by Barry Rachin
“Drivers are needed to deliver meals to the subsidized housing on Woodward Ave.” Mavis had her coat on and was fishing in her pocket for the car keys. “This was such a joy! I’m going to do it every year.” Mavis stretched, rising up on her toes and kissed Harry lightly on the cheek. “Merry Christmas, Harry!”
Around two o’clock, coffee and dessert were served and the meal was officially over. Harry went into the men’s room to pee. The three men Harry noticed earlier were smoking cigarettes outside the door as Harry brushed by and entered the bathroom. “Ain’t that the Chink waiting tables?” It was the voice of the gaunt, goofy-looking fellow.
Harry positioned himself in front of a urinal and unzipped his fly. “A room full of horny white guys and look who the foxy bitch sucks face with.” Again, it was the infantile winker running off at the mouth. He lowered his voice and, to Harry’s great relief, the running commentary became unintelligible. After a minute there was a raucous outburst of indecent hoots. Harry waited until the threesome had gone back to their seats before sneaking out the back door.
*****
In May Harry was accepted to Boston University. His senior prom was scheduled at the Biltmore in downtown Providence. The Paul Borelli big band would set up in the main ballroom. He didn’t have a date yet. Tuesday afternoon when Harry arrived at Shop Rite, another woman was working the middle register. “Mavis never showed,” the woman reported flatly. “No call. No nothing.”
An hour later, three policemen entered the store and requested, Molly Pruitt, the store manager. They spoke informally near the recycling bins; one officer penciled notes on a loose-leaf pad. Toward six o’clock fragments of second-hand information began to circulate. Mavis was at the hospital. A bad car accident. Head injuries. Broken teeth. The husband was dead.
Harry hurried to the manager’s office. “There’s been some talk - ”
The manager looked up. Her face was pale, expressionless. “Not now,” she said tersely and waved Harry out of the room.
Harry cornered Nellie Higgins at customer service and asked about the accident. Nellie looked even worse than Molly Pruitt. “There wasn’t any accident. Mavis’ husband came home drunk and beat the crap out of her. Busted up her face something awful, according to the cops. She’s still at the hospital. Be released home in a day or so, poor woman.”
Harry felt his brain convulse, crushed like an animal’s paw in a steel-trap. “The husband?”
“Cleaned out their joint bank account and flew the coop. Cops figure he headed south… got relatives and friends down there.” Nellie leaned over the counter. “We’re taking up a collection... to get Mavis a nice fruit basket and a card.”
“Fruit basket,” Harry repeated hollowly and groped his way to the men’s room where he sat on a toilet with the door closed and lowered his head between his legs.
Some ugly bitch who can’t neither hear nor talk. A deaf mute.
Harry remembered Travis’ drawling commentary. How he laughed like a treacherous fool, a Judas Iscariot, with Mavis, no more than twenty feet away, drying the last of the dishes.
In the morning, Harry bunked school and headed over to the hospital. Mavis was sitting in the solarium with a hospital-issue robe thrown over her shoulders. Both eyes were smudged black, the sooty discoloration fanning to the delicate lashes, bleeding down the cheekbone like spilled ink. “Travis hits real hard.”
Harry gripped the back of a hardwood chair and held on like a drowning man. The two front teeth were gone, snapped off at the gum line, leaving a gap five-eighths of an inch across and half an inch deep. “Why did he do it?”
Mavis folded her hands demurely in her lap. “For the fun of it.”
“What’s wrong with your eye?”
She patted the side of her face gingerly. “He broke my cheekbone. The eye won’t focus.” Mavis opened her mouth and pointed. “My medical insurance has a deductible on dental... five hundred dollar. And I’m already in hock up to my ears.”
A nurse pushing a wheelchair ahead of her entered the solarium. “Need another X-ray of that cheek.”
Mavis transferred to the wheelchair and sat legs askew like a rag doll, slumped at an angle. “It was sweet of you to come.” The nurse pushed off, leaving Harry standing in an empty, sun-drenched room.
A week later, Harry heard, through word of mouth, that Mavis was back at Fox Run. Travis Calhoun had been sighted at a cabin his uncle owned in Murfreesboro on the west fork of the Stones River. But when the police arrived he was long gone, driven deep into the rural brush by enlightened self-interest.
Harry went to visit Mavis one night after work. “How’re you feeling?”
The raccoon mask had faded to a sickly yellow tinged with olive. “Much better. The double vision’s gone.”
Both eyes seemed to be cooperating quite nicely. “I had a similar problem with one of my eyes when I was a baby,” Harry said. “Any word on your husband?”
Mavis smiled. “Called from a truck stop in Georgia. Apologized half a million times for what he did. Cried like a baby.”
“Yes, that seems about right.”
Mavis went into the bedroom and returned with the blue-handled revolver. She tipped the muzzle forward and cracked the barrel to reveal a fat, 357 slug in each chamber. “I told him, if he ever showed his face around here, I’d blow his pecker and both testicles off with the defective Smith and Wesson.”
Harry ran a finger over her closed lips, inserting it gently into her mouth, navigating the crevice. “After your husband bashed your exquisite teeth in,” Harry said, “I asked myself what the immortals would do - Gandhi, Krishnamurti, Hermann Hesse, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Tolstoy... the whole, cosmic crew. All the enlightened masters and morally superior beings. I pictured them munching pork lo mein and chugalugging Budweisers till their spiritually-unencumbered brains were fried; listening to whiny hillbilly music and your husband’s sarcastic tirades.”
Harry laid an envelope on the kitchen table. He opened it and a collection of bills - twenties and fifties spilled across the surface of the table. “Five hundred bucks to cover the deductible on your dental insurance.” He nudged the bills toward her. “To get your mouth fixed.”
Mavis collapsed tiredly into the chair and stared at the scattering of money. “This isn’t right.”
“Trust me,” Harry shot back. “Where’re the broken teeth?”
On the counter next to the sugar jar, was a piece of Kleenex, bunched together and tied with a string. She brought the impromptu pouch to the table and carefully unwrapped the tissue. Harry flipped the teeth over several times until they lay front-side up. Identical in every respect, the pale enamel on one was obliterated by a wine-colored stain. “Which is which?”
Mavis shrugged. He took the blotchy tooth to the sink, rinsed the blood away and placed it alongside its mate. “Twin souls!”
After awhile, he rewrapped the teeth in fresh tissue and secured it with the string. “Bring this to the dentist on the first visit.”
“Yes, I’ll certainly do that,” Mavis said. “Would you like some coffee?” Harry shook his head. She put the kettle on to boil. While the water was heating, Harry moved into the living room. On the coffee table was a clothbound collection of spiritual verses. A page toward the rear was dog-eared and a short verse underlined:
Since we’ve seen each other, a game goes on.
Secretly I move, and you respond.
You’re winning, you think it’s funny...
In the kitchen the kettle sent up an insistent, wheezy drone. Mavis brought the warm drinks into the living room. As they talked, Harry hardly noticed the fading raccoon mask or the intermittent, sibilant hiss as her tongue stumbled and faltered through the breach.
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The Reluctant Bigamist
When Karla Pilsudski stopped by her brother’s place, she found Mickey, crouched behind the living room sofa peeking through the curtains. Around his thick neck hung a chain of armo
r-piercing, machine gun shells. The week after his Army discharge, he bored the quarter-inch holes in the soft, brass casings, later threading the bullets together on a length of rawhide. Like so many golden, shark’s teeth, the shells fanned out across a khaki T-shirt with a gash under the left armpit.
Karla placed a grocery bag on the coffee table. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Reconnoitering,” he muttered, without turning his head. “A full battalion of VC recently infiltrated the countryside.”
A gawky woman with plain features and a thin, residual scar below her nose from a harelip, Karla leaned closer for a better look, almost rising up on Mickey’s shoulders piggyback style. In the next yard over, two, oriental girls were building a clumsy, wooden frame with two-by-fours and a bag of 8-penny nails. The rectangular structure lay on the uneven ground. “Your new neighbors are Cambodian, not Vietnamese,” she noted.
Tat. Tat. Tat. The older girl, plump and in her thirties, alternately hammered the studs together then tug them apart. The younger, much prettier girl stood to one side wearing a goofy, ineffectual grin. Lost in adolescent reveries, she held the bag of nails against her meager breasts.
“What are they doing?”
“Building a storage shed.” Mickey gestured with his eyes at a mound of rubble directly behind the girls. “A squad of enemy sympathizers poured the foundation last weekend.”
Karla cringed. “I wish you wouldn’t talk crazy.”
The girls moved a few feet away and were hidden behind a Scotch pine. Mickey lurched to the next window over. Now the tangled clothesline with its T-shaped poles was blocking his view. He had absent-mindedly left the rope out all winter; having repeatedly frozen and thawed so many times, the cotton cord was ruined. Cracked and discolored, the old-fashioned, wooden clothespins weren’t much better. Not that he bothered much with laundry in recent years. A month after they moved in, the Cambodians installed a sleek, umbrella-shaped unit, the metal pole sunk in a foot-deep tub of cement and crushed stone. The clothesline arms folded straight up and out of the way when not in use.
“A friend of mine works at the Providence Housing Authority. He says a Cambodian family in one of their second floor units lined their living room floor with plastic drop clothes, spread a six-inch layer of topsoil and planted rice.”
“Preposterous!” Karla eyed her brother suspiciously. “How did management find out?”
“Drop cloth sprang a leak, flooding the apartment below.”
“Racist hogwash!”
“Yeah, well I’ve heard the same, whacky story from three, semi-reliable sources.” Mickey scratched an inflamed hair follicle buried in his scruffy beard. “Drive down Cranston Street. On every dilapidated corner, all you see are Cambodian markets, nail salons and eateries.”
“Blight with a Southeast Asian hue,” Karla interjected acidly, anticipating his train of thought.
“They doubled and tripled-up in single bedroom apartments,” he ignored her sarcasm. “Extended families of grandparents, in-laws, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, and halfwit second cousins once removed.”
“So what’s your point?” Karla pressed.
Mickey reached into his front pocket and fingered a joint the size of an Italian sweet sausage - pure Maui-wowi. Hawaii's finest. He tested the ends to insure they were twisted tight. “Nothing,” he muttered without conceding defeat. “A simple statement of historical fact.”
It was ninety degrees, the middle of August. In an hour or so, he would pedal his ten-speed bike into Brandenburg Center, sit on an isolated bench in the rear of Veteran’s Memorial Park and get blissfully wrecked. Around two pm, he’d wander over to Bagels and Cream for the luncheon special and a cup of mocha Java cappuccino, then return to his spot in the leafy park until dusk. A perfect day... a no-brainer.
“Goddam nails are too short,” Mickey grumbled peevishly. “The slightest breeze would blow the foolish structure over.”
“It’s none of your business how they build their shed if, in fact, that’s what they’re doing.”
“I wouldn’t build an outhouse with anything less than three-and-a-half inch nails.” Mickey lumbered away from the window and grabbed the grocery bag. “Where’s the Heineken?”
Karla’s expression soured. “Last thing you need,” she said, pointing at a beer gut which resembled a full term pregnancy. Following him into the kitchen, she watched as her brother sorted the groceries.
“You never called my girlfriend. It’s been a month now,” Karla said.
“The gay divorcée?”
She removed an empty beer can from the piano bench. Liquid had seeped through the finish to the porous wood below and left a darkened halo. Most of the furniture had similar, alcohol-induced blemishes. “Betty’s the new deaconess at church. You might have known that if you ever showed up for Sunday services.”
Mickey opened the refrigerator and slid a tub of unsalted butter onto the middle rack. “Her husband ran off.”
“The marriage ended by mutual consent.”
“Then why’d he bail out on the woman?” Mickey pressed.
“Betty,” she said casually, “is a bit of a fussbudget.”
He set a box of pitted prunes in the cupboard. “Which is to say, the woman’s a control freak... an anal compulsive whacko?”
The scar on her top lip flexed and furrowed in a bleak smile. “We’ll put Betty on hold for now.” Karla glanced at her watch. “Kids will be home from school soon. I gotta run.”
She turned to go but Mickey grabbed her arm and gestured in the direction of the Cambodian’s property. “Three, shitty years in Vietnam, and now I got to wake up and look at these slant-eye assholes every day for the rest of my life.”
Mickey glanced distractedly about the bedroom. A cardboard box with empty beer cans lay in one corner. The bed was unmade, the top sheet trailing on the floor. A dust bunny the size of a small rodent peeked out from behind the box. Next to a half-eaten slice of pepperoni pizza, a pile of girlie magazines littered the night table.
Mickey never paid full price. Rather, he bought outdated, remaindered issues - three for ten dollars - the front covers ripped off. Retrieving a carpenter’s belt from the floor, he slipped a hammer into the rawhide loop and clipped a Stanley 25-foot Powerlock II tape measure to the leather pouch.
“Excuse me,” Mickey hollered, stepping over the property line, “but I couldn’t help notice.” The heavier girl straightened up and stared coolly at him while her younger sister giggled and looked embarrassedly away. Mickey drew the tape from his work belt and ran the yellow blade the length of the bottom board. “None of these studs are centered.”
The older girl edged forward and stared blankly at the metal tape. Mickey pointed to a thin, black line with arrows on either end which bisected the blade every 16 inches and began marking the wood with a flat, carpenter’s pencil. “This is where you want the studs for a proper, nailing surface.” Fishing a hammer from the leather belt, he struck the base sharply, separating it from the others boards. The pretty girl jumped, scampering toward the house.
“You barge into our yard uninvited,” the older girl hissed, “and tear our new shed apart.” Squat and nondescript, she had little of the exotic charm usually associated with oriental woman. Using the claw, Mickey began removing the bent nails. “What are you doing now?”
“These nails are too short. They won’t hold a shed together.” Mickey retrieved one of the ruined nails and tossed it over his shoulder.. “Wouldn’t build an outhouse with anything this flimsy.” He lumbered back to his house and returned a moment later with a pail of framing nails and a 48-inch level.
Ignoring the women, he hammered the wood together, two nails in either end, to form a simple box, then sandwiched the remaining, five studs at equal intervals. Placing the level on the foundation, Mickey lifted one end and checked the yellow bubble. “Foundation’s cockeyed. You’ll have to shim the front in order to keep the building straight up and down.”
“And if we choose not to?” The older girl blustered.
Mickey put his hand in his pocket and fingered the bulging joint. “It’s the weekend,” He replied ignoring the question. “I won’t need these tools until Monday morning. Consider the nails a gift, an unsolicited act of Caucasian kindness.” Leaving the tools and nails strewn on the ground, he wandered back to his own house.
Around five, Mickey returned from the park. In the next yard over, the rear and two side walls were standing erect on the foundation which had been shimmed with remnants of cedar shingles to a perfect 90 degrees. “Sonofabitch!” he muttered.
Around eight o’clock, there was a knock at the door. The two, Cambodian sisters were standing on the front stoop with a brown paper bag. “I rang the bell for the longest time,” the older girl noted peevishly. Without being asked, she stepped over the threshold and into the house. “I’m Rasmei Butt and my sister’s name is Mearadey.”
The last person brazen enough to show up unannounced was a Jehovah Witness hawking salvation and back issues of The Watchtower. As the zealot was just getting up a head of apocalyptic steam, Mickey went into the bedroom to locate some of his own, illustrated literature, and the visit was curtailed.
“And you are?” Rasmei asked.
Mickey tentatively sniffed the air. “Something smells good.”
“Your name, please.”
“Mickey .” He moved a few steps closer. “What’s in the bag?”
“My family runs an oriental restaurant. We brought you some delicacies.”
Mickey whisked the bag into the kitchen and began opening containers. “Mooshi beef with hoisin sauce,” Rasmei said, indicating a dish with a half dozen, thin, rice flour pancakes, “and shrimp fried lort.”
The sink was full of dirty plates. Along with the oil-stained pizza box, a half-dozen crumpled beer cans littered the counter near the refrigerator. Grabbing a fork and clean plate from the cupboard, she scooped the food onto the dish. “Six treasure chicken.” Rasmei held a selection up to his nose. “Each treasure represents a spice: fennel, anise, ginger, licorice root, cinnamon and clove.” She stared blankly through a torn undershirt at his hairy chest. “It’s the house specialty. Very popular.”
