by Mark Slouka
“Sure,” I said. A car went by.
She didn’t even think about it, he said, didn’t hesitate—just asked him if he thought it was OK, then walked right out. They couldn’t talk, he said, so they could hear. What would they do if a train came? she asked. It can’t come, he said. Halfway across she took his hand.
He didn’t know why he decided to push it—maybe it was because she trusted him. It was on the way back. Did she want to try something? It was almost dusk now—the trestle was just ahead. It was safe, he said, as long as she did what he said—scary but safe. He hadn’t thought she’d say yes.
I could have told him different.
Holding on to the railing, they’d sidestepped out on the tie ends that stuck out over the gorge and the river. Ray went first, kicking the snow, watching it curtain off into the air. It was slow going—forty feet out, clearing the wood with his right boot, he started hitting ice. Maybe they should head back, he said. She smiled and shook her head. They were almost halfway across when he heard the whistle.
The fear wasn’t something you could hide. She had to listen to him, he said. They’d be OK. Was she listening? She nodded.
Just tell me what to do, she said.
They had time, a minute, maybe a little more. They weren’t on the tracks, no part of the train could touch them, but it would be close—very close. How close? she said. A foot, not even. It wouldn’t be going that fast, thirty, thirty-five, but it would feel fast. Very fast.
They could feel it in the timbers now, in the steel under their hands—that deep thrum as if the earth were vibrating.
She’d feel a jolt, he said—like getting hit hard by a pillow.
She nodded, tried to smile.
“You OK? I’ve got you—warm up your hands.”
“I’m OK.”
“We’ll be all right—all we gotta do is hang on.”
“I’m OK.”
They could hear the huff of the engines, approaching through the woods.
The noise would be bad, he said. They’d probably blow the whistle coming up to the trestle. She had to be ready. And the snow coming off the ties. They’d be standing in a blizzard for a few seconds. She had to turn away from it, close her eyes.
It was loud now—very loud. They could see the light cutting quickly through the trees.
“OK?” he yelled.
She nodded, then pressed herself to the railing. She’d turned her head away, was looking at him.
It was only then he saw it was a freight, and in the shock of that first blasting scream of the whistle, the steel vibrating under his hands, he swung around and across her, pinning her to the rail, his arms around her body, his head pushed against her hair and then they were lost, buried in a blizzard of screeching steel that went on without breath or pause for a minute, then two, then three because it was a freight, a mile-long wall, and when his hands began to go he pushed them through the rail and locked them like a belt on the other side and then it was gone and they didn’t move—just stayed there until he could feel her breathing underneath him.
They didn’t say much making their way across to the other side—it was almost dark now but you could see because of the snow—and when they stepped off the trestle they brushed the snow off themselves. He asked her if she was OK. She nodded.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m—”
And she stepped up and kissed him. “I’m not,” she said.
A CAR CAME BY, flaring Ray’s coat like someone dragging him by the lapels.
“I mean, I’ve almost just got her killed, it’s dark, I’m going to have to walk her home ’cause we’ve missed the last bus … You know how far it is to Putnam Lake—I didn’t get her home till eight.”
“A.M. or P.M.?”
He didn’t hear me. “I can’t stop thinking about her.”
I could see the patches of snow in the woods, thicker on the hillside. I wasn’t used to winter yet.
“I mean, it’s crazy.” He shook his head. “It’s just bein’ with her, listenin’ to her talk—” A gust whipped the snow over the road like hair. “I don’t know, it’s like you put your arm around her and you just feel, I don’t know …”
“What?”
“Forget it—I’m just talkin’ outta my ass now.”
“What?”
He laughed, yelled it into the woods: “Fuck, I don’t know! Jesus, listen to me. I’m tellin’ you, man, she could just walk out of those woods right now an’—”
He’d stopped, was walking into the road.
“What’re you doin?”
He lay down across the dotted line, his arms out like Jesus.
“—tell me to lie down in the middle of the road—”
“What the hell you doin?”
“—and I’d say fine, let ’em run over my sorry ass.”
“C’mon, Ray, quit fuckin’ around.”
“Just run me over.”
“Fine.”
He was smacking the snow off his coat when he caught up to me. “What?”
“Nothin’. Just gotta get home, that’s all.”
He nodded. We walked quietly for a few seconds.
“You met her folks yet?” I said.
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Not like I’m—”
He stopped.
“What?”
“I don’t know, you know—not like I’m you.”
“Don’t be a jerk.”
“I’m serious—you know what I’m sayin’. Anyway, I will—just not yet.”
“She met your dad?”
He looked at me like he didn’t understand. “Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know, you know—he’s your dad.”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said quietly, and then: “No. She hasn’t.”
“Guess that makes sense,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Really? Why?”
“I don’t know, if it was my dad—”
“It’s not.”
“No, I know that. I was just thinkin’, you know, if it was me—”
“It’s not you.”
“OK, fine.”
“Hang on, wait.” He stopped. “You think it’s because I’m fuckin’ ashamed of him?”
“No, I … what’re you doin’? I just meant—”
There was a look on his face, almost like a smile. “That what you think? That I’m ashamed of him?”
“No, I just meant—”
“—because he puts away a fifth of Jack Daniels and throws up all over himself an’ shit—that what you think?”
“I don’t know, fuck. What do you want me to say? I just thought—”
“What?”
“I don’t know, you know—I’m ashamed of my old man, sometimes.”
He looked at me for a second. “Really? I didn’t know that.”
“Sometimes, you know …”
We walked around a woman’s high-heel shoe standing up in the road like it was waiting for a foot.
“Why?”
“Fuck, I don’t know.”
“Seriously.”
“I don’t know. Colonel Klink—you know. Hardly knows I exist.”
“Lucky you.”
“Look, all I was sayin’ is you don’t have to be ashamed of him,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said.
“I mean, he’s done some good stuff, too, right? Like during the war? Or when he was a cop?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, that’s somethin’.”
“No. You’re right.” We’d started walking again. The wind moved the tail on a squirrel somebody had run over in the road.
“There’s one should have looked both ways,” he said.
We passed the beautiful white house with the green shutters. Set back from the road, cozy and clean, it always looked like the kind of house you’d have to be happy in.
“I ever show you that stuff?” he said.
&nb
sp; “What stuff?”
“The stuff he brought back from the war.”
“Don’t think so.”
“Wanna see it? C’mon, you’ll get a kick out of it.”
He could see me hesitate. “Don’t worry about it, he’s back at work, doin’ his bit for society. Bein’ the man.”
IT ALWAYS LOOKED WORSE in winter: the rim of snow along the crease of the wall where the sun couldn’t reach, the broken chair, the nails coming through the roof. When we walked in Wilma was bobbing up and down behind the loveseat which somebody had dragged in front of the kitchen door. Ray picked up the lamp by the couch, then went over and knocked her gently on the nose between her eyes with his knuckles. It made a hollow sound that used to make us laugh.
“Home sweet home. You want a beer?”
“Sure.”
It was the usual mess, only colder, damper. The lamp was out. Bits of some kind of shiny paper covered the sofa, the carpet, the table.
He stepped up on the loveseat and over the back into the kitchen. “Father had company last night. I just put her in here so she wouldn’t fuck up her paws.”
“What is this stuff?”
“Glass—what’s it look like?” He turned on the radio.
I looked closer. A tiny bolt of lightning curled to a point. The couch glistened, dusted with fangs and needles. On the table, next to a shard on its back like a cartoon egg was a glass half-filled with beer. Somebody had dropped the screw-in parts of three lightbulbs into it.
Ray stepped back over the loveseat, carrying a couple of beers in his right hand. “Maybe I’ll leave it—let him clean it up.”
“What the fuck were they doin’?”
“Batting practice.”
“With light bulbs?”
“Cheaper than glasses.”
He leaned over and picked up a plastic stick with a fist-sized horse’s head on the end of it. The head had long orange strands coming out of its skull the color you sometimes see on old men who dye their hair.
From the kitchen I could hear Harry Harrison saying something about The Ed Sullivan Show and the Doors.
“Yeah, it was a real happenin’.” He swung the horse stick like Mantle lining one to third. “Around two in the morning my old man’s just talkin’ shit an’ swingin’ Trigger here when I hear Tommy yell ‘Hey, batta batta’ and then a pop and everybody goes nuts and my old man yells, ‘Yeah, bring it—I’ll put your lights out, baby.’ After that it’s basically just pitch, swing and duck.” He took a sip of his beer, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Took ’em a while to run out ’cause they’re so fuckin’ drunk they keep missin’.”
“So where were you?”
He shook the horse’s head at me. “Well, Wilbur, I didn’t care for it,” he said in the voice of Mister Ed. I looked at the horse. Up close, its yellow marble eyes looked oddly terrified.
He tossed it on the couch, handed me his beer. “No big deal. Do me a favor—sweep that shit off the couch. I’ll be right back.”
I started cleaning the glass off the armrests and the table with the horse. WABC was on. Harry Harrison was saying something about the Knicks in that great, gravelly voice that made him sound like the uncle you never had, the one who’d always understand, who could talk you through anything.
Ray came back carrying a wooden crate filled with something wrapped in garbage bags. The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” had just finished. He’d never understood that song, Harry was saying—what gloves? He needed galoshes, too. And a hat.
“He worries about this shit so he keeps it in plastic,” Ray said.
Some of it was in small tins, some wrapped in newspapers going back to 1949 and taped up with masking tape. We unwrapped it piece by piece like it was Christmas: torn-off uniform patches with side-by-side S’s like bolts of lightning, a set of silver dinner forks with “Waffen SS” engraved on the handles, a blue-velvet sack with four gold rings that spilled heavy and cool into my palm. One ring had a jawless skull with tiny red jewels for eyes.
“Cool, right?” Ray said.
“Fuckin’ amazing,” I said, not knowing what I was feeling, exactly.
He popped the tape on a thick packet of newspaper and pulled out a small dagger in a silver-tipped scabbard. Like everything else it was intricately worked—the guard engraved, the blade slim and straight. It sat in my hand like it had been made for it. I slipped it back in the scabbard, then pulled it out.
“Where’d he get this stuff?”
“Fuck knows. Overseas.”
Two oak leaves had been engraved into the blade. Next to them, like an artist’s signature, was a tiny oval with a squirrel in it. I turned the blade over. Engraved in the steel were the words Meine Ehre heist Treue. My honor is loyalty.
Your father died for them at the Somme and they turned on us like dogs, my mother had said.
“Wonder who this belonged to,” I said.
Ray was prying the lid off a tin of Prince Albert with his fingernails.
“Yeah? I wonder who these fuckin’ belonged to.” He spilled a hill of gray, dried-out cigars on the newspaper.
I was looking at the tin. On the front was a picture of a bald man with a beard, leaning on a cane. Underneath were the words “Crimp Cut. Long Burning Pipe and Cigarette Tobacco.”
Then I saw the fingernails.
Ray chuckled. “Every man needs a hobby, right?” He picked one up and the hill slid down a little like in a game of pick-up sticks. “There’s twenty-seven of them—used to be twenty-eight. Only fifteen of these, though.”
He spilled out another tin.
They looked smaller than they should have, like dried apple slices, but you could see the ridges, the lobes, the curled-in edges where the cut skin had dried.
He held two up to his forehead. “He’s all ears,” he said.
The guy with the cane had a white rose in his lapel. His head looked strangely small for his body.
“Twenty-eight. How do you figure that worked?” He was scooping them up with two hands, dumping them back in their tins. “C’mon, you’re good in math—divide by five.”
Your father died for them at the Somme and they turned on us like dogs.
“Remainder of two, right? What’d ya think—got bored, maybe? Sounds like Dad. Still, anyway you cut it there’s some two-fingered German out there havin’ trouble holdin’ his beer stein.
I picked up a strip of cloth. It was about as wide as a man’s belt—a rich gray-black with white borders. Near the center was something I couldn’t make out: a head-like shape, but disordered—something like a jaw, a hole like a single eye.
“Flip it.” He pointed to the cloth. “Go ahead—turn it over.”
It should have been nothing—you see a thousand every Halloween—but I started to shake. I could feel myself breathing shallow so I wouldn’t be sick; my forehead was wet.
“Anyway, it’s not like fifteen is any better,” Ray was saying. “I mean, it’s like that painter, right?”
This skull had been made by an adult, I kept thinking. An adult—a grown man or woman. Carefully, lovingly sewn to look like it was made of ropes: frayed, cut-off ropes for the eye sockets, the nose, each decaying tooth a thin double-strand of rope. It wasn’t a joke—it was an expression of faith, an assertion of principle. Like dogs. They turned on us like dogs. A straight black cut ran down the middle of its forehead, another passed over its left eye, a third sliced the left cheek. It looked like it was in pain, like it had been killed with a cleaver and was proud of it. Like it was staring you down.
“Funny, my old man beat the shit out of me once when I was in second grade,” Ray was saying. “Said I took one of his fingers—that he had counted ’em.” He taped up the dagger, put it in the box. “Fuck, I’d rather give him the finger than take one.”
There was something about the hole that used to be the left eye that affected me like a smell, that forced my face to the side like a hit of carrion. I couldn’t look away. I kept trying but it was like
being in a crowded room, knowing someone’s looking at you. I could feel it, drawing me like a pit, a Niagara in the earth; I could hear the roar rising up from the dark. One morning I’d walk out across that field, the ropes like hardened gopher mounds under my feet, step carefully over that strange, straight canyon—and disappear.
Then I saw it, the detail that tipped it from nothing to nightmare. A single stitch, drawn too tight by the skull’s maker, had accidentally made the left eye human—given the pit an expression, like a slight spasm of compassion, or regret. The right, unflawed, showed nothing.
Ray took the cloth from my hand, put it in the garbage bag, tied it off. “I mean, he was right—I took it. The finger.”
“Why?” I said stupidly.
“I don’t know—guess I just wanted to show somebody. Wilma, sit! Funny thing is, nobody believed it—they thought it was fake. Even after they’d touched it.”
“Why didn’t you just put it back?” I said, pulling myself up, following his voice.
“I don’t know—got scared. I was showin’ it to this bunch of kids during recess when the teacher started walkin’ over so I threw it over the fence. She wanted to know what it was, so everybody started yelling that I’d thrown away my finger. She wanted to know what that meant. Didn’t mean anything, they said.
Anyway, it turned into this big deal. She threatened ’em with all kinds of stuff, said she’d call their parents if they didn’t tell the truth—some of ’em started to cry. Then she took ’em aside, one by one. After a while they figured out the truth wasn’t gonna work so they started makin’ shit up: it was a cigarette lighter, a pocketknife, I don’t know what. A box of Raisinets—that was my favorite.”
“Did it work?” I said.
“People only believe what they already believe.”
“Weird story.”
“You know what’s really weird? Somewhere across from the Shell station is a Nazi’s finger with flowers and shit growing out of it in the spring.”
I didn’t say anything.
He chuckled. “I mean, you talk German. What do you think he would have said if you’d walked up to him in some beer hall and said, ‘Guess what, you Nazi fuck. That finger you’re pickin’ your nose with is gonna end up in the weeds in fuckin’ America a thousand miles from the rest of your ass and there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it—Heil Hitler.”
