But You Scared Me the Most

by John Manderino

  She wrote that down. “Or how about this?” she said, writing it: “Here . . . lies . . . Oscar . . . a . . . good . . . little . . . dog . . . killed . . . by . . . a . . . monster.”

  “Perfect,” I told her, getting up. “Says it all.”

  “Where you going?”

  “For a walk, stretch my legs.”

  “Monster!”

  Strolling along the side of the road, hands behind my back, kicking a stone ahead of me, I felt bad for Pinkie and hoped she got herself another little companion real soon. I also felt bad for Megan and hoped she got herself another companion soon. Meanwhile, the sun was sinking very colorfully, a soft little breeze coming up. And as I walked along I mostly felt bad for poor little Oscar, having to leave such a pleasant world as this.

  THE WEARY GHOST OF UNCLE DOUG

  I woke up in the middle of the night and there he was, sitting on the edge of the bed in the moonlight from the window, in his lumberjack shirt, staring off. I was about to scream—but he looked so sad, sitting there shaking his head.

  “Uncle Doug?” I said.

  He gave a long sigh.

  I got up on my elbows. “What’re you doing here?”

  Another sigh.

  “What’s the matter? Tell me.”

  “A friend of mine,” he said, still looking off, “I forget his name . . . this was long ago . . . told me to buy up all the shares I could in a young company . . . a camera company . . . and do you know the name of that camera company?”

  “Kodak,” I said.

  “And I was going to. I had fifty dollars at the time and I was going to buy fifty dollars’ worth of shares in Kodak, at eighteen cents a share. That’s a lot of shares, Tommy.” He looked at me. “But do you know what I did with that money? Instead?”

  “Went to the track,” I said.

  He looked off again. “Someone else had given me a different tip, you see. I still remember the name of the horse: Gypsy Queen. I put fifty dollars to win on Gypsy Queen, and do you know where she finished? Where my Gypsy Queen came in?”

  “Eighth,” I said.

  “In a field of nine,” he added, and sat there shaking his head.

  I sat up further. “Uncle Doug, you told me that story a hundred times while you were alive. You’re not still going over that now, are you? You’ve been dead for ten years.”

  “Gypsy . . . Queen.”

  “Uncle Doug?”

  “There’s nothing else to do here.”

  “Where . . . exactly are you?”

  He shook his head. “Not a clue.”

  “So you just wander around regretting you didn’t buy shares in Kodak?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s awful. Can’t you just let go of it?”

  “I don’t want to,” he said.

  “You want to go around beating yourself up till the end of time?”

  “You don’t understand, Tommy. Otherwise I’ll just drift away, just . . . merge. Jesus, I hate that word.”

  “Merge with the elements, you mean?”

  “With the sky and the trees and the sheep and the sheep shit and the goddamn flies on the sheep shit—yeah, all that.”

  “But that’s a good thing, Uncle Doug. That’s . . . you know, organic.”

  He looked at me. “I don’t ever want to forget myself.”

  “But . . . you’re miserable.”

  He turned away. “Nevertheless.” He sat there looking off, stubbornly.

  I had an idea. “How about if I promise I’ll never forget you, Uncle Doug—how would that be? Then you could let go and I’ll still be here remembering.”

  He sighed. “I am awful tired, Tommy.”

  “I would think.”

  “So,” he said, “what would you remember?”

  “Well, let’s see . . .”

  “I ever tell you about that time I was in the service? What I did to that smart-assed corporal?”

  “Knocked him ass over teakettle, as I recall.”

  “What about that smart-ass of a foreman I had?”

  “Ass over teakettle. You’ve told me all your stories, Uncle Doug, and I promise I’ll never forget them. They’re easy to remember. So you might as well go ahead and . . . you know . . .”

  “Join the sheep shit?”

  “You might as well.”

  He sat there looking off. Then he suddenly thrust his sleeve at me. “Speaking of sheep, feel that material.”

  I felt it.

  “That’s pure wool, Tommy. One hundred percent.”

  “You can tell.”

  He took his arm back. “I want you to always remember me in this shirt.”

  I promised.

  “And winking at you, like this,” he said, giving me a manly, crow’s-footed wink.

  I promised I would always remember him in that shirt, winking at me exactly like that.

  “And maybe saying something, something like . . . let’s see . . .”

  “‘If only I bought those shares in Kodak.’”

  He looked at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just . . . I was just . . . I’m sorry.”

  He leaned closer. “I’m gonna tell you something, Tommy. Little secret. I never liked you very much. I always thought you were kind of a smart-ass.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, hitting back, “I always thought you were kind of a sonofabitch, Uncle Doug.”

  He laughed like hell. He liked that. “In this shirt,” he said, holding out his sleeve again. “Feel that material.”

  “I just did.”

  “Feel it again, dammit.”

  I felt it again. “Yeah,” I said, humoring him, “they don’t make shirts like this anymore.”

  He sprang to his feet. “They don’t make men like this anymore,” he said, poking himself in the chest. “Y’know that?”

  I glanced at my alarm clock. “Uncle Doug,” I said carefully, “I don’t mean to be rude, okay? But it’s after three in the morning. I have to get up in a few hours. So . . .”

  He nodded, and sighed, and sat down again, heavily. “Must be nice,” he said.

  “What’s that.”

  “Being alive. Must be awful nice.”

  “Not all that nice—getting up at six thirty in the morning to go to work with hardly any sleep, for example,” I said to him, hinting.

  But he wasn’t listening. He was thinking about something. Then he looked at me with this wild sorrow on his face. “I blew it,” he said. “Do you know that? I blew it, Tommy.”

  “Kodak, you mean?”

  “Not Kodak, I’m not talking about Kodak, I’m talking about . . .” He stared off hard, looking for what he was talking about. Then his face softened. “I remember,” he said quietly. “I was about your age, working construction. It was lunch break. I was sitting by myself on a girder at the top, twenty stories up. A nice day out, big blue sky, the city laid out below, me in the middle, eating a ham sandwich, with a thermos of coffee. The sandwich had a lot of mustard on it, Tommy, the way I always liked it. I sat there swinging my legs . . . eating that sandwich . . .”

  I waited for more but there wasn’t any. “Huh,” I said.

  He put his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. “Remember me, Tommy.”

  “I will, Uncle Doug.”

  “In this shirt.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  He stood there for a moment looking around. Then he gave me a manly wink, and was gone.

  186,000 MILES PER SECOND

  “Oh, Stan, it’s ungodly big!”

  “Is it? Is it?”

  “A monstrosity!”

  “Is it?”

  “A pulsating radio star!”

  “A what?”

  “Don’t stop!”

  He didn’t get that last bit but generally Stan loved the things Claire came out with during sex, especially concerning the size of his member, which in fact was only average but they enjoyed pretending otherwise. For a while Claire was calling it a
phallus. “Oh, Stan,” she would cry, “what a magnificent phallus!” That was when she was taking a night class in Greek mythology at the nearby community college. She told him he was hung like a centaur.

  Claire was always taking a night class, not for a degree but because she was interested. Stan admired that about her, how smart she was and how interested in things like Greek mythology, or art history, or even something like geology. She took a geology class last year and that was all she talked about for a while, rocks. “Enough about the rocks, Claire, will ya?” he finally told her one night, then apologized and asked her to tell him more about the rocks, begged her to, and she eventually gave in.

  After sex tonight, lying there relaxed, Stan asked her what she meant when she called his penis a pulsating radio star.

  “I said that?”

  “What the hell is a pulsating radio star?”

  “A rotating neutron star that gives off a beam of electromagnetic radiation—called ‘pulsars’ for short,” Claire answered, from the astronomy class she was currently taking.

  Stan asked her what that had to do with his dick.

  “The first pulsar was discovered in 1967,” Claire continued, “approximately twenty-three thousand light years away, if I remember correctly.” She paused. “You don’t know about light years, do you, Stan.”

  He said he had to be honest.

  She told him a light year represents the distance light travels in a year.

  “Light travels?”

  “Oh it travels, Stan. It travels.”

  “Never knew that.”

  “Care to know how fast?”

  “Let’s hear.”

  “One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles—ready for this?—per second.”

  “Jesus,” he said, impressed.

  “In one second it can travel seven times around the Earth. Seven times, Stan, in one second.”

  “That’s bookin’,” he agreed.

  “So just think,” she said, pointing at him, “just think how far it can travel in one year.”

  “Pretty damn far, I’d say. Listen, I’m gonna get a drink of water. You want one?”

  “No,” she sighed. “Go ahead. Get your water.”

  Claire didn’t like interruptions, so he was quick about it. And coming back he said to her right away, “Seven times around the Earth in one second—that’s hard to believe.”

  “You think I’m making it up?”

  “Of course not,” he said, climbing in beside her. “I’m just saying it’s hard to imagine.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “Well imagine this. Imagine how—”

  “Hey Claire?”

  “What.”

  “Don’t point at me like that, okay?”

  “I’m trying to teach you something here, Stan.”

  “I know you are and I appreciate it. I just don’t like being pointed at. You do it a lot. It’s kind of annoying.”

  “I see,” she said. “Well. I’m sorry. I won’t point. In fact, why don’t we talk about something else. How was your water?”

  “Don’t get like this.”

  “Like what, Stan?” she asked him, blinking.

  “I want to hear about the traveling light, I really do. I just don’t like when you stick your finger in my face, that’s all. So go ahead. What was the speed of light again? I’m trying to remember.”

  She sighed, recited: “One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second.”

  “See now, that is amazing to me. I mean, how can anything travel that—?”

  “Oh, stop. You’re not interested.”

  “What’re you talking about? I’m very interested. Come on, tell me some more.”

  She sat up a little. “All right,” she said, nodding. “Fine. Let’s talk about distances, shall we?”

  “Bring it on.”

  “Do you have any idea, Stan, any idea at all how far away the stars are? Take a guess. Go ahead.”

  “Well, I would say . . . approximately speaking . . . millions and millions of miles. Or so.”

  She smiled at him sadly. “Okay. Listen up.”

  “I was way off, wasn’t I.”

  “Stan, let me tell you something. There are stars out there—stars we can see—that are so far away they’re not even there anymore.”

  “Explain,” he said.

  “Okay, it takes their light—which, remember, is traveling at 186,000 miles per second—”

  “I remember.”

  “Going that fast, it still takes their light so long to get here? By the time it arrives, the star’s been dead and gone a thousand years—in some cases millions. We’re actually seeing something that hasn’t been there for millions of years. So just think, Stan, how far away that has to be. Can you even begin to possibly imagine the kind of distances we’re talking about here?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Stan?”

  “See, I don’t like that.”

  She laughed. “What do you mean you don’t like it?”

  “Something being that far away.”

  “Stan, these are facts. These are scientific facts I’m giving you here.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t like it.”

  She touched his leg. “And remember: those are just the stars we’re able to see. There are stars out there so far away, so inconceivably—”

  “Drop it, Claire, will ya?”

  She drew back and cocked her head. “What’s the matter, Stan?”

  “Nothing. I just think we’ve talked enough about the stars. It’s after eleven and we should be getting to sleep now.”

  She nodded, slowly. “Interesting.”

  “Aw, don’t start.”

  “Start what, Stan?” she asked him, blinking.

  “Psychologizing me.”

  Claire took an introduction to psychology class last summer and they had some trouble for a while the way she kept analyzing everything he did, telling him the real reason he was doing it.

  “I’m just curious,” she said to him now. “You seem upset and I’m wondering—”

  “I’m not upset. I’m tired, that’s all.” He reached for the lamp. “There’s a difference.” He switched it off.

  “This is called ‘avoidance coping,’” she told him in the dark.

  He found her mouth and kissed it. “Goodnight, Claire.”

  “It’s maladaptive, Stan,” she added, turning on her side, away from him.

  He scooted close and spread his hand on her stomach.

  They lay there.

  After a minute she asked him, “Can I tell you one more thing?”

  “Is it about the universe?”

  “Then I’ll stop.”

  “Go ahead,” he told her.

  “It’s expanding, Stan.”

  “Oh?” He brought his hand up to her breast and softly cupped it.

  “Are you listening?”

  “I’m right here.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It’s getting bigger, Stan.”

  He agreed, gently pressing himself against her.

  “I’m talking about space,” she said, and turned around to face him in the dark. “I’m talking about the distance between things—do you understand? What I’m trying to say? It’s expanding, Stan. Every day it’s getting—”

  “Claire, are you pointing at me?”

  “Ah, fuck it.” She flipped over, facing the other way again.

  He sighed and turned onto his back. He dropped his arm across his forehead.

  They lay there like that.

  After a little while Claire began softly snoring.

  Staring up at the dark, Stan pictured them there: in their bed, in their room, in their house, in their town, their country, their planet, the camera receding at 186,000 miles per second, the Earth the size of a basketball, then a softball, then a baseball, then a golf ball, then gone, swallowed up in the dark that just went on and on—endlessly, pointless
ly—on and on and on.

  “Claire,” he whispered, horrified.

  THE WITCH OF

  WITCH’S WOODS

  After the lady opera singer was finally finished Ed Sullivan said he had a bunch of acrobats from China for us next and they all came running and tumbling out and started doing acrobatic stuff with a lot of energy.

  Karen goes, “Must they continually smile like that?”

  She was on the other end of the couch. She’s fifteen, I’m twelve. I don’t know why but lately she tries to talk like the Queen of England.

  I agreed, though, about the way these acrobats kept smiling. It was boring. Their whole act was. They were really good, I’m not saying they weren’t, but it was like watching a machine. I think they probably practiced too much, you know? I actually think if they started flying around the stage with smoke coming out of their butts it would still be boring, just something they worked on every day for years. Now, if a bunch of Chinese guys just came along and started doing what they were doing, somersaulting onto each other’s shoulders and so on, that would be different, that would be something.

  Know what I mean?

  Afterwards Ed Sullivan came back again and said Señor Wences was next and I thought Oh no. He’s on a lot. He’s this old ventriloquist with an accent, Spanish I think, in a tuxedo, who talks to the side of his hand with a little wig on it and two eyes and lipstick like a mouth, moving the thumb up and down for a lower lip. He sets the hand on top of a headless little doll-boy’s body, but there’s no neck, which looks weird, the way the head is sunk between the shoulders like that. He calls the little boy Johnny. What gets me is the voice, Johnny’s little voice, something about it.

  “I’m turning this off,” I told Karen, and got up.

  “Please do, William.”

  She calls me William lately instead of Bill. I don’t mind.

  I slapped the off button and came back. “Can’t handle that guy.”

  “The entire act is utterly creepy,” she agreed.

  “I hate when he has the hand give him a kiss.”

  “The man is clearly ill.”

  She went back to the book she was reading for school and I went back to my Sergeant Rock comic. Our mom was on a date with her latest boyfriend, this tall, nervous guy Mr. Mackenzie with an Adam’s apple like Barney Fife. I read a couple pages of Sergeant Rock but kept thinking about Señor Wences, about Johnny, about his voice, this high, whispery, bashful voice with a Spanish accent. I don’t know why but it gets to me, in the heart I mean. That’s why I turned it off, because of the way Johnny gets to me with that little voice of his.