Sacred Alarm Clock

by John T. Biggs

  “She’s hit in the chest,” Joseph says as the pain closes on my lungs so I can barely squeeze in enough air to stay alive.

  “Load her in the truck,” Charley Sweet Medicine says. “Keep pressure on the wound.”

  Joseph tells me I saved his life. Absorbed all the killing power of the gunman’s bullet after it passed through my mother. I’m a hero just for standing there.

  “You’re going to make it,” Joseph says.

  “Right.” Raj is trying hard to think of an East Indian proverb but he can’t.

  They both are lying.

  “I love you,” Joseph says, just like my mother did. And I know that’s not a lie.

  I want to answer back but I don’t have enough air. A smile is the best I can do.

  Bob told me to call him Robert while he closed the deal on the condo. It made him sound more important. It made me sound more educated.

  “Say yes when I give you the cue, Cindy. Otherwise let me do the talking.” He fanned himself with a copy of the lease agreement, but all that did was move hot air around.

  “Global warming.” Bob didn’t believe in things like greenhouse gasses and carbon footprints except as an excuse for the sweat circles under his arms. He looked at the clock over the property manager’s desk, but it had stopped at ten fifteen this morning along with everything else that ran on electricity. He fidgeted in his chair and complained about the lack of air conditioning.

  “Incomprehensible,” is how Bob described the manager’s desire to include me in the meeting. He was the one with a college degree and a guaranteed job as high school history teacher.

  “It’s probably the riots,” I told him. Those had pretty much stopped since the National Guard came to town, but still. . . “I’m sure the manager wants to check out her new tenants personally.”

  “Stephanie,” Bob reminded me. “Her name is Stephanie. She isn’t like the girls back home.”

  He’d introduce me. I’d say hello and he’d take everything from there. But when Stephanie walked through the door, Bob forgot all the plans he’d made. A pleated mini skirt will do that to a man.

  She really wasn’t like the girls back home. She had shoulder length black hair that didn’t hide the dozen piercings in each ear, or the tattooed snakes that stuck their heads out of her nearly-see-through blouse and wrapped their forked tongues around her chin. Stephanie wore black lipstick, and mascara underneath her eyes so dark and thick it made her look like death.

  I had to admit, she made death look sexy. Bob thought so too. I watched him struggle with his vocabulary for a few seconds, then I introduced myself.

  “Hello, I’m Cindy Silver, Bob’s significant other.”

  “Robert!” Bob finally found his voice, but just enough to remind me I’d forgotten to sound educated.

  “Cindy Silver.” Stephanie put a little whistle in the S-sounds. She walked around the room in a big circle with her eyes on me. Like I was the center of the universe and Robert was a piece of cosmic garbage that happened to float by.

  “Bobby, why don’t you make some coffee while I get to know your girl?” She chased him to a coffee pot into the corner of the office—don’t ask me how—and before Bob knew what was happening, he was looking for someplace to fill it with water.

  She said, “I don’t usually like girls who are prettier than me.” She moved in close and traced the contours of my face with a bright red acrylic fingernail.

  She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips just as Bob returned with a carafe full of water.

  “Hey there!” He sloshed a little water as he took a step toward Stephanie, then spilled a little more when he took a step away.

  “Something troubling you, Bobby?”

  He raised the carafe as if he were offering a toast. “No electricity, and. . .” He trailed off, partly because he was about to say something really stupid, and partly because he noticed the little girl sitting on the chair beside the office door he’d just come through.

  The child was a miniature version of Stephanie except for the piercings and tattoos. Same shoulder length black hair, same pleated mini skirt, same dark circles under her eyes.

  “My daughter, Mary. She’s learning to be invisible,” Stephanie said. “It’s good for little girls to be invisible when their mommas play the grocery game.”

  “Grocery game?” I waited for an explanation, but all she gave me was a Mona Lisa smile.

  Stephanie walked to the chair where Mary had been sitting, but wasn’t anymore. She looked at me until I asked, “Where’d she go?” exactly like she wanted.

  “Since you asked so nicely. . .” She leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Bobby is a pig,” and then told us it was time to sign the lease.

  Bob wanted to know what Stephanie said, and why she had to say it so he couldn’t hear. But he couldn’t ask while we signed the papers, or while Stephanie walked us to our condo.

  “Right across from to mine,” she said. “Just think, Cindy and Bobby living next door to Mary and me.”

  I’d almost forgotten about the little girl.

  “Where is she?”

  Stephanie opened the door to our unit and handed me the keys without answering. She gave me a little wave, ignoring Bob as though he was as invisible as Mary.

  I wanted to explore our new place once our next-door neighbor was gone, but Bob wanted to talk.

  “What did she say, Cindy?”

  I didn’t need a college education to know the truth would never do. “She told me you were hot.”

  Bob loved to have his hotness confirmed by girls like Stephanie. “Tell me exactly what she said.”

  “She’ll watch you from her window when you move our furniture in.” Men always believe lies like that. Bob flexed his biceps and stood like he was posing for a muscle building ad.

  • • •

  Stephanie sat on one of my brand new kitchen chairs and showed me her tattoos. Pretty weird, but Mary cuddled on my lap and put her head against my chest and that made everything seem natural.

  “Every tattoo tells a story.” Stephanie pulled the hem of her miniskirt up and scratched at an illustration on her left inner thigh, a rainbow colored arrow pointing north with a message below it in small blue gothic letters—too small and too gothic to read from a respectable distance.

  I leaned in close and read it out loud to make it clear I wasn’t up to anything personal. “Deposit empties here.”

  “I keep things humorous below the waist,” Stephanie said. “Ask every man I know.”

  I was sure Stephanie knew a lot of men, but I was only curious about one of them. “So how about Mary’s father? Does he like the body ink?” I wasn’t just making conversation. Girls like Stephanie usually had guys who were a whole lot worse. Maybe Mary’s dad was in prison, or maybe he was dead, or maybe he’d walk into the room any minute wearing a jacket made of human skin, looking for a matching pair of gloves.

  “Tell Cindy about Daddy, Mary.”

  The little girl sat quietly on my lap and watched Stephanie unbutton her blouse, which was sheer enough to blur the graphic details while letting major features shine through.

  “Tell her baby. Who’s your daddy?”

  “Broken condom.” Mary struggled with the R in broken, the way a three-year-old is supposed to, but she said condom perfectly. Then she gave me a big, wet toddler kiss on the cheek and clapped her hands.

  “Mary’s dad isn’t in the picture.” Stephanie pulled her blouse open, poked her chest forward, and said, “Now look closely at my breasts,” like a naughty stage hypnotist.

  I wanted to say no, but Mary burrowed deeper into my lap and put her arms partway around my waist and hugged me, so I let Stephanie show me the circle of miniature Jack Daniel’s bottles tattooed around her left nipple and the string of tiny cowboy pistols orbiting the right.

  “Really fine work,” I said. That sent Mary into a giggle-fit and made her clap again.

  Stephanie pointed to her left breast. �
�This one’s Yin.” Then the right. “This one’s Yang. I think of them as my twin girls.”

  According to Stephanie, her girls represented liquor stores being looted by angry mobs.

  “Liquor stores are the first to go when civilization comes apart. The one down the street gets robbed twice a week.” She shimmied her twin girls in Yin and Yang order. “Liquor and guns. Take it as a sign.”

  She gave me a few seconds to think about how things had gone to hell in the last few years and how they were getting worse instead of better.

  Since Stephanie was so talkative, I asked about the tattoo snakes on her neck that looked ready to eat her head.

  “You’re not ready for the snakes quite yet.”

  But I was ready for the red, white, and blue dagger running down her spine with its point at her tailbone and its handle between her shoulder blades.

  “People always stab you in the back,” she told me. “Your enemies stab you first, and your friends stab last, but in the end, stabbed is what you are.”

  She backed up to me and sat on my knees like a lesbian lap dancer, crowding Mary between us. “The inscription on the blade’s kind of small. It says Et tu Brute!”

  “Stephanie. . .” Before I could come up with a polite but firm objection, Mary put a hand on each of my cheeks and gave me a smoochy Hollywood kiss.

  She said, “I love you Momma Cindy,” only she couldn’t quite do V’s so it came out, “I lub you Momma Cindy.” That smattering of baby talk nearly made me cry.

  Stephanie looked over her shoulder old-time-stripper-style as she walked back to her chair. She spun, like a ballet dancer, sat down hard enough to shake the room. “Good girl, Mary. You set the hook real good.”

  Mary giggled and clapped her hands some more. She jumped off my lap, ran behind Stephanie, and peeked at me under a not-so-maternal arm covered in a multicolored Asian vine.

  “She likes you Momma Cindy. Ever think of having one of your own?” Calm and natural, as if she was fully clothed.

  I told her, “I don’t think Bob and I are ready to be parents,” trying hard to avoid eye contact with Yin and Yang.

  “Bob doesn’t really figure into it. Does he?” Stephanie said.

  “Well, I’m not ready to be a mother yet.”

  Stephanie sat there in my new kitchen chair naked from the waist up and stared at me without speaking for a full minute. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until it came out all at once.

  “Let’s see what Mary has to say about that, shall we?” She hugged her daughter’s face against the pistol-decorated breast and asked her, “What about it Mary—Momma Cindy and motherhood?”

  “I lub you Momma Cindy” she touched her chubby baby fingers to her lips, blew me a kiss, and smiled. “I lub you sooo much.”

  “Mary does just fine with women,” Stephanie said. “She needs more practice with the men before her turn comes around.”

  Mary waved to me and smiled in spite of everything. Natural and unnatural, crazy and ordinary.

  “Her turn for what?”

  Stephanie licked a fingertip and wiped away a smudge on Mary’s forehead. “Her turn to play the grocery game.”

  • • •

  One hot day is like another in Oklahoma City, especially when soldiers are in the street and gasoline is rationed. When there’s not enough electricity to run a fan, much less an air conditioner. They call it a brownout, but burnout is a better word. As soon as Bob walked through the door he started opening windows.

  I didn’t tell him that was useless because the air outside was hotter than the air inside. He’d come up with a scientific sounding argument and open windows anyway.

  “Damn it’s hot,” he said, way too loud. That’s how Bob talked when he felt guilty. Like when he cheated on me back home with a girl who “didn’t mean anything.”

  So when he walked around living room chairs talking in his I-had-an-affair voice, it didn’t take me long to figure out what had happened.

  “The power went off while I was teaching about the Magna Carta,” he said. “Can you imagine what that’s like? In the dark with thirty snickering teenagers talking about history so old it’s got a Latin name.”

  “Like Et tu Brute?” I said. “Inscribed in ink on the tattooed knife on Stephanie’s back.”

  “What?” The expression on Bob’s face looked like one of the actor mug shots I used to look at on the Internet.

  I stepped in front of him and put my hands on my hips while he ran through his list of explanations. Finally he settled on the truth.

  “Sometimes things just happen, Cindy. You know, like when you move into a nice place where your girlfriend will be comfortable, and there’s somebody next door who won’t leave you alone.”

  “Did Stephanie show you her whisky bottles and pistols?” I knew he’d play close attention to Yin and Yang, because Bob liked breasts a lot, especially those he’d never seen before.

  “But nothing happened.” Slow, clear, like the president of the United States lying into a microphone about how things would be getting better in no time at all.

  “Nothing I expected, anyway.” Bob tried to open the windows wider. He opened the front door and closed it again—gently.

  “Jesus, Cindy. It was really strange.”

  I shrugged.

  “She’s got tattoos everywhere.” Bob circled a spot with his index finger, somewhere between his groin and his navel.

  “Dates and pictures. Names too. Bob is tattooed right above her. . .”

  Bob knew a word or two that would pinpoint the location, but they didn’t seem right for the occasion.

  “I get it, Bob.”

  “But the weirdest thing was Stephanie’s little girl.” Bob’s voice slowed down. His volume lowered too, until his words were hardly more than a whisper. “Mary sat on my lap while Stephanie explained how it took a hundred years for Rome to fall but we’d get there in another month.” He said Mary was so quiet he thought she’d fallen asleep, and then, “She kissed me on the mouth. Not the way a baby kisses, Cindy. Not that way at all.”

  He walked around the room again, shutting windows this time. Waiting to hear what I had to say, but Bob was never good at waiting.

  “That’s when I ran out,” he said. “Really, Cindy, what else could I do?”

  • • •

  Knives are real conversation stoppers. I’d never thought about that until Stephanie met me at her front door carrying one. Then I couldn’t think of anything else, except that maybe now wasn’t a good time to talk about what happened with her, and Bob, and Mary.

  She saw me staring at the knife and said, “Oh this old thing,” like she was showing off a dress she’d picked out for a special occasion. “Her name is Raven Blood.”

  “The knife,” Stephanie told me. “Knives have names, you know, especially knives like this.”

  She handed it to me hilt first, which made me feel a little better. Then she handed me a sheath.

  “Fits around your ankle if you’re wearing pants. Above your knee if you’re in a dress—at least the kind of dresses you wear.” Stephanie did a little spin that made her red pleated mini skirt fan out like the rings of Saturn. “Bought it on Craigslist before the power got so bad. Couldn’t be sure the order took, but FedEx delivered it.” She told me, “Raven Blood has a titanium alloy blade. The handle is gunmetal and bone. Perfect balance for throwing. Feels powerful doesn’t it?”

  She walked me to her kitchen and watched while I fastened the knife around my ankle.

  “Wear it all the time.” She kneeled in front of me and checked to see I’d done it right. “You have to protect yourself, Cindy. Piggy Bob’s a coward.”

  I’d planned to slide into the subject of Stephanie and Bob, like easing into a cold shower, but I felt like taking a more direct approach now that I had a knife strapped to my leg.

  “Kind of looks like the one tattooed on my back.” Stephanie stayed on her knees. She folded her hands together like a Buddhis
t monk, asking my pardon for her little scene with Bob, using body language instead of words.

  “You showed Bob Yin and Yang.” I said it cold and sharp the way I imagined Raven Blood’s edge would feel, but it still made Stephanie laugh.

  “So how much did Bob the Pig tell you?” Stephanie stood and dusted off her knees.

  “He said Mary kissed him. . . You know. Not like a three-year-old.”

  “Girl power is the most important thing,” Stephanie said, “She’ll get it right eventually.”

  It occurred to me I hadn’t seen Mary since Stephanie let me into her apartment. I spent a few minutes searching out places a three-year-old might hide. I made a clicking sound with my tongue that might bring a puppy running but would never work with a little girl.

  “She’s practicing invisibility again,” Stephanie said. “It’s the second most important thing.”

  “You’re teaching a three-year-old girl to seduce a grown man?”

  “Her technique needs polish. Maybe I’ll turn her loose on someone who’s less prissy than Bob.” Stephanie’s smile was hard to read.

  “You’re joking, right?” But how could someone joke about a thing like that?

  “A little girl can’t stay invisible forever,” Stephanie said.

  At exactly that moment, the electricity came on and Mary hopped out of the oven and said, “Hi, Momma Cindy.”

  • • •

  Bob scooted a kitchen chair in front of the living room window so he could watch Stephanie’s condo. All the schools were closed until the government got things working again.

  He couldn’t get there even if the school was open, because a tornado tore up all the houses around the school and the National Guard kept everybody out.

  “Another man on a motorcycle.” Bob watched Stephanie meet the biker at her front door and accept a paper sack full of groceries.

  Mary stood on her tiptoes beside Bob so she could see. “Momma likes potatoes a lot. Corn too, and beer. Things that keep.”

  I stood behind Bob, put a hand on his shoulder, gently so he wouldn’t jump. He had a union contract, so I guess the school made direct deposits in the bank, but the bank was closed and nobody had much confidence in money. The only thing that still worked in Oklahoma was the weather. Black clouds hung over the city for weeks at a time. Now and then tornado sirens sounded but the shelters weren’t open and the televisions were off and the radio batteries were hard to find.