by Doug Lawson
“They belonged to my daughters—I do hope you enjoy them. Though I’m afraid you’ll need to learn the art of wrapping them from someone who has had more experience than I.”
“They’re lovely,” April said. “You really shouldn’t have done this.”
Aravind raised his hands. “My daughters are modern American women. What do they need these for?”
Claire turned the shimmering cloth over and over in her hands. She held it up to April, an inquiring look on her face. “You can try it on later,” April said. But Claire shook her head, tap-danced her feet.
“I do not mind waiting,” Aravind said.
So April took Claire into the house. She brushed her unruly hair into pigtails and helped her out of the shorts and tank top and wrapped the long sari around her waist, over her shoulders. It was much too large for her, and it went around and around her slight frame, but when she was done Claire went and stood in front of the long mirror in the main bedroom, smoothing her hands up and down the shimmering folds of fabric.
“You too, Mama,” Claire said quietly, almost a whisper.
So April complied, quickly working the sheer material around herself. She tucked the ends of the sari in where they seemed to fit.
She stood side by side with Claire at the mirror, where the two of them were now transformed into elegant, beautiful creatures of mystery.
There were traffic noises outside, old brakes squeaking to a stop, and as she was walking to the door she heard the yelp of a dog, a shout from Aravind. She rushed outside, trying not to stumble over the sari, as other voices joined his.
A small dump truck with a confederate sticker on the back window had parked on the road behind Aravind’s SUV. There were men inside, two of them with bright yellow hats, and one of the drivers had gotten out with an anxious look on his reddening face. Behind the trucks, Mrs. Bill’s Lexus SUV pulled in, sunlight glancing off the windshield. Aravind was in the yard near to the dump truck, bent over something vivid and white moving on the ground, while at the same time trying to manage the leashes of the all the dogs who anxiously wrapped and rewrapped themselves around him. The white thing on the ground yelped again, and April realized it was one of the dogs.
She ran over to Aravind. Mrs. Bill shut the door of the Lexus and stood surveying the scene with an imperious air, taking in Aravind, the dogs, and the two of them, who she clearly didn’t recognize behind the saris. “What’s going on here? What’s all this?” she said. “You people will need to leave my house this instant!”
“It’s not yours,” April said, bending down over the white dog, next to the fat, soft tires of the dump truck. The dog climbed to its feet awkwardly, like a new colt, holding a back leg off the ground. Angrily, she looked up at Mrs. Bill. “You can’t just take what you want, don’t you realize that?”
Mrs. Bill frowned in April’s direction. “April? Is that you?” She came up and took April’s arm and lifted her to her feet. “Honey, just what’s going on here? Who’s that . . . that man?”
“A friend of ours. Look—”
But Mrs. Bill was still caught up in her own talking, waving her hands in the air. “But April, really! This is more than a little inappropriate, isn’t it? All of these animals on the property! And Alec’s hardly in his grave, and here’s this, this foreign man! What if the news people saw you here, dressed like this? In their clothes like that?”
April felt her face grow hot. Claire came up beside her to look at the dog, and folded herself fearfully against April’s legs, watching all of them—Mrs. Bill’s sunken, intense eyes, the anxious concern on Aravind’s face as he cradled the dog, felt down the dog’s injured leg. “We’re not exactly at war with India, Sarah.”
Mrs. Bill frowned, dismissively. “Honey, what’s the difference? India, Afghanistan, Syria? How many of our men do they need to take before we stand up for ourselves?”
April raised her hand and swung her palm across Mrs. Bill’s carefully made-up cheek. Mrs. Bill staggered back with a look of shock and put her hand up to her face. She squinted back at April as if seeing her there for the first time.
“You little bitch,” she said quietly. Her look of shock shifted into one of anger: cheeks tight, eyebrows low, face getting red. She took a step forward, and April wasn’t sure if Mrs. Bill was going to leap at her, polished nails extended like claws.
The driver in the yellow hat stepped toward the two of them, his hands out in a placating way. “Ladies . . .” he said hesitantly.
“Go home, Sarah,” April said. “To your own home. This one is ours.”
Mrs. Bill opened and closed her mouth. “I don’t think—”
But she didn’t finish, because Claire stepped forward then. With her little hands on her tiny hips, her stubby, vibrating pigtails, she glared back at Mrs. Bill and threw her little chest out and she barked at her, six or seven good solid woofs that echoed back off the hills behind them.
Mrs. Bill’s face went bright scarlet, and she looked from Claire to April and then back at Claire in disbelief. She raised up a finger and pointed—whether it was at Claire or at April, April wasn’t sure.
But April didn’t wait to find out. She stepped forward and hoisted Claire up in her arms. Claire looked at her and April nodded back, and then both of them began to bark at Mrs. Bill, as loud as they could.
April decided she liked the way the barks felt, coming up out of her throat from some deeper place, all guttural like that. And she liked it that she didn’t give a fuck what the rest of them thought about her daughter, about her, about both of them standing together there and barking at Mrs. Bill as the sun went down and the moon started to rise, as the new fog over the lake starting to creep in on them like the gentle hand of memory ready to turn everything soft and white.
She watched as Mrs. Bill took another step back and stared at both of them in disbelief. Then the woman threw her hands up in the air and retreated to her shiny SUV, put the car into gear and sped off, leaving deep tire tracks behind her. The old dump truck followed close behind.
They caught their breath and looked at each other. “Mama,” Claire whispered. “You are a good barker.”
“Thanks, Claire,” April said. “You’re pretty good yourself, you know.” She tugged on one of the girl’s tiny pigtails. And while she had a sense of it then, it was really only years later, when April had found and married a nice architect, with allergies and smelly feet and a deeply affectionate nature, and after Claire had grown into a shining young woman full of desperate beauty and was about to go off around the world on adventures of her own—it was only then, standing on the edge of this same lake, with Claire in her twenties hugging her goodbye, that April knew: it had been the sounds of the two of them, barking together that had been the thing that had banished not only Mrs. Bill from their lives, but had started to chase off that awful lethargy that had lumbered along beside her since Alec’s death.
She had stood in a place, this place—once Alec’s and one that she and Claire still called her own—and she had opened up her heart. And here, like her dead husband, like her beautiful daughter, she had begun to find her own true voice.
JERSEY DEVILS
CLAUDE HAS NEVER made good decisions, and a premature last-night celebration on the night before his actual last night is right up there with the rest of them. Bourbon, too much of it, followed by the usual: an imagined insult, a broken glass, the slap of fists and the tight hug of the wide, bald man at the door. The asphalt of the San Jose street cups Claude’s cheek like a woman’s hand and carries him into a waking dream of hospital ER fluorescent lights, the smell of disinfectant, gruff nurses poking and prodding and bandaging. Then the sound of beeping monitors dopplers off, followed by an hour or two of sweaty, fevered sleep filled with country music played too fast, the four-four beat hooked to a lawnmower engine, thumping in time to his hyped-up, fight-or-flight pulse. And the ghost of his father, dead and buried Lenny Choteau doing that shuffling two-step dance of his with a grin on
his pale face and a rusted shovel in his hand, his flannel shirt smelling of wet dirt and ashes. Mon tabarnak! Lenny curses him in French as he dances. Mange d’la merde! Goddamn Tabernacle! Eat shit! Lenny’s teeth are the color of coffee grounds and his tongue is a blind, obscene earthworm.
The next morning at dispatch, in a twist, Rudy Roy Castigliano decides he wants to ride along with them. Rudy Roy—boy in a tux at this time in the morning, ruddy and immaculate and shining in the rising sun like a dancing bear. Rudy Roy with the giant smoldering stogie. Rudy who doesn’t care about the schedule since the guy Claude works for works for a guy who works for Rudy Roy’s dad.
Rudy Roy wants to ride along with Claude and the old guy named Alpo for no reason Claude can make out. To drink bad coffee? To get in touch with the little people? But Rudy Roy gets paged, makes a loud call—the tiny silver flip phone couched in a huge paw—comes back and says no such luck. “Getting a freighter in just a little while,” Rudy Roy says. In the cold morning, smoke steams from his pores. “Some big things needin’ immediate attention, you know what I’m saying? But no big deal. You guys know the routine, don’t ya?”
Claude doesn’t, but he isn’t about to say so. Not this particular route, anyway. He’s driven for Castigliano on and off for the past few years, but each job is different, each company is different, and here he is, the last one, the last time he’ll need to look at this teenager and say, “Yes, sir, let me light that for you.”
Alpo nods back at Rudy Roy and sweats in the cold Oakland fog. With a string-haired, rounded head, arms that seem just a little too long, and small, wrinkled hands clasping a shopping bag, Alpo’s a graying chimp. His huge wireframe glasses reflect the etched metal bones of the Bay Bridge, the rundown docks, the guys doing crack behind the warehouse with the sign that says Bovex, the name of this new start-up venture, which Claude knows has something to do with farming. Rudy Roy gives him a locked briefcase, two hundred-dollar bills, and another flip phone. “You run into any problems, you call me, hear? Number of the cell’s on speed dial.”
In the cab of the trailer truck, Alpo hunches over a map, folding and refolding as they pull out, tracing roads with his fingers and whispering to himself. He looks out the window for a few minutes, points the way, then looks down at the map again.
Alpo’s tiny, balding chimp head condenses all the humidity out of the cab like a cold egg. He wipes his wrinkled hand across the top of it, dries it on his pants, and then unrolls the top of the shopping bag, sorts through it, and takes out a cassette. The tape clicks into place in the amped-up sound system, and the soundtrack of the movie of Claude’s miserable life begins, sung by a resurrected chorus of 1980s American girl bands. Alpo comes alive as though someone hooked him up directly to the truck’s battery, tapping his hands on his knees and the dash, glasses flashing. “I know a lot of people say they’re all tits and no talent,” he shouts over the music. “I think they’re wrong. I mean listen to those harmonies in there! Layered like cake. Listen to that timing—perfection! Perfectimundo! You don’t think they had to work at that?”
Claude nods, noncommittal. The clouds break open and down comes three times the rain that’s been dumping on them all morning. The truck shivers in the wind that’s up out of nowhere in this paved-over country. The northbound traffic is stupid; stupid drivers, all of them changing lanes when they should just sit there. The coffee and the painkillers have moved into his hands and arms. The nerves flare up and his palms sweat so much he can’t hold the wheel straight.
But then, strangely, it all passes over like the shadow of his father’s hand across his troubled brow—another small reprieve. The traffic parts and they shoot easily up the middle lane. He thinks about Canada, about the view from Lenny’s front porch, the one he hasn’t set his boots on in years: the broad stretches of the bay between Bouctouche and Prince Edward Island on a calm day, the boats working in and out of the tiny marina, the wind filled with salt and the smell of fried seafood. With that in his mind, shining like it’s just on the far side of the tollbooths, even the cheery undead superpowers of the music merge with the road rhythm into a strange sort of harmony. It vibrates his teeth a little deeper into their sockets.
North of Medford, Grant’s Pass, and Myrtle Creek, deep into the wilds of Oregon. The first stop is a small farm off a back road that’s only recently been paved. The road lines are bright and shiny, tracked over with mud at the mouth of the dirt driveway. They pull up to the old house and a guy with sideburns—Lenny’s age, if Lenny was still around—comes out chewing gum, dressed in dirty brown jeans and a T-shirt with the Hawaiian flag on it. Four hairy dogs scurry out the door behind him and run circles around the truck, barking and whining. Alpo takes a list out of the shopping bag and consults it, then rolls down his window and the guy comes over.
“Mr. Frank?” The guy blinks a few times, looking in at the bandages on Claude’s face. “Mr. Frank?”
“Charles. Frank Charles.” He labors over each word as if speech is a new thing and his mouth needs some time to get used to it. “You guys do that every time, y’know. I’m an old friend of Mr. Cas. We was in together. You guys should give me some more respect, okay?”
Alpo pushes his glasses up on his slippery nose. “Any problems this month, Mr. Charles?”
The guy thinks about it for a minute, hitches up his belt with both hands. His sideburns are long, and they feather out over his ears. “Never seen them shit quite that way before. Maxie, be quiet.”
“No fatalities? No illnesses?”
“Two.”
“Two dead?”
“That’s what I said.”
“The white Jerseys? Or the other ones?”
Frank Charles studies his running shoes. They’re white with blue swooshes on them, and they’re caked with mud. “Other.”
“What did you do with the bodies?”
“Left ’em there, like you said to.” He giggles once, out of the side of his mouth—a strange, pressurized sound.
“All right, we’ll take care of that. Any births? Says here you had a few cows almost ready to go.”
“Three a those.”
“And the calves, they were all completely white?”
“Yep. I don’t know how you guys did it since they was preggo before you even got started with the shots.”
“How about the milk,” Alpo asks. “Production stable? You tracking it like we showed you? Any changes up or down?”
“Up.”
“They’re producing more milk than last month?”
“Oh yeah!”
“A lot more? A little more?”
“More’s what I said, isn’t it? You figure the rest out. Maxie! Quit! That damn dog. She starts it. Rest of them just follow her lead.”
“And you’re dumping the milk, right Mr. Charles? Remember you signed those papers that said how the milk was to be disposed of?”
Frank Charles’ eyes get big for a second, and then he looks around quickly—at the house, the low clouds, the silver bulldog on the hood of the truck. “I remember. I been dumping all of it, just like you said. I’m not selling any of it, no sir.”
Claude shakes his head.
Alpo rolls his eyes. “How about the food intake?” he asks.
“I’m just not hungry.” Frank grins at Claude. When Claude’s expression doesn’t change, he looks back at Alpo. “What’d you do to that guy, anyway?”
“Is the livestock eating more or less, Mr. Charles?”
“Shit. You guys have no sense of humor. I can’t get the damn things to eat much of anything anymore. Not that they seem to need it.”
“All right. I’ll need to see your data, Frank.”
Frank Charles wanders back toward the house, stops on the porch and giggles again, opens the screen door and goes inside. The dogs seem a little confused, and decide to settle down on the porch. Alpo takes Rudy Roy’s Bovex briefcase, cups his hand over the lock, and dials a combination. Inside are rows of glass vials and a large syringe n
estled in foam, some things wrapped in plastic, and some sort of handheld computer, flat and black and about the size of a slice of bread. All of it is surrounded by stacks of cash, mostly twenties. He pulls a pen off the computer and writes some notes on the screen. The computer beeps, and Alpo writes some more notes.
Frank Charles is taking his time. Claude pops the cassette out of the radio and turns the FM on, looking for news. Rain tomorrow, no shit. Train derailed in Texas. More bombings. The flip phone rings so he doesn’t get the full gist of the newscast, but it doesn’t sound very good. Alpo answers the phone, then passes it over.
“Clawed Shoo-tow,” Rudy Roy Castigliano says. “My frog man! That you? Look. I know it’s your last gig. I know it, my man! But look, you always been good to us, right? What say you take just a few more rides. For me. Personal. No more of this small-time crap. I mean the real stuff! The stuff that matters. The stuff that pays you back the right way, know what I’m saying?”
Claude knows. He just doesn’t know what to answer. Frank Charles comes back with an old pencil tucked behind his right ear and a stack of paper, and Claude tells Rudy Roy he’ll think about it and call him back. “Think hard, my man,” Rudy Roy says. “You know I’m countin’ on you.”
Frank Charles smiles like a proud five-year-old when he hands the materials over. Alpo takes the sheets and spreads them out on the briefcase, and even Claude can see that the last group of columns was all filled in pretty fast, in pencil. Alpo circles a few numbers for show. “Thanks, Frank. You remember that today’s the pickup day? We’re going to need to check all of them over and get our own livestock loaded before I can pay you. I’m going to have to bring those white calves along with me, too.”
Frank Charles is still smiling. It’s a smile with pressure behind it in the jaws and eyes, like the whole of his face is holding something back. He nods absently, and waves them on around back to where the barn is.