Lit Riffs

by Matthew Miele

  You’re becoming brittle, I repeated.

  Is the sex good with the undertaker? Pam asked.

  It is what it is, I replied.

  I imagine it’s like being fucked by a tall, white candle. That’s how I imagine it. All waxy and cold. So when do you dock? And if you had to choose between Garitón and Oberlin, which would you choose? Oberlin is a lot more hospitable to homosexuals.

  Is your son gay? I asked. Above me, in the dark, I heard the hum of an airplane engine.

  No! Pam said. I just think homosexuals are smarter, but care less about grades. My son could have very smart, very chic friends who wouldn’t compete over GPAs.

  I dock tomorrow, I said.

  I’ll book you a flight, Pam said.

  Where has he been? I asked. The airplane hum grew louder. It messed up our reception.

  I don’t know where he’s been, but I know where he is, Pam said.

  Where is he? I asked. I could barely hear her.

  Look up, Pam said, and her phone cut out.

  Silor and I parted amiably at the dock in Helsinki. I checked into the room with the mink headboard. I pretended Elgar was in the shower, I pretended he was wearing his eye pillow and lost in the closet. He was here, though. He was here, and I lay on the bed, I rubbed against the mink headboard and waited. I thought, if a woman is prone on a bed, she must have a reason. I missed my flight, I missed another flight. I ate everything in the zinc guest fridge.

  After three days, I showered and put on a new gray suit, fresh from its brown paper wrapping. The fortune said, Who has more emotions? A squinel frozen in a waterfall or Miss Winterbottom? Ha ha ha! The suit hung off me and let the cold air from the sidewalk up inside it. I walked into a boutique and bought a white coat, a white fur hat, a pair of elk-skin gloves the color of the teeth of the waiter in the Japanese restaurant.

  I wandered through town until town was gone. Soon I came to a country club. There were tire tracks pressed into the snowy road, so I walked in them. The road curved to the left and I saw the clubhouse and a frozen lake and the white golf course beyond. I saw a pair of men out on the first tee, or maybe it was the second tee. They were practicing their swings in the knee-high snow. Each clumsy swipe lofted a sparkling wing of snow into the air.

  I recognized the winter sporting-eye pillow. I had worn it to bed, once, when the hotel’s heating system failed.

  You’re not following through, I heard Elgar say. The eye pillow was pushed up into his hair.

  Silor gripped his club and sliced meanly at the snow.

  No, no, Elgar said. Are you thinking of your wife when you swipe at the snow?

  Silor nodded, grim-faced. Elgar handed him his flask.

  Well, don’t, Elgar said. First rule of golf is to shelve your rage at the clubhouse. Look at me, he said. Look at how I have shelved my rage so that this driver—he shook the driver—this driver is not a barometer of my myriad disappointments. Do you understand?

  Silor returned the flask. Elgar threw it into the snow. The flask sank from view.

  Now then, Elgar said. Watch.

  He fumbled in his hair, pushing the eye pillow over his eyes. He wiggled his bottom back and forth, he made a few slow-motion strokes through the air, he gripped and regripped the club.

  Maybe I made a noise, or maybe I was simply breathing louder than the wind.

  Elgar froze. He unslumped himself and directed his eyepillowed gaze at me.

  Miss Winterbottom, he said.

  Silor turned. Saw me. Raised a halfhearted palm.

  You should be ashamed of yourself, Miss Winterbottom. According to rumor, you’ve been a very bad employee, sleeping with the clients. How does that make us look at Elgar’s Disposables? How does it make us look?

  I didn’t respond.

  It makes us look unprofessional, Miss Winterbottom. It makes it look like we’ve running a class-act brothel instead of an unreliable wood supply company. I need not tell you that this creates confusion with our brand identity.

  I’m actually not so confused, Silor said.

  Shut up, Elgar said. You wouldn’t know an orifice from a wormhole.

  Silor kicked around in the snow with a black-booted foot, searching for the flask.

  I think, if you want your job back, which is what I’m guessing you want, then you should take off your clothes, Miss Winterbottom, and lie down here on the snow.

  He tapped at an untouched snowy spot with his driver. The driver made a whispery blue divot that the wind quickly erased.

  I stared at Elgar and pretended that, beneath it all, he was a good man with some queer ideas. It was easier than admitting we were two eternally cold souls incapable of thawing, for no especially good reason. But next to him, I would never appear emotionally lacking, and isn’t that the definition of a soul mate? A person who allows you to appear gloriously as something you are not and can never, will never be?

  I lay in the snow and took off my clothes. Elgar picked up his antique driver and placed the wooden club on my forehead. He ran the club along the ridge of my profile, he slid it down my throat, between my breasts. This sounds so humiliating, I know, but I cannot explain that this was a moment of tenderness between two Eternal Helens, this was a moment of gorgeous depravity for the invulnerables of this world. Elgar lifted a snowy boot and pressed the treads into my chest.

  And where will you send me, Miss Winterbottom? he asked. I want to see the stars.

  I was about to answer when my phone rang. Silor wrestled with my coat, and the phone fell into the snow, leaving a little heart-shaped hole.

  Silor handed the phone to Elgar.

  Hello? he said.

  I looked at Silor. Silor shrugged.

  Miss Winterbottom, how wonderful to hear from you. And how’s your son? Got into Harvard I hear? Yes, yes, I believe there’s an excellent amount of homosexuals there. Would you like to speak to your predecessor?

  Elgar dropped the phone on my belly. I put it to my ear.

  Pam? I said.

  I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, Pam said. Who’s Miss Winterbottom?

  Pam, I—

  Don’t listen to a thing he says, Helen. The man’s a necrophiliac, I swear he is. You’ll be dead before he gets another hard-on. I’m thinking maybe this method of mine isn’t working for you. Have you thought about getting a job, Helen?

  I have a job, I said.

  You’ve never had a job in your life. You don’t know what work is. Did you hear my son got into Harvard? That little bastard owes me everything. I told him if he doesn’t call me twice a week, I’ll make sure he flunks out.

  I dropped the phone into the snow and propped myself up on my elbow. I was alone on the golf course. Two pairs of footprints led into the woods. I heard laughter between the trees, I heard Pam’s voice distantly saying a squirrel in a waterfall or maybe it was you’re too spineless Helen or look up. I looked up but the sky was the same color as the snow, and the whole world felt like the inside of something, like a furred, soundless interior, safe and empty. I started to giggle, or cry, I wasn’t sure which, but the snot on my face made me colder than an avalanche worth of snow. I reached for my coat pocket to get a tissue. Instead I discovered a tiny filigree of paper, airmail thin and crumby to the touch, as though it had just been cracked free of its cookie prison.

  It said, If a woman is not built for laughter at her expense, she is not built for love.

  author inspiration

  Cat Power’s mournful cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I Found a Reason” is all the more haunting a rendition when you listen to the original—a jaded, jangling, tongue-in-cheek love song that bears no resemblance to Cat Power’s quasidirge. I liked the idea of doing a “third-generation” cover, one that would blend Reed’s jaded with Marshall’s haunted and collapse the two versions into one that spoke to both approaches. The main characters, thus, are loosely based on what I know of Reed and Marshall. Helen hides behind her hair, as Marshall is famed for doing
at performances, and Elgar is a picky eater who dines at fancy restaurants. I used to waitress at an aggressively romantic French restaurant in Manhattan that was, inexplicably, a favorite of Reed’s. But there was a lot of velvet, and since, in the name of romance, the restaurant was dark (and abutted the Holland Tunnel), you did feel you were underground. Regardless, Reed was a refreshingly grumpy presence in the midst of the near-nightly wedding engagements and the banquette snuggling and the vaguely desperate quality to everyone’s supposed happiness. That incongruity—a curmudgeon in the house of desperate love—is what, I hope, my version captures.

  SWAMPTHROAT

  arthur bradford

  I’m on my way to the promised land … I’m on the Highway to Hell …

  “Highway to Hell”

  AC/DC

  William “Swampthroat” Simpson was my idol. He was a heavyset, lumbering oaf of a guy who wandered around our town with his head down and long, stringy hair covering his eyes. When he was seventeen, years before I met him, a chain saw slipped from his hands and bounced up into his neck. He lost four pints of blood that day, but they saved him at the hospital. To cover up the damage, the doctors placed a series of skin graphs on his neck, leaving his throat scarred and covered in patches of different colors. It was difficult for him to shave properly after that and there were often stray whiskers, long and curly, sprouting from his neck. This was why we all called him Swampthroat. He wasn’t fond of the name and always introduced himself as William, but he allowed us to call him Swampthroat all the same.

  I first met Swampthroat when he started dating my older sister, Robin. He was twenty-four years old then and I was sixteen. Robin had sort of a wild streak and it was considered an unusual thing to do, to go out with a guy like Swampthroat. I was sitting on the couch when Robin first brought him home. He clomped inside wearing big leather boots, tracking dirt onto the floor.

  “Next time take your boots off,” Robin said to him.

  “Sorry,” said Swampthroat. He had a deep, scratchy voice. It was sort of timid and quieter than what you’d expect. Maybe his vocal chords were damaged, too. He saw me sitting there and walked toward me, still tracking dirt behind him.

  “My name’s William,” he said, extending his hand.

  “Hi,” I said. His hand was fat and meaty. It was dirty, too.

  “You can call him Swampthroat,” said Robin. “Everyone else does.”

  Swampthroat nodded in agreement and we shook hands.

  Robin led him upstairs and they went into her bedroom. Robin liked to listen to loud rock music. Swampthroat enjoyed this kind of music as well, and together they would listen to it for hours. Robin wasn’t bad looking or unpopular and I wondered at first why she would want to be associated with a guy like Swampthroat. But, as I came to see later, it was his reckless side that made him attractive.

  Later on that day, after he and Robin had left the house, our mother came home and said, “What’s that smell?”

  I said, “Swampthroat was here.”

  That winter Swampthroat drove his van off a bridge. He’d been going fast, hit some ice, and went into a skid. He and his van landed in the shallow river below the bridge and he nearly drowned because the impact knocked him out. They found him lying facedown in the cold water. No one was sure how long he’d been lying like that, but it was determined that because the water was so cold, it had slowed his heart down and allowed him to survive without oxygen for an unusually long time.

  “You’re a lucky man, William,” the doctor said.

  Without his van Swampthroat had no way to get to work, so Robin let him use her car, a little hatchback, which had once belonged to our father. Swampthroat crashed that car, too. He hit a deer one night and then plowed into a pile of rocks. The car could still drive though and Swampthroat chased down the deer, which had been limping by the side of the road. He then killed it with one of the large rocks from the pile he’d run into.

  “It was suffering,” he explained.

  Swampthroat stood at our doorway with blood on his hands, telling us the story. Outside, in front of our house, sat Robin’s beat-up hatchback. Tied to its roof was the dead deer.

  “You idiot,” said Robin.

  “I didn’t want it to go to waste,” he said.

  Robin broke up with him then. She’d had enough. Before he left, Swampthroat took me out behind the house and showed me how to clean and dress the deer for eating. He did it all with a small hunting knife and some rope. It was sort of like cleaning a fish, except messier, and with more fur. He presented the venison to Robin and my mother as a gift, to help offset the damage he’d done to the car. It was a lot of meat and my mother looked at it perplexed.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” she said, once he had left.

  I inherited Robin’s hatchback after that because I was just then learning to drive. The car worked all right even though its front end was wrinkled up and the windshield was cracked. I had to wash the deer blood off it, too. I didn’t have an official license, just a learner’s permit, which allowed me to drive with another, older person in the car. But I often took the car out anyway, by myself, just to have the feeling of being away on my own.

  One time I was driving along the State Road and I saw Swampthroat standing by a billboard with his thumb out, hitchhiking. I was surprised to see him there and passed him by. I went a mile or so down the road and then realized he had probably recognized the car. I figured I had better turn around and pick him up. It was doubtful that anyone else would stop for him.

  When I pulled up next to him, Swampthroat seemed relieved to see that it wasn’t Robin at the wheel. He got inside and immediately the car filled with his damp, grungy smell, the odor of Swampthroat.

  “So, you got yourself some wheels,” he said to me.

  “That’s right, thanks to you.”

  “Did you eat that deer?”

  “Not yet. I don’t think so.”

  “Tell your mom to cook it up,” he said. “Make a stew. That’s good meat.”

  “Okay.”

  We drove for a while down the State Road before Swampthroat asked me where I was going.

  “I’m just driving,” I told him.

  “Oh, right.” He thought for a minute, peering ahead at the open road. “Maybe you could take me to see a friend?”

  “How far is it?”

  “About an hour.”

  “You have money for gas?” I asked him.

  “Sure.”

  This was a concern because although the hatchback was small, it didn’t get good mileage. I was going broke driving it around. We stopped at a gas station and Swampthroat used his last six dollars to put gas in the tank. It turned out he’d lost his job on account of not having a car. I noticed, too, once we got going again, that his knuckles were scabbed up and swollen.

  “I got in a tussle,” he explained.

  We drove forty miles down the State Road and then he told me to slow down. He leaned forward and scanned the side of the road.

  “Up there,” he said. “See that sign?”

  There was a hand-painted wooden sign a little ways ahead of us. It marked the entrance to a small dirt road.

  “Turn there,” he said to me.

  When we got up close, I was able to read the words on the sign. Painted in drippy black letters, it said, “Highway to Hell.”

  We drove down this road, hardly a highway, for several miles. I’d never been this way before. Grass was growing up between the tire tracks, and several times the underside of the hatchback scraped loudly against the earth below, especially on Swampthroat’s side where the car rode lower.

  Finally we reached a sad-looking shack tucked into a nook in the woods. A small yard had been cleared away out front, and rows of blue plastic barrels were scattered about within a maze of chicken-wire fencing. Swampthroat explained that chickens of various rare breeds were living inside those barrels. The proprietor of the shack, a woman named Tilly, raised them and sold the
m to collectors.

  “She’s famous for her hens,” he said, “known around the world.”

  A wobbly old hound shimmied it’s way out from under the shack and began barking at us.

  “I better go inside,” said Swampthroat.

  He made no mention of me going with him and I was just as happy to wait there in the car. Swampthroat walked past the growling hound and knocked on the door. It opened up and he went inside.

  The hound lay down on the grass and ignored me. I watched the blue barrels for signs of the famous hens inside. I figured they must have been sleeping because I saw nothing, though I did hear an occasional cluck. Eventually Swampthroat emerged from the house carrying a small paper sack and walking more quickly than usual. He opened up the car door and threw his big body inside.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  I started up the car, began to turn it around. An older woman wrapped up in a camouflage army coat stepped out of the house and stood there glaring at us. Her long gray hair was done up in an untidy bun with the loose strands flying about her head.

  “Is that Tilly?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Swampthroat. “Let’s go.”

  A younger, potbellied man came walking out from behind the house. He was holding some kind of wooden device with a short rope attached to it.

  “Let’s go,” said Swampthroat again.

  The potbellied man stopped walking toward us and raised the wooden device up to his shoulder. It was a crossbow, a homemade job constructed of two-by-fours and regular household rope. I pressed down on the gas and we lurched forward down the bumpy dirt road, not moving very fast. A loud metallic thud rang out as something smacked hard into the back of the car. In the rearview mirror I saw the potbellied man stooped over, reloading his crossbow. We plowed ahead, barreling down that “Highway to Hell” as fast as I dared to drive, and that man didn’t get a chance to fire his weapon at us again.