Dan

by Joanna Ruocco

  “I’ll never figure it out,” thought Melba. “Meanwhile, people keep dying and where they do they go in the jelly? Do they rot in the jelly and make more jelly? Could time be made of people?”

  Melba walked slowly from the alley. Inside the bakery the air was warm and fragrant and the phone had fallen silent. Melba heaved a sigh of relief as she settled onto the stool. Sleepily she considered the pretzels on the trays through the glass countertop. Any of them would do for breakfast, with butter and Peggy Shine’s orange marmalade, which Melba kept on a special shelf in the walk-in refrigerator. Suddenly the door burst open and Melba sprang to her feet.

  “Jumpy aren’t you, Melba?” said the man who stood backlit in the doorway. Melba stared at the silhouette.

  “Officer Greg,” she said, and he approached the counter.

  “I’ll be the one to name names around here, Melba,” said Officer Greg. “If I can even call you Melba.” He seemed unwilling to look at Melba head-on and kept his head turned to the side even as he came forward.

  “I’m not committing myself to seeing you, Melba,” said Officer Greg. “So don’t get any ideas that I’ll testify on your behalf as an eye-witness.”

  “You’ve been talking to Ned Hat,” said Melba and she couldn’t keep the smug, deductive note from her voice that she knew Officer Greg, like so many officers, found offensive in lay people.

  Officer Greg bumped into the counter and stopped coming forward. Melba looked at his profile appreciatively.

  “Have you considered becoming a nose model?” she asked.

  “I am a police officer, Melba,” rapped out Officer Greg, but Melba observed that his nostrils had flared slightly at the compliment.

  “Or something more part-time. Donating your nose to science?” she continued, warming to the topic. “It wouldn’t take very long and it would do such a world of good. I would donate my own nose but it’s an inferior specimen and it seems to me that science should get only the best from people. Think of all science does for us.”

  “No, Melba, I won’t,” said Officer Greg. He took a thick roll of clear tape from his pocket. Melba looked at the tape, then followed Officer Greg’s gaze. He was looking at the cash register.

  “You don’t mind if I check for fingerprints,” said Officer Greg, scratching the roll of tape lightly with his fingernails, which were long, Melba noted, no doubt for the very purpose.

  “It’s so difficult to find the end of the tape,” she murmured, hoping with the comment to establish a kind of sympathy between them, but Officer Greg flinched. He did not look toward her but Melba saw that his lips trembled with emotion, at least on the left side of his face.

  “It’s the beginning of the roll of tape,” said Officer Greg at last, sighing. “The beginning! Melba, I’ve championed you to the men of this town, men who claim that you’re a succubus, because you’ve always seemed diurnal to me, decently dressed, and your mother is an athletic woman, but how can I champion you at all if you’re going to say such negative things?”

  After a pause filled only with the sound of mixers and the light scratching of Officer Greg’s fingernails, Melba spoke, painfully aware that her words must sound coy or ungrateful.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I don’t deserve a champion.” Officer Greg did not answer but moved swiftly about the bakery, applying and removing strips of tape to the counter, walls, and ceiling, which he reached using a collapsible police stool that doubled, in its collapsed state, as a cudgel. Melba marveled at this device but said nothing about it. She did not find it easy to speak with police officers. One always wanted something from them, aid or exoneration, or else to be left alone entirely, passed over unnoticed or, if noticed, quickly forgotten, and this made it impossible for one to speak freely, as, say, a rational, disinterested party might be expected to speak in the public sphere. Melba was always imputing some hidden agenda to the comments she made to police officers and this incessant fishing around her own mind for possible motivating factors or subterfuges caused her considerable stress. When faced with a police officer, she would flush and sweat and wring her hands in a manner bound to strike even a near-sighted, kindly, non-inquisitorial person as unreservedly degenerate.

  Now, to occupy her hands, the palms of which were already mashed together, fingers jumbled, she became brisk, rising from her stool and pulling out first one tray, then another, scanning the baked goods for desirability.

  “Would you like a pretzel?” she asked Officer Greg, and he grunted, labeling the strips of tape and, after punching a hole in each one, slipping them onto a key ring which he clipped to his belt. Melba selected three pretzels and wrapped them carefully in wax paper before nestling them in a large white paper bag. She passed them over the counter to Officer Greg who reached out for them, head still turned to the side, opening and closing his hand like a pincers several times on empty air before Melba could aim the bag between his fingers.

  Officer Greg sighed, his profile surprisingly eloquent for the profile of a police officer at that hour of the morning. It wasn’t just the above-average nose, but the long drape of the eyelid, which was thin and trapezoidal, nothing puffy or stubby about it.

  “My gut tells me you’re not supernatural, Melba,” said Officer Greg. “I don’t quite believe you’re an employee …”

  “But I am an employee,” broke in Melba. “Leslie Duck is my boss. What else could I be?”

  “I’m going to run these prints and we’ll see,” said Officer Greg. “You could be a lot of things. A wife, a mother, a safe-breaker, a patient …”

  “I’m not!” protested Melba.

  “Well maybe you’re a victim, then …” continued Officer Greg and Melba gasped.

  “A victim! Like Grady Help?”

  Officer Greg’s fine eyelid quivered. “Who told you Grady Help was a victim?”

  Melba swallowed.

  “Everyone knows it,” she said. “It was a pillow fight, wasn’t it? He was suffocated during a pillow fight at Dan Elementary during the annual slumber party. I almost think I was there, or nearby anyway, asleep in the bleachers.”

  “Grady Help is not a victim, Melba,” said Officer Greg.

  “What is he then?” asked Melba eagerly. She leaned forward, letting her eyes drop down the ledge of Officer Greg’s brow and skim over the sophisticated slope of his nose again and again, deriving a breathless pleasure from it. She hadn’t expected confidences from Officer Greg!

  “He’s a renter, Melba,” said Officer Greg and Melba jerked her hands apart and slammed one fist on the counter.

  “Why yes!” she cried. “He is!” Just a few days before, Melba had run into her mother while wandering the weedy verges of the public golf course and her mother had taken the opportunity to denounce Grady Help in exactly those terms.

  “Men like Grady Help are old enough to be fathers, but what are they?” Gigi Zuzzo had said. “Renters! They get together and play tabletop games. All their money goes to tables. What’s the difference between a table and a house?”

  Melba had not answered her mother. She had often thought that a table was in fact like a house, but a more wonderful house, a miniature house created especially for just one person. How she dreamed of sitting beneath a table, curling up in the gently dipping curve of a trestle foot, sucking a pistachio, the floor-length vinyl tablecloth closing her in on all sides.

  Gigi Zuzzo waited, tapping her fingernails on her front teeth. Finally she could wait no more.

  “I’ll tell you,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “Property taxes! A man who owns a table doesn’t have to pay property taxes. If everyone owned a table instead of a house, we wouldn’t have roads. We wouldn’t have schools either. Who do you think drove away your precious Principal Benjamin?” Gigi Zuzzo spat a golf tee she had been holding in her mouth like a toothpick and went on with clearer speech. “Men like Grady Help, that’s who. Your father Zeno Zuzzo is almost a man like Grady Help,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “Do you know what the difference is betwe
en your father and Grady Help?”

  Melba shook her head cautiously.

  “Me!” cried Gigi Zuzzo. “I turned your father into your father, but otherwise he was Grady Help. Whenever I kicked him out of the house he reverted back into his Grady Help-like state, but worse, because he didn’t rent anything. He moved into Pike’s Ditch and slept under the footbridge.”

  Melba nodded, less cautiously. She remembered when her father moved into Pike’s Ditch, an increscent gouge rumored to be a natural formation that divided the Dan junkyard from the retirement home. Gigi Zuzzo seemed much happier with Zeno Zuzzo living there. As soon as he left, she’d moved Melampus into the master bedroom and given up sleep. Giving up sleep, claimed Gigi Zuzzo, had an energizing effect and built muscle mass. She had given up sitting as well, and whenever Melba came through the door after an outing Gigi Zuzzo was standing behind it, already speaking. Melba went on many outings in those days. She would visit her father in Pike’s Ditch and together they passed the glad hours. Zeno Zuzzo showed Melba how he occupied himself throwing knives into a pile of tires and also imitated birdcalls. Melba was impressed by the birdcalls and once she had made the mistake of demonstrating to her mother the different trills and chirps. Gigi Zuzzo’s face had darkened as Melba fluted out the lovely little sounds.

  “I don’t suppose your father was too busy chirping to tell you about Shane Joseph?” Gigi Zuzzo asked.

  “Shane Joseph,” Melba murmured. She remembered a man who had come as a speaker to Dan Elementary. He had long hair and wore an ace bandage on his wrist. He had told a story:

  Once upon a time, he—Shane Joseph—was struck by lightning while playing guitar on his porch in a droning, staticky drizzle. The guitar was incinerated, and he had not replaced it. He had not even mourned it. The lightning strike had destroyed, for him, not only that particular guitar, but all guitars. The very idea of guitar had been erased from his consciousness. He knew the word “guitar” but the word corresponded to nothing, to a void that then filled with the sounds guitars had masked. Without guitar, Shane Joseph was able to listen at last to the music of the moss, the moss that seemed so much a part of Dan, always at hand, always underfoot, mantling stones and bricks, shingles and boards, tree trunks and porch furniture, that no one suspected its alien origins; no one, with the exception of Shane Joseph, heard it sing of its journeys, of its spores that had traveled light years through interstellar space; no one heard it sing of the world’s end, of the sub-aquatic cities the survivors would build beneath the risen seas and of the glorious governance of those cities; no one, with the exception of Shane Joseph, and whatever young people might someday be taught to join him in the erasure of guitar from their consciousnesses, opening in its place the void that would be filled with songs of creation and destruction, the songs of the moss, thank you—and as Shane Joseph finished speaking, Principal Benjamin stood and dimmed the lights. In the ensuing silence, he switched on the overhead projector, showing architectural drawings of a black granite pyramid in the place of the school music trailer. Shortly thereafter, the school music trailer was demolished, but the construction of the pyramid was never completed, and rather than functioning as a power station, it seemed, in its half-finished state, the closest thing to a tomb Principal Benjamin had been accorded. Melba sighed. The memory of Shane Joseph brought her pain. Shane Joseph.

  “He wears an ace bandage?” she said.

  “Not that Shane Joseph!” Gigi Zuzzo snorted. “This Shane Joseph was a vagrant. Vagrants move about on foot, but they also need their arms. Vagrants climb water towers and they scale other things too. Cabooses. Well, Shane Joseph learned the hard way about birds.”

  Melba listened with interest. She had a great fondness for birds. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, she would run up the hill behind the house and play dead upon a rocky eminence, hoping to lure a hungry raptor from the air. After a few hours, supine, staring at the pointillated blue and white of the sky, she would experience restless motion in her limbs and roaring in her ears, and hurry home for freezer pastries and milk. But she would always return to the eminence, dreaming of the young hawk that would descend from the sky to stick its beak into her viscera. She would start up, catching it unawares, and tame it, teaching it to ride upon her forearm, and, in leather gauntlet, she would journey through life providing a perch for a compact, responsive friend whose physical and emotional maintenance would become her great calling. Gigi Zuzzo, however, pronounced the word “bird” so as to emphasize its tinny, brittle quality, alerting Melba to its irreconcilability with the word “friend,” which she knew had a warm center, like runny caramel in a chocolate square.

  “Shane Joseph’s vagrancy brought him to Pike’s ditch,” said Gigi Zuzzo, “but he was only passing through. He didn’t intend to stay there. He was a true vagrant, not the type that’s always looking for some excuse to settle down. But your father invited him to spend the night beneath the footbridge, and Shane Joseph agreed. The next thing … Kablooey!”

  “Kablooey,” echoed Melba.

  “Bird droppings are flammable!” cried Gigi Zuzzo. “Your father treads lightly. He had no problems skimming over the bird droppings that had accumulated under the footbridge. But vagrants shuffle, Melba. They have a shuffling gait, and they tend to take great big breaths, like this, Melba,” Gigi Zuzzu expanded her impressive diaphragm. “It’s a tendency vagrants have. They think it demonstrates that they are unconfined. These breaths are expressive of the vagrant’s sense of freedom, do you understand? Now combine these deep breaths with kicked up bird droppings, rum vapor, and a stubby cigar and what do you get?”

  “Kablooey?” whispered Melba.

  “Kablooey!” It was obvious that Gigi Zuzzo wished she had a small paper lunch bag she could blow up and punch explosively into a wall. She looked longingly at the milk carton Melba held in her hand, but Melba shook it up and down to indicate that it was as yet too full of milk.

  “Your father is lucky Officer Greg and I understand one another,” said Gigi Zuzzo, “or your father would very likely have been accused of vigilantism, or have had his name added to a registry of second-degree murderers and been forced to perform community services, landscaping, decorating paper plates for senior lunches, running the flu clinic, helping Dr. Buck check children for scoliosis and lice.” The conversation ended then, because Gigi Zuzzo, recalling Melba’s curvature, had forced her facedown onto a fitness ball, and spent the remainder of the evening pulling alternately on her left arm and right leg.

  Now, in the bakery, Melba noticed her left shoulder and right hip listing in opposite directions, no doubt the result of her uncorrected S-curve, and she wished she had been more stoic regarding her mother’s ministrations. Her mother’s words ran dizzy laps in her head and she looked at Officer Greg with wonderment.

  “Is it true you understand my mother?” asked Melba. Her question came almost too late. Officer Greg was leaving. She could tell by the way he’d drawn up the corner of his mouth, lifting the bag of pretzels to brace against his chest. Officer Greg spun toward her but, remembering that he did not intend to look at her full on, he overshot the mark, pivoting to present her with his other profile, this one jowly, not nearly as debonair. He blinked rapidly, staring out through the bakery window, squinting even, as though trying to read the backwards lettering frosted on the front of the glass.

  “That case has been solved, Melba,” said Officer Greg in a light tone designed to counteract the intimacy of the disclosure. “I won’t reopen it. You should worry about yourself. There’s nothing secure about your position. I can’t think of a single person who would vouch for anything about you. You say Leslie Duck is your boss, but I don’t have any records of Leslie Duck’s being anyone’s boss. Leslie Duck is a bachelor. The last I heard of Leslie Duck he was moving to the coast to start a banana plantation.”

  Melba’s mouth opened and closed. It had been quite some time since she’d laid eyes on Leslie Duck. And he had been talking about ba
nanas!

  “Let me tell you something about bananas,” Leslie Duck had said. “They’re blanks, Melba. Sterile! Isn’t that wonderful? There’s so much fecundity in fruit form. It disgusts me, all the juices and seeds. I spit them! Pah! The banana is different. There’s something self-contained about a banana. I don’t just mean the peel, which has a prophylactic quality. The banana itself is reserved, dry and continent, no leaks. You can really hold onto a banana. You can eat it or you can keep it by your side, in your pocket, or in a banana pouch slung from your belt.” He showed Melba his banana pouch.

  “Is that rabbit fur?” she asked.

  “Badger,” said Leslie Duck, thumbing the mussed hairs. What else had he said? Melba could not remember. Surely nothing about leaving Dan for good? She glanced around the bakery. Everything seemed in order, not at all as though the owner had abdicated, severing the employer-employee relation, transforming the bakery into an acephalous establishment, a chaotic zone of rogue interactions and escalating depravity. The rubberized maps were in place by the customer entrance; the refrigerator was stocked with bottles of chocolate milk and orange soda; the napkin dispenser on the counter bulged with napkins. Officer Greg had left a piece of tape on the brass drawer of the enormous cash register, but police officers left tape in all kinds of places; it meant nothing.

  “Am I trespassing?” asked Melba in bewilderment. “I thought I was working.”

  Officer Greg looked almost pitying. “I’ll get to the bottom of it,” he promised. “That’s what I do. I’m like a submersible. Just remain calm and go through your day as you would normally, as though you were Melba Zuzzo, daughter and bakery employee.”

  “I’m a sister too!” Melba burst out.

  Officer Greg shook his head. “Calm, Melba. No wild claims. No histrionics. I’m taking the evidence to the station.” He paused, shifting the paper bag in his arms.

  “Hmmm,” he said, looking down at the bag with real fondness, stroking a crinkle with his fingertip. “Melba, you know, I do hope you work here. I’d hate to consider this bag contraband. Now, what about the Danish with the cheese?” Numbly, Melba plucked a cheese Danish from its tray with the metal tongs and thrust it toward Officer Greg. He opened the bag and Melba dropped the Danish inside.