by Anthology
“This is Ann,” Jackie said. “I’ve been looking for you, Popsy, because . . . well, because I need to tell you something.” She slid onto the bench next to Harry, on the other side from Manny, and put one arm around Harry’s shoulders. The other hand kept a close grip on Ann, who smiled encouragement. Manny stared at Ann as at a ghost.
“You see, Popsy, for a while now I’ve been struggling with something, something really important. I know I’ve been snappy and difficult, but it hasn’t been—everybody needs somebody to love, you’ve often told me that, and I know how happy you and Grammy were all those years. And I thought there would never be anything like that for me, and certain people were making everything all so hard. But now . . . well, now there’s Ann. And I wanted you to know that.”
Jackie’s arm tightened. Her eyes pleaded. Ann watched Harry closely. He felt as if he were drowning.
“I know this must come as a shock to you,” Jackie went on, “but I also know you’ve always wanted me to be happy. So I hope you’ll come to love her the way I do.”
Harry stared at the red-haired woman. He knew what was being asked of him, but he didn’t believe in it, it wasn’t real, in the same way weather going on in other countries wasn’t really real. Hurricanes. Drought. Sunshine. When what you were looking at was a cold drizzle.
“I think that of all the people I’ve ever known, Ann is the most together. The most compassionate. And the most moral.”
“Ummm,” Harry said.
“Popsy?”
Jackie was looking right at him. The longer he was silent, the more her smile faded. It occurred to him that the smile had showed her teeth. They were very white, very even.
Also very sharp.
“I . . . I . . . hello, Ann.”
“Hello,” Ann said.
“See, I told you he’d be great!” Jackie said to Ann. She let go of Harry and jumped up from the bench, all energy and lightness. “You’re wonderful, Popsy! You, too, Manny!
Oh, Ann, this is Popsy’s best friend, Manny Feldman. Manny, Ann Davies.”
“Happy to meet you,” Ann said. She had a low, rough voice and a sweet smile. Harry felt hurricanes, drought, sunshine.
Jackie said, “I know this is probably a little unexpected—”
Unexpected. “Well—” Harry said, and could say no more.
“It’s just that it was time for me to come out of the closet.”
Harry made a small noise. Manny managed to say, “So you live here, Ann?”
“Oh, yes. All my life. And my family, too, since forever.”
“Has Jackie . . . has Jackie met any of them yet?”
“Not yet,” Jackie said. “It might be a little . . . tricky, in the case of her parents.” She smiled at Ann. “But we’ll manage.”
“I wish,” Ann said to her, “that you could have met my grandfather. He would have been just as great as your Popsy here. He always was.”
“Was?” Harry said faintly.
“He died a year ago. But he was just a wonderful man. Compassionate and intelligent.”
“What . . . what did he do?”
“He taught history at the university. He was also active in lots of organizations—
Amnesty International, the ACLU, things like that. During World War II he worked for the Jewish rescue leagues, getting people out of Germany.”
Manny nodded. Harry watched Jackie’s teeth.
“We’d like you both to come to dinner soon,” Ann said. She smiled. “I’m a good cook.”
Manny’s eyes gleamed.
Jackie said, “I know this must be hard for you—” but Harry saw that she didn’t really mean it. She didn’t think it was hard. For her it was so real that it was natural weather, unexpected maybe, but not strange, not out of place, not out of time. In front of the bench, sunlight striped the pavement like bars.
Suddenly Jackie said, “Oh, Popsy, did I tell you that it was your friend Robert who introduced us? Did I tell you that already?”
“Yes, sweetheart,” Harry said. “You did.”
“He’s kind of a nerd, but actually all right.”
After Jackie and Ann left, the two old men sat silent a long time. Finally Manny said diplomatically, “You want to get a snack, Harry?”
“She’s happy, Manny.”
“Yes. You want to get a snack, Harry?”
“She didn’t even recognize him.”
“No. You want to get a snack?”
“Here, have this. I got it for you this morning.” Harry held out an orange, a deep-colored navel with flawless rind: seedless, huge, guaranteed juicy, nurtured for flavor, perfect.
“Enjoy,” Harry said. “It cost me ninety-two cents.”
THE PURE PRODUCT
John Kessel
I arrived in Kansas City at one o’clock on the afternoon of the thirteenth of August. A Tuesday. I was driving the beige 1983 Chevrolet Citation that I had stolen two days earlier in Pocatello, Idaho. The Kansas plates on the car I’d taken from a different car in a parking lot in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City was founded by the Mormons, whose god tells them that in the future Jesus Christ will come again.
I drove through Kansas City with the windows open and the sun beating down through the windshield. The car had no air conditioning, and my shirt was stuck to my back from seven hours behind the wheel. Finally I found a hardware store, “Hector’s” on Wornall. I pulled into the lot. The Citation’s engine dieseled after I turned off the ignition; I pumped the accelerator once and it coughed and died. The heat was like syrup. The sun drove shadows deep into corners, left them flattened at the feet of the people on the sidewalk. It made the plate glass of the store window into a dark negative of the positive print that was Wornall Road. August.
The man behind the counter in the hardware store I took to be Hector himself. He looked like Hector, slain in vengeance beneath the walls of paintbrushes—the kind of semifriendly, publicly optimistic man who would tell you about his crazy wife and his ten-penny nails. I bought a gallon of kerosene and a plastic paint funnel, put them into the trunk of the Citation, then walked down the block to the Mark Twain Bank. Mark Twain died at the age of seventy-five with a heart full of bitter accusations against the Calvinist god and no hope for the future of humanity. Inside the bank I went to one of the desks, at which sat a Nice Young Lady. I asked about starting a business checking account. She gave me a form to fill out, then sent me to the office of Mr. Graves.
Mr. Graves wielded a formidable handshake. “What can I do for you, Mr . . . ?”
“Tillotsen, Gerald Tillotsen,” I said. Gerald Tillotsen, of Tacoma, Washington, died of diphtheria at the age of four weeks—on September 24, 1938. I have a copy of his birth certificate.
“I’m new to Kansas City. I’d like to open a business account here, and perhaps take out a loan. I trust this is a reputable bank? What’s your exposure in Brazil?” I looked around the office as if Graves were hiding a woman behind the hatstand, then flashed him my most ingratiating smile.
Mr. Graves did his best. He tried smiling back, then looked as if he had decided to ignore my little joke. “We’re very sound, Mr. Tillotsen.”
I continued smiling.
“What kind of business do you own?”
“I’m in insurance. Mutual Assurance of Hartford. Our regional office is in Oklahoma City, and I’m setting up an agency here, at 103rd and State Line.” Just off the interstate.
He examined the form. His absorption was too tempting.
“Maybe I can fix you up with a policy? You look like dead meat.”
Graves’s head snapped up, his mouth half-open. He closed it and watched me guardedly. The dullness of it all! How I tire. He was like some cow, like most of the rest of you in this silly age, unwilling to break the rules in order to take offense. “Did he really say that?” he was thinking. “Was that his idea of a joke? He looks normal enough.” I did look normal, exactly like an insurance agent. I was the right kind of person, and I could do anythin
g. If at times I grate, if at times I fall a little short of or go a little beyond convention, there is not one of you who can call me to account.
Graves was coming around. All business.
“Ah—yes, Mr. Tillotsen. If you’ll wait a moment, I’m sure we can take care of this checking account. As for the loan—”
“Forget it.”
That should have stopped him. He should have asked after my credentials, he should have done a dozen things. He looked at me, and I stared calmly back at him. And I knew that, looking into my honest blue eyes, he could not think of a thing.
“I’ll just start the checking account with this money order,” I said, reaching into my pocket. “That will be acceptable, won’t it?”
“It will be fine,” he said. He took the form and the order over to one of the secretaries while I sat at the desk. I lit a cigar and blew some smoke rings. I’d purchased the money order the day before in a post office in Denver. Thirty dollars. I didn’t intend to use the account very long. Graves returned with my sample checks, shook hands earnestly, and wished me a good day. Have a good day, he said. I will, I said.
Outside, the heat was still stifling. I took off my sports coat. I was sweating so much I had to check my hair in the sideview mirror of my car. I walked down the street to a liquor store and bought a bottle of chardonnay and a bottle of Chivas Regal. I got some paper cups from a nearby grocery. One final errand, then I could relax for a few hours.
In the shopping center that I had told Graves would be the location for my nonexistent insurance office, I had noticed a sporting goods store. It was about three o’clock when I parked in the lot and ambled into the shop. I looked at various golf clubs: irons, woods, even one set with fiberglass shafts. Finally I selected a set of eight Spalding irons with matching woods, a large bag, and several boxes of Top-Flites. The salesman, who had been occupied with another customer at the rear of the store, hustled up, his eyes full of commission money. I gave him little time to think. The total cost was $612.32. I paid with a check drawn on my new account, cordially thanked the man, and had him carry all the equipment out to the trunk of the car.
I drove to a park near the bank; Loose Park, they called it. I felt loose. Cut loose, drifting free, like one of the kites people were flying that had broken its string and was ascending into the sun. Beneath the trees it was still hot, though the sunlight was reduced to a shuffling of light and shadow on the brown grass. Kids ran, jumped, swung on playground equipment. I uncorked my bottle of wine, filled one of the paper cups, and lay down beneath a tree, enjoying the children, watching young men and women walking along the footpaths.
A girl approached. She didn’t look any older than seventeen. Short, slender, with clean blond hair cut to her shoulders. Her shorts were very tight. I watched her unabashedly; she saw me watching and left the path to come over to me. She stopped a few feet away, hands on her hips. “What are you looking at?” she asked.
“Your legs,” I said. “Would you like some wine?”
“No thanks. My mother told me never to accept wine from strangers.” She looked right through me.
“I take what I can get from strangers,” I said. “Because I’m a stranger, too.”
I guess she liked that. She was different. She sat down and we chatted for a while.
There was something wrong about her imitation of a seventeen-year-old; I began to wonder whether hookers worked the park. She crossed her legs and her shorts got tighter. “Where are you from?” she asked.
“San Francisco. But I’ve just moved here to stay. I have a part interest in the sporting goods store at the Eastridge Plaza.”
“You live near here?”
“On West Eighty-ninth.” I had driven down Eighty-ninth on my way to the bank.
“I live on Eighty-ninth! We’re neighbors.”
It was exactly what one of my own might have said to test me. I took a drink of wine and changed the subject. “Would you like to visit San Francisco someday?”
She brushed her hair back behind one ear. She pursed her lips, showing off her fine cheekbones. “Have you got something going?” she asked, in queerly accented English.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, have you got something going,” she repeated, still with the accent—the accent of my own time.
I took another sip. “A bottle of wine,” I replied in good midwestern 1980s.
She wasn’t having any of it. “No artwork, please. I don’t like artwork.”
I had to laugh: my life was devoted to artwork. I had not met anyone real in a long time. At the beginning I hadn’t wanted to, and in the ensuing years I had given up expecting it. If there’s anything more boring than you people it’s us people. But that was an old attitude. When she came to me in K.C. I was lonely and she was something new.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s not much, but you can come for the ride. Do you want to?”
She smiled and said yes.
As we walked to my car, she brushed her hip against my leg. I switched the bottle to my left hand and put my arm around her shoulders in a fatherly way. We got into the front seat, beneath the trees on a street at the edge of the park. It was quiet. I reached over, grabbed her hair at the nape of her neck, and jerked her face toward me, covering her little mouth with mine. Surprise: she threw her arms around my neck and slid across the seat into my lap. We did not talk. I yanked at the shorts; she thrust her hand into my pants. St. Augustine asked the Lord for chastity, but not right away.
At the end she slipped off me, calmly buttoned her blouse, brushed her hair back from her forehead. “How about a push?” she asked. She had a nail file out and was filing her index fingernail to a point.
I shook my head and looked at her. She resembled my grandmother. I had never run into my grandmother, but she had a hellish reputation. “No thanks. What’s your name?”
“Call me Ruth.” She scratched the inside of her left elbow with her nail. She leaned back in her seat, sighed deeply. Her eyes became a very bright, very hard blue.
While she was aloft I got out, opened the trunk, emptied the rest of the chardonnay into the gutter, and used the funnel to fill the bottle with kerosene. I plugged it with a kerosene-soaked rag. Afternoon was sliding into evening as I started the car and cruised down one of the residential streets. The houses were like those of any city or town of that era of the Midwest USA: white frame, forty or fifty years old, with large porches and small front yards. Dying elms hung over the street. Shadows stretched across the sidewalks. Ruth’s nose wrinkled; she turned her face lazily toward me, saw the kerosene bottle, and smiled.
Ahead on the left-hand sidewalk I saw a man walking leisurely. He was an average sort of man, middle-aged, probably just returning from work, enjoying the quiet pause dusk was bringing to the hot day. It might have been Hector; it might have been Graves.
It might have been any one of you. I punched the cigarette lighter, readied the bottle in my right hand, steering with my leg as the car moved slowly forward.
“Let me help,” Ruth said. She reached out and steadied the wheel with her slender fingertips. The lighter popped out. I touched it to the rag; it smoldered and caught.
Greasy smoke stung my eyes. By now the man had noticed us. I hung my arm, holding the bottle, out the window. As we passed him, I tossed the bottle at the sidewalk like a newsboy tossing a rolled-up newspaper. The rag flamed brighter as it whipped through the air; the bottle landed at his feet and exploded, dousing him with burning kerosene. I floored the accelerator; the motor coughed, then roared, the tires and Ruth both squealing in delight. I could see the flaming man in the rearview mirror as we sped away.
On the Great American Plains, the summer nights are not silent. The fields sing the summer songs of insects—not individual sounds, but a high-pitched drone of locusts, crickets, cicadas, small chirping things for which I have no names. You drive along the superhighway and that sound blends with the sound of wind rushing through your opened windows, hiding th
e thrum of the automobile, conveying the impression of incredible velocity. Wheels vibrate, tires beat against the pavement, the steering wheel shudders, alive in your hands, droning insects alive in your ears. Reflecting posts at the roadside leap from the darkness with metronomic regularity, glowing amber in the headlights, only to vanish abruptly into the ready night when you pass. You lose track of time, how long you have been on the road, where you are going. The fields scream in your ears like a thousand lost, mechanical souls, and you press your foot to the accelerator, hurrying away.
When we left Kansas City that evening we were indeed hurrying. Our direction was in one sense precise: Interstate 70, more or less due east, through Missouri in a dream.
They might remember me in Kansas City, at the same time wondering who and why.
Mr. Graves scans the morning paper over his grapefruit: MAN BURNED BY GASOLINE BOMB. The clerk wonders why he ever accepted an unverified counter check, without a name or address printed on it, for six hundred dollars. The check bounces. They discover it was a bottle of chardonnay. The story is pieced together. They would eventually figure out how—I wouldn’t lie to myself about that (I never lie to myself)—but the why would always escape them. Organized crime, they would say. A plot that misfired.
Of course, they still might have caught me. The car became more of a liability the longer I held on to it. But Ruth, humming to herself, did not seem to care, and neither did I. You have to improvise those things; that’s what gives them whatever interest they have.
Just shy of Columbia, Missouri, Ruth stopped humming and asked me, “Do you know why Helen Keller can’t have any children?”
“No.”
“Because she’s dead.”
I rolled up the window so I could hear her better. “That’s pretty funny,” I said.
“Yes. I overheard it in a restaurant.” After a minute she asked, “Who’s Helen Keller?”
“A dead woman.” An insect splattered itself against the windshield. The lights of the oncoming cars glinted against the smear it left.
