The Clay Head Benediction

by Marty Rafter

consider reaching out to him, but even if I could, there is a low concrete barrier that prevents any of this sort of interaction. So, I stand and watch him, but I don’t think to communicate with him because there is nothing I can really say to encapsulate everything that a person should say to an elephant when he looks at him though a cage built by his own kinsmen, so I just stand there instead. And then a family comes in. A wonderful happy family, who are solid representatives of everything that is worthwhile about my own species, and the elephant’s heart races again, and nothing I can do will convince him that they aren’t hunters, so I leave.

  And I sulk through the monkey exhibit thinking about trained monkeys, and lonely forgotten dogs living lives at the ends of chains, and the lives of the people who put the dogs onto the chains, and I think about finding a place to hide a head, and then I hear a voice behind me.

  “Luke? Luke Kolbe?”

  I turn towards the sound, and a smiling face topped by a red heat that says Slazenger is inches from me, and the man is taking my hand in his and shaking it.

  “Holy shit, man. How long has it been? Ten years? At least ten years...”

  The man puts his arm around me.

  “Honey, this is Luke Kolbe. You remember I told you about him? He used to be one of the bartenders down at Hailey’s Tap Room”

  The man introduces me to his family, his wife, his two children, and I smile, and shake their hands, and say nice things about the children, and laugh along with the man as he tells them of great times that we had apparently had that I have absolutely no recollection of. And then the man asks his wife if she would be willing to take the children “up ahead a little bit” while we catch up, and she seems a little bit annoyed, but agrees, and she tells me that “it was nice to finally meet the legendary Luke Kolbe” and she seems sincere, so I thank her sincerely, and watch as they all walk away, and when they are out of sight, the man grins and says to me, “man, what are you doing here?”

  “I came to look at the animals. “I say

  “Oh shit, you never change, man. ...” He reached out and grabbed my shoulder “I miss that. We used to laugh our asses off”

  I smile, but can’t think of anything to say

  “So what about you? Last I heard you were in real estate, huh?” He says

  “Yeah, in the summers mostly”

  “So, what like residential, commercial..?”

  “No, apartments. I’m an agent for Reinhold management”

  “They have a bunch of agents there, or what?”

  “Actually, I’m the only one” I say

  “No, kidding? So, I bet you get all the listings huh?”

  “I guess so, they have about six hundred units, I keep them rented”

  “I bet you do. “He says “hey, actually, it is kind of lucky that I ran into you. A buddy of mine from the club, Chip Brady... do you remember Chip?”

  Off to my left, a little boy is running with one of those rectangular boxes of popcorn and a look of unrestrained glee on his face. Then, because is watching the popcorn instead of where he is going, he runs directly into the leg of a woman who is replacing a bag in one of the trashcans, and he falls, and the popcorn spills everywhere.

  “Sucks to be that kid” my companion says. “Anyway, him and some other guys set up this company where they are renovating some of these old churches and schools and turning them into condos”

  “Sounds interesting” I say, still watching as the little boy’s mother comes over to comfort him over the loss of his popcorn

  “Oh, yeah. These guys are cleaning up to. Making piles of cash”

  “Good for them” I say

  “That’s what I’m getting at. They said they were looking around for their own agent. I guess the broker's fees are killing them”

  “It can be expensive” I say

  “I’m going to tell them about you. You would be perfect. Perfect. You have a card or something?”

  “A business card? No. I think they are all at home”

  The man reaches into his wallet, and takes out one of his, and hands it to me “well, here is mine. Send me your contact information, and I will put you in touch with these guys. Man, talk about coincidence. That is fantastic; he was just telling me about that”

  I look at his card “Thanks” I say

  “Hey, I better catch up with everybody, or I am going to hear about it all night from the wife, but seriously, e-mail me about that. It was great to see you” he says

  “Good to see you, too” I say

  “Enjoy the animals, you fucking lunatic” he says, grinning at me.

  I smile back “I will do my best.” I say, and the man laughs loudly, and slaps me on the shoulder again, and then jogs away.

  After the zoo, I don’t feel like trying to navigate the bus schedules again, so I decide to walk home. It is a long walk, but manageable for a person without a schedule, and it gives me the chance to think of something other than terrified elephants and chance encounters with ghosts of my past. There would also be many places to hide the heads along the way. And so, I walk. And I hide a head in a tree, and at an old synagogue that is now a community center, and at the foot of a statue. I give one to a guy on a bicycle who doesn’t ask any questions, just solemnly puts it into his pocket, and rides away. Then, I go and eat alone at the noodle restaurant, but the old woman isn’t there, and I leave one of the heads along with the tip. After I eat, I’m not tired at all, so I consider walking to Ben’s apartment to see if he is home, but it is already too dark to walk in his neighborhood alone, so I decide against it.

  I go back to my apartment and look through my notebooks for a while, but nothing surprises me, and anything that was decent, I have already committed to memory, so I put on the radio instead, but before I do, I checked my phone to see if I had received a return phone call from Ben’s social worker, but I had not. So, even though the office is closed, I call again, and leave her another message to remind her that I am still expecting a response. I listen to music for the entire night. It is fantastic. Every note is like a bite of food, and every pause, like rest for my body, and I sit in the chair and listen, and watch the dawn arrive again accompanied by song, and then the morning show programs begin. And they are inane and base, and frantic, and full of obsessions about traffic and politics and scandal, and they turn the food of my soul into something hard and stale and worthless, and the announcers are so full of answers and so empty of questions that weren’t secret accusations, that I want to run into the street and hide heads in every hiding spot I could find. But the heads are gone. I had given them all away, and I could make more, but it would mean time, and being confined to this room, and this noise on the radio, so I go out on the street despite it all, to visit my heads.

  It is 7:30 when I leave my building, and within a few hours, I could check a lot of the heads, and hopefully find that most of them were gone, and their absence would fill me with the energy to make more, and then maybe I could rest. So, I walk first to the woods, to the stand of trees where I had hidden the face to keep watch over the place in my dream. And I am happy to find that one, even though it is damp and its little glass eyes are accusing, it is fine that that one should stay to keep watch for me if I am to turn back into a tree, and discourage any opportunistic hawks that would seek to build a nest in me. But, most of the rest are there too. The ones in trees and behind benches, and in graveyards, and under statues, most of those are there. Some are gone though, and that gives me solace. By 3, I have made my way back to the cathedral to check the face by the pond, and it is there too, but it has been turned over. It had been found and hidden again, so I move it. Then, with nothing more to do, I walk to the library to wait for Ben, but he is not outside when I arrive, so I change my mind about waiting, and walk to the office of his social worker instead. When I get there, it is ten minutes to five, and the woman at the desk has already collected her things to leave for the day and arrange
d them on the counter top to signify her intention of escaping as soon as she is able, and I ask again for Maria Olson, and the receptionist tells me that she has already left for the day without even checking her extension, so I walk out without saying goodbye.

  At home, with nothing to read, and no energy to make anything, I fight to stay awake. I know that I should sleep, but I know too that when I will do, I will dream. And the dream will be the devil’s second favorite story, about what might have been. About a man named Luke Kolbe who put away childish things and moved on to Slazenger baseball caps and outings with the family at the zoo, and discovered the mechanisms for decency where normal people do. But the shoe that fits one pinches another. It was Carl Jung that said that, and he went crazy, too. Incidentally, I know that is what you are thinking. I have known that all along, but I did not have a choice. There was a time for me that there were no clay heads, no endless walking days. But this is my compromise. Because there was once an endless envying thirst where all this used to be. And then there came a time that I realized that it is only evil things that really cling to you, that hunt you, that always require your feedings and attention and only grow more to wear your body like a suit of clothes, and then, when you have fed it so much that it can no longer fit inside of you, it escapes, and gives you back a shell. A big