My mind travels fast, faster than fastballs and agile tongues – from grisette to ball(s), ball to diamond, a song “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” and so on.
The first strike came through the bay window, beveled glass blasted to kingdom come, at least as far as the dining room and, as luck would have it, the kitchen, because the pantry door was open. It was a sunny afternoon. Light leaked in the window and the hole in the window and, of course, it refracted in the lethal bits that penetrated the Martha Stewart wallpaper and slipcovers and the oil paint-ing of his mother, turning his living room into a veritable disco ball.
He never found the ball or the kid who threw or hit the ball, even though he ran directly outside, naked, as it happens, because he had just emerged from the shower, and had a look around. I should say a myopic look, because he hadn’t put in his contact lenses. No kid, no ball, no mother dragging kid by the ear to apologize, no contacts. That would be four balls, a walk.
Because he prided himself on logic, he deduced from this lack of forensic information that the beautiful explosion in his living room was caused by a bullet. This is what he told the cops: “I was standing in the window [actually showing his wet/naked/fragrant self to the young Adonis drinking a gin and tonic on his porch across the street] and someone shot at me. Luckily he missed.” Did the cop smirk as he wrote this down in his book? Did he roll his eyes when a careful search failed to turn up bullets or balls of any description?
“Were you singing?” the cop asked, a leading question. He apparently wants to be a lawyer and takes every opportunity to practice his clever-in-court theatricals. Windows break when the fat soprano sings.
No runs, no errors. Nothing. The cop left and he was alone with his fears, his undisciplined King Charles spaniel and a sideboard filled with bottles of single malt Scotch. He had a few and then slept like a baby infused with Phenergan.
“It could be car,” his cleaning lady, Magda, a Bosnian War survivor, suggested the next morning. “I very scared when car make bang.” Magda cleaned up what was left of the glass. (“Oh, Mama in paradise,” she said, pulling a glinting sliver out of his mother’s right eye, which was appropriate because that is where all of Magda’s family now resided, thanks to the sharpshooters in Sarajevo. His mother was probably in hell. He would be willing to bet on that, no prayer on her lips when the drain had been successfully circled).
He agreed, the last thing he needed was to freak out his cleaning lady, who, because of language barriers, didn’t realize other cleaning ladies were getting minimum wage, plus carfare, plus lunch.
His dog, who normally thought the world was her big green latrine, refused to go outside and she relieved herself in the bathtub. She also ran and hid under the bed every time the phone rang.
One of those calls was from me. I had ordered a new suit, a bartender and catering for two hundred for the launch party. He was publishing my book on erotic Inuit art, How to Make Love in a Snowsuit, and my copy edit was long overdue.
“I can’t talk; someone is trying to kill me and my dog is pissing in the bathtub,” he said, before hanging up. Translation: the copy edit had met a similar obstruction to the one that made a necessity of daily enemas and prune juice. I decided to cancel the bartender and the catering and wear the Hong Kong suit to a family wedding.
Have you noticed the world is ass over teakettle? We have had four major seismic events in the Ring of Fire over the past year, a hurricane has flattened New York and New Jersey, a bunch of billionaires have spent trillions on an election that didn’t return as much as a loaf of bread, and Barney’s in New York is featuring an anorexic size zero five-foot-eleven-inch Minnie Mouse in Jimmy Choo heels and a Vera Wang dress in their tweeners display this Christmas.
So who cares if my book comes out? Well, me for one. I spent three freezing years living in igloos, researching sex in sealskins, and polar bears with six legs.
Let me explain. I have in my small collection of aboriginal art a carving of a six-legged polar bear. The sculptor, who was grateful to a missionary for saving his soul and uniting him with his one true love in a Christian mar-riage, rewarded him with a sculpture of two mating bears. This makes sense. Were we not instructed by the gospels to go forth and multiply? However, the priest rejected the gift, praising the carver’s skill but insisting he could not own a piece of pornographic art. The carver, a practical man, took back the sculpture, shaved off the head and forelegs of the male bear, leaving a female with six legs.
Now, doesn’t that interesting artifact deserve the attention of the literate public?
Unlike my publisher, I do not have opiate dreams. Mine are of the pragmatic, straight-up archetypal variety. That is, when I am not in too deep a sleep to remember them. After the phone call, I dreamed about polar bears jumping from melting floe to floe, and, come to think of it, whence cometh that particular flow? My dictionary says it is from the Norwegians, who, after they die of cold, are sent out to sea in burning boats. Perhaps someone will send my publisher a burning boat.
And whence cometh the melt? That is another story, perhaps enhanced by my desire for publication, the devil sacrament that uses up the sacred wealth of trees. Pity the polar bears, balancing on shrinking floors, and not a rock in sight. So went my dream, and then I woke up. Perhaps the bay window was penetrated by a rock, and that would also fall into the deliberate column, deliberate but not so dangerous as a bullet.
“Maybe it was a rock,” I’d ventured in my next call. “Maybe the guy across the street was offended by your nakedness.”
“Not a chance,” he said, and went through the list of famous and beautiful men he had slept with. “I’ve never been rejected.”
“How is the edit coming?” I came right out with it. He sighed and I saw my pages melting like ice floes, my book sinking into a cold Arctic sea.
Months passed. I heard that the editor had edited out the most alarming assassination options and accepted the randomness of fate. He had opened his curtains, unlocked his front door and taken his disobedient dog for walks in the urban jungle half a world away from my vanishing tundra and the nuisance grounds that provided me with so much priceless material.
I phoned again. “Can’t talk,” he said, before putting down the receiver. “I’ve been traumatized by a home inva-sion.”
His Facebook account reported that a window washer had entered through the door on the second-floor balcony adjoining his bedroom, got into bed and fallen asleep. The editor had arrived home late after an egregious literary event, a book launch (not mine, needless to say), and got between the sheets without taking off his clothes. He assumed the other warm body under the covers was his dog and that was true, but his dog was just one of two warm bodies.
When he called 911, he reported a rape, but the story changed when the same officer who wanted to be a lawyer arrived with his partner, an attractive martial artist called Brenda, who was sleeping with him although both were married to other people. I mention this because it gives a certain frisson to the interview. In a subsequent call, my editor reported their conversation.
“You arrived home drunk.”
“Yes.”
“You took a cab, I assume.”
“Uh…”
“I’ll be checking.”
“Am I the criminal here?”
“You might be. Did you walk the dog?”
“No.”
“Wouldn’t she have needed to go out?” The cop who wants to be a lawyer was once in the dog unit. He knows how much dogs need eaties and walkies when their owners arrive home at 10 p.m. after being gone all day.
“I think I told you last time that my dog has been peeing in the bathtub.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I took off my shoes and fell into bed.”
“Then what?”
“I had a dream.”
“Yes?”
“I dreamed my dog was dying and I had to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”
“And you woke up
kissing your dog on the mouth,” Brenda guessed. She was learning vicariously.
“No, it wasn’t my dog. It was the man who was in bed with my dog.”
“And that man was…?”
“The window washer I hired on my way out the door yesterday morning.”
“Then what?”
“Then he raped me.”
“How did he do that?”
“The usual way.”
“I’m sorry?”
“He penetrated me.”
“I thought you were fully dressed.”
“I must have undressed in my sleep. I’m a thrasher.”
“You thrashed your clothes off, and then the window washer raped you.”
“Yes.”
The partner of the cop who wanted to be a lawyer lost it at this point and, since she had lost her validity in the interview process, he helped her out to the car. Then they went for coffee.
“They never came back,” he told me. “I’m sure he’s sleeping with his partner. I heard her tell him she wanted to be in a monotonous relationship.”
“When was that?”
“While they were looking under the bed for the window washer.”
I am a big admirer of John Irving, who really gets the congruency of sex and death, baseballs in the forehead, penises bitten off during car fellatio. Perhaps my editor has bigger fish to fry, major popular novelist kinds of fish, and this is code for lost. “I have to see a man about a dog.” Dogs, to me, à la Vermeer, conjure domestic fidelity, integrity, loyalty, all good things I expect from humans as well as canines. I am confused. Perhaps his dog is also confused. I doubt she’s in on it, which constitutes animal cruelty, in my opin-ion, and my wife agrees with me.
My grandfather used to say that to me about his mysterious disappearances. I didn’t know whether he’d gone to the bathroom, gone to make a bet on dogs or horses or gone to get in some putting practice. He certainly didn’t mean, “I’m about to get into bed with a man and a dog.”
I put my new summer suit in the closet, drank all the champagne (it was the kind with the jar stopper lid and we are going to use the bottles for vinegar, Christmas gifts. I doubt I will send one to my editor, but perhaps I should. Vinegar would be appropriate, but probably too much money to post). My wife, who shared the champagne and the loneliness of the endless nights I’d slept in the igloo a thousand miles away, suggested the shooter/window washer might be another writer. We were now approaching the situation as a shaggy dog story, vaudeville, a Sutra with endless twists. We’d taken to role-playing, changing characters – sometimes I was the male cop, sometimes the window washer, and always my editor. She was always the dog.
We made a joke out of ten years of my life.
I made one last call late in November, tongue ready to either give him a verbal lashing or lick the stamps for the box that held the last bottle of vinegar. He picked up the phone after nine rings and paused. If I weren’t the caller and he the callee, I would have hung up. Those pauses never augur well. Most often it is someone in Asia who wants your money. I think he was identifying the number on his phone. I heard him manning up. Then I heard the dog barking. I made note of the timbre so I could encourage my wife to get perfect canine intonation during our next pantomime.
“I was out walking the dog,” he said.
“That’s good,” I said. “So everything’s back to normal again.”
“N-n-n-no,” he answered. “Not at all. I was just shot at in the park.”
“Shot at? Are you dead then?” I like the idea of talking to zombies. It has the warm bullshit feel of a Caribbean breeze.
“Yes. No. I was wearing my cashmere coat and it must have stopped the bullets.”
“Ah.” I wondered if that coat represented my share of his block grant, but pushed that thought back.
“What did it feel like?” I covered the receiver with my hand and told my wife to pick up in the kitchen.
“Like a dull poke.”
“A dull poke?” My mind went to the purple vibrator one of my wife’s friends used to beat up her unfaithful same-sex partner.
“Maybe it was canes. Were you blocking the sacred path?” I have been to his house. It adjoins a convent, which is now a rest home for elderly nuns.
“That’s ridiculous. The nuns adore us.”
“Just a thought. She might have left a love offering on the convent lawn. Did you phone the cops?”
“Of course, I went into the public toilet and called them on my cell.”
“And?” I was thinking that was dumb. What if he’d been pursued in there, if being the big question?
“Nothing. I got the smart-ass cop who wants to be a lawyer.”
“And what did he say?”
“Three strikes and you’re out.”
I could hear my wife snorting in the kitchen. She couldn’t help herself. I married her for her uncontrollable laughter.
“That sounds about right.”
From now on, I’m going to write fairy tales.
Susan P. Redmayne
BAPTIZED
A spider on the wall above the pantry was looking for a crack in the crown moulding, crawling back and forth along the ceiling line. Rose listened to its tiny footfalls, imagining the little clinging feet crawling through her hair.
The children, as usual, noticed nothing.
The sun had come out, the spring air was warming the yard. In the farmhouse kitchen, Joshua and William were struggling to focus on their math problems. Marjorie and Margaret were underfoot, tugging at their sagging diapers and pawing at Rose’s pant legs. The baby fussed from the bassinet. The infant always chortled and cooed like a little angel for his Daddy and for Nana Marie. But when Rose went to pick him up, he stiffening at her touch and spat out his pacifier. She left him alone to cry and kicked the plastic soother with the toe of her slipper. It skittered across the worn linoleum.
“Let’s go stretch our legs for a spell,” Rose announced.
Her brood scurried for the door. Rose felt plump and slow with the remnants of weight gain from her recent pregnancy. The children tore off down the laneway. Rose was in one of Arthur’s old lumberjack coats and had pulled on his muddy rubber boots, too. Her brown hair was stringy and several days past clean. She was glad of the isolation that farm life afforded.
She thought about a meatloaf for dinner. Was there still time to get a pie into the oven? Were the beds made yet? She couldn’t believe it was Thursday – or was it already Friday? The days blended together in sameness and routine. She reminded herself of the boys’ appointments at the dentist tomorrow. After the embarrassment of forgetting the previous appointments, she knew she had to be more mindful. Or was the appointment next week? So scatterbrained! What they all must think about her in town. In her distraction, she had let the children run off too far ahead. Rose struggled to pull her focus back to the twins who were already making a mess of their clean clothes, splashing in potholes.
“Mind those puddles, now! I won’t have you traipsing mud back into my clean house!”
But Rose’s eyes were drawn away from the children to an older man who stood unmoving in the shadows of the trees that lined the path running down toward their pond. Though there was distance between them, Rose could tell that he was watching her. He was too old and formally dressed to be one of the country hunters who occasionally stumbled onto their property. The dark colours of his attire and the sharp angles of its tailoring stood out against the soft green growth of the new spring season. His black suit and long wool overcoat accentuated the pale, tissue-like quality of his weathered skin and white hair. He was working his jaw with great exaggerated movements, open and closed and open again, as if exercising muscles that had been clenched shut for some time. But he did not speak.
Rose pulled her husband’s coat tighter around her careless outfit. She glanced toward the children and then looked back toward the place where the man had been standing. She stared at the empty space until she convinced herself that
she might have imagined him, and then she turned back to the children.
Some number of days or weeks after that first visitation, Rose could no longer ignore the niggling sensation of being scrutinized from the shadows. If she turned quickly to look over her shoulder, sometimes she thought she caught a flash of black coattails disappearing behind a tree trunk. It was often no more than a smudge of darkness against the glorious summer backdrop, but it could no longer be dismissed.
“Why do you do that?” Her husband had caught her spinning quickly on her heels as she walked up the porch steps.
“Do what, Arthur?”
“You’re constantly looking over your shoulder.”
“Someone is watching us, I think. All the time. Watching me, and sometimes you, too, and the children.”
“Are you sure you aren’t imagining things, again? I don’t see anyone.”
“He’s not here now.”
“Sounds a bit silly.”
“I’ve been seeing someone.”
“Here? On our farm?”
“Skulking near the pond. Or around the barn. He wears dark clothes.”
“Rose, honey, it’s probably just one of the Wright boys doing some fishing.”
“It’s not one of the Wright boys, Arthur. It’s not a boy at all.”
Arthur yanked open the screen door and disappeared into the gloomy interior of the house. The door recoiled on its springs and slammed shut in front of her. Strangers are everywhere, Rose thought.
“Are you lost? This is a private property.”
Rose had caught the old man peering at her from behind the hedgerow surrounding her vegetable garden. With the wave of a wrinkled hand in a tip-of-the-hat flourish, he bowed and cleared his throat.
“No, my dear madam. Not lost. Not lost at all! I am Brother Ambrose, and I am very pleased to meet you at last. Very pleased.”
His voice was higher pitched than she expected from a man, even one as old as he was, and yet it reverberated around the yard. The children, who were playing nearby, took no notice of him.
“Well, then, Mr. Ambrose, I’m afraid I’m… ”
“Brother Ambrose, my dear lady.”
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