Collected Short Stories: Volume IV

by Barry Rachin

  George cut a piece of meat with his fork and swirled it in the brown gravy. “Mr. Richardson is a paranoid jerk. He doesn’t just hate white people, he hates everybody.”

  Sade told George that her father referred to Jamaicans as ‘Jewmaicans’, because, once they arrived from the island with their immigrant-status green card, they started saving up to buy rental property which they promptly let to poor, native-born Afro-Americans.

  He didn’t especially like Haitians either. The women were all goody two-shoes, religious fanatics who mixed traditional Catholicism with voodoo and animism. Their religious mumbo gumbo was enough to make a respectable, college-educated Negro throw up! That’s what Sade told him. Not that George had any intention of sharing any of this with his parents.

  “I love Sade Richardson pure and simple. Nobody can keep us apart.” George spoke with grim determination.

  “Try telling that to the guy who lives on the other side of that fence,” Mr. Wiener shot back in a surly voice.

  George toyed with his squash. His mother had basted the top with a glaze of brown sugar and honey before placing it in the oven. George laid his fork down next the plate and rose from the table. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Mr. Wiener’s voice sounded childishly hysterical.

  “To have a little chat with the neighbor who lives on the other side of the cedar fence.”

  George walked briskly out the door into the fading light, crossed over to the Richardson’s property and rang the bell. “Sade’s not here.” The wife answered the door. “She’s at basketball practice.”

  “I need to speak to your husband.”

  Mr. Richardson inched up behind his wife with his moody mug pressed close to the screen door. “You don’t get along with my folks,” George said, “but that has nothing to do with me.” He turned and pointed at the basketball net at the far end of the driveway. “The next time I see Sade outside shooting hoops, I’m coming over to visit. If you don’t like it, call the police.”

  “You got some god-awful nerve!” The man made a motion toward the screen door but his wife blocked his way.

  George pointed a second time at the transparent backboard and cotton net. “I’m in love with your daughter,” he added stonily, “and in another eight or ten years I could end up being your son-in-law, so we got to get beyond this childish bickering.” Mr. Richardson’s mouth fell open. He didn’t look angry anymore. The expression on his face was one of utter bewilderment. Quite possibly for the first time in his adult life, the man was at a loss for words.

  “Yes, George, that sounds fair enough,” Mrs. Richardson blurted, although it was unclear what, if anything, she was referring to as she slammed the door shut.

  The youth went home and picked up where he had left off with the butternut squash. Mr. Wiener and his wife had finished their own dinner and placed the dirty plates on the counter next to the sink. They sat drinking Bigelow tea while their son ate his meatloaf, mashed potatoes and butternut squash flavored with brown sugar and honey. There was no mention of the Richardson’s feud, airborne propane tanks, restraining orders or a thirteen year-old Jewish boy’s romantic predilections.

  *****

  Toward the end of the E. M. Forster novel, one of the main characters, Mr. Emerson, described life as a public performance on a violin in which you must learn the instrument as you go along. Standing there on the Richardsons’ front stoop with the parents staring out at him from behind the screen door, George Wiener had flailed away on his flimsy, student-level instrument for all it was worth. At no point did the youth lose nerve. He never felt more alive, in control of his adolescent destiny, as when he was reading Attila the Hun – a.k.a. Melvin Richardson - the riot act.

  Later that night Mrs. Wiener entered her son’s bedroom and stood stiffly by the night table. “You never mentioned what happened over at the Richardsons’.”

  In the darkness, George lay back under the covers and considered the question. “That man is still fighting the Civil War.” He didn’t quite know what else to say about his abortive confrontation. “What he did last week was an act of both historical protest and personal anguish, but I don’t think he will be hurling any more propane tanks over the fence.”

  “Well that’s a relief!” Mrs. Wiener turned around and abruptly left the room. George listened but didn’t hear his mother’s footfalls descending the stairs. Rather, she lingered on the upstairs landing, mulling something over in her mind. Finally she trudged back into the room. “Do you remember the Disney movie Bambi?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “In the early spring, all the animals became ‘twitterpated’, intoxicated with love. They chose a soul mate, a life partner, and went romping through the fields and meadows.” Mrs. Wiener sat down on the edge of the bed. “Puppy love – that’s what you’re feeling right now for the Richardson girl.”

  “Sade. Her name is Sade and it’s not puppy love,” George replied. “Puppy love is a shallow and transient emotion that can evaporate in a fickle heartbeat.”

  “Yes, that’s true.” Mrs. Wiener felt stymied, outfoxed by her son’s semantic precision. “I stand corrected.” Rising from the bed, she left the room and retreated down the stairs.

  *****

  In the morning, George dug through the compost heap where his parents had been dumping banana peels, eggshells, coffee grounds, fruit and other degradable refuse in a shallow pit. Inside ten minutes he assembled a muddy can full of writhing worms and night crawlers. Around eight o’clock he headed out to the Brandenburg Reservoir. On the second cast he hooked a largemouth bass. Deftly playing the muscular fish into shore, he removed the hook, threading a nylon rope through the gills and back out the mouth before tossing the tethered fish into the shallow water.

  Around eleven o’clock Sade appeared. “Come with me,” George said flatly. “He led the way back out into an open meadow carpeted with cornflowers, chicory, ivory-colored baby’s breath and snapdragon.

  “What about the fishing gear?”

  George waved the question off. On the far side of the meadow a muddy trail half-buried in undergrowth led back down to the water. “Look over there to your left.”

  They were standing on a rock ledge extending out over an algae-choked stretch of placid water. There were rotting tree stumps, cat-o’-nine-tails; and a swarm of dragon flies flitting back and forth in the marshy shallows. “I don’t see anything.”

  George raised his hand and indicated a row of blackened stumps jutting out from the murky water. “That flat rock beside the third stump from your left.”

  Sade’s body tightened and the breath caught like a jagged bone in her throat. Involuntarily, the girl took a step backward. Fifty feet away, sunning itself on the granite rock was a medium-size snake. The body was tattooed with brown, tan and gray crossbands. The broad head jutted out distinct from the neck, the snout blunt in profile with the top of the head extending forward slightly further than the mouth. The body had a heavy build, the tail moderately long and slender.

  “It’s a water moccasin.” George’s voice hardly rose above a whisper. “I came down here first before going to the cove, but as soon as I saw our friend sunning himself, I immediately left.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Leave,” George replied. “The cove is a good three hundred feet away, but vipers are strong swimmers and that nasty brute could cover the distance in five minutes without even breaking a sweat.”

  “I thought snakes were cold blooded.”

  “You know what I mean.” George turned and led the way back to the fishing hole, where he collected his gear. Before reaching the street, the woods emptied out into an open meadow speckled with wildflowers, the honey-colored grass in some places waist high. When they were a reasonably safe distance from the water, George threw himself down on the warm earth and Sade snuggled up next to him.

  “You stopped by my house the other day.” There was no reply. George was still worrying about the water
moccasin. The mature snake looked to be about three feet long, grown strong on a diet of frogs, small fish and carrion. In the future when he fished the cove, he needed to be more vigilant, sweep the grassy shoreline and underbrush regularly with his eyes for uninvited guests. And, of course, he would warn Sade against joining him in the future. “My father says,” she interrupted his reveries, “you’re the craziest, little shithead he ever met.”

  George just smiled. A scattering of chickadees careened drunkenly through the early morning sunshine, flitting through the lower branches of the pine trees that rimmed the meadow. “I’m in love with you.”

  She rolled over in the tufted grass, her cheek resting lightly on his chest. “Now tell me something I don’t already know.” The tone was smug, gently mocking.

  George told her about his favorite author’s theory of the ‘muddle’ and how life often resembled an impromptu violin performance. Then he told her that, according to Forster, there was only a certain amount of kindness in the world, just as there was only a certain amount of light. “‘Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.’ That’s what Forster said." When the boy finished talking, she snuggled closer draping a leg over his thigh. The sun was almost directly overhead now, the temperature drifting into the low eighties. The sweet aroma of pine sap mixed with wildflowers perfumed the air. “Well?” he pressed.

  “Well what?” She rested an arm on his chest, and he brought a hand up around the small of her back.

  “Was it worth hearing?”

  She caressed his face with a free hand. In no great hurry a turgid bumblebee lumbered by en route to a clump of orangey flowers. “No, like everything else you tell me, it was stupid as hell.” The Chickadees’ chatter was joined by the rhythmic hammering of a woodpecker. A pastel, earth-colored moth was feasting on nectar in a bell-shaped ivory flower.

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  Twin Souls

  According to Mahatma Gandhi,” Mavis Calhoun announced breathlessly, “society’s coming apart at the seams, collapsing under the weight of technology gone berserk.” Mavis took a quick sip of coffee. “Personal computers, CD-Roms, faxes, supersonic jets - ”

  “There were no personal computers with CD-Rom in Gandhi’s time,” Harry corrected. “No faxes either.”

  “That’s not the point,” Mavis blustered. “Personal happiness can’t be reduced to a fat bank accounts or income property.”

  Mavis and Harry Wong Smith were on ten-minute break, sipping tepid coffee in the Shop Rite Supermarket employee lounge. Twenty-nine year-old Mavis had relocated to Brandenburg, Massachusetts almost a year earlier to the day. She landed the cashier’s job in February. In his senior year of high school, Harry bagged groceries and stocked shelves. “Societies gone bonkers,” Mavis reaffirmed, “and we need to resist the urge.”

  “Which urge?”

  “To join the unenlightened masses… drink from the well with the crazy water.”

  Harry shook his head up and down as if on cue, a bogus gesture. But then, Mavis’ thinking was so outmoded and unfashionable—like something out of the psychedelic sixties, his parent’s whacked-out generation. A culture built on tie-dyed T-shirts, flower power, twenty year-olds chanting secret mantras and waiting for the millennium or Armageddon - whichever came first.

  Mavis grew up in Knoxville, on the Tennessee River. Her father worked for a lumber firm, harvesting tulip-poplar, hickory, yellow pine, red and white oak. The summer before she moved East, Mavis and her new husband, Travis, traveled to the Blue Ridge Mountains and climbed Clingman’s Dome, at 6643 feet the highest peak in the state. Mountain laurel, redbud and irises rimmed the trail. Mavis saw five wild turkeys and a brood of mottled, brownish ruffed grouse in the bush. The adult male kept up an unearthly drumming sound with its wings trying to frighten the newlyweds away. These were the sort of things Mavis told Harry when he wasn’t running price checks on kiwi fruit or chasing down abandoned shopping carts in the supermarket parking lot.

  Harry didn’t know or particularly care if any of what Mavis was telling him was true. He could listen to her lilting voice for hours - for the better part of eternity. Stare into her cocoa-brown eyes, while watching the pouty bottom lip form syrupy phrases like ‘dervish whirling’, ‘right livelihood’, and ‘transmigration of souls’. Content was irrelevant. A lecture from Mavis on the intricacies of backyard composting would have left Harry equally spellbound.

  Mavis smiled displaying a set of perfectly white, even teeth. Her shoulder length hair was straight and black, the nose compact. Except for the pearly teeth, there was nothing particularly remarkable about Mavis Calhoun. Still, the ditsy woman got under Harry’s skin like an itch. Not so much an itch as an irresistible craving.

  Harry had his own theory about the woman.

  Mavis Calhoun was 'covertly' beautiful. The woman possessed an untapped potential for hidden loveliness - a confused landscape of precious imperfections. Hers was not the fragile beauty of classic line and unblemished texture but, rather, a quality resembling the unpredictable exuberance of wild flowers - of catchfly and purple coneflower; the eagerness and zeal of chicory and yarrow; the scruffy, unassuming ardor of scarlet phlox and Queen Anne's lace.

  In a rash moment of over exuberance, Harry once told Mavis something of the sort, but the guileless woman balked, didn’t know what to make of the odd remark. Back hand compliment or sincere flattery? Mavis simply rolled her chestnut-colored eyes and spoke of something else. Harry never broached the issue again.

  In recent weeks, when Mavis tried to snare him with the metaphysical mumbo jumbo, Harry focused on her teeth. The two, sturdy slabs, top front, so durable and immaculate, were symbolic of the woman’s spiritual perfection. Twin alabaster tiles, unblemished by nicotine or periodontal complications.

  “What’s your husband’s take on Eastern philosophy?”

  Mavis scowled. “I showed Travis a picture of Gandhi in his white robe; he said the mahatma looked like a flea-bitten faggot.”

  Travis Calhoun dropped his wife off at work two or three nights a week. A heavyset man, most days he was unshaven and wore torn jeans with a rebel flag sewn on the back of his dungaree jacket. Married at eighteen, they were high school sweethearts. One pregnancy early in the marriage ended in miscarriage. Mavis never became pregnant again. When Harry mentioned the stillbirth, Mavis swallowed hard and looked away. For the remainder of the day, outside of an occasional price check, there was no carefree banter, and Harry had the presence of mind to leave the woman alone. “No, I wouldn’t think your husband would be overly interested in Eastern philosophy.”

  Mavis splayed the fingers of her left hand and studied the wedding ring. The tiny diamond, more like a chip than a bona fide, precious gem, glinted weakly. “That’s why,” Mavis confided breathlessly, “It’s such a blessing to find a spiritual twin soul.”

  Another of Mavis’ cockamamie notions held that Harry Wong and Mavis Calhoun were twin souls. She shared this intimation recently in a mad gush of esoterica and Harry, too smitten with her infuriating loveliness, couldn’t disagree. “We really should be getting back,” he said and gulped the last of his coffee.

  In the late seventies, Harry’s parents traveled to Guilin in southern China to adopt a baby girl. The orphanage, which sat at the base of an outcropping of limestone pinnacles rising six hundred feet in the air, offered the Americans a package deal. Six months earlier a boy with a wandering eye was born in a nearby province. The distraught parents brought the child to the baby home. One eye gazed curiously about the lobby while the other eye flitted indiscriminately in space. “Our child has a wicked demon,” the mother said and, with her husband, hurried quickly away.

  Strabismus: an imbalance of the eye muscle in which one eye cannot focus. A simple operation at Children’s Hospital in Boston rid Harry Wong Smith of the ancestral curse. An act of gratitude, the Smiths inc
luded the biological parents’ last name on the birth certificate. East meets west. Harry Wong Smith - a semantic absurdity. Harry never used his middle name - not on signatures, certainly not in public.

  One afternoon in early April, Harry visited the Brandenburg library. “I’m researching Bernoulli’s principle.”

  “Could you be a bit more specific?” The reference librarian was completely bald but sported a thick black beard as though his facial hair had been relocated from the naked skull.

  “Bernoulli studied planes,… aerodynamics.”

  The librarian came out from behind the desk and led Harry up a flight of stairs to the rear of the building. “You should find what you're looking here.” He pointed to a row of books at chest height and went back to his post. Harry selected three volumes and took them into the reading room. Daniel Bernoulli - he found a lengthy reference in the appendices of the second book.

  The bulge in the upper surface of an airplane wing makes this surface longer than the lower portion. Because the air above moves faster, it exerts less pressure creating an upward imbalance.

  Harry began making notes. At the photocopier, he reproduced several diagrams, went back to the table where he had left the other texts and began assembling a bibliography of sources.

  Less pressure is exerted by a fluid that is flowing faster than ...

  “Fancy meeting you here!” Mavis Calhoun was standing on the far side of the table clutching a sheet of paper in her hand. She wore a summery cotton dress and a string of pearl. The impish smile tore his heart out, churned his mind to mush. She raised the sheet up over her head like a trophy. “You’re looking at the happiest woman in the world!” “That man,” she gestured in the direction of the reference librarian, “gave me this list of the one hundred favorite novels recommended by the American Library Guild.”