Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  “My mom and dad had me when they were super young, so I think I ruined their fun a little bit. We always had dogs because of my dad. The one that I remember best we named Pierre. You know how the pet you remember best is the one that was there when you changed the most? That’s why I remember him. I got my belly button pierced when he was around and my dad had him come in the car when he got his first kidney stones. In the middle of the night he was in the backseat hugging Pierre while he was yelling at my mom to run the red lights.” She turns her head. “Are your parents coming to any of the matches this season?”

  “I think so, yeah. They need to see when they can make the drive. It’s far for them.”

  “Yeah.”

  Out of the snow, far off and at the end of the field, a small white house appears. She turns onto a small dirt path on the left. I guess this means we’ve arrived.

  There’s a little hill, between us and the house in the distance. “Last stop,” she says. We get off under a tree, and she turns to face me. For the first time off of a mat, I’m thankful for something before it’s done happening. Her hair is up. I think she is wearing eye makeup. I’m bad at describing faces, they are what they are and Mary Beth’s is about as nice as they can get, which is fun to look at and great to think about touching. She has on a green mackinaw. She puts things in my head without trying, I obsessively catalog her gestures and the way her lips move and memorize the painters she names, and I calm down because I’m so busy concentrating on her. She’s a marker on the map to consider in six months, when OC time runs out. The fact that I don’t know what we’re doing right now is a large part of what makes it so exciting. Maybe she plans to take me somewhere to resume our passions.

  She covers up the bike with a shaggy tree branch and pulls me up the little path that leads to the top of the hill. Even through gloves, holding her hand makes me nervous, and so for no reason, I ask the first question that I can think of.

  “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

  It takes her a moment to answer, which I take to mean there are choices to pick from. What are we doing? “I went out in the snow when I was seven and got gangrene, I lost three of my toes.”

  “Jesus. How?”

  “I got lost in the woods. Do you want to see my toes?”

  “I do, if you want to show me.”

  “Dummy, I’m kidding. I broke my arm. But I got ambidextrous from that.” She looks at me and her left ear screens the sun. It turns bright red. All the blood vessels running along the inside part of her ear. “What’s the worst thing that’s happened to you?”

  In these types of situations, where I don’t want to say anything about myself, I typically ask the other person more questions. I’m not used to spending this much time with another person. I clear my throat and point to the green pickup truck moving down the road. “Is that why we came out here?” I say.

  “Oh shit, get down,” she says, and yanks me so we’re both belly-down on top of the hill. She removes binoculars from her mackinaw! She points them at the truck, which turns into the driveway of the house. A man gets out. “That’s him, all right.”

  “Why do you have binoculars?”

  But she doesn’t seem to hear. She sighs and mutters, “I hate it here.”

  “Mary Beth?”

  She hands the binoculars to me. On the near side of the house, there’s a door with two steps that the man clears of snow by sliding his foot across. I can’t see his face, but I do see that his hair is in a ponytail. There’s a black case in his hand. He unlocks the door and goes inside.

  “That’s Professor Silas, Levi Silas, music department. He’s my Intro to Jazz teacher.”

  “Why are we spying on his house?”

  “Because his wife died four years ago. He was there, it was the bathroom of that house. Look at the window.” I aim them there, but we’re too far away to see. There’s absolutely nothing between us and the house, nothing really on any side, making a sneak-up impossible. A strange, dark splotch is on the side of the house, a cloud around the window.

  “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you what happened. There was a 911 call in the middle of the night. It’s five seconds or so long: Silas is on the phone saying there’s a fire, come right away. You know where the closest fire station is? Down past the mount and near the creek? By the time they got the fire trucks out here he was standing out in the road, and the fire was coming out the side of the house. They put it out. They found her naked and burned up in the bathroom. The door was closed.”

  “Why was she in the bathroom?”

  “That’s the problem. They brought in all these fire investigators with dogs. They found a candle in the bathroom, next to the wife. That spot on the house is the leftover fire damage. Looks like he painted over it.”

  “What did he say happened?”

  “He said his wife liked taking midnight baths. With the lights off and smelly candles and rag over the face and everything. Or that’s what I heard. He said it wasn’t unordinary for her to get up when she couldn’t sleep and take a long bath. He said he woke up, went over to the bathroom to call his wife back to bed, it was late. Saw the light from the fire under the door and opened it, grabbed her hand and thought she was right behind him, she was yelling to him that she was going to put it out, and so he made the phone call and ran out of the house. Her old friends won’t talk to him, won’t have anything to do with him. From what I heard, they questioned him and questioned him and questioned him. But he never got arrested. I think they tried to get him to slip up on his story, to crack him on why his dead wife was in the room where the fire started with the door shut, but he wouldn’t do it. What else can you do? He said the door must’ve been knocked closed as she tried to put out the fire, and no one else was around to say anything different.”

  “Let me summarize. You’re saying that he’s saying that in her franticality, she knocks shut with her foot or elbow the bathroom door, in effect sealing her own tomb.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying he’s saying.”

  “Why would he kill his wife?”

  “Why does anyone kill anyone?” she says crazily.

  Because there’s no answer to that, I ask, “How do you know so much about this?”

  “I hadn’t heard when I signed up for Jazz this semester but when I showed up on the first day, there were only four other people in there.”

  “So?”

  “Stephen, it’s an intro to jazz class. It’s in Opal Hall, one of those huge rooms. Every single one of those seats should be full. There should be a waiting list. The final exam is he plays you songs and you have to say whether it’s Jelly Roll Morton or Bill Evans. So I started asking around.”

  “He hasn’t hurt you, has he?”

  “No, Stephen.”

  “It’s not funny,” I say. “Threatened you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Relax, he’s completely normal in the class. That’s what makes it even weirder.”

  “Was the class good?”

  “Yeah. I asked for some of the records he played for Christmas.”

  “Why is he still teaching if he’s a murderer?”

  “When I asked my roommates they said he’s friends with Lee James.”

  “Who’s him?”

  “‘Who’s him?’ Is that what you said?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oregsburg’s president, dum-dum.” She scootches closer until the side of her butt is touching my side and I do not object. “They have their own jazz trio. I heard they practice on weekends in the music building. That’s probably what he’s coming back home from. The case he was carrying was his trumpet.”

  I stare at the house, like some meaning will appear. “I guess the next question is why did you bring me out here?”

  “I’ve been out here five or six times by myself. I don’t know why I keep coming. Every time I look at the house it like … fucking
distorts into some symbol of what’s wrong with Oregsburg for me. And I wanted you to see it. This person just gets to live in a small nice house in a field north of school. This is where he lives. Shit. He keeps getting to live here, he murdered his wife and he still goes on every Sunday playing the trumpet, then he gets to go back to his house and makes tea and showers in the room where she burned to death and then goes to sleep in their bed. Is it just going to stay like this forever? Until he dies of old age in his sleep?”

  At some point, the binoculars have been forgotten. Her ice-cold hand is under my clothes, squeezing and pinching my back. She looks at me with the womanly intent.

  “I think under people’s skin there’s good and bad,” she says. “With a lot of people it could go either way. This place, it’s like an experiment, it’s like a test for the people who live here.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Yes, you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about. It takes a certain kind of person to live here. A lot of people, the cold, the separateness, it doesn’t affect them. But some people, it does something to their brain. It’s floating around here.”

  “Does what to the brain?”

  “I’ve only taken one psychology class—”

  “Have you heard of Wilhe—”

  “But there are a million ways the brain can screw up. There are more variables of disorder for the brain than any other part of the body. Dyslexia, aneurysms, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, a stroke. A kneecap, that can only break, can only break or fracture or pop. A brain, the number of ways it can go wrong, it’s frightening.”

  A car goes by on the road at the bottom of the hill.

  “What do you want?” she says.

  “I want to win the championship.”

  “Not that. I knew that already. Why do you want that? What’s behind that?”

  “I want to become my full self before I die.”

  “Why do you want that so badly?”

  “Because I’ll have years and years of happiness and fulfillment. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to say? Something like that?”

  “Don’t talk down to me. Let me get this straight. You win the championship in Kenosha in March, and for the rest of your life you’re happy. You don’t win—”

  “I’m going to win.”

  “You don’t win in Kenosha in March and you’re unhappy for the rest of your life?”

  “Yes.”

  “How does that work? How can your entire life be determined by one ten-minute period?”

  “You’ve never wrestled before. And it’s seven minutes.”

  “Did you ever do sets in math?”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “It’s where you group a bunch of related things together in the little brackets. You should know what a bracket is.”

  “Don’t talk down to me.”

  “But yours is like a bracket with one thing in it. It’s a one-thing set.”

  “Why else does the world exist than to test you and see if you’re good enough to pass the test? I’ve been preparing for this since I started wrestling. When I was eleven. Everything outside of wrestling is devoid of mystery and deep faith. If this isn’t my test, what is?”

  “I don’t know, Stephen, but you don’t, either. That’s the point. You’re not going to turn into a fireball in Kenosha in March and extinguish from the world. Life is long. Possible future tests? O.K. How about being a parent? Moving to another country or doing something that helps someone else? What’s the point of living the rest of your life if the high point happens when you’re twenty-two?”

  “The point is to put the rest of my life on the right track with what I do when I’m twenty-two. To affect the next fifty years with something good. Then I die at seventy-two, wrinkled like a turtle and peeing in a bag, but that’s fine. Because I set things in order when I had no wrinkles and could control my body and used it as a tool to stomp down all these other doofuses. Or, on the other hand of the coin, a bus comes out of nowhere and kills me next year. You’d say, ‘What a waste!’ But it’s not a waste. I’m dead, but look what I’ve done. It doesn’t even matter that I’m dead. It’s about taking control of your life, about nothing ever telling you what you’re incapable of.”

  “You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. You have no fallback plan. You only care about one thing.”

  “That’s right. Caring about the one thing makes it what it is.”

  “No. You can choose to care about other things. It’s not healthy.”

  “You don’t understand. I don’t feel like I have a choice.”

  “No one’s questioning you doing this. I’m talking about your mind-set, your way of thinking.”

  “But the way of thinking is part of it,” I say. “It’s necessary. The act and the goal wouldn’t be what they are without the way of thinking.”

  “What are you doing for others?” she says with a fierceness that she thinks closes the door on our talk. But I don’t let her get the last word, I don’t let her think I’m sensitive.

  I say, “I’m setting an example.”

  A light has gone on in the house. It’s gotten darker.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too.”

  She is quiet for a second, her mind unmixing her moods. I barely have differences in moods, so I wait for her to tell me what she wants me to do. If she tells me to sprint over the hill and run into the house and kill Silas, I will do it. It would surprise her how fast I would do it.

  She says, “Why do you like me?”

  “Because I’ve never met anyone who thinks the way you do. You work harder than anyone else. You’re always busy because you’re working. I can’t even guess what you’re thinking most of the time. It seems like you can turn things into what you want them to be. I like the way your lips are. You showed me this house. Is that what you meant?”

  She seems to be searching my face for something, and after a while says, “If we got married I’d be Mary Beth Florida. Isn’t that weird?” She turns me over onto my back, takes her glove off by biting the fingertip and pulling, saying, “You’re very cold. Let’s help you out with that.” In my sweatpants, she uses a different technique than Masha. First of all she starts slow, setting the scene so to speak, in a way that I find a lot more romantic. I can’t decide whether she wants me to look at her or close my eyes. “Like this?”

  “I’m not allowed to finish, that’s the only rule, I think.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re doing a really good job.”

  “Thank you.”

  She loops the drawstring of my sweatpants in an intricate way around my parts. I don’t know what to do with my brain or my eyes. I squeeze the cold dirt on top of the hill. I say, “Tell me something about your life.”

  “Anything?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll just keep doing this while I talk. Is that all right with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “When I was a kid, there was a rash of dead goats across Minnesota. The towns by me. They couldn’t figure out what was going onto these farms, into the livestock pens, and pulling out the guts of the goats. It started in the town just south of me, Red Lake Falls. At first, they thought it was a neighborhood dog, and so they rounded up a bunch of unclaimed dogs and shot them. But then in my town, some goats started turning up with their bellies open. And by then it had stopped in Red Lake. So then people started suspecting a pack of wolves or coyotes migrating north. But then everyone realized that couldn’t be right: If it were wolves or coyotes, why were they just killing goats? Why weren’t we finding other animals?” She stops at points in the story to lean down and kiss me, which is aggressive and nice. “By then they were putting a daily count, a little red box in the top corner of the paper every morning, it got to be a thing you’d check when you woke up, to see how much higher it’d gone. It kept going up, twenty-seven one day, then twenty-nine, then thirty-four. It went on for about two w
eeks, up to thirty-nine. And then for a few days it would still be thirty-nine, and after a few days, they took the box out of the paper, and the next week we heard about dead goats up in Hallock, right by the Canadian border. At the time it seemed like a pretty big story, but then you find out something that everyone around can’t stop talking about is only being talked about by the people around you. When I think about it now, I just picture this abstract thing, like a cloud or shadow, moving north when no one’s looking. The weirdest thing about it was that the goats’ intestines were just pulled out, not eaten or messed with, it was like something just took them out to look at. And the whole time it was happening, I was staying up really late with one little light on in my room. I was on the first floor and there was a big open field out my window. Pierre was sleeping on the floor. I couldn’t remember why I was forcing myself to stay up. I think I thought whatever was killing the goats would show up if I did. It would be three in the morning, and I’d listen and look at the window, looking for something I would only recognize the moment I saw it at my window, trying to get in.”

  “I think you should probably stop.”

  She brings my hand over to herself, lies down on her back, positions me so I’m straddling her. “I have no dumb rule against finishing.” I use my concentration very strongly. She comments on the largeness of my hands. What are you doing for others? She closes her eyes and tips her head back. Snow gets in her hair. Her moans, which I don’t care for a second if they are for my benefit, I commit to auditory memory. She obviously doesn’t care who hears. They spring from her throat louder and louder so I keep an eye on the Silas house while she lets me finish her off.

  When she’s done, she holds my acting hand and puts the fingers in her mouth. “You bite your fingernails, huh?” she says. Her eyes do that dreamy woman thing that you see a few times in your life if you’re lucky, and for a moment I think she will fall asleep on the hill. “Aren’t you ever tired? Don’t you ever want to rest?”

  There have been ten billion women in the world, stretching, speaking, itching, laughing, eating, burping, and none of them have made the impression Mary Beth has made. Every step of her life dents the earth harder, like she’s sucking up more air than everyone else. She’s more destructive, taking it all up, like in my middle school acting class where the teacher screamed at you to use the whole stage. Mind your own business is the standard of North Dakota, but she ignores all that.