The Metaphysical Ukulele

by Sean Carswell

  Flannery, for her part, had fought this battle with her mother many times. Neither side ever declared victory. There was no point in fighting one more time, and in front of Erik. She ate her salt-free soup and said all she could through her silence.

  Regina knew about this Mr. Langkjaer, though. Flannery did not know men. Regina did. She’d married Flannery’s father. And it taught Regina an important lesson. Men leave. All men leave. It’s in the nature of a man to leave. Her husband Edward had left without having to go anywhere to do it. He didn’t even bother to get out of bed to die. He just lay right there in their marriage bed, soul gone to heaven and corpse chilling Regina when she awoke. He could blame the lupus, sure. Flannery would blame that same silent killer. But he left, sure as the day is long. And so would this Mr. Langkjaer. As sure as the pointy nose on his crescent moon of a face, he’d leave. She didn’t know for certain that this was the last time he’d visit. She sensed it would be, though.

  After dinner, the old woman chaperoned Erik and Flannery as far as the front porch. Flannery carried her ukulele in her right hand and held Erik’s elbow with her left hand. The longer she continued the adrenocorticotropic hormone treatments, the more her joints seemed to creak, the more her bones seemed to disintegrate. If Erik had much walking in mind, Flannery would have to subtly suggest a walking stick. Twenty-nine years old may be far too young for a girl to need a cane, but Flannery knew that the hip needs what the hip needs. She leaned on Erik’s elbow as lightly as she could while walking down the steps. If Erik noticed, he said nothing about Flannery’s heavy hand. He pointed to a strand of flowers surrounding a nearby red oak. “Your geraniums are lovely.”

  Flannery smiled. Bless Erik’s heart. He couldn’t tell the difference between a bush and a tree, much less between geraniums and chrysanthemums. He did know Flannery’s stories, which was more than Regina could say. For Regina, the fact that Flannery wrote short stories was something short of a scandal, but more than an embarrassment. She would never understand what kind of lady would think so much of herself to think that her daydreams needed to be written down and typed up and sent out into the world. It was nothing short of indecent.

  Erik trafficked in fiction. He travelled from university to university, selling these daydreams in textbooks and anthologies. He knew the daydreams Flannery would share, and he knew the first one. It had been a little story named “The Geraniums.” And so, on Flannery’s front yard, any flower must be a geranium. Even if it was this deep into fall and geraniums never survived that first October cold snap. Even if autumn blooms with that deep yellow had to be a chrysanthemum. Flannery said, “It’s not so literal.”

  Erik helped her down the final step and onto the brick walkway. A peacock bellowed. Erik winced. No matter how many times he’d heard these fowl cry, they always sounded like a wounded child to him. “What’s not so literal?” he asked.

  “The geraniums,” Flannery said. “You can know me a little from my fiction, but I don’t tell the whole story.”

  Erik nodded. They moseyed down the brick path to Erik’s Ford. Erik opened the passenger door for Flannery. She and her ukulele settled into the front seat. Erik shut the door behind them and sauntered over to his own door. Time seemed to run at a slower pace on these Milledgeville autumn afternoons.

  Flannery guided Erik down the various dirt roads, through farms and fields, pecan plantations and second-growth southern pines that locals looked at as lumber more than trees. For someone who never drove and seemed to lose more mobility every time Erik came to visit, Flannery knew every back road of this county. She could navigate him directly into the gothic past and the hidden beauty. Forget country. This place was a whole different planet from the Denmark Erik knew as a boy. He gawked and asked questions, amazed to find that Flannery could name every tree and distinguish the tupelos from the poplars, the loblolly pines from slash pines, the sweetgums from the black walnuts. Flannery could tell the story of the old white man trudging along the road, lugging a wood box of carpentry tools and Erik could even believe that Flannery knew the old man and that the story was real.

  For her part, Flannery kept thumbing through the book of samples that Erik called his bible. She noticed Emily Dickinson’s poetry was finding a home in more and more anthologies these days. Just ten years ago, when Flannery attended the Georgia State College for Women, Dickinson was little more than a footnote in literature classes. Flannery had learned about Dickinson from a history professor, of all people. Helen Greene. The very same woman who had introduced Erik and Flannery. “You selling more Emily Dickinson these days?” Flannery asked.

  “You know we don’t sell individual authors,” Erik said. He stole a glance at Flannery. Her gaze was still locked on the bible. In moments like these, when her smile didn’t push up the cheeks that were swollen by hormone treatments, with her glasses off and no sense of eyes upon her, Flannery was something like a beautiful young woman. Erik may not have been in love, but he was aware that Flannery was a woman and he wanted to kiss her. Instead, he turned his eyes back to the dirt road in time to swerve around a startled squirrel. He added, “You’re a little bit like that Emily Dickinson.”

  Flannery clenched her jaw. “How so?”

  “Living out your days in your family home, watching over your mother in her old age…”

  “My mother is not that old.”

  “…writing these enigmatic little pieces about God and redemption. You could be the twentieth century’s own little virgin poet.”

  Flannery whipped not only her gaze but her whole body so that she sat facing him across the bench seat. Erik had never seen such speed, such agility out of her. He wondered if he’d said the wrong thing, if she might pounce upon him. She glared at Erik, perhaps wondering the same thing. Instead, she produced her ukulele and began to strum a few simple chords. “Greensleeves,” she said. She played through the chord progression. It sounded somewhat soft, but she played with enough force and confidence to be heard over the wind flowing in through the windows. She strummed as she said, “Every Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of ‘Greensleeves.’”

  And, to prove her point, Flannery sang first about a narrow fellow in the grass and second about a visit from death, all while playing the same simple chord progression. When she started into “Wild nights, wild nights!” in that notoriously thick Southern accent of hers, Erik slowed the car to a crawl and parked under a stand of hickories. He listened to Flannery sing about the wild nights that could be their luxury. When she stopped, he said, “With your permission, I would like to kiss you.”

  Flannery, of course, was no Emily Dickinson. She would not hide behind a curtain and listen to music in another room. She would not lock herself in her room when a suitor came calling. She may not be the most experienced romantic in Baldwin County, and she may be a devout Catholic, but she would not be defined as the twentieth century’s own little virgin poet. She spoke softly. “You have my permission.”

  Erik closed his eyes and leaned in. Later, he would read Flannery’s fictionalized version of this kiss. She described the adrenaline that surged through her, the same type that enables a girl to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house. But for Erik, all he felt was awkward. Flannery didn’t know how to position her lips, so he ended up kissing her teeth. He grazed his hand softly across her ribs. He could feel the crumbling bones underneath her wool coat, each rib jutting like the ridges in the dirt roads they’d ridden along. The teeth. The ribs. Flannery’s sickness flooded through Erik. Where he wanted to feel love, he felt death.

  He was at a loss. Should he keep kissing her teeth? Could he stop? Erik dangled over the precipice of panic for one second, then another until, luckily, the sound of a man clearing his throat drifted through the open window. Erik released Flannery. They both turned to see the man who had wandered up behind the parked car. He was a lean white man in his late fifties. He pushed back a black felt hat ringed with sweat. “Y’all doing okay?” he asked. “Ain’t go
t a flat tire or nothing, do you?”

  “No,” Erik said. “Everything is just fine.”

  “Well, okay, then.” The old man nodded and started again on his way down the road.

  Flannery, for her part, could not stop giggling. Clearly, she was just plain tickled by the whole affair.

  Unfortunately, Flannery was so flustered when Erik dropped her back off at Andalusia that she forgot her ukulele in his car. The next she heard from him, he’d taken a six-month leave of absence from work and returned to Denmark. Whether or not he took her ukulele with him is not clear. Either way, both were gone.

  The autumn turned to winter and the subsequent spring limped in without the usual sense of rebirth. Flannery’s doctor took her off the adrenocorticotropic hormone and put her on an experimental drug called Meticorton. Flannery’s thirtieth birthday came with a cane that she would need to get around that summer. One year after the kiss, Flannery purchased the pair of aluminum crutches that she’d ride for the rest of her life. These crutches helped her out to the mailbox, where she found her final letter from Erik: the one in which he announced his engagement.

  Flannery stuffed the letter in the pocket of her wool coat and hobbled through the magnolias and red oaks, the chrysanthemums back in bloom and the sweetgums carpeting pathways with their fallen leaves until she made it well into the back forty of Andalusia, to a shack that an old black man had built, that Regina knew nothing about and everyone else ignored. The man’s name was Coleman. Flannery liked him because he had skin that wrapped around a bag of bones in the same ill-fated manner as Flannery’s. She caught sight of then turned a blind eye to the moonshine still he used to make his money. She tapped on his door with the rubber end of her crutch. Coleman groaned and cursed his popping knee joints and kicked over a tin plate that never should have been left on the floor to begin with and eventually opened the door. Of course, he would’ve known from the knock that it was Flannery and of course he would’ve known what she was there for. He invited her in. He lit the fire in his little chimney and set a kettle on to boil. He asked, “Would you like some coffee, Miss Flannery?”

  “Yes, please, Coleman.” She lowered herself into an old cane chair next to Coleman’s one table. She hesitated to ask. Surely, Coleman would get to the matter in his own time. She leaned the crutches against the back of her chair and folded her hands in her lap. She could still feel the crumpled letter in her coat.

  Coleman watched the kettle come to a boil, then set two mugs of coffee on a slow drip. He smiled wide enough for Flannery to catch a glimpse of his foremost tooth: the lower right canine. He reached from behind a chest of drawers and pulled out his latest work of art: a cigar box ukulele made for his favorite dying girl. He handed it over.

  Flannery grazed her fingers across the frets, tapped the soundboard of old, dry redwood, and tuned the strings. It wasn’t quite the masterpiece of dark mahogany and tortoiseshell binding that she’d left in Erik’s car, but it was beautiful in all the ways it seemed so fallen and lacking. Flannery worried that, if she looked up to smile at Coleman, she’d cry. Coleman said, “Play us a song for our suffering, Flannery.”

  Flannery plucked through the scale of C, eight simple notes, then let her fingers leap and dance across the fret board. It was a song from a place of sickness. A place where there is no company. Where nobody can follow.

  The Bottom-Shelf Muse

  I was nothing more than watching the paint peel off the walls in my down-at-the-heels brain emporium when the buzzer rang. January winds had been rattling the wood in my window frames all day. They beat an unsteady rhythm. The buzzer fell right into place, like a low-level percussion from the Gas Company Evening Concert. My last nickel was lonely for another nickel it could rub together with, so I went into the waiting room to see who was buzzing there.

  A young man stood between the window and an old red davenport, frozen between sitting to wait for me and mustering up the courage to knock on my office door. He wore a tailored, bluish-gray suit with flannel thinning around the knees and the elbows. It was the kind of suit that wore out before a kid like this could finish paying the mortgage on it. His eyes still darted from davenport to office door, but he added a glance at me into the cycle. With what sounded like his last breath, he croaked out, “Hello.”

  I set my office door into a wide swing and pointed inside. “Don’t just stand there drying out your tongue, Cream Puff,” I said. “Come inside and let’s jaw.”

  The man skittered around me and into my office. He took a seat on the wooden chair in front of my desk. I moseyed around to my desk chair and planted myself. The low-rent dandy needed some time to sit there looking stupid, so I filled my pipe, put a flame to the leaves, and took a couple of puffs. The wooden window frame beat a minuet. The man swallowed hard and came out with it.

  “Name’s Candy,” he said. “I’m here on behalf of my employer.” He presented me a card the way the maitre d’ at the Cocoanut Grove offers a bottle of Beaujolais. I snatched the card. Candy’s employer’s name meant nothing to me. Just another Joe making pictures. His title was supposed to send me over the moon. Studio Executive. Big deal. I’d been around this town long enough to be disillusioned about what a lot of golfing money can do to the personality. The organ grinder’s monkey was even less impressive. I tossed the card into my ashtray. Candy went on.

  The studio he worked for was in a bind, he said. Their lead actor, a fellow by the name of Alan Ladd, had been drafted into the war effort. He was shipping out in a couple of months. They were racing to make one more picture with him before he left. They’d had to open a Los Angeles branch of the US mint to print enough money to pay the writer to type up the script for the Ladd movie. They’d been filming scenes faster than the writer wrote. Now they were running out of pages to film, and the writer had to come up with most of the third act. An ending. No one could figure out who the murderer was. The writer wasn’t talking. He claimed to have some kind of writer’s block. Candy’s boss had even offered the writer a portrait of Madison—a five thousand dollar bill—to finish the script. It was all for nothing.

  I tapped the ashes of my pipe onto the business card in my ashtray. “What are you asking me to do?” I asked. “Be the murderer or read the script and solve the crime?”

  Candy pulled a passport wallet from inside his suit. He opened it carefully and produced a photograph. He passed the photograph across my desk. I expected to see a picture of the writer. Instead, it was a picture of some kind of miniature banjo surrounded by the soft light of a photographer’s studio. I set the photo on my blotter and said, “Is this a joke?”

  “It’s a ukulele. A banjo ukulele. The writer got it as a gift from George Formby. You know George Formby?” I shook my head. Candy said, “He’s the biggest star of the pictures in England right now.”

  “I haven’t been to the Odeon in Leicester Square in some time,” I spat. “London’s a far drive in these days of gas rationing. All those V-2s falling around town aren’t very pleasant, either.”

  Candy regarded me with his monkey eyes, like suddenly I was making the music from the organ, only I was grinding it backwards. He shook his head enough to rattle his brains back into gear. “It seems that this banjo ukulele has gone missing. The writer can’t write without it. This is yours if you can find it and get the writer writing.” He handed me an envelope full of bills.

  “When do you need it?” I asked.

  Candy placed his manicured hands on the threadbare knees of his slacks and pushed himself into an upright position. “Yesterday,” he said.

  I thumbed through the envelope. Double sawbucks nestled together cozy as mice. There must have been a couple of dozen of them in there. About five hundred large. Good money for a funny-looking ukulele.

  I took two of the Jacksons for expenses and slid the envelope back to Candy. “You pay me when the job is done.”

  No matter how smart you think you are, you have to have a place to start. All I had was the picture of
the ukulele and the name of the writer: Chandler. If I went around showing people a picture of a ukulele and asking them if they’d seen it, the State of California would catch wind of it. In no time, they’d start fitting me for a camisole up at Camarillo. Talking to Chandler wouldn’t get me anywhere. A guy who could send everyone at Paramount Studios into a panic over a banjo ukulele wasn’t going to do me or anyone any good. But talking to a writer made a certain amount of sense. All those scribblers down at the studios were chummy. As far as I could tell, they spent most of their days drinking champagne in the breakroom, and most of their evenings drinking scotch in a bar. Talent for these guys amounted to having a good secretary. The studio secretaries would come up with characters, plot, and dialogue by the reams. The writers were at their best when they scratched their names on the backs of paychecks and constructed elaborate laments about their talents drying up in the hot January winds of Hollywood.

  The writers were easy to find. All I had to do was catch a red car west on Hollywood Boulevard and sidle up to the bar at Musso and Frank’s. You couldn’t spit at Musso and Frank’s without hitting a screenwriter.

  It was my favorite thing about spitting there.

  Writers at Musso are easy to spot. Look for slicked, graying hair badly in need of an oil change and dented with the ring of a dusty fedora. Look for the gabardine suits with the cheap cut of a Boyle Heights tailor. Look for the ash stains on their slacks and the ink stains on their middle fingers. Look for their eyes drooping from days spent drinking in the breakroom. Look for that air of disheveled dignity that comes from years of wearing a mask of talent with no face below it. Look for all these things and you’ll find a gaggle of them perched around the corner of the bar.