Homunculus

by Wintner, Robert;

  A couple more beers and another coffee level a man nicely up to siesta time. Suey comes in and bellies up. “New pantyhose?” he asks. She hikes her tutu and turns a circle. “You must feel better.”

  “I’m about to feel better,” she says, ordering a gin on ice. “You not helping?” she asks. He says yes, he is helping himself to a new day and eases out wondering why nobody tells him anything.

  Movers file in an out. The truth hangs by rusty wires on Heidi’s door. It flutters in the breeze and says Tony on the front. Inside is a map with a star, some arrows, a U R Here and two lines leading to an X. Underneath it reads:

  Come out if you want to. H.

  He stands in the traffic of morbid art and Inquisition furniture as it’s carried out piece by piece like cockroach parts carried away by ants. Going, going, gone, and everyone knew it but me. But a man with nothing to lose can console himself that nothing is lost.

  Map in hand, he wanders out, drawn like a fading comet to iffy gravity. He knows she can take it or leave it. He decides nothing and clomps again down Canal Street past the bus station. He has some dough—plenty enough for Mexico. A ride to the city is under twenty bucks and seems easier. He could hole up urban and see what comes up. But you can’t breathe in Mexico City.

  So maybe not.

  No.

  Not.

  He passes the tiendas selling sugar pop in plastic bags and buys one for the sugar. Down again past the glue factory he stops to ask the nags if they have any idea what’s up. But he doesn’t ask for fear of the reciprocal question, What do you know? So he and the nags ruminate over pleasantries. “How do you do? How you do be? Evening, evening.” He knows what they see, a shabby gringo headed out, headed down. He wonders if they suspect the glue for him too. Dropping his sugar pop bag on the ground according to custom he wads the map in an act of something or other, call it pride for now, because a man with nothing to lose clings to something or other. He pridefully drops his wad with the nags and walks down past the trash-dirt-chickenshit-scrub-scrap, down, down, down to the flats, where he rock-hops Shit Creek, also known as the Shenandoah River.

  That was a long time ago, the dawn of life, that new day starting with some silly moment or something—Céline was a Nazi, and we can’t have that. “Boy. Nazis,” Tony Drury says aloud on the other side and stops to look back up at the smell of the land of carnage.

  Turning full circle and following sundown feels correct. The road looks promising to the glowing horizon. The countryside beckons peacefully, clean, unpopulated. Yes, I’ll take some of that. The rocky plain looks forever with a veer to the south that surely shortcuts to Heidi’s new spread. If it doesn’t, well then, just how lost can a man get? Nothing to lose gains complexion with sundown. Golden light brings on what real buckaroos long for, the real nothing of nothing to lose. Anyone could know where Charles went—Charles got the hell out, gave in to symptoms and vamoosed. The problem remains of where a man could vamoose to, but if this isn’t it, then what?

  He walks and walks but nothing changes except the growing shadows like angels along the road.

  What comes to a pretty good clip slows when the angels clock out and the shadows merge to a single darkness. Picking around the rocks carefully now, he follows the light within. Ah, moonrise; he stops to watch the void delineate and to wonder when this too will become a real nice place to raise a family. When will the prayer of the righteous be answered?

  He picks up the pace, hurrying from what ails him until he stops and wonders what. He breathes hard, chilling quickly. The night flows over, cold and colorless, numb and forgetful, still and immense, like death. He doesn’t know how far he’s come but figures ten o’clock or maybe two. Accepting total loss in the dark on the plains is not good but not bad for a man in poetic context. Tony Drury understands loss and its needs; everyone goes and sooner isn’t much different than later. The place feels good, a certain center of the universe. So he gathers sage and sticks into a pile and lights it. It flares with terrific heat but only for a minute, until the sage burns out, so he shags some more. Because you can’t relax if you’re freezing, but a man willing to die shouldn’t have to work so hard. The embers pop and fade.

  He sits. He settles in and breathes deep and lets the cold go as Kensho would counsel. He wishes upon a star for a pint of the good stuff that would sip so well on a night like this by the dying embers under the stars. He asks God for a pint. “Just one, God, a last one, please, God, and for that pint, I promise to be good until forever or sunrise, whichever comes first.”

  He pulls a pint of the good stuff from his jacket. “I might be crazy, but I ain’t stupid,” he tells the night. He doesn’t believe it, sitting in the dark and cold like a fool—but a fool with a pint. “Here’s to you.” He toasts a billion stars, glugging for the spirits, finding God within, the one who hears the prayer of the righteous. Oh, Tony D is smart enough to play the prayer and the prayee, and he vows that vengeance will be his. In great draughts he takes warmth unto him and says, “Let there be light.” And so it is.

  “You know I been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good be out … of the rain …” If a man can’t find a tone on a desert all alone, is he really tone deaf? “On the desert, you can remember your name … ba daa daa da-da-daa daa … something something …”

  What a night, what a night. He drinks and has the best smoke of his life and doesn’t care what time it is or the year. He drinks and laughs and doesn’t care if he sleeps, which he can’t do anyway with a big rock holding him up, poking a shoulder blade, until he drinks a great long guzzle and settles in with a belch and a nod. He dreams of the fire everlasting.

  At dawn a gang of boys passes by on their way to their trees and their cows. He wandered fifty yards off the road. The sun warms him as he lay in the dirt beside the rock. The boys see him and come over for a look and giggle when he sits up with a “Mmuhh” and a mud-caked face. These gringos; what they won’t do next. Cute little guys, they stare at another freak of nature come south. “Hey, where’s Heidi’s place?” One boy points down the road to a speck on the rise, making the desert a magical place indeed. “Muchas gracias, little buddy.” The little muchachos giggle some more. Well, they’ll remember Tony Drury anyway.

  The new day looks harmless, clear as the night before. He sits there while the boys finish staring and giggling. He feels something on his face, something clinging. He waits for it to move but it doesn’t so he comes up slowly and slaps himself like the Aqua Velva man. “Ah, I needed that,” he tells them, peeling the dirt and drool hardened like adobe mud on his bottom jowl. He joins in the laugh until his little pals go up the road to another day of existence. Maybe he’s on his way too.

  But he sits another minute hoping the future will be like this, crisp, hungry and clean. Life was best on the trail, with a world waiting when you weren’t even twenty-five and folded your bedroll wet if you wanted to. Well, that was a long time ago and God forgot the coffee, but a couple inches of the good stuff is better than no wake up at all, because the future is a frame of mind when you get right down to it.

  But please don’t mention attitude, not now, not on a crisp, radiant morning with the warmth flowing as if life is on again. No, it isn’t good to drink at sunrise. Any fool knows that, but sometimes you make do. Sauce isn’t the same as coffee, but it’s something. He stands, old bones crunching into gear. He never thought it would come to this, but once standing, he laughs again at how light a man can travel. No pack-up or clean-up here, just another long piss on another new outlook and a left right left where yesterday left off but with a difference, not exactly a zippety-do-dah but with a spec just yonder to march to. He stretches his stride, feeling angels in the ether.

  “There was a crooked man who walked a crooked mile, who had a crooked sixpence and a crooked fucking smile,” he sings to the vast mesa of his potential until two burros sing back. He turns their way up the side road to the rancho.

  She bought the burros
when she leased the place, for atmosphere and authenticity. “They’re so cute,” she will say later. She’s pissed earlier when he bangs on the door. He wakes her up.

  She brought Taco too, a ne’er-do-well mutt who works the circuit for handouts. On the lam from a local boy who wants to fight him in a ring against other dogs, Taco fits in with the gringo crowd, feisty, fearless and sensitive. Fighting in a ring for macho idiots isn’t his cup of tea. He has more spirit than the mean and ugly boy who cut his ears off with a straight razor so other dogs couldn’t grab them and for a meaner look, though the boy looks mean enough for both of them.

  Tony can’t imagine Taco being that cruel to another dog or a person. His ugly pug-face with scar tissue where his ears got stanched make him look like Spanky’s dog Petey after a shot at the title. An off-center eye-patch and a wary disposition make him fit in. Taco never whines and won’t walk on a leash. He begs with his eyes, like Charles used to do, and he stays by you, thick or thin. He slipped under a table when the local boy came looking. Taco knew whose legs to squeeze between and when to stay still. It got to be an honor, recognition by Mother Nature or something, if Taco chose you to protect him, to look up as stupidly as a mean and stupid boy and say No se and keep the secret. When the coast was clear the dog got tacos under the table. He knew like the gringos knew: home at last, for awhile.

  Taco jumped onto the rich gringa’s lap one day and timed his little smooch just right because a ranch needs a dog. Taco the dog and Tony Drury became colleagues, roommates, Heidi’s tenants. Taco rode out in the truck, sitting on the front seat for all Tony knows. Tony got a note hardly hung on the door. But Taco isn’t up by much. She’s pissed at him too, because he didn’t bark when a stranger walked up to the door.

  “Hey, ease up,” Tony says. “Some people don’t consider me a stranger. He’s a friend of mine.” She grunts and goes back to her beauty rest. It’ll only be another few hours. Tony makes coffee and fries four eggs. Taco watches but doesn’t beg. He puts on the look lucky dogs learn for getting ahead in a gringo world. His eyes are despondent, hungry, commiserating—We’re in this together, aren’t we? They sparkle, ready for action or a couple over easy. And that’s it. Life has changed, kind of.

  X

  Night Into Day

  Heidi Heller is no drop out; she only retreats. Thirty-five is old if you’re not yet twenty, but at thirty-four, she understands transitory nature and knows she’ll one day see these days as a time of choice. She sees a fork in the road, the routes unmarked and hazy, yet she believes a guiding spirit will lead the way, if only she can nurture its emergence.

  The spirit expresses itself through playing cards and papier-mâché. Camp crafts and games provide a wholesome atmosphere, reminiscent of cleaner, childish times, before a girl knew what the world wanted. Nevermind; the years wear like comfortable clothing, a bit soiled maybe, but she plays hard. Isn’t that the best way?

  Heidi knows her mood looks worse than it is; she’s not upset, really, she’s only sensitive to things unfolding. The cards and pasty glops align and form just so. Winning hands play out in soft disposition; the royalty converses sensibly. Social order is further reflected by anthroprecise figurines. Or, on cloudy days, chaos fouls the suits while lumpy mutants and trolls with warts on mottled skins plead for mercy. Sometimes decapitation alone can end their pain. Sometimes the heads still howl from the windowsill when the torsos are thrown to the dog, who won’t eat them and suffers his own pain. Sometimes the trolls are mannerly, as if anyone would believe such lies. Hey, it’s a game.

  Tony Drury doesn’t envy sportsmen, with their equipment and inclement weather. And for what? To kill some poor animals feeding on seeds or bark or pond sludge? Where’s the return, when you can get anything at the grocery and leave the wilderness in peace? Yet he watches from a blind like a hunter. Sometimes, if his timing is good, he’s invited to bag the landlady, and, for awhile, all parties are relieved. It’s primitive, but that’s life in the country.

  The spread is sixty acres with a house like Vatican City, with huge domed ceilings in the sleeping chambers, the kitchen, the great room and the corridors—corridors twenty feet wide and thirty feet high that give moment to a walk down the hall. Heidi loves this place for its capacity to house her discoveries of a changing world.

  She keeps her cards in a blue bandanna saved from childhood. Sometimes she holds the deck to her ear, not to hear what it says in the rational, audible sense; yet she is told a thing or two. Sometimes she says, “Okay.” Or she shrugs and says, “Nothing for now.” She may hush with wonder and put her hand on her mouth as her eyes open to astonishment, like Mrs. MacIntyre used to do. Mrs. MacIntyre came to clean but brought the cards and destinies when Heidi was only eight. Twenty-four years later, Heidi won’t divulge her source. Let him wonder; he thinks I’m loony but won’t say it because the landlady might evict him. What a pussy. Let him fear. It’s good for him. If he didn’t need it, he wouldn’t have it.

  She plays close to the chest, caressing the hands dealt her, stroking her luck. She deals solitaire and talks to the kings and queens and jeers the jacks—fool, has-been, queer, but that doesn’t make you loony. She looks to see who’s laughing then sighs like a writer tearing everything up, plowing through the spread and reshuffling. She redeals for another go on a fresh page.

  Most hands fit nicely with the tick tock clock. Hours pass in amazing curiosity, some hands are so remarkably similar to past hands, and if you don’t think that means something, you might have another thing coming. The cards know. He asks what the cards tell her. She says, “They tell you if you win or lose. You didn’t know that? Boy. It’s all in the deck. You deal it. Whatever you want, Babycakes.” She deals again, illustrating her point. She’s not the same old Heidi but is removed from her former self, retreated to the country like a pupae to her cocoon. Despite its cavernous character, she sometimes squirms; one day she’ll fly, but not today.

  Tony Drury is tolerated. Calling him Babycakes doesn’t cheer him up. He seems to think she doesn’t care, but what’s a girl to do for that? It’s not just anyone she drops her drawers for, though she knows what he thinks about that, too. She reads the new deal with amusement, wondering whether to deal again or set the deck aside for the shirt and pants shuffle. She toys shamelessly, but doesn’t he bring it on himself, a grown man lying on the sofa in visible distraction, practically whining when she stands there naked. She can wobble her tits and make him whimper. How can they be such fools? He asks if the last trick was a good one. “No,” she says. “But I’m horny. See if you can scratch my itch, will you.”

  “You know I’ll try,” he says, getting down to service, trumped again with nothing wild. He doesn’t complain, because a man rarely does, because, after all.

  When she comes on for a perfunctory fuck he might see she’s only putting him on, if he could see past the tits in his face. Jesus, what a billygoat, but he does make her laugh, and it’s times like these that melt her heart. Because for all his weakness, he is a sweet guy, and talk about convenience, and he can go the distance now and then. What’s more, Tony D may have a problem with the vision thing, but he’s a regular Prince Charming next to Charles, who needs a woman like some men need a desk or a telephone or a repository for his seed. She wonders what life would be without Charles, or if Tony had Charles’ flair and social skills. What if Tony was gregarious like Charles. Then again, what if Charles was urbane as Tony. What if she had a man with manners and spirit, a physically fit, emotionally stable man who could ring the bell once in the morning and again at night—Mm … Oh! Oh! Oh! God! Oh! Oh! God! Oh! Oh. There. Like that. Where do they go once the little geyser goes off? Dreamland? Just like that? Does he know she’s getting off, getting up, going out?

  Some days the face cards are more engaging than her lodger, the joker. She holds the cards more dearly then in wonder; how can two people need each other yet deny each other? She wants to see what she’s missing, so she fucks the lodger, who is nothi
ng if not willing. It feels all right, and he seems to need it, and something is there but what? Then she slides off and plays again, solitaire.

  He sees the bright side: easy sweets, good tequila, a roof and dinner. He watches as her eyes close and her lips quiver; she deals. He reads her face like she reads the cards, pulling for sprightly omens. He pretends to read a book and satisfies himself that a man on call is better off than some men. He waits stoically, improving his mind as necessary.

  The rancho is a welcome change beyond cards for her, reading for him. Then come crafts. They work together in papier-mâché. She wants a likeness of him. He fears effigy but calms when the dolls called Tony have puffy red lips and chunky midsections. He likes passing the time in pleasant industry and recalls bygone days in town, when regular sex with Heidi seemed elusive. It’s still not regular, but she seems more tolerant in spite of the moods.

  Two brooding hens scream bloody murder when she dismantles the coop for the chicken wire. She makes a chicken out of chicken wire and glop, forming plump, firm breasts and a tidy vagina crudely similar to her own with her own pubies glued on. Two chicken-sized tarantulas and matching scorpions are gender enhanced with full round breasts and vaginal thickets also in the signature series or else with pendulous genitalia like Tony D’s. Some have short, stumpy dicks not at all like his. She sees him thinking and says, “A girl likes a little variation.” He asks how a girl could prefer a pickled pepperoncini to a fresh cucumber. “Like I said,” she says. “It all fits.”

  “You said that?” But he presses no further. She eases as well, allowing cranial hair on the private parts of the new chickens and scorpions and tarantulas, because she doesn’t want to trim her vagina any further and neither does he. She laughs and thinks him lovable for going along with her art, for understanding the difference between this and all else. “Okay, okay,” she says. “Look …”