“Be careful, this’ll put hair on your chest,” the man said as he popped a lid on the cup.
“It’s for my mom.”
“Well, it’ll put hair on her chest too. Unless she already has some.”
Arnie thought then of his mother’s chest, sweaty and smooth where the sheet pinched back her breasts. Her auburn hair was peppery at the roots.
“You visiting?”
Arnie shook his head. “We’re supposed to be staying here for good.” From a rack on the counter, he picked up a handful of packets of sugar and creamer, along with two cherry pies in paper wraps — one for the new guy, one for him. His mother’s stomach didn’t usually kick in until four o’clock.
“Comes to three forty-seven,” the man said. “Let me give you a bag for that.” While the man put the coffee and pies in a sack, Arnie noticed the stack of tide tables by the register. A buck fifty apiece. On the front cover it said, “The bigger the dot the better the fishing.” He flipped through the pages and saw that today was supposed to be a big-dot day.
“And one of these,” he said.
The man nodded. “If you’re gonna live on the coast you gotta know when low tide is, right?” Suddenly Arnie realized that they hadn’t just come to the end of the earth but another planet where he didn’t even know the basic rules of life.
“How come?”
“Weh-yell. . so you can drive your car on the beach, for one,” the man said, handing him his three pennies and the bag.
“Our car’s a junker. We barely made it out here.”
When he heard it coming out his mouth, Arnie realized that this information was too intimate to be giving to a stranger. But the man just said that having an old car was good. “Then you won’t care so much if you lose it when you get stuck and the tide comes up and washes it out to sea.”
Arnie felt his jaw drop a little while he considered the possibility. The man behind the counter laughed.
“Don’t worry. That only happens to the tourists. You got to start thinking like a local now, since you’re here for the duration. Pay attention to the ocean. You got to build up your tolerance for rain.”
“It wasn’t my idea to come,” Arnie said, bunching up the neck of the bag in his fist.
“S’okay,” the man assured him. “There’s plenty of worse places you could be.”
WHEN ARNIE GOT BACK to the motel, the door was locked. He banged and waited, then finally Jay opened the door in his flannel shirt and skivvies. “Hey, whassup,” he said. His mother was inside the bathroom, filling the tub. Her voice sounded as if it were coming from a tunnel when she called, “Arnie, you find everything okay?”
Of course he had, so he ignored her. Sometimes she acted like he was an idiot.
To Jay he said, “The man at the store said the steelhead were running.” Running: the word made Arnie think they had to hurry or else it’d be too late. He considered telling Jay about today having a big dot, to see if Jay would know what he was talking about. It would be a kind of test.
“See? What’d I tell you?”
“So when are we going?”
“Real soon,” Jay said, studying the bathroom door. “First your mother and I got to get ourselves cleaned up.” He grabbed a towel that was folded on a little shelf above the coat rack.
“I got you a pie for breakfast,” Arnie said, pulling the coffee out of the bag.
“Great. I love pie.” But Jay set both the coffee and the pie down on top of the motel TV, which was old enough to be a box, and picked up an ashtray instead. “Better warm up your casting arm, Little Man,” was the last thing he said before he disappeared inside the bathroom. When he opened the door, for a second Arnie could see the white slope of his mother’s back, crouched over the water tap.
He tried the motel TV but now, at midday, found only soap operas and cooking shows. The motel TV sat next to their own set, a thirty-six-incher that Jay had brought in from the car last night so that it wouldn’t get stolen. Arnie’d brought in his transforming lizard, and for a while he tried playing with it but soon realized that it was the wrong toy to bring because it did not have any purpose beyond changing from one thing to another. And it could not be the two things it was at once — like you could not have the lizard do battle with the spaceship. Too slow to be constantly changing back and forth.
Last night he’d also brought in the fishing pole, just a cheap Zebco rig, nothing to worry about getting stolen, but still. Its reel was made of plastic and shaped like the nose cone of a rocket. He drew back the drapes and opened the balcony’s sliding door. It overlooked the dune behind the motel, which was littered with the random plastic that the last storm had delivered up. He could not see the ocean from here but could hear its pulsing underneath the steadier howling of the wind.
He stepped back inside and slid the door shut, his ears humming in the quiet. He could walk to the beach, but his jacket was still locked in the car, and then he thought about what the man had said: You got to build up your tolerance for rain. He searched the pocket of Jay’s crumpled jeans but did not find the keys there — he must’ve had them in his flannel shirt. He thought about knocking on the bathroom door then, but could not bring himself to do it. The two of them would be in the tub, flopping around like seals.
So he sat on his bed, eating his cherry pie and watching a fat man in a chef’s hat make something called polenta. It looked like what prisoners of war would have to eat. Even with the TV on, Arnie could hear Jay’s laughter made husky with smoke, the water spattering through it. His mother’s laugh reminded him of a vine, tendrils wrapping themselves on anything that would hold.
When he finished eating, what Arnie did was stab a piece of the other pie on the hook of his Zebco. Out on the balcony, he pulled the damp sleeves of his sweatshirt down around his fists. Ten yards off in the dune there was a considerable puddle of rainwater, surrounded by broken glass and one abandoned flip-flop. No fish were leaping from it, not that he could see, but two seagulls seemed very interested in whatever lay beneath the surface: they nosed the water and threw drops over their heads. And if you could drive on the beach here, you might just be able to fish in a puddle. Who could tell how things worked now that they’d come to the end of the earth?
Arnie’s first cast bounced off the roof overhang on the balcony. His next landed in the mud below, and failed to attract the seagulls’ notice. But on the third cast he was able to make his pie-piece land near the rim of the puddle: the two birds gawked at it for a moment, wondering what it was. Then one pecked gingerly and finally managed to pull a piece of the piece loose. Swallowed. Tried to go back for more. This discovery — that the waxy clod was edible — caused the other bird to turn up the volume of its squawk. The two birds commenced lunging in earnest, one stabbing its beak at the pie-chunk while the other huffed its feathers, and while they were caught up in this game of feints and counter-feints a bigger, whiter gull swooped down and gobbled up the hook.
Once it realized it was snagged, the bird landed, then hopped on the ground for a while with a look of confusion that soon gave way to rage. The bird flapped in the puddle and made the sound kyee! kyee! while its beak snapped open and shut. Mud flew as the bird slapped the puddle with its wings: kyee! But little by little, the bird wore out its fury, until its beak hung open as if it were panting, its tongue flickering in and out, and when it next hit the apex of one of its hops, Arnie reeled in some line: tick tick tick tick tick. Then the bird hung on the end of the line between bursts of flapping and pendulating from side to side. Arnie was worried that if the bird panicked, the hook would tear out of its mouth, so he reeled with a slow rhythm of pauses and starts: tick tick tick tick. He had this idea that maybe if he could get the bird into the dim light of the motel room, he could hypnotize it somehow. He could hold it under his arm and stroke its throat until it opened up and let him gently remove the hook.
“Easy,” he chanted as the bird came closer, growing larger as it did, blotting out a bigger portion of
the sky. Tired now, the bird’s wings fluttered inefficiently and its pink legs dangled like a puppet’s. Slowly, and with just a few feet of line played out between them, Arnie backed into the room, reeling the bird with him.
For a minute the room’s carpeted interior seemed to sedate the bird as it stood on what his mother had called the credenza, ratcheting its head like an emperor on a balcony, surveying the crowd. But then the gull caught sight of itself in the mirror and burst into a renewed frenzy. It threw itself against this other bird, knocking over the coffee that was on the motel TV, and, finding no bird there, it tried the other corners of the room, heaving itself against the drapes and toppling a lamp. The room’s low ceiling further amplified the bird, until it was as big as an eagle, with a beak the size of a gaffing hook.
Finally the gull came to rest again on the credenza, next to the two TVs, a perch from which it looked at Arnie with its yellow eyes. Its beak had an orange spot that bobbled as the bird swiveled the line in its mouth. Though its look was fierce, Arnie could see its heart beating through the feathers. The skin of its breast quivered underneath the white pelt.
Now he could hear them in the bathroom, the water splashing and the tendrils of her laughter wrapping themselves around her normal breaths. He had never hypnotized anything before, but he knew the trick required a shiny object. He used the earrings his mother had left on the nightstand, which were made from Chinese coins, and he swung one of these before the bird: tick tock tick tock. The bird’s gaze followed the coin with a slight movement of its head, suspicious but calmer now. Tick. . tock. . tick. . tock. But when his mother suddenly emitted a shrill noise that sounded as if it had been made with the last air left inside her, the bird broke off its concentration. Before it could start flapping Arnie lunged at it and trapped it in his armpit. When the bird snapped at his fingers, he drove them deep into its mouth, worked loose the barb from the tender throat skin, and teased the hook out.
Then came the best part, when Arnie took the bird out to the balcony and watched it fly off like a braggart, as if this were all part of a plan the bird had itself dreamed up. That’s when Jay came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. He had no hair at all on his chest, which supported a sinewy, muscley mass.
“What the hell were you doing out here?” He wasn’t angry; his voice sounded distracted, as if he had been sleeping. “Jumping on the bed?”
“Caught a bird,” Arnie said, holding up the pinched spot on his thumb where the bird had almost broken the skin. “By accident. I was practicing my cast.”
Then his mother came out of the bathroom, wearing Jay’s flannel shirt.
“What happened?”
“He caught a bird,” Jay said. His mother’s grin was more of a stunned than a happy look, as if she’d just been knocked down by a truck.
“A bird, huh?” She looked around the room, picked up what was left of Jay’s cherry pie, and licked the filling from its center. “Where’s that coffee?” she said.
“The bird knocked it over.” He thought his mother would be mad, but she just shrugged as she studied the cup.
“Good thing it wasn’t our TV,” she said, her mouth full of crust. Then she wandered out onto the balcony, trying to lick a spot of cherry goop on her chin that lay just beyond her tongue’s reach.
“See how the magic works?” she hollered, her bare legs reminding him of the white bellies of two fish. “You come to the end of the earth and then you catch a bird.” Her face still had the spot of cherry goop, and now it also had that misty look, so Arnie knew what was coming next.
“Hey, c’mere.” She spread her arms for him, and from experience he knew it was useless trying to avoid her. She would chase him around the room if she had to, he could run outside but then she would chase him around the parking lot.
So he went out and let her trap him with her damp plaid arms, swinging him gently from side to side. “You catch a bird,” she said, rocking him, “and then you set the bird free. It’s all part of the plan: movement, stasis. Where else could this have happened?”
Arnie did his best to ignore her. “So when are we going fishing?” he asked Jay, the question muffled against her breasts.
“Soon.” Jay had picked up his jeans and was feeling the pockets.
“You said first thing. You promised.”
Outside on the balcony, Arnie’s mother held him and would not let go. Rocking and rocking.
“He’s right, Ray,” she said. “A promise is a promise.”
“It’s Jay,” said the new guy, lighting up a cigarette.
DOCTOR VICKS
Funny how you can go your whole life without something, and then one day that very thing starts descending on you in droves. As if suddenly the universe has gotten fed up with your renunciations and has decided to make damn sure that you relent to what it sends.
Take, for example, a vacuum cleaner: maybe you’ve always made do with the carpet sweeper (not even electric) that your mother handed you like a bayonet when you first headed off to college. Life was simple: you pushed the sweeper, its bristles spun around and ate up all the crumbs. And somehow twenty years go by without your ever feeling any need to upgrade the sweeper. . until one day when this guy shows up on your front porch, lugging a vacuum with an iron snout and a plaid cloth bag like a bagpipe. He comes bearing the news that you’ve won a free one-room carpet cleaning, and you’re trying to tell him: Oh, no, Mr. Slyboots, whoever you are, my life’s just fine the way it is. .
But say he barges in anyway, sticks his foot in the door, as the expression used to go back in the days when people were willing to be more literal. Now the foot in the door is this man’s speech: Don’t worry, there’s no money up front, no risk. He’s screaking the vacuum down your hall, trying to hunt himself up some carpet, which is difficult, your house being planked in wide pine boards except for in the living room where there’s some ugly orange mid-depth shag that you have a fondness for lying on when brooding and so have resisted your husband’s rallying against it.
Oh, no, Mr. Slyboots, whoever you are, there’s always some kind of risk.
The vacuum guy is short and wide, maybe fifty but a hard-earned fifty, his short-sleeved shirt pee-yellow and fraying, a gray tattoo escaping from each hem. One bicep’s got two bird feet clenching a crumpled flag; on the other some runes that you decode as the bottom half of U.S. NAVY. He reminds you of Popeye, especially when single-handedly he attempts to lift the sofa in the middle of the room, and though it’s only a joke what you say next — about him being careful not to rupture himself — it makes him puff up like a rooster. Apparently you have insulted him, and in retaliation he hoists a chair as if it were a marshmallow. As if to prove you cannot stop him. Rupture himself indeed!
Before you know it, he’s got the cleaning attachment mounted on top of the vacuum’s snout and is laying down the foam in stripes, saying, Now, what would you pay for this kind of cleaning power? as the foam dries into dust. What would this kind of cleaning power be worth to you? It’s a question he will not let you off the hook of, until finally you guess, Four hundred dollars? just to try the number out. It’s the wrong one, though, a number that makes the man squint at you with one eye bugged, as if he wants to punch you. But then he swallows the big gob in his throat and picks up his spiel where he left off, at the part about the Denby Company’s installment plan. Five years at only forty-five dollars a month — that’s what you’d pay for this kind of cleaning power!
You sit on the stairs, watching the man grunt in the wake of his machine while his whole story assembles inside your brain in flashes. How he did not think it would come down to this, humping vacuums on and off of porches, how he thought his pension was in the bag. . until downsizing cut him short. And he is humiliated by his day-in, day-out need to proclaim the virtues of the Denby, or it’s you on the stairs who imagines that he is, or it’s you imagining that you imagine: who can tell when by late afternoon you’re always buzzed? When the man squats to
adjust the pile-depth feature, and you see the spot where the sole of his black loafer is worn clean through, you resign yourself to doing what you can to save him. Forty-five dollars a month is not much, after all. And cleaning has always held your interest.
ACTUALLY it’s the crevices that interest you, the creases on the front door of the stove, for example, where the dirt congeals, combines with grease, and changes form. There it becomes durable to the harshest solvent, a matter stronger than mere dirt. You have to stab it with a knife and pry it out like the old mortar in the stone walls that snake their pathways through these woods.
The idea had not appealed to you at first — your husband’s suggestion, then insistent lobbying, that you all move out here to the woods. You all: husband, wife, son. The woods: scrubby forest, logged off long ago. The rationale was that your son had started hooking up with trouble, had committed break-and-entry and been caught. But something about this explanation sounded fishy, sounded like a cover for some other story about what’s going on, a story that has to do with you, though you are not sure what it is. Oh, no, Mr. Slyboots or the equivalent of which you were about to say, when your husband tricked you by bringing you here to see this house, with its clean plank floors and their umber grain, the intricacies of which you could spend a lifetime studying. And the front porch that overlooked an old mill creek, which flashed by white and silver where it passed over stones, the same round stones whose fellows have been mortared into the foundation upon which the house itself sits. First thing you did was go down to the creek and yell to see how loud a yelling it had the power to drown out, which had embarrassed your husband (beside him the realtor standing on the porch in heels), but he let you do it because he knew it would win you over, another trick.
Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories Page 3
