by Shem, Samuel
They watched—first in drunken puzzlement mixed with a hint of satisfaction at the order of the world, then in drunken horror as their dog ran after the stick of dynamite, fetched it, and started barreling back toward them. See the dog run. See the Columbians run. See how fast the dog runs. See how slow the men run.
At the time of the explosion, Orville was at Miranda’s kitchen table finishing up “Egg Trickee” before driving Cray to Sixth Street Elementary School.
“How many?” Orville asked Cray, holding a square piece of Cray’s morning omelet in the palm of his hand. The birds and the cats watched too.
“One!”
“Miranda?”
“Two.”
Orville flipped the piece of omelet up in the air and tried to catch it in his mouth. He missed the first time. The second time he did it.
“Not again!” Cray cried. “I never win anymore.”
”You won yesterday,” Orville said, leaning over and making a great show of kissing Miranda on the lips. Whoever got the right number got kissed by Orville. If neither of them called it right, he kissed his own reflection in the mirror. Cray dawdled over his breakfast, reluctant to go to school. As they were all headed out the door, the call came in about the exploding ice fishermen and their dog. Orville said he was on his way.
The door of the Chrysler had hardly closed and the engine barely rolled over when Cray said, “Can we play the Animal Guessing Game?”
Cray had invented the game. One person thinks of an animal, and the other two have to guess it. After five wrong guesses there are clues.
“Orvy, you think of one first,” Cray said.
“Okay.”
“You got it?” Cray asked.
“Not yet.” Orville was always amazed at the speed at which Cray’s mind worked, compared to his own. A six-year-old brain versus a thirty-nine-year-old model. Growth versus decay. He paused, as if thinking, and then said, “Got it. But I warn you, Cray, this time it’s a hard one. Real hard.”
“I go first, okay, Mom?”
“Fine.”
“Is it a . . .” Cray stopped, finding out that he had no idea what was at the end of the sentence he had started. “A tree sloth?”
Orville feigned amazement. “Did you say . . . a tree sloth?”
“Yeah!” Cray was bouncing out of his seat with excitement.
“You didn’t say . . . a tree sloth, did you?”
“I did, I did! Mom, you heard me, I did!”
“Unbelievable!” Orville said. “It was a tree sloth.”
“I knew it!”
“How’d you do that, Cray?”
“I always get it with you.”
“You sure do,” Orville said, nodding with grave assurance.
“My turn,” Cray said. He thought. “Okay. Guess.”
Miranda sat and listened with amusement. Orville connected with Cray by joking around. Cray loved it, mostly, but once in a while he got a confused look on his face, not knowing if Orville was joking or serious. Amy, who Cray now called Big Sister, told him the other day, “The thing about Uncle O., Cray, is that he’s a big joker, so you can’t tell sometimes whether he’s serious or not.” Miranda knew the dangers of too much joking around. Orville didn’t yet seem to realize that kids need to know where you really stand. She kept reminding herself that Orville had never been a father. He didn’t have six-plus years in the trenches, hadn’t felt the humiliation and ineptitude and, worse, the rage that comes with parenting. He just plain didn’t know how to do it. And Cray came with no instruction manual. To see Orville using the outdated manual of his own father was both touching and disheartening.
How reluctant he had been to join in with Cray and her and sing out loud in public, or even in the car. When sureness was needed, how shy he seemed, and when pliancy was needed, how sure. The worst, though, was how impatient he was with child-time, those moments when, needing to get somewhere in a hurry, Cray would suddenly discover a toy he couldn’t leave the house without but couldn’t find, or a book or a worm in the yard, and dawdle. Orville had trouble realizing that it isn’t only what you do with a child but what you don’t do, what you ignore, or even, after you screw up, what you do next.
Neither did he realize how having him around didn’t make it much easier, because she had to take care of not only Cray but him. There was also the Cray-Orville thing, the Cray-herself-and-Orville thing, and the herself-and-Orville thing. And all the while she had to hide the constancy of her caretaking from them both.
But she loved how he jumped right in with Cray and when he found himself in over his head, how he thrashed around, fighting to break the surface. His energy had made some things better: there were fewer skirmishes in The War of the Wakeup and The War of the Getting Out of the House to School on Time. But The Great Battle of Bedtime had escalated. Cray was responding so intensely to this father-y person in his life that the Sleepytime Skirmishes were worse. Cray didn’t want to shut off the world of Mom and Dad, and who could blame him?
As they drove into Columbia, the day darkened. It was one of the bad cement dust days, the wind blowing in from the Universal Atlas. The buildings and bundled-up Columbians were gray, spectral shapes, and the vinegar scent was an acrid backdrop to a world of broken sunlight. Orville dropped Cray off at Sixth Street School and Miranda at the library down on Fourth and headed for the emergency room.
The dynamite had rearranged the life force between the two fishermen and their dog. The front half of the dog and the lower half of one man had been blown off. Both were dead. The other Columbian was okay, except for a hand and arm that looked vaguely like a leg of lamb trussed up by a drunken butcher, a silver belt buckle embedded in his crotch, and a case of hysterical weeping.
“Nigel! Nigel!” the fisherman bawled. “Nigel!”
“I’m sorry. Your friend is dead, but you’ve got to hold still!”
“Friend? Friend? Nigel was my dog!”
As Orville sliced and diced and patched and matched, seeking to create an arm as useful as a thalidomide flipper, he tried to reconstruct the scene on the Hudson. The dog must have been in the process of giving the dynamite to the dead Columbian when the live Columbian threw himself not on the dynamite to save his buddy but on his buddy to save himself. How else would a belt buckle with the name J. Rhodes get embedded in the crotch of a man named Ulysses Stoiber?
Works of art are not finished but abandoned, he thought, as he walked downhill to Eighth and the Hendrick Hudson Diner for coffee. Along the way he noticed that the empty storefront next to the never-open Suttee’s—where as a kid he’d bought long strings of rock candy, probably the same stuff still hanging in the window—was now dressed up in red-white-and-blue bunting and a new sign:
VOTE AMERICA
VOTE SCHOONER
“Happy Days Are Here Again” played from a loudspeaker. A crowd had gathered. Orville moseyed on over. It turned out to be the grand opening of the Henry Schooner for Congress Campaign Headquarters. The aging long-term incumbent, a Republican with old fascistic proclivities and a new young wife and Alfa Romeo, was retiring to become a lobbyist. The Republican primary in September was wide-open. Schooner was ready.
As Orville watched, a many-colored crocodile of children in their winter outfits, puffs of breath like cartoon blurbs above their heads, wended its way across the Seventh Street Park to the Schooner headquarters. A teacher escorted them. Orville recognized red-headed Cray bundled up, paired with Maxie Schooner. The first-grade class was getting a living lesson in democracy. Cray saw him and shouted, waving him to come over. Orville did. As he approached, he saw Henry and Nelda Jo and teenaged Henry Jr. standing bareheaded and without jackets on the sidewalk in the dusty, freezing cold. Maxie broke rank and ran to Henry, who lifted him high up in his arms. Catching sight of Orville, Henry smiled broadly and motioned him to come closer.
W
hy, Orville wondered, does Henry always seem so happy to see me?
The scene was chaotic, amateurish. Music was playing too loudly, kids were shouting and fooling around, mittened hands kept spilling the cups of punch or coffee or hot cocoa or dropping the cookies or doughnuts. Nelda Jo and Henry Jr. wandered aimlessly among the crush of Columbians and New York antiquers. No one was organizing anything. It was a mess.
Henry pumped his hand, shouting, “Glad you could make it to the opening, Orv—”
A sudden spotlight, fighting the dull gray cement dust. A TV camera from the Albany station had started shooting. Flashbulbs popped. Henry smiled at the cameras. The TV lights went off. Henry moved on to the next hand.
For a while Orville stood there and watched what seemed to him a pathetic launch of Schooner’s campaign. Even Schooner the Great, he thought, isn’t immune to the Columbian Spirit. Yet walking away down Washington toward his office, Orville was struck by what had not happened: no breakage. And it wasn’t until he was all the way down to the office on Fifth that he realized that he’d been had.
He turned around and ran back. By this time the music was off. The children were gone. Henry was alone in the office, sitting upright behind a metal-topped desk that looked like it came straight out of the war surplus at Geiger’s junkyard. He was smoking a cigar, studying a neatly folded Wall Street Journal.
“Henry, you can’t use . . .” Orville was unable to catch his breath and made yet another mental vow to lose the weight he was gaining by eating like the Columbians—and to stop smoking.
“Why, hello there, Dr. Rose!” he said cheerfully. “Siddown, siddown.”
“Henry, you can’t use me on TV.”
“What’s that, buddy?”
“That camera, that TV videocam that was shooting me shaking your hand?” Henry nodded. “You can’t broadcast it. I won’t let you give the impression that I’m supporting your run for Congress.”
“Really?” His face showed such surprise and hurt that Orville winced a little. “Well, okay,” Henry went on, recovering his good cheer. “If I’d knew you felt that way, I never would have let ’em ran it right then.” This time Henry didn’t catch Orville noticing his bad grammar. “No problem, Orv. I got the TV guy’s number right here.” Henry dialed. Waited. “Axel? Henry . . . Yeah, thanks. Hey, listen, you can’t use anything with the picture of Dr. Orville Rose in it, okay? What’s he look like?” Henry described him, in a flattering way. “You run that piece of tape, you never get an exclusive again, get it? Great.” He hung up. “Done.”
“Good.”
Schooner eyed him. “Wait a sec. You think I set it all up?” Orville said nothing. “How could you even think that I would without your permission—”
“Easy.”
“You think your endorsement of me, as town doc, means that much to—” He stopped. “Yeah, I see. It’d mean a lot, the town doc and all, yeah.”
“Gotta go, Henry. Got work to do.”
“Cut me some slack, Orv, ’kay? You know, we’re more alike than otherwise.”
“Bullshit.”
“You’n me should sit down alone and chew the fat, get it all out on the table, get it over with and move on. I mean, we never did that, right?”
“Why should we?”
“’Cause we’re in the same boat, bein’ back in this shit hole town after bein’ out in the wide, wide world! We both want to make it better, right?”
“Shit hole town?”
“Who said that?” he asked, looking around at the empty walls, chuckling. “Not me. You didn’t hear that from me.”
“Which is why we’re not sitting down.” Orville left.
Back at the office, he settled into Bill’s chair. On the desk Orville saw a postcard among the mail—the Sphinx, a palm tree, a camel held by an Arab in a jalabi and ridden by two hefty Western tourists, a man and a woman. He flipped it over.
Howdy, partner,
Joined Wolfgang and Kenni Vista on their round-the-world trip. First stop, Egypt. Hot! Mosquitos big as small children. Babs bowels bad, but Starbusol working good, so far. Food foul, even at Cairo McDonald’s. Good luck.
Bill
Orville raised his eyes from the postcard and found himself staring up into the dead eyes of the fourteen-point buck.
“I’m screwed.”
That night Miranda, Orville, and Cray sat at her kitchen table for dinner. It was the first time Cray was eating with them and not in front of the TV. Clearly unused to the idea of dinnertime conversation, Cray had to be coaxed into talking about his day at school.
“Well, today in class I started my new novel. It’s called CFIT.”
“Sea Fit?” Orville asked. “What’s that?”
Miranda knew. She held her breath.
“C-F-I-T.” Cray spelled it out. “It stands for Controlled Flight Into Terrain. That’s how my dad died. He died in a CFIT. He crashed his acrobatic plane. I got a picture of him and his plane. Can I be excused to go get it, Mom?”
Miranda, startled both by his wanting to show it and by his courtesy, said, “Sure.”
She and Orville barely had time to exchange glances when Cray was back with a framed snapshot of a stunt plane, gleaming all red and yellow, a man standing beside it, hand on it affectionately, as if it were a woman. Beside the plane he was small, his features hard to make out. A shock of sandy blond hair, ruddy cheeks, a strong jaw, a smile. Aviator sunglasses and leather jacket completed the picture of the flier, tough and confident.
“That’s great, Cray,” Orville said, moved.
“Yeah, but for my novel I need to know why he crashed. The problem is I can only ask him why he crashed if he didn’t crash. But if he didn’t crash I could ask him, but he wouldn’t have. It’s confusing.”
“Very,” Orville said.
“I wish I knew, too, Cray,” said Miranda.
“Okay,” Cray moved on, “now you tell me about your days.”
Orville told a funny story about a boy bringing his pet pig into the office because he wasn’t oinking right. Miranda told them about Mrs. Tarr and her finding in the DAR attic a gigantic old map of Kinderhook County, the Penfield Map, as big as a two Ping-Pong tables and drawn in an old style that showed orchards by drawings of rows of individual trees and farms by rows of corn.
“Cool,” he said. “I’m finished. Mom, can I go watch TV now?”
“Sure.” She was stunned by all this, and by Orville’s presence bringing it out.
Cray turned on the TV but then came back. “I got an idea. I could ask his grave. Where’s he buried, Mom?”
“Mississippi. Avalon, Mississippi.” She had told him this several times.
“Can we go ask his grave?”
“Sure. If you think you’re ready.”
“I am. Can Orvy come, too?”
“He sure can, cute-heart.” Her voice was unsteady.
“All three of us? Cool.” Cray went back to the TV.
Miranda, wide-eyed, said, “Do you know how incredible that is?”
“No, how?”
“A first. I just . . . I’m just amazed.”
“I’d love to hear more about him.”
Miranda took this in slowly, as if it were a hand reaching in toward the store of her secrets. A little war took place inside. A negotiated settlement came out. “Sometime, yes. I’m not sure I’m ready yet to talk about my . . . well, my pre-Columbian history.”
Sensing her struggle, Orville offered her his own secret. “You know, this thing about asking his grave, well . . . not only do I get these letters from my mother, but from time to time I . . .” He stopped himself, unable to admit to seeing her flying around, and instead said, “I talk to her.” But suddenly it seemed too intimate, and he regretted putting himself out there.
“Yes,” she said, nonchalantly. “After my par
ents died, I’d have conversations with them. In fact a few times, in the year after, they’d come to me when I was, you know, half-asleep, as if they were in the room, and I’d talk with them. What do you say to her?”
“It’s not so much what I say, it’s more what I imagine she says to me, and—”
“Hey, Orvy, look!” Cray was shouting. “You’re on TV!”
They rushed to the set. There he was shaking hands with Henry Schooner. Orville had told Miranda about Schooner’s promise, and now they watched his betrayal. In spite of himself, Orville’s disgust was tempered with astonishment. What he had seen as a chaotic, pitifully amateurish scene with a schlumpy candidate and an unattractive crowd under a brooding sky had been transformed.
The camera had created a world of order and professionalism. Henry Schooner looked terrific—chest out, smile big, collar and tie snappy, white hair wind-blown, hatless and winter jacketless and impervious to the cold that had everyone else bundled up to their eyeteeth. All of this gave the impression of vitality, of an outdoorsy youthful candidate who those of a certain age could not help but associate with John F. Kennedy or Robert. In the segment they ran, Henry was clasping Orville’s hand and elbow with confidence and conviction. “God Bless America” played subtly in the background. Orville, identified as “the town doctor,” looked pale and tired and, yes, schlumpy but seemed in that video moment to be in the very process of being transformed, popped out of the worn, dull groove of his daily grind and uplifted. Clearly, one man’s hand-and-elbow clasp was lifting another man up into the rare atmosphere of a seminal event in Columbian, perhaps even American, history. Other footage showed Nelda Jo and Henry Jr. and little Maxie held up high in Henry’s arms—all as telegenic as their man. The background music was somehow muted yet hopeful. Strangest of all, the day itself had been fashioned anew. It was bright and cheery, lit with angel-rays of light streaming down through the clouds, a joyous, even biblical, illumination.
