by Gray, Amelia
Almost to the center. But the center of me is that brick. It’s there when you bring my cheeseburger no lettuce on a steaming red tray. It’s there when you reach into your flat front pouch for my straw. It’s there when you pull your hair up behind your visor when you go in for your shift and when you lean over the grease trap with your scraper and bucket. It’s there when you stand at the register, Jenny, your unpainted fingernails hovering over the keys as you think of those old dollar bills, the tens and rolls of quarters, wondering if you shouldn’t just no-sale the register and open it, one of those times when blue-eyed striped tie Bill is smoking a cigarette in the bathroom and looking at the Sears catalog he has hidden behind the toilet. You could just open that register and reach in with two hands and pull out fistfuls of cash and put it into your front pocket, stuffing it all down there, paper-wrapped straws scattering across the greasy floor. You’d walk out and throw your visor into the garbage and you would never come back.
But where would you go, with your great treasure? I see you on the beach at Galveston, peeling off that thick dirty uniform and walking slow into the water, trading the salt of french fries and tater tots for the healing salt of the ocean. I see you saving souls in that warm water, Jenny, I see you taking men in that water and making bricks of them all. You sink them there and build a wall with them, and create purpose to their roughness and use to their weight. You build a sea wall and stand on the other side with your feet planted wide on the hot sand, your golden hair streaming behind you like a flag of independence.
You have a power, and there is no reason this power should frighten you. Surely you see how Bill looks at you, and the men paving the road and even me over my cheeseburger no lettuce sucking chocolate milk through a straw. We are all drawn to you, but I am the only one who understands that draw, knowing how I started the kiln’s fire myself, long ago. Now, my guts are full of clay and you can dig it out yourself. Open me up and hold the dangerous brick in your hands, feel that awful weight.
THIS QUIET COMPLEX
Maria Telesco
Leasing Office
Windy Pointe Apartments
1220 Thorpe Ln.
San Marcos, TX 78666
January 8
Dear Miss Telesco,
As you well know, I typically prefer to address my complaints to you personally. I look forward to the hours we spend together each week, discussing the maintenance terms of my lease. We are women of respect and empathy, and informal communication is often sufficient. However, I felt that I should address my complaint with you today in the form of a signed letter.
I always look forward to the Windy Pointe Apartments’ Annual Christmas Decoration Contest. You could say it is one of the few reasons I might remain in an apartment complex with a mold infestation. Thank you, by the way, for sending Charles and Marcus to repaint my ceiling. (They told me it was dust but we both know that’s not true, don’t we?)
Creating the beauty of the season is a matter of placing clean, bright lights precisely in place, lining the window with washable fire-resistant faux-nettles, and hanging germ-free antimicrobial cloth garland over the balcony in a way that perfectly accents the blue in the rails. Charles was a dear for sanding them, by the way. I know he did not find any termites but it’s possible the termites escaped, isn’t it? Perhaps the entire rail should be replaced?
Besides the cheer these decorations bring to the hearts of the children of this apartment complex, I have always appreciated the eighty-dollar rent deduction the first place prize always brought. Last year, I used the extra money to purchase a tarpaulin for my living room floor—a once-over with bleach kills the bacteria that falls from the ceiling while I am sleeping at night. This year has been tough, and I was hoping to be able to afford another set of acid-free storage bags for my summer clothes.
Obviously, you cannot imagine my shock and disappointment when Sandra McCloskey in Apartment 3-B won first prize.
Sandra McCloskey placed a tree on her balcony, a real tree that affects my real pine allergies. She “decorated” the tree with strings of popcorn, which attract birds that sit on her unwashed balcony ledge—birds that proceed to defecate, I can only assume, on her balcony rail. Additionally, Sandra McCloskey (I think we can speculate that she is not a Christian woman) invested in one hundred blue icicle lights, which she did not consider cleaning before nailing them at unevenly spaced intervals to her overhang. I saw her take those lights directly from the box and hang them. I watched her do this.
Miss Telesco, this loss is not a matter of pride for me—at this point, it is a matter of my health and safety. Though my contest entry perfectly blended the purity of artistic expression with the sanctity of an antimicrobial environment, I can understand your position as impartial judge, perhaps wishing to reach out to the younger, pine-loving crowd that has so recently flooded into our quiet home. However, I think it would not be beyond your power to ask Sandra McCloskey to remove her “decorations” at the earliest possible convenience. She’s had her fun, she’s won her prize. Let her spend the money on tainted meat and ineffective coconut-scented soaps. All I ask is that, in future competitions, you not allow her menace to continue before the eyes of the world, and of God.
Happy New Year!
Helen Sands
VULTURES
The vultures were everywhere. On the local news, the meteorologist speculated calmly after his seven-day forecast that the vultures were eating moss by the river. They weighed down trees and circled over the town.
I found Brenda looking at the sky when I came back from hauling boxes to the trash bins behind the daycare.
“They’re over the baseball diamond behind the high school,” she said, “three blocks away.” She shielded her eyes against the sun, watching.
“Everybody’s looking up these days,” I said.
“The radio says it’s good for the muscles in your neck,” Brenda said. Inside, the children had already begun to destroy the carton of Easter eggs we had hidden in the snack room.
* * *
At home, I told my boyfriend Toby that he had to come with me to Evelyn Merkel’s to mop her floors and fight the vultures.
“I don’t want to go anywhere near any vultures,” he said.
“It’s my money, then.”
“It would be your money, anyway. I’ve got some ideas,” he said. “I need time to put something together and I can’t waste it on vultures.”
“Fine,” I said.
* * *
Evelyn Merkel was wearing a housecoat with a nightgown underneath, and her hair was curled in rings that fell over her shoulders. She set her thin hand on Toby’s back and gave him a little push over the threshold.
“Out back,” she said.
Mrs. Merkel had a metal pole in the yard to hold up the clothesline and two vultures were chasing each other around it. They screeched and darted, beaks terrifying and open, showing sharp tongues. I couldn’t figure if they were playing or fighting. When Toby moved the curtains to the side, they turned at once and screamed at us. Mrs. Merkel tugged the curtain back over the window.
“I don’t want them knowing we’re in here,” she said. “Do you two want breakfast?”
“We already ate,” I said.
“What do you have?” said Toby.
She had English muffins and unsalted butter. Mrs. Merkel said she wanted to make orange juice but couldn’t due to the vultures monopolizing her citrus tree. Out back, the birds made frantic scraping noises against the metal pole.
Toby found a rake in the garage while I finished the dishes. Mrs. Merkel switched on a soap story. Toby stood at the door, gripping the rake with both hands. It was the old kind of rake, with a heavy metal bar at the end and tines that could aerate a lawn if you dragged it. On the television, strangers danced at a party.
“Don’t slam the door,” Mrs. Merkel said. “Don’t kill them.”
He laid his palm on the door. “These vultures are symbols,” he said.
�
�Wave that rake around and make some screech noises,” she said. “I don’t want you killing anything.”
One vulture was rooting around in the compost pile, and the other snapped at the clothesline and fell back.
“They’re big,” Toby said. He slid the door open.
Outside he danced around the vultures with his back to the wall. They shrieked and he swung the rake low to the ground, catching a long divot of grass and flinging it back to the door. Mrs. Merkel turned up the volume on the television and Toby took another swing, passing closer. The birds fell back in unison and took off running, rising. He leaned the rake against the wall and opened the glass door so violently that it smacked into the other side.
“For goodness sake,” Mrs. Merkel said.
* * *
Brenda invited me out to lunches on weekends because she wanted to be my friend. We drank ice water and watched the sky.
“Do you think there are more?” she asked. She wore a thin neck brace almost covered by her turtleneck. “There are more than last week.”
“Mrs. Merkel has three more,” I said, squeezing lemon over ice, licking my fingers.
“The parents are asking me about it, I don’t know what to tell them. They don’t think it’s safe to bring their children outside.”
“Did you tell them it was safe?”
“I don’t know if it’s safe. I don’t think it is.” She held her hand to her throat and leaned back in her chair to look up at the sky. “On the radio they say the vultures won’t go until they’ve exhausted a population.”
“I just wish somebody would do something about it,” she said. “I’d swear that they’re after us.”
The next morning, I touched Toby’s hand. He looked up from the paper. “Mrs. Merkel’s vultures are back,” I said.
He chewed at the inside of his mouth.
“I can’t spend all my time there,” I said. “I have a job.”
“I can’t go. I’m working on an idea.” He closed the paper and pushed a yellow pad towards me. On it was a drawing of a refrigerator door, with knobs and buttons in a row across the top.
“What is it?”
“Condiment dispenser. I’m working on the cleaning mechanism, and then I’m going to call a phone number and they’re going to start making it.”
“Would it really work?” I leaned over to the notepad again and he covered it with his hand.
“You’re always talking about how you can’t find the right jar of mustard,” he said. “This way, they’d all be in a row. There’s a panel across the top, you don’t even have to open the refrigerator door.”
“Do I need to do the rake trick myself?”
“You’d never have to look for mustard again,” he said.
* * *
I showed up thinking Mrs. Merkel wouldn’t be home, but when I went to take the sheets off the bed, I found her crouched in the corner of her bedroom.
“I know what they’re here for,” she said. “They’re waiting for me.” She had a cardboard box taped over the window.
“They’ve been circling for days,” she said. “They’re waiting for me to die.”
“Don’t say that.”
“That’s what they do, isn’t it? They wait for things to die, and nobody’s doing anything to help me.” She stared at her cardboard window. “I’m hungry.”
The adhesive remover would be in the garage. “I’ll make some soup if you come out of here,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, she emerged from the bedroom looking apologetic. “I’ve been alone for fifteen years,” she said.
“Your soup is at the table.”
She sat down at the table. “I know what they’re here for,” she said to the soup.
* * *
When I got home I found Toby on the couch, eating peanuts and drinking champagne from the bottle.
“She’s losing it,” I said.
“I think we could really do something with this town if we set our minds to it.” He passed the bag of peanuts. “I was just thinking, everyone’s scared to death of these vultures.” He took a drink of champagne and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “We need to make some kind of repellant.”
I sat at the other end of the couch and he moved his feet to give me more room. “How would we do it?” I asked.
“We play off people’s security,” he said. “Take a guy afraid they’ll find him while he’s playing golf. Sell him a golf umbrella with metallic panels.”
“Blind the birds?”
“Or a lady who’s scared they’ll eat her garden. Sell her a bag of quicklime, but you’ve got ‘Vulture Repellant’ written real big across the front.” He took a long drink of the champagne. “The overhead is practically zero.”
Brenda ushered the children inside as soon as they stepped out of their parents’ cars. She held them close to her, casting furtive glances at the sky. The children usually played out front on nice afternoons, but the meteorologist’s article in the newspaper said the vultures came in with the warm front and to be cautious when allowing children and small animals out.
“Did they carry off Mrs. Merkel’s laundry?” Brenda asked. We were eating a snack with the kids.
“She hasn’t hung her clothes out in a month. She wears her housecoat and the underwear she put in storage years ago.”
“Who puts underwear in storage?”
An animal cracker fell in my glass of milk.
The children had all the typical meaningless adorable things to say. Louis asked if the devil sent the vultures, probably because he had seen the flock circling over the abandoned Methodist church. Brenda’s child said the vultures came from the desert and smoked cigarettes.
For the craft project, I came up with the idea of making vulture pictures out of feathers and macaroni. After they finished we could paste on some paragraph printed from a book about where vultures come from, and the kids could take the pictures home to their parents. Brenda put Robert in time-out when he made a picture of a vulture eating his baby brother.
“I don’t think I want children,” I told Brenda, who was busy separating feathers globbed together with dirty paste.
“They’re not bad when you have one at a time,” she said.
“You shouldn’t wait until you’re thirty, though,” Brenda said. “Your kid’ll end up retarded.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Radio,” she said, sneaking another cracker from the bin. “It’s medical science. How are your boyfriend’s ideas coming?”
“He’s making a vulture repellant.”
She finished her cracker and started filling juice cups on a tray. “That’s a pretty good idea,” she said. “That’s good, that he’s trying to do something.”
“He wants to poison them.”
“He could market that.” She drank a cup of juice and filled it again for the tray. “You’ve got to believe in him, or he’s going to lose faith in himself.”
“But he wants to kill them.”
“I’m not saying you need a man right now, but that man of yours, he’s fine. He’s no bastard, like Brittney’s father. He’s an inventor, he’s one of those genius types that we don’t understand right away.” She pursed her lips and picked up the juice tray. “Just let him crack his eggs, honey.”
* * *
The blue panel with yellow flecks I saw in Mrs. Merkel’s backyard was, on closer inspection, an image of the Virgin Mary printed cheaply on a hook-stitched rug. It hung from the clothesline. Inside, Mrs. Merkel had meatloaf in the oven.
“Your beau brought it over,” she said. “He put the clothesline back up and said a prayer and, wouldn’t you know, those buzzards haven’t touched the ground since.”
We watched Mary from the kitchen window. She held her palm serenely against the possibility of vultures. The blue tassels at the edges of the rug flicked around in the wind. Toby had arranged pillar candles and small statues. The pillar candles had blue and green wax and depicted the Stations of the
Cross, and a big white one was set in the center for the resurrection.
“It was so kind,” Mrs. Merkel said. “He wants me to call him if they come back down. I’m making meatloaf.”
She was wearing an faded yellow dress with a wide, white belt. Her hair was out of curlers and she had it pulled back. She was stirring a pitcher of Tang. “I feel like a million bucks,” she said.
“It’s not very Methodist, is it?”
She tapped the spoon on the pitcher. “It’s more Methodist than shooting them, which is what Mr. Dobbs was doing.”
* * *
