by Ben Fountain
Just your basic lunch date, that was the tone of it. They hung up, and Melissa decided that she didn’t feel crazy. It seemed, rather, that reality itself had gone mad, and she was riding her own little scrap of sanity through the cosmic whirlwind.
Thursday was hot and sluggish, the sky hazed over with a scum of cloud the color of congealed bacon grease. The air had a dense, malarial weight—there’d been a rare outbreak near Myrtle Beach, more evidence of global warming—and driving out to the trailer Melissa cranked the air conditioning so high that her spit curls jumped and spun like small tornadoes. They got on the subject of Rhee’s boyfriend, a retired Delta Force sergeant who raised compe tition roses. “He sounds neat,” Melissa said, tobacco rows flashing past like shuffled cards. “You guys serious?”
“We’re seriously happy,” Rhee said, “with the way things are. We’ve got each other and got our space and that’s just fine. Neither one of us is interested in shacking up.”
“I hear those Delta Force guys are pretty tough.”
“Sure,” Rhee answered in an offhand voice. She watched the low sandy hills roll past, the scrubby brakes of saw brier and slash pine. “Men are funny, though. I never met one yet who didn’t need to be mothered at least a little bit. And I think people underestimate that side of sex, the maternal side of what goes on in bed. There’s a wild thing and there’s a needing thing, but nobody ever talks about that needing thing. Makes us all feel too vulnerable, I guess.”
“Sex is a swamp,” Melissa said by way of agreement. She turned off the paved road onto the mashed-granola track that led to the trailer, the woods closing around them like a green fog. Poplar and pine shafted through the porous undercanopy, the arching sprays of dogwood and pin oak; Melissa believed there was something watchful about deep woods, a biding if not quite sentient presence, like a block of vacant houses. Through the tunnel of trees they could make out the clearing ahead, the light flooding the open space with a jewel-box glow. “How nice,” Rhee exclaimed as they pulled into the clearing. The trailer was a long aluminum carton with flimsy black shutters, but Melissa had softened the package as best she could, with azaleas and flower beds planted along its length like piles of oversized throw pillows. Inside she showed her cousin to the spare bedroom, tensing as she opened the door. Today the altar seemed even gaudier than usual, as resistant to reason as a blaring jukebox. Rhee approached it with her hands clasped in front of her. Melissa lingered by the door, wondering what she was supposed to do.
“I guess you want to be alone?”
“Doesn’t matter!” Rhee answered briskly.
But Melissa felt an urgent need to be useful. She left, quietly shutting the door behind her, and went to the kitchen to fix lunch, where she reflected on the therapeutic value of staying busy. Which might explain, it occurred to her as she spooned out chicken salad, why the women in her family were such dazzling cooks? A few minutes later she was setting the table and heard a thump down the hall, a muffled fumbling as if a sack of potatoes had hit the floor.
“Rhee?”
In the den the fake-antique clock gave three iron ticks.
“Rhee, are you all right?”
Melissa walked down the hall and tapped at the door. “Rhee, is everything okay?” Melissa cracked open the door to find her cousin spreadeagled on the shag pile, eyes closed, mouth wide to the sky, a blissed-out stoner look on her face. Melissa was to her in a second, kneeling to check her pulse and set a palm to her forehead—her pulse was even, her breathing deep and steady as the tides. Whatever was happening, Melissa decided, was a psychic, as opposed to a medical, episode, and so she sat and eased Rhee’s head onto her lap, wiping the slug track of drool from her cousin’s chin. There followed a prolonged series of non-moments, an enforced though not unpleasant lull like waiting in traffic for a train to pass—Melissa sat there stroking her cousin’s hair and listening to the birds outside the window, the cicadas buzzing like tiny chain saws. A luxurious sense of calm stole over her, a suspension of anxieties both large and small; suddenly the strangeness of things didn’t matter so much. After a while she lost all feeling of the floor, as if she were floating, enwombed in her own sphere of weightlessness, and then she realized that she was thinking of Dirk, her rambling and not-very-focused thoughts suffused with an aura of tenderness. She did love her husband, she felt sure of that; a revelation seemed to be building from this basic point, but Rhee’s eyes were fluttering open, startled at first, then locking onto Melissa from upside-down.
“Ahhh,” she said, smiling through a long sigh. “Melissa.”
“Be still.”
“No, it’s okay, I’m fine. I saw her, Lissa, she’s beautiful, she’s a beautiful black sister.” Rhee was grunting, hoisting herself into a sitting position like a mechanic crawling out from under a car. “I saw the white one too but she was farther back, it was the sister front and center today. Whoa,” she ran a hand through her hair, “that was strong.”
“Are you all right?”
“Sure, just got to get my head back. I’d love some water by the way, and a couple of Motrin if you got it.” She was rolling to her knees, determined to stand; Melissa helped her out to the kitchen, where she accepted a chair at the table. “One gorgeous sister,” she was saying, “deep, deep black skin, and beautiful braided hair right down to her butt. A killer body, oh my goodness she was something.”
“Uh-huh,” Melissa said, moving from sink to cabinet.
“Techy,” Rhee went on, “sort of a diva, a real queen-bee type. And old, she’s been around from the beginning. One of the ancients.”
“Right.” Melissa was glad for this small task to do. “So did she, ah, talk?”
Rhee thought for a moment. “Actually, no! Not that I remember. We just stared at each other for a while. Sometimes it’s like that.”
“But sometimes they do. Speak, I mean.” Melissa placed the Motrin and water on the table and sat.
“Not really speak.” Rhee’s eyes widened as a pill went down. “It’s more like sending. Direct thoughts going back and forth.”
“Oh.” Melissa watched the second pill disappear. She gathered her nerve; there was really no smooth way to say this. “Is she evil, do you think?”
“Oh heavens, Melissa, how should I know? She’s a power that’s come into your life, a force, a source, a cause, whatever you want to call it. Nature and then some, that’s how I look at it.” Rhee blew out her lips with a rubbery sound. “Beyond that you’ve got to work it out on your own. I can help you up to a point, but whether it’s good or bad, that’s pretty much up to you. You’re the only person who can figure that out.”
For some reason Melissa was more or less expecting this, a variation on the once-familiar grow up theme; apparently adulthood required you to be your own best psychic as well. They ate lunch, though Rhee was logy and barely picked at her food; on the drive back into town she fell asleep. Melissa nudged her awake as they pulled into the law firm’s parking lot.
“Are you okay to drive?”
“I’m fine,” Rhee said. She seemed a little out of it.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes, no problem!”
“Well.” Melissa watched her cousin hunt around for her purse. “Thank you. I don’t know how to thank you enough.”
“Oh Lissa, what little I did I was happy to do. We’re family! And you and I are buddies too, sort of the wild hairs of the clan. But believe me, they all show up at my door sooner or later.”
Melissa giggled; she felt relief, along with a burning need to know. “Who?”
“Life is so much more interesting than people think!” Rhee found her purse and heaved at the door. “You’d be amazed. Take care, Lissa.”
Melissa arrived home that evening to find a message from Dirk on the answering machine—he would be late, a SOC briefing was going to keep him at the base. She changed clothes and went for a run, then started on supper while the sweat wicked off her skin, leaving a gummy residue like tree sap
. The dusk was deep enough to see fireflies through the windows when she noticed the silence; usually she put on music and sang while she cooked, but tonight she’d forgotten, a lapse that brought on a fit of self-consciousness. She stopped what she was doing and listened, staring out the window at the trees. After a minute she began to feel afraid, the fear grounded in a near-religious conviction that James was out there in the woods, watching her. Abruptly she turned and stepped across the kitchen to the door; after locking it she stood there with her head bowed, listening, her hand on the deadbolt latch. After a moment she turned the latch again, unlocking it.
So if you really thought he was out there, would you do that? Are you really so brave? she asked herself. She moved down the hall peering into every room, and on her way back, with no real purpose in mind, she stepped into the spare bedroom. There was just enough light for her to make out the altar, the ratty flea-market jumble strewn over the shelves, the cheap comic-book colors of the Virgin prints. She approached the altar and clasped her hands as Rhee had done. The two Madonnas stared back through the muddy light with the vapid self-regard of fashion models.
Melissa stood there for a while, waiting. She became aware of her breathing, the loom of her heart inside her chest. Various aches and itches asserted themselves. Eventually it seemed necessary to speak.
“I,” she said, and flinched—the word went off like a gun in the tiny room. I, what—acknowledge you? But that seemed corny, false. She took a breath and tried again. “Maybe I can live with you,” she said, wondering if she’d finally lost it, “but I want you to know Dirk is mine. I found him first, I married him, he’s already taken. And if you think I’m going to give him up…”
She felt a tingle, a quilled prickling running up her spine—did that mean anything?
“…well, you’ve got another thing coming.”
A kind of spasm, a jolt of exasperation almost made her laugh. Was something happening? She felt punchy, loose in the head, and with that came a surge of sisterly affection for this thing, this Erzulie who’d turned the world inside-out. Melissa began to see the possible humor in this, and even the Madonnas seemed to take on a merry look, the joke expressed in a crinkling around their eyes, the shadows bundling at the corners of their lips. What, exactly, had she been fighting? She wanted to say some agency inside herself, and she stood there for a time absorbing it, feeling in a sure but as yet inexplicable way that she’d arrived at something. Clarity, perhaps. A sense of scales balancing out. She felt older, and saw how that might be a positive thing. She carried the feeling with her back to the kitchen, wondering as she flipped on the stereo if any of this meant that her life had changed.
Five minutes later Dirk was blowing through the door, leading with his pelvis as he kissed her hello. He got a beer from the refrigerator and popped the top.
“Well, babe,” he said, “it’s Kuwait.”
Melissa screamed.
“Hey, it’s not so bad. They got about three million mines laying around from the war, we’re gonna show their guys how to dig’em out.”
Mines. Melissa resisted the urge to tear at her hair. “When do you go?”
“Not for six weeks.” He pulled her close, snaking his hand under the waist of her shorts. “Think you can stand me that long?”
Later that night Melissa had occasion to reflect that sex smelled a lot like tossed salad, one with radishes, fennel, and fresh grated carrot, and maybe a tablespoon of scallions thrown in. The notion came to her as she lay naked in bed, making a tent out of the sheet with her folded knees. Beside her Dirk was nodding in and out while they drowsily reviewed the events of the day. Melissa mentioned that she’d had lunch with her cousin the psychic.
“Psychic,” he said in a drifty voice. “I know this lady?”
“You’ve never met her.”
“Hunh. She do voodoo?”
“Well, it’s more like she’s got her own thing going.”
“Wanna meet her,” he said, seeming to fade out.
“Sure, we’ll have her over before you leave.” Melissa shifted, raising peckish sparks from the sheets. “So what’s it supposed to be like over there. In Kuwait.”
“Hot,” he muttered. “Sand. Lotsa camel jocks running around.”
“Any voodoo?”
He chuckled, then murmured something she didn’t understand. Maybe a minute went by. Melissa listened to a hoot-owl lowing outside. Acres of crickets jangled in perfect time like thousands of synchronized maracas.
“Though in a way I guess it’s all voodoo, hunh.”
“Wha?”
She hesitated, taking the measure of how she felt; after a moment she decided it felt okay. “In a way it all comes down to voodoo, I said.” She didn’t really get it, she told him, but she could handle it. If this was something he thought was important in his life, she would trust him, she would try to understand. Because she wanted them—
“Oh honey I love you so much,” he blurted, his voice too drastic, almost weepy. For a second she thought he was mocking her, until he went on in that same urgent voice: “Cap’ll take it, yeah, Cap’s got it under control. No go no show what a bullshitter, intel says it’s solid, bro. Roger that, lock and load. Ready to rock.”
So he’d slept through her big concession speech. Pow, he hupped in her ear, pah-pow-pow, pow; target practice had commenced for the night, in semiautomatic mode. Melissa sighed and straightened her legs, the sheet collapsing about them like a giant flower. So in six weeks she would be alone again. The episode with James was a shadow on her mind, like some dark, ominous smudge in an X-ray; she dreaded Dirk’s leaving, but something in her was rising to meet it as well, anxious to see if she would manage better this time. For a while she thought about her little drama at the altar, trying to fix in her mind the true experience of it, the tingling immanence that in retrospect had about as much zip as static cling. She didn’t know what to think about any of this. Voodoo, desire, oversexed spirits, dreams channeling information like a video stream—if these were real, then the business of who we were transpired mostly in the air around us. You could drive yourself crazy with it, she supposed. Some did; and some found their peace in it? But at least there was this, she thought as she rolled toward Dirk, spooning herself into his concourse of knobs and hollows. This was real, whatever else life might bring—there were, finally, no words for this. Melissa kissed her husband’s shoulder, closed her eyes, and waited for sleep.
Asian Tiger
The Myanmar Peace and Enlightened Leadership Cup was a bush league tournament by any standard, not even regular Asian Tour but a satellite, the dead-end fringe of professional golf. Which was where Sonny Grous made his living these days, when he wasn’t missing cuts on the Hooters Tour or hustling hundred-dollar nassaus in America’s suburbs; as a twenty-three-year-old rookie on the PGA Tour he’d won two tournaments in nine months, which inspired Golf Digest to run a cover story entitled, “GROUS, AS IN LOOSE.” He’d come out of Linwood, Texas, by way of Austin, a big smiling kid with personality and a long game his peers called how itzer-in-a-can. “Like a bouncer in a strip club” was how Fuzzy Zoeller described him, 230 malleable pounds on a six-three frame and an ample, full-bodied face to match, along with blond hair cut in floppy surfer-boy bangs. What impressed him most about being on Tour? “All the free stuff,” Sonny replied, “I can’t get over all the great free stuff they give us.” Balls, clubs, bags, clothes, the whole kit; he didn’t mention the free-flowing, practically gratis booze, nor the women who hung around the practice green in every town, auditioning for the players in hair-trigger halters and the kind of shorts that make men sweat. He was dreaming those first few years on Tour, lulled by success and the sexual buzz; by the time he woke up and realized that he was going to have to grind to make it, his slide had already dropped him off the money list.
Everybody had to grind. Nicklaus, Watson, Norman, nobody could coast—once he understood how bloody the competition was, it scared him, the lightning strikes of his r
ookie wins. Those trophies gradually morphed into weights around his neck, but at this, the quiet-desperation stage of his life, they were his meal ticket, an automatic entrée into every joke tournament and corporate junket in search of anything resembling a marquee name. Myanmar, his agent said, what they used to call Burma, down in the heat-rash crotch of the world. Not the most politically correct place you’ll ever see, they were on everybody’s shit list for human rights and most of the world’s heroin was grown there. It was your classic Third World basket case, complete with drug mafias, warlords, mind-bending poverty, and a regime that made the Chinese look carefree, plus a genuine martyr-saint they kept under house arrest, that sexy lady who won the Nobel Peace Prize—whatshername? On the other hand the generals who ran the country were nuts for golf. After thirty years of incoherent isolation they were building resorts and courses by the dozen, leveraging the sport into hard foreign ex- change. Now they were holding a tournament to boost the off-brand national image, but there was a problem: who in their right mind wanted to come? American pros of a certain stature were offered all expenses paid, plus a ten-thousand-dollar guarantee, plus a shot at the sixty-thousand-dollar first prize against what promised to be enticingly tepid competition.
“Do not talk politics,” said the agent.
“It’s cool,” said Sonny, who hadn’t voted since the Dukakis tank episode.
“Just get in, play your game, and get out. I’ve got you a spot in the Ozarks Open in two weeks.”
Sonny stepped off the plane in Rangoon—Yangon in the official, post-imperialist nomenclature—got a whiff of the dense alluvial air, and thought: home? No, he was about as far as he could get from Linwood and the ditchwater funk of the gulf coast, but Rangoon’s scruffy urban mass had a small-town feel, its streets shot through with a rural ethic. The smog harbored startling hits of orchids and manure. Rusting corrugated roofs and moss-streaked stucco seemed to mediate a timeless, more organic state of mind. Roosters could be heard at all hours of the day, and even rush hour lacked world-class conviction, a tinny whirr and chutter that teased his ear like the plinking of thousands of pinball machines.
