit of God. He and his father are on the road now with the Tabernacle Tent, bringing God’s message as a team. His father tells the story and Jimmy, who can’t talk anymore, sings—a melodious mourning sound which brings the sinners from the back rows to the front to be saved. God be praised!
GOLD COAST
They wake simultaneously in a hotel room on the thirty-seventh floor, neither of them sure of the time, both still a little drunk, a little numb from the silence that has grown between them.
“Look at the sky
! Look at the light!” she exclaims.
He’s already seen it—how could he not have? The enormous bed faces a wall of windows. They’ve left the drapes open. The wall of windows now seems like a wall of sky, almost indigo, shot with iridescence as if veins of a newly discovered precious mineral have been exposed. It isn’t dawn yet. It’s still a gradation of night, but night with tomorrow already luminous behind it like the silver behind the glass of a cobalt mirror.
He can see the sky reflected in the windows of all the surrounding buildings that tower up to form the glass cliffs of the gold coast they’ve drifted to. He knows that every city has such strips, and he distrusts them. No matter how authentically elegant they might appear, he thinks of them as illusory, removed from the real life of cities, as places that are really no place, reflections floating like illuminated scum on the surface of a river. He remembers how, as teenagers, he and a buddy spent their nights exploring the gold coast of the city they’d grown up in, and the mixture of awe and contempt they’d felt toward it.
He no longer feels superior to gold coasts. He wonders how many of his fellow sleepers are sitting up as he is, silently peering out of high-rise rooms in which the drapes have been drawn open on tremendous windows, windows for giants, scaled to span the winking horizon of the city. He both envies those still sleeping peacefully and pities them for missing these nameless few moments of sky which he knows already will be unforgettable. He wonders which of those two emotions the future will reveal as the more accurate. Once, shortly after they’d become lovers, she told him, “I’m not sure if meeting you has been the most lucky or unlucky thing that’s ever happened to me.”
He had laughed.