Shaking out the Dead

by K M Cholewa

  Geneva leaned on her kitchen counter hovering over her legal pad. She read the two statements again. Then she looked to Ralph sitting to her right in his black lacquer box.

  “I like Look Forward,” she told the dead man and then laughed at the irony.

  The album ended. The needle lifted. The new silence of the duplex asserted itself at once. Rachael was long gone. Geneva had said good-bye to her in her living room with Lee and Tatum looking on.

  “When you think of me,” she had told Rachael, “think I wonder when we’ll see each other, and I’ll think the same.”

  And think of Rachael, Geneva did. Unlike with thoughts of Tatum, there was no accompanying tug or pull. Thoughts of Rachael would just appear like magic. A memory. A moment. Like she wasn’t even really gone. It wasn’t a haunting because it was pleasant. As promised, when it happened, Geneva would say the words. I wonder when we’ll see each other.

  She refused the word again.

  There would be no more agains. History doesn’t repeat itself, she thought. We repeat history. We re-create it at a loss for new ideas and take the raw material of the infinite and impose the same tired frames upon it.

  Tilt the frame, Geneva thought, climbing up on her inner soapbox. Better yet, break it. Go a step further and change the person looking through it. And change, she was coming to suspect, always had to do with letting go.

  She looked at the black lacquer box.

  Helene hadn’t believed that there was such a thing as a right moment. When it came to letting go, it was the doing it, she had said, that made the moment right. Maybe so. But even if there was no right moment, Geneva knew there was a right feeling. She was willing to wait for it.

  And speaking of waiting. . . Her eyes slipped toward the clock. Ten minutes to go.

  She had a rule: no thinking about John until she was on her way out the door to see him. She permitted herself to think about him for up to two hours after parting company too. She had two reasons for her mindfulness. First, she didn’t want to transfer her preoccupation with Ralph to John, though it was tempting to live and relive a touch, a look, a word. Second, she also didn’t want to turn John into an idea with which she had a complex relationship that he, the man, only dropped in on from time to time. She was having sex with John twice a week or so, but Geneva never slept over. Not yet.

  Six more minutes.

  Geneva abandoned her legal pad and went to spruce up.

  In the bathroom, she washed her hands. She applied expensive moisturizer to her face, neck, and up her arms. In the bedroom, she dressed, choosing a black, gauze peasant blouse. Don’t think of John, she thought. Don’t Look Back. The don’ts don’t work. They kept one in a holding pattern, caught in the gravitational field of the unwanted.

  She looked at the clock.

  Time.

  Geneva grabbed her keys. She grabbed Ralph, too, as she liked to keep him on hand available to the convergence of the right time and right place.

  It was early evening when she turned down the gravel road. The smoke from the fires was socked in like rain clouds, shrouding the mountaintops and sealing off the sky. But Geneva felt anything but claustrophobic. She was heading for the shack, and the anticipation was sweet.

  Geneva reached John’s driveway and pulled in beside his truck. She had been leaving Ralph in the car at John’s, but today, she picked him up and carried him to John’s door. Do different and different happens, right? John’s door opened as she approached.

  “Trying to keep the smoke out,” he said, pulling the door closed behind her. Inside it was shadowy, the curtains and windows both closed. Fans were blowing from two sides of the room, circulating the stuffiness.

  First, Geneva kissed him. Then she placed the box on his table. She stepped back, and they looked at it together.

  “Let go, let go,” she said. “Common advice, but no one ever lays out the mechanics of it.”

  “Open your hand?” John offered.

  “You’d think,” Geneva said, sitting down at his table. “But it’s obviously more complicated. Do you think you have to know what you’re hanging on to in order to let it go?”

  John lowered his body into one of the plastic chairs. He put his hand before him in a fist, palm facing down. He opened it.

  “Let go,” he said. “Seems to me that whatever’s in your hand is going to fall.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head, unconvinced. “Just thinking ‘let go’ puts your attention on the fact you’re hanging on. That alone might be the obstacle. Like just thinking about it, even letting it go, creates the gravitational pull that keeps it there.”

  John crossed his legs. The fans buzzed, chopping away at the air. She tapped her fingers on the table and then looked at John. A slow smile spread across his face. He had all the time she needed.

  “Speaking of gravitational pulls,” Geneva said.

  She leaned in. He leaned in too. She placed a hand on the back of his head as they kissed.

  “One sec,” Geneva said, gently pushing him away. She picked up Ralph and carried him to just outside the door. She placed him on the ground beside the shack.

  “One sec,” she said again, this time to the box, and she slipped back inside.

  40

  

  Tatum and Vincent shared a platonic hug and parted paths outside the restaurant. From her car, Tatum watched him cross the street, heading back to his motel. She considered killing the engine and following him to his door. It beat going home to the unblinking light of her answering machine. Lee had told her he’d call by last week. Tatum had asked him if Rachael could visit before school started. There was another call Tatum hoped for too. A silent message and the soft click.

  Stick to stalking Vincent, she told herself, as he slipped into his room. Sleeping with Vincent was the option she held in reserve. Her cyanide capsule.

  She pulled out of the lot and drove home. Back at the duplex, she turned her key, and the click of the lock echoed. The whole place seemed hollow. It had been like this since Ralph’s funeral. For a guy who never lived there, he sure seemed to clear the place out when he died. She dropped Vincent’s next three chapters on the coffee table beside the small pile she’d assembled of odds and ends left behind by Rachael. Try as she might, she could dream up nothing from which to rescue Rachael, not one good reason to kidnap her and head for Mexico. Rachael was taking swimming lessons. Lee had gotten her a tutor so she wouldn’t be behind in school come fall. Hard to justify taking a kid out on the lam for that.

  Her eyes shot to the answering machine. No blink.

  Good thing it didn’t matter.

  Okay, Tatum thought. Time to take some action. Pack Rachael’s things. Ship them. Signal to her own subconscious that it was time to let go. She reached down and gathered up the pile left behind in the abrupt departure: Clothes from the hamper, now laundered and folded. Barrettes and books. The photo albums at which Tatum had never peeked. The glitch that had kept Tatum from shipping had been that such a thing required a box, and since getting rejected at the diner, the basement had been off-limits. The last thing she needed was to return to the scene of the crime and moon over the deserted mattress.

  But it doesn’t matter, she reminded herself. Not anymore. Tra-la-la-la-la-blah.

  She carried Rachael’s stuff to the kitchen counter and miscalculated putting it down.

  “Crap,” she said as the pile hit the floor. One of the albums fell open, face down, crumpling the pages on impact.

  Paper dolls cut out from photographs littered the floor beneath it. They hadn’t been pasted down. Tatum crouched down and shook the book to loosen whatever more of them there might be and then gathered them up onto the counter. There were two of Paris. Five Margarets. Four Genevas. Three Lees. Five Rachaels. Five Tatums. She pulled one of each from the pile and lined them up. Not one was still in her life.

  Only Vincent was left.

  Only
Vincent was missing from the line of paper dolls. He was in Tatum’s nightstand drawer.

  She opened the photo album that the pictures had fallen from. How to put them back? She stared at the blank page. Could she fix it?

  “Huh,” Tatum said as a memory snuck up on her, one of staring at the blank space in another book asking the same question: Can I fix it? Can I fix the Book of Rachaels?

  An idea was forming in her as to how to fix both.

  At the top of the basement stairs, she threw the switch and began her descent. The empty boxes were in the far right-hand corner. She could pass the mattress without looking at it. Don’t look at ghosts, and they won’t see you. Isn’t that how it works?

  Just a corner of the mattress reached her peripheral vision as she passed. She located a sturdy, right-sized box for what she wanted. Then, she turned. She looked. Just real fast. As far as mattresses went, it was a sorry one.

  “Go away,” she said to the encroaching memories.

  Vincent. Vincent. Sleep with Vincent, she thought heading for her stored belongings. Let go. Move on. She retrieved the Book she meant to defile. She meant to defile a lot of things. Then maybe she’d pack her own bags and put some miles between herself and the past.

  She climbed the stairs back up to her apartment two at a time. This was her plan: Sleep with Vincent to get past Paris. Send Rachael her things and get past expecting her back. Then, turn her attention to moving. How far? She wasn’t sure. But away. Away from Geneva. Outta here. Gone.

  Tatum dropped the box and the green leather book beside the paper dolls. She retrieved Vincent from her nightstand and placed him in line with the others. Her plan was to paste the paper dolls where her entry in the Book of Rachael belonged. She’d paste in Margaret, herself, and Rachael. Lee, Paris, Vincent, and Geneva. She would write nothing. This would be her contribution to the legacy. The unfolding history of Rachaels would strike her like she was crystal, and she would scatter the ray.

  She flipped through the pages determined and ready to execute her plan. But what she saw where she expected the blank space beneath her name stopped her.

  Black ink. Her scar sucked into itself like fingernails pressing into one’s palm. Her breast was silent, the scar of what was louder than the soft curve of present flesh. Tatum looked at the face and then looked away. It was complete. It was unnerving.

  She reached to the page with a flat hand and crumpled it in her palm, tearing it from the spine as she did so. She dropped it on the counter. Paris had not turned away. He drew her eyes, and it was her. It was the lie of her. Or the truth of her. She didn’t know which.

  Paris drew her beautiful, and good.

  Paris was gone, and he took that woman with him.

  All the friggin’ paper dolls were gone.

  Except Vincent.

  A body slamming into hers making her forget — that was what she needed.

  Tatum grabbed her keys.

  41

  

  Paris emerged from the basement and into the kitchen of the diner. By tomorrow night, all the pots and pans would be sold, the kitchen equipment and the booths too. The place would be ransacked by secondhand buyers. He crossed the kitchen and pushed through the swinging door that led to the dining room. Jerry was behind the counter, folding a small wad of bills and easing them into his front pocket.

  “Cash bonus,” he said to Paris. “Guess this one’s off the books.” He jerked his head toward the casino. “Blair’s got it when you want it.”

  Paris looked toward the casino. Pocketing the bonus would put a thousand bucks in his pants. He was already carrying, as he did every night, the five hundred he promised himself he’d give to Linda.

  “What’s next?” Jerry said, tucking a cigarette between his lips.

  “Don’t know,” Paris said. “You?”

  “Got a job at the Circle K.”

  Convenience store clerk. Paris could see it.

  “Smoke bad out there?” Jerry said. He took the cigarette from his lips and tucked it behind his ear.

  “I came up from the basement.”

  “Right.”

  It was a lot of conversation. It was a way of saying good-bye.

  Jerry took a last look around and then raised a hand. He turned and took the walk out of the diner into the casino and through the orange-green flash of keno machines into sunlit haze.

  Inside, Paris reassembled the newspaper on the counter. He helped himself to a bowl of clam chowder and ate it, scanning the empty dining room while he strategized over the evening’s tasks.

  The night would be slow. The clientele had dropped off as items disappeared from the menu, eighty-sixed with a black Magic Marker. There’d been minimum restocking. Paris finished his soup, drinking straight from the bowl. Back in the kitchen, he pulled his apron off of a nail. He did a final inventory of the cooler. Hamburger. Eggs. A bin of dry onions and a bin of soggy tomatoes. He knew there were french fries in the freezer. The bread was day old.

  It was the end of a line.

  “Good,” Paris said, pulling the bin of tomatoes from the shelf. He soon would be back to having nothing to lose. There was penance to be paid for wanting more, and there was no more. Tatum had been right all along. Wanting more is really wanting something else.

  Paris dumped the bin and watched the tomatoes slip into the garbage can. He would forget. He would forget all of it. The good as well as the bad. He knew how. There was work to do, and it was enough. There was hamburger, eggs, and day-old bread. It was enough too. He would make meatloaf.

  Six p.m. turned to ten p.m. without a single customer. No one would know it, though, watching Paris’s industry. Meatloaf and french fries, plates of it moved out from the kitchen and into the casino for Blair and every drunk and gambler who hovered or lurked. Paris kept an eye to the supply, though. He wanted to make sure the women got theirs.

  When there was no one to feed, Paris worked on the cooler. He wiped down the metal shelves and then headed for the janitor’s closet for the mop. He opened the door to the scene of his crime. It had been that next morning that he had gone to Tatum’s, and she had shown him the scar. Look where it all had led. It made him glad that Linda hadn’t returned. It was another sign that it was over.

  Paris reached for the mop’s handle and became unsteady. He thought he was panicking. The mop handle seemed to vibrate. Paris, himself, was trembling. A flash of wet heat came up behind his face. He reached for the wall.

  Paris blamed himself for the loss of balance because he trusted that the ground beneath him was solid. That, at the least, was a thing he could count on.

  But there is no “at the least.” At the least, there is always nothing.

  Paris was not shaking. It was the very earth.

  Then, it stopped. Paris heard laughter and exclamations from the casino up front. Then, applause. The electricity in the air seemed elevated, the outpouring of adrenaline mingling with the tension shrugged off by the planet. The foundation upon which Paris stood was no longer the same. New cracks formed. Old channels sealed.

  Before and after. Equilibrium returns, but we are not the same.

  42

  

  The fans oscillated, sending welcome breezes across John and Geneva’s bodies as they rolled in the bed, one on top and then the other. It was not athletic but steady and peaceful, information exchanged with smiles, sighs, and backward rolling eyes. Afterward, they ate bread, cheese, and sliced pears. They opened the door to the west. Burning forests made for spectacular sunsets. Three different purples, orange, and blood red lay like ribbons across the sky. Geneva drove home glowing. She had come to love this stretch of highway regardless of the direction in which she drove. Her Doors cassette was cranked up. Love was calling her.

  Love, she thought. It seeks a host. It wants us as much as we want it. At worst, we are parasites to each other, we and love, each destroying the other. At best, she thought, we see
k each other out for mutual benefit. We co-evolve. Our relationships to one another are one thing, she thought. Our relationship to love quite another.

  She arrived home and came in through the yard. Inside, she snapped her fingers as she settled in as though keeping beat with something slick and lounge-y. She wandered to her wall of albums, hips swaying before the selection. What was it her hips were hearing? Ray Charles? Tina Turner? She pulled a silver sleeve from the shelf. Drummers. Lots of them. Assembled by Mickey Hart.

  “This will do,” she said, going a different way. She slipped Diga onto the turntable. It had a percussion-driven instrumental of “Fire on the Mountain.” Very apropos. But apropos, shmapropos. She went with the B-side instead. It was the better jam.

  Geneva’s hips rocked. Her eyes closed, and a smile played on her lips. The music was native all the way. Primitive. Speaking to the body, not the mind. She held up her hands, palms turned outward, and she led a parade of one through her living room. Her head bobbed. Her shoulders grabbed a shimmy then slid down her back. She turned her arms into snakes. Her body felt delicious, alive in the groove, grinding and stretching, working out the glitches, and shaking out the dead.

  If this was love she was feeling, she thought, love was movement. Motion. Flow. Responsibility had clotted her love. The heart and the hearth are not the same. The Romans knew and kept their goddesses separate. Duty calls us. Love draws us. Duty tests our perseverance. Love tests our courage. You can value one. Or the other. You can value both. But they are not the same.

  Geneva knew it would not be long now before the stars were right and the moment upon them, both her and Ralph, to let go of. . .