Because for everything that I sell for one hundred and fifty, I’ve had to shell out fifty, so it’s like if everything goes bad, I mean I could sell it but I don’t want to get anyone sick with E. coli, that’s not my business, I never volunteered for the nerve-gas patrol if you know what I mean. I just don’t want to lose money, you understand. I’m thinking of Ma at home waiting for me to bring her home a carton of cherry ice cream like I do whenever I make a decent sale, and I’m almost about to explain but the guy’s talking too much, out-tonguing me basically. Meanwhile the guy’s wife has disappeared again when I’d had the sense she was my only hope, something about her white ankles and vanilla scent and the way she knew to tie knots.
Not to go on too long but I’d say my guys apparently had vanished from outside, worse than steam, showing no loyalty, and I’m sitting there about three hours, telling by their folksy-cute kitchen clock that cuckoos in the voice of every different kind of bird. Three hours later and this crazy couple finally decides all right, it’s enough, they’re going to untie me. They’ve made me eat all the beef, the guy has even said back to me the thing I had said to him, which is that possession is nine-tenths of the law. Being tied up had gotten me confused and I’d started saying things out of sequence.
So that was yesterday. At least I got out with my pants on.
We have enough houses tucked away in the hills that I could be in business for a whole nother year before shifting to another line of work, and it would help out Ma with her payments for her lung cancer, that stupid doctor she goes to once a week who makes her breathe into a breathalyzer or whatever just to chart her lungs. None of it makes sense, and nothing lasts forever, I tell my ma whenever she complains but she sort of chucks me on the head and says Jimmy you used to be a decent kid, used to be able to figure numbers in your head so quick, and I let her treat me like I’m six because the old lady has gotten some marbles loose and there’s no way I’m ever going to forget I’m all she has, this is why I’m so steady with the cherry ice cream except for yesterday. Not to mention that she has reminded me that I’m all she has practically every day since my dad was locked away and me only eight and allowed to see him once a month at visiting hours. Which is all a long way of saying I’ve changed my tactics, I’m a reformed man. Which also means I see the world in a new way and look, you gave me your time, it hurts me but I’m just about ready to give it to you.
Three Poems
Rae Armantrout
PROVENANCE
It’s characteristic of X
to place his anxiety here
between “time”
and “alive.”
What can you give me
for this glimpse
and its provenance?
I’ve got one just like it.
What interests me now
are spin-offs
of spin-offs.
The narrative
that rescues us
once more
in a less probable way.
By sailing
upside down at dusk
we’ve returned
from the land of the dead.
RESOUNDING
Are you still interested
in the image
of this island
as a brown shoulder
or breast
half hidden
by clouds?
Are you turned on
by chimeras?
The impossible woman,
part igneous,
part surge.
*
Go be
embedded,
beaded, pebbled.
The fickle luster.
That’s right.
The fretwork
of disaster
Go on be
half
shrouded by
UNBIDDEN
The ghosts swarm
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone.
*
Did the palo verde
blush yellow
all at once?
Today’s edges
are so sharp
they might cut
anything that moved.
*
The way a lost
word
will come back
unbidden.
You’re not interested
in it now,
only
in knowing
where it’s been.
Gumbo Limbo
Brian Booker
THE VERY EXISTENCE OF the town of Gumbo Limbo, based on a murky distinction between land and fog and the gray-green waves, had always seemed diaphanous at best, and in fact Gumbo Limbo may not be there anymore, and so far as I can see, it probably never was. But in the time I am thinking of—when a frail guest arrived on the shore, and lies spread like smut in a rotten hull, and rains of an impossible duration nearly smudged the village away—a boy did live in Gumbo Limbo. His name was Liam Murgen, born Van den Heuvel. He was the one who befriended the guest. Both of them have long since left. This was all quite a long time ago.
The boy lived there because when he was a very little boy his parents died in the scenic railway fire in Canada, so he was sent to live with an uncle far down south in Gumbo Limbo. It turned out the uncle was dead, but the boy was taken in by the local apothecary Murgen, who’d been a friend of this uncle. In those days the boy had little else than a box of clothing and toys mislabeled “Julius.” He’d harbored a vague notion that his parents were resting in a fancy sanitarium in Massachusetts or Maine, and would return when the fire (which he imagined to be still raging in the remote north) was over. In his mind’s eye he saw a mostly faceless man and woman reclined on a balcony under a canvas awning striped yellow and lime; a nurse or butler pressed cool pink cloths to their foreheads and served them chilled milk in crystal tumblers on a sapphire tray.
The boy no longer much imagined these scenes. He’d assumed his guardian’s name, and was not unhappy residing with the elderly man in the apartment over Murgen’s Apothek in Barnus Lane. He watched all the people of Gumbo Limbo in their gradual, inevitable parade through the pharmacy, suffering in greater or lesser degrees. He saw how while one customer burdened with the most flagrant of maladies might struggle in futility to conceal them, another, with no evident disease of any type, would flaunt his imagined ill with ostentatious mummery. He saw the discretion and care with which Murgen dispensed remedies for these afflictions, whether or not they were visible to the eye, whether they abided in the mind or the flesh. So the customers came with crepitus and albugo, quinsy and railway spine, split nails and sclerotic teeth, light sleep and dyspepsia. They came with rodent ulcer, stammer, and lily rash, St. Clair’s disease, limping, and glomus. Murgen pressed granules of medicine into hard little tablets, mixed acetous tonics and dissolving powders, compounded pots of waxy or oily unguents. He fermented widow’s wood, crafted a debriding agent from the beards of blue mussels, and desiccated the milk from a rare deep-sea orchis. Sometimes these medicaments salved the maladies but most of the time they did not. Murgen gave free treatments to those who could not afford them, like Mr. Hannity from the swamp who came with an egg of a tumor on his face and went away weeping with gratitude and no hope, no hope. Murgen tried not to lie and to those supplicants who wanted to be deceived he mostly kept silent. He knew their secret deformities and the fear those deformities wrought in them. He knew why they employed him: to kill off the half-dreamt, half-real monstrous versions of themselves they so hated and cherished.
Murgen cherished Liam, and worried for him. He believed the boy was losing his eyes. A customer standing near the medicine counter might have seen, through the wooden grille separating the front store from the back office, how Murgen would sit the boy across from the eye chart, and, with practiced fingers trembling with palsy and personal concern, retrieve from the optical rack lens after thick gla
ss lens, fitting them in the viewfinder and quizzing the child:
—Number one, or number two? Is this one a little clearer, a little sharper?
The boy didn’t know; he couldn’t tell. Then:
—There. Something.
Refracted convex in one of the big glass jars on the shelves—some of them dusty, their labels nearly illegible—Liam thought he’d discerned something clear and sharp.
—No. It was nothing. I’m sorry.
Murgen would sigh.
—That’s OK.
But it wasn’t OK. The eyes were sick. Murgen feared to try his tonics on the child because in truth he couldn’t quite believe in them. Often now a morbid doubt crept in. He’d have gladly wrought an optical potion employing the blackest of diabolical arts if he thought its chemical burn might rend the veil on the boy’s vision. But there wasn’t any magic in Murgen’s craft.
—Still, muttered Murgen. Sometimes I think that boy sees everything.
It was true Liam’s dreams were still optically clear. And that was why, on the gray and mild winter morning when the boy discovered the strange visitor, he woke early and hurried down to the seashore with the peculiar sensation that he’d had the exact same dream as somebody else—he didn’t know who—and furthermore (although, by the time he reached the dunes and broke into an urgent lollop, he’d forgotten what the dream was about) would see reproduced there in exact clarity the very thing he’d grasped in the dream, and then lost. But when he got there it was all gray on gray, beach and sky dissolving in a colorless mist: not the lapidary dreamscape, but the murky pannic haze of the boy’s waking eye. And yet something out there held its form between the solute phases of saltswell and sandflat: a darkly saturate spot. A thing washed up. The boy came closer: it was a creature, that was true. But even up close it was hard to tell what the creature looked like. Was that a fin or lobe—some kind of sac? A slippery part, some scales—a portion of claw? Maybe the adumbration of a face. But it was tricky, similar to the way the mouth on a stingray’s underside resembles a miniature little smiley face, but when you flip it over, it turns out the real face is on the other side: the eyes two wide-set dull expressionless beads. You’d rather have the more perfect little face on the underside. How much certainty ought one invest in a face, for fear it could be the false one? In the spirit of friendship, at least, one grants the benefit of the doubt to each and every possibility of a face.
—Hi, said the creature.
—Hi, said the boy. What are you doing here?
The boy bent his ear close, for the creature seemed to speak in the quiet susurrus of the listless surf itself.
—There is nowhere else, it said. No further to go. Isn’t this the end of the sea? It keeps putting me up here, always at night. Always at night.
The creature sounded melancholy to Liam.
—Are you cold? the boy asked.
—I start to forget what it’s like to be in the water, it said. I forget water. And the air is cold. But I also forget that it comes again, the tide, and takes me back in. Then I remember water, and I’m not cold. But the next night it sends me up again, to the edge, where I’m cold.
—What do you do when it rains? asked the boy, for even now a light prickling of rain had begun.
—When it rains on the sea? You can hear it, but can’t feel it. It’s just more water. Hardly that. More like the shadow of a cloud. But up here on the shore I can feel it.
—Do you like it?
—No, said the creature.
The boy nodded. Then he said goodbye and ran back home, because he knew Yak was approaching in his rolling chair, coming along the road behind the dunes, and Murgen had told Liam to steer clear of Yak, who was a crazy person, though wealthy, a shrimp speculator and owner of lime mines up-country.
That night Liam dreamt of a creature. He saw it lying on the sand in the dark. He woke early, and in the dawn light went back to the seashore, and again the visitor was there.
When Liam touched the creature it was cold; it quivered slightly and sighed. It was rough like a cat’s tongue.
—Are you sick? the boy asked.
—It’s different in the sea, replied the creature. Things have wisps and tatters, trail parts of themselves. Parts drift, tangle, and separate. It all ebbs and flows together, in and out of one thing and another. You’re always inside everything, and everything is around you, and you move in it and it moves you around. But on the beach here it is different. On the beach, yes, here I might be sick.
—Are you sad?
The creature didn’t know; it wasn’t sure what sadness was.
—What do you feel like? asked the boy.
—Pick up that whelk shell, said the creature. Put it to your ear. Listen.
Liam did so.
—That’s what I feel like, said the creature.
Boy and creature spoke a while and although the creature often gave ambiguous replies to the boy’s queries he thanked him for his friendship, because in the course of their talks they’d become friends. At night the boy dreamed and when he woke he was sad at first, but then happy, because he remembered his friend was really there in the dawn on the shore, and it was.
But kneeling in the sand the boy found a loose scale, a translucent tooth, a husk of something that snapped like a seedpod. He rolled the fragile bits in his fingers; he feared they were part of the creature, who was coming undone from the strain of being washed up night after night. It needed to be in the water all the time and for some reason it couldn’t be, the sea wouldn’t let it, though of course the sea has no mind and therefore is not to blame.
The boy didn’t want his friend to disintegrate. He decided, with some reluctance, to confide the matter to Murgen.
The next day he led the old man to the spot.
—There it is, said Liam.
Murgen craned his head—his hips were stiff—and peered toward where the boy pointed. Murgen seemed uncertain; there was a smell; he couldn’t make much of what he saw there. He’d heard of the gourami, a fish capable of breathing the air. He’d heard of things caught in the nets by fishermen in Ireland or China.
—We should put it out of its misery, I think.
—No! cried the boy, crouching protectively over the creature. Wordlessly the boy queried his friend. The creature indicated the waves—and just then there washed up a tiny snailshell. Liam picked it up and saw how the inside glistened royal purple.
—Look, he said, showing Murgen. It’s a gift. Like him. The sea keeps giving him back to us.
The elderly man fondled the rare shell and handed it back to the boy, who put it away in his pocket.
—I remember an old story, Murgen explained to the boy, about a siren who slipped through the dike in Holland. She came to live among the people. Nobody could make out her speech, but they taught her to weave. They said she worshipped the cross as if by instinct. It was argued that she was not a fish because she knew how to weave, but was not a woman because she was able to live in water.
Murgen’s mind was drifting. The boy made no reply.
Murgen nodded. He agreed to the boy’s wishes. The old man helped the boy put the creature in a big pickle jar of clean water. First they dropped a little cake of sodium in the water and Murgen stirred with a wooden stick until the cake had dissolved. They brought the jar to the back room of the apothek where it was safe. Liam asked the creature if it felt OK there and the creature said that it did, but could they put the jar up on the high shelf because it felt safer and more comfortable up there, and so they did.
Now in the mornings when the boy came downstairs he went to the back room of the shop and climbed up on the stepladder to see how his friend was doing.
And were it not for Murgen’s shop assistant—a youth by the name of Tim Rutter—the trouble in Gumbo Limbo might never have gotten started, and they all might have continued on OK.
Rutter was a lanky, feral-eyed person with oily skin and a streak of cruelty that must have come from somewhere. H
e’d become attached to Murgen’s shop some years back. He was not a good assistant, and customers patronized the apothek despite his presence. Rutter hosted a repertoire of malfeasance not so much methodical as it was impulsive, arbitrary, and weird. Not only did he overcharge the customers and keep the money, but he hocked phlegm in the philters and touched himself behind the counter when a pretty girl was in the shop, or sometimes a boy, or sometimes no one at all. He seemed too clever to be truly retarded, as the physiognomy of his head and face might have suggested, though some found the feral aspect perversely attractive or even irresistible. In fact he was an almost wholly unremarkable youth, except that he suffered from an irregular form of Saint Vitus’ Dance, whereby not a fit but a sudden glazed expression stole over him, a mask that suggested to those looking at him an odd mixture of contentment and consternation that seemed not to belong to his person. The frequency of the spells varied, but they tended to last several minutes. Privately Rutter referred to his condition as “the morbus,” because that is what his aunt, a Mrs. Torpin, told him it was called. This aunt characterized her nephew’s rapt visage as peaceful, on account of Jesus was stroking his cheek in those times. She tried to take advantage of the spells to whisper in her paralyzed nephew’s ear of the need of controlling his weakness.
Many people in Gumbo Limbo suspected that Tim Rutter had caused a dreamy, wild-haired girl named Oona LeMur to become pregnant after she welcomed his attentions, having evidently confused certain instances of the boy’s hypnoid countenance with a complicated physical ardor. Oona lost her baby, though nobody knew for sure if the child had miscarried or if Rutter had employed some artifice he’d found in the pharmacy. Afterward Oona developed what they called the “woman’s epilepsy”; she wandered the quayside at night pushing an empty stroller, and after a while they put her away in a home.
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