An Orchard in the Street

by Reginald Gibbons

  A Man in a Suit

  8/27/1992

  To: Mr. Tony Szathmari, Mr. Fong Wei

  This is the first time Mr. S. has requested a report from me. I hope that what I am writing about what happened will answer the questions he asked me. Please let me know if there’s something else. Two nights ago, when it was so hot, I was at about mid-shift and was actually about to go to one of our two stores in Lakeview but someone told me I needed to get to our 24-hour store on N. Clark right away, fast, because something was happening. What it turned out to be was that around 1 a.m., when it was still very hot, I have learned from many witnesses, although I did not see this part of what happened myself, that this greenish blue raft of ectoplasm came across the parking lot like a kind of giant amoeba, nobody saw from where. When it got near the doors of our big N. Clark St. 24-hour store, where the light just pours out of that place, it brightened up a bit, and people were standing around pretty fascinated but not wanting it to get too close to them, and only a few of them ran off in a fright. This thing kind of seethed toward the center--it was about the size of a queen mattress--and it slowly lifted up into the air a kind of column of itself, I guess if it was up to me I would say, that turned into this figure of a man wearing a tan poplin suit, white shirt, no tie. I can’t say if it was really a man--his skin neither white nor brown nor black, people could not agree on what it was, he had on very dark sunglasses, his hair was dark and very short. So he floated to the edge of this ectoplasm thing and stepped out of it onto the asphalt like he was stepping out of mud, and he nodded to one man who was standing very nearby--from what that guy told me I didn’t understand if it was a friendly greeting exactly, but I figured it was the kind of nod that a man will give to another man just to kind of signal that there is nothing wrong, like a truce between them, no cause for alarm or action, or any feeling whatsoever, for that matter. And then the man in the suit, if like I said it was a man, because when he got closer to the entrance he did trigger the automatic door open, just like anybody else would do, and he went inside. Sounded like a huge number of the seventeen-year cicadas were making a tremendous racket in the trees around the parking lot, too, like kind of an outdoors soundtrack for this.

  There are always a fair number of shoppers in our 24-hour store. All types, as everyone knows. Some of the people in the parking lot hung around the ectoplasmic raft and several others followed the man inside and watched him take a cart and go first to the pharmacy section and get some cold remedy and some chewable vitamin C, and then in the school-supply section pick up a couple of ballpoint pens and a legal pad and a roll of Scotch Magic Tape, and then he headed into the groceries and bought biscuit mix, a jar of red raspberry jelly, a pound of breakfast sausage, a pound of drip-grind coffee and some no. 6 filters, butter, a half gallon of orange juice, and a dozen extra-large brown eggs. I have the receipt for you, which the man or something did not take with him.

  People said he did not react to any other person in the store. Never seemed to look at anybody. Some said that if you were standing where he walked by, or you were near him in the checkout line, there was nothing different about the smell of this man. And nobody really panicked or got weird about this whole thing, which I think is really odd, like he had some way of not alarming people even though they saw that thing in the parking lot.

  The man was a very patient person--he was at the register of the checkout girl who only started yesterday. His bill was $19.92. He paid with regular used-looking U.S. cash money from his pocket. He asked for plastic not paper. The bagger handed him his bag and afterward when he found out who, or maybe what, his customer had been, he said that when his fingers happened to touch the man’s, they felt just like ordinary fingers to him. The man never once took off his sunglasses. He was trim, about five-foot-ten, and clean looking.

  Later I talked to some people who had been standing near that ectoplasmic puddle. Which kind of quivered and throbbed a little around the edges and was bubbling slowly in the center. Even though the man didn’t smell strange, the parking lot thing had a very peculiar smell, in their opinion. Something like a combination of burnt hair and like ozone from off an electric motor. And it might as well have been a trained pet, it was waiting so faithfully for the man, not leaving its spot by the automatic doors, despite all the attention being paid to it by people standing around it watching but staying several feet away so as not to be touched by it. It didn’t respond to anything anybody said to it, although several people tried talking to it, and shouting to it, like it might be able to hear but not very well. Everybody says it was only about half a foot thick, but a little more than that in the middle, where the man had come out of it. When I got there later you could hardly hear yourself out there because of the buzzing cicadas. When it’s the seventeen-year hatch like it is this year, it’s like alien-world sound, really, and that gave me something to think about.

  Then here came the man or thing like a man again out through the automatic doors, people said, and they fell back from him as he came out carrying his plastic bag of purchases, wearing that pretty nice suit, and nicely pressed, too. He was now wearing a hat, the old-fashioned kind that men wore in movies--which everyone said was not on him when he went into the store, or when he did his shopping, or when he paid for his groceries. No one else in the store was even wearing a suit.

  He nodded to a few men, the way he had before, and without looking at any of the women (one of them screamed, she told me). And somebody had called the police.

  So the man in the poplin suit, not a bit wrinkled, came real calm to the edge of the blue-green raft of ectoplasm and stepped into it and sank right through it and disappeared into it like it was the surface of a deep pool and the ectoplasmic stuff rose in a thick lump of almost a splash where he had gone through it, and a little whiff of vapor came off the lump like a tiny cloud. Several people said that vapor smelled like a locker room; others were directly in its path as it drifted a few yards and they said that it had no smell at all.

  As soon as the man or creature had gone into the raft of ectoplasm, it gathered itself in and began to bubble more and extend its way back into the parking lot, with people on that side jumping out of its way as soon as they saw it was coming at them. Not that many people seemed to really be afraid of it, which I should explain didn’t surprise me, somehow, although I can’t explain why not. But they sure didn’t want it to touch them. On the spot near the door where it had been waiting, it left behind the plastic bag, but it was empty, although the cash register receipt was still in it, and that’s why I have it now.

  Some shoppers trailed after the ectoplasm. A lot did, and yet nobody ever said what else it did or what happened to it, or where it went, that I could find out. And I interviewed about fourteen or fifteen people about it.

  Probably a lot of people will say they were there and saw it, but at most there were about thirty, counting both the parking lot and the store, who did, and a few of them, anyway, were too scared to catch more than a glimpse of it. A DJ from one of the rock stations--the one who says he is going to run for alderman--was on the air this morning about how all this had all been staged by a rival station, but did not say how or what for. The TV Action Eyewitness News van was there but they came too late to get anything on video except the empty spot where the ecto had stayed waiting for its man.

  Maybe it was the man that was like a faithful pet of this thing, and it sent him on an errand for it, to bring the fixings for breakfast. Maybe there wasn’t any man at all and what people thought was a man was only a remote-control part of itself that the queen-size mattress of ectoplasm sent into our store in that shape so that it could shop like a person and pay for things the way anybody else would.

  There was a little bit of a run on the Osco liquor department afterward. No problems, though. Very little additional to add. The whole event has caused a lot of people to do some thinking. I mean, the ones who were there. You’ve got your green valleys and you’ve also got your red ones, right?
(Along with your dry wadis and your flash-flood arroyos, if you get what I mean.) And you have to think about where you have come to. I mean, it’s us that have to think about it. (I worked on this report yesterday and I do not mind having to prepare it and if Mr. S. would like reports on a regular basis, I would like to do that.) I need to say that all this is not just about the man in the suit--you can see that. How does this kind of thing happen in this country? I would bet that somebody in the back office is going to want to make an ad out of this for the whole chain, but I think that would be not right--what would you say? That not just people but something, we don’t know what, also shops with us? One copy of this report has been sent to Mr. S. and one to Manager Wei, and I have kept a copy, and I gave one this morning to a man who was out in the parking lot when I was there two nights ago and called me yesterday to ask about it all, if I knew anything more, I don’t know how he found my number, and when I told him I was writing it all up as Mr. S. asked me to, he asked if he could have a copy and he came and got it this morning. I hope it was OK to give it to him. He said he is studying neighborhood dynamics on Clark St., which I certainly do think is a good thing. I mean people need to know about this kind of thing. A patrol car showed up about two hours after the incident, and it was not really apparent to me that they were even interested. I was still there, talking to people, and I personally showed them where it happened.

  /s/Jerry Wozcik

  Group Captain, Night Security

  Time Out!

  Oh let’s say that the great tree that the storm blew down will be set upright and will grow again. It will!

  The wind that pushed it down will stand it up again. Let’s say. You can do it. The storm wasn’t that bad, you’re OK. Just put it behind you, that’s all.

  Who do you blame for your bad luck or your tired lungs or your sagging life? It’s the principle of the thing. Who are these people, let ’em go somewhere else. For Christ’s sake don’t bullshit me. Who’s he, anyway, to try and throw his weight around? Look, all I said was . . . Fight (sport, spectators, partisans, gambling, money, hierarchy, dominion, betrayal, bloodlines, bloodshed, territory, speed, strength, limelight) or flight. Bend or break, rough it, get moving, pack the heat, bring it on.

  Benches, pews, chairs, recliners, bucket seats, stoop steps. Another used car, tractor, half-ton, coffin.

  But didn’t get the promotion recently even though chosen for the parade marshals on the Fourth prestigious the management and research team that took it public then sold on the hobby side of things working groups Rick has kept up with his life-plan of climbing in every state with good peaks rebuilt his cousin’s cabin when his cousin was sick for a year now they share it Chief Information Officer proud father of Sean and Sharon.

  Curly organized the union annual laid off when orders fell carried Mary’s piano just with Abe it was two months then three then four and started spending most of his time at Louise’s fixing up her place cases of beer we wouldn’t even see him funeral was something hardwood floors overhead blue jeans 12-gauge boots riding mower a nice bass boat.

  Aiee! Buy! CT-scan! Dentures! Gunpowder! Hyperconductivity! Urologist! Internal combustion missionary! Lift-off, prayer breakfast, solar, sell, torque, wages—the challenge, the network, the commission. The hernia, ulcer, heart, emphysema, arthritis, baldness, hangovers, back, prostate, hypertension, big C.

  Term life, annual interest, Medicare B, liability and collision, still under warranty, the daughter’s games at school but that boyfriend no never, new whatever for the wife, the boy’s lazy backtalking sad-ass friends, close-out sale on big flatscreens, consolidated with a single loan, identity pirates, indoor-outdoor hassles, minimum wage, job retraining, security system, three gallons of Kelly Green on sale, I don’t trust the cloud, trigger lock, clogged gutters, rent’s overdue, respect’s overdue, discounts on diabetes, what kind of a job is that, previously owned dentists, fucking Comcast bill, but did you ever notice how the labels on so many things at the hardware are so plain and functional, no fancy wrappers, just saying what it is but then you notice the hype and you can’t trust even trust a screwdriver. What happened to the genuine male packaging?

  To say nothing of 117 to 115, 42 to 27, 3 to zip, two kings and three fives. All that striving drives the lives and dries the wives. All the falling prices fail the frail or hale working man and fill his shoes with lunar-panel crash-and-burn get-and-waste gas-and-helectric yee-haw fuck-you.

  Preparations for Winter

  Behind our house, across the small yard, the widow’s house—the nearer widow’s house of the two side by side—seems nearly uninhabited since her husband died. The life inside is so far inside that not even a fingertip touch of it reaches the windows.

  Her losses. Her parents, long ago in some other era so remote that the light from it, which now reaches her only in photos, has shifted to yellow. Then this eight-block community that was once an immigrant enclave, a neighborhood of small frame houses and low brick apartments with, then, neighbors going in and out of the small shops for meat, talk, groceries, solace, alliances. (Now the old ones sometimes reappear—from where? Almost spectral they come down the sidewalks once in a while in summer, and ask the young couples up on their porches with their toddlers if they knew so-and-so who used to live in this house, or the one next door, and the new people have never heard of him, never knew of her.) Then the widow’s children, who grew up and grew older and grew away—all five of them. Then her husband. While she was out, a thief came in and broke off a leg from a dining-table chair and beat him too hard with it in his living room and took her jewelry.

  A year has gone by and now the elm that had filled the sky so hugely with its slow airy striving bulk is gone. I didn’t see the long labor of men surrounding it and crawling up into it and cutting it to pieces, so when I came home that day its disappearance seemed instant. Impossible. The small limbs and the sections of the great trunk were gone; heavy sawn sections of the big limbs lay on the ground. Coming through the new openness, cold new light strikes the back of our house.

  And there wasn’t any waiting for the unmanageable great stump of the felled tree to soften and decay. It was chewed up by mechanical force and violently churned into the earth, as if it had committed a crime against men, whose feeling toward it was an enormous obliterating rage.

  That was a few weeks ago. In her backyard today two young men are building a wooden crib for the elm wood. A third man is working ineffectually and dangerously at splitting some of it with an axe, having to swing it with foolish vehemence against that stubborn damp wood because he doesn’t have a wedge or a maul, probably doesn’t even know he should have one or the other. A young man’s careless foolhardiness might offer the widow a preoccupation she could make good use of. Even if he’s someone she doesn’t know, has merely hired, and whom she might fear or distrust. Here he is, enacting his young disregard for his own limbs and life. But she must be inside her house.

  And didn’t anyone—not either of these men, certainly—tell her that elm won’t burn, that it’s a mistaken economy or convenience to try to use it in her fireplace, that it’s no good for burning and it stinks when it’s lit? And worse—if it died of disease, then if she burns it, the smoke can carry the infection to other elms. Who convinced her to have such a solid crib built for the worthless wood of her elm? She’s been deceived; cheated; led into error.

  But perhaps no one needed to talk her into it. Maybe the two men who aren’t going to tell her they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing are providing her with an unintended gift: the sounds of hammering and a shrill power saw in the still, cold air, the scent of the sawn lumber for the crib, the good wood they’re using to build the crib, and then the enduring of the elm wood. The measuring and cutting and making, their flannel work shirts, torn and stained, their jean jackets and their old jeans, their murmured comments to each other, their breaks to have a smoke. The elm logs are dark, wet, rough, very heavy, they’re the very lifelessness of the
dead tree, still unreduced, still intractable, astonishingly substantial. As if proof had been required by some authority, the tree is now proven dead—its parts will be stacked neatly in the new crib made of other wood, the elm wood will be put into a new shape not that of a tree. Maybe the wood won’t even be carried into the house, maybe it won’t be mistakenly forced to burn—burn, damn you!—against its own sputtering will, in her fireplace—the very tree that presided over every backyard year of the life of the widow and her husband. Maybe she never intended to burn the elm wood.