by Barry Rachin
*****
“Doing anything Saturday night?” Mavis asked the first week in November. Harry said that he wasn’t. “Come for supper. I told Travis all about you and he’s dying to meet you.”
The idea of Travis Calhoun, bigoted redneck, adulterer and homicidal maniac, dying to meet Harry Wong Smith was so absurd it demanded an equally absurd rebuttal. “Did you tell him I lust after you day and night?”
Mavis burst into hysterical laughter. “You’re the funniest boy alive!” She could hardly catch her breath. “I’ll remember that one, for a hundred years.” Harry smiled weakly and went off to check his weekly assignment.
On Saturday late in the afternoon, Harry pulled on his best, wrinkle-free Dockers and a green sport shirt. Smearing Bay Rum cologne on either cheek, he grabbed his windbreaker and headed out the door.
The Calhouns lived at Fox Run Estates, a low-rent apartment complex, three miles north on route fifty-seven. The single bedroom apartment featured a small living room and dining area off the kitchen. She was alone when he arrived. On a coffee table was a picture of the couple at their senior prom. Travis Calhoun, macho blond hair curling over his ears and fifty pounds leaner, looked dashing in a white tuxedo. Mavis glowed with an utterly ditsy joie de vivre. Peering through the open doorway into her bedroom, Harry could see an antique white dresser and matching bed tables.
“Stove’s on the blink,” Mavis said. “Won’t be fixed till morning. Travis is picking up Chinese food. Can I get you something to drink?”
“Soda’s fine.”
Fifteen minutes later a blue pickup truck with a smashed side door pulled up in front of the building. Smelling of hard liquor, Travis Calhoun entered the kitchen. He went directly to his wife, kissed her on the mouth and placed a brown bag on the kitchen table. “Larry, is it?”
“Harry,” he corrected. Travis grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down a bit too forcefully. Lurching unsteadily to the refrigerator, he palmed two beers, placing one on the table next to Harry’s empty glass. Twisting the metal cap, Travis rubbed the rim of the bottle with a greasy hand and took a deep swig, draining half the contents before he came up for air. “Like music?” He drifted toward the stereo.
Before Harry could answer, he added, “Shitkicker. That’s what we listen to mostly. Dwight Yokum, Delbert Clinton, Willie Nelson, Clint Black.” He fiddled with the dial until a twangy melody burst through the static. “Country and western. Good-ole-boy music.”
“That’s sort of nice,” Harry said, removing the cap from his beer. He filled the cup three-quarters full and took a sip. “Nice lyrics.” The tune, a rollicking, hillbilly song, told the story of a lovelorn cowboy who loses control and shoots up the jukebox in a bar; it was genuinely funny, as original as it was clever - a silly story told, in verse, of a lover’s despair and redemption. Harry took another drink.
Travis opened the containers while Mavis set the table and passed out silverware. “Let’s eat!”
When the meal was finished, Travis plucked two more beers from the refrigerator and hustled Harry into the living room. “Mavis’ a gem and I’m the luckiest sucker alive.”
“You’re the luckiest and I’m the second luckiest.” Harry wasn’t sure what he meant by the obtuse remark. The Smith’s were teetotalers. The first beer had softened Harry up; the second transported him to a state of magnanimous euphoria where he was beginning to appreciate Travis Calhoun as much if not more than his goddess-of-a-wife.
“It’s like I won the lottery when Mavis agreed to marry a worthless skunk, white trash, son-of-a-bitch like me.” Tipping the bottle vertical, Travis nursed the suds at the bottom of his beer through the longneck and into his waiting lips. “She don’t ever shut up though... always with the fucking Eastern philosophy.” He placed an arm around Harry Wong Smith’s shoulder and squeezed hard as though they were blood brothers.
“Small price to pay, though.” Harry’s speech was slurred. Was he being too familiar with Travis Calhoun, a man who, except for Nellie Higgins wild accusations, Harry hardly knew?
In response, Mavis’ husband jumped up and got more beer. “A deaf mute,” Travis sniggered. “When I lose my temper ‘cause she’s cackling on and on about some skinny-assed faggot in an oversized-diaper, I tell Mavis that I’m gonna divorce her. Marry some ugly bitch who can’t neither hear nor talk.”
Harry burst into uncontrollable laughter.
“What’s so funny?” Mavis called from the kitchen.
Again Travis leaped up, but this time rushed into the bedroom instead. When he emerged, he was carrying a revolver. He gave the oversized gun, a Smith and Wesson Model 19 with a blue neoprene grip, to Harry.
“Getting sloppy in my old age.” Travis retrieved the gun, opened the barrel and removed the copper shells one by one. “Three fifty-seven magnum. Hundred fifty-eight grain Federal jackets.”
He handed the gun back to Harry just as Mavis entered the room. “For God’s sake, Travis!”
He waved her off. “Gun’s empty, Safety catch’s on.”
“Nice looking weapon,” Harry said.
“Piece of shit. Don’t group the shots. Every bullet flies off in a different direction like goddamn birdshot.”
Mavis sat down on the couch next to Harry. She wore a cotton blouse and tan stretch pants. “Travis took the gun for repairs,” she said “but nobody can figure out what’s wrong with it.”
“Had the slugs checked with calipers. No problem. The hammer cams rearward when the trigger’s released and there’s plenty of mainspring pressure.” Under the best of circumstances, Harry would have trouble following the conversation. “Cylinder gap had some play to it but not enough to explain why it sprays lead like a shotgun.” Travis took the gun, pointed it at the far window and squeezed off a phantom round. The barrel spun with mechanical precision and the firing pin sprung forward.
“Jeez, Travis!” Mavis wrenched the gun from his hand and returned it to the bedroom.
Travis shook the slugs back and forth in his free hand like dice. “Still, who gives a shit about accuracy? Thief breaks into your house - at a distance of thirty feet you just point and shoot.” Travis fashioned a gun from his hand and index finger, squeezing off an imaginary round in the direction of his wife’s head.”
Mavis returned. “So, where were we?”
Christmas day, the Shop Rite Supermarket sponsored a free dinner for the unemployed and local residents down on their luck. Supermarket staff and VFW members catered the affair which was held at the post hall in South Attleboro. Harry waited tables. Mavis helped out in the kitchen preparing box lunches for elderly shut-ins. Harry arrived an hour early. Two hundred people had already arrived, an odd assortment of somber souls.
“I don’t see how this makes any difference in the quality of their lives,” Harry grumbled. He was standing near the side entrance as a steady stream of late arrivals filtered into the room. Mavis had just come out from the kitchen to join him.
At a nearby table, three men in their late twenties were laughing a bit too loudly, but nobody seemed to care. One of the men, a gaunt, goofy-looking fellow with bad teeth, winked at Mavis. The gesture seemed more childish than brazen and further dampened Harry’s holiday cheer. “The alternative,” Mavis said, “is we don’t have a party, and they all go without Christmas dinner.” “They can’t help it,” Mavis added, nodding pleasantly to the fellow with the bad teeth.
A staticky Jingle Bells burst over the loudspeaker but no one was singing. They were waiting for the main course. You could see it in the grim set of an old woman’s jaw, the impatient squabbling of a dowdy, middle-aged couple. Frig the music! Bring on the goddamn turkey!
The kitchen doors flew open and a column of staff emerged with platters of steaming mash potatoes, green beans and winter squash. The meal was officially underway. “Got to man my battle station.” Mavis disappeared into the kitchen.
A teenage girl - she couldn’t have been any older than Harry - stank of body odor.
Not the usual, day-old variety but the rancid, nose searing stench - a month’s accumulation of sloth and grunge. “Merry Christmas! How’s your meal?” Harry felt no connection whatsoever with the foul-smelling girl. She might as well have been a humanoid from some far-flung solar system impersonating the real thing. No sympathy or compassion. All Harry wanted was to finish out the shift, go home and forget about Brandenburg’s poor unfortunates.
“Another busload’s pulling in,” hollered one of the VFW workers. “Get a headcount and let cookie know how many extra meals.”
“Another busload,” Harry thought. Brandenburg was a relatively small community; how many indigents could there possibly be? With hot food on the table now, the guests were mollified. Not that anyone was singing, but the mood had lightened.
“Drivers are needed to deliver meals to the subsidized housing on Woodward Ave.” Mavis had her coat on and was fishing in her pocket for the car keys. “This was such a joy! I’m going to do it every year.” Mavis stretched, rising up on her toes and kissed Harry lightly on the cheek. “Merry Christmas, Harry!”
Around two o’clock, coffee and dessert were served and the meal was officially over. Harry went into the men’s room to pee. The three men Harry noticed earlier were smoking cigarettes outside the door as Harry brushed by and entered the bathroom. “Ain’t that the Chink waiting tables?” It was the voice of the gaunt, goofy-looking fellow.
Harry positioned himself in front of a urinal and unzipped his fly. “A room full of horny white guys and look who the foxy bitch sucks face with.” Again, it was the infantile winker running off at the mouth. He lowered his voice and, to Harry’s great relief, the running commentary became unintelligible. After a minute there was a raucous outburst of indecent hoots. Harry waited until the threesome had gone back to their seats before sneaking out the back door.
*****
In May Harry was accepted to Boston University. His senior prom was scheduled at the Biltmore in downtown Providence. The Paul Borelli big band would set up in the main ballroom. He didn’t have a date yet. Tuesday afternoon when Harry arrived at Shop Rite, another woman was working the middle register. “Mavis never showed,” the woman reported flatly. “No call. No nothing.”
An hour later, three policemen entered the store and requested, Molly Pruitt, the store manager. They spoke informally near the recycling bins; one officer penciled notes on a loose-leaf pad. Toward six o’clock fragments of second-hand information began to circulate. Mavis was at the hospital. A bad car accident. Head injuries. Broken teeth. The husband was dead.
Harry hurried to the manager’s office. “There’s been some talk - ”
The manager looked up. Her face was pale, expressionless. “Not now,” she said rather tersely and waved Harry out of the room.
Harry cornered Nellie Higgins at customer service and asked about the accident. Nellie looked even worse than Molly Pruitt. “There wasn’t any accident. Mavis’ husband came home drunk and beat the crap out of her. Busted up her face something awful, according to the cops. She’s still at the hospital. Be released home in a day or so, poor woman.”
Harry felt his brain convulse, crushed like an animal’s paw in a steel-trap. “The husband?”
“Cleaned out the joint bank account and flew the coop. Cops figure he headed south. Got relatives and friends down there.” Nellie leaned over the counter. “We’re taking up a collection... to get Mavis a nice fruit basket and a card.”
“Fruit basket,” Harry repeated hollowly and groped his way to the men’s room where he sat on a toilet with the door closed and lowered his head between his legs.
Some ugly bitch who can’t neither hear nor talk. A deaf mute.
Harry remembered Travis’ drawling commentary. How he laughed like a treacherous fool, a Judas Iscariot, with Mavis, no more than twenty feet away, drying the last of the dishes.
In the morning, Harry bunked school and headed over to the hospital. Mavis was sitting in the solarium with a hospital-issue robe thrown over her shoulders. Both eyes were smudged black, the sooty discoloration fanning to the delicate lashes, bleeding down the cheekbone like spilled ink. “Travis hits real hard.”
Harry gripped the back of a hardwood chair and held on like a drowning man. The two front teeth were gone, snapped off at the gum line, leaving a hole five-eighths of an inch across and half an inch deep. “Why did he do it?”
Mavis folded her hands demurely in her lap. “For the fun of it.”
“What’s wrong with your eye?”
She patted the side of her face gingerly. “He broke my cheekbone. The eye won’t focus.” Mavis opened her mouth and pointed. “My medical insurance has a deductible on dental... five hundred dollar. And I’m already in hock up to my ears.”
A nurse pushing a wheelchair ahead of her entered the solarium. “Need another X-ray of that cheek.”
Mavis transferred to the wheelchair and sat legs askew like a rag doll, slumped at an angle. “It was sweet of you to come.” The nurse pushed off, leaving Harry standing in an empty, sun-drenched room.
A week later, Harry heard, through word of mouth, that Mavis was back at Fox Run. Travis Calhoun had been sighted at a cabin his uncle owned in Murfreesboro on the west fork of the Stones River. But when the police arrived he was long gone, driven deep into the rural brush by enlightened self-interest.
Harry went to visit Mavis one night after work. “How’re you feeling?”
The raccoon mask had faded to a sickly yellow tinged with olive. “Much better. The double vision’s gone.”
Both eyes seemed to be cooperating quite nicely. “I had a similar problem with one of my eyes when I was a baby,” Harry said. “Any word on your husband?”
Mavis smiled. “Called from a truck stop in Georgia. Apologized half a million times for what he did. Cried like a baby.”
“Yes, that seems about right.”
Mavis went into the bedroom and returned with the blue-handled revolver. She tipped the muzzle forward and cracked the barrel to reveal a fat, 357 slug in each chamber. “I told him, if he ever showed his face around here, I’d blow his pecker and both testicles off with the defective Smith and Wesson.”
Harry ran a finger over her closed lips, inserting it gently into her mouth, navigating the crevice. “After your husband bashed your exquisite teeth in,” Harry said, “I asked myself what the immortal saints would do - Gandhi, Krishnamurti, Hermann Hesse, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Tolstoy... the whole, cosmic crew. All the enlightened masters and morally superior beings. I pictured them munching pork lo mein and chugalugging Budweisers till their spiritually-unencumbered brains were fried; listening to whiny hillbilly music and your husband’s sarcastic tirades.”
Harry laid an envelope on the kitchen table. He opened it and a collection of bills - twenties and fifties spilled across the surface of the table. “Five hundred bucks to cover the deductible on your dental insurance.” He nudged the bills toward her. “To get your mouth fixed.”
Mavis collapsed tiredly into the chair and stared at the scattering of money. “This isn’t right.”
“Trust me,” Harry shot back. “Where’re the broken teeth?”
On the counter next to the sugar jar, was a piece of Kleenex, bunched together and tied with a string. She brought the impromptu pouch to the table and carefully unwrapped the tissue. Harry flipped the teeth over several times until they lay front-side up. Identical in every respect, the pale enamel on one was obliterated by a wine-colored stain. “Which is which?”
Mavis shrugged. He took the blotchy tooth to the sink, rinsed the blood away and placed it alongside its mate. “Twin souls!”
After awhile, he rewrapped the teeth in fresh tissue and secured it with the string. “Bring this to the dentist on the first visit.”
“Yes, I’ll certainly do that,” Mavis said. “Would you like some coffee?” Harry shook his head. She put the kettle on to boil. While the water was heating, Harry moved into the living room. On the c
offee table was a clothbound collection of spiritual verses. A page toward the rear was dog-eared and a short verse underlined:
Since we’ve seen each other, a game goes on.
Secretly I move, and you respond.
You’re winning, you think it’s funny...
In the kitchen the kettle sent up an insistent, wheezy drone. Mavis brought the warm drinks into the living room. As they talked, Harry hardly noticed the fading raccoon mask or the intermittent, sibilant hiss as her tongue stumbled and faltered through the breach.
