by Steve Vernon
Hell, I even thought about Misty Abilene.
“Yeah,” I said. “I got a notion what you’re talking about.”
“I figured you did,” he said. “That’s why I stopped. I felt your wishing halfway down the highway. What the hell were you doing on that goat path anyway?”
Now it was my turn to shrug.
“I took a wrong turn, I guess.”
He chuckled, and his big red face glowed like a freshly stoked coalstove.
“Why don’t you give it a whirl? Go on. You know you want to. Try it. Just climb on. It don’t hurt much.”
So I climbed on in.
At first the trailer seemed like any other trailer. Big and hollow, a little dustier than most.
Only the dust had a strange kind of scent to it. A tang, like the incense they burn in some churches.
Then I heard the voices, low and far off and lulling, like waves in a seashell. Soft like the kind of whispers a woman makes when she’s telling you how much she never wants to lose you.
“Wish I’d never…,”
“Wish he hadn’t…,”
“Wish, I wish, I wish…,”
In the darkness I saw a woman holding a baby she’d let go a lifetime before. An old man catching a fish out of a gully run dry from sunshine and neglect. A young boy running through an endless field with a big lolling wet tongued hound baying happily at his heels.
And then there was me. Standing alone in the back of an empty trailer full of wishes and dreams and over two thousand years of accumulated regret.
I made my wish.
I heard it fall amongst all those hopes and dreams like a feather drifting into a pillow of sponge cake and soft blown snow.
Then I made my way from out of the truck.
The old trucker stood waiting on the roadside, like he had all the time in forever.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked.
“Just a fellow with a long row he’s chosen to hoe.”
I wasn’t buying his song and dance. I wanted an answer.
“You can’t kid your way out of this one. I need to know.”
“Do you need to know? Is that what you really wish?”
I shook my head.
“I want to know,” I corrected.
He nodded and pulled aside his black plaid collar.
“I’m the fellow who spoiled the party. I’m the one who gave the world away with a single stupid kiss.”
I saw the rope burns, hidden like a smoldering snake beneath his folded collar.
“Well Judas,” I said, meaning it for the very first time.
He smiled, like he figured I’d known the truth of his identity all along – and maybe I did.
“So what do you want?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“I reckon you know.”
I hugged him. I kissed his cheek, like he was some kind of saint. In the dusty folds of cheek wrinkles I tasted the far off sands of distant Jerusalem, the dropping silvered thankless stains, the rope of regret burning at my throat.
I knew what mistakes could taste like. I knew how to take a wrong road, a detour that looked to last forever.
I knew what it was like to need to find your way back home.
“I forgive you,” I said.
He smiled as softly as a summer rain.
“Hell,” I added. “We all forgive you.”
The big man’s smile got real wistful.
“Someday,” he said. “Someday all.”
Then he was gone, like a puff of yesterday’s smoke.
All I saw were the chain of bright red goodbye lights, rolling down the road.
Then even that was gone.
I looked around.
I recognized where I stood.
I was standing inside The Lucky Scratch.
The place where it all began.
I saw myself, standing there in front of me like a twisted funhouse mirror, my ring finger poked deep into my mouth, like I was making a wish.
I picked up a cue stick. I aimed for the goodnight spot right behind the left ear, and I clocked myself out.
Then everything went black.
I awoke in the county hospital. Nobody could quite tell me how I’d got there. Seemed some drifter had cracked my skull with a cue stick.
First thing I saw was Amy, standing by my bed.
Next thing I was hugging her like a drowning man hanging onto a life ring.
Jimmy was there too, and I hugged him twice as hard.
***
It’s been three years now, and I haven’t stopped hugging either of them. Everyday, hanging onto them, just so they know how much I need them.
I’ll never forget how I lost them.
Some folks have to tie a string around their finger if they want to remember something important.
Not me.
See, I’ve got a ring of teeth marks, branded like a tiny rope burn, right around my left ring finger. Where I’d bit down, when the pool cue swung me home. A row of red teeth marks, like the goodbye lights of that detour trucker and his trailer load of wishes.
Hard Soup
I’ve marinated the meat in the best red wine I could afford, five days now, with garlic onion and bay leaf and a little stick of cinnamon, lots of cracked black pepper, and lots of aching tears.
On the fifth day I rubbed it with olive oil and browned it well in a hot pan. I kissed it for luck. Crane was right, it tasted bitter.
I carried the meat ceremoniously to a black metal roasting pan that I’d beaten with a hammer into the rough shape of a coffin. I browned a sliced onion in the pan, added more tears, and a little butter for flavor.
Then I deglazed the fry pan with a bit of the marinade, stirring and scraping the caked-on bits from the pan, swilling it into the juice for more flavor.
I poured the contents into the coffin-roaster, covering the meat just a little over half way. I stuck the coffin-roaster into a slow oven, set to three hundred degrees. Nice and slow, everything took time, let the hurting leak on out.
I added the insecticide last.
I served the meal in a valentine shaped bowl, bought especially for the occasion. I set her body in her chair across the table from me. The freezer kept her when I could not. Her chest hung open like a secret treasure box. She had a smile on her face. I’d placed it there, a finishing touch before placing her in the freezer.
Finishing nails.
Then I spooned it up. Bitter, it tasted bitter, but no worse than finding your wife in bed with your best friend.
Heart meat is hard, unless you cook it properly.
I ate it up, every last drop.
I bit my lip until the gag reflex stopped working, and waited to die.
If I’d timed it right, they’d find us together before she thawed. A frozen tableau, two hearts, one broken in my chest and one well braised in my belly.
Well done. Well done.
The Woman Who Lost Her Tooth From Laughing Too Loudly At The Sea
Hanna watched her grandmother at work in the kitchen, shucking the oysters and rinsing them in water. It was hard work getting them out of their tightly closed shells, but grandmother made it look easy. She placed the shucked oysters into a pan of melted butter and bacon leavings. The oysters skated as they hit the hot oil, raising a blister of bubbles about their puckered bottoms.
Then grandmother turned her attention to the eel, slicing it up into chunks no thicker than her thumb.
“Stir the oysters, Hanna. Softly, so you don’t bruise them.”
Hanna stirred the oysters with a long wooden spoon, while grandmother placed the slices of eel into the roast pan. She sliced a fat crying onion on top of that and the tears ran down her wrinkled cheeks.
“Salt is good for the stew,” Grandmother said with a picket fence grin.
Then she dumped the oysters and their liquor into the pan with the eel meat and onions.
“Fetch me the wine jug,” She said.
Hanna brought her the wine jug
, and grandmother covered the rest of it with wine. Hanna chopped a couple of sweet plum tomatoes and dropped them into the pan. Grandmother chopped some parsley and peppered it heavily. She covered the pan with a lid and slid it into the oven.
“Now all we’ve got to do is wait,” She said, smiling that piano keyboard smile of hers.
“Grandmother,” Hannah said, “Why do you have so many holes where your teeth should be?”
Grandmother laughed. Hannah always liked the way that her grandmother laughed. Soft and wet, like rain falling down. She sometimes laughed so hard that tears came to her eyes, but Hannah never thought she had ever seen her grandmother truly look sad.
“They are not holes,” Grandmother said. “They are only the memories of smiles that I gave to myself.
“Tell me about the memory-holes,” Hannah asked.
“I can’t tell you about the memories,” Grandmother said. “There are as many memories as there are tears in salt water, but if you listen closely I’ll tell the story of the woman who lost her tooth from laughing too loudly at the sea.”
So grandmother started telling, and Hannah just listened.
“There was a woman who lived by the sea. She’d lived alone for a long time. Then one day a hunter knocked her door. He had a brace of freshly skinned rabbit hanging off his belt and a gap toothed smile. He wore a red plaid shirt, and a vest made of fox fur.”
“Wouldn’t that have been hot in the summer?” Hannah asked.
“I never said it was summer, now did I?” Grandmother said.
“It’s summer now,” Hannah said.
“Just because it is one way on the outside, doesn’t mean it’s the same on the inside,” Grandmother said. “It’s summer outside, but a story is different than reality.”
And she continued to tell.
“Now this woman had not been truly laughing at the sea. She had only been laughing beside the sea, but misopportunity can be a terrible adventure. When she turned her head to listen to a gull weeping for fish she looked out at the sea and laughed all the harder. The sea misunderstood, and with a wave that cracked across her smile as neatly as the whipslap of a bull’s tail cracking a horsefly, the sea stole her tooth and tumbled it away into the wayward tide.”
Grandmother smacked her wooden spoon against the counter. It made a whip-cracking sound that made the young girl jump.
“Now when this woman realized the thing that she had truly lost, she began to weep, and her tears ran into the sea. After a while, the sea began to slop about the rim of the world like a bowl of overfilled soup. In time it looked as if there might soon be no difference between the sea and the shore.”
“Why would that be a bad thing,” the young girl asked. “If we were all the same we might not fight so much.”
“Foolish child,” Grandmother said. “Without difference there could be nothing, for nothing is so much the same as nothing at all, not let me finish my story.”
And she went back to her telling.
“Stop weeping, woman,” said the sea. “You shouldn’t have laughed so hard at me.”
“Why is the sea talking in rhyme?” the young girl asked.
“Why do your rap musicians all talk in rhyme? It is a kind of pretend rhythm.”
“Now let me finish my story.”
“Stop weeping woman,”
“You said that, grandmother.”
“And I said stop interrupting. You shouldn’t have laughed so hard at me.”
“I wasn’t laughing at you,” said the woman. “I only turned my head to hear the gulls weeping for fish.”
“Is that my fault, woman? Tears set sorrow free. Stop weeping or I’ll grow angry.”
But the lightness of feeling that swam about her skull since her tooth had been taken from her, left her deaf as death to the sea’s threats. Besides, the sea felt guilty, and was only pretending to be angry.
“Like you pretend to be angry with me, grandmother.”
“Yes my child. But be quiet or I will carry you down to the waters and let you talk to the ocean’s six-fathom mouth.”
“I will fetch your tooth back,” said the sea, but that was a false promise. In the time that it took for the sea to feel guilty enough to do anything about the woman’s plight, a swimming fish had swallowed the tooth and the tooth had been shat into bottom sludge and a crab had eaten the bottom sludge, and the seagull who wept for fish had found the crab in the low tide and had cracked the crab’s shell like a coconut and had eaten the meat, tooth and all; and then a hungry fisherman had accidentally snared the gull as he was casting his net and had roasted the gull on a spit, and although the meat was tough and greasy he ate it whole and rowed away to the land where the sea could no longer touch him.”
“And still the woman wept, until the sea sent her a tooth of driftwood, but the driftwood did not like her mouth and fell out and rotted in the sand and the sun.”
“Send me a tooth, the woman shouted through her tears, for wood is not bone. Flesh needs flesh.”
“So the sea sent her an oyster and in the oyster was a pearl, just the same size and shape as the woman’s missing tooth. For a time it seemed as if the pearl might turn the trick and the woman might find her laughter again. But then misfortune grinned as a one-eyed crow with wings as black as the breath of midnight swooped down from behind a thundercloud and plucked the pearl from the woman’s mouth and carried it away to replace the hunger that was buried into his empty eye socket.”
“How can a crow have something buried beneath its eye socket,” the girl asked.
“Everything has something buried beneath it. Now hush.”
“Send me a tooth,” the woman said. “Send me a tooth that cannot run away.”
“By this time the sea had grown disgusted. It sent her a fish, and told her to try and make a tooth out of fishbone.”
“Fishbone is only good for toothpicks and choking down old men’s windpipes,” said the woman with a wave of the fish. “Damn you sea, send me a tooth.”
“Now this argument could have continued for as long as could be imagined, but at this moment in the story, a fisherman saw the woman standing at the shoreline and cursing at the sea and waving the fish like it was some kind of a club and he smiled at her behind her back until she turned around and saw him stop smiling.”
“Why are you cursing? The fisherman asked.”
“I am cursing because the sea won’t give me what I want, said the woman.”
“The fisherman almost smiled again, because the fish she was waving was really very small and he too had often cursed the sea for not giving him what he wanted.”
“Then why weep? It weakens the curse, don’t you know?”
“I am weeping because the sea has stolen my tooth.”
“At this the fisherman laughed, and he smiled again, an open-wide wide-open kind of smile.”
“That is not such a bad thing, the fisherman said. See here, I too have lost my tooth when I bit into something hard that was hidden inside a seagull’s body.”
“And he smiled and she saw that what he’d said was true, and in the mirror of his broken smile the woman saw the memory of her own smile reflected back at her. She kissed his smile, and in the kiss their smiles came together, and in the together their smiles were different yet became the same. And in the same that they’d became they laughed. The echo of their laughter and smiles were whole in each other’s mouths, and their laughter echoed with the sea’s weeping waves.”
And Grandmother smiled at Maggie, and whistled a soft tune through that special hole in her smile where she kept the memory of a man who sailed away and never found his way back home.
And the sea?
The sea kept singing as it has since time first learned how to turn.
FORGET ABOUT TORTURE
She dreamed
about golden overshoes
dragging her downward
into a sea of champagne bubbled lace
her scream drowned out
in a swallow of confetti
one gray morsel at a time
forget about torture,
sometimes the cruellest thing
a man can do to a woman
is to get down
grimly
upon one bent knee.
Steve Vernon
Voodoo Chicken Trucker Run-Around
There is a lot of ways to kill a chicken.
“Did you ever see the like?”
I just nod.
“My God, did you ever see the like?”
I nod again. She looks at me, like she’s expecting an answer, but all I can do is nod, and stare at all the chickens.
I let the gaps fill in my silence.
There are gaps in every conversation. Some think of these gaps as uncomfortable silences, but really they’re quite comfortable. Just moments of heavenly silence.
Omissions.
Things being left out.
Things never meant to be said.
Thelma does all my talking for me.
“I’ve never seen the like.”
I smile and nod.
“All those chickens.”
There were a lot of chickens. Chickens all across the highway. A big red Peterbilt tipped hilly-nilly onto its side. Maybe a couple of hundred bright red plastic chicken crates strewn like building blocks after a long tantrum.
It didn’t look real. Like a joke in the middle of a sermon. Like we’d driven off the road and into the twilight zone. A gap in reality.
There were chickens as far as my eyes could see. I could see their feathers floating like angel dandruff. I could see them drifting like great fistfuls of pussy willow with a high pollen warning in effect.
“Did you ever?”
And that’s about when I did it.
That’s when I filled the gap.
The first time out I used my hatchet.
Then my Swiss army knife.
The third time was a chunk of Nova Scotian granite.
*
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I am hitching the trailer in front of the tractor, as it were.
It all began with the chickens.
A whole truckload of them.
No, that’s not right.
I’m leaving something out.
It all began with Thelma.
Thelma is the wife. I ought to say my wife. Thelma’s a person, not an object.
