Body and Bread

by Nan Cuba

  “His knees popped?” he said. “Like, you think something might’ve broke?” He leaned, squinted his eyes toward my mother.

  “Sam, you’re getting too carried away. Besides, your sister has joined us and now would be a good time to plan for Rockport.” Each summer, we stayed at the coast two weeks in my grandparents’ two-story with a screened porch facing a panorama of water.

  “You sound like girls,” I muttered to Kurt, knowing how to prick him. Then to her, “But what about all that stuff y’all were saying?”

  “We were being silly.” She straightened my collar. “Not ‘stuff,’ sugar. No such word, remember?”

  I tilted my shoulder away from her.

  She sipped her drink.

  “But, Mom, you didn’t finish,” Sam said, scooting down the bench. “Come on, Sar.” I sat beside him. “Tell her the part about Otis the first time,” he blurted, “with his eyes stuck open.”

  “No, Sam.” Her protectiveness was equal parts sympathy and a conviction that I be refined, not the ill-bred outcast she thought my grandmother had labeled her. “There are some things you boys are not to discuss in front of your sister. And that’s my final word. Now, about Rockport…”

  This was the same person who’d thrown a horse’s reins into my grandfather’s face, and that woman, not this parent, was the one I wanted to emulate.

  “But you were the one telling the story,” Sam said, “and you’re a girl.”

  I leaned on my elbows.

  My father’s hand skeleton clattered. “That’ll be all, boy. Remember that galled horse,” he warned. “Rub him and he’ll kick.”

  Sam glared, shook his head, and uttered a “Ga-a-ah” as he squeezed from between Kurt and me, then stomped upstairs. His bedroom door slammed.

  My mother didn’t know that Sam and I had already talked about death a few weeks earlier, on a day when he taught me how to hit a softball. He stood, pitching it in low, slow arcs. I had little trouble connecting, my target sometimes rising like a bottle rocket. He chased after my lobs and skinners while I ran around the bases.

  Beside the house, Sam held the hose while I sipped, the water bubbling with its tinny taste. A spiked horned toad disappeared into the bushes. Sitting on the front porch steps with him, I hoped someone would drive by. Girls had crushes on him, and I wanted them to see him with me. He popped the softball in and out of his glove. As it hit the webbing, the thwap made him seem wise, handsome.

  Our thoughts turned to our bodies, while, at the same time, our father stood in a sterile room cutting, suturing. A disorienting connection, like drinking octli then watching ritual sacrifice.

  “Sarah, you know, we’re all really just an accident,” Sam said, holding the ball in his right hand, turning, rubbing. He glanced at me through a half-wink. “A minute or a second later, and you’d have been somebody else.”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, my mouth hanging open. Such talk felt creepy, but I loved it when Sam got serious.

  He straightened his cap, pounded his glove. “But we made it. That’s what counts, right?” His elbow nudged me.

  “Uh huh,” I said, hugging my knees. Again, a solid whack of leather.

  “But the weirdest part is the other end.” He pulled his hands, glove and all, toward his waist, rested his forearms on his thighs. He squinted at the sky, his cheek muscles twitching. “How, someday, we won’t be alive.”

  I rocked, still holding my legs. The concrete felt warm, gritty. “I wonder if you dream when you die.”

  “Shh no.” He rubbed his palm down his jeans. “Your body gets cold and clammy.” He leaned toward me. “You don’t feel nothing.” His voice was husky, his breath like steam. “You don’t even think. It’s like, clunk, it’s over, for good.” He flipped the ball toward the mitt.

  “But Gran says our souls go to another world so we don’t need to be scared.” She’d held my hand one night as we knelt by her bed, her knuckles a row of marbles.

  “I don’t know about any of that.” Sweat dripped from underneath his cap, down the side of his face; he rubbed it into the shoulder of his t-shirt.

  “You don’t think there’s such a place?” The possibility of Sam’s disbelief panicked me. If he was wrong, he was doomed to burn forever. If he was right, I was doomed to rot.

  “I believe there’s just dead.”

  The ball smacked. My teeth pressed dashes into my knee.

  The others stayed in the kitchen to watch TV while I sneaked to Sam’s room. He sat on his unmade bed, holding his moss-colored, Chinese water dragon. A fluorescent light warmed its aquarium, bathing a branch and pebbles in a hazy glow. The lizard’s tail curled across Sam’s lap, the spikes along its back like miniature daggers.

  “Come here. I’ll let you hold her,” he said, rubbing the top of its head until its eyes closed, sleepy.

  “Uh uh.” I took a step backward.

  “Chicken,” he said. “She can’t bite.”

  He’d once made me touch a crawdad and, later, a fish. Light-headed, I sat on the edge of the bed. When Sam held out the lizard, it waved its front legs twice, froze. The spidery claws clutched my hand and wrist, its skin soft, not slimy.

  “I’m sorry about what happened downstairs,” I said.

  “Mama’s so stupid,” he said, flopping on the bed.

  “She must’ve had a reason.”

  “You don’t know anything.” He grabbed a tennis ball next to his bed, bounced it off the wall. He caught it, threw it again. Every time it hit, a gray smudge appeared. He tossed it into the corner. “Come on.” He snatched his cap. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  He left a note next to the telephone in the kitchen: “Sarah and I have gone to play softball.”

  We trudged across yards, up streets, down an alley. “Wait,” I whined, trotting. Dogs yapped along their fences; cars sped past. Downtown, an empty Woolworth announced “For Rent” in its window; boards sealed the double doors of the town’s less popular movie theater. Over the years, each block’s expanding quota of broken glass and graffiti had correlated with the accumulating window cracks and water-stains at the GC&SF station. Trains still lurched every day into its yard, then left again with an occasional passenger, grain-heavy hopper, log-filled flatbed. But most cars rolled along, their wheels clicking, their linked bodies empty.

  The sky stretched a fading blue, cloudless; the sun inched behind First National. Half an hour later, we turned a corner to face Latimore Memorial Hospital, its complex of buildings and covered walkways sprawling.

  Sam led me to the oldest wing, where my father taught anatomy. “Dad brought me here,” he said, knowing I’d never been invited. “There’s something you’re not going to believe.”

  The construction was granite brick with Gothic oval windows, ledges of dark limestone, balconies on the west and north sides. The same architect had built the GC&SF station—ornate, clumsily reminiscent of European cathedrals.

  The concrete stairs led to heavy front doors topped by a cut glass window inscribed “Nugent Sanitarium.” An arch of carved Greek heads in profile bordered the entrance. Instead of starting for the entry, which was locked Saturday evenings, Sam turned toward a side doorway partially hidden by pyracantha bushes. He pulled it, motioned for me to crawl through the square opening.

  We walked along the lobby to a double stairway. On the second floor, we found offices and exam rooms. The third floor was the top one, and when doors opened onto the lab, chilly air smelled of camphor, Lysol. The sun’s last rays trailed through giant skylights, casting beams at angles across the floor, then up walls. I grabbed Sam’s arm, pressed next to him. Huge jars lined shelves along both sides of the auditorium-sized room. The crocks were round or rectangular, with lids as big as my waist and human body parts inside, floating. One contained a leg with the outside layer of skin peeled away, the white tendons and bone and red muscle exposed, labeled with tags, spelling out long names ending in “ula” or “dorsi.” A hand floated in another, the fingernails
glistening silvery blue. The delicate ligaments looked as perfect as spider webs, the joints like intricate gears ready to whir. Next was a man from the chest up, his right side perfect, his left neatly whacked off through his ribs, past his nose, the top of his head. He wore a stony gaze, as though he hadn’t noticed his condition. Farther down, I saw a brain, light gray, velvety, with its convoluted parts and purple veins, followed by other organs, rust-colored ones—a heart, lungs, a kidney, sliced and opened. Next to my shoulder, a baby’s face stared from the single eye in its forehead, a tiny Cyclops, partially skinned. At the end of the room, a bookcase held more jars, these with tagged heads whose faces tilted, their swollen lips kissing the curved glass.

  I stepped back, grunting. “Are they real?” No wonder my family didn’t seem fazed by cruelty. What was it like to work here every day, where a body was only pieces tacked together? Robots. Zombies.

  “Of course.” But Sam was looking somewhere else. Two rows of coffin-sized metal boxes lined the floor. Over each, a light hung suspended from the thirty-foot ceiling. Sam stared at one of the caskets in back. “Come on.”

  Up close, the metal container reminded me of a torture chamber, of hunched clubfooted men pouring smoking liquid into beakers. Sam bumped me when he yanked down on a side latch. A clank echoed. One side of the lid slid back, and something rose on a plank inside. It was huge and must have been immersed in liquid, because there was a rush, like the sound of someone rising out of a swimming pool, dripping, splattering. A soiled sheet covered it; a sickly sweet smell flipped my stomach. Sam pushed the handle on the other side. Pulley ropes crept through their slots. The rest of the lid swung around, the plank rose again with a swoosh, the bang ricocheted.

  Sam pulled the sheet back: A man, with flattened gray hair and a wide, slanted forehead with his eyes partially open. His face’s left side pressed against the shoulder, wrinkling his cheek, puckering his crooked lips. His right calf and foot had been sliced, shredded—a scarecrow losing his stuffing. Above that lay the man’s sagging genitals.

  I knew what they were because I’d seen Hugh’s—when he’d tear off his clothes and run down the street in front of our house—and Kurt’s and Sam’s too, as they each stepped out of the shower, before wrapping towels at their waists like skirts. Sam laughed at my accidental glimpses, but Kurt accused me of spying, yanked at my shorts until I screamed, then tightened his towel before walking to his room. I felt relief when those parts were covered, not only because my brothers usually spotted me watching, but also because I believed their bodies were too mysterious for careless exposure. Such marvels needed protection, secrecy, the bulges they formed in clothes hinting at something I didn’t yet understand but longed to.

  I stepped back from the cadaver, embarrassed but determined to watch whatever Sam might do. If the men in my family could look at a naked, plucked, dead man, so could I. But I moved around the feet, stood next to my brother.

  Sam touched the arm, which rested on the chest. He tapped the skin in several places—firm as an orange peel. But its color was brown; even the fingernails had a tinge like muddy water. The man’s eyes had sunk in their sockets, so Sam pulled a lid back until the black center, surrounded by its wrinkled, murky white, bulged. He turned the lid loose, and it fell, sleepily, to its original position. Touching, poking, he examined the man’s ear and teeth; he even pulled lightly on the hair. Then he placed one of his hands back on the elbow and with the other, he tugged on the wrist. After several light jerks, he shifted his right hand to the man’s waist, and with his left, he pulled hard on the forearm. Smoothly, as though sweeping through water, the contorted limb straightened. Sam rested it on the plank, and while he still held it, he stood there, nodding, gazing, nodding.

  Here, I thought, in a place where everybody else hacked things apart, Sam pulls the body back together.

  I remembered my mother describing Otis’ curled body as looking like a chicken. Terrible, I thought. I heard him say, “…the best friend I had or would ever have on earth was dying,” and I pictured him tracing a giant S in the air. He’s gone, I thought selfishly, but I couldn’t explain the emptiness.

  “Hey, look,” Sam said as he prodded just below the man’s shoulder. “A tattoo.”

  A faded blue drawing of a hand holding a hoop with two keys draped across sagging muscle. The keys were the giant kind used for ancient locks. The hand, gripping the ring, curled into a fist.

  “I don’t like it,” I said, tightening my chin, missing Otis: no more lessons about banana-peel starfish, and except for Sam, only my parents and people like them.

  “He’s a convict,” Sam said. “The color’s not right. See?” He rubbed at an obvious change in the tattoo’s shading. “This father of a kid I know says they melt checkers or Bible pages for ink and can draw good but the color’s never even.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Something bad, murder most probably.”

  I focused on his hand, the hair dark at the base of the fingers. “You think he had kids?”

  “Maybe. A couple’d be about right.” Sam took off his cap, ran his fingers across his stubble-cut hair. His biceps twitched; a whiff of sweat and orange soda hit me.

  “Uh-huh. And one of them was kind of bad too, but his mom helped him all she could.” I was thinking about how when he talked back to my mother, my father got so mad, sometimes he spanked Sam. My father was sad afterwards, but Sam never cried.

  Sam stood close, his arm rubbing me whenever he moved. Each brush prickled, like something visceral moving through my pores, my blood.

  He pulled on the tattoo again. “I don’t think this is how the poor guy expected to get out.” His gaze moved to the man’s face, then the chest, the fists. With a hand on each side of the head, Sam gently turned it, facing it forward. But the cheek and mouth stayed crooked, so he tried smoothing the skin with his thumb; then, with his fingers, he worked the lips, touching them until the features softened, resting.

  The dead man’s hand lay across his thigh, the fingers slightly separated; the last nail, longer than the others, curved inward as though searching. Black hair swirled from under his breasts, across his stomach, finally thickening, soft and twining, at the nest of skin and parts between his legs. His penis had gauzy veins and a mushroom cap; it nestled against a divided sack covered in velvet. The area, with its shadows and central organ, signified earth shoots, fungus emitting spores like smoke.

  I longed to touch such a place, to test the suppleness and tension there, to know, finally, my mother’s most forbidden secret. I lifted my hand, but couldn’t bring myself to place it on the dead man. Instead, without looking at Sam’s face, I leaned my cheek against his chest, rested my fingers on the bulge in his jeans.

  “Whoa,” Sam said, jumping back, peeling my hand away.

  I turned, startled, as he stared, his temple pulsing. Please don’t look at me, I wanted to cry. Did I disgust him? I wanted to say I didn’t mean to, that my touching him was an accident, that I knew it was wrong, please don’t tell, please don’t… I covered my mouth, squeezed my eyes shut.

  “It’s okay, Sar. Look.” He nudged me. “Really, it’s okay. Come on. I’ll show you.”

  He pointed at the scarecrow’s dark region. “This is a penis.”

  I hung my head.

  “Sarah, hey. You need to know this.” He put his hand on my back. “During sex it gets stiff, and semen from the testicles,” he pointed again, “moves into the woman to fertilize her egg. Presto,” he patted my head, “one more bratty kid for a brother to have to look after.” He shoved me, knocking me off-balance.

  I shoved him back, relieved, laughing. “You mean somebody for brothers to push around.”

  “Ungrateful,” he sang, hanging his thumbs in his front pockets.

  On the wall at the end of the shelf, I spotted the jar with the brain inside. “Look over there, Sam,” I said, pointing.

  “What about it?”

  “What’s that remind you of?”


  “Huh?” He looked from the jar, to me, then back to the jar and its contents.

  “Broccoli.”

  “That’s good,” he laughed. “Okay, now that one.” I followed his eyes toward something round, puffy, faintly pink: intestines. “This, broccoli-brain, is one you’ll never guess.” He pointed at the guts. “Take a good look at the man in the moon, in a jar.”

  As our giggles rumbled around the room, I leaned back, catching the view through the skylight. Nighttime now, the sky an immense shadow. The moon’s sullen beam had kept us from noticing the change. Two stars pinned the vast backdrop. Across the room, that half bust of a man perched in silhouette, staring ahead through the glass. Otis, I thought—more than flesh, limbs, body. Otis, the storyteller; Otis, the scarecrow; Otises everywhere, like lights lifting.

  CHAPTER 5

  AS THE HENRY R. FINEMAN Endowed Chair of Mesoamerican Studies in the university’s anthropology department, I teach a light course load each semester and never have to teach freshmen. That’s fortunate because they make me jumpy (short attention span, practically illiterate), and they don’t like me. It’s not their fault. I’m not patient enough; the basics bore me. They wouldn’t sign up, anyway. Word is out: cranky. Am I proud of this? No. Even my colleagues close their doors when I walk by (I get the hint). Can I change? I wish. But give me smart graduate students, and I’ll turn myself inside out and enjoy every minute.

  So when a baby freshman appears at my office door with purple eyes and a graceless stance, for a single slugging heartbeat I imagine Sam lurking nearby. I remember meeting Cornelia, Terezie’s daughter, on the church steps after my mother’s funeral. Her painted acrylic nails and pierced nose are perfect additions to her inherited allure.