The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories

by Steve Almond

  She laughed a little, tried to laugh, but then she was weeping again, more quietly now, and I thought of Daisy, bent in obeisance over those helpless shirts, and how happy it made men to see a woman, a beautiful woman in particular, weep.

  And just a little later, when we’d managed to rid ourselves of clothes, she clung to me until we were both choked of air, though when I asked her what it was all about she only shook her wild hair and bit my neck.

  I COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN. She was a beautiful young woman after all, big and pink and vital. And it was summer. You don’t think about such things in summer. You’re in love; you think you’re in love.

  And then summer ends and the chilly breath of autumn comes out of the East and the flags of skin get folded into sweaters and it gets worse, the shaky hands, the stumbling, the mood swings, until finally, just before Christmas, she names the thing and it’s some disease you’ve seen on posters, some breakdown in the muscles—one of your teachers in junior high had the same thing, Ms. Rolff, and you can still remember the way her head shook at the chalkboard, and you, teasing her behind her back.

  Who was it who pulled away from whom? I still can’t keep it straight. There weren’t any scenes, any blowups. We simply agreed to let the affair run down. She made it easy for me. No talk of loyalty, duty, the things I might have done.

  It was only that one day I couldn’t rid myself of, the golden varnish of summer, which, rather than ebbing, ebbing away as the white glare of winter took us under, grew warm and encompassing.

  Lil moved on, staggered off to a new program and later, I heard, to an experimental clinic run by a doctor in Mexico. But I was still snagged in that summer idyll, the sun, the clear blue water, her skin—it was my punishment. We never think about such days as they’re happening. We never consider what it means that Daisy is weeping over those shirts, feeling her betrayal before she has enacted it. We never read a book for its deepest human lesson, not in summer.

  Instead, we close our eyes and let our lovers step toward us, through the fading hydrangeas, the impenetrable dusk. And when their hands tremble, we take them in ours and pledge never to leave them, not now, not ever. Even as the summer ends and the books take on their true, cruel weight, this is the story we tell ourselves, and I would trade every word in the English language for the chance, right now, once again, to believe.

  LARSEN’S NOVEL

  LARSEN HAD WRITTEN a novel, and his best friend, Flem Owens, had no earthly idea what to do about it. He could, in point of fact, barely lift the thing.

  “What is that?” his wife, Beth, said. “Is that a rabbit? Did he give you a rabbit?”

  Flem dropped the red velour binder onto an end table. This happened every time he brought home something unexpected: Beth accused him of harboring an inconvenient pet. All because, years ago, he rescued an opossum he had somewhat accidentally hit with his car and attempted—alright, he could see this now, foolishly—to revive the animal on their kitchen table. “Is a rabbit twenty pounds?” Flem said. “Is a rabbit made of paper?”

  Beth flipped the binder open and inspected the pompous font of the title page. “So this was the big surprise, huh? Wow.”

  “Six hundred and seventy-three pages of wow,” Flem said.

  “You didn’t tell me he was writing a book.”

  “I didn’t know.” Flem shook his head.

  He heard his daughter, Belle, pounding down the stairs in that vehement way she and her friends had. The running of the Belles, Beth called it.

  “Did Dad get me a rabbit?” she hollered. “I heard you guys talking about a rabbit.”

  “No such luck,” Flem said.

  “What’s that?” Belle began rubbing the red velour. She was eleven years old and in a rubbing phase, which unsettled Flem.

  “Daddy’s friend Teddy wrote a book.”

  Belle wrinkled her nose, a bit like a rabbit. “Why’s it in a photo album?”

  LARSEN LIVED IN an Eichler with his wife, Poor Jude. Flem could not think of her as anything but Poor Jude. She was a small woman with the hacked nose of a minor league hockey player and incongruously plump, firm-seeming breasts. These were her marquee feature, these breasts. Once, at a swim party years ago, Flem had found Jude alone in the cabana and watched her unsnap her top and let it fall to the wet cement. He breathed in the mildewed bamboo and coconut oil and looked at them, sagging like old grapes.

  And then there was being married to Larsen, who had insisted on an eighteenth-century British nautical theme at their wedding (not long after the swim party), because he had been on a Horatio Hornblower jag at the time. When the minister said, “Do you, Theodore …” Larsen shot the crowd a big grin and yelled, “Aye aye, Cap’n!” It was the sort of gesture another man—a man, say, with charm—could have pulled off. Poor Jude.

  She answered the door looking, as she often did, like someone was yanking at the corners of her mouth.

  “What’s that smell?” Flem said. “Is that sap?”

  “Incense.” Jude made a befuddled noise. “Go on back. He’s waiting for you.”

  Larsen was on the living room rug, wedged improbably into the lotus position. He had one of those exaggerated faces, the features large and set too close together. His lips and nose seemed to yearn for one another, as if he might kiss himself at any moment. He looked like a gargoyle was the truth, in the autumn dim.

  “What’s the deal?” Flem said. For nearly a month, Larsen had been bugging him about this meeting, saying things like brace yourself and make sure you come alone.

  Larsen was trying extremely hard to appear beatific, as if he had looked the word up in the dictionary. “Sometimes in life, we reach a kind of a crossroad,” he said. Larsen was a year older than Flem, and prone to weighty declarations. “A place where we realize there is more than just one person inside of us. We think there’s just one person, but then we realize, uh, there’s another. You see what I’m getting at?”

  “I think so,” Flem said. He was thinking about the Rams, who were scheduled to get clobbered by the 49ers at four.

  “Put it this way,” Larsen said. “‘When one door shuts, another opens.’ You know who said that? Cervantes, the man who wrote Don Quixote, which is considered perhaps the first great novel ever written.”

  “I think it’s Cer-van-tes,” Flem said. “Three syllables.”

  “Right,” Larsen said. “What it is, the point, is change. Evolution. Creative growth. If you’ll just close your eyes.” Larsen called out to Jude, who did not respond. “Okay,” he said, “just wait here. Eyes closed.” Flem heard a bang, followed by a crash, followed by some nifty cursing. Larsen lumbered back into the room and placed what felt like a huge, furry music box on Flem’s lap. “I wanted you to be the first one to read it,” he said, “after Jude.”

  Flem stared at the title page. Just Call Me Bones: A Novel by Theodore Habadash Larsen. “Wow. I mean, since when …”

  Larsen was grinning ridiculously. “I don’t want to say too much. Because the truth is, this is just a working draft.”

  “But I’m not a critic,” Flem said gently. “Shouldn’t you show this to someone in the field? Like a professional?”

  “That’s the whole point,” Larsen said. “I want this first novel to be the sort of work that appeals to all audiences, even the kind who consider soup labels high literature.”

  Flem didn’t consider soup labels high literature, though he did spend more time than he would have liked to admit reading the labeling on food.

  “What am I supposed to do exactly?”

  “Just read and react. That’s all I ask.”

  Flem nodded. He flipped through the pages in a bit of a daze. The house smelled of unwashed laundry and vanilla, and he could hear the small chaos of Larsen’s sons in their bedroom. Teddy Jr., the four-year-old, was a little slow, but the older one, Jake, was sharp as a tack. He was blasting away on a TV video game and cackling.

  “You want a drink?” Larsen said. “I feel like we shou
ld have a drink.”

  “I’d love to. Really. But I promised Beth I’d do some errands.”

  “One drink,” he said. “Make it a Neer Beer.”

  As he pulled out of the driveway, Flem saw Jude watching him through the front window. The tight smile was still in place, the same expression, he thought, you sometimes see on hostages.

  “IT DOESN’T MAKE any sense,” Flem said. Or actually, whined. The manuscript lay on his lap, steadily pressing his quadriceps to sleep. “The guy tells me every mundane fucking detail of his mundane fucking life.”

  Beth shook her head. She didn’t much like Larsen. Or Jude. They were his friends. “Just read the thing and get it over with,” she said.

  This was easy for Beth to say. She tore through novels like … what was the expression? A bat out of hell’s hand-basket? Something. Flem considered himself more of a measured reader. It had taken him four years to finish the first half of that Le Carré novel, the one about the Tinker and the Sailor. He’d done better with that book about the bridges of Wisconsin, which he nearly finished before the movie came out. He’d expected to see Meryl Streep’s breasts in the film and found himself angry at the book when this did not happen. “You could read it, too, honey,” Flem said, snuggling Beth’s elbow. “You’re such a terrific reader.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said. “This is your fiesta, bub.” She snapped off her bedside light. “I’ve got an off-site to handle tomorrow. Early.”

  This was how Beth talked since she’d become a consultant. Flem still had no idea what it all meant. He stared down at page one.

  Ever since he could remember, Red Lawson had known he was different. As a baby, he had looked around the maternity ward of the hospital, at the other babies wrapped up like loaves of sterilized bread, and he had thought to himself: I am not the same. I am different.

  His mother Angel and his stepfather Billy Ray had raised him to live the American Dream, and he had grown up determined to please them. He was the most handsome kid in his class, with dusky skin and bright green eyes like marbles, and the best athlete. Most of the girls had a crush on him. But Red eschewed all distractions. He even passed up the chance to go to the Olympics, even though Coach Hardy said he would have won the decathalon without even breaking a “sweat.” But instead, he kept to his studies and graduated fist in his class. One day, he read a book on trends in dentistry and realized that the big money resided in the revolutionary field of gum disease prevention. His parents were so proud of him. But deep down, Red knew he was different.

  He was a periodontist with the soul of a bluesman.

  When Flem arrived at work the next morning, his secretary handed him a pink message slip marked URGENT.

  From: “Red”

  To: My Pal Flem

  Message: Well???

  “He specified,” Gloria said. “Three question marks.”

  Flem stared at his drills. “Hold my calls,” he said.

  By two, Larsen had called six more times. Flem phoned Beth after his 2:15, a septuagenarian with a condition Flem privately referred to as “black gum.”

  “Is this Hutchins?” Beth said. “This better damn well be Hutchins.”

  “It’s me,” Flem said.

  “Hutchins?”

  “No. Me.”

  Beth barked something at one of her coworkers, a death threat it sounded like. “I’m tied up in an interface,” she said. “Can this wait?”

  “I just wanted some advice.”

  “Quit breathing like that. You sound like you just ran a marathon.”

  Gloria tapped him on the shoulder and handed him another message, this one marked MEGA URGENT.

  “HE CALLS EVERY DAY,” Flem told Dr. Oss. “I mean, no kidding. Every day.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “It’s so self-centered. Like I don’t have the rest of my life to tend to. Belle’s starting to grow breasts. Beth says it’s the hormones they pump into these chickens. My mother won’t stick with the Saint-John’s-wort. You take her out, she makes a scene. The salad bar doesn’t have gherkins, whatever. And that damn dream has started up again.”

  Dr. Oss raised his eyebrows, his countertransference equivalent of an erection. He loved the dream—it was like a golden oldie—though it always consisted of the same thing: Flem in the middle of his life, doing something utterly routine, when suddenly no one could see him. He turned the color of his environment, the beige and whites of his office, the winter hues of Beth’s decor. And life went on as usual. Occasionally someone might say, “Has anyone seen Flem?” But there was never any panic over his absence, as Flem might have preferred.

  “Where were you?”

  “At Larsen’s.”

  “And?”

  “I stood around.”

  “Might you elaborate a bit, Mr. Owens?”

  “I stood around, being invisible.” Flem sighed grumpily.

  “I wonder,” Dr. Oss said, “why you might be attracted to Larsen. If he disregards your feelings so much, I mean.”

  “I’m not attracted to him,” Flem said. “He’s just one of those friends, you know. We went to school together. We wound up in the same city. Our kids play. It’s one of those things. You know what I mean.”

  “No,” Dr. Oss said. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  THE PHONE RANG and Flem did a little involuntary neck twinge, what Beth called his “chicken peck.” Belle snatched up the receiver and frowned. “Hey,” she said.

  From the dinner table, Flem mouthed the words: Who is it?

  “I’m fine,” Belle said, coiling the cord around her pinkie in a vaguely lewd fashion. “No. Yeah. Noooo.” She giggled. “Okay. Let me check, Mr. Larsen. Okay-ay … Ted.”

  Flem mouthed the words, and he mouthed them very distinctly: You don’t know where Daddy is.

  But Belle, who was showing the first hints of adolescence, pretended not to see him. She held her hand over the phone and called out, “Daaaaad! Daaaaad! Pho-ooone.”

  Flem placed himself directly in front of his daughter: Daddy is not here. Not here.

  Belle took her hand off the receiver and said, “One sec.”

  Daddy is gone, Flem mouthed, and, from the table, Beth said, “Honestly.”

  “Oh,” Belle said, “I think that’s him. He just came in.”

  No no no.

  “Yeah, okay. Here he is.”

  Belle held the receiver out and Flem considered (briefly) the scene that would ensue if he punched his daughter in the jaw.

  “Oh hey. Hey buddy,” Flem said. “I was just out in the garage.”

  “You guys have a garage now?”

  “Carport.”

  Beth made her you’re-being-an-idiot sound, like a cat sneezing.

  “You’re a hard guy to track down. You get my messages?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t you get my messages? I left a few at your office.”

  “With who?”

  “I don’t know. Sounded like a new girl.”

  “I’m going to have to give her the shitcan, I swear.” Larsen chuckled. “Anyway, that’s a relief. I was starting to get paranoid, thinking maybe you were avoiding me because you didn’t like the novel.”

  “Are you kidding?” Flem chuffed. “No way. No siree. Just busy. Super busy.”

  “So?”

  “That’s the thing.”

  “You haven’t read it?”

  “Oh no, no. I’ve read it. I read it all right.”

  Belle started to do a little tap dance, with an imaginary cane and all.

  “Yeah?”

  “The first couple of chapters, actually. So far.”

  “And?”

  “I mean, hey.”

  “Yeah? Really?”

  “Sure. I mean, strong start. Strong central character. Right there. The way you establish his difference, you know? The way he’s different.”

  “You don’t think the telepathy stuff is too much?”

  “Hell no. Liked the telepathy stuff. Absolutely.”
<
br />   “Because I wondered if people would think, you know, it doesn’t really come together until the abduction.”

  “The abduction. Right.”

  “And you don’t mind that I used your name, do you?”

  “Heck no.”

  “Because when I thought about Red’s best pal, you know, it’s not a strictly autobiographical novel. It’s more along the lines of a magical impressionism thing. But there are some elements. Write what you know, as they say.”

  “Sure.”

  “But you like it so far?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You’re not just saying that, right? Because, you know—” Larsen’s voice deepened here, in a distressingly earnest way, “—it took me ten years to write.”

  “Ten years?”

  “Probably closer to twelve. I wrote in the mornings. Before work.”

  “You were doing it this whole time?”

  “I’d get hit with an idea just like, boom, divine instigation.”

  “And you didn’t tell anyone.”

  “That was the hardest part!” Larsen’s voice trilled up again. “The hardest part! But I wanted to wait until, you know, until it was done. One hundred percent.”

  “Right.”

  “So?”

  “Okay.”

  “The rest I mean? When do you think—”

  “Well now, that’s a thing, a real thing. It’s a long piece, a serious piece of work. And with the way things have been at the office. Boy.”

  “How about if you take another week?”

  “I was thinking more like late December.”

  “December 4 it is. That’s a Sunday. We’ll have a little party.”

  “Right. I’ll check my calendar. We may have a thing that weekend,”

  “Hey, you’re a pal, you know that? I knew I could count on you.”

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” Beth said. “Just read the fucking thing. Get it over with.”

  They had just made love, poorly. Midway through, Flem had opened his eyes and caught sight of the garish manuscript on his night table. He felt a spasm in his lumbar, his erection went south, and Beth let out a flummoxed yawn. “I can do it,” he said. “You’ve just got to help a little.” It hadn’t been pretty.