“What are those things on your head?”
“Oh.” His own visibility was still a surprise to him. “Birds.”
“What are birds?”
“They fly.” Mano jerked his head so they’d fly, but the birds just stayed there. “So, you can also see them? You can see everything?”
“Mano, you’re not a ghost, you know? You’re not dead.”
“I’m not?”
“No, you’re not. And neither am I. No one’s dead but the dead. Now come here and touch me wherever you want to touch me. You’ll see how not dead you are.”
Mano wasn’t ready to re-enter the world of the living so quickly. He didn’t budge. He only stared. He could see her whole body all at once. And he felt her watching him, too. The ever-expanding universe that Mano had been floating in had suddenly contracted, and became just a room. Inez’s bedroom.
Mano noticed Baby Zuzu’s bassinet in the shadows on the other side of the bed. “Is that Zuzu?”
“It is. She’s asleep.”
“Isn’t she going to hear”
“Hear what?”
“Inez, please...”
“Hear what, Mano? Hear me moan? Hear you take off all your things and get into this bed with me?”
“I...she...” Mano felt tangled in this new lust.
“She’s a baby, Mano. It’s ok. She’s never cried.”
“But...”
“Mano, take off that heavy broken accordion, and give it to me.” Until just then, Mano had forgotten that the accordion was on his back. He didn’t want to give it up, but he couldn’t bear to make Inez upset in a state like this. Inez turned onto her side, her back turned to Baby Zuzu’s bassinet, and faced Mano completely. Her breasts fell to the side, and her left knee became the new highest peak. Mano imagined his hand sliding up her right thigh, up and up, where everything gets softer than it already was, warmer, wetter, and darker.
While keeping the radio pinned beneath his arm, Mano took the accordion from his back, and walked it over to Inez. Inez placed it clumsily on the bed beside her, and then moved her hand over the top of it like it was a person, like she was stroking its hair. The accordion made a sound as she touched one of its keys, but the sound didn’t surprise her at all.
“That’s Pepe’s accordion. He wanted to be in a polka band.”
“Mano...shhh.”
Mano felt like he was in trouble, but it was the kind of trouble he could learn to like. “I’m sorry.”
“You should be. Pepe isn’t here right now. Now take off your sheet and give it to me.”
“No.” Mano thought of what remained of his mother in the sheet. “I can’t.”
“Mano, give me that sheet. You’re no ghost. You can’t go around wearing a sheet if you’re not a ghost.”
Mano wanted to explain, but he knew that Inez would only shush him again. And there was no other answer he could have given Inez other than ok.
“Ok,” he pulled the sheet up and over his head. The two black birds flapped off his head, and then re-landed on his head. Their claws scratched up a cowlick between them. Mano handed the wadded sheet to Inez. He worried she’d be able to smell his mother’s death inside of it. Mano wasn’t a ghost anymore. He was now alive again and in the world. A man in the world. A man. A radio under his arm. The black poodle quiet near his feet. He felt his own man-weight in his shoes.
“Pretend this is you.” Inez looked at Mano without ever looking away. She wrapped the broken accordion with the bed sheet, then she rolled over onto it. Her body was facing the bed now, and she was much higher in the air as she straddled the accordion.
Mano watched Inez’s body move, while she watched him watch her. He watched her ass as it clinched and then relaxed like she was trying to grind the sheet-wrapped accordion deep into the center of the bed. Her grinding became stronger and stronger. The muscles in her legs flexed.
Baby Zuzu awoke in her bassinet. “Milk!”
Inez kept grinding.
“Zuzu wants milk,” Mano tried to interrupt as if Inez hadn’t heard Zuzu’s call.
Mano could see the black hair between Inez’s legs move back and forth on his mother’s sheet, like she was brushing it dirty.
“Zuzu doesn’t get this milk. It’s for you.”
As Inez moved, she made a song with the accordion. She made the accordion pump in and out, in and out, and Mano could recognize Ba Ba Black Sheep in its melody, a song that he and his mother used to sing together when he was a very small child. In his head, he sang it while Inez fucked the accordion.
Ba ba black sheep, have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.
Mano felt his body get harder, and sadder, as the melody of the accordion sped up. It sped up until the song became unrecognizable to him. It became just a single long pump of sound, a moan or a whine, and it mixed with the sound of Baby Zuzu in her bassinet.
“Milk!”
Mano was so hard, so sad, all alone in the world, no mother, no Pepe, watching the sheet, watching the accordion break and pump, ba ba black sheep. Inez’s body suddenly deflated. It looked as broken now as the accordion.
“Milk, milk!” Zuzu screamed.
Inez refilled her lungs with air and turned her head to look at Mano. After three or four long breaths, she managed to say, “I miss my husband.”
Together they pushed hard the sorrow down, and deep back inside.
17.
Mano was sore. He was resting on his back on the floor next to the black square in the back room of his barbershop. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and zipped up his pants. All the things he loved, except his mother’s sheet, were still with him, attached to parts of his body, beneath his arm, on his head, and behind him, like a shadow. The accordion, more broken than before, with a living layer of Inez Roar glazed upon it, played a long slow note of struggle as Mano rolled onto his elbow.
Mano could hear the voices of many men in his barbershop.
“It’s true. I saw it with my own eyes. It was tragic, really,” said The Businessman.
When Mano opened the door and stepped from the back room into the main room of the barbershop, he found nearly a half dozen men crowded together, forming a line from the front door. The Builder, The Bartender, and The Repairman were standing against the wall just inside the shop’s front door, and The Lawyer, The Inn Keeper, and The Chef were sitting in the three chairs along the wall. The Businessman, who were three people in total, were squeezed into the single barber’s chair in front of the mirror. The Businessman had three bushes of grey hair on their heads.
“What are those things on your head?” asked The Businessman.
“They’re called birds,” answered Mano.
“Birds? What do birds do?”
“They fly. But these just sit on my head.”
The Businessman glanced at The Lawyer, who anticipated their question and shook his head no.
The Chef changed the subject. “You need a bigger barbershop. Business is good, yes?” And then he answered his own question. “Business is good.”
“I suppose it is,” Mano said, a little stunned from his sudden entrance back into the living world which was full of people who needed haircuts. “One at a time. One at a time. That’s all I can do,” Mano smiled for The Chef through his waking haze. “Is it good for you, too?”
“Couldn’t be better,” answered The Chef. “All the new people in town are coming in for the cheap sheep special. It’s not baaaaad I tell them. Not baaaaad at all. And they all laugh.”
No one in the barbershop really laughed.
“I can vouch for that,” said The Businessman. “It’s not bad. And it’s cheap.”
“Business is good at the inn, too,” said The Inn Keeper. He went on to explain how a few travelers heard word of God’s Finger and wanted to visit Pie Time out of curiosity.
“And those that God’s Finger has left behind need to drink,” added the Bartender.
The attention everyone was giving Mano had run
dry, and they turned their attention back to The Businessman, so they could finish their story they were in the middle of.
“Just a shave and a little off the sides please, sir, and thank you,” said The Businessman to Mano. Mano sharpened the blade of his razor with a leather strap. Then The Businessman continued. “So, when we all came back into the room, there she was under the table.”
“She was under the table?” asked The Chef.
“Yeah, how did she get under there?” asked The Inn Keeper.
“Hell, we don’t know how she got under there, or why. We all left to tour the rest of the factory, and she wasn’t in the group,” said The Businessman.
The Lawyer nodded his head in agreement.
“So Ms. Good ran back to the room to get her, and she screamed. We all ran back to see what was the matter, and there she was, dead, under the table.”
“It was God’s Finger,” concluded The Chef.
“A real shame,” added The Builder.
The Lawyer opened his mouth to say something, but just wrote in his notebook instead. Mano leaned The Businessman back as they were talking, and he rubbed their grey face with oil.
The Businessman continued, nearly prone, “It was our first time seeing a death hole up close. It was just like the others, as far as we understand.”
All the others sighed a single sigh, knowingly. They looked at each other in some mutual understanding while The Businessman, who had only been in Pie Time for a few days, were back in Mano’s hands, looking at the water stains on the lowered ceiling of the shop.
“What was in it?” Mano asked.
The others looked disgusted by his question.
“In it? You mean, in the hole?”
“Yeah,” said Mano, “...in the hole.”
“Well, now that you ask, there was a hot water bottle in there.”
“A hot water bottle? Huh, you don’t say?” said The Builder. “I wonder why God would leave behind a hot water bottle.”
“In fact, it’s right here.” The Businessman pointed to their briefcase. “We put it in our briefcase just to get it out of the way.”
“Do you mind?” asked Mano.
The Businessman lifted their head and looked around at everyone else in the room, and then finally at The Lawyer. The Lawyer nodded his head yes. “No, we don’t suppose we do.”
The Lawyer rifled through The Businessman’s very large briefcase and found the hot water bottle. It was red and made of rubber. It was just like the one in the portrait painting Mano saw in the back room of the factory. The Lawyer handed it to Mano, who set down his razor on the counter. Mano filled the rubber bottle with hot water and then he lifted his shirt. He readjusted the accordion on his back, and tucked the radio further up into his armpit. He pressed the water bottle against his lower back. “Ahhh, this is just what I needed,” he exhaled. Mano then secured the bottle to his lower back by wrapping it around his stomach with the paper that he used to keep hair off of his customers’ collars. Mano added one more thing to his body, which was now bigger because of it. He put his shirt back down around the bottle, and picked his razor back up.
“It was only taking up room in our bag. You’re welcome to it for keeps.”
Mano thanked The Businessman as the muscles in his back softened.
“Why are you holding all those things?” asked The Baker.
“I love them,” said Mano.
The Builder put his head back against the wall, and steered the conversation back to the original main road. “What a tragedy. June Good was a good one. She kept this town humming, no doubt. Before her and The Foreman, Pie Time was just a smear on the map. Simply tragic.”
Everyone nodded in solemn agreement. The Chef put his head in his hands and added, “She was the class of Pie Time. Tragic, indeed!”
“The real tragedy of it is when we had to tell The Foreman about her death,” said The Businessman between their teeth. They didn’t want to move their jaws while Mano shaved them with a straight edge. “He didn’t take it well. Not at all.”
“But how was Vera? How did she take it?” Mano asked.
“Ms. Good?” clarified The Businessman.
Mano nodded his head yes.
Everyone looked at Mano, confused.
“What do you mean, son? I’m sure Ms. Good was as sad as everyone else, but The Foreman, he lost so much. He lost his wife under that table. He was a real mess.”
“Oh, right, yes, of course.” Mano backed away from the good intentions of his question.
The Repairman had been steaming, and finally bubbled over. “This has got to stop! We need to put a stop to this! Before long, we’ll all die, just like that. We’re bound to this death now, God’s Finger. We’re all just biding our times until it happens to us. But, what can we do about it? That’s what I say. What can we do. It’s time we do something about it before we all have death holes in our chests, like Mothers says, like the dirty sinful little mice that we are.”
The Businessman sat up in the barber chair with the same motion that corpses sit up from their coffins. Now they were facing the line of men who were all charged by The Repairman’s speech. Mano stayed small behind them cutting their hair with his shears.
“Have you thought about protection?” the Businessman inquired, as if they were taking a survey.
The Lawyer looked sternly at The Businessman, and forced a cough.
The Chef started rambling, as if he was offended by The Businessman’s question. “What do you mean, have we thought about protection? We’re dealing with God’s Finger! We’re being poked all the way through, one at a time! So if you think we haven’t thought of protecting ourselves, well then...”
“We’re just being blessed too hard,” argued The Chef, as if to remind everyone of the complexity of the situation. “We need to protect ourselves from God’s blessings.”
“Then why haven’t you done it yet?” pressed The Businessman. “It’s clear that Pie Time has a new kind of death to deal with. That’s not in dispute. So why aren’t you protecting yourselves from God’s Finger so that you don’t die like dirty mice?”
“Of course, but I don’t see...”
“We just have to be better...”
The Businessman interrupted. Their eyes were lighting up. This was their chance. “No, no. Being better doesn’t mean you can’t also protect yourselves. Now, how much would you pay for it? To be protected against your future pokings?”
The Lawyer looked around at the results of the survey without moving his head.
“Anything, I suppose.”
“I’d pay anything.”
“Of course, anything.”
The freed grey hairs of The Businessman were like confetti around their heads now. The grey hairs lit up in the rising sun through the barbershop window, and their new shorn heads looked as if they were in a bright snow globe. “That’s it then! I believe you. It’s coming, friends. Your new life without fear is near! Trust in me.”
The Businessman then rose to their feet, dramatically pulling off their own barbershop cape, and undoing their own paper collars. They asked The Builder if he’d like to get a drink with him at The Bartender’s bar that night. Everyone seemed to be in agreement.
There were problems. The Businessman could smell them. And these were problems to be solved by business.
18.
In a very short time, Father Mothers III’s reign as priest had become the most productive reign in the brief history of Pie Time. With the money he had raised from his father’s death, Mothers built a bigger and better cross on the top of Lady Blood. He used his father’s plans which had been found nailed to the smaller original cross, but he doubled the size of his father’s intended cross using the hired expertise of The Builder and the unusual strength of Lil’ Jorge. The cross was now the size of five men, and could easily be seen from anywhere in Pie Time, and perhaps from anywhere in the entire valley.
The Builder climbed up onto the new cross to test its str
ength, and to nail the last nail. “As God intended,” Mothers said to The Builder. “Pie Time will be safe now.”
Because of Pie Time’s recent fervor for attending church, Mothers had raised much more money than the money that he needed to build the cross. In addition, he built new pews for the growing congregation out of wood harvested from the trees west of Pie Time, and he built a new donation box out of the skull of his own father, Father Mothers II. It was, essentially, a pine box, but the lid of the box was the deceased priest’s skull. The people could open the skull’s mouth and just slide the money in. Mothers knew how much the children, especially, liked to push rolled-up cash directly through the teeth of their last priest.
However, Mothers’ most talked about update was the new confession booth. The booth was built in such a way that Mothers could sit behind a screen designed to be directly in front of the confessor, and only the priest could see through the screen, and not the other way around. In this way, the priest could see the confessor in full frontal view, but the confessor could not see the priest.
Mothers had recently taken up an interest in photography, and he liked to take photographs of the naked. He began saying things in his homilies like “A naked body is its most pure, free from sin, vulnerable to the lord.” It was his idea then to photograph the naked bodies of his confessors at the very moment that they confessed, for the sake of invoking their truest confessions, for creating a condition of vulnerability and exposure in the face of new purity, for cleansing oneself of sin. And, as he saw it, people were dying rapidly at the hands of God’s Finger, so his photographs were also taken for the sake of posterity. His record of sinners free from their sins were pinned to the north wall of Lady Blood for everyone to see. It quickly became clear to the believers of Pie Time exactly who had confessed, and who hadn’t.
The first one to step into the new confession booth on its first morning of use was Vera Good. She was wearing a black veil and June Good’s fur coat and pearls. Until she lifted the veil, Mothers thought he might be seeing the ghost of Mrs. Good.
“Good morning, Vera.” Mothers took his place at the back of the confession booth behind the screen. Vera opened the door, and skeptically examined the new booth.
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