Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories

by Various

  Atlanta Bowkers felt such an anger rise in the hollows of her skull that, for a moment, her eyelids went completely dry, and she could not see at all. When the moon misted her eyeballs once again, the black man was halfway across the schoolyard. His legs blurred in a rising mist cloud—droplets breathed from the field’s moist belly. Suddenly the sprinklers gushed, floating him up on moonlit rainbows. His feet did not touch the ground again, and he sailed into the night on a chariot of blue mist, looking for all the world like an angel.

  The next day, Atlanta Bowkers told everyone she met that the black man was the devil himself.

  “I doubt he’s the devil,” said Tom Hawkins, at the emergency meeting of the community association.

  “No.” Doug Smolz chewed the tip of his pen, staining his lips blue. “The devil is part of an old Christian myth that has licensed enough misery in the world, thank you very much.”

  “Yes,” Keeley O’Keefe, who had recently found within her a latent activism, agreed. “The crusades. Slavery. Colonialism. The list is long and bloody. No, let us not reactivate the Old World tales of the devil. Let us look for a less incriminatory myth.”

  “I heard,” said Gwen Packer, “that the whole edifice of Christian beliefs is actually built on an older stratum of Pagan mythology.”

  “You heard that in my class,” said Keeley O’Keefe.

  “I never took your class. I’ve never even been to university.”

  “Then you heard it from one of my students.”

  “I read it in a book by Guru Babi Cromwell, someone twice as knowledgeable about other cultures as—”

  “Ladies,” Doug Smolz held up a hand, blue-stained along the fortune lines. “You’re both right. There are older models to look at here. We need to give indigenous peoples their due, and recognize where we have stolen their lifeways.”

  “Were the Celts indigenous?” said Tom Hawkins. “Wasn’t anyone there before them? Because those are probably the people we should recognize, the people that had the roughest go of it.”

  The meeting lasted for five hours, only one of which was actually devoted to practical solutions. Of these, there were only three, soon whittled to one: to find and hire an expert in indigenous pagan mythologies. But this was no easy task. In fact, in the week after the ad was placed, only a few herbalists and chiropractors from the nearby suburb of Hummingbird Hills showed up, and, after their interviews, were all dismissed with a perfunctory “thank you.”

  “Good lord.” Tom Hawkins rubbed his sinuses, after the last chiropractor was gone. “What is the colour of evil anyway?”

  “White,” Doug Smolz said without hesitation. “Moby Dick was white. He was evil. Batman wears black, he’s a good guy.”

  “What does Robin wear?” said Gwen Packer.

  “Green. He wears tights too.” Tom Hawkins saw the look on Doug Smolz’s face, and quickly added, “Which doesn’t mean that he was gay. Or that there’s anything wrong with being gay. Not that it’s wrong not to be gay. Or not wrong to not be . . .” He rubbed his head.

  They made no headway over the next week. Meanwhile, many of the neighbours began to show up in growing congregations beneath the black man’s window, where they proceeded every sundown to beat drums to drown out the despicable wail of his violin. Those who didn’t own drums either went to buy them at the African Drum Shop, or resorted to rhythmic household items—gonging pots, panging pans, snipping scissors.

  “What colour is God?” yelled Keeley O’Keefe at the crowd.

  “No colour!” they yelled back.

  The drums throbbed. There were phone calls from adjacent suburbs, inquiring into the racket. The Six O’Clock News showed up. High school cheerleaders arrived to lend choreographic support, and nobody quite caught the irony that the Bergamot High football team was nicknamed The Devils. Not until Robbie Goodings, who seemed to enjoy the chaos, pointed it out. “Why not make the black man the team mascot?”

  He suggested it sarcastically; it was received seriously. “Yes,” folks said with a great deal of enthusiasm. “Why not? That’s the best thing the neighbourhood could do under the circumstances.”

  The drums throbbed. Through it all, no one noticed that one evening the black man himself quietly packed up his violin and left by the back door. No one noticed, not for weeks, until one evening Atlanta Bowkers burst sobbing from the front doors, mascara smearing her cheeks in salty stripes, and cried, “He’s gone!”—then collapsed to the lawn, while behind her Debra Gentry forgot that the doors opened inward, and, in her roaring hurry to second the news, flattened her face on the glass like a bug on a windshield.

  The drums stopped. There was a grand moment of silence, a collective indrawing of breath. Somewhere in the neighbouring suburb of Hummingbird Hills, a police siren unwound itself.

  “After all we did for him,” said Keeley O’Keefe, finally. The sentiment was echoed in an instantaneous and almost mystical outpouring of collective rage, in which everyone’s self-awareness vanished, and the drums pounded again, and the usually composed citizens of Bergamot View began to dance madly, and wailed, and smoked cigarettes materialized from nowhere, and pulled each other’s hair, and, perhaps, though it was not substantiated, engaged in unspeakable varieties of sexual commerce with each other’s spouses, behind bushes, inside faux-fountains, atop picnic tables.

  Next morning, no one was completely clear on what had happened. Tables were overturned. There was mustard everywhere. And the black man—the devil, or djinn, or whatever he was—had truly gone. Robbie Goodings suggested that, if the devil had been watching the night’s shady spectacle—already so vacant in collective memory—he had probably decided to leave for good.

  “Well, fine,” said Robbie’s mother. “He was not what we were looking for in the first place.”

  Days later, Robbie, himself, disappeared. The police found nothing but a cold trail through the woods at the end of Dinger Crescent, where the moon pooled in silver hollows, and the detectives grew sleepy, and emerged hours later with only a hushed memory of violins. They said the boy had likely run away. There was no foul play. There was nothing anyone could do. Ginger Goodings cried for days, and could not sleep at all, not even with the aid of gentle herbs. She spent nights repainting her walls in fauvist greens and yellows, and only came out of mourning to practice yoga and deep breathing on the boulevard.

  After several weeks of embarrassed nods and perfunctory hellos, the community association regrouped to organize damage control and a new plan, for the suburb of Bergamot View did not take lightly its responsibilities to social justice and world citizenship.

  “We need to get back on the horse,” said Tom Hawkins. “We need to address, once again, the imbalance of racial diversity in our community. We need to get someone into that apartment again.”

  Everyone nodded. Ginger Goodings nodded off.

  “But what kind of tenant?” said Doug Smolz. “We need to do it right this time.”

  “A Celt?” suggested Kelley O’Keefe.

  “Not indigenous,” said Tom Hawkins.

  In the end, they prioritized a list of visible ethnicities, and decided that, in context, a Native American—not an Indian, they were from India—would make the most suitable tenant for the flat above the old Chinese grocer’s, given that they were here first, and that they had a beautiful mythological system which could really teach everyone a lot about taking care of the earth, if not the lawns.

  The new plan, while not foolproof, was a measurable improvement over the last. Its possible ramifications were thoroughly discussed and specified, its margins for error finessed through a software designed originally by Aruna Mohanraj, one of the suburb’s dentists, to track the hygienic maintenance of her patients. So the community association sent out a new summons, by newspaper and worldwide web, which said:

  Wanted: One red man to receive free lodging and sundry benefits in the Community of Bergamot View. We are very firm on our criterion: you must be a red man. Please apply in person
.

  That evening, the hedge that ringed the woods at the end of Dinger Crescent parted its leafy curtains, and a devil stepped through.

  Originally published in On Spec, Winter 2003 Vol 15 No 4 #55

  A.M. Arruin lives in an abandoned hotel in the Porcupine Hills, with a crow who talks, a cat who wishes he could, and a fish who thinks she can. He was once the author of Crooked Timber: Seven Suburban Faerie Tales, along with many published short stories and poems.

  Pizza Night

  Laurie Channer

  There’s a slam like a gunshot going off, makes you and Lesley both jump a foot on the couch, nerves instantly on edge. You look across the clutter of the big loft, to see Tim, electric and alone, near the door, his date nowhere in sight. “Shut up!” he yells over. “She’s gone, all right?” He whirls and punches the door, hard, twice, and that shakes you, too. “FUCK!” he blares. Of course he hurt himself. “FUCK!” again. Of course it made him madder. Past the plants, bookshelves and entertainment unit, he kicks at something you can’t see, and you hope it’s nothing of yours or Les’s. You know he’s acting out, but it twists your guts to see force applied like this.

  He bounds over to his area and turns up his thrash metal. Slipknot or Tool or one of those bands whose name adorns most of his T-shirts. That’s not usually a problem, after all; you like Hole.

  It’s getting harder to hear the movie you rented, but you bite your tongue before daring to say anything. Even before tonight, you’ve been finding it harder and harder to confront him, because of the ensuing hassles. “C’mon, Tim,” you try, more wheedling than decisive. You want this to be a nice night for Les, who’s had a bad week with pain. “What’s the rule about volume?”

  He turns his too-bright eyes toward the two of you. It’s well-lit over where he is; he switched on his track lighting a while ago, and Les turned your lights down to watch the TV screen better at the start of the movie. It’s like he’s showcased in spotlights for you and Lesley, the audience, in the near dark, side by side on the sofa over in the other end of the loft. Tim waits just long enough to make you think he’s going to ignore you, which might actually be a relief in itself, but then he hops over to his stereo and dials it down to the marker you all agreed to six months ago when he moved in. It’s a line at 6 in red-black nail polish. It’s his, from a night he went to see Marilyn Manson. Les threw all her nail polish out years ago, and you’ve never owned any. Six is still kind of loud, but the loft is big enough that you’re supposed to be able to hear the TV in your end while he plays his music in the other end, near the door, no one disturbing the other, especially Lesley now that she’s on disability. You wondered when he moved in what you and Les would do if he didn’t respect the volume arrangement, what kind of trouble that would be. Those were the days.

  Hyperacuity has set in now, though, and you’re sensitive to the slightest noise from Tim’s end. And the noise is more than slight. He’s still pissed, and he’s not done showing it. He wants to be noticed, of course, so you and Les avoid so much as glancing his way, the same reason and the same way you’ve made it a practice to determinedly stare away from stretch limos when you see them gliding through the centre of the city. You don’t want to give him the satisfaction of attention.

  It’s Lawrence of Arabia on the DVD player, four hours of it, your pick because you’ve never seen it before and it’s supposed to be stupendous. It’s wasted, though, because with all Tim’s slamming around, you can’t concentrate, haven’t picked up on who the characters are or what’s going on. Every scene is newly disorienting. Les has had to explain to you nine times who Alec Guinness is playing. You can think of him only as Obi-Wan Kenobi, a calm and comforting presence from Star Wars, and you wish he was here. Instead, he looks so different in this picture, and it unsettles you more than it ought to. It’s only a movie. You reach for the remote, ready to bail on the whole thing, but Les takes it from you. “This is what we do. Don’t let him win.”

  You know what she means. It’s Friday night: date night, movie night, pizza night. It is what you and she do together, and have done since you met. You do it even though she’s barely mobile any more with her fibromyalgia and her wrecked back. It’s the highlight of her week now that she can’t teach anymore.

  The movie’s meant nothing to you now, though, since the first half hour. The pizza’s sitting cold on the coffee table in front of you, barely touched. Tim has won, even though his beef wasn’t with either of you. The more he bangs things around in his end of the loft, the more he enlarges his own angry sphere. He’s constricted yours and Lesley’s two-thirds of the loft until it feels like the two of you are sitting together on a little life raft the size of this couch, this table and this TV screen, exposed and adrift in his turmoil.

  Tim is puttering slightly less noisily on his side of the loft. You sneak a look and see he’s rummaging through desk drawers, in the manner of a Muppet, even down to tossing the stuff he doesn’t want willy-nilly back over his shoulder. He moves to the kitchen, does the same through the utensil drawers.

  “I can’t find the big scissors!” he yells. “Where’s the big scissors? I need the GOOOOOOD scissors!”

  You stop looking. You know the sound each drawer makes, though, and can follow his path by listening, though you’re trying not to hear.

  “SOMEONE HAS TO HELP ME FIND THE GOOD SCISSORS!”

  You sit up straighter on the couch and start to open your mouth to holler back when Lesley puts a hand on your arm. She shakes her head wearily, her meds draining her. This is old news. Tim venting out loud. This is what he does. And what it always does to you. It’s always the same amplitude whether it’s something major like spilling coffee on his computer, or minor, like a pen that won’t write. But tonight you don’t know why it’s especially menacing. Maybe you and Lesley don’t need his share of the rent that badly.

  “Are you just going to sit there, you great fat puddings, or is someone going to help me?”

  Lesley shakes her head again. “Don’t take the bait,” she says, not taking her eyes from the screen. “Don’t give him the satisfaction.”

  Sharing a loft is an exercise in not hearing. Your friends always ask, “Sure, maybe you can tune out somebody else’s TV or phone conversation, but what about, you know . . . sex?”

  You actually can ignore the noises of him with a girl. In fact, it sounds so embarrassingly clumsy, you’d rather not listen in. And he’s had to tune out you and Lesley. He hasn’t said it’s a problem. In loft-living, when you can’t help but hear, the unspoken rule is to at least pretend you don’t. Despite the insinuations some people have made about him listening in, you seriously doubt he’s been getting off on the sound of two overweight, middle-aged dykes getting at it, as infrequently as it happens. It’s not what twenty-two-year-olds salivate over when they think of girl-on-girl scenarios.

  But it’s why you don’t really know what’s gone on here tonight. You’ve gotten so good at tuning out that by the time you actually did hear the commotion, the sharp sounds, voices and that final slam, they were already vibrations dying away on the air. And then you weren’t sure what you’d heard. And it’s that and what you have or haven’t done about it that’s the real problem. Not Tim.

  He’s still bashing around in his end, muttering away to himself, occasionally tramping back and forth to the bathroom, and you feel small in the face of it. You finally say to Les what’s been bothering you the most. You say it very quietly, sunk down as you are on the couch, partly so Tim can’t hear, and partly because you’re ashamed. It’s over an hour too late. “I think he hit her.”

  Lesley’s answer is quick. She’s not as zoned on her medication as you thought she was. “No, he didn’t. He wouldn’t. We were sitting right here.”

  “We heard something.”

  Les is firm, “That was a door slam.”

  “You don’t want to believe he hit her because we didn’t do anything.” All the things you and Les have stood for, marched for, s
poken out about, the rainbow of ribbons you’ve worn. But that was years ago, before you both got so tired. Take Back the Night? Hell, tonight you can’t even Take Back the Loft.

  “It wasn’t the sound of flesh hitting flesh,” Lesley says, “It was something hard. She slammed the door on her way out or he slammed it after her. She’s not here anymore, is she?”

  You cast your mind back to that one specific moment, the first minute everything changed. There were raised voices you hadn’t been properly aware of except in retrospect, and the one loud sound that drew your attention to the fact that something had been going on. Les is right, it wasn’t a smack on skin, nor even a fist to soft flesh. It had been harder, sharper, woodier. It could have been the door. It could have been a body hitting a wall or something. But there was only one slam. The girl was gone now, so it had to have been the door. If she’d been slammed first, there’d have been two sounds. You take some consolation from that.

  You know, however, that you’re rationalizing. Whatever the details, something happened tonight, under your roof, and the more it sits with you, the worse it sits with you. Something that caused Tim’s date to leave so abruptly was maybe something you and Les should have stepped in on. You are more uncomfortable than ever.

  Eyes on the screen, you wish the movie was shorter, because you can’t bear the thought of sitting here, miserable, unable in your current circumstance to comprehend a word of it for another two hours plus. It might as well be a foreign movie with no subtitles and no dubbing, as you stare dumbly at it, not seeing. At the same time, you wish the movie was longer, because as soon as it’s over, you will have to move, speak, interact. Something more will be expected of you and you’re afraid of what that will be, or what effect it will have. For now it’s cover to hide behind. This is what we do on Friday nights. Instead of watching the moving images, all you can do is watch the digital counter on the DVD player tick over slow seconds.