“Please...”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and then it was out of me. I sat up in bed, and with my voice all wrong told her I was sorry over and over again. “Steady as she goes, Mr. Sick,” I heard John Foster Dulles say from the other side of the curtain, but I couldn’t help myself. I kept saying how sorry I was for everything, for frightening her, for hurting her and her family—
“It’s all right,” the girl was trying to say. “You were ill. You weren’t yourself.”
“Yes,” I said, then in a whisper: “no.”
“We don’t mean to upset you,” the mother said. She seemed to want to say something else but stopped herself. And then, almost like an accusation: “They told us you were better.”
“Yes,” I answered. I tried to smile. I tried to look grateful. I tried to look better. “I am better,” I said. I held my hands out, helpless. “I am better.”
“We just wanted to say,” the girl said with a tight, purposeful smile. “That it’s all right now. We understand.”
I closed my eyes. “Thank you,” I said and this deep, deep sigh came out of me. I looked down into my lap, shoulders slumping, face slack like maybe I had had a lobotomy. There on my knees was my poem about the three magi.
“Well...” the mother murmured.
“I have a no-contact order on me,” I blurted out after a moment. I looked at the girl’s ruined face, then up at her mother. Did they not know that? “But stay a minute,” I said. And then I asked would they mind if I read them the poem I was working on? It was a mess, I said, but it was—and then I said this fancy-pants poet-thing: it was the only myrrh I had to offer. They smiled politely.
“Okay,” the girl said. I slipped my reading glasses on.
And so there in a hospital room in Iowa City, with a suicidal fat farter and a manic-depressive with a salvation complex, and a young woman and her mother just trying to be decent, Herod massacred the innocents again, and the living skeletons on Bullfinch 7 made their bodies disappear, and Marty Browne lost himself out behind second base. Smell of leather, glint of gold, something something something, and a game of Sorry! in the kids’ oncology ward.
I don’t think they made heads or tails of it, but when I was done, the girl said it was lovely anyway. I thanked her, made the usual excuses about it just being a first draft, then laid the notebook aside and took my reading glasses off. Now it was my turn to be embarrassed. I nodded at the piano music on her lap. Did she play?
“Oh, I used to.”
“We should be going,” the mother said.
“I used to but I quit,” the girl went on. “I’m just trying to get a little of it back.” She let her fingers dance across a keyboard. “A little each day if I feel strong enough.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s good.”
She seemed to understand that I just wanted to have a normal conversation. That it was important to have a normal conversation.
“I quit because of a traumatic experience,” she said. She turned to her mother. “You remember that?”
“Yes,” the mother answered. Non-committal, like okay we’ve done our good deed....
“I was in this talent show,” the girl went bravely on, turning back to me. “In middle school?” And she started in on a story about how she’d messed up in front of the whole school, how she’d had to stop and start over again—this too-hard Bach invention she’d foolishly chosen—how she couldn’t see the music because her eyes were swimming, and the outside of me was listening to her, smiling and listening, but the inside was thinking how close to the truth Ichabod Sick had been. Without even knowing it, in his madness, how close to the truth: she was something special. It wasn’t just empty beauty. She had—hadn’t she? in spite of everything?—sought out Ichabod Sick. She had come into his sickroom, into his sick life, and without ever saying it, she had forgiven him.
“I was practically in tears,” she was saying. “When I finally finished there’s this kid from my class in the wings, and he’s holding these tennis balls because he’s on next, and he says: You stink.” And she laughed a rueful laugh. “You stink,” she said. “This kid. Herman Yoder. I’ll never forget it.” And she looked down into her lap, at the piano music, at the memory.
“Tennis balls?” I found myself saying.
“He juggled.”
“Oh, I see.”
And that was it. We said a few more things—I mentioned something about Robert Frost not being able to read his poem at Kennedy’s inauguration because the wind made his eyes water—and then she was saying again how glad she was I was feeling better, and I was thanking her, and then with all three of us smiling her mother wheeled her out of the room. A week later I was discharged, and a couple of months after that I left Iowa City. I never saw her again.
But some years later at a posh reception I cornered this mini-skirted gastroenterologist and under the ruse of researching a poem asked her about the swollen face, the acne—what GI disease was that a symptom of? Side effects, she said, running a finger along her spaghetti straps—medication. Prednisone. Probably Crohn’s Disease, she said—a very nasty condition where the body tries to reject its own intestines, current research indicating that an overactive immunological system was attacking waste in the intestines, usually leading to ulcers, fistulas, a probable colostomy and bowel cancer down the road, did I want to come up and see her medical books sometime?
* * * *
Against the wall of corn Herman Yoder looks like an erect, hairless, man-sized possum, all pink and ugly and rodent-like.
“What pleasure in the world?” I’m saying to him. “What small beauties?” We have been cataloging his many murders while the sun shines and the world ripens. I have in my head that October day ten years ago when to keep myself from going mad I hiked through a cornfield not so far from this one and stumbled on Steam Days the second time—the cuts and scratches, the dirt, the smell, and then the beautiful young woman. And now Herman Yoder’s skin all red and blotchy from the cornstalks. He keeps asking what the fuck we’re doing and I keep telling him that I am annihilating him. I am annihilating you, Herman Yoder, I say and I march him this way and that, sometimes with the corn rows, sometimes against. On occasion the roar of the harvester descends upon us like we’re in a fifties sci-fi dinosaur thriller.
“What are we doing?” Herman Yoder screams back at me.
“We’re looking for sanctuary,” I tell him. “The atmosphere cleaving and revealing the untouched breast. N-42.”
And I start to call out Bingo numbers as we go. Herman Yoder keeps saying that he didn’t do anything—I didn’t do anything, man, he says over and over.
“G-51!” I cry.
“I don’t even know you!”
“B-8!”
He tries to run—angry, impotent. He crashes through the rows of corn, but he’s naked and his feet are bare and hurting and it’s no problem for me to keep up. I pelt his glabrous back with Bingo numbers. After a couple of minutes we break out into a waste of stubble and dirt. And there’s the harvester a few acres away, green and yellow and toy-like, a sail on the horizon for poor Herman Yoder who begins running toward it, waving and crying out. It’s then that I have to tell him to stop. I fire off a round over his head for punctuation.
“Now, now,” I scold when I draw up to him. He is breathing heavily and there are smudges of blood on his shaved legs. He’s bent over and he’s got his hands on his knees like an exhausted sprinter.
“It’s a beautiful autumn day, Herman Yoder,” I tell him. And it is. The sky is blue and the sun is shining and there are lovely threads of high cirrus overhead. There are golden and scarlet treetops in the distance and the white steeple of the Historic Register church a couple hundred yards away. These are the sights that surrounded her all her life. This is her home. “This is her home,” I say out loud with deep satisfaction. “What?” I hear, but I am closing my eyes, imagining her in the world again—the soft scent of her in the breeze, the deep delicio
us reds of her jellies, the launderer’s soap, the refiner’s fire.
“In my travels, Herman Yoder,” I say, inhaling everything there is to inhale, “I have often thought of Grace Albrecht back here, the fixed point of the compass—” and here I lift my nose to a faint scent of the past—“and whatever happened to me it was all right because I knew that she was here and that it was right that Ichabod Sick should be an attractor of the ugly and the dirty, the sex and the vanity and the petty crimes. It was a way of sacrificing myself.”
I open my eyes. He has straightened up, but it isn’t easy to stand naked out of doors. Some intuitive shame takes hold of us, doesn’t it?—has taken hold of Herman Yoder so he’s got one of his arms folded in front of him, his fist tucked up under his chin like a shivering child just out of his bath, and the other hand across his private parts. I put the muzzle of the Special to my lips and kiss it. I’m feeling pretty good right now. The harvester is coming toward us, mowing the circles of hell around us—the dirt, the waste, the remnant stubble—and that feels pretty good too.
“What I didn’t reckon on was you back here, near her, you with your tennis balls and the pus oozing out.”
The guy inside the harvester has been watching us for some time now. A naked man and a man with a gun standing in the middle of his cornfield! I raise the gun, stiff-arm it at Herman Yoder’s head so it looks like I’m about to execute him. Like that famous Saigon photo. The guy in the harvester slides the window back and shouts something at us but we can’t hear him over the distance and the roar of the dinosaurs. I calmly swivel the gun, move my arm ninety degrees until the gun is pointing straight at the harvester, straight into the window where the guy starts having a fit. Then I bend my arm at the elbow, bring the muzzle slowly up to my own head and rest it on my temple. I trust all three of us appreciate the tripartite structure, the classical composition.
“I will now recite a poem, Herman Yoder,” I say. “It will explain, perhaps, the necessity of our execution.”
A pheasant flushes in front of the harvester. The farmer guy is still watching us, twisted around in his seat. He has what looks like a cell phone clapped to his ear. But Herman Yoder isn’t watching. He’s begun backing up, edging toward the rows of corn, eye on the gun still pointed at the madman’s head. He has the look of the desperado who’s about to make a break for it. For some reason there’s a bell ringing in the cornfield. The average age for onset of bipolar disorder is nineteen.
“Where then is the other way?” I start. And there he goes, spinning around like a running back and crashing into the wall of corn. “Where the world with no Herod and his scimitars?” I shout after him. I reload my gun, let him think he’s maybe getting away, and then tumble into the corn after him. I shout the next line of the poem at his back, and the next, the stuff about the leukemia kid and Lydia with her pelvic bones like faucets. I get out of breath pretty fast, so that by the time the poem peels off into the smell of my Spaulding glove, I’m only pelting him with bits and pieces of it—the sane world of my childhood, a smiling kid, leadoff hitter for his Little League team, and all that goldengrove unleaving stuff. I fire a shot in the air just for the heck of it. And then its on to the fourth stanza with its gift rescinded and the pain and the mania and the crumbling. Babies thrown down wells, skewered on swords. The Magi circle back on themselves, return to the manger because there is no other road, there is no other way home. Ahead of me Herman Yoder staggers out of the corn onto a lawn. For a moment I think we’ve circled back to his house—symmetry!—but then there’s a scream. I’ve got just enough time to see the steeple looming over us—big and white and square—before I’m out of the corn too. There’s the little white church I’d passed two hours earlier, and the old graveyard beside it, and out along the road shiny cars and pickup trucks. It’s a wedding, for Christ’s sakes. There’s a couple dozen people down along the road and lining the sidewalk running up to the church. The men are all in black. The woman are bright yellow and ruby and lavender. There are some Mennonites sprinkled among them. Some of them are wearing hats like it’s 1958.
“And what use?” I shout at them. Herman Yoder has stumbled, collapsed onto the old turf of the graveyard. “This frankincense, this myrrh!”
They turn their eyes from the naked man to the man shouting at them. Who knows, maybe it’s a funeral. I lift my arm in the air and the sight of a gun sets everyone running. I fire a round in the air. Ronnie told me it was a weapon, not a gun.
Herman Yoder is saying something. I take a step toward him, bend over his naked body. “What?” I ask him.
“Go away,” he manages in between heaves of breathing. “Just go the fuck away.”
“Poem’s not done,” I tell him. I take a step back and catch my breath. There are people hiding behind tree trunks. Behind cars. Other cars are peeling out down the road. There’s a little girl in a pretty aquamarine dress calling for her mother. I start in on the last stanza, the stuff about the maculate world and Grace Albrecht’s laugh like a necklace of silvery syllables. And with each line I shoot something. I shoot a gravestone. I shoot a tree. I shoot a window in the church so that the glass shatters and tinkles down onto the pews inside. There’s screaming and cowering and sudden silences. Some guy who was heading for the shotgun in the back of his pickup truck has changed his mind and hit the dirt. I reload. I’ve run out of poem but there’s still plenty to shoot. The cornfield. The steeple. A sparrow on a power line. Overhead there’s the blue sky all peaceful and untroubled as if there’s nothing going on down here. I raise the gun up over my head and take a shot at it. Somewhere there’s a child crying. I aim at the sky and take a second shot, a third, but it’s still there, still blue and lovely and serene. It stretches from horizon to horizon. And there’s only so much ammunition.
The Black Wig
by Kim Henderson
It is time to leave the party. My wife is giving every guy there fuck-me eyes, which is what she does every Halloween when she puts on a black wig that makes her blue eyes look like a movie star’s. She finds various excuses for black wigs—Cleopatra, Amelie, Mia Wallace. But it’s always for the same reason: so that once a year guys will do a double-take when they see a woman who is in no way blended and blurred, a woman of great contrast—which equals daring, which equals a good fuck.
I’m a robot this year. Completely homemade—cardboard and duct tape and wacky sport sunglasses, which are great because no one can see my facial expression when my wife mildly betrays me with other men. And she had to pick this party, full of engineer dorks, men who are supposed to be my friends. I figure I can tolerate it once a year, so I nurse a beer in the kitchen and try not to watch her parade around in her big black 1970’s wig, pretending to be best friends with every guy there, giving out hugs and saying in that high-pitched drunk squeal, “Remember when?”
Of course, she’s not really daring, nor is she a slut. The costume of great contrast is what it is: a costume. Worn once a year. If she were truly daring, she’d dye the damn rat’s nest and go for contrast all year, but of course then eventually the hair would lose its sheen and hang like handfuls of moss, and she would just be one of those pasty Goth chicks that are a dime a dozen in any city mall, the really skinny ones in big black boots made of fake leather that squeak like a wet raincoat with every step. But then no one would really want to screw her.
I swirl my warm Budweiser and talk to some guy dressed as a quark—red shirt and a U for “Up”—and somewhere is his nerdy girlfriend, the anti-quark, in pale blue with a bar over her U. They have it right with the matching couples’ costumes. A quark can’t fool around with a slutty witch or a French maid, not with Miss Anti-Quark around the corner. Maybe next year Holly and I can wear the two-person cow costume we spotted at Mega-Halloween. Of course she’ll get to be the head with its four-inch-long eyelashes, and I’ll be stuck blind in the back, heavy with udders. The ass.
This quark and I are talking about the theoretical side of quantum physics, whi
ch is apt considering he and I took physics and thermodynamics in college together, along with most of the men here. But I don’t care much for the topic at this moment, because I don’t want to think about if there is another version of Holly who’s guiding one of these guys to a bedroom, or several of these guys. However, talking helps me not notice various characters’ hands lingering on her waist as she makes her hugging rounds—Fred Flintstone, George Jetson, The Riddler—so I go on and on about Copenhagen versus Many-Worlds while other guys’ pinkies snake below her panty line.
Right on the other side of the countertop, she flings her arms around some guy with a smeared-on black eye, which requires I physically shield my gaze with my hand, pretending there’s something in my contact. This quark is now blabbing about Many-Worlds theory in a movie he saw—is he actually trying to keep my attention averted? He’s talking ninety miles a minute, and Black-Eye Dude has just wrapped his arms around Holly and sniffed her hair. She’s hugging him, her legs spread a little too far, her little black mini-skirt stretched taut—who is she even supposed to be with this outfit? Tina Turner? Jackie Brown?—and he’s got both hands on her back, and his thumbs are massaging, and he’s smelling her with his eyes closed. She probably reeks of pheromones.
A hyper Chewbacca leaps past them, over the countertop, swiping beer bottles onto the floor with his giant feet, and yanks the refrigerator open. He grabs two bottles of beer and dangles his pink human tongue, which looks unusually small and disgusting with all that fur around it. The eyes are a boring gray, and a touch of pale skin surrounding them glows under the fluorescent light, where there is no fur. I glance at Holly and she has snuggled deeper into the black-eyed-P’s arms—not pea, the letter P, there’s a P in electrical tape on his shirt, the clever bastard. She glares at Chewbacca. She doesn’t like frat boy types. I wonder myself how this Chewbacca got here, but maybe he’s just a normal guy—like the quark or me—who’s not himself tonight.