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Belly Up

Page 16

by Rita Bullwinkel


  “She’s beckoning to someone else,” said the medium. “A group of young men.”

  Her herd of ever loyal lovers, thought Carol.

  These are the people I have killed, thought Sam, the crew-cut clad man.

  “They’re a group of brothers, I think,” said the medium. “But they’re not speaking English. Maybe that’s why they need the young woman here. She’s relaying information for them. One moment please. Please be quiet while I try to go in.”

  Lillian shifted in excitement that they might be her immigrant homesteading relatives.

  Then it was very quiet and Carol’s youngest granddaughter, Olivia, listened to the squirrels running up the trunk of the cedar trees and watched the way the light caught on the polyester curtains, emanating an orange glow, and the way the medium’s house looked so plastic and crooked and temporary, as if it had been made to be overtaken by nature and its flimsy architecture would yield to the trees and the vines and the animals and the dirt at the slightest push.

  Lillian, the master of the garden club, head honcho retiree, most beautiful out of all her Bend friends, the type of mature woman who looked younger than her age and would have been a perfect candidate to advertise expensive eye cream, waited gleefully. Here they were, she thought. Those boys have come to tell me I am the true daughter of their land. Because this was the narrative that she liked to tell herself, that she was of ancient Oregon stock, and before that strong French peasants, who all had good heads on their shoulders and success written on the insides of their wrists. It gave her a sense of authority, this lineage, which she liked telling people and most people, especially old people, found it an interesting narrative, one that checked all the right American boxes, but her friend Carol’s granddaughters, who were visiting from Seattle, had found this narrative, which they had been told on the drive down, entirely boring and despicable, especially the older teenage granddaughter, Izzy, who couldn’t help thinking that for all old peoples’ whining about children being stuck in their computers, that it was the older people who were the ones usually trapped in their own world, trapped in their made-up self-constructed narratives, not the youth. It was the older people like Lillian and her Grandma Carol and most well-off retirees that just told the same origin stories over and over again regardless of whether or not they were even true.

  And the stories always helped them. Like Lillian’s story about her dumb French ancestors. The story made Lillian seem both sophisticated and exotic and American and established to her garden club friends.

  Izzy knew what Lillian was up to when she convinced her grandmother, Carol, and their neurotic friend Phyllis, to go to the medium’s house and connect with the dead. This whole thing, this whole trip from Bend, was about Lillian’s narrative, what made Lillian look good and posh and fun.

  People never change, thought Izzy. Having friends is always an act of competition and mock compassion. Her poor daffy grandmother Carol was no better off than her little sister Olivia on her first day of the eighth grade. Izzy thought of Carol, her grandmother, dressed in Olivia’s Catholic school uniform and laughed a little in her head.

  Everyone ignored Anna and Cliff, the crying Portland couple, who had already found what they came here to get.

  The crew-cut-clad man, Sam, startled everyone when he asked, “What language are they speaking?”

  “The foreign brothers?” said the medium. “I can’t tell.”

  “Can you ask them?” said Sam.

  “Let me try to ask the woman if she knows,” said the medium. “She seems more receptive.”

  “What are they wearing?” said Sam, quickly, with more than a hint of impatience.

  “One moment,” said the medium. “I am looking. You know it’s not easy to hear what they’re saying. It’s like looking through a sand storm and trying to hear above the blows of the wind.”

  The only dead person Izzy knew with long blonde hair was a girl named Felicia whose mother had been a farm hand in Fresno and breathed in all the pesticides during her pregnancy that had likely left Felicia ridden with childhood cancer and dead. After Felicia lost all of her hair their sophomore year of high school Felicia wore a long blond wig which her close friends braided at lunch and put plastic clips in like they were signing the cast of a broken bone. Izzy didn’t know Felicia well. She was a friend of a friend. They had gone to the same parties and known who each other were, but when Felicia entered her last stay at the hospital, Izzy did not visit. In this way, Izzy thought of Felicia’s death like something tragic she had witnessed on television, something she had seen and had known was bad, but not something that really caused her any real emotional pain. After Felicia had died, Izzy had purchased and worn a big oversized T-shirt that said RIP FELICIA and had a big, color, fuzzy-framed, mall photo of Felicia’s face in the blonde wig screen printed on the back.

  Izzy did not speak out loud her thought that the unclaimed spirit at hand might be Felicia, because Izzy did not believe in spirits. Being a witch, however, was a fashion aesthetic that Izzy could relate to, so she eyed the medium’s silk headband enviously and wondered if she might be able to find it somewhere online where similar ones were sold.

  In contrast to Izzy’s rejection of the medium’s communications, Olivia found that every moment that passed inside the medium’s house she was more fascinated. Fascinated not because she believed any magic was really taking place, but because the way people were claiming the dead as the medium roll-called out their features was so bizarre. It reminded Olivia of the time her cousin, Lisa, got married and threw her bouquet out into a crowd of women who all jumped at the same time to catch it, and then screamed and laughed when they did, as if they had won something, which Olivia knew they had, or at least knew what the whole thing meant, impending proposal and so on, but that wasn’t what had interested her about the event. What got her watching at Lisa’s wedding was the clamoring and the way the crowd shifted when the bride swung left or right. “There it goes,” Olivia remembered thinking when Lisa finally threw it. The medium’s house was like that. Only everyone got a bouquet.

  “No one thinks the blonde girl is here for them?” repeated the medium.

  “You weren’t able to find out what language the brothers are speaking?” said Sam.

  “It’s not a language I know,” said the medium. “Maybe it’s ancient.”

  “How much do you know about languages?” said Sam.

  “Not a lot.”

  Sam was visibly annoyed by this answer, but his general cool did not waver. Olivia looked at him and realized he was probably in the Army. He had the haircut and clean shaven face for it, and presented himself in a conservative way that showed he was at once used to being told what to do and cared very little for the world that took place outside his own head. Also, there were a lot of young Army men in these parts of Oregon, Olivia knew. Young men who never graduated from high school, or just barely—young men who were looking for something commendable to do.

  Olivia, the youngest in the trailer by three years, thought that everyone’s faces looked eager. That Anna and Cliff even, despite being settled into mourning, looked attentive and present, and Lillian impatiently awaiting the arrival of her dead relatives, and Phyllis panting quietly in attention, and Izzy and her Grandma Carol looking around at the other present people, waiting to see who walked out of the grave next. And Sam, still patient, still sitting silently, leaned over his knees, his elbows resting on the tops of his thighs, his eyebrows waiting, furrowed in anticipation, politely questioning with his face if he could claim the dead brothers at hand.

  “I think they might be my ancestors,” said Lillian excitedly. “Are they speaking French?”

  “No,” said the medium. “They’re not speaking French and they’re not your ancestors. They’re responding negatively to your energy.”

  Lillian gave a little audible guffaw, looked at Phyllis, and blinked her eyes rapidly.

  “Spirits don’t care what you want,” said the medium.
“They come here because they want something from you.”

  Lillian crossed her arms and legs a little and leaned back into her chair and projected the bodily stance of, “What a bunch of crock. If I say they’re my ancestors, they’re my ancestors! What gives you the authority to tell me who these spirits belong to?”

  “I think they want something from you,” said the medium, looking at Sam. “Actually they’re circling around you, kind of yelling at you. One of them just tried to poke his finger in your ear.”

  “What the fuck,” said Sam. “Get them away from me.”

  “I can’t,” said the medium. “Maybe it would be best if you lay down so they can properly assess you.”

  “Like a dog,” said Sam.

  “You don’t have to do it,” said the medium.

  “I’ll lie down,” said Sam.

  Sam got up from his folding chair and lay down in the middle of the circle. The medium took a bundle of sage and lit it on fire and waved it over Sam’s head. Sam closed his eyes and spread his limbs out on the carpet while everyone else watched this performance. Olivia thought he looked dead.

  The boys Sam was after were ones he wasn’t sure if he had murdered. He’d killed other people at war, but with the others he had always been able to look at their bodies, to assess their corpses and think, here is a thing that was once living that is no longer alive. These boys, though, he could never be sure. It was at long range, with explosives. There was a boom and he had seen body-shaped objects lift off the ground, but whether they were dead—this he did not know. He did not know if they were brothers. He did not know if they were soldiers. They were boys, like him. He kept having dreams about them, as a group, some in which there were hundreds of them and others in which there were just two or three, and his dreams alternated between being a world in which they were alive, recovering, transferring crates of produce on and off a truck bed in a mountain, and a world in which they were all dead. In the dream of the dead, he became one of the boys and saw his body in a hole being shoveled full until it was all black with dirt and he could not see. So there were these two different realities of the boys dead or the boys alive, which he became, periodically, stuck in, and he just wanted one to sit with, which was what the medium was giving him, the fact that they were all dead.

  This was what he had come for and he was relieved that it was being delivered to him. Lying down on the floor as sage smoke came into his nose, he could feel his muscles that touched the carpet, which muscles pressed against the warm of the floor, and which parts of his body, like the backs of his knees and the crooks of his ankles, were lifted up off the carpet because the structure of his body’s bones would not let them touch.

  “Can everyone hum for me please?” said the medium. “Hmmmmmm.”

  Anna started in with vigor, so Cliff followed, and Olivia and Phyllis went willingly, while Izzy, Carol and especially Lillian were slow to follow but eventually joined in. The buzz of their voices sounded like bees hustling. It went on for a long time like that until the medium stopped and then everyone stopped and Sam got up and went back to his seat.

  The sage had smoked up the house and everyone’s voices were sore from humming. There was a sudden feeling of closeness in the ensuing silence, because everyone present had participated, and helped Sam accomplish his thing. What exactly had been done, they weren’t sure, but it felt good to have made a sound together for a period of time. This is why, Cliff thought, people like to sing.

  The medium had her eyes still closed when she said, “A cat. I usually don’t let them in if I see them on Saturdays, but you’re not from around here, are you Olivia? And coming back tomorrow would be too hard.”

  “Thank you,” said Olivia. She was glad that the medium hadn’t allowed anyone else to try and claim Skillet, a neighborhood kitten that she had adopted earlier in the year and that, less than a week after the adoption, had been run over by a car.

  Carol looked surprised. She had decided to take her two granddaughters to the medium because Lillian had wanted to go and Lillian and Carol were something of a duo, and Lillian had pleaded with Carol quietly about it for weeks and Carol liked being pleaded to. So even though Carol didn’t particularly care for talking to any spirits and didn’t really want to believe, she had gone and dragged her out-of-town visiting granddaughters with her. But now it all seemed kind of silly and things were going poorly because Lillian hadn’t seen any of her French relatives and Phyllis was happy as a clam and her youngest granddaughter, Olivia, was now delusionally petting an imaginary cat. Her daughter, the girls’ mother, would never forgive her, thought Carol. Good grief! She’d practically handed them over to the cult leader. Izzy looked more skeptical, which reassured her. But who knew what either of her two mysterious granddaughters really had going on inside their heads.

  “What a load of bullshit,” said Izzy. “How many fourteen-year-olds do you know, who at one point or another, have had a dead cat?” Lillian and Carol nodded in agreement. Everyone else ignored Izzy, most vehemently the medium, who did not even look Izzy’s way. Phyllis looked torn.

  Anna and Cliff were still huddled together on the far end of the circle, almost directly across from the medium. Cliff held Anna, who periodically touched the sleeping Wilma at both of their feet. Every time Cliff saw Anna touch below her knees it hurt him. Every stroke visibly showed him that he was not enough and that there was a hole and that as good as he was at not being broken he could not do anything for Anna that would fix what had happened and what was wrong. Cliff hoped Anna would not ask him to go back to this trailer with her. If she wanted to come again she would have to come alone.

  “This is the last one I’ll let in,” said the medium. “An old man.”

  “Don’t you think it’s Grandpa, Grandma Carol?” said Olivia.

  “No I don’t,” said Carol. “Your Grandpa wouldn’t have anything to say.”

  “I think it’s my husband,” said Phyllis.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Lillian. “Phyllis, your husband is still alive!”

  “It happens,” said the medium. “That some souls leave the bodies they inhabit in stages. Is it possible your husband has already begun to pass on to the next life?”

  “Probable,” said Phyllis. “I rarely realize he is alive.”

  “He says he hates you,” said the medium.

  “Well, I hate him too,” said Phyllis, looking strangely satisfied.

  “They’re all leaving now,” said the medium. “Your small hurt girl is getting up and going.”

  Anna put her head down in Cliff’s lap and did not say a word.

  “And the foreign brothers and the girl with long blonde hair and the old man. They’re all going back into the slit I let them in through,” said the medium. “To seal the slit, we’ll have to all hold hands.”

  Joined together in their circle of hand-holding, everyone looked very weary, especially Phyllis, Sam and Anna. On the way out the door the medium spritzed them each with holy water to keep the ghosts from following them outside her home.

  It’s a strange thing, the medium thought, the way we take care of our living. And even stranger how the living choose to take care of their dead. As she cleaned up her living room and put away the folding chairs she saw Olivia crouched over her dead kitten, it buried in the backyard, put into a hole on a bed of flowers. She saw Phyllis’s husband dead in five years, his corpse in a staunch Protestant funeral march, and Carol’s childhood friend Alice, syringe in purple arm. She saw Wilma, little and smashed in her tiny coffin, and Sam’s foreign brothers howling, lying down legless where they bled to death, and where their bodies stayed until someone found the remains days later and stacked their corpses into a funeral mound like closely pressed strips of dried meat.

  And the medium thought of the many ways in which one can come in and out of this life. She thought of the Catholic embalmers ready for the second coming, ready at will to wake up and walk again, stiff lips and an empty head without the br
ains which have been put in a separate bucket, pulled out of the body through the nose. And then she thought of the Tibetans that cut up their dead into a million pieces and feed the body-bits to the vultures, put their dead right back into the god-system as soon as they can so that the next life will be faster coming, faster found, so that the dead can enter the next body they want to be in before their old body even gets cold in the stomach pit of a big bird. And she thought of those white flocks of families on the banks of the Ganges, their dead painted in gold and red and put on a pile to burn and float downstream. The medium went to Banaras once and saw burning after burning. A black cloud of human flesh smoke had hung over the entire city. People everywhere, either stoic or crying, and everyone in white, everyone with flowers, everyone singing, praying, and the small little boy who could tell she wasn’t from there saying, “Come here, gorah, this way, let me show you the dead.” When the medium thought of her body and what it would look like when she left it, she wished she’d never had it in the same way that someone would regret buying an ill-fitting dress. It seemed to her so unbecoming, to have a body that is only of use temporarily, that after it is done with will be disposed. She thought of the living bodies which had been in her trailer only moments earlier (Phyllis, Carol, Lillian, Izzy, Olivia, Anna, Cliff, and Sam), and she pictured herself cutting open each of their brain containers so that what was truly in their heads became revealed. And she saw herself dipping into each of their brain buckets with a ladle and pulling out from the depths of their bowls their thoughts, which looked like sticky thick woolen thread.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks are owed to the following.

  Institutions

  A Strange Object

  Brown University

  Hawthornden Castle

  Tent: Creative Writing

  The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

  The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation

  The MacDowell Colony

 

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