Esther Stories

by Peter Orner

  He was a short, bulbous man, much smaller than Growling Poe, with a missing front tooth. When he spoke, his voice whistled out in a soft hiss. He had the accent of a far-off place which we couldn’t, even with an atlas, identify. Somebody said he might be from Missouri, but somebody with an Aunt Leona in St. Louis insisted that if he was from anywhere, he was from south of Cape Girardeau. We never asked him directly. None of us ever spoke to either Poe, and Smiling Poe was even more unapproachable than Growling Poe, who, though he spoke harshly to our grocers, florists, and stationers, at least made pretense of conversation. For instance, Growling Poe would say things like: “You call this an avocado?” or “Is there a particular day of the week you don’t cheat people? The Lord’s Day, perhaps?” Smiling Poe, on the other hand, always spoke politely, but always at, never to. He was the one who scared us, and although his show was slow in spots, especially during his ten-minute attack on that vapid Professor Longfellow, the horror of emptiness, the sadness of the tomb, lurked in every word he softly uttered. During “The Cask of Amontillado” you could hear drunken Fortunato’s groans for mercy as if they were pleading from your own chest. It wasn’t pleasant, Smiling Poe’s show, but it was necessary. Yet, twice was enough dread, even for me. Who wants to be reminded more than that that we’re all Fortunato? That we’ll all, every one of us, beg the joke over as the mason walls us in?

  The fact of his being still down there began to grate—and it went beyond my nerves. Other people had the same notions, but nobody dared talk about it. You didn’t need to see his show more than once to feel his presence all over town. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, that same death drifting up out of the basement. Monday, Wednesday, Friday were an imitation—this we could tolerate. We started ignoring Smiling Poe harder. When we saw him haunting the sidewalks, we ducked into insurance agents’ offices or the dry cleaners to avoid seeing his face and that missing tooth. Growling Poe got blithery about parking tickets and bad vegetables and bird shit on the hood of his rented Toyota and, though not a stellar actor, was at least human. Smiling Poe walked above us with that grin that jutted from his lips like a knife blade, and after thirty weeks of it we began to sympathize with Rita Larry-Pontewitz’s campaign to ban the real Poe from the library and his impersonators from our city limits. Growling Poe if only because his clothes and big forehead reminded us too much of Smiling Poe.

  And still they gave shows—ticket prices had long since been slashed in half—always to unsuspecting tourists hungering for a bargain (who cared what it was?) who’d been lured to town by Rita and Hal, who had put us on the map. We were starting to become known as the town that couldn’t get rid of its Poes. Until. Isn’t there always an “until” in stories of death? And what story is not, finally, a death?

  It happened on a Tuesday night during Smiling Poe’s show. It was almost spring, and after a long winter, tourist attendance for the shows had actually been picking up. That night Hal Hodapp, who was handing out flyers in the Historical Society foyer advertising our glassblowing exhibition, had counted five people descending into the catacombs when he noticed that one of them was Growling Poe in disguise. Hal said it wasn’t a very good disguise, but different enough for him that he looked like a new man. He was dressed as an average guy about our town, his hair combed forward, wearing a faded Izod shirt, circa 1972. Hal was curious, because to his knowledge neither Poe had ever seen the other’s show, so he followed the short line downstairs. He told us later at the Blue Parrot that it was a virtuoso performance, the best he’d ever seen in person or listened to from the laundry chute. That Smiling Poe looked like he’d lost weight, that his face had begun to shrivel, raisin-like, and his one front tooth gleamed a hideous yellow in the shallow light. Two cats rubbed against his legs, and what was so terrible, Hal said, was that Smiling Poe acted kindly toward the cats, that often in the middle of the show he reached down with his skull-colored hands and rubbed them. Those cats. Hal said all he wanted was to leave and go upstairs and curl up with his electric blanket turned all the way to twelve, because Smiling Poe emanated cold, even as his hand stroked the cats. But he had stayed because he wanted to watch Growling Poe’s reactions. And at our table at the Blue Parrot, Hal said Growling Poe’s face during the show reminded him of the men he’d imagined about to be beheaded in that very room. Because his eyes never moved, never twitched.

  No one will ever know if he planned it in advance or if it came to him in a sudden jolt of jealous inspiration, but during Smiling Poe’s almost entirely whispered “Raven,” Growling Poe threw his voice at the very moment of the bird’s first “Nevermore.” Growling Poe was as mediocre a ventriloquist as he was an actor, Hal said, but it was good enough, and Smiling Poe looked up at the corner to the left of the papier-mâché bust of Pallas, and he didn’t stop, didn’t say, “Nevermore,” just went on with the poem. Each time it was the bird’s turn to talk, he let the corner do it. Hal said that by the third or fourth time, all four tourists from Bangor knew it was the guy in the third row, in the pale golf shirt, but by that time Smiling Poe believed in the voice.

  Hal’s eyes got red, and he thrust down the last of his 7-Up. “I tell you, the man thought he’d reached beyond the grave, that after thousands of ‘Ravens’ he’d finally broken through to someone. To the devil, to God, to Poe himself, or—” Hal paused and we all leaned forward. I noticed Hal’s gums had turned the color of ash. “Or, to his own Lenore.”

  When he reached the poem’s final moment, Smiling Poe said so softly you had to strain to hear him, like a man swimming to the surface of a dream:

  And my soul from out that shadow that lies

  floating on the floor

  Shall be lifted—

  And he waited, as though he actually expected the dread word to come later than before. And he stood there smiling that awful smile, his legs akimbo.

  Shall be lifted—

  And still there was nothing from the corner.

  “I didn’t look at Growling Poe at that point,” Hal said. “How could I? Man so cruel to lead another man into belief and then rip the rug out like it’s nothing.”

  Smiling Poe didn’t continue. Hal told us that after his unfinished “Raven,” he just walked out, although there was a good fifteen minutes left in his show and Montresor still had to murder Fortunato. They listened to his slow clod up the stairs. Nobody moved. Everybody, even the cats, watched the corner. Hal said he even prayed. Then Hal backed up his chair, dropped three quarters on the table, and left us. We listened to one of the quarters bounce and spin before landing flat, and we felt ashamed, though we couldn’t have said why. And even now, even years after, when shame still coats us like the fine dust we often wear, thanks to the cement factory north of town, we still can’t say why.

  They found him Wednesday morning drooping from a light fixture in his hotel room. There was an unfinished sandwich on the table and two black suits in the closet. The coroner said, medically speaking, Smiling Poe had been dead for at least eight hours, but the cleaning woman who found him swore—she still swears—that when she opened the door he was still writhing, that he didn’t stop moving until she touched him, poor man, never seen anybody look so lonely—not dead, lonely.

  Shoe Story

  THE PHONE deadly silent, I recall a certain pair of shoes.

  We were at Ike’s, at our table by the window, having burgers and sloppy cheese fries, and I was whining about Devon and how she’d dumped me for the twenty-seventh time. On my ass this time, I said. And this time, this time, I swear I won’t call her back when she calls. This time I’m going to have R-E-S-O-L-V-E. This time when I say I’m going to do something, by fucking God, I’m going to do it. Cal yawned a long yawn. He’d heard it all before and didn’t want to waste his breath on eloquence he’d already orated, as he put it. We were circling again. Ike’s, burgers, cheese fries, Devon dumping me number 22, 23, 24, 25, 26…But during take number 27 something happened, something that pushed us out of our routine. A woman’s voice. Crass
and loud and roaring and beautiful and low. A woman’s voice, upstairs, in the apartment above Ike’s.

  Liar! Nobody lies like you! Nobody! You lie and you lie and you lie, and when you say you’re not lying anymore, you lie about whether you’re lying.

  Bullshit, a man retorted. Meek, but not dead yet. Bullshit. What about Martin Jumbileau?

  Martin Jumbileau? she raged. Martin Jumbileau! You mean you’re going to bring him into this? Like I’m some kind of lowlife you pulled off the street and saved. Tanya’s right. You are foul.

  Then she winged her shoes at him.

  I know this because Cal and I were sitting there listening, wiping our hands on our pants—Ike’s got no napkins—when two white shoes dropped into the street like tiny planes crash-landing. Women’s patent-leather pumps with straps. They lay sprawled on the pavement, toe to toe, linked in the agony of the fall.

  Cal and I stared out the window at those snazzy shoes as we listened to the silence of victory unfold in the apartment upstairs. And the world was merciful. It did stop its spin, and those shoes were angels dispatched to rescue ourselves from our own grease-soaked and burbling-over hearts.

  Thursday Night at the Gopher Hole,

  April 1992

  ON A THURSDAY NIGHT, in the tiny men’s room at the Gopher Hole in Gilbertsville, Iowa, in the infamous pisser with the hidden step down—ask Candice what happened to Frank Knipp’s forehead when it met the urinal after he tripped in the dark—the other Frank, the quiet one, Frank Waverly, saw something alarming in the mirror. Odd furrows, just above and below his eyes, ruts that looked like they were somehow getting deeper by the moment. And his cheeks were now twin percolating spasms. Frank Waverly stared at himself. He’d had two, three beers; he wasn’t drunk. Frank Waverly rarely got drunk. He was known as a light drinker who thought a lot about things, a methodical man who trolled around for answers before making judgments. For this reason, he was a man who could always be called upon to fix odd things—not because he was so clever with his hands, but because he studied what was wrong with something before he touched any of the parts.

  Examining his face more closely, Frank went through some of the possible explanations for this strange turmoil. He knew immediately that whatever it was had nothing to do with fear of marriage, of having to be with Nancy forever even if things didn’t pan out, or fear that sex wouldn’t be any good after. All that crap that Raymond and Pauly Sicosh kept razzing him about. He wasn’t afraid of weddings—it was the only thing he’d ever really wanted. When they were boys, his brother Lance drew pictures of himself as a dentist torturing babies; Frank’s drawings were of tuxedos and veils and four-story cakes the size of the Kickapoo township landfill. So it wasn’t Nancy. Nor was it her last name, which was enough to shrivel the balls of most men in town. You had to tread carefully when dealing with a Degardelle, particularly a female Degardelle. If something went wrong, you’d end up with a posse of mothers and aunts and eighteenth cousins chasing you to Sioux City with shovels and rakes and firearms. Nobody (and this had been true, people said, since the Civil War) embarrassed that family and got away with it. Chick Larson’s stunt with Nancy’s cousin Theresa was an obvious case in point. His famous two-days-before-the-wedding waffle; now he lives under Buicks at the Jiffy Lube in Cedar Falls. But Frank had gone to school with Degardelles (Randall, Stevo, Little Joey). He’d delivered pizzas with Degardelles (Little Joey, Nancy’s older sister Steph). He’d been surrounded his whole life by that locally royal family. He wasn’t intimidated by them and besides—and on this he truly walked alone—he actually liked Nancy’s mother. Not accepted, feared, or stood in awe of, but liked. She had been his third-grade teacher (now she was Superintendent of Schools), and even though she’d stomped on his foot whenever he stuttered his T’s, she’d taught him to read.

  The bizarre doings in his face didn’t stop. His gurgling cheeks were beginning to expand. He thought of Nancy after she got her wisdom teeth pulled and came home morphed into Louis Armstrong. And it wasn’t that Nancy talked too much, even though she did. That was what he loved about her, that she never stopped the chatter, that she went on about who knew what half the time. Babbling onward about Nick Desmond’s wife, Suzie, and how nuts she was with her backward jogging. Then she’d switch and talk about summers up at the Degardelle family cottage in Rhinelander. Then, a related story, maybe, about her Uncle Vasco and his seasonally wandering hands. Then she’d inexplicably about-face into another merciless attack on Barbra Streisand. “I mean what the hell do I care how many neuroses she has?” What mattered to Frank was not the content but the dependability of her patter. Nancy filled the often unendurable silences of his life. He didn’t exist in silence literally. S and F Packaging was as loud a place as any. It was just that there were times in the day—even when he was working side by side with people—when he’d feel the silence build to a low whine, as if a mosquito were trapped and slowly dying in his ear. An odd, sometimes nagging, sometimes blissful silence that cut him off from everybody, even his closest friends, guys he’d grown up with and now worked beside. Guys whose kids called him the Other Uncle Frank on the Fourth of July. For the most part he hid the problem well. Nobody except Nancy even knew about it. Whenever it was obvious to others that Frank was trying to read their lips rather than listen to them, most just thought, That’s Frank Waverly, thinking so hard about other things that he can’t keep up.

  For a long time he’d been certain that his brother was the cause of what he considered his private condition. He might be filling an invoice code or on hold with a wholesaler when he’d be struck by the simple thudding fact of his brother. That his brother hiccuped, that his brother farted, that he could do both, proudly, at the same time. That it was Lance who once changed the channel for an entire hour. That Lance was the one who squirted his mother’s hair jizz in both his ears and asked him if he could hear the Pacific Ocean now. That he was the one who cross-country skied on the roof of Hoover Elementary and whooped at the fat cop to come up and get him if it was so illegal. That it was Lance who threw the alarm clock and then the basketball to wake him up on the morning of a day he has no other reason to remember now. Sometimes he thinks he’s co-opted his brother’s dumbest memories and made them his own, because remembering what Lance did is easier than remembering the physical Lance, the one with the disgusting fungus toes, the one who slept with his eyes half open, like a bad imitation of a dead guy.

  Frank gripped the sides of the sink and glared at himself in the murky light. Someone jiggled the door handle. Frank’s shoulders knotted, the way they did if anyone tapped him from behind when he was in the silence. Except now he was watching it happen in the mirror, and it wasn’t temporary. His shoulders stayed hunched. The ruts around his eyes were deepening into ditches and his cheeks were still blimping. A dark-purple fluid was beginning to drip from his nose into the sink. The handle rattled again. Frank managed a shallow “Still in here.” Whoever it was—it sounded like Tony Lemoyne—said, “Laying an egg in there or what?” Frank didn’t answer. He just kept staring. Not only at everything that was going wrong in his face, but also at the things that remained the same. His skimpy eyebrows, his slightly bucked teeth, his disproportionately fat upper lip. At the mustache he’d hated for six months but didn’t shave off and couldn’t say why not. He pressed the tab of the soap dispenser and caught the pink splat. He foamed up his face and rinsed, but still couldn’t get rid of any of it, what was new or what was him. He checked his pulse, which seemed okay, though the Red Cross class had been years ago and he couldn’t remember how long to keep his fingers on his wrist. But there was a beat there. One, one, one, one, one. Then he said, out loud, “God?” It was unlike Frank in that he didn’t think about it before he blurted. It came from his mouth not his brain. Here in this bathroom that Candice cleans twice a year, once because she always hides Easter eggs behind the toilet and again before the health inspector comes. That asshole Lemoyne kicked the door. “There’s a man out here that�
��s gonna start squealing like a pig.” Frank laughed, but not at Lemoyne. No one laughed at Lemoyne, even when he was funny. Nancy once asked him if he was an atheist. Her Grandmother Degardelle was worried. He’d lied, said he was a believer. Now here he is, a secret blasphemer, in this stink of a bathroom with Tony Lemoyne holding his legs together outside the door, trying to read his face for a message from on high. Shit, if John Denver can talk to Him in the rearview mirror of a Pinto, why not me? He hoped it didn’t have anything to do with politics, because he hadn’t read the Register in days. Maybe this has something to do with Sadaam again. Another call to arms. Rallying the troops to kill some more Arabs in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. If that was the case, though, why wouldn’t He go through Raymond, because he’d been in Desert Storm the first time around and he was right there at the bar? (Or Nancy, because she videotapes C-Span.) Frank’s eyes turned from their usual hazy brown to black, and his upper lip curled over his mustache and began to dam up the purple fluid, so that he started to breathe it back up his nose. He finally got scared and considered leaving his face and calling Nancy—Candice would let him use the phone behind the bar. He would tell her what was happening, and Nancy would say, Wow, Frank, reminds me of that Bible thumper convention my sister Julia dragged me to: eighty thousand people in a football stadium taking turns narrating their personal experiences with God. God on the call-waiting, God on the intercom at the Department of Motor Vehicles, God in the plastic-only recyclables. What’d you say was wrong with your nose, Frank? Disgusting purple what’s coming out of your nostrils?