Madagascar

by Steven Schwartz

  A light tapping came from the door between the rooms. He opened his side and saw Tess standing there in her pajamas, the blue haze of the television flickering in the darkness. “Can I come in?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Allie fell asleep. Can I lie down in the extra bed?” Gone was the white strapless dress highlighting her smooth and too-tanned shoulders. She’d turned back into a little girl in pajamas with hems that draped over her feet.

  He pulled back the covers for her and she crawled under. He wasn’t going to dissuade her. Allie would wake up in the morning and guess Tess was in here. She would understand.

  Gene sat on the edge of the bed and held his daughter’s hand; her eyes fought off the full assault of sleep. He knew that she kept herself so busy that it was only in this quiet space before she drifted off that she was vulnerable to the stomach-churning misery of being motherless. “You okay?”

  Tess shook her head. “I’m having a bad night.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I’m too tired.”

  “Would you like to say a prayer?” It was the only other thing he could think to do, unreligious as he was.

  She shook her head back and forth. “Something else,” she said. “It’s something Mom used to say when I was little and scared.” She buried her face in the pillow and indeed she looked like his six-year-old daughter Tessy again. “I’m embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be. What is it?”

  “You have to tell me, ‘Goodnight, lovely.’ ”

  “Goodnight, lovely.”

  “You have to say it over and over until I fall asleep, and your voice has to get softer as you do it.”

  He did as she instructed him, and in no time her breathing surrendered to the stiller rhythms of sleep. He kept it up for quite a while, softly as his dry throat would allow, until he could only hear the words in his own head.

  In the morning, Tess was still sleeping and Gene peeked in on Allie who was sitting up in bed reading The Iliad. They were to leave that afternoon.

  “Tess is still in bed,” Gene said.

  “That’s okay. I’ve already packed for the both of us. But it would be fun to hang out a little longer, too.”

  “I’ll see if we can get a late checkout.”

  “Good thinking,” said Allie, as if rewarding him for his ingenuity while allowing him to believe he’d come to the idea on his own.

  “A classic,” said Gene, nodding at The Iliad.

  “You sissy, curly-haired pimp of a bowman!”

  “Pardon me?”

  “That’s what Diomedes says to Paris. At least in my translation. I have some problems with, let’s say, the choice of idiom, but it’s supposed to be the best translation on the market. You have to go with what’s available.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Don’t vex me, bitch!”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s Aphrodite. She can be rather intemperate.”

  “Oh,” said Gene, and stood uncertainly a moment. “Thank you for being such a good friend to Tess.”

  “I think Tess and I will be friends forever.”

  “I hope so,” said Gene.

  “Hope is the thing with shards,” Allie said brightly.

  “I think it’s ‘feathers.’ ”

  Allie smiled patiently and a bit sadly at him.

  “Right,” said Gene. “I guess you already know that.”

  “I’ll wait for Tess to wake up if you’d like to go eat in the meantime, Mr. Guthridge.”

  How did she know? “I’d appreciate that.”

  “No problem,” she said and picked up her book.

  He took the elevator down and waited in the buffet line, willing himself to select only two items plus coffee. Still, he couldn’t resist the temptation and piled his plate with eggs, Maine lobster, oysters, and a smaller plate with melon, assorted cheeses, and peach cobbler. He wanted to throw a napkin over it as he made his way through the line. Decency dictated that he should have restrained himself on a first-run and come back again if he wanted more, but he couldn’t stop and added the Dover lox and Dungeness crab legs. A middle-aged woman in front of him turned around and looked with disgust at the tower of food on his plate, the duck with green peppercorn he was trying to make room for, the eggs Benedict leaking its yellow river of Hollandaise over the Canadian bacon. At least that’s what he thought her face expressed until he realized she was choking. Fierce guttural noises emanated from her throat. She was bending toward him, unable to do anything other than grab her throat and stare with boggled-eyed panic at him.

  And then suddenly anonymous hands were being wrapped around her from behind and Gene watched as a piece of jumbo shrimp flew like a dart directly into his breast bone. The woman, who had started to sink to her knees, was caught by her savior, a man Gene would later learn was an EMT and visiting Las Vegas with his family and who had rushed across the room recognizing the sounds of distress. Through it all, Gene stood with his mountainous plate of food to be consumed as proxy for his lost insides.

  “Thank you,” the woman whispered to the EMT. “Thank God you were here,” she said. Her family joined her now. They’d gotten up from their table and hurried over to see why a burly stranger had grabbed her and with one powerful yank beneath her rib cage expelled the perfidious giant shrimp that left a bloody orange stain on Gene’s white shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman told Gene. Speechless in front of her, he set his plate down to cast it out of his sight. “I’m so embarrassed. I should know better than to eat in line. It’s bad manners and now I understand why. My God, I couldn’t breathe at all! Can I get your shirt cleaned for you?” Her voice strained and raw, she was offering him—him—contrition.

  “It’s fine,” said Gene. He actually didn’t know if he wanted to preserve it or burn it.

  At his feet lay the offending obstruction. Esophageal juices had already denuded the shrimp into a wan lump. No one dared pick it up. He almost felt sorry for it but stealthily tapped it like a hockey puck into oblivion under the buffet table.

  “Come sit down, Marla,” her husband said, visibly shaken too. The woman’s two daughters—dark-haired twins about ten, wide-eyed at the scare—took each of her hands and led her gently away to a far corner of the restaurant. Her husband stayed behind, clasping the EMT’s hand between his and thanking him profusely. “No problem,” said the EMT. “It’s just another day for me.”

  Surely, Gene thought, this entire scene had been played out for his benefit, if only he believed in such coincidence, if only he could make himself see its lesson and redemptive meaning and all else that such an occurrence might bespeak to his damaged soul. But the reporter in him was already debunking the significance of the event and its relevance. Rather, despite her supreme competency, Janice was just plain unlucky. Some things, no matter how much you’re used to being in charge, you just can’t do. She simply could not wrap her arms around herself to save her life. One’s own embrace had its limits. And he had not been there to help. At the very moment that he was in a restaurant stuffing his own face with a Reuben sandwich following a tedious interview with a city councilman, Tess was walking into the house after school to find her mother dead and bent over the high back of a dining room chair, trying, the police had conjectured, to thrust its hard edge into her chest.

  Such were the facts, as they were: one soul was lucky, one was not, and he, presently being in the most infamous capital of luck—or not—had no choice but to stop pitying himself about that chilling fact. You could not figure out who was a winner from luck alone. If he had lost anything, it was his belief in his own insignificance. He had started to imagine that he should make some difference in the world and that Janice would have wanted him to. When, in fact, he had no other purpose than to dwell on the ineffable question as to why he, an overeating, ill-equipped and damaged man, should be the surviving parent to a daughter who so loved and adored her mother that Gene had once overheard
her say, “I couldn’t live without you, Mommy.” Implying, if made to choose, she could do so without him.

  Las Vegas, with its fake history, fake pyramids, fake Venetian canals, fake Eiffel Tower, with its artificial waterfalls and buxom Greek sirens from a Homeric fantasy land, all of which he’d schlepped the girls to, was the most platonic unideal—a shadow more vivid than its referent, and he couldn’t wait to leave its artifice. Even death was a facsimile of itself out here, a conceit that would amuse, say, the French with their trenchant irony and condescension about everything American that fell short of their puffed-up standard of seriousness. Yet more than anywhere Las Vegas offered a strange commiseration for his loss: the garish surroundings; the acquisitive, maddening search for luck; the left-behind hopes; the loneliness of an empty wallet. Here he was smack at home among his fellow brethren—all of them bearing up under life at its most desperate. He too had come seeking that great wave of release, hoping to be tossed upon its forgiving shore.

  Tess came into the restaurant, her arm linked in abiding kinship with Allie. So lightened was his daughter by her friend’s presence! The two of them were in shorts and sleeveless tops, their bare shoulders squared toward the task of finding him. Each had a yellow rose in her hair. Where had they gotten them? He could only guess—a flower cart? Their putative ninth-grade admirers? Freshly rested, their burgeoning youth had been renewed, their faces effulgent in the morning light.

  They looked a bit mischievous. Eager, yes, for more fun.

  He waved to them from across the room. Tess spotted him and whispered something to Allie. And then they both waved back in unison—big, circling waves hello, as if they were making the great world whole right in front of him.

  Bless Everybody

  They’d been led to our land. The woman, Meredith, was far along in her pregnancy, and the coincidence of her name being close to “Mary” struck me, no place to lay their heads as they awaited the birth of their child. We—I—owned two hundred acres, cut out of the red rock along the Wyoming-Colorado border. Indians had long ago run stolen horses into the box canyon at the end of our property, and after them, rustlers had done the same thing with cattle. I’d poked around in the red dirt and once dug out the shoulder bone of a bison as big as my thigh. Arrowheads, spear points, and shards of clay pottery I’d turned over to the local museum; rumor had it that this was as sacred ground as any that ran along the Front Range from Colorado to Wyoming.

  Peck Foster, my neighbor of the adjacent two hundred acres, had given the couple my name and number and told them to call me about the one-room cabin on our property. The young couple had parked outside the gate and took it upon themselves to walk the land and see if they could find the person who presided over this “magical” place. It seemed like a good story, this being led to the land. I didn’t believe in providence, but I was retired and had time on my hands to be amused by such notions and told them I’d meet up at the gate to our property.

  That “our” is misspoken. I’m divorced and Rosalyn took her share of the property in a cash settlement. I used a chunk of my retirement money to buy her out—I’m sixty-eight years old, and I’d worked as an inspector for the highway department thirty-nine of those years. I’d always wanted a piece of property as fiercely beautiful as this one. Every time I passed it on the road at sunset the red rock glowed like hot coals in an evening fire—a view of the openhearted earth. When it went up for sale, I talked Rosalyn into putting our money down. I was land proud, no doubt about it. A little stream called Watson Creek ran through the valley and turned the cottonwoods leafy with shade in the spring, as they were now.

  They were waiting for me by the gate. When I’d spoken to the husband on the phone, he described their lifestyle as “migratory,” but he certainly didn’t sound like a dangerous drifter. I’d have put the man in his mid-twenties and the woman a few years younger and their Volkswagen bus older than the both of them combined, rusted on its fenders and painted a robin’s-egg blue with a bumper sticker on the back that said BLESS EVERYBODY. NO EXCEPTIONS. The van’s tires were bald and its grill had picked up a couple of tumbleweeds and was chewing on them like too much spaghetti in a child’s mouth.

  “Thank you, sir, for meeting us,” Calvert said, sticking out his hand. He was a thin man with a big toothy grin, and blond hair down to his collar, his eyes all afire at hello. He tipped his hat to me, a brown felt fedora with a white feather tucked in the band.

  They showed me their wares: ceramic leaf earrings and beaded hemp necklaces; tiny “sweetheart” notebooks no bigger than the palm of my hand with paper that still looked like the wood it came from; sassafras and strawberry scented drip candles in Day-Glo colors. They went to craft fairs and sold what they could, and took temporary jobs. “We’re realistic people,” Calvert said. “You can’t live off today what you did in the sixties.”

  Sixties or not, they didn’t look like they had a practical bone in their bodies, not with that baby in their future.

  “Sir, we’d just like to stay here a few nights,” Calvert said. “We want our child to absorb some of this”—he spread his skinny arms in a panorama over the expanse of my land—“holiness, before we move on.” I thought: people really talk like this?

  He patted Meredith’s swollen stomach. She looked as if she were due any day.

  “Where you going to have the baby?”

  Calvert clasped his hands together. “Wherever we may be.”

  I looked at Meredith, hoping I wasn’t hearing what I just did. But she had that dreamy come-what-may look. “There’s a good hospital in town,” I said. “You should check in with them.”

  “No need,” Calvert said. “We’ll be taken care of.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We just followed our hearts here. We came over the pass and looked down and just knew. Isn’t that right, Mer?”

  Meredith nodded, still with that dreamy look.

  “I’d feel much better if you saw a doctor or midwife while you were here. We got a clinic in town that helps those in need.”

  “You are a kind man,” Calvert said, as if my reputation preceded me. “Your hospitality will not go unnoticed.”

  Meredith’s stomach made a shelf of the long dress she was wearing, a thin faded shift of yellow daisies, not suited for pregnancy, just oversized. Her ankles and toes had a film of dirt, and I wondered how long it had been since they’d had hot showers.

  Before she retired a year after me, Rosalyn had worked in the public school system, first as a teacher, then a district administrator. She appreciated the threat of liability. I did too, working as an inspector for the highway department. She’d moved out to Eagle Estates (I still had our old place in town) and her backyard sloped down thirty yards to an artificial lake with her own dock.

  “You haven’t heard the best part,” I said.

  “I can’t wait.”

  “The wife is pregnant.” I suddenly realized I’d been calling her “the wife” with no good reason. They’d never said they were married. “I tried pushing them to see a doctor while they’re here.”

  “Wait…did you say pregnant? As in living-out-of-a-van pregnant? How many months?”

  “I’d say seven. Not being the best judge of such matters. She’s pretty ripe, though.”

  “Oh, Charlie. What have you gotten yourself into?”

  “Maybe nothing. They just want a couple days to rest their bones. I’d be more worried if there was anything there to get into. It’s still the same empty one-room place with a bed and stove and a hard tile floor. Nothing to lose, nothing to break, and nothing to disturb. They want to walk the land, that’s fine with me. Soak up the vibes or whatever they believe. Anybody breaks a leg, blame it on nature. I’m not running an amusement park up there.”

  “Anything happens they could sue you.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  I’d come over to pick up Martin, our golden retriever. Rosalyn was going to Atlanta for a week. We shared custody of Mar
tin, going on twelve years now. Before that we’d had Betsy, a springer spaniel, and when we first married, Reginald and Cora, a couple of dachshunds who fought like the brother and sister they were. It wasn’t lost on us that we always gave our dogs dignified people names, no Bandit, Snuggles, or Doodles for us. These were our children with hopes for their futures, limited as they might be. Rosalyn traveled every month or two working part-time now as an educational consultant. Last month she’d gone to Hawaii. She didn’t travel alone either; she had met a man when she was in Cleveland. He was a VP at a large educational testing company, and all I knew about him was that he was divorced with three grown children. She had put up a picture of him on her dresser. Her new man was a square-faced gent with blue eyes, a tennis tan, and hair graying around the temples—mine had gone almost all white. He was closer in age to Rosalyn, who was thirteen years younger than me at fifty-five, the new thirty I heard. Nobody said that about sixty-eight. Not yet anyway.

  Rosalyn put down her iced tea on the marble patio table. She’d fixed up the place with abstract paintings that reminded me of geometry problems (we’d had pictures of those grinning dogs of ours hanging in the old place—I still did), plush white sofas (she was always chasing Martin off of them), and long drapes.

  “I’d better be going. I got some painting to do on the basement.”

  “Almost finished?”

  “I’m getting there.”

  Rosalyn hadn’t been inside our old house for months. I was fixing it up to sell. We still owned it together, free and clear, our one common possession if you didn’t count the dog. Just to keep it fair, I paid her a little rent every month until I could get it sold and move out. I was going to live up on the land. I’d priced running electricity from the utility poles at the road, and it would cost me three thousand dollars. Right now all I had was a well that pumped out rusty water. I’d warned the couple not to drink from it. Nothing would happen to them, just the poorest tasting water around from all the iron in it. They said that wouldn’t bother them, the water was still purer than any that came from a faucet.