by Jan Carson
‘Done,’ said Sorry, as soon as she got to thirty-three thousands. They opened the fridge together, fists grazing momentarily on the handle. Mr Fluff was more than alive. She had used her fridge time profitably. The margarine tub now played canvas to an uncanny likeness of the President himself. ‘It’s nice in here,’ Mr Fluff purred. ‘There’s a little yellow light and everything. It really helps when you’re trying to draw.’
This was the first and longest conversation Mr Fluff would have with anyone aside from Soren James Blue. The situation, she reasoned, had been dire enough to justify the breaking of her own mute laws. More so, Mr Fluff was a master of comic timing and relished, for months thereafter, the look on Miranda’s face; a bipartisan mix of horror and delight. Mr Fluff measured her moments carefully. Though Sorry swore blind to parents, psychiatrists and an ever-decreasing circle of incredulous friends that Mr Fluff was capable of actual, articulate conversation, no one besides herself and Miranda could verify this claim. Within twenty-four hours of the encounter Miranda was ensconced in a midsize U-Haul winging her way to Kansas with little thought of testifying. Pete followed behind with the car.
Mr Fluff and Soren James Blue had been, somewhat awkwardly, soldered together ever since.
– Chapter Nine –
Drinking and Smoking
The People’s Committee for Remembering Songs was struggling to harmonize under pressure.
Whilst the ladies on the sofa, incapable of coping with real-time disaster, sought comfort in birdy little chit-chats about the latest soap opera intrigue, the men pounded the carpet, balled fists constraining their rage. They were stoic by numbers. Between them they’d soldiered through seventeen individual wars on four separate continents, lost a devastating total of nine life partners and thirteen children, conquered six different types of cancer and survived fifteen or more presidential elections, not to mention Civil Rights, Watergate, the Great Depression, McCarthyism and the onslaught of MTV. They were not about to be intimidated by a teenage girl.
Bill was the first to take charge of the situation. He proposed marching straight to the Director’s office to lodge an official complaint about the girl.
‘We’ll say,’ he announced to the room, ‘that she hit Irene with an umbrella in the face. They’ll have to take an actual assault seriously. We’ll agree our stories before we go and if everyone says the same thing, well, they’ll be legally responsible to act on it. They’ll have to get rid of the little devil.’
‘Hopefully they’ll throw her in jail,’ added Clary O’Hare and launched into a meandering anecdote about a Japanese prisoner of war camp and a goat, an army pal from Tennessee and the incredible benefits of knowing Morse code in such a situation.
‘Never mind jail,’ hissed Roger Heinz, incapable of containing the rage any longer, ‘the bitch deserves to be hung, drawn and quartered if you ask me.’
‘No one’s asking you. No one’s ever asking you, Roger,’ snapped Bill. He was not the sort of man given to alligator impulses. However, Sorry’s departure had knocked the civility right out of him.
The two men glared at each other from either side of the Oriental rug. Averagely built and erring on the cautious side of short, Roger Heinz had a face like a brick shit wall. It was six years since he’d last been reprimanded. The unlucky idiot unfortunate enough to question Heinz’s right to the only empty booth at the IHOP on 82nd had eaten his pancakes pureed for the next fortnight. Short order cooks and oil change guys from east coast to west could recount similar outbreaks of inappropriate violence. The military had planted an uncommon rage in Roger Heinz. Whilst other men favored the penis, Roger Heinz did his best thinking in his fists, finding they automatically curled and rose like a perfect pair of divining rods at the first inkling twitch of anger. Approaching eighty, his arms were not what they’d once been. Rising into an argument he felt them sag at the elbow like cheese strings left too long in the sun. The rage was not diminished, however, and more and more Roger Heinz found himself attacking with words and occasionally small weapons – salad forks or flick knives – which could be pocketed, or at a pinch secreted in his armpit.
Cornered now, he searched his tracksuit pockets for a spare soupspoon, and finding himself entirely unarmed, fell back on his well-maintained arsenal of insults.
‘Screw you all and your shitty songs,’ he yelled and stomped out the front door. Within Baptist Retirement circles, Roger Heinz’s exits were legendary. His anger could be contained for only so long before, like an over-blown air mattress, he exploded, scattering insults and terse expletives in his wake. Whilst exiting, the red mist lifted briefly, allowing him to scoop the remainder of the oatmeal cookies into his pocket. If nothing else, war had taught Roger Heinz to put the stomach’s needs before all other loftier causes. The door slammed behind his back, screen rattling as it settled.
‘He’ll be back,’ muttered Nate Grubbs.
‘More’s the pity,’ replied Bill, who’d held a secret grudge against his neighbor since the night he’d caught Irene eyeing up Roger Heinz’s surprisingly pert backside, bending to load the post-practice coffee mugs into the dishwasher. Though his wife was clearly insane and could not be held responsible for which behind she chose to ogle (or fondle, as Bill had begun to suspect), he resented the fact that she’d landed upon such a very loud-mouthed, obnoxious backside. It was, he calculated, almost five years since she’d last made moves upon his own ample posterior and it was this realization, more than anything, which smarted and fueled his dislike of Roger Heinz.
The room fell impatiently silent in the wake of Heinz’s departure. Momentum was fading. Mrs Kellerman, exhibiting the early signs of Alzheimer’s, had no recollection of Soren’s departure or, for that matter, her unexpected arrival. Lately Mrs Kellerman had been struggling to form a sharp recollection of anything after the year 1963. All but the youngest of the People’s Committee began to anticipate the need for an afternoon nap. On the sofa, sandwiched between two substantially cardiganed ladies, Mrs Huxley was already beginning to nod off.
‘So we’re going with the umbrella story,’ pronounced Nate Grubbs confidently, assuming authority for the group. ‘We should get our story down on paper, to make sure we have all the facts straight.’
From the inner pocket of his sports jacket he produced a tatty notebook and carpenter’s pencil and beckoned the men to gather round. The women watched on from the plush seats. The sofa was their territory. They moved only for kitchen duties, for ambulances and natural disasters. They were the kind of women accustomed to being ignored. A series of fathers, husbands and lately sons had made decisions on their behalf, informing them after the event of vacations, separations, relocations and home improvements. They had, over the years, come to realize that failing a kitchen strike, a raised voice was the only way to make their presence known.
‘Write down that she uses terrible profanity,’ shouted Mrs Huxley, anxious to add her penny’s worth.
‘And smokes cigarettes,’ hollered Mrs Kellerman, unsure as to whom they were speaking of, but convinced, as she had been from her earliest Baptist days, that only the commonest kind of people and sluts smoked cigarettes.
‘And she turned Malcolm against us,’ spat Clary O’Hare. A round room’s worth of assenting nods and yeahs confirmed his suspicions.
‘And that she hit Irene in the face with an enormous golf umbrella,’ concluded Miss Pamela Richardson, taking the opportunity to further embellish the lie.
In the corner, by the spider plant, Irene began to cry softly, tracing a single finger backwards and forwards across her papery cheek as if attempting to locate the imaginary spot where she’d been struck.
‘I don’t like that girl,’ she whispered. ‘It’s bad luck to bring an umbrella indoors.’
No one blamed Malcolm directly, but the ghost of his rebellion was a grave cloud looming over the living room ceiling, constraining all their thoughts and deliberations. In the kitchen dinette with a cup of scorched coffee cooling in
his hand, Cunningham Holt listened carefully and held his tongue. He neither agreed nor disagreed with the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs. He was a moderate man and rarely took sides. Despite his betting past, organized sports were wasted on Cunningham Holt for he found himself rooting, on every occasion, for a measured draw, a result which would favor no man over the other. Yet Malcolm Orange had taken the trouble to tie him down and with this small gesture, an act of kindness unrivalled in Cunningham Holt’s entire sinking existence, the old man felt himself forever bound to the boy.
For seventy years, Cunningham Holt had been entirely dependent on the arms, the shoulders and kindly gestures of others. Though he sponsored several black children in unfortunate countries and was first to subsidize the Annual Thanksgiving Turkey and Tipples Tea Dance when the cutbacks set in – using his small fortune to bless the needy – he had never once had the opportunity to help another individual.
Each evening when night descended upon the cul-de-sac and the residents turned their attention to sleep, to sexual activities and earnest prayer, Cunningham Holt lay back on his collapsible table bed and consoled himself with a series of fervent superhero fantasies. In each of these vignettes he would imagine himself a much younger man, wide-eyed and blessed with above average intelligence, coming to the aid of ordinary people in jeopardy. Not for Cunningham Holt the anonymity of the mask or clichéd cape. He felt no need to assume superhuman strength or powers. He simply strode through these imaginary situations, mundane as an office worker, in corduroys and well-worn Hush Puppies, adjusting satellite television aerials, fixing burst water mains and escorting elderly ladies from one side of Fred Meyer’s parking lot to the other. Having been catapulted into a lifetime of dependency, it was Cunningham Holt’s holiest, miracle dream that he would one day be allowed the pleasure of helping someone do something they could not do by themselves.
Malcolm Orange was not himself. Cunningham Holt could hear this in the cut of his voice. Malcolm was disappearing and Cunningham Holt felt it his incumbent duty to interfere. Whilst the debate ricocheted round the People’s Committee, fluctuating between petitions, protests and old-fashioned lynchings, he took the opportunity to tip the dregs of his coffee into the waste disposal and slip, unnoticed, out the back door.
No one noticed Cunningham Holt leave. Ninety minutes earlier, assisted by an ancient cane, no one had noticed him arrive. Edging from one garden to the next, with nothing more than a memory map to guide him, the old man began to circumvent the cul-de-sac’s edge in pursuit of Malcolm Orange.
On the other side of the cul-de-sac, crouching between the recycling bin and a long-abandoned fridge-freezer, Soren James Blue was trying to recall the best way to break into a house.
Soren James Blue was enormously angry. The People’s Committee for Remembering Songs had reminded her of her parents; ordering, organizing, coming upon her suddenly like a too-tight sweater. Soren James Blue could not stand to be restrained. All summer, subjected to the trials and treatments of the Center, walled up in the Baptist Retirement Village with her insides tumbling out, she hadn’t been able to muster the energy for an enormous anger. This morning she’d felt stronger, strong enough to order someone else into submission. Malcolm Orange had been a miracle find. She fully intended to torture him mercilessly, correcting the imbalance in her self-defined power structure, for the remainder of the summer.
The People’s Committee had not been part of her plan. Groups made Soren James Blue edgy and claustrophobic. She would never be the sort of dictator interested in a co-op. Standing on Irene’s oriental rug, the anger had come bubbling out of her like a suppressed sneeze. She wanted nothing to do with the old folk. She wanted to destroy each one of them, individually. She wanted to wreak havoc on their homes and gardens, torturing them into taking her seriously.
Soren James Blue wanted to give the People’s Committee a proper, quantifiable reason to dislike her; something more immediate than a nose ring, more personal than a mistrust of her father, more reassuring than the faint assumption, present from the age of three, that she was simply one of those thoroughly unlovable little girls. Burglary seemed a natural place to begin her reign of terror.
A lifetime of parental indifference had allowed Sorry more than adequate exposure to the sort of movies which gave graphic guidance on how to kill zombies, blow shit up, pleasure men (and also women), ingest ungodly amounts of habit-forming drugs and, most importantly, vandalize other people’s property. As she crouched beside the bin, the stench of moldering vegetable scraps turning her stomach, Sorry made a mental list of every burglary she’d ever witnessed. A glasscutter and suction device were her weapons of choice. However, there was also the distinct, ill-defined understanding that something could be done with a credit card or hairpin, twiddled in just the right fashion. Semtex, of course, was an option, or the mundane possibility of wriggling forehead first through an open bathroom window. With little in the way of burglarizing equipment and all windows frustratingly sealed, Soren James Blue had just settled upon the notion of instigating an old-fashioned smash and grab, when she caught sight of a pair of rubber-tipped sneakers peering around the corner of Chalet 5.
‘I can see you Malcolm!’ she whispered furiously. ‘Are you perving on me again?’
Malcolm Orange took two urgent steps backwards, dragging his sneakered toes behind him and, for the third time that day, accidentally thumped his head off the wall, hard enough to induce nausea. Chalet 5 swam in front of him, a brick and plasterboard cloud, coming and going before his eyes. He folded in two, grabbing his ankles for balance, and threw up on the gravel path. The vomit tasted of chocolate and vinegar. It caught him smartly in the back of the nose. He kept his head tucked between his knees for a good few seconds. Whilst bent, in pursuit of gravity’s centre, Malcolm examined the enormous gaps, blooming now like Holy Jesus stigmata in both wrists and ankles. Through the absence in his left wrist he could see a cockroach clambering across the hot gravel. The sensation of peering through his own bones caused him to vomit a second time. The cockroach disappeared, drowned in a deluge of half-digested Chips Ahoy.
‘Holy shit, Orange,’ exclaimed Sorry, ‘you’re like a barf fountain. I could learn a thing or two about puking from you.’
Malcolm Orange stood up and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He dropped his arms so they dragged dully against the edge of his thighs and glared at Soren James Blue. From this distance, with the taste of vomit settling on his tongue, she looked like a really bad idea. Though he couldn’t explain his own feet, the need to follow her, dashing from Bill’s doorway, across the turn circle and round the back of Chalet 5, had been irresistible. Malcolm Orange had never been in a gang before, and while he was not entirely clear if a fourteen-year-old girl and her cat equated to a proper gang, he’d been reluctant to miss out on the possibility.
Malcolm was having second thoughts now. He suspected that Sorry was about to break into Emily Fox’s kitchen. This realization split him. More than anything in the world Malcolm wished to impress Sorry and yet he did not want to go to prison or to the electric chair. Big time lies and cigarettes were only sins against the Jesus God and could, with the right amount of piety, be prayed into absolution. Burglary was an actual crime against the police and Malcolm Orange had no desire to risk the repercussions.
‘I’m going,’ he said.
‘Disappearing again?’ said Sorry and laughed glibly at her own wit.
‘Not funny. I’m going. I should check Ross is OK at Bill and Irene’s. I have things to do.’
‘Liar,’ she said, ‘you never do anything.’
(She was not far from the truth. Before Sorry’s arrival, Malcolm Orange had allowed his days to blur inconsequentially into each other. Passing time was marked only by the advent of night, of morning and Sunday dinner, when the Oranges almost always ate Mexican.)
‘Take off your shirt,’ she commanded.
‘No way,’ said Malcolm, ‘you already saw me naked once
today. I’m not falling for that again.’
‘Twice,’ said Sorry, ‘I’ve seen you naked twice today. Big, dumb thrill!’ and began to tug at his shirtsleeve.
Though loath to admit it, Malcolm Orange found the sensation of being undressed by a girl far less repulsive than he’d previously imagined. He muttered softly in objection, yet allowed himself to be disarmed and un-shirted, even ducking his head to assist with the last tug. Parts of him, previously perforated, seemed all of a sudden less problematic, warmer and inclined to flutter, like a barrel full of gin-drunk butterflies. Bare-chested, Malcolm folded his arms across the worst of the holes, and hooked his hands into his armpits. In the shadow from Chalet 5’s gable wall he was painfully white; the color of brand-new tube socks.
Malcolm Orange felt like Adam, caught between the Devil and a good, true thing. The next move, he recalled from the motel movies, belonged to him.
‘Take off your shirt,’ he commanded, and reached for a fistful of Sorry’s sleeve.
Soren James Blue threw back her head and laughed cruelly. This was not how things normally progressed on TV.
‘Nice try kid,’ she said, wrapped Malcolm’s shirt around her right fist and punched a grapefruit sized hole in the window of Emily Fox’s kitchen door. Withdrawing her fist she unrolled Malcolm’s shirt, shook the excess shards onto the back doorstep and handed the glassy shirt back to him. Malcolm Orange was in shock. He could not bring his hands to grab properly. The shirt slipped from his grasp and slithered down his legs, nicking a blood-red crescent into his kneecap, before it came to rest upon his left sneaker. He kicked the shirt loose. It landed in Chalet 5’s shrubbery.