Reptile House Page 11

  The girl called out, “Oh no, oh no!” at the horses.

  “There’s a dead one,” said the intercom.

  A passenger was crying in the back.

  “The poor things,” said the blind man. “I hate to see suffering animals.”

  The police came on horseback. Gates arrived in sections, one by one from the convention center off-ramp, one man on each end, around the cars and buses, through the crowd, then pinned together at the hinges for a crooked corral.

  “Look at this crowd,” Marlon said. “Hungry for misery.”

  Eventually, an officer waved the 32 through.

  She got off at Harrison, not her usual stop, a tone-deaf President with a cross-eyed First Lady.

  She ran on the sidewalk. Marlon watched her run off.

  Years back, he’d lost the pocketknife. It was this same sloppy time of year and Marlon punched in late with freezing fingers. The flaw was simple: a hole secretly formed in Marlon’s pocket. His coworkers said he’d never find it. On break, Marlon had taken a flashlight for the search. He had backtracked. He had crossed and searched opposing corners. He had picked around the pits made by cellar steps, searching and never losing hope. There were no spectators when he found it. He had stopped to tie a boot under an awning. There it was. No cheers or backslaps when he held the knife in the air triumphant. Perhaps a better life was coming. Perhaps finding only required bending and reaching. Perhaps her love will be full and full of compassion as it was for injured horses, for stray dogs, he guessed, waiting in alleys beside trash cans, hoping. Perhaps he will buy her flowers once a week. Perhaps roses or daisies. Perhaps the florist will say, “But sir, we have no daisies,” and Marlon will answer, “Dahlias? Thank you. Keep the change.”

  The 32 sped away from her.

  Perhaps the water towers will be filled with delicious Elixir with spigots at the bottoms and words across the enormous bellies, in both English and Braille, instructing: “Drink here: For the True End of All Sad Times.”

  “Goodbye,” Marlon said to her shadow running. “See you soon.”

  Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland.

  Nearing McKinley, the blind man stood. He squeezed out of the row past Marlon.

  “Good night,” said the blind man. “This is my stop coming up.”

  “Good night,” said Marlon.

  The blind man swayed down the aisle. As he turned under the big round mirror, Marlon was seized with sudden joy and gratitude. He could not contain himself from calling out: “I’m sorry you’re blind! Blindness is the worst of all disabilities!”

  The blind man had begun descending the steps. His hat and face were still just visible. The blind man stopped and turned.

  “You’ve overcome blindness beautifully,” Marlon added. He covered his eyes with his hands to demonstrate, then uncovered his eyes, like the blooming of a flower.

  The blind man stared.

  “Blind!” said the intercom.

  The lady with the apple giggled. The apple was just core now.

  Other passengers whispered.

  Marlon stood in his row. “Blind,” he said.

  “No,” said the blind man, and shook his head as if this was very sad news.

  Marlon moved into the aisle. In the big round mirror Marlon appeared to be shrinking smaller and smaller, until tiny, then tinier, a diminishing dot, melting to minuscule, dissolving to microscopic, absolutely into nothing, completely, whatsoever.

  “Not blind?” Marlon said.

  “I can see everything,” said the blind man.

  When the bus bumped, Marlon swayed in the aisle, swinging like a man in a tree.

  “Sit down, you idiot!” said the intercom.

  “Leave him alone,” said the blind man on the steps.

  “No backtalk to the driver!” said the intercom. “Even if you’re blind.”

  “I’ve had enough of all this picking and tearing,” said the blind man. “Of people being nasty to each other.”

  “No yelling on the bus,” said the intercom.

  “Now look,” said the blind man. “You just missed my stop.”

  The 32 flew along between Van Buren and Coolidge.

  “You get off when I say so,” said the intercom.

  Marlon moved forward, up the aisle, toward the front of the 32. His hand pulled him forward as if swimming up through the seat backs. He grew with each step in the big round mirror. Several passengers stood for a better view.

  “All riders must sit,” said the intercom.

  “Slow down!” someone called in the emergency row.

  “This is my bus,” said the intercom and snapped it’s gum as Marlon arrived and stood under the big round mirror. No reflection was possible. He looked down the steps at the blind man. His papers had fallen, were scattered. He was on his knees over the papers.

  “I believe in things,” Marlon said. “I believe in things.”

  “Forget it,” said the blind man, then to the driver: “Stop the bus. Open the door!”

  “That’s my door,” said the intercom.

  The pocketknife surprised everyone, even the blind man who had already seen it, who knew all about it and its history.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” said the blind man.

  Some screamed. The 32 sped on. The intercom laughed. Marlon’s blade was small and dull. It cut the air like a conductor’s baton, rising, falling. The 32 accelerated then fishtailed across Hoover, but did not shake the pocketknife free, or Marlon, who spun, as if a tree tossed by a storm. Some passengers stared in case they were interviewed later, noting his hair, the trouser descending into rubber boots, but missing the glint on his eyebrow. Some pointed camera phones—such footage was valuable—especially as a baseball bat appeared from a hidden space to the left of the driver’s seat.

  “Dumb ass,” said the intercom and cracked the bat on the steel money box.

  “Enough!” said the blind man who now steadied himself between the railings on the top step. “We need peace and kindness to live together successfully.”

  The bat jabbed. The knife danced back. They seemed at last to be enjoying life. No one would have predicted such dexterity in either. The driver jabbed with one hand, the other on the steering wheel. Marlon crouched like a bear. The knife flew out like a one-clawed paw.

  “Shitwad,” said the intercom. “The girl thinks you’re a piece of shit.”

  Marlon lunged and fell back, lunged again undeterred.

  When the first blood was produced, the 32 lurched and some passengers remembered their worst disasters: falls off swing-sets as toddlers, and running too fast down a newly paved hill until their face smashed on unpainted concrete. Some passengers remembered fears—public and private—draft cards, for examples, and worse, huts aflame in foreign villages. Failures: baby’s bubbles at the bottom of pools, chlorine stink and sucking drains, and, oh how horrible, their most poisonous humiliations as the knife dove and the bat parried as if a demonstration of hopes and disappointments, attempts and rebuffs to kiss the girl, but she turned her head. Sad times never ending!

  The passengers crouched. Some smelled final attics full of old dresses, or reached again between forgotten floorboards—the desired item as always too far, the fingers too short and only single-jointed. Some reconsidered stolen bikes, and pets in nooses, and mothers-in-the-arms-of-across-the-street fathers, and revenge, and moving vans, and caskets balanced on uncles’ shoulders, and empty cupboards, and cupboards full of nothing good. Some passengers thought nothing. They watched with frozen faces. Marlon would have recognized all of them.

  “You can’t subtract me,” Marlon said. “Only I can subtract me.”

  “Asswipe,” said the intercom, but the face was no longer laughing. The face, Marlon saw, was just a fat man: gray cheeks and lips and piggy eyes. Sick and likely to die young of hardening arteries. Or electrocuted by wire in a tub. Perhaps no one cared about the driver either. Perhaps no one cared about anyone. What joy! What new release!

 
“I am multiplying,” Marlon said to the ceiling of 32, to the now imaginable sky beyond it, between imaginably gorgeous apartments and heavenly clouds, “I am exponential.” He stabbed the knife skyward.

  “Mother-fucking pussy,” the intercom said. “Mother-fucking psycho.”

  “Stop!” said the blind man, stepping between Marlon and the driver.

  “I am as infinite as anyone,” Marlon said. “You too will die alone.”

  “We will all die alone together,” said the intercom. “Get over it.”

  The next moves were quick and blurry. The three men mixed together with a steering wheel, many-legged, too many causes and conflations for simple newsroom explanations, while the bat and knife intersected sleeves and skin and steering wheel. The 32 tossed with commensurate swerve and energy released. Passengers peeled at the window seams. No time for 911. “Let me out!” they called as the bus tires tipped and skidded, then jumped and straddled the median. A foot hit the gas. The apple core flew. The head-on occurred at Roosevelt, who, during his term, blinded one eye while boxing a friend.

  The bus accident was the headline story at ten. The witnesses were sought to verify sequence, to opine intent, heat of passion by degrees, motive, history, too many questions. The horse accident ran second after the commercial break. A casino fire ran third since no one died, only smoke inhalation and fabric damage. Rich at Six rounded out the show. He did not yet know his personal connection to the leading tragedy.

  Rich at Six made his reputation for extreme weather accuracy one Christmas Day. He predicted funnel clouds would descend on the region by noon, an unheard-of thing for that time of year. Some scoffed at his wand on the pale green chart. The counties all looked so apparently cloudless. He tapped the places of imminent touchdowns and waved toward depressions looming in the west. He foretold tornadic conditions, wind-makers too severe to quantify. The people were stunned as pressures built and systems weakened. “Go to the basement,” he’d said. And they did it, though they knew nothing about him. Even CEOs took to the steps in their luxury buildings. “Go back! You forgot your TV,” he’d said. They had carried down portables. They had plugged in under laundry tables.

  Rich had said, “Watch this footage. This footage is amazing.”

  The people had done this too, though the footage was grainy: they’d watched a delivery truck blown over on the interstate. They’d watched loaves of bread in plastic bags tumble in the ditch, pushed here and there by wind.

  Rich said, “Now, folks, imagine the morning.”

  And when the show was over, they turned off their sets and closed their eyes. They saw how birds would circle the wreck at daylight. Land by loaves. Peck bags for crumbs so close to asphalt, they’d have to lift their wings with each passing car.

  For Swimmers

  1. Drowning is unnecessary.

  Ruth tucked a white curl under her cherry bathing cap. She wiggled into ready position on Slippery Rock. It was a perfect day for a swim, a bluebird day, a Lake Day as her father would have said. The water was calm and calling. It was May and the water was still very cold and he would have noted that too in his finger-wagging tone. Her father had been such a worrier. Ice just went out when? She did not remember. She was trying to forget things. There was nothing to worry about. Yes, she was very old, but she had made the round trip to Victory Rock a thousand times at least. This day would be 1001. Anyway, hardly anything was verifiable and certifiable, nothing entirely and completely. So true. She just wanted to swim. She had lived 29,997 days so far. So she dove.

  Jim and his wife bought the place just north across Ruth’s property line on Pike’s Point in 1961. They came in May that year with all the other summer people and showed up every weekend. They were a friendly family. Just as soon as they got settled they invited Ruth down for dinner at their picnic table by the Lake for introductions, fire, wine, and congenial conversation.

  Ruth was very welcoming to the new family, an attractive woman. She was so very independent. She knew she was just their type of person. She could see the wife admired her and so did Jim, that they agreed completely at first. She came from a big family in the area, Ruth told them. She toured them through the old family cottage on the Point. She, of course, knew everything there was to know about the Lake. Right off, she offered to show Jim, who liked to fish, all the good fishing places and Jim’s wife, who liked to bake, the places where the berries grew biggest. Ruth was perfectly harmless to them and vice versa. In short, they all three looked forward to many years as friendly neighbors.

  Ruth told of the rocks off their shore: Slippery Rock, Station, Three Sisters, Flat Rock. If you were a good swimmer you could navigate from one to the other out to Victory Rock, the biggest, and farthest—a monster of a rock out in the deep deep. Too deep and far for your little kids, she said. There was a man-sized V scratched into the granite where your feet went. The kids had called it Victory during World War II for morale and the home team.

  Jim’s wife did not like swimming, she told Ruth, and someone had to watch the kids. The next day Jim and Ruth stood out on Victory together, both up to their ribs in the drink and waving.

  “Why’s it here?” he said.

  “Why’s anything? It will be here until the next Ice Age,” she said.

  “Ice Ages are rare,” he said.

  They dove back toward shore.

  The three new friends were always together. They sipped coffee and made cakes and meatballs. Ruth brought dusty albums of pictures: the cottage from 1908, her father and family by a fire and a horse, Ruth in Indian buckskin and braids, the Lake’s record trout on the end of the line, and Ruth grinning in her canoe. On their whitest wall, Jim and his wife projected slide shows of places they’d been to: California, Yellowstone, and New Orleans. They unrolled maps of places they might someday visit. “Together,” Jim suggested, with Ruth, and the women agreed. They boiled lobster and ate it with butter dripping. Ruth’s face was a mess, “like a child,” she laughed, and Jim dabbed her chin and lips with his napkin while his wife tucked in the children. They swam to Victory Rock daily and from Ruth Jim learned the contours of the shoreline and the underwater terrain.

  At night they played guess-who-I-am and charades until late. They watched the waves during three-day-blows, violent storms that rattled the windows. It would rain and rain. The night trail between the cottages was a tunnel of wet and the flashlight tumbled its light up into the trees and made the strangest shapes. Jim and Ruth soon discovered they shared a strong weakness for each other. She laundered the sheets on Friday morning readying for the weekend arrivals and his midnight slide into her bed.

  2. Don’t swim far from shore unaccompanied by a boat.

  Ruth paddled in the cherry bathing cap and no boat. The boat had been sold, when? Then she forgot the question. Most questions needed forgetting. She stopped to adjust the cherry cap. Red had been Jim’s favorite and she considered blue. Station Rock was for a swimmer’s rest. So the old lady rested.

  Ruth’s father was the first person to own land on the Point. He blasted the road in with dynamite when everyone else said it could not been done. He was a careful man and had a great respect for the water. “Anyone could drown in that Lake,” her father had said, pointing out the blue window. “Best swimmer in the world.” Then he told the story of his motorboat being swamped at Perch Place way back, and so on.

  Father was a believer in rules and procedures and so for his children he had written out a list of instructions for swimmers. His warnings looped on the page like too much fish line in deep water. Six instructions in all. He had affixed the paper on the wall in the cottage under his photograph so unknown progeny would recognize the author. The corners were pinned. Four pins in all.

  “My wife is not a bad woman, just not the right woman.” Jim had said this more than once.

  “Leave her then,” said Ruth crawling on top of him. They had a wonderful time together.

  “Give me time.”

  “How much time?�
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  “I don’t know. Give me time.”

  “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Ruth said and was absolutely sure this was true.

  “Of course,” he said and crawled on top of her this time.

  Then the wife stepped in. Ruth lost many friends, of course, but had her family. Jim busied himself with work and family. He joined the planning board back home and took on many new responsibilities that gobbled up his time. His wife asked him to fundraise for the Save the Loon Society and he did though he cared little for the bird.

  They both repented, but not completely. They swam by themselves to Victory. She watched him with binoculars from her screen porch when it was his turn. His midnight visits were rare and surreptitious to the extreme, but more romantic and passionate because of that.

  3. It is sound advice never to swim alone even in shallow water.

  Ruth swam and smiled at the quaintness of the rule and turned like a mermaid. Three Sisters. As kids they played tag in this triangle, diving between the one stone sister and another, one kid treading in the middle—The It. Inhale and hold it through the dive till you get there. Beware the clutch of the foot from below. She sat on the smallest sister and pulled her legs up. Triangulation and strangulation. To children, all that screaming and howling at the grab was fanciful, entirely outlandish, a farce. Maybe the wife was dead. People die every day. Such black fish come up from somewhere. So cold. She shivered. The dog barked, maybe it was Elsa’s dog off its run again. Sound carried so far on calm water. SO FAR! Miles and miles or at the beach, that dog. One could count on dogs and rocks and beaches. The mermaid dove on to Flat Rock.

  Years passed. Ruth made new friends, Elsa at the end of the Lake and a pen pal in Rome. Ruth met Jim in cities mostly when he was on business. On trains. They made love and fucked alternately, rolling and chatting in between about irony and telepathy. This while the sleeping car swayed and the whistle sounded. So strong, it was just a matter of time.