A pall of futility hung over their marriage. All the things that had seemed so imminent—financial security, children, ripe old age—were no longer. They felt as though the future had been misrepresented, falsified. They fell to contemplating all those things not done, things they’d always believed there would be time for, later. All the vaguely instructional clichés by which they’d conducted their lives—Hard work pays off, Good things happen to good people, Someday our ship will come in—were worthless in the face of this mindless, devouring disease.
Graham prayed. Not having grown up in a religious household and ignorant of all things devotional, he composed prayers like business letters, each no more than a veiled Faustian pact: Dear God, if, in your infinite wisdom, you can see your way clear to cure my wife, feel free to take ten—no, fifteen—no, twenty years—off my life, or give me leprosy or strike me with a lightning bolt. Please consider my offer, I think you’ll find it a fair one, amen.
THE HOUSE WAS A RAMBLING TWO-STORY: latticed mullions on catherine-wheel windows, meticulously landscaped lawn, shrubs swaddled in canvas and bound with twine. It backed onto a man-made lake, one of several in the city: pulling up, Graham glimpsed water through gaps in the foliage, moonlight glancing off ribbed waves. A lip of light spilled beneath the garage door; every so often, that lip was darkened by the shadow of a passing foot.
The motorhome, a late model Chinook Summit, was parked at the end of a wide interlocking brick driveway, parallel to the garage. Standing in the RV lot, the owners had no doubt imagined rambling, cross-country journeys, sultry nights parked on lake shores lit by a harvest moon—just like in the sales brochure. Of course job, family, and other obligations rendered their freewheeling fantasies just that, resigning the motorhome to its current role as a repository for dust, cobwebs, and shed maple keys. Graham repossessed many such luxury impulse items: Sea-Doos, bass boats, catamarans, executive nautilus equipment. The owners seemed to think since they weren’t actively using these toys, they should be spared the onus of paying for them.
The camper door hung ajar. Graham picked his way through the cramped living space, puzzled to find signs of active habitation: his penlight swept countertops littered with empty potato chip bags and crushed beer cans; the kitchen table and captain’s chairs held hamster cages; a twenty-five-gallon aquarium sat on the floor, next to a chicken-wire cage scattered with brown feathers. The predominant smell was of cedar shavings, and below that the ammoniac odor of rodent piss.
Graham slid behind the wheel and dropped the gearshift into neutral. The camper rolled down the drive’s smooth grade, Graham pumping the brakes gingerly. He wedged blocks of wood under the tires and slid under the RV’s bumper, squinting up into the dark topography of linkages and drive shafts, wiping beads of coolant off the radiator grille to stop them dripping onto his face.
He’d clipped chains to the axles when the garage door began its rattling ascent. A square of grainy yellow light fell across his legs. He peered out from under the front wheels at a pair of advancing shins.
“Ah, jeez,” a voice said. “Coming to take your pound of flesh.”
Graham hauled his ass out from under the hood, fists balled. He took one look at the guy and relaxed: tall and willowy, dressed in a kelly green track suit with a badly pixelated photograph superimposed on the sweatshirt. The overall impression was of lightness, airiness: the man seemed constructed from featherweight space-age polymers. His pinched features bore an expression that reminded Graham of those lab-coated scientists in 1950s Movietone filmstrips.
“My final possession spirited away in the middle of the night.” The guy threw his hands up helplessly. “This is it—the end of James Paris! The end, I tell you!”
Graham wondered what it was about property seizure that gave rise to soliloquies so melodramatic they’d embarrass a threepenny hack.
“Relax, Mr. Paris. It’s no big deal.”
“Says you, no big deal.” The man smelled as though he’d spent the night marinating in Bushmills Irish whiskey. “You got what’s left of my life chained to the bumper of your truck.”
Up close, Paris looked older than Graham had initially thought: skin wrinkled and crepey around the eyes and mouth, shiny over the cheekbones. Whether this was true age or a temporary haggardness brought about by recent events was unclear. Graham saw the photo on Paris’s sweatshirt featured two pit bulls. The names Rodney and Matilda were printed below in block letters.
“Mr. Paris … ”
“James, call me James.”
“Graham. You’re behind on your payments, James.”
“I know, Graham. How much—a month? Two?”
“I don’t know for sure.”
“How’d you know where to find me? Isn’t even my house.”
“We have our ways.”
“Alison must’ve called the dealership. She won’t be satisfied until I’m under a train trestle, eating Alpo. The woman wants me ruined.” Paris pronounced ruined as roon’d.
Ex-wife, Graham figured. He’d filled the role of distribution agent in more than a few bitter divorces, ensuring both parties got exactly what the settlement stipulated. Surveying his own modest possessions, he often wondered how much of it he owed to the avarice and spite of men and women who once pledged ’til death us do part.
“Would you mind giving me a minute to gather my stuff?” Paris said. “I’ve got a few things in the camper and—oh, you little brat! ”
A small lumpy shape wobbled across the driveway, making a beeline for the canvas-wrapped mulberry trees. Paris stumbled after it, slippers skating across the wet flagstones. He fell on top of the ungainly creature then rose to his knees, cradling a furry bundle to his chest.
“Swear, can’t turn my back for a minute,” he said. “The rest of them are fine, but this one, he’s too curious for his own good.”
Paris held a guinea pig. Brown, with a white stripe running down the center of its vaguely bovine face, eyes like glossy black BBs set on either side of its skull. It sat serenely in Paris’s cupped palms, hairless paws resting on a curled finger, warbling and blinking its eyes.
“No end of frustration.” Paris stroked the animal with thumb and pointer finger, shaping the fur on its head into a mohawk. “He’s a good boy, still. Come inside?” He nodded towards the garage. “Just for a minute? I won’t hurt you.”
Graham smiled: he outweighed Paris by a good seventy pounds. Peering into the garage, he saw video recorders set on tripods, white umbrellas angled on poles, a boom mike suspended from a roofbeam.
Graham followed Paris into the garage. A miniature set lay sprawled across the floor: strips of sod interspersed with bristly thatches of alfalfa and gnarled bits of driftwood. Tiny houses scattered about: one shaped like a boot with a thatched roof and a window cut in the heel, the other a white cottage with a sagging roof and water wheel. A drift of popcorn lay beneath a magnifying glass rigged to a stick driven into the sod. The enclosure was hemmed by a chicken-wire fence.
An assortment of avian, amphibian, and rodent life roamed the pen. A mouse’s pointed white head poked from the cottage’s shuttered window. A frog perched atop a chunk of granite, the elastic bladder of its throat expanding and contracting. A duck slept off in the corner, beak buried in its feathered ruff. A painted turtle stood facing the boot-shaped house, head telescoped from its shell on a long wrinkled neck.
Paris set the guinea pig down on the grass. It scurried over the turtle’s shell into the boot.
“Where’s my star?” said Paris, scanning the ground. “Where’s Sammy?”
A twitching pink nose emerged from the pile of popcorn, followed by a round furred face. The hamster—brown and white, black-tipped ears—gripped a kernel of popcorn in its paws, chewing in the rapid, gluttonous manner of such creatures.
“Will you look at that.” Paris ducked behind a camera, angling the lens. “I’ve been begging him to do that all night!”
He left the camera rolling and went over to the wo
rkbench, where a half-empty bottle of Bushmills sat. He poured a respectable two ounces into a white mug; rooting around under the bench, he came up with another mug, and, after wiping it clean on his sweatshirt, filled that too.
“Like herding cats.” He handed Graham a mug. “I end up burning two hours of tape to get the shot I need. Got to work at night, too, since most of these guys are nocturnal.”
The mouse crawled out the cottage window, nosed its way through a patch of alfalfa and entered the boot. A distressed squeak. The guinea pig’s head appeared out the top of the boot, pushing up the conical thatched roof: it appeared to be wearing a coolie hat, the type worn by Vietnamese rice farmers.
“What are you up to here?”
“Are you kidding?” Paris seemed genuinely upset. “It’s Riverside Tales!”
“The TV program,” Graham said, confused. “The … the children’s show?”
“Of course, the children’s show. Well, not exactly. There were some, let’s say, obstructing legalities,” Paris waved his cup in a dismissive arc, “that, well, caused me to change the focus from series continuation to a stand-alone effort in the spirit of the old series.”
“You mean a knock-off?”
“Homage, Graham, homage. See, there’s Sammy Hamster,” he pointed, “and BP the Guinea Pig, Marian Mouse, Scholarly Old Frog, Turtle—they’re all here!”
Graham remembered the show about a group of animals living along a river. Each episode, some problem arose—a flood or a blizzard, one of the guinea pig’s wacky inventions gone awry—that the riverbank denizens would solve. Though childless himself, it was the sort of sweetly instructive program Graham might encourage kids to watch.
“You’re the creator?”
Paris shook his head. “Nah. I’m up late a few weeks back, watching the tube. Three, four o’clock in the morning—nothing but infomercials and test patterns. I came across this old children’s show, Riverside Tales. I’m thinking, four in the morning—what kid’s watching this? Anyway, seemed like something I could pull off. Head to the pet store and buy the cast, right? No SAG, no unions, no agents, none of those hassles.”
Two dishes sat in a corner of the pen. One held sunflower seeds and barley pellets; the other was empty. Paris slopped a thimbleful of liquor into the empty dish. “A rare treat,” he assured Graham. “Helps with performance anxiety. Anyway, the show went on hiatus years ago. This,” he said with a boozy sweep of his arm, “is The New and Improved Riverside Tales! ”
“You’re a film producer?”
“No, ad executive. Was, should say. Ever seen the commercial for Blastberry Crunch?”
“You mean the breakfast cereal? The one with the, oh, the giant talking berries?”
“Colonel Blastberry, right, and the Berry Patrol. That was my campaign. I wrote the jingle that played over ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’” He sang in a low baritone: “Colonel Blastberry, Colonel Blastberry, Colonel BlastBERRY, nutritious and brave!”
“So why are you doing this?”
“I was fired, is why. I’m stone broke, is why. I’m living in a camper, is why. My ex-wife is a bloodsucking vampire bat, is why.” Paris’s face contorted. “God, I don’t even live in a camper anymore!”
“What about your house? Why don’t you sell it?”
“I told you, I don’t live here. I’m house-sitting for friends. I gave Alison everything: the house, the car, the dogs. Were it legal for that sea hag to suck the very air from my lungs, believe me, she would.”
“I take it you’re angling for a film grant.”
Paris nodded. “Rented the video equipment, sunk the last of my savings into this set, these critters. Talking Custer’s last stand, here.”
“I don’t remember a duck,” Graham said, with a nod towards the slumbering mallard.
“That was my idea. Dillson Duck. He’s comic relief.” Paris shook his head. “He’s not working out.”
The hamster wandered over to the water dish and lapped the booze. It shook all over like a wet dog shaking itself dry.
“That’s the spirit, Sammy,” said Paris. “Hey, would you mind doing me a tiny favor before leaving with my camper and, y’know, the final shreds of my dignity?”
“What’s that?”
“I’m on the last scene, here. In this episode, BP built a popcorn machine.” Paris indicated the magnifying glass tied to a stick. “The machine caused some problems, but they’ve been resolved. So, now, the denouement. Good triumphs, evil is thwarted—”
“Evil? It’s popcorn.”
“What? I know it’s popcorn. It’s a metaphor.” Paris enunciated slowly, as though addressing the recipient of a frontal lobotomy. “The popcorn represents evil, metaphorically speaking.”
“Ah.”
“Music swells, harmony abounds, the riverside animals clasp hands in the spirit of friendship and love.” Paris stifled a belch. “All that crap. Fade to black.”
“What can I do?”
“Well, I’ve got to get these guys together in one shot. They need to be … frolicking.” He clapped his hands briskly. “So! Could you handle the camera while I motivate the talent?”
“I can handle that.”
Paris herded the animals around the popcorn with a pair of plastic spatulas. For the most part, they seemed resigned to their roles: Scholarly Old Frog burrowed into the white drift until only the green-black humps of its eyes were visible. Dillson Duck quacked morosely and went back to sleep. Turtle tucked his head into his shell and wouldn’t show himself for love nor money. Sammy—slightly intoxicated by now—became amorous with Marian Mouse; his advances coldly rebuffed, he bit her.
“We got some …”
“Yeah, I see.” Paris brushed a cluster of dark pellets off the popcorn.“Goddamn turd factories.” He opened a jar of peanut butter, dipped his finger, offered it to the rodents.
“So that’s how you make it look like they’re talking?”
“You bet. They love the stuff. Sticks to the roof of their mouths. Drives them bananas.”
Marian, BP, and Sammy sat around smacking their lips. It really did look as though they were having an animated, albeit distracted, conversation.
“That’s a wrap,” Paris said. They’d spent the better part of an hour, filled two video cassettes, killed the bottle of Bushmills. “Iron out the bugs in the editing room.”
Graham glanced out the window, moon hanging low and fat over the lake. “I’ve got to go.” He didn’t want to leave. The booze suffused him with a mellow glow, softening every angle, inspiring a pervasive goodwill towards all creatures great and small.
“Yes, we’ve both got business to attend to. Suppose I’d better head to the dump and gather the makings for a shanty.”
Paris hunted a cardboard box out from under the workbench, setting the animals inside.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re taking my home, remember? Their home, too.”
“But … you can’t abandon them.” Graham was horrified Paris would set the box out on the curb for tomorrow’s garbage pickup.
“They’re your responsibility.” “Relax,” said Paris. “Come with me.”
THE BACKYARD SLOPED DOWN to a thin stretch of sand along the lake’s shore. The sky held a livid pallor, the onset of dawn. Snow piled along the banks. Waves lapped the shoreline.
Paris walked down to the water. The animals congregated inside the box, preening, scratching the cardboard. Paris set the box in the sand, heeled off his shoes, removed his socks, rolled up his pantlegs. He tucked the dozing duck under his arm and waded into the lake.
“Cold,” he hissed through his teeth. He waded out until the water touched his knees, setting the duck down. “You’re free. Rejoin your mallard brethren.”
The duck swam towards Paris.
“No! Go away. You’re free, don’t you get it? Free!”
Paris trudged back to shore, leaving the duck to swim in aimless circles. He plucked Turtle and Scholarly Old Frog from the box.
“Boys, it’s high time you became men.”
Graham sat on a boulder near the water. He didn’t say anything— wasn’t his place to. Paris laid the animals down on the coarse sand. The frog hopped into the water, an inky blur lost amid waving strands of eelgrass. The turtle dipped a tentative foot into the water. Satisfied, it swam out into the lake. The dark convex of its shell cut a slow path through the water, starlight bent upon the dome.
Paris stretched out on the sand. Breath puffed from his mouth, white and vaporous. Graham stirred the toe of his boot through the sand in a figure-eight pattern.
“They’ll be okay, won’t they?”
“I don’t know,” said Graham. “Winter’s coming.”
A series of shrill squeaks arose from the box as Marian Mouse’s unsullied character was again challenged by a boorish Sammy Hamster.
Turtle’s shell described a lazy arc through the water, looping back
towards shore.
“Cuts people’s chests open. What he does for a living.”
“He who?”
“Guy sleeping with my wife. She’s a nurse, he’s a cardiovascular surgeon. Looks like John Travolta, and not Saturday Night Fever Travolta—Look Who’s Talking Travolta. It’s depressing.” Paris took a deep breath and let it out slow. “Sometimes I think about walking into the hospital, into the operating theater, punching him. Right in his swarthy face. I bet he wears gold chains under his OR scrubs—a lot of them. I think, y’know, like maybe it’ll solve something, right? Answer something. But then I think, hey, this is the way she wants it. She’s happier now, right? I know that.”
“Maybe you should be happy for her, then.”
“It’s just, I thought I’d be happy, too. I wanted to be free, unfettered. All I could think about. A fresh start, hey?”
“Sure,” Graham said. “Sure, I know.”
Sleeping away the daylight hours, Graham’s most persistent dream was one in which he repossesses a car, but, instead of driving to the impound lot, keeps driving. The car is a ’63 Corvette Stingray convertible, cobalt blue. Sitting behind the wheel, he senses his personality shift to that of the car itself: growling and aggressive, the loudest, meanest dog on the block. All the perceived shortcomings that haunt his waking self—a lack of true intellect, a feeling he could’ve done better—evaporate like water dripped on a searing engine block. The city of his dream is such as he’s never seen before: he drives dusty laneways strung with adobe huts where dusky-skinned children chase lean hens through open yards, past imposing Kashmiri towers bellying in the shape of onions at their peaks, greenwater canals clogged with sleek gondolas.
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