Steel Animals

by SK Dyment

“I have to pee,” says Wanda.

  “In the basement, just down those stairs,” says Ben.

  “Oh, thank the sun and stars!” cries Wanda, and she runs to the basement door, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

  “There’s a new one up here,” says Betty, “A new one I put in myself. What a lifelong learning disaster that was! It took me three weeks to get the tile glue off my furniture.”

  “Just let her go.”

  “Young lady…” Betty begins to rise, but Ben touches her arm.

  Wanda has found the light switch and has raced down the stairs.

  “When she has to go, she really has to go,” Ben tell her. “So,” he continues, “have you seen my uncle since he moved into retirement?”

  Downstairs, Wanda has removed the heavy old prosthetic and is peering into it with a flashlight. This is something she has never done before, but Ben has done it, and there, just as he promised, are three sets of digits, down inside the mechanism, sheltered from wear and tear. The safe is exactly where he had told her it would be, next to a bookcase full of legal manuals. Wanda pops the prosthetic back on, using her old, familiar, heavy hand to turn the dial on the box and open the lock. Inside, she find, the manila envelope Ben has mentioned and some books of poetry Rudy had written himself. She slips them inside her sweater and relocks the safe. There is another envelope of writing in a hand different than Rudy’s, and she leaves it where it was. She feels a frisson of fear raise the hairs on her nape.

  “Never could get that damn thing open. How do you do it?” says Betty, standing at the top of the stairs. She looks at Wanda credulously.

  “It’s just my magic hand, it knows, and opens thing compulsively…” says Wanda.

  “Knock it off,” says Betty. Wanda holds out the heavy prosthetic for the sake of veracity. Rudy’s mother walks across the room and feels it. She can also see it is a club. “Nice weapon,” says Betty, reaching under her sweaters. “I only have a little derringer 22 caliber, tucked here,” she withdraws it, “under my breast.” She points it at Wanda.

  “You know I ought to slap you for meddling with my things,” she hisses.

  “I can never slap anybody,” says Wanda, raising the heavy prosthetic limb.

  “I know it’s phoney. It isn’t a real hand at all.”

  “It’s in very good condition for its age,” says Wanda, attempting a conversational tone.

  “The pistol or the hand?” Betty says, glaring at the safe.

  “It’s a very heavy hand that has knocked the lights out of very many people,” says Ben from the bottom of the stairs.

  “But she broke into my safe. I haven’t been able to break into it ever. That’s insult to injury. Hell, that’s break and enter. And there’s something I want in there.”

  “Wanda, open the safe.”

  “Lock picks,” says Betty. “Rudy put them in there and I want them out. It’s the whole set for Fords from the seventies. He won’t even return my calls.”

  “You can buy those online if he doesn’t call back,” Ben tells her. His voice grows necessarily comforting, like a trained negotiator in the cockpit with a terrorist. “I’ll buy you a beautiful set if we can’t find them in there.”

  “But these ones belonged to my original husband. That, and there’s a little 1975 Mustang parked about a mile away, one that is daring me out of my mind.”

  “We were after the GM set, but they weren’t in there at all….”

  “Oh, you can have those. My new husband has them already. It’s the Mustang,” says Betty, “I can’t stop thinking about it. I want it. Or at least, to drive it. It just sits there, night after night, like a lost kitten with no mother.”

  “Did you see a Ford lock-pick set in there?” Ben asks.

  “Ben, she’s got a gun pointed at my head. All I can do for the moment is pray to heaven and repeat the damn combo.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Betty. She lowers the gun.

  “Well, let me show you what the hand can do,” says Wanda. Ben switches off the lights.

  “Switch those on at once!” scream the two women together. Betty has once again cocked the little pistol.

  The prosthetic hand turns the tumbler-lock three times, and the safe falls open. Ben turns on the lights.

  “Turn those off,” says Betty, and she leans over to Wanda, throwing the arm that was not holding the gun over her shoulders for a moment in an unexpected gesture of reassurance. They shine their flashlight into the opened safe.

  “Well, I’ll be,” says Betty, “letters from Gary. Leave the light on, Rudy, and quit foolin’ with it for the love of Pete,” Betty snaps.

  “My name’s not….”

  She reaches in and recovers documents that had been written before her husband’s death. “These are of great value to me,” She stands, smiling. “Your phoney hand did that?” she asks Wanda.

  “It can open almost any type of tumbler or wafer lock, simply by sensation,” she tells Betty.

  “But only in the dark,” says Ben.

  Together, they climb the stairs back up to the kitchen.

  “Well, I’m indebted to you, young lady,” Betty says. Then, she opens one of the letters, now crisp with age, and reads to them aloud.

  “‘My Dear Betty, I know I have been terrible company in the last few months, drinking, pacing, dulling my normally unrivalled sexual performance….’ Hum, hum…” says Betty. She skims for a few paragraphs, then picks up her king Can and takes a slug.

  “‘I have become involved in some extremely serious business affairs. In a very few days, I will be opening the trunk of one Ford Fairview car and depositing the body of a certain member of my circle of criminal acquaintances. Please forgive me, I will be in Reno for several days, then return to you with a great deal of cash. I remain your faithful husband, championship bowler, and loving father to my son. I certainly hope that my recent sexual performance...’” Betty hums aloud once again and sets the pistol by her hip.

  “‘I hope this to be my last illegal act, but I doubt it knowing me. We must get Babyface out of our business as soon as possible or our whole family could suffer the consequences of his stinkin’, finkin’ flap and rattin’ mouth. Our whole family, right down to our very dear Rodney, the apple of my eye.’ Oh, he called him Rodney. His name was Rudy.”

  “He must have been distracted in those final days,” says Wanda helpfully.

  “I’ll say,” says Ben. “He was drinking like a fish.”

  “‘I have gone for a long walk and to feed pepperoni to a guard dog at a nearby printer that can process some government mint quality paper that has fallen into my hands. The counterfeit plates are with Babyface, but Babyface is our snitch. I will only return to pick up my lock-pick set, and then I will be gone. I am leaving this note where you will find it, in a small envelope underneath the basement telephone that the boys always eavesdrop on. If I do not return, you will find the combination series to this safe jammed inside your red bowling shoes at the toe.’”

  “Oh, how long does this letter drag on!” says Ben, remembering stealing off with the vital letter at the direction of his boyhood friend.

  “Hushy-hushy!” says Wanda.

  “A note at the toe of my bowling shoe…. Jesus fuck! I wondered what that scrap of crap was!” Betty picks up the derringer, walks to the refrigerator and brings back two pina coladas on a tray for the couple, a king Can for herself.

  “‘If I do not return in seven days, I am dead, or I have hooked up with a woman in Reno who is a better bowler, in which case, c’est la vie. Goodbye, baby, I have left these poems for you to publish as a sentimental memory of our love.’ Poems! I don’t want to read any stupid poems! That’s what his son was always doing. Tennyson this, tennis elbow that. I don’t have time for such things. And look at how many there are.” She holds up the fat stack of papers, and then som
ething catches her eye, and she starts reading again. “‘All of them are about you, and I was just joking about a girl in Reno. I love you, baby. You are my heart’s desire. I sure hope my recent sexual performance … hum hum hum … and I hope to be in your arms soon!’”

  Betty slams down the king Can and bursts into tears. She tosses the loaded gun onto the floor as if she was tossing a chicken drumstick.

  “I have to thank you, thank you, you flower-power hippos, you hippie bike and rollers, you have safe-picked your way into my heart and healed my haunted past. There must be three hundred poems here, and all of them are all about me.”

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

  “Are you kidding? His penis was the most dismaying part of his personality, which was flaccid to begin with. My new husband is wonderful, doting, and he doesn’t like to bowl. But now I know that Rodney had his lock-pick set on the night of the murder. Which is what snuffed old Gary instead of Babyface and his flapping mouth.”

  “Rudy, he’s called Rudy, Betty. You called your son Rodney.”

  “We had better go,” says Ben. The envelope is starting to migrate out of Wanda’s sweater and into the front of her jeans.

  “Yes, you had better….” She picks up the little gun again and points it their way. “But why didn’t you tell me you were going to break into my safe?”

  “I thought you would be angry at me for wanting the GM seventies lock-pick set.”

  “Ben, you know me better than your own mother. Who is she? Who is she, Ben?” Betty asks, waving the pistol.

  “She’s a little Grand Prix that has just been sitting there for months, and I thought…”

  “For pity’s sake,” says Wanda. “When a woman with a pistol invites you to leave her home it’s considered good form to do it.”

  “She’s just jealous that your first love was not a woman,” Betty snorts.

  Ben looks at Betty with surprise. He has no idea she had guessed his boyhood feeling for Rudy had a romantic element.

  “Well then, good luck with the Mustang,” he tells her.

  “And good luck with your muscle car mistress.”

  Betty sees them to the door and embraces them through their jackets. Ben feels a small shoulder holster under her sweater.

  Wanda is beginning to make a crinkling sound as she walks. “It was nice to meet you,” says Wanda. “I’m glad you are happy with your new husband.”

  “Happy? He’s the hottest thing at the Theatre Circle, and he’s only heating up when we hit home! It is my belief, God rest Gary, that this is the love that God intended me. Otherwise he would not have walked into my life, at such a needy time.” She smiles to herself. “A lot of the ladies call him Babyface, because he’s so….”

  “Gotta go,” says Ben and Wanda, and they close the door swiftly behind them.

  23.

  SINCE THE FALL of the cat, Jackie has been unable to get the idea of a glider out of her head. Why can’t Ben and Wanda move to New York? It might be fun. Jackie thinks a fresh start for them all could be the answer. The new garage she has set up with Ben and the magic beginnings of a flying animal glider is louder for her than the chatter of Alaska and Vespa planning the class-action suit against Turner, or the sight of people walking in the streets below, carefully crossing the sidewalks when they approach their building. The newspapers in their hands carrying the story of the mysterious mood-swinging mogul B.F. Turner, and his ultimate suicide by rifle. A long discussion of manic-depressive illness is carried on into the “Living” section. The Turner company has avoided any sort of public discussion of who is taking Turner’s place in the conglomerate or how the company will be run following his demise. Shareholders have not been affected, and an official press release will announce the company’s restructuring in a few months. Turner’s widow is in mourning and tells the press she has moved to their winter place in the British Honduras, which no one has told her is now called Belize. That’s it for comments on B.F. Turner.

  Where Rudy is in all this is anyone’s guess. It is bothering Vespa a great deal and she loses her temper every time Jackie tells her to wonder about something else.

  They decide to have a private date with each other and so they wander into a film about a dog that runs away from its American owners in Greece. Vespa says the film is for children and does not want to see any more. Jackie has never been to Greece and stays after Vespa has run out, then remembers, it was a date. Finally she finds the theatre that her lover has run to. It is not filled with children. United, they kiss passionately through the second half of a Greenaway film in which a wife serves her dead boyfriend’s remains to her husband in a feast.

  They both feel a little sickened by the equation of their sexual desire with heterosexual cannibalism, but it is the only theatre that is not full of children cheering for a dog. Returning to Olesya’s apartment to make love in her bed, they find Alaska is back.

  “Well, that somewhat concludes our date,” says Vespa.

  “Don’t change plans because of me,” says Alaska, sprawled on Olesya’s bed.

  Vespa redirects Jackie by drawing. Vespa draws beautifully and has filled pages of Jackie’s workbook with pencil illustrations that would look stunning in a gallery.

  “These are beautiful,” Jackie tells her, snuggling close.

  “Thank you, Jackie.” Vespa looks up at her and the look conveys she is still in love with Jackie.

  But then Alaska comes out from the balcony, deliberately interrupting. “What are you two up to? Oh, sketches … let me see them….”

  “I’m not sure if Vespa is ready to share,” says Jackie, but her lover is already looking at Alaska with an overly-open, an approval-seeking gaze.

  “Well, they’re all right. I’d call them a bit overly formalistic. Definitely masculine.”

  Instead of telling Alaska to fuck off, Vespa turns to her and asks her what she would change in the design. Jackie grits her teeth. A rubber alligator dressed in Spanish moss falls unexpectedly from the north wall, and Jackie takes the crash as her cue.

  “I’ll be in the studio,” she tells Vespa, without saying how much she’ll miss her.

  “It’s a garage, not a studio,” says Alaska. Vespa and Alaska laugh and Jackie feels the old coil of hate surfacing towards Olesya’s friend before she remembers the talks about love she has had with Ben.

  “Come with me?” Not waiting for a response from Vespa, Jackie picks up her own sketchbook blueprints and heads down to the studio, where she has a cot. There she sets to work adding Vespa’s designs to Ben’s concept.

  It is an aluminum hang-glider in the shape of a cat, using two chainsaw motors and sporting a devised muffler system that not only redirects exhaust but surrounds each engine with insulation similar to the sound attenuation of a recording studio. She works until she hears a tap on the door and Vespa arrives with two coffees. Jackie is in the middle of her welding, experiencing a deep connection with her machines. Startled, she burns a hole in the light-gauge aluminum she has chosen for Vespa’s design.

  The aluminum has increased in tensile strength through heat treatment and is still incredibly light. It is true to Vespa’s sketches, and so she assumes Vespa can see Jackie is true to her love. This connection is not necessarily the case. Preheating with a brazing torch set to a low temperature flame, Jackie transfers to a heavily fluxed electrode set at a DC reverse polarity and only 100 amps. With a nod at Vespa to shield her eyes with the protective helmet Vespa is cradling on her hip, she strikes an arc and begins a near vertical pass in a straight line.

  She has shaped the joints by hand so that they fit together snugly. Despite a back-up plate, Jackie begins to burn another hole. Even though she is doing it for Vespa, it causes her to slip into one of the states Vespa finds almost impossible to communicate with.

  Jackie has also not greeted Vespa physically, but she cries, “Oh
, ah, baby, poor baby,” whenever she burns the aluminum model.

  “You are working on my model, but you don’t want me here,” says Vespa through the shielded helmet. “My spirit but not my person. My muse, but not my…”

  “Mouth,” Jackie interrupts.

  It is not true. She has been hoping Vespa would come and visit her with all her heart. The arc, which is extremely difficult to keep alive at such low amperage, gutters out and dies.

  “I think it all looks very moody,” Vespa finally says. Jackie snaps off the power to the arc welder and lifts her visor so that their eyes can meet. She smiles at Vespa. “I think it looks very faithful to my love of your original sketch.”

  “But you don’t want me around?”

  “Who says I don’t want you around? Only you think that.” The holder-cable winds around Jackie’s foot and she almost trips as she steps toward Vespa. They both look at the machine.

  “But maybe it doesn’t want you around,” Jackie says.

  “If it doesn’t, then I’ll leave you two lovers alone.”

  “It’s not my lover, it’s an arc-welding machine.” Jackie’s eyes travel over it and she brushes some dust from one of its dials, but Vespa recognizes the stroke and is jealous. “Baby, I was hoping you would follow me here. Where have you been?”

  “Alaska and I went to every door in Olesya’s building, and we also created lists of all the other Turner properties we can find. Olesya’s lawyer says that she is interested in helping us with our case. It isn’t her speciality, but it looks like it could be a high-profile thingy.”

  “How’s Olesya?”

  “She ate an asparagus and apricot energy bar yesterday and a cabbage and cranberry energy bar in the afternoon. Today she drank a mocha-almond rhubarb and bee pollen milkshake and consumed at least half of an algae and wheat germ smoothie.”

  “Does this mean she’s eating?”

  “Her lawyer says there may be an amnesia loophole that could get her off the charge.”

  Jackie loses her self-control. “There is no amnesia loophole. If that little bitch finds some freaky New York State amnesia loophole and walks away from this one….”