The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

by Ben Marcus

  “Mary,” Bruce said. “This man has developed a hole in his stomach. I said we’d help fix him up.”

  Mary looked at Haakon. “Aha,” she said. She lifted his tunic and surveyed the wound. “Water,” she said to Ørl, who was looking on. Gnut eyed him jealously as he left for the well. Then Gnut cleared his throat. “I’d like to pitch in,” he said. Mary directed him to a little sack of onions in the corner, and told him to chop. Bruce got a fire going in the stove. Mary set the water on and shook in some dry porridge. Haakon, who had grown rather waxen, crawled up on the table and lay still. “I don’t feel like no porridge,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Bruce said. “The porridge is just for the onions to ride in on.”

  Gnut kept an eye on Mary as he bent over a small table and overdid it on the onions. He chopped and chopped, and when he’d chopped all they had, he started chopping the chopped-up ones over again. Finally, Mary looked over and told him, “That’s fine, thank you,” and Gnut laid the knife down.

  When the porridge was cooked, Mary threw in a few handfuls of onion and took the concoction over to Haakon. He regarded her warily, but when she held the wooden spoon out toward him, he opened his mouth like a baby bird. He chewed and swallowed. “That doesn’t taste very good,” he said, but he kept eating anyway.

  A minute passed, and then a peculiar thing occurred. Mary lifted Haakon’s tunic again, put her face to the wound, and sniffed at it. She paused a second and then did it again.

  “What in the world is this?” I asked.

  “Gotta do this with a wound like that,” Bruce said. “See if he’s got the porridge illness.”

  “He doesn’t have any porridge illness,” I said. “At least he didn’t before now. What he’s got is a stab hole in his stomach. Now stitch the man up.”

  “Won’t do any good if you smell onions coming out of that hole. Means he’s got the porridge illness and he’s done for.”

  Haakon looked up. “Oh, you’re talking about a pierced bowel.”

  “Yes,” said Bruce. “Pierced bowels, the porridge illness.”

  Mary had another sniff. The wound, evidently, did not smell like onions. It only smelled like a wound. She cleaned him with hot water and was able to stitch the hole to a tight pucker, after telling Gnut about fifty times, thanks very much, she could manage without his help.

  Haakon fingered the stitches, and, satisfied, passed out. The five of us stood around, and no one could think of anything to say.

  “So,” Gnut said in an offhand way. “Were you born like that?”

  “Like what?” Mary said.

  “Without both arms, I mean. Is that how you came out?”

  “Sir, that is a hell of a thing to ask my daughter,” Bruce said. “It was your people that did it to her.”

  Gnut said, “Oh.” And then he said it again: “Oh.” And then really no one could think of anything to say. Finally, Gnut stepped around the table and quietly let himself out. Then we heard him out in the yard, cussing and kicking things. He did that for a minute or two, but he was calm when he came back in, and silent again.

  Then Mary spoke. “It wasn’t you who did it,” she said. “But the man who did, I think I’d like to kill him.”

  Gnut told her that if she would please let him know who it was, he’d consider it a favor if she’d let him intervene on her behalf.

  She thanked him and Gnut nodded and grunted.

  I said, “I would like a drink. Ørl, what have you got in that wineskin?”

  “Hmph,” Ørl said. The skin hung from his shoulder, and he put his hands on it protectively.

  “I asked what have you got to drink.”

  “I’ve got some carrot brandy, for your damned information. But it’s got to last me the way back. I can’t be damp and not have something to take the chill off.”

  Gnut was glad to have something to raise his voice about. “Ørl, you’re a son of a bitch. This man’s daughter got her arm chopped off on our account, Haakon is maybe gonna die, and you can’t even see your way to splash a little booze around. Now, that is the worst, the lowest, thing I’ve ever heard.”

  So Ørl opened up his wineskin, and we all had a dose. It was sweet and potent and we drank and laughed and carried on. Haakon came to, and in the mawkish way of someone who has almost died and sees the world through new eyes, he made a sentimental toast to what a splendid day it was. Bruce and Mary got loosened up and we all talked like old friends. Mary told a funny story about a filthy-minded apothecary who lived down the road. She was having a good time, and did not seem to mind how Gnut was getting all up in her personal space. No one looking in on us would have known we were the reason this girl was missing an arm, and also the reason, probably, that nobody asked where Bruce’s wife had gone.

  It was not long before we heard Djarf causing a commotion at the well. Me and Gnut and Ørl stepped outside. He had stripped to his waist, and his face and arms and pants looked about how you’d figure. He was hauling up buckets of cold water, dumping it over his head, and shrieking with delight. The blood ran off him pink and watery. He saw us and came over.

  “Hoo,” he said, shaking water from his hair. He jogged in place for a minute, shivered and then straightened up. “Mercy, that was a spree. Not much loot to speak of, but, damn, a hell of a goddamn spree.” He did another deep knee bend, massaged his thighs and spat a few times. Then he said, “So, you do much killing?”

  “Nah,” I said. “Haakon killed that little what’s-his-name lying over there, but no, we’ve just been sort of taking it easy.”

  “Hm. What about in there?” he asked, indicating Bruce’s cottage. “Who lives there? You kill them?”

  “No, we didn’t,” Ørl said. “They helped put Haakon back together and everything. They seem like very nice people.”

  “Nobody’s killing them,” Gnut said darkly.

  “So everybody’s back at the monastery, then?” I asked.

  “Well, most of them. Those young men had a disagreement over some damn thing or other and fell to killing one another. Gonna make for a tough row out of here. Pray for wind, I guess.”

  Brown smoke was heavy in the sky, and I could hear dim sounds of people screaming.

  “So here’s the deal,” Djarf said. “We bivouac here tonight, and if the weather holds, we shoot down to Mercia tomorrow and see if we can’t sort things out with this fucker Ethelred.”

  “I don’t know,” Ørl said.

  “Fuck that,” I said. “This shit was a damn goose chase as it is. I got a wife at home and wheatstraw to bale. I’ll be fucked if I’ll row your ass to Mercia.”

  Djarf clenched his jaw. He looked at Gnut. “You too?”

  Gnut nodded.

  Djarf yelled. “Aaaaah! You motherfuckers are mutinizing me? You sons of bitches are mutinizing my fucking operation?”

  “Look, Djarf,” I said. “Nobody’s doing anything to anybody. We just need to head on back.”

  “Motherfuck!” Djarf yelled. He drew his sword and leaped around the yard, striking at the earth and chunking up his gobs of sod. Then he snorted and ran at us with the sword raised high, and Gnut had to slip behind him quickly and put a bear hug on him. I went over and clamped one hand over Djarf’s mouth and pinched his nose shut with the other, and after a while he started to cool out.

  We let him go. He stood there huffing and eyeing us, and we kept our knives and things out, and finally he put the sword back and composed himself.

  “Okay, sure, I read you,” he said. “Fair enough. Okay, we go back. Oh, I should have told you, Olaffsen found a stash of beef shells somewhere. He’s gonna cook those up for everybody who’s left. Ought to be tasty.” He turned and humped it back toward the bay.

  Gnut didn’t come down to the feast. He said he needed to stay at Bruce and Mary’s to look after Haakon. Bullshit, of course, seeing as Haakon made it down the hill by himself and crammed his tender stomach with about nine tough steaks. When the dusk started turning black and
still no Gnut, I legged it back up to Bruce’s to see about him. Gnut was sitting on a hollow log outside the cottage, flicking gravel into the weeds.

  “She’s coming back with me,” he said.

  “Mary?”

  He nodded gravely. “I’m taking her home with me to be my wife. She’s in there talking it over with Bruce.”

  “This a voluntary thing, or an abduction-type deal?”

  Gnut looked off toward the bay as though he hadn’t heard the question. “She’s coming with me.”

  I mulled it over. “You sure this is such a hot idea, bringing her back to live among our people, you know, all things considering?”

  Gnut’s voice grew quiet. “Any man that touches her, or says anything unkind, it will really be something different, the sort of shit I’ll do to him.”

  We sat a minute and watched the sparks rising from the bonfire on the beach. The warm evening wind carried smells of blossoms and wood smoke, and I was overcome with a feeling of deep satisfaction. It had been such a pleasant day.

  We walked into Bruce’s where only a single candle was going. Mary stood by the window with her one arm across her chest. Bruce, we could see, was having a fit of anxiety, and when we came in he moved to block the door. “Get back out of my house,” he said. “You just can’t take her, with what little I’ve got.”

  Gnut did not look happy, but he shouldered past and knocked Bruce on his ass. I went and put a hand on the old farmer. His whole body had gone tight with grief and fury.

  Mary did not hold her hand out to Gnut, but she did not cry when Gnut put his arm around her and moved her toward the door. The look she gave her father was a wretched thing to see, but still she went easy, because with just one arm like that, what could she do? What other man would have her?

  Their backs were to us when Bruce grabbed up an awl from the table and made for Gnut. I stepped in front of him and broke a chair on his face, but still he kept coming, scrabbling at my sword, trying to snatch up something he could use to keep his daughter from going away. I had to hold him steady and run my knife into his cheek. I held it there like a horse’s bit, and then he didn’t want to move. When I got up off him he was crying quietly. As I was leaving, he threw something at me and knocked the candle out.

  And you might think it was a good thing, that Gnut had found a woman who would let him love her, and if she didn’t exactly love him back, at least she would, in time, get to feeling something for him that wasn’t so far from it. But what would you say about that ride back when the winds went slack and it was five long weeks before we finally fetched up home? Gnut didn’t hardly say a word to anybody, just held Mary close to him, trying to keep her soothed and safe from all of us, his friends. He wouldn’t look me in the face, stricken as he was with the awful fear that comes with getting hold of something you can’t afford to lose.

  Things got different then and they stayed like that. Not long after we got home, Djarf had a worm crawl up a hole in his foot and had to give up raiding. Gnut and Mary turned to home-steading full-time, and it got to where we just stopped talking because those times we did get together he would laugh and chat a little bit, but you could see he had his mind on other things.

  Where had the good times gone? I didn’t know, but when Pila and me had our little twins and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know what awful things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It’s crazy-making, but you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home.

  DO NOT DISTURB

  A. M. HOMES

  My wife, the doctor, is not well. In the end she could be dead. It started suddenly, on a country weekend, a movie with friends, a pizza, and then pain. “I liked the part where he lunged at the woman with a knife,” Eric says.

  “She deserved it,” Enid says.

  “Excuse me,” my wife says, getting up from the table.

  A few minutes later I find her doubled over on the sidewalk. “Something is ripping me from the inside out.”

  “Should I get the check?” She looks at me like I am an idiot.

  “My wife is not well,” I announce, returning to the table. “We have to go.”

  “What do you mean—is she all right?”

  Eric and Enid hurry out while I wait for the check. They drive us home. As I open the front door, my wife pushes past me and goes running for the bathroom. Eric, Enid, and I stand in the living room, waiting.

  “Are you all right in there?” I call out.

  “No,” she says.

  “Maybe she should go to the hospital,” Enid says.

  “Doctors don’t go to the hospital,” I say.

  She lies on the bathroom floor, her cheek against the white tile. “I keep thinking it will pass.”

  “Call us if you need us,” Eric and Enid say, leaving.

  I tuck the bath mat under her head and sneak away. From the kitchen I call a doctor friend. I stand in the dark, whispering, “She’s just lying there on the floor, what do I do?”

  “Don’t do anything,” the doctor says, half-insulted by the thought that there is something to do. “Observe her. Either it will go away, or something more will happen. You watch and you wait.”

  Watch and wait. I am thinking about our relationship. We haven’t been getting along. The situation has become oxygenless and addictive, a suffocating annihilation, each staying to see how far it will go.

  I sit on the edge of the tub, looking at her. “I’m worried.”

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “And don’t just sit there staring.”

  Earlier in the afternoon we were fighting, I don’t remember about what. I only know—I called her a bitch.

  “I was a bitch before I met you and I’ll be a bitch long after you’re gone. Surprise me,” she said. “Tell me something new.”

  I wanted to say, I’m leaving. I wanted to say, I know you think I never will and that’s why you treat me like you do. But I’m going. I wanted to get in the car, drive off, and call it a day.

  The fight ended with the clock. She glanced at it. “It’s six-thirty, we’re meeting Eric and Enid at seven; put on a clean shirt.”

  She is lying on the bathroom floor, the print of the bath mat making an impression on her cheek. “Are you comfortable?” I ask.

  She looks surprised, as though she’s just realized she’s on the floor.

  “Help me,” she says, struggling to get up.

  Her lips are white and thin.

  “Bring me a trash can, a plastic bag, a thermometer, some Tylenol, and a glass of water.”

  “Are you going to throw up?”

  “I want to be prepared,” she says.

  We are always prepared. We have flare guns and fire extinguishers, walkie-talkies, a rubber raft, a hundred batteries in assorted shapes and sizes, a thousand bucks in dollar bills, enough toilet paper and bottled water to get us through six months. When we travel we have smoke hoods in our carry-on bags, protein bars, water purification tablets, and a king-sized bag of M&Ms. We are ready and waiting.

  She slips the digital thermometer under her tongue; the numbers move up the scale—each beep is a tenth of a degree.

  “A hundred and one point four,” I announce.

  “I have a fever?” she says in disbelief.

  “I wish things between us weren’t so bad.”

  “It’s not as bad as you think,” she says. “Expect less and you won’t be disappointed.”

  We try to sleep; she is hot, she is cold, she is mumbling something about having “a surgical belly,” something about “guarding and rebound.” I don’t know if she’s talking about herself or the NBA.

  “This is incredible.” She sits bolt upright and folds over again, writhing. “S
omething is struggling inside me. It’s like one of those alien movies, like I’m going to burst open and something’s going to spew out, like I’m erupting.” She pauses, takes a breath. “And then it stops. Who would ever have thought this would happen to me—and on a Saturday night?”

  “Is it your appendix?”

  “That’s the one thought I have, but I’m not sure. I don’t have the classic symptoms. I don’t have anorexia or diarrhea. When I was eating that pizza, I was hungry.”

  “Is it an ovary? Women have lots of ovaries.”

  “Women have two ovaries,” she says. “It did occur to me that it could be Mittelschmertz.”

  “Mittelschmertz?”

  “The launching of the egg, the middle of the cycle.”

  At five in the morning her temperature is 103. She is alternately sweating and shivering.

  “Should I drive you back to the city or to the hospital out here?”

  “I don’t want to be the doctor who goes to the ER with gas.”

  “Fine.”

  I am dressing myself, packing, thinking of what I will need in the waiting room: cell phone, notebook, pen, something to read, something to eat, my wallet, her insurance card.

  We are in the car, hurrying. There is an urgency to the situation, the unmistakable sense that something bad is happening. I am driving seventy miles an hour.

  She is not a doctor now. She is lost, inside herself.

  “I think I’m dying,” she says.

  I pull up to the emergency entrance and half-carry her in, leaving the car doors open, the engine running; I have the impulse to drop her off and walk away.

  The emergency room is empty. There is a bell on the check-in desk. I ring it twice.