by Maria Flook
“Do you want to sign this paper?” Margaret asked her sister.
“Fuck that. Fuck those bodies going to science.”
“My feelings exactly,” Margaret said. She tore the paper in half and the wind shoved the pieces ahead of her as she walked out the door. She heard Tracy say something about the sandwiches; then he came outside.
They stood at the Duster while Cam unlocked the doors to let the heat escape. Margaret looked up at her sister’s apartment and saw the wind lifting the curtains.
Tracy said, “Margaret this, Margaret that. That really sums it up for Jane.”
“Is it my fault?” Margaret asked.
“Richard’s girl,” Tracy went on. “That’s it tied up in a bow.” He repeated her father’s name a few times trying to get the perfect resonance. “It’s your stigma,” he told her. “Go with it.”
“Eat shit,” she told Tracy, but she shrugged. She rubbed her elbow, which was sticky with a gummy residue. Her skin smelled sharp and yeasty from the spilled beer. Margaret looked up and down the street. Clapboard houses in straight sun-baked lines leading right up to the Atlantic. There was a diner or a delicatessen on every other corner, people standing around selling lemon ices and squares of cold pizza. Everywhere the familiars, humming like pins and needles in her bones. “Will you just look at this. It’s the white trash of the Jersey shore,” she said, but she knew it was hers, her kin, and they all deserved better.
Cam steered into a parking lot that faced the water. Margaret went inside a restaurant and came back in her sarong-style, French-cut swimsuit, which revealed her hipbones. Tracy and Cam had undressed and Tracy was already swimming far out into the sea. She walked down the beach with her brother until they found an evocative pulse in the waves where they angled into the surf. Margaret felt drunk as soon as she went under and she couldn’t rise to the surface. Cam grabbed her wrist and pulled her into shallow water. They were both too drunk to swim and they stayed together near the shore. Tracy was still swimming far out. Cam told her, “He’s totally crazy.” She couldn’t disagree with this, and she turned on her back to float and watch the sky.
Then they waited on the beach. Having lost sight of him, Margaret was too angry to be fearful. “That fuck,” she said. “He’s really an asshole.”
“Are you certain we don’t have to get help?” Cam asked her.
“He’ll need help. Just wait.”
She pulled her knees up and hugged her legs. They watched the water. The wind lifted a few tags of froth, but the water was fairly calm. Tracy was gone. Farther down the beach a motorcycle was purring along. It was coming toward them. A girl was driving. She was wearing a chartreuse bandana knotted around her bosom. Sitting behind her was Tracy. Tracy hopped off the bike while the girl kept her hand on the throttle to keep the motor raging. Margaret said hello, but the girl had some wiring on her teeth that kept her jaw knitted tight, and she couldn’t return the greeting. She saluted Cam and Margaret, then engaged the clutch; the wheels tore into the sandy berm and the motorcycle moved through impressive whoops and twistees as she sped away.
Cam was shaking his head, smiling. Margaret couldn’t stand to watch him. Leave it to Tracy to find somebody’s soft spot. He tricked them and returned with no fear of reprisal. The girl on the motorcycle was wonderful, both skilled and dreamy. What could Margaret say about it? Cam and Tracy were laughing about the girl. Cam was impressed. The shift worried Margaret. It was better to keep them of two minds, like a train that has a locomotive in the front and one in the back. It can change direction without a roundhouse.
Before they left the beach, Margaret walked over to a pay phone to call Elizabeth. The telephone receiver was disassembled; the coin return was laddered with gloss from a spider. She had to walk farther. At the next booth, she dialed her stepmother and told her that they were going to be late. Yes, they had a swim, they were having fun. Yes, Jane was fine. The baby was big. Margaret didn’t tell Elizabeth about the affidavit. If they wanted to give themselves over to science, they would just have to do it on their own.
Elizabeth told Margaret that Darcy had reported to the police that the Duster was stolen and she wanted the thief arrested.
There was a sunset as they rode the ferry and they sat on the top deck, above the rows of cars, to watch it play itself out. The ship’s engines rumbled, stilled, rumbled again as the ferry maneuvered out into the open water. Margaret told her brother what Elizabeth had said. He was staring directly at the oblong blob of sun that touched the horizon and sent a shimmering funnel across the surface toward them. Cam didn’t blink.
“She’s responding accordingly,” Tracy said. “Tit for tat, with a little twist of revenge. It’s a passion move—”
“Shut up, faggot!” Cam told him, and he walked away, taking the ladder, hardly touching the treads. He plunged down to the bottom deck, where the Duster was parked.
When they were driving again, Margaret said, “Why don’t you just telephone Darcy and tell her to call off the cops? We’ll be home in less than an hour, and she’ll have the Duster back.”
“It’s very dramatic,” Tracy said.
Cam said, “She’s just jerking my chain. She’s a bitch to the end, that’s all.”
“We can get home without even seeing a cop,” Tracy said.
“That’s not the point,” Cam said. “I don’t care about seeing a cop.”
Margaret suggested that they stop at the highway patrol and explain their situation before a police car pulled them over. She wondered why Elizabeth didn’t explain the situation to the authorities? You know, Darcy—an emotional woman going through a divorce, that kind of thing.
Cam said, “Because Elizabeth’s cold. That’s why they’re selling their bodies.”
“They get money for their corpses?” Margaret said.
“I don’t think so,” Tracy said. “There’s transportation costs, a fee for the refrigerator truck.”
“What do you know about it?” Cam said.
“Don’t you have a hair of feeling for your folks?” Tracy said.
Margaret saw it happening. She reached for the radio, but Cam brushed her hand off the knob.
“What about your own mother?” Cam said.
“I’ve got one.” Tracy stretched his arms.
“Well?”
“We’ve come to terms. It’s copacetic,” Tracy said.
Cam couldn’t let it rest. “Now Margaret, her mother’s dead, she can’t judge the situation here—”
“Tell me about it,” Margaret said.
They were doing the speed limit one minute, then Cam was tightening the distance between cars. “Let’s try harder,” Margaret said. “Why don’t we just try to get the police on our ass.”
“I’m driving the car,” Cam said.
Tracy said, “A little too fast.”
She felt her diaphragm knit tighter, and her breath was getting too shallow. They reached ninety miles an hour. “You’re doing just what Darcy wants.”
“Sure,” Cam said, “whatever you say.”
Cam slowed the car and they went a few minutes at an easy speed. No one said anything. It was the new dark before the moon and stars. Everything was invisible, blotted out. A few strands of mist lifted off the fields and strayed over the road, swirled through the beams of their headlights. They were heading back through miles of vegetable farms. Margaret searched far ahead where the headlights thinned and it was a blank wall; then the beams reached through, washed over each distance. Cam must have seen what she was doing and he clicked off the headlamps. The dark plowed into the windshield.
Tracy leaned back into his seat. He cleared his throat to erase his alarm. “You’re crazy,” he said.
Cam cruised through the blackness for a few seconds, then flicked his high beams on again, just in time for a hare to freeze, fluttering to the left and right, then keeping still. In that halo of chaos it couldn’t escape and they felt its thud under the front wheel.
Margaret yelpe
d and covered her face with her hands. The men were laughing and groaning. They almost seemed happy; they greeted that small death willingly.
Cam stopped the car on the side of the road. Tracy walked a few feet away from the car and urinated in the sparse weeds. Margaret could hear the stream slap the broad-bladed grasses and drill its little notch in the sand. “Might as well,” Cam said, and he got out of the car to find a place. She wondered about the two men sharing this brief intimacy. What she knew of one, she could not beg from the other. Could carnal knowledge equal a brother’s blind devotion? She watched the two men zip their pants. Tracy shifted his weight from one leg to the other to adjust the fit of his jeans, shoving them lower on his hips so he had room for himself. It reminded Margaret of a horse she had watched pawing the dirt in an indoor arena, his big velvety testicles shivering each time his hoof struck. The two men stood even in height and similar in physique, shoulder to shoulder in the dark before her. When they stood in front of the vehicle, she thought of a pair of exquisite drays, horses that must always be well matched in conformation and temperament.
As a child, she had never seen a man’s flesh without the confusing drape of his slacks, but she had one helpful document: a catalogue from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a book of reproductions from the celebrated Picasso show of 1958, which her parents had visited. She liked a painting called Boy Leading a Horse, in which a youth stood naked beside a big horse. The two walked side by side, face front. The boy’s bare foot edged the sharp hoof; the velvet nostril of the horse brushed the boy’s narrow hip. The painting made no concession to charm; the tones were terra-cotta and grey, with intense scumbling on the upper third of the canvas where the sky dissolved in the background. Margaret studied the painting, gauging the boy’s lean figure; its proximity to the weighty beast was startling. Their intimacy seemed a great, enslaved tolerance—a patient exchange of power. The power of the flesh. The boy’s genitals were like little apples; the horse’s eyes were rounder, larger.
“Are you finished?” she asked. “You two have to come back in the car while I go to the bathroom. Sit in this car while I find a place,” Margaret told them.
“She’s got a toilet phobia,” Tracy told Cam.
“There’s no toilets out here,” Cam said.
Margaret walked into the field. She couldn’t see very far in front of her and the low rows of vegetables looked strange, black-leaved, like something poisonous. There weren’t any shrubs or fences she could hide behind. “Look the other way or I can’t get started,” she told them.
She saw them turn their faces, but they were laughing. It was always the same, men thought she was making a big production. She urinated standing up, but she had to remove her panties and hold them in her hand, she had to spread her feet wide. Standing up was better than squatting. Squatting in an open field reminded her of lower beasts; aren’t all beasts approached from behind during rituals of mating? Women are the only animals with vertical cunts, she was thinking. Women’s cunts telescope upward and women have to be cajoled, coerced to lie down on their backs or on their bellies. They have to be instructed to kneel or straddle. Tracy often tugged her hips onto him, his weight and rhythm against her back. She didn’t have to think for herself; he absorbed her as he pushed into those central inches. He liked best when he didn’t have to look her in the face or reveal his pleasure to her. She allowed him that consolation.
She walked back to the car and she saw Tracy counting out something on his fingers. He was making some assertions and numbering his reasons. She felt a slight pulse high in her stomach, some kind of nausea, like when she imagined people were conspiring. When the two men huddled together like that, forgetting about her, their sudden neutrality with one another seemed too private. They seemed ready to move ahead without her.
When they were driving again, Tracy kept looking over at Cam. Margaret watched Tracy’s impatience. He was pinching a crease in his jeans with his thumb and forefinger, running his fingers down the fabric, then smoothing it out with the heel of his hand.
She watched the dark. A streetlight showed an erratic cloud of June bugs, little cigar stubs circling the glare.
Cam said, “We made our decision. We pretty much decided.”
“We did? I hate that editorial we. I can never tell who’s talking. No one takes responsibility,” she said.
“We’re driving to Chicago,” Cam told her.
“Hail Mary,” Tracy said.
“Are you following me?” Cam asked her. “We’re doing it.”
“You’re driving to Chicago? In this Duster?”
“With the three of us, we can drive straight through.”
Margaret said, “Come on—I don’t have a change of clothes. I’m dressed for the beach.”
“You’re fine.”
“I only have these flip-flops.”
Tracy said, “No, your shoes are in back.”
“Those aren’t mine,” she said. “Those are Darcy’s.”
“Try ’em,” Tracy said.
“I won’t try them.”
“We’ll get something. I have a Sears card,” Cam said.
“Terrific.”
“She’s not impressed. It’s the Sears image—it could use some work,” Tracy said.
“Maybe she can come down a level,” Cam said.
“The Arrow Collar guy? He’s not my problem,” she said. Margaret pulled her fingers through her salty hair and would say no more. Tracy said that just because her mother was dead, squared away so to speak, she shouldn’t shirk her family obligations.
“We can shut up,” Margaret said.
“Your mother is—”
“Dead,” Cam said.
“This is harassment,” Margaret said.
“You’ve never owned up to it,” Tracy said.
“Trace, please—” Why did she plead? She never sliced off the last syllable of his name unless she was whining.
Tracy told her that if they went to Chicago they could visit her mother’s grave. It’s about time. They could look it up at the town hall and find the location.
“It’s not my quest—it’s Cam’s!” Margaret said.
Cam told Tracy to shut up. He was making it worse.
Tracy explained Teilhard de Chardin’s Theoretical Axes of Happiness to Cam. He was saying, “People fall into three groups: Number one, there’s The Tired. These are the pessimists, fearmongers like Margaret, but these are even worse than Margaret. Number two, we’ve got Pleasure Seekers, hedonists, people who mate incessantly until they’re numb, people who drink without drunken relief, they tip the bottle until the last dribble is extinguished.”
“He’s revving up,” Margaret said.
“Oh really? Number three, The Enthusiasts. These people are lords of the safari, soul searchers, always ready to explore life’s junkyard down to the last double-chromed bat-wing window from an extinct Sunbeam convertible. Eureka! That’s what we should try for. We’re scavengers. Cam’s our leader.”
“This has nothing to do with finding car parts in a scrap heap. Cam’s got a lifelong grudge.”
Cam punched the radio so the news was screaming. Then it was the baseball scores, and they listened to see how the Cubs were doing. The baseball idea embroidered the issue and the men gripped it. Cam started asking about the pitching lineup. He hadn’t been following the Cubs. Tracy was chattering. He said he once had Harry Caray’s signature on a ball, right on the sweet spot where the stitches come together to frame his John Hancock. Maybe they could take in a game at Wrigley.
Margaret used to like to go to the ballparks with Cam. In Baltimore they sold miniature Oriole pennants attached to No. 2 pencils. At Phillies’ games, they purchased steaming soft pretzels—singles, or five in a paper sack. They sold a peppermint stick inserted in half of a lemon. She longed for the simple pleasure of that. Those two clean flavors, contrasting cool and sour.
“Well. I might go to Chicago so you can find Lewis, but I’m not taking any detours to cem
eteries. That’s out of the question,” she told Tracy.
“Don’t slam any doors yet,” Tracy said. “Sandra’s weedy plot could use some sprucing up. Maybe we can get an azalea, do some transplanting.”
Margaret did sometimes picture Sandra’s grave. She had read a magazine article about an exhumation. The article stated that the atrophied uterus was typically the last and final organ of the human body to decompose. The muscular womb was tough and stringy; it condensed into a hard knot and could be found intact years after burial. Margaret imagined her mother’s bones, the ivory cradle of the pelvis, and centered there—a tiny amber fossil—the shrunken pocket in which she was started and from which she was expelled.
Tracy knew when her thoughts veered, and he pushed her shoulder until she was settled against him. They were driving into Wilmington and argued about the Duster.
“Isn’t it risky going around the city in this car?” Margaret said.
“I’ve got to pick up some cash at the office,” Cam said.
“What cash are you talking about?”
“Who are you, Officer Krupke?” Cam said.
Tracy said, “Petty cash at the apartments?”
“Bingo.”
“That’s crazy,” Margaret said. “I’ve got money at the house.”
“I’m not dealing with Elizabeth at this point in time.”
Cam parked the Duster in the tenants’ parking lot and went into the office. Margaret got out of the car and sat on the hood, but it was too hot. Tracy saw the swimming pool and started over.
He was peeling his pants down, and then she saw his white shirt on the cement beside his jeans. He stepped down the ladder and lowered himself into the water without disturbing the surface. He disappeared. She waited beside the Duster, listening to the hood contract as the engine cooled. When she didn’t hear any splashing, she wondered if maybe Tracy hit his head on something. When she walked over, he was floating on his back, pretty as you please. He looked quite evocative, his whole trunk exposed to the air, naked.