Another Perfect Catastrophe

by Brad Barkley

  “Okay,” he said. “I will get it. If Earl here is any good at climbing trees.”

  Earl looked up at him, the pink doll in his hand, the Rusty’s Liquors key chain still looped around its neck. “I can,” he said. “Just let me up that tree.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Nelson said. He touched Earl on the shoulder.

  “Nelson, it’s getting dark out, and he needs to ask his grandma anyway.” Brenda was at the front of the store, working the counter.

  “Well, ask her, then, and we’ll go first thing tomorrow, soon as you open up here.” Earl nodded and ran off to ask. Myra let a handful of coins rain through her fingers and into her pocket, a nervous habit she’d never let go, a souvenir of her old life.

  “Party starts at one,” she said. “And you wear something bright. You show up wearing some old dark suit and a black armband, I won’t let you in the door.”

  “I’ll wear a Hawaiian shirt, Myra. I’ll wave bye-bye if it makes you happy.”

  By early the next morning, Myra had filled the sorting table at the back of the store with her own old stuff, boxed and gift wrapped. Roxie was there already, too, had left that morning wearing a bright sundress. She’d brought with her salsa and guacamole, and was busying herself in the back, setting out paper cups and napkins. Nelson pulled Earl away from the smells of champagne punch and cake, toward his truck in the parking lot. Right away, Earl began asking every question he could think of, wondering if he could try driving, if the truck could do a wheelie, what it was that Nelson had stacked in the back of the truck.

  “I know something you’d like,” Nelson said. He jumped up into the bed and patted his hand against one of the tanks of helium he had to deliver to Pizza Palace, the top of the tank painted to look like a clown. Nelson turned the nozzle and let the cold gas blow inside his mouth, sucking down mouthfuls of it.

  “Rady to climb that tree, Earl?” Nelson said in a high, Donald Duck voice. Earl only looked at Nelson and blinked.

  “How did you do that?” He looked a little bit afraid.

  “Helium,” Nelson said, his voice normal again.” It’s an old trick.”

  In the cab of the truck, Earl opened the glove compartment and pushed his doll inside, dug around under the seats for bottle caps and spare change, and would not stop asking questions. Soon enough they pulled up in front of Mary Alice’s house and Nelson set the brake.

  “This is the place, and that’s the tree,” Nelson said. “Think you can handle it?”

  “I climbed bigger trees when I was a baby.” He pulled his doll from the glove box and stuffed it into his jeans pocket. Nelson headed to the front door to tell Mary Alice that they would be climbing her tree. Across the yard his boots broke through into the tunnels, the weeds caving with each step. Stapled to the door was a second notice to condemn, this one bigger, the names and dates all filled in with ink. He knocked, heard her movements inside, cupped his hands against the glass. He saw nothing but stacks of newspapers, a box of grocery store fire logs. Behind him, he heard crying.

  Earl had climbed up about twelve feet and gotten stuck in the lower branches of the oak, afraid to move up or jump down. Nelson walked toward him, stepping into holes, turning his ankles. The Chihuahuas lay sleeping at the base of the tree. Beside them was the vinyl snake, flattened and full of tiny bite marks. It was late morning, the sun high above them, the shadow of the tree narrow and dark green. The plastic daisies slowly turned in a faint breeze. The party would start in an hour, and he imagined them already opening their presents, smiling and kissing Myra as she gave away little bits of her life. Earl sat on one branch, clutching the other above him, his doll on the ground, in the roots of the tree where he had dropped it. The first cluster of mistletoe was at least forty feet above him, impossible to reach.

  “Come down out of there,” Nelson said.

  “I can’t,” he said. His glasses had slid down his nose, and he let go just long enough to push them up.

  “Sure, and I’ll catch you. We’ll see about your doll.”

  Nelson heard the screen door squeak and turned to see Mary Alice step onto the porch. She grabbed the bottom of the condemn notice and pulled on it, leaning back and shaking until the cardboard tore loose of the staples. She wore a man’s suit-coat over her dress, and held the condemn notice to her chest like a girl carrying schoolbooks.

  “You get that boy out of that tree,” she yelled, her voice watery. “Before he breaks his neck.”

  “I think she means it, son,” Nelson said.

  Without another word, Earl turned and slid backward out of the tree, and Nelson caught him under the arms. Nelson told him to wait in the truck, then walked over to Mary Alice.

  “Did you come about those moles?” she asked him. “My daughter-in-law hates me.”

  For godsake, Nelson thought, and closed his eyes a moment. This is what it came to. You live your life the best way you can, and this is what’s waiting for you at the end.

  “Ma’am? I have to tell you, I think those moles are here to stay.”

  Her mouth worked noiselessly, as if searching out words. Nelson turned to leave. He didn’t know what else to do. As he moved across the yard, the dirt gave way again and he stumbled, tore his pants and his knee on the rocky ground.

  “Goddammit,” he said. He walked around the back of the house, found a pile of rusting tools next to the water meter, and dug through until he found a shovel with a broken handle. He carried it to the front, jabbed the blade in the ground, and levered his weight against it, spading up the tunnels. His hands shook as he dug, his breath escaping in wet bursts. Again and again, he stuck the shovel into the dirt until he unearthed a nest of moles, white and shrunken, writhing on the blade. He stopped, his breath ragged. They were no larger than his thumb, hairless, their eyes tiny slits. He watched them move, blind and so narrowly alive. He dumped them onto the hard ground, put the blade against the first one, and severed it in two. He killed another, then another, as a tiny pool spread across the dirt.

  “You gonna mash ‘em all?” Earl spoke, standing suddenly in front of Nelson, watching him. Nelson leaned on the shovel and looked across the wide expanse of yard, the network of tunnels. There would be hundreds of them, thousands, more. Tiny and white and blind, filling the ground under Mary Alice’s house. He looked around. Mary Alice ignored them now, and sat on the porch bench tearing strips off the condemn notice and stuffing them into her ruined shoes.

  He let his breathing settle down. “I guess I’m not,” he said. He lifted the remaining moles, watched as they tried to burrow into the blade, then turned his wrist so that they fell back into the hole. Just as he began scooping dirt back into the hole, Earl dropped his doll down the tunnel.

  Nelson stopped shoveling. “What are you doing?”

  Earl shrugged. “He got killed when he fell out of that tree.”

  “Baloney. I’ll fix it up for you, good as new.”

  Earl shrugged. “It don’t matter.”

  “Are you sure?” Earl nodded and Nelson spaded up a blade-ful of soil, buried the doll with the moles. He packed the dirt with his foot, replaced the shovel, and on the way back to the truck retrieved the ruined snake.

  “What’s that?” Earl said.

  “A blow-up snake,” Nelson said. “It’s supposed to scare things away, but I don’t think it’s working.”

  Earl shook his head and waited for Nelson to explain. Nelson found a roll of duct tape on the floorboard of the truck and patched the vinyl, the copperhead spotted with squares of gray. After three hard puffs left him breathless, Nelson climbed into the bed of the truck and turned the nozzle on the Pizza Palace helium tank. He opened the valve of the snake and let it swallow the hiss of gas, slowly filling along its length. When it was tight he closed off the nozzle, and bounced the copperhead like a ball on the air.

  “Got one more job for you,” Nelson said.

  “What?” Earl reached and touched the snake.

  “See how long you can keep
your eye on it, not let it out of your sight.” Nelson pulled away his hand and the snake rose, twisting as it ascended, shifting on thermals and faint breezes. It pulled away over the tree and the house, over the fast-food places and car lots, over Mary Alice filling her shoes with cardboard, over the Laundromat five miles away where the party was starting, Myra laughing and laughing with all her old friends. Earl stood cupping his hands to his eyes, serious and intent. The snake lifted higher still, rose to a faint ink squiggle against the sky, and then, in the time it takes one moment to become the next, disappeared.

  Those Imagined Lives

  Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

  —Stephen Hawking

  Across three dap of driving from West Virginia to northern Utah, Weimer had turned the word over in his head, fingering its crevices and edges: Affair. This, after the stilled and empty days following the events that the word represented, after the talks and affirmations, the reprehensions and admittances, and after Shawna had broken seven of the ceramic serving platters she made and sold through gift shops in Berkeley Springs. Weimer would have favored more noise and anguish, would have preferred the platters smashed against the wall to the way Shawna had lifted them one at a time, snapped them over her knee, and quietly stacked the ruined pieces on the kitchen table.

  Somewhere near 1-80 in Nebraska, he’d allowed himself a last thought of Leah Bowen (her bulky hair, that tiny gap in her teeth) and resolved to turn his thoughts back to his good and faithful Shawna, his undeserved Shawna, back to that sad stripe of clay down the thigh of her jeans. In the same moment, he decided that he didn’t like the word, after all. Affair. He said it out loud to the car, to the fast-food wrappers on the floorboard, to the announcer on the radio. The word made him think of the movies his younger colleagues preferred, those old black-and-whites they found in the classics section of the video store. Affair. A Cary Grant word, or William Holden. Martinis and cigarettes and cobbled streets in Paris. It romanticized what had been nothing more than three months of occasional, almost rote afternoons in the apartment of the young woman who ran the AmeriCorps program at the high school where Weimer taught physics and calculus, a woman who e-mailed him because the phone took too much time, who attended weekend raves over in Morgantown (“West Virginia has raves?” Weimer had said, when she told him). After he finally called things off, she shrugged, said, “Yeah, all right,” and offered him a Dos Equis.

  Entanglement, he’d tried for a while, when he was only ten miles from Lisk’s house in the middle of God-knows-where, and after he’d left phone messages for Shawna, talking to his own machine in response to his own invitation to do so, and after his Frank Sinatra CD had gotten stuck in the player, then the paperclip he used to try to retrieve the CD, then the Bic cap he used to try to retrieve that.

  Entanglement wasn’t it, either.

  “Warm bodies,” Lisk said, an hour later. “That’s the phrase you’re looking for. See, you want to objectify the whole thing, when all we’re really talking is a few lies from your mouth and an exchange of fluids, right? You fucked and you fucked up. They sound alike, bro, but the concepts are way different.” He thought for a second. “What do they call that?”

  An old corduroy couch occupied most of the small deck on the front of Lisks modular house where they sat drinking tequila sunrises, staring off at the flat, black loaf of 1-80 cooking in the August heat. A corner of the deck was taken up by a decent-size Dob telescope, which belonged to Lisks girlfriend, Maysoon, an astrophysicist, the real thing, who’d moved to the desert to continue her work on dark matter, doing large-scale velocity measurements at the university while working on a digitized model of the universe. Her work brought her here, as Lisk’s troubles with the feds had brought him; no one, Lisk said, ended up here by accident.

  “What do they call what?” Weimer said. He drank and watched Lisk, who was watching the ice in his drink. They had not seen each other in five years, though they’d stayed in touch with late-night phone calls and their correspondence games of chess.

  “You know, words that pull double duty like that,” Lisk said.

  “Homonyms,” Maysoon said from behind them. She brought them each a thick hamburger lush with ketchup and onion, plus french fries heaped on a paper plate. She bit deeply into her burger, her tiny frameless glasses moving as she chewed, the octagonal lenses obscuring her dark-eyed intelligence. Weimer had always thought her oddly attractive with her choppy hair, her crooked teeth, her smoothed and angled face of vaguely Asian origins. She was five months pregnant and wearing a black sports bra, the smooth, brown camber of her bare stomach beautiful and insistent. Weimer wished then that Shawna hadn’t draped herself with those maternity tents when she’d been pregnant, or that he’d asked to see the progression of her own curving flesh.

  “Hey, bro,” Lisk said, “I want to show you something.”

  Weimer chewed. “Is it legal?” Lisk had started his arsenal of guns at fourteen and had been growing it ever since, along with all his trouble and paranoia.

  Lisk shrugged. “Out here, no one cares.”

  “You know, there are translanguage homonyms,” Maysoon said. Her burger was gone already, like a magic trick.

  “What do you mean?” Weimer asked.

  “My mentor, Dr. Van der Shaar, never says a word, right? He gets a little drunk at a faculty party and starts telling us this stuff. You know what this means, ‘fry’?” She held up one of her soggy french fries.

  “Not a clue,” Weimer said.

  “The car,” Lisk said, ignoring her, too caught up in his own plans. “Did you see it out back?”

  “In Dutch,” Maysoon said, “‘fry’ sounds exactly like ‘vrij,’ which means T make love’.” She smiled at Weimer. For a few seconds, he tried to pretend she was flirting. “Ask me what ‘Spain’ means,” she said.

  “It means ‘Weimer is still pissing his life away,’ “Lisk said.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Weimer said.

  Lisk grabbed his forearm. “You didn’t answer me. The Impala, did you see it?”

  “I did. It’s a beauty. Especially if you’re fifty-five years old and it’s 1973.”

  Lisk’s wet mouth hung open. “Hey, I paid a good eighty bucks for that car. Eighty bucks that’s supposed to go to Uncle Sam.”

  “Your good, old Uncle Sam,” Weimer said. “Have you two patched things up?”

  “He tends to hold a grudge,” Lisk said.

  “‘Spain’ means ‘nipple,’ “Maysoon told them. She frowned this time. “Language is like … rubber. I don’t see how the linguistics people stand it.” She held her hands under her belly, like a five-year-old holding a bowling ball. Then she looked up at the sky. She was always, in all the years he’d known her, looking up at the sky without the benefit of her Dob or light collectors, with only her naked eye, as if something might happen up there and she would miss the whole thing. She leaned back to look, her throat long and smooth. How much time had passed since Weimer had taken notice of Shawna s throat, of those little wisps of hair along her neck, the freckles on her upper chest, all the things that had drawn him into what he assumed to be, having no other words for it, love with her? The thin whisper of guilt in his ear, asking real questions instead of the rhetorical kind. And so he guessed a long time as his answer, thinking that maybe thirteen years had exponentially dulled his ability to see her. Then again, his brain argued back, when he did see her, it was always just that. Just her.

  He’d thought of all these things during the drive up, when he wasn’t thinking of ways to name his betrayal (Betrayal?), thought of his wife and the woman she’d made herself into over their space of life together, and he tried to see her not as his wife but as some separate being, an entity apart from him, and it shocked him, right outside Provo, how easy it was to do this. Not because of his apartness from her, but because of hers from him. His misplacing (Misplacement?) of affection had been this dumb, blind, weighted thing, a wrecking b
all swung at midnight through the mortared center of their lives, but instead of demolishing her it had simply broken her free. Freedom from or freedom to, he wondered, recalling some undergraduate course in ethics. But of course it was freedom from, always freedom from; that’s why she’d been so calm when she destroyed her ceramics. And why the whole thing scared him down to his bone marrow. What—the question insisted itself, the sum of all his worry—had he done?

  “So what’s with the car?” he asked Lisk.

  “Schemes, plots.” Lisk drank. Maysoon slid her chair next to his and took his hand. “Game plans and contrivances.”

  Weimer nodded and looked out over the flattened landscape, the long hyphen of highway visible to them, the puncture of sunlight in the sky. Their backyard, Lisk had said, was thirty thousand acres of salt flats. The air here smelled vaguely of burned laundry, and try as he might, he could see no potential for anything resembling a game plan or contrivance in all this emptiness. But he didn’t say this, knowing that Lisk would shake his head and accuse Weimer of yet another failure of imagination. Their last year at Hopkins, Lisk had made plans to go do service observations for Goddard, while Weimer had quietly taken a teaching job at the Catholic high school. Since then, whenever Weimer complained about his job, Lisk would shake his head as if some tragedy had occurred, and say to Weimer, always, the same thing: “Welt, mi amigo, don’t blame the macrocosm if you opt for triviality.”

  They sat drinking and watching the slow arc of the sun toward evening. At one point Weimer realized that he’d been here five hours and had not yet been inside the house. Three times he and Lisk had ambled out into the sagebrush to pee, and once Lisk had pulled a pistol from his belt and fired it off into the empty desert. Weimer looked at him, only half-surprised. These were old habits. Lisk himself had of course gotten older and thicker. His hair, which he still wore in a thin, braided ponytail, had mostly disappeared on top, as if it had escaped down his back with bedsheets knotted together. And he still wore the black-framed army-issue glasses, their clunkiness lending him the look of some late-sixties underground radical group member. This was, Weimer had always supposed, his reason for wearing them.