by James Thomas
During the next two weeks, Roy gets mad every time I call the cats by their new names. But he is more mad that Savannah, Joe Namath, and Pillow take to their names so quickly. It’s all in the tone of voice, I tell him.
I get happy with my new cats.
After a couple of months I get smart. Come Sunday breakfast it isn’t Roy filling in the crossword; it’s a new man—better with words and cats—named Ralph.
TRUE LOVE
They met at a national entomology conference. To his eye, she was a woman of extraordinary physical grace and beauty, the last thing he expected to find at a professional conference.
He was struck by her slender, hairless forearms, the delicate curve of her neck, the proud way she carried her rather small head.
His tall thin frame and slightly bulging eyes reminded her of the subjects of her first highly successful entomological research project. It was a strong and fond memory. The project had established her reputation for creative insectology.
He approached her during the cocktail hour after the first day’s papers.
“Hello,” he said, “I’m Lloyd Gaynor.”
“Gaynor? Oh, yes. Termites.”
He was pleased.
Her name was Phyllis Turner and he knew and admired her work on fire ants. Fortuitously, he was seated next to her at the dinner. Their mutual attraction was very strong, so strong that their exchanges took on a quality of escalation, advancing their intimacy in a series of minute but rapid steps, a breathless spiral like a ritual dance.
An attraction strong enough to evoke real fear.
A revelation occurred over the mocha bombe and espresso that excited her more than she cared to show. She realized that as part of the research he was describing in termite neurobiology he had developed a computer model that could save her six months in her statistical analysis of fire ant brain function. She expressed her interest in a low key, oblique way. He was encouraging but noncommittal.
Shortly after the dinner, by unspoken agreement, they ascended in the hotel elevator to her floor and entered her room. They undressed without speaking, he in the bathroom, she in the bedroom.
He entered the bedroom and paused, standing beside the bed. She stood naked across the bed from him. They examined each other’s pale, slender, almost hairless bodies.
He spoke first.
“The female praying mantis is nearsighted and dangerous. When the male is impelled to mate, he approaches her slowly and with great caution, sometimes waiting motionless for up to twenty minutes before the next short advance. When he finally summons the courage to dash forward and mount her from the rear, she typically responds by twisting her upper body around and biting off his head. This act quite literally removes his innate fear of her, since it removes the neurons and ganglia in which that fear resides. He then copulates to a successful conclusion and dies, presumably as happily as any creature can without its head. After he dies, she eats the rest of him.”
He paused and looked at her expectantly. His long thin penis extended out and upward with mute pink urgency.
When she spoke, she used the same light didactic tone as he.
“The female empid fly also has a nasty habit of eating the male when he approaches her during mating season. To divert her from this purpose, the male typically finds a morsel of food and wraps it elaborately in a silk balloon formed by his glandular secretions. The time it takes the female to unwrap his gift is often long enough for him to copulate successfully and escape unscathed. But in one empid species, whether through cleverness, laziness, or just bad faith, the male fails to put any food inside the balloon. The female is hoodwinked into copulation with an empty promise.”
These things they said to each other were well known to both, as indeed they were to any first-year graduate student of entomology.
There was a pause after she spoke. They continued to stare at each other. It could have gone either way.
Then they fell upon each other.
THE COLONEL
What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
SNOW
Our first year in New York we rented a small apartment with a Catholic school nearby, taught by the Sisters of Charity, hefty women in long black gowns and bonnets that made them look peculiar, like dolls in mourning. I liked them a lot, especially my grandmotherly fourth grade teacher, Sister Zoe. I had a lovely name, she said, and she had me teach the whole class how to pronounce it. Yo-lan-da. As the only immigrant in my class, I was put in a special seat in the first row by the window, apart from the other children so that Sister Zoe could tutor me without disturbing them. Slowly, she enunciated the new words I was to repeat: laundromat, cornflakes, subway, snow.
Soon I picked up enough English to understand holocaust was in the air. Sister Zoe explained to a wide-eyed classroom what was happening in Cuba. Russian missiles were being assembled, trained supposedly on New York City. President Kennedy, looking worried too, was on the television at home, explaining we might have to go to war against the Communists. At school, we had air-raid drills: an ominous bell would go off and we’d file into the hall, fall to the floor, cover our heads with our coats, and imagine our hair falling out, the bones in our arms going soft. At home, Mami and my sisters and I said a rosary for world peace. I heard new vocabulary: nuclear bomb, radioactive fallout, bomb shelter. Sister Zoe explained how it would happen. She drew a picture of a mushroom on the blackboard and dotted a flurry of chalkmarks for the dusty fallout that would kill us all.
The months grew cold, November, December. It was dark when I got up in the morning, frosty when I followed my breath to school. One morning as I sat at my desk daydreaming out the window, I saw dots in the air like the ones Sister Zoe had drawn—random at first, then lots and lots. I shrieked, “Bomb! Bomb!” Sister Zoe jerked around, her full black skirt ballooning as she hurried to my side. A few girls began to cry.
But then Sister Zoe’s shocked look faded. “Why, Yolanda dear, that’s snow!” She laughed. “Snow.”
“Snow,” I repeated. I looked out the window warily. All my life I had heard about the white crystals that fell out of American skies in the winter. From my desk I watched the fine powder dust the sidewalk and parked cars below. Each flake was different, Sister Zoe said, like a person, irreplaceable and beautiful.
EVERYTHING IS GREEN
She says I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to. So it is for sure that she is lying, when it is the truth she will go crazy trying to get you to believe her. So I feel like I know.
/> She lights up and looks off away from me, looking sly with her cigarette through a wet window, and I can not feel what to say.
I say Mayfly I can not feel what to do or say or believe you any more. But there is things I know. I know I am older and you are not. And I give to you all I got to give you, with my hands and my heart both. Every thing that is inside me I have gave you. I have been keeping it together and working steady every day. I have made you the reason I got for what I always do. I have tried to make a home to give to you, for you to be in, and for it to be nice.
I light up myself then I throw the match in the sink with other matches and dishes and a sponge and such things.
I say Mayfly my heart has been down the road and back for you but I am forty-eight years old. It is time I have got to not let things just carry me by any more. I got to use some time that is still mine to try to make every thing feel right. I got to try to feel how I need to. In me there is needs which you can not even see any more, because there is too many needs in you in the way.
She does not say any thing and I look at her window and I can feel that she knows. I know about it, and she shifts her self on my sofa lounger. She brings her legs up underneath her in some shorts.
I say it really does not matter what I seen or what I think I seen. That is not it any more. I know I am older and you are not. But now I am feeling like there is all of me going out to you and nothing of you coming back any more.
Her hair is up with a barrette and pins and her chin is in her hand, it’s early, she looks like she is dreaming out at the clean light through the wet window over my sofa lounger.
Everything is green she says. Look how green it all is Mitch. How can you say the things you say you feel like when everything outside is green like it is.
The window over the sink of my kitchenette is cleaned off from the hard rain last night, and it is a morning with sun, it is still early, and there is a mess of green out. The trees are green and some grass out past the speed bumps is green and slicked down. But every thing is not green. The other trailers are not green, and my card table out with puddles in lines and beer cans and butts floating in the ashtrays is not green, or my truck, or the gravel of the lot, or the Big Wheel toy that is on its side under a clothesline without no clothes on it by the next trailer, where the guy has got him some kids.
Everything is green she is saying. She is whispering it and the whisper is not to me no more I know.
I chuck my smoke and turn hard from the morning outside with the taste of something true in my mouth. I turn hard toward her in the light on the sofa lounger.
She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me that can not close up in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.
DRAFT HORSE
When he was a kid growing up in Fargo, he used to walk from the barn to the house, thirty below, his breath steaming out and then flowing past his face. On those mornings he could hear the way the cows seemed to brush together in the cold, and imagined he could hear them at night when the temperature dropped even lower. From his bedroom it sounded like their hides were made of metal, how each hair had frozen on their backs and was rasping against the others.
And he remembered the way the sun used to look coming in through a quarter inch of frost on the single pane window. It would break up, splashing into a prism on the walls. He would wake and hold his finger to the cold window, then come back later in the day from school and find his fingerprints perfectly preserved in ice.
Each day in the cold, each month when it never got above freezing, he wondered how the sun could shine and not warm him. He would stand for as long as he could and watch his shadow move in an arc in front of his body. The cold would begin in his shoes then work its way up the inside of his legs. Then his fingers would go numb and he would be dancing in the January sun, his shadow cavorting on top of the snow.
Each morning he would have to go to the cows. There would be the smell of heat rising from their bodies mixed with the smell of hot manure, steaming below them. He shoveled the warm odor sifting like mist into his nostrils.
Sometimes when he shoveled, he remembered the old stories about the cold. Men freezing in their sleep. Or how the water would freeze in mid-air after you threw it out of the bucket.
After he washed the manure smell from his skin with pure castile soap, he would always go back into his room and look for a long time at the photograph of his grandfather on Rogers Lake. It was 1925. There were several men standing around a burning horse carcass on the ice. The flames rose black and thick into the February sky. The horse, a huge Belgian mare, had slipped hauling ice on the lake.
He remembered the way his grandfather described bringing the horse down. How he slipped the barrel into her ear as if it were a finger, he said. He had wanted to leave her on the ice, let the cold take her but his brother had insisted she be shot and burned on the spot where she failed.
So they put her down. One shot. Then Uncle Ike doused her with gasoline. Someone, perhaps his grandfather, had touched the match to the mottled hair and the horse rose in flame like a storm. When they all stepped back someone took the picture. In the right corner of the photograph near the wagon you could see small icicles beginning to form on the ice blocks piled four high, the men holding their arms to shield them from the heat.
For many nights he had a dream of walking to a black spot in the ice, poking through the remnants with a pitchfork, how the silver bridle ornaments still glistened somehow. He could hear the sound of hooves, which sounded like ice breaking up. Now, every spring, when he drifts over that spot where they did the burning, he looks down over the edge of the boat and imagines the bones resting on the bottom, the horse in full gallop, her breath streaming out like clouds of snow underwater.
CORPORAL
Once I had visions of being a general. This was in Tacoma during the early years of World War II when I was a child going to grade school. They had a huge paper drive that was brilliantly put together like a military career.
It was very exciting and went something like this: If you brought in fifty pounds of paper you became a private and seventy-five pounds of paper were worth a corporal’s stripes and a hundred pounds to be a sergeant, then spiraling pounds of paper leading upward until finally you arrived at being a general.
I think it took a ton of paper to be a general or maybe it was only a thousand pounds. I can’t remember the exact amount but in the beginning it seemed so simple to gather enough paper to be a general.
I started out by gathering all the loose paper that was lying innocently around the house. That added up to three or four pounds. I’ll have to admit that I was a little disappointed. I don’t know where I got the idea that the house was just filled with paper. I actually thought there was paper all over the place. It’s an interesting surprise that paper can be deceptive.
I didn’t let it throw me, though. I marshaled my energies and went out and started going door to door asking people if they had any newspapers or magazines lying around that could be donated to the paper drive, so that we could win the war and destroy evil forever.
An old woman listened patiently to my spiel and then she gave me a copy of Life magazine that she had just finished reading. She closed the door while I was still standing there staring dumbfoundedly at the magazine in my hands. The magazine was warm.
At the next house, there wasn’t any paper, not even a used envelope, because another kid had already beaten me to it.
At the next house, nobody was home.
That’s how it went for a week, door after door, house after house, block after block, until finally I got enough paper together to become a private.
I took my goddamn little private’s stripe home in the absolute bottom of my pocket. There were already some paper officers, lieutenants and captains, on the block. I didn’t even bother to have the stripe sewed on my coat. I just threw it in a drawer and covered it up with som
e socks.
I spent the next few days cynically looking for paper and lucked into a medium pile of Collier’s from somebody’s basement, which was enough to get my corporal’s stripes that immediately joined my private’s stripe under the socks.
The kids who wore the best clothes and had a lot of spending money and got to eat hot lunch every day were already generals. They had known where there were a lot of magazines and their parents had cars. They strutted military airs around the playground and on their way home from school.
Shortly after that, like the next day, I brought a halt to my glorious military career and entered into the disenchanted paper shadows of America where failure is a bounced check or a bad report card or a letter ending a love affair and all the words that hurt people when they read them.
SUBTOTALS
Number of refrigerators I’ve lived with: 18. Number of rotten eggs I’ve thrown: 1. Number of finger rings I’ve owned: 3. Number of broken bones: 0. Number of Purple Hearts: 0. Number of times unfaithful to wife: 2. Number of holes in one, big golf: 0; miniature golf: 3. Number of consecutive push-ups, maximum: 25. Number of waist size: 32. Number of gray hairs: 4. Number of children: 4. Number of suits, business: 2; swimming: 22. Number of cigarettes smoked: 83. Number of times I’ve kicked a dog: 6. Number of times caught in the act, any act: 64. Number of postcards sent: 831; received: 416. Number of spider plants that died while under my care: 34. Number of blind dates: 2. Number of jumping jacks: 982,316. Number of headaches: 184. Number of kisses, given: 21,602; received: 20,041. Number of belts: 21. Number of fuckups, bad: 6; not so bad. 1,500. Number of times swore under breath at parents: 838. Number of weeks at church camp: 1. Number of houses owned: 0. Number of houses rented: 12. Number of hunches played: 1,091. Number of compliments, given: 4,051; accepted: 2,249. Number of embarrassing moments: 2,258. Number of states visited: 38. Number of traffic tickets: 3. Number of girlfriends: 4. Number of times fallen off playground equipment, swings: 3; monkey bars: 2; teeter-totter: 1. Number of times flown in dreams: 28. Number of times fallen down stairs: 9. Number of dogs: 1. Number of cats. 7. Number of miracles witnessed: 0. Number of insults, given: 10,038; received. 8,963. Number of wrong telephone numbers dialed: 73. Number of times speechless: 33. Number of times stuck key into electrical socket: 1. Number of birds killed with rocks: 1. Number of times had the wind knocked out of me: 12. Number of times patted on the back: 181. Number of times wished I was dead: 2. Number of times unsure of footing: 458. Number of times fallen asleep reading a book: 513. Number of times born again: 0. Number of times seen double: 28. Number of déjà vu experiences: 43. Number of emotional breakdowns: 1. Number of times choked on bones, chicken: 4; fish: 6; other: 3. Number of times didn’t believe parents: 23,978. Number of lawn-mowing miles: 3,575. Number of light bulbs changed: 273. Number of childhood home telephone: 384-621-5844. Number of brothers: 3½. Number of passes at women: 5. Number of stairs walked, up: 745,821; down: 743,609. Number of hats lost: 9. Number of magazine subscriptions: 41. Number of times seasick: 1. Number of bloody noses: 16. Number of times had sexual intercourse: 4,013. Number of fish caught: 1. Number of times heard “The Star Spangled Banner”: 2,410. Number of babies held in arms: 9. Number of times I forgot what I was going to say: 631.