Collected Short Stories: Volume II

by Barry Rachin

  “She’s a quick study,” Grace replied.

  An aluminum walker was positioned next to the recliner. The elderly woman had fallen several times over the summer, and Carl purchased the device from a durable medical company. “The foreign film, Dersu Uzala, is coming to the Avon.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “A true classic. It makes the rounds every so often.” Mrs. Shapiro’s head bobbed up and down, an affirmation of some distant memory. “The Russian film is forty years old, but every time they bring it back, the theater sells out.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Three times. Once with each husband.” She played with the rail of the walker. A pair of yellow tennis balls had been cut and pressed onto the rear legs so that the device wouldn’t mar the floor. “Forgive my impertinence; I thought you and Carl might like to go. The Avon’s just over the state line in Providence, if you were feeling self-conscious about anyone from school seeing you together.”

  The basement door opened and Angie, covered with sawdust, approached. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Think about what?”

  “Nothing,” Grace shifted gears. “How’s it going downstairs?”

  “Come and see for yourself.”

  The workshop was surprisingly small, but Carl had arranged the machines in an ingenious fashion. All the large power tools—the drill press, band and miter saws, router table and jointer were pushed up against the walls so that the space in the center of the room remained empty. Whenever Carl needed to use a particular tool, he lugged it into the middle of the room, made his cuts and pushed it back against the far wall. Though it seemed like drudgery, as Carl explained, he eventually got use to positioning the tools and could set up the cuts rather quickly. When everything was situated at arm’s length, there was little wasted effort.

  “You’re finished for the day?”

  “Just sweeping up,” He grabbed a push broom and began coaxing the sawdust that spread a gossamer film like dry snow the length of the workspace into a pile. “Feel free to look around.”

  Angie was stacking small wooden parts on a bench. The shelves above the bench held a collection of projects in various stages of completion. “Are these poem boxes?” Carl nodded and reached for a dust pan.

  Grace opened a box. A dainty haiku by the Japanese master, Kotimichi, was rimmed by a scaly, emerald-colored wood. “Sassafras,” Carl said. He took the box from her hand, rubbed the green wood with a piece of 220-grit sandpaper and raised it under her nose. A sweet, perfumed fragrance flooded her brain. The next box contained a pithy verse, translated from the German, by Rilke. There were two love poems— a sublime verse by Pablo Neruda and another from the Persian mystic, Rumi. Offerings from the French feminist, Anais Nin and e e cummings lay side by side.

  “This is precious,” Grace murmured. Carl put the broom aside and glanced over her shoulder. The author insisted that people lived their existence dogged by a whimsical fate. Avoiding danger was no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Security was a superstition that did not really exist in nature. The final stanza implied that life was either a daring adventure or nothing.

  A daring adventure or nothing.

  “Helen Keller,” Grace spoke so softly the words were almost inaudible. “Who’d have ever though ...”

  She felt the corners of her eyes burn and swallowed hard. Suddenly she was lightheaded, mildly disoriented. Grace turned to her daughter. “Go upstairs and say goodbye to Mrs. Shapiro,” she said. “I’ll join you in a minute.” When Angie was gone she turned to Carl, “There’s a foreign movie playing at the Avon in Providence. I was wondering if you’d like to go.”

  “That would be nice.” Carl picked a block plane off the table. Turning the thumbscrew clockwise, he retracted the blade below the bottom edge and laid the tool on its side. “Its not a problem for you?” The lanky man was talking in an oblique code.

  “A problem for other people, perhaps, not for me,” Grace replied.

  On the way home Grace told Angie about the foreign movie. “A date?”

  “According to Mrs. Shapiro,” Grace parried the question, “Akira Kurosawa is one of the finest Japanese film directors.”

  “Carl asked you out on a date?”

  “No,” her mother corrected. “I asked him.” Angie slid down on the seat with an idiotic smile plastered across her face, her knees rammed up against the dashboard. She didn’t stopped smiling the rest of the way home.

  ******

  Carl picked Grace up in his battered, Chevy F-10, pickup truck. They drove across town, located the interstate just outside of Seekonk and reached the Rhode Island line in ten minutes.

  He pulled off the highway in Pawtucket, an old mill town that had seen the cloth trade gobbled up by overseas markets. At the far end of Hope Street they passed Brown University. Many of the residential tenements, which were protected by the Providence Historical Society, sported decorative trim and gingerbread molding. Homeowners couldn’t even change the color of their property without permission, insuring that the choice was in keeping with local preservation ordinances.

  The film, Dersu Uzala, was over thirty years old yet, just as Mrs. Shapiro had predicted the line at the ticket window wound down the street and around the corner to where a dark-skinned street vender was selling falafel wraps and humus from an open air kiosk. The crowd was mostly Brown University students, dressed in raggedy, torn jeans and funky tops - kids whose parents earned salaries in the comfortable six figures. “Les miserable,” Carl chuckled. “We should be so lucky.” There was no malice in his tone. The ticket countered opened and the line surged forward.

  The previous summer, Grace went to the movies on a blind date. The science teacher fixed her up with her cousin, also recently divorced. The guy seemed perfectly nice when she talked to him on the phone and on the ride to the theater acted perfectly normal. He sat quietly through the coming attractions then began pawing her five minutes into the main feature. On the pretext of using the restroom, Grace escaped to the lobby where she experienced a massive anxiety attack. A taxi brought her home. The boorish oaf never even bothered to find out why Grace had gone AWOL on a blind date.

  The movie, which described the friendship between Dersu, the hunter, and Arsenyev, the explorer, was in subtitles. Midway through the film, the two men were stranded on a barren plain, when the weather turned bad with a violent wind storm and snow. They built a makeshift shelter from twigs, leaves, fallen branches and anything else they could find in the frozen Siberian landscape. Grace glanced at Carl. He was sitting with his lips slightly parted, lost in the pathos of the scene.

  Afterwards they strolled over to the East Side Pancake House for dessert. The waitress took their orders and returned shortly with coffee and pastry. “Angie mentioned a neighborhood kid who’s been causing you grief.”

  Grace added a teaspoon of sugar and stirred her coffee. “How much did she tell you?”

  “Enough to know this troublemaker isn’t going join the Peace Corps or become a model citizen any time soon.” Carl sliced a wedge of apple pie and leaned forward. “There’s a bar a couple miles down the road on Federal Hill called The Ironhorse Tap. If you have a problem with a worthless punk, you go see one of the patrons,… preferably a middle-aged man who wears several pounds of gold chains around his 20-inch neck and rings on either pinky finger.” Carl’s tone was flippant. “You bare your soul, tell the man how much you’re willing to spend to make the problem go away. And then you drive home and forget all about The Ironhorse Tap”

  Grace had an intimation of what Carl was talking about. Federal Hill in Providence was synonymous with the Mafia. People like the mob king, Raymond Patriaca and his near-do-well son, Ray Junior, ran the underworld. Tough guys with names like Buckles Mancini and Frankie the Moron Mirabelli - they ran prostitution, drugs, numbers and protection rackets. During the Feast of Saint Anthony, they strong-armed local merchants and extorted money from the street venders. God he
lp the enterprising fool with the pepper and sausage cart who didn’t plan to cough up the dough!

  And if some troublesome dimwit like Dwight Goober was raining on your parade, you arranged a meeting with one of the regulars, some gentleman in good standing at the Ironhorse Tap social club, and they made the problem go away. No questions asked. It was curbstone justice at its finest.

  “What’s in it for me?” Carl finished his pie then extended his cup while the waitress freshened the coffee. “That’s all these hoodlums understand. Freud’s pleasure-pain principle.”

  “And whacking somebody on the kneecaps with a lead pipe,” Grace interjected, “falls into the latter category.” Carl cleared his throat as though he was going to say something but thought better of it.

  The door opened and more college students crowded into the restaurant. Grace brushed a strand of hair away from her face. “Since Tuesday, we have been studying Gray’s Elegy. A masterpiece, for sure, but the kids can’t relate.” She broke into an impromptu recitation:

  'Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,

  Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove;

  Now drooping, woeful wan,

  like one forlorn, Or crazed with care,

  or cross'd in hopeless love.

  Carl shook his head in disbelief. “The poem’s three hundred years old,” Grace groaned. “These kids are into MP3 players, Britney Spears and gangster rap. Old English isn’t exactly their cup of tea. ”

  A college girl at the next table pulled a new sweater from a bag and showed it to her friends. The sweater was knitted from a bulky, moss-colored yarn. Grace had seen similar designs in the upscale boutiques on Newbury Street in Boston. Imported from Ireland, you couldn’t touch them for under two hundred dollars. “I’m copying a verse from Gray’s Elegy on the blackboard. When I turn around, a girl in the front row is picking her nose. I’m explaining the subtleties of Gray’s Elegy and this ditsy girl with braces and a training bra is balancing a moist bugger on the tip of her finger.”

  “So I got this whacky idea,” Grace rushed on, “what if I pilfered some verses from your poem boxes - the haiku by Kotimichi , that amazing Helen Keller quote, some Kahlil Gibran - and taught that instead.”

  “Well, I suppose-”

  “There was a romantic poem by Pablo Neruda,” she cut him short, “something about boundaries merging.”

  Carl lowered his eyes and thought hard. “I love you,” he repeated from memory, “because I know no other way than this. Where I does not exist nor you.”

  “So close,” Grace picked up the next line, “that your hand on my chest is my hand.”

  “So close that your eyes close,” Carl delivered the final verse, “as I fall asleep.”

  Now that the noisy table of college students had paid their bill and left, the waitress began clearing the plates. “Well, I don’t know,” he added thoughtfully. “Neruda might be a little too intense for eighth graders with training bras.”

  He shook his head and began to chuckle as though at some private joke. “You’re asking me, a janitor, for advice. I’m sure Ed Gray would get a kick out of that.”

  “Ed Gray is a horses ass!” Grace impulsively leaned across the table and kissed him on the lips, a generous, unhurried gesture. “It’s the Neruda poem,” she said by way of explanation. Her chest was heaving with emotion. “I seem to be having a real problem with personal boundaries. Yours and mine.”

  It took Carl a good minute to catch his breath. “I’d kiss you back,” he said softly, “if it wasn’t for the audience.” Several customers, including a busboy and the waitress who was clearing the nearby table, were staring curiously at the couple.

  Whatever else Grace had in mind to say about Gray’s Elegy evaporated with the kiss, flew out the window of the East Side Pancake House on gilded wings. They spoke little during the ride home. Grace could feel her body glowing. When they were a mile from home Carl finally turned to look at her. “Remember when I refinished your classroom floor?” His expression was sober.

  “That was over a year ago.”

  “It still looks good, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “Acrylic doesn’t hold up as well as polyurethane but it’s still a nice product.” He spoke in a flat, distracted monotone. “You were sorting papers and I was moving chairs around washing one portion of the floor at a time.”

  He leaned over and brushed her cheek with a feathery kiss. “That was when I first realized I was in love with you.” Carl said nothing more for the remainder of the ride home.

  ******

  Angie had already gone to bed and was fast asleep when Grace got home. The mail was in the kitchen piled neatly on the counter. A couple of sales flyers from the mall, the telephone bill and a notice for jury duty. On top of the pile was a crumbled potato chip bag. Lays Onion and Sour Cream. Grace found the plastic bad crammed into the mailbox earlier in the day. The word “BICH!’ was scrawled across the front in ink. A gift from the illiterate Dwight Goober. The youth had begun throwing empty Marlboro cigarette wrappers on the front lawn along with soda cans and, most weekends, beer bottles. Not that anyone ever saw him. The debris was manageable. Problem was, Grace couldn’t see where his petty hatefulness was going.

  Grace had a theory. She called it the ‘Theory of Misplaced Altruism’. Watching the Labor Day Telethon with Jerry Louis every September, her heart broke for the poor unfortunates, the children with muscular dystrophy twitching spastically in their high-backed wheelchairs. The courageous parents who devoted their lives to sick children were modern day saints. Grace called in her pledge and said a fervent prayer to the same inscrutable God she ignored through the rest of the year.

  She had no similar sympathy for that motley collection of freaks and losers in the juvenile section of Brandenburg District Court. The Dwight Goobers of the world, the sluttish girl in the revealing tank top and her mother with the horsy teeth - they threatened to rip her world to pieces with their chaos and depravity. They used the system to beat the system just like the loud­mouthed drunk who held court every morning at Adam’s Diner. The implicit message: live a thoroughly despicable life, wreck your health then go on the dole.

  Grace was reminded of a TV segment on 60-Minutes earlier in the week. A bully was terrorizing a small-town, Southern community - a redneck Dwight Goober beating up neighbors, vandalizing their property, making obscene and salacious remarks to their womenfolk. The town fathers held an impromptu meeting and decided to get rid of the bully. They shot him in the head five times and left him to bleed to death in a drainage ditch. Then they went home to their evening dinners, bowling leagues, Sunday morning church and choir practice. The crime was never solved even though everybody knew who did it. Things quieted down after that. Got back to normal. No more bully.

  No more Dwight Goober.

  After the 60-Minutes segment, Grace fantasized about buying a gun. Something high caliber, where the soft lead slugs would heat upon impact with flesh and expand as they tore through the body. She would hide in the back yard until her nocturnal nemesis arrived. No need to berate the bastard. No outbursts of self-righteous indignation. Grace, the mild-mannered English teacher, would morph into dispassionate executioner, a cross between The Terminator and Dirty Harry. Call it a cold-blooded act of revenge. No, not revenge. Retribution. Most people thought of retribution as punishment, but, properly understood, retribution was a commodity given or demanded in repayment. A dozen years from now, Grace rationalized, Dwight Goober would have amassed a small fortune in uncollected debts. Why wait?

  ******

  “Mom?” Grace drifted into her daughter’s bedroom. Angie was sitting up in bed now. “So, how was your date?”

  Grace smoothed the comforter up around her daughter’s throat. “I guess we’ll have to learn to share.”

  It took a while for her mother’s remark to register. “Figured as much.”

  “How so?”

  “B
y the radiant look on your face.” Angie smirked. “I haven’t seen you this happy since last summer.” Grace was trying to recall what spectacular event her daughter was referring to. “Our wilderness trip,” Angie clarified. “The Appalachian Trail.”

  ******

  The summer following her divorce, Grace Paulson and her daughter hiked the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuously marked footpath in the world. Not the two thousand miles stretching from Maine’s Mount Katahdin down through Springer Mountain in Georgia. No, nothing so daring. Rather they would start at the beginning (or the end, depending on your place of departure) and spend a week exploring various spots along the way.

  “Well, I guess it’s just us girls,” Grace said. She was loading provisions in a backpack, the lightweight frame propped up against the refrigerator. There wouldn’t be refrigerators where they were going. No stoves, central heating, flush toilets or other basic amenities. “We’ll park twenty miles below the base of Mount Katahdin and hike north. Climb to the summit and retrace our steps.”

  Angie handed her mother a stack of wooden matches sealed in a watertight metal tube. “How high?”

  “Five thousand two hundred and sixty-eight feet.”

  “Twelve feet less than a mile.”

  “A linear mile.” Mrs. Grace smiled laconically. “Only if you zoom straight up, vertically, like a helicopter.” She took the matches and stashed them in a side pocket next to the spare flashlight batteries. The tent was tiny, just large enough for two. In the morning, they drove north on route 95, crossing the New Hampshire state line around ten a.m.. They reached north central Maine by early afternoon and parked the car in a small lot just off the trail. The weather was warm and muggy. “Get your pack up high on your shoulders,” Mrs. Grace cautioned, “so the weight’s evenly distributed.”

  A clutch of hikers, some lugging huge quantities of gear and others traveling light, passed leisurely in either direction. No one seemed in any particular hurry. Grace knelt down and fingered a smallish leaf, red fading to yellow.