From Stories in the First Person
People Not Like Us
I was in the parlor doing my homework, wondering why anybody in North Carolina really needed to know the capital of Montana, when there was a knock on the door. It was not a loud knock, but a firm one, a knock that demanded attention.
Since I was the man of the house and Mama was in the kitchen doing the supper dishes, I went to the door. Whoever it was didn’t knock again. I guess he figured that with that kind of knock, one time was enough. I opened the door, and through the screen, I saw a strange man.
He wasn’t strange like I didn’t know him. Everybody in Cowenville knew Athel Proctor. He was strange because he seemed like he was all arms and legs with a little bit of body in between and a head stuck on top. On top of that was a bunch of black hair slicked back with Brilliantine or Wild Root or something. He was wearing clean overalls, a clean work shirt, and the dirt had been knocked off his brogans.
“Hello, young Frank,” he said. “I’m here to see your mother.”
§
Sitting on the Horney Wall
One very interesting thing about Abigail Vinell was that after two beers in a parked car on a dark road, the only thing she would have on would be her bikini panties and her engagement ring. She wouldn’t take either of them off, although the fact that she was engaged to an older guy about to graduate from the university didn’t seem to bother her. The university was almost three hundred miles away. In the meantime, I was right there.
It was a fairly warm March night, and the last night I was going to see Abigail before Easter break. I wanted to make the most of it. The armrest of the passenger door of Ollie’s Chevrolet was making a painful dent in my kidney, but I didn’t say anything. Abigail, naked except for the panties and engagement ring, was stretched out on top of me, so I figured what was in front of me was so much more important than what was behind me that I could deal with it. I shifted a little so that the armrest could make a dent in another part of my back, and my hand left her breast and strayed to the edge of her panties. She pulled it back up.
“Why not?” I said. My voice was a little muffled because we were in the middle of a kiss, her lower lips gnawing against mine as if she were eating corn on the cob.
She pulled her face away from mine and looked me in the eye. “Just because,” she said. “And don’t beg, Joey. It’s a turn-off.”
Then she kissed me again, and I ran my fingers down the satiny smooth skin of her back.
Then she said, “Time to go,” and began to put her clothes back on. With Abigail, it was all foreplay.
§
So Sweet Revenge
Everything about Gus Reid seemed to shout, “I want more,” from his fat cheeks crowding his greedy little eyes, to his heavy jowls pulling his face to his shoulders,to his sausage-sized fingers, one of which had a large ring on it. It might have been a diamond. It might have been glass. I couldn’t tell.
Sitting across the desk from him, I thought that the cheap, stamped nameplate saying that he was G. Reid was really just an eccentrically spelled label. We were sitting in his office at the back of a strip center in a part of town I hadn’t even known existed two days ago.
“I don’t gamble on rec league games,” he said. "No way to handicap them.”
I shook my head. “I’m not asking you to gamble. I’masking you to back a sure thing.”
He leaned back in his chair, at least as much as his fat body and narrow chair would allow.
“Let me get this straight. You want me to make book at one to three against your own team. I don’t understand that.”
“Let’s just say I have my reasons.”
“And you don’t want a cut of the proceeds.”
“Nope. You keep it all.”
“And how do you plan to fix this game?”
“That’s my problem,” I said, “and I’d rather not talk about it.”
He nodded. I guess he was used to dealing with people who’d rather not talk about what they were doing, mainly because what they were doing was illegal. I didn’t know whether what I’d planned to do was illegal or not. Didn’t much matter, because I didn’t plan to get caught.
“You sound sure enough of yourself,” he said. “I admit it sounds interesting. I’ll triple my bet without doing any work. How much would I put up?”
“That would be for you and the other guy to work out, but it’d be south of ten grand.”
He nodded again.
“You realize, of course, that you’re guaranteeing this. If it blows up, I’ll get it back from you one way or another.”
He fixed me with what I think was supposed to be an intimidating stare. I couldn’t tell because, with Gus Reid, one look was just like another.
“And,” he said, “as you’ve probably heard, I’m not a very nice person.”
I grunted. I had heard a lot of things about Gus Reid, but the word nice was never mentioned.
“Yeah, but I don’t know any nice people who would do something like this.”
His body shook slightly. I guess he was laughing. He held out his hand across the desk. I shook it, thinking I would wash my hand as soon as I left.
I left. Now all I had to do was figure out how to deliver. I had left the most complicated part for last.
§
Bent Light
Of the eight panes in the cracked and peeling window frame, five were part of the original house, put in when the house was built more than a hundred years ago. Three panes had been replaced, one because I broke it with a rock when I was seven. The other two had been broken at other times by somebody else. Staring through the old glass, all I knew was that the world looked different through new glass.
When you stared out of the old panes, you couldn’t help wondering how the tree trunks bent so gracefully, then bent back, and how the corner of the barn described a shallow S-shape. When I shifted my gaze to the newer glass, things became straighter, clearer, and not as interesting. Mama had called the old glass wavy glass, and it was. The defects were created with the glass; the panes were made that way. When I was real young, I learned that if you stared through the glass long enough, you became confused about what was real and what was changed by the glass. Old glass bends light, deforms shapes, and warps reality. More than once, I’d gone from the dark parlor to the front porch and was surprised that the corner of the barn was straight. Sometimes I felt disappointed.
§
Fermata
When I walked into the diner, it was as if I’d been dumped back into the sixties or maybe that a sixties artifact had been dragged forward four decades to bear some sort of witness. The black and white tiles on the floor. Red plastic tops on the counter stools. And too much fluorescent light. At the counter. a woman about my age was sipping coffee. I sat down on a stool at the far end of the counter.
The counterman was leaning against the wall near the back end of the counter. He was a big guy, wearing an apron over his white t-shirt and khaki pants. I could tell he had muscles. Just the type for a 1960s diner, except he wasn’t smoking. He detached himself from the wall and strolled over, probably guessing that at this time of night, nobody was in a real hurry. I asked him about the pies, and he said they had apple, chocolate, lemon, and peach. Also had some pretty good chocolate cake. I ordered the apple pie and coffee and settled down on my stool to wait for it to be delivered. I didn’t want to stare at the woman, but she kept pulling my eyes toward her. She was wearing a short coat over a button-down shirt and gray slacks. I didn’t think she was a hooker; she was too old and too well-dressed. But I couldn’t think of another good reason for a woman to be out alone at three o’clock. Unless maybe she was a cop, but she was too well-dressed for that, too.
The counterman brought my pie and coffee and slid them across to me.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He’d already started walking back, but he turned around.
“Nick. Why?”
“I just wanted to know whose pie I was eating.” Actually, I was just curious about whether his name fit this place as well as his appearance did. I was beginning to sink back in time to when Connie and I would find an all-night diner for hamburgers after a gig. While we ate, we’d do an autopsy on the night’s work. What had gone right. What had gone wrong. Which of the pickup guys we’d want to play with again. Usually, if there was somebody we really didn’t want to see again, it was a drummer. Bad drummers make very long nights.
Nick had gone back to his post. I wondered if there was a gun under the counter there. Maybe he didn’t want to be far away from it if some bad guys came in. I tried to think what I’d do if they did, but I wasn’t interested enough to worry about it. I took a small bite of my pie and a sip of my coffee. It wasn’t bad, and it was served on thick plates and in mugs that were probably bought when the place was opened. I concentrated on the pie.
“You look like somebody just drowned your last goldfish.”
It took me a second to register that the woman at the other end of the counter was talking to me. Had to be since Nick hadn’t responded. “Yeah,” I said. “Sort of a sad night.”
§
Facebook Friends
I pulled into the IHOP parking lot a few minutes before ten and just sat in the car for a minute, wondering if this was something I really wanted to do. I didn’t want an argument, political or otherwise. I didn’t want a new, old friend, especially Ken. And I didn’t want anything that brought complications.
I just wanted to live out the rest of my life, remember Catherine, see my grandson once a week or so, and have dinner with Gerald, Jr. and Kelly, his wife, every couple of months. This year I had started reading the books that I claimed to have read over the years and watched some sports on TV. I was still in pretty good health with the exception of a prostate the radiologist described as “grossly enlarged,” and I could sleep most nights between my trips to the bathroom. I was afraid that whatever Ken wanted to talk about might change that.
But I went inside anyway.
It was always that way. Even when my fledgling agency pitched a national fast-food account, one that we probably couldn’t have handled even if we had won it. I was told that we shouldn’t even bother. But I went in anyway. A couple of years later, the guy we’d presented to went to a smaller, regional chain, and we got a call. Then we got the account. Sometimes good things happen.
Ken was sitting at a booth in the back, reading a newspaper. Evidently, he’d been here for a while. He didn’t look much like the guy I had known in college. That guy was thinner and had hair. He also had more color in his face. But he did look like the picture on his Facebook page. Probably not so much for me, since I used a picture that was maybe fifteen years old. He looked up and waved at me.
When I got to the booth, he stood up and held out his hand. I shook it. Before he sat down, I noticed the holster and the automatic on his belt. I motioned to it.
“You going to save me if the terrorists attack the IHOP, eh?”
He shook his head. “You can save your own ass. This is just to make sure I get out alive.”
“Somehow, I think I’m more afraid of sitting here with you than the eventuality of some terrorists. I don’t like guns.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s my constitutional right to carry one.”
I started to answer that. I didn’t believe that anything in the Constitution gave him the right to sit across from me in the IHOP with a gun on his hip. I really didn’t care what kind of guns he had at home, but I wasn’t sufficiently convinced of Ken’s sanity not to worry about sitting within point-blank range.
“Why’d do you want to see me, Ken? I’ve got some other things to do.”
He laughed. “Old farts like us don’t have anything to do. Just live while we can and try to die without causing anybody too much trouble. But I won’t keep you long. I just need a favor.”
“And why do you need this favor from me.”
“Because I need something done by somebody who won’t be talking to anybody who knows me, especially my wife. And, besides, we have a lot in common.”
“The last thing I can remember that we had in common was my girlfriend in college. “
His eyes widened a little, and he smiled as he remembered Love. I remembered her, too, and if there was ever a woman misnamed, it was Love.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I had forgotten about that. I guess I need to say I’m sorry I moved in on you.”
“No apologies necessary. The only things that were holding us together were her inertia and my hormones. I couldn’t imagine spending any large part of my life with Love Morgan. I imagine her husband or husbands died an early death just having to deal with her.”
§
The Occasion
“It’s the last day,” I said. “After today, I won’t be a teacher anymore.” I imagined her reminding me of all the times I’d wished for the retirement day to come. “We can travel,” I’d told her. “Maybe I’ll even try to write again.”
Once upon a time, I was going to be a writer. That was probably what attracted Eleanor to me. I wasn’t that handsome, and it was obvious I wasn’t rich. Eleanor, on the other hand, was glorious. Beautiful, smart, and with a laugh that invited you to join in. I didn’t question why she loved me. I just assumed that it was my writerly mystique.
But Eleanor just continued grading papers. She knew that there was nothing I’d rather do than teach.
I stood at the rectangle of neatly trimmed grass that blanketed Eleanor, lost in memory.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, my dear,” I said. I spoke softly. If she could hear me at all, she could hear me whisper. “Nothing to get up for in the morning, and no one with whom to share my idleness. No use for the hundreds of things rattling around in my head.
“Perhaps you were the more fortunate one. Until the moment you left, you had someone who loved you. Almost all of your life, you had purpose. After today, I will have neither.”
Then I dropped the stadium pillow to the ground and knelt. Someone passing might have thought I was praying. I wasn’t. I was reciting.
Coffin-bound, heavy stone, lie on her breast; I vex my heart alone, she is at rest. Peace, Peace, she cannot hear lyre or sonnet, all my life’s buried here, heap earth upon it.
The thoughts were real, were pure, but there was still something of an inside joke in the recitation. Eleanor had hated Swinburne and had a strong dislike for most of the Victorians. She called them a frothy layer between plainer speaking poets, much too effete and dainty for her taste. She’d told me that they’d turn a sentence into a pretzel just to try to make a pedestrian rhyme. Besides, she would say, who would name a child Algernon? Mostly, I’d just continued grading papers. She was entitled to her opinion.
But I wondered if it was a sign of some sort of mental illness that I went back to the Victorians every time my emotions were intense.