20

by John Edgar Wideman

  The howling stopped about a minute before the power kicked back in and the light returned. I collected the cans, stood and pushed the button for our floor again, taking comfort in the familiar graffiti, the fake wood-grain control panel, the ordinariness of it all.

  ————

  Calvin sat with his foot up on Ed's bed. I arranged the Pepsis around his ankle.

  “How's that feel?” I asked.

  “Cold.”

  The pale blotchiness of Calvin's cheeks made me think of packaged supermarket tomatoes.

  “Whoever that guy is,” said Ed, “he's seriously whacked.”

  “Vietnam,” said Calvin. “You know that guy with the blonde hair and beard who always eats by himself, wears an Army jacket?” He sipped at his drink, put it down hard on the edge of the desk. “He was over there. Went out on patrol with a buddy, and his buddy tripped a mine. Blew off part of his leg. That guy dragged a man two miles through the jungle, a guy who was already dead. When he found out, something in him just sort of snapped.”

  I knew for a fact this wasn't true. The guy with the beard who ate by himself was from Spokane, Washington, where he taught second grade and played piano at a Holiday Inn lounge, evenings. I'd talked to him once, when we'd both been waiting for the elevator. His name was Pat, and the main thing about him was his shyness. Of course, he might still have been the Wildman, but if so, it had nothing to do with Vietnam, or legs getting blown off.

  “Where do you get your information?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Classified. I could tell you, but then I'd have to shoot you.”

  Ed coughed.

  “You are so amazingly full of shit. I've talked to that guy. He's never been out of the country.”

  “Do you believe everything people tell you?”

  “Do you believe everything that pops into your head?”

  I looked over at Ella, who'd found herself a spot on Ed's bed, where she was busily licking one extended leg. The radio, which had been playing jazz, segued into crunching guitars. The water stain on our wall reminded me of something from biology class. I took one of the cans from next to Calvin's leg, tore off its pop-top.

  He was silent, looking around the room. His eyes rested on my picture of Lili Arnot. “That your woman?”

  I nodded. In truth, Lili Arnot would have probably been surprised to know I even had a picture of her, let alone that I was telling people she was my “woman.” In the picture, she wore cutoffs and a white blouse and held a tennis racket under one arm.

  “She gave me a blowjob once.”

  His face was a marionette's, grinning, wooden, vaguely evil. I hurled my open soda at it. The can glanced off the side of his head, continuing on to the wall, then to the floor where it spurted and frothed for a few seconds onto the stained carpet.

  Considering his ankle, Calvin came at me with amazing speed. He threw me against the opposite wall. I'd cut him with the can, and blood dripped down over his ear. There was an oniony smell of perspiration about him, mixed with a sweeter scent of hair stuff. I put my hands around his neck and tried to choke him, while at the same time, he threw hard punches at my stomach and sides. There was a kind of purity to the moment, as when a thick August afternoon finally transforms itself into rain. This was where we'd been heading tonight, after all. If we couldn't beat up fags, we could at least beat up each other. I figured he might kill me, but I refused to worry. That was my role—the guy who worried—and I was tired of it. Ed shouted at us to stop, but we'd locked up like jammed gears. Calvin bit my shoulder and I jerked forward with all my weight, enough to push him off balance, causing him to step back. He cursed loudly and sat on the bed, where he pounded his fist up and down on the mattress.

  “What?” I said. “What happened?”

  “He twisted it worse,” said Ed, going over to take a look. “Maybe it's broken.”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” said Calvin.

  “You want to go to the hospital?”

  “We can't take him to the hospital,” said Ed. “They'll take one look at him and call the cops. Look at his pupils. They're the size of dimes.”

  “I'm all right,” said Calvin, grimacing.

  We decided on more aspirin and repacked the sodas around his foot.

  No one said anything for a while. My sides hurt where I'd been punched, but basically I was OK, though I did feel a little stupid. Ed, who was wearing his “Bird Lives” T-shirt, started doing curls with a thirty-pound barbell. Calvin reached over and took my notebook along with a pair of number-two pencils off the desk, began playing drums atop my arranging homework. I didn't stop him, I just watched, painfully aware of my inadequate pencil marks on the stiff paper. They looked like a road construction project abandoned after only a few feet. Finally, I asked, “Did the lights go off here?”

  “Lights?” said Calvin. “What lights?”

  “When I was on the elevator, the lights died.”

  “Somebody should put that elevator out of its misery.”

  I sat down in a chair and had one of Ed's Kools. There were less than two weeks left to the summer. Soon, other people would have this room. It was wrong to think that our presence would linger on, though it was to this notion that I realized I'd been grasping all along, the idea that in some way we were etching ourselves onto the air, leaving shadows that would remain forever.

  After a minute, Calvin put aside the pencils, took his knife out again and began flipping it. He seemed to have forgotten all about our fight, or the way we'd let him down earlier. He seemed to have forgotten about everything. I thought about the rockets we'd watched by the water, the way they rose in one big fiery line, then separated into smaller projectiles, burning out slowly in their own, solo descent.

  “I know these two girls that share an apartment a few blocks from here,” he said. “I met them at a record store. Very cool, very good-looking, and their parents are away. I'm serious—we could go over there.”

  “All three of us?” I said.

  “Yes, all three of us.” He was suddenly enthusiastic. “They wouldn't mind. We could say we were hungry, get them to make us eggs. That would get us in, then we could just see what happened from there.”

  “I am a little hungry,” Ed admitted.

  “You really want to go out again?” I asked. “You've been through a lot. Think about it. You got hit by a car.”

  He wasn't listening. “The hard part will be getting past the security guy at their building. We'll need a diversion. After that, we're home free.” He dug a piece of paper from his wallet, and on it there was indeed a name, Nicole, written in loopy, high-school-girl handwriting. It was followed by an address. There was a distinct possibility that this was real.

  “We'll get ’em to make us omelets,” he said.

  For a moment, I saw Calvin as a distillation of my own, ugly soul, and in his grinning, wicked eyes I thought I saw a reflection of all the bad things I'd done, as well as the ones I would do.

  “It's really pretty late,” I said, quietly.

  But Calvin was already putting on his shoes.

  1996

  VAQUITA

  Edith Pearlman

  “Some day,” said the minister of health to her deputy assistant, “you must fly me to one of those resort towns on the edge of the lake. Set me up in a striped tent. Send in kids who need booster shots. The mayor and I will split a bottle of cold Spanish wine; then we will blow up the last storehouse of canned milk…”

  The minister paused. Caroline, the deputy, was looking tired. “Lina, what godforsaken place am I visiting tomorrow?” the minister asked.

  “Campo del Norte,” came the answer. “Water adequate, sewage okay, no cholera, frequent dysentery…”

  Señora Marta Perera de Lefkowitz, minister of health, listened and memorized. Her chin was slightly raised, her eyelids half-lowered over pale eyes. This was the pose that the newspapers caricatured most often. Pro-government papers did it more or less lovingly—in their c
artoons the minister resembled an inquisitive cow. Opposition newspapers accentuated the lines under Señora Perera's eyes and adorned her mouth with a cigarette, and never omitted the famous spray of diamonds on her lapel.

  “There has been some unrest,” Caroline went on.

  Señora Perera dragged on a cigarette—the fourth of her daily five. “What kind of unrest?”

  “A family was exiled.”

  “For which foolishness?”

  The deputy consulted her notes. “They gave information to an Australian writing an exposé of smuggling in Latin America.”

  “Horrifying. Soon someone will suggest that New York launders our money. Please continue.”

  “Otherwise, the usual. Undernourishment. Malnourishment. Crop failures. Overfecundity.”

  Señora Perera let her eyelids drop all the way. Lactation had controlled fertility for centuries, had kept population numbers steady. In a single generation the formula industry had changed everything; now there was a new baby in every wretched family every year. She opened her eyes. “Television?”

  “No. A few radios. Seventy kilometers away there's a town with a movie house.”

  Golden dreams. “The infirmary—what does it need?”

  Again a shuffling of papers. “Needles, gloves, dehydration kits, tetanus vaccine, cigarettes…”

  A trumpet of gunfire interrupted the list.

  The minister and her deputy exchanged a glance and stopped talking for a minute. The gunshots were not repeated.

  “They will deport me soon,” Señora Perera remarked.

  “You could leave of your own accord,” said Caroline softly.

  “That idea stinks of cowshit,” Señora Perera said, but she said it in Polish. Caroline waited. “I'm not finished meddling,” added the Señora in an inaudible conflation of the languages. “They'll boot me to Miami,” she continued in an ordinary tone, now using only Spanish. “The rest of the government is already there, except for Perez, who I think is dead. They'll want my flat, too. Will you rescue Gidalya?” Gidalya was the minister's parrot. “And while you're at it, Lina, rescue this department. They'll ask you to run the health services, whichever putz they call minister. They'll appreciate that only you can do it—you with principles, but no politics. So do it.”

  “Take my bird, take my desk, take my job…” Caroline sighed.

  “Then that's settled.”

  They went on to talk of departmental matters—the medical students' rebellion in the western city; the girl born with no hands who had been found in a squatters' camp, worshipped as a saint. Then they rose.

  Caroline said, “Tomorrow morning Luis will call for you at five.”

  “Luis? Where is Diego?”

  “Diego has defected.”

  “The scamp. But Luis, that garlic breath—spare me.”

  “An escort is customary,” Caroline reminded her.

  “This escort may bring handcuffs.”

  The two women kissed formally; all at once they embraced. Then they left the cool, almost empty ministry by different exits. Caroline ran down to the rear door; her little car was parked in back. Señora Perera took the grand staircase that curved into the tiled reception hall. Her footsteps echoed. The guard tugged at the massive oak door until it opened. He pushed back the iron gate. He bowed. “Good evening, Señora Ministra.”

  She waited at the bus stop—a small, elderly woman with dyed red hair. She wore one of the dark, straight-skirted suits that, whatever the year, passed for last season's fashion. The diamonds glinted on its lapel.

  Her bus riding was considered an affectation. In fact it was an indulgence. In the back of an official limousine she felt like a corpse. But on the bus she became again a young medical student in Prague, her hair in a single red braid. Sixty years ago she had taken trams everywhere—to cafés; to the apartment of her lover; to her Czech tutor, who became a second lover. In her own room she kept a sweet songbird. At the opera she wept at Smetana. She wrote to her parents in Krakow whenever she needed money. All that was before the Nazis, before the war, before the partisans; before the year hiding out in a peasant's barn, her only company a cow; before liberation, DP camp, and the ship that sailed west to the New World.

  Anyone who cared could learn her history. At least once a year somebody interviewed her on radio or television. But the citizens were interested mainly in her life with the cow. “Those months in the barn—what did you think about?” She was always asked that question. “Everything,” she sometimes said. “Nothing,” she said, sometimes. “Breast-feeding,” she barked, unsmiling, during the failed campaign against the formula companies. They called her La Vaca—The Cow.

  The bus today was late but not yet very late, considering that a revolution was again in progress. So many revolutions had erupted since she arrived in this plateau of a capital, her mother gasping at her side. The Coffee War first, then the Colonels' Revolt, then the…Here was the bus, half full. She grasped its doorpost and, grunting, hauled herself aboard. The driver, his eyes on the diamonds, waved her on; no need to show her pass.

  The air swam with heat. All the windows were closed against stray bullets. Señora Perera pushed her own window open. The other passengers made no protest. And so, on the ride home, the minister, leaning on her hand, was free to smell the diesel odor of the center of the city, the eucalyptus of the park, the fetidity of the river, the thick citrus stink of the remains of that day's open market, and finally the hibiscus scent of the low hills. No gunshots disturbed the journey. She closed the window before getting off the bus and nodded at the five people who were left.

  In the apartment, Gidalya was sulking. New visitors always wondered at a pet so uncolorful—Gidalya was mostly brown. “I was attracted by his clever rabbinical stare,” she'd explain. Gidalya had not mastered even the usual dirty words; he merely squawked, expressing a feeble rage. “Hola,” Señora Perera said to him now. He gave her a resentful look. She opened his cage, but he remained on his perch, picking at his breast feathers.

  She toasted two pieces of bread and sliced some papaya and poured a glass of wine and put everything on a tray. She took the tray out onto the patio and, eating and smoking, watched the curfewed city below. She could see a bit of the river, with its Second Empire bridge and ornamental stanchions. Half a mile north was the plaza, where the cathedral of white volcanic stone was whitened further by floodlamps; this pale light fizzed through the leafy surround. Bells rang faintly. Ten o'clock.

  Señora Perera carried her empty tray back into the kitchen. She turned out the lights in the living room and flung a scarf over Gidalya's cage. “Goodnight, possibly for the last time,” she said, first in Spanish and then in Polish. In her bedroom, she removed the diamonds from her lapel and fastened them onto the jacket she would wear in the morning. She got ready for bed, got into bed, and fell instantly asleep.

  ————

  Some bits of this notable widow's biography were not granted to interviewers. She might reminisce about her early days here—the resumption of medical studies and the work for the new small party on the left—but she never mentioned the expensive abortion paid for by her rich, married lover. She spoke of the young Federico Perera, of their courtship, of his growing prominence in the legal profession, of her party's increasing strength and its association with various coalitions. She did not refer to Federico's infidelities, though she knew their enemies made coarse jokes about the jewelry he gave her whenever he took a new mistress. Except for the diamonds, all the stuff was fake.

  In her fifties she had served as minister of culture; under her warm attention both the National Orchestra and the National Theater thrived. She was proud of that, she told interviewers. She was proud, too, of her friendship with the soprano Olivia Valdez, star of light opera, now retired and living in Tel Aviv; but she never spoke of Olivia. She spoke instead of her husband's merry North American nieces, who had often flown down from Texas. She did not divulge that the young Jewish hidalgos she presented t
o these girls found them uncultivated. She did not mention her own childlessness. She made few pronouncements about her adopted country; the famous quip that revolution was its national pastime continued to embarrass her. The year with the cow? I thought about everything. I thought about nothing.

  What kind of cow was it?

  Dark brown, infested with ticks, which I got, too.

  Your name for her?

  My Little Cow, in two or three tongues.

  The family who protected you?

  Righteous Gentiles.

  Your parents?

  In the camps. My father died. My mother survived. I brought her to this country.

  …Whose air she could never breathe. Whose slippery words she refused to learn. I myself did not need to study the language; I remembered it from a few centuries earlier, before the expulsion from Spain. Nothing lightened Mama's mood; she wept every night until she died.

  Señora Perera kept these last gloomy facts from interviewers. “The people here—they are like family,” she occasionally said. “Stubborn as pigs,” she once added, in a cracked mutter that no one should have heard, but the woman with the microphone swooped on the phrase as if it were an escaping kitten.

  “You love this sewer,” shouted Olivia during her raging departure. “You have no children to love, and you have a husband not worth loving, and you don't love me anymore because my voice is cracking and my belly sags. So you love my land, which I at least have the sense to hate. You love the oily generals. The aristocrats scratching themselves. The intellectuals snoring through concerts. The revolutionaries in undershirts. The parrots, even! You are besotted!”