by Jon Cohen
On the floor where he’d fallen, Cliff turned and looked at the dresser. “No, no, that’s just—”
Naked and furious, Amanda tore across the room and found the mini digital video camera, a little black box about the size of a deck of cards tucked between the books. “You’ve been filming us? Cliff, you dirty shit, you’re filming us!”
She hurled the camera into the wall above Cliff’s head.
Smashed bits of black plastic rained down on him. “Amanda. It’s just—I knew.” He got to his feet.
“Knew what? What are you saying? Did you put this online, you prick?”
“No, no, no! No way. It’s just for shots of you. From the waist up. For me. For when it was over.”
“What?”
“Just from the waist up.”
“Stop saying that!”
Cliff’s voice was an abashed whisper. “I knew, I mean, we both know. It couldn’t last. That this was just you getting over Dean.”
Amanda took this in.
“And I never put them online. Honest. The only other—” He caught himself.
Amanda’s look instantly hardened, her eyes drilled into him. “You showed Hoop.”
“Only because—”
She crossed the room, stood smiling incredulously in front of Cliff, then slapped him so hard he saw stars. “Where’s your computer?”
Sprawled on the bed, shaking his head, trying to clear it, he said, “In the den, but—”
She ran out of the bedroom. Cliff listened to the computer being smashed to bits. Amanda reappeared in the doorway panting with rage.
From the waist up. She looked down at her breasts. Then out the bedroom window. In the distance stood the huge barn filled with cows with milk-heavy udders. She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at Cliff. “You two are a couple of dairy perverts.”
Cliff whispered, “He gets lonely, is all. He never gets to see.”
She struggled into her clothes. “You better learn the difference between a woman and a goddamn cow. What’s wrong inside your head, Cliff? Your mother didn’t breastfeed you or what?”
He blushed deeply.
Fully dressed, she stood before him. “If Dean were alive, he’d grab you by the neck and toss your ass into the middle of your manure pile. Because that’s what you are and always will be, Clifford Blair. Steeped in cow shit!”
On the way home, on the long winding curves of Route 11, she passed Stu in his Buick, Tom in his Honda and about four different guys from the EMT crews. It was wall-to-wall man. Amanda thought: No. Never again. Not in a billion years. Losers and weirdos, the whole damn lot of you.
The gesture she made after each car went by was not a friendly wave.
10
Back at his office at Endless Dreams Realty, Stu Giptner brooded. Amanda Jeffers giving me the finger. Is that really what I saw in my rearview mirror? Yeah, it was. Definitely. Wow. Doesn’t that just cap off a perfect friggin’ day. Zero sales prospects and Amanda Jeffers giving me the finger. Was she mocking his nothingness? Did failure radiate off him to that degree? Assuredly. Would everybody start giving him the finger now? No doubt. He began to scratch at the scaly patch on the back of his bald head. The patch had been a source of irritation since childhood. In moments of high agitation, he scratched so feverishly the dry rasp sounded like a squirrel gnawing on a walnut. The other realtors down the hall closed their doors when Stu really got going. Scritch, scritch, scritch. He winced. Ow. He was going to draw blood if he wasn’t careful. He folded his hands in his lap and went to his mantra. Repeating his mantra helped neutralize the negativity when he’d had a long, fruitless day.
“Six figures,” he said. Ahhh, better, yes, the green warmth of potential money washing over him. “Six figures, six figures.” Someday soon, very soon, real soon, soonish, he would become a six-figure realtor. Come on, Stu, hold on to that good feeling, he willed himself. Don’t let it fade. Oh no, it’s fading. Push that mantra hard. “Six figures, six, six, six.” Soon now, real soon, sooner or later. Later. Late in life. Better late than never. Never. Never, never, never.
He’d never get there, never ever. Six figures. It was Stu’s endless dream and endless torture. If he could just become a regular six-figure realtor. If he could just...
He sighed and scratched, lifted his weary gaze to the Endless Dreams Realty calendar that hung on the light-suckingly dark, fake wood paneling inches in front of his nose. His office was the size of a broom closet. “Yeah, right,” he snorted at the calendar photo of an immense log home that surely belonged to some rich mogul. Behind it, the snowcapped Rocky Mountains ascended grandly into a pure blue sky. “Right. Gimme a break.”
Endless Dreams Realty handled commercial, residential, lot-land and rental properties in a thirty-mile radius from the epicenter of Stu’s unprepossessing office, north to Harford, south to Elkdale, west to Dixon and east to Tanners Falls. The Endless Mountains were not the Rockies. They were not even the Catskills. The Endless Mountains, let’s face it, were inglorious hills where rich moguls never built homes. The only moguls were the coal barons down in Scranton, and that was...how many years ago?
Stu leaned back in his chair and tried to conjure a date. He was terrible at dates, which reminded him of the torture of Mrs. Kruckewszki’s high school history class, which reminded him that his life in general was a string of constant defeats, predictable disappointments and unceasing agitations with an occasional cigarette break in between.
Let’s see, he thought, the Pennsylvania coal barons were alive in...1900 or somewheresabout? Stu felt the heat of stupidity rise in his cheeks, just as it used to when he was a stupid kid twenty-five years ago in Mrs. Kruckewszki’s classroom. Except he wasn’t stupid, not at all—he was unlucky. Mrs. Kruckewszki always called on him just when he happened to be daydreaming, usually about how to get money without working too hard. If she were alive today—and thank God, she was six feet under in Maplewood Cemetery—and called on him right this minute, Mrs. Kruckewszki would catch him in the exact same daydream.
He squinted at the calendar photo and wondered: Did coal barons work hard? Probably. So, really, he’d rather be a coal baron’s son. And when were those damn coal barons anyway? Well, whenever the hell they were, they sure as Suzy didn’t build any grand homes in this woeful little corner of the Endless Mountains like the log mansion pictured on that lie of a calendar.
Stu reached for the pack of cigarettes nestled in his coat pocket, slid one between his lips and sucked air through it, savoring the tease of unlit tobacco. After a minute or two, he slid the moist cigarette back into the pack. One cigarette a day right after lunch was all he allowed himself, and if he made it through the day on one, he rewarded himself with half a pack smoked through the course of the evening, which more often than not was spent at the Green Gables bar in the company of Cliff, Tom, Ronnie, Walter and the rest of those winners. At the end of an interminable day working his potential buyers (yeah, right) or sitting slumped in his Endless Dreams Realty soul-devouring office waiting for the phone to ring—a phone that Stu was convinced was connected on the other end to either a graveyard or a desert island—cigarettes and a beer or two was not a reward, but a life-saving goddamn necessity.
“Coal barons. Right,” he blurted, fixed now on the subject he’d torture himself with for the next hour. No rich coal barons around here, he thought, only ancient coal miners who in their youth had dug their own black anthracite graves day after day and now sat coughing the remaining hours of their lives away in their decrepit little clapboard homes priced under six figures—the crummy fixer-upper “as is” properties—which was the only real estate that Vince Bromler, head broker and owner of Endless Dreams Realty, ever let Stu sell. Dead coal miner houses and dingy double-wide trailers owned by quarrymen. Never the parceled dairy farms on the rolling hillsides, never the commercial properties along the I-81 corridor, never
the lake homes.
Lake homes. “Yeah, right,” Stu said.
He lowered himself into the gloom of his thoughts, like a coal miner riding a coal car deeper into the descending dark. Buyers could smell the glum on him. He lifted his eyes to the wall calendar and sighed his patented desultory sigh. Why were they called buyers if they never bought? The economy hadn’t always sucked. Why was it always so hard, good times or bad?
This afternoon, for example, the little “as is” gem out past Freeman’s Corner in Dimock. Clomping up the front porch steps in his menacing black steel-toe work boots, the prospective buyer, a burly unsmiling guy with a buzz cut named Rod Karp, put his foot through the top step and when he grabbed the porch railing, a four-foot section snapped off in his hand. The foreclosed house had been on Stu’s listing for a year, and he’d maintained it with threats and pleas and multiple tubes of cheap caulk. He kept a case of caulk in the back of his Buick at all times and a hammer, too, not to fix any of his properties, but to knock off rusty gutters and loose shutters and anything else that might be dangling. Or just to bang repeatedly on the ground after a sale went south, as today’s did in less than a minute and a half.
Rod Karp had gone red-faced with anger. His scalp turned red, too. Stu could see it through Karp’s buzz cut. Stu had always been scared of buzz cuts, and Rod Karp’s looked like a million little nails anchored in boiling blood.
So Stu quickly smiled. It was a rictus grin. “Fifty thousand is a great, great price!” His voice a piglet squeal.
“I just put my foot through the goddamn porch!” Karp yelled.
“Only the top step—fixable—I’ll get my men on it!”
Karp raised the piece of busted railing over his head and Stu dropped to the ground and cringed in anticipation of the blow, which he deserved. Instead, Karp hurled it at Stu’s car with such force the right headlight vaporized in a sparkling cloud of glass dust. Then he jumped into his black Dodge Ram pickup, circled Stu twice like an Apache on horseback and roared down the dirt road.
Stu had let a minute go by before he sat up. He was shaking and feeling like he might throw up. He flopped back on the ground and stared at the sky. Someday he would just crumple to the ground and never get up again. It would happen because he was pusillanimous. Stu had come across the word a few months back, when he had been idly Googling definitions for “spineless” and “soft” and “lily-livered.” Pusillanimous. The word impressed him because it seemed to be composed of “pus” and “villainous,” which was precisely how he saw himself: made of pus and small-bore villainy. He was the kind of man who would cheat widows and librarians, given the chance. He would steal candy from a baby, except he didn’t want to get caught. The mother might slap him. Stu envisioned it. Slapped and falling to the ground in a heap, a sticky lollipop instead of a cigarette in his mouth.
Sequestered in his office now, still trembly from the Karp encounter, Stu whispered, “I’m soft.” He scratched his patch and whispered again, “I am a soft man.”
He was a soft man in a region of tough men. Even the good guys, the ones nothing like Rod Karp, were tough in a way he could never be. Cliff was as tough as they come, and so was Ronnie and old Walter, too. Virtually all the exhausted, sweaty men hoisting beers in Green Gables were tough and worked in tough jobs Stu knew he wouldn’t survive an hour, let alone a lifetime. Truck drivers, tractor mechanics, lumberyard workers, quarrymen. My God, Ronnie slaving away in Empett’s quarry with stone saws and dynamite? Or dairy farming, like Cliff, are you kidding me? Stu was afraid of cows. The big dumb half-ton sons of bitches could bump you into a fence post and snap your spine like a potato chip.
Cows got Stu to thinking about deer, and deer led him to a particularly shame-inducing fear—guns. He could barely stand the sound of one going off, hated the smell of the cleaning oil, didn’t even like being in the same room with a box of live ammunition. Everybody hunted something up here—even little Olive the librarian owned a .22 for scaring off groundhogs. There you have it, Olive Perkins, no bigger than a sparrow, was tougher than he was. Hell, all of the women in his thirty-mile real estate radius were. Including and especially...Amanda Jeffers.
Amanda.
Stu sighed, this time with pleasure, settling back in his office chair and raising his feet to his desk, idly massaging the tiny scar on the middle finger of his left hand like he was rubbing a magic lamp to conjure a genie. Maybe Amanda had given him the finger, not disparagingly, but in friendly acknowledgment of a finger episode—a crisis—that she had helped him through so wonderfully, three years ago. Sure, of course, yes. That’s what she’d been doing when she passed his car on Route 11. Stu massaged, and slid into reverie. Sweet Amanda.
Three years ago he’d sliced the finger on the edge of a tuna can, setting off a journey that led him, ultimately and deliciously, to Amanda. Ronnie or Cliff would have bandaged the wound with duct tape and a paper towel and gone right back to work with their dirty cows and dirty jackhammers. A wound was important only if it seriously impaired a trigger finger.
But Stu was pusillanimous, and when he saw blood blossom from a wound that looked to him deep as the Mariana Trench, he cried out and grabbed a dish towel and sat down hard on the floor of his tiny apartment, pale and shaking. Stu was scared of cows and guns and buzz cuts, but what really terrified him was the notion of losing a finger. Half of the men he knew were missing fingers, and now, trying to make a tuna sandwich, he was about to join the club. He peeked at the towel. Blood seeped into view on the lower left corner. His precious blood was flowing abundantly enough to soak through a towel. He slid his hand under his armpit and clamped down hard, tourniqueting his wound as he fumbled in his pants pocket for his cell phone. He would call Ruthy, his ex-wife.
He hesitated, remembering their last meeting with a wince, and lowered the phone. Last month, he’d been showing Ruthy around an “as is” up in West Gibson, and when she opened a kitchen cabinet door, a hissing opossum leaped out, teeth bared. With a scream, Stu latched on to Ruthy as the opossum flew past them, skittered twice around the countertops, jumped to the floor and ran into the living room.
Ruthy jerked free of him and narrowed her eyes. “You were gonna sell me this infested piece of crap place? I mean, goddamn, Stu, I knew you’d try to cheat me, but I didn’t know you was going to do it this bad!”
“Like I knew a possum was living in there, for chrissakes, Ruthy!” Well, he sort of knew. He’d heard a rodenty noise yesterday when he was caulking a few things around the house, but he was hoping it was just mice.
Ruthy looked him up and down, slowly, like she had lasers for eyes she was using to slice him in two. Above their heads the yowling opossum bounced off the walls of the upstairs bathroom. Suddenly and inexplicably, the toilet flushed.
They both stared at the ceiling. “Least he’s toilet trained,” Stu joked.
Ruthy shoved him aside and stormed out of the house.
So he couldn’t call Ruthy, and he couldn’t dial 911 because not even Stu, scared as he was, would allow men with buzz cuts the opportunity to shake their heads and roll their eyes as they put him in the back of an unnecessary ambulance. Paper towel and duct tape, they’d be thinking, that’s all that little skin-nick needs.
The longer he sat on the apartment floor, the deeper the deadly foreign microbes from the tuna lid were burrowing into his wound. He was going to lose the finger, but Christ, he didn’t want to lose the arm, so he mustered all his strength (very little) and courage (less) and ran downstairs to his Buick, covering the twenty miles of gravel back roads to Susquehanna Hospital’s ER in less than fifteen minutes, steering with one hand.
Sitting in his office, thinking back on all this, Stu came to his favorite part of The-Day-I-Almost-Lost-My-Finger. The Amanda Jeffers part. Amanda when she still had her smile, before Dean up and died on her last year in that snowy field.
Swooning across two chairs in the ER wait
ing room, Stu had tried not to think about the scalpel that would finish the job the tuna lid had begun. The Susquehanna Hospital doctor would tend to his wound with the brisk, brutal efficiency of a Civil War field surgeon. Bite down on this here whisky rag, Corporal Giptner, and feel free to cry out to yer mama, because we gonna start sawing.
Amanda Jeffers appeared in the hazy distance, an earth angel in scrubs, and even though Stu knew he was going to lose his finger, at least Amanda, luscious, powerful Amanda, would be the one holding him down while they hacked it off. She was so beautiful. Between the booms of his panicked heart, he heard actual angel music as she walked down the corridor toward him. Sweet violins, a babbling brook, celestial birds at dawn.
“Hey there, Stu,” she said, looking at his towel-wrapped hand. Her voice had none of the Scranton nasal common to the local women. It was pure velvet, and so was her skin when she took hold of his arm. Everybody in the Endless Mountains was a mix of Polish and German, but Amanda looked like a big Dutch girl or a Swede, that smile, those white teeth, the blond hair, her full hips. She was the epitome of the woman Stu would never, ever have.
“How many fingers and how did you do it?” she asked as she guided him to an ER room. In his erotically laced fear-haze, her voice took on a thick Swedish lilt.
“One finger,” he managed to croak. “Tuna lid.”
“Ouch,” Amanda said. Not mocking, not at all. Wounds didn’t have to come from guns and axes and tractor accidents. There were lesser, perfectly legitimate wounds in the world. Stu wanted to kiss her for acknowledging it. He lay back on the stretcher as she carefully unwrapped the dish towel and dropped it into the biohazard trash can. He couldn’t feel his finger, and in a moment of panic thought it had been tossed into the trash can along with the bloody towel. He peeked. It was still there. He looked quickly away and tried not to whimper.
Amanda adjusted the exam light. “Aw, that’s just a bitty cut, Stu Giptner. It won’t even need a stitch, just a couple of Steri-Strips.”
