by Ben Marcus
The door opened and someone called Hello. Then: “Anyone home?”
Scarliotti waited and was not going to say anything and go ahead and lure them in and kill them, but it was a girl’s voice and familiar somehow, but not the nurse, so he said, “If you can call it that.”
The girl from the Lil’ Champ stepped in.
“I’m down here.”
She looked down the hall and saw him and came down it with a package.
“You paid for a case,” she said.
“I could use a case,” Scarliotti said.
“Pshew,” the girl said. Even so, she was, it seemed, being mighty friendly.
“Well, let’s have us one,” Scarliotti said.
The girl got two beers out of the package.
“You like Andy Griffin?” he said.
“Fith. He’s okay. Barney’s funny. Floyd is creepy.”
“Floyd?”
“Barber? In the chair?”
“Oh.” Scarliotti had no idea what she was talking about. Goober and Gomer, he knew. The show was over anyway. He turned the set off, holding up the white remote rig to show the girl.
“They let you off to deliver that beer?”
“I’m off.”
“Oh.”
“On my way.”
“Oh.”
Scarliotti decided to go for it. “I would dog to dog you.” He blushed, so he looked directly at her to cover for it, with his eyes widened.
“That’s about the nastiest idea I ever heard,” the girl said.
“My daddy come by here a while ago, took a swang at me,” Scarliotti said. “Then the nurse come by and give me a raft of shit. I nearly froze the beer. Been a rough day.”
“You would like to make love to me. Is that what you’re saying?” Since she had touched him in the store and he had said what he said, the girl had undergone a radical change of heart about Scarliotti’s repulsiveness. She did not understand it, exactly.
Scarliotti had never in his life heard anyone say, “You would like to make love to me,” nor had he said it to anyone, and did not think he could, even if it meant losing a piece of ass. He stuck by his guns.
“I would dog to dog you.”
“Okay.”
The girl stood up and took her clothes off. Compared to magazines she was too white and puffy, but she was a girl and she was already getting in the bed. For a minute Scarliotti thought they were fighting and then it was all warm and solid and they weren’t. He said “Goddamn” several times. “Goddamn.” He looked at the headboard and saw what looked like a dent where his father had backhanded it and was wondering if he was wearing a ring done that or just hit it that fucking hard with his hand when the girl bit his neck. “Ow!” he said. “Goddamn.”
“You fucker,” the girl said.
“Okay,” Scarliotti said, trying to be agreeable.
“Good,” she said.
Then it was over and she no longer looked too white and soft. She was sweaty and red. Some of Scarliotti’s hair had fallen out on her from the good side of his head and he hoped nothing had fallen out of the bad side. The trailer had stopped moving from their exertions. There were ten beers sweating onto a hundred pills beside the bed. The nurse and his father would not be back before the trailer could start ticking in the heat and bending on its own, unless they bent it again themselves with exertions in the bed, but all in all Scarliotti thought it would be a good enough time to have some fun without being bothered by anyone before the trailer found its way down the hole.
* * *
Scarliotti woke up and took the sweating beers in his arms and put them in the refrigerator and came back with two cold ones. “They look like a commercial sitting there but they don’t taste like a commercial,” he said, waking and mystifying the girl. “Women,” he said, feeling suddenly very good about things, “know what they want and how to get it. Men are big fucking babies.”
“How do you come to know all that?” the girl asked.
“I know.”
“How many women you had?”
“Counting you?”
“Yeah.”
“Three.”
“That explains how you know so much.”
Scarliotti started laughing. “Heh, heh, heh … heah, heahh, heahhh—” and did not stop until he was coughing and slumped against the wall opposite the bed.
“Quailhead,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You call me quailhead?”
“No. You want to go down to the Green Room and eat free grits?”
“Eat free grits,” she said flatly, with a note of suspicion.
“Yeah.”
“I thought you were going to be a millionaire.”
“I am. Pert near. That’s why I don’t pay for grits.”
“Well, I still pay for grits. I ain’t eating no free grits.”
“See? Heh, heh … it proves what I said. Women know what they want.”
“And men are babies.”
Scarliotti started the laugh again and crawled into bed with the girl.
“Be still. Shhh!”
“What?” the girl asked.
“Listen to the trailer.”
“I don’t hear anything—”
“Listen! Hear that?”
“No.”
“It’s ticking. It’s moving. You ever thought of living in a sinkhole?”
“No.”
“You want to go down into a sinkhole with me?”
“No.”
“You want to go to the Hank show?”
“Okay.”
“I mean, us all, whole thing going. Trailer and all.”
“To the Hank show?”
“No, into the sinkhole.”
Scarliotti started the uncontrollable heaving laugh again at this, and the girl reluctantly stroked the shaved side of his head to calm him. At first she barely touched it, but she began to like the moist bristly feel of Scarliotti’s wounded head.
Scarliotti woke up and looked out the window and saw a dog and a turtle. The dog appeared to be licking the turtle.
“Ballhoggey wollock dube city, man. Your dog,” he said to the girl, “is licking that turtle in its face. That turtle can bite, man. That dog is, unnaturally friendly, man. I don’t want to even go into salmonella. That turtle can kill your dog from here to Sunday. It dudn’ have to bite him, man. I don’t want that turtle to bite your dog, man. On the tongue like that. I think I’d start, like, crying. I’d cry like a son of a bitch if we had to get that turtle off your dog’s tongue. Your dog’s tongue would look like a … shoe tongue. It would be blue and red. Your dog would be hollering and tears coming out of its eyes. That turtle would be squinting and biting down hard, man. I don’t want it. I don’t.
“You better get your dog, man. We’d have to kill that turtle to get it off. If it didn’ cut your dog’s tongue off first, man. Shit. Take a bite out of it like cheese. This round scallop space, like. God. Get your dog, man. I have an appointment somewhere. What time is it? I think this damn Fruit of the Loom underwear is for shit. You see this guy walking around in his underwear with his kid, going to pee, and then popping out this fresh pair of miniature BVDs for the kid just like his, and they walk down the hall real slow in the same stupid tight pants look like panties? Get your dog, man.
“Shit. Fucking turtle. What’s it doing here, man? I mean, your dog’s not even supposed—What time is it? Get the bastard, will you? I can’t move my … legs. I don’t know when it happened. Last twenty minutes after I dogged you. I’d get him myself. That dog is … not trained or what? Did you train him? People shouldn’t let their dogs go anarchy, man. Dogs need government. Dogs are senators in their hearts when they’re trained. They have, like white hair and deep voices. And do right. Your dog is going to get bit, man. Get your dog. Please get your dog. This position I’m in, I don’t know how I got in it. It dudn’ make sense.
“Do you ever think about J.E.B. Stuart? His name wa
sn’t Jeb, it’s inititals of J. E. B. He had a orange feather in a white hat and was, like, good. Won. Fast, smart, all that, took no survivors; well, I don’t know about that. Kind of kind you want on your side, like that. Man. It’s hard to talk, say things right. If you don’t get your dog I’m going to shoot—you. No, myself. Claim your dog out there. The window is dirty as shit. I pay a lot of money for this trailer, you think they’d wash the goddamn window. No, you wouldn’t. You know they wouldn’t wash the goddamn window. I’d shoot the turtle, but the window, they wouldn’t fix it so they wouldn’t wash it, would they? I’d shoot your fucking dog before I’d shoot the turtle. That turtle idn’ doing shit but getting licked in the face and taking it.”
The girl said, “I don’t have a dog.”
“Well, somebody does,” Scarliotti said. “Somebody sure as hell does.”
LETTERS TO WENDY’S
JOE WENDEROTH
October 12, 1996
Like a man who out of anger explodes into a sound he will never know the meaning of, that he will never even hear but will only know in the awkward effects of its being heard—and who then finds himself suddenly in the absence of that sound, having resumed himself as if he could not possibly have contained its violence, its inarticulate force, I come to stand on the other side of my order.
November 3, 1996
Surgeon-light booming. I take a bite. This recent organization of animals, chunks of homelessness dwindling. I take a sip. Gusts of patience—nothing to worry about. I take a bite. Grass finding always a new naive cause. I take a bite. Surgeon-light booming—nothing to worry about. I take a sip. Loud shadow of animals in the causeway, home-gouging. I take a sip, a bite. Guts of patients.
February 8, 1997
Wendy, will you not even poke me? Not even a slow poke? I wonder why you treat me so. Am I a wooden board? Am I to be thought of as a simple wooden board? Come on, just give me a slow poke. I’m not a wooden board, honey. Come on, just poke me like you used to. Just a slow poke. Look into my eyes—are these the eyes of a wooden board?
March 6, 1997
My life is not a story. I’d like to apologize for that. I know what a nuisance it is for you. I’ve tried to make my life into a story—you know I have—but every time I’ve been returned to the heart of the city in chains. I accept this as the fated role I am to play. I wait here, in chains, for you to pass by. For you to look out of the story and into me, into the way I’m bound, unsheltered, guilty of nothing.
March 20, 1997
If you need someone to hold the fort down, you need someone dead. I’m your man. If I’m not dead, no one is. There’s no fort I cannot hold down. It’s impossible to convey just how dead I am and how secure the fort would be in my care. Perhaps seeing it evaporate in the care of someone far less dead than myself would make you understand. But then, there is no understanding without the fort.
April 5, 1997
Often I come to Wendy’s looking like who’d a’ thought it. This is only ever an indication that I am still appropriate, which is to say, still overdetermined by a fascination with the meaty crux. You can call me a scientist if you want to, but if you do, you don’t understand how hungry I am. Sometimes I am so hungry I wear a white belt with white pants.
April 19, 1997
It is rare for a baby to be so bad that it is sentenced to be hanged, and even rarer for the sentence to be carried out, and yet, when a baby is hung, what a pleasant surprise it is for the passersby. Even the passerby whose arms and legs are bound is able to inch up close enough to the tiny, swaying, villainous nugget of softness and know, with his bare cheek, the threshold through which real evil sinks away.
July 14, 1997
I will miss this spectacle. Sorely miss. I sorely miss it now. The children writhing on the floor, half-imagining how near they are to being set at ease. Meat induces sleep, they told me when I was a child, but what does sleep induce? Please accept my apology. It was never my intention to be actual.
FIELD EVENTS
RICK BASS
But the young one, the man, as if he were the son of a neck and a nun: taut and powerfully filled with muscles and innocence.
—RILKE, “The Fifth Elegy”
It was summer, and the two brothers had been down on a gravel bar washing their car with river water and sponges when the big man came around the bend, swimming upstream, doing the butterfly stroke. He was pulling a canoe behind him, and it was loaded with darkened cast-iron statues. The brothers, John and Jerry, had hidden behind a rock and watched as the big man leapt free of the water with each sweep of his arms, arching into the air like a fish and then crashing back down into the rapids, lunging his way up the river, with the canoe following him.
The brothers thought they’d hidden before the big man had spotted them—how could he have known they were there?—but he altered his course slightly as he drew closer, until he was swimming straight for the big rock they were hiding behind. When it became apparent he was heading for them, they stepped out from behind the rock, a bit embarrassed at having hidden. It was the Sacandaga River, which ran past the brothers’ town, Glens Falls, in northeastern New York.
The brothers were strength men themselves, discus throwers and shot-putters, but even so, they were unprepared for the size of the man as he emerged from the water, dripping and completely naked save for the rope around his waist, which the canoe was tied to.
Jerry, the younger—eighteen that summer—said, “Lose your briefs in the rapids?”
The big man smiled, looked down, and quivered like a dog, shaking the water free one leg at a time, one arm at a time. The brothers had seen big men in the gym before, but they’d never seen anyone like this.
With the canoe still tied around his waist, and the rope still tight as the current tried to sweep the iron-laden canoe downstream, the big man crouched and with a stick drew a map in the sand of where he lived in Vermont, about fifteen miles upstream. The rapids surged against the stationary canoe, crashed water over the bow as it bobbed in place, and the brothers saw the big man tensing against the pull of the river, saw him lean forward to keep from being drawn back in. Scratching in the sand with that stick. Two miles over the state line. An old farmhouse.
Then the man stood, said good-bye, and waded back into the shallows, holding the rope taut in his hands to keep from being dragged in. When he was in up to his knees he dived, angled out toward the center, and once more began breaststroking up the river, turning his head every now and again to look back at the brothers with cold, curious eyes, like those of a raven, or a fish.
The brothers tried to follow, running along the rocky, brushy shore, calling for the big man to stop, but he continued slowly upriver, swimming hard against the crashing, funneled tongue of rapids, lifting up and over them and back down among them, lifting like a giant bat or manta ray. He swam up through a narrow canyon and left them behind.
At home in bed that night, each brother looked up at the ceiling in his room and tried to sleep. Each could feel his heart thrashing around in his chest. The brothers knew that the big man was up to something, something massive.
The wild beating in the brothers’ hearts would not stop. They got up and met, as if by plan, in the kitchen for a beer, a sandwich. They ate almost constantly, always trying to build more muscle. Sometimes they acted like twins, thought the same thing at the same time. It was a warm night, past midnight, and when they had finished their snack, they got the tape measure and checked to see if their arms had gotten larger. And because the measurements were unchanged, they each fixed another sandwich, ate them, measured again. No change.
“It’s funny how it works,” said John. “How it takes such a long time.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” said Jerry. He slapped his flat belly and yawned.
Neither of them had mentioned the big man in the rapids. All day they’d held it like a secret, cautious of what might happen if they discussed it. Feeling that they might chase him away, that they might make i
t be as if he had never happened.
They went outside and stood in the middle of the street under a streetlamp and looked around like watchdogs, trying to understand why their hearts were racing.
So young! So young!
They drove an old blue Volkswagen beetle. When the excitement of the night and of their strength and youth was too much, they would pick up the automobile from either end like porters, or pallbearers, and try to carry it around the block, for exercise, without having to stop and set it down and rest. But that night, the brothers’ hearts were running too fast just to walk the car. They lay down beneath the trees in the cool grass in their backyard and listened to the wind that blew from the mountains on the other side of the river. Sometimes the brothers would go wake their sisters, Lory and Lindsay, and bring them outside into the night. The four of them would sit under the largest tree and tell stories or plan things.
Their father was named Heck, and their mother, Louella. Heck was the principal of the local school. Lory was thirty-four, a teacher, and beautiful: she was tiny, black-haired, with a quick, high laugh not unlike the outburst of a loon. Despite her smallness, her breasts were overly large, to the point that they were the first thing people noticed about her, and continued noticing about her. She tried always to keep moving when around new people, tried with her loon’s laugh and her high-energy, almost manic actress’s gestures to shift the focus back to her, not her breasts, but it was hard, and tiring. She had long, sweeping eyelashes, but not much of a chin. The reason Lory still lived at home was that she loved her family and simply could not leave. Lindsay was sixteen, but already half a foot taller than Lory. She was red-headed, freckled, and had wide shoulders, and played field hockey; the brothers called her Lindsay the Red.