Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 15

by Kelly Link Gavin J. Grant

  then i told him how my mom & i haven't been getting along 2 well, & a couple of weeks ago she finally came right out & said she'd b glad when i graduated so i could get a job & move out. no way she'd help me pay 4 college so i wasn't sure what 2 do. i didn't say much more b/c i don't like talking about her, & anyway boadicea started 2 move more & gray said she was finished.

  the poor thing looked so tired. she turned towards the water & started 2 push herself along w/her flippers. she'd go a few feet, then stop & rest 4 a minute. i got scared when she reached a dip in the sand w/a little water in it. it confused her & she got herself turned back away from the ocean.

  "gray,” i whispered, “she's going the wrong way."

  gray walked over 2 her. “boadicea,” he said, right out loud. “ur going the wrong way.” & then boadicea turned around again, just like she understood him, & moved in the right direction. when she finally felt the edge of a wave under her it was like i could feel her anticipation. she rested a few seconds more, then pushed herself another foot or 2. it was incredible, like this huge joy & relief & then we were gone, well she was at least.

  gray was quiet 4 a minute. then he said, “come on, we need 2 dig up the eggs.” i'm not sure i would've found the right spot again, but gray went right 2 the nest she'd covered w/sand, & gently smoothed it away til he came 2 the 1st egg, well, the last 1 she laid, really.

  he picked it up, & i knew the egg was in safe hands.

  "do u want 2 hold it?” he asked, & put it in my palm.

  it was round & leathery, the size of a ping pong ball. it was a little squishy, but gray said the outside would harden later. it was hard 2 believe our queen boadicea had come from an egg that little.

  there were 103 eggs in all, not including 1 that was broken. while i was made sure we had them all, gray went back 2 the parking lot & pulled a bucket from behind the public bathrooms, & we set the eggs inside. i was worried about leaving the bucket there, but gray said it was ok, the college students would b coming, & then i saw headlights down the beach. gray waved at them 2 make sure they saw us, & then we left. we didn't talk at all on the way home, not that its easy 2 talk on a motorbike anyway.

  when i woke up the next morning, the whole thing seemed like a dream, but i knew it wasn't. the name boadicea kept running thru my head. i thought about her, lonely boadicea swimming by herself & coming back 2 her birthplace every year. would she recognize 1 of her children if she met it? would i c her again next year? if i did, i knew i'd recognize her from that propeller gash.

  i thought about gray 2 but i didn't c him again. he never came back 2 school, & when i asked around, no1 knew anything. i missed him.

  i talked 2 ms henry, my guidance counselor, not long after. she found me some info on financial aid & said if i started at the community college & then switched 2 stony brook i could get a marine sciences degree & it wouldn't cost as much that way. she said she'd help me w/applications & stuff—said she had a daughter a few years younger than me so she could translate my IM in2 college speak, lol. so i've got some work 2 do if i'm going 2 b 1 of those students in the jeep someday.

  but i have an advantage now, i think. i can't explain it, but i'm pretty sure i have gray's touch now.

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  The Truck

  Neal Chandler

  Gary Parker rifled through the top drawer of his night stand. He'd be late to teach his class. He was as good as late. Damn. He threw the drawer shut, crossed the room and began to rifle through his wife's lingerie drawer, down among the jewelry boxes and empty Nivea tins. Camilla had left again without leaving him money. He found a quarter and two dimes underneath a rolled pair of panty hose. It wasn't enough. Damn. Damn. Damn. The drawer bottom was dotted with pennies, but counting out pennies in the faculty dining room was humiliating. He slammed her drawer shut, threw his book bag over his shoulder and ran down the hall to his daughter's room. Emily was fourteen. She was intensely fourteen, and she'd have a fit if she came home to find her baby-sitting money missing again. It would be the second fit in as many weeks. With the file on his nail clipper, he opened the bright yellow cash box on her dresser. He took out three dollars, thought about it, and put one back again. Then he thought again and stuffed the third bill into his pocket. Camilla was the one at fault. Let Camilla deal with Emily. He had to get to class.

  Today he would cover “the climax and seeded self-dissolution of Structuralism” (this was a line from Parker's own forthcoming monograph), but today was also the last lecture before spring break. Ten minutes late and he could count on fifty percent attrition. Any later and the classroom would be empty.

  He replaced the cash box, zipped up his jacket, and headed back down the hall toward the living room. Hitching up his book bag, he was picking up speed and also noticing that the lace on his Topsider was untied and trailing, and thinking as he broke into a jog that he didn't have time to tie it, and was, in fact, just entering the living room when he smacked head on into the truck.

  He met the carpet with a muting, sense-swallowing thud. Slowly, grumpily he heaved himself up to a sitting position, flinching and gritting his teeth and probing the knob on his forehead. “Shit,” he mumbled, beginning to collect himself, and then after a few moments of opening and closing his uncertain eyes, spoke again in a tone of epiphany, “Shit!"

  There, looming in the filtered sunlight was the startling, orthodontic grin of a chrome grill towering brightly above his head. He closed his eyes, lay back down while waves and colors churned through his optic nerve. He calmed himself. When he felt in control, he carefully re-opened one eye.

  "Holy shit!"

  The truck was immense, a steel-and-jet enameled Leviathan overwhelming his tiny living room. Something had happened. He'd been knocked unconscious and awakened insane. He'd been rushed and late for class. But to snap off completely, he couldn't accept this. He was going to ignore it, to get himself up off the carpet and go to school. He looked at his watch and groaned. He'd missed his class altogether.

  Unsteadily, he got onto his knees, pushed upward, straightened and stepped back into the hall. He took hold of the door jamb and looked hard at the machine across a narrow strip of carpet. The truck was a Kenworth. It said so vertically on a round red medallion.

  Gary Parker knew something about trucks. When he was in junior high school, his best friend's father had owned a White cabover with a 430 engine and nine-speed transmission. The friend had taught Gary to spot Whites and Peterbilts, Kenworths and Internationals the way that other kids spotted Chargers and Mustangs and Camaros. That had been long ago, of course, and the bald truth about Parker two decades later was that he couldn't even drive a stick shift. But he had once aspired to, and now, standing in the doorway, the sub-sweet smell of lubricant and diesel fuel filling his nostrils, he saw clearly that the blow to his head had dislodged a fragment from his past, had sent it somehow crashing into the space occupied normally by the living room. Nothing comes from nothing, he thought. Matter over mind. A remarkable and illustrative occurrence.

  Parker let go of the jamb. He stepped back into the living room where the high fenders and soaring sleeper rose cathedral-like over bookcases, his wife's hanging plants, and the coffee table. He was seriously injured. He had to get to work.

  It was almost dark when he arrived home again, and he was in an evil mood. Condescending smiles and the “I was here. Where were you?” notes tacked to his door hadn't improved his day. People had been reliably sympathetic. The secretaries marveled at the swelling on his forehead. The growing purple bruise—soon to be edged in green—certified his innocence, in fact, his martyrdom. Yet he felt like an idiot.

  When the students, returning from vacation, got hold of this story, they would gleefully class him with the sort of professor who can't tie his shoes or pay a bill, who loses his glasses on his forehead, leaves his fly open, walks absently into the women's john. There would be jokes in the cafeteria, the registration line. “Oh yeh, Parker. Very deep. He wal
ks into walls."

  He wheeled his bicycle into the garage and chained it to the rototiller. The car was there. Camilla was home, probably sitting with her legs up in the living room where a few hours earlier, injured on the floor, he had imagined seeing a truck. It was cold and getting dark, but he tinkered in the garage, adjusted his bicycle seat, cleaned a reflector, ordered the lawn tools along the wall, took his time about going in the house.

  "Why can't you get home at a reasonable hour? I made dinner. I don't know why I bother.” Camilla was grousing at him quite ordinarily from the living room. He felt a surge of relief. It had all been a wild hallucination.

  "I don't see any dinner."

  "It's in the oven. All you have to do is cook a vegetable. The broccoli in the refrigerator is a week old. I only buy it because you say you like it. Make a salad if you want. And get Emmi to set the table.” There was beef-something thawed and bubbling in a casserole in the oven. He knew he'd find Camilla spread across the sofa doing reports. He edged towards the door. “Where is Emmi?"

  There sat his wife amid files and clipboards and binders, her feet propped high on the coffee table just inches from the stamped, metal steps and enormous polished fuel tank of the truck.

  "What?"

  "I said ... I...” He looked at the Kenworth and then back at his wife.

  "Gary?"

  He had to look away. “I asked where Emily was."

  "Where else would she be?” Camilla went back to her work. “In the basement watching television. I just don't see why you can't get away from that place. They pay you little enough."

  He called down the stairs to his daughter to come set the table. After taking the broccoli from the refrigerator, he called down again.

  Her answer was preemptive. “You took my money, didn't you?"

  By the time she'd reached the bottom stair, he was in retreat. “Talk to your mother."

  "I already did.” In the kitchen she knelt and began throwing things around in the cupboard, looking for place mats.

  He broke the silence. “Your mom paid you back, didn't she?"

  "I hate it when you break into my bank. It's ... it's like burglary."

  "Yes, it is,” he conceded. “And that's a serious crime in bourgeois societies which value property over people. But among the desperate poor, burglary is sometimes a talent, a survival skill."

  "What is that supposed to mean?"

  "It means that for people with money, burglary means violation of rights and of principle, but for people left without money, burglary means lunch."

  "That's bullshit, Daddy."

  "Of course it is. I had a burrito and a Pepsi. What did you have?"

  "For lunch?” she asked.

  "We were talking about lunch."

  "We were talking about burglary. You know I hate school lunch. It's disgusting. I ate the brownie, but I picked out the nuts."

  "Well now, for some needy people..."

  "Don't tell me. For starving people wasting food is worse than burglary."

  "Exactly. The real crime is starving."

  "You're not starving."

  "Let's say I'm innocent of starving."

  "And that's supposed to make you a good person?"

  "Hey, it's not always easy."

  She wouldn't smile or look at him, but he knew they had gotten through this skirmish.

  It wasn't until they'd all sat down at the kitchen table that his daughter noticed his injury. “Daddy, what happened to your head?"

  Camilla looked up. “Gary, my god!"

  "I'm okay. I hit my head on a door jamb this morning. It looks worse than it is."

  "Are you sure? It looks terrible."

  When it was settled that he was all right and evident that he didn't want to talk about it, they retreated to eating. Parker ate broccoli and salad and picked reluctantly at the red meat. Camilla savored the beef and shuffled the green stuff around her plate until it was spread thinly enough to suggest having been eaten. Emily expanded on both leads, stirring virtually everything on her plate into hungerless entropy.

  "For Pete sake, Em,” Parker raised a reproachful eyebrow, “try something. You can't eat cereal three meals a day."

  "Why not?” Her face was lit with challenge.

  "You need a balanced diet.” He leaned forward on his elbows toward his daughter and saw the high fender and enormous tire appearing directly through the door behind her head. “There are four major food groups,” he said.

  Emily rolled her eyes. Her mother was silent.

  After dinner, he cleared the table and did the dishes, listening to a basketball game. It was April and his team had already been mathematically eliminated. By the time he'd finished, Camilla and Emily were downstairs watching television. Parker dried his hands and went carefully into the living room. The truck awaited him, preened and softened by the lamplight, attendant on his coming. Its deep obsidian finish had the sultry perfection of luxury cars in slick magazines. He moved his fingers across the fender as if along a perfect ebony shoulder.

  He reached up and traced the chrome and red enamel logo. Then he continued around the cab, the sleeper, and on along the trailer. The passage was narrow. He had to squeeze past the stereo and climb up and over the recliner. He'd progressed almost to the end of the mammoth rig when he realized he was still in the living room. It made no sense. Of course it made no sense. And it made no difference which sense he employed. No truck this size could possibly fit into his tiny living room, his house for that matter, nor could it have entered without reducing the three bedroom ranch to rubble. Yet here it was, sprawling far and wide across the carpet.

  Later that night in bed, Parker put it behind him. He had hit his head, had been hallucinating. It could have been worse, but he would now think about other things, pleasant things, would float off to sleep. Yet every attempt he made at distraction, every line of conjecture, even sure-fire sexual fantasies floated off rudderless and disconnected toward the specter in the living room. He was still awake and brooding when Camilla came to bed.

  "Aren't you going to read?” She was genuinely surprised.

  "I have a headache."

  "Poor thing.” His wife crawled in next to him and reached over to kiss him carefully on the side of his forehead opposite the bump. “Are you going to be okay? Do you need to be consoled?” She ran a finger over his chest.

  "I'll be all right,” he said. “I'm just very tired,” and he rolled over onto his side.

  Camilla nested her chin on his arm for a while and traced a finger along his neck.

  "Don't.” He twitched away.

  "Good night, Gary,” she said quietly. “I'm sorry."

  In the morning Parker was certain he hadn't slept at all. But he feigned sleep until his wife and daughter, fighting over the curling iron and over who was making whom late, finally managed their noisy exit. Then he rose and staggered to the bathroom. Fully blossomed, the bruise over his eye looked like an evil mushroom. No wonder he'd been out of his mind. It was now spring break. He wanted to lounge and work on an article he had outlined months before. His lectures were on file, the most recent set of papers graded and returned; he had a full week of freedom to work. But he couldn't concentrate, couldn't point his mind. Oh, the truck would be gone. He was certain. Like any bad dream, this one would have run its course. But why had it been there in the first place? These things had significance. Nothing comes from nothing, especially not an enormous truck. He was mending, but he was shaken.

  He showered and dressed just to feel that he was doing something. And then a burst of resolve launched him from the bedroom out into the hall. The moment he'd cleared the door, however, his shoulders slumped. The eighteen-wheeled behemoth still rose sphinx-like from the carpet. Parker slunk miserably past it through the re-cluttered kitchen and out into the morning.

  The sun on his forehead, at least, seemed welcoming and free of implication, and he gave himself over to it. Wheeling his bicycle from the garage, he turned, out of h
abit, toward the college. He didn't have to go to school, so he dawdled, shifting up only twice through the rachet-rachet-kerchunk of his ten-speed. The snow had shrunk to matted eyebrows under the hedge rows, and the poplars and sugar maples in the distance were haloed in that wan, phosphorescent green that pilot-lights the spring. The wind, despite the sun, was laced with cold. He was glad when he reached the campus.

  The blinking computers had recently been connected to library systems state wide. There were 623 sub-entries under “truck.” From “truck campers” and “truck drivers—anthropometry” he skimmed on through “drivers—health and hygiene, vocational guidance, truck racing and terminals.” There were categories for dump trucks, fork lifts, refuse collection vehicles. The relentlessly analytical parade of screens made him tired. He tried a search of the Psychological Information Index but turned up not a single reference under “truck.” Nothing he stopped to check on, no aspect, no category seemed remotely promising, nor was much of anything “locally available."

  Abandoning the project, he wandered to the periodicals area and gathered up current journals. He needed to think about something else, to regroup. In a sunlit corner he stacked the journals at his elbow. He began to read, but found himself needing to reread the first paragraph. He was out of practice. He went back to the table of contents to find something easier. But wherever he began, he couldn't seem to find a gear low enough. He read for an hour, an hour and a half, but it was no use. Disgusted, he gave up and went sullenly out to unchain his bicycle and peddle away.

  He rode across campus and out the main gate, headed south toward the Interstate. The sun was high and hot now. There were fits of dandelion along the berm, and just across a freshly ploughed field, scores of crows dropped into the stark branches of a black walnut tree to glower and prate.

  When he reached the overpass, Parker dropped from the saddle and stood straddled over his bicycle at the guard rail while traffic disappeared beneath him. The freeway was a pulsing artery through row-tilled calm, a connecting torrent of sedans and compacts, muscle cars and mini-vans, pick-ups and flatbeds and U-Hauls and, of course and especially, the semis he had come out here to see. The big rigs emerged like bar-graphs from the horizon, rising slowly in the flat, linear distance, pressing toward him vaguely at first, then with sudden deliberateness, approaching faster and faster—forty, sixty, eighty thousand pounds of steel and chrome and glass through the acid sunlight—first climbing, then running, then plunging toward his fragile perch. He stopped brooding. Splayed over his bicycle in a faint diesel haze, hushed and box-eyed, he fixed on each big braying rig as it bawled closely beneath his feet to leave him gently quaking with the overpass.