They were used to a more bucolic existence, since they lived in that little town up in the Berkshires, where Dakota was a professor of some sort. If you were trapped listening to him for a couple days, as I often had been, he would tell you what a big man he was, how much respect they had for him up there, and how his research was the biggest and best in whatever field it was he studied.
We got off outside the farm gate, where a line was queuing up on the sidewalk.
“I knew this would happen,” Dakota said. “We should have arrived earlier, as I suggested. That’s the problem with the city. Everything is so damned crowded.” His face was red and he looked like a little puffer-fish there on the sidewalk. He was a short man, maybe five three or so, and said everything with exaggerated hand motions and wild eyes.
“Lighten up, Dakota,” Helen said. “We’re supposed to be on vacation.”
He piped down then and stared off into the distance, seething. His children chirped away happily with Eric. They were taking bets on which of them would pick the right pig to win the race.
Helen held Ivory’s hand. I smiled at my sister-in-law and she smiled back. She was a pretty woman who looked a lot like her sister, my Sarah. I wondered what madness had driven Helen to marry such an arrogant jackass like Dakota.
“Six dollars?” Dakota said. He was now yelling at the old lady selling tickets to the fair.
“It’s a donation,” she pleaded, in a kindly voice.
“We could have done this for free at home,” Dakota said. “There are plenty of farms up in Wells.”
I interrupted before he could make things worse. “I’m sorry for his impoliteness, ma’am. He’s from Massachusetts. Probably even a Patriots or Sox fan.”
She laughed and I paid for all of us and we went in. Dakota’s face looked like a plum about ready to burst in the heat of the autumn sun.
“I wanna go find the pig races!” Eric shouted. He darted ahead into the crowd. I watched his little blue baseball cap bobbing up and down as he ran along and felt a swell of fatherly pride.
My wife said, “Why don’t you and Dakota go find the beer garden, and Helen and I can take the kids to see the animals?”
“Fine,” I said, but inside I felt kind of sad. Like I said, I don’t drink much, and anyway I had been kind of looking forward to the pig race.
Dakota and I wandered into one tent that was a sort of ‘Best in Show.’ Mostly it was retired people displaying big tomatoes and pumpkins and nice looking pies and that sort of thing. Probably they grew the vegetables in community gardens, or maybe they had little yards wherever they lived. They seemed like sweet people proud of their handiwork. Of course, Dakota loudly criticized the vegetables and sweets and other crafts there, saying that a true country fair would have had much better specimens.
I steered him out of there as quickly as possible, and we wandered across the fairgrounds. There were some college-aged kids dressed up as knights in a roped off area. They wore metal armor that gleamed in the sunlight and attacked each other with boffer weapons as kids cheered them on.
“How absurd,” Dakota said. “That kid’s weapons look ridiculous! His sword is made of foam! Knights didn’t look that way.”
“You have it wrong, Professor,” I said. “This is exactly how knights waged warfare in medieval Queens.”
Dakota started to protest, then stopped and gave me an angry look. “Very funny.... Well, I can take a joke.” But he looked like he couldn’t take a joke at all.
Mr. Personality and I walked past some cows and chickens and things. The smell of cow manure is not one you usually run into in Queens. There are other unpleasant smells, like the sewer or diesel exhaust and things like that, but no cows. Here it hung over the sweaty crowd like a wool blanket.
We finally found the beer garden. There was a big wooden sign that said ‘Biergarten’ in some stylized lettering, and the guy pouring drafts from a keg was dressed in some very hokey lederhosen, probably purchased from one of those Halloween stores that pop up every October.
“You’re showing quite a bit of leg there,” I said. He laughed and poured us a couple of Spätens in red plastic cups. I paid for them and handed one to Dakota.
He frowned. “I thought they had craft beer here,” he sniffed.
“That’s German, I think. Pretty good.” I enjoyed the coolness of it against the back of my throat.
But Dakota always had to be the expert. “Well it might be German, but that doesn’t mean it was produced in a small batch.” It didn’t stop him from drinking it quickly and ordering another, though. He drank that one down too and ordered again.
“At least it’s subject to the German purity laws, even if it isn’t truly a craft beer,” he said. “You know, I’m descended from a very well-regarded Germanic family.”
“Is that so?” I said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go bragging about that too much around here. German purity and all. It might not fly.”
That shut him up for a while. Dakota sipped at his beer, and we took a stroll through some grapevines that grew just beyond the tent. A sign proclaimed that the Queens Farm Museum made its own wine on premises.
“How about that,” I said, “Queens wine. That’s something else. Have to try it sometime.”
“Probably tastes like hypodermic needles and hot dog wrappers,” Dakota said. He nursed his beer and sulked.
I had listened to about enough. “Dakota, let me ask you something. Every time you visit us, you seem to hate everything about us, and about the city. Why don’t you just stay up in Wells and do whatever it is you do up there, and leave us in peace?”
“Oh, I bet you’d love that. Then you wouldn’t have to deal with someone smarter than you.”
“I don’t know where that came from. Besides, Helen and Sarah are both smarter than me.”
“So are the kids.”
“Look, I see no reason we can’t be friends. We’re married to sisters, for God’s sake. That means we must have something in common. But really, if you hate the air mattress, you can always get a hotel. If you dislike my beer choices, you can bring your own. If you find Queens so disagreeable, let your wife bring the kids for a weekend and stay up in God’s country. We can come visit you like we do every Easter, and that way the kids will still be friends. See what I mean?”
Dakota was looking off into the distance when he muttered, “Look at the ass on her.” A couple of nicely shaped women in halter tops and short-shorts were walking away from us.
“You’re a real charmer, you know that?”
“Your wife has a nice one on her too.”
“You want to repeat that?”
“Well, she does. What can I say? I’m an ass man.”
“I wonder where she is, anyway.” I looked at my watch and did my best to ignore him.
“She’s probably off pleasuring some dude behind the tilt-a-whirl.” He tittered like a little boy. The beer was really working on him now.
“Dakota, say that again, and you’ll regret it.” I could feel my heart rate increase rapidly. He was testing my limits, as he so often did.
“Oh, just relax,” he said. He changed the subject quickly. “I want to see their wine press. Let’s try to find it. It must be in one of the barns behind the vineyard here.”
He pointed to a large grey building in the distance, on a hill past the vines and some trees. We walked that way and went down a little slope. Then there was a small path through some woods. It was strange, being on a little nature trail like that in the middle of the city. Not a soul was there except me and Dakota. We walked for a couple of hundred yards and came out at a grassy field.
There was no one there at all. We crossed the field to the barn. There was a big yellow sign with black lettering that said STAFF ONLY. Dakota went past it, into the open barn.
“Hey, I don’t think they want us in there,” I called after him. I followed him into the darkness.
Finishing his beer, Dakota tossed his red cup on the concrete floo
r. There was a sharp smell of disinfectant and some other odors I couldn’t place.
He found a breaker on the wall and flipped on the lights to reveal a couple of huge cylindrical tanks in the center of the barn.
Dakota’s eyes grew as wide as if he’d just found some lost treasure. “The fermenters!” he called out.
There was a metal staircase beside it that led to the top of the tanks. He climbed up and I followed.
I wasn’t in the mood for exploring. “Look, I think we ought to go back to the pig races,” I suggested.
“What’s the matter, your balls in your wife’s purse?”
We climbed to the top and there was a catwalk that went across the top of the two big vats. It spanned the whole width of the barn. We were at least a story or two up in the air. The catwalk was metal, like the ladder, and it was a kind of grate that you could see through, which made me nervous. I’ve always hated those things and even avoid them on the sidewalks. They seem like they might give way.
Below us were the vats and the empty floor of the barn, and at the end of the catwalk was a big open window with a weathercock perched out on a beam that jutted from it. The window was one of those large ones you often see on barns, with wooden doors that open to the outside.
One vat was closed, the other was open and empty. Dakota looked down at them with disgust.
“I hope they know how to sanitize these things. Making wine is no easy trick. It can take generations for a vine to really become top shelf, too. I’m sure whatever they make here is swill.” He walked along the catwalk to the window.
I followed. I’ve never liked heights. Looking down at the floor made me dizzy, so I looked in front of me, at the back of Dakota’s head.
He sat down at the open window, and with his legs dangling down. I looked outside and felt my gut leap. The barn was built into the hill, and it was a drop of maybe twenty feet or more down to a small paved parking lot outside. A tractor was parked beneath us, with some sharp blades were attached to the back for plowing..
Dakota saw my expression. “What’s the matter? Scared of heights? So I guess you’re not such a big tough guy after all. And you always putting on your Gary Cooper act. Don’t worry, I won’t let you fall.” He looked down to the tractor. “They’ve got that hooked up to harvest whatever grain they’re growing here, I guess.”
I didn’t say anything. The beer had made me a little groggy. I felt like I might get sick. A finch flew in the barn door, circled once, then landed on the railing of the catwalk. I envied its balance and quiet calm as my stomach churned.
“I better get back,” I said. I thought the cornflakes I ate that morning were about to come up.
“Don’t be such a pussy,” Dakota mocked. He had an evil look in his eye. “ Speaking of which, like I was saying earlier, I wouldn’t mind tapping Sarah at all. I always thought she was better looking than Helen anyway.”
This is how Dakota had always been since I had known him. Rather than back off from any sensitive issue, he would instead go to great lengths to bring it up at the most inopportune time. We could all be out at dinner and he would start talking about Sarah’s parent’s divorce, which happened when she and Helen were in high school and still upset them now, years later. He would rant about politics. I was pretty much a liberal in his book, so he would go all Glenn Beck on me. I don’t think he even believed what he said most of the time, he just enjoyed getting a rise out of people.
Suddenly I felt very calm. I looked at this little toad of a man, and he seemed very distant, like some irritating object in space that needed to be removed. I addressed him calmly. “I warned you once, Dakota.”
“About what? About Sarah’s fine booty, or her lovely tits? I have to hand it to you, man, you married a real fine filly. She must be hot as hell in bed.”
He giggled, as he so often did. I looked at his crooked nose’s profile against the sunlight. I wondered who might have broken it, maybe when he was a child, and wished it had been me. I was sure he deserved it, even as a little boy.
I thought about all the insults he had lobbed at me over the years. I had ignored most of them for the sake of my family. How he denigrated our home, my job, our whole life. I had hoped for a long time that Helen would divorce him, but knew it would never happen. He was stuck to her like an albatross.
I thought of other people who had crossed a line with me over the years, the way Dakota had. Just in the past few weeks there had been a few who regretted tangling with me. The so-called performer who played with balloons like an idiot at the Roosevelt Avenue platform. How I had loathed him for interfering with my commute! He walked around doing his little balloon animal tricks and yelling in this shrill, horrible voice. No talent, and no sense of decency either. Everyone avoided him, even little kids who you would expect to have tolerance for such nonsense.
One day a few weeks back, he had tapped me on the head with his doggy-shaped balloons as I was trying to read the paper. I looked up and saw his ugly face, clown-like with greasepaint. He gave me a shit-eating grin, and I thought he looked like the kind of guy who wanted to molest kids after the puppet show.
“Don’t ever touch me,” I warned him.
He bopped me on the head a couple more times and laughed and ran away.
But the next day I got to that stop extra early. Every day I had to transfer there on my way to the city, and he was always there on the F platform, like a stain. I had gotten there before rush hour, as he had been setting up. Just me and him on the platform. I crept up behind him as he took his junk out of a duffel bag. He turned and saw me. He was a little shocked, I think, to have an audience of one so early in the day!
He tried to win me over with his puppets, but I wasn’t having it. The train came rocketing through the tunnel, and it didn’t take much effort to push his emaciated ass out in front of it.
It was easy enough for me to high tail it out of there, and besides, puppet man was a known loon.
There had been others too. Up at the Cloisters one Sunday last spring, I had pushed that overbearing professor type down a long flight of stone stairs in an empty corridor. Like puppet man, he had been asking for it. Droning on and on in every gallery about phallogocentrism of the medieval period, or some such nonsense. I wondered what he would have said about his own broken, twisted body at the end of those stairs, had he a chance to pontificate over it. Probably he would have thought that was phallogocentric too.
Buses were an ally against annoying folks in the city too. Express buses were the best, but you had to do it late at night. They were big and moved faster than the local buses. The month before had been my first try at that. People could get so loud and obnoxious on their iphones. My fellow rider had been going on and on about his new precious 5c. Too bad he couldn’t use it after the QM24 turned him into part of its front grill.
And there had been others, of course. After a lifetime in a city with so many millions, you find ways and means.
Today presented a new, and altogether wonderful opportunity. I didn’t think it could be more perfect. Dakota, the vintner, hoist on his own petard! I had hoped I might get him alone, but this was almost too good to be true.
I leaned down and gave Dakota a gentle little shove. Not much, just enough. It was as if it happened in slow motion.
“Hey, wha—” His face was a mask of shock for an instant as he fell forward. He reached out into air. I might have grabbed for his arm—maybe that would have saved him. I didn’t.
Dakota’s yelp hung in the air for a second, and the weathercock made a noise and spun around as he grabbed at it and missed. Then there was sound like a sack of potatoes being tossed into the back of a pickup truck. I poked my head out of the window and saw him below. His upper half was splayed against the tractor, with his head twisted at an unnatural angle. His butt and legs were impaled on the plow blades. He didn’t move.
I felt much better. My stomach was fine. I figured I should alert someone, the museum officials, or the cops or
something. Slowly I made my way across the catwalk to the ladder, whistling.
*************
Since then, we have had many peaceful weekends with Helen, Juniper and Ivory. Helen was a little reserved for a while after Dakota’s death, but to be honest, she never seemed all that sad. She remarried a couple of years ago, to another professor from the college. His name is Carl. From what I can gather, he likes to fish. He doesn’t say much.
The farm is my new favorite place in the city, and I visit it as often as possible. Next month some guys from my job’s Midwest office are coming to town. They are annoying as hell, always giving me new work and forcing me to do thankless tasks even when I’m off the clock. Maybe I’ll take them to see the cows and pigs of the Queens Farm while they’re here. I’ll give them a taste of New York they never knew existed.
~~END~~
Last Train to New Haven
by Kevin Wetmore
Her eyes were filled with madness. She looked vacant and yet her eyes conveyed the deepest insanity he had ever seen in a human being… other than her, if she could be called a human being. He felt paralyzed and yet…
The florescent lights above flickered and made the lower tunnels of Grand Central seem more claustrophobic and dark than they actually were. His footfalls echoed back from the walls, sounding like insane clapping, mocking him for running in the tunnel in the first place. But he was going to get on the 1:30 to New Haven if it killed him. It was not that he wanted to sleep in his own bed; he simply could not wait the four hours for the next train.
You can’t even wait in the station. As soon as the last train pulls out, a stern voice warns that the station is closing and will reopen at 5:30 in the morning. Then the MTA cops come through and make sure everyone leaves. It’s not like Theodore was homeless or anything. He was dressed in a trendy if inexpensive suit, one of two he owned. He affected the air of an intellectual and future professor —which simply meant he was currently an affected graduate student. His area of specialization was Gothic fiction of the American Northeast. It impressed few, but he loved the topic. He had mostly associates; his books were his true friends. Life in New Haven suited him well. His world was the size and shape he needed it to be.
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