Collected Short Stories: Volume II

by Barry Rachin

  *****

  Always a bit of an oddball, Buddy Hazelton kept a mystical verse tacked to both sides of his faculty office door so visitors got the full effect both coming and going.

  The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you;

  Don't go back to sleep.

  You must ask for what you really want;

  Don't go back to sleep.

  People are going back and forth

  across the doorsill

  where the two worlds touch.

  The door is round and open.

  Don't go back to sleep.

  Rumi, Persian Poet

  On more than one occasion, I questioned Buddy about the inscrutable poem, but he either made a joke of it or conveniently sidestepped the issue. A week before he disappeared, we visited a local Mexican restaurant during a break in classes. "That jackass, Rodger Ephraim, approached me yesterday with the most outlandish request," Buddy fumed. "He wanted to shoehorn his entire lecture schedule into three days."

  I tried to imagine such a feat but my usually nimble brain balked at the notion. "Wouldn't that push undergraduate classes into the late afternoon?"

  "More like early evening," Buddy corrected. There was no mistaking the look of revulsion.

  In addition to core curriculum, Rodger Ephraim taught Fundamentals of Ethics. It seemed hypocritical - unconscionable even - that, the educator would take unfair advantage of students, while pursuing his own enlightened self-interest. But then, Rodger didn't give a rat's ass if twenty-year-old co-eds languished in musty classrooms from early morning straight through suppertime. "So what happened?"

  "I told him the request was absurd and to get the hell out of my office.” Buddy laughed mirthlessly. "Ephraim's got a time share condominium on Lake Winnipesaukee. Since separating from his wife, he's also been having an affair with one of his leggy coeds. Every weekend, the lech drives north to the New Hampshire border with the twenty-something blonde - like transporting stolen property across state lines where nobody knows his business."

  The waitress approached. I ordered the quesadilla with guacamole and a Coke.

  "The zesty chili cheese fries sounds interesting," Buddy said, folding the menu.

  "It’s not for the faint of heart,” the waitress cautioned. “Chili fries are seasoned with green onions, jalapenos, sour cream, garlic pepper, and a sharp Monterey jack cheese."

  "Yes, I'll go with the zesty chili cheese fries." Buddy relinquished his menu and leaned back with a satisfied expression. “What do you have on tap for dark beers?”

  “St. Pauli Girl,” the waitress replied.

  Buddy splayed his legs out at a cockeyed angle under the table. “Bring me a mug.”

  “On second thought,” I blurted as the woman was turning away, “make that a gin and tonic.”

  When the waitress returned with the drinks, Buddy adroitly drew the head of foam off the top of the chilled mug then sipped deeply at the chocolaty liquid. “Language is a dicey proposition.” A morose expression enveloped his normally buoyant features. “Nothing’s ever what it seems to be.” “Whether it’s a length of rope of a philandering philosopher,” he added cryptically, “you gotta cut through the semantic bullshit.”

  * * * * *

  The length of rope reference referred back to a discussion in his office the previous summer. “Here’s a little joke I like to play on incoming freshman.” Buddy rose and went to the closet, where he removed a thick coil of rope. Cutting a foot-long section with a pocketknife, he waved it in front of my face. What do you see?”

  “A piece of rope.”

  He snapped the rope taut and held under his stubbly chin. “The tensile strength is rated at three hundred pounds.” Buddy began unraveling the braided rope, picking it apart with his nicotine-stained fingernails and after a minute lay three separate strands on the top of his desk. “And now what do you see?”

  “I dunno,” I ventured hesitantly. “The individual components of what was formerly a piece of rope.”

  Next, Buddy ripped the material into tiny shreds until all that remained was a pile of cottony fluff. “And this… how would you define this untidy mess?”

  “Rope in the abstract,” I quipped.

  He gathered the gossamer filaments in his cupped hands and held them over the waste paper basket. “Can the original rope be put back together?”

  “No more likelihood of that than Humpty Dumpty being put back together again by all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.”

  Buddy spread his palms and the fluff floated gently downward disappearing into the trash.

  Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness. If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done. A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

  Buddy could quote Wittgenstein verbatim, off the top of his head. Linguistics masquerading as innocuous, light dinner repartee - he pulled it off with an opaque smile and self-effacing wit.

  “Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep,” he noted irreverently one day as a stultifying faculty meeting was breaking up.

  I should have seen it coming. All the telltale signs were there. Buddy was going to do something rash. Outrageous. Utterly absurd. He had no intentions of staying at the university. Prestige meant nothing to him. His studies in phenomenology taught him that a red delicious and a Fuji share the category of meaning that we might call "appleness but that’s where all epistemological similarities fell to pieces." He was more concerned with Husserl’s "essences. From Buddy’s perspective, humans were imprisoned in a room with a door that was unlocked and opened inward as long as it never occurred to them to pull rather than push.

  *****

  "He's finished with the elephants!" Rodger barked, jolting me out of my reverie.

  Sure enough, the animal having been led away by a handler, Buddy was coiling the hose. Temporarily blinded by the bright sunlight, he squinted at our approach. Recognizing his former colleagues, Buddy tossed the hose aside and stepped forward. "If you're looking for work," he quipped, "there're no vacancies." We shook hands. Buddy's demeanor was gentle and self-effacing.

  A morose looking older man with a three-day growth of beard and a pronounced limp straggled across the open area. In his left hand he clutched a set of flat throwing knives. With his free hand he repeatedly flipped a balanced blade end-over-end, catching it effortlessly on the descent. Bringing up the rear, a younger man dressed in sequined tights with a crimson bandana knotted around his neck led a dappled horse into an adjacent tent and started the animal trotting easily counterclockwise around the circular track. "Whatever possessed you?" Rodger blurted what everyone at the college had been thinking for the past three years.

  Buddy shrugged and wiped a bead of sweat from his neck. "You're both still with the college?"

  Rodger stared at him incredulously. "I assumed your position when you took sabbatical."

  Rodger Ephraim prospered from Buddy's fall from grace.

  As the newly minted chairman of the philosophy department, his future was secure, regardless of the fact that his grasp of philosophical theory was rote, formulistic and patently uninspired. If Rodger chose to 'consolidate' his work schedule so he could spend more time at Lake Winnipesaukee with bodacious bimbos, no one would challenge him.

  Buddy reached up and scratched his armpit through the rip in his shirt then pointed at the trainer, who now had the horse cantering in the opposite direction. “The standard diameter of a trick horse-riding ring is exactly forty-two feet, which is the minimum distance for horses to circle comfortably at full gallop." As Buddy explained the physics, the centrifugal force generated by cantering in circles allowed riders to stand fully erect without falling, a feat which would be next to impossible otherwise.

  "Your Wittgenstein article," Rodger n
oted, "still gets quoted regularly in the scholarly press." Reaching out, he placed a hand on Buddy's shoulder. "The college administration would probably take you back even in a lesser capacity if…"

  "It's swell to know there's no hard feelings," Buddy's face scrunched up with warm emotions. "I sure hope you'll stick around for the finale."

  The finale… was that when they shot Buddy Hazelton, a man who could read Ludwig Wittgenstein in the original then sit down and write his own scholarly exegesis, out of a cannon?

  *****

  Back outside, we bought tickets and half an hour later reentered the circus through the main gate.

  People are going back and forth

  across the doorsill

  where the two worlds touch.

  The door is round and open.

  Don't go back to sleep.

  The animal smells, the raucous calliope music, clowns, performers on stilts, midgets, strongmen, acrobats, fire eaters, fat and bearded ladies - they all hovered at the threshold, the doorsill where the two worlds touched. Before we reached the big tent Rodger pulled me aside. "I'm going over there," he gestured at a smaller, dingier tent near the porta potties, labeled 'Freak Show - Grotesques and Human Oddities from around the World! "What do you say?"

  "No, I'll just wait here for you." Rodger hurried off.

  Up ahead, the door to a trailer opened, and Buddy Hazelton, dressed like Captain America in patriotic colors emerged followed by the wiry woman with the bouffant hairdo. Buddy held a star spangled helmet by its chinstrap. The woman draped a comforting arm around his shoulder, said something briefly and they both laughed. Leaning over, she kissed him on the cheek effusively before rushing off toward the big tent.

  What was it Buddy said at the Mexican restaurant over chili fries and Saint Pauli Girl? They had been discussing Wittgenstein, the 'illustrious one'. Wittgenstein had written that philosophy was like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

  Ten minutes later, Rodger resurfaced wearing a foolish smirk. "Well that was interesting."

  "Did you see the Pugilist Pinhead?"

  "What's that?"

  I pointed to a garish poster, a cartoonish mural depicting an oriental man replete with Fu Manchu, bulging biceps and a head the size of a tennis ball. "Oh him… the pinhead was just a witless microcephalic but the other freaks were pretty interesting."

  Rodger found us good seats halfway up a center row. We bought popcorn and peanuts. I ate a corndog on a stick as the full-size clowns and rowdy midgets worked the crowd in preparation for the opening act. Sporting a tuxedo with top hat and tails, the ringmaster drifted center stage. "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages…"

  Back to Table of Contents

  What would Junie B. Jones Do?

  "Mr. Jacobson, the old Jewish guy who lives on Bickford Street, sniffs little girls' bicycle seats," eight-year-old Benjamin Carter announced cavalierly as though the topic made for polite dinner conversation.

  The family had just sat down to the evening meal. Grace Carter poured some gravy on her mash potatoes, cleared her throat and asked, "Where exactly did you learn this?"

  Benjamin sipped at his apple juice. "Mitzi Brookfield... she overheard her parents talking. They said Mr. Jacobson's got mental abba… abba… abba…"

  "Aberrations," his mother offered.

  "Yeah, that's it."

  Lillian Carter was a quiet, undemonstrative woman, who favored gardening, crossword puzzles and feng shui. The previous year, she arranged Benjamin's bedroom to promote a harmonious flow of nourishing energies. The new setup was supposed to 'excite and calm' at the same time, a concept that neither Benjamin nor his father comprehended. To that end, Mrs. Carter removed the television and kept windows open until later October. Sometimes she even placed small dishes of essential oils – the young boy was partial to bergamot, citronella Java, clary sage and jasmine - on a shelf. She positioned the bed away from the doorway and replaced his bedside table with a twin black walnut set. When Mr. Carter inquired why the boy needed two tables, Mrs. Carter smiled and explained that it was a matter of balancing positive energies.

  Mrs. Carter glanced across the table at her husband. The man, who had raised a forkful of meatloaf to his open mouth, lowered the food back to the plate without tasting it. "Speaking of mental aberrations," Mr. Carter said, "the Brookfield clan are a bunch of knuckle dragging nitwits who - "

  "Phillip!" Mrs. Carter rose with such force that her chair went flying out from under her, slamming against the hickory hutch. The children eyed their mother uncertainly. The woman retrieved her chair, setting it in its proper place. Her husband smiled indulgently at the three youngsters, placed the meatloaf in his mouth and chewed with his head tilted at a sharp angle. "Very tasty. What spices did you use?"

  "Seasoned bread crumbs," Mrs. Carter replied evenly. There would be no more discussion of the Brookfields or Mr. Jacobson's predilections for adolescent bicycle seats. "Basil and thyme."

  He speared another portion of the succulent meat. "Yes, very nice."

  * * * * *

  Later that night after Benjamin brushed his teeth and crawled under the covers, his mother came to his room and said, "Regarding our neighbor, Mr. Jacobson, you shouldn’t believe much of anything that gossipmonger Mitzi Brookfield says.”"

  Jeremiah Jacobson had lived on Bickford Street forever - long before the Carters bought their split-level ranch house. The Jewish man resided there with his wife and two kids. Over the years, the children grew up and moved away. In late November, three days before Thanksgiving, Mrs. Jacobson, a short woman with sclerotic legs, suffered a massive heart attack and passed away. Since then, old man Jacobson had gone a bit queer in the head. He let his hair, what little there was, creep helter-skelter down over his prominent ears. And then there was the scraggily salt-and-pepper beard which enveloped his sallow cheeks. Whether he grew the beard in mourning or as social protest, the patchy growth made the elderly man look utterly derelict, down-on-his-luck.

  Since Mrs. Jacobson’s passing, Lillian felt a strong neighborly sentiment towards the widower. When the temperature topped out in the low nineties, she sent Benjamin's older brother over to trim the old man's lawn. A couple of times when the ShopRite Supermarket featured two-for-one coupon days, she even picked up extra groceries for the older man and had Benjamin lug them over to the dilapidated house with the weed-strewn lawn.

  "Regarding Mr. Jacobson," Mrs. Carter began again, "he wasn’t always so odd. The man designed custom bracelets, rings and pendants for thirty-three years. Balfour Jewelry gave him a retirement party when he left work, and there was even an article in the newspaper." Mrs. Carter eased down on the edge of the bed. "The year the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl, Mr. Jacobson helped design the fancy team rings."

  Rising, Mrs. Carter wandered over to the bookcase. Teasing a tattered paperback from the shelf, she returned to the bed. "What's this?" She laid the book on the bed sheet next to his chest.

  "Junie B Jones and the Yucky Blucky Fruitcake."

  "What's with the B?"

  Benjamin wrinkled his nose. "The B stands for Beatrice. Except Junie don't like Beatrice; she just likes B and that's all!"

  Mrs. Carter ran her fingertips over the mangled cover. "How come the book is such a mess?"

  Benjamin wiggled his smallish rump settling it comfortably on the mattress. "Probably because I read it a million, quadrillion times, that's why."

  Mrs. Carter shut the light. Then she kissed his cheek as she did every single night since as far back as Benjamin Carter could recollect. The pretty woman with the pale blue eyes stood over him swaying gently in the dark. Benjamin couldn't make out her features. "Maybe, at this stage in his life, Mr. Jacobson feels a bit like your favorite book. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  The crickets were chirping in the back yard. A neighbor had trimmed his la
wn in the late afternoon and the cloying scent of fresh-mown grass drifted through the open window. "No, not really."

  Benjamin felt his mother's hand caress his cheek. "Well, perhaps someday you will." "The Brookfields,” she mumbled distractedly almost as an afterthought, “have a penchant for stirring up trouble."

  "What's a penchant?"

  "It doesn't matter," his mother replied rather abruptly, "just so long as you know that Mitzi Brookfield is a first-class troublemaker and don't feed into her nonsense." Benjamin fluffed the pillow and lay back down. She kissed his smallish hand, pressed it to her warm cheek and went away.

  * * * * *

  "I spoke to Ben about Mr. Jacobson." Lillian Carter stood just outside the bathroom door where her husband was hunched over the sink, raking a toothbrush across his gums.

  "And how did that go?"

  "Pretty good." The woman pawed at the oak floorboards with the toe of her slipper. "The kid's in second grade. What’s he know about malicious slander?"

  Mr. Carter put the toothbrush away and reached for the unwaxed dental floss. "Jacobson’s wife died… his kids moved away. He's eighty years old for Christ's sakes!" He wrapped a length of floss around his left index finger, pulled the strand taut then wriggled it down between a rear molar.

  "I ran into Jake Brookfield in the Dairy Mart the other night, buying a slew of lottery scratch tickets. He also had a three-pack of those glossy, soft-porn magazines they stow away behind the counter."

  "You don't say!" Mrs. Carter chuckled and shook her head.