What My Last Man Did

by Andrea Lewis

  “Stop that.” Louis snatched the page from her hand. “We’re not dying. There’s no bombs.” He held out his palm and she let the lighter fall into it. “I’ll protect you,” he said.

  “You’d save my mother first.” Iris narrowed her eyes at him. “Wouldn’t you?”

  He stared back, amazed at this rare interval of eye contact with Iris. Amazed at everything about her, the strange little girl who saw through everybody, understood everything, knew too much. He shoved the photo and the lighter into his pants pocket. “I’d save you both,” he said. “No, I’d save you first.”

  “Why?” Iris plopped into the desk chair.

  “Because we keep each other’s secrets.” Louis started gathering up the red plaid bedspread off the bed. “Now. Remember what I said?”

  “What secrets?” Iris sat up straight and watched him.

  He swirled the bedspread and struck a matador pose. “Remember? I said I knew how to cut hair.”

  “That’s a secret?”

  “That’s one of them.” He settled the spread around her shoulders and tucked it into her collar. “I’m pretty good, too. I needed money and I worked in a barbershop.”

  “It won’t help now,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m a freak.”

  “No you’re not.” He combed his fingers experimentally through the hair at the back of Iris’s head. “That’s one of your secrets.”

  “What is?”

  “Well, don’t tell anyone.” He picked up the paper doll scissors from the desk. “But you’re going to be beautiful.”

  10

  Family Cucurbita

  I had known Rick for twenty minutes before he told me about his dead wife’s uterus.

  “Puerperal sepsis,” he said, leaning on his garden spade. “Some of the placenta stayed in there after Angelica was born. It sort of rots and gets infected.”

  We were standing in my sad excuse for a vegetable garden. Behind Rick, over our low wall, I could see the professional-looking raised beds he was putting in his own backyard.

  Rick told me how the infected uterus could have been treated in a hospital but they were living on Alaska’s North Slope, along the Colville River, far from help. The baby was born during a six-day blizzard, the birth attended by an elderly Inupiaq woman who closed her eyes and keened when the wife’s fever shot up.

  Rick rambled on. “I worked as a bush pilot back then. Flew them out myself in the Staggerwing as soon as the weather cleared, but my wife died on the flight. Angelica was two days old.” His eyes filled up. “That was March 14, 1972,” he said, squinting back in time through fierce New Mexico sunlight.

  Angelica, now five, played hopscotch behind us on Rick’s patio. They had moved in two weeks ago, along with Rick’s mother. That morning he had come over, introduced himself, and launched his life story with a brand of too-early intimacy that made me nervous. I was twenty-five, and my recently-wrecked relationships had made me wary of men, especially ones who teared up and talked placentas in the early going.

  Rick swiped at his eyes. His fingernails were rimmed in garden dirt. His pink cheeks bloomed above his copper beard. He was a little over six feet, with a big barrel chest and big rounded shoulders. He had on a white t-shirt and overalls so large they looked like waders. Considering we had just met, he stood in too close and peered at me too intently, as if he were reading our conversation from subtitles on my forehead.

  “Hannah,” he said. “That’s a beautiful name. Have you ever seen a Staggerwing?”

  I hacked weakly at some star thistle with my hoe. “I don’t think so.” I wanted him to go back to his own garden where he belonged.

  “It’s a bi-plane. A classic. Mine was a Beech D17, built in 1945. The upper wing is inversely staggered behind the lower. She was beautiful. I wish I could’ve shown her to you. Do you live alone?”

  “With my sister.” I took another half-hearted swipe at the thistle. “Iris.”

  “Here, let me help you.” Rick took the hoe out of my hands and made a vicious hack at the weed. To my delight, it still resisted. He upended the blade and grazed the edge with his thumb. “This needs sharpening. I can fix this for you.” He held onto it, along with his spade, as if we were at a garage sale and he might buy them both. “What are you growing here?”

  I hated people looking at my garden. I was stymied by the hard New Mexico dirt, despite consulting Horticultural Extension pamphlets about the hardiest plants to grow in the brutal Las Cruces summer. I bought faded packets of seed at Mondragon’s Hardware-Septic-Nursery, amended the soil per instructions, and planted the seeds at the recommended depths. Now Rick eyed the broken plastic ruler I had stuck in the ground with a straightneck squash packet stapled on top. It was late April, already blazing hot, and nothing had come up yet. We stared at the bare earth as if new shoots might show themselves at any moment.

  “I see you are interested in cucurbits,” he said.

  “Well, I thought I’d try some squash.” I was already longing for the anonymity Iris and I had enjoyed over the past year while the next-door house had been up for sale. No one else on this Las Cruces block of chain-linked front yards and chained-up dogs and low stucco houses had paid any attention to us.

  “Your gourds, your squashes, your pumpkins, those are all in the family Cucurbita,” Rick said. “I’m fascinated by them too. Have you tested for phosphorus?”

  “No. I just thought I’d see what happened.”

  “You’ve got to test for phosphorus!” he said. “I’m planning to put in pumpkins and the first thing I did was test for phosphorus. I could bring you my test kit.”

  “No thanks.”

  “It’s not a problem. I’ll bring it when I bring this back.” He hefted my hoe and started across the driveway to his garage.

  * * *

  “What did Paul Bunyan want?” Iris asked. As I suspected, she had been watching from the kitchen window. Curious, but not willing to get involved.

  “Telling me about Mrs. Bunyan’s infected uterus.”

  Iris dunked a raspberry leaf teabag in a cup. She sat at the kitchen table in her baggy shorts and baggy blouse, her white, skinny knees drawn up under her chin. Her dark-brown hair was tied in a ponytail with a purple rubber band off a Safeway bunch of broccoli. “Why does every man you meet immediately think of reproductive organs?”

  “Good karma?” I knew she was going to bring up Quentin.

  “The first day you met Quentin he asked if you wanted to see his penis.”

  “Iris, we were five.”

  “Still,” she said. It was like this, living with someone who had total recall. You could name any date from Iris’s twenty-seven-year life and she could tell you what happened that day. “You and Quentin were betrothed.”

  In a way, this was true. Our parents decided very early on that I would marry Quentin Boudreau McKenna, III. I liked Quentin, but I couldn’t marry him. Instead I fled to Las Cruces and a job in the Chemistry Department of New Mexico State, where I started a romance with my boss. It fell apart three months later in an episode I’m sure has become department legend. Stockroom tryst, 12% solution hydrofluoric acid, bottle falling. The Grade 1 burns on his back required a trip to the ER and a confession to his wife. My job was gone, I was through with men, and I did not want Rick to like me.

  “Paul Bunyan likes you,” Iris said. “I could tell.”

  “How?”

  “He was hovering. He was practically on top of you. He was trying to see down your blouse.” Iris dunked her teabag, and perused one of the Horticultural Extension pamphlets, You and Your Squash.

  “His name is Rick. He expounded on the family Cucurbita.”

  “You’ve got to love a man who knows his squash.” Iris plopped the teabag in her saucer. “You should go out with him.”

  She always tossed out advice on things she didn’t have to deal with. Happily cloistered with her studies and her writing, she left the real worl
d to me. I admit I let it happen. I made her come and live with me after our mother sold our family home and its two hundred acres of Galveston Island and Iris went over the edge. When our mother died soon after, Iris mourned mainly the fact that the land and all its wildlife could have been saved if Mother had only kicked off a little sooner. We had both worshipped our father, and Iris did hold some esteem for our mother, who had recognized Iris’s genius and allowed her to leave high school at fourteen to study by herself. This Iris had done nonstop for the past thirteen years.

  * * *

  Rick found an excuse almost every Saturday and Sunday to come over and join me in my garden. My soils were tested, my tools were sharpened, and the plastic ruler pieces were gone. Each row was marked with a tiny wooden billboard lovingly lettered in Rick’s own hand. But by the first week of June, my squash had a serious case of powdery mildew. The fragile new leaves cringed and curled under mottled white splotches. I hated looking over at his raised beds with the giant pumpkin plants pushing their way out of the earth like alien life forms in a B movie.

  One Sunday morning Rick brought his little girl, Angelica, with him. He also held in front of him, in the solemn manner of a wise man bearing gold, an orange box of fungicide. His gardentool belt—with trowel, hand cultivator and weed digger swinging from their leather slots—clanked rhythmically on his waist. He had continued to fill me in on his autobiography and his many short-lived careers besides bush piloting, which included bus mechanic, oilrig roughneck, smokejumper and his current job as bricklayer for a construction company in Las Cruces.

  He seemed to want an equally detailed résumé from me but I resisted, even though I had a comparable patchwork background of waitressing and grad school, fruit picking and teaching, typing and lab work. Where Rick glowed with pride at his versatility, I quailed with regret over my toe-in-the-water forays into jobs and relationships, my two degrees in chemistry that now felt meaningless. Still he pried. Were our parents alive? (No.) What had our father done? (Mining.) Good money in that? (Yes.)

  “Angel, this is Hannah,” he said to his daughter. “I want you two to get along.”

  Angelica twirled six rows of pearlescent pop-beads she wore on one wrist. She had on a Superman t-shirt and a skirt with a print of yellow light bulbs and green telephones. Her fine, white-blonde hair hung limply around her shoulders. “Can you say hi?” Rick asked.

  “I have a pet tarantula,” Angelica said. “Her name’s Mabel.”

  “Really?”

  “I have dirt in my sandals.” She sat down and took off one white plastic sandal and shook it.

  Above her head, Rick displayed the box of fungicide like a TV pitchman. “This stuff works on both anthracnose and powdery mildew.”

  “I don’t like putting poisons on my plants,” I said. I had tried a home remedy of vinegar and cayenne, but was too embarrassed to tell him. He looked at me as if I were a mother neglecting her children.

  “But this will save your plants. I’ll just give them a little.” He started sprinkling the pellets around the plants.

  “Please. I’d rather you didn’t.” I grabbed his arm and pulled. A big clump of pellets came out all at once spattered to the ground. Angelica sensed the danger. She scrambled to her feet and wandered over to our back door.

  My hand was still on Rick’s arm. He looked down on it, smiled, and covered it with his free hand. “You’ll thank me,” he said.

  “Can I go in your house?” Angelica called. She was on our back step, both hands on the doorknob. Iris must have been watching again. The door suddenly opened and Angelica nearly fell inside. “Who are you?” Iris asked.

  “I have a pet tarantula,” Angelica said.

  “Then you better come in.” Iris pulled her in and shut the door.

  “Was that your sister?” Rick asked. “Why doesn’t she come out?”

  “She’s a little bit reclusive.”

  “I’ve been here a month and that’s the first I’ve seen her. Is she sick?”

  “She reads a lot.”

  Rick frowned at some chickweed springing up between rows of straightneck and crookneck squash. He unholstered his weed digger. “What does she read?” he asked, kneeling to tackle the chickweed.

  “History. Science. She’s working on a book. Several books, actually. One is about conquistadors.”

  “She reads and writes?” He made it sound like a miracle someone could do both.

  “She’s quite brilliant. Her IQ’s 166.”

  Rick gathered up a green ball of chickweed and tossed it on the mulch pile. “So, are you two pretty well off?” he asked, as though he was tossing the question on the pile too.

  “What?”

  “Oh. I mean—” He pulled a folded white handkerchief from his pocket and shook it open as if to erase the question. “I just meant, are you supporting her? Do you work?”

  It was true we had a hefty inheritance. Still I was half-heartedly looking for a job to justify all those years in school. When I didn’t answer Rick’s questions, he blew his nose—three deep honks—to fill the silence.

  Iris and Angelica came outside. Angelica waved a book. “Daddy! Look what Iris gave me.”

  “What’s that, Sweetie?”

  “It’s a book about spiders. There’s a picture of Mabel!”

  “Brachypelma smithi,” Iris said.

  “Mexican redknee tarantula,” Angelica pronounced proudly, holding the book open to a glossy color plate of the spider. From the two hairy bulbs of its black and gray body, eight bristly legs jackknifed out in horrifying stripes of red, yellow and black.

  Rick gently pried the book from Angelica’s fingers. “We can’t take this.” He caressed the green cloth binding.

  “Please, Daddy.” Angelica peered up at him.

  “Take it,” Iris said. “She’s very eager to learn.”

  Rick gave his daughter the book. “Can you say thank you?”

  By way of thanks, Angelica hugged Iris’s leg and buried her face in the wrinkled crotch of Iris’s khaki shorts. Rick picked up his weed digger and the orange box of pellets. “Would you girls like to join us for supper next Saturday? My mother’s been wanting to have you over.”

  “Say yes,” Angelica begged, grabbing Iris’s hand.

  * * *

  I was surprised Iris agreed to go to Rick’s for dinner. But she had that reclusive person’s curiosity about other people’s lives, especially the interiors of their houses. She believed she could divine all their secrets from the patterns on their china, the fabrics of their bedspreads, and the sell-by dates on the spices in their kitchens. It was Saturday, and we were due at Rick’s in an hour.

  “I thought I might wear this.” Iris held up a turquoise crinkle-cotton peasant skirt I didn’t even know she owned. I wasn’t sure I had ever seen Iris in a skirt. Not since she was Little Bo-Peep in kindergarten. After kindergarten, Iris had jumped to third grade.

  We were in her room. I was lying on her bed in the usual sea of books she slept with. Iris held the skirt against her waist, posing this way and that in the mirror, like a four-year-old playing dress-up. Finally she put on the skirt and a scoop-neck eyelet blouse that barely stayed up on her bony shoulders.

  “I’m going as I am.” I propped my feet on a copy of Aiton’s Antonio de Mendoza. I was still in my jeans and NMSU Aggies t-shirt and had no intention of changing. If I made an effort, if I so much as put on lipstick or washed the dust out of my hair, I feared Rick would take it as encouragement.

  “I think Mr. Bunyan is working up to asking you out.” Iris brushed her hair hard, pulling it back from her face into a ponytail, then letting it drop and brushing again.

  “No he’s not,” I said, though I feared she was right.

  “Would you go?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because this is my year of no men.” I picked up Crónicas del Buenos Aires Colonial and flipped through it, even though I did not read Spanish. Iris was fluen
t in Spanish and French.

  “You haven’t had a year of no men since junior high.”

  “I’m starting now.”

  * * *

  Rick greeted us at his door looking scrubbed and eager, his beard freshly fluffed and his barrel chest bulging in a tie-dyed t-shirt of orange and magenta. We sat on his pumpkin-colored couch while he poured jelly-glass tumblers of blush wine from a jug. Iris admired two porcelain geisha figurines posing on the mantel with their parasols and rosebud lips. “They say geisha wore red undergarments to keep their reproductive organs healthy,” she said. I gulped my wine, thinking of Rick’s dead wife’s reproductive organs, but he seemed unfazed as he refilled my glass. A stout woman in a light blue dress came in from the kitchen waving a wooden spoon and pushing frizzed gray hair off her forehead.

  “This is Mona,” Rick said. “My mother.”

  Mona’s head seemed to balance like a bowling ball directly atop her sloping shelf of bosom. Her face glistened and her glasses were completely fogged. She tried to peer through them at Iris and me, her nose twitching as though she could identify us by scent.

  “Is this the queer one?” She pointed the spoon at Iris. “The one who never leaves the house?”

  “That’s me!” Iris stuck out her hand, but Mona had already turned to me.

  “Then you must be Hannah. I’ve heard all about you.”

  Angelica came in wearing a rhinestone tiara and a red cowgirl dress with white satin fringe down the arms. She carried a small aquarium that could only be the home of Mabel. I swigged more wine, while Iris rushed to greet the tarantula.

  “She likes to show off her spider,” Rick said.

  “Isn’t it dangerous?” I asked.

  “No. They’re quite docile and shy.”

  The aquarium appeared to be empty, except for some sticks and mossy-looking mounds of earth mixed with sawdust.

  “Mabel hides a lot,” Angelica said.

  “Brachypelma smithi are burrowing spiders,” Iris added. The two of them gazed expectantly into the aquarium.