Sinister Shorts

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “Always chasing the high.”

  “But the chase keeps 'em going, get it?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “That's you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You feel stuck in your job. Sometimes you feel stuck with me.”

  “Cath…”

  “You've always been the seeker. Like Emerson's traveler, who is never happy. The spot you are in is never quite good enough.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Something's wrong, isn't it?”

  He stood and tried to put his arms around her but while accepting his embrace, she sighed deeply.

  “Nothing's wrong. It's the last day of school before finals. I'm distracted,” he said.

  “That's not it.”

  “Nothing's wrong, goddammit!”

  The look she turned on him proclaimed exquisitely the depths of her understanding and grief. He had done nothing different than he did any other weekend, but his wife was already mourning over some unknown catastrophe. That's what a real marriage was, understanding too deep for deception. Well, he had a real one, didn't he, and now he had blown it, along with everything else.

  He knew he should tell her before word leaked back, as it surely would, and soon, but he couldn't. He knew that he would try to explain, and he knew he couldn't. Cath's simple values were admirable, but there were things in his world that could not survive such astringency-delicate, complex things. Nothing could make her understand how wrapped up in that moment he had been, how obliterated he had been. How impersonal it had been. He had wandered outside her framework, and was lost to her comprehension.

  He kissed her good-bye, lingering, wrapped in the smell of her shampoo, doing his own mourning in advance of the news.

  In the car he tuned the radio to an all-news station all the way to school. Pasting a composed look on his face, he greeted the other teachers in the hallway with the usual salutations. They greeted him back.

  So Roo hadn't said anything yet. There was still time.

  Once in his classroom, he opened up the briefcase he was carrying, removed his gun, and tucked it into the bottom drawer.

  “Final projects are due this morning,” he started off in first period, second period, third period. “You had the weekend to finish up,” he said while he flitted between heaven and hell.

  At lunch, he sat under a tree, itching in a patch of cut grass, his paper sack untouched beside him. The gardener came unpleasantly close with his rake a few times. The teachers would not tolerate the noise of leaf blowers, so disruptive to the calm of academe. Mr. Cahill thought their position made his life harder and made his opinion known however possible. A horde of little children skating, followed by a troupe of mothers, screamed by on the sidewalk.

  Another bell rang in fourth period and then there was the senior class parody, which was witty enough to shake a few nervous laughs out of him.

  Fifth period. Roo.

  She walked into the classroom with her friend Jayne, and sat in the back row until class started, chatting quietly.

  “Stories to the front, please,” he said, amazed at his own cool. How did he do it? How could he function in the middle of the worst crisis of his life? Cath would leave him, if she knew. She would never trust him again.

  He watched to see if Roo had something ready. She did.

  “I need to see you after class, Miss Fielding.”

  She nodded, and her eyes returned to her book.

  “Now read this Katherine Anne Porter, the last story in your lit book, and answer the questions at the end. As you are reading, I want you to be thinking about how she generates a theme. What are the elements? What role do characters, plot, and detail play? Pay attention to the ending and the beginning. Look for parallels in the structure. Oh yes. We've talked a lot about point of view. We'll be talking about that again at the end of the period.”

  The class groaned.

  “Thought you could take it easy just because it's the last day, huh?” How normal he sounded! How pathetic and irrelevant everything he said sounded!

  He had staved off the inevitable over the weekend, because he was afraid. He had justified his hesitation by telling himself he had to see Roo one last time to apologize, and that's what he would do, wasn't it, even though something sharp and nasty in him wanted to take her down with him.

  He tried to write to Cath, but ended up throwing the pages away. He could not face her with this. He could not face the pain of her humiliation, and his own public downfall.

  The world sucked. Everything was bound to appear so sordid, when it had been nothing but a spring day, the sunshine, the trees in an ocean breeze. Ah, how the world sucked.

  Blurry in his thoughts, looking for something to get himself through to the end of the class when he would get Roo alone, or himself alone, or both of them, he hadn't decided, he picked up Roo's story and began to read.

  “The Young Lady,” a new title, headlined the page. She hadn't used her synopsis at all. Roo wrote well; he usually enjoyed her assignments.

  A clutching at his heart reminded him, and his moist fingers left marks as they traveled down the side of her paper. His time was up. He had done something others would see as deplorable, selfish, vile… the respect of his colleagues, the admiration of his pupils, all that would be lost along with Cath, as soon as they knew.

  Was Roo's time up, too? Did he have to decide this minute, or was the decision made the moment he pulled off the road that day with her? His heart began to thump. He worried someone might hear it, might find him out before he could escape.

  A squirrel ran down a tree outside. A few of his students turned to watch.

  The gun in his drawer made that side of the desk feel warmer, like a hearth, so he leaned that way as if its comfort could pamper him through the last few minutes of class. But as he read, he forgot the desk; he forgot the gun. His fear continued to sit in his stomach, indigestible as coal, but he gave it no attention.

  He found himself driving along in a car, a young girl, feeling the pressure of an older man's eyes on her skin as she feigned sleep. He took in the fine sensory details of her clothing, her perception of this man, his handsomeness, his strength, his intelligence. She had such a crush.

  And slowly, he began to understand.

  Roo's story was the story of his seduction.

  Way back at the beginning of the year, Roo had decided to go after him. But Carl, well-schooled in how to handle students with crushes, had not taken her bait. He threw out his arsenal of defenses to frustrate her. Nothing she did caused even a flicker of interest in his eyes. Nothing she wore made him look any closer than he looked at all the other girls.

  So, she had developed a plan. She would seduce Newell. She reasoned that would draw Carl's attention. She didn't care what kind of attention she got. Negative was okay for a start. She just needed a way to rise above what she called the “herd of anonymous cattle” in the classroom. If necessary, she would sacrifice her grade, but that direction had not come until later, when Carl continued to ignore her.

  With fascination swinging toward dread, he read on, recognizing only snippets of the situation he had lived. The English teacher in him marveled at the point of view, so distinct, so different from his own. Moments he remembered had been distorted into something completely unfamiliar.

  Roo's girl was ready to explore a bigger world. She had put her own physical feelings on hold long enough. Her character cited Margaret Mead on the subject of adolescent sexuality.

  Carl read on. Appalled by the cold analysis of her seduction of his son, he flipped a page and stumbled into her version of his own. There it was, a “tryst” on the cliff, romanticized and glossy as a magazine cover.

  The story was a message to him. A confession. She wanted him to understand. She wanted him to see it from her point of view. “The young lady had a different tale to tell,” she wrote.

  He sat back in his chair and felt a glimmer of hope.

&nb
sp; She would not tell Cath. This life that he loved so much would continue. For a long time he looked out the window, watching Mr. Cahill trimming pine branches outside with a long pole.

  He would not lose his job. The gun… he would not have to use it.

  He picked up a pencil and went to work on her story. Mechanically, he marked spelling errors in red while his mind kept up a chorus of protests at trivializing the contents.

  Contrast POVs: his story was the story of her seduction.

  She would never tell anyone, the last few lines read, and she told “the man” to keep silent. His victim did not accept her victimization.

  What a gift. He wanted to stand up and cheer, he felt such a gush of relief. This was better than sex. Better than falling in love. She had given him back his life!

  At the end of class, she walked up to his desk. “Mr. Capshaw, how'd you like my story? Did you get a chance to read it yet?”

  “I did. It's on the racy side of good taste, Roo, but you worked hard on this and I'm sure your grade will reflect that.” He struggled to maintain his poise, but she undid him, opening her mouth a little to reveal her sharp, newly minted caps. As she ran her tongue self-consciously over them, eager to hear more, he found his attention riveted on the perfect white rectangles that were all for show, not for biting better.

  “I like the way you developed your theme,” he said finally, then sat back in his chair.

  “Great,” she said, nodding. Her eyes said nothing special to him. Only her mouth's half-smile appreciated the joke.

  “You have summer plans?”

  “My relatives have a house at Tahoe. I got most of my finals done early so that we can leave tomorrow, all except for this class, and I thought you might pass on requiring a final, Mr. Capshaw. I mean, you know what I can do well enough already, don't you?”

  “The final's a big part of your grade.”

  She shrugged. “My mom's decided to enroll me in private school next fall. So this is my last day here. Could you possibly double the credit on the story? I worked really hard on it.” Her words, her posture were as always. Only the force behind her words betrayed the sea change in their relationship.

  “I guess I could. Yes. Well, we're really sorry to lose you, Roo. Stop in to say hi next year. And you have a nice summer, now.”

  “Have a hot one, Mr. Capshaw.”

  He watched her leave, closing the door on his class for the year. Outside, Mr. Cahill, taking advantage of the school-wide exodus, started up the leaf blower. Ignoring the din, Carl rushed to clear his desk. He wanted to get home early and curl up with Cath in the hammock. He needed her to steady him, to bring him down from the lunatic elevation of his thoughts. Because there was no tragedy here. No harm done to anyone! No suicide! No murder! Looking around the classroom, he allowed the prosaic sight of crooked desks and beat-up linoleum to mute the twanging of his heart.

  He dismissed his sixth-period study hall early and finished marking his students' stories. Before leaving, before putting the gun in his pocket to stow in the locked box at home, he reread the ending of Roo's tale.

  “She would dispense with her mother's criticism, that she was a greedy girl, that nothing satisfied her. That breaking the rules led to heartache. How worth it it was to have a hope, play it out, and blunder. What did her mother understand about the moments that fed a girl's soul and in between, the pleasurable hunger of her waiting?”

  She needed to cut it. She needed to tone down the florid language, be more subtle. He wrote on her paper to “watch the fragments” and gave her an A.

  Laughing to himself, restored, he wondered how she would interpret her grade.

  On the way home, he stopped to buy roses, yellow ones, Cath's favorite. He felt such love for her, such appreciation. He couldn't believe his luck, but he was so thankful for another chance. It had been an aberration, he said to himself in the car on the way up the hill to his house. He would never, ever do it again.

  “Cath,” he cried, throwing open the front door. “Cath?”

  A yellow note, very brief, had been stuck to the front of the refrigerator.

  She would not be back.

  Juggernaut

  From the Hindi, Jagann-ath. A large, overpowering, destructive force or object-an idol of Krishna which is drawn on a huge cart during an annual parade, under whose wheels devotees throw themselves to be crushed…

  The first accident gave Neal the idea for the second accident.

  He had spent the evening of the first crash pouring coins down the throat of the Silver Ghost, the name of his favorite slot machine at Harrah's Tahoe. As usual, when he was about to give up, eager, in fact, to watch the cherries, plums, and jackpot signs line up, signifying nothing, three bars kachunged into place and seventy-five dollars in tokens pinged into the bin. It was not a big win, considering his investment that evening, but it was enough to keep him going until his eyes were bloodshot and the free drinks from earlier in the evening had invaded his bloodstream and slithered over his brain stem. Now he felt tired. Exhausted. Oh, how he could not wait for bed.

  His car was hard to find because he had not parked in the usual spot, so he floundered around the lot looking for it under stars bright as burning spear points, shivering. Up here in the Sierra, November always came as a rude shock. October blew through like fire, all reds and oranges and gusting wind. Winter chased right behind it like a hound from some bone-biting, cold hell.

  Finally, he found the Toyota crouched in the far end of the lot, almost touching the dark forest beyond. He wished he were drunk, but no such luck. The abysmal state of his stomach had kept him prudent, along with the hot cups of coffee toward the end of the session.

  Too bad, because a clear head brought him around to thoughts of Juliette, who would be waiting at home, mad because once again-once again, she would say, in that new and strident tone he hated-she had to spend the evening alone. Of course, she wouldn't say that at first, she would stand at the kitchen counter watching him with her mouth sullen, refusing to talk, refusing to respond.

  As he started the engine, he drifted into a pleasant fantasy. She would decide for once to treat him right. He would come through the door and find her sleeping in a pretty pink negligee like the one she wore when they were first married. He would crawl into bed. Her fragrant arms would rise to pull him down beneath the cool white sheets. Not a word would be spoken; no guilt would be heaped on him.

  Checking his rearview mirror for oblivious drunks, he backed out slowly, drove through the valet parking area and out toward the street, where he stopped to wait for a break in traffic before entering. It was while he was there, mentally with Juliette, imagining what they would do in bed, that a stretch limo roared up behind him, screeched its brakes, skated into a skid, and slammed into him with the force of a locomotive.

  The next day he awoke in the hospital, loaded up on Darvon. He had jammed his foot on the brake and been thrown forward, almost through the windshield, he was told. Luckily, car traffic along the highway had been light, so no other car had been involved. Aside from a moment of paralyzing fear as he saw the car sliding along the ice toward him in his rearview mirror, he remembered almost nothing of the accident.

  He was shook up, that was all. The doctor and the chiropractor he found later legitimized the exaggerated backache and the jaw trouble. His lawyer settled for twenty-five thousand from the limo company, and with another twenty-five hundred thrown in by the casino for nuisance value, he had enough for bills and gambling money until February.

  To add to his good fortune, there had been that moment when Juliette arrived at the hospital, her blonde hair shimmering down her shoulders like the falls near Emerald Bay, gorgeous and young. He basked in the envy of his fellow patients and for just a few moments there at the beginning when she thought he was really badly hurt, he basked in the glow of her concern.

  “Your hands?” she had asked first thing and, for a second, he couldn't think why she would care. Then he remembered.
He played the piano in the bar at the casino, didn't he? When he had a job, which she thought he did.

  “The doctor says no permanent damage,” he told her.

  She pulled his hands to her chest and left them there to feel the pulsing life underneath her sweater. Five years of her, and he would never get enough.

  The windfall caused problems. Soon after he got home from the hospital the fights with Juliette resumed. She wanted the money, wanted to put him on an allowance, wanted his paychecks, wanted to save for a future, and yammer yammer yammer. He never could hold his own in an argument with her. Her words pounded on him like a club, so he hurt her back the only way he knew how, with the back of his hand and sometimes when she just would not shut up, with his fists. He always regretted it, always begged for her forgiveness, and she always came through after a day or two.

  If she ever left him… but he would not allow her to leave. She knew that. He would hunt her down and bring her back. He had done it before, and she knew he would do it again. Marriage made two people one. He would no more let her go than he would let his left leg walk off without him.

  Nothing meant more to him than Juliette. She was his biggest score, the one he would hold on to.

  One day, a few months after the first accident, Neal went shopping at the jewelry store at the outlet center for a little present for her. He wanted something that would tell her exactly how bad he felt about a minor fracas of the night before. The saleslady pulled out a display of glamorous-looking gold necklaces. All the glitter in one place made him nervous-he turned his back briefly to count his money.

  He had spent most of the insurance settlement, so he counted out his singles. When he was satisfied he could just swing the thinnest gold chain and was about to say so, the saleslady said, “Let me show you some other necklaces I think you'll love!” Sweeping the expensive chains back underneath the counter, she came up with another display that looked identical to him. Leaning in conspiratorially, she had said, “Vermeil. All precious metal, of course.”