by Jan Carson
Thereafter, Malcolm had been keen to find his own man voice and had eventually trained himself to speak in a fashion which he felt most keenly resembled Wolverine, the most masculine man he had yet to discover. He practiced his man voice on fence posts across America and, when his confidence had finally peaked, made a failed attempt at intimidating the Dairy Queen checkout girl into giving him a free ice cream.
‘Dammit, woman, get your fat ass over here and take my order,’ he’d barked over the countertop. ‘Two small fries, a chicken strips basket, three Diet Cokes and throw in a G-D Blizzard for free. I been freezin’ my butt off out here for the last two hours, waitin’ for you to get your act together.’
Satisfied by his delivery, Malcolm Orange had risen up on tiptoes to clock the woman’s reaction. Two feet from his nose, safely ensconced behind a large slab of security glass, a well-built African American lady was giving him the kind of look oft-delivered by his mother, mere seconds before a good slapping.
‘Young man,’ she’d said, depressing the intercom button so the four people in the line behind Malcolm could also hear her comeback, ‘you better thank the good Lord that I ain’t your mama. I’d tan your hide for that speech if you were one of mine.’
Not to be outdone, Malcolm Orange had held his ground and continued in his best man voice, ‘Woman, you don’t want to be messing with me. My papa’s got a gun in the car and he probably won’t let me use it myself but I might ask him to shoot you for me.’
Thereafter, the possibility of a Butterfinger Blizzard, even at full retail price, slid swiftly out of the picture and Malcolm Orange had found himself making a desperate run for the Volvo’s backseat, anxious to avoid the imminent arrival of the cops.
‘Sorry Papa,’ he’d muttered from the safety of the backseat, ‘they’re all out of chicken strips, soda and fries. Worst Dairy Queen I’ve ever been to. We’ll have to go somewhere else I guess. We should probably go pretty quick.’
During the short drive from Dairy Queen to Burger King, Malcolm Orange had peered out the Volvo’s back window, scanning the road for cop cars and surreptitiously practicing his man voice.
‘What in blue hell are you doing with your voice, Malcolm?’ his father had asked. ‘You sound like Pee-wee Herman.’
Having ascertained that this mumbled squeak was Malcolm’s attempt at a man voice, the adults in the car had mocked him at intervals for the next two days, performing progressively hysterical Malcolm impressions every time the car fell silent.
Malcolm Orange refused to be dissuaded. He ignored their mockery and placed his man voice on the back burner, secretly hoping the opportunity for intimidation might arise sooner rather than later.)
‘Hello God,’ Malcolm Orange yelled, raising his voice against the possibility that God might be otherwise occupied with some other urgent conversation. ‘Hallowed be thy name. We need a place to stay and my mom needs a job so we can eat. Can we stay here in your house, please?’
‘You can’t stay here, son,’ God replied. He sounded an awful lot more Southern than Malcolm Orange had expected.
‘God Almighty,’ whispered Mrs Orange, immediately realizing her own profanity and clamping a muffled hand over her mouth. ‘I wasn’t expecting an actual answer.’
Malcolm, on the other hand, had secretly suspected that today might be the very day on which God redeemed himself and, thus convinced, proceeded boldly.
‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘You’ve got more than enough room here for the three of us. Why can’t we stay just for a couple of nights?’
‘No swearing in the house of the Lord,’ God replied. He seemed to be moving closer in the dark.
‘Sorry,’ said Malcolm Orange.
‘Sorry,’ said Martha Orange.
‘No harm done,’ said God. ‘Seems y’all are in a bit of a pickle. Hard times makes good folks forget their manners. Listen, I’ll just put the lights on and maybe we can wander over to Dunkin’ Donuts and see what I can do to help you out.’
‘Awesome,’ said Malcolm Orange, who had already in his secret heart forgiven God for the chicken pox and the lack of death rays and was beginning to consider the possibility of forgetting the entire Ross mix-up.
‘Cover your eyes, Malcolm,’ shouted his mother, who had enough Old Testament knowledge to know that looking God in the eye, be it accidental or self-initiated over a large cappuccino, never ended well.
And with a wry little disclaimer of ‘Let there be light’, God flicked the light switch and flooded the sanctuary with a raw, halogen glow.
God was an African American man – five foot eight at a generous estimate – dressed head to toe in a sinless white suit.
For the first time in over three years, Malcolm Orange was speechless. Real life God, he suddenly realized, was just as disappointing as all the real life people he claimed to have magicked into existence.
Martha Orange, raised on a diet of conservatively illustrated Ladybird books, knew full well that God was old and olive-colored and particularly well-bearded and as the man standing in front of her was none of the above, nor even trying, was reasonably relieved to discover the Oranges had not accidentally rolled into the unveiled presence of the Almighty.
‘You’re not God, are you?’ she asked somewhat hesitantly. It was not the kind of question she was accustomed to asking strangers.
‘Goodness, no. Never claimed to be,’ the man replied, laughing hard and loose like a plate of barely set Jell-O. ‘I’m just Steve.’
‘Steve who?’ asked Malcolm who always preferred full and formal names over half-assed first names.
‘Steve Marten,’ Steve replied.
‘Like the actor?’ asked Mrs Orange.
‘Bingo ma’am. But mine’s spelt with an e instead of an i.’
‘Sounds the same to me,’ muttered Malcolm, who’d never heard of Steve Martin, either with or without an i. ‘What were you doing hanging out in the dark pretending to be God?’
Steve Marten let out another belly laugh and, bending his skinny legs, lowered himself down to Malcolm’s level, a move which Malcolm Orange never ceased to find infinitely patronizing. ‘I never claimed to be God, young sir. I was just taking a nap on the front pew after I got the hall floors polished.’
‘So, if you’re not God and you’re just Steve Marten, you won’t be able to help us much will you?’
‘Depends on what you’re looking for in the way of help. The offer of a coffee still stands. There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts three blocks from here. I’d be more than happy to buy you good folks a snack, looks like you could both do with a bit of sustenance.’
‘And what about after that?’ Malcolm Orange asked, dredging the pit of his swagger for the last remnants of a man voice. ‘Seems to me we’re still screwed whether you buy us a coffee or not.’
‘Malcolm!’ his mother exclaimed, stretching to deliver a swift, admonishing clip to her son’s right ear. ‘Don’t be so rude. Mr Marten is terribly kind to offer us a coffee. Apologize now before I skin you alive.’
Malcolm Orange mumbled a half-hearted apology while Steve Marten belly laughed his way out of the sanctuary and all the way down to Dunkin’ Donuts, where he bought them drinks and pastries and offered to put a good word in at the Baptist Retirement Village on the edge of town.
‘My youngest sister’s been working there for three years now,’ Steve Marten explained over his caramel macchiato, milk foam clinging to his upper lip. ‘It’s not so bad, if you don’t mind wiping old folks’ butts and smelling like porridge. They’re always looking for new starts. I’ll get our Marge to put in a good word for you.’
And true to his word, for Steve Marten was a born-again Christian and struggled to lie, even on his tax returns, Malcolm’s mother found herself starting in the retirement community just two days later. Less than a week thereafter, the Oranges were offered an empty retirement chalet in return for an extra night shift and a thirty percent cut of Mrs Orange’s pay packet. Malcolm Orange duly located his tennis rac
quet, packed his extra pants into a carrier bag and moved into his first permanent home of the last five years.
‘Mama,’ Malcolm Orange said, as they ate their first meal at the new kitchen table; a meager mishmash of Kentucky Fried Chicken and ramen noodles, picked straight from the packets, ‘I think God kind of did help us out, don’t you?’
‘Definitely,’ agreed his mother, though she knew it had all been the doing of Steve Marten, the floor polisher, who had for his excessive Christian charity demanded, and been duly awarded, fifteen sweaty minutes in the broom cupboard, alone with Martha Orange.
‘The Lord works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform,’ she mumbled through a mouthful of fried chicken, and could not help but wonder when she’d first begun to sound exactly like her own, long-gone father.
– Chapter Four –
Soren James Blue
On the first full morning of his disappearance, Malcolm Orange woke to the sound of labored lovemaking creeping through his open window. During the night his curtains – whipped senseless by the chalet’s overzealous air conditioning – had parted company, permitting all manner of unwanted sounds and sights to enter his bedroom.
Having recently emerged from his fifth dinosaur dream of the week, Malcolm was too exhausted to contemplate closing the window himself, so he shoved last night’s Kleenex wad further into his head and crawled back beneath the blankets. Thus cocooned, he hoped to slip back into sleep, recommencing the dream exactly where he’d left off. However, the noises persisted, tunneling their way through four inches of duvet, X-Men-themed. After several minutes of feigned indifference Malcolm poked his head out to glance at the wall clock; a gaudy Coca-Cola number purchased with tokens from Texacos all across America. Un-muffled, the noises were ten times louder and undeniably sexual. Somewhere on the cul-de-sac, someone was having themselves a really great time, and it hadn’t even turned seven yet.
Malcolm Orange was not the sort of child driven by sexual curiosity. He knew how babies got born, both accidentally and on purpose and, due in part to his beauty parlor education, was more than familiar with all the insertions and extractions involved in the process. Having spent most of his formative years dozing on the dirty floors of midwestern motels, he was also preternaturally well-accustomed to the odd noises people made in bed together. Malcolm had little interest in what was going on under his nose, but it irked him slightly to be incapable of putting a name to the grunts.
Malcolm, still overly enamored with the acquisition of a permanent neighborhood, prided himself on knowing everyone and everything that happened on his cul-de-sac. After six short weeks in the Baptist Retirement Village, he could now differentiate between each of the individual noises which kept the community ticking arthritically towards its next meal.
In the distance he could hear the faint whirr of Miss Pamela Richardson’s electric wheelchair making its umpteenth circuit of the block. He pictured her crisscrossing the streets in a tartan picnic blanket, gunning her Zippy Wheel 2000 as she attempted to outrun the Grim Reaper. Beneath Malcolm’s window the morning sprinklers were already sizzling, drowning his mother’s long-parched lawn in a fine aquatic mist. Bill and Irene, in the second chalet down, were practicing their daily hymns, grating painfully on a substandard duet of ‘The Old Rugged Cross’. Irene had forgotten all but the hymn’s refrain and was substituting lyrics from the Lion King soundtrack in a futile attempt to keep up with her husband, who, at five years her junior, was now three times sharper in the head. Their early morning sing-songs had become a regular feature since the Director announced his music ban. The parking lot gravel crunched and grumbled as the staff exited and entered the Center; two dozen beginning and two dozen ending their daily dose of butt wiping and pill counting. Four blocks over, the inevitable sirens – police, ambulance and the occasional fire truck – simmered up and down 82nd, forming a shrill city soundtrack as they shuffled homeless men and prostitutes from one street corner to another in an endless parody of human chess.
The Baptist Retirement Village ran like a cheap opera with every sound, every conversation and elderly cough a carefully choreographed part of the whole. Malcolm Orange knew each of these sounds by ear. He recorded his findings neatly in a brand-new dime store notebook, eventually hoping to determine patterns, progressions and mysterious anomalies peppering this, the most comprehensive research project of his short career.
The Baptist Retirement Village was comprised of two distinct sections. The Oranges lived on the cul-de-sac, a sweeping, circular street of some twenty-odd chalets each housing an elderly person, sometimes single, oftentimes doubled up for marital or budgetary reasons. Mrs Orange, having presented her family as a particularly needy case before the Baptist council who ran the Village, had been given the keys to Chalet 13; a two bedroom matchbox situated at the snake head of the cul-de-sac.
The Oranges were Chalet 13’s fourteenth set of occupants.
All but two of the previous occupants had since passed away. Occupant number eleven had been lingering stoically, exploiting the dull end of a diabetic coma for the past eight years, whilst occupant number three, having used an orthopedic cushion to smother occupant number four in her sleep, had last been seen hailing an airport taxi outside the local Rite Aid.
One month previously Chalet 13 had been occupied by Denise DeWitt; a buxom blonde lady of eighty-five who grew tomato plants in the spare room. The metallic scent of tomatoes would linger in Malcolm Orange’s bedroom for the next two years, infusing all his underwear with the faintest hint of greenhouse gases. Every so often, in the darker corners of the closet, he would stumble upon a particularly wily tomato shoot attempting to sprout, uninvited, from the shag pile carpet. Unaware of Chalet 13’s previous occupants, the tomato plants both fascinated and perplexed Malcolm Orange. They were one of the many conundrums he’d come to associate with retirement living.
Denise DeWitt had been something of a legend on the cul-de-sac. Having worked her way through four husbands and a subsequent seven live-in lovers she had finally, in the fall of her eighty-fourth year, pronounced herself done with men.
‘Damn men,’ she’d confessed to the Meals on Wheels lady, ‘are like damn buses … when you’re my age, you get a back ache every time you ride one.’
Within days she’d swapped her spandex pantsuits for a series of figure-defying smocks and taken to wearing a sloppy knit cap to conceal her purple-blue hair which was beginning to dreadlock. Shortly thereafter she’d unceremoniously evicted the forty-five-year-old Nigerian man who’d been squatting in her spare room for the past six weeks. (It had been common cul-de-sac knowledge that Denise DeWitt – who had on several occasions returned from the Rite Aid on 82nd with both her diabetes medication and a virile-looking homeless man – had every intention of seducing her lodger just as soon as the opportunity arose.) With no excuse for flirtation, no shirts to iron or sandwiches to fix, Denise DeWitt soon found her days dragging tediously towards the weekend.
‘I’m too old to get laid now,’ she’d announced at the weekly potluck supper. ‘Is there an alternative to sitting on my ass waiting to clock out?’
After she’d pronounced the normal distractions – bingo, daytime television and membership of Bill and Irene’s recently formed People’s Committee for Remembering Songs – substandard uses of her time, Denise DeWitt had landed upon gardening, specifically the cultivation and manipulation of tomato plants.
‘I’ll grow them in my spare room,’ she’d explained, ‘that way there won’t be room for a man, should I ever get tempted.’
Thereafter, the residents of the cul-de-sac had found themselves well-supplied with tomato chutneys and pickles, soups and fresh salsa for all their chip-dipping needs. Denise DeWitt had found in her tomato plants the kind of stalwart stickability she’d been missing in every one of her eleven lovers. Her spare room ran thick with vines and creepers. Her fingers turned green and calloused almost overnight. Her dreadlocks, daily drenched in a fine mist of organic plan
t food, sprouted from her hat and ran wild as mermaid tendrils down her flabby back.
Denise DeWitt was eighty-five years old, enjoying the finest few months of her life, when she suddenly and unceremoniously died, bolt upright in the bath with a jar of tomato chutney in her left hand. The Meals on Wheels lady stumbled upon her almost twelve hours later. The tomato chutney had slipped from Denise’s hand, turning the bathwater blood red and consequently leading to some six hours of confused gossip concerning the cause of death. Having served the retirement community for the better part of thirty years, the Meals on Wheels lady was well-accustomed to finding the odd corpse. With little or no thought for ceremony, she phoned the relevant authorities, pulled the plug out and threw the bath mat over Denise to preserve her now wizened dignity. Whilst she waited for the coroner to arrive, she sat on the toilet seat and polished off Denise DeWitt’s morning porridge. ‘It’s not that I’m not sad or anything,’ she explained to the coroner when he finally arrived, ‘but there’s no point letting a good breakfast go to waste.’
Less than a week later, the bathtub had been thoroughly disinfected and a regular wilderness of tomato plants relocated to the compost heap behind the Center. The Director, horrified by the state of Chalet 13, had successfully billed Denise’s relatives for the kind of deep clean normally associated with a violent crime scene, but the stench of tomatoes lingered on, making it almost impossible to rent the chalet to a proper resident for proper money. Martha Orange’s arrival had been extremely timely for the Baptist council. When the worst of the death smell had dissipated, they’d shuffled Martha and her kids into Chalet 13 and docked a significant slice off her pay for the privilege.
Malcolm barely noticed the smell. He felt more at home in Chalet 13 than any of the two dozen shops, shacks or stucco bungalows he’d previously lived in. The chalets had been erected in 1978, with good intentions and vast amounts of concrete. Seventeen years of incessant drizzle had yet to erode even the upper epidermis. Malcolm was a big fan of concrete. It reeked of permanence. He fully intended to spend the rest of his waking life on the cul-de-sac, sliding from youth to manhood and eventually the kind of tremendously ancient state which could only add credibility to his claim for permanence.
