Joe lost track of Maggie while she was doing time. He had written her often in the beginning, and she had always answered—funny letters. You’d think from reading her letters she was having a great time in jail. He wasn’t fooled.
She’d served about half her 18 months when her letters stopped. He called the jail. Was he family? Well, not exactly. They wouldn’t tell him anything. He kept writing for another month. Then he stopped. He was pretty sure he would have heard if she’d died in jail. It wasn’t like they lived in such a harsh place you could die in jail and not be mentioned in the daily papers.
He liked to think she was getting help. Maybe in jail they’d make her see a doctor who could figure out why she had to steal things. Maybe she would change. Maybe she already had. Maybe she’d gotten to a place in her life where a guy like Joe just didn’t make sense any more.
The month of her release came and went. He hadn’t been sure of the exact date anyway. He couldn’t just hang around the jail waiting for her to come out. He did hang around waiting for her to call. She didn’t call.
The next woman in Joe’s life was a freelance creator of computer games. Her name was Roberta. She was all the time shooting him with imaginary ray guns. She had a ten-year-old daughter named Tiffany and a sixteen-year-old son named Sam. One night Sam tried to strangle Joe with the cable that hooked his mother’s computer to the laser printer. Joe decided he wasn’t cut out to be a dad. He and Roberta weren’t together anymore.
There were posters all over town.
The Amazing Maggie! Come one, come all. See her pull a rabbit out of a hat. See her pull a hat out of a rabbit. Put her in a box and watch her get out of it! You won’t believe your eyes.
The big question for Joe was whether he wanted to be in the first row or not.
Opening night, Joe took a seat somewhere in the middle of the third row—not too near, not too far. When the lights went down, he decided he had agonized for nothing. She probably couldn’t see him anyway.
The curtain went up. The band jumped into a song, long and lazy in the beginning so the dancing men in black tie, tails, and top hats could tap along with their walking sticks, picking up the pace, putting on the Ritz, lining up along the stage, and then in the middle pulling back into a big V so Maggie could appear in a thundering explosion of pink smoke.
Ta da!
Nobody’s assistant now, she was the main event, a headliner. She did card tricks. She made things appear and disappear. She made things float in the air. She was really very good.
So, did she look either sadder or wiser? Joe couldn’t tell. Mostly she just looked good. She seemed totally at ease on stage. She loved the audience and the audience loved her back.
Could he take credit for any of it? Probably not. At best, he’d been practice for her, and there had been jail and therapy and whatever else she’d been up to since he’d lost track of her.
She lined up her dancing men and pulled produce from their ears. Cantaloupes! Watermelons! Fat zucchinis.
Hey, no fair, Joe thought, that’s our trick!
“For this next part,” she said, and from the shadows came a drum roll, “I need a volunteer from the audience.”
A spotlight swept across the crowd, and when it passed him, he thought he saw her eyes widen a little.
Okay. Now or never again. Joe jumped to his feet.
“Me,” he shouted, “pick me!”
Season Finale
I am a P.I. on TV. You’d know me if you saw me. Sam, who is the brother of my dead lover, knows me. He grabs my arm as I step out of Brinkmann’s Hollywood Pharmacy.
“You!” he says. I can see the emotions swashbuckling on his face. He’s purple with anger, but he’s got this goofy grin that keeps going off and on like he can’t believe his luck. Being bald and beefy with tattoos on his hairy arms, he doesn’t look much like Pamela.
“Hello, Sam,” I say. “How are you holding up?” I expect him to ask me if I found out who killed Pamela.
He punches me in the mouth.
I fall to the sidewalk, and he comes down on my chest, pinning my arm with his knees. He pummels my face with his fists. People step around us.
“Help!” I call, but no one comes to my aid. No doubt they think we’re filming. My lights go out.
It’s not a pretty sight I see when next I’m able to open my swollen eyes. Pam’s mom is stirring something on the stove, and a long ash from the cigarette in her mouth falls into the pot. Pam’s dad folds his newspaper and gives me the eye. Sam is punching his left palm with his right fist. I want to touch my face but find that I’m tied to my chair. Pam herself is across the table from me, and she looks cold and blue. There are crystals in her honey hair, and a little icicle hangs from her nose. She sits at attention.
“Let’s begin, Mother,” Pam’s dad says.
I can see that this is going to be bad.
Pam had died off-stage. I had imagined her going peacefully—a sweet, gentle drifting away on puffy clouds of poison. I can see now that that isn’t true. Her face is a frozen scream.
“I vote guilty.” Pam’s mom taps her spoon on the edge of the pot. She throws her cigarette in the sink then produces another, like magic, from the apron bulging over her belly.
“Me too,” says Sam, still punching one hand into the other.
“Whoa now! Hold on,” says Pam’s dad. “Let’s hear what Pammy’s got to say.” He looks at her, then he looks at me. “Doesn’t she look nice? We’ve been keeping her cold for you. What? What’s that you say, Pammy?” He leans his head close to Pam’s gaping mouth. “She says she loved you, Mr. Nasal Spray. She says you could always make her laugh.” He twists his head around until both he and Pam are staring at me, and he laughs that squeaky laugh of hers: hee, hee, hee. He’s got it down just right.
Then his face gets mean. “She says you killed her, Mr. Mouth Wash.”
I can see that I’m in some trouble here.
“Why would I do that? We were going to be married!” Didn’t they understand that the girl always dies once the hero decides to marry her? It’s sad, but that’s the way things are. It’s an absolute law of the universe: when the TV hero loves, the beloved dies. I can’t help it. Can I flap my arms and fly?
“Pammy says guilty, and I say guilty.” Pam’s dad puts his hands on the table and pushes himself to his feet. “So that makes it unanimous.”
Sam drags my chair away from the table and jerks me upright.
“Hey!” I say. “Hey, wait! I was in the studio at the time.”
“The studio?” Pam’s dad looks puzzled.
“At the time?” Pam’s mom smiles a shrewd smile.
“My show, you know?” I try again.
Sam belts me a good one in the stomach. “What show? You work in a goddamn drug store!”
“That’s just my cover!” I probably shouldn’t have told them that, but what with the way I was struggling to get my breath after Sam punched me, they may not have understood the significance of my remark anyway.
Pam’s dad picks her up. She’s still sitting at attention, and he looks like a man moving furniture.
They drag me off to the cellar.
Sam padlocks one end of a chain around my neck. The other end is welded to a metal ring on the wall. He cuts my arms free, and, still wobbly from all the excitement, I sit on the stone floor. Pam’s dad puts her in a chair facing me.
“She may seem cold now,” Pam’s dad says. “But she’ll warm up to you.” He knocks his knuckles against an oil drum by my side. I see that way down low there’s a little silver faucet hooked to the drum. “Here’s your water.”
“You get to sit in your own shit.” Sam grins at me.
“You can’t say ‘shit’ on TV,” I tell him.
Pam’s mom leans down close. “
Pammy told me all your stories, Mr. Feminine Hygiene Spray. We was like two girls, Pammy and me. Well, this is going to be close up and in color. In a few days my Pammy will be wearing her special perfume just for you, Mr. Speed Stick. She’ll get that special look. Ain’t no fade-away.”
“Let’s go, Mother,” Pam’s dad is on the stairs. “Hawaii’s waiting. Come on, Sammy, you don’t want to miss those hula girls.”
They go away and leave me there with Pam. The door above bangs shut, making the light bulb on its long wire swing and the shadows dance. Pam just sits there looking at me. I can see that the icicle on her nose has melted.
“Okay, okay,” I say.
It’s not our ordinary stuff, and the writers will have a hell of time getting me out of this one. My fans will puzzle over it all summer. It’ll drive them crazy.
“Fade to black,” I say.
Nothing happens.
The Sweater
She had obviously made it herself, so what was there to do but to try it on?
“Okay, here goes,” he said.
“Happy birthday to you,” she sang softly. “Happy birthday to you.”
The sweater felt a little scratchy. It was green with big red horizontally stretched diamonds.
“Happy birthday, dear Geoffrey.”
It smelled like straw or maybe clean sheep eating straw. He pulled it over his head.
“Happy birthday to you!”
Inside it was a lot darker than he’d expected. Was the weave so tight no light at all could penetrate? The neck hole was tight around the top of his head. He tugged gently. He could imagine Alice sitting across the table looking at him. Smiling smiling smiling. She would be freeze-face-smiling so when his head popped out of the sweater hole ta da! there she’d be smiling smiling smiling saying oh I hope you like it and it looks so good on you. She’d be waiting for the million questions he must have.
He should use this time in the dark to come up with some questions. How long did you work on it? What is it made of? Where did you get the yarn? How come I never saw you knitting?
He had, of course, seen her knitting but that would not be something he should admit. He pulled a little harder. Had she misjudged the size of his head?
Alice would be looking at his brown hair poking out the sweater hole like an animal backing out of its den. Inside, in the dark, he sensed a vast and empty space.
“Hello,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m just checking the echoes,” he said.
“Echoes?”
He pulled hard and sat up straight and strained to poke his head through the neck hole of the sweater. No dice. If he pulled too hard the sweater might squeeze down his face, certainly wiping the smile if not the nose from his face. He might lose his face altogether and pop out as a skull with chattering teeth and a small patch of hair on top exactly the size of the neck hole.
He stopped struggling. It might be easier to roll the thing up so his arms would be on the outside and he could get more leverage, maybe do a screw-top routine, but that would mean he couldn’t appear magically to meet her smile with one of his own. He stretched his arms out, groping in the darkness for the boundaries of this new place. There didn’t seem to be any boundaries and now he couldn’t even feel the rough wool against his face. He could feel the tight band of the hole around his head. It was a headache that swoops in like a pigeon to land on your head and after some speculative pecking, spreads its wings and hugs your head tight, quivering.
It reminded him of the infamous medieval hat torture and the dream of some guy in a black mask roasting a silver derby until it glowed red and then pushing it down onto Geoffrey’s head where it sizzled and popped and he rolled over and Alice moaned in her sleep.
“Give me a flashlight,” he said.
“What?”
“I need a flashlight,” he said.
“Aren’t you going to put on the sweater?”
“I’m trying to put on the sweater,” he said, “but I can’t see what I’m doing.”
She was silent.
“Are you out there?” he asked.
She sighed, and then he heard her slide her chair back. Her steps across the kitchen floor. The junk drawer to the left of the dishwasher opening. Stuff rattling. Her steps back to the table. “Here,” she said.
“You’ve got the flashlight?”
“Yes.”
“Poke it up under the edge and let me have it,” he said.
A moment later he felt cold metal against his stomach, and he groped down and grabbed the flashlight. It felt like a little man with a big head.
“Thanks,” he said.
She didn’t reply, but he could tell she was back in her chair across the table again.
He flipped on the flashlight.
The light was bright green, unearthly. It made his hands glow green, but it didn’t reach the far wall. He turned in a circle but the light didn’t reach any of the walls. He pointed it up. The ceiling was too high to see. He walked forward but got no closer to the wall, and then it hit him that since the walls were attached to the roof and the top of his head was lodged in a hole in the roof, as he moved, the roof moved, and as the roof moved, the walls moved, so no matter how quickly he walked he would never reach any of the walls.
There might well be secret doors in the walls. He might find them if he could run his hands over the walls. If he could get close enough to shine his green light on the walls, he might find hairline cracks marking the secret doors. He could reach down into his pants pocket and get his pocket knife and slide the blade into a hairline crack and pry the door, open pass out of the darkness and into a meadow. There would be trees and birds in the trees, and the trees would line a gurgling creek with silvery blue fish darting about and looking up at him nervously when he settled on the bank and put his feet in the water.
He would never get his feet wet if he couldn’t get to the wall and the secret door. How far could the wall be? Maybe if he pulled his head way back (bringing the wall closer) and stretched his arms way out, he might be able to get his fingernails into the hairline crack of the secret door. Best check the echo again.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello again,” she said. “What are you doing in there?”
“Looking for a way out,” he said.
“Here, let me help.”
“Don’t!”
Too late.
She seized the sweater on either side of his head and yanked down with tremendous force. The roof collapsed over his head, but his nose and ears stopped it before his head could be completely exposed. He looked down the slope of the sweater and it was like the sides of volcano that had just pushed his head out of the earth instead of a bunch of lava. He looked across the table at Alice. She wasn’t smiling.
“Work your arms up into the sleeves,” she said.
“What about my nose and ears?” His voice was muffled.
“Me, me, me,” she said.
“It is my birthday.”
“Yes,” she said. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
He let go of the flashlight and it rolled off his lap and fell onto the floor.
“What was that?” she asked.
“The flashlight,” he said.
She ducked under the table.
“You’ve broken off the little alien’s head,” she said from under the table.
“The flashlight had a little alien head?”
“Not anymore,” she said.
He looked down the slope of the sweater and across the mesa cluttered with cups and saucers, salt and pepper, sugar and the bright remains of bows and box and paper that had contained his birthday gift. Her empty place. He waited for her to reappear, but she didn’t come back up from under t
he table.
“What are you doing under there?” he asked.
“I’m walking under a slate-gray rainy sky,” she said. “I can see the ocean in the distance. I’m just going to keep walking until I get there.”
“Is there any gum stuck to the sky?”
“Scratches.” she said. “Streaks and scratches. Little hills. It isn’t easy to tell what’s the ground and what’s the sky.”
He worked his hands out from beneath the sweater and rolled it up to his nose and worked it down his face. He got his arms in the sleeves.
“Come out,” he said. “I’ve managed to get the sweater on.”
No answer.
Home Remedy
Perry took another look at the things he’d laid out on the lid of the closed toilet, everything lined up precisely, like a tray of doctor tools: ice pick, pliers, and a spray can of ant-and-roach poison. This was going to hurt. Yes, it would hurt, but nothing else had worked. Nose drops just made them frisky.
Time was not on his side. He had to quiet things down in his nose before Carmela woke up and came rubbing her eyes and scratching her butt and knocking on the bathroom door. She didn’t yet realize that he was the source of their infestation.
Perry picked up the red and green can of bug spray and took a moment to puzzle out the backwards letters when viewed in the mirror—black letters spelling bug death in reverse. Did that spell life for him then? Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? He put the white nozzle of the bug spray to his left nostril, took a deep breath through his mouth, and pushed the button. Fire raged through his nose and into his head, burning down the forest behind his eyes, chasing crazy black and yellow dream birds into his sudden tears. He swallowed a scream. His nose bulged and contracted as something inside punched around, fighting to get out. He sneezed, sneezed again. The maddening tickle ceased on the left, and a slick brown roach, as long as the first two joints of his little finger, slid out of his nose.
Meet Me in the Moon Room Page 8
