For a time we sat quite still together, not talking, the sleeve of his shirt shifting minutely against my thigh as he breathed. It seemed possible we would spend the rest of the night sitting like this—drowsing under the silky spell of the pool, its toothless blue murmuring, its completely fathomed deeps. The entire night wrapped in stillness as the moon wore to a thin nacreous wafer and the ocean, it seemed just possible, faded too with the coming dawn until, pale as a cloud, it drew itself back and disappeared.
Where would we sleep? I was beginning to wonder. What would Mr. Clawson offer me in lieu of his missing sport’s coat to make into a pillow for my head?
“How could anyone be expected to believe it?” Mr. Clawson finally said.
“I think it’s true,” I said. I was dry now and thought how it was that dryness was a condition noticed only by the lack of damp whereas to be wet was sudden and appalling. The sand showered from my skin in plates like calving glaciers. “I think I saw it come out of the water.”
“I was there, of course,” Mr. Clawson forged on, “but in the waiting room. That was the way things still were. The waiting room for fathers with its plastic chairs and even ashtrays.” He plucked something off his lower lip and wiped it precisely on the knee of his trousers. “It was a terrible hospital, not the one we had chosen.”
I had heard this story before. The story of Thingy’s birth, but only in whispers that subsided into silence when I or my Aunt Thalia or my father was seen entering the room. Thalia, who had never whispered once in her life, was inclined to shout whatever last breathy word she had caught dying on the lips of the Pinta who believed death and romance were different words for the same story. “Went to the wrong house?” Thalia would roar, without breaking stride or even looking at the Pinta turned suddenly pale and sweaty as a wedge of cheese. “Well go on,” Thalia would shout as she strode out the door, “The baby screaming on the floor, you were saying. Mrs. Clawson snug as a tick, you were saying. Don’t mind me. I’d hate to interrupt.”
From this, and from our own shared memory, Thingy and I had pieced together a plausible narrative: Thingy’s mother’s untimely panic, her father’s absence, an ambulance called twice to houses on the same road and the sort of careless, take-it-for-granted accident that happens in a place where everyone knows the details of everyone else’s lives. Including their due dates. Including, as my father would insist, how much they put in the bank on Friday afternoon.
In the end, the dispatcher assumed that the two calls, for side-by-side houses high on the same generally under-populated street, was a mistake, some kind of foul-up on the part of the operator, DeeDee Smitz who was fat and had bad skin, read novels about dragons and the societies that attended them while on duty, and was generally considered to be not all that bright. After all, what were the odds? After all, when considered from a purely objective, mathematical perspective, what was the likelihood? As a result, only one ambulance was sent. Mrs. Clawson rode to St. Francis Sans Souci in a froth of peach-colored maternity wear, accompanied by a halo of sirens and bleating horns, where she was dismayed to labor in a shared maternity ward. My mother bled to death on her kitchen floor.
“I think a woman can’t quite understand the mystery of her parts,” Mr. Clawson said. He was still gazing through the window where his daughter seemed to be telling the story all over again to a smaller, but no less enthusiastic audience. The two brothers had faded away into the far reaches of the house, but the mule-faced boy was still with Thingy, still stuck tight to her side and following her every move with his cruel, melancholy eyes. Mrs. Clawson was nowhere to be found. Not a trace of her. As if she had lifted through the ceiling, toes dangling pale and pointed beneath the hem of her dress.
“Perhaps it is because a woman is afforded both the exterior and the interior sensation of her parts—or the posterior and anterior?—” Mr. Clawson mused. He was leaning back more frankly now, his forearm pressed up against my calf which for some reason I didn’t move.
“No matter. No matter,” he went on, passing a shaky hand before his eyes to banish his confusion, “either way it’s sure: she knows what goes into her and she knows what comes out. Any woman does. It’s a matter of instinct, natural primal instinct—nothing wrong with that—but while she’s busy bearing down, while she’s busy expanding and contracting, think of the man. Think of her clueless mate, boozling around in the waiting room, buying her flowers, a teddy bear.”
Mr. Clawson laughed and looked up at me. He had very white teeth, very straight. They caught the moonlight with an unapologetic frankness and I suddenly wanted to reach across the space between us and press the tip of my finger against one of his square, smooth, wet, white teeth.
“Can you imagine?” Mr. Clawson said. “A teddy bear. Well, I did—I bought a blue teddy bear and a bouquet of Gerber daisies, it was all they had, and I went down a long hall, through swinging doors, past all kinds of carts and other detritus, to her room.”
Mr. Clawson paused, remembering. I could feel the thick wiry hairs of his forearm against my calf and worried that he could feel the prickle of my own hair growing back in from that morning’s shower. Mr. Clawson had thin lips, almost nonexistent. It was as if the flesh of his jaw and cheeks rushed right up to the hole of his mouth where it plunged out of sight. I imagined his lips would feel rubbery. They might even prickle with stubble. He smelled of some sort of thin, clean spice. Something blue. We were sitting very close together, watching the busy house, listening to the busy ocean, apart from those things in the tidy isolation of the little, square yard.
“And there,” Mr. Clawson said, spreading his hands before him like a magician setting up a miraculous substitution; a dove for an orange, a rabbit for a girl, “and there, laid out before me. . .Can you imagine the mess? The noise? Her cunt split right in half, it looked to me. My own wife’s cunt which I had dabbled in so happily, so innocently up until this point. I had thought of it as a still, clear pond. A little resting place. When I thought of my wife’s cunt, I now realized, I had imagined a sandy bottom, languorous water weeds. . .” Mr. Clawson laughed again. He looked up at me and gripped the back of my calf, laughing.
“Oh, I was forced into a reckoning,” Mr. Clawson said. “I was forced to come to terms with what was weak within my own nature, and I have done that every day ever since. It’s like a mantra with me.” He pulled away for a moment to fetch his drink, but then came right back, resting his chin on my knee, passing his arm under my thigh to sip from the glass on the other side. I made a noise, some noncommittal noise that I hoped sounded casual and encouraging. Mr. Clawson seemed to take it that way.
“That’s what I like about you,” he said, gazing pensively over my thigh and into the camilla. “You’re not so squeamish, so finely tuned. If we don’t have language in common then what do we have?” He was getting worked up again, lifting his chin from my knee, raising his voice. “If we can’t say what we have experienced in plain language and thus expunge it, then we must admit the thing into the secret chambers of our soul,” Mr. Clawson shouted into the shrubbery. Behind us something plopped into the pool which made a slurping sound.
“Do you know what the soul is?” Mr. Clawson asked.
“No,” I said.
“A blob of glup. Do you know what the soul needs?”
“No,” I said. My legs were falling asleep, the circulation cut off by the edge of the lawn chair, but I was too precariously balanced to move. I felt proud of myself for not being the camilla, blighted by the strictures of its life, visibly withering. I also felt vaguely like we were playing a game, some call and response which would spell out an unexpected word I wouldn’t be able to guess until the very end.
“No,” I repeated, a whisper.
“Me neither,” said Mr. Clawson and suddenly deflated. He rested his chin on my knee again like a good dog. He laughed. “What else could it possibly need?” he said, but not to me.
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do in response. He seemed
so friendly; he was almost panting. The hair on the top of his head swirled in an unexpected cowlick that made me feel very sorry for him. I think I did something like pat him on the head. If I am to be my most honest, as I hope I am always able to be with you, Ingrid, I will admit I buried my fingers in Thingy’s father’s hair and scratched his scalp the way I did for fat, little Dog whose legs were too short to reach between his shoulder blades.
Mr. Clawson took another sip of his drink and, still laughing softly, turned his head and laid his cheek against my knee. Against my expectation, I found his skin smooth and soft, with a resilient toughness where the muscles of his jaw bunched and stretched. I moved my scratching to behind his ears but became confused and shy. I let my fingers still at the nape of his neck but then thought it too much of a statement to pull away entirely. We sat there for a little while: his breath warm against my knee, my palm resting on his back and fingertips just barely touching the skin above his collar. I watched a plane wink across the sky, so far away its incredible speed was slowed to a crawl in my vision. Inside, the party had moved elsewhere and Thingy, left alone in the living room, leaned forward and accepted the mule-faced boy’s hungry embrace.
“Oh, look,” Mr. Clawson said. He reached out and grabbed my opposite ankle, tugged gently until I let him draw my foot up near his face. “Look, Alice,” he said. “You’re bleeding. You have a cut.” And, even though the cut itself was shallow and had long since scabbed in a thin crust, Thingy’s father passed his fingers over my skin as if pressing back rills of pumping blood, bent his neck and kissed the arch of my foot as if stemming a tide.
He pressed there for a long time, lingering, moving his lips in a speech I could feel but not hear. His lips were warm and dry. They brushed over my skin, but I swear to this day, Ingrid, I swear on my mother’s burst body which I sent to the grave, I have no idea what it was Mr. Clawson asked me. All I know for sure is what I said in return. And what came after, of course. Which is where you come in.
The Horse’s Tale
Once, through a confluence of events and no fault of his own, a horse fell in love with a baby.
This happened at a busy crossroad where two well traveled paths met and mingled before going their separate ways. At first the crossroad was a naked x, pressured on all sides by trees. The roads that stretched away from that place were cold and thin, insufficient lines drawn between the mountain and the valley. Over the years many trees had been cut for lumber and the forest pushed back to widen the thoroughfare. Then someone had built a gibbet. Then someone had built a stable behind the gibbet and soon enough an inn next to the stable, a feed store on the other side of the road, an apothecary’s shop snug at its side. Soon there were enough buildings and goods to consider the place a small town.
The crossroad was busy day and night but it was not named as a town would be. It was an in-between place. Often travelers were seen standing in the middle of the x, turning from road to road in a state of bewilderment. From each road came the same cool wind. Down each was afforded the same looming view of spruce and hemlock, rock, frosted blooms of lichen, hard dark earth.
One day, to the crossroads came a white horse ridden by a young and weary rider. They were on their way back down to the valley after a trip to a mountain town to secure the hand of a lovely mountain bride who had been promised but, souring over the months of postal courtship, now refused her betrothed on her father’s very hearth. “That cunt,” the young and weary man said over and over as they came down the steep road. He murmured it into the white horse’s mane as he sank exhausted over the pommel and every time the horse flicked back one soft, sensitive ear as if to agree.
It is impossible to say what the horse thought of all this. At this point he was only a horse, though a handsome one with round knees, strong haunches, a lustrous tail and yellow hairs bristling from his pink, speckled muzzle. He had been born in a barn not so many years ago. He remembered everything that had happened to him since that point: sliding from his mother’s quivering vagina and laddering himself upright on his own quivering legs, a whisk of straw scrubbed over his face and in his nostrils, a cold breeze as the barn door opened and someone else came in. After that came many, many days that were largely the same.
Immediately after birth, the white horse had been given to the young and weary man as a present and this man had formed the basis for almost everything the white horse knew about himself. For example, he knew he was an animal and that to be an animal was to stand when someone told him stand and go when someone told him go. He knew the sun, which was like his curry brush, and the grass, which was like the bit in his mouth. He knew a sly kind of joke which had to do with his eyes and lips and a quick, sideways shuffle and, if the man were in a different mood, he knew a stupid, towering fear of brown leaves and blowing paper down from which his master could disdainfully calm him.
The young and weary man was mostly patient, but sometimes used the lash. He mostly remembered the horse’s soft mouth, but sometimes sawed the reins until the corners of the horse’s lips split and bled. In this way the white horse learned what was expected of him and, because he knew nothing but this expectation, came to understand his most intimate self as a figure of what he would do next. Not what he currently was; not what he desired to become.
This is not so strange. Who expects a mule or an ox to have a spiritual life? Who suffers a crisis of self alongside a flea? The world is full of dawning. The sun comes up. If a man or a woman or a horse is awake to see it, they might mark the very moment when the sun appears to pull itself free of the horizon: shivering like a yolk, bouncing into its shape.
The horse brought his rider to the crossroad at noon. It was early spring and the sun was small and silver as a coin. They had traveled together all night. At first, spurred by the rider’s spleen, they had pelted down the winding, treacherous road, blood in the white horse’s nostrils, stones turning under his hooves. Then, when the moon rose, the rider relaxed and they traveled more slowly. There was time to watch shadows slide across the path in front of them. Time to smell the high, thin scent of the pines and listen once and then again as, close by their side, something heavy struck and something small shrieked and fell silent.
When the sun comes up in the mountains the world is very far away. The mountain is black and at first the sun is announced by a deeper blackness, a pooling in the valley. Then the world inches forward in slow shades of violet. Distance is uncovered and every creature knows a specific unease—to see the world unchanged when I have been so changed! to see the world cold and still when I am hot and pounding!
The horse tossed his head and flicked his ears as the sun came up over the side of the mountain. Below them the valley was filled with fog which boiled like the surface of an uneasy lake. Behind them rose the mountain, its face streaming with green water. The horse was small, his great heart beat. The rider leant against his neck and said, “That cunt. That cunt,” in a voice as soft and thready as the new wind kicking up in the leaves. Then the path turned and they wound down again into darkness, quiet under the spreading branches of the pines.
So. When the horse and his rider came to the crossroads, at noon, weary from their journey, heart-sore and ill-at-ease, their minds were set on vengeance and on dinner, on pain and on a warm, snug place to sleep. This is to say, neither one of them was thinking of love. This is to say, they both nurtured within them a hard dark spot, like a black rock worn smooth by the river, which they turned and turned as if by turning it they would better be able to see. . . .
The crossroad was busy and loud. A man in a red jerkin sold live chickens strung up by their feet. A woman wearing a silver mask was standing on a box waving her arms. Someone was selling meat pies; someone was selling pots. A man tugged on a woman’s bodice and her breast popped out. A man sharpened knives on a stone he held between his knees.
The rider dismounted and looped the reins around the pommel. He gripped the white horse’s bridle at his cheek and pulled as he used
it to balance, standing on one leg and then the next, arching his back like a bow.
“Ten pots. Ten pots,” said the man who was selling pots.
“I was buried in the meadow, but I arose,” said the woman in the mask. “I was buried on the mountain, but I washed into the stream.”
The horse whickered. His hooves felt sore and splayed. He urinated on the ground in a great, steaming arc and turned his head to watch the stream runnel through the dirt.
“Ten pots. Ten pots,” said the man who was selling pots. He was walking away from them, a pack on his back hung all about with pots and he clanked as he moved. All in all, he was a funny sort of man, easily dismissible. His hair was black and stood up around his head as if he were wearing a crown. “Buy pots,” said the pot selling man, and no one turned to mark him pass. He was like a slow, clanking shadow, unmoored from the sun, but in between all the pots was a sort of a hollow space and wedged in that hollow space was a kind of a pouch and in that pouch, her face purpling above the drawstring like a furious ornamental cabbage, was a baby girl.
The man turned his stone; he fingered it greedily.
The horse raised his head and pulled against the bridle. He opened wide a protesting eye and, for the very first time, he could see.
Of course, it didn’t last. Even as the white horse strained his thick neck forward, the woman in the mask stepped off her box to buy a meat pie from the vendor and blocked the horse’s view. When she moved again and he could see past her, the man selling pots had melted away into the crowd.
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