Tabloid Dreams

by Robert Olen Butler

  Which brings me to this morning. I wake up and maybe I’m dreaming. I don’t know. I dream sometimes, I think. I just can’t ever remember. But I wake up this morning and something makes me get up from my bed and I go to the cardboard boxes and I dig out my daddy’s pistol. One night when he was drunk and he wasn’t thinking about all the big stuff he was going to do with his life, he fieldstripped this thing while I was there at his elbow. On the kitchen table. He was talking about his daddy, remembering him. Maybe I was dreaming about that.

  “This is the tricky part with the 1911,” he said, and his hands were shaking, and it was only the first step. He said, “My daddy told me he was a big hero in the war. He killed a hundred Germans with this gun. But he was a lying son of a bitch about everything else. So he was probably lying about that too.” While he was talking, my daddy was working out the plug at the end of the barrel and his thumb kept slipping. Then all of sudden there was a twang and the recoil spring flew out of the pistol and across the kitchen and through the door and landed in my mother’s lap and she jumped up screaming. One second she was sitting there in her robe watching TV and then she was waving her arms and leaping around the room. I started laughing but my daddy didn’t crack a smile. He turned to me real slow and he said, “The tricky part is not to let the spring fly out. You pay attention.”

  I stopped laughing right away. He was teaching me. I leaned against him and we waited for Mama to calm down and then I went and got the spring and I put it in his hand.

  Now this morning I’m holding the pistol and it feels heavy, a good pound heavier than the Makarov, and that’s a lot if you want to hold a pistol steady to shoot straight. I hold it with two hands and I reach my fingers up and they curl around the trigger. Just barely, but it’s okay. That surprises me, but I forget sometimes that I’m still growing. So I’ve got my fingers on the trigger and the pistol is wobbling around and I’m crying. That pisses me off a lot. My daddy’s making me cry now and it’s a good thing he’s not walking in that door right now cause I know I’d blow his fucking brains out.

  I scrunch up my shoulder and dry my eyes on it, never letting go of the 1911, and then I try to just settle down. I pull the pistol up in front of me and it’s still a little loosey goosey, but my chest kind of goes up and down and I swallow hard and the tears have stopped and the stuff I’m feeling sort of goes away. I’m supposed to see Ivan this morning, and I think what the hell. I slide my one 1911 magazine into the pistol and put it in my paper bag.

  Later, I’m ready to go out and I’m passing through the kitchen and there’s my sorry-ass mama sitting at the table in her slip. It’s hot and she’s fanning herself with a magazine and I stop. She looks up at me and smiles.

  “You don’t always have to make your own lunch,” she says nodding at my paper bag and her voice is real tiny and she’s still staring at the bag.

  “I don’t ever see you in clothes,” I say to her.

  “I ain’t got no nice clothes,” she says. “There ain’t no clothes stamps.”

  “How much you need to buy yourself a lot of nice clothes?” I ask her.

  “Need?”

  “How much money’d that cost?”

  She looks down at her toes and laughs at this. “I got expensive tastes,” she says.

  “How much?”

  “Ten thousand dollars would about do it,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say and I go out.

  I go into the Black Sea Social Club and Ivan’s in the back of the place shooting pool with one of the other guys I never talk to. A third guy, Nick, is sitting drinking a beer at a table. When Ivan sees me coming to him, he puts his cue down and circles around the table.

  “There’s the man,” he says.

  “Ivan.”

  “You have your lunch bag. Good.”

  I lift the bag for him. It feels heavy. I think maybe I should go back home for the Makarov before I head to Brighton.

  “I have good job for you,” Ivan says and he eases his butt back onto the edge of the pool table. “Important job.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “A man at oyster restaurant on Mulberry Street.”

  “Mulberry Street? That’s not in Brooklyn.”

  Ivan stands up again, and he comes to me and my neck is cricked back as far as it’ll go to look at his face. I ease a few steps away and he eases with me so I’m still looking way up. I don’t like it. “This is not Russian gang,” he says. “This is worse thing. Mafia. You’re not afraid, are you?”

  “Why you ask that?” I say. “Shit no.”

  “Good,” he says. “The Mafia, they eat little kids in their restaurants.”

  Ivan hasn’t talked like this to me since the first job. I guess he thinks he needs to start from scratch to get me to waste some Mafia don, but he’s got that wrong and I’m beginning to get itchy.

  “I’ll do it,” I say, and I step back from him and he lets me. My neck stops cricking and I’m feeling a little better.

  “Good,” Ivan says.

  Then the guy behind him says, “You win respect down there, they make you boss of Bambino family.”

  Ivan looks over his shoulder at this guy and I think he’s unhappy with him, but when Ivan turns his face back to me, he’s smiling. I know what a bambino is. But I let it pass. Ivan’s been okay to me.

  “Look,” I say, “I got no problem doing this. I want ten thousand dollars.”

  Ivan’s head kind of snaps. Then he gets this thing in his voice. “This is a lot of money,” he says. “You know how much money this is?” And his voice is all stretched and gooey.

  “I know how much it is. I want that.”

  “I give you three hundred. That’s fifty percent raise.”

  “Ten thousand or forget it,” I say and I say it hard enough so that he knows I mean it.

  Ivan’s sunken cheeks suck in some more. “Listen now,” he says. “I give you very good gun. I give you a lot of money for little kid.”

  I straighten up and cock my head. “Wait,” I say to him.

  “No, you wait for me,” he says. “I am doing good things for you all the time. You are not appreciating me.”

  “Fuck you,” I say.

  Now his face pinches and he slits his eyes at me. “You can’t talk like that to Ivan. You got nothing till Ivan does things for you. You got nobody in world but Ivan. I am father to you.”

  This makes sense. So I go into the brown bag and out comes the 1911 and it’s in my two hands and my first shot shatters the light over the pool table. We all of us just stand for a second after that and it’s real quiet. Then the guy behind Ivan goes into his coat and the 1911 is flopping around in front of me like a goddamn can opener but I see his hand move and I follow it and my next shot is in the center of this guy’s chest and he flies back. Now Nick is standing and I take him out with one in the shoulder and he’s looking there like he doesn’t know whose body this is and the next one in his throat and he’s down.

  And I’ve still got Ivan. He’s grabbing around at his chest, maybe to see if he’s hit, maybe reaching for a gun, which he doesn’t seem to have. He looks at me and he says something in Russian. Probably something about being my fucking father. I put the next shot way up there in the center of his forehead and he flies back and the place is very quiet again and my real daddy’s gun is feeling like it doesn’t weigh anything at all, it’s just floating there in my hands like it’s part of me.

  That was a few hours ago. I’m sitting in Tompkins Square Park and off somewhere behind me I can hear the swing chains creaking and I know I’m going to have to make a few plans soon. Some things are tough the first time you do them and then you get used to them. Some things you only need to do once. I figure if I ever meet up with my daddy now, him and me could maybe just talk.

  “Every Man

 
She Kisses Dies”

  Bring on the sports heroes and the U.S. senators and the middle management bosses and the bad-seed uncles and the boyfriends your mama brought home from the cheap bars for the night, bring them to me and let them put their hands on me and their lips on mine and I’ll kill the sons of bitches, giving them what they want. I might as well. Because the men I love, the ones who come to me gentle and speak sweetly and take it slow and look me in the eyes and try their hardest to do it right, they all die, as it is. From the touch of my lips.

  He’s gone for the moment, into the bathroom. He’s surely afraid. He’s so gentle and he must be afraid. I haven’t kissed him yet. The room is white. The sun is coming through the window and the glare from the walls blinds me. I have nowhere to look, it is so pure and so empty. I listen for him. He clears his throat. Even that sound from him, coming through the closed door, has a tiny trembling in it. He is afraid. So am I.

  Did I catch this from somebody? In some unprotected moment of passion? It’s possible. How do you protect yourself from passion? And if you can protect yourself, how can it be passion? Must passion be gone from this world forever? Is that what we have to expect from each other if you suddenly find a man looking you in the eyes and you’re sure he’s seeing you and you can see him, real clear, and he says here is my body, take it, from my love for you, and I say here is my own body, I give you the same. If you are to really love each other, do you have to want this thing made of rubber between your sweetest flesh and his? If you find a moment on this earth when there is passion and there is love, shouldn’t this barrier between the two of you make you sadder than death?

  It does me. And it made me that sad even before I knew my own curse was worse by far. I have nightmares—they seem like nightmares but maybe they’re just visions of the right thing to do in a world like this. I am about to kiss a man and we both really feel something between us and I say, Wait a minute. I go into the drawer in the nightstand and I pull out a foil pack and I tear it open and it’s wax lips, big red wax lips, and I put them on and I murmur okay out of the corner of my mouth and we kiss.

  The thing is, I believe in God. I still do. My daddy was a preacher and he would talk about the lips of a strange woman dripping like a honeycomb and her mouth being smoother than oil but her end being bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, he would say, and her steps take hold on hell. It was from Proverbs that he was quoting, and he quoted it about once a year in our church and I would always remember it. Later on, though, I would read farther in Proverbs and I would hear the voice of those bad women and they would talk to the men passing by and they would sound to me like they were simply full of yearning and love. I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt, one of them says. I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloe, and cinnamon. Come, she says, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with love. The Bible says the house of this woman is the way to hell, but I’ve thought about her often. And about God. I want to ask Him: What’s wrong with seeking solace with love?

  I went on to disappoint my daddy till he wouldn’t even talk with me when he was dying. But I went to the hospital anyway and he turned his face from me and I went out into the hall and I watched my mother bend to him and they kissed on the lips. He would kiss her on the lips at night in our house, all my childhood long. He would do that. I think I forgave him his ideas for a long time more than I should have because I would see him kiss my mother on the lips.

  I did not become a woman like the ones in the book of Proverbs. They were prostitutes and all I did was love the men I wanted to love, even if sometimes I made some bad choices. He knew I kissed them and sought solace with them. He would quote these verses in his church and look at me when I was there and think of me when I wasn’t, and there was no difference in his mind between what I did and what he believed was an abomination.

  I went away to the city. The big city, Chicago. And I suppose I’ve received my answer from God. He’s fixed it so that I kill with my kiss. Even a man, I must assume, like Philip. A good and sweet man like him. The wood floors shine between me and the door to the bathroom. One large room. Utterly empty. All white. The sunlight is white, too, and in the great splash of it on the floor, there is not a single scuff mark. We are barefoot. We are wearing white linen. I am sitting in the center of the floor on a white down cushion. I think Philip loves me, and we have not kissed. He knows about me.

  I’m not entirely sure when this began. I think it was up in Wisconsin a couple of years ago. It was when Daddy was alive and I went up there with a man named John. A poet at heart. And on the first day in some lodge on some lake up there beyond Oshkosh we ran into a man and woman from Daddy’s church. An hour later Daddy was on the phone.

  “We haven’t talked much in recent times,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I’m not going to quote scripture to you,” he said.

  “Good for you,” I said. “‘He that reproveth a scorner getteth to himself shame. And he that rebuketh a wicked man getteth himself a blot.’” That was Proverbs too.

  I heard him squeak in rage on the other end. But still he didn’t do what came so natural to him. I felt a sneaky little admiration for him at that. But he did pick up my words. “Do you see yourself as a scorner and a wicked man?” he asked.

  “Not a wicked man.”

  “Person then,” he said.

  “No.”

  “I was afraid that was so.”

  “So why did you call?”

  “Because I love you.”

  “You sure it’s not because I’m embarrassing you in front of your friends?”

  “It’s not their souls I’m worried about,” he said.

  “Bye, Daddy,” I said, though I didn’t hang up the phone. Neither did he. He didn’t say a word. For a long time we just sat there on the phone listening to each other breathe. He wasn’t going to be the one to do this. So finally I did. I put the phone on the cradle as softly as I could.

  That night I was with John. He took me in a rowboat out onto the lake and there was an enormous red moon coming up over the trees. God was mooning us on the lake. John was rapturous over it. He started quoting poems, one after another, until I said, “Quiet. Please.” I said it very gently and he obeyed without a flicker of hurt on his face and I appreciated him for that. “I want to hear you breathe,” I said. And he drew near and put his face close to mine and I listened to him. Perhaps we dozed, as well, because a long time passed, and when we were conscious, we did nothing but listen and drift. Then the moon was very high. It had shrunk above us but it had grown much more intense. It was full and silver and cold. He’d made no attempt to touch me, though we had rented one room with one bed. He was a patient man, and I was filled with longing to touch him. So I put my hands on his cheeks and drew him to me and kissed him.

  He sighed deeply and began quoting Chinese poetry. Written by Li Po, he said, a man in love with the moonlight. Then John turned and the image of the moon was floating right beside us in the water and he said, “Li Po would kiss the moon from love.” And John leaned out of the boat and bent his face toward the moon in the water and there was only the slightest roll of the boat and he was gone.

  “John,” I said and I leaned out and waited for him to come up, tossing the water out of his face and hair and laughing. But he never reappeared. Not even to flail around and go down again. Nothing. And I feared at once that I had done it.

  That fear passed, of course. No one could be sure of such a thing from one incident. My father died soon after, going to his grave without acknowledging me again, though, to his credit, this dismissal of me was not compromised even to try to draw some judgment-of-God lesson for me about John’s death. I was depressed for some months, though I mourned John’s death much more intensely than my father
’s. That made me feel guilty and so it was nearly a year before I went out again.

  With Frank. Frank was a big man, square jawed and blond, and I felt almost fragile next to him. That’s a nice feeling for a woman who’s always been a little too tall and big-boned for many men. Frank made me feel almost ­dainty and we both worked at the Merchandise Mart and one afternoon he said to me, “Let’s take our summer-Friday half day together and go to Wrigley Field.”

  So we did. We got on the el and headed for Addison and the friendly confines, and we got pretty good seats on the third-base side. About six rows in. It was one of those Chicago days when the wind comes in off the lake and it feels like it blows all the humidity away and the flag was stiff out over the bleachers and the ivy on the outfield walls was quaking and my hair was thrashing around and the Cubs were even winning. Frank turned to me, on this first date, and he gave me a smile as white as the moon and before he could look back to the next pitch, I moved my face toward him and he was ready and we kissed and our lips had barely touched when there was a crack in the distance and then a crack very nearby and his lips lurched hard into mine and slid away.

  They say the ball rebounded out past second base. Ryne Sandberg made a one-handed catch. Frank would have liked that. But he was dead.

  There is enough of my daddy’s sense of the world in me to understand after two in a row that something was happening here that was providential. Not that I didn’t test it some more. Not that my own improvised half-theology didn’t cling to the notion of a God who would look on the yearning of a woman and a man to touch and take solace—or even a woman and a woman—any two people who found themselves in the terror and isolation of this life they did not choose—I half imagined a God who would look on such creatures and pity them and love them and try very hard to show Himself in those moments when the two people, whoever they were, were letting go of their own selfishness and fears and faithlessness and trying to find a way to cling hard and long and permanently to each other. And if they failed at that, God would see just the yearning for it as worthy of a gift of all the grace a God could give.