A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  Michael opened the screen door, and the wind did its thing against the hinges, and he said, “Goddamn it.”

  He came in behind her. Gave the light string a yank, and filled the room with light.

  He said, “What was that about?”

  “The aerial.” Even her voice shivered. “That whole thing was about the aerial.”

  She would make hot chocolate. There was peppermint schnapps.

  She said, “Frankie was afraid it would blow away.”

  She got a pan out and set it on the stove.

  Michael said, “Great. Instead, he almost got blown away.”

  She got the milk out of the refrigerator and stood there with the door open, and she couldn’t tell if she was colder than the refrigerator or not. “Want hot chocolate? There’s schnapps.”

  The screen door blew open again and Frankie came in.

  “I’m going to have to replace those hinges in about a minute,” he said. “Thanks, Mrs. Bryn. Did you get bonked?”

  “You want some hot chocolate? With schnapps?”

  “I can’t. Gotta get going. I have a friend with me. Sort of.”

  Michael and Pattianne both said, “Where?”

  Frankie’s face was one big happy face, his smile all about that crooked front tooth, and he said, “You got to meet him.”

  He went back out. He didn’t let the wind get the door.

  Pattianne dumped powdered cocoa into the pan of milk, her fingers tingling, spilling cocoa onto the stove, and there were sparks where the cocoa was caught by the gas flames.

  Michael came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders and said, “I don’t think Frankie is old enough to drink.”

  His hands were warm. His hands were always warm. She pushed up the sleeves of the sweatshirt and stirred the cocoa into lumps, smaller and smaller lumps.

  He kissed the back of her neck. Even his lips were warm, and he said, “What’s this?”

  He pulled the purple beads out of the back of the sweatshirt and they tickled across her nipples. The hinges screeched, the door blew open, the beads dropped back down inside her sweatshirt. The flame under the hot chocolate flared.

  And Frankie said, “Meet Bullfrog.”

  A small white hound-dog type of dog with long brown ears and short legs. Pattianne dropped to her knees.

  “Bullfrog?” she said. “Are you Bullfrog?”

  He said yes. His eyes were hound-dog eyes, sad and droopy, and his long, oddly bushy tail thumped a couple times on the floor.

  She said, “Is he yours?”

  Bullfrog licked her hand and sniffed at her wrist, sniffed on up toward her elbow, his fat pinkish nose tickling the skin on her arm. She got goose bumps, and a funny cooing sound came out of her.

  “He’s gorgeous,” she said, and she took his long ears in her hands. “His ears are cold—he was cold out there.”

  Unbelievably soft ears.

  The hot chocolate in the pan foamed over, hissing into the flames, and the flames shot up blue.

  She said, “Where’d you get him?”

  “He was wandering around at Lewiston’s place,” Frankie said. “The old French teacher, from last year? He was going to call the pound. They kill dogs there, you know.”

  Michael took the pan off the stove. Bullfrog’s nose bounced in the air in the direction of the hot chocolate.

  She said, “He’s hungry.”

  Frankie said, “He’s always hungry. That’s his deal. Eat. Sleep. Chase cats. He usually seems kind of disappointed when they run away, though. Or else he loses them. I don’t think he can see too well.”

  After Frankie and Bullfrog left, she put pasta water on to boil, and she said, “What would cocoa have in it that would make sparks like that?” And, “Did you guys ever have a dog?” And she told him about Starla, who was a spaniel, who piddled when she got excited, who lived until she was old.

  “We had a retriever once,” he said. “Or a lab. I can never remember which is which.”

  She cut sharp white cheese into triangles and laid them on a Flow Blue plate, only a buck at a junk shop in Popple Creek, no chips. She asked him when the next debate tournament was, and where.

  “Tuesday,” he said. “Mizpah.”

  And she said how Minnesota has some weird place names, and here’s some white wine, and what’s this blue plate called again.

  “Flow Blue,” he said.

  “It looks like a mistake,” she said. A windmill, all blurry around the edges.

  “They were a mistake,” he said.

  He sat in the living room and opened the newspaper, and ten minutes later his head was leaned back against the back of the couch, reading through his nostrils, he liked to say, and then there was a soft snore.

  She tucked the purple beads into the pocket of her coat, and then she touched his shoulder with one finger, two fingers, whispering, “Wake up. Let’s have dinner. I love you. I love you.”

  East of St. Cloud, the Mississippi made its claim, made everything about business, warehouses, shipping plants, industry. And the towns got denser, and it felt like New Jersey. West of St. Cloud, the land seemed to open up, and on Tuesdays sometimes, or on Thursdays sometimes, she drove the O-Bug over the roads as if she were going somewhere, somewhere west. There were trees, far back along the property lines, or in the dips in the fields where there were creeks maybe, flares of red and yellow.

  “Crimson, scarlet, vermillion, gold, caramel, purple,” she said—what she would write to Miss Mimi.

  “Dassel, Kandiyohi, Manannah, Kerkhoven,” reading the signs at the intersection in Eden Valley. A kid in a pickup truck watched her from across the intersection, a four-way stop, her turn to go. If there were a dog in the passenger seat of the O-Bug, she could be talking to the dog instead of riding along talking to herself.

  A huge, lopsided pumpkin sat at the front of a hardware store. Really huge, as big as a wheelbarrow. Another one, not quite as huge but more lopsided, was posed outside the Good Days Food and Drug. Shop windows had orange and black crepe-paper streamers, and witches and skeletons hung from the lamp poles. There seemed to be a lot of hay bales here and there, and a lot of the really huge pumpkins.

  When she stopped for gas at the Eden Valley Gas ’n’ Go, there were bags of Fun-Size Snickers by the register.

  Michael loved Snickers.

  “Milky Way is better,” she always said.

  “Snickers have peanuts,” he said.

  “Milky Way,” she would insist.

  “Snickers has a better name.”

  She asked the Gas ’n’ Go girl where she could get one of those big pumpkins. The girl looked up through thick black bangs.

  “Got to grow one,” she said. “For the competition. You grow them, you don’t buy them. Ten eighty-five.”

  “And a bag of Fun-Size Snickers, please.”

  Just driving around.

  Michael and Rick stopped inside the sagging gate. The cemetery was old. The grave markers were dark with black moss. Some were tilted. The boys bunched up behind them, quiet. Rick had the pickle buckets.

  “Kinda cold,” one of the boys said.

  Another one went, “Shh.”

  Rick said, “The water’s over here,” and he led the way toward a short spigot that stuck up from the ground. Michael stepped aside, and the boys moved past him. No joking around. They fell into single file. Rick had that effect on them. Michael knew they weren’t afraid of Rick. He thought it was respect.

  There were five pickle buckets. A little dish soap in each one. Sponges. Rick knelt at the spigot and worked at it until the handle turned a quarter turn and rusty water dribbled out.

  “Don’t scrub too hard,” Rick said. “The markers are fragile.”

  “Even after being out in, like, snow and all?”

  “What’s fragile?”

  “Delicate,” Michael said. “Flimsy. From the Latin fragilis. Liable to break. Same root as fracture.”

  One of the boys said, “You k
now, Latin is a dead language.”

  And another, it was Charles, said, “That’s rude, dude.”

  And the first one said, “I’m just saying, like, we’re in a cemetery and all.” And Michael heard the rustle of a shove.

  “I think cemeteries are kinda weird.” That was Sammy.

  When each pickle bucket was half full of soapy water, one set in front of each boy, Rick said, “Who remembers the prayer?”

  The boys looked at each other, and at the ground. Michael could tell Gerard and Sammy were trying not to laugh or something. He could tell they were all a little nervous. And he loved them for that.

  Rick said, “It goes like this: May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.”

  Sammy automatically said, “Amen,” and then he said, “Sorry.”

  Rick laughed, a small forgiving chuckle, and Sammy’s face got red.

  “It’s okay,” he told them. “You don’t have to say the prayer out loud, but think it.”

  He handed out the pickle buckets, one to each boy, and they headed off in different directions, lugging the buckets as if they were too heavy. Michael felt a big feeling in his chest. An ache.

  “But say the names you see on the markers,” Rick said. “Out loud.”

  “Okay.” That was John. John the Agreeable, they called him in staff meetings. He was too agreeable for his own good. Always getting led into trouble. Usually the one who got caught. He was small, his coat too big. The ache in Michael’s chest got bigger.

  He and Rick walked through the cemetery, listening to the mumbled prayers. Some graves showed whole families, their markers with dates going back a hundred years. It was late afternoon. The sun was low and the sky was clear. He could hear the freeway far off. Like everything else around here. The landscape made him homesick. It made him nervous. The cemetery was on a small rise. There was one tree, right in the middle.

  “Some of these names haven’t been spoken aloud in generations,” Rick said.

  Michael cleared his throat. He didn’t know what to say. It seemed terribly important, and he just nodded. He heard the words of the prayer for the dead in his head. He wanted to say it out loud and was afraid to say anything out loud. His throat felt full of tears.

  Rick touched his arm. “You okay?”

  “I guess.”

  His parents went to the cemeteries of their families, but they never took him or Claire. He would change that. He longed for that sense of the generations, stretching out before him, after him. Seven months wasn’t really that long to be waiting to get pregnant.

  “Are you thinking about your father?”

  “I guess.”

  He didn’t want to talk to Rick about his father. Or about the empty flat space around here. He clapped Rick’s shoulder and moved away, toward a crooked thin marker. There were flat markers in the brown grass around it, three on one side, two on the other. He brushed his hand over the crusty moss on the face of it, off the single letter R. He leaned against it, and then pressed it to see if it would straighten. There was a crunch, and he jumped back, and the tall marker fell over at his feet with a quiet thump.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Michael, are you okay?”

  “Oh my God.”

  It lay across one of the flat name markers. Amanda.

  “Dude.”

  “Wow.”

  “Man, that thing was fragilis.”

  “Fractured, man.”

  “It’s okay, boys,” Rick said. “Let’s keep working. It can be set back up. Accidents happen. Just don’t lean on the gravestones.”

  Michael couldn’t catch his breath.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. It had just collapsed. It was that old. It had stood that long.

  “It’s okay, Michael,” Rick said, his voice low. “It’s okay, boys,” his voice louder. “Just be careful. They’re old, and some of them are crumbly.”

  “Rick, what should I do?” Michael stared at the broken marker.

  “It’s okay. I’ll call the sexton.” Rick’s hand closed around Michael’s elbow. “Michael?”

  He was shocked at the damage. He was shocked at the whiteness of the crumbled concrete around the base of the broken marker. He couldn’t look at the boys.

  One of them mumbled, “Sexton,” and Michael heard giggles. Rick rolled his eyes, and just like that, Michael knew what to do.

  “Sexton,” he said loudly. “From the same Latin word as sacred. One who tends sacred objects. Back to work on your sacred objects, boys.”

  It was quiet and windy. It got cold. Nobody went near the broken marker.

  He had Rick drop him off at home, and he took the pickle buckets in with him. The O-Bug was gone, the house empty. He was in the kitchen, getting ready to rinse the pickle buckets, when she came in. Her hair was blown all over. Her nose was red.

  “Pickle buckets,” she said.

  They were stacked up on the counter, and the damp grocery bag was on the table.

  “So, hey,” she said. She looked inside the grocery bag, at the sponges and dish detergent. “What’s up?”

  He turned back to the pickle buckets. “Rick and I took some of the boys out to the St. Wendel Cemetery.”

  He felt the shake in his voice and hoped she didn’t hear it.

  “St. Wendel?”

  “It’s a pioneer cemetery,” he said. “We cleaned the markers.”

  He worked one bucket up out of the stack and knew he wouldn’t tell Pattianne about breaking the marker. About the lonely cemetery. The bucket was too big for the sink. He set it back.

  About the prayer circles.

  About how much he hated Minnesota.

  “I was just rinsing these out,” he said. “No one ever goes out there anymore.” He didn’t know what else to say.

  He stood with his back to her. His hands rested on the stack of buckets. “No one is left to take care of the graves. Whole families died out, gone.” He set the buckets on the floor. “Some of those names haven’t been said out loud in fifty years.” He turned and leaned back on the counter. Slid his hands deep into his pockets. There was white concrete dust on his shoes. He felt a little sick, picturing that white gash in the dark old place.

  “So,” she said. “Who’s St. Wendel?”

  She shook the bag of Fun-Size Snickers sat him, and it was like he came back into the kitchen.

  “Hey. Snickers.” Back to her.

  “Milky Way is better,” she said.

  “Snickers have peanuts,” he said. And he wondered what had been so sad. And what was suddenly easy.

  The Buddhism-book guy came in and set all the small cranes swooping in circles.

  He said, “I have to tell you, I was thinking about you the other day, Tuesday—no, Wednesday, well, maybe Thursday last week.” He sucked on one side of his mustache. “What day was it raining?”

  Thursday, four in the morning, rain fell straight down onto their house. Then around five in the morning the wind came up from the west, slapping the last yellow heart-shaped leaves onto the window, and the last starry red maple leaves, and then the rain washed them all away.

  “Thursday,” she said. “It rained Thursday.”

  “Yep, well, then, it must have been Friday,” he said, and he smoothed his red mustache in a single gesture of forefinger and thumb.

  She hooked her heels on the rung of the stool, folded her hands together in her lap, settled on her backbone.

  He reached one finger out to a blue crane.

  “This one here,” he said. “This bluish one here is the same as these cranes out by where I’m working at.” The blue crane swung toward him, all the cranes swung toward him, and he pulled his finger back. “I asked one of the young fellas out there, out there along the meadow, it not being a meadow now, all that rain, turned it right back into a swamp, out there where the old highway goes up to the caves?” His eyebrows had worked themselves into a question.

  “Never been there.”

/>   “Cranes,” he said. “Kind of gray and blue colored, just like this one here. You can’t hardly see them, same color of the grass clumps, about that tall, that tall swamp grass? You can hear them, though. The cranes, not the swamp grass. They make all sorts of noises, you can hear them even when you can’t see any sign of them, way up in the air they start up, sounds kind of like a horn, coming down out of the sky.” He didn’t have his hard hat, and his boots didn’t leave dusty footprints on the carpet. He got close to the shelf of herb books and said, “You got any books about birds?”

  “No,” she said. Angels. UFOs. Fairies. “No bird books, sorry.”

  “This young fella, he said, ‘You ought to see these sand cranes,’ that’s what he called them, sand cranes, when it’s their time, ‘courtship ritual’ he called it. I thought that was a nice way of saying it, courtship ritual.”

  From behind, he was a big puffy square of nylon and two legs in gray slacks and a head of bristly reddish-gray hair.

  “We don’t have any nature books, really. It’s pretty much all philosophy and religion. New Age.”

  Facing her again, he sucked on his mustache and looked all around. “Well,” he said. “I thought it would be nice to read up on them, seems they’re real characters, dancing around and what all. That would be during the courtship ritual.”

  “So.” Her feet unhooked from the rung, and her butt looked for the center of gravity. “How is that book on Buddhism working for you?”

  His head set to nodding up and down. “I been reading it,” he said. “I’m working that stretch of the old highway. Not much traffic. I’ll read a little bit and then put it down and think on it. Funny how that works, thinking on something new like that. I start out thinking on it, and then pretty soon I’m not thinking on it, I’m thinking on something else, and I never even noticed, I never thought well, here, I’ll stop thinking on such and such and start in on thinking about such and such instead—you ever notice how thinking works that way?”

  Suddenly it was a question.

  “Course it gets pretty quiet out there,” he said. “That old highway never sees much traffic most days. Folks avoid it. It floods over pretty easy, that’s why they’re draining that swamp, widen that road.” He planted his legs wide and crossed his arms and looked up at the ceiling.