Phantom Strays

by Lorraine Ray

Once I knew something about clouds, something so profound you would have paid quite a bit to know it. And it was something important that I really didn’t want to forget. Something significant that had taken quite a bit of time and effort to discover. It had to do with a hook for a really good story that I lost track of in the morass of vaguely moribund memories.

  So I remembered it had to do with cows and those cows were really great in that story. They were precious cows. Well, maybe it was an onyx cow or a skeleton cow I’d seen in Nogales on that rainy day when I almost went down the sewer. Sure, that was an interesting memory, and it could have inspired me to write about cows and clouds, because it rained so hard down there that day.

  And, of course, a man attacked me once while I was studying the clouds vaguely not even remembering, searching in that blank way you have to be when writing is going to come to you, but doesn’t. I was a little fool, and should have known better than to write at night when parked near an arroyo and I was alone with a window rolled down so I could loll my head partway out and be seen, God only knows, by the who who was really scary. Just when writing gets really good and you’re totally into developing the story, you will find someone scary watching you or in that case actually come after you and you will be in the battle of your life.

  He’s a character of my story I really don’t ever want to write, that man in the balaclava. He came in on his own and had his part. He didn’t ask for permission to scare me half to death. I wasn’t able to edit him out completely, only partially, before he had taken his place, before he inserted himself. I suppose his attack is a story that may have the germ of a good story in it, that may be a treasure of the desert, but I know for my own sanity that I must edit him out forever as much as possible. I don’t want to tell his side of that story. It’s way too real.

  And at the same time that I was busy forgetting getting attacked I was also teaching myself the art of stenographic shorthand. I studied a smudged and dog-eared secretary’s course book I borrowed from the library. Made the squiggles individually, linked them in a long squiggle, even worked to give my squiggles individual character. Filling the Big Chief notepad and smaller pads that fit in my pockets with my practice shorthand, line after line, and enjoying the effect of these strange squiggles on the paper and the mysterious part it place in my future, I imagined, when this great squiggled novel would arise like the mighty entity it was, to walk astraddle the continent, and maybe other continents where it would not be forgotten.

  One day I practiced my shorthand by taking down an interesting conversation between my parents. It was about a new suit my mother had purchased for my father.

  “All the architects wear them,” she began. Our father had been protesting the new suit she had made him purchase. They were in their bedroom and I lurked in the hall with a pad and pencil.

  “I know it’s fashionable because those architects are always so gall-darn stylish. My goodness, they wear the nicest turtleneck sweaters, pure angora and nylon, and the most expensive slacks, almost hand-tailored. So I bought you the same Nehru collar suit. A leisure suit, they call it. It’s the latest thing and you’re gonna wear it, by cracky. That’s what they’re all wearing in New York City. If you’re gonna go back there and to Minneapolis and Chicago, you’re gonna wear what they wear and that’s all there is to it. This is what’s new! Architects always keep ahead of trends, not like you stick-in-the-mud engineers, by cracky.”

  “Architects are boobs.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that word. You work with them. It’s no use calling names in order to make yourself feel better.”

  “Nothing in this world makes me feel better.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Sad Sack has come to live with us.”

  “That Bernie designed a high rise with seven stories of south facing windows. For Arizona. There isn’t an air conditioning unit big enough to carry the load. And if there was, this cheapskate we’re working for would never pay for it. I keep telling Bernie that and he doesn’t listen. All he thinks about is aesthetics. Wait till the client complains that everyone is sweating non-stop. He won’t even consider window treatments to cut heat transfer.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, tucking my pad and pencil in my back pocket quickly as they began to emerge from their room.

  “Your father needs a leisure suit. He doesn’t like the one I picked. This plaid is a little too bright, but I think the colors suit him.”

  “I am dressed like a cretin who vomited on himself,” Father said sadly.