Wide World In Celebration and Sorrow

by Leon Rooke

  The work of one such renegade from these ranks might be remarked upon: Samuel X. Sleane, 17, the X that self-divined portion of name he had crudely carved upon his own arm, was set to stab a needle into the vein above that point where the X had been cut, when a gust of wind shook the abandoned Project trailer in which Samuel lived. The wind burst through each of the trailer’s three smoky windows, gusted the door from its hinges, captured in a whirling pool each object from door, window, and wall, three times catapulted Samuel X. Sleane against the ceiling, slamming his body three times against the floor, sucked the needle from Samuel X. Sleane’s bloodied hand, blew the hair straight out from his skull, snatched all clothing from his body except one sock, whistled through his every orifice… as in the meanwhile and for the whole of Samuel X. Sleane’s own tumbling the needle spun in fixed circumference through the crowded air, finally, it seemed to find its true course and drive itself with absolute accuracy into the most hated treasure Samuel X. Sleane possessed: the miniature, much weathered portrait he carried in his wallet, a one-inch by two-inch grainy black-and-white machine photograph of his father and mother snapped one grim drunken day in St. Paul before Samuel X. Sleane was born or possibly even thought about, this pair being the party Samuel X. Sleane, in rare, coherent moments, rightfully blamed for his painful sojourn on earth.

  When Samuel X. Sleane came to his senses he was flat against earth, naked in tall bulrushes by a blue lake, under a cloudless sky, in a place he did recognize.

  The Winds of Hope, he thought. Holy damn.

  The rippling of the Western Comet began just beyond the Forks Reclamation Project when a black funnel of wind engulfed the 44th car. The 15 products of the Nissan Motor Company on that 44th car shook and shivered, the 8 wheels transporting these Nissan inventions lifted as one from the rails, cars to the front and rear responded accordingly, these cars upending and touching wheels high in the air, like a macabre ballet, one might say, the very rails weightless as sticks, whipping hither and yon. Within seconds the 17 chemical cars sailed through the air, exploding moments later in rivulets of fire heard as far away as Wisperthal, Sarama, and Wennemucca. In the end, the Western Comet’s full complement of 99 cars came to final rest within a score of fiery fields, coloured fumes surging upwards in duplication of giant rainbows, liquids uniting high into the air, into the very clouds, where explosions took place by the minute, a dense congregate of particles raining down upon the whole of the Forks Reclamation Project, through the whole of the district and beyond, as far afield as Wisperthal, Sarama, and Wen-nemucca.

  Dora Bell stopped her Nissan Fury in the middle of an un-kempt path. For some minutes her eyes fixed on a naked boy standing knee-deep in the water of a lake so still and blue it seemed hardly to exist in a real world. She had seen any number of naked boys and men in her time, and she appraised the form of this one with the same deliberation given those others. That he looked to her stringy and wind-blown, scatterbrained, even more than a little deranged, did not concern her. He had the dark, somber, smoking eyes her mother had warned her about. She was beyond such idiocy now – or thought she might be – and here was a boy who needed a mother.

  “Come on,” she shouted, and the boy came.

  “Get in,” she said, and the boy did.

  In Orebro, Sweden, later that day, there would be cause for celebration. Singed hair, a broken toe, the telegram would say. Otherwise fine. Send money.

  When spears of light shot above the sisters’ house and the very heavens spun, the sisters did as their grandmother had always told them they should. Go below, she had said. Hide.

  So here they were, crawling on a cool packed-dirt route that went on so long and deep they had never found the courage as children to follow it to its end.

  “Old Mum always said there was an underground city down here,” Ana Coombs said. “Keep going.”

  The sister said, “I can’t believe that worm actually took our monkey cup.”

  Ana Coombs said, “I’d like to have been here when she died. She’d have faced death with open eyes, calling it bastard names.”

  The old man at his shack by the tracks, holding aloft a black umbrella, looking at the sky while composing his own raft of bastard names for what it was he saw, recalled a plague unmentioned among the 365 Plagues of Egypt, the Plague of All Plagues, the Plague of the Unmentionable. To escape this plague, infants of his ghetto during the time he was born were swaddled in blankets, tied and knotted by rag, rope, and mystery. Under veil of night, these cocooned babies one by one ascended by balloons into the heavens, the foremost hope of those below that the winds be favourable

  THE UNHAPPINESS OF OTHERS

  Bed and I are at the window watching what is going on in there, which is mostly the men in there watching something else, this blue TV light flickering over their faces as they swallow beer and nudge each other, Daddy Stump among them though not nudging anyone himself, as he is hoisted in his usual fatigued manner against the wall, when Bed says, a little too loud, which is how she talks, “Who died in there, Royce? What are we watching, Royce?” Which are good questions, the very both of them good questions that I am having myself, but too loud, attention-grabber questions, so I go to jab my fingers into her eyes to shut her up, when what she is doing is already running, which is the one thing she does first-rate, like Daddy Stump does standing against his walls. That is when the overhead bulb flares in there, inside the room where we are watching through the window what goes on, and a mad scramble from the men in there washed under these blue flickers, because the old pigshead barrel Bed and I are standing on has decided to collapse because of Bed’s takeoff footpower when I go to poke her, this poke intended only to shut her up from her speaking of the dead, which she speaks of right and left these days on account of Mama Stump’s bedridden plight, like her whole mind these days is consumed with thoughts of how the earth covers you and you down there with your eyes closed and the earth’s weight weighing against your closed eyelids, as I do myself these days, when it comes to that.

  “Quick, the light!” somebody says in there, first the dive for cover and then somebody says that, one of the former nudgers under the blue flickers, then the next second all of us scrambling, me just catching a glimpse of Bed swooping away around the corner of the house, shouting back, “I told you that old barrel was rotten!” Me in pursuit of her now, since she’s running the wrong way, Bed is, into a deadly trap, if you figure the men in there are sharp enough to head for the front door and not the window where we were looking at what was going on in there, and had been since the minute we’d noticed them steering one by one, over the minutes, into that scrungy, rundown, unused place, them furtive and decomposed as something would be furtive burrowing into a hole where, once everyone gets in there, a thing worth looking at might be going on.

  But they don’t catch us or see us, thank God, maybe because they are too decomposed to swoop outside, or at least too disruptured to exit except by the stealthy departure, just as they’d done one by one in the ingress, their heads slunk down that way, like a chicken will bury hers under wing, since if they swooped out as a gang intent on finding out who it was was sneaking their looks at them they could be identified and hoof-printed, anyone seeing them to ask what they were doing in there, it being condemned property with No Trespassing signs slung all over the yard and trees, along with the KEEP OUTs.

  Next time they will throw up planks over the window like they ought to have done this time, and you’d think Daddy Stump, snagged up against that wall in that way only he knows how, with a clear shot at what was going on in there, would have thought to do that, him being as well-versed and schooled in spy work and subterfuge – especially since his truck crash – as anyone else in these parts.

  But whoa-up.

  There is Bed sprawled in a mud puddle at the side of the house, the three black slips she likes to wear all hoisted and scrunched up under her elbows, now whimpering a little, not because of the mud but because of the humiliation o
f having been caught by me for practically the first time since she learned fast-running was her excelling point in life.

  “Hey, Royce,” she says, but I don’t wait to see what else is coming out of her mouth, I just snatch her up by her waistbands and bootleg her through the fence hedge, and back home fast as we can fly.

  So we can be there, in the front room with the TV turned up loud, vibrating the little glass shoes it sits on so as not to scar the floor, Bed down on the floor spread out on the dog’s old newspapers, to save the mat, which for unknown reasons is prized around here, and me sitting eelbent on the foldout smelly couch with my hands up over my face, honing rapt-eyed on that TV set, when Daddy Stump hobbles in. Like if I bat my eyes the whole show and the crate that holds it will plain disappear. Like if you don’t concentrate fully on every second of your life then the whole ceiling, to instance one thing that will, will collapse.

  When Daddy Stump comes in. This being about three minutes, or pretty soon anyway, after we have fled from watching what was going on inside that house with him shagged up against the wall, which is where he goes now, to his usual wall, his head at the very same grease spot, after first turning down the TV to a whisper you can’t hear even if you crouch inside the thing.

  “You kids look a tad out of breath,” he says. “You kids look,” he says, in his own whisper that you have to strain to make out or know he’s talking at all, “like you been up to something you shouldna’ been up to,” he says. His voice rising now and getting more meanness into it, the tone getting more his own now, like the words have to gnaw up past his wired teeth. This for some reason making me relax a bit, though not much. Not for long. Because how he finishes his speech is with, “And maybe I’m going to have to strap you, both of you, give you a few knobs to think about. The thing is which first?”

  He’s slipping his belt out of his pants as he says this, in no hurry to get down to it, this slow way meaning he means business now, which I see with just the half of my eyes, just up to that belt and no more, just up to that buckle, for instance, where there’s a dab of red that could be old bloodstains, mine or Bed’s or his own leaking out. Bed no doubt glomming onto the same, though otherwise we have the usable half of our eyes glued at these whispering people on the TV set, like they are watching us and being careful to keep their voices low so as not to intrude or halt anything going on in here, and whose watching silent talking make me think of the last time he had that strap snapping his business, when the people across the road called the law, which is what got the dog started, the law’s arrival, and ended up with Daddy Stump’s disfigurement, if disfigured is how you’d describe the condition he’s got himself in now, which I wouldn’t, not to his face, and Bed wouldn’t either, despite a natural talent inclining her to spit it out. That head of his still swathed in the white bandages, though them not white now, from the surgeon’s brainwork.

  This goes on for slow minutes, that belt job, and for me, slick with sweat, it seems that what the entire world has reduced itself down to is the three points of a triangle like was talked about this week in school, minus the fractions I for one didn’t hunch up to. There’s the TV, there’s that belt of his now being checked out for its limber qualities, little soft smacks against his own hand, him liking that the same way you’d like spreading extra batter over a cake or licking the spoon, and there’s Bed with the mud drying and already cracking into jigsaw shapes on her slung-out limbs because the heat in this house is up to a constant 85 because of the infirmed one’s shivery condition in the Fatal Care unit.

  “I think it was I told you to stay home,” Daddy Stump says with those teeth.

  Then he has this clump of my hair in his hand, and it’s my clump he’s twisting, while I squint my eyes tight, my breath flat, catching the odd wet blink of Bed down on the floor with her hand crawling up under the black slips to scratch at where chunks of mud are drying in her behind.

  I get an “ouch” or two out, hardly anything else including my breath, as meanwhile Daddy Stump is pulling out my hair until he can decide which body part will be juiciest to his strap as he goes about finding out whether we know or don’t know what it was he and his buddyroles were watching in there in the KEEP OUT house down the road, under their blue flickers, or whether we’ve been here the whole of the day glued to this dumb TV box, which it is how with not one spoken word the world can hear what’s going on in here.

  Which is a good thing, too, because what we hear in the absence is the tick of the kitchen clock, the bong-bong recitation of minute and hour. Which reminds us, and Daddy Stump too, that it is time for the nursing rounds, time to turn Mama Stump on her sheets in there in the Coma Room in her bedridden, no-holds-barred, write-off condition.

  “You two Joes just hold on,” says Daddy Stump, giving a hard belt-lash to my ankle bones as he hobbles off in that up-down, swaying way he hobbles since his truck crash.

  Bed is still scratching, now rolled over to watch me rub both hands over my scalp in the soothing of the ripped scalp patch and figuring out how much I have left.

  “Perfection!” Bed says, “Utter perfection!” Yelling this out, along with a big grin which comes out at the same time, which statement I guess is occasioned by the new delightful sensation she’s feeling from all this mud drying on her, even those clumps lumped in her behind, which would worry me.

  I crawl up and flip the TV channel, wondering what another place would look like when you can’t hear anyone saying anything though the lips are moving like they think you ought to be able to.

  “You stay off that mat,” I tell Bed, because I see her inching that way for the comfort, like she’s decided the newspaper is something you’d put down for the dog to do his stuff on, that being how we did it around here before the dog ended up on Daddy Stump’s truck hood and came through the windshield into his lap, where she still wouldn’t quit, all while he’s revving the truck to shoot it by those law officers who have squared off their Plymouths up by the mailbox, and squared off themselves behind it, their holster belts up near their titties, those blue lights whipping.

  Daddy Stump, in his truck that time, sees this. He views it and is considering the choices even as the dog comes through the windshield. He’s got to carom off the rear end of that Plymouth, hit the ditch and take out the mailbox, take out a few scrub trees and part of the fence, if he’s to make it. Which he likely would have but for the pistol shot and the dog which is up on his chest now in a blue of broken glass slobbering her licks over his face, her legs doing a jiu-jitsu over the steering wheel, so happy that this time that dog is getting to go with Daddy Stump where it is that dog thinks he is going.

  “Oh, Swami,” Bed says to me then, with these raw welts on her legs, which I guess is why she’s taken to wearing Mama Stump’s black slips that Mama Stump won’t ever recall once wearing herself.

  Those people on the TV go right on with their mute talking.

  A bit later I hear the door open in the Intensive Care room down the hall where Mama Stump abides the hour.

  “Water,” Daddy Stump calls.

  Which Bed purses her lips at, watching me to see if we have heard any words hailing our way from the Death Chamber.

  A minute later the door rattles open again, him saying, “Didn’t I tell you to bring your mama a glass of water?”

  Bed grins, like she’s saying she never heard of water and wouldn’t know where to look for it in its pure form.

  “And I mean now,” Daddy says, while I hold my breath to see will he add, “And I don’t mean maybe,” or will it be, “I don’t mean tomorrow.”

  But he just bangs shut the door.

  Bed is now clumping stiff-limbed around the room, looking to see will her mud suit fall off or will she be able to wear it forever.

  “Stay away from that mat,” I tell her again, for that mat’s precious and could be is all that’s left from the Stump twosome’s old bridal suite.

  Bed clumps behind me to the kitchen, where I draw the water. S
he’s saying, “Mama Stump gets out of that bed when no one’s here.” She’s saying, “I’ve seen Mama Stump’s footprints.”

  “Where?” I say, watching the water run over the glass and over my hand and dribble down my arm to the floor, so that pretty soon there’s a puddle there Bed can squish her toes about in. “On the linoleum?” I say. “Where have you seen the stalker’s footprints?”

  “All over,” Bed says. “Mostly on the ceiling.”

  “Hip-hip, hooray,” she says.

  She points up at the ceiling where the light bulb is hanging from the chewed up, fly-speck cord, which reminds me of the dozen or so light bulb spares we’ve now got somewhere in the house, from the time this woman came to the door wearing push-pedal leggings and with this lopsided face, selling “Electric light bulbs,” she said, “of assorted wattage.”

  “Proceeds to charity,” she said, to Daddy Stump who is there by the front door holding her at bay, saying, “That’s us.”

  Bed says, “Excellent,” watching the puddle spread out towards her feet which she steps back from, not ready yet to squish about and upset the status quo of her mud suit. “Excellent, excellent,” she says, raising her black slips up over her waist and on up till the three black slips are over her head, maybe in the darkness of that headspace remembering what I am remembering myself, which is Daddy Stump at the front door talking to this woman selling electric light bulbs of assorted wattage and telling her that he will bet her a dollar he can illuminate any one of these light bulbs she’s holding without even screwing that bulb into a socket of any kind but simply by putting that light bulb screwend into his mouth. And the woman saying, “I never heard of that,” but not saying she will bet, though Bed and I are searching everywhere we can think to find that dollar. Because if Daddy Stump can do what he claims he can do, and do it without any tricks, then he is a man mankind has been underestimating all these years.