The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

by Ben Marcus

  We children are not children. We are sister and sister, face front and center, buttoned mother-of-pearl. Mother’s oven is Dutch. The rattle of the boil is a sound we sisters prefer to ignore. We are waiting on the weather, my sister says. We are waiting for a fit like a fine kid glove. We are waiting for a higher tide to roll in.

  It is a hook my mother says she nailed herself.

  An unrelated rumor has been hanging in the air.

  My mother keeps a basket by the door with nothing in it. It is there for the season, my mother says. She says, Go and fetch your father. He is salting the beach.

  A job is a job. This could not be simpler.

  But my sister and I are slow and slowest. We are in the wrong year. Our father is never in the place we expect. Father sickness-and-health, he is chewing the breeze. He is checking what is greener on the other side. He is butter through our fingers. Gone.

  The rumor is bearing on the burial mounds. It is the clatter of change. There is talk of heads of arrows switching hands up the Old Goat Road. Somebody is selling precious pennies, it is said, and crooked corn. Somebody is selling beads of sweat, a little Pepsi in a cup. Somebody is marking down the souvenir bones of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe.

  We do not investigate ourselves.

  The stitching in the kitchen says nothing, is only p’s and q’s, is out-of-date.

  It is winter already and the ice is full of fish, my mother says. We have the recipes engraved on a laminated log. We have lanyards and all-purpose holiday plums. We have edible leaves. We have drawstring hoods. This is smart, my mother says. But we are winded and it smells like snow.

  All the stiffs are frozen stiff, my sister says. She is waiting on tables that are empty. She is waiting on a headdress, a puff-puff, a tepee for two. My mother’s hair has turned to silver and we are scraping by.

  I am making a crust. I am fluting the edge.

  My father is sighted up the hill and in the road and on the lake. But it is never him. The party line is busy. There’s a message in a bottle. A ship is on a shore.

  My sister has begun to misremember. In the interest of time, my sister says, she has started seeing double. She is slugging the port. She is carrying a tune south across the border.

  My mother has a suitor with a range.

  There is a legend on the map.

  There is something boiling over.

  There has been a drowning.

  We have prints. We have a photo of the Mona Lisa on a ring for keys. This is not Chicago. We have cherries by the peck.

  There are stars for lying under.

  There are stones.

  My sister is impossible to call. We have gone too far. We are no longer listed. They have changed the exchange. The poor old goat, my mother says, is gouty, and spent.

  But we are somewhere else. We are always somewhere else. We are in this plangent earth. We are going up the road. We are standing on the roof of the world, facing off.

  SCARLIOTTI AND THE SINKHOLE

  PADGETT POWELL

  In the Pic N’ Save Green Room, grits were free. Scarliotti, as he liked to call himself, though his real name was Rod, Scarliotti ate free grits in the Green Room. To Rod, grits were virtually sacramental; to Scarliotti they were a joke, and if he could not eat them for free in a crummy joint so down in the world it had to use free grits as a promotional gimmick, he wouldn’t eat them. Scarliotti had learned that when he was Rod, treating grits as good food, he had been a joke, so he became Scarliotti. He wanted his other new name, his new given name, to come from the province of martial arts. Numchuks Scarliotti was strong but a little obvious. He was looking for something more refined, a name that would not start a fight but would prevent one from starting. He also thought a name from the emergency room might do: Triage Scarliotti, maybe. But he had to be careful there. Not many people knew what terms in the emergency room meant. Suture Scarliotti, maybe. Edema Scarliotti. Lavage Scarliotti. No, he liked the martial-arts idea better. With his new name he would be a new man, one who would never eat grits with a straight face again.

  There were many things he never intended to do with a straight face again. One of them was ride Tomos, a Yugoslavian moped that would go about twenty miles per hour flat out, and get clipped in the head by a mirror on a truck pulling a horse trailer and wake up with a head wound with horseshit in it in the hospital. Another was to be grateful that at least Tomos had not been hurt. Now, his collection of a quarter million dollars in damages imminent, he didn’t give a shit about a motorized bicycle. He wasn’t riding that and he wasn’t seriously eating grits anymore. He was going to take a cab the rest of his life and eat grits only if they were free. He would never again be on the side of the road and never pay for grits, and it might just be Mister Scarliotti. Deal with that.

  The horse Yankees who clipped him were in a world of hurt and he wanted them to be. They were the kind of yahoos who leave Ohio and find a tract of land that was orange groves until 1985 and now is plowed out and called a horse farm and buy it and fence it and call themselves horse breeders. And somehow they breed Arabian horses, and somehow it is Arabs behind it all. Somehow Minute Maid, which is really Coca-Cola, leaves, and Kuwait and Ohio are here. And the Yankees are joking and laughing about grits at first, and then they wise up and try to fit in and start eating them every morning after learning how to cook them, which it takes them about a year to do it. And driving all over the state in diesel doolies with mirrors coming off them about as long as airplane wings, and knocking people who live here in the ditch.

  Scarliotti is in his motorized bed in his trailer in Hague, Florida. It is only ten o’clock but the trailer is already ticking in the heat. Scarliotti swears it—the trailer—moves, kind of bends, on its own, when he is lying still in the bed, and not even moving the bed, which has an up for your head and an up for your feet and both together kind of make a sandwich out of you; hard to see the TV that way, which is on an arm just like at the hospital and controlled by a remote just like at the hospital, a remote on a thick white cord, which he doesn’t understand why it isn’t like a remote everybody else has at their house. When the trailer moves, Scarliotti thinks that a sinkhole might be opening up. Before his accident that would have been fine. But not now. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars would be left topside if he went down a sinkhole today, and even if he lived down there, which he thought was possible, he knew he couldn’t spend that kind of money down there. He thought about maybe asking Higgins, whom he worked for before the accident, if they could put outriggers or something on the trailer to keep it from going down. They could cable it to the big oak, but the big oak might go itself. He didn’t know. He didn’t know if outriggers would work or not. A trailer wasn’t a canoe, and the dirt was not water.

  There were about a hundred pills on a tray next to him he was supposed to take but he hadn’t been, and now they were piled up and he had started throwing them out the back window and he hoped they didn’t grow or something and give him away. You could get busted for anything these days. It was not like the old days.

  Tomos was beside the trailer, and Scarliotti had asked his daddy to get it running, and if his daddy had, he could get to the Lil’ Champ for some beer before the nurse came by. The bandages and the bald side of his head scared the clerk at the Lil’ Champ, and once she undercharged him, she was so scared. He let that go, but he didn’t like having done it because he liked her and she’d have to pay for it. But right now he couldn’t afford to correct an error in his favor. Any day now, he’d be able to afford to correct all the errors in his favor in the world. He was going to walk in the Lil’ Champ and buy the entire glass beer cooler, so he might as well buy the whole store and the girl with it. See how scared she got then.

  He accidentally hit both buttons on the bed thing and squeezed himself into a sandwich and it made him pee in his pants before he could get it down, but he did not care. It didn’t matter now if you peed in your pants in your bed. It did not matter now.

/>   He tried to start Tomos by push-starting it, and by the time he gave up he was several hundred yards from the trailer. It was too far to walk it back and he couldn’t leave it where it was so he pushed Tomos with him to the Lil’ Champ. He had done this before. The girl watched him push the dead moped up and lean it against the front of the store near the paper racks and the doors so he could keep a eye on it.

  Scarliotti did not greet her but veered to the cooler and got a twelve-pack of Old Mil and presented it at the counter and began digging for his money. It had gotten in his left pocket again, which was a bitch because he had to get it out with his right hand because his left couldn’t since the accident. Crossing his body this way and prorating his arm to dig into his pocket threw him into a bent slumped contortion.

  The girl chewed the gum fast to keep from laughing at Scarliotti. She couldn’t help it. Then she got a repulsive idea, but she was bored so she went ahead with it.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  Scarliotti continued to wrestle with himself, looking like a horror-movie hunchback to her. His contorting put the wounded part of his head just above the countertop between them. It was all dirty hair and scar and Formica and his grunting. She came from behind the counter and put one hand on Scarliotti’s little back and pulled his twisted hand out of his pocket and slipped hers in. Scarliotti froze. She held her breath and looked at his poor forlorn moped leaning against the brick outside and hoped she could get the money without touching anything else.

  Scarliotti braced his two arms on the counter and held still and then suddenly stuck his butt out into her and made a noise and she felt, as she hoped she wouldn’t, a hardening the size of one of those small purple bananas they don’t sell in the store but are very good, Mexicans and people eat them. She jerked her hand out with a ten-dollar bill in it.

  Scarliotti put his head down on the counter and began taking deep breaths.

  “Do you want to go on a date?” he asked her, his head still down as if he were weeping.

  “No.” She rang up the beer.

  “Any day now I will be pert a millionaire.”

  “Good.”

  “Good? Good? Shit. A millionaire.”

  She started chewing rapidly again. “Go ahead and be one,” she said.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “You going be Arnold Schwarzenegger, too?”

  This stopped Scarliotti. It was a direction he didn’t understand. He made a guess. “What? You don’t think I’m strong?” Before the girl could answer, he ran over to the copy machine and picked up a corner of it and would have turned it over but it started to roll and got away and hit the magazine rack. Suddenly, inexplicably, he was sad. He did not do sad. Sad was bullshit.

  “Don’t think I came,” he said to the girl.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t come. That’s pee!” He left the store with dignity and pushed Tomos with the beer strapped to the little luggage rack over the rear wheel to the trailer and did not look back at approaching traffic. Hit him again, for all he cared.

  In the trailer there wasn’t shit on the TV, people in costumes he couldn’t tell what they were, screaming, Come on down! or something. He put the beer in the freezer. He sat against the refrigerator feeling the trailer tick and bend. Shit like that wouldn’t happen if his daddy would fix damn Tomos. His daddy was letting him down. He was—he had an idea something like he was letting himself down. This was preposterous. How did one do, or not do, that? Do you extend outriggers from yourself? Can a canoe in high water just grow its own outriggers? No, it can’t.

  A canoe in high water takes it or goes down. End of chapter. He drank a beer and popped a handful of the pills for the nurse and knew that things were not going to change. This was it. It was foolish to believe in anything but a steady continuation of things exactly as they are at this moment. This moment was it. This was it. Shut the fuck up.

  He was dizzy. The trailer ticked in the sun and he felt it bending and he felt himself also ticking in some kind of heat and bending. He was dizzy, agreeably. It did not feel bad. The sinkhole that he envisioned was agreeable, too. He hoped that when the trailer went down it went smoothly, twisting, scraping. The sinkhole was the kind of thing he realized that other people had when they had Jesus. He didn’t need Jesus. He had a hole, and it was a purer thing than a man.

  He was imagining life in the hole—how cool? how dark? how wet? Bats or blind catfish? The most positive speculation he could come up with was it was going to save on air-conditioning, then maybe on clothes. Maybe you could walk around naked, and what about all the things that had gone down sinkholes over the years, houses and shit, at your disposal maybe—he heard a noise and thought it was the nurse and jumped in bed and tried to look asleep, but when the door opened and someone came in he knew it wasn’t the nurse and opened his eyes. It was his father.

  “Daddy,” he said.

  “Son.”

  “You came for Tomos?”

  “I’mone Tomos your butt.”

  “What for?” Rather than have to hear the answer, which was predictable even though he couldn’t guess what it would be, Scarliotti wished he had some of those sharp star things you throw in martial arts to pin his daddy to the trailer wall and get things even before this started happening. His father was looking in the refrigerator and slammed it. He had not found the beer. If you didn’t drink beer you were too stupid to know where people who do drink it keep it after a thirty-minute walk in Florida in July. Scarliotti marveled at this simple luck of his.

  He looked up and saw his daddy standing too close to him, still looking for something.

  “The doctor tells me you ain’t following directions.”

  “What directions?”

  “All directions.”

  Scarliotti wasn’t following any directions but didn’t know how anybody knew.

  “You got to be hungry to eat as many pills as they give me.”

  “You got to be sober to eat them pills, son.”

  “That, too.”

  The headboard above Scarliotti’s head rang with a loudness that made Scarliotti jerk and made his head hurt, and he thought he might have peed some more. His father had backhanded the headboard.

  “If we’d ever get the money,” Scarliotti said, “but that lawyer you picked I don’t think knows shit—”

  “He knows plenty of shit. It ain’t his fault.”

  “It ain’t my fault.”

  “No, not beyond getting hit by a truck.”

  “Oh. That’s my fault.”

  “About.”

  Scarliotti turned on the TV and saw Adam yelling something at Dixie. Maybe it was Adam’s crazy brother. This was the best way to get his father to leave. “Shhh,” he said. “This is my show.” Dixie had a strange accent. “Don’t fix it, then.”

  “Fix what?” his father said.

  “Tomos.”

  “Forget that damned thing.”

  “I can’t,” Scarliotti said to his father, looking straight at him. “I love her.”

  His father stood there a minute and then left. Scarliotti peeked through the curtains and saw that he was again not taking the bike to get it fixed for him.

  He got a beer and put the others in the refrigerator just in time. He wanted sometimes to have a beer joint and really sell the coldest beer in town, not just say it. He heard another noise outside and jumped back in bed with his beer. Someone knocked on the door. That wouldn’t be his father. He put the beer under the covers.

  “Come in.”

  It was the nurse.

  “Come in, Mama,” Scarliotti said when he saw her.

  “Afternoon, Rod.”

  He winced but let it go. They thought in the medical profession you had mental problems if you changed your name. They didn’t know shit about mental problems, but it was no use fighting them so he let them call him Rod.

  The nurse was standing beside the bed looking at the pill tray, going “Tch, tch, tch.” />
  “I took a bunch of ’em,” Scarliotti said.

  The nurse was squinching her nose as if she smelled something.

  “I know you want to get well, Rod,” she said.

  “I am well,” he said.

  “Not by a long shot,” she said.

  “I ain’t going to the moon,” he said.

  The nurse looked curiously at him. “No,” she said, “you’re not.”

  Scarliotti thought he had put her in her place. He liked her but didn’t like her preaching crap at him. He was well enough to spend the $250,000, and that was as well as he needed to be. It was the Yankee Arab horse breeders were sick, not well enough to pay their debts when they go running over people because they’re retired and don’t have shit else to do. The nurse was putting the arm pump-up thing on his arm. She had slid some of the pills around with her weird little pill knife that looked like a sandwich spreader or something. He wanted to show her his Buck knife, but would reveal the beer and the pee if he got it out of his pocket.

  “It’s high, again. If you have another fit, you’re back in the hospital.”

  “I’m not having no nother fit.”

  Scarliotti looked at her chest. The uniform was white and ribbed, and made a starchy little tissuey noise when she moved, and excited him. He looked closely at the ribs in the material when she got near him.

  “Them lines on your shirt look like, crab lungs,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, like crab lungs. You know what I mean?”

  “No, Rod, I don’t.” She rolled her eyes and he saw her. She shouldn’t do that. That was what he meant when he said, and he was right, that the medical profession did not know shit about mental problems.

  The nurse went over everything again, two this four that umpteen times ninety-eleven a day, which meant you’d be up at two and three and five in the morning taking pills if you bought the program, and left. He watched Barney Fife get his bullet taken back by Andy. He wanted to see Barney keep his bullet. Barney should be able to keep that bullet. But if Barney shot at his own foot like that, he could see it. Barney was a dumb fuck. Barney looked like he’d stayed up all night taking pills. There was another noise outside. Scarliotti had had it with people fucking with him. He listened. There was a timid knock at the door. He just lay there. Let them break in, he thought. Then, head wound or not, he would kill them.