The News of the World: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  I was home by two and my funk had me nailed to a chair in the dark living room, unable to blink. Luckily, Billy Wellner came by. He’d been to lunch with Ruth and had three beers and didn’t want to write any more policies that afternoon. We took off our shirts and played the World Series of one on one in my driveway: best of seven. For an insurance agent, Billy has a good jumpshot, but he rarely drives for the basket and he’s all right hand. I beat him four straight and walked him to his car.

  Across the street, Mudd Miller himself came onto his porch and began bellowing the names of his children. There were long pauses followed frequently by a name he’d already called.

  Billy threatened a rematch and said, “Let us know how Story is.”

  Half an hour later, I heard the car in the driveway, but Story didn’t come in. I found her sitting in the driver’s seat, washed out and pale. She made a grim little smile. “I should have had you come,” she said. “It’s the only thing so far that’s hurt. I could hardly use the clutch on the way home.”

  I took her in and put her to bed. “You’re all slimy,” she said.

  “Sweaty. I’m all sweaty. Since I can’t paint, I’m putting my energies into basketball. Does it hurt now?”

  “Just a small fire. I think they used a fingernail clippers.”

  I called the Wellners. Ruth answered and I told her about Story and asked her to handle the Township tomorrow. Before hanging up I gave her the accurate score of this afternoon’s basketball massacre. “Why is the world all women and boys?” she said. “You take good care of Story; I’ll handle the office.”

  Later still, Dr. Binderwitz’s secretary-assistant Michelle called and said that the biopsy showed nothing, that Story was all right. It was a great spring twilight, I could hear the one nightingale calling from Mugacook, and the voices of children playing tag on the edge of the campus, but when I looked in on my sleeping wife, a powerlessness so profound swept over me that I felt my back knotting up. I wanted to shake her shoulder and whisper: “I’ll solve this problem,” the way a husband should about an incorrect billing or a loose window or a gummy carburetor. I leaned against the doorway that spring night, and I knew the truth: I couldn’t do anything about this. I couldn’t paint or make us have a baby. I could throw a jump shot in from the corner, but as Ruth said, that is a matter for boys.

  Story slept. The examination had told us again: she was all right. I folded my arms and felt them tingle with a tension that was new to me; I know now it was the blood sense that I was getting closer.

  FIVE

  BIGVILLE has, just as it has a Volunteer Fire Department, a volunteer baseball team, which is one of the oldest institutions in the township. And one of the customs that has grown up with our team is that the mayor throws out the ball for the opening game, which is always played at home against New Hartford.

  At one in the afternoon on the day after her laparoscopy, Story stood up on the first row of the silly little bleachers in Bigville Park and threw a brand new Bradley baseball to Mudd Miller, who plays catcher for the ball team. He was standing inside the baseline, so it was a fine toss by a woman who had just twenty-four hours prior had a laparoscopy. In fact, when Mudd came over ceremoniously to hand Story back the baseball, he commented that she had more on the ball than any mayor in his fifteen years catching.

  Ruth sat with us, being solicitous of her friend Story; she let me know just with her posture that Story’s discomfort was somehow all my fault and that she, Ruth, was fundamentally alarmed that a person of my caliber would even try to impose his twisted gene pool onto another generation. Besides her motto about all the kids at K Mart, she always said to Story, while I was in the room; “Why would you want a child, when you’re married to one?” However, there was a look of genuine concern on the county attorney’s face today, so I could take her cheap heat and watch the ballgame.

  During a laparoscopy, a probe is inserted near the navel and searches the fallopian tubes for obstructive material, primarily known as endometriosis. Dr. Binderwitz had been able to tell us that the search had shown nothing, no obstruction. Story’s tubes were clear. The operation left a tiny wrinkled scar under her navel, as if to underline it, an emphatic italic of her beauty.

  The field was full of townspeople, tradesmen, and friends. Billy was straightaway in right field. Mr. Cummings from the food center was at second base, and one of the deans from the college was on the mound.

  The baseball game was tight until the top of the ninth when a bearded man who works in the Sinclair in New Hartford hit a change-up over the old railroad trestle scoring three runs. Bigville couldn’t match that, and after the game, Story and I walked the mile home.

  “What are we going to do?” Story asked.

  “Find a better pitcher; move the dean to the outfield.”

  She grabbed me around the neck in a mock wrestling hold. I tried to duck out, restrain her arms.

  “Careful, one of us just had an operation.” I took her hand and we walked on. “Is that the last test?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And there’s nothing wrong with us.” The two of us kicked stones along the old road, like two teenagers walking home from school. It was full May, two weeks past even the last cold rain, and the blossoming trees drooped into our path. I could see four men dragging the diving raft toward the lake down at the Grove. Tomorrow, Sunday, some lucky ten-year-old would climb the twenty red rungs on that wooden platform and commit the first cannonball into Mugacook for the summer season.

  “What do we do?” Story whispered.

  “Keep our chins up.” I said. “Interact sexually … and …”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Something else. It’ll come to me. Something else.”

  Story took my arm. “I love you,” she said. “I’m sorry we can’t have children, but I still and will always love you.”

  WHEN you hold a woman you know quite well, press her softly into, say, a mattress, one hand under her neck, the other on the swelling of her hip, her skin so smooth as to seem forbidding and inviting at the same time, if she moves once, say to reach under your arm and to pull you forward, your mind will go right on by progesterone counts and histograms into a warm lyric zone where it will disappear in a dandy stinging swelter.

  In such a swelter, my limbs lost in Story’s, one night in May, at a moment when my eyes were about to roll away, I again saw my three fingers come creeping over Story’s shoulder; and in the blurred proximity of the warm moment, they looked like the same three blank-faced old men arriving to witness our coupling. At the time I thought it was an odd vision for such a crucial time, but it was the beginning of an odd era, a time when cause–effect would take on new meaning, when order, sequence, science would whirl away.

  That night when we rolled apart, I first dreamed of moons and geese and drowning, and then sometime late in the night I saw a perfect and vivid vision:

  A man wearing a turquoise steerhead with jeweled horns does a low, steady hop around a campfire, swinging a stone phallus on a gold chain and singing with the insistent drums: HAH-MAH, LOH-LAH, HAH-MAH, LOH-LAH! He stops. He twists a glass vial of some thin red nectar onto the flames. They reach up in a hissing flash and light the area. In the new flare, the man thrusts his painted hand into the abdomen of a splayed chicken, tosses the entrails out in a splash, and begins—as the fire crawls back down to the logs—to read the throw, fingering the shiny organs apart as his shiny eyes begin to fill with the future.

  I won’t say much about the next few days, except that I did not start painting. I spent all my free time between morning and afternoon classes in the library and the library annex. With the good weather, the buildings were empty, all the undergraduates gone outside to court, and my research was simple. After I exhausted the campus libraries, I went down to Bigville Memorial, built of hewn granite and given to the town by Hugo Ballowell’s great grandfather. I spent more than one day there, in fact, I used up the rest of May, not even looking up as the light c
hanged at midday or in the evening, and I ended up in a corner of the basement. I found everything. The two volumes I selected had to be catalogued before I could take them home. The Dark Arts and Life Before Science. Together they weighed twelve pounds. Mrs. Torrey looked at me as if I was unhinged while I waited for her to write the library cards, but the heft of those books as I hauled them down to my studio seemed the first real thing in my quest. At last, I thought, I am finally doing something.

  SIX

  I ROWED the boat into dark Mugacook. Okay. Okay. Okay. Now. I’ve done all my homework. The first sperm to reach the ovum is the only one to enter. Of the millions of sperm sent out, only hundreds reach the ovum, and only the first to touch it enters. Upon entering, he swells and bursts, spilling the twenty-three chromosomes he’s been carrying. That part is beyond me.

  I rowed the old red rowboat and said aloud, “Okay, okay, okay.”

  When I perceived I was in line with the lighted church spire in town and the dozen lights of the Ballowell main house, I rowed toward town another five pulls and shipped the oars. It felt like the middle of the lake, but I didn’t know; it was dark. I picked up the basketball, my old Voit. I’d scored layups on ten driveways in four states with this ball. I felt the ball in my hands. It was a little flat, but I mounted it on my fingertips for the shot, feeling the old worn nubble, and sent it up in a perfect arc, rocking the old wooden boat a bit more than I meant to. I grabbed the gunwales to keep from going in the dark water myself, and I heard the sarisfying bip! of the ball’s splash.

  The sperm’s journey is the equivalent of a three-and-a-half-mile swim, so I was going to have to swim from the town beach over to the boathouse and then head for the middle. I rowed back. I pulled the heavy boat up on the sand, dragging it well clear of the water, and I undressed, putting my clothing over the bow. Then I curled onto the cool sand and tried to grow quiet. I was too excited. I could feel, smell, sense the whole round lake lying beside me, and somewhere in the middle, the basketball. I squeezed my eyes shut in joy. This is it. I could feel a warmth in my shoulders and in the backs of my legs; this was really working.

  But I’d left nothing to chance. Tomorrow, the garlic would arrive, and I’d pick up the jade. I had ordered the chickens and the birdseed and the rice. I’d become part of a process that had me in its sweep, and in a second, I was on my feet, yipping like a monkey as I rushed in four long strides right into the warm waters of Lake Mugacook.

  The medium of the water enveloped, moved me. I was flying, floating, gliding. The trees along the water’s edge drifted by as if the lake were quietly turning for me, taking me with it. I closed my eyes as I swam for minutes at a time. By the time I took my first real breath—or so it seemed—I looked up and saw the square white face of the boathouse smiling at me. Behind me, in the middle of this huge lake, the deepest lake in Connecticut, was a basketball. I turned, kicking hard, headed right for it. I imagined the other millions of sperm swimming behind me, wandering, loitering, taking the wrong turn into Cookson Swamp or Succor Brook, drowning in the acid at the top of the vagina, their tails being eaten by antibodies.

  I swam for a long time. It became real swimmimg, my arms finally heavier than the water, and I could hear myself breathing, blowing water out. It was a big lake. When I crawled to where the middle might have been, I sighted the church spire, a lighted sliver over the town. I turned to line up with Ballowells’ lights.

  There were no lights.

  I stood in a treadwater position and swiveled. No lights. Ballowells had gone to bed. Ballowells had turned out every one of their seventy thousand lights and they had gone to bed. I had no idea where I was. For a while I was under the water, which I did know, and I came up several times saying the word “Okay!” spitting like a seal. Across the lake I could still see the white line of the church spire. It was a mile and a quarter to the rowboat, then through the grove, down the pond road a half mile, across Route 43, and up the steps into the church. My knees ached like burning rubber.

  I was under, then way under, and then up for air. Each time I cracked the surface my “Okay!” had more water in it, and finally I couldn’t even hear the word. This was not a hospitable environment. I went into my drown-proofing moves, but I kept going down too far and had to kick to mouth air. Something touched my toe, something small, but it was enough. I panicked. The antibodies were eating my tail. In a frenzy of side straddle hops, side strokes, leaping waves, I called “Whoa!” and went down.

  The water played a lugubrious synthesizer tone in my ears as I fell freely through the thermoclimes past two, three zones of colder water. Small hot squiggles crawled across the inside of my closed eyes. I was swaying back and forth wonderfully. It was like the time I was playing one on one with Billy Wellner at his house. We were playing around his pickup and I perfected a shot where I would drive around the rear of the truck and then lean back into the fence and throw a set shot up off the board and through the hoop. I made the shot nine times in a row and beat Billy 22–2. All he could say was, “You’re wrecking the fence.”

  Then.

  Then I touched the basketball, and it was in one hand, then both hands, and my knees closed around it too, as we bobbed past forty-six million stars in outer space.

  THE voice behind the flashlight said, “Get up.” It was our constable, Gill Manwaring, I could tell, and he was trying to sound real tough. Story herself had hired Gill as constable.

  “You better get up, fella.”

  I lay still, wrapped around the ball, in the same fetal position in which I must have washed upon this shore. He hadn’t recognized me. His boot ran up under my kidney. “Up!”

  In a voice I recognized as Raymond Burr’s, I said, “Hey, Gill.” I rose, not unlike a cow would, a piece at a time, and looked into the flashlight. “What time is it?”

  “Dan?”

  “Yeah.” I stood facing him, holding the ball nonchalantly in front of my private parts. He lowered the light and I came to understand there was a personage standing behind Gill.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Late night swim got away from me. Can you take me around to my boat? It’s at the grove.” My eyes adjusted by steady, painful degrees in the starlight, and I could see that this was the three acre front lea of the Ballowells’, and that Annette Ballowell was backing steadily toward her dark and significant mansion.

  It wasn’t until I sat my bare ass on the seat of Gill’s Rover that I lifted the ball onto my lap and saw the disturbing and exciting truth: it wasn’t the same ball. It wasn’t my ball at all.

  SEVEN

  THE next morning when I removed the thermometer from Story’s mouth, she looked up at me. “It’s the deep end you’re over, isn’t it.”

  I read the thermometer with new intensity. “Ninety-seven point seven.”

  “Why don’t you just paint household objects until it takes. You’ll get it. You’ll see it again. School will be out this week, and you can just take some time.”

  “I’m going to do that. I’ll be all right.” I nodded and heard the angry little tides inside my ears. “I’m going to paint everything.”

  When Story left for Town Hall, I burst into action. I didn’t have class until four, so I ran to the studio barelegged in my Sears robe and stretched three canvases, 60 by 60, my shrunken hands atremble. I could feel the heat. I was in motion; I couldn’t do it fast enough. I had one palette wet under cellophane and without changing it a bit, I started in.

  The volleyball that had saved my life in the confidential waters of Lake Mugacook ten hours before was a Sportcraft Professional Model manufactured in New Castle, Pennsylvania. In postal blue magic marker script along one seam was the name: Allen. Luther Allen was a retired broker who clipped coupons on his lakefront property in town. His children and grandchildren came up from New York and New Haven on weekends.

  On the first canvas, I broadbrushed the curve of one side in vermilion. I had to hold my head cocked a certain way as the
lakewater gurgled up and down my eustachian tubes. Many times when I changed positions, water ran out of my ears. I worked fast because I figured I had two hours tops before Story ran into Gill Manwaring and I’d get a phone call. If I could grab a secure start on three canvases, it might testify to my equilibrium. But as my hands moved across the paintings, working all three in one stroke, then one for twenty minutes, I wondered. They didn’t look like volleyballs as we know them.

  So many times the magic in painting transpires in the twelve inches between the palette and the canvas, and your head, hand, or heart better get out of the way. I felt that warmth in my arms now, and I tried to proceed with caution or reason or passionless purpose, but I might as well not have been there. This was not the way I used to paint. I ran from the studio several times, whenever my neck would get too sore, and I dressed a piece at a time, retrieved the hammer, all my roofing nails, the butcher knife. My garlic was arriving at noon.

  When the phone did ring, Story simply said, “What’s going on?”

  “Story, I’ve got a start on three good pieces. Can I call you back?”

  “Dan, what’s this with Gill?”

  “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. I’ll tell you later. All about it. I gotta go.” And I did go. I found myself an hour later in the studio, one canvas finished, the others running to a close. The first looked like nothing, like a rose moon in a blue blanket, I don’t know, but God it thrilled me! Some of the edges floated like folded velvet; I’d never done that before. I’d never seen it done before! This was no landscape that I knew. The whole time I’d been in the studio, I’d only had two thoughts. One was simply a picture of Story’s face as she hung up the phone: that worry. The other was so profound it powered me through the day. I wanted, more than anything, for my children and grandchildren to come visit and play volleyball on the lawn. The picture made sense and gave reason to everything in my life.