by Brad Felver
It’s near dark before we’ve pulled the kidneys and heart and other organs out. Linus doesn’t want to hang him overnight even though I tell him the pork will have a richer flavor.
“It ages just the same,” he says. He clicks his dentures. “Lazy city people.”
I don’t want him thinking I’m lazy, so I start to hack him up and wrap the shanks and hocks and ribs and loins. My father was the best butcher I ever knew, cleaned every scrap, could squeeze an extra cut from a steer’s nose and make it taste like sirloin. Linus isn’t so talented, but he does okay. I show him a few things, about dipping the blade in cold water and keeping it moving with long strokes, about pitching it at the proper angles, about staying with the grain as long as possible. He pretends not to listen to me. “Don’t play smart,” he says. But before long he’s moving faster and not wasting so much. Mostly I can tell he’s the kind of man who does everything himself. I imagine if I kept after him long enough, he could teach me how to make rocks. And he doesn’t seem to tire. He hangs that hand-rolled cigarette from his dry lips and sets to work, never lighting it, just clenching it there and slowly chewing out the tobacco. And he’s quiet in a sturdy old man sort of way, so quiet it makes you feel like a sissy when you start talking, like he outlasted you in some primal game of chess.
“I could take some of this into the city,” I tell him. “Sell it for higher than market price. SoHo. Gramercy. Midtown West—those people love overpaying for anything.”
Linus stares at me for a minute. He doesn’t talk, just clenches that cigarette between his lips. “You trying to steal my pork?”
“No, sir,” I say, and I go back to work.
We slaughter two hogs a day for the first three days. “You do okay with that,” Linus says, “so we’ll stick with it. Don’t want to confuse you.”
Evenings, when we’re finished working, I drive back into the city. It’s a strange sensation: I don’t miss the place, but I’m just so used to being there, it’s like there’s a gravitational pull I can’t escape. Kind of like having a limp that slowly heals. You know, how you end up hobbling longer than you have to because you just get used to it? Gus isn’t thrilled about the situation. He obeys when I open the car door and toss his leash in there, but in that lackadaisical, snooty way that reminds me he’s a teenager in dog years. At first, we head toward the natural history museum. I want to sniff you out, see the guy who’s putting it to my wife.
I pretend Gus is a seeing-eye dog and that I’m blind, and I get away with it longer than you’d think. Just stick an arm in front and pretend to be groping for something. No one wants to question a blind man. But I’m sure they realize I can see just fine when I stare at this exhibit of early Neanderthals hunting a woolly mammoth. It says not to touch, and I don’t, but boy, do I want to peel back the little huntress’s tunic, get a peek at her chest. But I realize I’m an idiot. That kind of thing has gotten me into trouble before—touching someone else’s nipple, which I swear was mostly an accident—and I guess touching the Neanderthal tit wouldn’t really be sticking it to you the way I’d like. And that’s really all I was after. On my way out, I ask the blue-blazered docent if one of his colleagues is bald and talks like a pretentious member of Parliament, but he ignores me. You can understand why, I guess. I wonder now, did they tell you about me later as you sat in your break room, eating your camembert and rye crackers?
I’m running low on money, so I grab some cheap Chinese noodles for dinner. Gus and I end up in Gramercy, wandering the streets. I mutter to myself, thinking of the things I can say when I do bump into the both of you. “Karen,” I could say and remove my hat. “Look at all this hair!” Or I could tell her I’ll start refilling the ice trays and taking her for bacon and pancakes on Saturdays. Or I could say something about not being a fossil, like you are, but I can’t quite work out the phrasing, and I’m afraid I’ll get it wrong and seem like an idiot rural who also happens to have a full head of hair.
I wander the side streets and alleys until I see her car—our car. The little Honda hatchback you’re probably embarrassed about. It’s on a tight one-way right next to the private park, surrounded by Volvos and Audis and glossy black iron fences. I can’t decide if I want to sit on it and wait for her or slash the tires. Gus sniffs around the doors because he smells her and probably thinks that means he’ll get some food. So I wait for almost an hour, leaning against the car, planning my move. I have to be back to the farm in the morning, and it’s a long drive. So I tear off a corner of the Chinese leftover box and leave a note under the windshield wiper: Let’s talk, I write. Gus and I miss you. Call me. Then I write down the number from Linus Houghton’s ad and start on my drive.
It’s not like Karen and I ever had such a good thing going. Bad match from the start. You probably don’t realize, though. Probably don’t ask too many questions about me. You’re a bald museum docent, used to doing the talking. She wanted to train me into some refined fop who liked art and Russian opera, you see, and I was pretty reluctant. She’s so quiet and refined. Reads all those books and never talks too loud in a restaurant, even when I wear a flannel shirt under that Joseph Abboud sport coat she bought me. I do think she loved me at first. She was a city kid, grew up in a boxy Bronx high-rise, and here I was, a guy with calluses. She could feel cultured around a guy like that. Looking back, she probably started getting frustrated early on, though, when she realized I wasn’t going to turn into some cosmopolitan dick.
Has she told you any of this? Told you about our silent fights, sitting across from each other at that little metal table we had, eating cold pastrami sandwiches, just glaring? Or what about all those nights we just threw our hands up and went to sleep because we were too tired to fight anymore? Or that President’s Day weekend, 1993, when we drove up to Vermont, to that adorable little bed and breakfast with the wraparound porch and the gingerbread trim. It had a petting zoo—cows, sheep, a couple pigs, a horse. All she wanted to do was feed the lambs, run her fingers through their soft coat, and so why did I go on explaining about how the different parts she was petting were really just different cuts? That’s the scrag right there, dear. Kind of tough but okay for stew. And that—that’s the fillet. I like the chump chops better, a little fattier, but most people like the fillet. That’s what you’d order at the little restaurant down the street—the one you said took reservations six months out and we would never get to try. She was awfully upset after that, which is probably fair. I apologized and everything, told her I’d take her to get that fillet soon, though I never did. Later that night she crawled on top of me and started gyrating. And I just went with it because who wouldn’t? Even you would. But halfway through I realized she wasn’t moaning so much as she was sobbing, and then I didn’t know what to do, so I sat there for a minute before I started feeling dirty. Then I rolled her over and we sat quietly in the dark and didn’t talk for a while.
On the drive home she told me I was like a chunk of deformed brass. She kept polishing me, thinking I’d stay like that. I’d be like gold. But after a couple weeks I’d be all tarnished again, and she’d have to start over. That’s called a metaphor, and she uses lots of those, being a librarian and all.
I wonder, did she tell you some skewed version of this? Or was she maybe too embarrassed? Or does my name not even come up? I start suspecting something is wrong with Linus late that first week. We’re up early mending fence, splitting firewood, clearing brush from trails in the woods. It’s all refreshing work, and I’m taken back immediately to being a kid, trolling around the farm with my father, working those thick yellow calluses deep into the creases of my hands. And Linus starts to open up just a little, easing off the angry old man routine.
“A museum docent?” he says.
“A bald one,” I tell him.
He shakes his head. “Never been to a museum myself.”
“Well,” I say. But I don’t really tell him much more about you since I don’t know much more. Just that you guide little kids aroun
d and don’t have as much hair as I do.
“So when you drive in there at night, it’s what, some kind of stalking?”
“Nothing like that,” I tell him, but then I don’t really explain any more since I don’t know why exactly I do go in there or what I’d do if I bumped into you.
Anyway, while we’re mending a length of split-rail and talking like this, Linus reaches too far for a flat-blade screwdriver, and his forearm pops out from under his jacket. And it’s messy looking: red and blistered, dark splotches like craters. Mix that with his old man wrinkles, and it starts to look like someone hit him with a load of buckshot and he never cleaned it, so it got all gangrened. Has to hurt like a real bastard.
Linus catches me staring, I know he does, and we both stop for just a minute. He looks down at his exposed arm, but he doesn’t cover it because that would be too obvious.
“What you do,” he says, “is buy her some sort of jewelry. A necklace, maybe, with a turquoise rock on it. Women love turquoise shit.”
“Right,” I say.
He stands and stretches, kind of nonchalant like, pulls his shirt back over his forearm. “You’ve been working out good,” he says. “You go hard, don’t need me training you. How’s an extra hundred a week sound? On top of room and board.”
I squint at him, trying to figure his angle, but I don’t think too long. I need the money, and I tell him that’d be great if he can spare it.
“It’s a deal,” he says. “A hundred a week for the next few weeks so long as you keep working out. Get you back on your feet, maybe help you buy a turquoise rock.”
I leave Gus with Linus that night when I drive in to the city. They seem to have hit it off: Gus gets his snout scratched, but he doesn’t ask stupid human questions, doesn’t stare at that rotting arm. As I drive that night, I can all but see Gus with his face on Linus’s lap, the old man’s gruesome looking arm draped around him, petting little circles, feeding him chunks of bologna while they listen to the radio.
I park near Baruch College and walk up and down the side streets until I see the little hatchback that you hate. At first I’m dismayed because it looks like my note is still stuck under the wipers, but then I realize it’s a different note, one from Karen. Please, Marty, it says. Don’t come around. Vick carries a stun rod for work, and I don’t want him to use it on you. Hugs to Gus, Karen.
What’s odd, though, is how small to Gus is, like she wrote Hugs as a sign-off but then realized it was inappropriate now and had to squeeze the other part in to make it more acceptable. I stare at it for a long time, how squished to Gus is.
So I write her another note on the back of hers, and I pin it under the wiper blade: Dogs can’t hug, but I can. Call me. This is silly.
We trade more notes on the car. Karen doesn’t call, but she responds. One of them says it’s not fair to her, the way I’m writing nice notes now, that I have to stop. It’s like I’m Lopakhin and she’s Lyuba, and we’re trying to keep on living in some cherry orchard even though we know we can’t. She knows I don’t read books like she does, but she still says things like that. Please do stop, Martin, she says.
You’re oblivious to all of this, of course. No way she’s telling you. Do please understand, Vick, I’m just writing little notes to Marty, but you’re still the one who gets to see my nipples.
I ask Linus if his daughter has any books around so I can find out about Lopakhin.
“What?” he says.
“Doesn’t she have some books around here or something?”
He looks confused. “Oh,” he says. “My daughter. No. No books.”
Then he limps outside and calls for Gus. And I sit there wondering about Linus, what his deal really is. He’s a mysterious character, and I think I could live in his house for the next ten years and still not really understand him. Why he is how he is. That arm, his daughter, all of it. I think on that for a while, and I can’t decide who I’m more like, Linus or you. I guess neither. I’m some strange mixture who only erects half walls around himself. And I don’t know where that leaves me, where I should be or who I should be there with.
So I go to the library one evening, tired of talking around the issue. I’ll make Karen tell me about Lopakhin, why I’m like him. But she’s not there. Must have changed her schedule to eat dinner with you.
I ask a different librarian about Lopakhin. She helps me find this book, The Cherry Orchard, and I read half that damn thing to find out about him. He seems like a superior-type dick who really isn’t. The kind of guy who drinks tea and would never cheer for the Mets because it wouldn’t be proper, even though he wants to. But I guess that’s the point. She likes the refined assholes who get offended by paper napkins and buy new furniture designed to look old. So when I write her a note back, I mention something about how Lopakhin cares about Lyuba, you can tell he does, and isn’t that worth something?
Then Linus’s daughter apparently has a problem with her passport, and so she has to stay in Madrid a bit longer. He wants to know, could I maybe do the same? Maybe an extra week? He could use the help before winter sets in. And he’d be willing to up it to two hundred dollars that extra week.
I tell him sure, I could use the time to set up another place. I don’t say anything about his daughter even though I want to. My role with Linus is pretty limited. I need the money, and he’s offering enough that I keep my mouth shut. I tell him I can stay even longer if he needs it. I look down at his arm, the nasty one with the boils. I don’t mean to, but I can’t help it because I’m sure me being here helps a load, what with that arm being so torn up.
“No,” he says. “Just a week.”
It’s getting colder now, thick frost in the mornings, but we still head out just after sunrise. Most mornings we spend out a ways from the house, splitting firewood. At first he insists on working the chainsaw himself while I drop the logs in the hydraulic splitter and stack them in the truck bed. But I can tell he’s struggling with it. And so I offer to switch spots.
“I can handle a chainsaw just fine,” I say. “Used to all the time. Why not let me take over, give your bad arm a rest.”
He glares at me then, like I just insulted him. “My what?” he says.
“It’s why I’m here, right?” I say.
“Your wife doesn’t like you too much,” he says. “That’s why.” Then he drops the chainsaw at his feet and motions for me to take over.
We go on like this for most of the morning, cutting up the better part of three maples without saying a word. Near noon, when the sun has peaked out just a bit, Linus rolls up his sleeves in a big, dramatic scene, as if to signal he can do whatever he likes now. And both arms are splotched with lesions and open sores and this white sort of mold-looking stuff all around them.
“Stare now,” Linus says. “Get it out of your system.”
And then I don’t know what to do. Do I stare or not? And so I just glance over real quick, as if I see but don’t really care too much one way or the other. I feel Linus staring at my back, but I just keep on cutting away, the sawdust blowing out the back end, clinging to my arm hair and every little crook in my body.
That night we’re eating pork chops and applesauce when Linus tells me he won’t be needing me that extra week after all. His daughter sorted out the passport problem. She’ll be back in a few days. I should pack my things.
I stare at him for a while. He doesn’t look at me, just keeps chomping away at his pork as if he doesn’t care one way or the other.
“I can still help out around here,” I say.
“Did you buy a turquoise rock yet?”
“Linus,” I say.
“I don’t run a boarding house, New York.”
Gus wanders into the kitchen and starts sniffing at my leg. Linus tears off a hunk of meat and holds it out for him. He scratches Gus’s ears, which just burns me up for some reason.
“To be clear,” I say, “you don’t have a daughter, right?”
He stops petting Gus. “To
be clear,” he says, “you did drop the hammer on your wife’s cousin, right?”
And I don’t answer that just the way he won’t answer about his made-up daughter. I don’t owe him an explanation just the same as he doesn’t owe me one, I guess. I bet if you were sick the way he is and you needed help, you wouldn’t want anybody heaping their pity on you, either.
So I leave in the morning, and that’s the last I see of Linus Houghton. I go back to the city, but it feels different. Dirtier, more crowded. Without Karen, it feels like I don’t belong so much. Like a party I wasn’t exactly invited to. So I find a place way out by Yonkers. It’s a crummy room in a crummy house, but it works. When I scan the Post each week, I still see Linus’s ad, exactly the same as it was when I first saw it. No yappy dogs. He probably has another guy working with him now, somebody else who can split logs and won’t notice he’s sick for a while.
Eventually I run into you, don’t I, Vick the bald museum docent? Both of you. I’m walking my side streets, nowhere else I need to be. I’m looking for our little hatchback, a note tucked in my pocket apologizing for all the hanging sausages, and there you both are, sitting on a stoop, shoulders touching, smiling. A bottle of wine on the step below you. A log of crappy, pre-packaged salami at your feet. No frowns. Like a postcard you’d buy in a gift shop.