by Lori Ostlund
“They’re sitting on the couch,” Aaron said. He had never heard of body language.
“Together?” Clarence cackled, and Aaron nodded miserably.
“Talking?”
Aaron nodded again.
“About what?”
“About my father.”
“What about your father?” Clarence asked greedily.
“My father was going to take me,” he said. He looked up at Clarence. “My mother said they were arguing because he wanted me with him.”
Clarence sniffed. “Would you like to see the wasps now?” he asked, as though seeing the wasps had already been discussed.
Aaron knocked his shoe against one of Clarence’s wheels.
“Stop that god-awful kicking,” Clarence said, and Aaron turned away. “Fine, if you don’t want to see the wasps, then you shall not.”
“I do want to see the wasps,” Aaron said in a low voice.
“Well, you mustn’t be petulant, or I can assure you that the wasps will not want to see you. Now, slide open that door and see that my ramp is clear. Sister’s troublesome dogs are fond of sitting on it whilst gnawing bones.”
Aaron went over to the drab white drapes that covered one wall and managed to open them, revealing a sliding glass door. On the other side of it, a ramp sloped gently to the ground. It was covered with leaves and several well-chewed bones. Aaron walked down the ramp, kicking it clean, then back up to where Clarence waited, a pair of oversize sunglasses perched on his nose.
The wasps, it turned out, lodged in the school bus. “I’ve seen them only once,” Clarence explained as Aaron pushed him along a path beside the driveway. “Sister carried me inside.”
Aaron listened at the open door of the bus. “They’re at the back,” Clarence called. “Be sure not to rile them.”
Aaron climbed the steps and sat in the driver’s seat. The steering wheel was covered with cobwebs and desiccated insect husks. He pretended to drive, using both hands to flip out the sign that said STOP FOR CHILDREN. Mainly, he was thinking about what he had heard his mother telling Gloria.
“What are you doing in there?” Clarence asked fretfully, but instead of replying, Aaron walked to the back of the bus, where the wasp nest hung from the emergency door. He listened for the wasps again, but all he heard was Clarence calling to him from outside. He reached up and shook the nest, hard.
The wasps were on him instantly. As he ran back down the aisle of the bus, he felt small explosions of pain, first on his arms and legs and then across his entire body. He stumbled down the steps of the bus and fell to the ground.
“Sister,” Clarence called weakly. “Sister, come at once.”
The dogs came first. They circled Aaron, howling. When he opened his eyes next, his mother and Gloria were there. Gloria pulled the afghan from Clarence’s legs and began swatting Aaron with it. She stripped away his clothes, shaking out the sluggish wasps lodged in the folds of his shirt and stomping them into the ground with her boots.
“Vile creatures,” Clarence announced.
Aaron lay on the ground in his underwear, his body covered with red welts. This time when his mother cried, she did make the low moans.
“This will require poultices, Sister,” Clarence declared, the last thing Aaron heard before he passed out.
* * *
He opened his right eye. The left was swollen shut. His mother was there beside him, Gloria behind her, Clarence at his feet, head tipped back so that he seemed to be sighting Aaron along his tusks. Aaron sniffed, aware of an odor that was coming from him, a combination of grass and mustard. He did not like mustard because it reminded him of hotdogs.
“Do you like hotdogs?” he asked Clarence. His mother sniffled.
“Certainly not,” Clarence said. “I dislike hotdogs in all of their permutations, though I particularly despise the bratwurst.” Something about Clarence’s response, the way he said “permutations,” calmed Aaron, and he closed his good eye again. Soon, he heard his mother and Gloria stand and leave the room.
“Your mother was quite hysterical,” Clarence whispered. “She seemed to think you were hallucinating because you kept crying out that you were”—he paused dramatically—“the king of pain.”
Aaron did not remember calling out, nor how he had come to be on the sofa, but he knew he had never experienced pain like this, pain that was everywhere, burning and throbbing and itching. He fell back into a sweaty, listless sleep in which he dreamed that he was on a parade float, calling, “I’m the King of Pain” as he rolled down the street, waving to the people below. He could hear Gloria, Clarence, and his mother talking, their voices blending with his dream, their conversation punctuated by a clinking sound that he later realized was the repetition of cup meeting saucer but in his dream became the steady tapping of a pair of cumbersome tusks that collided with everything in their path. When he awoke, he studied Clarence, relieved to find him still in possession of his small, elegant tusks and not the monstrosities of his dream. Only then did he realize that the tusks in the dream had belonged not to Clarence but to him.
“Where are we?” he asked, looking around the small, sunny room.
“We’re at the Bjorklunds, Aaron,” his mother said. She glanced at Gloria, who prodded one of his poultices.
“I know that,” Aaron said. “I mean this room.”
“This is the sunroom,” Clarence announced grandly. “As you may know from your studies, the sun has tremendous curative powers.”
Gloria and his mother rose and gathered the cups. Once they had disappeared into the kitchen, Clarence wheeled closer. “You provoked them, didn’t you?” he said.
“Who?” Aaron asked. He sat up.
“The wasps,” Clarence said impatiently. “You must have provoked them.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Aaron said. In fact, he did know, but he did not want to talk, not even to Clarence, about the clarity he had felt as he reached toward the wasps intending to do just that—provoke.
“Do you like rabbits?” Clarence asked after a moment.
Aaron recalled the rabbit at the petting zoo at the first Paul Bunyan Park, the sleekness of its ears and the way it trembled when he held it. “Yes,” he said.
“Splendid,” Clarence shrieked. “Sister is preparing one of the little rascals for our supper.”
He did not look at Clarence because he knew that Clarence was waiting for him to respond, that Clarence was upset with him for refusing to discuss the wasps. Though his mother had said he was to rest, Aaron stood up. He felt weak, but he took a step and then another, keeping his hand on the couch. He noticed a pile of newspapers, stacked in a beam of sunlight. Atop it was a cat, gray with white-tipped ears.
“May I pet the cat?” Aaron asked.
“Indeed you may,” Clarence said. “Nothing gives me more pleasure than a child who has learned to use the English language properly, except for an adult who has done so. That, of course, is a good deal rarer.”
Aaron let go of the couch and took several slow steps toward the cat. Though it hurt to do so, he crouched beside it, wanting to appear less threatening. He whispered, “Hello, cat,” and then, more loudly, “Do you have a name?”
“Of course he has a name,” Clarence said. “His name is Aaron.”
Aaron turned to look at Clarence. “Is that really his name?”
“Do you take me for a liar?”
“Maybe you’re teasing me,” Aaron said.
“I can assure you that I tease, to use your word, with far greater sophistication. Really, Aaron, what would be the purpose of such simple-minded game playing?”
“I don’t know,” Aaron said. He did not understand exactly what he was being asked, but a word came to him and he said, “I guess it’s a coincidence.”
“A coincidence indeed,” Clarence agreed, looking in no way surprised at his use of such a word. “Sister named him.”
Aaron turned back to the cat and tapped gently on its paw. It stretched and
opened its eyes. Except there were no eyes, just two empty sockets where the eyes should have been.
“Oh!” Aaron cried, tipping backward onto his buttocks.
“Did I forget to mention that our feline friend is eyeless?” Clarence crowed.
“What happened to his eyes?” Aaron asked, his voice shaking. The empty sockets seemed to be staring at him.
“Sister found him in the barn several years ago. The ants had made a picnic, as it were, of his eyeballs.” Clarence laughed. “His mother had moved the rest of the litter elsewhere. He was a tiny, starving thing when Sister found him, but she nursed him back to health, and that was that. She’s quite devoted to him.”
“Doesn’t he get lost?” Aaron asked.
“Lost?” Clarence said. “There’s no opportunity for him to get lost. He’s not allowed outdoors except when Sister takes him on a leash, and then he just sniffs the geese droppings and eats a bit of grass. Otherwise, this room is his world, and though it’s small, I imagine he feels quite safe here. You know, there’s something to be said for the security of the familiar, in all its confining glory.”
* * *
Aaron did not think he could fall asleep again, not with the eyeless cat nearby, but he returned to the couch and soon he was sleeping. He awakened to the smell of food cooking and the soft whistle of Clarence’s breathing.
“Clarence,” he said, sitting up, “will you ever get bigger?”
“Bigger?” said Clarence. “What sort of dwarf would I be if I were bigger?”
“I don’t know,” said Aaron.
“Are you familiar with the expression ‘I’ve seen bigger dwarves’?”
“No,” said Aaron.
“Well, it’s a first-rate expression. You may be young for irony now, but I’ve no doubt you’ll grow into it nicely, so it’s an expression worth remembering. I daresay it will provide you with something on which to ruminate when you’re older and experiencing the proverbial rainy day. There are sure to be many in that hamlet of yours. What is it called? Mortonville?” He spoke as if Mortonville were a bitter herb he had been forced to sample.
“Have you been to Mortonville?” Aaron asked. He tried to picture Clarence there, peering through the plate-glass windows of Bildt Hardware, rolling past the Trout Café.
“Certainly not,” said Clarence. “Were I able to travel and inclined to do so, I can assure you that it is not to Mortonville I would go.” He added with an air of finality, “Indeed not.”
Neither did Aaron want to think of Clarence in Mortonville, where he imagined people staring, then looking away, putting their hands over their mouths to conceal their laughter each time he spoke because they would not be able to see Clarence as the author of humor, only as its object. In Mortonville, Clarence would not be Clarence at all.
“Of course, I cannot take credit for the expression,” Clarence went on. “It was submitted to me by a pen pal from Iowa.”
“What are pen pals?” Aaron asked.
“Pen pals are people with whom I correspond via the postal service.”
“You write letters?” Aaron said, by way of confirming his understanding.
“That is precisely what we do. I’ve numerous pen pals, almost all little people. It is thanks to them that I have managed to compile my archives.”
“And all of these people—the pen pals—are they your friends?” Aaron asked.
“Friends?” Clarence said. “If pressed to do so, I would place most of them firmly in the category of acquaintances.”
“Pal means friend,” Aaron pointed out.
“They are most certainly not pals, for that is a word I despise. In fact, thanks to you, young Aaron, I shall refrain from using the term pen pals ever again. Dreadful,” Clarence muttered, raking his tongue loudly against his teeth.
“What will you call them?” Aaron asked.
Clarence thought for a moment. “I shall refer to them as my correspondents.”
“What do you and your correspondents write about?”
“Everything. I am compiling what I hope will be the definitive collection of artifacts and documents related to dwarves in our society. This is the archive of which Sister spoke earlier. I dare say it shall be my life’s work. Already I’ve been at it—informally, of course—for most of my adulthood, though my fascination truly began in adolescence. As a boy, you see, I was quite convinced I was an anomaly, and though my parents assured me that there were others of my stature—even shorter—I refused to believe it. I measured myself daily and took to hiding in places too small for anyone else in my family to fit. The big pot in which my mother melted lard and the valise that my grandfather carried when he came to live with us were my favorites. Finally, when I was fourteen, my parents resorted to desperate measures to prove me wrong.”
“What did they do?” Aaron asked.
“They hired a dwarf. They ran advertisements in several newspapers, and a man replied, an older gentleman, unrelentingly tedious. He arrived on a Friday dressed in what appeared to be a boy’s church suit and departed after dinner on Sunday. While I normally despise Sundays, I was never so relieved to see Sunday arrive and that fellow depart.”
“What was his name?” Aaron asked.
“Otto. He was a clerk in a grocery store in Winnipeg and had been for thirty-some years. The first night he described for us, in detail, the special stool he’d had fashioned so that he could reach the register. At meal times, as we discussed various trivial matters, he would shout out the prices of the food we were consuming—‘potatoes this or that much a pound’—his finger punching the air frantically. He was ringing up the meal, you see. As my sisters cleared the table the second night, I turned to him and asked, ‘Well, Otto, what is our grand total this evening?’ I was teasing, but his index finger shot out, tapped an imaginary total key, and he pulled himself up in his chair to better make out the figure. Of course, we leaned forward to hear it, at which point the silly man became quite flustered and tucked his hands beneath his buttocks. We laughed, both to ease the moment and because it was funny. He tried to be good-natured, but his job was really all he had and he wasn’t clever enough to be self-deprecating, so I think the visit upset him greatly.”
“Did he cry?” Aaron asked.
“He may have, though not in our presence.”
“What happened to Otto?” Aaron asked.
“Nothing happened to him. He went back to his stool at the grocery store in Winnipeg. I’ve received archival scraps from him over the years, nothing significant.”
“I wish I had correspondents,” Aaron said. “It must be wonderful.”
“It can be,” Clarence agreed. “Take Olga, my correspondent in Iowa. It was she who contributed the ‘bigger dwarves’ expression I mentioned earlier, after learning of my archives from Otto. That was nearly a decade ago. She told me nothing of herself in that first letter. Olga requires coaxing. Later she explained that she had been given Otto’s address by a well-intentioned cousin of her husband who knew Otto from the store.” Clarence coughed and spat delicately into a large handkerchief, inspected the contents, and folded the handkerchief around them. “ ‘He’s of your ilk,’ the cousin said when she presented Olga with Otto’s address. Isn’t that a delightful introduction?” He laughed. Aaron laughed also because he liked Clarence’s laugh, but he thought the word ilk sounded awful.
“The truth,” Clarence continued, his voice becoming more nasal, “is that Olga wrote to Otto because she was lonely, but they were not of the same ilk, not at all. I received my first letter from her on June sixth, 1962. It was, as I have already noted, a pithy epistle. I wrote back, thanking her for her fine contribution to the archives, and over the years we have become well acquainted.” He cleared his throat again. “In fact, Olga’s is a sad tale. Have you any interest in hearing it?”
“I like sad tales,” said Aaron. “In school we read only happy ones. My mother says I’m too young to be interested in tales of woe. That’s what she calls them.”
“Yes, I suppose you are young, though I have found that there is no better way to forget your own tales of woe than by listening to those of others.”
Clarence’s fingers had crept out from beneath the afghan. They were plump, like breakfast sausages, and Aaron found himself thinking pigs in a blanket, which he had ordered once in a restaurant based solely on the name. He remembered how happy he had been when his breakfast arrived and he discovered that pigs in a blanket were sausages, the beauty of their name matching their tastiness.
“You seem distracted,” Clarence said querulously. “Perhaps we should speak of something other than Olga’s sad story?” A rattling began in his throat, which he tried to clear, but the phlegm seemed to build. “You’ll forgive me for making such a racket,” he gasped. “It has been a difficult week.” He stared straight ahead, his sausage fingers clutching the afghan.
“I believe there has been a settling,” he announced finally. “Sister and I have a little joke that we engage in at such times. She tells me I am sounding phlegmish, and I reply, ‘I should say closer to Dutch, Sister.’ It never fails to amuse her. I must admit I’ve come to find the joke tiresome, but it would disappoint her if I were to stop.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand the joke,” Aaron said.
“What is there to understand?” Clarence said. “Surely you’ve heard of Flanders?”
“No,” said Aaron.
“What grade are you in?”
“I’m starting second grade.”
“Second grade?” Clarence cried. “Second grade and you are unfamiliar with Flanders? I am quite sure that by the time I began second grade I was well versed in European geography, inclusive of its subtleties.”
Aaron said nothing. He did not understand how this place called Flanders had even entered the discussion. “What about Olga and the tale of woe?” he asked.
“We shall speak no more of Olga,” said Clarence severely, then, less severely, “Come. Supper awaits us. You shall be my valet.”
11
* * *
Aaron studied the meat on his plate. He had thought that rabbit would be easy to recognize, but without the telltale ears, this was not the case.
