The Awful Possibilities

by Christian TeBordo

  “There isn’t much left,” he says. “You can help.”

  He hops back into the hole and beckons the man. The man steps closer to the edge and looks down. He squats, sits, and slides into the grave. The gravedigger hands him a pickaxe and tells him to watch where he swings it. The gravedigger sets to work. The man too, eventually and reluctantly.

  Between swings and scrapes, he can hear the little girl running around above them, digging through her bag, removing things from her bag, placing the things she’s removed at some distance from her bag.

  He swings, the gravedigger’s shovel scrapes, and the thumps of the little girl’s feet carry the message that her feet are moving, down through the earth to him. Swing scrape thump. It goes on like this until he swings, the gravedigger’s shovel scrapes, and the little girl wails:

  “Will!”

  The man stops mid-swing. The gravedigger hops from the pit in one quick motion, shovel in hand. The man drops his pickaxe and tries to climb out too, but it’s easier getting in than getting out.

  The edge is about level with the top of his head. He places his hand on the earth above him and tries to lift himself upward, gets far enough to see flat ground, the legs of the gravedigger with an arm around the little girl, their backs to him, before falling back down.

  He swings his arms as far as he can over the edge, grabs a clump of grass with each hand, and tries to worm his way up and over, swiveling his hips and kneeing the side of the grave. He’s got his shoulders out on flat ground and his face buried in the dirt when the gravedigger finally turns, sees him, and grabs his wrists, pulling him into the open. He lies there a moment, face down, spitting dirt from his mouth, smelling the grass and something else. Something that stinks.

  When he lifts his head he sees it—a fishbowl of average size, and in it, a goldfish the size of an average fishbowl, dead, bloated round like a cartoon or a bath-toy, and staring at him with sunken, glassy eyes. Beside it, a gun, and several feet away, the bag, a withered crumpled shell of its former self. He’d say something, but something’s got his tongue.

  “Ready for the funeral?” the little girl whimpers.

  She’s crying. He reaches into his back pocket, and pulls out the crumpled wad of used napkins he’d put there. He hands them to her. She blows her nose as the sobbing slows then stops altogether. Her breath comes shaky and shallow, and she looks fragile.

  “How’d he die?” he says.

  Her face twitches on the brink of something, of crying or that look.

  “Ate himself to death,” she says.

  A fish in a bowl can’t eat himself to death. The man gets up on his palms, all fours. He stands, breathes in the fresh air. A fish in a bowl has to be fed to death. He looks down on her, her face lit from below by the orange glow of the lamp.

  “You killed him,” he says.

  “That’s enough,” says the gravedigger.

  He reaches a hand out to keep the man from moving any closer.

  “I gave him a choice,” says the little girl.

  She reaches for the gun. The man freezes. He looks to the gravedigger for an explanation.

  “For the twenty-one gun salute,” says the gravedigger. “She’s only got the one.”

  “She killed him,” says the man.

  He turns back to the gun, to her. She’s got that look on her face again, and suddenly I remember what it reminds him of.

  He was about her age, under the sheets late at night reading a cut-rate comic book by flashlight. There was an illustration. It was supposed to teach a moral. Two little kids, a boy and a girl with huge heads, tied together by a rope, one end knotted around the girl’s waist, the other the boy’s. They were running away from each other, toward milkshakes larger than they were and just out of their reach, stretching the rope taut. This was represented by loose fibers at the center of the rope, and the look on their faces. That was the look.

  The moral was in the next panel. They took turns standing on each other’s shoulders and enjoying the milkshake. But he didn’t learn the moral. He couldn’t get past that look on their faces.

  It made him want to swing the rope over one of the gigantic straws protruding from the gigantic milkshakes and dangle from their legs, listening to them scream as the rope slipped up their bodies to their scrawny necks, to swing as their bodies spasmed spaghetti western style. He wouldn’t let go until every last drop of life had been squeezed from their cartoon bodies.

  But I think I’m starting to get the hang of him.

  She’s got a gun. There’s a full-grown man with a shovel standing next to him.

  moldering

  I was growing moldy of wallet from hoeing down and the sweat therefrom. My wife, who does not hoe much anymore, down or up, though her business is fancy-dancing and her body hard in all the right places and soft in the others, liked to remind me that it stank repulsive and caused me to scrub my hands upon handling it.

  Now I am faithful to her in all things, and I still enjoy the pleasure of her flesh and hers only as much as I would have on the day I met her if she’d have allowed me to lay hands on her during our five episodes’ courtship, but a man has his pride, and so I did my best to ignore her cold-shouldering all the way to rejection-outright until the fourth straight evening of unfulfilled marital duties when I felt myself about to explode, and I burst out with a “What must a man do to regain your affections?”

  “I do not know,” said my wife, “for no man but you has managed to gain my affections, and therefore no man but you could ever have lost my affections, ergo, there is no man but you who could hope thus far to regain my affections.

  “As for you,” she said, “your hopes of regaining my affections hinge upon three simple tasks: first, you must secure a new wallet for yourself and my affections by proxy. Then you must destroy the old, moldy wallet now in the seat of your dungarees after transferring its contents to the new. Finally you must lather your hands as you’ve never lathered them before and run them a minute under the hottest water your skin can stand. That accomplished, you will find me upon this very bed, warm of shoulder and spread of legs, so long as I sense that you will never think on these last days again, except as a reminder to be vigilant against molding the new, and as a warning.”

  My wife is a reasonable if stingy woman, and I would have been more than willing to fulfill each of these obligations daily, but for the part about the sense of what I would and would not think on, not because I was resistant, but because the senses of people about things or thoughts can be unpredictable if not fickle, not least so my wife’s, so I knew that some kind of preemptive gesture was required of me.

  Without further consideration, that is, without enough, I told her: “My darling, it’s so like you to ask so little of me that it shames me when I fall short.”

  I leapt from our bed and proceeded to dress myself in the clothes of that day, beginning with the dungarees in whose back pocket the old wallet moldered, saying: “I am even now dressing myself with the intention of marching to the tannery, where I will purchase, not just a new wallet of immaculate hide, but a pretty little handbag for you, cut from the same animal as the wallet, as a token of my dedication to our oneness.”

  By the time I had finished my modest oration, my shirt was buttoned and tucked, my boots were on, and my hat was in hand. My wife was already sitting up, a look like concern upon her face.

  “At this hour?” she said.

  I glanced at the clock on the night table. It was midnight, but my brain was aflame, and the lamp behind my wife showed me the shape of her beneath the lacy gown she favored, redoubling my intention of redoubling my efforts on our respective behalves.

  “Woman,” I said, “my passion knows no midnight, and besides, the tanner was a friend of my youth.”

  I placed the hat atop my head and tipped it to her, not daring to attempt to rustle a kiss from a woman of such will as I left our bedroom and then our cozy home.

  The tannery’s neighborhood is not qui
te as cozy as ours, but I am no stranger to it having grown up there, the son of a preacher man and woman both, and the respect of the residents of the old neighborhood for the memory of my dear departed parents, not to mention my own knack with bootstraps, has earned me the reputation of a local boy made good. The old folks look upon me with homespun admiration. Witness, for instance, the repulsive vagrant who approached me as I strolled the night-dark streets, the same man we used to torment as boys, offering him at times a sandwich or some stale pastry laced with gravel from our lots, others, something a bit more sharp.

  He approached me beneath the rare functional street lamp and I recognized him immediately. He was older and might have had even fewer teeth if that was possible, evidence that boys keep being boys, but it was the same ugliness as ever.

  He said: “It’s kind of late for a guy like you to be wandering these streets,” and I thanked him kindly for his concern as my heart’s cockles warmed at the thought of the intense loyalty of my downtrodden brothers and sisters, especially as I had not always been so generous toward this particular brother. I offered him a Marlboro Red from my just-opened package, but he refused, most likely out of humility, though possibly he associated free cigarettes with some small explosion in the past.

  I lit one of my own, told him to suit himself, and said: “I’m off to the tannery.”

  “Tannery’s closed this time of night,” he said.

  Again with that almost childlike eagerness to help. I hesitated to tell him that he wasn’t saying anything that I didn’t already know, but, as he was bound to see me continue on in the tannery’s direction, it being only a few blocks off, I feared he would panic if I didn’t set his mind at ease.

  “I’m aware of that,” I said, “but the tanner was my closest boyhood companion.”

  “Things change,” he said, imbuing those two words with all of his pride in my accomplishment, as though he’d had some small role in them, and I grew watery of eye, but decided it would be gauche of me to inform him in so many words that his role had been larger than he could know. Instead, I tossed the remains of my cigarette into the street and offered again. He accepted this time, and I walked on toward the tannery waiting for a bang that never came.

  The tannery was closed as expected, but I could see inside by the light of the neon signs in its windows, signs that advertised a variety of tobacco and alcohol products, another reminder that things had changed, but the sign above it still said the tannery. I supposed it made sense that a craftsman in the old neighborhood could no longer sustain himself on fine hides alone, what with the wide variety of mass-produced and artificial textiles available for much lower prices.

  It saddened me that someone as skilled as the tanner, someone who had, as a youth, demonstrated the potential to craft chaps for the thighs of the crowned heads of Europe (and no less an authority than Mr. Bedell, our YMCA camp crafts instructor, had suggested it), had sunken to hawking perishables to pay the rent. But a gift is a gift, and gifts don’t go away. I reasoned that my friend would be made as glad by the commission as I would by the results, even at this hour.

  If things hadn’t changed too much, then he still lived above his shop in a cramped, vermin-infested efficiency that was not without its bohemian charms, and I dared to hope that the small workshop where he did his finest work was still there, in the corner by the stove, for I meant my new wallet and my wife’s pretty handbag to be his very finest work.

  I went to the small door at the side of the tannery and pressed the buzzer’s button with a sense of anticipation I hadn’t felt in ages, then waited impatiently for the door to open and my old, dear friend to greet me with surprise, then brotherly warmth, a warmth that I hadn’t experienced of late, a byproduct, I suppose, of this hectic modern life and of my vast responsibilities.

  As it turned out, I would have to be more patient than expected as my friend the tanner did not answer the door at all, and neither did anyone else. While I waited, I thought back on my last trip to the tannery, the time I had purchased the wallet moldering in my back pocket. That had been years ago, shortly before I took my bride, and if memory serves, I had arrived at a similar hour and waited another, periodically pressing the buzzer, only to find that my friend’s bell was broken.

  It seemed unlikely that a man of my friend’s dexterity would not, in the course of these many years, have attempted to fix the bell, or at the very least to engage a repairman, but the urgency was great, greater now that I needed a pretty handbag to match the wallet I would request, and I could not afford to waste an hour standing in the street until my friend came down to take the air and smoke a cigarette as he had before.

  I didn’t bother knocking on his door as I knew that the street door merely let into a stairway, and at the top of the stairway was another door which led into the tanner’s studio and which would block even the loudest of knocks, so I raised my leg and brought my boot down upon the door’s knob with great vigor, and the knob came off and fell to the sidewalk with a clang and I raised my leg again and kicked at the hole in the door where the knob had been, and the door splintered and gave.

  I ran up the stairs, hoping that I hadn’t spoiled my chances of surprising my friend with the racket produced by the door’s destruction, and in hopes of maintaining any element of remaining surprise, I crashed through the door at the top of the staircase announcing myself as follows:

  “I am come in fulfillment of ancient prophecy, for though I have no need of riding chaps and my head is unadorned, is not the celebrity the new American royalty, and am I not, in all modesty, a celebrity?”

  I would not have stopped there, but would have gone on to flatter my friend with my opinions of his abilities if he had been there to hear them, but he was not and I did not, as I am no great admirer of the sound of my own voice and try to use it only when it can be of some use to my fellow man.

  My fellow man, as I said, was not there, but there was plenty of evidence that he had not been gone long—the coffee in the pot was still lukewarm—and that he meant to return shortly—the lamp above his kitchen table had been left on.

  There were also signs throughout the place that the place was still, in fact, his. The butts in the ashtray were of the brand I recall him favoring, and, mounted on his wall, in a deep frame behind glass—a frame not particularly well-wrought but of great sentimental value because I had made it in the same crafts class at the same YMCA camp in which my friend had fashioned his first wallet—the wallet was even now on display in the very frame I had given him as a gesture of respect for his gifts, and because, even at that tender age, I knew that I wasn’t meant to work with my hands, and Mr. Bedell’s reaction to the frame had confirmed as much. Most encouraging, though, was the work table, crammed, as I’d remembered, into the space between the couch and the wall.

  Whatever was on the table was covered by an oilcloth. I was tempted to peek beneath it to see what dazzling new heights my friend had attained, but the years have taught me nothing if not respect for the sanctity of the artist’s sanctuary, be the artist a lowly worker in leather, like my friend, or an artist of personality and entertainment, like myself, so I resigned myself to waiting in a chair at the kitchen table, heartened by the idea that I had retained the element of surprise, and passing the time by imagining his reaction to finding me awaiting him at his kitchen table to offer him the commission of a lifetime.

  Naturally, even the most patient of men can only occupy himself with such thoughts for so long before the excitement that they provide peters out and finally becomes a kind of repulsion, but I am a resourceful man, and so I pulled my wirebound notebook and a pen from my pocket with the intention of taking notes on the evening’s events to that point, convinced that they could be worked into something revelatory and motivational if recited at one of my many speaking engagements.

  However, when I placed the notebook upon the table, I found that it had become, not moldy like the wallet, but warped of page and still damp from the last nigh
t’s hoedown, and when, undeterred, I put pen to paper, I found that the pen would not make its mark. It was then that I hit upon the idea of ordering a hide-bound notebook to match the new wallet and the pretty handbag, and I made a note of it on the back of my hand with the pen, so that I should not forget about it in my excitement over the reunion and my eagerness to please my wife.

  By then I had been distracted from thoughts of the reunion long enough that they were again capable of producing in me a sense of anticipation, although less intense than previously, the type that need to be rationed out lest they become repulsive, so I alternated imaginings of the reunion with imaginings of my wife’s silhouette backlit by her bed lamp, and of all the glorious favors she would grant me upon my successful return, which thoughts can never become repulsive, even if the acts themselves might seem somewhat distasteful when put into words.

  I won’t put into words what I was imagining when I first noticed that I was hearing my old friend staggering up the stairs because I put it quickly out of my mind, lit a fresh cigarette, crossed my legs, and gave myself a sharp slap to the face to clear my head.

  I had left the apartment door open in order to hear him staggering up the stairs, being well aware of the difference between surprise and shock, and knowing that when he found it that way, he would be prepared to find someone awaiting him, and would therefore not have a heart attack when I began my speech, but that he would never in a thousand lifetimes expect that it was I who awaited him.

  He stormed through the door with the jagged neck of a glass bottle in his hand and thrust it blindly about him screaming, “What do you want motherfucker!”

  I realized I hadn’t taken enough care to consider the effect that returning home to find both of his doors splintered and open, in the old neighborhood no less, would have upon my friend’s delicate and artistic constitution, and he was obviously deeply intoxicated to boot, so I labored to set his mind at ease post-haste.