by Maria Flook
When the girl was napping, snoring in little nasal sips, Willis decided he was finished with her. After a long ordeal of sex, his knees fluttered as if a half-dozen moths turned back and forth behind the patella in a strange postcoital metamorphosis. It wasn’t the familiar honey-dripping landscape of afterglow, it was something new, an unpleasant haze. For the last few weeks, his routine sex life flickered on and off, depending on his program of morphine. On one level he could complete the task, but an abyss was opening up between his expertise and his ability to engender and employ it. Willis went into the kitchen and sat down at the tiny dinette, tipping the chair back on two chrome legs, thinking it over.
He walked around the apartment looking for a drinking glass that didn’t have butts and ashes. A bowl of leftover guacamole was turning brown where it sat at the center of the table. In Norfolk, Willis had watched a triple-X videotape, a pretty nice one until the last thirty seconds. In these last moments, the actress turned her back to the camera, bent over to touch her toes, wrapping the palms of her hands around her Achilles tendons, and there it was: green crud in her slit. Guacamole smeared into the vulva of a porn queen has its lasting effect. She was thumbing her nose at her own public, and Willis took account of it.
Willis refused to eat a tortilla chip slathered with the guacamole paste. When Willis explained the video to Debbie, she listened in disbelief. “You’re kidding. That dip has lemon in it. Shit. That lemon would sting, wouldn’t it?”
Willis poked around the kitchen, throwing the garbage in a bin. He wrapped the violet-stained avocado skins in a newspaper. It was an old issue of the Newport Daily News. He read the brief obituary for his friend’s stillborn baby. He thought of Sheila Boyd, the new mother. He wondered why someone’s family misfortune became his secret burden. Willis felt its indirect weight upon him. He recognized his panic systems gearing up. His panic moved into place the way harpies collect on the cornerstones of buildings. Like the jagged, winged edges of a puzzle, in an instant the beast was fully assembled. Willis had to concentrate on his breathing. Breathing, without direct monitoring, became the central player in these attacks. To help Willis avoid hyperventilation, a Navy therapist had drawn a diagram for Willis; it was a simple box.
Ascend left side: inhale.
Cross over: hold breath.
Sink down right side: exhale.
Return to the starting point: hold.
Repeat.
The inch of print about the baby triggered his symptoms. He was tipped way over the point of comfort. Regardless of faith, regardless of good deeds or blind devotion, every routine minute was a notch on a roulette wheel. Because of this giant-size wheel, Willis kept honed and wiry; he performed his daily tasks amidst a meteor shower of little chances and threats.
Willis read the simple text about the baby and tore it out of the newspaper. He folded the clipping several times, creasing it with the edge of his cast, until it was a pleated strip, then he folded it again, making sure he ironed it flat. He took the tiny accordion of smeared paper into the bathroom and dropped it in the toilet. He let it soak in the bowl. He waited until the newspaper clipping looked saturated, almost sinking, then he pressed the chrome handle. It wouldn’t flush. The toilet was sluggish. He jiggled the handle. The clipping swirled open. He fished the clipping out of the toilet water and carried it, dripping, to the kitchen sink. He drenched it in Debbie’s Cuty Polish Remover and struck a match. He watched the flame licking the solvent but the newspaper clipping wasn’t igniting. He doused it again, until the white sink blossomed with fiery dahlias, foot-high crimson flowers. The porcelain turned black, scorched and smelly. The scrap was, at last, missing.
He went into the bedroom and crawled into bed beside Debbie, careful not to wake her. She would want to start over. He wondered about certain physical repercussions from his job at Narragansett WASTEC with Carl Smith. What could happen to him if he was exposed to barrels of toxic sludge? Earlier that evening, he shot cum on the bedsheet. It looked iridescent, it glowed, an elongated, electric puddle. Radioactive.
“You’re crazy,” Debbie had told him. “That’s just the reflection from HoJo’s.” She rubbed the glimmery stain with her thumb. A big billboard for Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge was right outside the bedroom window. The sign’s blue-green illumination fell upon the rumpled linens. Willis wasn’t taking any chances. He told her, “Good thing I pulled out.” He wasn’t ready to father any deformed children.
In her sleep, Debbie turned to him. He stood up, gentle as a cat so he wouldn’t wake her. More than ever, he did not desire the human touch.
An hour later, Willis was driving to the Warwick Airport. Night work. The Fritz shift. Debbie told Willis, “You’ll end up in a facility. You and Federico,” she said. “Is he selling dope? I’ll tell you right now, I’m not standing around in some needle park—”
Willis concentrated on the freeway traffic, finding the wind door between two semis. He told her, “Fritz didn’t say what’s involved. It’s not your business, is it?”
Fritz was waiting in the airport parking lot near a private hangar. A jet was whining on the tarmac, but it wasn’t anything to do with them. Fritz sat down in the front seat and pushed the girl into the middle. “Word is, we go over to McCoy.”
“McCoy Stadium?”
“That’s where we make the pickup.”
“I thought it was air freight.”
“It came in here today. But this place is thick. We have to go to McCoy, where it’s dead.” Willis rolled around the airport circle. Debbie was sitting in between and she started to tell them that she wanted Willis to take her back to Newport. “I’ll be good. We can go over to Yesterday’s.”
“Not tonight,” he told her.
“No cover after ten o’clock.”
Willis said, “If you don’t shut up, I’ll drop you off at Carl’s. He’ll take you onto his boat. Teach you manners.”
“No cover at Carl’s,” Fritz said.
“Oh, shut up,” she said.
Willis liked teasing her. He turned off the highway and drove out to Warwick Neck. He parked the sedan right on the water. He pushed Debbie across the seat and Fritz tugged her out of the car. They guided her past the pitch-black berths and nudged her to the edge of a finger pier.
“See it out there? The Tercel,” Willis said.
The disabled dragger was moored two hundred feet away, a fifty-foot hulk, everything dark on it except for a yellow sheen coming from the fo’c’s’le porthole. The old fishing boat looked pretty grim; even in the poor light, you could see it wasn’t kept up. Pleasure boats in the harbor looked white as shirt collars resting on the water. “I’m going to lend you out to Carl if you don’t behave,” Willis told her.
He went over to a piling and picked up the air horn left chained there by the dock association. He tooted a few harsh blasts. They watched a figure come out of the hatch. It was Carl Smith. He jumped up on the rail and held on to the antique gallus rigging. He looked ashore.
Fritz said, “I wonder what condition he’s in.”
“His usual condition.”
“Hope he don’t fall in.”
Carl Smith searched the pier but he didn’t recognize what he was seeing.
Debbie broke away and ran back to the car. She got in and slammed the door. She had another thought and reached over to lay her palm on the horn. She kept it there until Willis returned.
Willis and Fritz had their joke. It added a little pepper to the rest of the drive. They came into Pawtucket riding the side streets through residential blocks until they saw the Paw Sox stadium, a huge dark horseshoe rising four stories high over the Portuguese neighborhood.
“Your favorite place,” Fritz said, talking for Willis.
“Shit. It’s a nice park, isn’t it? It’s small enough to see the little details.”
“We saw Chico Walker come up,” Fritz said.
“That’s right. And we saw The Bird come down.”
“Pathetic.”
“He had his glory days, don’t forget.”
“We all do.”
The place was deserted. They drove into the parking lot and steered close to the stands. A forklift with a stack of forty-pound bags of fertilizer was parked against a wall. The season was two weeks away. The high beams illuminated four cardboard cartons lined up on the asphalt, already unloaded. A man saw them drive up and he moved away from the boxes, jogging behind the stadium. In a moment, his headlights whipped across the field as he left the parking lot.
“I think that’s the guy who left these off.”
“In and out, just like that?”
“On schedule,” Fritz said.
“I wonder what’s his hurry?”
“Not the best sign.”
“I’d say that it’s a bad sign.”
They got out of the car. Fritz rested his elbow in the palm of his hand and studied the row of boxes.
“What’s in here?” Willis said.
“We don’t open the crates until we get there.”
“We don’t verify the merchandise?”
“That’s right. We don’t.”
“Live cargo. Exotics,” Willis said.
“Bingo. They ice down these boxes, it puts them to sleep so they don’t make a racket.”
“I don’t like it. I don’t like anything live,” Willis said.
“Agree,” Fritz said. “Maybe it’s dead already. I don’t hear a sound. Then what? Point. Who gets the blame?”
“Usually it’s the last link in the chain.”
“Us.”
“You.”
“Yeah, well.” Fritz scratched his forehead with his thumbnail. “You’re fucking negative, you know that?”
Willis helped Fritz arrange the cardboard cases in the trunk of the car. As he lifted the boxes the contents shifted in small scratching thumps, but he couldn’t tell what it was. There wasn’t any smell to it, no growls or hissing. There weren’t any air holes.
They drove out of the parking lot and went along the river into East Providence. Willis parked in front of Debbie’s sister’s house.
“Out.”
“Fuck you,” she told him. She unsnapped the long leather strap from her pocketbook and she started to slap him. The metal clasp stung the backs of his knuckles where they emerged from his cast.
He was shoving her off of him when Fritz opened the passenger door and grabbed her ankle. She giggled when the other man got involved. She liked everything to be a contest. Fritz started tugging her out of the car; Willis pushed her. She fell onto the cold pavement, still trying to smack Willis with the leather thong. She stood up next to the car. She made a fist and lifted it high. She dropped her fist on the smoked windshield; the heel of her hand was a hard crescent, like a little horseshoe.
A small acoustic thud—a few chunks of frozen popcorn fell onto the seat. The safety glass had burst in a conservative circle, the circumference of a SnoCone. Then, in slow motion, tiny silver cracks traveled across the glass, looping like grapevines until half of the windshield was marred.
Willis kept his voice level, but his jaw was grinding. “This is Rennie’s car.”
“Well, who do you think I am? A chump?” she said.
“She always has to hit something,” Fritz said.
She wrinkled her nose at Fritz and dipped in a little curtsy.
Willis brushed his hand over the windshield, fingering the cracks.
“Excellent. Cunt.”
“Go ahead. Get it fixed and I’ll smash it again,” she said. She straightened her shoulders, surprised at herself. Then she looked very pleased that she could mar a big windshield bare-fisted. Next, she was running across the lawn. Her high heels wobbled on the frozen turf and she fell down. She stood up again, laughing.
Willis chased the girl around to the back of her sister’s house. Willis grabbed her around the hips. She was screaming for help in tight, delighted shrieks, but the house was dark. Fritz waited on the sidewalk and toed a flip-top cigarette box with his shoe until he had it in the gutter. In the late winter night, the air was without the din of insects or the brushing notes of foliage, and he could hear the girl’s laughter. Fritz didn’t want to stand around alone and he followed them behind the house. Willis had his jeans opened and Debbie was beneath him, her white legs scissoring. Willis wasn’t serious and the girl was laughing. Her breath bloomed and dissolved, bloomed again in little white trumpets at his shoulder.
“Maybe this is the last time. Just one last time,” Willis told her through his teeth as he bit the leather tab of his car keys and rocked her, his keys jangling against his chin.
“Oh, Jesus,” Fritz told them. “It’s the teddy bears’ picnic.” He walked back to the car and waited.
In a minute, Willis came around to the front.
“You did her with your keys like that?”
“What?”
“With your keys in your teeth?”
“You wanted to hold my keys for me? Anyway, I didn’t do it. Shit, I already did her once tonight. She needs to have more?”
They got back into the car and Willis touched the inside of the squint to see if the silver cracks were palpable. “Does that look like I hit something, a seagull or something?”
“A seagull?”
“Rennie’s got insurance on this, if it’s an accident. Otherwise, it’s going to have to stay. Get used to it, Fritz, it’s your side.” When he started driving, the whole windshield sparkled and blurred with the oncoming headlights.
In Fall River, they took the cartons into Gene Showalter’s place, a big granite triple-decker with gargoyles on the front cornerstones. Griffins resting on their haunches. It was an elaborate mansion, unusual in the dilapidated mill town. The house looked over the mouth of the Taunton River, where it spilled into Mount Hope Bay.
“This son of a bitch has himself a house,” Willis told Fritz.
“Wait until you see inside. This is no Mr. Average, he’s a collector. He’s a hobbyist.”
“A hobbyist?”
“He’s got antiques and weird gizmos all around the place.”
Willis shrugged. “I don’t like that airy-fairy decor.”
“He’s got a braille Penthouse,” Fritz said.
“No shit? Is this guy blind?”
“No, he just collects one-of-a-kind stuff.”
“That sounds right. He found out about you. How did he get the braille Penthouse?”
“Paid for it.”
“That’s usually how.”
Willis stacked the cartons on the carpet while Fritz introduced him to Showalter. Willis said that he liked the house and Showalter told him that it was a banker’s turn-of-the-century mansion, complete with an English “lift.” Showalter led them over to the elevator. Willis looked at the wrought-iron platform, the brass filigree on the metal stall, and its shiny accordion gate.
“It goes all the way to the third floor,” Showalter said.
Willis smelled the heavy lubricant used on the cable.
“Want to try it?” the man asked Willis.
Showalter held the pleated gate, letting Willis decide. Fritz might have enjoyed taking a ride, but the man seemed to forget about him. Willis wouldn’t step on the platform. When Willis refused, Showalter released the gate and it skated shut.
Showalter took them into a room where a big-screen TV was running without the sound; it was the Celtics loping from one end to another. The team shifted back and forth across the screen. Showalter ignored the picture and offered Fritz a rum and Coke. Willis asked for a straight shot.
“With ice or neat?”
“Ice is fine.” Willis didn’t like the production. Showalter was making it into something. Willis watched Showalter take a single ice cube in the palm of his hand; he tapped the ice cube with the back of a spoon, one strike and the ice cracked into five sharp pebbles. He threw it in a tumbler and poured a good two fingers of bourbon over it. He swirled the smoky alcohol one time and handed the drink to Wil
lis.
“Now, Fritz tells me you’ve got some Cuban?” Showalter said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re of Cuban descent.”
“My mother was from Santiago.”
“It’s funny, you look a little wan to be Latin. Maybe your mother was the Ivory Girl? Maybe Snow White?”
“He’s fair now,” Fritz told Showalter. “In the summer he browns. He’s well-done by the Fourth of July.”
“Jesus,” Willis said. “Where are we going with this?”
Showalter told him to sit down, relax.
Willis and Fritz sat down, together, on a leather sofa. The sofa cushions were gleaming, tight pillows of golden hide, and Willis had to keep his feet squared on the floor to keep from sinking back. He had one of his crazy flashes: his dime-store pocketknife scored the leather couch, a ladder of deep gouges, a cruel diagonal tic-tac-toe. He visualized the X’s and O’s. He imagined the O’s with demonic happy faces.
The room was decorated with artwork and bric-a-brac. Willis studied a skinny metal sculpture on the coffee table.
Showalter said, “That’s a Giacometti reproduction.”
“Looks like Reddi Kilowatt,” Willis said.
They were sitting in a library. The books were arranged in glass display cases. There was something wrong with it. Willis blinked his eyes. It was a library, all right, but the books were all tiny, only two or three inches high. Hundreds of doll-sized volumes, various foreign-language dictionaries and Bibles, some with velveteen or gold leather bindings. Willis squinted at the tiny, pristine rows behind the glass.
Showalter said, “I collect these. Miniature books.” He pulled open a glass door; the frame fell from the top and rested against Showalter’s collarbone as he reached for a miniature volume. He closed the glass door and turned the key. He placed a book in Willis’s hand. Prescott’s Conquest of Peru.
