Shaking out the Dead

by K M Cholewa

  “Well, yes and no,” she said, trying to be fair. “Reverse the sexes. Old geezer climbs on his veggie wife and humps ’til the cows come home. Cause for concern?”

  “But the sexes weren’t reversed.”

  “True,” Geneva said. “Equal and fair are not one in the same. But that’s a concept far too sophisticated for the world’s glut of literalists.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Geneva shrugged a whatcha-gonna-do shrug. The hash had tweaked her perspective, and she wasn’t interested, at the moment, in indulging any feelings of victimhood. Some took drugs to escape reality. Others took them to escape lies, melt the neurological barriers that allow for self-deception. The result was clarity, which is why drugs are dangerous. Delusions or the loss of them — either can flip a person out. And, just minutes before, some rather unflattering clarity had descended upon Geneva.

  Being banned from Ralph was no burden. She couldn’t deny it. In fact, she felt off the hook. She did not miss Ralph, nor did she believe that Ralph missed her. She was unable to conceal from herself that her impulse toward him was not one of desire but responsibility alone. Was it inevitable? Just as tadpoles become frogs and acorns oaks, must love make its journey from desire to duty?

  That’s where she had been when the shish kabob appeared to her.

  A soft wind kicked up, creating a hush out of nothing.

  “Paris is in love with you,” Geneva said, switching gears, redirecting the focus to someone else’s complications.

  

  Geneva’s words sent an electrical current running through Tatum’s torso, into her legs, and down to her feet. It was a feeling similar to being caught in a lie. She pulled the throw up over her head like a hood. It flashed through her mind that maybe Paris was wrong. Secrets weren’t so secret. Was it the cosmic membranes that were thinner than imagined, or just the duplex walls?

  “Why are you saying that?”

  “Because you already know it,” Geneva said. “I don’t think I’m giving anything away.”

  “But why now? Why are you telling me that now?”

  Geneva cocked her head. “Something happened?” she said.

  Tatum sat down on her steps and told Geneva about the encounters between her and Paris, both at the start and end of the day. She told her about the misunderstandings that had newly cropped up in their interactions, the new and unwelcome awkwardness.

  “I miss him so much,” Tatum said. “Sometimes even when I’m with him. It’s just so weird that you would say that tonight, right in the wake of all this.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Wet light sparkled in the yard as the snow re-stiffened. Above them, the sky was blue-black. Stars pierced the night, not objects, but action. Light hauling ass. Geneva picked up the shish kabob.

  “We were guided here tonight, brought together by the shish kabob,” she said in the voice of a campy prophet. “It wanted us to review the lesson of the Tree of Life.”

  “And what’s that?” Tatum said, half-laughing.

  Geneva replaced the shriveled oracle on the shelf beside the grill and closed its lid.

  “Energy flows and takes form,” Geneva said. “Energy flows into form and fills it. Eventually, the form gets filled to capacity. When it can no longer hold the energy, it has to break, free the energy, until it takes form again. This is the lesson.”

  Tatum curled her toes against the cold.

  “Are you channeling a shish kabob?” she asked.

  “If the form fights for its life,” Geneva said, “tries to hold itself together under the pressure, it breaks violently. Or it begins to atrophy. It leaks to death.”

  “In English.”

  Geneva looked at Tatum. Tatum looked back.

  “Change or die,” Geneva said. “Your relationship with Paris has to change or it’s going to combust or dribble away.”

  Tatum looked away, then up at the sky.

  “That stinks,” she said. “Nothing’s forever, huh?”

  “Not even nothing.”

  “If you’re right,” Tatum said, “about Paris’s feelings, I feel bad for him. He’s in for a big disappointment. I’m impossible to love.”

  Geneva rolled her eyes.

  “‘I’m impossible to love.’” She echoed Tatum’s words, somewhat derisively.

  “You know, Geneva” — Tatum’s voice was tight with irritation — “I get a little tired of this bullshit that says we all have value and worth. You know who says that? People with value and worth. You know why they say it? So they don’t have to look at the reality of the lives of the people who don’t have it.”

  “An oppressed people,” Geneva said.

  “Fuck you,” Tatum said, but without energy. She stood and turned to go inside.

  “Wait,” Geneva said.

  Tatum turned, wearily.

  “You don’t have value to have, you have it to give. You value. The only way you cannot have value is if you don’t value anything.”

  Tatum dropped into a hip and crossed her arms over her chest, tightening the blanket. “If a person is too hard to love,” she said, “no little saying or little philosophies can change that.”

  “Then what’s the flaw in Paris that he loves the likes of you?”

  “This isn’t about Paris.”

  Geneva turned away, waving a hand in the air.

  “I’ve got some bad news,” she said, moving back to the grill. “If you feel unworthy of love, you’re probably not feeling worthy to love, either. I hate to break it to you, sister, but you’re probably withholding love from people who are aching for it.”

  “I love people.”

  “Sure,” Geneva said, “but is your love making the great journey? For love to get out, you risk some coming in.” She picked up the shriveled shish kabob. “Ever read Faulkner?”

  “Probably,” Tatum said, “in school. I think I read the one with a retarded guy in it.”

  “The Sound and the Fury,” Geneva said. “I was thinking of As I Lay Dying. The mother character in the story says that children violated her aloneness. They tore open what was meant to be shut and protected. Something like that.”

  Tatum hugged herself. She looked into the yard. “You think that’s what’s happening to me?”

  “Trust the shish kabob,” Geneva said. Then she waved good night and headed for her steps, shish kabob in hand.

  “Geneva.”

  She stopped.

  “Geneva,” Tatum said. “Paris kissed me once.”

  “Did you kiss him back?”

  Tatum thought for a minute. She had honestly never considered it.

  “I think I did.”

  Geneva stayed quiet.

  “If it doesn’t work out,” Tatum said, “I could lose him forever.”

  “We lose everybody anyway,” Geneva said. “To death. To busyness. To the failure to make the effort. That’s why you just have to love them, love them, love them. No matter what.”

  “Unconditional love, huh?”

  “I don’t think of it that way,” Geneva said. “I just think of it as love. Why qualify love?” Geneva finished climbing her stairs. “Good night,” she said, “and good luck.” She slipped through her door. Her porch light went dark.

  Tatum looked at the sky, black and silver. The stars above were not immortal. The space in which they hung was not eternal. Big bangs come, and worlds collapse. Nothing is forever. Not even nothing.

  Inside, Tatum peeked at Rachael asleep in her bed. The tough hand life had dealt her did not yet show up in her face. She looked innocent. Unruined. Tatum considered Geneva’s proposition that feeling unworthy of love entailed withholding it, that there was no such thing as one-way traffic when it came to the heart. If that were so, Tatum figured her love had probably been as useful to Rachael as her dead mother’s. Something guaranteed, but existing on the other side of an invisible barrier. Love that’s there, but not here. Tatum’s body acc
epted the truth of it. The biochemistry of regret kicked in and took shape. She felt guilt.

  Revelation is not necessarily ecstatic. Rarely is it the turning point that its reputation suggests. Revelation is merely an option. A flashing arrow, perhaps, but not a destination. Tatum pressed her hand to Rachael’s forehead, checking for fever. She was warm but in a good way.

  Tatum left the bedroom door cracked, put on her p.j.’s, and paced the living room. She stared at her coffee table, empty seeming, without Paris’s hat.

  Paris.

  The moment you realize you’ve waited too long, you worry it might be too late.

  She would call him. First thing in the morning. They would see each other, and she would tell him everything, though, she had no idea what “everything” was. She would tell him she missed him. She could start there.

  In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth, trying to imagine what words she would say. She looked at herself in the mirror, ready to rehearse. But nothing came to her but memories, the past throwing up a sand storm. The kiss in the park. Margaret’s funeral. Motel rooms. Tatum forced her focus through the haze of it and made eye contact with her own reflection. She had managed to land squarely in the moment, apart from the memories and tomorrow. Green eyes met green eyes. Then, in one fell swoop, like ripping off a Band-Aid, she pulled her top off over her head. She looked at the gash, the angry searing where a breast used to be. Not once had she mourned it. The scar had given shape and form to a thing already there, something embedded that had finally and simply risen to the surface. Never had its violence shocked her.

  But she thought of Paris now. She stood behind his eyes to see. For the first time, she looked at it.

  22

  

  A fluorescent light above the counter buzzed. Paris looked up and watched it sputter. None of the customers took particular notice. Not the two Goth girls, looking young and vulnerable, despite their black makeup and practiced vacant stares. The couple in the corner failed to notice too. They focused on their newspaper and tried to resign themselves to each other’s failings. The meth-head at the counter picked at his doughnut, never looking up.

  It was business as usual, as Paris liked. Routine is dismissed by most as the daily grind. But Paris found it good and holy. Spring, summer, fall, winter. Over and over. The planet never wearied of it and wished for more.

  Besides, Paris had had plenty of business-not-as-usual for one day. Too much unspoken and misspoken. He hated the sense of a boundary, invisible but solid, between him and Tatum, like Plexiglas in the ether. They had tried to act as though it wasn’t there. Maybe the acting was the problem, Paris thought, but what else is there to do? Bang on his side watching her bang on hers? Is it that one couldn’t get out or couldn’t get in?

  The meth-head abandoned his doughnut. It looked as though it had been pecked by birds. Paris opened the vat and stirred the soup, thinking about the women who would straggle in later. The soup was for them. He would be here with them. Then he came around the counter to sweep beneath the stools and noticed Blair, the bartender, in the casino talking to one of the Deluxe’s owners. The owners were two brothers who had inherited the place from their father, a former Butte miner with a prosthetic hand. The father’s grit, however, had skipped a generation. His boys were effeminate without being gay. Their faces were pointed, and they looked both craven and mean at the same time. Their edicts flowed through Blair to Paris, even though Blair wasn’t Paris’s supervisor. Blair and Paris were more like separate rulers of neighboring kingdoms. It was a chain of communication, not of command. Blair shot Paris a look over the brother’s shoulder. Paris didn’t like it. It nipped at the heels of a fragile well-being he was struggling to cultivate in cleanliness and routine.

  Paris cleared the meth-head’s plate and rang up the seventy-five cents due and dropped the three cent tip into his apron pocket. He continued to work efficiently, as he always did, boss or no boss looking on. The Deluxe’s owners were not bright but knew enough to largely leave Paris be, recognizing, if not appreciating, a bargain employee when they saw one. The brother waved to Paris from the casino before leaving. Paris nodded in response, all business.

  Blair and Paris met at their kingdoms’ boundaries, where bright light met neon haze. Both wore white T-shirts and jeans. Paris’s cook’s apron was wrapped around and tied in front. Blair had a rag thrown over a shoulder.

  “Gary says they’re selling the building,” Blair said. “Thinks they can sell it for office space.”

  Paris frowned.

  “He didn’t leave a copy of the want ads,” Blair said, “but it’s coming.”

  “Shit,” Paris said.

  “No shit,” Blair responded.

  An old cowboy stepped past them into the diner. Blair and Paris turned away from each other as duty called.

  The cowboy ordered off the breakfast menu. Paris started a fresh pot of coffee and flipped hash browns. Axioms jangled in his head: Was the news about the diner the proverbial second shoe? First, disconnect with Tatum. Now this. Had, indeed, the other shoe dropped? Or was the governing theory the theory of threes, that bad tidings were packaged like blind mice and little pigs. If this were the case, there was more to come. It was just a matter of time.

  The cowboy ate his eggs and potatoes. He came and went quietly, leaving a modest tip. The couple left too, the man placing his hand on the small of the woman’s back as they slipped through the casino. The Goth girls enlisted Paris’s help to figure out their check. They paid, and Paris was alone.

  He cleared the dirty dishes and wiped down the tables.

  Paris worked. He tried to insist that all was well. But his feet told the truth, hot and nervous, and deadly, no doubt, when he would peel off his socks in the dawn.

  

  Linda arrived at 2:20 a.m. with the retarded girls in tow. Paris took the girls bowls of soup and fistfuls of crackers. He poured Linda coffee.

  “Soup’s good tonight,” he said to her, pleased there was so much of it.

  But Linda made a face and shook her head no.

  Paris went into the kitchen to run a load of dishes. He kept an ear open to the dining room should more of the women arrive. Through the cook’s window, he saw a dishwater blonde in a man’s coat he hadn’t seen in weeks slide into the booth in the corner. Her B.O. was acidic, but it clung to her, leaving most of the diner unscathed. Paris was sympathetic, and he took her soup without asking and poured her coffee too.

  If the worst were to come to pass and the Deluxe closed its doors, he thought as he returned the coffeepot to the burner, he would never say anything about it to the women. Let the doors one day be locked, he decided. Let it be heard of by word of mouth. Let it disappear as it once appeared out of nothing into nothing.

  He collected the napkin holders and was restocking them behind the counter when he felt the foreign presence enter the room. Actually, what he felt, at first, was the antennae of Linda and the retarded girls going up, reaching and assessing threat vs. opportunity. Paris looked up. Two Indian dudes slid onto stools at the counter. It was perfectly normal. It was completely wrong. An invasion on sacred ground. The retarded girls watched them warily. Paris dropped menus in front of them and set them up with utensils.

  At 8 p.m., Paris would’ve liked them. One wore a western shirt with a zigzag pattern in purples and reds and a bolo tie with a bear. He had long hair and a cowboy hat. The other one had a clean-shaven look. Smooth skin. Short hair. A plain, white dress shirt with blue jeans. Their vibes were good ones.

  The men both ordered burgers.

  Paris dropped the patties on the grill and smooshed them down with the spatula. He listened to their conversation through the hiss of the meat.

  “His old lady wrapped him in silk,” Bolo Tie said. “Then, she wrapped him in a tarp and duct taped it.”

  “That’ll do,” said White Shirt.

  “She says the silk will protect his ‘vibration’ �
� it’s a New Age thing. Little Mickey and Amos packed him in the truck. Too bad it’s been warm, eh?”

  White Shirt nodded. “I can’t drive my truck anywhere anymore,” he said. “Not off the rez.”

  Paris served their burgers slightly rare.

  The men ate in silence for a time, following up bites of burgers with fistfuls of chips. Paris didn’t make eye contact with Linda or any of the other women, feeling somehow responsible for the intrusion.

  “I didn’t know Buster at all until the cancer,” Bolo Tie said through his chewing. “I guess like overnight he got hooked in with the traditional stuff. Started carrying rocks, smudging. He got real particular about funeral arrangements.”

  “Sounds like he came to his senses.”

  Bolo Tie pushed his dish away, tossing his napkin onto it. Paris approached to clear it.

  “Hey, Vincent, by the way,” Bolo Tie said, “Frankie wants to talk to you before we move Buster.”

  Paris’s eyes darted toward the man in the white shirt.

  “Yeah, that’s cool,” Vincent said, “as long as I’m on the road by the day after tomorrow.”

  “I told them.”

  It wasn’t hard to piece together. This was Vincent. The Vincent. Paris wasn’t sure if he wanted to hurry them along or keep them there to study him more closely.

  “I got some people to see tomorrow,” Vincent said. “Some stuff to do.”

  Paris wrote up their check, tore it off his pad, and placed it in front of them.

  “Thanks, man,” Vincent said, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. “I got it,” he said to his friend.

  Paris looked in Linda’s direction, and her eye caught his. He could see what she saw. Him, unnerved. Paris hovered at the counter, performing fake chores. He wiped clean surfaces and checked freshly refilled condiments. Linda stole glances. The two men leaned on their elbows and worked their teeth with toothpicks. Paris cleared Vincent’s plate. Vincent gave the pile of check and cash a shove in Paris’s direction.

  “Keep it, man,” he said.