by Ana Simo
In real life, as distinct from uncoiled memory, McCabe was as alive and human as Mrs. Crandall, even if I perceived no carnality in her. Was flesh necessary for life? Thunder, lightning, wind, music, and, come to think of it, birds did not bring flesh to mind, and yet they were alive. McCabe was the most splendid specimen of the breed. I knew that life and passion existed outside the flesh. I had seen it in McCabe and experienced it with her, but I did not understand it. My brain was too small to grasp this in any but the most general way. Whenever I tried to understand McCabe and her effect on me, I would feel the vertigo of the starry sky. Just as on the Night of the Dead at Shangri-La’s cemetery, when praying to heaven with my grandmother for her indito godchildren’s forebears. Abandon yourself. Do not think. Who said that? I could not identify the voice. The zone of clarity has lousy acoustics. Bincrósbi, for all we knew, could have been a sadistic pedophile, the kind who shoots videos of six-year-old girls sticking pencils into their tight little assholes. Saint Bincrósbi, Protector of the Spics. He had the narrow, sharp features that McCabe’s body was made for, but mercifully did not get. Things would not be what they are if McCabe had Bincrósbi’s mug. This curious thought finally woke me up.
The house was mute. A robin sat on the rosebush. Don’t they migrate? McCabe would have known. I missed her. Unbearably. Odiously. Just one more day of suffering. I may have held her soul in my mouth, whatever that meant, but it did not stop my longing. It made it worse. My appetite for her was as insatiable as Mrs. Crandall’s had been for me until the day she imposed her will on herself and dismissed me. Exemplary Mrs. Crandall. I was tempted to go to her, drown in her overflowing and uncomplicated breasts, but I pulled back on my leash as she had on hers. Mrs. Crandall and I understood each other perfectly well. We were dogs in heat—prairie dogs, not the horrific kennel-dwellers. Two cowardly, but free, prairie dogs.
With the logs split by McCabe, I had built a pyramidal pyre inside the icehouse. After stuffing the pyramid with fire starters, and placing a large gas can in a corner, I had removed two stones from the upper part of the icehouse wall so that the smoke could escape. Oxygen to keep the fire alive would come in through the heavy iron door, which I would keep open as much as necessary. The stone could resist a temperature of about twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit without cracking. I would lay McCabe’s naked body on top of the pyramid face up, arms open, eyes closed.
I had seen her naked body twice before. The first time was from my window on a balmy October morning, after the snow that had frozen my feet had melted. She had been splitting logs for about an hour by the gardening shed when she took off her clothes and work boots and doused herself with the hose. The water must have been cold, but she did not seem to mind. She coiled the hose on a low sycamore branch and stood underneath, face upturned, drinking the water and letting it run down her chest and belly. I could not see her face. From my window, she looked about six inches high by the distant shed. I hesitated before I picked up the Judge’s binoculars. I was afraid to disturb the flow of events. That was one of my phobias. Curiosity was stronger. Like a doomed time traveler in a Saturday morning show, I trained the binoculars on her face. Her lips were parted to receive the water, the tip of her tongue visible inside her mouth, waiting, her eyes closed in the heavy-lidded way of someone sleeping. Her face was transfigured. She was so human that she was inhuman. I dropped the binoculars as if I had stepped barefoot on burning coals. The second time was at night. My own moaning woke me from the fever long enough to catch a glimpse of her standing naked at the foot of my bed, then walking to the window to close the shades. Oh, merciful one, who rushes in the dead of night to the sickbed of the worm without thinking of covering yourself! I had seen her naked twice, yet I still had not seen her flesh. The fire would.
McCabe’s pubic hair was a deep red. I had not trained the binoculars on her body. That would have been indecent. I had seen the red splotch with my own eyes on the distant six-inch figure, right before water began to pour out of the hose, darkening and flattening the hair on her head and body. The hair on her head was almost black, like her eyelashes and the hair of her armpits. Her tee shirt sleeve receded to reveal the dark armpit hair when she lifted her right arm above her head to get me a book from the Judge’s uppermost shelf. I was next to her and happened to look up from my wheelchair at that very instant, catching the dark underarm shadow. Behind the book I had asked for, whose title I don’t remember, she found a 1904 edition of Audubon’s Birds of America. During our last meal together, she told me that finding that book, on that precise day, had been a good omen. Of what, she wouldn’t say. Perhaps as a consolation, she volunteered that she had grown up watching birds in Maine, which in the summer was the bird capital of the world. More than two thousand different species had been sighted. The cliffs near Portland were a favorite nesting spot for albatross. McCabe almost convinced me she was from Maine. What does it matter now?
McCabe took the Audubon book to her room the night she found it. She must have taken it with her when she left, along with what I always assumed was her birding notebook. Now everything is subject to reinterpretation. The Audubon book, as all other items in the Judge’s house, was in an inventory attached to the lease that McCabe had signed. Early on, before her transformation, old McCabe had given me the lease to keep along with ten thousand dollars in twenties and tens for household expenses. I had insisted on a cash economy. “Ain’t no more where dat come from, so make it last,” she jabbered in her phony Afro-Brooklynese. The time when I was devoted to covering my tracks, with alibis, with taking my revenge on that bombastic but ultimately harmless creature also named McCabe, seems so remote now that I wonder if my brain is finally going dark under this mattress, or if the remoteness is of a moral nature, an acknowledgement of my insignificance. I am not today who I was at the end, and I was not then who I was at the beginning, or even in the middle. This is not a riddle, dear listener, but a statement of fact.
In the silence after Bincrósbi’s posthumous white dream, I wondered what the Judge’s heirs would think happened to the Audubon book. I could ask McCabe when I saw her. I sat in bed, sobered by this unappetizing possibility. My curiosity was beginning to flicker already. I was, until then, the most curious person I had ever known. It was my pride, my sole accomplishment, the only respectable entry in my private Guinness Book of World Records, chock full of petty excesses. That Christmas morning, however, I did not want to learn anything more about McCabe. I knew little, or nothing, but it was enough. I would not ask her about the Audubon book and her notebook, or where she had been, why she had left, why she had come back (although this was not a mystery: she would come back because, unlike me, she was still curious—she who had no flesh, she of the eternal mercy, she of the impassible face which was the face of kindness because hatred is never impassible—she, unlike me, was still in the world). It was a sublime contradiction, that of mercy and power, whose deciphering would have delighted me not long ago, but now left me indifferent. A lifetime of curiosity was over. The time of acceptance and action had begun, a twenty-four-hour cycle that would end the next morning at this hour with a pyramid of smoldering ashes. Did anyone know the precise hour of Mary’s accouchement? We should drink a toast to her, McCabe and I.
I scrubbed my body with a stiff brush until my skin was a reddish brown. How I wished I could keep that vibrant color, instead of my dull beige. The bathroom mirror showed a naked female of the human species emerging from a sulfurous cloud. She was short and solidly built, with some roundness of ass and belly to balance the muscular arms and back. Her breasts were small and not yet sagging. Her face was older than her body. It told her real age: old, but not irreparably old. Her short hair was dyed brown to match her eyelashes, eyebrows, and eyes. Her hands, feet, and ears were surprisingly small. Her nose strong, her lips fleshy, her teeth regular but slightly yellowish, her chin weak, her face square. This was the person known as I.
I put on my best clothes for my Christmas dinner with
McCabe: black corduroy pants and jacket, beige button-up shirt and socks, black leather boots I had shined the day before, all much worn, but of good quality. For the pyre I would change into work clothes and old sneakers. I took my time brushing my teeth, clipping my toenails, combing my hair, rubbing lotion on my body, getting dressed. It was nine o’clock. I did not expect McCabe to arrive before noon. There were only two flights she could take: the daily flight from Chicago to the state capital, one hundred and eighty miles southeast of Elmira, arriving at 1:00 p.m., or the weekly Penal Colony transport arriving there at 10:30 a.m., in time to catch the 11:00 a.m. air taxi to Elmira. Traveling all the way by land, or on a privately chartered plane, seemed far-fetched options. If McCabe arrived on the earlier flight, I would offer her a light, cold lunch; if on the second, an apéritif. Dinner would be served at eight o’clock. The venison would go into the oven around six o’clock. Her bed was freshly made in case she wanted to take a nap before dinner. I opened her bedroom windows to let in the clean winter air.
Ice floes lumbered down the river toward the Shangri-La bend, where they got stuck. Soon the bend would be frozen solid. Once, Glorita had dared me to walk on the ice. When I refused, she stepped on it alone. I watched her walk toward the middle of the frozen bend until I could not stand my fear. I grabbed a sturdy tree branch and followed her. “What’s that for?” Glorita said when she turned around and saw the branch. “Nothing,” I said, embarrassed. “I can take care of myself,” she said. I thought she had read my mind and knew the branch was to save her if she fell through a crack. “I know,” I said. “Then why do you keep butting in?” she yelled. Glorita was scary when she got pissed. I was afraid she’d melt the ice and we’d both drown. She was angry that I had gotten into a fight for her. A big moron called Ñico pawed her at the bus stop in front of the school, so I jumped on his back and tried to strangle him. He whirled around like a mad elephant with me hanging on to his back, my hands too small to circle his thick neck. Two of his pals ended up pulling me off and kicking me on the ground until Glorita threw herself on top of me screaming at them assholes, mothafuckas, pendejos, cabrones, hijoeputas, chingones, etc. They hesitated for a second because she was a pretty girl, even if she let the fucking dyke suck her pussy, come suck my big fat Mexican dick instead, you puta. Glorita seized the moment to pull me away. The three orangutans jumped up and down in a frenzy of crotch-grabbing rage. Ñico screamed he was gonna stick it up my filthy tortillera dyke ass. I yelled at him to go home so his daddy could shove it up his fat ass: “He’s waiting for you, maricón!” The three gave chase, but the school bus pulled over in the nick of time. I was spitting blood. My left eye was closed and my lips swelled. Breathing was painful (a broken rib, as it turned out). I told my parents I had fallen down the stairs trying to catch the bus. They didn’t believe me, and I was grounded for a week. The truth I told only my grandmother. Glorita and I were thirteen. There had been other fights before, and much taunting, but this was my first big match. In the next five years, until I graduated from high school and Glorita dropped out, I got another rib and an arm broken, lost two teeth, and saw my clothes periodically ripped and my lips, nose, eyes, elbows, and knees bloodied. I was not a victim. I gave almost as good as I got. I never ratted on anyone—not out of a sense of honor, but because it would have made matters worse: everybody hates queers, even those who say they’re our friends, and a lot of queers hate themselves. To compensate for my size and inferior muscle power, I began to wear, and use, brass knuckles decorated to look like rings. I always aimed at their snouts. I also carried a box cutter in my pocket, which I used more than once, and a hunting knife in my knapsack that I often flashed, but never used.
High school taught me that my enemies were everywhere, and my people nowhere. I was still one with Shangri-La in what concerned white people, but not in what concerned me. The benevolent Shangri-La of my childhood, all for one and one for all, turned into the envious, narrow-minded, bigoted, gossipy, hateful, brutal Shangri-La of my youth. It loathed me and I loathed it back. Just like Elmira, although Elmira is unforgivable. Even Rafael avoided me in public, afraid to call attention to himself. I did not hold that against him. Rafael did not know how to fight. No one was unhappy to see me board that refugee bus, except Glorita and my grandmother. I lost them both that day. Do not try to find any larger meaning in any of this. Mine was an unexceptional adolescence. Glorita and I did not fall through the ice. She told me to turn around and start walking back to the shore. She would follow, keeping a distance between us, so as not to stress the ice. I did as she said. Not once did I look back to see if she was following me, despite my doubts. On the shore, I kept looking ahead and just waited, and waited, and waited. I was about to turn around when I felt Glorita’s arm over my shoulder. She was already taller than I was and liked to feel proprietorial.
I reluctantly shut the windows in McCabe’s bedroom. Glorita was vividly over there, on the icy shore. I could not tear myself from her. In the end, I did. I betrayed her. But it was only provisional, until I took care of McCabe. In the kitchen, the clock radio was still on, now spewing static. I ate breakfast, then went up to my room and brushed my teeth again. Trying to read Turgenev’s Home of the Gentry, I got stuck on “the little girl stretched her hand out of the window the little girl stretched her hand out of the window the little girl stretched her hand out of the window.” I read and reread it without understanding it, unable to move on. This has happened to me in airplanes during takeoff. A newspaper intended to calm me down trapped me in a groove in which terror replaced meaning. I put the book back on the shelf. I knew it by heart. I could close my eyes and walk through it. That is what I did until the Judge’s grandfather clock announced that it was noon. As if on cue, I heard the crunch of the gravel on the driveway.
A dark-blue sedan was approaching. Was it the same one that McCabe had taken that night in September? It disappeared from my view as it pulled into the front entrance. I heard the car door slam and steps on the pebbles. I controlled my urge to run to the front door and fling it open. I began to descend the stairs, measuring my breathing as if the plane was about to take off. The doorbell rang. Had I left the door locked? Had she lost her house keys? McCabe was being formal. I did not know how I should greet her. I decided to take her bag. It would be my sword of purity. Until I had it, my hands would remain deep in my pockets. They should not touch McCabe. It was not myself I was restraining, since I had no desire to touch her, but social convention, with its enforced physical contact, its collisions and accidents. The doorbell rang again.
I opened the door with my right hand, keeping the left in my pocket. The door traced a fluid, dignified arc. It had taken me much practice and oiling of the hinges to remove all hints of anxiety or reluctance from my door opening. A banality, you will say, but a loose screw sinks the big ship. Nothing, not even the color of the roses in a particular vase, had been left to chance. The path from McCabe’s arrival to her apotheosis on the pyre had been minutely mapped. The door opened with an elegant sweep. I heard a breathless “Hi, there.” Then I heard myself say, “Hello.” Then, “Could you please open the garage door?” I did as I was asked. When the blue sedan was parked in the garage, hidden behind the Land Rover, I offered to take one of the two small bags. “Thanks, but I think I can manage,” was the polite answer. We stood in the dim light of the garage, unsure of what to do or say next. “I owe you an explanation,” I heard. The acrid body odor was distracting, as were the soiled shirt, muddy shoes, and greasy dark-blue suit. “Motor oil. Had to pour it in the dark. Got it all over me.” Where had that telegraphic form of speech been learned? “So…” I said, searching for the right balance between distress and panic. “Sorry to barge in on you like this…” came the insincere answer. I slammed the car top with unintended violence. “Whatcha done?” said a mean, deep voice coming out of my chest that I had not heard in years.
He looked at me reproachfully. That is what saved him. I had grown up cosseted by his reproac
hful gaze. It made me feel daring and modern where he was meek and old-fashioned. I took him to the maid’s room in back of the garage. Unused since the Judge died, it smelled musty. “Take a bath. You stink,” I said, handing him a large garbage bag for his filthy clothes, a towel, and a bar of soap. He was anxious to tell me his story. “Later,” I said. I had to throw the kitchen window open, so McCabe would not smell his presence. I warned him not to leave the room, or make any noise. “You can’t stay long. This is not my house,” I said. “I know that,” answered Rafael Cohen.
27
The Grand Vizier
When I returned with food, booze, and an air freshener, Rafael was dressed for summer cocktail hour in the Vineyard in a pale blue shirt, white and blue seersucker suit a size too large, and sockless penny loafers. He was scrubbed clean and imperfectly shaved (his perennially blue jowls always lent him a Nixonian truculence on TV, which his soft, high-pitched voice belied). His big, swarthy head, though, was pure La Esperanza. All he was missing was the moustache. Those were the only clothes he had in his car when he left, he said, devouring the ham and cheddar sandwiches.
I found him a forest-green parka that had belonged to Mrs. Wilkerson. It was a little tight on his waist, but not too girly. The Judge, who had been six foot four, could only provide socks, scarf, and woolen cap. I personally contributed a large grey cable-knit sweater that fat McCabe had given me before she melted away. Nothing could be done about the penny loafers and the seersucker pants. He would have to freeze in them. The jacket, on the other hand, was returned to the bag it came from, which I noticed was otherwise empty. What I had taken for a second bag was in fact a large, hard-cased briefcase. Rafael had shoved it under the bed, but insufficiently, so the top and handle stuck out. It was 1:30 p.m. He had been here only an hour and a half and it felt like a century. The elasticity of time is one of the themes I wish I had had time to study. McCabe would not arrive now until four o’clock at best, if traffic out of the state capital were miraculously light. I had two and a half hours to get Rafael back on the road.
