The following are some of the stories in Acts of Ineffable Love - The Collected Stories of Glenn Cheney. (The Shectucket Press, Hanover, CT 1995. 88pp. Softcover. ISBN: 0-96-46507-0-3) Copyright: 1995 Glenn Cheney. $7.00
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If you can't have kids, why not a frog farm in Brazil? If you're not tied down, why not go for it? It seemed like a good idea - not the frogs, necessarily, but the going for it. Rosilda would get to live nearer her mother, who was suffering arthritis and some vague deterioration of the spleen. Sam would get to ditch high school Spanish.
"You'll learn Portuguese in one flash," Rosilda said, throwing the blankets off them and reaching for the light. Sam sat up. It was decided. They were moving to Brazil.
"How much does a place cost there?" he asked.
"Ten thousand," she said. "We can find a nice place for ten thousand. Plant flowers all around. Will be beautiful."
"Ten thousand," said Sam. "The whole thing? Just like that? Paid for?"
"Is cheap there," she said, "if you have dollars."
He didn't mention the frog farm right then. He still had it in the back of his mind, something he'd read about in Mother Earth News. Rabbits were in the back of his mind, too. Tropical fish, escargot, bees, silkworms - the back of his mind was an ark of esoteric livestock. For some reason, though, the frogs stood out. He didn't hear Rosilda going on about the house they'd build and the flowers they'd plant around it. He was remembering the details of the frog farm, thinking how he'd send back letters and pictures for the faculty bulletin board.
They scrimped and fretted and packed and planned. They bought stuff you couldn't get in Brazil: a laptop, certain seeds, maple syrup, everything written on the care and slaughter of frogs. On the last day of June, having collected their measly pensions and vacation pay, having cashed in their IRAs and held an everything-must-go tag sale, they flew to Florida for a day with Sam's folks, then on to Rio, and from Rio inland to the mountains of Minas Gerais. Her brother Victor met them at the airport with his old black Volkswagen.
"Be careful with him," Rosilda whispered while Victor tied the suitcases to the roof. "He's a little crazy."
But Victor talked of grand things. Sam understood enough of his Portuguese to catch words like capitalism and cosmos, names like Darwin, Nietzsche, Heidegger. It all related to frog-farming, which Victor had been investigating. He said something twice, emphatically, waving one finger in the air while trying to drive and look Sam in the eye. Sam asked Rosilda for a translation.
In English she said, "God's gift to earth," then switched to Portuguese to gasp, "Victor, watch the road."
Victor went on in high school English. "You can eat the legs," he said, wiggling his fingers at his mouth.
"I know," Sam said.
"Eight dollars one kilo. The skin - " he pinched the hairless flesh of his forearm " - leather. Thirty-two dollars one kilo. Dollars."
"Wow," said Sam, impressed. He formulated an experimental sentence in Portuguese and launched it: "How many skins per kilo?"
"More or less twenty," said Victor. He took his hands from the wheel to hold up ten fingers.
"Only?" Sam said in Spanish. "Big frogs!"
Victor gestured again, indicating a monster almost the size of a Volkswagen windshield. Rosilda translated distractedly: "New breed. Only in Brazil. Twenty kilos."
"That's forty-four pounds!" Sam said.
"Forty-four," Victor said, nodding and smiling. "Only in Brazil. This is the promised land of next millennium. Frogs are the cattle of the future and Brazil is the land of frogs."
"Truck!" Rosilda said. "Cuidado!"
Victor glanced ahead, swung back to his side of the road and went on talking . "We will be the kings of frogs. It will be biologically impossible for anyone to catch up to us."
"We?" Sam asked.
"You and me."
"Biologically?"
"Genetic selection. Theoretically, you can make one frog as big as one sheep. Scientific fact."
King of frogs. Sam liked that. He could see himself, shepherd's crook in hand, looking over a swampy pasture of eight-hundred-pound frogs. He had to laugh.
"I'm serious," Victor said. He knocked on his wrist. "The bones. The best nutrient for plants. The viscera - " he patted his stomach - "guess who eats frog viscera."
"Don't know," said Sam.
"Guess."
"Japanese?"
"Ha! I liked that. No. Other frogs! Frogs eat frogs. You use the good parts to make money, the rest goes back into the system. One hundred percent recovery. No loss."
"A perfect system," Sam said.
Victor said, "You got it."
* *
They found a place in a town called Cachimbo, an hour from the city. It wasn't the dream house Rosilda had foreseen, but it had plenty of room for planting flowers. And water: a stream tumbling off a mountain of rock. A canal fed a shallow pond about fifty feet wide. Victor declared the place perfect and they bought it.
Sam went along because he figured forty acres had to be good for something, and he'd never owned a water fall before. Rosilda approved but without enthusiasm. The house, a poorly built white-washed mud-brick structure with bent walls and concrete floor, had a porch overlooking the pond a good hundred yards away. The windows had heavy shutters but no glass. It was a house that could be knocked down and rebuilt later. The important thing was the land and the water.
Besides, their plans had changed. Rosilda would stay in the city at her mother's place, to take care of her. Sam would stay on the farm to do whatever he could to make money. Now they needed it. The place cost eighteen thousand, not ten, which just about wiped them out. But it was a perfect place for frogs.
Victor got hold of some baby carp and released them in the pond. "A delicacy," he said. "They taste like chicken. Six dollars a kilo. And what do you think they eat?"
"Don't know."
"Guess."
By this time, Sam was getting tired of guessing esoteric frog facts. Knee-deep in pond mud, he was making a Sisyphean effort to dig a post hole under six inches of water. He had just jammed the digger into his foot. Victor, giving instructions and advice from the bank of the pond, waited five seconds for Sam's answer, then came out with it.
"Frog dung," he said triumphantly.
Sam said he didn't understand. The frog part he got, but the other word was new. Victor gave the vernacular and illustrated with a quick sound effect. Sam got it but didn't believe it.
"Carp don't eat that," he said.
"They eat the algae. Frog dung has more nitrogen than any other dung, except that of worms. Put nitrogen in water, you get algae. Put carp in algae, you get fat carp. Only one problem..."
"What's that?"
"Carp eat tadpoles, too."
Sam already knew that carp ate tadpoles. That's why he was digging fence posts in the pond. They had to put up a fence between the frog section and the carp section. He wished he could say, "Good fences make good neighbors," in Portuguese, but then Victor came up with something even better: "Peaceful co-existence."
"This is a model of the world," he said. "The class struggle. Six dollars a kilo against forty dollars a kilo. And we are the imperialists, exploiting them all."
"Frog kings," said Sam, and Victor laughed like an idiot. Sam threw the post hole digger at him, overhand like a spear, and said, "Dig."
* *
Rosilda got a job managing a store that sold fancy imported home furnishings. Sam made a little money giving English lessons to a dentist, a rich kid, and some engineers from a nearby graphite mine. When he wasn't in town, he stayed on the farm, preparing the pond for the frogs, building tadpole hatching tanks, insect larva tanks, frog retention walls. Once or twice a week Victor came to help or at least watch. On weekends Rosilda took the bus to Cachimbo but spent her time keeping her husband from looking neglected. She cleaned up the mud he tracked in during the week, re-washed the plates he had only rinsed, scrubbed the bed sheets in a galvanized tub. Feeling appropriately guilty, Sam told her she really didn't have to do all that. Rosilda agreed. She wanted to relax on weekends. Since a maid that far from the city would cost practically nothing, she asked around and found a girl to come clean the place every day and cook Sam a decent lunch. "You'll like her," she told Sam. "She has teeth like a frog and skin the color of mud." He knew whatteeth like a frog meant. It meant Rosilda didn't like frogs and the girl had not been chosen for her beauty.
Not that they had money for such a luxury. Inflation was twenty percent a month. Rosilda suggested it might be better for them both to live in the city and visit the farm on weekends. Sam said they could get by on the farm if they had a good garden and made a little cash off the frogs and eventually some rabbits. He had plans.
"We can lead a poor but good life," he said as they sat eating dinner at the shaky card table in the living room. "We'll have enough. Most people in this country would give anything to have what we have. Most people in the States, too."
"Victor's crazy with that frog idea," she said. "I never heard about nobody make money from frogs. Coffee, cattle, sure. But no frogs. Somebody I know tried raise rabbits. Everybody died."
"The key is to think small," Sam said. "A couple of rabbits, a couple of goats. Half a dozen chickens, max. That' s how you start. Then you just make things grow."
"I don't know. I never heard about nobody try to be poor."
At dawn the Monday after, Sam stepped out the back door and found a young girl with buck teeth sitting on an overturned bucket. She was wearing a T-shirt and a beige, unhemmed skirt that barely came to her knees. Her skin was light brown but tinged with a bit of rosiness from the sun. Off-white spots bigger than freckles dotted her face and forehead, a genetic aberration Sam figured went back to a Portuguese slave owner.
He had no idea what to do with a maid. He motioned her inside, gestured at the mess and said, from the doorway, "Good luck." Her bank of teeth broke from her lips in a smile, but she quickly hid it with one hand.
He went down to the pond to work but kept coming back for glasses of water. Each time, she was in a different room, down on all four, rump up, leaning into the brush, schik-schik-schik-schik-schik, five scrubs to each patch of floor. He didn't know what to say to her so he stayed outside except once in a while came in for more water and a quick check. A maid. Schik-schik-schik-schik-schik. Another picture for the faculty bulletin board.
He was nailing up the knee-high anti-carp fence when Victor drove up the long driveway in his Volkswagen and stopped near the pond. He had the front trunk tied down over a heavy old apple crate. Sam came out of the water to look. Cowering in the bottom of the crate in a mat of wet leaves were a bullfrog the size of a shoe box and three females the size of shoes.
"Mancha rosas," Victor said. "See the rosy spots on the back? That's how you know. The bull's a prize winner. Had his picture in the paper. Look." And he snapped open a clipping with a photo of what the caption claimed was the largest tadpole in history: fifteen centimeters long - almost six inches - at the age when a tadpole's back legs first sprout. It looked like an amphibious Edsel.
"Let's go show the maid," he said.
"Maid?" said Victor. "We have a maid?"
"We?" said Sam.
"The frogs are ours."
"Okay. Yes, we have a maid."
"What color?"
After a moment's consideration, Sam said, "Cinnamon."
Victor guffawed. "I didn't ask what flavor!"
"What difference does it make?"
"Blacks cook better but they're slow. Mulattas are smarter but they give you more problems. Scientific fact."
Sam didn't address statements like that. Victor, nutsy indeed, was full of them. Scientific proof of pyramid power, rational proof of the existence of God. He was better left undisputed.
They lugged the crate up to the house, set it on the kitchen floor and called the maid. She looked in cautiously, suspiciously, then suddenly screamed and leaped back. Victor lifted the massive bull by the armpits and, making monstrous snorts, advanced at her. The girl screamed once, then again, harder, and fled to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Victor seemed to think that was pretty good.
They finished nailing up the fence across the pond, splashed around to herd the last of the carp through a gate to the other side, then opened the canal to feed in more water and released the frogs.
"Now it's only a matter of time and nature," Victor said as they sat on the bank, drying their legs in the sun, admiring the marvel of four frogs in a pond. "Next month we'll have a quarter of a million tadpoles. By January we'll have a hundred thousand frogs."
Victor left before noon. Sam went up to the house to coax his maid from the bathroom and formulate some kind of apology. She was already out, though, poking around the rusty kitchen cabinets. Before he could say anything, she asked what he wanted for lunch.
Not one to give orders, he gestured vaguely at the cabinets and said, "Anything."
"There's rice and beans and one egg," she said. "That's all."
He thought for a second and said, "Let's go into town. You can buy what we need."
So he fired up his Fiat and off they went. She sat quietly, one hand gripping the side of the seat, the other gripping the knob on the glove compartment. Watching her out the side of his eye, he thought she looked like a kid on a roller coaster. "First time in a car?" he asked.
"Oh, no," she said. "Many other times. But I like it."
He finally asked her name. It was Tânia. She was seventeen. She lived on the other side of the hill with her parents and nine brothers and sisters. Her father, it turned out, was Furão, an alcoholic chicken thief. Neighbors had warned Sam about him. They said to shoot him on sight. Sam didn't say so to Tânia. Something in her voice, though, revealed she wasn't proud to admit her father's name.
In the dark, dusty little supermarket, Sam felt both patronly and husbandly as he followed her down the aisles. Not knowing how to deal with Brazilian foods - he'd been living off rice, canned beans, sausage, eggs and Rosilda's weekend leftovers - he kept saying "Good," and "Okay" as Tânia lifted things from the shelves for his approval. She didn't buy much there, but then led him down a couple of streets to a cobblestone plaza of booths piled with vegetables and fruit. Again she showed him each item and he said good, okay, to each. He had trouble understanding the amounts of money she said to pay, so he handed her his wad of bills and let her do it. He carried the basket. It was a lot like being married.
* *
One day during tadpole season Tânia showed up with a meaty bruise on her cheekbone and three little kids around her legs. When Sam asked what happened, she just said, "Nothing," then asked if her sisters could stay with her. "To help," she said.
They didn't look like they'd be much help. The youngest was about two, the oldest about six. But Sam couldn't resist. He scooped up the two-year-old and called for the other two to follow. He took them down to the pond and had them crouch down at the edge of the water to see the swarms of jittering black tadpoles. "Baby frogs," he said. "Pretty soon, big frogs." But they gave no response. Maybe it was his accent or his broken sentences, or maybe they were just dumb. They looked when he pointed at the ghostly shadows of carp under the water, but they didn't seem capable of saying whether they saw or not. Did they want to fish? He might as well have asked three fire plugs if they wanted to dance.
At lunch time, Sam found his plate of rice, beans, collards and, today, breaded beefsteak awaiting him on the card table, as usual. Normally he ate alone, but today, when he saw Tânia seating her sisters on buckets and crates on the back porch, each with a plate in lap, he insisted they sit with him. Tânia insisted they couldn't, but Sam insisted and insisted, and finally they did. He brought in a long wooden bench off the front porch and got pillows for the kids to sit on. Tânia jabbered at them in clipped, harsh, peasant dialect. Sam couldn't understand the words, but knew by her tone she was telling them to behave.
Everyone ate in silence. Tânia never looked away from her plate. Sam got a good look at her bruise. It had worsened since morning. She'd probably been hit that same day. He asked her again what happened, but she seemed not to hear. "Tell me," he said, reaching out to touch her wrist. "Tânia."
Her arm jerked a couple of inches away. Without looking up, she shook her head just a bit. Sam looked at the little girls. The middle-sized was staring at him with big, brown eyes and clunking her feet against the bench. Sam smiled and said, "What's your name?" Her legs stopped swinging, but she didn't answer.
"Tell him," Tânia snapped. The little girl squeaked, "Rosamaria." Sam asked how old she was, but Tânia stood up and started scraping the girls' unfinished food into one plate. Sam was still chewing beef as she herded the girls into the kitchen and closed the door behind them.
Later that day, toward evening, he was surprised to find them still hanging around. Tânia was cooking his dinner, something she didn't normally do before leaving. When he saw her issuing dollops of rice and beans onto four plates, he knew she wasn't going home. Letting them eat on the porch, he sat alone at the card table, chewing slowly, thinking. When he delivered his plate to the sink, he put a hand on her shoulder and said, "If you want, you four can sleep in the other bedroom." Keeping her hands in the dishwater, she whispered perfunctory thanks.
During the night, one of the little girls started crying, and then the others joined her. Tânia tried to hush them by scolding, but it didn't work. Sam, quite awake in the next room, felt sorry for them all. He had no idea what to do about their situation and wondered whether to get involved. He didn't mind if they stayed for a while - the farm needed some kids on it - but he knew Rosilda wouldn't approve. She didn't even like frogs.
Two of the little girls stopped crying, but one moaned on. Soon Tânia came tapping at his door. Did the senhor have anything for an earache? He didn't think so, but he got up and pulled on his pants and went to have a look in his shaving kit. He found a single Tylenol tablet of indeterminate age.
"She can't," she said. "She won't swallow pills."
Sam said, "I know a way." In the kitchen, while Tânia looked around his shoulder, he crushed the tablet between two spoons, then dribbled honey on the powder. She followed as he led the way back to the room, spoon held high, one hand below to catch drips. Sitting at the edge of their bed, he groped for the little girl and told Tânia to turn on the light. Feeling quite the bwana, he looked into the kid's ear, up and down, left and right, then opened his mouth to make her open hers. She took in the honey. When a little dribbled out, he pushed it back in with a finger. He stroked her head, laid her down, covered her up, and told Tânia she'd be okay.
Sam now went to the city on weekends so Rosilda wouldn't come to the farm. He hoped the problem would resolve itself before she decided to visit again. When she asked him what was new, he said, "Nothing," even though he could have mentioned the growth of the tadpoles, the first of the frogs, and, most recently, the failure of a hundred thousand frogs to materialize. Sam doubted they had a hundred in all.
Not much new on Rosilda's end, either. Her mother's spleen was neither better nor worse. No one was buying imported home furnishings. The rent on the apartment was going up fifty percent next month but her mother's pension was frozen. Sam and Rosilda would have to make up the difference, which was only fair since Rosilda was, in fact, living there. Food and medicine and doctor fees were going up, too. Sam and Rosilda would have to chip in.
Which didn't leave much to invest in frogs. Sam was upside down under her kitchen sink when Rosilda assumed a seat on a chair from the dining room. She really didn't see how they could afford the luxury of a place in the country. He didn't say anything. Above him, the sink was full of week-old water Rosilda had been saving for his return. It smelled of sewage as it dribbled out of the pipe he had managed to loosen but not remove. When he grappled with the pipe, the water dribbled down his arm and off his elbow.
"We aren't rich, you know," she said. "Country homes are for rich people. You can't live with one salary in this country. We two have to work. Where are we going to work out in the country? You want more money for your frogs this week, né ? You know how much that I pay for bread yesterday? Hmm?"
In a certain sense alone, his head and shoulders in the semi-darkness of the cabinet under the sink, Sam was just looking at the pipe now. He knew it hated him and wanted to make him suffer. He didn't doubt he deserved it. But it was better facing sewage in the dark than coming out of the cabinet to guess the price of bread.
She said, "Guess," and then, "Go ahead. I'm waiting." And then, after a good pause, in a dramatically lower voice, "You have one family to support, you know."
A burst of air rushed from his nose, something between a laugh and a snicker. He tried to smooth it over into a cough, but she caught it. "What?" she asked. "Why you laugh?" He gave a couple more coughs and didn't answer. She sat for a while, then got up and left.
Early Sunday morning, claiming to have adolescent tadpole problems - the first she'd heard of tadpoles at all - he packed his little haversack and headed back to the farm.
Tânia was hoeing in the garden when he arrived. The kids were playing with a distressed frog and a brown and white puppy that was prancing and yapping at it. They'd discovered a certain spot on the frog they could touch to make it jump. When they poked it with a stick it leaped three or four feet, arms and legs splayed out as it hurdled through the air. With each leap the kids collapsed with hilarity. Sam didn't like it, though. "Hey," he said. "Take that frog back to the pond."
But Tânia, looking over the bamboo garden fence, said, "No."
Sam looked at her. "Why not?" he asked, rather surprised she had spoken up against him.
"They saw a cobra down there."
The word made Sam gasp. He wasn't sure if "cobra" meant an actual cobra or just any old snake. Either way, it was bad news for frogs. He left his pack on the porch, caught the frog, got his machete from behind the woodpile and walked gingerly, vigilantly, down to the pond. The puppy came but the Tânia held the kids back.
The frogs didn't have much to say about a snake, but they did look concerned about the situation. They seemed to hunker a little lower in the water, and nobody was playing on shore. Dozens of yellow eyes and green brows poked up through the velvety pond scum, all looking at him. He could hear them thinking, What are you going to do now, Sam?
He thought the first thing he would do was sit on a convenient boulder and smoke a couple of cigarettes. Where were the hundred-thousand brothers and sisters of these terrified survivors? Digesting slowly inside cobras? Victor hadn't said anything about cobras. He'd given Sam pamphlets about diseases of the frog, history of the frog, stages of frog metamorphosis, but nothing about cobras. Maybe he assumed forty-pound frogs had nothing to worry about as long as they stayed off the highway.
Sam was peeling an orange and smoking his third cigarette when the puppy started barking and jumping around in the grass. Sam stood to see a low, dark, sinuous shadow slide from behind a bush. Even standing on the boulder, machete in hand, he couldn't tell how long it was. More than ten feet. It was black, with yellow spots on the back. Wondering if the spitting and flying and death-in-thirty-seconds cobras he'd heard about as a child were real, he whistled and called up toward the house. Tânia came out. He motioned for her to come. She walked about halfway before figuring out why he was standing on the rock. Only with a lot of gesturing and pointing and insisting did he convince her to come all the way down.
"Over there," he said, pulling her up onto the rock. "There's part of it under that bush."
"God in Heaven," she said. "It's going to kill us."
"Is it poisonous?" he asked.
"I don't know. I think so. It's going to kill us."
"No," said Bwana Sam. "It's looking for a frog."
Breathing hard, they watched as the snake wound silently around stones and tufts of grass, closer and closer to the pond, oblivious to the puppy's shrill yap. It looked endlessly long and thicker than a snake should be. By the time Sam discerned the tail, the head had disappeared. Only the front four or five feet of it groped over the frog retention wall and pulled into a tangled coil at the edge of the pond. The head rose. Tânia, torn between looking and cowering, whimpered at Sam's arm. The snake's head rose a bit higher, pulled back, dipped, froze, waited, waited, then jabbed into the edge of the water. When it pulled back, it had the hips and legs of a frog wiggling from its mouth. Tânia gasped so loud it was almost a scream. The snake pulled back, adjusted the frog a bit, then coiled all around to force it further in. It took a long time. Sam watched, open-mouthed, and Tânia sobbed so hard she retched.
Then they ran back to the house. Tânia called the children in and closed all the doors and shutters. Sam told her not to worry, the snake certainly wasn't going to come looking for them. But when he got in the car to go into town to call Victor, she looked dubious.
Sam described the snake over the phone. Victor said it sounded like a jararacuçu. "Be careful," he said. "They're mean. And where there's one, there's more."
"If they've eaten a hundred thousand frogs, there's a lot more. What are we supposed to do now?"
"First thing, put dolomitic lime all around the pond. Snakes won't cross lime. Scientific fact.'
"That's all?" Sam said, wondering why lime hadn't ended the world's snake problems centuries ago.
"I"m going to get a gun," Victor said. "We'll kill them. I'll be there tomorrow morning."
Sam bought forty kilos of lime to hold the fort until Victor arrived with the artillery. Tânia and the kids watched from the porch as he sprinkled a wide white band around the pond, then sprinkled it again. He could imagine a snake licking it with its little forked tongue, then turning away. Maybe lime did the trick. Until sunset they all kept watch from the porch, the kids taking turns in Sam's lap while he held his binoculars to their eyes. They saw no snakes.
The next morning, though, when Sam and Tânia and kids and the puppy trooped down to the pond, they found what could only be the track of a snake across the dew-damp field of white. When Victor arrived, they showed him. He nodded heavily and said, "They're desperate."
He had a gun, a long-barreled .22 pistol loaded with tiny capsules of buckshot. When he shot it into the pond, the pellets ripped up two square feet of water. "With this," he said, "you can't miss. But you have to be close."
Sam shooed the kids away and then took five shots at varying distances across the carp side of the pond. The pistol had hardly any kick and the pellet groupings seemed tight enough at up to twenty yards. He re-loaded and tried to hand it to Tania, but she wouldn't take it. Victor protested. "Never give a woman a gun," he said in sudden English. "Especially a maid."
"I can't sit here waiting for snakes all day and all night," Sam said. "She'll have to stand guard sometimes. Tania, take it. For the frogs."
"You're going to be sorry."
She wouldn't take it. Sam said, "Sit here, like this," and sat on the ground, his back against the tall rock. "Knees up like this. Elbows on your knees, the gun out like this. Two hands. Point it at the snake and squeeze the trigger slowly. Keep looking..." And he let off a shot. "Easy," he said.
He coaxed her to the right position. Once she had her skirt adjusted to her satisfaction, he set the gun in her hands. She gave a nervous little laugh, like a kid doing something for the first time. Sam said, "That's the snake over there, that banana leaf. Go ahead. And don't close your eyes."
She had to turn her head away as she pulled the trigger, but she made the shot and even hit the leaf a little. Sam said, "Do it again," but she wouldn't.
* *
Victor and Sam were swinging in hammocks and drinking beer under two mango trees - Tânia was down at the pond, standing guard - when Victor proposed yet another anti-cobra idea. Geese, he said, attacked snakes. In fact their reputation was strong enough that they didn't have to attack snakes. Snakes knew the smell of a goose and stayed away. But there was one problem: geese ate frogs.
"Then to hell with the frogs," Sam said. "Let's raise geese."
"Escargot. If you want to make money, you want to look into snails."
"But don't geese eat..." And that's when they heard the crack of the pistol and the rhythmic wails, lungful after lungful, of a maid face to face with reptilian death. Well before they reached the pond, they saw the violent throes of a long, black snake thrashing above the grass, writhing in agony, flailing and twisting and lurching back on itself, showing the ivory white of its belly and the inside of its mouth. Tânia was gripping her face in her fingers and screaming, screaming, screaming. Sam took the gun from between her feet and emptied it at the snake, shot by shot knocking it down until they heard it only twitching in the grass. While Victor poked at it with a long stick, Sam put his arms around Tânia's shoulders and said, "It's okay, it's okay." Gradually her screams became sobs and then a low, damp whimper. When Sam tried to lift her to carry her to the house, she stopped him, then got up and went alone, still holding her face in one hand.
For the first time since Sam had met him, Victor had nothing to say, no comments or revelation of fact. He kept to himself, walking slowly around the pond, arms crossed over his chest, looking down, thinking. An hour later, he handed Sam a box of ammunition, said, "Be careful, hear?", then got in his car and drove off.
For several days, Tânia stayed within five paces of the house and kept the kids within her sight. When the kids asked Sam to bring them a frog to play with, he brought three and made a big to-do about organizing them into a jumping contest. Of course they wouldn't stay put on the starting line, so Sam kept hopping after them, rolling over in somersaults, even catching one in mid-air. The kids giggled and squealed and fetched frogs and held them to the ground at the starting line. Tânia came to watch. When the kids realized one frog could jump remarkably further than the others, they wanted to get more from the pond to see who was the grand champion. But when Sam said, "Okay, let's go!", Tânia, suddenly serious, said, "No."
She agreed to go, though, and walked down with Sam, each of them carrying a cardboard box for the catch. They were poking through the pond scum with sticks when Sam saw something whitish whisk by under the water. It was a carp.
He decided to drain the pond and solve the problem immediately. While Tânia sat watching from the boulder, Sam pulled the sheet of plywood away from the drain screen at the low end of the pond. As the water descended across the upper end, it uncovered a host of frogs Sam hadn't known he had - certainly not a hundred thousand, but plenty just the same. Uniformly the size of children's tennis shoes, they might have had a little elbow room if they 'd spread out evenly. But, uncomfortably exposed to daylight and air, they leaped in silent desperation, colliding, falling all over each other, forming amorphous piles that melted, dispersed, and reformed.
It was a lot of frogs. Tânia, still up on the rock, gushed with a confluence of giggle and scream. Trying to look and not look, to back away and look closer, she wrapped her arms around her torso and hips as if trying to hide nakedness from a crowd.
The screen fence had risen above the mud at a point near the middle of the pond. Sam kicked off his sandals and rolled his shorts up as high as they would go. Careful to keep off the frogs, he stepped gingerly into the mud. His foot sank way in, and when he moved his other leg forward, he sank in halfway to his knee. By the time he reached the middle of the pond, the mud was up to his thighs.
The screening had come loose from a nail several inches below the mud. He thought he'd be able to hook the hole in the screen around the nail, but he couldn't pull it down far enough. He needed more weight. He looked toward his maid and said, "Tânia, come here."
She inhaled audibly and shook her head at the impossibility of doing such a thing, at the surprise of being asked. But Sam said, "Yes. Please. Hurry. Come on. Yes."
And she did it. She touched the mud with her big toe, as if testing the temperature, then stepped in a little, then again, up to her ankles. With each step she sank a bit deeper and gave a little hoot and raised her skirt to keep it above the mud. Deeper and deeper, higher and higher, until she knew she should stop. By then, though, it was too late. She was sinking. Trying to turn, she lost her balance and swayed into even deeper mud. She didn't have anything on under that skirt, so when a mound of frogs lurched under her and she lurched at Sam, he brought her in close and tight and then kissed her. For a second it was like kissing a post with teeth, but then she let him, and then she kissed back. Frogs swept around, leaping and flopping against them like children sensing a secret and wanting in.
* *
After that, they slept together every night. Sam felt a lot like a teenager in love. He even saw the potential for poetry. She was a cinnamon swirl, sweet and buttery, their bed a toaster oven. The kids didn't seem to attach any significance to the change. And really, it was all quite the same except that they got to keep a box of frogs in their room. Tania was still the maid, Sam still the benevolent patron. They still didn't talk much, but Sam touched her whenever she was near, and sometimes their eyes met. At night, she slept curled up inside his arms and legs. On weekends, he slept with his wife.
How did Victor find out? Maybe the kids told him. Maybe by some instinctive perception he knew enough to ask them where their sister slept. Whatever it was, Sam knew because he could feel Victor watching him. When Sam looked back, Victor looked away. And he wasn't talking. Sam had never heard him so quiet. It was an odd reaction. This kind of thing was normal in Brazil. Standard. Victor didn't say anything until finally, down at the pond, when they were alone, he said, "You're sleeping with her?"
With a shy little smile of confession, Sam said, "More or less."
"How can you do that? She's a peon."
"She's very nice, actually. I like her."
"But she's black."
"Mulatta."
"Same thing. More trouble. And how old is she? Seventeen?"
"Eighteen, pretty soon."
"When?"
"When the rains come," said Sam.
"The rains?"
"That's what she said. I don't think she knows about months."
"And Rosilda?"
"Have you decided yet what we're going to do with all these frogs?"
That shut him up. He looked at the pond as if trying to see how it had something to do with his sister. But he didn't say anything, and pretty soon, without a word, he steamed off to the house, got in his Volkswagen and drove away.
Now what? Was Victor going to honor the rule men had, or would he act to preserve the virtue of his sister? Sam figured he'd find out Saturday, that he probably had three days to decide between an illiterate cinnamon swirl and good old Rosilda. But it was only two days before Victor's car came up the driveway, his sister in the seat beside him.
Still wearing her calf-length business suit, Rosilda came through the door looking hard for evidence. Tania was in the kitchen: schik-schik- schik-schik.. Sam slipped out, closing the door behind him. Victor, not looking at him, tried to maneuver around, but Sam grabbed him by the front of his shirt, knotting it up under his chin with both fists to pin him against the wall. Victor laughed and convulsed as if being tickled. Sam, an inch from his face, growled in plain English, stressing each word, "You. Fucking. Idiot."
"I didn't tell her," Victor said, but Sam didn't let go. "I just told her you had kids living here. That's all."
Sam dropped him to go into the house. Rosilda, just coming out of the kids' room, stuck her head in Sam's room, gave it a quick look - right, left, down, up - then marched to the kitchen. "You," she said to Tânia, cutting off the schik-schik-schiks. "I want those kids far from here. This isn't an orphanage. And get those frogs out of the bathroom."
Sam looked around her. Tânia, squatting beside a galvanized bucket of suds, brush in hand, teeth out, scared, meek, whispered, "Sim, senhora."
Rosilda said, "What?" and Tânia had to say it again a little louder.
"Okay," Rosilda said. Then she turned to Sam and said, "I want to talk with you."
They went outside on the porch. Rosilda still had her purse over her shoulder. She said, in Portuguese, "We're selling the farm." Sam said nothing. He heard Victor barking at Tânia inside the house. "My salary doesn't give even for rent," said Rosilda. "This place eats money and produces nothing. I talked with a real estate agent. He's bringing people here Sunday."
"What about the frogs?" Sam said in English. "They're doing very well. That's what we came here to do."
"Victor says they're big enough to kill and snakes are eating all. You never told me about snakes."
"There's lots of things I never told you."
"Like what?" Sam didn't answer. "Like what?" she asked again. "Hmm?"
"Nothing," he said. "If you want to kill the frogs, we need a freezer."
"We brought some ice chests. I found one restaurant will buy all frog legs we deliver. I'm going back with the car today. You and Victor are going to kill the frogs. Sunday I will come back with the agent and pick the legs. Okay?"
Okay? What was he supposed to say to that? He didn't say anything. Inside the house, Victor was barking at Tânia. Sam leaned on the porch railing, looking down on his frog farm until Rosilda went through the house to the car. Victor drove her down to the pond, where they pulled three red and white ice chests from the back seat. Then Rosilda drove away alone.
Tânia was in the kids' room, door closed. He almost knocked but then didn't. He went down to the pond, where Victor, pants rolled up, using a long-handled shovel for balance, was just stepping into the mud. The herd of frogs, which covered the basin of the pond, parted before him as he uprooted each ankle and swung it forward, heavy with mud. Panicking, the frogs piled into two rolling waves that percolated with the few who managed to wriggle free and leap away.
"Where are you going?" Sam asked as lightly as possible.
Victor turned from the shoulders, looked Sam up and down, then turned back to face the frogs. Up to his knees, he could go no farther without getting mud on his pants. So he steadied himself and lifted the shovel back over one shoulder. When a frog leaped into the clearing before him, he crouched a bit and swung the shovel over his head and down like a sledge hammer, whacking the frog so hard it disappeared in the mud.
Sam heard a chorus of gasps way up at the house. He turned to see Tânia on the porch, the kids around her legs, her fingers to her teeth. He wanted to say something to her, though he had no idea what and she was too far away for anything less than a shout.
Using the shovel for support, Victor leaned forward to pluck the dead and broken frog from the mud. Holding it by one leg with the tips of his fingers, he swung it back and then forward, releasing it so it arcked to the bank and flopped into the grass near the ice chests. Sam looked back toward the house. Tânia and the kids were gone.
Victor pointed to one ice chest. On top of it lay a kitchen knife. Sam picked it up and tested the blade with his thumb. Very sharp. Victor, shifting the shovel to his other hand, put a finger to his groin, then traced a line to his chin. Sam was still looking at the dead frog at his feet and the knife in his hand when he heard the sharp crack of the pistol at the house. Victor flinched, and a few spent pellets of buckshot blooped into the carp side of the pond. The pistol cracked again. Victor yelled, "Ow!" and slapped a hand to the back of his neck. When he took it away, a tiny bead of blood appeared. Stuck in the mud, he could only hunch against the next shot. Crack. He flinched again and twisted to glare at Sam and growl, "See?"
See what, Sam wondered. See why you shouldn't give a girl a gun? Why you shouldn't sleep with a peon? How mulattas make more trouble? That scientific fact prevails in the end?
Victor staggered to the edge of the pond and collapsed dramatically. Sam looked over his wounds. The spent snake shot had broken the skin in a few places but hadn't really penetrated. All he needed was a few dabs of peroxide.
But technically, legally, he'd been shot. If he got his hands on Tânia he'd hurt her bad. If Rosilda found out, she'd have her thrown in jail. She wouldn't stand a chance in a trial. With no clear idea what to tell Tânia, he left Victor on the ground and walked slowly up to the house. The kids' bedroom door was closed. No sounds came from within. Sam sat down at the card table and tried to think of something. He waited a long time before knocking on the door, then opening it. They weren't in there. Most of their stuff was gone, too. Sam dashed to the back door. He didn't have to look long before he saw them walking single file up the path over the ridge, Tânia in front, a large bundle on her head.
The warm and soft places inside him wanted to call them back. But he had no idea what to tell them if they came. Should she run away, leave the state before Rosilda had the police after her? Would she be safe back in the hills, wherever it was her father lived?
Running away wouldn't work, he knew, and yes, the police could find her if they tried. The only solution was in Rosilda. She could be dissuaded. She'd be ready to abandon the whole thing - farm, frogs, and charges of assault - if he let her. That's what she wanted.
As Tânia and the kids faded into the brush near the top of the ridge, he let the thought grow. Dumping the farm was a very logical solution. It solved all the problems, from snakes to spleen to rising rent. He could teach English in the city and not have to worry about things. He wasn't tied down anymore. Why not just give up and go?
Pangs swelled up around his heart when the bundle on Tânia's head disappeared over the ridge. That was the end of her. He could turn his back and go down to the pond and patch up his brother-in-law with a little peroxide. Then they could get on with it and by Sunday be gone.
A man walks into a button shop. At the little ding-ling of a fairy bell, he's standing in a damp, muffled world that smells of boiling cabbage. He knows the button he needs, or thinks he does until he sees how many buttons there are in the world. They're all here, billions of them heaped in tin buckets and wooden boxes on tables beside stacks of cards of buttons on the floor, racks of buttons hanging from the ceiling. Signs say things like "Mediterranean," "19th Century," "Wooden and Bone," and "Collectors." One whole wall is made of tiny drawers, each with a little knob and four buttons stuck on front. A good quarter of this wall, several dozen drawers, has buttons marbled like tortoise shell, each different but each quite like the one he thinks he needs.
Being human, he's going to look in one of the drawers as if he might find the answer in there, some kind of a sign that says, "This is the button like the one on the shirt your mother made so long ago." If he finds the right drawer, it occurs to him, it will be a drawer his mother looked in years ago for surely she got the buttons here. Not trusting the samples on the outside, she looked into drawer after drawer, jerking them open, one after another, snapping them shut, methodically navigating across the wall, correcting her course by some mysterious logic, finally closing in on the right drawer, the right buttons, buttons perfect for the shirt of her only son.
He sees a likely drawer just below shoulder-level, a height his mother would have started at. Just as he pulls on the little knob, a white moth flutters out. A split second later, the man discovers something he never knew, never suspected about button drawers: they're only three inches deep. They slide right out into your hand if, of course, your hand is ready for that. A woman would pull the knob with thumb and forefinger while her pinky and the finger next to it took the weight from below. A man just pulls the drawer out and dumps it as if the sinews of his wrist were gossamer. The man knows all this before the buttons reach the floor. A shock of adrenaline against his brain freezes the burst of tortoise shell into a nebula swirling outwards. Then they're clattering across the dusty softwood floor, some bouncing, some rolling, each in motion as frantic as that of the moth.
The curtain of a doorway at the rear of the shop sweeps open to reveal a babushka, short and stout. The buttons suddenly lie quiet as if afraid. From the look on her face, he knows she knows the sound of buttons hitting a floor. She looks neither angry nor surprised but rather analytical, studious, concerned, like a coach who knows he needs to call a shot. The man knows she doesn't run things here, it isn't her shop. She's somebody's mother or an aunt brought over to pick up buttons. If she speaks English, it's a few fits-all phrases of umlauts and guttural diphthongs. The man stands there waiting for one, the empty drawer dangling in his hand like the lid of a cookie jar.
Clucking and squawking, the babushka disappears behind the curtain. A younger voice clucks and squawks back at her. A second later, she marches out with a corrugated tin dust pan and what could only be a Ukrainian button rake, a short-handled tool with a row of rounded teeth. As she stoops to pull the buttons into a pile, she politely scolds him in her language, rolling her R's, her voice swooping up and down into soft, urgent valleys and peaks. The man knows she's asking rhetorical questions about being careful and praying for deliverance from the world of men, all in a tone between warning and apology. He's glad button rakes have short handles and wonders if they're made that way to make women stoop just when they need to aim their anger upward. But then he's sorry to have thought that because he can see the pain shooting up her back as she bends to reach under a table. She has to support herself with an elbow against her thigh. Feeling guilty -- for the pain, for the short handle, for the buttons on the floor -- he rushes to pluck up a button that refuses to budge despite repeated sweeps of the rake. Now down to her level, lower even, he smells the full strength of cabbage and potatoes, sees the grain in the soft, refined burlap of her clothes, imagines the feel of the wart on her lip. The woman, still in her painful crouch, says, "Tunk-hue, tunk-hue" and her hand flutters about her chest and face. "Oh, tunk-hue, tunk-hue."
Then, to the surprise of them both, his hand sinks into the dough of her arm and eases her upward. "I'm sorry," he says, gesturing with his head toward the drawer in his hand.
"Oh, no, no," she says. "Ho-kay, ho-kay." Her hand waves before her as she points to the pile in the dust pan and says, "You button?" She leads him to the counter where she dumps the buttons in the clearing beside the big, brassy old cash register with a crank on the side. She fans them out smoothly, as if she always sold buttons that way.
Now it doesn't matter what the buttons on his shirt look like. He has to take one of these. Looking them over as a connoisseur of fine buttonry might -- eyes squinted, head tilted, eyebrows brought to a knot above his nose -- he pokes a couple of likely candidates until he remembers the button in his hand, the one from under the table. That is exactly the button he wants, whether it matches his shirt or not. He puts it in the center of his palm and holds it out for approval. The babushka says, "Da." Then she chirps something about ten syllables long. He guesses she is offering to sew it on, or maybe asking if he would marry her daughter, or if that would be all, of he'd like a bag, or a bowl of cabbage and potato soup.
Easy questions, all of them. Indeed he would agree to anything this woman asked. She's looking him in the eye and yet also, somehow, down. He says, "Da." She reaches for the cash register, clicks two numbers and pulls on the crank. The machine goes chi-ching with polite finality. The drawer rumbles open and two numbers pop up on top: .04.
Four cents. Why bother, he wonders. Why charge anything? Four cents hardly covers the wear and tear on the little rake, let alone the pain in the back, the time it will take to resort the buttons.
It just so happens he has four pennies in his pocket. They've been rattling around in there for weeks. He's relieved to hand them over and to hear them plunk, one by one, into the penny bin. She puts the weight of her hip against the drawer until it latches shut, then pulls a hand-sized paper sack from under the counter. With two hands, she holds it open to him. He tilts his hand to drop the button in. She folds the top over, creases it with two fingernails, and, smiling, hands it over.
They go together to the door, she dipping her head and thanking him, he doing the same. The little bell goes ding-ling as he opens the door behind him. He has the funny feeling he should kiss her on each cheek, but of course he cannot. He'll be back, though, he knows, and not just to spill buttons. He'll bring the shirt. In fact, he'll wear it. He'll point to the threads hanging where the button used to be. She'll understand and take him behind the curtain to feed him cabbage and potato soup while her beautiful daughter sews the button on. He will kiss the wart on the daughter's lip and propose marriage. She will accept, and they will live happily, with all the buttons in the world.
What happens when a Dodge gets old, when it loses what it had in '65? Tailgate won't drop, rear window moans and shrieks, kids - grandchildren - won't climb in through the back. The dog barks at it. It's an embarrassment in the driveway, but nobody wants it in the garage. It leaks in odd places, stains the floor, might even die and then there it would sit; you can't even get an old Dodge towed anymore.
Then one day it flunks its emissions test. A high school drop out, greasy, dumb, declares the brakes shot, ball joints shot, bearings shot, transmission damn near shot, the whole thing not worth fixing. He says he wouldn't touch it.
Now what's a Dodge to do? Not much choice but tank up and head west. It dodders in a slurry of commuters but then hits the interstate and breaks free. The revs build up to five grand, no sweat. It could go on like this forever. Three hundred and sixty cubic inches get cramped in the suburbs. They don't put tail fins on cars to make them go slow. All this Dodge needs is a little action in the back, some kids horsing around, trying to get skittles to stand up, arguing over the rules of Monopoly, sticking noses into the cooler for a whiff of bologna and tuna fish, waiting for the next place with a clean bathroom. It needs a retriever with its head out the window, ears blown back, nose feasting on the breeze. It needs a woman riding shotgun while she knits, Daddy at the wheel, fingers to chin, trying to think of one good reason not to ditch TV repair and start a dude ranch. Maybe it needs to pull over fast because the dog threw up or so a kid can hunker behind an open wing to pee on a guardrail. This Dodge has headed west before, but never like this, never empty.
For years the buttons on the radio haven't worked, though time and potholes keep nudging the frequency. It might play pop for a month, then nothing but static, and then suddenly it's all news through half the winter. The clunk-clunk, clunk-clunk of the concrete slabs on the interstate jiggles the needle to bring in Ukrainian music from Buffalo. Accordions, lutes, wails of a broken heart floating in a blizzard of static, music good enough for now and better than nothing by far.
The same could be said for the girl on the side of the road, a chick in faded jeans, a chamois jacket with fringes, dangling earrings, hair as fancy as a peacock in heat. She's just standing there, no thumb out, no baggage besides a tiny pocketbook, but it's enough to bring an old Dodge to a swaying, drawn-out halt. Taking her sweet time sauntering up from behind, she touches a tail fin, takes a while to open the door. She doesn't get right in but looks around as if into a cave that might have drawings on the wall. Her eyelashes, thinned to about five per lid, blink a few times. Seems she's never seen such a wide speedometer, such acreage on a dashboard, such a hump down the middle of the floor. Peering way in over the stuff piled in back, she asks, "How far ya' going?" but something in her tone says, How far do you think you'll get?
The answer doesn't matter. She gets in, holds her pocketbook in her lap a while, then leaves it on her left. She looks out the windshield and chews her gum as if trying to mold it into a precise shape. Her name? Donna. Where's she going? West. How far? Vegas. What's the story? Her Datsun died. She left it on the side of the road, back in Jersey. What does she do?
"I'm a hairdresser," she says. "For the dead."
The dead?
"You know, cadavers. When people die, I do 'em up for the funeral. Perm. Bleach. Trim. Whatever. Doesn't bother me. I get seventy-five bucks and it takes me about an hour. And that was in Jersey. In Vegas they get two hundred bucks. A lot of people die there. They hit the jackpot and croak and there's nothing to do with their money but blow it on a big funeral."
Pets? None. High school diploma? Yes. Marital status? The day before yesterday, her boyfriend threw up on her. The next day she heard about Las Vegas and three hours had her Datsun fired up and headed west.
Family? Her mother's a hairdresser, for the living, and her little brother has some kind of a problem. He cries a lot for no reason. If he whines too much, her father smacks him. As soon as she gets some money together, she's sending for him. Then they're going to L.A., where she's got another brother. He left home the day after high school graduation. Now he follows migrant workers with a lunch truck. As soon as she gets out there, they're all going to move in together like a family, not married of course but together and being nice to each other.
"Like happily ever after," she says. "I'm going for it."
Has she ever seen a Dodge like this old Dart? No, not a station wagon, but her father has a '78 Caddy. He needs it because he's got a big belly. Has she ever seen an odometer turn over a hundred thousand? Yes. For the second time? No. Well she will in Tennessee, maybe Arkansas. It reads 99,258.6. She leans way over to see and gives her gum an extra loud crack before sitting up. Still looking over at it, she says, "You think you'll make it?"
She has reason to worry. Every few seconds, the motor skips a beat. For that instant, it's dead. But it catches, hums along for three seconds, then blinks again. Consistently. It gets neither better nor worse. They stop at a Sunoco for a look under the hood. She takes her little pocketbook to the ladies room while the Dodge knocks down a can of STP, chugs a quart of 10W-40 and tanks up on hi-test for a change. Back on the highway it seems smoother, but still there's that blink of unconsciousness.
Donna's never been in Kentucky before, but the Dodge has, twice. Once on the way to the Grand Canyon, the Missus went into labor in Frankfurt. She delivered a baby boy almost two months early. But since it was just as easy to head west as back east, they set up a little nest of blankets in the back and off they went, stopping at every rest area for a change of diapers. Did Donna know a baby's poop smells sweet as long as he's breast-feeding? No, she didn't.
The motor doesn't sound good. The rhythmic blinking has broken down into an irregular stutter. The radio skips channels more often: country-western, a preacher, two guys having a chummy talk about fishing. Laughing, Donna pushes the selector buttons. It's always two guys talking about fishing. But then one button pushes all the through and rattles down inside the dashboard. The needle slides way over to the left and it's one guy speaking in Spanish. Donna laughs and says, "That's weird." She doesn't seem to know it's a bad sign in an old Dodge.
Just north of Knoxville, a cold mountain rain lashes at the windshield. The wipers, arthritic, unsteady, can't keep up. Neither can the heaters. Cool air streams in through the dashboard. Part way down a long hill, a baby raccoon lopes out from the median strip. The Dodge swerves and squeals. The little raccoon skitters across the right lane but stops, turns, tries to go back, stops again, turns around, cowers. The Dodge goes over it, thumpity-thumpity-thump. Donna, hands over her face, screams, "Stop! Stop!"
The Dodge coasts onto the shoulder. Donna sobs, "Go back. I want to go back." The raccoon's almost half a mile behind them, too far to back up, but Donna keeps saying, "Please. Go back."
There's nothing in the rearview mirror, so the Dodge swings a wide U-turn and heads back up the hill. They go all the way to the top without seeing a dead raccoon, then come back down, two wheels on the shoulder, very slow past the place. And then she sees it in the grass, stumbling as if dizzy. "It's alive!" she shouts. "It's alive!" She bursts out of the Dodge and into the rain, steps over the guardrail, kneels low beside the coon and nests it in her arms. Still trying to walk, climbing over her arms, it doesn't seem to know it's off the ground. Donna has to keep reaching so it doesn't fall. "Poor thing," she says. "I wonder where its mother is."
It's just a baby, a quivering bundle of wet fur. Donna strokes it and coos and says things like, "There, there. It's all right now."
But the engine won't start. It cranks and cranks, again and again. The only choice, the only hope, is to jump-start it -- no easy trick with an automatic transmission. If it catches by the bottom of the hill, they're still headed west. If not, it's the end of an old Dodge. After three tractor-trailers charge by, the emergency brake pops off and the Dodge starts to roll. At first the gravel on the shoulder seems to hold the wheels back. The steering's stiff as rigor mortis. They're halfway down before the Dodge can lumber up onto the pavement and pick up real speed. Fifty yards before the bottom of the hill, the transmission slams into Drive. Donna crosses her fingers and squeezes her eyes shut. The Dodge slows, moans, shudders, falls silent, then kicks to life, backfires once, twice, falls silent, hesitates, coughs, and suddenly accelerates with the sound of a rocket. The windshield wipers come on and the radio plays Beethoven's Ninth.
Bit by bit, over the next twenty or thirty miles, the little raccoon settles down and seems to sleep, though it shudders now and then as if remembering. Donna's finger runs from its nose to its forehead times, smoothing the whiskers on each cheek. A thumb and finger massage behind its ears and dig into the fur around its neck. Her hand, wrapped around its body, slides down to the tail, where it shifts to scratch with her long, pink fingernails. The raccoon, nestled in the groove between her legs, chin resting on one thigh, doesn't move.
Donna says, "He's making a sweaty spot on my leg." When she tries to slide it to a different position, it jerks awake and starts squeezing out shrill moans, one with each breath. "Poor thing," she says. "Why doesn't it open its eyes?"
Maybe she should make a soft place for it in the back, unroll one of the blankets. Maybe it wants to eat. There's food in the cooler, maybe some melted ice.
The raccoon keeps moaning with the rhythm of a wet baby or a rusty machine. Leaning over the back of the seat, Donna fluffs the khaki blanket into a nest and sets the raccoon in it. Still it won't quiet down. It keeps moaning and trying to walk somewhere, never opening its eyes.
"It needs me," says Donna. "Is it all right to go back there?"
Of course it's all right. What does she think, a station wagon has snakes? Of course she can go back there. She'd be doing an old Dodge a favor.
She looks suspicious, like she knows the difference between the front seat and the back seat of a car. But then she wiggles over and starts arranging things, making walls of suitcases and folded blankets. A quick whiff of bologna and tuna fish drifts around, and then she and the little raccoon are both curled up in a sleeping bag, fast asleep.
Old Joe, couldn't cut hair. Forty-eight years circling a barber chair, three or four steps to the snip, and he never got it, never figured out how to measure a hairline on all sides of a head at once. He never figured out how to smooth down the rough shag of clumsy scissor-work or even-up a lop-sided job that looked like the doing of a drunk. You could ask him to take a little more off the left, a little more off the right, but your hair would just get shorter and shorter until pretty soon you wished you'd got up and left while you still had something to comb around. Joe couldn't even find the part in your hair. He forged a new trail every time.
Did he ever know it? Everybody had opinions on that, but nobody remembered him as a young barber. Frank Scotti kind of remembered, but you couldn't get much of an answer out of him. He remembered Joe from way back - back during the depression, a time that filled Frank with memories that crowded out any thoughts about haircuts, except the price, which apparently depended how much you had, something between nothing and a nickel.
That steadily rose to six and a half dollars, with Joe apologizing each time. If you ask me he felt guilty about it because he knew he didn't deserve a raise. He knew his skill didn't improve with inflation. Smoothing out shags still just made for a shorter shag; it just cost more.
So we had a lot of crew cuts in town, which of course you'd expect on a bunch of hick wheat farmers who no matter what their haircuts wouldn't expose their scalps to daylight without need. Only on Sundays, in church, would you know that Cyme, Kansas had a lousy barber. If you got bored in a back pew and started looking around, you'd notice, or at least I did. Everybody, all the men, looked like Joe had sneezed during a crucial snip. Joe sat up front, and he had the best haircut in town, at least the only straight one, among the Presbyterians anyway. Same went for his boys, four of them - small, medium, large and extra large lined up in the pew, not a cowlick among them, each neckline level, four in a row, like steps leading up to their mother, who kept her hair in a bun.
So question number one was whether Joe knew he couldn't cut hair. Question number two was how come he could cut his own kids' hair and nobody else's. Nobody ever, ever thought he did it on purpose though of course among ourselves we joked about him just trying to make his own kids look good. We also joked about maybe he was a wheat farmer at heart and ought to be reaping his crop with a twenty-foot thresher.
But we didn't joke in front of him. With him, the topic of hair never came up. Somehow you knew it would hurt him if we complained or made light of it. When he cut your hair, he really tried. You could see it in his eyes. When he got down to the nitty-gritty of the last few snips, he'd shut up for a few seconds and not hear what you just said. Then he'd make a little noise with his tongue as if to not say, "Damn."
Even if you were getting married or something you had to give him your business and not just because you'd have to drive forty minutes to give it to a stranger. Even when you went you wouldn't dare come back with a haircut. We had to go to Joe because he wanted us to so bad. He had to be the friendliest guy in town, shaking hands all over the place, patting everybody on the back as if checking our shoulder muscles, asking about wives and kids, looking like he cared a lot about all of us. And I do believe he did. A lot of his talk, at the diner, the Elks, the tavern, wherever, almost all of his talk aimed to find out what went wrong with people and whether they got it fixed. Did Frank ever get that cyst cut off his neck? Mike get his truck running? Stew ever get that belt for his washing machine? Anybody know what become of Jo Ellen Jackson? It seemed like he had this need to keep up with us, to see us through our affairs, make sure we lived long enough to make it to the next haircut. In fact, if you didn't live that long, old Joe'd cut your hair in the coffin so you looked good when we sent you off. He did that for more than one guy I can think of. I read somewhere that hair keeps growing long after death. In Cyme, Kansas, that was a good thing.
He wasn't that friendly and concerned just to make sure he got our six and a half dollars every month or so. Not at all. I don't think you could say that about anybody in town, not even Harry over at the bank. We all did our jobs, nobody getting excited about them, everybody doing what needed to get done. I mean like if you really needed a plumber on Christmas Eve, Wally Watson would take care of you. He wouldn't like it, but he'd do it, and he wouldn't make you pay extra just because your pipes picked Christmas to freeze on. If you really, really needed fertilizer at noon on Thanksgiving, Gus'd go open the store and sell it to you, or at least send his kid or maybe just give you the key and tell you to go get it yourself. And God knows if you needed haircut at midnight during a blizzard, Joe'd have his shop open and his chair brushed off so you could return your hair to the way it used to be before it finally grew back.
Not that anybody beat down his door for a haircut. Even if you wanted to you couldn't because you can't beat down a door if it's open.
Anyway, back to my original point of the whole thing, we could never decide whether Joe knew he couldn't cut hair. I maintain he knew. How could he not know? He looked at hair every day of his life. He went into Topeka sometimes. He had a TV, got magazines. How could he not look at the president's hair and not compare it to the ones he cranked out every day?
So he knew. And because he loved us, the way everybody in town loved each other, pretty much, in a Christian way, I mean - because he loved us, he wouldn't of given us bad haircuts on purpose. He knew, and he wanted to cut a good head of hair each and every time that one of us took our heads in there and let him have at it. And each and every time, for forty-eight years he blew it. He blew it and he knew it. He never figured out that certain something that a real barber knows and a plumber doesn't.
It turned out that an undertaker knows, too. That became obvious at Joe's wake. We're standing around his coffin like a bunch of collies left out in the rain, and there lies Joe, neatly trimmed. Somebody said his wife must've done it, but then Shanahan says no, he'd given Joe his final cut. As a matter of fact, he'd been doing the whole family's hair since the first boy was born. For free. He and Joe had made a deal. Joe would trim the deceased; Shanahan wouldn't go into the barber business. Joe cut Shanahan's hair for free, and Shanahan cut Joe's family's hair for free. If Joe died first, he got a free burial in the best of coffins, and Shanahan got the barbershop. If Shanahan died first...well, he didn't tell us how the agreement would have handled that. It didn't happen so it didn't matter.
Something tells me Shanahan always wished he could be our barber rather than our undertaker. I think he wished he could grab our hands and slap our shoulders and ask about our kids the way Joe did. It kind of has the opposite effect when an undertaker does things like that. I can recall him asking how the family was, but if somebody was sick, he'd never ask. He couldn't.
In a way, Shanahan got his wish. He became our barber, but he was still our undertaker. He'd walk back and forth across the street, from barbershop to funeral home, depending on where a customer needed attention. Of course hair got pretty long in that town before anybody stopped in for a trim. Not that we had anything against him. We just didn't want an undertaker fussing over our hair. Who would? You don't have to try it to get the creeps. But sooner or later we all went in. What else could we do? A man's got to get his hair cut.
What are you supposed to name a kid? You have to look ten years down the road before you slap a moniker on a boy, a name that will have to see him through the fifth grade. Ever seen a fifth grader named Horatio? Mortimer? Dudley? It's terrible, what happens. Ridiculed for the word closest to his soul, the first word he ever recognized, one he's heard every day of his life, young Oscar or Pinkus reels as if wounded when kids hurl their first stones of insult. He retreats from social circles, starts reading during recess, plays with himself in the bathroom. All because his father wanted a boy named after some family hero from Wales or Lithuania.
So you're standing there in the maternity ward, your firstborn in your hands, all seven pounds of him, when a nurse you wouldn't give the time of day to says she needs a name. Now. She has the forms right there on her plexiglass clipboard. If you don't give her a name, somebody's going to mix up your baby Jones with some Tom, Dick or Harry Jones from the crib next door. It happens all the time, she says, so what's his name? You look at this kid not much bigger than a rabbit and all you can think is Moses.
There's no good reason for that name, no great-great-grandfather, no special biblical affection, no appreciation for whatever Moses means in Greek. The lack of will for the name in the face of its swelling presence in the mind seems to make it even more powerful and demanding. Like something imposed by God. Now what do you do? You haven't slept in twenty-nine hours, your wife's unconscious, the nurse is poised at her clipboard, and God wants your manchild named Moses.
So Moses it is.
You try to picture this water-puckered prune with a long gray beard that forks at the bottom, a prophet in possession of higher truth. But before that, he's going to have to suffer the fifth grade. The experience, the social trauma, may be the factor that forces the poor boy into the internal bicameral mind-games that build on each other, like feedback, into the deafening, maddening echo of the voice of God. The next thing you know, his bifurcated beard is blowing in the wind, backlit by lightning as he speaks grandly of things unintelligible.
Within an hour, the nurse returns. She says she's sorry, and she's pale enough to prove it. Looking into your eyes like someone doomed, she says she needs a middle name. "Or rather..." she stumbles, "...I mean, if you would. A middle name. Or just an initial. Something I can put down."
You have no idea. No special name swells into your soul like Moses did. Logic and unsure guilt hint that you'd be wise, or at least nice, to give your son a plain vanilla handle like Bob or Frank.
The nurse, pen point against her clipboard, waits. She looks like she might start crying. You're afraid of hurting her. Maybe she's got a brother named Moses. Or an ex-husband. Maybe once she had to have the name carved in a tombstone. She looks like she wants you to ask. So you do.
And she says, after hesitating so long you suspect she's deaf, "Well, we already have a Moses Jones. Born this morning. I just know it's going to get screwed up."
You barely have time to wonder what the odds are before she swallows and says, "And we have a Moses Gonzalez, a Moses Wylen, a Moses Moriarity, a Moses Anderson and one other, I don't remember his last name. And two Moses Joneses.'
"All in one day?"
"All this morning. I didn't know. I just came on duty."
That certainly complicates matters. Now you're clearly dealing with divine intervention. That's no prune in your hands. The Holy Spirit has blown down and endowed the earth with a host of Moseses, and you're in charge of one. The nurse, says, "It's incredible," and looks at you as if for an answer.
An answer. You consider asking her to scratch out the name Moses and change it to something else. But you love this tiny boy too much to take a chance like that. So you consider asking her to drop the Jones. In a world of Moses Moriarities and Gonzalezes, there would be one just plain Moses. Would kids in the fifth grade dare laugh at a kid named just plain Moses? Probably not. But then he might turn out normal, a regular kid, part of the gang, no real Moses at all. Either that or he ends up ostracized and eventually neurotic enough for a special ed. class where he won't do anybody any good.
There's no telling what will happen to a kid named Moses, or, when you think about it, a kid named anything else. Today he's a seven-pound water-puckered rabbit, tomorrow he's got a seven-pound beard and eyes that glow in the dark. Or maybe he'll sell life insurance over the phone. There's no telling. You might as well float him down a river in a straw basket and wait to read about him somewhere. But that's too much to explain to a nurse who just wants a middle name. She's still standing there, the weight of western civilization pressed against her clipboard.
"William," you tell her. A good safe bet.
"William?" she asks, a little disappointed, even a bit confused.
"It was my father's name," you say. "But everybody called him Bill, and he turned out pretty good."
The nurse gives you a long look before she grants young Moses the name of his grandfather. William it is.
And thus your son is saved, brought down into the swaddle of mediocrity. One of the guys, a regular Joe. He can deny his first name if he wants. M. William Jones. Sounds respectable enough. You can imagine that name on the cover of books or followed by a title like "Comptroller." When his buddies in the fifth grade ask him what the M stands for, he can learn to tell them it's none of their business. They'll either respect that or press the issue until he beats them down with a swaggering glare and says, "Moses. Want to make something of it?" Which of course they won't. They'll back right off as if from wasps. They'll call him Bill and let him play in the infield. He'll get his turn at bat. And if it just so happens he bats a perfect thousand and hits the ball so hard it disintegrates in the stratosphere, nobody can complain. They can just stand there and gawk as he thumps his bat on the ground and says, "The name is Moses and thou shalt not forget it!"
A Wife Like A Vat Of Beer
We had a little bootleg operation going in the basement. Beer. We had seven thirty-gallon garbage cans on a long table of cement blocks and two-by-fours. Every day we bottled thirty gallons and brewed up thirty more. Thirty gallons made seven cases, and we sold each case for twenty-five bucks.
I think at first Gail liked the adventure of it. When somebody'd ask her what she did for a living, she'd say, "Oh, I'm a bootlegger." She liked to say we had "revenoors" on our tail. She sewed up black velvet curtains for the basement windows, and if we worked at night, she lit candles. I didn't mind. I liked the shadows they threw and the warm light. Nothing more beautiful than a glass of nut brown ale in candlelight. And the gurgle of beer vapors bubbling through the seven little water-filled air locks. Very nice. It was like a womb down there, the womb of a woman who loved beer.
Not that we sat around all day drinking beer. We had bottles to sterilize, bottles to fill and cap, wort to siphon into secondary buckets, full cases to lug out to the van, empty bottles to hose down on the picnic table out back. Hard work, but it beat commuting, and I never had to wear a tie.
We had a St. Bernard we'd raised from a pup. He was a fine dog, so I didn't mind that Gail smothered him with more love than most kids get. He had his place on the couch, and on a cold night, I didn't mind if he slept at the bottom of the bed where we could tuck our feet under him. She named him Prince Charming, which was okay with me because he was such a good dog. But then she named our vats of beer after the seven dwarves. She'd say things like "Grumpy's got a funny-looking oil slick," or "I think Dopey needs another day. Must have been that yeast."
Naming the vats didn't bother me because each held a different type of beer. Sleepy was a pilsner, Doc a dark ale, Happy a lager, and so on. The names helped keep things straight. What bothered me, after a while, was how she'd talk to them. She'd come into the basement in the morning and say, "All right, everybody up. How ya' doin' there Doc? You just about all bubbled out? Grumpy been bothering you? He's got problems, don'tcha, buddy. I can tell by your breath." When she patted them on the lid, their air-locks sputtered and sighed.
She was like that, a regular batch of wort herself: bubbly, spirited, as sweet and homey as malt extract. Again, no problem. In the course of business, I 'd say things like, "Let's bottle Sneezy before he goes flat." But I never talked to them.
Things went pretty well for a number of years. We got by and never lacked customers. We never missed a mortgage payment, never lost a penny to income tax, and God knows we drank the best of beer. Then one bright summer day Prince Charming committed suicide. Ran out into the road, which he'd never done before, and got hit by a lady in a station wagon. He was old and getting sway-backed and losing his hair. He knew his time was up, so he did what he had to do. I respect a dog for that. We buried him in the woods behind the back yard with a Champaign bottle of Doc's dark ale to help him into the next world. Gail lashed up a nice-sized cross for the grave. Trying to make a joke, I said, "How do you know he wasn't Jewish?" She gave me a bad look and said, "He was Catholic." What was weird, what kind of scared me, was that she didn't say like a joke, the way she usually would. I asked how she knew he was Catholic, and she said, "Saint Bernard, right? Ever heard of a Jewish saint?"
But it wasn't a joke. I mean, it was a joke, it was the kind of thing she always just had to say, but this time she was serious about it.
From then on, Gail was wort gone flat. No more bubbly humor, no chatter with the dwarves. At meals she was pensive, like she'd just glimpsed the true meaning of death. She'd stop chewing in the middle of a mouthful of mashed potatoes and kind of look down off to one side. Instead of cleaning her plate and jumping up before the last swallow, she'd save meat scraps and go scrape them onto Prince's grave. Weird? Not to her. The scraps always disappeared by the next day, which of course was due to raccoons. But raccoons didn't explain how she could hear his dog tags tinking at night as he scratched for fleas, or how she could smell his fur on wet days.
Okay. Everybody's got a right to their own weirdness. And I could understand her getting all broken up over losing Prince Charming. Like I said, he was a good dog. But then she started getting too weird. Once she jerked awake in the middle of the night and declared "Sneezy's got a fever." I jerked awake, too, of course. At first, not sure what I'd heard, I didn't say anything. But then I put my hand on her hip and said, "No he doesn't. Go back to sleep." But she said, "Yes he does. He does." And she threw back the covers -- this was in February -- and dashed down to the basement in nothing but a flannel nightshirt. I stayed in bed wondering what was happening, then pulled the covers over me and went back to sleep. At dawn I realized she was gone and then remembered why. I found her in the basement asleep in a rocking chair next to Sneezy, one candle still burning.
Believe it or not, I went over and put the back of my hand on the vat. Right at room temperature. Then I checked Gail. Body temperature. She snapped awake and took a few seconds to remember where she was. Her attention swung around to Sneezy. She looked at it -- at him, right? -- like she was a little scared. Then she went upstairs and got dressed.
I never said anything about it. Neither did she. Nor did she go throwing aspirin into our beer or anything. It was just a weird dream, and not the last. Another night she jolted awake, or sort of awake, and started crying and saying Dopey wouldn't talk to her. Another night Happy had lice.
I didn't need a shrink to tell me Gail needed a baby, but if she didn't think of it, I wasn't about to bring it up. Everything was too smooth without kids. No reason to look for trouble. Besides, I could see Gail as the type who smothers a kid with too much love. A dog can take it, but not a kid. I could imagine her pumping a kid so full of milk it couldn't move. I could see her all but living at the doctor's office. I've seen kids get so spoiled they have little nervous breakdowns every time Mama has to peel herself away. Mothers like that shouldn't have babies.
Still, I was thinking about it and wondering whether we should discuss it or whether the problem might eventually just solve itself. In a way, it did.
Enter Uncle Sam. A knock on the door. It's a sheriff in a ten-gallon hat and two guys in suits. They have a search warrant that says they get to look in our basement. Sure enough, they find seven vats of untaxed beer.
I didn't even hire a lawyer. The trial turned out to be a meeting between me and a judge and the sheriff. The evidence was some Polaroid pictures and a case of beer with my fingerprints all over it. The sheriff estimated we'd been selling thirty gallons a day for fourteen years and therefore owed $39,842.12 in assorted taxes. The judge said if I pleaded guilty to that and paid it off, he'd drop a number of other charges that added up to thirty-eight years in jail.
So we had to sell the house and move into an apartment in town. Gail got a job as a bank teller. I drove a cab for a while and then got a job selling swimming pool equipment. I hate to admit it, but life wasn't the same without the dwarves. I missed the little guys. I sure didn't tell Gail, but I did get her a little blue parakeet. She named her Rapunzel. Rapunzel sang pretty good and ate a lot less than a St. Bernard. Gail bought her every little bird accessory in the book -- little bells and mirrors and kiwi seeds and such -- but a cage can hold only so much. And a girl like Gail can go only so long before she's got to take the bird out and massage the nape of its little neck. Then she wants it to drink hot cocoa, and the next thing you know, Rapunzel flies out the kitchen window.
Gail goes into shock again. Bad dreams; won't eat. We kept the cage in case Rapunzel came back. No other bird would do, and of course we couldn't get a cat because then what would happen when Rapunzel came home?
What I think happened next is, Gail took it all out on the bank. She worked late every night. Then she talked about it when she got home. Not office gossip, though. She talked about how she liked fifty dollar bills the best but felt guilty about it. So many ones came in. She told me about some of the filthier pennies she saw. She gave them baths in a special machine. Her hands smelled of money when she came home, but she didn't wash them, and she slept with her fingers up near her face, as if praying.
And damned if there doesn't come another knock on the door, this time right in the middle of dinner. Uncle Sam again, search warrant in hand. This time they've got shotguns. Gail doesn't even get up from the table. The sheriff asks her where it is. She doesn't look at him, doesn't even stop chewing. She just shakes her head very slowly. The sheriff asks me where it is. I say, "It what?" He nods to the agents and they go to work, poking here and there. It takes them all of four minutes to look in the blanket chest we keep the TV on.
Lo and behold, it's full of one-dollar bills.
They're all bundled and stacked nice and neat and all wrapped up in a blue wool blanket tucked in around the edges. The sheriff flips through one of the bundles. White dust flies into his face. At first he's surprised at the dust, but then he smiles and says, "Well, well, well, what have we here?"
Following laboratory tests, it turned out we had thirteen thousand nine-hundred and twenty-two ones and a small fortune in baby powder. A multitude of charges boiled down to embezzlement. We pleaded insanity. The judge was a woman. I told her the whole story, beginning with the birth of Prince Charming. While I talked, she kept nodding. During the prosecution, she looked distracted, like maybe back home she had a St. Bernard with a full bladder. I guess I told a pretty good story. The only sentence was that Gail had to give the money back and see a shrink.
Which she did, for eighty dollars an hour. Seventeen-hundred and sixty dollars into the cure, he knows just what ails her. He calls me in, explains that it isn't too late, she's only forty-one. I tell him my theory about mothers who love babies too much and besides, does he know how much it costs to raise a kid these days, especially considering how nobody's going to give Gail a job? But he's got an answer for everything. First of all, do I want to keep paying him for something that's just going to get worse? Second of all, he never heard of anyone giving a child too much love. Third of all, a kid doesn't have to cost all that much. He tries to tell me it'll probably cost less than I spend on beer, which of course isn't true because I'm still drinking the good stuff we used to make in the basement.
Apparently he said pretty much the same to Gail, so I couldn't get out of it. I said okay as long as I got to name the baby. I really didn't want to let a kid get stuck with a handle like Rumplestilskin or something. But three months later I still don't have a name, and Gail's throwing up every chance she gets.
But she was happy and mostly back to normal. She kept a hand on her belly all the time. But the way her eyes would suddenly wander, I knew she was trying hard to feel something in there, some sign of life. And pretty soon she did. First a little bulge, then a little kick. Her doctor recommended she get the baby's genes checked, but Gail said no, she'd take what she got.
Being alone around the house all day, she of course started paying more attention to the plants than necessary, praising their leaves and stems, talking their little ears off. I called her old shrink and he said no problem but why didn't I get her a fish? No mammals, he said. Get her something she can't touch.
So I trotted on down to the pet store and what do they have on sale for nine ninety-nine but goldfish bowls with everything included: the seaweed, plastic gravel, the fish. I pick out a pretty little goldfish with a white spot on his side and bring it all home. Gail goes ape. Half an hour later she's got it all set up and the fish's name is Jack because of the way he climbs up and down the seaweed like it was a beanstalk. And I could see what the shrink was driving at. There was no way she could get her hands on this fish. She did everything a mother could do -- make a little curtain around the bowl to keep it warm, dropped in little fish accessories, fed him ten or twenty times a day, did everything but take his temperature. At night she put a candle behind the bowl and sat there draped around it, one hand against the glass, the other under her belly.
Finally the big day came. Her last words as they wheeled her into maternity were instructions for the fish. Such-and-such a food every day, such-and-such a stuff if he starts feeding off the bottom. Don't tap on the glass, don't put your fingers in the water. I said okay, okay, don't worry, don't worry, you just take care of yourself and have a good baby. Then the big door flapped shut behind her.
Well I knew it was supposed to take a long time, but not that long. Being a good husband, I stayed in the waiting room the whole time, all Tuesday night, then all Wednesday night, living off food from a vending machine, smoking so much my cheeks stuck to my teeth. You'd think in all that time I would have thought up a reasonable name for a kid, but I didn't. Thursday morning they told me it was a girl, and that afternoon, name or no name, I got to go see.
And there she was, the little mother, baby at her breast, smoothing its wet black hair again and again. She glanced at me, then back to her baby, as if I hadn't been out of the room five minutes. I sat gently on the bed and reached to touch the little girl's tiny ear lobe. Gail stopped smoothing until I was done. The only thing she said, and she didn't say it nicely, was, "Thought of a name yet?"
"Almost. I can feel it coming." But of course it wasn't. I sat there for a long time, wishing she'd say something to me or at least look up from the baby. Finally I said I had to go home and take a bath and a quick nap and then I'd be back. Gail, still silent, just kept smoothing and smoothing and didn't look up.
I went home and fell asleep in the bathtub, then made coffee and forgot to drink it because I was shaving and thinking how I had a wife who wouldn't look at me and a daughter who didn't have a name. "Elizabeth," I said into the mirror, curling a line of lather off my neck. "Susie. Bridget. Dorothy." But nothing sounded even vaguely right. "Barbara. Nancy. Pat. Jacqueline...Jackie...." That's when all of a sudden the memory flooded down on me. My face half full of soap, I rushed to the kitchen, practically dived to the table to take the fish bowl in both hands. But I got there about two days too late. The poor little guy was belly up at the top of his beanstalk, eyes fogged over, fins limp.
Frantic, desperate, I dialed Gail's shrink with one hand while the other groped through the water with a soup spoon. The shrink didn't answer and Jack just kept swirling around, flipping and tumbling in the eddies the spoon stirred up. Finally I hung up the phone, picked up the bowl and just dumped it into the garbage disposal. It sucked the water down with a vicious hum, and with a quick, hard crunch obliterated the evidence.
Three seconds later it dawns on me maybe I could find another fish just like Jack. So it's off to the pet store one more time. Goldfish bowls now cost twenty-nine dollars not including seaweed and such, but still that's cheap. The problem wasn't the price, it was the fish. In a tank the size of the Pacific swam the population of Asia. Half had white spots on the side, but no two the same. Which looked just like Jack? Damned if I knew.
I never felt so doomed. Gail was going to kill me, if not with a butcher knife, then surely with neglect. And her baby she was going to smother with enough lollipops and Yoo-Hoo to kill a cow. She was going to name her girl Princess and treat like one, Daddy be damned.
What could I do about it? Without a spotted goldfish, nothing. I turned my back on the tank and wandered around toward the snake department. I wanted a python. I wanted to get bit and die in three minutes. But before I got past the parakeets, I came across a cage on the floor. Inside lay the cuddliest little St. Bernard in the world, a male, fast asleep in a puddle of spit. Five hundred bucks - a fourth the price of a shrink. As soon as I sunk a finger into its fur, I knew that with a fish, I was barking up the wrong tree. But was a puppy a cure or a surrender? I worried about that for all of thirty seconds, but it didn't seem to matter either way. Was I going to lose a wife and a daughter for the lack of a dog? Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin. I handed the man my credit card, then bought a cigar and went home.
With the good feeling of having jerked fat from a fire, I cracked open my last bottle of Doc's dark ale and settled into my armchair, the puppy in my lap. "What's wrong with love?" I asked myself, scratching deep in the puppy's scruff. One could do worse. We had a little girl and she was going to eat up love the way other kids eat candy. The house is going to be full of love, made of love, and our little girl is going to eat it up.
With that thought, I knew I had in my lap a dog named Hansel. I'd tell Gail he came wandering out of the woods half-starved, like he needed a home with a good mother. Then I'd let her name our little girl anything she wanted. We might even brew root beer in the basement, and if we absolutely must live happily ever after in our little kingdom of make-believe, well it's all right with me.
Click here to read more of Acts of Ineffable Love.