Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  “Something I, too, had to learn. And I cannot think of ‘The Dream’ without thinking of dear John Keats’s lovely ‘The Eve of St. Agnes.’”

  I had led her, circuitously, to the last undiscussed story of the supernatural five, “Transformation.”

  “It puts me in mind of Poe, too,” I said. “Specifically of ‘Hop-Frog’—the dwarf business—and ‘William Wilson’ with its use of the theme of the double.”

  “Poe died not quite two years before me. He could hardly rival Shelley as a poet, but he had an independent sensibility that reminded me in some ways of Shelley’s.” She closed her eyes. “‘From childhood’s hour I have not been / As others were—I have not seen / As others saw—I could not bring / My passions from a common spring.’ Poe’s words, not Shelley’s, but they would serve well as a caption under a portrait of my husband.”

  “Or under your own portrait.”

  She shook her head. “Do you know the story of how a friend of Shelley’s mother told her to send her boy to a school where they would teach him to think for himself?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well. Mrs. Shelley’s eyebrows shot up and she exclaimed, ‘Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, rather teach him to think like other people.’”

  We both laughed, I louder than my visitor.

  “True, my character Guido in ‘Transformation’ has much of Shelley in him, both before and after the metamorphosis which gives the story its point.”

  “At the end, Guido’s priest tells him that the dwarf who so nastily impersonated him might have embodied a good rather than an evil spirit. Did you intend a moral?”

  “Most people despise change, particularly in themselves. But without continual, even continuous, intellectual and moral transformation, one dies by pieces and joins the dead whilst yet upright. I seek transformation even in my death, else I would not have visited you here.”

  She shifted, placed both feet on the floor, and stood. I stood, too. The air in my office felt thin and unsustaining.

  “You have to go?”

  “Yes. At once. Thank you for tolerating my intrusion.”

  I tried to wave off her thanks and extend my own, but she stopped me. She declined my invitations to stay over with us, even to escort her down the stairs. Instead, she commanded me to remain in my office while she descended alone.

  “But why?”

  “I can easily see myself out.”

  “I mean, why deny me the pleasure of accompanying you?”

  “You would hardly relish accompanying me to the immaterial demesne from which Volition and Time distilled me into your presence here.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She started to reply, but restrained herself. I seldom kiss a woman’s hand, even as a joke, but I seized my visitor’s and touched my lips to its back. It had a brittle texture, but no taste or temperature. If I overstepped propriety, she allowed the violation, then gently withdrew her hand and exited my study. The door shut behind her, and I heard her carefully descending footfalls.

  I slunk from my office to the stairs and leaned against the wall to see my visitor’s foreshortened body on our bottommost landing. She kept going down, but like a soldier marching in place, making no spatial progress—until the cold, or maybe Time and Volition, spun a helical sheath that she must have felt tightening nooselike around her. This sheath abstracted her, giving me a view out the landing window of two weathered rocking chairs and a black metal porch railing.

  My father died believing that he would sleep, insensible, until the putative End of Time roused him and all his faithful co-religionists. My visitor would probably tell him that heavy sleepers do not reanimate. Perhaps she already has.

  Story Sources

  [From this list, Sunstein’s biography and Robinson’s notes in Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories proved most helpful.]

  Aldiss, Brian. “Introduction.” The Last Man by Mary Shelley. London: Hogarth Press, 1984.

  Bishop, Michael. Brittle Innings. New York: Bantam, 1994.

  Crowley, John. “The Reason for the Visit.” Antiquities: Seven Stories. Seattle: Incunabula Press, 1994.

  Noyes, Russell, ed. English Romantic Poetry and Prose. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.

  Poe, Edgar Allan. “Alone.” Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Washington Square Press, 1960.

  Robinson, Charles E., ed. Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976. (Soft-shell reprint, 1990).

  Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. Afterword by Harold Bloom. New York, Toronto: New American Library (Signet Classic), 1965.

  “Shelley, Percy Bysshe.” The New Encyclopedia Britannica. Macropedia, Vol. 16. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1979).

  Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Great Short Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Pocket Library (Pocket Books), 1954.

  Sunstein, Emily W. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1989.

  Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Foreword by Marcus Cunliffe. New York: New American Library (Signet Classic), 1960.

  Chihuahua Flats

  IN A DUSTY PANEL TRUCK WITH A SLACK TRANSMISsion and no spare, Dougan bumped into the cactus-lapped verges of Chihuahua Flats. He came nudged by a fitful Texas sirocco, desperate to expand his territory. Behind him, in the cargo bay, a dozen or more economy-size bags of N.R.G. Chunx in slick double-lined red paper, the dogfood itself dry as potsherds and frangible as old biscuits.

  Even over the engine’s banging and backfires, Dougan, his good ear cocked, could hear a deranging insect rustle in two or three of the bags. Well. So what? How much could the blamed roach borers eat?

  About a block from the kennel, he began to brake. He rode the rubberless pedal or else he fiercely pumped it. The truck squealed in the gust-driven desert blow, jounced in a perpetual sand scour; when it shuddered to a rolling ebb, Dougan wrestled it into the crazed adobe driveway of the kennel to which he had pointed it these past howevermany hours. Dead on the ground, Dougan’s truck neither sighed nor swayed.

  A sign in the yard—a huge red-cedar shake on oily chains, its letters heat-gouged out and dyed in char—said MILLICENT T. CHALVERUS / CHIHUAHUA FLATS KENNELS / BOARDING * GROOMING * BREEDING * SALES. It bucked and twisted, its chains glinting, its face sun-shellacked.

  The sprawling house had a whitewashed mission look. Behind it, cockeyed on the rattlesnake-peopled steppe, blazed a three-story concrete run with a roof of terra-cotta macaroni halves.

  Dougan pushed the door buzzer and got back through the wall a lizardly metallic hiss. The sweat-plastered hair on his nape struggled to stand, giving him an almost pleasant chill—so he buzzed again, and then again, leaning with his decent ear hard to the doorframe.

  Come around! You got to come around! said a speaker unit next to him, a grill like an Aztec medallion.

  Miss?

  Come around! This so piercingly that Dougan nigh on to stumbled off the porch. He recovered, though, and circled on a hurried limp to the fenced-in compound out back.

  I’m Millie Chalverus, said the woman at the gate. Who are you? Whaddaya want? N why should I care?

  She had green eyes bracketed by hard-to-see laugh lines, skin like coffee-colored suede, and, shoehorned into a pair of ebony-and-gold-embroidered pedal pushers, a haunch like a ripening matador’s. A velvety black haltertop crossed her upper torso. Her toenails peered up at Dougan from her scuffed huaraches like lacquered violets. Ankles, midriff, shoulders, arms: continents of glistening suede.

  Talk to me, lover. I got stuff to do.

  Dougan said, Vernester Dougan, Kennel Supplier.

  Zatso?

  Yes, Miss. Outta Lubbock. Specializin in high-protein, super-vitaminized bugproof feed. Not to mention assordid n sundry groomin, trainin, n recreational products.

  How you do talk. What you got beyond a downpat spiel?

  Miss? Dougan’s eyes bounced. A
bowel south of his navel went slack and took on a windy cargo of doubt. So much skin. Such lakegreen eyes. A mouth you could press a kiss on thout ever quite reachin her teeth.

  By the way, Dougan. It’s mam, not miss. I got a little too much age on me to truckle to miss.

  Sorry, Dougan said.

  Yeah. Well. Don’t sweat it.

  Beneath him, a quick yip and a helium-high growl. A dog no bigger than a heifer’s stool had reared up against the chainlink gate. It had raised its paltry brindle hackles, and the fudge pools of its eyes stuck out like a mantis’s. Dougan could have snapped off those eyes and sent the dog on a looping fieldgoal arc by slamming his boot against the gate. Except for Millie Chalverus, he would have surrendered to the idea and launched the mutt.

  Instead he said, Nice dog.

  He don’t like you, Dougan. Thet’s a fac.

  He don’t know me. I only jes got here.

  Conchos has a built-in sense bout folks. You don’t tickle his fancy cep mebbe crosswise n backards.

  Conchos, huh? Hey, Conchos, howya doin? Dougan knelt in front of the dog. He moved a forefinger toward Conchos with a thought to rubbing his nose through the mesh, but Conchos leapt against the gate, snarling and pogo-sticking. Dougan fell over sideways.

  Chalverus chortled. Dougan brushed himself off.

  Guess if Conchos don’t like me, you don’t either, he said. Guess I got as much chanst to sell you on my bidnus as I do to drop me a baby nex Friday.

  Don’t give up so quick.

  Mam?

  Conchos cain’t judge character worth a sue. Why, he’d bite Mother Teresa on the tush n lay a sloppy wet one on a liar like Ollie North.

  Dougan blinked in the magnesium glare of the sun. To the northwest, a hawk floated between Chalverus’s stockade and the salmon and mint ridges of a distant rampart. Below Dougan’s left eye, a tic began to cycle.

  If Conchos don’t like you, you must be okay.

  No shit? Dougan turned crimson. His last word rang in the air like a bell. No lie. I meant, no lie.

  No lie, Chalverus said. Whynt you show me what you got?

  Dougan recovered. Currying combs? Choke chains? Bugproof feed? Jes name it n I’ll go gitter.

  Whynt we try some food? Conchos aint gonna come round to you, honey, for no choke chain or metal brush.

  Food it is. Good choice. Great choice. N.R.G. Chunx’re flat-out worth their weight in Taos silver.

  Dougan broke into a pebble-skittering trot. Thank God Conchos didn’t like him. Stupid pile of crap. Why’d anybody own a Chihuahua? Why’d a gorgeous gal like Millie Chalverus breed the bat-eared midgets?

  In the oven of his cargo bay, Dougan wrestled with the dogfood bags. He scrutinized them all for punctures, tears, and bore holes, then selected out a bag as glossily seamless as the Messiah’s robe. This one he toted in a Groucho Marx crouch back to the kennel.

  As soon as the Chalverus woman let him in, Conchos seized his trouser cuff, snarling through clenched teeth and flapping like a pennant on his instep until they reached a feeding area under a wide green plastic awning. All along the three-tiered run next to it, a chorus of unseen caged Chihuahuas whimpered and yipped.

  Chalverus cried, Let go, Conchos. Let go!

  Conchos released Dougan’s cuff, reared like Trigger, and scuttled holus-bolus away, fussing without relent. Grateful, Dougan lowered the dogfood bag and bent over it like a soldier over a gut-shot buddy.

  Thanks, he said. Much bliged. It jes gits hotter. As if to prove this remark, clammy drooping semicircles had bloomed under his workshirt’s arms, big cancerous splotches. He split the bag with his pocketknife and doled out onto the concrete a handful—a prodigal double handful—of N.R.G. Chunx, brickred pellets craggy as owlcasts and burly as paperweights. Conchos pricked his ears, tilted his head, scented the spill, skipped from foot to foot like a balsawood puppet. Several Chihuahuas on the tiers, also smelling the food, began to yammer and bay, a doggy munchkin chorale.

  Awright, Dougan told Conchos. Come git yore picnic.

  Conchos looked at Dougan, then at Chalverus, then at the mound of N.R.G. Chunx. Go on, Chalverus said. I don’t mind. Have yoreself a go. So Conchos tiptoed over and tried to mouth a chunk, but not one in the pile was less than half the size of his head. Conchos could not even crack a piece with a forepaw on it to hold it down. Stymied, he danced a bemused do-si-do, looking up again at Chalverus.

  You must feed these boulders to St. Bernards, she said. Or starvin African pachyderms.

  We give you a lot for yore money.

  Well. It’s useless to me if Conchos n his sort cain’t eat it. N it shore as shivers looks like they cain’t.

  Wait, said Dougan. Jes you wait. Outside the run, he saw a steppingstone long and wide as a breadloaf. Gimme a minit, okay? He wedged himself through the kennel gate while holding it ajar with an outstretched leg, prized up the stone, and eased back through the gate with it before him at groin height, an honest-to-Jesus threat to herniate him. See, he said. See, now. He dropped the stone on the N.R.G. Chunx, picked it up, dropped it again. He put one boot sole on the stone and ground it from side to side. There. See. He nudged the stone aside, disclosing a pile of rubbly fragments and a scatter of brickred powder.

  Conchos pitter-pattered up and fell to. He chewed what he could, cracking the kibbles in his jaw teeth, and licked what he couldn’t. He did a little jig as he ate.

  The put-up-or-shut-up test, Dougan said. The taste test. I think this stuff’s done passed it. Don’t you?

  Looks thet way, Chalverus said. But am I myself gonna have to pulverize ever bag I decide to buy?

  Nome. No way. Place you a long-term order n I promise you plenty of prepulverized N.R.G. Chunx whenever you ast.

  Deal, Chalverus said.

  She and Dougan shook hands. Her palm and fingers, Dougan noted, had a breezy dry silkiness. Even her calluses had a well-cared-for feel, as if she refused to allow the desert any tyrannical say-so over the expression of her womanhood. What a find, thought Dougan.

  On Christmas Eve, four months later, Dougan married Millie Chalverus in a Catholic ceremony in the den of her house on the outskirts of Chihuahua Flats. About seven years back, she had lost her previous husband, Joseph Worrill, to an oilfield fire between Midland and Odessa, Texas. Starting up Chihuahua Flats Kennels had rescued her from the blues and maybe even poverty, for the biggest part of Mr. Worrill’s insurance money had gone to cover a slagheap of outstanding debts. Dougan cared nothing for the petty facts of Chalverus’s past life, particularly her marriage and any earlier romances—except insofar as her past, sprouting up as memory or as unfinished business, derailed her happiness or blighted his and her itemhood. Even today, the rolling gravel in her laugh and her skin’s swarthy flush made Dougan swoon standing up.

  I do, Chalverus had said, keeping her own name, as she had kept it with Mr. Worrill (for business purposes and to feed her soul). Anyway, at that I do, Dougan had begun to live—to live in sweet truth—for the first time since his release from Dooly Correctional Institution in Unadilla, Georgia, where he’d spent five years on a DUI unlawful-death conviction. (Driving blotto on cheap corn liquor in Macon, he had fender-glanced with his pickup an old woman walking home. Except for a vicious bump to his right ear, he had killed her without half noticing.) Even operating his own shoestring kennel-supply business in Lubbock had failed to drain from Dougan a melancholy unease, and this subtly toxic ache had poisoned him on every long-distance haul through the panhandle or across the hot alkaline flats of the Jornada del Muerto. But one I do had changed that, nullifying the poison.

  Dougan abandoned Lubbock. He threw over his kennel-supply business. Chihuahua Flats Kennels had work enough for two, and Millie Chalverus, now his beloved wife, had no objection to his coming aboard and shouldering a man-sized moiety of the labor. He toted bags of Chihuahua chow, hosed down the runs, patched gaps in the chainlink, replaced fallen roof tiles, and haggled at the doorstoop with jewelry-freighted high-pressure
salesguys besotted with their own stale hormones and decades of worn-out macho propaganda. And so, in many ways, the union of Vernester Dougan and Millie Chalverus seemed to Dougan the recipient of a sure-nough heavenly blessing.

  Conchos, though, never came around. He despised Dougan. He yapped whenever Dougan entered the house. He tried to guard the master bedroom against Dougan’s certain arrival. Failing that, Conchos fell back to protect the bed itself, an immense two-layer wheel under a spread of the same embroidered fabric from which Chalverus had made the pedal pushers in which Dougan had first beheld her delectable croup.

  Yip yip yip, went Conchos, yap yap yap, meanwhile snarling his outrage and prancing in strategic if hopeless retreat. Dougan wore heavy suede gloves to deal with Conchos and always picked him up and moved him aside whenever such run-ins took place. It annoyed him, Conchos’s implacable hatred along with all the silly-ass threats, but Dougan never—not once since the day of his first N.R.G. Chunx delivery—felt the least urge to strangle Conchos, dropkick him into orbit, or render him unpeelable roadkill. Dougan had resolved not to hurt Conchos because Chalverus loved Conchos and what Chalverus loved Dougan respected unconditionally.

  I love you, Chalverus told Dougan on their wedding night, but—

  But what, babe?

  But my soul—my deepest privatest heart—is tucked away in thet little dog. I jes cain’t help it.

  You don’t have to, Dougan said. I respec whatsoever you love n’ll try to love it myself n hope thet one day Conchos’ll take to me too.

  Although Dougan heard the nobleness of this pronouncement, he found that in town for his weekly haircut he had a hard time being faithful to it. Pete Mosquero, his barber, liked to rag him about Conchos:

  You don look to me like a Chihuahua esorta guy.

  No?

  No. I jess refuse to blieve you like em.

  I don’t, Dougan said, but—

  You see, I magine you an Espringer espaniel esorta guy or mebbe a golden retriever.