THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

Summer 2004: The Sewanee Review--Best Story of the Year Award

Recipient: The Andrew Lytle Memorial Fiction Prize

 

 

It was dark and the South Seattle roads were icy; everything I owned was in the back of the station wagon in cardboard boxes.  The car jolted across a line of frozen ridges, the lids of the boxes flying up like birds trying to get loose each time I hit one.  I fishtailed through the intersection and merged onto Martin Luther King Way.  Parked cars humped with snow glided by and the heater labored, chipping out two fist-sized holes that bloomed and widened on the windshield as I flew down the silent street.  I had exactly six hours to figure out a way to avert disaster.  Mickey had totally blown up. Usually she calmed down, but this time she’d stayed mad at me long enough to apply for a transfer.  To everyone’s surprise it had come through.  If I had more time I could talk her out of leaving, but it was about her pride and five hours wasn’t long enough for me to apologize convincingly enough.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, Mickey was taking Emily our eight-year-old daughter with her too. Emily was the only thing we'd done between us that turned out right.  She’d gotten all of our good features--not that there were so many to begin with--but Emily went a step further, pulling them together with intelligence and wit and a stare that could stop you at twenty yards.  Even at eight with her two front teeth missing she had the power to silence a room with a glance. 

Emily was scrawny, like Mickey, but she had grace, never tripping or falling over things, and she had style to burn.  Her hair was curly red, and it frizzed out at the ends into corkscrews where she chewed it when she was thinking.  She had a narrow face and high cheekbones and a body straight and hard as a ramrod.  Her eyes were like tiny chunks of obsidian, exploding with light when she was happy, burning holes through people like laser beams when she wasn't.  She liked to wear rubber boots with red tops--summer, winter, it didn't matter--and dresses two sizes too large for her that she found at the thrift store.  She had her own notions of fashion.  We were buddies.  I couldn't bear to lose her.

I hung onto my cell phone as the Ford skidded through an unplowed mound of snow and ice.  I could hear the attorney on the other end calculating how much to charge.

"A thousand dollars," he said.  "Cash, before noon if you want to get the writ out on time."

 “Write it up, I’ll be there.”  I thumbed the phone off and slid sideways past an oil truck stuck at the side of the road.  I had no credit and no reserves--an unfortunate and still painful business reversal had wiped them out.  I had no clue where to get my hands on a thousand dollars.  Sweat beaded my forehead as the unthinkable percolated up into my consciousness.  It was the only solution.  I caromed off of Martin Luther King Way and headed for Ballard and the garage in the snow-covered alley where I stored my equipment. 

I carefully negotiated the axle-high snow to the back of the garage, parked and loaded my brand new paint striper onto the tailgate of the station wagon.  The Ford swayed to the left when I was done, and I was wheezing hard as I tucked my shirt back in and checked the time: 10:30.  The paint striper teetered but stayed on as I burned rubber down the frozen alley and headed for the auto wrecking yard in the industrial no-man’s land south of Boeing Field that housed my arch-rival’s office.

I skidded into the driveway and got out.  Snow jutted in ragged clumps like mini-icebergs looming above a sea of colored ground-glass that spilled from the wrecking yard’s driveway.  A line of rainbow ruts pointed the way to Roger Proctor’s ramshackle hut. I pushed open the door and dinged the bell on what used to be a parts counter and waited. A moment later, Roger materialized.  That was just one of the things that I disliked about him.  He had a way of slipping out of shadows, from behind posts, from out of thin air even: one minute he was nowhere around, the next he was at your elbow, his proximity signaled by an overpowering urge to sneeze as the ever-present odor of curry that surrounded him wafted over you.

Roger was lean as a beanpole and wrapped way too tight. He jerked and ticked his way through life as if someone was yanking the strings that moved him along.  His skin was gray to match the dirty overalls he always wore, his face long and narrow, punctuated by a nose that looked as if it had gotten caught in a door and permanently bent.  Course black hairs sprouted from his throat and ears like tufting from an abandoned mattress.  Just the thought of Roger's smirk of satisfaction the last time I'd seen him made me queasy.  We'd both bid on the biggest job yet, and I’d won, but I’d cut the price too far in my eagerness to trump Roger and wound up losing a full season’s profits.  Soon after that the winter rains came, spelling an end to parking lot painting until spring.  I was going to be King of the parking-lot stripers, instead I’d screwed up.

Roger jerked over to where I stood, looking like road-kill that could still walk. 

"Congratulations on the big contract," he smirked. 

I wanted to punch him, but I stifled myself. "Forget the pleasantries,” I said.  “I'm here to offer you a deal on my new striper."  His bushy eyebrows went up like a pair of wiper blades.    No matter how much he hated me, I knew his greed would win out. I'd gotten the striper less than six months ago, and I'd seen him drooling over it from a distance.  It was a beauty: stereo headphones, electronic controls, computer regulated twin jets that laid down a line as clean and sharp as a knife blade--circles, corners, automatic wheelchair symbols for disabled parking, emergency diagonals--everything you could think of and more, all controlled from the master panel.  You could stripe the world with it.

"Nah, I don't think I'm interested," he lied.  "I'm a little over-inventoried as it is."  He picked his teeth with a matchstick, leaving a telltale red stain on his lip, in his excitement he'd put the wrong end in first.  The hubcap with hands on it above the door to the back room said 11:00.  I didn't have time to spare.  I'd paid over six grand for the striper.

"It's out in the wagon.  I'll let it go for three."

"Why are you selling it?  Something wrong with it?" he asked suspiciously.

"It's fine, works like a champ. Go take a look."

I followed him out to the station wagon, his arms and legs twitching in anticipation.  It was all I could do to let him paw it over, I wanted to shoulder him aside and wipe it clean with a cotton cloth I kept for just that purpose in the back of the car. For a moment, a glint of sunlight beamed down from beneath the leaden lid of clouds that clamped the city and sparkled along the chrome and black shiny plastic of the striper.  I had to turn away.

Roger jumped down from the tailgate.  He could barely keep his eyes off the striper.  His head kept jerking to the side like a sparrow checking for a crumb as he talked to me.  "I'd go a grand, but that's all it's worth to me," he spread his hands, seeing how I would take it.

I could feel the blood rush to my face.  "It's worth six, more with the options I've added."  I calmed myself.  "Two."

"I could do fifteen, but that's tops."

"Give me the money," I said.  His eyes widened in surprise.  I knew he'd have gone for more, but time was running out.  Fifteen would have to do. 

In his office, he counted out the bills.  I watched as he and a flunky guided the striper down ramps to the concrete pad beside his office door.  On the way out I churned up a spray of mud and gravel and colored ground glass, but it didn't help dispel the last image of Roger’s greasy hands all over the chrome, the striper already looking as if it was wilting under the first blast of curry fumes.        

I made it to the law office with twenty minutes to spare. 

"I'm here to see Mr. Flores," I told the receptionist behind the counter and she pointed to a seat along a line of brightly colored plastic chairs next to a corner table piled high with magazines.  I pulled out a Field and Stream and leafed through it, looking at photographs of dead fish and smiling men in waders and vests.  The smell of coffee hung in the air and my stomach growled, then a door opened and a man squeezed himself out of an office and lumbered toward me. 

"Rodney Flores," he boomed, extending an arm the size of a tree trunk with a hand that looked like a catcher's mitt attached to it.  I’d never seen him before, only talked to him on the

phone--he was immense.  He turned himself slightly sideways to get down the hall without wedging fast, employing a crabbed gait as he walked that propelled him along in quick little squirts like a squid.  His shirt was stiffly starched, a blindingly white expanse vast enough to hold a ski lift.  At his throat, lost in chins, a bow tie fluttered for air and bright red suspenders held up a pair of stiff gray trousers that looked like cousins to the waders I'd seen on the smiling men holding the dead fish in the magazine.

"Come in, come in, sit down," he gestured to a chair and slid around the side of an enormous wooden desk.  Next to his desk a stuffed turkey stood on a pedestal, its wings outspread, a ferocious look in its beady, myopic glass eyes.  I handed him the money and watched him count it, his eyes as beady as the turkey’s. He glanced up at me and caught me looking at the stuffed turkey.

"You a bird lover too?" he asked.

"Sure, sometimes."

“A man who likes birds is all right in my book,” he said, nodding, his jowls rippling like a wave at Husky stadium.  “Turkeys mate for life you know, it would be better if we paid attention to them, should have been our national bird.  Old Ben Franklin lobbied hard for it, but the eagle won.  Hmmph.  A scavenger, no better than a seagull.  But that's not going to solve your problem.  What you need is a writ of Delecto Scriptum Forbearus.  He slipped the money into his desk drawer.

“When is she leaving again?”

"Today.  Four o'clock."

"This is going to take some speedy work then.  We need to get it to the judge and have it signed, then have it delivered by a server, but never fret, I guarantee we’ll get it there by three. Plenty of time,” he boomed again shaking my hand.  “I’ll have Marguerite write this up and we’ll get started.” He ushered me out to the reception room, and I waited while his secretary wrote a receipt.  I felt drained, as if someone had changed my oil and forgot to put the plug back in. 

I thought of Emily and brightened.  Maybe I could go see her. I turned the Ford’s engine on and cranked up the heater and dialed Mickey's cell. Five times it went into her voice mail while I watched my breath steam up the driver’s window.  Finally I hung up.  It was probably better this way.  I couldn’t chance getting there too early before the process server.  Mickey could always smell a rat.

I drove aimlessly around the University District, then parked the Ford and got out.  It was President’s Day and students thronged the streets.  Shop doors opened and closed filling the air with the sounds of music and the perfume of scented soaps and new leather and the heady aroma of coffee.  My spirits lifted.  Even the sky, up until now dark and gray, had cleared, and a brilliant patch of blue drifted across the top of the city like a perfect floating flower, opening and closing as if it was suspended in a crystal bowl of water.

I climbed the stairs to the campus and passed the statue of George Washington standing guard with his sword.  Skate-boarders filled Red Square, swirling and dipping gracefully across the open surface like skaters on a pond, the abrasive hiss of their wheels cutting through the air like blades on ice.  Across the vast sea of red tiles loomed Suzzallo Library, its stained glass windows brilliant in the sunlight.  As I pushed through the red padded-leather doors with the diamond-shaped windows that opened to the room for Far Eastern Studies my spirits took a dive again. It was almost like the old days when Emily and I spent hours in there, the only difference this time was that she wasn't with me.   

The sun flooded through the soaring stained glass windows, shining on the old oak carrels as if they'd been polished with car wax.  At each end of the long high room two revolving globes hung suspended from slender rods, the continents faithfully reproduced in illuminated bas-relief.  Soft chairs and floor lamps formed pools of subdued light along one wall, books covered the others.  I pulled out a chair and sat at one of the long reading tables that marched down the middle of the room.

We always sat in the same spot, Emily drawing with her crayons, occasionally looking up to see what I was doing, or to check out the students flirting with each other quietly along the tables. "Listen to this," I'd say to her, reading from one of the books piled up at my elbow. “This is Montaigne, writing in the sixteenth century.  He says women had their teeth pulled out for better pronunciation, and that they swallowed sand and ashes to destroy their stomachs so they could have a fashionably pale complexion.”

"Ugh, gross," she'd say absently, chewing on a strand of hair wound around her finger while she colored furiously. 

“He also says there were places where people let all the hair on the right side of their bodies grow as long as it could, but they shaved everything off on their left sides.”   

"Um," she'd grunt, but later I'd look over, and she'd have started a new drawing, one in which a group of people stood with hair only on one side of their bodies just as I'd described.

I read her the stories that interested me, like how when Caesar was nearly captured in Gaul and he had to jump out of the boat he was in and swim to safety through stormy waters, the whole time holding his red cape of office in his teeth so as not to lose it. And there was the story of Zenobia, Queen of the Desert, who was in love with the prince Odanthus, how she took over as ruler when Odanthus was murdered and beat two Roman generals in the field and added Egypt to her kingdom. 

Emily yawned, pretending disinterest, but she was listening. I read how the Roman Emperor Aurelian had to go in person to finally defeat her.  When I described Zenobia being paraded through the streets of Rome in golden chains, and how Aurelian gave her a palace and her freedom and full rights of nobility because he admired her courage so much, Emily was all ears.

The next day, Emily’s outfit consisted of an old sheet dyed purple with a rhinestone pin to hold it together, three lengths of gold plastic chain from a hanging lamp draped around her body, and a curtain-rod with an eagle on the end for a scepter.  Her rubber boots completed the ensemble.  It was the only thing she'd wear, and it drove Mickey nuts, but Emily held out, retreating to a regal silence that finally caused her mother to give up--she should have known better, but Mickey was one of those people who never learned.

What really captured Emily's imagination though, was a story about golden treasure in the sea.  In Plutarch, a passage describes how Alexander the Great at the end of his conquest of India threw a huge amount of gold and jewels in the Indian Ocean as a tribute to the God Thetis for his victory.  Emily managed to work it into every drawing, and she told everyone who was interested or not that we were going to find it and she would be a queen.  It got so bad that she wouldn't answer unless Mickey curtseyed and addressed her as your majesty.  When she began referring to Mickey as the queen mother, much to the confusion of school officials and telephone callers, Mickey had had enough. 

The next morning when Emily got up, the toga and chain and scepter were nowhere to be found.  The battle raged for six days with Mickey chain smoking at the kitchen table, and Emily refusing to wear anything except a pair of underpants and her red-topped rubber boots.  Mickey wouldn’t let her out the door and the atmosphere became frigid, pierced with icy silences and laser-beam glares hot enough to burn holes through the sheet rock in the walls.  In the end, Mickey caved.

The toga and chains and scepter came out of the attic, Emily returned to school, and the air in the house thawed, but Mickey blamed me for filling Emily's head full of stories. Mickey still snorted in disdain whenever Emily insisted that we were going to be rich. But that was Mickey, we hadn’t seen eye-to-eye on anything since the day we’d tied the knot.

 We’d gotten married when we were nineteen.  The Monday after I started working at Boeing, and we had Emily four months later.    For six months I bucked rivets, the next six I drilled holes.  I spent every day up in the lofts working on the big jets, crouched on a catwalk in a sea of noise and triple digit temperatures.  The highpoint was lunch when the plant would fall silent for thirty minutes and I could eat and read a paperback.  I'd come home at night with aluminum burrs in my hair and down my neck, my ears ringing from the air-hammers, and the conviction that I wasn't going back the next day.

The fact that I hated the job didn't put a dent in its practical aspects.  Mickey was quick to point out my good fortune in getting it in the first place--a neighbor of her family was a foreman at the plant--and my lack of qualifications for anything else.  It was true I hadn't gotten around to graduating from high school.  High school was boring, but I wasn't going to let that stop me.  I could see opportunities all around me, every day a new idea popped into my head, and none of them had anything to do with rivet guns or air-hammers or living like a robot from break to break.      

One day I quit.  I turned in my badge, sold my toolbox to a

new-hire, and threw away my lunch box, the bologna sandwich still in it.  When I came home and told Mickey, she had a fit--but I'd made my mind up.  We limped along.  Mickey used the family connection and got a job for herself at Boeing, driving around a jitney changing light bulbs in the ceiling with a long stick with suction cups on the end.  I had plenty of time to think things over and finally decided that from then on out, no matter what happened, I was going to make it on my own and not work for someone else.

I checked my watch and saw that it was time to go.  Red Square was deserted when I emerged, the winter wind waiting sharp as a terrier.  I shoved my hands deep into my pockets, as alone on the red bricks as an insect on the ice of a pond, all around me the high spires of the university buildings rose into the winter sky. It was easy to feel like a failure, but I wouldn't let myself.  The writ would get served, and Mickey would have to stay. Everything after that would work itself out--I would make it work out. 

I felt truly happy for the first time that day.  Emily would not be leaving, and the thought comforted me all the way back to the station wagon.  The sky was so clear and sharp you could cut glass with it, and the winter sun poured down, brilliant in the patches of ragged snow and ice alongside the road.  Half way out to Mickey's, the heater finally penetrated the permafrost in the floorboards and my feet began to thaw.  The sunlight was cheering me up, and I turned the radio on and sang along with Johnny Cash about Folsom Prison.

When I pulled up to the house the front door hung open and Mickey and Emily stood outside bundled up in coats.  Suitcases and bags surrounded them, jutting up crookedly from the frozen earth like a miniature Stonehenge.  It was 2:15.  I parked and jumped out of the Ford.  Mickey watched me approach warily.

"It's barely two,” I said.  “Why are you out here in the cold?"  Emily rolled her eyes at me then nodded at her mother.

Mickey lit a cigarette.  She threw the match in the snow where it sputtered out and blew a stream of smoke between us.  "Earlier flight," she said, arms folded, the collar of her good blue coat closed tight around her scrawny neck as she chewed her lip and looked at me.  It was just like her to sneak away before I could show up.  "How early?"

"It leaves at 5:00."  She glanced at her wristwatch.  "The cab should be here any minute."

"You don't need a cab," I forced a smile.  "I can take you."

"No way, Jose.  First of all, I'm not getting in that deathtrap. Second of all, I want to make the flight on time.  Third of all, I wouldn't want to put you out."

"No trouble, no trouble at all," I said expansively, but she wasn't buying it.  She glanced at her watch a second time and looked away.  I could tell from the drawn look around her eyes that she was nervous, wondering what I was going to do.  I wondered the same thing.  If the process server didn't show, I was sunk.  Mickey pulled the collar of her coat tighter and tapped her foot while she smoked. 

She'd put on lipstick and her makeup looked different, and she'd gotten her hair cut, short and wavy, so that instead of looking like a tangle of barbed wire it was soft and close to her head, outlining the angular shape of her jaw and cheeks which suddenly didn't look so hollow. In fact, she looked pretty good. I digested this startling turn of events in the silence that followed.

Emily coasted over and stamped her feet, frowning as she hunched her shoulders next to me.  Her red ski parka ballooned around her, zipper zipped tight, hood up.  Her skinny legs, encased in heavy white stockings, poked out from the elastic waist of the red jacket.  Standing there she looked like some exotic flower waiting to bloom.  She held her curtain-rod scepter at her side.

"Hey, sport," I squeezed her shoulder.  She twisted away, her eyes drilling holes in me.

"I don't know why you two don't just make up," she said loudly, glaring at Mickey, then at me.  "I don't want to go to Georgia.  I don't care that it's warm and sunny.  I like it here."

"I worked hard to get this transfer," Mickey said.  "Talk to your father, ask him what he's got lined up this week.  A batch of jeans with only one leg?  Maybe some more T-shirts that shrink up to the size of a postage stamp?  Or perhaps another five hundred cases of Hungarian goulash that nobody would buy?  Remember how good that tasted?  I want a paycheck that I can count on, week-by-week, one that shows up on time in a predictable amount.  I'm tired of writing checks that bounce, and I'm tired of unscrewing light bulbs eight hours a day."

Emily stumped to the madrona tree in the middle of the yard and began whipping at it furiously with the curtain rod, striping the red bark until the rod broke in half, the gold head flying across the frozen grass.  She wheeled on us both.  "I think you're stupid, and I wish I didn't have to live with either one of you." Tears rimmed her eyes, but she refused to give in to them.  Instead, she plodded over to where the tip of the scepter lay and picked it up and put it in her coat pocket.

My throat felt as if it had a grapefruit stuck in it, and Mickey looked as if she was going to cry herself, but she just lit another cigarette and puffed on it furiously.

"Hey," I said.  "It wasn't my fault about the jeans.  It was a great deal.  They don't let you unpack the containers before the customs auctions, I explained all this to you.  What would anyone think?  A bill of lading, fifteen gross of assorted sized jeans, all new?"

"All with one leg missing," she cut a stream of smoke at me.  "You couldn't even give them away."  

I couldn't argue with that, I'd finally had to take them to the dump to avoid the storage charges.  It was true I’d had my share of setbacks lately, but I figured my turn was bound to come.  My mistake had been not seeing how bad Mickey’s dissatisfaction had gotten.  She’d begun staying later and later after work with her friends while Emily and I rattled around together.  At first, I didn’t notice much.  I was onto my new project to become King of the parking lot stripers.  When I wasn't working on that, Emily and I were out at Suzzallo checking on Alexander's route, or digging through used bookstores for anything that shed light on the treasure.  I figured Mickey would come around.  Only when it was too late did I realize how deep the chill had gone. 

I craned my head looking for the process server.  Emily circled back over and stood next to me and scuffed the frozen earth with her boot. 

"Oh, Christ," Mickey said staring down at the wire door of the pet carrier hanging open.  "Where's the cat?" 

    Emily shrugged a little too innocently.  Mickey tugged on her arm, sending her off in the direction of the corner of the house. "Go call him.  If he doesn't show up he'll have to stay, we don't have time to wait."  Emily crouched down by the front steps and whistled for the cat while Mickey ran around the side of the house calling its name.  Her voice diminished, then rose as she appeared from the back yard. Her hair had come undone, the carefully manufactured waves reverting to their normal state of chaos like strident exclamation marks in synch with the shrill pitch of her voice, and she had a run in her nylons.      

"For crying out loud," she said in exasperation, "Can't you help us out?"

"Sure," I said.  I glanced at the large straw bag that Emily had set against the trunk of the madrona.  The tip of a gray furry tail poked out from under a blanket.  "Here, Hunter," I called. 

"Here, boy."  I snapped my fingers in the driveway and met Emily's eyes.  She looked away.  Hunter was Emily's cat through and through.  He loved car rides, and he had a mind of his own. No pet carrier was big enough for him.  He preferred to lie on the dashboard of the station wagon so he could see where we were going, ears flattened down, eyes tracking birds through the windshield, teeth chattering and whiskers vibrating.  He wasn't happy unless he was on the dashboard.  Put him on the seat and he would growl, put him in the back and he would yowl his displeasure loud enough to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

Mickey stomped back to the circle of suitcases.  Her eye shadow was smudged and her lipstick was on her teeth.  I liked her better this way, it was the Mickey I knew.

"We're not staying behind for the cat," she barked at Emily.  "It's not going to work.  No cat, too bad."  She wheeled on me, the color high in her cheeks. "If I hadn't been watching you every moment, I'd suspect you.  There's nothing you can do to stop me.  It's too late for that." 

She looked away, her face in profile.  Her nose was crooked, and there was a bump in the center of it from the time she’d gotten hit by a bat playing softball.  From the side, she didn't look like anything at all, her ears were too large, her hair unmanageable, and her chin receded.  She had great eyes though, and a wonderful smile, and when she looked at you, the force of her personality emerged like a light going on.  I loved the back of her neck, the soft, wispy tendrils of hair that corkscrewed up, and the way she shuddered when I kissed her there.  My emotions were seesawing all over the place.

She glanced back at me, a sudden look of panic sliding quickly across her face as if she was sinking, then she regained her equilibrium and her chin lifted.  She crossed her arms defiantly, radiating firmness and conviction at me.  I felt as if someone had put my head in a vice and turned it to full squeeze.  "What about baseball?"  I said desperately. "You hate the Braves."

"They're not so bad," she said.

It was a lie.  She detested the Atlanta Braves.

"You'll miss half the Mariner's games, and the time zones will be all mixed up.  You'll be watching baseball in the middle of the night."

"I'll tape them and watch the next morning."

"You're going to give up Edgar and Lou and Jamie Moyer, the craftiest pitcher alive?  When it looks as if we're going all the way?  You'd give up the World Series?" 

"Georgia's not the end of the world.  They have television there," she said, but I could sense her uncertainty--Seattle had a brand-new world-class ball field, and the entire city had waited a long time for a season like the one that was coming. 

"And Ichiro?"  I asked.  She was a huge Ichiro fan.  In the stands she would scream until her voice was hoarse, booing opposing hitters, yelling advice to Lou Piniella, exploding out of her seat when the ball rose and rose into the cloud-scudded sky of Safeco Field, pulling Emily and me with her by sheer force of will until we were all shouting at the top of our voices.  At home she was even worse because of the replays.

It was her passion that had attracted me to her in the first place, and now when it was too late I suddenly realized it was still there for me, that nothing had changed, that I still loved her as much as ever. 

The cold February sunlight blazed in the white tags fluttering from the handles of the suitcases.  A Yellow Cab turned the corner at the end of the block and nosed gingerly toward us, rising up and down through the still-frozen ruts like an icebreaker clearing a new channel.

"Wait," I said, an overwhelming panic rising in me.  "Don't go." Out of nowhere, the sudden memory of the scent of Mickey's skin swept through me.  I could feel the delicate softness of her earlobes, the insubstantial weight of her body molded against my ribs as we slept, her heart beating in the stillness.  The longing that filled me was as sharp as if I'd just been cut.  

Emily, standing next to me, sensed my turn of heart.  She'd always been able to tell what I was thinking.  I could feel her entire body straining against Mickey's refusal. Mickey wriggled under Emily's gaze like an insect pinned to a board as Emily waited for her reply.  The cab slid into the driveway and crunched to a stop.  "It's not too late," I pleaded.

"Yes it is," Mickey’s cheeks were wet.  "Hurry up," she said brusquely to Emily.  "Get your bags."

The driver got out of the cab and lifted the suitcases and bags into the trunk.  Emily clutched her straw bag.  "What about Hunter?" she wailed.

"Your dad can take care of the cat.  Come on, let's go."

Emily wrapped her arms around my waist and hugged me fiercely.  She looked up, her eyes blazing--her tactic with the cat hadn't worked, but I could see that it was not going to be a smooth ride for Mickey.  "I'll see you soon, Dad," she whispered, and marched off to the cab.  The tip of the cat's tail twitched once at the corner of the straw bag and then disappeared into the back seat. 

The driver put the cab in reverse and backed out of the driveway and drove slowly up the corrugated street to the intersection.  In the back window Emily held her fingers up in a V, then the cab turned and passed out of sight.

All I could hope for was a diversion, there was still a chance. If the process server made it in the next twenty minutes we could chase them down.  They might not even make the airport at all--if Hunter decided he wanted to lie on the dashboard, all hell would break loose in the cab.  I'd wait, grab the process server and race like mad out to Sea-Tac and see if we could find them pulled over somewhere on the side of the road.  If that failed, we would try to find them in the airport.

I stood in the yard and waited.  The slash-marks in the madrona from Emily's curtain-rod scepter looked like wounds bleeding in the rust-red trunk.  A breeze blew up, twirling the dead tear-shaped leaves down around my feet to stick like blank post-its in the scuffed snow.  The curtainless front window stared at me accusingly. Inside the house, the rooms stood open and empty.  It was as if we'd never lived there.

The minutes dragged on; no process server.  At three o’clock I gave up.  I'd never felt so low.  I got into the Ford and fired it up.  Just then, a red Huyndai raced around the corner, skidding off the curb like a bumper car.  It crested the ruts of ice like a toy speedboat and braked to a slippery halt behind me, blocking my exit.  A tall, gangly kid with glasses and a face so narrow that it looked as if someone had sat on his head jumped out.  He pushed his thick black-framed glasses up on his nose with his forefinger, checked the house number and glanced at a sheaf of papers in his hand, then marched resolutely up to my car window.

"Mickey Carson?" he said, phrasing the question like a statement.

"No," I said tiredly.

He nodded at the house.  "You live here?"

"Not anymore."

"That's close enough.  Here," he handed me the papers.

"Mickey’s my wife’s name."

"Sure, and Mickey Mouse is a girl,” he rolled his eyes and pushed the papers into my hand and started to walk back to the Huyndai.

“Hold on,” I glanced at my watch.  I could still try to get my thousand bucks back.  “3:09,” I said, writing the time down on the front of the writ.  “Sign this.”

“No way, Jack.  All I do is deliver them.”

“You’re late.”

“Not my problem.”

He jumped in the Huyndai and reversed down the driveway; the rear wheel raced suddenly, screaming like a blender on high.  He rolled his window down and looked back.  The tire spun madly as he pumped the accelerator, sending up a cloud of steam and pulverized ice.  "Shit," he said. "High-centered again."  He got out and walked to the back of the car and bent down to the bumper.  "How about a hand here?" he asked.

“Sure,” I said, “as soon as you sign.”

He frowned, then held his hand out for the writ.  I helped him lift the rear-end of the tiny car over the hump of ice that had hung it up and watched him buzz off up the street.

I couldn't shake the gloom that had descended on me.  I'd lost Emily, Mickey was gone, my business no longer existed.  The thought of Roger blasting curry fumes on my striper roused a knee-jerk of anger in me for a moment, but it didn't last, and soon I was lost in my funk again. 

I drove back to the University District, heading for the cheap rooming house that I now called home.  Even the thought of Suzzallo library failed to cheer me as it usually did.  Its lighted globes with the continents revolving in stately procession had always held out the promise of worlds yet to be conquered, now it felt as if they were mocking me for having grand ideas.  A glimmer of sunlight flickered through the windshield, but it was too far away and too weak to penetrate into the depths of my gloom; I drove, reflecting on the state of things. 

It became clear to me that it had been my dream to go to the Indian Ocean and find Alexander's treasure, not Emily's.  She was just a kid; I'd dragged her around, filling her head with all kinds of stuff that she'd never use.  What good did it do me, or anyone for that matter?  There was nothing I could ever do with it--I hadn't even graduated from high school, let alone from college--I just loved to read.  It had been my salvation, and the source of everything I knew and believed in. 

At first I’d devoured paperback mysteries and adventure novels, then I’d discovered history and I’d been hooked.  Whole worlds opened up before me filled with stories of heroes and gods and people doing everything imaginable under the sun.  I felt as if I’d been root-bound in my own time and place and found a way out. I read everything I could get my hands on, exhausting library after library in a steady process of elimination that led as surely as an illuminated road-map to the sprawling university campus, where, I was positive, all of the knowledge in the world lay.               

Eventually, I figured out the system, which professors were too lazy to check their rosters regularly, who taught what, how to show up on the first day of classes, get a syllabus, hit the lectures I was interested in--but for what?

I knew as much about ancient history as any graduate, I even knew some of the professors on a first name basis--after awhile they got used to seeing me, and as long as I didn't add to their paper load they didn't seem to mind me sitting in.  A few times I'd brought Emily along.  I wanted to show her that there was more to the world than the programs on television, that she could follow a dream as far as she wanted.  I wanted her to see the university and the students and the classrooms so she wouldn't be like me.  I knew that just telling her wouldn't do it, so I dragged her around with me, infected her with history.  All the stories were nothing more than that, an infection that would succumb without reinforcement to television and the force of modern advertising like bacteria to a disinfectant.

I'd wanted to give her a sense of proportion, to get her out of the present and give her a role model, to show her that women had a history.  The world was waiting with sticks to beat up on her: I'd searched for an anchor and found Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, the woman who at twenty-two had ruled a kingdom, conquered Egypt, and ridden at the head of her troops to defeat two Roman armies.  Alexander's treasure was the glue that held it together.  I didn't really think we were going to go to the Indian Ocean, but I'd hoped to have enough time to firmly establish the infection.  Now Emily was gone.

  I turned off 45^th into the University District.  The afternoon sun sank below the tops of the storefronts, leaving a red smear on the horizon that lingered for less time than it took for the streetlight to change in front of the rooming house where I was staying.  Suddenly I felt as if I was suffocating: I parked and bolted out of the car, slamming the door behind me hard enough to rock the Ford on its springs.  Attached to the side of the dilapidated rooming house was a fire ladder.  I scrambled up it, gulping in great mouthfuls of air as I hurled myself up the slippery metal rungs.

At the top of the ladder I caught my breath, then kept going, up and up.  The thick cedar shingles, rimed with frost, skittered slippery as fish beneath my fingers.  I pulled myself forward blindly, shingle by shingle, up the steep-peaked roof on my stomach until the moment came when there was nothing ahead of me but thin air and the sharp crest of the roof beneath my forearms. I heaved myself forward and lay there, breathing raggedly, elbows locked into the peak.              

Below, the city opened before me.  I could see the twin rows of lights of the cars on the freeway, one red, the other brilliant white, winding in a constant stream that looked as if it had no beginning and no end.  The wind gusted, stinging my face.  Above my head the clouds raced across the sky.  I hung on.  The moon emerged suddenly, bright as a lantern.  All around me rooftops jumped into view, dipping and soaring like the interlocked wings of a flight of birds gliding through the night.  Chimneys and antennas and dimly lighted dormers thrust up like mastheads in a dark sea.

The wind howled in earnest, and the clouds above me parted revealing a dark winter sky filled with stars sharp as knife blades.  I closed my eyes, and held on.  I felt as if I was tethered to the earth by the slimmest of cords, as if I might fly away at any moment and go spinning off into the darkness.  The thick wooden shingles dug into my arms and legs, and I began to shiver. 

Then the strangest calm came over me.  I could see myself spread out on the roof-top like a pale moth, the engine of the earth pulsing below me, the light from the stars above rolling in, breaking against my face like swells from a vast and distant ocean.  The roofs and the planet, and me, flung out like a flag in a heavy wind, hurtled through a starry space that went on and on, and my life in all of it was no more than a heartbeat.

I'd read once that time goes in a circle, and I could see it now, going out and coming back on itself like a big black snake with its tail in its mouth.  In it were the rooftops and the city below me and all the cities and all the people who lived in them, even all of the people I'd ever read about in all of history.  Even the stars, more than I could see, with planets spinning around them and life playing itself out everywhere.  There was no past or future, only now, and inside the circle of that black snake all the life that ever was or ever would be was compressed into a single voice, lifted, in the space of a moment, into one great shout.

I could feel my brain squeezing against the top of my head trying to hold it all in.  It was like trying to remember a fragrance or a color or a shooting star.  All I knew was that I was in there, and Emily and Mickey as well, and that the only thing that was important was that we be together, that we be part of the moment.  As hard as I tried to hold it, the image began to slide away from me.  What remained when it was gone was the certainty of what I'd seen and the conviction that our voices mattered.      

I could stripe parking lots anyplace.  Atlanta was no different than Seattle: paint faded everywhere.  Mickey didn't really want her new job--she was just mad at me.  She needed me, and I needed her, and Emily needed us both.  At that moment I knew.  I’d go to Georgia and find them.  Mickey and I would make up.  And we’d go to the Indian Ocean--I could convince her.  Sure, it was a dream, but wasn’t everything?  Along the way, we could practice shouting.

Copyright 2003: David Buckner

 

 

 

 CAT IN THE RAIN

Sewanee Review, Spring 1992

Favorite Stories: http://www.sewanee.edu/sreview/Fiction.html

 

On the boat ride over to McNeil Island it was low tide; I could see where the mainland nearly came up to the prison, but the current is strong--it can pick you up and take you before you've gone fifty yards; and it's cold--you can't last twenty minutes in it.  When I was there, an Indian kid tried to escape.  They fished him out of the Sound the next day in a rainstorm and hauled him up onto a grain barge.  He'd tied himself to a wooden pallet with a length of yellow nylon rope, and it was still around his wrists when they brought him back in.

The cells at McNeil held five men; there was a sink in the middle of the wall with pegs on it where you hung your coffee cup; in the corner was a toilet. The graffiti was Spanish, left over from when they brought in the Marieltos.  Charles Manson was there once, for auto theft, and Alvin Karpis from the Ma Barker Gang; even the Birdman of Alcatraz was there.  All I really cared about though was how long I was there, and when I'd get out.

 

As often as I could I'd work outside.  Occasionally I'd see the sun and Mount Rainier; there were seagulls and cormorants, and tugs pulling strings of barges, and, towards the middle of winter, a guy who came out every day across the bay in a little rowboat with two fishing poles up in the back who sang while he rowed.

Sometimes he'd catch something, and I'd see it flash silver as he netted it.  There were cattle, on the sloping hills across the bay; when the wind was right I could hear them calling, mixed in with the soft insistent vibration of the big guns down in the naval firing range that went on night and day, and him singing. 

I always wanted to be down there with him, drinking a little scotch or bourbon to keep warm, feeling the sweat, and the heat in my arms and back from the rowing, watching the tips of the poles, maybe singing some myself. 

It was the guy in the row boat who kept me in one piece through all of that first fall and winter; through the cold, deadly grey of those short days, when all the rest of the world seemed nonexistent; through the months of watching my back and waking at the slightest noise; through the fights, and the broken nose, and the cracked rib; it was him that I held onto, out in the horseshoe-shaped bay across from McNeil, rowing and singing.  I used to dream about how I'd come back to the bay, find a place with big windows that let the light fan onto the water at night; I'd get a boat and row out and introduce myself and share a drink and talk about leader lengths and bait--I used to lie in my bunk at night, imagining it.

The other thing that got me through was reading.  When I was a kid I read a lot.  School didn't interest me, but I'd sneak up to the library and go back home with the books under my coat so none of my friends would see them.  The library was a war-surplus quonset hut, tin-sided and cramped, in a neighborhood where most of the cars were up on blocks and the ones that weren't were considered fair game.  I read every adventure story and science-fiction novel they had, and when I'd gone through those, I read history.

I read about the Romans and the Egyptians, and I remember telling my friends all those old stories.  We'd be up at the Shop-N-Save on a Friday night, waiting for some guy to come out of the liquor store and stash his bottle under his front seat before he went in to buy groceries.  All the while I’d be talking about scarabs or dung beetles, or pictures of Roman ships.  Later on we figured out it was easier to break into the liquor store instead of standing around waiting for just one bottle.  It was that kind of progress that I had time to reflect on at McNeil.

The prison library was even smaller than the quonset hut, but I read the entire works in Toynbee's history of civilization, and all of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and after that the lives of Hannibal, and Alexander, and Caesar; and, by the time I got out, half of Napoleon

 

My parole was in Seattle and that's where I wound up.  I found a place to live up on top of Queen Anne, on the very spine of the hill in a quiet neighborhood, where the houses all grow into one another and where kids ride tricycles on the sidewalks at night.  It was an apartment in the top of a two-story house; all around were roof tops and television antennas and chimneys, with swallows darting across the peaks of the roofs as if they were in the bottom of some ocean that only they knew about, right by the windows, fast, and then breaking away as they neared my face on the other side of the glass, as if they didn't expect me or anyone else to be there. 

When I moved into the apartment I inherited a scraggly black tomcat who hung around until I felt sorry for him and fed him some scraps.  After that he never left; he didn’t beg or play up to me though: that’s what I liked about him--eventually he came inside and took up residence and filled out, but he made it clear that it was his decision.  In the evenings we'd sit together in front of the window, me reading the newspaper, him watching the swallows.

Dotty, the woman who owned the place, was a garage sale shopper; every week she'd come up to show me something she'd bought.  Once it was a gold globe lamp that I put up over the bed so that at night it would glow in the window; another time it was a chair, a big old green naugahyde recliner with an afghan on the top of the headrest to cover up where the stuffing was coming out.  She brought up drawer organizers and wall hangings and flower pots and hand-knitted toilet paper covers, filling up the bedroom with its slanted ceiling, and the kitchen, and spilling out into the front room that overlooked the alley and yard and carport below. 

Dotty had plastic daffodils in the dirt at the sides of the house; all winter they stood there, lined up in a row like a picket fence with their yellow centers bright beneath the grey clouds and the rain.  Her husband was a retired merchant marine who'd been big into golf.  She was always after me to get to know him, and one day I went to the driving range with him to hit a few balls, but I got bored and began to lose attention, and the next thing you know I'd busted his brand new Ben Hogan five-iron, the head of the club flying out onto the grass, farther than the ball even; we drove back to the house in silence.  She was into health too, always dropping by with magazines showing clean colons and ads for home irrigation, and the right kinds of foods.   Her husband had cancer, and I went along with her and looked at the stuff and gave up red meat, but he was dying anyway, getting frailer every time I saw him, until the only thing that was left of him were these enormous hands that looked as if they belonged to someone else.  She was well-intentioned though, and nothing she ever gave me was so ugly or so large that I couldn't hold onto it for awhile before bringing it back down.

 

After a couple of weeks I got a job as a bartender at a restaurant at the bottom of the hill.  It wasn't much of a restaurant, a place where you went in a line and chose what kind of sandwich you wanted and waited for them to nuke it in the microwave, but it had a good-sized bar upstairs with a view of the one-way street below where every night around closing at least one car would go booming up the wrong way.

It was just a small neighborhood place that occasionally filled up, whenever the Sonics were playing at the Coliseum or a convention was in town; and then it would get busier than a person could stand and just as suddenly be dead when the game or the function had begun.

The bar was U-shaped, with stools all around the sides and I ran the blender and made coffee and poured liquor and beer and chatted with the regulars who came in for the half-price doubles during happy hour.  It was easy work, and it kept me out of trouble. 

In my off hours I sat up in the apartment and looked out the sliding glass door at the rain hitting the concrete pad below.  I needed to change my life, but I didn't know how to go about it.  I couldn't see any of my friends.  If I did I'd start up again--I knew that, and I wasn't going to do it. All I had to do was remember the court and the judge and the lawyer, all the people standing around, not mad or anything; that was what finally got to me.  Before it had been like a game, go in, get slapped, do a few days or a little more, no big deal, just laughs; but this was different, no one was mad and no one was laughing.  It was as if they were working on a conveyer belt and they all knew each other and I was invisible. It was their job to keep the belt moving, and I was on it; they could take a hand, or a leg, or squash me like a fly--whatever they wanted, as long as things kept moving.  I'd always prided myself on my independence, believed I had control over my own life, that the law was for other people.  But it wasn't.  It was for everyone like me who got in its way--that's what I learned and what had scared me. I was glad I'd learned it, but it still didn't tell me what to do.    So I sat up in the apartment looking out at the rain.  I'd drink some coffee, maybe have a beer to cut the edge of the caffeine, then start all over again--sitting, staring, listening to the radio--that's how the winter passed.

 

There were a few women who came into the bar on a regular basis, and I would serve them and chat and make small talk.  There was one who began coming in more often and I could tell she was interested in getting to know me better.  She was short, with freckles like muddy water across her face, her hair the frizzy kind that looks as if it had just transmitted ten thousand volts or so, and she was a talker, non-stop; the more she drank, the more she talked, to me, to anyone else around her at the bar; after awhile the regulars got to know her, and she became one.

Her name was Rose, and she was going to the University.  I never would have guessed it; in the bar she seemed kind of dizzy.  She was pretty, in her own way, and her talking didn't bother me; in fact I'd rather listen than talk any day, but life was still kind of shaky, and I was trying to avoid complications.

One night it was raining--it had been pounding down against the windows for a week straight--then it stopped, and a fog had rolled in.  She came in and I poured her drinks and had one or two myself to keep her company.  It was a slow night.  After awhile I couldn't think of any good reason why I shouldn't take her home with me, so I did.

By the time she left in the morning I was beat.  She had lots of plans for us, but I needed some space.     I told her I'd give her a call; that night she was sitting at the bar when I came on.

An eight-hour shift is a long time to look at someone across from you while you work, and I ran out of small talk pretty quick. She kept drinking; it was busy, and the other regulars had by then gotten in the habit of buying her drinks.  I tried to be friendly, but distant.  It was a basketball night and it was getting busier by the minute, people were lined up at the bar and the noise made it impossible to carry on a conversation. 

At seven, when the game fans in the bar suddenly cleared out, she was still there, and when she asked to come over to my place again I had no way to avoid it.  She shook her head when I said no.  I'd been putting the drinks down in front of her that the regulars had been buying, now I wished I hadn't.  Her eyes were glassy.  She nodded, said how about later, and I said no, that I needed a good night's sleep; she just stared at me, somewhat unfocused; how about after that then she said, and I turned away, exasperated.  I could feel her eyes on my back and I kept away from her side of the bar, hoping she'd forget about it.   

I talked to the other customers and rearranged the area around the cash register and flirted with the cocktail waitress, and when I turned back she was gone. 

She didn't come back, even after I had cleaned the bar twice where she'd been.  The cocktail waitress was gone too, so were most of the customers.  I leaned back and drank a Pepsi and looked out the window. 

Pretty soon Lonny, the owner of the place, walked up the stairs. I gave him a Pepsi and he used it to wash down a Valium.  On my days off he'd shaved his moustache and his face looked unnaturally broad, the space between his lip and nose pale, like a white sidewall from the tire of one of those old gangster cars.  I couldn't get used to it and caught myself staring at him, and I knew it was making him nervous.  He was jumpy anyway, even with the valium.  I hoped to god Gerry, Lonny's wife, wasn't with him. She was hell on wheels, all claws and sharp-edged comments and early on I got the picture as to why the valium--I often thought he should try giving some to her, but maybe he had.  Just then the cocktail waitress came out of the women's bathroom and walked over and got her tray and gave me a funny look.  I made the drinks that were on her ticket and waited for her to pick them up.  When she did, she said my girlfriend was lying on the floor in the restroom telling everyone she loved me but that I wouldn't have anything to do with her--and that she had thrown up all over everything and was a mess.

I couldn't believe what was happening; I should have left well enough alone, but it was too late for that.

When Gerry marched up the stairs, demanding to know what was going on with the broad in the bathroom, I said take her to my place; she took my keys and blew a reef of cigarette smoke in my face and said I was supposed to service the customers, but maybe I could restrain myself.  She went in to the restroom and then came out in a few minutes with Rose and took her downstairs in the freight elevator.  When I got home, Rose was in my bed, snoring.

 

After that night she began moving more and more of her things in  Every day it was something else--a dress she was going to wear when we went out, a raincoat that got hung up to be there in case of bad weather, even a bathrobe hanging behind the bathroom door.  At the end of a month she had nearly as much stuff in the apartment as I had and four of the eight drawers of the dresser. 

After she'd been around awhile, she and Dotty got on all right too; Dotty had always been trying to fix me up with someone, and I could see she liked Rose--that she felt as good as if she'd been responsible herself.

In the mornings Rose would head off to the University, and I would clean up the kitchen and work around the house.  The bedroom got painted a light lavender with pink trim.  In the kitchen wire racks went up on the walls for cups and glasses, woven straw mats went on the floor, and the green naugahyde recliner went back downstairs to Dotty. 

It went on like that for another month.  Sometimes it made me a little edgy, and the cat didn't like it much either; I could tell he figured she was responsible by the way he stayed away whenever she was there.  I wasn't used to having someone around all the time either, but it was like trying to keep the wind from blowing; everywhere I turned there was more of her stuff, and whenever I said something about it she didn't seem to hear--and she was bossy.

One day, right after she said she was giving up her apartment, I packed all her stuff into her suitcases and the rest in garbage bags, put the biggest Yale lock on the sliding glass door I could buy, arranged some days off, and took the bus to Portland and went on a bender.

When I got back into town I went straight to work.  I was hungover, but that didn't explain why I felt so bad.  I'd missed her.  All the way back on the Greyhound I thought about her.  I'd discovered I needed her; I needed her to care about me, even if she was bossy.  After throwing her out I was sure I'd never see her again. 

I hadn't even clocked in yet when Gerry came out of her office demanding to know what I was going to do about Rose.  She said she was up there right now, in a lawn chair, with her own TV and a reading lamp, telling every one she didn't have anywhere to live now that I'd kicked her out.  When I heard that she was upstairs, it was as if a buzzer was going off in my heart.  Gerry stabbed me in the chest with her finger so hard it hurt and said that was bad enough, but she was only drinking water, for god's sake, and either I got  her out or I could get out.

That night Rose moved back in.

 

After that things were a lot easier--it had released some pressure. Rose began to listen more, and I started seeing us as a couple.  I'd come home from work at the bar, and we'd lie in bed and eat chocolates and drink a beer or two and listen to the stereo and talk until we got tired.  Afterwards, in the darkness, I would lie awake, feeling her beside me; sometimes it would be windy, and it would make noise and the top of the house where our bedroom was would shake, or if it was calm, I would listen to the high thin squeals coming up from the wheels of the trains in the interchange.  I'd never lived like this before, and I would lie there, thinking about it.

On the evenings that we had off we would go to the movies, or for a walk up along the top of Queen Anne Hill; we’d look at the houses and Rose would talk about which ones she liked and what we would do to them ourselves. 

I still felt as if I didn't fit in, as if everybody's life was flying along on schedules that I couldn't even see, as if I'd gone to catch a bus and all the timetables were written in a foreign language, but things were easier than they ever had been, so I just rolled with it.

The tomcat took Rose’s return hard though--it was as if he’d crossed a line when I’d put her out and there was no going back.  He made it clear that he thought Rose was an intruder and spent most of his time walking around with his ears down flat or puffing up and hissing.  He made such a fuss I began keeping him outside, and soon he was only coming in for his meals.

When school was out Rose and I had a lot more time together.  All summer she was at me--what was I going to do with myself, how long could I be happy tending bar, what would happen to me when I got old and had nothing to fall back on.  I tried to tell her that I was fine, that I was perfectly happy tending bar, that in fact I was happier than I'd been in a long time, happier than I'd ever been probably, that tending bar was for me a long step toward being normal, what with its regular hours and time clock and everything; but she kept pressing me so that I began to think about it myself.

As it turned out, I started in at the junior college in the fall. Rose said they had to take me, that they had an open door policy. She said it didn't matter anymore what your major was, that I could study history or anything else I wanted, that the business community was looking more and more favorably at liberal arts graduates.  It was odd, being in school, but not as hard as I thought.  I studied at home and late at night in the bar and kept up.

 

The battle with the cat went on the whole time.  I hoped that he and Rose would eventually get along, that she’d win him over, but he was having none of it.  If I did let him stay in, he invariably started up at three or four in the morning, scratching at the door to go out, or pushing his bowl around on the floor; when he sprayed the bed it was the last straw, and he was out for good.  I’d fill up his food bowl, and he’d come around sometime later and eat and that was about it.  Life was going at ninety miles an hour then--for the first time in my life people were telling me I was doing good.  I was even beginning to dress differently.  I was all caught up in it, trying to make sense of books and schedules, so I didn't think too much about the cat; as long as he wasn't causing any trouble he wasn't on my mind.

One day when I came home I found him lying at the foot of the stairs that led up to the apartment.  He could barely lift his head, and when I picked him up he was limp and didn’t resist.  I made a bed for him out of bath towels on the couch and cooked him up a batch of chicken livers.  Toward evening he seemed to be his old self.  When he wanted out I let him go, thinking he'd be back in a little bit, but soon Rose came in, and with one thing and another he slipped my mind, and we went to a movie.   It had been clear when we left, but a storm rolled in, blackening the sky, bringing lightning and thunder and a downpour.  When we got home I called for the cat and walked around down back, but he didn't come.

In the morning on the way out I found him on the green nylon mat at the edge of the carport; he'd died sometime in the night in the rain.  I was on my way to school, to take a test, and I couldn't stop.  I didn't want to just leave him there, but I didn't have any time, so I picked him up and took him over and put him alongside the house among the plastic daffodils.          

All day at school I tried to think of what to do with him.  

I felt guilty, as if I shouldn't have made him stay out so much, but when I went to get him he wasn't there.  I looked all around the sides of the house and under the carport and along the fence.  There was no sign of him.

I knew he was dead.  He couldn't have gotten up and crawled off, but he wasn't there, and I went up the stairs to the apartment and sat down and looked out across the roofs of the houses back of the alley.  It had started raining again on the way home and now it was coming down with a vengeance, beating against the roof and the sliding glass door and bouncing high up in the air from the pavement below.

About half an hour later, Dotty's husband knocked on the sliding glass door.  He looked worse than the last time I'd seen him, as if the walk up the stairs had taken it all out of him.  I opened the door and he asked me if the black cat was mine and I said yes and he said he'd found him dead out along the house and that he'd put him in the garbage can in the alley.

After he left I went down to the can and lifted the lid, and there the cat was, completely stiff, his eyes and mouth open and his teeth in sharp rows where the skin was pulled back as if he was snarling at me.  The rain was still coming down, streaming off the lid into the garbage can onto his face and along my legs into my shoes, splashing into the water that ran in a torrent along the concrete gutters so that the houses seemed to be floating, as if they were boats, to the sea.  I put the lid on and twisted it down tight.  The rain hammered at it, drumming through the metal into my hand like locks closing; I could feel it all the way back up the stairs to the apartment.

Copyright 2003: David Buckner

    

         

TIES THAT BIND

 

Short story Award: Dickinson Review

Anthologized: Object Lesson, Bluestem Press

Written Arts Award Issue: King County Arts Commission

   

 

All the shoes of my life were lined up in front of me.  I'd never thrown a pair away, no matter how worn or out of style: wingtips, still shiny, the little holes in the tops filled with wax that glistened when buffed; hiking boots I wore only a few times, too stiff for anything else; golf shoes, spiked and tasseled; black patent-leather slip-ons, somewhere there was a tuxedo that matched; boat shoes, pointed-toe Italian loafers, basketball shoes, army boots from my leather days, rubber kayaking booties, rock climbing shoes, espadrilles--the apartment was one continuous line of shoes, from the front room, along the hallway, and past the kitchen to the bedroom, toe-to-toe, tongues every which way, laces askew--I'd decided it was what I needed to do--to clean house, make a new start, just like the new apartment I'd gotten up on Capitol Hill overlooking Lake Union and all of Seattle spread out below. 

 

I put an ad in the paper: Shoes, all types, reasonably priced, and waited for my phone to ring.

 

I got phone calls.  One guy thought it was brake shoes.  Somebody else thought it was shows, a typo.  A little skinny guy with a furtive air came out and looked at them, there was something odd about the way he caressed them, and he only wanted one of each pair--I refused.  Then for the rest of the week, nobody called.  I ran the ad again.

 

I was sitting in the only piece of furniture in the apartment, an Early American rocker from Sears with a green cotton pad with cannons printed on it, when the phone rang.  It was a woman's voice, it sounded as if there was some kind of interference on the line, it cracked and popped, I said I had shoes, what kind she asked, all kinds I said, why are you selling them, a new start, that's the way to do it she said and asked me where I was and I told her and she said she'd be over around three. 

 

I walked around, straightening the few things in the apartment that were out of place, I still couldn't figure out the static on the phone.

 

At three o'clock the door bell rang downstairs and she said hi and blew a pink bubble that popped and I knew what the static had been.  She had bristly red hair, and freckles, all over her face, as if she'd fallen asleep behind a screen door in the sun; she was dressed in jeans and a sweat shirt with the sleeves rolled up, brightly colored handkerchiefs cornered out of her back pockets as she walked ahead of me up the stairs.  She glanced around.  Her hair was held in by a bandanna, but just barely, carrot-colored clumps jutted out like rusty Brillo pads. Her eyes were the green of new dollar bills.  We walked along the line of shoes.  She picked up the wing-tips, skipped over the kayaking booties and went to the hiking boots, she lifted up the tongues and peered inside them.  They're all size ten, I said.  She shrugged and picked up the patent-leathers.  She wasn't at all my type, I could see that, her fingers were too blunt, there was dirt under her nails, her lips were tattered, as if she chewed them, her hair was an impossible shade of red.  How much, she asked.  I raised my eyebrows.  How much, she blew a pink bubble that popped like a gun going off.  Two hundred dollars, I said.  You're nuts, she coughed, swallowed, her eyes crossed for a moment, she'd eaten her gum.  What are you, some kind of idiot, what are you going to do with all these shoes, two hundred dollars is crazy, she unwrapped a new piece of gum--double bubble.  I put my hands in my pockets and looked regretful.  I just wanted her to leave.  Look, she said, I'll give you fifty dollars for the lot--what are you hanging on to them for, are you ever going to wear them?  I shook my head. 

 

Okay, she said, looking at me oddly, if you change your mind here's my number--you don't have a brother named Frank, do you? she asked suddenly, staring at me intently, smiling as if she was expecting me to yell surprise, maybe throw my arms around her and call out a bunch of mutual acquaintances from the bedroom who'd all been waiting for the signal, but her smile stopped me from saying something clever, it changed everything, the way her eyes lit up and how white and small and perfect her teeth were, and her skin, clear and taut, with the freckles like small dapples of sunlight, and I could only stand there with my mouth open and look back at her wishing I was Frank, so she would smile at me like that.  No?  she said, and I shook my head.  An old friend, she said wistfully, someone I miss, and she turned and walked down the stairs.  I followed her to the door, trying to think of something bright to say, but it was as if I had a brain cramp, as if I couldn't get over the sudden transfiguration of her beauty, and how I hadn't seen it when she first came in, and so I let her go and watched her walk away.

 

For the rest of the week I paced around the apartment.  Finally I called her.  Look, I said, wanting to make conversation, what are you going to use them for?  I have an orphanage, she said.  Come on, I said, they're all size ten, what are you going to do, stuff them with newspapers?  Okay, she said, what I really want them for is to make scarecrows, they work great, you nail them to cross-poles and the tongues flap and the laces flutter and it keeps the black birds out of my strawberries.  I didn't want to tell you, some people might be offended.  There was a pop over the line.  I don't know, I said.  Okay, okay, she said, it's not true.  I use them for starters, planters, for the flowers I grow, they're perfect, especially the dress shoes, there's something about the leather, the older the better, maybe it's the polish.  How do I know you're telling the truth, I said, all my suspicions jumping around me, those shoes were my life, who was she, coming in, first ugly, then suddenly beautiful, I was confused, sweating into the silence of the phone line, truth was circling around like a flight of stacked-up planes, I couldn't get a grip on it, no way would I trust her.  Are you still there Frank?  she said.  I hung up.  The phone rang two times while I paced.

 

A week later my door bell rang.  I went down but there was no one there, only a pair of penny-loafers filled with potting soil and two lovely Martha Washington Geraniums.  There was a note.  Honest, it said, I know you're not Frank.  Please reconsider--your shoes will have a happy home.

 

Every day a new pair of shoes appeared on my doorstep.  Mary Janes with Pansies; oxfords, bright with Marigolds; hightop basketball shoes brimming over with Petunias.  I couldn't stop thinking about her.  I remembered her smile, the way she picked up my shoes, lovingly, as if they had lives of their own.

 

By the second week I had more plants than I knew what to do with, the flowers were everywhere.  I began calling her number, there was no answer--but the plants kept arriving.

 

After the third week, I went to the library and looked up her address in the cross directory and rented a van and took all the shoes lined up in my apartment to a concrete building that smelled of sulphur in the south end and had them chromed, then drove to where she lived in Georgetown, down among the factories and warehouses and loading docks--a small house with a large yard, nearly overgrown with flowers and berry bushes and fruit

trees--and unloaded the shoes onto her front porch.

 

Now the laces ring like chimes in the breeze and you can hear the wind singing through the eyelets, and when the sun is shining we walk through the garden wearing sunglasses, hand in hand, the reflections of the shoes on our faces, and we stop sometimes and I tell her about them, where a particular pair came from, where I wore them, and we hold hands, the flowers all around us, up to our shoulders, buzzing with bees and pollen and great fiery blossoms, and all the shoes, shining in the sun, with her snapping her gum, and clucking at the plants, snipping off a runner here, tut-tutting at a curled leaf, and it's as if my whole life's out there, triple-chromed and rust resistant, with new life coming up every year.

Copyright: David Buckner 2003