Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

I got the phone book flipped open at random. Tell me like at the track, I say, and he takes my hand and in his hoarse voice says, Touch the names like you’re touching yourself.

  More, I say. Dirty. Like those poems you wrote me.

  Like you’re fingering that beautiful slick flame in the shadow between your creamy thighs. Like you know I’m watching you do it.

  Dirtier. Tell me something you never told me.

  Take those voluptuous tits out. I love it when your nipples perk up so everyone at the track sees they want to be sucked, but only I get to suck them.

  They’re our tits. I gave them to you. You like them?

  I like squeezing your nipples while I fuck your voluptuous tits. You like that?

  Pinch them hard. Yeah, harder.

  Tell me how you want it, you slut. Tell me the dirtiest thought you ever had.

  Tell me you wanta whip my voluptuous ass.

  What? he says.

  Tell me, you sumnabitch. Like I’m your sparkle horse.

  I wanta whip your voluptuous ass.

  You gotta really want to.

  Phone book’s on the floor, I’m over the chair, his buckle makes this tink as his belt slides from the loops.

  Mark me, I say.

  When the knot on the dishrag comes undone, he stops. We’re both breathing like we been racing up flights of stairs.

  You okay, Rosebush?

  I slide up my slip so he can see the marks.

  He kneels and traces them with a fingertip, slides his finger lower. You’re dripping, he whispers, and wipes my wetness on the marks like salve, then kisses them. Never kissed me like that before, so gentle. The wicks are flickering out, making smacking sounds like his lips. I don’t tell him it ain’t his marks he’s kissing.

  Some crazy night, huh, Rosebud?

  Ain’t over yet, I say.

  I’m shaky like electric’s running through me, and pick up the phone book from where it fell open on the floor, lay it on my lap, close my eyes, and run my finger along the page. To Lionel James. I look up the James column for Lester. There’s Leo and Leonard and Leroy, but no Lester. There’s L James, and Frank says, Let’s try him.

  It’s a her, I say, but Frank calls anyway, lets it ring and ring this tingly ring, then asks, Lester there?

  I can hear L James shouting through the receiver. Frank hands me the phone like it’s burning his hand: “Middle of the fucking night, you dumbassed shitkicking motherfuck.” A woke-up girl baby’s crying behind her.

  It’s hopeless, Rosebush, Frank says, and starts to cry, too, his face pressed against my legs, the fans whirring at different voooms, me turning pages in the phone book. He’s got his head cradled in his arms like he’s mercifully asleep when I tell him, Frank, he’s one of them guys with two first names. It’s right here, James Lester living on Martin Luther King Drive.

  Could be him! I don’t fucking believe it! Only Lester lives in a housing project. Frank gets up off the floor, grabs the phone, and starts dialing the number.

  Better wait till morning, I tell him.

  No fucking way. Maybe it ain’t him. The phone rings and rings like before, but this time it’s a man’s voice finally answers.

  Lester, Frank says, what happened to you, my man?

  Frank’s looking at me, smiling this nasty smile the whole time he’s carrying on his cheery, bullshit side of the conversation: Those racist bastards, Lester, and you with Parkinson’s … You got the money? Good man … Yeah, you earned extra for your trouble … We’ll discuss it … Don’t worry, of course we’ll renegotiate. I’m coming down … Where you living? They got it wrong in the phone book. No, now, Lester … We got to celebrate. You wait up for me. I’m bringing a cold six-pack and an everything pizza.

  He moved to the Lawless Gardens project, Frank says. They named that right.

  Let it wait till morning, Frank.

  Can’t, Rosebush. Too much could happen between now and then. I got to get it before he brags to some friend who’ll immediately be figuring how to screw him out of it. Don’t worry, Rosebud, we’re still on a roll.

  Don’t give him more percentage than the tax woulda been. He didn’t do nothing to win that money, Frank. Suppose he’s already told someone and they’re setting you up. It ain’t worth risking your life out there at this hour.

  You let me worry about that, Rosebush. I wasn’t born fucking yesterday.

  He loads the gun he stole off a freight shipment. Handguns were the most prized thing people at the railroad yard stole. You could always sell them, but this one’s a six-shooter, a cowboy pistol, and when he brought it home, Frank said it was to keep under the bar at the Four Deuces. Of course we didn’t own the Four Deuces yet, but Frank was planning for the future.

  A night to remember, huh, Rosebush? Frank says, and he’s out the door.

  I got a bad feeling about this. I fall into bed thinking I won’t sleep mercifully, too many thoughts, and lay there watching lightning, knowing I should turn off the window fan because a downpour’s coming to break the heat, but I can’t move and don’t hear the rain or thunder or nothing until that tink a Frank’s belt wakes me. He’s undressing. The window fan’s off.

  What happened? I ask.

  Got the money, Frank says, and now I gotta get some sleep. Never been more tired, Rosebush.

  How much you have to end up giving him, Frank?

  So very very fucking tired, Rosie. And he falls into bed half dressed and he’s out, rasping in his sleep like having nightmares, like not just his voice but his breath got hoarse at Sportsman’s. I cover him with the bedspread and watch him while it gets light, wondering what he’s dreaming.

  When he wakes up it’s afternoon and we go together to see Verman, and put money down and shake on the deal for the bar. Then me and Frank have a drink, sitting right where you are, Rafael, and Frank says, Look around, Rosebud, it’s all ours now. We clink glasses and I see the two of us, Frank that sumnabitch and me, staring back smiling from the foggy mirror behind the bar, framed by dusty Christmas lights.

  Never went to the track again. Frank was convinced the IRS was waiting for him there.

  The cowboy six-shooter? No, I don’t keep a loaded gun under the bar. I asked Frank about it once after we bought the Deuces, during an epidemic of robberies in the neighborhood, and he says he couldn’t apply for a permit for no stolen piece, so he sold it, and don’t mention it again. That was the first time I wondered if Frank had some hiding place, you know, a strongbox or a safe, where he stashed the stuff he stole—the gun, the perfume and jewelry he’d give me on birthdays as if he’d bought them. He always had some deal going. He did the books for the bar, and there was all kinds of unreported income he hid from the IRS.

  The Deuces was doing all right. We were our own bosses like Frank predicted. And our own flunkies, like he didn’t—bars are work. He put in a kitchen and I cooked—potato soup, goulash, kielbasa, chili—like that, and we’d get a lunch crowd from the train yards and factories along Rockwell.

  I’ll tell you when that gun came back to mind—five years later, after my miscarriage. I carried that baby nearly to term, working the kitchen the whole time. Was going to be Frank, Jr., if it was a boy, but I told Frank, I knew she was a girl. Frank wanted to name her Bunny after our good luck, and I said, No way, Playboy ruined that name, but how about Harriet?

  That’s good, Rosebud, Frank says, laughing, Harriet, very clever, I love it.

  So that was the name we put on the gravestone.

  There a special Angel of Death who comes just for the little ones? God should at least make it less scary for them—send something gentle like a butterfly, so beautiful you don’t think it’s taking you away forever. As they were lowering the casket in the ground I made them stop and spilled water from the flowers on it to baptize her.

  Guess I went a little crazy after that. Nearly died myself of sepsis and when I said I wished I had, they put me on meds and I couldn’t get outta bed. Frank closed the kitchen and worke
d the bar alone. I spent a year in a stupor, and woke up fat and faded, with gray in my hair, and one afternoon I put on a dress, the only one that still fit, and went downstairs and started cooking again.

  Maybe I had an intuition, because my first Saturday night back in the kitchen, the Widow comes in. For all I know she’d been coming for nightcaps the whole time I was upstairs zonked. She sat where you’re sitting—silky black dress, black nylons, dark movie-star glasses, like maybe her eyes were puffy from tears a grief. Believe that and I got a bridge to sell you. Heels, dyed hair braided with a black ribbon, manicured nails same red as her lips. Perfume you could smell through the cigar smoke. Frank waits on her and she orders Chopin neat, tells Frank he got a sexy voice, asks, Do you sing? And when he answers, Not lately, she sashays to the jukebox and plays “Strangers in the Night,” and gets him to sing along with her on the do-be-do-be-do part. See, I’m why there’s Sinatra to play. I swear if she’d of played “Wild Horses,” I’d of come outta the kitchen and unplugged the jukebox. Soon as the music starts, Frank that sumnabitch turns off the ball game on the TV, something we never do, but none of the regulars complained. They were all like bewitched, do-be-do-be-do-ing. With the jukebox playing, I couldn’t hear from the kitchen whatever else she and Frank was talking about, but I see him buy her the next round on the house. She takes a cigarette from a silver case and Frank lights her and takes one hisself when she offers. They touch glasses and none too ladylike she belts it down, exhales like blowing a kiss, and leaves a ten-spot tip. Never seen her in the Deuces again even though she lived just across the alley.

  Our new neighbor, Frank tells me. Nice of her to come in and introduce herself. She’s Polish. Moved here from Springfield after her politician husband passed away. Said his real estate company owned half the block, including Pani Bozak’s old house. Must of left her well off.

  If she got money, why in the hell’d she move here? I ask. Why’s she living in a house that sat all boarded up? I thought that place was condemned. Did you tell her how Pani Bozak was found dead with her eyes pecked out?

  Frank goes, That’s just superstition, dumbass like the kids around here who used to torment that old ba-ba for being a witch. Fixing that place up will be good for property values. She said after living downstate she was homesick for where people speak Polish and still remember what Solidarno meant.

  Solidarno! Yo, Frank, try Viva Zapata! You said yourself Twenty-second looks like Tijuana. You never noticed how a native-born Pole thinks American Polacks are ignorant? Maybe she needed a neighborhood where she can look down on people, and by the way, when’d you start smoking again?

  Just being friendly, Frank says. Friendly’s good business.

  And who comes into a neighborhood dump like the Deuces dressed like it’s the goddamn Copacabana?

  Ain’t no dump, Rosie, Frank says.

  I have to tell you, Frank, it’s got to looking uncared-for.

  I done the best I could on my own, Rosie, while you was upstairs.

  There’s a two-bedroom flat upstairs. One of the bedrooms, Frank’s so-called office, was going to be for Harriet. Frank had it piled with magazines and paperbacks—Forbes, Bartender, Wild West, Railway Collector, his Best Loved Poems of the American People, old opera LPs he wouldn’t pitch. He was a pack rat. He called it being a collector. Boxes of greasy, old-smelling junk—flares, padlocks, warning flags, signs, bells, timetables, engineer caps, kerosene lanterns. Toward the end of his career as a railroad dick he went on a spree. If it wasn’t nailed down Frank collected it. Hell, if it was nailed down the sumnabitch stole the nails—spikes, wooden ties, switches. Claimed there were people who’d pay for railroad memorabilia. So he moves his junk out onto the enclosed back porch along with his desk, file cabinet, La-Z-Boy, and a kerosene space heater from Sears, which I never trusted—every winter in the neighborhood there’s fires from those things and carbon monoxide. Frank insisted they burn odorless, but I can smell it. We fixed up Harriet’s room real nice. He never moved back.

  I never liked that porch. When we first moved in I tried to have morning glories, but the light back there’s no good. Not to mention the pigeons—generations homing from before Verman probably, their crap crusted like concrete. I hate that smell of shit and feathers when it rains. Horny bull pigeons pacing the sills, puffed up, making that nonstop spooky ooh-ooh like a backyard of ghosts. I asked, Frank, ain’t there some way to get ridda them?

  He bought a sumnabitching pack a M-80s, and blew off a couple, which scared the flock across the alley to Pani Bozak’s, where they could shit up her yard, not like it mattered cause she kept illegal chickens, and a one-legged rooster that woke up the neighborhood. Next day the pigeons are back on our side.

  I go, Frank, how about a BB gun or rat poison?

  What you need’s an owl, Frank says. Pigeons are terrified of owls. That’s what they do to scare them off the skyscrapers downtown—set a plastic owl out like a scarecrow and it keeps them away for good.

  You’re talking a bird a prey, not the cigar, right, Frank?

  Real funny, Rosie, he says.

  But the sumnabitch never bothered bringing home an owl, so I avoided the porch. It was Frank’s new office for “doing the books,” an activity that looked a lot like reading Wild West paperbacks, listening to the ball game, drinking beer, taking naps, and scribbling in the spiral notebook he kept in his back pocket. When we were young, he wrote his poems and his predictions about the races in those notebooks. I hadn’t seen him writing in them since we stopped going to Sportsman’s.

  I asked him, What you always scribbling lately?

  Just words, he says.

  What kinda words?

  Words I see going by on trains.

  Like what? Get Fucked, Blow Me?

  Yeah, Rosie, like Get Fucked.

  One Saturday I hear the opera station mixed up with the creepy pigeons. Usually Frank played it quiet cause opera annoys me. But it’s blaring. I walk to the porch and he’s standing by the windows looking out, waving his arms like he’s Pavarotti. Jumped like I’d caught him in the act. I look out the window to see what he’s singing at. Across the alley, where there used to be Pani Bozak’s chickens pecking at a dirt yard, there’s the Widow’s laundry hanging on a pulley clothesline from her back window. What sun shines back there’s shining through her flimsy black panties. It’s like Frederick’s of Hollywood: lacy slips, camisoles, D-cup bras, nylons—not pantyhose—silk nylons like she was wearing when she sashayed into the Deuces, like women used to wear with garter belts. You see underclothes like that and know why they’re called unmentionables. Everything’s black but her bedsheets, silk sheets that must of cost a fortune. With every breeze, her panties wave on the line like pennants over a used car lot.

  I go, Enjoying the view?

  I was just wondering the color of those sheets, Frank says, all innocent.

  Sumnabitch is right—in the sun those sheets ain’t white or silver, pink or peach. They’re pearly. I never laid eyes on such beautiful sheets. Obviously she wants the world to see what she lays her rich ass down on. I go, If she’s so goddamn rich, why don’t she let the Chinese do her laundry?

  Probably wants it smelling fresh, Frank says.

  That yard smells like chickens and cat piss, I say. And how come she still got the back door boarded up? That place still looks condemned. So much for property values.

  Frank just shrugs. Then the sumnabitch asks, Ever wonder what it must feel like to sleep on sheets like that?

  Words can be a slap in the face, but that was a sucker punch. Knocked the breath out of me. I suddenly knew, plain as the nose on a face, something was going on. That the weaselly sumnabitch was in so deep he couldn’t hide it. He hadda play the opera loud, hadda be writing poems again in those notebooks, hadda be sneaking out at night, hadda ask, You ever think what sleeping on those sheets is like, cause that’s all he can think about. Maybe it’s his way a telling me he already has.

  Maybe the sumnabit
ch thinks after over a year I still ain’t awake. Well, that woke me up. I don’t say nothing. But my mind’s racing about how when I’m laying sick upstairs, he’d taken to going out at night after closing the bar, like walking the dog, except we ain’t got a dog.

  Frank, where you going? I’d ask.

  Just for a walk to clear my head, Rosie. I don’t get enough exercise. You go back to sleep.

  You taking a shower before going for a walk?

  I stink from the bar, he says. That cigar smoke gives me migraines. You know they’re finding smoke’s a BOH.

  B O Wha?

  Bartender occupational hazard. Like black lung for miners.

  When he’d come back, God knows what time, I’d smell cigarettes on him and figured the sumnabitch was going out cause he was smoking again on the sly.

  It’s late, Frank. Where’d you walk to?

  Over to the yards to see the trains rumble by. You know I like watching the trains. I miss their smell. Tonight I saw a boxcar go by with RAGE on it, and the next car said RAGE, too, and the next car said AGAINST, and the next THE DYING … then OF THE … and the last car said LIGHT.

  People sure write some weird shit on trains.

  If you just read stuff on one car, yeah, but put all the cars together and there’s patterns, like messages. The sound of trains keeps some people up. Me, it cures insomnia.

  Since when you got insomnia?

  Insomnia’s a BOH—having a screwed-up clock. Midnight for normal people’s noon to bartenders. Go back to sleep, Rosie. Be glad you can.

  Go to sleep, Rosie. Oh, yeah. I don’t say nothing, cause trying to talk would be like choking. And what if I’m wrong? It’s just possible the sumnabitch is so goddamn oblivious it never occurred to him not to ask the woman he’s married to whether she ever wondered what it would be like sleeping on some slut’s sheets.

  Oblivious or not, the sumnabitch don’t know I’m on to him, and that means it’s me holding the four deuces, a hand he don’t see coming from that single deuce showing on the table. I got the luxury of waiting to pounce, watching him dig hisself deeper. It calms me down when I realize it. Gives me patience.