Marvel and a Wonder

by Joe Meno

  Then there was a hot feeling along the back of the old man’s neck, as if someone was standing behind him, and when he glanced over, he saw that he was not alone; it was the same yellow-eyed man from the wrecked pickup, the one who had been on the side of the road. He looked like he had been lashed; his black hair was plastered up against his sweaty forehead with a swipe of blood. He was standing gingerly, leaning against one of the used cars, balancing himself with the fingers of his left hand, the right holding a pistol. The grandfather’s eyes did not shift, locked upon the other man’s, the horse motionless now.

  The two of them—the grandfather and horse—stood like an old-time photograph or pulp illustration, white hat tipped back upon the old man’s head, a grim expression on his face. The stranger pushed off the hood of a car, then inched forward. He stumbled from the front end of one vehicle to the front end of another, the gun still upraised. The grandfather studied the stranger’s eyes, seeing the pain in the man’s wrenched-up features, noticing the desperate glare in the mark of his lip, and watched as the intruder slipped some, catching himself on a weather-beaten Chevrolet. The stranger steadied himself, moaning; and it was then that the grandfather went for his own sidearm, clumsily lifting it from the back of his pants, the gun wavering before him like a flag, some indistinct warning, though the stranger kept on coming.

  The grandfather could see the fearlessness, the nerve in the other man’s face, and held his own weapon out, tightening his grip, knowing it would do no good, seeing the inevitability of what was coming like night and day; the other’s shadow inched closer, now only a couple of feet away, the horse standing beside the grandfather with an air of exhaustion, quivering, both of them struggling to remain upright. Grimacing, the stranger pointed the gun at the grandfather’s stomach, the old man finding himself too tired to fight, his arm feeling heavy, the pistol now dangling uselessly before him.

  The stranger said something Jim did not hear but understood the import of. The grandfather shook his head. The stranger said whatever he had to say again, taking a final step forward. The old man ignored this and looked over at the animal. He put a weak hand out, touching its shivering white flesh. If it is God; if it is only a test; if it is a message; if. Then the old man thought, To give in; to come so far; to just let go; and lowering his hand to his side, he thought, Go. Then again, Go.

  Unspeaking, the grandfather pointed the gun toward the sky and jerked the trigger, the gunshot an eruption of both sound and light, the mare rearing up, tossing back its great neck, front hooves rising upward then crashing against the pavement, flying off once more, a blur of steaming silver-white, the grandfather having done all he could, all there was to do, seeing the animal vanish as it rounded a corner down the street, the stranger holding the gun out before him, infuriated, mouth slightly agape, discharging the pistol directly at the old man’s middle, a flash of muzzle fire, the grandfather there for a moment, swaying, legs going weak, collapsing to his back along the uneven blacktop, the stranger pausing, glaring down into the old man’s face with a look not of remorse nor guilt but one of pity, then disappearing, the stranger moving off in an clumsy hurry, away from where the horse had just fled, having given up now too, creeping back between the parked cars, his shadow replaced by the shadow of some other shapeless moving thing. The old man lay there as drapes quickly unparted, shades pulled open, the sound of gunfire traveling through the town’s sleep and dreams, the horse’s advancement along the town’s street reporting like the bell tolling once again, then growing fainter, beautiful, indistinct. He peered up into the sky and tried to catch his breath, placing his hand upon the thudding cavity of his chest. Now he could sleep and there would be no horse nor highway nor town nor trees. He smiled and saluted with his eyes the colored flags snapping in the breeze.

  _________________

  The boy heard both gunshots and ran off in their direction. Before him, kneeling in an open lot of mottled grass and broken pavement, was the horse, its ribs appearing and disappearing between short breaths; then it was falling onto its side, head impassive, heavily lidded eye opening and closing with difficulty. The boy knelt beside it, careful of its bloody foreleg. There was also blood from somewhere near its front quarters and somewhere else along its back. He placed a hand on its throat and looked down, watching the eyelid blink, the sun streaming across the horse’s skin with an unjust light.

  Forty yards away he saw his grandfather’s legs jutting out from beside a row of used automobiles. The boy ran toward the worn-looking boots just as a state trooper’s vehicle and a local squad car pulled up behind him. Ten minutes passed before an ambulance from the neighboring town of Coldwater arrived. The two paramedics got his grandfather on a stretcher and loaded him headfirst into the back of the ambulance, the old man’s eyes closed, mouth agape behind a plastic oxygen mask, pulse failing. Everything then—the sun, the stars, his grandfather’s face—had gone white.

  _________________

  Over the muddy fields, the meadow grass bowing beneath the platinum hooves—horseshoes flashing like gunfire, like silver in a mine, one after another, brief points in a distant sky—thrashing over the sodden earth, on and on, the horse moving so fast it looked like it had climbed directly into the firmament, the grandfather and boy standing against the snake-rail fence, their twin shadows reaching away from the sun, the two of them silent, their mouths drawn, their hands too far to touch, the sun beginning its descent, the two shadows at the fence shifting toward one another, becoming a single figure of blackness, the horse a third shadow racing against itself with a violent, unassailable abandon, the two of them, grandfather and grandson, together against the fence rail, dreaming of other things.

  _________________

  By the time Jim came to, he found he was flying, a silver gurney stretched out beneath him, feet pointed skyward, the two paramedics lifting him headfirst onto the emergency room bed. The boy was beside him then, face appearing like a globe in the corner of the old man’s eyes. The grandfather blinked as a sign of recognition, of appreciation. The boy stood in silence near the open curtain as the doctors and nurses worked, seeing the old man’s chest rise then fall, rise then fall, rise then fall. His grandfather’s eyes looked softer than anything the boy had ever seen before. The boy took a step forward and held the old man’s hand, the fingers callused, the palms full of blisters, and saw his grandfather’s face staring back obscured by the oxygen mask, eyes full of fear and something else unfamiliar. Beneath the plastic mask, there was a weak smile. The boy tried to smile back. The electronic monitor began to drone, the old man’s heart failing, the doctor placing his white-gloved palms on the old man’s bare chest, pushing anxiously, counting out the compressions, the monitor repetitive in its static lull, then there was a cough, then a gasp, the electronic alarm wailing, the boy looking down at the darkened, yellowed half-moons of the grandfather’s fingernails, the old man’s hand in his own hand becoming the most important thing in the world, the contours of the grandfather’s uneven lips, the map of his wrinkled neck, all of it too important to shut your eyes to.

  _________________

  In the emergency room, three hours later, the boy sat watching the nurse take his grandfather’s pulse behind the pale-blue curtain. She held his wrist like it was a child’s, then set it down and tucked it beneath the blue blanket. She wrote something on the chart, checked the IV, and wrote something else before exiting.

  Then they were alone. The boy stood there still for some time before putting a hand on the old man’s blanketed foot. “I didn’t know who to call so I called Mr. Northfield. He said he’s gonna drive down tonight. He wanted to let you know he was gonna bill you for every mile.”

  The grandfather blinked slowly.

  “There’s a policeman and a state trooper out there. They said they want to talk to you. But the doctor said they have to wait. So all you got to do now is rest.”

  The grandfather blinked again.

  The boy coughed, then adjusted hi
s glasses and peered down again. “You have to get better soon.” Then, lowering his head, speaking softer now, “You’re all I got left.”

  The grandfather blinked once more. The boy lifted his hand from the old man’s foot and turned to face the curtain. He couldn’t decide if he should stay or go out in the waiting room.

  “I better let you rest,” he finally said.

  The grandfather squinted sharply.

  The boy saw his pained expression and frowned. “Unless you’d like me to stay.”

  The grandfather answered with his eyes and the boy sat down. The grandfather seemed to smile before slowly shutting his eyelids. Tomorrow, when he awoke, he would tell the boy what he thought, he would tell him everything. Tomorrow.

  For A.L.

  Thank you to Koren, Lucia, Nicolas. Thanks to Johnny Temple, Johanna Ingalls, Ibrahim Ahmad, Aaron Petrovich, and everyone at Akashic for their unending courage and unflagging support. Thank you to James Vickery for his insights as an early reader, Todd Baxter for his conversation and encouragement, Jon Resh for his enduring friendship and design acumen. Thanks to my family. Thanks to the Department of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, its faculty, staff, and students. Thanks to Maria Massie, Sylvie Rabineau, Gil Netter, and Arthur Spector.

  JOE MENO is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and a finalist for the Story Prize. He is the editor of Chicago Noir: The Classics and the author of two short story collections and multiple novels including the best sellers Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails; Office Girl; and his latest novel, Marvel and a Wonder. He is a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.

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  of the opening pages of

  Office Girl

  ___________________

  ANYWAY IT’S SNOWING.

  But then there is the absolute bullshit of it! The amazing gall of some people! Who does he even think he is? Odile Neff, art-school dropout, age twenty-three, rides her green bicycle along the snowy streets of the city that evening at five p.m., arguing with herself. She is wearing one gray sock and one black sock and her faint-pink underwear, hidden beneath her long gray skirt, is dirty. It is January 1999, one year before the world as everyone knows it is about to end. Communism, like God, is already dead.

  Having just finished an eight-hour shift conducting telephone surveys for an international research company—How many members in your family? What sort of hair spray do you use? How often do you use your hair spray? Have you noticed any dermatological irritations, including but not limited to eczema, carbuncles, warts, or various skin cancers, in connection with the frequent use of your hair spray? Has your hair spray ever interfered with the quality of your life?—she is now riding home and swearing to herself about something she is having a difficult time understanding, and about the person who has become the cause of all her grief. Her green hood is up, completely covering her small white ears, green scarf bound around her chin, the hem of her gray skirt blowing as she pedals along. It’s only the second week of January but the winter has already become a verifiable pain in the neck. She wears her pink mittens which have become unknotted, the pale pink penumbras of her fingernails peeking out. And with these mittens she holds the cold plastic of the bicycle’s handles, cursing to herself again and again.

  “Asshole!” she shouts out loud. “Why won’t you talk to me? Why not just talk to me and be honest about everything?”

  She never thought she would be so stupid, and yet, here she is. Her fancy pearlescent shoes, bought for twelve bucks at the thrift store, keep slipping off the pedals, making her even more frustrated. The gray sky, the waxy unending weather, the caliginous buildings rising up in humorless planes of speckled silver glass, all of it makes her feel so small, so tiny. The snow continues its liberated march in considerable flakes, falling all around in achromatic sheets of bleary chalk. Also, there is his gray sock, Paul’s gray sock, sitting in the left pocket of her parka, which she has been carrying around for the last few days.

  Why am I so stupid? she asks herself again. Why do I keep wanting to be with him?

  Her face is an abject expression of disgust, mouth twisted to the side in a frown, narrow eyebrows raised.

  Is it just because I’m not supposed to? Is it just because he’s married? Is it just because I thought I had the world by the balls and I always end up making a mess of everything?

  Her green bicycle, unable to answer, only vibrates with rage.

  AT A STOPLIGHT.

  Odile pauses a block later at a stoplight which has become obscured by ice. She looks over and sees a bus idling beside the curb. On the side of the bus is an advertisement for some men’s hair dye that promises to be SO FEROCIOUS! Odile grabs the silver paint marker from the pocket of her green coat and uncaps the pen and leans over and draws a pair of enormous silver breasts on the male model in the advertisement and then adds a pair of hairy, dangling, unkempt testicles between his legs. Beneath this pictogram she writes, You are an idiot, Paul. She then caps the pen, shoves it back into her pocket, and rides off through the uninterrupted snow.

  A NOSE UNLIKE HER MOTHER’S.

  Odile, pronounced O-deel, has dark hair, which runs just past her shoulders, a wide forehead, which is framed by uneven bangs she cut herself, and a pair of gray-blue eyes that are set several inches apart in a soft, heart-shaped face. The size of her eyes, larger than most girls’, lends a quality of constant amazement to all of her facial expressions. Her ears are attached to her head at a spot lower than average, and are also a little wider, suggesting an elfish affectation, though this is hardly noticeable, as it’s her large, gleaming eyes that draw you in. Her nose is neither long nor snub and is rounded in appearance, as it often is on the faces of girls of European descent. Her nose is unlike her mother’s, who at first glance may appear to be the greater beauty, as there is a small bump along the left side of the bridge of Odile’s nose, imperceptible to anyone who has not spent an afternoon lying in bed beside her, listening to the song she loves the most, “After Hours” by the Velvet Underground, or admiring her profile in the dark of a theater, ignoring the black-and-white film by John Cassavetes. This very small bump is the consequence of an ice-skating accident that occurred when Odile was six, and, on deeper inspection, only adds to her attractiveness. It allows the viewer to wonder what other worlds, what other small pleasures, there are to discover. Like the small beehive tattoo on her left wrist, which is so faint it’s almost invisible: What does it mean? How old was she when she got it? Will she tell about it you if you sleep together? You look at it and then up at her open mouth, at the sensitive lips, the lips rounder and somehow more adventurous than you noticed at first glance, the mouth already smiling, already laughing at something you said or did.

  At the moment, atop her bicycle, her mouth is partially occluded by a green scarf, though it’s moving as she continues arguing with herself out loud. She curses at a cab driver and swerves past a woman with an incredibly wrinkly face, dressed in a gray fur coat. The woman’s arms are piled high with packages, each of them tied nicely with a white string bow. Your face looks just like an elephant’s, she wants to say but means it in the nicest possible way. And look out: there’s another drift.

  BUT TEN YEARS BEFORE.

  At the age of twelve, two weeks before her thirteenth birthday, Odile was molested by a group of boys who were several years older. It was after ice-skating practice one afternoon: Odile was waiting outside the rec center for her mother to come pick her up in the plain beige station wagon when five young men, boys from the nearby public school, found her sitting on the snowcovered merry-go-round and then began to taunt her. One of them had a ski mask on, another a red scarf around his face. She ignored them at first but when
the boy with the mask leaned over and said something dirty, like, “Do you want to take a bite of my dick?” she stood, trying to run back inside the rec center. After a few steps through the snow they chased her over to the bottom of the cold metal slide, and then they took turns holding her down while each of them put their hands all over her, one of them, a boy with a dark peach-fuzz mustache, going so far as to get her black tights down to her knees. Another boy, who had a face like a mussel, all droopy and white and silvered-over with sweat, was the one peering over her when Odile realized it was she who was screaming. And then, somehow, she got her left hand free and grabbed ahold of his right ear and pulled as hard as she could. The boy shouted and rolled off and then one of the other boys hit Odile in the side of the head with a clod of snow and then she just laid there like she had died. The fact that she hadn’t died was, in fact, an awful kind of disappointment. She watched through a swollen eye as the boys all walked off. And then she got up a few minutes later and stumbled over to where her bag was lying, unfamiliar as an amputated limb, and then, holding her sore ear, her sore cheek, she limped to find her mother parked out in front, humming along to Sonny and Cher on the radio. Odile told no one about the incident and instead decided that if such a situation should happen ever again, she would force her attackers to kill her first. Having survived such a particularly violent and thoughtless assault, Odile found she was no longer afraid of anything.

  AT THE CORNER OF DAMEN AND AUGUSTA.