Pastoralia

by George Saunders

  What could I say? He’s only barely related to me? He hardly ever does that?

  Angela’s eyes were like these little pies.

  I walked her home, got no kiss, came back, cleaned up the dishwasher as best I could. A few days later I got my class ring in the mail and a copy of The Prophet.

  You will always be my first love, she’d written inside. But now my path converges to a higher ground. Be well always. Walk in joy. Please don’t think me cruel, it’s just that I want so much in terms of accomplishment, plus I couldn’t believe that guy peed right on your dishes.

  No way am I table dancing for Angela Silveri. No way am I asking Angela Silveri’s friend if she wants to see my cock. No way am I hanging around here so Angela can see me in my flight jacket and T-backs and wonder to herself how I went so wrong etc. etc.

  I hide in the kitchen until my shift is done, then walk home very, very slowly because I’m afraid of what Bernie’s going to do to me when I get there.

  MIN MEETS ME at the door. She’s got flour all over her blouse and it looks like she’s been crying.

  “I can’t take any more of this,” she says. “She’s like falling apart. I mean shit’s falling off her. Plus she made me bake a freaking pie.”

  On the table is a very lumpy pie. One of Bernie’s arms is now disconnected and lying across her lap.

  “What are you thinking of!” she shouts. “You didn’t show your cock even once? You think it’s easy making those thumbprints? You try it, smartass! Do you or do you not know the plan? You gotta get us out of here! And to get us out, you gotta use what you got. And you ain’t got much. A nice face. And a decent unit. Not huge, but shaped nice.”

  “Bernie, God,” says Min.

  “What, Miss Priss?” shouts Bernie, and slams the severed arm down hard on her lap, and her other ear falls off.

  “I’m sorry, but this is too fucking sickening,” says Min. “I’m going out.”

  “What’s sickening?” says Bernie. “Are you saying I’m sickening? Well, I think you’re sickening. So many wonderful things in life and where’s your mind? You think with your lazy ass. Whatever life hands you, you take. You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying home and studying.”

  “I’m what?” says Min. “Studying what? I ain’t studying. Chick comes into my house and starts ordering me to study? I freaking doubt it.”

  “You don’t know nothing!” Bernie says. “What fun is life when you don’t know nothing? You can’t find your own town on the map. You can’t name a single president. When we go to Rome you won’t know nothing about the history. You’re going to study the World Book. Do we still have those World Books?”

  “Yeah right,” says Min. “We’re going to Rome.”

  “We’ll go to Rome when he’s a lawyer,” says Bernie.

  “Dream on, chick,” says Min. “And we’ll go to Mars when I’m a stockbreaker.”

  “Don’t you dare make fun of me!” Bernie shouts, and our only vase goes flying across the room and nearly nails Min in the head.

  “She’s been like this all day,” says Min.

  “Like what?” shouts Bernie. “We had a perfectly nice day.”

  “She made me help her try on my bras,” says Min.

  “I never had a nice sexy bra,” says Bernie.

  “And now mine are all ruined,” says Min. “They got this sort of goo on them.”

  “You ungrateful shit!” shouts Bernie. “Do you know what I’m doing for you? I’m saving your boy. And you got the nerve to say I made goo on your bras! Troy’s gonna get caught in a crossfire in the courtyard. In September. September eighteenth. He’s gonna get thrown off his little trike. With one leg twisted under him and blood pouring out of his ear. It’s a freaking prophecy.You know that word? It means prediction. You know that word? You think I’m bullshitting? Well I ain’t bullshitting. I got the power. Watch this: All day Jade sat licking labels at a desk by a window. Her boss bought everybody subs for lunch. She’s bringing some home in a green bag.”

  “That ain’t true about Troy, is it?” says Min. “Is it? I don’t believe it.”

  “Turn on the TV!” Bernie shouts. “Give me the changer.”

  I turn on the TV. I give her the changer. She puts on Nathan’s Body Shop. Nathan says washboard abs drive the women wild. Then there’s a close-up of his washboard abs.

  “Oh yes,” says Bernie. “Them are for me. I’d like to give those a lick. A lick and a pinch. I’d like to sort of straddle those things.”

  Just then Jade comes through the door with a big green bag.

  “Oh God,” says Min.

  “Told you so!” says Bernie, and pokes Min in the ribs. “Ha ha! I really got the power!”

  “I don’t get it,” Min says, all desperate. “What happens? Please. What happens to him? You better freaking tell me.”

  “I already told you,” Bernie says. “He’ll fly about fifteen feet and live about three minutes.”

  “Bernie, God,” Min says, and starts to cry. “You used to be so nice.”

  “I’m still so nice,” says Bernie, and bites into a sub and takes off the tip of her finger and starts chewing it up.

  JUST AFTER DAW N she shouts out my name.

  “Take the blanket off,” she says.“I ain’t feeling so good.”

  I take the blanket off. She’s basically just this pile of parts: both arms in her lap, head on the arms, heel of one foot touching the heel of the other, all of it sort of wrapped up in her dress.

  “Get me a washcloth,” she says. “Do I got a fever? I feel like I got a fever. Oh, I knew it was too good to be true. But okay. New plan. New plan. I’m changing the first part of Phase One. If you see two thumbprints, that means the lady’ll screw you for cash. We’re in a fix here. We gotta speed this up. There ain’t gonna be nothing left of me. Who’s gonna be my lover now?”

  The doorbell rings.

  “Son of a bitch,” Bernie snarls.

  It’s Father Brian with a box of doughnuts. I step out quick and close the door behind me. He says he’s just checking in. Perhaps we’d like to talk? Perhaps we’re feeling some residual anger about Bernie’s situation? Which would of course be completely understandable. Once when he was a young priest someone broke in and drew a mustache on the Virgin Mary with a permanent marker, and for weeks he was tortured by visions of bending back the finger of the vandal until he or she burst into tears of apology.

  “I knew that wasn’t appropriate,” he says. “I knew that by indulging in that fantasy I was honoring violence. And yet it gave me pleasure. I also thought of catching them in the act and boinking them in the head with a rock. I also thought of jumping up and down on their backs until something in their spinal column cracked. Actually I had about a million ideas. But you know what I did instead? I scrubbed and scrubbed our Holy Mother, and soon she was as good as new. Her statue, I mean. She herself of course is always good as new.”

  From inside comes the sound of breaking glass. Breaking glass and then something heavy falling, and Jade yelling and Min yelling and the babies crying.

  “Oops, I guess?” he says. “I’ve come at a bad time? Look, all I’m trying to do is urge you, if at all possible, to forgive the perpetrators, as I forgave the perpetrator that drew on my Virgin Mary. The thing lost, after all, is only your aunt’s body, and what is essential, I assure you, is elsewhere, being well taken care of.”

  I nod. I smile. I say thanks for stopping by. I take the doughnuts and go back inside.

  The TV’s broke and the refrigerator’s tipped over and Bernie’s parts are strewn across the living room like she’s been shot out of a cannon.

  “She tried to get up,” says Jade.

  “I don’t know where the hell she thought she was going,” says Min.

  “Come here,” the head says to me, and I squat down. “That’s it for me. I’m fucked. As per usual. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Although come to think of it I was never even the freaking bridesmaid. Look, show yo
ur cock. It’s the shortest line between two points. The world ain’t giving away nice lives. You got a trust fund? You a genius? Show your cock. It’s what you got. And remember: Troy in September. On his trike. One leg twisted. Don’t forget. And also. Don’t remember me like this. Remember me like how I was that night we all went to Red Lobster and I had that new perm. Ah Christ. At least buy me a stone.”

  I rub her shoulder, which is next to her foot.

  “We loved you,” I say.

  “Why do some people get everything and I got nothing?” she says. “Why? Why was that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Show your cock,” she says, and dies again.

  We stand there looking down at the pile of parts. Mac crawls toward it and Min moves him back with her foot.

  “This is too freaking much,” says Jade, and starts crying.

  “What do we do now?” says Min.

  “Call the cops,” Jade says.

  “And say what?” says Min.

  We think about this awhile.

  I get a Hefty bag. I get my winter gloves.

  “I ain’t watching,” says Jade.

  “I ain’t watching either,” says Min, and they take the babies into the bedroom.

  I close my eyes and wrap Bernie up in the Hefty bag and twistie-tie the bag shut and lug it out to the trunk of the K-car. I throw in a shovel. I drive up to St. Leo’s. I lower the bag into the hole using a bungee cord, then fill the hole back in.

  Down in the city are the nice houses and the so-so houses and the lovers making out in dark yards and the babies crying for their moms, and I wonder if, other than Jesus, this has ever happened before. Maybe it happens all the time. Maybe there’s angry dead all over, hiding in rooms, covered with blankets, bossing around their scared, embarrassed relatives. Because how would we know?

  I for sure don’t plan on broadcasting this.

  I smooth over the dirt and say a quick prayer: If it was wrong for her to come back, forgive her, she never got beans in this life, plus she was trying to help us.

  At the car I think of an additional prayer: But please don’t let her come back again.

  WHEN I GET HOME the babies are asleep and Jade and Min are watching a phone-sex infomercial, three girls in leather jumpsuits eating bananas in slo-mo while across the screen runs a constant disclaimer: “Not Necessarily the Girls Who Man the Phones! Not Necessarily the Girls Who Man the Phones!”

  “Them chicks seem to really be enjoying those bananas,” says Min in a thin little voice.

  “I like them jumpsuits though,” says Jade.

  “Yeah them jumpsuits look decent,” says Min.

  Then they look up at me. I’ve never seen them so sad and beat and sick.

  “It’s done,” I say.

  Then we hug and cry and promise never to forget Bernie the way she really was, and I use some Resolve on the rug and they go do some reading in their World Books.

  Next day I go in early. I don’t see a single thumbprint. But it doesn’t matter. I get with Sonny Vance and he tells me how to do it. First you ask the woman would she like a private tour. Then you show her the fake P–40, the Gallery of Historical Aces, the shower stall where we get oiled up, etc. etc. and then in the hall near the rest room you ask if there’s anything else she’d like to see. It’s sleazy. It’s gross. But when I do it I think of September. September and Troy in the crossfire, his little leg bent under him etc. etc.

  Most say no but quite a few say yes.

  I’ve got a place picked out at a complex called Swan’s Glen. They’ve never had a shooting or a knifing and the public school is great and every Saturday they have a nature walk for kids behind the clubhouse.

  For every hundred bucks I make, I set aside five for Bernie’s stone.

  What do you write on something like that? LIFE PASSED HER BY? DIED DISAPPOINTED? CAME BACK TO LIFE BUT FELL APART? All true, but too sad, and no way I’m writing any of those.

  BERNIE KOWALSKI, it’s going to say: BELOVED AUNT. Sometimes she comes to me in dreams. She never looks good. Sometimes she’s wearing a dirty smock. Once she had on handcuffs. Once she was naked and dirty and this mean cat was clawing its way up her front. But every time it’s the same thing.

  “Some people get everything and I got nothing,” she says. “Why? Why did that happen?”

  Every time I say I don’t know.

  And I don’t.

  • The End of FIRPO IN THE WORLD •

  THE BOY ON THE BIKE flew by the chink’s house, and the squatty-body’s house, and the house where the dead guy had rotted for five days, remembering that the chink had once called him nasty, the squatty-body had once called the cops when he’d hit her cat with a lug nut on a string, the chick in the dead guy’s house had once asked if he, Cody, ever brushed his teeth. Someday when he’d completed the invention of his special miniaturizing ray he would shrink their houses and flush them down the shitter while in tiny voices all three begged for some sophisticated mercy, but he would only say, Sophisticated? When were you ever sophisticated to me? And from the toilet bowl they would say, Well, yes, you’re right, we were pretty mean, flush us down, we deserve it; but no, at the last minute he would pluck them out and place them in his lunchbox so he could send them on secret missions such as putting hideous boogers of assassination in Lester Finn’s thermos if Lester Finn ever again asked him in Civics why his rear smelled like hot cotton with additional crap cling-ons.

  It was a beautiful sunny day and the aerobics class at the Rec had let out and cars were streaming out of the parking lot with sun glinting off their hoods, and he rode along on the sidewalk, racing the cars as they passed.

  Here was the low-hanging willow where you had to duck down, here was the place with the tilty sidewalk square that served as a ramp when you jerked hard on the handlebars, which he did, and the crowd went wild, and the announcers in the booth above the willow shook their heads, saying, Wow, he takes that jump like there’s no tomorrow while them other racers fret about it like some kind of tiny crying babies!

  Were the Dalmeyers home?

  Their gray car was still in the driveway.

  He would need to make another lap.

  Yesterday he had picked up a bright-red goalie pad and all three Dalmeyers had screamed at him, Not that pad Cody you dick, we never use those pads in the driveway because they get scuffed, you rectum, those are only for ice, were you born a rectal shitbrain or did you take special rectal shitbrain lessons, in rectal shitbrain lessons did they teach you how to ruin everybody’s things?

  Well yes, he had ruined a few Dalmeyer things in his life, he had yes pounded a railroad spike in a good new volleyball, he had yes secretly scraped a ski with a nail, he had yes given the Dalmeyer dog Rudy a cut on its leg with a shovel, but that had been an accident, he’d thrown the shovel at a rosebush and stupid Rudy had walked in front of it.

  And the Dalmeyers had snatched away the goalie pad and paraded around the driveway making the nosehole sound, and when he tried to laugh to show he was a good sport he made the nosehole sound for real, and they totally cracked up, and Zane Dalmeyer said why didn’t he take his trademark nosehole sound on Broadway so thousands could crap their pants laughing? And Eric Dalmeyer said hey if only he had like fifty different-sized noseholes that each made a different sound then he could play songs. And they laughed so hard at the idea of him playing songs on Broadway on his fifty different-sized noseholes that they fell to the driveway thrashing their idiotic Dalmeyer limbs, even Ginnie, the baby Dalmeyer, and ha ha ha that had been a laugh, that had been so funny he had almost gone around one two three four and smashed their cranial cavities with his off-brand gym shoes, which was another puzzling dilemmoid, because why did he have Arroes when every single Dalmeyer, even Ginnie, had the Nikes with the lights in the heel that lit up?

  Fewer cars were coming by now from the Rec. The ones that did were going faster, and he no longer tried to race them.

  Well, it would be reveng
e, sweet revenge, when he stuck the lozenge stolen from wood shop up the Dalmeyers’ water hose, and the next time they turned the hose on it exploded, and all the Dalmeyers, even Dad Dalmeyer, stood around in their nice tan pants puzzling over it like them guys on Nova. And the Dalmeyers were so stupid they would conclude that it had been a miracle, and would call some guys from a science lab to confirm the miracle, and one of the lab guys would flip the wooden lozenge into the air and say to Dad Dalmeyer, You know what, a very clever Einstein lives in your neighborhood and I suggest that in the future you lock this hose up, because in all probability this guy cannot be stopped. And he, Cody, would give the lab guy a wink, and later, as they were getting into the lab van, the lab guy would say, Look, why not come live with us in the experimental space above our lab and help us discover some amazing compounds with the same science brain that apparently thought up this brilliant lozenge, because, frankly, when we lab guys were your age, no way, this lozenge concept was totally beyond us, we were just playing with baby toys and doing baby math, but you, you’re really something scientifically special.

  And when the Dalmeyers came for a lab tour with a school group they would approach him with their big confident underwater watches and say wow oh boy had they ever missed the boat in terms of him, sorry, they were so very sorry, what was this beaker for, how did this burner work, was it really true that he had built a whole entire T. rex from scratch and energized it by taming the miraculous power of cosmic thunder? And down in the basement the T. rex would rear up its ugly head and want to have a Dalmeyer snack, but using his special system of codes, pounding on a heat pipe a different number of times for each alphabet letter, he would tell the T. rex, No no no, don’t eat a single Dalmeyer, although why not lift Eric Dalmeyer up just for the fun of it on the tip of your tremendous green snout and give him a lesson in what kind of power those crushing jaws would have if he, Cody, pounded out on the heat pipe Kill Kill Kill.