SUMMER RESIDENCY

Here are some photos from the summer residency, plus the lyrics to the "FU-MFA" song, &

a slightly revised version of "The Arm of St. Edmund"...

Frankie in the li'l prayer chair

The Shooting Gallery

FU-MFA (lyrics by Belden/Schneider)

FU-MFA! (x3)

Here we are again at Ender's Island
Look around you'll see that everyone is smiling.
Hi, where ya from and what is your genre?
Can you tell me now where can I do my laundry?

FU-MFA! (x3)

7 months ago the gales were blowing
The sky was gray and it was snowing.
We read and wrote and then we went and had breakfast
We read and wrote and then we went and had lunch
We read and wrote and then we went and had dinner
We read and wrote and then we drank a lot of wiiiiiine.

FU-MFA! (x3)

So our advice to you new MFA'ers
Start writing and start saying your prayers.
Make sure that you pick a good mentor
and not one who will be a tormentor.

FU-MFA! (x6)

***

The Arm of St. Edmund

By Chris Belden

The arm of St. Edmund of Canterbury went missing from the chapel sometime between the reading Wednesday night and 9 a.m. mass on Thursday. The glass tube in which it had long rested sat empty but for the small golden pillow on which the saint’s petrified hand had once lain. Word spread quickly among the writers gathered on the island. Several recalled a moment on Wednesday night, around 11:30, when tapping was heard on the window of the St. Michael’s community room, where they’d been drinking beer and gossiping. They had laughed at the time, but now, as they remembered the rap rap rap on the glass, each one of them pictured the blackened fingers of St. Edmund. The stories accumulated throughout the day. A poet’s door had mysteriously opened while she lay in bed reading. “There was a click,” she reported, “and I watched the knob turn, but no one was there.” Items went missing: a fountain pen, a cell phone, a collection of spiritual poems. One fiction writer was certain a beer had been stolen from his private cooler under his desk. Meanwhile, the authorities had been summoned and were conducting a search of the island. The slightly offended writers opened their rooms to police officers, who peered under beds and into closets. By late afternoon, the arm had not been found. It was suspected that outsiders had been responsible, and the police moved their investigation off-island. That evening, as one of the fiction writers neared his room, he heard someone strumming his guitar. “I figured it was my roommate,” he said later, but when he opened the door, the room was empty and the guitar lay on the bed where he’d left it. “What song was it playing?” someone asked, and the writer, a novelist, said, “It sounded like ‘Freebird.’” Later that night, a half-asleep non-fiction writer was certain she heard someone typing on a laptop. Assuming it was her roommate, she went back to sleep, but in the morning she discovered that all the adverbs had been deleted from the opening chapters of her memoir. At breakfast the next morning everyone seemed to have a story. Someone’s light had turned on at 4 a.m. Another had woken to find her suitcase open, her underwear in disarray. The director of the writing program had discovered that the cap to his expensive single malt scotch had gone missing, though he couldn’t say for sure he hadn’t lost it himself the night before. On this, the final day of their residency on the island, the writers could talk of little else but St. Edmund’s arm and the weird events that had occurred. The arm appeared in workshop exercises, crept into poems. One writer, previously disdainful of genre fiction, began writing a mystery thriller about the theft of a relic arm on whose hand was tattooed, in Aramaic, the secret location of the Virgin Mary’s bones. That night, no one slept. And while a few fiction writers did get drunk, the others were attached to their notebooks and computers, composing epic poems, experimental novels, and memoirs exploring religious themes. By morning everyone was exhausted and elated, and ready to return home and continue their projects. They buzzed like a hive of bees at breakfast: “I wrote ten solid pages!” “I wrote five sestinas and three sonnets!” “I started a memoir about my twelve years of Catholic school education—and I wasn’t even molested!” Afterward, everyone packed up and said farewell. There were hugs and kisses and cries of “Good luck!” and “Keep writing!” Cars were loaded with suitcases and books and computers. And if anyone had looked back as they drove, one by one, across the narrow causeway away from the island and toward their homes and jobs and families, they might have caught a glimpse of someone waving goodbye, his shriveled black fingers glinting in the morning sun.

Craft Essay #8 - The Trial

Craft Essay #8:
The Trial by Franz Kafka


Miriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines “Kafkaesque” as “of, relating to, or suggestive of Franz Kafka or his writings; esp. having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre or illogical quality.” As defined, “Kafkaesque” is a term we can apply to everyday occurrences in 2009: attempting to navigate the labyrinthine recorded message menu of a utility company will qualify. But how does Kafka create—with technique—this “nightmarish” quality, or what translator Breon Mitchell calls the “sense of slight unease” (p. xvii) that has inspired and maddened so many readers?
First and foremost, there is the contrast between tone and content. A young man, Josef K., is caught up in the bureaucratic maze of The Law, having been accused of an unspecified crime by unspecified accusers, his life and job hanging in the balance, the unknown lurking around every corner, and all this is narrated in the most straightforward, unemotional, logical tone possible. What makes these illogical events “nightmarish” is not just the events themselves but the fact that the (third-person) narrator describes them as if they are absolutely normal. K.’s first “inquiry,” held in the back room of a dingy apartment in a nondescript block of apartment buildings, perfectly exemplifies this contrast. Here is K.’s initial glimpse of the setting:
K. thought he had walked into a meeting. A crowd of the most varied sort—no one paid any attention to the newcomer—filled a medium-size room with two windows, surrounded by an elevated gallery just below the ceiling that was likewise fully occupied, and where people were forced to crouch with their backs and heads pushing against the ceiling. (p. 41)

K., with whom the narrator is closely aligned, does not seem surprised by the weird fact that the gallery is so close to the ceiling that the spectators are forced to stoop. Instead, in the next line, he merely notes that “the air is too stuffy.”
The novel is chock-full of such scenes. Unnoticed people suddenly make themselves known (the Chief Clerk who lurks in the lawyer Huld’s bedroom [p. 102]); peculiar architectural details abound (that gallery on page 41, the extra stair at the law offices [p. 68], the awkwardly placed pulpit at the cathedral [p. 209]); and bizarre occurrences erupt out of the most mundane circumstances (the two guards receiving a flogging in a storage closet at K.’s workplace [p. 80]). All are described in the most blasé of tones, and while K. may occasionally be startled, his reactions tend to be as logical as the narrator’s: faced with the flogging of Franz and Willem, for example, he simply exclaims that he hadn’t complained about their behavior to the magistrate—i.e., it wasn’t his fault they were being punished!
One of the more unusual tonal strategies employed by Kafka is the near total lack of metaphor and simile. The narrator can be quite descriptive—of both settings (the Juliusstrasse on pages 38-9, the cathedral on pages 206-7) and characters (Bertold on page 61, Leni on page 97)—and yet he resists any impulse toward the poetic or figurative. This technique (or is it a lack of technique?) works on an almost subliminal level—I was nearly halfway through the novel before I noticed it—to keep the story grounded in the reality that the events otherwise lack.
Writers often don’t consider the importance of how their work appears on the page, and how it can contribute to mood. If we are to believe that Breon Mitchell has rendered The Trial “precisely, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence” (p. xvii), then we must assume that Kafka’s long, complex paragraphs are as intentional as the precise, realistic tone. He does not even separate the lines of dialogue, choosing instead to pile them up within the same paragraph. Some paragraphs go on for pages. The effect can be oppressive, as during K.’s prolonged anxiety attack at the law offices (pp. 73-5). In this way, the author creates another unnerving contrast with the logical, orderly tone of the story.
Yet another unsettling technique is Kafka’s brilliant use of the “unreliable narrator” (technically, it’s not the third-person narrator who is unreliable, but because he is so closely aligned with K.—transmitting to us K.’s every thought and feeling—the effect is similar to that of a first-person narrator). Throughout the story, K. maintains a cocky, even arrogant attitude toward his predicament. At the first inquiry, he mocks the magistrate, both out loud (going so far as to call the proceedings “sloppy” [p. 45]) and in his thoughts (K. assumes the magistrate is so knocked out by his eloquence that the official “slowly lowered himself back into his chair as if to keep anyone from noticing” [p. 45]). When he first visits the law offices, K. interprets the other defendants’ behavior as respectful toward him—“‘Everyone stood up. They probably thought I was a judge’” (p. 174). As with all skillfully presented unreliable narrations, however, the reader is way ahead of the character. The gap between reality (K.’s case is hopeless) and the character’s attitude instills in us a feeling of dread, even as we laugh (nervously) at his arrogant pronouncements.
Which brings me to my final observation: The Trial is often hilarious. (Of course, this could be just me. I also find Moby-Dick laugh-out-loud funny.) Huld’s extended riff on the necessity of lawyers (pp. 111-22) is a beautifully sustained comic monologue. K.’s unlikely adventures with the various women he encounters—they all throw themselves at him—are also quite amusing (K. notes this himself: “I recruit women helpers, he thought, almost amazed” [p. 107]—that “almost” makes it all the more funny). Even K’s execution becomes a comic scene, as the two killers (“old supporting actors,” K. calls them, noting how they seem to have been sent by central casting [p. 226]) are nearly stymied by their “nauseating courtesies”: they keep passing the knife back and forth, like the overly polite Disney cartoon chipmunks (“After you.” “No, after you.”) before one of them finally plunges the knife into K.’s heart. The imposition of such slapstick into this scene makes it all the more horrifying. K.’s final, dreamlike observation—of a “faint and insubstantial” human figure with arms outstretched at a far-off window (p. 230)—is as profoundly unsettling as any in the previous 229 pages. K.’s questions—“Where was the judge he’d never seen? Where was the high court he’d never reached?” (p. 231)—wrench the gut. His last words—“Like a dog!”—and the feeling that “the shame was to outlive him” (p. 231) make this one of the saddest endings in all of literature.

Craft Essay # 7 - Atonement

Craft Essay # 7:
Atonement by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan’s Atonement offers a plethora of craft essay topics—the shifting point of view, the fracturing of time, the withholding of pertinent information, the use of description to enhance mood—hell, I could write three pages just on the way McEwan diverts our attention so that Robbie Turner manages to believably deliver the wrong letter to Cecelia. But these brilliant techniques would not be half as effective if the characters were not so vividly brought to life.
McEwan wastes no time. In the novel’s very first sentence, he provides us with a piercing glimpse into the character of Briony Tallis, the 13-year-old girl whose overheated imagination will wreak havoc on those around her:
The play—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. (p. 3)

First, there is the matter of Briony having written a play, an impressive accomplishment in and of itself, never mind the producer’s duties she has taken responsibility for. The “two-day tempest of composition” clues us in to the girl’s tumultuous nature. Of course, at this very early point in the novel, we don’t yet know Briony’s age, but that final detail—“causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch”—implies youth, since no adult playwright would care about missing two meals during the frenzied completion of a play. In one sentence, the author establishes Briony as precocious, tempestuous and immature.
Such a perceptive, economical sketch is typical of the novel, but McEwan uses many other techniques to establish and develop character. Because the third-person narrator is closely aligned with one character at a time (Briony in chapter one, her sister, Cecelia, in chapter two, etc.), we are privy to those characters’ opinions and observations of others. And these characters are very opinionated, constantly judging those around them. These judgments (for example, Cecelia’s labeling of Robbie Turner as “pretentious” on page 18) tell us as much, or more, about the judge as about the judged. Another example: to Cecelia, her mother is “distant, even unfriendly” (p. 19), but to Briony, Mrs. Tallis is “endlessly kind and sweet and good” (p. 151). We may find, as we read on, that both girls are right, in a way, but the narrator’s real purpose here is to deepen our understanding of the character who is doing the judging. Cecelia, just out of college, does not feel close to her mother and even resents her. Briony, on the verge of puberty, still worships her mother, who dotes on her, the baby of the family.
McEwan also utilizes lists to show character. Until chapter 8 (p. 73), we know relatively little about Robbie Turner, whose love for Cecelia leads to so much pain and turmoil. On page 77, the narrator lists the items in Robbie’s cramped study, which range from hiking maps and a compass to “ten typed-up poems [that] lay beneath a printed rejection slip from Criterion magazine, initialed by Mr. Eliot himself.” This list, combined with Robbie’s bathtub reverie over Cecelia’s plunge into the fountain earlier that day (pages 73 and 28, respectively) paints a vibrant portrait of a sensitive, adventurous, intelligent young man who is madly in love. (The compass and map also foreshadow Robbie’s tortuous trek through war-torn France later in the novel.)
Another tool in the author’s character toolbox is dialogue. Pierrot and Jackson, Briony’s young twin cousins, whom she recruits to perform in her play, are revealed the first time they open their mouths, on page 11: “I hate plays and all that sort of thing,” Pierrot says, and Jackson chimes in, “I hate them too, and dressing up.” These two may be brats, but, interestingly, our poor opinion of them evolves into empathy, and not because they change (in fact, they remain rather oafish throughout), but because we grow to better understand the narcissistic Briony and the twins’ manipulative sister, Lola.
Dialogue is also used to establish the characters of Nettles and Mace, Robbie Turner’s battle companions on the long march through France to Dunkirk. Because they are relatively minor characters, the author must render them quickly, which he accomplishes through the use of repetition. On page 181, as Robbie studies a map, Nettles jokes, “He’s seeing crumpet” (crumpet being British slang for “a desirable woman”), and Mace replies, “He’s having his fucking doubts again.” This exchange is repeated, almost word for word, on page 202. These two, with their routines, are like a pair of vaudevillians. McEwan then deepens them with very brief descriptions of their actions (Mace displaying unlikely domestic talents as he improvises comfy straw mattresses in an old barn [p. 184]) and physical characteristics (Nettles’s “sharp features and a friendly, rodent look” [p. 184]).
This second section of the novel contains many such minor characters. Here’s a “pink-faced [Major] of the old school” who tries to recruit Robbie for one last run against the Germans: “The major had a little toothbrush mustache overhanging small, tight lips that clipped his words briskly. ‘We’ve got Jerry trapped in the woods over there…We’re going to get in there and flush him out’” (p. 207). Later, a similarly gung-ho lieutenant appears for all of three paragraphs: “Round-shouldered, bony, with a deskbound look and a wisp of ginger mustache” (p. 232) Then there is the gypsy woman who gives Robbie and Nettles some water and food: “She was rather handsome, with dark skin, a proud look and a long straight nose, and a floral scarf was tied across her silver hair” (p. 240). These characters, along with the author’s terrifying descriptions of the landscape and action, make Robbie’s final days believable and agonizing.
Likewise the final section of the novel, which follows Briony’s harrowing experiences as a wartime nurse. The narrator deftly introduces wounded soldiers, injecting their brief time on the page with great meaning. Here is a fatally wounded lad whom Briony comforts in his final moments:
He was sitting, propped up by several pillows, watching the commotion with a kind of abstracted childlike wonder. It was hard to think of him as a soldier. He had a fine, delicate face, with dark eyebrows and dark green eyes, and a soft, full mouth. His face was white and had an unusual sheen, and the eyes were unhealthily radiant (p. 288).

It is impossible to discuss character development in Atonement without acknowledging the vital role played by point of view. McEwan’s narrator is remarkably controlled, almost surgical in her∗ descriptions of both landscape and character. She is wiser and more sophisticated than any of the people populating the story and thus can articulate their feelings and un- or partially-formed philosophies. Cecelia, though she may not recognize the underlying source of the tension between herself and Robbie, is, in the narrator’s translation, aware that “there was no ease, no stability in the course of their conversations, no chance to relax” (p. 26). Likewise, the narrator is able to describe Briony’s teenage musings on life and meaning in a way far beyond the girl’s ability to express it herself:
She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If only she could find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. (p.33)

These super-articulate representations of what are probably, in actuality, confused and rambling thoughts, clarify the characters for us, and help us understand their desires and motives.
Atonement is a heartbreaking novel not just because its two lovers don’t live happily ever after, nor because Briony never reconciles with her sister. The twists and turns of the plot, the clever literary tricks, the crystalline language—it would all add up to nothing if not for the fully realized characters.

49 LOVE LANE - Section 5

8. Confession

Daisy and I were out in the front yard, sitting on the grass, avoiding her mother. I had just mowed the lawn with my new push mower, the old-fashioned, motorless kind with the curved blades. Abby thought it was ridiculous, but it was cheaper than a gas mower and I felt good about saving energy. Daisy had watched me go back and forth, fascinated by the clattering blades and the swish of grass being cut. Now, we sat in the shade of the tall silver maple, listening to the birds.
“Smell that, Daze,” I said, taking in the tangy aroma of freshly cut grass.
“Baby,” she muttered. “Baby.”
The mowing had not taken long. The far side of the yard remained barren but for a few clumps of fragile new grass. I would have to call Anders Lehigh again to come out and reseed. Or, more likely, given our financial situation, I could leave it like this, looking like a white trash yard. But I didn’t want to think about it. My mind was ping-ponging between my job situation and the Dead Baby Story. I still hadn’t told Abby about the disastrous meeting with Berk. For a week now I’d avoided the job topic altogether while waiting for her to ask a simple question—When does school start? Don’t you need to work on lesson plans? What kind of new car should we get? I wasn’t sure I could withstand the inquiries without breaking down and confessing everything. Just looking into her eyes—on those rare occasions when I could meet hers with my own—I felt on the verge of cracking. So I was spending a lot of time in different rooms, or outside. This was absurd, I knew. I was like one of those people who put off going to the doctor while a tumor the size of a bowling ball is growing in their belly. I was well past the point of early detection.
Daisy pulled at the grass and tried to stuff it into her mouth.
“No, sweetie. We don’t eat the grass.”
I was watching the baby because Abby had become exasperated by her antics earlier that morning. There had been an unusual amount of fussing and whining and willful disobedience.
“Carl,” Abby had called, “can you please watch her for just a little while?”
She used that accusatory tone that implied I didn’t watch Daisy nearly enough.
“Fine,” I said, putting down my book and coming in from the bedroom to sit down with Daisy on the living room floor.
Abby put a hand over her eyes. “Can you take her out of the house, please?”
“Are you alright?”
“I just don’t want to be in the same space with her right now.”
This was unusual. Abby was typically as patient with Daisy as she was impatient with me. But, grateful for the opportunity, I took the baby outside.
“Please stop,” I said to her now as she continued to eat the grass. “Stop.”
I yanked the grass from her little fist. Her eyes bulged up at me and turned shiny.
“Dear!”
Daisy and I both turned to see Mrs. Schwinn standing in her driveway.
“Hello,” I called out, not sure if she’d been addressing me. Maybe she thought I’d been too rough with the baby. I hoped she couldn’t see the bruise on Daisy’s forehead. She’d somehow managed to smack her head while sleeping in the crib the other night. Abby said she found her like that in the morning and we both spent the day monitoring her behavior in case of concussion. But she’d acted normally and now her forehead showed only a small red mark within a circle of pale blue.
“I’d love to shoot them all!” Mrs. Schwinn said, squinting in the sun and twirling her car keys.
“Sorry?”
“Let me know if you find some way to keep them away. I’ve tried it all!”
“Who?” I asked. Daisy laughed uneasily, like someone watching a Beckett play.
“I’ve tried rotten eggs and garlic and cinnamon and stinky soap. I even tried peeing in the yard myself!”
She turned to her car, an old station wagon with, for as long as we’d lived there, one thin donut wheel on the left rear side. “Sometimes I watch from the window and wish I had me a gun.” She opened the car door and, just before climbing in, said, “Gosh darn deer!”
“Oh!”
She slammed the door shut and turned the key. The engine sputtered several times before roaring to life. She backed out of the driveway, brakes squeaking, and pulled away. I waved but she didn’t even glance at us.
“Did you hear that, Daze?” I asked. “Mrs. Schwinn wants to shoot poor old Bambi.”
Daisy grinned and grabbed another handful of grass.
Mrs. Schwinn’s anti-deer rant reminded me of Jerry Winters’s bizarre anecdote. I looked up at the house and the window of Daisy’s room. It was true that no deer, even on its hind legs, could reach that height. Nor could a man, unless he was unusually tall. Was the whole story made up? Jerry was so deadpan, and I’d been so high that night, I couldn’t tell if he really believed some two-legged, cloven-hooved creature had been lurking in the garden.
Daisy started coughing, her face pink with streaks of green around her mouth. I patted her on the back as a gooey mix of grass and bile dribbled from her lips.
“I told you not to eat that.”
I wiped her chin with my fingers, then dried them off on the grass. Daisy smiled and opened her mouth. I scraped a few stray blades off her tongue and she giggled.
Just before coming outside, while Abby lay on the sofa sighing dramatically, I had changed Daisy’s dirty diaper. I was not squeamish about cleaning up poop (though the odor never failed to surprise me), but I had to admit to a shyness about touching the baby’s genitals—her “woo-woo,” as Abby called it. I remembered the shock of seeing her swollen labia at the birthing center, and the nurse explaining that it was perfectly normal, something to do with hormones, and that I needn’t be alarmed. Now, those little pink folds, long since calmed down, seemed to hold all the mystery that had gone out of her mother’s older, dark-haired version. While wiping it gingerly—always gingerly—with a moist tissue, I wondered about those deranged men who got a sexual thrill out of touching children even as young as Daisy. Occasionally I’d read news stories about men who had gone even further. How absolutely far gone must you be to force yourself inside such a fragile, barely existent opening? Then my mind would move into the future to the point where my Daisy becomes a young woman and actually wants someone to push himself inside her, and I would again be confronted with wonder and terror at how any of us survive into adulthood.
Now, out in the yard, a bee floated drunkenly in the air around Daisy’s head, as if dangling from an unseen wire. The baby, unaware of any danger, swatted the bee away as she would a mobile. The bee danced away, then immediately returned. Daisy laughed. I leaned over and waved the bee off again.
“Get outta here!” I said, flapping my hand at the persistent insect. Daisy’s grin disappeared, replaced by a look of hurt. “Not you, sweetheart,” I said. “I meant the nasty bee.”
“Bay-bee,” she burbled.
Another bee materialized, and they both danced in the air around Daisy’s head. I sensed an illogical rage pour into me. I wished for a baseball bat to swat them right out of the air.
Then I remembered a trick I’d picked up while working in a hospital during summers off from college. I ran up the deck stairs and into the house. In the bathroom I found an aerosol can of Abby’s hairspray and ran back outside. Daisy was now waving her arms at the insects as they buzzed around her face. I ran down the deck stairs and knelt beside her. Covering her face with one hand I took aim with the other. I hit the first bee dead-on. Its wings immediately glued up, and it plummeted to the ground, buzzing angrily. The other seemed to sense danger and flew crazily around us. No sooner did I aim the can than the bee zigged and zagged out of harm’s way. I sprayed indiscriminately, dousing the air with sticky chemicals. Daisy squealed and tried to crawl away, but I held her close, my hand still covering her nose and mouth. I finally got a good shot off at the bee, but he had enough flying power left to carom back around me. I turned and doused him. Without a sound, he dropped.
By now, Daisy was crying sharply. I let her go and she crawled away, her eyes red, her mouth curled up into that terrible rictus.
“What the hell?”
Abby ran down the deck stairs and lifted Daisy into her arms.
“There were bees,” I said, certain this would explain everything.
“Did you consider bringing her inside?”
I didn’t answer, embarrassed to have not considered that option. Abby huffed and carried Daisy up the steps and into the house. I sat back on the ground, the aerosol can still in my grip. I looked up at the blue sky, at the thick green canopy of the maple tree. From somewhere in the grass nearby came a strangled buzzing sound. I stood up, located the crippled bee scrabbling among the grass blades, then I ground him with my shoe until the buzzing stopped.
*
To further avoid my wife, I decided to take a walk around the lake. Heading down the hill I could sense the air thickening, as if the algae that clogged the lake were somehow sending slimy, invisible tendrils onto dry land. I could smell the lake rotting in the hot air. Overhead, trees hung limply, their leaves still. The sand on the beach was littered with twigs and leaves. I wondered when someone had last played here. Maybe in the spring, though the water would have been too cold for swimming. I picked up a stone and tossed it into the lake, where it landed with a thuk atop the algae. The pathetic sound of rock against impenetrable muck steered my thoughts back to my job situation. Not only did I need to tell Abby what had happened, I needed to look for work. Our savings would run out by year’s end, and our insurance coverage was minimal. Basically, we were covered if someone got hit by a truck. Anything less than that came out of our own pocket. Daisy was late for her one-year check-up because we were waiting until September, when my teaching coverage was supposed to kick in.
Perspiration poured from my forehead as I continued walking the lake road. On my right were houses that once looked like ours but had been renovated into respectable two-story homes with large picture windows looking out onto the lake. At one time these views were probably impressive.
At the end of a driveway lay a rolled-up newspaper in a clear plastic bag. I thought of the articles I’d read at the library, and I wondered where the reporter had ended up. I couldn’t remember the name, only a few phrases and that grim black-and-white photograph.
I looked up and down the road. Deserted. The house appeared unoccupied—the windows were shut, no car in the driveway. I snatched up the newspaper and quickly walked on.
I was half way around the lake before I stopped and sat on a stone wall in front of a squat, brown house with an unkempt lawn. Blood pounded in my ears. While walking I’d been certain someone had seen me take the newspaper and was following me. But no one was on the road. In fact, I hadn’t seen a soul the entire mile I’d walked. I imagined everyone at their jobs, frantically earning money.
The plastic bag was damp from having been carried under my arm. I pulled out the newspaper and searched for the banner. What were the chances that the reporter had remained at the same publication for twenty-five years? Only three reporters were listed, none of whose names I recognized. Nonetheless, I decided I’d call the newspaper offices when I got home.
Still a little short of breath, I sat there on the wall for a while, skimming the news. The air on this side of the lake was slightly less oppressive, plus I was in no hurry to get home, anticipating a tongue-lashing from Abby about the bee incident. How great it would be, I thought, to just take off, to climb into the Corolla and drive west until the ties that bound me snapped. I could work odd jobs—short-order cook, house painter, gas station attendant. I’d meet desperate, lonely women who would come back to my weekly-rate hotel room and drink tequila and we would dance to a transistor radio before tumbling into the sack. Of course I would last about two days before I longed to hold Daisy in my arms. She was on the cusp of turning into a little person rather than a helpless baby, and I didn’t want to miss out on all the interesting things she’d have to say. It would take a little longer to miss Abby, but I would, eventually, and I’d remember how sturdy she was, and how she made such an effort to forgive me.
She’d known something was awry immediately. Even that first night, when I came home from the school theater with the smell of guilt all over me, she could tell I had changed. “What’s eating you?” she asked, and I told her I was stressed about school—the play, upcoming finals, difficult parents. Somehow I managed to put off my confession for two weeks, which gave me plenty of time, unfortunately, to accrue more things to confess.
I almost skipped the second performance of the school play, knowing I’d be too weak to resist a repeat of opening night, but I went anyway. Throughout the show, Okay Peterson glanced over at me in the wings until I lost sight of her (and everyone else’s) performance, thinking only of what was to come after the cast and crew went home, leaving Okay and me at the theater alone.
The third night—closing night—I did not hesitate. I kissed my wife and daughter goodbye and left our apartment with my heart skipping in anticipation. I was already getting the hang of denial.
I wondered many times since then if our affair would have lasted longer if I’d had a confidant to share information with. But there was no one I could trust—my friends were Abby’s friends, and my family was crazy about her—and so I was alone with this thing. For two weeks I lugged it around, the kisses and the sex and the notes and the glances in the hallways, like a rapidly filling steamer trunk, never able to open it up and show someone else the crazy, beautiful, awful things inside. I didn’t confess out of guilt; I confessed out of loneliness.
One night I just blurted it out. Daisy was asleep in her crib in the bedroom and Abby and I were in the living room, folding laundry. I’d taken an unusually long time bringing the clothes up from the apartment building basement, where the coin-operated machines were located, because I’d called Okay to tell her I couldn’t meet her. We had planned to get together that night in the park, but there was no way for me to sneak out without arousing suspicion. Okay had been upset and I’d had to talk her down—just the latest manifestation of her immaturity that was wearing at me. When Abby asked me why I’d taken so long, her tone of voice told me she expected a lie. By now she’d stopped asking what was bothering me, having tired of my stock answers. And it would have been easy to make something up—the towels were still damp, the dryer broke down, the super asked me to help him carry something—but I couldn’t do it. At the same time I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth: I was on the phone with my sixteen-year-old lover who was in tears because I can’t hook up with her tonight.
“Well?” She folded a pair of my boxers into a neat square.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said, and the steamer trunk I’d been dragging around burst open.
At first I tried to minimize my sins. I spoke generally of giving in to temptation, of inappropriate behavior, as if I’d cheated on my taxes instead of on my wife. But Abby had never been one to accept partial bad news. If a doctor told her she had cancer, she would ask to see the bloody tumor the moment it was torn from her flesh.
“Who is it?” she asked. She didn’t seem angry. It was more like she wanted to hear some hot school gossip.
I looked away. “Someone at school,” I said.
“Not Janet Weisbrod?” she gasped, referring to a recently divorced speech teacher.
“No!”
“Then who?” She tried to move her face into my line of sight, but I wouldn’t let her see my eyes. “No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
I chanced a glimpse at her horrified expression, then looked away.
“A student?”
I flinched, expecting a physical attack, but none came. She was hoarding her ammunition. The energy buzzed inside her.
“What exactly did you and this girl do? Assuming it is a girl.”
“Yes, it’s a girl,” I said.
“What did you do, Carl?”
“Well, we kissed.”
A pause here, as she took it in. Then: “What else?”
I dithered, my tongue slack in my dry mouth.
“Come on, Carl. This is about more than some hormonally-charged teenager.”
I looked down at a pile of my socks. One of them had a gaping hole. “You’re right,” I said.
For some spouses, including me, that would have been enough. No details, please!
“Tell me,” she said. She was getting some enjoyment from this grilling, and I couldn’t blame her. I was paying for my bad behavior. “Tell me,” she repeated. I noticed then she was holding a pair of novelty boxers she’d given me for my birthday. The shorts were black with a vividly rendered tiger on the front flap.
“Carl.”
I used the most neutral language I could muster: foreplay, oral sex, intercourse. As I said these words they sounded insanely filthy, much worse than the crass terms I might normally use.
“How many times?” Abby asked. Her face had grown more rigid, as if she’d been told of a death in the family.
“I don’t know.”
“How—many—times?”
I felt myself twisting in anticipation of those physical blows.
“Twice?” she said. “Three times? Five? Ten?”
“Maybe half a dozen times.”
“You mean you fucked her six times? Does that include blowjobs?”
“God. I don’t know.”
“Think, Carl. How many times did you put your dick into this little girl’s mouth? How many times into her tight little twat?”
“Jesus, Abby.”
“Tell me.” Her knuckles were white as she clutched at my tiger shorts.
“Maybe, like, six times we had intercourse, and maybe…I can’t remember.”
“You don’t remember this little chickie going down on you? Come on, Carl. You can do better than that.”
“Okay, okay. Five times.”
“Five?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Her bullying made me want to be defiant now, but it was like standing on a tall, wobbly stack of ice blocks.
“You did use a condom when you fucked her.”
“Of course!”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
And I had, except for that first time, when I’d pulled out. I tried to wipe away the memory of Okay’s amazed expression.
“What positions?”
“What?”
“Was she on top? Did you do it doggy style? Good ol’ missionary?”
“Abby, stop!”
“Did you do it up her ass?”
“Please!”
“I want to know everything,” she hissed, tugging at my boxers. “I want to know every fucking thing you did, you fucking fucker.” Tears flew from her eyes, little sparkling diamonds arcing over her cheeks and onto her hands.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
We were up until dawn. She would cry for a while, then rear up and demand more details—“Did you lick her pussy? Did you come in her mouth?”—before crumpling again. Twice Daisy interrupted us to nurse, for which I was grateful. Abby neither wept nor cross-examined me during these brief respites. Then, as soon as the baby was down, she launched another round of interrogation.
As the first pale rays of sunlight dribbled through the windows, she asked her final question: “Is it over?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
She looked at me for a long time, trying to decide if I was lying or not. This time I did not turn away. And though I’d been uncertain when I answered her a moment earlier, her stare made me stronger, and I knew I’d told the truth. It was over.
*
“Can I help you?”
The voice came from behind me. I turned to see Charles standing in the doorway of the house where I’d paused to rest. He wore a gaudy pair of Bermuda shorts and a tank top. His dark hair stood on end, as if he’d just woken up. He had his hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun.
“Sorry,” I said. I stood and stepped out into the street. For the first time I noticed the burgundy Cadillac parked in the driveway.
“Do I know you?” Charles asked.
“I’m a friend of Arnie Johnston’s.”
“Oh,” he said. “Do you need something?”
For a second I considered purchasing some marijuana, just for the hell of it. I’d sort of enjoyed getting high. But I didn’t have the correct paraphernalia, never mind the nerve—or the money. “No,” I said. “I was just resting.”
“Well, please don’t rest on my wall.”
“Okay. Sure.”
He stood there in the doorway, waiting for me to move on. His feet were bare.
“You know, you really should drive more carefully,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I said it except that I felt I needed to give him a poke.
He stepped out onto the small cement porch. “What?”
But I just waved and walked on.
*
When I got home, Abby and the baby were out. There was no note. Relieved, I picked up the telephone and went out onto the deck. For some reason I didn’t want to make this call inside the house. I dialed the newspaper office.
“Press,” a man answered. He sounded harried. I tried to explain what I was after—that I’d read some articles from twenty-five years ago and was hoping to track down the reporter.
“Which reporter?” It sounded as though he were doing three or four things at the same time.
I told him I didn’t remember, and before he could stop me I explained that the articles had been about a local murder case, that a child had been killed. I mentioned Arliss Taylor’s name.
“Oh, yes,” the man said. “I remember it quite well.”
“Can you tell me who wrote those articles?”
“I sure can.” It sounded like he’d stopped doing those three or four other things. “That was me.”
I was speechless for a moment.
“Hello?”
“Sorry. I’m just surprised is all. Listen, I was wondering if it would be possible to meet with you to discuss the case.”
“And what exactly is your interest in this case, Mr. –“
“Hammond. Carl Hammond.”
“Mr. Hammond. If you don’t mind my asking.
“Of course. The murder was committed in the house I live in.”
“Oh, okay. I was worried you were a writer doing one of those true crime books or something. You see, I’ve always wanted to write that one myself.”
The man’s name was Philip Harper, and he was now editor of the newspaper. He couldn’t meet until after Wednesday, he said, because of the paper’s deadline. I scheduled a meeting for Thursday afternoon.
“Thanks so much, Mr. Harper.”
“Phil. And it’s no problem. It’ll be good to refresh my memory.”
“See you Thursday then,” I said.
“Yeah.” He paused, but I could tell he wanted to say something.
“What is it?”
“How is the house?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Is everything okay?”
“Sure. Fine. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“No reason. It’s just…”
“Yes?”
“Nothing, really. We’ll talk on Thursday. Sorry, but I have to go.”
Then he hung up.
*




Dear Daisy,
The box the box the box the box the box. I’ve pulled and poked and banged and still it does not open. I’ve shaken and tilted and rattled it beside my ear and still I don’t know what’s inside. So today I took you to the hardware store to find some sort of tool that would help. Inside the little family-run shop on Main Street that I fear will no longer exist when you grow up, an older man in a red apron smiled at your precious face before asking if he could be of help. His nametag said “Tom.” He wore a bristly gray mustache and combed his hair from just above his right ear all the way over his scalp to his left ear. Normally this looks silly, but somehow Tom carried it off. I showed him the box and asked if he had any ideas how to open it. He whistled as he held it in his hands. “Where’d you get this beauty?” I didn’t want to tell him I found it buried in the yard, so I said I’d inherited the box from an aunt. (As you grow older, Daisy, I will often tell you never to lie, but the truth is there are times when you must. You’ll see.) Old Tom poked and prodded but could find no way to open the box. He admired the craftsmanship and was hard-pressed to identify the wood. He called out to another clerk who was also stymied, saying only that it might be oak or some other very heavy wood. The only way to open it, Tom decided, was to saw it in half. I could see he was reluctant to do that. “How much do you want to get in there is the question,” he said. “A family heirloom like that.” He asked what was inside and I confessed I did not know. He put his ear to it and shook. “Something pretty darn solid in there.” He asked if I’d like to buy a saw, though I could tell from the way he asked that he wanted me to say no. So I said no thank you and turned to leave. “Ma’am,” he called out, startling me, since I’d never been called that before. “The box,” he said. I had left it there on the counter! I thanked him and left the store. By then you had become very heavy and restless in my arms, and when we got outside you started bawling. I opened the car door but when I tried to put you in your seat you stretched out your arms and legs and straightened your spine so that it was impossible. I set the box on top of the car and tried to bend your limbs but you are strong, Daisy, and I was afraid of hurting you. Your face was red and tears rolled down your cheeks and splashed onto your pink cotton top. I took a deep breath and tried again. Thankfully all that bellowing had weakened you a bit and I was able to force you into the seat. While you wailed into my ear I strapped you in. You strained against the straps and let loose with a shriek that nearly melted the windshield. By now people were staring at me on the street, their eyes alert for some sign of abuse. People are always so ready to judge, Daisy. I confess I scowled at them as I walked around the car and climbed in. It was only when we arrived home, after a seemingly endless ride during which you never stopped howling, and I had gone around the car to open your door, that I realized I’d left the box on the roof! There it still sat, unmoved, on top of the car. I think I am meant to have it. It’s now under your crib, where you lie sleeping as I write this. It’s past midnight, and your father is snoring in bed. I’m not at all tired. Outside, lightning flashes every few seconds, but no thunder follows. The night is absolutely silent. It’s strangely exciting, Daisy! For a split second at a time, the world lights up as bright as daytime, then plunges back into darkness. Just now I saw a pair of deer out on the lawn, illuminated by a strobe of lightning: a buck atop a doe. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me until I realized what they were doing out there. And the buck, in a flash, he turned to look at me—am I crazy to think so?—before darkness fell again. Sometimes I am so glad we live here.

9.
On Thursday, I entered the Hungry Hen Diner at exactly noon. The booths along the wall were all occupied, as were the stools at the U-shaped counter. In the far booth sat a man sipping from a cup of coffee.
“Philip Harper?”
“That would be me.” He wore a long-sleeved white shirt and a faded blue and white tie. His graying hair was cut short, military style. His thick glasses, held by black frames, gave him an owlish look.
We shook hands and I sat down opposite him. “Thanks for meeting me.”
“Not a problem. But I only have an hour. I have to come up with an editorial about this ridiculous sewer issue.”
“Must be hard to edit a newspaper in this town.”
“It’s a joy and a pain in the kiester.”
A waitress with pendulous arm flab took my order of root beer and French fries.
“A fitness nut, I see,” Harper said. He ordered a tuna sandwich, hold the potato chips. Then, after the waitress waddled off: “So, what can I do for you?”
“Well, like I told you on the phone, my family and I have recently moved into 49 Love Lane, and we heard this story about the baby…”
“Jane Bingham.”
“Jane?”
“The baby. Her name wasn’t in the paper, of course.”
“Right.” My spine went all icy. “My daughter’s middle name is Jane,” I said.
“How old?”
“Fourteen months, give or take.”
“That’s more or less how old Jane was. She was a cute kid, too. I saw pictures.”
I had a vague impression of the waitress bringing my soda.
“What else wasn’t in the articles?” I asked.
“There’s not a whole lot.”
“Were they married? Annette Bingham and Taylor?”
“No.”
“Was Taylor the baby’s father?”
“That’s what they claimed. I heard rumors to the contrary, but nothing solid. They didn’t perform any blood tests or anything.”
“Rumors from neighbors?”
“Yeah.”
“Which ones?”
“I’d have to look at my notes again. I talked to everyone I could.”
“Our neighbor, Mrs. Schwinn—“
“Across the road?” Harper asked.
“Yeah.”
“I remember her.”
“She told me that ‘strange things’ had gone on in the house.”
“I heard similar things. I remember the lady had a husband—“
“Mr. Schwinn.”
“Right. He said something about Satanism.”
“What—like devil worship?”
Harper chuckled. “Nothing solid. I think he was a religious nut or something.”
The waitress brought our food, but I’d lost my appetite. Harper picked up his sandwich—daintily, with both hands—and took a huge bite. He was probably accustomed to eating quickly.
“What happened to Taylor?” I asked.
“Pled guilty,” Harper said with his mouth half-full. “Got ten to twenty-five, or something like that.”
“So he’s out.”
“Unless he got into more trouble.”
“Did you ever speak to him?”
“Nope.”
“And the mother?”
“She refused to talk. Then she moved away with the boy.”
“Bill?”
“That’s right. Bill. Or Billy. They went down south, I think.”
“I wonder whatever happened to them,” I said.
Harper took another big bite. “I felt sorry for the boy,” he said. “To grow up in a house like that.”
“A house like what?”
“You should’ve seen the place.”
“You went inside?”
“When I took the photo of the house. The door was unlocked.”
“What was it like?”
“A mess.”
“You saw the crime scene?”
He nodded.
“The bedroom?”
“Yeah. Right off the hall there, as I recall. Jeez, I can still picture it pretty clearly. There was a blood stain on the far wall.”
“Across from the doorway?” I asked. That was where Abby had hung a portrait of her parents.
“The plaster was dented. That was worse than the blood. There wasn’t much blood, actually. I think I expected more.”
“Small head.”
“Uh huh.”
“What about the rest of the house?” I asked.
“A shit hole. Annette just up and left the place, maybe took some clothes, that’s all. There was junk everywhere, crappy furniture. Very white trash.”
I pictured the house in such a state. It was difficult—Abby was obsessively neat. Though in the past few days I’d noticed she was letting some things slide: Daisy’s toys didn’t get picked up as quickly, dishes lay in the sink all afternoon.
I picked up a french fry but didn’t eat it. “Why did you ask about the house?”
“Hm?” Harper had finished his sandwich and was poking at a small cup of cole slaw with his fork.
“On the phone. You asked how the house was.”
“Just curious, I guess. Something like that happens in a house, you never know.” He shoveled some slaw into his mouth. “I wonder how many people have lived there in the past twenty-five years.”
“Quite a few. Why?”
“Sometimes that’s a sign. People move in, don’t stay for long.”
“A sign of what?”
Harper took up a napkin and wiped his lips. “The place my ex and I got married—down south? It was an old plantation. Every single person who came, including myself and my wife, as we were driving up this very long drive to the house, saw a couple of old black ladies out in the field with their hoes. I didn’t think anything of it, but when someone asked the old caretaker about it, he said those were the slaves. ‘Slaves?’ we said. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘They’ve been here more than a hundred and fifty years.’”
“So you think my house is haunted?”
He shrugged. “If there’s a house that would be haunted, it would be yours.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t believe in that kind of thing.”
“Neither do I, actually.”
“What about those slaves?”
“I think that old guy was pulling our legs. So who told you about little Jane’s murder, anyway?”
“Our lawn guy. He said he was there when it happened.”
“That’s right. There was another kid there. A friend of the boy’s. What’s this lawn guy’s name?” Harper took out a pad and a pencil.
“Anders Lehigh. You shouldn’t have any problem with him. He seems to enjoy talking about it.”
Harper wrote down the name. “Excellent. Maybe he’ll have more on this Satanism angle.”
“You think there could be something to that?”
“You’d be surprised how many people are into burning black candles and sacrificing small animals. It’s a fad, like bowling. I mean, these are not rocket scientists we’re talking about. They shouldn’t have had children. Then again, I know a lot of people who shouldn’t have children.”
“I think you’re right,” I said.
He started to pull out his wallet, but I put up my hand and said, “It’s on me. Thanks for your help.”
“Thank you.” He stood up. “This story’s got my juices flowing again. I’ll do some checking around, make some calls. In the meantime, let me know if you find out anything else.”
“Same here.”
“You got it.” We shook hands.
“Hey,” I said, as he was starting off. “Do you have any job openings over at the newspaper?”
“Looking for work?”
“Sort of.”
He shook his head. “We don’t need anyone at the moment. Unless you want to deliver papers.”
Sadly, I considered it for a moment.
“There’s only three full-time staffers,” he said. “And the pay stinks.”
“Just thought I’d ask.”
“Sorry. I’ll see you, Carl.”
The waitress brought the check and set it on the table. I ate a french fry, but it was cold.

Craft Essay #6 - Carter/Carey

Craft Essay #6:

Saints and Strangers by Angela Carter

meets

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

I.

Angela Carter’s story collection Saints and Strangers is about language—crazy, glorious, spinning, glittering language. She hangs her language like technicolor laundry across the sturdy clotheslines of such iconic tales as Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the legend of Lizzie Borden, the sad life of Edgar Allan Poe, and Baudelaire’s infatuation with Jeanne Duval. Carter uses language and other techniques—summary, tone, point of view—to subvert these stories and twist them to fit her view of the world.
Behold the heightened language of “The Fall River Axe Murders”: “the dark, satanic mills” (p. 9), “a stangulatory neck tie” (p. 9), “this burning morning” (p. 9), “domestic apocalypse” (p. 11)—all in the red-hot first few pages! And the accumulation of adjectives: “sweet, sensual, horizontal thing” (p. 9), “the large, accusing, blue stare” (p. 17), “her soft, warm, enormous bum” (p. 22). And the alliteration: “In a blue serge suit one look at which would be enough to bring you out in a prickly heat, Andrew Borden will perambulate the perspiring town truffling for money like a pig” (p. 10); “For he held himself upright with such ponderous assertion it was a perpetual reminder to all who witnessed his progress” (p. 19). The repetition: “Hot, hot, hot” (p. 9), “Bustle! bustle! bustle!” (p. 9), and
Still, all still; in the house nothing moves except the droning fly and the stillness on the staircase crushes him, he falls still. Stillness pressing against the blinds, stillness, mortal stillness in the room below, where Master and Mistress share the matrimonial bed.
All this linguistic hysteria and yet, at the same time, Carter’s language grounds us by, in effect, rubbing our noses in the smell, taste, and feel of what it was like to be in the Borden household on that fateful August day. Then, perversely, after setting us up like a chicken with its neck stretched out on the block, she does not even document the murders! Her narrator—a modern observer jaded enough to acknowledge that the presence of a Borden family friend (one John Vinnicum Morse) is inconvenient to a story designed for “the maximum emblematic effect” (p. 11)—is more interested in the potential causes of Lizzie’s violent outburst: an unspecified form of mental illness (bipolar disorder?) synchronized with her menstrual cycle.
Carter repeats this cause-and-effect theme in “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe,” where her savvy third-person narrator demonstrates how Poe’s unfortunate childhood inspired his dark poetry and tales of death, not to mention his fatal alcoholism. Her weapon of choice in this endeavor is, of course, language. Here’s how she (for this narrator is a woman just as surely as Philip Roth’s is a man) describes the birth of Edgar’s little sister: “They heard the shrill cry of the new-born in the exhausted silence, like the sound of the blade of a skate on ice, and something bloody as a fresh-pulled tooth twitched between the midwife’s pincers” (p. 73). Again, there are those pile-ups of adjectives: “Veins as blue as those on Stilton cheese but muscular, palpitating, prominent, lithe, stood out on her forehead” (p. 74). When poor Edgar’s actress mother dies and the three Poe children are doled out to various foster homes, the narrator wonders when they will meet again: “the church bell tolled: never, never, never, never, never” (p. 75). How could Poe not have grown up to write “The Masque of the Red Death”?
“Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a tongue-in-cheek setup for Shakespeare’s comedy, narrated by the magical fairy adopted by Titania. As in the other stories in the collection, the language is a head-spinning combination of timeless poetry and contemporary lingo. “Child of the sun am I, and of the breezes, juicy as mangoes” (p. 91) rubs up against lines like “Puck is no more polymorphously perverse than all the rest of the sub-microscopic particles” (p. 90). The narrator is at once a sexually ambiguous sprite and a modern academic type who goes on at length about the difference between the English woods known to Shakespeare and the “necromantic forest” where the Bard’s comedy is set (p. 87). Paradoxically, as in the other tales, these linguistic and intellectual flights of fancy not only amuse and entertain but also somehow grab our lapels and yank us into her bizarre world.
“Peter and the Wolf” ignores the Prokofiev folk tale in favor of a dark, disturbing version held together by the author’s total command of language: “The howling of the wolves mutilated the approaching silence of the night” (p. 59). Here is a description of the wolf-girl’s genitalia as glimpsed by Peter: “a set of Chinese boxes of whorled flesh that seemed to open one upon another into herself, drawing him into an inner, secret place in which destination perpetually receded before him” (p. 63).
Like the other stories, “Peter and the Wolf” relies heavily on summary, as several years are compressed into eight short pages:
A girl from the village on the lower slopes left her widowed mother to marry a man who lived up in the empty places. Soon she was pregnant. In October, there was a severe storm. The old woman knew her daughter was near her time and waited for a message but none arrived. After the storm passed, the old woman went up to see for herself, taking her grown son with her because she was afraid. (p. 59)
This technique is consistent with the old folk tales and legends the author is upending. But then she will pause and describe something in a prose so sharp it cuts:
If they had not been the first wolves he had ever seen, the boy would not have inspected them so closely, their plush, grey pelts, of which the hairs are tipped with white, giving them a ghostly look, as if they were on the point of dissolving at the edges; their sprightly, plumey tails; their acute, inquisitive masks. (p. 60)

This contrast is echoed by the narrator’s tone, which careens throughout the book from the wildly eccentric (“He saw the primitive, vast, magnificent, barren, unkind, simplicity of the mountain” [p. 67]) to the authoritatively concrete (from “Axe Murders”: “Bridget’s lopsided shoes stand together on a hand-braided rug of aged rags” [p. 12]) to the amusingly vague (that same authoritative narrator admits, when describing the Bordens’ Saturday meal, “I don’t know if they had greens or not” [p. 20]). This stark contrast—between summary and specificity, and between several tones—creates a weirdly pleasurable frisson.
The dichotomy is most boldly clear in the collection’s final piece, “Black Venus.” From pages 111 to 118, the third-person narrator tells the story of an exotic black dancer/prostitute and her poet lover. Few specifics are given—no names (just “she” and “Daddy,” as in “sugar daddy”), and even pinning down the time frame requires some math skills (thanks to a reference to Josephine Baker’s fame “a hundred years later” [p. 114]). But there are plenty of fireworks in the language: “She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off” (p. 111); “Night comes in on feet of fur” (p. 112); she had “the voice of a crow reared on honey” (p. 118). Then, on page 118, the narrative suddenly transforms from what feels like another legend into a factual account of the relationship between Charles Baudelaire (the poet) and his muse, Jeanne Duval (the dancer). Dates are provided, places named. Baudelaire’s notes are referred to (pp. 118-9). But even as the narrator grounds us in facts, she continues with the stunning poetic language. On page 121, she describes the Antarctic: “Down there, far down, where the buttocks of the world slim down again.” When Baudelaire was aroused, “his Lazarus arose and knocked unbidden on the coffin-lid of the poet’s trousers” (p. 122). And of course there are the adjective-mad descriptions: “She walked beside him like an ambulant fetish, savage, obscene, terrifying” (p. 122).
Like Peter staring at the wolf-girl’s “forbidden book,” we are at once repulsed by and attracted to these stories with their raw, glistening words; their unflinching descriptions of bodily functions and their high-falutin’ poetry; their intellectual analysis and their slangy informalities. There is a staggering intelligence behind it all, someone with a clever intellectual agenda, but what pushes these stories under our skin is the language.

II.

Like Saints and Strangers, Peter Carey’s picaresque novel True History of the Kelly Gang derives much of its power from language. But unlike Carter’s erudite narrators, Carey’s first-person narrator, infamous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, is a semi-literate character whose limitations are his strength.
For example, because of Ned’s near-total lack of formal education (though he has read R.D. Blackmore’s classic adventure, Lorna Doone), he does not bother with such formalities as commas or quotation marks. More than illustrating the narrator’s grammatical ignorance, this lends the storytelling a headlong, propulsive quality appropriate to Ned’s adventures. It also forces the reader to concentrate, so as to make sense of such sentences as
She prayed Almighty and merciful God who has commissioned Thy angels to guide and protect us command them to be our companions from our setting out until our return to clothe us with their invisible protection to keep us from all danger of collision of fire of explosion of fall and bruises. (p. 242)

Another grammatical issue is Ned’s tendency to misconjugate the verb “to be”: “It were during Sgt O’Neill’s hateful reign…” (p. 13); “We wasn’t finished tending to the pigs” (p. 13). This beguiling quirk lends Ned’s writing the quality of everyday speech, and somehow makes him all the more likable.
Another of Ned’s more charming limitations is self-imposed. Because the novel is primarily composed of episodes he has written down for his young daughter to read, the polite bank robber and horse thief avoids offensive curse words. Sometimes he does this with the use of dashes (e.g., “bastard” becomes “b-----d” [p. 115]). At other times, he resorts to the well-known substitutions of “eff” and “ess, ” as in “It was eff this and ess that” (p. 9) or “What’s he effing want?” (p. 111). Most resourcefully, Ned often replaces “fucking” with “adjectival,” as in “Get out of my adjectival chair” (p. 34). This last technique creates an odd effect for the reader, who must take the extra nanosecond to re-place the original word. It both pulls us out of the story—in a way that reminds us that this was written by a “real-life” person—and pulls us in by forcing us to write the story with him.
Despite Ned’s limitations—or perhaps because of them—he is capable of dazzling and colorful wordplay, particularly when employing similes: “Peering sideways at her like a chook about to peck a cabbage stalk” (p. 108); his parents were “ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history” (p. 92); “as peaceful as a broody hen” (p. 57). These and the liberal use of quaint phrases (e.g., when the family cows were unable to produce, it was because “the milk had gone up into the cow’s horns” [p. 99]), and unique Australian terms (“bowyangs” [p. 94]; “mia mia” [p. 73]) give the tale a palpable sense of authenticity, and root us in the time and place.
Throughout the novel Ned also makes use of abbreviations such as “v.” for “very” and “cd.” for “could.” Toward the end of his story, as seemingly all of Australia’s police force is closing in on him, Ned employs these abbreviations even more, since he doesn’t have the luxury of writing out full words (“Time is of the essence daughter” he writes on p. 353). This technique, like the lack of punctuation, helps propel the story forward, and it also bolsters the charming conceit that these chapters are actual transcripts quickly scrawled by Ned Kelly himself. This marks another major difference between True History of the Kelly Gang and Saints and Strangers: whereas Carter’s narrators seem to be speaking from a place outside the story (even the first-person ones, such as the fairy narrator of “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” who uses the language of a modern intellectual), Carey places Ned firmly in his time and place. He even goes so far as to precede each of the thirteen “parcels” of manuscript pages with a brief description of the type of paper used by “their author” (e.g., National Bank letterhead, for Parcel One) and their condition (e.g., “dust soiling along [the] edges” of the pages of Parcel Two), much as a museum or a bookseller might describe an actual historical document.
Occasionally, Ned will resort to alternative techniques in order to round out the sweeping story. He includes newspaper accounts of the Kelly Gang’s exploits (complete with snarky annotations made by his girlfriend, Mary Hearn [p. 303]), or scenes reported (in first-person) to him by friends or family, such as Joe Byrne’s vivid retelling of Ned’s boxing match with Wild Wright (p. 106). There are also a few mysterious scenes of Ned’s mother, Ellen, written from Ned’s point of view even though he is miles away and not a direct witness. While it’s possible that Ellen later recounted these episodes to Ned, who then included them in his narrative, the impression is that there is some sort of telepathic element at work (the two of them are especially close, so much so that one of Ellen’s beaus calls Ellen Ned’s “girlfriend”). This impression is reinforced by the spooky nature of these scenes, which include the appearance of the dreaded Banshee (p. 91) and the curse of Kevin the Rat Charmer (p. 173). Thus, even as he switches point of view, Carey is technically agile enough to convince us that this is a first-person narrative told by a simple man in 19th century Australia.
Carey bumps up against the built-in confines of the first-person narrative only when it comes to the wounding and capture of Kelly by police, since Ned is unable to write down the details of the event himself. The siege at Glenrowan comprises the only third-person sections wholly independent of Ned’s account (I don’t include the newspaper clippings because Ned has made it clear that he has pasted them into his notes). The novel includes two separate descriptions of the siege. The first is an “unsigned, undated, handwritten account” placed at the very beginning of the novel (p. 3). The second is placed at the end (p. 357) and includes a scene with Thomas Curnow, the schoolteacher responsible for Kelly’s capture. This second version of events is credited to an “S.C.” (Curnow’s wife? She would be the only one privy to the scene with her husband, though how she would know what went on elsewhere during the siege is unclear). Carey’s thorough devotion to maintaining “authenticity” in these sections—by, for example, providing convincing notes (complete with references to the library where the accounts can be found)—lends even more believability to Ned’s first-person narrative.
In both Saints and Strangers and True History of the Kelly Gang we are in the hands of great storytellers. While their techniques may be wildly different on the surface—Carter’s heightened, heavily saturated legends vs. Carey’s more grounded “true history”—their stunning narrative techniques are both held together by authenticity of detail and, most of all, language.

49 LOVE LANE - Section 4

7. Windows

I was at the playground, pushing Daisy on the swing set and thinking about how to tell Abby about losing my job, when I recognized Kevin Prince, the previous owner of 49 Love Lane. We’d met briefly a few months earlier, when we had the house inspected. The place was empty at the time except for some tools he was removing from the garage. He’d been pleasant enough, wishing us well, but he had also seemed distracted and in a hurry.
“Kevin?” I called. He looked up from helping his young son climb some steps up to the slide. He clearly did not recognize me. “Carl Hammond,” I said. “Forty-nine Love Lane?” His face registered the information. He nodded and waved while his boy careened down the metal sliding board.
I scooped Daisy up and walked over, dodging several rambunctious children as they tore around the playground. It was the most elaborate playground I’d ever seen, with slides and jungle gyms and swings and zip lines. The ground was covered with a soft black layer of recycled rubber, which absorbed the heat so that I could feel it through the soles of my sandals.
“It’s Carl,” I said again, holding Daisy tightly as she squirmed in my arms. She was upset I’d interrupted her play.
“Of course,” Prince said. “I remember now.”
His face was fleshier than I remembered, and a pot belly pushed at the fabric of his polo shirt. His khaki shorts revealed a pair of knobby and weirdly hairless legs.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Good, thanks. Hey, I had a question about the house, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure.”
Daisy continued squirming so I set her down on the sand, where she crawled to the foot of the slide. She smiled at Prince’s boy as he zoomed down the board.
“Were you very familiar with the history of the house?” I asked.
“Not really. We didn’t even meet the previous owners. Why?”
“Just curious.”
I grinned with disproportionate pride as Daisy pulled herself up onto her feet and grasped the side of the slide, where she hung on for dear life.
“We heard a crazy story about the place is all,” I said to Prince.
“What kind of story?”
“Well, apparently, some numbskull murdered a little baby in the house.”
From the look on Prince’s face I could tell he hadn’t heard this story.
“Jesus. When did that happen?”
“Twenty-some years ago.”
“I’m glad I didn’t know.”
His son climbed up the stairs and swished down the slide again. Daisy watched, fascinated.
“So you never noticed anything strange about the house?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“Well, a neighbor told me that some people thought it was haunted.”
Prince watched as his boy went down the slide head first.
“Careful, Grayson.” Then, to me: “I never noticed anything.”
I was struck by the emphasis on the pronoun. “How about your wife?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You’d have to ask her.”
“Is she around?”
He snorted. “We’re separated at the moment.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear that.”
“Shit happens, right?”
“That’s for sure.”
For some reason I was tempted to tell Prince about losing my job. Maybe I thought he’d understand my dilemma. Maybe I just needed a guy friend who would take my side. But I held back, and instead asked if he’d ever noticed anything odd about any of the neighbors.
“Like who?”
“I guess I was thinking of the Johnstons,” I said.
“Not really. But then I didn’t socialize much. My wife—or whatever you call her now—she’s the one who got around like that.”
So your experience with the house was a good one,” I said.
“Honestly? We never should’ve bought the place.”
“Why not?”
“Everything changed somehow.”
“Well, that happens when you have a kid,” I said.
“It was more than that,” he said. “She changed.”
“And you blame the house?”
“No, you‘re right. I guess I just associate all that crap with the house because that’s when things started falling apart.”
He gazed off toward a teenage girl watching her two younger siblings. He girl’s jeans hung so low you could easily imagine what lay beneath the zipper.
“Damn,” he said. “All these little foxes.”
“Now, now, Kevin.”
“Right—like you don’t feel the itch when you see that.”
The girl lifted up her little sister and a three-inch expanse of smooth skin shown between her jeans and her blouse. I didn’t say anything.
“You’d better watch out with this one,” Prince said, nodding at Daisy.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, with a boy—“ he pointed at his son, “—I only have to worry about one penis. With a girl, you have to worry about every penis.”
I laughed, but I also pictured a fourteen-year-old Daisy in those low-riding jeans, smiling at the boys who—I remembered—wanted nothing more than to pull them down.
Prince’s son tore down the slide head first again, his feet flailing over the side. One of his sneakers caught Daisy on the head, and down she went.
“Grayson!” Prince cried. “Be more careful!”
Daisy sat on the ground, her face blushed and her mouth open wide, but no sound emerged. I picked her up and checked her ear. It was red, but there was no blood.
“Sorry about that, Cal,” Prince said. “Is she okay?”
“I think so.”
“Grayson—say you’re sorry to the little girl.”
The boy, who was a lean version of his father, mumbled an apology.
“C’mon, we gotta go,” Prince said. “We need to get you back to your mother.” He turned to me and said, “Good seeing you, Cal. Good luck.”
“It’s Carl,” I said, but he didn’t hear me as he walked away.
Daisy had still not uttered a sound. She quaked in my arms, tears streaking her pink cheeks. Finally, she let out a choked breath, and started bawling.
*
By the time we arrived home Daisy was sound asleep. I lifted her from the car seat and carried her in to the house. Her skin was hot from the sun, her sweaty thin hair pasted across her head. She seemed heavier than usual as I lowered her into the crib, where she rolled onto her side, snorted, and continued sleeping.
Feeling tired myself, I made my way to our bedroom, only now noticing that Abby was nowhere to be seen. I’d expected her to be in the yard working on the garden when we returned, but there was just a rake lying on the grass next to a pair of gloves. Then I saw the bedroom door was shut. I hesitated. I’d been avoiding Abby as much as possible since the meeting with Berk two days earlier. When I’d returned from the meeting that afternoon, after driving around for to hours, she noted how long I’d been gone but didn’t ask how it went, and I certainly didn’t want to talk about it. Now, with every passing moment, it was getting more difficult to even think about bringing it up. Of course the truth had to come out, but I kept telling myself I needed time to process it and to make a plan. Which I hadn’t yet done.
I pushed open the bedroom door as if I were entering a dark, cobwebby cellar to investigate a strange noise. I was hoping Abby would be sound asleep and I could slide in beside her unnoticed. But when I peeked in I found her lying on top of the sheets completely naked, wide awake, with a grin on her face. This was something she used to do years ago, long before Daisy arrived, when she was feeling especially amorous.
“Well, don’t look so disappointed.”
“No no no. I’m just surprised is all.”
It seemed like ages since I’d seen her naked in the daytime. She was always quick to throw on her clothes or a robe, as if exposure to daylight would singe her bare skin. I’d forgotten how long her legs were, and though she’d lost weight her figure had retained some of its youthful hourglass shape.
“Are you gonna just stand there like an idiot?”
I wasn’t exactly in the mood, but I knew this was a rare opportunity, so I quickly pulled off my clothes and lay down next to her.
“How’s my Daisy?” she asked, putting her face close to mine.
“Good.”
“She had fun?”
“Yes.”
I had to admit it was a little intoxicating to feel the heat coming off her naked skin. She kissed me softly while running a finger around my chest and down my belly.
“Mmm,” she said, glancing down at my crotch. “I see Carl, Jr., is awake.”
The lying naked on the bed, the finger, the Carl, Jr., reference—it was like making out with an old girlfriend. When we kissed I felt that familiar tingle rolling around my skin.
“What’s gotten into you?” I asked as she kissed my stomach en route south.
“Are you complaining?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Then shut up already.”
With that she took me into her mouth and my head shot up on my neck as if I’d been given a pleasant shock. That’s when I noticed, through the open window, Monica Johnston in her yard. She was sitting on a folding lawn chair in her cut-off jeans and a frilly white blouse, sipping from a can of Coke and talking to someone I couldn’t see. Holding my breath, I tried to listen but all I could make out above Abby’s soft moaning was a buzzy chatter punctuated by the occasional laugh. At first I worried that the girl could see us, but it was bright outside and the bedroom would surely appear dark from there. Then the idea that she could see us became sort of exciting, and I felt ashamed, and like the inevitable thunder after a flash of lightning I saw the pale, unblemished face of Okay Peterson looking up at me while doing exactly what Abby was doing now. I lay my head back down and tried to re-enter the moment, which was fairly easy since Abby was working on me with an enthusiasm I hadn’t seen in years. Then, as if I couldn’t feel guilty enough, I started to feel bad about passively lying there enjoying myself.
“Hold on,” I said. “Don’t you want me to do you a little bit?”
Abby sat up and, wearing a determined expression, straddled me.
“I can’t wait,” she said.
She reached down, slipped me inside her, and started riding like a jockey on the final straightaway. Though it felt fantastic I was having a difficult time losing myself. She was behaving so differently, writhing atop me and grunting—this was not the usual quiet, perfunctory performance of a long-married mother. For a moment I became anxious, remembering a steady girlfriend in college whose reinvigorated libido was due, it turned out, to an affair she was having with her English professor. But I couldn’t imagine Abby sleeping with someone else. She had a powerful sense of loyalty, which had made things all the more traumatic when the Okay Peterson thing exploded.
“Oh God,” she groaned, and I became very aware of the open window.
“Shh,” I said, smiling, trying to make it funny, but she didn’t even acknowledge me. Her face was red and sweaty, and that weird combination of sexy and ugly that happens when inhibition is gone.
“Oh God!” she repeated, even louder. Then she suddenly stopped and climbed off. “C’mon,” she said, getting onto all fours. She positioned herself facing the window, so I knew she could see Monica out there, still on the lawn chair.
“Not so loud,” I said, kneeling behind her. From here I could see that Monica was chatting with her father as he tinkered with the lawnmower. He looked comical in a bright red and blue Hawaiian shirt. Neither of them seemed aware of what Abby and I were up to.
“Come on!” Abby said, reaching down between her legs to grab me. As I slid in she let out a loud groan and I couldn’t help it, I had to look out and see if Arnie and Monica had noticed. They continued talking as before.
By now I was so self-conscious that I was completely outside myself. I pushed and pulled and went through all the sticky motions but I may as well have been out in that yard with the Johnstons, listening. Still, it felt good on a purely physical level, and looking down at Abby, at the flare of her hips, I was able to feel a tinge of the joy that used to come with sex.
“Oh God!”
I was sure they heard it this time. Arnie looked up from the lawnmower, and it seemed he was looking right into my eyes. Maybe they could see into the room. Then he looked over at Monica. I couldn’t tell if he was simply gauging her reaction or confirming that she’d heard it also so they could snigger about it. How does an incestuous father and daughter react to such a thing?
“Oh God, oh God!”
That’s when I understood: Abby was doing this on purpose. She wanted Arnie and Monica to know that she knew about them. Even back when we’d great sex she was never like this—she never yelled “Oh God!” She would grunt, she’d groan, she’d whisper little words that came out in puffs of air. “Oh God!” was what Monica said during sex.
“Abby,” I said. “Be quiet.”
“Oh God!” she cried, even louder.
“Stop,” I hissed.
“Oh God!”
I stopped moving, but she didn’t care. She slammed herself back at me, our sweaty skin thwacking, and reached down to touch herself. I considered pulling out but I could tell from the way she was breathing and moving that she was close. She always came quickly in this position.
So I just knelt there like some kind of sex doll while she pounded at me, and just before she finished she swallowed her breath for what seemed like a long time, so that I wondered if she would ever breathe again, and then she let out a long growl, and I felt her contract inside, her body vibrating as she ground her ass against my hips.
“OH GOD!” she shouted one last time.
Outside, the Johnstons were giggling.
I sat back on my heels. Abby collapsed onto the bed.
“You don’t want to come?” she asked between gasps. Her face was pink and filmed with perspiration.
“What was that about?” I asked, picturing Arnie’s grin.
“What?”
“’Oh God!’” I mimicked. “’Oh GOD!’”
“You’re angry because I enjoyed having sex with you?”
I could tell this was going nowhere. I lay down as far as possible from her. She reached over and grabbed me.
“You want me to finish you off?”
I was still pissed and a little disgusted. It wasn’t like her to go so far to make a point, to expose herself in such a personal way. But her hand felt good on me. I didn’t push it away.
*
“Carl!”
The voice was vaguely familiar and seemed to come from inches away. I opened my eyes expecting to see a face—whose, I didn’t know—but there was no one, only a pillow where Abby had been lying.
“Hey, Carl!”
It was said in a way that would attract little attention while also being loud enough for me to hear.
“Carl! Out here!”
Then I recognized the voice: it was Arnie’s. Through sleepy eyes I saw him standing at his fence, his hands forming a funnel around his mouth.
I climbed from the bed and slipped into my boxer shorts. The events of the afternoon came back to me—the sex, the “Oh Gods,” Arnie and Monica laughing.
“Carl!”
I went to the window but somehow my perception was a little off and my head butted up against the screen, knocking it right out of the frame and onto the ground below. Feeling clumsy and foolish, I decided to climb down and retrieve it, forgetting that the bedroom was not at ground level but a few feet higher to accommodate the not-quite-underground basement. I realized this only after I’d dangled a leg out the window; it seemed that no matter how far down I stretched my foot there was only air. Finally, in order to give the impression that I knew what I was doing, I pulled my other leg out and hung by my hands from the window before letting go and falling the twelve inches or so to the ground. Fortunately, no blood was shed.
When I turned to face him, Arnie wore a bemused expression.
“Nice shorts.”
I looked down and noticed I’d put them on backwards.
“You know, you didn’t have to come outside,” he added.
“I know.”
Then I thought of Abby, who would disapprove of me having this conversation, seeing as Arnie was having sex with his own daughter, who, thank God, was no longer in the yard.
“How can I help you, Arnie?”
“Frannie and the kids are going out tonight to some terrible movie, and I thought you might want to come over and share a little doob.”
“Me?”
“Jerry’s coming, too. You know Jerry, right?”
I pictured Jerry Winters making that elastic face at Daisy. “Of course,” I said.
“Eight o’clock okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, so pleased to be included in something that I didn’t stop to think how I’d explain it to Abby.
“Alright, then. See ya later.”
As I watched him turn and walk up the deck stairs, something caught my eye in an upstairs window. At first I thought it was Frannie looking out at the yard, but then I wasn’t sure. It may have been Monica, or the boy, Ellis. Suddenly aware that I was standing there in my underwear, I held the window screen in front of me. Then the face disappeared.
“Carl?”
I turned to see Abby at our bedroom window.
“What are you doing out there?”
“Oh. The screen fell out.” I held it up to show her.
“How’d that happen?”
“I sort of bumped it out. Anyway, I had to come out and get it.”
“In your underwear?”
I had no serviceable explanation. So I shrugged.
“I thought I heard you talking to someone,” she said.
“Me? No. I was just cursing.”
She looked up at the Johnston house as if she’d just seen the face too. I could tell she was thinking of Arnie and Monica. She had that look she got when contemplating something distasteful. This made me think of Berk, for some reason. For a second I considered telling her the bad news, if only to get it over with. Perhaps she’d take pity on me in my vulnerable, nearly naked state. But her face seemed so hard, I knew her heart would be equally immovable. I’d tell her later. For now I concentrated on how to get out of the house at eight o’clock.
As it turned out I did not require a clever ruse. By eight, both Daisy and Abby had fallen sound asleep on the sofa. This was a lucky break as I had not come up with any decent excuses to leave. I never took walks by myself, and a run to the store would necessitate an actual run to the store, leaving no time to stop by the Johnstons’ house. I spent much of the evening reminiscing about my bachelor days, when I could go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted, even to an incestuous neighbor’s house to smoke marijuana.
After double-checking the sleeping girls, I tip-toed out the back door. The sun had just dipped below the far hills, turning the clouds a deep orange. A quarter moon hung in the blue sky. I knocked on Arnie’s door and it immediately swung open, as if he’d been standing there waiting for me.
“Carl!” he said, looking surprised.
“You said eight—correct?” I made a show of checking my watch.
“Yeah, yeah. Come on in. I just thought you were somebody else.”
Just then the burgundy Cadillac that had nearly run me and Daisy over pulled into the driveway.
“Speak of the devil,” Arnie said. He ran down the steps to the car. The driver, who looked even younger than I’d thought—he was maybe twenty-five—smiled and exchanged a few words with Arnie. Then Arnie handed him something and received in turn a plastic sandwich baggy. Arnie stepped back and the young man pulled out and tore off. He had never turned off the engine.
“Who was that?” I asked when Arnie reached the door.
“Him? That’s Charles. He lives across the lake.” He dangled the baggy and grinned. Inside was a thick green clump. “C’mon. Let’s go out back and sample the merchandise.”
On the way we paused in the kitchen, where Arnie grabbed a couple beers from the refrigerator.
“Sorry,” I said. “I should have brought some beers or something.”
“You’re a terrible guest, Carl,” he said, laughing.
We sat at the table out on the deck, under the striped umbrella. I wanted to ask where Jerry Winters was, but I suddenly felt shy, like I shouldn’t ask questions. Arnie, too, was silent as he methodically packed a small amount of pot into the bowl of his little pipe.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m supposed to thank you for having us over last week. That was great.”
“No need to thank us.”
“But it was just so nice of you.”
“No, I mean your wife already thanked us.”
“She did? Abby?”
“No. Your other wife. Yeah, Abby stopped by a couple days ago.”
I was flummoxed. I could have sworn she’d vowed to never speak to the Johnstons again. I took a long swig of beer.
The sky had darkened visibly in the brief time since I’d arrived, the clouds now a fading pink, the moon sharper and more detailed. Crickets chirped among the shrubs, and from the lake came the occasional cry of a goose. I’d noticed that, despite the algae, water fowl still populated the lake, families of Canada geese and a trio of stately swans who moved as if on unseen wheels across the flat, green surface. Daisy liked to point to them and burble, recognizing their shapes and colors from one of her books.
“Hey!” Arnie shouted, startling me. Then I saw that Jerry Winters had appeared at the back door, having let himself in. He’d also helped himself to a beer.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I was dealing with a septic situation.” He thrust his hand at me and said, “Jerry Winters.”
“Yes. We’ve met,” I said, shaking his hand.
“Carl lives next door to you, Jer,” Arnie said.
Jerry laughed. “That’s right. You have the little girl.”
“That’s me.”
“Sorry. Must be the fumes.”
“Speaking of fumes.” Arnie pulled out a long-necked propane lighter normally used to ignite grills.
Jerry clapped like a child about to be served ice cream and cake. He was squat and round-shouldered, but with powerful arms and wrists—the guy you turned to when you needed to unscrew a stubborn jar lid. Under what was apparently a ubiquitous baseball cap his face was chubby-cheeked and youthful despite a five o’clock shadow. He seemed to have dressed for a slightly more formal occasion in a pristine long-sleeved white shirt and unfaded blue jeans. He looked like a man on a date.
Arnie held out the pipe to me. “Here ya go.”
“Me?”
“Guests always go first.”
I took the pipe and the lighter. I stared at them as if I’d never seen such things before in my life.
“Go on, Carl,” Arnie said. “It won’t bite.”
I inserted the pipe into my mouth and lit up.
“Don’t forget to inhale,” Jerry laughed.
With the first hit, the smoke scraped my throat like steel wool. I held it in till my lungs were about to burst into flames, then pushed it back out into the night.
“Good man,” Arnie said, taking the pipe and handing it to Jerry.
When I stopped coughing, I felt my brain come loose from its stem and float, balloon-like, at the top of my cranium. My head, so much lighter now, tilted up of its own accord, and I saw how the moon had lodged itself in a tree, where it dangled from a branch by its upper pincer.
The pipe came back around and the smoke rolled over my calloused esophagus into my lungs. Two hits and I was useless. Arnie and Jerry were talking but I had a hard time holding onto their words. Normally this would have been frustrating but instead the situation struck me as amusing. I felt my cheek muscles stretch into a grin.
“Carl’s happy,” someone said.
I giggled and cooled my throat with a swig of beer. Arnie went inside and returned with three more beers and a package of baloney.
“We’re all out of chips,” he said, but no one cared. We grabbed at the clammy meat and ate. I bit patterns into one slice, creating a baloney star. Jerry rolled his into a baloney cigarette. We laughed and laughed.
Time stretched itself out. If a minute was a stick of gum, the pot had pulled one chewed-up end out and out until it was three feet long.
Somewhere a baby was crying. This reminded me of something I’d wanted to ask.
“Hey Jerry,” I said, “Do you remember a guy named Arliss Taylor?”
Both Jerry and Arnie, who had been giggling like girls, became quiet.
“Sure, I remember Taylor.”
“Do you remember when he killed that baby?”
“Aw, Carl,” Arnie said. “Not now, man.”
“I remember,” Jerry said.
“What was he like?”
“He was an asshole,” Arnie said.
“He was that,” Jerry said.
“There’s a lot of assholes,” I said. “They don’t kill their own baby.”
It was brief, and in my drug-addled state I almost missed it, but the two men exchanged glances.
“Well,” Jerry said, “he was a strange guy.”
“How so?”
“Didn’t he lose his job?” Arnie asked. “Over at the dump?”
“Sounds about right,” Jerry said.
“That’s not so weird,” I said, seeing Mr. Berk’s lizardy head.
“He was just a fuck-up, I guess,” Jerry said.
“The newspaper said something about weird goings-on,” I said. “In the house.”
“What newspaper?”
“The local one.”
“You looked it up?” Arnie asked.
“Something about weird religious practices.”
Jerry moved his hands around as if trying to grab hold of old memories. “I think what’s-her-name was into some kind of cult-type shit, I don’t know.”
“Annette Bingham?”
Jerry was surprised by the name. “Annette Bingham. Remember her, Arn?”
“Course I do.” Arnie pursed his lips as he thought of her.
“What kind of cult?” I asked.
“She wasn’t into that crap,” Arnie said. “That was Taylor.”
“What crap?”
“Who knows?” Jerry said. “It was all rumors.”
“Rumors about what?”
I saw Jerry turn to Arnie. The pot was wearing off now, my mind clearing like a field after an evening of smoky fireworks.
“It was weird sex stuff, supposedly,” Arnie said. “Orgies and shit.”
“Orgies? In my house?”
“It was just rumors,” Arnie said.
“Somebody must’ve seen something,” I said.
“Taylor liked to brag about shit,” Jerry said. “He probably made it all up.”
I looked over at our house.
“Did you guys ever hear or see anything?”
“That I would remember,” Jerry said.
“Not much you can’t hear in this neighborhood, Carl,” Arnie said with a grin. I felt my face burn. “You dog,” he added.
“Did you know the house is haunted?” I asked Jerry, wanting to force the conversation in a new direction.
“I’ve heard that.”
“But you’ve never witnessed anything yourself?”
“Like what—a ghost or something?”
“Whatever.”
“No. But there was that one family—what was their name? With the little boy?”
“The Princes?” I asked.
“Maybe. Or the people before them.”
“They had a baby, too?”
“Whoever. One night they’re out in the garden with a flashlight, right outside the baby’s window. I was walking by—I think I was coming home from here—and I asked what was up. I thought they’d lost something. The mom says she saw someone looking in the window. The husband was sure it was an animal—a deer. The eyes were red, he said.”
I remembered the buck out on our lawn, its eyes glowing.
“Yeah?” I said.
“There were these hoof prints in the dirt, around the bushes.”
“So it was a deer,” I said.
Jerry paused.
“What?”
“Two problems with the deer theory. First, that window is too high for any deer to look through, unless it’s on stilts.”
I pictured the window. Like our bedroom, which I’d nearly killed myself climbing from, Daisy’s was definitely too high up for a deer—or even a man—to see into.
“And the other problem with the theory?” I asked.
“Well, I’ve hunted deer all my life. I’ve tracked them all over this area. Those prints in the dirt, they…”
“What?”
“They were inconsistent, let’s say.”
“What’s that mean?”
He sighed, as if I should understand what he was getting at.
“The prints were not made by a four-legged animal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Whatever was outside that window,” Jerry said, “walked on two legs.”
“What?”
The two men looked at one another. I couldn’t tell if more information was coming.
“You mean it was a person?”
They continued to stare at one another until Arnie’s lip started quivering.
“A person with deer hooves,” he said.
Jerry, still stone-faced, put a hand over his heart. “All I kow is what I saw, man.”
Arnie waved his fingers around and made a spooky noise. “It was SATAN.”
Jerry didn’t laugh, but I could tell he appreciated Arnie’s joking around. So did I, actually. There was still enough pot in my system that I managed to laugh.
“Beelzebub,” I said, and we all cracked up.
“Carl?”
The familiar voice came out of the darkness.
“Speak of the devil,” Arnie said, and we laughed some more.
“Carl?”
“Yeah?” I couldn’t tell where she was.
“What’re you doing?”
“Just drinking a beer.” It sounded like she was in the bedroom, but with the light off.
“When are you coming home?”
“Soon. Is Daisy in bed?”
“Of course.”
“O-kay,” I said, drawing it out. “So do you need me to do something?”
“No.”
Arnie and Jerry were looking away, avoiding my eyes.
“I just like to know where my husband is,” Abby said. “It’s a little quirk of mine.”
“Well, I’m right here, hon. I’ll be home in a bit, okay?”
There was no answer, but I could tell she’d moved away from the window. The invisible malevolent laser beam had turned off.
“Wow,” Jerry said.
“She’s a little tense,” I explained.
*
Dear Daisy,
As I write this I’m sitting next to your crib, watching you. You continue to hiccup, even as you sleep, trying to scoop some air into your raw little lungs. Thank God you have finally stopped wailing. I’m still a little shaky but I want to write down my thoughts and feelings before your father returns from his mysterious errands. Reason tells me you’re fine but I can’t imagine every forgetting that split second when you slipped from my fingers and the sickening sound that followed. This is what happened. Yesterday, while you were with your father at the playground, I uncovered a strange box while working in the garden. It was buried just inches below the surface, in an area that was not even a garden until a week ago, when that section of the yard was tilled. I pulled the box from the dirt and cleaned it off as best I could. It was the size of a cigar box and made from some sort of solid, heavy wood. There were no carvings or decorations. In fact, I couldn’t even find a hinge or an opening of any kind. Still I could tell it was hollow because there was the sound of something rattling around inside when I shook it. I took the box into the basement and poked at it with a screwdriver, but I couldn’t find any way to open the thing. Finally, feeling frustrated, I put it away and went back to gardening. But for the rest of the day and all night long it gnawed at me: what’s in that box? Who buried it? Today, it continued to bother me to the point where I had a hard time concentrating on anything else. And so I waited until your father left before heading back downstairs. You didn’t want to go but I don’t like to leave you unsupervised for even a moment. Your father says it can be dangerous to be too cautious. Maybe he’s right. Nonetheless, I picked you up and you squirmed and whined but I was determined. It would only take a minute to get the box and bring it back upstairs. I had put it in a cupboard so your father wouldn’t find it. I don’t know why, really. I just didn’t want him to know about it—not yet. When you grow up and get married you’ll understand the importance of harmless secrets. I opened the cellar door and switched on the light. You started crying and I held you close and tried to calm you. But you can be stubborn sometimes, and you know what you want—and don’t want. I nearly dropped you on the way down the wooden stairs, but somehow held on. I managed to open the cupboard and remove the box. It felt heavier than I remembered. I positioned the box under one arm so that I could hold onto to you. You squirmed and cried as I turned to go back up the stairs. I was about half way up when it happened. You made a sudden move to break free the box started slipping from under my arm. I tried to catch it, and then you were no longer in my arms. The difference was startling. Not holding you, I felt so light and inconsequential that I could have floated up against the ceiling. Meanwhile, you were falling. What does that feel like, Daisy? You are 29 inches long and you fell more than four feet onto your head. That would be like me falling ten feet. I was shocked but somehow managed to bend down and catch you on what seemed like the first bounce off the step. You didn’t cry at first. Your eyes were enormous as they took in what must have been my horrified expression, and then you let loose. I forgot about the box and ran back upstairs. There was no blood, thank God, but I could see an egg growing on your forehead, right at the hairline. I know that bumps are a good sign—we want the swelling outside the brain rather than inside—but there’s something terrifying about seeing our skin stretch like that to accommodate blood and swollen tissue and what must be a fiery ball of pain. You screeched so loud I was sure the neighbors would show up at the door with the police. Tears were leaping from your eyes an inch into the air before dropping onto your face. I tied to apply a piece of ice but you kept pushing it away with your little hands. So I rocked you, I paced, I sang to you, I cried along with you, all while hoping your father would not come home to lecture me on child safety, to pry into my secret. So for now it remains between you and me, little sweetheart. And later, when you wake up, and your booboo has gone down, we’ll try again, and find out what’s in that box in the cellar.