Collected Short Stories: Volume III

by Barry Rachin

  “How's business?”

  “Not good. Hardly any guests,” Mr. Chowdhary said. Terry slid out from behind the counter, leaving the magazine but taking the nuts.

  A brooding hard-edged melancholy swept over his face as he watched the traffic pass out in the street. “The last guest to check into the motel was a young woman attending a trade show for semiconductors. I asked how business was and she replied, 'We did thirteen million last year.'” Mr. Chowdhary stared blankly at the far wall. “I don’t even know what semiconductors are, but a woman half my age can sell thirteen million dollars worth.”

  “You’re considering a midlife career change?” I was trying to make light of the situation but he chose not to see the humor. Instead, Mr. Chowdhary smiled sheepishly, like a man who discovers that society and its unruly stepchild, technology, have surged off, helter skelter, in a new direction.“I met Gandhi,” he said abruptly, steering the conversation off in a new direction; his thoughts seemed fragmented, uncharacteristically disjointed. “Gandhi and his goat. My father and I marched with him from Ahmadabad to the Arabian Sea; that was in nineteen thirty during the struggle for independence. I was only a little boy then - no more than eight years old.”

  “I must tell you that, initially, the goat made more of an impression on me than the Mahatma. It was only after I came to America that I realized the man was far more important than the silly goat.” He pushed the ledger book to one side and toyed uncertainly with the fountain pen. “Sometimes it seems I’ve spent my life chasing after Gandhi's goat.” “My daughter,” Mr. Chowdhary changed the subject abruptly, “You can’t imagine the grief she causes me!”

  “I don't really feel comfortable -”

  “There was an untimely and rather grotesque death in the family,” Mr. Chowdhary blurted, ignoring my protest. “A relative on my wife’s side. He was not such a nice man. A boorish oaf, you might say. But still, when a man dies and under such bizarre circumstances, one tends to overlook his faults.”

  “It's not really necessary -"

  “So anyway,” Mr. Chowdhary rushed ahead with his story, “My wife stopped by the funeral parlor earlier to pay her respects, while I went in the afternoon with my daughter.” The phone rang, an inquiry about lodging. Mr. Chowdhary gave the caller the rates and hung up. “Where was I?”

  “Something about a funeral.”

  “Not a funeral, a wake,” Mr. Chowdhary corrected. “At the wake, a friend of the family says, 'Such a nice person. So sorry for your loss.' And what does my heartless daughter say?” Mr. Chowdhary's voice was rising both in pitch and emotional intensity. “Can you possibly imagine?”

  I stared at the man, who, slouching forward, placed a hand over his eyes. It was unclear whether he had either the desire or will to proceed with his story.

  Terry returned and was leaning against the door jamb fishing pistachio nuts from the brown, paper bag. “What I said,” She picked up the thread of her father's narrative while continuing to munch nuts, “was that the relative in question was a nasty drunk and a bully, who didn't deserve a fancy wake much less anybody's sympathy.”

  Dead silence. With my only avenue of escape - except for the windows - blocked, I could only look back and forth between Mr. Chowdhary and his daughter. “You heard with your own ears! I am disgraced by such a rude child!”

  Terry was cracking the last of the pistachios, fishing the whole nuts out from among the empty shells at the bottom of the bag. “Isn't it so, Father, Uncle Sukamar was a drunk and a violent bully?”

  “Yes, of course,” Mr. Chowdhary spoke immediately without giving the question any deep consideration. “His vices were common knowledge, some would say legendary. But is this any way to treat the dead?”

  Sukamar. Where had I heard that name before? Of course! The foul-mouthed fat man who badgered me mercilessly the afternoon of the christening. “If you don't mind my asking, how did your uncle die?”

  “Boiled alive,” Terry replied.

  Mr. Chowdhary frowned disapprovingly at his daughter. “A horrible accident! He'd had too much to drink and fell asleep in the Jacuzzi. Thirty-six hours. It was not a pretty sight when they found the poor man.”

  Asleep in the Jacuzzi. I tried to imagine Uncle Sukamar lying in a tub of swirling, super-heated water, a gin fizz clutched in either hand - his sightless eyes glazed over, the swollen tongue protruding obscenely between fleshy lips. Boiled alive. Yes, God was fair and equitable!

  The pistachio nuts gone, Terry crumpled the bag into a tight ball and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. “I won't apologize and I have only one regret,” she said, “which is that I accompanied you to the foolish wake in the first place.” With that, she wandered out into the warm night, leaving us to our own, private reflections.

  The next evening less than an hour into my shift, a man and a woman entered the lobby and requested a room for the night. The man smelled of liquor and was so fat that his belt buckle had turned completely upside down to accommodate the excess flesh. His necktie hung limply to one side. The woman, a tall brunette dressed like a high school cheerleader minus the pompoms, I recognized immediately. She had registered earlier in the week with a much younger fellow. “We’d like a room for the night,” the man said.

  I paused for a fraction of a second, just long enough to consider options. “We don’t rent to prostitutes. Go away.”

  Turning the color of a well-cooked, Maine lobster, the man with the pendulous gut began sweating profusely; he spun around unsteadily and staggered toward the screen door.

  “Shit!” The woman in the cheer leader’s outfit muttered, trailing after him. “Goddamn shit!”

 

  Around seven o’clock, the phone rang. “Have you eaten?” Mrs. Chowdhary was on the other end of the line. I told her I was ordering pizza. “No need. We just finished supper and so much curried chicken is left over.” There was a slight pause. “You do like curried chicken, don't you?” I said that I did. “I’ll fix you a plate.” She hung up the phone.

  A few minutes passed and Terry entered with a dish wrapped in aluminum foil. Her straight, black hair, which normally cascaded down her neck almost to the small of her back, was tied in a tight bun. She wore jeans and a University of California sweat shirt with cutoff sleeves. Peeling back the foil, an aromatic steam rose up from the dish. “There’s white wine and scallions in the sauce; curry powder and pineapple chunks, too.” I mixed some white Basmati rice with the sweetly pungent sauce.

  “Since the unfortunate incident at the wake, my father won’t talk to me,” she said petulantly. “And when I enter the room, my mother sighs and looks away. I've become a pariah in my own home.”

  I fished a plastic fork from the drawer. “Please, help yourself.”

  She stabbed at a sliver of chicken, twirling it methodically in the sauce, and we ate from the same dish. “A young priest at the wake said so many flattering things about the deceased, I wanted to vomit!”

  “It’s just a eulogy,” I said weakly. “I’m sure wonderful sentiments were expressed at Joseph Stalin’s funeral, too.” I tapped her lightly on the forearm. “Did your father ever mention a trip to Ahmadabad?”

  “Ahmadabad? That's in the state of Gujarat. No, he never spoke of such a trip.”

  “He went with your grandfather to see Gandhi.”

  “If my father had mentioned such a thing, I would have remembered.”

  “A prostitute came to the motel earlier this afternoon.” I told her what happened.

  Terry sat quietly studying the white prongs on her fork. Finally, she reached across the counter, cupped my face in her slender, brown hands, and kissed me with such tenderness my knees buckled and brain went numb. Finished with the kiss, she pressed her hand lightly against my chest, pushing me away at arm's length. “When I enter the room,” she spoke plainly, “your eyes glaze over like some moonstruck character in a Kahlil Gibran poem.”

  I could think of nothing to say. The kiss had over
whelmed me - disoriented my tongue, paralyzed my mental faculties. “You hold back,” she continued, “because you're a coward, in the romantic sense. A woman understands these thing; I don't hold it against you.” A dirty brown moth fluttered against the screen door. It thrashed about vainly in search of the domestic warmth and brightness within; after a half dozen passes, it plunged to the ground. “Yes, you are a coward,” she said flatly, “and it's my great misfortune to have fallen in love with a man who won’t say what's in his heart.”

  Terry wandered to the far end of the room and brushed a finger over the Hindu goddess' venomous crown. “I never kissed a man like that before,” she said wistfully. “Didn't even know I was capable of such a thing.”

  The conversation lapsed. The brown moth returned and ricocheted crazily off the screen a number of times making dry, scraping sounds and sending up a puff of powdery scales. “Do you own a bike?” I asked. Terry shook her head. “Why not?”

  Smelling of sandalwood laced with pineapple juice and curry powder, she came back to where I was standing. “What sort of question is that?”

  I grabbed her hand which lay on the counter, and she made an effort to pull away, a reflexive gesture, but I held firm. Terry stared dispassionately at her captive fingers, like so many small animals languishing in a snare. Dusk faded to darkness. I reached under the counter and flipped the switch turning the motel’s neon sign on. “This weekend, I’m going to buy you a bike,” I said. “Ten-speed, all terrain. We’ll ride out to the harbor and lunch at one of the dockside restaurants.”

  Terry’s eyes clouded over. “Even a cheap bike could run fifty dollars.”

  “Consider it an investment in the future.”

  “Whose future?”

  Thrust and parry. At the core of the sexual sparring, concealed behind the inane banter, lurked a cockeyed logic that caused the moist breath to catch in my throat. Whose future? That of a woman with insatiable appetites and emotional excesses; an erratic creature who blasphemed the dead yet regularly attended Mass and knew all of her devotional prayers by heart. A soul infinitely more dangerous, devious and desirable than the Hindu snake goddess! “Too soon to tell,” I replied, without further elaboration. “Are we on for the weekend?”

  Terry undid the bun and shook her fine, dark hair out, a shimmering shower of blackness, onto her bare arms. “Have to check my social calendar,” she replied, collecting the plate and fork. She kissed me lightly on the cheek, brushing the wetness away with her fingertips. “Though I ate the better portion, I’ll tell Mother you were crazy for her curried chicken.”

  Back to Table of Contents

  Six Catholics and an Atheist

  Kirsten Hazelton, the discharge planner at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, was sitting alone in a rear pew of the prayer chapel, when Dr. Wong entered and slid down on the polyurethane oak next to her. “Strange place for a patient conference,” the osteopath noted. Despite his round, boyish face the stocky, middle-aged man was old enough to be her father.

  “The chapel was closer to the wards than my office.” She didn’t bother to state the obvious; except for a few diehard Catholics, hospital staff seldom ever visited the somber prayer room. "Mrs. Edwards is leaving us tomorrow." The elderly woman with the lantern jaw and bedraggled mop of gray hair had tripped over a frayed rug two weeks earlier and fractured a hip. Surgery was uneventful, the patient already up and about with the aid of a walker.

  "She's being released to rehab for a few weeks before going home," the doctor confirmed.

  "Yes, that was the original plan." Kirsten was staring at a picture of the Holy Mother alongside a gold crucifix that adorned the altar. “Did you know she plays cello in the local civic symphony?”

  “You don’t say!” The surgeon was clearly impressed.

  “A notice appeared in the local newspaper that the orchestra needed players to round out the string sections. None of the younger musicians wanted to play the less-demanding second or third parts.”

  “Mrs. Edwards has no illusions,” Dr. Wong interjected, “of becoming the next Yo Yo Ma.”

  “She was just happy to participate at any level.”

  “What were they rehearsing?”

  “Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony and an entr’acte from a Verdi Opera.”

  “Impressive stuff!” “Barring complications, there’s no reason,” the doctor observed, “that she couldn’t return to the orchestra in time for the fall season.”

  “Yes, that’s her plan.” Kirsten conjured up an image of the petite woman with her spindly legs wrapped around a cello, energetically stroking the strings. "However, her son, Brandon, apparently wants his mother placed in a nursing home so he can put the house in the hands of a real estate broker."

  Dr. Wong listened impassively. “But you just said -"

  "The patient wants to return home,” Kirsten finished the doctor’s sentence. “Naturally. Mrs. Edwards is quite upset… distraught."

  The osteopath rubbed his chin. "Have you thought about asking Father McNulty to intercede… plead the elderly woman’s case with the family?"

  Kirsten's features cycled through a series of unflattering contortions. "Father McNulty would be my last choice."

  In his later sixties, Father Evan McNulty was a hellfire and brimstone ideologue with no social graces to speak of. The skinny cleric suffered from rosacea - the cheeks, nose, chin and eyelids mottled with spider-like blood vessels and chronic eruptions. The priest much preferred the challenge of defeating evil in the abstract to the mundane banalities of parish life.

  "Yes, I know what you mean." The doctor leaned back in the pew extending his legs beneath the velour kneeler. "Mrs. Edwards is only in her seventies. Once the bone mends, that woman's got another decade of active years ahead of her."

  "Which is just my point: she doesn't belong in some geriatric facility playing bingo and trying to make small talk with residents who can’t recall what day of the week it is."

  Dr. Wong smiled and patted her hand reassuringly. "I'll drop by Mrs. Edwards' room later today and make sure she doesn't get bullied into making a bad choice." The older man seemed momentarily lost in some private reverie. "You get solace from your faith?"

  "Yes, of course. Don't you?"

  "I'm an atheist."

  Kirsten burst into a fit of laughter, which quickly ebbed away to nothing when she realized that the physician was not responding in kind. "You're serious?" He shook his head. "But you work at a Catholic hospital."

  "What difference does that make? Doctor Shapiro is orthodox Jewish and the chief of oncology; Dr. Watanabe, is a practicing Buddhist. Being godless doesn't imply a lack of morals." He rose to his feet. "Maybe I better speak with Mrs. Edwards before the son badgers her into giving up her independence."

  The following day Kirsten ran into Dr. Wong eating lunch in the hospital cafeteria. No sooner had she sat down, the physician's cell phone twittered. He spoke briefly and hung up. "My daughters are coming home for the holidays, and my wife is already frantic about the preparations. What are you doing for Thanksgiving?"

  "Keeping my options open," Kirsten replied evasively. She had been dating an intern since the summer, but the relationship fell apart, when the doctor was offered a position at a hospital in Connecticut. Her parents were unaware of the breakup and the notion of going home alone was terribly unappealing.

  What Kirsten needed was a younger version of Dr. Wong - not that she was the least bit attracted to the roly-poly physician. But still, at least he golfed on weekends, accompanied his youngest daughter to figure skating lessons at the Lynch Arena in Pawtucket and baked homemade breads. Perhaps a brief ad in the personals section of the local paper might jump-start a new romance, get Kirsten's pitiful social life back on track:

  Thirty-something female looking to meet devout Catholic with no major vices, social diseases, sexual aberrations, fetishes or incurable neurosis. Must be family-oriented, compassionate, love children, not be married to the workplace and
appreciate the effusively intoxicating love sonnets of Pablo Neruda. Smokers need not apply.

  "I spoke with Brandon Edwards," Dr. Wong said, interrupting Kirsten's private reveries, "and informed him that ultimately his mother should choose what's in her best interest… even waved a Patient's-Bill-of-Rights form under his nose."

  A few years back, Kirsten used a similar ploy with another dysfunctional family. It was nothing more than a bluff, a hollow show of bravura. "And what was his response?"

  "He promised to honor his mother's wishes." Dr. Wong leaned across the table and tapped Kirsten's forearm. "Problem is, I don't trust that shlub. He gives me the creeps."

  The discharge planner briefly met the son, who only visited his mother twice while she was recuperating at the hospital. The day of his mother's surgery, Brandon never even made an appearance and only resurfaced a week later. "And do you believe that malarkey about honoring his mother's wishes?"

  "No, but there's only so much the hospital do." “Somewhere back in my college years,” the doctor shifted the conversations, “I stumbled across a clever creation myth. According to the Blackfoot Indians, it was the Spider God that fashioned the universe.”

  “But you don’t believe in divine spirits.”

  “Just because someone doesn’t believe, doesn’t make him ignorant of other people’s traditions or heritage.” “Everything worked out fine,” he resumed, “except for the humans.”

  “Running true to form,” Kirsten noted, “they always gum up the works.”

  “Of course, so the Spider God threw down a fire ball and burnt the earth and everything on it to a crisp… a regular Native American Armageddon. Then the Spider God started over… rebuilt the universe from scratch.” The doctor sipped at a cup of tepid coffee. “No luck! The human species mucked the planet up a second time worse than ever. But the Spider God was far too busy with other celestial tasks to worry about the human dilemma. By the third go round she pretty much gave up on two-legged creations and left the Homo sapiens to sort things out as best they could.” Dr. Wong grinned sheepishly and made a wry face. “Which is a convoluted way of saying that s few Brandon Edwards will always slip through the cracks.”