Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

  “Did you learn that from your Indians?” Ray asked.

  “Callie’s got an internship though her school,” Jack said for my benefit.

  Grey said, “She’s working with the Chippewa Action Program—”

  “’Bout time they get to swindle us for a change, eh,” Ray said. “That’s what I tell her, ’Bout time they get to swindle us for a change, eh Cal?”

  “’Bout time they scalp somebody,” Grey said, looking Ray’s way down the table.

  “The first thing we learn,” Callie said, “is to avoid forming stereotypes.”

  “Sometimes we forget how much the young have to teach us,” Dolores said, anxious to squash any conversation that would give attention to her daughter rather than herself. Her eyes scanned the table, looking for a target to zero in on. “Trudy,” she said, “where’s Dianne this holiday?”

  “At her father’s,” Trudy said. Dolores knew this, and for a second I felt sorry for Trudy.

  “Ah, yes, I should have thought.”

  “Would all grass look like rice if you cooked it?” Todd asked.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Grey said.

  “It’s a fair question,” Jack said. “Ask Callie.”

  “Ask me what?”

  “Would it? Would all grass look like wild rice if you cooked it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “I guess they can’t teach you everything at college,” Dolores said.

  I said, “I’ve got a professor back at school who says—”

  “Ray read in the Weekly World News that Satan is a college professor at one of those liberal universities,” Dolores said.

  The Toad asked, “What’s the Weekly World News?”

  “It’s a tabloid,” Callie said.

  “You used to write for them, didn’t you Dad?” Grey said. Jack chuckled.

  “I’m sure the devil has better things to do with his time,” Agnes said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Ray snarled and startled Agnes. Jack, too, looked up from his plate somewhat surprised and looked first at Agnes then down the table.

  “Nothing,” Agnes said. “I only just meant the devil could think of more destructive ways on earth than posing as a teacher.”

  “Or were you saying that I could find better things to do with my time?” Ray said, now looking at the table instead of at Agnes.

  “What’s a tabloid?” Todd asked.

  “I’m sure that’s not what she meant to say,” Jack piped in.

  “It’s those papers by the checkout at the Kroger,” Callie said.

  Then everyone is talking at once and nobody hears Jack tap his glass with his fork and then he’s saying, “Hey, hey,” until finally he shouts it and everybody stops yelling at each other and looks. “I think a toast is appropriate.”

  “You want me to handle that, Dad?” Grey said.

  “This is the day we count our blessings, and we are blessed to have Dolores and Ray join us for the first time”—we all lifted our glasses, except Agnes who lifted the gravy boat—“and to have Tom here to remind us of how much the joy of his return has made up for our sadness when he left us.”

  “In other words,” Grey said, “how can we miss you if you don’t go away?”

  They were still going at it when Callie and Grey and I ducked out and walked over to Friendly’s, which was hopping with refugees from other households around the island, many like us loosening ties and kicking out of pinched leather shoes. Greta waved from behind the bar and said something to Grey when she slid the two bottles of beer and a Coke across the bar that made him laugh.

  “What’s funny?” I asked.

  “She said to tell you she knew they’d kick you out of college,” Grey said.

  “See,” Callie said, “you could just stay here and no one would think anything of it.”

  “Grey doesn’t need me around when he’s got Natch.”

  “Shit, Tom,” Grey said.

  Callie asked, “Who’s Natch?”

  “She doesn’t know him?”

  Callie and Grey looked at each other. “Why would she, man? He’s a customer.”

  “Who is he?” Callie asked.

  “He’s kind of a steer-er.”

  “A steer?” Callie said. “Like a boy cow?”

  “No, a steer-er. He steers business my way.”

  “How about you?” I asked Callie. “You planning to stay here all your life?”

  She looked at Grey and half laughed, “I like it here as well as anywhere else.”

  A Mac Davis song came on the jukebox, “It’s Hard to be Humble,” and all the regulars sang along. The song is funny the first time you hear it.

  “You could at least stay a couple of extra days,” she said. “Ellises are having a party on Sunday.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I was thinking about going back tomorrow.”

  “How come?”

  “I have to go back in a day or two anyway, so what difference does it make? Trudy doesn’t want me around and Pop doesn’t need me this time of year.”

  “Stay over at the Reeds’,” Callie said, but Grey interrupted.

  “He says he has to go,” Grey said. “Right?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said.”

  Pop and Trudy took the news better. The next morning—after falling asleep to the sounds of polka music and laughter vibrating from his room—I’d asked Pop, “Feel like going for a ride?” thinking I could borrow somebody’s bike and we’d find enough dry pavement to make the effort worthwhile.

  When I asked, Trudy looked up from her eggs, startled. My father noticed her movement out of the corner of his eye. He stared at me for a moment and shook his head and Trudy went back to eating.

  “Anyway,” she said. “It’s snowing.”

  “Never stopped us before,” I said, which was true.

  “Well,” Trudy said, “I can’t be responsible for whatever foolishness went on here before me.”

  Pop lifted his eyes from the table for the first time all morning, and I looked into them for some sign of regret, but I didn’t see it, only fatigue. “I guess I’ll get going then,” I said.

  Trudy said, “Really, honey, already?”

  Pop spoke, “You know when the bus comes?”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “If I’m on the 11:15 ferry I’ll be able to catch it.”

  15

  OR THE WONDERFUL LAMP

  Ship drifted into the room, whistling Billy Joel. He’d been sullen because he was flunking Statistics. That was bad because Ship’s major was Pre-Business, and from what he told me, if you were Pre-Biz, flunking Statistics was the one thing you didn’t want to do. For all his talk, Ship was a bad student. You could attribute his incompetence to two factors: he was lazy and he was dumb. Normally he didn’t let a bad grade get him down so the previous couple of days had been depressing, but now that he was back to his musical self, I missed the gloomy version.

  He kept whistling, and I kept ignoring him, until he quit whistling and started to sing, and at last I said, “Shut the fuck up.”

  He smiled and dangled a manila envelope in front of my face. “I used the old yearbook ploy.”

  More than a minute went by while he waited for me to ask him what the old yearbook ploy was, and when he realized I wasn’t going to, he said, “I went to the theater department and told them I was from the yearbook staff. I said we were going through our files and couldn’t find a current photo of an actress, Drucilla—‘Gordon?’ she says. ‘That’s right,’ I say.”

  I made a grab for the envelope, but he jerked it out of reach.

  Slowly, he slid the black and white glossy photograph out of the envelope and, holding it tightly, dangled it in front of my face. “That her?”

  It was.

  Doing a lousy job of hiding his satisfaction, he put the picture back in the envelope. “Then I called administration and told them I was Dr. Whatshisname, requisitioning plane tickets for a show in Columbus and
I don’t have an ID number on one of my actors. She says, ‘What’s your authorization number?’ and I say, ‘Lady, I don’t have a clue. This is the first time this has happened.’ She says she needs it for the entry, will I call her when I find it. I say, ‘Sure will,’ and she gives me the ID number. After that I call records and say I’m verifying a scholarship on one of my actors.”

  “Do they give scholarships for theater?”

  “Doubt it,” Ship said, “but she doesn’t know that. She says she’ll send the transcript campus mail. I say, ‘I need it today. I’ll send over my assistant director Dennis Shipman.’ When I get there, she doesn’t get up from her desk. ‘It’s on the counter,’ she says. ‘Thanks,’ I say. I take the transcript, and, in my carelessness, I accidentally get a copy of her application, too.”

  He waited for me to congratulate him.

  “Let’s see it,” I said.

  He tossed the envelope on my bed and read from his notebook. “Gordon, comma, Drucilla. No middle initial. Born 2-17. She’ll be twenty in February—an older woman. Theater major, GPA 3.75—” he whistled, but then said, “Well, it’s Theater. Parents Burt and Alice. Permanent address, Fox Valley Road, Windsor, Ontario.”

  “She’s Canadian?”

  “That’s what it says.”

  “What’s she doing down here?”

  “Search me. She lives in Waters.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  Ship smiled. He tossed the directory on top of the empty envelope. “She’s in the book, call her up.”

  I left the phone book lying where it fell.

  Ship folded his arms across his scrawny chest. “Gonna call her?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Why not call her now?”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I said. “You wouldn’t just call her up.”

  “I wouldn’t?”

  “Well, you might.”

  “How’re you going to meet her if you don’t call?”

  “Who says I want to meet her?”

  “You don’t?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You going to stake out her dorm?”

  “Oh jeez, you’re bright,” I said and kicked the directory onto the floor.

  Ship went to pick it up, thought better of it, and headed for the door. “Bright enough to know you’re yellow,” he said and slammed the door on his way out.

  As soon as he was gone, I ripped a page from the pad and opened the directory. Ship had circled the listing and number in red pen. I copied them out, tore the page out of the phone book, put a match to it and used the flame to light a cigarette. A burning ash landed on Ship’s blanket. I whacked it out with the letter I was writing to Aunt Berthe about our happy holiday dinner.

  It was after ten when I finished. Ship hadn’t come back and figured to be in the TV lounge watching Leno. I stamped the letters, shut out the lights, and sat cross-legged on my bed, not sure what I should do. I smoked a cigarette, then lit a second with the butt of the first. I listened for Ship’s footsteps in the hall.

  I pushed a chair under the doorknob, so Dennis couldn’t barge in, took the slip out of my wallet. I dialed six digits of the number and hung up. Then I dialed again. It rang. It rang a second time. Someone picked up on the other end, there was a silence, and before I could say hello, a girl said, “Dru Gordon doesn’t live here anymore,” and hung up.

  That night I dreamed I was back on the island. It was just as it had been at Thanksgiving, only the table was outdoors and no one seemed to notice or care except me. The trees were bare. There was snow and a gale blowing from the north. Everyone was there, sitting at a long table. My father, Grey, Callie, the Reeds, Todd and Trudy, Dolores and Ray, his blazer now white instead of orange. We were dressed for a summer picnic on the beach. Everyone was talking at once. Or I should say that everyone’s lips were moving at once. I couldn’t hear a word over the wind, though I understood that what they were saying was horrible, full of hatred and regret. My place was at the head of the table, Callie sat at the other end. For a long time I stared at her, willing her to look at me. She leaned toward Ray to whisper something in his ear and as she did our eyes met for the first time. I said her name. She smiled and held her finger to her lips.

  Waking in a state of dread, I lay in the dark with no idea of where I was until I heard air whistling through Ship’s nostrils as he slept. I had an irresistible feeling that I should go home, that something hideous would happen if I didn’t. I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night and thrashed around until seven in the morning when I called the shop and let the phone ring for about twenty times without an answer.

  I decided not to go home. Instead I would take Dooley’s advice and fall in love with school instead of a girl.

  “Take Edwards’s class,” he said, as I was filling out my registration form for the spring semester.

  “He good?” I asked.

  “He is a she, Pamela Edwards. No, she is not good. In point of fact she’s dead awful.”

  “Then why would you want me to take her?”

  “Don’t ask the obvious question. It doesn’t befit the scholar.” He licked an envelope shut and held it up between two fingers.

  “Even so I am going ask you to do something for me that you may thank me for and that I will equally likely come to regret.”

  “Do I have to do it?”

  He looked at the envelope as he tapped it on his desk. “Yes, I imagine the powers of destiny are too strong for you to resist. Do you know the theater next to the church?”

  “At the foot of the hill? Yes, sir.”

  “Take this envelope down there and give it to Harold Sing.”

  “Harold Sing, did you say?”

  He smiled across his desk. “Yes, I believe you know him.”

  The front door was locked. I walked around to the side and tried the door there, which opened onto a dark corridor with a dim light coming from what turned out to be a small auditorium. As my eyes got used to the dark, I made out the familiar shapes of Crowder and Sing, another man with the sharp-featured good looks of a movie actor, Majors, he would tell me his name was, Mike Majors; and two girls, one tall and coat-hanger thin and the other not so tall. The not-so-tall girl was a familiar face around campus, dressed always in black mourning clothes, right down to the hat and veil, with her face caked with white makeup and black lipstick. She looked like a corpse. The tall coat-hanger I would get to know as Bea. The corpse’s name was Harriette.

  Downstage, Drucilla Gordon crouched on her knees, leafing through a pile of papers that lay on the floor in front of her. She was the only one who saw me coming down the aisle.

  “Professor Dooley told me to bring this over,” I said, croaking a bit.

  “Dewey did?” Her black eyes reflected the gold light high above her head, in a way that gave her a look of willfulness, even willful willfulness.

  “Dooley.”

  “Dewey to us. What’d he send over?”

  Before I could answer, Sing called from upstage, “Is that our letter from Dewey?”

  Drucilla Gordon looked at me. “Is it our letter?” she asked.

  “I guess,” I said

  “He says he thinks so,” she said.

  “Then ask him to give it to you.”

  “I think he was going to—” and then to me—“you were, weren’t you?”

  “It’s why I brought it over.”

  “Splendid,” she said.

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, tilting her head and talking to me like I was five.

  It was a little humiliating. I handed over the letter and turned to leave.

  “Wait.” She called after me, “Want to see?”

  “What?”

  “We were just about to do a run-through.”

  I got the feeling that she was sorry about giving me a hard time, and I said, “Sure.”

  “Sit there,” she said. She climbed the stairs t
o the stage. “Go ahead, Roy.”

  CROWDER: [standing against a semicircular rail that stands on top of a smaller stage or dais in the middle of the larger stage] Good Friday began with a third denial. General and Mrs. Grant had arrived in the capital on Thursday on their way to Philadelphia. They were hoping to meet with the Secretary of War and leave town before the Lincolns knew they were in Washington. President Lincoln was planning to go to Grover’s Theater on Friday to attend a new production, Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp, with his son, Tad. But upon hearing that his general was in town, he canceled his reservation at Grover’s and sent a messenger to the Grants inviting them to Ford’s Theater to see Our American Cousin, probably thinking that an English drawing room farce was more suitable to the Grants’ taste than a kiddie play about flying carpets and genies.

  This fuss over the arrival of the Grants takes on the qualities of a farce, itself, if you imagine the hickish Lincolns scrambling around the White House to prepare for the arrival of le grand Général, Mrs. Lincoln dusting, the President dictating commendations and dispatching couriers. Just as plans appear to be set, a rider arrives with a letter conveying the Grants’ regrets.

  BEA: Stood up at the last minute, the President asks several of his cabinet members; all refuse. After declaring the theater outing off, the President inexplicably changed his mind and instead asked his military attaché Major Rathbone [Majors steps forward and clicks his heels] if he would like to attend with Clara Harris, his stepsister and fiancée.

  DRUCILLA: Imagine, Henry, the theater with the President of the United States.

  SING: We, myself and a small band of patriots, met at Gautier’s restaurant on March 13. Over a dinner of oysters and cognac and fine cigars, I detailed my plan of abduction, one that outshone those previous in its boldness, desperation, and ingenuity.

  Whereas in the past we had sought to stop the President’s carriage in open country, like highwaymen, I thought instead to burst in upon his box, the next time he attended the theater. The plan, though well-struck, did not proceed well from its inception. Lee’s surrender on Palm Sunday intervened, and the President’s fickle nature when it came to public appearance also complicated our execution, when on the morning of the 14th of April 1864—