Phantoms

by Jack Cady

  After all, those books belong to The Corporation, and The Corporation has its own philosophy. The Corporation not only wants its fair share. The Corporation wants to own Everything. The Corporation will not be stolen from. Thus, the Package Police.

  "Our plot marches forward," Victoria whispers. She is excited. She places a book titled Teach Yourself Celtic in Your Spare Time on the conveyer, then slowly turns to dispose of packaging. Recycle goes in one dumpster, reusable packaging in another. The Celtic book had been wrapped in newspaper. A headline flatly states:

  VAPORS EXCITE CAT SHOW

  PULCHRITUDINOUS KITTY DEEDS FURBALL

  "No story enclosed, just headline." Victoria speaks with some chagrin.

  "None needed," Pork whispers. "We got enough to work with." Pork sounds as excited as Pork ever sounds, which is to say, real dreamy.

  "Put a sock in it," I tell them. "We got problems."

  A Package-Police cruiser has just pulled a U-ey at the end of our conveyor row. It heads toward us. The cruiser is electric and only big enough to hold one cop and one prisoner.

  "Pulchritudinous," Pork says, and says it real dreamy. I give him a good nudge. He sort of wakes up.

  This cop has missed his place in history. He’s a perfect model for a Storm Trooper or an Alabama Deputy, an Adolph or a Bubba. He chaws on a toothpick and wears short sleeves to show his biceps. His brush cut stands spikey above blue eyes that can’t help looking at the front of Victoria’s shirt.

  "You creeps, again," he says, and gives me a shove just hard enough to mess up what I’m doing. "Keep workin’."

  I place a book titled Ergonomics and Policy Reform in 13th Century Mesopotamia on the conveyor. The packaging was bubble wrap. I toss it into the reusable material dumpster. Pick up another package.

  This particular cop always shoves me when he’s after Pork . . . something, Victoria always explains, that they teach you in cop school.

  "You moved your lips funny," the cop says to Pork. "Say it again."

  "Cheeseburgersforlunch," Pork tells the cop. It’s one of our ready made words. We have ready-mades for occasions like this. "We were talkin’ lunch," Pork says. "Before that we were talkin’ breakfast."

  "And now you’re talkin’ bull." The cop knows full well he’s in the presence of subversion. He knows we’re stealing thoughts, but doesn’t have enough to hang us.

  We got rights. The cop doesn’t even have enough on us to justify a mild beating. He’s one frustrated jockstrap.

  "With French fries," Victoria says, and says it most sweetly. She zips open a package containing Pachyderms Of The Circus: Their Wit and Wisdom. This one is wrapped in newspaper. She deftly, and with no seeming regret, tosses the paper into recycle. We who know her, though, feel her sorrow. We caught a fleeting headline, something like:

  SYMPHONY GOES 0 AND 1 AGAINST MENDELSSOHN

  Something to think about. And we will. As soon as we get rid of Adolph.

  "We’d ask you to join us for lunch," I say in a loud whisper, "but then we’d be fraternizing." I figure the cop is so dumb he’ll think it’s a compliment. I think rightly.

  "Another suck-up," he says. When he finally leaves we shelve Mendelssohn for the moment, then once more discuss a question of law.

  It is true we steal words and thoughts, but we’re not stealing them from the books. We’re taking them from the packaging. Plus, things fall out of books: pressed flowers, locks of hair, clippings (usually obituaries or marriages), bookmarks, snapshots, postage stamps, love letters, receipts, and postcards. It’s all throwaway stuff.

  So, if it’s junk, who owns it? The Corporation says, "Throw it away."

  "You can’t steal something that’s been thrown away," Pork always explains. "That’s our fall-back position. When we finally get caught, and finally heal up from the beating, and find ourselves in front of a judge, that’s our defense."

  "Pulchritudinous," Victoria murmurs. "Nobody is gonna throw something like that away. That’ll be their claim."

  "Plus," I say, "they got lawyers. They own the judge. We got minimum wage."

  "And the joy of combat," Pork tells me. "We got the pleasure of taking stuff right under The Corporation’s drippy little nose." Pork can talk vicious when he wants.

  "Every day," Victoria murmurs, "I take an idea, or an image, or a word away from here. I set it loose in the world. That, I believe, is Pulchritudinous." Victoria sometimes gets a dazed look whilst talking philosophy.

  She is describing our mission. Our mission is not to defy The Corporation, but to subvert. We are warriors. That’s the truth.

  When books go out of here, headed for Bangkok or Plymouth-in-England, or Carrolton, Kentucky, they look just great. The Corporation has slicked them. Spots on covers have been cleaned. Torn dust jackets have been repaired. Lots of them look new, and all of them look snazzy. Like Reno.

  But, I’ve seen inside some of those books. The words are still there, the ideas, the theories, the stories; but somehow life is gone. It’s like everything in them is written on a dying desert wind. The books show color but have no heat of impassioned brains or beat of loving hearts. It’s a giant gyp. The Corporation keeps the life of the book and sells the husk. Just like Reno.

  Our subversion comes because we hijack words, ideas, dream-stuff, and yeh, occasional stardust. We hijack entire concepts, plus screwball visions. We can take a headline, a cat show, and talk it through. Then, we take it outside of Storyland and set it free. If our new idea or vision can make it beyond the city limits, it has a strong chance for a healthy life.

  "Lunch," Pork says, and really means it.

  We get takeout burgers at a roadhouse, then roll the car a mile into desert. The land is flat and covered with sage. In some places small hills rise, also sage-covered. We choose our spot with great care because The Corporation has spies. If we get caught, doing what we’re about to do, the least that will happen is fractures.

  I smoke a butt, smoke another. In the distance Reno seems to dance through heat waves, a tired and faded dance. The Corporation fits right into Reno. The Corporation came here because of tax stuff and central shipping. Birds of a feather.

  We chaw on burgers, pretending that we hold a conversation about nothin’. We look here, there, every place. When we spot no spies, Victoria murmurs a little chant, tosses in a small but mystical spell. Then Victoria moves her delicate hand as if she waves a wand. She opens her hand. Pulchritudinous flies free.

  Pulchritudinous dances like a tiny blue flame beneath desert sun. It rises above desert sage, skimming like a splendid little bird. It bounces playful. It dives, circles, and sports around us as it seeks a destination. It finally heads out in the general direction of Tennessee. It’s gonna have one whale of a hard time making it in Nashville, but at least it’s free of Reno.

  "What is the difference," Pork murmurs, "between Storyland and The Strip?" He’s talking, of course, about the Reno Strip.

  "Us," Victoria says quietly.

  I know what she means. Of course, Victoria is crazy, even if she does have smart brains. I search across the desert, but nothing out there moves. It looks like we’ve pulled off a successful stunt, but a day will come when someone spots us. Scary thought, but I don’t think that any beating we get, or even any jail sentence, will allow The Corporation to reclaim Pulchritudinous.

  "Time to get back to Weird Row," I tell my comrades. "We still got to deal with Mendelssohn."

  Tattoo

  This tale was written for Ella Rappé and Lillie Schmidt.

  Today she is a good woman, and although yesterday is gone and so is she, an awful illumination hangs about her memory. It is the mute dread of unforgiven sin, and it exists like the rumor of weeping in our pecuniary and jiggling-breasted day. I walk through the strobing center of the blare and recall the silhouette of a coiffed woman, the bright gleam of a new coin, and imagine many rows of dead faces; paleness surrounded by ebony caskets with the nose-numbing perfume of mortuaries hanging like drape
s. She was my aunt Edna and she was good. Everyone says that now.

  I see one other thing that exists as vividly in my mind as the black Sunday coats of a dozen rural preachers. It is a small grave marker of coarse concrete, the figure of a kneeling lamb. The eyes are round and ill cast, the ears curved like dull and circular horns above configurations of molded fleece. The feet are tucked under. Altogether, a blob of cement sitting on a small slab among tall and dying weeds. In a way the lamb is the whole story. I think of pathos and the success of small hopes. I did not think of such things when my sister and I were small and vied for our aunt’s favor as she took us to movies or Sunday school.

  We were not unusual children. There was no magic in the rattle and spit of electricity from trolleys that passed beneath my aunt’s window. The rain that swept the panes of the dying restaurant below her second floor apartment was cold. Always cold. I wonder if we grew too quickly in defense against the cold; leaving to find our American fortunes in the clatter of roads, the quarrel of classrooms and in the busy sales of marketable goods under dangling bulbs.

  We grew in an Edward Hopper world. To this day the painting of the Nighthawks reminds me of that restaurant. There is a harmed, sharp-faced woman in that painting. There is also a hawkish man who, externally at least, sometimes reminds me of me. A second man with a washed-out face tends the counter and doubtless serves chopped-up portions of the American head on the platter of the 1930s.

  I grew and went about other business. My aunt continued to work. Her picture would not vary in my mind for many years. It is a childhood picture of a large woman with sedate clothing and enormous bosom who emptied treasures of gum and pennies from a black purse. Lately the picture has changed. The sin hovers. I did not even know of the sin until I was thirty and deemed old enough to forgive. Forgive whom?

  She was born in 1890, was pregnant with an illegitimate child in 1906, and in early 1907 the child died at birth. The concrete lamb has been kneeling over that child’s grave ever since; and this is the 70s and the lamb has knelt for more than sixty-five years. Past the death of cousins and the disappearance of high-peaked farm houses shedding snow in the midst of eighty acres of corn-stubbled fields. My aunt left the country town after the birth and moved to a small midwestern city twenty miles away. She was not a stranger there, but in 1907 it was probably as far as a young woman could flee. The lamb remained in the family plot, the stone nameless and accusatory.

  Sometimes I imagine that it rose on cracking joints at night to frolic. Sixty-five years.

  Her first man and the father of the child was a medical student who was the son of the town doctor. The doctor delivered the child and it died. The son quit medical school and disappeared. Death hisses through the past, and the seeds of ancient springtimes root deep and live long.

  Her second man. And now here’s the tale. A mindless, vicious and tongue-wagging malcontent with arms tattooed in celebration of motherhood and tall ships. A sanctimonious ex-adventurer who stood with God and coveted virginity. My uncle Justin. In 1918 he had just returned from the war. A Navy Man, and he sailed in a battleship around the world. A gunner’s mate. It was enormous. He was grand and tattooed and muscled and he had just sailed around the world.

  They were married after six months and after her confession about the lamb. Two years later, at age thirty, she bore a son who would be their only child.

  Tattoos do not change. When my sister and I were young we watched the snarled anchor, the leaping panther, the pierced heart and the full rigged ship vibrate over muscles that were hard and capable. Later the muscles changed. In the depression there was no work. There was only the radio, the systematic soap opera fantasy that drained a perhaps stupid man’s will. Much later, when he was old and lazy; a man pale and of no muscle, the tattoos were brilliant in red and blue, palpably etched against a canvas of pallid flesh. Only the tattoos were real. The man in every way failed to become his symbols.

  Was there ever a chance? I was in awe of him when I was little because he ignored me and yelled at his wife and son, but I loved my aunt dearly.

  "Buy yourself a present. You’re so big now that I don’t know what to give you."

  I was seven years old in thirty-nine. I had seen a half dollar several times, but to own one, to be given one . . . the gleam of the huge coin she passed to me made me gasp. I did not realize that the coin would buy nothing as great as its own lustre and so I bought an airplaine. We carried it to the mortuary for my aunt’s twice-weekly appointment with the dead.

  This story is so short. She lived eighty-two years of days; a tiresome round that included cold lips above jaws frozen in rigor mortis, above manipulated eyelids; the work upon work that always returned her to the apartment where her unemployed ex-sailor boomed platitudes and sat by the radio among mugs emblazoned with the pictures of ships, medals for righteous conduct, souvenirs of crossing the equator. "Til death do you part." She worked with death.

  The days of torn scalps. The days of mending and knitting and patching above breaks in heads that were soon to be skulls. My aunt was a hairdresser for the dead and also ran a small beauty shop for the living. Death paid twice as much, and it was work that was available in the depression. She had a son who she hoped would finish college.

  ". . . and Justin never let her forget it. If she complained about anything he always came back with nagging about that." My mother’s eyes when she told me the story of the lamb were without judgment. Indeed, my mother knew our entire family so well that the knowledge placed her beyond the requirement to judge.

  By then the depression was gone, the Second War was over, and my young world was a memory that had faded before the second American reconstruction.

  "You really mean that she has lived with Justin all these years and suffers from something that happened before he knew her?"

  "Right is right."

  "And wrong is wrong, but we both know better."

  "So does Justin," my mother said, "or maybe he doesn’t."

  It was amazing, this evil perpetuated by zealous righteousness. The occasion was my first big experience with time structuring itself in my mind. I believe it is my aunt who has made me an amateur historian.

  My mother told me the story and then turned away to other business. My family has always worked hard, and on this occasion my mother’s work was to help feed forty people. The year was 1962, the last family reunion we would have in that small town that is still as raw as new boards; a town enclosed by iced December fields which have been cleared for nearly two hundred years. I wonder at the rawness of small towns and think that nothing man-made and beautiful was ever constructed at the bottom of a mountain.

  The family arrived. One of my cousins was the local Packard and Farmall dealer. A second cousin, a man of the hearty variety, announced that he was in the pig business and we all laughed. Children swirled between our legs. I took a position in a corner of the living room and knew that what I watched was the last gasp of an anachronism.

  Reunion. Had there ever been union? I remembered my childhood, walking excursion with my aunt, the perfumed smell of waiting rooms where I looked at pictures in magazines while my aunt worked in a back room. In a little while Edna and Justin arrived.

  Their son had driven them. When the purple and white station wagon was parked, his children joined the throng. The son came next, walking ahead of his wife. I had not seen my aunt and uncle in several years. She was helping him from the car. With the story of the lamb fresh in my mind I watched and took a small and criminally vicious pleasure in noting that my uncle limped. She supported him as he walked to the house. His hands dangled.

  I glanced at the son who had taken a soft chair; graduate of a business school and a Navy destroyer, loud with assertion. He was sitting, legs crossed, and over a rumpled sock the red eye of a tattooed cat stared from above the ankle. I hurried to the door to greet her and help her with her coat.

  My aunt. My dear aunt, beloved of a childhood that had contained some
hope of wizardry, some belief in prestidigitation if not in magic. I talked to her for a long time that day. Saw the sagging wattles of a once full and healthy face, the drooping flesh of the upper arm, the implied immortality of a single gold-capped tooth. She smiled and was happy. I grinned like a clown performing in pain and wondered. What was this resolve that lived so long, worked so tediously, forebore joy in this world with complete confidence in a supposed next, and resulted in happiness? I judge. Frequently I judge wrong. Did she judge?

  "I’m so proud of you. We all are." She spoke of my university education as I might speak of my son’s report card.

  Later she rambled. ". . . after the war . . . you remember the shop."

  "I remember. There was a sign with the silhouette of a beautiful woman." I also remembered the machines that temporarily set hairstyles that came from movies where instant orchestras appeared on 1930s side streets. Black and silver machinery that twisted over heads to make all women into temporary Medusas.

  ". . . after the war. The home permanents came out. I had to sell the shop. Still work some. Anderson and Hittle still call."

  I shuddered. Listened. Felt the sweep of guilt and work and time.

  ". . . gets his Navy pension . . . it’s really Old Folks pension but it don’t hurt if he calls it Navy. We get by. Oh, look at the children. It tickles me pink to see everybody here and look so good."

  We were called to dinner. Uncle Justin, by virtue of being a deacon, said grace. He properly thanked Jesus the Lamb of God and slobbered the Amen because he was hungry. A customary thing, but I excused myself as soon as possible.

  I saw my aunt and uncle once more and that was two months ago. I am forty years old now and do not understand my age, only that I have it. Passing by plane from the west coast to St. Louis I rented a car and drove to spend a weekend among the streets of the clanging city where I had spent my childhood.

  "You must see Edna," my mother said. "She’s failing."