by James Thomas
Spider’s shaking his head, his eyes are wet, and for some crazy reason I’m so happy that he’s laughing. For a second I think it’s really Teddy telling the story. “And then,” I say, “that canary they used to have that she was trying to clean the cage when all this started, it comes flying into the kitchen all yellow, flapping its wings, singing like crazy.” I’ve always wondered, if one of them was unconscious and the other one was hysterical, who could have been paying any attention to that bird. But that’s how Teddy told it. “And that dog gets real quiet, it must be thinking the master’s dead, and Louise is at the top of the basement steps crossing herself, saying ‘Holy Mary, mother of God,’ and she’s looking at that big naked corpse laying in the puddle on the kitchen floor and she’s thinking, I’m not ready to be a widow yet.”
I glance out the window at the traffic passing by in the early darkness and I’m glad I’m in here where it’s warm. How can it be fall already, I wonder, with winter in the air? By Christmas Rita wants to be out of the house, she wants to move back to that little town where her folks are, and I suppose someone else will be telling different stories here in Teddy’s rec room.
Everyone around the table’s looking at me, as if they’re afraid I won’t go on. I know Teddy would have added something real good about Louise, like she was promising God she’d make Bernie go to church if by some miracle he comes back from the dead, but I just tell about how she’s on the phone shouting at the cops to please hurry, she thinks her husband had a heart attack. My voice runs a little fast on that part and everybody’s eyes around the table flicker a little as if someone just came into the room and walked off with one of the pictures of the old softball teams that are on the wall but no one’s going to say anything about it. Then I’m telling about the dog licking Bernie’s face and all of a sudden he’s shouting “Get that fucking animal off me, what the hell am I doing down here?” and Louise is kneeling on the wet kitchen floor saying “Thank you, God, thank you so much” and that bird’s chirping away from on top of the refrigerator.
Now everybody’s smiling and for a while it seems as if nothing has changed, like we’re ready to go out to the field tomorrow and play softball: you can smell the beer and the cigarettes and the pizza, and we’re happy. I take a swallow of my drink. It feels cool going down my throat, and over my glass I look at everyone. I want to believe all the rest of us are going to be around here for a long time.
THE NICEST KID IN THE UNIVERSE
Franky Gorky was the nicest kid in the universe. He always listened to his parents. He shared his toys and candy with other children. Birds sat on his bedroom window in the mornings and waited for him to wake up before they started to sing. Wild animals came up to Franky Gorky and ate out of his hand. Every kid who ever lived on 24th Street heard of Franky Gorky because he was the nicest kid who ever lived.
But he wasn’t the smartest kid.
For one thing he never noticed the moon.
Franky Gorky never noticed the moon till one night in December his parents took him outside on a cold night after a snowstorm just after the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the night Greta and Gary Gorky took him outside and pointed to the crescent in the sky. Franky Gorky thought it was a funny street light. “No,” said his dad, Gary Gorky, “it’s the moon.”
Well Franky Gorky didn’t know what to think about the moon, though he wished it was round, and every night after he got put to bed he went to his bedroom window where the birds waited for him to wake up in the morning and went out and looked at the moon, which, he started to notice, was actually getting bigger, in fact after a while it looked like it was really going to get round. Of course he was a good kid and he knew good kids often got what they wished for, but he’d heard enough fairy tales where people got what they wished for, like King Midas, and it ended up doing more harm than good, lucky for him nobody else seemed to notice that the moon was getting rounder. He wished he could talk to his grandmother who wouldn’t tell his parents and always seemed to know about stuff. In fact as the moon got bigger and bigger and one night got so big and white he thought it would suck his bones and maybe the bones of the whole world, something Franky Gorky didn’t want responsibility for, Franky Gorky remembered that usually you just didn’t get one wish, you got three wishes, and Franky Gorky stared up at the ice death moon and wished it would go away and that he could see his grandmother.
Franky Gorky may have been the nicest kid in the universe but that didn’t mean he always did the right thing, even he realized that, and by the time the moon was about half gone again and he started feeling good he figured out that what he should have wished for was that the moon would go back to normal, not that it would go away completely. Wishing that it would go away completely was a big blunder, especially since he’d used his third wish on getting to see his grandmother who he found out was coming to see the Gorkys on Christmas like she always did.
So it was a sad Christmas Eve for Franky Gorky when the moon went out. He could barely think about his Christmas toys, and instead of lying awake all night trying to keep from thinking about what he was going to get for Christmas by thinking about the baby Jesus and the Wise Men and how the world was to be saved from Original Sin, he kept going to the window and looking for the moon which he’d wiped out with the abuse of his wish, and now all he had left was his grandmother, Grandma Gorky, who was driving in from Buffalo like she did every Christmas, who would listen to him and know what to do.
And Franky Gorky was up like a dart on Christmas morning, waiting at the front window for his Grandma Gorky, and when she came he did the first bad thing of his life, he ran out of the house without permission and headed across the street where Grandma Gorky had parked because Christmas visitors all over the neighborhood had taken all the parking places on the Gorkys’ side, slipped on the ice, and got rubbed out by a drunk driver.
That’s what happens, said my father, when people take other people’s parking places.
That’s what happens, said my mother, when you don’t look both ways.
What happens is, if you’re the nicest kid in the whole universe, then you have to die.
This is what happens when you try to explain something.
THE PARENTS
We bring our babies, blue-eyed babies, brown-eyed babies, we have come to watch the parade, the marching bands. Young women step high; batons fly, flash against the sky like lightning rods. Oh, spare the child, for next come the floats. See Mickey Duck! See Donald Mouse! Snow White rides in her pumpkin carriage, faster, faster, speeding toward marriage with the prince who will give her babies, blue-eyed babies, brown-eyed babies, like our own babies, who are—lost. Lost at the parade! Where are our babies, our babies? We are looking for them everywhere, frantically, everyone helping and shouting: Find the babies!—when suddenly we see them. No wonder no one could find them. They have grown three feet taller, sprouted whiskers or breasts, swapped spun sugar for Sony Walkmen. We kiss them and hug them, but we are secretly frightened by their remarkable new size. They tell us not to worry. They will take care of us. And sure enough, later, we let them drive us home, because their eyes are sharper, their hands are steadier, and they know the way, which we forget more and more often. They stroke our hair and tell us to be calm. On Saturday, our babies help us to choose the best coffin. They are embarrassed when we insist on taking it home to try it out, but they give in because they don’t want to upset us. After they leave for the cinema, we climb into the coffin and pull the lid over us. The salesman had said one wouldn’t be big enough, then said one would not be sanitary. We laughed: Age has shrunk us. We are small enough to fit in here quite comfortably. It is as dark as a movie house, the kind in which we used to neck in the back row. Now, of course, nothing is playing. The film has completely unwound, and the only sound is the flicking of the loose end, around and around.
WATER
She touches his hair by the river.
I am in our apartme
nt, working. Her hand moves down his back.
I empty the trash and unclog the kitchen sink. His former girlfriends have turned into lesbians.
I take the key to his apartment, which he gave me so I could water his plants during the summer. He bends his kissing face to hers.
I walk over to his apartment, just two blocks away. Their legs dangle in the river.
I unlock the door and bolt it behind me. The room smells of feet and stale ashtrays. In the kitchen is a gas stove. I turn it on without lighting it.
Down by the river is a flock of geese, which they admire while holding hands. Soon he will take her back to his apartment. Soon they will lie there, readying cigarettes.
I relock the apartment and slip into the street. The air smells of autumn, burnt. In the sky, birds are leading each other south.
I know there is nothing left between us, that she looks at me each morning as if I were interrupting her life.
STOCKINGS
Henry Dobbins was a good man, and a superb soldier, but sophistication was not his strong suit. The ironies went beyond him. In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor. Like his country, too, Dobbins was drawn toward sentimentality.
Even now, twenty years later, I can see him wrapping his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck before heading out on ambush.
It was his one eccentricity. The pantyhose, he said, had the properties of a good-luck charm. He liked putting his nose into the nylon and breathing in the scent of his girlfriend’s body; he liked the memories this inspired, he sometimes slept with the stockings up against his face, the way an infant sleeps with a magic blanket, secure and peaceful. More than anything, though, the stockings were a talisman for him. They kept him safe. They gave access to a spiritual world, where things were soft and intimate, a place where he might someday take his girlfriend to live. Like many of us in Vietnam, Dobbins felt the pull of superstition, and he believed firmly and absolutely in the protective power of the stockings. They were like body armor, he thought. Whenever we saddled up for a late-night ambush, putting on our helmets and flak jackets, Henry Dobbins would make a ritual out of arranging the nylons around his neck, carefully tying a knot, draping the two leg sections over his left shoulder. There were some jokes, of course, but we came to appreciate the mystery of it all. Dobbins was invulnerable. Never wounded, never a scratch. In August, he tripped a Bouncing Betty, which failed to detonate. And a week later he got caught in the open during a fierce little firefight, no cover at all, but he just slipped the pantyhose over his nose and breathed deep and let the magic do its work.
It turned us into a platoon of believers. You don’t dispute facts.
But then, near the end of October, his girlfriend dumped him. It was a hard blow. Dobbins went quiet for a while, staring down at her letter, then after a time he took out the stockings and tied them around his neck as a comforter.
“No sweat,” he said. “I still love her. The magic doesn’t go away.”
It was a relief for all of us.
THE HURRICANE RIDE
In salt air and bright light, I watched my aunt revolve. Centrifugal force pressed her ample flesh against a padded wall. She screamed as the floor dropped slowly away, lipstick staining her teeth. But she stuck to the wall as if charged with static, and along with others, didn’t fall. She was dressed in checks and dangling shoes, her black handbag clinging to her hip. The Hurricane Ride gathered speed. My aunt was hurtling, blurred. Her mouth became a long dark line. Her delirious eyes were multiplied.
Checks and flesh turned diaphanous, her plump arms, gartered thighs. Her face dissolved, a trace of rouge.
I swore I saw through her for the rest of the day, despite her bulk and constant chatter, to the sea heaving beyond the boardwalk, tide absconding with the sand, waves cooling the last of light. Even as we left, I saw the clam-shell ticket stand, the ornate seahorse gate, through the vast glass of my aunt.
When does speed exceed the ability of our eyes to arrest and believe? If the axial rotation of the earth is 1,038 miles per hour, why does our planet look languid from space, as bejeweled as my aunt’s favorite brooch? Photographs of our galaxy, careening through the universe at over a million miles per hour, aren’t even as blurred as the local bus.
Momentum. Inertia. Gravity. Numbers and theories barrel beyond me. It’s clear that people disappear, and things, and thoughts. Earth. Aunt. Hurricane. Those words were written with the wish to keep them still. But they travel toward you at the speed of light. They are on the verge of vanishing.
A MOMENT IN THE SUN FIELD
Hansen’s twelfth birthday, after one of Bobby’s mom’s hamburger suppers, Mike Pasqui came over to Bobby’s house and the two of them talked Bobby’s dad into playing some 500 with them. Dad grumbled a little—he always did—but he grabbed the bat and ball from the back porch and headed for the back yard with Mytzi, Bobby’s muttzy dog, yapping behind—and he always did that, too.
Mike and Bobby took the field first, and Dad hit balls to them.
A caught fly ball earned Bobby 100 points. A grounder played on one bounce earned Mike 75. A flubbed grounder—a two-bouncer—stole 50 points back from Mike. And on it went into the evening. When one of the players earned 500 points, he took the bat until someone else got 500. Mike didn’t do much batting, which was okay with him. He just liked being a part of the game. And since Dad preferred to bat, after a while he decided to do all the batting no matter who scored how many points. And that was okay with everyone, too.
Pretty soon, Bobby had 1,075 points, and Mike had around 300 (he had stopped counting), and Dad was swinging and smacking the ball and even joking around a little bit.
It wasn’t too long and the shadow of the house slid up on Dad, slid over him, and stretched for the horizon, which it would reach, Bobby knew, the moment the sun disappeared below the opposite horizon. It would be a shadow hundreds of miles long, millions of miles long, and Bobby sometimes wondered if that was what night really was, all the shadows of all the houses and all the dads and all the kids playing 500 stretched out and added together.
Dad tossed the ball into the air in front of him and popped a fly out of the shadow and into the sunlight. The sun splashed onto one side of the ball, splashed it cool and white against the cool and darkening sky. The ball spun, and began to fall, and Bobby positioned himself under it, held his glove out not for a whole ball, but just a piece of one, because it looked like just a piece of one, a slice of ball, the slice splashed extra white in the high sunlight.
Bobby waited for that little bit of ball to come down, and suddenly he understood the moon.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL COBBLER
The grandfather of General (later President) Ulysses S. Grant tanned hides and cobbled shoes in Pilgrim County. Neighbors knew him simply as Noah Grant, the close-tongued man to whom you took your skins for curing, from whom you bought your moccasins, or, if well-to-do, your boots.
For a long time no one expected him to become the father, let alone grandfather, of anybody. He was too sparing of words ever to put together a speech long enough to qualify as a marriage proposal. Contrary to the predictions of Roma’s gossips, however, he did marry. In due time he fathered a son, Jesse, who fathered a son, Ulysses, who helped lead a multitude of other sons, both Union and Confederate, into premature graves.
Although he lived by tanning the hides of murdered animals, Noah did not like killing, and never fired a gun. Skins heaped all around him while he worked: bear, otter, marten, deer, the reeking wildcat and fox, panther and wolf, the sumptuous mink. The animal kingdom seemed to have shed its collective coat in his tanning shack. The longer he worked among hides, the more silent he became, as if the tannic acid were curing him of speech. Dumb beast among dumb beasts, the neighbors said.
In his s
ilence, Noah never left off musing. Perhaps a way could be found to skin the animals without killing them, as sheep were sheared for their wool? Perhaps the deer and panthers could be bred so that each animal would bear a dozen thicknesses of skin, and thus fewer need be killed? Or maybe some vegetable could be trained to produce fur instead of fruit? Noah became, in short, a philosopher.
While his knife scraped fat from a raccoon skin, or his needle pierced the hide of an otter, he contemplated the world’s secret equations: nine bearskins would buy you a rifle, forty-three would buy a horse; between eighty-five and one hundred deer would get you a yoke of oxen; mink was worth about the same, inch per inch, as calico; for one muskrat you could get stinking drunk on rye whiskey, and for a panther you could stay that way a week. There was occult meaning in these equations. If you thought about them long enough, the grandfather of U. S. Grant was persuaded, you could deduce the paths of stars and the causes of war.
CORNERS
Mildred and Jessie were elected to inspect Marie’s remains before the public viewing. Mildred got to go because she was the oldest, and Jessie because she had come the farthest. The other siblings had gotten to pick out the casket and the dress their sister, Marie, would wear.
The undertaker, a former high-school classmate, showed them solemnly into the parlor. “I think you’ll be pleased,” he said as he lifted the casket lid and stepped back.
Jessie felt a familiar tug of pity for him, like the one she’d feel when she’d encounter him in school the day after she and her sisters had been making fun of him the night before.
“She looks wonderful, Tom,” Mildred said. “You’ve done a good job. What do you think, Jessie?”