“I haven’t been well. I’ve been having some problems. My days have been full of problems.” Etta seemed determined to avoid eye contact. I watched as a leaf over her right shoulder let go of its branch and lazily spun down towards the surface of the stream. Her arm shot out like a mongoose and she snatched it out of the air.
“Here,” she said, and she stood up and turned around and stuck it behind my ear. She gave the impression of smiling intensely, almost freakily, but it was all in the set of her chin and the lines around her eyes. I didn’t really have a response to this. I wished she would sit back down.
“Uh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I told her. “What…what kinds of problems?”
“You know. The kind that mess you up.” She tapped the ember of her cigarette onto the carpet of brown pine needles and I ground it out with my foot. “Problems with the Man. I’m a wanted fugitive. Did you know that?”
“This isn’t really how I imagined our ten-year reunion,” I said. “We’re supposed to be trying to out-bullshit each other. I tell you that my four year old just tested into his preschool’s gifted program, you tell me about your recent promotion to Assistant Supervisor of Cell Phone Sales and CEO Fast-Tracking. Also, it should be indoors.”
“Also, there should be about a hundred and fifty more people.”
“Not necessarily. I’m okay with this many.” She came pretty close to a smile at that. Somewhat close.
“Ask me about the fugitive part,” she said, turning back to watch the stream.
I looked at my watch. It was 7:33 in the evening and the sun was teetering on the edge of South Mountain. Great golden shafts of light streamed down, gilding the hemlocks. A quiet breeze raised the hairs of my forearms – the chilly, resigned exhalation of the mountain. Half a mile away frogs were having sex. If only it would make the occasional effort, I thought, the world could be a halfway decent place to live.
“Okay, tell me about the fugitive part.”
She sat back down and this time I sat down beside her. I handed her a broken pine branch and she used it to tickle the water.
“No, I was making that up,” she said. “I was trying to out-bullshit you.” She sucked at her cigarette and pushed up her glasses. “I only wish I was a fugitive. I kind of feel like I’ve missed my chance to really fuck some shit up, and soon I’ll be thirty and no one will take me seriously anymore. Like, I’ll try to join a radical animal liberation terrorist cell and all the kids will think I’m a narc.”
“No one will think you’re a narc. They don’t even have narcs anymore. If they want to find out if you’re going to blow up a pharmaceutical plant, they just listen to your phone calls.” I shifted uncomfortably. I felt like I was missing the point.
“You’re missing the point,” Etta said. “Listen, I remember when we were like eight and your dad got his pants caught in the harvester, and you missed school for two weeks and our whole class put our lunch money in a pretzel bin to buy flowers for the funeral. And I came over to your house and we were going to go play in the garage and your mom was in there just kind of staring at all those canvases that he started painting and didn’t ever finish. And then we went out behind the grain silo instead.”
It was true. We went out behind the grain silo instead. Etta kissed me out behind the grain silo, I now realize, because she didn’t know anything better to do. I threw a corncob at her.
“I get it,” I said. “But you’re not going to get killed by a harvester. Look, you’ve done a lot of things with your life. You’re twenty-eight. I heard that you worked as the only female rodeo clown in Arizona for a while. That’s something.”
She stood up, sighed, chucked the pine branch into the stream. A congregation of startled crayfish exploded away from it in a burst of mud. She looked down at me. A halo of milkweed spores illuminated her from behind. When she spoke she sounded like the angel of bad news.
“You’ve changed,” she said. She had me there.
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
“Don’t say, ‘I couldn’t help it,’” she said.
“I wasn’t going to,” I said. But I had been thinking about it.
“I shouldn’t be so surprised. I just, I don’t know, I thought we’d go rob banks together. I have no idea what comes next,” she said, “and I’m scared, okay, I’ll admit that, I’m pretty scared. Pretty terrified. Got it?”
“Um.” I was still sitting down and my butt was getting wet. “Do you want a ride back to town?”
“Forget it,” she said. “I’m going to go get eaten by wolves. Do they have wolves here? Mountain lions? Deer? I guess they all got run over.” She strode forward into the stream, splashing water all over my trousers. “Something better get me,” she said, without turning back, when she was halfway across.
I watched her cross the stream and disappear among the skirts of the hemlocks, her bearing fixed on the ridge of South Mountain. What could I do? The most I could hope for was to ruin my shoes. I have never been good at helping people with their problems.
The sun was gone for good. Fifteen miles to the south, under a humming yellow lamp, my mother was waiting up for me on the porch of our old house. She was drifting off to sleep, and she needed someone to wake her up and take her inside and play a few hands of gin rummy with her and put her to bed. I got up, brushed off my damp trousers, and followed the path back up the bank to the parking lot.
The year was 1962, the place was Schenectady. I’d been working in pest control by day and shacking up with an alcoholic dancer named Pauline by night. In my pocket I carried a tiny notebook in which I placed a tally mark every time she didn’t respond to something I said.
I was on my second notebook by the time I got assigned to the Coleman place. Vince, my dispatcher, told me to bring four tanks of imiprothrin, a pair of galoshes, and a cyanide capsule, just in case. Randy lived over on the eastern edge of the city, in a rathole flat above a 24-hour pawn shop called Make Or Break’s. I meant to knock twice, but he swung open the door after only one.
In those days Randy looked nothing like he does today. His most notable characteristics were his dreaming, unassuming eyes and his painfully twisted back – a deformity attributed to a childhood bout with scoliosis, which would be suddenly and miraculously healed years later following a mushroom trip in the Himalayas.
He was cleanshaven, which I found odd, considering the bohemian trappings of his apartment. On an easel in the corner rested a canvas draped with a cloth, in which holes had been cut such that only very small portions of the painting underneath were visible at any given time. Candle butts were melted into the ceiling and the walls. In the kitchen I found a hifi stereo with an axe through it.
After a cursory inspection of the apartment turned up no infestation, I asked Randy for more details as to the specific nature and location of his pests. A rambling, near-incoherent monologue-cum-rant followed, by the end of which I was forced to conclude that the creatures plaguing this man were in reality the hallucinatory manifestations of the dozens of pieces of music gestating in his mind at the moment. I sat on a wooden milk crate while he described them to me, his eyes tracking them around the room: a bat-winged myna bird screeching from atop the doorjamb, a blue cat with six legs scurrying under the armoire.
It was hours before I left, retracing my steps through the snowy streets, lugging the imiprothrin back to the pest control offices. Stray dogs padded past without looking at me, yellow in the sodium lamps. When I arrived home, dawn was melting over the horizon and Pauline was gone. She’d taken my wallet and my record collection.
Feb 13, 10:15-10:30pm
February 15, 2008
My brother falls down a well in the hard light of Christmas morning while I roll across the empty left side of our bed and dream about oxen steaming through the night. Neither one of us can remember falling asleep the night before. In our stomachs spaghetti knots like a tangle of yarn and we viciously kick each other’s shins to warm up under our cold blankets.
“I can hear them wrapping things down there.”
“That’s not them, they’re not the ones who wrap the presents.”
“Shut up.”
“Listen! Really, that was a sleighbell.”
“That was somebody bumping against the tree.” At a certain point we tire out and go limp, each of us holding the other one like a stuffed animal.
He wakes up as the first razor of sun crests the far-off bumpy mountain range and quietly disengages from me. Down the stairs in his bare feet, right past the thermostat and into the immense holy presence of the tree which has burst up from our floorboards like a vital middle finger defiantly raised against the obstinately snowy world outside. We find the torn paper of his first gift, a green pair of rubber boots from Woolworth’s, near the rocking chair. He’s stepped on the ribbon and dragged it outside with him…it finally lets go of the boot’s sole halfway across the backyard, where it bleeds up at us from the inside of his footprint.
His trail traces a wild skirling path through the yard, around the stubble of the dead garden, into the trees at the edge of our property, to their final destination: the black eye staring up from the ground, the hole-in-one, the drain that we always tilt towards when we’re not watching.
Missed connections 5
November 26, 2007
You crawled out of a pumpkin – m4w – 24
Reply to: pers-489560763@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-11-26, 1:31AM CST
On Friday I was walking home from the train in a bit of a drizzle, paying attention to the stray cats and stoplights exuding their radiance, everything doubling in size at each moment, with my keys in my pocket. In an alley off 31st Street skulked a big black dumpster, and next to it sat a beautiful pumpkin the size of a bass drum.
Somebody was throwing it away, so I decided to carry it home, scrub it, and make it into several dozen pies. I took two steps towards it, and then I saw a thin line around the stem where the top had been cut off, then replaced. I watched as the lid gave a wiggle, rose an inch, slid to the side, tottered, and fell to the wet pavement. Seconds later, your head, in perfect profile, rose matter-of-factly from the hole in the pumpkin. You unfolded yourself, popping shoulders into place, brushing stray seeds from your jacket and strands of pulp from your hair. One leg and then the other rose, and you stepped out of the pumpkin and into the haze of the city.
Clearly I was in no position to say anything to you, but you turned your head and held my gaze for an indeterminate moment before giving me a half smile, then walked briskly down the alley to get lost in all that baffling and grimy plumbing. Your eyes were orange. If there’s any chance that I might see you again, please write to me.
- it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
PostingID: 489560763
The start of something
March 13, 2007
I’m much better at starting things than I am at finishing them, so this is just a start. Please tell me how to make it better.
——————————————–
Muriel got down under the front porch and tried to drag the dog out. Her behind stuck up like a hillock and I sat back in the lawn chair enjoying her behind and the sunset, in that order, with my beer a distant third.
“I can’t believe he hasn’t gotten used to thunderstorms yet,” she said, muffled, from under the porch. “Thirteen years, Christ.”
“He got killed by lightning in a past life,” I told her. “What?” she said. Lebo was whimpering more loudly than I would’ve imagined an animal could whimper, if I hadn’t been hearing it regularly for the past thirteen years. She started scooting back, yanking the dog with her.
“Lebo got killed by lightning in a past life,” I said again. She looked up and pushed a flip of graying hair out of her face. “He used to be the world’s tallest man. But he led a life of sin. He was struck down by the hand of the Lord in the middle of a beach in Florida, and when the crabs came out at night he was already toasty. Nature’s microwave.”
“You’re a nitwit,” she told me, and heaved Lebo, that trembling bag of bones, into my lap. My lawn chair flipped. I spilled my beer all over the dog.
***
By eleven the power was out. We made a cave out of our forty-acre quilt and used flashlights to read each other’s palms while Leboshivered under the bed and outside it rained.
Muriel’s left palm was almost completely smooth, with one tiny cross of inch-long lines, just in the middle.
“I used to have stigmata in high school, did I tell you that?” she said. “That’s where it healed.”
“Bullshit.”
“Do you really think that God would have chosen me if I were the kind of person who would lie to you about having stigmata?”
There was something wrong with that but I was too tired to figure it out.
“I…” A gargantuan yawn shut me up for a minute. “I can’t believe that in twenty-two years of marriage you never told me that you had stigmata.”
“Idiot,” she giggled. Then: “Actually it was self-inflicted. I used to stab myself with scissors so that people would think I had stigmata.” There was something wrong with that, too, but my ears were full of cottony thunder and I was underwater with Muriel in our quilt cave. There was no fighting sleep; I shut my eyes and went away.
***
Saturday we patched pants; Sunday we snapped beans. Monday night Janet called.
“I’m thinking about coming up for a visit,” she said. I was down in the kitchen, Muriel had the upstairs line.
“That’d be sweet of you,” said Muriel. “Would you be bringing that Gus?”
“We would like it if you brought that Gus,” I said.
“I haven’t been with Gus for eight months,” said Janet. “It’s Bob now. You met him at Christmas. He gave you those art prints.” I remembered. He had been wearing a shirt and tie at Christmas.
“We would like it if you brought that Gus,” I told her again.
“I just remembered, sweetie,” said Muriel. “All the roads are actually flooded right now. No one can get in or out of town. If you try to come now, you’re liable to get capsized.”
“It’s been raining,” I put in.
“Your roads aren’t flooded,” said Janet. I heard something start beeping in the background. “Shoot, I have to go. I really have to go.”
“Your father had to build a raft out of spare tires just to get the groceries,” said Muriel.
“I really have to go,” said Janet. She went.
Muriel came downstairs and we sat on the couch together and wished that our daughter had the good sense to recognize a damn fine man, by which we meant Gus, when he was staring her right in the face.
***
I hauled myself out of bed the next bright morning and went outside to get my feet dewy when I noticed that the car had been spraypainted overnight. I went back up and gave Muriel a nudge. She came slowly and beautifully awake.
“Did you write Fuck You Mr Patterson on our car?” I said.
“No,” she said. Light cast through the netted curtains and made a shrine of her nose. “Did you?”
“It must have been Ted,” I said. Ted was our neighbor who twitched.
“It wasn’t Ted,” she told me. “Ted’s in Lancaster County on a healing retreat.”
She had to be dreaming. “No he isn’t, that’s crazy. Wake up.” I gave her another nudge. She opened one eye and looked annoyed.
“I am awake. Ted’s learning to use meditation and the earth’s natural healing power to center his energies and achieve levitation. He told me about it last Tuesday.”
“Levitation?” I said, but she had already closed her eye. “Well who was it, then?” I asked the bedside table. There was no answer. “Nobody calls me Mr Patterson,” I said.
***
Muriel was still asleep when I finished breakfast and went back outside. The car was still painted. I rolled up my pajama pants and crossed the wet grass. The welcome tree sighed and licked at my cheeks with its red leaves. Barks echoed from the field across the road as Lebo came rushing up to shove his nose deep into my crotch. I gave him a scratch and he hopped back, yipped at me once with his ears up and his black eyes fixed on me, and then sprang away to water the feet of the welcome tree.
“John?” Muriel called in a soft voice from the door. I turned around. Her nightgown clung to her like a kid. I ambled back over.
“You got up!” I told her. “That’s wonderful.”
“You weren’t making up the car,” she said.
“Would God have chosen me to have my car vandalized if I were the kind of person who’d lie about it?” I smartassed.
“Would God have reincarnated the world’s tallest man as a tree-pisser-onner?” she smartassed back. She had me there. Lebo looked up at us and grinned, leg raised. “Come on, don’t let him do that.”
“What are you worried about?” The tree was doing fine. “It isn’t going to shrivel up. Hearts of oak, ma’am.”
“How many times does he need to mark it, though? It’s your tree, Lebo! Who else pees on this tree?” She turned to me. “Do you pee on this tree, John?”
“My secret is out. I’m competing for territory with our dog.”
“Is that so,” she said. “You’d better make sure he doesn’t get me too, in that case.”
“Come over here and I’ll mark you,” I said. I would’ve, too, if the mailman hadn’t come.
Missed connections 4
March 12, 2007
humboldt craigslist > missed connections > Thin mints
please flag with care :
[miscategorized]
[prohibited]
[spam]
[discussion]
[best of]
email this posting to a friend
Thin mints
Reply to: pers-292029517@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-03-11, 12:07AM PST
It is girl scout season and the world is full of girl scouts. Mainly they seem to be stationed at the entrance to the grocery store, where their mission is to twist around on one foot while tugging at their hats and blurting out “Hellowouldyouliketobuysomegirlscoutcookies!” at me every time I try to go buy vegetables. So far I have kept my wits about me, surviving by means of my tried-and-true defense against aggressive New York panhandlers (“Sorry, I’m not carrying cash”), but I know it’s only a matter of time before they get to me. Lately my strategy has been to attach myself to another shopper as they enter the store, matching their stride and walking a pace or two behind them, only to quickly disengage myself and slip unmolested through the door at the moment that my human shield is getting snared into buying cookies.
Today was different. Things seemed to be going off without a hitch; I locked up my bike and surreptitiously fell in step behind a shortish woman in a big woolly hat. As we moved within range of the door’s eight-year-old sentry, I tensed for the breakaway. “Hellowouldyou-” came the pitch, and then the woman in front of me stopped in her tracks. I had to skip to the side to avoid a collision.”I’m going to lay it out for you, one point at a time,” said the woman in the woolly hat. “A, your cookies are made with hydrogenated oils. No living being has any business ingesting these oils. These oils will give you coronary heart disease.” Her words were quick and sharp. I had forgotten about my groceries and was standing still, staring at her hat, which was still hiding her face. The girl scout and the girl scout’s mother also stared.
“B, there is milk chocolate, eggs, or another animal product in almost all varieties of your cookies. I happen to be a vegan. Do you know what that means?” She paused even though it was obvious that none of us was going to answer. “It means that your troop, your friends, and you are all directly responsible for the commercially-motivated torture of animals and the buildup of the greenhouse gas methane. Whereas I have chosen a better path.”
I was trying to crane my neck to get a glimpse of her face, but that hat was still in the way. This was clearly all somewhat beyond the girl’s comprehension, but she was getting the gist. Her bottom lip started sticking out and trembling.
“C, your cookies cost nearly six dollars a box. Ask me whether I would rather buy a box of your immoral and deadly cookies, or pay one and a half percent of my rent this month. Go ahead, ask me.” She made another one of those pointless pauses. “I didn’t think so. Ciao.” And she swept past, like a compact steam engine absolutely sure of where it was going.
Now, we all three kind of stood there for a minute or two, and I’m pretty sure that at some point the kid started crying, and her mom may have given me a dirty look – did she assume the woman in the hat was with me? Or did she just want me to have stepped in, somehow? – and bundled her daughter away to their car. I wandered around for the rest of the day like I’d been clobbered. This is a weird thing for me to accept, since it comes completely out of the blue, but here it is: I have never in my life been so aroused as I was during those thirty seconds in front of the doors to the grocery store. If you’re reading this, and you gave a third grader absolute hell today while wearing a big woolly hat, please write back. I am ready to be abused.
- it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
PostingID: 292029517
Missed connections 3
March 12, 2007
humboldt craigslist > missed connections > Bluebird
please flag with care :
[miscategorized]
[prohibited]
[spam]
[discussion]
[best of]
email this posting to a friend
Bluebird
Reply to: pers-291512605@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-03-09, 10:48PM PST
Hiking in the Arcata Community Forest two days ago, I ran into you on loop trail B. Your flannel shirt was blue and mine was brown, and you said we looked like the mismatched eyes of a three-legged dog you had when you were four. I showed you what I’d been carving, and you sang me half a verse of a song you’d written about orioles before stopping with embarrassed laughter. We passed three barking dogs, I got on my bike to leave, turned to say goodbye and saw you slipping back down the trail. I wanted to follow you, but took just two steps before I saw you stop, cock your head, then leap into the air and just keep heading up. You flew off into the redwoods. I swear I had not eaten one single drug in weeks.
- it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
PostingID: 291512605
Missed connections 2
March 12, 2007
humboldt craigslist > missed connections > Olly olly oxen free
please flag with care :
[miscategorized]
[prohibited]
[spam]
[discussion]
[best of]
email this posting to a friend
Olly olly oxen free
Reply to: pers-288876406@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-03-05, 12:32PM PST
You: early 20s, short red hair, sneaky expression, skirt over jeans, playing hide & seek with three friends in Shay Park
Me: the guy you didn’t realize was playing, who you couldn’t find
Coffee some time?
- it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
PostingID: 288876406
Missed connections 1
March 12, 2007
humboldt craigslist > missed connections > During the last rainstorm
please flag with care :
[miscategorized]
[prohibited]
[spam]
[discussion]
[best of]
email this posting to a friend
During the last rainstorm
Reply to: pers-287587062@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-03-02, 11:27PM PSTI felt my back tire pop and squeezed the brakes. Moments later, the first big raindrop whapped into the back of my hand. I looked up and the second, third, and fourth drops described a beautiful equilateral triangle on each cheekbone and directly between my eyes.
I scrambled for my poncho, already realizing that I’d left it at home. A half-hour walk in the rain, then. Worse things have happened. Raindrops peppered my scalp like hail. In less than a minute my shirt was soaked through.
The rivers were already high, and this was all it took to push them over the top. Under the cement overpass, I passed a little tributary, swollen like a tick and moving faster than I was. Colorful debris dotted the churned water: floral lampshades, a basketball, bright red sneakers with the laces snagged to a broken branch. I leaned my whole wet back against the chilly cement and laid back my head, staring up into the graffiti and birds’ nests.
When I looked back at the water, this is what I saw rushing along in the current: one purple inflatable armchair, bobbing like a happy duck, cradling between its big arms a woman, maybe 23, with black hair all rainy and tangled and an open-faced joy for the entire world. You stared me straight in the face for half a second and laughed out loud and then you disappeared around a bend in the river.
Where are you now? I want so very badly to meet you. Please write back.
- it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
PostingID: 287587062
