“Yes, but it was a very good hamburger joint.”
“It’s nice of you to say so,” he said.
“The music,” she said.
“I suppose we should try to climb out of here,” he said.
“We could just sit here until it goes away,” she said.
“I really don’t think it’s going to go away,” he said.
“You’ll see,” she said.
“Fat chance,” he said.
“Those horrible pants,” she said.
“Look who’s talking,” he said.
Her head burst into flames.
“Watch it!” He scrambled out of the car. A moment later she got out, too. Flames raged up from her head.
That was so just like her, he thought and turned and walked toward the embankment.
“Hey!” she said. “Hey! You can’t set my head on fire and just walk off. Come back here!”
“What do you want from me?” he said without turning to look back at her. He didn’t stop walking. “This is the best we could do.” Why was she blaming him for her head anyway? Her fire and his hot words could be totally coincidental.
“Please.” There was something in her tone, something helpless, something speaking to their long history which had not always been happy, but had been often good, or at least not too bad most of the time.
He signed. He turned. He would have recognized her anywhere. Even without flesh. Maybe it was the way she stood, her shoulders slumped, her metal head ablaze.
“Bang it,” he said, “maybe you can put it out if you bang it.”
“I won’t bang it,” she said.
“Oh, all right,” he said. “Okay. Hold still.” He walked back to her.
He had no lungs and couldn’t blow, and when he waved his hands and slapped at the flames, they just got bigger, so maybe it was good he couldn’t blow. He glanced around the junkyard and spotted a bent and rusted metal bucket. “Hold on,” he said.
He dumped nails and dirt from the bucket and put it over her head.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“I don’t think it’s working.” Her voice was muffled.
She was probably right. There were still a few flames licking out of the black smoke billowing from under the rim of the bucket.
“Grab on,” he said. “Maybe it’ll go out as we walk.”
She groped around blindly and then seized him with the alligator clip of her right hand.
He led her around the perimeter of their secret place. Piled high on all sides were mountains of oil drums and old tires, hills of twisted metal lawn furniture. Smashed television sets. Piles of kitchen gadgets. Steam whistles. Buckets of bolts and pails of nails. Dead cars and broken bicycles.
There were no sounds from the freeway above, no sounds from the exit ramp, no sounds from the bridge. If there were other machines out there, they weren’t making any noise.
“My peacock,” she said.
“Will you get off the subject of my pants?” he asked.
“Who said anything about your pants?”
“Maybe your head would go out if you didn’t talk so much,” he said.
They made another circuit around the junkyard. There was no easy way out, no gentle slope, no simple climb. He took her back to the blanket. Most of the meat was gone, some stains, bits that might be meat and might be metal. “Sit down,” he said and guided her into a chair. “I want to see how hard it would be to climb the slope.”
He walked back to exit ramp-side. The distance here should be the shortest. He took a look back at her sitting with her hands folded in her lap, a little black smoke still drifting from under the bucket over her head. A mechanical woman in a metal garden waiting for her mechanical man to come back so they could open their wicker-wire picnic basket and eat aluminum foil sandwiches. Someone should do a painting.
He looked up the slope. He couldn’t tell where the top was. It might go on forever. He bent at the waist and put the hammer at the end of his arm down on an oil drum. It rolled away from him, and he fell. He got up and tried again, and brought an avalanche of junk down on top of himself. He fought his way to the surface. His body was just not built for scrambling up hills of junk.
He could probably keep bringing down the junk on his head until he made a path through to the dirt, but it would take a long time. And then what? He had a sudden picture of himself crawling to the top at last and looking down at her and realizing that she couldn’t climb out and he couldn’t climb back down.
He wouldn’t let that be the way they ended.
He went back to her. She was humming something under her bucket. There wasn’t much smoke now.
He walked around the edge of the blanket, righting the upside- down windup birds on the TV antennas. He lined up the mechanical squirrel skulls and cobbled together enough old parts to make a couple of raccoons, if you knew they were supposed to be raccoons and didn’t look too closely and weren’t too critical.
He sat down on the other chair.
He leaned forward and pulled the bucket from her head. “Raccoons,” he said.
Her head split open in a smile.
He turned the bucket upside down and held it between his knees and tapped out a rhythm with his hammer.
“Our music,” he said.
“La la. La la,” she sang.
In the Refrigerator
So I come home to find her sitting on the hide-a-bed with this brown paper bag over her head. She hasn’t turned on the lights. There are shadows everywhere. I can just make out the name of the grocery store printed in upside-down letters on the front of the bag. She’s wearing one of the big bags.
“What are you doing?” I say.
“Don’t talk to me,” she says.
I reach across her and turn on the table lamp. I see that she’s wearing basketball shoes untied, and that her hands are folded in her lap.
I look her up and down, becoming strangely aroused, knowing that she knows I’m looking at her but can’t look back.
“I’m looking at you,” I say.
“Leave me alone.”
I sit down beside her, being careful not to touch her but sitting close enough on the sagging couch to make her lean in my direction. She moves away from me in prissy little annoyed scoots. Her bag wobbles, but when she’s gotten as far from me as she can, she straightens it, then puts her hands back in her lap. I sigh and settle back with my arm across the top of the couch, my hand just behind her head. I stretch out my legs. They don’t quite reach the opposite wall. Otherwise, we’d never be able to fold the couch out into a bed at night. I could reach to my side and take something from our tiny refrigerator if there was anything I wanted in our tiny refrigerator. The place smells of her. The place smells of me. It’s uniquely our smell now, merged in the end by these close walls.
I sigh again, knowing she’ll know I’m sighing at her.
I get no response. It’s as if she is in another room instead of sitting right beside me on the couch with a paper bag over her head.
“So have you been sitting here with that bag over your head all afternoon?” I say.
She says, “I heard you coming up the stairs.”
I say, “You heard me coming and you hurried over to the couch and put a grocery bag over your head?”
“Yes,” she says.
I suppose what she’s doing makes some sense. In fact, nothing she does makes absolutely no sense. We live in a single room. We cook here, we sleep here, we do everything here. Well, we do go down the hall to use the bathroom we share with another couple. But there aren’t many chances to be alone.
“Let me see your face,” I say.
“Go away,” she says.
“I think we should hash this out,
” I say.
She doesn’t answer, and her silence infuriates me. I lean in close to snatch the bag from her head, but stop myself just in time.
“Come out of there!” I say.
“I won’t,” she says.
I take a deep breath. I count to ten. I do some deep knee bends. I root around under the sink and find a paper bag of my own. I wait to unfold it until I’m standing right in front of her again. I want her to hear the sound.
It doesn’t make enough noise when I unfold it. So I shake it. I can see it is having an effect on her by the way she squeezes her hands into fists in her lap.
I sit back down beside her.
“Okay,” I say, “you want to be alone, I’ll just go off by myself.” I shake the bag again and then put it over my head. I am startled by all the room inside. “Hey, there’s really a lot of room in here!” I say, and as I speak I can hear my voice is different, and I realize that she can probably hear that my voice sounds different now, too. I picture her sitting there beside me with the bag over her head, wondering just what I’m up to. Has she figured it out yet? Is she sitting there picturing me sitting here with a bag over my own head? Or has she taken her bag off?
I worry that maybe she is looking at me now.
As if to confirm my fears, I hear her get to her feet and open the refrigerator.
Then I hear nothing at all.
I don’t even hear the refrigerator close.
I listen carefully. But I cannot tell what is going on. Is there anyone out there? I’m afraid to look. I’m afraid to know.
The Perect Gift
The children had stuffed their ragged clothes with newspaper against the snow that Christmas eve. Tim still had on his dirty Dodgers cap, and you could see Amy’s mousy hair through the holes in her summer scarf. They huddled together on the curb in the moonlight, waiting for Santa, blowing into their hands, rubbing one another’s shoulders, listening to their chattering teeth, listening to their rumbling bellies.
“Me, I want cake,” Amy said.
“I want a burger,” Tim said. “I want some fries and a Coke and maybe one of those one-man pies.”
“Cake,” Amy said. “Chocolate cake.”
Soon headlights appeared moving slowly down the dark street. The children could hear the tires in the oily slush of melted snow.
“Get ready to run,” Tim said. “In case it’s not him.” He took her hand and they got their feet.
The big white limo with the two red you-better-watch-out eyes on the door pulled up beside them, and Santa climbed out of the back seat.
“Merry Christmas!” His voice boomed and echoed in the carcasses of the burnt-out buildings lining the street. He dragged his big sack out on the sidewalk. “I’ll bet you two have been good this year,” he said. “Is that true?”
“Yes!” the children cried.
Santa gave them a stern look, but they knew he didn’t mean it. “Maybe I should check my book.”
“No!”
“You’re right. No need to look. I remember you two.” The jolly old gentleman dug into his big red sack of Christmas goodies. “Let me see. Let me see.” He finally found what he wanted and straightened up again. “Here you go, young man.” He handed Tim a big card, maybe four or five inches high and eight or so long. “And one for you, Missy.”
Tim looked down at his card. It was smooth and slippery. Glossy. There was a picture of several cooked birds surrounded by greenery on a white plate. There was a border of little blue flowers all around the card. Along the top were the words GREAT RECIPES OF THE WORLD. There were instructions. The ingredients were in bold letters. A snowflake fell onto the card and melted, but the card was so slick, the snowflake couldn’t wet it. What Tim liked best about the card was that it was new; it had no sad history. Tim looked at Amy, then they both looked back up at Santa.
“I can see you’re wondering,” Santa said. “It’s like this.” He put his hand on Tim’s shoulder. “If you give a man food, he can eat for a day, but if you teach him to cook, well, dot dot dot!”
“Dot dot dot?” Tim asked.
“Yes,” Santa said with a bit of an edge to his voice. “Dot dot dot!”
Tim and Amy knew just how to talk to grownups. “Thank you, Santa,” they said together.
Santa treated them to a few ho ho hos, and his bowl full of jelly routine, then climbed back into his car. The limo sloshed on down the street.
When the car disappeared, Tim and Amy settled back down onto the cold curb.
“What’d you get?” Tim asked.
“Casserole of Octopus,” Amy said. “Looks squishy. What about you?”
“Braised Squabs.”
“What’s a squab?”
“I don’t know. Looks like little chickens in the picture.”
“Timmy?”
“Yeah?”
“Wanna trade?”
Tim pretended to think about it for a moment, and it wasn’t all pretend, then he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her in close. “Anything for you, kiddo,” he said.
Message in a Fish
The phone rang three more times before Josh decided it wasn’t part of the elaborate dream he was dreaming of Valerie and got up to answer it. As he stumbled into the living room, he thought the phone would almost certainly stop ringing just as he picked it up, so there was no need to hurry. He had time to run through a short list of people who might be calling him at a time like this: someone else had died, probably Aunt Eppie, or maybe it was a collections guy—Josh hadn’t made payments on anything in months, or a wrong number, or a crank call—some serious heavy breathing or Prince Albert in a can (or maybe it would be Valerie calling from the Starship. See? I’m not so dead after all!). He picked up the phone, and said hello.
“So, you the guy with the fish?”
“What?” Josh stood on one foot so he could pick the other one up off the cold wooden floor. In the dark, the hum and splash of his fish tanks sounded like a creek cascading over smooth rocks. It might be a chilly night in the rain forest along the Rio Negro—were there ever any chilly nights in South America? And what was this about a fish?
Oh yeah, the fish. His classified would have appeared in today’s paper. Good god, why was he still in bed? He pushed the little button on the side of his watch and saw that it was four-thirty in the morning. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Have you mistaken me for the Time Lady?” The caller sounded like a man Josh wouldn’t want to get to know. “Did you advertise the fish or not?”
“I did,” Josh said. “I just didn’t expect people to be calling up in the middle of the night. And who’s the Time Lady?”
“Just how many people do you think will be calling at all for an item like this?”
“Lots!” Josh said. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by Cosmo? He was a beautiful and very rare fish. To see him was to love him. If things had not been so very desperate, Josh would not have placed the classified at all, but now that he had, he was sure people would be lining up around the block just to get a look. Josh would have to sell tickets, maybe hold an auction. It was not like such fish were falling out of the sky.
“In your dreams,” the caller said.
“Are you sure you know what we’re talking about here? If you’re just looking for something to swim around and look pretty, maybe you should try your local pet shop.”
“What I want to know is does it have lips yet?” the caller asked.
Okay, clearly the man knew which way the wind was blowing. Only people familiar with the Top Hat Fish would ask about the lips, and not only the lips themselves, but the timing of their appearance. An amateur would have asked about the hat.
“He’s just getting lips,” Josh said.
There were so many things
to know about Cosmo. Probably the most common blunder was to confuse him with a common arowana (Osteoglossum bicirrhosum). Not that the arowana wasn’t an interesting fish in its own right. Often described as “prehistoric,” arowanas were imported into the pet shop trade from South America. They grew to a length of about 20 inches in captivity and preferred large live foods like goldfish, but they could also be trained to take chunks of raw fish or beef. They were sleek and graceful and were often displayed in big tanks in Chinese restaurants. In the wild they leaped out of the water to snatch bugs and small birds from overhanging branches. In captivity they often leaped out of their tanks and flopped around on the floor and died.
Your garden variety arowana was no Top Hat Fish (Osteoglossum sombreroium) like Cosmo. Cosmo was two feet long and pearly white with rose highlights and blue eyes. And the hat, of course. The reason the Top Hat Fish was called the Top Hat Fish was the black growth on the top of its head. The growth developed slowly (like the lips) but in adult specimens looked just like a black satin evening hat.
“So you’re saying the fish has no lips,” the caller said. “Okay, so how about the hat? Are you sure you’ve got a true Top Hat? It’s an easy mistake to make when you’re new at this.”
“I’m not new at this,” Josh said. “The hat is around two inches high and maybe an inch in diameter. It is jet black and perfectly formed.”
“In that case I’ll give you a hundred dollars for the fish.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Josh said.
“Look, you know and I know no one else is going to call on this.”
“You’re not even in the ball park,” Josh said. “This isn’t bargaining. I don’t even hear you yet.”
“I think my offer is pretty reasonable,” the caller said, “considering the fact that you’ve probably taken an ordinary arowana and superglued Ken’s black plastic ballroom-dancing hat to its head.”
Meet Me in the Moon Room Page 11