Address to the Greenville Senior Women’s Club 35th Annual Pedigreed Dog Show

March 2008 | back-issues, fiction

by Summer Block

Address to the Greenville Senior Women’s Club 35th Annual Pedigreed Dog Show by the mystery writer H.L. Lemontre

It’s quite an honor to be speaking today as both a guest and a participant. I am asked to speak at a lot of dog shows by fans of my mystery series, but rarely do I get the chance to speak in my own hometown, and even more rarely do I get to speak at a show where my own dog is also a contender. Perhaps you’ll indulge an old woman if I tell you a bit about how I came to write the [i]Fluffems[/i] series.

Readers are always tickled pink when I confide that I don’t like dogs. Everyone seems to find it quite simply hilarious. Journalists, too, love to quote the author of sixty-two books in the [i]Fluffems the Softest Dog[/i] series as admitting that she doesn’t even like dogs! Well, I’m not trying to be cute, I can tell you that. I don’t care for dogs. I’m not trying to be funny. Everyone seems to find it perfectly hilarious that the creator of the adorable little white terrier Fluffems shouldn’t like dogs. If you ask me, dedicating your entire life to a subject in which you haven’t the least interest isn’t very funny at all. But I’m an old woman, so I suppose I see things differently.

Well, as I’m among friends, I might as well tell the truth. I started the whole thing as a joke. I heard about a series of mystery novels where a cat solves the mysteries, and it just seemed so ridiculous, and I thought, well, why not a dog? If a cat can solve mysteries. I started with my first one, [i]Fluffems the Softest Dog and the Case of the Wicked Wicket[/i], and it sold like hot cakes. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed so easy. After that, I settled into a routine, and before you know it, six books were done. The sixth was the most popular at the time, [i]Fluffems the Softest Dog and the Case of the Purloined Pudding[/i]. It’s important to have catchy titles.

Anyway, I came upon it all quite by accident. I don’t like dogs, but I do like mysteries. Everyone enjoys a little light reading now and then, and for a woman of a certain age it’s better to be seen on an airplane with a decent mystery than a romance novel like you sometimes see women just reading right out in the open, which I think looks tacky. Some people have tried to find all sorts of literary meanings in my work, especially in the later books like [i]Fluffems the Softest Dog and the Case of the Tempting Trifle[/i]. I think they just feel guilty about reading mysteries and want to dress it up to justify it to themselves. Like people that call any old thing art so they can go to galleries and look at smutty pictures in public.

But anyway, I like mysteries. I like their structure, and I like the idea that things should have a cause. I think people should take responsibility for things. And I’d like to think I have a logical mind. I was told that, as a girl, and I always did well at science and math, which after all are puzzles, like mysteries. I’ve come to look for mysteries everywhere. I don’t mean, of course, that I go around snooping through people’s medicine cabinets or looking for dead bodies, like that woman on TV. I just mean I like to look for clues, and the cause of things. Sort of a whodunit. I’m seventy-three years old, all my friends are dead, and I’ve never been married. I’d like to know who did that.

Of course, my own little dog looks very little like Fluffems. I copied the idea for Fluffems’ appearance from a greeting card sent to me by my sister, God rest her soul, who loved dogs and sent a card with a dog on it every year for Christmas. My own dog isn’t white or fluffy and he doesn’t have blue eyes. He’s a dachshund, and I introduced a dachshund briefly as a sidekick in [i]Fluffems the Softest Dog and the Case of the Captured Cozy[/i] but a lot of my readers didn’t like it. They said it drew attention away from Fluffems.

It may surprise you that although I have never liked dogs, I do like dog shows. That is because I have always appreciated perfection. My own dog is really a superior specimen. I acquired him as a present from a reader, in fact. That was around the time that [i]Fluffems the Softest Dog and the Case of the Daunting Dagger[/i] won the Poirot Prize for Best Mystery in a Series. A fan wrote me the kindest letter about my work. I get so many letters these days and my eyes are bad, I have a little Indian girl from the college who reads most of them for me, but she passed this one on to me, it was so nice. A gentleman fan—most of my fans are women—with very nice penmanship. He particularly liked [i]Fluffems the Softest Dog and the Case of the Spilled Soup[/i]. That’s the one where Fluffems learns to ride a motorbike.

Well, I kept up a correspondence with this gentleman for quite some time. He was living in Virginia with his daughter; his wife had passed away. I believe he had once been a military man, but he loved a good mystery. He was the one that gave me the idea for Fluffems to use the computer in the later stories, to communicate with Mrs. Peale. I met him only once. He said he would be near Greenville to visit his other daughter, and did I want to have dinner. We went to the Ivy Room, which used to be a lovely place, but now they have one of those live bands that could wake the dead and the food’s not what it used to be. He ordered wine, and after dinner he insisted we drive back up to his hotel so he could give me a present. It was a dog. Can you imagine that? A little dachshund, with a ribbon around its neck. I thought it was extremely importunate to give someone a dog as a gift and I told him so, but he really insisted. I am too old, I told him, to start in caring for something like that. Later I found out his other daughter lives nearly fifty miles from Greenville. I suppose that was a clue, but I’m an old woman and I don’t much notice things like that anymore. He went on back to Virginia, I think his mind is going a bit now.

Well, my apologies, I do run on a bit sometimes at these speaking engagements, and I know there are many dogs here to put through their paces. Who would have thought when I was just a girl getting high marks in science at Greenville High that I’d be back here today with my own little dog and a shelf of stories. Well, I guess it’s a mystery.

[i]Note: The piece has been published online before, but only on my personal blog, www.thefoghornmagazine.com, and can be removed upon request.[/i]

Biography
Summer Block has published essays, short fiction, and poetry in a variety of publications, including
McSweeneys, Small Spiral Notebook, Tarpaulin Sky, DIAGRAM, the San Francisco Chronicle, Monkeybicycle, Stirring, ALARM, Identity Theory, January Magazine, and Rain Taxi. Find her work at www.summerblock.com.

Cyclops

April 2004 | back-issues, fiction

Cyclops
by
Kevin P. Keating

-1-
White sunlight pierced the cracked, mud-encrusted windshield of the pickup truck, stinging my one good eye. The woods, green and lush and wild in the full heat of summer, became an impressionistic blur. With trembling fingers I adjusted my eye patch, desperate to see where I was being taken. Dirt and gravel churned beneath the tires of the truck as Hollerin’ Bob, laughing with raucous child-like glee, stomped on the accelerator. Thick rivulets of brown saliva trickled down his scruffy chin. As the truck fishtailed and careened toward a ditch, something sharp gouged the small of my back. I let out a sharp cry of pain and searched the seat for the pocket flashlight I kept in my back pocket but my fingers only scraped a thin layer of grime from the vinyl seat. In weepy-eyed panic, I clutched a new copy of Ulysses to my chest, believing that the words of a great writer like Joyce could be used like some ancient incantation to help protect me from the chaos of life in Coshocton County, Ohio. I need only find the correct page and, with the proper awe and reverence, recite a perplexing passage in a plodding monotone.
Mr. Peaches didn’t believe in magic. With a snort of contempt, he seized the novel, fanned his face with the pages, and then hurled it to the floor. He slouched so low in the seat that the brim of his greasy baseball cap was nearly level with the dashboard, but when he caught me staring at the tattoos on his forearm he sat up, nudged me in the side and waved a nearly empty tin of tobacco under my nose. “Patch, you wanna try some of this?” We hit a dip in the road and he nearly choked on the wad bulging from his ruddy cheeks.
Above the revving engine Hollerin’ Bob bellowed, “Hey, Patch, this sure is a lot differ’nt than the adventures you been readin’ in that damn book.” He slapped my thigh and then jerked the steering wheel hard to the left.
I jostled around the truck wedged between the two men, their thick shoulders knocking my skull with every twist and turn in the dusty country road.
“You ain’t been down to Wills Creek yet, have ya, Patch?” asked Hollerin’ Bob.
I shook my head.
Mr. Peaches picked a few small clumps of tobacco from his crooked yellow teeth. “Damn if there ain’t catfish there that can swallow a baby’s leg,” he said. “You won’t believe your eyes. I mean, your eye.”
The men laughed.
We raced up an anonymous gravel road toward a small shanty hidden by a swatch of underbrush and a grove of diseased pine trees. The shutters of the cottage were lopsided, the porch littered with pinecones and brown needles. No one had any intention of cleaning the place. Even the breeze seemed too listless and lazy to sweep away the debris.
Hollerin’ Bob slammed on the breaks and I knocked my head on the dashboard. “Me and Peaches will run in and get the rods,” he said.
In the distance, a rabbit raised its ears and darted toward the woods. Mr. Peaches leapt from the truck and hurled a rock at the animal. “Damn things are always eatin’ my lettuce and tomatoes,” he murmured. “Don’t know why I bother plantin’ anything down here.”
The men disappeared inside the cottage. I stood outside and leaned against the front bumper. I cocked my head, and made an effort, albeit a half-hearted one, to appreciate the alien serenity of the countryside, but instead of the peculiar clatter of cicadas and the rustle of leaves I heard that incessant kicking and thrashing coming from the back of the truck. I considered making a run for it, driving away in a cloud of dust and a fury of mayflies. The keys were in the ignition. Unable to relax with all that racket, I approached the tailgate. Even from a few paces away the air smelled sharp and pungent. I reached into the bed of the truck and lifted the heavy green tarp. The unblinking red-rimmed eyes of Old Crow stared back at me. Brown packing tape covered his mouth and wound around his head, pulling at his cheeks and making him look like the victim of a botched facelift.
“Hey, man,” I said. “How you doing back here? Pretty hot under this tarp, huh? Well, I think the game’s over. I’m pretty sure they’re gonna let you go now.”
Old Crow closed his eyes, shook his head. Heavy beads of sweat trickled down his cheeks.
I smiled and tried to explain it to him in the simplest way I knew how. “They’re only fucking with you, that’s all. You understand, right?”
A mosquito landed on my forearm and I squashed it with a sharp slap.
“Bugs eating you?” I asked. “They’re pretty annoying, aren’t they?” Behind me, I heard footsteps. “Here they come.” From the corner of my eye, I saw Hollerin’ Bob carrying three fishing rods. Mr. Peaches cradled a case of beer in his arms. “Just remember. This wasn’t my idea.” I dropped the tarp back over Old Crow’s head.
“That’s not part of the rules!” Hollerin’ Bob proclaimed. Every word uttered by Hollerin’ Bob was some kind of proclamation. “No peeking aloud.” He huffed as he marched, his prodigious gut wobbling from side to side. Flies buzzed around his eyes and he swatted at them as best he could. When he reached the truck, he tossed the rods into the bed where they landed with a loud clatter next to the shifting tarp. The kicking and thrashing grew more intense, and Hollerin’ Bob shouted, “Shut up back there or we ain’t never gonna let you out!”
Mr. Peaches stuffed a beer into my hand. The two men watched me closely and because I knew this was some kind of test–of camaraderie, conformity, machismo–I accepted the beer and gulped it down. After I finished it Mr. Peaches handed me another. I drank that down, too. One long steady gulp.
“How does that make you feel, Patch?” asked Hollerin’ Bob.
I nodded. “Not bad.”
Hollerin’ Bob laughed. He leaned over the bed of the truck and shouted, “Did ya hear that? Not bad, he said, not bad!”

-2-
For the rest of that afternoon we drove in circles I think, I’m not sure, just up and down the same dirt roads, drinking and farting and belching until evening. I felt inept, feeble, a delicate city boy who couldn’t grasp their world of dirt roads and 4x4s any more than they could grasp my world of books and university life.
As I stared at the big bugs bursting in bright green globs against the windshield, Hollerin’ Bob turned to me. “Let me ask you something, Patch. What made you start on books? Were you a sensitive boy? Hmmm? I only ask because I think my son might be, you know, a sensitive boy. Bookish and what not. Tell you what I think done it to him. The belt. I used come home from work, tired as hell, and I used to whoop him with my belt. I couldn’t help it. I ain’t got no patience for kids. Now he has his nose in a book all the time. Never talks to me.”
Mr. Peaches cracked open another beer. “My boy ain’t like that.” He took a long swig. “I once put my boy in an inner tube and floated him out to the middle of Will’s Creek. I tied one end of the rope to the tube and the other end to a tree and let him drift. Them catfish came right up and tried to swallow his little legs like they was worms. Never heard a child scream so loud. After a half hour or so he finally stopped makin’ such a fuss and just sorta slumped over. He never picked up a book as far as I know. You ever catch a catfish, Patch?”
“No.”
“Well, you’re gonna catch one today.”
I found that in some vaguely shameful way I admired these men. They were a tough pair and seemed impervious to trouble. They didn’t worry about drinking too much, staying out too late, behaving respectably, saying the right things. They simply didn’t give a damn. Marriage didn’t matter because their wives didn’t matter. And their children feared them, feared the crack of the belt against their backs, the smell of alcohol when they burst through the door demanding a hot supper. But despite their hardnosed, old school ethos, they had been very good to me, gladly instructing me about their trade. They were middle-aged boilermakers who described themselves as “lifers” while I was just some college kid trying to earn money for next semester. “We been welding and grinding and hammering for longer’n you been alive,” Mr. Peaches liked to remind me.
My uncle, a prominent labor leader from Cleveland, arranged it so I could stay with them at their cottage. “You can’t go wrong,” my uncle told me. “The rent is free. Besides, they’re good men. You’ll learn a lot from them.” My uncle was right of course. When I first arrived at the cottage several weeks ago, I came prepared with an arsenal of books, Borges and Calvino and Saramago, but the education I was to receive would not consist of a careful analysis of postmodern fiction. Without opening their mouths, the men supplied me with a remarkable amount of information. Their bodies were veritable roadmaps of tragedy and misfortune, their eyes ruined from endless hours of welding, their knees shattered from particularly nasty falls, their bones improperly mended together in odd and lumpy configurations, their teeth chipped or crooked or missing altogether, their noses red and pitted from excessive drink.
The cottage, more of a child’s tree house than a habitable dwelling, had no electricity, and at night, as the men played cards by candlelight and drank beer at a makeshift table made of particle board and sawhorses, I tried to read with my pocket flashlight. The batteries never lasted very long and I always ended up tossing and turning on a mattress in a corner. Like a child who wants to hide from monsters lurking in his closet, I pulled the sheets over my face, trying to shut out the smell of cigarettes and the sound of high-pitched, whinnying laughter.
We worked at the power plant ten miles down the road. As an unskilled laborer I did all the grunt work and spent my days organizing toolboxes, detangling electrical cords, and securing ropes. I lifted loads, hauled away scrap metal, got the men coffee and water during breaks. From a safe distance I watched as cranes lifted heavy steel plates high into the air. The men scrambled along narrow planks of scaffolding, reached out to grab the plates, and then welded them to the exterior of giant cylinders. The strange language of the trade unions left me in a state of total confusion. Haggard and grim-faced, their cheeks black with grime, they shouted at me in a code I couldn’t quite comprehend: “Get me a new stinger. I need a crescent. Find me some more rod. 7018. Turn my machine down ten. Tie me a sheepshank. Where’s that chippin’ hammer?” I can’t say that I entirely adapted to this new environment–my mind had been conditioned to respond to the detailed instructions of soft-spoken, high-strung intellectuals, not the terse commands of sweating, short-tempered boilermakers–but Hollerin’ Bob and Mr. Peaches taught me, as best they could, how to swing a hammer properly and how to really drive a nail home. They showed me how to tie a dozen different knots, how to grind welds until they were flush with the metal, how to use an acetylene torch to cut through rivets. They even took me to a store in town and told me which steel-toed boots to buy, which leather gloves would last longest, and which long sleeved flannel shirts would best protect my arms from cascading sparks.
As part of their initiation process, the men teased and tormented me. One day, Hollerin’ Bob, a swaggering bull of a man, walloped the back of my legs with a plank of wood. Mr. Peaches emptied my lunch box and replaced my pita chips and hummus with chicken bones and a Moon Pie. They drew obscene pictures in the books I read at lunchtime, Isaac Singer and H.P. Lovecraft. They laughed at my outrage and jovially explained, “We’re just fuckin’ with you.” I soon found out that, as a rule, boilermakers were continually fucking with one another, it was their code, and no one was exempt from it.
Everyone also had a nickname, each an allusion to some kind of catastrophe that left the men physically or psychologically scarred for life–Giraffeneck, Leper, Monkey, Cockburn, Girly, Mudflap–and I knew and addressed my co-workers by these various monikers. My own nickname came quite easily, a gift from the gods. This was during my third week on the job. We’d been working another twelve-hour shift and the summer sun had taken its toll on me. Too exhausted to watch where I was going, I carelessly wandered behind Old Crow, a humorless journeyman who’d only spoken to me on a few occasions, usually to berate me in some way. “Watch yourself now, pretty boy,” he’d say. “Don’t get your hair mussed. He-heh-ha! Watch that lilly white skin. Might get a sunburn. He-hah-heh!”
With his arms working like pistons, Old Crow pulled up a hundred yards of torch hose through the steel grating of the power plant. The small metal bits attached to the end of the hose flashed in the late afternoon sun, and before I could leap out of the way, one of the metal bits struck my eye, shattering the contact lens into a dozen miniscule shards. I screamed and writhed on the ground, clutching my face.
Hollerin’ Bob and Mr. Peaches took me to the nearest emergency room (a thirty mile drive), and the doctor, a small Indian man with a disdainful frown, plucked the pieces out of my eye one by one and softly scolded me for wincing and blinking. “You must cooperate,” he stated flatly. I could smell cigarettes on his fingertips. “Am I going to be blind?” I whimpered. He paused. “Keep still.” When he finished he handed me an eye patch and told me to wear it for a week, then he quickly scribbled a prescription for eye drops. “Apply them twice a day.” I clutched the piece of paper to my chest and whined, “But am I damaged for life?” His disdain seemed to deepen, bordered on impatience, disgust, revulsion. “No, your eye is perfectly fine. Apply the drops.” He yanked the white curtain open and marched off, giving me the unmistakable impression that he was sickened to be in the presence of another stupid redneck. He never even asked how the accident had happened and probably assumed that I’d fallen out of a tree or jumped off a garage or got into a fistfight at some squalid roadhouse.
On the drive back to the cottage, Hollerin’ Bob muttered, “Goddamn towel head He ain’t got no business talking to you like that.”
After the accident, the foreman stationed me in the tool room and told me to watch my step, to look sharp, to pay attention. When the men came in I handed them crescent wrenches and extension cords and sledgehammers. They whistled when they saw the yellow bruise forming around my eye, asked how I was holding up, and jokingly called me Patch. The name stuck.
Then one day, just before the afternoon whistle blew, Hollerin’ Bob and Mr. Peaches appeared in the doorway.
“Hey, Patch!” Hollerin’ Bob shouted.
“Yeah, hiya, Patch,” Mr. Peaches giggled like a mischievous schoolboy.
“We got a surprise for you, Patch. Out in the truck.”
“Yeah, Patch, a big surprise. Come and take a look.”
I only wanted to go back to the cottage, to collapse on the dirty mattress, to sleep until fall arrived when I could return to my insular world of Derrida and deconstruction, but what choice did I have? Reluctantly I followed the men out to the pickup truck to see their insipid surprise.

-3-
The moon flickered through the treetops now, its green goblin glow transforming me into a local yokel, and when we hit a bump in the road I burst into a fit of sloppy laughter, enjoying the novelty of my stupid intoxication. Hollerin’ Bob seemed to appreciate this metamorphosis, seemed almost relieved by it, and like a madman he swung the truck across the width of the road. Fireflies floated through the vast darkness like constellations. The sweet smell of honeysuckle and lilac and a hundred different wildflowers, so very different from the sulfurous stench surrounding the power plant, all merged together and became charged with mystery.
Once again, Mr. Peaches caught me studying his meaty forearms, the skull, the cross, the gothic letters, and when Hollerin’ Bob stopped the truck and switched off the lights each symbol seemed to pulsate and float in the darkness.
“Come on, Patch,” Mr. Peaches said. “Let’s get the fishin’ rods.”
The men seemed to understand the darkness and moved forward with confidence.
I toppled out of the truck. A pile of empty beer cans clattered to the ground, a cacophonous musical accompaniment to our reckless adventure.
“You okay, Patch?”
“You’re good friends, both of you,” I said. “You could have left me back at the cabin. Left me to my books.” My words became a string of insensible syllables, the low croaking of a toad swallowed whole by the ravenous darkness and then regurgitated from the night’s grumbling guts. In a drunken dance, I crushed the cans under my boots and then stomped through the mud, stumbling over branches, banging my knees against trees, scraping my arm on thorns. I looked up to the stars for guidance but the thick canopy of leaves hid them from view. The night was so impenetrable that I felt trapped at the bottom of those terrible smokestacks or pinned under that stinking green tarp in the bed of the truck. Then I remembered, dimly, that Old Crow was still back there but the memory was as faint as the glowing red ember of the cigarette that now guided me.
Someone thrust a rod into my hand.
“Come along, Patch.”
“Okay,” I said. “But what about whatshisname?”
“Who?”
I hiccupped. “Old Crow.”
I don’t know why but I felt my stomach tighten as Mr. Peaches, his hot breath stinking of tobacco, leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “What’s wrong with you, huh? You a nigger lover or something? That jig’ll be just fine. Them Africans, they’re used to the heat. Besides, he fucked with you. Fucked with you bad. A man fucks with you, you gotta fuck with him right back. Maybe you don’t understand that. Maybe that’s ‘cause you ain’t got balls enough to stand up for yourself.”
Mr. Peaches spit on the ground and he and Hollerin’ Bob marched off to the creek.
For what seemed like a very long time, I shuddered in the darkness and jumped at every snapping branch. Wild turkeys roamed these woods, an occasional fox, sometimes a coyote or two. I heard, or imagined I heard, high-pitched screams, animals in heat, sounds so menacing that I unzipped my pants and pissed on the back tire because I was afraid I might wet myself.
Without Hollerin’ Bob and Mr. Peaches to lead the way, I was helpless, blind as a mole, and I had to feel my way back to the cab of the truck where I sifted through the crumpled cigarette cartons and tobacco tins until my fingers came across the pocket flashlight. I flicked it on. My copy of Ulysses was still on the floor, its pages darkened by soot, but seeing that ancient name in big bold letters suddenly inspired me, and I pointed my little beam of light into the night and went to the bed of the truck.
“Don’t worry, Old Crow,” I said, “I’m coming, buddy.”
I thought that maybe Old Crow was dead. Judging from the way Hollerin’ Bob had been driving that day, it was distinct possibility. But when I lifted the tarp and started to unravel the tape around his mouth, Old Crow came to life, his eyes rolling around in his head like bright red marbles in a black bowl.
“Whoa!” I said. “Calm down. It’s just me. I’ll get you out of here in minute.”
After pulling the last of the tape off his mouth, he gasped and said, “Hurry now, do my hands.”
“Right,” I said and giggled. “Musta been a heck of a ride back here!”
I set the flashlight aside and worked slowly, methodically, picking at the tape with my jagged nails. After a Herculean effort, I managed to get Old Crow’s hands free. He sat up, rubbed his wrists, and then, without looking at me, without even saying thank you, he lashed out and struck my jaw with a clenched fist. I fell backwards, knocking my head against the tailgate. My head was cracked open, I was sure of it, shards of bone protruding through my scalp. Dazed, I watched as Old Crow yanked the tape off his ankles. He stood up and then delivered a swift, solid kicked to my side with one of his steel-toed boots. I couldn’t breathe, thought my ribs were crushed into a fine powder, a white dust that seeped into my lungs and choked me. I reached out for help but Old Crow grabbed the flashlight and hurried down the desolate country road in silence. Like a groveling dog, I got to my hands and knees. I panted, gasped, tried to scream at him, curse him, threaten him. “You dirty, black sonofabitch!” I rasped. “Hollerin’ Bob will get you! Mr. Peaches will get you! You’ll see. They were right about you after all. They’ll get you!”
A certain amount of time elapsed, I wasn’t sure how much, but at some point during the night I heard Hollerin’ Bob’s booming voice echo inside my skull. “Get the kid up! Get the kid up!”
I clutched my head, climbed down from the bed of the truck and made my way to the cab. Terrified that Old Crow might appear out of the darkness and strangle me, I locked the doors and flicked on the headlights.
Through a dense tangle of branches, Hollerin’ Bob emerged like a Sasquatch, his eyes beaming from behind a thick growth of beard, his shoulders hunched, his hands, heavy with drink, batting away bugs. Behind him, Mr. Peaches carried a gigantic catfish by the gills, its slimy brown dorsal dragging in the dust. The men showed me their prize and boasted of their struggle to pull the leviathan from the muddy waters of the creek. They tossed the fish into the bed of the truck, too drunk to notice that Old Crow was gone. I told them nothing. Bleary-eyed, beaten, bruised, I pretended to admire their catch and felt relieved that our adventure was now over.
At last we arrived at the dilapidated cottage, and without bothering to recover my copy of Ulysses from the floor of the truck, I staggered off to my mattress in the corner. Before I drifted off to sleep I wondered if in fact I was the protagonist of this adventure or if I was simply a minor character who appeared but briefly in one episode in the ongoing adventures of another man. And while my mind puzzled over the implications of this idea, I grew drowsy and gratefully descended into the oblivion of a deep and dreamless sleep.

Koan Inertia

January 2004 | back-issues, fiction

by Dave Clapper

The yellow arrows on the pavement split to left and right, defining the acceptable movements of vehicles. And for a while, I’m immobilized, thinking of a butterfly flapping its wings. A typhoon I don’t want to create, so I sit in my car, studying the arrows. And I think then of my exhaust and of the Greenhouse Effect (especially because my particular automobile mocks emissions tests), and realize that not moving is a butterfly flapping its wings just as surely as turning is. And I’m jolted into action, but still haven’t made a choice. I shift my foot from the brake to the gas and the car leaps forward, splitting the arrows. We jump a curb, the car and I, and obliterate a hedge, its branches clawing at the Mitsubishi’s undercarriage, living people buried and trying to come back. The back wheels then leap the curb as the front wheels bounce down from another. Cars and trucks honk out of our way, my car and me, and we find our way across a street and into the wall of a gas station’s mini-mart. Coming to almost-rest, hood crumpled, steam rises. A butterfly observes the carnage and veers right.

Merrill Lynch Wants Me Dead

January 2004 | back-issues, fiction

by jc jaress

It’s a grossly long story; the missing Merrill Lynch Roth IRA account. The final saga in an ugly divorce…how could it not be an ugly divorce? It was an ugly marriage first wasn’t it? So why is it surprising to think than an ugly union would have anything but an ugly offspring…in this case, the divorce resembled a one-armed strung out hooker with asphalt-torn nylons a broken shoe and a lisp, “Thay, buddy, can I bum a thmoke?” Why do people call us buddy?

But the Merrill Lynch Roth IRA account is still missing. I think that it never existed. But then, I don’t really remember. I quit remembering a long time ago. As soon as the paperwork was filed I figured the money was gone anyways. Either she’d end up with all of it or I’d have to sell it off to pay the attorneys. Either way, I never thought much of it after that.

There is the one known account that is worth about $5,000. Not much, really. I had just started saving the year before she left and, though it had been worth about $9,000 at one point, the dot.com thing sort of took all of the steam out of it. No, the dot.com thing took the money out of it…she took all of the steam out of it. But, today, it’s $5,000 and change. And it’s one half mine. This other, missing account…I don’t know.

The odd thing. No, not odd. Disturbing. The disturbing thing is that I haven’t seen or heard from Merrill Lynch in over three years. I mean, they have my money. I trust them to hold it, I guess. I call…they say they have it. They say that they mail out Quarterly Statements to their investors but I haven’t received one in over three years. I used to receive them at our old house. Before she left. Then I moved. Then I moved again. And then once more. That’s three moves in three years and I’ve never heard from them since.

Though, I still receive Modern Painters, a very good if not obscure sort of Euro-trendy art magazine. I think David Bowie is one of the publishers but it still does a very good job covering art. They deliver it – from England or Canada, maybe – to my house. My old house. My in between house. And my new house. How do they do that? And the credit card bills…they keep coming, too. I was late one month during my second move. Some sort of mix up with the database. I called them and they reversed the late charges and apologized. It’s good that they record those conversations. And the people that are trying to refinance the homes that I have never owned find me all the time. The Disabled Veterans always take the time to send me little address labels with flags and eagles on them. But I don’t use the labels because I don’t send them money. I used to send them money but they just kept sending more labels and I started feeling as if I wasn’t writing enough letters to my family to use up my Good-American allotment of labels.

I was in house #2 and house #3 for less than one week when Home Depot found me. They sent me a nice welcome letter and a 10% off coupon and they gave me directions on how to get to their stores. So what’s wrong with Merrill Lynch?

It got me to wondering…all of these others…they must want something from me. I think it’s my money. I mean, I’m sure their sweet people and all but really…they want my jack. And so they keep up with me. They put up with me. They don’t care how many times I move or what city I live in or whether I own or rent or steal. They all know that eventually I will want to read about David Salle or Alex Katz or…what’s her name…the one that paints those swirling, sensual, fleshy canvases like de Kooning but with more sex. Whatever. They know that one day I will buy an extension cord and some 2-part epoxy. And one day, maybe, I will write more letters to my family and friends. That’s why they keep up with me. That’s why they follow me. So what’s wrong with Merrill Lynch?

OK, so I haven’t invested in my IRA in over three years. Do they think that I will never make another investment? Don’t they realize that people’s lives change and that, although I can’t put money into that particular account anymore, maybe I might be interested in opening a new account and dumping a whole bucket of new cash into it? Isn’t that what they do? Take buckets of cash and wring their commissions out of it and leave us with just a little more or just a little less than when we started? Isn’t that their job? Why don’t they follow me like the rest of the rats?

Then it dawned on me…they want me dead.

Merrill Lynch would rather that I die and my family have no way to find the money. They don’t want someone cleaning up my house, snooping around wondering what this Quarterly Statement is all about. No, they want me to die without a trace so that the company can wait the three or four or seven years and then absorb my money back into the system. By osmosis…right down to the bottom line. Back into their overfed, diabetic system.

All right, maybe they don’t want me dead but at the very least they want me to forget that I have my money there. Why else wouldn’t they follow? It’s pretty shortsighted on their part. Is this the sort of small-minded corporate thinking that has consumed our country’s institutions? Take the easy pickings. Don’t say anything…maybe they’ll just forget. Or die. Yeah, die.

I can see the Inactive Accounts Manager at Merrill…Merrill, that’s what they call it. Over lunch. On their cell phones while you and your partner or mate or whatever you call him/her are having a very intimate, and expensive, moment. They’re on their phones instructing someone to “…and call Merrill to follow up on those inactive account reports. See if anyone has died lately. I want a breakdown of the Recently Dead, the One-Year Dead and the Two-Year Dead when I get back to the office.” Click. Is it a click anymore? Maybe it’s a flip or a beep. Whatever.

Every morning the Inactive Accounts Manager reads the obituaries and wrings his sticky hands. He is a small man. He’s a big lazy slob…but he is a small man. He doesn’t pay his fair share when he dines with friends. He smokes. Mostly your cigarettes. He drinks on your tab. Drives a Buick Regal or something that wishes that it was a Buick Regal and the velour smells like coffee and gin sweat and there is a greasy worn out spot between the driver’s legs because he has a habit of steering with his left hand while the other is stuffed between his legs like a little kid trying not to pee.

And he is waiting for me to die.

Well, fuck you – I do not plan to die during your reign on this planet. And it is not the lousy $5,000 and change account that is truly missing anyways. It’s the other, nonexistent, account that is missing.

I don’t know how it happened. It was ugly. She cheated. It got uglier. She cheated more. What is beyond ugly? That’s where it went last. And she cheated again.

We sat down with the lawyer–her lawyer–we listed the accounts that we had between us and planned how to divvy them up. Then they fucked me. I’m not bitter but they really screwed me, so I got my own lawyer and we spent two years trying to cut a watermelon in half. Seriously, one medium sharp pencil, one piece of scratch paper and a calculator with about 15 minutes of juice in it was all that was needed to cut this fish in two but it was decided to drag it out for 20 months instead because that would somehow make things more right. The lawyers and the accountants…I never knew that there was such an animal as a forensic accountant…they’re like the Quincy’s of the bookkeeping world…anyways, the professionals, they ate all of the money. They left us amateurs with less than nothing. I still owe.

But there’s this missing Merrill Lynch Roth IRA account. I know it doesn’t really exist. But somewhere (and we do not know where) someone (and we do not know who) said that there were three Merrill Lynch Accounts. One hers and two mine. I don’t know. I quit paying attention five years ago when this all started. Five years ago when all of the air was let out of the balloon. And the balloon was rolled up and put into its traveling case and the case was loaded onto the ship and the ship was sent hurtling into space in the general direction of the sun. With any luck the balloon, the case, the ship and the sun will all converge one day. The resulting flare will cause worldwide blackouts. All radio transmissions will sound like Jerry Lewis being eaten alive by hyenas. The sky will flash bright then darken completely. Computer memory will fail – everywhere. The One-Year Dead, the Two-Year Dead…all of the Dead will no longer exist and a very small man who used to have a reprehensibly cushy job at Merrill Lynch will sit behind the wheel of his 1998 maroon-colored vehicle and he will grab his balls and begin the long drive home.

Burning In Water (w/ a thanks to Bukowski)

October 2003 | back-issues, fiction

by jc jaress

The hair around my nipples has grown longer. It’s not something that one would notice. Hell, I didn’t even notice until one late summer day – actually, an early fall day in Southern California where we regularly push the summers well into October and on into December if we’re lucky – while smoking a cigarette and reading the latest edition of “Modern Painters” I looked down across my bare chest at hairs that had begun to grey and noticed a lengthy curl about my left nipple. Fortunately, the right nipple had equal growth so I did not look unbalanced in any way but the long hairs and the greying and the fact that I could repose on a Thursday late-summer morning and consider this newly discovered arrangement satisfied me in a very adult way.

I had long wondered when I might consider myself adult. 40. And without children. Two years divorced from a 16-year marriage that had begun desperately, ended tragically and with the in between years spent running up and down the same tired hills so often that the geography had ground down into a long, flat, arid plain complete with mirages, and buzzards and the ever-hopeful site of an oasis. It was from this Italian Western image of my life that I prison escaped myself, albeit kicking and screaming and thirsting for more staked-to-the-ground-waiting-for-the-ants-to-eat-me-alive-Indian-torture that I had so come to love and hate. It was in these few short years after the divorce that I had learned to see me. Not the “star of my own movie” image of me but the real me. The whole me, with flaws and fears and unspoken desires; a me that previously had demonstrated itself only in sweaty palms and knotted tongue and ranting self-directed, though outwardly-manifested, anger.

But there had been plenty of real Vincent Price torture inflicted upon me. Like the night that I spent outside of her boyfriend’s closet/office (he was a glorified janitor – a “maintenance man”) listening to the amorous lovers until I could take it no more and introduced myself by the uncontrolled banging on that cold steel door with the sort of fever that sends one hastily to the hospital for fear that the body might boil inside of its own skin. Had that door been wooden, or had there been a window. But what janitor’s closet would rate the expense or privilege of a window. And so, I sat. And read aloud to the caged birds that did not sing. Charles Bukowski. I went out to my car and pulled a recently purchased copy of “Burning In Water, Drowning In Flame” and began to read as if to children at bedtime. Of course, and unpremeditated on my part – for it was an unread copy to me, Buck’s poetry called for “cutting the balls off of the guy” in the first entry. I skipped ahead a poem or two to share in his dismay with his “sack of shit black-haired whore”. Bukowski probably was and wasn’t the best of choices that nig…no one sings of what beautiful sacks of shit that we humans are better than Bukowski.

The faint hum of a car engine preceded the police by just a few seconds but enough that I remained calm and expectant as they “surprised” me with guns drawn for whatever madman must be lingering about outside of the University janitor’s closet reading poetry at 2:30 in the morning. Surreal does nothing to describe the flush of emotions, the acuity of the senses, the sharpness and absolute blindness of that moment when first you hear your loved one’s panting, throaty, impaled voice through a steel door in the hallways of your own alma mater. Nearly twenty years prior I would have given nearly everything to steal away into an unlocked closet with any number of fresh, new little college girl-things or some worldly, frustrated, closed-down, soon-to-be-spread-eagled instructor that chose to lose it one day with a coed and dragged me into some secreted space. But not your wife. No one, no one wants to hear their wife’s murmurs and squeals from the other side of That Door.

I tried explaining all of this to the police; there were three. Good, bad and indifferent. Mr. Bad talked with the inconvenienced couple while Mr. Good chuckled with me over the absurdity of the situation. How, no, he never had come across a guy reading poetry to his wife and her lover and, though there were several other choices of action that he suggested, this was far and away the most inventive approach to the dilemma that he had ever encountered. Mr. Indifferent was the go-between; running back and forth with updates, “If they want to pursue this, you will go to jail” and “It is against the law to stalk someone…even your own wife” and, finally, thankfully, “They have agreed not to press charges.” The cops, in their car now, followed me the mile and one half to my house. They stopped short of walking me to the door figuring that their last threat of arrest if I stepped foot on the campus again should suffice a guy that had enough deranged wits about him to sit and read a book when he could just as easily taken apart both of their cars that were so conveniently parked together like a pair of cooing doves in the deserted campus parking lot.

I spent the next six hours packing her things. The U-Haul station opened at 7:00am and I bought two bundles of the largest boxes they sold and filled them, carefully, and with packing paper, with just about everything that looked or smelled or intimated a connection to Bukowski’s, and my, sack of shit whore. It’s only now, today as I sit admiring my lengthening and greying chest hairs, that I begin to truly appreciate the wonderful gift that she bestowed upon me; that surreal sense of what it is to be alive. To begin to feel the world disappearing from under my feet until I was left completely ungrounded and, for the first time in my life, face-to-face with myself.